Instead, he had to quicken his pace to follow Paul as he ran along the corridor. In the lift Paul didn’t stop talking about the kindness and care which Paddy would receive. Gurtha now felt that ripping sense of betrayal for what he was about to do to Paddy. Why couldn’t Paddy have bloomin’ well held onto his senses for a bit longer?
The lift doors opened, Gurtha stepped out and there were three rooms along a corridor, all vacant.
“Another two unexpected deaths yesterday which Cecilia won’t have known about means you have a choice of rooms – most unusual.” As he threw his arms open to indicate the vastness of choice, Gurtha gazed into the closest room. It had a metal hospital bed with a long red cord hanging beside it, a button to press for an emergency and a strong smell of Dettol. Everything was white and steel.
Gurtha asked, “Is there an en suite room?”
Paul turned to look at him with a certain curiosity,
“Pardon?”
Gurtha repeated, “En suite?”
Paul breathed in deeply, so deeply that one of the buttons popped open above the waistband. The button above that one looked under pressure too.
“I realise that this is very recent news for you. However, it is unlikely your father will even remember that he needs to go to the toilet. We have Care Assistants who will help him to these facilities.” He indicated to an open door where a man slumped over in his wheelchair was being pushed by a young girl with pink hair and a ring in her nose to a room a little further along the corridor.
Gurtha shook Paul’s hand warmly and said that he would be in touch.
His next stop was the Milthorn. As Gurtha walked through the front door, he knew immediately that this was the place for Paddy. It was true that there was a smell of pee more than Dettol, but that didn’t seem to matter. There was something in the air that felt different. Maggie, the Manager brought him into her Office and talked about the practicalities of moving Paddy in.
“It will take time for him to settle. If you can bring photos, anything at all that reminds him of home – that will help. Let me show you his room.”
They walked upstairs along a corridor where there was a dining room on the right.
“We like them to eat together and have grouped them in small tables. Sometimes they like to eat alone in their rooms and we respect that also.”
The dining room had a sense of being a small restaurant with five circular tables, a coffee area and a large window looking out onto a car park and beyond to the mountains which Paddy would recognise.
Along the corridor there were photos and names attached to each of the rooms. They reached a room with an empty space which invited a new photo. As they entered, the room was flooded with sunlight. The walls were painted primrose gold. The whole room was warm and inviting. From the window a football pitch, on which young boys were practising for a match, was visible. The hills surrounding Belfast lay beyond the football pitch. There was a normal bed in the room – not a steel hospital bed – a wardrobe, a kettle, a few cups and saucers and a cupboard for biscuits. Paddy loved his biscuits – custard creams, jammy dodgers and McVities digestives with a mug of tea.
There was an en suite – with a step in shower with toilet and an emergency cord with a red button to be pulled should help be needed. Gurtha heard the tremor in his voice as he asked, “Can I bring Paddy’s clothes?”
“Of course.”
♥
The door opened and Elizabeth walked in. She smiled at them both.
“I want to get out of here. Can you help me? Let me out.”
She was a thin, frail, white haired woman with an anxiety about what would happen next.
“You’re going out – aren’t you?” She pointed at Gurtha. “I have to get out of here.” She sat on the bed. “I never smoked. They said I smoked but I never did.” She clicked the heels of her shoes together. “Do you have a cigarette?”
Maggie took her by the arm, “Let me take you back to your room. This is Paddy’s room.”
Maggie left and Gurtha sat on the bed, imagining Paddy’s photos on the wall, his clothes in the wardrobe and how he would hobble every night to the en suite toilet where he would leave a little puddle on the tiles and no-one would think it strange.
He looked at his watch. It was seven o’clock. Cornelia would be in the Holiday Inn waiting for him. It would take him another two hours to move Paddy’s clothes, pictures and photos to the new room in his new home. He would spend the night in Paddy’s house – as a last farewell to it. Cornelia would have to have dinner alone.
♥
Gurtha drove back to Paddy’s house thinking that it would probably be the last time he would stay there. He climbed the stairs to his old bedroom. He pulled back the candlewick bedspread and undressed, finding himself a pair of Paddy’s pyjamas, as his clothes were in the Holiday Inn. At this very minute Cornelia would most likely be knocking on his door. He checked his mobile phone. There were no messages. He knew that he should have rung her, especially as she had gone to all the trouble of coming over, but he didn’t want to have a conversation and instead he sent a short text:
“Sorry not to be able to meet tonight. I’m sleeping in Paddy’s house. I need to organise his clothes as he is going into residential care. See you tomorrow at 2.00 pm. Enjoy your evening. Gurtha.”
DAY 16
MONDAY 26TH AUGUST 2013
GURTHA DROVE Paddy from the Royal Hospital to the Milthorn Residential Care Centre. It was a sunny day; clouds were puffing up over Black Mountain. Paddy sat very still in the front passenger seat. He looked straight ahead and asked, “Where are we going?”
Gurtha answered, “We’re going home.”
“You’ve taken the wrong road. That’s Casement Park. That’s not the way home.” He was wearing a green Magee tweed jacket and olive green corduroys, a cream shirt and a dotted dark blue tie. He pulled his cap a little further down over his face.
