Collected Stories

Attracta

Attracta read about Penelope Vade in a newspaper, an item that upset her. It caused her to wonder if all her life as a teacher she’d been saying the wrong things to the children in her care. It saddened her when she thought about the faces that had passed through her schoolroom, ever since 1937. She began to feel she should have told them about herself.

She taught in a single schoolroom that hadn’t altered much since the days when she’d been a pupil in it herself. There were portraits of England’s kings and queens around the walls, painted by some teacher in the past. There were other pictures, added at some later date, of Irish heroes: Niall of the Nine Hostages, Lord Edward FitzGerald, Wolfe Tone and Grattan. Maps of Europe and of Ireland and of England, Wales and Scotland hung side by side. A new blackboard, attached to the wall, had ten years ago replaced the old pedestal one. The globe had always been there in Attracta’s time, but since it did not designate political boundaries it wasn’t much out of date. The twenty-five wooden desks more urgently needed to be replaced.

In the schoolroom Attracta taught the sixteen Protestant children of the town. The numbers had been sometimes greater in the past, and often fewer; sixteen was an average, a number she found easy to manage when divided into the four classes that the different ages demanded. The room was large, the desks arranged in groups; discipline had never been a problem. The country children brought sandwiches for lunch, the children of the town went home at midday. Attracta went home herself, to the house in North Street which she’d inherited from her Aunt Emmeline and where now she lived alone. She possessed an old blue Morris Minor but she did not often drive it to and from her schoolroom, preferring to make the journey on foot in order to get fresh air and exercise. She was a familiar figure, the Protestant teacher with her basket of groceries or exercise-books. She had never married, though twice she’d been proposed to: by an exchange clerk in the Provincial Bank and by an English visitor who’d once spent the summer in the area with his parents. All that was a long time ago now, for Attracta was sixty-one. Her predecessor in the schoolroom, Mr Ayrie, hadn’t retired until he was over seventy. She had always assumed she’d emulate him in that.

Looking back on it, Attracta didn’t regret that she had not married. She hadn’t much cared for either of the men who’d proposed to her and she didn’t mind being alone at sixty-one in her house in North Street. She regularly went to church, she had friends among the people who had been her pupils in the past. Now and again in the holidays she drove her Morris Minor to Cork for a day’s shopping and possibly a visit to the Savoy or the Pavilion, although the films they offered were not as good as they’d been in the past. Being on her own was something she’d always known, having been both an only child and an orphan. There’d been tragedy in her life but she considered that she had not suffered. People had been good to her.

English Girl’s Suicide in Belfast the headline about Penelope Vade said, and below it there was a photograph, a girl with a slightly crooked smile and freckled cheeks. There was a photograph of her husband in army uniform, taken a few weeks before his death, and of the house in Belfast in which she had later rented a flat. From the marks of blood on carpets and rugs, the item said, it is deduced that Mrs Vade dragged herself across the floors of two rooms. She appears repeatedly to have fainted before she reached a bottle of aspirins in a kitchen cupboard. She had been twenty-three at the time of her death.

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.

There’d been a time, faintly remembered by Attracta, when her Aunt Emmeline hadn’t been well disposed towards Mr Devereux and Geraldine Carey. There’d been suspicion of some kind, a frowning over the presents he brought, an agitation whenever Attracta was invited to tea. Because of her own excitement over the presents and the invitations Attracta hadn’t paid much attention to the nature of her aunt’s concern, and looking back on it years later could only speculate. Her Aunt Emmeline was a precise person, a tall woman who had never married, reputed to be delicate. Her house in North Street, very different from Mr Devereux’s, reflected her: it was neat as a new pin, full of light, the windows of its small rooms invariably open at the top to let in fresh air. The fanlight above the hall door was always gleaming, filling the hall with morning sunlight. Attracta’s Aunt Emmeline had a fear of dankness, of damp clothes and wet feet, and rain falling on the head. She worried about lots of things.

