by Cathy Kelly
Lily’s friend Mary-Anne would twitter with anxiety at Lily’s mention of feeling light-headed, and would probably get faint with the shock of it all, and need to sit down herself. Everyone had to have a hobby and Mary-Anne’s was hypochondria. At eighty-six, she was a slave to her pills and a torment to her GP.
Lily was the opposite. She didn’t want a fuss. She’d move before everyone emerged, perhaps walk slowly out down the lower left side of the courtyard and on to Patrick Street. A cup of strong tea in Dorota’s might revive her.
She could sit and look out at the harbour and watch the fishing boats come in. Thursday was the day Red Vinnie – so called because of the bright red slicker he wore – brought in his lobster pots. Vinnie always had time for a chat and he’d talk of the seals he’d seen basking out beyond Lorcan’s Point, or the gulls with the strange yellow stripe on their wings the like of which he’d never seen before in his thirty-five years as a fisherman.
He was still young enough to find change shocking, Lily reflected. She’d lived long enough to see that there weren’t as many changes in life as people thought: the world moved on a cycle and everything came round again. Only someone of her age could see that. Wait long enough and the past had its turn again and became the present.
The past – Rathnaree, Lady Irene, dear Vivi – had been taking up space in her mind lately because of that sweet Australian girl who’d been so softly-spoken on the phone, scared of ringing such an ancient old dear as herself.
Jodi Beckett, the girl’s name was and she had a photograph, she said, of Rathnaree in 1936, of Lady Irene’s birthday party.
‘It’s all beautiful and glamorous, like people from a film,’ Jodi had added excitedly. ‘They’re standing in front of a fireplace with a tiger rug at their feet. I don’t like that because it’s a real tiger. It’s so cruel, but the rest is so amazing. The clothes are incredible, glamorous…’
It had been all that, Lily agreed, smiling wryly: very glamorous, although not so much so when you were the person sweeping up the ashes from those once-blazing fires at six on a cool morning, knees hard on the marble hearth, trying to be quiet lest you wake the household who wouldn’t care less about waking you if they needed something.
But that wasn’t the thing to say to the girl. Jodi, pretty name, so confiding too, had told Lily that she’d married an Irishman, who was the new deputy headmaster in the local secondary school. And that her great-great-grandparents had come from County Cork and her family in Brisbane considered themselves Irish and loved all things Celtic.
‘Investigating the past in Ireland is what I’m meant to be doing,’ Jodi had said on the phone. ‘I knew so much about Ireland before I came here. I love it.’
Lily thought of how the past got romanticised into the rich vibrancy of Technicolor and Hollywood, where the servants weren’t seen – except to doff their caps and be meekly happy with their peasant lot – and the rich got to be glamorous and have fun.
There were so many stories she could tell young Jodi about those times, but they might not be the stories Jodi was expecting.
Yes, there were silk gowns that bared pale, pampered backs, and the glitter of family diamonds and emeralds hauled out of jewellery cases for parties and balls. But that was only one side of the story. The less glamorous side was of whole families practically born into service by virtue of being born on the grand estates, families who were expected to have subservience in their blood. Except that not all of them wanted to wear a uniform, bob endless curtseys, and do the bidding of people who were exactly the same as them, except that the gentry had money behind them.
Lily knew that feeling all too well, because that was how she’d felt about the likes of Lady Irene.
She sighed, thinking of her younger self and all the anger and resentment she’d carried inside then. People now didn’t really understand class the way older people did. Money could buy you anything now. But then, money was nothing against the wall of the fierce class divide. When you were born one of the peasant class, you died that way too. Raging against such cast-iron barriers made little difference. Such complex memories weren’t what Jodi was anticipating.
‘I’ve made a start on the history of Rathnaree, but there’s not much about it. No books – isn’t that incredible? I’m sure you’ve so many stories and things. I’d love to hear them but…’ Jodi paused. ‘Only if you’d like to talk to me. I wouldn’t want to tire you out.’
