“So where did it happen?” Sally’s voice was barely above a whisper.
“The most extraordinary thing. When he was in the office he got a call late there, and he went to deliver an order.”
“An order?”
“Yes, there’s this photographer, she buys a lot of frames from us, and anyway he went round there to deliver some rushed things she needed for an exhibition, and he had a drink in her house and that’s where it happened, and that’s where it came on.”
“In her house?”
“Yes, and Rita, that’s her name, she said there was no pain, he just clutched his chest and he said my name. He said, ‘Anna,’ and she called the ambulance and they got him to hospital, they did everything they could, but they said he died instantly.”
“It must have been a shock for her too,” Sally said, not fully able to believe that she was having this conversation.
“Terrible—she was quite distraught this morning. I asked her to come over to us, but she said no.”
“Probably wants to be alone.” Sally could barely speak.
“Oh, Sally, isn’t it dreadful?” Anna said. “How am I going to carry on without him?”
“He would want you to,” Sally said. Her mind was racing. She herself had left Anna and David’s home at seven-thirty this morning. The hospital had not phoned by then. Anna must realize that David had spent the night with Rita. If she thought about the timing for two minutes she would realize that it was very odd for anyone to call to someone’s house at 5 a.m. for a drink. She had to be fooling herself. Or arranging a cover story that she would live with for the rest of her life. She could not possibly believe that. Which was it?
“Would you like me to come back? Would I be any good?”
“I’d prefer if you were to come next week, if you can, for the funeral. You’d be a great support to me then. Honestly, Sally, everyone is so broken up here. None of my friends seem to know what to say, my father, he can’t get any words together at all—I don’t even understand what he’s saying. It’s almost as if he thinks it was David’s fault that he died.”
“I suppose it’s the age thing; he feels that David was so young to go.”
“That must be it.” Anna seemed relieved with this explanation. Sally thought about it every hour of every day until she flew back to stand at her friend’s side on the day of David’s funeral. They all wore black, the women who had been in the Chinese restaurant and the strange pale woman with the long fair hair, who stood alone at the edge of the crowd.
“That’s Rita. You know, the woman who got him to the hospital,” Anna whispered.
Anna’s eyes were red from weeping, but her face was innocent. All around her people stood waiting to hug her and mourn the passing of a hardworking father, a loving husband, a tireless workmate. He was such a good man, they all said, and what a tragedy that he had not lived so that they could have had their older years together.
Sally listened, and watched. She saw Anna invite Rita back to the house, but the pale woman with the long straw-colored hair shook her head and went away alone.
Anna moved in the center of a crowd of sympathizers who would be going back to her house, where sandwiches and wine would be served. On the faces of the women who had gathered so recently in the Chinese restaurant Sally saw some pleasure. It was as if Anna had won a battle that had never been declared. Anna was the tragic heroine, the brave young widow, the loved and honored woman, whose name had been spoken by the dying man. The husband who had gone out working to provide for his wife and children with no care for himself, his health, his own wishes.
That’s the way history had been rewritten.
The white-faced woman who had been such a danger had been banished. And punished, while the wife had been cocooned with crowds of loving sympathizers.
The mistress had left alone. Sally excused herself from the group in the graveyard and followed the woman to the small car. She didn’t know what she was going to say, but she felt that something should be said.
Rita turned and looked at her with some surprise.
“I’m Sally,” she began.
“Yes, I know … the media friend,” Rita said.
There was something in the way she said it that was exactly like David’s voice. Sally could imagine him being fairly dismissive about her.
“I just wanted to say …”
Rita looked at her, waiting.
Sally, who could talk to millions of people in her column and on television, was stuck for words.
“I wanted to say you were terrific,” she said.
Rita looked at her for a long time. “He always said you had class,” she said eventually.
“Well you certainly do,” Sally said.
And then there was nothing more to say.
Back in the house Sally looked at her friend Anna as if she had never seen her before, and even though Anna reached out her hand several times and squeezed Sally’s in gratitude for the solidarity, it didn’t make anything clear. Suddenly she didn’t know this woman, Anna, who had been her friend since school uniforms. Was this a giant act? Was Anna playing a role because something had to be salvaged from a life that had been going to sour? Now she was the grieving widow, the brave girl who would somehow carry on with the huge support of family and friends. If she had acknowledged the situation, there would not have been this turnout. People would have shuffled with embarrassment and said that in many ways David had deserved his untimely death. Rita would have been the bereaved.
Anna must have known this and realized that other people knew also. But perhaps she was just doing it for today. And for the children. Later tonight, when everyone had gone home, Anna would talk to her, talk to her properly, as they had done for years. Then all this mask and pretense would drop.
Everyone was so pleased that Sally was there. They went home safe in the knowledge that Anna could have no better company and counsel.
