The Grace Girls

by Geraldine O'Neill

  ‘How d’you mean?’ Heather said, keeping her voice as ordinary as she could. The row from this morning had really upset her and she was not in the frame of mind for more of it.

  ‘Well, the position she’s in,’ Mona said, taking a sip of her tea. ‘With her organising a quick wedding . . .’

  Heather shot Kirsty a glance.

  ‘Don’t look at me,’ Kirsty hissed. ‘I’ve not said a word.’

  ‘No, don’t be blaming your sister,’ Mona said, almost sweetly. ‘I didn’t hear it from her. I didn’t have to – the whole place is talking about it. It seems Jim Murray got a bit drunk last night and let the cat out of the bag in the pub.’ She shook her head, looking directly at Heather now. ‘He’s took it awful bad about his pal . . . awful bad altogether. Seemingly, he was blaming himself for not being able to hold on to him when he wanted to follow you home . . .’ She halted. ‘There’s some even sayin’ that Gerry Stewart threw himself in front of the taxi deliberately . . . suicide like.’

  Heather pushed her plate away and stood up. She hadn’t been hungry to start with, but she suddenly felt that another bite of a sandwich would choke her. She’d expected Mona to say something – that would only have been typical – but she hadn’t expected to hear the very worst slant that anyone could possibly put on it. She hadn’t even considered that extreme slant herself.

  Surely Gerry Stewart had not been that desperate? Drunk and upset, yes. But suicide? Heather couldn’t even contemplate the thought.

  ‘I’m just going to have a word with my mammy,’ she told Kirsty. ‘And then I might head back home.’ She lifted her bag and without a word or a backward glance to Mona she went across the hall to where Sophie was standing.

  ‘Poor Heather,’ Mona whispered now to Kirsty. ‘She’s not at all herself. The whole thing’s got the girl in an awful state. She doesn’t know half of what she’s sayin’ and we won’t hold anythin’ she does say against her at this terrible time.’

  ‘She’ll be OK,’ Kirsty said, reaching for a beef and mustard sandwich. ‘Anybody would feel upset at the funeral of a young lad – especially when he used to be her boyfriend.’

  ‘She’s probably feelin’ very bad about her finishing with Gerry Stewart, and then this happening. She’s probably wonder­ing now if she had been a bit hard on him.’

  ‘Well, she shouldn’t be feelin’ that,’ Kirsty stated, ‘because she’s nothing to feel bad about.’

  Mona nodded, taking a bite of a chicken sandwich. ‘I agree wholeheartedly with you, Kirsty,’ she said now. ‘Heather has nothing to blame herself for at all.’ She sat for a few moments in silence, looking around her, checking who was there. ‘I hear you were out at the house in Glasgow last night?’

  Kirsty took another sip of her tea. ‘My daddy and me went to collect Heather,’ she said, deliberately giving very little away.

  ‘I believe it’s lovely,’ Mona said. She knew she’d have to tread very carefully here if she wanted any information, because much as Kirsty was the easiest going of the two girls, she had the Grace bit in her and could clam up when she liked. ‘According to what your father told Pat. He said it’s like one of those old mansions.’

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Kirsty said, brightening up. ‘It’s got all the modern things like a fridge and a toaster and a fancy cooker, that kind of thing.’

  ‘And did she cook you a dinner or anything?’ Mona said lightly.

  ‘No, no – we’d already had our dinner earlier,’ Kirsty said vaguely. She’d just spotted the men coming in the door now, back from the graveyard. ‘She did us lovely sandwiches, and then when Andy came in, we all had a drink and some nuts and crisps.’

  ‘And did you have that while Andy was havin’ his dinner?’ Mona asked.

  ‘No,’ Kirsty said, only half-listening. She was watching Jim Murray coming through the door on his own. There were a lot more people coming in, but there was no sign of Liz Mullen.

  ‘So he came in from work and sat and had a drink before eating?’ Mona said, trying to picture it all.

  ‘The three of us had this nice sweet sparkling wine,’ Kirsty said, watching Jim now as he made for the bar in the little ante-room. She thought he looked very strained and agitated. ‘And Andy had a gin and tonic and my dad had a bottle of beer.’

