by Cathy Kelly
She flicked on the kettle and wondered what was wrong with her. She’d been single for a long time now and had grown used to it; comfortable in her solitary state and perfectly happy to wake up on Saturday mornings with only herself to please.
But lately – and she wished she knew why – she’d felt a strange loneliness inside. She’d told nobody about this, not even Nora. Certainly not her children. She didn’t want anyone’s help because nobody could help her. She simply wished she understood what had happened to bring on this melancholy. Why, after happily spending years on her own, was she now wistfully looking back to the days when she’d been married to Stephen and busy with Fiona and Michael? Was it thinking about her son finally getting engaged to his childhood sweetheart?
Whatever it was, she decided firmly, she needed to get over it.
Three
The heart will break, but broken live on. LORD BYRON
Leila drove home quickly, her mind barely on the road, inhabiting instead the unknown hospital ward where her mother lay scared and in pain. She’d get in and out of her apartment in twenty minutes, she’d decided – twenty minutes to eat a snack, pack and be off.
If only she could talk to her mother …
She rang as she parked, but after being shuttled around three departments, she was finally told that her mother was in surgery.
Leila burst into tears. Surgery, and neither of her daughters were there. This was not the way families should do things.
‘Give me your number,’ the kind voice said. ‘We’ll keep in touch with you about your mother’s progress.’
‘I’m in Dublin; I’m driving down now,’ Leila said tearfully.
‘Drive carefully. You don’t want to end up in the bed next to hers, do you?’
Somehow Leila managed a wry laugh. ‘True,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t be much help that way.’
She had to quieten down the feeling that she hadn’t been much help with her mother for a long while. And as for Susie … No, she wasn’t going to think about that at all.
Leila’s apartment was the sort of place she’d dreamed of living in when she was a schoolgirl in Bridgeport all those years ago. The Martin home had been a seventy-year-old fixer-upper which they’d never had the money to fix up; its distinguishing features were bad lino, old wallpaper, and a couch so decrepit that if you sat on it incorrectly, one of the springs might bite you.
The three Martin women had cleaned for all they were worth, but the house always looked tired and old. As a result, Leila had longed for a home with modern decoration and not an old piece of furniture in sight.
Her open-plan apartment was on the top floor of four. She’d had it redecorated when Tynan moved in because he didn’t like her ‘girlie’ wallpaper. Now, the whole place was minimalist in the extreme, painted in neutral colours with one feature wall a dark grey – which had seemed wonderfully chic a couple of years ago, with the decorator waxing lyrical about it, but now reminded her of a mortuary.
These days, everything about her home felt cold and empty.
It wasn’t as if Tynan had been at home to welcome her when they were married. He’d often stayed out till four in the morning, checking out some band or other. But at least there had been the prospect of him coming home at some point, a warm body sliding into the bed beside her. And the signs of his presence would be there: his breakfast dishes sitting on the drainer, the washing machine full but not yet turned on because he’d forgotten to push the button in the rush out the door. There had been proof that another human being lived here. Now, there was only emptiness and the sense of failure that tugged at her every day.
She threw her bag on to the couch – modular, expensive suede, also mortuary grey and one of Tynan’s favourite pieces – shrugged off her coat and heels, and hurried into the minuscule kitchenette to make a quick snack. If she was driving to Waterford, she’d need some sort of boost.
The kitchen cabinets were ruby red – her favourite colour, she’d realised far too late. Too late for the designer to liven up the rest of the apartment, anyhow. Over the past six months, Leila had been trying to de-mortuarise the place, but it was all too neutral for splashes of ruby cushions to bring it to life. The nubbly red throw she’d bought didn’t suit the suede couch. The red candles looked a bit too romantic when lit.
One day she’d redecorate, she muttered. All she needed was money and time.
She found a ready meal in the freezer, stuck it in the microwave and went off to pack.
