Two Fridays in April

by Roisin Meaney

  ‘No – I’ll do it after the cemetery.’

  He glances at her. She wills him to keep quiet.

  ‘Daphne, the sooner you—’

  ‘No,’ she snaps. ‘I can’t, I just can’t think about that right now. I’ll do it after. I must get to the cemetery.’

  She can hear how irrational she sounds, but a phone call is completely beyond her right now. She wouldn’t be able to concentrate, couldn’t communicate with any degree of clarity. If he keeps going on about it she’s in serious danger of exploding.

  Thankfully he seems to sense how tightly wound she is. ‘OK,’ he says calmly, and they travel in silence after that.

  She sits hunched forward, briefcase clasped to her chest, eyes fixed on the road ahead, seat belt straining around her. Water dribbles from her hair onto her face – she swipes it away, biting her cheek, forbidding the tears that are dangerously close. Her clothes cling to her, heavy as lead. The seat will be ruined after her – might as well have flung a bucket of water over it – but the condition of his car is the least of her concerns right now.

  The traffic, once they reach the main road, is dismayingly heavy. They inch along, stopping and starting. Daphne closes her eyes briefly, yearning for Finn, longing for this horrible day to be over.

  After an endless crawl the cemetery finally comes into view – she can see it half a block ahead as they sit waiting for a red light to change. She unbuckles her seat belt, unable to wait any longer. She’s afraid to check the time.

  ‘This is fine,’ she says, reaching for the door handle. ‘Thank you for the lift.’

  ‘Daphne, I know someone—’

  ‘No,’ she says vehemently. ‘You’ve done enough.’ There: let him take that any way he wants.

  She scrambles out and pushes the door closed before he has a chance to say more. She makes her way rapidly through the rain without a backward glance. At the intersection she darts across the street, dodging traffic. She runs the half-block, arrives at the cemetery gates.

  They’re closed. By her watch it’s three minutes to six.

  The tea is blindingly hot, and very sweet. ‘I’m sorry,’ she repeats, reaching for another tissue, and again the policewoman tells her she has nothing to be sorry about.

  ‘Drink the tea,’ she tells Daphne, turning for the door. ‘Take your time, no rush. I’ll just put the form through, get the word out.’

  Her name is Louise. She’s younger than Daphne, somewhere in her middle-twenties. She smells of soap, or maybe shampoo, something clean and uncomplicated. Her nails are perfect shiny ovals, and she wears an identical thin silver ring on each of her index fingers. Her boyishly cut hair has the colour and sheen of new conkers. She looks vaguely familiar.

  She’d reacted swiftly when Daphne began to crumble. She lifted the hatch that was set into the counter and ushered Daphne through to a room in the back before the scattering of people in the police station’s reception area had much of a chance to see what was going on.

  She found a box of tissues. She produced a mug of tea and a plate of Rich Tea biscuits – All the budget will run to, I’m afraid. She exchanged Daphne’s sodden jacket for a dry navy fleece – Throw it over your shoulders, it’ll warm you up a bit. I’ll put yours on the radiator.

  She’d taken a statement from Daphne, recorded her responses in a form. She didn’t complain as Daphne wasted her time with tearful explanations about cemeteries and anniversaries and late arrivals.

  What are the chances of getting the car back? Daphne had asked.

  We’ll do our best, she’d replied, but a fifteen-year-old car would more than likely be targeted by youngsters looking for something to take for a joyride, and they’re often found crashed or burnt out. We’ll hope for the best, but it might be wise to expect the worst.

  The room is warm, if a little sparsely furnished. Two dull green couches are set opposite one another, a coffee table positioned between them, and what looks like a CCTV camera in a corner where the wall meets the ceiling. Big Brother watching Daphne falling to pieces.

  A family room, Louise called it. Part of our attempt to become more public-friendly. Big improvement on before – up to this, all we had were tiny interview rooms, or the cells.

  She makes an effort to compose herself before Louise gets back. She dreads to think what she must look like, all swollen eyes and bright red nose, hair all over the place. Probably just as well they didn’t think to put a mirror in the family room.

