Like One of the Family (15 page)

‘....pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, Amen.....'

It is over now, Jane thought, and her tears began to flow again. She pressed her handkerchief over her eyes and doubled over in a wild paroxysm of grief, mourning for her husband whom she had deeply loved and would never get over, and her son whom she had also loved and been unable to help in his darkest hour

The old nun came forward and laid a gentle hand on her shoulder. Her eyes were compassionate and she waited with patient detachment until Jane regained control of herself and got unsteadily to her feet.

Terry gravitated towards his mother and she allowed him to take her arm, then stooped over the bed and gazed sorrowfully down at Hugh. She smoothed back the heavy auburn hair, the same rich colour and texture as her own, from his forehead and bent and kissed the beloved, pale face. ‘My dearest, my son,' Terry heard her whisper and his own tears began to flow in nervous sympathy, not only for the lifeless body on the bed who had done such a shocking and incomprehensible thing, but for his father, lying equally lifeless and still, in another part of the emergency unit.

Sheena had stayed at home with Ruthie, both of them in the care of the woman police officer who had arrived at the house just minutes before the ambulance had left for the hospital. Sheena sat in the front room, holding her little sister close and trying to soothe the child in her first wild hysteria and fright. She had been barely conscious of the police woman, who divided her time between speaking on the telephone and conferring with the two Gardai in the kitchen while they were writing out their reports. Sheena was overwhelmed by her own desperate grief and incomprehension, and her mind ran in shocked circles, questioning and laying blame, so that she hardly noticed the little body relax at last in her arms as Ruthie slept. She had come home to find the house in an uproar. Just inside the kitchen door, she stumbled over her mother, down on her knees beside Hugh's fallen body, desperately attempting to staunch the blood flowing from the wound in his chest. Her father lay nearby, his features twisted in agony.

‘Daddy, my Daddy,' Ruthie sobbed, trying to reach the prone figure, wriggling and struggling in Terry's grip. Sheena had wanted to go to him too, but when Jane looked up, her eyes wild and tragic as she worked over the unconscious body of her son, and told her to take the child at once from the room, she had obeyed. And as she did, she heard Terry urgently telephoning for an ambulance.

Now Sheena sat on the couch, holding her sleeping sister in her arms and waiting out the long-seeming span until her mother and her twin returned from the hospital. The police woman had made tea several times and kindly offered to take Ruthie from her to give her a chance to move about but Sheena had dumbly shook her head, desperately needing the warm live feel of the little body close to her own. At last she heard the key turning in the lock, and then they were coming tiredly into the darkened room where she sat and when she raised her frightened eyes to Jane's and Terry's faces she knew, without being told from their stricken expressions, that her father and her brother were dead.

Jane went through the days of mourning and burial with her usual quiet competence, handling the funeral arrangements, legal formalities and social obligations which fell on the widow of an esteemed and highly qualified medical man. The hardship of her situation was not eased by the journalists who were lying in wait for her whenever she left the house. And when the excitement and speculation about the killings began to die down, there was the ordeal of the inquest to be got through, bringing in its wake the resurgence of unwelcome publicity. On this extremely distressing occasion Jan had cause to be grateful yet again for the reticent support of Teresa Murray, whose non-judgemental attitude impressed her more than any amount of syrupy sentiments.

Jane was outwardly composed but inwardly she bitterly railed against the loss of her husband and son, and mourned the terrible waste of their lives. Even with the pills she prescribed for herself she could not sleep, and except for brief snatches of rest taken at odd moments during the day, remained awake for the three days and nights following the tragedy. Throughout the day she was possessed of an unnatural calm, but behind her closed bedroom door at night she lay suspended in a kind of limbo, alternating prayers with weeping, her love and misery rending her as she relived those last cataclysmic hours, over and over again.

