‘I wish …’ she began, and came to a halt. She wished so much. She wished he was different. She wished their story was different. She wished she’d held her tongue on that last encounter instead of telling him, in a fit of anger, that he would die alone. She wished they loved one another, and depended on one another, and missed each other when they were apart.
Some minuscule shift occurred in his face then, some blurring of the edges happened. ‘What do you wish?’ he asked mildly, eyes holding hers, an almost-smile on his mouth – but her courage didn’t equal his, and she shook her head.
‘So many things, I wouldn’t know where to start. We’d better get going,’ she said, reaching for the door handle.
‘Stay,’ he said, ‘there’s no need for you to come out,’ so she remained where she was, and echoed his goodbye – no embrace, never an embrace. She turned the van around while he was still walking across the pier, not thinking about the conversation they’d had in the field, because God alone knew where that might bring her. Best to put it from her, to pack it away where nobody would find it, to never dwell on it.
On the way back to Walter’s Place she thought up a story for Gav. An insurance thing, she’d say. Some official arrangement he wants to set up. To be honest, it was so boring I didn’t pay it too much attention. Some form he needs me to fill in. It wasn’t great, it wasn’t even particularly believable, but it would have to do. She hated lying, only ever did it when she knew the truth would hurt, but he’d left her with little choice.
She pulled up by the five-bar gate and got out. She left the van unlocked – this was Roone: only tourists locked their vehicles – and made her way into the field, because she felt a sudden need to talk to George.
‘What do you make of that?’ she asked him, running a hand along the rough hair of his neck. ‘Is that not the weirdest—’ And then she had to stop, because the lump in her throat was making it difficult to carry on. She lifted her face to the sky, palm resting against George’s comforting warmth, and drank in the fresh air with the taste of the sea on it until it steadied her.
‘He comes here,’ she resumed, stroking the soft ear, scratching along the length of the nose, ‘no warning, George. Not a phone call, not even a text. We could have been gone away.’ Although he’d known they wouldn’t be gone anywhere, not with the season in full swing, and the island bursting at the seams, like it always was in the summer months.
‘Why me, George? Why did he have to—’ She broke off again, blinking and swallowing, pulling more sea air into her. God, this was ridiculous. She’d have to hold it together when she went inside, or Gav would see right through her. ‘OK,’ she said then, patting the donkey’s flank. ‘OK. Thanks, George. Always good talking to you.’
He meant nothing to her. They had no bond, like a normal father and child would have. All her life he’d failed her. She’d resolved to sever ties with him that last time, sworn never to let him get to her again. And now here he was, dragging her back.
Get a grip, she told herself, crossing the field to the house. You’ve agreed to his request, nothing more to be done. It’s his problem, not yours. Let it go, let it off, don’t think about him any more.
She entered the house, setting her face to meet Gav and the kids. Becoming once more Laura the wife, Laura the mother, Laura the one who sorted things out. Laura the sister in a few weeks, when Tilly flew over from Australia to spend her third summer on Roone.
Little imagining, as she pushed open the scullery door, smile in place, that letting it go, letting it off, was going to prove completely out of the question.
JULY
Imelda
HIS TIES. HIS TIES TORE HER HEART IN TWO. EVERY ONE of them drawing her back, every one of them throwing up a memory that made the loss of him a thousand times worse.
His narrow dark green tie in a fine wool. Their first dinner together in Manning’s Hotel. The salmon mousse she’d eaten in tiny morsels, terrified he’d ask her something when her mouth was full. His smile when she’d told him about the ballet classes she’d taken up the previous year, nervousness causing her to blurt it out. Kicking herself the minute she had it said, in case he thought her a fool to be doing something like that at her age. His fingers touching hers briefly when they’d both reached for the salt: the skip it had caused inside her, like a foolish smitten girl.
