All day she had waited for him to come but it was only after dinner when the whole house seemed to be asleep that there was a soft knock on her door and Edward slipped into the room. He didn’t look at Patricia or the baby but sidled over to the other side of the room.
Patricia spoke in a whisper so as not to wake Elizabeth.
‘You knew about this baby?’ She was standing at the foot of the bed, while Edward sat slumped, eyes on the floor, in the chair by the wardrobe. He remained silent.
‘Did you really think that if you gave me a baby, I wouldn’t want to leave this prison? Are you serious? That’s what you thought?’
Edward twisted his head from left to right.
‘It was Mammy. She said—’
Patricia wanted to scream so badly that she clasped her hands over her mouth. Edward groaned and wrapped his arms around his head.
Patricia moved forward and knelt before him.
‘Edward.’ She tried to sound as reasonable and calm as she could. ‘We have to get this baby back to where it belongs. I don’t know where you got it, but she must go back. This is serious.’ Silence. ‘Are you listening? Do you understand, Edward?’
She placed a hand on his knee and he looked up, catching her eye for the first time. ‘She’s mine,’ he said in the softest of whispers.
Patricia wasn’t sure if she’d heard him correctly. ‘What? Your baby?’
‘I’m her father.’ His voice sounded dry and matter of fact.
It felt as if all the air had been sucked from the room. How was this possible? It wasn’t possible. Edward was lying. He must be. How could they have kept a baby, a crying baby, hidden all this time? Then it came to her, like putting a name to a face or turning a corner to find you weren’t lost after all: she remembered the pink soother. The one she had found in the other bedroom. She had forgotten all about it. Maybe he was telling the truth.
‘Where has she been, Edward? Why didn’t I hear her?’
Edward seemed less distracted now. He knew the answers to these questions.
‘A neighbour. Mrs Lynch had her.’
‘But the mother, Edward. There must be a mother, who is she?’
He simply stared for a moment and Patricia wondered if he had decided to stop speaking but then he ran his tongue over his top lip and said, ‘I was married before.’
Patricia immediately wanted to correct him. He sounded as if he genuinely believed that they were married, but she resisted.
‘All right. But where is she? Who is she?’
He leaned forward and took Patricia’s hand.
‘Mary.’ There was something in his tone that suggested that Patricia was supposed to know this fact already.
‘Mary?’ she repeated.
‘Every bush, every bower, every wild Irish flower, it reminds me of my Mary on the banks of the Lee.’
Patricia dropped his hands and sat back. The song they had shared on the bridge. That moment, which she had found romantic, he thought had been his way of telling her about his wife.
‘Edward …’ She was at a loss for words. The workings of his mind were a mystery to her, she didn’t know where to start, how to explain her feelings so that he might understand.
‘I thought that was just the old song, Edward. I couldn’t have known that Mary was your wife.’ She paused and looked at his impassive face. ‘Do you see?’
‘She died,’ was his simple response.
Patricia thought of the rest of the song. Of course she was dead. For a moment she felt sorry for the crumpled man in front of her but then she remembered the baby. Tiny Elizabeth in her basket. This wife hadn’t passed away years ago.
‘When did Mary die, Edward?’
‘Last year. The end of last year.’
Patricia froze and deliberately tried to slow her breathing down. She could feel panic bubbling in her chest.
‘But Edward … Edward, you wrote to me late last year, so …’
‘It was Mammy’s idea,’ he said quietly.
Patricia turned away. She couldn’t look at him. At last the madness was explained. Edward didn’t want a wife, Elizabeth needed a mother. Edward was still speaking.
‘Mammy thought nobody would want me if they knew from the start that I had a baby. That’s why I didn’t tell you. She said you’d fall in love with Elizabeth once you met her, once you held her.’
As if to prove Mrs Foley wrong, Elizabeth chose that moment to squirm under her blankets and then let out a night-shattering cry. Edward immediately sat up with a look of panic. He clearly hadn’t spent much time around his baby daughter. Patricia didn’t know what to do. She desperately wanted to ignore the baby, not allow Edward or his mother to think for one moment that their plan might be working, but at the same time, the one blameless party in this whole twisted scheme was the baby. Why should she be made to suffer? Patricia picked Elizabeth up and began to pace around the room.
She looked down at Edward and spoke sternly. ‘I’m doing this because somebody has to. Go and get her a bottle. Your mother said she’d left some out downstairs.’
He got up to go, but paused by the door. ‘Do I need to heat it up or anything?’
‘I don’t think so. She drank cold milk earlier so she mustn’t mind it.’
Edward left her and the baby. Patricia rocked her gently in her arms while she made shushing sounds. Elizabeth continued to make it very clear that she needed to be fed.
Patricia looked down at the little red face and was relieved to not be worrying about some distraught mother wailing over an empty pram. At least this was her home and Edward was her father. She realised that the person she still needed to be worried about was herself. She was the one who needed to be rescued, not this baby.
Edward burst back into the room brandishing the bottle as if returning to the front with orders from a general.
‘Here you go.’
