The Carmel Sheehan Story

by Jean Grainger

  ‘I'll go and make the tea if you like, Kitty?’ Carmel suggested. She wanted to give them some space.

  ‘Do, girleen, ’tis all out in the kitchen.’

  Kitty gazed at Tim and then down to where their hands were intertwined. ‘I knew that, even then. But I thought we loved each other, we could have shielded each other, and I suppose I thought it might still work. You should have contacted me, Tim.’

  ‘I know I should have, and I’m sorry. But I’m so glad we didn’t marry. You deserved someone who could love you properly. A proper relationship with children and everything.’ Tim was trying to make her understand. ‘I didn’t know much back then, but I knew I could only bring you pain.’

  ‘You’re right about one thing: you didn’t know much back then. If you did, you would’ve known that men are not my thing. I suppose that never occurred to you?’

  Kitty watched his face as he processed her own bombshell.

  ‘What?’ he said, disbelieving. ‘Are you telling me—’

  ‘Yes, I’m a lesbian. But at least when we were young, though people in Westport might have been disgusted by you, they knew what you were existed. Girls who were attracted to other girls was unheard of back then. I felt like the only one in the whole world. With you, at least, I felt a bit normal.’

  ‘Oh, Kitty, I can’t believe it.’ Tim smiled sadly. ‘If only I’d known, we could have run away together.’

  ‘Oh, once you left, there was nothing keeping me here, so when I got the chance to go to America, I took it. A local girl, Marie Donnelly, do you remember her? Well, she got work with her brothers in New York, and she came home on holidays and she invited me to go back with her, so I did. I spent twenty-four years in New York—Brooklyn. I loved it. I met Georgie Harper there, a beautiful black girl from Tennessee, and we were together for eighteen glorious years, until she was in a horrible car accident coming home from the shelter. She set up homeless shelters for women and girls. She died of her injuries three weeks after the crash, and I thought I’d die too. I swear, I remember thinking that no human could withstand that much pain. But I did. Every street corner, every bar, every cafe reminded me of Georgie, and I couldn’t bear it in Brooklyn for another second, so I left New York and never went back. An opportunity came up in South Africa, so I went there.’ She sighed. ‘You’re not the only one with secrets, Tim.’

  ‘Kitty...I had no idea. I mean, all these years I was afraid I’d broken your heart, too.’

  ‘Haha! D’ya hear him?’ She found that idea very funny. ‘A broken heart by Tim O’Flaherty, no indeed. You never broke my heart, Tim. My heart was broken only once, when I lost my Georgie. You only have that kind of love once in a lifetime.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘How did life treat you, after you left here?’

  Tim told her the whole story—those first awful months, Marjorie, the children, and finally, Brian.

  ‘And how long is he dead now?’ Kitty asked.

  ‘Just over a year. People say it gets easier, but I’m not there yet,’ Tim admitted sadly.

  ‘Well, would you look at us, two young freaks of nature, and we couldn’t even admit it to each other. Do you know what I think, Tim? I think your father did you a great favour by throwing you out. Imagine if he never caught you? Or he did and never said anything? You’d be up there still, a lonely old bachelor farmer, never having known the joy of children or a love like you had with your Brian. Yes, then, ’twas the best thing he ever did for you.’

  ‘I’m not sure that was his motivation, but you’re probably right,’ Tim agreed. ‘We’ll never know now, though, will we?’

  He told her about the wild flower garden, and she was silent when he finished.

  After a moment, she said, ‘I met him one Christmas Eve, your father. He was coming out of Hannigan’s below, and he had a few drinks on him. He wasn’t much of a drinker, I’d say, but he was drunk that evening. ’Twas the first Christmas after you left. Anyway, I was going home after picking up a few things for the Christmas dinner for my mother, when he stopped me. I was shocked, first at the state of him, and second because he’d given me very short shrift when I called after you left.

