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Limestone

Page 22

by Fiona Farrell


  The answer I had imagined for years. And now I had it, I wasn’t quite sure how to reply, seated there in a rental Toyota in a lay-by overlooking the river grown wide and expansive as it reached its conclusion. I took a deep breath and said I was Clare Lacey and I thought we might be related and that I was in the general area and wondered if we could meet.

  There was a pause, an ‘oh my god not another one why did the Irish have to be so bloody fecund’ kind of pause, and then he said, ‘Well, you’d better come over then.’ And he gave me directions to a house in the country not far from Listowel: turn right at the bridge, straight ahead at the crossroads, left at the top of the hill …

  So I drove down the winding roads, following another strip of damp tarmac between green fields, through straggling villages and a town of narrow streets and dull skinny houses, out to its edges where the road dipped to cross a river on a bridge of several arches, and black and white cows grazed the valley grass. Then I turned a corner and the road rose before me to a sloping field covered in a dozen executive homes, all stone cladding and heraldic lions on the gateposts. There was an older house set back from the road at the end of a driveway lined with old chestnut trees, with a sign at the gate. Veterinarian. S. J. Lacey, BVSc.

  I turned in, bouncing through puddles to the yard before a plain-faced Georgian farmhouse with two storeys like a doll’s house in a storybook, and a door in the middle and a chimney pot at either end. The outbuildings on each side had been renovated, on the one side as stables but on the other as office and surgery. In the centre of the yard was a raised circular bed planted out with daffodils and brightly coloured polyanthus, but it took little imagination to detect the former well-head. Drawn up alongside was a Range Rover towing a horse trailer from which a young man and an older skinny man whose hair might once have been red, now faded to tobacco-stain grey, were unloading a big bay thoroughbred, skittish and blanketed though the afternoon was warm.

  The older man had his back to me, and for just a second I thought it was him. I almost called out. But before I could utter the word, he turned, and of course it was not him, but a man who might have been him, had my father been permitted to grow old. My father was young and lithe, capable of performing tricks he had learned in a circus: standing on his bike as he rolled down the road on his way home from work, for instance. This man could never do that. He was too old. He was how my father would have looked had he stayed with us another thirty years.

  He turned, frowning, as I drove into the yard, keeping a tight hold on the thoroughbred who was spinning circles, tugging at its halter.

  I parked the car in the space marked SURGERY and climbed out, my feet unreal on the cobbled yard.

  ‘Be with you in a minute,’ called the skinny man, his arm being dragged half from its socket. ‘Go in the house. Eva’ll look after you.’ The horse tossed its diva’s head and slid on stone as the younger man ran to his assistance.

  So I knocked on the glossy green paint of the front door and a woman emerged from the back of the house. A beautiful woman, blonde hair tied back in a ponytail, shoes kicked off, slender linen trousers on long legs, and a loose top of some filmy fabric. She was enormously pregnant, at that bulbous stage that normally makes even the most elegant of women look puffy and careworn. But she glowed. She was glossy, like that horse out in the yard. A thoroughbred, fine boned. She smiled a dazzling, even smile.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ she said. ‘I’m Eva. Simey says you are relation and I am to make you cup of tea.’

  She had one of those throaty Eastern European accents, Russian perhaps. Or Polish.

  ‘I’m Clare,’ I said. And I felt plain. Very plain. A stumpy pony to Eva’s lean graceful breeding.

  She led the way barefoot down the hall, which was white-painted and hung with horse prints: the expensive kind, originals, slightly foxed, depicting eighteenth-century riders on horses with impossible sway backs in park settings of oaks and elms. Sunlight flooded a kitchen which stretched across the rear of the house. A dazzling array of appliances lined up in brushed steel. Big bowls in bright primary colours stood on shelves. French doors opened wide to a barbecue area in what might have once been a muddy cow yard. The old buildings were still there but whitewashed behind a brass band of golden daffodils blazing away in tubs and window boxes. The yard opened out to a wide view of rolling wooded country, smoothed by the late-afternoon sun.

