I’ll be home for Christmas

by Roisin Meaney

  Two days was all she and Tilly had had together, less than two days. Barely beginning to get to know one another, and now Laura was leaving, and when she got back to Roone Tilly would be packing for Australia, if she hadn’t already left.

  Because of course she would go home. After sleeping on it, Laura had seen that there was no question of Tilly staying. She would phone her parents when she felt ready and she would tell them everything, and when she got home they’d deal with it, because that’s what parents did.

  How could it be otherwise? If Tilly stayed, if she had the baby here, how could things ever be the same with her adoptive parents? She’d do irreparable damage to them, and to their relationship with her. She’d said they were decent people – Laura couldn’t help her to hurt them; she couldn’t do it.

  She and Tilly needed to talk. They needed to sit down and thrash it out – but when? And Susan needed to talk too: this was why she’d come to Roone. It was almost, Laura thought, as if Gladys had chosen the worst possible time to die. Even beyond the grave, she was doing her best to be awkward—

  She stopped, appalled with herself. She slapped the thought away. She looked at Evie and Marian, engrossed in their coloured paper and fabric and glitter. ‘I’ve never been without them,’ she said, ‘except when I was in hospital. I’ve never spent a single night apart from Poppy.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Susan said. ‘Tilly and I will spoil them rotten’ – and she had to be content with that.

  ‘What should we tell them?’ she wondered aloud, eyeing them again. ‘How will we get away?’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Susan said. ‘Go and pack. I’ll think of something while you’re upstairs.’

  Laura turned to Tilly. ‘Will you come and help me?’

  They climbed the stairs together, Laura rehearsing what was to be said in her head. Tilly ducked into her room – ‘I’ll be with you in a second’ – so Laura got their biggest suitcase down from the attic. When she entered her room, Tilly stood there.

  ‘This is for you,’ she said, holding out a small package wrapped in pink tissue paper. ‘I meant to give it to you before. I know this isn’t the best time,’ the words running into one another, the familiar flush sweeping up her face, ‘but you’re going away now and … well, it’s just something small, I didn’t know what to get, you might not even—’

  ‘Stop,’ Laura commanded. ‘Give it here.’ She dropped the shirt she was holding and took the package and unwrapped it. She unfolded the two brightly patterned cushion covers and held them up. She laid them out on the bed, side by side.

  ‘It’s Aboriginal art,’ Tilly said. ‘There’s a store in our town.’

  ‘Thank you, they’re gorgeous.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really. You didn’t have to do that.’

  Tilly smiled shyly. ‘I wanted to.’

  Awkward, in the light of what she had to say. Laura folded the cushion covers and moved them to the top of the dressing table. She turned and looked her sister full in the face.

  ‘Tilly, I’ve been thinking about what you told me yesterday, and I really think the best thing for you to do is come clean to your parents, tell them everything, and go home on Wednesday.’

  She watched the smile sliding off like wet putty, the skin around her eyes getting pink. ‘I can’t stay here? You’re sending me away?’

  ‘It’s not that – it’s not a question of me sending you anywhere. It just seems like the best thing to do. I’m sure your parents would much prefer if you went home to them. I’m sure they’ll come to terms with it, once they have time to get used to—’

  ‘You don’t know them,’ Tilly cried, dashing tears away before they had a chance to fall. ‘You have no idea what they’re like! You can’t possibly know how they’d react. You said you’d help, you said.’

  ‘Tilly, I am trying to help, I’m trying to do what’s best—’

  Footsteps sounded in the corridor: Tilly immediately wheeled and disappeared. A second later Gavin was at the door with two sombre boys in tow, and Laura had to switch her attention to them.

  Their first close brush with death. You couldn’t really count Nell’s mother Moira, whom they hadn’t known that well, or Walter, who’d been in their orbit for such a brief time. This was the real thing; this they could feel.

  Laura sat them on the side of the bed and knelt on the floor beside them. ‘You’re very brave boys,’ she said, finding hands to hold. ‘Granny would be proud of you.’

  ‘But why did she just die?’ Ben wanted to know, in a voice that wobbled like Tilly’s had. ‘She was fine yesterday, she wasn’t even sick.’

