Lizzie tries to smile back. ‘We are.’
After a minute, Angela stands up. ‘I’d better get back, I suppose.’
Lizzie walks to the car with her, and hugs her at the door. ‘What would I do without you?’
‘Ditto, my dear.’ She gets into the car. ‘Lizzie, mind yourself. You’ve a busy few days ahead of you; try to sleep, and don’t worry about anything in Merway. See you soon.’
Lizzie stands on the path, waving, as Angela drives off. Six months ago Daddy stood here and waved me off. She wonders how she can possibly go on producing so many tears.
Two days later, Joe McCarthy comes to Daddy’s funeral.
Lizzie doesn’t know he’s there until after the Mass, when people are lining up to shake her hand and tell her they’re sorry for her troubles. Tony O’Gorman is there, with Pauline Twomey, and all of her old friends, and some of her regulars from O’Gorman’s, and friends of Mammy’s whom she’s known for years. Lizzie is standing beside Mammy and nodding and saying thank you and telling people to come back to the house afterwards, and then she sees the next person and it’s Joe.
She looks at him and bursts into tears. He reaches out and gathers her into his arms, there in the church in front of everyone, and holds her. ‘I’m so sorry, Lizzie,’ he says. She smells his spicy aftershave and feels the rough cotton of his shirt against her wet face, and she doesn’t know what he’s sorry for, and she doesn’t know what she’s crying for most. She wants to stay wrapped up in him for a long time; it feels like the safest place for her to be, with his arms tight around her. He keeps the dark away.
Then she remembers Mammy standing beside her. She takes a deep breath and makes the tears stop, and stands back from him, and says, ‘Thank you for coming, Joe.’ He slips something into her hand and moves off, and she puts it quickly into her pocket and turns to the next person in the line.
She can still feel his arms, wrapped around her and holding her tight.
She sees him again at the graveside, standing next to Angela and Deirdre. The day is showery; someone holds an umbrella over her as they watch Daddy disappear into the ground. She hangs on to Mammy and tells him goodbye and carries on ignoring God.
They go back to the house, and Lizzie busies herself passing around sandwiches, finding plates for buns that someone brought, making pots of tea, opening bottles of whiskey and gin and vodka and wine. Angela is everywhere, making sure everyone has a drink and something to eat. Deirdre spends her time at the sink, recycling the piles of cups and plates that keep appearing. Sometime during the afternoon, Lizzie sees Angela touch Mammy’s arm and say something, and she watches Mammy’s face break into a careful, grateful smile.
Joe doesn’t come back to the house. When there’s a lull in the afternoon, Lizzie finds her jacket and puts a hand into the pocket. She pulls out a chubby little wooden cat, his head cradled in his paws, his tail curled around him, fast asleep. There’s something poking out from under one paw. She looks closer; it’s a tiny fish-tail. She pictures Joe bent over his workbench, carving it.
But Charlie is never in the shop.
Lizzie serves food and drink, and mourns.
Chapter Eighteen
And life goes on.
Nights are there to be got through. Days are measured in meals: prunes and Bran Flakes in the morning, a sandwich and a cup of tea around midday, dinner in the evening. Mammy still cooks all the dinners. Lizzie has offered to help, but Mammy won’t hear of it.
‘Thanks, love, but I prefer to keep busy. You go and read your book, and I’ll call you when it’s ready.’ Lizzie wishes she could concentrate on a book; it might make the hours seem less like years.
Conversation is difficult. Lizzie does her best.
‘I passed Johnny McDermott in town today.’ The McDermotts live at the end of the road.
‘Is that right.’ It’s far too flat to be a question.
‘I hardly recognised him, he’s got so tall. He must be – what, eighteen now?’
‘I suppose, about that.’ Mammy pushes a bit of bacon around her plate.
‘He was smoking. It’s a pity, isn’t it, when they start?’ Surely that’ll get a response.
‘Mmm.’
Sometimes Lizzie talks about the people she met in Merway.
‘He’s an artist – I think I told you about him on the phone. He paints outside every day, whatever the weather – unless it’s absolutely lashing. You should see his paintings; they’re great. And his house is just by the beach, practically on it.’
‘Really.’
