Masters of the House

by Robert Barnard

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  Contents

  Chapter One: After the First Death

  Chapter Two: The Funeral

  Chapter Three: Carrying On

  Chapter Four: That Woman

  Chapter Five: The Threat

  Chapter Six: Asking Questions

  Chapter Seven: A Discovery

  Chapter Eight: The Irish Club

  Chapter Nine: A Visitor

  Chapter Ten: A way Out

  Chapter Eleven: Back to Normal

  Chapter Twelve: The One who Got Away

  Chapter Thirteen: Rob and His Women

  Chapter Fourteen: Talking About Carmen

  Chapter Fifteen: The Learys

  Chapter Sixteen: Small Businessman

  Chapter Seventeen: Connections

  Chapter Eighteen: Conclusions

  CHAPTER ONE

  After the First Death

  “No!” screamed the woman on the bed.

  She had caught a gesture, the merest suspicion of a shaken head from the doctor as he handed the little scrap of a baby to the nurse to be put in the incubator. The doctor turned back to her, smiling encouragement.

  “No!”

  “There, there, Mrs—Heenan, isn’t it? You must think of yourself now.”

  “And of all your other children,” said the Sister, who knew Mrs Heenan’s family situation better than the obstetrician.

  Mrs Heenan protested no more. She looked from one face to the other as if anxious, even in the midst of her terrible pain, to assure herself of the import of their words. Then she gave a little sigh and closed her eyes. It was as if she had gently unslipped the boat she was lying in from its moorings and was beginning to drift out to sea.

  The obstetrician knew the signs. He leaned forward urgently.

  “Mrs Heenan, it’s important you get a grip on yourself. We certainly haven’t given up on your baby. Everything that we can do is being done for her. Mary you were—Mary you’re calling her, aren’t you?—Mrs Heenan, try to hear what I’m telling you. . . . Nurse! Nurse!”

  The woman on the bed was still breathing and showing few signs now of pain. Five minutes later the brief life of the tiny scrap called Mary had flickered and been extinguished. And the frail craft on the bed was drifting further and further out to sea, soon, before their eyes, to reach a High Sea that was untroubled: without pain, without fear, without feeling.

  • • •

  “He’s in the waiting room, is he?” Dr Sharkey asked the Sister.

  “Yes. His wife told me he’s never wanted to be present at any of the births.”

  “How much was he told?”

  “I don’t know. She was told of the danger, but when I asked what she’d told her husband she got . . . well, cagey.”

  “It’s a common enough reaction. It’s a way of shutting their own eyes to possibilities, as well as their husband’s. . . . Telling him’s going to be difficult.”

  He looked at her. She had sometimes in the past relieved him of the responsibility.

  “Oh please, Dr Sharkey. With both of them gone, I couldn’t find words. It’ll be better coming from a man.”

  He pursed his lips, then nodded. He composed in his mind the ragbag of phrases he had used on similar occasions. Then he straightened his shoulders and went into the corridor.

  • • •

  In the waiting room, surrounded by scruffy piles of newspapers and magazines, there were three men, sitting in postures of anxiety familiar to the doctor. Two were young, one probably still in his teens. The third was a middle-aged man slumped forward in his chair, his chin cupped in his hands. Dr Sharkey went up to him.

  “Mr Heenan?”

  The man looked up and then got up. He was of middle height, broad in the shoulders, with a round face formed to be seen over a pint mug or swapping jokes with a pretty girl. But now he looked stunned, as if he had not slept for hours. The doctor had seen victims of major accidents, and their rescuers, who looked like that. Almost shell-shocked.

  “Is it over?” he asked eagerly in a thick voice that broke with emotion. “Boy or girl? Ellen’s fine, is she? She’ll be wanting to see me.”

  “Could you come to my office, Mr Heenan?”

  “I’d rather see Ellen first.”

  “This way, please.”

