Something in Common (22 page)

I
t was happening again, and she was terrified.

She lay in the bath, door ajar, listening to the up and down swing of Neil’s voice as he read Martha’s bedtime story in the next room. This week she was demanding ‘Winnie the Poor’ every night. Sarah could picture her curled up in bed, Baba tucked firmly under her chin. Baba was a soft black sheep with creamy-coloured ears, a present from Helen that had arrived in the post two days after they’d brought Martha home.

The miracle of her daughter, their daughter, had overwhelmed Sarah. The months of waiting, once they’d started down the adoption route, had seemed endless. No, not months, years. Almost two years after she’d agreed to put in an application for someone else’s baby, still not at all certain that it was what she wanted.

But Martha, with her shiny little head and enormous blue eyes, Martha, with her miniature fingernails and tiny, perfect ears – Martha, whose gaze had fastened on Sarah’s face as she’d sucked determinedly at her very first bottle in her new home – Martha had won her over without even trying, had found the empty place inside her and settled right in.

And now, just
when everything was going so brilliantly, when they were planning to do it all over again, this.

‘Congratulations,’ her doctor had said that afternoon – because he was programmed to look on a pregnancy as a good thing, even if you’d tried and failed three times, even if the thought of another failure was unbearably frightening.

‘We’ll take very good care of you,’ he’d assured Sarah, no doubt guessing exactly what she thought of the news. ‘There’s no reason why you won’t carry this one to term.’ Sarah didn’t remind him that he’d told her that three times before. He meant well.

She lay in the bath and wondered when to tell Neil that she didn’t have a tummy bug after all, that her nausea and indigestion of the past few weeks had a very different cause. She’d suspected the truth, naturally, and refused to consider it, doomed to failure as it most likely was. But now it had been confirmed, and there was nothing to do but let nature take its cruel course for the fourth time.

Maybe she’d say nothing to Neil. Maybe it was best to keep it to herself this time. What was the point in setting him up for more heartbreak?

They had Martha, and they were in line for another baby: let that be enough for them. Let this seedling inside her go the way of all the others. She’d tell nobody – although it would be hard, with Christine and the boys due tomorrow for lunch, and her father coming on Sunday to spend the day with them, which he did most Sundays now.

Presently she heard Neil sneaking from Martha’s room. Seconds later his head poked around the bathroom door. ‘Will I put on the kettle?’ he whispered.

‘Do. I’ll be down in a minute.’

And maybe after
it was over she would talk to the doctor about going on the Pill, although the thought of that brought hot tears that ran down her face and dripped almost silently into the cooling water.

T
he house was definitely empty. No lights, no sound for more than a week, not since Alice had reported seeing the ambulance. Helen had gone straight out, but there had been no sign of it. She’d looked about for anyone to ask, anyone who might have witnessed the scene, but nobody was around.

She should have called to his door. She should have enquired, even if he’d told her to get lost, even if he’d run her off the premises. At least her conscience would be clear now: she wouldn’t feel like the worst kind of person. It was perfectly clear that he had nobody: it wouldn’t have killed her to ring his doorbell.

The dandelions had taken over his front lawn. Every one a reproach, a reminder of how Helen had ignored his absence until he’d been carted away in an ambulance. Jesus, it wouldn’t have killed her to show some neighbourliness.

She checked the
death notices each day and saw no sign of his name, which didn’t mean he wasn’t dead. But with nobody to ask, she had no way of knowing. The postman still walked up his garden path every few days – junk mail probably, building up on the mat inside – but no other person appeared; no one came to cut the grass or open the curtains or feed the cat.

The cat: she’d forgotten the cat. Was it still in the house, slowly starving to death with its owner gone? And then she remembered flinging the dustpan at it one night when it had sat mewing outside her back door. Not trapped inside then, which was something. But that had been ages ago.

She opened the fridge and saw eggs, butter, a block of Cheddar cheese, two carrots, a parsnip and a bowl of jelly. The only food that seemed remotely suitable was the cheese. Cats did dairy, didn’t they? She cut a wedge into small cubes and left them on a saucer outside the door. If it was still around, and hungry enough, it would eat it.

