The Dead School (12 page)

There were trips to the Abbey Theatre to see the plays of Yeats and Teresa Deevy and Paul Vincent Carroll. To marvel at the abilities of the great F.J. McCormick. To see Jimmy
O’Dea in pantomime at the Royal Theatre. There were outings too to the countryside with the Ballsbridge Literary and Historical Society. There was even a trip to the lakes of County Cavan
where the pair of them stood together on the lakeshore, two silhouettes by the bending reeds in the autumn twilight. Was it any wonder the mammies said, ‘Inseparable, Mrs Inseparable the pair
of them. Whenever you see one, you can be sure the other’s not far away.’

Not that they minded one bit, the mammies, as indeed why should they, for by now they realized that their sons were under the care of one of the most respected headmasters in Dublin. Only two
years after his appointment, with the Monsignor retired and Father Stokes now at the helm, St Anthony’s had a general inspection of the whole school, the results of which were their wildest
dreams. As were the Inspector’s comments on the wonderful work being done in the school as regards training in good habits, the formation of character, and the pride clearly being taken in
all things Gaelic and Irish, the evidence of which was visible no matter where you went in the school, from the neat displays of handwritten poems by the executed insurgents of 1916 to the framed
photographs of balladeers and martyrs long since passed away and on every wall, the Mother of God, Mary of the Gael, looking down upon each and every little boy who passed through St
Anthony’s as if he was hers and hers alone.

And so it was a proud Raphael Bell who stood at the door of St Anthony’s Boys’ National School the following day and watched his boys filing in with their heads down and their
rosaries twined about their fingers, without a doubt their young souls unblemished as those of new-born babes.

All of which doesn’t mean of course that there weren’t occasional difficulties which Raphael had to face, as any headmaster must in the day-to-day running of a
school. One such being the incident with Donnellan the bully who, despite repeated warnings, had continued to tease and torment young Matthews whose mother had been recently widowed and who had
quite enough on her plate without having to come up to Raphael’s office every five minutes to complain about the likes of Mr Donnellan. Standing there in his office, a fragile, stick-like
thing practically wasted away by sorrow since her husband’s death, she reminded him so much of his own dear mother, Evelyn, now sadly confined to a nursing home in Cork city, her mind no
longer her own. Mrs Matthews fiddled with the strap of her handbag and stared at the floor. ‘He wets the bed at nights, Mr Bell and I don’t know what to do.’

‘You can put your mind at rest, Mrs Matthews,’ said Raphael, ‘for you’ll have no worries after today, I promise you.’

‘God bless you, Mr Bell,’ she said, adding, ‘He loves you, you know, my little Martin.’

Raphael smiled as he put his arm around her narrow shoulders and escorted her to the door.

Donnellan denied it, of course. Raphael knew he might as well be talking to the wall. ‘Did you take his marble?’ he shouted at him again, their noses almost touching. ‘Did
you?’

The brat denied it again. And then would you believe it – again. There were beads of sweat on Raphael’s brow.

‘I’m going to ask you one last time,’ he said. ‘Did you?’

‘No,’ muttered Donnellan sullenly.

Raphael was having no more of that. He opened the cupboard and took out his stick and gave the insolent wretch three slaps that were so hard that the tears leaped instantly to his eyes.

‘Did you?’ he snapped, and a vein started ticking just above his right eye.

‘No!’ he cried defiantly.

It took another eight slaps to get the truth out of him. Raphael himself was exhausted. But it was worth it.

‘Let that be a lesson to you,’ he said. ‘And if you go near that boy again by God I can tell you it will be God help you. Do you hear me?’

The boy said nothing. Blood rushed to Raphael’s face. He bawled, ‘Do you hear me?’

‘Yes,’ the brat squeaked. For that’s what he was. A brat.

Raphael glared at the smirking upstart clutching its raw hands.

‘Get out of my sight before I really lose my temper!’ he snapped and Donnellan slunk off.

