by Joan Lingard
Rachel sighs. ‘I don’t know what she’s up to these days. Fifteen is a ghastly age.’
Cormac could say amen to that, but it could be a mistake.
Clarinda Bain was the youngest pupil in fifth year, though it was difficult to think that she was only fifteen. She looked eighteen at the very least and many of the girls in sixth year could have passed as her junior.
‘She has an air of knowingness about her, don’t you think?’ said Alec McCaffy, when they were having a nightcap together in Cormac’s hotel room. He was perched on the only chair, an uncomfortable upright, while Cormac lounged on the bed with his shoes off. His feet ponged a bit but McCaffy would just have to put up with it. His nose was always twitching anyway, as if trying to detect bad smells. The students were all asleep, exhausted after a day of non-stop sightseeing; at least it was to be hoped that they were asleep. The two men had done a little teacherly patrolling along the corridors earlier to make sure that their charges had stayed in their own rooms. What they did back in Edinburgh was up to them but, here, in their care, they preferred that they didn’t indulge in any cohabiting.
Clarinda’s name had surfaced in a lazy sort of way.
‘An air of confidence, you mean?’ said Cormac.
‘Of experience, I would say. She’s been around, don’t you think? But she’s a likeable girl all the same.’
What did Alec mean: all the same? Being liked or disliked surely had nothing to do with having or not having experience? Alec agreed. It was just a façon de parler, he said, pleased with himself at bringing out a French phrase. Cormac said, a little pompously, that he did not feel entitled to pass moral judgements on the students. They were not children, these young men and women, though he could not help thinking how immature they were in many ways and uncertain of what they were doing. He thinks the same of his daughter, now that she is the age that Clarinda was then.
Chapter Six
Kathleen is the next of the aunts to call. She is the hardest-edged of the five remaining sisters, not excepting Maeve, Cormac’s mother, who, although she likes to ‘give off’ on the phone, has a softer heart. Kathleen has wiped from her memory those misty, illicit afternoons when she met her married lover along the banks of the river Lagan and takes a hard line now on faithlessness. Perhaps it was because her own lover did not keep faith with her in the end that she has turned this way. She bends the knee at church every morning before she will allow food or drink to cross her lips. She might be doing penance, Cormac has suggested to his mother, who said that the church had become the love of her sister’s life. ‘She always had to be fixated on something, Kathleen, and there wasn’t too much choice left open for her by then. When she was in her teens we thought she might have become a nun.’ A bit like Gwen John who in later life turned for solace to the Roman Catholic church? Having lost her revered master, Gwen John took on a new, less troublesome one, who was always there to be spoken to when she wanted to speak to him and who could not jump on a train and escape to Meudon. Her involvement with the church did not seem to have been as all-embracing as his aunt’s, however. It appeared to have been somewhat more objective, in that she sketched the nuns and other worshippers in church, which suggests that she was there in part as an observer – are artists always present in part as observers? he wonders – and was not concentrating totally on the mass itself. He finds it odd to be linking the two women in his mind since they stand poles apart in every other way. His aunt has never lived anywhere but Belfast and the only creative thing she ever does is crochet doilies. Though why should he dismiss that? Perhaps she puts her heart and soul in them. Not that that would make them works of art, in his estimation, though some might disagree. His mother, when she responded to his suggestion of his aunt doing penance, said she was sure that Kathleen had long since been redeemed. Lucky Aunt Kathleen.
She is on the phone now, this redeemed aunt, telling him to listen to her. But instead of calling him son she addresses him as Cormac Aherne, which he finds significant. He suspects she is thinking about his father whose surname she often used when addressing him. ‘Look here, Patrick Aherne,’ she’d say and he’d have his answer ready for her, as smooth as silk, ‘I’m all eyes, Kathleen O’Malley, for you’re well worth looking at’, which would bring a swift blush to her cheeks before she rallied to make her point. Now she says, ‘I’m going to give you a good talking to, Cormac Aherne. It’s in your own best interests. I’m the one who’s always given it to you straight, who’s never soft-soaped you.’
