Grace After Henry

by Eithne Shortall

  I have dealt with historical adoption cases through the firm. Harrowing, horrendous stories of women held against their will and nuns who made them scrub floors and bathroom walls until the moment they went into labour. Ours was nothing like that. The stuff you hear in the news would make you sick. The kind of stories that should have the entire country taking a good hard look at itself. To be a part of those cases would have been unthinkable.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Imanaged fifteen minutes of the murder mystery my parents were watching before taking myself off to bed. Neither of them asked why I was home, just if I wanted a hand removing the crates of mothballs from my bed. Mam helped me transfer them to the floor and when I got under the covers, there wasn’t an inch of carpet exposed. I felt like I’d been embalmed.

  ‘Well,’ said Mam, standing in the doorframe, ‘you should be safe from attack tonight anyway.’

  ‘Will you turn off the light?’

  The room went dark. ‘Night, pet.’

  How long had Andy stayed at the Walshes’? If Isabel made rice pudding and they went through a few more photos . . . that couldn’t take more than an hour. Andy wouldn’t have dinner because we ate before we got there. Unless he wanted to be polite. I tossed and turned and dozed off sometime after 3 a.m. but was awake again by four. What if he’d stayed over? But then he’d never spent the night at mine, so he was hardly going to spend the night there. What was he going to do – sleep in Henry’s old room? Of course he hadn’t stayed.

  Mam left early the next morning to go walking with a friend and Dad was making avocado and parsnip breakfast fritters from Ed Balls’ new cookbook. He washed the last saucepan, dried it, folded the tea towel, placed it delicately on the draining board and sat down at the table with a sigh of profound contentment. ‘Now.’

  He might have stayed over. The Walshes had plenty of guest bedrooms. What if he did and what if he was still there now? I was worried and jealous and unbearably put out. He was slipping through my fingers and I couldn’t keep my grip.

  ‘Eat up there, Grace, before it goes cold.’

  ‘It must be great to be retired,’ I said, straightening the plate in front of me. ‘Nothing to worry about anymore.’

  Dad guffawed. ‘No work to worry about. Still plenty of other things to occupy my mind.’

  ‘Like me?’

  ‘Yes. And how your mother never manages to put the towels back in the bathroom after a shower.’ He smiled at me over his fork. ‘We haven’t heard as much from you lately. Hadn’t seen you for a while before the inquest. Everything good?’

  I stuffed a fritter into my mouth. ‘Busy.’

  ‘You’re dead right. Best way to be. You look well, anyway.’ And Dad went back to cutting up his breakfast, relieved to have completed the task Mam had left for him. He’d asked and I was fine, just busy. That was enough information to report back.

  ‘These are nice.’

  ‘Arra they’re grand. Claudia Winkleman’s are miles better.’

  He drove me to work, singing along to the radio all the way, and the restaurant was full of singing too because Dermot was preparing for a musical theatre audition. I stayed a little later than necessary and abandoned the bus for a slow walk home. I couldn’t help hoping Andy would be waiting on the doorstep, which of course he wasn’t. But he did say he’d call. Yesterday when I left, he said: I’ll talk to you tomorrow. I had this terrible pain in my stomach at the thought of him still in Rosedale, maybe wearing a T-shirt and socks that had belonged to Henry because he’d slept in his own clothes and then hadn’t left at all.

  The hallway was cold, though not as bad as I’d imagined. It was like when I was a kid and we’d get back to our house after a week’s holiday: it didn’t matter if the central heating had been left on timer, it needed body warmth to heat it back up. There was a letter on the mat and on the back, it said: This came to my house. Betty.

  I pulled it open, surprised it hadn’t been done already. It was from the hospital. My first scan was booked in for two Mondays time. I went upstairs and stood in front of the bathroom mirror. I pulled my T-shirt back and turned to the side. Maybe . . .

  I boiled the kettle and placed some pasta in the saucepan, then I took a container of leftover sauce from the fridge and poured it onto a pan. I waited. I considered sitting in the hallway and wallowing. It had passed the time before. Only the coats were no longer in a heap on the floor and I knew this was a different kind of loneliness, more aimless than bereft. I picked up A Christmas Carol from the couch in the living room and opened it at the bookmark.

