Chapter Nineteen: Derry, Rathbarren, Dublin March 1918 -- January 1919
Mickey knocked at the open back door of Number 16 and called out,
‘Hello, the house! Molly are you down?’ Casting an insulted glance at the narrow ugly kitchen, he went through to the parlour and heard her step on the stair. It was half--nine in the morning and he had watched for an hour to make sure that no one was coming or going before stepping across the alleyway. He had arrived yesterday, stopped to see his sisters on his way to Sligo to break the news of the annulment from Jenny to his father, but he did have other purposes: to see his child, since Molly had determined after four agonising months that Katie was his child after all. She had been puzzlingly cool about the whole thing until a month ago, offering precious little information. Not even a photograph. He found out why from Annie when he got back from the pub with Tom: it was only then the inheritance was noticeable, for the child’s hair had come in blonde after falling out. Annie put it together one afternoon when all the little ones were together.
She had taken him aside in the kitchen after making him up a bed on the sofa.
‘I shouldn’t be asking, Micko, it’s none of my business like, but were you after having it off with Molly when she went to Dublin last year?’ She crossed her arms, frowning.
He went scarlet at her directness and it was answer enough, but he managed a strangled, ‘Yes.’ He was relieved to have it out, for at least now they wouldn’t be completely shocked when they left. ‘And we--’ he began quickly, excited to at last be telling someone in the family their plan. The tension of the last six months, being unable to tell anyone, had been awful. But Annie cut him off, shaking her head.
‘It’s a bad business. I saw her after Paddy was through with her when she came home. You’re a fool itself Mick, God help me saying it, for I love them both. But I love you more. No good’ll come of it.’
‘But Annie, we have it all fixed,’ he cried, grabbing her arm. ‘We’ve made the plan these six months! We’re going away, the three of us, to America! It’ll be easy for me to get a job there with one of the papers if I need to, but I shouldn’t. This exhibition should bring me a lot of patronage, enough that I won’t have to work for years –’
‘Slow down a minute,’ Annie said. ‘I can hardly keep up with ye.’ She squinted at him incredulously. ‘You’re going to America? With our Molly?’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know how you pulled that one off.’
Tom called from upstairs, ‘Are you never coming to bed, woman? Ye’ve got the whole bloody day to gab wi’ him.’
‘I’ll be up, so, Tom!’ She called back, inclining her head out the kitchen door. To him she said, ‘You don’t know what you’re playing at here Mick. It’s a sorry day, I don’t mind saying, and I think you’re daft. What will Da have to say about it, or will you not tell him?’
‘Of course I’ll tell him!’ he hissed conscious of the thin walls. ‘He’ll know Katie didn’t spring from the pea patch.’
‘Yeah, but what --’ Annie began.
‘Annie!’ Tom called impatiently.
‘Jaysus, bugger the man,’ she muttered, ‘will he wake the house? I’m coming!’ she shouted back. ‘I’m just coming!’ She looked at him warily. ‘Good night Mick. Don’t do anything daft before breakfast, will ye?’ She went upstairs. So his sister knew. There was one hurdle down.
‘Kate, is that you?’ Molly asked, coming round the hall door with a pile of linens. She started at the sight of him, a hand going to her heart. ‘Mick! Good grief, what are you doing here! I thought you were Kate about the laundry! My God, if one of Paddy’s spies sees you, you’re a dead man!’ She looked out the windows. Very thin, her complexion hectic, nervous as a bird, this is what Paddy Leary and Derry had done to her. She looked consumptive. No better reason could he think to bring her away.
‘I came to show you a copy of the exhibition booklet before the painting goes to show in Dublin,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t bring the genuine article, obviously.’ He stuck his hands in his trouser pockets, and lowered his head. ‘And to see Katie. You’ll not deny me that I trust.’ His teasing went by her. She did not seem glad to see him at all. What was wrong with her? Was she really so afraid of Paddy’s spies as that?
‘No.’ She put down the linens she held on the chair. ‘But she’s asleep. She just went down for a nap, so you’ll have to be quiet.’ She nodded. ‘Come up.’ Darting a glance out the windows again she led him up the creaking, rotting steep stairs with the loose rail to a tiny room with two beds and a crib. Asleep was a golden--haired round--faced child, red--cheeked in slumber.
‘She looks just like all of Annie’s girls,’ he said, reaching down to lay his hand on that cherub’s warm head. A child of his in the world, one that under the present circumstances he could never claim.
‘That’s what convinced me, too,’ Molly said in hushed tones. ‘My grandmother Jacobs was blonde, but that would be a long chalk. Then Annie was here with Mary and Nan one day. The resemblance was so uncanny, I’m surprised she didn’t notice.’
‘Don’t be too sure that she didn’t.’
She stared at him.
‘She asked me last night after Tom and I came back from the pub. I saw your husband there, by the way, and his gang of murderers,’ his voice roughened and the child stirred. ‘So he knows I’m here.’ He looked down at the baby. ‘Could I hold her, do you think, without waking her?’
‘I expect so. Just a moment,’ she fetched the chair and brought it near, then lifted the child out and transferred her carefully into his arms. His child. Four months in of her life he had missed, and they could never be regained. But he was here now, never to leave her again. He was stricken with a wash of joy and sorrow so exquisite that it gave him an actual physical pain in the chest. Perhaps broken hearts were not metaphors after all. He looked her over in wonder. She was perfect in every way, his golden little darling child, and fat as a partridge.
‘She’s been well?’ he asked without looking up. Molly stood in front of him, watching closely.
‘Very well. Not so much as a cold.’
‘Thank you for that.’
‘Mm? For what?’
‘Taking such good care of her. I was worried Paddy was liable to chuck her out the window.’ He was joking, but by not much. He had endured a thousand agonies about them this last year. His mind crowded tumbling with everything he wanted to say, but where to begin? Again, the joke fell short of the mark.
Molly crossed her arms. ‘He likes children...’ she said defensively. That was as may be, but Mickey didn’t trust him as far as he could throw him with Katie. But he didn’t want a row. Oh no…. He rocked the baby instead, enjoying the wonderful peace that spread through him like a warm ripple. After a year of hope and worry, of moving heaven and earth to free himself from the fruitless sham with Jenny, it was good to sit with his own wee child. If it was possible to be perfectly happy, then he was.
‘You do that very well,’ Molly observed of his vague half--conscious swaying in the chair.
‘I used to look after Katie,’ he said smiling, ‘and wee Niall.’ The baby who had died of typhus with Mammy. ‘I was a dab hand with babbies.’ He looked up at her and she frowned, troubled.
‘I’m sorry, Mick.’
All that was water under the bridge now, of no moment. He could forgive her anything now. He tossed his head, shrugging it off. ‘If there’s something you need to do,’ he said, ‘I’m happy to sit here with her. I won’t drop her.’ She took the hint and went out, back down the stairs to her linens. He sat for two perfect hours in the pale spring sunshine by the single window with his baby while she slept, dreaming dreams for them of how it would be. At last there was the security of a family about him, his own, that he had wanted for so long, and he was supremely happy. He had everything he wanted now, after all the trials. Molly came in every few minutes, up and down the stairs on this errand or that, but it was all a feint to keep an eye on them. Katie woke at last and when Molly hurried in at the cry, he had his hands full of nappies and his mouth full of pins.
‘I told you I knew one end of a babby from another,’ he grinned, handing her over. When the baby was fed they went downstairs again and sat in the dining alcove where he dandled the child on his knee.
‘You said you saw Paddy last evening,’ Molly said.
‘I did.’
She frowned. ‘What reason did you give him for being here?’
‘I gave him no reason!’ he scoffed, and Katie started, staring at him uncertainly. ‘He’s not my master to approve my comings and goings!’ The child set up a howl. He picked her up properly, bouncing her easily. ‘Whist you, whist our Caitín, there’s a girl.’ When she was quiet again he asked, tossing back his hair,
‘Did he give you any bother about it?’
Molly looked grim. ‘He asked me if I knew you were coming,’ she said. ‘I said yes, because Anne and Kate told me. There would be hell to pay if he knew you’d written me.’
‘Did he believe you?’
She looked up at him sharply, ‘As I don’t bring your letters into the house he has no choice but to believe me, does he?’
‘No need to bite my head off, darlin’’ he murmured.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said tersely, looking at her hands. ‘I hate deceiving him. I’m always afraid he’ll find out.’ She shuddered involuntarily. ‘He hates lies above all.’
‘And he can’t stand the truth,’ he observed, kissing the baby.
‘Could you?’
Jesus, this was getting them nowhere! He handed the baby over. ‘Take her won’t you a moment, I want to show you something --’ He pulled the exhibition folder out of his coat pocket. On the front was a copy of the painting. ‘Here you are! Before the wide world has its chance.’
Her response was rather less enthusiastic than he had hoped. She gasped and stared at it for long minutes, scanning it with a troubled eye.
‘My word, it’s huge!’ she said at last. ‘It’s one of the biggest things you’ve done.... Very good colour. You went out to Meath, I see.... It’s very flattering. All my friends will be jealous.’ This fatuous response wouldn’t wash.
‘Do you like it?’ he pressed.
She frowned, removing the booklet from Katie’s damp grasp and seeking mouth. ‘It’s very flattering. Good composition. Very good work. What did Mr. Orpen think?’
‘He said it was magnificent -- ‘ he said distractedly. ‘Molly! What do you think of it? You’re giving me nobby art patron nonsense. Is there something wrong with it? Do you think it too revealing?’ He had painted her in old Gaelic robes of saffron, clinging to every curve, leaning on the Stone of Destiny at Tara with a broken harp at her knee. About her the lowering sky was thunderous, and in the distance a blood--red sun was setting. All was storm and strife around her while she languished with that look of unspeakable grief he had seen first and often.
‘No,’ she smiled. ‘I have evening gowns that show off more than this.’ She handed the booklet back and put the baby over her shoulder. ‘No, that’s not it.’
She was driving him mad with her elusive politeness. ‘What then?’
She rose and paced the room, walking to the end of the parlour before the window and back, her pinched face drawn even more in thought. She bounced the now hiccoughing baby distractedly.
‘What sort of message do you hope to give by it?’ she burst out at last. He breathed a sigh of relief, rising from the chair.
‘I told you, it’s to express the loss of the young men of the country in the wars --’
‘But whose war?’ she insisted. ‘The European war, Carson’s war against Home Rule, or the Sinn Feiner’s war?’
He shook his head, perplexed at her vehemence. ‘All of it. They’re all Irishmen, Molly, who’ll never come home again, or dandle a baby of their own. It’s the waste of lives I’m against. You know that. It’s the pointless stupid bickering over what kind of Irishmen they are and where they owe their loyalties. You know this, I wrote you ----’
She shook her head impatiently several times, wincing. ‘Didn’t you consider what that image means to some people, innocent impressionable people? The harp and shamrock and all that green palaver!’