He remembers his mother’s hard yellow carbolic soap, how brutal it felt against his skin. He used to pinch bars from her cupboard and carve them with his penknife into upright bears and crouching lions. ‘You’re wasting my good soap!’ she’d cry. He’d tell her he wasn’t, that he was making something. When he holds a bar of soap in his hands even now he can feel its possibilities, can see it undergoing a transformation, a shape gradually emerging from the mass. He is not careless in his buying of soap; he examines a bar carefully, noting its texture, colour and scent. He likes Pears soap for its lucent amber colour and distinctive smell; it, too, reminds him of childhood for it was the soap that Aunt Sal favoured. His son does not understand his preoccupation; he is not interested in shape or form. He wants to be a doctor when he grows up and have a stethoscope, which he is proud to be able to say correctly. ‘That’s fine,’ Cormac told him. ‘Healing people is a good thing. And you’ll earn more money than if you were to start carving bars of soap.’
Meanwhile, his aunt is carrying on with her straight talking. Broken marriages are the ruin of society. The children of divorced parents are lost children. ‘Away and get back to your wedded wife, son, and no more of this nonsense!’
‘What nonsense?’
‘Your other woman. And don’t be telling me there isn’t one!’
He protests in vain, for his aunt isn’t listening. She has her own ideas.
Before Cormac and Rachel married they discussed fidelity.
‘I don’t think so-called “open marriages” work,’ said Rachel. ‘I believe in fidelity. I know your father—’
‘My father has nothing to do with me,’ said Cormac, which was obviously not true. ‘Anyway, my parents’ marriage could hardly be described as open! My mother hadn’t the faintest idea what he was up to.’ They were lying in bed, he and Rachel, a good place to discuss fidelity. He had no intention ever of being unfaithful to her. He smiled and stroked the thick fall of dark hair back from her face. He loved the thickness of her hair, the heavy swing of it against her neck when she moved, just as he loved the direct gaze of her grey eyes which made him think of lake water. He loved everything about her, but especially her calm stillness, some of which he hoped might flow into him, with time. ‘I can’t imagine being tempted by anyone else when I have you.’
‘Maybe not now,’ said Rachel seriously. She was a serious person. ‘But what about in ten or twenty years time?’
‘By then we shall be knee-deep in children.’
They were agreed that they would have children, sometime, and more than one, when their careers were up and running. Rachel had just recently finished her training as a GP and he was trying to make it with his sculpture, eked out by part-time jobs like working in a bar. They were both only children who thought their childhoods would have been better if they’d had siblings; hence their desire for a large family. After having two, they were to change their mind on this.
‘Do you think having children will stop one yielding to temptation?’ asked Rachel.
He laughed. ‘You’re not worried, are you?’ He kissed the curve of her neck and she twitched at the feel of his mouth on her skin and laughed too.
‘No, Cormac, I’m not worried, about anything.’ As regards his father’s decampment, she couldn’t help thinking that she wouldn’t blame any man going off and leaving Maeve Aherne and Cormac knew that she thought that. She had a stand-offish sort of relationship with his mother which lacked warmth, though they were p
erfectly polite to each other, and she was careful not to say anything against the woman who would become her mother-in-law, except on the odd occasion when she became exasperated. He’d taken her over to Belfast a couple of times to ‘meet the family’. The O’Malley sisters! His mother had put Rachel in the spare room with the glassy pink satin bed cover and curtains to match and the holy pictures on the wall and given him a bed on the settee downstairs. She had left the door of her own room open a chink all night. After one visit Rachel said she could see that Cormac was devoted to his mother, even though he moaned and groaned about her. ‘Of course you are! And that’s fine by me. She stood by you through the hard years, didn’t she, willingly making any sacrifice necessary to give you the chance in life that she didn’t have? As you yourself might say, that’s not to be sneezed at.’ She made him laugh.
