All That I Leave Behind (8 page)

‘MP, she’s not trying to upset you or me or anyone else,’ June said, more confidently than she felt. ‘She just wants to get married in the town where she grew up, and she wanted to see Daddy before, well—’

At the mention of Daddy’s name, Mary-Pat shot forward and grabbed June’s arm. ‘She wants Daddy to come to the wedding, you know.’

June felt the glass, slippery in her hands. She longed to take another big swig of the nasty wine, to find oblivion in Brides & Co. on South Anne Street. Anything but to have to listen to her sister. ‘Oh?’ she said carefully. ‘Have you told her what he’s like?’

Mary-Pat shook her head. ‘She’s been in a couple of times, but he was knocked out with all the pills and now they have a vomiting bug, so no visitors are allowed, thank God. We have to keep her away from him,’ she added by way of explanation.

‘We do?’ June knew that Daddy wasn’t quite right, that he was inclined to say the first thing that came into his head these days, but she couldn’t help thinking that Mary-Pat was being a bit cloak and dagger about it all. Rosie would see him sooner or later, before or after the wedding. Maybe she was afraid that Daddy would embarrass them all in public. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time, she thought.

She went to reassure Mary-Pat that she and Gerry would look after Daddy, to make sure she could relax and enjoy the day, because she felt guilty about it. Mary-Pat did all the running after Daddy, bringing him those unhealthy big bars of chocolate and the
Racing Post
, and June knew that it was the least she could do, to offer to mind him for one day … but one look at her sister made June say, ‘You’re right. It’s not a good idea.’ Because she knew that’s what Mary-Pat wanted to hear. June always agreed with Mary-Pat, even if her sister was talking nonsense – because it was easier than to face up to her. She’d always let Mary-Pat bully her, and she’d never minded that much, but sometimes she just wished her sister would be a bit … kinder. A bit less relentless.

There was something June couldn’t put her finger on, and she had a sense of the horrible shagpile carpet in the shop shifting beneath her feet. She knew that Daddy was feeling better – he’d practically risen from the dead, sitting up one day last week in St Benildus’s after a week in a semi-coma and demanding a fry-up, and that was good, wasn’t it? They were all delighted about it, weren’t they?

Mary-Pat got up, shuffling forward on the sofa until she could stand up. ‘So that’s settled then. The bug will do for now, then we’ll tell her that he’s got the bladder infection back and that he’s too ill to come,’ and she began to rummage in her handbag for a cigarette. ‘What?’

‘Nothing.’ June knew better than to probe. Mary-Pat must have her reasons, June thought doubtfully, even if she knew that her sister wasn’t telling her everything. We all have our reasons. June thought of her little writing box under her bed, with those flimsy blue aerogrammes in it, and for a moment she closed her eyes. No, mustn’t think about that.

‘I need a fag,’ Mary-Pat muttered. ‘Where the hell did I put my lighter?’

‘I’ll come with you,’ June volunteered, desperate to get out of the stuffy shop. She followed her sister out onto the busy pavement, thronged with people in summer clothes. It was another baking hot day, of the kind they’d grown used to this glorious summer. Mary-Pat found her cigarettes and her lighter and after lighting up and taking a big drag, she leaned against the shop window, her face relaxed for the first time all morning, and she closed her eyes and lifted her face to the sun. For a moment, June wondered if she could cadge a cigarette off Mary-Pat, but she changed her mind. Smoking was so bad for your skin.

The two of them stood there in silence for a few moments, drinking in the hot summer sun, Mary-Pat’s cigarette smoke spiralling into the air. ‘You all right, June?’ Mary-Pat’s eyes flicked open.

Mary-Pat’s question came so suddenly, June started in fright. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ I was under the impression that you were the one who was in a bit of a state, she thought.

‘You look a bit … tired, that’s all.’

‘Oh, God, no.’ June shook her head. ‘I’m fine.’

‘How’s Gerry … and the girls?’

‘They’re fine.’

‘Fine.’

‘Yes, fine, Mary-Pat.’

‘Sure, what would you have to be complaining about anyway?’ Mary-Pat threw her cigarette on the ground and put it out with her foot, in its huge white trainer. ‘All the servants wiping your bottom for you and making you breakfast in bed.’

‘Very funny. Orianna and Luka are hardly servants. Orianna’s practically part of the family now anyway.’

‘Right. And I bet you have her sitting up to dinner with you every night. I can just see her, clinking the wine glass with Gerry.’ And Mary-Pat cackled at her own joke.

‘How’s the WeightWatchers?’ June knew she was being a bitch, but she couldn’t help herself.

