This Is How It Ends (22 page)

She summoned some false cheer.

“Looks perfect to me.”

Pray we don’t all get food poisoning, she was thinking. She followed him back up the stairs, holding the gravy boat carefully in the palm of her hand. Instant gravy, from the smell wafting up off it.

“Help yourself to some chicken, Bruno.”

Hugh passed the platter across the table. They’d moved on to the red wine now. Hugh had uncorked a bottle of Bordeaux earlier, leaving it on the sideboard to breathe. There were carrots as well as peas. He’d pulled out all the stops.

“College was my escape route,” he said. “That was my ticket out.”

It was Hugh doing all the talking now. Bruno seemed happy just to listen.

“It took me ten years to get through. I had to take every second year off to earn my fees. Medicine was the preserve of the upper echelons in my day. Still is, for all I know.”

And he stopped to eat a slice of chicken. Reaching out for his glass, he took a long gulp of wine.

“They’d never seen the likes of me. I still had the mud on my wellies when I arrived. They used to take pity on me, they used to invite me home for dinner, the lads from Dublin. I must have looked like I needed a good feeding.”

Addie was watching him in amazement. She couldn’t have been more surprised if Hugh had suddenly revealed that he could speak Serbo-Croat. This was a side to him that she’d never seen before. He was talking about himself.

“They were all sons of doctors,” he said. “Most of them were grandsons of doctors.”

He paused for another mouthful of chicken.

“I’d never even seen a doctor before. The one time I was sick as a child it was the vet was called out to me.”

And Bruno laughed. But Addie wasn’t so sure it was a joke.

Touch of the
Angela’s Ashes
, she was tempted to say, but she didn’t. Instead she found herself asking a question. Even as she was saying it, she wished she could take it back.

“I always thought your father was a ship’s doctor?”

She could hear her own voice vibrating from inside her ears.

“My dear,” he said, a dismissive snort in his voice. “Have you not worked it out by now? There was no ship’s doctor. How many ships do you think sail into Navan?”

By the end of the evening Hugh had the whiskey decanter out and he and Bruno were talking poetry. Bruno was talking about Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens. He was asking Hugh about Yeats.

“Forget about Yeats,” said Hugh dismissively. “It’s Kavanagh you need to read if you want to understand Ireland. Or Padraic Colum, even better.”

And he began to quote. Watching him, Addie was struck by how theatrical he was, he could have been an actor.

Well, I’ll be damned, thought Addie. I never knew he was interested in poetry.

H
IS MOTHER WASN’T
married, did you know that?”

“I didn’t. But I’m not surprised, if that’s what you mean. It makes complete sense.”

They were sitting at Della’s kitchen table, a pot of chamomile tea in front of them. Della picked the pot up with two hands and began pouring the steaming yellow liquid into their mugs.

“New mugs?” asked Addie.

“Christmas present from Simon’s mother. She heard the company was going bust so she went tearing into town to buy up everything they had.”

“And we think our family is weird.”

“I know.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“I can’t believe you’re not surprised.”

“Oh, Addie, come on. It’s always been obvious he has some kind of a secret in his past. He’s ashamed of his background. Why do you think he never talks about his family? Why do you think he never brought us down there to visit them?”

That voice Della uses sometimes, it’s like she’s explaining things to a simpleton.

“It never even occurred to me,” said Addie, her voice full of wonder.

“He has a chip on his shoulder the size of a house.”

Listening to her, Addie felt dizzy. How did Della know all of this?

Addie thought back to a summer she once spent InterRailing. With a few friends from college, she’d spent a month taking trains around Europe, that was what everybody did back then. An overambitious itinerary, you tried to see too much, and you ended up seeing nothing. Addie got so tired from all the traveling that she kept falling asleep on the train. One day she woke up in the late afternoon to find she’d slept her way through Belgium. A whole country had gone by without her even noticing.

She had that exact same feeling again now.

“Why did he never tell us, Della? I can’t understand why he never told us.”

Della threw her eyes up to heaven.

“I suspect you’d never get to the bottom of it.”

WHY HAD HE
never told them?

That wasn’t really the point, it occurred to Hugh. The why of it was obvious. It was what he had never told them that was the heart of the matter. The what of it was too nebulous to tell anybody.