‘You, wall,’ she said as she walked past, gesturing at the empty spaces where Tynan had removed his framed band posters, ‘you’re history. I must have been bonkers to let you come in here. You almost smell of embalming fluid.’ She glared at the wall, wanting to take her fear and upset out on something.
She’d paint it herself. White. And hang pretty pictures on it. Something Tynan would have hated.
In her bedroom, with the king-size sleigh bed that was ridiculously big for one, she threw some clothes into a weekend bag, changed into jeans and a dark comfy sweater and made sure she had chargers for all her electronic gadgets.
In the bathroom, she simply swept the top shelf of the cabinet into a bag, added her toothbrush and she was done. Time was of the essence: she wanted to be with her mother when she woke up from the operation.
The microwave pinged and she went into the kitchen, took out the tuna bake and, without bothering to tip it out of the black plastic carton on to a plate, gulped it down where she stood, leaning against the sink. It was her favourite meal at the moment. She’d been eating it most nights since she’d gone off the chicken risotto.
‘Delicious,’ she said to the microwave. ‘Thank you, honey. What would I do without you? Go insane and start talking to the wall, probably.’
A glass of water later, she flicked the lights off.
‘Don’t forget to put the bins out,’ she called to the microwave as she left.
It didn’t answer. It never did.
As soon as she was in the car, her day began to get even worse. It had started to rain and the traffic had gone into meltdown.
‘Oh come on! I have to get to a hospital!’ she yelled at the unmoving line.
Sitting in the jam out of the city made Leila realise with another giant pang of guilt just how long it had been since she’d made the journey to Bridgeport. Nearly two months, she worked out; she’d gone right after the launch of the big Christmas kids’ movie in late November, and it was now January. She hadn’t made it home for Christmas because she was with a girlfriend in Paris; there was an Eclipse conference in Cannes just after New Year, and it had seemed like a very good idea to spend her first Christmas without Tynan somewhere else. The hotel in the Marais had promised gastronomic delights and even a first-class gym to burn off the calories in luxury – not that either of them had set foot in the gym.
‘Santa won’t come if you’re not home,’ Jack had said tearfully on the phone when he’d heard the news. ‘You have to come, Auntie Leelu, you have to!’
‘I can’t always come,’ Leila had said, angry with Susie for telling Jack what was happening. She was already feeling guilty about not seeing her mum without her sister making things worse. Why couldn’t Susie be one of those parents who made up adorable fibs for children, like Leila can’t come because she has to work on something really important, but she’ll send you an extra-big pressie to make up for it?
‘I’ll give you an extra-big present to make up for it,’ she tempted.
‘I don’t want a present – I want you,’ said Jack in a fierce voice.
‘Wait till you see what I’ll bring you from Paris—’ Leila had begun, but Jack had put the phone down and she was left talking to the air.
Kids remember the promises had been the tagline of the big Eclipse Christmas movie, and it had hit Leila just then that there was a good deal of truth in that sentence.
The general craziness of work after the holidays had kept her from making it back to Bridgeport, and
now she had the Parisian toy-shop gifts stowed in the back of the car. They would be a distraction for Jack, what with his beloved gran being in hospital. That would be OK, wouldn’t it?
She stopped once to get a cup of tea and to phone the hospital again. They told her that Mrs Martin was in recovery.
‘Thanks,’ Leila said, suddenly not really wanting her tea any more.
An hour and a half later, she reached the hospital and was directed to a ward with eight beds in it. She would have walked past her mother’s bed if the nurse hadn’t told her it was the one beside the door. The frail creature swathed in bandages and attached to a drip, her face full of darkening bruises, didn’t look like her mother at all. Her normally golden head of hair was all grey now, only hints of gold at the ends. She looked well over seventy instead of sixty-three.
Leila, who prided herself on never crying, felt the tears running down her cheeks.
‘The bruises make it look worse than it really is,’ the ward nurse said gently. ‘I know that this is serious and it’s going to be a slow recovery for her, but many people in car accidents have much worse injuries, ones they’ll never recover from. She’s had a lucky escape.’
