The Friday Tree Read online

  Contents

  Chapter 1: The Plot

  Chapter 2: Rose

  Chapter 3: Smoke

  Chapter 4: The Men

  Chapter 5: Miss Chalk

  Chapter 6: George

  Chapter 7: Cannonball

  Chapter 8: A Sky Full of Starlings

  Chapter 9: Children of Other Lands

  Chapter 10: Isle Lecale

  Chapter 11: The Point

  Chapter 13: On Broadway

  Chapter 14: Truce

  Chapter 15: Under the Tree

  Chapter 16: The Princess Victoria

  Chapter 17: Imbolc

  Chapter 18: Naming the Fields

  Chapter 19: The Easter House

  Chapter 20: Dreaming Straight

  Chapter 21: Wild Frontiers

  Chapter 22: Brigid of the Flowers

  Chapter 23: A Whistling Woman

  Chapter 24: The Churn Rock

  Chapter 25: Angel

  Chapter 26: Brother and Sister

  Interview with the Author

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names,

  characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the

  author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons,

  living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  Published 2014

  by Ward River Press

  123 Grange Hill, Baldoyle

  Dublin 13, Ireland

  www.wardriverpress.com

  © Sophia Hillan 2014

  Copyright for typesetting, layout, design, ebook

  © Poolbeg Press Ltd

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-1-78199-146-6

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  www.wardriverpress.com

  About the Author

  Former Associate Director of Queen's University Belfast Institute of Irish Studies, Sophia Hillan returned to her first love, writing fiction, in 1999, when she was runner-up in the Royal Society of Literature’s first VS Pritchett Memorial Prize. Her short story “The Cocktail Hour”was subsequently published in David Marcus’s first Faber Book of Best New Irish Short Stories,and another short story, “Roses”,was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2007. In 2011 she received high praise for May, Lou and Cass,the untold true story of Jane Austen’s nieces in Ireland. She lives in a hollow at the bottom of a hill, in a house filled with light and many, many books.

  To the memory of David Marcus

  “Come, we will go forth together into the wide world.”

  Grimms' Household Tales: “Brother and Sister”

  Chapter 1: The Plot

  “Elle est absolument pure,” said Francis and, although she did not understand, Brigid laughed.

  It was late summer, a bright day, the smell of cut grass stronger than the lingering must of the sun-curtain at the front door. Outside, the sky, moving across the top of the house in stripes of white and blue, led to seven trees at the back of the plot. Seven trees and seven days bounded the map of their lives and on this morning, given what had been happening, it seemed necessary to both children to find something to make them laugh.

  Brigid and Francis Arthur lived in a time when men of a certain standing wore dark suits and hats, their wives soft wool with a single strand of pearls, and families aspired to modest comfort, to a house like the Arthurs’ house, at the edge of the town, minutes from fields and the dark blue hill they called the Black Mountain. Brigid and Francis had careful parents, and Isobel, the girl, who was not a girl at all. Relatives and friends visited, the children spent a month each summer by the sea, their birthdays brought toys and handsome books. In the five and eleven years that Brigid and Francis had, respectively, lived, they had never known deprivation, until the night in August 1955 when their parents left them.

  On that summer night, the children asleep, their parents crept away, instructing their taxi-driver to let the silent car roll down the passage slope, out on to the quiet road and, only then, out of earshot of their sleeping children, to start the engine and allow the headlamps to sweep ahead and show the way. As the light travelled across their darkened ceilings, the children turned, shuddered as if cold, then settled back into quiet sleep. Yet, when they woke, Brigid was conscious of emptiness in the morning and Francis, through the blinds, saw the pale beginning of the end of summer.

  They asked questions that morning and all that day of Isobel who, without apparent interest or information, told them that their parents would not be long, and that they had no need to worry. Yet, when that day became night and their parents did not return, and another night and day passed, then another – when, slowly and inexplicably, days and nights accumulated, until their parents had been away for over a week, then the children’s questions lessened and, finally, they ceased.

