‘I put one down,’ he continues, through a mouthful of cornflakes, ‘by mistake, but Vita drove six down there deliberately.’
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
He crouches to look into the crevasse, putting down the cereal bowl. ‘Six,’ he murmurs again. ‘Mummy said if she did it again she’d lose her sweets on Saturday. Do you think we’ll get them back?’
‘The sweets?’
‘No, the cars.’
Monica looks down into the jagged black tear. ‘I don’t know,’ she says carefully. ‘Maybe it’s—’
‘I’d say not. Vita said she pushed them down there to see if the devils would drive them out.’
Monica considers this sentence. She takes each idea separately: pushing cars into a crack in the earth, the devils, the driving out again. No, she concludes, it makes no sense at all.
Hughie seems to glean this because he looks up at her. She is struck by the perfection of his skin, its flawless translucence, the meander of veins beneath its surface.
‘Granny says that devils live there, inside the earth,’ he explains, ‘so Vita thought that if she put the cars down there, the devils might find them and drive them out. Vita said she wanted to see them.’
Monica blinks away an image of tiny red creatures boiling up out of the crack like ants.
‘Do you believe it?’ Hughie asks.
‘Do I believe what?’
‘That devils live down there.’
‘I . . .’
‘I don’t,’ he says helpfully.
‘Neither do I. And I’m not sure that they’d know how to drive.’
He lifts his head and gives her a smile of such charm and trust and brilliance that she feels tears start into her eyes.
‘Is Grandpa going to come back?’ he says.
‘I don’t know,’ Monica says, ‘but I’ll tell you something, if they don’t stop arguing about who’s going where, I’m going to scream.’
Hughie looks impressed and a little bit scared, and Monica goes into the house to find that Claire – who’s recently had a most unfortunate haircut that Monica is hoping she got her money back on – is leaving to fetch Gretta.
It has been decided that Claire appearing on her doorstep will wrong-foot Gretta into compliance. Any of them, and she would throw herself back on her old tricks for avoiding things she doesn’t want to do: the pills, the headaches, the shrieking. But Gretta will be so disconcerted by her well-spoken English daughter-in-law arriving, alone, to take her to a family conference that she will be hoodwinked into agreeing.
They gather on the pavement outside Michael Francis’s house to wave Claire off.
‘Don’t tell her it’s a family conference,’ Michael Francis says to his wife, through the car window.
‘I won’t,’ Claire says.
‘Don’t even say the words “family conference”,’ says Monica.
‘I won’t.’
‘Say “cup of tea”,’ Aoife advises. ‘Tell her you’ve come to bring her over for a cup of tea.’
Claire nods. ‘I will.’
‘Cup of tea,’ Michael Francis agrees. ‘Good thinking.’
‘Bye-bye, Mummy!’ Vita calls, dancing up and down on the pavement, caught up in the drama of the situation.
As Claire drives off, Hughie runs down the pavement alongside the car in his bare feet, waving and calling, with Michael Francis shouting after him about putting on some shoes, for God’s sake.
By the time Gretta steps through the door, everyone is dressed, more or less. Vita is naked in the back garden and Hughie is inside a tepee, so Monica can’t see if he’s clothed or not. Monica, her brother and sister are in the sitting room, which has, like Claire’s hair, taken a distinct turn for the worse, with the furniture pushed back, the mantelpiece bare and the cushions piled up in a corner.
When Gretta arrives, there is a great deal of bustle: the children surge in from the garden and fling themselves at her; Monica is surprised by the avidity of their affection. Vita holds on to the stuff of Gretta’s dress, incanting, ‘Granny, Granny,’ and Hughie dances around her, shouting something about marbles.
Monica conducts a careful examination of her mother as she talks to the children. She hasn’t, Monica noticed, glanced their way since coming through the door. Which is more than significant. Gretta looks determined, steely, Monica decides. ‘Prepared’ might be the word. Her hair, for once released from its eternal curlers, has been brushed out and up. A line of firmly applied lipstick across her mouth. She has on her good dress and her proper shoes.
