She heard a click.
Hello there
, Alice said brightly.
You’ve reached Alice, I’m sorry I can’t get to the phone right
—
Helen disconnected, and the
line burred softly in her ear. She replaced the receiver and drank steadily until the glass was empty. She set it on the bottom step and walked up to her bedroom, keeping a tight hold on the banister.
M
atron sighed. ‘Sarah, I won’t pretend this is good news. You’ve been invaluable here since you started, you know that – and you’ll certainly be a hard act to follow. But of course you have to do what needs to be done. Your family must come first.’
‘If two days a week doesn’t suit, if it would make it easier for me to give up completely, I’ll understand perfectly.’
‘Actually, two days might work out fine – I think Josie would be glad to do more than just the weekends. Let me talk to her.’
And Josie was spoken to, and said she’d be delighted with three more days each week. And just like that, half of Sarah’s problem was solved.
They’d be fine, even with her reduced income. The cookbook royalties wouldn’t go on forever but Neil’s contribution was generous, and she was slowly warming to Paul’s idea of a picture-book spin-off series.
‘You have a ready-made market – so many children are familiar with Martina and Charlie. That’s half the battle. Give it a go anyway – what have you got to lose?’
Remembering her long-ago failure
as a fiction writer, Sarah had balked at the outset, but as she turned the idea around in her head, she began to have second thoughts. Maybe it was time to try again, maybe writing for children would suit her. If a new series took off, it would be a whole other income.
But whether or not it did, they’d manage – and she would have more time to give to her father.
‘Good news,’ she told him that afternoon. ‘With what I’m still getting from the books I don’t need to work full-time any more so I’m just going to do two days a week.’
‘Oh.’
‘I might start a new book, and I’ll be able to call around here more often to see you, or you can call to us.’
He hadn’t shaved. His chin was covered with grey stubble. She didn’t ever remember him not shaving. He also looked as if he’d lost weight – how had she not noticed that before?
‘What are you having for dinner?’ she asked.
A beat passed. ‘I have stuff in the fridge,’ he said. ‘I’m fine.’
He didn’t look fine. ‘Do you have any of that 3-in-1 oil?’ she asked. ‘Our small gate is squeaking and I can’t find mine.’
When he’d gone out to the shed, she opened the fridge and found the turned remains of a pint of milk, two eggs, an untouched bowl of jelly spotted with mould and a dried-out wedge of Cheddar cheese – and sitting on the bottom shelf was a pair of neatly folded black socks.
She looked through presses and pulled out several half-packets of biscuits that had gone completely soft, three tins of soup and a plastic bag that held half a dozen decomposing tomatoes.
She replaced everything, thinking fast. When he returned, she took the oil she didn’t need and put it into her bag.
‘Why don’t you come back with me for dinner?’ she asked. ‘I’m doing a chicken pie – it just has to be reheated. I’ll drive you home afterwards.’
‘Ah no, I have everything I need here.’
Everything he needed. Two
eggs, or soup that came out of a tin: that was all that was edible in the house. But what could she say without confessing that she’d been rummaging through his kitchen? She could hardly drag him kicking and screaming into the car, or insist that he came to her house every day to be fed.
When she got home, she put the chicken pie into the oven and phoned Christine. ‘We have to do something,’ she said. ‘He can’t live on his own any more. Have you noticed how thin he’s got?’
‘I did think he’d lost weight … Have you said anything to him?’
‘No – he can’t see that there’s anything wrong. I know he’ll refuse to leave the house of his own accord.’
‘What about looking for a home help, someone who’d go in for a few hours, cook him a dinner, tidy up a bit? I’m calling in to see him tomorrow, I could suggest it.’
But Sarah couldn’t imagine him going for that either. He’d been independent for so long, healthy for most of his life. Why would he agree to have some stranger coming to his house every day when he didn’t see any need for one? ‘I’m not sure that’ll work,’ she said. ‘Bring him something he can have for his dinner, enough for two days. Tell him it was left over. Leave the other with me for the moment.’
She remembered how good he’d been to her when Neil had gone to live with Noreen. She remembered how she’d leant on him, how he’d stepped in and kept things from collapsing around her.
