by Rosie Orr
Bell ringers? Violet satin?
““What’s the feckin difference? Who’s going to feckin see?” is what he had the impertinence to ask me. Can you credit it?’ A strong Irish accent had begun to edge its way into her vowels. ‘I said to him in no uncertain terms, “God will see, Mr Heaney. And I’m quite sure that God can tell the difference between violet and mauve, even if you cannot.”’ There was a sharp rustle of paper down the line. ‘Well, I must get on, I have to ring the photographer next.’
Poor guy.
‘He did the photos for the daughter of a friend of mine’s wedding, not that it was a patch on this do, of course. No, Annabel’s was a very paltry affair; only four bridesmaids and a mere three tiers to the cake. Still, the photographs were frightfully good. I shall tell him to model the groups on Royal weddings, and I do think it’s so important to have a really good portrait of the bride’s mother to mark the occasion. Hello? … Mrs Hardy?’
Anna put the bottle down very carefully. ‘Yes. Gosh.’
‘Now, let’s set a date. How about the last Wednesday in June, the twenty-seventh?’
‘Yes, that would be –’
‘Let’s say seven-thirty then.’
Where? The Waldorf? The Ritz?
‘At Chez Gaston, in Covent Garden. Do you know it?’
Well, she didn’t know it exactly – she’d walked past it occasionally on trips to London and caught a glimpse of the pink-shaded table lamps and lavish flower arrangements lurking in the gloom beyond the supercilious doorman’s epauletted shoulder.
‘Gosh … Yes. Lovely, I’ll look forward to it.’
‘So shall I, if I haven’t died of complete exhaustion by then.’ A venomous sigh hissed down the line. ‘Well, I must get on. Goodbye, Mrs Hardy.’
‘Bye – and thank –’
The phone buzzed in her hand.
After a while, she put another log on the fire, cleared up the sticky mess on the table and made herself some coffee.
Then, with a sigh of relief, she knelt down at the typewriter again and got back to the red peppers.
CHAPTER FIVE
Declan O’Halloran shifted slightly, trying to accommodate his right knee where a particularly sharp piece of flint was digging into his flesh so hard it had pierced the worn denim of his trouser leg. The ground was littered with jagged stones and fragments of shale marking the area in front of the wayside shrine as separate from the weed-choked turf that surrounded it. Gritting his teeth, he pressed his hands harder together and tried to pray. Any passerby – though there was little chance of one in such a remote area of Connemara – would have seen a spare, wiry figure in jeans and an ancient fisherman’s sweater, with black hair, a two-day stubble shadowing his angular jaw and intense brown eyes. Indeed the passerby, had he or she stopped for a chat, would very likely have enquired whether Declan might not be Gabriel Byrne’s brother. Declan, who was tired of being asked this question, and had no idea who Gabriel Byrne was, always assumed it to be some thinly veiled insult and would gaze into the distance until his interrogator, embarrassed, moved away.
The afternoon light was fading fast now, but it was half an hour before he opened his eyes. Rising to his feet he stood, head bowed. Tears streaming down his face, he picked up the daisies wrapped in Queen Anne’s lace he’d placed at the foot of the shrine the previous Thursday and replaced them with his new offering. Meadowsweet, candytuft and clover glowed like jewels among the dark green ferns in which he’d carefully wrapped them; he’d wanted to add buttercups but he couldn’t remember if Maura had liked them.
He said a final prayer, made the sign of the Cross and stepped back, gazing at the shrine. It was recessed deep into the grey drystone wall, veined and threaded with ochre-coloured lichen and exuberantly patterned with shockingly white bird shit. Declan hated the bird shit – it spoke too strongly of life. He looked away.
