The First Time I Said Goodbye

by Allan, Claire

  “I can’t believe I’m so lucky,” he whispered as he looked into her eyes. “We must get everything moving as soon as we can. All the paperwork. Your passport. Everything. I know it might be a little rushed and maybe not the day you dreamed of, but I will make it special.”

  “Ray, would you not be so silly? The only thing I ever really dreamed of is that the man I marry loves the very bones of me and I love the very bones of him back.”

  “Well, you have that, Stella Hegarty. And there was me, steadfast in my belief that I would not let a Derry girl win me over and you have won me over hook, line and sinker. Come here . . .” He pulled her into the good room. “I have something for you. It’s not a ring, not yet. And I was going to give it to you anyway but for now, until I can get a ring, this can be our token, proof of our engagement . . .”

  He handed her a small green leather box which she opened to reveal a gold brooch, set with emeralds.

  “Emeralds for my Irish girl,” he said.

  She gasped at it. She had never owned anything so beautiful. She wasn’t even sure her mother owned anything so pretty. Even Mrs Murphy would be stunned into silence by this. Ray took the brooch from the box and pinned it to her dress, gently brushing close to her breast as he did, and her breath hitched in her throat. When he was done, and he stood back to look at her and she felt him gaze deep into her eyes, she had the urge to kiss him more passionately than ever before, right there and then – right in her mother’s good room while the Baby Jesus was lying innocent in the crib and she could hear the roars of laughter from children in the street playing in the snow. She blushed as the impure thoughts danced through her mind and she thought how she could barely wait until it was their wedding night and they truly belonged to each other.

  Chapter 19

  Don’t you remember how it felt? That Christmas morning? Don’t you remember how we kissed – how it felt so right? I’m pretty sure we could make it feel right again.

  * * *

  Derry, June 2010

  Sam walked back into the bedroom where the letters, read and unread, were scattered over the bed. It seemed obvious to me that we were setting up some kind of council of war there for the day.

  Sam had disappeared at one stage to phone Second Hand Rose and tell his staff he wouldn’t be in. I felt a little disappointed, to be honest. There was something comforting about that place and I kind of liked the idea of escaping into that calming alternative reality again. But even I knew now, as we delved deeper and deeper into my mother’s past, that this was crunch time.

  I felt, in some ways, wracked with guilt. If it had been me who had handed these most personal of letters over to someone else and was waiting for their response, I would have driven myself sick with worry about it all. I would have been checking my cell every three minutes to see if they had sent me a message and fighting the urge to call. I didn’t like the thought that my mother could be driving herself mad with worry like that. Then again, as I had to remind myself, my mother was not me. She was likely to have adopted a calmer approach altogether. I’d rarely, if ever, seen my mother get rattled about anything. I’d rarely, if ever, heard her utter a cross word (except, perhaps, when I refused to take Irish dancing lessons). I could count on one hand the times I had seen her cry – she wasn’t one to get sappy over advertisements on the TV. It took big things – returning to Ireland after almost fifty years, holding my father’s hand as she said her final goodbyes to him – to make her shed a tear.

  That’s not to say she was cold – not really cold. She was a good mom. We were happy. She kept me in line. But she wasn’t the more affectionate of my parents. That was Daddy – always would be. As an adult I had come to realise she showed me her love by making sure I had clean, fresh clothes, that I had help with my homework, that there was food on the table, that she was there every day when I came in from school, that she would kiss me every night on the cheek before I went to bed. But with Daddy it was bear hugs, and ‘love yous’ and long chats into the small hours. He just loved me in a different way.

  Now, reading my mother’s letters, I found it hard to square this passionate, tactile, affectionate woman with the lady I knew. But then, wasn’t this trip all about surprises?

