‘No. I’m sorry about that. Stupid. Is there somewhere we could talk?’
I raise my arms and gesture round us. ‘Not really. It’s pretty busy everywhere here today.’
The party’s breaking up, and people are starting for home. Already the young parents have left to start preparing the evening meals, and plates are being tidied away, and soon there will be glasses washed in the kitchen sink, bubbles climbing one above the other as the washing-up liquid lathers and dances round Laura’s hands. All the work of the day will disappear as miraculously as it first came together; it will all be lost as if it never really happened. Men will arrive in a van to take down the marquee, and night will surely fall, and that will be the end of it for another year, the day of the party gone. We probably could find somewhere quiet to talk. But I don’t want to make things easy for him. He hasn’t earned that.
‘OK.’ Sam steels himself. ‘Look. I came because I fucked up today. I realise that.’
‘Right.’
‘I should have come this morning. I don’t know why I didn’t. I got scared, I think. I was worried about meeting your family or something.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. The same reasons everyone is. And I think I have a bit of anger towards them as well.’
‘What about?’
‘Because they let everything happen to you. Because they didn’t protect you enough from what happened. From getting ill.’
‘What more could they have possibly done?’
‘I don’t know. I’m not saying it’s rational anger. I’m just angry.’
‘OK.’
‘But as soon as I sent you that text I realised I’d fucked up. So I came to say I’m sorry.’
‘OK.’
He risks a smile at me, and I smile back, because I like him. I can’t help it; he makes me happy. I wish he’d arrived in the morning, but it still feels good to know he’s made the journey now.
‘And I’ve been thinking.’ He becomes serious again. ‘While I was on the train, I was thinking about us. I don’t think I make it clear enough how important this is to me. And how much you mean to me. I don’t know, I don’t feel like I tell you enough. And I want you to know that you matter. And this isn’t just a thing, you know? I care about us.’ He takes both of my hands in his, and looks at me.
‘All right,’ I say.
‘So I think I need to stop being such a loser, really. I need to stop not turning up for you, you know?’ He pauses, uncertain for a moment whether to go on speaking. ‘All I ever wanted was someone who liked me best. And put me first. I never had anyone like that. I always wanted that. And I feel like you’ve wanted it too, since I’ve known you. I don’t know. I don’t want to put words in your mouth. I’ve just been thinking a lot about this while I was on the train. But I suppose I feel like I want to tell you that I like you best. Of everyone. And I want to put you first. And I hope we might feel the same way about each other, even though I’m a dick and I bailed on you today.’
He looks young and frightened, no matter how sure he sounds, and I suppose it’s because he’s risking himself. I look in his eyes, and it feels like everything I need to be able to live might be there waiting for me. All the strength it will take to get through might be there, if I lean on him, if I take his hand, if I love him. All anyone needs is someone else who matters to them. Is that Sam, then? Can I find what I need in being with him?
‘OK,’ I say. ‘It’s cool of you to have come, after all, so OK.’ He smiles at that. ‘You know what this means though.’
‘What?’
‘You have to meet my family.’
Sam laughs. ‘I thought that would probably have to happen if I came to their house, yeah.’
‘You OK about that?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Just try not to be angry at them or anything.’
Sam shrugs. ‘Fair enough. Where are they all?’
‘That way.’ I point to the marquee, and we start to walk. ‘Was the train crowded? I always find it’s really crowded from Bristol to Salisbury. They don’t put enough carriages on.’
‘I had to stand all the way, yeah.’
‘And there’s no 3G most of the way, so you can’t really use your phone, so you get bored out of your mind standing around.’
‘That was all right. I had a book.’
I watch Sam slyly from the corner of my eye as we walk together over the gravel. He’s like a mystery to me, like a book that I want to read and haven’t started.
I see that Grandad is standing with my parents, which makes things easier. I can get all the introductions out of the way in one go. Mum will find it harder to do anything stupid with the whole of her family around her. I approach them. Dad sees us first.
