Minutes later, she is followed by her brother and sister.
Monica stops in the vestibule. The gloom is a relief after the glare of the street and she would like to take a moment to rest her eyes. Michael Francis, not paying attention as usual, barrels into the back of her, pushing her forwards so that she catches her elbow on a leaflet stand.
‘Oh,’ he says mildly, ‘sorry.’
Monica doesn’t answer, just rubs her elbow without looking at her brother. ‘I don’t think it’s significant,’ she says, in a low voice. One should always whisper in libraries: she knows that.
‘God, this place hasn’t changed much, has it?’ Michael Francis is looking at the curving, dark-wood staircase that goes up to the children’s library, the strange metal cage-like structure that contains a lift they were never allowed to use. His voice is louder than she is comfortable with. For all his education, he hasn’t learnt the whispering rule. ‘Why not?’ he says finally, leaning closer to look into the cage lift-shaft thing.
‘Why not what?’
‘Why don’t you think it’s significant?’
‘It’s just a bit of paper,’ she says, looking down again at the scrap Michael Francis had shown to her as they walked here. ‘Torn from somewhere. A letter. There’s no reason for it to mean anything.’
‘But Mum said she didn’t recognise the handwriting. Didn’t know where it was from. And look at what it says. It’s so . . . apocalyptic.’
Monica feeds the syllables of this word through her mind, once and then twice.
Her brother glances at her. ‘Doom-laden,’ he says quickly. ‘You know, as in—’
‘I know what apoc– what it means, thank you very much.’
‘Fine. I was just—’
‘What are we doing here anyway?’
‘We’re here to find Aoife.’ He moves towards the doors into the main library and peers through the glass. ‘I thought we should talk about things. Without Mum hearing.’
Monica frowns. ‘Why?’
‘Because we need some kind of a plan. You said so yourself.’
‘I meant why can’t Mum hear?’
‘Because she’s . . .’ Michael Francis trails away, still peering through into the library, where people are moving, slow as fish in a pond.
Monica sighs, dabs at her forehead with her hankie. ‘Aoife’s probably not even here anyway.’
‘She said she was coming.’
‘But that doesn’t mean she did. You know Aoife.’
‘Well, you’re wrong,’ Michael Francis says, tapping the door. ‘Here she is now.’
Monica steps up to the glass. For a moment, she can view the woman crossing the room beyond the door as a stranger might. Aoife is attractive, Monica sees, as if for the first time, her narrow, zipped trousers, the colour of hyacinths, fitted snug around her hips, the hectically patterned top loose about her clavicle. Hair pulled up and carelessly secured at the back of her head. Who would have thought she’d turn out like that, when she’d been such an odd-looking, graceless child, her face always so screwed up and cross, forever stumbling over her own feet? Monica remembers being made to accompany Aoife here, to this library, after school. ‘Walk her along, would you?’ Gretta would beg Monica. ‘I just need a bit of peace.’ Because Aoife was a terrible one for questions. Why does the Earth only go one way round the sun? Does it ever go backwards? What’s behind the sky? How do you know? Who says so? What’s the biggest city in the world? What’s the smallest? Gretta used to say it gave her brain ache, ten minutes in the company of Aoife. She had liked the library, though, despite having refused to learn to read for years. It used to make her go quiet and still. She treated books as the basis for her own imaginings. She would glide along the aisles, up and down the stacks: ‘Here’s one I haven’t read,’ she’d whisper to herself, and tilt it out of its place on the shelf. Then she would take it to a chair, sit down and turn the pages, looking through the pictures, muttering her own made-up version of the story. Monica would wait for her on the chairs, saying, ‘Hurry up, Aoife, let’s go home.’
Monica watches now as grown-up Aoife makes her way through the shelves, her top thing billowing and then deflating with the forward momentum of each step. Not something Monica would ever wear but she can see the appeal of it on Aoife. Aoife is holding a big, thick book in her hands, the size of an encyclopedia. And, as Monica and Michael Francis watch, Aoife does something truly shocking. Monica wouldn’t have believed it, unless she’d seen it with her own eyes. Aoife, quite clearly, slides the book into her bag. American Photography, Monica reads, as it disappears into the canvas. She has put the book, this American Photography, into her bag. Without taking it to the desk. Without a backward glance. She zips the bag shut and keeps walking towards them, her head down.
