Dom leapt like a fish. He jerked his hands away from Nan. We all looked at her, a brief suspended moment of shock. Then Ma swallowed and blinked rapidly.
‘Cheryl,’ she said. ‘You’re upsetting Dominick. Please stop talking about him like that.’
Nan raised an eyebrow, looking Ma up and down. ‘I’m not complaining, Olive. It’s not anyone’s fault. Francis is just a child. Sure, how was he to know? But if he had only listened to Laurence, none of this would have happened, and Dom would be alright.’
Ma pressed her teeth together. I could see her counting slowly backwards from ten in her head. She turned apologetically to James Hueston, and I think she was talking to herself as much as the old man when she ground out, ‘Cheryl can’t help it, Mr Hueston. She says funny stuff sometimes, but it’s not her fault. Try not to let it upset you, because . . . because she doesn’t mean it. Before her stroke, she really was the most wonderful – the most vibrant woman. It would have done your heart good to see her.’
James Hueston’s jaw worked slowly, as if he was chewing something unpleasant. I think he suspected the truth. I think that, unlike my ma, he could see the effect that Francis was having on Dom. I wondered if he longed to tell Ma. I wondered if, like me, he wanted to grab Ma’s face and turn it to Dom and scream at her, ‘Take a good look. Take a good long look at your son!’
Instead he said, ‘Cheryl were always the loveliest person.’
I allowed myself to check on Dom. He looked as though he were sinking – alone, desperate, confused . . . drifting out of reach. Nan was shivering, now, clutching the tartan car-blanket around her and frowning. Behind her, thin spidery threads of fog drifted around her shoulders. They were emanating from Dom, rising up from him in a slowly gathering mist as he stared at my nan.
‘Dom!’ I said sharply. He looked up at me, and I was at a loss for what to say to him. I held his eyes with my eyes. I tried to tell him, It’s alright, I’m here. Look at me. Just keep looking at me. I’m here. ‘Do you want some toast?’ I croaked lamely.
His shadow-eyes just glittered at me; his expression didn’t change. But the fog dissipated without a trace into the air.
Ma answered me before Dom’s silence became obvious. ‘Toast would be lovely,’ she said. ‘Put the kettle on if you like.’ She glanced at Dom, but of course she saw nothing, not a flicker of anything wrong. She dropped her eyes to look at Nan, who was hunched against the cold, and rocking. ‘Maybe we should bring Nan back in to the fire,’ she said.
‘No, no,’ drawled Nan, waving a hand dismissively. ‘It’s just Francis. If he’d stop breathing down my blooming neck, I’d be fine.’
Dom skittered back, distancing himself from Nan as much as possible in the small room.
Ma gave him a sympathetic little grimace. ‘It’s alright, pet. Don’t pay her any notice. Sure, she’ll be off on a different track altogether tomorrow. You remember the three days she thought I was Oliver Cromwell? She kept snarling at me, Hell before Connaught, you blood-soaked tyrant, and refusing to budge from the sofa.’ She twisted a smile at him and wrinkled her nose in understanding.
Dom just kept backing off, his mouth open slightly, his arms hanging. I resisted the urge to go to him and just stood there with my heart lodged painfully beneath my Adam’s apple, watching him shuffle backwards until he was smack up against the sink. James Hueston began talking, and I knew it was to distract our mother from the sight of her eldest son slouched against the counter like some cheap zombie extra.
‘When Fran died, his poor mam just disintegrated,’ said James, catching and holding my mother’s attention. ‘She just sat down and never really got up; that’s how it felt to us at the time. The girls took over running the house, looking after each other and their dad. But Lorry . . . poor Lorry.’ James shook his head. ‘Nancy couldn’t stand the sight of him after that. Just couldn’t bear to look at him. They had been so alike, you see, him and Fran. Twins.’ He flicked a glance at Dom. ‘Lorry came to live with me and Dad. Can’t say it was . . . well . . . it weren’t like it had been here. It weren’t comfy, shall we say. My dad weren’t ever home; he worked all the livelong day, and there just weren’t no . . . there weren’t no tenderness.’ He watched Ma cradling Dee and nodded to himself. ‘Aye. I missed Nancy Conyngham an awful lot – can’t even begin to imagine how poor Lorry felt. It were just him and me from then on, all alone, the two of us. And we were so . . . it were . . . for a long time . . . ’ He struggled for words. ‘Fran’s death . . . ’ He glanced at Dom again. ‘Fran’s death just cut us to ribbons.’
