She gets down, then, from the stool. She sits on Robert’s chair, the tweed jacket behind her, the stiffened collar pressing an n shape into her back. She registers an urge, at first dull, then sharp and jagged, to see her husband, to share this with him, perhaps not in words, but just to sit by him and know that he was feeling what she was feeling: their girls, their beloved offspring, in terrible disarray and nothing to be done.
She sits there and feels her aloneness and the lack of him, and she looks out at the plane trees, their yellow, crinkled-up leaves, motionless in the still, heavy air. Her hands are folded on her chest, her ankles crossed. So, she makes herself think, to block out the awfulness of his baffling absence, there we have it. Monica in the kitchen, clattering about with dishes. Aoife in the bedroom. Michael Francis keeping his head down somewhere, no doubt.
The dry leaves of the trees outside the window could be a photograph, she thinks, the way they are so still.
Aoife came three weeks early. Gretta was walking back from the corner shop with Michael Francis and Monica when her waters broke. She wasn’t put out. It was early February. She had on a thick coat, a pair of woollen stockings: they would soak up the worst of it.
She held out the shopping bag. ‘Here,’ she said to Michael Francis, who was walking ahead of her, as he always did, ‘carry this, would you?’
He pretended not to hear, just kept going.
Monica materialised at her side, hair neatly plaited, her parting like a line of chalk bisecting her head. ‘I’ll take it, Mammy.’
Gretta patted her on the shoulder. ‘Don’t you worry, it’s too heavy for you, darling.’
Monica looked at her. Gretta could feel the beam of that look, as if it burnt her skin. She’d never been able to hide anything from Monica, anything at all. It was useless to try. Even before she could talk, Gretta had been aware that this child knew everything about her, and vice versa. She’d got used to the invisible telegraph wire that ran between them: all day long messages passed along it, without anyone else knowing.
‘Don’t worry,’ she repeated to her daughter.
Monica pulled the shopping bag out of Gretta’s hands. She walked ahead and gave it to her brother, ten months older but a foot taller, then returned to Gretta’s side. She took her hand. ‘Are you all right, Mammy?’ she asked, her face white with anxiety, tipped up to look at her.
‘I’m fine, pet.’ Gretta spoke through a surge of pain, managing to keep her voice even. ‘I’m fine.’
At the house, Monica made Gretta a cup of tea (Gretta did not say that the thought of it, at this precise moment, made her want to be sick). She sent Michael Francis next door, where they had a phone, to get the neighbour to call their father: they had had the number written on a pad in the kitchen for weeks.
Gretta was gripping the back of a chair – because the pains were coming fast now, with barely a gap in between; it had never been as fast as this before, not any of the times she’d been through it – when the neighbour appeared through the living-room door. She had four children, three lodgers, a husband killed in the war, and had lived in Gillerton Road all her life. She and Gretta looked at each other for a long moment and Gretta was aware, as ever, of Monica intercepting that look, drawing it to herself, attempting to read what wasn’t being said.
‘I’ll be back,’ was all the neighbour said.
Gretta wanted to let go of the chair but found she couldn’t. Her arms were numb, prickling with pins and needles. ‘Won’t be long now,’ she tried to say, noticing that her voice was coming out a little slurred. ‘Are you looking forward to meeting your—’
‘Daddy wasn’t there,’ Michael Francis was saying, from what seemed to be a great distance across the room.
‘What?’ Monica said.
Quiet, Gretta wanted to say, be quiet, can’t you see I’m trying to concentrate.
‘He wasn’t there. We phoned but he wasn’t there.’
‘Well, where is he?’ Monica said.
‘Don’t know. They said they didn’t know where he was.’
‘Are you sure . . .’ Gretta said, taking great care with each word ‘. . . you dialled the right number?’