‘Did she just . . .?’
‘Yes,’ Monica breathes.
Aoife appears through the doors. On seeing her brother and sister standing in the lobby, she stops in her tracks. ‘What are you two doing here?’ she has the gall to say.
‘Looking for you,’ Michael Francis says.
‘Did you just steal that book?’ Monica raps out, and realises those are the first words she has spoken to her sister in three years. ‘You take it right back in there this minute.’
Aoife snorts, turns on her heel and walks out of the library.
‘I can’t believe she did that,’ Michael Francis says, his arms hanging loosely at his sides.
‘I can.’
Monica goes after her. Outside, they pursue her along the pavement. Michael Francis is the first to catch up with her and he says, ‘You can’t steal from a library, Aoife.’
Aoife, marching along, says, ‘It’s not stealing.’
Monica says, ‘It certainly looked like stealing.’
Michael Francis says, ‘Monica’s right, Aoife.’
Aoife says, ‘Relax. I’m only borrowing it. I don’t have a library card. I’ll bring it back tomorrow.’
Michael Francis says, ‘What do you want it for anyway?’
Monica says, ‘Of all the selfish, thoughtless—’ She doesn’t finish because Aoife suddenly grips her arm.
‘Oh, God,’ she says, ‘isn’t that Joe?’
It is Joe. Walking along Blackstock Road, his hand deep in the jeans pocket of a woman next to him. The woman is pushing a pram, his head bent towards her to catch something she is saying and he is smiling and he looks carefree and untroubled as if he had never cried and cried in a first-floor flat very near here, the noise of it terrifying and animal-like, head held in his hands as if it hurt him more than anything else ever had, as if he’d never pushed his face up close to that of a woman and said, you disgust me, you’re inhuman, you make me sick, as if he’d never stood opposite that same woman in a church and vowed before God that he would love and honour her for better and for worse, as if he’d never held her hand as they stood in the cone of light from a streetlamp and said she was everything to him, he couldn’t live without her. Here he was, living without her, walking along in the sunshine with that same hand tucked into the back pocket of a different woman’s trousers. Here he was, still with that old checked shirt but with a new wife, who seemed to have a pram, inside which, Monica supposed, there must be a baby.
Michael Francis is thinking, Oh, shit. Aoife is thinking that it’s the same woman she saw earlier, with the pram, and wasn’t she a few years above her at school? Belinda something. Greenwell, was it? And Monica is thinking almost nothing at all. Her mind is a sheer drop of panic, of noiseless incomprehension. She cannot see how this has happened, how this is allowed to happen. She wants to say to someone or something: no, you can’t do this, not now, not after everything, please, no.
Aoife takes charge. She steps back, opens the door of the nearest shop, pushes Monica through it and shuts it. Suddenly, all three of them are standing in the window of a florist, looking out. Always, afterwards, the scent of compost, mixed with jasmine blossom, will bring to Monica’s mind the recol
lection of watching her first husband walking within a foot of her, unaware that she’s there, his arm wrapped around another woman’s shoulders, a blanketed chrysalis form inside a navy pram borne along the pavement before them, like a prize. Monica cringes behind a spray of carnations, unable to look away, until the window is blank again, until the three of them have gone.
‘Well,’ Michael Francis exhales sharply, ‘that was a near miss.’
‘I didn’t know he’d got married again,’ Aoife murmured, standing on tiptoe to catch a last glance.
Monica closes her eyes. She pulls her elbow away from Aoife because her sister is still gripping it, as if she’s afraid Monica might stumble, as if she’s forgotten everything that happened.
‘Didn’t you?’ Monica snaps. ‘I always thought you and he were so close.’
Gretta is walking through her house. She ought to be clearing up. Those plates, the teacups, the serviettes and crumbs – all over the sitting room. She should be collecting them and piling them into the sink. She needs to tidy the cushions, draw the curtains in the front room, keep the sun off the three-piece suite. She saved the dishwater from breakfast for the dishes: she’s no water-waster, never will be.
