Grievance

Relieved, Steve says, ‘None of us would argue with that, although we still have a responsibility to investigate the cause of the violence.’

As he finishes speaking, he gives a nod of dismissal, turns away from the class and walks over to the window. He is not quite as absorbed in his own thoughts as he seems: he is aware of his students packing up their bags, pulling on jackets and forming into groups as they drift out of the room. He turns to face Nora as she, too, makes her way between the seats.

‘I just wanted to repeat what I said earlier,’ he said, ‘that it’s good to have an authentically Irish member of the class. At least, I assume you’re the only one, unless there are others who are keeping their heads down.’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ she says, attentive but not smiling. Steve realises that, although he has seen her smile, she hasn’t yet smiled at him, and wonders how long he’ll have to wait for that. ‘I’ve come into contact with most people in the group, but not everybody. And there are what you might call the London Irish, like Nick.’

‘We don’t get a large number of Irish students here, though there are a few. May I ask what brought you?’

‘Oh, this and that. You know.’

‘You thought you’d spread your wings?’

‘Something like that.’

This is much harder work for Steve than the class he’s just given, but he persists none the less. ‘Well, we’re honoured. These are exciting times in Northern Ireland. You must feel you’re missing out.’

‘You mean with the Assembly and all?’

‘Well, yes. You are in favour of what’s going on?’

Nora hesitates briefly and, when she speaks, chooses her words with care: ‘My family’s Catholic. On the whole, Catholics are more likely to support the Good Friday Agreement.’

Steve smiles his relief, although he is puzzled by the form her reply takes, as though she is at pains to give as little information as is consistent with candour. ‘I thought as much. Your name, I suppose. It tends to be something of a giveaway in Ireland.’

‘Well. Certainly according to Seamus Heaney it does, though I’ve never been stopped by an RUC man.’

‘No, I suppose not. Young women aren’t usually thought to pose the same kind of threat as young men.’ Finding nothing else to say, and uncomfortable at her reluctance to volunteer any information about herself – a rare characteristic in his experience of young people – Steve releases her. ‘Well, I’ll see you next week.’

He watches her leave the room and notices that Phoebe Metcalfe is just outside the door, waiting for her. Not for the first time he wonders at the friendships formed by students and remembers some of the people he has had to avoid since Oxford. He gives them time to move on – he wouldn’t put it past Phoebe to waylay him and offer him her views on the little people – before picking up his helmet and satchel and leaving.

Half an hour later, Phoebe, Nora and Nick are seated at a Formica table in Marco and Gianna’s, the local Italian coffee bar. Usually Pete would be with them, but when last seen he had given them a distracted wave as he chatted up Annie Price. They are all drinking cappuccinos, and Phoebe, having declared herself to be ‘sinking’ with hunger, is eating a large cinnamon Danish that her friends have declined to share.

‘So, what did he want?’ Phoebe asks Nora, not for the first time, but now that they’re seated Nora can hardly evade the question. Phoebe’s learned from experience that Nora will give away as little as possible without appearing eccentric, and so attracting an even more unwelcome degree of attention; persistent questioning usually produces some result, however grudging.

Nora takes time to form her reply. Her manner, as so often, suggests someone much older. ‘He wanted to make sure that I was a Catholic.’

Phoebe’s round face, pink now from the coffee and the steaminess of the atmosphere, puckers in bewilderment. With Nick and Nora she often seems like a child, puzzling out the ways of the adult world. ‘But why? He doesn’t strike me as someone who cares about religion. Is he going to ask all of us? Is that allowed?’

‘It’s because he doesn’t want the embarrassment, some way into the term, of finding out that he has a wicked Ulster Protestant in his midst,’ explains Nick.

‘But why does it matter?’

‘Because it would be politically compromising for him to single out Nora as a favoured student, then find that she was on the wrong side.’

‘But what does politics have to do with religion?’ Phoebe asks, but before either of them can answer, says, ‘On second thoughts, don’t bother. I wish he’d stop banging on about it, whatever. I thought this was meant to be a literature course.’

‘Everything is political for Steve, but when he comes to Ireland he happens to be right.’

Nick is watching Nora as he says this, but she is staring absently into the remains of her cappuccino. Like Steve, he has given some thought to the nature of Nora’s friendship with Phoebe, and thinks he has arrived at a partial explanation. Phoebe, for all her questions, is fundamentally incurious. As on this occasion, she dismisses any information that is incompatible with her worldview. He judges that this suits Nora well. In the year he’s known her she’s been persistently evasive about her background – remarkably so, given that her accent immediately identifies her as coming from one of the few parts of the United Kingdom that impinges on everybody’s consciousness.