The next time she looked out, an hour or so later, the saucer was empty. The cheese could, of course, have been eaten by any number of creatures – not all of them cats – but she decided to assume it was Malone’s pet that had found it.

She wrote
cat food
on
her shopping list. It wouldn’t make up for her shameful neglect of its owner, but it might go some small way towards making her feel less despicable.

H
e broke her heart.

A scarecrow, skin and bone, grey trousers bunched with a belt at the waist, shirt collar badly frayed, stubble on his scrawny chin as pure white as the wisps of hair that trailed across his head. Shuffling in slippers from his bedroom each day to pick at the dinner that was put in front of him. Not making any effort to talk to the people around him, leaving the dining room as soon as he’d finished.

‘He lived alone,’ one of the nurses had told Sarah when she’d enquired. ‘He’d been ill, pneumonia I think they said. He couldn’t get out and about, he ran out of food – not that I’d say he ate much in the first place. Practically starving by the time anyone realised he was there. He was a month in hospital.’

‘Who found him?’

‘No idea. Some neighbour, I suppose.’

Charlie had lived in Dublin all his life, but a shortage of beds in the capital’s nursing homes had resulted in his being sent to St Sebastian’s, forty miles away, to convalesce. In the two weeks he’d been there Sarah had seen no visitor, and as far as she knew, nobody had phoned the home to enquire after him. Nobody at all seemed to care what happened to him.

On mild
afternoons he’d make his way to the garden and sit on one of the wooden benches, wrapped in the tartan rug that was folded at the bottom of his bed. Sarah would see him from the kitchen window, his balding head poking from the rug that dwarfed him as he sat there alone, and her heart would contract with sympathy.

And because she was trying not to spend all her spare time keeping count of how long it had been since her last period – seventy-four days – she’d taken to wandering into the garden when she had a few spare minutes to sit on the bench beside him.

At first there wasn’t much talk. She’d remark on the weather, or wonder if he was warm enough, and he’d respond with as few words as he could get away with. He wasn’t unfriendly, just detached, as if he’d had nobody to talk to for a long time, and had got out of the habit of conversation. She asked him once what his favourite food was.

He considered the question, his head to one side, his gaze fixed on a twiggy furze bush. ‘I don’t know,’ he said finally. ‘I’ve never been that bothered about food.’

Sarah imagined him lying in bed, too weak to leave the house, barely able to make his way downstairs and find whatever meagre offerings his fridge had yielded. Wouldn’t have taken him long to run out, by the sound of it. Hard to imagine a man living in the middle of the city, surrounded by others, almost dying of malnutrition.

He had the appetite of a small bird, ate practically nothing, but he needed food now to build him up. She’d try chicken soup with a soft bread roll, that might tempt him, and a finger of apple tart with custard afterwards. Surely he’d manage that.

Towards the end of his third week at St Sebastian’s (eighty-three days since her period), while they sat in silence on the garden bench, he turned to Sarah, out of the blue, and said, ‘I had a cat’ – and to her dismay she saw his eyes were brimming with tears.

‘Oh,’ she
said, putting a tentative hand on his arm, her own eyes filling at the sight of his distress, ‘oh, please don’t cry.’ She couldn’t bear it if he cried.

His face collapsed. ‘I don’t know where he is,’ he said, pulling a crumpled grey handkerchief from his trouser pocket. ‘He went missing while I was sick. I couldn’t feed him. I didn’t have anything to give him—’ Oh, the heartbreak of having to watch the tears spilling from his eyes, stuttering past the crevices in his face. ‘I don’t know how to find him. I asked in the hospital, I asked them to send someone to look for him, but they said they couldn’t do that, but I don’t know where he is.’

‘I’ll help,’ Sarah cried impulsively, swiping her own tears away. ‘What can I do? Is there anyone I could phone? You must have a neighbour who’d go and have a look.’

She wanted to ask who’d found him in the house – surely that person would oblige by hunting around a bit – but the question sounded insensitive. Besides, it had been … how long now? Almost two months since he’d left the house? The cat could be anywhere – did cats hang around houses, waiting for their owners to return? Did they die of loneliness if no one came back, or did they simply find someone else to feed them?

