Helen pictured them sitting apart from the small gathering, wondering when she was going to appear, maybe witnessing the growing unease when Helen hadn’t shown up, and wasn’t answering her phone.
She imagined them watching the group leaving, and wondering what was going on. She thought of them finally deciding that they’d had a wasted journey and making their way back to Heuston station for the train to Kildare.
She recalled Sarah’s delight when she and Neil had been invited to the wedding, how excited Sarah had sounded at the prospect of them finally meeting up. Helen remembered her own misgivings, particularly as the day itself approached, and her doubts about the wisdom of getting married had been growing silently. She’d regretted her impulse to invite them then, and wished it undone.
She’d write to Sarah tomorrow, she’d try to explain, and hope that Sarah would understand. She’d apologise, and maybe send something as a token of how sorry she was – and knowing Sarah, and her infinite capacity to see the best in everyone, Helen would be forgiven by her too.
But the following day an envelope arrived, stamped with the Kildare postmark. There was no return address in the corner and the handwriting wasn’t Sarah’s, but it rang a faint bell. She tore it open and pulled out the single sheet within.
Dear Helen
Just a note to apologise for missing your wedding last week: I’m afraid we have very sad news. Sarah went into premature labour that morning, and our son Luke was delivered by emergency Caesarean section but didn’t survive. We are both devastated, as you can imagine.
May we offer you our sincere congratulations on your wedding, and wish you all the best in the future. Sarah will be in touch when she feels able.
Sincerely
Neil Flannery
Helen reread the words, trying to take them in. Not sitting in the registry office then, no wasted journey because they’d never made it to Dublin. Sarah had gone into labour too early, and their baby had died. While Helen was taking off her wedding shoes and walking away from a life with Frank, Sarah was losing her baby.
She laid the page and its envelope on the hall table and picked up the phone and dialled Alice’s number. When the answering machine came on, she listened to her daughter’s voice and waited for the beep.
‘It’s me. Maybe you could ring me back when you get this. I have news.’
***
My dear Sarah
I simply don’t know what to say. I can’t imagine what you must be going through. I’m so terribly sorry.
I’m enclosing a lavender sachet. Slip it inside your pillow case and know that I’m thinking of you.
H xx
PS I’m not married, long story. I’ll tell you sometime, when you want to hear.
Dear Mrs Flannery
Mum told me what happened, and I just wanted you to know that I feel very very sad for you.
I’m sending you some of my favourite chocolate. It’s all I can think of.
love Alice xx
Sarah
‘It’s only been a month,’ he said. ‘You’re still upset. It’s understandable. You don’t know what you’re saying.’
But she knew exactly what she was saying. ‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated. ‘I know you don’t want to hear this, but I can’t go on living a lie any longer.’
Neil searched her face. ‘Sarah,’ he said, ‘love, you’re still hurting after … what happened—’
‘Luke,’ she said. ‘We lost Luke, that’s what happened.’ Every word ripping her into pieces. The wound still raw and bleeding, the image of his tiny white coffin being lowered into the ground still obscenely vivid.
Neil flinched, his eyes closing briefly. Jesus… Do you think I don’t know what happened? Do you think I can bear it any more than you can? But turning against me won’t help things: we need to support each other now.’
She shook her head, searching for the words that would hurt the least, because she didn’t want to hurt him any more than she had to.
‘This isn’t about losing our baby, this is about me … changing. I’ve changed towards you. I’ve fallen …’ and here she faltered, because there was no kind way to say what had to be said.
‘Sarah, don’t do—’
‘I don’t love you any more,’ she said loudly, the words trampling over his. ‘I’m not in love with you, so I can’t stay married to you. It would be wrong, and dishonest.’
She watched his face twisting, his forehead creasing, his head shaking from side to side. ‘Don’t say that, you don’t mean that. You’re—’
‘It was wrong to get back together,’ she said. ‘It was wrong for me to take you back. I did it because I was lonely and I missed you, I missed being married, and I thought us being a couple again would make me happy, but it didn’t – or not for long.’
