Книга - Marble Heart

Marble Heart
Gretta Mulrooney


A stunning piece of psychological suspense from the author of Araby.Two very different women brought together by a secret from the past.Joan has a tentative grip on the world – she’s too trusting, soft-centred, cheery and straightforward, the sort of woman who still keeps teddy bears on her bed. By nature and by profession, Joan is a carer, employed to look after Nina Rawle, a crisp and sophisticated woman, stricken by a long-term illness. There is a very good reason why Joan has been taken on by Nina (nursing skills aside) and Nina’s tangled past in Northern Ireland, in which a single and fatal act of political passion played a destructive role, has a great deal to do with it. How and why Nina will reveal herself to Joan, whose part in Nina’s past is truly significant, makes for a tense and twisting tale.This is a quite different novel from Araby. We have here a pure piece of storytelling, a psychological tale with more than a touch of Barbara Vine. The fantastic storytelling skills and exploration of character which made Araby such a gem are in abundance in this new novel.













Copyright (#ulink_c657695e-64fd-50b5-9e5a-97cd7b1353fc)

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Published by Flamingo 2000

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First published in Great Britain by

Flamingo 2000

Copyright © Gretta Mulrooney 2000

Gretta Mulrooney asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Source ISBN 0 00 655182 3

Ebook Edition © March 2016 ISBN: 9780007485376

Version: 2016-03-16

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Praise (#ulink_81de6761-adcd-55cb-a4ca-1ed1110f21a4)

From the reviews of Araby:

‘An amusing, totally unsentimental slice of life and a chilling meditation on mortality. Never angst-ridden or moralistic (a mixture of black comedy and over-the-top farce). I really enjoyed this truthful and affecting novel.’

Books Ireland

‘On hearing of Kitty’s admittance to hospital, her grown-up son Rory returns to Ireland to comfort his father and await the diagnosis. Rory’s narrative is interspersed with a series of flashbacks through which Kitty emerges larger than life. These snapshots of the past are part of a process of unpicking the odd tangle of love and petty grievances that characterise familial relationships. Mulrooney’s ability to make sense of the contradictions in clear, precise prose is the most remarkable achievement of the novel. A beautifully observed study of reconciliation, Araby makes astute points about conflict and shifting values between generations.’

The Times

‘Mulrooney has a real gift for dialogue, the words and phrases ring true and make her characters wonderfully real. A tenderly funny and genuinely moving piece. I loved it.’

Time Out

‘What is admirable about Mulrooney’s writing is the way she manages to keep the tone buoyant, while alluding to many heartbreaking strands of family history. For both Kitty and Rory, this is a story of gallant survival.’

Independent

‘I loved it. Such a sweet story without being in the least bit sentimental, and very moving without being harrowing. There are moments when the reader is absolutely there, so acute is this novelist’s eye and ear.’

MARGARET FORSTER

‘A wonderfully funny view of Irish motherhood, but Mulrooney also evokes powerful emotions as Rory comes to appreciate quite how much his infuriating but irreplaceable mother means to him. Highly recommended.’

Literary Review


Dedication (#ulink_bcd87de0-e4d9-54c0-9f15-5b2e01499638)

FOR EVE AND ALAN


Contents

Cover (#u821ddb3e-a8c9-5260-b92e-94ab027d4d7d)

Title Page (#ud3b1578d-8d00-5f3e-b2ae-9c956ab923d1)

Copyright (#ulink_8dcab441-4b5d-513f-a008-dededa125dd9)

Praise (#ulink_525cce9e-53ee-51ea-824f-2514ab172ed6)

Dedication (#ulink_91a7742c-e18b-5cbd-9bda-46431cf00d88)

1. Joan (#ulink_21386d6b-bd01-56a6-812c-94a099ff41f7)

2. Joan (#ulink_258b913e-a7fc-516d-ba4a-c7063cdd51a5)

3. Nina (#ulink_8226a1ca-9b8d-5833-b19c-af92a0195517)

4. Nina (#ulink_8e18a8d3-7059-527d-b2da-48f9aec0625c)

5. Martin (#ulink_7b57f77a-0b79-5962-ac56-66a4a7b4934c)

6. Joan (#litres_trial_promo)

7. Nina (#litres_trial_promo)

8. Nina (#litres_trial_promo)

9. Martin (#litres_trial_promo)

10. Joan (#litres_trial_promo)

11. Nina (#litres_trial_promo)

12. Nina (#litres_trial_promo)

13. Nina (#litres_trial_promo)

14. Joan (#litres_trial_promo)

15. Nina (#litres_trial_promo)

16. Joan and Nina (#litres_trial_promo)

17. Martin and Nina (#litres_trial_promo)

18. Nina and Joan (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)


1 (#ulink_c7f80f50-fe46-5b6c-a131-9658ea0a63d6)

JOAN (#ulink_c7f80f50-fe46-5b6c-a131-9658ea0a63d6)

Alice Ainsley once told Joan that she always got a feeling in her bones when something was about to go wrong for her. It was like a dull ache, she said. She could sense in the morning if she was facing one of those days when the world was aiming to slide out of kilter. She felt like that the day her husband announced he was leaving and when her son rang to tell her he’d been arrested for possession of Ecstasy. Alice’s people had been tenant farmers in Somerset for generations. That was where she reckoned she got the knowledge in her bones from; it was inherited. Folk who worked the land needed a feel for all kinds of things. They had to be in touch with the world around them, the weather, their animals and crops. Her grandfather could tell if a cow was sickening from the feel of its ears and could forecast thunder, snow or drought. Alice had a habit of raising her nose and sniffing the air as if she were standing in a held, scenting rain.

Joan’s bones didn’t signal any warnings to her the morning she met Nina Rawle, but then she wasn’t from country stock. Her mother’s parents had worked in a garment factory in Bromley and her father’s family were street traders in Canning Town. No hairs stood up on the back of her neck as she parked the car outside Nina’s flat. She didn’t spot any black cats or magpies presaging disaster, there was no ominous rush of goose pimples on her skin. She walked in with a smile on her face, ready to do a good job. ‘Take people as you find them’ had always been among Joan’s numerous aphorisms, one of the many commonsense dictums she had heard from her Bromley grandmother. On that April day with the tart sap of spring in the air she saw in front of her a very sick woman who obviously needed help.

Alice was Joan’s employer and her friend, a combination that wouldn’t work in many situations but fitted the two women well. Joan had been on the books of the Alice Ainsley bureau for six years and knew the business thoroughly enough to run it on the rare occasions when Alice was unwell or took a quick break. They often had a glass of Martini in a little wine bar near the bureau, sweet red with lemonade for Joan, dry white with soda water and ice for Alice. Sipping slowly, they would discuss contrary clients and their problems with men, the major difficulty being the lack of them.

Maybe if Alice had met Nina, instead of just taking her phonecall, things would have turned out differently. If Nina had made her way slowly up the stairs to Alice’s office, leaning on her sticks, her hair swinging, Alice’s nostrils might have twitched. Detecting trouble, perhaps she would have told Nina that Joan’s schedule was full and offered her another assistant. Maybe, if, perhaps. Nina didn’t visit the office; she made a phonecall and Alice simply heard a cultured voice putting business her way.

Joan’s grandmother used to sing while she did the washing, a forties’ number: ‘If I’d known then what I know now I’d be a different girl’. She sang roughly but tunefully, tapping out a rhythm with her little nailbrush on the shirt collars as she worked carbolic soap into a lather. Nina reminded Joan of her gran, perhaps that was why she warmed to her so quickly. There was something about the no-nonsense way that Nina talked, her strong chin and firm lips, that summoned up Gran’s face. And of course there was the Lily of the Valley perfume; it was so unusual, so surprising to find a younger woman wearing it. It had been many years since Joan had sniffed that fragrance. The scent of it was strong the first morning she met Nina, calling up clear, happy memories.

Joan was feeling particularly well on the sunny Wednesday morning when Alice offered her a new client. She’d had blonde highlights done the previous day and her hair had a lovely shine. The locum doctor had given her a new prescription for sleeping tablets and he’d said, with an air of surprise that told her he wasn’t just trying to make her feel better, that she didn’t look forty. When the alarm rang at seven-thirty she realised that she’d had a good night’s sleep. That was always a bonus, like an unexpected present. Her face in the mirror was smooth, her eyes clear; anyone could see why a young man had given her a genuine compliment. She cleaned her little flat before she left for work, finishing with the kitchen floor. No good keeping other people’s places ship-shape if your own’s a mess, she always said.

She was full of energy as she ran up the steps to Alice’s office above the dry cleaner’s. Alice referred to it as the nerve centre. Joan had never understood how she managed to organise so many people from that tiny space. She supposed that Alice was just a natural although she did suffer: her voice was often scratchy with tiredness. Her nails were bitten ragged and she always looked a mess, her clothes thrown on any old how. It was just as well she didn’t often get to meet the public, dressed in her shapeless skirts and limp cardigans. Sometimes Joan used to think she lived in that office. She’d had calls from her at all hours of the day and evening. Alice derived huge enjoyment from creating rotas, writing in capitals with a black, thick-nibbed marker on the wipe-clean board which she divided up into weekly grids. She spent hours puzzling out the most cost-efficient use of staff time. That was her true talent, they’d often agreed. If Napoleon had had you, Alice, Joan would joke, he wouldn’t have lost Waterloo. Joan was a people person with a liking for hands-on contact and could always find a way of getting around even the most awkward of clients. They made a complementary duo and Alice’s acknowledgment of this was evidenced in the post of deputy manager she had created for Joan and the regular, albeit small, wage increases.

The office held one large desk and a sturdy metal filing cabinet with a phone and fax machine on top. There was a microwave, a kettle and a toaster perched on a shelf next to telephone directories. Alice was eating toast spread with jam and dragging a comb through her flyaway hair when Joan arrived. She saw a hair land on the dark jam and shivered; that kind of thing made her skin creep.

Alice didn’t have to soft soap her friend the way Joan knew she did with other staff, to get them to take on cantankerous old dears with more money than sense. She could depend on Joan, especially in a crisis. Some of the staff she employed were here today, gone tomorrow, leaving her in the lurch. A certain number of them just didn’t take to the work, others found something better paid. Joan prided herself on doing a thorough, efficient job. She had never had a day’s sickness, not even when the old dreams made her restless. She would arrive for work feeling heavy-eyed when she’d have liked nothing better than to burrow back under the bedclothes. It was important to her not to let people down. Rich said that she had the kind of face that made you want to trust her. When she tried to get him to explain what he meant he laughed, saying that she was just fishing for compliments. Alice appreciated her dependability. Joan had stepped in at the last minute quite a few times to pull the irons out of the fire; she was the only one willing to look after a boy with AIDS while his parents took a holiday. She had an album full of thank you notes from people she’d helped: the man with the broken pelvis, the couple who had the car smash, the girl with ME, to name but a few.

Working for the bureau was more than simply a job for Joan. Before she was taken on by Alice she had been employed by Mrs Jacobs, a widow in her late sixties whose first name Joan had never known, in an old-fashioned ladies’ clothes shop in Forest Gate. It was one of those places that the years seem to have ignored, a narrow-fronted shop with tangerine-tinted plastic taped inside the window to protect the stock from the sun. Buxom dummies displayed corsets, well-upholstered brassieres, pastel-coloured cardigans and shirtwaister dresses in man-made fabrics. The wooden drawers held a supply of support stockings in a shade of brown that reminded Joan of oxtail soup. By the till was a notice stating, PLEASE DO NOT ASK FOR CREDIT AS REFUSAL EMBARRASSES. Mornings were punctuated by Mrs Jacobs’ steaming Bovril at eleven and in the afternoons the malty odour of her hot milk drink hung over the acrylic jumpers. Joan measured customers’ bosoms and hips and discussed the qualities of triple-panel girdles while her employer wrote out price tags and talked on the phone to members of her Bowls club.

There had never been a great amount of custom and once the ageing female clientele started to die the doorbell rang less and less. Mrs Jacobs hinted that she didn’t need help any more so Joan took to scanning the job centre window.

The forced move had been a blessing in disguise. Living on her own, the evenings used to drag when she worked from nine to five. Alice paid more and Joan liked knowing that she would be out in other people’s houses some weeknights instead of sitting in with a glass of sweet vermouth, keeping the TV on for company while she worked one of her tapestries. Of course, since she’d got to know Rich she wasn’t available on Sundays any more. She had told Alice about the plans she and Rich had made for when they could be together. Alice was the only person she had confided in about their situation. Joan knew that she was discreet and broad-minded. Her own son had been in trouble a couple of times so she lent a sympathetic ear. Back then, Joan would have said that people who had suffered in life were more understanding; that was certainly true of Alice. But afterwards, when everything had fallen apart, she wasn’t sure of anything.

‘I’ve got a new lady for you,’ Alice said that morning, munching. ‘You’ll have to watch your Ps and Qs from the sound of her.’