  She pictures her much-loved car – God knows where it is by now. It’s the only one she’s ever owned, the only thing she’s ever won. The draw ticket bought absentmindedly and promptly forgotten, the thought that it might get pulled out never once crossing her mind. But then the letter, several weeks later: Dear Miss Carroll, Congratulations!

  Twenty-one years old with a brand new VW Beetle, the first of her friends to have any car, let alone the one they’d all lusted after since its arrival in Ireland just a few months before. The envy of them all she’d been – and able to drive it right away, her father nagged into teaching her before her eighteenth birthday. The test passed first time, thanks to him.

  And, of course, the car was what had brought her and Finn together – not that it had seemed like a good thing at the time. She’d parked and opened the door, her mind a million miles away, full of something she can’t now for the life of her recall – and he’d cycled straight into it, and gone flying over the handlebars to land several feet ahead on the road.

  She was shocked and mortified and apologetic; he was gracious and forgiving, and mercifully not seriously injured. She tried to persuade him to let her take him to hospital to get his cuts and bruises attended to, but he insisted he was fine – his bike shop wasn’t far away; he’d see to them himself there. She watched him limping off, trying to steer a straight course despite his buckled front wheel, and she cursed her inattention.

  She found herself thinking about him for the rest of the day. She baked a lemon cake when she went home: it was the least she could do to say sorry. A bicycle shop should be easy to find – and if his wife was behind the counter, so be it.

  The shop was certainly easy to find, less than a hundred yards up the street from where the collision had occurred. She called in during her lunch hour the next day and met a woman who, unless he’d chosen someone considerably older than himself, was definitely not his wife.

  Not the friendliest either. She listened to Daphne’s explanation, her face tight with disapproval. He’s not here right now, she said curtly, looking with suspicion at the box that held the cake. A miracle he was able to come to work at all today: he can hardly walk, he’s so stiff. Plain as day she was protective of him, and disapproving of Daphne’s carelessness, not to mind her having the gall to show her face in the shop.

  And just as Daphne was wondering whether to hand over the cake – would he ever see it? – the door opened and in he came, his face still scribbled with scratches, a purple-black bruise encircling one of his navy eyes.

  It didn’t take her long to fall in love. Just ten months later she walked up the aisle to him, a bride at last on her thirty-second birthday. And less than three years after that, another bicycle accident made a widow of her.

  Two light taps on the door. Louise reappears, holding Daphne’s jacket, damp and crumpled, and the form they completed earlier.

  ‘Well,’ she says, ‘are you feeling a bit more human?’

  Daphne sets down the mug, gets to her feet. ‘Yes, thanks.’ And, oddly, she does feel somewhat better. A little calmer, a bit less tightly wound, as if someone has opened a valve in her and let out some of the pressure. Marvellous what a good cry can do.

  Louise taps the form as Daphne eases herself back into the jacket. ‘One last thing we need to clear up. Something I should have asked earlier, and forgot: are you quite sure you locked the car?’

  ‘Definitely. I always do.’

  Louise nods. ‘You have your key so.’

  ‘I have, i
t’s in my bag.’

  Another nod. ‘And just for the record, and to keep me happy, will you check that you have it?’

  Daphne unzips the side pocket of her bag, where she always stows the key, and reaches in to pull it out.

  It’s not there.

  ‘I must have …’ She rummages through the main section, finally upends the bag onto the coffee table, scrabbles among tissues and lipstick and wallet and gum and pens. Searches the pockets of her jacket.

  No key. It’s not possible.

  It’s in her briefcase then, it must be. She never normally puts it there, but today isn’t normal.

  The key is not in her briefcase.

  She looks at Louise in bewilderment. ‘I always lock it, I’ve never forgotten, not once …’

  She trails off, the awful reality dawning. No key, which must mean that she didn’t lock the car. Not only did she not lock it, she left the key sitting in the ignition. There’s no other possible explanation. How could she have been so thoughtless, so stupid?

