by David Park
Knowing it would be easier to accept his offer than decline she handed him the two bags and when he had started towards the door of the cottage she opened the boot again and draped her waterproof coat over the urn. There were only a few more bags and she gathered them up quickly.
‘Go on in, John,’ she called as she saw him hesitate at the door. ‘I’m just locking the car.’
A gentle man imbued with diffidence and manners. Someone who never left the village and who worked for the local council in their parks and cemeteries department until he too retired. It was his father’s boat they used to go fishing in all those years ago. At the funeral in Belfast she had hardly recognised him in a suit whose wide lapels suggested it had been bought in the eighties. Afterwards he and his wife Gillian had almost apologised to her for coming and she thought the occasion had been an intimidating one for them but she had appreciated their presence as much as any dignitary’s. She would give them something when it was all over – one of Don’s books signed to them perhaps and a small cheque if she came eventually to sell up.
‘Strange without him,’ John said as he placed the bags on the kitchen table. ‘I was used to going by the house and seeing him sitting working at his desk in front of the window. Worked all hours, he did. Looking for the words, I suppose.’ He wiped the back of his hand slowly across his mouth as if his own words had surprised him and some embarrassing residue still lingered on his lips.
‘Looking for the words. That’s right, John. Will you stay for a cup of tea? – the kettle’s on.’ But she knew him well enough to guess that he wouldn’t and when he thanked her but declined she followed him back to the door. ‘Say hello to Gillian for me. I appreciate you both coming to the funeral. The girls are coming up tomorrow for a day or so. Call in and we’ll speak soon.’
In reply he simply nodded and took his familiar slow walk back down the path. There was a light breeze drifting in laden with the scent of the night sea as thin curlicues of white fretted the shifting blackness of the surface that stretched immeasurably into the distance.
She took her cup of tea and sat down on a footstool close to the fire. Some of the driftwood crackled and a little shower of sparks sprayed to the hearth. She looked at the small black burn marks stippling the carpet in front of the grate and smoothed her foot across them as if this might rub them away. He was always one for burning wood. Sometimes she thought he would set the chimney on fire. Once he burned a review he didn’t like – cremated the whole newspaper, stuffing it into the grate then pushing it in with a stick as the flames made it fan open. Of course it was the drama of it he liked best. Not that he had many bad reviews – it was all too incestuous for that, too much of a boys’ club and in a world that was based on a tight network of connections, no one was going to rock the boat or venture into dissent, even if she suspected his work was increasingly seen by some as old-fashioned. And yet always below his surface simmered the bitter awareness that his talents, and thus his recognition, fell short of the truly great Northern poets who throughout his career had taken all the prizes that were on offer.
It always pleased him to appear magnanimous. If only everyone had known what resentments, what paranoid jealousies, what acute divination he possessed for any possible slight, lingered just below the surface of his engaging embrace of newly-fledged poets, they wouldn’t have been so quick to flush with the pleasure of his commendation. And no one got more encouragement than those young women whose talents, however meagre, combined with prettiness. She tried not to think of the women but the more she tried the more the fire seemed to spark the memories until their faces and names flared lambent in its spreading flame. The ones she knew about. And she was glad not to know about the others. By now she should have been simply weary of it all but something insisted on tipping her into new anger and both her trembling hands clasped the cup as if holding a bitter chalice, frightened that at any moment it might overflow and spill each of the old hurts into fresh life.
