by Maria Hoey
He was also pessimistic, although he disagreed.
“I’m not a pessimist,” he told me once. “I’m a stoic.”
And then there were the little things like Christmas, except that to me Christmas was not a little thing. In our house Christmas had always been a big thing. But Dominic didn’t “do” Christmas. He looked at me askance when I asked him where he kept the decorations. “Surely you don’t go in for that nonsense?” he said.
“But we can at least get a tree,” I said. “Everyone has a tree.”
In the end I did buy a tree, albeit a sad synthetic dwarf thing in its own pot. It was less than three feet high but still, it was a Christmas tree, and I put it on a corner of a bookshelf. I switched off the lamps and in the darkness the tree’s tiny LED bulbs glowed silvery soft. It smelled of nothing of course but I had thought of that and bought a scented candle. When I lit it the room slowly filled with the scent of pines and I sat in the darkness and gazed at it. I discovered that if I narrowed my eyes the lights blurred and the smell of pine flooded my brain with memories so that I was no longer standing in Dominic’s sterile flat but in the middle of the sitting room at home, gazing up at one of the giant real trees of Christmas past. I could pretend that my father had just hauled it in, fresh from the woods, dragging it the short length of the hall, my mother groaning anxiously as its wider branches scraped her beautifully papered walls.
Dominic clocked the tree as soon as he walked through the door and pulled a face. I reassured him that it wasn’t real and so could not shed.
“That pong seems pretty real,” he said.
“It’s not a pong,” I told him. “It’s pine – pine and cedar actually. I bought a scented candle. You don’t really mind, do you?”
Dominic shrugged. “Knock yourself out,” he said drily. “I’m off to take a shower.”
And that was the thing: he never tried to stop me doing or having the things I wanted, he just chose not to share them with me and over time that made me feel lonely, as lonely if not lonelier than if I were actually living on my own.
But there were positives to being with Dominic too – how else would I have stayed with him as long as I did? Unlike me, he was practical, so after years of listening to me moaning about hating my job and regretting not finishing my degree, he finally stopped sympathising and he told me to either shut up or do something about it. There was, he said, nothing to stop me finishing my degree here in London. Egged on by him, I looked into my options and eventually found a way of working as an intern on a magazine while accumulating credits in a local college. In essence I was nothing more than a general dogsbody – I did the coffee run and proofread other people’s articles and, although I got to attend the editorial meetings, it was only to take minutes and, when the time was right, to go out and wheel in the sandwich trolley. It took another three years, but eventually I did graduate with my degree. In the meantime, because I was paid only a pittance, Dominic without demur covered the lion’s share of the bills. I made a point of letting my mother know that he did, but she had taken against him and was not for turning. In one of her letters to me she even informed me that if he were ever to cheat on me, I was not to think twice but to pack my things and come home. “If there is one thing I cannot abide,” she wrote, “then it’s a philandering man.” And, because I had never entertained fears of that nature, I remember laughing it off despite an underlying feeling of annoyance that she could even contemplate a scenario in which a man would find another woman preferable to her own daughter.
My father, in his own very different way, must have sensed that all was not right either. He never said so directly. Just once on the phone, he said to me, “You know you can come back any time you want to, love? You know that, don’t you?”
I said I knew that, but that I was fine.
And he then said, “You know I say a prayer for you every night, don’t you, Kay?”
That I had not known, and it moved me almost unbearably to think of those nightly prayers rising into the empty darkness, my name borne aloft by the force of his will for my wellness. “Thanks, Dad,” I said, “please don’t ever stop saying them.”
