What She Never Told Me (4 page)

‘The little brat obviously wasn’t getting enough attention, so he flung out his arm and sent everything flying. If I owned a restaurant, I’d ban children completely,’ Ursula says. ‘Now, aren’t you glad you don’t have one of those to deal with? At least you can start again without having to worry about how the kids are coping.’

When I was very young it had never occurred to me that I wouldn’t have children of my own. That was what happened when girls grew up. They got married and had children, and that was the future I had assumed for myself. I had even thought about names for these children I would have, names that changed depending on which book I was reading at the time or which film I had seen.

I had watched Angela’s girls grow up, fall in love and marry. When they became pregnant, I was thrilled. And when Ronan and Brigid came on the scene, I was filled with love for them.

But my own life hadn’t turned out like theirs. And, now, childless and likely to stay that way, I think about what Ursula has said.
Glad?
I know what she means, but it’s not necessarily the word I’d use.

Chapter Five

I’ve been dreading the return to Ireland, but I feel my heart lift as the plane flies in towards the airport, with the wide sweep of Dublin Bay below and the Wicklow Mountains clear and blue in the distance. There has always been a reason to return. After this trip, there will be none, and I feel a small kick in my stomach because, even though I love the Keaveneys, without the anchor that my mother provided, there will be no chain pulling me back.

I haven’t told Angela exactly when I’m arriving. I didn’t want to give her a date and then renege on it, as I had reneged on my promise to spend Christmas with her and Joe. And now that I’m here, I want to spend this first night in my mother’s house by myself.

Heavy rain begins to fall as I turn north on to the motorway, making it difficult to see beyond the space the little hired car occupies on the road. ‘Welcome to bloody sopping wet Ireland,’ I mutter to myself, gripping the steering wheel and slowing the car as much as I can without annoying the other drivers, who keep up their speed, unfazed by these treacherous conditions.

And then, as suddenly as it began, the rain stops, the sky is visible again and the sun throws a wet glow over everything. A double rainbow appears, and I want to believe that it’s some kind of mystical sign telling me all will be well.

My mother’s house is just outside the town, on the southern side of the river. The Keaveneys all live on the northern side. It’s a small two-storey cottage, almost hidden by the trees and rhododendron bushes growing in the garden.

There are other houses along the road but, once you walk through the gate of my mother’s property, you feel you’re somewhere remote, contained within a world delineated by the dark, almost decadent crimson of the rhododendron. Another month or two and they’ll be in bloom. I’ve often wondered what made her choose this house, shadowy and even a little bit mean, after living in a house that was washed through with the light that came flooding in off the estuary, even on the greyest of days.

She hadn’t sought my advice, or even my opinion. When Dermot died, I spent two weeks with her, during which time she made no mention of her plan. Six months after that, she put their house on the market.

‘I can’t believe you did that without even talking to me,’ I said when I phoned her, having heard from Angela about the plan to sell the house. ‘It was my house, too.’

‘It was never just your house, Louise, or mine. It’s Angela’s, too,’ she said. ‘And it’s far too big for me now. I’m going to sell it and give Angela some of the money and buy something smaller.’

‘But, Mamma, you could at least have asked me what I thought.’

‘What difference would that have made?’

What difference indeed. My mother had never sought my opinion about anything. Once she had made up her mind about something, anything at all, that was it. Even as a child I understood that.

I haven’t been here since November, when she died. I couldn’t face Christmas in Ireland, so I spent it by myself, with bread and cheese and a bottle of Pomerol. After that, I found several more excuses not to travel. But, before long, April had rolled in with its promise of spring and I knew I couldn’t keep putting it off.

Now, the house feels damp and unfriendly after several months of neglect, but at least everything is working – the lights, the central heating, the kettle.

I close the curtains to keep the night outside at bay. I’ve always hated the dark. Even in London, walking in well-lit streets, I’m a little bit scared of the darkness that lies at the far end, beyond the lights, of the sense that nothing is quite safe.

I decide to light a fire, and find plenty of turf, coal and wood in the small shed in the yard, and an old pack of firelighters in the cupboard beside the fireplace. When the flames finally take hold, I pull up an armchair, the one my mother always sat in, and lean back into it, nursing my mug of tea and trying to make sense of all that has been happening, how and why my life has changed so much in just a few months. I still don’t understand why my marriage broke down, but I suppose I must have been part of whatever was wrong. ‘We both need a break,’ Sandy had said, the night he left.