The shoes are the giveaway. Gretta would do anything to avoid wearing shoes, especially in this heat. She has always suffered from swollen ankles, bunions, fallen arches, corns, heel pain, toe pain – her feet, she is fond of saying, are the bane of her life. She spends her time shuffling about in fabric slippers or soft mules and will put on shoes only for special occasions. The fact that she has forced her feet into these leather sandals tells Monica one thing: Gretta is more than ready and they have a battle on their hands.
For a good five minutes, Gretta talks. She gives them a long description of the spuds she’d been peeling and the various people who’ve called and the heat and the general uselessness of the London Metropolitan Police Force. She still doesn’t meet the eyes of any of her offspring.
It would be Aoife, of course, who cuts across her.
‘Mammy,’ she says, interrupting a litany about who slept where and for how long, ‘do you have any idea why Dad might have gone to Round . . . Round-whatsitsname?’
‘Roundstone?’ Gretta gives them a strangely wild smile and dabs at her neck with a hankie. ‘I haven’t the foggiest.’
Monica leans forward in her chair to catch every nuance of her mother’s tone. Gretta is a hopeless liar: Monica can catch her out every time.
‘No idea at all?’ Aoife persists.
‘If it was even him at all this cousin saw,’ Gretta says, replacing the hankie in her handbag and shutting it with a resonant click. ‘It might well not have been. You know, I was thinking I’d manage chips for lunch. I’ve no appetite, none at all, but I might get down a few chips. Egg and chips. It was always your favourite, Aoife.’
The mere sound of the word ‘chips’ makes a kind of fury balloon in Monica’s oesophagus. How can their mother be talking about food, here and now? She battles it down again.
‘I’d understood,’ Monica says, with control, ‘that Dermot had said it was definitely him.’
Gretta’s shoulders give a small shrug. She opens her bag, takes a look inside, then shuts it again. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. Her face is the obstinate mask of a child caught out in a falsehood or exaggeration. ‘It was Mary, anyway.’
‘Mammy, does the name Assumpta mean anything to you?’
Gretta’s face brightens, as it always does when she talks about anything to do with Connemara. ‘Assumpta is the name of . . .’ Her face falls as she cuts herself off. She gives them a narrow look. ‘Why do you ask?’
Monica grips the arms of the chair. ‘The name of what?’
‘Is it too much trouble to ask for a glass of water?’ Gretta twists her neck around and calls through to the kitchen. ‘The heat of this place, Michael Francis, it’s worse than our house. What have you got in the walls? Sheep’s wool?’
‘What were you going to say,’ Aoife asks, ‘about Assumpta? That it’s the name of what?’
‘It’s the name of—’ she begins then cuts herself off again. Her hand flies to the collar of her dress, to her hair, to the arm of her glasses. ‘It’s the name of the convent outside Roundstone, all right? The Servite Convent of St Assumpta.’
‘The one Dad was seen going into?’
Gretta shrugs again, fiddling with a loose thread on the hem of her dress.
‘Mum, did you know,’ Aoife says, ‘that Dad sends money to something he marks as “Assumpta” every month? It must be that convent.’
Gretta continues to wind
the thread round and round her finger.
‘Did you know that?’
‘I did not,’ Gretta snaps, ‘and I’d like to know how you know that. Sniffing around the house, going through private papers. I always brought you up to respect private property, not to poke your nose into other people’s business. I don’t see why anything should have changed.’
Monica waits. This is always her policy when her mother is hiding something, hedging something, obviously lying.
Her mother heaves herself about in her chair, snapping open the bag once more. ‘Rifling around in people’s possessions,’ she mutters, pulling out one bottle of pills, then another. ‘Never seen the like.’ She leans her head back on the chair, in a show of weakness. ‘My head,’ she moans.
