by Cathy Kelly
Jodi loved it here now. Finding the photograph of Rathnaree had been the catalyst. Until then, she’d stood on the edges of the town and hadn’t become involved. And then she’d gone to Rathnaree, poor Mrs Shanahan had had a stroke, Jodi had met Anneliese and Izzie, and somehow she’d become tangled up in their lives and in the lives of the local people. She had friends here, a life here and she loved the strange charm of the town. If Lesley didn’t, that was her loss.
‘Here we are,’ Jodi said brightly, as Dan pulled up outside the Harbour Hotel. Tamarin boasted two hotels, a cluster of guest houses and several B&Bs. The Harbour Hotel was definitely the grandest of the bunch, although it was certainly in a different league to the Intercontinental in Sydney, which Lesley insisted was her favourite hotel.
Originally named the Tamarin Railway Hotel, back in the days when the trains had come this far out, it was a cheerful building, with long, wide windows, an entrance hall with two giant pillars and lots of flowers in pots going down the steps at the front.
Lesley glanced at it with a hard eye.
‘Cow,’ Jodi thought crossly.
She loved the Harbour Hotel. It was gorgeous inside, with a Laura-Ashley-meets-the-Ancient-Mariner style that meant lots of sprigged, floral soft furnishings and plenty of seafaring bits and bobs hanging around, including a giant fish hung over the fireplace in the lounge bar. Dan and Jodi were never quite sure if it was a real fish, despite the writing underneath it, or a plaster of Paris copy. It always looked far too vivid and cheerful to be an actual marine creature caught mid-breath.
When the pair were checked in, Lesley said she wanted to go to her room and lie down. Jodi and Karen looked at each other again. Jodi wanted to sit and talk to her mother, but she knew that probably wouldn’t be possible because Karen would be trying to take care of Lesley, who wanted no doubt to go upstairs and glare around her room, complaining that it wasn’t what she’d expected and she was jet-lagged and, really, what on earth was Jodi doing stuck here in the middle of nowhere in some God-forsaken town that didn’t even have its own airport.
It had been a source of great irritation that Tamarin didn’t have an airport because Lesley set great store by flying. That didn’t mean she enjoyed it; Jodi knew the flight from Australia would have been a nightmare, what with her aunt growling at the poor stewardesses, because, no matter what they did, it wouldn’t be right. She glowered at her aunt. The excitement she’d felt over the past few weeks waiting for her mother was diminishing every second she spent in Lesley’s presence.
‘Lesley, you must look at this. I know you’re so interested in boats,’ Dan said suddenly and pulled her over to the wall, where there were several big framed pictures of old-fashioned ships coming into Tamarin harbour. Darling Dan, Jodi thought, he knew her so well. He knew her aunt was annoying the hell out of her.
‘Sorry, sweetpea,’ said her mum, giving her a hug. ‘She’s just tired. She’ll be fine tomorrow. We need a good sleep. It’s been a killer trip. We should have stopped over in Hong Kong, but I didn’t want to waste a minute away from you.’
‘I don’t want to waste a minute either, Mum. I know Lesley will be OK when she gets some rest,’ Jodie said, which was a kind fib between the two of them. ‘I’m just so glad you’re here. We’re going to have a lovely time and I want you to meet all my new friends. You’re really going to like Anneliese, too. She’s your age, actually.’
‘She’s the one you told me about, the woman whose husband left her?’ Karen asked. ‘How’s she doing?’
‘Well,’ Jodi paused, ‘not bad on the surface, but you might be able to get more out of her, Mum. She might talk to you. I don’t think she’s coping underneath the brave face, and I feel sort of responsible for her.’
‘You crazy girl,’ Karen said fondly. ‘You’re always getting yourself mixed up with other people and taking care of them, aren’t you?’
When they got home to Delaney Street, Dan sat down at the kitchen table to go over some work for school the next day, while Jodi went into the small second bedroom she was using as an office. If it had just been her mother visiting, Karen could have stayed here, but Jodi drew the line at facing her aunt morning, noon and night.
