by Maeve Binchy
Would her mother’s soul think she was right to have told Sean nothing about the death? Was that the right thing to have done in terms of real and genuine acting for the best? She was very much afraid that a lot of her protestations to Sean had been hypocritical. Why did she not let him come home now and declare himself? His mother was no longer there to feel the shame and the hurt. Was there a possibility that Angela was becoming a settled schoolteacher who didn’t want things upset for herself?
Angela wondered why she had never told Clare about Sean. In ways she had been closer to Clare than to anyone. Clare had her own secret and disgrace with poor Tommy in jail over in London. But there had never been the right time. And now it was almost too late.
Angela looked at Clare’s letter of sympathy, and the Mass card signed by a priest at University Church. The girl was very good to have written so soon and to have spent what little pocket money she had on having a Mass said. Angela knew what a sacrifice that would have been. Clare had written that Angela must have some consolation in knowing that she had always been there to provide a safe and happy background for her mother to live in; and that she had done it with no sense of grudging, but with humor and happiness; that it was a great gift to give a parent. And Clare said that she would never be able to do anything as positive herself. It was possibly the only letter that didn’t say what a great consolation it must be to have Father Sean praying at this time and how sad it was that he hadn’t been able to get back for the funeral.
Angela went to England during the last week of term. She told the children that she would like no Christmas cards this year and that she might stay away for Christmas with her sisters or with friends in Dublin. Everyone seemed to think this was a very sensible thing to do. No point in trying to celebrate Christmas in an empty house, although there were plenty of people who would ask her for the day.
It was cold and wet on the mailboat; and stuffy and uncomfortable on the train journey to London. She was puffy-eyed from lack of sleep as she got on yet another train to take her to Sean’s school.
She walked a mile from the station, and remembered the day she had come with Sean to see the big house in Ostia where his wife and babies were tucked away in the courtyard. She recalled the sense of dread she had felt then at meeting them, and how it had been replaced by sadness.
She had been here to this school before, when Father Flynn had arranged the job, in the days when the cause at Rome had not been deemed lost. Sean had still been enthusiastic, and as busy in his letters to the Vatican as he had once been in his visits.
There had been little mention of it recently in his letters. He had written that Shuya had taken in a lot of work; and that Denis was doing very well in the Junior School; Laki was getting on famously at the nearby convent, and they both had lots of friends. It wasn’t really permanent or anything, but it was a very good, expensive education for Denis that they wouldn’t have been able to afford.
Angela wondered what kind of work Shuya was doing: surely in a school like this they wouldn’t go along with her doing mending and sewing as she had been doing in Rome? But perhaps they were less hide-bound in England: maybe a Latin master’s wife might well take in sewing or even washing.
Angela arrived at the small gate lodge. The garden was much more cared for than when she was last here, even though it was midwinter. There were nice silver trees and golden bushes giving color. The door was painted a bright, sunny yellow. It was a much more cheerful house than when she had seen it first.
She knew that Sean would be at school and she intended to meet him as he left his classes and came home for lunch. He had said that one of his greatest joys was to walk across the playing fields just for half an hour’s peace in the cottage with Shuya, and then walk back. Angela understood only too well how welcome that break from the shrill little voices would be. She didn’t have such luxury herself: Immaculata saw to that.
She tapped on the yellow door. Shuya. A smiling, delighted Shuya, arms outstretched.
“I saw you from upstairs. I ran down. Welcome, welcome. I can hardly believe it. I am so very happy. We are all so happy. And you have a suitcase, this time you will stay with us.”
“This time I’ll stay with you, Shuya.”
They had tea, and Angela looked around. Shuya was different somehow. Younger-looking, smarter. She had her hair up in a chignon; she wore a light green jumper and skirt, and a big white collar pinned with a brooch of Connemara marble.
Angela had brought it the last time she came to visit, and her heart was touched to think that this might be the only piece of jewelry that Shuya had. Shuya talked about the work she took in. It was far from washing and sewing. It was typing for theses; it was translations for Japanese businesses in London; it was roneoing and duplicating for anyone that needed it—one of her biggest customers was the school itself. They found it far better to pay Mrs. O’Hara for neatly done examination papers, or notices, or leaflets, than to work a machine themselves and ruin reams of paper. She had quite a cottage industry going, she told Angela proudly; and she even employed a girl to come three afternoons a week to help her.
On the piano there were pictures of the children; grown now so much that Angela realized she would hardly know them. Denis, over ten years old and Laki eight. In another frame was a picture of her mother, the only nice one that had ever been taken. Young David Power and James Nolan had taken it years ago when they got a camera first and were busy snapping everyone in the town, to try to set up as some kind of rivals to Gerry Doyle. It had been a rare thing to catch her mother smiling, without the lines of pain on her face.
Her eyes rested on it. And Shuya noticed.
Very quietly she said, “Have you come to tell Sean about his mother?”
“Yes,” Angela whispered.
“Is she very ill? Does she ask for him?”
“No. It’s not that.”
