Heartstones (20 page)

‘I always remember that you don’t like plum pudding, Dr Brennan.’ She set the trifle down in front of him. The sugar strands were bleeding into watery rainbows across the cream.

The trifle had a taste of soap about it, I had a feeling that the cream was off.

Some things were nice. There were crackers and Della made me giggle as she read out the riddles in a range of funny voices until Mrs Smythe chastised her, ‘Stop playing the giddy goat and act your age.’

We sat beside the fire and listened to the King’s speech crackling across the Irish Sea, and afterwards Gordon found some classical music and we played three rounds of rummy to the strains of Strauss and Mozart. Gordon opened a bottle of Advocaat that a patient had given him as a Christmas gift. We sipped it from green glasses that I hadn’t seen before and he handed round small packages: brown pig-skin gloves for Mrs Smythe, a bottle of Miss Dior for Della, and a beautiful pearl necklace for me. He even had a little box for Razzle, who lay prostrate and snoring in front of the fire; I opened it and found a new leather collar and a name-tag with ‘Razzle’ engraved on one side and the surgery phone number engraved on the back.

Mother had sent me a silver compact and a china brooch – a bouquet of purple pansies. An accompanying card wished me a very happy Christmas and told me that she would spend hers ‘visiting friends of Aunt Margaret in Bath. I have a new cashmere twin set to wear for the informal luncheon party and full-length black lace for the evening ball – your Aunt Margaret and I are hoping to have such fun. Elizabeth’s life has been one long social whirl. She’s turned down several propositions of marriage already …’ I had to resist the urge to throw the card into the fire.

I put the card back in the envelope and gave Della the scarf I’d knitted and Gordon a set of handkerchiefs that I’d embroidered with his initials. I hadn’t thought to buy a gift for Mrs Smythe but I noticed that her gift tag had the message ‘With season’s greetings from Gordon and Anna Brennan’.

Mrs Smythe and Della retired to the kitchen to wash up, declining my offers of help. Gordon and I were left alone together and suddenly I felt very tired. I stood up and thanked him for his generous present and made to say goodnight. He stood up also. ‘Wait,’ he said, and when I stopped he placed his hands on both my shoulders and looked at me with eyes that seemed full of sadness.

‘I know this isn’t how you might have imagined your marriage, Anna,’ he stroked my cheek, ‘but I want you to know that I’m really very fond of you.’ For one awful moment I thought he was gong to kiss me, but instead he turned away to stoke the embers in the dying fire.

January 4th 1949

I have lost so many days. When I look back on Boxing Day now, it seems like months ago not just nine days. I have to force myself to remember what happened to try to distinguish between the facts and the feverish dreams.

On Boxing Day morning I woke up with a dull headache and wondered if I had had too much Advocaat. I felt too embarrassed to admit a hangover to Gordon so I slipped on my tweed skirt and jumper and went down to try to attempt to eat my breakfast. Mrs Smythe had gone to see her sister for the day and had taken Della with her, so we were on our own. We ate in silence and as soon as I put down my knife and fork Gordon fetched my coat and ushered me through the door to walk down to the meet.

The High Street was full of steaming horses and people; breath fogged up the freezing air and the Flannigans manoeuvred through the crowd with trays of hot punch and sausage rolls. The dogs were barking and I couldn’t make out the position of the person playing the fiddle, maybe there was more than one. Small boys zig-zagged in front of us and a tinker woman thrust something towards my face and gave a toothless grin before Gordon gently steered me away. The scene reminded me of a Brueghel painting; my head throbbed and my eyes began to hurt.

All the time I thought I might see my father, mounted on his chestnut hunter, striking in his red coat and white cravat. But instead I saw faces I hadn’t seen for months, friends of Father’s, Mother’s cronies; some smiled at me, others turned away, no one came to talk to me, no one came to ask if I was well.