  The doctor gave him no choice, but guided his arm along the corridor, round two corners, and into his office. The man let himself be led, walking heavily with a slight limp. When they were both inside, Dr Sharkey propelled him into a chair, then got a bottle from a bottom drawer in his desk and poured him a small whisky.

  “What is this, Doctor?” Heenan asked, eying the bottle. “Is there something wrong with the baby? We’ve been lucky so far, God be thanked. Tell me so I can go to her.”

  The doctor waited until he had had a swig of the whisky.

  “I’m afraid it’s worse than that. I don’t know how much your wife told you. . . .”

  “Told me? What about?”

  “Ah, I see. It’s often the way.” The doctor swallowed. “Well, your wife was told some time ago that there would be problems with the birth. And not just to the baby, but danger to herself as well.”

  Heenan looked at him as he came to a halt. He echoed his wife’s protest.

  “No”!

  “I’m afraid so. The birth was as difficult as we feared, and . . .”

  “They’re both gone! Aren’t they? Tell me straight! They’re both dead, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, Mr Heenan, I’m afraid they are.”

  “Oh, God!” The man howled his outrage and keeled forward. Dr Sharkey let him sit thus, his face in his knees, his shoulders heaving. He seemed to be saying something, but all Dr Sharkey could make out was something that sounded like, “Oh, God, I have sinned.” He thought he must be mistaken.

  “You won’t want to be hearing medical details as yet,” he said at last, feeling that the shuffling of his little cards of conventional phrases was leaving them increasingly threadbare. “Take another little drink of whisky. . . . It does help, even doctors admit that. . . . Then perhaps you’d like to be driven home.”

  He poured another quarter of an inch into the glass, then came round and handed it towards the hunched, unhearing figure. As he stood over him, he distinctly caught Heenan’s words:

  “Lord, I am punished, justly punished.”

  Sharkey took him by the shoulder, pulled him upright and thrust the glass into his hand.

  “Get that down you, man. Remember you’ll need all the strength you can muster to tell your children. I’ll try to find someone who can drive you, and a car.”

  Five minutes later two ambulance drivers, a man and a woman, arrived at Sharkey’s office, raised Heenan tenderly to his feet and led him out to the waiting car. Sharkey wondered whether he was in a fit state to go home but didn’t see what else he could have done. This was the winter of 1979; ancillary workers were on strike; all the hospital services at the Leeds General Infirmary were working at full stretch.

  He hurried back to Maternity to monitor the progress of a woman who was about to be delivered of twins.

  • • •

  As fast as was consonant with compassion the ambulance people bundled Heenan towards a car.

  “That’s a bad limp you have,” said the man.

  “Got it in a fire. Used to be a fireman,” mumbled Heenan.

  It was almost the la
st piece of normal talk they got out of him.

  The woman ambulance driver got into the back of the car with Heenan. She tried first administering comfort, then attempted to stiffen him for the ordeal ahead. Nothing she said seemed to get through. He muttered over and over again, “I am justly punished.” The woman looked into the driving mirror and saw the driver’s eyes looking back at her.

  “What should we do?” she whispered.

  “What can we do?’ He shrugged, not unsympathetically. “There’s no spare staff at the hospital. We’re needed there. We’ll go in with him. . . .”

  At last they drew up at the address they had been given. It was a detached house in Rodley, a minute or two from the Ring Road. It looked as if it had been built between the wars, and the paint was peeling and the plaster beginning to crumble in places. But it was a roomy house, quiet apart from the hum of traffic, and beyond it lay fields and a small wood. The ambulance woman registered that it was a better house than she had expected the man in the car to live in: a good place to bring up children in, she thought.

  “Mr Heenan,” she said gently. The driver had got out and was holding open the door.

  “What? What?”

  “Mr Heenan, you’re home. Your children will be wanting to know what has happened.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  He heaved forward, put a foot out of the car and stumbled out onto the road. He looked around him wildly. The woman had briskly got out on her side and now took his other arm, and together the two ambulance people began leading him to his front door.