“Because if it helps, he must go, go alone, dressed as a priest. If it is best. I will persuade him, if it is best.”
“No, Shuya, no. She’s dead. She died a month ago.”
“One month ago?”
“I know. I know. I had to make up my mind on my own. It seemed best.”
There was a silence.
“Please, Shuya, wasn’t it best? It took the decision away from him. Sean didn’t have to decide.”
“Maybe he should have decided. Maybe he can’t be protected all the time from having to make a decision.”
“I don’t know anything anymore,” Angela said sadly.
“Forgive me. Please, what am I thinking about? Your mother has died, and I give you no sympathy. I must be so cruel and thoughtless. Tell me about her death. Was it sudden?”
“Yes. Yes, she had a heart attack, you see. If it had been something slow then I would have let Sean know. But it would have been too late for him and I didn’t want . . .”
“Please. Please. I think you did what was going to be the most painless for Sean. As always you acted for his good.”
Shuya stood up and put her arm around Angela’s shoulders. “You did what was best. I thank you for not having to go through all that with him. All the agonies. I thank you for giving us all this peace. He will become resigned to his mother’s death. She has only been a dream to him, for thirteen years, since he last saw her. It is not a real person he will mourn. It is an idea.”
“You are wise, Shuya.”
“I think I shall be a teacher. I am doing examinations that will qualify me to teach typewriting and shorthand. I suppose they will recognize these examinations in Ireland.”
“Well, yes. But are you going to Ireland?”
“Sean talks of little else.”
Shuya pointed out the path she should walk to meet Sean. She said she would leave them alone in the house to talk. The lunch was all ready.
He wore a heavy overcoat with the collar turned up and his hands were in his pockets. He looked younger than a man of almost forty. His face split open into a big foolish sm
ile . . . he started to run toward her and then stopped.
“Is it bad news?” he asked suddenly.
“Mam died very peacefully. She died without fear. It’s all over.”
He blessed himself. “The Lord have mercy on her soul.”
“I came when it was all over to tell you.”
“You’re very very good to us.” He took her and hugged her to him.
“I hope I did right. It was all so quick and so sudden. I could have telephoned you. I rang people to tell Geraldine and Maire. But I just didn’t, Sean. I thought that if Mam can see you she’ll understand everything and it would have been too much on you, and, to be honest, on us.”
She felt better having admitted her own selfishness. He had his arm around her shoulder as she walked back to the gate lodge with him.
“Does Shuya know? Have you told her?”
“Yes.”
“What does she think? Does she think it was for the best that Mam is dead and buried without my being there?”
In a flash Angela understood what Shuya had meant. People protected Sean. They kept the world away from him. If she were to say now that Shuya gave her approval there would be the quick smile of relief and everything would be fine.
“Yes. Shuya said it was the right thing. She thanked me for giving you all a gift of peace, that was the way she put it.”
Sean smiled as she knew he would. “I would like to have been there to hold my mother’s hand. But if it all happened so suddenly, then thank you again for shouldering everything, Angela.” His arm was around her companionably still. “Was it all very sad, very harrowing?”
“No. You know the way people say it was a blessing. It was, Sean. She was in such pain, all the time. Every movement was an ache or a stab to her. She couldn’t dress herself, or move without help.”
His face was pained. He wouldn’t want this to be part of his idea of his mother.
“Dr. Power said that she had the worst arthritis he had ever known. And she was incontinent too, not because she really was, but because she couldn’t get up in time.”
He closed his eyes with distress.
“It wasn’t much of a life. She wasn’t really happy from the time she woke up in the morning. It is peace for her. I look at the corner of the room where she used to sit and I think that all the time.”
“How long ago?”
“A month. I couldn’t come any sooner, because of school. You know the way it is.” She smiled at him the resigned conspiratorial smile of one teacher to another.
They had reached the house. He looked anxious that Shuya wasn’t there when they went in.
“She’s gone into town. She said she’d leave us to talk, I told her there was no need.”
Angela found herself pouring the soup for her brother, even though this was not her house. She put on a kettle to make tea afterward. She cut the bread. She had been in the door only a minute and already she was mothering him.
“I wish the children had seen their grandmother. They have no grandmother,” he said.
“Well neither did we, Sean, not to speak of. Dad’s mother was dead before we were born, and Mam’s mother died when I was a baby. You don’t remember her, do you?”
“No. But Denis and Laki will have a better life than we did, things are different now. And they know that one day they’ll go to Ireland. I have books, look, here . . . Lots of books about Ireland, so that they’ll know. And we have books about Japan too. They’re not going to grow up confused, and not knowing who they are like we did.”
“You want very much to come to Ireland, then?”
“But I’ve always said that.”
“I know. I know.”
Sean thought about his mother being dead and put his head in his hands. It didn’t seem real to him, he said, he thought of her cheerful and full of chat and bursting with information about things and the center of everything. She had been a bit like that perhaps in 1945, when Sean had last been home, when the glory of the priest-son in full regalia very largely compensated for the loss of the drunken troublesome husband who had been a heart scald to her for her whole married life. Yes, Mother was bright in her spirit then, even if she had pains in her joints. And Sean hadn’t seen her since. He could be excused for thinking that she had been a woman with as clear a glance and a smile as she had in the photograph frame on the piano.
