Alice, standing on her mother’s left, wore a pale grey trouser suit. Her newly blonde hair, long enough for the past few years to gather up, had been caught on top of her head with a triangular ivory clip, a style that managed to make her look both younger and older than her twenty-seven years.
The church held just three other occupants: the groom, the priest and the priest’s niece Lara, whose suggestion the location had been. ‘It was my local church growing up,’ she’d told Helen. ‘Uncle Peter has been there forever – he baptised all of us, and gave us communion and confirmation. He’s a darling.’
Breen had been bemused at Helen’s choice of wedding location. ‘Aberdeen? In October? Could you possibly have found any place more remote?’
‘It’s not a bit remote – there’s a direct flight from Dublin. Alice has been there with Lara, and she loved it. And I want to go away. I don’t want to get married in Dublin.’
He didn’t ask why. He knew why.
After the ceremony the little bridal party ran from the church through the wind and rain to the two waiting cars. They drove in convoy through the streets to the restaurant where Lara had waitressed every school holiday since she’d been old enough, and after the meal and the toasts, and the cake that Breen – Breen! – had insisted on, the two couples said goodbye to Uncle Peter and dashed across the road to the hotel where they were staying.
And later, lying awake in her sleeping husband’s arms, Helen Breen listened to the storm that continued to rage outside the window of their room, and she recalled again her first wedding day, twenty-eight years earlier.
Another church, another man. She remembered her happiness that day, unaffected by her parents’ disapproval – she hadn’t cared how they felt, all she’d cared about was Cormac. She wondered what her parents would make of Breen. Probably approve: unlike Cormac, he was solvent and well educated. And when you thought about it, it was her mother who’d finally brought Helen and Breen together.
She turned her head and regarded his face, or what she could make out of it in the almost pure darkness of the room, and marvelled again that it had become so dear to her. She ran her fingertips lightly across his skin, feeling the tiny indentations of the pockmarks in his cheeks, the prickle of stubble on his chin, and he murmured and stirred, and gathered her closer to him.
And sometime during the night, the wind died down and the rain stopped and she slept, and didn’t dream at all.
Sarah
It’s done. Say hello to stupidly happy Helen Breen, currently honeymooning in Cornwall, as you can see from the picture on the other side. Weather mixed, beaches beautiful. We’re walking and eating cream teas (he needs fattening up) and reading, and being horribly competitive with the Independent’s cryptic crossword. Home next week, when normal life will resume. Hope all’s well.
H xx
Sarah
‘When someone his age gets Alzheimer’s, the progress is usually very rapid. I’m afraid you’ll see big changes quite quickly. I’ll drop by anytime I’m passing and see how it’s going, but you’ll need to consider putting him into full-time care sooner rather than later.’
‘How soon?’
The doctor hesitated. ‘Hard to be precise, but I would say we’re talking weeks rather than months.’
Her father called her Dorothy, which had been his late mother’s name, or Laura, his only sister, who’d died in a road accident at eighteen, years before Sarah had been born. He sat for hours without speaking, or roamed the house agitatedly – unable to tell her, when she asked, what he needed. He forgot words constantly, or used the wrong ones.
He stayed in bed each morning until she went into his room and helped him out of his pyjamas and into the tracksuit bottoms and loose sweaters that seemed most comfortable for him now. Once a week he sat in the bath while she washed him, like she’d washed Martha and Stephen as young children.
The children adapted astonishingly well. Martha, thirteen since May, read to him from the daily paper; ten-year-old Stephen sat beside him on the couch as they watched cartoons, or walked with him on milder days around the garden. Sarah marvelled at their capacity to accept what she struggled to come to terms with as she mourned the disintegration of his mind, the breakdown of the man she’d loved and depended on all her life.
He became incontinent. He wandered out of the house one day when she was preoccupied with dinner preparations, and was missing for three hours. He was finally discovered by Brian, sitting at a bus stop four miles away, and refused to return home, insisting that Brian was a stranger, until Christine arrived.
The weeks turned into months, confounding the doctor’s predictions, and they continued somehow to manage his slide towards oblivion. And then one autumnal morning, when Sarah went in to get him up, she found him standing by the window in his pyjamas.
‘Good morning,’ she said in a voice that was too bright. ‘You beat me to it.’
He turned to look at her, and the emptiness in his face frightened her.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked, walking towards him.
He clutched his pyjama top. ‘Do I know you?’ he asked.
In the afternoon she phoned the nursing home.
‘I think it’s time,’ she said to Matron, struggling to keep her voice even.
‘We’ll get the room ready. He’ll have the best of care, you know that.’
She did, but it broke her heart to see him there, in the very place she’d opted to spend less time in so that she could look after him. She’d look at him hunched in an armchair in his dressing-gown, other clothes having finally become redundant, and her heart would twist. More often than not, when she approached him he would look blankly at her, or ignore her completely.
The hardest thing, she wrote to Helen, is that we’re all strangers to him now. There’s nobody he recognises – and I don’t know if he’s even aware of this, if he feels totally alone in the world, or if he’s gone beyond feeling anything. It really is the cruellest illness.
