Chapter 4 #23
Liam is labouring over a Latin text, his finger moving along the line from word to word, and sometimes back the way it came.
Enda has ten long-division sums to solve for the next day.
She sighs, plucking the pencil from her mouth, and leans over her work.
If the two of them don’t finish these exercises by tomorrow, and correctly, they might get the strap, but Enda is finding it hard to bend her mind around it all.
How is she supposed to think about twelve times nine when she can see that her mother’s eyes are swollen from crying, when her parents seem not to be speaking to each other beyond, Will you take a cup of tea?
I will, or Is that you heading out again?
It is, when Enda, checking behind the flour barrel, has seen that the pouch of her mother’s savings has disappeared?
It is impossible. Enda sighs again and Liam peers at her from under his cowlick of hair; she tips her head in the direction of the flour barrel and widens her eyes, hoping Liam will cotton on to the fact that the money has gone, perhaps stolen, but he gazes instead at the kettle, puzzled.
Like sudden rain, the solution to one of her sums falls upon Enda.
She snatches up the pencil and writes a series of figures in a fierce cascade, ending with an emphatic and underlined = 327, then flings down the pencil, triumphant.
Of all her lessons, Enda likes mathematics the least—there is nothing for the mind to snag on and wonder about, just the rightness and wrongness of it.
She would never admit to anyone that it comes easily to her: numbers that stack up in one column, fitting into each other’s vacancies like stones in a wall.
It makes a kind of dull, prosaic sense to her but she finds no pleasure in it.
The savings behind the flour can’t have been stolen, she thinks, because how would anyone have found them?
And a theft wouldn’t explain the tension between her parents, the heavy, crackling atmosphere in their room, like the air in the street gets before a thunderstorm.
Their father is out somewhere, this Enda knows, but she has no idea where.
None of it makes any sense: he came back from the mapping, spent weeks lying in bed, then suddenly rose up, and has been absent for days now, only returning at night-time when Enda and her siblings are in bed.
Her mother, if asked about this behaviour, draws in her mouth and just says, He has matters to attend to, but will not say what these matters might be.
Enda has begun to suspect that her mother doesn’t know any more than she does.
Enda wishes to know what the matters are; she wishes to know very much. She also wishes to know what is going on in her household and where the money has gone and where her father is and why her mother doesn’t ask him and why the two of them refuse to exchange a word with each other.
She sighs, then glances up to find that Rose is now standing at the table, staring at her, eyes wide, as if to drink in as much information as possible. She has that doll of hers clutched to her chest; one of her hands rests upon its back.
“What?” Enda snaps, half her mind still engaged with three into thirty-seven, carry one.
Rose says nothing but keeps looking at her, unblinking. It is enough to tip Enda’s precarious equilibrium over a cliff.
“Mammy,” she cries. “Rosie won’t stop staring at me.”
Their mother across the room lifts her darning to her mouth, bites off the thread, and, without turning round, says, “That doesn’t sound like a terrible crime.”
“She’s putting me off,” Enda says, kicking her heels against the legs of the table, which joggles the inkpot, which in turn sprays a fine mist of ink onto Liam’s page.
“Enda!” Liam shrieks. “Look what you did.”
“I didn’t do it,” Enda shouts back. “Rose did it.”
“I did not,” Rose says, indignant. “I never touched it.”
“You did.”
“I did not.”
“Did.”
Liam starts to cry, scrubbing at the page with his cuff; Rose joins in, saying that Enda is a horror. Her mother is saying, “That will do from all of you, I’ll thank you to remember that—” when the door opens and their father steps inside.
A gust of the stairwell enters with him, air that is chill and moist: it eddies its way around the cramped room.
Enda feels it coil about her calves, then move on towards the windows.
Her father’s hair is pushed off his brow.
He is grinning. His eyes meet theirs. He looks, Enda is able to think, even in the face of the howling and shouting going on around her, like himself again, like someone restored.
“What the devil is going on in here?” he asks, with good humour. “Fighting like cats, are you?”
Enda darts a look at her mother, at Liam, at Rose. They are all silenced, wary; Liam’s cheeks are wet with tears but he gazes at Tomás, mouth trembling, as if unable to believe what he sees. Their mother’s brows are pulled together; she has one hand pressed to her middle.
Tomás bends to hoist the snivelling Rose onto his shoulder. “What do you cry for, a leanbh? Why such a sad look on your face?”
He bends his knees, bouncing her up and down, her head dangerously close to the rafters, her hair tossing back and forth.
Rose’s sobs turn rapidly to giggles and she clutches at her father’s collar, dislodging his cap.
Enda can recall sitting up there herself—she can almost feel the sensation of being that high and that close to her father.
For a moment, she can feel that she is Rose or that Rose is her, one of the two, that time has collapsed and she is tiny again.
Enda feels no relief at the change in Tomás.
Something is amiss, she knows, and she both does and doesn’t want to find out what it might be.
She is filled, all of a sudden, with a desire to go back in time, to when she was younger, Rose’s age perhaps, to when life was simple, to reverse, like Liam’s fingertip on the Latin verse, to the start of the sentence, to make sense of it all.
She certainly doesn’t want to be eleven, sitting at the table, doing her mathematics, about to hear whatever it is her father is going to say.
So when her father puts Rose down—she clings to his leg, of course, just as Enda used to, begging for more—and pulls out of his jacket a folded square of paper, saying that he has had a letter, that he has some news for them all, Enda is not surprised.
What her father is saying is at once shocking and not shocking at all.
It makes no sense and perfect sense. Of course, she wants to say, I felt this coming.
But also, What are you talking about, how can you say that?
Her mother is aghast, her hand to her mouth, and she is saying, Tomás, Tomás, what do you mean you took the savings, the money I’d put by.
How could you do such a thing? Why could we not have talked it over?
Liam is open-mouthed, aghast, and he is looking at Enda as if she has the power to stop this.
“It’s so simple,” their father says, looking from Phina to Liam, his palm resting on Rose’s hair.
“I have in my hand a letter from the land steward of the viscount’s estate, confirming everything.
I used the money to lease a cottage and some land out where Liam and I were mapping.
We will leave the Lanes. We must. We’re barely getting by here, and you, Phina, you’re worn to a thread with worry.
We will go out to the peninsula and live there.
It is,” he urges them all to see, “the answer.”
“The answer to what?” Enda demands.
Her father looks at her, for the first time, and he smiles. “To everything,” he replies.