She is sometimes eager, as she was in today’s class, to express a view on Ireland, often with the implied suggestion that the English fail to understand it, then seems to regret drawing attention to herself. Always her opinions on Ireland are cast in strictly impersonal terms, as though she has arrived at an opinion through studying the subject rather than as a result of experience. As far as he can remember, she has never volunteered an anecdote about her childhood or parents, the kind of stuff that’s common currency among students who, in the early days of friendship, like to define and establish who they are. When such occasions arise, and members of a group try to outdo each other with stories of an outrageous parent or eccentric upbringing (for everything is exaggerated in the interests of glamour), Nora falls silent, or turns the conversation, or makes an excuse to leave. It’s as though she’s afraid of being found out.

There is some discussion between them about whether Nora can’t or won’t talk about herself. Pete has always subscribed to the view that Nora doesn’t choose to talk, that she preserves her mystery so that they (the men particularly) can project their fantasies on to her. If she were known to have had a conventional middle-class background, albeit in a different place, she would be like the rest of them, apart from her extraordinary looks, of course.

Nick isn’t so sure. Within the limits she has set herself, Nora is often touchingly eager to please, almost too compliant to other people’s wishes – a characteristic that Phoebe has been quick to spot and ready to exploit. He thinks that Nora is genuinely inhibited, but by what he hasn’t yet decided. Privately – because in a gossipy environment like a university where any hint of the glamorous, subversive or criminal is immediately seized upon and enlarged – he’s speculated about an IRA connection. It’s difficult to imagine Nora actively involved, but her conformity to the role of model citizen and outstanding student – like him, she gained a first in her first-year exams – would be the perfect cover.

On the other hand, the revulsion she sometimes expresses against terrorism could be genuine. Sometimes he thinks that her adaptability, her unwillingness to impose her will, might indicate that she’s been a victim of aggression; that she’s used to keeping her head down. Whatever the cause, it’s thought that she never goes home and, as far as he knows, she spent the entire summer working in a hotel in Devon, presumably to help pay her way through college.

He wonders what it would be like to have a relationship with her. The idea certainly appeals, but she seems to be as inhibited about sex as about everything else, and Nick is so used to girls who leave no room to doubt their willingness that he’s not sure how he would begin to break down her reserve.

Putting aside for the moment thoughts about that particular reserve, Nick decides to chance his luck with a direct question about Ireland. ‘So tell me, Nora, how, in your opinion as an insider, did Steve tackle the Irish question?’

She turns her head judiciously to one side, exactly as she might, he thinks, if she were marshalling an argument for an essay or a class presentation. It occurs to him for the first time that, although she never draws attention to her successes, she is most at ease with academic discourse, as though she has developed that side of her character at the expense of the rest.

‘He talks a lot about stereotypes, and how they tell us nothing about the country, only about the prejudices of those who subscribe to them, but he has all the prejudices about the Irish of the liberal London intelligentsia – how we’re all victims and it’s all the fault of empire, as though there’s no such thing as personal responsibility and morality. Irish Catholics are all angels, and all the others are now animals. He’s just turned the traditional model on its head.’

He wants to ask her, ‘Then what, for Christ’s sake, is the reality, or your reality?’ but knowing that will get him nowhere, says, ‘In his own way, Steve’s an old romantic. He may subscribe to a cool, post-structuralist approach, but you could see that he fancies himself as a bit of a Swift – an outsider who uses his mordant wit and superior intelligence to see further and deeper than an insider.’

‘I don’t think he’s at all romantic,’ says Phoebe. ‘I’d heard so much about him that I was expecting something more…’ Unable to find the word she wants, she lifts her arms, then drops them to express her disappointment, only just missing, in their cramped surroundings, the empty cups and plate on the table. ‘I thought he was a bit of a cold fish.’

‘So what was he like – close up and personal, I mean?’ asks Nick.

‘He looked older,’ Nora says. ‘Tired, as though a couple of hours’ work had exhausted him.’

‘I suppose he’s getting on a bit. It’s hard for ageing rebels like him to know what to do with themselves, with younger generations yapping at their heels. Do they go back on everything they’ve believed in, like those Old Labour people trying to look comfortable in a New Labour government? Or do they find a new cause for themselves? I guess that’s why he’s taken on Ireland. At the moment it’s sexier than Marxism, but I’d say he’s a bit of a latecomer to the game. Wouldn’t you, Nora?’

