She blew out the candles and watched her mother sipping the single Babycham she ordered each birthday dinner, the only alcohol she ever took. She listened to her father making his usual jokey speech about how hard he’d had to work to afford the birthday dinner, and about how he and Martha looked forward to the day when they could retire and be supported by their children. Same speech every year, same everything every year.
‘Won’t be long,’ he said to Sarah, ‘with your new job, and Christine marrying into money, your mother and I will be heading off on the world cruise any day now.’
Brian grinned. ‘I think you might have to wait until Sarah writes her bestseller.’
‘Any day now,’ Christine added, cutting the cake into slices.
‘You can laugh,’ Sarah told them, ‘but I am going to write a book.’
She was. She just had to find the time. After work tomorrow she’d make a start for sure, or sometime very soon anyway. A period tale she thought, set in a big house with servants – that kind of story was always popular. All she needed was to sit down and make a start.
She joined in as they sang ‘For She’s A Jolly Good Fellow’ and wondered, not very seriously, when she would finally get to meet Neil Flannery. Might be a big let-down, not her type at all, but it would be nice to find out, either way.
She didn’t have long to wait. The following Friday, as she was helping Donna, the kitchen junior, to wipe down the stainless-steel worktops after the lunch clear-up, she glanced out of the window that overlooked the small car park. There was Nuala Flannery on her usual visit to Stephen – but the car was wrong: that wasn’t her blue Mini. And Nuala wasn’t getting out on the driver’s side.
Sarah watched as the other door opened and a fair-haired man emerged. Long legs, tall, slim. Grey tweedy jacket, blue jeans, too far away to make out facial features. She watched him take his mother’s carrier bag from her – it must be him, it must be the son – as they walked together in the direction of the main door.
She waited twenty minutes, making out the following week’s menu plan and writing up the shopping list for Dan, the nursing-home driver and general handyman, before making her way down the corridor towards Stephen’s room. She would have been dropping in anyway, she told herself. They’d think it odd if she didn’t appear: she always put her head in when Nuala was there to ask if they wanted tea.
She tapped on the door, her stomach fluttering slightly. Stop, don’t build it up.
‘Come in.’
Stephen’s voice. She opened the door. ‘I just wondered,’ she began, not looking in the direction of the man who stood by the window, not looking at him at all, ‘if anyone wanted a cuppa.’
‘Sarah,’ Stephen said, reaching a quavering hand towards her. ‘Come in and meet my son. Neil, this is the best cook in Ireland – apart from your mother, of course.’
‘Oh, shush.’
Grey eyes, magnified behind large, thick glasses that gave him a scholarly look. Regular features, longish nose, fairish hair. Outdoorsy complexion, a ruddiness to his cheeks, not surprising given the job he’d chosen. She was conscious of both his parents observing them as they shook hands, could feel her own cheeks becoming hot. Hopefully he’d think it was from the kitchen.
‘Hello,’ she murmured, having to look up several inches to meet the grey eyes. His palm felt slightly rough – from wielding a spade, she presumed. She wondered if he wore the glasses when he worked. They’d look a bit incongruous with his gardening gear.
‘I’ve heard a lot about you,’ he said, their hands still clasped together. ‘Apparently you make a terrific scone.’
She smiled, glad of the opportunity to turn towards Stephen. ‘Well, your father seems to like them.’
‘He must have gained half a stone since Sarah came along,’ Nuala put in.
‘And you should taste her lemon meringue pie,’ Stephen added. ‘I made Nuala get the recipe, didn’t I?’
‘You did – and mine didn’t turn out half as nice.’
‘Get away, it was lovely.’
It seemed to Sarah that along with the spoken conversation there was another, unarticulated exchange taking place between the older couple: How’s it going? Are they getting on? Were we right? Something in the way they both looked from her to Neil, in the heartiness of their voices, in how Nuala’s glance flickered to their hands as they separated at last. All that was needed was for Stephen to say something about how lucky the man would be who got Sarah, but thankfully he didn’t.
