I’ll be home for Christmas

by Roisin Meaney

  When she returned to the kitchen she found Nell alone with the three children. ‘James had to go to work,’ she told Tilly, topping up her tea, ‘and Andy has a football match.’

  Football. He was sporty. She stored the information away.

  ‘Can I tell you something?’ Nell asked her then, slipping into the chair beside her.

  ‘Yes.’ What was this? Had she seen how Tilly was with Andy? She felt her face getting hot.

  It wasn’t about Andy. ‘I’m due in late June,’ Nell said. ‘I haven’t made it public yet, but I’ve been dying to tell someone outside the family.’

  Tilly shaped her mouth into a smile. ‘Congratulations. I won’t tell.’

  Nell was pregnant, and clearly delighted about it. Susan was pregnant, and presumably happy too. Tilly was pregnant, and too afraid to tell anyone, apart from Laura.

  Maybe she could confide in Nell, ask her to help – but immediately she dismissed the idea. What could Nell possibly do, if Laura was bent on sending Tilly home?

  She had to change the subject. ‘What’s Roone like in the summertime?’

  ‘Very different. Weather can be mixed, although it’s a lot milder than now. Very crowded too, we get lots of tourists. Good for the island, of course, plenty of business for everyone here, but I must admit I prefer it in winter, when it’s ours again.’

  ‘I’d love to live here.’ She hadn’t meant to say it. ‘I mean, I know I’ve only just got here, and I’ve seen so little of it, but I feel a sort of … pull, or something.’

  Nell nodded. ‘I know what you mean. I see it with people sometimes – it’s like the island claims them. Laura was exactly the same, Gavin too. They both wanted to come back – I think they’d have ended up living here even if they hadn’t got together.’

  ‘You’ve never lived anywhere else?’

  ‘I have – I did my training in Dublin. I was there for a few years, working in a salon, but I never really settled there. I knew I’d come back here as soon as I could. I’m not really a city person.’

  She stopped. She studied Tilly’s face, her head tipped sideways.

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘if you want something badly enough, you’ll find a way to make it happen.’

  Make it happen: easier said than done. Tearing up a boarding pass had been satisfying, but it didn’t change anything. Without Laura’s support it would take a miracle to make what she wanted happen.

  ‘Roone is no stranger to miracles,’ Nell said.

  It was like she’d read Tilly’s mind.

  ‘Laura told you about the tree, didn’t she?’

  ‘What tree?’

  ‘The one that fell. The one that bore fruit all year round.’

  ‘Oh yes …’

  She hadn’t believed Laura; she’d thought it couldn’t possibly be true. And now here was Nell saying the same.

  ‘The slice of tart you just ate,’ Nell went on, ‘was made with apples from that tree. Just because something seems impossible doesn’t mean it can’t happen. We have lots of evidence of that right here on Roone.’

  They heard the front door opening just then. Tilly’s heart leaped – maybe he’d forgotten something – but a minute later Colette appeared, home from Mass. They told her about Gladys, and more tea was made, and by the time Tilly got up to leave it was almost an hour later.

  She dressed the girls in their jackets as Nell wrapped the remains of the apple tart in tinfoil for them to bring home. ‘I’m back at work on Tuesday,’ she told Tilly, ‘in case you feel like dropping in for a trim before you leave. Call it a belated Christmas present.’

  Making her way back across the field with the girls, Tilly thought about wanting something badly enough that you found a way to make it happen. All very well for Nell to say, living on Roone and pregnant with her second child, and clearly living the exact life she was meant to live. Not so easy when everything you wanted seemed completely impossible.

  Still, she wouldn’t give up hope. Nearly three days until her flight was due to leave: enough time for a Roone miracle.

  Once they hit the outskirts, once the traffic began to thicken and the hotels and car showrooms and warehouses started to merge into a continuous line, the city evoked the same mix of feelings it always did when Laura visited it now. She’d grown up in Dublin, she’d fallen in love for the first time here, the boys had been born in a Dublin hospital. So much history, so many good memories. Of course it had a hold over her.

