Araby

by GRETTA MULROONEY

  Now I touched the thin skin of her face, feeling how still she was. Where are you, I wondered; are you here at all? I heard my father moving about and I got off the bed, smoothing the cover. He came through, combing his hair with his fingers.

  ‘No change?’

  ‘No. The nurse thinks it won’t be long.’

  He pulled up the chair. ‘I’ll stay with her now. She mustn’t be left.’

  I set off to fetch Biddy who was sitting with Mrs Kelly over the remains of a leisurely breakfast. Mrs Kelly had her own cup in front of her and there was an atmosphere of congenial chat.

  ‘How is your dear mother this morning?’ Mrs Kelly asked.

  ‘About the same.’

  ‘Ah, it’s a hard time on all of you. Still, Biddy, isn’t it good that you’ve come to heal the breach?’

  Biddy nodded. ‘I’m glad I had the chance. I have Rory to thank for phoning me.’

  ‘Biddy’s been telling me that your mother’s people were from around Bantry,’ Mrs Kelly said.

  ‘That’s right.’ I could see that Biddy had been telling her a lot more as well. I thought how much my mother would dislike this; she’d say that Mrs Kelly had been ferreting for information, striking while the iron was hot to find out what she could. Then I gave myself a mental shake; what did it matter? My mother was beyond whatever real or imaginary motives Mrs Kelly might have and what use was this information to her anyway? ‘It’s good of you to put my aunt up at the last minute,’ I said more agreeably, ‘especially as it’s out of season.’

  ‘Oh, not at all, it’s the least we can do. You’ll be back tonight, Biddy?’

  ‘Yes. Can I give you a ring to let you know what time?’

  ‘Of course. No trouble at all.’

  ‘I could have walked up really,’ Biddy said as we got in the car, ‘it’s not so far.’

  I looked at her thin shoes. ‘It’s a good twenty minutes and the lanes are wet.’

  ‘She’s a nice woman, that Mrs Kelly. I’d forgotten how genuine people are here. There’s much more family feeling.’

  ‘Have you any idea where John-Jo is these days?’ I asked.

  ‘No, I’ve not heard from him in years. I’d imagine he drank himself into an early grave, like our father.’

  When I opened the door to the cottage my father was standing looking out of their bedroom. He lifted one hand, then dropped it slowly down.

  ‘Your mother’s gone. About five minutes ago.’

  We followed him into the room. She lay just as I’d left her except that my father had placed her rosary in her hands. An open Ireland’s Own lay on the chair. Biddy touched my father’s arm, saying, ‘Poor Kitty, ah poor Kitty.’

  I stood at the foot of the bed. I was empty and cold. She had become someone it was hard to recognize; all my memories were of a big, rounded woman. In shape now she must look as she had as a young girl, small and slender.

  ‘She never woke up,’ my father said. ‘Her breathing got rough and stopped. She just drifted away.’

  ‘It was for the best, Dan,’ Biddy murmured. ‘She’d only have suffered otherwise. Will we pray for her soul?’

  They knelt by the bed, my father lowering himself with difficulty. He took his beads from his pocket and started the Misericordia, a prayer that they’d always said at the end of the rosary, part of the often lengthy ‘trimmings’ that my mother liked to attach;

  ‘Hail holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, hail our life, our sweetness and our hope; to thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve, to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this vale of tears …’

  Their voices joined, Biddy’s higher tones skimming his low rumble. I held the bedpost, watching their bowed heads and my mother’s wasted face. All I could think of were the lines from that song. They went around in my head; I could hear her singing them, putting little flourishes on some of the notes:

  And I’d kiss him far into the night-time

  With kisses worth silver and gold.

  ELEVEN

  I hadn’t realized how quickly everything moved in Ireland once a person died. I was used to daily events meandering along; I felt cloaked in my English persona most strongly whenever I tried to force a date for something to happen. The bottled gas for my parents’ cooker would always be delivered ‘sometime next week’; the turf-man merely mentioned the month he’d turn up. My mother died on Monday and I was startled to discover that the funeral would be on Wednesday. My father decided to keep her at home until the Wednesday morning, when she’d be taken to the church. He’d stick to the old ways, he said, and hold the wake with her there; he wasn’t going to have her stranded in a lonely funeral parlour.

