Holding

by Graham Norton

  It was a few weeks before anyone saw the new mother, and the little boy seemed very small. The headscarved mothers of the parish spoke in hushed tones once more about their prognosis. Nobody expected Little Tommy to thrive. Mrs Burke returned to being a figure of pity.

  Time proved everyone wrong. The baby grew quickly, becoming a sturdy little boy who went to school, and the smile returned to his mother’s face. It was not to last long.

  Most people in the village would have said that Big Tom drank the farm, but Mrs O’Driscoll had heard her parents talking. She knew there was more to it than that. He gambled a big part of it away and mismanaged the rest. She remembered Little Tommy, hardly able to see over the counter, and his mother, bright red in the face, stumbling over her words as she asked for a line of credit. It was the first and only argument Mrs O’Driscoll had ever heard her parents having. Her father holding out a ledger asking her mother if she was mad. Why had she agreed to give the Burke woman tick? Her mother had shouted back at him. Had he no heart? It was a simple act of Christian charity. Anyone would have done the same.

  Dying was the only sound business decision Big Tom ever made. It turned out that, unbeknownst to his wife and son, now eighteen years old and ready to farm himself, a life insurance policy had been purchased. For the first time in their lives they had some money in the bank. The other bit of good fortune that befell them was that bad business out at Ard Carraig with Robert and Rosemary Ross. The Ross daughters had land but needed money. Little Tommy didn’t have enough to buy a farm, but he was able to pay a fair rent. Everyone was pleased to see these two dark tales find some sort of happy ending. Mrs Burke went to her grave knowing that she had raised her son well. He never touched a drop and had no interest in the horses.

  After his mother died, a change came over Tommy. He had always been a hard worker, but now it took over his life. He was always trying to sell you something, and all he ever wanted to talk about was land. The price of it, who had it, who was selling, where it was. His fervent wish to be nothing like his father seemed to have taken a sinister turn. Everyone liked a young man to be ambitious, but this was different. It meant too much to him. It wasn’t natural. A good-looking young lad like Tommy should have friends and be falling out of the pub at closing. Mrs O’Driscoll remembered thinking to herself that he would never be satisfied, and sure enough, it had ended in tears.

  The door to the shop opened and brought her back from the past. A late-afternoon breeze rustled the paper bags hanging from the vegetable baskets. She didn’t recognise the man in the suit who walked in, but after nearly forty years behind the counter she knew the type and she didn’t like it. Too much time had gone into picking out that tie, and his smile was the sort he might have used meeting a group of special needs children on a day out.

  ‘Twenty Camel Lights, please.’

  She reached behind her for the packet.

  ‘Oh, and a box of matches.’

  Mrs O’Driscoll rolled her eyes. He might think he was some sort of hotshot, but he was never going to make her rich.

  5

  Abigail stood by the open front door for a few minutes, watching the lights of the cars make their way down the avenue. The branches of the trees caught the headlights and reared up against the black sky. She took a couple of deep breaths and stared at her own shadow stretched out across the gravel. The stillness. She liked this time of night.

  Normally Florence went to bed first, taking a book and a small glass of milk, then, once Evelyn had set out the breakfast things, she too would make her way up the stairs. Abigail relished the half an hour or so when the house was hers alone. It wasn’t that she didn’t like people; she just didn’t need them. Sometimes she saw this self-reliance as a character flaw. Was there something wrong with her? But mostly she felt it was a strength.

  It didn’t take Dr Freud to figure out that her emotional reserve was deeply connected to the death of her parents. She would have said she loved both of them equally, but in truth it was her father she adored. Her earliest memory was holding his big shovel of a hand and walking unsteadily in oversized wellingtons across a ploughed field. They had fed the calves together. She had sat on his lap as he drove the tractor up to the back paddock. Even when Florence and then Evelyn came along, her special bond with her daddy went unbroken. While the other girls stayed in the house with their mother or played around the garden, Abigail remained by her father’s side. With her serious little face framed by an angular fringe, she became a familiar sight wherever Robert Ross went. The men who worked on the farm took to calling her ‘Shadow’, as if she was a loyal collie.

  Of course she missed him when he died, but what broke her heart was discovering that he hadn’t loved her enough not to leave. When her mother had died, she had been sad, but there was another feeling, too. An energy and strength that flowed through her as she prepared to be her father’s partner. Together they would run Ard Carraig. When she howled into her pillow in the days and nights after Evelyn found the body, what hurt her the most was that her father hadn’t shared her vision of their future. It was the first time in her short life that she had realised she was alone. Pain like that can do strange things to a young heart.

  Abigail stepped inside and closed the heavy front door behind her. She turned the upper lock and slid the thick brass chain across. Making her way slowly down the hall, she switched off the lamp on the long oak table. A pale blue bowl held some bunches of keys and a few lines of raffle tickets. Beside it, framed photographs of the three girls at various ages in school uniform stood in order alongside a larger silver frame that held the black and white image of Rosemary and Robert on their wedding day. Abigail had often stood and stared at those faces, searching for a sign or a clue, something that foretold the sadness that was to be heaped upon them. Nothing. Smiles so certain of the future and all the joy it would bring. Florence in her first communion dress and veil. God, she looked so like her mother.

