‘She was a bit mad for those hundreds and thousands at one time,’ I said, ‘they appeared on everything.’ I could see them now, coating the tops of puddings and biscuits like rainbow-coloured insects. It was always like that with food; something would take her fancy – glace cherries, candied fruits, marshmallow shapes – and it would be added to every dessert. Sometimes it was a kitchen implement that dictated the fashion; when she bought a potato scoop we were served rounded balls of mashed potato for weeks until we begged for a change. The worst trap to fall into was to acknowledge that you had liked a particular dish, macaroni cheese with chopped tomatoes, for example. Then it would be presented to you for evenings afterwards until the very sight of it made you nauseous; when you feebly suggested that it might be time to ring the changes, she would put her hands on her hips and say that she was driven demented with the food fads that went on around her.
Biddy shook her head. ‘It’s ridiculous when you think of it; what a thing to fall out over.’
Knowing my mother, it seemed entirely in keeping; in fact, I found the explanation deeply satisfying.
I sat for a while, listening to the songs and picking out Denny’s fine tenor voice. The rumble of conversation and the selection of old tunes, with differences of opinion about their provenance and the airs they could be matched with created a comforting backdrop. I felt as if life had been put on hold, caught in this warm hollow by the glowing turf.
Near midnight, Dermot went out to freshen the teapot and I followed him after a few minutes to round up the rest of the snacks and bring them to the fire. He was standing with the kettle in one hand and a cup raised to his nose.
‘What on earth … ?’ he said, taking a sip and proffering the cup to me.
I sniffed at the dark-brown liquid. ‘What are you trying to make?’
‘Coffee. Look.’
He showed me a jar which did indeed bear a label stating ‘coffee’. I took it, nipped one of the dark-brown granules out between my fingers and put it on my tongue. I chuckled.
‘It’s gravy,’ I told him. ‘She moved things around containers; don’t ask me why. Those are gravy granules.’
He stared at me. ‘She could be a complete and utter fruit basket.’
I nodded, smiling.
‘So where would the coffee be?’
‘Haven’t a clue, I never drink dried stuff. The flour bin?’
He muttered, opening cupboard doors. I pulled back the curtain and looked out of the window. The taste of meat stock was on my tongue; you got me, I acknowledged, you managed to slide a morsel of animal down me at your wake. I pictured the cocky smile she’d give when she’d got her way, folding her arms across her chest.
Dermot’s shadow was on the glass, moving impatiently along the shelves behind me, examining containers. I turned to give him a hand.
TWELVE
I went to bed in the early hours after the wake ended, wondering if I would dream about my mother, but the only thing that disturbed my sleep was Denny’s stertorous breathing. It turned out that he had hitched his way to us from Bantry with just the clothes he stood up in. He assumed, with a genial expectation, that things would fall into place, that there would be somewhere to rest his head so that he could attend the funeral. Raking around at two in the morning, I found an old blow-up mattress that had been in the back of the cupboard for years; it might well have been the one that he’d slept on the time he had surfaced in Tottenham. Dermot and I took turns inflating it by mouth and we laid it on the floor in the little room where we were sleeping.
Denny took off his shoes and suit and climbed into his sleeping-bag wearing his shirt, tie and underclothes. He zipped himself up with satisfaction.
‘I’ve neverrr shlept in one of dese yokes beforrre,’ he told me, ‘’tis like putting a leterrr in an envelope.’
Dermot opened the window a notch. ‘I think we’ll need a bit of oxygen overnight with three of us in here. You must have been to a good few wakes in your time, Denny. Did we do all right?’
Denny lay back, his bald head like a smooth egg on his pillow. ‘’Twas a good sending-off and de singing was shtrong. But wakes in generrral arrren’t what dey ushed to be. We ushed to wake de dead forrr two whole daysh and nightsh and de whole of de parish would be dere. The tay dat was dhrrrunk and de rosharrries dat werrre said! Still, dem ould daysh is gone and dat’s all dere is to it.’
A moment later he was asleep, his tie hanging outside the sleeping-bag.
I lay for a while, reflecting on those vanished days he’d referred to. Less than a century ago, my mother’s death would have been an occasion that absorbed the neighbourhood for the best part of a week. Afterwards, my father would have been left with his family around him and a close-knit community where people thought nothing of dropping in to each other’s houses in casual companionship. His sorrow and his children’s sorrow would have been shared and assuaged. By the end of this week, my father would be alone in a silent house, all the bustle stilled; Dermot would be back in Hong Kong, Biddy in Southend, myself in London. His neighbours, distanced from each other by cars and jobs, would keep an eye on him, but there would be no regular visiting. Here he would be with his thoughts and the hundreds of reminders of the woman he’d shared his life with. Lines of a poem translated from the Irish came to me:
I parted from my life last night,
A woman’s body sunk in clay:
The tender bosom that I loved
Wrapped in a sheet they took away.
