When they had been tucked up for the night, and talked to, Matthew and Annie crept along the landing and listened outside the smallest bedroom. They had hoped for silence, but what they heard were sobs and muffled words and phrases. White-faced, they tiptoed downstairs.
“He’ll get better,” said Matthew, louder than he intended but still sounding unsure.
“Yes, he’s bound to,” agreed Annie. “He’s strong.”
They both knew they were contradicting themselves, merely cheering themselves up.
“Of course he is,” Matthew said, his voice still too loud. “He’ll get himself together. Look at all the overtime he did when he was afraid of losing his job.”
“That’s right. It’s just that sometimes he looked the weaker one, beside Mum.”
“She shielded him. Took things on herself and kept them from him.”
“There won’t be anyone to do that now.”
The conversation seemed to be taking a direction unwanted by either of them, but they were powerless to turn it back.
“It may take him a while to recover,” said Annie.
“We’ll have to get him to the funeral. Somehow.”
“Funerals,” said Annie. “It’s the little baby’s, too.”
“Dad didn’t want another. Though he never said.”
“We none of us really wanted another—not even Mum.”
“It’s Mum’s death that’s upset him. . . . I suppose the dole money will just keep coming in, will it? Could we phone Social Security and ask them to send it here? Or does he have to go and collect it?”
“Surely he’ll be able to go and collect it? He wouldn’t want us to starve.”
“He doesn’t sound as if he can think straight about anything at the moment. . . .” He looked at her, the worry now undisguised. “If only people don’t start asking questions—while he’s like that.”
“We can cope with Greg and Jamie,” said Annie.
“Of course we can. But they’ll say I’m only thirteen. . . . I wish I knew more about funerals.”
“Couldn’t you go and talk to Father Muldoon about it? And perhaps you could bring up the dole then, or go to him after.”
“I don’t think we should go to school tomorrow. I don’t think you do till after the funeral.”
“I suppose not.”
“I’ll go and talk to him. . . . I suppose if he’s still like this we’ll have to cover up. Perhaps do it for a few days.”
“Yes.” Annie looked at him hard. “We’ve got to do something. We mustn’t all be taken into care.”
He gazed back, then nodded determinedly.
CHAPTER TWO
The Funeral
THE NEXT MORNING the children got up with fear in their hearts.
Matthew made the breakfast while Annie got the two younger children dressed. Gregory had cried himself to sleep but then had slept soundly through. Jamie still didn’t understand and kept saying, “Mummy?” Annie thought it would be best not to try and explain; perhaps eventually he would just stop saying “Mummy” and say “Annie” instead.
They had cereals and toast as usual. Uncertainty made them nervous, silent. Matthew made a big pot of tea, and the question of who should take tea and toast up to Dad was there in the air. With a heavy heart Matthew decided it was man’s work. When they heard the lavatory flush, he put two rounds of toast on a plate, poured out a strong, sweet cup, just as his father liked it, then went slowly upstairs.
Dermot Heenan was sitting on the bed in his underclothes, staring ahead.
“How can I eat?” he muttered. “Why should I keep myself alive?”
“For us,” said Matthew urgently.
“By God, don’t you know you’d be better off without me?” came the thick mumble.
Matthew looked at him, and a tingle of fear went up his spine. He turned and left the little bedroom.
When breakfast had been eaten and washed up, he rang the Presbytery at St Joseph’s and spoke to Father Muldoon. The priest had heard the news from the hospital chaplain and had known more about the danger to the lives of mother and unborn child than Dermot Heenan had done. He was sad for the woman and her family, and he said soothing words to Matthew that were no less sincere for having become standard with him.
Matthew had to concentrate hard, determined to get it right.
“I wondered, Father, if I could come and have a talk with you—about the funeral and that.”
Father Muldoon’s surprise showed in his voice.
“You, Matthew?”
“Well, Dad and Annie have their hands full, you see.”
“I’m sure they do. I could come round to the house—”
Matthew had to stop himself saying “No!” too loudly and too quickly.
“I think it would be better, Father, if I came round to see you. The little ones find it difficult getting used to the idea of Mummy not being here, and Annie and Dad are trying to take their minds off things.”
Father Muldoon was used to eldest children in large families shouldering adult burdens early in life. He accepted the position more readily than Matthew had expected he would.
“I see. Well, I’m free at eleven.”
Promptly at eleven, Matthew was ringing the Presbytery doorbell. He still had the black tie he had been bought when Aunt Lucy had died, and he wore his blue school blazer and grey trousers. Father Muldoon didn’t quite know what to offer him, but he put a mug of Nescafé in front of him, and the boy sipped at it as they talked quite composedly about the funeral.
“Dad’s so upset he doesn’t want to talk about it. I wondered if you could help with the arrangements, Father.”
He meant, “. . . if you could arrange it all.” Father Muldoon was used to doing that. It happened often enough, especially with lonely old people. He talked the situation over with Matthew, especially the father’s unemployed state, and then arranged something simple and decent for the following Thursday.