‘I’d love a cuppa,’ Nuala was saying – Nuala who never took one normally. ‘Can you sit with us and have one yourself?’ Oh, clever Nuala.
Sarah made a show of looking at her watch, even though she knew the time practically to the second. ‘I have a few minutes,’ she said.
Nuala turned to her son. ‘And maybe you’d fancy one?’
‘I’d love one, thanks.’ The grey eyes met Sarah’s again. ‘Can I give you a hand?’
‘Oh, no, honestly—’
For goodness’ sake, was she blushing again? You’d think she was fifteen, not twenty-five. It was Stephen and Nuala looking all pleased with themselves – it was the obvious matchmaking that was going on. Really, as if they didn’t think either of them capable of finding a partner on their own.
She escaped from the room and hurried back to the kitchen, where she made tea and cut slices from one of the coffee cakes she’d baked that morning. ‘Who’s that for?’ Donna wanted to know, and Sarah said Stephen Flannery had a few visitors, and were the salt cellars refilled yet?
First impressions had been favourable, she decided, taking a tray from the stack on the shelf by the window. Nothing objectionable about his appearance – the glasses made him look intelligent, they were a plus – and clearly he was on good terms with his parents, which reflected well on his character.
She scalded the teapot and spooned in tea. Had his own house too, which was good; and being a gardener meant he appreciated nature, also a lovely quality in anyone.
But there was no point in building it into anything at this stage: he might well have a girlfriend his parents knew nothing about, or he mightn’t fancy Sarah in the least. A possibility, that was what he was. A slightly less faint one, maybe, than he’d been before they met, but still just a possibility.
Chances were nothing would happen – life didn’t fall into place as easily as that – but for now she’d keep an open mind. No harm in doing that.
1976
Helen
Dear Miss Fitzpatrick
Thank you for your piece on the death of Agatha Christie which you submitted recently. Please find attached our cheque payment.
Regards
Typed underneath was M. Breen, Editor, but the signature above the typed name was Catherine Fortune’s. Word for word, apart from the subject of Helen’s submission, it was identical to the half-dozen or so other letters – hardly letters, more like notes – that she’d received from the newspaper since the previous August. All signed by Catherine Fortune – M. Breen, Editor, being too busy, presumably.
And paper-clipped to the note was the identical cheque that had accompanied all the rest. More than she’d expected, enough to keep her and Alice in bread and jam for a month or two, with a few quid left over for a bottle of Powers Gold Label.
‘Mama!’
She opened the kitchen door. ‘What?’
‘My sausage fell on the floor. There’s stuff stuck on it.’
‘Rub it off and it’ll be fine. I’ll be in in a minute.’
She slipped the cheque out from under the paper clip. She folded it in two and tucked it into the pocket of her jeans. She tore the note and its envelope in two and dropped the pieces into the ashtray that shared space on a kitchen chair with the phone.
She opened the front door and lit a cigarette and stood looking out at the garden. Gravelled rectangle roughly the size of a double grave, narrow cement path running alongside it to the gate. A waist-high privet hedge separating
her from her neighbour, immaculately cut on his side and across the top, left alone to do whatever it wanted on hers.
The grey sky was striped with ribbons of pale blue. A teenage girl passed in the street, her cream cheesecloth top surely not warm enough for the chilly February day, her platform-soled clogs poking from beneath the wide, wide legs of her jeans. Helen leaned against the door jamb and marvelled all over again that she was being paid to do what came so easily to her, that this occupation which gave her so much satisfaction was proving to be her salvation.
It hadn’t started the way she’d planned, with the shop-assistant piece. She’d begun writing it, she’d been more than halfway through, early on the morning of August the first, when a newsflash on the radio had announced the massacre in Northern Ireland of three members of the Miami showband, returning to Dublin in the early hours after performing for the evening in a County Down dancehall.
