All That I Leave Behind

by Alison Walsh

  She’d almost felt sorry for the woman then, as the two of them had stood on the doorstep, Duke whining to get off the lead. ‘I have just one question,’ Mary-Pat had asked. ‘Why? Why did you leave Rosie like that? Why did you abandon her?’

  Frances O’Brien had trembled then, her body shaking in her pink fluffy dressing gown. Eventually, she’d said, ‘She needed more than I could give her. She needed a family.’

  Mary-Pat had waited, knowing that there was more. The woman had clutched the collar of the dressing gown tightly around her and bit her lip. ‘Do you remember we met that time in the supermarket?’

  Mary-Pat had nodded. How could she forget? The sight of her in that big woolly jumper, looking like the loneliest woman in the world. The outcast.

  ‘Well, that’s what decided me. I was all alone and I had nothing. No family, no friends, no money. I had nothing to offer a baby. But you … you all had each other.’ The acid in her tone was hard to ignore. ‘I knew straight away that that was my only choice. To give my child what she needed.’

  Mary-Pat wasn’t sure whether to believe her story, that she’d made the ultimate sacrifice for her child’s sake, but then, she’d never had to make that choice, had she? ‘And besides,’ Frances O’Brien had said then, as if anticipating Mary-Pat’s next thought, ‘I knew that everyone would blame me, no matter what. Nobody would blame John-Joe. I’d be the woman who ripped your family apart, not him. It’s always the woman, isn’t it?’

  The bitterness was suddenly so strong, Mary-Pat could almost taste it. The woman was right, in a way. She’d been the Scarlet Woman, in spite of the fact that Daddy … Mary-Pat couldn’t bear to think of it any longer. And anyway, Daddy had lost everything too. He’d lost the only woman he’d ever really loved and, for him, that was everything. That was the irony: for all his messing about, Daddy only really loved Mammy.

  ‘That’s not quite right, Frances …’ she’d begun, but Frances had waved her away, her eyes glittering with tears.

  ‘Don’t tell me that I didn’t make the right choice, Mary-Pat. I know that I did and nobody can tell me otherwise.’

  Mary-Pat had nodded then because nothing more needed to be said.

  Frances O’Brien had hesitated for a second, clutching the chain of her reading glasses, and then she’d laid a chilly hand on Mary-Pat’s arm. ‘Thank you for letting me know.’

  Mary-Pat had shrugged. ‘Yes, well, what good does all of this do if we don’t learn from it? C’mon, Duke, let’s go,’ and she’d turned on her heel and marched back up the canal.

  It was funny, Mary-Pat thought, that just a year ago she’d been in such a sweat about Rosie coming back. She’d felt as if her whole life was under threat, that with Rosie home it would all fall apart. And she’d been right. It had fallen apart, but somehow, miraculously, it had all come back together again, in a different way. And she was a different woman now, she knew that. It had sure shaken them all up. And if she thought to ask herself about June, she’d quickly remind herself that what her sister had done was unforgivable, even if somewhere, deep down, Mary-Pat would have to admit to herself that she was glad that the whole thing about Mammy was out in the open. There were no secrets any more. But still, it was easier not to fully forgive June – that way Mary-Pat didn’t have to think too much about her own actions. And anyway, some things could never be fixed, not properly anyway. Oh, well, Mary-Pat shrugged. She’d better go and see if that midwife had managed to tidy her nephew up for his visitors.

  She was about to get up and leave, putting her mobile into her handbag, when she felt a presence beside her, a cloud of that expensive perfume her sister wore, the one that always made Mary-Pat feel a bit sick.

  She lifted her head slowly, and June was standing there, awkwardly clutching a large blue teddy bear, an ugly-looking thing that was nearly twice the size of her. Jesus, she looked like a train wreck, all angles, her hips too narrow for her jeans, with cheekbones that jutted out and big shadows under her eyes. Her hair looked a bit weird too, as if she’d dyed it some peculiar version of her usual expensive colour. She looked as if she’d aged ten years in the last few months. For a second, Mary-Pat felt sorry for her – she looked as if she’d been diminished, somehow, made tinier and more brittle by life.

  ‘I was just thinking about you,’ Mary-Pat blurted.

  ‘Oh, really? Was it good?’ June looked hopeful for a second, running her hand through her hair in that familiar gesture, but there were no expensive bracelets on her wrists, Mary-Pat noticed.

  God, you can be an awful eejit sometimes, Junie, Mary-Pat thought. ‘No.’