‘Thanks.’ Patricia sat in the chair that Edward had been occupying and Elizabeth vigorously latched herself to the rubber teat. Her father sat on the bed. The baby’s hunger and now her happy rhythmic sucking seemed to act as a balm on the room. Neither Edward nor Patricia felt nearly as stressed and upset as they had just a few minutes earlier.
‘She needed that,’ Edward said with an admiring grin, as if eating was a talent.
‘She did,’ Patricia agreed and then they sat in silence for a few minutes. She watched Edward watching Elizabeth.
‘How did she die?’
‘Mary? She died giving birth to that one.’
Patricia absorbed this information looking down at the baby slurping happily, oblivious to all the sadness and pain she had been born into.
‘She started to bleed and they couldn’t stop it. By the time the ambulance came it was too late. She was gone.’
Patricia couldn’t help but have some sympathy for this man. He wasn’t a bad person, just naïve. Too innocent to live in this world, especially with his life being dictated by his mother. Patricia wondered if Mary had been held against her will.
‘How did you meet Mary?’ she asked, trying to disguise her suspicions.
‘Just by chance, and we hit it off.’
Edward wasn’t lying. It was true, they had met by chance but that wasn’t the whole story or even their first encounter.
What he didn’t say was that they had been connected many years before. When he saw her behind the counter in the chemist’s Edward hadn’t recognised her at first. She was just a woman dressed in black standing at the dispensary. He had asked for the regular prescription of the pills his mother had been on since James drowned. It had been Mary who had noticed him.
‘Edward?’ she had asked uncertainly, a smile brightening up her thin, pale face. Suddenly he saw the ghost of a young girl he had known.
‘Mary?’
They spoke then. She told him about her new job, there in the chemist’s. The grandmother who had raised her had passed away so she thought it was time to make her own way in the world. She as
ked about Mrs Foley and Edward found it wasn’t painful to talk to her. The words came easily. He was enjoying himself.
A stranger might have seen a man and a woman shyly flirting across a counter but what drew them together that day wasn’t a physical attraction or romantic chemistry. What connected them was what they had shared. They had both lost James. Mary had been his girlfriend at the time of the accident and his death had affected her deeply. At the funeral, despite her youth, she’d taken on the role of de facto widow and people shared their sympathy with her in almost the same way they did with the family. She had taken to wearing black and vowed to never love another.
So many years had passed, but in each other’s company they felt alive. They understood one another because they both knew what they had lost. Edward found that he had invited her out to the farm one Sunday; his mother would like to see her. This was true. Mrs Foley had always been fond of Mary. James had begun to get himself a bit of a reputation locally with the girls so it was a relief to his mother when he started to go steady with someone. She went out of her way to praise Mary. ‘A grand capable girl,’ was her seal of approval.
Edward hadn’t really expected her to say yes, but one Sunday, not too long after the meeting in the chemist’s, she was sitting at the kitchen table dunking the Marietta biscuits she had brought into her tea. Conversation had been general. The farm, her grandmother’s passing, the new job, but soon the talk had turned to James.
Edward and his mother never spoke of the missing brother and son, but the presence of Mary in the house gave them permission. They feasted on memories of the young man they had all adored, but there had been no tears. They laughed about the time he hadn’t put the hand brake on and the car had ended up blocking the entrance to the Garda barracks in Clonteer, the way he had named all the cows after the neighbours, how Dora the collie had continued to sleep on one of his old jumpers till death had claimed her too.
They arranged to meet again. A film in Clonteer. A walk along the headland on a Sunday. These weren’t referred to as dates, but they knew they didn’t want to lose each other. When Edward had kissed her it was as if a spark of James had been reignited. In truth, their brief little romance wasn’t with each other, it was a celebration of a love they shared. Asking her to marry him seemed like the right thing to do, for his mother, for Castle House, for James.
Sometimes it was hard to recall, but there had been happy times. Mary stepping her way carefully across the fields, her belly growing, a picnic lunch for them to be shared sheltering against a high hedge. The three of them sitting around after dinner talking about the future. Old Mrs Foley had picked the site for her bungalow and she had found a design she liked from the book of plans. The sound of Mary’s breathing when he woke in the night. The smell of her hair fanned out on the pillow next to his. Castle House had been transformed. It had all seemed too good to be true.
Her death had been unbearable. Cruel beyond endurance. It was like having to say goodbye to James all over again. Mary had been the keeper of the past. Losing her meant letting go of any hope of happiness. He still remembered shivering on the rocks on the far side of the paddock while the ambulance took her body away. He slipped back into a state of guilt and sadness like someone returning wearily to an unmade bed. The future, any future, had seemed impossible to imagine as he stared into the starless night.
His mother had changed overnight. This time, however, it wasn’t like when they had lost James. Back then she had disappeared into a dark place barely able to get out of bed. Edward had dropped out of school to look after the farm but there was no one to look after him. He had lived on sandwiches for months, until Mrs Lynch from the Co-op had advised him to call out the doctor. The pills had helped. His mother had left her room, and cleaned and cooked. True, she seemed distracted, almost sleepwalking through her days, but for Edward it was an improvement. When Mary had come on the scene for that couple of years, it was as if he had got his mother back; the woman who made decisions, the woman who took on tasks and completed them, the woman who knew exactly what to do. When Mary had died the change that came over Mrs Foley was different; it was a far more subtle shift. She didn’t retreat into the darkness of her room, but became strangely driven. She couldn’t allow this fresh tragedy to destroy them. She had seen Edward happy and she refused to accept that it was over. Mary could be replaced. A new woman would be found. A wife and mother. Castle House would be a home again. She could make that happen. It was as if she was willing a future for Edward into being.