Gurtha felt a solid ache in his stomach. He breathed deeply.
“It’s a new home for you. It will be easier to manage. That house was too big for you after Nuala died.”
“Nuala’s not dead.” Paddy shook his head. “She’s shopping or she’s gone over to the Church to sing in the choir.” His voice was soft and gentle. Gurtha patted him on the knee.
“We’re nearly there.”
He spun the hired car into the car park of the Milthorn and helped Paddy to swing his arthritic legs around and then pulled him onto his feet. Maggie met them at reception beside the hairdressers where three women were waiting in a row to have their weekly hair wash, curlers rolled into place and a hair brush to follow up. Maggie walked quickly to room 11 and opened the door. Paddy shuffled inside and sat on the bed.
“What all this then?” He looked up into Gurtha’s eyes.
Gurtha put the kettle on to make a pot of tea and opened the jammy dodgers and placed them on the china plate. Maggie hesitated at the door.
“Paddy, I’m Maggie. Anything you need just walk down the hallway and you’ll find me by reception. I’ll see you later and introduce you to your new friends at lunchtime. Paddy munched on his jammy dodgers. Crumbs fell onto the ground. They sat in silence beside one another. Gurtha looked at his watch.
“I’ll leave you to settle in. Do you want to know where the bathroom is?”
Paddy shook his head, “No. I don’t want anyone washing me.”
“That’s fine. The toilet is in that room beside the door if you need it. Let’s put the TV on.” He switched the channels until he found an old Western movie.
“You’ll enjoy that until I get back.”
Paddy reached for another jammy dodger and sipped his tea, “I’ll see you later then.”
Gurtha left the room, gently closing the door behind him. He felt as if he was crumbling inside. It was much harder to leave Paddy here than he had ever imagined. It really felt as though he was abandoning a child to strangers. He felt his eyes prick with tears.
He looked into th
e dining room. Six or seven residents sat at a table, waiting for lunch to arrive. They didn’t talk to one another, but sat in silence, hands folded on the table. Each of their lives seemed to Gurtha to be a bundle of secrets contained within a disintegrating body. Eventually no-one would know or care what their lives had meant to them. Now, to ask them a question – to extract a moment from the past to know it deeply, seemed important. What was the present for them now? Nothing. The future? Nothing. But to experience again a moment in which they had felt their lives filled with love – even one moment when they knew with total certainty that they were loved – wouldn’t that be wonderful? Could it not be possible to replay and replay again and again that moment of knowing, a moment which was, after all, only the unfolding of love within and beyond time?
The movement of their lives now coloured in leaves of gold, orange, then black before dropping onto the soil and being reabsorbed into the tree from which they fell. Where was the love in that? Gurtha knew that there was love in the total movement of life, but he couldn’t feel it. He knew that there was something which held the tragic, the irrational and absurd with meaning in meaninglessness. He knew that there was something holding order within disorder, life within tragedy, the Divine within what was human. He didn’t know exactly what it was. William Blake knew.
‘He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sun rise’.
♥
Elizabeth stood by the door still hoping to escape, wearing white slippers. Her grey hair looked as if it hadn’t been brushed for a few days. Her legs were little sticks of legs – boney and brittle, which you could see beneath the transparency of a white and blue cotton skirt. She folded her arms as he approached, hugging herself, “You’ll take me home. Won’t you?” She smiled at him, “Have you got a cigarette?”
Gurtha took her by the hand, “Elizabeth, you don’t smoke.”
Elizabeth looked directly into his eyes and pulled herself up straight, “You’re right. I don’t.”
She turned to face the corridor leading back to her room. She walked quickly with her head jutting out slightly and turned around only once before she reached the bottom and had to turn left. He couldn’t see her eyes but she gave him a look of reproach – like that of a deer heading into a forest, alone, without a mate.
♥
Gurtha suggested that Cornelia and he had lunch in Pizza Express across the road from the Holiday Inn. He opened the door for her. Cornelia wore white lace gloves, a cream hat with a pink band of silk around it and a long vanilla dress which moved like melting ice-cream. Her shoes had a little strap across them. She would have been perfectly at home in a 1920s black and white movie or having afternoon tea at the Ritz.
“What would you like to drink?” The waitress, with a ring in her nose and a heart shaped tattoo on her neck, asked.
“A Margarita, thank you.” Cornelia removed the lace gloves and sat them on top of the side dish. She turned her head slightly to the right and looked at Gurtha. The waitress waited for Gurtha to order.
“Sparkling water.”
She handed Gurtha the menus. Cornelia smiled one of those vacant smiles Gurtha had seen several times before. It was as if she was thinking of something private which made her chuckle or that she was in a black and white film, sitting across the table from John Gilbert. Perhaps she was Greta Garbo appearing with him in ‘Flesh and the Devil’. Although she looked at Gurtha, she didn’t see him, but saw a man with a centre parting in his dark slicked hair, a smile which indicated total adoration of her and a moustache which looked inked into his upper lip rather than real.
She tapped her lips again with her fingers.
“I loved Nuala.”
