Nora Webster (40 page)

That evening, when she knocked on Mossy Delaney’s door, his wife answered and asked her what she wanted.

“I would like to talk to Mr. Delaney,” she said quietly.

When Mossy appeared, it was clear that he had been asleep. Nora tried to speak softly so that his wife would not hear. She explained to him what had happened.

“So I should have come to you in the first place. I am in a dreadful situation now. Really stuck. And I can pay you before you start.”

“Is it just one of those small rooms?” he asked. “It’s not the whole house?”

She nodded humbly.

“I’ll do that for you in the morning. Do you have the paint?”

“I do.”

“I’ll be there at half past eight.”

She nodded again.

“Do you need the missus to walk up home with you? You look very shook.”

“No, I’ll be able to get home,” she said. “But I am very grateful to you.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

T
he pills Dr. Cudigan prescribed took the pain away, or they masked whatever was still happening in her chest and in her arms. There was still a heaviness and a sense of strain. On the third morning she believed again she was having a heart attack. But then the sharp pain died down once she got up.

She moved carefully and slowly all the more now since she could not sleep. She did not know if the painkillers caused her to lie awake in the night with rushing thoughts and then a blank state of being half-alert, or whether it was the lingering ache in her arms and chest. Mossy Delaney and a helper finished the painting in a day and a half. When he was done, she told him that she appreciated how obliging he had been.

“The thing is,” he said, “you’d work for people with plenty of money and they would be just plain ignorant. The money makes them ignorant. I won’t name anyone now, but there are ignorant
people in this town, and if you want to know them, then go and work for them. There’s one woman I could name. All I know is that I will get my reward in heaven for not spilling a can of red paint all over her. I came close to it, mind. And I would have enjoyed the screaming. But I’d always like to help someone out, and you are a brave woman for thinking you could paint a ceiling yourself. God, we got a great laugh when we saw what you had done! Painting a room is like anything else. You have to know how to do it, missus, you have to have the skills. I mean, you wouldn’t go to Larry Kearney if you needed the bank manager, now would you? Or Babby Rourke if you needed the bishop?”

Fiona supervised the men who came to put down the carpet and she and Conor also dealt with the man from Dan Bolger’s who came to hang the curtains. There were a few things still missing, such as a new shade to cover the bare bulb that hung from the ceiling in the middle of the room, and the white walls without any pictures seemed strange and bare. During the day, the heavy curtains made the back room seem dark; after work she sat in the newly made room with the smell of fresh paint and dozed and woke again. She knew that she should stay awake so that she could find a rhythm of sleeping, but it was too hard. All night now she longed for the morning, but once she was half an hour at work she felt a desperate tiredness.

She formed the habit in Gibney’s of going to the bathroom and sitting in one of the stalls, letting her head rest against the wall and falling asleep for a few minutes and then washing her face in cold water before returning to her desk. Since Elizabeth had dropped both boyfriends for a new one, and the new one seemed to Nora to be solid and serious, and devoted to Elizabeth, they had a lot to discuss and that helped to keep her awake.

She found that if she had a cup of instant coffee in the morning made with three spoonfuls of coffee and as much sugar as she could stomach, then she would be fine for the first hour, or maybe longer. If Elizabeth left the office, she boiled the kettle that Elizabeth kept beside her desk and had another large cup of coffee. It almost made her sick but if she concentrated she did not have the same urge throughout the morning to put her head on her arms at the desk and fall into a deep sleep.

When she went back to Dr. Cudigan after seven days, he told her that it would be a mistake to take sleeping-pills with the painkillers. He checked her pulse and ran his stethoscope over her chest and back, and said that, as she had strained her muscles quite badly, maybe she should stay with the painkillers for another week or so, and then, if she still could not sleep, he would take her off the painkillers and prescribe sleeping-pills.

