Lessons in Heartbreak (34 page)

‘Did you ever talk to Lily about her work as a nurse during the war?’

‘A little,’ he said. ‘Mrs Shanahan wasn’t a patient of mine, but it’s a small town and we met up. Medicine hadn’t changed that much from the First World War, and I was interested in what she’d seen in London. Although she wasn’t that keen to talk about it, to be frank. I’ve found that before: people involved in brutal times don’t want to talk about it, and those on the periphery never stop.

‘She worked as a theatre nurse and that was a tough job back in the day. A person would need to be in the whole of their health to handle that. Dealing with patients was only half of it. The surgeons weren’t easy to get on with. Like kings, they were. Theatre nurses had backs of steel, we used to say.’ He thought some more, spinning his mind back to before Jodi was born.

‘I do remember we talked about how surgeons used human hair for suturing sometimes. They did marvellous things then. The hospitals were run so well, of course. There was none of the cross-contamination or infections we get now. No MRSA, I can tell you. Hygiene was very strict. Those old-time matrons
who ran hospitals when I was a medical student, well, we were all scared out of our lives by them. Not that you’d let on, oh no. We used to tease the matrons. Lots of joking got us through. My favourite joke was that the treatment was successful but the patient died. Gallows humour, I’m afraid, m’dear. Doctors are very bad for it. Tell me,’ he said suddenly. ‘What are the youngsters up in the hospital saying about her? Any use?’

‘They’re not that hopeful,’ Jodi said sadly. ‘It’s very sad. Izzie Silver, her granddaughter, is devastated. It doesn’t look like Lily’s going to wake up.’

‘It’s a pity,’ Dr McGarry said. ‘She was a nice lady. Beautiful in her day, too, let me tell you. When she came home after the war, she could have cut quite a swathe through the town. There were no end of young men who’d have liked to have put a ring on her finger, but she had no interest in going out. Then she married Robby Shanahan. Nice fellow; quiet, though. Could never see why she’d settled for him. She could have had anyone, the pick of the town and Rathnaree too. Still, people will always surprise you, and that surprised us all.’

He talked for a while longer but he didn’t have any more information. He couldn’t think of anyone called Jamie at all, never mind one connected with Lily.

‘Hope I didn’t say anything I shouldn’t,’ Dr McGarry said finally. ‘My wife says the dog shouldn’t wear the muzzle, I should.’ He roared with laughter at his own joke.

‘No, you didn’t say anything you shouldn’t,’ Jodi assured him. ‘Just one more question: why were people surprised at Lily marrying Robby Shanahan?’

‘No reason, just a feeling,’ he said. ‘It seemed like an odd match, to my mind. I’ve had a flash of inspiration: you could talk to Vivi Whelan. She’s got to be pushing ninety-five and if she’s compos mentis, she’d be a good person to talk to. Back in the day, nobody knew what was going on in Tamarin like Vivi.
Married to the butcher, you see, and the butcher knows everything because, one way or another, the whole town come into your shop to buy their dinner.’ He tapped the side of his nose. ‘The butcher, the post office and the chemist: they’re the places where they know everything that goes on in a small town. I think Vivi might be your best bet for solving this mystery.’

As she walked home from talking to Dr McGarry, Jodi thought about what she’d learned. All the stories certainly painted very different portraits of Lily Shanahan. From Izzie, Jodi had the picture of a vibrant, strong and, above all, motherly person, who took care of her family with kindness and courage. Dr McGarry had drawn a picture of a career woman who’d been at the top of her game during a world war, when the human casualties were unimaginable to modern eyes. What were the other sides to Lily?

In the second bedroom, Jodi closed the file. Tomorrow, she’d bring her mum and Lesley to visit Anneliese and perhaps they could talk about Lily. Kill two birds with one stone, as Dan might say.

Anneliese found a saddle of scrub grass on the dune and sank upon it, letting her legs stretch out in front of her. She was tired, bone tired. Walking normally invigorated her but now, it exhausted her. Her muscles ached all the time and even climbing the staircase left her shattered. She wondered, could shock make you ill? Surely some of those auto-immune diseases hit people who’d been emotionally battered? Perhaps she should look them up on the internet.

