by Nesta Tuomey
‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, assist me in my last agony,’ sighed Ginny. She turned her head on the pillow and, with mouth jagged open, gave up the struggle.
Much later Lily awoke. She stretched herself stiffly and looked about her, not immediately remembering where she was. There was a brightness beyond the window as the first approaches of dawn began to lighten the darkness. Ma, she thought and listened for the harsh, irregular breath. A milk float rumbled down the road making the window frames rattle. Terror possessed Lily. She leaned nearer the bed and peered into the staring face on which there seemed to be a kind of leer.
‘Mammy,’ she cried, afraid in the shadowy room with only the corpse for company, ‘Mammy, speak to me.’
She clutched her mother’s hand which felt surprisingly warm, not clammy like when she had found her. It made it all the harder to accept that she was gone. ‘Slipped away while I slept,’ Lily began rehearsing what she would say to Niall.
All along the row next day the blinds were lowered although many of Ginny’s neighbours were newly come to the road and hardly knew her. From time to time, people called to Lily’s house and she received their condolences with reddened eyes and a small sniff. She had on a navy wool dress from which she had removed the white collar and on her only suitable coat she had sewed a black armband, deeming it needless expense to buy black especially for the funeral. Her mother had disliked mourning clothes and refused to wear them when Lily’s father was buried. So Lily defiantly told everyone who called, as if gauging their reactions before following her mother’s example.
There was not a big turn-out at the church. Most people from Ginny’s generation were already dead and the few people attending the Mass did so out of respect for Lily. The priest was new to the parish and had not yet got around to making house calls. He gave his usual sermon for the deceased elderly, laying special emphasis on the grand welcome Ginny would receive on crossing over to the side of the angels and saints.
‘Where every tear will be wiped away and there is nothing but happiness to look forward to for all eternity,’ he smilingly predicted as though personally responsible for this happy state.
Most mourning relatives appreciated these few words he found. It absolved them from guilt at the relief they experienced when their elderly parents went to their reward. Fr. Molloy made them feel it would have been churlish of them to feel any other way. But Lily, struggling with her tears, felt only guilt that she hadn’t insisted on Ginny going into hospital. If only she had, she told herself, her mother would have been alive that day.
In the funeral car she sat clutching her husband’s hand. Beside her, young Niall stared solemnly out of the window. ‘Who shot her?’ he asked when Lily told him that his grandmother was dead. ‘You see too much television,’ Lily retorted, but had to smile. He was only six after all. She would really miss Ginny, she told herself, was missing her already. ‘A girl’s best friend is her Ma,’ Ginny often said and Lily was inclined to agree. Perhaps it was her being a change-of-life baby that made them so close. Ginny, after a hitherto unfruitful marriage, was forty-four when Lily surprised her. You could tell her anything, she thought regretfully. Nothing ever shocked her. And laugh! Sometimes the tears ran down her face at the stories Ginny told her. Stuff she wouldn’t have dreamed of telling Niall. And, in turn, she had told Ginny things she would have been shy of Niall knowing. ‘Lily Madden,’ she resorted to her maiden name. ‘You’re an orphan now.’ She gave an overwrought sobbing laugh. ‘Catch on to yourself , Lily,’ she scolded. ‘A thirty-four year old orphan! That’s a laugh.’ But she hadn’t felt so bad in years, not even when her Da had passed on. Lily felt disloyal even thinking such a thing.
As the cortege moved slowly along the road she found herself involuntarily searching for the stooped figure in the shabby fur. It was hard to believe Ginny wouldn’t be out leaning on the gate, watching her own funeral as she had watched the last journey of so many of her neighbours. Fancifully, Lily imagined her hovering somewhere in the ether, taking it all in. If she had extra sensory powers she would have been actually able to see Ginny, she was convinced, so palpable was her mother’s presence.
Out of respect the hearse came to a brief stop in front of Ginny’s house before heading off again at a slightly faster pace for the cemetery.
‘Your mother would have liked that,’ Niall said, breaking the silence.
Lily nodded. It was true. Ginny had put great store on ritual.