‘Oh yes, it did certainly,’ agreed Nan softly. ‘Poor Nancy was never the same, and Laurence lost all his sunshine. Remember, Shamie? He wouldn’t let us call him Lorry anymore? I think it reminded him of Fran,’ she murmured. ‘That’s what I think.’
Dom’s eyes were brimming with tears. ‘Poor Lorry,’ he said softly. Ma shot him a look and creased her mouth and nodded, the two of them moved by the story, but each for an entirely different reason.
The old man fiddled with his cigarettes, lifted them, threw them down with a grimace, lifted them again. Finally, he opened the pack with a disgruntled ‘gah!’ and lit himself another fag. The sweet smoke hazed the air, and I inhaled it gratefully. It smelt like Grandda Joe and summer and normal times.
It shocked me when Nan reached across the table and helped herself to a Woodbine from James’s pack, and even more so when James leant forward, natural as you please, and lit it for her. Ma gaped as Nan pulled in a lungful of smoke and held it like a pro. Evidently she was just as surprised as I was to see Nan with a fag in hand.
Nan knocked her head back, relishing the flavour, and eventually released the smoke in a fragrant blue stream that tumbled slowly through the pool of light from the ceiling lamp. ‘Oh yes,’ she said softly, her eyes following the curls and torrents in the light, ‘your ma missed you an awful lot, Francis. She cut poor Laurence out of her life as surely as if you’d both died.’
Dom opened his mouth, his face questioning, but shut it again when James Hueston spoke.
‘Been a long time since we sat and shared a fag in this kitchen, Lacy dear.’ He tapped his finger on the table as he spoke, his eyes shifting from Dom to Nan. ‘Do you remember? The last time we all sat round this table – Lorry, Jenny, May, yourself and me – we played cards all night long.’
‘That would have been poor Nancy’s funeral,’ said Nan.
‘Mam?’ whispered Dom.
Ma looked at him. ‘Yes, love?’ But Dom was looking at James, his thoughts on his long-dead but only now mourned mother, I suppose. Ma seemed to decide she’d imagined his hoarse whisper and turned her attention back to our miraculously lucid nan.
‘What age were you, then?’ I asked Nan. ‘When Fran’s mam died.’
Nan frowned. ‘I was . . . oh, let me see . . . Laurence must have been . . . ’ She thought a moment, her lips moving as she calculated.
James shot a sideways glance at my brother. An acute column of cold was building around him. I could feel it advancing across the room to where I was standing. I dug my fingers into the back of my chair. James and I made eye contact for a moment.
‘It were 1915,’ said James, flipping ash into his saucer and turning his attention back to Nan. ‘You and Lorry had been engaged for seven months. It were the year before me and Lorry joined the army. The year May found politics.’
‘Oh May,’ tutted Nan, shaking her head, her jaw popping.
‘She were a brave woman,’ countered James. ‘They were all brave. All those men and women. Fighting to free Ireland.’
‘You were brave, too!’ Nan pointed her fag at him. ‘And no one should have ever implied otherwise! May Conyngham was a bloody fool to let politics come between you. She lost herself a great man when she broke your engagement. I could have strangled her.’ Nan angrily stubbed her fag out. It was only half smoked, and she instantly regretted it. She gave James a sheepish look. He grimaced playfully at her and lit her anothe
r. They were as easy with each other as an old married couple, as comfy as worn slippers.
I hadn’t seen my nan this alive, this now, in over nine months. James Hueston, this warm, generous-spirited man, had invoked her for us. He had called forth my nan, and he had warmed my brother, just by being himself. What cruelties could possibly have brought a man like this to the water’s edge on a winter beach? What could have driven him to surrender himself to those icy waves?
‘What became of Lorry?’ asked Dom. ‘Please tell me, Shamie. What happened to him?’
James Hueston vacillated for a moment. Then he stubbed out his cigarette. There was something final about that gesture, as if, unwilling to inflict this detail on Francis, James had decided not to continue. For a moment, I thought he might actually excuse himself and leave us all hanging. I nearly interceded, but Dom spoke again. ‘Shamie,’ he pleaded. Please. I can’t go on. ‘Just tell me.’