The heavy blossom that had lit
The ancient boughs is tossed and blown;
Here was the burden of delight
That long had weighed the old tree down.
My body’s self deserts me now,
The half of me that was her own,
Since all I knew of brightness died
Half of me lingers, half is gone.
The face that was like hawthorn bloom
Was my right foot and my right side;
And my right hand and my right eye
Were no more mine than hers who died.
I drifted into sleep, thinking that I would ask him if he wanted to come back to London with me for a couple of weeks at least, but knowing he’d refuse. I doubted that I’d even get him to budge for Christmas; he liked his own bed, he’d say, his grumbling bones couldn’t adjust to foreign ones these days.
The undertaker arrived at half-past eight the next morning to take my mother to the church. My father followed the coffin out to the hearse and when it had been installed, he patted the rear window as if in confirmation that he’d see her again soon. The morning was mild and sunny.
‘She’d say we chose a good day for it,’ I said as my father came back in.
‘She would indeed. Is Denny awake?’
‘In the bathroom.’
‘And is all the transport worked out?’ He fiddled edgily with the top button of his shirt.
‘Don’t worry, Dad, we’ve got it all sorted.’
‘I want this to go as smooth as clockwork.’
‘It will. Wasn’t Denny amazing, getting here under his own steam?’
My father nodded. ‘Your mother always used to say that God keeps a special eye on the simple-minded.’
As we drove to the small parish church at mid-morning the sun was high and clear. Biddy and Denny came in my car, and my father travelled with Dermot in his. Biddy had only a vague recollection of Denny from when she was a child, but they’d got into conversation at the wake and were talking ten to the dozen on the short journey to the funeral mass. Denny was reminding her of great aunts and uncles; a Michael who’d been in the British Army in India, come back to Bandon with a handsome pension and been shot by the IRA during the civil war. His body was never found, said Denny, even though my grandmother had gone to the local brigade chief and begged to be told its whereabouts. Then there was a Tessie, a real good-looker, who’d emigrated to America and was said to have played a bit part in a Gary Cooper film.
As I turned at the crossroads leading to the church a sudden thought struck me; what if Ita appeared at the mass and came back to the house afterwards? I didn’t see how she could possibly know that my mother had died, but word got around fast on the rural grapevine; Denny might have mentioned it to someone who knew the postman who came to Ita’s cottage. I would have to explain how I knew her, and she might ask questions of my father or Biddy which would unravel ancient history and give Biddy a terrible shock. She’d said to my father that my mother was the last of her sisters; this was no time to discover that there was yet another twist in the family’s knotted story.
I scanned the church carefully as we walked in. It was nearly full, but I couldn’t see any sign of Ita. I thought back to John-Jo staggering towards my grandmother’s grave, and had a vision of a shower cap appearing in the cemetery as we interred my mother. I focused, picking up a hymn sheet, realizing that I wouldn’t be able to relax completely until we were back at the house.
My mother’s coffin rested just below the altar. There are only three times when we can be sure of being the centre of attention, my father had remarked on the eve of my wedding; at birth, marriage and death.
Father Brady came from the vestry and the congregation stood. He bowed to the coffin, blessed it with incense and ascended to the altar. How many years was it since I’d been at mass? Twenty-five, I reckoned, not counting the end of one I’d caught one Christmas Eve when I’d arrived to pick up my parents from the midnight service. I had no idea how things were ordered these days; when to kneel, rise, sit, make a response. I felt like an actor who hasn’t learned his lines or moves properly. I studied the pamphlet provided and saw that instructions were given at certain points.
Father Brady gave a three-minute, general sermon about life and death; the trials here, the bliss before us if we had faith. He finished by saying he was sure that my mother, a good and generous woman, was enjoying eternal happiness. I found it bland, but she would like it with its simple assurances. My father had chosen hymns she favoured; ‘Lead Kindly Light’, ‘The Lord’s My Shepherd’, ‘Hail! Bright Star of Ocean’ and a modern ditty I didn’t recognize, a toe-curling happy-clappy song that I stared at the floor through. Then came a prayer I recalled well, one that I had learned in Latin during my own devout period, Psalm 129 for the dead. It had been read at the funeral of Mary Quinlan all those years ago in Twickenham and its dramatic verse had grabbed my attention. I whispered it in Latin as Father Brady intoned it: ‘De pro-fundis clamavi ad te, Domine; Domine, exaudi vocem meam.’
Out of the depths have I cried unto thee,
O Lord; Lord, hear my voice.
O let thine ears be attentive to the voice
Of my supplication.
We came to the lines that I found particularly moving, ones that I was sure my mother, with her love of the dramatic, would approve:
My soul hath waited on his word:
My soul hath hoped in the Lord.
