The Closet of Savage Mementos (20 page)

My B&B smells of damp drowned in air-freshener; it makes me gag. It is one of those places that has signs everywhere telling you what
not
to do. ‘Do not smoke in the bedrooms’; ‘Do not wear outdoor shoes indoors’; ‘Do not have the TV volume loud after 9pm’. 9pm! I don’t feel welcome and I have the privilege of paying for my intrusion. Maybe that is the way it is in most B&Bs. The landlady acts surprised every time I open the door and walk in.

‘Oh,’ she says, ‘you’re here.’ As if she would prefer that I were not.

‘Yes, only me,’ I say, or some other foolishness.

I had been hoping for a gossipy old dear who I could quiz about everyone I used to know in the village. But, the view is good from my room. I can see the last hills along Loch Brack before it opens its maw to the sea; and the water, of course, which lies smooth and grey until the ferry ploughs through it, crashing waves against the shore that I can hear from my bed. And there are white roses under my window – roses as big as a child’s head – and their smell is intoxicating.

I go outside and take some of the photographs I was sent to take for the newspaper. Of the sea, the loch, the white and black houses, the seals, the boats in the harbour, wheeling seagulls against cloud, of the Gàidhlig street signs, and the mountains stacked one behind the other like cut-outs in five shades of blue. I stand in front of Struan’s house on Clanranald Street and look at the upstairs window where a net curtain billows, just as it did twenty years ago. I walk through the village and imagine a different life for myself; a life where I stayed and settled and brought up Malachy as my own. Mine and Struan’s.

From my B&B room I ring Verity. My hands are slick and shaking and my mobile phone slips from my fingers like a live salmon. I wipe it with the edge of the sheet and when my mother answers, I manage to whisper that it is me. I start to sob.

‘Ah now. Stop that, Lillis. Nessa is fine. I know you miss her but she’s grand. She’s sucking away on a bottle as we speak. Listen.’

I hear Nessa’s little suckles and the sounds of the milk hitting her throat; my breasts fill and I press against them with both elbows.

‘I do miss her; I miss her like mad.’ I gulp and wipe away snot with a sopping tissue. ‘Mam, I need to tell you something. It’s important.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, it’s hard to know how to put it. I, well, it’s that you have a twenty-year-old grandson in Scotland. My son. I had a baby. I’ve met him; I met up with him yesterday in Crieff.’

Verity sighs hugely and my phone slides again. She says something that I don’t catch and I grip the mobile and shove it to my ear.

‘The phone fell. What’s that? What did you say?’

‘I said I know, sweetheart. I know about your first baby. I’ve always known.’

Her answer bullets over the phone line and lodges in my brain. My hands shake and my ribs bend outwards like they will snap, then they contract. ‘You know? You
knew
?’’

‘I knew.’ She sighs again.

‘What? I can’t believe that you knew, all that time. All those years.’

‘How could I
not
know? I took one look at you coming into the arrivals hall at the airport and I knew. Well, at first I thought you were pregnant still, but I realised after a while what must have happened.’

‘You never said a thing.’ It shocks me that she could have known and said nothing. Absolutely nothing. For twenty years! Who does that? What kind of a woman does that to her own daughter, leaves her to deal, alone, with the hugeness of such a thing? My blood seems to fizz through my veins and it makes my head and limbs pop. ‘Jesus, I could have done with you saying something, Mam. Anything.’

‘Could you? You didn’t seem like a person who wanted that conversation. At the time.’

I try to fathom this. Verity knew the truth about me but chose silence because she thought that was what I wanted. ‘But I can’t believe you didn’t bring it up.
Ever
.’

‘But neither did you, sweetheart.’

‘I didn’t know how to; I was all over the place. You could have said something later. Any time. You know, when I had my miscarriage. Or when I was expecting Nessa.’

‘What? And upset you when you were already vulnerable? By then it was up to you, Lillis. If I had cracked that egg you would have turned your back on me. You know you would.’

She sounds so sure but I am not sure. I stuck by her through every sort of name-calling and disaster; I pulled her back to herself time and time over. I am stunned that through years of abusing me she didn’t manage to toss this one thing at me: that I was a mother, and that I had abandoned my child.

‘Still,’ I say, wanting her to know that I blame her. I want, too, to be properly angry with her. But meeting Mal has caused a freshness to rush through me, a vigour, and it has softened my edges. What went before doesn’t matter as much now that I have seen him and talked to him and, in a way, confirmed for myself that he is real.

I hold the mobile away from my face and look at it, as if Verity might spirit through the speaker and sit on my B&B bed in Kinlochbrack and explain herself. And if she does, that I might be able to forgive her. She coughs and I put the phone to my ear.

‘I am sorry, you know,’ she says. ‘I did a lot wrong and I’m sorry. I worried about what happened, over the years; I worried about you.’

‘Does Dad know about it? Robin?’

‘I never said a thing.’ I look out the window at the nodding white roses and beyond them to the sea loch. ‘What’s his name, your son?’ Verity’s voice is gentle.

‘Malachy Dónal. He’s known as Mal.’

‘Lillis, listen to me. Don’t fuck this up. Do you hear me? You have everything you’ve ever wanted now. Jump at the sun, sweetheart. Don’t be like me. Jump at the sun.’

Fashioned in wrought iron, over the gate to the tiny Catholic graveyard at the end of Market Street, are the words, ‘May all who rest here feel content’. Bees drone around my ears and white butterflies toss themselves through the air unsure, it seems, which direction to take. My shoes crackle noisily on the gravel path, so I walk on the grass verge instead. Struan’s grave is tucked by the far wall, high enough up for a view of Loch Brack but sheltered all the same. Malachy told me where to find it. The gravestone is white marble; it has Struan’s name and dates and a Celtic scroll. I lift my camera to take a picture then stop; some things are better not photographed.

