“How long was it before you went to the police?”
“Oh, I forget. Three days, was it? Maybe four. It was Rob who went. They took all the particulars, of course, but when they asked him about other men in her life, and when he told them what kind of woman she was, they rather lost interest. They said she must have gone off with someone, and she’d probably make contact before very long. So if we ever hear any more of Carmen, it won’t be because of the police. Either we make enquiries ourselves, and I can’t see the point of that, or she decides to make contact again with us.”
Matthew opened his mouth to mention the insurance money and then closed it again. To raise the possibility of Carmen’s death and to give such solid grounds for believing in it would be to make it clear that he himself didn’t believe the accepted version of her disappearance. And that might threaten the whole basis on which the family life of the Heenans had been reestablished. No, much better to keep quiet. He had already gone as far as he ought with his questions, though it was natural enough that he should be interested in Carmen and her disappearance.
“Time for your bed, young man,” said Auntie Connie. “No reason for you to be tired out tomorrow just because your sister goes gallivanting off to the ballet!”
Over the next few days Matthew began rearranging the new information in his head. On the last day of her life Carmen had been on tenterhooks about something. Auntie Connie assumed that it was on account of some new man in her life who was coming that evening to sweep her away to a life of glamour and excitement. She was wrong, of course. But that left Matthew with a mystery. Presumably, whatever it was that was causing Carmen to get so worked up all day was the same thing that had brought her round to Calverley Row that evening. She had been out shopping during the day. Had she heard something then, perhaps? If so, from whom? And what could it have been?
Matthew, thinking these thoughts on the way to school, frowned in concentration. Something was wrong here. Auntie Connie had said she had been shopping. But what day had it been when she was killed? He was sure that there was school next day because he had missed the morning through exhaustion. But earlier on the day of her death he had been working in the garden—which was how he had come to leave the carving knife on the kitchen windowsill. Surely Carmen had been killed on a Sunday. If so, she had probably not been shopping but doing something else. Had that something else, whatever it was, led to her making one more attempt to find out what was going on in Calverley Row?
And then there was the question of Rob. Rob had been at a darts match. Matthew didn’t know a great deal about pubs, but it seemed to him likely that if he had been playing in a darts match it would have been very difficult for him to disappear for a while, whereas if he had merely been watching it . . .
The next weekend, on a sunny Saturday, Matthew dived into the cupboard under the stairs, rummaged around and emerged with an old dartboard and a set of darts. He had sometimes played with his father in the past, though Annie had never liked the game and kept the younger children well away. So now he played on his own in a rather desultory fashion until he heard Rob and Grace at the back door, paying a regular visit. Then he began playing Round the Clock with more enthusiasm.
“That’s a lovely game,” said Rob, coming out before long. “Keep at it and you’ll be a champion.”
“Beat you at Round the Clock,” said Matthew, handing him the darts.
“Oh, I’m a dreadful player. I haven’t got the eyesight. But it’s a fine game to watch.”
When Rob was still on seven while Matthew had gone all round the clock, there was little doubt in the boy’s mind that Rob had merely been watching a darts game on the night that Carmen died.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Learys
“DAD’S A LOT WORSE,” said Jamie, pushing back a stray lock from his nearly grown-up face, “a whole lot worse.”
“So you said in your letter,” said Annie, her face concerned over the big pot of tea they had brewed. “I would have come to help if I could. What sort of worse?”
“It started—oh—a couple of months ago, just when Auntie Connie got sick. Maybe the two are connected. I suppose in a way she jollied him along, kept him up to the mark. First of all, he gave up his rug-making.”
“There will be rejoicing in Wilton, and Allah will be praised throughout the realms of Persia,” said Matthew.
They all laughed. Laughing when the subject of their father came up had been a familiar form of release for them for many years now. They sometimes felt guilty about it, but how could they feel love or loyalty for someone who had never meant a great deal in their lives and was now nothing but a millstone?
“We were throwing them away at the end,” said Jamie. “It was funny: It was as if he couldn’t physically manage it any more and didn’t care, either. It didn’t distress him; he just seemed to slip further and further back—regress, that’s the word, isn’t it? Then he couldn’t seem to take care of himself, even to the extent he used to.”
“By the time I left home he could be relied on at least to bathe himself,” said Matthew, “except that he’d stay in forever if we’d let him.”
“That went, then I had to wash him, then—well, I won’t go into the other things, they’re too nasty. You’ll have to go in and see him. But the fact is he seems to have lost all control of himself and all will to live.”
“He never had much of that,” said Annie. “Not after Mum died. Sad that you have no memories of how he was before.”
“I’m sadder I have no memories of Mum,” said Jamie. “But Auntie Connie’s been my mother. I couldn’t have had a better. Dad has just, well, always been there. A fact.” He smiled. “You know, I think when I was young I thought it was a normal fact of life, as if everyone had one.”
“What about the social services?” asked Matthew. “Have you been along and told them the situation?”
Jamie spread out his hands in a gesture of helplessness.
