She hadn’t lingered on the actual killings. She’d spoken of the horribly quiet aftermath, the lingering tang of smoke in the air, the pieces of the blown-up minibus strewn across the road and scattered over the surrounding fields, the ripped-apart guitar cases, the destroyed instruments. She’d mourned the senselessness of killing three young musicians.
She’d moved on to describe her own reaction on hearing the news; the shock and disbelief the newsreader’s calm voice had caused. She’d imagined the families of the dead men hearing the same words from policemen, being woken up on a Friday morning to have their hearts smashed to pieces.
She’d skimmed over it when it was finished, but she’d changed nothing. She’d scribbled a note to M. Breen, asking if he’d like to print it, and she’d signed it
Helen O’Dowd.
She’d slipped it into an envelope and walked with Alice to the letterbox at the end of the next street.
Two days later she’d opened the paper and there it had been: a half page of her words accompanied by a picture
of the crime scene. The headline, which she hadn’t written, read
The Day the Music Died
, and underneath, in smaller print,
An insider’s view of the Miami Showband Massacre.
Her name – her pseudonym – was there too, in even smaller print.
The following morning a cheque had arrived, accompanied by the first of the letters. Helen had phoned the number at the top of the page and asked to speak to Catherine Fortune.
‘Oh, I
loved
your piece,’ she’d said warmly, as soon as Helen had introduced herself. ‘So moving. Well done. Sorry it had to be cut a bit, to make it fit.’
‘It’s not my name, though,’ Helen had replied. ‘Fitzpatrick is my name: O’Dowd is just … one I’m using.’
Catherine Fortune had understood immediately. ‘Oh – right, so you need a new cheque. That’s no problem, just send me back the old one and I’ll pop a replacement into the post.’
‘Thanks a lot – and when can I send another piece?’
She’d heard the smile in the other woman’s voice. ‘Anytime you like – but of course it’s up to Mr Breen what goes in.’
‘Of course.’
‘And you need to make it a definite length – either five hundred or a thousand words usually.’
Clearly, no special qualifications were needed to have an article published; it just had to pass muster with the boss, which she’d accepted was fair enough. She’d better wait a while, though, didn’t want to seem greedy, in case it put him off.
She’d finished the piece on the shopgirl – so light it seemed compared to the other, but maybe it was good to show him that she was versatile. She’d forced herself to wait three weeks before posting it off – and the following week there it was, accompanied by a shot of a model (Helen presumed) posing behind a department store
counter, a look of utter boredom on her perfectly fresh face.
Since then she’d sent roughly one article a month. She’d written about the second marriage of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, eighteen months after their divorce, and the ordinary suburban house in Monasterevin where a Dutch businessman was imprisoned by terrorists for over a fortnight, and a new law that was passed in Britain which introduced equal pay rights for women – and every article she submitted to M. Breen had found favour, and had been printed, usually word for word.
In November Catherine had attached a handwritten note to the usual letter, asking for a photo.
Just a small head and shoulders will be fine
, she’d written.
Something we can put with your pieces, since you’re becoming a regular with us!
Helen had bought a new film for the camera she hadn’t used since before Cormac’s illness. She’d snapped herself as best she could half a dozen times – no front views, all three-quarter profiles, all taken slightly from above so her eyes weren’t visible – and she’d used the rest of the reel to photograph the amazingly beautiful sunset that evening.
The head and shoulders photos, when she collected them from the chemist, were nicely out of focus. She picked the best of them and sent it off to Catherine. The sunsets were disastrous, the glorious sky reduced to smears of over-exposed, watery colours. As she was stuffing them into the bin, she realised that taking a snap of her only child hadn’t even occurred to her.
Her phone had rung early on the morning of January the twelfth.
‘Mark Breen here,’ an unfamiliar, brusque male voice had said, and it had taken Helen a few seconds to realise who was on the other end.
‘Nice to—’
‘I’m assuming you’re a reader.’
‘Well, I—’
‘Agatha Christie has just died. Are you familiar with her books?’
‘Of course I—’
‘Good. Can you do a thousand words by the end of tomorrow?’