He stopped her with a hand. ‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m saying I don’t want to be responsible for sending men out to die by it!’ She snapped. She gasped and began coughing, a deep rough rattling noise. Katie startled, squirming, and he took her again.
‘Come sit,’ he said, and pulled her into one of the parlour chairs.
She sat and coughed with that terrible noise while he bounced the baby and Katie dribbled on his arm. He was wild with the thought that she disapproved of his work, when it was one of the purest expressions of his feeling for Ireland, his feeling for her too, that he’d ever put down on canvas. She misunderstood him. How could she misunderstand him, after everything that he had written her? How could she not perfectly understand his motives and feelings? Were they not as one, as he had written, perfectly in harmony as craftsman and muse? Not so perfectly, it seemed. A violent panic assailed him, clutching his stomach with a vise grip and spreading like poison outwards.
‘It’s not to die by it. Molly,’ he rasped hoarsely, ‘Mother of God I would never do that!’ He paced before her. ‘I was out in Easter Week. I lost count of the boys who died in my arms while we were carrying them through the barricades…and since! I wrote you about that lad in Great Brunswick street I happened on as the RIC were done with him…’
‘I never read your bloody letters,’ she muttered, leaning exhausted against the chair back. ‘They were too much to keep up with.’ He felt as if he had been struck. At his look, she cried, ‘I see it every day. Mick, and I’m so damned tired of this place, and the patrols and the dirt and the noise, and the unionists with their threats… I don’t want to hear about it in letters! I don’t want to know! And I don’t want to be associated with it!’ She looked up, glaring. ‘Bad enough I’m a prisoner in this place with Paddy, must you drag me in to become some sort of symbol for the Sinn Feiners as well? I don’t want to be associated with it! I don’t want my name on it! I want none of it!’ She had another fit of coughing while he shook his head violently, bewildered and frenzied.
‘I can’t take it off, Molly, it’s done, everything’s printed, and it’s not under my control. What’s more, I wouldn’t even if I could. It’s my painting, my work, and no one, not even you, has the right to tell me what goes into it – or off it!’ His control was fast slipping. Her betrayal pushed him over the edge – what had she done with his letters? Thrown them in the post office dustbin? All that he had worked for, planned for, hoped for, all that he had written her, all ephemera. The baby was squirming and fussing and he patted her agitatedly. Molly was staring at him. Her consternation was beyond him. He couldn’t take in her emotions, so overwhelmed was he with his own. ‘What the hell did you do with everything? Why didn’t you read them? My God, I poured out my soul to you, and you didn’t bloody read them! What’s the matter with you? He’s poisoned you against me! And this place! This falling down rat’s heap of a place! I hate this town! Jesus’ he cried, gesturing wildly towards the window, ‘look what this place has done to you! What it’s done to us.’ He faltered, at a loss now and desperate. He quit his pacing in front of her. ‘Molly, come away with me, come out of this, now. Come with me to Sligo now and forget the rest! Never mind planning! We’ll make do. You can stay there safe with Katie until I book passage to America.’
‘America?’ she echoed, shaking her head slowly. ‘I can’t go to America. I can’t go anywhere with you, Mick!’
The words made his heart stop, then race madly. ‘But it’s what we planned! It’s what you promised!’ Katie was struggling now, and beginning to cry.
‘I never did any such thing!’ Molly cried, rising from the chair and reaching out her arms for the baby. He held her away, the reckless panic hitting him like a wall. His heart raced and his mind closed round her refusal. He was suffocating in it, and struggled against the descending unreality of the words. It was all he knew. He barely took in the room, it became illusory, a painted backdrop. He heard Katie’s wailing not at all, only the racing of his own mind.
‘You did!’ He insisted. ‘You said that if I could find a way you would do it, and I have! You promised! You can’t go back on it, not now, not now, not since Katie!’
‘It was about the painting!’ she cried. ‘About sitting for you! Give her to me!’ She reached for the baby again, who was screaming now, but he held her off. ‘I never said I would go away with you!’ Her voice rose over the noise. ‘And even if I had, I couldn’t now, it’s impossible.’
She was tearing his world asunder. It came raining down in shards like coloured glass, breaking around his feet, leaving him bloodied. ‘Why?’ he cried, over the drumming in his brain. ‘Why, after he’s beaten you senseless! Is that the way you want it?’
‘Because, Mick, I’m pregnant!’
He stopped. All the thundering in his head stopped, everything stopped. Only the sound of the baby screaming remained. Molly was inches from him, trying desperately now to wrest the hysterical baby from him.
‘You bitch!’
She struck him, shrieking. ‘There’s enough of that word, I will not be called it again! Now give me my baby!’
He was on fire where she slapped him, and something snapped in him. ‘No!’ He pulled Katie from her grasp, holding her, screaming and shaking and red, enough above his head to be out of Molly’s reach. ‘You can’t have her!’ He shouted. ‘I’ll take her, she’s mine! Mine! If you won’t have me then you can’t have her!’ He backed up toward the mantel. ‘Get away from me, Molly! She’s mine!’ He turned, pulling the baby into the shelter of his coat. Behind him Molly was crying, begging over Katie’s ear splitting and convulsive shrieks, ‘Mick, please, please, give me my baby!’ She came round, trying to take her away, but he held fast, shouting, ‘No, no, no, you can’t take her! She’s mine!’
‘Jesus are you murdering the child I here? You’ll have the polis down on us --’ Annie stood in the kitchen doorway. ‘Holy Mother of God!’ She was before him then, crying his name, and at last it got his attention. He stood staring at her, and Molly.
‘Give over, Micko,’ Annie murmured. ‘Give over, old darling. Mickeen, Mickeen. Give us the wee ane now. All she wants is her mammy. She’s frightened, just as you are. Give over, Mickeen, you’re all right. It’s all right now… Here darling, here –’ she prised the baby from his grip and gave her to Molly. His mania began to wind down a little and he felt as lost and helpless as a child. God, what had he done? Molly had retreated to the chair by the window with the baby and was holding her fiercely close trying to calm her, fumbling with her shirtwaist buttons, crooning, ‘Baby baby baby, my Katie, sh sh…’
‘Aine,’ he murmured, shaking with cold, and wildness retreating to leave only confusion and horror. What had he done? ‘Help me! My God, what have I done?’ Shame and horror overwhelmed him and he began to cry uncontrollably in great gulping sobs.
‘I wouldn’t hurt her,’ he cried, tears running down his face. ‘Oh my God. I wouldn’t hurt her!’ He took a step forward, blind with weeping. ‘I wouldn’t hurt her,’ he repeated. ‘She’s all I have – Molly!’
Annie’s grip was strong on his arm. ‘Come home Mickeen,’ she murmured quietly. ‘Come home me old darling. Katie will be fine. Molly knows you didn’t mean her harm. She’ll be fine. There see now, she has her mam and is quiet. Come along home.’ She led him out, stumbling, dazed, unable to stop crying.
At home, Annie sat him down in the parlour and went for the bottle of whiskey at the back of the kitchen dresser. She poured him out a double and sat next to him. ‘Get this down you,’ she said quietly, and helped him with it. Two, three. He took four before the whiskey hit him and he was able to stop crying for a little. He sat with his head in his hands, feeling the most wretched thing alive.
‘I’m a monster,’ he said miserably, ‘to do that to my own child. She’ll hate me forever..’
‘I’ll explain it to her,’ Annie said grimly. ‘She’ll understand.
The horror rose again and he broke out in tears. ‘You don’t understand! I’ve ruined everything!’ His voice rose hysterically and he was sobbing. Annie poured him another whiskey.
‘Drink,’ she said tersely. ‘And to bed wit’ ye. Sean and Jimmy can sleep on the sofa. Come on now.’
He shook his head wildly, buried under the weight of his colossal grief. ‘No, no, no, you don’t understand, I’ve ruined everything! I can’t – I can’t go on…’
‘Mick!’ Annie snapped. ‘Drink the bloody craytur or I’ll pour it down your gob, so help me!’ Her tough manner—the very one she used with her disobedient children – got to him, and he did as he was told, and afterward was a little clearer. She went upstairs with him, taking the bottle, though he didn’t need it. With the strong drink taken both the pain and the shame ebbed. His head hit the lumpy pillow, the room spun, and he escaped into blessed oblivion.
He slept the whole of that day and into the next in Seanín and Jimmy’s bed .If they made any noise, he certainly never heard it. When he woke by the light in the room it was the middle of the day and Katie sat in the chair folding nappies. He ached all over as if her had been beaten and his eyes were still swollen and crusted over from crying.
‘Mick,’ she murmured, and went to the door, calling for Annie. She came in, her sleeves rolled up and arms red from washing powder.
‘How are ye?’
‘I’ve been better,’ he mumbled, staring resentfully at the wall. Why did he have to wake up at all?
‘I spoke to Molly.’
He looked at Kate.
‘She won’t tell,’ Annie said, crossing her arms. ‘Will ye, Katie?’
‘No,’ Katie grumbled.
‘What did she say?’ he asked dully. He doubted it would be good. Why would she have anything good to say of him at all, after everything? It wasn’t.
‘She wants you to keep away from her. Those are her words. She was frightened Mick, and angry as any mother would be. She’ll get over it, give her time. But for now you’d do best to leave it. Go home to see Da.’
The very thought made him panic, for he was totally incapable of behaving normally. His whole life was a wreck, a bloody wreck. All he wanted to do was hide in bed and never come out. He began to cry. ‘I can’t. I can’t leave it! And, and I can’t go, not all the way out there! I can’t, I can’t face all those people on the trains!’
‘I’ll go with you Mick,’ Katie said, when his crying jag was finished. ‘It’ll be good to see Da.’
‘Running away from your husband already?’ Annie teased dryly. Kate had only been married six months, to Matt Gallagher whose family owned the greengrocer’s in the next street. It made him think of Jenny, and he cried again. ‘O Jesus mercy!’ Annie exclaimed. ‘It’s a bloody joke… I’m sorry, Micko.’
‘Thank you Katie,’ he managed when he could stop crying enough to speak. ‘Aine, I’m sorry! I’m sorry for all the trouble I’ve caused you. I’m sorry!’
‘Go way, you gossoon!’ Annie said, coming over now. ‘Sure what else would I do for me brother?’ She wrapped her arms about his shoulders, smoothing his hair and rocking back and forth as if he were a child. It was so safe here with his family, but he felt completely unworthy of their love and patience. All he could do was cry.
This went on for two days before his sisters forced him out of bed, into the bath and a suit and put him bodily on the evening train to Sligo, Kate at one hand and Annie at the other. He was haggard and thin – he had lost a stone’s weight in the four days, being unable to eat – but he hardly cared how he looked. He pulled his hat down and huddled in the corner next to Katie and slept all the way to Sligo.
It was the biggest trough he had ever been in, especially with the sudden contrast to the last two months. He had been so elevated, so expansive, working non--stop with marvellous energy, really feeling as if he could do anything that came into his mind. In the last four weeks he had done six complete paintings on huge canvases that Will Orpen called brilliant. The month before he had done four, all to be included in the April showing. This was in addition to his work with the paper, where he had turned in almost two hundred photographs.