‘Hello, love, are you all right?’ he says.
‘Fine. I just wanted to introduce you all to someone. This is my boyfriend, Sam. Sam, this is my dad and my mum and my grandad.’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ Sam says. He smiles and steps forward and shakes each of my family’s hands in turn. I feel calm again now. The thing with anything frightening that ever has to be faced is that you only have to be brave for ten seconds. After that, it’s done, and things can be easy again.
‘Where have you come from, Sam? I don’t think I’ve seen you around today, did you just arrive?’ Grandad asks warmly.
‘I travelled over from Bristol.’
‘Oh yes? Did you drive?’
‘No, I can’t drive. I failed my test, and now I can’t afford lessons, not on a student loan.’
‘You’re at Bristol?’
‘Yes.’
‘That must be a lovely place to study.’
‘It is, yeah.’
‘So you caught the train, and got a cab from Andover?’
‘That’s it.’
‘Very good. They never put on enough carriages from Bristol, do they?’
Sam grins. ‘I had to stand all the way. But it wasn’t too bad. I just stuck my head in a book.’
Around us, the paraphernalia of the celebration continues to be dismantled. And just beyond the limits of our vision, another day of our lives is falling away, unrecorded and unremarked, packed up with the tables and chairs, the plates and glasses. Whenever you see a person washing up a cup, if you look close enough you’ll see them consigning something for ever to memory.
That’s how the whole world goes. No tape will be made to stand for us after we’re gone, and speak what we believed in. None of us matter like the people in history books, the people in movies.
from Interview 88
It was still dark, and the customs boat was bearing down. I knew we were fucked and they’d seize what we had on the boat. I remember the sky was very clear, stars out, and the light had just started lifting. Then the chop of the waves against the hull, and you see the light of the customs boat right on top of you, and hear the voice coming over the loudspeaker. I wondered who’d forgotten to pay the right guy off, how the hell it might have happened. I wondered whether the guns we were carrying would make it into the press, or whether the police would suppress the news. I thought of the old guy in the tweed suit who’d met me at Liverpool and supervised the pick-up, Fred or Frank or whatever his name was, but I wondered whether he’d been picked up and all, whether this was just a fuck-up at one end, or maybe customs had rolled up the whole operation.
Robert
WHEN THE DAY has ended I send Laura home, insisting I want to clear up by myself. She has done enough, I tell her, and I haven’t pulled my weight, and she deserves a rest, an evening on the sofa. Most of the hard work has been done by the last of the guests already; they brought all the crockery and glasses into the kitchen, and helped put the bottles into black bags, and took the bags to the gate. What is left might well take the rest of the night and the next morning, putting on the next wash and running a dishcloth over the last one and storing it all back away again, but there’s no way of hurrying it along, it just has to be done, so I might as we
ll do it myself. Two people won’t make the dishwasher get through its cycles any faster. And it isn’t hard work to prepare the glasses for returning to Oddbins and potter round the house putting things back in order. Out on the lawn, the men from the marquee company work, and know their jobs, and need no help or supervision. I’m not going to let Laura stay and look after me, although I know she wants to see things through to the end, like the captain of a ship. But I tell her I don’t deserve it today.
‘Don’t be silly, Robert, it’s not a question of deserving or not deserving anything. I’m here to help.’
‘But I can’t do anything for you in return. I never do anything for you. So let me do this small thing, and save you the last of the lifting, seeing as you’ve already done everything else since first thing this morning.’
‘You’re looking at this all wrong.’
‘Perhaps I am, but that’s how I’m looking at it. Go home, Laura. Have a glass of wine and get a good night’s sleep. I’m so grateful to you for everything. I feel so guilty you did so much. Please don’t do anything more.’
She leaves, unhappy to be going, uncertain as to why exactly I am getting rid of her. After so many years of prickliness, she seems to view my insistence that I am thinking of her comfort with some suspicion. We’re a work in progress, Laura and I. I suspect we always will be.
