Michael?’
Her father stops eating. ‘1904, she was born. She was forty last March. That’s when she started to complain. Just after the child was born.’
He looks around at them all, then at the priest. ‘I met a nun once in a church in Galway,’ he says. ‘She was back from America. D’you know what she told me? She said that a man’s soul weighs the same as a snipe. Some scientist over there weighed people just before they died, TB patients she said, and then he weighed them again just after they died, beds and all. And weren’t they lighter . . . Imagine that . . . The soul was gone, she said.’
Aunt Maud blows her nose into her handkerchief. Evelyn goes around the table with the teapot, then whispers something to Aunt Maud.
‘She told Evelyn where to get the linen table-cloth to put on the table for the meal,’ Aunt Maud says. ‘Isn’t that right, Evelyn?’
Evelyn nods and sniffs. ‘She did. Only a few days ago. She told me which drawer it was in.’
Tess is watching her father. He takes a drink of tea and swallows. All the time he is looking down. She can see the bones in his face moving under his skin.
‘She was a fine woman,’ the priest says. ‘A fine woman.’
‘She even told us which dress to lay her out in – her new blue dress,’ Evelyn says.
Tess’s heart nearly stops. She understands what that means; her mother is lying in her coffin in her new blue dress. The one she got in Briggs’ that day that Tess got her dress, the one she is wearing now. Carefully, she leaves the cake plate up on the sideboard and walks out of the dining room on shaky legs. She climbs the stairs. The sun is flooding in through the stained-glass window, like yesterday. She hurries past, to the upstairs landing and down along the corridor to her parents’ room. The door is closed. She stands for a moment, then turns the handle and walks in. It is dark. The drapes have not been opened. There is a bad smell, like when a mouse dies under the floorboards. She runs and drags open the drapes on one of the windows. The mirror is still covered with the black cloth. On the dressing table there is a photograph of her father and mother on their wedding day. She looks at it. Her father might get a new wife now. She might get a new mother. There is another photograph of her mother in a nurse’s uniform when she was young and working in a hospital down in Cork. She opens the top drawer, lifts out a red cloth box, checks her mother’s brooches, her locket, her hat pins. Nothing is missing. She opens the wardrobe door and gets a terrible fright. For a second she thinks there are people in funeral clothes standing inside the wardrobe. She pushes at the coats and the dresses but there are too many and she is too small and they fall back in her way again. She pulls and drags on the hems of the dresses and skirts, bringing them towards the light. She is almost crying. There is no blue dress. Her mother is wearing it in the coffin. Then she remembers that her mother is no longer in the chapel. She is down in the ground now. Or up in Heaven.
In the dark she is counting sheep, like Claire told her to do. It is no good, she cannot sleep. She starts to count all the days since she was born, but it is too hard. She tries to remember every single day, every single minute with her mother. Suddenly, there is a loud bang. She sits up, terrified. She hears dogs barking in the distance. Maeve does not stir in her bed across the room. Then everything is silent again. She listens out for sounds in the house. A big bright moon is shining into the room, making everything white, even the floorboards. Mellow the moonlight. When the woman comes on the wireless singing this song, her mother sings along. There’s a form at the casement, a form of her true love. And he whispered with face bent, I’m waiting for you love. Tess meant to ask her mother what a casement was, and a form. Her mother said there is a man in the moon and Tess kneels up on her bed now and looks out the window, turning her head this way and that, trying to make out his face.
In the morning before it is fully bright she wakes up. She listens out for Oliver. And then she remembers and a sick feeling comes over her. Early each morning last summer the little birds used to sing, huddled together under the roof above her window. Now they are all gone, their wings and tiny hearts are grown up. She closes her eyes, tries to go back to sleep. The house is so quiet she thinks everyone might be gone and she is the only one left. She pulls the blankets up to her chin to keep out the cold.
She sits up, looks across at Maeve sleeping. She gets out of bed and runs over to the big window, hardly feeling the floor under her. The sky is grey and low, everything still asleep. She looks out across the lawn, then far off over the fields. Her father is coming over a hill, in his long coat, with a gun on his shoulder. He is carrying dead rabbits. He comes nearer and nearer. She has never seen him like this, so lonely.
2
THEY ARE RUNNING down the road to Glynns’. Running, she feels free. In her bare legs, in the rush of air, she feels strong and free. She keeps up with Maeve, happy, almost dancing, almost forgetting what has happened. The door opens and Mrs Glynn walks out with Oliver in her arms. They run to him, cooing, and take him into their own arms. Inside, they sit on a rug and eat bread and jam and play with Oliver until they all grow tired and quiet.
Just when her thoughts start to come against her and she remembers why she is here, there is a knock on the door. A family of tinkers stands outside. Maeve and Tess gather close to Mrs Glynn. ‘God bless this house and all in it,’ the tinker woman says in a rough voice. She has a baby in her arms and three or four children beside her. A girl of about Tess’s age is chewing the ends of her hair. She stops chewing and looks at Tess in a way that makes Tess look away. Out on the road the tinker man and three older boys wait with the donkey and cart. Tess recognises the tinker man. He came to the school one day and cleaned out the lavatories. The tinker woman holds out an empty tin can now, begging for milk or anything they can spare. Her big brown face and her rough voice and all the wild children frighten Tess and she cannot wait for them to go away again.
She stands at the window and watches them crowd onto the cart and squat down. As they pull away it starts to rain. The girl is behind, facing back, and she catches Tess’s eye again and stares at her. Tess feels cold and strange. She is afraid the girl will put a spell on her. She thinks the tinker girl knows something about her, something that Tess herself does not know. The girl straightens up. Her eyes lock onto Tess’s. Slowly, she sticks out her tongue. Tess’s heart almost stops. It is meant for her and her alone. She is doomed, cursed. The cart rounds a bend and disappears out of sight.
The next evening Aunt Maud comes and brings Oliver away. They have packed up all his things. Tess watches as their uncle Frank’s car drives away. She walks around the house, trying to find a place that will make her feel right again. She goes to all her favourite rooms, to the space under the back stairs, the orchard. But happiness does not return. Nothing will do away with this feeling she is carrying inside her, like a bad secret.
Her older sisters, Evelyn and Claire, do not return to boarding school. On their first morning back at national school Claire walks Tess and Maeve to the end of the avenue. They have mutton sandwiches and shop cake, left over from the funeral, for their lunches. They walk along the road to the end of their father’s farm. Tess grows nervous; she is not sure they will be safe venturing this far from home. She looks into a field where the cattle are butting heads and jumping on each other’s backs.
In the school yard the children form a circle around herself and Maeve and for a little while she feels special. Is your mammy dead? they ask. She wonders if there is a way people can tell now. ‘Did ye touch her – was she as cold as marble? Where’s she buried?’ one of the big boys asks. Kildoon, Maeve says. ‘That’s where Seán Blake’s granny is buried. Her grave was robbed,’ he says. ‘They dug up her coffin and took the rings off her fingers and the pennies off her eyes.’ He looks straight at Tess. Then the bell rings.
She