She ought to be doing all these things. But for now she is moving about her house, passing through the doorways, rooms and corridors, running her hand along the varnished top of the banister, placing her palms on the back of the chairs, feeling the brush of the curtains, touching the raised, dry edges of the wallpaper.
It’s not often the house is empty like this. Ever since Robert retired, she rarely gets the place to herself: he’s always there, shaking his newspaper from the armchair or trailing her from room to room. It’s this kind of emptiness she likes – signs of people around, their discarded possessions left as a reassurance of their return. Monica’s jacket on a hanger, Michael Francis’s car key on the hall table, that scarf of Aoife’s draped over a peg.
Being alone is not something she’s used to, growing up in a farmhouse with six siblings, parents, grandparents, an aunt and uncle or two all under the same roof. She doesn’t think she ever knew that house empty.
This house has gone through phases, of course, Gretta thinks as she goes into the upstairs back room – the girls’ room, as she still thinks of it. She straightens the eiderdown on Aoife’s bed, plumps up the pillow on Monica’s. Will Monica be staying here tonight? Hard to say, harder even to ask as Monica never gives a straight answer to anything. She’ll think of a way to put it to her later. When would have been the last time they slept together in here? The night before Monica’s wedding, she supposes, Aoife only eight at the time, the age Hughie is now. She wonders, for the first time, whether Aoife found it hard to sleep in here alone after that, whether she missed her sister at night.
If Gretta closes her eyes, she can picture the room as it was in those days, the walls around Monica’s bed covered with pictures of film stars, of wedding dresses, those around Aoife’s decorated with her illegible lists, her drawings of wolves and foxes and staircases that went off into thin air.
The house is full of ghosts for Gretta. If she looks quickly into the garden, she is sure she can see the ribcage of the old wooden climbing frame that Michael Francis fell off and broke his front tooth. She could go downstairs now and see the pegs in the hall full of school satchels, gym bags, Michael Francis’s rugby kit. She could turn a corner and find her son lying on his stomach on the landing, reading a comic, or baby Aoife hauling herself up the stairs, determined to join her siblings, or Monica learning to make scrambled eggs for the first time. The air, for Gretta, still rings with their cries, their squabbles, their triumphs, their small griefs. She cannot believe that time of life is over. For her, it all happened and is still happening and will happen for ever. The very bricks, mortar and plaster of this house are saturated with the lives of her three children. She cannot believe they have gone. And that they are back.
As for Robert, Gretta cannot begin to think. His absence is beyond understanding. She is so used to him being here, being around, that she can’t quite accept he has disappeared. She finds herself almost on the verge of speaking to him: this morning, she got two teacups down from the shelf. They have been together for so many years that they are no longer like two people but one strange four-legged creature. For her, so much of their marriage is about talk: she likes to talk, he likes to listen. Without him, she has no one to whom she can address her remarks, her observations, her running commentary about life in general. Her mind, these past few days, has been filling up with things like, I saw the oddest-looking baby in the butcher’s today, did you see there’s a new ticket man at the tube station, do you remember that hairdresser’s Bridie went to. Her temples ache with all that is unspoken, unlistened to.
In the bedroom, she stands in front of the chair at his side of the bed. A tweed jacket, far too hot for this weather, hangs off its back. She fingers the collar, warm in the sun, then runs her fingers down its slippery lining into the pocket. A couple of coins, a paperclip, the stub of a tube ticket. Nothing more. The kind of things anyone might find in their husband’s pocket.
Stand in his shoes, the policeman had said to her, and then ask yourself, where would he go? You need to think yourself into his head. The man had tapped his crown, as if to demonstrate where a head could be found. But the truth is that, although she has lived alongside him for thirty-odd years, although they spend every waking moment of their lives together, these days, Gretta can no more put herself in Robert’s shoes than in those of the Queen of England. Despite his reliance on her, his enduring attachment to her, she still has no idea what goes on behind those glasses, what thoughts simmer beneath that thick, whitening hair.
