Helen began to climb the stairs. ‘Is she in my room?’
‘Helen, she’s asleep, you can’t wake her. You can’t take her out in the cold – it’s not fair to the child.’
It wasn’t fair to the child that she had to grow up without a father. It wasn’t fair that the child’s mother wondered, every now and again, what it would be like to smother her with a pillow. ‘She’ll be fine, she’ll go back to sleep in the car. And I have jelly babies if she doesn’t.’
Her mother’s exasperated sigh, which she knew intimately, followed her all the way up the stairs, but there was no further argument. The only good thing, if you could call it that, about your husband dying, about being widowed at thirty-two, was that people were forced to make allowances for you – for a while anyway.
She pushed open the door of her old bedroom and walked across the thick wool carpet towards the little hump of her sleeping daughter. Alice lay on her back, her face turned slightly in the direction of the window at which Helen had often stood as a teenager, blowing out the smoke of her illicit cigarettes.
She reached for the small black-patent buckled shoes set neatly by the bed before scooping Alice and the blanket that covered her into her arms. Alice made a sleepy, protesting sound which Helen ignored as she hefted her onto her shoulder and left the room.
Her father stood at the bottom of the stairs, arms outstretched. ‘I’ll take her.’ There was no sign of her mother – sulking, no doubt, in the sitting room.
Helen surrendered her load, grateful that he wasn’t putting up a fresh argument, and led the way to the car. Alice was manoeuvred onto the back seat and the blanket wrapped around her. Helen’s father closed the passenger door softly and walked around to the driver’s side.
‘Have you thought at all about what you want to do?’ he asked, his hand on the door to prevent it closing, and Helen guessed that he’d been instructed to bring it up. Three fucking weeks, that was all they’d given her to mourn.
She looked at him. ‘Do?’
He had the grace to look discomfited. ‘About a job, I mean. How you’re going to support Alice.’
‘Not yet,’ she said steadily. ‘I’ve been a bit preoccupied.’
He put his free hand up, warding her off. She imagined him sitting on the bench in his wig and gown, cutting short barristers and criminals alike with just such a gesture. ‘I’m not saying you have to decide right away,’ he said. ‘It’s just … your mother and I want to help any way we can, you know that.’
‘Yes.’
‘We’d look after Alice, we’d be happy to, if you wanted to look for work. We’d love to see more of her.’
‘I know.’
‘Or if it was a question of money, if you wanted to study for—’
‘No. Look, I have to get Alice to bed.’ She turned the key, forcing him to release the door. ‘I’ll give you a ring,’ she said, pulling it closed and driving off without looking at him again. She got to the end of the road and turned left, shoving her hair angrily away from her face. Three fucking weeks.
From the back seat came a whimper. Helen said, ‘Ssh,’ and kept on driving. The trouble was, she did need money, or she soon would. Cormac had been useless with it, living from one engagement to the next, he and the lads doing the same dancehall circuit as The Clipper Carltons and The Dixies and all the other showbands, with no thought for the future – and Helen hadn’t been much better. One week they’d be drinking whiskey and eating fillet steak, the next they’d be pulling the sofa apart to find enough change for a pint of milk. There had been no life insurance, no talk of savings.
Alice’s arrival had prompted them to become somewhat more responsible, and for a while they’d budgeted for more balanced spending periods. Fillet steak was replaced with pork chops and chicken, and there was generally enough milk in the fridge. Cormac even opened a savings account in Alice’s name, and arranged for small monthly payments to be made into it. They still had their moments, of course, when a larger than usual cheque arrived, or when the band was booked to play the Hibernian Ballroom every Thursday night over the summer – although they realised fairly quickly that hangovers and small babies were pretty much incompatible.
And then the unthinkable had happened, and Cormac had been diagnosed and money, or lack of it, had become the least of their worries. During the months of his illness Helen had lived from day to day, eking out the fivers that arrived in mass bouquet cards from relatives on hearing the news, drawing funds when she had to from their miserable joint account, trying to avoid the savings, still tragically small, that had been intended to put Alice through university.
