The Light of Amsterdam (34 page)

‘Marion, I have something I wanted to give you but I don't know if it's the right thing to do now or not. It's a present. A sort of present.'

Surely they had seen enough of presents to last them the very rest of their lives. Her fingers unintentionally squeaked the glass. He had stepped back, his hand slipping slowly and uncertainly from her neck.

‘But you've already given me my presents,' she said, looking at the flush of self-consciousness that coloured his face.

‘I thought it was something that you might like but I'm not sure now. Maybe it's stupid, maybe it's not the right thing any more.' He puffed his cheeks, holding his breath then blew it free in a long stream and as if releasing his doubt took a small black box from his pocket. ‘It's a ring.'

‘A ring?' she asked while taking the unopened box from his outstretched hand and letting it balance in her palm. ‘A ring for me?'

‘Sort of, but not exactly. It's for you but it's for me.'

She didn't understand but he took the box back and opened the lid, then angled it forward for her to see. It was a wedding ring. A man's broad, plain wedding ring.

‘I thought it was high time I had one. Don't know why I never got one before.' His voice was more nervous than she could ever remember hearing it. It seemed fragile, beating against the tightening stillness of the room, and as the meaning of it coursed through her she struggled for words and could only stare at his face until he looked away. ‘Perhaps I should have done it sooner and perhaps this is the wrong time for it. If it is I'll put it away and it can be something else we're going to forget.'

‘It's the right time,' she said, brushing his cheek with the tips of her fingers, the way she had touched the coldness of the glass. ‘I'm glad.' Her voice was a whisper and for a second she looked back to the window where the greyness smeared the glass and threatened to flow into the room itself. ‘It's the right time.'

‘That's good,' he said, his voice stronger than before.

She took the box again and, removing the ring, held it tightly in the pinch of her fingers then raised his hand and carefully slipped it on his finger. ‘Where did you get it?' she asked.

‘In Lunn's where we got yours. Seemed the right place to go.'

‘Even after all these years?'

He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at it on his finger, moving his hand slowly to let it catch the light. She sat beside him and held her own hand out. ‘Mine looks dull in comparison.'

‘Does that mean you want a new one?'

‘No, you never replace your wedding ring. For better or worse this is the only one.'

‘Where did all those years go, Marion?' He half-turned to look at her. ‘We've been happy most of the time, haven't we?'

She heard the uncertainty in his voice and leaning lightly against him said, ‘Yes, Richard, I think we have.' Then there was only the slight rustle of their breathing. She glanced again at the window. ‘Do you remember that first night in the Slieve Donard and our room looking out over the sea?'

‘Of course I remember it. I think I was more frightened that night than any time in my life.'

‘You were frightened?'

‘The speech, that first dance and you know – all the rest.'

‘There's a lot to worry about, a lot to get right. Young ones seem to take it in their stride nowadays. It was just a big day out for the boys. And as for Judith – there's no sign of it happening.'

‘As long as she's happy.'

‘As long as she's happy,' she echoed.

They sat in silence again and then she asked him to draw the curtains and as he did so she half-expected to hear the disappearing rasp and flow of the sea. On the table stood the nativity scene and the wise men offering their gifts. In the morning she would pack it carefully in her case, wrapping each figure in the soft tissue paper and snuggling it all between the protective softness of her clothes so that nothing got broken. He had given her a ring. If she had let herself, she would have constructed different reasons why he had done it but as she watched him vanquish the last chink of the outer world she told herself that he had given it and that was enough. Everything was enough – it was foolish of her to have looked for something more, for something that now seemed as nebulous and undefined as the mist slowly embracing the city in its languid arms. She thought again of Lillian who had everything taken from her so early and she knew she owed it to her and to herself to live, to hold on tightly to whatever it was she had. She would not be the one who would give it away or let it sift slowly like sand through her fingers. And there were things that she knew were no longer worthy of her care and how much of herself she had wasted in worrying about them. What would happen would happen. So after they had switched off their lights and he came to her, nervous and frightened like he had that very first time, she opened her arms to him and when in the final moments his breath streamed warm and needy against her face and she heard him whisper, ‘Only you, only you,' she gently hushed him, over and over, until her whisper sounded like the ebb of some far-off sea.

