“I see.” The ominous message that lay beyond his words was repellent, yet I didn’t hesitate to get into the car with him. I felt very aware of his closeness, the way he held the steering wheel, his long brown hand touching the gear lever.
“What are you looking at?” he asked.
“You. I haven’t seen you in daylight before.”
He slid a disc into the CD player and a man with a hard, angry voice began to sing “The Wild Rover”. “I love Irish music,” he said. Then he looked at me in a way that made me catch my breath. “You look great in daylight.”
He started up the engine and steered aggressively into the traffic. “But you’re doing me head in, girl. I wish I’d never met you.”
We stopped at a pub in Formby, the first customers of the day. Tom demolished a mixed grill, while I forced myself to eat a slice of toast. As soon as he’d finished, I poured us a second cup of coffee, and said, “Now will you tell me why we’re going to Southport?”
“I thought you’d like to meet me gran.”
I looked at him, startled. “Your paternal grandmother?”
“What the hell does that mean?” he almost snarled.
“Is it your father’s mother?”
He banged the cup down on the saucer. “Christ! You talk like a fuckin’ encyclopaedia. It’s me dad’s mam, Nancy O’Mara, eighty-six years old, as fit as a fiddle, but completely gaga.”
The nursing-home was a large, detached house in a quiet road full of equally large houses, all set in spacious, well-tended grounds. The decor inside was subdued and expensive, the floors thickly carpeted in beige. The fees must have been horrendous, and I assumed it was Tom who paid.
The smiling woman in Reception toned perfectly with her surroundings: beige suit, beige shoes, beige hair.
When she saw Tom, the smile became a simper. The barmaid in the pub had looked at him in the same way.
“How’s me gran been?” he enquired abruptly.
“Just the same,” the woman gushed. “Sometimes she seems very aware of what people say to her, but in the main she lives in a world of her own. We persuade her to do her exercises every day and she’s in remarkably good shape for a woman of her age. She’s in the garden, which is no place for an old lady on a day like today but there’s no arguing with Nancy. We just wrap her up and let her go.”
Tom led the way through to the rear of the house where a door opened on to a vast lawn. On the far side, a woman was sitting ramrod stiff on a wooden bench. She looked tiny beneath the fir trees that towered over the garden on three sides, so thick that not even the faintest glimmer of sunlight could get through.
She watched our approach with interest, ebony eyes flashing brilliantly in her hawk-like, liver-spotted face.
Snow-white hair, with streaks of black, was piled in a bun as big as a loaf at the nape of her stringy neck. She wore a crimson coat and fur-trimmed black boots. A black lace stole was draped around her shoulders.
“Have you come to read the meter?” she enquired, in a hoarse, deep voice, when Tom sat down beside her. He motioned to me to sit the other side.
“No, Gran. It’s Tom, and I’ve brought a friend to see you. It’s no good introducing you,” he whispered. “She wouldn’t take it in.”
“There’s no need to introduce her,” Nancy said unexpectedly.
“I know who she is.” She fixed the glittering eyes in their dry brown sockets on me. “Oh, yes! I know who she is.”
“Who am I, then?” I felt uncomfortable, slightly afraid, under the woman’s piercing gaze.
Nancy cackled. “That would be telling!” Her long face became fretful. “The chap hasn’t been to read the meter in ages. One of these days, they’ll cut the ‘leccy off.’
“Stop worrying about the meter, Gran. Everything’s all right. It’s all been seen to.” Tom’s attitude to his grandmother was tolerantly offhand. He hadn’t kissed her, and seemed to be there out of a sense of duty, rather than affection.
A woman in a grey cotton frock and a white apron was coming towards us with a tray of tea-things. Nancy grabbed it eagerly, apparently capable of pouring the tea, heaping sugar in all three cups. We were drinking it in silence when I noticed that one of her dangling jet earrings had caught in the stole. I leaned over to unhook it, but was shrugged away with a sharp, “Don’t touch me!”
I made a face at Tom. “I don’t think she likes me.” I was hoping we wouldn’t stay long. The garden was a melancholy place, cheerless and dark, the only sound was the dew plopping from the trees on to the thick, wet grass. It was doubtful that the old woman appreciated visitors. I’d hoped to get from her a feeling of the past, of the woman who’d been married to Tommy O’Mara when he’d lost his life on the Thetis in 1939, but it was impossible to imagine Nancy being young.