Nora merely shrugs, as though she’s reached the limit with this particular conversation. What she doesn’t say is that, throughout the session, Steve kept reminding her of her father. She doesn’t say it because she hasn’t yet found a way to talk about home, and to explain the resemblance she would have to tell her entire family history.

Ballypierce

Nora’s earliest precise memory is of a day shortly before the birth of her brother. She remembers that the baby’s imminence hung in the air that afternoon, charging the atmosphere and releasing in her father a restless energy. Always a boastful man, his pride in himself, and in her, seemed to know no bounds. And while she is sure, without having a clear memory of them, that there were other, similar occasions before that afternoon, she knows that there were none afterwards. This, she thinks, is why she remembers the afternoon so clearly, that it marked the end of an era: with Felix’s birth, another, altogether different, phase in their lives began.

She remembers sitting on the counter in her father’s shop, surrounded by a group of admiring men. The pretext for her being there was that her mother needed to rest. Her father had come home for lunch, as he was in the habit of doing when it was just the three of them, leaving in charge one of the succession of young women that he had working for him. His routine was sufficiently established for people to know not to take in their prescriptions over the dinner hour, when many of the other shops, which couldn’t afford extra help, closed. Her mother had told him that the midwife had called, that her blood pressure was up again and she needed rest.

‘Will I take the wee girl back with me, Bernie?’ he had asked.

‘Since when have you needed my permission?’ her mother had replied.

It was acknowledged between the three of them that she and her father were a team, and while her mother boasted of this to her acquaintance – the degree of interest that Gerald took in his four-year-old daughter was sufficiently unusual to arouse the envy of other women – her resentment at being excluded sometimes surfaced at home. Nora was hoping that the baby would be a boy, not for herself or her father, who were perfectly content, but for her mother. She and the baby boy would then form another self-contained team and the family would be perfectly balanced.

So Gerald took her back with him and she spent the first hour or so sitting at a little desk that Gerald had rigged up for her in the corner, drawing and doing a few sums that he had set her. Really, this was only marking time until a sufficient crowd had gathered, mostly other shopkeepers who had left their wives, now released from kitchen duties, in charge while they slipped out for half an hour.

Without understanding at that point precisely why, she knew that it was a mark of her father’s importance that his shop acted as a magnet for men with time on their hands during the slow, early-afternoon hours before the schools were out. Ballypierce was a largely nationalist town where incomes were low and trade rarely buoyant. But Gerald, who had grown up and gone to school with many of the other traders, was a great man among them, a pharmacist who had gone to Belfast to study. They could leave their shops, but he had to stay at his post to make up prescriptions, apart from the hour dedicated to lunch, when he insisted on a home-cooked meal. He was one of the few whose family didn’t live above the shop, having chosen instead a new bungalow, built to architect’s specifications on a hill at the edge of the town with a view over the valley. The flat above the shop was let so he was a landlord in addition to his professional status.

People might not have jobs but they still became ill and needed medicines that the Health Service funded so, whatever else was happening, the Doyles were always comfortable. And Gerald, instead of joining the Protestants at the golf course or sailing club, as he was entitled to, had stayed one of them, always ready for good craic, always pleased to see an old friend who dropped in. By comparison with others in the town, his shop was like a palace, with large plate-glass windows on both sides of the door, all the fittings built to the highest standards, always sweetly smelling from the soaps and perfumes and ladies’ cosmetics, and gleamingly clean, because Gerald insisted on the highest standards of hygiene and had been known to sack a girl whose hair always looked unwashed. And when the party was under way, Gerald would send his assistant into the little kitchenette to make them all cups of tea.

That afternoon Nora was lifted on to the counter, the one with the little room behind it where Gerald made up his prescriptions. She was wearing a navy blue smocked Viyella dress with matching tights – Gerald had requested that Bernie change her before they left – and her hair was tied back into a tight ponytail. When Gerald had started this routine, as soon as she could walk and talk and had no need of nappies, she would recite a few nursery rhymes or count to a specified number, but since he had taught her to read she was always required to show off her current level of attainment. That afternoon she read from a simplified picture-book version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

‘You’re a great girl, so you are,’ said Malachy McGready, the greengrocer. ‘It’s no wonder your daddy’s so proud of you. But if he gives you books like this to read, you’ll start to think you’re a wee Brit. You won’t find many Susans and Edmunds around here.’

Gerald gave a satisfied little smirk, having come prepared for just this rebuke. ‘Don’t you know who C. S. Lewis was?’ he asked. ‘Your man was born in Belfast and ended up a professor at Oxford.’