  ‘What a beautiful place,’ I said, and Eva smiled as she fetched some cups and said, ‘Thank you, was not good when I arrived, but Simey said, do what you want: windows, flowers, what you like. Men, you know. They happy living in barn.’

  She made that little kissing pout of the lips, the toss of the hand, the charming flyaway shrug.

  ‘Now, you want tea or you want coffee? Simey will have tea because he is Irish, but I have stood watching horse for hours and I need now coffee. Very strong.’ She was switching on a machine that would not have been out of place in a major city café, all spouts and dials. And I thought yes, I would like a coffee. Something very strong.

  Eva moved, graceful and picture perfect, about her Italian kitchen, grinding fresh coffee beans, filling a kettle, pouring milk into a jug. ‘Simey has bought new horse. Ovation. She will be winner for sure. Always winner for sure. But I am cold standing watching her jump, all I want is come home.’

  She tipped coffee into the filter and tamped it down with practised expertise.

  ‘When is your baby due?’ I said. And Eva smiled that radiant smile and said June, not long.

  ‘Is first baby in both families. I have no brother or sister, and Simey’s family — well, older brother is priest, and sister killed in car accident six months after wedding. So this first and only child. And Simey never find anyone to marry till he meet me last year. So … is special baby!’ And she stroked her belly the way pregnant women do, as if it were not their own skin they are touching but the skin of the little creature who is curled down in the dark, safe and perfect in warm water.

  The coffee machine began to wheeze and hiss and Eva was preoccupied with the fuss of cups and hot milk and putting some biscuits on a plate. This kitchen, now I had a chance to look about, was bare of clutter. There were no photographs here of children at their First Communion nor smiling elders cutting the cake at the Diamond Wedding anniversary. Just a single image of Eva and Simey smiling on a tropical beach, she holding a bouquet of crimson hibiscus.

  The door swung open and Simey came into the room with a light bouncing step so familiar it made my breath catch in my throat. How can that be inherited? A way of walking?

  ‘Sorry about that,’ he said, and the voice too was my father’s. He washed his hands briskly at the sink and rubbed them dry on a tea towel. ‘So, Clare,’ he said. ‘We’re relations, is that right?’

  ‘I think so,’ I said.

  ‘And Eva here has been making you at home.’ He put his arm about the young woman’s shoulders. ‘Is that coffee you’re making?’

  ‘For us,’ said Eva. ‘For Clare and me. Tea for you is in pot.’

  ‘Ah you’re a grand girl, so you are,’ said Simey, and he hugged her and gave me a wink. ‘She lives in hope that she’ll turn me into an urban sophisticate, drinking my lattes and my espresso, but it’s tea for me. Always has been, always will be. Too set in my elderly ways, aren’t I now?’

  He popped a whole biscuit into his mouth, and Eva laughed and handed him the tray. ‘Here,’ she said, the fond wife, indulged and indulgent. ‘We sit on terrace in sun.’

  ‘So,’ said Simey as we settled at a glass-topped outdoor table next to a barbecue large enough to cook a young steer at one go. ‘You’re from New Zealand?’

  And I said people usually guessed Australia, but Simey said he’d been to New Zealand. Spent six months at a practice in Darfield back in 1989. He had learned to tell a New Zealand accent from an Australian one, knew it was a mistake to confuse them. ‘It’s as bad as picking an Irishman for English. Do you know Darfield?’

>   ‘Yes,’ I said, thinking how odd it was, how very peculiar, that my half-brother had been living only twenty minutes away for six months in 1989, and that I could have passed him on a street in the city, sat next to him at a café, glimpsed him from the car on my way to the Coast perhaps. And not known.

  Simey was saying something. They were sitting side by side across the table, looking at me as if they expected an answer.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I missed the question.’

  ‘So how are we related exactly?’ said Simey. ‘I didn’t know we had any Lacey relations in New Zealand. I’ve never taken any interest in genealogy myself, though I gather it’s popular. Right up there after the porn, isn’t it, on the internet? So who was the connection? Some Australian convict, I’ll be bound.’