I am angry about the business with Frank and Geoffrey. I never saw so clearly how petty it all was before. The futility of it, the smallness of the discussion I arranged, and I surrendered the whole of a day. It feels like a bitter betrayal to learn that Frank knew about the planning of Enniskillen. Such a possibility never occurred to me for a moment, and I am bewildered by the reversal. It strips the relationship we shared of any vestige of trust, any sense of achievement. He could have said something, surely, if there was any bond between us. And he didn’t. In all the years since, he never owned up to it, not until he thought he might get caught. So what did our collaboration ever amount to? I helped him take a place on the right side of the narrative, among those who had sought reconciliation, that was all. I helped him cross the floor on to the right side of history, when he was part of the conspiracy that killed those people all along.
My mind is so full of Frank that I can’t quite concentrate on saying goodbye to Hannah. She and Michael are among the last to leave, and help pack up the things on the lawn, and put the chairs back into the house, and return the trestle table to the barn.
‘Thank you for another lovely day, Dad,’ she says.
‘Do you think it was?’
Hannah shrugs. Of course, she knows what I mean. There’s no one in the world who is closer to me any more, not really, so perhaps she always knows what I am thinking.
‘Will you stop these now?’ she asks. There it is again. She knows what’s in my mind as well as I do.
‘I think I will.’
‘Probably for the best. It’s sad though. Mum used to enjoy them so much. And so did we because they made her happy. We don’t need to pretend we enjoy the business of seeing everyone like this any more, do we? You least of all. You’ve done your share.’
That is what I have always wanted, really – to have done my share. And perhaps in some ways I have, in some walks of life. And perhaps there is still time to do more, to be of some use to my family.
Hannah gives me my present, a map of the county she found somewhere and had framed, and wishes me happy birthday. ‘It’s terrible without Mum here, isn’t it?’ she says.
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘it is.’
‘I’m proud of you for getting through it.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I almost didn’t come. When I got up this morning I thought I couldn’t. I wasn’t thinking.’
‘Too painful?’
‘I just thought I’d make it too hard for Kate. And I knew she was already here, and I knew she wanted to remember her grandma. I thought maybe I should stay away.’
‘I’m glad you didn’t,’ I say. ‘She came here for your mum, yes, and to support me, just like you’ve supported me by being here. But she came here to see you as well.’
‘Do you think?’ Hannah’s voice wavers, and I see her shoulders drop a little, as if she’d been hunching them up without noticing until now.
‘Of course. You have to be ready for it to take time. And it might not work just yet. But I think deep down you both want the same thing.’
‘I hope we do.’
‘You handled today well, you know. I was worried there’d be a scene.’
‘Thanks, Dad. I tried, it’s just – I don’t know how to say it to her. I don’t know how to say I’m sorry that I wasn’t a good-enough mum.’
‘None of us feel like we’re good-enough parents, you know,’ I tell her. ‘I’m sure I wasn’t. Half the time I wasn’t even there.’
‘You had your work.’
‘I still felt guilty, all the time. It’s part of being a parent. You work out with hindsight how you might have got things right, and it’s hard not to regret the errors. When you think of the stakes.’
‘Yes.’ Hannah frowned, and seemed to be thinking deeply. ‘That’s it.’
‘I know all this has hurt you. The way you haven’t spoken. But maybe you’ll come out of it now. You never know, maybe you’ll get there.’
‘Maybe. Anyway. I ought to go.’
‘All right. I love you, darling. Chin up.’
‘Love you too. I’ll go and find my things.’
Michael is waiting behind her at the edge of the room for his turn to say goodbye.
‘Thank you for coming today,’ I say. I can’t help still seeing the man standing in front of me through the filter of the boy he once was. I’ve never quite got used to the idea that this man married my daughter. It’s very hard to give people away.
‘Thank you for having us.’
‘Do you think things were all right between Hannah and Kate?’
