The Carmel Sheehan Story

by Jean Grainger

  Chapter 20

  Catriona and David were speechless. The silence hung heavily between them all.

  ‘But... But, Tim, we can’t do that.’ Catriona was struggling to articulate. ‘This is your land, your family’s land, and no matter what the situation, we have to pay you for it...’

  Tim leaned over and put his hand on hers. ‘Please, I’m quite sure this is what I want to do. I’m quite wealthy, I own my own house, and I have everything I need. I’ve travelled all over the world, and now that I’m getting on in life, my needs are fewer. You’re young, just starting out in life, and I like the sound of what you’re doing—the farmer’s market and sustainable farming and all of that. Brian, that was my partner, he died last year, was a great gardener, he’d love that idea as well. So, consider it a donation, whatever you want to call it.’

  He saw the confusion on their faces—Brian was his partner?

  ‘It’s a long, sad story, but in a nutshell, I’m gay, that’s why my father threw me out. I got married and had a family, but for obvious reasons it didn’t work out. And then, luckily, I met Carmel’s uncle, Brian, and we were together for many years. I want to do this. My children are grown up and don’t want anything to do with me. Your family looked after my parents, and seeing that flower garden today… I planted that with my friend Kitty Lynch the summer before I was sent away. I thought my father hated me, hated what I was, and my mother never really connected with me either once I left. So I lived all my life thinking they never cared about me. But they did care. They looked after that garden, and that must mean something.’ Tears shone in the old man’s eyes.

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ David said. ‘Your friend Kitty Lynch, how old would she be now?’

  ‘Same age as me, I suppose, maybe a bit younger? Mid to late eighties. Why?’

  ‘Because I think your Kitty Lynch is my grandaunt. She lived here all her life. Her nephew Donal is my dad. She’s the only Kitty Lynch in the parish, to my knowledge.’

  ‘And is she still alive?’ Tim asked. This day was proving more and more amazing.

  ‘Oh, indeed she is, hale and hearty. She’s a bit of a character, never married or anything, but she’s been all over the world. She lived in America for years and then in South Africa. I can take you to meet her if you like?’

  ‘If she is the same Kitty, I’d like that very much,’ Tim said quietly. ‘I owe her an apology, and it’s long overdue.’

  There was a moment of silence, and then Tim perked up again.

  ‘Now back to the deal! Are we on? I’ll instruct the local solicitor here to draw up all the necessary paperwork. You two can take care of the fees for that and any other technical things that need to be done, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s all yours.’

  Catriona’s eyes filled up with tears. ‘I can’t believe it. Are you certain this is what you want to do? It seems too much, and I don’t want you to feel like we pressured you and regret it afterwards. And, I mean, what about your family? I know they’ve said they don’t want it, but when they hear you’ve given it away to strangers, they’ll be furious, surely?’

  ‘Catriona, David, listen to me,’ Tim said seriously. ‘My children don’t even know this place exists. Their mother made sure that they have no sense of being half-Irish, so you need have no worries on that score. Nothing about Ireland, Mayo, or me holds even the slightest interest for them. As for me regretting it, I don’t do regrets, I just don’t. Life is for living, and I’m grateful to be in a position where I might be able to make a real difference to someone. So please just accept it. Will you?’ He gazed from her face to his.

  David stood up, walked around to the side of the table where Tim sat, and stretched out his hand. ‘Thank you very much, Tim. My family will always be in your debt. And if we can ever do anything for you, anything at all, then please just get in touch. And that garden will always be looked after. I promise.’

  Tim shook his hand, and Catriona joined them and kissed Tim’s cheek. ‘Thank you, Tim. You don’t know what this means to us.’

  Tim put his arms around both of them, and Carmel had to wipe away a tear.

  They drove in the hired car behind Catriona and David on the way back into Westport. They were taking Tim to meet Kitty again.

  ‘How do you feel now?’ Carmel asked.