Today he’d decided he was going to do something about the desiccated remains of the floral offerings others had left for loved ones, years ago, by the look of some of them – a few in stained and cracked jam jars, a couple in empty Guinness bottles. He couldn’t leave them; Maura must hate it. She’d always been a stickler for tidiness, what with being a nurse and all. She had nagged for months after they were married to get him to pick up his socks and put them in the basket instead of dropping them on the floor beside the bed. Their bed, with its crisp white cotton sheets … Bed linen had been Maura’s one extravagance; she couldn’t abide nylon, or polyester, or any of that stuff. He hadn’t known the difference himself until she showed him. He closed his eyes. There were a lot of things he hadn’t known till Maura showed him. Gently teasing him, with laughter in her eyes, she’d given him lessons in parts of the female anatomy he hadn’t even known existed. He’d been a more than willing pupil; some nights they’d still been making love when the first buses could be heard rumbling down Cobb Street. Now the only sound he heard at dawn was his own breathing as he stared into the darkness, and these days he didn’t bother with sheets at all.
Bowing his head to show he meant no disrespect, he added the withered flowers to the decaying heap and turned away, ‘Till next week, darlin’.’
He stepped back onto the muddy track, and headed for the tiny whitewashed cottage he had called home for the last three years. The Virgin Mary stood smiling sadly after him, watching him walk away.
As he trudged down the track in the gathering dusk and took the fork that led to the cottage his eye was drawn to the setting sun as it slipped behind the Maumturk mountains. The sky glowed in a blaze of fiery orange, shading to a deeper red that in turn faded to a wash of translucent pink. It was a long time since a sunset had reminded him of anything but blood.
Pushing through the thicket of nettles that threatened to block the front entrance to the cottage, he almost slipped in the mud. Damned weather – last week the track leading to the main road to Galway, where he worked on the Gazette as a part-time staff photographer, had been so muddy as to be almost unnavigable. As he passed the rain butt, he saw that it was almost full. At least he’d have enough water to wash his clothes tonight. As soon as he’d got the fire going, he’d cover the range with enough pans of water to fill the tin bath. He’d wash the clothes and then himself, then heat a pot of soup and get down to work.
As he pushed open the door and entered the dark living room, with its flagstones and sparse furniture, he realised with a rush of shame that he felt almost happy.
It was late that evening before he’d finally completed his chores. It had taken an age to get the range going – the slabs of peat he burned for fuel were stored in a lean-to at the side of the cottage and they’d become damp. He went out with a torch and saw that last night’s gale had created a gap the width of his spread fingers between two of the galvanized tin sheets that formed the roof. Thank God the generator that was the cottage’s sole source of electricity, and vital to his work, hadn’t suffered.
Eventually he’d hung the last shirt over the wooden rack to dry, given himself a perfunctory scrub in the unpleasantly gritty water, eaten his soup and soda bread and stashed in his camera case everything he might need for whatever jaunt Andy McGinty, the Gazette’s editor, was planning to spring on him the following morning. Please God it wouldn’t be another dog show. Slipping into his dark room, he closed the door behind him and pulled gently on a string.
The safe light came on, bathing the jars and trays on the wooden trestle table in a warm red glow. On another table was an ancient enlarger and a small metal shelf unit cluttered with photographic equipment. Pegged neatly by their corners from a line strung wall to wall just below the ceiling hung several contact sheets, their subjects unclear in the rosy gloom. Equally indistinct was the framed poster announcing an exhibition of photographs on the wall opposite the door.
Declan picked up the camera from the end of the trestle table, flipped up the cover at the back of the case and removed the film.
Smiling for the first time that day, h
e began to work.
CHAPTER SIX
All things considered, Anna reckoned she’d got through the weekend pretty well. Saturday was always the coffee bar’s busiest day, and she’d had almost no time to think about Jack. The Tony nightmare and the Tina horror had only one benefit – that they could take the place of her feelings for Jack in her mind. Every time thoughts threatened of Jack’s hands, his voice, the defeated look on his face as he was leaving, she banished them by worrying about the approaching reunion with her ex-husband (what would he say? How would he look?) or the forthcoming dinner at Chez Gaston (what shouldn’t she say? How shouldn’t she look?). Of course it was silly to worry – Roxy was right, Sam would never manage to track his father down, and even if he did, Tony would refuse to come to the wedding. And Tina was probably really nice when you met her, she just wasn’t at her best on the phone. The poor woman had a lot on her plate. Anna wouldn’t want to be organising a wedding for three-hundred people. Or was it five hundred? No, that was the reception, wasn’t it? Or possibly the number of bell ringers …
She spent Saturday night working on the fourth draft of the new poem, anxious to have something worth taking to Piers Poets the following evening. By the early hours she’d achieved her aim; exhausted, she fell asleep on the sofa as the last log collapsed into ashes in the grate and didn’t wake until late afternoon. After she’d spent a couple of hours on cleaning and laundry, she bathed, ate a bacon sandwich and set off for The Vines.
