Masters of the House (3 page)

“What about the dole money?” Matthew asked her.

“Well, it will become National Assistance now because your father couldn't take a job even if he could find one.”

“No, that's right. He's at home all the time now and very upset. Annie and I do all the shopping. Could we collect the Assistance money for him?”

“Well, it's unusual. . . . But you could get authorisation from your father.”

“What would he write? Could you write it for him?”

“Oh, I think so. Then you could just get him to sign it.”

Matthew thought Dermot could probably still sign his name. He felt emboldened by success.

“We know the postmaster at Calverley,” he said. “There shouldn't be any problem.”

“There are other benefits that you could well qualify for as a family,” said Mrs O'Connor as she typed the note. “I'll look out the forms.”

“Could you fill out the forms as far as you can?” Matthew asked. “Or I'll come in and do them with you? My dad's a builder. He's not very good at that sort of thing.”

She agreed without a qualm, and the two began a relationship, liking and understanding each other. Or thinking they understood.

By then there had been no improvement in Dermot Heenan's mental state. When they took him his food he mumbled about not wanting to live, about being worthless and damned, about their being better off without him. When they collected his tray they found he had hardly done more than toy or nibble, often not even that. Sometimes Annie sat on the bed and forced him to eat, forking it into his mouth. “You've got to eat, for us, Dad,” she would say—to get the predictable reply. Sometimes they heard him go to the lavatory. They never heard him washing.

Washing became urgent as the day of the funeral approached. The night before, when the little ones had had a shower, which was what they preferred, Matthew and Annie ran a bath. Annie fetched her father, then left it to Matthew to get Dermot's clothes off and get him into it.

“What's all this for?” mumbled his father.

“For the funeral, Dad. The funeral's tomorrow.”

“I can't go, Matthew!” he said, turning as if to run away. “I can't see her buried! I killed her!”

“Of course you didn't kill her, Dad.”

“As good as.”

“You'll have to go, Dad. What would people think if you weren't at the funeral of your own wife?”

“Don't give a curse what they think.”

But he let himself be undressed and put in the bath. While he was washed he kept muttering about his sinfulness, about the
damned not being wanted in church. When he was washed and dried, Matthew got him into pyjamas for the first time since the deaths. When they had got him into bed, and without talking about it, Matthew and Annie went and prayed together by Annie's bed, as they had not done since they were small children.

Next morning, by unspoken agreement, Matthew left to Annie the tasks of making the breakfast and getting the small ones ready. He had the major task. He put his father's best suit—his only suit—over the bannister, then fetched him a cup of tea from the kitchen. It was pointless to waste time trying to force toast down him. He was sitting on the bed in the familiar position, bent forward, gazing ahead. When he saw Matthew with a cup in one hand, his suit over the other arm, he began whimpering.

“No, I can't go, Matthew. I can't see her buried.”

“You've got to go, Dad. I've got your white shirt here too. Stand up and we'll get you into it.”

“I tell you I can't go to church, Matthew. I can't.”

Matthew tried a new tack. He stood over him like a schoolteacher.

“Dad! Get up and get dressed!”

His mother had sometimes treated her husband like another of her children. In their hearts the children had always known he was the weaker of the two—easily led, inclined to take the easy way out. He was used to others making decisions for him. When he heard the steel in Matthew's voice he stood up. Matthew breathed a short sigh of relief.

“Right. Get out of your pyjamas. . . . Here's your shirt.”

When he had got his father dressed, he told him to sit in the upright chair under the window, not on any account to get back into bed. Before he closed the door he turned and saw his father begin to slump forward again. Downstairs Annie was
washing up, having sent Gregory upstairs to dress Jamie and himself—as an experiment, to see if he could. She looked up at Matthew as he came into the kitchen, and he nodded.

“He's dressed. We'll get him down nearer the time.”

“Thanks be to God,” Annie said. It was one of her mother's phrases.

“He's mentally ill. He ought to see a doctor.”