Dillon, the production editor and his putative boss, accused him of inside information as he had so many of the harassment of nationalists and the poor that to a casual observer it would look suspicious. He was not believed when he said he just happened to be in the wrong place at the right time, that he was following his nose. What innocent citizen had a nose for political and social danger? He did his cause no good when, enraged at being accused of Fenianism, he grabbed the paperweight on Dillon’s desk and hurled it through the window. Had not the copy boys come running in at the noise of shattering glass, he’d have hurled Dillon through the window behind it. He had him by the lapels and had to be dragged off him.
‘Get him out of here!’ Dillon shouted. ‘Rafferty, if I ever see another unauthorised photo from you on my desk, you’re out! Do you hear me? OUT! Bloody Fenian bastards….’
But that was not the end of it. He went back to his regular work of covering society affairs, which in this meagre time consisted of theatre openings, and had a dressing--room tete â tete with the actress whose show at the Gaiety he was covering. He had never crossed that line before, and it set off something reckless in him. He spent wadges of money down the kips for a solid fortnight, on the most tawdry of whores; he went shopping in Grafton Street, buying clothes and haberdashery, more tobacco than he could use in six months, pipes, pricey art supplies he never used like gilding. Anything that caught his fancy for he was convinced that the break he had been waiting for was coming with the April show.
It wasn’t the first time he had gone over the top. That was when he had first come to Dublin and was trying to adjust to city life. His typical pattern of three or four hours’ sleep had been pared down to two and he was working the rest of the time non--stop, reading, studying, painting, writing. Then on a single day in November, Paddy had ripped apart one of his papers with his scathing commentary, and while he was still reeling from that, he went to the GPO for his mail to find a letter from Kate, full of the details of Bridie Twomey’s wedding party. He tore his studio apart, slamming doors and hurling everything not nailed down onto the floor or out the windows, screaming and ranting and swearing for two hours non--stop. He ruined two paintings, broke the bed, and tore apart every stretcher frame he had, put a hole in the door and knocked off the doorknob. The door was locked, and by the time Tim and Pete managed to get in, he was tearing up canvas in shreds trying to hang himself. Pete wrestled him to the floor and chloroformed him. He had that advantage, being a medical student.
There was the time in October of 1914 after the scene at the Learys, and in Derry with Jenny. He had always been moody, his whole life, hell to get on with according to Annie who was no garden party herself. Every single time afterward he was morose. Sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months, but he was always able to function. Not now. Now he was completely unable to cope even with the thought of going back to work, of doing anything apart from the continual walking he did in the hours Da was working in his small shop adjacent to the house. He went to Mass in Coolaney every morning, walked and walked, came back at sunset, dizzy with hunger, said the paidrin with Da and collapsed on the settle. Day after day. The minutiae of the countryside gave him a focus and kept him sane. Exhaustion kept him from thinking.
Katie had evidently been talking with Da while he was out, and for once he was grateful for her gossipy tongue, for it relieved him of the responsibility of saying the dreadful words. Da never broached the subject, but let him approach it on his own, the morning before their last day while they sat at breakfast in the quiet hour after dawn. English was too much, too bald, too curt. He began ambivalently in Irish, grateful for the broad facility of the language, and for his father’s ever quiet and placid manner; he was safe to talk to, was Da. He’d never look down his nose at you like Father Doyle. He’d tried confession, been seized with panic, and fled.
‘Things are bound to be different, Dada, when I go back to Dublin,’ he said.
‘Eh, so?’ Sean murmured.
‘You’ll have heard from Aine that things weren’t right between Jenny and me…’
‘Aye. She was saying it in a letter. But it’s no but I didn’t see myself when yez were here,’ Da murmured as easily as saying how the sun had just come up and it looked a fine day. It gave him courage. He drew a shuddering breath and glanced at Kate, who busied herself at the range.
‘It’s done,’ he said. ‘We had the papers in January…’
‘It was no easy thing I’m sure, Mickeen.’ Sean drank his tea.
Mickey winced. ‘There’s more.’ He glanced at Kate. ‘There was a woman I knew in Dublin – the one in the painting…. She used to sit for me…. She had a child last year, a wee girl…. A beauty she is Dada, like her Mammy….’ He broke off, his voice hoarse, tears spilling over, his nerve failing. ‘I can never call her my own, for Molly’s married and can’t or won’t leave, and while I know that’s right, I love her and it hurts so much….’ He put his head in his hands on the table, weeping. ‘I’ve made such a mess of things, Da. I’ve done everything wrong…’
‘Mickeen, buachaill,’ Sean said sadly, laying a hand on his shaking shoulders. ‘Now you know the terrible price paid, and why they call it a sin. I’m sorry for you, boyo, that I am. There’s no help for it, for anything that’s done. You can only pick yourself up and go on.’
‘I can’t,’ he cried.
Sean turned to Kate. ‘You know this woman, daughter?’
Katie crossed her arms and leaned on the dresser. ‘It’s Mrs. Leary, Da.’ She looked at Mick disparagingly. She and Annie both thought him daft for taking up with her, someone out of their station.
‘What sort of woman is she?’
Katie harrumphed, shaking her head. ‘She used to throw the dishes at me when she was cross. They fought like cat and dog in that house!’ Mickey opened his mouth to protest, but Sean raised a staying hand.
‘I’ll hear your sister’s side of it, if you please… Is she good to the child?’ he asked.
‘Very good,’ Kate said, nodding. ‘She’s grand with children. It’s people she’s bad with.’
‘You snotty little----’ Mick began angrily, rising from the table, but his father caught his arm.
‘Easy now. She’s a right to her opinions, an she lived with her so she knows the more than you of it…What of the husband, daughter? He would know, I’m thinking, as all of yez do. What of him?’
‘Oh, Mr. Leary’s grand with the wee anes, Dada!’ Kate said, warmth creeping into her voice. ‘He’s been as great with wee Katie as the others from the day she was born. He’s God’s own love of children, he does. There’s no worry there.’
They were the most painful words Mick had ever heard. It must be true, for even Molly said as much and she had no more reason to love the man than he did.
‘Ah, that’s grand, that’s grand,’ Sean said.
‘Da!’ Mick exclaimed. ‘How can you say it?’
Da bent him an impassive glance. ‘It’s the child I’m thinking of, Mickeen. Isn’t she what matters here?’ She was, of course, and he felt ashamed of his outburst.
‘Now,’ Sean murmured. ‘The best thing you can hope for, son, is some word of her from time to time if your sisters could do that; it would be well for you to keep out of it, I’m thinking. Enough harm done, and that’s my advice. Given all, you’re lucky itself that the child has their love and good will. Now, I’m no more pleased than yourself about this, but we must be practical. Do you hear me, boy? You must keep out of it.’
He ground his teeth. ‘Yes, Da. I hear you.’ How in the name of God would he ever get on? And to have to rely on Annie and Kate for information! It was an agony. But he had offended his father’s dignity enough this day, and he would not protest. Da went out to work then, and he rose from the table.
‘You’re mighty pleased with yourself, aren’t you?’ he sneered at Kate. She threw the dishtowel at him.
‘I’m not the one with a bastard, Mick Rafferty, so you mind your tongue!’
He went into the bedroom to finish his packing, slamming the door behind him.
The Royal Hibernian Academy showing in April was successful in terms of numbers, but not in terms of patronage, which Orpen said must be put down to the times. With the 1916 prisoners returned and up to their old tricks, and Sinn Fein recruiting everywhere – and the RIC and Dublin Castle as determined to put them down – people were wary of anything that evinced the national sentiment. As most of his painting had been of different parts of the countryside and city disturbed by the war, this left him out rather. Oh, the Academy and patrons lauded him – called him an exciting new talent with a keen and critical eye – but he only sold two paintings that evening and took no commissions. The affair, in rented rooms in Ely Place, was covered by the daily papers, and he took some ribbing from Martin Reilly from the Independent to be standing in evening dress on the other side of the camera.
‘Smile for the dicky bird,’ Martin grinned, ‘now don’t be nervous. It won’t be a minute.’
Molly’s friend Mrs. Talbot was there with her husband and draped in a fur when she entered, over a trailing silk frock.
‘We couldn’t miss it, of course,’ she said in the false--cheery tone he now recognised as the society mask. ‘Not with Gerry as your star. It is too bad she couldn’t be here, Michael, but did you know that her sister is expected? Mrs. MacNeeson. I told her to present herself. She is just furnishing a house in Merrion Square and could do with some fine art It’s so very good to see you, Michael…’ And they moved along, she and her mumbling, frog--eyed husband, who never looked to know quite where he was. What she really thought of it all was a mystery of course. Molly’s sister did come with her goggle--eyed husband – did all the gentry have goiter these days? -- and introduced herself after the speechifying by the Academy when the gallery was full and he was pulled in four directions to speak with people. He’d have known her anywhere. She was tall, with curling chestnut hair, and the face was the same though the eyes were green. Her accents held not a trace of Ireland. She had gone to public school in England. She gave him her thin narrow gloved hand and looked down her thin narrow nose at him as she spoke,
‘I suppose, Mr. Raftery, that I must stand this evening as a representative of my family. Though I must confess, it is rather extraordinary to see one’s relation depicted in such a manner. I daresay it surprised my sister Mary as greatly. You must be a awfully persuasive fellow.’ Raftery was the commoner form of his name, but he was annoyed at her getting it wrong. Even more annoyed at the condescension and thinly veiled hostility of her words. He made a mocking little bow.
‘I suppose I must be, Mrs. MacNeeson. Thank you so much for coming, and representing your family.’
The galling thing was that of the two paintings sold, Mrs. Talbot bought one, for £250, and Molly’s sister the other, for £500. It was more than two years’ wages at the paper, all in a night, from women who neither understood nor appreciated his art. They bought for the sole reason of their connection with Molly, and bought landscapes, both; Liz a study of the hills above Bray, and Patsy – that was her name – one of Howth, presumably because it was her home country.
The next day the Sinn Feiners came to the opening proper, some three or four dozen at first then in small groups throughout the day, a good portion of whom were women from the Cumann na mBan and Inghinne na Eireann. These were the last people whom he wanted to make much of his work, but they did. Molly had been right – the nationalists took to An Roisin Dubh as their own inspiration. It was infuriating that she, the most oblivious of West Britons, should have been able to see clearly what he did not. Mary Brigid Pearse and Arthur Griffith offered to buy the painting to use as part of their upcoming commemoration of the Easter Rising and the election campaigns throughout the country. £1000 was the offer – and where would they be getting that kind of money? But he said emphatically no.
‘I didn’t intend it as a political platform, Mr. Griffith,’ he told the little round bespectacled man. Griffith crossed his arms.
‘Is that so? I would be very interested to hear how you did intend it, then, Mr. Rafferty.’