Chapter 15
One of the worst times of my life began in the early hours of the 9th November 2011. My mother, having shown no prior symptoms, died in her sleep of sudden cardiac arrest. My father rang me with the news and within a couple of hours I was on a plane back to Ireland. I arrived home to find my father, more dazed than distraught, or so it seemed to me. He stayed that way through the days before and immediately after the funeral, mechanically doing and saying what was expected of him at such a time. I did not worry overly at first. I was shell-shocked myself and not a little disbelieving – a world which did not contain my mother seemed to me not just inconceivable but unimaginable. But when the mourners went home and we sat together, just the two of us in that silent house, the full magnitude of his loss hit him in a tidal wave of grief. Before my eyes he sank into a visible depression. Always a quiet man, he withdrew now more than ever into himself. He suffered from insomnia and lost his appetite and the weight fell away from him, ageing him in a way I found frightening to watch. I decided that I could not in good conscience return to London, leaving him on his own, so I decided to stay on for a while. Dominic said I was doing the only thing I could. I took a leave of absence, initially for one month, but I was still unhappy to leave him by late December. Dominic said he would not come for Christmas – with it being our first Christmas without my mother he thought my father and I would want to be alone together. He said he would try to make it for New Year’s Eve but in the end he caught a flu and said he felt too miserable to fly. In January his job became so busy that he was, he said “pulling nighters as well as working weekends” and the promised weekend in Ireland was put off once more. I remember, near the end of that month, watching television with my father and seeing a clip of the Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, telling the audience at some economic Forum that the Irish people “went mad with borrowing” during the boom.
“Would you listen to that chinless wonder!” said my father contemptuously and I saw it as a sign that there was light at the end of the tunnel of his grief.
But still I was reluctant to leave him alone for too long. In the end, one Friday early in February, it was I who caught a flight to London to spend the weekend with my partner.
We made love that night – I instigated it.
On the Saturday morning I woke up to find that Dominic had already risen. From the living room I could see him on the balcony: he was standing with his hands on the rails gazing down and I had to say his name before he became aware of me. I came out and stood next to him, glancing down to see what had grabbed his attention.
I caught a flash of kingfisher blue and turned with a grin to Dominic, “Are you ogling our neighbour?”
“No, but I’m thinking that that’s what we should be doing,” said Dominic.
I laughed aloud. “Running – us?”
“It’s not like we couldn’t both do with losing a bit of weight,” he said, his eyes still on our neighbour pounding the pavement below.
We, or rather I, had christened her Thin Lizzy, but in my defence only after I had taken against her on account of being snubbed. She had moved into the apartment right opposite ours a couple of months earlier. I first met her in our hallway when we came out of our apartments at the same time one morning. I had never met her face to face before although I had caught glimpses of her back as she hurried out ahead of me in the mornings, trailing expensive scent, all spiky black heels and briefcase. To me she looked like the sort of woman who would know how to do clever things with scarves; and she was thin, enviably thin. Once or twice she had run past me as I dragged myself wearily home in the evenings, a flash of black and kingfisher-blue lycra, her blonde ponytail flying behind her as she moved – she had a tiny bum and the skinniest thighs I had ever seen. That morning when we met in our hallway, she rewarded my smile with a blank look, just lo
ng enough for me to notice that her lips were thin and her eyes slightly prominent before she turned her back on me and made herself busy locking her door. Nope, I definitely was not her type.
Now, on the balcony with Dominic, I looked down at my body, more surprised than put out. I could always afford to lose a bit of weight, but in all our years together he had never said so before.
“It’s just Christmas fat,” I said and I smiled at him.
“Which Christmas?” he said, and he was not smiling.
On the Sunday evening, Dominic dropped me to the airport and I remember reassuring him that this situation, me in Dublin and him in London, would not last forever – it was just until my father showed signs of feeling a bit better. Dominic told me not to worry, to do what I had to do and for as long as it took. I remember thinking how understanding and unselfish he was being and wondered if I had been selling him short all this time.
