‘Put on your best dress,’ she told me. ‘We’re going to have a picture made in Forest Hill, to send to your Irish soldier.’ She finger-curled my hair and gave me Vaseline for my lips and eyelashes.
On the bus my mother blinked and blinked, unaccustomed to the natural light that poured through the windows. She’d stayed inside so long. ‘Oh, Mum,’ I said.
‘Never you mind.’ She grabbed onto my hand. ‘We’re going to take care of you, Nan. My darling girl. And you mustn’t be crying. He doesn’t want to see tears in his picture, I’ll tell you that.’
I thought Finbarr wouldn’t mind seeing tears. I’d never known him to mind anything. Still, I smiled dutifully at the camera, sitting on the photographer’s stool, sincere in my happiness as I imagined looking at Finbarr’s cheerful face. Some days later I went on my own to collect it. It was a pretty picture, so much prettier than I was in real life, I worried he’d be disappointed when he saw me again. My smile showed off the good luck of my straight, white teeth. In the letter I sent along with the picture, I wrote in tiny, crowded print. Paper was scarce during the war and I wanted to tell him the truth about everything. Over the next four years I wrote to him regularly and dutifully. I wrote about what had happened to Colleen and how I couldn’t look at my father anymore, nor he at any of us. I wrote simple things about school and my friends. I wrote how the war had reached us in London with the Zeppelin bombing, and how Megs wanted to work as a nurse but Da wouldn’t let her and in this case Mum agreed. I admitted I knew his danger was much greater but I was terrified of the aerial attacks. ‘Nothing could be crueller than attacking from the sky.’ As my pencil moved carefully, sparingly over the page, I held in my head the same Finbarr from peacetime. In my mind, his smile broke open as easily as ever. He wrote back, saying he hoped to get enough leave, and save enough money, to come to London. He kept the picture of me tucked into his sleeve during battle and tacked beside his bunk at night. I imagined the edges frayed and worn. He’d touch my cheek before sleeping and tell me goodnight. I wished I had a picture of him.
Two men had failed my sister. First the philosophy student and then our father. But I knew Finbarr would never fail me. He would crouch in the trenches with my smiling face tucked into his sleeve, and he would think about the day on Ballywilling Beach. He’d remember our goodbye kiss and put his fingers to his lips.
‘I love you, Nan,’ Finbarr wrote. The letters were a celebration on the page. I’d never heard him say it aloud. ‘Wait for me.’
As if I’d ever do anything else.
Four years of war. Four sisters turned to three. I wrote a poem about Colleen that won a contest, a five-shilling prize. It was printed in the newspaper but my father refused to read it. One morning after he went to work, Mum called Megs, Louisa and me into her bedroom.
‘Look here,’ she said, opening her bottom drawer and pulling out a tea tin. She twisted off the lid to show us where she’d been squirrelling away the money she earned at Buttons and Bits. I’d been working there myself, a day or two a week, and knew it would take considerable time to amass what Mum was showing us. ‘None of you will go the way of Colleen, do you hear?’ Her voice sounded as stern as I’d ever heard her. ‘If ever you’re in trouble, come to me. We’ll take this money and run away.’ She showed us she’d put her mother’s wedding ring in the tin along with the bills and coins. ‘We’ll go to America or Australia and say you’re a war widow. And then we’ll come back and say you got married there, and he ran off, or widowed you. Your father be damned. You promise me, now. I can’t lose another of you.’
We promised, all three of us. I handed over the five shillings for my poem, to add to her cache.
When news of the Hundred Days Offensive began, I worried myself sick, especially when letters from Finbarr ceased with no warming. ‘There might not be any post coming from the front,’ my mother tried to soothe. ‘Let’s not fret till there’s cause.’
There was plenty of cause. Bad news arrived for girl after girl, mother after mother, father after father. By now I was nineteen but I think in my heart I may have been much younger. The world quaked around us. One minute my mother would be her old self, brisk and loving. Then she would fade away, pale and still, staring out the window.
‘What are you watching for, Mum?’
‘Nothing,’ she’d say, and go back to some busy work. But I knew what she was watching for. Colleen, heading towards home, a small child’s hand in hers. Love and reason have never been well acquainted.
On Armistice Day I had never seen so many people in one place as there were on the streets of London. With Megs, Louisa and our friend Emily Hastings, I went out into the celebrating throng. What noise and joy. We couldn’t stand shoulder to shoulder, everybody moved sideways.
Megs, Louisa, Emily and I tried to hold hands as we made our way through the streets but it was impossible. It should have been frightening, being trapped in the midst of so thick a crowd, but the happiness was even thicker. You can’t imagine the joy and goodwill. If you tripped, a hundred hands reached out to catch you. If you sneezed, a thousand people said ‘God Bless You’. A soldier caught Megs’s arm as she tripped over the curb, then tipped his hat and revelled on with his mates. I searched the crowd, as if there were any reason for Finbarr to be held within it, as if – being lucky enough that he loved me – I could be lucky enough to summon him before my eyes.
Somewhere out in the masses, Agatha Christie was walking too. During this stretch of time, a lonely married lady with her husband off to war, she’d occupied herself by taking a course in shorthand. When Armistice was announced right in the middle of class, everyone stumbled out into the celebrations, marvelling at the crowd just as we did. Englishwomen – Englishwomen! – dancing in the street. For all I knew, Agatha and I were shoulder to shoulder, either once or many times during that heady day.