‘I married them myself,’ the priest said, and was it Gretta’s imagination or did he look straight at her as he said this? ‘A beautiful wedding, a baking hot day in the middle of summer. A fine-looking couple they were.’
Some time on the day after the wedding – and, of course, the party back at the Riordans’ house was still going on – it became clear that no one could find Sarah. Guests started looking in and out of the rooms and, as word spread, out in the back yard and the street. It was high summer, the middle of a heatwave; no one could sleep for the heat. Soon everyone at the party turned away from the celebration and the music and the drinks, asking, where’s Sarah? Until someone asked, where’s Frankie?
‘You can see where this is going, can’t you?’ the priest said.
Frankie and Sarah had run off. To Dublin, some said, or back to Sligo, said others. Either way, they had disappeared, together, still in their wedding clothes. Some said that Sarah was with child and it wasn’t clear by which brother, but no one knew for sure.
‘A terrible business,’ the priest said, chewing his sandwich.
Gretta thought this was the end and she was telling herself to move off, to go, to walk out of there and not come back. But the priest was telling another woman about how Robert had tried and tried to find them. How he went to Dublin and searched the whole city, he went to Sligo but no one had seen them. He wanted the girl back, despite everything. The priest had never seen a worse case of a broken heart.
Not long after, Robert was called up and went off to Europe to fight; the mother was killed when their house was hit by a bomb. Several years after the war, Frankie resurfaced, in Ulster, in prison.
‘Prison?’ Gretta repeated, because Robert had told her that his brother, Frankie, was dead, killed in the Troubles.
‘It was a contentious case and caused a furore at the time. He was convicted for shooting a police officer during the Northern Campaign but another man later claimed he had been the one who did it, that Frankie had had nothing to do with it. Only God knows. Frankie was released, I believe, after many years but, of course, his health was broken. The girl, Sarah, was long gone by this point, to America, some said. And the most touching part of the story, which I heard years later from another priest, is that after Frankie came out of prison, even though they have never spoken to this day, Robert or Ronan makes sure that Frankie is looked after. He arranged for him to be cared for, and if that isn’t the very essence of . . . Ah, hello.’ The priest turned away to greet someone and began a conversation about a particular building in Boston and Gretta was left standing there, until she had the presence of mind to move away, out of the room and on to the pavement outside, where she held Aoife in the darkening air, as swallows flitted around in great wheeling, invisible tracks.
They would never understand, these children of hers. Never.
Monica waits. Aoife waits. Michael Francis waits and Claire, who has come to stand beside them, waits.
‘It all happened a long time ago,’ Gretta bursts out, then swallows one of her pills. ‘I don’t even know the details myself.’
‘Just tell us what you do know,’ Aoife says.
‘The thing is . . .’ Gretta says, dabbing again at her brow ‘. . . it’s not my story to tell. It’s your father’s and he . . . he didn’t even . . . Well. It doesn’t seem right for me to be telling it here.’
‘I think the time for what’s right has passed,’ Aoife says, sitting forward. ‘Dad’s gone. Let’s just hear the story and get on with deciding what to do next.’
‘I can’t just . . . The thing is . . .’ Gretta screws up her face, as if considering where to start or perhaps which version to tell ‘. . . the thing is, there was bad blood between your father and his brother.’
Monica puts her head on one side. ‘Why?’
‘I don’t know!’ Gretta snaps, then looks away. ‘It was all before my time. But it was a tragedy. A shocking tragedy.’
Aoife pounces: ‘What kind of tragedy? What happened?’
‘It was . . . I can’t say . . . It was all during the war. A political disagreement. Your father was fighting for the British and then Frankie got mixed up in the Troubles and . . .’ Gretta trails into silence, looking frightened.
‘And what?’
‘There was . . . other trouble.’
‘What kind of trouble?’
‘There was a woman and . . . well, she ran off with Frankie in the end.’ Gretta is sweating, beads of moisture running down the sides of her face. ‘And now his health is broken so . . . so let that be a lesson to you.’ Gretta waves a hand in the air, as if that is the end of the matter.
