Something in Common (6 page)

‘When you’re married, you and Christine can give me a present between you,’ she told him, ‘and Christine will pick it out, so you’ll be off the hook.’

He
grinned. ‘You mean my mother will be off the hook. I haven’t a clue when it comes to presents.’

‘You haven’t done badly with me so far,’ Christine told him.

‘Only because you drop loads of hints – I’d have to be blind and deaf not to pick up on them.’

‘That’s true.’

Sarah watched them together, so comfortable, so at home in each other’s company. She thought again how lucky her sister had been to find the man she wanted, and to discover that he wanted her too. Sounded so simple, but here she was at twenty-five still without a single prospect.

Unless you counted Neil Flannery, whose father Stephen Sarah had been cooking for since she’d got the job in St Sebastian’s. Even though she hadn’t even met the son, she supposed he was a faint possibility.

Stephen certainly thought so. ‘You’d be ideal for each other,’ he’d told her more than once. ‘He’s a good lad, just hasn’t met the right lady. And he’s about your age.’

His wife Nuala silenced him whenever he brought up the topic in her company. ‘Stop that, you’ll embarrass Sarah. I’m sure she’s well able to find her own boyfriends.’

She came to see her husband often, nearly every second day – they were from a small market town less than twenty miles from St Sebastian’s – and she sat by his bedside or armchair for much of the afternoon. Their only son, the mysterious Neil, worked during the week as a gardener and visited his father at weekends, when Sarah was off-duty.

‘But he’s starting a job soon just up the road,’ Stephen had told her, ‘and he says he’ll be in more often while that’s going on, so you’ll get to meet him then.’

‘Shush, stop that,’ his wife had said automatically.

What must it be like, Sarah wondered, to have your life partner struck down so young, to watch him deteriorate, see the strength and vitality washing out of him, to be forced eventually to put him into care because you could no longer look after him yourself?

‘Of
course we would have loved to keep him at home,’ Nuala had told her once, when they happened to be leaving together. ‘This was the last thing Neil and I wanted, but it just became too much. And it wasn’t fair on Neil either. He has his own life, and his work takes him all over the place.’

Awful to have husband and wife living apart from one another, never sharing a bed at night, never waking up together or sitting down to a family dinner. What kind of a marriage was that for anyone?

The loneliness Sarah had already witnessed in the nursing home and the poignant stories she’d heard from some of the residents had broken her heart several times over, had reduced her to private tears more than once. But she still felt convinced that the job was right for her – she could make a difference to them. She
was
making a difference.

She looked around the hotel table at the faces she’d grown up with. So lucky she was to be surrounded by a caring family, with so much heartbreak out there. She smiled at the chocolate cake that was being wheeled across the dining room on the dessert trolley – chocolate for her, coffee on Christine’s birthday – with the half-dozen flickering candles stuck into the top.

She was aware that everyone in the room was looking at them now, waiting for the birthday girl to blow out her candles. If she were married she’d cook a birthday dinner herself, invite her family around. But without a husband or a home of her own, she was still the child who got taken out by her parents.

She blew out the candles and watched her mother sipping the single Babycham she ordered each birthday dinner, the only alcohol she ever took. She listened to her father making his usual jokey speech about how hard he’d had to work to afford the birthday dinner, and about how he and Martha looked forward to the day when they could retire and be supported by their children. Same speech every year, same everything every year.

‘Won’t be long,’ he said to Sarah, ‘with your new job, and Christine marrying into money, your mother and I will be heading off on the world cruise any day now.’

Brian
grinned. ‘I think you might have to wait until Sarah writes her bestseller.’

‘Any day now,’ Christine added, cutting the cake into slices.

‘You can laugh,’ Sarah told them, ‘but I
am
going to write a book.’

She was. She just had to find the time. After work tomorrow she’d make a start for sure, or sometime very soon anyway. A period tale she thought, set in a big house with servants – that kind of story was always popular. All she needed was to sit down and make a start.

