by Joan Lingard
‘You sign my name, Cormac.’
Cormac signed ‘Maeve Aherne’ in backward, sloping writing, to make it look unlike his own, which was firm and upright. In school he was complimented on his fine, clear handwriting. ‘You have a good hand, Cormac,’ his teacher told him.
His mother got him to make the phone calls too. ‘I don’t like the phone,’ she said, though she spoke to her sisters on it every day. But that was different from talking to total strangers whose faces she couldn’t imagine. Later, Cormac would come to wonder if it was the making of these calls which made him hate the telephone so violently. His mother had another reason for asking him to do it, of which he was aware; she was too proud to tell these people, ‘My husband hasn’t come home.’
For the first few calls his throat was dry and he had to keep clearing it but after that it was as if it was oiled and the questions slipped smoothly out. ‘I wonder if by any chance you might have seen my dad Pat Aherne recently?’ For a minute or two he would then nurse the receiver while the person at the other end extolled on the likeability of Pat Aherne. ‘He’s great crack, Pat, so he is. We always look forward to him coming. He cheers you up so he does.’ And then, ‘But, no, we’ve not seen him this last month or so. Is there anything wrong? I hope nothing’s happened to him. Hang on a minute till I get Maureen. She might be able to tell you when he was last here.’
Cormac held the receiver against his chest.
‘What’s going on?’ asked his mother.
‘He’s gone to ask Maureen.’
‘This’ll be costing us a fortune. Maureen could be anywhere, whoever Maureen is.’
In due time, Maureen herself came to the phone. ‘Are you Cormac, Pat’s wee lad? How are you, son? I hope nothing’s happened to your daddy. He was always talking about you, telling us how clever you were, especially with your hands. He’s not been here for a wee while now. I was expecting him in last week, as a matter of fact. Our stocks are running low. A woman was just in there looking for ox-blood and I couldn’t oblige her. Will you be taking orders yourself? Or your mammy?’
Not right now, he told her, and hung up.
His mother had her finger under the next number on the list. She read and he dialled. He dialled Tralee and Galway, Newry and Portrush, Dublin and Donegal Town. He began to feel he was travelling Ireland himself.
And then, one evening, he got his first lead.
‘Your dad was in one Thursday there, two or three weeks back,’ said the man at the other end of the line. ‘Hang on and I’ll go and check my order book.’ When he returned he was able to tell Cormac that his father had visited his shop on the Thursday of the week before he disappeared. ‘After that he was heading up into Clare.’
Cormac dialled a County Clare number on the list and a woman answered. She knew Cormac for once his father had taken him on a trip over to the west and they had called at her shop and she had given him a large bag of bullseyes. ‘We saw your daddy not that long ago, on a Thursday it was. I remember it was a Thursday for my sister always comes for her lunch on a Thursday. She lives out in the country, you see, and it’s her day for the butcher. I’d bought a nice bit of liver so I said to your dad that he was welcome to join us. “I’ve plenty,” I told him, “and liver’s good for the blood.”’ When the woman’s memory was jogged further she pinpointed the week.
‘We’re getting there,’ Cormac told his mother. He felt excited and sick at the same rime.
Only one County Clare number remained on the list. This man also recalled meeting Cormac and was able to tell him that his father had been in on the Friday of that week and that he’d been in great form. He didn’t know where he was heading afterwards. ‘Mrs Blaney might be able to tell you. He stayed there on the Thursday night.’
Mrs Blaney was a widow woman who lived about five miles out of the village, up a rough track. She took in the odd B&B when the chance arose, which was not too often in such a remote spot. There was not a lot of passing trade. Cormac had spent a night there with his father. She’d welcomed him with open arms, gathering him to her soft, pillowy bosom. For a moment he’d thought he was going to suffocate until he managed to ease his face away. ‘He’s a nice-looking lad, Pat,’ she’d said. ‘A chip off the old block!’ She had a full-throated laugh. She’d given them a great tea of thick cut ham and fried potatoes with apple pie to follow and two kinds of cake. Cormac had stuffed himself full and had then fallen asleep in front of the warm peat fire, scarcely surfacing when his father had carried him through to the bedroom.
