The People Next Door

by Roisin Meaney

  Jim bowed his head then and blessed himself, and the four of them stood in a silent semi-circle for a few minutes. Yvonne could feel the heat of the sun on the back of her neck. Imagine – almost eight o’clock and still so hot. The best May they’d had in years. A bead of sweat ran down her back and settled into the waistband of her skirt. Under her arms, her blouse felt unpleasantly damp; she couldn’t wait to peel it off when they got home. She thought longingly of a cool shower and hoped Clara wasn’t planning one of her extended sessions in the bathroom.

  Eventually Peggy made the sign of the cross and turned to her husband. ‘Ready?’ She nodded once in the general direction of Yvonne’s shoulder – ‘We’ll be off then’ – and smiled again at Clara. ‘Come and see us soon, pet.’

  She may as well have looked directly at Yvonne and said, ‘Not you. Don’t you come near my house.’

  Jim blessed himself and put his free hand on Clara’s arm – ‘Take care, my dear’ – and smiled at Yvonne. ‘Bye now.’

  ‘Mind yourself, Jim.’

  Of course they didn’t mention the next dinner, in just over two weeks’ time. Yvonne occasionally wondered if Jim was punished for those dinners. Did he get the silent treatment when he got home? Did Peggy rant at him before he went? Or did she just ignore the fact that her husband made regular visits to the enemy? Somehow that didn’t seem very likely, knowing Peggy.

  Clara watched them walk away. ‘She’s such a cow.’

  Yvonne frowned at the pot of flowers. They were the dark orangey-yellow of duck egg yolks. ‘Ah, don’t, love.’

  ‘Well, she is – you know she is. I hate the way she makes a point of treating you like dirt. Does she think I don’t notice?’ Clara’s pretty face twisted as she scowled in Peggy’s direction. ‘And Gramps is such a pet. I can’t understand how he puts up with her.’

  Yvonne smiled. ‘For better or worse, I suppose.’ She bent and unwrapped the freesias, pulling away the damp paper. She tried to prop the little flowers against the headstone, but as soon as she let go, they tumbled apart in a green and pale yellow spatter.

  No point in saying, again, that Peggy couldn’t help it, that she needed someone to blame for Brian’s death – and Yvonne, who, as far as Peggy was concerned, had already ruined his life by trapping him at eighteen, was the obvious choice. No point in trotting out those awful half-truths again – Clara had been fed them often enough.

  She didn’t remember her father at all. She hadn’t a single memory of the made-up songs she’d refused to go to bed without, correcting him sternly if he got a line wrong, or the endless games of snakes and ladders or the sock-puppet shows he put on when she had measles and, later, chicken pox. Clara had no idea what a wonderful father she’d had for the first five years of her life.

  And, naturally, she hadn’t a clue about how her mother had been planning to leave him, in the weeks and days before he died. And that was the problem, of course – Yvonne had no idea if Brian had said anything to his parents, if he’d confided in them about the awful little scene in the kitchen, late one night after Clara was in bed …

  ‘Peace at last – she’s gone off.’ He’d poured his can of Bulmers into the glass Yvonne insisted on and walked towards the television.

  ‘Hang on.’ Her mouth was painfully dry. She could still taste the sardines they’d had for dinner. ‘Don’t turn it on a minute.’

  ‘Match of the Day is—’

  ‘I know, but just a minute.’ She’d forgotten Match of the Day, the one programme he couldn’t live without. No matter – she’d started now. ‘I – need to talk to you.’

  He perched on the arm of the sofa. ‘Go on so, if you’re quick. You have three minutes.’

  She watched his throat move as the cider went down, heard the wet glugs of his swallows. What made a man’s Adam’s apple look so heartbreakingly vulnerable?

  She waited until he’d lowered the drink, pushing her nails into the couch. She said, ‘It’s about us.’ Now. No going back now.

  ‘Us?’ He looked at her. His lips were wet. ‘What about us?’ He started to smile. ‘Is this one of those talks where you tell me I don’t spend enough time with you?’ He glanced towards the clock on the mantelpiece, a lightning movement she didn’t miss.

  ‘Brian …’ There was a small, almost perfectly round bruise on the back of his left hand. It was yellow and dark blue. ‘We … I think …’ All her practising, and she couldn’t think how to say it.