She sat down at the desk and looked at her notes on Rathnaree and Tamarin. Jodi had just finished editing a book on Roman legends for her old employers and it had taken up a huge amount of her time, so the Rathnaree stuff had been shelved for a while. But she couldn’t resist flicking through her notes again. Her work schedule was now clear. The Roman book was finished and she had nothing else on except spending time with her mother. She could quite easily fit in some more research.
Not that it had been easy so far. The only easy bit had been researching the Second World War to find out what life would have been like in Tamarin then. Everything else was hard: in fact, the only analogy she could come up with was that it was like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Originally, she’d thought that finding out all about Rathnaree would be a simple task: finding clues laid out simply on a path, a bit like Nancy Drew unearthing information at high speed with minimum effort. But it hadn’t turned out like that. Instead of finding a great hoard of stuff, she’d found nothing but the odd mention of Rathnaree in newspapers and periodicals online in the library. It didn’t appear to be mentioned in any books about the War of Independence or further back.
She’d had no luck tracing the mysterious Jamie either. There were plenty of men named James in the parish records, but without a surname or some clue of the link to Lily or Rathnaree, the paper trail was stone cold.
The fact that the first person she’d tried to interview had suffered a stroke had shocked Jodi into retreating back into the simplicity of the internet, but eventually she realised she’d have to dig up information the hard way. She needed to talk to actual people again.
With Dan’s help, she’d drawn up a plan of action.
‘Dr McGarry is on the school board and so was his father before him,’ Dan said. ‘His father’s got to be in his eighties, but I don’t think much passes him by. He’d be good to talk to.’
She’d never got around to phoning him. But today, with nothing else to do, she decided to make the call.
Dr McGarry Senior was thrilled at the notion of talking to Jodi about the past.
‘Nobody wants to know about the past,’ he said. ‘It’s all future this and future that, but we can learn from the past too.’
‘That’s what I think,’ Jodi agreed. ‘Can we set up a time to meet?’ she asked, her diary in front of her.
‘I’m free now,’ said Dr McGarry eagerly.
Dr McGarry lived on the seafront in a tall narrow house with an attic converted so he could sit and watch the sea. Jodi followed him up there carrying a tray of tea and biscuits. A very old spaniel waddled up the stairs between the two of them, and sank panting on to the floor.
Once the tea had been dispensed, the doctor sat back in his chair.
‘Medicine was different during the Second World War,’ he intoned and Jodi could imagine him forty years before, leaning back in a similar chair in a lecture hall with students listening to his every word. He liked telling stories, she realised. No wonder he’d been so keen to talk to her. ‘The war changed everything. Before, we didn’t have penicillin. It’s hard to imagine now, isn’t it? There was sulfa powder – bless me, the old sulfa powder.’ He sighed and gazed into the distance. ‘We put it on wounds to fight bacterial infection. It didn’t always work, mind you. When penicillin came, I used to think of the people it could have saved. It was a wonder drug, really. We’d all heard about it and we were waiting for it, like a cure for AIDS today, I suppose. It was miraculous to us. Cut the rate of tuberculosis right down during the war, although it wasn’t freely available outside the military until a few years later. It came into its own in Ireland in the fifties, you could say.’
‘What was the war like here?’ Jodi asked.
‘We didn’t have a war here, such
as it was,’ he amended. ‘Ireland never got involved. We were neutral, or neutered as some people called it. What we had was described as “the emergency”. Terrible bloody name. Apologies for swearing, dear. Afterwards, when we knew it all and heard the stories, it was so limp calling it a bloody emergency. Millions of people died and we had an emergency. Very Irish. There was some rationing too but here, in rural areas, we didn’t go short for much. Forgive me.’ He collected himself. ‘I’ve gone off on a tangent as usual. Where were we?’
‘Did you ever talk to Lily about her work as a nurse during the war?’
‘A little,’ he said. ‘Mrs Shanahan wasn’t a patient of mine, but it’s a small town and we met up. Medicine hadn’t changed that much from the First World War, and I was interested in what she’d seen in London. Although she wasn’t that keen to talk about it, to be frank. I’ve found that before: people involved in brutal times don’t want to talk about it, and those on the periphery never stop.