The County Clare shopkeeper gave Cormac the phone number of Mrs Blaney, while commenting that he hadn’t seen her for a bit. ‘She might be off visiting her sisters in Galway. It’s a bit lonely for her in that house there, with her man gone.’
Cormac thanked the shopkeeper. His ear was getting hot and sore from pressing it against the receiver rim. He dialled this last number, knowing that it would be the last. He heard the phone ringing at the other end, remembered the comforting warmth of the slow-burning peat fire, and the pleasure of the sweet, moist cakes, and wakening in the morning into a calm stillness broken only by a few plaintive bird notes and Mrs Blaney’s soft, pillowy laugh coming from another room.
The phone went on ringing, and on ringing, and on ringing.
‘There’s no one there,’ he said to his mother and wiped his damp hand against his jersey sleeve.
To Maeve Aherne, her husband’s disappearance remained a mystery, for her son said not a word to her about the secret things he knew. Pat Aherne was not seen again by them, nor by the shoe-polish firm who would have liked to recover their car and their samples of shoe polish. They sent threatening letters to his wife. She had done nothing with the car, Cormac wrote back, acting once again as her scribe, and she had no money to give them in compensation. The very idea! The boot should be on the other foot. They should be compensating her for sending her husband into wild and lonely places. Goodness knows, he might be lying in a bog, for all they knew!
Cormac and his mother were poor now. The days of sliders and sand castles at Donaghadee belonged to the past. Maeve Aherne got a job in a greengrocer’s but it didn’t go anywhere near compensating for the loss of her husband’s income. She brought home a bag of tired vegetables at the end of each day and just enough money at the weekend to pay the rent and insurance and get basic shopping at the Co-op. Before their telephone was taken away, Cormac tried Mrs Blaney’s number once more, when his mother was out. This time there was no ringing tone, only a long note that sounded like a dirge. He felt sure his father was no longer in the country. He would have crossed the Irish Sea, gone to the mainland. The sea was a great divide; it offered a means of escape, which, in his own good time, Cormac himself would take.
Aunt Kathleen is still on the phone waiting for a response from his end.
‘Why should you think there’s another woman, Aunt Kathleen?’ he asks, a little slyly.
‘There always is.’ She should know, right enough!
‘Or man,’ he puts in. But perhaps she has forgotten that part of her life, effaced it from her memory.
She does not react but goes on to tell him that his mother has need of him. ‘She’ll never admit it, Cormac, but she’s going downhill. You’ll see a difference. She’s frail these days.’
For a while after Cormac’s father disappeared postal orders made out to Maeve Aherne arrived in envelopes posted and registered in various towns and cities of England. First, there was Liverpool, for wasn’t that where many Irishmen ended up, with no money to take them further? Pat Aherne did travel on for after that came Walsall and then Wigan and Warrington. There was never an address to write back to.
‘He always did have itchy feet,’ his wife commented. ‘I should have seen the signal when we were courting. He was always talking about going to America. But then a lot of them talk that way, don’t they, and they never go?’
It might only have been the north and the Midlands of England Pat Aherne had absconded t
o but for all the difference it made to them it might as well have been America.
‘Towns beginning with W,’ said his son, bent over a map of England, trying to fathom where his father might go next. Wolverhampton? That was further south, but it might take his fancy.
Pat’s next port-of-call turned out to be Coventry, breaking the pattern, and after that there was a long silence. Then came a letter saying, ‘Hope you are both keeping well’, with a five-pound note inside it.
‘Not worth him getting an order for, I suppose,’ said his wife, who by this time expected nothing.
Nothing else came.
After his phone call from Aunt Kathleen Cormac feels he has no option but to ring his mother. ‘I’ll be over at Easter,’ he promises.