Charlie blew his nose noisily, dabbed at his eyes again. ‘Well, there’s George,’ he said doubtfully, ‘but he doesn’t live near. I went on the bus …’

‘Let me ring him anyway. Let me ask him. He’s a friend of yours, is he?’

‘Well … he has a garden centre. I used to go there a bit. He’d have my address – he delivered plants to me. He knows where I live.’

A garden centre. The only person he could come up with was someone with a garden centre a bus ride away.

‘I’ll ring
him,’ Sarah promised. If the man had a heart she’d get around him: he’d surely oblige an old customer in need. She’d give him the number of St Sebastian’s, ask him to call if he saw any sign of the cat. What would happen after that, she had no idea. Let them find the cat first, if it was to be found. Maybe this George would take it in, look after it until Charlie was ready to go home. If all came to all she’d send Neil to get it and bring it back, and she’d look after it herself. There was always a way, if you wanted something badly enough.

She got a description of the cat from Charlie and found the garden centre in the
Golden Pages.
She rang it first thing in the morning from Matron’s office. She asked for George, and was told he was out doing a delivery. ‘I’m his partner,’ the man on the other end told her. ‘Maybe I can help you.’

It was a
long shot – he might never even have met Charlie. But she’d made the call, she might as well try, and he sounded nice. ‘It’s a bit of a long story,’ she said. ‘Allow me to explain.’

‘Y
ou got a cat?’

From the look on her mother’s face, Helen might as well have told her she had the plague. They sat in her parents’ spacious drawing room, the September sun a red ball slipping behind the roofs of the houses across the road, red and purple sky reflected in the giant gilt-framed mirror that hung above the fireplace.

Her father’s eightieth birthday, Black Forest Gateau and sherry all around, except for Alice who was drinking Fanta. Helen had given him a copy of Frank Delaney’s
Silver Apples, Golden Apples: Best Loved Irish Verse.
Alice had sketched Malone’s cat and put it into a frame that she’d found selling for thirty pence in a charity shop. No doubt her grandparents would find a suitable spot for it; the downstairs toilet maybe.

‘It’s not our cat,’ Helen told her mother. ‘It belongs to our neighbour. Alice looks after it mostly, don’t you?’

‘Mm.’

‘So what are you doing with it?’

‘The neighbour’s in hospital. We’re just looking after it until he gets home.’

Three months, maybe
more, since Malone had been last sighted, she’d lost track. The chances of him ever returning to his house becoming slimmer, surely, with each day that passed. His cat making himself at home next door, Alice sneaking him into the kitchen whenever Helen wasn’t around, feeding it leftover meat from the fridge last week that Helen had been planning to turn into a curry, a suggestion from Sarah some time ago.

She’d seen a man from her bedroom window a couple of days earlier getting out of a van that had
F&G Garden Centre
on the side. She’d watched him pushing open next door’s gate and decided she’d better ask him about Malone, but by the time she’d finished dressing and gone downstairs, both man and van had disappeared.

She ate cake and listened to Alice telling them about her Inter Cert results. A relief that she’d scraped through: on to the next two years. Still talking about art college, but Helen wondered if an accomplished portfolio, which she’d already begun assembling, would be enough to secure her a place.

‘She’ll have to work hard across all subjects,’ her art teacher had told Helen. ‘She has the artistic talent, and definitely the drive, but there’s stiff competition for art college, and she should pull up in the other areas too, to give her a fighting chance.’

She studied her father, still an air of authority about him at eighty, well honed from years of putting criminals in their places. Her mother in a duck-egg blue twinset and grey tweed skirt, cutting more cake, pressing another slice on Alice, who would eat Black Forest Gateau for breakfast, lunch and dinner if she was allowed. Shame Helen had never baked a cake in her life.

Sarah probably made her own Black Forest. Helen could imagine her piping on the cream, dotting the swirls with plump black cherries. More on her mind these days than cakes, according to her last letter.