Then again, why bother?

When she’d been thirty-five or – six, she remembered hitting a very deep depression that coincided with Beth at her teenage worst. In time-honoured tradition, Anneliese had managed to hide her own bleakness in order to deal with her daughter’s problems.

Somehow, the family had clambered out of the depths and Beth’s outlook had been transformed when she fell in love with her first boyfriend, Jean Paul, and Anneliese had been able to relax long enough to think about herself. Standing still had done it: the depression hit her like a slow punch out of nowhere. It was more intense than it had ever been before and the intensity panicked her.

Fear, bleakness and the abyss of her life gaped in front of her. Intellectualising didn’t help. There was no point telling herself that she had so many things to be grateful for, that she had a lovely husband and daughter, that this too would pass. Her mind took all the platitudes and considered them, and the big dark hole inside her stamped on them. Nothing worked, not even the tablets.

Every morning, she dropped Beth at school, went to work, and sat in terror all day. She decided that listening to music might help and put a Vivaldi tape on her Walkman. It didn’t work.

Reading happy books might do the trick: she consumed every self-help volume she could find. That didn’t work.

Seeking solace with God could be the answer: she sat in St Canice’s and begged for help, but none came. There were no heavenly beams of light falling through the stained-glass windows as a personal message for her. She was still lost and alone.

Finally, she took to walking. She walked miles and miles, burning up roads as she tried to walk the pain out of her heart because she wanted to feel better NOW.

And finally, slowly, something began to repair inside her.

The problem with now was that all those cures took a long time to work and Anneliese didn’t have a long time. She wanted to feel better now. It was five months since Edward had left and she still felt worn and battered by the black wave that engulfed her every day.

It was fear of life itself. Nameless, almost inexplicable fear of what would happen.

The fear meant it was better to stay insular, keep away from people and places so you wouldn’t get hurt.

So many people had tried to help.

Dear Brendan invited her to dinner several times a week.

‘I’ve told Edward he’s a stupid fool,’ Brendan said to her, ‘and I won’t have Nell here, no matter how long they’re a couple.’

‘That’s very kind of you, Brendan,’ Anneliese had said, ‘but there’s no need to do that.’ She supposed that, as someone who’d always championed women, she should point out that both Edward and Nell had betrayed her and therefore why should the punishment be meted out only on Nell? But try as she might, Anneliese couldn’t be that forgiving. Sisterhood hadn’t worked very well in the reverse, had it?

Yvonne phoned every day to say hello and on the days when Anneliese worked in the Lifeboat Shop, she insisted that the two of them have lunch.

‘You could do with feeding up,’ Yvonne said, regular as clockwork. ‘You’re far too thin, Anneliese. At our age, you have to choose between your face and your figure, you know, and if the figure’s that thin, the face gets cadaverous. Not that I’m saying yours is or anything, but –’

Lovely Yvonne, she tried so hard.

Even Stephen in the garden centre talked to her, and for Stephen, who made shyness into an art form, that was saying something.

He’d been delighted when she asked for her old job back, saying, ‘I’d love it, we missed you,’ which was practically a speech from him.

Anneliese couldn’t help but realise that she’d only retired because Edward had been telling her to do so for such a long time.

‘You don’t need to work any more, love, you’ve worked enough,’ Edward had been saying to her for a couple of years. Funny then, that when she finally handed in her notice, he hadn’t seemed so keen. Probably because of Nell.

Beth had had her to stay in Dublin and it had been a disaster from start to finish. Beth was in baby-mania and everything revolved around her pregnancy and what would come after. Lightning could strike down the houses on either side of her pretty little townhouse and she wouldn’t have cared in the slightest – apart from worrying over whether lightning-blackened bricks were dangerous to her baby.

The moment she arrived at Beth’s, Anneliese knew she’d made a mistake. She felt too raw, too sad to deal with her daughter.

