The Ludlow Ladies Society

by Ann O'Loughlin

  Connie dipped her head. Eve, still holding her hands, squeezed tighter.

  “There is one more thing, Connie.”

  Connie pushed Eve’s hands away.

  “Ed must have tried to persuade Arnold after that; there are bits of torn-up airmail letters and, from what I can gather, one letter opened but resealed. I did not think I should read it.”

  “What good will it do reading it?”

  “Maybe nothing, but not to open it may leave you worse. You don’t want it gnawing into you.”

  Connie took the letter, turning it over in her hands before quickly pushing it back to Eve.

  “Will you read it?”

  Eve did not argue but got up and, taking a knife from the drawer, carefully slit the sides of the envelope further so she could open it wide. Unfolding it, she scanned it quickly. Plopping down on the chair, she looked directly at Eve.

  “I don’t know if it will help you, but it does explain the pain Ed felt.”

  “I can’t bear to look at his handwriting again. Can you read it to me please?”

  Eve straightened on the chair and cleared her throat before starting to read.

  Laurel Drive

  New Hyde Park

  NY 11040

  March 20, 2009

  Dear Arnold,

  I note you have not answered any of my previous correspondence in which I asked for details about my birth family and particularly a medical history.

  I don’t intend to make a claim on your extensive property or to burden you with any further visits, but I would like an acknowledgment I am your son and that you have a granddaughter. That you have not even been just a little bit curious about your granddaughter or even enquired as to her name is testament to the man you are.

  You leave me fatherless, wondering how can I be a good father to my daughter. It feels as if I was doomed to failure before I even began. That the role model I have aspired to in my mind all these years was a man of noble character would be laughable, were it not so sad.

  Your granddaughter’s name is Molly. I have nothing to offer her; my love is tainted by my past.

  Arnold Brannigan, you have not only turned your back on me, but you have left me gutted, knocked down by your rejection, unable to be confident in my own ability to be a good father.

  Life is hard any day of the week, but your anger, rejection and denial of me makes every second and every minute of every hour unbearable.

  I shall fight this demon you have placed on my shoulders. I can only hope to God that for my daughter’s sake, I win. But if I can’t, I hope my past will someday help others understand and maybe forgive.

  Don’t worry, I will not bother you again.

  Your son,

  Ed

  Eve closed the letter, the rustle of the light paper making a big noise in the still of the room.

  “It was probably the last letter Arnold read. Going by the postmark, he received it just before he died,” Eve said.

  Connie rested her head in her hands.

  Eve tidied away the letters in the box. The wind trapped at the top of the chimney wailed, the gutter banged a strange rhythm against the top of the window, the clock loudly ticked down time in the hallway.

  27

  Hetty, fretting, tried Eve’s number several times. In bed, she tossed and turned, worrying Eve was dead or had fallen down the stairs in her little place and was unable to call for help. It was one in the morning when she got into her car and drove to Eve’s house, calling in the letterbox, pressing the bell, listening intently in case her friend was inside. When she saw a light come on next door, she scurried down the path, into her car, turning out the road towards Ludlow Hall.

  She was not sure why she was here, but resolved to continue slowly up the avenue and to turn for home if there was no sign of anybody up and about.

  She prayed Connie was awake, because if she could not talk to somebody about Eve she would surely burst. Rounding the rhododendron, her shoulders slumped when she saw not one flicker of light at the house. Hesitating, she slowed down, intent on turning around, but, afraid the car would get stuck in soft ground, she decided to attempt to drive around the house and out the back lane. At the very least, she would be able to turn the car in the back yard.

  As she drove into the yard, Hetty saw the pool of light thrown on to the cobbles from the kitchen. Excited, she stopped the car, rushing across the yard to tap on the back door. Shivering, she waited for Connie to answer, all the time looking over her shoulder, her fear heightened by the knocking of the stable door, which had been left open earlier by the workmen.

