I’ll be home for Christmas

by Roisin Meaney

  She crossed to the windows, drew the curtains closed. When would she start to show, when would people know by looking at her? Where would she be in a week’s time, in a month’s time? Where could she go? Who could she turn to for help?

  She left the room and made her way downstairs. Susan stood in the hall, speaking softly on the phone. Tilly went to walk past, but Susan reached for her arm.

  ‘She’s here now,’ she said. ‘Look after yourself, talk tomorrow.’

  She passed the receiver to Tilly. ‘Laura,’ she said, and vanished into the sitting room.

  Laura. Tilly looked at the phone. After a few seconds she put it to her ear. ‘Hello.’

  ‘Tilly – all well?’

  ‘Everything’s fine.’

  ‘Good … and tell me, did Nell get someone to do the deliveries?’

  ‘Andy’s doing them.’

  ‘Andy – of course. He’d be perfect – he’s done it before with Gavin. I never even thought of him.’

  A beat passed.

  ‘We’ve had lots of callers this evening,’ Laura said. ‘Friends of Gladys, all coming to pay their respects. The Irish are good around death.’

  Good around death: what an odd thing to say.

  ‘Tilly.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re still mad at me, after what I said this morning. I can hear it.’

  She didn’t contradict her.

  ‘Tilly, I don’t want us to fall out. It’s the last thing I want.’

  She stopped. Again Tilly remained silent. What was there to say?

  ‘It was … quite amazing to discover that I had a sister. I’m very glad you came, I really am – and I hope we keep in touch.’ A small laugh. ‘God knows, this family hasn’t exactly a good track record in that regard.’

  Keep in touch. A letter once in a while, she meant. A card at Christmas. Just as long as Tilly kept to her side of the world.

  ‘Well,’ Laura said, ‘I’d better let you go. Goodnight lovey, we’ll talk tomorrow.’

  ‘Goodnight.’

  She replaced the receiver and stood for a minute in the hall, hearing a soft burst of laughter from the sitting room. She looked at the jumble of stuff hanging on the hallstand, at the girls’ little jackets, and Poppy’s minuscule hat that Susan had brought, and Laura’s dark green oilskin.

  Her family lived here.

  She eased the front door open as quietly as she could. She leaned against the jamb and tilted her head up to the stars, and listened to the distant wash of the sea.

  Lovey. Laura had called her lovey, without even thinking about it.

  I’m very glad you came, she’d said.

  When the cold began to bite she closed the door softly and re-entered the sitting room, where the talk had turned to someone called Annie Byrnes, whose bones, it would appear, had the power to predict the weather.

  Nothing, Tilly decided, resuming her seat by the fire, would surprise her about Roone.

  MONDAY

  28 DECEMBER

  ‘I’ll be off so,’ she said, checking her bag for purse, tissues, phone.

  They were in the hall. It was just after nine, and she’d been awake for what felt like hours, watching the furniture in Gladys’s twin room slowly materialising as the dawn seeped through the curtains. The other bed was empty: Gavin had sat up all night beside his mother’s body, keeping her company before she left the house for the last time. The boys had been shoehorned into the single bed in the smallest room, Ben’s head at Seamus’s feet.

  ‘Will you not have something to eat?’ Gavin asked, his face drawn and grey, his eyes bloodshot after his solitary vigil. At least he was talking to her.

  ‘I don’t feel like anything.’ Her appetite had deserted her, as she had known it would. She’d make up for it later. ‘I’d rather get going.’

  She’d have welcomed a lift, but he didn’t offer. Her destination lay a mile to the east, she was groggy from not enough sleep, and the day was dull and grey. But he must be exhausted, and in no state to sit behind the wheel of a car.

  ‘You should grab some sleep now while you can,’ she said. The undertaker was due at noon. ‘The boys are well able to get their own breakfasts, and I’ll call you in plenty of time.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  He wouldn’t. She knew he wouldn’t. ‘See you soon then,’ she said and let herself out, closing the door quietly behind her.