One thing I do know for certain is that my mother, through her smoking, was responsible for her own illness. It was a habit I’d always hated, though her use of a cigarette holder gave a kind of sophistication to the way she would lift her fingers towards her mouth, inhale slowly as if she was thinking deeply about something, and then move them away, a thin trail of smoke wafting into the air in front of her as she exhaled silently.

Why, then, do I feel a weight of guilt about everything to do with her death? Is it because I left? But that can’t be it, because it wasn’t my idea that I should go to London, it was hers. And yet the thought that eats away at my heart is of my mother abandoned. By me.

The house still holds a faint smell of cigarettes, which had always been hard to banish, probably because of the suffocating foliage outside that limited the extent to which a breeze could sweep in through the narrow sash windows and around the rooms. The other house never smelled of cigarettes; the big windows, once opened, pulled air in and sent it swirling into every corner.

I go to the kitchen, find her supply of Silk Cut, just a few packets, and I fling them into the bin. It’s my first administrative decision. But I hold on to the silver cigarette holder, whose provenance I have never asked. It must have been a present, but not one that Dermot had given her. She had it long before we met him.

*

Apart from the remains of the pizza I had delivered the night before, there’s no food in the house. There’s coffee and tea, but no milk. So I walk down the hill into the town for breakfast. New cafés have sprung up by the river and I choose one on the south side, called White Nights, on the assumption that its very name suggests the coffee will be strong. It is, and I have two big cups of it.

The river is the heart of the town. All sorts of small shops and businesses line the quays and there’s constant movement across the small pedestrian bridge that runs parallel to the main St Mary’s Bridge connecting the two sides of the town. I smile, thinking that, while Londoners talk about ‘north of the river’ or ‘south of the river’ and Dubliners talk about the ‘northside’ and ‘southside’, in Drogheda there was only ever the ‘far side’. Whether you lived north or south of the river, anyone living on the opposite side was from the far side.

I look across to the nineteenth-century warehouses and mills on the north quay that have been turned into spacious open-plan apartments, the old brick exposed as a design feature. A few years ago, I suggested to Sandy that we should think about buying one of them.

‘And do what with it? You wouldn’t want to live in it, would you?’

‘Well, no, but we could come here whenever we wanted. We could always rent it out.’

‘Och, don’t be ridiculous, Lou. It would be madness to buy a place we’d use only a couple of times a year. It makes no economic sense. And two flats are equal to two sets of everything, problems included.’

He was right about the economics of it; had we bought the apartment, we would now be paying a mortgage that far exceeded the value of the place. But his real objection, I knew, was that he didn’t want to have to see my mother any more than was absolutely necessary. Owning a place in Drogheda would draw us back too often for his liking. I hadn’t told him about her initial opposition to him—in fact, when I first took him to meet her and Dermot, she was utterly charming to him—but he was good at picking things up. And whenever we did turn up together in Drogheda, he would throw out the odd remark about how controlling she could be, even to the extent of telling me where I should take him, whether we were heading out to visit the local tourist spots or just going out to dinner by ourselves. But, then, as the saying goes, it takes one to know one, and Sandy could be fairly controlling himself. The difference was that I was so besotted with him, I didn’t mind allowing him to make the decisions.

Now, sitting with my coffee, I think how lovely it would be to stand at a big south-facing window and watch the river flow towards the sea, count the swans gliding on the fast water, feel the movement of the sun through the day and the passing of the hours. I play with the idea of selling my mother’s house and buying one of those riverside apartments in which there are no memories lurking – a clean, new space with big windows that let in the sunlight and the starlight. It’s a pleasant daydream that lasts until I finish my coffee.

Back at the house, I consider embarking on a spring clean, but admit that this would really be an excuse to delay knuckling down to the real work. There’s a lot to be done. It mystifies me that, for someone who was a perfectionist in so many ways, my mother kept so much stuff. She was almost a hoarder. Papers, photographs and documents that have been put away in no particular order over the years, now have to be gone through, separated into what needs to be acted upon, what should be kept and what can be thrown away.

