Lessons in Heartbreak

by Cathy Kelly

  Directly outside the doors, standing right in front of lots of moving human traffic crossing the road, Izzie Silver stopped pushing her trolley and started sobbing for herself. A hundred miles away, Anneliese sat at her aunt-in-law’s bedside and talked softly about how she felt, and how she simply wasn’t able to cry.

  ‘It’s like I’ve this black hole inside me,’ she whispered, even though there was no need to talk so quietly. There was plenty of noise in the bustling ward where Lily had been moved earlier that morning. They needed the bed in the intensive care unit and with no change in the old lady’s condition, and no sign of any change, the small hospital couldn’t justify keeping her in a vital ICU bed.

  ‘Crying would be better,’ Anneliese went on. ‘Therapeutic or something. But I can’t. It’s like being full of nothingness. No matter what I do or how I try to buoy myself up, it’s hopeless. Grey, dismal desert only with blackness everywhere. Oh, Lily,’ she sighed to the still, silent figure in the bed. ‘I wish you were here so I could tell you – well, you are here, but not in the same way.’

  Lily’s pale, lined face didn’t flicker.

  Anneliese didn’t know if she was present or not. Were people in comas there? Even so, talking to an almost-not-there Lily still surpassed talking to everyone else.

  ‘The oddest things occur to me about it all. Like the fact that Nell was so bitter,’ Anneliese whispered. ‘She said I must have known about her and Edward. That was almost the worst thing. She kept insisting that I knew and allowed it to go on. I didn’t. I swear on the Bible, Lily, I didn’t. How could I let Edward have an affair and not say a word to him about it? I wouldn’t, and not with Nell.

  ‘She was my friend. Was,’ Anneliese added bitterly. ‘Nobody’s going to believe me if she’s my best friend and she says I knew all along. I won’t be believed and, if I deny it, she’ll say I’m just a vengeful ex. She might even tell Edward that she and I had talked about it. She could tell him anything, and how would he believe me over her?’

  It wasn’t a relief to say these horrible things. They hurt as much in the telling as they did in the thinking. The ache was still there, the ache of aloneness.

  What was worse was how she’d become alone.

  The evening before, she’d sat on the verandah and stared out at the sea, trying not to think about the beautiful trapped whale still circling sadly in the harbour, and she’d thought about her Worst Case Scenarios.

  It was a trick of hers when she felt depression looming: to think of the very worst things that could happen and visualise herself coping with them. A person could cope with anything, she knew, making herself think of people who’d gone through every pain possible from torture to seeing people they loved murdered.

  Edward’s death was one of her Worst Case Scenarios.

  She remembered seeing an interview with a woman who’d been widowed in the World Trade Center attacks and it had almost hurt to watch it. The woman’s pain was so raw, so open and she spoke of how her life had changed and now, she expected the worst.

  Her words had resonated with Anneliese for two reasons: because she was speaking of widowhood, and Anneliese knew too many widows of her own age not to fear it, and secondly, because Anneliese had felt that sense of fear all her life: that pain was just round the corner, waiting its time. She’d felt like that for ever. Waiting for the blade to fall.

  She’d been so cautious, pushing Edward with his healthy heart and his healthy diet to have blood tests every year at the doctor’s. She’d cooked giant lumps of broccoli, bought him fish-oil tablets, stocked the fridge with blueberries. She’d done everything to keep him with her, warding off disease.

  He’d been taken anyway. He might as well have died. It was like he had died, in a way.

  ‘How did you manage, Lily?’ Anneliese asked. ‘How did you manage when Alice and Robby died? Forgive me, but I keep thinking that death is almost easier. You can grieve. How can I grieve?’

  And then she checked herself: Lily had done her grieving privately because she’d had to keep calm for Izzie.

  ‘Forgive me, Lily,’ she said now. ‘That was terrible of me. Nothing could be worse than losing Alice. I’m sorry. There’s no comparing my loss to yours. I’m sitting here whining and I haven’t had as much taken from me as you. But I can’t help feeling devastated. I only wish you were here. You could make sense of it all for me before I go totally crazy.’

  ‘Good morning. How are we all doing here?’ said a cheerful young voice.

