That, too, Attracta remembered as she continued her walk around the headland. Mr Devereux afterwards never referred to it, and Mr Purce never spoke to her again, as if deciding that there was nothing left to say. In the town, as she grew up, people would reluctantly answer her when she questioned them about her parents’ tragedy in an effort to discover more than her aunt or Archdeacon Flower had revealed. But nothing new emerged, the people she asked only agreeing that Mr Devereux in those days had been as wild as Mr Purce suggested. He’d drilled the local men, he’d been assisted in every way by Geraldine Carey, whose husband had gone away to Louth. But everything had been different since the night of the tragedy.
Her aunt tried to explain to her the nature of Mr Purce’s hatred of Mr Devereux. Mr Purce saw things in a certain light, she said, he could not help himself. He couldn’t help believing that Father Quinlan would prefer the town’s Protestants to be dead and buried. He couldn’t help believing that immorality continued in the relationship between Mr Devereux and his housekeeper when clearly it did not. He found a spark and made a fire of it, he was a bigot and was unable to do anything about it. The Protestants of the town felt ashamed of him.
Mr Purce died, and was said to have continued in his hatred with his last remaining breaths. He mentioned the Protestant girl, his bleak, harsh voice weakening. She had been contaminated and infected, she was herself no better than the people who used her for their evil purposes. She was not fit to teach the Protestant children of the town, as she was now commencing to do. ‘As I lie dying,’ Mr Purce said to the clergyman who had succeeded Archdeacon Flower, ‘I am telling you that, sir.’ But afterwards, when the story of Mr Purce’s death went round, the people of the town looked at Attracta with a certain admiration, seeming to suggest that for her the twisting of events had not been easy, neither the death of her parents nor the forgiveness asked of her by Mr Devereux, nor the bigotry of Mr Purce. She’d been caught in the middle of things, they seemed to suggest, and had survived unharmed.
Surviving, she was happy in the town. Too happy to marry the exchange clerk from the Provincial Bank or the young man who came on a holiday to Cedarstrand with his parents. Pride goeth before destruction, her pupils’ headlines stated, and Look before you leap. Their fingers pressed hard on inky pens, knuckles jutting beneath the strain, tongue-tips aiding concentration. Ariadne, Finn MacCool, King Arthur’s sword, Cathleen ni Houlihan: legends filled the schoolroom, with facts about the Romans and the Normans, square roots and the Gulf Stream. Children grew up and went away, returning sometimes to visit Attracta in her house in North Street. Others remained and in the town she watched them changing, grey coming into their hair, no longer moving as lithely as they had. She developed an affection for the town without knowing why, beyond the fact that it was part of her.
‘Yet in all a lifetime I learnt nothing,’ she said aloud to herself on the headland. ‘And I taught nothing either.’ She gazed out at the smooth blue Atlantic but did not see it clearly. She saw instead the brown-paper parcel that contained the biscuit-box she had read about, and the fingers of Penelope Vade undoing the string and the brown paper. She saw her lifting off the lid. She saw her frowning for a moment, before the eyes of the man she loved stared deadly into hers. Months later, all courage spent and defeated in her gesture, the body of Penelope Vade dragged itself across the floors of two different rooms. There was the bottle full of aspirins in a cupboard, and water drunk from a Wedgwood-patterned cup, like the cups Attracta drank from every day.
In her schoolroom, with its maps and printed pictures, the sixteen faces stared back at her, the older children at the back. She repeated her question.’
‘Now, what does anyone think of that?’
Again she read them the news item, reading it slowly because she wanted it to become as rooted in their minds as it was in hers. She lingered over the number of bullets that had been fired into the body of Penelope Vade’s husband, and over the removal of his head.
‘Can you see that girl? Can you imagine men putting a human head in a tin box and sending it through the post? Can you imagine her receiving it? The severed head of the man she loved?’
‘Sure, isn’t there stuff like that in the papers the whole time?’ one of the children suggested.
She agreed that that was so. ‘I’ve had a good life in this town,’ she added, and the children looked at her as if she’d suddenly turned mad.
‘I’m getting out of it,’ one of them said after a pause. ‘Back of beyond, miss.’
She began at the beginning. She tried to get into the children’s minds an image of a baby sleeping while violence and death took place on the Cork road. She described her Aunt Emmeline’s house in North Street, the neat feminine house it had been, her aunt’s cat, Diggory, the small sitting-room, her aunt’s maid, Meta. She spoke of her own very fair hair and her thin face, and the heavy old-fashioned clothes she’d worn in those days. She spoke of the piety of Geraldine Carey, and the grain merchant’s tired face. The friendship they offered her was like Penelope Vade proclaiming peace in the city where her husband had been killed; it was a gesture, too.
‘His house would smell of roses on a summer’s day. She’d carry his meals to him, coming out of the shadows of her kitchen. As if in mourning, the blue blinds darkened the drawing-room. It was they who bore the tragedy, not I.’
She described Mr Purce’s face and his grating voice. She tried to make of him a figure they could see among the houses and shops that were familiar to them: the hard black hat, the walking-stick poking away litter. He had done his best to rescue her, acting according to his beliefs. He wanted her not to forget, not realizing that there was nothing for her to remember.
‘But I tried to imagine,’ she said, ‘as I am asking you to imagine now: my mother and father shot dead on the Cork road, and Mr Devereux and Geraldine Carey as two monstrous people, and arms being blown off soldiers, and vengeance breeding vengeance.’
A child raised a hand and asked to leave the room. Attracta gave permission and awaited the child’s return before proceeding. She filled the time in by describing things that had changed in the town, the falling to pieces of O’Mara’s Picture House, the closing of the tannery in 1938. When the child came back she told of Mr Purce’s death, how he’d said she was not fit to teach Protestant children.
‘I tried to imagine a night I’d heard about,’ she said, ‘when Mr Devereux’s men found a man in Madden’s public house whom they said had betrayed them, and how they took him out to Cedarstrand and hanged him in a barn. Were they pleased after they’d done that? Did they light cigarettes, saying the man was better dead? One of those other men must have gone to a post office with the wrapped biscuit-box. He must have watched it being weighed and paid the postage. Did he say to himself he was exceptional to have hoodwinked a post-office clerk?’
Obediently listening in their rows of worn desks, the children wondered what on earth all this was about. No geography or history lesson had ever been so bewildering; those who found arithmetic difficult would have settled for attempting to understand it now. They watched the lined face of their teacher, still thin as she’d said it had been in childhood, the fair hair grey now. The mouth twitched and rapidly moved, seeming sometimes to quiver as if it struggled against tears. What on earth had this person called Penelope Vade to do with anything?
‘She died believing that hell had come already. She’d lost all faith in human life, and who can blame her? She might have stayed in Haslemere, like anyone else would have. Was she right to go to the city where her husband had been murdered, to show its other victims that her spirit had not been wholly crushed?’