I lost Gordon for a little while and found a space inside the butcher’s doorway. I leaned my cheek against the coolness of the tiled wall and hoped I might be able to hide there until the hunt set off. I watched the crowd going through the motions of a tradition that seemed suddenly ridiculous to me. I could no longer bear to be part of the whole repugnant scene and began to search for Gordon to take me home. In the distance I saw him talking to a man dressed in a black hunting jacket. The man took off his cap and I recognised him as the young man whom Gordon had treated for a sprained wrist a few weeks before, the man who’d looked like George. I couldn’t face negotiating the crowd that separated us, so instead I gave a small boy sixpence to go and tell the doctor that his wife had gone home feeling unwell.

By the time I reached the house I realised I had a fever; my bones ached, my whole body shivered. I made it upstairs to my room and still in my clothes lay down on the bed, pulling the covers over me as I was consumed with cold and then throwing them off as I burned up with unbearable heat. I continued like this for what seemed like hours until eventually I fell into a heavy sleep.

When I woke up I expected to find it dark but the piercing sunlight shafting through the window suggested it was somewhere around midday. My mouth felt scorched, all I could think of was my need for water. Unsteadily I got out of bed and made it through the door on to the landing. I heard the front door thud and Gordon’s voice and then another I didn’t recognise. I slowly came downstairs, my head spinning, my hands clinging on to the banister for fear of falling. Gordon and his visitor had gone into the consulting room, I wondered if there had been an injury during the hunt that Gordon was now attending to.

I had to sit down on the bottom step for some minutes, my legs too heavy to take me onwards to the kitchen. Standing up I knew I’d never make it into the kitchen without passing out, let alone back up the stairs to bed. I needed Gordon; I needed him to help me before I collapsed onto the quarry tiles that seemed to undulate beneath my feet.

I stumbled towards the consulting room door meaning to knock but as my hand touched it the door swung slowly open, gradually revealing the interior scene. The hunting cap on Gordon’s desk, the satin-lined black jacket discarded on the floor, the young man dressed in shirt sleeves, unbuttoned to his waist and Gordon, still in his outdoor coat, moving his hands across the younger man’s chest as though performing some sort of examination. Suddenly the man took hold of Gordon’s face and kissed him and Gordon drew him tightly into a passionate embrace. I must have gasped because they both stopped and stared at me. I think Gordon said my name but I was already backing out of the room, seized with an energy that had been completely lacking only moments before.

I ran back up the stairs, my heart racing in my ears. Within seconds the symptoms of my fever had returned and soon I was shivering and burning up again as the image of what I had seen downstairs swam in and out of tangled dreams and nightmares.

I was vaguely aware of Gordon and Mrs Smythe and, once, Della wiping my face with a damp cloth. ‘There, that should make you feel better, Mrs Brennan, I’m sure it will.’

I heard Gordon telling Mrs Smythe that this time it really must be influenza.

Much later I heard the clock downstairs strike midnight. I opened my eyes and found Gordon sitting on a chair beside the bed. The bedside lamp cast shadows on his face and he held an empty whiskey tumbler in his hand. He rubbed his temples and with eyes averted to the floor asked me to forgive him. I fixed my gaze on a brown stain on the ceiling and wondered how it had got there; it looked rather like a leaping hare. Gordon promised to try harder to control his urges if only I could find it in my heart to stay with him. He took my hand in his. My throbbing mind wandered to Michael, I wished he was with me by my bed, I wished it was his hand that held mine. I wished I was anywhere but in this room with Gordon.

Days passed and the fever never seemed to lessen. I began to cough and each breath hurt my ribs.

I overheard Mrs Smythe say ‘pneumonia’ with self-satisfied certainty.

Gordon treated me with penicillin – a wonder drug he called it and later told me it had saved my life – but still I wheezed and coughed for days and would have cried with the pain of it if I hadn’t felt so ill.

All my conscious thoughts were full of Michael, once I woke with the sound of his name still ringing round the room from my unconscious cry. I opened my eyes with a start and felt relieved to find myself alone.

