On his days off, Graham would get to his Mum’s house early. Stevie wouldn’t be home yet, and Graham couldn’t just sit there like a spare part, so he mostly went to the spare room and looked at the bed where Lindsey slept now.
It would never be made, or Stevie’s single by the wall; the blankets all in a heap, and clothes all over the floor. Graham picked them up and folded, because he was meant to be doing his bit. Even if Lindsey didn’t want it.
On his hands and knees like that, he found an old shoebox one afternoon, half under Lindsey’s bed. He pulled it out and lifted the lid. Graham found a whole pile of Eric’s pictures.
So then he knew where she went; most likely she was with the old guy right now.
There was a small sketch at the top, of Auntie Franny: all creased, like it had been looked at a lot. Graham lifted it away and found faces he knew, and faces he didn’t, a couple of Papa Robert among them. And then there were a whole lot of sketches with no one in them.
They were all of landscapes and they all looked like Ireland; just like the place Papa Robert had always told of. Rolling fields as far as the skyline, riddled with lanes, dotted with farms, framed by the hills that rose behind them.
Or were those the Tyrone hills behind Lindsey’s Dad’s house?
Graham leafed on through the pages, and there they were again, in the low summer sun, and the more Graham stared, the more they came to look the same as he remembered from that first time. When Lindsey pulled him up the path and in through the door, and there was no one home, nobody but them, half on the floor, half on the sofa in the front room.
Graham was stung. How did Eric know what those hills were like?
When he’d first fetched Lindsey back to Glasgow, when they used to cycle all over, she’d got Graham to ride them to the top of the scheme one time. Her fingers hooked into his pockets, she’d stood and shown him the view out west, beyond Drumchapel to where the back-country started, and she’d told him they were just like the hills her Dad climbed. She never said too much about home, but Graham could hear she’d been glad to escape that man. Lindsey was still an unknown quantity, but it had felt good that day, knowing he’d been the one who fetched her away. Graham had liked the pull of her fingers, that way she’d had back then of tugging him onwards. She’d pulled him through the flat that morning, when his Mum was out at work and his Dad still sleeping. Finger to her lips, Lindsey had led Graham into the bathroom, the only door with a lock in the house, pressing herself up against him in her rush, the hard mound of her pregnant belly, the twisting life inside that the two of them had made.
But now it seemed like Eric knew her better. Probably the old guy knew what was happening with their marriage. It was more than Graham did.
There was even a sketch in the pile that Eric had done at their wedding: Lindsey and Stevie on the back of a coaster. Graham stared at the fine pencil lines, simple, beautiful, the pair of them.
He shoved the pictures back into the box. Graham lay down on the bed, hands to his head. He was still there when Lindsey came into the room.
She looked frozen to the bone, standing there, blinking at him. Then she climbed under the blankets, turning her back, curled over with all her clothes on, like she couldn’t get warm.
Graham lay on top of the duvet, next to Lindsey. Him on one side of the bed and her on the other. Time was she’d have had her arms around him, and her legs; it hurt him to remember.
He knew where she’d been, and he’d seen the drawings she kept. Graham didn’t know what to say, but he wanted to say something.
“They sketches you have,” he told her. “The wan on the coaster. It looks just like you.”
The thought just fell from his mouth, there where he lay, his head all heavy on the pillow, and there was some relief too, once it was out, because the picture was lovely, and a very good likeness. Lindsey stirred a bit then, and Graham thought she might turn over, but she didn’t.
After a while, she said:
“That was me ages ago.”
19
Eric didn’t have to wait too long before Lindsey came again. Wanting out, he thought, but not finding a way, and he watched her with concern, sunk deep into his armchair. He’d been drawing at his desk most of the morning, but he gathered up his sketches after she arrived, thinking to work near her instead, on the sofa by the gas fire. Eric had been sitting with her a good half hour when Lindsey pointed:
“How is it you’re always drawing that place?”
Her finger jabbed at his pages, Papa Robert’s much-mourned landscape, which Eric had laid on the rug between them: fields ready for harvest, sheaves stacked by hand, an uncut hayfield in the dawn light. There was one of his father too, as a boy of five or so, just by the low door of his childhood home; rough clothes and stonework, the lane beyond an unkempt abundance. Eric had given Lindsey sketches just like these, over the past few weeks and months, and she’d never passed comment, only he could see now from her face that she didn’t like the drawings at all, the place they depicted.
It had Eric blinking a moment, looking them over. He’d been trying hard to make the place look beautiful, just as Papa Robert had always said it was; the family’s own smallholding that they’d lived on and worked. What did Lindsey find to take issue with?
Still he left his pages where they lay, because he reckoned he’d been just the same at her age: too sore to hear more, or even think more about his father’s Ireland.
“I know how it is, hen,” he said. “I couldnae have drawn these before now.”
And then Lindsey gave him a half-frown, like she needed him to explain that.
He’d put so much distance between himself and Papa Robert, two or more decades’ worth.
“Gets harder tae go back.” Eric shrugged. “The longer you leave it. That’s how it was, anyhow, wae me an my Da.”