He was frightened of the dark. He’d never told anyone that. He used to creep into their bedroom in the middle of the night. He can still remember standing there on the creaking boards, pleading with them in a whisper. But they would never let him stay, they would always send him right back. They wouldn’t let him have the light on either, they said it was too dear.

He can remember lying stock-still in his little single bed, afraid to breathe. Outside his window, creeping country noises. The trees rustling and the cows breathing. Something falling over in the yard, a clatter as it crashed to the ground. An animal cry, something in pain. In the morning, the shame of having appeared to them, the wounded pride.

He didn’t even like them.

He had always been made to feel like a stranger in that house. He had never understood why. The way she always made sure he knew how much she’d spent on his clothes, the way she grumbled as she darned his socks. When she baked a cake he always had to ask her before he could cut himself a slice.

The farm repelled him, he wanted nothing to do with it. His chores, he did them under sufferance and badly. The marks he got in school, they were further proof of his unwillingness to work on the farm. As if he earned those marks out of spite.

“Well, I only hope it serves you well.”

That’s what she’d said when he got his Leaving Cert results. She’d stuffed the precious slip of paper into the envelope and handed it back to him. He’d been expecting no more from her.

That was when she had told him, that summer. She’d been worrying that he might need his birth certificate to register for college.

“There’s something I should tell you,” she said.

Her glance was shifty. She was foostering about with some cutlery, making a play of polishing it. She couldn’t meet his eye. She only looked up at him after she’d told him. His surname, he would find a different surname written on his birth cert. His name wasn’t Lynch, it was Murphy. It had always been Murphy. She told him why.

Something righted itself inside him, like a stone settling onto the bed of a river. He was glad, that was his immediate reaction. He was glad she wasn’t his mother. He needn’t feel so guilty now for not loving her.

He thought of the English stamps on the letters that had come from her sister every month for as long as he could remember. He’d never bothered to read any of those letters, he’d just steamed the stamps off them for his collection. Most of the time they were just plain old stamps with the queen’s head on them. But sometimes around Christmastime they would be more decorative. Sometimes there would be a special edition issued for some royal anniversary or other.

Hugh had pasted all of those stamps into his album, never knowing what it was that they represented. He’d examined the postmarks on them. They were always posted in Reading.

An absent aunt, she was seldom talked about. Kitty was her name and she’d been in England for years. She worked in a hospital, that was all he knew. He’d never had any reason to show any interest in her. He’d only met her once, when she came home for her father’s funeral. Hugh would have been twelve then. She had hugged him outside the church. He had been embarrassed by the hug. She had held on to him for such a long time. All he had wanted was to get free of her.

“Is she a nurse?” he’d asked them afterwards.

And they’d laughed at him, the two of them. No, she wasn’t a nurse, they’d said, she was just a cleaning lady. Had they meant to be so cruel? Whether they’d meant it or not, the memory of it was cruel.

She had died when Hugh was in his fourth year of secondary school. They’d brought her home to be buried, that was what she would have wanted, apparently. It was only afterwards that he was able to make sense of the pitying looks people had given him at the funeral.

At the time of course he hadn’t understood.

HE NEVER WENT
back to visit them.

It seems unbelievable to him now. He searches in his mind for a reason for his behavior, but he can’t find one. He tries to pinpoint what it was that they did to him that was so awful. But he can’t for the life of him think of anything.

They took him in. They gave him a home. A childless couple, they must have hoped for children of their own. They would have imagined that this foundling nephew could fill the void. They would have been disappointed when it didn’t work out that way. Even the lie they’d told him, it was probably meant well. It would have seemed like a solution that worked for everybody. You could imagine them sitting around the kitchen table and working it all out. May and Seamus would get the child they yearned for. Kitty would get a new life, free of the disgrace that she had brought upon herself. And her child would be reared within matrimony. His murky origins would be whispered about for miles around but never spoken of out loud. The child himself would be none the wiser. The road to hell, it’s paved with good intentions.

Helen had tried to persuade him to go back. After they were married, she had suggested it to him several times. Gently at first. But after Della was born she brought it up more often, she was more insistent. In the end she gave up on him and went on her own, bringing the girls with her. It was never spoken of between them after that.