She joined in as they sang ‘For She’s A Jolly Good Fellow’ and wondered, not very seriously, when she would finally get to meet Neil Flannery. Might be a big let-down, not her type at all, but it would be nice to find out, either way.

She didn’t have long to wait. The following Friday, as she was helping Donna, the kitchen junior, to wipe down the stainless-steel worktops after the lunch clear-up, she glanced out of the window that overlooked the small car park. There was Nuala Flannery on her usual visit to Stephen – but the car was wrong: that wasn’t her blue Mini. And Nuala wasn’t getting out on the driver’s side.

Sarah watched as the other door opened and a fair-haired man emerged. Long legs, tall, slim. Grey tweedy jacket, blue jeans, too far away to make out facial features. She watched him take his mother’s carrier bag from her – it must be him, it must be the son – as they walked together in the direction of the main door.

She waited twenty minutes, making out the following week’s menu plan and writing up the shopping list for Dan, the nursing-home driver and general handyman, before making her way down the corridor towards Stephen’s room. She would have been dropping in anyway, she told herself. They’d think it odd if she didn’t appear: she always put her head in when Nuala was there to ask if they wanted tea.

She
tapped on the door, her stomach fluttering slightly.
Stop, don’t build it up.

‘Come in.’

Stephen’s voice. She opened the door. ‘I just wondered,’ she began, not looking in the direction of the man who stood by the window, not looking at him at all, ‘if anyone wanted a cuppa.’

‘Sarah,’ Stephen said, reaching a quavering hand towards her. ‘Come in and meet my son. Neil, this is the best cook in Ireland – apart from your mother, of course.’

‘Oh, shush.’

Grey eyes, magnified behind large, thick glasses that gave him a scholarly look. Regular features, longish nose, fairish hair. Outdoorsy complexion, a ruddiness to his cheeks, not surprising given the job he’d chosen. She was conscious of both his parents observing them as they shook hands, could feel her own cheeks becoming hot. Hopefully he’d think it was from the kitchen.

‘Hello,’ she murmured, having to look up several inches to meet the grey eyes. His palm felt slightly rough – from wielding a spade, she presumed. She wondered if he wore the glasses when he worked. They’d look a bit incongruous with his gardening gear.

‘I’ve heard a lot about you,’ he said, their hands still clasped together. ‘Apparently you make a terrific scone.’

She smiled, glad of the opportunity to turn towards Stephen. ‘Well, your father seems to like them.’

‘He must have gained half a stone since Sarah came along,’ Nuala put in.

‘And you should taste her lemon meringue pie,’ Stephen added. ‘I made Nuala get the recipe, didn’t I?’

‘You did – and mine didn’t turn out half as nice.’

‘Get away, it was lovely.’

It seemed to Sarah that along with the spoken conversation there was another, unarticulated exchange taking place between the older couple:
How’s it going? Are they getting on? Were we right?
Something in the way they both looked from her to Neil, in the heartiness of their voices, in how Nuala’s glance flickered to their hands as they separated at last. All that was needed was for Stephen to say something about how lucky the man would be who got Sarah, but thankfully he didn’t.

‘I’d love a cuppa,’ Nuala was saying – Nuala who never took one normally. ‘Can you sit with us and have one yourself?’ Oh, clever Nuala.

Sarah
made a show of looking at her watch, even though she knew the time practically to the second. ‘I have a few minutes,’ she said.

Nuala turned to her son. ‘And maybe you’d fancy one?’

‘I’d love one, thanks.’ The grey eyes met Sarah’s again. ‘Can I give you a hand?’

‘Oh, no, honestly—’

For goodness’ sake, was she blushing again? You’d think she was fifteen, not twenty-five. It was Stephen and Nuala looking all pleased with themselves – it was the obvious matchmaking that was going on. Really, as if they didn’t think either of them capable of finding a partner on their own.

She escaped from the room and hurried back to the kitchen, where she made tea and cut slices from one of the coffee cakes she’d baked that morning. ‘Who’s that for?’ Donna wanted to know, and Sarah said Stephen Flannery had a few visitors, and were the salt cellars refilled yet?

