The Butterfly Cabinet (23 page)

I did not dare move. I stood there, listening to the rain against the window, counting the beats between thunderclaps, watching as the room was suddenly illuminated, and just as suddenly dropped back into darkness, waiting for the storm to pass. My mother did teach me an important lesson. She taught me the importance of armor. She taught me how to construct my own impenetrable cocoon. She taught me how to protect the spirit. She taught me how to hide within myself. I have tried to teach that same lesson to my children, but they have always been stronger than me. If I am guilty of failing to do my duty as a mother then it is in this: I have not succeeded in teaching them how to safeguard themselves from love.

Mrs. Walsh testified to my docile and prayerful behavior in church. The first time I met Mrs. Walsh was at the Dunluce meet; she had never seen a lady ride in a “fig leaf” before and I could tell from her expression that she considered the tailoring distinctly risqué. I decided to meet her with head-on naïveté.

“You do not use the newest safety skirt, Mrs. Walsh?” I asked her. “It is a true innovation. It comes right away at the waist in the event of a tumble. There is no risk of being dragged. I have left several in the saddle, never had one fail me yet.”

She was clearly appalled at the prospect of hordes of ladies
standing around the fields at Dunluce in their drawers. I’m sure she blamed me for the general decline in the quality of rider at the Route. I heard her mutter to Mrs. Graham that I would be riding cross-saddle next. Alas, no. My audacity never extended to that: a lady could not ride astride and expect to remain in polite society. Not that I am likely to find myself much in polite society now. When I dismounted at Runkerry, I deliberately flashed my ankle at her. I dare say I would not have done so, had I known that my good name was to be put in her hands.

Mrs. Walsh was present on one occasion when Charlotte showed herself to be less than enthusiastic about entering the schoolroom. She was not a child who sat at her studies willingly. I had to admonish her more than once. Mr. Morell found it an astonishing suggestion, however, that a child of barely four years could show independent will and dismissed poor Mrs. Walsh’s evidence with one turn of his heel.

That Julia should spend a night in the wardrobe room before the trial was not my idea. It may have been Edward’s; Mr. Crankshaft himself may even have suggested it. Whatever benefit the experiment may have been expected to have must have been utterly undone when I saw Julia’s face in the courtroom.

For what purpose had she spent a night there, Mr. McKinney asked her.

“For testing it as regards ventilation,” replied Julia in an unnatural tone.

“And I suppose the fact of you being here today shows that you were able to breathe?” replied Mr. McKinney, a distinct twinkle in his eye.

Julia looked blankly at him, her face paler than usual, no doubt due to an additional layer of buttermilk and
poudre de riz
. I do not think she was in the humor for satire. The idea of Julia, pale and sickly, voluntarily spending a night in the wardrobe room in April with no fire and no mattress! Did she honestly think it
would help my case? What was she trying to do? I laughed aloud. Several members of the jury looked my way.

The prosecution appealed to the jurors’ sense of humanity. Imagine what it would feel like for a four-year-old child to be locked in a room without ventilation, light or heat; to be tied like an animal so she could not move; to be left to cry without being heard; to perish there alone.

What is the good in exhorting people to indulge in their vulgar imaginings? We cannot feel what other people feel. The closest approximation one can achieve is through some unrelated experience of one’s own, an attempt at a transference of emotion that is entirely unconnected. I do not know what Charlotte suffered and they do not know what it is to be a woman in a dock accused of murdering her child and discussed as if she were not present. It is pointless to waste time pretending otherwise.

What needed to be proven, it appeared—what the jury, if they were to convict me, were required to be convinced of, without doubt of any kind—was that wickedness or evil intention had motivated my actions, and this, then, was the question I asked myself. Had I intended, by binding Charlotte in the manner in which I had, to cause serious injury to her? Did I mean to harm her? Could I have foreseen the outcome? Was it, in essence, a vindictive act? I meant to punish her, certainly. I meant to correct her behavior, without doubt. I did not mean to injure her, not in any way. I was trying to teach her how to save herself.