  But the bad stuff was here too. The upheavals of her childhood had occurred here. Aaron had died in a Dublin park. She’d endured years of loneliness and struggle in the city. And now Roone was home, and Dublin was where she came to visit, and that was fine by her.

  Since their move to Roone, Gavin had taken a trip to Dublin every few months to spend a couple of nights with his mother. Gladys had treasured those solo visits, and the chance to dote undisturbed on her son, and Laura had welcomed them too, ensuring as they did that Gladys would be less inclined to descend on Roone in between. Winwin.

  The terraced house where Gavin had grown up hadn’t changed since Laura’s last sight of it in March. They’d visited for Gladys’s birthday, shortly before Laura had got her diagnosis. Same dark blue front door that Gavin repainted every few years, same small square of gravel out the front, same huddle of terracotta pots standing guard to the left of the door. Filled with daffodils last time, as far as Laura remembered. She wondered if there were bulbs waiting in the soil, biding their time until spring. No Gladys around to see them bloom.

  As soon as they let themselves in Larry emerged from the kitchen, looking a little rumpled, and sombre greetings were exchanged. ‘Folks have been calling all day,’ he told them. ‘They’ve been bringing food.’ He made it sound like an accusation, as if the offerings had been delivered purely to annoy him. ‘They were asking questions – I didn’t know what to tell them.’

  Every one of them wondering who the mystery man in Gladys’s house was. Tongues wagging, no doubt, up and down the road. Larry in the wrong place at the wrong time, this awful responsibility landed on him. His wife’s death still so recent, the timing so cruel.

  ‘I’ll go up to see her,’ Gavin said, starting for the stairs.

  Laura fished comics from the single case they’d brought and ushered the boys into the tidy little kitchen. ‘Wait here with Larry,’ she instructed, finding the sherry Gladys kept for visitors and pouring him a glass without asking if he wanted it.

  She climbed the stairs and entered Gladys’s room. Gavin, in a chair by the bed, lifted his head briefly. She went to stand beside him, wanting to lay a hand on his shoulder but not daring.

  Gladys looked calm. Whatever the manner of her death, she appeared at peace now. She lay on the neatly made bed wearing the blue suit they’d waved her off in the day before. She’d been made up but not garishly: a suggestion of lipstick, a hint of blusher. The cheeks more sunken than in life, the flesh under the chin gathering in loose folds, no Gladys left to raise her head and pull it in.

  Laura regarded Gavin’s bowed head. Praying for his mother’s soul, or maybe just remembering her. An only child, no sibling to mourn with at this time, nobody to share his reminiscences – and there was nothing in the world Laura could do to change that for him.

  He gave the best foot massages: they’d been her salvation when she’d been expecting Evie and Marian, and the size of a hippopotamus. He was useless with money – but money had never featured in her list of priorities. He’d proposed twice, and twice Laura had said no – and sometime after her second refusal, shortly after the girls were born, she’d turned the tables and asked him to marry her, because somewhere along the way he’d become important, and walking down an aisle with him seemed to be the most sensible way to show him that.

  He couldn’t put a proper knot in a tie to save his life.

  He grew the best tomatoes she’d ever tasted.

  His instinctive love of animals, all animals, used to please her inordinat
ely.

  Without prompting, Ben and Seamus had stopped calling him Gavin and switched to Dad.

  ‘I’ll put on dinner,’ she whispered eventually. He nodded without looking up. She turned and left the room.

  In the kitchen the boys were reading and Larry was hovering, cradling his sherry. ‘Have you eaten?’ Laura asked him, and when he told her he hadn’t, she lit Gladys’s oven and put in one of the donated casseroles. Paprika chicken, she read in green biro on an address label stuck to the lid. Reheat for fifteen minutes at gas 6.

  ‘I made a hotel reservation for the night,’ Larry told her. ‘Figured you folks would need all the space here. Same place I was supposed to stay in, close to the airport. Good for my flight in the morning.’

  Laura hid her relief. ‘Gavin will drive you there after you’ve eaten,’ she said, and he thanked her and went off to pack up his things.

  ‘We’re starving,’ Ben said, even though they’d got takeaway chips on the way up, making the car smell of vinegar from Portlaoise to Dublin.