‘Oh, pile of miserable crap as usual, but, sure, not all of us are blessed with your genes, June.’ The way Mary-Pat said it made June blush with shame. She didn’t know why she was being so mean. Mary-Pat always teased her about being comfortable, but neither of them really minded. June knew that her sister wasn’t bothered about nice things, not really. If she was, she’d hardly be living in Gnome Central, as the girls unkindly called it, that tiny little house, filled with knick-knacks and fishing gear and that dog. June shuddered every time she thought of him, that big horrible brown thing who drooled all over the place. She also knew that things had been tough for Mary-Pat and PJ in the last few years, but her sister had never complained. Once, she’d even broached the subject of giving them a little loan, but Mary-Pat had nearly bitten her head off and June hadn’t asked again.

There was another long silence. ‘MP?’

‘What?’

‘Do you ever look around and wonder if it’s been worth it?’ Lately, June had sometimes wondered just that, even though she’d rather die than admit it to anyone. She’d done everything in her power to avoid it, to stave it off, thinking too much about things. She’d poured herself into the job of homemaker, to use the American term, to make sure that Gerry and the kids never wanted for anything and if June felt guilty about farming out the job to her Filipina housekeeper, she told herself that that’s what it took to keep the show on the road. With Gerry hardly ever there, she needed all the help she could get.

And she compensated for her guilt by driving the girls wherever they wanted to go, telling herself that it was because she loved her Land Rover, but really it was because she needed to feel useful. ‘It’s what I’m there for,’ she’d say when India or Georgia would say that they could just get the bus to their piano classes and hockey camps. And even though she saw the looks on their faces, a mixture of irritation and pity, she ignored them. I’m still useful, she thought to herself. I’m still needed. Because she couldn’t bear to think what it might be like if she wasn’t.

‘What do you mean?’ Mary-Pat was saying. ‘If what’s been worth it?’

‘Oh, you know, you think you’re going along and then … suddenly everything seems different. I mean, it’s the same, but you see it differently.’ June was trying to explain how she felt these days, but by the look on Mary-Pat’s face, she wasn’t making much sense. ‘What I mean is—’ June was about to continue when Melissa stuck her head around the door of the shop. ‘There you are. I might have known, Mum, that you’d be smoking your head off.’ She curled her lip. ‘Rosie’s waiting for you.’

Mary-Pat grimaced. ‘Better get it over with then.’

‘Behave, MP, will you?’

‘I’ll try,’ Mary-Pat said, pushing the door of the shop open with an exaggerated sigh.

‘Ta-dah!’ Melissa was standing beside Rosie, a huge grin on her face, and when Mary-Pat and June were silent for a second, she squealed, ‘Doesn’t she look amazing?’

June was rooted to the spot. Rosie was standing in a shaft of sunlight, which caught her lovely golden-red hair and lit up her pale, freckled skin. And she just looked a vision in antique cream lace, with a dropped waist, that suited her boyish figure, a large damask rose pinned to her hip, her lovely hair piled in a loose bun on her head. She looked like one of those women in the pre-Raphaelite paintings that Mammy loved so much. Oh, she was lovely, just lovely, June thought. How did you grow up so suddenly, Rosie? she thought. How did that happen? And, not for the first time, she felt that guilt that she’d had so little to do with it. That she’d left it all to Mary-Pat.

She could still remember it, the day she’d run away. Not that she’d admitted that to anyone, even to herself. June was nineteen, nearly twenty, and she knew it was her last chance to get out, even though she told herself that she was simply going up to visit Susie at the nurses’ home in St Vincent’s where she was doing her training, and where she would host illicit parties, her tiny room stuffed full of student nurses and doctors. It was fun, and June wanted that more than anything else. Fun and life and excitement.

It had been part of her Grand Plan. She’d actually called it that, had written it into the pink furry diary she kept under the bed and which June had loved because it had had a little padlock on it. She’d written the heading in block capitals, with a row of bullet points below it. First, she’d learn to talk properly, not like some ‘bogger’ as they called it in Dublin. Then she’d have lots of acquaintances. Everyone in Dublin had them, to go to the theatre with, to the kind of expensive restaurants June couldn’t afford. Nobody in Monasterard had them – they had sisters, brothers, friends, cousins, not acquaintances. It sounded much more sophisticated. And June wanted to be sophisticated more than anything else.

And so she’d told no one, sneaking out the door that Saturday afternoon, everything she’d need stuffed into a little duffle bag that she’d found under Pi’s bed. But Rosie had followed her. ‘Where are you going, Junie?’ She’d bounced up and down on the balls of her feet, her little freckled hands grimy from hours spent on the towpath, messing around the way she loved to do.