I think, Helen replied, that it’s safe to assume he knows nothing. I think the suffering is all on the part of the family members who are all too aware of the changes, and I can imagine how awful it is for you. I wish I could help, but all I can do is offer useless little fripperies, and my good wishes.
She sent a fountain pen whose barrel was made of pale wood, and a small bottle of jade green ink.
Mum told me about your dad, Alice wrote on one of her handmade cards. That must be so sad for you. I’m thinking of you, and hoping that you’re managing. She enclosed a slim little book called Reflections, a gathering together of poems by various people, some of whose names Sarah remembered from her schooldays, and a bar of the same chocolate she’d sent after Luke.
Neil and Maria visited Sarah’s father once a fortnight. They brought grapes and bottles of Lucozade and sat with him in his room, or brought him outside to shuffle with them up and down the corridor.
Maria looked about thirty. Her auburn hair was cut into an asymmetrical bob, her clothes tailored, her nail varnish unchipped. She and Neil had met when she’d employed him to overhaul the garden of her parents’ house. She’d moved in with him soon after Sarah had been told of her existence, and she commuted now to her PR job in Dublin.
‘I got your cookbooks for my niece,’ she had told Sarah, the first time they’d met. ‘She loves them.’
‘She has a sports car,’ Stephen had reported. ‘She let me put the roof down.’
‘Can I get my ears pierced?’ Martha had asked. ‘Maria says she’ll take me if you say yes.’
A month ago, Neil had asked Sarah for a divorce. She had seen no reason to refuse.
Her first Martina and Charlie story was almost ready for publication. Paul was aiming to have it on the shelves in time for the Christmas market.
‘You’ve found your true calling,’ he’d said. ‘It’s charming, it’s simple and it’s full of warmth. You’ll go far as a children’s writer.’
She had taken no
pleasure from his words, no pleasure at all.
Helen
It was shocking how quickly they’d fallen into the kind of routine that might be expected of a couple who’d been married for fifty years. It was slightly unnerving how much she enjoyed it.
Presented with a choice of three places to live in, they’d opted for Helen’s. The three-storey red-brick terraced house Breen had shared with his wife had been put on the market, along with Helen’s parents’ home – for different reasons, neither dwelling had appealed to her. Breen professed himself well satisfied to live in Helen’s house, although it was by far the least impressive of the three.
The neighbourhood was changing. There had been a recent influx of young professionals to the area, renovating and open-planning and attic-converting as they went. Helen wasn’t altogether sure she approved of all the changes: the old shabbiness had had a character to it that she suspected was being replaced with something a lot more sterile and less interesting. She took some comfort from the fact that Cormac’s house had remained as unchanged as possible in her twenty-eight-year tenure.
She and Breen had no long-term plan: time to think again if both properties sold – and with the housing market continuing to boom, there was every reason to believe they wouldn’t have long to wait.
In the meantime Helen was happy to go on living in the house where Alice had grown up. The fact that Frank had also lived there for a few years, and the manner of their parting, still caused her an occasional pang of guilt: she hoped he’d met someone who deserved him.
She and Breen both worked from home, in separate rooms. She continued to write for various publications at the kitchen table; he compiled crosswords, proofread theses and copy-edited literary publications in the sitting room, with one or both of the cats normally keeping him company.
And every day Helen discovered a little more about him.
He was left-handed – how had she never noticed that? His birthday was on January the first. His grandfather’s fifteen younger siblings had all emigrated. His only brother had died of septicaemia at the age of thirty after impaling his foot on a rusty nail, leaving behind a wife who’d since remarried, and an infant daughter. Both his parents had been university lecturers.
He had a sweet tooth. He was a far more accomplished cook than Helen, and desserts always featured when he was on dinner duty, which was most of the time. In three months of marriage she’d gained almost a stone.
He was allergic to penicillin and grapefruit. His only form of exercise was walking. He enjoyed classical music but despised opera. He’d had his appendix removed at ten, his tonsils at twelve. He’d never had chicken pox, mumps or measles. So far in his life he’d broken one arm, one collarbone and one ankle. His favourite season was autumn.
He’d been deflowered by an older woman, a married neighbour, when he was seventeen, and employed to mow their lawn over the summer. She’d followed him into the shed when he’d been returning the mower.
‘I had no choice in the matter,’ he told Helen. ‘She had her knickers off before I knew where I was. I think I was a major disappointment, all over in about thirty seconds. It never happened again.’
They lived quietly, venturing out only occasionally to a play or a concert she was reviewing, or to have dinner with two couples he’d known for years. Soon after returning from honeymoon he’d organised a dinner party to introduce them to Helen.
‘You want to invite some of your friends?’ he’d asked.
‘I have one friend,’ she’d told him. ‘She lives in Kildare. I told you about her.’
‘That’s the penfriend you’ve never met.’
‘But we’ve been writing to one another for twenty years.’
‘And you never felt like coming face to face?’
‘We came close a couple of times, but it didn’t happen. Probably not meant to be.’
Breen’s inherited cats were mother and daughter, both neutered. The mother was affectionate, the daughter aloof. They slept curled together in a corner of the couch, and made ribbons of the kitchen chair legs when Helen wasn’t looking.
