Lessons in Heartbreak (15 page)

There was just one person she’d trust with those secrets and that was Izzie.

Perhaps the best thing would be to write a note for Izzie and tape it on to the box so that one day, when Lily was gone, Izzie would find it. But then, maybe Izzie wasn’t ready for her grandmother’s secrets just yet.

Besides, Lily was sure Izzie had secrets of her own to occupy her. Izzie had been subtly different the last few times she’d phoned from New York: a little preoccupied, a little awkward, the way she used to be when she was younger and had something to hide.

‘Is everything all right, love?’ Lily had asked the last time they’d talked, on Sunday night.

‘Fine,’ Izzie had said in a brisk tone that reminded Lily, with an ache, of Izzie’s mother, Alice. Izzie sounded exactly like her mother when she spoke: the same soft tones, the same way of emphasising certain words so her voice flowed like water, rapidly and quicksilver. When Izzie’s voice had grown up, a few years after her mother’s death, it was sometimes unbearably poignant for Lily to hear her speak: it was like Alice come back to life.

They’d looked so different: Izzie was tall and strong with eyes like Lily’s own and the milky Celtic colouring that was set off by that marvellous caramel hair of hers. Alice had been small and fine-boned, with dark hair and the olive skin of Lily’s own grandmother, the fearsome Granny Sive.

Granny Sive was descended from the fairy folk, people used to say when Lily was a child, which was one way of saying they were scared stiff of her.

Lily had never been scared, though. Granny Sive had simply been uncompromising and different, a modern woman in olden times. No wonder they were all scared of her.

Granny Sive, now there was an old lady who’d have had a lot of great stories in her life.

What a pity nobody had come along to hear her tales.

Lily sighed. She hoped she’d done the right thing with the diary and the box. It was hard to know what the right thing was. But Lily had been feeling so unsettled since the phone call from Jodi Beckett. There was – how could she describe it – a sense of time speeding up, an urgency in her heart since then. Like she needed to phone Izzie and talk to her, but it would sound strange if she rang up mid-week and said she’d been feeling odd. Poor Izzie would think she was going gaga.

She’d phoned Anneliese the previous evening to say how she felt but Anneliese and Edward’s answerphone came on and she hung up without leaving a message. She hated answering machines, they were one of the modern inventions she’d never liked, and how could a person leave such a message on a machine anyhow?

Anneliese, I feel scared and anxious. Please tell me I’m not going gaga, will you?

It would sound too strange, definitely senile. She dreaded losing her mind: it had happened to so many people she knew. Even lovely, lively Vivi had succumbed and was now in the nursing home outside town. Laurel Gardens, it was called. A gentle-sounding name for a place Lily never wanted to be.

The diary…Her mind kept drifting back to it. If only she’d phoned Izzie after all. Izzie would know the right thing to do. Darling Izzie, who’d said she was going to New York to live, no matter what.

‘I don’t care if I’m living on threepence and sleeping in a teeny apartment where you couldn’t swing a hamster, never mind a cat,’ she’d said all those years ago. ‘I’ll be doing it IN
NEW YORK. You went and lived abroad, Gran, you must know what I’m talking about?’

Lily had nodded. ‘You’re right, Izzie darling, forgive me. I’d forgotten.’

‘Gran, you never forget a thing,’ Izzie had laughed.

Sitting now in the sunlight, Lily wished that weren’t so true. It might be nice not to remember.

She thought so much about the past nowadays. Did that mean she was very close to the end of her life? Did the voices of the past come to warn her? She saw them all in her dreams now: Mam, Dad, Tommy, Granny, Uncle Pat, Jamie, Robby and her beloved Alice. Alice was the worst. No parent should ever have to bury a child. The place where Alice had been was a part of her heart that Lily couldn’t bear to touch, even now that Alice was twenty-seven years gone.

There had been so much death in her life, Lily reflected. All those young, healthy people dying because a bomb had landed nearby, or men shipped home with injuries everybody could see, and scars on the inside where nobody dared to look but that killed them just the same.

As a girl who’d grown up in the countryside, Lily was familiar with death. There had been no question of keeping children away from the coffin at a funeral – everyone, young and old, bent to kiss the icy forehead of the corpse nestled in its wooden box. Lily had sat quietly at wakes and listened to old songs sung and watched the dead being mourned. But she’d never seen an actual person die until those first days on the wards.

She’d been amazed to find that life didn’t ebb out of people with a fanfare – it slipped away quietly, leaving nothing but a body growing colder as the doctor moved swiftly on to the next patient. It was only much later, when the bloodied gauze and instruments were being cleared up and the amputated limbs were being carted off to the incinerators, that anybody had time to tidy up the dead patients.