And
just like that, she’d got her first commission, along with an introduction to her employer, who clearly didn’t believe in wasting words. What did she care, as long as he paid up?
She ground her cigarette under her shoe and threw the butt into the privet hedge. Ten minutes later, as she was bundling Alice into her coat before letting her out to play in their scrap of back garden – same size as the front, straggly excuse of a lawn – the doorbell rang.
To her surprise, her mother, who hardly ever called unannounced, who hardly ever called full stop, stood outside, looking as perfectly groomed as ever.
Tailored grey coat, under which she most likely wore its matching dress; silk stockings, black patent handbag and shoes, hair backcombed into submission. Looking as out of place in the humble street with its shabby terrace of houses as it was possible to look. No car in sight, of course not: her parents had always come to Helen and Cormac’s by taxi, afraid to chance leaving a car unattended.
‘Happy birthday,’ she said, offering Helen a cream envelope. Her birthday, completely forgotten about for the second year running. The one time in the year that Margaret D’Arcy felt entitled – or obliged – to cross her daughter’s threshold uninvited.
‘Come in.’
Helen stood back, picturing the mess of the kitchen, dishes piled in the sink, the remains of Alice’s breakfast still on the table. What the hell: let her take them as she found them, her own fault for not ringing ahead.
Her mother made a pretty good show of not appearing to notice the untidiness as she accepted Helen’s offer of coffee. Supermarket brand, not the good stuff her parents were used to, but it wouldn’t kill her.
‘Where’s Alice?’
‘Out the back.’ Helen put on the kettle and slit open the envelope, conscious of her mother’s eyes on her. She pulled out the card it contained and opened it without reading the message
on the front. Two twenty-pound notes lay inside, the same amount they’d given her each birthday since she’d turned eighteen.
The money had kept coming when Helen had committed the cardinal sin of moving in with a musician, but it had become a cheque that was posted to Cormac’s address rather than personally delivered. This arrangement had continued after Helen and Cormac got married, and the only contact she had with her parents was one strained phone call from her to them each month.
The fact that Cormac hadn’t lived long enough to cause them more than a few years of outrage had changed things, of course: once it became apparent that he was not, after all, going to outlive them, they’d reappeared, turning up at the house with bottles of wine and fruit cakes, offering to take Alice for a few hours, asking if there was anything they could do, anything they could pay for. Pretending a concern they couldn’t possibly feel.
Each time they appeared, Helen had made them tea and cut slices of whatever cake they’d brought. She had updated them on Cormac’s condition and watched them trying to interact with the granddaughter they barely knew. She’d taken the money her father had handed over – pouring money into the gulf between them, imagining he could fill it – and thanked him with as much grace as she could manage.
At the funeral she’d listened as people sympathised with her mother and shook hands with her father. She’d thought about how much of a disappointment Cormac had been to them, how they’d despised the fact that he didn’t go to work in a white shirt, how they’d done little to hide their disdain in his company. She’d recalled her wedding day, the pinched, strained smile of her mother, the contempt for his new son-in-law plain in her father’s face, and she’d known that she could never, ever forgive them for their snobbery and heartlessness.
Since Cormac’s death they hadn’t been invited to Helen’s house. She couldn’t care less if she never laid eyes on either of them again, but she was damned if she was going to deprive Alice of whatever wealth they left behind, so every Thursday afternoon she took Alice to visit them. They sat in the kitchen and made
small-talk for as long as it took Helen to drink a cup of her mother’s admittedly very good coffee.
While she waited for the kettle to boil she busied herself with jug and filter, searching in her head for something to talk about. When she turned around, her mother was gathering up Alice’s crockery, trying to keep her sleeve out of the puddle of ketchup on the plate.
Helen went to the back door and opened it. ‘Granny’s here,’ she told Alice. ‘Come in and say hello.’
Alice was no conversationalist,
but she’d do. Anyone would do.
‘Y
ou’ll be glad to hear I’ve made a start on the book.’
‘About time – you’ve talked about it for long enough. How far have you got?’
‘Well, I haven’t begun the actual writing yet. I’m still thinking up a plot and getting the characters together.’
‘Oh.’
