Eager to Please

by Julie Parsons

  ‘You know what it is, don’t you, Rachel?’ She felt Judith’s breath on her cheek.

  ‘Of course I do. Of course. It’s just . . . It’s just such a strange, surprising image.’

  The sword cut through the bearded man’s thick neck. The girl stared intently, seriously at him. She pulled his head back and down, her fingers twisted through his hair. She remembered her own head pulled back and down, her own hair trapped between Martin’s fingers.

  ‘It’s wonderful, isn’t it? It’s our favourite, Stephen’s and mine. One day we’re going to Rome, to the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, to see it. Together. Will you come with us?’

  She had made a choice when she left prison. And the choice did not include Judith. She could not afford to be sorry. She could afford nothing now, nothing except her resolve. She closed her eyes. She would think just for now how it all might have been. But after that she would think no more about her.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  IT HAD BEEN easy for Daniel Beckett to find Rachel. The guard who did nixers for him had got hold of her address. He had read the conditions of her release too. Said to him, ‘She’ll be no bother to you, boss. But if you’re worried we can warn her off.’

  But what was there to worry him? She was harmless, she was helpless. She was on her own.

  He drove to the house in Clarinda Park. The one with the row of dustbins outside, in the area in front of the basement, with the discarded crisp packets and chocolate bar wrappers lying jammed up against the front railings. He had driven slowly past to see if he could see any sign of her behind the sagging net curtains that drooped across the big bay windows on the first and second floors. He had slowed to a stop, the engine idling, and looked out, then put the car in gear and moved slowly up the hill, and driven right around the top of the square to park on the other side. And wait.

  He had found the daughter too. His daughter, he reminded himself as he sat in the café on the seafront at Howth and watched her move from table to table, taking orders, clearing away dirty crockery. A summer job, he supposed, between school and university. The name of her foster-family and their address had come from the same source as Rachel’s. All in her file in the Garda station. And it had been easy to watch the girl’s house and follow her down the hill to the town and the café.

  ‘Yes?’ She stood beside him, her notebook in her hand, her pencil poised. ‘What can I get you?’

  He ordered cappuccino and a ham sandwich. Then called her back to change his order to black coffee and a Danish pastry. Then called her again, said he wanted tea and a cheese roll.

  ‘Brown or white?’ she asked, in a tone of exaggerated patience.

  He dithered, watching her expression of resignation turn to irritation.

  ‘You decide. I’m useless, can’t make a choice to save my life,’ he said and smiled up at her. She rose to the bait and took it. Picked wholewheat for him.

  ‘It’s better for you, you know. Healthier.’ And she smiled back. It had been years since he had seen her. He had heard when Rachel’s parents had given her up to be fostered. And he had wondered whether he should intervene. But he thought it through. Rachel had never told anyone that he was the child’s father. He had waited for it to come out as evidence in the trial. But she had said nothing. He had seen her face that day when he was giving evidence. Her shame at the way their relationship was talked about in open court. She didn’t want her child to become part of that mess. He knew that was it. He had wondered about the kid, what she looked like as she grew up, what kind of a person she was becoming. And then he had met Ursula and she had changed everything for him. She had given him children of his own. So he didn’t need that child of his imagination any longer. And he realized now, as he watched her, that he had all but forgotten her.

  He left her a tip and waved goodbye at the door. He watched her for a moment through the plate-glass windows. She reminded him of someone. Not Rachel, he thought. He would never have known that she was Rachel’s daughter. And then he saw who it was as a cloud crossed the sun and his own reflection formed in front of him. She turned towards him and waved again. She was very something. He couldn’t decide. Not pretty exactly, with her cropped black hair and her strong, sturdy body. And then he realized what it was. She was very sexy.