‘She worked as a theatre nurse and that was a tough job back in the day. A person would need to be in the whole of their health to handle that. Dealing with patients was only half of it. The surgeons weren’t easy to get on with. Like kings, they were. Theatre nurses had backs of steel, we used to say.’ He thought some more, spinning his mind back to before Jodi was born.
‘I do remember we talked about how surgeons used human hair for suturing sometimes. They did marvellous things then. The hospitals were run so well, of course. There was none of the cross-contamination or infections we get now. No MRSA, I can tell you. Hygiene was very strict. Those old-time matrons who ran hospitals when I was a medical student, well, we were all scared out of our lives by them. Not that you’d let on, oh no. We used to tease the matrons. Lots of joking got us through. My favourite joke was that the treatment was successful but the patient died. Gallows humour, I’m afraid, m’dear. Doctors are very bad for it. Tell me,’ he said suddenly. ‘What are the youngsters up in the hospital saying about her? Any use?’
‘They’re not that hopeful,’ Jodi said sadly. ‘It’s very sad. Izzie Silver, her granddaughter, is devastated. It doesn’t look like Lily’s going to wake up.’
‘It’s a pity,’ Dr McGarry said. ‘She was a nice lady. Beautiful in her day, too, let me tell you. When she came home after the war, she could have cut quite a swathe through the town. There were no end of young men who’d have liked to have put a ring on her finger, but she had no interest in going out. Then she married Robby Shanahan. Nice fellow; quiet, though. Could never see why she’d settled for him. She could have had anyone, the pick of the town and Rathnaree too. Still, people will always surprise you, and that surprised us all.’
He talked for a while longer but he didn’t have any more information. He couldn’t think of anyone called Jamie at all, never mind one connected with Lily.
‘Hope I didn’t say anything I shouldn’t,’ Dr McGarry said finally. ‘My wife says the dog shouldn’t wear the muzzle, I should.’ He roared with laughter at his own joke.
‘No, you didn’t say anything you shouldn’t,’ Jodi assured him. ‘Just one more question: why were people surprised at Lily marrying Robby Shanahan?’
‘No reason, just a feeling,’ he said. ‘It seemed like an odd match, to my mind. I’ve had a flash of inspiration: you could talk to Vivi Whelan. She’s got to be pushing ninety-five and if she’s compos mentis, she’d be a good person to talk to. Back in the day, nobody knew what was going on in Tamarin like Vivi. Married to the butcher, you see, and the butcher knows everything because, one way or another, the whole town come into your shop to buy their dinner.’ He tapped the side of his nose. ‘The butcher, the post office and the chemist: they’re the places where they know everything that goes on in a small town. I think Vivi might be your best bet for solving this mystery.’
As she walked home from talking to Dr McGarry, Jodi thought about what she’d learned. All the stories certainly painted very different portraits of Lily Shanahan. From Izzie, Jodi had the picture of a vibrant, strong and, above all, motherly person, who took care of her family with kindness and courage. Dr McGarry had drawn a picture of a career woman who’d been at the top of her game during a world war, when the human casualties were unimaginable to modern eyes. What were the other sides to Lily?
In the second bedroom, Jodi closed the file. Tomorrow, she’d bring her mum and Lesley to visit Anneliese and perhaps they could talk about Lily. Kill two birds with one stone, as Dan might say.
SEVENTEEN
Anneliese found a saddle of scrub grass on the dune and sank upon it, letting her legs stretch out in front of her. She was tired, bone tired. Walking normally invigorated her but now, it exhausted her. Her muscles ached all the time and even climbing the staircase left her shattered. She wondered, could shock make you ill? Surely some of those auto-immune diseases hit people who’d been emotionally battered? Perhaps she should look them up on the internet.
Then again, why bother?
When she’d been thirty-five or – six, she remembered hitting a very deep depression that coincided with Beth at her teenage worst. In time-honoured tradition, Anneliese had managed to hide her own bleakness in order to deal with her daughter’s problems.
