Aoife twists a strand of her damp, salty hair. ‘I don’t know.’
By the time Gretta reaches the door of the convent, she is hot, out of breath and furious. She hadn’t known the driveway would be that long, hadn’t reckoned for the terrible stony terrain of it, how she’d have to watch each step if she didn’t want to turn her ankle, her with her bad knee.
She is perspiring, panting and all of a sudden livid with her husband as she yanks the bell. How dare he? How dare he come here and tell no one and make her trek all the way out here, with all the kids and the grandchildren in tow? What, in God’s name, did he—
The door opens and the figure of a nun appears and, at the sight of her, Gretta’s outrage deflates, as if pricked by a pin.
‘Hello, Sister.’ Gretta makes a humble beginning; she has to stop herself genuflecting. ‘I’m so sorry to bother you but I wonder if you can help me. I’m looking for my—’ Gretta comes to a sinkhole. She finds she cannot say the word ‘husband’, not to this lady, not to her face, lined yet serene, framed in white, beautiful grey eyes she has, her fair eyebrows raised in enquiry. ‘Well, my . . . He’s here, you see, Robert . . . Ronan . . . Mr Riordan, visiting . . . someone. Frankie, um, Francis, Francis . . .’ Gretta cannot recall the surname – whatever was it now? – and then she remembers. ‘Francis Riordan.’
The nun inclines her head. ‘Come in,’ she says. ‘I’ll take you down.’
She steps backwards, and Gretta follows her into a large vestibule, thickly carpeted. Her shoes sink into its moss-like texture. She follows the nun across the hallway, down some stairs, along a corridor. She is, she realises, terrified, more terrified than she’s ever been in her life. The hunt for Robert/Ronan has been all very well, thus far: the children arriving, the visitors, the detective trail, then the phone call to say where he was. But suddenly it strikes Gretta, as she walks, like a penitent, behind the nun, that Robert may not want to be found. He may not want to be brought back. He may have left with the thought that he would not be returning. He may, in leaving that day, have made the choice to discard the family and enter back into his past. Why had this not occurred to her before? What, in God’s name, is she doing here?
They pass a huge wooden crucifix, a painting of the Holy Father, a tapestry of a religious scene, rendered in wools of orange and purple – Gretta hasn’t a chance to identify it, something with a lumpish hill in the background and a tangerine-haired Jesus holding up His arms to Heaven. They pass into a narrower, darker corridor with a flagged floor. Click, clack, go Gretta’s shoes on the stone, click-a-clack. She feels pain thumping its way into her head. She wants to reach into her bag to find her pills but she daren’t in front of the nun.
‘Have you come far?’ the nun says, over her shoulder.
‘Not too far, Sister.’ Gretta is having to almost gallop to keep up with her – long legs she must have under that habit. ‘Well, London, actually. But, you see, I’m from here. I grew up near Claddaghduff, so it doesn’t feel far. If you see what I mean.’
The nun says nothing to this.
‘How long,’ Gretta ventures, and her heart is leaping, leaping because this is the only bit of the story she hasn’t had, ‘has Francis been with you?’
The nun turns her head as they descend a smaller, narrower staircase. ‘Mr Riordan has been with us a long time. Fifteen years or so, I believe.’
Gretta puts on a last spurt of speed so that she comes level with the nun and they are walking down the steps side by side.
‘His health has not been good, as perhaps you know. But he has kept the garden for us and worked on building maintenance, to the best of his abilities. We’ve always found him to be a peaceable addition to our little community. But, now, of course,’ the nun adds, ‘his time with us is coming to an end.’ She stops outside a door. ‘Here you are,’ she says, indicating with a hand. ‘You may go in.’
‘Is . . .’ Gretta swabs at her neck with her hankie, adjusts her bag on her arm ‘. . . is he in there?’
The nun inclines her head. ‘You can go in,’ she says again.
‘Could I trouble you, Sister, for a glass of water? I’m so sorry. It’s just I’ve had a long and thirsty walk and I’ve a pill I should take. Will I come with you to get it? Maybe that’s easier. I wouldn’t want to make you walk all the way back and—’
‘Wait here,’ the nun says, ‘I’ll be back shortly.’
