Читать книгу Last Summer in Ireland - Anne Doughty, Anne Doughty - Страница 9

1

ARMAGH, 1986

This morning, after the most ghastly ten minutes in Mother’s bedroom, I went to Emain. I just took off, as Sandy would say. And the moment I crossed the main road and set foot in the lane that weaves its way between the scatter of farms and strikes west to run along the foot of the great mound, I felt better, so much better I could hardly imagine the waves of nausea that almost overcame me the minute I’d pushed open her door.

I walked quickly, my eyes eagerly seeking out the familiar features, once the focus of my childhood imaginings: the oak where Robin Hood crouched ready to pounce on the Sheriff of Nottingham, the hazel bush whose fruit bestowed wisdom on those who partook of it, the twisted hawthorn beneath whose branches the little people danced on moonlit nights. Smiling to myself as the memories flooded back to me, I turned aside into McCreesh’s field and tramped through the rough grass by the hedgebank.

‘Oh wonderful,’ I said aloud, as I found the primroses, the patch I’d known for thirty of my thirty-five years. Last autumn the hedges had been brutally cut back by a machine that left the branches bruised and torn. I feared the primroses might have gone. But here they were in full flower, the pale leaves offering the faintest perfume to the morning sun as I bent to touch their soft petals.

The flutter and scuffle of birds followed me all the way down the lane. A blackbird was singing its heart out on the pointed gatepost of Toner’s farm. I glimpsed a wren, minute and secretive, hopping through the ground ivy at the foot of the hedgerow.

Had I not caught sight of a man perched on the low roof of a cottage painting the inside of the chimney stack, I would have danced for joy. I had been let out. I had escaped. From what I had escaped, or from where, I could not say, but the feeling of freedom buoyed me up like a following wind, my feet barely touched the ground as I sailed along the lane heading for the familiar green gate.

‘It’s because these are my hedgerows,’ I confided to a thrush, so absorbed in smashing a snailshell that he didn’t hear me coming. Other places were all very well. I could enjoy Hampstead Heath or St James’s Park, and Matthew’s home village in Norfolk was wonderful with those great skies arcing over the marshes and the heathlands. But this was my own place, this was part of me, and I had been lonely for it for so long.

As I closed the small, green gate carefully behind me, I wondered how I could possibly be lonely for a place I had had to visit regularly in the last eight years, even more often this last year, the year of my mother’s dying. But no answer came to me as I began the climb along the outer ramparts, across the ditch and up to the top of the great mound.

Every time I begin the climb, I feel just as excited as I did the very first time my father took me there. I’m so convinced that this time will be even more exciting than before that I forget how very steep the mound is. In my enthusiasm I move far too fast. By the time I reach the top, I’m always out of breath.

This morning, I pushed it so hard I had to flop down on the grass to recover myself. For ages, I just sat there, not quite believing it. Suddenly, summer had come and here was I, at Emain. The sun was warm on my skin, its brilliant light spilled over all the little fields and the patches of woodland spread out below me, bringing them alive, picking out every soft, new leaf, every fresh-painted farm and cottage.

The top of the mound is completely healed again after the excavations. For years, I longed for them to be over. I could not bear the nakedness of those scraped surfaces, the rubble walls dated and labelled, the post-holes numbered and colour-coded. Now I had my Emain back, soft and green, keeping its own secrets and sharing mine.

When finally I did get my breath back, I stood up and scanned the horizon. Whatever the weather, however clear or misty the day, I’m always aware how for millennia, men and women have stood on this high point. Here they have stood in pride and hope, in fear and expectation, century after century, their eyes turned north to the glitter of Lough Neagh, or west to the hills of Tyrone and Donegal, or south and east towards the lowlands of the Bann and the Lagan, where the old road goes through the mountains to Tara.

On my very first visit, my father had told me how the warrior princess Macha had traced in the dust with the pin of her brooch the outline of the citadel. For Emain was the heart of the country of the Ullaid, the old Kingdom of Ulster, the setting for the great stories about Cuchullain and the Knights of the Red Branch.

Intensely aware of the long past, I stood in sheer delight, watching the high white clouds stream out of the west against a pure blue sky, their fleeting shadows racing across the grass like companies of phantom horsemen summoned into battle.

‘You’ve a great imagination.’

I could hear my mother’s voice, as clearly as if she had been standing beside me. If you wrote the words on a page, they would look harmless enough. They might even be read as a compliment. But the written word can’t conjure up that characteristic intonation, that inflection of the voice, that habitual edge of criticism; nor can it show the tightening of the lips, the ironic smile, the upward movement of the chin and the dismissive shake of the head.

The last thing you ever did where Mother was concerned was take what she said at its face value.