“Your mother and father both had an insurance policy towards the cost of funerals in the family, I know that. And the parish has a fund that might help a bit with the rest,” he said. “Will there be many family members coming, do you think?”
“I don’t think so,” Matthew said, glad to be able to say that truthfully, glad that there was hardly anyone to ask questions. “Mum has—had—a brother and a sister in Ireland, but I don’t think they’ll come over. Dad had Aunt Lucy, but she’s dead. All our grandparents are dead.”
“Perhaps we’ll have two cars for family, just in case.”
“I wanted to ask about money, Father.”
“Money? Well, as I said, there’s this fund—”
“No, I don’t mean the funeral. I mean for food and that. Housekeeping. Now Dad’s all we’ve got, he won’t be able to work, will he? They won’t force him to get another job?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t think so. Not with the four of you to look after. Your dad needn’t worry about that. I tell you what. There’s someone in the parish—Nan O’Connor, you probably know her—works at the Social Security office. Would you like me to make an appointment for your father to go along and see her?”
“If it’s not too much trouble, Father.”
So by the time he left, he had an appointment for his father to talk over the situation with Mrs O’Connor on Monday at ten o’clock. Of course it was Matthew who went.
She was surprised at first, but the boy was such a little adult, and he explained so sensibly about his father’s being so upset and having to be both mother and father to the little ones, that she readily talked over the situation with him.
“What about the dole money?” Matthew asked her.
“Well, it will become National Assistance now because your father couldn’t take a job even if he could find one.”
“No, that’s right. He’s at home all the time now and very upset. Annie and I do all the shopping. Could we collect the Assistance money for him?”
“Well, it’s unusual. . . . But you
could get authorisation from your father.”
“What would he write? Could you write it for him?”
“Oh, I think so. Then you could just get him to sign it.”
Matthew thought Dermot could probably still sign his name. He felt emboldened by success.
“We know the postmaster at Calverley,” he said. “There shouldn’t be any problem.”
“There are other benefits that you could well qualify for as a family,” said Mrs O’Connor as she typed the note. “I’ll look out the forms.”
“Could you fill out the forms as far as you can?” Matthew asked. “Or I’ll come in and do them with you? My dad’s a builder. He’s not very good at that sort of thing.”
She agreed without a qualm, and the two began a relationship, liking and understanding each other. Or thinking they understood.
By then there had been no improvement in Dermot Heenan’s mental state. When they took him his food he mumbled about not wanting to live, about being worthless and damned, about their being better off without him. When they collected his tray they found he had hardly done more than toy or nibble, often not even that. Sometimes Annie sat on the bed and forced him to eat, forking it into his mouth. “You’ve got to eat, for us, Dad,” she would say—to get the predictable reply. Sometimes they heard him go to the lavatory. They never heard him washing.
Washing became urgent as the day of the funeral approached. The night before, when the little ones had had a shower, which was what they preferred, Matthew and Annie ran a bath. Annie fetched her father, then left it to Matthew to get Dermot’s clothes off and get him into it.
“What’s all this for?” mumbled his father.
“For the funeral, Dad. The funeral’s tomorrow.”
“I can’t go, Matthew!” he said, turning as if to run away. “I can’t see her buried! I killed her!”
“Of course you didn’t kill her, Dad.”
“As good as.”
“You’ll have to go, Dad. What would people think if you weren’t at the funeral of your own wife?”
“Don’t give a curse what they think.”
But he let himself be undressed and put in the bath. While he was washed he kept muttering about his sinfulness, about the damned not being wanted in church. When he was washed and dried, Matthew got him into pyjamas for the first time since the deaths. When they had got him into bed, and without talking about it, Matthew and Annie went and prayed together by Annie’s bed, as they had not done since they were small children.
Next morning, by unspoken agreement, Matthew left to Annie the tasks of making the breakfast and getting the small ones ready. He had the major task. He put his father’s best suit—his only suit—over the bannister, then fetched him a cup of tea from the kitchen. It was pointless to waste time trying to force toast down him. He was sitting on the bed in the familiar position, bent forward, gazing ahead. When he saw Matthew with a cup in one hand, his suit over the other arm, he began whimpering.
“No, I can’t go, Matthew. I can’t see her buried.”
“You’ve got to go, Dad. I’ve got your white shirt here too. Stand up and we’ll get you into it.”
“I tell you I can’t go to church, Matthew. I can’t.”
Matthew tried a new tack. He stood over him like a schoolteacher.
“Dad! Get up and get dressed!”
His mother had sometimes treated her husband like another of her children. In their hearts the children had always known he was the weaker of the two—easily led, inclined to take the easy way out. He was used to others making decisions for him. When he heard the steel in Matthew’s voice he stood up. Matthew breathed a short sigh of relief.
“Right. Get out of your pyjamas. . . . Here’s your shirt.”