They looked at each other. It was a thought they had tried to avoid. The phrase “into care” seemed to hover in the air between them. They put the thought from them. Annie let the water out of the sink and went upstairs to change and see that Jamie looked decent. They hadn't wanted to take him to the funeral, but they couldn't think what else to do with him. The immediate neighbours were out at work all day, and they'd never been close to Mrs Heenan.

At quarter past ten they both went up to their father's room and stood in the doorway.

“Dad. It's time.”

He took some seconds to register what they were saying, then he made to stand up, lurching forwards. They took an arm each and led him downstairs. When they took him into the living room, little Jamie, spruced up and scared, looked at his father as if he couldn't remember who he was.

“Poor kids,” muttered Dermot Heenan, wiping his eyes with his sleeve. “Poor bloody kids.”

At that moment the two black cars drew up outside. Matthew led his father to the front door and then out to the car where a black-suited man was holding the door open.

“Matthew!” whispered his father urgently. “I'll go to the service. But I can't see her put in the ground.”

Matthew thought for a moment, then let the attendant shut
the door on his father. Matthew ran towards Annie and the two small ones, going towards the second car.

“He says he'll go to the service but not to the burial. It might be better. People would try to talk to him. You come back with him in the first car, and I'll go to the churchyard.”

Annie thought for a moment and then nodded. Matthew ran back to the shiny black limousine and let himself be put into the back seat with his father. He whispered sharply, “Stop mumbling, Dad.”

The funeral was a nightmare. Dermot Heenan stumbled from the car and up the steps of St Joseph's, his head seemingly buried in his bricklayer's chest, looking neither to left nor right. In the pew at the front to which they were led, he slumped forward in his usual position, holding it with redoubled persistence since it prevented him from seeing the full-sized and the diminutive coffins standing before the altar. Matthew hoped it would be thought he was praying—as perhaps he was.

The church was quite full. Ellen Heenan had kept up links with the Irish community in Leeds. Dermot's Irish links were three generations in the past, but his social life was centred around the Irish Club in the York Road, apart from occasional visits to the pub with his mates from work. Ellen had been a regular churchgoer at St Joseph's and had taken the older children. Dermot was more occasional, but both were popular. People were sorry at Ellen's death and sad for the motherless family, and they came to pay their last respects and to express their sympathy. Matthew and Annie rather wished fewer had come to see their father in his present state. They felt they couldn't look around, but they sensed still more people coming in after their arrival.

Father Muldoon spoke simply and well. He talked of Ellen's
womanly love for her family, her modesty, her sense of duty. He said she was a model Catholic wife and mother. He expressed the congregation's sympathy for the bereaved family and said that he himself, who was shortly to return to Ireland, would always remember Ellen Heenan as a model of motherhood such as that country knew so well how to produce.

Annie pulled down Jamie's little finger, which was going up his nose. From the end of the pew she heard her father groan. She thought, We're not thinking about Mummy at all. Father Muldoon is up there talking about her, but we're thinking of something else entirely. How to put a good front on. How to get by without people realising about Daddy. And yet she was everything to us. She fed us, clothed us, loved us, wiped our knees when we fell over, wiped our eyes when we cried. And now she's gone, and we're not even thinking about her at her funeral.

But then she thought, Mummy wouldn't have wanted us to be taken into care.

The service ended with “Eternal Father, Strong to Save.” When the congregation rose to sing, Matthew patted his father on the shoulder as if to say, “Don't try to stand—everyone knows you're too upset.”

When the coffins had been taken from the church, the mourners waited respectfully for the family to leave. Matthew gave his father a gentle shake, and he got up and charged out of the church, down the steps, and into the waiting car—his bolt hole, his nest, his womb. The children followed at a more seemly pace, and Annie ushered the younger ones towards the first car. As he got in, Greg looked at his father with a sort of baffled curiosity.

Matthew stood for a moment at the top of the steps, small
and frail-looking, waiting for the first car to move off and the second to come forward. He could see the hearse with the coffins already trailing up the hill in the direction of the Catholic churchyard. He felt a sudden spurt of fear at being the only one of the family by the grave.