There was Lorna the university librarian – she was probably the first – a raven-haired stick of a woman with plucked eyebrows and tight skirts who looked as if she had been pressed thin between the pages of the legal tomes she so zealously guarded. Publishers’ editors – at least two of those. Did they see it as an additional accomplishment on their CVs? Always convenient on his trips to London and no doubt available to him like room service. Their faces and names existed now only vaguely in her memory but she saw them as wide-eyed public school girls with plummy voices shimmering out of red-lipsticked mouths who no doubt thought it would be an opportunity missed if they had passed on such an intimate literary connection. Then in later years there were the research students, Americans mostly, chasing some ludicrously titled dissertation that was invariably rooted in a misty-eyed vision of Romantic Ireland and who inevitably claimed some distant lineage to the land. These were also the most persistent, insensitive in the frequency of their contacts and simpering requests for just one more answer. All of them used and discarded – he probably wouldn’t even have remembered their names after a few years had passed and eventually she presumed they tired of sending him unanswered emails, or ignored invitations to read their finished opuses. Except for Antonia of course. That memory at least made her smile just as the fire released a sudden corroborating cackle.
Outside the wind was rising and it sneaked in under the roof tiles, momentarily stretching and lifting them into a shudder of protest. A little spume of smoke blew into the room and she tried to fan it away with her hand. ‘A bunny boiler’ he had called her and perhaps the reference to a film she knew he had never seen was apt enough. A stalking bunny boiler who was clearly unbalanced by whatever intimacy had passed between them, and who had foolishly mistaken it for a future promise of a relationship that instead ended as soon as it had begun. He had come whining to her like a little boy, unnerved by the intensity of the harpy who seemed to have shed all other aspects of her life in pursuit of this one true faith and whose lurking presence suddenly shadowed every waking part of his daily round. She was in his in-box, on the end of his phone late at night murmuring her incantatory affirmations like a demented Molly Bloom or perched in the front row of his every reading or appearance like a hooded crow with her black scapula of wiry hair. Once after supper they had glimpsed her hiding in the shrubbery of the garden. She had taken pleasure in the episode, asking repeatedly with feigned innocence what would have made this woman behave in such a way and amusing herself by nodding with apparent sincerity when he had attributed it to some kind of mental breakdown.
It was a matter of some teasing regret that Antonia’s visa had proved to have long expired and allowed the university to pack her quickly back to America. She had enjoyed the momentary pulse of fear her crazed pursuit had injected into his ordered existence, the little shiver he had experienced of things spiralling out of his rigid control. But what was it with these women? It was true that right through to his death, he retained a rough-hewn, slender handsomeness, his tall straight back unstooped, his once red hair weathered into bronze and then aided and abetted into lingering colour by what came out of a bottle. For all his vanity his strong green eyes never became clouded or lost their piercing vigour. But as she stared at the fire’s secret caverns she told herself that the physical alone couldn’t explain the attachments he’d forged during his life. Did they think he’d immortalise them in sonnets? Did they think that when he spent himself he expelled his desire in iambic pentameters? Or was it the mystery that enthralled them – the connection they hoped to make with some primitive force of the imagination that would quicken them into their own richness of life? It was too easy for her now to say that she herself had never sought that quickening and too easy for her to lay all the blame for that at his feet. The sourness of that knowledge felt sharp in her mouth and for a second she thought of spitting it into the fire but even that angry impulse beached itself on pitiful hesitation.
The tea was cold now but she went on holding it. Perhap
s she had never been brave enough, then gradually over the years when passion had settled to the mundane necessities of a marriage, she had let herself be worn down by the unspoken force of his will and bending her life to the ever-present, future possibility of what might flow from his pen had become a way of thinking, an unchallenged way of living. Once she had taken pleasure at each new arrival, counting it as a blessing, the bestowing of the gift that shed penumbral light on her, but even that had faded and it was her children who brought her what was needed to survive the gradual fraying and unravelling of daily life. She thought of her two daughters arriving in the morning. She thought of her lost son who would never come home. If she sat any longer she knew she would cry so getting up she took her cup to the kitchen and drained what little was left of its contents. The empty Tesco bags reminded her of the urn still in the car but she didn’t want to bring it in, didn’t want to share the night with him, because she knew that deep down he had resented their children. Loved them too of course but hiding somewhere deep inside his love, she believed, was the thought that they were interlopers who distracted her and at times him from what should have been their primary service.