“You couldn’t have done different,” Lindsey told him, firm. Like there were some people, some situations, where turning your back was all you could do. It had Eric blinking again, uneasy, this time at the girl. Was that what she told herself as well?
She sat a moment, brooding. Then she gestured, back down at Eric’s pictures, like she needed to change the subject:
“Looks just like where I grew up.” Lindsey kicked a toe at one, dismissive. “Put a petrol station at the fork there. Coupla clapped-out cars. Coupla shitebags, running guns.”
The girl shuddered at the thought. Her border hometown: not just boring, it was a war zone.
“Nothing’s changed, I’ll bet. There’s too many folk there can only hate. Can only pity theirselves.”
It gave Eric pause, how vehement she was, and he found himself wondering: did she count her Dad among them? But he couldn’t ask her, or not just yet. He didn’t know that he could be so direct. Eric had so much he wanted to say to Lindsey this morning, he thought he’d have to go careful, like Brenda said; he’d have to work on getting the girl to listen first.
So Eric looked down a moment, before he spoke, at the sketches of his father’s place. The farmhouse, such as it was, and those few Louth acres, still whole and wholesome, before the civil war descended.
“Aye, my Da,” Eric started, thinking Papa Robert had come to learn the harsh sides of his homeland as well. “He talked a bit like you sometimes, so he did.”
Lindsey raised an eyebrow at that unexpected common ground:
“You said he loved it there.”
She eyed him, doubtful, pointing at the soft Louth landscapes. But Eric thought he’d caught her attention at least, so he told her:
“He did, right enough. When he was a boy, aye,” he qualified.
Papa Robert had told of a stone and simple house, a single-room dwelling, lived in by three generations.
“He said they lived by the sod and the crop and the change ae seasons.”
Spring with the primroses massed along the ditches, when his father lent his horse and his hand to the harrow, and then the longer days of harebells and poppi
es, and skylarks rising from the fields laid to fallow.
“He who blesses hissel in the earth shall bless hissel in the God ae truth.”
Eric smiled at that, just a little, even if Lindsey shook her head: even the tiniest scrap of Bible was mostly too much for her.
“Aye, but the faimly had reason tae feel blessed, hen. The way my faither tellt it.”
Eric glanced over his pictures, pushing one closer to the girl; of Papa Robert as a child, outside the house that he was born in.
“He said they were good tenants who’d had the great good fortune tae become owners.”
Eric pointed out the climbing rose, and the neat kaleyard below, that Papa Robert’s mother had tended, and he told Lindsey how they grew what they ate, and a bit more too: potatoes and oats that they sold for boots and cloth and soap.
“They didnae lack for life’s requisites. Or for company either. He said there were plenty farms round about; plenty ae faimlies, just like their ain wan.”
The girl nodded a moment, sage, only then she said:
“Except they went to a different church on Sunday mornings. Am I right?”
And she tilted her chin at him, like she knew she was in any case.
They were one of a handful, true enough, Papa Robert’s family; Louth Protestants, few and far between, farming the land, holding to a king and a country they felt their own was part of. But although Eric told Lindsey:
“Aye,” it still rankled somehow.
It had taken him time and thought to put together these drawings, from what he remembered of his father’s stories, and this was how Papa Robert had seen things as a small child, so of course it was a childlike view of things. Eric thought Lindsey could at least try to go along with him, just for now, to see Louth and its families as his father had.
He persisted:
“My Da said their life was graft, aye, an their riches were children, hands tae make light work.”
And Papa Robert was still young then, but not too young to be useful, so he’d tramped the lanes with his mother, bringing the midday food to the menfolk, because they didn’t only tend their own land, but went where help was needed.
“If they aided their neighbour’s ploughin, so they’d be helped when they were reapin. That’s how it went.”
Papa Robert’s father worked for wages too, from the grand house, like all the men round about, bringing in the crops at harvest. Eric told the girl:
“It was what aw the folk bought their winter stores wae.”
And in his mind’s eye, young Robert came down the rise, to see all the neighbours striding through the grand man’s hayfields with their scythes; Papa Robert’s father in their midst, and the farm dogs loose, leaping through the crop as it fell, tearing after the rabbits it had sheltered. All the men locked in the rhythm of work, just like the last year, all the years before.
But Lindsey’s grey gaze held him, sceptical.
“Aye, right.”
Like she just couldn’t recognise this common-cause Ireland he was describing.
So then Eric sighed:
“I know. I know.”
For all that the farming year rolled onwards, they weren’t peaceful times: there’d been war and slaughter all Papa Robert’s young life. Even after the country cut itself loose from the mainland, its king and its garrison, the fighting hadn’t ended there, it had only turned inward. Eric told the girl:
“Papa Robert’s mother. She came fae further south, an she knew folk had been burned out.”
The grand house just by Drogheda where she’d worked before she was married. The grand family hounded for assisting the Crown, servants and tenants scattered to the mercy of the four winds. She had a sister who’d fled north. What if that happens to us?
“Papa Robert never saw it, but,” Eric insisted. “No in their corner ae Louth. He said it never touched them, an he never thought it would do.”
“More fool him then.”
Lindsey gave a hard smile, and then she shoved his picture away from herself.