‘We were happy,’ he insisted. ‘You were happy, I know you were—’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I thought I was, I told myself I was, but I wasn’t. I was happy when I found out I was pregnant. That was what I wanted, that was all I wanted. I didn’t admit it, even to myself, but when Luke died …’
She stopped, struggling against the tears that still tried to pour out of her whenever she dropped her guard enough to let them. She usually managed to save them for the times she was alone – cycling to and from the nursing home, lying in the bath, waiting in the car for Stephen and Martha to come out of their joint piano lesson. Snatching a few minutes to sit in the nursing-home garden, overgrown and wild again now without Charlie or Martina to look after it.
She drew in a shaky breath and forced herself to continue. ‘I went to Brian’s mother’s funeral,’ she told him, watching his expression changing. ‘I saw Noreen there. I think I knew that day, when I saw how … defeated she looked. I felt bad for her. I felt bad because of what you had done, to both of us. I was ashamed of what you had done.’
He nodded slowly. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘so that’s what this is all about. You’re getting your own back. I hurt you, so now you’re hurting me.’
‘No,’ she said fiercely, ‘it’s not that – I’m not like that. I don’t think like that, you know I don’t. I was heartbroken when you left me, of course I was, and the fact that it was for someone I’d trusted and liked made it twice as bad. And when you came back I could see that you were genuinely sorry, and I was prepared to forgive you – I did forgive you. It was only when I saw her again that I realised that what you had done had … killed something between us.’
‘That funeral was weeks ago,’ he protested. ‘You said nothing about it. You didn’t even tell me you’d gone.’
‘No, I didn’t. I was prepared to stay with you because I was pregnant with your child. I thought I owed it to you, and to the baby, to stay together. But now—’ She broke off, biting into her cheek.
‘I’m still Stephen’s father,’ he said, ‘and I’m as much Martha’s parent as you are.’
‘I know that – and you always will be. You’ll be able to see them. We’ll work out an arrangement. But we won’t be together any more. We can’t be. I can’t.’
‘Sarah, don’t do this,’ he said, his voice changing. ‘I’m grieving too, you’re not the only one.’
She looked at him, the man she’d once loved. ‘I know you are,’ she said gently, ‘but it doesn’t change things. I’m sorry.’
‘We need each other,’ he insisted. ‘You do love me – you’re not thinking straight now.’
She got to her feet. She took in the thick, light-brown hair that never lay straight, the little bump halfway down his nose, the squiggle of creases that fanned out from his grey eyes, the twin freckles in the centre of his right cheek. Not at all unattractive, in a roughly put-together sort of way. Good hands too: she’d always admired his hands.
‘I am thinking straight,’ she said. ‘I’m telling you the truth for the first time in months. We’re finished. This is finished. I’m not happy about it, I wish it could be different, but it’s not, and it never will be. You need
to understand that.’
But she knew nobody would understand it: they’d all think she’d lost her mind. They’d tell her it made no sense, she was acting irrationally, she’d regret it. They’d put it down to her grief. They’d say she was lashing out at the one closest to her, like people often did when they were overwrought.
But they’d be wrong. She’d never been so sure of anything. It was the right thing to do, like it had been the right thing to do to marry him eighteen years earlier, after they’d met in the nursing home and fallen in love.
She’d managed without him once; she’d do it again, even without the help of her father who was eighty-five, and beginning to show signs of slowing down. She was heartbroken, torn in two with loneliness and anger and grief, but she’d cope. She was healthy and strong, with two beautiful children, a steady job and a successful series of books that was about to be published in the US. She’d find a way.
Later that week, after Neil had packed up and moved back to his mother’s house, after Sarah had explained to the children that they were going to be living apart from now on, but that they’d see him as much as they wanted, after she’d broken the news to Christine and her father, and endured the disbelief and disapproval that she’d been expecting, she sat down to write to the one person she knew would understand.