  ‘Daphne,’ Louise says gently, ‘it happens. Today was a tough day for you. Your mind was elsewhere. You were preoccupied. You’re not the first.’

  She can’t believe it. The key in the ignition, an open invitation. It wouldn’t have taken a second for someone to slip in and drive away, and she’d given them well over an hour.

  Five minutes later she’s heading home in a taxi. The rain has finally eased off. It’s lightly misting now, blurring the edges of the trees and railings and buildings they pass. Daphne leans back, closes her eyes wearily. The day isn’t over, there’s still Una’s birthday dinner to prepare.

  Birthday.

  Her eyes snap open.

  The cake. She never collected the cake.

  She arranges the parboiled potatoes around the chicken. She shakes the dish gently to make them skitter and dance, coating them in the hot, oily juices. She twists the salt mill and scatters garlic slivers and little snips of rosemary. She returns the dish to the oven and turns her attention to the cake she got in the corner shop. The plan-B cake.

  Out of its box, it’s even smaller than she’d thought. The top and sides are covered with flamingo-pink icing; anyone’s guess what chemical has been used to achieve that particular shade, or what lies beneath the pink layer. A far cry from the fancy chocolate cake, but it was that or a jam swiss roll.

  Nearly a quarter past seven. No sign of Una yet, wherever she went after school. Hopefully not moping on her own somewhere, hopefully out with a pal or two. Home soon: she knows she’s expected.

  A pink envelope sits on the table, addressed to Una. The Queen of England looking out from the stamp, the address of Una’s maternal grandparents written in blue biro on the reverse. The usual tenner inside probably, tucked into a birthday card – their only contact with their granddaughter, apart from the same again every Christmas. Punishing her still for something that wasn’t her fault.

  Daphne crosses the room and sinks into the armchair by the patio doors, the one Mo donated to Finn when he was furnishing this house nearly thirty years ago. Started off by the fireplace in the sitting room, relegated to the kitchen when Finn had risen to a three-piece suite. A bit shabby by this but still here, and still comfortable. A tidy little wing-backed chair covered with heathery tweed, perfect for this corner.

  Finn used to sit in it on summery evenings, when the sinking sun would throw a slanted beam across the tiles. He’d pore over his beloved cycling magazines, long legs stretched out, hair hiding his face from her until he shoved it back every so often, only for it to slide forward again within half a minute.

  This was always his chair. When she sits in it now she imagines being cradled in his arms.

  Her phone rings. She finds it in her bag and sees George’s name on the screen.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Daphne, it’s me. You OK?’

  ‘I’m OK,’ she tells him. She won’t mention the car, can’t face going into it now.

  ‘You are? Really?’

  ‘I am, really. And you? All set for your big performance?’

  ‘As set as I can be. Hard to believe they’re onstage for all of about two minutes – the hair I’ve pulled out to get them ready for it.’

  ‘Ah, I bet they’ll steal the show.’

  He teaches junior infants, twenty-four of them in his care. She called to his classroom once to deliver a wallet he’d left at her house the evening before, and there he was, all six foot of him folded onto a low stool, giant storybook propped open on his knees, all his little charges perched on cushions that were scattered about the floor, everyone looking perfectly content.

  ‘Is the birthday girl there?’

  ‘She’s not – she’s due home any minute.’

  ‘Give her my best.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘By the way,’ he says, ‘I’ve decided to go house-hunting. Did you hear?’

  ‘No I didn’t, but it’s high time.’ At twenty-six he still lives at home with his father and Isobel. ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘Oh, just something small and humble. You might keep an eye out.’

  ‘I saw one, only this afternoon,’ she tells him, the chilly little bungalow hopping into her head. ‘It’s new to the market: we’ll be putting it on the books next week. Come over for lunch tomorrow and I’ll tell you more.’

  ‘Sounds good – around one?’

  ‘Lovely.’

  After hanging up she sits back and looks out at the garden, glistening and alive after all the rain. George was just seventeen when they’d met, nine years younger than Daphne but easily a foot taller. He’d worn a grey suit, the trousers barely making it all the way to the ends of his long legs, and he blushed anytime someone spoke to him.

