Dead Secret

by Deveney Catherine

  CHAPTER THREE

  Father Riley is out when we phone. His housekeeper says he’s away visiting family but he’ll be back for this evening’s vigil mass at 6pm if we want to come to that and catch him after the service. I don’t, frankly. I don’t want to go to mass. I arrange to meet Sarah there but I’ll probably be accidentally-on-purpose late so that I can skulk outside like I always did. I have plans for this afternoon.

  Da’s bureau is made of dark mahogany, rich and brown and shiny as a conker. A lid that lifts down to make a writing desk. Three drawers. Stumpy little feet. A lovely thing in its way, though I would never have chosen it for myself. It is from a bygone age, just like Da really. Sarah and I were always aware that Da was older than everyone else’s dad. I used to complain that the house was too dark and heavy and old-fashioned with its solid old wardrobes and bookcases and autumnal patterned carpets. Da just said you didn’t get craftsmanship like the old days and he was probably right. He loved that bureau. He never locked it but there was an unspoken rule that Sarah and I didn’t go into it, and we never did. It would have been like reading Da’s diary.

  But it is time now. I run my hand over the lid of it. It is polished, smooth as a mirror, but the surface has tiny, fine-line scratches that show its age. Scratches that tell of its history and give it character, like laughter lines around the eyes. The hinges squeak as it opens and small packages and envelopes tumble from the inner shelves as the lid swings down. Whenever Da had opened it, things had fallen out. I used to tease him and say him I was going to sort it out one of these days, and he would tell me with mock sternness to keep my nose out.

  Boxes of screws, silver new and shiny. Twists of paper with old rusty nails, pulled from God knows what and kept for a good thing. Just in case. The inner working of a broken radio. A burned-out television valve. God, he was eccentric. A broken handle from the old electric cooker. A length of electric cable. And paper clips and pencils tied with string, and multi-coloured elastic bands, and pencil sharpeners with shavings still attached, and bottled ink, and string and staples and tacks.

  In the middle drawer there are some photographs, a couple of formal ones in cardboard frames and a few more recent instamatics in a plastic wallet. The framed one has a cover and inside, a leaf of thin, rustling paper that covers the photograph. I have seen this photograph before. It is of Da’s parents. Grandma Connaghan is small and neat with dark dreamy eyes and the vaguest smile but Grandpa gazes suspiciously, almost belligerently, into the camera lens. He is small and squat like Da, his shirt sleeves rolled neatly to his elbows to reveal powerful, muscular forearms. Forearms carved from years of outside work on the tiny strip of land they called a farm.

  Da told me Grandpa had used those muscles to cut the turf of his own wife’s grave and I thought it was the saddest thing I’d ever heard. Da was only ten when his mother died but he talked so vividly about those days after she’d gone, about the house being full and the kettle always on, the sound of cups chinking in saucers, and the chatter of the mourners in the front room, and the procession in to see his mammy where she lay. There was wailing then, and tears, and the chant of prayers; decades of the rosary being said over the body. And then there was nothing. Just nothing.

  Da had an older brother, John, who was fifteen. He was supposed to inherit the farm but he said sure, he wasn’t wasting his whole life in Donegal. He was off to America for a better life. So he sailed off and none of them saw him again. His better life was dying of TB out there.

  Grandpa said everyone was getting on with their lives now and they had better all get on with theirs. He packed up a small case for all of them and set out for the Derry boat that came to Scotland. We never compared notes on what it was like growing up without a mother, Da and I, but I do remember that he once said Grandpa was a good man, a good, good man but hard, and losing his mammy had been a bit like losing the feathers in his pillow and sleeping with a pillowcase of stones under his head instead. I never felt that. Da was the feathers in my pillow.

  I place the crinkled paper back over the photo and empty out the snapshots from the plastic wallet. Most of them are of me and Sarah. First Communion, and Christmas, and some from the year we went on the family holiday to Ireland. That was the year Da kept going on about our roots, and how important it was that we knew where we came from. He said that he would take us on holiday to show us our family history.

