The Lost Souls' Reunion (9 page)

‘I didn't get the letters until last month. Your father had hidden them. She's not going to burn in the sun like her mother, is she?'

By the time I returned with hot steaming bread wrapped in newspaper, both their faces had changed. They sat close together. My grandmother stood to make tea, but I was there before her. There was no kettle, the pan had to be boiled on the gas ring. I kept the matches in my skirt, away from Carmen. I wanted to shout at the old lady with the half-bald head, ‘She is having a good day today. On a bad one she won't speak to you and she might even try to set fire to you.'

‘Eddie called to the house many times to look for you,' Noreen talked as if I had spoken. ‘I told him you'd gone to London. He came here.'

‘Eddie?' Carmen asked. ‘Is he still in London?'

‘No, he's back home. Not long back.'

He had heard my mother's voice, crying for him in the night. He had not heard it well enough.

Carmen went into the bedroom to change. When she came back she had washed herself clean of all that her mother had seen at first. She was Carmel – loudness wiped away.

She would not have done this for me, even when I poured the water and pointed to the flannel. Noreen saw her daughter's broad feet, scarred and tortured from the pointed shoes.

We ate the hot bread with smeared butter and we drank sweet tea, even though the summer was with us again for a time in autumn, and it was too hot for food. Our window was wide open but it did nothing to relieve the closeness of the air. Pearls of sweat appeared on Noreen's cheeks, growing fat then running a river into the damp neck of her blouse.

‘I bought this on the way here,' she said, showing us her hat. ‘I always fancied myself in a hat and when I saw this in the window I knew it had my name on it.'

Carmel laughed a high laugh, not sure of where it would lead her. I went for the pill bottle and gave her one. She took it.

The talk began to pour on the second cup of tea. They forgot about me. I was afraid of this talk, of the peace it brought with it.

‘Where is he?' Carmel asked finally.

‘Gone,' Noreen said.

*   *   *

As the bus disappeared over the brow of the hill Noreen could not stop herself thinking that it was she who should have been on it, resenting her only daughter's escape. Then she thought of what the price had been.

Late that night, Joseph returned, full to the gills, ready to wreck the house on the back of a crooked look.

He opened the door of the house and slammed it against the wall so that the damp plaster cracked, split, fell away. He like the noise, it sounded good in his head. He went to his gun rest and found his gun gone. Up the stairs, slowly, the spots of anger in front of his eyes and the drink making his feet unsteady.

He opened the door to his daughter's room and he turned, expecting the mother to rush out pleading for her like a bleating sheep. The mother did not come. Again he pushed the bedroom door against the wall with a force that drove a picture off the wall. The glass shattered into thousands of fragments so tiny that they could be felt underfoot for a long time afterwards.

Joseph shielded his eyes from the light of the hallway, for the room was in darkness, and he found his wife sitting bolt upright in his daughter's bed, pointing his own shotgun at him.

‘You wouldn't dare,' he snarled.

‘I would and I will, and what's more I know I wouldn't need a second bullet.'

Joseph stopped at her voice, which had all but disappeared into a soft whisper over the years, now grown again. Even on this first night Noreen seemed bigger, filling out the large bones and flesh that had grown limp on them.

‘I am ready to kill you,' the grown voice said.

‘Why don't you?'

‘Because killing would be too good for you. I am spending no time in no prison for your carcass, unless you make me. The girl's gone. You will beat me no more because I have no reason to let you any longer.'

The trigger was cocked; the click rang in his ears. His wife's face had a new expression.

He left, treading on the shattered picture frame. It was a forced Christmas picture of the three of them. Carmel had wanted it put in a frame and on the wall. Noreen Moriarty lived under the same roof as Joseph for many more years. He never raised a hand to her. Now and again he tried the handle of the door to Carmel's room. Each time it was locked. Once he put a shoulder to it. The click of the shotgun put a stop to him doing that again.