  She made her way into the living room and put the fire guard in front of the dying embers in the grate. The polished wood of the side tables glowed golden beneath the light of the lamps. She made her rounds of the room, switching them off one by one, then picked up a stray wine glass to return to the kitchen. Once there, she put it on the draining board ready for Evelyn to deal with in the morning. Turning away, she caught a glimpse of her own reflection in the black sheen of the window. She stopped and stared. As the ghostly image floated in the oily darkness, she could clearly see the bags under her eyes and the deep lines cutting across her forehead. Abigail was not a vain woman, but even she was taken aback. When had she become so old? Not yet fifty, but this was the face of an ancient crone. It seemed unfair. She still felt like a girl who was just taking care of the place, waiting for the grown-ups to come back. She rubbed her eyes and went across to the dresser to get a glass for some water. Time for bed.

  Tonight had been a disaster. Nobody had had any appetite for bridge. They all just wanted to gossip and speculate about the bones. Even Mavis, who never spoke in much more than a whisper, had been moved to shriek at the assembled players, ‘It was on Sky News!’

  Big Tom, Little Tommy, Sergeant Collins: the names went round the circle like pass the parcel. The actual bridge game never really took off, and then Evelyn had been fussing around making a fool of herself. Who forgets to put the tea in the pot? Abigail had been embarrassed. Of course she knew well what had upset her sister, and doubtless the others would speculate about it in the morning, but nobody would have dared say anything in front of them.

  Yes, she thought as she started up the stairs, I’m glad today is over.

  Everything about Abigail suggested a practical woman, from her cropped grey hair to her flat brown shoes. It wasn’t just the solitude of the night she enjoyed; it was the routine. The familiarity of habits she had developed over decades. A house run according to her rules. The click of light switches marked her progress to the top landing and along the corridor to her bedroom. As she turne
d off the last one, she was surprised to see a glow coming from beneath the door of Evelyn’s room. Abigail hesitated. Normally she would have been annoyed. Her sisters knew she didn’t like them to leave their lights on, but tonight she felt differently. Should she go back and knock gently, enquiring with a whisper if everything was all right? Of course she knew that she should, but the truth was that she was afraid Evelyn might say ‘no’, or appear at the door with a face streaked with tears. Then what would she do?

  It wasn’t that she didn’t care. She did. Evelyn wasn’t like Florence, who never gave Abigail cause for concern. The school and the children seemed to provide Florence with everything she needed in life, but Evelyn, sweet, innocent Evelyn, well, she was different. Had Abigail been wrong to keep them all together? It had felt like the right thing to do. Florence hadn’t hesitated to come back to Duneen for Evelyn’s sake. Evelyn had been through so much and appeared to be so fragile. It was only proper that her sisters would take care of her, but now it seemed that act of concern had turned in on itself. The refuge of Ard Carraig, Abigail had to admit, was now a sort of prison for the three of them. Evelyn should have more in her life than cleaning this house and cooking for her sisters.

  Christ, thought Abigail, I think I’m the antisocial one, but even I have more friends than Evelyn. It pained her to think it, but what that girl really needed was a man. Leaving the light seeping out across the threadbare carpet, she went into her room and shut her door.

  At that very moment, Evelyn was flicking through a copy of Vogue. It was from March 1995 and came from the neatly stacked piles of the magazine beneath the window. Every year, someone donated them to the book stall at the Church of Ireland fete. Abigail wouldn’t have approved of her wasting money buying them new, but when they were so cheap and it was all going to charity, even she couldn’t do more than raise an eyebrow.

  The pages were being turned with a slow, steady rhythm, but Evelyn’s eyes weren’t focused on the photographs of Madonna wrapped in Versace. She was staring straight ahead at the opposite wall of the bedroom. The drab wallpaper was a tangle of green and brown leaves and had certainly been there in her grandmother’s time. She traced her eyes along the branches looking for where the pattern repeated itself, as she had done so many times before. There was no way she could have gone to bed and fallen asleep. Not now. She hoped she could calm down. She had been so embarrassed tonight with the supper fiasco. Pouring out cups of hot water. Her face flushed at the memory of it.

  March 1995 was finished. She folded it shut in her lap and then got up to return it to the pile. As she stood, she too saw her face in the cold glass of the window. She paused. Yes, there were a couple of grey hairs and she looked a little tight around the mouth, but this face was basically unchanged. She remembered another night over twenty years before when she had stared at her reflection in this bedroom. Tears had been running down her cheeks and her chest had been heaving as she tried to gather breaths in between her stifled sobs. She had longed to run to her sisters but she couldn’t tell them what had happened. Looking back, she realised that they must have known. It turned out most of the parish had been watching the soap opera of her life play out, but neither Abigail nor Florence had asked her how she was, or even touched her arm as she stood hunched in the boot room doing a hand wash in the big butler sink.

  She felt a strange pressure building behind her face. No. She would not cry. She might have carried the pain for twenty-three years, but she would not release it now. Her face contorted into a thin smile.