She was so tired at night that she had to make sure that neither Fiona nor Conor was close by when she went up the stairs, gasping for breath when she was halfway up, and holding the banister so that she would not fall back. Without taking her clothes off, she lay on the bed with the light on, and her sleep then was the same sleep of oblivion as she had slept in that basement bedroom in Sitges. But it lasted sometimes for less than ten minutes. After it, she was fully awake, with thoughts darting. Once she was in her nightdress and in bed with the light off, she did everything she could to make herself sleep. She counted sheep; she lay on one side and then on the other. She refused to let any thought come into her mind. But nothing worked. She would have to go back to Dr. Cudigan and insist either on sleeping-pills or that she could stop taking the painkillers.

Lying awake like this in the dark she could be anyone in the past, she thought. She could be either of her grandmothers, whom she had never known. They had both died before she was born and were dust now, a skull and some bones under the ground somewhere. Her mind moved back and forth over them and what she knew about them until it shifted and focussed on her mother, whose face came to her now and whose presence seemed close. She could be her mother lying here. It was just a difference of years. She lay still in the dark with her eyes open, breathing and then not hearing her breath. In the half-sleep, her mother came closer. Slowly, the image of her mother laid out after her death appeared to her, as though her mother were lying on this bed in this instant, seeing nothing, hearing nothing. No matter what she did to avoid it, that last time with her mother’s body re-surfaced in vivid detail.

She had not loved her mother when she was alive. She wondered if Catherine and Una thought about that when her mother died, as all three left their mother’s body in the care of the nuns who had come to lay her out in the upstairs bedroom of her house. As Nora sat in the kitchen without speaking to them, she knew that the next time she would see her mother she would be in the stilled, formal pose of death. The room would be darkened. There would be flickering candlelight; her mother would be at rest, no longer there, gone from them. She would lie in repose through the night and for most of the following day.

It struck her what she would do. She had seen it once before when her father died. Her aunt Josie, and her aunt Mary, her mother’s older sister, had found a chair on each side of the laid-out body and they sat there without speaking until the undertakers came with the coffin. A few times the two women took tea, but mostly they refused. They took hardly any food either. Sometimes they prayed, sometimes they
merely looked closely at their dead brother-in-law, a few times they acknowledged the arrival or the departure of someone they knew. They watched and waited, having found a place where no one would disturb them. They did vigil.

Nora knew there was a chair on the other side of the bed from the door in her mother’s room, an old armchair that had once been downstairs. Her mother had used it to put clothes on. Her mother, in the old days, would have made sure that all her clothes were in the wardrobe or in the chest of drawers. But in recent years she was too weak. Moving was hard. Her mother did as little as she could. Nora remembered that she suddenly felt a sadness then, something she had not felt before. It had come to her in one second what death meant: her mother would never speak again, never come into a room again. The woman who had given birth to her was not breathing now and would not breathe again. In some way, Nora had not bargained for this, had always felt that there would be time for herself and her mother to meet and talk with ease and warmth, or something like warmth. But they never had, and they never would now.

She waited, without lifting her head, until someone said that the room was ready. She passed the others without speaking. When Catherine asked her a question, she did not listen and did not reply. Whatever Catherine needed to know, she could find out in some other way. Nora was the eldest of the daughters; now she would be the first in the room. She walked up the stairs and nodded to the young nun who was standing in the doorway. The curtains had been drawn and there was a smell of freshly starched linen. She waited for a moment and then passed into the room. It was her mother’s chin she noticed first; somehow, in settling her head against the pil
low, they had made the chin seem longer than it should have been. It appeared out of place. She wondered if she should say something to the nun, if something could be done about it. But she supposed not. It was too late now, she thought. Maybe it would make no difference.

She found the chair across the room. The clothes that had been on it had been put away somewhere. She hoped that her staying here would not cause her sisters or the neighbours to feel that it was because of remorse or the need to make up to her mother, to show regret for what she might have done, or what she had not done, in the past. She did not feel remorse. Instead, as she looked at her mother’s dead face, she felt a closeness to her, a connection that she had in some way always felt, but never acted on, or spoken about.