Gordon was kind. He sat with me for many hours reading to me, talking to me, encouraging me to take a little water or beef tea. It cannot be denied that Gordon is a caring man no matter what else he may be. Every day he takes Razzle for a walk with his dogs and lets Razzle stay in my bedroom all night as he knows it comforts me.

Mrs Smythe performed her nursing duties efficiently and Della came in every day to brush my hair and tell me the gossip: Mr Nuttall’s wife has gone to Dublin on the train and rumour has it that she’s not coming back; there are workmen at the Castle – the new roof will start next week.

I am sitting up in bed leaning against a pyramid of pillows made for me by Della and writing this. At last I feel a little better. The coughing fits have lessened and the pain in my chest has almost gone, but the thought of getting out of bed makes me feel exhausted.

I think of what I saw on Boxing Day. I know now it was no fever-induced hallucination, it makes sense of everything else that’s puzzled me about my husband. I think I ought to leave, get a train to Dublin like Mrs Nuttall and make a new life; but then I remember what will make me stay: my complete lack of money, my love of the Castle and now Michael.

As Phoebe turned the last page of the diary three small envelopes slipped onto the patchwork quilt. ‘Anna’ was written in spiky letters on each one. Phoebe opened the first and took out a sheet of paper that looked as though it had been ripped from a sketchbook.

Dear Anna,

I met Della Smythe in the high street today. I’m ashamed to say I was relieved when she told me that you had pneumonia – that explains why you didn’t meet me at the boathouse as we’d planned. Then I was filled with concern. I do hope you’re feeling better; Della assures me that you’re on the mend. She asked me if I wanted her to take a message to you so here it is, and here is a picture to cheer you up,

Phoebe studied the small drawing of a puffin, plump and bright-eyed and coloured in with pencil crayon.

Did you like the pebble I gave you? I wish you a fast recovery,

Yours, Michael.

Phoebe put it back in the envelope and opened the second letter.

Dearest Anna,

I was so pleased when Della brought your letter to the school today. You can’t imagine my relief when I read that you are feeling better. You ask about my own health and I can tell you that I am very well, though both the Delaneys have the influenza so I’m teaching the middle and the top school at the same time, which is becoming quite a riot. I am not cut out to be a teacher, if only I could paint all day and make a living from it.

You also asked about my Christmas – it was the usual madness at home, my brothers are a rowdy lot especially when they’re full of drink. They teased me for being too quiet and said they think I have a sweetheart in Nancy Delaney. Let me assure you I have not. If I was quiet it was because I thought of you. I know that you are married and that I have no right to think of you at all but I do, I cannot help myself.

Please write to me again, Della says she’s very happy to play the post mistress (her own words),

Michael x.

Dearest Anna,

My heart soared as I read your letter. That you should think of me is more than I could hope for. Please don’t feel you have to tell me anything about your marriage; it is already clear that you’re not happy. Would it cheer you up to know that you are scarcely ever out of my mind? Please get better soon, I long to see you again.

In the meantime I have had to find some distraction or I should go quite mad. Yesterday I took the early bus to Kenmare and spent half a month’s wages on oils, canvas, an easel, and brushes. On my return I set up the easel in the boathouse. I intend to paint there everyday. The light beside the window is good enough and I cannot see the film director coming to claim his ramshackle shed anytime soon.

I am filled with enthusiasm and last night stayed till midnight drawing out the charcoal outline for my first painting. I want to have it finished for you to see when you are better – I will work hard and fast and hope that that will hasten your recovery.

Michael x

On the bottom he had drawn a line of seals and their pups.

I saw these on the headland yesterday.

Chapter Eighteen

The days of that first week merged into one another. Quickly rituals were created, habits formed. Each morning Phoebe woke to the pale light flooding through the curtains. If there wasn’t rain she ate breakfast outside. Toasted soda bread eaten in the brackish air was a pleasure to rival the first cigarette of the day when she was younger.