The instant he closed the door behind him, Raphael felt as if his head was lifting off his body, lightweight drifting into air. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling. For just a second it terrified
him. He clung on to his desk. Far away in the world there were tiny sounds that had somehow become stars, glittering like lights in a night city as they tried to send him some kind of signal but
knowing they never could because he was lost to them now. He was on the verge of crying out to them, but then the moment passed and he realized it was the sound of the children laughing and playing
directly outside his window.

Then there were the choral competitions. Every evening now you could hear the boys beavering away after school, with Raphael walking up and down past the window, mouthing the
words along with them and every so often spinning on his heel to cry, ‘No! No! No! For the love and honour of God how many times do I have to tell you! Right – from the beginning
again!’

It was Father Stokes who had first suggested the idea of a school choir. Much as he adored music, Raphael had never considered himself much of a practitioner, but Father Stokes’ confidence
in him gave him all the encouragement he needed. ‘You wait and see, Raphael,’ the young priest said one day. ‘Between the pair of us we’ll knock a few notes into these
crows,’ as Raphael grinned mischievously and reached in his top pocket. He held up the brand-new tuning fork which he had purchased that day in Walton’s music shop in North Frederick
Street, ‘Just what I was thinking myself, Father,’ he said.

They could not believe it when they were awarded the prize in Belfast the following year. ‘As beautiful a rendition of “The Lark in the Clear Air” as I have ever had the
privilege to listen to,’ the adjudicator had said.

St Anthony’s Boys’ National School had been somehow transformed from a drab old battleship ready for the breaking yard into a phantasmagorical galleon soaring towards the future at
full sail across the skies.

Now, if you had said to any of the boys in sixth class, or indeed any of the classes in St Anthony’s, ‘Boys, I’m sorry to have to tell you but I’m
afraid your teacher is a scaredy cat,’ it would have been as if you had cracked just about the funniest joke that was ever invented in the world. The idea of Mr Bell ever being afraid of
anything was enough to bring tears to your eyes. What – the man who had stood up to the docker Byrne when he came down, as he said himself, ‘To bait the Master’ for what he had
said to his son? Not only stood up to him but sent him off home with his tail between his legs after getting a promise out of him that he would never darken the school door again until he was
prepared to show a little bit of manners. Yeah sure, Mr Bell a scaredy cat. You’d have had your work cut out for you if you tried to put that one over on the loyal warriors of St
Anthony’s School, I’m afraid. They’d have made a laughing stock of you, for God’s sake! Which was even funnier again because the laugh of it all was that it was in fact
true. The bold Raphael
was
a scaredy cat. Oh, he wasn’t scared of boys who squared up to him and snapped ‘I won’t do it!’ or ‘You can’t tell me what to
do!’ or for that matter, whiskey-swilling dockers or irate mothers or anyone else. But he was a scaredy cat when it came to women. Oh he was a silly old scaredy cat then all right.

One day a young woman had called to the office to inquire as to whether there might be a place for her son in his school and when she crossed her legs, Raphael flushed to the roots. When he
heard the swish of her stockings his eyes went everywhere but in her direction. He looked at the map of Ireland on the back of the door, at the Pope conferring his blessing on the multitude in St
Peter’s Square, at Maura and Sean who were playing ball with Nip the dog. Nip has the ball. Maura has the ball. Sean has the ball. Woof, woof, says Nip. Eventually there was nowhere else to
look. He knew his face was the colour of a tomato, but there was nothing he could do about it because the more he thought, ‘My face is the colour of a tomato. I must look ridiculous. I must
do something about it,’ the worse it got.

That was exactly what happened the very first day he met Nessa Conroy at a meeting of the Legion of Mary in a hall in Mountjoy Square. When the meeting was over there was tea and sandwiches for
everybody. Raphael was chatting away to another teacher from the south side of the city when Father Stokes took his arm and said, ‘This is Nessa, Raphael. She’s only just joined us
recently.’ He smiled as he introduced them. ‘Nessa’s from the wee north,’ he said and as the blood rushed once more to his head, Raphael tried not to spill his tea all over
himself.

