by Anne Griffin
My hands begin to shake when I think over it all, son. Can I, hand on heart, say that I did my best for her?
‘Moanie Maurice,’ she used to call me in the latter years. But the awful truth of it is I would have been a thousand times worse without her. I could almost feel it as I walked through the door, the armour slipping away as she took my coat or kissed me on the cheek or put her hand to my back as she laid my dinner down. Jesus, son, I should have told her every feckin’ day what a marvel she was.
I’ve stopped sleeping, have I told you? Two hours, three if I’m lucky now and then I’m awake. Staring at the ceiling, going over it again, this bloody decision, because although I know it’s time to go, son, it’s still hard. Even now, there’s a little part of me that wonders am I doing the right thing at all. There was a woman in her eighties somewhere in England, so desperately lonely that she sat at her kitchen table and put an empty bag of frozen spinach over her head and suffocated herself. I mean, when I heard that I just thought, is that me, is that what it’s really come to?
* * *
I get off the stool and shove these quaking wrinkled hands deep down in my pockets. I need to move. I need to shake this off me.
‘Wait there,’ I say to my refilled glass as I take to the corridor again. Head down, I count: twenty-seven flowers in the carpet, six pairs of passing shoes, one fallen abandoned napkin. Swishing skirts and high-pitched voices filled with the night’s excitement pass me but make no impression. This place could be on fire and I wouldn’t give a damn now.
My piss is unreliable as usual. Of late it’s become erratic, threatening to flood its banks one minute and refusing to squeeze a drop the next. I stand at the urinal waiting for it to make its mind up.
‘Get out to fuck,’ I order. And for once in its life it obeys, flows like the Shannon, in a flash flood. A good omen, I think.
After, I stare down at the Armitage Shanks sink, letting the water flow for far too long, not wanting to look in the mirror just yet. But when I eventually lift my white fluffy mane, it is my father that greets me. It’s not the first time. As the years have gone on I’ve noticed him creep into my face more and more. Sunken cheeks and high forehead. But it’s mostly in the eyes. Grey marble beads of wisdom. I stand as tall as I can and smile. And then I reach my hand to touch the cold glass.
‘You’ve done mighty, son,’ he says, ‘mighty.’
It takes me by surprise, so much so my eyes sting, and I know if I’m not careful tears will force themselves out, making a spectacle of me. Enough of that now, I think, as I shake my head and make for the door.
On my way back up the corridor to the foyer, I wonder what would happen if I shouted out my intentions to the world. At the double doors I dance a shuffle as I manoeuvre my way through the couple coming in the opposite direction. Still got the moves. What would happen, do you think, if I leaned in to whisper in their ear to tell them of my plans, would they believe me? Would they whip out their phones and ring 999? Or would they simply smile and walk away from the drunk old raving fool?
On I go, overshooting my turning for the bar, my feet bringing me to stand once more at the picture of Hugh Dollard, in the foyer. He still looks nothing like the man I remember. What might he say were he to know that tonight I’ll sleep in the room that was once his? And that everything that was ever dear to him is now mine. I sway back and forth, my hands still in my pockets, thinking of my victories all over again.
‘Did you know Great-uncle Timothy?’ a voice asks me, interrupting my simple pleasures. I look around and see a face that I’ve not seen in years.
‘Hilary?’ I say, ‘Hilary Dollard?’
‘Dollard was never my surname, not even before I married Jason. It’s Bruton, please.’ She gives me a tight-lipped smile that suggests friendliness, but you can never be too careful. She’s got her daughter’s eyes, though, or Emily has got hers, whichever way round it might be. Soft brown. The generations washing away the Dollard sharpness. Oh, but all the Dollard ghosts: Amelia, Rachel, Hugh, Thomas, are there in hints, around the mouth and her cheekbones, diluted down into something … kinder. Thin, vulnerable, grey hair surrounds her face.
‘Mr Hannigan. I don’t think we’ve ever formally met.’