And now she is gone. After all the months of waiting, of knowing the diagnosis she refused to acknowledge, the months of phoning and visiting hospital and then hospice, of trying to behave better than one felt. Yet when the end came, it was still a shock. I didn’t even suspect anything from Sandy’s tone when I picked up the phone last Friday evening.

‘I’ve been trying to get you since five-thirty. I tried Robert Fairclough’s, but you’d gone.’

‘Yes, I went for a drink with Pat at the Festival Hall. She’s over for the Tyroneweave Exhibition.’

The pause at the other end was only momentary.

‘Mother passed away at twenty-five past five.’

Passed away. To write that the men and women who once stood upon this mound had passed away was appropriate enough, but for my plain-speaking sister to use the words was more of a sudden shock than the news itself. But we choose our words to match our feelings and when it came to the point, Sandy’s feelings were clearly not what she had expected. Waiting in the queue for security at Heathrow next morning she still sounded totally distraught.

‘I’m sorry, Dee, I haven’t the remotest idea what to do at a time like this. There’s a Which paperback I meant to buy.’

She looked so uneasy and so unhappy I’d have liked to put my arms round her, but that’s not something you can do with Sandy. I couldn’t do it when she was nine, or nineteen, and I certainly couldn’t do it now she was twenty-nine.

Our mother’s fierce hostility to physical contact of any kind between women had gone deep with Sandy and this was no time to upset her any further. All I could do was reassure her that I knew the rules, the unwritten ones that guide the community at times like this. I knew every line that would have to be spoken and every gesture that would have to be made from years of observation and hours of listening to Mother as she assessed the relative success or otherwise of the many funerals she had attended.

‘I’m prepared to do it their way, if I can manage it,’ I said, as we crossed the wet and windy tarmac. ‘How do you feel about it?’

‘I don’t,’ she shouted back over the whine of the engines. ‘Just let’s get it over with. Tell me what to do and I’ll do it. I won’t be happy till I’m walking back up that corridor.’

Sandy was as good as her word and Matthew, my husband, as reliable as ever. We performed the prescribed rituals in the prescribed fashion. Even Mother might have admitted that her funeral ‘went off very well.’ After it was all over I was left with no more than a handful of fragments and images flickering inside my head like the fleeing shadows on the grass.

I didn’t get much sleep in the two nights before the funeral, so on the day itself I seemed to see everything in the brightest Technicolor, with the sound turned up. The incredible noise of elderly relatives drinking tea or whiskey, according to sex, in the sitting room. The fallen petals from the wreaths tramped into the hall carpet. The bright green wing of Sandy’s eyeshadow. The frayed ends hanging down from the giant umbrella produced by the funeral director.

I felt slightly drunk most of the time, though I left the actual alcohol to Sandy and Matthew. Nevertheless, I felt very much in command of the situation. Like an anthropologist who has studied her tribe long and hard, I knew exactly what I should do at each point as the elaborate ritual unwound. I think I even managed to play my part with conviction. Matthew said I did it very well. Sandy was quite unambiguous in her praise: ‘You were just fantastic, Dee. Given how you really feel, you were incredible. I don’t know how you did it.’

In one way, it was all very easy. You simply didn’t allow your true feelings to get in the way. You let people have what they wanted, say what they wanted to say, believe what they wanted to believe, because that was what was important for them. Truth of any kind was the enemy, not to be allowed within the charmed circle of mourners and mourned.

In particular, Mother’s dying, lengthy, painful and diminishing, had to be rewritten to their liking. She had fought every step of the way, refused all the help and support the hospice had so richly offered, been critical and unpleasant to everyone she had come in contact with and repeated endlessly that her only wish was ‘to be out of this damn place and back to work’. But such facts, however true, are not relevant to those who gather to mourn.

The church was very full and very hushed. In contrast, the minister’s voice was very loud. It seemed to oscillate in harmony with the sudden drumming of rain on the roof and against the windows of the north aisle. I found its resonant boom strangely soothing. But the more it went on, the sleepier I got. I was listening to poetry in a foreign language. I was sure it was very good and no doubt apt to the occasion, but what was I supposed to say at the end of it all?

I sang the hymn vigorously, took deep breaths as I had been taught at choir practice and hoped that would help me to get through the address. We were asked to be seated. I composed myself.

‘Pearl Henderson, our dearly beloved sister in Christ, devout member of the church, unfailing servant of the Lord, whose triumph over death, whose courage in adversity was surely an inspiration to us all, goes before us into glory . . .’

As the words cascaded down upon me, I couldn’t quite grasp what was happening. I just kept looking at the toes of my new black patent shoes. Even though I had polished them the previous evening, they seemed to be very dusty. I wondered if it was the shininess that attracted the dust and whether they would have been less dusty if I hadn’t polished them.

‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, if the Lord doesn’t have her the devil must.’ I was in the school playground, on a March day, bright with sun, the dust blowing in a sudden breeze, the long arc of a skipping rope curving before me, the chant of children’s voices.