Clearly she had worried about Mr Devereux. There was an occasion when Archdeacon Flower had been specially invited to tea, when Attracta had listened at the sitting-room door because she’d sensed from her aunt’s flustered manner that something important was to be discussed. ‘Oh, have no worry in that direction at all,’ she heard the Archdeacon say. ‘Gentle as a lamb that man’s become.’ Her aunt asked a question Attracta could not hear because of the sound of a teacup being replaced on a saucer. ‘He’s doing the best he can,’ the Archdeacon continued, ‘according to his lights.’ Her aunt mentioned Geraldine Carey, and again the Archdeacon reassured her. ‘Bygones are bygones,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it a remarkable thing when a man gets caught in his own snare?’ He commented on the quality of her aunt’s fruitcake, and then said that everyone should be charitably disposed towards Mr Devereux and Geraldine Carey. He believed, he said, that that was God’s Wish.

After that, slowly over the years, Attracta’s aunt began to think more highly of Mr Devereux, until in the end there was no one in the entire town, with the possible exception of Archdeacon Flower, whom she held in greater esteem. Once when MacQuilly the coal merchant insisted that she hadn’t paid for half a ton of coal and she recollected perfectly giving the money to the man who’d delivered it, Mr Devereux had come to her aid. ‘A right old devil, MacQuilly is,’ Attracta heard him saying in the hall, and that was the end her aunt had ever heard of the matter. On Saturday evenings, having kept Attracta company on her walk home, Mr Devereux might remain for a little while in the house in North Street. He sometimes brought lettuces or cuttings with him, or tomatoes or strawberries. He would take a glass of sherry in the trim little sitting-room with its delicate inlaid chairs that matched the delicacy of Attracta’s aunt. Often he’d still be there, taking a second glass, when Attracta came down to say goodnight. Her aunt’s cat, Diggory, liked to climb up on to his knees, and as if in respect of some kind Mr Devereux never lit his pipe. He and her aunt would converse in low voices and generally they’d cease when Attracta entered the room. She would kiss him good-night after she’d kissed her aunt. She imagined it was what having a father was like.

At the town’s approximate centre there stood a grey woman on a pedestal, a statue of the Maid of Erin. It was here, only yards from this monument, that Mr Purce told Attracta the truth about her parents’ death, when she was eleven. She’d always had the feeling that Mr Purce wanted to speak to her, even that he was waiting until she could understand what it was he had to say. He was a man people didn’t much like; he’d settled in the town, having come there from somewhere else. He was a clerk in the courthouse.

‘There’s a place I know where there’s greenfinches,’ he said, as if introducing himself. ‘Ten nests of them, maybe twelve, maybe more. D’you understand me, Attracta? Would you like me to show you?’

She was on her way home from school. She had to get back to do her homework, she said to Mr Purce. She didn’t want to go looking for greenfinches with him.

‘Did Devereux tell you not to talk to Mr Purce?’ he said, and she shook her head. As far as she could remember, Mr Devereux had never mentioned Mr Purce. ‘I see you in church,’ Mr Purce said.

She had seen him too, sitting in the front, over on the lefthand side. Her aunt had often remarked that the day Mr Purce didn’t go to church it would be a miracle. It was like Geraldine Carey going to Mass.

‘I’ll walk out with you,’ he said. ‘I have a half day today for myself.’

They walked together, to her embarrassment. She glanced at shop-windows to catch a glimpse of their reflection, to see if they looked as awkward as she felt. He was only a head taller than she and part of that was made up by his hard black hat. His clerk’s suit was double-breasted, navy-blue with a pale stripe in it, shiny here and there, in need of a good ironing. He wore black leather gloves and carried a walking-stick. He always had the gloves and the walking-stick in church, but his Sunday suit was superior to the one he wore now. Her own fair hair, pinned up under her green-brimmed hat, was what stood out between the two of them. The colour of good corn, Mr Devereux used to say, and she always considered that a compliment, coming from a grain merchant. Her face was thin and her eyes blue, but reflected in the shop-windows there was now only a blur of flesh, a thin shaft between her hat and the green coat that matched it.

‘You’ve had misfortune, Attracta.’ Solemnly he nodded, repeating the motion of his head until she wished he’d stop. ‘It was a terrible thing to be killed by mistake.’