Helen had figured it out, he was sure of that. She had figured it out before he did. She understood him so well. It wasn’t anger that was holding him back. It wasn’t hurt. It was snobbery, pure snobbery that kept him away.

O
N NEW YEAR’S EVE
they walked over to Della’s house.

Lola was sniffing her way along the ground ahead of them. In the front windows of all the houses, gloomy-looking Christmas trees loitered in the dark. Nobody could be bothered to turn on the fairy lights anymore. The pavements were littered with broken glass, and Addie was worried that Lola was going to get some stuck in her paw. It was hard to see how it could be avoided. The street cleaners weren’t back at work yet. Nobody was going back to work until after the weekend.

It was Della who answered the door. She was wearing a black sequined dress that hardly covered her knickers. Black tights, black stiletto heels.

Bruno leaned forward to kiss her on both cheeks. He handed her the bottle of champagne they’d brought with them and stepped inside. Addie followed him in. She took off her coat reluctantly. Underneath it she was wearing her usual V-neck jumper over a T-shirt and black leggings. She felt like the babysitter.

The kids all came crashing down the stairs, one after the other.

“Addie! Addie!”

Tess was holding something in her arms, her shoulders hunched into her chest to protect it.

“We got a kitten!”

Lisa looked like she was about to burst. She couldn’t keep still. She was jumping up and down on the spot.

“I love your outfit, Lisa.”

She was wearing her ballet leotard over woolly tights, her little legs rattling around in a pair of wellies. A tiara perched skew-ways on her head.

Addie crept forward to take a peek at the cat.

Tess offered her up for viewing.

“Do you want to hold her?”

“No offense, darling, but I’m not wild about cats.”

“I hate cats too,” said Elsa in her slow, husky voice, her eyes sliding over to meet Addie’s, her mouth twitching into a reluctant smile.

“Dad’s allergic to her!”

“That’s not good.”

“He says she has to go.”

“I don’t think Lola likes her much either.”

Lola had gone slinking into the living room, her tail between her legs. She was sitting under the coffee table now, peering out.

“Don’t tell me Lola is afraid of the cat,” said Simon, a dry laugh in his throat.

“Simon,” said Addie, “Lola is afraid of her own shadow.”

“WELL, DID YOU
go to the doctor?”

Della had been nagging her to go. “You’re in pain,” she kept saying. “You need to find out why. There must be a reason.”

But pain, as far as Addie was concerned, was something to be ignored. If you ignored it, it would eventually go away.

“It’s probably just wear and tear.” That was Addie’s view. “You know, the human condition.”

But Della was skeptical.

“I’m not convinced it works that way. Will you just go to the bloody doctor?”

And Addie had promised. She had sworn that she would.

Della brought it up again as soon as they were alone. The boys were in the living room at the fire, the kids parked upstairs in front of the telly. Della and Addie had come down to the kitchen to get some glasses.

“Well,” said Della, “did you go to the doctor?”

“I did, but she didn’t really say very much.”

“She must have said something.”

Della had kicked off her shoes. She was climbing up onto a chair, trying to reach the champagne glasses on the top shelf of the press.

“She said my blood pressure was a bit high.”

“Oh?”

“She took some bloods.”

“Did she say why?”

“She said it might help her figure out what’s going on.”

Della handed the glasses down to Addie, one by one. She was climbing back off the chair now. Her dress was so tight on her that she was having some difficulty getting down.

She hitched the skirt up over her hips and hopped off the chair.

“OK,” she said with a sigh. It wasn’t clear if the sigh was about the blood tests or the climb for the glasses.

“She said it would be a week or two before she gets the results back.”

Della shimmied the dress back down and climbed into her shoes again.

“Do you want me to ask Simon about it?”

“God, no!”

“OK. Well, I’m sure it’s nothing to be worrying about. But it’s no harm getting it checked out anyway.”

“Absolutely. You’re absolutely right.”

“Do we need an ice bucket?”

“No, no. It just came out of the fridge. It should be cold enough.”

“We’ll have it drunk so quickly, it wouldn’t be worth it.”