  Sarah and I were ecstatic about that holiday. We didn’t ask why it was that if family was so important, he never told us about Mother. We didn’t give a brass monkey where our family came from but we did want to be able to say in school that the Connaghan girls were going on holiday, same as everyone else. It wasn’t Majorca, but still. It was a holiday.

  Da took us back to the little patch of barren land, a bracken-strewn stretch of rocky turf and hillside where they kept a few sheep. We walked the field and he showed us the stone outline of the croft where they lived. And there, in the field, with the silence broken only by the wind, he cried at the smallness of it, and the way his parents tried to hew a life out of granite for all of them. It was so much smaller, so much more barren, than he remembered. He walked away then, so we wouldn’t see his tears, and Sarah and I hung around at a loss, shivering, and not just with the cold, knowing neither what to say nor what to do.

  After a minute I ran across the field to him and slipped my hand in his and he smiled at me as we walked in silence together, while Sarah hung back across the other side. He tucked my hand into his coat pocket. “Ah, Rebecca,” he said, “What would I do without you?” He always made me feel important. He told me about John and America then. And about him and Peggy, and then about the baby girl who died and took Grandma with her. Sian, he said Grandpa called her, though she was born dead.

  He said nothing then for a minute. He was lost in thought and I shivered a little in the wind.

  “Are you sad, Da?” I asked him.

  “A little bit, darlin’.”

  I was worried then. I thought maybe he wanted to come back here to live, but he shook his head and said no, there was no living to be had in Donegal. There was only beauty here, he said, and you couldn’t eat beauty. That’s why they had all come away in the first place. I think they also came because Grandpa was running away from the ghosts, though Da never put it quite like that.

  He was ten when they left and Peggy was five. It was nearly Liverpool they went to, but then a letter arrived from an old neighbour in Donegal who had come to Glasgow and he said there was work to be had in Scotland on the roads. I’d get him to tell me over and over the story of Grandpa docking in Glasgow with four pounds in his pocket and two addresses, one for digs and one for work. It was my favourite bedtime story and I would bury my head in the pillow as he told it.

  “Are you cryin’, darlin’?” he’d ask.

  “Naw!” I’d spit scornfully. “I’m sleepin’!”

  But I wouldn’t pull my head from the damp pillow and Da would sit for a minute, stroking my hair until I really did fall asleep.

  It is a full hour before I find it, in an old tattered envelope in the bottom drawer. I have gone through all the loose papers, the old school reports, and a parchment, yellow and withering with age, that turns out to be a report of Da’s days in National Service. “Character: excellent,” it says, as if character can be examined and diagnosed like flat feet. I am putting it back when I see the large brown envelope right on the bottom. It is falling apart; the flap is no longer there and the sides are beginning to separate.

  I pull out the sheets of paper inside and a number of photographs fall out. Da leaning on a gate in his naval uniform, his foot resting on the top bar, hands clasped in front of him. And Da again, with a young woman looking laughingly into his eyes. Jesus. I stare at her, those teasing, haunting eyes. She… can it be…? Mother?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Even I can see we look alike. Same coppery highlights in shoulder-length brown hair. Same colour and shape of eyes. Here she is a
gain, her arm looped through Da’s. And here, on her own, making kissing gestures at the camera. Kath, Lochglas Bay, it says on the back. And here, leaning against a wall with a sultry smile. Look at her, the way she pouts so provocatively, so aware of her own power.

  I suppose it sounds strange to say I had never seen a photo of Mother until now. But anything is normal when you don’t know any different. There is no point trying to relate what I tell you to your life. Unless you are an outsider too.

  There are letters too, still in their own, smaller, original envelopes. On some of them, I recognise Da’s distinctive, old-fashioned, looped hand. For a moment, I finger them hesitantly, uncertain whether to read them. It’s not just about privacy. If I read a dead man’s letters, I run a risk. Whatever picture they give me of Da, it will be unalterable. He won’t be here to explain or to expand. Whatever they tell me will be fixed in time; fixed in stone.