  ‘It happens that way sometimes, lovey, especially when people get a bit older. The doctor will tell us what happened when we meet him.’

  ‘Could you?’ Seamus asked, his freckled face twisted with anxiety. ‘Could you just die?’ Ten years old, a child still. Laura regarded them both, her darling boys. She wanted to take away their troubles, she wanted to keep them far from everything bad.

  But she had to tell them the truth. ‘I could – but it would be very unusual, at my age.’

  ‘But you were sick,’ he said. ‘You had cancer, an’ Andy’s real mum died of cancer.’

  Too big a worry for him, much too big. ‘A lot of people get better from cancer too,’ she told him. ‘I got better. I’m fine now.’

  Hear that, God? No second doses: you’ll make me into a liar.

  ‘Will we have to look at Granny?’ Seamus asked.

  ‘Not if you don’t want to.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  ‘That’s fine.’

  She remembered her first corpse. Grandpa O’Mahony. He’d died less than a year before her mother had taken off for Australia, so Laura would have been about the boys’ age, ten or eleven. Say goodbye to your grandfather, Luke had said, and Grandpa’s yellow face in the coffin, looking nothing like Laura remembered, had been horrifying. He didn’t look asleep, like her mother had said he would: he was like a wax dummy of himself, a macabre joke someone was playing on them.

  And then Granny O’Mahony had died too, just a few months later. Another coffin, another unnerving face that Laura could hardly bring herself to look at. The life gone, that was the frightening thing. The spark that had made Granny O’Mahony into a person was missing. She and Grandpa had been extinguished.

  Laura wondered suddenly if their deaths had had anything to do with her mother’s departure. Might she have simply moved back home to their house in Kildare, rather than halfway around the world, if her parents had still been alive? Had their deaths actually been part of the reason she’d left?

  No time to think about that now. It was coming up to half ten: they’d make the eleven o’clock ferry, they’d be in Dublin by late afternoon. She’d ring Larry when they got to the mainland, let him know they were on the way.

  ‘Get your pyjamas,’ she told the boys, ‘and your toothbrushes.’ The essentials, that was all they needed, and a smart set of clothes. ‘Did you talk to the doctor?’ she asked Gavin, who’d been standing silently by.

  ‘Yes, it’s sorted.’ Looking at her waistline, or somewhere around there.

  ‘What about your deliveries? Weren’t you to start tomorrow?’

  He shrugged. ‘They’ll have to wait.’

  ‘They can’t wait – we need the money.’ Especially now, with a funeral to pay for. She thought quickly. Hugh had helped out before, when Laura was in hospital, but he and Imelda were going to Mayo this afternoon to visit her sister. ‘Leave the order book with Susan – ask her to send Tilly over to Nell’s with it later, she’ll find someone.’

  He nodded, went off without a word. Still keeping her at arm’s length.

  Finally they were ready to set off. Laura kissed the girls goodbye at the front door – ‘I told them you’re going to buy new saucepans,’ Susan said, and Evie and Marian didn’t look as if they minded in the least being excluded from such a boring task.r />
  ‘We’ll talk when I get back,’ she promised Susan.

  ‘We will, of course.’

  There was no sign of Tilly, another person mad at Laura. ‘She must be in her room,’ Susan said, ‘I’ll get her,’ but Laura said no need, they’d already said goodbye upstairs. Had Gavin noticed anything, she wondered, when Tilly had rushed past him in the corridor? Probably not: still reeling over the news of Gladys.

  They drove to the pier and boarded the ferry, and Laura explained to Leo Considine why they had to leave, knowing that by the time they were halfway to their destination the whole of the island would know.

  And somewhere on the long road to Dublin, while the boys read comics in the back seat and Gavin pretended to listen to the radio so he wouldn’t have to talk to her, she thought about the task that awaited her, and her heart sank quietly.

  She heard the others leaving as she rummaged in her suitcase and found the boarding pass she’d printed out for her return journey before she’d left Australia, in the unlikely event that she’d need it.

  She read the date: Wednesday, 30 December. Three days from now. She tore it in two and dropped the pieces in the wastepaper basket beside the locker. She splashed enough cold water on her swollen eyes to fill a paddling pool, and then she went downstairs.

