Barefoot Over Stones (26 page)

‘I know it’s sudden, Mam. To tell you the truth I’ve only known that Leda was pregnant for about six weeks and then she went into labour early and I just never got the chance . . .’ His voice tailed off and, given a modicum of leeway, Iris was like an animal sprung from a trap.

‘And just who is Leda, Colm?’

‘She is my girlfriend. Well,
was
my girlfriend for a few months at the start of the year. It wasn’t serious but she got pregnant and now . . . well, now we have a baby. His name is Tom.’

‘Well, I suppose I should be honoured that you got round to telling me at all.’

‘I was trying to get my head round it myself, Mam. I didn’t mean not to tell you. It wasn’t
deliberate. He is gorgeous. Just wait until you see him.’

Colm’s effort at softening Iris worked somewhat.

‘I would quite like to see him if that wouldn’t be too much trouble to you and – what did you say her name was? Leda?’

‘Come over to the apartment, you can see him now. He is home from hospital. They discharge very quickly these days,’ Colm added, knowing how pathetically inadequate he must sound.

He knew his mother’s feelings were hurt but he had bigger problems on his hands. She would have to take her place in the queue for satisfaction behind Harry Reilly of Reilly & Maitland who was already firmly on the warpath. Unsolicited leave was frowned upon. In fact, even leave of the totally above-board kind was considered an absolute nuisance. Harry sounded as if he had adhered himself to the ceiling with disbelieving rage when Colm had rung that morning to announce that he would not be in that day and might not be in all week in fact. A baby son, whom he had neglected to tell anyone about, was the elaborate excuse. Well, you had to hand it to him for originality, Harry thought gruffly as he slammed the phone down on Colm.

An irate boss and a mother whose nose was out of joint were, however, falling down the list of worries occupying Colm. To those minor irritations he could now add the fact that Leda was, to all intents and purposes, missing. She had fled the apartment the very minute Colm had come back from work the evening before.

‘I have to get out of here or I will explode. I need air and not to be here listening to him crying,’ she said, tossing her head in the direction of Tom’s Moses basket.

‘When will you be back?’ Colm asked, but if Leda answered from beyond the slammed door Tom’s cries drowned it out.

Dear Jesus, he didn’t even know when she had last fed him. Maybe Tom’s cries were hunger but the stench that rose from the basket revealed that a change of nappy might be the best bet. Now some twelve hours later, having changed five nappies, given four bottles and had so little sleep that he thought his eyelids were about to go on strike, Colm was allowing himself to panic. Where was she? What if she didn’t come back? How would he and Tom manage? From his perch on the couch he watched his son gurgle contentedly in his sleep and his own body gave in to the pure exhaustion that overwhelmed him.

Iris let herself into Colm’s apartment with the key she kept for an emergency. She didn’t approve of the area where her son had bought his apartment, thinking it a little rough, even though she had to admit the apartments were in themselves quite beautiful. She had avoided visiting as much as possible, preferring her son to come home to her instead.

Today was different, to say the very least of it. She had spent the duration of the uncomfortable bus journey from the city centre in a heady flux of exasperation and anticipation. Colm had thrown a bombshell and she wasn’t sure if her temper or delight was going to win through, but as the bus neared the stop closest to Colm’s apartment the butterflies that unsettled her stomach gave some indication of the softness of heart that Iris Lifford had spent years doing her best to hide.

She picked her way through the babycare shop and supermarket shopping bags that littered his hallway. Nappies, Babygros still in their packets and baby bottles peeked from their packaging. There was even a clothes airer with some vests and blue baby blankets strewn at random on its rails. She followed the cries to the kitchen and she got the first glimpse of a small red-faced infant squirming and squalling on Colm’s shoulder. Her son was struggling with the sterilizer. The steam burned his hands as he wrestled the scalding bottles from their heated cauldron. She dropped her bag and her hands reached instinctively for the brand-new little person that would, she dared to hope, look utterly familiar.

