Those Faraday Girls

by Monica McInerney

  As a teenager, Maggie had asked Clementine if Sadie’s decision had been connected with her in any way. It had been preying on her. After all, Sadie had gone off to become a hippy just after Maggie had stayed with her for those few weeks, the time Clementine was sick. Maybe spending too long with an almost six-year-old had put Sadie off her family.

  ‘Of course it had nothing to do with you, Maggie.’

  ‘Does she miss us, do you think? Do you miss her?’

  ‘It’s not about missing her. It’s her life. She has to do what she wants with it.’

  Maggie checked her watch. She’d better get to the post office. She put all the parcels into a large carry bag, placing her mother’s parcel on top.

  It was the oddest-shaped of them all – as always, a jumble of gifts, like a lucky dip. It was a treat shopping for a mother who was only seventeen years older. Their tastes were very similar. The main gift this year was a vintage brooch, a mixture of delicate gold wire and bright red, green and orange stones, in the shape of a penguin. Maggie always sent her mother something to do with a bird, obvious as it was. There was also some American chocolate (Clementine loved it as much as Tadpole did), a second-hand CD of opera music, and practical items: thick socks, thermal underwear, heavy-duty moisturiser and a new watch to replace the one she’d lost last time she was ‘down south’, as Clementine and her fellow scientists called Antarctica.

  Maggie wondered whether Clementine had got word yet about her next trip. In the old days, in London, she emailed or was on the phone to her mother every day, up to date with every piece of news. Since her move to New York she’d tried to be more independent. She managed it well in a practical way, phoning only once a week, not using email at all, and only rarely sending text messages. She wasn’t managing so well emotionally – all the questions about her family were still buzzing around her head. It’s just they weren’t getting answered.

  She toyed for a moment with sending the parcel to Antarctica, rather than Hobart, just because she still got a kick out of seeing the address:

  Clementine Faraday

  Davis Station

  Antarctica

  Even though she knew the reality – that the parcels were only delivered once or twice a year, depending on weather conditions – she still liked imagining a polar post office, staffed by penguins, the mail delivered on sleds. Once she heard from Clementine when the next Antarctic trip was on, she’d send another parcel to that address. In the meantime, she addressed this one to the family home in North Hobart, adding a quick sketch of a Christmas pudding and sprig of holly to the label. She was glad Clementine had decided not to join the rest of the family this Christmas. Her mother had assured her it had nothing to do with Maggie’s own decision; that it was work-related. Maggie wondered about that. Either way, it made it easier for her that Clementine wouldn’t be joining the family either.

  She’d just gathered up her keys when the intercom buzzed. It was Ray, the doorman, to let her know a repairman was on his way up. She waited outside her door for him.

  ‘Thanks for coming so quickly,’ she said as she led the man to the tiny kitchen. ‘It’s the stove. The second ring just won’t seem to work for me.’

  ‘Like all of us, breaking down with age. What’s that accent of yours? British?’

  ‘Half British, half Australian,’ she said.

  ‘Nice mix. I’m half Irish, half Polish myself.’ He stopped in the middle of the room and rubbed his shirt-sleeved arms. ‘You’d want to talk to your super about that airconditioning. It’s freezing in here.’

  As the repairman spoke, Bing Crosby burst into a chorus of ‘Jingle Bells’. The man looked around, taking in the decorations, the table piled high with Christmas parcels and the air rich with the scent of cinnamon and other spices.

  ‘Are you early or am I late?’ he said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘All of this.’ He gestured at the room. ‘It’s the middle of summer out there. Old people all over New York are dropping like flies in the heat and you’re living here in Santa’s grotto, wearing that get-up.’

  ‘It’s a family thing,’ Maggie hurried to explain. ‘We always celebrate Christmas in July.’ Embarrassed now, she took off the Santa hat and duffel coat she’d had on all day. She caught sight of her hair in the mirror opposite. It was standing up in dark tufts, her ears far too visible. She quickly smoothed it down. ‘I was just getting into the spirit of it.’