  She knew who it was buried up above and the thought of it gave her pleasure. It must be Tommy Burke. He hadn’t left her. He hadn’t run away. He’d been in Duneen the whole time, unable to reach her. She sat on the bed and then stretched out and hugged her pillow. She was seventeen again. Tommy hadn’t stopped loving her.

  She breathed in the clean smell of the pillowcase and tried to make sense of her feelings. There was relief, but also sadness and a rage, because her life, her whole life, with kisses and children and picnics and laughing, had been stolen from her. She held her breath. How had shiny-haired, tanned-skinned, wide-mouthed, lovely, perfect Tommy ended up buried in an unmarked grave? Maybe now after all these years the mystery of her life would be solved. The loneliness and misery weren’t her doing after all. Someone had robbed her of her happiness, and now that they had found his body, she knew exactly who was to blame.

  6

  At this rate he might lose weight. Mrs Meany had gone home the night before without leaving him any dinner, and this morning he had left the barracks before she arrived. She’d never forgotten to feed him before. He hoped she wasn’t sick. A pâté sandwich last night and a bowl of cereal eaten standing up in the dark kitchen this morning was all he’d had. He felt a little light-headed but also more energised than he had for years.

  The detective superintendent from Cork crushed his third Camel Light of the morning underfoot. PJ looked at him. Christ, he was an awful prick. The slicked-back hair, the long, thin hook of a nose, the suit and clean pressed shirt. What sort of man wore socks that matched his tie? Since 7.30 the nasal whine of his voice had been droning on. ‘If it was a vagrant’, ‘if it was a suicide’, ‘if it was a murder’; he had a detailed theory for every possible outcome and was more than happy to share them. Somehow everyone else had managed to make themselves look busy, leaving PJ to become an unwilling frozen audience of one. The wind blowing across the site seemed to have brought winter with it. He had feared the worst when he had googled Detective Superintendent Dunne the night before and discovered that his Christian name was Linus. Linus? What sort of a name was that? How could he solve a crime if he couldn’t even figure out that his name made him sound like a gobshite?

  The forensic team had arrived late yesterday and taken the bones up to the lab in Cork for testing. Now they were back examining the area and looking for any more remains. PJ felt that in the absence of new or contradictory evidence they should be following his lead. The young man who had been farming this land twenty-odd years ago had left the village and not been heard of since, and now a body had turned up. Surely it seemed fairly safe to assume that Tommy Burke was either the victim or the murderer. These so-called experts only seemed interested in the things they didn’t know. The use of mechanical diggers meant they weren’t sure if it was a shallow or a deep grave. In turn this meant they were going to have difficulties getting any sort of accurate timeline for the death. The one thing they could say with any certainty was that the remains that had been found so far belonged to a young adult male.

  After all the clearing and excavations it was hard to tell what part of the old farm they were actually standing in. The builder did have a map, but for some reason it was in the Skibbereen office. It was on its way. Sergeant Collins’ stomach gave a deep gurgle of impatience, but it went unnoticed under the never-ending lecture on criminal investigation. He looked around the flattened site, trying to get his bearings.

  The first time he had come across the Burke farmhouse was just a couple of weeks after he’d been transferred to Duneen. It wasn’t just the promotion that had excited PJ; he liked the idea of being a one-man band. After graduating from Templemore, he had been stationed in Thurles. He liked the job well enough; it was the nights in the pub, the banter in the barracks that he found tough. Nobody ever said anything to his face, but he found it hard to shake the way the uniforms looked at him when he arrived. In every pair of eyes he saw the unasked question, ‘How the hell did you get through training?’ The truth was that PJ had just scraped through, and that was mostly thanks to his written work. In Thurles he worked longer hours than anyone else and was always the first to volunteer for the shifts that nobody else wanted, but it never seemed enough to make him accepted.

  As the new sergeant in Duneen, he was keen to make a fresh start. He felt he could really be of service. For years the village had had some old codger who, from what he’d heard, did most of his police work from a bar stool in Byrnes
. PJ was the young blood. He had decided to go for walks around the village on Sunday evenings. You saw things differently by foot, and it was a chance to exchange a few words with anyone he met on his travels.

  He remembered that it had been a warm evening in early September. He had made his way up past the school but was beginning to regret his route. The road was much steeper than he had imagined and he was getting quite short of breath and was coated in a slick of sweat that was making his clothes stick to him. As an excuse to rest, he stopped by a thick bit of hedge and pretended to be looking for a nice length of branch he could break off to use as a stick.

  As he peered into the darkness of the shrubs, he was surprised to see a glint of light about twenty feet ahead of him. What was it? A piece of metal, a bird’s wing? He stepped into the ditch to get a closer look. Glass. It was a tiny bit of exposed window, the rest of it covered by a mass of untamed foliage. He stepped back and went to the other side of the road. Sure enough there was a small rusty gate almost lost in the dense hedge, and there, high up, he could see the very top of a chimney pot. An entire house swallowed whole by nature. PJ wiped the sweat from his eyes and let out a long sigh. The sadness of such neglect was somehow superseded by a wonder at the vigour and power of nature. The scratchings of man so easily erased. He had continued his walk, making a mental note to find out the story behind the buried farmhouse.