  Like her mother, he thought. Or the way her mother once had been. Long-limbed and graceful, with a sweet smile as she woke. So beautiful and capable. So much his brother’s wife, and then, as if by some magic spell, his very own. For how long? Two weeks, maybe three. A perfect time. Turned over in his mind like a pocketful of loose change. Then pushed away with all the other memories. Until now, and the woman he saw walking up the hill from the town. She was nothing like she was then. She walked with a slight stoop, her back rounded. Her steps were short and hesitant. She stopped every few paces and paused, as if she was catching her breath. She looked around, as if she wasn’t sure how far she could go, then walked on, as if, he realized, she was waiting for permission. She passed within feet of him. He averted his gaze, looked down at the newspaper on his knees. Felt his heart begin to leap in his chest. She was so close he could have put out his hand and twisted his fingers through her thick hair. Grey now, not dark and glossy the way it was before. But he didn’t. He shrank back into his seat and watched her walk the rest of the way to the house. Watched her pause on the front step, stand staring at the door, then put her hand in her pocket and take out the keys. Watched her fumble and fiddle with them, before finally the door opened and she walked through. Waited to see if she would appear at any of the windows in the front of the house. And when she didn’t he drove around the square and back out on to the road, finding himself behind the row of houses, counting them up from the end until he spotted the right one. Parking on the side of the road, looking up, until he saw a shadow against the pane, then, as the bottom half of the sash opened, her face as she leaned out, catching the breeze on her face. Lifting her head to the sky, closing her eyes so for a moment he recognized her for the woman she had been. He waited until she had disappeared back inside the room. He imagined himself there with her. Watching her, curious to know. Would her skin still feel the way it did? Would he still want to lie awake beside her, fearful of losing a moment of sensation? Would he still feel that moment of triumph when she turned and smiled at him and he knew she wanted him as much as he wanted her?

  And then it was time to go. He turned the key in the ignition and moved slowly away up the hill. A curious symmetry to all this, he thought, watching mother and watching daughter. He liked knowing where they both lived and worked, he decided. He liked even better that they knew nothing about him. That was the way he wanted it. And that was the way it was going to stay.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ANOTHER HOT DAY. Another day to be enjoyed. Midsummer’s day. Hours of brightness ahead. The sun on her face so she put on her dark glasses and lay back on her rug against a rock on the pebble beach at Killiney. A new experience to view the world through tinted lenses. She didn’t wear them before. She had never liked the way the colours of the natural world were altered, made artificial by the glass. And she had never needed to hide before, to keep her emotions to herself, as she had yesterday. The day of Judith’s funeral.

  They had all been there. The guards, Jack Donnelly and a group of others she didn’t know. And Judith’s father and brother. They were both, she could see, in a state of shock. Rachel remembered how it felt to peform mechanically, to greet the congregation with fixed smiles and firm handshakes. She sat at the back and watched. And saw the tall, slender woman with the white-blonde hair cut in a ragged pageboy and her daughter’s face, ruined now by age, who followed the coffin, from the brightness outside into the gloom within. Judith’s mother, Rachel thought. Elizabeth, that was her name. She watched her take her seat behind her husband and son. There was no contact between them. No recognition on either side of their relationship. She remembered what Judith had told her. Her mother’s infidelity with a fa
mily friend. How her mother had left home. How she had come back and there had been a court case for custody. How she had lost it and been granted limited access. How she had arrived after school one day and taken the children, driven to the ferry to England, driven all the way to Kent where she was living. And how the police had come three days later and taken them home.

  Rachel watched her as she left the church after the service. Saw how she stood apart from the other mourners. On her own, running her thin fingers absent-mindedly through her hair. Jack Donnelly was the only person who spoke to her. He took her aside, his hand under her elbow. He looked as if he was asking her questions. She responded with nods and shakes of her head, her hands moving expressively. Rachel remembered the postcards that she had sent to Judith in prison. Regularly, once a week. Watercolours of flowers and birds. Detailed, beautiful. Her name was in small print at the bottom. She was an artist, Judith said. She worked in a nature reserve. It was like something out of a fairy story. A cottage in the woods.

  ‘Or that’s how it seemed to us at the time. Stephen and I were Hansel and Gretel in the gingerbread house.’