  ‘Oh, Carmel, I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t. Seeing the wild flower garden stirred up so many emotions in me. Like, he tended that so lovingly, for so long, they both did, and that touches me deeply, but then it’s such a bloody waste! If they did love me still, why couldn’t they put pen to paper and write to me? They knew how to contact me. I wrote to them, sent Christmas cards and all of that, I gave them an address they could contact me at—a priest, actually, he was very good to me. I waited and waited for a reply, but nothing ever came. It was as if I was dead. And now I find out they looked after my garden, I can’t help but think they saw it as tending a grave, except I was alive and desperately wanting their love. Those first months in London were the worst of my life. I honestly thought about suicide so often. Nobody wanted me; I felt I was alone in the world.’

  ‘I can imagine what meeting Brian must have felt like,’ Carmel said, ‘someone to love, to feel accepted by. Though the circumstances were different, I do understand, Tim, I really do. I felt like you for so long—unloved, unlovable.’

  ‘I know you understand. And even Marjorie, I mean, it wasn’t a perfect marriage obviously, but she made me feel wanted. And I was so low, so vulnerable, I suppose, I grabbed her with both hands—figuratively, if not literally.’ He gave a sad little smile. ‘She deserved better.’

  ‘Not better, Tim, just different. Try to think of it this way: because of her marriage to you, she has children she dotes on, and grandchildren too, so I’m sure she doesn’t regret being married to you from that point of view. It’s incredibly sad that your kids feel the way they do, but you’ve tried, often, and nothing is budging so it’s time to let it go. Marjorie deserved to be married to a man who could love her, that’s true, but you did not deserve to be frozen out of your children’s lives, so she’s not without blame here either.’

  ‘You’re right, I suppose,’ Tim admitted reluctantly.

  ‘I think when it comes to the pain of the past, we just need to take it out, look at it, not bury it or anything, but then relegate it to where it belongs: in the past. All we have is now, this moment, and regrets and recriminations serve nobody. Not Marjorie, not your parents, not Charles and Rosemary, and most definitely not you. You did your best, and you’ve kept your promise to Marjorie all these years at huge personal cost to you and, in some ways, to Brian, so it’s time to stop beating yourself up about it.’

  He sighed. ‘I’m thinking a lot about Brian today. I wish he was here with me, though he would be saying exactly what you’re saying, I’m sure. He was so strong, so good at dealing with people. I left all of that to him. He used to laugh, saying I could be the nice English gentleman while he got to play the rough Paddy.’

  ‘I don’t know, you managed to put the run on that creep Jim Daly fairly well.’ Carmel grinned.

  ‘He was awful, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Dreadful,’ she agreed. ‘I never saw hair that colour before.’

  ‘And that car. Good lord, what was he thinking?’

  ‘Not much, but men like him really do believe they are God’s gift to women, poor deluded eejit.’ She giggled, and Tim joined in. It helped to lighten the mood.

  ‘So, what will you say to Kitty, if it is the same one?’ Carmel asked, carefully following David and Catriona as they drove effortlessly along the winding country roads. The road was only really the width of one vehicle, and the hedgerows grew high on both sides. She really hoped they didn’t meet a tractor or something. She was getting more confident as a driver, but earlier on, she’d had the trauma of reversing under the gaze of some sixteen-year-old smoking a cigarette while driving a huge combine harvester. She’d managed it, but thinking about it was s
omething that made her come out in a cold sweat. She’d seen it all around the roads of Birr, when she would sit in the back as Bill and Julia sat in the front seats on the way to and from mass. Sometimes the farm machinery was only inches from them as they edged past on the narrow country roads.

  ‘I’ll apologise first anyway,’ Tim decided. ‘I just left, and we were such good friends. I never contacted her again. Those early months in London, I wrote to her, oh, maybe fifty times, but every letter ended up in the bin. I was afraid she’d heard about the incident with Noel in the barn and was disgusted. Things were so different then. There was no understanding whatsoever. And I was worried she really thought we were the makings of a match. She was just another name to put on the list of people I’d let down, so I never got the guts to make contact. Then I met Marjorie, and the one time I mentioned Kitty, she went silent on me for a week, so I never brought her name up again.’