  Anneliese looked up, startled by the interruption. A nurse hovered and from the ultra-friendly set of her face, Anneliese guessed she’d heard the end of the monologue. Anneliese was too sad to feel embarrassed. She guessed that nurses were used to hearing people murmuring hidden thoughts at hospital bedsides.

  ‘I just want to check on your mother-in-law’s vitals,’ the nurse said, still smiling.

  Anneliese nodded and moved out of the way, not bothering to correct her. Aunt-in-law sounded ridiculous. ‘Will you be long?’ she asked.

  ‘We might be a while. You should take a walk outside,’ the nurse said, resiliently cheerful. ‘It’s a lovely day.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Anneliese. Lovely day for throwing yourself over a cliff. What would the poor girl do if she said that? Probably find the on-call psychiatrist and tell him there was a mad woman in-house, and could they find her a bed, a straitjacket and a needleful of benzodiazepam.

  She collected her bag and went into the corridor, not knowing quite what to do with herself. Somehow, she ended up in the small hospital coffee shop, at a table with a cup of frothy white coffee and a scone that looked hard enough to bounce off the walls. She wasn’t in the slightest bit hungry, but she buttered the scone anyway and bit into it.

  Keep putting the fuel in, she remembered someone saying to her once. But why? Old worn-out cars got scrapped. Why couldn’t old, worn-out people get scrapped too? Why bother putting fuel in when the engine was gone?

  She shoved the scone away and, to occupy herself, switched on her mobile phone. Brendan had sent her a text message. He was hopeless with phones, spent so long sending the simplest message that the time involved far outweighed the benefits of texting versus actually phoning.

  Once, she, Beth and Izzie had laughed gently with him over his hopelessness in this area. Now, Anneliese wondered if she’d ever laugh at anything again. What did laughing actually feel like? Would she ever do it again?

  Marvellous news. Izzie has arrived. She will be at the hospital by four.

  No text shorthand for Brendan.

  Anneliese thought of Izzie, who was strong on the outside and soft as a marshmallow on the inside, and how she’d cry at the sight of her darling Gran in the hospital bed. Then, she thought of Beth, who’d sobbed when she’d heard the news on the phone, but who couldn’t come until the weekend.

  ‘Of course, don’t rush,’ Anneliese had reassured her. Reassuring her daughter was what Anneliese did best. ‘Gran will be OK.’

  Another lie. Who knew if Lily would really be all right or not? But there was method to her madness: the longer Beth stayed away, the more time Anneliese would have before she had to tell her daughter the horrible news about her parents’ separation.

  It was ridiculous that she still hadn’t told Beth about her and Edward, ridiculous. Beth would be furious with her, but Anneliese just hadn’t had the heart to do it. As if telling her daughter would make it all true.

  Anneliese knew she could not be strong enough for both Izzie and Beth.

  That was what she’d wanted to tell Lily before the nurse interrupted them.

  ‘Beth doesn’t need me,’ she half-whispered to herself in the hospital coffee shop. ‘She has Marcus to look after her and he adores her. Nobody needs me any more. I don’t have to be here. For the first time ever, I don’t have to be here.’

  It was both liberating and terrifying at the same time.

  She didn’t need to be there. Be anywhere. She could jump off the cliff or
walk into the sea and keep walking, and it wouldn’t really matter.

  ‘How did you manage, Lily?’ she wondered out loud.

  She partly knew the answer: Lily had thrown herself into raising Izzie. She’d had to bury her own grief and deal with her granddaughter’s instead. But Anneliese had nobody to take care of. She had only herself and, right now, she didn’t care what happened to Anneliese Kennedy.

  The first person Izzie saw when she went into the four-bed ward was Anneliese. Sitting by a bed with knitting on her lap and a far-away look on her face, she seemed so wonderfully familiar that Izzie had to bite her lip to stop herself crying again and ruining all the repair work she’d done with make-up on the way there.

  Then she saw her grandmother, tiny and frail as a child in the bed, with no hint of the vital woman she’d known all her life. Shock leached the colour from Izzie’s face and her emotional armour came tumbling down.

  ‘Anneliese,’ Izzie gasped, grabbing her aunt’s hands in horror and stopping beside the bed. ‘Oh God, poor Gran, my poor Gran.’