Thirteen

As she walked the cold wind began to slip like a silent thief between the buildings and she pulled her jacket tighter to stop it stealing the little warmth that was left to her and when she passed bars and restaurants, their windows steamed with heat, she envied those inside. She remembered the time Shannon had got lost as a child and the sense of terror it had produced as running from place to place, frantically calling her name, she tried to recall where she liked to play, all the time tormenting herself with thoughts of injury or kidnap. If that hadn't been enough there burned the fear that he might have taken her, come back into their lives and taken her for no other reason than he thought she was his. And as she sidestepped the two lurching drunks coming towards her, their arms round each other's shoulders so that they looked as if they were in a ragged three-legged race and about to sprawl forward at any moment, she was cut again by the thought that the very thing she feared had happened all these years later. She tried to remember how long Shannon had said she'd been seeing him but it was blunted by confusion and all that was sharp in her memory was their angry reflections in the mirror of the toilet and the look on her daughter's face when she had hit her.

One of the drunks saluted her but she kept on walking and part of her believed that even in this strange city there would be something that would finally lead her to her daughter, just like that time all those years ago when she had found her on the old disused train line under the bridge with her friend, making echoes with their voices. She had heard her before she saw her and at first there was the panic of thinking it was a cry of distress as her own voice intercut the childish echoes. Shannon's confusion and ultimate indifference to her concern, her childish insistence that she was having fun and didn't want to go home, that it was too early for bedtime and her anger as she had been led forcefully by the arm to the house, all came rushing back. It was all happening again – her daughter indifferent to her distress, not understanding how she had upset her, absorbed entirely by the echo of her own voice. Despite the sharpness of the memory part of her was already cynical about what Lorrie had told her and unconvinced by her description of Shannon's distress even though she desperately wanted it to be true. But it wasn't safe for her daughter to be alone in a foreign city at night and she needed to find her as quickly as she could, calm her and do whatever was necessary to get her back to the hotel.

All around her the city simmered with noisy life, the streets thronged with people intent on pleasure. She passed lots of groups, mostly of young women with their cigarettes held aloft like fire-flies in the night and shiny mobile phones pressed to their ears. There was the chattering clatter of their heels and despite the cold their primped bodies on show with their excited voices breaking against each other before shattering into laughter again and again. She passed the older couple she recognised from the plane, who in contrast to the young women walked hunched against the cold, seamed at the shoulder and locked into each other's silence. Hardly anyone walked alone and those who did strode out with a purpose that said that soon they too would be with the one they loved. Once again she felt conscious of her solitariness and she thought that this was not a place in which to be on your own.

She had no plan in her walking, just a belief that sooner or later she would find her daughter, and in her imagination she called her name and waited for her echoing voice to rise up above the clamour of the city but there was only a returning chaos of sound that coursed through the streets and flowed about her, indifferent to her growing concern. The same sense of loneliness she had felt after Shannon had told her renewed itself, framed in her memory like the painting of the girl reading the letter. After all these years he had returned and kidnapped her for no good reason that she could ever concede, other than the desire to lay claim to her as if she were a possession to be added to what was already his. He had always been someone who wanted to own things – she remembered how he had liked to walk past the moneyed houses in Cultra, how he had liked to talk big about the future. After he had left her she had seen him once, only once and by accident, in the city centre on a Saturday afternoon going into a shop and for no longer than a few seconds. But she had felt sick, sliding into a faintness which made her call her father in a breathless panic to come and collect her, never telling him what had happened and not going back into the city centre on that day for more than a year.