“Your dad is obviously very cut up by your Mum's death.”

Matthew looked around quickly. It was Harry Curtin, a burly man with a kindly face, who had been his father's employer. Matthew knew he was not a Catholic, so coming to Ellen Heenan's funeral was a good deed that required special effort.

“He is,” said Matthew simply. Then he thought he ought to add something. “But he'll get over it. He can be quite strong really. Like when he did all that overtime last year because we needed extra money with the baby coming.”

“You don't do ov—” Curtin began. Then he stopped. He was conscious of Matthew's throwing him a quick, puzzled glance. “Yes, of course. I'm sure you're right. Your dad will find the strength.”

“Thank you for coming,” said Matthew, as the second car drove forward, and he walked down the steps and got into it, feeling very small and alone.

The ceremony at the graveside was most terrible of all. When the car arrived at the churchyard, the driver directed Matthew to the newest part of the ground, where he had known his mother would be buried. The two coffins were already being lowered in, and Matthew dawdled over, conscious that other cars were arriving. He told Father Muldoon that his father couldn't face the burial. Then he stood at the foot of the grave, trying not to look down, sensing a little knot of people gathering behind him. Father Muldoon read the brief words of committal, but it was as he scattered earth over the coffins that
Matthew broke up. Now that he did not have to worry about his father, the terrible truth about what had happened to them suddenly overwhelmed him. Simple words hammered themselves into his head: We loved you, we've lost you. Consciousness of everything their mother had done for them and the love she had had for them filled him and brought with it a knowledge of the dreadful gap she left, a gap that he and Annie would have to strive inadequately to fill for the younger ones. But there was a gap in
their
lives, too, and there was no one to fill it for them.

And another feeling followed—a sort of anger. I should not be here alone, Matthew thought. This isn't something I should have to bear. We should be given support, not have to be giving it. And not hiding things, contriving, lying. His face crumpled, and he looked down as his father did into his chest. The weight on him seemed insupportable.

A hand on his shoulder told him it was over. He righted his face, wiped his eyes, and walked back towards the car. Father Muldoon, with a lifetime of experience, judged it was best to leave him to himself. But as the little group around the grave broke up, Matthew, about to get into the limousine again, found that someone with less understanding than Father Muldoon had caught up with him. He heard a coarse voice behind him say, “I'm sorry your father wasn't here because I did want to express our condolences.”

Matthew turned to see a woman whom he felt he knew slightly—someone who occasionally came on Sundays to St Joseph's. She was dressed in a dark grey suit and had on a purple hat which did not seem quite suitable. She was smiling encouragingly, but her ample figure seemed somehow intimidating rather than comfortable, her breasts aggressive pyramids through the white blouse. Matthew was disturbed by something
about her which he could not quite put his finger on but which later, in bed that night, he was to identify to himself as something sexual.

“Yes, Dad is very cut up,” he said, using Mr Curtin's phrase.

“Well, he would be, wouldn't he? I expect you all are.” She smiled again, an overdone, uninviting smile. “Will you tell him specially that Mrs O'Keefe expressed her sympathy? Said if there was anything she could do . . .”

“Mrs O'Keefe. Yes, I'll tell him,” said Matthew, getting into the car.

But as the car drove him slowly home, Matthew was not thinking about Mrs O'Keefe. He was remembering his brief words with Harry Curtin outside the church. Harry Curtin was liked by the Heenan children. He'd often dropped in on the house in Calverley Row when their father was working for him, sometimes bringing sweets, and had always been cheerful and listened to what they wanted to tell him. He'd been genuinely sorry when he had had to lay their father off. Matthew felt he knew him.

And he was sure that what he had started to say when Matthew had mentioned overtime was “You don't do overtime in a recession.” Or “You don't do overtime when you're about to be laid off.” Only he'd stopped himself just in time. Or not quite in time. Because Matthew felt quite sure that was what he'd been going to say.