Light a Penny Candle

by Maeve Binchy

  Then there was silence. Nobody seemed to have heard. Elizabeth had closed the front door and bolted it. She remained frozen for a moment. Then she walked unseeing past Harry.

  Harry stood breathless. But almost immediately he heard Elizabeth’s voice soothing little Eileen.

  ‘It’s all right, shush, shush. Don’t worry. Daddy will be home soon. Daddy’s out late, Daddy’s out getting a big job. He’ll be home soon. He’ll be home soon. Everything will be fine.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ Harry said aloud.

  The ambulance men left quietly. There was no need to rush to the hospital with sirens blaring. Henry Mason was dead. It was the porter who had gone up to the top floor to tell young Mrs Mason the news. She came to the door in her dressing-gown looking confused and carrying her little girl in her arms.

  ‘What is it? You can’t mean it … not possible … how did it happen? How could it have happened …? He wasn’t home. Did he fall? How could he have fallen? Can I see him? Henry? Henry? Henry?’

  And there were cups of tea and the police as well. No, Henry hadn’t come home, he was out having a few drinks. One of the secretaries had rung to say he would be late. He must have had too many. He wasn’t used to drinking. Oh God.

  ‘Elizabeth?’

  ‘Aisling?’

  ‘Don’t move, stay where you are, I’ll sit down beside you. …’ Aisling sat down on the side of the bed. She took Elizabeth’s thin cold hand in hers. Elizabeth said nothing. Aisling rubbed the hand a little as if to bring back the circulation. The clock was ticking very loudly. Outside there was a faint noise of traffic, and almost as faint was the hum of conversation from the sitting room. Harry was talking to the callers in a low voice, discouraging anyone from trying to see Elizabeth, noting all the offers of help. Eileen had gone to stay with friends who had a small child. Elizabeth’s father had been and gone. Elizabeth had refused an injection to sedate her. She said she would be all right.

  Elizabeth’s eyes were not still, not for a moment; they darted all around, into Aisling’s face and out of it. … Her head never moved, it lay on the pillow as if it was too heavy to raise.

  ‘Can you walk? I think we should go out,’ Aisling said.

  ‘Yes, yes, that’s what we’ll do.’ Elizabeth pulled her hand away and pushed back the covers. She was half-dressed. She moved to the chair and pulled on a blue polo necked sweater and a plaid skirt. She found a jacket in the wardrobe. She looked frail and ill.

  ‘Are you sure …?’

  ‘Yes, you’re right, it’s just what I want to do. …’ She slipped her feet into shoes and looked at Aisling trustingly like a child.

  Aisling murmured to Harry, and in a moment they were out on the landing. Neither of them looked at the floor or at each other. They got into the lift and stood almost rigid as it went down. They walked, heads down and hands in pockets, out the door and across the road. Their steps seemed urgent and anxious until they got into the park, then unconsciously they seemed to change their stride, into the stroll of park walkers, the slow gait of Londoners enjoying the grass and the flower beds instead of the traffic and the noise.

  ‘What am I going to do?’ Elizabeth asked eventually. There was a long silence, but Aisling had slipped her arm through Elizabeth’s and they walked without looking at each other. ‘I mean, what’s going to happen?’ Her voice was very thin.

  Aisling spoke slowly. ‘You’ll make a life for Eileen. You’ll remember all the good bits and put the bad bits away. I think that’s what people do.’

  ‘Yes.’

  They walked on, arms linked.

  ‘It didn’t turn out all that well for us … what was wrong with us …?’ Aisling said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, here we are, Elizabeth … widows, both of us … only your Eileen left to show for it all … for all the hope and the … dreams … you know.’

  Elizabeth’s voice had become stronger. ‘Your Mam wouldn’t like us talking like that … going over the past.’

  ‘No, she wouldn’t.’ Aisling was quiet for a moment. Then she spoke again. ‘Mam always knew what to say … she used to say what I thought was the wrong thing … but it turned out to be the right one … I don’t know how she found the right words … it was a kind of skill. …’

  Elizabeth said, ‘No, I don’t think she even tried, I think the words were just there.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Aisling.