A crowd of his supporters was now gathering round. Mick tossed his hair back.
‘As an elegy,’ he said flatly. ‘As an elegy to the waste of Irish lives.’
‘Ah now,’ Griffith said. ‘I’ve seen your photos in the Independent,’ he mean the ones of Tim Creevy’s murder by the G Division. ‘You’ll forgive the error in my thinking you a nationalist.’
‘I am an artist, Mr. Griffith. Nothing more.’
‘Nothing more?’ One of the Cumann women interrupted. Her hand swept upward in a gesture towards the painting. ‘This is what you would call nothing more? I think you’re equivocating, Mr. Rafferty.’
‘That’s as may be,’ he said impassively, privately impressed that she knew the word. ‘But I painted the picture, and I should think I know how I intended it.’
‘You were out in Easter Week, I believe, Mr. Rafferty?’ Griffith said. That shocked him. Griffith smiled. ‘One of our boys remembered you from the Red Cross squad. We keep an eye on things, round here. You obviously have some sympathy with the fate of the nation.’ This was hardly the place to do recruiting for Sinn Fein and Griffith’s utter certainty about his whereabouts that week unnerved him. He never thought the physical force movement was watching him. But of course they would, being in and out of Paddy Leary’s house as he had been. But for how long had they been watching him? Shaken as he was, he managed to protest,
‘My sympathy lies with the families of the dead. Since you know where I was, you’ll also know that I was out with Frank Skeffington. I am a pacifist, Mr. Griffith. I see no point in murdering each other over intangibles. I lost two brothers in your dirty little war, to no effect that I can see. It changed nothing.’
There was a general murmur from the nationalists gathered round. Griffith said, ‘If you value your life, Mr. Rafferty, I would be careful to whom you said that. It might not be taken well in some quarters.’ The implicit threat hung silent and ponderous in the air for a long moment. Then Griffith looked around, at his group of supporters. ‘Well, I can see we’ve done all we can here.’ He tipped his hat. ‘Good day to you, Mr. Rafferty.’ And out they went.
The episode unnerved him, the more so because he had no one in Dublin to ask for help. By the appearance of things, every side was suspicious of him, and as the by--election hotted up, he wished more earnestly every day simply to get out of the country. But he hadn’t the money yet. The pay from the seven paintings he eventually sold from the exhibit helped, but they were not nearly enough. He didn’t want to go over a beggar, as it would grant him only a short--term visitor’s visa since Wilson’s government had cracked down on Irish émigrés at the behest of Winston Churchill. No, he wanted to do it right… If he had sold Roisin Dubh to Griffith’s Sinn Feiners, he’d have enough, but there was nothing about that prospect that cheered him. If he had done he’d have been marked as a Fenian for certain, and without contacts in that way going abroad he was a dead man. Late in May, he wrote to Annie,
‘I don’t know what to do about it all. Dublin grows worse every day. There’s some
fellow named Collins organising the Volunteers; they’ve taken over a couple of the
pubs and hotels and are harassing the RIC barracks up and down in the county
towns. Nobody appears to know what the jackeen looks like and the Castle are mad
with it. There are house searches every day. Curfew has been reinstated; we’re back
to 10 PM from 11.30. Last night I was trailed by a couple of Castle goons on my way
home from the Met school, if you can imagine it. It has happened regularly since the
exhibition. I fear things will get worse rather than better. God do I want out of this
bloody country!’
During the elections last year, Sinn Fein had won enough seats to prove a serious threat – if not an embarrassment – to the British Government in Ireland, hence the subsequent arrests and harassment of nationalists. But the people’s will was strong this time. The executions and mass arrests of 1916 had worked a miracle in the minds of the Irish people. From May through the early part of September, over and over again, Sinn Fein stood candidates, from Joe MacGuiness in Longford, to Eamonn DeValera in East Clare, to William Cosgrave in Kilkenny. Out from the Dublin Brigade of the Volunteers went a telegram to Lloyd George with two words, Get Out. Understandably the Home Office was in an uproar. The Manchester Guardian called the Irish elections the equivalent of a serious defeat in the field.
As a result of the Sinn Fein Ard Fheis, Eamonn DeValera, MP for East Clare now on remand in Lincoln Jail in England, was elected First Minister of the Dail; and the very next day was elected as the President of the Irish Volunteers. A complete break was not long in coming. After the signing of the Armistice on 11 November, Lloyd George announced that the General Election promised since August would finally be held in Ireland. The results of the December election could not have been worse news to the PM, or for his Government’s plan for partitioning the country and the granting of very limited Home Rule, for they were overwhelmingly in favour of Sinn Fein from north to south. Even in Derry, whose City Council before had been 90% Unionist, there was a complete reversal. Out of 105 seats in Ireland, 73 went to Sinn Fein. This was in addition to the seats won the year before .It was a landslide victory. No British political party had ever received such a majority at a single election.
Sinn Fein convened an all--Ireland Assembly of the Dail in the Mansion House in Dublin on 21 January 1919, and proclaimed itself the only legitimate legislature of the Irish Republic. On that same day in Soloheadbeag, Co. Tipperary a local battalion of the Irish Volunteers led by Seamus Robinson, Dan Breen, and Sean Treacy made an assault on the RIC barracks, coming away with a supply of gelignite and killing two policemen.
On the 23rd Mick was at Blane’s Hotel in Ship Street in Portstewart, waiting to board for the Transatlantic crossing to New York. It was merely co--incidental that he was leaving the country in the wake of the mass celebrations and riots subsequent to the elections, but he was not sorry to leave; not sorry to miss the bloodbath that would surely follow; not sorry to remove himself from the suspicious surveillance of all parties that he had endured for nearly a year now.
Molly had agreed to meet him on her way to visit her friend Sarah Edgeworth in Antrim. Paddy sending her out of harm’s way again. There were riots from the outraged Unionists continuing in Derry these last three weeks since the election; there looked to be no let up thanks to the founding of the Dail, which the Unionists took as a sign that Britain was abandoning them to the Sinn Feiners now that the war in Europe was over.
He was shocked at her appearance. She had been very ill with influenza in July and August – Anne said they had feared for her life – and she was still alarmingly thin, weak, and with that wracking consumptive cough. There were deep black circles under her eyes and all liveliness had gone from her. She was hardly more than a ghost of the raving beauty that captured his imagination eight and half years ago. She attended dully to the children and was content to sit in the dreary room that she took adjacent to his or in the lounge and talk of inconsequential things if she spoke at all. If they had twenty minutes alone together in those twelve hours he would call it generous. To the children the meeting was co--incidental, and even to Katie he was no one other than the Kilgallens’ Uncle Mick. That was painful, but he hadn’t the heart to berate her for it when she was so ill.
Joe and Sally were solicitous of her, which was very touching. Joe had grown tall in the last year, and it was heartbreaking to see that otherwise rough and bluff foul--mouthed boy transfigure in her presence into a calm, polite young gent who shouldered his way through crowds before her, opened doors, and held her hand without shame. Easy it was to see his father in him, thin--voiced and narrow--shouldered as he yet was; the stamp was very clear, and in those extraordinary moments Mick could see – oh painfully! – why she had loved Paddy Leary in early days, for obviously the boy had learned such behaviour by proximity. It was a bleak insight into the man, and he didn’t want it, didn’t want it at all. It was far easier to hate him, to hate them both, than to see the mosaic.
Sally was a regular little mother, incongruous as it was with her wild, high--coloured appearance and strong language. She was not a shy girl, tall as her brother and just as bluff. She was all rough edges, coltish awkwardness and sharp tongue. But with Katie, the baby Eamonn, and Molly she was tender and patient. It was remarkable to see her looking after the fractious baby one minute and rounding on her brother for some remark the next. Both of them were mature beyond their years, as they had not been in Dublin. It was hardly conceivable that two short years could accomplish so much, but who could tell their experiences? Annie complained that the police and the Orangemen all daily harassed them, and that may well not have been an exaggeration. It would explain these two young people.
He asked after Eamonn while they were at tea. The child was obviously a trial, ill or evil tempered by the continual stress of their lives. It was Joe, his mouth full of scones, who volunteered that ‘Da named him for deValera.’ Mickey looked at Molly.
‘Is that true?’
She smiled a little, ruefully. ‘Yes it is. He admires him very much.’
‘Huh!’ Joe scoffed tossing his hair out of his eyes. ‘I’ll say! Micko, you should hear him and Tom go on about Dev in Easter Week! He sounds like a bally hero in their mouths so he does, holding off regiments of Brits at Mount Street Bridge with thirty men and a couple of carbines.’
‘Joejoe,’ Molly murmured, with a discreet glance over her shoulder. She was evidently not chiding him for swearing.
‘It’s all right, like, Mammy,’ Joe assured her. ‘Yer man there’s no but a clerk.’ Mickey looked up casually then, and noted the man by the counter of the café with the newspaper. He could have been a G--man. He was impressed. They had eyes in the backs of their heads to see without looking and instantly assess who was dangerous and who was not. None of them had obviously sized the place up when they came in, not even Molly. He began to wonder if her low--key demeanour was something else. She had become clever, if so.
He knocked up her door at five--thirty in the morning to say good--bye. She was awake and was instantly before him, slipping out into the dim--lit passage. Now that the moment was on him, he could hardly force the words from his throat.
‘I wish to God you were coming with me.’
She winced and bit her lip. ‘So do I.’ She shook her head. ‘I never thought it would be as bad as this.’ He thought it best not to say that it would get worse. She deserved that innocence at least. He caught her hands, struggling with his feelings, that tide that rose on the sight of her and always had.
‘In a year I could have enough for both of us, all of us,’ he said, though he knew that optimistic.
‘I could book passage right now and save you the bother,’ she said wryly. It was a painful joke at her own expense. ‘I could run away anytime, except there’s nowhere to run.’
He pressed her hands, sliding his thumbs over the backs. ‘Think about it.’
That broke her control. She choked on a sob. ‘I can’t, Mick, I’d go mad!’
‘I’ll write, you’ll know where I am, if you ever change your mind, ‘ his thoughts, like his words began racing. The porter rounded the stairs to the right at the end of the red--papered hall. The call he was waiting for so as not to miss the boarding. Shite. He flung his arms around her. ‘I love you. I have always loved you,’ he told her fiercely.
‘Don’t!’ she begged, breaking into sobs. He kissed her wildly then, to say good--bye, to keep her from rousing the children, because he might never see her again.
‘Five minutes, sir,’ the porter said, walking past. He tore himself away, picked up his cases.
‘All right, all right,’ he said blindly. He couldn’t look on her sorrow, on the wreck of her beauty. It tore him apart.
‘Mind yourself, darling girl,’ he murmured, choking on the words, and started off down the hall.
‘And you,’ she gave a little wave, forlorn, and he ran, tearing down the stairs and away to the waiting cab and the dockside. They had left each other two things, he reflected in the cab as he sat shaking -- the painting, and Katie. Nothing else was worth thinking about.