His revenge was simple; he never gave Noreen another penny. The town remarked on how the big woman must have turned simple, to let her husband do all the shopping, pay the bills, even buy her few bits and clothes right down to her underwear. It was decided Joseph had turned over a new leaf. The reason for his chronic temper was the wife he had at home who would not lift a finger for herself or him. Time can distort as well as heal. The distortion left Noreen without a person in the world to enquire after her.

She ate because Joseph could not cook and he had to bring her the food to do it for him. She spat in his dinner each night.

The letters that came from London never reached her, since she no longer went into the town. The postmistress had delivered them into the hands of Joseph.

*   *   *

Eddie called to the house seven days after Carmel had left when he was sure Joseph was away in the fields. Noreen said nothing to him for a long time – a man who would wait seven days before enquiring about a woman he was supposed to love was no man at all.

‘I came after Carmel, where is she?' Eddie said outright, after a silence in which a tea had grown cold. The kitchen was clean and bare. It made him want to cry to think of the thin girl he loved growing in this place.

‘Gone,' Noreen said into a sink that showed her a reflection that had changed as much as she had expected it to and more since the first time she had looked at it.

‘Gone where?'

‘London.'

Noreen told him the truth, that Carmel had gone away with a child in her belly. From the look in his eyes she could tell it was his, as if she did not know already. She did not sleep nights, thinking she had two wandering souls on her hands now, not just one.

It took Eddie a month to follow. He had never wanted a big city in a different country. The windows of Scarna were his and he had wanted no others. He thought she would fade from him but in the fourth week the pain in his chest was worse. A woman and child of his, elsewhere.

Eddie left. On the night he arrived in London, Carmel was walking up the grey stairs and in on Constance Trapwell, complete with peacock feathers. On the night of Carmel losing their child, Eddie lay on a bed with no sheets and reached into his sorrow, pulling out the tears he had not cried.

When he was not working he walked the city looking for her. But she only came to him at night, in a dream. It was the same dream always – her eyes on him, with the naked flesh of another man between them. He reached out to pull the man off her, but his hands were tied.

Then the dream changed. In it, he saw her waiting, with a full belly, on him to do something for her and the child between them.

‘What can I do?' he asked. ‘I can't grow the child. What can I do for the child?'

On the way home from the factory where he did work he did not care for, one of many jobs, he saw the crib in the window of a shop. The finest of wood and hours of making gone into it. He could not prevent what happened then, went in and asked how much it was, as if he was an expectant father with all that to look forward to. The sales assistant had smiled at his shyness and said she was not afraid to serve a man, though she had not served one before. Maternity business was the business of women.

She gave him the price and he nodded and went to his wallet and found it would be more than one month's work to pay for it. He made excuses and left, promising to return since she had agreed to keep it on hold.

He never walked that way home again for fear he would see her and feel the shame of not calling. He would have gone back, with the saved money, but he had the dream of Carmel again. It was for him to make, no stranger.

‘Why, Carmel? Our child will have outgrown this.'

‘Because we will have another. That's why.'

And he could not prevent himself from buying the finest of woods – walnut and rosewood. He could not stop spending all his half-day Saturday searching for copper nails. For he was no carpenter and could not make dowels or turn or join wood. He worked at it and each night he continued the work in dreams and felt Carmel at the back of him.

‘I don't appreciate you standing over me,' he growled, but by it he meant he wished that he could have the reward of her face and the look on it as she saw what he was producing. Even he was proud of it. He lay in bed each night and watched it take shape and took time in shaping it, for something in him said this was something that should be made to last.

The men who shared the digs with him, with rooms of their own, peeked in and wondered about the fine work and who it was for.

‘A nephew.'

They could get no more out of him. He looked for Carmel each day that was his. In all the places where the Irish gathered. He could not look where he could not bear to find her so he had no hope of seeing her.

*   *   *

Then he stopped looking and let the dreams take over. In them he had her company, although unseen.