  ‘Some sort of spirit, anyway. Where’d you say that family of yours was from? The North Pole?’

  She managed a weak smile. Maybe he was right, though. Maybe she’d gotten a little bit carried away. She pressed the off button on the CD and crossed the room to draw back the curtains. Bright summer light flooded in, bouncing off the tinsel and foil decorations. The sky outside was blue. The garden below was filled with sun-bathers. She blew out the scented candle and turned off the flashing Christmas lights too. What had she been thinking? That doing it like this would make her less homesick?

  The man watched her, an amused look on his face. ‘That’s Christmas for you. All that work and then it’s over in an instant. So, want to show me that stove of yours?’

  Maggie led him to the kitchen and watched as he inspected the ring. He didn’t mention the mulled wine in the saucepan on the other ring. Neither did she.

  ‘So do you like it here in New York?’ he asked, as he lifted up the wires and removed the fuse.

  She nodded. ‘Yes. Yes, I do. It’s great.’

  ‘You’re here for work?’

  ‘No.’ She paused. ‘More of a career break.’ She had a sudden urge to sit him down, make a cup of tea, tell him everything. She was longing for a conversation with someone apart from herself. But she was worried that if she started, she wouldn’t stop. Besides, she’d made a deal with Miranda not to talk about it too much.

  ‘The apartment’s yours for as long as you want to stay there,’ her aunt had said. ‘But on condition there’s no going over and over everything, all right? If you want to keep blaming yourself for something that wasn’t your fault, I can’t stop you, but I’ll tell you now, hair shirts are right out of fashion in New York this year.’

  She’d been just as outspoken when she heard that Maggie had decided not to join them for their annual get-together. ‘But you have to be there. You know Christmas isn’t Christmas without a child around to marvel at the lights and get excited at the presents.’

  ‘I’m twenty-six, Miranda. I’m not a child.’ She’d been in no mood for teasing.

  Juliet had been more sympathetic when they spoke on the phone the day before. ‘Maggie, please, change your mind. It’s not too late. Get a flight and come and join us. It’ll do you good. It’s not right for you to be on your own like this, not after everything that’s happened.’

  Maggie had been tempted. She pictured herself arriving at Belfast airport, getting a hire car and heading west, driving across the bare landscape, seeing the yellow gorse and the purple heather against the dark brown of the peat fields, the mountains appearing to her left, the glint of the sea now and again, that sweep of view as the road opened above Glencolmcille. She imagined the drive through the village, the winding road, the narrow stone bridge, the steep climb up the laneway, seeing the house for the first time, walking in to find the living-room fire lit even though it was summer, the kitchen filled with cooking smells, the decorated tree in the hallway, having fun arranging all the presents underneath…

  ‘Please, Maggie,’ Juliet had said again. ‘Come and celebrate with us. The pudding is perfect this year. I’ve tried a new recipe.’

  She’d told Juliet that she was sorry, she’d made up her mind.

  She’d had a text message from Clementine within the hour.

  Maggie, are you sure about this? Isn’t it just what you need at the moment?

  Juliet had obviously phoned or texted Eliza as well. Maggie’s phone rang ten minutes later. It was a bad line, the echo travelling from Melbourne
to New York.

  ‘Maggie, is it true?’ Eliza didn’t bother with a greeting. ‘I’m about to travel all that way to see the best niece in the world and she won’t be there?’

  ‘The others will be there, Eliza.’

  ‘It’s not the others I’m coming to see. I saw enough of them when I was growing up. Would you like to talk about it? Do you think you might be over-reacting? You had a terrible shock. It might still be manifesting itself.’

  Angus’s voice came to Maggie’s mind again. ‘Those aunts of yours think they control you. Think for yourself for once.’

  She’d told Eliza there was someone at the door and she needed to go. She had a stomach-ache for half an hour afterwards. The phone rang twice more and she didn’t answer. She knew it would be either Miranda or Eliza again. When she checked the machine an hour later, she was right; both of them saying the same thing. That Christmas in Donegal wouldn’t be the same if she wasn’t there.