‘Hello, the house! Molly are you down?’ Casting an insulted glance at the narrow ugly kitchen, he went through to the parlour and heard her step on the stair. It was half--nine in the morning and he had watched for an hour to make sure that no one was coming or going before stepping across the alleyway. He had arrived yesterday, stopped to see his sisters on his way to Sligo to break the news of the annulment from Jenny to his father, but he did have other purposes: to see his child, since Molly had determined after four agonising months that Katie was his child after all. She had been puzzlingly cool about the whole thing until a month ago, offering precious little information. Not even a photograph. He found out why from Annie when he got back from the pub with Tom: it was only then the inheritance was noticeable, for the child’s hair had come in blonde after falling out. Annie put it together one afternoon when all the little ones were together.
She had taken him aside in the kitchen after making him up a bed on the sofa.
‘I shouldn’t be asking, Micko, it’s none of my business like, but were you after having it off with Molly when she went to Dublin last year?’ She crossed her arms, frowning.
He went scarlet at her directness and it was answer enough, but he managed a strangled, ‘Yes.’ He was relieved to have it out, for at least now they wouldn’t be completely shocked when they left. ‘And we--’ he began quickly, excited to at last be telling someone in the family their plan. The tension of the last six months, being unable to tell anyone, had been awful. But Annie cut him off, shaking her head.
‘It’s a bad business. I saw her after Paddy was through with her when she came home. You’re a fool itself Mick, God help me saying it, for I love them both. But I love you more. No good’ll come of it.’
‘But Annie, we have it all fixed,’ he cried, grabbing her arm. ‘We’ve made the plan these six months! We’re going away, the three of us, to America! It’ll be easy for me to get a job there with one of the papers if I need to, but I shouldn’t. This exhibition should bring me a lot of patronage, enough that I won’t have to work for years –’
‘Slow down a minute,’ Annie said. ‘I can hardly keep up with ye.’ She squinted at him incredulously. ‘You’re going to America? With our Molly?’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know how you pulled that one off.’
Tom called from upstairs, ‘Are you never coming to bed, woman? Ye’ve got the whole bloody day to gab wi’ him.’
‘I’ll be up, so, Tom!’ She called back, inclining her head out the kitchen door. To him she said, ‘You don’t know what you’re playing at here Mick. It’s a sorry day, I don’t mind saying, and I think you’re daft. What will Da have to say about it, or will you not tell him?’
‘Of course I’ll tell him!’ he hissed conscious of the thin walls. ‘He’ll know Katie didn’t spring from the pea patch.’
‘Yeah, but what --’ Annie began.
‘Annie!’ Tom called impatiently.
‘Jaysus, bugger the man,’ she muttered, ‘will he wake the house? I’m coming!’ she shouted back. ‘I’m just coming!’ She looked at him warily. ‘Good night Mick. Don’t do anything daft before breakfast, will ye?’ She went upstairs. So his sister knew. There was one hurdle down.
‘Kate, is that you?’ Molly asked, coming round the hall door with a pile of linens. She started at the sight of him, a hand going to her heart. ‘Mick! Good grief, what are you doing here! I thought you were Kate about the laundry! My God, if one of Paddy’s spies sees you, you’re a dead man!’ She looked out the windows. Very thin, her complexion hectic, nervous as a bird, this is what Paddy Leary and Derry had done to her. She looked consumptive. No better reason could he think to bring her away.
‘I came to show you a copy of the exhibition booklet before the painting goes to show in Dublin,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t bring the genuine article, obviously.’ He stuck his hands in his trouser pockets, and lowered his head. ‘And to see Katie. You’ll not deny me that I trust.’ His teasing went by her. She did not seem glad to see him at all. What was wrong with her? Was she really so afraid of Paddy’s spies as that?
‘No.’ She put down the linens she held on the chair. ‘But she’s asleep. She just went down for a nap, so you’ll have to be quiet.’ She nodded. ‘Come up.’ Darting a glance out the windows again she led him up the creaking, rotting steep stairs with the loose rail to a tiny room with two beds and a crib. Asleep was a golden--haired round--faced child, red--cheeked in slumber.
‘She looks just like all of Annie’s girls,’ he said, reaching down to lay his hand on that cherub’s warm head. A child of his in the world, one that under the present circumstances he could never claim.
‘That’s what convinced me, too,’ Molly said in hushed tones. ‘My grandmother Jacobs was blonde, but that would be a long chalk. Then Annie was here with Mary and Nan one day. The resemblance was so uncanny, I’m surprised she didn’t notice.’
‘Don’t be too sure that she didn’t.’
She stared at him.
‘She asked me last night after Tom and I came back from the pub. I saw your husband there, by the way, and his gang of murderers,’ his voice roughened and the child stirred. ‘So he knows I’m here.’ He looked down at the baby. ‘Could I hold her, do you think, without waking her?’
‘I expect so. Just a moment,’ she fetched the chair and brought it near, then lifted the child out and transferred her carefully into his arms. His child. Four months in of her life he had missed, and they could never be regained. But he was here now, never to leave her again. He was stricken with a wash of joy and sorrow so exquisite that it gave him an actual physical pain in the chest. Perhaps broken hearts were not metaphors after all. He looked her over in wonder. She was perfect in every way, his golden little darling child, and fat as a partridge.
‘She’s been well?’ he asked without looking up. Molly stood in front of him, watching closely.
‘Very well. Not so much as a cold.’
‘Thank you for that.’
‘Mm? For what?’
‘Taking such good care of her. I was worried Paddy was liable to chuck her out the window.’ He was joking, but by not much. He had endured a thousand agonies about them this last year. His mind crowded tumbling with everything he wanted to say, but where to begin? Again, the joke fell short of the mark.
Molly crossed her arms. ‘He likes children...’ she said defensively. That was as may be, but Mickey didn’t trust him as far as he could throw him with Katie. But he didn’t want a row. Oh no…. He rocked the baby instead, enjoying the wonderful peace that spread through him like a warm ripple. After a year of hope and worry, of moving heaven and earth to free himself from the fruitless sham with Jenny, it was good to sit with his own wee child. If it was possible to be perfectly happy, then he was.
‘You do that very well,’ Molly observed of his vague half--conscious swaying in the chair.
‘I used to look after Katie,’ he said smiling, ‘and wee Niall.’ The baby who had died of typhus with Mammy. ‘I was a dab hand with babbies.’ He looked up at her and she frowned, troubled.
‘I’m sorry, Mick.’
All that was water under the bridge now, of no moment. He could forgive her anything now. He tossed his head, shrugging it off. ‘If there’s something you need to do,’ he said, ‘I’m happy to sit here with her. I won’t drop her.’ She took the hint and went out, back down the stairs to her linens. He sat for two perfect hours in the pale spring sunshine by the single window with his baby while she slept, dreaming dreams for them of how it would be. At last there was the security of a family about him, his own, that he had wanted for so long, and he was supremely happy. He had everything he wanted now, after all the trials. Molly came in every few minutes, up and down the stairs on this errand or that, but it was all a feint to keep an eye on them. Katie woke at last and when Molly hurried in at the cry, he had his hands full of nappies and his mouth full of pins.
‘I told you I knew one end of a babby from another,’ he grinned, handing her over. When the baby was fed they went downstairs again and sat in the dining alcove where he dandled the child on his knee.
‘You said you saw Paddy last evening,’ Molly said.
‘I did.’
She frowned. ‘What reason did you give him for being here?’
‘I gave him no reason!’ he scoffed, and Katie started, staring at him uncertainly. ‘He’s not my master to approve my comings and goings!’ The child set up a howl. He picked her up properly, bouncing her easily. ‘Whist you, whist our Caitín, there’s a girl.’ When she was quiet again he asked, tossing back his hair,
‘Did he give you any bother about it?’
Molly looked grim. ‘He asked me if I knew you were coming,’ she said. ‘I said yes, because Anne and Kate told me. There would be hell to pay if he knew you’d written me.’
‘Did he believe you?’
She looked up at him sharply, ‘As I don’t bring your letters into the house he has no choice but to believe me, does he?’
‘No need to bite my head off, darlin’’ he murmured.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said tersely, looking at her hands. ‘I hate deceiving him. I’m always afraid he’ll find out.’ She shuddered involuntarily. ‘He hates lies above all.’
‘And he can’t stand the truth,’ he observed, kissing the baby.
‘Could you?’
Jesus, this was getting them nowhere! He handed the baby over. ‘Take her won’t you a moment, I want to show you something --’ He pulled the exhibition folder out of his coat pocket. On the front was a copy of the painting. ‘Here you are! Before the wide world has its chance.’
Her response was rather less enthusiastic than he had hoped. She gasped and stared at it for long minutes, scanning it with a troubled eye.
‘My word, it’s huge!’ she said at last. ‘It’s one of the biggest things you’ve done.... Very good colour. You went out to Meath, I see.... It’s very flattering. All my friends will be jealous.’ This fatuous response wouldn’t wash.
‘Do you like it?’ he pressed.
She frowned, removing the booklet from Katie’s damp grasp and seeking mouth. ‘It’s very flattering. Good composition. Very good work. What did Mr. Orpen think?’
‘He said it was magnificent -- ‘ he said distractedly. ‘Molly! What do you think of it? You’re giving me nobby art patron nonsense. Is there something wrong with it? Do you think it too revealing?’ He had painted her in old Gaelic robes of saffron, clinging to every curve, leaning on the Stone of Destiny at Tara with a broken harp at her knee. About her the lowering sky was thunderous, and in the distance a blood--red sun was setting. All was storm and strife around her while she languished with that look of unspeakable grief he had seen first and often.
‘No,’ she smiled. ‘I have evening gowns that show off more than this.’ She handed the booklet back and put the baby over her shoulder. ‘No, that’s not it.’
She was driving him mad with her elusive politeness. ‘What then?’
She rose and paced the room, walking to the end of the parlour before the window and back, her pinched face drawn even more in thought. She bounced the now hiccoughing baby distractedly.
‘What sort of message do you hope to give by it?’ she burst out at last. He breathed a sigh of relief, rising from the chair.
‘I told you, it’s to express the loss of the young men of the country in the wars --’
‘But whose war?’ she insisted. ‘The European war, Carson’s war against Home Rule, or the Sinn Feiner’s war?’
He shook his head, perplexed at her vehemence. ‘All of it. They’re all Irishmen, Molly, who’ll never come home again, or dandle a baby of their own. It’s the waste of lives I’m against. You know that. It’s the pointless stupid bickering over what kind of Irishmen they are and where they owe their loyalties. You know this, I wrote you ----’
She shook her head impatiently several times, wincing. ‘Didn’t you consider what that image means to some people, innocent impressionable people? The harp and shamrock and all that green palaver!’
He stopped her with a hand. ‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m saying I don’t want to be responsible for sending men out to die by it!’ She snapped. She gasped and began coughing, a deep rough rattling noise. Katie startled, squirming, and he took her again.