  ‘Have you had many brothers, Spirit?’

  ‘More than eighteen hundred,’ said the Ghost.

  ‘A tremendous family to provide for!’ muttered Scrooge.

  I flicked back through the earlier passages, letting my fingers get jammed in the pages, and when I heard the water start to bubble over, I closed the book and went back to the kitchen.

  ‘Right,’ I said to the empty room. Then I left the house entirely and knocked on Betty’s door.

  ‘Would you like some dinner?’

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’ she said, holding onto one side of the door. ‘Did it fall on the floor? Do you need a guinea pig to make sure it’s fit for your consumption?’

  ‘No,’ I replied patiently. ‘I’ve made too much and just thought you might like to join me if you haven’t already eaten.’

  ‘I have. Dorota made me a lamb cutlet and roast potatoes.’

  ‘Oh. Right,’ I said, having forgotten the home-help woman came on Wednesdays. ‘That’s fine so. Just thought I’d ask.’

  ‘But,’ said Betty as I turned to go, ‘that was two hours ago, and I am meant to eat regularly, with my blood sugar and everything.’ She opened the door a little more. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Pasta arrabiata.’

  ‘Sounds foreign.’

  ‘Look, it was just a thought. If you’re not—’

  ‘Go on so.’ She sighed. ‘Bring it in. And you can use your own plates. You needn’t think I’m washing up.’

  ‘I was thinking you’d come into me?’

  Betty looked aghast. ‘I’m eighty-two, Grace. Do you want me to do everything?’

  We ate in relative silence in her front room with the television on. I checked my phone every couple of minutes, alternating between having it face up in case I missed something and face down because I was irritated by my own obsessiveness. In the break between Coronation Street and Fair City, Betty told me how she was certain the Hegartys were the ones leaving their rubbish at the end of the road. ‘They wouldn’t pay you a compliment never mind pay their bin charges,’ she said. ‘And they must be doing it at night, which is doubly sneaky. So you may keep that curtain open!’

  I could have left but I had no desire to sit in the house next door on my own. I kept imagining Andy at the Walshes’, that even if he had left they’d asked him to come back again to eat with them, a proper formal meal. I pictured him taking up the dinner invitation that I kept declining. I had declined it because of him and he just went ahead and took it? I turned my phone over again and then threw it away from me to the other side of the sofa. He could have been anywhere.

  The credits rolled on Fair City, and when Betty didn’t say anything about me leaving I stayed for the next soap too.

  Someone was screaming at someone else in a pub when my phone finally rang and Betty threw me a look like she wished I’d never been born. I picked it up and hurried into the hallway.

  ‘Hello?’ I said.

  ‘I can still hear you!’

  ‘Hello,’ I said quieter this time, moving down towards the kitchen.

  ‘Grace?’

  I could tell from the background noise that he was outside. It was the quiet static of an enclosed space, a garden maybe. And I saw him there, standing among Isabel’s flowerbeds, the phone pressed to his ear.

  ‘Can you hear me?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, closing my lips as quickly as I’d opened th
em. I was annoyed at myself now too. Barely a day had passed and already I missed that voice and its stupid melodic tone.

  ‘I wanted to call earlier but I was crazy busy all day.’

  ‘Right.’

  Busy how? Busy with what? Busy with who?

  I pictured him accompanying Isabel on one of her walks, strolling down to Dun Laoghaire harbour to see Conor’s boat. I envisaged them from the back, both tall with good posture, as I’d seen that image in real life many times before.

  ‘I’m walking home,’ he added.

  ‘Home from where?’ I said, more irritated than I was probably entitled to be.

  ‘From work . . . Is everything all right? I was on that site down by the gas company today. We were meant to get off at six but of course it dragged on until eight. I can’t talk too long; I’m on one of the guys’ phones and he’s about to hop in his car.’

  I didn’t say anything and my irritation didn’t diminish, it just shifted its focus from him back to me.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he said eventually, aware that something was off.