Mr. Morell, in his summing-up, took exception to my having sat down to luncheon and ordered a bath, knowing that Charlotte was locked in the room in her soiled clothes and had had no food since eleven. There were many more words, sarcasm apparent in his repetition of Mrs. Walsh’s testimony of “this mother boiling over with fondness and affection.” Were parents to be at liberty, he asked the jury, to hang their children up to rings in the wall, to lock them in dark closets, and to leave them there for hours
without care or attention? I opened my mouth and closed it again. Even had I been at liberty to speak, what would I have said in my defense?

The jury took only half an hour. Back in the dock, I watched as they trooped back in, one after the other. The foreman was a small, studious-looking man, with fair wispy receding hair and little round glasses. He stood with one hand gripping the wooden pew in front of him, his other hand holding a sheet of paper, and as I watched and waited for my fate to be sealed, I saw his hand tighten on the pew, his other hand tremble very slightly. When he finally opened his mouth to utter the verdict of conviction, and my heart sank, despite the inevitability of such a return, he added a statement that I had in no way anticipated. He said that in the opinion of the jury, the crime had been committed through a mistaken sense of duty, and as I listened he used a word that had not been much used over the course of the previous weeks. He recommended me to mercy. I thanked him for that, with every pore of my body—not because such a sentiment might shorten my sentence, not because it might sway public opinion even slightly, but because of the human recognition of suffering that it encompassed. Apart from Edward, he may have been the only person in that courtroom who acknowledged it. I think it may have been the first time since Charlotte’s death that another human being looked me in the eye.

15 DECEMBER 1968

Is it cold out, Anna? There’s no way of feeling the weather in here. Did you hear Captain O’Neill’s speech? We are standing at a crossroads, he says, and it’s up to us to choose: the path of order or the path of violence. The people are to stay off the streets, he says, stop marching and protesting, and that way they’ll not get their heads battered in by the police. Well, my head’s safe enough in here. There’s not much danger of seeing me out with a placard in my hands. But if I was younger, Anna, no speechifying of his would keep me in. Nor you either, I’d say, if it wasn’t for the baby. What about the path to justice and the path to injustice? What has he to say about that? Does he think the people are just going to lie down and say nothing? You’re lucky, Anna, that you have the house in Victoria Terrace. How would you feel if you were told you didn’t deserve a vote because the roof over your head wasn’t your own, and you with no way of putting a roof over your head? What sort of justice is that? I know what you think of me—an oul’ dyed-in-the-wool Republican, and maybe I am. Maybe I’m a communist too! But I’d like to think I’d stand up for anyone who wasn’t getting a fair deal. No matter what color their politics. Peig taught me that, at least.

It wasn’t easy going back to the castle after the trial. None of us knew what was going to happen. Miss Julia came back, and the master, but the place was empty without the boys. We didn’t know if we’d be kept on: Madge and Cait were already looking around for places in other houses. But by then I knew I was in trouble, and I prayed the master would keep me on. I didn’t know where I was going to go or what I was going to do. All I knew was that I wanted to stay near my mother and, if I’m honest, near Alphie too.

I met Alphie once after the time Owen was conceived. On the Strand, it was, early May. I told him and he said: “We’ll go. We’ll take the boat from Derry as far as Liverpool and after that we’ll decide if we want to go any further.” As simple as that. A north wind blowing straight down the beach, the sand lifting like a low mist, blasting at our ankles, everything shifting, making you think it could carry you with it if you gave in to it. But how could I? How could I leave Mammy with news like that: a daughter expecting and run away with a married man? As if she hadn’t been through enough. And Peig, how could I have done that to her? That would have been a very different kind of life for me: I’d have had a different story to tell. And I just looked at him, and I said, “No,” and walked away from him. I didn’t have another plan, not then. I didn’t know what I was going to do. But I couldn’t do that.

Six months after Owen was born, May time again, me and Madge were down on the Peasants’ Strand gathering kelp, baskets tied to our backs, shepherds’ crowns thrown up by the storm, crunching under our bare feet. Oul’ Peter went past and called to us, his horse’s straw collar all stuck with buttercups and whin blossoms, and we climbed up to him and he told us the news.