Colm was relieved at the way his mother wrapped herself up in Tom, expertly giving him his bottle and patiently winding him as if she had had recent practice. For her part Iris was glad that Leda had been asleep when she arrived. Good manners may have dictated that she be up to meet
her child’s grandmother, particularly in these most irregular circumstances, but Iris had to admit that she relished the chance to have Tom to herself. There would be time enough to meet and analyse this Leda woman who had insinuated herself into her son’s life and home. Once she had jotted down a feeding schedule from Colm and packed him off to bed to catch up on some missed sleep, Iris turned her attention to the shoddy state of the apartment. She noticed it had gone distinctly downhill since her last visit six or so months before. Colm had always sent his clothes out for laundering and ironing, an extravagance that the extraordinarily house-proud and parsimonious Iris could never condone. She poked her head into the washing machine while Tom slept and found the undisturbed manual and some detergent tablets. Time to put you into active service, she thought as she scoured the apartment, picking up dirty baby vests, bibs, sheets and tea towels that lurked in heaps on every chair and on the table and even on the floor (she discovered with disapproval). With one load washing and another gathered and waiting, Iris went to sort out the assorted babycare debris that she had passed in the hallway.

It became clear that someone without a single clue about what babies needed had gone on some kind of hormonal rampage in Mothercare. She was anxious not to judge Leda before they met but honestly this was insane. Apart from the ridiculous amount, twenty-three to be precise, of newborn Babygros and fifteen vests, there were at least another half-dozen bottles, not counting the full set that Iris had just arranged, six ounces of formula apiece, in a neat line on the door of Colm’s otherwise empty fridge. She abhorred the waste and the mess, but she had to admit she was relishing the chance to sort it all out.

First she unwrapped from the booty what she thought her grandson might feasibly need. It was a neat pile. Then she put together a bag of returns for Mothercare. She would take them back herself and exchange them for bigger sizes. They were bound to be understanding and probably still amused at the new mother who had bought them out of every tiny infant size that they had in stock. Receipts tumbled out on to the ground. She was puzzled at the fact that it was Colm who had signed for all the purchases. If he was there could he not have talked some common sense into Leda? She was, she had to admit, somewhat disappointed that Colm seemed to have inherited none of her sense of prudence.

The phone ringing jolted her out of her zealous bout of housekeeping. She was annoyed at herself because she had meant to take it off the hook so as not to interrupt the sleeping house. She pounced on its third ring without pausing to allow the caller to greet her.

‘Good morning. This is Colm Lifford’s phone. I am afraid he is unavailable at the moment but I can take a message.’

The spiky formality, when she had been expecting Colm’s calm and understanding voice, made Leda think about hanging up. Had he patched the apartment phone through to Reilly & Maitland? This sounded a bit like one of the nosy crew at the office reception desk, an unfriendly bunch she remembered from the short weeks that she had temped there.

‘Who is this?’ Leda asked with rising irritation.

‘This is Mrs Iris Lifford, Colm’s mother, and who may I ask is this?’

‘I’m a friend of Colm’s and I need to talk to him straight away.’

‘Well, that won’t be possible, I’m afraid. As I said, he is unavailable.’

‘Look, this is Leda Clancy. I need to talk to him about Tom.’

‘Did you say Leda? I understood from Colm that you were asleep here in the apartment!’

‘I’m staying with a friend for a while, not that it’s any of your business. Now
can
I speak to Colm?’

‘Listen here. If it has to do with my son and my grandson then it’s one hundred per cent my business. I’ll thank you not to take that tone with me, young lady.’

‘Just get Colm, will you?’ Leda snapped.

Iris put the phone down and took a deep breath. It looked as if Colm was still being incredibly tight-fisted with the truth. She knocked on her son’s bedroom door and she heard his progress as he shuffled towards the kitchen. His clothes were wrinkled and he looked immeasurably worse than when he had gone to bed some hours before.

‘Mam, is it Tom? Is he OK?’

‘Tom is fine, Colm. It would appear that the mother of your child is on the other end of the phone and not here in this apartment, recovering from a sleepless night. Perhaps when you have finished speaking to her you might fill your mother in on any details you may have omitted. I do not appreciate being taken for a fool.’