Her children looked at her. Her children. From across the room, their faces oval in the weak February light. The order of what happened next is a little jumbled for Gretta. She remembers the neighbour back in the room, saying the ambulance was coming, it would be here any minute, and she, Gretta, saying she wasn’t getting in any ambulance because she had to wait for her husband. Michael Francis and Monica, she thought, had been sent to the neighbour’s house, with promises of eating bread and jam with the neighbour’s children. This baby isn’t going to wait, the neighbour said, and reached for the vase on the mantelpiece just in time for Gretta to throw up into it.
Then she was somehow on the floor and the neighbour was there, gripping her hand and saying, bear down now, Mrs Riordan, and all Gretta could think was that the neighbour had covered the carpet in sheets from the airing cupboard and they were the wrong sheets, the good sheets. Gretta wanted to say, there are other sheets, old ones, and I keep them in the shed, but no words would come out because her teeth were clamped together. Bear down, the neighbour kept saying, it’ll soon be over, and Gretta wanted to say, shut up, shut your face, and where’s my bloody husband, but waves kept overtaking her, cresting over her head. Suddenly, ambulance men were there, large and uniformed, striding into the room, and Gretta found the strength to rise to her feet and say, can I go to hospital now?
But the men – no more than boys, really – were taking her by the elbow and saying, no, there’s no time, you’re not going anywhere, lie back now, missis.
‘Can’t,’ she got out, ‘I can’t, I—’ She broke off because she was suddenly aware that there was someone else in the room with them. She peered round and caught a glimpse of thin legs with grey knee socks. Gretta bellowed: get her out of here, get her out. Monica, she said, get yourself next door, get in there now. But Monica did not move. Get her out, she screamed, for the love of God, she’s ten years old. But the people in the room weren’t listening, they were saying there was no time, that it was happening now, that she must push and push and push; someone was moving her back to the sofa and where in God’s name was Robert or Ronan or whatever he was called, where the feck is my husband, she heard herself shout, even though she knew Monica was there; she couldn’t see her but she always knew because of that invisible wire. Right at the last moment, just before the baby came slithering out into the ambulance man’s waiting hands, the neighbour seemed to snap into her senses and seized Monica by the shoulders and jostled her out of the room.
Gretta always knew everything about Monica; she always had, from the moment she first saw her. It was never this way with her other two, just Monica. And she knew, when she came round from the trance of birth, in the trundling ambulance, alone but for a howling baby, that Monica, while perhaps not having seen it all, had seen too much, far too much, that what she had witnessed she would never forget.
Monica pushes her fingers into the telephone’s coils, winding them round and round the tight spirals.
The phone in Gloucestershire rings for a long time. She is about to hang up, thinking that Peter must have taken the girls on an outing somewhere, swimming, perhaps, or to a friend’s house, when a voice answers, high with importance: ‘Hello, Camberden three eight three four.’
Monica is so taken aback to hear one of the girls reciting her own phone number so fluently that, for a moment, she is speechless. Then she collects herself. ‘Jessica, sweetheart,’ she says, ‘is that you?’
There is a pause. Monica and the child listen to each other breathing.
‘Jessica?’ Monica repeats. ‘Is that you? Or Florence? Is it Florence?’
‘Who is this?’ The child’s voice is clear and haughty.
‘It’s Monica, darling. Are you having a lovely weekend? Is Daddy—’
The voice cuts in: ‘Who?’
Mo
nica lets out a little trill of laughter, trying to extract her fingers from the telephone coils but the longest finger, next to the index – whatever is it called? Does it even have a name? – remains stubbornly stuck. ‘It’s me, Monica, your . . . daddy’s . . . well . . .’
‘Who?’ the child says again.
Monica inhales, she presses her fingernails into her palms. ‘Would you please go and get Daddy and tell him I would like to speak to him?’
There is another pause. Then she hears the unmistakable noise of the receiver being slammed down.
Monica stands there for a moment, unable to believe what has happened. She thinks about calling back, demanding that Peter be put on the phone, but she hasn’t the stomach for it, cannot listen to one more syllable spoken by that reedy, insolent voice.
She would bet anything it was Jessica. The little one, Florence, wouldn’t have the nerve to do it. But Jessica: she’s capable of anything.
