Like One of the Family

by Nesta Tuomey

  Jane looked pale and tired. She gave Claire a long, pitying look.

  ‘No love. I just wanted to see you. It’s been a long time.’

  Claire felt uneasy. She didn’t know what month it was, let alone what day of the week. There was something in Jane’s subdued manner that frightened her. The light in her eyes seemed to have gone out, her mouth was serious. Uncomfortable, Claire looked away.

  ‘How is Sheena... Hugh?’ she asked.

  Jane’s voice was steady as she said, ‘Sheena’s very well... she and Terry are doing their summer exams...’

  Were they into June already?

  ‘.... and Ruthie, in her own way, struggling along.’

  ‘What about Hugh?’ Claire asked again.

  ‘You must hurry and get well,’ Jane said. ‘This year we’ll be going to the cottage a little earlier and we hope you’ll come with us.’

  Back to Waterford. How could she?

  ‘There’s plenty of time yet,’ Jane said, as if reading her thoughts. ‘You’ll be fully recovered by the time we’re heading off. Your mother has promised to come too, later on, so we’ll have that to look forward to.’

  When she was gone Claire wondered again about Hugh. She suddenly thought of the day she called to see his puppy. He’d been abrupt, not exactly rude. Embarrassed. But why? He hadn’t wanted the puppy. The thought was followed by a vague, terrifying memory about the puppy, and something about Eddie. She tried but the fog had come down again and she couldn’t remember.

  Her father had to come and visit her before Claire found out that they were both dead. Why hadn’t someone told her?

  ‘You were ill, Claire,’ Jim said, sitting on the side of the bed, holding her hand. ‘It wasn’t the time to trouble you with something so tragic.’

  No wonder Jane hadn’t answered her when she asked about Hugh. Poor Hugh. Her head felt hot and heavy, as if the pebbles were overheating again.

  ‘Why did he do it?’ she asked, her voice breaking.

  ‘No one knows, Claire,’ Jim said. He stroked her hand, studying her face anxiously. ‘Try not to dwell on it, love. It seems the poor kid was bullied at school and just flipped under the strain.’

  Claire thought that her father was looking very well. He was wearing a blue, short-sleeved shirt. The colour suited him. His breath was free of alcohol. He had even cut down on cigarettes. She wondered who washed his hankies and socks now that he had left home. She felt a lump in her throat. She wanted to kiss him but didn’t want to be the one to do it first.

  ‘You get yourself better,’ he said, when he was going. Everyone was telling her that. As if she didn’t want to! She nodded. ‘You’ll come and visit me soon,’ he said. ‘I’ve got this great thing for making lemonade. I’ll stock up on flavours in the meantime. Chris can come too and we’ll have a party.’

  Claire tried to smile but it went all wobbly. She wished he would stay and just go on talking. It seemed so long since they’d had a proper conversation. Years. And now he was going and he hadn’t even kissed her.

  ‘Hey,’ Jim said, coming back over. ‘Give me a glimpse of those pearlies.’ It was an old joke between them. She smiled in spite of herself. He bent down and kissed her forehead. Claire clung to her father, not wanting to let him go.

  When he had gone she lay back with closed eyes, mourning for Hugh, remembering him that last day forlornly watching herself and Sheena through the kitchen window. And Eddie. His last words to her? She wished with all her heart she could remember.

  In the middle of July Claire went with the McArdles on their summer vacation to the seaside. She sat in the back of the Rover with Ruthie and Sheena, quiet and withdrawn, dreading the moment of arrival at the bungalow.

  The previous week her father had rung and asked her over to his flat. Annette was convinced that Jim was living with the woman who had ousted her and strongly condemned any association with the enemy. Longing to accept, Claire had hesitated, but in the end had braved her mother’s displeasure and gone. It had been a pleasant visit. Her father had cooked up rashers and sausages and bought in a chocolate cake.

  ‘I’m on flexitime this week,’ he told her when she asked how he had found time to shop. ‘I go to work at eight and finish at two.’

  Claire felt sudden jealousy for his new way of life. Why couldn’t he have arranged his life this way for them? Paradoxically, he had abandoned his family in order to become like other fathers.

