It was Penelope Vade’s desire to make some kind of gesture, a gesture of courage and perhaps anger, that had caused her to leave her parents’ home in Haslemere and to go to Belfast. Her husband, an army officer, had been murdered in Belfast; he’d been decapitated as well. His head, wrapped in cotton-wool to absorb the ooze of blood, secured within a plastic bag and packed in a biscuit-tin, had been posted to Penelope Vade. Layer by layer the parcel had been opened by her in Haslemere. She hadn’t known that he was dead before his dead eyes stared into hers.
Her gesture was her mourning of him. She went to Belfast to join the Women’s Peace Movement, to make the point that somehow neither he nor she had been defeated. But her gesture, publicly reported, had incensed the men who’d gone to the trouble of killing him. One after another, seven of them had committed acts of rape on her. It was after that that she had killed herself.
A fortnight after Attracta had first read the newspaper item it still upset her. It haunted her, and she knew why it did, though only imprecisely. Alone at night, almost catching her unawares, scenes from the tragedy established themselves in her mind: the opening of the biscuit-box, the smell of death, the eyes, blood turning brown. As if at a macabre slide-show, the scene would change: before people had wondered about her whereabouts Penelope Vade had been dead for four days; mice had left droppings on her body.
One afternoon, in order to think the matter over in peace and quiet, Attracta drove her Morris Minor to the sea at Cedarstrand, eight miles from the town. She clambered from the strand up to the headland and paused there, gazing down into the bay, at the solitary island it held. No one had ever lived on the island because its smallness would have made a self-supporting existence impossible. When she’d been growing up she’d often wondered what it would be like to live alone on the rocky fastness, in a wooden hut or a cottage built of stones. Not very agreeable, she’d thought, for she’d always been sociable. She thought it again as she turned abruptly from the sea and followed a path inland through wiry purple heather.
Two fishermen, approaching her on the path, recognized her as the Protestant teacher from the town eight miles away and stood aside for her to pass. She was thinking that nothing she might ever have said in her schoolroom could possibly have prevented the death of a girl in a city two hundred miles away. Yet in a way it seemed ridiculous that for so long she had been relating the details of Cromwell’s desecration and the laws of Pythagoras, when she should have been talking about Mr Devereux and Geraldine Carey. And it was Mr Purce she should have recalled instead of the Battle of the Boyne.
The fishermen spoke to her as she passed them by but she didn’t reply. It surprised them that she didn’t, for they hadn’t heard that the Protestant teacher had recently become deaf or odd. Just old, they supposed, as they watched her progressing slowly: an upright figure, spare and seeming fragile, a certain stiffness in her movement.
What made Attracta feel close to the girl in the newspaper item was the tragedy in her own life: the death of her mother and her father when she was three. Her parents had gone away, she had been told, and at first she had wept miserably and would not be comforted. But as days passed into weeks, and weeks into months, this unhappiness gradually left her. She ceased to ask about her parents and became used to living in her Aunt Emmeline’s house in North Street. In time she no longer remembered the morning she’d woken up in this house in a bed that was strange to her; nor could she recollect her parents’ faces. She grew up assuming they were no longer alive and when once she voiced this assumption her aunt did not contradict it. It wasn’t until later in her childhood, when she was eleven, that she learnt the details of the tragedy from Mr Purce, a small man in a hard black hat, who was often to be seen on the streets of the town. He was one of the people she noticed in her childhood, like the elderly beggar-woman called Limerick Nancy and the wild-looking builder’s labourer who could walk a hundred miles without stopping, who never wore a jersey or a coat over his open shirt even on the coldest winter days. There were other people too: priests going for a walk in pairs, out along the road that led to the golf-course and to Cedarstrand by the longer route. Strolling through the afternoon sunshine there were nuns in pairs also, and there was Redmond the solicitor hurrying about with his business papers, and Father Quinlan on his bicycle. At night there were the florid country bachelors tipsily smiling through cigarette smoke, lips glistening in the street-light outside Colgan’s public house. At all times of day, at all the town’s corners, the children of the poor waited for nothing in particular.