It took Eric aback.
For a moment there he could only sit.
He considered the girl before him, and how she hadn’t shown him this hard edge before now. But then Eric nodded, slow, retrieving his drawing, pulling it close again.
“Aye, hen,” he told her. “I took my Da for a fool as well. When I was your age.”
Eric thought he’d shown that same hardness to his father, right enough, when he was courting Franny.
“I reckoned I could hold my ain wae Papa Robert by that time,” Eric said. And then he sat forward, fixing his eyes on Lindsey:
“See that Greenock room I tellt you about?”
She nodded, hesitant. Aware maybe she’d irked him.
“I took it because I wanted tae get married,” Eric went on, thinking if he talked about that time, instead of Ireland, maybe she would listen to him.
“I never tellt my Da how far advanced my plans were,” he said. “Papa Robert was nae innocent, but. He saw what was transpirin. An how I never brought Franny home tae visit.”
Eric had always gone alone, and the way he remembered it now, he’d only ever gone home to argue. It had him squinting, that thought, as he told the girl:
“I went dressed in my work suit, an my good shoes.” It was uncomfortable to admit this. “I was already earnin mair than my faither did.”
Eric had felt that he knew more too; it made him sigh:
“I was sure ae that, aye.” So bloody sure of himself. “I had an answer for every objection my Da raised.”
Lindsey stayed quiet, watching him talk. Still a little wary, but he could see she wanted him to go on now.
Brenda had told Eric later how she’d learned to dread those Saturday afternoons. He thought Papa Robert must have too. Eric said:
“I mind how my faither would be sittin in his chair when I came in the door, newspaper open on his lap, only not like he’d been reading it, but. Just waitin.”
Braced, Eric thought. Papa Robert had sat in that same chair while he did his schoolwork, just a few years before, and he must have been bewildered at the change in his son.
“Papa Robert tried so many arguments against. He tellt me Frances was too much older, she’d been poorly, we’d mebbe never have children, an children were life’s purpose.”
Eric looked at the girl:
“Except I’d learned tae see where my faither stood in life by that time. You get me?”
Few boys at the High School had come from housing schemes, so Eric had come to keep quiet about his origins.
“Naebody had a faither in the Orange.”
Not one of the friends he’d made since leaving.
“It felt like comin up for air. Like lifting my heid and seein a whole world where none ae that mattered.”
Lindsey nodded, grim, like she could well imagine it: how Papa Robert would have come to seem wanting, narrow by comparison. But still, it pained Eric to think of this.
Convinced of his own rightness, he’d told his father to look on the bright side.
You’ll have nae grandkids raised in the Romish church.
And that was when all hell broke loose.
“What did Papa Robert say then?” Lindsey’s eyes were on him, searching.
“He raged at me,” Eric told her, blunt.
Papa Robert had raged at his lack of respect. You think that’s what this is, son? You never listened tae me? You never heard what I tellt you aw these years?
“He brought it back tae Louth, aye. How it ended there, for our faimly.”
Lindsey let out her breath, as though she might have known it, but Eric went on:
“My Da, see. He tied hissel in knots over me gettin wed.”
Papa Robert had let Eric truss him up, that’s what it felt like: he got himself backed into a corner, inarticulate in fury. You think it’ll work, son. It’ll come apart. I’ve seen what happens when it does.
Lindsey was right, of course: Ireland was alwa
ys his father’s argument of last resort. But Eric still didn’t like to think how he’d responded.
“I knew the Bible backwards. So I knew how tae hurt him.”
Eric had chosen his Dad’s favourite passages to fling at him in return.
“Oh ye blind guides, I tellt him. Ye fools an blind. Hear the instruction ae thy faither. For that shall be an ornament ae grace unto thy head. Aye, right, I seid. Mair like chains about my neck.”
Lindsey nodded, like that must have been satisfying to say.
But Eric could only think how hard it must have been to take. So dismissive. Such an onslaught. How could Papa Robert back down? What room was he left for coming round?
“I felt I was strong then,” he told the girl. “Stronger than my faither. That was before I understood, but. What Papa Robert learned in boyhood. Back in the Free State, aye?”
Lindsey looked at him, confused now.
So Eric told her, simple:
“Life can send you reelin, hen. It can deal you blows you never recover from.”
And then he waited, to see how she would respond.
Pushed into speaking, she shifted a bit against the cushions. Then she said:
“You mean like when Franny fell ill again?”
Eric nodded.
Lindsey did too, like she understood.
Only then she told him:
“You can’t blame yourself, though. You weren’t to know.” The girl said: “You had to make that stand.”
Like she still thought it was a good one, that he’d only done the right thing. The break was all Papa Robert’s fault, she could see no cause for regret, but Eric shook his head:
“I walked away. I turned my back, aye? Permanent.”
He looked at Lindsey, deliberate, holding her eye, because he didn’t want her doing the same.
“I had my feet planted firm, on the moral high ground. An then when Franny died, I was stuck up there, alane.”
Eric spoke with force now, pronouncing the words, and the girl’s eyes flicked away from his, uncomfortable, but he knew she was listening, so he kept going:
The Walk Home Page 16