They lit the fire and they sat on the floor beside it, with tea and a tin of biscuits, as they had done so often over the years. And Anna took out albums and talked about what a wonderful husband David had been, and how lucky they were that they had made the right decision, and how she would bring up the children in the memory of the best daddy in the world. Sally listened, open-mouthed.
She wanted to cry out, “This is me, it’s Sally, who knows everything as you know everything about me. You don’t have to pretend anymore—let’s say what a hopeless, hard-to-understand thing it all was, and in the end, didn’t she behave well, the tramp that took him away?”
But there was no way that any of this would be introduced. It was clear that Anna was not moving out of the role. And that by now it was possibly no longer a role. By now, she believed every line of it. What was the point of saying anything that would upset it all now?
But it did not seem the action of a friend to sit and look at old pictures and mouth things that weren’t true. Yet wasn’t this the very attitude that Sally herself had suggested when they were all at the Chinese meal? That had been her policy: don’t allow a friend to become just another victim. Someone who has to be told something. Give her instead the gift of dignity. Sally shivered by the fire. She had given Anna that dignity—today’s funeral was the very proof of it. But at what cost?
She looked at the woman who had once been her soul mate and knew that everything was now on a different level. The friendship they had once shared had died in the face of all this pretense. Was it better that they should just go on with this huge thing unspoken between them, or was it impossible?
They could have got over this together, as they had got over so many other things. It was going to be an entirely new experience having a friend that you couldn’t talk to about the hugely important things in life. Sally didn’t know why she wanted Anna to face up to what had happened. But she did.
And she knew that what she had offered, dignity and respect, were not nearly as satisfying as a good cry and a lot of nose blowing and a resolution that
things could be solved. That was friendship. And somehow in the middle of all this, friendship had got lost.
Years ago if you had a daughter who was hopelessly in love with an unsuitable man you sent her on a world cruise to cure her. That’s what Shona’s father said over and over. But he said it only to his wife because nobody was meant to know about Shona’s unsuitable young man.
There were complications.
And Shona’s mother said that this was a ridiculous kind of thing to keep harking back to. Only one percent of the population, if that, would have been able to afford a world cruise for anyone. Certainly, no one who lived on Chestnut Street could afford it.
What they really needed was to know somebody miles and miles away who would give a job to a lovesick twenty-two-year-old, a job she couldn’t refuse.
And suddenly they looked at each other and remembered Marty.
Marty, who had been in the same lodgings as they had all those years ago when they first met. Marty, the American student, who always kept in touch, even though, like themselves, he was middle-aged now.
Maybe they could write to Arizona to Marty and he might offer a job to Shona.
It didn’t sound as if Marty made a big enough living to employ strangers, but they could ask.
They wrote to Marty and told him the truth.
That for nearly two years Shona had been besotted with this Vincent. She had dropped out of college, hadn’t taken her degree and just sat waiting for him to get in touch.
She would listen to no reason or argument saying that Vincent couldn’t love her or else he would be with her. No suggestions that Vincent might have a wife somewhere.
It was a relief to be able to tell Marty.
To tell someone, without covering up, as they had to do at home.
Marty wrote back.
“Tell me about difficult children,” he wrote, and he let them know that his eldest boy was also a child who broke parents’ hearts.
But this boy was only seventeen. Shona’s parents were sure that he was just a kid, a kid in Arizona, trying to prove himself.
Marty wrote them a separate letter, one they could show to Shona.
A letter saying that he ran a general store and he could do with some help.
He really needed a bright girl in her twenties to talk to the tourists who would be driving past on their way to the Grand Canyon.
There would be plenty of time to sit and think and enjoy the peace of the countryside, he said.
Shona read the letter. Her parents didn’t dare to meet her eye.
Vincent hadn’t been in touch for some weeks now.
“I’d like to go,” she said.
They let their breath out very slowly.
When Vincent called three weeks after she had gone, Shona’s mother said she had the address somewhere, but she couldn’t lay her hands on it.
When he called again, Shona’s father said he hadn’t his glasses.
He didn’t call a third time.
Shona settled in well with Marty and his wife, Ella, sleeping in her own little room above the store. They worked hard and their little nine-year-old twins helped by carrying goods out to customers’ cars.
And then there was Nick.
Nick was seventeen, handsome and brooding. He took no part in anything, he shrugged and sighed so much if asked to help at all, that they had given up on him.
His two little brothers admired him from a distance.
He carried heavy loads for his mother, and every morning lifted a basket of washing out to the clothesline. She smiled at him fondly but with a sadness.
Marty looked at his son with mystification and sorrow.
Maybe a dozen times a week he suggested some activity, a drive, a barbecue, a trip to the movies.
The boy barely answered.
He was a master of shrugs. His shoulders seemed to have a life of their own like a mime artist.