After she had dressed she walked – along the beach, over the headland, across to little pebbly coves beyond. Often she took her sketchbook and would sit down on the rough grass and draw whatever she could see in front of her, and sometimes things that were simply in her head. Once she climbed the track up to the Castle and stared at its weatherworn façade, wondering what would happen to it, who would buy it. She didn’t see Theo but she could see his battered Land Rover sitting on the forecourt; weeds sprang up around it, bright green dandelion leaves and the soft new shoots of brambles pushed their way through the gravel. Phoebe took out her sketchbook and started on a simple line drawing of the house, but when Poncho appeared, sniffing round the corner, she drew back into the woods and made her way down to the beach again.

Sometimes, despite what Theo had said, she helped Honey as she sat at the pub kitchen table struggling with her homework. Already she could sense the little girl’s confidence growing. The day she mastered spelling the word
the
Phoebe bought her the green jade dragon from Rainbow’s End.

All week Theo kept away from the boathouse while she was there, though when she woke up in the morning new pots would magically have appeared, and once the kiln had been turned on, continuing to warm the building for days.

Phoebe found that she enjoyed working in Fibber Flannigan’s bar. The job was undemanding and every day there was laughing – with Katrina, with Fibber, with the customers. Sometimes they made Phoebe laugh so much that tears ran down her cheeks.

There had not been much laughter with David: passion, fervour, excitement, anguish, tears of frustration and despair – but not of laughter. There hadn’t been much room for female friendship either; when she wasn’t teaching, Phoebe’s life was all for David, whether it was being with him or longing to be with him, she hadn’t needed other people. She had been careful not to reveal herself in any way to colleagues who might have become her friends from fear of being found out. Even with Nola she had put up barriers.

Now Phoebe enjoyed the warm camaraderie she found with Katrina and for the first time she could talk to someone about David, to mention him in conversation.

‘David would have liked that,’ or ‘David would have felt the same,’ or ‘David and I used to say  …’  Phoebe found that she was actually beginning to believe that David had been her husband, beginning to imagine the house they had shared together, the holidays they took, their weekly trips to Sainsbury’s, the wedding dress she wore. On her walks across the cliffs she would find herself remembering things that hadn’t really happened, things that David would never have taken the risk to do – a picnic in the countryside, a trip to buy him a new suit.

The hurried sex on his way home to Sandra was replaced, in Phoebe’s mind, with long leisurely afternoons of lovemaking, the furtive texts with public declarations of undying love. She found great comfort in these imaginary memories and sometimes felt upset when an actual real memory bubbled to the surface: the way he sometimes didnʼt turn up when theyʼd arranged that heʼd come round; the way he constantly checked his phone.

‘You have been so lucky to find a good man in your life,’ Katrina said as they sat side by side chopping onions at the kitchen table. ‘You will always know you had good husband, good marriage, you never will have the need to regret – and believe me I know about the regret.’

Phoebe stopped chopping and looked at Katrina. ‘You never talk about any men in your life before Fibber?’

Katrina shrugged. ‘What is point in raking up old times?’

‘Did someone hurt you?’

Katrina shook her head vehemently. ‘Like I say, is all in past.’ Her eyes were suddenly full of tears but when Phoebe tried to put an arm around her she turned away. ‘I hate the Irish onions, they always make me cry.’

With Fibber and the other customers talk was easy – a mix of chat about the news, the latest television programmes, reminiscences, jokes, and of course the unrelenting stream of local gossip. That first week the Castle featured large, its sale and rumours about Theo and Honey’s pending departure. Phoebe could see the sadness in Fibber and Katrina’s eyes, and Mrs Flannigan seemed to withdraw still further into frosty antagonism and migraine attacks.

Only for Honey did Mrs Flannigan make an effort. When the little girl wandered into the kitchen after school, Mrs Flannigan would make hot chocolate for her, and, easing her wide hips into the windsor chair, let Honey sit on her lap while she drew dragons or munched on Katrina’s biscuits.

If it was busy in the bar Mrs Flannigan would rouse herself enough to come and help serve, but now she didn’t bother to put her careful make-up on, let alone adorn her fingers with glittering rings. Her once elaborately coiffed helmet of hair now resembled an old Brillo pad sitting on her head.