Her heart had stopped. The Miami. She’d never met them, but Cormac had. Their paths had crossed often, all the showbands knew one another. He’d known them, he’d spoken to them and now three of them were dead, ambushed on a country road in the middle of the night and shot.
She’d put her head in her hands and cried at the thought of their wives and children and parents, at the years of grief and anger and pain that had only begun for them. Christ, was there no end to the madness of Northern Ireland? Would the slaughter of innocents never stop?
When she could see straight, she’d wiped her face and set aside the article she’d been writing, and rolled a fresh sheet of paper into the second-hand typewriter she’d bought with her father’s money. She’d written without stopping, more tears spilling out of her. She cried for the just-killed men and for Cormac, her fingers blindly finding the right keys until Alice had appeared, rumpled and pink-cheeked and demanding breakfast.
All that day she’d kept at it, any chance she got. She’d introduced herself as the wife of a former musician. She’d outlined the lifestyle of a typical showband, the camaraderie between the members, the rehearsals in draughty garages, the endless travelling to venues, the dingy B&Bs when getting home after a night’s playing wasn’t an option.
She’d written her imagined account of the atrocity, describing the chat in the van beforehand, the happy banter of the men after a successful evening’s performance. Their acceptance of the checkpoint, their slight annoyance maybe, at their journey being delayed, their assumption that they’d be on the way again before long.
She hadn’t lingered on the actual killings. She’d spoken of the horribly quiet aftermath, the lingering tang of smoke in the air, the pieces of the blown-up minibus strewn across the road and scattered over the surrounding fields, the ripped-apart guitar cases, the destroyed instruments. She’d mourned the senselessness of killing three young musicians.
She’d moved on to describe her own reaction on hearing the news; the shock and disbelief the newsreader’s calm voice had caused. She’d imagined the families of the dead men hearing the same words from policemen, being woken up on a Friday morning to have their hearts smashed to pieces.
She’d skimmed over it when it was finished, but she’d changed nothing. She’d scribbled a note to M. Breen, asking if he’d like to print it, and she’d signed it Helen O’Dowd. She’d slipped it into an envelope and walked with Alice to the letterbox at the end of the next street.
Two days later she’d opened the paper and there it had been: a half page of her words accompanied by a picture of the crime scene. The headline, which she hadn’t written, read The Day the Music Died, and underneath, in smaller print, An insider’s view of the Miami Showband Massacre. Her name – her pseudonym – was there too, in even smaller print.
The following morning a cheque had arrived, accompanied by the first of the letters. Helen had phoned the number at the top of the page and asked to speak to Catherine Fortune.
‘Oh, I loved your piece,’ she’d said warmly, as soon as Helen had introduced herself. ‘So moving. Well done. Sorry it had to be cut a bit, to make it fit.’
‘It’s not my name, though,’ Helen had replied. ‘Fitzpatrick is my name: O’Dowd is just … one I’m using.’
Catherine Fortune had understood immediately. ‘Oh – right, so you need a new cheque. That’s no problem, just send me back the old one and I’ll pop a replacement into the post.’
‘Thanks a lot – and when can I send another piece?’
She’d heard the smile in the other woman’s voice. ‘Anytime you like – but of course it’s up to Mr Breen what goes in.’
‘Of course.’
‘And you need to make it a definite length – either five hundred or a thousand words usually.’
Clearly, no special qualifications were needed to have an article published; it just had to pass muster with the boss, which she’d accepted was fair enough. She’d better wait a while, though, didn’t want to seem greedy, in case it put him off.
She’d finished the piece on the shopgirl – so light it seemed compared to the other, but maybe it was good to show him that she was versatile. She’d forced herself to wait three weeks before posting it off – and the following week there it was, accompanied by a shot of a model (Helen presumed) posing behind a department store counter, a look of utter boredom on her perfectly fresh face.