If someone else had made that remark Joan would have taken offence but she was used to her employer’s sense of humour and knew that Alice appreciated all the times she’d put up with vulgarity and rudeness. The old boys were the worst, exposing themselves, pretending they couldn’t manage their underpants. Some of the old women were no better though; the ones who were losing their minds could be terribly crude. It was just as well that Joan’s attitude was one of live and let live.

Alice leaned forward with the details she’d written down. ‘She sounded very top drawer on the phone, not quite our usual customer. Her name’s Nina Rawle, aged forty-six. She needs someone every day.’

‘What’s up with her?’

‘She didn’t want to go into it when she rang, said she’d discuss things with you. She asked for you in particular, by the way, said someone recommended you.’

Alice gave her a satisfied smile. Word of mouth wasn’t unusual; quite a few clients came the way of the agency through the grapevine, especially people who’d had Joan working for them. Joan liked it when this fact was acknowledged, although she would always be quick to add that she wasn’t one to blow her own trumpet. When she saw Nina Rawle’s Crouch End address she decided that it was probably the woman who’d needed help with the baby a couple of months ago who had put her on to the bureau.

After she’d finished the usual formalities with Alice, Joan headed off to Crouch End. Before she started the car she pulled on her work tabard. Alice was rightly proud of it. She had designed it herself, in apricot polycotton with a cream trimming. It had AA on the front, in fancy gold lettering, which often brought a smile to clients’ faces.

The address Alice had given her turned out to be a big Edwardian house in a leafy street. It was divided into flats and Nina Rawle’s name was on the ground floor bell. Joan rang and waited. There was one of those spy holes in the door so she made sure she placed herself dead in front of it with the AA of her tabard showing. After some time the door opened slowly and a woman with grey shoulder-length hair and the biggest eyes Joan had ever seen was standing there, supporting herself on two sticks.

‘Good morning, I’m Joan Douglas from the Alice Ainsley bureau. Are you Mrs Rawle?’

The woman nodded and gestured with her head, already turning back into the house. ‘Close the door, will you,’ she said in a firm voice, the kind that Joan always thought of as BBC.

She stepped into a beautiful hallway, wide with polished floorboards and a huge gilt-edged mirror along one wall. The wallpaper was dark green, patterned with tiny red flowers, the kind that she guessed cost a day’s wages per roll. Classy, she thought; you’d need a bob or two to buy a place here. She followed Nina Rawle along the hall and through her own front door. Nina walked slowly, head bent, leading Joan to a long, high-ceilinged living room. The walls were freshly painted in pale cream but completely bare. There was a leather two-seater sofa, a recliner easy chair, stacks of boxes and at least two dozen plants in china bowls. The floor featured the same polished boards as in the hall, with one soft Persian rug covering the centre. A small table had one coffee cup and a lap-top computer on it. There was a slightly empty, impermanent feel to the room. Mrs Rawle might be moving in or out, it was hard to tell.

Nina lowered herself into the recliner chair, gesturing Joan to the sofa. The way she fussily settled her sticks next to her leg reminded Joan of an old woman and that was when she realised that this new client resembled her grandmother. She was wearing a dark blue tracksuit that obscured her shape but her body looked thin. Her face was pale; her cheeks marked with pink blotches, the skin stretched so finely that it seemed as if layers had been stripped away. Her neck was scrawny, her big eyes dull. You’re a poorly creature, Joan thought, but she said how lovely the carpet was because she liked to start on a positive note with all her clients.

‘Yes, I think so too,’ Mrs Rawle said, propping her arms on the sides of her chair. Her voice was the strongest thing about her. ‘It’s good of you to come so promptly. I’m sorry I can’t offer you tea but it would take me ages to get it. Maybe you’d like to make us both a cup in a minute.’

‘Of course,’ Joan said, ‘I suppose that’s why I’m here.’

‘You’re not bothered about routines, are you?’

‘Some like them and some don’t,’ she replied, guessing what was on Mrs Rawle’s mind. ‘My older clients prefer them but with younger people it’s different. Basically, I’m here to do whatever you ask.’

Mrs Rawle looked at her coolly. ‘Then could you take off that horrible apron? The colour reminds me of vomit.’

She stared, taken aback. ‘People tend to find it reassuring,’ she said.

‘I’m sure, but I’m not “people”. Really, it’s nasty, I can’t sit and look at it. Reminds me of hospitals, of officious busybodies.’

Joan undid the side ties and pulled it over her head, thinking she had a real nit-picker here. But as Alice never tired of saying, the customer’s always right. Over the years Joan had had a few classy clients like Mrs Rawle. They all shared the same tremendous confidence about coming straight out with what they wanted. Her gran used to say that toffs got their own way through sheer brass neck.

‘There,’ she said, ‘I shan’t wear it here again, I’ll leave it in the car.’

Her client positioned a cushion and sat back. ‘I’d like some tea now. Earl Grey for me with no milk. Please help yourself to whatever you want. I think there are biscuits in the tin. The kitchen’s through there.’ She switched on the portable CD player that was clipped to her waist, hoisting the head set draped around her neck up to her ears.

The kitchen was narrow, no bigger than Joan’s but beautifully fitted out in light oak with marble worktops. It was what Joan called slubbery: littered with bits of food, dirty crockery and saucepans. The tiled floor was tacky and the built-in hob had tomato sauce spilled on it. Her fingers itched to get cracking. Nothing pleased her more than to transform mess and clutter into sparkling order. A side door led from the kitchen to a good-sized sunny conservatory where there was a small pine dining table and four chairs covered in bits and pieces; candlesticks, glasses, papers, more boxes with china and a tea service. Around the floor stood a jumble of tall plants and by the far window a desk littered with folders and magazines. In spite of the mess the place had that understated, expensive sheen that meant the quality spoke through the grime. Joan’s poky flat was homely but she could only afford white melamine cupboards and a thin floor covering in her kitchen. If she let it get the slightest bit untidy it quickly took on a down-at-heel air.

She was about to take a look at the bathroom when the kettle clicked. She had never made Earl Grey before. The tea bag exuded a sickly perfume. She was looking to make a cup of coffee for herself but Mrs Rawle didn’t have any decent instant, just coffee beans so she settled for an ordinary tea bag which came from a Fortnum and Mason box. All the crockery matched, lovely white bone china with a blue flower but it was sticky to the touch and Joan thought that living in this mess must have been depressing for her new client. Then she said to herself that if anyone came into her home and found it in this state she’d be mortified, even if it had got that way because she was ill. But that was your middle-class confidence for you again. She searched for white sugar but there wasn’t any, just brown crystals that would taste of toffee. She remembered that she had a box of sweeteners in her bag.

Mrs Rawle was reading the newspaper but she put it down and switched off her CD player when she saw Joan.

‘Did you find everything?’ she asked.

‘No problem. I’m used to getting my bearings in other people’s houses.’

‘Of course.’

Mrs Rawle’s hair fell from a side parting, just skimming her shoulders. Joan thought it had probably been a dark brown before she went grey. In her opinion long hair didn’t suit middle-aged women, especially if it had faded. She had worn her hair long until she was twenty-eight; then she had it cut and layered and people remarked that she looked eighteen again. Mrs Rawle’s needed a good styling and a colour, one with a touch of bronze or mahogany to give her a lift.

Joan sipped her strong tea and asked her client if she had a garden. She replied that yes, the garden was hers, it went with this flat. She’d only moved in a month ago, that was why things were still disorganised.

‘I overestimated what I could do,’ she explained. ‘That’s partly why I’ve had to call you in. This is new to me, having paid help. What do your clients usually tell you on the first visit?’

‘Well, a bit about themselves and what they want me to do. If they’ve got a medical condition, they let me know if there’s anything I should be aware of.’ Joan preferred to say ‘medical condition’ rather than illness, especially with someone younger like Mrs Rawle. She thought it added a touch of dignity.

Mrs Rawle propped her chin on one hand. ‘I haven’t always looked like this, I didn’t have a collection of tracksuits because they’re easy to put on until fairly recently. I became ill three years ago; my tissues started fighting each other. I’ve got worse in the past six months. Most days I can do very little. That about sums it up. I want you to come in the mornings and get me some breakfast and any shopping I need, then again in the evenings to prepare supper. I need you to help me unpack all this stuff, get organised. I might like to go out once a week if I feel up to it. Does that sound negotiable?’

The way she listed it all, fast and crisp, she might have been asking Joan to be her secretary. She was a cool customer all right. Her big hazel eyes were very direct, almost uncomfortably so. It was only her body that was frail, Joan decided; there was a firm will inside that thin frame.

‘What about lunchtimes?’

She shook her head. ‘I want to have to fend for myself some of the day; can’t be going soft.’

Joan wondered where her family were. Maybe she’s like me, she thought, pretty much alone. There was no wedding ring on her finger but Joan could see a faint white strip there, as if she’d removed one in the recent past. She and her husband must be separated or divorced, Joan decided, unless he’d died. But widows didn’t usually get rid of their wedding rings, they clung to them. Mrs Waverley had been distraught because she couldn’t find her ring when her Harry dropped dead. Joan had searched high and low for it to no avail and in the end had lent her an ordinary signet ring she had been wearing.

‘That all sounds fine,’ Joan said. ‘I can’t do Sundays.’

‘Weekends are covered, this is a Monday-to-Friday arrangement.’

‘Have you had breakfast today?’ It was just on eleven.

Nina Rawle hesitated, then said no. She smiled at Joan, the first smile she’d given, as if she could relax now they had agreed terms. She’d like an egg, she said, and toast.

Joan got her what she wanted, wondering what her talk about her tissues amounted to; maybe she had cancer but couldn’t say it. People came out with all kinds of expressions to disguise illness; a man she had helped who had lung cancer always referred to his dodgy chest. She wiped things over as she waited for the egg to boil and made the toast nice, cutting off the crusts and slicing it into triangular shapes. When you’re ill, she thought, the little touches make a difference. She had noticed a patio rose planted in a tub in the conservatory, a bushy variety with orange-red blossoms. She nipped out and cut a single flower, putting it beside Mrs Rawle’s plate on the tray.

‘Oh,’ she said when she saw it, ‘how lovely! I’m not used to this kind of luxury.’

‘When I’m helping someone I like to attend to the details,’ Joan told her. ‘Now, tuck in before it cools down. Something tasty and hot is just the ticket when you’re not feeling too chipper.’

Mrs Rawle looked taken aback but she laughed. ‘Thank you, I will. Have you been doing this kind of work long?’

‘Six years, just on.’ Joan moved a plant which had tilted over on top of another.

‘And do you like it?’

‘Oh, yes, I love it. There’s always something new and I like meeting people.’

‘Some of them must be difficult, though – demanding.’

‘Well, sometimes. But I try to see the best side of people. You have to, and most clients are decent when you get to know them.’

‘Do you live near here?’

Joan chuckled. ‘Oh, I couldn’t afford this area. I’ve got a place in Leyton.’

‘Leyton.’ Mrs Rawle looked puzzled. ‘I don’t think I’ve been there.’

‘It’s okay, the only drawback is there’s no tube near but I’ve got Bessie – that’s what I call my car – so I’m not dependent on public transport. Now, shall I pop and tidy the kitchen while you’re eating?’

‘Please do. And could you see to the bathroom, too? I make quite a mess when I’m showering.’

There was an archway at the end of the kitchen, leading to a small tiled hallway. The bedroom was to the right, the bathroom on the left. It had a shower unit with a fitted seat, a bath, bidet and washbasin, all in the green of mint-flavoured chewing gum.

Quite a mess was an understatement. The floor was greasy with water and hair, toothpaste and soap clogged the basin. There was a perfume in the air that Joan recognised immediately. She lifted a bar of creamy soap and sniffed. Lily of the Valley. She could see that Nina Rawle had talc, deodorant and an atomiser, all from Selfridges. She used to buy Gran a tin of Lily of the Valley talcum powder from the Co-op for every birthday and Christmas. On the front of the yellow tin was a spray of dark green leaves with drooping delicate white flowers. Joan had thought it was the height of classiness. Gran’s name was Lily and she used to pull the front of her dress forward and shake the talc down her chest, saying, ‘Lily by name and Lily by smell!’ Then she’d tell Joan that she would be the most perfumed lady at the opera which would set her granddaughter giggling as Gran never went anywhere except to the whist drive. When Gran died and Joan was sorting her clothes, drifts of the snowy powder crept from the seams of her dresses and the perfume was all around her. Inhaling the scent of the soap took her right back to their dark little bedroom in Bromley with the gentleman’s oak wardrobe and the commode disguised as a chair. If Joan thought that she detected any omens that day, finding the Lily of the Valley seemed a good one. Then she gave herself a shake; she wasn’t being paid to stand and daydream.

She spent a good hour cleaning without even touching the conservatory. By then it was getting near the time she had to be at Mr Warren’s, so she washed up Mrs Rawle’s dishes and arranged to come back at six-thirty to cook supper.