The town was everything in Attracta’s childhood, and only some of it had changed in the fifty years that had passed. Without nostalgia she remembered now the horses and carts with milk-churns for the creamery, slowly progressing on narrow streets between colour-washed houses. On fair-days the pavements had been slithery with dung, and on fair-days they still were. Farmers stood by their animals, their shirts clean for the occasion, a stud at their throats, without collar or tie. Dogs slouched in a manner that was characteristic of the dogs of the town; there was a smell of stout and sawdust. In her childhood there had been O’Mara’s Picture House, dour grey cement encasing the dreamland of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Built with pride in 1929, O’Mara’s was a ruin now.
Within the world of the town there was for Attracta a smaller, Protestant world. Behind green railings there was Mr Ayrie’s Protestant schoolroom. There was the Church of Ireland church, with its dusty flags of another age, and Archdeacon Flower’s prayers for the English royal family. There were the Sunday-school classes of Mr and Mrs Dell, and the patience of her aunt, which seemed like a Protestant thing also – the Protestant duty of a woman who had, never expected to find herself looking after a child. There was Mr Devereux, a Protestant who never went to church.
No one in the town, not even her aunt, was kinder to Attracta than Mr Devereux. On her birthday he came himself to the house in North Street with a present carefully wrapped, a doll’s house once, so big he’d had to ask the man next door to help him out of the dickey of his motor-car with it. At Christmas he had a Christmas tree in his house, and other children in the town, her friends from school, were invited to a party. Every Saturday she spent the afternoon with him, eating his housekeeper’s delicious orange cake for tea and sticking stamps into the album he’d given her, listening to his gramophone in the room he called his office. He loved getting a huge fire going in his office, banking up the coals so that they’d glow and redden her cheeks. In summer he sat in his back garden with her, sometimes reading Coral Island aloud. He made her run away to the raspberry canes and come back with a punnet of fruit, which they’d have at suppertime. He was different from her aunt and from Mr Ayrie and Archdeacon Flower. He smelt of the tobacco he smoked in his pipe. He wore tweed suits and a striped shirt with a white celluloid collar, and patterned brown shoes which Attracta greatly admired. His tie matched the tweed of his suit, a gold watch dangled from the lapel of his jacket into his top pocket. He was by trade a grain merchant.
His house was quiet and always a little mysterious. The drawing-room, full of looming furniture, was dark in the daytime. Behind layers of curtains that hung to the ground, blue blinds obscured the greater part of the light: sunshine would damage the furniture, Mr Devereux’s housekeeper used to say. On a summer’s afternoon this woman would light a paraffin lamp so that she could polish the mahogany surfaces of the tables and the grand piano. Her name was Geraldine Carey: she added to the house’s mystery.
Mr Devereux’s smile was slow. There was a laziness about it, both in its leisurely arrival and the way it lingered. His eyes had a weary look, quite out of keeping with all the efforts he made to promote his friendship with Attracta and her aunt. Yet the efforts seemed natural to Attracta, as were the efforts of Geraldine Carey, who was the quietest person Attracta had ever met. She spoke in a voice that was often hard to hear. Her hair was as black as coal, drawn back from her face and arranged in a coiled bun at the back of her head. Her eyes were startlingly alive, seeming to be black also, often cast down. She had the kind of beauty that Attracta would like one day to possess herself, but knew she would not. Geraldine Carey was like a nun because of the dark clothes she wore, and she had a nun’s piety. In the town it was said she couldn’t go to Mass often enough. ‘Why weren’t you a nun, Geraldine?’ Attracta asked her once, watching her making bread in her big, cool kitchen. The habit would have suited her, she added, already imagining the housekeeper’s face framed by the coif, and the black voluminous skirts. But Geraldine Carey replied that she’d never heard God calling her. ‘Only the good are called,’ she said.