  ‘I’m at Betty’s. Having dinner.’

  ‘Oh right. That’s nice. Do you . . .? Will I call over?’

  ‘Well, it’s pretty late now so,’ I said, clamping my mouth shut mid-sentence.

  ‘Tomorrow evening?’

  ‘I’m working,’ I said, growing more frustrated with him and me and the whole situation.

  ‘Friday?’ he offered.

  ‘Nope.’ I told myself to get a grip. I was trying to punish him, though I knew it wasn’t fair, and in the end I was punishing myself. ‘Sunday evening?’ I suggested.

  ‘I promised Isabel I’d go to theirs for dinner.’

  The sound of a car alarm filled the silence as I digested this information.

  ‘But any other day,’ he said. ‘What about Saturday?’

  ‘Can’t.’

  ‘Really? Sunday night is the only time you’re free?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Well then, why don’t you come to dinner too? I’m sure Isabel won’t mind.’

  I bit my lip hard. As if he had a clue what Isabel would or wouldn’t mind. As if he knew her.

  ‘No thank you,’ I said curtly. ‘Anyway, I have to go now. I’ll see you around.’

  ‘See me around?’

  ‘Yep. Bye now.’ And I hung up with as much aggression as one could expend on a touchscreen phone. Then I went back into Betty and watched through blind frustration as some woman told a man with loads of tattoos that she was leaving him.

  FORTY-NINE

  Ipreferred being in Betty’s so much more than being alone in my own house that I came back the next day too. I was on a late shift so I called in before work and helped clean her windows, something I had yet to do in my own home.

  ‘There,’ I said, climbing down from the stepladder. ‘All the better to spy out of.’

  She made me tea and we sat and gossiped about the neighbours – well, she gossiped, I still didn’t know who most of them were – and then I left for the Portobello Kitchen.

  On Friday, at around noon, I knocked on her door for the third day in a row.

  ‘Is this one of those old people scams?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You. Not being able to get enough of me.’

  I sighed. ‘No, Betty. This is not a scam.’

  The door didn’t budge. ‘I heard a thing on the radio about how this young person in England started calling to his elderly neighbour every day and everyone thought he was just being Christian but then the old woman died and the family discovered that she’d signed over her house, car, stocks, shares in all these airlines – because her husband had been a pilot – everything, to the neighbour who’d been calling and slowly brainwashing the poor woman for months.’

  I had a house I couldn’t stand to be in alone, a dead boyfriend who’d half come back then left again, and a leech sucking all the nutrients from inside me. I was in no humour for this.

  ‘Because I don’t have any stocks,’ added Betty. ‘If that’s what you’re thinking.’

  I reached into my back pocket and held up the two Telly Bingo tickets. Like flashing a private member’s card, the door finally opened. ‘I don’t have shares in any airlines either,’ she said as I stepped into the hallway.

  ‘Good to know.’

  Betty did the usual no-peeking tickets-behind-her-back routine and gave the sly grin she always gave when I made my selection, as if somehow she knew what numbers were going to come up.

  ‘If it’s not a scam, then what is it?’ she demanded, settling back into her chair. ‘Three days in a row. Is it because the toolbox man hasn’t been calling around? Has he jilted you? Is that it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re awful unlucky with the men, aren’t you?’ she said, not unsympathetically. ‘One dies, fair enough. But to lose two of them . . . You’d have to wonder, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘Ah, you would,’ she said decisively. ‘Have you given any thought to my theory that you might be cursed?’

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ I snapped, if only to shut her up.

  ‘Yah,’ she said with a deep intake of breath. ‘They say these things come in threes all right.’ She didn’t miss a beat. It was almost impressive. The woman was unflappable. ‘That’ll send a man running, sure enough.’

  ‘It’s not his,’ I said. ‘It’s Henry’s – my partner. The one who died. Not my husband, Betty. My partner.’

  Her face softened slightly. She put her bingo ticket down. ‘As you may or may not know, I don’t believe in sex before marriage . . .’

  ‘I did not know that but I can’t say I’m surprised.’

