Something in Common (27 page)

The big man raised his eyebrows, which were growing as enthusiastically as his beard – such a very hairy face he had. ‘Well, if you like, I could do that, but the number is back at the garden centre. I have it stuck on a notice board there—’

‘Here,’ she said, pulling a receipt from her bag and scribbling her number
on it, ‘you could ring me with it. There’s an answering machine if I’m not at home.’ She wrote
Helen
under the number. ‘Thanks awfully.’

‘No problem at all,’ he said, the smile bouncing back onto his face as he pocketed the receipt. ‘You want to break the good news to him yourself.’

‘That’s it,’ Helen said, struggling to keep a straight face. He could get a job as Santa, no problem. Put him in a red suit, give him a sack and a queue of kids. No false beard required.

‘Charlie was a nice old soul,’ he told her. ‘And knew his stuff when it came to plants, a real expert.’ He gestured across the newly built brick wall to the paving stones that lay now in place of Malone’s precious lawn. ‘Look what they’ve done to his garden – wouldn’t do him good to see it.’

‘Don’t suppose it would.’ Helen felt the conversation had gone on long enough. She began to move down the path. ‘I’m afraid I have to go. I’m trying to make the post.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ he said immediately, following her to the gate, nipping ahead of her to open it. ‘Would you like a lift?’

Helen looked at him, amused. The proverbial good Samaritan. ‘Thanks, but I think I’ll make it on foot. Goodbye now.’

‘Much obliged to you.’ He put out his hand. ‘I’m delighted that the mystery is solved at last – thanks again for your help.’

He seemed genuinely happy. Imagine looking for a cat that wasn’t yours, imagine keeping an eye out for more than two years, just because someone had asked you to. The male equivalent of Sarah, spreading goodness and light wherever he went.

His handshake was as firm and warm as she’d expected. She put him in his mid-fifties, a few years older than her, and at least a foot taller. Not to mention several stone heavier.

As she walked away she heard the van door slamming, the engine starting up. He drove past her, tooting the horn and waving cheerily.

She
made the half-four collection by a couple of minutes. She called to her mother afterwards and they drank coffee and talked about Brian Keenan, still in captivity after more than four years, and Cardinal Ó Fiaich dropping dead in France, and Alice’s description of the basic living conditions at the eco centre.

When she got home, having declined her mother’s offer of a salmon steak, she grilled a couple of fish fingers – no motivation to cook a proper meal without someone to share it – and tossed a green salad to go with them. She watched a film and fed the cat—

The cat. Malone.

She checked her answering machine and saw the message light blinking. She pressed
play
and the bearded man’s big genial voice burst into the silence: ‘Hello Helen, Frank Murphy here, we met earlier when I was looking for Charlie’s cat. I have that nursing-home number for you.’

The area code was Kildare: what had brought Malone all the way out there? Wasn’t there any nursing home good enough for him in Dublin?

Sarah was in Kildare – maybe he’d ended up in her nursing home: some coincidence if he had. She’d ask him tomorrow if there was a cook called Sarah Flannery working there, tell him to say Helen said hi.

She returned to the kitchen. ‘Remember Malone?’ she asked the cat. ‘Old man you used to live with. He’s still alive – can you believe it?’ But the cat continued snuffling into his bowl and ignored her. She made tea and wrote a letter to Alice as she drank it, and told her about Malone not being dead after all.

Wait till he heard who had his cat.

T
he
door to Matron’s office was open, which meant she was on her morning rounds. As Sarah passed, the phone on the desk began to ring. She could leave it, and the answering machine would pick it up, but she hated to ignore it. She entered the office and lifted the receiver.

‘St Sebastian’s Nursing Home, may I help?’

‘Good morning.’ The voice was husky, hard to tell if it was male or female. ‘I’m looking for Charlie Malone. I believe he’s staying there.’

Sarah’s heart sank. Why hadn’t she minded her own business and kept going to the kitchen? ‘Er, may I ask if you’re family?’

‘No, I’m not family.’ Marginally sharper. ‘I’m a neighbour – I was a neighbour of his. Are you telling me only relatives are allowed to speak to him?’

‘No, no, it’s not that, of course you could talk to him—’ Lord, a neighbour after all this time: maybe this was the person who’d found him. But why wait till now to look for him, years later?

‘Hello? Are you still there?’

Say it, get it over with. ‘It’s just, I’m really sorry to have to tell you this’ – the words stuttering out – ‘but I’m afraid Charlie, er, he’d been ill, you see, a few years back, with pneumonia – well, maybe you know that already – and it had weakened his heart, and he … suffered a heart attack, I’m afraid, and he, well, he died, quite suddenly, just a few months ago. One of the other residents found him, in fact, in the garden here. He had made such a—’

Stop,
shut up, you’re blabbering. She stopped. There was silence at the other end.

‘Hello?… Hello? Can you hear me?’

The silence stretched, and she realised that the line was dead. The caller, whoever she was, had hung up. She replaced the receiver and left the room.

Helen lowered the letter. All it had taken for them to stop fighting was for Alice to move away: put a sea and a few hundred miles between them and they got on fine.

She found an envelope and copied the Cardiff address onto it. She’d get a postal order for two hundred pounds sterling next time she was in the post office. She had no idea how much apartment rental was in Cardiff, but it was all she could spare, and it would help.