  They were waiting for me to answer. I sat there with my coffee, looking at them both. He with his arm resting on the bench-back behind Eva’s perfect shoulders. She with one hand resting on the swelling of their child. That little baby, that nucleus of muscle, bone and blood, good gifts and bad all gathered there beneath the skin.

  What good would it do to burst into this family, to say, ‘Well, actually, we share a father’?

  What would be the point of launching into explanation after so many years? To empty it all out like a heap of old rags from a broken suitcase: the travelling man falling in love on the spot with the girl in the Copper Kettle, the pony by the clothesline, the fire in the yard, the bitter abandonment, the months of prayers that went unanswered, the boy painting his devils on the bedroom wall, the brittle bones. The legacy left by our father. It would all be too much. All those genetic links and connections, explanations and comparisons and hurts that were felt so long ago.

  And what about the baby there in the womb, so sure of safety? What of those brittle bones that might be taking shape as Eva and Simey sat unwittingly, drinking their tea and coffee and looking out over the Irish countryside? Cell by cell, sifting down in the dark water. How could I bring that to this sunny hillside? The possibility of genetic disorder. My stone bones.

  So, ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s right. A Fenian, James Lacey, who came out to Australia. He’d have been Michael Lacey’s —’ I couldn’t quite manage to say ‘your father’s’ — ‘great-great uncle. He was born here.’

  ‘So that’s how you tracked us down,’ said Simey, though he was bored already with this dull story of transportation. ‘Sure and there’s a lot of old history round the place. But it’s past and gone. It’s the future that counts after all.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. Because in this place it had to be true.

  Simey patted Eva’s shoulder. ‘And look at me now. An old bachelor set in his ways and thinking there’s nothing left for him but decrepitude and decay, and then this beautiful young veterinary assistant drops from the sky like an angel and says she’ll marry him. And here he is, about to become a father for the first time at sixty years of age! And she a mere child of thirty-nine! Ah, it’s caused a dreadful scandal in the parish, so it has.’

  ‘Don’t listen to him,’ said Eva. ‘Everyone was happy we marry. Everyone like him, Clare. He is good man, magic with horses.’

  ‘Ah sure and aren’t all the Laceys good with horses,’ says Simey, dunking his biscuit in his tea and sucking it up. ‘It’s in the blood.’

  ‘So, was Michael also good with horses?’ I said. I wanted to ask some question about him. I wanted to hear something more, some other new scrap of information. Anything would do.

  Simey shrugged. ‘My father? I don’t know much about my father’s abilities, I’m afraid. He left when I was three years old.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said and Simey said there was no need for apology. That was the way of him. He’d turn up when it suited. There’s some like that: won’t stay in their own field, always leaping the walls and away. That was Michael Lacey.

  ‘So you never saw him again?’ I said. It was far too personal a question from someone who had arrived on the doorstep only half an hour before, but I had to ask it.

  ‘There was once,’ said Simey. ‘Just after Christmas, the day before my eleventh birthday.’ And he told the story of how he was walking home from school and met a man on the bridge down there, a stranger leaning on the parapet, smoking a cigarette, and how he called out as Simey passed, saying, ‘Simey! Come over here. I’ve a gift for your birthday.’ So Simey went over, and the man gave him a pocketknife.

  ‘I remember it lying in his hand,’ said Simey. ‘He had a stump of a finger on his right hand that he told me had been eaten by a circus lion, but then he was always a big man for the stories. But very pleased with this knife he was. Showing me all the blades and the screwdriver in the handle, and the little tweezers. And he asked after my brother and sister and my mammy. And I said why don’t you come up to the house and see them for yourself? But he said maybe next time, and then he walked away. The cheek of it. I tossed that knife in the river the minute his back was to me. And it was a good knife too.’

  The pain was still there, a momentary flicker of it just beneath the skin.

  ‘And that was the last time?’ I said. I couldn’t help myself.

  ‘Not quite,’ said Simey. ‘He came home at last to die. An old dog knows its own kennel. He passed away in this very room.’