  ‘Anyway, he said something to me. He said: “If you see him, tell him...” And then he stopped. ’Twas as if he just couldn’t say the words but what he wanted to say was kind, not harsh. He waited for a second. He was a bit unsteady on his feet. He said, “Tell him I’ll mind the garden for him.” Sure, I never saw you again from that day to this, so I couldn’t tell you anything, but he missed you. I’m sure of it, and sure it near killed your poor mother. She’d sit over on St Teresa’s side of the church, all alone on a weekday, and she’d cry. She got a mass said for you every year on your birthday and on the anniversary of the day you left. ’Twas you she was crying for, her only child.’

  Tim was hardly aware of the tears that ran down his cheeks as Kitty described his parents. That part of his head and heart had been locked away for so long, he’d buried the pain so deeply, that it came as a shock to have it resurface.

  ‘I wish...’ Tim managed through his tears. ‘I just wish they...’

  ‘Sure, Tim, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride,’ Kitty said gently. ‘There’s no point to wishing now. But you should know they never forgot you, never stopped missing you. That’s really why your father got so close to Catriona’s family. They were the family he had lost, I suppose. You did a good thing giving herself and David the land. You’ll really make a mighty difference to them, and they were very good to your parents. What goes around comes around, as they say, the wheel is always turning.’

  On and on they talked about old school friends, about Georgie and Brian, about all the changes to Westport since they were young.

  ‘What made you come back?’ Tim asked, curious.

  ‘Well, I had a great few years in Cape Town. I loved it there. I had little bakery and a café, and I made great friends. Even though the time I was there was difficult—apartheid was still in full force—when Mandela came to power, he changed everything. Really, everything. I was so fortunate to live there in those years. He drew together a nation that was so divided it was impossible to see how they could ever pull in the same direction. He was a remarkable man. But, in the end, I was getting older, the body wasn’t what it once was, and I wanted to be near my family. My brothers were always close with me, if they weren’t with each other, and I visited home often so I knew all the kids and everything.’

  ‘And did they know about you? About Georgie?’ Tim was gentle.

  ‘Well, I keep a photo of her beside my bed, and I talk to her every night, but they’ve never asked and I never say who she was. I think they do know, but the idea of an auld wan like me having relations with anyone is enough to put you off your dinner, so acknowledging my being a lesbian would probably finish them off completely. It’s not a problem for me or for them, so we just leave it be. Now, let’s have that tea. I don’t know where your friend has got to.’

  Tim’s mobile phone beeped, and he took it out of the pocket of his coat.

  I’ve gone to meet the others at the hotel. I let myself out the back door. Think you need time alone with K. Talk later C xx

  ‘Carmel let herself out,’ Tim said as he went to join Kitty in the kitchen. ‘She probably felt a bit in the way what with us banging on about the Dark Ages.’ The cake was out of the oven. Carmel must have taken it out before she left, otherwise it would have burned to a crisp by now.

  Kitty stood there in front of him, and suddenly they were not two old people, almost ninety years gone, but a boy and a girl, so afraid of the world they’d been born into, where nobody would accept what they were. Tim took a step across the tiny room and wrapped his arms around her, holding her close.

  ‘We did OK, Kit. Despite it all, we did OK. And here we are, together again for the final act.’

  Chapter 22

  Carmel was delighted to see the bus in the car park of the hotel. She missed Sharif and longed to tell him
about the day’s events.

  As she walked into the hotel, she was almost knocked down by a sea of purple silk that turned out to be Zeinab, and by the looks of things, she was in high dudgeon.

  ‘Zeinab, is everything OK?’ Carmel asked as the woman barrelled past her.

  ‘Oh, Carmel, no, everything is not OK. Nothing like it, in fact. I simply cannot stay one more moment, not another second. I’ll take a taxi to the airport this minute and return to Karachi. Have my things sent on from London.’ She seemed to be both upset and furious simultaneously.

  ‘Look, whatever’s happened, I’m sure we can sort it out,’ Carmel said placatingly. ‘Why don’t we just go for a walk, just around the block, and compose ourselves, and you can tell me what the problem is?’ She knew she sounded like someone dealing with a recalcitrant five-year-old, but honestly, that was how Zeinab behaved sometimes.

  ‘No, there is nothing anyone can do. Nothing at all.’ Zeinab was attracting attention from the people sitting at the tables outside the hotel having a drink.