Leila nodded. She knew the nurse was right. But her mother looked so old, so fragile, not the strong woman she’d once been. That was the shattering revelation.
Could an accident do that to a person?
‘She’s not in pain, is she?’ As she spoke, Leila held the hand without the drip attached. The skin felt papery, no hint of hand cream, no scent of her mother’s perfume. Just the sense of age and the smell of the operating theatre.
‘No, she’s not in pain,’ the nurse soothed. ‘She’s on a morphine drip. But she’ll be up in no time. We’ll have her out of bed for at least a few steps tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘We get patients on their feet quickly in case of clotting,’ the nurse said. ‘Just a few steps on a walker. Then she’ll be having physiotherapy and there are exercises she’ll have to do. In a week, you’ll be surprised at how well she’s doing.’
‘She won’t be confined to bed?’ Leila could hardly imagine her mother walking.
‘No, she’ll be out of here in a week to ten days, and then on to a nursing home for convalescence. She’ll need physio and the gym, you see.’
Leila’s disbelief must have shown on her face.
The nurse patted her arm kindly. ‘It’s all a perfectly routine part of the recovery process. Tomorrow will probably be the worst day – the first day after the operation often is – but it improves every day after.’
Tearful, Leila nodded. ‘You’ve been so kind,’ she said.
‘Leave your number with the nurses on the desk when you leave; we’ll call if we need you.’
‘Can I stay for a while and just sit with her?’
‘Of course.’
Leila found a chair and pulled it close to the bed. Before she sat, she bent and kissed her mother’s forehead, noticing more wrinkles there than she recalled from her last visit. Even in sleep, with her face relaxed, the web of fine lines showed her mother’s age. Her lovely hair looked as if it hadn’t been washed for days, the grey curls clinging to her skull. The hand with the drip inserted was badly swollen, which Leila assumed was from the crash.
‘Mum,’ she murmured, stroking the other hand, ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t here earlier, but Susie looked after you. She had to go home with Jack.’
Thinking of the phone call with her sister, Leila felt more tears trickle down her cheeks. In her own pain about Tynan, she’d ignored her family. Susie was angry with her, she’d let her nephew down and Mum no longer even went to the hairdresser to have her hair dyed. What had happened, and why hadn’t she been there to see it?
The unsettled feeling stayed with Leila as she drove out of Waterford to Bridgeport. She was on automatic pilot, not looking out for changes in the town the way she’d found herself doing on previous visits. Ever since she left for good, it was as if she wanted her home to stay exactly the way it had been when she was growing up. Tynan had teased her about it.
‘You’re like the long-absent emigrant who thinks everyone in Ireland’s stuck in a forties movie, going to country dances and staring at big cars like they’re spaceships. Everything changes eventually, baby, even where you grew up.’
Since Tynan went out of his way to avoid setting foot in his childhood home – even though it was in Dublin and his mother still lived there – Leila had been tempted to tell him that he had damn-all knowledge of things changing, but she hadn’t.
‘Change is good, Leila. Get with the programme.’
He was right, of course. She reminded herself of that as she took in the new developments and tried not to let them upset her. Like the supermarket that now sprawled over the fields where her class had gone on nature walks, beloved of all students as a way of escaping the classroom. The trees where they’d laughed and chatted as they tried to get bark rubbings were no longer there.
At least that first sight of the town, coming into view as she drove over the headland, seemed unchanged, still dominated by the two bridges: an Edwardian one of great beauty, and a modern cantilevered creation with one steel stem reaching up into the sky and taut wires streaking out of it to hold the whole structure up.
Leila remembered how she and Susie and Mum used to laugh at the traditionalists and the Viking lobby arguing over the names of the bridges. There had been a time when her father had joined in the laughter, but it seemed so long ago, she could barely remember it.
