Her father winks. ‘Squashed fly for you?’
She smiles, hooks her arm through his. ‘Thought you’d never ask.’
Barbara’s voice sounds faintly from upstairs. ‘Fintan, is that you? Is the tea ready yet?’
Her father darts for the tray, checks that there’s a paper napkin. ‘I’ll pop up and then we’ll have a chat about Glenkeen. Pour yourself some tea, love.’
She stays standing in the kitchen, not wanting to sit in the living-room amongst the raised chairs and footstools, the crocheted blankets that drape over Barbara’s knees. She pours tea and dunks her biscuit. Upstairs, her father is murmuring. She studies the poster by the cooker, a list of foods that Barbara is and isn’t permitted. They’re divided into three categories, and coloured in green, amber and red; eat at any time, eat occasionally and NEVER EAT with a bold black cross by the warning. This last section includes wheat and dairy products. On the wall by the fridge is a pretty, oval art deco mirror. Her mother would always check her hair in it before she went out, lick two fingers and press her fringe down. Then she’d apply a last coat of pink lipstick, pressing her lips together and forming them into a pout. ‘I’m so gorgeous, I can hardly stand myself,’ she’d say in a Marlene Dietrich voice.
It was here in the kitchen that she told Liv of the bone cancer marching startlingly, swiftly through her body. She had been painting her nails a deep cherry and announced the prognosis as she held them out to dry.
‘I can’t complain, my lovely, I’ve had a good time; born in a different place I could have been gassed or persecuted or sent to a gulag.’
Liv wants to howl at someone that it’s just not fair, but at whom? She drinks the tea too quickly, scalding her tongue.
* * *
Douglas wanders into the bedroom as she is packing, ostentatiously drinking alcohol-free ginger beer. He’s wearing shorts and a T-shirt, signalling that he’s going to spend time on the rowing machine in the basement. The can of innocent pop and the exercise are part of the theatre of life with him: Act 1, the drunken binge, Act 2, the reparation, Act 3, the one glass that will do no harm.
He sits on the edge of the bed and watches her fold and tuck. He likes to watch her, especially when she is cooking, moving between chopping board, fridge and hob, reaching for herbs and spices. He says that her movements are economical and measured, no energy wasted. She replies that all men like to watch women work, it reminds them of their mothers.
Light is falling slanted across the bed, warming the slatted oak headboard. The shadows skulking through the slats form bars on the plain cream wall. Her suitcase lies in a wedge of late sun. It is new and expensive, light dappled brown with darker trimmings a shade of bitter chocolate. The smell of virgin leather fills the room, pungent and rich. It reminds her of shops in narrow cobbled alleys in Italy and Spain, filled with expensive goods for tourists. She would have preferred her old case, a cheaper sort with dodgy locks but with handy inside pockets she is familiar with. Her old case smells of her and the bottles of duty free scent she’s carried over the years, the little perfumed leakages of journeys. With its black edging, it is instantly recognizable on airport conveyor belts. She knows exactly where to put things in the frayed green case. With this one, she has to rearrange: it seems to resist her. But he has bought her the case; it is his way of accompanying her, reminding her of him. She knows this and so she struggles to fit her underwear and jeans and the new waterproof she’s bought from the camping shop that tucks into a handy bag.
‘Always a Mac for Ireland,’ she says. ‘I learned that early on.’
‘I know. Those doomed picnics on beaches; just as your mother got the white pudding sandwiches out, clouds whipped in and the wind and rain started. You always ended up with sand in your teeth.’
She is constantly amazed at the things he remembers. She can’t even recall having told him about those picnics and yet he knows the details of the white pudding. It frightens her sometimes, that he should have stored so many of her memories, made them his own. There are times when he speaks about her past as if he’d been there. His recollection of his own childhood is muted, apart from a few scattered, vivid scenes: his first day at school when he’d stamped on the teacher’s foot, overtaken by rage at being kidnapped from home, a trip to Weymouth when he’d accidentally locked himself in a restaurant toilet and the fire brigade had to be called, the time in Wimbledon when he’d tripped up a kerb, ripped his shin and blood had soaked his shoe. When she asks him about his childhood years he looks blank and shrugs, says he can’t think back that far or it is a blur. She suspects that it’s a deliberate ploy because there was little joy in the life of young Douglas. Maybe that is why he collects her reminiscences, to shore up his own deficiencies.