  They sat down on a seat where they had often stopped when they had taken Eileen out in a pram … and even before that, when Aisling had come to London first … in those days when she had just run away.

  ‘It must have been very quick for him,’ Aisling said.

  ‘The policeman said that it would have been over in a few seconds.’ Elizabeth put her face in her hands.

  ‘Stop, stop.’

  ‘No, I’m not crying, I’m just thinking about the few seconds. They must have seemed very long … it …’

  ‘No, no, think of it like a dream, you know the frightening bit … then it’s over. …’

  ‘But in a dream you wake up.’

  ‘Well, it was over for Henry … he felt no more then.’

  Elizabeth stood up. ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘It took Tony much longer to die,’ Aisling said.

  Elizabeth looked at her. ‘I suppose it did,’ she said.

  ‘And look at all you did for Henry … look at it and remember all the good. You gave him a home, he always wanted one … you gave him confidence … all those things … he would never have got them from anyone else. …’ Aisling looked at the ground as she spoke. Elizabeth looked across the park.

  ‘You made Tony happy too …’ she said.

  ‘No, I didn’t, nobody could have, and I certainly didn’t. I made him worse.’

  ‘Don’t look at it that way. …’ Elizabeth’s voice was clear now, and strong as ever. ‘You were what he wanted and he got you. … That’s the only thing that gives us any hope out of all this. … If people got what they wanted. …’

  ‘What can I do for you, Elizabeth? I’ll do anything, anything, you know that. …’

  ‘I know. I know. You always have … you’ve always rescued me. …’

  ‘No, you rescued me … you did the rescuing years ago … if I hadn’t a friend like you all my life what would I have had … Maureen, Niamh … Joannie Murray … some friends … they would have been, for all that happened. …’

  ‘And we never fought … in all those years we never had a real row. …’

  ‘I know, sometimes I think when you left Kilgarret first, when you came back here, I used to get annoyed because you were so distant … I didn’t know. …’

  ‘And I didn’t know … when you and Tony were married at first and you sent these brittle letters … I was annoyed. But I didn’t know.’

  ‘What can I do for you Elizabeth, please …’ she asked again.

  ‘Tell me what happens next. …’

  ‘There’ll be the inquest … and the coroner will say. …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘He’ll say how he heard that Henry became upset and … and … went on a sort of drunken … well … batter … and then came home and then about the accident … and how he fell. …’

  ‘And what will the coroner say?’

  ‘I don’t know. … I suppose he’ll pass a vote of sympathy … isn’t that what they do when you read about inquests? They say that they would like to extend their sympathy to the relatives and friends of the deceased. …’

  ‘Like a sort of obituary?’

  ‘I suppose so … something like that.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And then it will all be over … and you’ll have to start to. …’

  ‘Yes. …’

  ‘Oh God, Elizabeth, I’m so sorry, I’m so very sorry. …’

  ‘I know … I know … I’m sorry, I’m very sorry too. …’

  The coroner’s inquest was brief and formal.

  Aisling
had read about inquests in the local papers back in Kilgarret. Mam had said that it was only a scourge and a torture to poor families to have the press reporters there, writing down every word and making it a thousand times worse … whatever awful sadness the people had already.

  She looked around the small dusty courtroom. Two men were writing in notebooks, they might be press. They didn’t look much like journalists. But nobody looked much like anything today. Everyone looked very odd as if they were playing a part in some play they hadn’t rehearsed properly. That’s what she felt anyway, and she felt sure Elizabeth must be thinking the same thing. It was odd, but for once it was hard to know what Elizabeth was thinking. Her face was like a mask.