‘There’s food in the fridge for tonight,’ Nina Rawle said. ‘I prefer light meals, soups and soufflés, snacks on toast, that kind of thing. I’d like some fruit. Could you possibly pick up a cantaloupe for this evening?’

Joan had never heard of a cantaloupe but she supposed they would have one in the supermarket. As Nina Rawle gave her the money she yawned, eyes watering. ‘Do excuse me,’ she said, ‘I don’t sleep well at night so I snatch naps during the day. I’m ready for one now.’

‘I sleep badly sometimes,’ Joan told her, ‘I have worrying dreams. Have you tried sleeping tablets?’

Nina looked uneasy. ‘Yes, but I don’t like taking them. Maybe I’m anxious that I won’t wake up.’

Joan didn’t believe in encouraging that kind of talk. ‘You’re just a bit down,’ she told Nina. ‘Try and get some rest and things will look brighter. Meeting someone new takes it out of you.’

Mrs Rawle gave another, fainter smile. ‘Oh, you haven’t tired me. I think we’ll get on, don’t you?’

Joan picked up her bag. ‘I speak as I find, and I think we can rub along very well, Mrs Rawle.’

‘We won’t stand on ceremony,’ came the reply. ‘You must call me Nina.’

‘Then you call me Joan.’

Nina Rawle was making her way carefully to the sofa as Joan left, leaning on her sticks, old before her time. She wore soft, Chinese-style slippers and the plastic soles made the lightest of taps on the floorboards, like a cat’s paws. There were only six years between them but there could have been twenty. Count your blessings, Joan told herself, heading for Bessie; you’ve got a good job and a neat little flat and Rich. She took a quick peek at the photo she kept inside her purse before starting the engine. Mr Marshall had kindly taken a snap of her and Rich with her own Instamatic. When Alice saw it she said they looked like peas in a pod because they both had round faces and Rich’s hair was the same shape, square-cut and layered. He came out quite blond in the photo although when you saw him in person there was a tiny bit of grey at the sides. Joan had warned him, as soon as she had her hands on him she’d tint that out. Mr Marshall laughed when he heard that and said could Joan pop in and do his for him sometime?

Sitting there outside Nina Rawle’s flat Joan thought that you met some good people in this world: Mr Marshall had been kind to Rich and of course Alice had been a brick about the whole thing. On the other hand, Mr Warren, the client she was about to see, was a real moaner; never a please or thank you but always quick to criticise if everything wasn’t just so. She gave Rich a kiss and tucked him away. There were another three days to go before she’d see him again but one of the advantages of having such involving work was that it made time fly.


2 (#ulink_144ffcce-8f84-5847-a993-64e1e2dde25e)

JOAN (#ulink_144ffcce-8f84-5847-a993-64e1e2dde25e)

Joan spent the first week with Nina Rawle helping her to get her flat organised. Nina didn’t want to be taken out anywhere; she said she’d rather concentrate on ridding the place of the stacked cardboard boxes. She could do very little herself. The least exertion tired her. By the time Joan arrived each morning at nine she’d showered but the energy she had expended left her exhausted for an hour afterwards. Her hair never looked quite clean and at times Joan could see a sticky crust of lather on the crown of her head. Joan wondered about offering to help her in the bathroom but Nina had a reserve that made her think better of it.

While Nina sat reading the paper or listening to music or the radio Joan prepared her breakfast. She liked a small bowl of muesli or a poached egg on toast and fresh fruit; a segment of melon or a peeled orange or grapes. Joan had never come across this eating fruit for breakfast before; to her, fruit was for puddings or for when she was watching her weight and then she ate apples. For evening meals Nina requested blended home-made soups, pieces of chicken or fish with steamed vegetables or cheese or tomato soufflé followed by more fruit. She liked two glasses of wine in the evenings, French or Australian red from the rack in the kitchen. She invited Joan to have a glass, too, but it wasn’t to her liking. If Joan drank wine she chose a sparkling sweet variety; Lambrusco was her favourite: those bubbles tingling on her tongue spelled luxury.

At first, Joan found the shopping nerve-wracking. Nina’s list sent her searching for star fruit, lychees, artichokes, smoked applewood and goat’s cheeses, Greek olives, red snapper and lemongrass. Joan had never taken much interest in cooking and, as most of her clients were old, they liked the kinds of dishes her gran had preferred: tinned steak-and-kidney pies with mushy peas, jellied eels, liver and bacon with a thick cornflour gravy, sausage and mash and shepherd’s pie. They were meals she could make with her eyes closed.

She felt anxious for the first few days, examining the produce at the delicatessen counter in the supermarket, but there was a kind, motherly woman there who helped her out. Joan explained that she wasn’t used to this sort of shopping; with me, she said, it’s a quick whip-round for a jar of coffee, a couple of ready dinners, a boxed pizza and a packet of frozen peas. The assistant laughed, tucking a straying hair under her cap and told Joan that she could hardly keep up herself with the new lines they were always introducing. They had to have what was called familiarisation, she revealed; sessions with the section manager where they learned about the product and how to pronounce its name. When she was a young housewife you bought either Cheddar or Leicester cheese. Now it was Italian this and Norwegian that, soft and hard, pasteurised and unpasteurised and were we any the better off for it? Joan was reassured that she wasn’t the only one who’d never come across some of these alien foodstuffs.

It was years since she had been to a proper fishmonger’s. She used to go to the one in the High Street with Gran on Friday mornings to buy slabs of the waxy yellow haddock that she then poached in milk. Gran had stomach ulcers and ate a lot of what she called slop food: junkets, custards and milky sauces. One of her favourite dishes was fresh white bread squares sprinkled with sugar and steeped in warm milk with an egg whipped in. Nourishing, she called it. She used to feed that to Eddie, Joan’s brother, when his chest was bad but she never made it again after he’d gone. Joan couldn’t imagine what Nina Rawle would make of such a concoction. She specified the fish shop where she wanted Joan to buy the red snapper, salmon and trout she liked. The raw smell of the place made Joan gag; give me a boil-in-the-bag kipper any day, she thought, avoiding the staring cod eyes. The assistant who served her had wet chilled hands and his eyes bulged too. The right one had a cast, the pupil pale as if it had been bleached. She hurried in and out of there.

Nina took it for granted that Joan was familiar with all these foods and although this unnerved her it also afforded her a certain pride; she liked to think that she could keep her end up in any situation. When Nina handed her the shopping list Joan glanced at it and nodded. Out in the car she would sit and read through. Unfamiliar items such as Jarlsberg or Prosciutto made her frown but then she headed for the woman on the delicatessen and all was explained. Nina also gave exact instructions about how she wanted things cooked, which was just as well as Joan wouldn’t have known one end of an artichoke from another. She had never come across some of the kitchen utensils but she was quick off the mark with anything practical and worked out how to operate the asparagus steamer and the chicken brick. As she grilled monkfish or turned bean sprouts in a wok moistened with sesame oil she thought that she would serve some of these dishes to Rich and impress him. He’d grown up by the coast in Frinton so she imagined that he might be partial to seafood. He complained about the muck he’d had to eat over the years; there was never enough and it was tasteless, worse than school dinners. Joan wouldn’t try him with the fruit, though. She knew he liked what he called proper puddings: jam roly-polys and treacle sponges with thick custard.

After Nina had eaten her breakfast they got on with the boxes. Joan knelt on the floor and Nina sat by her in her chair, sneezing now and again as dust rose. If there was a spring chill in the air she pulled her old woollen shawl around her shoulders, plaiting the fringes over her knuckles. Sometimes Nina wore dark glasses when the light was particularly bright. She had them attached to a silver chain and they dangled on her chest when she took them off.

She had worked out ways of saving energy and keeping things to hand: there was the CD player clipped to her waist and the headphones around her neck. She also had a leather belt of the kind that Joan had seen carpenters store their tools in where she kept her tablets, eye drops, glucose sweets, tissues, a hip flask and a slim volume of Keats. She sucked glucose constantly, saying that it bucked her up. When Joan mentioned that the sweets might rot her teeth, she said flippantly that she didn’t think she was going to need teeth for that many more years. Joan was shocked, especially by the casual way Nina came out with it. She felt herself colouring up and said something about it being a warm day.

The boxes were mainly full of books, dozens of novels. Some of them were old, creased paperbacks with dark green and orange covers. Two boxloads were in French. Joan recognised the actor with the big nose on the front of one.

‘Goodness,’ she said to Nina, ‘have you really read all of these?’

‘Yes, most of them more than once.’

Joan flicked through one, glancing at the strange words. ‘I’m not much of a reader, although I like a magazine story. The best are those ones with a twist at the end. What language is this?’

‘Italian. I was a university lecturer in languages, French and Italian, for twenty years.’

‘Did you have to give up work because of your illness?’

Nina nodded. ‘These are just a fraction of the books I used to own. I got rid of a load of stuff before I moved here.’

‘I try to read,’ Joan told her, ‘but I can never settle for long. I always notice a bit of dusting that’s needed or a cushion cover that wants mending.’

Nina raised an eyebrow. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever mended a cushion cover.’

‘There’s real satisfaction in doing a neat job on a seam.’ Joan rubbed a book jacket with the duster. ‘I suppose I’d better watch my grammar, now that I know I’m around a teacher,’ she said, laughing. ‘You know, no dropping my aitches.’

‘I’ve just realised, I’ve put the cart before the horse here,’ Nina said. ‘I need bookshelves for all these volumes you’re unpacking.’

This fact had crossed Joan’s mind already but she had assumed that Nina had something organised on that front. ‘Those alcoves would fit shelves very nicely,’ she suggested. ‘We could get free-standing ones at the DIY place or if you want fitted I could do it, but I’d have to borrow a drill.’

Nina shrugged. ‘No, I can’t be bothered with drilling, that sounds too permanent. Where did you learn to put up shelves?’

‘I taught myself out of a book when I got my flat.’

‘You live on your own?’

‘That’s right, I’m a single gal.’ Not for much longer though, she thought; just three months to go. She and Rich would need a bigger place to live eventually but her little nest would be fine to start with. Now that it was all beginning to seem more real, she had started to imagine how it would be in the evenings, the two of them watching TV over a takeaway or deciding to catch a film. Sometimes she pictured him there on the sofa and chatted to him, telling him her plans.

‘Let’s go to the DIY place then,’ Nina said suddenly. ‘I’ll just get a jacket. You have time, do you?’

‘You’re my only client today.’ Mrs Cousins, who she usually visited on Tuesdays had died two nights previously but she wouldn’t mention that, of course. She found a tape measure and sized up the alcoves while Nina went to the bathroom. When she returned she smelled of Lily of the Valley.

Joan told her it was the perfume her grandmother had used. ‘Funny how a scent can bring a person and lots of little things about them back to you, isn’t it?’ she said.

Nina buttoned her jacket up, even though the day was warm. Her poor circulation meant that she felt chilly when other people were taking a layer of clothing off. She nodded agreement but offhandedly, as if she wasn’t paying attention. Joan hoped that she hadn’t thought she was being compared to an old lady and taken offence.

The superstore was only ten minutes away and the mid-morning traffic flowed lightly.

‘You’re a good driver,’ Nina observed, ‘very confident.’

‘Ten out of ten?’ Joan asked.

‘Well, nine and a half. It’s always important to leave a margin for improvement, give a student something to aim for.’

Joan was getting used to her dry way of talking. She could just see her at the front of a class. She’d have been the kind not to take any nonsense, although Joan supposed that university students didn’t misbehave.

‘Did you like teaching?’ she asked.

‘Oh, yes. But it all seems a long time ago. It’s only a year since I gave up work and yet I feel as if I haven’t stood in front of a group of students for much longer. I’d be frightened to now, I’ve lost the knack.’ She laughed. ‘It was hard going for my colleagues at my leaving party, they didn’t know what to say. It was difficult for them to wish me a happy retirement, after all. People generally don’t like illness, it makes them uneasy, reminds them their own lives are fragile.’

‘That makes me think of a little verse I know,’ Joan said: ‘“We only know that each day bears, Joys and sorrows, sometimes tears.” Do you know Grace Ashley’s poems? I love them, I cut them out of magazines and put them on my fridge; I always carry a few in my bag.’

‘No, I don’t think I’ve come across her.’

‘They’re only a couple of lines, each one, but they make you pause. She really sums things up in a nutshell. I find them comforting.’

‘I think I’ll stick to a glass of good wine for comfort. Which reminds me, I’d like to stock up at the off-licence later.’

When they parked Nina handed Joan her sticks, then pulled herself out of the seat, holding onto the door frame. Her fingers were long and bony. Joan heard her knuckles crack as she put her weight on them. Her nails looked at odds with the puckered skin around them; they were oval, beautifully shaped with perfect half-moons at the cuticles.

They walked slowly into the store and made for the shelving section. Nina went straight to the pine and selected what she wanted within minutes, a golden Scandinavian wood. The two sets of shelves came to four hundred pounds. Joan thought it must be nice to go for the best without hesitating. Maybe once Rich was in a job they would be able to rip out the chipboard in her living room and have pine. If he was able to get a job; no, she wasn’t going to think negative thoughts, she was going to put her best foot forward.