  June flinched, clutching the teddy bear to her as if for protection, her face half-hidden under a mountain of blue fur. She whispered, ‘I shouldn’t have come. I knew it was a bad idea.’ And she turned to walk away.

  Mary-Pat sighed. ‘For feck’s sake, Junie, you’re here now. We’re not going to run you out of the hospital. Besides,’ she nodded at the monstrous bear, ‘you’ll need to put that thing somewhere.’

  June blushed. ‘India bought it. I would have picked something more tasteful,’ she added.

  ‘It won’t go unnoticed anyway,’ Mary-Pat said. ‘C’mon, visiting’s nearly over and I want to have a hold of him. He’s a gorgeous fellow.’

  June’s face lit up. ‘Is he? Who’s he like?’

  ‘Oh, his dad. He won’t be kicking him out of the cave, that’s for sure. And it’s not the Yank, so you can breathe a sigh of relief, like the rest of us.’

  ‘Oh.’ June looked startled for a moment. ‘Whose is it?’

  ‘It’s a very long story,’ Mary-Pat said briefly. ‘I wouldn’t know where to start, but we’ll sit down later, will we, and I’ll tell you.’

  June made that flapping motion with her hand, the one she always made when she was agitated. ‘Oh, it’s none of my business, really …’ and then she changed tack, dropping her shoulders, the tension draining from her face. ‘What am I saying? I’d love to talk,’ and June looked as if a weight had been lifted off her shoulders. And then she paused. ‘Will Rosie be OK if I come?’

  Mary-Pat shrugged. ‘No idea, but what’s the alternative? Are you going to lurk outside with that daft bear? Take the bull by the horns, Junie, that’s what I say.’

  June stood a little taller then, her grip relaxing around the teddy bear. And then she said, ‘I missed you, Mary-Pat.’

  ‘Ah, enough of that shite, Junie,’ Mary-Pat began, but June waved her away. ‘I need to say this, please.’ And she took a deep breath. ‘Mary-Pat, I’m sorry. I truly am. I never intended to keep anything from you – that wasn’t the reason I never told you about Mammy’s letters – I just wanted to keep the lines of communication open and … well, I missed Mammy so much. I can’t tell you what it was like just to be able to talk to her again.’

  ‘Lucky you,’ Mary-Pat said dryly.

  ‘I know, it was selfish,’ June murmured. ‘If it’s any help, I’ve broken off contact,’ she began, when a large elderly woman with a full tray of roast dinner pushed by her, muttering something about people clogging the place up with expensive toys and would they ever not just move out of the way. June would normally have been all apologies, offering to help the old bat with her tray, but instead now she just turned to the woman and said, ‘Do you mind? I’m trying to have a conversation here.’ Mary-Pat fought off the laugh bubbling in her chest as June gave a sigh of exasperation. ‘Look, I need to talk to you properly, Mary-Pat. I think we need that at least. But I want to know something first: will you forgive me?’

  Mary-Pat had to think about it, looking at her sister’s anxious face peering out from around that horrible blue bear. Part of her wanted to throw her arms around her sister and say yes, of course she’d bloody forgive her. But another part of her just didn’t feel ready. She felt scarred by the whole thing, somehow, unsure whether she’d be able to trust her sister again. Eventually, she managed, ‘Not in a hurry, Junie, but we’ll work on it. OK?’

  If
June looked disappointed, she tried not to show it, pulling herself up a little straighter, balancing the teddy bear on her hip and composing her face into as dignified an expression as she could manage with a fifteen-pound teddy in her arms. ‘Fine.’ And then another pause as she tried to formulate the question which was clearly on her mind. ‘Are you pregnant?’

  Mary-Pat tried to look nonchalant, as if it was the most natural thing in the world for a woman of her age, a woman who was closer to the big knickers and the retirement home than most, to be about to become a parent. ‘It’s another long story, and I’d need a few glasses of wine – not that I can drink them, but still … Now, let’s go and say hello to the new O’Connor.’

  ‘Is he an O’Connor or will he have his dad’s name?’

  ‘For feck’s sake, Junie, who cares? Get a move on or the child will be one by the time we get to see him.’ And Mary-Pat tucked her arm into her sister’s and dragged her along the corridor to the maternity ward.

  Later, when she got home, she sat down on the edge of the bed and rubbed her sore feet, and then she lay back on the bed and closed her eyes for a few moments. She was dog tired, but she knew she wouldn’t sleep: the events of the day kept rolling around and around in her mind. It seemed that after years and years of being stuck, things had all come flying loose at the same time: Rosie’s lovely little man, now probably roaring his lungs out at the hospital; the whole thing with June; PJ and herself and the new life that now lay in front of them. Mary-Pat felt herself grow dizzy at the thought of it all. I need to calm down, she told herself firmly, wishing to God she could take a pill and go to sleep.

