There was a short silence while both concentrated on their cigars, then Dick said, ‘I saw one of your advertisements in a magazine today; your Nan tells me it was your idea to have shopping by mail.’
‘Most of the ideas are mine. I just let her think she’s running the business.’
‘Pretty smart.’
Nick made a gesture to show that he agreed. ‘So … what have you been doing with yourselves while you’ve been in York?’
‘Nothing much, just going round the old haunts. It’s changed a bit.’
‘I expect it will have. How long do you plan to be here for?’
‘We haven’t fixed a definite return date. We’ll probably stay for a couple of months.’
Nick lifted his right leg, resting its ankle on his left knee, and nodded.
Dickie stared for a while at the young face opposite. If he needed more evidence than Peggy’s word that this was his son – and he did, for she had been a promiscuous slut – then he had it here in the Feeney blue eyes which held his scrutiny without flinching. He wondered how this fine young man could evolve from such a sordid coupling as his and Peggy’s. It had meant absolutely nothing to him, had been just another tumble, how could it yield such a son when the loving union shared by himself and Dusty remained barren?
On impulse, he leaned forward. ‘Look, Nick, I want to …’
The young man forestalled him, still seated in casual pose. ‘I don’t expect any explanation.’
Dickie rolled the cigar between his fingers, meditating over this. ‘Don’t expect, or don’t want?’ Receiving only a phlegmatic shrug, he added, ‘I couldn’t blame ye if you were hostile towards me. I can’t understand why you’re not. I know I would be in your position.’
‘What reason do I have to feel hostile?’ Nick’s free hand scratched the ankle which rested on his knee.
‘Me clearing out an’ leaving my brother to act the father.’
Nick unhooked his leg now and sat forward, too. His face was serious. ‘Let’s clear up a few misconceptions: he’s not acting, he is my father. As far back as I can remember he was there taking an interest in me, making sure I was happy. Now as far as I’m concerned, that’s what a father is. I’ve not the slightest interest in biological details, your brother is my father, you are my uncle.’ He rejoined his spine with the hard back of the chair.
After a moment’s perusal, Dick nodded and stuck the cigar between his lips. He had expected some kind of conflict, some show of feeling but the only emotion on his son’s face was that of mild contempt and even this soon blended into the usual fathomless mask. Dickie could not help feeling a certain malice for this apparent indifference and neither could he keep it from his tone. ‘If the relationship was so special it makes me wonder why he left ye behind in your grandparents’ house when he moved to Leeds all those years ago.’
Nick refused to bite a second time, recrossing his legs and making himself appear as relaxed as he could in this chair. ‘There was no question of desertion. Rosie and I were given plenty of opportunity to go with him, but at nine years old it’s surroundings that seem most important. We’d lived here most of our lives, our friends were here… I think it says a hell of a lot for Father that he didn’t force us to go, he knew we’d be happier here. It’s only since I’ve been a father myself that I realise how much it must have hurt him watching us turn to Grandad whenever we wanted something. But despite that and living twenty miles away he was still our father.’ Make no mistake about that, said Nick’s eyes.
‘He’s a lucky fella.’ Not knowing what else to say on the subject, Dickie proffered with a smile, ‘An’ so are you, Nick, that’s a fine-looking woman ye’ve got yourself.’
Nick returned a similar observation, but despite the compliments there was no warmth between them and as soon as the cigars were finished the two rejoined the others, Dick feeling a sense of deflation.
With their arrival, and the announcement of tea-time, it was suddenly noticed that little Paddy had disappeared. ‘Oh, my God!’ Erin clutched at her mouth. ‘If he gets out of the front door he’ll be straight over that road.’ She stood up as if to go and search, infecting Josie with her panic.
Ever calm, Nick bade them sit down. ‘Uncle Dick, will you take a look round the house while I search outside?’
‘He hasn’t got out that way.’ Thomasin pointed at the french windows. ‘They’re still bolted. Little demon, I never saw him go. He’ll probably be down in the kitchen, that’s where they all make for. Liz, you lasses go look upstairs. Erin, stop worrying, will you!’ She gestured forcefully for Erin to sit down while the searchers left the room.
