Finding Alison

by Deirdre Eustace

  ‘Fancy a paddle?’ They ambled to the water’s edge and stood a while in silence, the sea licking their feet and ankles.

  ‘I thought I’d never see you again.’ Her hand stole into his as they walked slowly along the shoreline, the sun warm on their backs. ‘When you hadn’t come back at the weekend, it was like Sean all over again – the angry parting, the not knowing.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He gripped her hand tightly. ‘I never meant to put you through that. I should have been honest with you, but I thought I was protecting you,’ he sighed. ‘And if I’m honest, I suppose I was protecting myself too. From seeing the pain in your eyes, knowing I caused it.’ His arm encircled her waist and he drew her close. ‘Months ago, I thought I had this all figured out. Thought I was ready for it, you know, resigned to it. But this last while with you has given me a new love for life, for this world. And I don’t want to go, Alison.’ His voice had dropped to a whisper. ‘I was running from that as well.’

  Three little girls in bright bathing suits ran giggling past them into the water. They both watched them a moment, smiling.

  ‘What happens next?’ Alison ventured as they turned to walk back up the beach. ‘Is there more treatment?’

  ‘Palliative care,’ William sighed with a mock grin. ‘Whatever that means! They’ll move me to the hospice in Raheny in the next day or two, as soon as a bed comes up.’

  ‘What’s it like, the hospice?’ She sat on the hot sand at his feet.

  ‘I haven’t a clue. Quiet and peaceful, I suppose. A prelude of what’s to come. They’re specially trained to make you comfortable, to help you die – as if anyone could . . . ’ His voice trailed away with his gaze, off up over the cliff tops.

  ‘Are you frightened?’ She looked up, waited for his eyes to meet hers.

  ‘I feel . . . ’ He swallowed back, looked again towards the children playing at the water’s edge. ‘I feel like a child, without a mother’s hand to hold, crossing the street.’ His smile was stitched with pain. ‘If that makes any sense.’ Alison could almost feel her heart physically tearing. Unable to bear the lonely resignation in his eyes, she bent her head slowly to the sand.

  ‘One more favour?’ William asked as they drove out of the village.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Could we take a little detour? I’d love to take a spin by my old home, see how it looks.’

  ‘Just show me the way.’ To hell with the hospital’s three-hour deadline, she thought, she’d make some excuse about traffic or losing her way. She knew all too well the importance of saying goodbye.

  ‘Turn left at the top of this street, then straight on through the lights.’ William shifted in his seat and stretched out his leg to ease the fire in his hip. ‘Just down the end of this street, then right.’ They had been driving for about twenty minutes when they turned into the narrow, tree-lined street. ‘That’s it!’ He pointed to a small terraced house on the right. ‘The cream one. Can you pull over for a minute?’

  The garden of the neat two-storey house was newly mown, a row of red rose bushes lining each side of the narrow pathway to the blue front door. A little girl sat on a tartan blanket under the window, her dolls and tea set spread out before her. She looked up from the doll on her lap and lowered the tiny teacup from her mouth. Tight blonde curls framed her face. William rolled down the window and smiled at her. She returned a slow, shy smile before turning her attention back to her charges.

  ‘Has it changed much?’

  ‘The door and the windows are new.’ He stared at the house, as if looking in through it. ‘The roses, they were my mother’s. Her pride and joy. I can see her now, pruning and weeding.’

  ‘What was she like?’ Alison prompted.

  ‘Quiet. I remember her always as being quiet, thoughtful. And fiercely independent. She ran a dressmaker’s from the front room there.’ He pointed to the window where the child sat. ‘When I’d come home from school, I’d always find her in there surrounded by materials for wedding dresses, jackets, trousers for alterations. She’d work away into the night. That little room was her whole world.’

  ‘Did she like it?’

  ‘I don’t think it was a case of liking it or not. It was what got us by. We never went without, she made sure of that. And she never asked anyone for help, always drumming into me the importance of being able to get by on your own.’ He smiled. ‘I can hear her now: Love many, trust few, always paddle your own canoe. That was her mantra.’