Every morning after breakfast they walk to the grave, about a mile away. They stand beside the fresh earth, still piled with wreaths. Mammy prays quietly, and Lizzie thinks about Daddy and doesn’t pray.
Sometimes they call into the supermarket on the way home, and Mammy fills a basket with the same foods they’ve always eaten – chops, sausages, eggs, oranges, potatoes, carrots, peas. Lizzie looks on the shelves and sees salami and melons and asparagus. Once she asks Mammy if she’d like to try some hummus – ‘Just for a change; you can spread it on bread or crackers’ – but Mammy just shakes her head. ‘I don’t think I’d like it, love. You get it if you want.’ Lizzie doesn’t bother.
In the afternoons she tries to read, and pulls weeds from Daddy’s flowerbeds, and mows the lawn he always mowed, and answers letters of condolence. And walks.
One evening, after dinner, Mammy gives her Daddy’s watch. He was presented with it at his retirement, four years ago, after working for forty-one years in the same insurance office in town.
‘I want you to take this, Lizzie. I know Daddy would have wanted you to have it.’
It’s a beautiful gold watch, with a black face and thin gold hands and Roman numerals. Daddy didn’t wear it for about a year after he got it. It sat on the dressing-table, in its shiny black box, and he kept wearing the old watch with the battered brown leather strap that he’d had for years, until Mammy wore him down – ‘For goodness’ sake, Jack, would you ever give that old thing to charity and put the new one on? What are you saving it for?’ But even after he started to wear the new watch, he always put on his old one when he was gardening or doing any kind of rough work; and he’d still be wearing it at bedtime.
Lizzie looks at the beautiful watch that Daddy never grew fond of, and feels miserable. ‘Thanks, Mammy.’ She takes off hers and puts on Daddy’s. It looks good on her wrist, big and solid – she’s always liked big watches. But it doesn’t remind her of Daddy.
She thinks it might be better not to tell Mammy that she’s already got something much more precious to remember him by.
After the crowd left on the day of the funeral, she went out to the shed and found his old baseball cap poking out from under one wheel of the lawnmower. It was splattered with paint and covered with dried earth, and it smelt musty. She keeps it in the drawer of her bedside locker, next to the little wooden cat.
She lies in bed every night and hears Mammy crying in the next room. Lizzie’s heart breaks for her – the life has gone out of her as surely as if she’d been buried next to Daddy. How can Lizzie possibly leave her like this and go back to Merway? She’ll stay a month or two, and then see.
And her heart sinks as she feels her old life wrapping itself around her again. Why, Lizzie, you’re back; how nice to see you. You make sure you stay this time, right?
No way. She’ll just keep Mammy company till she’s able to be on her own.
Mammy, who’s never lived alone in her life – who moved straight from her family home to married life with Daddy. Who doesn’t drive, barely knows how to change a light-bulb, has never replaced the battery in the smoke alarm and couldn’t find where to turn off the water supply if her life depended on it.
And slowly, when I go back turns to if I go back. Standing in the garden one night, Lizzie makes herself face the possibility that she may never again live in Merway. Never wake up and hear the seagulls. Never step outside the caravan door and breathe in th
e salty air. Never knead a ball of dough on Angela’s big kitchen table, up to her elbows in flour, giggling away at something Angela has just said.
Never open the door of Ripe and see Joe McCarthy smiling at her.
For the first time since Daddy died, Lizzie lets herself think about Joe – and immediately, a single question buzzes around her head: why did he tell her he had to let her go to take Charlie on? Angela said Charlie is never in the shop; it’s always Joe she meets when she goes in. And this brings a new and unpleasant notion drifting into Lizzie’s thoughts: was Joe trying to get rid of her? Did he realise that she was falling for him, and decide he had to put a stop to it? The night of Angela’s party, when he flirted like mad with her, whispered in her ear – was that just the Guinness talking? All the times they sat around the table in the back room, all the gentle teasing that she pretended to hate – could that really have meant nothing to him?