When he had got his father dressed, he told him to sit in the upright chair under the window, not on any account to get back into bed. Before he closed the door he turned and saw his father begin to slump forward again. Downstairs Annie was washing up, having sent Gregory upstairs to dress Jamie and himself—as an experiment, to see if he could. She looked up at Matthew as he came into the kitchen, and he nodded.
“He’s dressed. We’ll get him down nearer the time.”
“Thanks be to God,” Annie said. It was one of her mother’s phrases.
“He’s mentally ill. He ought to see a doctor.”
They looked at each other. It was a thought they had tried to avoid. The phrase “into care” seemed to hover in the air between them. They put the thought from them. Annie let the water out of the sink and went upstairs to change and see that Jamie looked decent. They hadn’t wanted to take him to the funeral, but they couldn’t think what else to do with him. The immediate neighbours were out at work all day, and they’d never been close to Mrs Heenan.
At quarter past ten they both went up to their father’s room and stood in the doorway.
“Dad. It’s time.”
He took some seconds to register what they were saying, then he made to stand up, lurching forwards. They took an arm each and led him downstairs. When they took him into the living room, little Jamie, spruced up and scared, looked at his father as if he couldn’t remember who he was.
“Poor kids,” muttered Dermot Heenan, wiping his eyes with his sleeve. “Poor bloody kids.”
At that moment the two black cars drew up outside. Matthew led his father to the front door and then out to the car where a black-suited man was holding the door open.
“Matthew!” whispered his father urgently. “I’ll go to the service. But I can’t see her put in the ground.”
Matthew thought for a moment, then let the attendant shut the door on his father. Matthew ran towards Annie and the two small ones, going towards the second car.
“He says he’ll go to the service but not to the burial. It might be better. People would try to talk to him. You come back with him in the first car, and I’ll go to the churchyard.”
Annie thought for a moment and then nodded. Matthew ran back to the shiny black limousine and let himself be put into the back seat with his father. He whispered sharply, “Stop mumbling, Dad.”
The funeral was a nightmare. Dermot Heenan stumbled from the car and up the steps of St Joseph’s, his head seemingly buried in his bricklayer’s chest, looking neither to left nor right. In the pew at the front to which they were led, he slumped forward in his usual position, holding it with redoubled persistence since it prevented him from seeing the full-sized and the diminutive coffins standing before the altar. Matthew hoped it would be thought he was praying—as perhaps he was.
The church was quite full. Ellen Heenan had kept up links with the Irish community in Leeds. Dermot’s Irish links were three generations in the past, but his social life was centred around the Irish Club in the York Road, apart from occasional visits to the pub with his mates from work. Ellen had been a regular churchgoer at St Joseph’s and had taken the older children. Dermot was more occasional, but both were popular. People were sorry at Ellen’s death and sad for the motherless family, and they came to pay their last respects and to express their sympathy. Matthew and Annie rather wished fewer had come to see their father in his present state. They felt they couldn’t look around, but they sensed still more people coming in after their arrival.
Father Muldoon spoke simply and well. He talked of Ellen’s womanly love for her family, her modesty, her sense of duty. He said she was a model Catholic wife and mother. He expressed the congregation’s sympathy for the bereaved family and said that he himself, who was shortly to return to Ireland, would always remember Ellen Heenan as a model of motherhood such as that country knew so well how to produce.
Annie pulled down Jamie’s little finger, which was going up his nose. From the end of the pew she heard her father groan. She thought, We’re not thinking about Mummy at all. Father Muldoon is up there talking about her, but we’re thinking of something else entirely. How to put a good front on. How to get by without people realising about Daddy. And yet sh
e was everything to us. She fed us, clothed us, loved us, wiped our knees when we fell over, wiped our eyes when we cried. And now she’s gone, and we’re not even thinking about her at her funeral.
But then she thought, Mummy wouldn’t have wanted us to be taken into care.
The service ended with “Eternal Father, Strong to Save.” When the congregation rose to sing, Matthew patted his father on the shoulder as if to say, “Don’t try to stand—everyone knows you’re too upset.”
When the coffins had been taken from the church, the mourners waited respectfully for the family to leave. Matthew gave his father a gentle shake, and he got up and charged out of the church, down the steps, and into the waiting car—his bolt hole, his nest, his womb. The children followed at a more seemly pace, and Annie ushered the younger ones towards the first car. As he got in, Greg looked at his father with a sort of baffled curiosity.
Matthew stood for a moment at the top of the steps, small and frail-looking, waiting for the first car to move off and the second to come forward. He could see the hearse with the coffins already trailing up the hill in the direction of the Catholic churchyard. He felt a sudden spurt of fear at being the only one of the family by the grave.
“Your dad is obviously very cut up by your Mum’s death.”
Matthew looked around quickly. It was Harry Curtin, a burly man with a kindly face, who had been his father’s employer. Matthew knew he was not a Catholic, so coming to Ellen Heenan’s funeral was a good deed that required special effort.
“He is,” said Matthew simply. Then he thought he ought to add something. “But he’ll get over it. He can be quite strong really. Like when he did all that overtime last year because we needed extra money with the baby coming.”
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