When she’d first met him, she’d told the other girls at work that he was the quiet type, serious, didn’t say much. Those are the ones you need to watch, a girl from Kerry had said. Gretta had laughed but she’d been sure, she’d been confident that he’d become less quiet as things went on because that was what happened. People got used to each other, people got less shy, more forthcoming; people came out of their shells.
She was working, along with all the other girls at the hostel, at a tea-house in Islington, the Angel Café Restaurant, which was an altogether lovely name. She’d seen the advertisement as she knelt in the farmhouse kitchen, stuffing newspaper into wet boots. ‘The Angel Café Restaurant, London, requires staff. Accommodation provided, wage and board. Apply by letter.’ She’d read it aloud in the kitchen to her mother. Listen to this, Mammy. The Angel Café Restaurant. As if, she’d said, the celestial beings were coming down from on high for a cup of tea. Her mother had said nothing, just hauled the door of the range shut with a clunk and wiped her hands on her apron. She hadn’t wanted Gretta to go. But gone she had, telling her mother she’d be away only a few months, just until she had a bit put by, just until Christmas, just until Easter or perhaps the summer. But then, on one of her evenings off, she’d gone to the pictures with another girl and the man in front of them in the queue had turned round and lifted his hat and said, was her accent Irish? And she’d said, who wants to know? He’d said that his mother was from Ireland, that he had been born there but came to England when he was just a little boy, he had changed his name from Ronan to Robert, to fit in, and she’d said, fancy that.
He worked as a cashier in a bank, he told her, the second time she saw him, he’d always been good with figures. He came to the Angel Café and waited until her shift finished, downing cup after cup of tea, watching her as she wove her way between the tables, holding her tray up high.
He had just come back from the war. He was older than others she’d stepped out with and had the black Irish looks she’d always admired, his hair parted in a straight line. He had a graveness to him, not like the boys she’d gone out with before, always shouting and larking and playing practical jokes. She liked the way his smile took a long time to arrive and just as long to leave.
He took her to Islington Green wher
e they sat under a tree for a time, before making their way down to the canal. He seemed to know and appreciate that she would have no problem with a long walk like that. She asked him where he’d been stationed in the war – that was always a conversation-starter in those days – but instead of a few lively stories about France he had looked at the ground and said nothing at all. She’d had to jump in to fill the gap, telling him about the farm, her brothers and sisters and what they were doing now, scattered all over the world. He’d listened carefully, and at the end of the evening, he could recite the names and middle names of her six siblings, in order of birth. His party trick, he’d called it. Then he’d escorted her back to the hostel, all without laying a finger on her. She’d been sure that he’d have a go at the canal and had been ready for him, her rebuttal a practised art by now, but he hadn’t even tried, just touched the small of her back as they scaled the steps to the street.
He came again the next day and the day after that. He seemed to have decided that she was for him; she liked his certainty over this, his conviction. The subject of his war experiences came up only once more in the entire stretch of their marriage. They were walking along Rosebery Avenue, arm in arm, when they passed a newspaper-seller and Gretta stopped to get one because she liked to know what was happening in the world. Robert took it and went to reach into his pocket for the change but then he stopped. Gretta looked at him; she looked at the newspaper in his hand. She saw the terrible stillness of his face. She saw the two men dressed in British infantry uniforms pass them by, oblivious, smoking, chatting as they went. She went into her purse to give the newspaper-seller his money; she took Robert by the arm; she steered him to a café nearby, where she ordered him a cup of tea and eased the newspaper from his grasp. She knew that this was not a time for her to talk, to fill the gaps of silence with stories, so she waited, stirring sugar into his tea, her hand over his and, after a while, some words came for him and he told her things he said he’d never told anyone before. About the wait on the ruined docks at Dunkirk, the way German planes had flown over them, dropping leaflets that said they were done for, surrounded, as good as dead. That he was on the last boat that left – the very last – and until he’d felt himself hoicked out of the sea and on to the wet planking, he’d believed he wouldn’t make it, that he’d be left behind, abandoned, stranded, having to find his own way home. Gretta sat and listened, and when he said that he never wanted to speak of it again, she’d said: of course, we don’t have to.