Lily used to find herself thinking about them later, when she’d be sandwiched between the girls – Maisie and Diana – drinking hot tea in the tea rooms, or sharing pink gins – then she’d allow herself to remember. Of course, remembering was always a mistake.

Each young man could be her younger brother, Tommy, who was somewhere in the Mediterranean, she thought, although he couldn’t tell her in his letters, and her mind would leap to the
what ifs
– what if it was him lying cold on a table…

Which was why they’d all order another round of pink gins.

‘Nil bastardi carborundum!’ Diana would cry, which was dog Latin for
Don’t let the bastards get you down
.

Despite all the death, they’d been so young that they didn’t think about dying themselves. Death was for other people. They were going to be lucky and, just in case, they’d live each day to the full.

And now, death was waiting for her, except that she wasn’t afraid to go. That was the one great gift of old age: readiness to move on. There was nobody left for her to take care of. Nobody would sob that it was too early when she died. God had let her live to care for her baby; she would have to thank Him for that, if she saw Him. Although she might be heading for the other place, the one with fire and the Devil. Lily grinned to herself. She wasn’t afraid of the Devil, he’d been laughing in her ear for years.

If everything she’d heard in churches all her life was true, she’d meet all the people she’d loved in the past. Like her darling Alice. Letting Alice go had been the hardest thing she’d ever had to do.

Lily closed her eyes against the sun and let herself dream until it all turned dark inside her head.

Four miles away, Anneliese was in her kitchen clumsily making strong tea in the hope that it might wake her up. She’d slept badly again, staring at the alarm clock for much of the night, and had only dropped off to sleep when dawn began creeping over the horizon.

Now, she was dressed and determined to go for a walk along the beach to get her out of the house, but her head felt heavy and muzzy. Normally, she might have sat down on the porch and read a book or a magazine until she felt more energetic, but she couldn’t enjoy those pleasures now. Every magazine she picked up had some article in it that pierced her.

Yesterday, a seemingly innocent magazine that came free with the daily newspaper had carried an interview with an actress starring in a film about infidelity.

Sickened, Anneliese had thrown the whole magazine into the bin.

The library books by her bed were no help either: she’d never realised she’d been so drawn to novels about relationships. If asked, she’d have said she read everything, but all the books she’d taken from the library, with the exception of a
thriller and an autobiography of Marie Antoinette, had dealt with families, couples and the relationships therein.

She had her second cup of tea outside on the porch. It was a beautiful sunny morning with a feeling of real warmth in the air and when she set off for her walk, Anneliese didn’t bother with her light rain jacket. Her grey fleece was enough; she’d soon warm up. If she walked along the beach away from Tamarin, right down to the outcrop of rocks that marked the end of little Milsean Bay and back, she’d have walked two miles. That would be enough to warm her up.

As she left, she noticed several people on the town side of the beach, more than the normal morning dog walkers. Anneliese strained to see what was going on. There were definitely six or seven people gathered together on the high ground between the two bays and it was as if they were looking out to sea for something.

A boat. Oh no, she thought. A fisherman’s boat had gone missing. It was the awful fear that haunted any seaside town.

Once a boat went missing, the whole community came to a stop, as people prayed, the air and sea rescuers searched, and families sat numb. Anneliese could remember a vigil being held in the church once, when a boat with three generations of fishermen capsized; what felt like all of Tamarin had crowded into the wintry cold of St Canice’s, as if the intensity of prayer could carry the boat and its crew back home. It hadn’t. Only one of the crew had returned when his body had been washed up on the rocks five miles south.

She had no business to be feeling low when all she’d lost was a husband – who still lived – while some pour soul in Tamarin was readying herself for the real loss of a man.

Although Anneliese felt too raw to deal with the pain of a fishing crew lost, she felt a responsibility to walk down to the people on the beach. She was a local and if help or vigil was needed, she had to be there too.

But as she walked quickly through the sand, down to the damp swathe of the beach, she realised that the people weren’t looking desolately out to sea: they were looking at something in the water.

‘What is it, Claire?’ she asked a woman who lived several miles inland and who was often on the beach walking three black-and-white collies who danced around the surf in delight.

‘Hello, Anneliese,’ the woman said. The dogs were at her feet, whimpering because they wanted to keep walking and not stand. ‘It’s a whale, look. She’s come in too far and now she can’t seem to get out.’

‘Poor whale,’ said someone else, moving so that Anneliese could stand on the highest part and see for herself.

There, in the waters of Tamarin Bay, was a dark shape circling in slow, aimless arcs. It was huge, had to be, because they were easily half a mile away from the shape and it was easily visible. Just as Anneliese was wondering how anybody could tell for certain what the creature was, it moved gracefully up in the water, a gleaming mound of darkest, silky blue, and she could see that it was clearly some sort of whale.