  Anneliese could do nothing but pat Izzie’s shoulders as the younger woman held on to the little body in the bed, sobbing ‘Gran.’

  It was almost too private to watch, Anneliese thought, and she began to turn away, hoping nobody else would approach so that Izzie could mourn in peace.

  ‘Anneliese! She’s talking!’

  ‘What?’ Anneliese rushed to the other side of the bed. ‘She hasn’t woken up, Izzie, not since…We should call the doctor.’

  ‘Yes, Gran.’ Izzie wasn’t listening to Anneliese. She was bent close to her grandmother’s face, trying to decipher the faint words.

  Lily’s mouth was moving and her eyes were open, shining out of her face with a vitality undimmed by nearly ninety years of life.

  ‘We’re here, Lily,’ Anneliese said gently. ‘You’re in hospital. You had a stroke, love, but you’re going to be all right.’

  Lily stared up at the ceiling, as if she was looking at somebody neither of them could see.

  ‘Jamie,’ she whispered in a voice as faint as paper rustling on the wind. ‘Jamie, are you there?’

  Izzie and Anneliese stared at each other across the bed. Jamie? Neither of them knew of a Jamie.

  ‘Jamie?’

  ‘Gran, it’s me, Izzie.’ Izzie stroked her grandmother’s cheek softly, but Lily’s eyes closed slowly shut and the brief moment of vitality faded from her face.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Izzie said. ‘Dad said she was still unconscious…’

  ‘She was. She still is,’ Anneliese said. ‘That wasn’t really waking up, was it? Your voice reached her, for sure, but she wasn’t talking to us. She was seeing someone else –’

  ‘Jamie.’ Izzie sat heavily down on the chair beside the bed. ‘Who the hell is Jamie?’

  NINE

  October 1940

  Lily Kennedy rested her stockinged feet against the base of the cream Aga in the huge kitchen in Rathnaree and sipped her tea from a flowered china teacup. It was early morning and the room was silent except for the ticking of the clock on the wall and the occasional crowing of the cockerel outside in the yard.

  The ten-minute walk from the Forge to the big house had been cold, with Lily and Mam hurrying along in their heavy outdoor boots, the cool of dawn biting into their faces and a weak sun lengthening shadows in the dark woods along the avenue. Lily wasn’t afraid of the dark: a girl raised in the countryside had no fear of shadows, although there were plenty of stories about bogeymen and spirits that gave her pause on the nights she bicycled from her friends’ homes in Tamarin. But looming dark shapes beside the road were often as not a cow or an innocuous blackthorn bush.

  Tommy had written in his letters about the city lights of London and how there was almost a glow above the houses in the sky from the street lights. They were all gone now, he said: nobody wanted a glow as a signal for Mr Hitler. Lily couldn’t imagine a city the size of London: Dungarvan was the biggest town she’d ever seen in real life, although she’d seen London, Paris and New York through the magic of films in the Ormonde cinema.

  And now she’d be seeing it herself, in a few days. She hugged the thought to herself, excited and a little bit anxious. Tommy, who’d helped her find out about the nurses’ training in the Royal Free, wouldn’t be there to meet her. His regiment, the Royal Irish Fusiliers, was being sent overseas, although he couldn’t say where to.

  Dad had read Tommy’s last letter and then crumpled it up and thrown it in the direction of the fire.

  ‘Tommy’s gone, why are you setting off too, Lily?’ he’d demanded gruffly. ‘We’ve had enough wars of our own to keep us going. We don’t need to be sending our children off to fight anyone else’s battles.’

  Lily hadn’t replied. She knew her father’s pain was over losing his beloved son to be a soldier rather than any diatribe against a war in which the Irish Free State was taking a neutral stance.

  Mam understood it better. She knew that Lily was passionate for another life, one away from Rathnaree.

  ‘A person would never believe the cold of this house if they didn’t experience it,’ said her mother now, hurrying into the room, dressed in her housekeeper’s uniform. ‘The beds are all damp despite it all, and there’ll be hell to pay if her ladyship comes home before it’s all settled.’

  Lily jumped to her feet and poured tea into another cup and saucer. Her mother didn’t bother with china cups usually, but Lily loved the delicate feel of the bone china.