‘Oh, nowhere special, Rosie-boo, just off to Timbuktu.’

‘You are not going to Timbuktu,’ Rosie said, her face crumpling and June thought how tactless she’d been. Rosie had a thing about people leaving. It made her anxious and they normally had to explain to her exactly where they were going and for how long. It was funny, really, because she’d had no memory at all of Mammy leaving, not like the rest of them, but somehow she seemed to have absorbed the anxiety about it.

And so, June had lied. ‘You’re right, I’m not. I’m just going to Dublin to a party. I’ll be back in the next day or two.’ And Rosie had seemed to accept what she’d said, but it didn’t stop her watching June as she walked all the way up the towpath to the village. June could feel Rosie’s eyes on her back, and it made her feel awful, because she knew that she was never coming back. Oh, of course, she had – she’d come back the following Tuesday to pick up the rest of her stuff, but she’d never stayed at home again. Not properly. And she’d never thought to wonder how her sisters felt about it. She was gone, leaving Monasterard, and everything else, behind her. And she’d come to Dublin and she’d made a go of things, gathering together a circle of friends-who-weren’t-really-friends for cocktails, the theatre, the gallery openings that she attended because one of her boss Paddy’s clients owned a place on Fitzwilliam Square. She’d been desperate, she knew, to ‘get on’. And because she didn’t resemble the back of a bus and had worked hard on her manners, she’d succeeded. Except she knew that she didn’t like the word now, ‘acquaintances’. It was a lonely kind of a word. And she was a lonely kind of a person.

***

Mary-Pat was the first to speak. ‘Very nice.’ She looked as if she’d eaten something unpleasant, her face screwed up and her mouth twisted. ‘Looks expensive anyway.’

There was a silence and Rosie’s face fell, her arms dropping to her sides. She looked all of nine again, in spite of her finery. For a moment, none of them said anything. There was a stillness in the room and June willed herself to speak, to open her mouth and say something, anything. She could see that Melissa’s fists were balled up, the knuckles white as she bit her lip. Oh, Mary-Pat, June thought, why on earth do you have to be such a bitch? And then she found her voice, rushing forward and pulling Rosie into a tight hug. ‘Rosie, you look beautiful, magnificent, utterly fabulous,’ and the compliments were so effusive, Rosie burst out laughing, while June pushed her away again to get a really good look at her. ‘Look at you. My baby sister’s all grown up.’ She felt Rosie’s bones under her hands, like a little bird’s, and then Rosie went a bit grey and her breath began to come in short puffs. ‘Do you need your inhaler?’

Rosie nodded, her cheeks flushed, her breath beginning to catch. ‘It’s all the excitement, I just …’

‘Don’t say another word,’ June said, motioning for Melissa to fetch Rosie’s handbag. ‘Just take a couple of puffs and relax.’ And she threw Mary-Pat a look over her shoulder. If you had been a bit nicer, the look said, this might not have happened. Wait till I talk to you later. But when she turned around, she noticed that Mary-Pat had tears in her eyes.

By the time June arrived home, she felt so exhausted she could just have gone to sleep in the car. She pulled into the gate and up the driveway, gravel crunching under the wheels of the Land Rover, and when she parked, the dulcet tones of Lyric FM fading, she sat there for a few moments, taking in the silence. She loved this view of the house, the bright yellow front door in the lovely Victorian porch, the two stained glass windows on either side, the bay window above it set into the red-shingled eaves: Georgia’s room. The estate agent had called it ‘a restoration treasure’, which had been shorthand for a complete mess, but June had loved it the first time she’d set eyes on it. It had been owned by a vicar, and the garden was lovely, and even if the rooms had been a little shabby, they’d also been beautiful, with their lovely high ceilings. It was large and gracious and restful – just like the life June had longed to have ever since she was a little girl. And now, she had it.

She sighed and climbed down from the Land Rover, opening the front door, popping her keys and bag on the eighteenth-century oak hall table, and went straight into the kitchen, where she opened the fridge and examined the contents before pulling out a plate of cold chicken, to which she added a large dollop of mayonnaise – the full-fat stuff that she kept hidden at the back of the fridge. There were a couple of cold sausages there, too, so she helped herself to them, starting to eat before she got to the kitchen table, plonking the plate down, fingers already greasy as she shoved the food into her mouth, chewing it quickly and then swallowing before sinking her teeth into the next mouthful. She wolfed it down, that was the expression, like a hungry dog and when she’d finished, licking the grease off her lips, she felt a bit sick. And guilty, and all of the other emotions she felt when she knew she’d failed to control herself. She put the plate into the dishwasher so Gerry wouldn’t notice it. He didn’t like to see her like this. It upset him.