Each time they appeared, Helen had made them tea and cut slices of whatever cake they’d brought. She had updated them on Cormac’s condition and watched them trying to interact with the granddaughter they barely knew. She’d taken the money her father had handed over – pouring money into the gulf between them, imagining he could fill it – and thanked him with as much grace as she could manage.
At the funeral she’d listened as people sympathised with her mother and shook hands with her father. She’d thought about how much of a disappointment Cormac had been to them, how they’d despised the fact that he didn’t go to work in a white shirt, how they’d done little to hide their disdain in his company. She’d recalled her wedding day, the pinched, strained smile of her mother, the contempt for his new son-in-law plain in her father’s face, and she’d known that she could never, ever forgive them for their snobbery and heartlessness.
Since Cormac’s death they hadn’t been invited to Helen’s house. She couldn’t care less if she never laid eyes on either of them again, but she was damned if she was going to deprive Alice of whatever wealth they left behind, so every Thursday afternoon she took Alice to visit them. They sat in the kitchen and made small-talk for as long as it took Helen to drink a cup of her mother’s admittedly very good coffee.
While she waited for the kettle to boil she busied herself with jug and filter, searching in her head for something to talk about. When she turned around, her mother was gathering up Alice’s crockery, trying to keep her sleeve out of the puddle of ketchup on the plate.
Helen went to the back door and opened it. ‘Granny’s here,’ she told Alice. ‘Come in and say hello.’
Alice was no conversationalist, but she’d do. Anyone would do.
Sarah
‘You’ll be glad to hear I’ve made a start on the book.’
‘About time – you’ve talked about it for long enough. How far have you got?’
‘Well, I haven’t begun the actual writing yet. I’m still thinking up a plot and getting the characters together.’
‘Oh.’
‘Still, it’s a start … Stop eating those cherries. I’ll have none left for the cake.’
Christine pushed the tub across the table. ‘So where’s Lover Boy taking you tonight?’
‘The cinema, Barry Lyndon. Why don’t you make yourself useful and line those cake tins?’
‘You’re blushing.’
Sarah laughed. ‘I am not.’
Still too soon to tell, only a few months since they’d laid eyes on one another; and even though this felt so right, she would hug it to herself and let nobody know how she was really feeling, not even Christine. Not yet.
It had begun slowly, with a handful of further encounters in his father’s room, during which Sarah noticed that he had a habit of placing a finger at the corner of his mouth and tilting his head to the side when he was listening. And his smile was delightfully crooked, sliding up more on the right. And his aftershave, or maybe it was whatever shampoo he was using, reminded her of the sea. And she liked the shoes he wore, and the fact that his fingernails were always clean, despite his job.
On the whole, she’d decided, she approved of Neil Flannery. As potential boyfriends went, he was definitely in with a chance. Once or twice their eyes had met, and he’d held her gaze for a scatter of seconds, and she’d thought, with a delicious flip in her stomach, that maybe there was something there.
But she was also acutely conscious, during each of these episodes, that they were being observed by his parents, who, no doubt, had had them marched down the aisle and happily married after their second meeting. Even if Neil was at all interested in her – and she had no real idea that he was – what chance did any kind of a relationship have of developing in Stephen and Nuala’s well-meant but terribly inhibiting presence?
And then one afternoon towards the end of November, about two weeks after they’d first come face to face, there was a knock on the kitchen door as Sarah was putting cups onto trays in preparation for the tea.
‘I’ll go,’ Bernadette said, wiping her hands on her apron. Callers to the kitchen at this time were commonplace: someone looking for a mid-afternoon cuppa or glass of milk, or maybe a hot-water bottle refilled. Sarah continued to assemble the cups as she planned the next day’s lunch in her head: stuffed pork steak with roast potatoes and turnip, followed by treacle pudding and—
‘It’s for you.’ Bernadette winked at her. ‘Stephen Flannery’s son.’