Well, Monica thinks, as she pushes her way into the front sitting room, that little madam needn’t think she’s going to get away with it. Monica is going to tell Peter exactly what happened the very next time she speaks to him. And what will Peter do? Monica knows: absolutely nothing. He’ll sigh and shift in his overalls and mutter about how hard it is on them, how she’s just expressing her discontent, he’s sorry, Monica mustn’t worry, they’ll come round.
She grips the back of the armchair that belongs to Robert and no one else. If she or Michael Francis or Aoife had done what Jessica just had, there would have been trouble. A slap on the bottom, early to bed and the prospect of a talking-to from their father when he got home.
Not that this had ever applied to her much. She was the good one, the well-behaved one, the responsible one. Still is. But she remembers Aoife and, occasionally, Michael Francis being punished with this formula: slap + bed + talk from their father. She remembers the heavy thudding of her father’s feet on the stair carpet, still in his good work shoes, before eating his tea, and even though she wasn’t the one waiting under the counterpane, it would scare her.
Monica moves from the armchair to stand in front of her father’s roll-top desk. She runs a speculative finger along its top; she rests a hand on its side. Then, casting a quick look over her shoulder at the empty front room, Monica inserts her fingertips into the lid. She tugs. Nothing. Locked.
Monica is unperturbed. She goes to the bay window and, stepping on to a tapestried (by her) stool, reaches up to the pelmet and delves about up there.
She had caught her father doing this once; she must have been twelve or thirteen at the time and it must have been Christmas because she distinctly remembers her father having to lean over the Christmas tree to reach. As he stepped down, he saw her, standing in the doorway. There was a moment in which she caught her breath, staring at him, the key in his hand. She knew immediately what it was for: they were all fascinated by their father’s desk, a wooden box with a brass lock and rows of drawers that crouched in the corner of the front room. He would take to it on a Sunday afternoon, sit there facing its depths, folding and unfolding bits of paper, writing with his fountain pen, ripping the tops off envelopes. But she needn’t have worried. He had, after a moment, smiled, tapped his finger to his nose.
‘Our little secret,’ he’d said. ‘Agreed?’
‘Agreed.’ She’d nodded and moved forward to stand beside him as he sat down on the chair and opened the desk. She’d always loved the way the lid rolled back into nothing, the slats of wood sliding away, like a wave off sand. She’d loved the desk’s cubbyholes and tiny drawers and little nooks more than anything, though, stuffed with bits of paper and bottles of ink and the wire loops of paperclips. There were photos in there, too, she knew. Pictures of Mammy as a young woman, with her hair all dark and her waist tiny, her hands hidden inside gloves. Pictures of people she didn’t know, standing stiffly in the sunshine in gardens far away.
‘Can I fill your fountain pen for you, Daddy?’ she asked.
Her father looked up from the papers in front of him. ‘You can.’
He got out for her the bottle of blue-black ink. Quink, the lid said. Quink, the curled letters on the glass read. Monica knew how to unscrew the barrel of the pen, how to dip just the silver nib and no more into the liquid, then squeeze until you saw the bubbles stop. Then that delicious feeling of the ink drawing up into the pen, that tiny noise of suction. She could hear Michael Francis clumping about upstairs; she could hear the rising screech of Aoife, in the kitchen, Nonononono I do it myself! But here she was, standing nicely, filling a pen with ink for her father, here she was, wiping the nib clean on her hankie for him and screwing on the lid. There was no act more right, more satisfying than handing it back to him, saying, ‘Here you are, Daddy,’ and then the reward of his hand on her shoulder, him saying, ‘Perfect, darling.’
Monica’s fingers encounter something hard and cold and she snatches the key off the pelmet, which is furred with dust that showers her as she leaps back off the stool. She swipes at her dress, cursing her mother’s haphazard housework.
Checking the room again, she steps up to the desk and inserts the key into the lock. She feels not a single qualm about doing this. It is her right. It is the only thing to do.