She
wondered who else lived in Cait’s house, and if Alice had a bed to sleep in, or even a couch. Maybe she slept on the floor, and hadn’t mentioned it in case her mother freaked out. She wondered what else wasn’t being mentioned.

Saturday art classes, free because the tutor was a student, maybe with fewer hours of learning under his belt than Alice herself. A far cry from the fine-arts course Alice had turned her back on, but at least she was doing something arty. And if she sold a painting or two it might encourage her to go back and study properly again.

Working in a pub, three nights a week. Helen wondered what class of Welshman it attracted, and how Alice got home after closing time, and if working there was better or worse than cycling a bicycle around Cardiff with someone else’s weekly shopping in the basket.

But she sounded happy, and she had Jackie with her, and they were coming home at Christmas, only nine weeks away. As Helen was slipping the letter back into its envelope, the phone rang. She walked out to the hall.

‘Hello.’

‘It’s me.’

Sounding as happy as if he’d just won a million on the National Lottery, as usual. In four months she’d never known the man to be in a bad mood.

‘How’re you doing?’ he asked.

‘Fine, just reading a letter from Alice.’

‘All well in Wales?’ He had yet to meet her daughter but you’d never know it, the way he always asked after her, always showed an interest when Helen mentioned her.

‘She’s left the centre, her and one of the pals. They’re living in Cardiff now, sharing someone’s house. Alice is working in a pub, and her friend is delivering groceries on a bike.’

‘Good for them, having an adventure. That’s what you need at nineteen.’

He
turned everything into a positive. She could picture the beam plastered across his face, and the image made her smile too. He could do that to her, even over the phone.

‘You free later?’ he asked. ‘I got tickets for that play at the Olympia.’

Another thing he did, book tickets and then tell her. She should be annoyed that he didn’t check to see if she was busy first, but getting annoyed with him was pointless – he never reciprocated, he was useless at arguments. If she told him she had something else planned, he’d simply laugh it off and pass on the tickets. Nothing bothered him.

‘I’d love to,’ she said.

‘Wonderful – pick you up at half seven.’

They’d been dating, or whatever you wanted to call it, since he’d rung, a few days after giving her the nursing-home number, to ask if she’d be at all interested in going out to dinner with him.

He took her to restaurants and the theatre and the cinema. He drove her out of the city on Sundays, his only day off, and they walked along riverbanks and drank tea in little village cafés with lace tablecloths. He was the most generous person she’d ever known, presenting her regularly with chocolate and books and flowers. He paid for everything when they went out, wouldn’t hear of her contributing.

He was pleasingly, but not overly, tactile. He would stroke her hand absently as they watched a play, and reach out to cradle her elbow when they crossed a street. Occasionally he draped a hand lightly across her shoulders as they walked. At the end of an evening he would bend his head and kiss her goodnight, his lips warm, his beard tickling her face, his huge arms enveloping her. And on most Saturday nights he stayed over.

There’d been no big seduction scene – they were both well beyond coyness. One evening, a few weeks after they’d got together, Helen had suggested he stay the night, and he’d smiled and accepted the invitation. He was gentle in bed, and as considerate as she’d thought he would be – and if their sex life wasn’t as earth-moving as she would have liked, she’d felt cherished for the first time since Cormac.

He
was good company. He laughed often, was never short of conversation. He could make a story out of anything. He loved his work: he got enormous pleasure from advising people on what to plant and where to plant it. His business, by the sound of it, was thriving.

He was fifty-two, four years older than her. He’d never been married, and he never referred to previous relationships, but it was obvious that there had been at least one or two: she certainly wasn’t his first lover. His parents and sister, his only sibling, were dead, but he had various relatives scattered around Dublin – cousins, aunts, nieces, nephews – whom he saw regularly. One of the cousins, George, had started the garden centre with him more than twenty years earlier, and the two still ran it together.

His goodnight kisses were comforting; she enjoyed the feel of his arms about her. His bulk soothed her, made her feel safe. His default setting was happy, his good humour the perfect counterpart to her occasional black moods. Simply by being himself, he made her feel less prickly.

On paper he was perfect. In person he was perfect too, if you were looking for someone dependable and kind. And what was wrong with dependable and kind? She was forty-eight; she’d moved beyond fireworks. He was good for her, she’d been lucky to meet him. To think it had been Malone’s cat that had brought them together.

Malone, who had been dead after all, who’d never got to find out that Helen had taken in his cat. The woman on the phone stuttering out the news, assuming that Helen cared. Pity all the same he hadn’t known that the cat was OK: sounded like the poor bugger had been attached to it.

I have a new boyfriend
, she’d written to Sarah, after she and Frank had been seeing one another for about a month.
You’d approve. He’s a real gentleman, treats me like a queen – and you’ll be pleased to hear that this time I’ve gone for my own generation. He’s fifty-two and looks like Santa, big fluffy beard, twinkly eyes, the lot. He actually dresses up as Santa in his garden centre on Christmas Eve – I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when he told me that.

She
made no mention of him in her letters to Alice: time enough to introduce them when Alice came home at Christmas. Frank would still be around, she was quite sure of that. She remembered Alice’s rejection of Oliver, her silent treatment of him whenever they’d been in the same room, the tension at their shared meals. But Alice was older now and had moved out – and Frank was no Oliver Joyce.