  He looked more carefully at her and said, ‘What’s up? Tell me. Did I forget our anniversary or something?’

  She’d had no idea it would be so hard. She hadn’t planned on crying – that hadn’t been part of it at all – yet her eyes filled suddenly with tears. ‘I – I— This isn’t working.’ She dipped her head and brushed away the tears before they had a chance to roll down her face. ‘We – us. We’re not working.’ There was salt at the back of her throat. She kept her eyes down, not daring to look at his face.

  He laughed. The sound startled her into lifting her head. He was grinning at her. ‘You’re having me on, aren’t you? This is April fool or something.’ He slid down in to the sofa, reached for his glass again. ‘Jesus, you nearly had—’

  ‘Stop.’ She put a hand on his arm. ‘Brian, I mean it. I’m not joking.’ His skin felt cool against her fingers. ‘We’ve made a mistake. We should never have … We made a mistake, that’s all. Clara was coming and – we couldn’t see beyond that.’

  His smile began to fade. ‘What are you talking about?’ He looked from her face to the hand that was still on his arm, and back to her face. He stared at her. ‘What are you saying?’

  She struggled for the words again. ‘I’m trying – I don’t want …’ Tiny bubbles floated to the top of the cider and burst there. She imagined them hitting her skin with minuscule damp pops. ‘I don’t—’ She couldn’t say it. She waited for him.

  ‘Do you not love me any more?’

  He’d whispered it. She could hardly hear him. Do you not love me any more? Because of course she’d loved him once. Hadn’t she?

  She shook her head, scattering fresh tears. ‘I’m sorry.’ She started to reach for his hand and he pulled it away from her.

  He lunged for his glass and drained it, gulping it down as if he’d die of thirst otherwise. Then he belched, deliberately loudly.

  She closed her eyes, whispered ‘I’m sorry’ again. Her head began to ache.

  ‘Look.’ His voice was stronger. She heard the creak of the sofa as he turned towards her. She kept her eyes closed. ‘Look, you’re tired. You’re worn out with that job – I told you not to …’ He grabbed her hand, held onto it tightly. ‘You don’t know what—’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head again, forced herself to open her eyes and look at him. ‘I do. Please believe me. I mean what I say. It’s not tiredness, I’m not tired.’ A pulse of pain thumped gently in her head.

  He searched her face, still holding tightly to her hand. ‘So what are you saying? What are you really saying?

  ‘It’s over.’ She had to push the words out. They felt too big to get past her lips. ‘We can’t stay together.’

  His face crumpled. ‘No.’ He leaned towards her and pushed his face into her neck. ‘No, don’t say that. No, no, please—’ She felt the hot wetness of his tears, smelled the hair gel he’d refused to change, even for her. Smelled the apple tang of cider. ‘I love you, you know how much I—’ He slid his arms around her and pressed her against him. ‘I love you.’ He lowered his head until it nestled between her breasts. ‘Please.’ He pressed his lips to her skin, just above the V of her T-shirt. ‘I love you so much.’

  She wanted to push him away, but his body shuddered with sobs and she couldn’t. She sat trapped in his arms, damp with his tears, until he lifted his head and ran a hand under his nose and said rapidly, ‘Look, just hang on – don’t rush into anything. I can take a few days off – I can do it next week, we can go someplace. I don’t know, we can get a B and B, my
parents will mind Clara, or yours – and we can just talk about it.’ He pushed the heel of his hand into each of his eye sockets in turn. ‘Will you just do that, will you just … please? Will you?’

  Yvonne looked at his wet eyelashes and his red, swollen eyes and his stupid, hopeful face and she knew that no amount of talk would change a thing, not if they talked until they were old. But she nodded and said ‘OK’ because he had a bruise on the back of his hand, and because she’d made him cry, and because she didn’t know how to say no.

  And then, just two days later, he’d taken the train to Dublin for a meeting, and the next time she’d seen him had been in the hospital mortuary in Athlone.

  His face was unfamiliar, they’d hidden the worst of the injuries under a thick layer of some tan-coloured cream, and his brown hair was parted on the wrong side. She had reached under the sheet, lifted his icy cold hand and turned the palm over. The bruise had almost completely faded. She could barely make it out.