She’d also sold, one bleak afternoon, the pitifully few pieces of decent jewellery she possessed to the only pawnbroker who’d consider taking them. Her wedding and engagement rings, an amethyst necklace she’d inherited from her grandmother, the gold stud earrings Cormac’s mother had given her the night before her wedding, a silver locket on a heavy chain from a man who’d wanted to marry her once.
And much as she hated to admit it, they’d hardly have survived without the purplish-blue fifty-pound notes her father slipped her now and again, not thinking, or not caring, that precious few shops were willing to let her break fifty pounds – ridiculous denomination, the price of a half-decent sofa – in return for a thirty-pence loaf of bread. She’d accepted the money with muttered thanks each time and made it last as long as she could.
And then, a week before Cormac’s death at the beginning of January, Rick, the band’s saxophonist, had slipped her an envelope during what turned out to be his last visit to Cormac in hospital. ‘It’s from all of us, just to help out,’ he’d murmured. Its contents, ten tatty twenty-pound notes, had caused Helen to burst into tears when she’d opened it, to poor Rick’s discomfiture.
She drove through Stoneybatter and pulled up in front of the little terraced house Cormac had inherited from his paternal grandmother. ‘We got on brilliantly,’ he’d told Helen. ‘She always said she’d leave me the house. I thought she was joking, but she wasn’t.’
The neighbourhood was what Helen’s mother would call decidedly working class. The houses on Helen’s road were old, the dividing walls thin, the rooms – mostly two up, two down – cramped and low-ceilinged, the stairs horribly steep, the gardens tiny. The storage heaters that Cormac had installed were expensive to run and of limited efficiency. But the house was paid for and it belonged to Helen now, and it was the only place that had ever felt like home to her.
She carried a whining, half-awake Alice inside and hauled her upstairs. ‘Shush,’ she told her, kicking open the door to the second bedroom.
‘But I’m cold.’
‘You’re fine – you’ll warm up in bed.’
Downstairs again, she opened the press above the fridge and took out the remains of the brandy that someone, she couldn’t remember who, had brought. She’d lost count of the visitors who’d come to the house over the last few weeks, who’d arrived in their Sunday clothes and perched on the edges of armchairs, speaking in hushed voices as if noise would kill Cormac sooner than the cancer.
She eased the cork off the bottle and walked into the chilly sitting room, home to the Sacred Heart picture and his little red light that had hung on the wall since Cormac’s grandmother’s time, the only memento that he’d insisted on keeping. Helen looked at the face that gazed back at her serenely. ‘Still here,’ she told it, ‘just like yourself.’
She crossed to the tiled mantelpiece and lifted down the envelope that sat there. To my parents, she’d written – had it only been last night? It seemed like a thousand years ago. She slit it open and unfolded the single sheet and read the brief message.
I hope you can forgive what I am planning to do. I can’t go on. Please look after Alice.
No salutation, no signature. She’d never been able to communicate on any meaningful level with them, never felt any real connection with them. On the face of it, her upbringing would have been the envy of a lot
of others. Her parents had money, tons of it – they were rolling in it, thanks to the ludicrously high salary paid to her father– and as their only child, Helen had enjoyed the best of everything growing up.
But they had no conception at all that what their daughter had needed, more than any expensive outfit or gourmet meal, was a modicum of affection. Helen didn’t remember a single goodnight kiss from either of them, or any declaration of love. There’d been no embraces on meeting or leaving them, no sign that they were ever genuinely moved by her. All her life she’d felt unwanted by them, as if she’d been an accident – or maybe a hasty decision, regretted the minute they’d conceived her.
She tore the sheet and envelope into pieces and tossed them into the fireplace on top of last evening’s ashes. She raised the bottle to her lips and gulped down the remaining brandy, gasping as the burn hit her throat.