She gives me her hand. Unlike when I refused her husband’s, I take hers now and hold it. When she finally pulls it away she sits on the couch and watches the suited and booted men pass by. She bends her head to those who say hello like she is the Queen of Rainsford, which I suppose in a way, she is.
‘I thought I’d come and see the place in full swing, as they say.’ She gives me a smile that, again, seems genuine and pats the seat beside her.
I move towards it, but stay standing, so she must look up at me.
‘I will not bite, Mr Hannigan.’
‘I stopped being afraid of you Dollards a long time ago.’
‘Is that so?’ she says with a laugh. ‘I rather hoped we haunted your dreams.’
I look at her and can’t help but smile, I can imagine why Jason Bruton fell for her.
‘I’d take a nightmare any day, if it meant I could sleep. I haven’t been doing much of that lately,’ I say, finally sitting beside her.
She glances over to me and smiles the smile of a fellow sufferer before looking down at her hands, her face becoming serious.
‘Since the day Jason died I don’t think I’ve slept one full night unaided. In the beginning I would bolt awake thinking it must have been something I did that caused him to get so ill.’
I look at her but she doesn’t turn to me. We sit in the awkwardness of our silence for a moment, while all around us the place bustles. A man carrying a keyboard comes through the front doors and makes his way to the back corridor. I think of rising to assist him with the double doors but know my knees would not let me get there in time and so I watch him put his back to them and push his way through, nearly knocking over a young one coming from the other side with an unlit cigarette. They laugh at their near collision and she skips past him, smiling broadly as he and his keyboard squash back against the door. I see him delay his exit and watch in appreciation of the girl’s departing figure.
‘Pretty aren’t they?’ Hilary says. ‘Girls these days. They seem prettier than in our day. Taller. Definitely taller.’
I laugh at the compliment of her thinking we are the same age. I must be at least twenty years her senior.
‘You said “Timothy”,’ I say.
‘Pardon?’
‘Timothy, you said “Great-uncle Timothy”. Your man there in the picture. Emily told me it was Hugh Dollard, Thomas’s father.’ My mouth feels dry and I think of my whiskey sitting waiting for me on the bar. At least I hope it’s still there and Svetlana hasn’t cleared it by now.
‘No, that man there was Hugh’s younger brother, Timothy. I never met him myself. I simply wondered as you were looking at him for so long if you knew him from all those years ago before he left?’
She looks up at him wistfully for a moment, while I look at her trying to understand what it is she’s actually saying.
‘But hang on,’ I say, ‘Emily’s actual words were – “That’s Thomas’s father.” But now you’re saying it’s Timothy Dollard?’
‘Exactly,’ she replies, her hands shuffling in her lap. ‘You have it all now, Mr Hannigan: our land, our hotel, our shame. Hugh Dollard, my grandfather, was not Thomas’s actual father. My grandmother had an affair with her husband’s younger brother, no less.’
Well, she has me there. I had not expected that. I blow out a gust of air from my lips and shake my head.
‘Thomas never knew that Hugh wasn’t his father,’ she continues after a bit, following my eye to him. ‘He went to his grave believing his father hated him. When the reality was he never knew him at all. My grandmother started her affair with Timothy before she married Hugh. They met the day she came to Rainsford for the formal engagement. Fell for him instantly, apparently. Well, he is handsome isn’t he?’
The handsomeness of men has never been my strong point so I don’t reply.
‘Unfortunately he was a terribly confused young man. Gay, but didn’t fully know it at that point. They continued their dalliance well into the early weeks of the marriage until one day Timothy wrote Amelia a note saying he was leaving for London, off to finally become the man he was. Hugh came home to find his wife passed out on the bed drunk with the letter in her hand. She admitted everything, including the pregnancy. You see, the thing was, the marriage had not yet been consummated. Grandfather had put his new wife’s reluctance to have relations in that way down to a shyness that he hoped would quickly pass. When he realised the truth of it all, he left to track Timothy down. Beat him to a pulp, and told him never to darken Rainsford’s door again. When Thomas was born, Grand-father couldn’t stand the sight of him. Treated him like he was an idiot, his entire life. Grandfather blamed him for every damn thing that went wrong in this God forsaken family. Poor Thomas. No child, Mr Hannigan, no child deserves that.’