  ‘Here’s your tea, Mam. Sit down.’

  ‘I’ve no time to sit,’ her mother said, but she took the cup and sipped it gratefully standing at the great scrubbed wooden table. ‘The red bedroom smells of damp, and even with the window open, I don’t know if the smell will be gone by tomorrow. Why, in the name of the Lord, did I say it was all right for everyone to come in late today, what with all the work to be done,’ Mary fretted.

  ‘Sit with me,’ Lily begged, because she knew there was no point telling her mother to stop rushing for people who were not actually there and who wouldn’t appreciate her rushing anyway.

  ‘I’ll sit for a moment,’ her mother said, and looked wistful. Her daughter was leaving home the next day, but Mary would be busy readying the staff for the big party. The family had been in Dublin for a week and were coming home the following day with a party of friends.

  Normally, the place would be buzzing even at this early hour, with Eileen Shaw, the cook, huffing and puffing about how the cold, wet weather made her cough worse. Sean, who’d been the Major’s batman in the last war and now worked as the family’s butler, would be lighting his pipe and casting irritated glances at Nora, the latest maid, who was all fingers and thumbs, organising Lady Irene’s breakfast tray. Sean was generally easy-going, but there had been quite a turnover of housemaids recently and Nora, who was young and awed by the grandeur of Rathnaree, fell short of the butler’s standards.

  Last, there would be Vivi, Lily’s best friend, standing outside and having a quick cup of tea and a cigarette before she started work. Lily loved Vivi: they were like chalk and cheese, Mam said, but they were best friends, had been since school, although Vivi had left at thirteen to come and work for the Lochravens.

  Mam had insisted that Lily stay on until she was seventeen, which was almost unheard of.

  ‘You’re daft to keep at the books,’ Vivi used to say to her. ‘Think of the fun we’ll have when you’ve a few bob in your pocket, Lily.’

  Vivi was short, curvy, and had recently gone to Silvia’s Hairdressing Emporium to have a platinum rinse to her hair, doing her best to look like Jean Harlow, her heroine.

  ‘But I’ll have to work for bloody Lady Irene,’ Lily pointed out. That was the downside of having money. If it had to be earned in Rathnaree, she’d rather not earn it. Unfortunately, there weren’t many other options for her in Tamarin. There was no money in the Kennedy household for her to train as a nurse in one of the big hospitals, which was
what she really wanted to do. So she’d ended up in Rathnaree after all, which had made Vivi happy.

  Leaving her best friend behind was going to be one of the hard things about going to London, Lily thought sadly.

  This morning was the last vestige of holiday for the staff. There weren’t many days when servants could lie in bed at their leisure. Tomorrow, it would be business as usual with frantic dusting, cleaning and polishing, and Eileen in a lather of sweat preparing the pheasant for the party, cooking her special wild mushroom soup and making delicate pastry for the crème mille-feuilles Lady Irene insisted upon.

  The fact that the family were away was the only reason Lily had come with her mother to Rathnaree in the first place.

  She hadn’t been there since the previous Christmas, when she’d left to work with old Dr Rafferty in his surgery in the village. When Dr Rafferty’s daughter got married, Lily had leapt at the chance to take over her job tidying up after the doctor, helping him out sometimes, in the hope that she might somehow find a way to train as a nurse if only she had some experience behind her.

  Lady Irene had been furious, although she had hidden it behind the usual veneer of disinterest.

  ‘If you want to spend your life working with sick people, Lily, then I wish you luck with it,’ she’d said when Lily had formally handed in her notice.

  Lady Irene’s last lady’s maid had been addressed by her surname: Ryan. But Lily, because she was the housekeeper’s daughter and had been in and out of Rathnaree since she could toddle, had been spared the harshness of being called Kennedy. It was a great sign, Lily’s mother said, pleased.

  ‘She’s very fond of you, love,’ Mam said with pride when Lily had been promoted, after just six months in the house, to the position of lady’s maid. ‘And why shouldn’t she be? You’re so neat and clever, and I never saw anyone fix her hair the way you can.’

  Lily was quite aware that being able to dress the older woman’s thinning dark hair was not necessarily a guarantee of her civility. Fifty years of having their every whim responded to did not endow a person with grace.