That evening Joan assembled the flat-pack shelves in the alcoves and cooked turkey with baby sweetcorn and broccoli for Nina’s meal. When she carried it through on a tray Nina was pouring a glass of wine for her, a sparkling white.

‘Here,’ she said. ‘I bought a couple of bottles of the stuff you like. Tastes like lemonade to me, but each to her own. Cheers!’

She looked exhausted after her outing. Mauveish smudges ringed her eyes and Joan noticed her hands trembling on her sticks. She was terribly touched by the wine.

‘You’d no need to buy this for me,’ she said, sipping.

‘It’s nothing, it humours me. Where are we up to with the books? The Ms?’

Joan was lining them up on the shelves in alphabetical order. ‘Alberto Morave next,’ she said. ‘Is he interesting?’

‘Moravia. I think so. The turkey is delicious. What do you have in the evenings? Do you visit family?’

‘No, I’ve nobody close, they’ve passed on. I usually eat on my own, a pizza or a chop, something quick. I quite like those low-calorie, ready-made meals. You can pop them in the microwave and they’re done in a couple of minutes. It’s not much fun, cooking for one.’

‘No. I used to find it a bore before I got married. The university had a staff restaurant which was excellent so I ate in there most days.’

‘Are you divorced then?’

‘Separated. Have you ever been married?’

‘Yes, only for a year, in my twenties. It didn’t work out. I don’t like living alone. I pretend to; you have to, don’t you? It’s like what you said about illness. People get embarrassed if you admit you’re lonely. I didn’t think Mr Right would ever show up but he has and we’re marrying soon.’ She heard Rich’s voice telling her it wouldn’t be long now. They planned to go to the registry office the week after he came out. Joan would have married him and waited for him – she knew other women in a similar position did – but Rich insisted that he wanted to be a free man before they tied the knot. Joan wasn’t going to explain any of that to Nina, though. There were certain things you didn’t confide to clients if you valued your job.

Nina gave a pained smile. ‘Sometimes it doesn’t work out even when you do meet the right person. It’s all a gamble, it can tear you apart.’

‘You’re tired, I reckon,’ Joan said, thinking she sounded low. Her voice was flat and there was a slide in it. ‘You’ve done too much today. A good night’s sleep will put a smile back on your face.’

Nina lowered her head and finished her turkey. She dozed for a while, the tray still on her lap. Joan didn’t move it for fear of waking her. She carried on quietly with the books, wondering how anyone could read this lot, thinking of all the hours of sitting still it would mean. Like her, Rich wasn’t a reader, which was a shame because it would have been a way of passing those long hours he complained about. Joan had to be on the go, doing something; a tapestry, some mending, cleaning windows, stripping the cooker. She was just like Gran that way, always up and active. She had never seen Gran sitting for long: ‘I’m as busy as a hen with one chicken,’ she used to say, zipping from room to room. The day before she died she was turning a mattress. Joan thought of Nina, alone here at night with just her books for company and little else to look forward to. It made a sad picture. She chatted to Rich inside her head, telling him that she was going to get on with decorating the living room when she got home. The whole place was going to be revamped before he arrived; she’d drawn up a timetable. The last time she had been to see him she’d taken colour charts and they’d chosen the emulsion. Rich suggested that she should wait until he was out and he’d help her but she said no, she wanted the place just so from their very first day together.

Joan and her brother Eddie went to live with their widowed grandmother in Bromley when she was three and he was eleven. Their father had died of a heart attack just before Joan’s birth and their mother was felled by cancer when Joan turned three. Gran had a two-bedroomed terraced house. She and Joan slept in the front bedroom, Eddie in the smaller back one. Gran worked long hours in the rag trade but she ran a tight ship at home and they all had their domestic jobs. Gran couldn’t stand even a speck of dust in the house. When the coalman came to shunt his sacks into the bin outside she covered the floors and furniture in the back room with sheets of newspaper. She craved an end-of-terrace house so that he could take his filthy, blackened hessian bags up the side alley but none ever came up for rent. She’d hover around him, warning him not to touch anything, monitoring his mucky boots. Sometimes, to annoy her, he’d pretend to lose his balance and her hands would fly to her face in silent agony.

The house was chilly during the day but on a winter’s evening, with the coal fire well stoked, there was nowhere cosier. When Gran arrived back from work they would make pilchards on toast and she’d tell them how she’d machined twenty skirts that day, or stitched three dozen collars. Sometimes she brought back clothes she’d got cheap because they were seconds. Joan was the first girl in the street to have a pair of loon pants and Eddie cut a dash in hipster trousers when they were just reaching the shops.

Joan was fifteen when Eddie disappeared. By then he had rented a tiny flat in Islington but he often stayed with them on a Friday or Saturday night and his room was kept ready for him. Gran would put a hot water bottle between his sheets on winter weekends to make sure that they were properly aired. His chest, weakened by bouts of childhood asthma, was easily affected by damp.

After they heard the terrible news Gran insisted on maintaining his room just as it was on the last Sunday morning they had seen him. She literally wasted away in front of Joan’s eyes, worn out with grieving for him. Joan would hear her crying in the night, deep sobs against the pillow in her bed by the window, sobs that went on month after month. Joan stopped crying after a couple of weeks. She seemed to have used up all her tears. She felt dry and tight inside and remote, as if nothing much would ever matter again. She didn’t know how to comfort her gran. She was a young fifteen, tongue-tied and awkward. What could she find to say to a woman of sixty-six who had raised two families and outlived a child and grandchild?

Her grandmother died when Joan was eighteen. She was alone in the world then apart from an aunt who’d rowed with Gran and kept her distance and a couple of cousins who’d moved out to Essex, shaking the dust of the inner city from their feet. They had never been one of those close cockney families who were supposed to inhabit London. Joan would wonder if those families ever truly existed – she had never met any of them. At times it occurred to her that she had been handed a raw deal, orphaned and then deprived of the two people closest to her. The sight of her single plate and cup on the kitchen table could make her heart knock.

Gran left her exactly one hundred pounds. Joan put it in a building society and carried on renting the house. She had left school at sixteen with four O-levels. The teachers said that she was good enough to stay on and do secretarial training, maybe head to college eventually. Eddie had been of that opinion too; he’d said that when the time came he’d help her choose a course. But then he’d gone, everything changed and Joan couldn’t see herself as college material. She didn’t have much self-confidence to start with and what had happened to Eddie made her inclined to keep her head down. The world seemed an unpredictable place. She preferred to tackle the small, domestic issues of life, move in a familiar groove where there were certainties. That was why the agency work suited her so well; things had to be done on set days at set times and this pattern rarely varied. The wider scene – politics, the environment, world problems, the chaos resulting from wars and famine – she ignored; other people were welcome to worry about and deal with those problems. She never bought a newspaper and watched only variety shows, soap operas and films on TV.

When she left school she went to work in a bakery, then in the ladies’ clothes shop where she stayed until she moved to Alice’s agency. At twenty-two she married Bernard Douglas, who had been in her class at school and turned up at her door now and again when he wasn’t driving long-distance lorries. It hadn’t lasted long and she had felt relief tinged with only a shade of melancholy when he had written from Düsseldorf to say he’d got a job based there and he wanted a divorce. She had married him because of panic, seeing that other women of her age were setting up home, choosing curtains and carpets. His motives were unclear. His absences had pervaded the house and even when he was there he imposed so little of himself on it that he left no vacuum when he took off for a trip to the continent. He was capable in a slow, unwitting way, good at practical tasks and she had confused this with dependability, ignoring the evidence that a man who chose to let his work regularly take him far from home might not have domestic interests at heart. The divorce left her with mended window latches, a new drain pipe and guttering. Occasionally she would recall the stale plastic-and-oil smell of his lorry cab and the duty-free brandy fumes he breathed on her as he came through the door.

Resolutely she put her mistake behind her, saved regular amounts and eventually had enough for the deposit on her flat in Leyton. It was on the first floor of a three-storey fifties block, one-bedroomed with no garden but she’d loved it the moment she had set eyes on it. There was a Grace Ashley verse that said:

Give me a room

And I will paint it with love’s loving colours,

Cushion it with heart’s ease

And it will be our cherished home.

Joan had worked those lines into a tapestry when she moved to her flat. It hung in its frame on the living-room wall. She went and read it over to herself on that night when Nina had appeared depressed about her marriage. It meant even more now that she was preparing a home for herself and Rich. The paint for the living room was standing ready inside the front door. They had selected white with a hint of buttercup for the walls and deep yellow gloss for the skirting board and radiator. Joan had spent the previous weekend stripping off the old wallpaper and putting up lining paper. When she told Alice what she was doing, her friend had offered to come and give her a hand with the painting. She was lonely herself, that was why she spent so much time at work. Joan understood that her business had replaced her family, who had abandoned her. Her one son had become a drug user, then joined a road protest group and was living up a tree somewhere. Her husband had taken off with his optician years ago, clearing out their joint bank account the day he left. According to Alice, all that had remained of fifteen years of marriage were his golf clubs and a stack of pornographic magazines stashed in the back of the wardrobe. It was generous of her to root so strongly for Joan and Rich, advising that they should grab whatever happiness came their way. Some people’s scars made them resentful of their friends’ good fortune.

Alice arrived promptly at eight that evening, dressed in overalls. She had brought her own roller and tray so that they could do two walls each.

‘How are you getting on with that new woman, Nina Rawle?’ she asked as they worked.

‘Okay. I thought she was a bit stand-offish to start with but it’s just her manner. She’s very weak physically. It must be terrible to be able to do so little when you’re comparatively young.’

‘What’s the matter with her?’

‘Something wrong with her tissues, that’s all she’s said so far. She moves like an old woman. I think she’s quite depressed.’

‘You’ll be good for her then, Joan, you’ll chivvy her along. We’re survivors, you and me, aren’t we? Get on and make the best of things.’

‘You have to, don’t you?’

‘Suppose so. Any vermouth going?’

Joan poured two glasses and they took a quick breather while they sipped.

‘It’s a lovely colour,’ Alice said. ‘Warm. I hope Rich appreciates all this. I’ll be having words with him if he doesn’t.’

‘I don’t think you need worry about that. He’s a smashing man, Alice, he really is. Will you be a witness when we get married? His brother’s agreed to be the other one.’

Alice raised her glass. ‘’Course I will. It will be a pleasure, as long as you promise me you won’t want to do anything daft like give up your job.’

‘No chance. I love the job. Anyway, we’ll need the money.’

They carried on painting, finishing by ten-thirty. Alice washed out the rollers while Joan wiped splashes off the skirting board.

‘That Nina Rawle,’ Alice said, ‘did she tell you who recommended you?’

‘No. It was probably Jenny Crisp, the young woman with the baby in Crouch End.’

Alice shook her head. ‘That’s what I’d assumed, but it wasn’t her. I know because she rang today and she said she hadn’t mentioned us to anyone. I’m sure we haven’t any other customers from Crouch End.’

‘I don’t know then. I must be more famous than I thought!’

Alice was sniffing the air. ‘There’s a very scented smell in this kitchen, sort of musky. What is it, some kind of air freshener?’

Joan pointed to the cantaloupe sitting on top of the fridge. ‘It’s that melon. Strong, isn’t it? They were on a special offer, I thought I’d try one.’

They had another vermouth as a nightcap and Alice left. Joan knew she wouldn’t be going straight home, though; she’d be calling at the office to check the answer-phone. She couldn’t wait to introduce Alice to Rich; she knew that they’d like each other. Her life felt good. For the first time in many years, everything was coming together. She raised her glass to Rich’s photo in the kitchen and said goodnight, sleep tight to him, as she always did.


3 (#ulink_8fc09e3d-7756-5e29-a6fb-eb96c0b10cc1)

NINA (#ulink_8fc09e3d-7756-5e29-a6fb-eb96c0b10cc1)

‘Cara Majella,

‘I wonder if you are asleep now in your dormitory, breathing in dry Ethiopian air? I have no idea of time-zone differences between our respective continents. You’re probably toiling in the daylight, helping with irrigation or holding a health class. You used to refer to sleep as “John O’ Dreams”. It was a name you’d got from your mother, one of those comforting childhood sayings that adults cleave to. “I’m ready for John O’Dreams,” you would yawn at the end of a long evening in the students’ union bar, shaking your hair out. When I was bleary-eyed after listening to one of Finn’s lengthy position papers on Irish capitalism you would say that John O’Dreams was after me. He would steal gently into a room, unnoticed, relaxing tired muscles, softly closing the eyes. My mother used to warn me that the Sandman was on his way. When I was reluctant to settle down, she would say that she could hear his footsteps on the stairs. He was as bold as John O’Dreams was self-effacing, a threatening figure in my childhood imagination who threw stinging dust under the eyelids.