  ‘Dinner won’t be long,’ Laura told them. She lit a fire in the sitting room and plumped cushions, looking forward to putting her feet up later.

  Two empty wine glasses sat on the coffee table, one with Gladys’s pink lipstick still on the rim. They’d sat in here last evening, the two of them, Gladys telling him about Dublin, suggesting places for him to see in the morning. Offering to accompany him maybe, unaware that the next time she left the house it would be in a wooden box.

  When the casserole was ready she tapped on Gladys’s bedroom door, and the five of them sat in near silence around the table, the boys doing most of the eating. Laura did her best to keep the conversation going, but with little co-operation from either Gavin or Larry she was forced eventually to admit defeat.

  Directly afterwards, Larry went off to retrieve his suitcase. Poor man probably couldn’t wait to get away. ‘Sorry your trip ended like this,’ Laura told him on the doorstep.

  He managed the faintest of smiles. ‘Guess it was never gonna be a happy one,’ he said, and she couldn’t argue with that.

  ‘There’ll always be a bed for you on Roone,’ she said, ‘a free one.’

  He thanked her politely, but she couldn’t imagine him ever wanting to come back. She wished him a safe flight and watched as he drove off with Gavin, remembering the day before when she’d stood outside another house and waved him and Gladys off in just this way.

  Two minutes after they’d left, as she and the boys were about to start the washing-up, the doorbell rang. She went to answer it.

  ‘Joyce Mulqueen,’ the woman said. Navy coat, sensible shoes, pale brown hair coaxed into waves. Carrying something wrapped in tinfoil. ‘I was her closest friend,’ she said. Eyes swollen from crying, nose reddened at the tip, trembling mouth bare of lipstick. ‘I can’t believe it.’

  Laura brought her into the sitting room and poured more sherry, the only other alcohol she could find in the house a dusty bottle of crème de menthe.

  ‘We were supposed to have Christmas dinner together,’ Joyce wept, ‘only she missed her ferry home – but of course you know that.’ Dabbing at her face with the tissue she’d pulled from her sleeve, the sherry ignored. Maybe Joyce was more a gin woman.

  It turned out that she and Gladys had met at bridge – Gladys played bridge? – which Joyce had taken up after the death of her husband, seven years earlier. ‘We became friends right away,’ she told Laura. ‘We have – we had – so much in common.’

  Joyce had spent most of the day in the museum where she volunteered twice a week. ‘I only heard the news from Dolores Piggott on my way home: such a shock.’ Pausing as she welled up again to press the tissue to each eye in turn. ‘I was only on the phone with Gladys last evening. We were going to meet for lunch tomorrow, with that American man who was staying with her. She sounded fine, just fine. I still can’t believe it.’

  Her offering turned out to be a tea brack. ‘It’s frozen, I hadn’t time to make another one – but it will help you out over the next few days. She often talked about you,’ she added, and Laura could imagine how that conversation had gone.

  Within minutes the doorbell sounded for the second time, and again a few minutes after that, and by the time Gavin returned, the front room had filled with neighbours and friends of Gladys, who were only just hearing the news. They made the pilgrimage upstairs in pairs, and teas and coffees became the order of the day, the sherry bottle, like its owner, having come to the end of its days.

  Laura sent the boys to the corner shop for more coffee and tea and milk as Joyce, who had rallied at the appearance of the other callers, bustled about, slicing up the various baked goods that arrived, keeping the teapot full and generally making herself very useful indeed.

  ‘I know you’ve been sick,’ she said, cutting a madeira cake into slices. ‘Gladys told me. That must have been hard, with little kiddies to look after, and you expecting as well.’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘Gladys was so worried.’ Arranging the slices on a plate. ‘She had us all doing novenas.’

  ‘Did she?’

  ‘And your little girls. I’ve seen lots of photos, and of the boys too, such nice polite boys – and the baby, of course. Gladys was so proud of them all, so delighted to be a grandmother.’

  ‘Yes …’

  ‘And she’s shown me photos of your beautiful home too. She used to say it was exactly the kind of house she always wanted.’

  Gladys had been worried about her.

  Gladys had been delighted to be a grandmother; she’d shown Joyce photos of the girls, of all the children.

