Authors: Liz Nugent
Downstairs, I stopped short at the kitchen window and noted that the pond had been drained and filled with soil. The silence ate into my bones and I went to the piano and played and played until I heard Daddy’s footsteps in the hall.
I ran full pelt at him and grabbed him around his waist, pushing my head into his upper stomach, trying to reach his heart. At first, he held his hands outwards, not wishing to touch me, but I would not release him and then I felt the warmth of his large hand on my skull and his other hand slowly enveloped my shoulder. He pulled my face upwards and looked into my eyes. ‘We must start again, you and I. We are all we have.’
It was easier not to talk about Diana after that, though she smiled at us from the framed photographs on the mantelpiece.
A new home tutor was appointed and Daddy chose all the subjects that I should study: Latin, music, art, literature, sewing and such like. I worked very hard and excelled at everything. Daddy said my posture needed attention and a ballet instructor was brought to the house, a tiny French
woman. We had plenty of space, so a barre was installed upstairs, and there, in the newly named dance room, I jetéed and pliéed and walked en pointe until my toes bled. I loved Madame Guillem. She treated me like her own child, although she never mentioned whether she had children. She took me under her wing and explained everything when my body began to change. She told me that I should be mixing with girls my own age, but I didn’t want to. Madame Guillem told Daddy that I was the best student she had ever taught. When I was sixteen years old, she suggested that I apply to the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School in London. I was horrified and terrified at the thought of being sent away again. Daddy thought it would be a good idea, but by then I had begun to notice the way he sometimes looked at Madame Guillem, and I didn’t like it. One day, I saw him help her to put her coat on and he held on to her arm the way he used to with Mummy. She smiled up into his face. Was she planning to get me out of the way? I have learned that you can never trust anyone. I gave up eating until the idea of ballet school was abandoned and Madame Guillem had been dismissed. I still practised to stay toned and supple. There was a mirrored wall behind the barre upstairs, and I liked to think that the girl in the mirror was Diana and that this time we were identical twins, dancing a duet.
Many years later, when I met Andrew and he enquired about the girl sitting beside me in the old photographs, Daddy explained that my sister Diana had drowned tragically when we were children, and abruptly changed the subject. When Andrew and I became more intimate, he questioned me about the incident and I lied and said it had happened on a day at the beach. He hugged me tightly to console me on my loss.
I became pregnant with Laurence over three years after our marriage. Andrew and I were so happy when I finally conceived, and Daddy opened a bottle of vintage wine to celebrate the news when I told him.
‘About time,’ he said.
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, having no sister or mother to advise me. My sister-in-law, Rosie, the queen of fecundity, descended upon me with advice and booklets and potions and lotions, but I preferred to work things out for myself. The pregnancy was uncomfortable and exhausting, and childbirth was excruciating, but when the midwife placed my newborn child at my breast, I felt complete for the first time since Diana’s death. Laurence being born on Christmas Day was fate intervening. My most treasured gift. I adored my little boy. He was mine. Andrew left us to our own devices, certainly for the first few months, but I wept when he was ten months old and Andrew insisted that we move the cot into the bedroom next door to us, which had been carefully prepared as a nursery. ‘We must have our own room back.’ Daddy agreed with Andrew, and the matter ended there.
In the summer time, I would bring Laurence’s pram outside. It soothed him when he was teething to be outdoors. He would stop crying then. I would lie on a rug on the lawn beside the pram and listen to his soft gurgling, feeling like I didn’t deserve such happiness.
When Laurence was nearly a year old, Daddy died, on the same day as John F. Kennedy. He had been sick with cancer for many months. Still, Daddy’s death shocked me as much as the American president’s. Andrew was of course sympathetic, but I had lost Mummy, Diana and Daddy, and now I clung to Laurence, the only one left of my blood.
