Instructions for a Heatwave (29 page)

“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.

“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.”

Sometime 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 backyard 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 furor 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 onto 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 rumors 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 were 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 pushing 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 anymore. 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 judgments 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.

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.