  Elizabeth’s face was very still, but her thoughts were darting all over the place, she felt that she must run after them as if she were collecting marbles that had spilled from a box. She remembered there had been an inquest in the hospital where Mother had died. Yes, dreadful fuss and anxiety all over the place, doctors and nurses very upset. The patient had been in a room near Mother, of very unsound mind, nobody doubted that, she had managed to get the glass to cut her wrists through great cunning that nobody could have foreseen, nobody doubted that either and there could have been no blame attached to any member of staff. But they had hated the inquest. She remembered them telling her that. What good did it do they had asked, upset everybody and didn’t bring back the poor old soul who had done herself in. She wondered had she ever told Aisling about that? Aisling looked very strong sitting there opposite her, her hands for once still on her lap.

  What an extraordinary place for them both to be. A coroner’s court. Harry Elton thought that the room was so small and shabby it must be only a temporary court. This wasn’t like courts you saw in films, or the Old Bailey. This was just a dusty room. But of course it wasn’t a trial, he told himself for the twentieth time, so there was no need to have a real court. It was only a tidying up of the bits and bobs of papers, that’s all it was. If it had been necessary there would have been a real court. But not unless there had been a crime.

  Simon Burke looked around, he could tell the titles of familiar law books just by their bindings. The place was a bit dusty. If he had been in charge of the place he’d have seen that it got a good going over each week. It never did any harm to give the Law some trappings, not make it seem like a storage depot in the back of some second-hand book-shop. He wondered what the others made of it. Aisling and Elizabeth so still, so pale both of them. He remembered the first time he had seen Elizabeth, he and Henry had seen her when they went to register for the little art course. Oh God. Henry. Poor bloody Henry.

  Johnny thought he saw Aisling smile at him and he smiled back. But she hadn’t been looking at him, she had only turned her head his way, her eyes didn’t meet his. Lord, Lord, what a business all this was. It was unbelievable that they should all be caught up in an inquest. Henry’s inquest no less. It was bloody ridiculous. Henry should be alive and well and going his own way, hitting the sauce a bit less. Incredible to look at both those girls … well women … Aisling and Elizabeth, and to think that both their husbands had more or less died from drink. The odds against that must be overwhelming. Poor old Henry, Lord this was a bloody awful business. Sooner it was all shut of the better.

  Elizabeth thought, Aisling said it would all be very quick and formal. Please make it quick and formal. I can’t stand sitting here. I can’t stand it one minute more.

  Aisling thought, if they don’t start soon I’m going to crack. This is desperate, sitting here while he fusses about moving papers from one side of his bloody desk to the other. God Almighty, get on with it can’t you, it’s meant to be a formality, a formal taking of evidence. Can’t you get on with it you stupid old bumbler? Stop making yourself into a little tin God.

  The coroner was now ready, everything on his desk was to his satisfaction. He was ready to hear the evidence. …

  Evidence was given by the police, by the ambulance men, by the porter. Everyone spoke in flat, measured tones about what had happened, and what times it had happened. Only Harry Elton and Simon Burke were called to speak. Harry Elton, stepfather of Mrs Mason … guest in the house. Heard absolutely nothing until the huge knocking on the door and the porter and the terrible news. Poor Elizabeth shattered. Dreadful tragedy … happy family life. …

  Simon had left him in an intoxicated condition at the corner of Great Portland Street and Mortimer Street. No, he hadn’t said where he was going to go. Simon Burke had advised him to get a taxi home, and he had said he would do that. No, Simon Burke had no idea where he might have gone after that.

  Nobody called Aisling O’Connor, friend of Mrs Mason, to give any evidence.

  Nobody asked Johnny Stone, friend and colleague of Mrs Mason, to describe the telephone call. Because no mention of a visit or a telephone call had ever been made.

  So they sat in the coroner’s court and said nothing until the verdict of misadventure and accidental death by falling down an internal staircase, after excessive alcoholic consumption, was recorded by the coroner.

  And then they all came out into the sun.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781409049203

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published in the United Kingdom by Arrow Books in 2006

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  Copyright © Maeve Binchy, 1982

  Maeve Binchy has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  This ebook is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  First published in the United Kingdom in 1982 by Century

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9780099498575