  It wasn’t as cold here as on Roone, but it was far from warm. She walked quickly, past landmarks that were familiar: the petrol station where she’d worked behind the till for a few teenage summers, the park where she’d played with friends after school, the cinema where she’d had her first date with Aaron.

  The film titles displayed on a board over the door meant little to her. With no cinema on Roone she was hopelessly out of touch. There had been talk of a mobile cinema being set up last summer, visiting the island every so often like the mobile library, but nothing had come of it. Pity: she used to love going to the movies.

  A group of youths loitered on a corner, shoulders hunched against the cold: they barely looked at her as she walked by. Too old at thirty, much too old to be of any interest to them.

  As she walked on, the flavour of the neighbourhood changed. Delis and pet parlours and art galleries replaced the chippers and off licences and betting shops. She eventually reached her road and turned in.

  The Whelans, the O’Briens, the Cassidys, the O’Donnells. The same families there for years, their houses architect-designed and detached, most of them surrounded by high walls and locked wrought-iron gates, with boxes for the mail and intercoms fixed to the garden walls. Do not disturb, if you can possibly avoid it.

  The polar opposite of Roone, where nobody locked a door, and where garden walls were mostly waist-high arrangements of stones piled on stones with nothing to hold them together but the skill of the workmen, designed more to keep little children in than to keep anyone out. Roone, where everyone disturbed everyone else all day long.

  Behind the O’Donnells’ wall a dog barked, sounding heartbreakingly like Charlie. A tall woman strode rapidly along the path on the far side of the road, head and shoulders swathed in a deep purple scarf, black bag dangling from a gloved hand. She didn’t even glance in Laura’s direction.

  And suddenly there it was. Her father’s house.

  Big gates, check. Immaculate lawn, check. Place she’d run away from as soon as she could, check.

  She tapped buttons on the keypad attached to the wall. Seconds later the mechanism whirred into life and the gates swept slowly open. She walked up the paved drive and stood on the doorstep and dialled his number on her phone. When the ringing tone stopped she waited for the voicemail beep, and then she said, ‘It’s Laura. I’m outside,’ and hung up.

  He never answered his phone. He let it ring and then he listened to the message if one was left, and he chose which deserved a response. He didn’t hear the doorbell from his studio at the rear. The great artist was an expert when it came to avoiding the common people.

  The seconds turned into minutes. There was no sound from within, no movement to be detected at any of the windows, or behind the glass panels on either side of the front door. Had she made the journey in vain?

  He’d always been an early riser; it was highly unlikely that he was still in bed at twenty past nine. And he generally didn’t go to his studio before eleven, not until he’d read his two newspapers from end to end and attended to his correspondence. He must be out. What now?

  She was about to admit defeat when she heard the familiar slop-slop of his leather slippers across the parquet floor. He never wore shoes unless he was going out; his slippers were replaced more often than any other footwear.

  There was a rattling fumble of the security chain being slid across and released, and finally the door was opened. He wore a baggy bottle green pullover and loose grey sweat pants. He was unshaven, the stubble white against his sallow complexion. The greenish pockets of flesh unde
r his eyes seemed to have grown larger in the months since her last visit in March. A pink spot flared, high up on his left cheek. He had an undernourished look about him.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked, frowning. ‘Isn’t Susan on Roone?’ His stale breath floated out to her.

  ‘My mother-in-law died yesterday,’ Laura told him.

  A tiny rise of an eyebrow, otherwise no change. ‘Was she sick?’ He’d met Gladys exactly once, at Laura and Gavin’s wedding.

  ‘No – heart attack, we think.’

  He shuffled back to admit her, and she stepped inside. It was colder in the house than out. She smelt polish and woodsmoke and turpentine and coffee, all the smells she associated with here.

  ‘So Susan is still on Roone,’ he said. Didn’t they talk? Hadn’t he phoned her since yesterday morning?

  ‘Yes. We left the girls with her …’ but he was already walking away so she walked after him, past the pair of white spindly-legged chairs by the wall with their maroon-and-gold-striped padded seats, and the bronze bust of Gauguin on its mahogany pedestal that had terrified her as a youngster. Past the various paintings by Luke’s contemporaries, and the drawing-room and dining-room doors with their faceted glass knobs that Laura had thought for years were enormous diamonds.