  ‘Not a lot for a man coming in from a hard day’s work,’ Mona said, her eyes wide with shock. ‘A drink and a few nuts and crisps!’ She repeated the list again to herself, as though learning it off by heart.

  Heather felt a gentle tug on her coat sleeve. ‘Have you a wee minute, hen?’ Mrs Stewart asked. ‘I’m awful sorry to bother you, but I have a few people here I’d like you to meet . . . I was tellin’ them about you and Gerry and they said they’d like to just have a wee word.’

  Heather looked at her mother now, hoping she might just say something that would rescue her. But Sophie didn’t seem to notice; she just put her hand out to Mrs Stewart and offered her heartfelt condolences. After they had spoken, Heather followed the bereaved mother back to the group of women who all offered her their sympathies and told Mrs Stewart how lucky Gerry had been to have had such a lovely fiancée.

  ‘Well, nearly engaged,’ Mrs Stewart had said, tears welling up in her eyes, and Heather simply did not have the heart to correct her.

  Jim Murray came out of the ante-room with a large glass of whiskey in his hand, taking great gulps out of it.

  ‘I’ll just go and have a word with Jim,’ Heather told Mrs Stewart, ‘if you don’t mind.’

  Jim’s suit looked sort of ruffled and his black tie was loosened around his neck.

  ‘Where’s Liz?’ she asked him. ‘I haven’t seen her since we were in the chapel.’

  Jim shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he said in a disinterested manner. ‘She said she was goin’ home when I went to the graveyard and she’d come back later.’

  ‘Well, if I don’t see her, will you say I’ll call up to her house either tonight or tomorrow night? We said we’d meet up to talk about the wedding dresses –’

  ‘Can you believe this is happening?’ Jim suddenly said, cutting Heather off. His eyes were darting around the hall. ‘I feel it’s all like a dream . . . as if he’s going to walk in the door at any minute.’

  ‘I wish he would,’ Heather said, her voice cracking a little. ‘I’m sure everybody does.’

  Jim took a big swig out of the whiskey glass. ‘Who are you kidding?’ he said, his tone changing and his eyes narrowing. ‘I bet you’re just glad he’s out of the way . . .’

  ‘Don’t be so stupid!’ she told him, horrified at what he’d just said. ‘We were just like a lot of couples – we broke up, that’s all.’

  ‘Aye, right,’ Jim said, taking another mouthful. He started to cough, almost choking. ‘Well, I’ll tell you something, Rowanhill will never be the same place for me after this . . . Nothing will ever be the same now my mate’s gone. What’s the future going to be like for me now?’ He shook his head dolefully. ‘Everything’s changed . . . everything’s changed.’

  Heather glanced around her, hoping no one could hear him. She wondered where Liz was now. ‘You shouldn’t be talking like that,’ she said quietly. ‘You’ve got a lovely girlfriend and you’re due to get married.’

  ‘A noose round my neck, more like,’ he said in a low voice.

  Gerry’s father came over to ask Jim something, and gradually he moved away from her, towards another group. Heather heaved a sigh of relief, deciding that she’d done everything she needed to do and she would go now and get Kirsty and they would go home together. All she could think of was going home and upstairs to bed, where she would pull the covers over her head and blot out the whole world.

  The two girls walked up the Main Street, both weary with the weight that funerals bring and relieved to leave the mourning group behind. Then, just as they came up towards Liz’s house, the door opened and Mrs Mullen came rushing out, still wearing the good Sunday blouse and skirt she’d
put on for the funeral.

  ‘Oh, thank God!’ she called, her breath coming in great gulps. ‘I was just watching out the window to see if any of you were passing – and my prayers have been answered! Will you run up to the phone box and phone an ambulance for Liz? Something’s happened and she’s bleeding.’

  ‘Where is she?’ Heather asked anxiously, her pale face turning even whiter.

  ‘She’s on the couch,’ Mrs Mullen said, pointing in through the open door. ‘The bleeding started off in the church and it got worse when she came out. She’s in an awful state.’

