Grand Affair

by Charlotte Bingham

  Maybe if she could give Ma some money she would love Ottilie the way she used to, and maybe she would smile and laugh the way she had always done until that dreadful day in the shop when both of them had to go to the police station and Ma had cried so awfully after Lorcan arrived wearing his best white shirt, his head of thick curly hair all tidied.

  ‘What you doing there, Ottie?’ Lorcan came into the kitchen, his handsome face dark and tanned now from being outside all day so that the colour of his blue-grey eyes stood out in a most startling way from the brown of his face. It was now deep winter and their little cottage was being rocked by the winter winds, and when you walked down to the beach at St Elcombe the sound of the waves pounding the beach was so loud that not even the crying of the seagulls could be heard above it, nor Ma walking along the beach every afternoon as she did now, whatever the weather, talking to herself. ‘You’re not to upset Ma by making a mess.’

  ‘Not making a mess, Lorcan, making jam tarts,’ Ottilie told him, standing on a kitchen stool to mix the flour and the margarine for the pastry while Joseph, his dark head bent over his homework, sat studying opposite her at the table.

  ‘You don’t know how to make jam tarts, Ottie.’

  ‘I do, I do, I do!’ Ottilie raised her voice in indignation.

  ‘Oh, you do so? So how do you?’

  ‘You take eight ounces of flour and half as much of fat and then you add the water little by little, and you roll it out with a rolling pin. See? I know because we did it at school.’

  Lorcan nodded solemnly. He had no idea whether or not Ottilie was right but when he looked down into the bowl he had to admit the mixture did look like raw pastry. He went out, saying, ‘Well, as long as Joseph’s watching you.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Lorcan, I’ll put the jam in the pies, and the tray in the oven for her. I won’t let her burn herself.’

  Joseph helped as he had promised and Ottilie watched the clock as if it was ticking away her last minutes on earth. Finally there were the tarts looking as good as anything. Ottilie picked up a plate and a cup of water and went through to Ma who was asleep in the tiny sitting room before an unlit fire.

  ‘I’ve made you a jam tart and some tea, Ma,’ she said, and she pushed her arm gently. Ma did not stir, so Ottilie pushed her some more. Still she did not stir, so Ottilie, having carefully placed the jam tart and the cup on a side table, climbed onto her lap and rocked her face between her hands. ‘Please, please wake up, Ma, please?’

  Lorcan must have heard her because he came through from the hall where he was mending a lamp. Seeing Ottilie rocking Ma’s face between her small plump hands he caught her up and took her out, saying, ‘It’s no good, Ottie. When Ma’s like that nothing will wake her, pet, nothing at all. You’ll just have to wait to give her your jam tart, you understand? Just wait till she wakes of her own accord, OK?’

  Ottilie nodded, confused and worried, but she ran off back to the kitchen.

  ‘Ma sleeping it off, is she?’ Joseph looked up from his book as she came back in. ‘Sleeping off the gin. Gin. The big sleep drink,’ Joseph went on, giving a fair imitation of an American accent.

  ‘Why does she have gin, Joseph?’ Ottilie wondered, transferring her kitchen stool to the sink so that she could wash up.

  ‘She has gin because she’s upset still, you know? Because of the incident with the old man that day in the stream, remember? Well, since then, all the local people – well, not all of them, but some of them – they’ve been out to get Ma. That old man. Well. See, he’s related to practically everyone in St Elcombe. And it seems Cornish people don’t like Irish people because of what’s on the news, Lorcan says. But Ma should never have punched him like that. It was asking for it. But then you should never have got into the stream that feeds into the troughs. That water’s very sacred to people round here, you know, like in church? Everything that’s happened, it’s all your fault, Ottie,’ Joseph added, meaning to tease her.

  But even though she knew that Joseph was really only teasing Ottilie had to swallow hard to stop herself crying, because although Joseph did not mean what he’d said about its being all her fault that Ma had changed so much she knew it was true. It was all her fault. If she had not climbed into the stream that day the man would never have put his hands on her shoulders and Ma would never have defended her and the people in the grocery shop would never have pretended that she stole their tea and biscuits.