‘Come sit,’ he said, and pulled her into one of the parlour chairs.
She sat and coughed with that terrible noise while he bounced the baby and Katie dribbled on his arm. He was wild with the thought that she disapproved of his work, when it was one of the purest expressions of his feeling for Ireland, his feeling for her too, that he’d ever put down on canvas. She misunderstood him. How could she misunderstand him, after everything that he had written her? How could she not perfectly understand his motives and feelings? Were they not as one, as he had written, perfectly in harmony as craftsman and muse? Not so perfectly, it seemed. A violent panic assailed him, clutching his stomach with a vise grip and spreading like poison outwards.
‘It’s not to die by it. Molly,’ he rasped hoarsely, ‘Mother of God I would never do that!’ He paced before her. ‘I was out in Easter Week. I lost count of the boys who died in my arms while we were carrying them through the barricades…and since! I wrote you about that lad in Great Brunswick street I happened on as the RIC were done with him…’
‘I never read your bloody letters,’ she muttered, leaning exhausted against the chair back. ‘They were too much to keep up with.’ He felt as if he had been struck. At his look, she cried, ‘I see it every day. Mick, and I’m so damned tired of this place, and the patrols and the dirt and the noise, and the unionists with their threats… I don’t want to hear about it in letters! I don’t want to know! And I don’t want to be associated with it!’ She looked up, glaring. ‘Bad enough I’m a prisoner in this place with Paddy, must you drag me in to become some sort of symbol for the Sinn Feiners as well? I don’t want to be associated with it! I don’t want my name on it! I want none of it!’ She had another fit of coughing while he shook his head violently, bewildered and frenzied.
‘I can’t take it off, Molly, it’s done, everything’s printed, and it’s not under my control. What’s more, I wouldn’t even if I could. It’s my painting, my work, and no one, not even you, has the right to tell me what goes into it – or off it!’ His control was fast slipping. Her betrayal pushed him over the edge – what had she done with his letters? Thrown them in the post office dustbin? All that he had worked for, planned for, hoped for, all that he had written her, all ephemera. The baby was squirming and fussing and he patted her agitatedly. Molly was staring at him. Her consternation was beyond him. He couldn’t take in her emotions, so overwhelmed was he with his own. ‘What the hell did you do with everything? Why didn’t you read them? My God, I poured out my soul to you, and you didn’t bloody read them! What’s the matter with you? He’s poisoned you against me! And this place! This falling down rat’s heap of a place! I hate this town! Jesus’ he cried, gesturing wildly towards the window, ‘look what this place has done to you! What it’s done to us.’ He faltered, at a loss now and desperate. He quit his pacing in front of her. ‘Molly, come away with me, come out of this, now. Come with me to Sligo now and forget the rest! Never mind planning! We’ll make do. You can stay there safe with Katie until I book passage to America.’
‘America?’ she echoed, shaking her head slowly. ‘I can’t go to America. I can’t go anywhere with you, Mick!’
The words made his heart stop, then race madly. ‘But it’s what we planned! It’s what you promised!’ Katie was struggling now, and beginning to cry.
‘I never did any such thing!’ Molly cried, rising from the chair and reaching out her arms for the baby. He held her away, the reckless panic hitting him like a wall. His heart raced and his mind closed round her refusal. He was suffocating in it, and struggled against the descending unreality of the words. It was all he knew. He barely took in the room, it became illusory, a painted backdrop. He heard Katie’s wailing not at all, only the racing of his own mind.
‘You did!’ He insisted. ‘You said that if I could find a way you would do it, and I have! You promised! You can’t go back on it, not now, not now, not since Katie!’
‘It was about the painting!’ she cried. ‘About sitting for you! Give her to me!’ She reached for the baby again, who was screaming now, but he held her off. ‘I never said I would go away with you!’ Her voice rose over the noise. ‘And even if I had, I couldn’t now, it’s impossible.’
She was tearing his world asunder. It came raining down in shards like coloured glass, breaking around his feet, leaving him bloodied. ‘Why?’ he cried, over the drumming in his brain. ‘Why, after he’s beaten you senseless! Is that the way you want it?’
‘Because, Mick, I’m pregnant!’
He stopped. All the thundering in his head stopped, everything stopped. Only the sound of the baby screaming remained. Molly was inches from him, trying desperately now to wrest the hysterical baby from him.
‘You bitch!’
She struck him, shrieking. ‘There’s enough of that word, I will not be called it again! Now give me my baby!’
He was on fire where she slapped him, and something snapped in him. ‘No!’ He pulled Katie from her grasp, holding her, screaming and shaking and red, enough above his head to be out of Molly’s reach. ‘You can’t have her!’ He shouted. ‘I’ll take her, she’s mine! Mine! If you won’t have me then you can’t have her!’ He backed up toward the mantel. ‘Get away from me, Molly! She’s mine!’ He turned, pulling the baby into the shelter of his coat. Behind him Molly was crying, begging over Katie’s ear splitting and convulsive shrieks, ‘Mick, please, please, give me my baby!’ She came round, trying to take her away, but he held fast, shouting, ‘No, no, no, you can’t take her! She’s mine!’
‘Jesus are you murdering the child I here? You’ll have the polis down on us --’ Annie stood in the kitchen doorway. ‘Holy Mother of God!’ She was before him then, crying his name, and at last it got his attention. He stood staring at her, and Molly.
‘Give over, Micko,’ Annie murmured. ‘Give over, old darling. Mickeen, Mickeen. Give us the wee ane now. All she wants is her mammy. She’s frightened, just as you are. Give over, Mickeen, you’re all right. It’s all right now… Here darling, here –’ she prised the baby from his grip and gave her to Molly. His mania began to wind down a little and he felt as lost and helpless as a child. God, what had he done? Molly had retreated to the chair by the window with the baby and was holding her fiercely close trying to calm her, fumbling with her shirtwaist buttons, crooning, ‘Baby baby baby, my Katie, sh sh…’
‘Aine,’ he murmured, shaking with cold, and wildness retreating to leave only confusion and horror. What had he done? ‘Help me! My God, what have I done?’ Shame and horror overwhelmed him and he began to cry uncontrollably in great gulping sobs.
‘I wouldn’t hurt her,’ he cried, tears running down his face. ‘Oh my God. I wouldn’t hurt her!’ He took a step forward, blind with weeping. ‘I wouldn’t hurt her,’ he repeated. ‘She’s all I have – Molly!’
Annie’s grip was strong on his arm. ‘Come home Mickeen,’ she murmured quietly. ‘Come home me old darling. Katie will be fine. Molly knows you didn’t mean her harm. She’ll be fine. There see now, she has her mam and is quiet. Come along home.’ She led him out, stumbling, dazed, unable to stop crying.
At home, Annie sat him down in the parlour and went for the bottle of whiskey at the back of the kitchen dresser. She poured him out a double and sat next to him. ‘Get this down you,’ she said quietly, and helped him with it. Two, three. He took four before the whiskey hit him and he was able to stop crying for a little. He sat with his head in his hands, feeling the most wretched thing alive.
‘I’m a monster,’ he said miserably, ‘to do that to my own child. She’ll hate me forever..’
‘I’ll explain it to her,’ Annie said grimly. ‘She’ll understand.
The horror rose again and he broke out in tears. ‘You don’t understand! I’ve ruined everything!’ His voice rose hysterically and he was sobbing. Annie poured him another whiskey.
‘Drink,’ she said tersely. ‘And to bed wit’ ye. Sean and Jimmy can sleep on the sofa. Come on now.’
He shook his head wildly, buried under the weight of his colossal grief. ‘No, no, no, you don’t understand, I’ve ruined everything! I can’t – I can’t go on…’
‘Mick!’ Annie snapped. ‘Drink the bloody craytur or I’ll pour it down your gob, so help me!’ Her tough manner—the very one she used with her disobedient children – got to him, and he did as he was told, and afterward was a little clearer. She went upstairs with him, taking the bottle, though he didn’t need it. With the strong drink taken both the pain and the shame ebbed. His head hit the lumpy pillow, the room spun, and he escaped into blessed oblivion.
He slept the whole of that day and into the next in Seanín and Jimmy’s bed .If they made any noise, he certainly never heard it. When he woke by the light in the room it was the middle of the day and Katie sat in the chair folding nappies. He ached all over as if her had been beaten and his eyes were still swollen and crusted over from crying.
‘Mick,’ she murmured, and went to the door, calling for Annie. She came in, her sleeves rolled up and arms red from washing powder.
‘How are ye?’
‘I’ve been better,’ he mumbled, staring resentfully at the wall. Why did he have to wake up at all?
‘I spoke to Molly.’
He looked at Kate.
‘She won’t tell,’ Annie said, crossing her arms. ‘Will ye, Katie?’
‘No,’ Katie grumbled.
‘What did she say?’ he asked dully. He doubted it would be good. Why would she have anything good to say of him at all, after everything? It wasn’t.
‘She wants you to keep away from her. Those are her words. She was frightened Mick, and angry as any mother would be. She’ll get over it, give her time. But for now you’d do best to leave it. Go home to see Da.’
The very thought made him panic, for he was totally incapable of behaving normally. His whole life was a wreck, a bloody wreck. All he wanted to do was hide in bed and never come out. He began to cry. ‘I can’t. I can’t leave it! And, and I can’t go, not all the way out there! I can’t, I can’t face all those people on the trains!’
‘I’ll go with you Mick,’ Katie said, when his crying jag was finished. ‘It’ll be good to see Da.’
‘Running away from your husband already?’ Annie teased dryly. Kate had only been married six months, to Matt Gallagher whose family owned the greengrocer’s in the next street. It made him think of Jenny, and he cried again. ‘O Jesus mercy!’ Annie exclaimed. ‘It’s a bloody joke… I’m sorry, Micko.’
‘Thank you Katie,’ he managed when he could stop crying enough to speak. ‘Aine, I’m sorry! I’m sorry for all the trouble I’ve caused you. I’m sorry!’
‘Go way, you gossoon!’ Annie said, coming over now. ‘Sure what else would I do for me brother?’ She wrapped her arms about his shoulders, smoothing his hair and rocking back and forth as if he were a child. It was so safe here with his family, but he felt completely unworthy of their love and patience. All he could do was cry.
This went on for two days before his sisters forced him out of bed, into the bath and a suit and put him bodily on the evening train to Sligo, Kate at one hand and Annie at the other. He was haggard and thin – he had lost a stone’s weight in the four days, being unable to eat – but he hardly cared how he looked. He pulled his hat down and huddled in the corner next to Katie and slept all the way to Sligo.
It was the biggest trough he had ever been in, especially with the sudden contrast to the last two months. He had been so elevated, so expansive, working non--stop with marvellous energy, really feeling as if he could do anything that came into his mind. In the last four weeks he had done six complete paintings on huge canvases that Will Orpen called brilliant. The month before he had done four, all to be included in the April showing. This was in addition to his work with the paper, where he had turned in almost two hundred photographs.