They were happy, lying in bed discussing marriage, which they would get round to when it suited them, and fidelity. They talked lazily. It was Sunday morning. Rachel was not on call and he did not have to rush off to work, and they had no children as yet to disrupt their peace. A few weeks after that particular morning Rachel discovered to her astonishment that she was pregnant, something which she had thought she had safely under her control. She was thrown by this for a few days but when she did tell Cormac he was immediately delighted and said they’d better get cracking and tie the knot.
Maeve Aherne, accompanied by her youngest sister, Sal, crossed the Irish Sea for the first time in her life, to come to the wedding of her son, which took place in the suburban Church of Scotland where Rachel’s parents worshipped. She was naturally disturbed that he was not being married in the church where he was christened, but such was the way of sons marrying daughters-in-law. As her sisters said to her, daughters-in-law always got their way, and there was nothing she could do to fight that. And, as her son had told her, prior to her coming, if she was going to come she would have to accept what was happening and not criticise. She kept her lip buttoned throughout the ceremony, which she found a poor affair. She disliked the colourlessness of the church, the lack of pomp and ceremony, and she missed the flicker of candles and the smell of incense.
‘She seems a nice girl,’ said Sal, when the congregation rose at the swelling of ‘Here Comes the Bride’. Rachel looked beautiful under her floating mist of white, worn to appease her own mother, who was no more charmed by this match than the groom’s mother. The bride was led up the aisle by her silver-haired father in morning dress. ‘He looks distinguished,’ whispered Sal. ‘He’s obviously not short of a bob or two. You can always tell, can’t you?’ Rachel’s father was a merchant banker, an occupation they had not encountered before but which impressed them. Cormac would appear to be doing all right for himself, said Sal, which mollified his mother to some extent.
‘A pity Pat couldn’t be here to see him married,’ she sighed.
Sal shook her head. Even after so many years her sister talked about Pat Aherne as if he had just gone down the road and might turn up at any moment.
On the Friday afternoon that he failed to come home he phoned late in the evening, when he’d have had a drink or two in him to give him the courage, as his wife said afterwards. He was phoning to say he’d been held up.
‘Have you a sore throat?’ she asked. She was standing in the unheated hall, hunching her shoulders against the chill. Cormac had come halfway down the stairs in his pyjamas. When his father hadn’t come in he’d had a funny feeling about it. A squirmy sort of feeling low down in his belly. ‘Your voice sounds dead queer, Pat,’ said his mother. ‘As if you’re talking through blotting paper.’
She listened for a moment, then looked up at Cormac, who was peering through the bannisters. ‘He’s wanting a word with you, son. Now don’t be long. You’ll get your death in your bare feet. And you should be asleep in your bed by this time.’
Cormac took the phone while his mother stood waiting.
‘Listen, son,’ said his father. Cormac was listening intently. ‘Something’s come up. I can’t tell you about it, not yet. Maybe sometime. Be a good lad and look after your mother. I’ll see you as soon as I can. And remember your oul’ da loves you.’
Cormac put down the receiver and his mother asked, ‘What did he say?’
Cormac swallowed and said, ‘That he’ll be seeing us as soon as he can.’
‘I hope he’s back by lunch tomorrow. I promised Mary he’d give her a run up the Antrim Road to her dressmaker’s. It’d save her taking two buses.’
But Pat Aherne was not back by lunchtime on Saturday.
‘He’ll be gassing if I know him,’ said his wife. ‘Propping up some bar somewhere, spending his hard-earned money.’
But she didn’t know him, thought Cormac. He knew his father better than she did.
Aunt Mary came round and had to be disappointed. She sat slumped in a tub chair in the living room complaining about her corns. She’d been relying on a lift. ‘My feet are not up to standing waiting on buses so they’re not.’ She was a large woman with spreading thighs and she wore vast, sack-like dresses with modesty vests at the neck that only partly concealed the deep angry cleft between her bosoms.
‘He might be back yet,’ said Cormac’s mother.
Cormac knew he would not.
‘That man of yours never did have any respect for the time, Maeve,’ said her sister Mary. ‘Or for other people’s time, either.’
His wife sprang at once to his defence. She might have a few things to say that were not in his favour but she would not tolerate one word of criticism from her sisters. ‘He’s a good man. He’s always been very obliging. He’s obliged you more than once, let me remind you, Mary O’Malley!’