  Every day after that Ottilie brought Ma a gift, something she had made or something she had drawn or painted, or a piece of fruit given to her by the greengrocer on her way home from school. Much as she wanted to eat the apple or the banana, she always kept it in her satchel for Ma. But when she ran into the cottage hoping against hope that today she would find her old Ma, the one who was always so happy and kind, she would stop at the sitting room door the moment she heard the sound of Ma snoring, and not bother to go any further into the room, knowing straight away that the old Ma was still not back, that she was lost to them for another day.

  One day Lorcan came back full of news. The builder was so pleased with his work he was to get a pay rise, another two pounds a week, but better than that Mr Hulton’s firm had been asked to renovate the old Grand Hotel on the seafront.

  ‘You know, the one that looks like a crumbling sandcastle?’ he told the other children. ‘I reckon we’ll be there for years and years. Mr Hulton says there’s enough work there to carry us into the next century.’

  Lorcan was so thrilled with his news that he even tried to wake Ma, but as usual Ma was sleeping so heavily that not even he could wake her properly.

  ‘I just wish I could get her to stop being like this, just once,’ he said, turning away from her in sudden and uncharacteristic despair. ‘I wonder should I go and see the doctor? Should I tell him she’s not well most days now?’

  ‘Don’t be daft. You can’t tell anyone anything, not here in St Elcombe,’ said Joseph. ‘Please, Lorcan. Just leave Ma alone. She’ll soon go back to being like she was before. One of these days she’ll stop falling asleep, she will, really. I expect it’s just what Ma herself was always going on about, just a – what was it? – oh yes, just a phase.’

  ‘If only they hadn’t put that thing in the paper,’ Sean sighed. ‘It was when she saw that – “St Elcombe Woman Fined” – that she got really bad. Such a fuss. They spelt her name wrong anyway – “O’Flannery” – and it was only a small item at the bottom of a silly page of news, after all, nothing to write home about.’

  ‘Not to her, Sean,’ Lorcan told him sadly. ‘To Ma that piece in the local paper was as big as a message put up in neon lights in Piccadilly itself. She won’t ever shop in St Elcombe now, not ever, even if she was dying. No, it has to be over the cliffs to Branhaven. As if anyone would try a thing like that twice. And as if they don’t know of her in Branhaven as well as St Elcombe. But no-one can tell her. Da always said they never could, mind.’

  The strange thing was, Ottilie noticed, that when Ma returned from walking over the cliffs to Branhaven, which she did most days no matter what happened, she never brought very much back with her. Just a packet of soap powder, or sometimes a tin of apricots or a jar of Marmite. It seemed an awfully long way to go for so very little. Meanwhile the winter crept into early spring and the spring tides were fierce, so fierce that Lorcan warned Ma again and again not to walk over to Branhaven unless she knew the weather forecast.

  ‘People have been blown off those cliffs you know, Ma. You must take care of yourself, particularly in those old shoes of yours with the laces always coming untied.’

  ‘I know what I’m about, Lorcan. I’m still the woman of the house, think what you may. And I’ll thank you not to tell me how to go on, dotie darling, for all that I’m sure you mean well.’

  ‘I’m not telling you how to behave, Ma,’ Lorcan told her, trying to take her hands in his to make her look at him. ‘I wouldn’t do that, Ma, ever. I just don’t want you having an accident, none of u
s do. And of course you’re still the woman of the house, and always will be.’

  Ma looked up at her eldest son, her eyelids swollen and her face plump now from the water retention caused by alcohol. She said nothing, but Ottilie could see that as she turned away her lips were trembling from the effort of not crying. She thundered from the room, her new much fatter figure making her seem clumsy where once she had been so graceful. Even her hair was no longer as lustrous as it had been, but flat and unkempt, and the long plait was not now anchored firmly on top of her head with a kirby grip in moments of crisis or decision but left to hang down around her face.