And then she thinks about the way Joe chats and laughs with anyone who comes into the shop. The way he makes old Mrs McLaughlin raise her eyes to heaven and sympathise good-naturedly with Lizzie: ‘God help you, dear, having to put up with his ráiméis.’ The way he can even raise a reluctant smile from grumpy old Gráinne in the newsagent’s. What ever gave Lizzie the notion that she was special? Just because he offered her a job doesn’t mean he fancied her, for God’s sake.
The fact that he came to her father’s funeral doesn’t really prove anything either; isn’t that something any friend would do? And the little carved cat – well, that was just Joe. That’s what he does. For everyone.
The more she thinks about it, the worse Lizzie feels. If Joe could see how she felt about him – if she was that pathetically obvious – who’s to say that half of Merway didn’t see it too? God, was Big Maggie telling all and sundry how Lizzie O’Grady was making a fool of herself over Joe McCarthy? She cringes at the thought of them all having a great laugh at foolish little Lizzie.
Wrapped up in her grief and loneliness, she comes to the conclusion that she was sadly mistaken about Joe. He needed someone to take over for a few hours in the shop, and she was available; that was all there was to it. Not that it matters, anyway, if she’s not going back to Merway.
She wishes she’d told Daddy about Joe. Even if it has come to nothing, she’s sorry Daddy never knew that, at the age of forty-one, his daughter had finally discovered what it meant to be in love.
One morning, about three weeks after Daddy’s death, Lizzie looks out her bedroom window and sees Mammy hanging clothes out on the line. She’s bending to the laundry basket like an old woman, fumbling with the pegs that she keeps in a biscuit tin. When did her hair go that grey? How can Lizzie even consider deserting her?
After dinner that night, she tells Mammy that she’s not going back to Merway. Mammy is delighted, and they live happily ever after in Kilmorris until Mammy’s death twenty-three years later. Lizzie makes her peace with God and enters a convent the day after Mammy’s funeral, and dies in a state of grace at the age of ninety-six, just after benediction. The other nuns miss Sister Elizabeth’s spicy fruit scones and rhubarb crumble.
Except that’s not what happens at all.
Lizzie is about to clear the plates from the table – she’ll wait till they’ve settled down for the night to talk about her decision – when Mammy puts a hand on her arm to stop her. ‘Hold on a minute, Lizzie. Will you sit down again, please? I want to say something.’
Lizzie puts the plates back on the table and sits down beside her.
‘What is it?’
‘Lizzie, don’t you think it’s time you went back to Merway?’ Mammy looks steadily at her, hand still on her arm. ‘Angela will be missing you for the baking.’
Lizzie’s eyes sting. She puts her hand on Mammy’s. ‘Mammy, I’m not going back – of course I’m not. I’m staying here to look after you and keep you company. I was going to tell you tonight.’
Mammy shakes her head, smiling faintly. ‘You don’t have to do that, love; I don’t need looking after.’
‘But I don’t mind.’ Since she’s not talking to God, she doesn’t imagine a lie will do much harm. ‘I couldn’t leave you here on your own. My place is with you now, and I’m happy to come back, honestly.’ Mind you, it is a fairly big lie. A colossal lie, really. But still, as long as she’s not talking to Him . . .
Mammy is shaking her head more firmly. ‘No, Lizzie, your place isn’t here; not any more.’ She presses Lizzie’s arm gently. ‘You have your own life to lead now. You go back to Merway; you liked it there, didn’t you?’
As Mammy speaks, Lizzie watches her face. The lost look that’s been in her eyes since Daddy’s death is still there – she misses him terribly. Grief has crisscrossed her forehead, and the skin on her cheeks looks tauter, the cheekbones more pronounced. A new collection of faint little vertical lines runs from her nose to her mouth. The man she expected to grow old with is gone, and now she faces the prospect of doing it on her own. It must be terrifying.
And yet here she is, sitting beside her only daughter – the daughter who’s just offered to come back and live with her – and letting her go. No, insisting that she go. She mustn’t know what she’s saying; she can’t have thought it through.
‘But, Mammy,’ Lizzie says gently, ‘you’ve never been on your own. How would you manage?’