First impressions had been favourable, she decided, taking a tray from the stack on the shelf by the window. Nothing objectionable about his appearance – the glasses made him look intelligent, they were a plus – and clearly he was on good terms with his parents, which reflected well on his character.

She scalded the teapot and spooned in tea. Had his own house too, which was good; and being a gardener meant he appreciated nature, also a lovely quality in anyone.

But there was no point in building it into anything at this stage: he might well have a girlfriend his parents knew nothing about, or he mightn’t fancy Sarah in the least. A possibility, that was what he was. A slightly less faint one, maybe, than he’d been before they met, but still just a possibility.

Chances
were nothing would happen – life didn’t fall into place as easily as that – but for now she’d keep an open mind. No harm in doing that.

Typed underneath was
M. Breen, Editor
, but the signature above the typed name was Catherine Fortune’s. Word for word, apart from the subject of Helen’s submission, it was identical to the half-dozen or so other letters – hardly letters, more like notes – that she’d received from the newspaper since the previous August. All signed by Catherine Fortune – M. Breen, Editor, being too busy, presumably.

And paper-clipped to the note was the identical cheque that had accompanied all the rest. More than she’d expected, enough to keep her and Alice in bread and jam for a month or two, with a few quid left over for a bottle of Powers Gold Label.

‘Mama!’

She opened the kitchen door. ‘What?’

‘My sausage fell on the floor. There’s stuff stuck on it.’

‘Rub it off and it’ll be fine. I’ll be in in a minute.’

She slipped the cheque out from under the paper clip. She folded it in two and tucked it into the pocket of her jeans. She tore the note and its envelope in two and dropped the pieces into the ashtray that shared space on a kitchen chair with the phone.

She opened the front door and lit a cigarette and stood looking out at the garden. Gravelled rectangle roughly the size of a double grave, narrow cement path running alongside it to the gate. A waist-high privet hedge separating her from her neighbour, immaculately cut on his side and across the top, left alone to do whatever it wanted on hers.

The
grey sky was striped with ribbons of pale blue. A teenage girl passed in the street, her cream cheesecloth top surely not warm enough for the chilly February day, her platform-soled clogs poking from beneath the wide, wide legs of her jeans. Helen leaned against the door jamb and marvelled all over again that she was being paid to do what came so easily to her, that this occupation which gave her so much satisfaction was proving to be her salvation.

It hadn’t started the way she’d planned, with the shop-assistant piece. She’d begun writing it, she’d been more than halfway through, early on the morning of August the first, when a newsflash on the radio had announced the massacre in Northern Ireland of three members of the Miami showband, returning to Dublin in the early hours after performing for the evening in a County Down dancehall.

Her heart had stopped. The Miami. She’d never met them, but Cormac had. Their paths had crossed often, all the showbands knew one another. He’d known them, he’d spoken to them and now three of them were dead, ambushed on a country road in the middle of the night and shot.

She’d put her head in her hands and cried at the thought of their wives and children and parents, at the years of grief and anger and pain that had only begun for them. Christ, was there no end to the madness of Northern Ireland? Would the slaughter of innocents never stop?

When she could see straight, she’d wiped her face and set aside the article she’d been writing, and rolled a fresh sheet of paper into the second-hand typewriter she’d bought with her father’s money. She’d written without stopping, more tears spilling out of her. She cried for the just-killed men and for Cormac, her fingers blindly finding the right keys until Alice had appeared, rumpled and pink-cheeked and demanding breakfast.

All that day she’d kept at it, any chance she got. She’d introduced herself as the wife of a former musician. She’d outlined the lifestyle of a typical showband, the camaraderie between the members, the rehearsals in draughty garages, the endless travelling to venues, the dingy B&Bs when getting home after a night’s playing wasn’t an option.

She’d written her imagined account of the atrocity, describing the chat in the van beforehand, the happy banter of the men after a successful evening’s performance. Their acceptance of the checkpoint, their slight annoyance maybe, at their journey being delayed, their assumption that they’d be on the way again before long.