All That I Leave Behind (27 page)

As she turned, the dog was sitting in front of her, an anxious look on his face. He came towards June and she shrank back against the sink, but he nudged her hand gently with his head and then he licked it solemnly, before looking at her as if to say, ‘Any better?’

‘Thanks, Duke,’ she said quietly. ‘Good boy.’

He wagged his tail in return.

‘Must be a tummy bug,’ she said to Mary-Pat when she came back to the kitchen, walking over to the sink and helping herself to a glass of water, gulping the contents down, not turning around to face her sister. She looked out the window to Mary-Pat’s back garden, at the ornamental pond stuffed with koi, surrounded by gnomes with fishing rods and a large plastic heron.

‘Did I tell you, Rosie went to see Frances O’Brien?’ Mary-Pat said. June didn’t reply because her limbs were trembling and her mouth felt dry. She sat back down at the table and reached out and helped herself to a bit of tea brack, biting into it, feeling the spicy fruit and the thick butter coat her tongue. She swallowed and felt instantly better, the sugar giving her a little boost.

‘She did? What on earth would that woman have to say to her?’ That woman, who had spent a summer in their home. Who had offered to French plait June’s hair and smooth electric-blue eye shadow over June’s lids. ‘We’re best buddies,’ Frances
O’Brien had said to June once, and she’d been thrilled that this woman, who just seemed to pulsate with life, would be her friend. Would spend time with her, the one no one wanted to spend time with because she was too ‘thick’, too slow to keep up with them all. But Frances O’Brien didn’t think so: she thought June was ‘an amazing little girl’. And June had treasured that – even when she’d woken up one morning to find Frances’s place at the breakfast table empty. When she’d asked where Frances was, Mary-Pat had given her a look of such venom she’d felt like hiding under the table. Frances had vanished as suddenly as she’d arrived, and even though she now lived less than a mile away from here, it might as well have been Timbuktu.

‘Lord knows. She was on Rosie’s baptismal cert and she thought she might know something. Wish to Christ she’d let it go.’ And Mary-Pat gave June that look again, the warning one, although June couldn’t quite work out what her sister wanted to warn her about.

She didn’t know what to say, so she decided to change the subject. ‘I’d better go. Gerry’s off early today and we’ve booked La Firenze.’

At this, Mary-Pat looked visibly brighter. ‘Oh, very posh,’ she said, in a mock south-Dublin accent. ‘Well, what is it Gerry always says? “Have fun,”’ and she did an imitation of Gerry that was pitch perfect.

‘Piss off,’ June said. ‘Tell Pi I said hello. I’ll be down to you next week.’

‘What’s with the weekly visits, Junie? Next thing, you’ll be moving back.’

‘Oh, there’s no fear of that,’ June said, picking up her handbag and holding it in the crook of her arm. ‘No fear of that at all.’

She had the front door open when Mary-Pat asked her, ‘June, are you sure you’re all right?’ She turned to look at her sister. She had never been able to lie to Mary-Pat. One look and she’d be blurting out the truth in no time. But she wasn’t about to do that now. If she told the truth, God knows what might happen.

I need to go and see Maeve, she thought, when she got back in the car. She wasn’t sure why she’d left it so long, but now it seemed urgent, something she absolutely had to do. Maybe she was looking for salvation, she thought grimly as she looked at her watch, calculating how long it would take to drive around the M50 and south to Bray, then back home again. Gerry would kill her if she was late. He’d already given out about restaurants having two sittings and how dare they throw you out after an hour when you’d paid good money for your dinner. She didn’t want to upset him – there was a board meeting in a few days at work and they always stressed him out. It was funny, she thought as she drove along, how that part of her brain could still work, could still mind him and look after him and care about him, while the other part … She blinked furiously. At least she could do one good thing today. Just one thing.

The road around the city was empty at this time of day, but June wouldn’t have noticed if it was jammed with traffic: she just kept driving, the white lines of the road markings disappearing under the car as she drove and drove. When she looked around to see where she was, she was almost surprised to see that she was coming up to the roundabout for Loughlinstown hospital, ten miles out of town, the icing-sugar dome of the Sugar Loaf mountain in front of her. It was as if the car had driven itself south towards Wicklow. It was funny how that happened, June thought as she drove, how your body still knew how to do the things your mind had forgotten about.