Attracta didn’t know what he was talking about. They passed by the last of the shops in North Street, Shannon’s grocery and bar, Banim’s bakery, the hardware that years ago had run out of stock. The narrow street widened a bit. Mr Purce said:

‘Has she made a Catholic girl out of you, Attracta?’

‘Who, Mr Purce?’

‘Devereux’s woman. Has she tried anything on? Has she shown you rosary beads?’

She shook her head.

‘Don’t ever look at them if she does. Look away immediately if she gets them out of her apron or anything like that. Will you promise me that, girl?’

‘I don’t think she would. I don’t think Mr Devereux –’

‘You can never tell with that crowd. There isn’t a trick in the book they won’t hop on to. Will you promise me now? Have nothing to do with carry-on like that.’

‘Yes, Mr Purce.’

As they walked he prodded at the litter on the pavement with his walking-stick. Cigarette packets and squashed matchboxes flew into the gutter, bits of the, Cork Examiner, sodden paper bags. He was known for this activity in the town, and even when he was on his own his voice was often heard protesting at the untidiness.

‘I’m surprised they never told you, Attracta,’ he said. ‘What are you now, girl?’

‘I’m eleven.’

‘A big girl should know things like that.’

‘What things, Mr Purce?’

He nodded in his repetitious manner, and then he explained himself. The tragedy had occurred in darkness, at night: her parents had accidentally become involved with an ambush meant for the Black and Tan soldiers who were in force in the area at the time. She herself had long since been asleep at home, and as he spoke she remembered waking up to find herself in a bed in her aunt’s house, without knowing how she got there. ‘That’s how they got killed, Attracta,’ Mr Purce said, and then he said an extraordinary thing. ‘You’ve got Devereux and his woman to thank for it.’

She knew that the Black and Tan soldiers had been camped near the town; she knew there’d been fighting. She realized that the truth about the death had been counted too terrible for a child to bear. But that her parents should have been shot, and shot in error, that the whole thing had somehow been the responsibility of Mr Devereux and Geraldine Carey, seemed inconceivable to Attracta.

‘They destroyed a decent Protestant pair,’ Mr Purce continued, still flicking litter from the pavement. ‘Half-ten at night on a public road, destroyed like pests.’

The sun, obscured by clouds while Attracta and Mr Purce had made the journey from the centre of the town, was suddenly warm on Attracta’s face. A woman in a horse and cart, attired in the black hooded cloak of the locality, passed slowly by. There were sacks of meal in the cart which had probably come from Mr Devereux’s mill.

‘Do you understand what I’m saying to you, Attracta? Devereux was organizing resistance up in the hills. He had explosives and booby traps, he was drilling men to go and kill people. Did nobody tell you about himself and Geraldine Carey?’

She shook her head. He nodded again, as if to indicate that little better could be expected.

‘Listen to me, Attracta. Geraldine Carey was brought into this town by the man she got married to, who used to work at Devereux’s mill. Six months later she’d joined up with Devereux in the type of dirty behaviour I wouldn’t soil myself telling you about. Not only that, Attracta, she was gun-running with him. She was fixing explosives like a man would, dressed up like a man in uniform. Devereux was as wild as a savage. There was nothing Devereux wouldn’t do, there was nothing the woman wouldn’t do either. They’d put booby traps down and it didn’t matter who got killed. They’d ambush the British soldiers when the soldiers didn’t have a chance.’

It was impossible to believe him. It was impossible to visualize the housekeeper and Mr Devereux in the role he’d given them. No one with any sense could believe that Geraldine Carey would kill people. Was everything Mr Purce said a lie? He was a peculiar man: had he some reason for stating her mother and her father had met their deaths in this way?

‘Your father was a decent man, Attracta. He was never drunk in his life. There was prayers for him in the chapel, but that was only a hypocrisy of the priests. Wouldn’t the priest Quinlan like to see every Protestant in this town dead and buried? Wouldn’t he like to see you and me six foot down with clay in our eye-sockets?’