  ‘Why is that lady in the funny dress screaming and crying, Mammy?’ asked a little girl in a high-pitched voice. ‘Did she cut her knee?’

  A red-faced mother tried to distract the little girl, but the child was not for deviating from this very interesting floor show. The mother mumbled something and tried to get the child to eat some of her sandwich, but the little voice rang out again. ‘She looks like Princess Jasmine from Aladdin, except way wrinklier and fatter, doesn’t she, Mammy? Maybe she’s Princess Jasmine’s granny?’

  The group gathered at the next table were trying to stifle giggles as Zeinab turned on the child.

  ‘Where I come from, children are trained not to be rude to their elders. I see no such efforts are made here.’ Her eyes flashed dangerously.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ the mortified mother said, her face burning. ‘She’s only three, and she doesn’t know—’

  ‘She needs a good spanking,’ Zeinab cut in. ‘That would teach her how to behave. If she was mine, I can tell you—’

  ‘What’s going on here?’ Just as Zeinab was warming to her theme, a tall man in his thirties emerged with a tray, taking in his embarrassed wife and his daughter, who was now crying behind her mother.

  ‘I was saying,’ Zeinab replied in her overbearing way, ‘that if that child was mine, she would find herself properly chastised for rudeness.’

  The man placed the tray on the table and lifted his little daughter into his arms. ‘Well, she’s not yours, so you can mind your own business. Now, Lily, did you say something to upset this lady?’

  ‘No, Daddy, I just said she looked like Princess Jasmine’s granny,’ the girl said quietly through sobs.

  ‘And that’s all?’

  The little girl nodded, and the man glanced at his wife for confirmation. She nodded, too.

  ‘And that’s what has you advocating assault on my little girl, is it?’ the man demanded of Zeinab. ‘Yerra, you’d want to cop on to yourself, going around taking umbrage at nothing. She’s only a child; she didn’t mean any harm. And anyway, you’re not exactly a spring chicken, are you? Go on away now, you mad old bat, and don’t be annoying us.’

  This exchange now seemed to have gathered even more spectators, and Zeinab was the focus of everyone’s attentions. Carmel didn’t know what to do. She stood by as Zeinab marched back into the hotel without another word.

  ‘I’m so sorry.’ Carmel was mortified. ‘She’s...well, I’m just really sorry.’ There was no way to defend or explain.

  ‘Ah sure t’wasn’t your fault.’ The man smiled, and Carmel turned gratefully away.

  Carmel got the key of their room and let herself in. Sharif was stretched on the bed reading.

  ‘Hey, you’re back, great.’ He leapt up and went to kiss her. He took one look at her face and immediately asked, ‘What’s up? Has something happened?’

  She told him about the business downstairs with Zeinab, and he burst out laughing.

  ‘Dead right, too. If someone was telling me to beat my child, they’d get the same response. I can just imagine her face, and her indignant stomp off. Just let her cool down. It was probably nothing. She was driving my mother insane today, fawning over Joe. It was a bit much, to be honest, and I apologised to him when we got back, but you know Joe. He pretended he didn’t notice. Maybe Ammi had a word with Zeinab—that’s probably it—and she didn’t like it.’

  ‘Right, well, she was threatening to leave, go to the airport, straight back to Pakistan.’ Carmel was still worried.

  ‘She won’t, believe me. She won’t do anything of the kind. She’s just looking for attention and to paint herself as the victim. Ignoring her is the only way to deal with it. Now, how did it go on the farm?’

  ‘Fine,’ Carmel said, still uneasy. ‘Great, actually. We had a lovely day. But, Sharif, can we go for a walk? I feel like I need some air.’ The encounter with Zeinab had really upset her. She wasn’t used to dealing with conflict. In Trinity, everything had been calm, because it was such a transactional relationship between the kids and the staff—no emotion involved. And then with Bill, it was years of just nothing, no fights, no arguments, but no conversation, no connection, either. But she was learning, listening to her friends in Aashna talking about falling out with sisters or brothers, or having blazing rows with friends, and she was beginning to realise that it was a part of caring about someone. Emotions can run high and spill out as anger just as much as joy and love. This was obvious to most people, but again, she found herself trying to figure out normal interpersonal relationships.