His navy tie with little red and grey boats stamped on it. The night he’d leant towards her as the credits were rolling after a film in Tralee – a spy thing she hadn’t been able to make an ounce of sense of – and asked her in a whisper, his breath warm on her ear, if she’d ever consider marrying him. Not three months since they’d first laid eyes on one another on Roone’s smallest pebbly beach, a day into her holiday on the island. She’d returned to Mayo less than a fortnight later, and after that the two of them had met up on Sundays only, in Tralee or Galway. Really, when you thought about it, it was no time at all to be thinking about marriage, but both of them had been certain by the time he’d asked the question. They’d reached an understanding, was how people would have put it.
His striped tie, rust and maroon and white, which had always put her in mind of a school uniform. His visit to Mayo so they could break the news together to her sister Marian and her brother-in-law Vernon. Marian’s mouth dropping open when they’d told her, for once rendered speechless. Vernon beaming like someone who’d just won the Lotto, pumping Hugh’s good arm, welcoming him to the family, telling him he was most welcome, most welcome indeed.
His wedding tie, the most heartbreaking of all. A beautiful dove grey, embossed with tiny repeated triangles in a shinier finish. His face at the top of the church, pale and tremulously smiling as she’d walked towards him on legs she couldn’t feel, hanging on tight to Vernon’s arm. Sick with nerves, but also knowing that she was entering the happiest time of her life. Wanting, despite her shakiness, to break away from Vernon and run up the aisle to him, hardly able to wait to become Mrs Hugh Fitzpatrick at the ripe old age of fifty-four. Little dreaming that before her sixtieth birthday she’d be his widow.
Was it too soon to be doing this, to be packing up his clothes? She had no template, no timetable for grief. Should she have waited longer? Probably – but she’d woken up needing to be around his things, needing to touch and sort and fold them, even if it killed her. She rolled the ties into neat rounds and secured them with straight pins. She placed them on top of the folded shirts, her heart broken clean in two with pain and loneliness and white-hot rage.
Not six years together, after waiting her whole life for him. The unfairness of it, the unbearable, unforgivable cruelty of it sent the anger raising a pulse in her temple, threatening to eat her up in its dreadful ferocity. Not even six years, when others got decades and decades, and children and grandchildren, and anniversary after anniversary after anniversary, before Death decided it was time to call a halt.
Denied his future, since losing him she’d hungered for his past. In the days that followed the funeral, when her grief had been bedding in, fierce and frightening, she’d ambushed his niece Nell, born and bred on Roone like Hugh, for what she could remember about him as a younger man, and poor Nell, full of her own loss, had battled tears as she’d reached into her memories and pulled them out.
He made a scarecrow once for some farmer who was looking for it. The head was a burst football, and he carved a bit of driftwood in the shape of the farmer’s moustache and painted it to match, and stuck it on. I remember my mother giving out to him, in case the farmer took offence, but Hugh only laughed at her.
He found a wall clock for my birthday. I would have been nine or ten. It was in the shape of a yacht, and it had an anchor for a pendulum. I thought it was the most wonderful thing I’d ever seen. It’s still around somewhere, I’m sure. I’ll have a look for it and show you.
He helped me to paint Jupiter, after Grandpa Will died, Hugh’s dad. I was seventeen, and I missed him terribly. He’d left me his little rowboat, and I got it int
o my head that I wanted to paint it, as a sort of tribute to him or something, I don’t know, and Hugh came with me to get the paint – I wanted something bright so we picked out yellow – and we painted it together.
I remember when his bid on Considine’s pub was accepted, and he renamed it Fitz’s and made it his own. He was so happy then, and we were all delighted for him. There was a huge session in the pub on the opening night. Nobody had planned it, but every musician on the island turned up with an instrument – and I’d swear the music never sounded better. I remember the sun coming up as I walked home with Dad.
Imelda had listened to all the silly precious recollections. She’d added them to her own pathetic few, and held them close and kept them safe. She unfolded them in the darkness of her sleepless nights and walked through his early life with him, acquainting herself with the young man she’d never known. It kept her from falling completely apart.