  When they got home from the cemetery, Magoo was waiting at the back gate. As soon as the car rounded the corner of the lane he stood, stretching each leg in turn. He darted between them while they were getting out, barking happily, then trotted ahead of them up the path and stood hopefully by his empty bowl, black tail swinging in a wide arc, wet tongue lolling from his panting mouth.

  Yvonne picked up the bowl and refilled it from the outside tap. Magoo ducked his head and began to slurp loudly.

  The phone began to ring as Clara was turning her key in the back-door lock. ‘I’ll get it.’

  Yvonne stood in the fading light, reluctant now to leave this glorious day behind. The air was wonderfully heavy with the scent of someone’s freshly mown lawn. She listened to the slop-slop of Magoo’s eager lapping as her gaze drifted around the garden.

  Clara reappeared. ‘Mum, it’s Greg. I’m off for a bath.’

  Greg – she should have guessed. He never forgot Brian’s anniversary. Yvonne lifted the receiver, smelled the citrus body spray Clara had taken to using lately. ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hello there.’ Greg’s deep, slow voice. ‘Just thought I’d give a shout, see how you’re doing.’

  ‘We’re fine, Greg. You’re good to ring.’

  Brian’s first cousin, and now one of Yvonne’s oldest friends. Like her, he’d been born in Belford and had lived there until he’d gone to a seminary in the midlands straight after school. He’d lasted just two years, before leaving for a sister of one of the other seminarians. When that relationship had ended, after little more than a year, Greg had moved to Dublin. He was still there, teaching music in a private – Yvonne assumed terribly exclusive – secondary school on the south side. As far as she knew, he’d never met anyone else in the years since the seminarian’s sister.

  Greg was tall, fair and short-sighted, with delicate, almost feminine features and a surprisingly deep voice. He played a variety of instruments and his knowledge of classical music was encyclopedic. He was quiet by nature, good with children and animals, and utterly dependable.

  Three or four times a year, sometimes more often, he made the trip back to Belford to visit his few remaining relatives – a married sister, a few cousins on the other side of the family, his Uncle Jim and Aunt Peggy – and on each of these visits, he called on Yvonne and Clara.

  Greg had been Brian’s best man, had stood next to Brian watching Yvonne as she’d forced herself to walk up the aisle, heart sinking, in the awful frilly dress her mother had pleaded with her to wear because it would hide her figure from the busybody aunts, her father’s twin sisters.

  ‘When are you coming down again?’

  ‘Well, we’re getting holidays on Friday, and then I have a couple of weeks of summer school, but after that I was thinking of Belford for a few days.’ Greg rented the small top floor of a house owned by one of the school’s governors. ‘I’ll give you a shout.’

  Yvonne smiled. ‘Do that.’ She was glad he’d kept in touch, glad that he hadn’t been put off by what must have seemed like rudeness on her part, when he’d called around to see her a few days after the funeral. When she’d sat silently and left most of the talking to him, feeling the air thick with what wasn’t being said.

  Because he never once mentioned his cousin, never spoke about Brian at all. Instead, he’d told her about the other seminarians.

  ‘Simon can speak eight languages and he’s never been outside Ireland, imagine.’

  ‘Mmm.’ As if she cared about Simon or about any of them.

  ‘And Tim left school at sixteen and went straight to the States, worked on building sites in New York for twenty-one years, and then one morning he woke up and knew he wanted to be a priest. Says he was never so sure of anything in his life.’

  ‘Right.’ She’d wondered how much longer he was going to stay.

  ‘We have this cook called Teresa, she’s been there for years. One of her sons was going for the priesthood when he got meningitis. She still talks about him now and again. He loved her tomato soup.’

  Tomato soup. She was being eaten up with guilt, she felt like the lowest form of life, and he was talking about tomato soup.

  She’d sat across the living room from him and picked at the skin around her nails and wondered if Clara was behaving herself for Granny O’Mahony She tried not to look at her watch while he was talking.