  On the tenth morning, as they sat at the silent breakfast table, Francis reached across and opened the cage where his budgerigar lived. “Hello, Dicky,” he said, as he stroked the bird’s head. Dicky put his head on one side and looked hard at Francis; yet, as always, and despite the hopeful persistence of Francis, he said nothing. Isobel put before the children bacon and toast, for which both of them said, “Thank you, Isobel,” and Isobel did not reply. She opened the window a little further as if it, too, had given offence, took up a basket of damp clothes, slanted it against her hip and walked away through the kitchen towards the back door.

  It was then that Francis, twisting round from the budgerigar’s cage, looked at the cold bacon and the hard and curling toast, checked to see that Isobel had gone, and reached to the sideboard for the bottle of brown sauce. “Elle est absolument pure,” he read aloud, and Brigid laughed.

  Suddenly, before their eyes, in a flash of green and white, with a black, dismissive glance, and a purposeful pointing of his long tail, Dicky leapt from his cage and flew through the open window, flapping, then soaring through the summer morning.

  Francis, in delighted surprise, said once more, “Absolument pure,” then, stopping as if to listen, he pushed back his chair, stood up, listened again, took Brigid’s hand, drew her after him through the kitchen doorway, through the shaft of light motes in the hall, beating past the front-door curtain and, jumping with her down the two steps from the small front garden, lifted her up to stand on the gate pillar. Then he stopped, and Brigid could hear the pounding of his heart.

  “What are we looking for, Francis?” she asked. “Dicky? Is Dicky here? Would he go out on to the road?”

  “Oh, no,” said Francis, shading his eyes against the light. “Dicky’s up at the back of the plot. He’ll wait for us.”

  The plot, the large field of vegetables behind their house, was out of bounds to them. Yet, if Dicky was there, he was near enough home to be safe. Still, that did not tell Brigid why they had left their breakfast.

  “Why are we out here, then, Francis?”

  Francis, scanning the horizon, said: “I’m sure I heard a car door slam. Someone is coming.”

  Brigid’s stomach jumped, turned over, jumped again. “Mama and Daddy?” she said.

  Francis’ face closed, his cheekbones sudde
nly sharp. “I doubt it,” he said. “But it could be Rose.”

  Brigid’s stomach sat empty, a flat balloon. “Rose,” she said, thoughtfully. “Will she take care of us till Mama comes back? Not just Isobel?”

  “Maybe,” said Francis. “That could be the plan.”

  “Francis?”

  “What?”

  “I hate Isobel. She hates me back.”

  “Why don’t you kill her then?” said a languid voice behind them. “By the way, I can see your pants.”

  Scrabbling at her dress, and so ripping it, Brigid looked down to see the next-door boy, their sometime friend.

  “I hate you, too, Ned Silver,” said Brigid.

  “Hello, Ned,” said Francis, without surprise. “You don’t have a pair of binoculars about you, do you?”

  “No,” said Ned.

  “I do.” Out of somewhere came a deep, male voice. “What are you looking for?”

  “Uncle Conor!” cried Brigid and Francis together, turning round just as Ned squeezed himself through a gap in the hedge between their front gardens. “Where did you come from?”

  The man at the gate looked at them from sleepy eyes, one eyebrow slightly raised, one corner of his mouth turned up as in a private joke. One hand out as though to break her fall, he leaned into the pillar where Brigid stood. Brigid looked at the hand. It was square and strong. Her father’s hands were narrow, the fingers long. Her father himself was narrow and long. Uncle Conor was high and broad, his shoulders wide.

  “From nowhere,” said their visitor. “Is your Aunt Rose here?”

  Francis had opened his mouth to reply, when Isobel appeared through the summer curtain, red and angry.

  “Get down from that, this minute, before I tell your mother!” Her voice was a hiss.

  Brigid wanted to say, ‘How can you, when she is not here?’ but, hearing the hiss, she said nothing.