Sarah added another two cups to the tray, feeling the blood rushing to her face. ‘Probably wants another round of tea.’
‘Yes, I’m sure that’s what he wants,’ Bernadette replied, plunging her mop once again into the bucket of steaming water. ‘That’ll be why he asked for you specially. He must have heard I can’t make tea.’
‘Sorry to bother you,’ he said, his leather jacket slung over an arm. ‘I know you’re busy, but I just wanted to say thanks for looking after my father so well. I’m starting another job in Tullamore next week, so I’ll be back to visiting here at the weekends.’
Sarah forced a smile. Not interested then, just being polite. Just saying thanks before he left. ‘It’s my pleasure. He’s a lovely man.’
He began to shrug on his jacket. ‘Well, he thinks the world of you, I know that, and it means a lot to my mother too, that he’s being looked after so well.’
She remained silent, the smile stiff on her face.
‘I don’t suppose …’ not meeting her eye as he fumbled with the zip ‘… you’d let me buy you dinner some time? I mean, only if you want to.’
He looked up then and she saw his crooked, charming smile.
‘That would be lovely,’ she said, delight fizzing inside her.
‘Good.’ The smile slid further up his face. ‘I can’t guarantee the standard of food would be up to yours, but we might be lucky.’
He took her to Bannigan’s in Kildare town and bought her sirloin steak and strawberry cheesecake. He drove her home and kissed her cheek, and asked to see her again.
The following Saturday night they went to see Shampoo at the cinema. He bought her a box of Black Magic and didn’t attempt to put his arm around her in the darkness, which was a bit of a disappointment. He drove her home and leant across to kiss her cheek, and she turned her head and met his mouth with hers. He tasted of chocolate.
For their third date he took her to a performance of The Field in a concert hall of a town about twenty miles away. During the interval they drank orange juice and he told her about a garden he was restoring in the grounds of a Tullamore hotel. As they resumed their seats after the interval, he slipped his hand into hers, and she moved closer and touched her thigh to his.
Their goodnight lasted twenty minutes. He cradled her head and whispered that he was very, very happy to have found her, and she wanted more than anything to stay in the dark car, within the warmth of his arms.
They saw each other every Friday and Saturday night. He’d given her a silver bracelet for Christmas, she’d given him Queen’s A Night at the Opera LP. All she could think about was him, and all that mattered were the weekends. It was 1976, and she was finally, finally in love.
‘You’re blushing again,’ Christine said, and Sarah threw a cherry across the table at her.
Helen
Twenty-three minutes into the evening she’d knocked back two large glasses of awful red wine, and eaten a single stuffed mushroom, and rejected everything else on offer – sausage rolls, chicken drumsticks, skewered something or other – from the long trestle tables that lined one side of the room.
She couldn’t remember the last party she’d attended, except that it must have been with Cormac, probably before Alice had been born. She was deeply regretting her decision to come to this one – what had possessed her to let Catherine talk her into it?
She’d escaped the newspaper’s last Christmas party by playing the widow card. ‘It’s the first Christmas without my husband,’ she’d
told Catherine. ‘I really don’t feel up to it’ – and Catherine had been all sympathy and understanding, as Helen had known she would. Anyway, with just a handful of articles written by then, and no direct contact at that stage with Breen, she hadn’t felt particularly affiliated with the newspaper.
This year she hadn’t got off so lightly.
‘Say hello to him,’ Catherine had urged her on the phone. ‘You needn’t stay long, just enough to show your face and tell him you’re happy to be on the payroll. It’ll stand you in good stead, believe me. And I’d really like to meet you too.’
Catherine might like to meet her, but Helen wasn’t convinced that Breen would. In fact, she considered it a safe bet that he wouldn’t give a damn if they never came face to face. Over the eighteen months or so that she’d been working for him, from the few conversations they’d had over the phone – he called her with commissions, she called him with queries – she’d got the impression of someone who was always on the verge of losing his patience.