  ‘I’ll go and phone the ambulance,’ Kirsty said, looking at Heather. ‘Then I’ll run back to the hall and tell Jim. You go on in and stay with Liz.’ Then she took to her heels in the direction of the phone box.

  ‘Oh, thank God it was you and Kirsty,’ Mrs Mullen said, as they rushed into the house. ‘I didn’t want to go asking just anybody and Liz said to watch out for you. She didn’t want the whole place knowing. By rights she should have gone into the hospital a good hour ago, but she wouldn’t let me call anybody else to make the phone call.’

  Twenty minutes later the whole of Rowanhill knew some­thing was happening as the ambulance drove down the main street with the emergency siren blaring and came to a halt outside the Mullens’ door.

  Hours after being admitted to hospital, the doctors told Liz Mullen that she had indeed lost her baby. Having noticed the absence of a wedding ring on her finger, they had been more muted in their condolences than they would have been had she been a married lady.

  After Kirsty had discreetly alerted Jim Murray as to what had happened, he had gone running down the road to be with his fiancée and he was with her in the hospital when they were both told the sad news.

  Heather had waited with Liz until Jim and then the ambulance came, and then she walked slowly down the main street where Gerry Stewart had been killed, wondering what else could go wrong.

  At her mother’s insistence Heather agreed to give work a miss on the Friday. It didn’t really take a lot of persuasion as she knew she still wasn’t back to herself. While she didn’t feel as bad as the day she had fainted, she knew she wasn’t up to doing a reasonable day’s work. Sophie pointed out that Heather had been through more than enough with all the funeral business without having had the shock of Liz’s miscarriage as well. Heather felt a bit anxious about not going in to work, but when Sophie made the phone call and Mr Walton had said he hadn’t expected Heather in and she wasn’t to come back to work until she was fully recovered, she felt a bit better.

  Chapter 54

  ‘It’s freezing tonight,’ Kirsty said as she slid into the passenger seat of Larry’s car. She made a loud shivering noise. ‘Thank God the car’s warm.’ She leaned over the seat to put a carrier bag into the back. ‘It was too cold to come out in an evening dress so I decided to wear my trousers and jumper and change into the dress when I get to the hotel.’ She gave a little giggle. ‘I hope the heating’s working or I’ll be going on stage wearing my big woolly jumper over my dress! I’d look very glamorous then.’

  Larry laughed. ‘You should be toughened to the cold, living in Scotland,’ he told her. He put the car into gear and pulled off.

  ‘It’s supposed to snow tomorrow,’ she told him. ‘It’s lucky it’s tonight and not tomorrow night or we’d be in trouble. The roads up in Lanark often get snowed in.’

  ‘This has been one of the mildest winters I’ve ever known in Scotland,’ Larry said now, as they drove out into the darker roads beyond the village street lamps. ‘I’ve never known a Christmas and New Year so mild.’

  ‘Well, it’s definitely changed tonight, the temperatures have gone right down. Was Dublin ever as cold as this?’ she asked him as they drove along. ‘What kind of heating did you have?’

  He went silent for a moment – his light-hearted mood suddenly disappeared as though she had asked him something very serious. ‘I suppose it was coal . . .’

  ‘Coal?’ Kirsty said in a surprised voice. ‘I thought it was always turf they used in Ireland. Where my daddy’s family come from in Offaly, it’s all turf. I never knew they used coal in Dublin.’ She halted, thinking. ‘D’you ever miss Dublin? You said your mother was in Manchester, so I suppose you don’t have much family back in Ireland . . . do you?’

  ‘None that I know of,’ he said. ‘Or maybe none that I want to know about.’

  Kirsty looked at him strangely, but he just kept his eyes on the road, staring straight ahead.

  Light flakes of snow had started falling by the time they arrived at the Clyde Valley Hotel.

  ‘It looks lovely, the garden all covered in white,’ Kirsty said as they walked across the car park and into the welcoming warmth of the hotel.

  ‘I don’t think it will come to anything much until tomorrow,’ Larry remarked. ‘It’ll be all melted by the time we finish.’