But it was not children’s voices I was hearing, it was still the minister. Quieter now, more conversational, he was reading from his notes: ‘Pearl Henderson was the youngest member of a churchgoing family. Hers was a home where Jesus Christ was known and loved and Pearl brought that knowledge to her family life here in Armagh after her marriage. It was the faith and care of Christ that sustained her when, with her two children still very young, she lost her husband and bravely took up the role of breadwinner.’

One of the undertaker’s men had a dreadful cough. I looked across at him as he tried to muffle it in a huge striped handkerchief, but the more he tried the worse it got. By the time he’d recovered himself, the well-articulated voice had reached the 1980s. Mother’s active phase of building up the business gives way to ‘the opportunity for further public service through the Business and Professional Women’s Club of which she was secretary for many years’.

‘Cheerfulness, industry and efficiency. These were the keynotes of Pearl’s personality. Whenever she did something she did it well, and the Church had good cause to be grateful for her gifts, for who but Pearl could have organised so efficiently the Christmas bazaar. She would long be remembered for her magnificent needlework and tapestry, for her Swiss rolls and her Christmas puddings.’

I had forgotten the Christmas puddings. We dreaded them. I could see so vividly before me the huge bowl of sticky ingredients, the row of ready-greased containers, and hear the sharp edge in her voice should either of us dare come into the kitchen while she was preparing them. There were boiled eggs for supper when she cooked the puddings for the bazaar. She’d had enough of cooking and washing up for one day, she always said.

I was quite upset when the voice telling me the story about this wonderful woman stopped and instructed me to lift up my heart and sing another hymn. Halfway through, the undertaker’s men smartly turned the coffin through 180 degrees like a military manoeuvre, summoned Matthew to take his place at its leading edge, and left Sandy and me to our own devices.

‘Come on, Deirdre,’ I said to myself, as the funeral director caught my eye. ‘You’re back on parade. Get Sandy moving down that aisle beside you. No one else can move till you do. Another two hours and it’ll all be over.’

It was raining more gently as we stood on the muddy, tramped grass by the open grave. A sheet of plastic grass covered the mound of excavated earth. Like a model of Emain itself, it dominated the wet ditch into which minute rivulets dripped and splashed.

The coffin bore a shiny, brass plaque: ‘Pearl Henderson, Born 21 January 1926, Died 16 May 1986’. The saturated earth fell upon it and obliterated her lifespan.

The funeral director moved us on. Behind us, the undertaker’s men in black coats and well-polished shoes, were filling in the grave as if they were hard at work in their own back gardens. As we reached the paved path at the edge of the churchyard, I saw the departing mourners pause, turn and adjust their face muscles ready to address a member of the immediate family with the customary, ‘I’m sorry for your trouble.’

Rather like going to church each Sunday, even if you never sang, never listened and left it to the minister to do all the praying, to speak these words now would ensure your presence had been noted, a tick entered in the register that mattered most to you – God’s or your neighbour’s.

After the words had been spoken, it was equally important to draw a response from the family member in question, preferably a comment the deceased had made in happier times. This comment would be repeated when the funeral was discussed in those circles where Mother was known, exchanged for similar comments, leaving the speakers confident that they had done justice to the event.

‘Miss Henderson, I’m sorry for your trouble.’

Those who knew me called me Deirdre, but those who didn’t followed the old custom of not allowing marriage to intervene between a daughter and the death of a parent. They lined up and said their piece as they shook my hand.

‘Parker. Fred and Mary. We knew your Mother very well. So sad. Such a loss to the Church. And what a wonderful new shop she made after the bombing. Such energy. I wish there, were more like her.’

I nodded and smiled, thinking of Malvolio. ‘Mother often spoke of you. You used to help on the cake stall, didn’t you?’

There were dozens of them, all ready to present the speech they’d prepared. I’ve always had a good memory for detail and as my mother was voluble about her activities and concerns, I found I could place nearly all of them. Unfortunately, so much of my life passed before me as I did so that I felt like the proverbial drowning man.

At some point, the minister excused himself for another engagement and I became aware of the fact that Sandy and Matthew were nowhere to be seen.

The last hands were shaken, and then, only then, did I realise that the funeral director had been standing behind me all this time, his huge umbrella angled into the drifting mizzle so that it didn’t get in the way, but still protected me from the worst of the rain.

‘It’s a hard day for you’n yer sister. She’s very upset, the young lady is. Yer good man thought he’d best take her back to the house. I daresay they’ll have a nice, hot cup of tea waitin’ for you. You’ll feel more yerself after that.’

That was the only time I lost hold of the proceedings. I mumbled my thanks and as he put me into the back seat of the funeral car I burst into tears and cried the whole way back to Anacarrig. Not for Mother. For a little man with a red nose and a country accent who had held an umbrella over me when he needn’t have bothered.