  ‘. . . but I do believe that a child is always something to be celebrated. New life is a great thing, Grace. You should be very happy.’

  ‘It doesn’t feel so great to me,’ I said, folding my arms across my stomach. ‘Not when I’ll be doing it all on my own.’

  ‘I raised my first two on my own for a while after their father died. It was tough,’she agreed. ‘I wouldn’t recommend it.’

  ‘I thought your husband, Patrick—’

  ‘God have mercy on his soul.’

  ‘Right. I thought he only died a few years ago?’

  ‘He did.’

  ‘So how were you raising your kids on your own? They were well grown by then.’

  ‘I got married when I was twenty-one,’ said Betty, taking a slurp of tea. ‘To Joe O’Toole, the handsomest man Crumlin has ever produced. He was our local postman and all the women used to go into hysterics when he’d ring the bell at them. They’d be almost throwing their knickers at him as he cycled by. I don’t think we had a single day of sadness the four year we were married. I got pregnant straight away with Joe Junior, then a year after him Trisha came along. I used to go to church every day and say the rosary because I knew I’d been too lucky and something bad had to happen. Then one Thursday Joe headed off to work and he never came back. He was hit by a bus five minutes from home.’

  ‘Oh, Betty.’

  ‘Joe Junior was three, Trisha just gone two. So Joe’s brother Patrick came home from England where he was working on the sites, and he took up the responsibility. I’d always got on with Patrick. He was groomsman at our wedding, and Joe and him were shocking close growing up. The next year, myself and Patrick were married and we had Louise and Anthony. He was a good man and we got on well. He was a great father to all four of them. I told Joe and Trisha about their dad but sure it didn’t mean much to them; they couldn’t remember him. Far as they were concerned Patrick, God have mercy on his soul, was their da.’

  ‘You married his brother?’ I said in disbelief.

  Betty rolled her eyes. ‘That was the done thing. No big swinging mickey. If one man died, another decent family member stepped up. Plenty of children were raised by uncles and aunts. Family is family.’

  ‘Wow.’

 
‘I wasn’t anything special, Grace. You do what you have to do to keep going. But I’ll tell you this, I couldn’t have raised those children on my own, Joe Junior was a terror.’ Betty was not a woman for tact but I must have looked particularly stricken because she quickly added: ‘Not back then, I couldn’t have. Things are much different now.’

  ‘Because women can work?’ I hazarded.

  ‘Where the feck would I have found the time to work? No. Because youse have dishwashers. And disposable nappies.’

  The Telly Bingo opening sequence began to roll and Betty flung her pen at the telly. The Blonde One had appeared on the screen.

  ‘Ah, for feck’s sake!’

  ‘Keep the shower curtain closed over!’

  ‘It is closed.’

  ‘I don’t want you to see me. I’m hoping to keep some romance in our relationship after this.’

  ‘I can’t see a thing, Grace.’

  ‘If I spy even a gap – ow! Ow! Ow ow ow!!!’

  ‘It’s pretty slippy in here.’

  ‘You’re sitting in a bath, Henry Walsh. I’m sitting on a toilet doing what feels like pissing razor blades. So pity about you. Do not touch that curtain! I don’t want to see more than your arm peeking out.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Just keep holding my hand, please.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘It’s sore.’

  ‘I know, Gracie. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Tell me something – ow! – tell me something to keep my mind off it.’

  ‘Can you imagine what we must look like? Imagine someone from room service came in and stood at the bathroom door. A couple of supposed lovebirds on a romantic weekend away, only it’s four in the morning and she’s sitting on the toilet seat and all you can see of him is an arm sticking out from the side of the shower curtain.’

  ‘Ha. Was that a yawn, Henry Walsh? Don’t you dare fall asleep. Do you know how you get a urinary tract infection? Sex! So this is your fault and we’re both going to sit here sharing my pain until it’s late enough, or early enough, or whatever, to go to a doctor.’

  ‘Your pain is my pain, love of my life. If you’re pissing razor blades, I’m sitting in a bath with a wet arse.’