The days and nights of grieving took their toll on them all. At the church and cemetery, and afterwards at the hours, relatives and colleagues came to pay their last respects. Ruthie was querulous, only understanding in part what had happened, and Sheena was furious and frantic in her grief. She had relied upon her father, blossomed and basked in his approval. Although not seeing him as some deity, like her younger brother had, Sheena had nevertheless counted on him. He had called her the belle of the ball and she had hoped always to be that for him. She had been reft by the sight of his agony as he lay prostrate on the floor, shuddering in pain. For the rest of her life, she thought, that memory would remain with her. For her brother she could not yet feel anything but hatred for what he had done.

Terry had had, perhaps, the greatest affinity with his father. They had shared a sporting interest and a fighting code. Eddie had been his mentor and guide and he an apt and willing pupil. He had loved and admired his father and dreamed one day of being his match. He felt bereft and cheated before his still irreconcilable loss. He saw his mother's great sorrow and pitied her, but felt heartened by it too, for her desolation was but an echo of his own. For those few days, he did his best to support her, comporting himself in a manner older than his fourteen years as he supported her up the aisle of the church and afterwards at the graveside, while all the time, within himself, he held at bay the storms threatening to annihilate him. Later he was the one who attended the inquest with her - Ruthie was too young to be a witness and Sheena had not been present - and he gave his account of what had happened on that evening in the kitchen. He had spoken with an awareness of his new responsibility as the only man in that sadly depleted household. He could tell by his mother's expression that she was proud of him, and after the verdict had been given – manslaughter followed by suicide when the balance of the mind was unsound – and they were travelling home in Teresa's car her whispered words of affection and her warm embrace compensated for the stress of standing in the witness box and recounting the horrors they had lived through.

Some days after the burial as she was going down to the washing line Jane tripped on something lying in the grass and, bending down, discovered the puppy's limp body and the empty bottle. With a sigh, she went back inside filled with fresh horror and regret, and bitterly blamed herself for not realising there was something gravely amiss with her son. When Terry came in from school he got a shovel and buried the pup.

Jane stayed up, grieving and dry-eyed, until the small hours, and was still unable to comprehend what terrible trauma could have induced a gentle boy like Hugh to take his father's life and his own along with it.

Annette was in mourning too. On the night of the tragedy she had been expecting Eddie to drop over later in the evening. She had left Claire sleeping and was sitting before her dressing table, freshening her make-up, when Christopher, whom she had sent to the shop for the evening paper, came crashing up the stairs full of the McArdle slaying. Annette was totally unprepared. Dead. Both of them. She stared white-faced at her son, not sure that he hadn't somehow got it all terribly confused. But no, Christopher said, there was a Garda car right now parked across the road in McArdle's driveway and there were neighbours standing all about saying that Hugh had blasted his father with a shotgun and then taken his own life. The ambulance had left for the hospital ages ago, Christopher said, and now the Garda cars were coming and going all the time. Claire, weakly eavesdropping from the landing, caught the tail end of her brother's disclosure and was unable to take any of it in. In her great confusion of mind, she assumed it was Hugh's new puppy that had been killed. It would be weeks before the full enormity of the tragedy would strike her.

With the exception of Terry, the McArdle family absorbed the grief and shock. Jane seemed to accept her loss with an almost philosophical forbearance which at first puzzled Terry and then angered him.

In a way Terry was even more jealous now of his younger brother than when he was alive. Terry believed in retribution. Observing his mother gazing fondly and regretfully at Hugh's Confirmation photographs - the most recent pictures to be taken before his death – it seemed to him that Jane felt it not matter what terrible things people did to each other. If they died early enough they would be enshrined for ever in memory. With Jane apparently determined on sanctifying Hugh, and Sheena pretty much taken up with looking after Ruthie, Terry felt left out in the cold.

So Terry avoided his family and perhaps they, occupied with comforting each other, neglected him. He hardly ever mixed anymore with his schoolmates, but found other friends. There was a reason for this.

At the time of the killings wild rumours circulated about the that before his death Eddie McArdle had been having an affair with some woman in the locality. Terry spent half of his time in hot denial, the other brawling with his persecutors. He was, not like Hugh, sensitive on the issues of integrity and honour. He held a very tolerant view on all things sexual and if it hadn't been for the terrible manner of Eddie's death, he might have even been rather secretly proud of his father's sexual prowess.