‘You see, the developers thought it would be easier if there weren’t individual gardens,’ Beth sighed as she and her mother looked at the patch of scrub grass outside their home. It had seemed like a good idea when they had bought it, a couple of years before.

‘It’s not suitable now, of course,’ Beth added. ‘We need a back garden for the baby, even if it’s only a sliver of grass, just so we can be outside. It will be such a pain to have to sell the place, you know, keeping it tidy every evening for viewings and everything.’

‘I know, it’s annoying, isn’t it,’ said Anneliese automatically.

She had been responding to a lot of her daughter’s statements like that. Since Beth had picked her up from the train station there had been a constant monologue about all the difficulties involved in the new baby. The house was wrong, for a start. There were only two bedrooms and they really needed three, for people like Anneliese who would be coming to stay with them when the baby was born. Every time her daughter mentioned this in such a blasé way, Anneliese prayed that by the time her grandchild was born, she’d have recovered some of her energy and enthusiasm for life. As it stood, she couldn’t imagine taking care of a baby. Babies needed kindness and love, and Anneliese felt like a big slab of ice.

Beth’s car would have to go: three doors were no good for getting a baby in and out of the back. Work was a problem too. Beth was a chartered accountant and it wasn’t the sort of job you could do on a part-time basis, not in her company anyway.

Try as she might, Anneliese couldn’t summon up any enthusiasm for Beth’s worries. It was odd. All Beth’s life, Anneliese had been consumed with interest in her, no detail was too small. From her anxiety as a small child over having a book to read for Book Day, to various worries over how she had done in her accountancy exams. But now, all of a sudden, Anneliese felt so distant from her daughter.

It wasn’t Beth’s fault: it was her. Edward leaving had suddenly sheared their family into three different compartments. It was as if, in making Anneliese redundant as a wife, he had somehow made her redundant as a mother as well.

The depression added to it all too. Anneliese hated this feeling of distance from her beloved Beth and damn it, she hated Edward for having done this to her.

‘Are you OK, Mum?’ said Beth, as they got inside the house.

She hadn’t asked this question yet, although Anneliese knew it was coming. She knew it as soon as she set eyes on Beth and realised her daughter had noticed how tired and drawn she looked, and how she hadn’t dressed up the way she might normally, if she was going to visit her daughter in Dublin.

For a moment, she was about to launch into her standard:
No, I’m fine, really
, speech – the way the old Anneliese would have done. And then, she changed her mind.

‘No, Beth,’ she said. ‘I’m not fine, I’m not OK. I’m heartbroken.’

‘I wish I could do something,’ Beth said sadly. ‘I don’t think I’m much help to you, Mum, I’m sorry.’

‘You’re a great help,’ Anneliese said passionately. ‘But there is nothing you can do. There’s nothing anyone can do. I just have to get through it.’

‘But if Dad came to his senses and came home, it would all be OK again, wouldn’t it?’

She was like a child, Anneliese thought wistfully. A child hoping that Mummy and Daddy could get back together and everything would be the same as it ever had been.

‘It’s not that easy,’ she said. ‘Even if he turned around and came home now, I couldn’t have him back. It wouldn’t be the same. He’s broken my trust and it’s a very fragile thing, you know.’

‘He’s sorry, though. I know he is,’ Beth insisted.

‘Did he say that to you?’ Anneliese asked.

‘Well, not in so many words.’

‘Not in
any
words, you mean,’ said Anneliese. ‘This isn’t something that can be easily fixed, Beth. It’s over. We’ll just have to put up with it. I’m finding it hard to deal with it, but that’s my battle, not yours. Now, can we talk about something else?’

‘Sure.’ Beth looked mildly shocked, but said nothing more on the subject as she showed Anneliese to the spare bedroom and began to outline the plans she’d made for the two days that Anneliese was going to stay in Dublin.

Sitting at Lily’s bedside, watching her disappear, the idea of going to Beth’s had seemed like a good one.