  Two days later, she’d just walked back into the apartment when the phone rang. It was Clementine, telling her she’d decided not to join in the family Christmas that year either. Her work commitments were just too heavy, she said. No, of course it had nothing to do with Maggie’s decision. She’d just hung up from Clementine when the phone rang again. Eliza, telling her she’d made the same decision.

  ‘How do they always know the right time to ring you?’ Angus had asked once. ‘Do they have you on radar screen or something?’

  ‘All done, Mrs Claus.’ The repairman had finished. It had taken him less than a minute.

  She paid him the fee and added a generous tip. ‘Thanks again,’ she said as she opened the front door.

  ‘You’re welcome. Merry Christmas.’

  She managed a smile, then shut the door. She looked at the parcels, the wrapping paper gaudy in the bright light, the decorations in a bundle on the floor. The mulled wine smelt sickly-sweet. So did the cinnamon candle.

  ‘Merry Christmas,’ she said to the empty room.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Glencolmcille, Donegal, Ireland

  Juliet finished making the last of the beds, straightening up with a soft moan, holding the small of her back. Some days her fifty-year-old bones felt like they were a hundred years old.

  At least the house was almost ready now. It helped that she hadn’t had to heat it from scratch, or spend her first day in the garden, mowing the lawns and hacking a path up to the front door through the gorse and the long grass. It had been the right decision to get a local caretaker and start renting the house out to other people when they didn’t need it. It wasn’t good for a house to stay empty for too long. The soul seeped out of it. The landscape around this part of Donegal was testament to that, with abandoned shells of houses and crumbling dry-stone walls here and there in the small green fields. Abandoned by families through emigration, death, or more optimistically for the comfort and pleasure of a new home.

  The Faradays’ holiday house had been built in the early 1900s. It was halfway up a steep hill, two kilometres from the village, reached by a short but curving laneway lined by trees that scratched and stabbed at the grey sky in the winter months, and formed a light-green tunnel of leaves in the summer. The house was called Radharc na Mara – Sea View, in the Irish language. The words were there in black paint on the whitewashed pillar by the front gate. Juliet had touched up the paint yesterday when she arrived. It was the first thing she did each visit, followed by the cutting back of the fuchsia bushes lining the short path to the front door, creating a dark-pink carpet of flowers at her feet as she worked. Fuchsia was the national flower of Ireland, in her opinion, the delicate flowers springing out of all the hedges and stone walls in the area, their bell-like petals fluttering in the breezes.

  The original house had been a traditional-style two-storey building with four windows, two up, two down, with a heavy wooden front door protected by a porch. A family of eight had first lived there, the Faradays had been told, all of them sharing just three bedrooms and one bathroom. The next owner had added another wing, in the same grey stone, with two more bedrooms and a second bathroom, creating a protected courtyard at the same time. The owner after that had rewired, re-roofed and painted the grey stone white. But the new kitchen, the modern laundry, the ivy growing over the low stone wall at the front, the tubs of fuchsia and honeysuckle at the entrance, and the beds of flowers and heathers all around had been added by the Faradays.

  The new windows were theirs, too. When Leo had first inspected the house, the windows had been the originals. Small, shuttered, deep in the stone walls, protection against the wind and rain that buffeted the hills and mountains most days of the year, fresh and fierce, straight off the Atlantic. It was the first thing he had asked the young man showing him the property. Would the structure of the house handle new windows? Not only new glass and frames, but larger, wider windows, double glazing too, of course. The young man, ‘scenting a sale, there and then’, as Leo had put it, hadn’t hesitated. Of course the house could handle it. It would also improve the house comfort-wise ten-thousand-fold not to mention add considerable value. With great aplomb he had then given Leo a business card for his brother-in-law, a glazier based in the nearby fishing port of Killybegs.