  She had torn a piece off the edge of the card and twisted it into a tube to fit into the end of the joint she was rolling. She lit it and inhaled. The smoke came out of her mouth in a gasp of breath. Then there was silence.

  ‘She wants me to go and visit her when I get out.’

  Judith passed over the joint. Rachel took it from her.

  ‘And will you?’ she asked.

  ‘Do I have anything to say to her, after so long?’

  Rachel waited until Donnelly had moved away and Elizabeth Hill was once again on her own. She walked towards her and held out her hand. Elizabeth looked at her, recognition in her eyes.

  ‘You’re the woman in the photograph, aren’t you?’

  Rachel nodded.

  ‘You were her friend, weren’t you?’

  Rachel nodded again, unable to speak.

  ‘Thank you, thank you for all you did for her. She wrote to me about you. She told me all about you, and she told me how much she loved you.’

  Elizabeth’s grip was firm, her hand warm. She put her arm around Rachel’s shoulder. She kissed her cheek.

  ‘Be strong,’ she whispered in her ear. ‘Be strong for me and for Judith.’

  Rachel looked at her watch. It was two o’clock. At this time yesterday Judith had been cremated. Her battered, beaten body transformed now into a pile of ash. Jack Donnelly had asked her who would have wanted to hurt Judith in that way. She didn’t know what to say.

  ‘It was deliberate,’ he said, ‘not an act of passion or anger. Her injuries were designed to be agonizing. So who hated her enough to want to do it? Or was it the case that someone wanted to make an example of her? Was that it?’

  She couldn’t answer him. She wouldn’t answer him. Even when he threatened that he would make sure that she was back inside in a matter of days if she didn’t tell him. But she just shook her head dumbly and tried to shut out the pain and keep the tears from spilling over and showing her weakness. They spilled over now and ran down her face behind her glasses. She closed her eyes, squeezing them tightly together.

  ‘Rest in peace, my sweetest heart,’ she said out loud, then stood up and walked to the water’s edge.

  Today was a special day. Today there would be more than ice creams. There would be a picnic and she had prepared it as carefully as she had prepared her story. Fresh brown bread. Smoked salmon sliced in fine slivers, with a lemon cut into quarters and wrapped in cling film. Smoked mackerel pâté and black olives from the deli in Glasthule. A piece of ripe goat’s cheese, and Carr’s Table Water Biscuits. A carton of strawberries and a tub of whipped cream. Some grapes, a bag of nectarines. And a bottle of white wine from New Zealand, suspended in a rock pool in a plastic bag. A book to read, and she was ready. To wait all afternoon if necessary. Until she saw the woman, the dog and the children walk down the steps cut into the rock to the beach.

  And her story? It was as flawlessly constructed to attract as her food and drink.

  Age? Forty-two.

  Marital status? Separated, soon to be divorced.

  Number, age and sex of children? Two sons at university. Both away for the summer.

  Place of birth and current place of residence? Born in Dublin, brought up in Ranelagh, moved to London when she married her husband twenty years ago. Visiting Dublin for a month, house-sitting for a friend in Monkstown.

  Occupation? School teacher. Didn’t work while her children were young, but returned to work six months ago after her husband left her for a younger woman.

  Husband’s occupation? Something in the city. Something to do with the stock exchange.

  Hobbies? Gardening, painting, printmaking, cooking.

  State of mind? Distraught, lonely, isolated.

  Needs? Friendship, someone to talk to.

  It would have been almost too hot on the pebble beach, the sunlight splintering into sharp points of brightness on the tops of the waves that rolled in from the Irish sea, except for the gentle onshore breeze that flicked at the pages of her book, turning them over with a sound like the riffling of a pack of cards as she laid it down on the rug beside her and watched, behind her glasses, the group of children who were playing nearby with a long string of seaweed. Tugging and pulling at its fronds, whirling its whip-like tail over their heads. Flicking it out so it caught at the back of the legs of the little ones. Licking at their salty wet skin, then stinging, so they cried out and jumped away. Not sure whether this was a game to be continued or abandoned. Someone was going to get hurt, Rachel could see that. As she could see the two children who had appeared at the bottom of the steps cut into the cliff face, hurrying away from their mother, who was slowed down by the baby strapped to her chest, and the weight of the large canvas bag slung over her shoulder.