A tall fountain of water sprayed up from the whale’s blowhole before the huge mammal sank back beneath the waters of the bay.

‘They rise when they’re in distress,’ said a voice, explaining. ‘She won’t know what to do.’

Anneliese hadn’t noticed the man before in the group of local people. He could be taken for a fisherman in his dark pants and bulky sweater, but she knew most of the fishermen and she’d never seen him before. He was tall and grizzled looking enough to be one of them, with a greying beard that matched thick, slightly too long, hair.

‘What should we do?’

‘I’m sorry to say, there’s not an awful lot we can do,’ he said.

‘But there must be!’ said Anneliese, furious at the resignation in his voice. Didn’t he care? That poor whale was like her: lost and alone, and now nobody wanted to help. It just wasn’t good enough. ‘Has anyone phoned the maritime wildlife people to tell them about her?’

‘That would be me,’ the strange man said. ‘I’m the local maritime expert. I’m living in Dolphin Cottage.’

Dolphin Cottage was less of a house and more of a barn, nestled among the sand dunes on Ballyvolane Strand, the next horseshoe-shaped bay up from Milsean. A squat wooden building, painted blue by man and washed beige by God, Dolphin House was one of the local houses that were permanently rented out.

‘I’m Mac,’ he added. ‘Mac Petersen.’

Anneliese glared at him, not taking the hand he held out. She’d done polite all her life: she wasn’t doing it any more.

‘And you can’t do anything to help?’ she snapped.

‘When whales become stranded in shallow harbours, they often die,’ he said, calmly ignoring her rudeness.

‘So this is it?’ Anneliese demanded, waving her arms to encompass the whole group. ‘Us standing around watching her die? That’s great. Well done Mr Marine Specialist.’

As she turned to see the whale’s dark shape move silently through the water again, Anneliese felt more empathy with the great creature than with any of the human beings around her. They knew
nothing
. Pain, loss, fear – they knew nothing about it. But the whale, circling in fear, she understood.

The man began to speak again but she didn’t want to hear.

Tears bit at the corners of her eyes as Anneliese stormed back up the beach.

She knew she’d lost it, but she was past caring. Bottling up her feelings had got her nowhere in life. She didn’t care enough about the world to hide who and what she was. Let the bloody world deal with it.

As she got in the door of the cottage, she caught the final ring of the telephone, before it clicked into answering machine mode. The message was still Edward’s voice, telling everyone that he and Anneliese were busy and couldn’t come to the phone, but to leave a message. Strangely, it was Edward’s own voice that came on the phone then, leaving her a message.

‘Anneliese, love – sorry, don’t know how to tell you this, but just had a phone call from Brendan and…I’m really sorry, darling, Lily’s in hospital, they think she had a stroke. She was sitting outside the church in town and they found her there this morning after Mass. Anyway, she’s in the hospital, they took her in by ambulance. Brendan’s on his way there now. I can’t go just yet, I have…’

He paused. ‘…something else to do, but I’ll drop in this afternoon, if that would be all right, if…’ he paused again. ‘If you wouldn’t mind me being there, I mean. Nell won’t be there, obviously, but I’d like to be there for Brendan and for you. OK, goodbye, Anneliese. Sorry to be bringing you such horrible news.’

The phone call ended. Anneliese stared at it for a moment, before rushing over and hitting one of the speed-dial buttons to ring Brendan’s number. Brendan Silver was Lily’s son-in-law, and Anneliese’s cousin, well, cousin-in-law, if such a thing existed. He was actually Edward’s cousin. A good, kind man, but not the sort of person you’d need in a crisis, and poor darling Lily was in a crisis. Anneliese felt her heart ache for her darling aunt. Lily mightn’t have been a blood relation to Anneliese, but she was one of the dearest people in her life. Strange how Lily – who had virtually raised her granddaughter, Izzie, when Izzie’s mother had died – seemed to understand how difficult life had been for Anneliese and Beth. Anneliese couldn’t imagine Lily ever suffering from panic attacks or depression. She was so calm, so serene, and yet she did understand. She’d been through the darkest thing a person
could deal with: the death of her daughter, Alice. Lily understood darkness.

When Beth and Izzie were teenagers, Lily often stepped in and invited Beth to come and stay when Izzie was spending a few days with her. Anneliese hated the sleepover concept, but with Lily it was different: when Beth was in her house with her cousin, Anneliese could relax. The two girls were like chalk and cheese, mind you, and Izzie was three years older too, but they loved each other and got on well despite the squabbling. It was also a welcome distraction for Beth. Lily never said why she was doing it, nothing so bald as saying: ‘You’re clearly depressed, I’ll take your child off your hands.’

