Letters From a Patchwork Quilt

by Clare Flynn

  He was looking at her, still holding their child, his eyes fixed on Eliza, waiting. She wondered if he could see the hesitation in her eyes, and she knew he expected her to tell him again, to remove all possible doubt.

  ‘I married you believing I could never love you, never care for you.’ She could see the hurt in his eyes, the slight twitch of his mouth as he prepared himself for her to retract her declaration. ‘I was wrong. I do care for you. Very much. And now with Christabel I am a part of a family. We are a family. Thank you for that, Karl.’

  He was about to speak but she silenced him with a finger on his lips.

  ‘For the first time in a very long time I have hope for the future, a sense of purpose, a sense of belonging. You have given that to me, Karl. I know at times I was unfair to you, cold, distant, ungrateful. I am sorry for that. I was angry. I took my anger out on you, when all you ever did was show me kindness. I was superficial, valuing things that I now know don’t matter, and overlooking those that do. It took me a long time to see you for who you really are, but now that I see that person, I know I love him.'

  Speaking the words made her surer, as though giving voice to the feelings anchored them, tethered them to her, made them real and irrefutable. She smiled and the baby made a gurgling noise as if in approval.

  30

  Gertrude Logan

  Over the years, Jack’s family grew. Mary Ellen’s confession about Marian’s parentage softened his feelings towards his wife, just as it hardened his hatred of the Irish priest. He felt pity for his Mary Ellen, but it was mixed with guilt that, like the priest before him, he was using her as a vessel for his lust. Their marriage lacked companionship, friendship or any meeting of minds. The lives they lived were mostly separate, there being no common ground between them, apart from in the marital bed.

  The year after Marian’s birth, Jack’s first child, a daughter, was stillborn. Mary Ellen couldn’t understand how or why the baby she had carried inside her for so many months and laboured to bring into the world was dead. She swaddled a waxen faced doll in the layette intended for the baby and carried it around between cradle and chair, pretending to nurse it. This tragic charade was broken by the arrival of the next baby, a son, Anthony. Over the following five years Francis, Jane, then another still-born daughter and Ursula followed in rapid succession.

  Mary Ellen saw her children as confirmation of her place in the world. A validation of her. She was a mother. She had produced lives. But her love for them was abstract and collective – she seemed incapable of appreciating them as individuals. She was happy to delegate their physical well-being to Sally, while their personal and emotional needs increasingly fell to Marian. Perhaps to make up for the lack of love or affection she received from either parent, from a very tender age Marian took on the role of little mother to her siblings, overseeing their washing and dressing, ensuring their attendance at school later and enforcing what little discipline existed in the household.

  Jack’s feelings for his children were ambivalent. Every so often he would be jolted by a shock of recognition at a facial expression, a tone of voice or a sudden movement that recalled one of his own siblings or resembled what he saw in the mirror. On the other hand, he recognised that his growing family was tethering him forever to his life with Mary Ellen and to this ugly northern town.

  Having grown up in a large family, he was comfortable having a lot of children around. He was absentmindedly indulgent towards the girls, Marian excepted, but a strict disciplinarian with the two boys. He looked for evidence that his own shortcomings had been inherited by the boys, whereas he never felt that way about the girls, whom he saw as light, delicate, sparkling creatures, flitting about him. Jack treated them as distant acquaintances, pleased enough to see them if he happened upon them, but never going out of his way to seek their company and uncertain how to handle them. The boys were different. Every time they made a noise he barked at them. Every time they laughed he sent them away to read their books, fearful that they would inherit the slow wits of their mother.

  Soon after Ursula was born, the two boys died within days of each other from whooping cough. It happened quickly. Jane too was infected but her little body offered more resistance and she made it through the crisis. Mary Ellen, pregnant with Alice, took their deaths badly, taking to her bed, howling and weeping for days and inconsolable at the graveside. Jack refused to let himself grieve. He saw his wife’s outpouring of grief as insincere and undignified and he refused to let his own mind dwell on his dead sons. He was sorry that they had been snatched away so young, but in some ways he saw their deaths as a blessing, an escape from a world that he increasingly believed held no joy, meaning or purpose.

  As for Marian, he barely looked at her and completely ignored her. When he did let his eyes rest on her in an unguarded moment, he saw in her long oval face, heavy chin and over-large nose the irrefutable signs of her parentage. For her part, Marian worked hard to gain affection and attention from the man she believed to be her father. She would try to show him her drawings, offer to bring him tea, ask him to look at her letters, holding her slate up to him eagerly, but to no effect. By the time Clementina was born in 1892, when Marian was sixteen years old, she had stopped trying and had retreated, hurt and cold.

  Childbirth and the years had impacted Mary Ellen’s looks. The tall slender woman had become stooped and had thickened heavily around the middle. Her once shining hair had greyed and roughened in texture. She looked older than her years. When he looked at her, Jack felt repelled by her and what she had become. But in the darkness of their bedroom he sank into her amplitude, losing himself in the abundance of her soft flesh.

