OUT OF THE BLUE a gripping novel of love lost and found (6 page)

Liv had spent a good deal of the holiday encouraging him into the sea, reassuring him that the shallow coast was perfectly safe. At the end of the fortnight, he was happy to doggy-paddle as long as the tips of his toes touched the bottom and she stayed near him. Watching him, she had enjoyed feeling nurturing, protective but later, when she reached the lowest ebbs in the marriage, she resented being trapped in the role of mother. I’m a mother with no children, she would reflect as she made excuses for him, forgave him, and waited up for him, cleared up the trail of debris he caused.

She had never been able to warm to his mother, a brisk, excruciatingly thin woman who regarded Liv as a downmarket addition to the family. ‘Haven’t heard from you for a while, since you blew in with that dreary bird,’ she’d written to her son after their first visit, which had been an endless, chilly spring weekend of croquet, mysterious horsy business and tasteless meals eaten in a freezing dining-room. The days and nights had been filled with the yapping and scrabbling of dogs that Liv feared. She had been glad that Douglas rarely visited his parents, preferring to keep his distance. They visited now once a year, at Easter and she thought of it as her duty, similar to the doctrinal laws she had obeyed in her childhood when communion and Mass had to be attended.

Bending, she picks up a handful of rough grass and soil, crumbling it in her fingers. This, she thinks, is what I want: simple days and nights. Today I’ll clean the house and poke about in the garden, see if there are any vegetables I can use, pick blackberries. I might see if they do an evening meal in Crowley’s. I’ll make cocoa and go early to bed and wake early. I’ll plan each day as it comes. No waiting for a key in the door and a smell on his breath, no half-truths and evasions and lies, no watching him push food round on his plate and missing his mouth, no having to look at the sheer heart-stopping stupidity of the smile on his lips.

She lifts her face to the breeze and lets her unhappiness lie quiet, like a calmed baby who will grow fractious again when it wakes to the difficult business of living.

Chapter 4

She’s itching and blinking from dust, in need of a bath. She has spent the day cleaning the cottage from top to bottom, dusting, sweeping with the heavy brush, scrubbing floors. She has washed all the kitchen crockery, cleaned the windows, cleared out the fire place and rinsed the curtains. She explored the shelves beside her grandmother’s bed/settee, sniffing the bottles and tubes of medications for rheumatism. They smelled of camphor, menthol and pungent eucalyptus. The eiderdown on the settee is impregnated with the same sharp scents and she imagines that Nanna must have rubbed them into her limbs before sleeping.

Carefully, she wipes off the books in the back bedroom and examines the yellowing pages. On each flyleaf are the initials O.F. The copy of
Bleak House
has a flattened Sweet Afton cigarette pack as a bookmark. Her grandmother had never liked cigarettes, or the devil’s weed, as she’d called them. That was why Liv’s mother had always smoked standing at the open door, or out in the glen.

It’s a long time since she’s done so much hard physical work; she and Douglas have a cleaner who visits once a week and sees to all the chores, including the ironing. She is grimy, aching, and happy. She lights a fire, cranks the big cast-iron pot from the back to the middle of the hearth and fills it with water, placing the tin bath ready in the centre of the kitchen. While she waits for the water to heat, she pours a glass of wine from the bottle she’s kept chilling in the well. It’s delicious, all the more so, she thinks, for being well earned. She relishes the taste, the relief of being able to open a bottle without having to worry that it will be an overwhelming lure, without having to hide it at the back of a cupboard or behind a bookcase.

Her father cleared most of Nanna’s personal papers after her funeral. In the dresser drawer Liv has found a small photo album. She sits by the fire with her wine and turns the pages, looking at black and white images of people she doesn’t know. There are various groups, the women in dark clothes, the men in suits. A nun is at the front of some of the groups, waving at the camera cheekily.

There is one photo of Liv and her grandmother holding hands, taken by the well; Liv aged about five in a ruched summer dress, Nanna garbed in her usual black, a tall woman with a full bosom, straight shoulders and capable hands. Around her grandmother’s head is one of the scarves she always wore, wrapped bandanastyle, framing her high forehead. Every Christmas, Liv’s father would buy one in Debenhams on the high street and post it in a padded envelope. It was always the same style, silk and in her preferred colours of blue or cream with a rose print. The bandana lent her an exotic air of a hippy or woman from the east who had wandered into the glen. Liv couldn’t recall ever seeing her without it, even at bedtime. She is sure that her grandmother slept in it. She holds the photo closer, scrutinising it. Both she and her grandmother look solemn, squinting in the sunlight. She has only distant, fleeting memories of the visits; hot potatoes bursting on a plate, milk cans wedged in the well, a sudden shudder of fear as a bull’s head loomed through a hedge, steam coiling from fresh cowpats, collecting eggs still warm from the hens for breakfast, her grandmother singing as she fed Susannah and chanting a rhyme as she helped Liv undress at night in front of the fire.