Not long after I returned to Dublin, my father had a fall at home and fractured his hip. He was taken to hospital in an ambulance, spent the night in a corridor on a trolley and was operated on the next day. I spent anxious hours awaiting the outcome of his surgery. I was terrified he would not survive the operation and that I would lose him too within months of losing my mother. He came through the operation without any complications and bore up under the obvious pain like the Spartan he was, and I spent large amounts of each day in the hospital at his bedside. I was then informed that when he was finally discharged it would not be to his own house but to a nursing home. I was extremely resistant to the idea, but the surgeon who had operated on him persuaded me it would be in his best interest and absolutely essential to his rehabilitation. I capitulated, hired a car as my father had given up driving at that stage, then spent the next week sourcing and visiting places where I would feel comfortable leaving him. His surgeon had estimated he would need to stay there for at least eight weeks and so I was anxious to find a nursing home as close to home as possible. It was easier said than done but I decided on one and stayed in Ireland for another ten days, until my father was ready to be discharged and I could get him settled into the home. Once that was done, the pressure was on for me to return to work and my father was adamant I go too.
“Get back to your work and don’t worry about me,” he told me. “I’m like a pig in clover here – they’re looking after me better than a hotel would.”
I was still unhappy about leaving him. Not even my determination to return to Dublin every Friday evening and stay the weekend could assuage my sense of guilt but there was nothing for it but to go back to my life in London.
The day I was leaving I had a visit from Mrs Nugent who told me that the Duff house had been sold again. It made me wonder at the hold that house still had, even after all these years, on my imagination. It made me wonder too, as I had wondered so many times over the years, where Robbie Duff was now.
On my return to London I found Dominic a bit distant but I had so many other things on my mind that I didn’t pay it much heed. Nor did I think a whole lot of it when, shortly after my return, he came home from work one evening with a couple of bags that bore the logo of a sportswear store.
“I thought I’d take up running, try to get fit,” he said.
“These are serious running shoes,” I said, opening the box and peering inside. I could see from the price tag that they were seriously expensive too. “Talk about jumping in at the deep end.”
“You’re mixing your sporting metaphors,” he said, and I thought he sounded a bit huffy. “If I’m going to do it, I might as well do it right. I actually started doing a bit while you were in Ireland, turns out I like it. It’s good for the head.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “I just never thought running was your thing. You must have caught the bug from Thin Lizzy across the hall.”
“Actually her name is Megan,” he said.
“Oh! How did you find that out?”
“We got talking one evening when we came in at the same time. She introduced herself to me.”
“Wow, that’s more than she ever did to me. All I ever got was a cold fish-eye. So not Thin Lizzy after all then, more like Matchstick Meg.”
Dominic had his back to me at the time but I had the distinct impression his back stiffened. All he said was, “She’s not so bad.”
His phone rang then and the subject was dropped and, in my case, forgotten. I really did have more important things on my mind. Working five days a week, then commuting forward and back to Dublin to spend time with my father each weekend took its toll on my health. I felt rundown and tired all the time but under the circumstances that seemed natural enough.
I only found out I was pregnant the day I miscarried.
Dominic did not understand my grief. “How can you miss something you didn’t know you had?” he said.
I could not explain to him that to me it seemed a double loss: for a while, I had been a mother and I had not even known it. Now there was nothing where I had never even known there was something. I felt that I had in some way betrayed my child by not being aware of his or her short but remarkable existence. I think I might have been better able to make him understand if I had not suspected that he was relieved. He had never expressed any interest in children, in fact I sometimes wondered if he actually disliked them. But I was certain, like many women before me I am sure, that all that would change when he had one of his own. I remember one particular night when I began crying as we lay in bed together, our backs to one another. I knew he knew I was crying but for a long time he ignored me, hoping, I knew, that I would stop. He hated women crying and so I had rarely done it. But now, let him lump it, I thought, he owes me that at least: the loan of his ear, the crook of his arm, the semblance of tenderness. And in the end he did turn over and his arm came down and encircled my body. He said nothing and I said nothing and, in spite of the warmth of his body, I felt cold.