It had never been like that. But she had understood that Anneliese sometimes needed the space to recover, so she could get her life back on track again. Lily had been such a part of Anneliese’s life ever since she had first come to Tamarin, thirty-seven years ago, and now Lily needed her.

Brendan’s mobile phone was turned off, but she left a message anyway. ‘It’s Anneliese here, I’ve just heard about Lily, I’m on my way to the hospital. I’ll run by her house first and pick up some things for her.’

Anneliese grabbed a few things for herself first. Coins for the phone in the hospital, the plug for her mobile phone charger, a few of her tranquillity teabags, a big jumper and socks in case she had to stay overnight, her knitting and the spare keys Lily had given her years before for emergencies. Then she locked up, put her overnight bag in the car and drove off. In the distance she could still see the people standing on the high dunes, looking down into Tamarin Bay, and she thought of the whale circling aimlessly in the water, not knowing where she was or how to get out. Even with all the people watching her and all the ocean life teeming in the Atlantic out beyond Tamarin Bay, Anneliese knew the whale felt lost and alone in the world.

It had only been a week since Anneliese had last visited Lily’s house. So much had happened in that week. Edward had left her and now Lily herself lay in hospital. Anneliese felt the guilt again, guilt that she hadn’t gone out and talked to Lily about her and Edward splitting up. She just hadn’t been able to face it, to face the pain and pity in Lily’s beautiful old face.

‘Oh love, I’m so sorry for you. Is there anything I can do?’

Anneliese had known all the things Lily would say, and she was afraid that they wouldn’t be any comfort to her, so she’d told Lily nothing. Now, her stupidity and fear meant that she mightn’t ever be able to say any of it. Lily was nearly ninety. At her age, a person who’d had a stroke might never recover. And all the pain Anneliese had inside her might remain bottled up there for ever.

As she drove, she let the tears flow, unchecked, down her cheeks. It wasn’t like the tears she felt with the panic attacks or the depression; those tears she tried to stifle, as if she could physically push them back into her body and stop the pain from escaping. But these tears for Lily were cleansing, they were a tribute.

Anneliese and Edward had always loved the road out to Rathnaree, which headed west of Tamarin along the top of the hill from where you could see the swathe of both Tamarin and Milsean Bays. Then the road dipped into woods and fields and parkland, bordered by huge hedges that stretched long tendrils out on to the road, making the road itself very narrow and forcing cars into the hedges in order to pass each other.

Lily’s house was the family home she had grown up in, a former forge that had once been a part of the huge Rathnaree estate. The Old Forge was no longer owned by the Lochraven family. They’d sold a lot of the land off years ago and now the house and the four acres of land it sat on belonged to Lily. That mattered a lot to her, she’d told Anneliese once.

‘I don’t think I’d be happy here if it was still part the Lochraven estate,’ she’d said. ‘I know it’s crazy. I’m old enough for it not to bother me, but there’s peace in the fact that it’s mine now, nobody else’s. There’s nothing like owning your own little bit of God’s green earth.

‘My mother, Lord rest her, would turn in her grave to hear me saying that. But I like the fact that it’s my own land and my own house. It gives me immense joy, actually, to own it.’

‘Why did the Lochraven family never give the house to your family?’ Anneliese asked. It didn’t quite make sense to her, that these incredibly wealthy people would never gift the homes to the loyal workers who had served them for years.

Lily had laughed loudly at that.

‘Oh, Anneliese, the number of times I wondered about that. I finally came to the conclusion that those sort of people don’t gift anything, that’s how they stay rich. They hold on to it and we’re just the peasants who do their bidding, working our fingers to the bone and getting nothing but a pittance in return. Well, I used to think that. Long ago. But I know a bit better now.’

There was something final about those last words, as if she didn’t want to be drawn on the subject of how she’d learned those lessons, but Anneliese had to know more. Thirty-seven years ago, Anneliese would ask anyone anything. She ploughed on.

‘Both your parents worked for them, didn’t they?’ she said.

‘My mother was the housekeeper from 1930 to 1951,’ said Lily. ‘Until she died, actually.’

‘She must have seen some amazing things, working in that big house,’ Anneliese added.

‘Oh, she saw lots of things, all right,’ Lily said. ‘She saw everything. That was how I learned my first French. Lady Irene used to say things like, “
Ne pas devant les domestiques
.” Not in front of the servants. I worked as a maid there for a while
and I got used to hearing that. Lady Irene never seemed to realise that eventually some of us might learn French and know what she was saying. Lord, but my mother used to go mad if I’d give out about them,’ Lily added. ‘First, she’d be scared someone would overhear. Then she’d say: “Where’s your gratitude?”