Tom said, “Gran’s never liked anyone much. The only person she ever cared about was me dad.” He glanced at his watch. “We’ll go soon. I don’t mind paying the bills, but visiting bores me rigid. I only come once a month to keep the nursing staff on their toes. I don’t want them thinking they don’t have to look after her proper.”
For the next quarter of an hour, I did ray awkward best to engage Nancy in conversation. I admired her coat, asked who did her hair, remarked on the weather, enquired about the food. It was hard to make out whether the old woman was merely being cussed when she didn’t answer, or genuinely didn’t understand.
“You’re wasting your time,” Tom said eventually.
“Sometimes she catches on if you talk about the things she used to know, like the war, or the shops in Smithdown Road.”
“I can’t talk about either.” Of course there was the Thetis, but under the circumstances that mightn’t be a good idea.
“C’mon let’s go.” Tom squeezed Nancy’s shoulder.
“Tara, Gran. See you next month.”
We were halfway across the lawn, when a hoarse voice called, “Hey, you.” We turned to see her beckoning.
Tom gave me a little push. “It’s you she wants.”
“Are you sure? Why should she want me?” I went back reluctantly, and got a fright when a hand came out and grabbed me painfully by the arm, pulling me downwards until our faces were almost touching. I could smell the fetid breath. “I know what you’re up to, Flo Clancy,” she said, in a voice that sent shivers of ice down my spine.
“But it won’t work. Your Martha gave him to me fair and square. He’s mine. You’ll not get him back, not ever.
I’ve told you before, I’ll kill him first.”
“She’s making a hole for her own back,” said Bel.
“A rod,” corrected Charmian. “She’s making a rod for her own back, or she’s digging herself into a hole. You’ve got your sayings mixed up.”
“Teh, teh!” Bel snorted loudly. “She knows what I mean.”
“Would you mind not talking about me in the third person?” I said mildly. “Furthermore, it’s none of your business who I go out with. I can make a hole for my own back if I like.”
“Rod,” said Charmian
“Rod, hole, whatever.” I waved a dismissive hand. I supposed it was inevitable that Tom O’Mara’s regular visits to the basement flat wouldn’t go unnoticed. When he had dropped me off after we got back from Southport Bel had been watching from Charmian’s window to witness my folly.
“Fiona said he’d been in and out, but I didn’t believe her.” Bel made no secret of her disapproval. “Young “uns nowadays,” she said disgustedly, “they hop in and out of bed with each other like rabbits. I’ve only slept with three men in me life, and I married “em all first.”
“Yes, but times have changed, Bel,” Charmian reminded her. She gave me a wink as she refilled the glasses, though even Charmian looked worried. “I hope you don’t mind me saying this, Millie, but Tom O’Mara’s got a terrible reputation. It’s not just women but all sorts of other things—drugs, for one. I wouldn’t go near that club of his. It worried me to death when our Jay invited him to his twenty-first. I don’t think Flo could have known the things he was up to.”
As the evening wore on, my irritation with the pair diminished in proportion to how much I drank. By the time we’d finished a bottle of sherry and started on another, the last, I didn’t give a damn what anybody thought. I lay on the rug in front of the fire staring up at the faces of my friends, feeling extraordinarily happy and without a care in the world. “He’s a scoundrel,” I agreed, “a villain, a good-for-nothing rogue. But he’s also dropdown-dead gorgeous.”
“What’s happening with poor James?” Bel demanded.
I thought hard, but couldn’t remember. Before I could say anything there was a knock at the door and I said, “Perhaps that’s him now.” I walked unsteadily to the door and for several seconds couldn’t recognise either of the small, clearly distressed women standing outside.
“You said it was all right to come,” a familiar voice said.
“Of course.” I blinked, and the two women merged into one: Diana, a different Diana from the one I’d always known, with uncombed hair and no makeup, her face white and shrivelled, like melting wax. I asked her in, trying not to sound too drunkenly effusive, and introduced her to Bel and Charmian, adding, because it was obvious that she was in a terrible state. “Diana’s father died last week. He was only buried the day before yesterday.”
Bel, who was over-effusive even when she was sober, jumped to her feet and took the new arrival in her arms.
“You poor girl! Sit down, luv—here, have my place on the settee. Oh, I bet you’re feeling dead awful. Charmian fetch the girl summat to drink. Millie, plump that cushion up and stick it behind her.”