As soon as he puts the phone down he goes upstairs to tell Davy that they will be going to Belfast for the Easter holidays; stating it will help to cement his will. Davy is lying on the bed, face down.
‘What’s up, son?’ He sits on the bed beside the boy and strokes his hair.
‘Nothing.’
‘Come now, there is, so tell me,’ says Cormac softly. He feels soft where his son is concerned. His daughter, too. Rachel was always telling him he was too soft with them. Too soft for their own good. It wasn’t doing them a favour; they’d grow up to find the world a harder place than they’d imagined. ‘You know you can tell me anything that’s bothering you, Davy,’ says his father. ‘And if I can do anything about it, I will.’
The boy lifts his head. His face is red and blotchy and his blond hair is sticking out like wisps of straw, which makes Cormac’s heart turn over. He would do anything to protect this child.
Davy wipes his eyes with the back of his sleeve. ‘I’m just missing my mum,’ he says and the tears come afresh.
Cormac cries, too, over the top of his son’s head as he hugs him to his chest and rocks him, the way he did when he was smaller. He’s still small. What terrible things are they doing to the children! And yet, what else were they to do? Their situation before had become untenable and this had seemed a civilised solution: sharing the children, living a couple of streets away from one another, spending Sundays together, like a family. It’s all right for Aunt Kathleen to say, ‘Away back to your wife!’
They lay in bed together, he and Rachel, on the night after his suspension from school, not touching, a clear gap between them, each keeping, by mutual, unspoken agreement, to their own side, as if they had thoughts they wished to keep separate from the other. Archie Gibson’s words still trembled in his head. ‘I have no option, Cormac—’ No option. No option.
‘Are you awake?’ asked Rachel, her voice quiet.
‘Yes.’
‘There’s something I should tell you, Cormac.’
He tensed, sensing from the vibration in her voice that this would be something he would not wish to hear. A car passed in the street, its tyres swishing softly on the wet tarmac. Possibly a neighbour coming home. Ah yes, that was what it was. The engine had cut out, car doors were slamming. All common night-time, reassuring sounds, except that tonight nothing could reassure him, except for a phone call from Mrs Bain to tell him that they were withdrawing their complaint and that it had all been a terrible mistake. But that was unlikely. Mrs Bain had gone too far for that and she was not a woman prepared to suffer loss of face. And she wanted him to suffer. She wanted to ruin him. He had offended her, had he not?
‘I’ve been having an affair,’ said Rachel. ‘It didn’t last long, and it’s over now. We were only together two or three times. I’m sorry.’
He was stunned. It had never occurred to him that Rachel – Rachel, of all people … He couldn’t believe that she had been as intimate with another man as she had been with him.
‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated. ‘Especially having to tell you this today. But somehow I had to, I don’t know why. Or perhaps it’s because of what happened today. I want to be open with you. We’ve got to be open with each other. And I didn’t want you to hear any rumours from anywhere else – just in case.’
In case they had been seen together? Though Rachel would have been very careful, he was sure, very discreet, whatever she had been doing. But no one could afford to discount chance. Had someone seen them, this man, whoever he might be, and her, when they had least expected it? Was that the reason for her confession? By the way, Cormac, I saw your wife with … With whom? His brain felt befuddled and incapable of taking anything more in.
She was lying on her back, eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling. Was she waiting for him to make a similar confession? He did have a sin, a minor one, he rated it, but still a transgression that surfaced every now and then to cause him unease. He had been unfaithful to Rachel following the birth of Sophie. He’d gone out with some mates to celebrate and had drunk a skinful and they’d picked up or been picked up by some women out on a hen night. Somehow or other he had ended up with one of them in her bed. Afterwards, it had all seemed rather foolish, but he hadn’t dared tell Rachel in case she would leave him and take their beautiful new baby with her. Could he face telling her now? His brief fling would seem tawdry beside her serious affair. For he did not doubt that hers would have been serious; Rachel would not embark on such a thing lightly. That was what bothered him more than anything: he feared she might have fallen in love with someone else.