‘A lesson?’ Aoife says.
‘I thought Frankie was dead,’ Michael Francis says, at the same time.
‘You automatically become an invalid if you fall out with your siblings?’ Aoife continues.
‘Yes,’ Gretta says, with emphasis. ‘No. That’s not what I meant.’
‘You definitely told us he was dead,’ Michael Francis insists. ‘You told us that many times.’
‘I thought he was dead! Your father told me he was dead but then . . . then I found out he wasn’t.’
‘Frankie’s alive?’ says Michael Francis. ‘I can’t believe this. How long have you known that? And why didn’t you tell us? We’ve got an uncle and we’ve never even met him. That’s really . . . peculiar. Why wouldn’t you just tell us? And what has all this got to do with Dad disappearing now?’
‘Quiet, Michael Francis,’ Monica hisses. ‘Just let her talk.’
‘Don’t tell me to be quiet,’ he retorts.
‘I will tell you, if I want.’
‘You will not. This is my house and—’
‘Don’t you two start,’ Gretta cries. ‘That’s the last thing we need. When I think about you as children, the lovely times we had, I can’t believe what’s happened to you all. I can’t believe that you’ve just—’
‘I think it’s underhand,’ Michael Francis says. ‘It’s deceitful. It’s downright strange not to have told us Frankie was still alive. I mean, I know he was mixed up in things over there but he’s still family – he’s Dad’s brother, for Chrissake. Haven’t we got a right to know—’
‘We don’t know if he was mixed up in things,’ Gretta cries, sitting upright, ever keen to dispel bad rumours about the Irish in general. ‘There are those who say Frankie’s conviction was a miscarriage of justice. A case of mistaken identity. And I’ve always thought that—’
‘The woman,’ Aoife says suddenly, ‘who ran off with Frankie. What about her?’
Gretta’s head snaps towards her. ‘What do you mean?’ she raps out.
‘I mean, what happened with her? What’s the story there? Is that why they fell out? Because she left Dad for Frankie?’
‘What?’ Gretta says. Then she says, ‘No.’ Then she amends this to, ‘I don’t know.’
Aoife frowns. ‘Was it quite a serious . . . I mean, were she and Dad engaged or something, beforehand?’
Gretta keeps her face absolutely motionless.
‘Mum? Was Dad engaged to this woman before she ran off with Frankie?’
Gretta holds herself very still, as if the slightest movement might give something away.
‘They were married,’ breathes Monica.
Gretta closes her eyes.
‘So, did they . . . divorce?’ Aoife asks, pronouncing the final word in a whisper, because that is how you always had to say it in Gretta’s presence, as if it was the name of some fatal illness that might be contagious if spoken into the air, especially since it had happened to her own daughter.
‘I . . . I can’t say.’
Aoife leans forward. ‘You can’t say?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because . . . because it’s not something I’ve talked . . . to him about.’
‘You’ve never talked to him about it?’
‘No.’
‘Never? Not once?’ Aoife is pu
shing too far too fast, Monica can see. She’s in danger of tipping Gretta over into a place where tempers flare, a place where anger will contain and protect her. She motions at Aoife to stop, to ease up, but Aoife ignores her. ‘You’re telling me you never talked to Dad about his previous marriage? You didn’t ask any questions at all when he told you? You weren’t curious in any way about it?’
Gretta fiddles again with her collar. She stares at the wall, at the mirror, her mouth set in a straight line. Monica can sense the storm coming and she has to head it off: if Gretta and Aoife get going, all will be lost.
‘He wouldn’t have told her, can’t you see that?’ she says to her sister, and Aoife looks at her with an appalled face. ‘He wouldn’t have told you, would he, Mammy? He wouldn’t have talked about it at all.’
Gretta flaps the hankie at them. Tears spring from her eyes and course down her cheeks and Monica relaxes slightly. Tears, she can cope with. ‘No, pet,’ Gretta sobs. ‘No, he wouldn’t. I asked and asked but he wouldn’t tell me anything.’