  As she followed him across the black-and-white-tiled floor she regarded his rear view. In the slight roundness of his back, in the way he held his arms out a fraction from his body, in the suggestion of a rolling waddle in his hips, she could see for the first time the old man he was becoming. Sixty-what? For the first time, she couldn’t remember his age.

  She wondered, as she had often wondered, what Susan – bright, warm, big-hearted Susan – could possibly have seen in this dour, shambling, ageing creature. It remained a complete mystery to Laura: but then, wasn’t that the way of love, wasn’t it an inexplicable phenomenon most of the time? Who could say what brought two people together, what drew them closer, what made them choose one another over anyone else?

  And every love story was different, every one unique. Look how she’d known, within minutes of meeting him, that Aaron was going to be significant, was going to change her life. With Gavin it had been different. She’d liked him from the start, but it had taken quite a bit longer for the affection she’d felt to develop into something stronger.

  Look at Nell, engaged first to one Baker brother, married now to the other. Look at Nell’s father, walking away from thirty-something years of marriage, deserting his wife for love.

  The kitchen was only marginally warmer than the hall. Didn’t he feel the cold, or was it miserliness that stopped him turning on the radiators? Even his minor paintings were commanding five-figure sums, for Christ’s sake. She drew her jacket more closely about her, resisted the urge to rub heat into her arms.

  ‘Have you eaten?’ he asked, lifting the lid of the bread bin and peering inside. ‘I could do you some toast.’

  She’d forgotten his total indifference to food. If he wasn’t presented with a hot meal in the evening he simply did without, or ate sweetcorn or tuna or the like straight from their cans. He probably hadn’t boiled an egg since Susan’s departure.

  ‘Nothing for me, thanks,’ she told him, her appetite still absent.

  ‘Coffee?’ Indicating the bubbling percolator on the worktop.

  ‘I don’t drink it any more.’

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘Since when?’

  ‘Since I got cancer,’ she answered lightly. Not once had he come to see her, not one single time.

  ‘Ah.’ He nodded slowly, his eyes travelling over her face. ‘You’re well now though. You’re better now.’

  ‘I am. Yes.’

  Don’t go into the ongoing monitoring, and the ache that she sometimes felt in the breast that was no longer there, and the terror that refused to go away. Don’t bother, he doesn’t want to know.

  ‘I’ll have tea,’ she said, ‘if you have any.’ Warm her up if nothing else. She rubbed her hands together.

  He glanced at them. ‘Are you cold?’

  ‘A bit. Don’t you feel it cold in here?’

  ‘Not really. Hold on.’ He went back out to the hall. She heard him opening the door of the cupboard under the stairs.

  She looked around. The kitchen was pretty much as she remembered it, same stainless-steel everything, same powder-blue-tiled floor, same cream paint on the walls. A single glass tumbler sat in the sink, the only evidence that the kitchen was used.

  He reappeared with a fan heater and plugged it in, positioning it to face the breakfast bar. ‘Sit,’ he said, so she sat on one of the two leather-and-chrome high stools, still wearing her jacket, and watched as he opened a cupboard.

  ‘Peppermint,’ he said. ‘Camomile. Green. Berry. Decaffeinated black.’

  ‘Green,’ she said, and he took down a box.

  ‘So,’ he said, setting two china mugs on the counter, ‘anything else to report from your island?’

  ‘Actually, I have some news,’ she said.

  His back was to her, filling the kettle from a filter jug. He plugged it in and turned to face her again, his expression a bit guarded now. He folded his arms unhurriedly. ‘Yes?’

  ‘You have another child.’ She watched him. ‘Another daughter. She’s seventeen, she was born in Australia.’ She stopped and waited to see if he had known of Tilly’s existence.

  For a few seconds there was silence. He held her gaze calmly as the kettle hummed softly. There was a smell of burning coming from the fan heater, but it was taking the chill from the air.

  Eventually he spoke. ‘I wondered about that,’ he said mildly.