  ‘And your father?’

  ‘He was a medical student, American. He went home for a holiday shortly after she became pregnant and he never came back. That’s all she ever told me about him.’

  ‘And she never met anyone else?’

  ‘No one was going to hurt her again.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘She never really got involved in anything outside of the house. Except for those roses, she minded them like they were children.’

  ‘It must have been lonely for her after you left?’ Alison realised how little she knew of him.

  ‘She pushed me, you know, to grow up, to live on my own. To leave and not feel the pull to come running back.’

  ‘She obviously loved you very much,’ Alison sighed, knowing how hard it had been to let Hannah go just for the few months of summer.

  ‘Yeah, I’m only understanding that now.’ He wound up the window. ‘Suppose we’d better head back.’ He looked ahead as if to turn and look at the place once more would break him.

  Back on the ward William silenced the nurse’s recriminations by placing a swift kiss on each of her cheeks and telling her that that was the perfect end to a perfect day.

  ‘Well, you’ll have to speak to staff nurse in the morning.’ Her young face burned with embarrassment.

  ‘Leave her to me,’ William smiled, sinking back onto the bed.

  Alison placed the menu back on the table. She had neither the appetite for food nor for the raucous laughter from the table to her left. She slipped from the dining room and called the lift. She needed space, quiet. Back in her room she showered, changed into a T-shirt and shorts, and ordered a salad and a bottle of wine from reception.

  Glass in hand, she sat out on her room balcony. She could see the pier below and the Sea Cat making its way out into the darkening night. She lit a cigarette, put her feet up on the chair opposite.

  William had been exhausted by the time they got back to the hospital and she had watched the light and life drain from him as he lay down on his bed. She tried to picture him as a boy in that little house in Drimnagh, growing up alone with a mother who did her best to rear him so that he would never experience the kind of hurt that had been hers. It hadn’t worked. Funny, the similarity she could see between this woman she had never known of until today and the person she herself had been when William first met her. Was it just a coincidence that William had come into her life at the start of summer? Perhaps. But inside she felt there was something much bigger at play.

  She sipped her wine, her mind wandering back over their time together. It was hard to believe he had only been in her life such a short time. With his gentle persistence, William had helped her give voice to the thoughts and feelings that had screamed silently inside her for years. He had encouraged her to examine them and to let them go. She had let Sean go. Along with the guilt, and all the questions that she had finally accepted had no answers. And to fill their place she had released the passion buried behind them. Being with William had helped her to recognise all the strength and energy she had wasted on the past, on nursing her hurt and battling things she could never change. It wasn’t anything in particular that he had said or done. It was just something, everything about him.

  She pictured him again in his hospital bed, the loneliness in his eyes when he spoke of the hospice where he would wait for death. A shiver raced down her spine. How could she leave him tomorrow? Even the next day? How could she return to a world that he had brought back to life for her while he lay dying among strangers?


  Her first instinct had been right. The moment she stepped onto that ward yesterday she knew immediately what lay ahead and though she didn’t honestly believe she had the strength to endure it, she knew even then what she would do. With the memory of her mother’s dying so fresh again in her mind, she had been afraid, terrified, and had buried the whole question until she was alone on the pier last night. Hours she had sat, trying to think it out, but it was all too much, too raw, too immediate. She needed time. Time to think it through honestly, coldly. To let it sit. But in that one crystal moment, outside William’s old house, she knew for certain that her gut, as usual, had been right. ‘Without a mother’s hand to hold . . . ’ Alison felt as if William’s mother had spoken to her then, had given her the permission and the strength to go with what the deepest part of her had already decided.

  Above all, William had taught her to love again. She could love and let go – and this time, she believed, without losing herself in the parting. She opened the patio doors and stepped back into the warmth of her room. Tomorrow could not come quick enough. Tomorrow she would ask him to return with her to Carniskey.

  * * *

  It was only when you gave yourself time to look back on these things, Maryanne thought, only when you were separated from them by the grace of years, that you could start to make sense of it all.