She closed the box that held his shirts and ties, mouth pressed tight, squeezing back the tears that wanted to fall all the time, all the time. The crying she’d done in the past seven weeks, rivers and rivers of heart-scalding tears – but there seemed to be no end to them.
Seven weeks. An eternity, an instant. Seven weeks since she’d woken and turned to him, and seen immediately that something wasn’t right. A peculiar purplish tinge to his skin, his eyes almost but not quite closed, a slackness to his features that was more than sleep, that was beyond sleep. Hugh, she’d said, thinking stroke, thinking brain bleed, not thinking worse, not yet, Hugh, wake up, reaching towards him, putting a palm to his cheek – and the horrible clammy iciness of it had made her recoil, as if he’d burnt her.
She’d risen to her knees, feeling a tumble of her insides, No, no, feeling everything in her turn to water, feeling the breath go from her, placing trembling fingers to the side of his neck, and then to his wrist, praying for a pulse, however weak, no, praying for a sign of life, no, no, no, no, no, no, gathering him up, what was left of him, pressing the coldness, the stiffness of him to her, no, no, no, howling it out, How could you? No, no, and nobody at all to hear her, with Eve moved out and Keith in Galway and God not giving a damn. While she slept beside him he’d taken his last breath and gone away from her, a month before his fifty-seventh birthday, his present of a navy sweater already bought and wrapped and sitting in the boot of her car, the only place he wouldn’t find it.
Heart, Dr Jack had said. A massive heart attack. He wouldn’t have suffered, he’d told her, and she’d clung, she was clinging, to that. Let him not have felt a thing. Let his life have come to a gentle and painless end. Let her suffer – let all the suffering be hers.
The immediate aftermath, the days following his death, she remembered only in disjointed, unrelated fragments – somewhat, she imagined, like the recollections of an Alzheimer’s patient, whose lived life could only be recalled, if at all, in haphazard, misaligned episodes.
The hands, all the hands of Roone reaching out to shake hers, not a soul on the island, young or old, who hadn’t known Hugh. Sorry for your trouble, sorry for your trouble, like a litany, like a Taizé chant, a poem learnt off by heart, the words affording some tiny solace by their very monotony. People calling her lovey and darling and pet, calling her all the names he’d called her.
The wobble in Henry Manning’s chin, his eyes swimming as he told her that Hugh’s first job had been washing up in the hotel kitchen at weekends as a schoolboy, a missing forearm no hindrance at all to him. As fast as anyone, Henry had told her, my father often said there was nobody like him to work, trembling mouth downturned in a way Imelda might have found comical, once upon a time.
The ham sandwich cut into four little squares that she’d forced herself to eat at someone’s urging. Too much butter in it, a smear of the English mustard that she hated, but she’d chewed and swallowed and washed it down with warm tea so that she’d be left alone.
The smell of wet clothes during the endless night of his wake, when people sat in relays by his coffin through the darkness, as island custom demanded. Rain pelting down outside, a fitting soundtrack it felt like.
Isolated images too. A bunch of big white and yellow daisies, tied with a green ribbon. Someone’s green quilted jacket draped over the back of a chair. Someone else’s silver drop earrings in the shape of flying birds. A biscuit sitting ignored on a saucer that had beautiful pink roses painted on it. Whose saucer? She had no idea, part of the paraphernalia of crockery and glasses that someone – Nell? – had rounded up for the wake.
The dreadful coldness of the lips she kissed as she told him goodbye, the day of the funeral. The taste of the blood she drew from her cheek, biting hard into it as the coffin lid was lowered. Trying to distract herself from the other pain, but there was no escape from it.
The feel of her sister’s arm about her waist as they stood at the open grave, her brother-in-law on her other side, propping her up between them. Nell standing across the way, similarly flanked by her husband and stepson, weeping quietly as her beloved uncle was put in the ground.