  The letter slips from the envelope. There is still time to put it back. I can walk away, keep everything intact. But I know I won’t. I need more than I have, and I have to be willing to lose everything to get it. I unfold the paper. Basildon Bond; azure not white. Da always used azure. It is dated 1966 and there is a Glasgow address at the top, an address in the west end. My eyes scan over the page quickly but I know before I even look that it is to my mother. I can scarcely breathe. The voice of a dead man talks.

  Dear Kath,

  Friday night, another weekend alone. I called earlier. Kirstin said you were out with Jackie, that there was a dance in the village. I feel pretty low tonight and a bit confused. Part of me is glad to think of you out having a good time and another part is just insane with jealousy. I’m not proud of it. But the thought of other men talking to you, dancing with you, laughing with you when I can’t, is hard for me take.

  I went for a pint with a few of the others from work but I didn’t stay long. I didn’t have the patience for the conversation somehow. I just wanted to get back to phone you. You’ve taken over my head a bit, Kath. There’s not much room for anything else in there.

  But then you were out, and standing in that draughty old phone box at the end of the road, I wondered why I had bothered to rush back. It’s a pretty cold, dreich night here tonight, which I suppose isn’t helping my mood much. The rain is pelting at the windows. At least I don’t have to get up early tomorrow, thank God. I said I’d go over to Peggy’s and help Charlie paint their kitchen. Peg was going to make dinner in the evening but we’ll see how the painting goes. We’ll probably end up with fish suppers from the chippie.

  I’m desperate to come and see you again in the next few weeks but I can’t really afford it until after pay day. We need to talk seriously, make plans. I wish you’d tell me how you really feel. Sometimes it seems like every time I get close to you, you fly off. Like some gorgeous butterfly opening her wings and saying come and get me, but never quite letting me. You don’t need to tease me, Kath. There’s no need to make me jealous. I’m jealous anyway. I’m so scared I’m going to lose you.

  I’m sorry. Maybe this letter isn’t helping either of us very much. I just miss you. I suppose that’s all I’m trying to say, really. I’m sore with missing you. I may not be the most exciting guy in the world, Kath, but I’ll always love you. You won’t ever have to doubt it.

  Yours always,

  Joe.

  I fold the letter, put it back into the envelope, a feeling of guilty unease rising inside me. It feels vaguely distasteful, like rifling through someone’s underwear drawer. But I swallow it down like bile, that unease, unwilling to let scruple supersede gut need. I need to know… everything, anything. I take another letter out of an envelope, and then another, and another, opening them, reading them, folding them again almost mechanically. Da’s tone undulates through the letters, shifting and reforming like shapes in a kaleidoscope; bright as shooting stars in one, dark and sombre the next. Even back then, when they were alive, she didn’t make him happy.

  The letters cover a six-month period and towards the end, in May 1967, they had obviously decided to get married. A summer wedding. Da talks of an old house they are to buy together in Lochglas that is dirt cheap but needs renovation. In one, he talks poignantly of an aunt dying; in another about a trip to the cinema. Banal talk nestling up close to serious talk of living and dying and loving.

  And through it all, an unfamiliar voice: the voice of the lover from my father’s lips. ‘When I held you, down on that shore at Lochglas,’ he writes in one, ‘I sensed for the first time in my life that there was some purpose, that there was something eternal as the rock on which we stood. I’m no poet, Kath, I don’t know a clever way to say this. But I just felt certain in that moment that though I’ll die some day, nothing can ever take away what I feel for you. It will be somewhere out there in the atmosphere, always.’

  I keep that letter in my hands for several minutes, staring at it. Reading, then rereading the words. Somewhere out there in the atmosphere, always. The voice of other people’s love is a foreign language, one you can’t understand unless you share the same country. It’s a language that lovers use to exclude the rest of us from the intimacy of their own private world. This I hear in my father’s voice as I read, and somehow, hearing a part of him that I never knew makes me feel estranged, creates a barrier even more brutal than death.