‘Breen,’ he’d snap as a greeting, managing to make her feel she was already in trouble. No ‘Hello’, no ‘Hope I’m not interrupting anything’, no small-talk at all. After the briefest possible conversation, his sign-off was usually an equally clipped ‘Right’ – because ‘Goodbye’, presumably, was out of the question.
Helen had never heard a word of praise from him, never got a hint that he’d actually liked any of her pieces, even though he had turned down not a single one of them. When she’d taken a chance and submitted her first unasked-for book review, a couple of weeks after the Agatha Christie piece, it had appeared in the following day’s paper – and not long afterwards she’d taken delivery of two book proofs by authors whose names she didn’t recognise.
500 words on each by Friday week latest he’d written – latest underlined twice – on the compliments slip that had accompanied them, MB at the bottom so she’d known it was him. Even his spiky handwriting looked annoyed.
God help Mrs Breen, in the unlikely event that such an unfortunate creature existed – would any woman in her right mind take him, for better or worse? Anyone who did would have to be as cantankerous as him. Maybe she’d turn up on his arm tonight, lording it over the plebs.
To make things worse, getting to the party had involved enlisting the help of her parents. There’d been little choice but to ask them, with Anna from across the road, Alice’s regular babysitter, having taken the ferry the day before to spend Christmas and New Year with her married daughter in England.
Helen was well aware that her career as a journalist was a source of continuing bemusement to her parents. Writing for a newspaper wouldn’t be much of a step up, in their eyes, from earning a living as a musician, and the fact that she was working in a male-dominated area – according to Catherine, Helen was one of just two female writers on the paper’s list of freelancers – didn’t help.
Then again, she was working for her parents’ newspaper of choice, which she knew her father held in high regard, and she was supporting herself and Alice, so there wasn’t much they could legitimately object to.
‘A Christmas party,’ her mother had said. ‘How sociable. Of course we can take Alice. Have you got something to wear?’
Helen had resisted the impulse to tell her that actually she’d decided to go nude. ‘My black trouser suit.’ The one I wore to Cormac’s funeral, she might have added, but didn’t.
‘That old thing? You’ve had it for years. Let us treat you to something new.’
Throwing money at her, like they’d always done. Still believing she’d mistake it for love.
The trouser suit was old – Helen had bought it before she met Cormac – but it would do fine for a party where she knew nobody, where she didn’t give a damn what anyone thought of her, or her outfit. Far cry from the hours she’d spent getting ready to go out to the parties Cormac and the boys would be invited to.
She felt the alcohol begin to soften her up around the edges, despite its unappealing taste. The not-very-large room – presumably the main working area of the paper – was full of noisy, laughing people, the air heavy with their cigarette smoke. Helen had spoken to nobody apart from Catherine, who thankfully had been on the lookout for her, and who’d turned out to be both older and heavier than Helen had envisaged, and every bit as friendly as she had always sounded on the phone.
‘I just love your writing,’ she’d told Helen, dabbing at her large, rosy face with a red napkin. ‘So original and witty, and you can write serious as well as funny. And your book reviews are always so direct.’
Breen, apparently, had yet to arrive. ‘He’s not really a party person,’ Catherine had admitted, which didn’t surprise Helen in the least. ‘He’ll definitely show up at some stage, though, and I’ll introduce you.’
But Catherine had gone to the toilet a few minutes ago and hadn’t reappeared – tired, no doubt, of having to babysit the freelancer. One more glass of bad wine and Helen would make her escape, Breen or no Breen. She edged her way through the crowd to the makeshift bar and refilled her glass, managing to splatter her jacket in the process when someone’s elbow connected with her.
‘Helen!’
In the act of reaching for a napkin, she turned. Catherine was making her way back through the crowd, followed by someone in a dark suit – presumably the famous M. Breen, dragged over to meet her so he could be duly thanked for his patronage. Helen gave a quick swipe at the damp stain with her sleeve and summoned as much of a smile as she could muster.