He slips off his trainer and sock and rubs his right foot with both hands. His fingers are sturdy and capable when not trembling. His thick thatch of hair makes him look younger than his years. His patients find him kind and reassuring; like all dedicated alcoholics he is crafty, pacing the booze outside of surgery, allowing recovery time. There have been nights when she’s told him that she’d be better off being one of his patients, then she’d have his full attention, he’d repair her instead of inflicting damage.
His low voice is soft, melodic. ‘I might not be here when you come back, if you’re coming back.’ He stares at his foot, flexing the toes.
‘Don’t say that, don’t start that again. I am coming back. We agreed that this would be a good idea.’
‘There’s agreeing and there’s knowing you have no chance at all if you disagree.’
‘Everything you say sounds like a threat.’
Then try this; have I ever told you that the day you walked through my surgery door with a sore throat, I thought you had the most beautiful tonsils I’d ever seen?’
She looks at him. He has a sudden smile and pale blue eyes, the transparent, swirling blue you are left with when you have rinsed cotton in whitening solution. She remembers that day, waking with a throat scraped with razors, trying to open her jaw wide while the kind man with a humorous mouth pointed a little torch. He had seemed so sturdy and dependable in his warm, snug surgery with potted plants on the windowsills. His shirt sleeves were rolled up to the elbows, workman-like, his tie loosely knotted and there were ink smudges on his fingers. ‘Hmm, I think you’ll live but you must feel rotten, you poor thing,’ he’d said.
‘You drew me a detailed diagram of my tonsils and Eustachian tubes, complete with labels.’
‘I was trying to keep you there, hold on to you. I still am.’ He shrugs. ‘Who will you get to rub your back for you when you’re across the sea in Ireland?’
‘It will have to go unrubbed.’ She refolds a shirt, presses down on it.
He straightens up, brings his hands together briskly. ‘I’ll do your shoulders now, a gift before you go, they’re looking hunched.’
She sits on the side of the bed while he works her muscles and sinews, stretching, untying the knots. He smells of the sweet pop and peppermint, the familiar aroma of attempted concealment. It is childlike, the way he thinks a mint or mouthwash will fool her. He gets through bottles of the stuff and keeps a spray in his pocket. She’s familiar with all the flavours, their different mint, aniseed or liquorice tangs.
She watches the bars on the wall and the spaces in between. On the dresser opposite stands a wedding photograph, one taken on the steps of the registry office. Douglas had had a severe haircut that gave him a startled, vulnerable look. The day had been breezy and her hair, much longer then, had laced across his lapel. They both appeared so much younger, so unburdened, the professional couple with the confidence to dictate their own terms for the wedding; unfussy, a brief ceremony, then a meal in a restaurant hired for the evening in Putney. The dining area overlooked the Thames and they enjoyed the backdrop of a gloriously slow sunset as champagne was served and toasts made. Instead of the usual tired disco for entertainment, they’d hired a group of drummers called TomTom w
ho they’d come across in the piazza at Covent Garden. The five men in Native American dress had beaten their thundering rhythms while the amazed guests ate dessert and liqueurs were delivered. She had relished this start to their marriage; making their own mark, declaring that they had a special, unique way of doing things. Had there been signs then, signals from Douglas that she’d missed, misty-eyed with love? She’d assumed that the whisky on his lips when they’d kissed to seal their union was Dutch courage.
‘Do you love me?’ he asks, brave enough to put the question because she has her back to him.
‘I do love you. I need this break, though, and you need to get help. We can’t go on like this, its madness.’
‘I’m sorry again about the Brighton thing. It isn’t that awful, though, not as if I created any trouble, did any damage. I bet they get plenty of people who fall asleep on trains.’
‘I’m sure they do, Douglas.’ She is too tired to discuss it again, tired of all the clichés that pass for conversation. They might as well be talking in different languages.