I let the applause from the presentations down the corridor distract me from having to feel any pity. But her story is like the wind under the front door, whistling its way through the crevices, getting through the cracks in my skin.
‘The years didn’t make it any better,’ she continues. ‘This house was filled with hatred. Mother was only conceived because grandfather got drunk and, well…’ She looks about the foyer and winces before raising her hand to her mouth. ‘Mother hated living here. Only she and father were penniless she would never have come back. They drank themselves to death, literally. Jason saved me from it all, Mr Hannigan.’
I close my eyes against her words. Blocking out the sorrow of others, refusing them permission to stack on top of my own enormous pile. The weight is exhausting and I feel the need to be gone. And yet I sense there is more to know, as I watch her watching me.
‘I’m not meaning to be rude,’ I say, curious now, ‘but I’m … I suppose, I’m wondering why you’re telling me all of this? Is there a purpose in me knowing?’ Quite right, I think, well said. Let’s get to the point.
She thinks about this for a moment and then says:
‘To explain, I suppose. I know it was you who took the coin.’
‘Look, I’ve been through this with Emily and I—’
‘No, Mr Hannigan. Look, I’m not here to accuse you of anything. I suppose what I’m trying to do in this roundabout way is to right some wrongs, to end the awful loneliness of this place and all it has done to those who have passed through it, including you, Mr Hannigan.’
She gives me a small embarrassed smile. I don’t know what to do, where to look or what to say. So I look at my hands instead.
‘Bricks and mortar can no longer fill the void Jason has left for me here now. I’ve deluded myself for far too long. And since Thomas died, I’ve realised it’s time to leave the awful tragedy of this family behind. It’s time for someone else to take up the mantle.’
Loneliness, that fecker again, wreaking his havoc on us mortals. It’s worse than any disease, gnawing away at our bones as we sleep, plaguing our minds when awake.
‘What is it, Mr Hannigan?’ she asks, watching it written all over my face, the utter hopelessness of it all. She knows. She knows it like I do, its touch, its taste, its smell. It is then she lays her hand on mine. I stare at it, and am surprised at my instinct to want to place my other on top. But it will not move.
‘How have you coped?’ I say, instead. ‘With him dying, leaving you, how have you managed to keep going?’
‘Ah. That. Does one really? That’s more the question. Does one really cope? If I’m anything to go by, then the answer is one doesn’t. Your wife died not too long ago, am I right?’
‘Sadie, yes.’
‘Well, you know then, it’s a living hell. You either choose to live with the pain of it or you get the hell out. I decided to drug myself to the eyeballs and imagine him at every corner and in every room of this place. Fat lot of good that did me or Emily for that matter.’ I feel her hand press harder on mine. ‘And you, you’re still with us so I take it you’ve chosen the former also?’
From the corner of my eye I find her face and watch her lips.
‘You’ve never thought of giving up?’ I ask, so quietly I wonder has she managed to hear my words. I wait to watch her mouth form the answer.
‘Too weak willed,’ she replies, with a smile that transforms her face into something beautiful, ‘it would take a stronger woman than me to bow out of this world.’ She pauses and turns to me, ‘But you didn’t answer my question. What is your secret?’
‘Whiskey.’
She laughs out long and loud. I haven’t a clue why. I never meant it to be funny. I meant it to be true. But still her lips broaden and it’s infectious. My own begin to do the same. Soon my insides are vomiting up the laughter. And we laugh together. Laugh our desperation into the foyer, around the youngsters coming and going. Laugh until it’s robbed our breath. Laugh so we must pinch the tears back from our eyes. Laugh so we must keep hold of the couch as if we’re in danger of falling off. When it starts to subside, we slouch against the velvet back and quieten down, letting our serious heads return.