Her plan had not been presented as a suggestion. It was simply what they were going to do. Giving the new baby away had been the hardest thing, but Edward knew he was in no state to take care of his daughter by himself, and so if that was what his mother said they should do, he didn’t really have a choice.
Mrs Foley had read out the ads from the Journal and between them they had chosen three to reply to. Patricia was the only one that wrote back. She couldn’t have known it as she sat at the kitchen table in Buncarragh, chewing the top of her pen, but she had sealed her own fate. Mrs Foley seemed to relish reading the letters to Teddy, and would often write and rip up two or three replies before she was satisfied and read them aloud for her son’s approval. His mother’s confidence in the plan meant that there was no turning back. He didn’t dare tell her just how excruciating the dates were, but his mother must have guessed. She knew her son and his many limitations, but she also believed that he was a good man and any woman would be lucky to call themselves his wife. The end justified the means.
Elizabeth had begun to cry and the pungent smell that filled the room suggested the reason why. Patricia rolled the changing mat out on the floor, and placed the squirming little girl in the centre of it. Edward knelt on the floor beside her and handed her a clean nappy from the pile that his mother had provided earlier.
‘Can you put some warm water in that?’ Patricia asked, handing him a plastic basin. Edward got to his feet and left the room.
Elizabeth lay on her back impatiently cycling an imaginary bike. Her face was raspberry-red and her cries were becoming more insistent. Patricia could hear the tap running across the landing.
‘I hope I’m doing this right,’ she said, almost to herself.
‘Looks good to me,’ Edward commented, coming back in with the basin.
‘There is some difference between how you fold them. I think for girls you put the pins on the side.’
When Patricia peeled the old nappy off, she and Edward both recoiled in horror from the smell. It was shocking that something so toxic had come out of such a sweet little creature. They laughed and for a moment Patricia was lost in her task, making sure her tiny charge was clean and comfortable. Edward was watching her and the baby, and a contented grin had spread across his face. Catching sight of his expression, Patricia scolded him.
‘Don’t think this is working. Your mother’s loony plan is not going to work. I’m caring for this little one only because I have to. She needs somebody, but I must go, Edward. You know that, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘You need to speak to your mother. You have to talk sense into her. Will you do that for me, Edward? Will you?’
He just nodded his head slowly.
Elizabeth, with her fresh nappy, was back in her knitted dress and booties and gurgling happily. Patricia picked her up and held her out to Edward, who took her gingerly and held her in the crook of his arm. There was something about seeing a father holding his daughter that seemed so perfect. The baby had grabbed hold of one of his fingers and Edward was swinging her arm from side to side.
‘You’re a lucky man.’
Edward didn’t look up from his daughter. ‘I don’t feel it.’
‘That little girl has lost her mother. She has been through so much. I need to leave soon, Edward. Soon.’
The baby turned her tiny head towards Patricia, then smiled and seemed to wave.
NOW
A bank of fog sat plump
and solid out at sea, obscuring the horizon. Elizabeth was sitting on the low stone wall in front of Castle House worrying about haemorrhoids. She could hear her mother’s voice. ‘Don’t sit on that cold stone, you’ll give yourself piles.’ Growing up it had seemed to Elizabeth that her mother believed the world was out to get her. ‘Don’t leave the house with that wet hair.’ ‘It’s not an hour since your lunch, you can’t swim yet.’ ‘Stop leaning against the storage heater, you’ll curl your spine.’ She had rolled her eyes and silently mocked her stupid mother for spending her life in a constant state of worry and fear. Now here she was outside this house with its blank windows and sagging gutters, wondering what had happened to her mother here. Why had she fled, leaving her husband behind? She knew so much more about her past than she had a few days before, but the mystery as to what had actually gone on in this house forty-four years ago seemed deeper than ever.
After leaving old Mrs Lynch’s house she felt completely disorientated, almost sick. The seismic shift in everything she had always believed to be true had hit her with such unexpected force. She sat in her car and allowed it to almost drive itself back to her birthplace. At least that much was the truth.
The kettle had been reboiled and more tea made before Elizabeth had managed to get her shuddering sobs under control. Handfuls of paper towels turned to pulp by her tears and snot sat on the table in front of her. Mrs Lynch couldn’t stop apologising, as if somehow it was her decision to rewrite history.
The two women had held hands and slowly more of her history had been revealed. Her mother, the woman who had given birth to her, had been called Mary. Everyone had been delighted when Edward had found her after living alone with his mother and the memory of his dead brother for so long. When news emerged of the pregnancy people were happier still. The dark past of Castle House was over, and the Foleys could look to a future filled with new life.
A Keeper Page 18