As he smooths her skin, the lighter strokes that mean he is finishing, she puts a hand on his forearm, hoping to soothe, to tell him that she too is sorry for the state they are in. She looks up at him, notes the frown marks becoming permanently ridged between his eyebrows. How is it, she wonders, that I love him but I can’t wait to get away from him?
Chapter 2
She takes the boat because she wants this to be a proper journey, with anticipation and a sense of arrival, treating herself to first class accommodation on the train and on-board. She is a good sailor and sleeps soundly in her cabin, lulled by the steady thrum of the engines, enjoying the rhythmical lift and fall of the Irish Sea which is enjoying a late summer calm.
She wakes at six, rested, and recalls earlier boat crossings with her parents as she washes her face and brushes her teeth at the tiny corner basin. Her father liked the sea but was a poor voyager, prone to sickness at the least surge of waves. Her mother used to bring a flask of Bovril for him, so that once he stopped vomiting, the warm salty drink could settle his stomach. They couldn’t afford a cabin and would sit on upright seats, her father pale, clutching a hanky and smiling with embarrassment as he sipped the beefy drink from the thermos cup. Her mother was an enthusiastic sailor and once Liv’s father was settled, she’d tie a scarf around her hair and say she was off to sniff the briny. Then she’d roam the deck, smoking and chatting with other intrepid passengers. Liv would stay with her father and worry about her mother up on deck, imagining that a crashing wave might sweep her overboard. She felt the dragging, gnawing burden of responsibility for both of them. Finally, as the minutes became half an hour, three quarters, her father dozing under his newspaper, her stomach knotting with anxiety, her mother breezed back, bringing the fresh blow of salt and wind with her into the rancid fug of the lounge. She’d take her scarf off and sling it round her neck, singing, ‘I joined the navy to see the world and what did I see? I saw the sea!’
Liv’s father was always exhausted when they arrived at Glenkeen and would sleep for the first day while her mother and Nanna talked softly so as not to disturb him. They referred to men often as vulnerable creatures, frail within a tough outer shell. Once the journey had been dissected, Nanna would get on with her daily tasks, feeding the hens and the pig, lifting potatoes, collecting young nettles for soup. Liv’s mother would light a cigarette and stand in the doorway, arms wrapped around her chunky belted cardigan, smoking and sighing. She sighed a lot in Ireland, at the rain and the breezes that whipped up from nowhere and the dampness that made her hair untameable. The smoke from the fire made her eyes sore and soda bread gave her indigestion. She was a London girl, a city girl; at night, she grew alarmed at rustlings of leaves, the barking of foxes, the silences. She couldn’t wait to draw the curtains close once dusk fell. When they played cards before bed, twenty-fives and whist, she tapped hers sharply on the table, as if to reassure herself.
Liv couldn’t wait to play outside. In London, she wasn’t allowed out of the front door alone into mysterious streets where strangers might lurk. Her first steps across the glen were tentative without an adult shadow. Then, growing bold, she would do a handstand by the lilies, her nose brushing their sturdy leaves. Her first game always, the true mark of her arrival, was to fold her arms around her body and roll with her heart pounding down the damp grassy slope at the side of the glen. As she tumbled over the prod of stones and scrape of thistles she shrieked, giddy with abandon. Then she would lie on her back, eyes half shut and wait for the sky to stop reeling.
She climbs the steep metal stairs and stands on deck as the boat sails in to Cork, lifting her head to the salt spray. The rails are rusty and damp as she holds them, bending to gaze into the rushing waves. The last time she made this journey was when she was ten, the summer her mother miscarried and her father had taken his wife back to London, leaving Liv for two weeks with her grandmother. That might have been the summer when Nanna told her about the Lusitania sinking near Kinsale on a fateful Friday in 1915 and the poor drowned souls who were washed up on the south-west coast. ‘You wouldn’t get me on the wild watery ocean, child, I like me two feet on solid ground.’ She’d thought that maybe that was why her father got seasick, because his mother had told him about the torpedo and all the lost souls.