  Sam sat the coffee cups down on the dresser before climbing back beside me on the bed. We lay there for a bit, staring at the ceiling, listening to the world go about its morning outside while we lay, me in my pyjamas, Sam in his work suit minus his tie, thinking about what was unfolding. I started to wonder why he had made coffee. We sure as hell weren’t going to drink it. That would require too much thought – and all our internal memory was being gobbled up by the skeletons tumbling out of the closet. We read on, gripped by what was unfolding.

  “Have you ever been in love like that, Sam?” I asked, the letters read and cast aside.

  He gestured around them. “I am fast approaching forty. I think if I had ever been in love like that there would be a fair chance I wouldn’t be a single man, now isn’t there?”

  “It doesn’t always work out,” I said, gesturing to the letters. “And I would say from those they were pretty much madly in love.”

  Sam rolled onto his side to face me and rested his head on his hand. “Cousin dear. I wish I could say yes. Part of me wishes there was a ‘big one that got away’ story, but there isn’t. Maybe I’m doing it wrong but I seem to have stumbled from one disaster of a fling to another. The longest I’ve been with someone was eight months and even then that only worked, I think, because we were long distance. In real terms we probably spent a fortnight together. I’m not sure I’m relationship material.”

  “Do you want to be? Do you think it’s a matter of meeting the right person? If your ‘Ray’ was to walk in here now . . .”

  “All dressed up like Richard Gere in An Officer and a Gentleman? I could go for that.”

  He laughed and rolled onto his back but I recognised that certain hollow echo in his voice.

  “So what went wrong? Was it the distance? Was it too hard?”

  “Something like that,” he said, picking an imaginary piece of fluff off the immaculate eiderdown. “When it reaches a stage where your significant other really wants to meet your parents but you know that’s not entirely possible, it doesn’t always go down well.” His voice was softer now, more serious.

  I reached out and took his hand. “Would she not come round? I mean, if you were happy. Surely all she wants is for you to be happy?”

  “She’s not a bad person, Annabel,” he said. “But she is stuck in her ways. And why wouldn’t she be? It’s just a shame.”

  It was a shame, I thought as he got up to sip from his coffee cup. And if I was being honest with myself I was shocked Dolores could act in such a manner. She who preached to me the very day before about accepting people for who they were.

  I shook my head. “Do you ever talk about it?”

  He shook his head then shrugged his shoulders. “Been there, done that. It doesn’t end well. I mean, I’m sure once I find the man of my dreams I’ll fight hard enough and my mother can go hang but . . .”

  “But you haven’t yet? Or this is putting you off?”

  He laughed, a short bitter laugh. “You Americans and your crazy ways. Always trying to analyse everything. There is no need to come over all Dr Phil on me. It’s not some big psychological block, you know. It just is what it is.” He paused and we were both lost in our thoughts for a moment.

  “Of course I’d love to find someone. I’d love to have a civil ceremony and settle down and become a living cliché of a middle-aged, settled, boring gay man but, as the song says, you can’t always get what you want.”

  “But if you try . . .” I offered.

  “Tell me this, cousin,” he asked. “Do you believe in the big love affair? I mean, we’re reading about it here but it went wrong, didn’t it? And look around you? How many people do you know who are truly, madly, can’t be without each other in love?”

  “You�
��re very cynical,” I said, but even as I spoke I wondered if he had a point. Sure people loved each other but does being in love last forever? Do people settle? Had I settled?

  “Are you happy then?” he asked. “With your man who you barely speak of? Is he the one? Does he love you like no other? Would he, like Ray, trudge through the snow to propose to you on Christmas Eve?”

  I felt those blasted tears prick at my eyes again. “No,” I muttered, shaking my head. “He wouldn’t.”

  I felt disloyal talking about him, letting anyone have a hint that all was not well, but at the same time I had been holding all this in now for so long.

  I never told anyone about Craig’s infidelity. I never even let Craig know that I knew. Part of it was selfish, I know. I had enough on my plate and I just couldn’t face another drama – instead allowing myself to stay part of a relationship where I could barely think about him touching me without thinking of him touching her. But I only had a finite amount of emotional energy and in those moments when I was trying to make sense of it all I realised there was only one man who deserved my tears in those weeks and months. And it wasn’t Craig.