The next time he met her was in the churchyard of the Pro-Cathedral when High Mass was being concelebrated by Father Stokes and two of his colleagues. It wasn’t easy this time either but
at least he didn’t have a cup and saucer rattling away in his hand, showing him up. They talked about the weather and the Mass and how beautiful it had been. When Raphael told her he was
hoping to enter his boys in the Belfast Schools Choral Festival again this year, her eyes lit up and she said that she herself was very fond of music. She loved the nocturnes of John Field, she
said, and owned just about every song Count John McCormack had ever recorded. ‘Do you know a song called “Macushla”?’ she said shyly. ‘I love it so much.’ When
she said that, Raphael almost felt tears come to his eyes, not just because she had said she loved the song Paschal O’Dowd had sung so beautifully all those years ago. It was because he had
just at that moment realized he had never talked to a woman like this ever before in his life. Usually his topic was his pupils. Johnny or Pat or Mickey or Tom and how they were getting on in
school. In fact the only woman he had ever really talked closely to was his mother. His mother whose mind had now finally been irrevocably lost to her and who, when he visited her in the Cork
nursing home, searched in vain for something in his face that might bring the name of Raphael Bell her son back to her once more.

It was only when the young woman had finished talking that he realized the churchyard was empty but for the pair of them. He could not take his eyes off her, her twinkly eyes, her pink cardigan
and the white blouse with little forget-me-not flowers on the collar. When she said goodbye, Raphael’s heart was thumping and his head was light all over again. Something was happening to him
and he did not know what it was. He was excited in a way he had never been before in his life.

The next day he went into a record shop and bought the nocturnes of John Field. He played them all that evening and for the life of him couldn’t sit still. Even his pupils remarked on it
the next day when, having given them six algebra sums to do before dinner, he went and completely forgot all about them and didn’t even correct one of them, which was not like Mr Bell at
all!

As indeed the following statement wasn’t either: ‘On account of you being such good lads this past week I’ll let you off homework. What do you have to say to that?’ The
boys didn’t know what to say. They were completely dumbfounded! Belly Bell letting you off homework – it was unbelievable! Just unbelievable!

They ran off out the gate that day cheering and when they told their mammies and daddies they couldn’t believe it either. ‘Mr Bell letting you off homework? You’re fibbing
aren’t you? Give me a look inside that schoolbag till I see if you’re telling the truth or not!’

But, as the parents found out, they were indeed telling the truth, and the reason they were was as pure and simple and uncomplicated as they come. The weekend before Raphael had been on a trip
to the ‘Wee North’ as Father Des called it, with the Literary and Historical Society, all the way to the Giant’s Causeway in County Antrim and would you believe it, who was on the
bus along with him? When Raphael saw her this time, he nearly fainted right there and then on the spot. But he was getting a little bit cheekier now and wasn’t quite the old beetroot-faced
Bell that he had been before and would you believe it, it was no length of time before he was helping her across rocks and taking photographs of seagulls and buying her ice-cream and laughing away
and telling her jokes to beat the band.

As he lay on the sand and watched her paddling in a rock pool, her blonde hair tied back with a scarf, he suddenly couldn’t believe what he was doing. He might as well have been standing
on a cliff pointing down to the pair of them and saying, ‘Look at that fellow down there in his shirt sleeves with the beautiful young girl. He’s the lucky man, isn’t he? I wonder
who he is?’ But you see he wasn’t standing on any cliff. He was lying right there beside her. Beside Nessa Conroy. And not only that but now he was carrying her sandals and taking her
small, cool hand as they made their way to the hotel. Out of nowhere came a whiff of her perfume on the salt breeze. They were supposed to be taking notes on the locality. Wandering around noting
the age of various buildings and important landmarks. They were taking no notes however. They had forgotten all about buildings and landmarks. When she had her sandals fastened, she tucked her
knees up to her chest and as she spoke her voice sort of hypnotized him. He was so busy listening to the sound of it that he only heard half of what she said. She worked in the civil service in
Dublin and shared a flat with two nurses on the North Circular Road. ‘Is that right?’ Raphael found himself saying and wondering did she know he was hypnotized. It didn’t matter
whether she did or not, for he knew there was nothing he could do about it anyway. She was speaking again now. He loved it. He loved her speaking. He loved it so much. Especially the way she said
‘Och, now,’ and ‘Aye, surely’. He loved that.