  ‘You missed them, they’ve just left,’ Susan said. If she noticed anything she didn’t let on. She showed Tilly Gavin’s order book and told her it needed to be taken next door and delivered to Nell.

  Next door, where Andy lived. If he was there, he’d see her looking like this. She found she didn’t care.

  ‘I could take the twins with me,’ she said, ‘if you like.’

  ‘That’d be great.’

  ‘Shall we go and see if Tommy’s at home?’ she asked the girls, and they stopped trying to dress Charlie in one of Gavin’s vests and allowed themselves to be wrapped in jackets and scarves and hats. Tilly pulled on her own jacket, regretting the loss of the green scarf she’d returned to Colette the day before.

  ‘You need a scarf,’ Susan said, and went out to the hall and returned with the red one she’d been wearing on arrival. Tilly wound it around her neck – it was beautifully thick and soft – and tucked Gavin’s order book under her arm and off they went to see who was at home.

  They walked through the field, the sharp cold of yesterday much diminished, all evidence of snow completely gone. ‘Where thnowman?’ Evie demanded, and Tilly picked up his red baseball cap and told her he’d gone to the North Pole to be with Santa and all his snowman friends, and they received the news doubtfully, looking at the nose he’d left behind on the ground.

  They stood on the neighbouring doorstep and Tilly rang the bell, feeling thoroughly miserable. Nell answered, a pink apron wrapped around her waist. ‘Look who’s here,’ she said. ‘Come in, everyone.’

  They stepped into the hall, which was filled with the smell of baking.

  ‘Are the others following on?’ Nell asked.

  ‘The others?’

  ‘Laura and Susan,’ Nell replied – and abruptly Tilly remembered the previous day’s invitation to brunch. ‘Change of plan,’ she said, and Nell peeled off the girls’ jackets and sent them to the kitchen to find Tommy, and Tilly told her what had happened.

  ‘Oh, Lord, that’s a shock. Poor Gavin. They’re gone already?’

  ‘On the eleven o’clock ferry. They took the boys with them.’

  ‘And Susan?’

  ‘She’s here, she came yesterday.’

  ‘God, what a thing to happen. Poor old Gladys.’ They walked towards the kitchen. ‘Colette is gone to Mass, and Andy’s still in bed. But James is here – you can meet him.’

  Andy’s father, Colette’s son, in the act of making coffee. Arresting blue eyes, bluer than Andy’s. Dark hair peppered with grey, chin shadowed with stubble. Cream sweater, black jeans. An echo of Andy in the face – or should that be the other way around? Their mouths were similar, she decided. Their chins came to the same little point.

  ‘Hi there,’ he said. ‘Laura’s mysterious sister from Australia: your fame has gone before you.’

  Nell murmured the news to him. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘that’s too bad. Sorry to hear that.’

  ‘Sit,’ Nell said. ‘You’ll have something, now that you’re here,’ so Tilly deposited her jacket and scarf on the little couch and sat at the table, trying to look cheerful.

  The girls had already settled themselves on the floor, next to Tommy and his train set. The dog Andy had returned with the day before, like Charlie but with a darker face, was dozing under the table. Did every house on Roone have a dog that looked like Charlie?

  She thought of the working dogs on the farm at home, the dogs that Pa trained to round up the sheep. They never came into the house, unless they wanted to be chased out again with Ma’s broom. Tilly would have liked a pet dog, but pet dogs didn’t live on farms at home.

  James picked up Gavin’s order book. ‘They want someone to do the deliveries?’

  ‘Yes, just for the next two mornings. They’ll be back on Tuesday.’

  James flicked through the book. ‘Andy could do it,’ he said, looking up at Nell.

  ‘He could. That might work.’ Nell began to slice a pie of some kind that was sitting by the cooker. ‘He’s dying to get in a bit of driving practice,’ she explained to Tilly. ‘He passed the test last month, but he doesn’t have a car yet. And he knows the ropes – he helped out a bit when Gavin was setting up.’