Dear Helen
It’s been over a month now since our darling son Luke was taken from us, the worst, most unbearable time of my life. Thank you for your kind note and the sachet. I love the scent of lavender, I sleep with it under my cheek. Alice wrote a sweet note too, and sent chocolate. You must be so proud of her.
Neil and I have split up again – my doing this time. He’s back in his mother’s house. I feel bad for the children, but they’ll still see plenty of him, and I thought staying married for their sake would have been worse for everyone in the long run. I know I’ve done the right thing, even if nobody else seems to understand that. We should never have got back together, I can see that now. I did it for the wrong reason; it was another baby I wanted, not Neil.
I went back to work two weeks ago. I could have taken longer but I needed to have something to fill my days. I’m driving again too. I’m still hopeless but I’ll probably be doing a fair bit of it from now on so I’d better get used to it.
You didn’t marry Frank, I wonder why. I suppose, like me, you didn’t feel it was right for you. Maybe we’re more alike than we think, you and I. I hope you don’t feel too bad about it now. I hope your family understood, and poor Frank too.
Write when you get the chance, I always love to hear from you.
Yours ever
Sarah xxx
1998
Helen
The number was unfamiliar. ‘Hello?’
‘Am I speaking with Helen?’ A woman’s voice, calm, businesslike.
Helen sniffed the pineapple she was holding. ‘Yes. Who is this?’
‘I’m calling from St Regina’s Hospital. We found your number in the mobile phone of an older lady who was brought in earlier—’
Helen lowered her arm. ‘What lady?’
‘The only identification we could find is a library card in the name of M. D’Arcy.’
M. D’Arcy. Margaret D’Arcy.
Helen dropped the pineapple and her half-filled supermarket basket, and began walking rapidly towards the exit. ‘What happened? How is she?’
‘May I ask if you’re a relative?’
‘Daughter.’ She rummaged in her bag for her car keys as she strode through the doors into the chilly January evening. ‘What happened?’ she repeated.
‘She collapsed on the street. She was brought in about an hour—’
‘How is she?’
‘The doctor is with her now. If you could—’
‘What hospital did you say?’
‘St Regina’s. It’s along by the—’
‘I know where it is.’
She hung up and pushed her key into the car door, trying to take it in. Her mother had collapsed on the street: her elegant mother had stopped walking and crumpled onto the path, surrounded by strangers.
Someone, presumably, had phoned for an ambulance, which had taken her to St Regina’s where someone else had rummaged in her handbag and scrolled through the contacts in her mobile phone – the phone Alice had given her for Christmas – and decided that Helen, first name only, might be able to identify her. She had no idea who else was in her mother’s contact list, or which other person they might have tried before they’d got to H.
Alice’s name was surely there, had to be one of the first listed. But Alice’s number was foreign, so presumably they’d have passed it by, searching for a more local one.
She buckled her seatbelt and pushed the key into the ignition. She drove more carefully than usual through the early-evening streets, something inside her head buzzing oddly, until she pulled into the hospital car park.
She turned off the ignition and sat looking up at the three-storey red-brick building. She’d driven past St Regina’s countless times – it was on her route to her mother’s house, barely half a mile from it – but had never been inside. On her mother’s insistence, her father had been brought to the Blackrock Clinic, a mile or two further away, when he’d had his stroke. Nobody around today to do the same for her.
Helen got out of the car and made her way towards the front of the building. She walked up the crumbling concrete steps and pushed through the white-painted double doors. The small lobby, with its long wooden bench set against the lemon-coloured wall to her left, held the plastic smell of hairspray.
‘Margaret D’Arcy,’ she said to the ludicrously young-looking woman – cropped blonde hair, pimples – who sat behind the reception desk. ‘She was brought in earlier today.’