‘Ah pet,’ Lily said kindly, ‘talking doesn’t tire me out. Let me look and we can talk about it all then.’
Jodi would love the box Lily had kept hidden in her spare room: full of letters, photographs and her precious diary, along with programmes from the theatre, menus, a fake gold compact that had once been filled with Tea Rose face powder, dried flowers from her tiny wedding bouquet, her old ration book, bits and pieces that made up a life lived fifty years before. When she’d been speaking to Jodi, Lily’s mind had instantly run to the box.
She’d taken it from its hiding place and put it beside her armchair in the sitting room, planning to open it up and look at its contents again. But somehow, she hadn’t. The box was still there, its dusty flaps closed.
Lily decided she’d meet the young Australian girl, but she wasn’t sure if she wanted the precious contents of her box out there in the world. There were secrets in there – nothing that would threaten the State, she smiled to herself. But secrets, nonetheless. Things she’d never told anyone.
There was just one person she’d trust with those secrets and that was Izzie.
Perhaps the best thing would be to write a note for Izzie and tape it on to the box so that one day, when Lily was gone, Izzie would find it. But then, maybe Izzie wasn’t ready for her grandmother’s secrets just yet.
Besides, Lily was sure Izzie had secrets of her own to occupy her. Izzie had been subtly different the last few times she’d phoned from New York: a little preoccupied, a little awkward, the way she used to be when she was younger and had something to hide.
‘Is everything all right, love?’ Lily had asked the last time they’d talked, on Sunday night.
‘Fine,’ Izzie had said in a brisk tone that reminded Lily, with an ache, of Izzie’s mother, Alice. Izzie sounded exactly like her mother when she spoke: the same soft tones, the same way of emphasising certain words so her voice flowed like water, rapidly and quicksilver. When Izzie’s voice had grown up, a few years after her mother’s death, it was sometimes unbearably poignant for Lily to hear her speak: it was like Alice come back to life.
They’d looked so different: Izzie was tall and strong with eyes like Lily’s own and the milky Celtic colouring that was set off by that marvellous caramel hair of hers. Alice had been small and fine-boned, with dark hair and the olive skin of Lily’s own grandmother, the fearsome Granny Sive.
Granny Sive was descended from the fairy folk, people used to say when Lily was a child, which was one way of saying they were scared stiff of her.
Lily had never been scared, though. Granny Sive had simply been uncompromising and different, a modern woman in olden times. No wonder they were all scared of her.
Granny Sive, now there was an old lady who’d have had a lot of great stories in her life.
What a pity nobody had come along to hear her tales.
Lily sighed. She hoped she’d done the right thing with the diary and the box. It was hard to know what the right thing was. But Lily had been feeling so unsettled since the phone call from Jodi Beckett. There was – how could she describe it – a sense of time speeding up, an urgency in her heart since then. Like she needed to phone Izzie and talk to her, but it would sound strange if she rang up mid-week and said she’d been feeling odd. Poor Izzie would think she was going gaga.
She’d phoned Anneliese the previous evening to say how she felt but Anneliese and Edward’s answerphone came on and she hung up without leaving a message. She hated answering machines, they were one of the modern inventions she’d never liked, and how cou
ld a person leave such a message on a machine anyhow?
Anneliese, I feel scared and anxious. Please tell me I’m not going gaga, will you?
It would sound too strange, definitely senile. She dreaded losing her mind: it had happened to so many people she knew. Even lovely, lively Vivi had succumbed and was now in the nursing home outside town. Laurel Gardens, it was called. A gentle-sounding name for a place Lily never wanted to be.
The diary…Her mind kept drifting back to it. If only she’d phoned Izzie after all. Izzie would know the right thing to do. Darling Izzie, who’d said she was going to New York to live, no matter what.
‘I don’t care if I’m living on threepence and sleeping in a teeny apartment where you couldn’t swing a hamster, never mind a cat,’ she’d said all those years ago. ‘I’ll be doing it IN NEW YORK. You went and lived abroad, Gran, you must know what I’m talking about?’