Gretta is left in the corridor, the door before her. She looks one way: a staircase. She looks the other: an uncomfortable-looking chair with clawed feet. Why hadn’t she considered, in all the bustle of getting ready for this trip, then the ferry and the drive, that Robert may not want her here? He may not want to come back to London and Gillerton Road. Faced with this door, she sees suddenly that she has made a mistake, a terrible error. In that room is Robert and he is with the brother he told her was dead, the brother he has no idea she’s known about for years, the brother he hid from her and all of them, the brother who ran away with his bride, the brother who spent most of his life in prison for a murder he may or may not have committed. Robert had his reasons for keeping all this from her, and now what has she done but ride roughshod over all those reasons and turn up here, unannounced. What is she doing? She must have been mad. Never chase a man, her mother had told her. No good will come of it. Why, why hadn’t she listened to her mother? Why did she ever go to London in the first place? She could have been married to a nice Galway farmer by now instead of this, a humiliated woman without even a—
Somewhere nearby she hears the susurration of footfalls, many footfalls, people walking in unison, the clink of something like keys or cutlery, and the fear of being found standing here like a spare part propels her forward, through the door and into the room.
It is very bright after the dim corridor. For a moment, she has to shade her eyes with her hand until her vision adjusts, and when it does, she can make out a small room with a high ceiling, trees beyond the window, a bed, a chair.
The chair is empty. The bed is not.
Striped blankets, metal frame, the sheets disarrayed, rumpled, untucked at the sides. The person in the bed is long, Gretta allows herself to think, and thin. She hadn’t expected that, when Robert is such a solid man, on the small side. These feet reach right down to the bottom of the bed, even with the knees turned slightly sideways. Rows of bottles on the bedside table, a silver kidney dish, an oxygen tank with its clear tube snaking towards the person’s face.
Gretta sets to. She pulls the blankets straight, she smooths the sheet, raising its edge so that the corners can be tucked in, neat and folded like an envelope; she lifts each arm, with care, so that the bedclothes lie straight and uncreased, so that the person will be comfortable, because a creased bedsheet can feel like a knife-edge to the skin of a sick person, Gretta knows that.
She could have been a nurse. She’d have made a good nurse. She’d have done it, if only she’d had the chance.
The arms are as light and dry as branches. Gretta eases the person forwards and plumps the pillows. The smell that comes off him Gretta knows from somewhere – sweetish, cloying, fusty – but she can’t for the moment recall where. She lays the man back down, straighter than he was.
‘There now,’ Gretta says.
She sits in the chair. Where is Robert? He must have been here, in this very chair, but where has he gone? She shifts herself against the unyielding seat, picturing her husband sitting here, as she is, seeing the things that she sees: that hole in the blanket, the upturned carcasses of wasps along the windowsill, the clock on the wall that hangs at a slight tilt. Is it her imagination or does the chair still feel warm? Odd to think that he might have been here just a moment ago. She straightens the bottles on the table; she flicks a stray feather to the floor; she refills the water glass, she holds it near the man’s face.
‘Will you take a drink?’ Gretta asks.
She angles the straw towards the man’s lips. Frankie’s lips. Cracked and dry, they are,
poor thing. She allows her gaze to edge over his face, a little at a time; she makes herself take in, feature by feature, this man who has existed at the edges of their lives for so long. A large scar, white and livid, runs like a seam through the skin of his brow, disappearing into his hair. It is a shock to her how much like Robert he looks: the same jut of the brow, the same thick, white hair, the same determined clench to the jaw. Stupid of her, really, not to have expected that. It is as if her husband is lying there in the bed or that Gretta is being offered a vision of the future. She shudders.
‘You must be thirsty,’ Gretta says. ‘Just a drop now.’
The lips open, the straw is admitted. Gretta watches the liquid travel the length of the straw, drawn upwards; Frankie swallows, once, twice, and it seems to take an enormous effort, like someone moving a heavy piece of furniture. Gretta puts down the glass.