  When there was no answer, she leaned over on her toes to peep in the window.

  Connie and Eve, sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table, did not move. She saw Eve place her head in her hands. A worry went through her that maybe she should not interrupt, that to bear witness was already too much. The stable door slammed louder. Frightened, she rapped hard with her knuckles on the glass.

  The two women at the table looked at each other, but neither moved. It was, Hetty thought, as if she was looking at ghosts. Fear surged through her, making her move closer to the window and rap louder with her knuckles.

  Connie jumped up and Eve sat up straight, turning towards the door.

  “It’s me, Hetty,” she shouted and she saw the faces of the two women relax.

  Connie swung back the door, letting Hetty bustle inside.

  “Is there something wrong?” Connie asked.

  Slightly embarrassed, Hetty, panic streaked across her face, stuttered her words.

  “I was looking for Eve. I was worried.”

  “What could not wait until daylight hours, Hets?” Eve asked gently.

  Hetty flopped down at the table. “I am so worried. What is going on, Eve?”

  Eve did not answer, nor did Hetty really expect her to.

  “You know she has only left poor Michael devastated: they have split up.”

  “I know you mean well, Hetty, but this is none of your business and that is that.” Eve sounded cross.

  Hetty stood up, looking directly at her.

  “Somebody has to tell you what an awful fool you are. Mind you, there is nothing new in that. You were married to a philanderer, Eve Brannigan. Most of us who had eyes in our heads knew that, but either you did not know or you ignored that fact. I don’t blame you, if you did ignore it. Look at what I lived with for all these years. The day has now come for you to grow up, Eve.”

  Eve jumped up, the chair screeching across the tiled floor. “You knew? Everyone knew?”

  “Knew what? Only that that man in his younger days was gallivanting with any woman he could find. He was free to do what he liked. Weren’t you installed here, enthusiastically looking after everything at Ludlow Hall?”

  Eve’s stomach stirred up sick, her head spinning.

  Hetty stopped for a second, but only to take in a deep breath.

  “Before you say it, Michael Conway hasn’t opened up his heart to me. I have been up all night, thinking why that poor man is so despondent. All he would say was you had split up, you are too upset over Arnold. For God’s sake, Eve, don’t let your happiness slip away now, because of that philandering no-good fool who cheated on you every week of his life. And he was no different to his father before him.”

  Connie put a hand on Hetty’s shoulders, hoping to restrain her flow. “Maybe Eve has heard enough.”

  Eve was doubled up at the table, her hands over her ears.

  Hetty turned to Connie. “Somebody had to say it. She can’t let a good man go. She has to grab this chance of happiness.”

  “Maybe Eve does not feel that way right now.”

  Hetty guffawed loudly. “What many of us would not give for a bite of the happiness on offer to her. Wake up, Eve, or that good man will be gone for good.”

  Eve, trembling all over, stood up and quietly walked out of the kitchen. Hetty and Connie heard her go into the drawing room, closing the door behin
d her.

  “She had to know the truth. She did,” Hetty blustered, as if she was trying to convince herself as well as anybody else in the room.

  “The truth is complicated and often uncomfortable,” Connie said as she stepped out into the hall.

  Hetty began to sob, big tears flowing down her face, settling in the thick wrinkles at the base of her neck.

  “She is the last person in the world I wanted to hurt. For God’s sake, I have wanted those two to get it together for so long.”

  Connie padded to the drawing room door, knocking gently. When Eve opened it a little, Connie slipped in. Eve went back to the fireplace to study the painting.

  “I loved him for so long, but deep down I knew, after the first flurry of love, he did not care one jot about me. Look at that painting. I knew a woman picked that dress for me. He insisted I wear it. I don’t bear any ill to that poor woman in America; I imagine he did to her what he did to me. And then he turned his back on his son.”

  Hetty hovered at the door. Eve swung around to her.

  “Hetty, I don’t like the way you did it, but I don’t hold it against you. Come, join us.”