Attracta didn’t believe that, and more certainly now it seemed to her that everything Mr Purce said was untrue. Catholics were different; they crossed themselves when they passed their chapel; they went in for crosses and confession; they had Masses and candles. But it was hard to accept that Father Quinlan, a jovial red-haired man, would prefer it if she were dead. She’d heard her aunt’s maid, Méta, saying that Father Fallon was cantankerous and that Father Martin wasn’t worth his salt, but neither of them seemed to Attracta to be the kind of man who’d wish people dead. ‘Proddy-woddy green-guts,’ Catholic children would shout out sometimes and the Protestants would call back the familiar reply. But there was never much vindictiveness about any of it. The sides were unevenly matched: there were too few Protestants in the town to make a proper opposition; trouble was avoided.

‘He was a traitor to his religion, Attracta. And I’ll promise you this: if I was to tell you about that woman of his you wouldn’t enter the house they have.’ Abruptly he turned and walked away, back into the town, his walking-stick still frantically working, poking away any litter it could find.

The sun was hot now. Attracta felt sticky within her several layers of clothes. She had a chapter of her history book to read, about the Saxons coming to England. She had four long-division sums to do, and seven lines of poetry to learn. What potions have I drunk of Syren tears, the first one stated, a statement Attracta could make neither head nor tail of.

She didn’t go straight home. Instead she turned off to the left and walked through a back street, out into the country. She passed fields of mangels and turnips, again trying to imagine the scenes Mr Purce had sketched for her, the ambush of men waiting for the soldiers, the firing of shots. It occurred to her that she had never asked anyone if her parents were buried in the Church of Ireland graveyard.

She passed by tinkers encamped on the verge of the road. A woman ran after her and asked for money, saying her husband had just died. She swore when Attracta said she hadn’t any, and then her manner changed again. She developed a whine in her voice, she said she’d pray for Attracta if she’d bring her money, tomorrow or the next day.

Had Mr Purce only wished to turn her against Mr Devereux because Mr Devereux did not go to church? Was there no more to it than that? Did Mr Purce say the first thing that came into his head? As Attracta walked, the words of Archdeacon Flower came back to her: in stating that Mr Devereux was now as gentle as a lamb, was there the implication that once he hadn’t been? And had her aunt, worried about Geraldine Carey, been reassured on that score also?

‘It’s all over now, dear,’ her aunt said. She looked closely at Attracta and then put her arms round her, as if expecting tears. But tears didn’t come, for Attracta was only amazed.

Fifty years later, walking through the heather by the sea, Attracta remembered vividly that moment of her childhood. She couldn’t understand how Mr Devereux and Geraldine Carey had changed so. ‘Maybe they bear the burden of guilt,’ Archdeacon Flower had explained, summoned to the house the following day by her aunt. ‘Maybe they look at you and feel responsible. It was an accident, but people can feel responsible for an accident.’ What had happened was in the past, he reminded her, as her aunt had. She understood what they were implying, that it must all be forgotten, yet she couldn’t help imagining Mr Devereux and his house-keeper laying booby traps on roads and drilling men in the hills. Geraldine Carey’s husband had left the town, Mr Purce told her on a later occasion: he’d gone to Co. Louth and hadn’t been heard of since. ‘Whore,’ Mr Purce said. ‘No better than a whore she is.’ Attracta, looking the word up in a dictionary, was astonished.

Having started, Mr Purce went on and on. Mr Devereux’s house wasn’t suitable for an eleven-year-old girl to visit, since it was the house of a murderer. Wasn’t it a disgrace that a Protestant girl should set foot in a house where the deaths of British soldiers and the Protestant Irish had been planned? One Saturday afternoon, unable to restrain himself, he arrived at the house himself. He shouted at Mr Devereux from the open hall door. ‘Isn’t it enough to have destroyed her father and mother without letting that woman steal her for the Pope?’ His grey face was suffused beneath his hard hat, his walking-stick thrashed the air. Mr Devereux called him an Orange mason. ‘I hate the bloody sight of you,’ Mr Purce said in a quieter voice, and then in his abrupt way he walked off.

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?’

No one answered, and Attracta was aware of the children’s startled gaze. But the startled gaze was a natural reaction. She said to herself that it didn’t matter.