  Dermot seemed philosophical about her dying just before he arrived. He swung into the practicalities of the death certificate and funeral arrangements. I took my father aside before he set off in Dermot’s car to see the priest about the service.

  ‘Did you know Mum bought a shroud? She showed me it. She wanted to be buried in it.’

  He was buttoning up his coat. ‘One of those awful yokes she saw in the paper?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I knew she would, I knew she was up to something. I said it was a gloomy-looking object, she’d be better in one of her frocks, but that was your mother all over.’

  ‘I’ll give it to Biddy, she’s going to help the undertaker.’

  He nodded. ‘Where had she hidden it?’

  ‘Bottom of the wardrobe. It’s not that bad; brown, simple, a bit monastic’ God, I thought, I sound like a fashion commentator.

  ‘Her mother had one, I suppose that’s why she wanted it.’ He leaned against the wall for a moment.

  ‘Are you okay? Are you sure you’re up to going with Dermot?’

  ‘Yes, yes. It’ll do me good. She’s not to be left, now.’

  ‘No, there’ll always be someone with her.’

  ‘That’s tradition,’ he said, ‘that’s an important one. She wouldn’t want to be left lonely, she always hated that. I won’t be long.’

  It was late afternoon, the time of day in winter that she found most melancholy, when shadows lengthen and a hush descends. Biddy was sitting with her, waiting for the undertaker to arrive. I got the shroud out and showed it to her. She nodded.

  ‘I didn’t know you could still get them. They were very popular at one time.’

  ‘Apparently Nana wore one; I never saw her in her coffin.’

  ‘Oh yes, she’d had one for years.’

  ‘You weren’t at her funeral.’

  ‘No.’ She sighed. ‘We’d quarrelled. I don’t know if you were ever told, but before I left Cork I had a son who went for adoption. She wanted to raise him herself but I said no. I couldn’t face the idea that he’d be here, I knew I’d never be able to make a clean break. We wrote for a while, but she was forever reminding me about him in her letters and once I’d met Roy I was worried he’d read one and ask questions.’

  ‘Roy didn’t know?’

  A ghost of a smile passed over Biddy’s face. ‘Not until many years after we were married. It was different then, Rory; women kept things like that to themselves in case it put men off, even men who wanted to marry them. “Damaged goods” was a phrase you’d hear. It was part of the reason I kept away from Kitty, too. I never knew if she might mention it in front of Roy.’

  I remembered her saying in the car that Roy hadn’t wanted to visit Ireland. Now I wondered if it had been more a case of her wanting to keep him away.

  ‘Did you see your son before he was taken for adoption?’

  ‘I had him beside me for one morning. I called him Brendan to myself, but of course that wouldn’t have been his real name.’

  I replaced the low-burning candle next to my mother, wondering if Biddy kept herself so carefully because if she allowed a crack to form, grief would pour through. One son cold in the ground, another out there somewhere, lost to her as effectively as if he were dead.

  ‘Mum always put a
lighted candle in the window on Christmas Eve,’ I said. ‘It was to guide the lonely traveller and to invite Christ in.’

  ‘Our mother used to do the same. You’d see it flickering as you came up the glen. I always loved the sight of it; it guided you to the place where you belonged.’

  ‘I don’t know much about what happens now, Biddy. Will the coffin be in here?’

  ‘It can be put wherever we say. I think in here would be best; it can rest on the bed.’

  She unfolded the shroud and laid it out ready at the foot of the bed.

  ‘I saw my mother prepare a dead person once, a woman who was a neighbour. She was so gende, she talked away to her as she was doing it. I’ll have a chat with Kitty as I wash her.’

  ‘I’ll sit for a bit now,’ I told her. ‘You get a cup of tea.’

  She straightened her jumper. She must touch up her face regularly during the day, I thought; her make-up always looked flawless. At the door she stopped, stroking her palm down one of the badly-painted panels.