From the morning watch even until night:
Let Israel hope in the Lord.
Tears came to my eyes then. I fervently hoped that she had reached the place she had yearned for.
There were no surprises at the cemetery, just a noon sun, a quiet final blessing of the coffin and handfuls of earth thrown gently down. My father stood on his own by the grave for a moment, his rosary hanging in his fingers; then he leaned down and added the rosary to the flowers and earth that were already blanketing her.
I drove back to the cottage with Biddy first; we’d said that we would see to the last-minute arrangements for the food that she and Dermot had prepared after breakfast. A small group of people were expected.
‘What do we veggies have instead of funeral baked meats?’ I asked her.
‘How about funeral roast nuts?’
I told her about bone marrow going missing and she laughed.
‘Oh, Rory, I do wish all those years hadn’t gone by without a word.’
I nodded. ‘That’s just the way things are sometimes.’ The mass, with its echoes of my religious education, had triggered memories for me; myself sitting with my mother, reading through the Devotions for Confession in my missal before my confirmation. Father Corcoran would be coming into school to ask us questions and check that we were properly prepared. My mother was going to make sure that I shone in these studies. There were exercises for the conscience, to use before confession:
Have you offended anyone by injurious, threatening words or actions? Or spread any report, true or false, that exposed your neighbour to contempt, or made him undervalued? Have you been forward or peevish towards anyone in your carriage, speech or conversation?
My mother had sat with a pious expression listening to me parrot the words while I pictured her and Assumpta bickering by the lockers. I wondered what she confessed in the wooden cubicle at the back of the church; she never seemed to be in there for long and her penance took only a few minutes, which didn’t suggest any major sins to be forgiven. Maybe she didn’t identify herself in those conscience exercises or maybe, with her inclination to bargain, she weighed things up and felt that she compensated for those faults by adhering to principles in the other exercises; behaviour in relation to God, for example:
Have you spent your time, especially on Sundays and holy days, not in sluggishly lying in bed or in any sort of idle entertainment, but in reading, praying, or other pious exercises; and taken care that those under your charge have done the like and not wanted time for prayer or to prepare for the sacraments?
She had certainly worked hard at ensuring that I fulfilled my religious duties. If I was part of the trade-off for her failings it must have been a deep shock, much deeper than I’d realized, when I renounced the faith.
I poked and stacked up the fire in the living-room. Biddy laid a lace cloth on the table and set out sandwiches and pickles on the plates I’d washed – the china set with rosebuds that my mother had kept for very best. I gave her silver sugar-bowl a buffing and filled it with sugar lumps, setting the delicate tongs on the top. The huge yellow and green cheese dish she’d bought in Muswell Hill, with the handle in the shape of a stocky ploughman, sat centre table; the ploughman held a hand over his eyes, forever peering into the distance.
‘Kitty had some lovely things,’ said Biddy, admiring the silver tongs, ‘real quality.’
‘She was always saying she should go on one of those antique programmes, to have stuff valued.’
‘Oh, she had an eye, certainly.’
We were a more muted gathering than at the wake, but by no means sombre. The priest came and sat with my father for a while, accepting a cup of tea but no food. He was on a diet, he explained to me ruefully, patting his tum. My father winked at me and said there wasn’t much we couldn’t tell him about diets. Dermot had taken a box from the cupboard and was going through old photos, showing them to Biddy and Denny. He looked in an envelope and handed a small white book to me.
‘Here, holy Joe, this has got your name in; from the time when you were one of the fold.’
It was my old missal. She’d kept it safe; just in case I became unlapsed, presumably. My childish hand was on the inside cover and various holy pictures free-floated amongst the pages. Flicking through it, I saw that I was a member of societies I’d completely forgotten: The Apostleship of Prayer (all members get a plenary indulgence on admission and on the first Saturday of each month), The Union of the Little Flower (a spiritual union to spread the Kingdom of God by prayer) and The Convocation of the Holy Trinity (the members will be included in Vatican masses in the spirit of reparation). Examining the certificates for each of these
, I noticed that the last two were dated 1986 and 1993; she had signed me up without my knowing.
I slipped out of the back door into the garden. It was nearly three o’clock and the sun was dropping. Her favourite cat, a malevolent-looking mustard and white female, shot past me into the hedge. The ratty dog up at the farm barked four short barks. The ground would be getting cold now, I thought, and she nestling in her shroud, unaware. I crouched and pressed my palm on the damp rosemary, crushing its springy leaves so that its aroma reached up to me.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gretta Mulrooney was born in London in 1952. She took a degree in English at the University of Ulster and lived for a few years in Dublin, working as a hospital cleaner, a plastics riveter (fitting together Guinness signs) and teaching English. She then returned to England to teach, before taking up Social Work. She has previously published short stories and children’s fiction. Araby is her first published adult novel.
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Araby Page 18