Dillon, the production editor and his putative boss, accused him of inside information as he had so many of the harassment of nationalists and the poor that to a casual observer it would look suspicious. He was not believed when he said he just happened to be in the wrong place at the right time, that he was following his nose. What innocent citizen had a nose for political and social danger? He did his cause no good when, enraged at being accused of Fenianism, he grabbed the paperweight on Dillon’s desk and hurled it through the window. Had not the copy boys come running in at the noise of shattering glass, he’d have hurled Dillon through the window behind it. He had him by the lapels and had to be dragged off him.
‘Get him out of here!’ Dillon shouted. ‘Rafferty, if I ever see another unauthorised photo from you on my desk, you’re out! Do you hear me? OUT! Bloody Fenian bastards….’
But that was not the end of it. He went back to his regular work of covering society affairs, which in this meagre time consisted of theatre openings, and had a dressing--room tete â tete with the actress whose show at the Gaiety he was covering. He had never crossed that line before, and it set off something reckless in him. He spent wadges of money down the kips for a solid fortnight, on the most tawdry of whores; he went shopping in Grafton Street, buying clothes and haberdashery, more tobacco than he could use in six months, pipes, pricey art supplies he never used like gilding. Anything that caught his fancy for he was convinced that the break he had been waiting for was coming with the April show.
It wasn’t the first time he had gone over the top. That was when he had first come to Dublin and was trying to adjust to city life. His typical pattern of three or four hours’ sleep had been pared down to two and he was working the rest of the time non--stop, reading, studying, painting, writing. Then on a single day in November, Paddy had ripped apart one of his papers with his scathing commentary, and while he was still reeling from that, he went to the GPO for his mail to find a letter from Kate, full of the details of Bridie Twomey’s wedding party. He tore his studio apart, slamming doors and hurling everything not nailed down onto the floor or out the windows, screaming and ranting and swearing for two hours non--stop. He ruined two paintings, broke the bed, and tore apart every stretcher frame he had, put a hole in the door and knocked off the doorknob. The door was locked, and by the time Tim and Pete managed to get in, he was tearing up canvas in shreds trying to hang himself. Pete wrestled him to the floor and chloroformed him. He had that advantage, being a medical student.
There was the time in October of 1914 after the scene at the Learys, and in Derry with Jenny. He had always been moody, his whole life, hell to get on with according to Annie who was no garden party herself. Every single time afterward he was morose. Sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months, but he was always able to function. Not now. Now he was completely unable to cope even with the thought of going back to work, of doing anything apart from the continual walking he did in the hours Da was working in his small shop adjacent to the house. He went to Mass in Coolaney every morning, walked and walked, came back at sunset, dizzy with hunger, said the paidrin with Da and collapsed on the settle. Day after day. The minutiae of the countryside gave him a focus and kept him sane. Exhaustion kept him from thinking.
Katie had evidently been talking with Da while he was out, and for once he was grateful for her gossipy tongue, for it relieved him of the responsibility of saying the dreadful words. Da never broached the subject, but let him approach it on his own, the morning before their last day while they sat at breakfast in the quiet hour after dawn. English was too much, too bald, too curt. He began ambivalently in Irish, grateful for the broad facility of the language, and for his father’s ever quiet and placid manner; he was safe to talk to, was Da. He’d never look down his nose at you like Father Doyle. He’d tried confession, been seized with panic, and fled.
‘Things are bound to be different, Dada, when I go back to Dublin,’ he said.
‘Eh, so?’ Sean murmured.
‘You’ll have heard from Aine that things weren’t right between Jenny and me…’
‘Aye. She was saying it in a letter. But it’s no but I didn’t see myself when yez were here,’ Da murmured as easily as saying how the sun had just come up and it looked a fine day. It gave him courage. He drew a shuddering breath and glanced at Kate, who busied herself at the range.
‘It’s done,’ he said. ‘We had the papers in January…’
‘It was no easy thing I’m sure, Mickeen.’ Sean drank his tea.
Mickey winced. ‘There’s more.’ He glanced at Kate. ‘There was a woman I knew in Dublin – the one in the painting…. She used to sit for me…. She had a child last year, a wee girl…. A beauty she is Dada, like her Mammy….’ He broke off, his voice hoarse, tears spilling over, his nerve failing. ‘I can never call her my own, for Molly’s married and can’t or won’t leave, and while I know that’s right, I love her and it hurts so much….’ He put his head in his hands on the table, weeping. ‘I’ve made such a mess of things, Da. I’ve done everything wrong…’
‘Mickeen, buachaill,’ Sean said sadly, laying a hand on his shaking shoulders. ‘Now you know the terrible price paid, and why they call it a sin. I’m sorry for you, boyo, that I am. There’s no help for it, for anything that’s done. You can only pick yourself up and go on.’
‘I can’t,’ he cried.
Sean turned to Kate. ‘You know this woman, daughter?’
Katie crossed her arms and leaned on the dresser. ‘It’s Mrs. Leary, Da.’ She looked at Mick disparagingly. She and Annie both thought him daft for taking up with her, someone out of their station.
‘What sort of woman is she?’
Katie harrumphed, shaking her head. ‘She used to throw the dishes at me when she was cross. They fought like cat and dog in that house!’ Mickey opened his mouth to protest, but Sean raised a staying hand.
‘I’ll hear your sister’s side of it, if you please… Is she good to the child?’ he asked.
‘Very good,’ Kate said, nodding. ‘She’s grand with children. It’s people she’s bad with.’
‘You snotty little----’ Mick began angrily, rising from the table, but his father caught his arm.
‘Easy now. She’s a right to her opinions, an she lived with her so she knows the more than you of it…What of the husband, daughter? He would know, I’m thinking, as all of yez do. What of him?’
‘Oh, Mr. Leary’s grand with the wee anes, Dada!’ Kate said, warmth creeping into her voice. ‘He’s been as great with wee Katie as the others from the day she was born. He’s God’s own love of children, he does. There’s no worry there.’
They were the most painful words Mick had ever heard. It must be true, for even Molly said as much and she had no more reason to love the man than he did.
‘Ah, that’s grand, that’s grand,’ Sean said.
‘Da!’ Mick exclaimed. ‘How can you say it?’
Da bent him an impassive glance. ‘It’s the child I’m thinking of, Mickeen. Isn’t she what matters here?’ She was, of course, and he felt ashamed of his outburst.
‘Now,’ Sean murmured. ‘The best thing you can hope for, son, is some word of her from time to time if your sisters could do that; it would be well for you to keep out of it, I’m thinking. Enough harm done, and that’s my advice. Given all, you’re lucky itself that the child has their love and good will. Now, I’m no more pleased than yourself about this, but we must be practical. Do you hear me, boy? You must keep out of it.’
He ground his teeth. ‘Yes, Da. I hear you.’ How in the name of God would he ever get on? And to have to rely on Annie and Kate for information! It was an agony. But he had offended his father’s dignity enough this day, and he would not protest. Da went out to work then, and he rose from the table.
‘You’re mighty pleased with yourself, aren’t you?’ he sneered at Kate. She threw the dishtowel at him.
‘I’m not the one with a bastard, Mick Rafferty, so you mind your tongue!’
He went into the bedroom to finish his packing, slamming the door behind him.
The Royal Hibernian Academy showing in April was successful in terms of numbers, but not in terms of patronage, which Orpen said must be put down to the times. With the 1916 prisoners returned and up to their old tricks, and Sinn Fein recruiting everywhere – and the RIC and Dublin Castle as determined to put them down – people were wary of anything that evinced the national sentiment. As most of his painting had been of different parts of the countryside and city disturbed by the war, this left him out rather. Oh, the Academy and patrons lauded him – called him an exciting new talent with a keen and critical eye – but he only sold two paintings that evening and took no commissions. The affair, in rented rooms in Ely Place, was covered by the daily papers, and he took some ribbing from Martin Reilly from the Independent to be standing in evening dress on the other side of the camera.
‘Smile for the dicky bird,’ Martin grinned, ‘now don’t be nervous. It won’t be a minute.’
Molly’s friend Mrs. Talbot was there with her husband and draped in a fur when she entered, over a trailing silk frock.
‘We couldn’t miss it, of course,’ she said in the false--cheery tone he now recognised as the society mask. ‘Not with Gerry as your star. It is too bad she couldn’t be here, Michael, but did you know that her sister is expected? Mrs. MacNeeson. I told her to present herself. She is just furnishing a house in Merrion Square and could do with some fine art It’s so very good to see you, Michael…’ And they moved along, she and her mumbling, frog--eyed husband, who never looked to know quite where he was. What she really thought of it all was a mystery of course. Molly’s sister did come with her goggle--eyed husband – did all the gentry have goiter these days? -- and introduced herself after the speechifying by the Academy when the gallery was full and he was pulled in four directions to speak with people. He’d have known her anywhere. She was tall, with curling chestnut hair, and the face was the same though the eyes were green. Her accents held not a trace of Ireland. She had gone to public school in England. She gave him her thin narrow gloved hand and looked down her thin narrow nose at him as she spoke,
‘I suppose, Mr. Raftery, that I must stand this evening as a representative of my family. Though I must confess, it is rather extraordinary to see one’s relation depicted in such a manner. I daresay it surprised my sister Mary as greatly. You must be a awfully persuasive fellow.’ Raftery was the commoner form of his name, but he was annoyed at her getting it wrong. Even more annoyed at the condescension and thinly veiled hostility of her words. He made a mocking little bow.
‘I suppose I must be, Mrs. MacNeeson. Thank you so much for coming, and representing your family.’
The galling thing was that of the two paintings sold, Mrs. Talbot bought one, for £250, and Molly’s sister the other, for £500. It was more than two years’ wages at the paper, all in a night, from women who neither understood nor appreciated his art. They bought for the sole reason of their connection with Molly, and bought landscapes, both; Liz a study of the hills above Bray, and Patsy – that was her name – one of Howth, presumably because it was her home country.
The next day the Sinn Feiners came to the opening proper, some three or four dozen at first then in small groups throughout the day, a good portion of whom were women from the Cumann na mBan and Inghinne na Eireann. These were the last people whom he wanted to make much of his work, but they did. Molly had been right – the nationalists took to An Roisin Dubh as their own inspiration. It was infuriating that she, the most oblivious of West Britons, should have been able to see clearly what he did not. Mary Brigid Pearse and Arthur Griffith offered to buy the painting to use as part of their upcoming commemoration of the Easter Rising and the election campaigns throughout the country. £1000 was the offer – and where would they be getting that kind of money? But he said emphatically no.
‘I didn’t intend it as a political platform, Mr. Griffith,’ he told the little round bespectacled man. Griffith crossed his arms.
‘Is that so? I would be very interested to hear how you did intend it, then, Mr. Rafferty.’