First, Dickie made investigation of the kitchen, gracing Vinnie with one of his smiles and making her blush as he had intended. With the girls pounding from room to room overhead, there were only two other places in the house where Paddy could be. He hoped one of these was not the room containing the coffins. The door of this room was slightly ajar; he hadn’t noticed before. With heart in mouth he crept over the hall and peeped in.
Paddy had lugged a chair up to Pat’s coffin. By standing on its seat he could rest his elbows on the back and see his grandfather, to whom he was now chatting. When Dickie inched nearer he saw that in one hand the little boy clutched a bag, whilst the other hand was trying to feed Patrick with chocolate drops. The corpse’s mouth matched Paddy’s own; a brown sticky ring.
Seized with the simultaneous urge to laugh and cry, Dickie held back for a second. Then, not wanting to shock the boy into falling off the chair, he said softly, ‘Hello, Paddy,’ and moved closer to lift him down.
‘Grandad’s come back from Heaven but he won’t wake up.’ Paddy directed a stained finger.
‘Ssh, let him sleep.’ Dickie carried the child to the door. ‘Ye shouldn’t be in here.’
‘There’s a lady in that one.’ Paddy’s finger indicated the cook’s resting place.
‘I know, don’t wake her up.’
Paddy looked deeply into his uncle’s face, then attempted to press a chocolate drop between the other’s lips. With a strangled chuckle, Dickie opened his mouth to accept it. ‘Thank you!’
Paddy’s responsive beam had a sudden braking effect on the man’s legs. He compared this charming little fellow with the one he was meant to adopt, and damned Fate. It would have been nice to spend a lot longer with the child, but the others would be concerned. So, after opening the front door and calling Nick back from the road, he went back to the drawing room.
While Josie censured her son and confiscated the bag of sweets, Thomasin asked where Dickie had found him. ‘He was in the front with Dad … trying to feed him chocolate drops.’
There was a collective, ‘Aw!’ and not a few damp handkerchiefs.
Sonny sighed. ‘I suppose this means more explanations. God help us.’ After some hesitation, he unbolted the french windows. ‘Come on, Pad, we’ll go for a little walk down the garden.’
‘He’ll need his coat.’ Josie began to rise. ‘And it’s nearly dark out there.’
‘We won’t be that long … I hope.’ Sonny took his son’s hand and stepped out into the twilight, closing the doors behind them.
The family watched the pair wander a short way down the garden, saw Sonny’s arm point to the dead flowers in the border, then at the sky. Paddy stopped walking to crane his head at his father, face searching … then his arms stretched up to be held and Sonny bent to comfort him. When they came back both were distressed. Paddy strained for his mother who enveloped him in a fleshy cradle and rocked him while Sonny blew his nose, at the same time running the handkerchief round his eyes.
With a voice that was gruff, Dickie excused himself. ‘I’ll just go an’ clean Dad up a bit.’
Standing once again in that room of rest, he spat on his handkerchief and dabbed away the smudges of chocolate from his father’s mouth, then tarried there, simply to look. How could you fit all those years into one oak box? All that pride, strength, spirit, sexual passion,
those hopes, dreams … how did they all condense into a few pieces of nailed-together wood? He became fixed with the body of his father on its bed of white satin and felt an overwhelming terror, seeing himself lying there. It seemed mere seconds since he had been sitting on that withered corpse’s knee, listening to a fairytale. The ornate casket with its brass handles and crucifix screamed mortality. Since it had entered the house yesterday it had sprung to every idle thought, given him nightmares.
Tomorrow, when the last person had filed past in respect, the lid would be screwed down and the box lowered into a dank hole in a windswept boneyard … but Dickie would never be rid of it. Never. His gaze was involuntarily drawn to the plainer coffin where lay the dead cook, then with a shudder, he left the room.
7
She wished she could have given him one of his lively Irish wakes, but no one would have understood – oh, maybe Erin and the boys, but not the others. Thomasin followed her husband’s coffin between the rows of black tophats and veils, a son on one arm, a daughter on the other. Behind her trailed Dickie and his wife, behind them Pat’s grandchildren.