Alphie had gone egg gathering, out near Port Cool. Fourteen men, one behind the other, they had stretched themselves out like a lobster line from the cliff edge, one half of a tug-of-war team, the drop against them. And because Alphie was the lightest and the
most supple, he was the one to tie the rope around his waist, pass it up between his legs and go down the side to where the razorbills had been laying. He leaned out against the sky and the thirteen men took up his weight, him leaning out over the sea where it swirled around Lawson’s Rock, the thirteen of them leaning back into the land. They fed the rope through their chapped hands and he disappeared over the grass edge, feet, and knees, and head. Then he shouted up that he couldn’t get to the eggs for a big jagged bit of rock that was snagging the rope but that it would do for a hand-hold, if he took the rope off. And Denny Campbell, who was the first in the line, shouted down for him to come back up and they’d lower him down the other side of it for the ledges were slippery, but Alphie was already untying the rope, and Denny began to feel the slack and he hadn’t time to turn round and tell the twelve men behind him to ease off and the rest of them all landed in a heap, with Denny laughing at them.

He shouted down to Alphie again, and Alphie shouted back that he was there, and that there were plenty of eggs on the rock ledges, and that he’d get one for each of them. So the men sat down on top of the rope on the grass at the cliff top and waited for the tug from Alphie to haul him back up again with the basket of brown speckled eggs, all warm in the May sun. Mackie Logan was ribbing Denny about a girl he was courting, and would he take her to the dance in the hall, and were her eyes still the color of bluebells when you had your nose pressed up against hers? And Denny was clawing up sods and firing them at him and they were all laughing and waiting for the tug on the rope, but it never came.

When Denny went to the edge to shout what was Alphie doing or had he eaten the eggs already, there wasn’t a soul to be seen, and they’d heard nothing the whole time, not a shout or a splash, not a thing above the long whistling of the blunt-nosed razorbills returning to the empty rocks.

The boys searched for him for days, shouting his name long
after there was any hope of him hearing it. All along the ledges where he’d been there were egg yolks and broken shells.

Peig got a straw collar and threw it on the water, saying that where it came to rest Alphie’s body would be found, but it disappeared out to sea, caught in the current that comes off the rock, and I suppose that’s where Alphie went too. I suppose it is, but the way Denny told it, it was like he’d vanished upward, into the air. There was never a trace found of him. It’s a hard thing to lose someone but it’s a harder thing again not to bury them. Peig never got over it. There was people said after that that they heard a voice calling out by Lawson’s Rock, a man’s voice pleading to be hauled up the cliff side so his soul could be laid to rest. I never went there, and neither did Peig. But she must have visited every other grave that meant anything to her while she was living, and picked the stones off them. Maybe she was gathering them for Alphie. Maybe she never gave up hope of burying him someday.

Is there anything good on at the pictures at the minute, Anna? Me and Bella used to be mad for the pictures. We went nearly every Saturday night to Menary’s on the Parade, and for sixpence you got to be in Hollywood. We saw everything. She liked Shirley Temple so anything she was in we had to go and see:
The Little Colonel
was one, and
Curly Top;
and I liked a good laugh: Laurel and Hardy were the best; and the musicals—Bing Crosby, what a man—and oh, Leslie Howard in
The Scarlet Pimpernel
. I loved that. We never missed.

Then one night, in the summer, we were coming back from a walk around the castle here, back along the Crescent to head down to the pictures, and as we were coming past the town hall, with the music coming out from the seven-piece band and the lights twinkling out over the sea, Bella turns to me and she says, “What about a go at the roller-skating, Maddie?” And I started to laugh at the thought of the two of us, women in our fifties and more at that time, her decently married with grown-up children and me
in respectable employment with your mother, and I turned and caught the look on her face and she was daring me, Anna, standing there with the lights shining out over the water and the smell of the seaweed drifting up from the rocks below. So I turned to her and I said: “Fair enough, then, sure we’ll give it a try,” as if she’d said “Will we slip down to Frizzell’s for an ice cream?” or “Will you take another turn as far as the harbor?” And she laughed then herself, and looked a bit scared, but it was her that started it.