  ‘You knew,’ Laura said. ‘You knew she was pregnant.’

  ‘I did, yes.’ Watching her as keenly as she watched him. Trying to gauge the effect his words were having on her. Interested in a detached way, as if this was an experiment he was conducting. As if he’d just pulled the wings off a butterfly and was waiting to see what it did next.

  Laura let the information settle. All the time he’d known he had another child. He’d known while Laura was going through her teens that she had a brother or a sister, and he hadn’t opened his mouth. He hadn’t told her.

  ‘What did you know about her?’ she asked.

  He let his arms fall open and turned to switch off the percolator and fill his mug with coffee. He put a bowl of brown sugar on the counter. He scalded the yellow polka-dot teapot Laura had given Susan a few Christmases ago, and spooned loose tea into it. Was he simply going to ignore her question?

  No, he wasn’t. ‘What did you know?’ Laura repeated. ‘Did you even know if it was a boy or a girl?’

  He set down the teapot and planted his palms on the counter. ‘Laura, at that point, things had broken down completely between your mother and me. She wanted us to—’

  ‘Did you even try to find out?’ she asked loudly, cutting him off. ‘Did you even care about your child?’

  A beat passed. The kettle began to change its tune, the hum becoming more businesslike. ‘This is not something you need to concern yourself with,’ he said tightly.

  ‘She’s my sister. How does that not concern me?’ Her skin prickled with anger. She could hear the blood pounding in her ears. She wanted to hit him, she wanted to hurt him. ‘She’s here,’ she said. ‘She’s in Ireland. She came all the way from Australia on her own.’

  ‘This is between your mother and—’

  ‘Tilly,’ she said. ‘Her name is Tilly. She has your eyes.’

  ‘Laura, I’m asking you to leave it—’

  Again she broke in. ‘She was adopted,’ she said. ‘Did you know that? No, of course you didn’t. She only discovered this year that she had a father and a sister living in Ireland. She’s on Roone. She came to find me – she came halfway around the world to find me. She knew nothing about you. Our mother had told her nothing except that you were still alive.’

  She looked at his closed face. She saw the utter coldness in the eyes that Til
ly had inherited. Tilly’s weren’t cold, though.

  ‘Your name isn’t on her birth cert,’ she said, watching him. ‘It says “father unknown”. She couldn’t bring herself to put your name on it.’

  Not a flicker. Not a sign he gave a damn.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘she won’t be bothering you. I just thought it was something you should know.’

  More silence. She let her gaze drift down to his hands, still flat on the counter. The hands that had brought into being so many marvellous works of art, the hands that were revered by so many. The skin loose and sagging now, the veins rising up starkly, the knuckles more pronounced than she remembered.

  Old, he was fast becoming old.

  Didn’t mean she had to go easy on him. She let her eyes travel back up to his face. ‘You shouldn’t have done it,’ she said. ‘You should never have had children. It wasn’t fair to us.’

  His eyes narrowed. ‘You need to stop talking now, Laura.’

  ‘I may as well have grown up with no real parents, like she did.’

  ‘I was here for you,’ he said angrily. ‘Your mother was the one who walked out: I didn’t go anywhere.’

  ‘You packed me off to boarding school the minute she was gone. You couldn’t wait to get rid of me.’

  ‘I had a career, I had commitments, it wasn’t—’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, her heart racing, her words pouring out, ‘your precious career left no room for anything else, did it? It was all you ever wanted, wasn’t it, to be Luke Potter the artist? Luke Potter the husband and Luke Potter the father didn’t come into it.’

  ‘I took you in,’ he said, ‘when your husband died. I let you stay as long as you needed.’

  ‘Susan took us in,’ she shot back. ‘Susan looked after me and the boys. You did nothing to make us feel welcome. You couldn’t bear it when they made any noise. You wanted us to stay out of your sight. You didn’t even bother trying to tell them apart.’

  The kettle clicked off. They both ignored it.

  ‘I set you up in that house,’ he said. ‘I paid your rent until you found your feet. I gave you an allowance.’