  ‘This bothers you?’ Jim asked.

  She had not known what to say.

  ‘You think I’ve selfishly gone off and left you?’

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ she managed at last to get out.

  ‘You don’t have to.’ He sighed. ‘In some ways I wish to God I hadn’t left but there seemed no other way. Was no other way.’

  ‘You said it was only for six months,’ she reminded him, almost accusingly, although she had never really believed in it herself.

  ‘I suppose it was wishful thinking,’ her father admitted.

  Claire had suddenly hated the woman, whoever she was. It was all her fault, she thought miserably. She had come between her parents at a time when their marriage was too shaky to withstand her, when Annette was too sad and dispirited to fight back or even recognise the danger. If only the baby hadn’t died, Claire thought.

  ‘You have your life ahead of you to do with what you want, Claire,’ her father had said as he kissed her goodbye. ‘Don’t forget that. You’ll be cleverer than we were. You won’t allow anything to spoil it.’

  Claire glanced out at the passing landscape and blinked away easy tears. It seemed her life was already spoiled.

  The holiday site was unchanged, the local people as friendly as ever, although now their warmth was tinged with pity. Nobody wanted to be the first to say anything but expressed their sympathy in gruff throat-clearings and lowered glances. Jane was aware of the warm tide of feeling but elected not to give them the opening they sought.

  Claire found the hardest part was not as she expected, crossing the threshold, but the absence of Hugh. The bungalow struck her as cold and remote without him and, outside of it, she seemed to see him in every turn of the road.

  When they were alone Sheena hugged and kissed her, swearing with tears in her eyes that she had never been lonelier in her life as in the weeks of Claire’s illness. Like Jane, she looked grey and tired. It was as though the bloom had gone from her skin, the sparkle from her life. In the privacy of their room, lying together under the one quilt, Sheena told her that Ruthie had begun wetting her bed and for weeks now she had been getting up at night to change her.

  Terry had got in with a gang of neighbouring boys, Sheena said, and was disappearing off all the time to drink beer with them in a waste lot behind the sports complex. Jane was worried out of her mind but was afraid to be too harsh in case she alienated him. Terry had always been stubborn and only had to be told not to do something to go out of his way to do it.

  ‘I can’t understand him,’ Sheena admitted, with a catch in her voice. ‘He is so moody and withdrawn that we’re afraid to say anything to him.’

  Claire listened sympathetically in the darkness, guessing from all Sheena said that she was really missing her twin. But most of all, from what Sheena did not say, it was clear she was missing her father.

  Jane was missing Eddie too, even more than she had imagined she would on this first trip back to the cottage. Her worst time was when she closed the bedroom door each night. On previous holidays that had always been the moment when she and her husband would lie close together, their fingers linked, and mull sleepily over whatever antics the children had got up to during the day. Now taking up so little space on her own in the big bed that had been their soft haven, Jane felt beleaguered by the phantoms that returned with the fall of darkness to haunt her.

  If Claire saw Hugh in every turn of the road Jane was convinced that she saw her son in every corner of the cottage. In the mornings when she emerged from her bedroom she f
ully expected to find him crouched beside the freshly lit fire, his head to one side as he carefully placed each additional briquette on the flickering pile. With an almost unbearable pang she recalled how pleased he used be for any little word of praise she would give him.

  Then there was Claire. At seeing her back in the setting where the seeds of the tragedy had been sown the previous Easter, Jane was affected so painfully that she was almost in danger of regressing where the girl was concerned. Soon, however, in the reality Claire’s gentle, self-effacing nature, all Jane’s earlier resentment faded entirely away. She now clearly saw how unbalanced her attitude had been when, half-crazed with sorrow, she had unfairly placed blame on a child for the misconduct of an adult. She felt such contrition that she longed to make it up to Claire and resolved never to give the poor girl any further cause than she already had to regret her links with their family.

  That decided, Jane made a determined effort to put past sorrows behind her. She treated Claire with great gentleness and was eventually rewarded by seeing her become, if not light-hearted, at least not as troubled as before.

  Annette joined them in Dualeen at the end of July, planning to stay a week, even two. With school closed for the summer she was not tied to any particular routine and was finding it lonely on her own with Christopher away in the Gaeltacht.