She placed the last of the wood on the fire and tried not to see anything other than what was there and tried too not to think of Roseanne. But it was as if her name was whispered by the wind that snaked about the outside of the cottage trembling the thin-paned windows that they had never got round to replacing with double-glazing. Roseanne, not one to be so easily blanked out or relegated to the status of a passing ship in the night. But it wasn’t bitterness that she felt about her now even though she was the one who had lasted the longest and the one for whom she guessed he had felt something that might have been as true and real as love. At the funeral she had been there and crying real tears, her eyes still wet as they brushed cheeks. Perhaps she would have been right for him. His intellectual equal and if only a little younger still holding on stubbornly to the fading flush of her beauty. A poet herself, a writer, a permanent player in the world of the arts, their relationship had endured over two decades. She had been in the cottage on a range of occasions, ostensibly for interviews or features she had been writing – probably had slept with him here too. If anyone should have been on the beach for the final farewell she knew it was Roseanne but thankfully he had thought better of including that prescription on his list and, even if he had, she couldn’t have inflicted such embarrassment on their children.
Knowing she couldn’t put it off any longer she went to the car and lifted out the urn. She hoped the wind would have died away before the early-morning ceremony that he had scripted. As if to find the answer she looked up at black-blotched clouds that looked raddled at their edges and heard the strangled cries of the gulls buffeted by the currents. Perhaps she had been foolish to listen to his voice beyond the grave and shouldn’t have persuaded the girls to make the trip that they had already hinted was a significant and unexpected inconvenience. But she had done everything else in accordance with his wishes and so she felt she should see this last obligation met and it was also the case that she didn’t want to do it on her own, didn’t want to be with him on her own ever again. It was foolish but she had started to think any divergence from his written wishes would incur his displeasure, a displeasure that might somehow find its own assertive way of making itself known. She wanted it finished. So the girls after flying in from London would come from Belfast on the train and she’d meet them at the station, they’d do it the following morning and then later that same day she’d drive them both back to the airport.
She carried the urn into the house, placed it on the mantelpiece then lifted it down and looked for somewhere less conspicuous. She tried different places, setting it down carefully and observing it as if it were a decorative vase to be placed in the finishing touch to an interior design, but nowhere seemed right and so she placed it on the slate hearth where the driftwood for the fire had been, then going to the kitchen opened one of the two bottles of wine she had brought.
Of her two daughters Anna had taken the most persuasion. The first phone call had ended with the impression that she couldn’t possibly come as she cited work commitments and the importance of the story she was working on for the paper about the exploitation of illegal immigrants and how it had a deadline that she was struggling to meet. Perhaps it was the absence of angry argument on her mother’s behalf that had managed to win the day; perhaps it was because she had asked for her presence in a manner that made it seem like a personal kindness. Maybe it was simply the filial guilt of the child who has made her way in the world without ever feeling the need to look back. Whatever the reason, an hour later there had been a phone call reversing her initial decision. And she was glad Anna was coming because a ten-year career in journalism had made her, if not hard-nosed, then strongly self-confident and perhaps she could draw on some of her daughter’s strength until the curtain had fallen on this, his final little public performance.
If equally unenthusiastic, Francesca had been more readily compliant to the request. She had been the daughter who was most upset at the funeral and she had held her mother’s hand throughout the service, in what felt like not so much an attempt to offer comfort but a need to receive it. At the graveside she had gone to pieces as she dropped her rose into the open grave, shuddering so much that for a second it looked as if she might topple forward. Strange to see such outpouring of emotion for a father who had so often withheld his blessing from her. ‘Let him go, Francesca,’ she had whispered to her. ‘Let him go.’ Let a father go who had teased her constantly and with what sometimes felt like barbs about a career and a small business she had started in London, designing and making wedding dresses and hats for the city’s wealthy. Perhaps he deemed it an unworthy occupation for a daughter of his. ‘Coating debutantes in icing sugar’ was how he had described it, smirking at his own wit and giving no credit for all the hard slog and commitment she had invested in it over the years, building it up from nothing after she had finished her art college degree. Now she was trying like everyone else to ride out the recession and never once had she asked for, or had they been able to give her, any form of financial support.