  Jack met Gertrude Logan soon after Clementina was born. He was accustomed to walking out of the overcrowded town with its hundreds of narrow streets, teeming with people. He often headed to the coast at the mouth of the Tees and was walking there in the sand dunes when he came upon her. He almost fell over her as she was half sitting, half lying amidst the marram grass.

  ‘I’m sorry, Miss. I’d no idea there was anybody there.'

  He raised his hat to her and was about to carry on walking past her onto the beach, when she spoke.

  ‘You’re Mr Brennan from the Tudor Crown in Colliers Street aren’t you?’

  He nodded.

  ‘I thought I recognised you. I’ve been in a few times to collect a jug of beer for my husband when he wasn’t up to getting there himself. I’m Gertrude Logan. My husband’s Bill Logan. He’s a foreman in the foundry.’

  Jack nodded. ‘I know Bill.’

  He looked at the woman, her skirt tucked under her and the wind blowing her dark hair out of the loose bun she’d tied on top of her head. There was something about her that reminded him a little of Eliza and he felt that familiar stab of pain at her memory. It wasn’t that she looked like her – this woman was not pretty like Eliza and was as dark as Eliza was fair, but there was something in her manner, the way she spoke or held her head – he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Rather than walk on, he hesitated a moment, trying to place what it was exactly that stirred the memory.

  ‘Where are you heading?’ she asked.

  ‘Just out for a walk.’

  ‘Same here. I stopped to look at the sky for a while. I love to watch the clouds. Sometimes in town you can’t even see the sky for the smoke.’

  Jack looked up. The sky was azure blue fading to paler blue near the horizon and faint wisps of lacy cloud were scudding across it at speed. He could hear gulls screaming and smelt the salty tang of the sea.

  ‘It changes all the time,’ she said. The colour of the sky and the shape of the clouds. They’re always moving, forming new shapes. Sometimes the whole sky looks dark and grey because of heavy clouds and then suddenly a gap opens and the rays of light shine through. It’s as if you’re catching a glimpse into heaven. That’s why I love it. Like looking into a kaleidoscope. I had one when was I was small. My father won it for me at the fair, but … it g
ot broken.'

  Jack saw a sadness in her eyes, but then it was gone and she was laughing. ‘Listen to me! Chattering away. You must think me strange, when we don’t even know each other.’

  ‘Not at all.’ He knew he should say goodbye and continue on along the sand dunes away from her, but he was rooted to the spot. ‘I like to watch the sea, myself,’ he said. ‘Same reason as you and your clouds. It’s always changing. I was born in Derby which is slap in the middle of the country so I didn’t see the sea until I was eighteen and moved to Bristol. And even then it was the Avon Gorge rather than the sea itself. But here it’s like your clouds. One day waves crashing on the shore and the next calm as a millpond. And the smell of the salt. You don’t get that from looking at picture books.’

  She studied his face for a moment, then said, ‘You don’t talk like a publican.’

  ‘And how’s that?’

  ‘I didn’t think men who ran public houses would like walking at the seashore and watching the waves.’

  ‘I was a teacher,’ he said. ‘I’ve always loved being close to nature.’ He smiled. ‘Probably comes from growing up in an industrial town. You don’t get a lot of chance. I used to write poetry.’

  ‘Used to? Why did you stop?’

  He shrugged and turned away to look out at the sea again. ‘When the waves wash up on the shore it makes me think that maybe that particular bit of water has travelled right across the world. All that water moving around. I’ve often thought of putting a message in a bottle and throwing it out there to see where it might end up.’

  ‘I heard about one being found that came all the way from France,’ she said. ‘The boy who picked it up couldn’t understand what the message said. It was in the newspaper last year. It was near Hartlepool he found it. You should do it. Write a message and see where it ends up. Or a poem! Why not?’

  He shrugged. ‘No point.’

  ‘Why’s there no point? It’s worth a try, surely.’

  ‘The only reason to send a message is if you want someone specific to read it. And throwing it into the ocean isn’t the best way to do that.’

  ‘Ah. You’ve no romance! You have to believe. You have to trust.’

  ‘I stopped doing that a long time ago’ he said.

  ‘How sad.’ She looked up at him, a frown creasing her face.

  There was silence between them for a moment, then Jack said, ‘I’d better be going. Good to meet you, Mrs Logan.’ He moved off down the dune, the sand sliding under his feet so he was almost running by the time he reached the bottom.

  She called down to him. ‘Mr Brennan, if you see my husband, please don’t mention you met me here. He doesn’t like me being out here on my own.’

  He raised a hand in acknowledgement and walked away down the beach. For a moment he wondered whether her remark about her husband was a hint that for him to offer to walk her back to town, but then reasoned that if Logan didn’t like her to be here alone he’d probably like even less for her to be out walking with a man.

  As he paced along the open sands, he was overcome by loneliness. The brief conversation with Gertrude Logan had highlighted the emptiness of his life. Just a bit of pointless banter, but every word somehow seemed precious. It was not so much what was said but the way it was said: her words offered up with a sense of trust. A spontaneous sharing of what was on her mind at that moment. It was banal, yet curiously intimate and it made his heart ache for everything he missed with Eliza. In the years he’d spent with Mary Ellen they had never had a conversation like that. They had barely had a conversation at all.