  Francis, just as silent, reached to lift her down but, before he could, Uncle Conor scooped her up. He smelled of tobacco and tweed. One strand of his hair fell forward as he swung her to the ground and, when he smiled at her, she saw a crooked tooth at the side, which she had never noticed before. She was not sure she quite liked it.

  “Don’t be cross, Isobel,” he said. “She’s my best girl, and he’s my best boy. Aren’t you, children?”

  They nodded, carefully, and then saw Isobel had become soft at his words, not like Isobel at all. Practised, they waited for her to come back to herself. In a few seconds, she turned to them and, hands on hips, eyes narrowed where Uncle Conor could not see, she said: “What were you doing, anyway, you villains?”

  Her words sounded friendly: the children knew they were not.

  Francis looked out from under his hair. “Watching for our Aunt Rose, Bella,” he said. Only Francis was allowed to call Isobel by that name. “Elle est absolument pure.”

  “Oh, your nonsense,” said Isobel, but she had softened again. “She’ll be here, a bit later. Come in now till we get Mr Todd a cup of tea.”

  “Can we have tea, Isobel?” asked Brigid, thinking of her lost breakfast.

  “Waste not, want not,” said Isobel, sharp as before. “You’ve torn your dress. Get upstairs and change.”

  Brigid, thinking how little adults could be relied upon, went angrily upstairs, past the silent room where her parents should be and began, as best she could, to change out of her clothes. Downstairs, she could hear the clinking of cups. There would probably be something nice with the tea. Isobel would leave her out, just because.

  I should really kill her, thought Brigid, but left the thought as she heard footsteps on the stairs, heard a bumping knock on the door and, awkwardly pulling on another dress, scrambled to open it. There stood Francis, with tea in the blue-rimmed cup she liked and, beside it, on a saucer, a piece of buttered, floury white soda bread. In his mouth he held another piece of bread.

  “Oh, Francis!” said Brigid. “Snow bread! The breadman came? I didn’t hear the van.”

  “Mm,” said Francis, taking the piece of bread from his mouth. “You need to listen more carefully. Please adjust your clothing.”

  Brigid pulled and stretched at the cloth, and then gave up. She began to gobble up her bread and gulp down her tea.

  “Who’s down there now?” she said then. “Did Rose come?”

  “Not yet. There’s nobody down there now, except Isobel.”

  “Has Uncle Conor gone?”

  “Yes,” said Francis. “I think he wanted to see Rose.”

  “Oh,” said Brigid, disappointed. “I wanted to talk to him. I thought he might tell us about Mama and Daddy.”

  “I doubt that,” said Francis. He was silent for a moment. Then he shook himself, like a swimmer. “Anyway, Uncle Conor will be back. Now,” he stood up, and brushed floury handprints on his shorts, “up you get.”

  “Why? What are we doing?”

  “We’re going to get Dicky, of course. He’ll be ready for us by now.”

  “What about Isobel? She’ll be so cross.”

  “Too busy to be cross at the moment. Come on.”

  Brigid followed him, trying to talk through a whisper: “But if he’s in the trees, that’s the plot. We’re not allowed in the plot.”

  Francis stopped on the stairs, and looked up at her, his face crossed by the bars of the landing rail: “I’m going to bring Dicky in. Are you coming?”

  Brigid thought, looking down at him: I’m taller than you now. She said, “Yes. Wait. Wait for me,” but she had to run to catch him, ducking past the sitting room where Isobel was now sweeping, sidling through the kitchen, careful not to slip on the damp patches of mopped tiles, and even more careful not to leave sandal marks, out after him through the backyard, past the narrow coalhouse, up the steps into the high bushy garden. She crept along the path by the next-door fence, making sure over her shoulder that Ned was not there to tell tales, then bumping up against Francis’ warm shoulder at the hidden place behind the broom tree, the one little place where it was possible to climb over into the plot.