  He’d left, finally, and come back the following afternoon. And the one after that. He played with Clara and he drank tea and he talked to Yvonne about everything but Brian. And then one day, maybe a week later, maybe two, when she couldn’t bear it any more, Yvonne had interrupted him in the middle of the kitchen, in the middle of a sentence – something about a laundry mix-up – and said loudly, ‘It wasn’t like it seemed, you know, with me and Brian.’

  The words had resonated in the room. Greg said nothing, didn’t look surprised, even. He watched her face through his thick glasses and said nothing.

  ‘It wasn’t like everyone thought.’

  He waited, long legs crossed at the ankles. In the sitting room, they could hear Clara speaking to her dolls: ‘No, you can’t go to the shop, you’re too small. I’ll get you a Curly Wurly when I do the shopping, alright?’

  Yvonne leant against the worktop and picked at a loose thread in the cuff of her jumper. ‘I just don’t want you to—’ She twisted the thread around her finger and pulled. It was surprisingly resistant. She unwrapped it and looked at the thin red line it had left on her skin. She lifted her head and glared at Greg. ‘I was going to leave him. I was planning to go. I told him, just a few days before.’

  It was the first time she’d said it out loud to anyone except Brian.

  ‘We should never have got married, it was a mistake.’

  She hadn’t even told her parents.

  ‘I didn’t love him.’

  The words fell from her mouth and left her wonderfully empty, like she felt after vomiting. Empty. Purged.

  Across the room from her, Greg sat calmly. After a few seconds, when Yvonne said nothing more, he nodded. ‘It happens.’

  And in those two words she heard absolution. The relief was so enormous that she dropped her face into her hands and sobbed, big full tears that streamed out of her, and Greg walked over and gave her his hanky, then went into the sitting room to Clara, closing the door quietly behind him.

  And even though he didn’t say much afterwards, and the subject rarely came up between them again, she knew he understood and didn’t blame her. And because of it, she could begin to stop blaming herself. It happens.

  After she’d hung up, after Magoo was fed his supper and brought in for the night, after the kitchen was tidied, after she’d finished the paper and caught the news on the radio (a bomb in the Middle East, another politician in trouble, two more road deaths in the past twenty-four hours), Yvonne O’Mahony locked the back door and climbed the stairs.

  No sign of Clara, no sound from her room. A soft murmuring from the pipes, the scent of lemons wafting damply from the em
pty bathroom and curling around the landing.

  Yvonne left the light off in her bedroom, crossed to the window and looked out. It had begun to rain, a soft, heavy fall. The moon was up, almost full. She could see the wet, silvery outlines of the three long, narrow back gardens, separated from each other by the golden privet hedges that some long-gone residents had planted.

  The knobbly shapes of the pair of apple trees next door, planted by Dan and Ali two years before. A ribbon of lawn, badly in need of a cut, running down to the trees, with a tilted rotary clothesline skewered through the middle of it. At the top of the garden a small patio, weeds pushing between the old paving slabs, shiny now in the rain. On the far side, a half-built brick barbecue topped with black plastic, a small round wrought-iron table and two matching chairs. A black wheelie bin in the corner.

  Number nine’s back garden, furthest away, was easily the best kept of the three. Beyond the patio decking – gas barbecue, gas heater, wrought-iron furniture – a wide bed of perfectly behaved flowers led down to a collection of neatly pruned shrubs framing an immaculate rectangle of lawn.

  At the bottom, a shed built in the same red brick as the house, full of Kathryn’s carefully cleaned tools, hanging in spirit-level-straight rows.

  ‘You’re so anal,’ Yvonne had told her. ‘Get a life.’

  Kathryn had just smiled. ‘You’re so jealous. Your shed’s like a bomb hit it. At least I can find things.’

  ‘Exactly – if I can’t find the tools, I can’t weed.’

  ‘Oh dear – jealous and lazy. I don’t know why I hang around with you.’

  Yvonne turned back to her own garden, looked out at the humped darkness of it. Just beyond the patio, her pathetic collection of herbs – a bush of woody rosemary, a little patch of struggling basil, some half-decent parsley, tilting chives, a few clumps of thyme and the mint that kept threatening to choke everything else. It was her least favourite herb – she loved the smell but hated the taste – and it was only there because Clara had insisted: ‘Mum, there is no way you can have roast lamb without mint sauce.’