  She would never forget Alison’s face that morning when she’d arrived at the door, shivering in that thin coat, the hair wild around her head and that poor bit of a child clinging to her hand, shaking, the priest, white-faced, behind them.

  ‘He’s gone,’ she’d whispered through her sobs as Maryanne steered them towards the kitchen, grabbed some warm towels from over the range.

  ‘Hush now, girl, come on, warm yourself,’ she’d soothed. ‘Give me that child.’ She had released the child from Alison’s death grip, folded her in her lap, her blood fired with temper, but not with surprise. No, Maryanne had seen this coming a long time and she knew the madam that was behind it too. Nothing went unnoticed in these small places.

  ‘I begged him not to go . . . ’

  ‘Easy, Alison, easy pet.’ The girl was hysterical, her tears putting the fear of God into the shivering child.

  ‘He could see the weather, he knew that boat . . . ’

  ‘Boat?’ Maryanne’s heart had stopped.

  It was then that the neighbours began to arrive, with their heads bowed, their sidelong glances of sympathy; their hurried whispers about rescue teams, forecasts, searches that had come good after days. It wasn’t too late yet, one echoed the other, frantically stamping down the truth that shone from their eyes.

  Someone had called the doctor. Maryanne brushed aside his concerns for her, instead leading him, straight-backed, to the bedroom where Alison was settling Hannah, away from the roars of Joe O’Sullivan in the kitchen, away from his stuttering insistence that he had seen Sean crossing the fields at Mount Airy in the darkness.

  She had put it down to shock in the first few days, that numb, calm feeling, that quietness inside her. Had put it down to knowing that it would spell the end for her if she gave the reality of his being gone even one moment’s acknowledgement.

  Days turned into weeks, and still no body. By day, Maryanne busied herself with the child, poor mite, her mother now all but lost to her too. Nights she lay in her bed, searching within herself for the first hint of a mother’s knowing, a mother’s grief. She found neither.

  Months crawled by and Maryanne watched on from somewhere outside herself. Watched her heart harden towards Alison, envying, almost despising the raw grief that drained and closed her face, that caused her young body to bend in upon itself as if to protect itself from crumbling. She listened to herself whip the girl with her anger, urging her to call off the searches, forbidding the raising of the boat, everything inside her screaming, straining to feel something, something.

  ‘Maryanne, sweetheart, what’s the matter?’ The nurse’s hand was cool on her forehead, the tissue soft on her wet cheeks.

  ‘Are you coming back to us, pet?’

  * * *

  ‘What was all that about?’ William asked as Alison sat on the bed and planted a good morning kiss full on his lips. He had been watching her talking to the staff nurse just outside the ward, noticed the body language, the heightened expressions.

  ‘She thinks she owns you,’ Alison began, her colour heightened. She had already spent an hour with the oncologist, at least he’d had the humanity to hear her out, to see reason.

  ‘Oh, yesterday? Don’t sweat, Fogarty’ll be around in a while, he’ll put her right.’

  ‘What time’s he due in?’ Alison was bent by the bed, rummaging in the locker. ‘God, you travel light.’

  ‘I won’t be needing much,’ he smiled. ‘He should be up before ten, why?’

  ‘I’d like to meet him before I head home.’

  ‘You’re going today? Oh, right.’ The disappointment in his voice, the way he tried to mask it. Alison turned her head to hide her smile.

  ‘Good morning, William, Alison.’ Joseph Fogarty smiled, took her hand. William looked from one to the other. How did he know her name?

  ‘So, how are you today, William?’

  ‘Good, thanks. Yesterday did wonders for me.’

  ‘Yes, I heard you were on the missing list for a while.’ He shook his head in mock disapproval. ‘Please, take a seat,’ Fogarty motioned Alison to the chair as he pulled the curtain around the bed. Alison bit down on her lip.

  ‘So, Alison here tells me you’re considering homecare?’

  A confused William glanced from the doctor to Alison and back again. She took his hand. ‘Yes,’ she jumped in, ‘we’ve talked it through and William feels he’d be more comfortable at home with me. I’ve discussed it with the GP and he can arrange all the help we need from our local Hospice Homecare Team.’