The group’s reaction to her work cheered her enormously; the praise was heartening and the criticism constructive. Barry took her aside during the break and begged to be allowed to keep his copy of the new poem. She was touched by his enthusiasm and agreed, though she wriggled out of accepting his offer of a lift home by saying she planned to walk on the beach for a while to ponder another poem she’d begun to make notes for. This, apart from being an excuse she knew Barry would readily accept, was true: as she’d been walking along the promenade en route to the pub, she’d passed a young couple entwined in one of the glass-sided bus shelters. Something about the girl (the dark curls tumbling over her shoulders, her air of intensity) reminded Anna of her younger self. The boy (blond and handsome, idly scanning the passing women over the girl’s shoulder despite the apparent passion of his kiss) reminded her of Tony. As Anna walked on, she wondered what future lay in store for the couple. Before she knew it, she’d whipped her notebook from her pocket and was scribbling as she walked.
After the meeting broke up, she set off along the beach, but she was too tired to add more than a couple of ideas to her notes. She went straight to bed when she got home and as she spiralled down into sleep, Jack drifted into her mind, naked except for his tie, gazing at her with an expression of despair – ‘the only one who’d even heard of pecan pie was Hayley’. His image was replaced by Lucy’s, encased in a wedding dress made of delicately browned meringue, a whirl of piped cream topping her immaculate chignon – ‘I think that poem looks rather good on you, actually, Anna’. And then Anna was on the beach, kneeling in front of a coffee table and gazing into a golden pool of spilled wine that surrounded a Lilliputian couple as they embraced in a tiny bus shelter, laughing – ‘frankly, we look on it as an investment’ – breaking apart in alarm as church bells began to peal discordantly …
Anna stirred, and woke. She rolled over, reaching for the glass of water on her bedside table. She’d been dreaming – something about church bells …? No, it couldn’t have been a dream – she could still hear them. Alarm clock? She checked the time – no, it wasn’t that, it was only seven twenty-two, there were still eight minutes to go before the bloody thing was due to go off, so what on earth …? Of course – the phone. She slid out of bed, cursing. Who the hell would be ringing at this hour? She pulled on her dressing gown and blearily made her way downstairs, glad that at least Sam couldn’t see her and a) criticise her for not having an extension by the bed b) make fun of her for being the last person in the Western world to refuse to have a mobile phone and c) mock her ancient candlewick dressing gown.
Stumbling into the living room, she almost fell over a can of furniture polish she had forgotten to put away. More annoyed than ever, she snatched up the receiver.
‘Anna?’
Suddenly it was hard to breathe. ‘Jack?’
‘Anna. Anna …’
She clutched the lapels of her dressing gown tightly together.
‘Anna – look, I’ve got to see you. I miss you, I can’t –’
She could hear birds singing faintly in the background. ‘Jack? Where are you? … Jack?’
‘Back garden. Look, I’ve only got five minutes – the twins could spot me from their window any minute. Darling, can I come tonight?’
Of course – it was Monday, and Monday was one of their regular nights. But hadn’t she decided she wasn’t going to see him any more? Unless –
‘Jack? Have you told her?’
A pause. She could hear a dog yapping frantically somewhere. ‘No, not yet – I tried again last night, honestly, but just as I got started there was an accident with the bloody dog, and I couldn’t –’
Suddenly there was a crash, as if a door had burst open suddenly nearby. The yapping increased, punctuated by shrill childish screams of joy. ‘Down, Spike, down! Charlie, for Christ’s sake – get those Wellington boots off him this minute!’
The uproar increased, almost drowning out Jack’s whispered, anguished plea. ‘Anna? Please, darling – please say I can come.’
She thought of his hands, his voice, the defeated look on his face as he was leaving … ‘Oh god, Jack, I miss you too. Seven o’clock?’
‘Anna, thank you. Thank you, darling. I can’t tell you how –’
He gave a sudden hoarse shout – there was a loud thump, as if he’d fallen, and the line went dead.
