There had been no word from Neil for at least a fortnight. With Stephen’s third birthday approaching Sarah had felt torn – knowing, despite what had happened, that he would want to be at the party, and willing him to show up for the children’s sake, but dreading having to face him again.
She’d told Martha and Stephen that he’d got a new job far away. It was the best she could come up with, and they’d seemed to accept it readily enough. Inevitably, though, they also looked for Noreen.
‘Where is she?’ Martha had demanded. Five years old and not yet aware that her father had broken her mother’s heart. ‘Why isn’t she coming?’
‘She had to go away,’ Sarah told them. ‘She won’t be looking after you any more.’ Seeing their faces crumple, she’d felt a dart of pure hatred for Noreen. Had she cared so little about them? Had it all been an act to snare their father? How could she destroy their trust in her, how could she wound them like this?
A few days before Stephen’s party, when Sarah had all but given up on him, Neil had finally phoned.
‘It’s me,’ he’d said – and even though it wasn’t wholly unexpected, the sound of his voice had brought all the hurt rushing back. ‘I’d like to see the children. I’d like to come to the party, if that’s alright. I’m assuming it’s on Saturday.’
Sarah had clenched the receiver, tried to keep her voice from shaking. ‘You have to come alone.’
‘I will
. And, Sarah … we need to talk, to sort things out.’
‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘I’m not ready for that. I don’t want to talk to you. You’re coming for the children, that’s all.’
A brief pause. ‘OK.’
It had been horrible. She hadn’t been able to look at him, had barely been able to acknowledge his presence. He’d given Stephen a far-too-expensive wooden train set, and Martha a pink coat that Sarah had seen immediately would be outgrown in a month. He’d hovered on the edges of the party, ignored by Sarah’s father and Christine, for the best part of an hour.
Sarah had felt his eyes on her as she’d poured lemonade and distributed ice-cream, as she’d stood beside Stephen when he was blowing out the three candles on his gingerbread house. When Neil eventually made his excuses and left, the composure she’d managed to keep up all day had crumbled.
‘Won’t be long,’ she’d said brightly, throwing Christine a look as she’d made her way from the room, weeping upstairs in her sister’s arms, her father holding the fort until she’d felt able to patch herself together again.
The following week a letter had arrived. He’d asked to see the children one day a week, more if Sarah agreed. He’d told her he would meet them alone if that was what she wanted. Noreen’s name hadn’t been mentioned, but the address at the top of the page was hers.
Sarah had waited several days before writing back:
You can have them on Saturday afternoons from two till six. I would prefer if you met them alone, and I would also appreciate if you didn’t bring them to that house. I haven’t told them why you left, just that you had to move for a new job and you don’t know when it will finish. Please don’t contradict this.
How horribly impersonal the words sounded, addressed to the man she’d been married to for so many years. Her first letter to him, she realised with a shock. In all the time they’d been together, they’d never been separated for long enough to warrant a letter.
The following
Saturday he’d arrived promptly at two. At the sound of his car pulling up the children had screamed with delight and rushed outside. Sarah could hardly look in his direction as they’d scrambled in, as she’d buckled them into the two child seats.
‘Have them home by six,’ she’d managed to say, before turning back into the house, a list of jobs lined up for her so she wouldn’t fall to pieces, Christine and the boys due at five to further distract her.
The afternoon had dragged, as long as a century. Halfway through her first job – cleaning the windows – she’d dropped her cloth into its bucket and gone inside to pull the photo albums from the sitting-room bookshelves. She’d sat on the couch flicking through the pages, reliving the years of memories they contained.
Their wedding reception in Uncle John’s hotel, her empire-line dress, so demure and pretty with its high lace neck and long sleeves, her hair coaxed into unfamiliar curls with rollers that had dug into her head the night before.
Neil wearing a grey suit – look how long his hair had been then, and the ridiculous sideburns – his arm around her waist as they stood under a beech tree, her impossibly happy smile, head tilting towards his shoulder.
Her mother in a lemon dress and matching coat, Christine in a loose blue frock that didn’t hide her seven-month pregnancy bump.