‘I joined the army because he joined the army,’ said James. ‘I were a tough little gurrier, you know, and Lorry, he has this tender side to him. There was no way I were letting him go to war on his own. I promised Lacy that I’d keep him safe.’ He smiled over at Nan, and she shook her head in grim self-recrimination.
‘I should never have made you make that promise.’
‘We were young, Lacy. We had no idea.’ His face fell like a plummeting stone. ‘We really had no idea.’ He ran his hand over his eyes. ‘So,’ he said. ‘Yes. Lorry joined up because . . . heh . . . because he was Lorry. And I tagged along behind because I loved him, and because it sounded like an adventure. And . . . ’ He shrugged. ‘We got by. We made it through; we outlived every single one of our original platoon. Isn’t that funny? Every man-jack of them dead by 1917. So,’ he whispered, ‘we end up in a mud-hole called Passchendaele, fighting forward and back for a few yards of muck and a shell of a town. And there we were, on Lorry’s twentieth . . . ’ His eyes flicked to Dom. He seemed to stop, reconsider what he wanted to say, and start again somewhere else. ‘On a . . . on a rainy night, near the end of 1917, we were running from one trench to another while the sky fell down around us. A really good friend of ours . . . Jolly . . . a real decent bloke . . . a good man . . . he . . . he slipped on the duckboards, he slammed into Lorry. Sent him flying. Sent him . . . sent him flying to the edge of the duckboards. And . . . ’
‘He went into the mud.’
They all looked up at me. My ma frowned with confusion.
But James wasn’t surprised. ‘Aye, lad,’ he said quietly.
‘Jolly pushed him into the mud.’
Dom mouthed the words after me. ‘Jolly pushed him into the mud.’ As if the repetition would force the sentence to make sense.
‘Aye,’ said James, eyeing me warily. ‘God love him. Jolly knocked poor Lorry over. Couldn’t do a thing about it.’
‘And Laurence drowned. In the mud.’
James nodded, his eyes swimming. Dom repeated the word ‘drowned’, but without any emotion.
‘It was very quick, Shamie,’ I said. I flicked my eyes to Mam. ‘It would have been very quick,’ I said.
James Hueston tilted his head, as if begging me not to lie; as if the pain of a lie now would be worse than all the horrible ‘maybe’s he’d carried with him all his life. ‘Are you sure?’ he whispered. Not, How do you know? Or, What are you talking about? Just plain, honest belief that I was telling him the truth. ‘Are you sure?’
I nodded. There was a long moment of stillness. The five of us – those who were awake, those of us freshly conscious of how utterly cruel life was – just suspended there for a moment of silence, each in our own cocoon of thought. I was thinking, So. That’s how it happens. All the time. All over the world. People just fall away. There’s no warning, and you can’t do anything about it. No matter how old you get. You just lose people and lose people and lose them again, and you never get them back.
I glanced over at Dom. I’ll get you back, I promised, I’ll fix this. But the Dom looking back at me was anything but Dom. He was Francis, all Francis, nothing but Francis, devastated and alone, looking out from a stolen face at the world he’d lost, at the friends he’d never get back. My stomach iced over at the sight of him. When would I fix this? How? How? Where was Dom? He seemed so gone. So utterly, irrevocably gone. Dom.
‘You know the strangest part of it?’ said James Hueston. He glanced up at Dom, then spoke directly to me. ‘You think it will kill you,’ he said. ‘I thought all those things, each one as they happened, would be the last thing I’d be able to bear. But I’m telling you, you just go on. Life just goes on, and you travel on with it, through all the different things. And they all happen to you, and you just sail through them and carry on. I thought . . . ’ He snapped his mouth shut. He glanced at my ma. And suddenly he was standing. He was pulling his coat on. He was pushing his fags into his pocket and looking around him in a glazed kind of confusion. ‘I should go,’ he said.
Ma reached for him, panicky with concern. ‘Oh no, Mr Hueston! Don’t go.’
James didn’t seem to hear her. He turned to me again, as if he’d forgotten to pass on a message and wanted to deliver it before he went. ‘See, yesterday morning, I’d had enough. I woke up, and the dreams had been so bad. I got up, and I couldn’t shake them. I thought about things I hadn’t thought about in years. About Francis and May, about Lorry and poor Jolly. I had . . . ’ His hands were in his pockets; he was thinking very hard. He looked directly at me again, searingly, willing me to get the point. ‘Son,’ James said, ‘I’ve had a good life. I want you to understand that. I left here when I realised this country would never acknowledge men like Lorry and me, and I washed my hands of the place. Had me a grand adventure of a life. You just go on. Understand? No matter what it throws at you, life carries you on, and you make the very best of it.’