“You know how it is these days. Stretched to the limits and beyond. Local government cutbacks all round. Even Mrs O’Connor couldn’t get any help for us.”
“For you,” said Annie. “You’ve had it all to do.”
“Oh, it’s only in the last few days that Auntie Connie has got really helpless. . . . Mrs O’Hara has been very good, and several others from church.” He looked at his watch. “Greg should be here soon. He said his train got in about four.”
“How is he?”
“Overworked and underpaid, if you believe him. He says selling properties in the Northeast is like trying to sell ice-makers in Siberia. He had to grovel to get permission to come down. They said the deathbed of an aunt didn’t warrant time off.”
“She really was a mother to you two,” said Matthew. “Do you think we should go up and see her before Greg comes? I mean, just in case?”
“I know she wants to see us all together,” said Jamie. “I’ll just nip up and see how she is—just in case, like you say.”
There was an expression of great tenderness on his face as he left the kitchen and mounted the stairs with a hurdler’s litheness. When he came down he said she was sleeping.
• • •
What had impressed Matthew and Annie back in 1979 was, in fact, Auntie Connie’s energy. She was not a young woman then and seemed to them positively an old one, but she apparently needed very little rest or sleep. If she was watching television with them or listening to the radio in the kitchen, she was always doing something else as well—knitting, sewing, darning, peeling potatoes or slicing beans. From the moment she took over the house in Calverley Row, the routine of the household, including the tending of their father, went like clockwork.
That didn’t mean that the children didn’t have their own tasks and duties. That was what they were used to as older children, and that was what they would have wanted, given the choice. Auntie Connie relied on them particularly for shopping, for she never relented over the car; and it was some years before Matthew c
ould pass his driving test—which he did when he was eighteen, triumphantly at the first attempt. About a year after she came, pressed for time, Matthew and Annie went across the field to the supermarket. Any disturbance to the turf had long since grown over, so they had difficulty identifying where they had buried Carmen. “Sheep aren’t really so terrifying after all,” Annie said, when they got home. After that they always took the field route and sometimes took Greg and Jamie with them—the innocent, unconscious bystanders at Carmen’s death.
The beautiful regularity and efficiency of the domestic routine in Calverley Row left Matthew and Annie with quite a lot of spare time to pursue their own interests. They soon caught up with their classmates at school, so the work that Auntie Connie decreed over the summer paid off. Annie’s outside interests, apart from ballet, were mainly domestic: She was already training for the housewifely role she was destined (and wanted) to fill—a role that was becoming old-fashioned in the early eighties. She took lessons in sewing and dressmaking from Mrs Harcourt and also helped Auntie Connie to redecorate the house. Matthew played football energetically and successfully, but he also penetrated further and further into the philatelic mysteries that fascinated Peter Leary. That meant he could spend quite a lot of time in the Leary household.
On the surface it was a household not unlike his own before the death of their mother. After Peter came Sally, the girl in Annie’s year at school, and after her came Martin, a lively boy of nine.
“When I found out what was making them come,” said their father, on one of his rare appearances when Matthew was around, “I made sure I stopped it.” And he added rather pugnaciously, “priests or no bloody priests.”
Matthew thought that rather an unpleasant thing to say when his children were around, calculated to make them feel unwanted. His mother had always been careful what she said when pregnant, though the older children had known that the last pregnancy was unplanned and unwanted, as well as medically inadvisable. The remark was typical of Jim Leary, however. He made no effort to be loved.
But mostly Jim was an absent force in the household, being either on duty at the fire station or sleeping when he had been on the night shift. Then the house was unnaturally quiet, all the children being old enough to honour the house rules.
“Dad’s got a heavy hand,” said Peter, which again shocked Matthew. He had to admit that his dad, with all his faults and inadequacies, had never struck any of his children.
Mrs Leary was a dumpy body, someone whose attractions had long faded and whose life was now centred on bringing up her family, feeding and clothing them on a smallish income, setting them a good example and keeping them on the straight and narrow. In this she was not unlike Ellen Heenan, and she was similarly successful. Matthew took to the family at once, and recognised it as a nice, normal unit, one he could fit into without any feeling of strangeness. Beneath her comfortable exterior, Bridget Leary had a steely backbone: If she said a thing was to be done, it was done; if she said something was out of the question, the matter was never raised again. Matthew not only recognised the pattern from his own life; he knew instinctively that it was a pattern that could be replicated in millions of working-class homes over the centuries: the mother as ruler, arbiter and moral centre of family life. It was a pattern which Annie, when she married in 1987, began unconsciously repeating in her own family life.
In such a unit the father can come to seem something of an intrusion. Ellen Heenan had never allowed that to happen in her family, helped by the bluff good nature of her husband. When he was home there were usually laughter and uproarious physical games. Matthew thought that would probably be how it was with Rob and Grace if they were ever to have a family. But in the Leary family Jim was unquestionably some kind of outsider. Matthew wondered whether this was because he seemed seldom to be there, whether his wife had tried to sideline him after his affair with Carmen O’Keefe, or whether there was something in him that kept him apart, made him the odd man out in the family, as Dermot, until he went mad, had never been.