Christmas passed soberly with none of the gaiety and laughter of other years. After dinner Lily excused herself and went up to lie dry-eyed on her bed, still consumed by feelings of guilt and regret.
It was February before she could bring herself to enter her mother’s house. She kept making excuses to stay away but the moment could not be put off any longer.
There is something about coming back into a house after the death of an old person who has lived there for a long time - all the key places have an aura about them that is almost tangible. Lily felt it most strongly in the sitting-room where Ginny had spent so much time, enjoying her glass of malt and watching television. She paused in the doorway almost expecting to see the top of the old white head against the chairback. Then she shook her own brown one sensibly. ‘Silly Lily,’ she said in parody of the children on the road long ago when she wouldn’t ring a doorbell and run away.
In her mother’s bedroom, which she had feared the most, she found nothing after all to alarm her. The only reminders of her mother’s last illness lay in the cough bottle, sticky and drained on the night table beside the stripped bed. Through the metal springs the red carpet showed vividly, surprising Lily by its newness. She recalled the day it was fitted and with what glee she had scrabbled her toes in the deep pile. She sighed and looked about her with nostalgic regret. All so long ago now. Under her sorrowing gaze everything, even the old jug on the washstand, was imbued with the reverent aura of the newly dead. She felt like the first person arriving at the tomb after the resurrection. That object, those curtains, had felt the touch of her mother’s hand.
Turning out the drawers she came across the small clumsily wrapped packages and felt a pang. Even in extremis Ginny was thinking of them. Oh Mammy, Lily thought with love, no longer with anguish. She pushed up the window and leaned out. Down below a woman was getting out of a car, she went up the path of the adjoining house, carrying a covered plate. ‘Cake sale,’ Lily absently identified.
The crisp morning air with its promise of spring felt fresh and invigorating on her face. It blew back the dingy nets and pulsed through the room like the life so recently extinguished, cleanly blowing all traces from the atmosphere.
Godsend
In her sister’s ultra modern, all white, kitchen with its vast layout of cupboards and worktops and eye-blinding flashes of chrome, Aideen left down the cake she had brought for the confirmation lunch, and went to put the wine in the fridge.
She stood looking about her, a frown creasing her smooth brow. In Grace’s kitchen there was no redeeming feature anywhere, Aideen often thought, nothing to offset the clinical white Formica and neutral coloured tile. The spotless scrubbed-up area reminded her of an operating theatre; sterile and germ-free it held about as little appeal. There was not even a child’s crayoned picture Sellotaped to a cupboard front or a glossy-leafed plant, strategically placed, to counteract the impression of soulless, antiseptic perfection. Given a free hand Aideen would have chosen vivid colours with contrasting shades. Yellow and black with splashes of vermilion and purple, patterns that were daring and bold. She often thought the artist in her was trying to emerge.
Now after several wrong guesses she located the right cupboard and took down a plate and carefully lifted the dessert from its box. As she had feared, the creamy top was destroyed and now resembled a snowy field after the thaw has set in and the neighbourhood children let loose in it. She set to work with a fork in an attempt to restore some of its former glory but sighed in despair when she only succeeded in taki
ng up more chunks of sponge.
‘Damn!’ she said in frustration, and gave it up as a bad job. Let Grace worry about it. She made a space for it in the packed fridge and went to join the rest of the confirmation party in the lounge.
‘Bring a couple of bottles of wine,’ Grace had urged when she rang earlier in the week inviting the family to attend the ceremony. ‘If you could rise to champagne that would be even better. I’m doing cocktails.’ She was quite serious.
When Aideen had offered to help out with the catering she had been thinking along the lines of a dessert, a rich gateaux maybe or a mouth-watering flan, certainly not wine or champagne. Indeed, alcohol had never entered her head, at least not in connection with the Hennigans who rarely if ever imbibed. Even as she was thinking this, Grace had said on cue, her voice sounding a little smug and far-away on the telephone, ‘It’s not for us, of course, we’re not drinkers here.’ When Aideen grumbled about the cost of champagne, her mother had said, ‘Well, dear, you did offer to help. I heard you. Why not buy sparkling wine? It’s much cheaper and you can be certain no one will know the difference.’
