Two Fridays in April (14 page)

The house is chilly. She plugs in the two-bar heater she keeps in the kitchen and switches on the radio while she fills the kettle
and spoons Bovril into a mug. Nothing like Bovril to warm the bones.

She must parcel up Una’s present. She gets up to rummage in drawers but all she finds is old Christmas wrapping paper, so she tears a length from her roll of tinfoil and uses that instead. What does it matter? It’s what’s inside that counts.

When the kettle boils she fills the mug, inhaling the savoury steam. The rain has persisted: she watches drops race one another to the bottom of the windowpane. No sign of Cheeky, next door’s cat who calls around occasionally for the few scraps she usually finds for him: more sense than to be out in that rain.

She plods upstairs and locates her phone on her bedside locker. She picks it up and sees a missed call from Daphne at 5:14, just two minutes earlier. No message, can’t have been important. Hardly any need to ring back, she’ll see her soon enough.

She opens a text box, selects Una as the recipient.
Happy birthday
, she types carefully, wishing for the umpteenth time that the keys were bigger.
See you soon, love Mo
. She sends it off: better late than never.

She shucks off her damp sneakers and tracksuit bottoms. She takes her black trousers from the back of the chair and pulls them on. The sneakers she replaces with black loafers, the only other pair of shoes she possesses. There: she feels smarter already. She balls up newspaper and stuffs the sneakers with it, leaves them propped on their heels against the wall.

In the bathroom she splashes her face with water and dabs it dry. She squeezes foundation from a tube, brushes on blue eye
shadow, strokes pink across her lips as steadily as her hand will allow.

As she works, she tries to focus on the separate sections of her reflected face – curve of cheek, slant of forehead, dip of eye socket, rise of nose – rather than see it in its entirety. It disconcerts her, that wrinkled old thing. She doesn’t want to be reminded of it.

Back in the bedroom she fumbles for ages with the clasp of her pearl necklace before managing to get it closed: why on earth do they make them so tiny? She dots eau-de-Cologne on her wrists and temples and behind her ears.

She takes her coat from the wardrobe and pulls it on. So dressed-up she feels in it, worth every penny, still going strong after ten years. Will undoubtedly outlive her – not that Daphne will think to recycle it. Straight into the bin, no doubt, along with all her other clothes.

At ten to six precisely she steps out of the house and closes the front door. Thankfully, the rain has stopped. She retraces the route they took coming home in the car till she reaches the river, not far. She turns and walks along by the bank, just half a block, until she comes to the wrought-iron double gates.

She turns in, the familiar mix of anticipation and apprehension settling over her, like it does every evening. In less than a minute she’ll see him – and her heart will break all over again.

‘A chocolate cake,’ she says. ‘From a bakery that’s not long open – where Hegarty’s camera shop used to be, you know, a few doors up from the charity shop where I told you I work now.
The bakery is very fancy – I dread to think what Daphne paid for the cake. I just hope Una appreciates it.’

She lifts a forkful of mashed potato, and his mouth drops open to admit it, his eyes never leaving her face.

‘I was caught in the rain earlier,’ she says. ‘I was waiting for the bus home from town. I was very lucky though, Nancy came along – I’ve told you about Nancy, married to Neville O’Keeffe, they live two doors up from me. Their eldest lad, Barry, would be about Finn’s age. Nancy was telling me he’s just after taking early retirement from his job, imagine.’

Another forkful, another silent mouthful. She keeps going.

‘Nancy gave me a lift all the way home. I was very glad of it, wet old day. She and Neville are off on holidays next month – they’re going to stay with some relatives in France. Well for some.’

In fact she has no idea if relatives in France exist, let alone whether Nancy and Neville are going to pay them a visit – but the accuracies don’t matter here. What matters is that she talks to him.

The things she makes up sometimes. You could fill a book with them.