  ‘Good. Well, it seems both of you have worked this through and William, well, you are the boss here. I’ll get the GP’s details from you, Alison, and send him on all the information he’ll need.’ He turned again to William. ‘I won’t say goodbye just yet, William – we’ll have a chat after lunch before you leave.’ He patted a silent William on the arm and rose to draw back the curtain.

  ‘Alison, if you’d like to come with me I’ll get that information from you.’

  She stood to follow and winked at a stunned William, a huge smile lighting her whole face.

  Alison returned twenty minutes later to find William sitting on the side of the bed, deep in thought.

  ‘Ali, I can’t let you . . . ’

  ‘Please, William, don’t.’ She sat on the bed and took both his hands in hers. ‘I’m not rushing into this with my eyes closed. I know what’s ahead – for both of us. I’ve thought really hard about it and it’s what I want. Not just for you, for me too. For both of us.’ She smiled through her tears. ‘Please, say you’ll come.’

  His eyes, brimming with tears, fixed on hers, his mouth clamped tight to steady the shake in his chin. He shook his head, nodded slowly and they wrapped their arms around each other in silence.

  ‘I’m going to head back to the hotel.’ Alison drew away after a long moment and wiped her palms across her wet cheeks. ‘I need to collect my stuff, make a few calls.’ She stood to leave, her hands finding his again. ‘And Fogarty wants to have a chat with you, go over your meds and stuff. I’ll collect you, say, about four?’

  William nodded, his hands squeezing hers, words still deserting him.

  I hope I can count on Dr Clarke, Alison prayed, as she swung out the hospital gate. She hadn’t spoken to the GP yet and she knew nothing of the hospice service in Waterford. What she did know was that her doctor wouldn’t let her down. She would ring him first, she decided, before Fogarty had a chance to get in touch. She’d liked him, Fogarty. He understood William, the spirit of him, knew that a hospital or hospice wasn’t the place for him to end his days. She’d felt bad telling those white lies about her training i
n cancer care. But they weren’t really lies. Her last few months with her mother had taught her more about cancer in a real and raw way than any course could match. She had better give Kathleen a ring too, she nodded, she was going to need the support of a true and strong friend.

  * * *

  ‘It’s not that ye’re not welcome here.’ Tom tried again, explaining to Sean, ‘It’s just, well, the house is small, and me and Ella, we need our space. Things haven’t been good with us lately and ye being here, well . . . ’ Ella had taken the boy to a concert in the local hall and Tom had seized the opportunity to talk to Sean about his leaving. He had hoped it wouldn’t come to this. Despite everything, he liked Sean, felt responsible for him in a way. He should never have shown him that advert in the paper, he knew that now. But at the time he had thought that maybe, in some way, it might help to ease the man’s torment. But it had only worked to deepen his pain, and Tom cursed his own well-intentioned yet ill-guided interference.

  ‘I know how you’re fixed, Tom, and I know I’ve stayed longer than I should.’ Sean could see how awkward Tom felt, having to bring up the subject. He knew Ella was behind it. He had heard them arguing, noticed how their conversations would dry up when he’d come in the back door unexpectedly. Through her silence Ella had made no secret of her wanting Sean gone from the house and he couldn’t blame her after what he’d put her through that night young Daniel had gone missing. ‘I’ll be gone out from under ye before the week is out,’ he continued, ‘and I’ll never forget all that you’ve done for me, Tom.’

  ‘Will ye go back on the boats?’

  ‘Where else,’ Sean sighed. ‘There’s no other place for me. Not the place I want anyway.’ He held his head in his hands, bent it low to the table.

  ‘Come on,’ Tom urged, taking his coat from the hook behind the door. ‘I’m goin’ down to Richie’s for a pint, ye’ll join me?’ He could sense Sean wanted to talk about Alison, could feel it coming. And he wanted no more of it: going over all the same old ground again, Sean trying to find something in what Tom had said that would give him some hope of her wanting him back.