  Francis was waiting easily, calmly, as if they were not forbidden to go into the plot. It belonged to Ned’s family, but it was used by other people to grow vegetables. Some neighbours had bought parts of it. One man had made a house for his plants from an old tram. The part of the plot directly behind their house was let to two policemen from the barracks at the end of the road. The children knew them as Mr Doughty and Mr Steele, and Brigid had an idea that they kept house together in the barracks, until the day Francis told her, to her disappointment, that they each had their own houses, and families. Brigid pointed out to him that they grew flowers – roses – at the front of the barracks, which to her mind meant it was their house, but Francis did not see the importance of this. When Mr Doughty and Mr Steele worked in the plot they wore no collars on their shirts. Their trousers, sitting just under their arms, were held up by braces with shiny clasps and leather buttonholes. Mr Doughty wore wellingtons, their toes turned up like clown shoes, but Mr Steele wore great leather boots with steel caps on the toes. Sometimes, when Brigid was by herself in the garden, Mr Doughty would come to the fence and give her large heads of cabbage, or a bunch of rhubarb tall as herself and say, “Bring that in to your mammy,” which Brigid, with some difficulty and much anxiety – there were creeping things in the leaves – usually did. Mr Steele did not hand her things to bring in. He raised a straight hand to them sometimes, from a distance, but he did not come up to the fence, and he did not speak.

  Today, no one was in the plot. Brigid and Francis looked at each other and, with easy accord, broke the rules. Francis took the piece of grass he was chewing out of his mouth, and lifted Brigid over the fence. “Don’t step in the nettles,” he said, and handed her a large, springy docken leaf.

  “What’s that for?” said Brigid, turning it over in her hand, all damp and furry.

  “For when you step in the nettles. To rub on the sting. Hold on to it, and keep behind me,” he said and,
swinging himself quickly over the fence, landed beside her like a long-legged cat.

  Facing him, in his cool shadow, Brigid could see their house as she had never seen it. Now, it seemed someone else’s house, strangely angled and chimneyed, the television aerial a large surprising H. The pipes on the back wall were a crooked nose. The windows, their blinds pulled midway up, were half-closed eyes, looking their disapproval and, seeing them, Brigid hesitated. Then Francis took her hand and, threading a path through the chess-squares of vegetables, kept her close behind him. Here and there, he indicated hidden nettles and Brigid saw they did all have docken leaves beside them. She looked about her. The plot was much bigger when they were in it and, glancing back, Brigid saw the house had gone far away. It was not strange any more, but a lost warm place.

  They made their way to the centre of the plot, quiet, watchful, as if the birds or the bushes would give them away, as if any moment they would hear a voice calling them back. Yet, no voice came. Somewhere, they could hear a contented insect browsing, a lazy summer sound. As they neared the seven trees, the high leaves about them brushed their cheeks, as though lifted by the light itself. The children stopped. High above them, in the sudden stillness, the birds sang out their joy. Francis, his head on one side, put his hand to his ear to listen. Close to, the trees were bigger, leafier. Now and again the sun darted through the dense summer leaves, light green, dark, light again, shining like diamonds in the cool hollows.

  Brigid, fearful of heights, was not afraid of the trees. They were familiar to her, though this was the very first time she had been close to them and seen them clearly. They had the shapes and colours of all the days. Right ahead of them was the Wednesday Tree, fan-shaped, a dull orange, not like the warm brown of Saturday, or the bright apricot of narrow Tuesday, or the dark blue of Thursday. Over to the far left was the Sunday Tree, a green implacable square, and beside it the dun-coloured bulk of Monday. To the right, the far right, was the tree that Brigid loved most. Friday was leaf-shaped, a light blue day, and the Friday Tree was a haze of greys and greens against the moving sky. It lifted Brigid’s heart to be near this tree, so close she could discern the whispering of its kindly leaves. She tugged Francis’ sleeve to see if he heard it too, but Francis did not seem to notice. He was looking up, scanning the branches for Dicky.