She could help him now. All she
had to do was convince him that she needed him again.
H
e looked exactly as she remembered, except that he wasn’t smiling. He wore a leather jacket she hadn’t seen before.
‘I’m sorry for your trouble,’ he told her. ‘She was a nice lady.’ Shaking Helen’s hand like everyone else, nodding at her as if she was no more than a casual acquaintance, not someone he’d asked to marry him six times, and who’d broken his heart in return.
‘Thank you,’ Helen murmured, aware of Alice’s eyes on them. ‘Thank you for coming.’
He moved on, and Helen saw him cupping Alice’s elbow as he shook her hand. It hadn’t crossed her mind that he would show up – but now that he had, she realised that it was completely in character. In the years they’d been together, he’d attended at least a funeral a week, sometimes when he hadn’t even known the deceased.
‘It’s a good customer’s mother,’ he’d tell her. ‘I’d feel bad not paying my respects.’ Or ‘I knew his brother well, we were at school together.’ Or ‘He was a neighbour of my aunt’s – I never met him, but he used to drop the paper into her every day.’
Frank Murphy wasn’t a man
to miss a funeral – so of course he’d show up now to say goodbye to a woman he’d got on well with, even if it meant coming face to face with her daughter who’d spurned him, who’d walked away from him on his wedding day.
She’d been a fool to throw him over, she knew that. She’d had the chance of marrying a genuinely good man who’d have taken care of her and tried to make her happy and loved her till the day he died, and she’d turned her back on it all. And yet, given the opportunity again, she knew she’d do exactly the same. As much a fool at almost fifty-six as she’d been at sixteen.
There was a pitifully small attendance at the funeral. In eighty-seven years Helen’s mother had remained faithful to the few friends she’d made in childhood, most of whom had predeceased her. The mourners this morning were mainly relatives, some of whom Helen hadn’t laid eyes on in years, with a scatter of her mother’s neighbours who introduced themselves whisperingly to Helen as they shook her hand.
She was touched by the idea of someone attending a funeral where the only person known to them was the one who had died. She would never have known the difference if the neighbours had stayed away, and it would never have crossed her mind to attend any of her neighbours’ funerals – apart, she supposed, from Anna, Alice’s old babysitter across the road, who was still very much alive.
She thought briefly of Malone, dying in a nursing home down the country. She wondered if any of his neighbours had seen his name in the paper and realised he was dead. She didn’t read the death columns in her daily paper, would never have realised that Breen’s wife had died if there hadn’t been a separate mention made of it, in deference to the former editor.
Even though the weather had mellowed a little in the past few days, the cemetery, on the crest of a hill, was cold and bleak. Helen stood stiffly, her hands deep in the pockets of her coat, as her mother’s remains were lowered into the same hole that had been dug for Helen’s father eight years earlier.
She felt a hand slip under
her arm and turned to Alice, who was crying quietly as she watched her grandmother’s coffin being lowered. The tip of her nose was pink from the cold, her hair hidden beneath a red knitted beret. She made no attempt to stem her tears, which ran slowly down her face and into the purple scarf that was wrapped several times around her neck. Helen took her hand from her pocket and covered her daughter’s.
The new business was going well, Alice had told her the night before. ‘I’ve taken on a secretary – well, receptionist, secretary and marketing person rolled into one, really – and a graphic artist, just out of college.’ She was still renting the same tiny flat, but the business was run from a separate space in a nearby building, also owned by her landlord. ‘He’s giving me a good deal on both places,’ she’d said. ‘I’m not exactly making tons of money so I can’t afford to give up the waitressing yet. It’s a bit scary, having two people depending on you for their income – but they’re great, and we had three new enquiries last week alone.’
She was also in a new relationship. ‘I met her just after Christmas, through a mutual friend. It’s going well, but it’s early days. She’s a dentist, her name is Lara. She’s Scottish, from Aberdeen.’
She didn’t ask if Helen had met anyone since Frank. After she’d had her say about the wedding that never was, the subject had been dropped and never revisited. Alice was probably hoping that her mother’s love life was well and truly over – and, given that no man had shown the slightest interest in her in well over two years, Helen had to accept that it probably was.