Anna went into the kitchen to put on the kettle for tea. As she reached into the fridge for the milk jug she realised she was singing.
The day sped past. She rushed out at lunchtime and bought pesto and homemade pasta from the little Italian delicatessen in Monmouth Street, and was halfway back to Avant Art when she realised she was almost out of fresh parmesan and ran all the way back again. She added garlic breadsticks, plus a bunch of daffodils from the red enamel bucket full of spring flowers beside the chilled cabinet, and just made it back in time to let Trish and Susie go for their break. Roxy grinned when she saw her pink cheeks.
‘Lookin’ a bit happier than last week, I’m glad to see; been mullin’ over your Aunty Roxy’s words of wisdom, I expect.’ She stuffed a flapjack in her mouth. ‘You take my word for it, girl, there’s no way that scumbag’ll dare show his face at the wedding.’
Anna thought of telling her about Tina’s phone call, but it would be disloyal to Sam to start criticising his future mother-in-law before she’d even met her, and anyway, if – no, when – Tina turned out to be lovely, she’d feel terrible. She spent the rest of the afternoon baking supplies for the week ahead while the girls served the customers and Roxy scrubbed out the fridge, regaling Anna with horror stories about the weddings of her apparently limitless relatives.
By six o’clock she was home. By twenty past she’d changed the white sheets already on her bed for Jack’s favourite dark green set, sprayed them liberally with the Body Shop’s vanilla perfume and arranged the daffodils in a blue jug on the bedside table. By six thirty-five she’d lit the fire in the living room, switched on the lamps, replaced the fading lilies in the fireplace with Sam and Lucy’s tulips and put Dave Brubeck on the CD player, turned low. By five to seven she was out of the bathroom and in the kitchen, wearing her peacock blue silk shirt (Jack’s favourite) and black trousers, her hair pinned up (so that he could unpin it again later) her make-up carefully renewed, her pulse points sprayed with more vanilla. She’d washed the rocket and watercress for the salad and the water for the pasta was just coming to the boil when she heard a key turn in the lock. She stood quite still for a mome
nt, letting pleasure and anticipation wash over her. She was transferring the salad greens to the shaker when the kitchen door opened. She turned. Jack stood in the doorway, gazing at her anxiously, clasping an enormous papier-mâché ass’s head to his chest. ‘Anna … I’m so, so sorry, darling.’
He looked if anything even more exhausted than the last time she’d seen him, and noticed with a pang how badly his hair needed cutting. She turned off the gas. The last thing she saw as they rushed towards each other was that the button that had been hanging by a thread last Thursday had now fallen off entirely, and then she was in his arms, the ass’s head crushed between them.
‘Oh God, I’m sorry too, Jack. I should have been more understanding. Of course I realise how difficult it must be for you to tell her –’
‘No, no, it was all my fault. I should have been more sensitive to your feelings. I know how badly you want –’
‘No, I was horrible – totally unreasonable, you were right. Oh God, I’ve missed you –’
‘Missed you too, darling. Angel –’
It was some time before they stopped kissing. When Jack finally held her away from him so that he could look at her better, the ass’s head fell to the floor with a dull thud and lay staring up at them accusingly.
Anna grinned. ‘Afraid he’s looking a bit cross-eyed.’
‘Jealous, probably.’ He kissed her again.
‘Still, ought to do the trick, I should think.’
‘God, I hope so. Don’t want to go through last week again.’
Jack had managed to wangle every Monday evening with Anna this term by telling Ruth he was directing the school Drama Society’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Monday night was the putative rehearsal night. He strengthened his alibi by returning home each week casually clasping some prop relevant to the play. Last week he’d been running late, detained by a staff meeting that had gone on longer than scheduled. He’d been so desperate to get to Anna’s that he’d grabbed the nearest object from the props cupboard without bothering to check what it was and it wasn’t until he was leaving her house that he realised he’d taken an alarmingly life-like Baby Jesus used in the first year’s Nativity play. Fortunately, Jack had had plenty of time to come up with an explanation as he cycled home. ‘You can’t see where a baby fits into the plot of The Dream, dear?’