After Rain (23 page)

    ‘I have to tell you what it was with Milton before we get home.’

    ‘Was it the Provos? Was Milton involved in some way?’

    ‘Don’t call them the Provos, Hazel. Don’t give them any kind of title. They’re not worthy of a title.’

    ‘You have to call them something.’

    ‘It wasn’t them. There was no reason why it should have been.’

    Hazel, who had only been told that her brother had died violently - shot by intruders when he was alone in the house- heard how Milton had insisted he’d received a supernatural visitation from a woman. She heard how he had believed the woman was the ghost of a Catholic saint, how he had gone to the priest for information, how he had begun street-corner preaching.

    ‘He said things people didn’t like?’ she suggested, ignoring the more incredible aspect of this information.

    ‘We had to keep him in. I kept him by me when we worked, Garfield wouldn’t address him.’

    ‘You kept him in?’

    ‘Poor Milton was away in the head, Hazel. He’d be all right for a while, maybe for weeks, longer even. Then suddenly he’d start about the woman in the orchard. He wanted to travel the six counties preaching about her. He told me that. He wanted to stand up in every town he came to and tell his tale. He brought poor Dudgeon McDavie into it.’

    ‘What d’you mean, you kept him in ?’

    ‘We sometimes had to lock his bedroom door. Milton didn’t know what he was doing, girl. We had to get rid of his bicycle, but even so he’d have walked. A couple of times on a Saturday he set off to walk, and myself and Herbert had to get him back.’

    ‘My God!’

    ‘You can’t put stuff like that in a letter. You can’t blame anyone for not writing that down for you. Your mother didn’t want to. “What’ve you said to Hazel?” I asked her one time and she said, “Nothing,” so we left it.’

    ‘Milton went mad and no one told me?’

    ‘Poor Milton did, Hazel.’

    Hazel endeavoured to order the confusion of her thoughts. Pictures formed: of the key turned in the bedroom door; of the household as it had apparently become, her parents’ two remaining children a double burden — Stewart’s mongol blankness, Milton’s gibberish. ‘Milton’s been shot,’ she had said to her husband after the telephone call, shocked that Milton had apparently become involved, as Garfield was, drawn into it no doubt by Garfield. Ever since, that assumption had remained.

    They left the motorway, bypassed Craigavon, then again made their way on smaller roads. This is home, Hazel found herself reflecting in that familiar landscape, the reminder seeming alien among thoughts that were less tranquil. Yet in spite of the reason for her visit, in spite of the upsetting muddle of facts she’d been presented with on this journey, she wanted to indulge the moment, to close her eyes and let herself believe that it was a pleasure of some kind to be back where she belonged. Soon they would come to Drumfin, then Anderson’s Crossroads. They would pass the Cuchulainn Inn, and turn before reaching the village. Everything would be familiar then, every house and cottage, trees and gateways, her father’s orchards.

    ‘Take it easy with your mother,’ he said. ‘She cries a lot.’

    ‘Who was it shot Milton?’

    ‘There’s no one has claimed who it was. The main concern’s your mother.’

    Hazel didn’t say anything, but when her father began to speak again she interrupted him.

    ‘What about the police?’

    ‘Finmoth’s keeping an open mind.’

    The car passed the Kissanes’ house, pink and respectable, delphiniums in its small front garden. Next came the ruined cowshed in the middle of Malone’s field, three of its stone walls standing, the fourth tumbled down, its disintegrating roof mellow with rust. Then came the orchards, and the tarred gate through which you could see the stream, steeply below.

    Her father turned the car into the yard of the farmhouse. One of the dogs barked, scampering back and forth, wagging his tail as he always did when the car returned.

    ‘Well, there we are.’ With an effort Mr. Leeson endeavoured to extend a welcome. ‘You’d recognize the old place still!’

    In the kitchen her mother embraced her. Her mother had a shrunken look; a hollowness about her eyes, and shallow cheeks that exposed the shape of bones beneath the flesh. A hand grasped at one of Hazel’s and clutched it tightly, as if in a plea for protection. Mr. Leeson carried Hazel’s suitcase upstairs.

    ‘Sit down.’ With her free hand Hazel pulled a chair out from the table and gently eased her mother toward it. Her brother grinned across the kitchen at her.

    ‘Oh, Stewart!’