  ‘Isn’t it odd that she never married, like? In those times, it just was what people did. Love, compatibility, political alignment, and all the things people seem to worry about now in relationships didn’t feature really. People just got married, usually to someone local, and stayed married and raised their families. I can never decide who had it easier? Like, their life expectations were so low, but there was a contentment in that. Our life expectations, in our generation, are so high. By reading magazines, you’d be convinced every relationship is doomed nowadays, if you’re not reading the same newspaper, eating the same paleo, sugar-free diet, and swinging from the chandeliers every night of the week.’

  Tim laughed out loud. ‘Carmel, you’re a tonic, honestly, thanks so much for coming today. I couldn’t have managed without you. You’re a great friend, just like Dolly was. I remember one time, when Brian was in the hospital, and there was a problem with my mobile—I don’t know, it’s all a bit Double Dutch to me, Wi-Fi and hop spots and cellular data, it’s like these kids in the phone shop are speaking another language. Anyway, it wasn’t working, and I tried dealing with them but got nowhere, so Dolly grabs me and the phone one day and steams into the Vodafone shop, raises all colours of holy hell, and makes a total show of us. I was mortified, but in the end, they fixed it. She was a lion, honest to God; she was so loyal. And even though she and Brian didn’t agree with her decision to say nothing to Joe about her and about you, we were friends with her. And, oh, did they have some scraps about it, full-on screaming and fighting, but they were cut from the same cloth, well able to stand their ground. They were reared in the same place, where people wore their hearts on their sleeves, and if you had a difference of opinion it often ended with a punch. But it never changed how she felt about us. She loved us, and we loved her. Sometimes, I just can’t believe that, now, here is her daughter, being just as good a friend to me.’

  Carmel loved these stories about her mother. It was as if with each little tale—from Sharif, Tim, Nadia, people in Aashna—another bit of the huge painting that was her mother’s life got coloured in. It was wonderful. She basked in the glow of being needed, as well; there was nothing like the feeling that you’re really helping someone you care about.

  Ahead, David and Catriona were slowing down as they approached the town of Westport. They indicated right up a hill and turned into a lovely development of smallish houses encircling a green area bordered with marigolds. In the centre of the green was a huge rose bed, where a profusion of white roses bloomed.

  ‘It’s like the Irish flag,’ Carmel remarked as they admired it, ‘the green, white and orange.’

  They parked up and got out. A plaque on the wall of the first house told them this was called St Gerald’s Crescent and was an assisted living community for the elderly inhabitants of Westport.

  David and Catriona led them up a little path to one of the houses and knocked on the cardinal-red door.

  It was opened quickly, and a tiny woman stood there. She couldn’t have been more than four-foot-ten, her thinning silver hair tied back in a bun.

  She gazed past her grandnephew and his wife, straight to Tim. She just stood for a long moment, taking him in.

  ‘I don’t know whether to hug you or murder you,’ were her first words.

  ‘I probably deserve the latter, but I would love the former.’ Tim grinned..

  ‘Do you hear him and his plumy English accent!’ Kitty laughed. ‘Come in here to me, Tim O’Flaherty, till I get a good look at you. Come in let ye...’

  David and Catriona exchanged a glance. ‘We’ll leave ye to it, Auntie Kitty,’ David said. ‘We’ve to pick the lads up from the summer camp. But enjoy the visit, and sure I’ll give you a ring later on.’

  ‘Right so, thanks for finding him.’ She patted David on the arm.

  ‘Oh, ’twas he found us, and what’s more, he’s giving us the farm.’ Catriona couldn’t contain her excitement. ‘He’s like a guardian angel.’

  ‘Is he now? Well, isn’t that something?’ Kitty grinned and bade goodbye to the young couple as she ushered Carmel and Tim into a little sitting room.

  Chapter 21

  ‘So, who have I here, besides my long lost friend?’ Kitty enquired.

  ‘This is Carmel Khan,’ Tim said. ‘She’s a friend of mine from London. Well, actually, she’s Irish as well, but we met in London. We’re over here on a kind of a trip around in a bus with Carmel’s family and her husband, so I tagged along.’