  Rachel sat up straight and watched. The boy was ahead of his sister. She wondered, looking at his long skinny legs, how old he might be. She had lost that easy facility that she, like all young mothers, had once possessed. That ability to age and place every child. Before, all those years ago, she would have looked at him and thought instantly, oh yes, seven and a half, maybe going on eight, then begun to compare and contrast the unknown boy with her own child’s abilities and progress. But now he was just small to her adult eyes. Ungainly, uncoordinated, his feet in runners with thick wedged soles, slipping and sliding over the wet, shifting pebbles. She looked from him to the woman with the baby. They were very alike. Despite the difference in age and sex their relationship shone out in their long limbs and high cheekbones, eyes that were narrowed against the sun, and hair that gleamed, clean and bright.

  His name was Jonathan. She could hear the little girl, who straggled along behind him, burdened by a plastic bucket and spade, calling out.

  ‘Jonathan, Jonathan, wait for me.’

  It was a long name with too many syllables. Rachel watched her, how she seemed to pause and gather breath before she used it. It must have been a struggle to master, she thought. Many attempts at getting it right. She watched the little girl pursue him, refusing to lag behind any further, desperately wanting to catch him up, beginning to run, her voice getting more and more frantic as she saw that her brother was nearly gone from her.

  They didn’t look alike, these two. She was round and dark, her hair cut so it framed her face. Her body was strong and solid, her calves already muscled, her feet in red leather sandals with straps and buckles, gripping the pebbles like the prehensile toes of a monkey. But her face was soft, her cheeks plump, a little roll of fat beneath her square chin and large dark eyes, which now were filling up.

  ‘Wait for me, Jonathan. Please wait.’

  But he had gone, disappearing into the group of other children, his fair head bobbing and dipping, lifting and falling as he too became part of the game. And she was left, standing by herself, tears dripping down her face and Rachel watching, waiting, wondering when she shoul
d intervene.

  The tall, fair woman had sat down now on a flat rock. She was busying herself with the baby, manoeuvring it out of the sling, laying it down on the blanket she had taken from her bag, unfolded and smoothed out. She was preoccupied with her youngest. While the girl stood looking around her, the bucket and spade dropping from her hands, and bumping slowly over the tumbled pebbles towards where the waves broke in a surge of white foam on to the beach. And then, great sobs shaking her voice from her diaphragm, she took a step towards Rachel and said, ‘I know you, don’t I? You’re not a stranger. You gave me a peach and a yummy ice cream. I like you. You’re nice. But he’s not nice. He won’t wait for me. He never waits for me. He can run faster than me. All the time. I hate him.’

  And then suddenly the gang of children had turned, were coming back towards them. The oldest and fastest whipped the younger ones into a mass of shouts and screams, pushing and falling as they struggled to keep together. And Jonathan, pulling his sister into the middle, reaching out to grab at her arms, then twirling the long piece of seaweed over his head, like a cowboy with a lasso, bringing it down on her back, so she cried out and lost her balance and fell, on to the hard wet stones, with the others prancing around her as if she were a sacrificial captive.

  On her feet before she realized what she was doing, Rachel pushed her way through them, reaching down to pick up the child, turning on the others, shouting that they had no right to behave in this way, threatening them with their parents’ wrath, lifting the girl up, smoothing down her hair, picking pieces of grit, small stones and crushed shells from her skin, taking her by the hand and leading her away from the rest. While her older brother, Jonathan, stood, unsure what to do next, turning first towards Rachel and his sister, then back to the rest of the children who were now drifting off, some looking anxiously towards their own mothers further up the beach, others still defiant, making angry gestures, kung-fu kicks and punches in the air. While Jonathan twisted and turned, like a dead leaf hanging from a branch. One minute defiant and angry, the next, frightened, sorry, repentant.