She played with her cheese salad while he talked about times gone by.
“We’ll say the rosary for her tonight, all of us,” he said. “That will make it important for the children.”
She wished she could get it out of her head that her brother was living in mortal sin and that it was quite incongruous for him to be organizing rosaries. And yet he seemed to see nothing out of character in it.
“Will the new Pope make any difference do you think?” she asked suddenly, reaching out and touching his hand. “He looks kind.”
“It hasn’t got anything to do with kindness. It’s just as complicated and tedious as the civil service,” Sean said sadly. “If I could get the papers to John XXIII then it would be a matter of days—but if I could have got them to Pius XII it would have been the same.”
“Does the fact that it’s gone on so long mean there’s more hope or less?”
“I don’t honestly know. It means that there’s more red tape, I suppose. If something has already been looked at by one person then other people are slow to take the file themselves.”
“Do they know here?” She nodded her head up to the school.
“At the very top yes. Otherwise no. I was very lucky to get in here.”
He was much less confident than he was before. There was a time when he would never admit that he was lucky to have got anywhere. It was all open to him, the whole world, whatever life he wanted. This whole business with Rome had changed his thinking.
But before they had the children with them, before they were all kneeling and saying a rosary for the dead grandmother the children didn’t know and wouldn’t have understood, she had to go back to his plans for Ireland.
“So you think you’d like to come back to Castlebay.”
“You wouldn’t mind?”
“No. Of course not,” she lied.
“Well I know you said that, long ago in Rome. You did say that the only reason for me to stay away was because it would break Mam’s heart.”
“That’s what I said. I’m not going back on it.” She couldn’t be any warmer. It just wouldn’t come out as more welcoming. It would be lunacy. It would upset everyone, the enormity of the deception for all those years. Denis, a big boy of ten. How could he not see it?
“No, no, I know you’re not going back on it. You’ve always been straight as a die, Angela. No one could have a better sister or friend.”
She made the tea, and poured a cup for herself. Her hand was shaking.
“It’s been awful for you, all of it. What will you do now? Will you live on in the house on your own?” His voice was full of concern.
“I don’t know yet. I will for the moment.”
“Yes, yes.”
“Maybe you’ll want the house? If you come back that is?”
Now she had said it, brought it right out in the open. This nonsensical idea of the priest going back to live in his native town with his Japanese wife and grown-up children.
To her relief he didn’t seem to think that this was automatically the way things would go.
“Oh, I don’t think we’d want to live in Castlebay. Where would I work? Where would they go to school?”
Angela fumed inside for a quick moment. What was so wrong with the convent where she taught? Or the Brothers, which had been good enough to educate Sean O’Hara. Still, this was all to the good.
“True, I suppose. But you do want to go back do you, and meet everyone—talk to Mrs. Conway in the post office, Sergeant McCormack, the Murphys, the Dillons.” She had deliberately chosen awful ones to mix in with ordinary people. She had to tread carefully.
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br /> “Well, it’s my home. It’s where I came from.” He was defensive. She didn’t want that at any cost.
“Don’t I know it’s your home—I’m offering you Mam’s house to live in. Of course it’s your home. I just asked what sort of way you’ll be coming home. Will it be in the summer? Do you want me to let people know you’re coming, or will you explain it all when you get there?”
“I thought that you’d . . . I don’t know. That’s something that can all be arranged later.”
“Of course it can.”
She went to see Father Flynn on her way back through London. He said they must go out and have dinner.
“I know now why people become priests. It’s a license to eat dinners out in restaurants for the rest of your life. I never ate in so many restaurants before or since as when we were in Rome.”
“Ah, those were the days all right. But this is half work. Young Ned O’Brien asked me to the place he’s working in. The landlord’s just opened a dining room off the pub, and the bold Ned no less is running it. Wait till I turn up with his ex-schoolmarm.”
“I don’t think he’ll be a bit delighted. Not that I ever taught him anything. I don’t think we can lay his educational deficiencies at my door. And Tommy, he’s out isn’t he?”
“For the moment. That was something I was going to ask tonight.”
“I’ll make myself scarce.”
“You don’t need to. He knows you’re in on it.”
“You’re grand and easy about things, Father Flynn. Is it something that goes with the job, like deafness goes with teaching?”
They saw Ned, important and nervous at the same time. Father Flynn pretending ignorance of everything so that Ned could put him at ease. In the midst of doing this Ned lost a lot of his own nerves. He explained that there were three things you could have: steak, chicken or fish. And you got soup before and ice cream after, no matter what you chose. But the price depended on the main course. He could have Father Flynn as his guest but, to be honest, he wasn’t sure about Miss O’Hara. Angela said that there was no question of her being a guest, she was going to have steak, the dearest, and was going to love it.