She wipes a fleck of potato from his chin, and immediately he frowns and swats her hand away. ‘No, dear,’ she says gently, ‘it’s OK, love, I’m just keeping you nice and clean. You’ll have another bit of broccoli. You like broccoli, don’t you?’ Spearing a floret and feeding it to him. ‘Good … that’s nice, isn’t it? You like that, you always went for broccoli when I made it. That and cauliflower, you loved them.’

Like a child. Like how she used to feed Finn when he was
small. Sometimes Leo grabs the fork from her and stabs the food with it, makes a right mess until she manages to reclaim it. Just like Finn used to do.

‘Daphne’s doing roast chicken tonight – it’s Una’s favourite. You like it too, don’t you? And stuffing, you always wanted extra stuffing when I made it, remember? The sausagemeat stuffing with onions – your mother gave me the recipe when we got married. “Lots of onions,” you used to say. “Don’t spare the onions.”’

He makes no sign that he hears her, never reacts to anything she says. He eats mechanically, chewing and swallowing with no indication of enjoyment. But he looks at her, he watches her face all the time. He must recognise it. It has to be familiar to him, whatever the doctors say. However empty his eyes seem.

She lifts the cup to his lips and he drinks noisily and unselfconsciously. She wipes the trail that dribbles out, and again he swats crossly. ‘Ssh,’ she says, picking up the fork, feeding him a little square of pork chop.

Every evening she comes. Six o’clock on the dot they serve up the dinner, and she feeds it to him. Every evening she makes herself nice for him. He’s still her husband, he’ll always be that, even if he can’t talk to her any more or live with her. Even if his mind has betrayed him, his memory plundered by the cruellest of illnesses.

They sit at right angles to one another in the day room, he in an armchair, she on a wooden kitchen chair. His plate is on a table by her side, out of his reach – he can’t be trusted not to send it flying. He’s given to sudden bursts of anger, forgotten as quickly as they occur.

‘I got Una fancy shampoo for her birthday,’ she tells him. ‘You remember Una, don’t you? She used to come and see you. There’s a nice smell from the shampoo, like lavender. It cost a bit, but I didn’t mind. I hope Una likes it. She has lovely hair, all curly and golden. I used to wish my hair was curly when I was young – did I ever tell you that? My mother used to put it in rollers for me – a nightmare, trying to sleep in them – and after all that the curls would last about ten minutes.’

Finn would bring Una to visit him in the early days. If the weather was good they’d wheel Leo into the garden; otherwise they sat with him in here. But by the time Una’s ninth birthday came around, Leo no longer recognised her, and Mo asked Finn to stop bringing her, fearing it would be too upsetting for the child.

He still came himself after that, of course, sometimes with Mo, sometimes alone. And Daphne, when she joined the family, accompanied him now and again. She’d never known the old Leo; all she saw was the husk he’d become. When his mood swings became a problem, one of the nursing-home staff had taken to hovering nearby whenever Daphne was in his company.

They’d wanted to do the same when Mo visited –
It’s not safe to be alone with him
, they told her – but she was having none of it.
I’m his wife, I can manage him
, she said, in the sort of voice people didn’t tend to argue with, so a compromise was reached: she leaves the door open when she’s with him, and they don’t bother her.

After Finn’s death she asked Daphne not to come to the nursing home any more.
There’s no need
, she said.
He’s gone
beyond knowing who comes to see him, it won’t make any difference to him
– but the truth was more selfish than that. The truth was that he was all she had now, and she wanted him to herself.

‘I bought a new top yesterday,’ she tells him now. ‘Three euro, like new. I would have worn it only it’s in the wash. I’ll wear it for you tomorrow. I think you’ll like it. It’s blue.’

Blue is your colour
, he’d told her once, before they were married.
Matches your eyes. Always wear something blue
. So she’d bought blue eye shadow – as a joke, really, but she likes it. She only puts it on for him now; she doesn’t waste it on anyone else.

‘Woman came into the shop today,’ she says, moving the empty dinner plate aside, picking up the bowl with jelly and custard in it. ‘She bought a teddy for her little boy. He’s in a show at his school. You know that song, “Ten in the Bed”? They’re doing a little play about it.’