So how could she bring herself to look at him now, to watch him lead her child down the aisle? Perhaps Shannon would see sense, understand what it meant to her, but even as she tried to comfort herself with these possibilities, she knew with bitterness that there were other considerations for her daughter that were as compelling as her mother's feelings. So she kept on walking, trying to pick out her daughter's face from those streaming around her, and then just as she realised that the wind had dropped, she was aware of a mist softly smoking its way up from the canals and seeping into the side streets. It gave them a ghostly feeling as if they had become a spectral memory of what they had been during the day and she shivered and hurried on, frantically scanning the crowds, desperate to find her before the city was sealed in the mist and they were lost to each other for ever.

The sense of loneliness pressed against her as she thought of the old man dying, her presence at his side only by chance – perhaps at some other time she would have merely collected what she was required to and left him there to sleep. But she had known he was going to die and not just from his breathing but from something she had felt in the room, some emptiness that seemed to arch over him and which she couldn't put a name to. And despite it all, despite the elaborate show and the rituals of being a community, the home was the loneliest place she had ever been and if she didn't need the money she would pack it in. The ones who did the most talking about their families were the ones who saw them least, covering up absence with stories about how successful their sons or daughters were and how their business needed them at the helm more and more. Occasional fleeting visits to keep the conscience sweet were the order of the day and these were always the ones who complained the most, probably believing that pointing out supposed deficiencies in care was a substitute for more frequent attendance.

At least Mrs Hemmings had found a substitute for company, sending her letters to the newspapers and posting her comments. She remembered how proud of these she was and how she liked to tell her that she was part of ‘an online community'. But loneliness wasn't confined to the residents and she thought of the time when in late afternoon in a small upstairs lounge, lit only by the light from the corridor, she had heard the quiet crying of one of the Filipino nurses curled in a corner armchair almost hidden in the shadows. She had hesitated at first, knowing the nurses kept themselves to themselves, speaking their own language to each other and sometimes seeming a little distant from the rest of the staff. But then she had gone over, only changing her mind when she saw the letter in her hand, and then quietly she had retraced her steps. Later she had heard from one of the other nurses that her mother was ill but she wasn't able to go home.

And now in a strange city where the sullen mist seemed suddenly patchy and unable to sustain itself, she too had a daughter who was crying for her. Well let her cry – she deserved every one of the tears – and no matter how many she shed she would never know what her mother had suffered. And let her cry whatever tears she felt were needed because now she would make her mother suffer it all over again.

She recognised some of the shops she had passed earlier with the guy from the plane and she wondered if he had found his son. So perhaps her photograph, her snapshot shaped and coloured only by hurt, wasn't so different after all, perhaps it was the one everyone had in their album but never showed anyone. And there was the shop that supposedly sold the most beautiful handmade chocolates – what did he think, that hers was a life that would be affected by this knowledge? That when she was at home she spent her time in search of such a shop? Perhaps she should ask the manager of her local Spar why he didn't sell such things. The bitterness of her loneliness had slowly dissolved itself and been replaced by self-pity, something early in her life she had understood was pointless and wasteful of the energy she needed just to keep going, but she told herself that she was entitled to hug it just a little while longer before she let it go. And there was the prospect of Christmas for it to feed on. It had already been decided that Shannon and Wade would go to his parents' on Christmas Day and come to her on Boxing Day, so she had volunteered to work in the home where the order of the day would be party hats and crackers, organised cheeriness and visitors arriving to play happy families in the afternoon, or just before teatime returning the relative they had signed out earlier like a book from the library. But the only certainty was that before the day was out the place would be a wash of tears with too many unravelling memories spooling out, too many longings for what didn't exist any more and couldn't exist ever again. Well she was paid to clean and serve and there would be more than enough of that to keep her busy until late at night so it wasn't her job to go around offering comfort. Let those whose job it was do it and then she realised that there wasn't anyone whose job it was, that despite the glossy brochures and all the big talk it wasn't in anyone's job description. She tried to spark a little consolation from the thought of the extra pay but it flared only briefly before being replaced by a new awareness of the night's unforgiving coldness.