Addie was following her out the kitchen door when Della turned round.

“Try not to worry,” she said tenderly. “They always say it’s probably nothing but it doesn’t stop you worrying.”

And Addie nodded, brushing off Della’s concern. But she was left thinking. Even as they were standing in front of the fire, even as Simon was unwrapping the foil on the champagne, there was something that had got snagged in her mind.

They didn’t say it was probably nothing. Most definitely, the doctor did not say it was probably nothing.

The pop of the cork gave her a fright. She held her hands up in front of her, leaning away instinctively.

The others were all laughing. “Happy New Year,” they chimed, and they leaned in and clinked their glasses together.

ADDIE GOT A
bit pissed that night.

Della had put together an extravagant meal: six courses, each of them small and delicious. But there was a lot of drinking time in between and not much soakage. Addie could feel herself getting drunk but she didn’t want to stop. Something in her wanted to let go of herself tonight, just to see what would happen.

Simon was in flying form, telling amusing stories from the hospital.

“Oh, we get all human life coming through our doors,” he was saying. “You can’t imagine, Bruno.”

He liked Bruno, you could tell. You could always tell if Simon liked someone. He was easy to read.

“The vast majority of people are hypochondriacs, Bruno. They’re just time wasters. Ninety percent of the people I see, there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with them. And then there’s the other ten percent. The ones who come in with a lump the size of a football growing out of their head. And they’re saying, sorry to trouble you, Doctor, the wife made me come. But sure I’m grand.”

They were all laughing, Simon was the only one with a straight face.

“It’s very depressing,” he said, in an effort to convince them.

But they all just laughed.

FOR A LONG TIME
nobody realized Tess was standing at the kitchen door. She was standing in the doorway, looking about her with wild eyes. Her hair was sticky with sweat.

It was Della who spotted her. She went over and heaved her up into her arms. The child was so big now, her skinny legs dangled down past Della’s knees. Returning to the table, Della flopped down heavily into her chair. She turned Tess round so she was sitting on her lap facing out. Della stroked the child’s sticky hair, pushing it back off her face.

“Did you have a bad dream, doll?”

Simon leaned in towards her and blew gently on her face to cool her down.

Tess stared at him as if she hadn’t heard him.

“Can you remember what it was in your dream? If you tell somebody right away, then it won’t ever come back.”

She had her eyes fixed on a point straight ahead of her. When she spoke, it was a surprise to everyone. They all fell quiet and listened to her.

“We were in school,” she said. “And the teacher was giving around these pieces of paper.”

Her voice was fractured.

“There was one for everyone in the class. It had your name written on it.”

She faltered, as if she wasn’t sure if she was going to remember what came next.

There was silence at the table.

“You had to open up your piece of paper.”

Her eyes were wide open and staring. She was looking from one to the other but it wasn’t clear if she was seeing them.

“The piece of paper,” she said, her voice wavering. She looked like she was about to cry. “It had the date of your death written on it.”

Everyone’s reaction was different.

Simon laughed, a yelp of a laugh. He was impressed by the dream. He was amused by it.

Della gasped. “Oh,” she said, “oh, sweetheart.” And she pulled the little body into her chest. “Oh, you poor baby, that’s so scary.”

Bruno was gazing at Tess, fascinated by the dream. That such a small person would come up with such a thing, he was amazed. He was remembering himself at that age. He’d forgotten how wide open your head was, the whole universe passing through it.

Addie was watching Bruno. She wanted to see his reaction. She wanted to see if he was as spooked by it as she was.

Maybe because it was New Year’s Eve, maybe everybody was alert to the idea of the future, what the future holds. Maybe it was the unsettling lucidity of the child, the otherworldly voice that came out of her. Maybe it awakened their own worst fears. Whatever it was, they were all rattled by it. They were at that point of the evening when they’d already had too much to drink. They would either get drunker now or they would sober up. Everything seemed very serious all of a sudden.

Simon started to fill everyone’s glasses, and Addie jumped up and started passing around the cheese. Della made soothing noises to Tess. The child was curled in against her mother’s body but her eyes were still wandering around the table, following the conversation. Addie watched as her eyelids began to shudder. Within moments she was asleep.