Groaning, Aunt Mary levered herself out of the chair. ‘Well, no rest for the wicked.’
She said it, thought Cormac.
‘Leave your aunt to the bus stop, Cormac,’ said his mother.
After he’d put his aunt on the bus he lingered on the main road and when he saw Joe Flynn come out of the pub he went over and asked him, ‘Would you have seen my daddy at all today?’
‘Your daddy, son? No, never set eyes on him. Not last night, neither, and he usually comes in of a Friday. Nothing wrong, is there?’
Cormac shook his head and went on home.
Sunday was one of the longest days of his life. He jumped every time the phone rang but it was always one or other aunts wanting to know if there’d been any sign of his father.
On Monday morning his mother phoned the head office of the shoe polish firm. They’d not heard from Pat Aherne but they presumed he’d be out and about on the job as usual. He was one of their more reliable commercial travellers and they couldn’t speak highly enough of him. ‘Maybe he was just wanting the weekend off, Mrs Aherne.’
‘I could hear the snigger in their voices,’ she said to her sister Sal after she’d hung up the receiver.
‘Surely they’re not thinking he’s playing fast and loose with you?’ said Sal who, as she said it, suddenly looked thoughtful. She would understand more than any of them the desire to do a bunk.
‘He wouldn’t do that, not Pat,’ said his wife.
After the next weekend passed and Pat Aherne had not checked in, his employers began to take his disappearance more seriously. They suggested to his wife that she should go to the police. He might have had an accident and be lying unconscious in some hospital south of the border. She’d have heard though, wouldn’t she? She wasn’t keen to go to the police but she didn’t know what else to do. Cormac accompanied her up to the station on the main road and she told her story, such as it was, and Cormac told part of what his father had said to him. The constable on the desk noted down the details and said that they’d had no report of any accident that would fit her husband.
‘He might turn up yet, missus. It’s early days, just over a week. He might be having himself a wee holiday.’
‘Fat lot of use they are,’ said Maeve Aherne as they left the station. ‘Couldn’t
find a tram ticket behind their left ear.’
On their return home she decided that they would have to conduct their own investigation. It was out of the question for them to visit all her husband’s customers since they had neither money nor transport. They could be contacted, however, by letter or telephone.
They went through Pat Aherne’s papers and drew up a list of customers. They were spread far and wide, in places they had heard of and not heard of. Donaghadee, Dundalk, Killarney, Killyleagh, Cookstown, Carlow, Ballymena, Ballybunion …
‘Some of these places are at the back of beyond,’ said Cormac’s mother.
Cormac liked the phrase ‘back of beyond’, even though his mother used it deprecatingly. She perceived such places as blanks, unimaginable, and therefore to be dismissed. He saw the grey, misty waters of the lake isle of Innisfree, with nine beans a-growing, and a hive for the honey bee. He heard the gentle lap of the lake water breaking on the shore and the sound of linnets’ wings filling the evening air. ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ had been one of his father’s favourite poems. ‘Wouldn’t it be great,’ his father had said on one occasion, ‘to find a place where peace comes dropping slow?’ Cormac wondered now if his father had found such a place and if so he might send for him and they could plant the bean rows together and live in the bee-loud glade.
‘He was a well-travelled man right enough,’ said Pat Aherne’s wife, as if he was dead. ‘It could take us weeks getting through this lot.’
It took them a full week. Most of the customers were on the phone; only a scattering of small village shops were not, but these Pat Aherne had visited only once a year, so his records told them. To these Cormac penned careful letters on his mother’s lilac-tinted, lined notepaper that had sprigs of violets in the top left-hand corner and on the matching envelopes. His mother dictated: ‘Dear sir or madam, I believe my husband Pat Aherne, who travels in shoe polish, calls at your premises. He has not been home recently and I am worried in case he has met with an accident or is suffering from loss of memory. If you have seen him in the last three weeks I would be most grateful if you would contact me at the above address. Yours faithfully.’