The woman – girl – set aside her magazine and tapped her computer keyboard. ‘Second floor,’ she said, her eyes not leaving the screen. ‘Left down the corridor and up the stairs, or there’s a lift further on. The nurses will tell you which room.’
The nurse Helen met on the second floor – sixties, harassed, baggy-eyed – showed her into an empty waiting room. ‘I’ll get the doctor for you,’ she said, rushing off.
‘Do you know how my mother is?’ Helen asked – but the nurse had gone, making no sound in her rubber soles. Helen ignored the stack of magazines on the chipped coffee-table and stood at the little window, hands planted on the barely warm, dusty radiator beneath. She watched a man in a white apron cross the yard below with a big tray of something she couldn’t make out. The darkening sky threatened rain for the first time in about a week.
‘Helen?’
She turned. A woman in a white coat had entered the room, hand already extended as she crossed the floor.
‘Jean Carmody,’ she said. Her voice was soft, the kind of whispery voice you’d use in a church, or maybe a library. Her skin was ice-cold, her handshake loose. ‘I was the doctor on duty when your mother was brought in.’
Helen waited, focusing on the lips that were bare of colour, and badly chapped.
‘I’m afraid I don’t have good news for you, Helen. Your mother suffered a brain haemorrhage, quite a severe one. There’s nothing we can do, apart from making her as comfortable as we can.’
‘She’s dying,’ Helen said, the words coming out sharper than she’d intended.
‘I’m afraid so. It could be hours, it could be a few days, but she hasn’t got long.’
Helen looked down at the doctor’s hands, which were clasped tightly now, fingers knitted together, almost in prayer. A long time since Helen had prayed for anything.
‘Can I see her?’
‘Of course.’
The doctor led the way down the corridor. Following her, Helen felt the echo of a walk down a similar corridor, leaning heavily on Breen’s arm. A long time since he’d crossed her mind too. The wedding day probably, two years last September. Her bouquet sitting in his blue bowl the night before.
‘She’s drifting in a
nd out of consciousness,’ the doctor said, ‘but she won’t make a lot of sense if she’s awake.’ They came to a door and she pushed it open, then stood back to allow Helen to enter.
The tiny room, suffocatingly warm, held just one bed. A small television, perched on a shelf high on the opposite wall, was switched off. Helen’s mother lay unmoving, her face almost as white as the pillowcase beneath her head, her eyes half open. At the sound of their approach she turned her head slightly.
Helen slipped into the tweed-covered green armchair by the bed and reached for the hand – looking, all of a sudden, terribly wizened – that lay unmoving on the sheet. ‘It’s me,’ she said, stroking the papery skin, the swollen knuckles, the perfectly manicured nails that her mother had had repainted every Friday afternoon for as long as Helen could remember.
‘I’m here,’ she said. ‘It’s Helen. I’m here now.’
Sarah
It had begun, a few months earlier, with a mixed-up word. It was that simple.
‘Grandpa said he went to the geography,’ Stephen had told her. ‘I didn’t know what he was talking about. He meant the library. It was funny.’
Sarah, preoccupied with preparing a buffet-lunch menu for thirty guests to commemorate the nursing home’s fiftieth year of existence, had passed it off as a moment of absentmindedness. The man had just turned eighty-seven: of course he was going to be forgetful.
But a few weeks later it had happened again.
‘He couldn’t remember the word “television”. He kept saying, “That thing in the sitting room,” and we were guessing sofa and fireplace and stuff. It was like a game, but he got cross when I laughed.’
The next time she saw him, Sarah had asked him lightly how he was feeling.
‘I’m fine,’ he’d said – and he appeared the same as ever to her. Slower, certainly, than he used to be, but still driving, still coming to them every Sunday to spend the afternoon and eat dinner.
‘Let me know,’ she’d said to twelve-year-old Martha, ‘if you notice anything about Grandpa – if he gets confused again, I mean, or does something a bit … odd.’
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