Addie motioned to Della, keeping her voice low.

“I think she’s gone.”

Della peered down at her daughter’s face. Looking back up at Addie she nodded without speaking. Using her legs to push herself up, she struggled to stand, staggering under the weight of the sleeping child. She sailed out of the room, Tess’s long legs dangling down either side of her like empty stirrups.

“WOULD YOU WANT
to know?”

Della’s face was thin and peaky-looking under the low-hanging light. The shadows under her eyes were accentuated, the hollows in her cheeks cavernous.

Nobody had to ask what she was talking about. It had been hovering in all of their minds.

“No,” said Simon. He was the first to answer.

“Are you sure? Think about it. You’d get a chance to do all the things you’ve always wanted to do.”

“I’ve already done everything I want to do,” said Simon decisively. That was the kind of mind he had, clean as a whistle. “For this stage in my life, I’m exactly where I want to be.”

“Seriously?”

That was Bruno. He was looking at Simon in disbelief, his eyes searching Simon’s face for an answer.

“Sure. I’m married to the woman I love, I have four beautiful children, I’m doing the work I always wanted to be doing. Nice home, nice car. Nice holidays. I’d like to have some more holidays, I suppose. Many more holidays hopefully.”

His glasses had slipped down the bridge of his nose. He pushed them back up with his middle finger. A habit of his that Bruno had noticed.

Della kept up the interrogation.

“So you wouldn’t change anything! If you found out tomorrow that you only had months to live, you’d carry on exactly as normal. You’d go into work on Monday morning, same as usual?”

Simon thought about it for a moment. He answered very carefully, putting thought into every word.

“Yes. I honestly believe I would.”

“Bruno?”

Bruno didn’t hesitate. He’d been waiting for his turn to be asked.

“I’d go see the northern lights. All my life, I’ve wanted to see the northern lights.”

They had all turned to Bruno now.

“Where can you go to see them?”

Bruno had thought about this. He had researched it.

“Well,” he said, “you can see them in Canada or Alaska. Norway is another place. But I’d go to Iceland. I’ve always wanted to go to Iceland.”

“I thought it was impossible to predict when they’re going to happen.”

Bruno shook his head.

“Not impossible. But you have to be prepared to wait around.”

“But if you knew you were dying, you wouldn’t mind waiting. You’d have nothing else to be worrying about.”

“That’s exactly right.”

Addie smiled at him. She was imagining him all wrapped up in his padded coat and his hunting cap. He was perched on a little stool in the middle of a vast stretch of ice, staring patiently up at the sky.

It was Simon who broke her train of thought.

“And yet,” he said, “we all know we’re dying. It’s the only absolute certainty we have. But still we don’t do these things. Not until it’s too late.”

Della started stacking their coffee cups up in front of her on the table.

“This is starting to freak me out a bit.”

She stood up.

“All I can think about is the kids. Maybe if they were a bit older I’d feel comfortable talking about it. But I can’t think about it now, it gives me the creeps. I think we should change the subject.”

“I seem to remember you were the one who started it.”

“Well, let me be the one to end it then.”

“But what about me?”

They all turned their heads to look at Addie. She was sitting bolt upright, her eyes shining.

“I’d swim in more swimming pools,” she said happily. “I’d sell my flat and I’d travel the world from pool to pool. I’d track down the most exotic pools on the planet. I’d make a list of them and I’d swim my way through them.”

She was picturing herself already. In her mind she was looking at an aerial shot of a grand hotel in Naples perhaps, or Capri. One of those pictures they take for the postcards they sell at reception. Beyond the hotel terrace, a row of railings gives way to a steep cliff. Far below that again, you can see the deep blue sea. The pool is a long turquoise oblong surrounded by striped umbrellas. Addie can see herself, a frog-shaped creature in a dark red swimsuit, moving through the pool at a slow breaststroke.

Even as she’s thinking about it, there are other pools lining up in her head. An infinity pool in Cabo San Lucas, the Pacific Ocean melting into it. A pool on a blazing rooftop in Cairo, the sound of Friday prayers reverberating in the air. A cavernous pool in a Paris basement, what was that movie?
Three Colors: Blue
.