Something in Common (26 page)

She stopped and laid down her pen. She sat back and looked into the cold fireplace, the ashes from their last fire two nights ago still lying in a little heap there. The room was chilly, but it seemed wasteful to light the fire, or switch on the central heating, for just one person. Tomorrow she’d find a cheap fan heater. She picked up her pen again.

She stopped again, rubbed at an itchy spot on her cheek, realised it was wet, tickled by a tear that had come out of nowhere.

Another tear splatted onto the page, just below the last line. She blotted it carefully with her sleeve.

‘What are you looking at?’ she asked the cat. ‘Haven’t you ever seen anyone cry before?’

He didn’t blink, his yellow eyes fixed calmly on hers.

She laid the pad aside and sank her face into her hands.

S
arah
stood at the kitchen window and watched as the old woman with the bent back snipped excruciatingly slowly at the forsythia, as she’d been doing every dry day for the past two weeks.

No one had passed any remarks. No one had wondered aloud why she was doing the very same thing she’d objected to when Charlie was alive, clipping and pruning and weeding, maintaining the garden he’d restored. Taking up, literally, where he’d left off, working determinedly with set shoulders and pursed mouth, as if she was on a mission and would not be deflected.

Which, of course, Sarah thought, was exactly the case. Martina was atoning for her contrariness. She was attempting, by carrying on the work Charlie had begun, to make amends for her harassment of him. How sad that they hadn’t been able to work together in the few years he’d been with them.

Martina was eighty-nine now and slower on her feet; arthritis had curved her back and swollen her knuckles. But each day that the rain stayed away she did what little she could in the garden, talking to no one as she worked. Alone with her thoughts, whatever they might be.

Had she ever confided in anyone in the whole of her life? Had she ever spoken of what was in her heart? Sarah still tapped on her door occasionally, but Martina seemed to have little interest now in conversation, barely responding to Sarah’s comments, her gaze drifting more and more to the garden and the shrubs she tended.

And
Helen, who as far as Sarah could make out had never been close to her parents, had lost her father in March, two months earlier. So sad to think they’d never connected in any meaningful way while he was alive. Did Helen regret it now, did she wish she’d tried to have some kind of relationship with him when they were both adults?

‘I’m so glad I married you,’ Sarah told Neil that evening, as they bathed the children.

He looked at her. ‘What brought that on?’

She soaped Martha’s arms. ‘Nothing. I just wanted to say it. I’m glad you asked me, and I’m glad I said yes. I think it’s terribly sad when people are afraid to communicate what’s in their hearts.’

He lifted Stephen from the bath and wrapped him in a towel. ‘I think your mum’s been drinking.’

Sarah frowned. ‘Don’t say that.’

‘Sorry,’ he said, reaching for the talc bottle at the end of the bath. ‘Just kidding.’

Sarah turned to Martha. ‘Men don’t know how to talk about their feelings but ladies do. That’s the big difference between us.’

Neil pulled a pyjama top over Stephen’s head. ‘I’ll be late tomorrow, got a call from a potential new customer outside Naas. I promised I’d drop over after work and have a look.’

The golf course hadn’t lasted; just two years before they’d admitted defeat and closed the gates. But Neil had survived, pursuing job leads doggedly, poring over landscaping books in his spare time, broadening his skills whenever he had the opportunity.

‘Out you come, lovey.’ Sarah helped Martha from the water. ‘How late is late?’

‘Could be eight or nine, could take a while. They’ve half an acre out the back they want to talk to me about: sounds like they want me to design a garden for them.’

‘You’ll
be well able.’ She dusted Martha with talc, stroked it onto the soft, warm skin. ‘By the way, I invited you-know-who to the party and he’s coming.’

‘Who?’

‘You know, the person I told you about, for N-o-r-e-e-n.’

‘What does that spell?’ Martha asked.

‘It spells “only for grown-ups”,’ Neil replied, getting to his feet, lifting Stephen into his arms. ‘Right, Mister, let’s get you to bed.’

‘What do you think?’ Sarah called after him.

His voice drifted back. ‘Fine, if you want.’

She turned back to Martha, who was pushing her feet into her rabbit slippers. ‘OK? All set?’

He could show a bit more enthusiasm for her idea – and it would have been nice if he’d said he was glad he’d married her too. That was men for you, hopeless.

S
he
pulled the sheet from her typewriter and set it on top of the others: five thousand words on Ireland beginning to drag itself out of recession for a new magazine she’d approached last month. Unemployment at its lowest in years, emigration and inflation down, exports up, all the signs there for the long-awaited recovery. She’d pitched the idea to them and they’d gone for it, and now it was done.

She glanced at her watch. Send it off this afternoon, catch the half-four collection if she didn’t delay. They’d have it a couple of days before the deadline, a mark in her favour.

She’d never delivered anything early to Breen – it was more fun to let him wait, let him sweat a bit. She remembered their testy exchanges, neither of them giving an inch. ‘Don’t push me, O’Dowd,’ he’d warn, and she’d push a bit more, see how far she could go.

There were no heated exchanges with his successor at the newspaper, a younger man named Ryan. There weren’t very many exchanges at all – these days she was contacted by various sub-editors, all of whom were terribly official, none of whom she could distinguish from any other. Breen, it would seem, had been unique.