Shona had tried in the beginning. But it was useless; the boy had no interest in her.
Once and only once he asked her a question. “Did you graduate?” he asked.
“No,” Shona said simply.
“It means a different thing here and there,” Marty began. “Shona did graduate from high school, Nick …”
It was useless—he just shrugged.
“I heard the lady,” he said.
The skies were blue and there was a lot of space. People talked about the presidential election in America. Would Ronald Reagan, the film star, really have a chance of winning? Would there be a Kennedy against him or would President Carter run again?
They talked about the Olympic Games in Moscow.
The summer was hot. Ireland was far away, but every night Shona wrote to Vinnie. She didn’t post the letters—she just told him how much she loved him and how she knew it would all be fine in the end.
As she wrote she watched the handsome Nick playing with a computer.
He seemed to do little else.
And the summer went on. Shona saved her earnings. When she got back she would take Vinnie on a holiday. Maybe they would rent a boat on the Shannon. He always said they would do that someday or maybe they would go to the Galway Oyster Festival. She had plenty of money. She spent hardly anything and Marty had paid her a decent wage for fourteen weeks.
After fifteen weeks Vinnie wrote.
He said that he had finally got her address and he knew now that he loved her and wondered had she thought of him at all?
Shona posted all the love letters she had written him in the Arizona sunsets, and then she said she must buy her ticket home.
She told Marty and Ella that she hoped she wasn’t letting them down, but it had worked for her, this wonderful opportunity. She had found peace of mind in this place and now the man she loved was calling her home.
They sighed and waited until she had left them with starry eyes before they called her mother and father with the bad news.
Shona went back to her little room to check for her wallet, or billfold as she now called it.
She smiled to herself, thinking about all the things she would have to tell Vinnie. He had never been to the United States. There had been some stupid problem about getting a visa, something silly from his past. She thought of Vinnie as she hunted for the money. And hunted and hunted.
It was an hour before she accepted the fact that her money was gone. She sat still for a long time. But she had to face it eventually.
And it was so unlikely that a thief would have come into her room and not approach the store itself.
But equally unlikely that Marty and Ella would creep in and steal back the wages they gave her.
Or those innocent twins or the shruggy, distant Nick, who hardly noticed her.
She saw their stricken faces when she told them. “Could you possibly have lost it on the bus the time you went on the tour?” Ella had so much hope in her voice.
But Shona knew she had not taken her money that day. She had not dared to risk spending any of it.
She looked around at them all. Nick’s eyes were brighter than usual. Most times he seemed miles away, but now he was very much involved. Too involved.
Shona was about to say that she was positive about not taking her money with her that day. But something made her change her words.
“Suppose I had—do you think they might have found any of it?”
“I hear they often find most of it,” Nick said.
Shona said she thought she could have left it on the bus.
She was rewarded by the relief in the two good, open faces of Marty and Ella.
Her heart was full of hate for the hurt that this child was going to cause them in the years ahead.
“Maybe Nick can drive me to the bus station to inquire?” Shona said through gritted teeth. He was silent in the car as they drove through the open countryside.
Shona let the silence lie there between them.
Then he spoke. “What’s it like, Ireland?”
“Green, small
, full of lakes and rivers and roads that twist and turn. Mountains. Sea all round the edges.”
“Is life easy there?” he asked.
“Not particularly. No more than it is here.” Her voice was leaden.
He handed her an envelope.
“Most of it’s there,” he said.
“Okay.”
“Only thirty dollars gone. I used it to send for some software.”
She didn’t reply as she looked out the window of the car at the Arizona scenery that she would never see again.
Had she been right to postpone their discovery of their eldest son as a thief?
Had she just done it so that she could escape from this life and leave them without trailing clouds of unhappiness?
They didn’t speak at all on the way home.
Shona made up a story about the bus company. She left Arizona for Ireland and Vinnie in high good form.
Vinnie said they would get married. Now, as soon as possible. Then they could use all her money on a honeymoon. Shona wore a friend’s dress for her wedding. They had only a few people there.
She would not let her father pay for a big reception. The photographs of her wedding day would not gladden any heart. You wouldn’t need to be a psychologist to see the look of strain on everyone’s face except the bride and groom.
Shona’s face was pure rapture; Vinnie had his nice relaxed smile.
The years passed more or less the way Shona’s father and mother knew they would.
They wrote every year to Marty and Ella about the whole story. Vinnie had long unexplained absences. There were no children.
Sometimes they thought this was a blessing. At other times they thought that perhaps children might have settled Vinnie down, made him stay at home and face up to his responsibilities.
Perhaps if she had been a mother, Shona would have had more anger on their behalf. On her own she had none.
Marty and Ella wrote back.
They said that life was fairly unchanged for them. Nick had left home and he didn’t really stay in touch.