Monica still waits. She can feel Aoife and Michael Francis begin to crack, to look at her and then their mother, wondering where to go next, but she, Monica, knows. She’s in complete control. She can read her mother’s mind, as if Gretta were a comic-book character with her thoughts appearing as words in the air beside her. Her mother shoots her a quick glance from under her lids. Monica crosses her arms, but says nothing.
‘I don’t know why he’s there!’ Gretta shouts abruptly, opening her eyes, struggling with the cap on a bottle of pills. ‘You have to believe me. Could I have a glass of water, to take my pills? Would that be too much to ask?’
Monica waits a moment longer. Then she uncrosses her arms. ‘I believe you when you say you don’t know,’ she says, ‘but I think you might have an idea. And I’d like to know what that idea is.’
Gretta gazes at the bottle in her hand, as if wondering how it got there.
She will not tell them, these children of hers. It is too long a story and happened so long ago, and there’s no use in raking up these old things and they wouldn’t understand. There is no need for them to know. She only has the story herself because of a strange accident, one of those odd coincidences that can happen with the long arm of the Catholic Church.
The priest had had a cup of tea in one hand and a sandwich in the other and he’d looked at her and said he’d known two Riordan brothers in Liverpool and could they be any relation to Gretta?
They will never understand that, these children of hers, the stretch and influence and all-seeing eye of the Church. Not one of them still attends, not Michael Francis, not even Monica, although there probably isn’t a Catholic church out where she lives, in the deep heart of English England. There are Catholic churches in New York, of course, she knows that, but she would bet her last penny Aoife’s never darkened the door of a single one of them.
It’s enough to break a mother’s heart.
If they went to Mass, she might tell them. She says this to herself. If even one of them went, just every now and again, she might see her way to telling them. But, as it is, she can’t.
If she hadn’t said her surname to the priest, if she’d kept it to herself, it would never have come out, she would never have known, she could have carried on as normal.
She surveys her children opposite her: Monica sitting, arms crossed, so composed, so neat, on the edge of the sofa; Michael Francis next to her, slumped against the cushions, looking as though he’d rather be anywhere else than here; and then Aoife at the end, sitting all tight in a ball, screwed up with crossness and tension. She wants the story, she wants the solution, she wants to know. Always has, always will.
Claire is in the room now, handing her a slippery glass of water – she might have thought to wipe it before serving it, but no – and she is whispering to Michael Francis. Gretta hears her say, how can Robert be at a convent, surely men wouldn’t be allowed? Michael Francis is whispering back that a Servite convent is one that serves, a working convent, not a closed one. And that, right there, Gretta thinks, is what comes of marrying a Protestant. They have no proper idea of how things work.
Gretta herself only knows by accident. She never sought out the story. She had gone with her sister-in-law to Galway for the day, to hear a priest visiting from Boston. Quite a day they had made of it, catching the bus from Clifden with ten or twelve others early in the morning to make it in time for the special Mass the priest was giving. Aoife was only a baby, so Gretta had taken her along; her mother had stayed behind to mind Michael Francis and Monica. On the bus, when Aoife cried, there were plenty of hands to take her and pass her around, plenty of laps to be bounced and dandled on as the country slid past the windows.
After the Mass, there was tea and small sandwiches, and at one point Gretta found herself being introduced to the visiting priest. Father Flaherty was his name, a Wexford man, by the sound of it, and he laid his fingertips briefly on Aoife’s head and Gretta sent up a short prayer of thanks that, for once, Aoife was sleeping quietly. On hearing her name and that she lived over in England, Father Flaherty had looked at her and said he’d known a family of Riordans during his time in Liverpool. Two brothers. Perhaps they were relations of Gretta’s.
Her sister-in-law and everyone who knew her was across the room and Gretta stood before the priest in a group of women she didn’t know and there was something in his face that made her say, ‘No.’