‘I want to see you,' he would say.

‘Not until it's done, Eddie. Keep at the work.'

‘It will be perfect, Carmel. Like a fairy cot, Carmel, it will be. The child will sleep sound in it,' he promised. As the work grew nearer to finishing he could feel her hands on his shoulders, her breath on him, the swell of her belly against his back. Into his spine the delight passed and he thought he would never be rid of it.

‘One more plane, one coat of wood oil. No varnish for the child. Let the child feel the wood proper, wood is good stuff to be felt. We know that,' he said.

Then he had finished and watched the crib and its gleam told him the love would pay off. He would see her.

That night he did not dream. The following night the dream where she was under another man returned.

Once, years into living alone in London and knowing few people and wanting to know less, when he could bear the dream no longer, Eddie went to the place where women work with men and took comfort with a woman he called Carmel all through the night. He left her room with his rent money on her dressing table and felt he had come to an end of something.

Across the street he saw a dark-skinned child leading by the hand a woman who had hair the colour of Carmel's. But it was not Carmel; this woman had no fire in her and limped awkwardly in high shoes Carmel would never have worn. She was thin, broken and slow.

In that moment he decided he had cried and looked enough. He left London with nothing but the crib he had made. He came home to settle down to a life alone and was lucky enough he had not sold his ladder, for he began to window clean again. The windows of Scarna had waited.

He put the crib in his room, where there was little else. It was the last thing he saw on sleep and the first thing on waking. Then he heard that Joseph Moriarty had died and Noreen had left the town. He walked out to the coast road and got into the Hoar Rock as anyone in the country did at that time, through an unlocked door. He set the crib by the fireplace, where it is this night, and knew that it was in the place where it should always have been.

Eddie Burns went home to a lonelier life that night, alone but for his guilt and thoughts of the child who might have kept him company.

*   *   *

Joseph Moriarty died, at the age of fifty-seven. His heart gave way under all the hate. Noreen watched him fight for breath, globs of unswallowed morning porridge spilling out of his mouth, one hand clutching his breast, the other fastened to the table edge. She smiled as he fell and his eyes rolled until they showed only white. He took a long time to go. She did not bless herself or him; she did not put a sheet over him, left him to survey the bareness of the kitchen. She pulled on his great coat and left the house quickly.

Late that night she came back to it and his open eyes. She pulled the place apart looking for money – and found Carmel's letters of so many years before.

Following Joseph's funeral, attended only by the curious and lonely of the town with little better to do, Noreen caught the mail boat to London and began her walking. Her steps had more purpose than Eddie's. She knew where to look because she knew what was in her daughter was also in her and she could go where he could not.

The working women did not surprise or shock her. She would most likely have become one of them if her way had not been different. In Sergio's Café they told her that her daughter would come.

‘Thank God someone turned up,' a woman with rust brown hair and a cockney accent said. ‘It's a mother those two need.'

‘It's two of them, is it?' Noreen asked Fanny, who had not introduced herself. None of the women had. The man behind the counter had watched her with slow eyes and purposeful movements. She would be made to leave if he felt there was reason, or one of the women called for it.

‘She has a girl, a little girl grown bigger each day. They're in here most days.'

Noreen stood up; she did not want to meet Carmel in a café after all the time that had been passed between them.

‘Could you tell me where she lives?'

Fanny was just about to when the woman with a French bob, dyed black to hide grey and dressed in clothes as new as her haircut, broke in. Her manner was not as elegant as her looks.

‘We would not. You know she comes here, you can wait for her. We don't go giving strangers addresses.'

Noreen sat down again and ordered a tea. The man behind the counter served it with the speed of a snail in no hurry. Noreen felt the eyes on her big body at the small table and felt the pricks of embarrassment at the cut of her clothes. She wore Joseph Moriarty's coat since she had given Carmel her own. Her shape inside the coat was lumpen – looks had been lost to Noreen a long time before.