Dan, Dan, the dirty old man, washed his face in a frying pan,

Combed his hair with the leg of a chair

And threw his britches up in the air!

Her grandmother’s hands were rough from work, but warm, and when Liv was washed and in her nightdress, Nanna would hold her face and plant a kiss in the middle of her forehead, saying, ‘Now, Alannah, it’s time to sleep the sleep of the just.’ She touches her grandmother’s face with her finger. I hardly knew you, she thinks, I was always too busy to come and see you and yet you left me your house, this refuge.

When the water is bubbling she transfers it by saucepan to the bath, a laborious process that takes a good ten minutes, topping it up with cold. No wonder she’d never seen her grandmother bathing. She lies in the tub with the pink radio on a chair beside her, listening to an Irish station. There is a discussion about the phenomenon of returning emigrants coming back to a country they’d left a long time ago. ‘It’s history revolving,’ a Professor Coughlan is saying. ‘Life is, if you like, a carousel and what goes around comes around; every nation has its time, when it takes a step forward on the world stage.’ She imagines an Irish dancer, one of those girls she used to see attending the Maura O’Dwyer academy on Saturday mornings, stepping forward from behind a curtain and commencing a jig. She supposes that’s what she is in a way, a second-generation returnee. She’d asked her father if he wanted Glenkeen and he’d shaken his head vigorously. ‘I’m too long away,’ he’d said, ‘there’s been too much water under the bridge, I wouldn’t want to be going back. And anyway, Barbara can’t be travelling these days, she gets too tired. Your grandmother wanted you to have it; it’s a gift of love. You could make something of it, you can do whatever you want, and it could just be an escape hatch.’

She’d looked at him then, wondering how much he knew, what he might have told Nanna in the letters they exchanged but he had busied himself with the washing-up.

She lowers her shoulders beneath the hot water. Sheer bliss. When she uses the soap, it creates a riot of soft lather. The day’s activity had driven away thoughts, but the usual regrets and anxieties surface as soon as light starts draining from the sky and evening steals in. She has read that babies and old people often grow restless and disturbed as dusk approaches. Douglas has told her that there is a name for it in older people with memory problems — sundowner syndrome. It is the time when all the frettings of life’s ragged edges encroach, the shadows of loss and longings, the whisper of things left undone. In his surgery, he briefs worried relatives who describe their elderly parents pacing the house, inconsolable, twisting their hands with worry, then passes them to the specialist nurse in the memory clinic. It seems to Liv that they suffer from a surfeit of memory rather than a lack of it, that they know only too well how the demons of the dark have their snares coiled at the ready.

This is the time of day when she recalls the disastrous milestones of her marriage such as the January evening Douglas phoned from the police station to tell her that he’d crashed the car. She was already worried at his lateness, glancing at the clock, getting up from watching the TV to peer through the curtains at the fierce, icy night. The weather forecast had advised motorists to stay off the roads unless their journey was absolutely necessary.
Pride and Prejudice
was on, but she couldn’t concentrate on Olivier’s Mr Darcy and when the phone rang, she knew that it would be bad news. Douglas had sounded tinny, thin voiced. She felt as frozen as the glacial air outside as he told her he’d been breathalysed and photographed. A police car had dropped him home and he had stumbled through the door, glazed still with drink, a clotted cut over his right eye and blood on his shirt collar. Bathing the eye with warm water and antiseptic, she had turned her face from his fume-laden breath. He was trembling, his skin warm and yeasty. There was mud on his trousers and coat sleeves and the hem of his coat was ripped. He looked and smelled like one of the street people who hung around outside the tube, mumbling their pleas for money. She gathered that he had driven into someone; both cars had been written off but miraculously, the other driver had also sustained only cuts. ‘He must’ve been over the speed limit too, don’t see why I get to take the rap,’ Douglas had grumbled. Patting his brow with cotton wool, she had wanted to shake him, to hit him and return the violence he was visiting on her, on their lives.

‘This can’t go on, I’m not going to be your nurse when your liver packs in,’ she’d told him the next morning, her voice snaked with bitterness.

But of course it had gone on, the dreary litany of ‘just another glass, I can give up tomorrow if I want, it’s just a question of determination’; the weekend health farm bookings for detox; the purchase of cases of spring water and mounds of grapefruit and oranges; the steady hum of the fruit juicer; the diets involving raw vegetables and pineapple; the use of medications that induced vomiting; the days when he looked paler, more frail than some of the patients who crossed his waiting-room. She had witnessed the good intentions, set up like the pins in the bowling alley, ready to be knocked down by the next seductive, brimming glass.