Lily had nodded. ‘You’re right, Izzie darling, forgive me. I’d forgotten.’
‘Gran, you never forget a thing,’ Izzie had laughed.
Sitting now in the sunlight, Lily wished that weren’t so true. It might be nice not to remember.
She thought so much about the past nowadays. Did that mean she was very close to the end of her life? Did the voices of the past come to warn her? She saw them all in her dreams now: Mam, Dad, Tommy, Granny, Uncle Pat, Jamie, Robby and her beloved Alice. Alice was the worst. No parent should ever have to bury a child. The place where Alice had been was a part of her heart that Lily couldn’t bear to touch, even now that Alice was twenty-seven years gone.
There had been so much death in her life, Lily reflected. All those young, healthy people dying because a bomb had landed nearby, or men shipped home with injuries everybody could see, and scars on the inside where nobody dared to look but that killed them just the same.
As a girl who’d grown up in the countryside, Lily was familiar with death. There had been no question of keeping children away from the coffin at a funeral – everyone, young and old, bent to kiss the icy forehead of the corpse nestled in its wooden box. Lily had sat quietly at wakes and listened to old songs sung and watched the dead being mourned. But she’d never seen an actual person die until those first days on the wards.
She’d been amazed to find that life didn’t ebb out of people with a fanfare – it slipped away quietly, leaving nothing but a body growing colder as the doctor moved swiftly on to the next patient. It was only much later, when the bloodied gauze and instruments were being cleared up and the amputated limbs were being carted off to the incinerators, that anybody had time to tidy up the dead patients.
Lily used to find herself thinking about them later, when she’d be sandwiched between the girls – Maisie and Diana – drinking hot tea in the tea rooms, or sharing pink gins – then she’d allow herself to remember. Of course, remembering was always a mistake.
Each young man could be her younger brother, Tommy, who was somewhere in the Mediterranean, she thought, although he couldn’t tell her in his letters, and her mind would leap to the what ifs – what if it was him lying cold on a table…
Which was why they’d all order another round of pink gins.
‘Nil bastardi carborundum!’ Diana would cry, which was dog Latin for Don’t let the bastards get you down.
Despite all the death, they’d been so young that they didn’t think about dying themselves. Death was for other people. They were going to be lucky and, just in case, they’d live each day to the full.
And now, death was waiting for her, except that she wasn’t afraid to go. That was the one great gift of old age: readiness to move on. There was nobody left for her to take care of. Nobody would sob that it was too early when she died. God had let her live to care for her baby; she would have to thank Him for that, if she saw Him. Although she might be heading for the other place, the one with fire and the Devil. Lily grinned to herself. She wasn’t afraid of the Devil, he’d been laughing in her ear for years.
If everything she’d heard in churches all her life was true, she’d meet all the people she’d loved in the past. Like her darling Alice. Letting Alice go had been the hardest thing she’d ever had to do.
Lily closed her eyes against the sun and let herself dream until it all turned dark inside her head.
SIX
Four miles away, Anneliese was in her kitchen clumsily making strong tea in the hope that it might wake her up. She’d slept badly again, staring at the alarm clock for much of the night, and had only dropped off to sleep when dawn began creeping over the horizon.
Now, she was dressed and determined to go for a walk along the beach to get her out of the house, but her head felt heavy and muzzy. Normally, she might have sat down on the porch and read a book or a magazine until she felt more energetic, but she couldn’t enjoy those pleasures now. Every magazine she picked up had some article in it that pierced her.
Yesterday, a seemingly innocent magazine that came free with the daily newspaper had carried an interview with an actress starring in a film about infidelity.
Sickened, Anneliese had thrown the whole magazine into the bin.
The library books by her bed were no help either: she’d never realised she’d been so drawn to novels about relationships. If asked, she’d have said she read everything, but all the books she’d taken from the library, with the exception of a thriller and an autobiography of Marie Antoinette, had dealt with families, couples and the relationships therein.