Terry never told his mother the reason for his brawling. She had suffered enough already. He preferred to let her think it stemmed from his love of fighting, anything but the truth. Terry may not have been idealistic and introspective like Hugh but he had his own code of behaviour. So he dealt with his problems in the only way he knew how. Jane had got to the stage when she met Terry at the front door with the bottle of mercurochrome in her hand. These days his handsome brooding face, so like his father's, was constantly bruised and battered. She worried in case the damage might be permanent.

Terry often wondered about the identity of his father's amour. Stephen Rigney, a boy in his class, swore he knew her identity. Stephen was the elder brother of Mark, the ring-leading bully in Hugh's year.

One afternoon Jane made herself go into Hugh's room and sort through his belongings. It was a task she had been dreading, but she steeled herself and set to work, methodically clearing drawer after drawer. She found poignant reminders of the child she had loved and lost. Hugh was a sentimental hoarder. All his summer and Christmas report cards since he began school were stacked in an Oxo tin. Jane, reading through them, saw that he had been consistently top of his class in everything but maths. She mourned the terrible waste of his young life and forced herself to continue.

He had kept his First Communion and Confirmation cards and his red Confirmation ribbon, worn so proudly on the day, was carefully enshrined in its box. To celebrate they had all gone out to a restaurant for lunch, followed by a trip to town to see the latest Harrison Ford adventure film. Later Hugh had said in all seriousness, ‘Thanks for a wonderful day, Mum. I wouldn't mind dying now it was so great.' Jane clamped down on her lower lip to keep from crying aloud the keening, despairing cry of all women down through the ages, when confronted by their dead. She doubled over, striving to regain control, knowing if she ever once allowed herself let go she could never get going again. Gradually she calmed.

She opened the last drawer and lifted out the contents. These were mostly comic papers and drawings. The top sheets were sketches of Hero and her pups, some lightly pencilled, others shaded and completed down to the last detail. Jane was particularly struck by a sketch of a horse, head upflung, mane flying, perhaps glimpsed from a moving car, the pose beautifully caught in a few bold strokes. She had always been proud of Hugh's artistic gift, but she hadn't realised just how good he was. ‘Oh the waste,' she sighed again, ‘the terrible waste.'

No! she wouldn't let herself go down that road again. She lifted out the last bundle of sheets and idly glanced at them. They were drawings of persons unmistakably engaging in the act of fellatio.

Jane was horrified by the explicitness of the phallic drawings and the accompanying captions. They were not, as she'd first thought, erotic messages, but revengeful declarations.

Closer inspection revealed Claire's name scrawled everywhere with affection, Eddie's with loathing. Jane clutched at a memory. Claire sick and despondent in the holiday bungalow, eyes full of despair. ‘Oh dear God!' Jane moaned. Bile rushed to her throat. She felt trapped in some terrible nightmare.

It was Eddie's child
.
She rose from the bed and rushed into the bathroom to hang over the hand-basin, heaving and retching until all the sickness had drained from her body. Throat aching, she straightened up and pushed tendrils of hair from off her perspiring forehead. She felt shaky and ill. Slowly, she went back to Hugh's room and sat down on the bed, striving to make sense of her thoughts.

Oh God, what had she done? It occurred to Jane that in her rush to mend the wrong done Claire by, as Jane had thought, Claire's own father, she had killed her husband's child, the half-brother or sister of her own children. Tears spilled down her face as she thought of how much she had wanted another child after Ruthie was born. She had experienced an early and difficult menopause, suffering constant headaches and a loss of sexual desire, until gradually she had ceased all lovemaking. Was that what had driven Eddie to seek satisfaction elsewhere?

Jane still could hardly believe it. A mere child and her husband. And to think he hadn't even taken precautions to protect her from pregnancy. She felt shamed and distraught, heartbroken too in a way, for it effectively turned Eddie into man she had never really known. A kind of monster.