She wrings out the hot flannel and drapes it over her face, hiding from the demons under the steaming veil. She dozes briefly, while the radio drones and the fire sparks and murmurs.

Her phone rings and she starts, slopping water over the side of the tub. She switches the radio off with a dripping hand and reaches for it.

‘You get a signal OK then, down in the glen — or is it on or up in the glen?’ Douglas says after a pause. He is speaking slowly and carefully. Familiar fingers pinch at her heart.

‘Yes, no problem with a signal. How are you?’

‘Oh . . . OK. Going to have something to eat in a min. I miss you.’

‘I miss you too,’ she says, a half-truth. ‘I’ve been really busy, cleaning mainly. I was just having a bath.’

‘How d’you do that?’

‘With a tin tub and a lot of difficulty. Four star it isn’t.’

‘Well, you wanted to go.’

‘Yes, I did. I wasn’t complaining.’ She stares at her white legs beneath the water.

‘You settled in, then?’

‘I’ve made a start. Everything takes a long time; fetching and boiling water, cooking over the fire. It slows you down. It’s good.’

‘Sounds amazing . . . oops, sorry, phone slipped.’

‘It’s early yet for you to be drunk, you must have left the surgery in good time.’

‘Hmm, not too busy today, just the average arthritic hip or two.’ He clears his throat. She hears an intake of breath, can picture him trying to focus. ‘Listen, I’ve rung AA, going for my first visit tomorrow night.’ He has put on his wheedling voice.

‘That’s good, Douglas, it really is.’

‘I’m trying, you know?’ he mumbles.

‘I know.’ She stares into the fire, into the tiger flames. He seems a very long way away. She is glad of that. ‘Let me know how it goes, won’t you?’

There is a fumbling. ‘Sno big deal,’ he says. ‘I just have to get myself there, I can do that. A couple of sessions should see me right, no need for months of torture and self-recrimination. Don’t want to change one habit for another, become one of those teetotal bores.’

She feels the dragging weight of his excuses like a stone around her neck. ‘Yes, of course. Listen, I’m getting a bit chilly now and you need to eat. I’ll ring you later tomorrow night, see how you’ve got on.’

‘OK. See ya later. Love you.’

There is a crackling as he fades. He’ll have bought a takeaway that he will fiddle with, eating a few forkfuls, spilling drifts of chicken tikka on the table as he misses his mouth. Finally he will give up, shoving the plate away and concentrate on his pack of beer or bottles of wine. She misses him, but in the way you would miss a nagging ache that you’d temporarily quietened with painkillers. No, that isn’t even it; she mourns him, she is quietly grieving for the man she met and married, the man he used to be, the one who treasured her before the pale and amber liquids in the dewy glasses enticed him away and replaced her as the love of his life.

She shampoos her hair briskly, digging her fingers into her scalp to stop the scalding tears that spring, leaking from the corners of her eyes, and rinses it with clean cold water from a jug. She has dressed and is contemplating the best way to empty the heavy tub when there is a light knock on the back door. A well-built man with eyebrows like wild hedgerows is standing with his hands in his pockets, whistling.

‘You’d be Liv Callaghan,’ he says.

‘I would, yes.’

‘The freckles are the same. I heard you were over.’ He has on a dark suit, a mustard-coloured knitted waistcoat and a trilby. His white hair is luxurious and wavy and somehow familiar. It is in stark contrast to the ragged dark of his eyebrows.

‘I think I know you but I’m not sure,’ she confesses.

He holds out a hand. ‘I’m Owen Farrell, your great-uncle — Bridget’s — your nanna’s little brother. We haven’t met for years. Last time I saw you, you had your leg propped on a chair and you were putting calamine lotion on your hives. The itching was driving you mental, you were twitching like a cat in a bag.’

She shakes his large hand, the size of a shovel. ‘Come in,’ she says. ‘Are you the man who used to smoke Sweet Afton and are those your books upstairs?’

‘Very probably. Bridget looked after me once when my Achilles tendon went on me. I was a runner back then, ran for the county. Anyway, one day the old Achilles went twang and Bridget said I needed feeding up. I’d try and blow the fag smoke out the window above but I’d say a lot sneaked back in.’ He takes his hat off and scratches his head. ‘What books did I leave?’

‘Dickens, Tolstoy, George Eliot.’

‘They’re the companions to see you through, all right. I used to be able to read for hours but the eyesight’s not so sharp now. The Achilles tendon is in great shape, though.’ He looks around the kitchen. ‘It’s a long time since I was in here. It hasn’t changed a bit. Bridget wasn’t your one for the shock of the new.’

He sounds like Nanna, quiet voiced. He has the same deep set, dreamy eyes and rangy frame and what she thinks of as a countryman’s walk, slow, from the hip. He picks up a brass bell with a stag’s head handle and rings it.