  Gladys had admired their house.

  Laura refilled the coffee pot, marvelling at all that had remained unsaid between them.

  By nine o’clock the house was theirs again, with Joyce leading the mass exodus and promising to return in the morning to see if they needed a hand. Gavin went for a walk, and in the emptied-out sitting room the boys were working their way through Gladys’s many TV channels, a far cry from the handful they had on Roone.

  Alone in the kitchen, Laura washed up. The girls would be in bed at this hour, and Poppy should be going up now too. She’d wait another while before she rang.

  She hoped Tilly didn’t hate her too much.

  She lifted a plate from the soapy water and thought about the two busy days that were ahead of them until Gladys was put into the ground and they could go back home.

  She dried the dishes, determined not to think about the morning, and what had to be done.

  Just get through it. Just get it over.

  Nothing had been organised, no invitations sent out. They simply arrived, shortly after Tilly and Susan had put the twins to bed and restored some sort of order to the kitchen.

  None of them came empty-handed. A box of flapjacks from Lelia. A bottle of brandy from Imelda, married to Nell’s uncle Hugh. Peppermint tea and vanilla biscuits from Colette and Nell.

  They sat in a little group around the fire, talking in low voices about Gladys as Tilly gave Poppy her bedtime feed.

  ‘Only three nights ago, Christmas Eve, we were all here with her,’ Lelia said. ‘She was sitting right there where you are now, Tilly.’

  ‘She was fine that night,’ Imelda said. ‘There wasn’t a thing wrong with her.’

  ‘Actually,’ Susan said, ‘maybe there was.’

  She told them about Laura finding Gladys on her bedroom floor the following morning. ‘She told me they called the doctor, and he wanted to admit Gladys to Tralee Hospital for tests – he said it could be her heart – but she wouldn’t hear of it.’

  ‘But that was Christmas Day,’ Imelda said. ‘No ferries were running, she’d have had no way of getting to the mainland.’

  ‘Tilly and I got to the island on Christmas Day,’ Colette pointed out. ‘A man from Kilmally brought us across on his boat. If Gladys had agreed to go to hospital, I’m sure something could have been arranged.’

  ‘It
could,’ Nell said, ‘but it mightn’t have made any difference.’

  ‘No, that’s true …’

  They listened to the soft lap of the flames in the fireplace, and the occasional snuffle from Charlie, sprawled on the hearth rug by Tilly’s feet. Poppy’s eyes began to close; her sucking became sporadic as sleep came to claim her. Tilly nudged her gently awake until the bottle was empty.

  ‘How old was Gladys?’ Imelda enquired.

  ‘In her seventies, I think.’ Susan looked to Tilly for confirmation, but Tilly shook her head. She’d known virtually nothing about Gavin’s mother, but she’d observed a sort of muted antipathy between her and Laura, a not-quite-meeting of the eyes whenever they addressed one another.

  She eased the bottle teat from Poppy’s mouth and lifted the baby to rest against her shoulder, rubbing small circles into her back, like Ma had taught her. When the wind was duly evacuated, she got to her feet. ‘I’ll put her up.’

  ‘Want me to come with you?’ Susan asked.

  ‘No need, I’m fine.’

  She felt their eyes on her as she left the room, and guessed Gladys would stop being the topic of conversation as soon as she was out of earshot. She didn’t mind: they were bound to be curious about her, turning up the way she had. Colette would probably tell them how she and Tilly had met, and they’d ask Susan how much she knew about the whole thing.

  She climbed the stairs, Poppy warm and heavy in her arms. Imagine what they’d say if they knew about her pregnancy, or how she felt about Nell’s stepson: they’d have something to talk about then.

  She tucked Poppy into her cot and placed the brown rabbit next to her. She gazed at her tiny sleeping niece. August, Gavin said she’d been born. By the time her first birthday came around Tilly’s baby would have arrived; he or she would be a few weeks old, if Tilly’s calculations were right, and if it came when it was expected.

  It. Her baby. Seven or eight weeks gone. No queasiness on waking any more, or not as bad as it had been. No other symptoms apart from an aversion to coffee. No change in her shape yet, too soon for that.