There was only one thing worse than not knowing all the facts of a situation and that, Iris had decided, was discovering the truly unpalatable ones. It had been six weeks since she had received Colm’s early-morning phone call. Six weeks since she had clapped eyes on Tom and devoted herself almost entirely to his care. She had of course gone home to sleep in her house at Grosvenor Gardens. She preferred to sleep in her own bed and take the first available bus to Colm’s apartment in the morning, gleefully receiving her gurgling grandson swaddled in the warmth of his baby blankets. Her work at the church had been scaled back completely. She had managed only one morning mass in three weeks and had temporarily handed her church-cleaning duties to a kind and unquestioning neighbour. She knew Father Hogan would do anything rather than pry and had done her best to dodge him, but he followed her to her car, which she had parked beneath the whitebeam trees that lined the church car park. She rarely drove any more, preferring to get maximum value from her free travel card, but this morning she had gone to the flower market to collect blooms for the altar display.

‘Iris, we are beginning to forget what you look like around here. You haven’t defected to another parish after all these years, have you?’

‘Oh, don’t be daft, Father. Everything is fine but I do hope you will excuse me as I am in a terrible rush.’

‘Certainly, Iris. I merely wanted to say if there was anything at all bothering you that you could certainly confide in Father Michael or myself. We would be only too glad to help.’

There was a list of things bothering her. Where would she start? If she told Father Hogan that Colm had a new son he would, naturally enough, want to see him. He would also want to know why she hadn’t shared the good news of the child’s impending arrival. He might even start planning the christening and expect to officiate at the happy ceremony. Having stood by Iris Lifford through the difficult times of her husband’s disgrace, Father Hogan would no doubt be looking forward to meeting Colm’s new family. A missing mother was going to be a difficult one to explain. Could you even christen a child without its mother being present? Did Colm actually want Tom christened? No, there was no good place to start this story. This can of worms was definitely too fresh a catch to go opening it up to scrutiny it could not bear.

‘Things are absolutely fine, Father,’ Iris said with as much conviction as she could muster. She started her car and when she dared to look in the rear-view mirror she saw Father Hogan’s vestments flapping like oversize bunting in the breeze.

After Leda’s phone call to the apartment Colm had told his mother the scant information he knew about her whereabouts and her intentions. It was a catalogue of grim revelations. Leda, it
seemed, had been calm and relaxed in the weeks before Tom’s birth. She seemed glad that Colm had taken such a passionate interest in the baby she was carrying.

‘And you didn’t notice anything strange about her behaviour?’ Iris was perplexed and Colm knew that question time had well and truly begun.

‘If you are asking me if she littered our conversations with clues that she would reluctantly spend a bare week with her baby son and then decide that she never wanted to see him again then I would have to say no she didn’t. She seemed OK while she still had Tom inside her.’

‘All I am saying, Colm, is that it is highly unusual behaviour. Did she seem depressed? Were there any clues? The slightest hint—’

‘No, there were no clues.’ His tone was snappy and silence hung between them awkwardly. Iris was cowed only for a moment.

‘So what exactly happens next? What happens to Tom?’

‘He stays with me, of course. I will do whatever it takes to mind him.’

‘How will you manage?’

‘I will cut back on work or I will work from here at night when he is asleep. I will do whatever I have to do.’

‘It could have consequences for your career.’ The words sounded cold and she regretted them immediately.

‘Mam, he has lost something huge already. He will not lose me. I promise him that.’

A blush rose on Iris’s face. She should not have doubted her son, but her life had served to make her distrustful of intentions and suspicious of motives. Colm had never done anything to damage her pride or belief in him. She felt ashamed that she had not supported him without question.

‘I will help you keep your promise, Colm.’

With her composure cracking a little Iris scurried in response to an imaginary cry from Tom’s room. She did not want her son to see the tears that welled in her eyes. It was time for them all to be resilient and do what needed to be done.

‘Even you, my little man,’ she whispered to the small figure of a soundly sleeping Tom.