He felt as if his marriage was coming apart, unravelling between his hands, like a piece of worn-out cloth. One false move, or word, and it would be rent asunder.
He ran his tongue over his parched lips and told her. She was very quiet, she hardly seemed to be breathing. Did she feel that his transgression evened the score? He thought not.
‘Things haven’t been very good between us for a while, have they?’ she said eventually.
‘Haven’t they?’ he responded stubbornly, though he knew that what she was saying was true. They had been drifting away from each other a little, but perhaps that was understandable after so many years. It didn’t mean that he didn’t still love her.
‘You’re upstairs every night, night after night, in your studio. Wrapped up in your sculpture. I know that when you start working on something you can’t think of anything else. But I hardly ever see you, except at mealtimes and even then you’re only half there.’
So she resented his work, did she? But he couldn’t live without it, he’d wither away. He had always thought she supported him, was proud of him even; she’d said so when he had his recent exhibition.
‘I suppose I am a bit caught up in it,’ he muttered.
‘Obsessed, I’d say. But then maybe you have to be to achieve anything.’
‘But you’re often out yourself in the evening. At your meetings and classes.’ She was a school governor and she went to conversation classes at the French Institute and to aerobic classes and sometimes she had a night out with her women friends. They had always agreed it was good to have separate interests, not to live in each other’s pockets.
‘But I’m not out till one or two a.m. I don’t come to bed in the middle of the night and get up in the morning growling like a bear with a sore head. You know you’re often grumpy in the morning because you haven’t slept enough.’
‘So it’s my fault, is it? That you’ve been having an affair?’ He still couldn’t make sense of it. That Rachel, whom he thought he knew almost as well as he knew himself, and who was usually honest and rational and reasonable, should do something that seemed so out of character. But what did it mean, ‘out of character’? Only that someone was taking you by surprise.
‘Of course it’s not your fault!’ she said almost sharply. ‘I’m not trying to put the blame on you. I’m just trying to understand where we are.’
They are silent, each locked once more inside their own thoughts.
He swallowed and asked, ‘Who is he, anyway?’
‘That’s of no importance.’
‘No importance!’ He sat up. ‘For Christ’s sake, how can you say that?’
; ‘It’s over,’ she said again. But could he believe her?
Chapter Seven
Cormac leaves Davy and runs back down the stairs. He lifts the receiver. He seems to spend half his evenings on the telephone these days, which he didn’t do when he was with Rachel; she took charge of it then, calling him only if it was his mother or one of the aunts. But they call more often, these female relatives of his, now that they do not have to go through Rachel, not that she would be unfriendly to them, she’d always have a little chat, ask after their health, before running up the two flights of stairs to bang on his studio door. From his high retreat he had been blessed by only being able to hear the phone ringing distantly. In this small house it penetrates every corner.
He dials Rachel’s number and waits. He is going to have to give her the satisfaction of telling her that Davy wants her. The boy’s welfare takes priority over his petty pride. Davy can go and spend the night with her if he wishes, and he does. ‘It’s not a problem,’ he told him before coming downstairs. ‘You can go round any time you want to.’ As long as he comes back to him: that he leaves unspoken. It is not a clause he can insist on.
The answering machine is coming on, drat the bloody thing! This is the answering machine for Sophie and Rachel Aherne. We’re sorry … Ta, ra, ta, ra. He clamps the receiver back onto its rest, cutting off her well-modulated voice. Oh, yes, he bets she’s sorry. Where the hell is she when her son is crying for her upstairs? Out with her lover? He knows he’s being unreasonable and would acknowledge that he often is, but ever since Rachel told him about her affair he has been obsessed by the identity of this man who lured her into his arms. Or perhaps she lured him into hers? Now he’s being ridiculous. He can imagine her voice telling him so. But is he?