Trespassers Read Online Free

become Seán’s courier after Eileen’s arrest. She too was caught, jailed, eventually released and subsequently married a man who was part of Dev’s establishment, which was by then in office and presumably enjoying its fruits, since my most dazzling childhood memory is of a gift she gaveme of two dolls, each – at a guess – fourteen inches tall. One was male, one female, so I called them ‘the prince and princess’, because they wore silky eighteenth-century costumes, and I say this not because I could have had such a thought then, but because even now I can picture the prince’s taut stockings, smart breeches and waisted jacket.
    Dressed as if for a white wedding, the sort Seán and Eileen didn’t have when they married so quietly in Boston’s Holy Cross Cathedral that they had to ask the sacristan and an assistant to be witnesses, the dolls made a perfect couple. Nobody I knew had a pair like that: a perfect image of married bliss. Molly had been a close friend, but, once Seán attacked de Valera, she had to break with us. ‘Fraternising’ with opponents was strictly forbidden after the Civil War.
    ‘She was a generous godmother,’ I remember Eileen sighing. ‘She gave you lovely presents. You’d best look after them, for there won’t be any more.’
    And indeed I don’t remember other presents, only the dolls, which someone said were French. In my memory they
look
French, like small aristos who could end up on the guillotine, a thought which may have been prompted by another memory. This is of my own hands twisting off one of their heads so as to get at its blue china eyes, then failing to fit these back behind their eye holes. They are attached to a wire which is hidden when they are in place. But I can’t get it in. I hold on to the eyes. Whose are they? The prince’s? I can’t be sure. All I clearly recall is myself sitting on the ground outside our new Dublin house on a later birthday which, just as Eileen predicted, brought no gifts from Molly. Lying next to me in the long June grass are the mutilated dolls. I must hide them before anyone sees what I did for reasons I no longer understand. It’s as if I had felt challenged to cock a snook at the godmother who has thrown me over and will not be back.
    Why won’t she? I am baffled. As I sit there fretting, it strikesme that lately there has been a lot of talk about something else I don’t understand: treachery. Dev’s, Seán’s, Molly’s and that of both sides in the Civil War. People keep using the word, which, as far as I can tell, has to do with people turning against their friends. So perhaps I too am treacherous, because the dolls now disappear. Perhaps they have been given to someone more deserving, like Kitty’s nieces who have few toys and to whom Eileen has been threatening to give some of mine.
    Has she done it? With the dolls? Better not ask. Perhaps they were so badly injured that she had to hide them from Seán.
    I don’t always grasp what is happening. Maybe I don’t listen, or maybe my parents explain things confusingly. My mother’s Aunt Kate certainly does. She has come to live with us but is unused to our ways. She used to live in Cork with Eileen’s father, but, now that he has died, will live with us. Our first meeting starts out on the wrong foot.
    Almost the first thing she does is scold me because I have gathered the hems of the new, short, poppy-red dress I am wearing, and raised them above my head. That way the dress works like a lantern, except that the light – it is a sunny day – pours in instead of out. As long as I hold up the dress, all I can see is redness, so I walk out our gate and along the road, feeling as if I were in the middle of a harmless but thrilling fire which has blotted out the world. I am too happy to give any thought to how I look.
    Then I hear a scolding voice. ‘Cover yourself,’ snaps the aunt, and she says something about knickers. She is bossy but, Seán assures me later, has