  She wiped her hands on her apron. ‘Maybe you could go with him, Tilly – see a bit of the island while you’re here. I hope you like apple tart, by the way.’

  ‘Yes,’ Tilly said. ‘I love apple tart.’

  She could go with him. She could sit next to him in Gavin’s little white van. She could travel around the island with him, for however long it took to do the deliveries. It was like being handed a gift, like someone had said, ‘I thought you might like this.’ It was just what she needed to hear.

  ‘As long as Susan can do without me.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure she could – it would only be an hour or so. Cream or ice-cream?’

  ‘Cream, thanks.’ An hour or so, tomorrow and the next day. Whatever trauma lay ahead, at least she would have this.

  The tart was wonderful. She said so, and Nell told her the secret was her pastry, which she made with boiling water. ‘It breaks all the rules of pastry-making, but it’s the best.’

  There was a painting of a collie dog hanging above the fridge. ‘You did that?’ she asked James, and he told her he had.

  ‘John Silver,’ Nell said. ‘He was gorgeous. I sort of inherited him when I bought this house. But he was old, and he died last year. Captain is Andy’s dog, really’ – indicating the dog under the table – ‘but we all love him.’

  ‘He looks like Charlie.’

  ‘They’re brothers.’

  ‘Ah.’ Tilly studied the collie again. ‘You know my father?’ she asked James.

  ‘Met him briefly at Laura and Gavin’s wedding. You know he’s famous, don’t you?’

  ‘Laura said.’ She didn’t miss the lightning glance that he and Nell exchanged: aware of the way things were, then. She wondered what her father’s paintings looked like. Sold for Monopoly money, Laura had said. Must Google him sometime.

  ‘I saw one of your paintings next door too,’ she told James. ‘It’s the man who used to own the house.’

  ‘Ah yes, Walter.’

  ‘I thought I saw him the other day, but Gavin told me he died.’

  Nell poured tea. ‘He did, four years ago last summer. He was a dear man, I knew him all my life. His family lived on the island for generations, but Walter was the last of the line. They’re all gone now. Darling, will you get milk?’

  The last of the line – so Tilly hadn’t seen a brother, or a cousin, or any relative at all. Strange that whoever it was had borne such a strong resemblance to him. Strange that Tilly had seen him in the field that had once
belonged to him, where he must often have been when he was alive.

  Strange – and a tiny bit unnerving.

  ‘Have you seen much of Roone yet?’ James enquired, and when Tilly said no, he told her about the holy well and the lighthouse and the prehistoric remains. ‘Get Andy to show you tomorrow. And there are some lovely beaches – although you’ll hardly be looking for a swim.’

  ‘No – but I was on a beach yesterday, just along the road from here.’ Right after meeting Andy, her head spinning.

  ‘One of the local men swims every day of the year,’ Nell remarked. ‘He was seventy-six last birthday.’

  Before Tilly could respond the kitchen door opened. ‘Morning,’ Andy said. Looking bleary with sleep still, despite the damp hair that suggested a shower. His chin stubbled like his father’s, rumpled blue sweatshirt, equally rumpled jeans, nothing on his feet but a pair of thick grey socks.

  Tilly tried not to stare.

  ‘There you are,’ Nell said. ‘Tilly dropped in.’

  He gave her a smile. She returned it, thinking how awful she must look.

  ‘Fancy a spot of driving?’ his father asked.

  ‘You know I would. Where and when?’

  They told him about Gladys. They showed him the order book. ‘No problem,’ he said.

  ‘Check the names,’ Nell told him. ‘If you don’t know where anyone lives, I can tell you.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘We thought you might bring Tilly along, let her see a bit of the island.’

  Tilly chased the last of her apple tart around the plate.

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Good idea. Say ten in the morning, yeah?’

  ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘I’ll be ready.’ Her heart dancing a little jig.

  She asked Nell where the bathroom was, and she was directed down the corridor. ‘Third door on the right,’ Nell said.

  The towel that hung on the bathroom rail was damp. She pressed her face into it. When she wiped steam from the mirror she saw how plain she looked. Still, there was always tomorrow.

  ‘Ten in the morning,’ she said to her blurry reflection. Forget about what came next, don’t think about it.