  Ottilie already knew what would happen next. Lorcan would have to watch helplessly as Ma once more escaped from the cottage, perhaps to walk yet again down to the beach or across the cliffs to Branhaven, and the usual feeling of inadequacy would sweep over him, the feeling that he might as well not be there for all the use that he, her eldest son, was to her. He loved his mother, but only she could stop herself from being destroyed, only she could pull herself back from the state into which her own hurt pride had sunk her. Ottilie knew all this because she loved Lorcan with all her heart, and because she loved him she would see the hurt in his eyes, and the look that was so much older than his years – the shoulders already a little stooped from anxiety, the hands already roughened from manual work, everything telling of the old young man that he was, the fated eldest son so often required by absent fathers to throw away their precious youth so that Da could be free.

  ‘Are you ready for school, Ottie?’ he asked, looking down at her.

  Ottilie nodded, silent as always at these moments when she knew that Lorcan and she were feeling just the same even though he was seventeen and she was seven. Nowadays Lorcan might work all the time at the Grand Hotel on the front, but Ottilie was sure that she was fast catching him up in cleverness. She could make pastry, write her name and tie her own shoelaces, but what neither of them could do was bring their beloved Ma back to be with them the way she had always been.

  Sister Raphael said to pray to God for things that you really wanted, and He would know all about what was truly in your heart. But to Ottilie praying meant just saying over and over again ‘Please make Ma better’ and squeezing her hands together so hard that they hurt, so strongly that they ached when she finally stopped begging God, besieging Him, to make Ma better soon.

  Lorcan and the boys always walked Ottilie to school together. It meant leaving as early as seven thirty because Lorcan had to be on site by eight o’clock. It also meant that Ottilie was left alone each day in the school hall for nearly an hour. Nowadays she would spend the time kneeling in front of the statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, absorbed in prayer for Ma and mesmerized by the sight of the statue’s golden heart with all the rays of love coming out of it.

  Today Ottilie prayed so hard for Ma to be the way she had been before she was accused of taking the tea and the biscuits from the shop that for the rest of the morning, even when she was writing her alphabet or reading aloud from her Early Learning Book, she still felt as if she was praying, as if she was elevated in some way, watching herself from above and seeing everything that was happening in the classroom, but not being really there.

  So intense was her experience that when all the other children went out into the playground to skip, if they were lucky enough to own a skipping rope, or to practise netball, Ottilie stayed behind to pray in front of the statue, and it was there, as she was praying perhaps harder than she had ever prayed before, that she felt a firm hand suddenly fall upon her shoulder.

  So elevated was she, so much apart, that she almost passed out from the fright of that hand on her shoulder. So it was that when she turned to look up at the nun standing behind her, Ottilie’s face had already lost most of its colour.

  It was to lose even more by the time Sister Raphael had finished telling Ottilie that her mother had ‘met with an accident’.

  Now it was Lorcan who was speaking, confirming what Sister Raphael had said in her clipped English voice, her eyes always so stern, her thin lips pressed together as if even her words must be subjected to the vow of holy poverty. Lorcan was using the same words that Sister Raphael had used. Ma had ‘met with an accident’, as if an accident was someone to whom a person had to be introduced, a polite procedure that was followed by death.

  Lorcan walked along talking all the time, thinking perhaps that by keeping going he could make sense of everything to her, but most of all to himself.

  ‘It’s not that surprising really, Ottie, now we come to think of it, is it? I mean I’ve been expecting something like this, and so has Joseph, we all have. It’s not as if we haven’t been warning her, and the way things have been – well, even you must have noticed, Ottie. Ma has not been herself for a good long while, not since being in the paper.

  ‘And Joseph and I, you know – we couldn’t stop her going over those cliffs to Branhaven any more than we ever could stop her doing anything she wanted. We did try, Ottie, all of us, but sometimes no-one can stop another person from doing what they want, they will just go on in their own way. That’s how Ma has been these last months, going on in her own way, so it’s not our fault what happened. She just must have slipped and fallen the way we all feared she might. But she didn’t suffer. She must have died instantly. The police said so, and they know all about that kind of accident, Mr Hulton says. He told me, you see, he came and told me that Ma had fallen off the cliffs and her body had been seen by another lady walking her dog.’

