Further to the south of Redwood there is another property, with a small boathouse: South Lodge. Lavender hedgerows, saxifrage-covered rocks, an assortment of mangy cats and kittens. This is Inshaw’s place. From this land he watches us. When we play he pretends he is out gathering mushrooms or repairing the corrugated roof of the boathouse. Sometimes I see his dark, deliquescent eyes follow the shuttlecock back and forth over the net. He is a presence in the game; triangulates it. She tells me to ignore him.
I have become, within weeks, father and mother to her. Father, mother and more.
Dinner. Frances has prepared salmon and marinated tuna and Miranda wants to teach me how to use chopsticks. She rises, comes towards me. The sick smell of her as she bends over my shoulder; death is in her breath. I have forgotten she is so ill. It is easy to do: that lightness of spirit, precision of play. She drops her head on my hair. Your beautiful hair, she says, your long, dark beautiful hair. I am aware of her bones against my own tumescence and curves. She comes away, stands before me, androgynous and stark, and for a moment it seems as if each of us has been called up from the depths of the other’s consciousness. We go on like this. The days are endless, summer does not turn. Only I notice the chicks are bigger in the oak, and that Inshaw has finally repaired his roof and is sailing his boat, or I would hardly register the passing of time at all.
I bump into Inshaw in the village. I am surprised. Nice man, shy. We discuss Miranda. Poor Miranda. It isn’t fair. It isn’t right. He says he will look out for her when I leave at the end of September. I realise I do not want to leave, not ever. I think of my first night and the thoughts I’d had of escape, of secret instant escape onto the tall hedge; I consider how fortunate it was I did not give in to those thoughts. The encounter with Inshaw has startled me. The sudden reality of the situation, a splint of cold glass in my skull.
She says little at breakfast. The evening before she had been on fire. Rapid, erratic thoughts, unfinished sentences, sentences that unravelled, ending in lacunae, gibberish. She had been rude, her inhibitors obstructed by that thing, growing, multiplying inside her. Tumour talk, Frances calls it. She has some toast, a thimble of marmalade, tea. I know she wants a game because she is dressed in the maroon gown. Worn when badminton was played as formally as tennis or cricket, the serge gowns are almost a hundred years old. They belonged to her grandmother. Miranda had found them soot-soaked in the cellar, later began to wear one as protection from the sun. Long-sleeved, cuffed, mandarin-collared, they are oriental in design. Frances says they make us seem like twins. Miranda leaves the house and I go to the games room to change. She has left a sprig of something, eglantine, by my washed and ironed gown on the bench. The sight of it horrifies me.
Our last game. Her play is at half-speed. Her co-ordination off. She is all over the place, drops the shuttlecock. It is tragic to watch. She observes the weakness in her own swing. Summons all her strength and it is poor. Flails about with the racket, pretends there is something wrong with it, but her racket is fine. Essays an awkward thrust and teeters. She is being milked by that thing. It is unspeakable. Eventually she gets a whack. The shuttlecock is not so much launched as massaged by the catgut. She continues, laughs it off, but she cannot get the shuttlecock to cross the net. The sky is a bowl of darkest mussel-blue. Then rain. She runs inside. I hear music: Joy Division, ‘Dead Souls’. The curtains are drawn. I smell burning herbs, cannabis. She is in pain. I know what I must do. I walk to Inshaw’s. He offers to sail the boat for me but I assure him I am a seasoned navigator. It is untrue. My upbringing proves fruitful for something: Inshaw lends me his boat for the day.
Miranda and I sail on the silver lake. The day turns bright and humid; a heron wades through the dark-green mud of the bank, water lilies spin with the current. The motor is off and I oar through syrupy, calm conditions till we come to the bend, continuing through a wider willow-lined stretch, still on the estate. Here the wild flowers are in bloom, the eglantine, meadowsweet, great burnet. Low clouds of red admirals skim the side of the boat, their fat gravid centres covered in wet fur. In fields I see bales of hay, barley being harvested. Her face has tilted to one side. Her freckled, yellowing face is beginning to develop a pronounced drop, with drooped jowls, and she drools when she speaks. In her eyes some recognition of what is happening to her. I will always be convinced by that look. I try to tip the boat. It is a struggle. The boat shudders, takes a while to capsize. She screams, splashes about. I swim towards her, hold her, our bodies small and snug in the water. My plan is to swim back once she has gone under, but I can’t leave. She clings to me, accepting and placid.