‘“Sleep offers us escape from grinding reality. It says, ‘that was then, this is now”. A balance evolves through sleep, an acknowledgement of the need for order. People say “sleep on it” when they mean that you need time to consider something, put a shape to it. That’s the kind of truism my new acquaintance Joan Douglas would utter: “sleep on it, things always seem different in the morning”. I’m sure that for most people, those with everyday anxieties, it does happen; they wake and smile, realising that in the light of day, things aren’t so bad after all.

‘Depriving someone of sleep is a form of punishment or torture; apart from the physical effects, it disorders their world and makes them crazy. But then we both knew that back in 1970; do you recall that we demonstrated outside an RUC barracks, protesting about the harsh treatment of political prisoners? We sprayed the reinforced concrete wall with yellow paint to signify police cowardice and ran before they could catch us.

‘I woke at two o’clock this morning and I immediately thought, some of us punish ourselves and some of us punish others. My father punished himself for losing his job by drinking his way to an early death. My mother punished him for never being the husband she aspired to by criticising every move he made. You punished yourself for what we did by becoming an exiled voluntary worker. I have delivered punishment on two fronts, pursuing retribution against myself for what I did with you and against Martin for loving me when I didn’t deserve to be loved.

‘One form of my punishment has been to wake at two every morning since the day I got married fifteen years ago. As my eyes open I look at the clock face and there it is, exactly two, as surely as if I had set the alarm. John O’Dreams and the Sandman linked arms and vanished from my life without warning on my wedding night. It is as if I knew that I wasn’t supposed to have the comfort and pleasure that Martin wanted to give me. The memory that lies always just beneath the surface was rising up in the silence of the night. Why should you sleep, it asked, why should you know warmth and companionship? So instead of the sanctuary I had hoped for, my marriage delivered me to bleak stretches of the night when I would lie and watch Martin sleeping. Contemplating another person sleep while you ache with tiredness becomes a kind of torture. There he was sailing a balmy sea of dreams while I stood shivering on a desolate shore. I knew all the little noises Martin made, the snuffles and sighs; I counted the number of times he turned in an hour and the pattern of his movements on the mattress. I tried copying his breathing, wondering if I could catch on to the shirt tails of his sleep and join it.

‘I could never make the night my friend. It pressed down on me, a heavy, alien blanket. I had intimate knowledge of all the phases of wakefulness. I could have written a thesis on them. First the sudden, dry-throated exit from sleep, eyes heavy but watchful, then the awareness of a rapid heartbeat, the twitch of tired limbs, the efforts to find a magic position that would lure slumbers back; left side, stomach, back, right side, foetal curl, left side again. As the minutes slid into hours there would be unsuccessful attempts to clear the mind, the random racing and crashing together of thoughts. Often in the thick darkness I would see you, your hair misty with smoke from the turf fire, jazzing on Finn’s grand piano or playing duets with him. Snatches of the songs you used to sing echoed in my head, particularly that rousing chorus from Brecht:

“So left, two three,

So left, two three,

To the task that we must do;

March on in the Workers’ United Front

For you are a worker too.”

‘I could hear the thump of your ankle boot as you kept time on the ancient carpet, dislodging years of dust: left, two three, left, two three. The march would go on and on, resounding along the years.

‘Sometimes I would be awake for three hours, sometimes four; on a very bad night, five. I learned the different qualities of darkness, from the impenetrable blackness of two AM through the thinning greyness that preceded dawn and finally the pale, lemony light that illuminated the striped curtains. In the summer months I regularly heard the day stealing in. A feeling of panic would take over as the first birds whistled or a milk float whined along the street; another episode of my life was about to begin and I had had no respite from the previous one. All order, all balance had vanished. Then I might cry from sheer frustration, tears of tension and self-pity, but very quiet tears so that Martin wouldn’t wake. My poor Martin. God knows what he made of it all, watching me mutate into a semi-zombie. He must have thought the woman he’d married was cursed with a schizoid personality.

‘On campus each day I would lock my office door at lunchtime and doze in my chair, the kind of sleep where you are half alert to voices and noises, where you twitch and jitter. My watch alarm would warn me when my time was up and I would come to, dazed and hot, eyes pricking. I took to not eating in the middle of the day because food made me more sluggish. My afternoons were spent sleep walking. I delivered lectures through an obscuring haze. It was as if I was inside a tank and my students were sitting on the other side of the scummy glass. I have no idea how I managed to keep going for so long. The students were kind and long-suffering. It is just as well that I had to resign when I did. No doubt in these days of mission statements and quality monitoring one of them would eventually have complained about me and I would have been inspected and found wanting, perhaps dismissed.

‘I have separated from Martin. I left him some months ago. I was mistaken if I hoped that giving him up would mean that I could sleep again. Deep down I believed that if I denied myself my husband, made a conscious sacrifice, some pity might be afforded me. My gesture of self-denial might be taken into account, weighed on unseen scales and go some way towards restoring the order I had helped to disrupt. But of course there is no unseen dispenser or order and justice – the responsibility for that lies within ourselves. And so I continue to wake at two. I suppose that the habit of fifteen years is hard to break. Returning to a single, friendless bed made no difference. It simply meant that I had no one to watch but myself, no breathing to listen to but my own.

‘I lied to the woman you will hear more about, Joan Douglas. She asked if I had tried sleeping tablets and I said I had. I knew that if I told the truth she would have encouraged me to get some; I would have had to listen to advice about breaking the pattern of insomnia. I’m sure that at some point she would have said, “You won’t know yourself once you’ve had a couple of unbroken nights”. Joan is one of those people who needs to think that every problem has a solution. I won’t allow myself sleeping tablets because I don’t deserve them. I deserve to lie awake and contemplate shadowy demons.

‘As the clock ticked this morning I imagined Joan lying asleep in her bed, snugly lulled by her own medication. She confessed that she is sometimes wakeful. Any wakefulness you experience will have skulking in its depths our shared memory, that icy hammer that shatters the warm layers of unconsciousness. I have no idea how the passage of time might have assisted you in reshaping that memory. I know that when I turn on my computer I will find exactly what I committed to it previously but the mind shifts and transforms, illuminating the past with the light of present experience. I only know that I can describe what happened in a certain place at a certain time.

‘We last saw each other in 1972. The annual letters we have exchanged since then have been paltry things, lists of domestic trivia. We have been unable to let each other go but we never allude to what we did. Our short notes have summarised the passing years; my teaching and marriage, my ill health, your involvement in crop planning and health promotion. Neither of us ever mentioned Finn until 1994 when you wrote that you’d heard from a cousin that he had been shot with two other men by a Protestant paramilitary. It was a pub shooting and that phenomenon all too familiar in Northern Ireland, a case of mistaken identity, the drinkers taken for IRA activists. That was all; one stark sentence sandwiched between paragraphs about the orphanage you were working in. “Peter said he was sure he heard the name Butler on the radio report.” When I read it I felt a gentle lift of the heart; he had, after all, been the instigator of what we did. He had presented us with the idea, urged us on, set up the plan. Then, as I re-read the news I thought, that deals with him, that settles part of the account. Now, what about us? His going was like a crack of light entering a dark room; the knowledge that he was dead allowed me seriously to consider what I should do to resolve my own unchallenged guilt. And so I pondered and recognised that no amount of charitable work or self punishment would do. I came to the decision that has prompted this letter and will unravel the past.

‘Joan, my new paid helper, will maintain me while I marshal my energy to write. She will be here again in the morning with her exhaustingly breezy manner and skirt that is just a little too short, making her plump knees look oddly naked. She will say how nice the bookshelves are looking now or aren’t the roses in the conservatory coming on a treat or I’ll feel better once I’ve got a nice breakfast down me. I will smile at her and when she’s bustled to the kitchen I will sink my head onto my chest and breathe deeply.

‘When she arrived the first time, wearing an awful apron, I was amazed at what I had let myself in for. I hid my feelings behind a businesslike mask. Cowardly, I almost told her that I had changed my mind or that we wouldn’t suit each other. I nearly cried out when she said that she’d have to be careful with her grammar now that she knew that I had been a teacher. Joan is the kind of person I would normally avoid, one of life’s surface optimists and lover of shallow wisdoms. When she touches her cheek and says that she speaks as she finds or you have to put your best foot forward, I want to run and hide.

‘But I won’t run, because I need Joan, I am no longer able to function alone. The days are too onerous without someone to do all those time-consuming tasks that can easily take hours when one moves at a snail’s speed. I am willing to endure recitals of the dreadful poet she likes, one Grace Ashley. Joan informed me that she has six teddy bears on her bed and in the early hours of today I pictured them watching her, open-eyed, just as I used to watch Martin. Then I reached into the drawer under my bed and took out this lap-top computer, a leaving present from my fellow lecturers. It wasn’t a surprise gift, I had told the head of languages what I wanted. As the parcel was handed to me I surveyed the uneasy figures in the room, standing awkwardly with their paper cups of cheap wine. I thought how horror-struck they would be if they had an inkling of the story that was going to be typed on their token of farewell, how their embarrassed sympathy would turn to outrage. An echo of the kinds of comments often uttered to reporters when a neighbour has been discovered in a crime came to me: “She always seemed a nice, quiet sort of person, kept herself to herself. Nobody round here would have thought she’d been involved in anything like that.”

‘As I waited for the blue glow of my computer screen to appear I propped my pillows higher, then took a couple of sips of brandy from my flask. It doesn’t stop the constant ache in my joints but it helps me bear it. Since this illness took hold I am always hot when I wake at night, chilled during the day. I had left the window open as usual and I turned my head towards the sharp air before I started writing.

‘The record that I am confiding to this screen, this long, painful series of letters, will serve several purposes. It is primarily for you, Majella. I want, I need you to have my account, my version of what happened. I want to say those things that could not be said then, when life raced away with us and words had to be so carefully chosen. Martin will receive his own personally tailored copy, a coward’s gift. I can summon up courage for many things but not for him; his reproachful eyes sear me. This is also a general confession for a wider audience, a purging of shadows and demons, a mapping of a blight that fell from the Belfast air. My frailty means that it will be in instalments but I will wait until I have completed it to send it to you, a small package bearing love and agony in equal proportions.

‘I am convinced that you confessed to a priest somewhere in Africa. You made a point of writing that you had returned to the church. I pictured you in a simple confession box in a tin-roofed chapel, a dusty village of thin people and animals around you. An ebony-skinned priest or perhaps a sandy-haired Irish missionary would have listened, his shocked breath freezing despite the heat before he raised his hand to bless you. What penance could he have given? What would the tariff be? I envied you your confession, your unburdening. My jealousy of it has grown with time. I wished that I could believe in a God who listened and forgave through human mediums. I have had to find another way of unburdening, lacking divine channels.

‘I find that I have addressed you in Italian, the language that we both excelled in, that we often talked in, that Finn didn’t speak and that first brought us together on an October morning in 1969.

‘You are going to have to forgive me, Majella, for the plan I am going to execute. I have taken a decision to clear the decks. I feel like a person who has been meaning to sort out a cluttered attic for years and finally gets down to it. Your mother didn’t like Finn, she thought he was a bad influence on you. I think that one of the reasons she was so kind to me was that she saw me as a polite, well-brought-up girl who would counteract Finn’s dogmatism. She once said to me in the cow shed that Finn was a cold, unfeeling character, that he had a marble heart. You will recall that I used to wear my emotions on my sleeve; when I loved I loved without reservation, hungry for affection. The cold clutch of guilt has made me guarded and watchful. Over the years it has frozen my spontaneity, slowly icing over my feelings. I have fashioned myself a marble heart in order to effect my plan. I have deliberately reduced my life to a small flat and a single purpose, abandoning Martin in order to concentrate on my task. Finn would have applauded my single-mindedness: “There is only one goal, comrades,” was his constant refrain.

‘I realise that I am addressing a Majella from another time. I don’t know the woman who inhabits an Ethiopian hostel and who has written that her skin is parched by the sun. I was familiar with a fresh, milky complexion, one that glowed with a rich bloom when you became fervent, which was often. That is how I visualise you, untouched by the years, no wrinkles or crow’s feet. You would joke that you’d have preferred the faded, wan look that was popular in the late sixties but your mother had given you too much buttermilk during childhood. The person you are now may hardly recognise the young woman then. When I glance back and see myself I feel an anguished fondness for the needy, uncertain person I was. That Nina bears little resemblance to the woman I am now, a grey-haired, crab-like creature. Finn would have been amazed at my apparent confidence in middle age and the certainty with which I run my days. “Nina Town Mouse” he used to call me in that teasing blend of comradeship and affection, or “Nina-mina-mina-mo”. My own secret name for myself now, stemming from my illness, is Wolf-woman. Finn would have had little time for my sticks and physical weakness. He was intolerant of sickness. When you had tonsillitis he bullied you from bed, saying that it was a question of mind over matter. He prescribed a long walk or a strenuous swim as antidotes for any ailment.