You’ll love them, she wrote to Alice. Remember how you used to spoil Malone’s cat, and beg me to let him sleep indoors? These two do, you’ll be delighted to hear. Breen insists they’ve been brought up as house cats and it would be cruel to expect them to live outdoors. I said I bet they’d love the freedom, but I got nowhere.
Alice and Lara had also moved in together. We chose my flat because it’s more central, Alice wrote, but it’s very small for two, so we’re on the hunt for a bigger one.
Wonderland Design was doing well, three people working for Alice now. Still can’t think of myself as a boss. I suppose technically I’m the managing director but so far I’ve stuck with senior designer.
She and Lara were going to Portugal for a week over Christmas, which meant Helen and Breen would be on their own. The first time her daughter and mother wouldn’t be with her on Christmas Day – and even if they hadn’t always gelled across the turkey and Brussels sprouts, she knew this year’s celebration would be poignant in their absence.
‘What do you want to do for Christmas?’ she asked Breen. ‘Looks like it’s going to be just the two of us.’
‘You want to go somewhere?’
She thought about booking into a hotel, eating turkey and ham surrounded by strangers in paper hats, like she and her little group had done in Troon. Or lying on a beach somewhere, having to keep reminding themselves that it was December the twenty-fifth. Neither scenario seemed right for their first Christmas together.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’m just not sure that I want to stay here, in this house.’
‘We do have two more houses,’ he pointed out, but she shook her head. Not her parents’, where the ghost of her mother might well still be hovering, and certainly not his house – what kind of awful Christmases must he have endured there?
‘Well,’ he said, ‘that just leaves Connemara.’
‘Connemara? You mean rent a house or something?’
‘No.’ He closed his crossword book, took off his glasses. ‘I mean I have a house there. Just outside a village, about a mile from the sea.’
She stared. ‘You have a house in Connemara? When were you planning to tell me about it?’
‘Whenever it came up,’ he said, and she felt the familiar urge to take him by the jacket lapels and shake him, hard.
‘And now that it’s come up, any other properties I should know about?’
He smiled. ‘No, just this one. I bought it ten years ago. Seemed like a good idea at the time.’
Ten years ago, after he’d taken early retirement. ‘What’s it like?’
‘It’s small. It’s a cottage, just two bedrooms. I always liked Connemara, had the daft notion that I might move there eventually.’
I, not we. He hadn’t planned on bringing his first wife.
‘Have you gone there much?’ she asked.
‘I spent a bit of time there, after Kathleen died. Before that, not much.’
She imagined him, retired and newly widowed, looking out at the fields, or maybe the distant sea, and wondering what to do with the rest of his life.
‘What condition is it in?’
‘Actually, it’s quite comfortable. I added central heating and spruced it up a bit. It’s not the Ritz, but it’s habitable.’
‘It’ll do,’ she said.
It didn’t really matter where they spent Christmas: what mattered was that he would be with her. But a small cottage in Connemara, with no memories to disturb either of them, seemed to her the perfect location for their first Christmas together.
We’re getting away from it all, she wrote to Sarah. We’re going deep into the heart of Connemara, where it turns out my new husband owns a holiday cottage – he just mentioned it casually the other night. We’ll walk by day and eat and drink in the evenings, and maybe take the odd trip into Galway for a city fix. Can’t wait.
It s
ounds wonderful, Sarah wrote back. Christmas for me this year will be very different too – Neil asked if he and Maria can have the children, and since they’ve been with me every Christmas since we split up, I didn’t feel I could refuse, so I’ll work in the nursing home in the morning as usual, and then I’m going to Christine’s for dinner. It’ll be different, but I’m sure very enjoyable.
Poor Sarah. Her father’s last Christmas, by the sound of it, and her children gone to spend it with her ex and his new partner. Cooking turkey for the few lost souls in the nursing home, serving it up to a man who no longer recognised her. Going to her sister’s house afterwards to pretend it was where she wanted to be.
There were two bits of positive news in her letter.
I just got advance copies of Martina and Charlie Go on Holidays, and it looks great. Paul has promised to send you a copy, so keep an eye out for it. It’s due on the shelves some time in the next week, fingers crossed. And please don’t feel you have to review it, honestly.
And listen to this – Stephen’s music teacher has put his name forward for a public recital in the National Concert Hall! It’s a fundraiser in aid of the street children of Calcutta, and it’s going to feature music students from all over the country. Stephen will be the youngest performer by a mile – he’s just gone eleven – and he’s really looking forward to it.
My only small worry is that I’ll have to drive up to Dublin that evening on my own. Neil will have Martha, it’s one of his weekends, so she’ll travel with him and Maria, and Stephen will be going earlier in the day with his music teacher – but I’m sure I’ll cope. I’ve got directions from Brian, who often drives there on business, so if I give myself plenty of time I should be fine.
It’s taking place on the Friday before Christmas, and if you haven’t left for the west by then I’d love it if you both could come. Maybe we’ll be third time lucky in meeting up!
‘We’re going to a concert,’ Helen told Breen. ‘I’ll introduce you to my penfriend. Her son is playing the piano, and she’d like us to go.’
Something in Common Page 37