Frankie. She lets the name roll, like a marble, around her head. Frankie. This is Francis. Francis Riordan. Caught by the British Army near the body of a police officer, the priest had said that time. How long would you get for that in prison and what would they do to you there? She glances at the scar on his forehead, then away.
Where, in God’s name, is Robert? Gretta thinks, with a surge of irritation. He should be here: Frankie does not have long, anyone can see that, and how terrible, how deeply sad, that a person should come to the end of his life and have no one – no one but a brother he hasn’t seen for thirty years. How is it possible, when there are so many people in the world, for a life to be so shockingly solitary?
She reaches out and eases the brittle white hair away from the brow. She tucks the sheet more comfortably under his chin. She takes Frankie’s fingers in her own, gathering them up like twigs.
And because she is imagining another woman taking these fingers and holding them and running out after her own wedding, and how could a man do that to his brother, it just beggars belief, and she would like to cancel these thoughts from her mind because the man is dying after all and this is a time for forgiveness, for putting all that to rest, she decides to speak but doesn’t know what else to say, what is there to say, really, in this situation, she says, ‘Hail Mary, full of grace.’ The familiar words fall from her mouth, into the still of the room, and just to make the shape of them is a comfort, to hear their rhythm: ‘The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women.’
She remembers her mother teaching her to refer to women as ‘ladies’; it was polite, she told her. Mind the lady now, she would say, if they were on a crowded pavement. Or: give the money to the lady, if they were paying in a shop. Gretta had asked her, if saying ‘ladies’ was polite, why wasn’t it, blessed art thou amongst ladies?
She had sent her mother that photo of her and Robert, and her mother had framed it and put it on her windowsill, the one that had a view over the lough where the hens were. A lovely picture it was: they had gone to a photographer’s studio on the Essex Road. Gretta had borrowed the suit from a girl she worked with – a beautiful lilac tweed it was, a colour that has always flattered her. She’d pinned a lily to the collar, bought new gloves. She was slim then, still with a tiny waist, and her hand in its new kid glove had looked like another lily, resting on Robert’s arm. Him in his suit, his hair parted so nicely. Who was to say it wasn’t a wedding photo? She’d never said it was; she’d written to her mother to say that she and Robert were wed and here was a photo.
‘Mother of God,’ she continues to murmur, with Frankie’s hand in hers, ‘pray for us sinners.’
Did she really say they were wed? Or did she just send the photograph? She can’t have said that to her mother; she can’t have lied to her mother. She would never have done that.
It was like one of those holes in the road in London. They dig them up and it all looks so shocking, those gashes in the tarmac, the rubble and the scar, the bare earth and mud so near to the surface of the city. Then they fill them in, cover them up and it looks new and incongruous, the fill-in tarmac black and glistening and domed against the old, gritty road. But then, after a while, it becomes bedded down, dusty, indistinguishable, so that you can no longer tell the old tarmac from the new, you’d never know that anything had been amiss there at all.