‘You see, Majella, I’m determined to say Finn’s name, to bring him in to this story at the earliest opportunity. We have been so coy about him over the years, leaving his name out but he is there, always a presence around us. Sometimes he used to stand between us and place a hand on our heads as if he was anointing us. I can still feel his palm with the chewed nails resting on my skull.

‘What is it you Catholics say when you enter the confessional? “Bless me Father, for I have sinned.” I think I remember you telling me that the first autumn we met. You were an atheist at the time and you were explaining the superstitious rituals of the church to me, its rigid dogma and controls, the way priests ordered the lives of women, subjugating them. Finn came in as you were speaking and lightly ran his finger over the back of your hand. You turned to him with that eager love he always drew from you. He was holding a leather-bound copy of Trotsky’s writings to his chest. He looked like our very own cleric that day, dressed as he often was in a grey polo neck and black jacket. He may even have read an improving paragraph of Leon’s thoughts to us in your kitchen, a homily for the true believers.

‘I clearly recall the first time I saw you. I walked into the lecture theatre on an October Tuesday in 1969 and there was a woman in a frilly, fussy smock bending down from her seat. Your red hair foamed around your dipped head, tendrils spreading across the floor as you retrieved the pen you’d dropped. I had been paralysed with nerves since arriving in Belfast the previous week. My only image of Ireland was the one I’d seen on a flickering TV screen. News bulletins delivered pictures of a savage, reckless place where blood flowed and neighbours freely murdered each other because of complex and, to the English, baffling ancient divisions. I was convinced that I could be shot or blown up at any time, especially if I opened my mouth revealing a home counties accent. I’d hardly spoken because of my fears; it seemed to me that my tongue was becoming swollen and dry, pressing against my teeth. I’d heard somewhere that a shock to the nervous system could cause muteness and I was genuinely fearful that next time I tried to speak, no sound would issue. I had sat alone in my room, looking at the bags I couldn’t bring myself to unpack and listening to the thud of feet in the corridors outside. From my window I saw students hurrying to join societies and heard them calling to each other. Even their accents, harsh and unfamiliar, unnerved me. The sounds they made were like snarls. I’d had difficulty understanding people in the few words of conversation I had been forced to exchange. I would have turned and fled, heading for home but there was little to go back to. I knew that my mother would already have stripped my bed and aired my room, shutting the door firmly, relieved that I would only return for brief holidays.

‘I had steeled myself to attend that first lecture in Italian. I held my books against my chest for security and to conceal my trembling arms. My legs were weak from lack of food. You swept up the pen and threw your hair back as you settled in your seat. I was aware of bows at your shoulders and down the front of your smock. I thought you looked like a sturdy countrywoman in an eighteenth-century painting, fresh from milking or hay-stacking.

‘You watched me hovering and pointed at the empty chair next to you. “D’you want this?” you asked. “You look as if you’re going to faint.”

‘I sank down next to you, overwhelmed with gratitude because I had been able to understand you. Your speech was slower and more measured than the other accents I had struggled with. You introduced yourself as Majella O’Hare and I told you my name.

‘“Nina,” you said, “that’s attractive, musical. I hate my name. I think it sounds like a sweet preserve: ‘a full-fruit Majella confiture flavoured with cognac’.”

‘I thought of marmellata, the Italian for jam. “I’ve never heard it before,” I confessed. It sounded exotic to me.

‘“That’s because you’re a Brit and your unfamiliarity with it is refreshing. My name doesn’t tell you what it would shout at someone from Ulster; that I’m a Taig, a papist, a left-footer, a Fenian and a feckless member of an underclass.” You gave me a friendly smile as you offered me my first lesson in the intricacies of Irish identity.

‘You asked me if I’d read the set text and I said that I had. In the original or in translation? you enquired. The original, I said, replying in Italian. Then you asked in Italian where I was from and I told you Maidstone, becoming articulate in the shared language and accent that provided us with a mutual territory. You hailed from a place called Pettigoe, which you added sounded like a skin disease.

‘“I’ve not seen you around,” you said. “Did you arrive late?” There was something about you that made me feel less fearful. Your voice was rich and amused, your eyes sparked with interest.

‘“I’ve been in hiding,” I admitted, “starving in my room because I was frightened at being in Belfast. I’ve been living on a scant supply of chocolate bars and canned drinks. I feel sick but starving.”

‘“God almighty,” you laughed, “no wonder you look like a wraith.”

‘After the lecture you took me to the canteen and we ate huge plates of spaghetti. Why, you asked, had I come to Belfast if the place was so terrifying? I’d not got the exam grades I needed, I said; this course had been offered through clearing, they were being kind because it was a new degree.

‘“Why did you do so badly in your exams? You don’t strike me as thick.”

‘“My father died last spring. I lost my concentration.”

‘“That’s tough all right,” you said. “It’s not so awful here, you know, we get a bad press.”

‘Strange that you should have used that phrase during our first meeting, “a bad press”. That type of press, the one we considered prejudiced, was our motivation and justification for what we did on that other October day when the rain fell and kept falling until dawn. But on that afternoon in the canteen, with the autumn sun still warm, the comforting clatter of dishes and my famished stomach contented, I was reassured by your presence. I was like a lost child bonding with the first person to offer affection. In saying that, I am not trying to diminish our friendship. I simply wish to record it honestly. I was always a moth to your candle, Majella. You didn’t set out to have me fluttering around you, but that is what happened.

‘I was fascinated by you as I sped through my spaghetti. Your clothes were crumpled and none too clean; under the blue smock you wore several bright vests in mustards and purples, teamed with one of those layered and fringed Indian cotton skirts that had glass beads sewn into the seams. You ate carelessly, gesturing as you talked, unaware of tomato sauce spattering your chest. On your feet you wore clumpy ankle boots. I never saw you in any other footwear, not even in high summer. You were big boned without seeming heavy and you had a clarity that I was attracted to. A strong tobacco aroma clung to you, especially noticeable when you shook your hair and I was puzzled because you didn’t seem to be a smoker. When I met Finn I realised that it was the odour of his French cigarettes that adhered to you like an invisible gauze. I was entranced by your easy laugh and the way you accepted me. As weeks went by I flourished in the affection you offered, an easy friendship that was new and wonderful. And your family romanced me with their noise and boisterousness. They eased the memory of the formality and chill silences I had been used to in my home. I envied you the wholesome, happy childhood I heard tales of when I visited Pettigoe, the kind I had only read about. In my imagination I made it mine, too; the lambings, the shared labours of potato harvesting, the battles to protect the hens from marauding foxes. I pictured lush, bucolic scenes, placing myself in them, filching glimpses of your past contentment for myself.

‘When I met you I emerged from a long, bleak hibernation. In your glow I uncurled, stretched, and stepped into a new life. I grew to see you and the straightforward, honest people you came from as my bedrock. Lacking strong ties and beliefs of my own, I believed in you. When your glow dimmed and I was deprived of your affection I suffered terribly. For some years I hated Finn more for sundering our friendship than for the path down which he led us. Of course, in my blinkered enthusiasm for our cause I didn’t see that our transgression would inevitably mean our losing each other. I was too naive and inexperienced to understand that there are no pure actions in life, that everything has consequences and pay-offs. I don’t think I saw or understood anything. When we set out in the car that night to carry out our mission as comrades we might as well have been wearing blindfolds, so completely oblivious were we to humanity.’


4 (#ulink_2b1ef288-04c5-56e9-9848-7ad0f0ad9150)

NINA (#ulink_2b1ef288-04c5-56e9-9848-7ad0f0ad9150)

‘Cara Majella,

‘Before I go any further, sifting through memories and years, I must tell you about the letter cards. The first one arrived a fortnight ago, the second this morning. I have them in front of me now. If I hadn’t already made the decision to open up the past they would frighten me more. Even so, they are alarming enough. I feel as if I’m being watched, my reactions monitored. When I received the first I sat frozen in my chair most of the day. As the sun faded I stared into the shadows and saw myself standing in a country lane, my feet mired in mud.

‘The cards are glossy productions, the kind that you fold over and seal. The photographs on the front feature views of phoney azure skies and intense landscape colours that rarely occur in Ireland. The peaceful rural scenes and wide stretches of picturesque strand flanked by hazy blue hills contrast oddly with the information inside. Both cards are a little creased because they have been typed. The first depicts panoramas of County Cork and I have read it so many times I could repeat it from memory:

‘I am stretched on your grave and you’ll find me there always; if I had the bounty of your arms I should never leave you. It is time for me to lie with you; there is the cold smell of the clay on me, the tan of the sun and the wind.’

It is no wonder that there are so many Irish laments and elegies, that so much keening has gone on here. You find it impossible to escape the past in Ireland. Everywhere you turn it surrounds you. You see it in the very shape of the country. You cannot go far here without stumbling over ruins and graves from previous times. Burial sites from prehistory stand silently on hills, watching the solitary walker. Graves hide under the vast boglands, waiting to be discovered by turfcutters. Passage graves, cairns, gallery graves, dolmens, wedge graves, killeens, court graves, portal graves, entrance graves, famine burials in cemeteries or under grass by the side of the road; the land is etched with random and ritual burials. The whole country is a series of catacombs. In the midst of life we are in death; that sentiment rings particularly true in this land where the dead keep close company with the living.

So many secretive graves, concealing the bones of those who died natural deaths as well as the many who were finished off by hunger or their foes.

In the view of Cork harbour, the second photograph, you can see Curraghbinny. It is a hill-top cairn, probably bronze-age. A clay platform inside it would have cradled the deceased but the body had disintegrated by the time the cairn was excavated. High up here, under a steely sky, it seems that the breeze carries cries of grief from that other time.

‘Can you imagine, Majella, how I felt when I picked up that first card? I was puzzled before I opened it and read the message. I know no one in Ireland these days; I could only think that one of my ex-colleagues was taking a holiday there. That line, you find it impossible to escape the past in Ireland resonated in my thoughts all day. An ambiguous you which could be interpreted both generally and specifically. I knew which way to take it, I repeated it to myself, over and over.

‘The card that came this morning was equally disturbing. Joan brought it in with the post when she arrived. I read it while she cleaned the kitchen. She sings while she works; verses from “Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head”, “Tea for Two” and other such jaunty numbers. This card is from Limerick and the first photograph shows Lough Gur, calm and sparkling in brilliant sunshine:

Megalithic tombs were built of huge stones and usually contained collective rather than individual burials. Bodies were buried singly, though, and you will still stumble on a lonely place where solitary bones have lain for centuries. Inhumation or interment of the corpse was usual although evidence of cremations has been found. Sometimes, with inhumations, bodies were exposed until the flesh had rotted and the skeleton was then buried.

The wedge grave was the first all-Irish grave form and you can see a fine example of one near the shore of Lough Gur. A couple of cremated bodies were found here but remains of twelve inhumations lay in the main gallery. The buried were surrounded by fragments of some of the good-quality eating vessels placed with them. Even now it is common to bury a loved one with some treasured possession. It is a way of soothing grief, imagining the departed helped on their way by familiar objects. The bereaved take comfort from it, feeling that they have established a link between the worlds of the living and dead. In a nearby churchyard today a musician being lowered in his coffin had his fiddle tucked in beside him. His wife stood by the grave, eyes brimming, lost in her sadness. She knows where her love lies, she will come back to hold vigil over him: ‘I would be a shelter from the wind for you and protection from the rain for you; and oh, keen sorrow to my heart that you are under the earth!’

‘I knew that I had been waiting for this second card. I know that there will be others. As Joan sang, “I’m gonna wash that man right outta my hair” I understood that my correspondent is determined to unlock my heart. Without warning, I felt that I might break down and release the swell of secrecy that I had harboured for so long. My eyes were scalded with tears but I heard Joan approaching and I composed myself, knowing that I mustn’t give in just yet.

‘In the early hours of this morning I have lain awake, wondering who is sending the cards. Whoever it is seems to be on the move, visiting chosen sites. I was always sure that only you, myself and Finn knew about our plan but now I’ve been imagining that one of the others found out or that you or Finn confessed to a comrade. There could have been a lonely hour, particularly after you split up, when one of you became desperate to share the guilt. Perhaps it was disclosed during pillow talk or maybe you told one of your brothers during a visit home, unburdening yourself while cleaning the hen house. But why would the confidant wait all this time to declare their knowledge? I have heard nothing about the comrades for years, with the exception of Declan. He was mentioned to me at a party and the unexpected confrontation with the past was extraordinary. I trembled as if a warning bell had clanged brutally in my ear. I’ve always assumed that our fellow revolutionaries became respectable middle-class professionals, much as comrades in England did, as I did myself; occasionally they might mention their madcap student days to one of their children or at a jolly supper, shaking their heads, smiling at memories of youthful radicalism. I recall reading that the leaders of the ‘68 Paris rebellion are now bankers, lawyers and TV executives. They featured in a Sunday colour supplement, sleek looking in soft chairs.