At least with Anna, even though he espoused to despise the popular press – ‘carrion crows pecking over the living and the dead’ was how he liked to characterise it – there had been a begrudging respect for a profession involving words. The one thing that irritated Anna, however, was his occasional and completely erroneous hint that being his daughter must have advantaged her and advanced her career. Whereas Francesca was never fully able to protect her own vulnerability, Anna as she grew up welcomed the jousting and often gave as good as she got. As a teenager she had sussed out her father’s shining lights and then enjoyed sniping at them and comparing them unfavourably to others she knew he looked down upon or resented. Sometimes in passing she would quote stanzas at him from inane pop songs and then proclaim, ‘That’s real poetry.’
So why was it that Anna had stood stony-faced at the graveside while Francesca had cried like a child? She poured herself another glass of wine and the light from the fire suffused it as she turned it slowly in her hand. Was it that Francesca realised that now she would never receive the father’s approval she had secretly longed for? They had never been a family that went in for ostentatious or revelatory expressions of emotion and if it was possible these had diminished even further after the death of Rory. She knew if she were to think now of Rory everything would fall apart more than it already had and she had to get over this final hurdle so she stood up and walked to the window but the glass gave her nothing except her own vague reflection. Behind her the fire sparked and in the still-unlit room a frantic flurry of shadow flames stuttered against the white walls. Suddenly she felt confined and wanted the freedom of the night so draining the last of the wine she rested the glass on his desk, set the fireguard in place and putting on her coat walked across the road and took the narrow path through the dunes.
/> The razor-edged grass fawned up round her legs but she knew better than to touch it having discovered as a child its power to cut. In the new holiday apartment block that nestled beside the golf course there was only one lit window. She had signed the petition objecting to its planning approval. He too had fumed at the proposal, even broken his lifelong resistance to signing petitions – he hadn’t even signed the one about the war in Iraq, or the cuts to arts funding. Perhaps he had been swayed by the naïve belief of the organisers that his name on their petition would carry weight with the planners, perhaps even believed it himself, then fumed even more when it proved an illusion. She didn’t mind the apartments that were generally only occupied at weekends or during the holiday periods, believing that they brought a renewed sense of life to the place with children wearing wetsuits in the summer sea and the smell of barbecues. The extra income helped the few local shops and everyone seemed able to rub along without any problems. And the recession had occurred at the right time in the sense that it was unlikely that developers would now move in wholesale as they had done in other places on the coast and apartment it out of recognition.
As she stumbled a little on the downward path to the beach it was the breeze off the sea that was keen against her face as it tousled her hair and for a second she thought of returning to the heat of the fire but then remembered how confined she had felt and strode out briskly along the length of the beach. The tide was slowly going out and she walked where the reclaimed sand sheened and stretched cleanly ahead of her. It suddenly struck her that perhaps she should have checked the tides. Would it be incoming or outgoing when the moment came? And did it matter? She thought of David Copperfield and the death of Barkis and how Mr Peggotty tells David that people can’t die along the coast ‘except when the tide’s pretty nigh out’. Would there be an early-morning tide to take his ashes out? She told herself that it didn’t matter, that despite the time he spent in the cottage, despite his description of himself as a beachcomber, he was a city person. She looked again for the green light but it had disappeared and in the dropping light the horizon smeared into a blurred bevel of charcoal. Her daughters would come in the morning and she was glad because already she understood that there was a price to be paid for what she had earlier felt as lightness but which had now slowly edged into an awareness that she was alone. Whatever loneliness she had experienced in her forty-year marriage had been one that ebbed and flowed in her head and ultimately always faded away when faced with the requirements of daily living. Now there seemed no escape from its reality and although she told herself that being alone wasn’t the same as loneliness she was unable to distinguish any difference between the two states as her feet suddenly sank a little into softer sand.