  After a few days it was clear to everyone that Annette was drinking too much. Claire was ashamed of her mother’s raucous laugh and unsteady gait in front of Sheena. There were times when she almost hated her. Jane was concerned but didn’t like to say anything. After all, Annette was the guest.

  One evening, having drunk more than usual, Annette became sad and vengeful. She began talking in a wild, provocative manner. She couldn’t seem to keep off the subject of Eddie, probing ever deeper, trying to gauge the depth of Jane’s sorrow and plainly irked by what she considered Jane’s smug assumption that Eddie had loved no other woman but herself.

  If she only knew, Jane sighed, knowing only too well that she had no cause to be smug but, nevertheless, determined to keep up the illusion of her husband’s fidelity.

  ‘How can you take so much for granted, Jane?’ Annette asked impatiently. ‘He was in a profession where he met lots of women. He wouldn’t have been human if he hadn’t taken advantage of it.’

  Strangely, this thought instead of casting Annette down afforded her a certain satisfaction. If she had been just one of many in Eddie’s life so, too, had Jane. Annette was getting an almost sexual thrill out of the conversation.

  ‘Please let’s change the subject,’ Jane begged at last, unable to hold back her tears, at a loss to know why Annette was behaving in such an unpleasant way. Just what was Annette trying to do to her? Wasn’t it enough to have suffered the loss of her husband and son without having to justify that loss? She looked at Annette’s half-empty glass and decided not to give her any more whisky.

  Terry came in and took an apple from the fruit bowl. Jane absently told him to wash it first. He went out munching.

  Annette raised her glass to her lips, missed and slurped it over herself.

  ‘Oh hell,’ she said, and began to cry.

  ‘What is it?’ Jane asked.

  ‘I have to tell you,’ Annette sobbed, looking at Jane through a fog of tears. ‘I don’t want to hurt you but I have to tell you.’ In her maudlin state she began to believe what she was telling Jane was inspired by repentance, and not malice.

  Jane listened without a word. Annette stopped crying. She looked frightened. ‘I know you must hate me,’ she gabbled. ‘It was like a kind of sickness. I know now that’s what it was. When I let Eddie make love to me, I was trying to compensate for Jim’s indifference. I told myself I didn’t care but deep down I really did.’ She waited as if expecting Jane to contradict this. When she remained silent Annette hurried on, pouring out more and more of her passion for Eddie, how much she’d suffered when he had died. She began to cry noisy, harsh sobs, her face contorted and ugly.

  Jane struggled to control her emotion. Forget she tried to steal your husband. Try to think of her as a patient. She leaned over and pressed Annette’s shoulder.

  ‘I never meant to tell you,’ Annette sobbed. ‘I never would have only I was so miserable.’

  She continued to cry noisily into her handkerchief.

  ‘I think we could both do with some coffee,’ Jane said, getting up. She went down the passage to the kitchen. Terry was standing like a statue beside the laden hall-stand and she passed by without noticing him. She desperately needed to be by herself. Behind her calm facade Jane felt a kind of helpless rage that Annette should have the gall to tell her right to her face that she had been having an affair with her husband. She struggled to tell herself it wasn’t malice prompting Annette but a kind of sorrowing bravado.

  Like hell it was!

  Jane took milk out of the fridge and closed the door. She pressed her hot forehead against the cool melamine and drew a shocked, sobbing breath. In God’s name what did Annette expect? Her blessing on her adulterous affair?

  Jane made a pot of coffee and automatically put cups on a tray. Was there ever to be an end to these nasty surprises? Bitterly she thought of her dead husband and son. Was she to be left with nothing? Not even those tender memories of her early love for Eddie and their years of toil and laughter. It seemed to her that everything she had ever prized was being gradually taken from her, stripped away bit by bit. Jane’s eyes darkened with pain. Surely to God she deserved better than this?

  She thought of the almost triumphant manner in which Annette had revealed details of Eddie’s infidelity. Jane realised what she had never realised before, that Annette was intensely jealous of her, only up to this she had managed to conceal it. With drink, however, it had all come spilling out like so much sewer water. Jane recalled her earlier surprise at how much Annette was drinking. Now she saw the reason behind it.