Twenty-four hours later I wash up against a bank. I am alive, and later wake up in hospital. Miranda floats to an island in the river, into a swan’s nest. She is so white two diving teams fail to spot her wound around the reeds and tall red crocus.
Twenty-two summers pass. The world is a changed place.
Redwood belongs now to Inshaw. He grants me a walk through the estate whenever I come here. Around the mile or so of angular hedges, the ancient oak and badminton court, where, sometimes, I think I hear the wind fluting through plastic.
Once he asked if I was happy. Before I had the chance to reply, he said his own life had been good and prosperous, but hardly happy. Mine was the same, I said. What is happiness? he asked, as if I knew any better than he. I pondered on this. For me, I said, happiness is two girls playing badminton under an azure sky with clouds that are bird-shaped. Those summers were best, he replied, when I used to watch you play. It occurred to me then, that for nearly a quarter of a century we had both been sustained by a few intoxicating memories squirrelled from our youth. I told him it was high time we lived a little. He agreed and told me then of his plans to flatten the court. I remember that as I walked towards my car, parked beside the silver lake, I had the distinct and certain feeling I was being watched.
1975
As the light weakened, Mr McCourt pulled open the velour drapes and lit the vanilla-scented candle. He had just said goodbye to his youngest daughter, and watched as she crossed the road to catch the airport bus. His children had been coming and going for a long time, perhaps twenty years, but he’d never gotten used to it, and ‘goodbye’ had become increasingly difficult.
‘We’re thinking of buying the white bungalow,’ he had heard her say throughout the four days; he knew she hadn’t even arranged to view it.
‘You’ll not be able to settle in if you leave it too long.’
‘It’s my town isn’t it?’ she had replied.
He watched her stand stiffly by her black trolley, her long red hair jetting out of a high ponytail. She did not look across at him standing behind the flame in the otherwise dark room. He must, he thought, be visible behind the nets in the dusky evening. Nor had she so much as glanced at the white bungalow. She reminded him of his wife with that hair and her petite frame, but something tight and of the city clung inelegantly to her. He had not fully believed her work-attributed reasons for rushing back to London.
He thought that maybe he’d talked too much during the days he’d spent with her; he thought of what his son, Francie, had said: don’t try too hard with her, don’t take time off for her. As far as he knew she hadn’t even been near Crowe Street.
He had taken time off for her. Almost in anticipation of her visit, he had recently brought in two new girls to help Bridie, his chief baker. Bridie had come home after thirty years with big plans for her own shop, only to have her husband run off with a girl half her age after their first month home. (He had felt sorry for her; she was often sour-faced but good with the women.) It had been his hope, until recently, that Francie or one of his daughters would run the shop with him. It had happened at Daly’s and Duffner’s; siblings working together in their respective shops, both families exuding a soft and enviable pride. Once he had Francie with him for a whole summer; the girls came sporadically during holidays but that had been the extent of their working together as a family.<
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The bus was late. Perhaps she would cross to the house and stay another night. They could listen to the Lena Martell records, or to Geraldine O’Grady, and he could tell her the stories about the farm, stories about the Channonrock families and O’Hara and his own scrapes at the border in ’69. He hadn’t told any of them the stories in years, he thought. Nor had they asked for them. Further evidence, if he needed it, that they’d all managed to sever themselves from their past. The realisation had come as quite a shock to him, about five years ago.