She had her second cup of tea outside on the porch. It was a beautiful sunny morning with a feeling of real warmth in the air and when she set off for her walk, Anneliese didn’t bother with her light rain jacket. Her grey fleece was enough; she’d soon warm up. If she walked along the beach away from Tamarin, right down to the outcrop of rocks that marked the end of little Milsean Bay and back, she’d have walked two miles. That would be enough to warm her up.
As she left, she noticed several people on the town side of the beach, more than the normal morning dog walkers. Anneliese strained to see what was going on. There were definitely six or seven people gathered together on the high ground between the two bays and it was as if they were looking out to sea for something.
A boat. Oh no, she thought. A fisherman’s boat had gone missing. It was the awful fear that haunted any seaside town.
Once a boat went missing, the whole community came to a stop, as people prayed, the air and sea rescuers searched, and families sat numb. Anneliese could remember a vigil being held in the church once, when a boat with three generations of fishermen capsized; what felt like all of Tamarin had crowded into the wintry cold of St Canice’s, as if the intensity of prayer could carry the boat and its crew back home. It hadn’t. Only one of the crew had returned when his body had been washed up on the rocks five miles south.
She had no business to be feeling low when all she’d lost was a husband – who still lived – while some pour soul in Tamarin was readying herself for the real loss of a man.
Although Anneliese felt too raw to deal with the pain of a fishing crew lost, she felt a responsibility to walk down to the people on the beach. She was a local and if help or vigil was needed, she had to be there too.
But as she walked quickly through the sand, down to the damp swathe of the beach, she realised that the people weren’t looking desolately out to sea: they were looking at something in the water.
‘What is it, Claire?’ she asked a woman who lived several miles inland and who was often on the beach walking three black-and-white collies who danced around the surf in delight.
‘Hello, Anneliese,’ the woman said. The dogs were at her feet, whimpering because they wanted to keep walking and not stand. ‘It’s a whale, look. She’s come in too far and now she can’t seem to get out.’
‘Poor whale,’ said someone else, moving so that Anneliese could stand on the highest part and see for herself.
There, in the waters of Tamarin Bay, was a dark shape circling in slow, aimless arcs. It was h
uge, had to be, because they were easily half a mile away from the shape and it was easily visible. Just as Anneliese was wondering how anybody could tell for certain what the creature was, it moved gracefully up in the water, a gleaming mound of darkest, silky blue, and she could see that it was clearly some sort of whale.
A tall fountain of water sprayed up from the whale’s blowhole before the huge mammal sank back beneath the waters of the bay.
‘They rise when they’re in distress,’ said a voice, explaining. ‘She won’t know what to do.’
Anneliese hadn’t noticed the man before in the group of local people. He could be taken for a fisherman in his dark pants and bulky sweater, but she knew most of the fishermen and she’d never seen him before. He was tall and grizzled looking enough to be one of them, with a greying beard that matched thick, slightly too long, hair.
‘What should we do?’
‘I’m sorry to say, there’s not an awful lot we can do,’ he said.
‘But there must be!’ said Anneliese, furious at the resignation in his voice. Didn’t he care? That poor whale was like her: lost and alone, and now nobody wanted to help. It just wasn’t good enough. ‘Has anyone phoned the maritime wildlife people to tell them about her?’
‘That would be me,’ the strange man said. ‘I’m the local maritime expert. I’m living in Dolphin Cottage.’
Dolphin Cottage was less of a house and more of a barn, nestled among the sand dunes on Ballyvolane Strand, the next horseshoe-shaped bay up from Milsean. A squat wooden building, painted blue by man and washed beige by God, Dolphin House was one of the local houses that were permanently rented out.
‘I’m Mac,’ he added. ‘Mac Petersen.’
Anneliese glared at him, not taking the hand he held out. She’d done polite all her life: she wasn’t doing it any more.
‘And you can’t do anything to help?’ she snapped.
‘When whales become stranded in shallow harbours, they often die,’ he said, calmly ignoring her rudeness.