  And then she thought of the shell. She reached out for her handbag, pulling it onto the bed and rummaged around in it until she found it, the nubbly surface warm beneath her hand. She pulled it out of her bag and she put it up to her ear. She closed her eyes and heard the hiss of the sea and saw herself on the beach at Carnsore with Mammy that hot summer’s day, all those years ago, and as she did, her breathing began to slow. She could see the waves breaking gently onto the stony little beach, could feel the hot sun on her skin. ‘Every time you listen, think of me,’ Mammy had said, but when Mary-Pat tried to think of Mammy, she just couldn’t call a picture of her up in her mind. She seemed to have gone all blurry, and the more Mary-Pat tried, the more indistinct she became. She’s fading on me, Mary-Pat thought. After all this time, she’s fading away.

  22

  Five Months Later

  Rosie couldn’t understand why Pi insisted on squashing them all into the Beetle, but for some reason he seemed to think that it was appropriate, that they all needed to make this pilgrimage in the old car. ‘It’ll remind us of all the times Mammy took us on day trips when we were kids.’ Rosie hadn’t the heart to tell him that it wouldn’t remind her of anything at all, as she hadn’t been part of that life with Mammy. That she had only been on one trip with her and it hadn’t exactly been a day trip. But she was so pleased to hear Mammy’s name spoken like that, normally, the way you would about anyone’s mother, that she said she’d be happy to. Because going on a day trip with her brother and sisters meant that they were a family. A real family, not a collection of individuals, a family who did the kind of things that all families did. And besides, Josh had never seen the sea.

  She didn’t need to take him – there wasn’t enough room in the Beetle, and Mark said he’d take him for a walk to his favourite place, the little marina at Porterstown to look at the fish. It was something they did together, every single morning, because he wanted to have his son to himself for an hour. ‘Making up for lost time,’ he’d put it once, and Rosie had felt the flush of shame at his words. She’d been so selfish, she knew that, and, that first time he’d held his son in his arms, she’d tried to explain: that it was too soon, that there was so much to understand, and somehow, she needed to find her own way back onto the path, but he’d shaken his head. ‘No. No more explaining. I’m here now.’ He’d looked at the little bundle in his arms, at the face that so resembled his. ‘My son.’ And then he’d looked at her as if he could hardly believe it, lifting the baby to his face and covering his head with kisses.

  ‘Yes, your son.’

  ‘Ehm, what did we call him?’

  ‘Josh.’

  He’d made a face then.

  ‘What’s wrong with Josh?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he’d smiled. ‘But he needs a Vietnamese name, too.’

  So he’d been called ‘Vien’, or ‘complete’. And here he was, sitting between her and June. It seemed important to Rosie that he come; that he wouldn’t miss out on a thing. At five months old he was hardly likely to remember, but that didn’t matter. She’d be able to tell him about it later, to say, ‘you were there,’ and that seemed important to her.

  Pius didn’t protest, bless him, when she asked him to fit the car seat, spending the previous afternoon grunting with exertion as he tightened the bolt that attached to the temporary seatbelt into the single bench seat in the back of the car. ‘To think we used to balance you across our knees,’ he’d joked, wiping the sweat from his forehead. Rosie had tried to tell him that she could probably manage herself, but he didn’t like that. He liked to take charge these days, even if she joked with him that he was turning into Mary-Pat.

  Eventually, he’d managed to squash it into position, but only right in the middle of the seat, so Rosie and June had to sit either side of Josh. They let Mary-Pat have the front seat, because, as she kept telling them, she was ‘about to drop’, so they could hardly not. As it was, they’d had to help her in, lowering her onto the seat, with Rosie lifting her legs into the footwell. ‘Jesus H. Christ, I’m too old for this lark,’ she sighed. ‘Too feckin’ old. Could we not have taken the Jeep, Pi? Feck’s sake.’

  June sighed and rolled her eyes to heaven behind her sister. ‘I saw that,’ Mary-Pat barked.

  ‘Yes, well, if you will keep moaning, MP. For goodness’ sake, you’re pregnant, not at death’s door,’ June said crisply. June had taken to saying a lot of things crisply, or briskly, that old half-smile that she used to wear now gone, along with the constant diplomacy. Her face looked better without that rictus, Rosie thought, more relaxed, and she could read her sister’s emotions more easily. It was funny how she’d gone one way and Mary-Pat the other, MP becoming more laid back and her sister more direct. It suited both of them. They’d changed in the past year. But then, Rosie supposed, they’d all changed.