A tragic story, the priest said, shaking his head, a lesson to us all in the importance of brotherly love. Gretta’s tongue was stuck fast to the roof of her mouth and Aoife felt like a lead weight in her arms and she knew she was going to hear a story about her husband, about the father of her children; she was going to hear the story he himself would never tell her.
She stood there and she thought about her house in London, her lovely little house, and she thought about her children: Michael Francis, the clever one, Monica, the pretty one, and Aoife, the baby. She thought about her garden, with the nasturtiums in pots by the back door and the peas climbing bamboo canes with their hooking green tendrils. She had the passing sensation of wanting to gather it all to her, as if somebody or something was threatening to take it away.
And while she was thinking this, the priest was ploughing on with his story about two brothers called Robert and Francis, but everyone called him Frankie, and how they were terribly close, and the hard life they had had after their father died and their mother brought them to England so that she could work as a cook to keep them.
They will never understand that either, these London-born children of hers: how hard it was then, how there was no work in Ireland, nothing to be done, how the mailboats were full of desperate people, coming over to England to earn a crust. These children of hers think they had it bad, people calling them names at school, telling those wearisome jokes in front of them, certain neighbourhood kids who said their parents didn’t want them to play with dirty Catholics. But they have no inkling what it was like to be Irish in England then, a long time ago, how much you were hated and derided and disrespected. How her brothers had had to go off to hiring fairs in their teens, how her sisters had gone into service in big London houses and never come back. How people spat at you on buses if they heard your accent or turned you out of a café or asked you to move along if you tried to get a bit of rest on a park bench or put up notices in their windows saying ‘No Irish’. These children of hers have no idea how lucky they are.
Even now – especially now, with all this trouble happening all over the country – the English don’t like them. They never will. There are certain shops she won’t go into, certain places where she hears a whisper behind her back or someone giving her a disgusted face. She was waiting to pay for a pat of butter at a local shop recently, a place she’d been going to for years, when the shopkeeper slammed something down on the counter before her and told her to get out, he didn’t want her sort around here. She was so astonished that for a moment all she could do was stare at him, thinking that in a moment he’d realise he’d made a mistake, mixed her up with someone else, that he would surely apologise and smile. But then she’d looked down at the counter and seen that his fist was resting on a newspaper and on the newspaper was a headline about an IRA bomb. She
should have drawn herself up, should have said, my family are decent people, not murderers. But she didn’t. She left the butter and backed away. Robert says time in England does that to you. Knocks the fight out of you. Better to keep your head down.
Anyway, so, the priest continued his tale about these Riordan boys, how the elder one, Frankie, always looked out for his younger brother, who was really called Ronan but who had changed his name to Robert, a quiet, bookish sort of boy, not like Frankie at all, who was a big fellow and liked everyone to know it. How a girl had come to Liverpool, and because she was from the same part of Sligo as the Riordan family and known to their relatives, they’d had her over for tea on her day off.
She was a strange girl from the start, the priest said. Although she was young – couldn’t have been more than seventeen or eighteen – she had this mane of silvery-white hair, down past her waist. A tiny, slight thing she was, like a nightingale or a mouse.
Gretta stood and absorbed this description. She built a picture in her mind. She considered it from all angles. She knew straight away that this image of a girl with silvery hair spread about her shoulders, like a bridal veil, she imagined it, would haunt her for the rest of her life, would live alongside her, like a house ghost.
The priest took another biscuit and said that the Riordan brothers both fell for her in a big way. Both of them. They would go over to the house where she worked, the two of them, hang around the back door to talk to the girl with the silvery hair.
‘We could all see trouble brewing,’ the priest said, with a wry smile. ‘Their mother came to find me and said what was she to do? Frankie took the girl flowers he’d lifted from the public park. Ronan or Robert as he called himself gave the girl his clothing coupons, his sugar ration. What, their poor mother asked, should she do?’
In the end, things resolved themselves. Robert and his mother came in one day to say that Robert and the girl, Sarah was her name, were to be married. The girl had chosen the more reliable, less wild brother and that was that.