In London, his wife had dragged the girls to Irish dancing on the other side of the city in Finsbury Park. He had taken all four of them to Irish language, flute and recitation classes at the Irish Centre in Quex Road in Kilburn, twice a week. They had done so in anticipation of returning, building a home and business back in the town; and he didn’t want his children to forget and grow up English. (The South London accent was enough for him; had he had any say they would have been trained to adopt his own sharp Monaghan spurt.) It had taken much longer than planned to save in London, and by the time he’d brought them back, the so-called ‘Irishness’ they’d been inculcated with stood out as artificial; an outmoded thing in the prospering town.
‘Irish culture is alive and well and living in Birmingham,’ he would to say to Bridie, who knew exactly what he meant.
He watched his daughter haul on a cigarette. Of all of them it was she he worried about most. She drank too much, he thought. He wondered, as she stood in the road, looking to see if the bus was coming over the Dublin Street hill, if she’d ever forgiven him.
The Mother and Daughter Wards (as he called them) passed the window and looked in. He jumped back because he didn’t want Margaret Ward to see him. She would think it peculiar, the lights off as he stood there looking out from behind a lit candle. He found her stern but also striking with her black-black bouffant hair and kohl-lined eyes, and he felt a little afraid at the thought of explaining himself to her. If she had caught sight of him she would probe him for sure. All the same, she was gracious, and uniquely considerate, too, in that she had had a memorial mass said for his wife in The Friary every year at Christmas on the anniversary of her death. But take-me-take-my-mother was written all over Margaret and he wasn’t ready for that level of commitment. He moved to the side of the window and momentarily took his eyes off his daughter, now fretfully pacing, to watch Margaret Ward’s pencil-skirted rump sway with maturity and confidence as she walked her mother into their own house, three doors up.
‘Why don’t you sell up, Mr McCourt? That’s what you should do. Travel while you still have the time,’ Margaret had said when he told her about his children’s lack of interest in the business.
‘Don’t you think the town’d miss me, Margaret? Wouldn’t they miss my buns?’
‘They would, I suppose. I’d miss your Tipsys. Mother would miss your Chesters, that’s a fact.’
‘This is it, Margaret. I couldn’t sell up even if I wanted to because I know there’s no one makes as great cakes as The Home Bakery. And until there is, I feel I just can’t sell.’ He had no intention of selling the shop and, at this stage of his life, had little interest in travelling beyond the town.
He checked his watch. The bus was now twenty minutes late. He thought he caught sight of his daughter looking over at him through the window. He waved but she didn’t wave back. He saw then that the birdseed she’d scattered on the bird-table had attracted a host of peach-breasted chaffinches, bullfinches, some siskins and a pair of collared doves, but the family of robins would not come down from the juniper tree. He had known this would happen. He only ever laid stale breadcrumbs but, as she’d bought the seed especially, he kept quiet about it. The male at the front played sentinel as the brood waited in the nest making ticking sounds. They’re cute enough, he said to himself. The robins would swoop down for stale bread because it was of little interest to the bigger birds that pecked at it as a last resort, preferring the berries, worms, gifts of other gardens. He liked to think that it was their closeness and joviality as a brood that impaired their ability to attack and mark territory. They were his favourites, and he made a mental note to go out and put down breadcrumbs once the bus had come and gone.
They had not always had such a variety of birds. When they first bought the house there had not even been a proper garden, just scrubland out the back, concrete at the front. He and Francie had rolled out a new lawn over the dug-up concrete. They had planted flowers, shrubs and a laurel hedge, and sowed a small area with vegetables.
After the garden, he’d put almost all of his time into the business, missing much of his children’s growing-up. Somehow he thought they would understand his occasional moodiness, his silences, as the consequences of running a demanding, successful bakery. He would start at four in the morning with the breads. By six he would be ready to blend icing. He would then pour the icing into various spacklings and place these in the fridge. Black icing was required for the lettering; lemon, pink, blue, green and gold were used for the buns and birthday cakes; navy for the children’s cakes – and this had to be prepared slowly as it was made from a delicate combination of black and red Wilton colouring. Sometimes he’d watch his over-heating hands ruin his handiwork and he’d have to plunge them into ice water. Then he would bake pastry: choux for the eclairs, flaky for the cream slices, short-crust for pies, tarts, followed by the mixes for the Madeiras, angel-food cake, gingerbread, lemon cake and various puddings. His creams consisted of mock, whipped, clotted, butter-starch and Chantilly, and an hour before the shop was due to open he made the pink and white meringues. His schedule was relentless, and though he experienced occasional surges of pride and satisfaction from his efforts, it was, in the main, a long, hard graft. That his children had never appreciated this punishing schedule was plain now. He had nonetheless been surprised to learn of their peculiar resentment towards him; they seemed to think he’d given too much time to the business during the difficult years after their mother’s death.