‘Is your mother all right?’ Phoebe asked Fibber as he showed her how to change a barrel in the musty cellar.

‘I think she’s very upset at the thought of Honey leaving,’ he heaved the large metal container into place. ‘And she’s never got over Maeve’s death. She had a string of miscarriages before Maeve and I were born – she was over forty by then. Little Miracles she used to call us, though I always suspected Maeve was her favourite.’ He smiled, ‘But I never held it against my sister. She was an angel from day one – the very image of our Honey. I hate to say this about my own brother-in-law, but Theo is behaving like a heartless bastard. How could he even think about taking Honey away from us to live on the other side of the world? It’s not as if his mother even knows Honey; I think she’s only met her about three times in the poor child’s life.’

‘What’s Theo’s mother like?’

‘When she lived here I used to think she was like one of those women off that telly programme,
Dynasty
was it?’ Fibber was bent over, attaching the lever to the new keg; he grinned at Phoebe over his shoulder. ‘Though you’re probably too young to remember that one, these days she’d be more like one of those ones on
Desperate Housewives – 
you know, all treadmill legs and big hair. I remember she didn’t used to like the sea, she said it was too loud at night and the beach was too full of sand, and it was never warm enough in Ireland for her to use the pool – the woman couldn’t wait to get back to America. I don’t think she even spent much time with her own two sons. I remember her at Theo and Maeve’s wedding, she could hardly bear to introduce the Flannigans to her fancy new husband; the two of them disappeared off to Dublin just as soon as the cake had been cut – there was no way they were staying for the céilidh afterwards.

‘What was her husband like?’ Phoebe asked.

‘All Tango tan and bright white teeth; you had to put your sunglasses on just to shake his hand. He complained to my mother that the roast beef we had for the reception had been sliced too thin, treated her as though she was the waitress instead of the bride’s mother.’

Fibber stood up straight and checked the beer was flowing through the tube. ‘To think of poor Honey living with that couple, it breaks my heart. There now, job done.’ He wiped his hands on his shirt and looked thoughtful. ‘You know the thing that seems strange to me about my mother? Usually she’d be putting up a great big fight about something like this, claws out, barbed-wire tongue, but she’s not doing anything; it’s as though she’s just resigned to it.’ He scratched his brush of hair and shook his head.

At night Phoebe immersed herself in Anna and Michael’s burgeoning affair. She read the diary entries slowly, savouring each page like a delicious meal. She had been infuriated to find that Honey’s drawings covered much of the third diary, the thick oil crayon completely obliterating whole pages. Anna’s recovery from pneumonia and the initial trysts with Michael were lost for ever beneath the child’s meticulous pictures and designs. Phoebe tried to scratch through the drawings, but only succeeded in tearing the paper.

Every now and then a sentence or paragraph would tantalisingly reveal itself through the intense colouring.

He must have been waiting because the instant I turned the corner he was there, coming up the lane to meet me, both hands …

Too soon I had to go, I’d given myself an hour and that had gone the hour before.

We are tiny figures against a bright blue sky, eternally captured in Michael’s thick brush strokes on the canvas.

It has been a week since I have seen him. The rain has been relentless.

Della came back from Mass with a note from Michael slipped into her pocket at the communion rail.

He has finished two more paintings.

The builders have made a bonfire at the Castle – a great heap of things the bailiffs left behind. Michael went at night and rescued the old chintz armchair from Mother’s drawing room. We have put the armchair by the boathouse window and today I sat, curled up in it with Razzle and watched him while he started another painting.

Michael appeared with a huge mirror, the whole door from the wardrobe in Father’s dressing room. He leant it against the wall and standing in front of it drew me to his side. ‘You are so beautiful,’ he said, and I watched in the reflection while he undid the buttons on my dress.

A quarter of the way through two whole entries revealed themselves before disappearing beneath a rainbow of crayon.