And then, the night before the trip, Grace had compounded the aggravation by ringing once more, this time asking that Aideen bring soft drinks.
‘We’ll require several bottles of lemonade and at least a litre of Diet Coke,’ she instructed, as though speaking to caterers. ‘I believe one of your young men is driving you so be sure and bring whatever he likes. We’re not drinkers here you know.’
Now that, as her father was fond of saying, you could sing if you only had an air for it, so Aideen thought as she put down the phone. She wondered if Grace was being unusually irritating or whether the fault could possibly lie with herself and, having engaged in a bout of self-analysis, was forced to acknowledge that she had never really got on with her older sister. Perhaps a contributing factor was the huge age difference between them, over a decade, with an insurmountable gap in taste and outlook.
Grace was the eldest of the O’Donovan children and Aideen the youngest, the afterthought of the family. Mattie had been in her mid-forties and Joe turned sixty when Mattie’s nausea was diagnosed as a change-of-life baby and not, as the poor, exhausted woman had been hoping, a defective gall-bladder. To those of the family mature enough to receive their mother’s confidence Aideen was referred to as ‘the secret.’ When she was born she became ‘the afterthought’ or in Mattie’s blacker moods, rather dauntingly, ‘the interloper.’
Growing up, Aideen learned of other equally unflattering names for babies born, like herself, at the end of the female cycle. Shakings of the bag brought to mind wood shavings, or scattered leaves of tea in the pre-bagging stage. Change of life conjured up something irresolute and unwelcome, not unlike a change of mind or heart. When she started dating Aideen preferred to style herself in dramatic vein as ‘the fruit of exhausted loins’ which had the effect of making boys sit up and take notice, not only for the audacity of expression but its implicit sexuality.
Grace would never have dreamed of giving tongue to anything so flamboyant. She had been a model schoolgirl, unimaginative and devout. Aideen, rebellious and irreligious. Unfailingly, Grace carried off all the class prizes at the end of the summer term. Aideen ambled her way uncaringly though grades, and counted herself lucky if she copped the art prize, which she invariably did. By the time Aideen was in her teens and Grace her twenties, they might have shared some common territory if her sister had been less rigid in her disapproval of all things frivolous. But Grace mistrusted glamour, shunned pleasure. She had contemplated life in a convent before finding her true vocation with Killian Hennigan, widower, and father of two little girls.
Now in her late thirties Grace had become a lean woman with an obsession for housekeeping and pious ritual. So far she had produced only one child, Garry, an optimistic feckless child, curiously unlike either parent. If he had been anyone else’s child, Aideen often thought, she would have quite doted on him.
The last time she had visited the Hennigans was Christmas and Aideen had noticed with a slight shock the bump under Grace’s skirt. She had assumed, erroneously, that Garry would be the only child.
The journey to Grace’s house in Oldgrange was slow and torturous. Aideen’s boyfriend of the moment had not risen to the challenge of driving her family to the country and, when appealed to, her brother Conor produced at short notice a ramshackle old van he had borrowed from a friend who travelled in poultry. Extensively travelled by the look of it, Aideen thought in dismay, when she saw it. The number plate was obliterated by miles of mud and dirt and prurient messages finger-painted on the side. There was just the three of them travelling. Aideen’s father had succumbed to a bronchial attack and begged off the trip. Although fairly hale for his eighty-four years, Joe did not believe in tempting the fates. Aideen had hoped to sit up front with her brother but there was room for only one beside the driver and Mattie could not be left on her own in the back. With as good grace as she could muster Aideen took her place beside her mother.
It was a strange sensation racketting along in the dark windowless rear of the van, unable to see out or gauge in which direction they were headed. Out of necessity they had taken armchairs from the house and installed them in the draughty womb of duralumin. ‘Pullman seats,’ Mattie insisted on describing them, her mind excited by cinematic images as they wrapped themselves in rugs against the cold. An hour into the journey Mattie had shed her years and metamorphosed into a happy hippy released on parole from her domestic prison.