Her father has left. She still cannot accept this fact, still cannot believe it. He has walked out without so much as a thought for her, left behind to deal with all this, to calm a hysterical Gretta, to face a deluge of siblings and relatives. He must have known that she, Monica, would be left to bear the brunt of the trouble and had he cared? No, he had not. He had gone and walked out without a backward glance. How could he have expected her to drop everything and come home to sort this out? It was the height of selfishness, the very essence of disregard.
Monica pushes back the roll-top with a sharp shove. It rushes into itself with a shocked rattle. She runs her hand over the embossed-leather surface; she sets the ink blotter straight; she touches the lid of the fountain pen, lying in its holder.
She has always known she is the favourite. It is, she tells herself, just the way things are. Nothing was ever said, of course, because that was not their way. But she knows it to be true, in both thought and deed. Everyone knows. Can she help it if they loved her more, if they took more pleasure in her company, if they found the path of her life to be the most compatible with their own? Their constant approval: she has never courted it, never asked for it. She cannot help it; it’s forever been entirely out of her hands. She has always been aware that despite her parents’ emphasis on study, on working hard at school, on getting good marks, on being top of the class, that she – not Michael Francis – is the one whose choices they applauded. She found herself a husband, she got married, she settled down, and moved into a flat just round the corner. Nothing the others could ever do would make them as happy as that. Nothing would validate more the people they were, the choices they themselves had made, than their prettiest daughter getting married in a big white dress to a local boy from a good Irish family. Nothing. Not even her subsequent divorce – which caused seismic shock-waves for her parents – was enough to topple her from prime position. If anything, they cleaved even more closely to her. Michael Francis could get himself three PhDs and it would never measure up. Aoife, of course, didn’t enter into this, the way she was: she’d gone out of her way to make herself the least favourite. But Michael Francis – Monica often wondered if it bothered him. If that was why he had worked so hard, pushed himself to do so well at school. Only to mess it all up with a stupid mistake and end up just like her, married and living round the corner.
Monica smooths her hair, readjusts a pin at the nape of her neck and sets to work. She will start with the cubbyholes; she will work left to right. There will be something in here, she is sure, some clue, something that everyone else would overlook. She knows her father better than any of them and she knows that a man who has spent his life working in a bank is sure to account for everything. He will have left a trace, a mark, a record
, even if perhaps he didn’t intend to.
Aoife sits cross-legged on the bed, the American photography book open on her lap. She turns its pages, a few this way, a few that, blows smoke out of the window, then turns a few more. She hadn’t known what she wanted when she went into the library and had almost headed towards the children’s section, the blazingly familiar shelves with picture books, the inaccurately rendered murals of cartoon characters wobbling across the walls. But then she’d caught sight of a shelf she’d never seen before, with long-spined books all in a row. And there this book had been, squeezed between others on quilting techniques and cake decorating.
It’s all here, right from William Henry Fox Talbot and his salt prints. Evelyn is the second last and, Aoife notices, one of the few women.
There are six of her photographs, not perhaps her most famous, all from before Aoife’s time. One had been in the exhibition she saw, all those years ago, in London, when she walked among the images, aged eighteen or nineteen or whatever she was, utterly unaware that one day she would be developing film for the woman, laying out contact sheets, setting up her lights. Odd that your life can contain such significant tripwires to your future and, even while you wander through them, you have no idea.
Seeing Evelyn’s work here, now, reproduced in a book, which she can look at sitting on her old bed, in her old room, is strangely reassuring. Aoife lays her hand on a double-page spread, one of a man with a startling birthmark covering half of his face, holding up a dead-eyed fish, another of a woman sitting in a slip on a bashed-up car, a railway track stretching out behind her. She puts her hand on these pictures and knows she isn’t stuck. She has a life elsewhere. She isn’t still living here, with no hope or brightness before her. She made it out.
She is just turning back to the photographer who precedes Evelyn when the door opens and her brother slopes into the room.
He doesn’t look at her. He doesn’t speak. He lowers himself, joint by joint, to the rug and lies there face down.