Gurtha felt the blood drain to his feet which felt like blocks of cement against the tiled floor.
“What do you mean that you loved her?”
Cornelia touched her lips with her fingers as though playing a piano and picking out the white keys.
“We had our differences, but I loved her.”
Gurtha repeated her words slowly.
“You loved Nuala? You can’t love someone you don’t know.”
“I knew her well enough. You would like to think that you were the only person to love her, but that wasn’t true. You heard what the priest said at the Requiem Mass. There were many people who loved Nuala – including me.”
She pushed a strand of her bobbed hair behind her ear.
“When you first told me about her all those years ago – I have to confess to being a little jealous. You seemed so in awe of her. You know I didn’t think it was - well - a normal relationship that you had with her.”
Gurtha felt a choking sensation in his throat. He looked at the menu and then at Cornelia. He asked her in a direct tone of voice.
“Do you think our relationship is, or ever was, normal?”
Cornelia opened a mirror and inspected her face as the waitress approached.
“No. I don’t. I never did. Whose fault was that? I’m having the aubergine paramagiana with a mixed side salad. What about you?”
Gurtha felt his heart furiously beating and heard his breathing gurgling around his throat as he responded to the waitress.
“Pizza Fiorentina.”
Cornelia touched the plate and took hold of the knife and fork, polishing them with her napkin.
Gurtha felt his cheeks burn.
♥
Laura sat alone at a table by the window. She looked out, watching the world go by. Then she opened her book and started reading, before glancing left as Cornelia in a loud voice challenged Gurtha.
♥
“You said that Nuala told you something about Henry and I.”
Cornelia signalled to the waitress,
“Another Margarita please.” She looked at her watch.
“I’m catching a flight back tomorrow. If there is something that you want to tell me, now would be a good time.”
Cornelia placed a finger behind her ear.
“I’m listening.”
Gurtha said nothing.
Cornelia continued, “You were going to tell me the other day when you came to see me. So tell me now.”
Gurtha hesitated.
“Is that why you’ve come here? To find out what Nuala thought about you and Henry?”
“Gurtha, I have come here as a long standing friend, to accompany you on your journey with Paddy. I know that the situation with Paddy is stressful. However, you did say that you wanted to talk and that it had something to do with Nuala and Henry. It’s easier to talk when we are alone and Barry isn’t here. Is it not? I also have something which I need to share with you.”
Gurtha nodded.
“OK. There is nothing to say, really. I have been confused that you began a relationship with Barry so soon after Henry’s death. I wanted to tell you that. I felt that there was something untrue in your reasons for being with him. If you remember all those years ago you said that our relationship was about ‘The Good, the True and the Beautiful’. I feel that there are lies in your relationship with Barry. Yet I have no right or reason to do anything other than to accept them. As for Nuala she merely expressed concerns that perhaps Henry didn’t receive the appropriate care for his heart condition. She knew the symptoms well as she suffered from heart failure.”
Cornelia breathed in deeply and rested her hand on top of Gurtha’s.
“You know that Henry’s medication was difficult to control. It was a delicate balance which got out of control in spite of the best efforts of the medical staff. In the last few weeks his Warfarin was impossible to stabalise. He suffered from internal bleeding, which damaged his vital organs. It was sad, but you know that he was admitted to the hospital for tests and he died in spite of all efforts of save him. I was lucky enough to have him at home two days before he died. They were sweet days which I will never forget and which bring me much
comfort. I have no idea why Nuala thought he was neglected. Nothing could have been further from the truth. As for Barry – it is true that maybe I looked for someone too quickly. Someone I felt would fill the gap caused by Henry’s death. It may have been a mistake. However, you also had a part to play in this.”
Gurtha pulled his hand away and sat upright.
“What do you mean? I don’t understand.”
“Can you not see? Did you not know? I have always loved you. If you had given me any indication that this love was reciprocated – then I wouldn’t have sought solace in Barry. I was prepared to wait for you. But that last holiday in La Quinta de Los Cedros – you were so disinterested – cold – heartless. You were changing. I am not someone who can live alone, like you. I need companionship. When Henry died, I needed friendship desperately and Barry offered me that. He seemed interested in me, listened to me in the way that you used to and he desired me physically. I felt that I was in a relationship with him which allowed me to feel loved. With you it was a mental game which we played together. With Barry it was quite the opposite. It had pleasure and comfort which came from our physicality together. Maybe that was a mistake.”
Cornelia finished her Margarita, slowly sipping the last drops.
“So – I’ve confessed. What else can I do? What more do you expect from me?”
Gurtha held his glass of water with both hands, “You told me all those years ago at Llanthony Abbey to ‘stay innocent and childlike’. Was that only for me? Were you excluded?”
Cornelia pulled on her lace gloves.
“I lost my innocence and my childlike nature when I was ten or even before that. That advice was to protect you. I didn’t want what had happened to me, to twist you.”
She touched his face with her gloved hand.
“I don’t want to lose your friendship. There is no reason why it can’t be even stronger than before. In difficult times if you persevere, a relationship can deepen. Do you not think so?”
The Secret Wound Page 20