  Hetty, wiping her eyes, stepped into the room.

  “I never knew how to say it to you, Eve, or maybe I thought you knew, and you were happy enough. I never had the words until now.” She stopped. “Maybe my words weren’t so good this time either.”

  Eve walked over and took her hands. “Hets, I am sure you want the best for me.”

  Hetty began to sob. “I am not a woman for small talking, Eve, not on something like this.”

  “I know.”

  The three of them stood awkwardly in the middle of the drawing room.

  Eve broke the silence.

  “I think it was all right, even good for a while, but Arnold became so distant after our baby died.” She pointed at the painting hanging on the chimney breast. “I knew then things would never be the same, and they weren’t. Look at the get up of me in a dress he had some floozie pick out for me.”

  “I was going to ask if you wanted the painting,” Connie said.

  Eve snorted out a laugh. “If I was strong enough, I would knock it down and burn it.”

  Hetty took two steps, flinging her arms around Eve.

  “There are three of us, and two of us are experts at a bit of arson,” she said.

  Connie got a chair, climbing up to examine the back of the painting.

  “Step far back; I might let it drop,” Connie said as the canvas and frame crashed down. A cloud of dust puffed up, the painting bouncing twice on the rug before landing near the bay window. Both Hetty and Eve ran to it as Connie, coughing, came down off the chair.

  Eve sat down on the couch, looking at the blank wall, a huge square of dirty green netted with cobwebs. “It makes the room and my heart lighter to have it down.”

  “Dawn is breaking. If we wait a short while, we can set it alight in the field,” Connie said.

  Hetty fished in her bag and took out a packet of cigarettes.

  “I did not know you smoked, Hetty,” Eve said in surprise.

  “So?” Hetty answered, and the three of them laughed at the defiant tone of a teenager in her voice.

  “I am afraid you will have to smoke outside,” Connie said.

  “No problem, I am used to the disdain,” Hetty said, making for the kitchen and the back door.

  Eve walked over, kicking out at the frame of the painting. “How is it, I can do all this now? I was never brave enough to do it before, even when Arnold was gone.”

  “Time and distance give a certain type of strength,” Connie said.

  “It will happen for you too, Connie, I know it.”

  Connie shrugged her shoulders. “I am not so sure about that.”

  They sat quietly, waiting for Hetty, each absorbed in her own thoughts.

  Eve felt an awful pain in her heart for Michael, feeling contrite that she had taken out her own deep hurt on him.

  When Hetty came back in, ponging of smoke, she looked at her two friends.

  “Have I missed something? What is wrong?”

  “Nothing is wrong. We have had enough drama,” Eve said.

  Weary from being up all night, they went to the painting, grabbing a section each, half carrying it to the front door and down the steps to the field.

  Connie climbed the fence first, taking the painting and managing to throw it on to the grass. Eve managed the fence fine, but Hetty, carrying a box of firelighters and two firelogs, called the others to help her out.

  “I am going to need a lot more dancing before I am fit for this carry on,” she said, slightly out of breath.

  Eve patted her on the back. “Come on, Hets, we need your strength.”

  The three of them dragged the painting, which now had a big tear in the middle, to the scorched spot where Hetty’s memory quilt had been set ablaze. They used the painting as a windbreak to light the firelighters and logs, before throwing frame and canvas on top of the fire.

  Flames at first licked hesitantly, until the heat, reaching the oil paint, took off in colours of blue, yellow, red and orange. Eve watched the painting crumple and melt, just as her life at Ludlow had done.

  Connie and Hetty stood back, the sparks rising high.

  “We can leave it here. It is not going to spread anywhere,” Hetty said. She turned to Eve. “Will I drop you off at Michael’s? You might get him before he goes to the shop.”

  Eve nodded, and they went inside while she ran upstairs to get her things.

  As they waited in the hall, Connie turned to Hetty.

  “You are a good friend, Hetty.”

  “Not very diplomatic.”