  His palm was damp when he shook hands with Daphne. His father Alex was marrying Daphne’s mother Isobel, and he and Daphne were meeting for the first time.

  ‘Good to finally have a brother,’ she told him. ‘I was getting a bit fed up with being an only child.’

  He gave a weak smile, his cheeks reddening. She felt sorry for him – he was as peripheral to all this as she was, and clearly out of his comfort zone. Maybe he was there only because he had to be, like her.

  ‘Are you allowed to have a glass of champagne?’ she asked.

  He shrugged, gave a shy smile. ‘I don’t think anyone would notice.’

  She took two from a passing waiter’s tray. They left the small gathering and found an empty couch in the hotel lobby, and she began the business of becoming acquainted with him.

  She learned that he was in Leaving Cert year, and planning to be a teacher. ‘My mother teaches English in a high school,’ he told her, ‘but I’d prefer primary. I love little kids – I love how they’re so … honest.’

  She thought it a peculiar word for him to choose. ‘Where’s your mother now?’

  ‘In Canada, Vancouver. She’s Canadian – she moved back after they split up.’

  She thought it strange that he hadn’t gone with her. Didn’t mothers generally claim the children in the event of a marriage breakdown? Apart from her mother, of course.

  ‘They gave me the choice,’ he went on, as if she’d asked the question aloud. ‘I wanted to stay here, at least until I finish school.’

  A tough decision for a young boy to have to make. She wondered how he felt about his father remarrying, and what he thought of Isobel, his new stepmother, but he didn’t volunteer this information.

  She told him about her job. ‘I like poking around other people’s houses, so it suits me perfectly.’

  ‘Did you ever want to do anything else?’ he asked.

  She laughed. ‘When I was young I wanted to be a driving instructor, like Dad, but then when he taught me I changed my mind – I realised I wouldn’t have half enough patience.’

  As they’d talked, she found herself warming to him. They discovered a shared love of crosswords, and a mutual aversion to sudoku. Before they were summoned by George’s u
ncle for the meal, they’d exchanged phone numbers and promised to keep in touch. And they had. They do.

  He never moved to Canada. He trained as a teacher in Ireland and got a job here, in the school where he still teaches. He travels to Canada during the holidays, and his mother has been back to Ireland a couple of times. From what Daphne can gather, there’s no communication between her and Alex. A bitter split, it would seem.

  In the almost ten years they’ve known one another, George has never mentioned a girlfriend; she wonders if he’s ever had one. It’s none of her business, but it doesn’t stop her wondering. Maybe he’s gay, although she never got that sense from him. She’d love him to find someone, sad to think of him on his own. At least she’d had Finn, even if it was only for a short while.

  She watches a sparrow pecking at something in the grass. Four weeks yesterday to her own birthday, the second last day of April. Her thirty-sixth coming up; she’s still young. Finn, if he’d lived, would have been turning fifty-three in July. The age difference hadn’t mattered a damn to either of them.

  He’d had a life before he met her. At thirty-eight he married Susan; they’d spent just four years as man and wife. Susan died in her early forties, a fortnight after stepping on a rusty nail that sent its poison zinging through her bloodstream. Six years after that, a driver opened a car door and Finn Darling cycled straight into it.

  It used to frighten Daphne, how accidental their meeting had been. What if she’d opened the door a few seconds earlier or later, or glanced in her wing mirror and spotted him in time to prevent the calamity, or simply parked further along the road? What if illness, or a dental appointment, had prevented her going to work that morning, or being on that street at that particular time? All the variables that might have stopped them coming into contact.

  But maybe there was such a thing as destiny; maybe the Fates would have conspired to bring them together in some other way if that encounter hadn’t happened. She might have twisted an ankle one day as she walked past his bicycle shop; they might have chosen neighbouring seats on a train, or stood next to one another in a checkout queue at the supermarket, or reached for the same magazine at the newsagent’s.