‘I find that equally hard to believe. Bobbie?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you mind if I stop the car? Just for a minute. I want to say goodbye to you without other people around.’ He pulled into a lay-by. ‘I want to kiss you for the last time.’
I felt a rush of tears in the back of my throat; my nose prickled and threatened to run. A pain stabbed between my shoulder-blades and ran through to my breastbone. We kissed, long and passionately.
‘Right,’ he said at last. He pushed me away almost roughly and started up the car. ‘We’d better hurry if you’re to catch the two o’clock ferry.’
After that we drove in silence. From time to time I turned to gaze at his profile and each time received a violent jolt to my heart. I found myself almost wishing he had gone out of my life when he was meant to, that morning. How would it be when we had to say goodbye? How could I stop myself howling like a child? We came to the outskirts of Dublin and turned south for Dún Laoghaire. How grim the back streets looked, though in reality they were no worse than any other suburbs. When I saw the signs for the harbour, my heart beat fast, the blood roared in my ears and my limbs trembled. He drove on, looking stern, saying nothing. I almost hated him for taking me willingly to that place of separation.
We entered the port. He found a space in the car-park.
‘Here we are,’ he said. His face looked grey.
‘Yes.’ I was thinking frantically. Whatever the consequences might be, this felt very wrong.
‘I’ll get your cases.’
He had got out of the car before I could detain him. He took the two big ones and I picked up the small one. He found a porter and a trolley. They said things I could not understand because my brain was seething with protest.
‘There she is.’ He pointed to the boat. ‘You’re in luck. The sea’s pretty calm.’
Every rib, every bone ached. I was in agony, physically as well as mentally. I decided to tell him that I’d changed my mind. That I couldn’t leave him. I would take a flat in Dublin, get a job, be his mistress, see him when he could spare time from his family. I would never ask him for anything and the moment he was tired of me I would go away without a word of reproach. I opened my mouth to say all this but a man came out of nowhere and said, ‘Senator Macchuin, isn’t it?’
Finn started. ‘Yes.’
‘I’m Roddy Clarke. Irish Recorder. I heard your speech on education. It was a fine one, very thought-provoking.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Are you going over to England, sir? I’m travelling myself. We might have a drink and a chat.’
‘No.’ Finn seemed to be speaking very slowly. He did not look at the man. ‘No. I’m not going. I’m seeing this young lady off.’ Roddy Clarke’s eyes rested curiously on my face. ‘My housekeeper. Miss Norton. She’s been looking after my house in Galway.’
‘Really?’ Roddy Clarke looked me up and down and I knew exactly what he was thinking. Of course, we could not hope to fool him. Finn looked quite ill and I could feel myself trembling uncontrollably. ‘And you’re going home now, Miss Norton?’ I nodded. ‘Have you enjoyed your stay in Ireland?’ I nodded again, clenching my hands inside my pockets. He was stealing the last precious moments. Why couldn’t he leave us alone? In desperation I opened my mouth to beg him to go away but a siren wailed, drowning my words.
The reporter took hold of my arm. ‘We’d better hurry, Miss Norton. The boat’ll be leaving in five minutes. We’ll get aboard so we can choose a decent seat.’ He pronounced the word ‘daycent’ as Timsy and the girls did and I was filled with such a longing to be back at Curraghcourt that to my horror a tear ran down my cheek. ‘I see you’re apprehensive, Miss Norton. No need to worry. These tubs are as safe as houses. I’ll look after you.’
Still he had hold of my arm.
‘Goodbye then.’ Finn held out his hand. I put mine in it. I felt a brief pressure then he had turned away and was walking back to the car.
‘This way.’ Roddy Clarke was pushing me through the throng of hurrying passengers. It was as well he did for I was almost blinded by fast-falling tears. We were going up the gangplank. I felt the throb of engines beneath my feet. I turned, blinking, rubbing away tears with my hands to see Finn, a distant figure, walking rapidly away through the crowd. He did not look back. Then he turned a corner and was gone.
‘Steady now, Miss Norton. Are you not well? I’ll get you to a seat.’