I wanted to home-school Laurence, but Andrew put his
foot down again, arguing that our son needed to be socialized. I kept him home as long as I could, so that when Laurence did eventually start school, he was one of the oldest boys in his class. That first week, I stayed outside the school every day, trying to spot him through the classroom window. Other mothers tried to inveigle me into conversation when the school bell rang, but I didn’t want to talk to anybody except my cherub. I swooped him up into my arms and carried him all the way home.
Gradually, Laurence began to talk about other children and his teachers, and I felt the first pangs of jealousy. As he grew into an independent little boy, I got used to it, but the deep bond we had shared was fading. Shortly after his seventh birthday, Laurence refused to sit in my lap any more, encouraged by Andrew. ‘You are far too attached to that boy. Let him off.’ We had been trying for another baby. I told Andrew that I wanted to have five children. He baulked at five but thought a sibling or two would be good for Laurence. We tried, and failed, and failed, and failed, and continued to fail. Laurence was to be my only child.
Forty years after Diana’s death, I echoed my father’s words to my son. ‘We must start again, you and I. We are all we have.’ The poor boy has had so much to deal with, and he has handled it all with such consideration and discretion. And he has done it all for me.
The months following my confinement after Andrew’s death were strange times. I let Laurence take charge of everything. It took quite some time for me to realize that we had no money. Laurence went to deal with the bank manager and the solicitors. I wasn’t able for it. The news was grim. Andrew had at some stage mortgaged Avalon to make investments
with Paddy Carey. Although thankfully Andrew’s death meant that the mortgage was redeemed, there really was very little left over. Carey had told Andrew that he was investing his money in a gilt-edged fund, but it turned out that he had been siphoning it off into his own pet projects, hoping in vain for a hit to cover his losses. Because Andrew had been a judge for only three years, his state pension was small, and the portion of it that I was entitled to as his widow was even smaller. The payments that Andrew had made into a private pension plan and life insurance over twenty years had been gambled away by Paddy Carey. There was a delay with Andrew’s will going through probate, because Andrew had been in the process of suing Carey when he died. The solicitor had told Laurence that suing Carey would be a futile exercise. He’d tried to persuade Andrew not to bother. Carey himself had gambled with the stolen money and was now rumoured to be destitute somewhere on the west coast of America.
I really couldn’t process all this information at the time. My medication dosage was quite high. I told Laurence that he would have to ask Andrew’s mother, Eleanor, for money. She would have to keep us. But when he approached her, she almost went into shock because it turned out that Andrew had been supporting her for the previous years also. He had persuaded her to sell her three-storey four-bedroom Victorian redbrick on the Merrion Road and buy a cottage in Killiney. Andrew had promised her he was making good investments on her behalf. She had no idea that he had lost it all. At the time, he had told me that his mother was getting too old to manage a big house, and at the back of my mind I had thought that our money worries would be over when Eleanor died, because she had to be sitting on a large pile of cash. At the beginning of our financial woes, I had urged Andrew to go to Eleanor and borrow from her. I had thought
he was too proud. In fact, he knew she had nothing except her cottage because he had gambled it all. All Eleanor now had was her pension. Finn and Rosie sent us a few cheques, but they reminded us (as if they needed to) that they had eight children to feed and that we must find a way to support ourselves. They got together with Eleanor to suggest that she might sell her cottage and move in with us. We have six bedrooms and so couldn’t argue that we didn’t have the room, but I made it clear that I would not countenance the idea. Eleanor took umbrage. Finn advised Laurence that we must sell Avalon immediately to free up the equity, but we couldn’t do that: first, because it is the only home I have ever known, and second, because we could never take the risk of the new owners discovering what is buried beyond the kitchen window.