  The work was done before the family had their first holiday there. Juliet now couldn’t imagine it any other way. The wide windows were what made the house, opening it up to the view and the light. The four back windows looked onto sweeps of mountainside, green tumbles of gorse and stonewall-edged squares of field beside scoops of shale, smudges of purple heather, the green and brown of the mountainside dotted with black-faced sheep. The side windows faced the nearby village – a sprinkle of whitewashed houses, a pub or three, a garage, two shops. Across from them was a curving beach, reached by a clamber up a small slope and then another clamber down some rocks. The Faraday house looked right over to that beach. Juliet lost hours each day sitting in one of the low, comfortable armchairs, staring out, watching the weather, hearing the wind, gazing up at the clouds in the sky in ways she never did at home in Manchester, hadn’t done in Sydney, not even in Tasmania when they had lived the life of islanders, surrounded by water and sky. It was wild here. She always had a sense that they – holi-daymakers and locals alike – were clinging onto the earth by their fingertips, that a gust of wind could easily come and whip them away, carelessly.

  ‘That, my love, is why I got double glazing,’ Leo had said the first year they stayed there, when she tried to explain to him how close to nature she felt in Donegal. ‘Not to mention underfloor heating, wool carpets for the bedrooms and a six-ring cooker so you can keep us well fed.’

  ‘No poetry in your soul at all, is there?’

  ‘Not when I’m hungry.’ He had gone to the cooker then, lifting up the lids of the pots, breathing in the fragrant steam from a simmering soup, opening the oven door to inspect the baking apples, currants and sugary syrup bubbling in the dish around them. ‘Those ten years in that Le Cordon Bleu college we sent you to weren’t wasted, were they?’

  ‘I loved every minute of it,’ she answered distractedly. She had never been within ten miles of a Le Cordon Bleu college. Or even a weekend cooking course. She was a self-taught cook, a self-taught businesswoman, a self-taught wife, sister, daughter…

  ‘And thank God for that,’ Leo said.

  She didn’t thank God for it. It had nothing to do with God. If she traced it back, it had everything to do with the moment when Leo was told by a colleague about a job in a place on the opposite side of the world in Tasmania. Was that when her fate, not to mention the rest of the family’s fate, had been sealed? If they hadn’t moved to Tasmania, would their mother still have died so young? If they hadn’t decided to stay in Tasmania afterwards, would Juliet have learnt to cook so well, which had led her to work in the city-centre café, which was where she had met Myles, which had got her to today, where the two of them ran a company and were in charge of more than forty cafés in Australia and t
he UK? Would Leo have kept up his inventing, producing dozens of useless gadgets until the day everything finally came through with his petrol filtration device and he had more money than he knew what to do with?

  Life wasn’t an accident. It was a series of dominos, each event making another happen, which led to another and another. Even this house. The last place any of them would have expected to have a family gathering was in Donegal, the wild, north-west county of Ireland.

  Leo had been staying with Juliet and Myles in Manchester six years earlier when he switched on a television programme. The sound had been turned low. To this day they still didn’t know what the programme had been about. The three of them had been attracted to the scenery: wild, bare mountains; green fields running down to the sea; long, empty beaches. It’s like Tasmania, Juliet had said. They watched the credits, and saw that it had been filmed in Donegal.

  She learned later that after leaving them, Leo had flown to the small regional Donegal airport, called into property offices in the town itself and spoken to several young property salesmen. The day after that he drove around the county with the brightest of them. It only took two conversations with local people to learn which house had once belonged to Tessa’s family. Unfortunately he was too late for it. It was a wreck of a building. The house for sale two fields away – sharing the same view – wasn’t, however.

  Miranda had been on one of her flying visits to Juliet’s house when Leo broke the news.

  ‘I have a surprise for us all,’ Leo announced after dinner, placing a brochure in the centre of the table. ‘I decided it was time we had a holiday house. Somewhere special for our Christmas gatherings. Have a guess where.’

  Miranda and Juliet glanced at it. A large house surrounded by green fields, with a glimpse of blue sea.

  ‘Byron Bay?’ Miranda asked. It looked like coastal Australia to her.

  ‘Somewhere in Victoria?’ Juliet suggested. ‘Near the Great Ocean Road?’