Their honeymoon in England, non-stop rain for three of the seven days. York Minster in the rain, Manchester in the rain. In a Blackpool restaurant with an entire lobster on a plate in front of her. Neil holding a bingo card up to the camera, laughing. She couldn’t remember how much he’d won.
Their first Christmas as man and wife, Sarah’s parents – her mother’s last Christmas – and Neil’s mother gathered around the dinner table, coloured tissue-paper hats pulled onto their heads, plates of plum pudding in front of them.
The weekend in Paris they’d treated themselves to for their first anniversary, Sarah standing in a lime green beret on the steps of Notre Dame, and sitting on a stool in Montmartre, giggling as someone drew the caricature they’d left behind them in the hotel.
Her thirtieth
birthday party, her father and Christine beside the cake with glasses in their hands, Christine pregnant for the second time, two-year-old Aidan perched on his grandfather’s lap.
Neil in shorts and T-shirt on a beach somewhere – Wexford? Cork? – the blue jumper she’d knitted him slung over his shoulders, his hair cocking up in wet points.
Martha, almost two albums full of her first few months. In Sarah’s arms, in Neil’s arms, in everyone’s arms. Happy, happy days, a child for them at last.
More happy days, her abdomen swelling with Stephen, Neil with a protective arm around her as they’d posed on the main street of Naas a month or so before she was due – shopping for a bag, as far as she could remember, that she could bring to the hospital, and probably some decent underwear too.
And then Stephen’s arrival, a few moments after his birth, her exhausted, ecstatic, tear-blurred face as she’d cradled him, Neil looking on, shell-shocked.
There were no photos of her fortieth party: they’d all been burnt before they’d made it into an album, along with any others of Noreen. Sarah and Christine had done it one evening, about a fortnight after Neil’s departure, when Sarah had still been a wreck.
When Christine and the boys arrived, it was an effort to pull herself out of the past, to put on the kettle and produce the biscuits she’d made with the children for their cousins that morning.
‘You OK?’ Christine had asked, her voice slipping under her sons’ chatter.
‘Just a bit melancholy, that’s all, looking at old snaps.’
Christine had squeezed her hand. ‘You still have plenty of happy memories with the kids, and plenty more to make. Don’t forget that.’
At six
o’clock, as she and Christine had sat on the garden seat wrapped in blankets and watching the boys kicking a ball around, the doorbell had rung.
Christine had got to her feet. ‘I’ll go.’
Sarah had let her, grateful that she didn’t have to face him. She’d listened but couldn’t hear how her sister greeted her brother-in-law – or maybe there’d been no greeting, just a stiff nod or a glare as she’d ushered in the children.
Inevitably, they’d wanted to see more of Neil, so Sarah had reluctantly agreed to an overnight visit every second weekend, although the thought of them spending any time under Noreen’s roof, the idea of their old childminder having any role in the family unit, turned her stomach.
‘How do you propose explaining the fact that you’re living with her?’ she’d asked Neil, still unable to mention the other woman’s name.
‘I’ll just tell them I’m staying for a while,’ he’d replied. ‘It’ll help that they already know her.’
The words had sliced into Sarah as deeply as a blade. The youth and innocence of Martha and Stephen would allow them to accept the situation now, but when would they need the truth spelt out, and what would the discovery of it do to them?
She’d face that when she had to. For now, there was a more immediate problem, and the thought of solving it brought little pleasure.
Without Neil or Noreen she had no regular access to a car, and since the house wasn’t on a bus route it meant that for the past several months her father had been setting his alarm in the mornings so he could bring Martha to school, a journey of just two miles from Sarah’s house, but a round trip of almost fifteen for him.
‘I really don’t mind,’ he told her, whenever she brought it up. ‘It’s something for me to do.’ But she couldn’t expect him to keep doing it indefinitely, and with the children getting older, it was inevitable that there would be more demands on a driver. They couldn’t be dependent on him all the time: it wasn’t fair.
She would
have to learn to drive, even if the thought brought her out in goose pimples. She suspected she’d be useless at it, far too nervous to be safe, but she had no choice. When the weather improved and the days got longer, she’d find a driving school, take some lessons and hope that she didn’t kill anyone.