But I start with her clothes. They’re crammed into two wardrobes, one in her bedroom and one in the room that I used when I came over to see her, and also into a couple of old trunks stored under the beds. Her room, unused now for several months, smells of nothing in particular, but when I open the wardrobe I feel my eyes sting as I take in the smell of the clothes, the faint hint of Calèche.

I allow myself a minute or so of reflection and then collect myself. I work through the wardrobes steadily, taking the items out one by one, folding and placing them in the big black refuse sacks I bought earlier. Before long, I’ve filled a dozen black bags. I should ask Angela if she would like to look through them before I take them to the charity shop, in case there’s anything she or her daughters would like.

My mother had good taste. I like to think that she passed some of it on to me. When I was in my early twenties, I became a slave to fashion, filling my wardrobe with things bought on impulse that did nothing for me. But by the time I was thirty, my mother’s influence had won out and I learned how to dress well on very little money, although my style was very different from hers. For her, understated elegance had to be the main feature of any outfit. I like comfort above all else – no cinched waists for me, no high heels – but I can’t help wishing I could wear these beautiful clothes.

After a couple of hours of steady work, I decide to take a break and drive the few miles out to Bettystown. The village has changed a lot over the years, the older houses and cottages sitting uneasily below the apartment buildings that shot up during the height of the property boom, but the strand is the same, stretching for miles. The day is so clear that I can see the mountains, soft blue and purple in the far distance. The tide is coming in, but I know I have plenty of time before it will cover the hard sand. I walk quickly, the dunes on my left and the sea on my right, until my legs ache, and then I face back the way I’ve come.

The dunes bring back memories, good ones. Ursula often came down from Dublin to stay with us at weekends and in the summer, and we used to cycle out to whichever strand took our fancy on a particular day. They were all within a few miles of Drogheda, and all had long stretches of silvery sand. But the beaches on the northern side of the estuary were quieter than those on the south and we were teenage girls – we liked the buzz of crowds. Bettystown had the kind of buzz you got in a place with holiday chalets and amusement arcades, ice-cream vans and fish-and-chip shops.

I had my first kiss among those dunes. Ursula and I were with a few other girls from my class, all in our early teens, and we met a group of boys on the beach. We played spin-the-bottle, taking turns to spin an empty bottle we had found and kissing whomever it ended up pointing at. I don’t remember much about any of the kisses, except that they weren’t what I’d expected after the apprehension and excitement that had preceded them. They were all a disappointment.

I haven’t thought about that game for years, but it seems to me now that everything that has happened in my life has had an element of a bottle being spun. And it has rarely been me spinning the bottle, just me going in whatever direction it ended up pointing, trusting it would be the right one. The only real decision I ever made on my own was to stop singing and start teaching. I’m not sure I even chose Sandy. Sure, I wanted him, but when it came to making the choice, making a move, it was Sandy who got us together, not me.

A dog’s excited barking brings me out of my thoughts. I look towards the sound and see a big, rangy red setter bounding around the beach, jumping in and out of the water. Some distance behind is a man, walking fast in my direction. There’s something familiar-looking about him, about the way he strides along by the edge of the water. But it’s not until I hear his voice as he calls the dog to him that I realise who he is. My heart misses a beat. I hadn’t expected to see him again after pushing him away so many years ago. He had left Drogheda a long time ago. It was unlikely that our paths would cross. And yet here he is now, walking towards me on Bettystown strand, although he shows no sign of having recognised me. He looks well. He has filled out.

I’m torn between whether I should talk to him or just walk on, but the decision is taken out of my hands. Soaking wet from the sea, the dog is keen to have a new playmate and jumps and dances around me so that my legs are covered in damp splodges of sand.

‘Bran! I’m sorry, he’s young and a bit . . .’ He breaks off, narrows his eyes to scrutinise me, and then says, ‘Louise?’

‘Declan. It’s been a long time. You’re looking great.’

‘So are you,’ he says. ‘Are you back here now?’

I shake my head. ‘No. I’m still in London. But my mother died, so I’ve been back and forth, sorting everything out.’

‘I’m sorry about your mother,’ he says. I can tell that he means it and I wonder why. My mother barely gave him the time of day.

He has the dog on a lead now and it’s straining to pull away. ‘Look, do you fancy a drink? I’ll put this eejit in the car so he won’t be jumping all over us.’