  Jack avoided the sand dunes for a while after that. He didn’t acknowledge to himself that he was avoiding meeting Gertrude Logan again, but he was. There was something about her that disturbed him, unsettled him. The emptiness of his marriage to Mary Ellen, his failure to fulfil the dreams he’d cherished since boyhood and the vast hole Eliza had left in his life preyed on his mind since the encounter with the woman on the shore. And his poetry? What had once been his passion seemed foolish and impractical since he stopped teaching and started pulling pints. The notebook in which he wrote his poems was tucked away on the bookshelf, beside the volumes of poetry and the novels which he no longer read. He remembered that morning all those years ago when Cecily had found his poems and made fun of him. That had been the trigger for his running away. What high hopes he had then, arriving in Bristol and landing on his feet. It had all proved a sham. But there was something about his brief conversation with Mrs Logan that made him want to fight back. Losing Eliza forever did not have to mean losing the rest of his dreams. Why shouldn’t a publican be a poet?.

  Next time he went to the coast, he took a pencil and his notebook with him in his pocket. Watching the waves crash onto the shore he remembered what he had said to the woman about the sea travelling across the world, and he thought of Eliza standing on the coast of America, staring out over the ocean and thinking of him.

  He pulled up his coat collar and settled down in the sand with the notebook propped on his knees and began to write.

  The sea that touches here the land

  Has travelled far, who knows from where?

  Watching waves break upon the strand.

  I wonder is she watching there?

  Her lonely figure on the shore

  Of a distant unfamiliar place

  Looks out to watch the seagulls soar

  Sadness covering her face.

  He began to write a third verse but crossed out the lines almost as soon as he wrote them. He chewed on his pencil. What was the point? Ever since he’d met Eliza his poetry had been for her and now she would never read it. The words mocked him. They were inadequate, commonplace. His feelings of loss and loneliness were too great to be captured in a few lines of doggerel. The fault lay in him, in the feebleness of his imagination, in the banality of his words, in his failure to bring the image of her alive. He broke the pencil in half and threw away the pieces.

  One day, on a whim Jack took the ferry across to Port Clarence on the north side of the Tees and walked past the foundries alongside the salt marshes towards the sea. He was leaning on a wall looking out to the sea when he realised someone was standing beside him.

  ‘You were in a trance there, Mr Brennan. Been seeing a hypnotist?'

  He turned to face her. Her expression was of amusement and he realised that the features he’d remembered as plain, were much improved when she smiled.

  ‘Mrs Logan, I’m sorry, I didn’t notice you were there.’

  She laughed. ‘That’s me. The Invisible Woman - no one noticed she was there until she was gone! That could make a good story for the penny dreadfuls, don’t you think?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ he said. ‘My wife loves them but I’ve never read one.’ He wanted to eat his words, realising how pompous he sounded, but she appeared unconcerned.

  ‘My husband reads them. Can’t say they’re my taste - but I’ve been known to scan over the pages before I light the fire with them.’ She raised her eyebrows at him and gave a little shake to her head.

  Jack laughed. ‘What brings you over here? It’s a pretty desolate spot,’ he said.

  ‘I saw you on the ferryboat. My husband left his dinner box behind so I had to come over to Port Clarence to bring it him. I thought I’d come and look for you and see if you wanted to walk back with me.’

  Jack was surprised and felt slightly uncomfortable. It seemed odd that a woman, another man’s wife, should seek out his company for a stroll over the salt marshes. He looked at her, wondering if she was testing him in some way – or teasing him. Her face betrayed nothing. Just that same open gaze he had noted when they met before, and an air of calm that surrounded her like an aura. She looked a bit older than he was, but then most of the women here looked older than their years, worn down by poverty, poor health and unhealthy living conditions in the crowded terraces.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Looks like it might rain later. We need to make the most
of it.’ She set off walking briskly in front of him, then looked back over her shoulder. ‘You coming then?’

  He had little choice but to follow, half running to catch up. She hitched her skirts to clear the wet grass and he caught a glimpse of her ankles over the top of her boots and felt an unexpected lurch in his stomach. What was wrong with him? She wasn’t beautiful at all. Plain if anything. Couldn’t hold a candle to Eliza. Yet he felt a sudden desire for her, a longing to reach out and grab her, lean her over the stone wall and take her right there. Then she smiled at him, oblivious to what was going through his head and he felt ashamed.

  ‘When my mother was a little girl there was nothing here,’ she said. ‘Just empty marshes as far as the sea. Collecting salt was the only industry. Nothing between here and the hills. Just a few houses. It’s hard to imagine that now, isn’t it? All those ugly blast furnaces and smoke stacks. Ships everywhere. In her day there were just a few fishermen lived on the coast. She was a shepherd’s daughter. Not many sheep round here now.’

  ‘She grew up in Middlesbrough?’