When Laurence eventually told me what he had discovered, I was astonished that he had put everything together in his head and come up with some correct answers. He knew the remains were Annie Doyle’s. He even showed me the tarnished bracelet he had pulled from the hoover bag and all the newspaper reports he had kept. The poor boy had worried himself to shreds over it. Laurence held his father entirely responsible but insisted that we should go to the guards, so that the girl’s family would finally have peace. He never suspected that I knew anything about it. He was so anxious telling me, he thought that the news would send me back to the psychiatric hospital. But I was a year out of it by then, and my wits had returned sufficiently. I feigned shock, horror and disbelief. I screamed and cried and grew hysterical. Fortunately, Laurence came to the conclusion that I would not be able for a scandal and the media attention that would follow. I suggested that he could move the body and
leave it somewhere it could be discovered, but he convinced me that the horror of the job was too much for him and the risk of being caught too great. In fact, by then I liked having the girl in the pond – Diana had been buried in a plot in Deansgrange Cemetery, but I liked to imagine that she was right here in the old pond where I’d left her.
Eventually, at my request, Laurence paved over the flower bed and cemented the old bird bath on top of it. He planted a few shrubs around the edge of the raised platform. It still looked odd, like a sacrificial altar. Laurence averted his eyes from the kitchen window at all times. After a while, he installed a blind and kept it closed. The kitchen was gloomy now. We made more use of the dining room, which previously had only been used on special occasions. Laurence insisted that we sell Andrew’s car. We got a shockingly low price for it and bought a small tin-can run-around. I taught Laurence to drive. He was a quick learner.
Before Andrew’s death, the plan had always been that Laurence would study Law at Trinity College and then be apprenticed to Hyland & Goldblatt, the law firm that Daddy had founded in 1928 with Sam Goldblatt. Andrew worked there until he was appointed to the bench, but now most of Daddy’s and Andrew’s friends were either long since dead or had moved on and started their own practices. Besides, even if we could have availed of a student grant for Laurence, we would still have had no income.
Laurence took civil service exams after the Leaving Certificate. I had hoped that he might be recruited for the diplomatic corps, but it seemed that was impossible without a university education. He was given a choice of the motor tax office or an unemployment benefit office. I thought that the motor tax office might have more prospects, that
perhaps they might train him as a tax accountant, but he did some investigation and found that would not be the case. I was horrified at the thought of his mixing with unemployed people, but he pointed out that
we
were both unemployed people.
‘Women go to work now too, you know, Mum.’ The notion of me getting a job was of course preposterous. I was trained for nothing and I have never mixed with outsiders. It was too late for me.
We survived on my widow’s pension and Laurence’s meagre wages, but as he was one of few men in his department, he was promoted quickly and steadily. Within four years he was in management, supervising a group of four or five. He made friends easily, and socialized after work on Fridays. I wondered at his ability to socialize. I never had it – not after the accident, anyway, but perhaps that is because I was home-schooled thereafter. I knew that Laurence did not enjoy his last schooldays, but that was all tied up with a sudden move to a new school, his father’s death, exam pressure and discovering the body of that girl. He certainly retreated into his shell after that. Thankfully, that put paid to his relationship with the awful Helen girl. I knew Laurence would never commit to a girl like that, so when they split up I was relieved, although disturbed to discover that she had broken up with him, after cheating on him with another boy. Bizarrely, they even stayed in touch after that and she still called to the house from time to time. She was training to be a nurse. I was astonished that a girl like that would enter a caring profession, but she boasted about moving out of home and annoyed me by suggesting that Laurence should get a flat. Laurence did not want to move out, nor could he afford to keep two households, so thankfully it was out of the question.
Laurence started dating a girl from work, a quiet nervous mousy thing called Bridget. I could tell that she liked him more than he liked her, that the relationship was quite one-sided. She certainly phoned him more than he phoned her, and when I answered the phone, she whispered and said ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ more times than were called for. But he started to exercise and lose weight again, and I wondered if he was really doing it to impress this mouse. He showed me a photograph of her once. She was quite average-looking, and a heavy fringe covered her eyes. I relaxed more after that. He would not leave me for her. Still, I helped him with his diet.
Acquiring or giving birth to another baby was now out of the question. I knew that there was no possibility of it. I had passed fifty. Laurence was an adult now, no doubt about it, but I was secure enough to know that he would not leave me. Laurence knew that I could never manage on my own. He would stay with me here, in Avalon.