‘Isn’t it sickening how you have to wait till you’re dead to see how popular you are,’ she murmured. Every pew in the church was crammed full and some mourners were having to stand at the back. Her comment was not a bitter one, merely an observation on the absurdity of human nature. There were people whom neither she nor Pat had seen for many a year, among them Dominic and Edith Teale, Erin’s parents-in-law. Since her husband Sam’s death when Erin had moved to Peasholme Green, the Teales had seen little of her and Belle; they were not a closely-knit family as were the Feeneys, and Belle had not really looked on them as her grandparents. Indeed, thought Thomasin, the last time they met must have been at Belle’s coming-of-age … almost five years ago. There was nowt so queer as folk. Still, she mustn’t quibble, she would no doubt have been very hurt had none of them turned up to show their respects.
Thomasin suffered the lengthy Requiem Mass in silence, but swore to herself that this was the last time she would enter this church. Afterwards, the black horses with their head plumes carried Patrick to his grave, where the final act was performed, ironically, by Father Gilchrist, a man whom Patrick had detested. The priest, it seemed, was to have the last laugh on Pat by flinging the crumbs of soil onto his coffin lid. Even in midsummer this cemetery was a dreadful place. Today in the bleak and bitter cold of January it filled Thomasin with such intense despair as she had ever felt in her whole life. Was there really a Hereafter or was this the terminus? This bloody, detestable hole.
Nearby were the graves of her parents, William and Hannah Fenton. Somewhere in this place, too, were the bones of all their old Irish friends and Pat’s first wife. But who knew where, with no stone to mark their paupers’ graves. Long ago, when Dickie had died Patrick had bought a family plot where Rosie, too, lay… but Dickie was standing here beside her. For the first time it struck Thomasin that someone else was lying in there with Rosie. While the priest droned on, she began to wonder who he was. He couldn’t have been loved otherwise his family would have come looking for him, would have traced him to that fire years ago. Anger stirred. He was an intruder, shouldn’t be in there – bad enough if he had been any stranger, but to have the man who had committed adultery with Sonny’s wife in the same place as her beloved Pat and Rosie … tears of rage mingled with those of loss, then dried just as quickly in the bitter wind. Too late to do anything about it now. A hand was trying to press something into hers. With a dull look at her daughter she accepted the crumbs of earth and cast them at the hole.
Stop! she wanted to shout. Fetch him up, I’m not having him in there with that wretch! He wanted to be in Ireland … but then she heard Pat’s voice say, ‘No, Tommy, Rosie’s in there. Leave me be an’ let the other fella lie.’
She felt another hand cup her elbow, steering her away from the grave; apparently it was all over. She didn’t feel as if she were here. Her body was, yes, but her mind would not coordinate. She felt like… like she had when she was giving birth to Dickie. The pain had become so bad that her mind, her spirit, had come adrift from her body so that it seemed as if she were watching herself writhing in agony from some point overhead. Strange, to liken the pain of bereavement to that of birth, for with the latter there was a whole new life beginning … but then were the two so dissimilar? At this moment more than any other she yearned for Pat’s surety in a Heaven.
* * *
Home from the cemetery, Thomasin’s mind had returned to her body, but the disorientation continued. Most of these people were family, part of herself and Pat, yet she was assailed by solitude. She was no longer one of a pair. It wasn’t that she thought no one would understand, for Erin had been through widowhood herself; she just could not articulate her grief. How could she talk to her children about how she would miss – already missed – the way his body curled into hers, the way, in his waking moments, he would cup a semi-conscious hand round her breast. Old people didn’t feel like that, or weren’t meant to. She herself had held this view when she had been young, wouldn’t have understood if anyone had tried to tell her. And what did she do when all this was over, when all these people went home? The thought made her so desperately lonely …
A large hand scooped her fingers from where they rested on her lap and squeezed comfortingly. Of all the people she might have expected to see when she turned her head, the last on that list would have been Dickie, the most selfish, the most insensitive, the most callous of her children. ‘You know,’ she said to him, rubbing his skin with a thumb, ‘I keep feeling I’ve done the wrong thing.’ Her eyes searched his handsome face. ‘Your father loved Ireland so much … maybe we should have taken him to be buried there.’