His wellingtons, side by side in the shed some days later, when Imelda had gone in search of a vase for flowers someone had brought. His dark green wellingtons, patched with stiffened earth, the sight of them bringing a wave of such desolation that she literally sank beneath it, dropped to her knees on the musty wooden floor, wrapped her arms about herself and rocked in anguish, her errand forgotten.
Enough. Enough. She crossed to the wardrobe and lifted out his everyday jacket, the donkey-brown herringbone with the worn leather elbow patches that he’d had forever, that he’d refused to let her replace. She undid the pinned-up right sleeve and let it fall to match its comrade.
She pressed the worn nubby cloth to her face and drew in the scent of him that still clung to it. She closed her eyes and imagined it growing solid and warm again, with the heft of his body inside it. She pictured her cheek resting against his chest, remembered them dancing in the back garden on warm summery nights with nobody to see them, the kitchen window open so they could hear the radio, the stars keeping vigil overhead.
Thank God he’d resisted her efforts to bin it. This she wouldn’t give to charity. This she would never be separated from, not to her dying day. She’d wear it: she’d settle it across her shoulders when she sat on the patio on chilly autumn afternoons with her book and a mug of camomile tea. It would be her comfort blanket, as it had been his.
She checked the clock radio: time to get moving if she was to make ten o’clock Mass. Still going every Sunday, despite her hatred of God these days. Still compelled, for some unknown reason, to sit and kneel and stand with the rest of the congregation. But she hadn’t taken communion in seven weeks. It was her single small protest, and it afforded a tiny satisfaction.
She returned the jacket to the wardrobe and moved the cardboard box to the chair by his side of the bed. She’d bring it to Tralee next time she was going. She’d drop it into a charity shop and come away quickly, before she could change her mind about parting with anything of his.
She picked up her phone and pressed Eve’s number, and listened to the rings that were still going unanswered. ‘It’s me,’ she said when she heard the beep. ‘It’s Imelda. Please give me a ring.’ The same message she’d left half a dozen times now, and no response to any of them.
Eve was hurting, she knew that. Hugh had become the father she’d never known. They’d formed a deep bond – Imelda, to her shame, had been almost jealous to see it – and his death had shaken the girl immensely. Imelda had to remember that, and make allowances. But she was hurting too, and this wasn’t helping. She’d just have to let it take its course, and wait for Eve to come back to her.
She smoothed down her skirt. She ran a hand through her hair, for all the good it did. She pushed down the rage that still threatened, every second of every day, to get the better of her. She opened the door and walked out to face the life that had to be faced, wishing for the thousandth time that she, not he, had die
d.
Tilly
TEN MORE DAYS TILL SHE BOARDED THE FIRST PLANE. They might as well be ten centuries. How was she to get through them without dying of anticipation, and endure the endless hours of travel that followed? Four flights in total to get her from Brisbane to Kerry. Over an entire day in the air, the in-between hours spent walking around airports, trailing through Duty Free shops, sniffing perfumes till she couldn’t tell one from another, sleep-deprived but terrified to sit for any length of time in case she fell asleep.
And even though there were still ten days to go, she’d already packed and unpacked her case half a dozen times. She’d also tried on every stitch in her wardrobe, searching for the best thing to wear when Andy set eyes on her – saw her in the flesh, as opposed to on a screen – for the first time in ten months and twenty-five days.
She’d almost settled on the turquoise dress he’d said matched her eyes – except that it was a little worn at the seams now, a little faded. Maybe the jade green tunic top she’d got from her best friend Lien for her last birthday – he had yet to see it, and Tilly loved it teamed with her navy cropped pants – but did the colour really flatter her pale freckly skin, her nondescript brown hair?
How about the terracotta sweater in a fine wool that she’d found on a sale rail after Christmas – or was it a bit too dressy, with its rows of tiny beads running around the neckline? Maybe her black sundress then – but it was linen and would crease horribly in transit. Oh, it was impossible to choose, but trying them all on, debating and rejecting and deliberating, passed the time before her shift at the restaurant started at five.
The Birthday Party: The spell-binding new summer read from the Number One bestselling author Page 2