‘Then, as a cat yowled in the street at four AM I thought that perhaps your news of Finn’s death had been a mistake. Your cousin could have been confused and it would be easy to muddle facts long distance. What if there was a killing spree but Finn was only injured or he escaped the sprayed bullets and is now announcing himself? It’s the kind of thing he might do, don’t you agree, and a close brush with death can alter perspectives, make one look at priorities anew. My own illness has played no small part in my current actions. And Finn did so much love mystery and the rich weave of conspiracy, especially when they gave him the advantage. The typing points to him; he always typed, joking that everything about him favoured the left, including being left-handed but his handwriting was illegible through being forced to use his right hand at his boarding school. You would complain that his portable typewriter was like a prosthetic, often tucked beneath one arm. His clattering on the keys used to drag you from sleep early in the morning as he set about another day’s crusade. He is the only person I ever knew who would carry his typewriter to the bathroom, balancing it on his lap as he sat on the toilet.

‘I pictured him, perched in hotel rooms in Cork and Limerick, typing, still smoking untipped cigarettes. You may well have had cards too. I’ve no idea how he would have obtained our addresses but Finn was always an excellent information gatherer. Perhaps he is down on his luck and looking for a helping hand from old friends; he’d run through a fair part of his inheritance during the years when we knew him and he had expensive tastes despite his professed solidarity with the proletariat. His public face may have been in harmony with them but when he brought the shopping home he’d always bought the best lean steak and his claret was the finest in the wine rack. Or maybe he simply wants to talk about the past and being Finn, is coming in at a tangent, testing the ground. All these ideas might just be the wild products of a tired brain. I can only wait and surmise, see where the next card comes from. Living with uncertainty is hardly new to me.

‘You introduced me to Finn the day after I met you. “Come and listen to traditional music,” you said, “meet some interesting people.” It was the first time I heard the word craic; “the craic’s great at Mulligan’s” you explained as we headed through the dingy streets. I already knew then that I wanted to get as close to you as possible. You were sporting a fringed shawl and I touched one of the swinging tassels as we walked. I can still feel its warm, rough texture. I didn’t tell you I had never been in a pub, embarrassed by the extreme narrowness of the world I had inhabited. I remarked on the shabbiness around us, gesturing at boarded-up shops and broken glass in doorways. The contrast to leafy, prosperous Maidstone was shocking. I don’t think you ever fully understood how subdued and genteel my childhood had been. You had never visited England, had no way of knowing the culture gap I was experiencing. You replied that it was people, not buildings that mattered; come the revolution, when the proletariat triumphed, all these streets would take on new life and purpose and the equal distribution of wealth would mean that the populace had an investment in their surroundings. I was impressed by your certainty and the apparent imminence of the revolution. We passed an army patrol at a street corner, squaddies no older than ourselves with blackened faces and camouflage jackets that looked out of place in an urban setting. The first soldier said hallo civilly enough and instinctively I nodded back. The second quickly followed with a cockier, “hiya, darlings, wotcha doin’ tonight?” and you snarled back, “fuck off, you bastard shits.” I felt a quiver of fear mingled with excitement as he spat on the pavement. “Nothing to write home about anyway, lads,” one of them mocked behind us.

‘“Didn’t people welcome them with cups of tea and cake when they arrived?” I asked. I had seen photos in my mother’s Daily Telegraph; little boys perched on squaddies’ knees, fingering their guns while aproned women ferried teapots.

‘“A gut reaction of relief,” you said. “Now the military are exposed in their true colours, tools of the fascist state.”

‘In the pub you introduced me to people whose names and faces I no longer recall and we sat in a blue haze of cigarette smoke, listening to jigs and the roar of conversation. I was stunned by the chat which flowed seamlessly; people in England don’t talk to each other the way the Irish do, enjoying the flavour of words on the tongue. Despite the plain floorboards and cracked window glass the pub seemed exotic. I drank in the atmosphere along with my lager. I recounted the story of hiding in my room and described the other women surrounding me in the hall of residence. There were five of them, plump pasty-faced Protestant girls from local townlands I’d never heard of. Union Jacks and banners stating “No Surrender!” had been pinned to their doors. They dressed in white nylon blouses and dark pleated skirts, wore brown barrettes in their hair and plain, flat lace-up school shoes, the uniform of fervent Evangelists. Within days of arriving they had put hand-written notices in the communal bathrooms: “Please Remove Your Hairs From The Plug Holes” – I think it was the sight of pubic hairs that caused specific offence – and “Remember, No one Wants To Bathe In Your Tide Mark!” Perhaps the college accommodation service had thought that coming from England, I would be more comfortable situated amongst a group of students who were loyal to the crown. Early in the mornings they visited each other’s rooms to pray and sing fierce-sounding hymns in their rural Ulster voices:

“Awnwerd Crustyen So-o-oul-dye-erz!

Marchin’ az tuy wur,

Wuth the crawz of Jeezuz

Goin’ awn beefurr . . .”

‘I was sure I had detected a tambourine but there was no danger of “Mr Tambourine Man” drifting through the thin walls. I heard myself being witty as I described them. I had never before been the centre of attention in a group of people, never talked so much and so freely; I didn’t know you could become intoxicated with language. There are times when, clawing my way through a typically constipated English conversation, I find myself craving some of that old, easy jawing.

‘You talked and laughed that night but you were distracted and when Finn came in and you relaxed I understood that your tension had been that of a waiting lover. He was wearing dark clothes and a black beret. A pack of papers was stashed under his arm and he was in a foul mood. That testiness, that air that nothing ever quite pleased him was part of his attraction. Sales had been poor, he said, and Vinny hadn’t turned up to help him. He laid the papers on the table and I saw that they were thin bulletins, printed on a duplicating machine and that his fingers were smudged with dark ink. Workers’ Struggle, The Paper of Red Dawn, I read as I craned my neck and you told Finn my name. He nodded a brief hallo and went to get a drink.

‘“Is Finn your boyfriend?” I asked.

‘“My lover and comrade,” you corrected.

‘I gazed at you and then at Finn’s long back, impressed by this mysterious world I was glimpsing and experiencing a twinge of envy that you were involved with such an interesting-looking man.

‘Did I fall in love with Finn a little myself that night? I think I must have done, otherwise why would I have come to dislike him so intensely? He was dark and sure of himself; even his irascibility fitted a certain brooding stereotype and I had, like many another teenage girl, immersed myself in the Brontës and Du Maurier. When he came back with his drink he sat next to me and asked me questions about how I was finding Ireland. He tipped mixed nuts from a bag into his palm and offered them to me, saying I should pick out the almonds, they were the best. When the nuts had vanished he licked his salty hand as carefully as a cat licks its plate clean, running his tongue between his fingers. As he spoke to me he was examining my face. Although his eyes were a soft brown they had a directness that made me feel nothing would escape his attention. And nothing did, Majella, nothing did; he was watchful and always at the end of the road before we had turned the corner.’

Nina sighed and opened a new document, naming it ‘Martin’. She typed quickly, her eyes a little blurred.

‘You are beginning to understand that I left you not just because I am ill or contrary. If you are bewildered by me, well, that makes two of us. When you harbour a knowledge that cannot be revealed you feel set apart from the rest of humanity. There were times in the long nights when I longed to wake you, confess to you, beg your help. But I had no right to taint you.

‘Can you picture me in that pub? My hair was long and wild and sometimes I used to colour it so that it took on a hue like ripe red gooseberries. I wore pale pink nail varnish until Finn remarked that it looked cheap; he was a puritan about make-up although I expect he would have approved of the type of products you can buy now, recipes originating from far-flung populations of the third world.

‘That was a magic night in Mulligans; the kind of vivid experience you always remember with completeness: the sounds, the colours, the voices, the feelings engendered. On that night when I met Finn I started to feel a release of energy, a thrilling giddiness. It seemed to me that I had spent my days up to my eighteenth year in a timid stasis, waiting for something to happen. My mother’s message to me was enshrined in her stock phrase, “no fuss please, darling,” and my father’s self-effacement and premature death left a void.

‘In my mother’s shaded drawing room, behind ruched curtains, I had watched television pictures of Soviet tanks in Prague and rioting in the streets of London and Paris; demonstrations against the Vietnam War in Washington, civil rights marchers from Belfast with blood streaming down their faces, the reality barely impinging on me as I went about the discreet life lived in English suburbia, preparing to go to the tennis court or the library. I was dimly aware of Joan Baez singing “We Shall Overcome” and of the student power that was setting European streets ablaze. The only cold war I was familiar with was the one my mother had waged for years against my father, a series of frosty skirmishes that left me stranded in no-man’s land, unsure of who I should offer my loyalty to in any particular week. There were plenty of occasions when they communicated by leaving notes for me and I ran back and forth like a messenger between the trenches. My mother’s dugout was the drawing room, my father’s the potting shed. The events of 1968 took place while I was attempting and failing to broker peace somewhere between these camps, carrying communications written in codes which the two sides were doomed to misinterpret. If I paid any attention to them, it was with feelings of distaste and anxiety at such breakdown of order; locked as I was in the long disintegration of a marriage, I couldn’t face combat in the outside world.

‘In Mulligan’s bar I grew inebriated on the yeasty tang of stout and the fumes of golden hot whiskies in which cloves bobbed like tadpoles. I tried my first plate of boxty, the publican’s speciality, a dish that I became addicted to. It was hot, peppery and buttery and when someone said it was the food of the gods I agreed. A student who I later learned was Declan, the treasurer of Red Dawn, leaned across and asked teasingly if I’d heard that old rhyme:

“Boxty on the griddle

Boxty on the pan

If you don’t eat Boxty

You’ll never get a man!”

‘I smiled at him, registering that he had deep blue eyes but Majella reproved him, saying that we didn’t want to hear any of that old sexist claptrap. Finn took a spoonful from my plate without asking permission and declared that boxty was good, humble peasant food, the backbone of Ireland, the kind of dish that had its equivalent amongst working people in all cultures. A man stood up and sang a traditional ballad that brought tears to my eyes, a song about loss of land and family. Then Majella rapped the table and launched into a song that spoke of present injustice. She sang with such passion that I bit my gum through the boxty:

“Armoured cars and tanks and guns

Came to take away our sons

But every man will stand behind

The men behind the wire.

“Through the little streets of Belfast

In the dark of early morn

British soldiers came marauding,

Wrecking little homes with scorn;

Heedless of the crying children,

Dragging fathers from their beds,

Beating sons while helpless mothers

Watch the blood pour from their heads.

Round the world the truth will echo

Cromwell’s men are here again,

Britain’s name forever sullied

In the eyes of honest men.”

‘Afterwards, I asked her in a whisper if that was really happening and she said yes, nightly; men taken away and never charged, never given the chance of a fair hearing, their families left devastated. We were living in a tyranny but Bob Dylan was right, these were times of upheaval and change; this system of injustice couldn’t last, the people’s blood was up.

‘I understood that night that life had been racketing around elsewhere while I quietly occupied my little corner, mediating my parents’ antagonism and avoiding my mother’s censorious eye. In our tidy bungalow tucked away in a cul de sac it was a crime to leave an unwashed cup on the table, draw the curtains back untidily or spill a drop of liquid on the furniture. The background orchestration to my childhood had been the tight hissing from my mother’s lips as she heaped blame on my father or found fault with me. Now I was in a city where people opened their mouths wide to bellow their opinions and were willing to suffer terrible wounds, even death, for their beliefs. A sense of sheer animation, an impetuosity I would never have guessed at, was pulsing in me. I saw it reflected in Majella’s eyes, heard it echoed in her voice. The urge of something to aim for, something to risk everything for, that was what I wanted. The deliciousness of the boxty was giving me a taste for more flavours. I was ready for tumultuous change. I was ripe for falling in love and I did, with the scarred warring city and Majella and Finn.

‘When you are judging me, when you finally weigh up what you have learned, remember that the impulse was to do good, to create, to make a positive mark on the world. I fell far short of my own aspirations but I did possess them, and that remains some comfort to me.’


5 (#ulink_acac8e96-aaad-56bb-8957-be31bae5029b)

MARTIN (#ulink_acac8e96-aaad-56bb-8957-be31bae5029b)

He looked in the bathroom mirror the evening Nina told him their life together was over and saw that he had a puzzled expression, like a child who doesn’t understand what it’s done wrong or a dog that suspects its owner is displeased. Then he did something he used to do as a child when he wanted to ease his troubles. He breathed on the mirror, wrote NINA in the condensation, then rubbed her name away hard with a flannel, making sure that none of the letters reappeared in the humid air. There, he thought angrily, morosely, self-pityingly; if that’s the way you want it, you can have it.

The next day he felt numb, as if his limbs had been shot full of Novocain. He prodded his arm; nothing. When he picked his hand up and let it drop it rested on his knee; someone else might have left it there. On the way home from work he stopped and had his right ear pierced in three places. The slap of the gun and the mild stinging helped him back into himself as did the burning antiseptic he had to bathe it in later. Nina didn’t notice, she was looking through him but when he fingered the tiny punctures and wiped the spots of blood he knew that he was real.