Now that she was here, with lots of outings arranged to cheer her up, she felt even more miserable than ever. At least in her own home she could be miserable if she felt like it. Here she’d be forced to smile and put a brave face on things.

She’d endured the trip, and on her return home, she’d slipped back into her quiet life, working at the Lifeboat Shop twice a week and working with Stephen in the garden centre on Saturdays and Sundays.

September was always an interesting time in the garden centre. The crazy summer rush of people realising that their back gardens were neglected was over. Everyone had bought
the sand pits and paddling pools and potted shrubs to brighten up the gardens. September was a new beginning, school time.

It was time for battening down the hatches and tidying up after the summer. It was also the time to plant bulbs for Christmas. For years, Anneliese had planted vast quantities for the Christmas market, and then last year she hadn’t done it at all. She’d spent all yesterday sitting out behind the big greenhouse with bags of compost and peat beside her, along with giant bags of hyacinths arranged by colour. There was something comfortingly familiar and monotonous about lining the pretty pots with crocks and then filling up with peat and soil and compost and planting the bulbs carefully. White hyacinths were her favourite. There was something about the combination of the pale subtle green and those strongly scented tiny white flowers that she loved. At home, she used to pot up two blue china bowls with bulbs and they’d always bloomed in time for Christmas. They were part of her Christmas decorations. She hadn’t bothered doing any this year.

Her bones ached and she moved off the scrub grass, getting to her feet to walk the stiffness out.

Walking on sand was supposed to be springy, but she’d never felt that. Perhaps she’d seen too many bad films when she was young where quicksand lured people in so that they sank into it, drowning in sand instead of water. To her, sand was not as benign as everyone thought.

Gazing out at the harbour from the dune, she thought of the poor whale. The marine-expert guy who’d tried to save her was still in Dolphin Cottage. Anneliese avoided him whenever she saw him walking that bedraggled big black dog of his. He’d done his best for the whale, though.

It was sad to see such a beautiful sea creature die simply because her sonar had become messed up and she couldn’t find her way out to sea again. Like me, Anneliese reflected. My
sonar was Edward and Beth and now they’ve gone and I have nothing. No safety, no security, no reason to be.

Did the whale drown? she wondered. Drowning was supposed to be quite comforting once you let yourself go – but how did anyone know that? Surely, if you’d actually drowned, you couldn’t tell anyone.

Anneliese felt the texture of the sand beneath her feet change. She looked down and realised she’d moved further down the beach and was now walking in sand drenched in seawater. The waves were out but suddenly a large wave swept in. She didn’t move, just let the seawater surge over her shoes. It felt interesting not to step back, the way she would normally. The salt water slowly drenched her feet in their light runners.

It was a cold, grey day after a week of glorious September sun, yet weirdly the cold wasn’t shocking. Instead, it was almost soothing, the soothing of nature’s logic. You stood in seawater and it was cold, like a mathematical equation, x + y = z and always would. Nothing else in life worked out so logically or mathematically.

Just to see how it felt, Anneliese walked a little further out. The seawater lapped around her ankles now, on the bare skin under her jeans. She could feel goose pimples on her legs, and it still felt strangely all right.

The sea was the same as it had always been: vast and somehow not frightening any more. It was the rest of the world that was frightening. With the natural world, you got what you expected. It was so-called civilisation that threw curve balls at you.

Anneliese stopped and let her mind flow around her the way the water was flowing around her ankles.

Would the sea embrace her? Would the cold numb her, so that she no longer felt anything, and just begin to float? Yes, that’s what it would do, what she’d do. People were animals, just organic matter, after all, so what could be more normal
than going slowly into something else organic, being consumed by the planet? It would be like the whale dying slowly in the harbour. It made perfect sense.

People would be sad when they heard. Death was sad. But they’d get over it. They had other things in their lives, other people.

Beth had the baby. Anneliese tried to stop herself thinking about the baby, her grandchild. The baby was part of a future life and she didn’t want to think about it. There was no place for her in that future, no place at all. She’d given everything she had to everyone else and now she was done, finished.