  Claire, Annette, Eddie. A tragic, terrible triangle.

  ‘Oh Eddie,’ Jane moaned in wounded misery. ‘What deep, dark shade was in you that I never even suspected?’

  Not now, she thought in panic. I can’t possibly think of it now. Later, much later, when alone she would take it out and examine it. She heard Annette’s sandals clipping unsteadily down the passage, coming to find out what was keeping her, and quickly straightened up. She took a firm grip of the tray and went to meet her.

  Terry stole on up the stairs to bed. Annette Shannon and his father. He struggled to take it in. His father and Annette Shannon. Claire’s mother.

  He had a flash of memory. Stephen Rigney, in his class, boasting that he knew the name of the woman his father had been involved with. She had a teenage daughter who was a real looker, he’d said. Terry stood shock-still as he thought of Claire, asleep upstairs. Quiet, bookish Claire with a mother like that. He wondered if she knew Claire was awakened by Ruthie’s cries. She got up and helped the little girl out of bed. Together they hurried to the bathroom. Sheena heard her sister’s wails but soon went back to sleep, glad to be relieved of the burden for one night.

  Ruthie sat on the toilet, her damp nightie ruched about her waist. ‘Finished,’ she said sleepily and eased herself off the seat.

  Claire guided her carefully back to their room and wrapped her in a blanket while she remade the bed. The sheet was not very wet as Ruthie had fortunately woken at once. As Claire deftly turned the bottom sheet and tucked the damp patch under the mattress, she heard the door open. She looked around and saw Terry standing there. He stared at her, solemn-faced and silent.

  He had hardly spoken a word to her since the holiday began. He was either rude and withdrawn, or else boisterously high and sitting on the wall talking to Susan Deveney, the over-developed teenager from the next cottage.

  ‘Sheena is asleep,’ Claire told him, but Terry just nodded and continued to stare at her. She felt acutely conscious of him as she helped Ruthie back into bed and bent down to tuck the little girl in. Conscious too, of her own b
rief attire: because her only nightdress was in the wash, she had resorted to wearing an old school blouse which barely extended to her thighs; her cheeks grew hot. Ruthie yawned and fell asleep at once. When Claire slowly straightened up from the bed and shyly turned around, Terry was gone.

  FIVE

  The excitement and speculation amongst the fifth years as to who would be selected to play the leads in the school opera was intense. Claire divorced herself from it and looked out at the garden to where the gardener’s boy swept up the leaves in golden heaps. Like scattered doubloons on the mossy grass, she thought, taking pleasure in the sight and in the simile. In three years Claire had made very few adjustments in her life, her friendship with the McArdles was, if anything, stronger. They were still her only friends and she continued with her solitary life, much as before. At first, the going had not been easy. Neither her mother nor her brother had any notion of what she had experienced or indeed been aware of the trauma she suffered and was still suffering, as a result of her early seduction and subsequent termination. She had tried to put it all behind her, but those events had left their mark. There were other hardships.

  Since Claire had returned to school in September her mother had made no secret of the fact that she was finding it difficult to pay the household bills. She said she was sick, besides, of doing without the kind of necessities other families took for granted. What Annette really meant was she longed for the luxuries she had had to forfeit when the family was reduced to living on one salary. Annette had extravagant tastes, and in the days before Jim had walked out she had thought nothing of spending big sums on lace slips or silk blouses. Even now she occasionally indulged herself on a lingerie spending spree, but not as often as she would have liked. She was sick of having to make do; there had to be some legitimate way of improving her income. Claire echoed this sentiment. The years since her father had left them had been really lean. It did not help that her mother was such a poor housekeeper. She was a careless and impulsive buyer, and food either accumulated and turned bad in the fridge or was already past its sell-by date when purchased. At the same time, Claire recognised how difficult it was for her mother trying to manage on a Montessori teacher’s modest salary and her separated wife’s allowance. The only solution that occurred to Annette was to take in a lodger, and while Claire did not much care for the idea, she soon had to agree that the additional income made all the difference to their comfort.