The annual holidays to Cork had stopped after that, and they had taken trips in the car to Swanage and Margate, staying in small bed and breakfasts. It was getting too expensive, her father said when she asked why they weren’t going to see Nanna; the cost of everything was racing away. She wrote little notes that he put in with his letters but found it hard to know what to say to an old lady who knew nothing of London. ‘Just pretend she’s sitting across the table from you,’ her father would advise but that didn’t help at all; you wouldn’t need to write to someone who was in the same room. ‘Dear Nanna,’ she would put. ‘I’m learning the violin and I’m in the school choir. I hope Susannah is behaving. I haven’t got much other news.’ Her father still made the journey every other year alone in the spring, before high season prices. During the week when he was away, her mother would rush Liv around London, visiting museums and churches, the zoo, Kew gardens, Kenwood House, the Tower. Her mother loved to be out of the house; she was never a home bird but liked to dash a bit of lipstick on, puff a cloud of L’air du Temps around her neck and click her keys like castanets as she tucked her bag under her arm and opened the door. Their feet hardly touched the ground as they hopped on and off buses; it was good to be a tourist in your own city, her mother told her, it made you look at it differently, appreciate its variety ‘because variety is the spice of life.’ There was a giddiness to those weeks, a reckless energy. Once her father returned, life resumed its habitual steady pace.
Chains clang and rattle as sailors make ready for docking. The morning is bright and chilly with a clear sky. She shivers in the crisp air and zips her jacket up snug, tucks her hands deep in the pockets. The boat glides along the broad estuary, passing pastel coloured houses and lush fields. Tractors are on the move and smoke spirals from chimneys. Gulls swoop over the boat, screeching its arrival. The engines judder and slow as it executes a stately turn, ready to find its berth. Liv feels the vibrations through the soles of her shoes, travelling along her calves. People on deck are smiling, clustering to the sides, peering to see if there’s anyone they know by the quayside. The bow doors start to rise and fan open. There is a sense of occasion and celebration, the excitement of reaching the destination. She smiles too, full of anticipation now, wanting to see her inheritance.
The thin young man at the car hire desk wears a smart grey suit a size too small and covers his callowness with a flip bravura. He busily avoids eye contact and rattles through the details of the Ford. His narrow wrists jut from his too short cuffs. She focuses on them to save his embarrassment; the bony joints are pale but she thinks they might conceal a wiry strength. He speaks so fast, she has to strain to understa
nd him, leaning forward like an old person with a faulty hearing aid. He reminds her of the jittery sixth form students who come to the reference room at the library, infecting it with their adolescent restlessness.
‘Sooo . . .’ he says, clicking the top of his pen with a frantic thumb and an attempt at a transatlantic drawl, ‘we have a specially reduced price of five-forty euros per month, thirty euros deposit. Deal with an option to extend. Just give us a bell to let us know.’
‘Fine, thanks. Is the tank full?’
‘It is indeedyo. Unleaded. Here on your hols?’
‘In a way. My grandmother’s left me her cottage near Castlegray.’ He won’t want the information but she is interested to hear how it sounds, how it will make her feel.
‘Cool.’ He hands over the keys, spinning them through the air. ‘Enjoy and have a nice day, Ms Callaghan. That’s a heavy-looking case.’
‘Yes, enough for a couple of months and all the vagaries of Irish weather.’ My cares are in there too, weighing it down, she could have said, smiling and saying cheerio to him. There were always the words you spoke, concealing the ones you swallowed, those words that sank down to your chest and lay there sullenly. So, last night after Douglas finished massaging her shoulders she’d said to him, ‘It will be a break for us both, a chance to think about things,’ instead of saying, ‘You’ve driven me beyond endurance, I can’t believe anything you tell me because you’re always lying to yourself.’
She trundles the suitcase past the huge sign saying Welcome to Cork. The car park is near, only a few minutes’ walk. Stepping outside, she sees that the sky has clouded now and there is a cool breeze sprinkled with rain. She halts, breathes in, feeling her tight lungs resisting.
The car reeks of air freshener, an unpleasant citrus disinfectant and something else, like a man’s spicy aftershave. She opens the window to halfway down and takes the cottage keys from her bag, laying them ready on the seat beside her, recalling her father’s instructions about the recalcitrant door. She can hear Nanna saying, ‘Bad cess to that old thing, it nearly has my arm ripped from my shoulder.’
OUT OF THE BLUE a gripping novel of love lost and found Page 2