  Perhaps it was then I started to close myself off from him – or perhaps I had already been closed off anyway. Maybe it was my fault – maybe all the doubts and niggling fears I’d had over the last few years had been felt by him too.

  I spent even less time at home, initially working longer hours at the bakery and then, as my father’s illness progressed, spending more time at home. There were many nights spent in my old bedroom, with all the vestiges of my teenage years staring down at me as I tossed and turned in a bed that no longer felt like my own.

  Craig seemed not to notice for a while and I’m not sure if that made things better or worse, easier or harder. I would have liked to think that me cutting myself off from him would set alarm bells ringing loudly in his ears. But I think, perhaps, instead he revelled in his new-found freedom. On those nights alone in my bedroom in my parents’ house, listening to my mother crying in the den after Daddy had gone to sleep, I tried not to think about what might or might not have been going on back home in my bed.

  Not that it felt like my bed any more either.

  He did catch on eventually, I suppose. On one of my less frequent stop-overs at home, as I gathered fresh laundry, took a long hot shower and made myself some soup, he prowled around as if trying to think of something to say. I didn’t, again, have the emotional energy for small talk so I went about my business.

  Eventually he spoke, his voice low, wounded even, as if it were he who was hurting. “What’s going on, Bella?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked him, knowing full well I was teetering on the edge of facetiousness.

  “You seem distant? What’s wrong?”

  I turned the burner off under the pot of soup I had been heating and turned to face him. I realised it was probably the first time I had looked directly in his eyes in a month. “What’s wrong? I’m assuming you’re looking for an answer more complicated than my father is dying?”

  He shook his head, ran his fingers through his hair and slumped back against the worktops. “I can’t figure you out. I can’t get inside your head. It’s more than your dad. I know it. I feel it.”

  I noticed his fist had tightened, could see the whites of his knuckles. I could feel the vibes of frustration bounce off him but I knew if I spoke, if I started, that too much would be said. Too much would be done that couldn’t be undone.

  “I’m tired, Craig,” I said. “I’m just tired.”

  I ladled my soup into a bowl and turned to walk through to the den when I felt him stand in front of me. Before I could blink, the bowl was out of my hands, the hot soup splashing on my wrists, forcing me to pull them back into myself.

  “You are always tired!” he shouted, hurling the soup bowl at the tiled floor.

  I watched it smash, as if in slow motion. I watched it splinter and shatter before the pieces settled into the hot, orange soup as it slowly slid and stretched across the floor.

  I suppose he was expecting a reaction. He was probably even expecting a fight. But I turned, stepped over the soup and walked out of the house – even though I was in my pyjamas – and went for a drive until the gas-light was blinking on my car and I was getting too tired to see straight.

  When I got home, the kitchen was clean – as if nothing had happened – and when I climbed into bed, wordlessly, I felt Craig, still asleep, slip his arm over me.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered and I lay awake for the rest of the night, listening to him snoring gently while I wondered just when we would admit it was all, irrevocably, broken.

  “He’s not a bad person,” I told Sam.

  “But . . .”

  “Well, I think, if I’m honest, coming here was running away from him a bit. Running away from us.” I don’t know how I expected to feel saying those words out loud. Relieved? Horrified? Instead I felt a certain numbness. As if the last few months, maybe even the last few years, had put an emotional barrier between me and Craig. I felt as if I was simply stating facts, not acknowledging publicly that my relationship was in tatters.

  “So has running away helped? Do you want to run back?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve tried,” I said. “I’ve tried and tried to rationalise it and make it work but it doesn’t. He was seeing someone else, Sam, and that should have horrified me but it didn’t. It felt as if it was, in some way, expected. I always knew this would happen. Not because I don’t feel worthy or anything but, maybe, because I know that we weren’t ever really meant to be. We just fell into a rut that neither of us knew how to get out of.”