  “But a good friend.”

  They were on the way down the driveway when Eve asked Hetty to drop her at home instead of Michael’s.

  “You are not backing out, I hope?” Hetty said, the car swerving on the avenue as she turned to look at Eve.

  “I have to do this my own way, Hetty, I am going to have to live with my decision for a very long time.”

  Hetty, in a huff, did not answer, barely saying goodbye when she dropped off Eve at her terraced house.

  28

  Eve left the sign on the front door. The last thing she wanted was the likes of Mary McGuane pushing her way in. She could not face the chit-chat of any customers today and particularly the likes of Mary “Tell the World” McGuane.

  Settling in the sitting room, Eve reached for the button box. Prising open the lid, she knew the buttons she was looking for: two white pearls left over from when she made her wedding dress. Digging her hands into the box, she shoved the buttons aside impatiently, letting them fall over her hands until she spied the pearl buttons. They were her most treasured buttons at one time, but now she no longer wanted to keep them. How many times had she held them, transported back to the wedding day, when he had danced her across the polished wooden floor of a London hotel as almost one hundred guests looked on.

  Pressing the lid back on the box, she snatched the pearl buttons tight. Walking across to the window, she opened it enough so she could throw them out, letting them drop down on the rose bushes to the wet earth below.

  There was a new determination in Eve. Having previously baulked at cutting up her wedding dress for the Ludlow memory quilt, she pulled her shears from the drawer. With a whip of her shoulders, she trudged upstairs to where the wedding dress was hanging at the back of the wardrobe, wrapped in an old sheet. She had made it herself from a McCall pattern. Long panels in a soft crepe, it was a snug fit with generous sleeves pulled into a lace cuff, the prim round collar trimmed in lace. The pearl buttons in a row down the bodice glinted in the light; many at the wedding had said it matched the happy sparkle in her eyes. In off-white, the dress skimmed her lovely figure, kicking out in pleats at her knees as she walked, a cape of white lace and a train adding a beautiful flow to the outfit. She loved the dress, remembering she had carried a simple posy of roses to match the ro
se she had clipped to one side of her head.

  Tears streamed down Eve’s face as she ran her hands along the crepe, thinking of the way Arnold held her, waltzing her across that floor, calling out to his friends, everybody laughing. Had he ever loved her? She hoped so. Otherwise their whole union was a sham, and she did not want to believe that.

  She had loved him for a long time, blaming herself when he became cold and distant after James passed away. She could forgive him for buckling under his bank debts, but to have a second family and not allow his son into his life: how could she ever forgive that?

  Draping the dress over her arm, she headed downstairs and laid it carefully on the sitting room couch. So many memories were contained in those crepe folds: the day she picked the pattern and yards of soft crepe. She had spent almost a whole month’s wages on it all and the pearl buttons for the bodice, with three on each sleeve, where she had gathered the fabric with a loose machine stitch, so when she raised her hand for Arnold to place the wedding ring on her finger, the buttons glistened in the light. The heavy-duty train, crepe overlaid with Irish lace from her aunt’s friends in Cork, was almost a work of art.

  Taking her shears, she sliced from the widest point to the waist, where the train was attached with two buttons and loops. The sleeves next: she nicked the cuffs and pulled along the grain, the fabric shrieking as loud as the pain in her heart. Gripping the shears tight, she cut in a straight line from the bottom of the dress through the waistline and bodice to finish at the neck. Flattening out the fabric, out of habit she cut two squares, in case she ever wanted to put the crepe into a patchwork quilt. The rest of the mangled dress she balled up into a bundle, ramming it into the bin.

  Not wanting to think how Arnold had flitted from one life to the other, she got her coat. Stopping at the mirror in the hall, she rubbed a little foundation into her face and dabbed on some pink lipstick in an effort to brighten herself up. Afraid she might lose the courage to walk up the street, she stepped quickly out the front door, banging it behind her in her hurry.