‘So how did you find all this out?’
‘A priest told me. Years later.’
Monica comes across the room and puts her arms around her mother. ‘Come on, it’s OK. Don’t cry. It’ll be OK.’ She says this over and over, almost as if she is trying to make herself believe it.
‘Where, where, where has he gone?’ her mother sobs.
‘We know where he is, remember? He’s in Connemara, at this St Assumpta place.’
‘You think Frankie’s there?’ Gretta whispers. ‘You think that’s it? Your dad sent all that money so that he’d be taken care of by the nuns?’
‘It’s possible, I suppose. But we’ll find out.’
Gretta starts to wail through her tears, not all of it coherent, ‘What else could I have done? I was so young and alone and away from home. I would never have done it but he said there was nothing he could do.’
Monica looks at her siblings over the noise and they look back at her: Michael Francis horrified, ill at ease, desperate for this to be over, Aoife with her eyes narrowed.
‘What do you mean?’ Aoife demands. ‘He said there was nothing he could do? About what?’
‘The . . . the . . . marriage.’
Monica scans her mind for what her mother might be talking about and, catching sight of the rosary beads in the open mouth of Gretta’s handbag, she hazards a guess: ‘Do you mean that he divorced this other woman? You mean it’s a sin, remarrying after a divorce? Mammy, everyone gets divorced, these days. I know you find it hard that I . . . I mean, I know you were upset when I got divorced but it’s not like that any more. You mustn’t think like that.’
‘No,’ Gretta sobs on. ‘No, you don’t understand.’
Monica holds the hot bulk of her mother to her side. She feels overcome, swamped by this: she would like nothing more than to be transported to the back of Peter’s workshop. There is a chaise longue under a skylight, which, if reclined upon, gives a view of nothing but clouds and empty sky and the swaying tops of trees. She would give almost anything to be there now, instead of in a hot room full of people to whom she’s related.
‘Mum,’ Aoife is asking, in the hot room, far away from a chaise longue underneath a skylight, ‘are you and Dad actually married?’
Monica gasps. She turns on her, as if to strike her, as if to give this sister of hers what she deserves, as if to tell her she can’t waltz back into this family she so easily abandoned and expect to cast judgements and ask such terrible questions. Monica goes to put her hands over her mother’s ears: her instinct is to shield her mother from the person who is saying these terrible things.
But Gretta is strangely still. Her face is turned away. And Monica knows that downwards curve of the mouth, the slightly lowered lids. It’s the face her mother wears when she’s heard bad language, when she’s confronted about some ill-thought purchase, when she has been asked to account for the whereabouts of one of her feckless relatives. The face she wears when called upon to reinvent, to edit, to retell a conversation or an encounter or an event from her past.
Aoife stands up from the sofa. She bends to pick up the glass of water and takes a swig. She rubs a hand over her face. ‘Wow,’ she says.
SUNDAY
18 July 1976
(9) The Secretary of State for Home Affairs will be afforded the right to request the support of Her Majesty’s Armed Forces in helping civilian authorities. Civilian authorities are hereby defined as including firemen, medical personnel and police officers.
Drought Act 1976
Ireland
The engines surge into a guttural snarl and an answering vibration is felt throughout the endoskeleton of the ferry. Rivets strain, staircases rattle, doors hum inside their frames, glasses drying on the racks behind the bar tremble together. A dog in the lounge feels it through its paws and crawls under a chair to whimper consolingly to itself.
Michael Francis, in the throes of a debate with Vita about why cheese should not be inserted in your ears, lifts his head to say, we’re off. Aoife, having a cigarette on deck, feels it and leans over the railing to see the massive churning of the waters from the rudders and she, too, feels a thrill of excitement. Gretta, rustling through boxes of sausage rolls and griddle cakes and chicken legs, straightens and looks speculatively at the darkening sky through the window. And Monica, who is somewhere in the hinterland between feigning sleep and actually being asleep, her head leaning back against the prickling fabric of the seat, opens her eyes a crack, contemplates the portion of her family opposite her and closes them again.