    She kissed him, hugging his awkward body. Pimples disfigured his big forehead, his spiky short hair tore uncomfortably at her cheek.

    ‘We should have seen,’ Mrs. Leeson whispered. ‘We should have known.’

    ‘You couldn’t. Of course you couldn’t.’

    ‘He had a dream or something. That’s all he was on about.’

    Hazel remembered the dreams she’d had herself at Milton’s age, half-dreams because sometimes she was awake - close your eyes and you could make Mick Jagger smile at you, or hear the music of U2 or The Damage. ‘Paul Hogan had his arms round me,’ Addy giggled once. Then you began going out with someone and everything was different.

    ‘Yet how would he know about a saint?’ her mother whispered. ‘Where’d he get the name from?’

    Hazel didn’t know. It would have come into his head, she said to herself, but didn’t repeat the observation aloud. In spite of what she said, her mother didn’t want to think about it. Maybe it was easier for her mother, too, to believe her son had been away in the head, or maybe it made it worse. You wouldn’t know that, you couldn’t tell from her voice or from her face.

    ‘Don’t let it weigh on you,’ she begged. ‘Don’t make it worse for yourself.’

    Later Addy and Herbert Cutcheon were in the kitchen. Addy made tea and tumbled biscuits on to a plate. Herbert Cutcheon was solemn, Addy subdued. Like her father, Hazel sensed, both of them were worried about her mother. Being worried about her mother was the practical aspect of the grief that was shared, an avenue of escape from it, a distraction that was permitted. Oblivious to all emotion, Stewart reached out for a biscuit with pink marshmallow in it, his squat fingers and bitten nails ugly for an instant against the soft prettiness.

    ‘He’ll get the best funeral the Church can give him,’ Herbert Cutcheon promised.

    Garfield stood a little away from them, with a black tie in place and his shoes black also, not the trainers he normally wore. Looking at him across the open grave, Hazel suddenly knew. In ignorance she had greeted him an hour ago in the farmhouse; they had stood together in the church; she had watched while he stepped forward to bear the coffin. Now, in the bleak churchyard, those images were illuminated differently. The shame had been exorcized, silence silently agreed upon.

    
‘I will keep my mouth as it were with a bridle,’
Herbert Cutcheon proclaimed, his voice heavy with the churchiness that was discarded as soon as his professional duties ceased, never apparent on a Sunday afternoon in the back room of the farmhouse. ‘Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God.’

    Earth was thrown on to the coffin.
’Our Father, who art in heaven,’
Herbert Cutcheon suitably declared, and Hazel watched Garfield’s lips, in unison with Addy’s and their parents’. Stewart was there too, now and again making a noise. Mrs. Leeson held a handkerchief to her face, clinging on to her husband in sudden bright sunshine.
‘And forgive us our trespasses.’
Garfield mouthed the words too.

    With bitter calmness, Hazel allowed the facts to settle into place. Milton had been told not to. He had been told, even by Garfield himself, that you had fancies when you were fifteen. He had been told that talk about a Catholic saint was like the Catholics claiming one of their idolatrous statues had been seen to move. But in spite of all that was said to him Milton had disobeyed. ‘Your bodies a living sacrifice,’ Hazel’s Great-Uncle Willie used to thunder, steadfast in his certainty. Prominent among the mourners, the old man’s granite features displayed no emotion now.

    ‘Amen,’ Herbert Cutcheon prompted, and the mourners murmured and Mrs. Leeson sobbed. Hazel moved closer to her, as Addy did, receiving her from their father’s care. All of them knew, Hazel’s thoughts ran on: her father knew, and her mother, and Addy, and Herbert Cutcheon. It was known in every house in the neighbourhood; it was known in certain Belfast bars and clubs, where Garfield’s hard-man reputation had been threatened, and then enhanced.

    ‘It’s all right, Mother,’ Addy whispered as the three women turned from the grave, but Hazel did not attempt to soothe her mother’s distress because she knew she could not. Her mother would go to her own grave with the scalding agony of what had happened still alive within her; her father would be reminded of the day of the occurrence on all the July marches remaining to him. The family would not ever talk about the day, but through their pain they would tell themselves that Milton’s death was the way things were, the way things had to be: that was their single consolation. Lost ground had been regained.

A Day

    In the night Mrs. Lethwes wakes from time to time, turns and murmurs in her blue-quilted twin bed, is aware of fleeting thoughts and fragments of memory that dissipate swiftly. Within her stomach, food recently consumed is uneasily digested. Briefly, she suffers a moment of cramp.