Diana burst into tears. “I’ve felt so alone since he died.
The house is like a morgue,” she cried. “I wanted someone to talk to.”
She was eaten up with guilt and anxious to share it.
The words came pouring out in a plaintive, childish voice, nothing like her usual terse, clipped tones.
She’d always blamed her father for the fact that she’d never married, she sobbed. “He said he was sorry. He took the blame but it wasn’t his fault at all. No one’s ever asked me to marry them. I was using poor Daddy as an excuse for being single, for having to stay in night after night, when I only stayed in because I had nowhere else to go. I’m a total failure as a human being, and it’s nobody’s fault but my own.”
“Don’t be silly, luv,” Bel soothed. “You stayed with your dad, didn’t you? That was very kind and unselfish.”
But Diana wailed, “I think he wanted to be rid of me so he could have his friends round for bridge. When I came home from university, he offered to buy me a flat. I refused. I told myself it was my duty to stay but I was terrified of being on my own. Then I complained so much about his friends that he stopped asking them. It was me who ruined his life, not the other way round.”
“You’re exaggerating,” I said, in what I hoped was a sober, sensible voice. “I’m sure it wasn’t as bad as that.”
“It was,” Diana insisted tearfully.
“In time, you’ll see things more reasonably,” Charmian said gently. “I felt dead guilty when me own mam died. I wished I’d been to see her more often, that I’d been a better daughter.”
Having exhausted the subject of her relationship with her father, Diana turned to her job. She was worried about losing it. George didn’t like her, no one did.
She’d never fitted in. “Daddy’s gone, and if my job goes, too, I think I’ll kill myself
“George sometimes gives the impression of being an ogre, but he wouldn’t dream of firing you,” I assured her, adding, though I wasn’t convinced that it was true, “He regards you as an asset to the firm.”
At ten o’clock, Herbie came down to demand the return of his wife, and Charmian went reluctantly upstairs.
Bel muttered that it was time she was making tracks.
“I suppose I’d better go, too,” Diana sighed, “though I dread the thought of spending another night on my own.”
“Come home with me,” Bel said instantly. “I’ve got a spare bedroom. I can make the bed up in a jiffy.”
“Can I? Oh, Bel! You’re the nicest person I’ve ever known.” Diana threw her arms around Bel’s neck and looked as if she might easily cry again.
Nancy had said, “I know who she is. Oh, yes, I know who she is.” She had taken me for Flo. They must have known each other, all those years ago. Was Nancy aware that Flo had been in love with her husband? And what did she mean when she said, “Your Martha gave him to me fair and square. You’re not getting him back. I’ll kill him first.”
It didn’t make sense, but perhaps that wasn’t surprising coming from an elderly woman who’d lost her mind. Even so, Nancy must have had a reason for saying it.
I took the newspaper cuttings describing the last days of the Thetis over to the bureau and placed them alongside the school photo with the child who looked so much like Declan. Beside the photo, I put Hugh O’Mara’s drawing off “my frend flo”. I looked thoughtfully from the cuttings to the photo to the drawing, then back again.
The Thetis had gone down in June 1939, the photo had been taken six years later and the little boy was in the bottom class, which meant he must have been five and born in 1940. “Your Martha gave him to me fair and square.” Flo had left instructions that Gran wasn’t to be invited to her funeral. What had she done to make Flo hate her so much?
“ Your Martha gave him to me fair and square.”
I felt my heart begin to race as I peered closely at the face of the little boy. He was a Clancy, no doubt about it, the same pale hair, slim build, Declan’s sensitive features.
Suddenly, everything fell into place. Tommy O’Mara had been the child’s father, but his real mother had been Flo. Somehow, Gran had given the baby to Nancy, against Flo’s wishes, or she wouldn’t have wanted him back. “I’ve told you before, I’ll kill him first,” Nancy had said.
It meant that Tom O’Mara and I were distant cousins.
Tom had the Clancys’ green eyes.
Poor Flo! I glanced around the basement room, at its fussy ordinariness, the flowers, lace cloths, abundant ornaments. When I’d first come, it had seemed typical of a place where a pleasant, but rather dull, unmarried woman had lived out most of her life. But as I’d discovered more about Flo, the atmosphere in the room had changed. There was the Flo who’d received those passionate love letters during the war; the woman who’d stayed in the Isle of Man with a man with a foreign name.