  Then he shook himself like an animal shaking itself after heavy rain. He clapped his hands. Enough of the melancholy.

  ‘Ah sure, and that’s all past too, and the lads’ll be in any moment for a drink. Do you want to join us, Clare?’

  But I said no. I had a long way to go. The light was fading, the sun slanting onto the soft green hills, a cool little breeze nipping at the heels of the day.

  Simey could not quite conceal a hint of relief. There would be no need to entertain this dull woman with her genealogical obsession when what they wanted to do was have a few drinks and talk about Ovation and her chances for the Coolmore Maiden at Mallow in November.

  So I left them there with all their affection and mutual delight and hope, and the baby who was their combined future ready to burst through the narrow opening between the interior world and the exterior in which we live our ordinary lives. I left the baby to be whatever kind of human it was destined to be. I left them and drove south toward the airport and the flight away to the other side of the earth.

  It was only after many miles driving through dusk, the Starlet humming along between the darkening hedgerows and stone walls, that it hit me.

  The detail I’d had nestled away there at the back of the brain. The thing that didn’t fit.

  Simey was sixty. In September I would turn fifty. So if I was about to turn fifty and my half-brother was sixty, how had he seen our father on a bridge in Ireland soon after Christmas when he was ten years old? How could Michael Lacey be handing his son a pocketknife on the eve of his eleventh birthday when he was supposed to be on the other side of the world in bed with my mother in Oamaru, making the daughter that was me?

  I had to pull over to work it all out on a scrap of paper. I was conceived in January. There was the Christmas window at the Copper Kettle, the beautiful girl making sandwiches who fell in love with the charming traveller on the spot and married him and had a baby within the year. I counted and scribbled and began again, and as I did so, other things began to slide into my mind. Things I had known all my life began to sort into a new conformation. Layers of fact were forced up and shattered by the force of alternative meaning.

  Mrs Moses.

  For some reason I found myself thinking of Mrs Moses. For the first time in years I saw her clearly: her little body twisted and turned so that she could not stand unaided and had to be carried onto the veranda each night by her strong kindly son to sit in the twilight and read the evening paper. I thought about her body. I thought about her frail bones. I thought about Ozzie and how he placed his big hand over my mother’s as they drove home from the picnic. And I thought about Phemie kneeling beside me in the hallway, asking her questions. And s
uddenly I could hardly breathe.

  I had to get out of the car. I stood in the gathering dark on a country road and took out my phone.

  It would be early morning in New Zealand, though Phemie had always been an early riser. She’d be up and organised in her little house in Oamaru. The cat fed, the porridge plate washed and dried and put away, a couple of Peace roses in a crystal vase on the mantelpiece where her photos stand: the whole flotilla of family for whom she has cared over the years. The nieces and nephews, grand-nieces and grand-nephews. Her little sister Kathleen, the beauty of the family, and her three children — Clare, Madeleine and Brian — lined up on the back step, squinting into the sun.

  The phone clicked.

  ‘Hello?’ said Phemie. An old woman’s wavery music. The word inflected upward.

  ‘Hello, Phemie,’ I said. ‘It’s Clare.’

  ‘Clare!’ said Phemie. ‘How nice to hear you. How are you? Are you keeping well? Now isn’t that a coincidence! I heard from Madeleine too, just last week, I think it was. I hadn’t heard from her for — ooh, it must be two years at least. She’s in Brisbane. She’s got a very good job. She’s selling real estate …’

  ‘Phemie,’ I said, because I didn’t have the time right then to discuss Maddie’s career. ‘I’m in Ireland.’

  ‘Oh, that’s nice, dear,’ said Phemie. ‘Are you having a lovely time?’

  ‘I’ve been trying to find Mick,’ I said.

  ‘Is that right …’ said Phemie. Her voice was more guarded.

  ‘And there’s something not quite right,’ I said. ‘And what I want to know is …’ There was no point delaying any longer. ‘I mean what I need to know is: was Mick my father?’

  There was silence at the end of the line.

  ‘Phemie?’ I said. ‘Tell me. Please. I have to know. Was Mick my father?’

 

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