The First Time I Said Goodbye

by Allan, Claire

  “Nope,” I smiled. “It’s American. Florida, in fact. I’m just over for a short break and I offered to help Sam here out for a bit. Isn’t this store just amazing?”

  “Yes, amazing.” She directed her answer to Sam and not me. Her eyes were searching for some sort of explanation from him and I wondered just how frequent a customer she was. She was dressed in a standard business suit – black fitted jacket and trousers, high boots, a flash of colour from a T-shirt under the jacket. On her fingers she wore an array of clunky cocktail rings, individual and flashy. The kind of rings I had spent the morning admiring in Sam’s store.

  “Annabel is my cousin,” Sam offered. “Her first time back in Derry. She offered to help out today, mad article that she is.”

  I pulled a funny face – I suppose to show I was indeed a “mad article” even when I felt not one bit article-y and I wasn’t even sure what he meant.

  Niamh’s shoulders relaxed and her expression changed, her smile seeming more genuine now. Without the hint of jealous bitch about her, it was even a nice smile.

  “Ah, your first time in Derry! We should show you a great time – shouldn’t we, Sam? A night out? Oh, let’s! Let me pick something up here – come on, you always do help me pick the most fabulous pieces – and we can talk about it.”

  She linked her arm in Sam’s and walked away, towing him across the room to discuss making me feel welcome in Derry. Clearly she was more interested in making herself a feature in Sam’s life, which was becoming more intriguing before my eyes.

  I was folding and refolding some of Sam’s stock when the little gold bell above the door tinkled again and I saw Auntie Dolores walk in, pausing just momentarily to look around her. She paused again when she saw me, clearly a little surprised at my new look.

  “Hi, Auntie! Sam sorted my new look – something a little different. He’s just with someone now . . .” I nodded my head towards the rear of the shop where Niamh was laughing uproariously, presumably at one of Sam’s jokes. “He has quite the fan club.”

  I stopped myself just before I went on to make a comment about him playing for a different team or not being interested in that kind of thing. Auntie Dolores had a look on her face which told me that she wouldn’t really appreciate wry attempts at humour.

  “Is everything okay?” I asked. “You look a bit flustered.”

  She looked at me, her eyes travelling up and down my new look. “God, girl, you are the living image of your mother. I don’t know how I didn’t see it before, not so strongly anyway, but you couldn’t look more like her if you tried.” Her eyes were misty and I felt myself flush.

  “Auntie, is everything okay?” I repeated.

  “Darling girl,” she said, “we really need to talk. Can Sam spare you?” She tugged at my arm, not waiting for my response, and called to Sam: “I’m stealing Annabel for a while, Sam!”

  Despite now knowing that I was in fact only Sam’s cousin, Niamh almost jumped the height of herself in glee at this news while Auntie Dolores grabbed my denim jacket – which looked a little at odds with my vintage ensemble – and hurried me out of the door.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” she said, turning to walk up Pump Street towards the tall cathedral, which looked out over the city’s walls. “I need to get to know you a little better, pet, and I think I’d like to fill you in on a few things too.” She said the words softly but there was a part of me that still felt as though I was walking headlong into an interrogation. “The Walls are lovely, aren’t they? You see almost all of Derry from here. I never get tired of walking them – except in winter. The ice doesn’t make them very pleasant.”

  She laughed, a deep throaty giggle, and I couldn’t help but smile. I’m not entirely sure, however, if I was smiling out of an awkward sense of responsibility. The undercurrent that Auntie Dolores was cross with me was bubbling under the surface.

  “Mom and I walked here the other day. She was keen to show it off.”

  “Your mammy always loved going for walks,” Dolores sniffed as we walked on. “I’d say that’s why she has the legs she has. The envy of the factory floor, she was. Miss Lovely Legs 1959 if I remember correctly. We might be sisters but we weren’t from the same gene pool when it came to our legs – I’ve them cankle things. Isn’t that what you young ones call them? And my feet swell up in the heat, but I’m sure you don’t need to know about that.” She smiled. “No one needs to know about that. But yes, I suppose there wasn’t much else to do but your mammy walked everywhere – and she and Ray, I’m sure they walked the length and breadth of this city.”