‘It’s like being in the Black Maria,’ she screamed ecstatically at her son’s unresponsive back, a shadowy blur through the dusty partition. ‘We’ll come quietly, Conor. Don’t put on the handcuffs.’
‘Tell him,’ she urged Aideen, anxious for him to share their experience. But Aideen was not equal to the task.
The gloom, the clamour, the odd sensation of being in a dark subterranean tunnel had gone like whisky to Mattie’s head. Never discreet at any time, she now spoke, or rather shouted, whatever came into it, without recourse to even the thinnest veneer of reticence which she normally employed in the presence of her children. Aideen tried to divert her but even when the engine was at its quietest, idling at traffic-lights, she ranted on at the top of her lungs.
They arrived late to the church to find the newly confirmed children already standing self-consciously about the churchyard, fussed over by godparents who spoke of this new sponsorship as their first ‘big’ job since the Christening front.
‘I suppose you didn’t leave on time,’ Grace chided Aideen. She wore flat shoes and a billowing dress, capacious enough for the fortieth week of pregnancy. She did not seem to see her brother. Her gaze alighted on Mattie. ‘Mother!’ she cried, ‘What have you done to your hair?’
‘Do you like it, dear?’ simpered Mrs, O’Donovan, patting her gentian-rinsed curls, just visible beneath a grey turban.
‘But it’s purple,’ Grace was saying.
‘Is it too strong?’ Mattie wondered. Always avid for the male point of view she turned to her son-in-law who was rattling his car keys in a vain attempt to restore Grace to an awareness of time.
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he mumbled, not heeding her. ‘Very nice, Gran. Shouldn’t we be going Gracie? I really think it’s time we...’ He broke off, having lost her to another set of parents.
‘Hi,’ Aideen greeted her step-nieces. Sara had her head in a book as usual. ‘Thérèse Racquin,’ she answered Aideen’s query, ‘Zola, you know,’ she added, in case Aideen wasn’t aware. ‘Elemental but nice,’ she passed judgement.
Killian drove the car right into the churchyard. Desperate situations call for desperate measures, his harassed expression suggested. Mattie sat thankfully into her son-in-law’s car and Aideen went with Conor in the van. Springing Mattie from the back had been an experience neither of them wished to repeat. With Killian leading, they travelled in convoy to the Hennigan’s house.
In the lounge, Mattie sa
t collapsed on the couch like Tweedledum, her hat still firmly anchored to the gentian curls. Her eyes had the unfocussed look of one who is in the process of thawing out after a long spell in the Arctic, her legs bandaged to the knee against incipient arthritis, stuck out childishly in front of her; conferring upon her, Aideen thought, the look of an elderly teenager.
Equally lost with her mother in the soft draylon depths was Brother Dominick, Garry’s school superior, his short legs just clear of the floor. ‘Very sound,’ he agreed, when Mattie made vicious by fruit punch when she had hoped for something stronger, recommended the inclusion of a cane in every household budget.
‘Spare the rod and spoil the child,’ she trotted out with surprising ferocity, although it was a long time since she had recourse to either. Her glance wavered hopefully towards the sideboard where her son-in-law tinkled busily, if deceivingly, with glasses.
‘More fruit punch, Gran?’ Intercepting her glance, Killian raised the jug of bilious-looking liquid.
‘Oh please, do have more everybody,’ entreated Grace. ‘I made plenty of it.’
Mattie shuddered and shook her head, tortured by visions of sweet, steaming glasses of whisky. Aideen felt a rush of pity and anger; the one for her mother, the other at her sister’s complacent denial of the needs of the elderly. Oblivious of the ire she was arousing Grace insisted on listing for them the ingredients of the non-alcoholic punch. ‘So easy to make and costs practically nothing,’ she assured them.
Aideen could well believe it.
‘Tasty and economical,’ approved Mrs. Hennigan, also a devotee of economy when practised on others. The reluctant bearer of four children, all of them boys, she now leaned forward in her eagerness to reintroduce the intriguing topic of corporal punishment. ‘My sons saw plenty of the cane,’ she told them all, casting a smiling glance at her daughter-in-law as though certain of her approval.