We climbed steep stairs to the passenger lounge.
‘Sit here. I’ll fetch you a drink.’
I was sobbing openly now and shivering as though in the grip of fever. I was being knocked about by elbows and cases but I was unable to protect myself. My eardrums were splitting with the noise of talking and laughter.
‘Get this down you.’
I drank it. I had no idea what it was. As fast as I swallowed it, it threatened to come back into my mouth.
‘Is the young lady sick already?’ A woman’s voice, kind, close to my ear. ‘Why, hello! I remember you! Wasn’t it this time, last summer about, that you crossed?’ I looked into the sympathetic face of the waitress who had been so motherly on that terrible voyage out. ‘My goodness!’ she said. ‘It’s plain to see your stay with us hasn’t done you much good. Will I fetch you a nice piece of Battenberg?’
FIFTY-TWO
My father’s funeral took place a week later. Ruby, who had sent the telegram, had wanted to save me from a distressing journey home so she had lied about the gravity of his condition. I was grateful for this kindness. On reaching London I had telephoned Cutham Hall and Brough had been sent in the Austin Princess to Blackheath station to meet my train. We had driven straight to the hospital. I hardly recognized the large mound of inert flesh that had been my small, trim, energetic parent. There was no time to do more than hold his hand and kiss him before he died. He was unconscious so probably he did not even know I was there.
‘I’m ever so sorry, dear. But it was nice that you were with him at the end.’
Ruby’s plump, powdered cheeks were streaked with purple where tears had washed away her make-up and exposed broken veins. I looked no better myself. During that last embrace with Finn in the lay-by, some of the contents of my bag had spilled out and I had made the long journey home without benefit of comb or make-up, my hair in knots and my face speckled with grains of mascara. Under the hospital strip-lighting, which made our faces livid, we must have looked like a pair of clowns.
‘What you need, dear, is to come home and rest. I’ll make you something nice to eat and that’ll buck you up. Poor dear Gifford! I’m so glad we were both there when he passed away. Your mother would’ve liked to be with us, I know, but she’s not strong enough for all this upset and Oliver, bless him, doesn’t like hospitals. I can understand that. You can’t go against your nature, dear, can you? Now, you have a good cry, Roberta love, that’s right. He was your dear dadda, wasn’t he, and now he’s gone and it’s very sad. There, there! Auntie Ruby’ll take you home.’
The next few days and nights seemed to have no shape, no purpose that I could understand. Mrs Treadgold’s knees had inconveniently given way beneath the shock of my father’s death. She valiantly ‘came in’ because she wouldn’t let us down in a crisis but she could do little more than sit on the old kitchen sofa and receive cups of tea and cake from Ruby, who was unfailingly sympathetic in the intervals between making beds, washing floors, bringing down cobwebs and scouring the scullery sink. I did my best to help though Ruby was anxious that I should rest.
‘You look peaky, dear,’ Ruby said two days after my father’s death. ‘Just leave that basket of ironing to me and I’ll get through it in a trice after I’ve got the towels in the wash and put an elastic waistband into your mother’s black skirt.’
Mrs Treadgold shifted expansively to accommodate on the troublesome knees the plate of custard tart she was nobly eating as she couldn’t stand by and see it go to waste. ‘It’s nerves, Roberta, and no wonder. What
with the Major going off so sudden and your mother not getting any better it’s a wonder we don’t all look like death warmed up. When I got that telephone call to say he’d gone, I shook like a jelly for an hour after. I haven’t been to the toilet properly – you know – since. The doctor says my bowels are a mystery beyond the skills of medical man.’
I did not leave the basket of ironing to Ruby, nor did I allow her to sit up till midnight with the waistband, but I was more exhausted than I could have believed possible. People wrote, telephoned and rang the doorbell to offer their condolences and to ask if there was anything they could do. Sometimes I wondered what they would say if I asked them to do a little light housework.