  ‘Well, thank God for that,’ Kitty said. ‘I thought you were like one of those old men who lose the run of themselves and want to have a young one on their arm, fooling nobody of course. So, you’re giving my nephew and his wife your farm? Sit down, sit down, let ye.’

  Carmel settled into an armchair with white lace-trimmed antimacassars on the back and arms. The huge three-piece suite of furniture seemed to take up most of the floor space in the small room. The fireplace was cleaned out for the summer, the grate filled with pinecones painted silver, and the whole effect was cosy and welcoming. The entire room seemed to be stuffed with ornaments and photos of a variety of children, weddings, first communions. There was a delicious smell.

  ‘I’ll make ye a cup of tea now in a minute,’ Kitty said, ‘and I’ve a cake in the oven. It won’t be long.’

  ‘It smells amazing,’ Carmel said. ‘You have such a lovely home.’

  ‘It’s nice all right. The council build these for all the old fogies like myself. They’re small, but it does me. I can do a bit of gardening outside, and I potter away. I’m able to get down to the shops and everything, so I’m very lucky, and sure the family are great.’

  ‘We were admiring the display with the marigolds and roses as we came in,’ Tim said, never taking his eyes off Kitty. The years had done their work, but she was still the same no-nonsense personality.

  ‘Well, I was doing it myself, with an old fella over beyond in number seven, but it got too much for us, the weeding and that. So my other nephew, Paudie, he works for the county council, so he organised to send up some fellas every week. They’re on community service for blackguarding around the town, drunk and disorderly and the like, and the judge here says a bit of hard work is what they need and they’ll have no more energy for acting the clown around the place. So that’s who takes care of the donkey work now, and I tell them what to do.’

  ‘I bet you do.’ Tim chuckled, and Kitty joined in.

  ‘Ah sure, they’re grand lads. I bring them in for tea and a bit of cake after, and sure one fella says to me that he never ate home-baked cake before. Imagine that? But sure, the mothers and fathers get everything in the auld supermarket these days, too busy for baking. I won’t go there, though, no; then, I get everything I need in the local shops. Sure, ’tis only a few pence dearer, and you’re supporting your own. That big German supermarket they have now out the Galway road, sure that’s not doing much for Westport, is it?’

  ‘If more people thought like you, Kitty, the towns would be in better shape, no doubt about it,’ Tim agreed. ‘There is a corner shop at the end of my ro
ad. Three generations of a family, the Patels, and he has the same problem. They opened a Tesco Metro on the high street, and the people flocked to it. Poor Sanjay, the grandson of the original owner, doesn’t know how long more he can keep going.’

  ‘Things were simpler in our day,’ Kitty said. ‘People went to the butcher for meat, and the greengrocer for the fruit and vegetables, and there was a newspaper shop and a sweet shop everywhere. It’s all bundled into one now, the price of progress, I suppose. So, where do we start?’

  Her question caught Tim unawares, but her blue eyes bored into his. She might’ve been old, but she was sharp as a tack.

  ‘Well...’ He smiled. ‘It has certainly been a long time...’

  ‘Well, we haven’t either of us much to go to the end, so we better get cracking,’ Kitty said matter-of-factly. ‘Why did you leave without a word? I went up to your house the next day, and a few days afterwards, but they just said you were gone and you weren’t coming back and that was that. I got the impression they hated talking about it. My own family, too, were just bewildered, and of course I had all the pitying glances for a few months afterwards.’

  Tim leaned forward in his chair and took Kitty’s hands. ‘I’m so sorry. I wrote so many letters to you, but I couldn’t post them.’ He took a deep breath. ‘The reason I left was my father found me in the barn with Noel Togher. Kitty, I’m a homosexual.’

  Carmel was kind of shocked, to hear him use that word. She was used to him being gay, and Brian and Zane; in fact, she was surprised at how many gay people there were in the world. But that word, homosexual, seemed so clinical or something.