  “Courage, Mr Heenan. For the sake of the children.”

  “Oh, God, it’s not courage they need. It’s their dead mother, God rest her soul.”

  Before they could get to the door, it opened. They had been watched from the window. A boy and a girl stood in the doorway.

  “Dad!” said the boy.

  The woman from the ambulance understood at once that they knew.

  “Can you get your dad inside?” she said. “He’s very upset.”

  “Oh, God,” he mumbled. “My poor children.”

  The children stood aside, and the ambulance people manoeuvred him with difficulty through the door.

  “Where can he go?” the driver asked the girl.

  “In here, the sitting room. He’ll need time. It’s the shock.”

  “Can you show me the kitchen?” the woman asked her. “I’ll make a cup of coffee.”

  “He prefers tea. I’ll make it. I know how he likes it.”

  The woman realised with a shock that it was the children who were taking charge, the father who was being mothered. She let the boy settle his father into an armchair in the sitting room and followed the girl to the kitchen.

  “You know, don’t you?” she asked, as she watched her at the cupboards.

  “Yes. He wouldn’t be so upset if it was just the baby.”

  “He seems to be terribly shocked.”

  “Mummy told us, you see. The doctor warned her there might be problems with the birth and . . . danger for herself. But she didn’t tell Daddy. She said he was worried about his job. And he lost it two months ago.”

  “What did he do?’

  “He was foreman on a building site. He said they didn’t want to sack him, but with the re . . .”

  “Recession?”

  “Yes. They had no choice.”

  “So he’s still out of work?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I suppose he’ll need all his time looking after you.”

  “Yes. Shall we take the tea in?”

  “I’ll help you. What’s your name, by the way?”

  “Anne. They call me Annie.”

  When they came into the sitting room with the tray, Annie’s father was sitting with his elbows on his knees, staring ahead, muttering to himself. When his daughter put the tray down on the table beside him and began pouring, he gave her one look, and tears came into his eyes.

  “Oh, Annie, what have I done to you? And Matthew? To all of you?”

  The eldest boy was sitting beside him, his hand on his arm. The younger ones were watching, frightened. The ambulance driver stirred in his chair and raised his eyebrows at his partner. She looked around, uneasy but unable to think of anything else they could do. The man got to his feet and approached the group of the man and the two older children.

  “Well, Mr Heenan, I’m afraid we’ll have to be going. You know how things are at the moment. We’d like to offer our sympathy to all of you—sincere sympathy.”

  There was silence. The man looked at his cup. Then, the words seeming to be wrung from him, to come from some barely remembered convention of behaviour, he said, “Thanks for all you’ve done.”

  Later, in the ambulance, the woman, unable to find words for her unease, said, “I hope he gets a grip on himself.”

  The man nodded, not unsympathetic, just overworked and exhausted. “He’ll bloody have to, won’t he?”

  “The children seemed to cope better than he did.”

  “They don’t understand, do they, not in the same way—about money and getting help and whatever. . . . The whole bloody system’s breaking down,” he added bitterly.

  As soon as they got back to the infirmary they were called out to a woman who had been battered half to death by her husband. Even the woman let the Heenans slip from her mind.

  • • •

  Annie and Matthew were frightened. They had encouraged, coaxed, forced their father to drink some tea; and he had got down perhaps a quarter of the cup. Now he sat once more, hunched forward, staring ahead. From time to time he muttered things—words, phrases, something to do with “punishment.” They didn’t understand. They didn’t see their mother’s death as a punishment—not for her nor for any of them. It was a disaster but unrelated to anything they had done.

  Scared by the silence, they sent the younger children out to play in the back garden.

  “But play quietly,” they said, with some rudimentary understanding of the decencies of death. Then they cleared up the tea things and went out to the kitchen.

  “I don’t know what to do,” said Matthew.