‘I miss him,’ Catherine had confessed to Helen, a few weeks after his retirement. ‘He wasn’t always the easiest to work for, but at least he was interesting. Now everything’s so samey and organised and … ordinary.’

Yes: whatever
else you could accuse him of, Breen had never been ordinary.

Helen slipped the pages into an envelope. She’d drop in on her mother after the post office: she was due a visit. Twice a week she called these days, sometimes more often.

Different now, without her father and Alice around, just her and her mother. Easier, in a way – or maybe Helen was mellowing. Maybe she was finally learning to loosen her hold on the resentments of the past. For whatever reason, she didn’t dread the visits to her family home like she used to.

Helen had heard the news of her father’s death – less than two months after his stroke, and only a few weeks after Alice had left for Wales – with a detached sadness, the kind of one-degree-removed sympathy you might feel on hearing of a distant relative’s death, or a fatal car accident on the news involving some perfect stranger.

Her mother, on the other hand, mourned him with a deep and genuine grief, often opening the door to Helen in those first few weeks with reddened eyes, or breaking off in the middle of a sentence to press a hand to her mouth. Her grief made her gentler, rubbed her corners soft. It also caused her, after the fierce rawness of it had passed, to draw her only daughter closer, to welcome her with what seemed like genuine warmth when she called.

‘How’s Alice?’ she would ask. ‘How’s the job going in Wales? What are you working on now? Why don’t you stay for dinner? Where did you get that lovely sweater?’

Showing an interest, listening to Helen’s answers as if she cared. For Helen, lonesome after Alice, gone four months now, it was oddly comforting. She and her mother had no one around them now but one another, and they must make do with that, and be satisfied with it.

She slipped the envelope into her bag and took her umbrella from its stand – rain off and on for the past week – and walked to the front door. As she reached to open it the bell rang, startling her.

‘Oh – hello there. That was quick.’

The man
standing on her doorstep smiled, showing large, even teeth. He was a big, white-haired, white-bearded bear of a man, with the reddish-brown complexion of someone who spent more time out of doors than in. His grey corduroy trousers were bald in several places, his faded blue T-shirt strained over his wide chest.

‘Can I help you?’ Helen asked. A van was parked on the road outside that struck a faint chord.
F&G Garden Centre:
maybe they touted for business around the neighbourhood. Maybe he was hoping to flog her a few shrubs today. If that was the case he’d be in for a big disappointment.

‘This will probably sound a little odd,’ he said, his smile staying put, ‘but I was driving by just now and I spotted a cat in your front garden. It’s disappeared now – hopped over the wall when I opened the gate – but I’m just wondering if by any remote chance it’s Charlie’s.’

What was he on about? ‘I don’t know anyone called Charlie,’ Helen told him, stepping out and pulling the door closed behind her, ‘and actually I’m in a bit of a—’

‘I beg your pardon, I should have made myself clearer. I meant Charlie Malone, who used to live next door.’

Helen, about to step past him, stopped. Charlie Malone. Malone.

‘The thing is, this is going to sound a little strange, but we got a phone call at the garden centre – well, I did actually, a long time ago, two or three years it must be – asking about his cat …’

Charlie Malone. She’d never known his first name – or maybe she had, years ago. Maybe Cormac had mentioned it way back. But for as long as she could remember he’d been Malone. But he was dead, wasn’t he? Why was this man, this stranger, looking for his cat now?

‘… and it’s a bit of a long story really, but he was trying to locate it, and he’d given the lady at the nursing home our number as a contact—’

‘Nursing home?’

‘Yes, he’d been sent there, apparently, when he came out of hospital, and the one thing that was bothering him was his cat. So of course I promised to keep an eye out for it, and I called around here a few times, we both did, my colleague and I …’

A
nursing home. He’d managed not to die in hospital then.

‘… but eventually we gave up, it just seemed pointless really, so much time had gone by. But then, like I say, I happened to be passing today, and I saw a cat in your garden, and of course it mightn’t be his at all – I never actually saw it myself, but the description …’

Still alive in a nursing home, not dead like she’d assumed. Tough old Malone, not ready yet to shuffle off his mortal coil. She should have known.

‘… and I was just wondering if maybe you took him in when Charlie got sick. I know it’s a long shot, but I thought it was worth a try, you know?’

He stopped talking, finally, and stood towering over her. His story was ludicrous – trying to track down a cat he’d never seen, years after its owner had moved away – and yet his expression was so open, his face so completely without guile, that she was inclined to believe him.

‘It
is
his cat,’ she told him. ‘I’m looking after it. I thought Malo—I thought Charlie was dead, so I put out food.’

His grin widened, nearly split his face in two. ‘Well, that’s very good news,’ he said delightedly. ‘I’m sure Charlie will be thrilled to hear that you have it. I’ll give a call to the nursing home and—’

‘Let me,’ she said. ‘Would you? Let me have the number, and I’ll ring.’

She’d get a kick out of telling Malone that his precious cat was alive and well, and that she was the one he had to thank. Let him put that in his smelly old pipe.