A crowd of his supporters was now gathering round. Mick tossed his hair back.
‘As an elegy,’ he said flatly. ‘As an elegy to the waste of Irish lives.’
‘Ah now,’ Griffith said. ‘I’ve seen your photos in the Independent,’ he mean the ones of Tim Creevy’s murder by the G Division. ‘You’ll forgive the error in my thinking you a nationalist.’
‘I am an artist, Mr. Griffith. Nothing more.’
‘Nothing more?’ One of the Cumann women interrupted. Her hand swept upward in a gesture towards the painting. ‘This is what you would call nothing more? I think you’re equivocating, Mr. Rafferty.’
‘That’s as may be,’ he said impassively, privately impressed that she knew the word. ‘But I painted the picture, and I should think I know how I intended it.’
‘You were out in Easter Week, I believe, Mr. Rafferty?’ Griffith said. That shocked him. Griffith smiled. ‘One of our boys remembered you from the Red Cross squad. We keep an eye on things, round here. You obviously have some sympathy with the fate of the nation.’ This was hardly the place to do recruiting for Sinn Fein and Griffith’s utter certainty about his whereabouts that week unnerved him. He never thought the physical force movement was watching him. But of course they would, being in and out of Paddy Leary’s house as he had been. But for how long had they been watching him? Shaken as he was, he managed to protest,
‘My sympathy lies with the families of the dead. Since you know where I was, you’ll also know that I was out with Frank Skeffington. I am a pacifist, Mr. Griffith. I see no point in murdering each other over intangibles. I lost two brothers in your dirty little war, to no effect that I can see. It changed nothing.’
There was a general murmur from the nationalists gathered round. Griffith said, ‘If you value your life, Mr. Rafferty, I would be careful to whom you said that. It might not be taken well in some quarters.’ The implicit threat hung silent and ponderous in the air for a long moment. Then Griffith looked around, at his group of supporters. ‘Well, I can see we’ve done all we can here.’ He tipped his hat. ‘Good day to you, Mr. Rafferty.’ And out they went.
The episode unnerved him, the more so because he had no one in Dublin to ask for help. By the appearance of things, every side was suspicious of him, and as the by--election hotted up, he wished more earnestly every day simply to get out of the country. But he hadn’t the money yet. The pay from the seven paintings he eventually sold from the exhibit helped, but they were not nearly enough. He didn’t want to go over a beggar, as it would grant him only a short--term visitor’s visa since Wilson’s government had cracked down on Irish émigrés at the behest of Winston Churchill. No, he wanted to do it right… If he had sold Roisin Dubh to Griffith’s Sinn Feiners, he’d have enough, but there was nothing about that prospect that cheered him. If he had done he’d have been marked as a Fenian for certain, and without contacts in that way going abroad he was a dead man. Late in May, he wrote to Annie,
‘I don’t know what to do about it all. Dublin grows worse every day. There’s some
fellow named Collins organising the Volunteers; they’ve taken over a couple of the
pubs and hotels and are harassing the RIC barracks up and down in the county
towns. Nobody appears to know what the jackeen looks like and the Castle are mad
with it. There are house searches every day. Curfew has been reinstated; we’re back
to 10 PM from 11.30. Last night I was trailed by a couple of Castle goons on my way
home from the Met school, if you can imagine it. It has happened regularly since the
exhibition. I fear things will get worse rather than better. God do I want out of this
bloody country!’
During the elections last year, Sinn Fein had won enough seats to prove a serious threat – if not an embarrassment – to the British Government in Ireland, hence the subsequent arrests and harassment of nationalists. But the people’s will was strong this time. The executions and mass arrests of 1916 had worked a miracle in the minds of the Irish people. From May through the early part of September, over and over again, Sinn Fein stood candidates, from Joe MacGuiness in Longford, to Eamonn DeValera in East Clare, to William Cosgrave in Kilkenny. Out from the Dublin Brigade of the Volunteers went a telegram to Lloyd George with two words, Get Out. Understandably the Home Office was in an uproar. The Manchester Guardian called the Irish elections the equivalent of a serious defeat in the field.
As a result of the Sinn Fein Ard Fheis, Eamonn DeValera, MP for East Clare now on remand in Lincoln Jail in England, was elected First Minister of the Dail; and the very next day was elected as the President of the Irish Volunteers. A complete break was not long in coming. After the signing of the Armistice on 11 November, Lloyd George announced that the General Election promised since August would finally be held in Ireland. The results of the December election could not have been worse news to the PM, or for his Government’s plan for partitioning the country and the granting of very limited Home Rule, for they were overwhelmingly in favour of Sinn Fein from north to south. Even in Derry, whose City Council before had been 90% Unionist, there was a complete reversal. Out of 105 seats in Ireland, 73 went to Sinn Fein. This was in addition to the seats won the year before .It was a landslide victory. No British political party had ever received such a majority at a single election.
Sinn Fein convened an all--Ireland Assembly of the Dail in the Mansion House in Dublin on 21 January 1919, and proclaimed itself the only legitimate legislature of the Irish Republic. On that same day in Soloheadbeag, Co. Tipperary a local battalion of the Irish Volunteers led by Seamus Robinson, Dan Breen, and Sean Treacy made an assault on the RIC barracks, coming away with a supply of gelignite and killing two policemen.
On the 23rd Mick was at Blane’s Hotel in Ship Street in Portstewart, waiting to board for the Transatlantic crossing to New York. It was merely co--incidental that he was leaving the country in the wake of the mass celebrations and riots subsequent to the elections, but he was not sorry to leave; not sorry to miss the bloodbath that would surely follow; not sorry to remove himself from the suspicious surveillance of all parties that he had endured for nearly a year now.
Molly had agreed to meet him on her way to visit her friend Sarah Edgeworth in Antrim. Paddy sending her out of harm’s way again. There were riots from the outraged Unionists continuing in Derry these last three weeks since the election; there looked to be no let up thanks to the founding of the Dail, which the Unionists took as a sign that Britain was abandoning them to the Sinn Feiners now that the war in Europe was over.
He was shocked at her appearance. She had been very ill with influenza in July and August – Anne said they had feared for her life – and she was still alarmingly thin, weak, and with that wracking consumptive cough. There were deep black circles under her eyes and all liveliness had gone from her. She was hardly more than a ghost of the raving beauty that captured his imagination eight and half years ago. She attended dully to the children and was content to sit in the dreary room that she took adjacent to his or in the lounge and talk of inconsequential things if she spoke at all. If they had twenty minutes alone together in those twelve hours he would call it generous. To the children the meeting was co--incidental, and even to Katie he was no one other than the Kilgallens’ Uncle Mick. That was painful, but he hadn’t the heart to berate her for it when she was so ill.
Joe and Sally were solicitous of her, which was very touching. Joe had grown tall in the last year, and it was heartbreaking to see that otherwise rough and bluff foul--mouthed boy transfigure in her presence into a calm, polite young gent who shouldered his way through crowds before her, opened doors, and held her hand without shame. Easy it was to see his father in him, thin--voiced and narrow--shouldered as he yet was; the stamp was very clear, and in those extraordinary moments Mick could see – oh painfully! – why she had loved Paddy Leary in early days, for obviously the boy had learned such behaviour by proximity. It was a bleak insight into the man, and he didn’t want it, didn’t want it at all. It was far easier to hate him, to hate them both, than to see the mosaic.
Sally was a regular little mother, incongruous as it was with her wild, high--coloured appearance and strong language. She was not a shy girl, tall as her brother and just as bluff. She was all rough edges, coltish awkwardness and sharp tongue. But with Katie, the baby Eamonn, and Molly she was tender and patient. It was remarkable to see her looking after the fractious baby one minute and rounding on her brother for some remark the next. Both of them were mature beyond their years, as they had not been in Dublin. It was hardly conceivable that two short years could accomplish so much, but who could tell their experiences? Annie complained that the police and the Orangemen all daily harassed them, and that may well not have been an exaggeration. It would explain these two young people.
He asked after Eamonn while they were at tea. The child was obviously a trial, ill or evil tempered by the continual stress of their lives. It was Joe, his mouth full of scones, who volunteered that ‘Da named him for deValera.’ Mickey looked at Molly.
‘Is that true?’
She smiled a little, ruefully. ‘Yes it is. He admires him very much.’
‘Huh!’ Joe scoffed tossing his hair out of his eyes. ‘I’ll say! Micko, you should hear him and Tom go on about Dev in Easter Week! He sounds like a bally hero in their mouths so he does, holding off regiments of Brits at Mount Street Bridge with thirty men and a couple of carbines.’
‘Joejoe,’ Molly murmured, with a discreet glance over her shoulder. She was evidently not chiding him for swearing.
‘It’s all right, like, Mammy,’ Joe assured her. ‘Yer man there’s no but a clerk.’ Mickey looked up casually then, and noted the man by the counter of the café with the newspaper. He could have been a G--man. He was impressed. They had eyes in the backs of their heads to see without looking and instantly assess who was dangerous and who was not. None of them had obviously sized the place up when they came in, not even Molly. He began to wonder if her low--key demeanour was something else. She had become clever, if so.
He knocked up her door at five--thirty in the morning to say good--bye. She was awake and was instantly before him, slipping out into the dim--lit passage. Now that the moment was on him, he could hardly force the words from his throat.
‘I wish to God you were coming with me.’
She winced and bit her lip. ‘So do I.’ She shook her head. ‘I never thought it would be as bad as this.’ He thought it best not to say that it would get worse. She deserved that innocence at least. He caught her hands, struggling with his feelings, that tide that rose on the sight of her and always had.
‘In a year I could have enough for both of us, all of us,’ he said, though he knew that optimistic.
‘I could book passage right now and save you the bother,’ she said wryly. It was a painful joke at her own expense. ‘I could run away anytime, except there’s nowhere to run.’
He pressed her hands, sliding his thumbs over the backs. ‘Think about it.’
That broke her control. She choked on a sob. ‘I can’t, Mick, I’d go mad!’
‘I’ll write, you’ll know where I am, if you ever change your mind, ‘ his thoughts, like his words began racing. The porter rounded the stairs to the right at the end of the red--papered hall. The call he was waiting for so as not to miss the boarding. Shite. He flung his arms around her. ‘I love you. I have always loved you,’ he told her fiercely.
‘Don’t!’ she begged, breaking into sobs. He kissed her wildly then, to say good--bye, to keep her from rousing the children, because he might never see her again.
‘Five minutes, sir,’ the porter said, walking past. He tore himself away, picked up his cases.
‘All right, all right,’ he said blindly. He couldn’t look on her sorrow, on the wreck of her beauty. It tore him apart.
‘Mind yourself, darling girl,’ he murmured, choking on the words, and started off down the hall.
‘And you,’ she gave a little wave, forlorn, and he ran, tearing down the stairs and away to the waiting cab and the dockside. They had left each other two things, he reflected in the cab as he sat shaking -- the painting, and Katie. Nothing else was worth thinking about.
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