  And then, at the back of the bundle, letters in another hand, a bold, careless scrawl scratching untidily across the envelopes. Only a few, far fewer than in Da’s writing. I take the first one out: black ink on rose-coloured paper. The paper is creased in four, as if it has been folded and unfolded several times. It is only a page of a letter; the rest is missing.

  My God, but you were in a funny mood in your last letter! What brought that on? You are so different from me, Joe, so intense and serious. I love that fierce heart of yours but you know, sometimes, in my most honest moments, even I am not sure I deserve you. I am going to do my best to love you for ever. But ‘for ever’ scares me a bit. Doesn’t just a little part of you think, who can ever know about for ever?

  Someone – Da, presumably – has doodled at the side of the page in blue ink, as if they have been reading the letter and become lost in thought. There’s a little hat on the page, like one he used to draw on the side of newspapers when he was doing the crossword. I refold the page, take out another letter in mother’s scrawl. I don’t recognise the address. Bayview, Lochglas. There is no date. The voice is so different from Da’s. Not burning and intense but flippant, playful – maybe even a little heartless.

  Dear Joe,

  A note – in haste! Dad was at a golf-club dinner last night so I asked him to try and corner David Carruthers about the job. (Makes me laugh to think of my dear old Presbyterian dad speaking up for his Papish son-in law-to-be amongst the Masonic mafia!) Anyway, turns out David Carruthers was very impressed with you at the interview and Dad thinks he’s going to offer you the job, which obviously would solve everything. Thought you’d like to know.

  Now listen. I have a special request. But first, before I ask, you must picture the scene. I am sitting at the bay window overlooking the loch, wearing a black mini skirt. (Dad HATES it – that’s how much you’ll love it.) The thing is… my dearest love! … I need more money for the living-room carpet. No, no, Joe! Don’t think wallet… think LEGS! So, any chance of any more? You know you accountants are loaded.

  Love, Kath. xx

  PS Jackie said to send her love.

  I stare at the letter. What is she talking about? An accountant? Da wasn’t an accountant. He was a bus driver. He had always been a bus driver. My eyes keep darting back and re-reading the sentence. You know you accountants are loaded. Whose life is this unfolding in front of me? Who is this stranger I called Da?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The letter sits discarded on my lap as a memory suddenly puffs from the chimney. One of my earliest. Me, trying to climb up the steps of Da’s bus. I must have been about three. Da was sitting at the wheel in the de
pot in Larkfield in Glasgow when Peggy and I called in. Peggy was behind me and put her hands under my armpits to lift me up the step, but I screamed and twisted and waved my legs in the air.

  “Self!” I’d shouted furiously at her. “Self!” I remember getting even crosser then, because Dad and Peggy had laughed.

  I always hated being laughed at. I had run to the front bus seat and buried my face in the cool leather, sobbing angrily. Da came to me then, lifting me up gently and sinking his face into my hair, whispering soothing words as he held me. Then he’d blown raspberries in my chest and thrown me in the air, and I had giggled and shouted “more”, until I finally put my arms around his neck and nestled in.

  He worked on the number 34 route that passed close to our house and sometimes, on the way home from high school, I’d let other buses go past until I caught Da’s. But sometimes, I’d get Khadim’s bus. Before one-man operation came in, Khadim used to be Da’s conductor but then he had to retrain as a driver. He used to tell me he had arrived at Central Station in Glasgow one freezing November day with five pounds in his pocket and big dreams. Not so different from Grandpa Connaghan. The five pounds, anyway. I used to look at Khadim dishing out bus tickets and wonder what happened to his dreams.

  When I got on his bus, Khadim would wink at me and let me off the bus fare. Sometimes, he and Da would give each other lifts home if they were changing over shifts, and if he was on Da’s bus when I got on, he would come and ask me about school. He had a sailor’s legs for a swaying sea, Khadim, standing firm against every lurch and jolt of movement.