  ‘Of course,’ Sharif said.

  She smiled and slipped her hand into his.

  They walked up to the grounds of Westport House, and it was spectacular. Huge thickets of rhododendron and hydrangea blossomed everywhere, and flower beds provided riots of colour. There was a river running through the grounds, and they walked and talked for two hours. She told him all about Catriona and David, and about Tim meeting Kitty again after all these years. She told him about sitting in the kitchen with the kids’ stuff all around and how lovely it all was. He didn’t flinch at the mention of children, as he had done up to now—or maybe she imagined it, but he seemed happy to discuss it. They came back to the incident with Zeinab, and he promised he’d find her once they got back and check she was OK.

  ‘So, how was your day?’ Carmel asked as he helped her over a huge log.

  ‘Wonderful,’ he said, smiling. ‘Just amazing scenery. The sea stack is incredible. It’s this huge column, I think it’s about a hundred and seventy feet high, just off the coast. It used to be connected, and then there was a storm that broke the land bridge so they had to get people off with ropes. Joe told us the legend about it, that when St Patrick was converting everyone to Christianity, the local chieftain wouldn’t go along with the new religion so Patrick struck the ground with his crozier and the land split in half, creating the sea stack and leaving the doubting chieftain alone on the rock. I’m not sure how true that is, but the place really is remarkable. You can see all the different colours of the layers of rock; I’ve never seen anything like it. And the sea beneath, foaming as it crashes, all the colours of turquoise, blue, green, azure. Honestly, I was blown away, literally and figuratively.

  ‘Then we went to the Ceide Fields. It’s a farm, the first evidence of farming in Ireland, five and a half thousand years ago. It’s hard to get your head around it. And the life there was fairly sophisticated. I’d never seen a bog before, fascinating. Then we went to Killala, a gorgeous little village with loads of ruins and an old monastery, and we had some lunch there. We really had a great time.’

  ‘I’m glad. So what was Zeinab doing that drove Nadia more mental than usual?’

  ‘Oh, she was just being herself really. She sees admiring another culture as somehow disloyal or something, so every time the rest of us were in awe, she’d pipe up with “Well, there’s much better than that in Pakistan” kind of thing. It drove A
mmi mad, so she openly refuted her by saying she never saw a sea stack or a bog or a pint of Guinness in Pakistan and would she please just give us all a break?

  ‘Well, that went down like a lead balloon, as you can imagine. So, Zeinab, knowing how much it drives Ammi crazy, turned up the dial on the flirting with Joe. She was making out like she couldn’t walk on the rough terrain so had to hold his arm all the time; then, when we were having lunch, she was offering him bites of her food. She even had her hand on his leg at one stage. Anyway, Ammi had enough, and when we got back, she told me she was going to have it out with Zeinab, tell her she was embarrassing us by her behaviour and warn her to stop immediately or else.’ Sharif grinned, he clearly found the whole thing very amusing.

  But it only made Carmel uncomfortable. ‘Or else what?’

  ‘Well, I don’t exactly know, but she wasn’t taking any prisoners. I probably should have gone, but I decided to stay out of it.’

  ‘Well, I think I walked right into the tail end of that particular chat,’ Carmel said with a grimace.

  ‘Don’t worry. It’ll be fine. They get on each other’s nerves, that’s all.’

  Carmel wanted to fight Nadia’s corner. It wasn’t fair to say they were both to blame. Nadia was lovely and normal and reasonable, and Zeinab was a self-serving lunatic. Carmel said as much to Sharif.

  ‘I know,’ he said calmly, ‘but she’ll be going back to Karachi after this trip, and we won’t have to see her for years.’

  ‘Unless she decides to stay and shack up with her favourite nephew.’

  ‘She won’t, don’t worry,’ Sharif assured her. ‘And even if she tried, her favourite nephew has a scary Irish wife so that’s not going to fly. It’s all going to be fine. Now, we better start heading back. We’re eating in the hotel tonight, and the table is booked for eight, and it’s seven now.’