In the weeks after my miscarriage, I admit I fell into a pit of inertia in which even the simple mechanics of daily living seemed too much to ask of my mind or body. All those showers to take and teeth to brush and food to choose and cook and eat, and bins to empty and work to go to – how many times, how many times must I do it all – wash, dress, eat, make up, make ready, rush, race, go, why, where, what for?
I continued commuting back to Ireland to visit my father and I did my best to hide my grief from him. He knew nothing about the pregnancy of course but he remonstrated with me for “wearing yourself out with travelling” when, he insisted, he was doing fine. He actually was doing fine but I had been told that his recuperation would take even longer than had at first been envisaged, which only added to my worries and general sense of gloom.
In the end Dominic told me straight that I needed to buck myself up. He actually used the words “buck yourself up”.
When I asked him how he suggested I might do the bucking, he said I should go see somebody. I was so miserable being miserable that I agreed and so I went to “see somebody” called Elaine. On each visit I would sit in one of the two armchairs next to the window. The window had a wooden blind and if my appointment was early in the day sunlight fell across my lap in slats. In the evenings the only light in the room came from the tall lamp behind my chair which spotted us in a soft yellow gold, leaving the spaces beyond dim.
Even on my first visit, I knew straightaway which chair was for me and which for Elaine. A small table had been pulled up closer to the chair on the left than the one on the right. At its centre there was a cardboard box of paper tissues, one tissue standing proud, ready for use. We talked about how grief was a process and how everything I was feeling was natural and valid. Elaine was very fond of the word valid. Talking about my parents did help me, I think, but it did not lift the general sense of sadness with which I was consumed. I remember on one occasion staring at the box of tissues on the table and wondering if my visits made Elaine want to cry too. I asked her if perhaps I should stop coming.
“Would you like to e
nd the sessions, Kay?”
“I don’t know – I thought maybe you might be tired of listening to me.”
“Do you find the sessions tiring, Kay? Because I am happy to continue for as long as you like, for as long as you find it useful. Do you find the sessions useful at all?” Elaine’s expression looked pained. She had classic English Rose good looks, very fair hair and very blue eyes and the palest gold eyebrows I had ever seen. I had to think about her question. Was it useful to sit for long periods of time in a room with a stranger, sometimes talking about everything and sometimes talking about nothing much at all? The quiet was restful it was true, soothing; beyond the slatted blind the sounds of the traffic were audible but only just. The clock on the wall ticked the seconds away, the seconds I paid for, 3,600 of them a week. I remember thinking I might as well sit here as anywhere else?
In fine clichéd fashion, I came home early from work feeling unwell one day and caught Dominic letting himself out of our bug-eyed neighbour’s apartment. He did not even have the grace to look sheepish.
“These things have a life expectancy, you know that, Kay,” he told me later that day as he packed some things into a holdall – I had told him to get out. “No use in being naive about it.”
But, as it turned out, I was also naive enough not to even consider that he would move in with Matchstick Meg, which was exactly what he did, while I went on living right across the hall in what had been our home. I remember holing up there, unable to face work, trying to sound bright and normal on the phone when I spoke to my father. At night I imagined I could hear them, Dominic and Matchstick Meg going at it like gym bunnies or running bunnies or whatever the correct analogy was. I wondered how long it had been going on, I did not believe Dominic’s assurances that it had started only recently. I imagined them laughing at me and I felt such a fool. I wondered if it was because I had put on weight or if in some other way it was my fault – after all, I had left Dominic alone for a long period of time, not just once but over and over again. But then I beat myself up for blaming myself when he was the one who had cheated and lied and no doubt would have gone on doing so if he had not been found out. We were not even married – I had a vague notion that if I pushed for it I might be able to claim rights to the apartment and more as a common-law wife, but, legalities aside, I somehow knew right away that I would not do so. In fact, I had no idea what I would do, so I just did nothing except sleep and eat and cry. I even lied to my father and for the first time since he had gone into the nursing home did not go home that weekend, citing Dominic’s old excuse – pressure of work.