She left the hall and returned to the kitchen. The aroma of baking buns wafted to meet her when she opened the door. She stood on the threshold, taking in her daughter as she flicked through the pages in the cookery book, her son as he played with his train set.
She thought back to the years when she’d imagined just such a scene, when it had seemed as if it would be denied to her forever. Now it was here, and she was looking at it through such different eyes.
But she had a lot to be thankful for. She had two healthy children, family support and a job she loved. She would appreciate it all, and not look back. And if she felt desperately lonely sometimes, that was only to be expected, and would have to be endured.
‘W
ell,’ Helen
said, looking around, ‘this is nice.’
It was horrendous. Exposed silver pipework – was that supposed to be trendy? – running along the orange walls that clashed with the drab mustard units in the tiny kitchenette. A dark green Venetian blind on the little window above the sink, a brown Formica-topped counter that separated the area from the rest of the room. Plenty of colours, none of which looked remotely comfortable together.
She glanced down at the navy carpet, eyed its suspicious dark splotches – how long since it had been put down? Probably just as well it was navy. And no dining table or chairs: they must eat all their meals standing at the counter, or sitting on the couch. A bright purple blanket thrown over it, hideous against the orange walls, and hiding God alone knew what.
And everything was open plan, an entire living space for two people in one not particularly big room, with no effort made to hide the ancient-looking double bed pushed against the opposite wall. She tried not to think about how many had slept in it, or not slept, before Alice and Jackie had got to use it.
There was a smell too, an underlying thick odour that brought to mind boiling cabbage and wet socks. She longed to fling open the long, narrow window, despite the ice-cold biting wind that had met her at the airport. Wales in April was even colder than Ireland, which was saying something – and this horrible little space felt no warmer than the street outside.
But none
of that mattered. None of it made her regret her decision to come. As soon as she’d read Alice’s invitation, which had arrived out of the blue a fortnight earlier, she’d realised she’d been waiting for it. Hoping for it.
We thought you might like to come and see the flat
, Alice had written,
if you feel well enough to travel. You could check out Cardiff, stay a couple of nights. We’d have to book you in to a B&B, we’ve no spare room, but there are plenty of cheap ones nearby.
And Helen, who was becoming mightily fed up with convalescence, had thought, Why not? And here she was, fresh off the airport bus – which had dropped them, thankfully, less than five minutes’ walk away.
‘Have a seat,’ Alice said, pushing buttons on a gas heater that looked at least as old as herself. ‘I’ll put the kettle on for coffee.’
‘Actually –’ Helen unzipped her case and lifted out a bottle of whiskey ‘– I might have a drop of this instead, but do boil the kettle because I think I’d like it hot.’ Maybe one or two toddies would thaw her out, stop her gut clenching with the cold, take the numbness from her toes.
Alice looked at her. ‘Are you OK? You’re very pale.’
‘Just a bit chilly, I’ll be fine once I warm up.’
‘Go and stand by the fire – it’s actually quite good once it gets going.’ Alice filled the kettle and plugged it in. ‘I hope this trip wasn’t too soon – after you being sick, I mean.’
‘It was months ago. I’m well over it.’
It was five months ago, and she wasn’t completely over it. Her chest still hurt slightly when she breathed. ‘It’ll take a while,’ the doctor had told her, ‘before you feel back to full strength. Just take it easy, let others do the running around for you.’ So she’d scaled back on the writing, doing just enough to remind people that she was still out there.
To her slight alarm, her mother had taken to visiting every few days, bringing fruit and wedges of quiche and slivers of smoked salmon, and insisting that Helen not call to see her until the weather softened. And of course Frank had been in his element, keeping her supplied with chicken soup and oranges, fussing over her as much as he was allowed to.
Christmas
had been interesting, for two reasons. It was their first without her father, and it was Frank’s introduction to her family. Amazing that he and her mother hadn’t already met, particularly during Helen’s week in hospital, with both of them visiting daily – they’d missed each other by minutes once – and in the immediate aftermath, when Frank had been a frequent caller, watching Helen like a hawk to see if she showed signs of getting sick again.