As she bumped off the motorway and down the narrow roads to Bray, June clutched the steering wheel and gritted her teeth, manoeuvring the Land Rover into a tight spot between a white van and an ancient Citroën. The act of completing the task made her feel stupidly pleased with herself. She wasn’t much good at reverse parking. When she got out, her knees were wobbly, her hands shaking as she fiddled with the car keys. She looked at the house, a granite Edwardian block with a white-painted balustrade over the porch and a shrivelled palm tree beside the red front door. ‘Elsinore’ was painted in the fanlight above the porch. It looked grand, shabby and genteel all at the same time, with the two white-painted lions that flanked the front doorstep, a riot of geraniums in pots lined up on either side of the tiled entrance.

The bell played a little tune when June pressed it. It sounded incongruous in the surroundings, a tinny ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’, and when it finished there was silence. June was wondering if she’d have to press the bell and hear the awful song again, when there was a shuffling noise inside. ‘Just coming,’ a reedy voice called from the other side of the door.

Maeve opened it, her black hair, now streaked with grey, pulled back into a bun, her currant-black eyes squinting in the sun. June knew that Maeve was older than Mammy, but wondered if this is what her mother would now look like: her face a criss-cross of wrinkles, dotted with liver spots. Her hands twisted with arthritis. ‘I’m sorry, Maeve,’ she began, ‘I should have called first, I—’

‘June!’ Maeve’s face crinkled up in a smile and her eyes all but disappeared. ‘Musha, for God’s sake, why? ’Tisn’t often we get visitors these days, I can tell you. C’mon in.’

June couldn’t work out who she meant by ‘we’ – Maeve’s husband, Alan, had died years ago – but at the sight of Maeve’s face, she wanted to cry with relief, to grab hold of the woman and hang on to her, sobbing, like a little girl. She remembered her manners then and instead cleared her throat to keep the tears down. ‘If you’re sure?’

But Maeve was already gone, shuffling gently down the hall on her walker and into the living room, clearly expecting June to follow her. She was talking as she went, a stream of chat that June couldn’t hear and so she just ‘aha’-ed and ‘yes’-ed at what she thought were appropriate moments. God it was depressing, she thought, as she watched Maeve shuffle through the gloom. The half-drawn curtains only let in a small trickle of light, through which danced dust motes and which dimly illuminated the piles of old newspapers scattered on almost every surface.

‘Excuse the mess,’ Maeve was saying as she lowered herself into an armchair. ‘The cleaning girl only comes once a fortnight now – I hardly think there’s much need with only myself … Oh, I forgot to offer you a cup of tea – where on earth are my manners.’ She chuckled and made to get up out of the chair.

June made a motion with her hand, urging Maeve to stay put. ‘It’s fine, thanks, Maeve. I can’t stay long.’

‘Oh?’ Maeve looked disappointed now, her liver-spotted hand clutching the handle of her walker, her face a mass of wrinkles as she peered at June, like a little walnut. June had to damp down a shiver of revulsion. To think, one day she’d look like that.

‘No. I have to … well, I’ve come about Mammy, Maeve.’

Maeve didn’t stop smiling, but waited, still, like a bird.

‘It’s just … I think I might need to show someone else the letters.’ As she said it, June suddenly wondered why she was asking Maeve’s permission. She could have shown them to half the world and Maeve would be none the wiser. But she hadn’t, because the weight of it had felt so enormous, a secret that only she and Maeve shared. Maybe that’s why she was here now, she thought, because she didn’t want to keep that secret any more – because she wanted to break it, to be free of it once and for all.

Maeve shook her head. ‘Oh, no, June. She was very clear about that. Just you. She thought she could rely on you to keep your counsel, so to speak.’

June twisted her scarf in her hands. It was an expensive scarf, black with a white skull motif on it. McQueen, so India said. She’d helped her pick it out in Brown Thomas, forking out a couple of hundred euro for it. ‘It’ll make you look younger, Mum,’ she’d said, to June’s amusement. As if a
scarf
could make you look younger. Now, she looked at it for a second, wondering why on earth she was wearing it – it seemed so silly, somehow, so … superfluous, that was the word.

She looked up and realised that Maeve was waiting for her to say something in response. ‘Maeve, I’ve never breathed a word to anyone. Not even Mary-Pat.’

‘Oh, I know you haven’t, pet, I know. That was precisely why Michelle trusted you. It shows she was right,’ and Maeve beamed, her little curranty eyes squished up in her face.