I stood there frowning at him. What was he telling me this for? I didn’t need to know this. I hadn’t lost anything. My brother was coming back! But, despite my growing scowl, James Hueston just kept talking, and staring me in the eye.
‘In 1947, after the second war, I married me a lovely Creole woman, a big grinning, roundy woman. We lived in Paris, where she were from. It were too late for childer, and her two boys never took to me, but we had a jolly old time together. We spent our whole lives laughing, ’til God took her. And even after that, I just went on. I had me a lovely life, son. I done so much! That’s what I wanted to make clear. And after Tania died, bless her, I came back here and settled down and it’s all been . . . despite everything, it’s all been so good! Life’s been . . . ’ He looked for a word, smiled when he found it. ‘Life’s been tasty,’ he said. ‘But the dreams got very strange these last few days, and when I woke up yesterday morning it were as though none of that good stuff had ever happened. It were as though I’d only ever had the bad times.’ He ran his hand over his face. ‘All my hurts were distilled for me into something bitter, and that was all I could feel . . .I think that it’s because of Lorry, son. And Francis. I think they’re more than a dream. I think, maybe, they’ve always been more than a dream, because they never got the chance. Life never carried them on. You understand? Life never got tasty, and so all they have is their last moments and the bitterness of being stuck.’
He looked from Dom to myself and back again. Dom was completely blank. My ma was very quiet, her eyes roaming over James Hueston. She thought he was like Nan. She thought that this poor old man was wandering in his head, drifting in and out of lucidity, the hazy companions of his past side-by-side with the flesh and blood of his present.
James Hueston looked at me hard one more time. ‘You’re not stuck, boy. No matter what’s happened, or what will happen. No matter what you lose. Life will carry you on – every tomorrow brings the hope of change. You got to know that. I wish I’d known it earlier; you got to let yourself be carried along.’
I could feel my fingernails splitting the brittle fabric of the chair-back. What’s he telling me this for? I’
ve not lost anything. Dom’s coming back! I’m going to fix it, and Dom’s coming back. I don’t need this old-man advice. I don’t want this old-man advice.
James saw this in my eyes, and he sighed and shook his head. Then he reached across the table and patted my mother on her arm. ‘Thank you for your hospitality, missus. I mean what I said – if you need help, please send the boys for me. I’ll do whatever I can for you.’
Ma nodded uncertainly.
‘And thanks so much for what you’re doing for Lacy. I don’t have the words to thank you. I just don’t have the words.’
Ma’s face softened, and she nodded. James pushed his chair in and went and kissed Nan on the forehead.
‘What about poor Dominick?’ Nan asked, reaching up to clutch James’s hand. ‘I thought you’d be able to help, but it sounds like you don’t have anything to give.’
Ma sighed wearily, assembled Dee into a manageable shape and got slowly to her feet. ‘Oh Cheryl,’ she groaned. ‘Please stop.’
Dom, James, Nan and I glared at her, and her face flushed under our collective disapproval. She swallowed and dropped her eyes. She hoisted Dee’s drooling weight onto her shoulder and mumbled without looking up at us. ‘I’m sorry. I get so impatient . . .I’m so tired . . . ’
James reached for Ma. I think he was going to try and explain, but Nan stood instead, squeezing his hand quickly before letting go and speaking gently to Ma. ‘Take me up to bed, Olive love. Sure, we all need a rest.’
Ma met Nan’s eyes. There was a moment of silent communication. Nan smiled and nodded. Ma swallowed hard and nodded back. ‘Alright, Cheryl love.’
‘I’ll see Mr Hueston out, Ma. I’ll lock up.’
Ma nodded gratefully at me, said goodnight to James and began to usher Nan from the room. At the foot of the stairs Nan turned and raised a hand to James, who was standing watching them with his hat in his hand.
‘Come visit me, Shamie,’ Nan said. ‘I might not be here, I go away sometimes. But, if you come visit . . .I think I might know you.’ She squinted at him, uncertain of the sense of what she was saying.
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