  I bristled at the mention of his name and I felt Dolores rest her hand on my arm.

  “I know this must be very difficult for you, pet,” she said softly.

  “You’ve no idea,” I said with more force than I intended. “I love my father.” The words stuck in my throat, bringing a bubble of emotion I had been trying to bury to the fore. “I loved him. I am a daddy’s girl and all this time I thought it was just us three and that we were solid. I thought it was just us. This feels like the biggest betrayal of him. He’s only gone a few weeks . . . and we’re here . . . doing this and she didn’t even tell me.”

  A tear slid down my cheek and I brushed it away, annoyed that I was crying here in public, ruining the look of this lovely outfit, embarrassing myself, letting my daddy down by not being strong and keeping it together.

  “Aw, pet,” she said. “Look, I know. I know what it is like to be a daddy’s girl. I was the biggest daddy’s girl in Derry. Your granda – you would have loved him. In my eyes there was no man like him and when he went . . . I couldn’t breathe. None of us could. It tore us apart for a long time. I know the pain, doll. I know what it is like – when your hero is gone.”

  I was beat then and the tears that had been sliding turned into a full-on waterfall which I was powerless to stop. In fact the weight of the grief I felt at that moment was so, so heavy that it threatened to push me directly to the floor and I felt my knees buckle.

  Dolores took my arm and pulled me into a hug – right there in view of the tourists who walked by, their cameras clicking at the Bogside below us and no doubt probably in our direction too at the drama unfolding in front of them. I allowed her to hug me, allowed myself to feel the warmth of her arms around my body holding me up.

  “Shush,” she soothed. “It’s okay, pet. It will be okay. We only miss them so much because we loved them so much and sure there is nothing wrong with loving someone that much.”

  Gently, slowly, she guided me to some stone steps where we sat down. Reaching into her pocket she handed me a tissue and allowed me to rest my head against her shoulder until I felt able to speak again without turning into a snot-filled, sob-racked mess.

  “I just don’t understand it,” I said. “Her bringing me here. He’s hardly gone and she had to have known about this before, so it means she had to have been thinking about this – about coming back to meet him – while my father was lying there, trying to hold on.” I surprised myself by how calm I sounded because even as I said the words it felt, once again, as if I was being slapped across the face.

  Dolores sighed, looked ahead, as if she were composing her thoughts into coherent sentences. “It’s not as simple as it all seems – it’s not as calculated as it seems. I’m not defending her – I can see how it seems as if I am – but I told her, I told her this was not the best way . . . But you see, pet, when you are our age you don’t have the luxury of waiting for a suitable time. You can’t wait till a suitable period of grieving has elapsed. And when she heard of the reunion – she couldn’t resist. This could be the only chance, before Ray Dawson would disappear back into the ether and she would never see him again.”

  “But she hadn’t seen him in years, had she?” I said, the thought crossing my mind that maybe she had – maybe they had stayed in touch. I felt myself sag momentarily with relief as she shook her head.

  “No, pet. She hasn’t. She hasn’t seen him, God
, it must be fifty years. It was well before she met your dad. I promise you.”

  “So why now? Why not let bygones be bygones? Did she not love my daddy? Was he not enough?”

  Dolores breathed in again. It was clear she was a woman who never spoke before thinking – even if Sam had made me feel like she was living somewhere in the moral Dark Ages.

  “She loved your daddy. You know that, in your heart you know that. Please don’t doubt it. But the thing with Ray, it was just something . . . It was one of those big love affairs – you know the kind you read about in books, or see in movies. It was a different time – a different era and they were the talk of this town for long enough. I suppose even when that doesn’t work out – when it falls apart, and we all had our part to play in it falling apart – you don’t forget it. Your mammy moved on. She was in love with your daddy – and she was very happy with him and never regretted any moment of her marriage with him – but with Ray, it was . . .”