  ‘He’d be fifty next February, Brendan,’ she said.

  I sat looking into the candle flame. My mother’s body was before me, but I was thinking of another woman, a woman who so hated the thought of her grandchildren being adopted, she had saved one and tried to rescue another. Then a thought came into my mind; what if she’d done the same with Brendan as she’d managed with Ita, waiting until Biddy had left on the boat and then going to the nuns? He might be out there, not far away at all, thinking that his mother was dead. Or she might have cooked up some other scheme for him, invented another set of relationships completely. The only person who might know was lying silent before me. I couldn’t say anything to Biddy because I’d promised not to reveal the other story about Ita. What would Biddy gain from it even if I could? It was pure surmise on my part; fifteen years separated Nellie and Biddy and Nana might have been well past the stage when she wanted to bother with another infant by the time Brendan was born. For many years I had found my mother’s family bewildering in its silences and feuds; a kind of irritation used to come over me when I contemplated their arguments, pregnancies, conspiracies and disappearances. Now I saw how easy it was to be drawn into the webs they had spun, how once one started to weave its way round you it was hard to escape; you were pulled inexorably into its depths. I would leave well alone, stay silent, knowing that my silence added another strand to the tangled skein.

  That evening, for the first time since I’d arrived, I didn’t know what to do with myself. Biddy and the undertaker were preparing my mother, Dermot had made calls to inform people about her death and was taking a long bath, and my father was marking prayers he wanted read at the funeral in a mass book. The house felt full and busy, but I was restless. I had been for a walk in the sharp night, but the darkness seemed hostile and I stumbled. The thought of her drew me back, making me turn and hurry; it wouldn’t be long now before she was in the frosty ground and I would have only the pictures in my memory.

  ‘Is there anything I can be getting on with?’ I asked my father.

  He lowered his glasses and chewed the end of his pen. ‘We’ll need grub for the wake tomorrow night, you could make a list. Will you take Biddy to buy stuff in the morning?’

  ‘Of course. How many will be coming?’

  ‘There’ll be ourselves, Una and Con and some of their boys, and God knows how many others. You’d better get enough for the five thousand.’

  I started on a list, but I couldn’t concentrate. I kept expecting her to call for us or ring the stuck-up lady or to hear the rattle of her blackthorn stick. A couple of the Christmas cards we’d written were still waiting to be delivered. Her tube of ointment was on the mantelpiece; I thought of how when she’d been rubbing it in she used to fail to remove it completely from her fingers so that you’d be picking up traces of it when you touched things after her. It wasn’t unusual to take a cup of tea she’d poured and find a liniment flavour on the rim.

  When the undertaker had gone we all went in to see her. The coffin had been positioned across the bed with her head to the fire and feet to the door. Candles burned at the bed’s four corners. She looked weary but tranquil in her brown robe, her hands with the rosary on her breast. Her hair had been neatly brushed back and tucked behind her ears. She’d have approved, I thought, saying so to Biddy.

  ‘You’ve done a grand job,’ my father nodded. He was going to go to bed early, he said, and keep her company, but before that maybe we could all kneel and say a decade of the rosary?

  I had no idea if Dermot practised his faith or not. He had come from the bathroom with eyes stung by more than shampoo. Now he reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out a rosary. My father glanced at me and without further thought I knelt, assuming a position that was at once foreign and completely familiar. My father led us off. I murmured along with them, recalling all the words with no difficulty, clasping my hands loosely in front of me. I’m doing this for you, I said silently to her, but it’s a one-off; if you’re watching you needn’t think it’s going to become a habit.

  While my father went to the bathroom I placed a clump of rosemary I’d picked in the coffin, pressing it down beside her. Then I took one of the cologne wipes from its sealed packet and smoothed it across her brow and on her chin. My little ritual completed, I whispered goodnight to her and left her to her sleep and her last nights with her husband.