This was greeted with smiles all round, not so much that one of their own (they were by no means convinced that a man who wrote like this could be so described) had achieved so much in the wider world but because Gerald had outmanoeuvred them yet again. These afternoon gatherings, whether Nora was present or not, were not so much exchanges between equals, as enactments and affirmations of Gerald Doyle’s superiority, and if he had ever been caught out or bettered, they would have felt keen disappointment. Malachy’s scepticism was, none the less, a necessary component of the drama.

‘Is that what you’re after for the little lady here – for her to be a professor at Oxford? What’s wrong with Queen’s, or Trinity, if she must leave home?’

‘I want the best for her, and she deserves it. And if when the time comes the best is still Oxford, then we’ll have to make the sacrifice.’ As he spoke, Gerald looked down fondly at Nora, who sat swinging her legs and munching a biscuit.

‘But tell me, Gerald, your man, Lewis,’ said Malachy, who had picked up the discarded book and was peering at it to make sure that he had the name right, ‘would I be right in thinking he was a Protestant?’

‘Well, you would, of course. How many Catholics do you suppose went from here to Oxford before the war?’ There was that in Gerald’s manner of a man who is playing a game so elaborate that his opponent, at the moment of thinking he has caught him out, finds himself the victim of superior strategy. Gerald’s air of victory took no account of his having ignored the drift of Malachy’s argument. Then, with a sudden shift of tactics, he addressed the point that Malachy had been labouring. ‘You want to know why I give Nora stuff like this to read? Because it’s what the children of the ruling classes read, and if you want them to get on in that world, you give them a head start. Rather than have her, at forty, feeling aggrieved at the way the world has treated her, I want her out there with the best of them, showing what can be done.’

A number of them felt mildly rebuked by this, but they would no more have thought of challenging him than they would a geometric theorem or a doctor’s diagnosis. Gerald loved imparting information, surprising people, overturning their expectations; and while he needed a patsy like Malachy in order to shine, none of them was prepared to risk losing his goodwill and, with it, the dim reflection of his glory that touched them as welcome members of his circle. They enjoyed the sense of inclusion that allowed them, later, to say to a wife or customer, ‘Gerald Doyle was saying to me only the other day…’ Besides, they believed, because he had told them, that his was the voice of science, reason and progress, and they were all reluctant to pit themselves against these mysterious forces. If he seemed more than usually pleased with himself that day, they put it down to the imminently expected baby, and were prepared to indulge him.

‘The teachers will have their work cut out when she starts school,’ said Liam Doherty, who owned the best of the nationalist bars. ‘You haven’t left them much to teach her.’

‘It’s a problem, right enough,’ said Gerald. On this particular point, if on no other, he was prepared to acknowledge himself baffled. ‘But there, I almost forgot. I’ve been looking into Shakespeare with her, and her memory’s prodigious. Come on, darling,’ he said to Nora, as he lifted her down from the counter and gestured to his companions to clear a space around her. ‘Show us how you do Shylock.’

Nora composed herself briefly, then stretched our her arms and recited, ‘“I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”’

After the first two short, monosyllabic sentences, this was delivered in the chanting monotone of small children reciting prayers that are beyond their understanding – a style that she had learned not from Gerald or from her mother but at the little nursery she attended in the mornings, where prayers were part of the routine.

Then, after a look of encouragement from her father, she shifted her position, hunching her shoulders into a forward stoop and holding out her right hand in a grasping gesture. ‘O my ducats, O my daughter, O my ducats, O my daughter,’ she growled, with as much depth, intensity and malice as she could muster. When she had finished, she ran over to her father and clutched him round the knees.

Her audience was genuinely speechless, not sure what to make of her performance, for all its precociousness. As was customary, it was Malachy who found a way of expressing their doubts: ‘This Shylock,’ he said tentatively, ‘wasn’t he a fellow?’

Gerald nodded. ‘The Jewish moneylender. The first Jew in literature, when writers weren’t afraid to tell the truth.’

‘She says it bravely,’ said Malachy. ‘I doubt there’s another girl her age who could match her. But were there no girls’ parts you could teach her?’

Gerald nodded slowly. ‘I looked into it, of course, but most of the young girls in his plays are only interested in love and such like and I didn’t want her head filled with that kind of nonsense. Now Portia’s different, of course. I tried her out with the “quality of mercy” speech, but there were words that even she couldn’t get her tongue round, and you have to be 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.’