He’d asked her to marry him; he’d proposed on the top deck of a bus going down Rosebery Avenue. He’d got down on one knee and she was so surprised she’d thought for a moment that he was looking for something he’d lost. A cufflink or a penny, perhaps. There was no ring; they had no money but no one had any money then, with the war only just over. So they were engaged. Or were they? They were. But then he’d said they couldn’t marry, not exactly, not yet: there was something he needed to sort out first. Was that it? Gretta finds it hard to recall. He’d said they were as good as married: was that it? Did he ask her to marry him or did he just say that they couldn’t marry yet but they would later, as soon as was possible, and she’d thought it was something to do with what had happened to him in the war, all those terrible things he’d seen, which was why she didn’t press him too much, because he hated to talk about that. He’d put down a payment on a house, he said, a lovely house with a garden out the back. They moved in. He gave her a wedding ring: you’ll need this, he said. Gretta remembers that, him saying, you’ll need this, and she was pleased. Or was she? Was she pleased with the wedding ring or did she cry in the kitchen of their lovely new house, holding it between thumb and finger? Was that her or someone else? The thing was, she was so frightened because she was already pregnant and she didn’t know what else to do: she couldn’t go home in that state, she couldn’t tell her mother, the shame of it would have killed her, so she had to stay with this man, she had to slip the ring on – it caught on her knuckle and, for a moment, she’d thought it wasn’t going to fit, but then it did and there it was. She said she wanted to go for a photograph and he said yes, which she took as a good sign. And the photograph when it came back was beautiful. She ordered three copies. She sent one to her mother, she kept one for herself and she gave one to Robert, saying he could send it to his family, whom she knew lived in Sligo. With the photograph on the mantelpiece and the ring on her finger, everything felt better. She introduced herself as Mrs Riordan, said, yes, I’m expecting, in February, yes, it’s my first, no, I don’t mind which, just as long as it’s got all its fingers and toes. She even got up the nerve to go to Mass, where she said to the priest that they’d married in Liverpool. Did she really say that? Can she have said that to a priest? She told herself that it didn’t matter, they were as good as married, it didn’t matter that she’d found the third copy of the photograph stuffed into a drawer, instead of sent to Sligo, she was here and he was here and that was what was important. When Michael Francis was born, he was the most beautiful baby Gretta had ever seen, fine and healthy, and so good, never cried at all, would sit for hours on a blanket on the kitchen floor. She pushed him about Highbury, showing him off in the squeaking pram in the spring sunshine, and somehow it was never mentioned and soon she was expecting again, and Robert got a job at a bigger bank and he was busy and happier, and life seemed good, too good to be true, almost.
‘Hail Mary, full of grace,’ Gretta says, coming back to the beginning of the looping, endless cycle of words, still clasping the hand of her husband’s brother, ‘the Lord is with thee.’
Claire stands over him. Again, he is presented with a view of her feet, fringed now with tidemarks of sand.
‘Of course I haven’t slept with someone else,’ she is saying, somewhere above him. ‘What a ridiculous idea. Who on earth would I sleep with?’
‘I don’t know. Someone on your course or—’
‘Someone on my course?’ Claire’s feet turn, walk away, then stop. ‘You thought I’d slept with someone on my course? But . . . they’re my friends, Michael. They’re the most interesting friends I’ve had since I went to—’ She stops, takes a few more stiff steps away from him, then turns. ‘I don’t know what to say to you.’ Her voice is no longer angry, ju
st puzzled.
‘I’m sorry,’ he mutters. ‘I’m sorry. I just barely know where you are, half the time. You’re always out and you never tell me anything. I just thought you might want to . . . I don’t know . . .’
‘Want to what?’ Claire says, standing over him again.
He says nothing; his heart is banging on the door of his ribcage, desperate for exit.
‘Want to what, Mike?’
He can’t look up: he doesn’t want to see the ghost of Gina Mayhew, which he is sure will be there on the beach with them. He doesn’t want to see it – not here, not now.
‘Retaliate,’ he manages to say.
She is there, he is sure of it, between them on the beach, in her divided skirts and those cumbersome buckled sandals.
Claire is strangely still above him. It is, he realises, the first time they have directly referred to Gina since that time he got back from France when, after they had put the kids to bed, she had turned to him in the kitchen and said, where were you when I phoned? The most awful of awful times, which went on from that question of hers, all evening and into the night and into the next day. When dawn came, they were still sitting at the kitchen table, him with his head in his hands, much as he is now, unable to look at her face.
‘You know what I was going to say?’ Claire says and, again, her voice isn’t angry, but quiet, measured. ‘I was going to say that maybe you should go.’
He looks up. ‘Go where?’
She looks back at him. She holds his gaze. The wind channels through and around their two figures. The cries of their children spin out across the beach. And he realises that it isn’t Gina Mayhew on the beach with them, it is the end, their end, standing there with them, like a third person.
‘You mean . . .’ He cannot finish his sentence. He cannot believe this has happened, that this has come about. The end has been reached; he has thought about it and dreaded it for so long and now he is meeting it here, on Mannin Bay. It seems peculiarly familiar, as if he has met it before, as if all the things they are saying have been said before. ‘You mean leave?’