Somehow, the family had clambered out of the depths and Beth’s outlook had been transformed when she fell in love with her first boyfriend, Jean Paul, and Anneliese had been able to relax long enough to think about herself. Standing still had done it: the depression hit her like a slow punch out of nowhere. It was more intense than it had ever been before and the intensity panicked her.
Fear, bleakness and the abyss of her life gaped in front of her. Intellectualising didn’t help. There was no point telling herself that she had so many things to be grateful for, that she had a lovely husband and daughter, that this too would pass. Her mind took all the platitudes and considered them, and the big dark hole inside her stamped on them. Nothing worked, not even the tablets.
Every morning, she dropped Beth at school, went to work, and sat in terror all day. She decided that listening to music might help and put a Vivaldi tape on her Walkman. It didn’t work.
Reading happy books might do the trick: she consumed every self-help volume she could find. That didn’t work.
Seeking solace with God could be the answer: she sat in St Canice’s and begged for help, but none came. There were no heavenly beams of light falling through the stained-glass windows as a personal message for her. She was still lost and alone.
Finally, she took to walking. She walked miles and miles, burning up roads as she tried to walk the pain out of her heart because she wanted to feel better NOW.
And finally, slowly, something began to repair inside her.
The problem with now was that all those cures took a long time to work and Anneliese didn’t have a long time. She wanted to feel better now. It was five months since Edward had left and she still felt worn and battered by the black wave that engulfed her every day.
It was fear of life itself. Nameless, almost inexplicable fear of what would happen.
The fear meant it was better to stay insular, keep away from people and places so you wouldn’t get hurt.
So many people had tried to help.
Dear Brendan invited her to dinner several times a week.
‘I’ve told Edward he’s a stupid fool,’ Brendan said to her, ‘and I won’t have Nell here, no matter how long they’re a couple.’
‘That’s very kind of you, Brendan,’ Anneliese had said, ‘but there’s no need to do that.’ She supposed that, as someone who’d always championed women, she should point out that both Edward and Nell had betrayed her and therefore why should the punishment be meted out only on Nell? But try as she might, Anneliese couldn’t be that forgiving. Sisterhood hadn’t worked very well in the reverse, had it?
Yvonne phoned every day to say hello and on the days when Anneliese worked in the Lifeboat Shop, she insisted that the two of them have lunch.
‘You could do
with feeding up,’ Yvonne said, regular as clockwork. ‘You’re far too thin, Anneliese. At our age, you have to choose between your face and your figure, you know, and if the figure’s that thin, the face gets cadaverous. Not that I’m saying yours is or anything, but –’
Lovely Yvonne, she tried so hard.
Even Stephen in the garden centre talked to her, and for Stephen, who made shyness into an art form, that was saying something.
He’d been delighted when she asked for her old job back, saying, ‘I’d love it, we missed you,’ which was practically a speech from him.
Anneliese couldn’t help but realise that she’d only retired because Edward had been telling her to do so for such a long time.
‘You don’t need to work any more, love, you’ve worked enough,’ Edward had been saying to her for a couple of years. Funny then, that when she finally handed in her notice, he hadn’t seemed so keen. Probably because of Nell.
Beth had had her to stay in Dublin and it had been a disaster from start to finish. Beth was in baby-mania and everything revolved around her pregnancy and what would come after. Lightning could strike down the houses on either side of her pretty little townhouse and she wouldn’t have cared in the slightest – apart from worrying over whether lightning-blackened bricks were dangerous to her baby.
The moment she arrived at Beth’s, Anneliese knew she’d made a mistake. She felt too raw, too sad to deal with her daughter.
‘You see, the developers thought it would be easier if there weren’t individual gardens,’ Beth sighed as she and her mother looked at the patch of scrub grass outside their home. It had seemed like a good idea when they had bought it, a couple of years before.
‘It’s not suitable now, of course,’ Beth added. ‘We need a back garden for the baby, even if it’s only a sliver of grass, just so we can be outside. It will be such a pain to have to sell the place, you know, keeping it tidy every evening for viewings and everything.’