‘There you are,’ Catherine said. ‘Mark, this is Helen O’Dowd – or should I say Fitzpatrick? Helen, meet Mark Breen.’
The navy suit looked expensive – having grown up with her father, she knew a well-cut suit when she saw it. Immaculate white shirt, dark grey tie. Almost-black hair, cut so short it stood in bristles around his head. Startlingly blue eyes that met hers full on, the barest ghost of a smile on his face as he nodded once, crushing her fingers briefly in his.
Not handsome – the nose a shade too wide, the cheeks a little pocked, the skin about the eyes deeply creased and shadowed – but a face you wouldn’t easily forget, with the intensity of that gaze. Hard to put an age on him: somewhere between forty and fifty, she thought.
She opened her mouth to say something suitably grateful, like Catherine had suggested – but the words refused to come. She was working for her cheques, for Christ’s sake, he wasn’t handing out charity. She was a decent writer: if she wasn’t, he’d have told her to take a running jump.
She raised her glass. She’d say what she chose. ‘Happy Christmas. Thanks for the invite. Good to put a face to the voice.’ There, that would do him.
He inclined his head again, the smallest hint of a nod. She had the feeling he was taking her measure. She saw his glance flick to the darker patch on the front of her jacket. ‘Someone bumped into me as I was pouring,’ she said. ‘I’m not blotto yet.’
‘It wasn’t an accusation,’ he pointed out mildly. The voice was familiar, if less peremptory than she was used to.
‘Just thought I’d explain.’ She indicated the bottle. ‘Can I get you one?’ It was a party, for crying out loud. Did he have to look so damn serious?
‘Not just now.’ As he spoke, his gaze drifted from her face to wander off to her left. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me,’ he went on, extending his hand towards her again. ‘Good of you to come, help yourself to the wine.’ Another finger-crushing shake and he was gone, disappearing into the crowd.
Helen looked after him, prickling with annoyance. Clearly, the great M. Breen didn’t consider her interesting enough to spend more than thirty seconds in her company. Help yourself to the wine indeed, as if she should be grateful for his atrocious plonk. As if all she’d come for was his free booze.
She turned back to Catherine. ‘That went well.’
The PA didn’t notice, or chose to ignore, the sarcasm. ‘It went fine. I’m delighted you finally got to meet him. Let me intro
duce you to some more of the gang.’
But Helen decided she’d had more than enough. ‘Thanks,’ she said, setting down her untouched glass, ‘but I really must be going – I promised the babysitter I’d be home by ten.’
The white lies she told, the fronts she put up, the hard shell she’d grown around her heart over the last two years. She stood on the path outside the newspaper offices, pulling the cold, crisp air into her lungs, ignoring the people who pushed past her. Everyone looking happy, three days before Christmas.
On the way to the bus stop she went into an off-licence and bought a bottle of their second cheapest whiskey.
‘Happy Christmas,’ the youngish bearded man behind the counter said, and Helen took her change and wished him the same, because for all she knew he deserved one.
Back home she felt her way along the tiny darkened hallway until her foot touched the bottom stair. She climbed halfway up and sat, taking the bottle from its brown paper bag and unscrewing the cap. As she drank, she conjured up her first Christmas with Cormac, just a few weeks after they’d met. The marvel of what they’d found still new and fresh, their hunger for one another all-consuming.
This house had been their sanctuary, all they needed under its roof. The Christmas Day chicken drying and shrivelling in the oven, everything forgotten in the wonder of their entwined bodies, the miracle of the love that had swept away everything else.
People passed in the street outside, their cheerful shouts climbing the dark stairs to her. She pressed a black-jacketed sleeve to her wet face, remembering the length of tinsel that he’d threaded between her toes, trailed up her calves and thighs and across her abdomen and breasts. She remembered the tantalising tickle of it along the mounds and valleys of her body, the delicious tease of its feathery touch making her hot with desire, forcing her finally to pull it away from him and draw him closer—
Something in Common Page 6