  ‘Did you bring everything?’ June was asking now, as Josh reached out and clutched her index finger, wrapping his little pudgy fingers around it, his eyes crossing with the effort of lifting it closer to examine it. ‘Oh, lovely baba,’ she cooed. ‘Lovely little boy.’ Josh gurgled in agreement, his black eyes dancing. His father’s eyes.

  ‘I have the map anyway,’ Pius shouted over the roar of the engine as he gunned the car down the towpath, a spray of gravel shooting out behind him.

  ‘Jesus, take it easy, Pi. You used to be such a careful driver. What’s with the Fernando Alonso act?’ Mary-Pat muttered, hands pressed against the dashboard.

  ‘I just feel like living on the edge, MP,’ Pius joked, teasing her by putting his foot hard on the accelerator so that the car jolted forward. Mary-Pat gave a little scream. ‘Very funny,’ she said. Then she rummaged in her handbag and produced a large black shell, holding it up for the others to see. ‘I brought mine. What about you, girls?’

  ‘Do I have to give away the original?’ June moaned. ‘It’s just, I have things marked in the margins and I want to keep them. Otherwise I can’t remember properly.’ She looked at the tattered copy of Gone with the Wind on her lap. ‘I need to remember,’ she said sadly.

  ‘I thought that was the whole idea,’ Mary-Pat said. ‘That we’d try to forget, or at least to pretend we were forgetting, even though there’s no question of it, is there?’ she said gaily. ‘It’s symbolic, that’s what it is, to give us some closure, as they say on all those American talk shows. Oprah’
s a great fan of closure.’

  Rosie couldn’t imagine that you could get any closure by doing what they were doing – taking a little trip to the beach like this on a cold December afternoon. Mammy’s leaving wasn’t the kind of thing that you could just wrap up and leave behind you, neatly filing it under ‘the past’ and moving on. It had changed their lives, had changed them in all kinds of ways. Maybe they were only just beginning to discover their true selves now that they’d stopped trying to push the past away. Maybe they’d begun to accept that things were much easier if they faced up to the past, accepted that it had happened. That they couldn’t change it, no matter how far or hard they ran from it. Look at her, she’d gone six thousand miles away and it had just gone right along with her, dogging her days, casting its shadow over her new life, even her relationship with Craig. Because it wasn’t all his fault, she knew that now. He’d accepted her exactly as she was: how was he to know that that wasn’t the real her at all?

  Or maybe it was Mark that had changed her, she wasn’t really sure. She was suspicious of the idea that one person could change another. It just didn’t work like that. Maybe it was that he’d made her more herself. She’d put on weight since Josh was born – or rather she hadn’t lost the baby weight, the kind the other mums in the village all moaned about, but which she actually liked. She liked her new softness. It felt different somehow, and she wondered if she’d developed a personality to match her new, fuller shape – more relaxed, less anxious, ready to laugh again like she used to, to enjoy being silly and having fun.

  ‘The mother of my child,’ Mark would call her, giving her a gentle squeeze around her middle, the little pads of fat that hadn’t gone away since she’d had Josh. She’d push him away, laughing. ‘I wish you’d stop calling me that, it’s nauseating.’

  ‘I would if you’d agree to marry me,’ he’d say softly, the way he did at least a dozen times a day, putting up his hands and saying, ‘All right, all right,’ when she playfully punched him on the shoulder. The truth was she didn’t want to get married, not again. Once had been bad enough, but she knew how much Mark wanted it, so she knew she’d probably have to do it eventually. But she’d made him promise not to put her through another wedding. Weddings were jinxed as far as she was concerned. Besides, they already had a wedding to go to in the spring, in Italy. It had been Pi’s idea and himself and Daphne and Dara had planned to spend a few months out there, ‘living the good life’ as he put it, courtesy of his new cash crop that had replaced the weed, which he’d manage to dispose of without setting fire to half of Monasterard in the process. Rosie had no idea that bean sprouts could be that lucrative, but there you go, what did she know? Them and the lovely potager that Pius had nursed into being and which to Rosie was a thing of wonder: the lovely beds full of leafy chard and fennel and kohlrabi, vegetables she hadn’t even known existed, planted side by side with nasturtiums and peonies and cosmos. It was lovely, magnificent really, and realising Mammy’s vision had given Pi a new lease of life, a new confidence and a new drive. At long last he could see a future for himself in which he was the main actor, of which he was in charge. And it had brought him Daph and Dara.