Michael casts about, clearly wondering what to say. ‘Perhaps they were as good as they could be. It’s a slow process. There’s a lot that wants working out.’
‘Well, yes.’
‘Time will tell, I suppose,’ Michael says. ‘People talk a lot about failure to launch. Have you heard that phrase? They use it about young people. The graduates who move back in with their parents, that sort of thing.’
‘I think I’ve read that, yes.’
‘As a rule it’s an idea that I disagree with. I don’t like the idea that everyone’s career ought to be some great acceleration. There are people who are happier having life happen to them, and drinking it in, you know.’
‘Of course.’
‘But I think of that phrase a lot when I think about Hannah and Kate. Failure to launch. Sometimes, that’s what it feels like. Something never started between them. Never sparked. I ignored it for a long time. Till Kate was ill, really. You can ignore so much, unless something comes along and really makes you look at it. Of course they love each other, but I don’t know whether they ever really reach each other. I don’t know what to do about it.’
‘I don’t know that any of us do.’
‘But they do love each other.’
‘Of course.’
We’re both trying a little too hard to persuade one another, I think.
‘Well, we ought to be going. Thank you, Robert. Thanks again.’
Once Hannah and Michael have driven away, I go back inside and stack the dishwasher in the way I like to load it, and run the hot tap till I can’t hold my hand under it, then start to fill the sink with washing-up.
There are days my life snags on and I keep circling back to them. These are the roots of all I do, and if an observer were to lay those days lodged in my memory over the surface of my present, perhaps all my life would be explained, all problems solved, all wounds revealed. That has always been the beautiful thing about throwing this party – it’s like hearing the refrain of my life return, the recapitulation of a theme that has shaped all the music,
to gather the same people into the same place at the same time of year, and watch us all changing, and dance the same old dance. But this will be the last time. Without Hattie the heart has gone out of the ritual. I can’t do it again. I’ll retire from the entertaining business. I can only hope that in time to come, years after I have departed maybe, Hannah and Kate might look back on this as having been the start of something, the beginning of a thawing, of spring between them, and find today has turned into one of those curious, unexpected moments their lives snag on as well, the days that lend the rest of life their pattern and their meaning. Then perhaps this last party, with all the colour drained out of it, might prove to have been worthwhile.
The meaning of your life can creep up on you very suddenly. A day you didn’t see coming; a person you didn’t expect you were going to meet. Perhaps today will turn into part of the meaning of everything for them.
When the dishwasher finishes its first load I take out a stack of plates and carry them back to the dresser. I could have got Kate and her boyfriend to do the heavy lifting, because they are staying the night, but they have gone out for a walk together, and I didn’t want to bring them back to earth from wherever they’re wandering with dirty plates.
In Ireland, starving was always about honour. The old way among the peasants of that country, as I understand it, was that if someone had wronged you, you sat down at their doorway and went on hunger strike. And if you died there at the person’s door, they were forever dishonoured, and reparations would have to be paid to the family of the deceased. To get the hunger striker up from where they sat, amends had to be made for whatever wrong you’d done them, and then they’d eat again. That was the history the IRA were drawing on, every time they used the hunger strike as a weapon. A history rendered sharper and more bitter, of course, by the horror of the famine in Ireland, which had seen so many poor people fall down at the feet of England, and fail to find salvation there. Perhaps that was a dishonour to England. And perhaps the turbulent memory of Bobby Sands and the nine other men who died on the hunger strikes in Long Kesh prison in 1981, which still echoed round the offices I had worked in when I arrived in Belfast, was spoken of so quietly because they brought a kind of shame on England. Certainly, I think the trouble that brought Kate so close to death is a shame on this country. On everyone who never helped her. On a society that put so much pressure on that poor girl. On myself, for not making any difference. I went in and saw her when she was in the hospital, travelled there with Laura and on my own, but I couldn’t help her. The news of the disaster reached me like a rumour, passed beacon to beacon from miles away.
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