He hit her once, just once, about three months ago now. Brought his arm up without warning, walloped her across the face with the back of his hand, sent her flying sideways out of the chair. She scrambled to her feet, nose and cheek throbbing, elbow stinging where it had hit the floor, heart doing cartwheels inside her.

Thank God nobody came in – they mustn’t have heard. Leo looked blankly at her as she resumed her seat, no trace left of the rage that had erupted out of him.

‘Oh, don’t do that,’ she said, searching her face with wobbling fingertips, feeling for blood. ‘Don’t do that again, love.’ And so far he hasn’t. She wasn’t cut; he hadn’t done any lasting damage. Her elbow was black and blue for a week, but nothing was broken or sprained. She’d been lucky, had got off lightly.

She didn’t say anything about it to the staff. He didn’t mean it, it wasn’t him. If she told them they’d sedate him more, turn him into a zombie. She’s more careful now: she watches his movements, keeps an eye out for anything unexpected.

He doesn’t know about Finn: she won’t have him upset.
Don’t tell him
, she’s said to the staff,
don’t let on
. She knows they think she’s being ridiculous, and maybe they’re right – Stephen, the man in the next room, died a couple of months back, and Leo didn’t react when Mo made a mention of it a few days later – but still she can’t bear the thought of him hearing that his son is dead. What father, whatever his condition, could hear that news and not be affected by it?

He eats his dessert with the same lack of emotion he displayed for the dinner, but she remembers how he used to enjoy it. Baked apples, he’d have been happy with one of those every day if she’d given it to him. Loved the way she did the baked apples, a knob of butter and a pinch of cinnamon and a spoon of sugar stuffed into the middle.

And gooseberry crumble with a scoop of ice-cream: the minute the gooseberries appeared in the shops he’d be at her to make crumble. And of course rhubarb tarts, with buttery pastry and a dollop of whipped cream. Just as well he didn’t tend to put on weight – three or four helpings he’d have sometimes.

Her stomach rumbles, the sound clearly audible above the small clink of spoon on bowl. She gives him a smile he doesn’t return. The loss of his sense of humour has been one of the hardest things to bear. He used to have her in stitches – a quizzical expression, a lift of an eyebrow, a jut of his chin was all it took sometimes. Even after she’d lost the babies, he’d do
everything he could think of to put a smile on her face. Gone now, all gone.

She spoons up the last of the custard. ‘Now,’ she says, ‘all gone.’

Nine years it’ll be in June. She was sixty-six, Leo a month off his seventieth birthday when she’d finally had to admit defeat, after so long trying to cod herself that he wasn’t so bad really. Telling herself, and Finn, that she could manage fine, when in reality she hardly closed her eyes some nights, so terrified she was of what he might try to do without her watching him.

Nine years she’s been without him, nine years since she sold the big house they’d inherited from his parents and moved into the small redbrick, chosen not least because of its proximity to the nursing home. Every penny of the difference going towards his keep here, to boost the money from the insurance policy he’d taken out as soon as the shop had started to show a profit.

Eight years or thereabouts since he’s looked at her with any glimmer of recognition, nearly three since he uttered his last word to her, or to anyone.

Shutting down: that’s how the doctors describe it. His faculties leaving him, piece by piece. No longer able to use the toilet, no longer able to feed himself, or groom himself. His walk nearly gone too, reduced to an unsteady shuffle. Seventy-nine in July, his quality of life, to all intents and purposes, as non-existent as Finn’s is.

But he’s still here, he’s still alive and breathing. He’s still eating, still able to chew and swallow. And he’s still her husband, in sickness and in health, for however long he continues to
breathe. The doctors don’t talk about how long that might be, and she doesn’t ask them. What’s the point of knowing? What would she possibly do with that knowledge?

But one day she might look into his eyes, one day when she’s guiding a piece of food to his mouth, or telling him about something that happened in the charity shop – and she might catch a glimpse of the man she fell in love with. She might see a spark of recognition in his face – he might find a way to let her know that somewhere inside, in some still miraculously intact part of his brain, he remembers her.