The night ferry to Cork. The Riordans have done this many times, in their many incarnations: first Gretta, alone, pregnant, then alone with baby Michael Francis, then Gretta with toddler Michael Francis and baby Monica, then Gretta with two children, then finally with Aoife in a carrycot and the other two running up and down the aisles all night. Gretta went every summer for a month, to visit her mother; Robert joined them for the final week. He always hated leaving the bank, he said, but Gretta thinks it was because he felt uncomfortable in Ireland – belonging yet not belonging, Irish by name and birth but English by upbringing, embarrassed by his confused accent, his soft Irish consonants mixed up with elongated Liverpudlian vowels. They had one last summer at the farmhouse after Aoife was born. Her mother was able to strap Aoife to her back, as she had done with all the other children, to wade into the lough to fetch the eggs from the henhouse, built on a tiny island to keep it safe from foxes. Gretta can see it as if it happened yesterday: her mother with her skirts held clear of the water, Aoife’s blue bonnet bobbing above the woollen blanket, the hens chit-chitting and hustling at her approach, her white feet dipping in and out of the lough’s brackish waters.
Gretta extracts a sausage roll from its plastic container and chews it. Something to line her stomach. She offers the box to Michael Francis, who takes two, to Claire, who shakes her head.
Gretta’s mother passed away four months after that, dropping dead outside the farmhouse door. She didn’t suffer, the cousin told her when he telephoned. A clot on the brain. Gretta has pictured this clot, many times, a dark, ferric gathering of blood like a snarl in a skein of yarn, inching its way around her mother’s skull, until the moment she reached the step of the farmhouse. Was she going in or coming out, Gretta has wondered. Was she looking up at the sky, her fists on her hips? Was she off to fetch the eggs? The cousin couldn’t tell her. Just that she was found on the step by the man who collected the milk.
Then, of course, the farm had gone to Gretta’s eldest brother and he had sold it before heading off to Australia. Gretta will never forgive him for that. Never, ever. After that, they visited less, until the old uncle who had lived alone on the island left his cottage to Gretta. As a young girl, she used to walk out across the strand, once or twice a week, sometimes more if it was cold, with eggs for him, milk, bread and cake. She never forgot, not even when a storm whipped in off the Atlantic. She didn’t like to th
ink of him out there, alone in his cottage. There she is now, he would say, when he saw her, putting down his spade. Which was almost all he ever said to her. She would hand over the basket, he would pat her once on the shoulder. She would sit with him, tidy his kitchen, straighten his books and papers, make him a cup of tea, a fried egg. Tide’s turning, he would say, after a while, and she would know it was time to go.
When she got the letter from the solicitor in Clifden, she could not have been more surprised. Why had the uncle chosen her, over all her brothers and sisters, over her cousins and her cousins’ cousins? It had caused some bad feeling, especially among those who still lived in Galway. But Gretta didn’t care. The uncle had given her his house on Omey Island – he had picked her. They could go to Ireland again, whenever they liked. Gretta rented out the cottage for most of the year, making a tidy sum, too, but she always kept August free. August was for them, for the Riordans, for her and her brood, and no one else. Aoife was three, Monica thirteen, Michael Francis fourteen when they had their first month on the island; Gretta would come out of the cottage door at the end of the day and call for them and they would return to her, down the bluff, back from fishing in the lough or collecting shells on the beach or talking to the tethered donkey up the road. Monica only came a couple more times because after that she started walking out with Joe and didn’t want to leave him. But Aoife came with her for years; just the two of them, in the cottage together. They were always more harmonious there than in London, not fighting so much.
Gretta sits up now and swivels her head around, surreptitiously levering sausage meat out of her molars with a fingertip. Where has Aoife gone? She went outside for a smoke ages ago, just as they left Swansea. She should be back by now.
‘Where’s your sister?’ She nudges Monica, who is pretending to be asleep. She is, Gretta knows, not speaking to her but Gretta has decided to act as though she hasn’t realised. It usually works with Monica.