The undertaker came to show me photographs of coffins, accompanied by little square samples of brilliantly varnished wood in various shades of brown, called things like the Balmoral, the Regal and the Prestige, all at astonishing prices, except the Fundamental, which I was too cowardly to choose. I selected ridiculously expensive brass handles and dutifully turned the plastic-covered pages of a catalogue with pictures of ugly flower arrangements, my mind anywhere but on the virtues of the five-pound ‘carnation tribute’ as opposed to the fifteen-pound ‘lilies only’.
We walked to the church behind the coffin and sang the hymns I had chosen with the assistance of the vicar who said that in his opinion what he called ‘Guide me, O’ struck a nice balance between regret for the departed and confidence in the everlasting.
Everlasting what, I wondered, as the bravest shrieked, ‘Feed me now and evermo-hor-hor-hor-hore,’ very high while the rest of us mouthed the words, frightened our voices might crack.
Everlasting grief. I thought I was learning about that. At the graveside, where there was what Mrs Treadgold called ‘a good turnout’, Ruby and I were conspicuous by our weeping. One could not expect friends and relations to be particularly sad. My father had not bothered to disguise the contempt he felt for them. My mother, sitting in her wheelchair, remained abstracted, gazing up at the rooks nesting in the dying elms. No doubt she subscribed to the view that it is vulgar to cry at funerals. Oliver looked greener than ever. I was sure he felt my father’s death deeply, though he could not be said to mourn. I saw him tweak Sherilee’s prominent bottom, tightly encased in black leather trousers, when he thought no one was looking. But you cannot lose a parent without pain of some kind.
Ruby cried, I think, because she felt she had lost someone of whom she was truly fond, though Oliver told me that my father had treated her as the next best thing to a slave. But Ruby’s nature was soft and she had no intention of going against it. I cried because my relationship with my father had been so far from ideal and that must have been at least as sad for him as it was for me.
Mrs Treadgold had equipped herself with mourning clothes of the deepest hue and a packet of paper handkerchiefs but in the event she was so interested in the service and what everyone else was wearing that she remained dry-eyed. Brough was, surprisingly, the only other member of the funeral cortège to show emotion. My father had bullied him to the point of cruelty for thirty-five years but when the coffin was carried to the grave Brough held himself erect and saluted while tears slid down the side of his nose.
We gave a lunch for the mourners afterwards. Ruby had refused my help, saying that she could see I was all in and would be better resting. People got very jolly on South African sherry and bridge rolls filled with egg and cress, sausages on sticks, chocolate sponge and iced fruitcake, pulling solemn faces from time to time when they remembered that this was a wake.
I drifted through the days that followed. I wandered round the house and garden, tried to read, watched television without any idea what the programmes were until my mother said couldn’t I pull myself together? My gloomy face and restless fidgeting were unsettling her. Now Mrs Treadgold’s knees were on the mend, my mother and Ruby had a comfortable routine reading their favourite novels, with breaks to listen to Woman’s Hour, Franklin Engleman coming Down Your Way and Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America. They ate large quantities of sugar-laden food. They seemed happy. Oliver pulled pints at the bar of the Red Lion, told bad jokes, polished glasses, grabbed the prominent parts of Sherilee whenever she was in reach, and topped up the bowls on the bar with a fresh layer of peanuts each morning.
I could not acclimatize myself to my own country. It was so tidy, so organized, so crowded. Everything seemed diminutive. Though this was supposedly countryside, around every bend in the road there was a house, a lamp-post, a privet hedge with a man in an argyle jersey trimming it into a neat shape. Clean cars stood on herringbone-bricked drives in front of diamond-paned windows sparkling with fresh applications of Windolene. Every roadside tree had the shape of a double-decker bus carved from its canopy. Beyond the gates of Cutham people seemed stiff and introverted, intent on presenting a respectable face that revealed nothing of their real selves. Knowing of my recent bereavement they took pains to keep contact with me to a minimum lest they should accidentally provoke me into losing self-control. If anyone more closely connected with me was surprised that I was taking my father’s death so hard they kept their own counsel. Only Ruby tried to show me by pats on the arm, sympathetic sighs and little plates of biscuits that appeared mysteriously at my elbow that she knew I was going through some sort of emotional turmoil.