  “Nor do I.”

  “We’ve never had anything to do with death.”

  “Except Aunt Lucy’s. And we didn’t even go to the funeral.”

  Aunt Lucy had left them her house. She had been a jolly, loving aunt, but she had died three years before, and their memories were becoming dim.

  “Dad will have to look after us now,” said Matthew.

  Annie was the manager, the realist. She had been her mother’s great help in keeping the younger children clean and tidy. Now she looked straight into Matthew’s eyes.

  “What if he can’t cope?’

  “He’ll have to cope,” said the boy fiercely. They washed the cups and saucers under the tap and put them on the drainboard to dry. “There were those children in my class who were put into care.”

  “I know. The Mortons.”

  “None of the teachers could control them.”

  “They were dreadful.”

  They said no more. There was nothing else to do in the kitchen, but they didn’t want to go back to their father. They stood by the sink, looking at each other.

  “Maybe he ought to go to bed,” said Matthew.

  “It’s only half past six.”

  “Yes, but he’s not well. He ought to go to bed and rest so that he can think about it and . . . accept it.”

  Annie voiced the fears of both of them.

  “He doesn’t sound as if he ever will.”

  “He’s got to come to terms with it,” said Matthew, talking very adult and using a phrase he’d learnt from television.

  “Perhaps we should try and persuade him.”

  Reluctantly they went back into the sitting room. Matthew leant over him.

  “Dad . . . Dad? Would you like to go to bed, Dad? It’s been a shock to you. . . .”

  “It’s been a shock to all of us.” />
  Again the words seemed to be wrung from him.

  “Not so much for us. You see, we knew.”

  “Knew what”?

  “About Mum and . . . and the danger. She didn’t want to tell you, with you being so worried about your job.”

  His father gave something between a grunt and a sob.

  “We think you ought to go to bed and get some rest.”

  “It’s more than rest I need. . . . Forgive me, Lord.”

  “Will you come up with us?”

  “Aye. . . . Aye, I’ll go up.”

  Little by little they got him up the stairs. He would stop after one or two steps and say, “Are the young ones all right?” or, “You’ve something for your suppers?” Finally they got him to the landing and steered him towards the door to the big double bedroom.

  “I can’t sleep there!” The words were bellowed out.

  “Dad!”

  “I can’t sleep there! Not where I used to sleep with your mother, God rest her soul. Annie, I’ll never sleep there again.”

  They looked at each other. Then they steered him to Gregory’s little bedroom. Once inside, Annie retrieved the boy’s toys and books which were scattered around, while Matthew persuaded his father to take off his jacket, then his trousers. They fetched his pyjamas from the big bedroom, but they found him sitting on the bed in his shirt and underpants, sobbing. They put his legs up under the blankets and sheet, and he lay down docilely, like a small child. But when Matthew turned in the doorway before switching out the light, what his father reminded him of, on the bare bed frame in the narrow room, was a picture of a monk in his cell in a religious book his mother had treasured.

  He and Annie tiptoed downstairs and watched the smaller ones in the twilit patch of garden at the back.

  “We’ve got to think what to do,” said Annie.

  • • •

  There was no problem about getting the smaller ones to bed. Their play had been solemn, and they seemed to welcome bed as a chance to absorb their new, motherless state—or perhaps to escape from it in sleep. The smallest one, Jamie, really did not understand. Jamie usually shared the second bedroom with Matthew, though Matthew had always intended to assert his right to a room of his own when his brother was older. Daddy’s being in Gregory’s room presented problems, and Matthew proposed to solve them for the moment by having Jamie in with him in the big double bed that Daddy said he would never sleep in again. Jamie cried, though, and said it was too big. He did indeed look tiny in it, and perhaps it brought home to him some sense of his loss. In the end he was put into Matthew’s room with Gregory, and Matthew faced the prospect of sleeping in the big bed on his own. Annie, the only girl, had always had a room to herself.