‘My story is one with hers,’ she said. ‘Horror stories, with different endings only. I think of her now and I can see quite clearly the flat she lived in in Belfast. I can see the details, correctly or not I’ve no idea. Wallpaper with a pattern of brownish-purple flowers on it, gaunt furniture casting shadows, a tea-caddy on the hired television set. I drag my body across the floors of two rooms, over a carpet that smells of dust and cigarette ash, over rugs and cool linoleum. I reach up in the kitchen, a hand on the edge of the sink: one by one I eat the aspirins until the bottle’s empty.’

There was a silence. Feet were shuffled in the schoolroom. No one spoke.

‘If only she had known,’ Attracta said, ‘that there was still a faith she might have had, that God does not forever withhold His mercy. Will those same men who exacted that vengeance on her one day keep bees and budgerigars? Will they serve in shops, and be kind to the blind and the deaf? Will they garden in the evenings and be good fathers? It is not impossible. Oh, can’t you see,’ she cried, ‘what happened in this town? Here, at the back of beyond. Can’t you appreciate it? And can’t you see her lying there, mice nibbling her dried blood?’

The children still were quiet, their faces still not registering the comment she wished to make. It was because she’d been clumsy, she thought. All she’d meant to tell them was never to despair. All she had meant to do was to prepare them for a future that looked grim. She had been happy, she said again. The conversation of Mr Purce had been full of the truth but it hadn’t made sense because the years had turned the truth around.

To the children she appeared to be talking now to herself. She was old, a few of them silently considered; that was it. She didn’t appear to understand that almost every day there was the kind of vengeance she spoke of reported on the television. Bloodshed was wholesale, girls were tarred and left for dead, children no older than they were armed with guns.

‘I only hope,’ they heard her saying, ‘she knows that strangers mourn her.’

Another silence lingered awkwardly and then she nodded at a particular child and the child rose and rang a hand-bell. The children filed away, well-mannered and docile as she had taught them to be. She watched them in the playground, standing in twos and threes, talking about her. It had meant nothing when she’d said that people change. The gleam of hope she’d offered had been too slight to be of use, irrelevant in the horror they took for granted, as part of life. Yet she could not help still believing that it mattered when monsters did not remain monsters for ever. It wasn’t much to put against the last bleak moments of Penelope Vade, but it was something for all that. She wished she could have made her point.

Twenty minutes later, when the children returned to the schoolroom, her voice no longer quivered, nor did it seem to struggle against tears. The older children learnt about agriculture in Sweden, the younger ones about the Pyrenees, the youngest that Munster had six counties. The day came to an end at three o’clock and when all the children had gone Attracta locked the schoolroom and walked to the house she had inherited in North Street.

A week later Archdeacon Flower’s successor came to, see her, his visit interrupting further violence on the television news. He beat about the bush while he nibbled biscuits and drank cups of tea by the fire; then he suggested that perhaps she should consider retiring one of these days. She was over sixty, he pointed out with his clerical laugh, and she replied that Mr Ayrie had gone on until seventy. Sixty, the clergyman repeated with another laugh, was the post’s retirement age. Children were a handful nowadays.

She smiled, thinking of her sixteen docile charges. They had chattered to their parents, and the parents had been shocked to hear that they’d been told of a man decapitated and a girl raped seven times. School was not for that, they had angrily protested to the clergyman, and he had had no option but to agree. At the end of the summer term there’d be a presentation of Waterford glass.

‘Every day in my schoolroom I should have honoured the small, remarkable thing that happened in this town. It matters that she died in despair, with no faith left in human life.’

He was brisk. For as long as most people could remember she had been a remarkable teacher; in no way had she failed. He turned the conversation to more cheerful topics, he ate more biscuits and a slice of cake. He laughed and even made a joke. He retailed a little harmless gossip.

Eventually she stood up. She walked with her visitor to the hall, shook hands with him and saw him out. In the sitting-room she piled the tea things on to a tray and placed it on a table by the door. She turned the television on again but when the screen lit up she didn’t notice it. The face of Penelope Vade came into her mind, the smile a little crooked, the freckled cheeks.