A letter from Constance arrived a few days after the funeral. I opened it eagerly and scanned the lines of copperplate for mention of his name. There it was. Finn came home last weekend. That’s two weekends running!! He seemed awfully tired, poor boy, but made valiant efforts to mend the generator which has packed up again. In the end of course I had to get in Thady O’Kelly … That was the only mention of his name. I ran over the letter again as disappointed as a starving man offered a few stale crumbs, then read it properly, chiding myself for being a weak fool.
Apparently Liddy had had a letter from Danny which had sent her into transports. The visitors were continuing to come in droves and on the whole it was a terrific success though there had been a distressing incident when one of the visitors had tried to walk out with a silver sugar caster. He had thrown himself on Constance’s mercy and explained that he was an illegal immigrant from Eastern Europe and had hoped to sell the caster to get money to send to his starving children so she had given him a five-pound note and let him go round Curraghcourt for free in exchange for the caster’s return. There had been an article in the local press about Eugene’s silhouettes. Remembering what you said, Constance continued, I put out of my mind all thoughts of sin and took the GREAT STEP. I must admit I was nervous, we both were, but Eugene was so sweet, so kind. Bobbie, I’m so lucky. I know I don’t deserve him. Naturally I’m not going to confess to Father Deglan what we’ve done. That means I can no longer take Communion but I don’t care! Nothing so wonderful could be wrong! There was a lot more about Eugene, which I read patiently, taking pleasure in the happiness that was apparent in every word. Flurry had put down several feet of track with the help of Sam O’Kelly, who had turned out to be a railway enthusiast. Flavia had started to bring the kittens downstairs, one at a time. Maria had taken a shine to Wee Willie Winkie, licking his head until the kitten was nearly drowned by saliva. Osgar had behaved well, only growling if the kittens approached his beloved glove. Violet sent her best love. Mrs O’Kelly had started work at the castle and was proving reliable and willing though unfortunately it was back to mince and boiled potatoes. How they all missed my wonderful cooking! In fact they were all missing me more than they could say and were looking forward to my return. Surely you could come back soon even if only for a while? Of course your mother will be needing you just now. But it’s not the same without you, dear, dear Bobbie.
I read the letter through again, despite the shooting pains in my breast. Then I put it away in a drawer. I lacked the strength of mind to answer it immediately. I was frightened by my own inertia, unable to make plans, to contemplate what might lie ahead. I was standing in the hall looking out
through the streaming window by the front door at the rivers running down the drive and wondering if I would ever again be able to see rain without thinking of bogs and mountains when the telephone rang.
‘Bobbie? It’s Fleur.’
‘Fleur! What a surprise!’ I saw several pictures in my mind’s eye in rapid succession: Fleur’s charming face and dark, cloudy hair; Dickie laughing amiably; the beauty of Ladyfield; and, of course, Burgo – not necessarily in that order.
‘A nice one I hope. Dickie saw the notice in The Times about your father so we guessed you’d be home. I’m dreadfully sorry.’
‘Thank you. How are you? How’s Dickie?’
‘We’re both well. Dickie was saying just the other day how much he missed your guiding hand in the garden. So when we read about your poor pa, he said to ring you. I was a bit doubtful … I thought you might be … Oh, Bobbie, I’m sorry I was such a beast. That horrible telephone call! I was so mean to you! I regretted it the minute I’d put the phone down but I didn’t have your number so what could I do? I’d no idea how to get in touch with you to say I was sorry. I telephoned Cutham but your father – I think it must have been your father – said he was going to inform the police if anyone else rang up asking for your telephone number.’
‘I expect he thought you were a journalist. Don’t worry, Fleur. I quite understood that you were upset about … someone else.’
‘I was but that’s no excuse. Do you forgive me, really?’
‘Completely. Absolutely. Don’t give it another thought.’
‘It’s more than I deserve. Where were you in fact? Or is it still a secret?’
‘I was in Ireland.’
‘Goodness! I never thought of that. I imagined you somewhere exciting. Rome or New York. What on earth made you go to Ireland?’
‘I saw an advertisement for a housekeeper.’
Moonshine Page 76