June could feel herself growing impatient. Get on with it, June. ‘It’s just, well, something’s happened. With Rosie.’

‘Ah.’ Maeve looked out the window, her hands clasped in her lap, as if trying to find something in the windblown seafront outside.

‘Yes. Daddy said something to her. On her wedding day, in fact,’ June said, rolling her eyes to heaven. Maeve knew Daddy. She knew what he was like. She’d understand.

‘Is that so?’ Maeve was such an expert at non-committal politeness.

‘Yes, Maeve, he did.’ June tugged at the end of her silly scarf. ‘He, ehm …’ June looked down at her hands, with their immaculate nails covered with just a sheen of clear nail polish, at her wedding band, her diamond eternity ring and the large emerald engagement ring that had belonged to Gerry’s mother. ‘He denied she was his.’

There was no response and when June looked up Maeve was still and entirely silent, her features giving nothing away. Eventually, she said, ‘Not very tactful.’

‘No.’ June had to smile at the understatement. ‘No, it wasn’t. But what I need to know is, is it true?’

There was a sigh from Maeve. A small, soft one. ‘Well, your daddy was – is – an interesting man, June. Complicated, that’s for sure. And your parents’ relationship was complex – not that they didn’t love each other. They did, but, well—’

‘I know about Daddy, Maeve.’

‘Of course.’ Maeve pulled herself slowly into a standing position, a look of pain flickering across her face as she did so. Leaning on her walker, she shuffled slowly over to where June was sitting on the overstuffed sofa and eased herself down beside her, reaching a withered hand out and patting her gently on the knee. ‘I know what you think, pet, but it’s easy to judge, when there were two of them in the marriage. It was difficult to live the life they’d chosen. There were a lot of hardships.’

At the mention of the word ‘hardships’, June swallowed down the anger which was threatening to bubble up again. You think I don’t know about the bloody hardships, she thought; you think I don’t
know
?

‘You know, your mother wasn’t an easy woman either, June,’

Maeve said quietly. ‘She had high standards, for herself and for others, and they could be hard to live up to sometimes. I think John-Joe struggled with that a bit and it brought out the naughty boy in him.’ She smiled. ‘Try not to be too hard on your father, June: he wasn’t entirely to blame.’

‘Do you mean for her leaving?’ June said, her senses on alert.

‘Not exactly,’ Maeve said. ‘Your mother was a passionate person, June. She was such a trailblazer. Oh, I still remember her in secretarial college, telling Mrs Joyce that it was time she wised up and joined the twentieth century, and asking her if she’d ever heard of Women’s Lib.’ Maeve chuckled. ‘And she refused to learn shorthand because she said it made no sense and, anyway, she wasn’t going to be a secretary. She was going to forge her own path. She wanted to change the world. And when she met your father, she thought he was a kindred spirit. But, sure, he wasn’t really able for her, the same John-Joe. He couldn’t keep up with her.’

The stuffy room seemed to settle around June, dust motes circling in the late-summer light. There didn’t seem to be enough air, and when she breathed in, it tasted of old books and mouldy newspapers. ‘Did she have an affair, Maeve? Is that what you’re saying?’ June said.

Maeve didn’t answer straight away, and in the silence, for some reason, June thought of Sean O’Reilly and how good he’d been to her, to them all. Even as a child, she’d known how much he’d liked Mammy, by the slight flush on his neck every time he caught sight of her, by the way his eyes followed her across the yard – not in a creepy way, but like a lovelorn boy, but there was no way … He was a good man, Sean. She’d spent half her childhood in his kitchen, nursing the sick hens he kept in a little crate by the range or playing with Bessie’s pups. Once, they’d had to warm one of them up, when the little creature had strayed out of the barn and had ended up soaking wet and cold. They’d placed the little black-and-white bundle carefully into the warming drawer of the range, Sean’s huge, spade-like hands scooping the pup up and onto the cast-iron grate at the bottom. ‘Will she get cooked?’ June had asked, worried.

He hadn’t laughed at her, just shaken his head seriously. ‘There’s only just enough heat here to warm her through. She’ll be fine, but you’ll have to keep a close eye on her. Do you think you can do that?’

June’s chest had puffed up with importance. ‘Yes, Sean.’ She’d nodded. And she’d spent the rest of the afternoon by the range, watching the little body as it slowly uncurled, the pale blue eyes opening, a little mewl escaping its lips.