Among the white stones covering the plot, I arrange the finds from a morning’s beachcombing on the strand below the B&B: a piece of pale sea glass with a zippered ridge; bits of sea pottery – blue and red willow pattern chips with edges as smooth as bone; an eardrum shell; slices of mother of pearl; a scatter of winkles; and a wedge of green glass with the letters STER, which I try, and fail, to pluck some meaning from. I finger a mussel shell which was given to me by a boy on the beach – he was the only other person there. He tapped me on the arm, startling me, and held up a perfect sea urchin for me to admire.

‘Wow, that’s very beautiful,’ I said, ‘weren’t you lucky?’

‘For you,’ he said, and handed me not the urchin but a mussel shell. He stared at it in my palm as if he didn’t want to let it go.

‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘that’s lovely,’ and he shambled away. There was something wandering in the boy, in his carry-on, in his eye. He is somebody’s son, I thought, watching him walk along the beach alone, dipping down to fish some new treasure from among the pebbles.

‘For you,’ I say now, as I place the mussel shell at the top of Struan’s grave, under the headstone. Struan, whose heart was as well hidden as a plover’s egg on a stony beach. Struan who gave me
my
son. ‘Goodbye, Struan,’ I say, ‘and thank you.’

I left Kinlochbrack the last time on a cold evening. The moon was riding high over the loch, throwing an unnaturally bright light onto the water; it was a huge cratered ball, glowing yellow in the black. As the bus pulled away from the harbour, I kept my eyes on the moon, so I wouldn’t have to see the village as I left it behind.

Today the sun shines as I drive along Shore Street and Loch Brack shimmers under the prawn boats being emptied by boy-fishermen in Day-Glo wellies. I go past the pier where a policeman directs the traffic that rumbles out of the belly of the ferry; he stops the cars to let me drive on. I drive past The Windhorse, which still survives with its beauty board walls and Clan MacLeod carpet inside. I pass the house that holds a row of bronze heads in its window: a stern man, a young boy and a foetal-faced baby, caught in an eternity of staring over the loch. I pass the graveyard that holds Struan’s body. And on I drive, up past the Braes and on towards Beinn Dearg which is under a lid of moss-stitch cloud. I overtake cyclists, bright in red jackets, their heavy panniers making them wobble as they tackle the uphill slopes. On the roadside there are lambs so cuddly I want to stop the car and hug them. For nearly six hours I drive south, on and on.

My aeroplane lands late. I walk into the arrivals hall at Dublin airport and I see a family stringing a banner between them: ‘Welcome to your new home, Baby Anna’. Pink balloons billow from either end. Their faces are creased with excitement, these new grannies, cousins and uncles who wait for Anna, who is probably coming to them from Russia or Vietnam. The first thing that pops into my mind is how unbelievably fortunate this baby is, to be welcomed with such love, with such giddy warmth, into her new family.

Cormac stands to one side of the banner with Nessa in his arms. He grins and waves and I rush forward. I kiss Cormac and pull Nessa into my own arms; I swear she has grown bigger in the five days I have been away. But I am back now to mother her, to be the mother that I am capable of being. And Kinlochbrack is a place of memories. That is all.

‘

BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS

The Closet of Savage Mementos
is a narrative about grief, betrayal by loved ones, motherhood, loss, post-natal depression and the grip of past events. The novel examines how the past influences the present and how secrets cannot be ignored. But ultimately it is a book of hope: Lillis is determined not to become the mother her mother was, so she gives up her son for adoption. She is forced into examining this decision when she has another baby twenty years later. Lillis’s hope is to be a good mother to her daughter, but she has to go back to the past, to the son she gave away, in order to find out how to become the mother she wants to be.

Is Verity a bad mother?

Is Lillis a good daughter?

Does Lillis’s initial decision not to be a mother reflect her experience of Verity as a mother?

Does the novel answer the question: does poor parenting cause poor parenting, or a fear of being a parent?

The Irish family is represented in different ways in the novel – Lillis’s separated parents, her father’s new family, the Spain family. What is the author trying to say about families in Irish society?

How is grief portrayed in the novel? Are there different kinds of grief in the book?

Is the age gap between Lillis and Struan relevant to their poor communication skills with each other?

Why does Struan betray Lillis?

Does Robin also betray Lillis?

Why did Lillis not let Struan know about her pregnancy?

Are there reasons that Struan does not attempt to contact Lillis after she leaves Kinlochbrack?

Why did Verity not tackle Lillis about what really happened to her in Scotland?

Are the friendships in the book good friendships? Think of Lillis and Dónal; Lillis and Margaret; Struan and Sam; Robin and Fidelma.

The narrative is about grief and love and how the two become entwined with unpredictable results. How is this handled?

In what ways does the past influence the present in the novel?

How important is the fact that Verity is a professional artist to Lillis’s desire to be a photographer?

Objects (paperweights and shells) and icons (the Virgin Mary) appear frequently. What is their significance? Do they add to the reader’s experience?

What does Cormac represent in the novel?

Is Cormac a replacement for Dónal, or a better version of him?

Are the sex scenes in the book well executed?

How does the depiction of post-natal depression – and Lillis’s unravelling – affect the reader?

Which of the characters is the easiest to identify with?

What role does landscape play in the novel?

Do Scotland and Ireland come off differently in the book? Is one place shown in a more attractive light than the other?

How does the future look for Lillis, Mal and Nessa? Will she able to mother her children well?

If you would like to ask the author any questions about the novel, you can contact her at [email protected]