  “Do you know how to get out of it now?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. Knowing the right thing to do and doing it were often two entirely different things. And I started to understand my mother a little more.

  Chapter 20

  If I could go back in time, I would undo the mistakes I’ve made. I would do anything for things to be different. But I can’t – so I will carry this with me forever.

  * * *

  Derry, January 1960

  The paperwork was underway. Stella had applied for her passport. Moves were in place to arrange her visa. There was talk of a wedding – a simple ceremony in a local church. She would borrow her friend’s good suit and have a bouquet of silk flowers made. She still had the shoes she had worn to the night at the City Hotel, which she would wear again. And she would maybe splash out on a new haircut. Kathleen and Ernest said they would put on a small spread in the house – sandwiches and cake – and invite the neighbours round.

  Sitting together in the flat, with Ray’s arms around her, she felt blissfully happy. She felt so safe there, so sure of herself.

  “I’ll get you a proper ring when we’re settled,” he whispered. “And we’ll do it again, you know, the wedding – some day – with a white lace gown and everything you have ever dreamed of – just for you.”

  He kissed the top of her head and revelled in the feeling of his lips brushing against her hair. She cuddled in closer to him, feeling his arms draw her closer still. If it could be like this forever she was sure she could never be happier.

  “I know this is more rushed than you hoped, or you wanted,” he said, “but if I could do it differently . . .”

  “Stop apologising for things you can’t change,” she chastised him, looking into his eyes. “Things happen for a reason – life happens for a reason – and this is just the way it is going to be for us.”

  “I’ll get you a good house. We’ll be happy,” he said.

  “We already are.”

  * * *

  January bit cold. Stella consoled herself as she walked to work through the snow that soon she would be in America. Ray promised her it would be different there. She wouldn’t have to work. The spring and summers were warmer and by the time they reached the suburbs of Boston the worst of the winter would have gone.

  She pulled her co
at tight around her, wrapping her bright red scarf as high as she could around her face to keep off the biting wind. Her feet were already wet and frozen and she knew that she faced eight hours standing on the factory floor – although the heat of the irons would keep her warm – she was at least grateful for that.

  In her highly emotional, newly engaged state, she even started to feel a certain fondness for the machines that left her so weary at the end of the day. She had started to count down her work in terms of weeks and days, and she started to try and cram as many memories in as she could.

  “Once you’re gone, you’re gone,” one of the supervisors on the factory floor had said. “You won’t see Derry again. You young ones think you know it all and won’t miss a bar of Derry – but when you are far from home you might think differently. Take it in, my girl – home will always be home.”

  Stella blew her hair from her face, wiped her hand across her forehead and smiled sweetly at her supervisor. “Home is where the heart is,” she said, “And don’t we all make tough decisions for love?”

  The older woman sniffed, crossed her arms across her ample bosom and went about her work while Stella continued with pressing the shirts ready for folding. She wasn’t the first girl to leave the factory to set off for a new life, and she was sure she wouldn’t be the last. She wasn’t aware of the others having been given a hard time. Then again the only girl she had been very close to was Molly Davidson and nothing could have burst her bubble. She had practically floated out of the factory on her leaving day, singing “From the Candy Store on the Corner to the Chapel on the Top of the Hill” as the girls joined in loudly, her laughter filling the factory floor.

  She didn’t imagine she would float out singing – it wasn’t her style – but she would smile as she left, knowing that while she was sad that a chapter of her life was ending, a whole new chapter was beginning. Any doubts she had were gone when she was with Ray – and while she wasn’t naïve and knew that it would feel like her heart was being ripped from her body when she left her family behind – she knew it was time she made a new family and she knew Ray would make her a perfect husband and that their life would be happy. She just felt it with every breath she took. They were meant to be together.