  Lorcan stopped, and Ottilie stood still too and stared up at him. Quite suddenly her eldest brother appeared even older than he had seemed when he dropped her off at school earlier. He seemed taller too, more like a real man than ever, perhaps because he had been called away from the Grand before he’d had time to change from the work clothes that made him look like other men they passed, all of them wearing overalls.

  ‘Will Da come back to us now, Lorcan? Will he come and take us back to Number Four?’ Ottilie wanted to know. Not that she knew Da, not even what he looked like, but she thought she just ought to say something quickly, there and then, in case she cried. Being brought up with boys she knew never to cry or they laughed at you.

  ‘Oh, Da hasn’t been near us in years, Ottie. I doubt if Ma ever heard from him again, after he sent her the money for the cottage that time. I think she knew it was a kind of pay-off, you know, that he would not be seeing us or her again for a good long while, if at all.’

  Lorcan paused, thinking to himself and then speaking out loud as if hearing the words rather than just thinking them was reassuring, calming.

  ‘I think that’s why she moved us like that, you know? To be away from any memories of Da at Number Four. They were very happy until the police and that came for him. And of course, Ma being a country girl, she liked the idea of going back to fields and meadows. Remember those pictures she was always picking up and staring at in Number Four? The ones of the fields and the sea? That’s why she brought us here. That was how she remembered Ireland, when she was a child, and that’s why she wanted to come here. She thought it would be like Ireland.’ Lorcan stopped pacing up and down the road, and kneeling to Ottilie’s level he looked at her very seriously. ‘I’m sure Da is around somewhere, of course, I doubt that he’s dead or anything, but there was nothing at Christmas from him, you know, not even a card, so there’s no way of reaching him in America and telling him Ma’s had an accident. He travels around so, for the work, and to keep ahead of the Green Card thing.’

  Lorcan could not bring himself to say that his mother was dead.

  In his mind even as he voiced his thoughts Ma had still only ‘met with an accident’. Fallen over the cliffs. Tripped on her shoelaces. Broken her neck. She was not dead so much as not alive. And she was simply not alive because she had done what he and Joseph had kept begging her not to do, walked over the cliffs to Branhaven just for a bit of a shop in windy weather.

  ‘Fact is, Ottie, Da could
be anywhere and America’s a very big place. Look, I’ve gotta go now. You’re a good girl. Be brave now, and try hard at your books. Don’t let me down.’

  Lorcan reached down and hugged Ottilie and as always Ottilie swallowed hard, her nails pressed into her small hands, trying not to let Lorcan see that there were tears in her eyes, trying not to show Lorcan just how frightened she was at the idea of not having Ma with them any more. What would it be like not to find her sitting on her chair outside the cottage, or even sleeping in the sitting room, what would it be like not to hear her say ‘Come here while I give you a kiss, dotie’?

  ‘I’ve to go and see the others, and then back to the site. Mr Hulton said I must go straight back once I’ve told you all about the accident because I’m a professional and it wouldn’t do in front of the other men to have too much time off because then they’d all want it, you know? I’ll pick you up at tea as usual. Stay until we come. Don’t move now, whatever happens, after the bell rings, just wait for us.’

  Ottilie turned back towards the school. Back into the dark panelled hall, and back past the small altar with its statue of the Sacred Heart before which she had prayed so hard that morning, begging God with His big golden heart with all its golden rays to turn Ma back into a happy person again, to stop her sleeping, to make her, please, please, please, like the way she had been before, the way Ottilie always thought of her, laughing and singing and making little jokes and always looking on the best side no matter what, being the Ma she remembered from Number Four. She so wanted her to be back with them again just how she was before they came to this foreign country called Cornwall, before Ottilie had sinned by paddling in the stream that day and making the old man angry, before God punished her and Ma had her name in the paper as ‘St Elcombe Woman Fined’.

  As she passed the statue on its plinth Ottilie stopped and stared at it as if she had never seen it before, which in a way she felt she never had, for now she looked at it, now she knew that Ma was dead, she realized that the statue was not God with a big golden heart, someone full of love for small children, but just something painted by a man, and the man with the big heart – he was just something painted too, nothing to do with God or being kind.