‘The thing I miss most about Jason is not what he said or did,’ she says, her hand long gone from mine, lying flat against her chest now, ‘it was his very breath, beside me in the room or the next room or somewhere in this place, I didn’t care. It was simply knowing he was there, that meant the world to me. I didn’t need him to do anything other than just be alive. Is it the same for you?’
I look at her and cannot release the words for fear of the tears that might insist on flowing. So I nod my answer. Nod like a mad demented dog. Nod to my knees, to my drumming fingers, down into my very soul. Closing my eyes, I hold back the tsunami and nod.
We are quiet now. And an image of Sadie comes to me. Her kneeling down out the back of the house at her rockery. Her pride and joy it was. And she is trying to get up. Her knees were bad, you see, arthritis, just like mine. She reaches her hand to a large stone and tries to pull herself up but she can’t. She waits a minute then tries again. She looks back to the house but she can’t see me standing at the kitchen window. I wave to her to wait. I wave to say, hold on, I’m coming. But before I leave the window, she has tried again and this time, succeeded.
‘Emily has never breathed a word about your arrangement over the hotel, you know,’ Hilary says, ‘she wouldn’t, she’s a good girl. But I’ve known since the very beginning, the night you offered her the money to save this place. I overheard it all in the office.’
She leans into me with a grin and looks for all the world like a little girl who is at last getting to reveal a secret she has kept sacred for far too long. I can’t speak and even if my throat and mouth allowed the words through, I don’t know what they’d say.
‘Do you know the truth is, I let you save me,’ she says, whispering it to me, grinning. ‘Isn’t that wonderful, Mr Hannigan? You saved me – a Dollard – as you like to call me,’ she laughs, lifts her head to the ceiling, then back down to her hands. ‘I couldn’t leave here after he died. Well, when I say couldn’t leave here I mean, him, of course – Jason. He was my world. He seeps out of every inch of these walls. He loved this rack-and-ruined place. Nothing and no one could dissuade him from the idea of it being a hotel, especially not me.’
She smiles sadly and looks about.
‘She would have sold it, you see – Emily, when she came home, when Jason was dying. I knew she was thinking that way and I couldn’t have everything he had worked for taken away from me. And then you came along on your white steed. Ironic, don’t you think? You might finally have been rid of us Dollards, instead you ensured we stayed.’
Her smile widens.
‘I could have laughed. You don’t think I’d forgotten, do you? You don’t think I’d forgotten how you’d treated Jason that night he stood at your door begging for money for us. He never live
d it down. Never.’
Her head, serious now, shakes from side to side, her compassion for me gone.
‘You brought a good man low, Mr Hannigan. A good, decent man. My man. It was you who condemned her here, do you know that? My poor daughter. Condemned to this life of servitude, to me, to them,’ she says, her outstretched hand indicating those passing, on the way to smoke their cigarettes. She swallows hard and adds: ‘And I let you.’
She begins to shake and snivel. Christ, I can’t be doing with more tears now. She quivers away beside me while I shift in my seat, looking around to see who’s watching. But everyone seems too caught up in the clatter of the night.
‘I’m done with the Dollard beatings a long time ago, Hilary. I’m not taking any more now.’
‘But no, you misunderstand me. It is me who is to blame. What kind of parent lets her daughter sacrifice her life like that?’ she asks, crying now, like I might have the answer. Me, the parenting expert!
My hand begins to rummage in my full pocket. And with difficulty I free my handkerchief that surrounds my little bag of pills, pull it out and place it in her hand.
‘Here,’ I say quietly, looking away from her, giving her as much privacy as I can.
Hilary blows her nose then considers me for a minute.
‘I need you to do something for me, Mr Hannigan,’ she finally says, her urgency worrying me, ‘buy this place. Buy it. Force Emily to sell to you or to anyone, I don’t care. Be the ruthless man you are and force her out. This place has done us enough damage.’ She moves closer to me, right in towards my face, searching me out, her hand back on mine. I look closely at her wrinkles that fan out from her pleading mouth, merging with those tumbling down from her eyes. She is so close that I can feel her breath and hear its pace quicken. ‘Please, Mr Hannigan, set her free.’