‘Does it matter to him now what happens to his body?’ Once more the old insensitive Dickie, thought Thomasin – but no, his next words surprised her yet again. ‘He’s gone somewhere better.’
‘By … you’ll never cease to amaze me!’ She shook her head in wonderment.
‘Me being the infidel?’ smiled Dickie.
‘D’you really believe that?’
‘That I’m an infidel or that there’s a Heaven? Doesn’t really matter whether I believe or not; Dad thought there was.’
She gave a slow nod of acceptance. ‘Still, I just keep thinking … I mean, he went to Ireland with the intention of dying there.’
‘Did he ask for you to have his body shipped there?’
‘No, neither of us wanted to talk about it. But maybe he was expecting me to know.’
‘If it’d make ye feel better could ye not just take one of his belongings an’ bury it in Ireland? Ye know, something he thought a lot about.’
‘He thought a lot about you but I doubt you’ll be volunteering for premature burial.’ His mother gave a mordant smile and patted his hand. ‘I never realised you were such a sentimental soul, Richard.’
He gave a self-denigrating laugh, but inside he felt quaky and sick. A look at his brother told him that Sonny was experiencing the same crisis, wondering how long it would be before the family was gathered for his funeral, wondering if there was anything afterwards. But added to this was the fact that when he died that was the end, there would be no continuity in his children, for he had none. He jerked his mind from such depressing thoughts. ‘Ye know, there’s something missin’ here. I seem to recall that Erin used to play the harp at all the old wakes.’
‘You’ve a good memory,’ said Thomasin; they had made the split from the Irish community thirty years ago, since when the harp had rarely been used for the same purpose. She peered around. ‘Where is your sister? It’s a good idea of yours. Go find her and tell her to give us a nice tune.’
Dickie went off to seek Erin, coming across her staring from the window of their father’s den in a pose of misery. ‘Hey, Sis, go an’ fetch the harp an’ give us a tune.’
She responded with derision. ‘I’ll play nothing for you!’ then pushed herself sulle
nly from the window and flounced off. ‘But I will play for my father.’
The harp was fetched and those funeral guests who had not seen it before remarked on the beauty of its carving.
‘It was the only possession my husband brought with him when the famine drove him from Ireland,’ explained Thomasin quietly as Erin got ready to play. ‘He could never master it himself, though I understand his father was very talented. Apparently, it had been handed down through the generations.’ Here she smiled, recalling Pat’s opinion on the harp’s ancestry, then sat back to enjoy the haunting music, remembering all the other times it had been played, both happy and sad. And with the plaintive melody came a decision; she would visit Ireland and take something of Pat’s. She knew the name of the place where he had been born; someone would give her directions. In fact, she decided, they would all go.
* * *
The old cook’s funeral in the afternoon was a much less crowded affair and the service not so lengthy as Patrick’s Catholic one. Even so, it was torture to have to stand once more in that chilly graveyard. Afterwards, when they were warming their hands round cups of tea and waiting for the arrival of the solicitor who would be reading Pat’s will, Thomasin spoke of her plan. ‘I think your father would have wanted you all to see where this family began; not in the slums of Britannia Yard but in a place of beauty.’
Erin was quick to respond. ‘I’d love to go. I wanted to go with Dad … but o’ course, we all know now why he refused to take me.’ She had been so angry about that, had called him all sorts of names, for which she was now suffering guilt ‘Should we wait till it’s a bit warmer?’ Another pang: those were the words she had spoken to her father.
Thomasin was averse to raising the subject of her own death, but Pat’s demise had shown her how quickly time sneaked up on one. ‘I have to face it, Erin, I might not last much longer myself – o’ course I could live another twenty years,’ she said with a chirpy tilt of her head, ‘but … who knows? It’s best if we arrange it for as soon as we can all make the trip. I’m not talking about a long holiday, just a little trip there and back. Two or three days should be adequate. I know Belle isn’t here, Erin, but there’s nothing to stop you taking her yourself some day. I have to grab my chance while I can. What do the rest of you think?’
Dickie (Feeney Family Sagas Book 4) Page 13