To her relief, Frank hadn’t come to the cemetery. The graveside was attended by the same relatives who’d shown up at the church, and just two of the neighbours: barely a dozen in all. When the short ceremony ended, Helen suggested that they accompany her and Alice to a nearby pub – better get them a drink and a bowl of soup at least – and the small gathering straggled its way down the gravel path towards the gates.
The cemetery, at noon on a
chilly weekday, was mostly deserted. At the sound of the group’s footsteps three small brown birds – thrushes? sparrows? – rose in unison from the skeletal branches of a tree. A young woman in a white fur jacket walked towards them, holding the leash of a little Yorkshire terrier. She didn’t acknowledge the mourners as she passed, her gaze fixed directly ahead; the dog sniffed at the ankles he encountered until she pulled him on.
Further on a lone man in a dark coat stood before one of the gravestones, his head bowed. As they approached he turned slightly to observe them and, catching Helen’s eye, he nodded in recognition, his expression unchanging.
‘I’ll follow you,’ she murmured to Alice. ‘Get a round of drinks and ask what they want to eat. I’ll just be a few minutes.’
She left the path without waiting for a reply and crossed the frosty grass towards him.
‘Hello,’ she said, the tips of her fingers stinging with the cold, making her wish for gloves. ‘How are things?’
He inclined his head. ‘Not bad. Was that someone close to you?’
‘My mother.’
‘I’m sorry.
He’d got a little thinner; his cheekbones stood out a fraction more. His hair was greyer, but his eyes were as piercingly blue as ever. Helen glanced at the headstone in front of him and read, right at the top,
Emily Breen, beloved daughter, 1958–1966.
Beloved daughter, eight when she’d died. She turned back to him. ‘Your child?’
He nodded. ‘Leukaemia.’
A dead child, a ruined marriage. An utterly sad synopsis of a life. She scanned the rest of the headstone and saw
Kathleen Breen, 1931–1995.
‘And your wife,’ she said. ‘I read she’d died. I’m sorry.’
‘Thank you.’
A small silence fell. Helen listened to the fading sound of the mourners’ footsteps. Alice would be wondering who he was.
‘How’ve you been, O’Dowd?’ he asked.
O’Dowd. ‘Fine, same
as ever …’ She looked towards the gates, and saw her group had disappeared. ‘I’d better go.’
‘It was good,’ he said then, ‘seeing you.’
She met his gaze directly, like she always had. Like they always had. ‘You too.’
‘Say hello to Alice.’
She smiled, touched that he’d remembered her name. ‘I will.’
She turned and began to walk away. After a few yards she stopped and looked back. He hadn’t moved.
‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘we could meet up sometime. For coffee, or brandy, or something.’
The ghost of a smile crossed
his face. ‘No law against it,’ he said.
‘I
know it sounds ridiculous, and I hate to ask, but I’ve got nobody else. And it wouldn’t be for long, I’m sure.’
‘It’s not ridiculous at all,’ he replied. ‘It’s natural that you’d be nervous, a woman on your own with three children.’
Three children: her heart dropped. He’d confused her with Christine, that was all. It was easily done.
‘Are you sure you wouldn’t mind? It would mean a lot to me.’
‘Of course I don’t mind. I’m happy to help.’
She felt bad, making up three break-ins in the area. Apart from the fact that she was lying, it was surely tempting Fate – what were the chances that real burglars would show up some night, just to teach her to tell the truth?
But it was working. Her father was packing a bag and moving into the spare room, and he was doing it because she’d asked him to help.
‘You’re a life saver,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you.’
He smiled. ‘That’s what parents are for, love. Happy to help out, you know that.’
‘And you’ll be well fed.’
‘I know I will.’
And I’ll look after
you, she promised him silently. It’s your turn.
‘I
don’t like this any more than you do, O’Dowd.’
‘Liar,’ she breathed.
‘There I was, minding my own business, going about my daily routine, and along you come … O’Dowd, are you listening to me?’
‘Don’t stop.’
‘What’s that? Didn’t quite catch it. Open your eyes, O’Dowd.’
She slapped his arm, laughing. ‘
Bastard
.’
‘You mean don’t stop
this?
… Is this what you mean, O’Dowd?’