The face, cleared of suffering and of familiar expression, resembled her mother in old photographs when she had a thin, dark, shy, watchful beauty. That, or traces of it, had returned. Her mother would have liked the idea that her youth, or some part of it, had come back.

Her two sisters came and looked at their dead mother. Catherine knelt and bowed in prayer and blessed herself as she rose to her feet. Nora watched her as she self-consciously stood by the bed in the role of prayerful, sorrowing daughter. She wished that Catherine would go downstairs. When she caught her sister’s eye for a moment, she found an expression there that she did not trust and she determined that no matter what happened over the time that followed she would not find herself alone with Catherine; she would stay here in the room all night if she had to. She would not leave the chair. When Maurice arrived to be with her, she told him that she was going to stay the night here in the room. He held her hand for a moment and then said that he would bring the children in the morning, but he
would go home now and stay with them. She smiled at him as he left. Her mother had loved Maurice. That was not unusual, Nora thought, as everyone loved Maurice.

Over the next few hours neighbours came. They each knelt down and said a prayer. A few leaned in to touch the dead woman’s hands with rosary beads entwined, or her forehead. They nodded at Nora and a few whispered to her, about how peaceful her mother looked, or how she had gone to a better place, or how she would be missed.

When Nora was alone in the room, she could hear voices downstairs and she guessed that people were having tea and sandwiches. The candles had burned down to half their size. Her mother was nothing now except an old woman who had died. There were no features in her face that Nora could make out, just whitened wrinkled skin and a chin that was still oddly noticeable. Without her eyes open, without her voice speaking, her mother was nobody, there was no life in her.

Eventually, the house became quiet. Una came and offered to stay instead of her, but Nora refused, and she suggested that her two sisters try to get some sleep. She would make sure that there were candles kept burning and that her mother was not alone on her last night in the world. There was silence in the house, broken sometimes by the passing of cars and by the rattling of the windows in the bedroom in the night wind.

Nora wondered if it was the tiredness, or the light from the candles that cast long shadows on the wall, but she would not have been surprised if her mother had moved now or spoken. The talk between them might have been easy.

What was strange as she began to look at her mother again was how little she was sure of. The details of her mother’s face had vanished, but there was an expression still, a sense of some
one. And then that sense became more exact, more clear, the more she watched. She could see other people in her mother’s face—the faces of cousins, the Holdens and the Murphys and the Baileys and the Kavanaghs; the faces of Catherine and Una; Nora’s own face; the faces of Nora’s children, especially Fiona. It was as though her mother in this long night alone became all of them.

All the natural life had gone and instead something else had come, something a long time in the making. It lingered there, and then it faded and something else replaced it. The face exuded an impression more powerful than anything it had ever done in the days and nights when there was breath and voice.

Nora was not sure. She tried to picture her mother as she remembered her best—an old woman in a grey coat of soft wool, a brooch in the lapel of the coat, a scarf. An old woman walking towards her; or a young woman in a photograph. But none of these images was as real as the face in the bed that night. She wondered how she would remember this, but remembering would be nothing compared to this looking, the intensity of this here and now.

The chin ceased to matter, it was a mere detail, and details now were of no consequence. What mattered could not be named or easily seen; if one of the others came into the room they might not see it at all. It was maybe what she and her mother had been waiting for. She wondered if she had kept away so that this encounter with the body of her mother, with her mother’s dead image, could matter more, or simply be possible. Her mother’s face was both more masklike and also more individual than it ever had been; Nora would be the only one who would recognise that. None of the others would be able to see it, they were too busy, too close, too involved. It was her distance that made it possible. It was her distance now that allowed her to sleep for a while and then wake with a start in her own room,
and realise that she had been dreaming, that the night’s vigil by her mother’s body was part of a dream. She was in her own house, and it was time to get up and wake the others and make breakfast and go to work.