It was months before Matthew could make up his mind on this because he didn’t see enough of Peter’s father to judge. The first thing he decided was that when he was around, and only then, Jim Leary was the head of the family in the sense that what he said went—without disobedience or even questioning. No doubt the heaviness of his hand had something to do with this. If the family was sitting around in the evening watching television, Jim might suddenly get up and say, “Bloody rubbish. Can’t hear myself think,” and turn it off. There was no appeal against this, and none of the children would attempt one. Bridget would say something like “It was pretty silly, wasn’t it?” and the children would turn back to books or games or, in the case of Matthew and Peter, the pile of stamp albums in the sideboard.
When Jim said he needed to “hear himself think” what he meant as often as not was that he wanted to do his football pools or study the racing columns of the Sun. Matthew gathered from Peter that his mother was kept on a rigid amount for all the household expenses, and the rest of his wage was inalienably Jim’s to spend as he liked on beer or small-time gambling. He didn’t smoke, needing to keep fit for his job; but this didn’t stop him from enjoying a pint or two regularly at his local. His big pleasure was not drinking but betting, and the nearest he came to being in a good humour was when he had had a win on a horse. Then he might—but more probably would not—add a 50p coin to his children’s pocket money.
He regarded his elder son’s stamp collecting as a form of gambling and approved of it for that reason.
“One day you’ll come up with a penny black,” he would say to Peter, “in one of those job lots you get from the dealers. Then all our fortunes will be made.”
“Bloody fool,” said Peter privately to Matthew. “The penny black’s the only rare stamp he’s heard of. If I did get hold of one I’d keep quiet about it till I was well away from him. I’d let my mother have her share, but I wouldn’t let him get his hands on it.”
“Do you hate him?” Matthew asked naively.
“I despise him,” said Peter, not grandly but stating a fact. “He’s nothing.”
It was perhaps this attitude in his children that led Bridget Leary to support her husband in his assertions of parental authority. He had irretrievably damaged his standing with his affair—or was it affairs?—but her bolstering of him was an attempt to glue the family structure together again. It was not reciprocated. When she was not around, her husband would speak of her with something like contempt. “Your mother’s in the grip of the priests,” he would say. “By heck, what are they to have silly women hanging on their every word?” Or he would characterise her as a blinkered person with no wider vision: “Your mother’s happy just grubbing along day by day,” he said to his daughter Sally in Matthew’s hearing. “Her eyes are on the ground, and she can’t lift them to the horizon. Now I’m not like that.” What vision he saw in the skyscape he never revealed, but Matthew suspected it was a big win on the pools.
The remark about priests was in line with one of his constant themes, the scorn of religion. “What’s religion ever done for mankind, beyond setting them fighting one another?” he asked in one of his grander philosophical forays. “Church? That’s for women. They like men with no balls,” he would say if the question of churchgoing came up. That was a crudely expressed version of Dermot Heenan’s attitude, which Matthew had always found puzzling. If religion was true, it was true for all men as well as women, surely? “If I want lectures on what I can and can’t do,” was another version of the same thought, “I wouldn’t go to someone who’s never done it in his life.”
This sneering at the church was part of a constant pattern of denigrating his wife and women in general. It was done on a barroom level, but forceful and unremitting. Peter told Matthew it had been going on for as long as he could remember but had got particularly bad since she had forced him to church and confession after his affair with Carmen O’Keefe.
“H
ow did she do that?” Matthew asked.
“Sheer force of personality. Oh, she did threaten now and then to leave him, but he knew that if the family broke up it wouldn’t be her doing. No, she just insisted—not nagging, but being firm. He’s a bully, but he’s got no staying power. In the end he caved in and went.”
But having caved in he got his revenge in those mean little jabs at her religion and her attitude to life, which had by now become a monotonous refrain. It was a happy little family when he was not there, edgy and watchful when he was. Peter said he couldn’t wait to get out of it.
“After all, Mother doesn’t need my protection,” he said. “If I stayed I’d want to take him on, and that would upset her more than anything.”
There was no way, Matthew had to admit eventually, that Jim Leary was ever going to talk about his affair with Carmen O’Keefe. Merely to approach the subject would be to invite an aggressive response, perhaps a violent one. And even if he had been other than the limited, very physical man that he was, how could one bring up the subject of an affair he had had with the father of a school friend?
One day in the early spring of 1980 Matthew said to Peter, “Aren’t you going to be seventeen soon?”
“Yeah, in June. Why?”
“You can get a provisional driving licence then.”
“I know. I suppose I could. But driving doesn’t grab me the way it does some kids.”
“You could get a car.”
“Buy one? Where would I find the money for a car?”
“Trade some stamps. You’ve got some quite valuable ones there even if you don’t have a penny black.”
Masters of the House Page 15