  “Different?” I offered, tiring of the word. I’m sure there was a hint of scorn in my voice.

  “Yes, different. Look, I can only tell you so much – your mammy is the one who can tell you everything. You should let her tell you.”

  “I’m angry, Auntie Dolores,” I said. “I hear what you are telling me. I know what you mean but, you know, sometimes you have to just let things go – you have to accept the timing is just rubbish and that things don’t always work out the way you wanted or hoped.”

  “Your mammy knows that more than anyone, Annabel. You may not understand it all now but maybe you will. Don’t you ever wonder about what could have been? Has everything all worked out exactly how you wanted in your life?”

  It felt like a low blow, except of course I was smart enough to realise that Dolores knew relatively little about my life. She knew what my mother had told her – that proud boasting about the successful business I had set up, the fact that I was in a long-term relationship with a man I had heard my mother describe as “a decent sort”.

  Then again, asking a woman several weeks after the loss of her father had she ever wished things had turned out differently was slightly insensitive.

  “Of course I wish some things could be different,” I said. “But you don’t get do-overs. This is not elementary school. We are not wandering about just out of kindergarten shouting ‘No take backs!’ – we have to move on.”

  “But if you could, Annabel, would you not like a do-over on something?” She let her words hang in the air before standing up and walking on. “Talk to her, doll. Just talk to her.”

  Chapter 12

  So much of who I am is because of who you made me. Who we made each other. I can’t just forget that – I never will.

  * * *

  Derry, November 1959

  It was a bold move. One that Ray knew would have had the men at the Base talking – those who knew about him anyway. It was a move that, if Stella’s parents had found out – would have seen him run out of town. He didn’t even know how Stella would react to the proposition but he knew that she loved to spend time with him as much as he loved to spend time with her. He knew how their time together was precious to them both and how they longed to have more time together – a place to sit and talk, to hold hands, to kiss, to be lost in a moment, together.

  Everything about their time together was strange – a mix of the wonderful experience of falling in love while trying to cram as much as they could into those stolen moments together. He knew his station in Derry wasn’t permanent and the clock was already ticking until he was demobbed. He didn’t know what would happen to them then. But as every day passed he started to realise more and more that he could not ever be without her.

  Ray was keenly, painfully, aware that Stella’s heart was in Derry – with her family and friends. He wasn’t sure, even though he knew she felt as strongly for him as he did for her, if she would come with him if he asked. He would chide himself as he lay in bed at night in the Base. Here he was, a marine – the toughest of the tough – and he was being turned into a soft touch by a bloody woman. He was trained to face the fiercest warriors in the world but he was scared of asking the woman he had fallen head over heels in love with to marry him – terrified she would say no and his heart would be shattered. It was insane – that she had so much power over him. A smile and he was lost – more lost than he could ever have imagined being.

  Sitting in Battisti’s, a pot of tea in front of him with two cups, he felt nervous. He checked the time again and looked out the window to watch the people scurry along Ferryquay Street, going about their business. She would be here shortly and he knew that there was a chance she would slap him square across the face when he told her what he had in mind. Still, he thought with a sneaky smile, perhaps it was worth the risk. In the last two months they had spent as much time as they could together – going to the pictures and sharing a box of chocolates, walking the streets hand in hand, meeting for their cups of tea in Battisti’s or Fiorentini’s, sharing sneaky kisses and passionate embraces whenever they could – but he just wanted more. He couldn’t believe it when Dusty had come to him with the proposition – that boy sure had a finger in every pie. Ray had to admire that kind of moxie. What Dusty wanted he got and, while Ray normally liked to keep his distance from someone who could let his mouth run off with him a little bit too much from time to time, he was glad to have been offered the chance to get in on the latest of Dusty’s dodgy dealings.