She looked at her face in the spotted mirror above the mantelpiece, saw the havoc wrought there. Cheekbones like blades: Alice had been the only one eating regularly for as long as Helen could remember. Shadows under her eyes so deep they might have been painted on, a testament to her broken nights. An eerie emptiness in the eyes, nothing left to shine out.
She pulled her hair back with both hands and gathered it into a bunch at the nape of her neck and stood silently in this position for several seconds. Eventually she dropped her hands and returned to the kitchen, where she took the scissors from the cutlery drawer.
She undressed slowly and completely, putting her clothes in a pile on the table. She spread overlapping sheets from the previous day’s newspaper in a rough square on the worn lino and stood in the centre, feeling the cold worming its way up through the bare soles of her feet. She worked methodically, without a mirror, beginning above her left ear and feeling her way slowly around. The scissors made a sawing sound that reminded her of a purring cat. The hair dropped silently, sliding past her naked shoulders and falling onto the newspaper.
When she had finished, she went back into the sitting room and looked again at her reflection. The right side was shorter than the left, the ends blunt and higgledy-piggledy, the top too full without its counterbalancing length. With her gaunt, blank face she looked like a doll whose owner in a fit of spite had hacked off her toy’s beautiful curls.
But Cormac had adored her hair, and without him it had become one more painful reminder: twining his fingers in it when they slow-danced, trailing it along his body when they were drowning in one another in bed, or wherever they got the chance. Washing it for her, both of them squeezed into the bath as he lathered and massaged and rinsed. Hadn’t she some chance of surviving without him if it wasn’t around to torture her with memories?
She didn’t care how she looked, but she wasn’t about to give strangers any excuse to stare at her. Tomorrow she’d take a tenner from the dwindling supply in Rick’s envelope and find someone to take off the rest of the curls, give it a shape that nobody would look twice at. She hadn’t been to a hairdresser in years. She’d go to some place that didn’t look like they’d rob you.
She lowered herself to the floor and lay on her side on the awful orange and yellow carpet that Cormac had chosen six months before they’d met. She brought her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. The cold air raised goose pimples on her bare skin but she stayed there, wound up tight, eyes open and unseeing, until she heard the doleful notes of the national anthem playing on her neighbour’s television.
She uncurled slowly and got to her feet, shivering now. She rubbed her arms and stamped her feet, feeling the lightness around her head. Back in the kitchen, as she was bundling up the newspaper sheets, a help wanted column caught her eye. She eased the page out from the rest, smoothed it flat and ran down through dental technician, typist, lorry driver, seamstress, legal secretary, waitress, crane operator.
She crumpled up the page and returned it to the bundle. Nothing she wanted, nothing she was qualified to do, apart from waitressing. Anyone could carry a plate from A to B, but she didn’t want to. She didn’t want to do anything.
She’d flatly refused to consider any kind of third-level education after secondary school, much to her parents’ dismay. ‘Have you any idea how many girls would give their eye teeth for the chance to go to university?’ her father had demanded, and Helen had resisted the urge to tell him to send one of them instead of her. She’d held her tongue and refused to budge.
His subsequent offer of a secretarial position within his brother’s legal practice had left her equally cold – she had no intention of working in a place where she was known as the boss’s niece. Instead she’d found a job without his help behind the counter of the glove department in Burke’s Department Store.
It wasn’t in the least demanding – in fact most of the time it bored her stupid – but it paid enough to allow her to move out of home and into a shared house, with a few pounds left over to have a couple of good nights out every weekend.
Twenty-seven and having the time of her life, marriage the last thing on her mind. Why would she tie herself down, give up her freedom in exchange for some man’s ring? And then twenty-eight-year-old Cormac Fitzpatrick had come in one day looking for a pair of gloves for his mother’s birthday, and while Helen was wrapping the sheepskin ones he eventually chose, he asked her if he could take her out to dinner.
And within six months they were living together in the house his grandmother had left him, arguing about the merits of The Beatles (him) over the Stones (her), and talking politics, which thankfully they agreed on – they both leant sharply to the left and despised the Church’s stranglehold on Ireland – and all she wanted was to take his name and to wear his ring for the rest of her life.