Dad had been ill for so long and Mum had held the family together. Until Leila had left and somehow it had all changed.
As she drove along the riverside, past the old stone warehouses and grain stores from the days when Bridgeport had been a fishing and trading town, she noticed that most of them had been converted into modern apartments or shops. On the other side of the Old Bridge, things were exactly as she remembered: the line of golden nineteenth-century houses facing the river, with half the town arranged in terraces behind them, steep roads leading up to the cathedral and the cathedral close, a tranquil square occupied by wealthier townsfolk like doctors and lawyers.
The Martin house was on higher ground, so she negotiated the terraces until eventually she turned left into a small road mostly made up of cottages dating back to the 1950s. She’d walked every inch of Poppy Lane thousands of times in her life: to school, back from school, to catch the bus to Waterford city with Katy and Susie, to her job in a fast-food restaurant so she could earn money and study, and later to the train to Dublin and college, to the airport so she could explore the world. At night and from the comfort of her car, the lane looked older and shabbier than she remembered.
But the sensation was that of driving into her own past.
Number 15 was halfway down the street. From where Leila parked her car, under a street light, it seemed that the garden looked distinctly less cared for than it used to.
It’s because it’s night, she told herself as she walked up the path, fishing in her pocket for her key.
Flicking on the hall light, she set her bag down, shut the door and looked around. After she’d left home, number 15 had finally been redecorated, the old paisley wallpaper replaced with a floral one her mother liked. The last time Leila had visited, the house had looked pretty and neat, with her mother’s precious plants in pots all over the place: ferns, orchids, and spider plants with trailing spider babies hanging down perilously.
The plants were still there, she saw as she moved into the living room with its pair of two-seater couches facing each other, but they were neglected now. Withered leaves hung limply from dried-up earth. Every surface seemed to be covered in a film of dust. She reached out a hand and ran it along the mantelpiece, sweeping up a tidy pile.
And there was a smell, too … Gone-off chicken, perhaps?
She went into the kitchen, where the smell was more intense. Opening the fridge, she found the source. She shut the door q
uickly and glanced around. The kitchen was far from clean, which was so unlike her mother. Even when the house had been a shrine to old wallpaper and museum-quality lino, it had been spotless.
But now … Leila looked at the floor: clearly it hadn’t seen a mop in a long time. She thought of her mother on her knees, attacking the old lino with a scrubbing brush. ‘It’s the only way to get it properly spick and span, Leila,’ she used to say.
What had happened to change her mother so drastically?
Grace’s house phone rang loudly, interrupting her as she was switching off the living room lights.
‘Mum, it’s Fiona. I know it’s late, but I thought I’d phone and say hello. Has Michael rung yet?’
Grace had let her daughter in on the Katy-and-Michael-getting-engaged theory.
‘No, he hasn’t,’ Grace sighed, walking into the kitchen with the portable phone jammed against her ear. Suddenly she felt so tired it was all she could do to fill the kettle for a cup of herbal tea to bring up to bed. It was only just gone nine, but she’d had a busy day. ‘They’re coming home tomorrow, so either he asked and she said no, or he didn’t ask,’ she said wearily.
‘Mum, don’t be mental!’ said Fiona. ‘There’s as much chance of me winning Miss World as there is of Katy saying she won’t marry Michael. Even though he wouldn’t admit it, you know as well as I do that the whole reason he brought her to Paris was to get engaged. They’re love’s young dream. If I didn’t adore them both, they’d make me sick, what with all the hand-holding and ear-nuzzling. They’re like grooming chimps. Besides, they’re already married – well, I feel as if they are, anyway,’ Fiona added. ‘Living together for five years qualifies as marriage in my book.’
Grace laughed. Fiona had always been able to make her laugh, even during the dark days after the separation when Grace wondered if she’d been stark raving mad to agree with Stephen that yes, their marriage was essentially over, because how could they live separate lives with him in a flat in Dublin and her with the children in Bridgeport?