‘Still, it’s a start … Stop eating those cherries. I’ll have none left for the cake.’
Christine pushed the tub across the table. ‘So where’s Lover Boy taking you tonight?’
‘The cinema,
Barry Lyndon.
Why don’t you make yourself useful and line those cake tins?’
‘You’re blushing.’
Sarah laughed. ‘I am not.’
Still too soon to tell, only a few months since they’d laid eyes on one another; and even though this felt so right, she would hug it to herself and let nobody know how she was really feeling, not even Christine. Not yet.
It had begun slowly, with a handful of further encounters in his father’s room, during which Sarah noticed that he had a habit of placing a finger at the corner of his mouth and
tilting his head to the side when he was listening. And his smile was delightfully crooked, sliding up more on the right. And his aftershave, or maybe it was whatever shampoo he was using, reminded her of the sea. And she liked the shoes he wore, and the fact that his fingernails were always clean, despite his job.
On the whole, she’d decided, she approved of Neil Flannery. As potential boyfriends went, he was definitely in with a chance. Once or twice their eyes had met, and he’d held her gaze for a scatter of seconds, and she’d thought, with a delicious flip in her stomach, that maybe there was something there.
But she was also acutely conscious, during each of these episodes, that they were being observed by his parents, who, no doubt, had had them marched down the aisle and happily married after their second meeting. Even if Neil was at all interested in her – and she had no real idea that he was – what chance did any kind of a relationship have of developing in Stephen and Nuala’s well-meant but terribly inhibiting presence?
And then one afternoon towards the end of November, about two weeks after they’d first come face to face, there was a knock on the kitchen door as Sarah was putting cups onto trays in preparation for the tea.
‘I’ll go,’ Bernadette said, wiping her hands on her apron. Callers to the kitchen at this time were commonplace: someone looking for a mid-afternoon cuppa or glass of milk, or maybe a hot-water bottle refilled. Sarah continued to assemble the cups as she planned the next day’s lunch in her head: stuffed pork steak with roast potatoes and turnip, followed by treacle pudding and—
‘It’s for you.’ Bernadette winked at her. ‘Stephen Flannery’s son.’
Sarah added another two cups to the tray, feeling the blood rushing to her face. ‘Probably wants another round of tea.’
‘Yes, I’m sure that’s what he wants,’ Bernadette replied, plunging her mop once again into the bucket of steaming water. ‘That’ll be why he asked for you specially. He must have
heard I can’t make tea.’
‘Sorry to bother you,’ he said, his leather jacket slung over an arm. ‘I know you’re busy, but I just wanted to say thanks for looking after my father so well. I’m starting another job in Tullamore next week, so I’ll be back to visiting here at the weekends.’
Sarah forced a smile. Not interested then, just being polite. Just saying thanks before he left. ‘It’s my pleasure. He’s a lovely man.’
He began to shrug on his jacket. ‘Well, he thinks the world of you, I know that, and it means a lot to my mother too, that he’s being looked after so well.’
She remained silent, the smile stiff on her face.
‘I don’t suppose …’ not meeting her eye as he fumbled with the zip ‘… you’d let me buy you dinner some time? I mean, only if you want to.’
He looked up then and she saw his crooked, charming smile.
‘That would be lovely,’ she said, delight fizzing inside her.
‘Good.’ The smile slid further up his face. ‘I can’t guarantee the standard of food would be up to yours, but we might be lucky.’
He took her to Bannigan’s in Kildare town and bought her sirloin steak and strawberry cheesecake. He drove her home and kissed her cheek, and asked to see her again.
The following Saturday night they went to see
Shampoo
at the cinema. He bought her a box of Black Magic and didn’t attempt to put his arm around her in the darkness, which was a bit of a disappointment. He drove her home and leant across to kiss her cheek, and she turned her head and met his mouth with hers. He tasted of chocolate.
For their third date he took her to a performance of
The Field
in a concert hall of a town about twenty miles away. During the interval they drank orange juice and he told her about a garden he was restoring in the grounds of a Tullamore hotel. As they resumed their seats after the interval, he slipped his hand into hers, and she moved closer and touched her thigh to his.