She went along when he and the band were performing, followed them around the ballrooms and dancehalls of Dublin and beyond, although up to this she’d despised the middle-of-the-road music put out by the showbands, giving a nod to jazz and pop and country-and-western with none of the grit of Led Zeppelin or Procol Harum, none of the fierce excitement of Grateful Dead or The Doors.
It didn’t matter: if he’d been playing organ music in cathedrals around Ireland she’d have sat in the front pew, mesmerised. He had bewitched her, he had swept into her life and taken it over. She watched him perform, the other band members invisible to her. She saw the way the women in the crowd eyed him up, all frosted lipstick and blue-lidded eyes, batting their false lashes at him and the other musicians, and she wanted to slap the smiles off their faces. She counted the minutes until the dancing ended and everyone went home, and he walked off the stage to her.
Needless to say, her parents had been horrified. Not so much at the idea of their only daughter living in sin – this was bad; but provided the neighbours, or their parish priest, didn’t find out, they were willing to endure it. Far worse was the fact that he was a member of a struggling showband and not at all wealthy or famous. But Helen hadn’t given a damn about her parents: all she cared about was the incredibly wonderful state in which she now existed.
She’d suspected, walking up the aisle a year later to Cormac – her father stiff with disapproval beside her – that she was already carrying his child, and she’d been right. Alice had been born seven months after the wedding, much to her parents’ fresh dismay. Bad enough that she’d married a musician from the wrong side of the tracks: far worse that he’d got her up the duff in advance.
She’d handed in her notice at Burke’s when she was eight months pregnant, told her boss she wouldn’t be back; much, she suspected, to his relief – they hadn’t exactly seen eye to eye over the years, but she’d been careful never to give him enough ammunition to sack her. The prospect of becoming a full-time housewife and mother didn’t exactly fill her with joy, but she’d bide her time until Alice started school, and then hopefully she’d find a more exciting workplace. In the meantime, they’d make do on Cormac’s sporadic earnings.
But now Cormac was gone, and his earnings were no more, and she ne
eded to find some other way to support Alice and herself, and she had no idea how she was going to do that.
She pushed the newspaper into the bin. She took her clothes from the table and went upstairs to bed.
Sarah
‘She wasn’t suicidal, it was a cry for help.’ Christine took a biscuit from the plate and sniffed it. ‘Is there ginger in these?’
‘No. How can you be so sure she wasn’t going to kill herself?’
‘Because of the scarf.’ They both looked at it, folded on the table by Christine’s mug. ‘She left it there deliberately, it’s obvious. She knew someone would come along and find it, just like you did, and stop her.’
‘But why didn’t she take it back when I offered it?’
Christine shrugged. ‘Maybe she was sick of it.’
Sarah wasn’t convinced. The woman had seemed in real distress – she’d seemed so wretched and defeated. But in the five days since their encounter there’d been no mention in the paper of an abandoned car, or a body found in a river, so thankfully it looked like she hadn’t gone through with it.
Christine stroked the soft silk. ‘It’s gorgeous. Are you sure you don’t want to keep it?’
‘I’m sure – I couldn’t possibly wear it.’
‘Well, I could.’ She opened her bag and slipped the scarf inside. ‘Are you delighted about the new job?’
‘I am – thrilled.’
The letter had come the day before, very formal, offering Sarah the position of head cook at St Sebastian’s, and signed by the secretary of the board of management, who hadn’t been at the interview. Sarah was to start, if she accepted the position, as soon as possible.
Uncle John had received the news of her departure from the hotel with rather less dismay than she’d been expecting; in fact, the prospect of losing her hadn’t seemed to put him out much at all. ‘It’s time you spread your wings,’ he told her. ‘You’ll make a terrific head cook, no bother to you. Give me a week or two to sort a replacement.’ And that was that.
Something in Common Page 3