  The tinkle of the bell over the door alerted him to Stella’s arrival. She was brushing the rain off her coat and removing her gloves while looking for him when his eyes met hers through the smoky, steamy air of the café. Even though the place was buzzing with chat, he could see only her smile and as he stood to greet her, kissing her softly on the cheek, he breathed in the scent of her perfume and grinned.

  “You are a sight for sore eyes, Miss Stella Hegarty,” he breathed, sitting down and reaching across the table to take her hand. Her skin was soft and the touch of his skin on hers sent shivers down his spine.

  “You’re a sight for sore eyes yourself,” she smiled. “I’ve missed you.”

  “It’s only been two days,” he said with a smile, even though the two days had felt like a lifetime to him.

  “Two days is a long time,” she said, her voice soft and her eyes looking directly into his. “I’ve missed you.”

  “I’ve missed you too, sweetheart,” he said, rubbing his thumb along the inside of her palm, revelling in this most innocent of contact. Her smile spoke a thousand words and he felt himself relax a little.

  He poured their tea and they chatted. He told her of the last few days, she told him about work – how they had been singing their hearts out just that morning and gossiping before the supervisor had told them they needed to get on with their work and they had spent the rest of the day with their heads down, afraid to so much as talk about their weekend plans or discuss their work with each other. She was tired, she said, but glad to see him – but she couldn’t stay too long. Her mother wanted her home to help with cleaning the house – they were having a family party that weekend and her mother wanted to make sure every inch of the house was gleaming.

  “The good delph she keeps in the cabinet in the parlour, that needs to be cleaned and everything, even though no one will see it anyway.” Stella laughed, rolling her eyes. “When mother gets a notion in her head, it’s hard to shift.”

  “You shouldn’t have to work like that, not after a long day in the factory,” he said, feeling protective of her. She did look tired and she had to stifle a yawn as she sipped at her tea.

  “Sure we all have to work hard – and it’s the least my mother deserves. It’s not easy, raising the six of us. A bit of hard work won’t kill me.”

  He nodded and noticed her shift a little in her seat.

  “Ray,” she started, “look, I don’t want to push you but Mother wants to know if you want to join us for the get-together. I know it’s a lot to ask – me
eting all the Hegarty clan together and they do like a good interrogation – but we’ve been walking out for a while and I suppose they want to know if your intentions are honourable.”

  He noted she had been talking to the table rather than to him and he blushed at the word ‘honourable’, especially given the proposition he had been planning to make to her. Feeling the blush rise from the back of his neck to his face, he forced a smile on his face. “If it means so much to you, of course I will go and meet your family. As long as they won’t try and run me out of town with pitchforks for being an out-of-towner!”

  “They may try and kill you with tea and kindness, but I’m assured they’ll be leaving their pitchforks at the door.”

  She smiled again and he thought of how he always wanted to see her smile – how he couldn’t imagine ever tiring of seeing how that smile crinkled her nose – how her head tilted a little to the side, how her blue eyes would flash at him beneath the longest eyelashes he had ever seen. He wanted to reach across the table and pull her into his arms there and then and kiss that smile, to feel those soft hands at the nape of his neck, to feel her body against his. It almost killed him not to do it and he knew he had to put his proposal to her, honourable or not.

  “Stella,” he said, thinking it was now or never, “I can’t bear to be away from you. I need to see you more, while I am here. I need to see you more. Dusty, well, he and a few of the guys, are just renting a small flat – a bedsit really – and they want to know if we want a share. I’ll cover the costs. Don’t worry. It’s just somewhere we can use to be together. Just somewhere warm, away from the world. No pressure . . .” He looked at her face for any sign of her reaction but she just blinked across the table at him. “Nothing dishonourable – just our own space away from the crowds. Just a place where no one else needs to know we are there.”

  He finished and looked at the table, his heart thumping against his chest. Mentally he prepared himself for a slap across the face. Would she think he was just like the other ‘Yanks’, only after one thing?