Since then she’d sent roughly one article a month. She’d written about the second marriage of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, eighteen months after their divorce, and the ordinary suburban house in Monasterevin where a Dutch businessman was imprisoned by terrorists for over a fortnight, and a new law that was passed in Britain which introduced equal pay rights for women – and every article she submitted to M. Breen had found favour, and had been printed, usually word for word.
In November Catherine had attached a handwritten note to the usual letter, asking for a photo. Just a small head and shoulders will be fine, she’d written. Something we can put with your pieces, since you’re becoming a regular with us!
Helen had bought a new film for the camera she hadn’t used since before Cormac’s illness. She’d snapped herself as best she could half a dozen times – no front views, all three-quarter profiles, all taken slightly from above so her eyes weren’t visible – and she’d used the rest of the reel to photograph the amazingly beautiful sunset that evening.
The head and shoulders photos, when she collected them from the chemist, were nicely out of focus. She picked the best of them and sent it off to Catherine. The sunsets were disastrous, the glorious sky reduced to smears of over-exposed, watery colours. As she was stuffing them into the bin, she realised that taking a snap of her only child hadn’t even occurred to her.
Her phone had rung early on the morning of January the twelfth.
‘Mark Breen here,’ an unfamiliar, brusque male voice had said, and it had taken Helen a few seconds to realise who was on the other end.
‘Nice to—’
‘I’m assuming you’re a reader.’
‘Well, I—’
‘Agatha Christie has just died. Are you familiar with her books?’
‘Of course I—’
‘Good. Can you do a thousand words by the end of tomorrow?’
And just like that, she’d got her first commission, along with an introduction to her employer, who clearly didn’t believe in wasting words. What did she care, as long as he paid up?
She ground her cigarette under her shoe and threw the butt into the privet hedge. Ten minutes later, as she was bundling Alice into her coat before letting her out to play in their scrap of back garden – same size as the front, straggly excuse of a lawn – the doorbell rang.
To her surprise, her mother, who hardly ever called unannounced, who hardly ever called full stop, stood outside, looking as perfectly groomed as ever.
Tailored grey coat, under which she most likely wore its matching dress; silk stockings, black patent handbag and shoes, hair backcombed into submission. Looking as out of place in the humble street wit
h its shabby terrace of houses as it was possible to look. No car in sight, of course not: her parents had always come to Helen and Cormac’s by taxi, afraid to chance leaving a car unattended.
‘Happy birthday,’ she said, offering Helen a cream envelope. Her birthday, completely forgotten about for the second year running. The one time in the year that Margaret D’Arcy felt entitled – or obliged – to cross her daughter’s threshold uninvited.
‘Come in.’
Helen stood back, picturing the mess of the kitchen, dishes piled in the sink, the remains of Alice’s breakfast still on the table. What the hell: let her take them as she found them, her own fault for not ringing ahead.
Her mother made a pretty good show of not appearing to notice the untidiness as she accepted Helen’s offer of coffee. Supermarket brand, not the good stuff her parents were used to, but it wouldn’t kill her.
‘Where’s Alice?’
‘Out the back.’ Helen put on the kettle and slit open the envelope, conscious of her mother’s eyes on her. She pulled out the card it contained and opened it without reading the message on the front. Two twenty-pound notes lay inside, the same amount they’d given her each birthday since she’d turned eighteen.
The money had kept coming when Helen had committed the cardinal sin of moving in with a musician, but it had become a cheque that was posted to Cormac’s address rather than personally delivered. This arrangement had continued after Helen and Cormac got married, and the only contact she had with her parents was one strained phone call from her to them each month.
The fact that Cormac hadn’t lived long enough to cause them more than a few years of outrage had changed things, of course: once it became apparent that he was not, after all, going to outlive them, they’d reappeared, turning up at the house with bottles of wine and fruit cakes, offering to take Alice for a few hours, asking if there was anything they could do, anything they could pay for. Pretending a concern they couldn’t possibly feel.
Something in Common Page 5