Grievance. Marguerite Alexander

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СКАЧАТЬ careful with a child like this not to tax the brain with more than it can handle.’

      There were murmurs of approval for Gerald’s commendable fatherly concern. These he stilled by raising a warning finger. ‘But don’t make any mistake about it,’ he said, ‘They can’t learn soon enough how the world works.’

      ‘You want her to know about the Jews?’ asked Liam, doubtfully. This struck all of them as an entirely unnecessary lesson. As Irish Catholics, they had never questioned the received wisdom that Jews were treacherous, money-grubbing and only out for themselves. On the other hand, none of them had ever met a Jew, or was likely to do so.

      ‘I want her to learn something much more useful than that,’ said Gerald, who was, as usual, a step ahead of them. ‘I want her to realise that, not just in this instance but in almost everything you could name, people’s instincts are being suppressed by those who think they know better. Now, take the Jews.’

      ‘I’d rather not, thank you,’ said Tom O’Neill, the butcher, raising the biggest laugh of the afternoon.

      ‘Very well, then. Take Shakespeare and the Jews. Now, the English are only too ready to accept what he has to say about England – all that jingoistic nonsense about sceptred isles and brave English soldiers throwing themselves into the breach, without knowing that he was more or less forced to write it, but they don’t want to hear what he says about Jews. And yet the man was ahead of his time. He said – you heard the girl – that they’re not animals, they’re human beings, like the rest of us. They bleed, they laugh and all the rest of it. I’ll go along with that. But – and it’s an important “but” – revenge matters as much to them as food and drink, and they don’t have the same feelings for their flesh and blood as we do. His daughter runs away, and all he can think about are his ducats. But you’re not allowed to say that any more, not in England or the States. No, I just want her to learn to respect the evidence and to be fearless in saying what she knows to be right. That’s all. The Jews are incidental, they’re just an example.’

      Signalling that the session was over for the afternoon, he lifted Nora up and held her, legs dangling, face on a level with his, as if he were displaying her. ‘And I want her to know that she’s more precious to her Daddy than anything else in the world, even ducats. Especially ducats.’

      There was no doubt that they made an appealing picture – Gerald fresh-faced, well-tended (it was rumoured that he took home some of the lotions and creams from the shop for his own skin, and that he needed a wife at home all the time to iron the shirts that he insisted on wearing, clean, every day), dressed in the finest tweed, linen and leather, a man in the prime of life, and Nora as dainty and delicate as a little fairy.

      ‘And what if the next one’s a boy?’

      ‘It’ll make no difference. There isn’t a boy who can match her.’

      

      Nora’s companion memory to what was to be the last occasion when her father took her to the shop with him to demonstrate her cleverness fell within days of the first. The two stand side by side, an end followed by a beginning. Everything about that second day was different, from the moment she woke up and sensed an alteration in the sounds of the house. Still in her pyjamas, she wandered through into the kitchen where her mother would be preparing the breakfast – hers to be eaten at the kitchen table, her father’s to be placed on a tray and carried through to him in the bedroom. Instead of her mother, however, there was Mrs Daly from next door, a woman of late middle age, whose children had grown and left home, moving about and, as she described it, making herself useful.

      ‘Now, pet, you mustn’t fret,’ she said. ‘Your daddy’s taken your mummy into the hospital, and when she comes home, please, God, she’ll have a new wee brother or sister for you. Now, what would you like for your breakfast? Will I cook you an egg or fry you a rasher?’

      Nora sat and spooned cereal into her mouth while Mrs Daly pushed a cloth over the work surfaces in a show of activity. She wondered how her mother felt about having another woman in her kitchen. She knew her to be ill at ease with her neighbours in this most select area of the town and that she suspected Mrs Daly, who had time on her hands and an imagination actively engaged in the lives of others, of a tendency to snoop.

      Bernie often said that her neighbours regarded her as fortunate, not just because they lived so well but also because, as an exceptionally pretty young woman, she had caught Gerald’s eye when she had come to work as an assistant at the pharmacy. And she suspected that ‘fortunate’ carried connotations of something in excess of what she deserved. Convinced that everybody around her was looking for evidence against her, she was an anxious, if unenthusiastic housekeeper, and kept her family, modest country people of whom she was now ashamed, at a distance.

      There was to be no nursery this morning, and Mrs Daly was clearly relieved when, after breakfast, Nora demonstrated that she was quite capable of amusing herself. Although she wasn’t very good at playing with toys, she had other resources, and after she had spent some time drawing and looking through books, she put on her rubber boots and jacket and wandered round the garden while Mrs Daly sat with yesterday’s newspaper at the picture window in the lounge, keeping an eye on her.

      At this time Gerald took considerable pride in his garden, which deteriorated sadly in the years that followed, and Nora, in her progress, named the shrubs and bulbs that were in flower, as her father had taught her: magnolia, viburnum, the quince-bearing japonica and daffodils. The daffodils were a concession to popular taste, as represented by Bernie: for himself, Gerald favoured those plants that his neighbours couldn’t identify when they passed the time of day with him while he was working in the garden. Nora talked to herself as she padded through the damp grass, conducting an endless conversation in her head – a habit that persisted with her into young adulthood.

      She was growing hungry and thinking it must nearly be lunchtime when she noticed that Mrs Daly was no longer at her post by the window. Assuming that the old woman must be preparing something for her to eat, she went back into the house, took off her boots as she had been trained and, without putting her indoor shoes back on, passed through the central corridor in the bungalow to the kitchen, which was at the front of the house facing the street. The architect whom they had consulted after buying their plot of land had convinced Bernie that, with his design, she would have a livelier time while she was working, but she had always felt exposed in there and had come to resent his advice.

      Just before she reached the kitchen, Nora heard voices, those of Mrs Daly and another woman, who seemed to be telling her something. They were speaking softly, but there was an undertow of excitement; suspecting that they would stop if she joined them, Nora hovered outside the door, which was ajar, as though someone had gone to close it without checking that it had held.

      ‘Lord love us,’ she heard Mrs Daly say. ‘Who would have expected such a thing?’

      ‘It can happen to anybody,’ the other woman replied.

      ‘But the Doyles, of all people,’ said Mrs Daly. Then she used a word that sounded to Nora like ‘gerbil’. They didn’t have pets, but Nora had once seen a gerbil when she had gone to play with Katy, a girl who lived in one of the neighbouring houses. It was a little rat-like creature in a cage, and when Katy had lifted it out, petted and kissed it, the sight had sickened her and she had refused all subsequent invitations to play. Why would Mrs Daly bring gerbils into a conversation about her family? But then, as the women continued, it seemed that they were talking about her mother’s new baby. Trembling, she crept away down the corridor and, not knowing what else to do, put her boots and coat back on and went out again into the garden. She didn’t feel hungry any more so she sat huddled on the bench wondering what to do.

      She СКАЧАТЬ