March 23rd

We walked beneath a brilliant sky collecting up sea shells and then arranging them in patterns on the slipway. Michael said I had a natural eye for design and I told him that the art mistress at school had told me that my still lifes looked as though they had been run over with a steam roller and that I lacked artistic flair.

Inside the boathouse Michael showed me a new picture he has started. The black rock is in the foreground; a crow stands on its summit and in the distance a rusty tanker sails against a stormy sky. It reminded me of a child’s painting, and I said I liked it but I wasn’t sure that my art mistress would have approved. Michael laughed and said that was good; he wanted to be liberated from the constraints of perspective and scale and truth to the image, he had no interest in pleasing art mistresses. Then he pulled me down onto the old bed that he has rescued from the bonfire. It was once in the maid’s room and now, with the blankets I have taken from Mrs Smythe’s linen press, it is my favourite place in the world.

March 26th

My chest has worsened again and I have lain in a feverish state for the past two days. Della brought me an envelope from Michael and in it, not a letter, but a pencil drawing of a scallop shell.

Phoebe looked at the yellowing scrap of paper that Anna had taped into her diary so long ago. The picture of the shell was beautifully executed, the perspective and shading perfect, creating an image which seemed almost three-dimensional; Michael had been a skilled draughtsman as well as an expressive painter. She smiled when she saw what he had written underneath:
Something for the art mistress.

‘Mrs Flannigan was a fine figure of a woman in her youth,’ the man who’d sung the Irish national anthem that first night said to Phoebe across the bar. Phoebe had found out his name was John Doyle, and that even though he was well over eighty years old he was known as Young John Doyle to everyone in Carraigmore. ‘She had a look of Hedy Lamarr about her, and a tongue like a whip when it came to the lads; she gave me a good lashing many a time just for telling her I liked her dress or the way she’d done her hair.’ He laughed and then that made him cough. Phoebe put down the glass she’d been cleaning, ready to rush around to the other side of the bar to help him if he collapsed. He stopped coughing, took a deep breath, straightened himself up as much as his bent spine let him, and lit a cigarette. ‘I don’t know how that wastrel Flannigan fellow got her in the end, she was always very wary of the village boys, wouldn’t give any of us a chance.’

‘Did you know my grandmother?’ Phoebe asked.

The old man nodded. ‘I knew Anna Brennan when she was just a schoolgirl and I was in short trousers. She and I used to help my father pull the carrots in the vegetable patch up at the Castle; he was head gardener there for years.’ He drew himself up still further, as though still proud of the position his father had held.

‘Old John,’ Phoebe said. ‘Your father was “Old John”.’

‘Indeed he was. He had those gardens beautiful – a picture to look at everywhere you turned until Mr Shaw’s incident with the shotgun. Your poor grandmother, she always was a Daddy’s girl. They used to walk down on the beach together. He bought her one of our puppies for a present.’

‘Do you remember Dr Brennan?’

‘Of course I do. He was a good doctor and a fine man. It was a loss to Carraigmore when he left to go to Africa.’

‘Did people think it odd that he married Anna Shaw? There was a big age gap and it must have seemed quite sudden.’

Young John frowned, the lines on his face deepening. ‘I can’t see that it was, at least I don’t remember it seeming that way. I do remember people said that he was a gentleman to take her in after all the scandal up at the Castle. The family were left with nothing you know, practically just the contents of a suitcase.’ He shook his head. ‘It was all a very sorry state of affairs. But you should ask Mrs Flannigan, she’d be the one to know about him.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Phoebe. ‘I don’t want to trouble her.’

‘Ah no, us old ones love a bit of reminiscing. I’ll ask her now.’

‘Please don’t.’

‘It’s no trouble at all,’ he leant forward and shouted down the bar. ‘Della, Della.’

Della?

Mrs Flannigan looked up sharply from the pint of Guinness she was pulling.

‘Phoebe here was asking about Dr Brennan,’ Young John called out. ‘I said you’d be the one to tell her about him, what with your mother being his housekeeper in those days.’