    Mrs. Lethwes dreams: a child again, she remains in the car while her brother, Charlie, visits the Indian family who run the supermarket. Kittens creep from beneath inverted flowerpots in the Bunches’ back yard, and she is there, in the yard too, looking for Charlie because he is visiting the Bunches now. ‘You mustn’t go bothering the Bunches,’ their mother upbraids him. ‘People are busy.’ There are rivers to cross, and the streets aren’t there any more; there is a seashore, and tents.

    In her garden, while Mrs. Lethwes still sleeps, the scent of night-stock fades with the cool of night. Dew forms on roses and geraniums, on the petals of the cosmos and the yellow spikes of broom. Slugs creep towards lettuce plants, avoiding a line of virulent bait; a silent cat, far outside its own domain, waits for the emergence of the rockery mice.

    It is July. Dawn comes early, casting a pale twilight on the brick of the house, on the Virginia creeper that covers half a wall, setting off white-painted window-frames and decorative wrought-iron. This house and garden, in a tranquil wooded neighbourhood, constitute one part of the achievement of Mrs. Lethwes’s husband, are a symbol of professional advancement conducted over twenty years, which happens also to be the length of this marriage.

    Abruptly, Mrs. Lethwes is fully awake and knows her night’s sleep is over. Hunched beneath the bedclothes in the other bed, her husband does not stir when she rises and crosses the room they share to the window. Drawing aside the edge of a curtain, she glances down into the early-morning garden and almost at once drops the curtain back into place. In bed again, she lies on her side, facing her husband because, being fond of him, she likes to watch him sleeping. She feels blurred and headachy, as she always does at this time, the worst moment of her day, Mrs. Lethwes considers.

    Is Elspeth awake too? She wonders that. Does Elspeth, in her city precinct, share the same pale shade of dawn? Is there, as well, the orange glow of a street lamp and now, beginning in the distance somewhere, the soft swish of a milk dray, a car door banging, a church bell chiming five? Mrs. Lethwes doesn’t know where Elspeth lives precisely, or in any way what she looks like, but imagines short black hair and elfin features, a small, thin body, fragile fingers. An hour and three-quarters later - still conducting this morning ritual - she hears bath-water running; and later still there is music. Vivaldi, Mrs. Lethwes thinks.

    Her husband wakes. His eyes remember, becoming troubled, and then the trouble lifts from them when he notices, without surprise, that she’s not asleep. In another of her dreams during the night that has passed he carried her, and his voice spoke softly, soothing her. Or was it quite a dream, or only something like one? She tries to smile; she says she’s sorry, knowing now.

    At ten, when the cleaning woman comes, Mrs. Lethwes goes out to shop. She parks her small, white Peugeot in the Waitrose car park, and in a leisurely manner gathers vegetables and fruit, and tins and jars, pork chops for this evening, vermouth and Gordon’s gin, Edam, and Normandy butter because she has noticed the butter is getting low, Comfort and the cereal her husband favours, the one called Common Sense. Afterwards, with everything in the boot, she makes her way to the Trompe-L’Oeil for coffee. Her make-up is in place, her hair drawn up, the way she has taken to wearing it lately. She smiles at people she knows by sight, the waitress and other women who are having coffee, at the cashier when she pays her bill. There is some conversation, about the weather.

    In her garden, later, the sound of the Hoover reaches her from the open windows of the house as the cleaning woman, Marietta, moves from room to room. The day is warm, Mrs. Lethwes’s legs are bare, her blue dress light on her body, her Italian sandals comfortable yet elegant. Marietta claims to be Italian also, having had an Italian mother, but her voice and manner are Cockney and Mrs. Lethwes doubts that she has ever been in Italy, even though she regularly gives the impression that she knows Venice well.

    Mrs. Lethwes likes to be occupied when Marietta comes. When it’s fine she finds something to do in the garden, and when the weather doesn’t permit that she lingers for longer in the Trompe-L’ Oeil and there’s the pretence of letter-writing or tidying drawers. She likes to keep a closed door between herself and Marietta, to avoid as best she can the latest about Marietta’s daughter Ange, and Liam, whom Ange has been contemplating marriage with for almost five years, and the latest about the people in the house next door, who keep Alsatians.