  The following day was a hasty blur. Biddy and I loaded shopping trolleys in Fermoy; cold meats, cheeses, bread, spuds for baking, soft drinks, fruit juices, wines, spirits. I asked Biddy what drink she liked, knowing that she’d say a cream sherry; a moderate little tipple with a touch of refinement. At the check-out she blew out a breath.

  ‘It’s ages since I bought so much at once. D’you think we’ve got enough ham and stuff?’

  We’d discovered that we were both vegetarians. Neither of us could gauge how much the carnivores might work through.

  ‘I think so,’ I said, reckoning that nobody’s bone marrow was going to be under threat.

  We got back to find Dermot wearing one of my mother’s cross-over aprons and wielding lavender polish. The house was spick and span, the cleanest I’d ever seen it.

  ‘Where’s Dad?’ I asked.

  ‘In with Mum. He gave me a clear run at the place. Any idea why she had bags full of silver foil stacked by the fridge?’

  ‘Probably saving it up for some appeal or other.’ I was thinking that she might have been contemplating a new hobby and had been building materials; foil collages, maybe.

  I opened their bedroom door and glanced in. My father was nodding in the chair, one hand resting on the foot of the coffin. The room felt quite different to the rest of the house, a quiet place apart.

  At six, Una and Con arrived with three of their sons, closely followed by Mr and Mrs Kelly and four other neighbours. My father took them in formally to see my mother, then they migrated to the kitchen for food and drinks. The house quickly filled up while I was unloading baked potatoes from the oven, and I heard fleeting phrases of the comfort being offered to my father:

  ‘… sure she was a grand woman …’

  ‘… Isn’t it as well she didn’t suffer long …’

  ‘… Ye’d made a great go of this place …’

  ‘… Any time at all, drop in and see us …’

  ‘… Didn’t she make a lovely garden out there where it used to be all nettles …’

  I skimmed faces that had become slightly familiar in the last fortnight and others I’d never seen, observing the texture of the life my parents had been living here, one that I had touched intermittently but barely knew. I had that feeling of apprehension that children experience when they first realize that their mother and father are individuals who had whole years of life before they became parents. I touched a warm potato to centre myself in the here and now. A pair of thick glasses sitting on a pudgy nose appeared in front of me and I stared, recognition dawning.

  ‘Is it
Denny?’ I asked, my heart lifting.

  The face was shoved in towards me for a close look.

  ‘Yerrra, ’tis me all might. And ye’d be Rrrorrry, wouldn’t ye?’

  I shook his hand, realizing that I was having no trouble understanding him. ‘That’s right. I used to come on your bus.’

  ‘Wisha, dat’s yearrrs ago now.’

  ‘It is. I remember it well, though, going off to Cork. It was always breaking down.’

  ‘Dat ould ting! ’Twas a wrrreck, surrre.’

  ‘Can I get you something?’

  He glanced at the drinks. ‘I don’t suppose ye’ve any Little Norrra limonade?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ I picked up a bottle of white fizzy stuff, nothing like the still, light-orange drink he’d loved. ‘Would this do?’

  ‘Ah, I suppose. I tink dey’ve stopped de Little Norrra now. I miss it terrrible.’

  I watched him pile a plate with food and make a face as he sipped his fizzy drink. He was stooped now and his hair had vanished. I peered around the table at his feet; he was wearing highly-polished black shoes with his dark suit. Did he still take off to Athlone I wondered, and if not, what type of sanctuary had he replaced it with?

  The bedroom door was propped open so that my mother could hear the talk and the singing that started up as the evening progressed. A crowd gathered around the fire. Dermot gave us a song about Ned Kelly, Biddy sang ‘She Moved Through the Fair’ and we had choruses of all those familiar ballads I’d learned instead of ‘Humpty Dumpty’ and ‘Jack and Jill’. Biddy was sitting beside me, flushed with the heat of the fire and several sherries. I turned to her.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘What exactly happened with the trifles?’

  ‘Ah, God.’ She ran a finger along her bottom lip, a thing I’d often seen my mother do. ‘Kitty sprinkled hundreds and thousands on top of them. They looked awful. I said something – I can’t even remember what now – and she went berserk.’