‘Better than you’d imagine,’ says Mammy crisply, and Lizzie sees a flash of the old Mammy, the one you didn’t dare face without whatever she’d sent you for. ‘I’m not completely helpless, you know. And haven’t I got plenty of friends and neighbours I can call on? There’s Peter and Claire next door, and Julia, and the McDermott lads are always around the place for odd jobs; and Rose is going to come and stay for a few days every now and again.’
Aunt Rose, Mammy’s widowed sister in Cork, already lined up to come and visit . . . Maybe Mammy has been thinking it through. A tiny flicker of hope leaps in Lizzie’s chest, but still . . . she has to be sure.
‘Well, yes, of course Rose will come, but –’
Mammy doesn’t wait for her to finish. ‘Look, Lizzie . . .’ She looks at the table and says nothing for a minute, and then she looks back at Lizzie. ‘I know it hasn’t been easy for you, seeing all your friends go off and get married, or go abroad somewhere, making something of their lives, while you . . . well, you never really got to do what you wanted, did you?’
She shushes Lizzie’s protests. ‘No, you didn’t. You took the waitressing job even though it wasn’t what you wanted; you wanted to be a baker, and we never really listened to you or tried to help you.’
This can’t be Mammy talking – Mammy who was so adamant that baking was no sort of a career, Mammy who had her heart set on me getting married and having children and taking over O’Gorman’s someday . . .
‘You got engaged to Tony because you knew it was expected of you,’ Mammy says gently, ‘and he wasn’t right either.’
Tony O’Gorman, son of Mammy’s best friend Julia – the most eligible man in Kilmorris, as far as Mammy was concerned . . . Lizzie remembers Mammy’s face the day they told her they were engaged; she was thrilled.
‘All your life, you did things that weren’t really what you wanted – maybe you felt we wanted them for you, or maybe you just thought they were things you should do . . . Anyway, that doesn’t really matter now.’
‘All Lizzie can do is sit and listen while Mammy says things she never expected to hear her say.
‘When you came home that day and told us you’d broken off the engagement and you were going to head off to God knows where, I couldn’t believe it.’
Don’t I know it; and didn’t you make no secret of how you felt. But Lizzie feels no bitterness; she’s too stunned to feel anything. She suddenly notices that Mammy’s eyes are full of tears.
‘I’m ashamed to admit it, Lizzie, but I had no idea you were unhappy – and you must have been, for a long time. I just never thought beyond what I wanted for you – or really, I suppose,
what I wanted for me.’ Mammy blinks, and a tear rolls from each eye and races down her face, veering sideways when it comes to a line. She pulls a tissue from the box on the table that keeps having to be replaced.
‘Mammy, don’t feel bad, please; I really didn’t know myself what I wanted.’ Lizzie squeezes Mammy’s hand. How hard must it be for her to lay herself bare like this? She’s admitting that maybe she got it wrong all those years . . . and doing it without the comfort of Daddy beside her. Lizzie speaks gently, ‘Something just – woke me up one day, and I knew that it was all wrong . . . and that I had to stop, and get away . . . It’s hard to explain.’
Mammy nods, dabbing her eyes. ‘And I made it as hard as I could for you to go. I’m mortified now when I think of how selfish I was, worrying about what people would think, never giving a thought to you and your happiness.’
Lizzie shakes her head, but Mammy goes on: ‘Lizzie, it’s taken Jack’s death to make me realise how short life is, and how silly it is to worry about what others think . . . and how we must make sure to make the best use of it that we can.’ She grips Lizzie’s arm urgently. ‘You have to promise me that you’ll go back to Merway.’
The spark of hope bursts into a tiny flame. Lizzie chooses her words carefully. ‘I have been happy there – happier than I’d been in a long time.’
Mammy smiles. ‘I know, love, and I’m glad you finally found the courage to make the break, despite your stubborn old mother.’
Lizzie starts to say something, but again Mammy stops her. ‘Hold on – there’s something else I have to tell you.’ She presses a hand to her mouth for a minute, then goes on. ‘Your father had a life insurance policy from his work, and he kept paying into it after he retired.’ She takes an envelope from her bag and puts it between them on the table. ‘I got this in the post today.’
Lizzie takes the letter out and discovers that Daddy, who always provided for them, made sure that they’d be well taken care of after his death too. The words on the page blur together.
The Daisy Picker Page 15