The candle flickered, crackled on a fallen hair. He thought of the bomb. Planted in the blue Hillman Hunter outside Kay’s Tavern in 1975, the year he lost everything. In 1975 he had handpicked all ingredients and supplies himself, baking the stock out the back and serving alone in the then staff-less shop. He bought some breads in from McCann’s and McElroy’s but mostly made his own: soda farls, brown sodas, white sodas, yeast browns and whites, and once a week a black rye with walnut and caraway seed. It was Mr McCourt’s fervent belief that had he not been alone in the shop on the day of the bomb his premises would have been spared.
His thoughts drifted off to the unearthly light that had hung over Crowe Street that Christmas afternoon as he watched The Home Bakery melt to the ground like warm lemon icing.
‘We’re lucky the town hall didn’t go too,’ Jack Daly had said. ‘Blew the doors clean off. Bits of them oak doors flying like leaves, so they were, Mr McCourt.’
‘It’s a horrible thing,’ he had replied, ‘horrible for someone to do that to people.’
‘That’s their response to Sunningdale* you know. You of all people, McCourt, should be doing something about that now.’
Daly’s unsubtle call to arms still haunted him. What he had done at the border in ’69 had been admired, but any man might have done that; the bombing of Kay’s was different, for it signalled the escalation of a dirty and protracted war.
Mr McCourt recalled that it had been a strange, overcast day from the outset. He remembered the full moon that had hung ominously by the outermost tip of Cooley, as if it possessed some significant bearing on the awful proceedings below. For many, the day had become a blur; for McCourt, a detailed recording he could replay with exactitude.
He had tried hard to save the shop. Over here, over here, he had screamed to the firemen, indicating the fire raging in his kitchens and all along the outer wall. He had watched them carry out two bodies, and over twenty injured from Kay’s. They had looked shattered: Joe and Jaxy.
He knew them both, and he had never seen either of them look so bloodless and horrified. We have you Mr McCourt. You’re next, they assured him. He remembered the flames finding fresh force in the pub, just as the Town Hall foyer exploded. He recalled the eerie smell of gas and the realisation then that he would probably lose the bakery.
With the detailed images of that day, came also its hellish sounds. He recalled the bells in St Patrick’s rumbling dissonantly as thin cracks wired the plaster in the shop wall right in front of him. Within seconds of the first blast, large wedges of two-by-fours, complete with flames, nails, melting turquoise paint, had crashed through the pastry display and onto the marble counter, catching the thick pile of wrapping tissue. He had even tried to quench the fire with his own shop coat. Open tins of oil, lined up in a row against the kitchen wall, caught the flames with a heavy fizz, and the entry to the ovens area collapsed outright. He had used the small fire extinguisher he’d bought off the travelling salesmen, but it had been no good. The emission dry and wispy.
He seemed to be in a daze as he stared out at the street’s glowering aftermath. Beneath the platform of the foremost engine, a red barrel had been rolling up and down a long stray plank. The barrel made a relentless, rhythmic din as it massaged the half-burnt length of wood. The rattle fixed in his ear, gave a rhythm to his thoughts: look at that barrel, like a sea-saw rattling, will it ever roll loose. Over and over, like some macabre rhyme. Beside the barrel oozed puddles of petrol with rainbow-coloured rims. Loose pieces of corrugated sheeting were strewn across the dark, wet streets, and occasionally gusts of wind would clatter them against the sides of fire engines. He recalled that water had dripped from eaves, even though it hadn’t rained.
The Scattering Page 2