During the following weeks he stayed strangely calm. Maybe, he thought, he’d been expecting Nina’s decision for some time. She had always eluded him. Before she became ill she was light on her feet, fast moving. There she would be on the periphery of his vision, vanishing through a door or up the stairs. He would hear the car ignition and realise that she had left the house with no warning. She would come back hours later, cheeks flushed, or yawning, with puffy eyes. When he asked where she’d been she would reply for a walk or a visit to a museum or just sleeping in the car. The first time she said that, ‘just sleeping’, he was convinced that he was being made a fool of and she was seeing someone else. Yet it was only a few months into their marriage and he couldn’t detect an air of deceit; she looked at him full in the face and spoke with such simple frankness, he had to believe her. She had driven up to the Heath, she’d say, parked near the pub on Spaniard’s Hill and drifted off. When he asked why, if there was something wrong, she shook her head, saying that there was no explanation she could give.

He followed her once, feeling craven, a sneak. He was annoyed that she was the one taking off, behaving oddly, and yet he was acting as if he was the guilty partner, trailing her covertly. His hands were damp at the possibility that she might spot him but she didn’t, driving just over the speed limit. She headed down by the River Lea near Tottenham Hale and pulled up at a fishing area. Then she reclined the seat, folded her arms and tucked her chin down. He waited there for an hour, feeling ridiculous, spying on his wife sleeping and wondered what he had done to cause her to flee from him.

Before he and Nina married they had known each other for just over a year, living together for six months prior to the wedding. During those months she had never, as far as he was aware, felt the need for solitary outings. She was often a little touchy about her own possessions and her books but he understood that; they had both lived on their own and it was difficult adjusting to an invasion of territory. It seemed that, as soon as they were married, she found the need to put spaces between them, spaces that grew, broadening, deepening. He was alarmed, thinking of those people who discovered that the charms of their partner quickly waned once they had formalised the relationship but when he asked Nina – and he asked her often, more often than he wanted to – if she was happy she would smile and say yes, of course, he mustn’t mind her strange foibles. Mystified, he would put his arms around her, sniffing the brackish odour of the river or polish from a museum bench in her clothes and hair.

She was rushing past him the first day he noticed her at the university. He had been appointed manager of personnel a month before and was still finding his feet. A person flashed by him, sweeping him into her slipstream rather as a tornado sucks up objects from the ground. He sought out that small, slim figure with the huge brown leather satchel that banged against her hip as she blew around the corridors. It was her lightness, a kind of sprite-like quality, that attracted him and held his interest. He would have to put his hand on her arm to secure her attention and keep her still. Her students, he discovered, called her ‘The Exocet’. She was a popular lecturer, admired for her zest and wit. Her singing voice was surprisingly strong for someone so slight and she occasionally entertained her colleagues or students with Italian and French songs. Her talent for mimicry was well known; she did a convincing Edith Piaf and Shirley Bassey.

He sat opposite her in the buffet one day and introduced himself, explaining that he’d seen her whirling along a corridor. Ah yes, she said she’d noticed his name in the university newsletter. Her head was neat, her glossy brown hair cut like a cap, glinting where the sun was illuminating it from behind. He found out that she had spent the summer in Italy which accounted for her lightly tanned complexion, the same honey shade as the melba toast she was crunching, and the deeper, caramel scatter of freckles across the bridge of her nose. He recounted his own fortnight spent on a walking tour of Tuscany and they swapped stories of Florence and Siena. She pushed her plate away and rested her chin on linked knuckles. He saw that she bit her nails and guessed that her confident air was overstated. He wanted to reach out and cradle her head, which to him seemed terribly vulnerable, between his hands. When she laughed she ran her fingers through her feathery hair so that strands stuck out. He liked the way she didn’t care, wasn’t bothered about her image. She reminded him of one of the wood pixies in an illustrated plate in one of his favourite childhood books, a hardback volume called Tales of the Forest Folk. The pixies were nimble and busy, collecting berries and honey, bandaging the wounded paws of squirrels and badgers. As she talked she played with an empty sugar sachet, folding and smoothing it with narrow fingers, shaping it into a star. Even when she was sitting she appeared active, her arms moving, shifting in her chair.

He used to joke that if he’d known he was going to fall for someone so energetic, he’d have taken up fitness training. Their relationship grew as they walked and cycled. He had to buy a bike, not having owned one since he was sixteen. At weekends they caught the tube and tramped around Epping or Theydon Bois or drove down to Sussex and walked on the Downs. Their cycle routes took them through Hampstead Heath or south of the river, following the Thames. It was autumn when they met and the air was growing misty. Yellowing leaves dived under their wheels and an edge of cold nipped their fingers. Their conversations rose and fell with dips in the road, paced to the rhythms of their booted feet and clicking gears. He found some of the longer walks, the ten-mile ones, hard going but the intensity of a new love buoyed him up, willing his legs on.

She was unlike any other woman he had come across. The two serious relationships he had been involved in before now seemed pleasant but arid affairs. Neither Helen nor Suzy would have made him stop on a road, pushing his head towards a bush and urging him to sniff deeply the pungent leaves. Nina knew the names of trees, plants and wild flowers; she would bend and scoop rainwater from a blossom with a quick flick of her tongue or deftly pick berries and cram them into his mouth so that his lips were purple stained and he would taste the tang of wild fruit for the rest of the day. She told him the best places to find small sweet plums in August and took him to a bridle path where blackcurrants massed, so heavily clustered that they bent to the ground. Her small garden was a riot of carefully tended plants and tubs brimming with greenery. Often, when he arrived, he found her crouching, hands buried in a bag of compost or taking cuttings. Herbs grew everywhere, on window ledges throughout her flat and in a special trough just outside the back door so that it seemed that there was no dividing line between inside and out. She gave bunches of herbs away at the university; dill, sage or marjoram frequently trailed from her satchel, scenting the pages of marked essays as she stood in corridors, advising on their use in cooking or in medicinal drinks. Sometimes she would slip from bed in between love making, returning with a handful of lemon balm which she would massage onto his skin. They rolled on the leaves, crushing them on the sheet as they slipped down a tunnel of fragrance.

One warm morning, when he had stayed the night with her, she took him onto the patch of lawn outside her garden flat and got him to lie face down with her on the damp grass, one ear to the ground. If you listened quietly you could hear all of London moving, she said; the tramp of thousands of feet, the rolling of buses and trains, the surging of boats on the Thames. Concentrating, eyes closed, he thought he could; there seemed to be a humming under the soil.

‘This is my favourite season,’ he said, freewheeling near Richmond. ‘The colours are soft.’

‘Yes, but the tastes are tart and many of the berries are inedible or poisonous. It’s a deceptive time of year; the golds and russets make you want to linger when you should be on your way home, securing your winter nest.’

He gathered that all this evening and weekend activity was what Nina was used to; she had done these walks and cycle trips alone. He wasn’t overweight when they met and he lost half a stone in the first months. A friend commented that love makes some people sleek and others thin. Perhaps he should have read more into the fact that Nina’s weight stayed the same.

It was at a campus party where Nina had sung ‘La Vie en Rose’ in the style of Piaf that he first noticed what he came to recognise as her mask look. It had dawned on him that Nina had no friends, just acquaintances. Her general popularity was exactly that; general, not specific to any one person. He was used to women having networks of friends but apart from when she was socialising in a group, Nina spent her time on her own. He pieced together a picture of a life lived reading, gardening and preparing lectures with frequent exercise and the odd party or theatre outing. She wouldn’t go to the cinema; she couldn’t stand the way it falsified life, she said, lending it a glamour it didn’t deserve.

Piecing together was exactly what he had to do because he found it difficult to form a comprehensive picture of Nina before he met her. She side-stepped those questions that lovers ask each other, confiding in return images of themselves at ten, fourteen, twenty, the problems of previous relationships, the flavour of a childhood. When he talked about his family or his first girlfriend or Angus, a close friend from university days in Warwick, Nina listened and nodded and made the odd comment, but there was no return of information. When he jokingly said that he sometimes thought she must have landed from another planet, that she was an alien sent to gather information, she laughed, replying that she was in regular contact with Mars. Nina would never give an inch when she didn’t want to. The pattern of their life together was quickly established in those first months; when she was being elusive he would joke, nervously trying to conceal how frustrated he felt and, taking his cue, she would joke back. So on each occasion he set a trap for himself and provided the escape route that she used for swift avoidance. Unwittingly, he sowed the seeds of his own unhappiness.

After Nina had done her Piaf at that New Year’s Eve party a young Irishman, a student, came up to them and told her how much he’d enjoyed it. He was obviously on a return trip to the sixties: his hair was long and he wore John Lennon glasses and a tie-dyed shirt.

‘It’s unusual to find a person singing at a party in England,’ he said, ‘other than drunken rugby choruses or the Birdie Song. It’s more the kind of thing you get back home in Ireland.’

‘Which part of Ireland are you from?’ Martin asked him.

‘Strabane.’ He turned to Nina. ‘We have a bit of a connection,’ he told her.

‘I’m sorry?’ she said.

‘My name’s Conor Lally. You knew my father, Declan Lally, at Queen’s, didn’t you? Look, I’ve a photo he dug out.’

He produced a wallet from his back pocket and found a creased black-and-white photograph. Nina didn’t take it. She let him hold it in front of her and Martin peered over her arm. There was Nina with long, free-flowing hair, wearing a layered skirt and waistcoat. Her right fist was in the air in a clenched salute, her left hand curled around one pole of a banner saying, TROOPS OUT NOW! A young man whose face still held the last residues of puppy fat lifted the other pole.

Nina took a step back and sipped her drink, looking down into it. ‘Declan Lally. It rings a bell. We were always demonstrating about something then.’

The young man nodded, moving closer to her. ‘I was home for Christmas and I was talking about some of the lecturers, the ones worth mentioning, the ones who don’t just take the money and run. Dad said he’d known a Nina Rawle. When I described you he said you must be the same person and he found this photo in an old album. The right-on sixties!’

‘This is Belfast?’ Martin asked, looking at that other, grainy Nina and then turning to her, touched her arm. ‘I didn’t know that you’d lived in Ireland.’ He was puzzled, because he’d told her that his grandmother who lived in Dagenham was originally from Galway and he had once had a holiday with her there.

‘No, you didn’t know. I don’t teach you, do I?’ she asked Conor, her voice polite but tight.

‘No. I’m doing Spanish and International studies.’ He was pleasantly drunk and you could tell that he was one of those earnest young types who pin you to the wall at parties and give you their world view.

‘Dad said that you were both into politics in a big way. He wanted me to ask you if you still sing “The Red Flag”? He’s active but he’s gone soft; he’s in the SDLP, refuge of the woolly middle-of-the-roader. That was the time to be a student, back then. There was real radicalism, burning-hot stuff. Look at the leaders you had: Tariq Ali, Danny Cohn-Bendit, Bernadette Devlin. Not like now – there are no real lefties, it’s hard enough to find a committed feminist. People spend their time worrying about bank loans and keeping their noses clean in case they can’t get a job. You’ve no idea how lucky you were to have been part of things then, you had the chance to make a real difference.’

Martin was looking at Nina as Conor delivered his enthusiastic monologue. Her face was freezing and setting, shutting down. He was shocked because her features were usually so expressive and the severity of her look alarmed him.

‘You’ll have to excuse me,’ she said, putting her glass down. ‘I think the pizza’s disagreed with me, I must go home.’

Martin hurried after her to the car. She was accelerating away before he managed to close his door.

‘Are you feeling sick? I can drive if you are.’

‘I’ll be okay, probably needed some air.’ She was winding her window down full and an icy breeze caught in his throat.

‘He was a bit of a bore, that guy. Do you remember his father?’

‘Vaguely. I might have spoken to him once or twice. We all went to lots of meetings.’ She turned her head towards her window, taking deep breaths. Her tone was flat, tired, her profile still expressionless.

‘What did you make of Belfast?’

‘It wasn’t a happy time in my life. Could we drop the subject? I think maybe I’ve caught that bug that’s doing the rounds.’

And so the subject was dropped and they never returned to it. Martin assumed that Nina had been homesick in Ireland or experienced a bad love affair. He had nearly left Warwick after a girl jilted him. Because he never met anyone close to Nina, a confidante of any kind, he had no one to ask casual questions of, no way of filling in the gaps she left.

There were other subjects that brought on Nina’s mask face. Funerals, for example; when Martin’s Dagenham grandmother died Nina told him she wouldn’t be going to the mass and service at the cemetery. He was astonished. She hadn’t known his grandmother well but he had assumed that she would accompany him. He had loved his grandmother and felt her loss. When he heard Nina’s words, spoken rigidly, the loss was heightened because he had expected to have her by him in his grief.

‘What’s the problem?’ he asked her.

‘I just don’t like funerals. They’re morbid, they make me feel desperate.’





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