  As she walked through the foyer, Kirsty mused that this was now her third time in the place, and she was quietly pleased with herself for not being in the slightest bit nervous about it now. She was already used to the plush surroundings and felt almost the same coming into the fancy hotel as she had felt with the clubs. It was part of her job and she had come to realise that the other people who worked in the hotel were only doing their jobs too – from the hotel manager to the waitresses and bar staff and cleaners. She would remind herself of that from now.

  Larry was obviously used to grander things back in Ireland and it probably had never bothered him coming into a place like this, and it would be the same for people like those two McCluskey sisters – the kind who went to very posh places and played golf in exclusive clubs.

  Kirsty felt a little pang of something she couldn’t quite describe when she thought of the dark-haired women, especially now that she knew that there was – or had been – something very serious going on between Larry and that Helen.

  She doubted if she would ever know the story behind it, because any time she broached his personal life, Larry just put up a barrier, a barrier she just could not get through no matter how hard she tried.

  She felt a bit foolish now, thinking back to how she had imagined that Larry was this single man who had just been a quiet Irish bachelor up until she met him. She couldn’t have been more wrong. He certainly hadn’t been living a bachelor’s life if Helen McCluskey had had a son by him.

  Just recently Kirsty had started to realise that people were not always what they seemed. Helen McCluskey definitely didn’t seem like a woman with a chequered past. Her confident, uppity manner didn’t give the impression of a woman who had anything shameful to hide.

  And then there was Claire, who Mona had been painting as this cold, snobby woman, who lived in a show-house rather than a real home. As soon as she had walked into her aunt’s house in Glasgow, Kirsty had realised that all the stories about Claire and her husband had been nonsense. Claire lived in the kind of beautiful house that Kirsty would absolutely love to have when she was older and married. If she ever got married.

  She still worried that she never seemed to meet anyone who she liked or vaguely fancied. Apart from that daft notion she’d had with Larry Delaney, there hadn’t been anything else that remotely resembled romance in her life.

  The dinner-dance evening went much the same as the dance at New Year. Kirsty had sung the same songs and felt very comfortable and easy as she slipped from one song to the other through her performance. The audience were every bit as enthusiastic as the one on New Year’s Eve which really delighted her as she had half-thought that the celebratory night had been something to do with it, and that they might have cheered on any singer. Kirsty had also felt easy enough about wearing another one of Helen McCluskey’s dresses tonight. She had suggested to Larry that she might as well get a couple of wears out of each dress before having them dry-cleaned and giving them back to him. Larry had just shrugged, saying she was more than welcome to the dresses. They had only been hanging in a spare room in hi
s flat. Kirsty thought it made sense. And she wasn’t likely to come across the owner again. By the time she’d got her wear out of the borrowed dresses, she’d have picked up a few glamorous stage dresses of her own.

  ‘I was wrong about the snow,’ Larry told her when he came into the dressing-room at the break in the show. ‘It’s got quite heavy and it’s lying on the ground. As soon as you’re finished we’ll head off, because we might have to take it very easy going home if the roads are bad.’ He thought for a moment. ‘And don’t worry if you see people leaving early, it’s not because of your singing, it’ll be because they want to get home before the snow gets worse.’

  ‘Wasn’t I sensible that I brought my jumper and jeans?’ Kirsty said, laughing.

  ‘You’re a very sensible girl,’ Larry said, smiling warmly at her. ‘And one of the most down-to-earth women I know.’

  It was only when she was on stage later on that it dawned on Kirsty that it was the first time Larry had used the word ‘woman’ when he was referring to her instead of ‘girl’.

  Larry knocked on the changing-room door a few minutes after Kirsty came off the stage. He came striding across the room to her, his brow furrowed. ‘I think we might have a bit of a problem tonight, Kirsty.’

  Her heart sank. This was it. This was the night when the bubble would burst. This was the night when she would discover that she had got it all wrong about people thinking her singing was good. Quite a few people had gone before the final part of the performance, so it was quite possible that they hadn’t enjoyed it.

  Kirsty took a deep breath. ‘Did the manager not like me? Does he not want me to do the other bookings?’

  Larry shook his head, laughing in amazement at her sugges­tion. ‘He loved you – the audience all loved you. How could you not know that?’