Something in Common (49 page)

‘D
o I need to bring a haridryer?’ she called.

Nothing

‘Breen?’

‘Helen, can you come in here a minute?’

She looked up. He never called her Helen. She crossed the landing and walked into the bedroom, still carrying the hairdryer.

He was standing by the bed. ‘What did you say your friend’s surname was?’

‘What?’

His suitcase sat on the bed, half filled with clothes. The radio was on, someone was talking.

‘Sarah,’ he said, ‘your penfriend. What’s her last name?’

She frowned. ‘Why on earth would you want to know that?’

‘Is it Flannery?’ he asked. ‘Just tell me, please.’

A beat passed. Her face changed.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, coming towards her. ‘I’m so sorry, that accident on Fri—’

‘No,’ she said, her head shaking slowly from side to side. ‘Don’t tell me that.’

‘I heard it just
now on—’

‘No, don’t
tell
me that.’

‘I’m so sorry, Helen—’

He took the hairdryer from her and laid it on the bed. She balled her hands into fists and squeezed her eyes closed as his arms went around her.

‘Oh, God,’ she said
quietly, leaning into his embrace. ‘Oh,
Jesus
Christ, you shouldn’t have told me that.’

S
he knew them all.

There in the front pew was Neil, who’d proposed to Sarah halfway up a Kerry hillside, who was useless at maths, who’d forgotten their fifth anniversary, who hated avocados and loved Jerusalem artichokes, who could make anything grow, who’d broken Sarah’s heart.

There he stood, wearing a grey suit that looked a size too small, the black tie around his neck drawing attention to the double chin. It was all she could do to shake his hand, to meet the grey eyes behind the glasses for an instant.

And here was his mother Nuala beside him, the same chin, the same long nose. A wizened little woman bent into a navy coat, her arm around the fair-haired boy with the chalk-white bewildered face who’d played the piano for hundreds of people just three nights earlier, unaware that his mother was already dead.

And next to them Christine, her face swollen and blotchy with grief, blonde hair twisted into a knotted black scarf, tailored black coat belted tightly, leaning in to cradle the niece – it must be Martha – who pressed, sobbing quietly, against her. Martha’s features hard to make out, small-boned, dark-haired, the precious adopted daughter who wanted to be an artist, like Alice.

And in the seat behind, sitting
in a mute row, were surely Sarah’s three nephews: Aidan, the soon-to-be doctor; Tom, whose nose was usually stuck into a book; Paddy, mad about rugby and surfing. And beside them, in his navy suit, their father Brian, the accountant who loved his sister-in-law’s tangy lemon tart, who had given Sarah driving directions to Dublin.

And surely, in the row behind, the woman in her thirties with the expensive haircut and camel coat was Neil’s new partner, who’d bought Stephen’s affection with a Game Boy, who’d tempted Martha with a few bottles of nail polish.

Helen knew them all.

She made her way along the front pew with the other mourners. She shook hands and said she was sorry, and she made no mention of who she was. She moved on and stood by the closed coffin that was wreathed in flowers. Propped on a side table was a copy of
Martina and Charlie Go on Holidays
, which had appeared in bookshops a fortnight earlier, and next to it a framed head-and-shoulders colour photograph of its author.

Helen studied the face of the woman she’d been writing to for two decades. Sarah wore a blue top whose V-neck was edged with lace, and a row of tiny pearls. Light-brown wavy hair, small nose, blue pale-lashed eyes from which tiny lines had begun to fan, generous mouth. The kind of gentle smile that encouraged you to ask for directions, a fragility about it that told you it wouldn’t take much to wipe it away.

It was an ordinary face. You wouldn’t turn your head to have a second look at it, but if she smiled at you it would come from her eyes, and you’d know she meant it. She had the kind of face you felt you knew, a face you felt you might have seen before.

She’d driven into a
tree, less than a mile from her home, on a road she must have used countless times before. It had happened long before she got to the motorway that she was so nervous of. No other car had been involved, no witnesses had come forward. The accident had been discovered by a young woman out walking her dog.

She’d died instantly, from a broken neck. She might have skidded on wet leaves; it might have been that.

‘Are you sure you want to know?’ Breen had asked.

‘Find out,’ Helen had told him, so he’d made phone calls and asked questions, and they’d learnt what there was to know.

Sarah was forty-eight. She was only forty-eight, and now she was dead.

In the church car park there was a yellow minibus with
St Sebastian’s Nursing Home
on the side. They’d sat together in one of the side aisles, a huddle of bowed grey heads, the people Sarah had fed and nurtured and loved.

Afterwards, the ones who could walk had shuffled to the top to shake hands with the bereaved family; the rest had been wheeled by women and men wearing coats over their white uniforms. Sarah’s father, Helen assumed, was not among the old men. No mourning for a daughter he no longer remembered.

They sat into the car and Breen immediately turned the heat on full. They watched as the coffin was slid into the hearse. In the knot of people still emerging from the church Helen spotted Paul, come to pay his respects to his most obliging author. They waited until the other cars had started to move off behind the hearse, and then they joined the line.

After the burial they were driving west. Their suitcases were in the boot, the Dublin house locked up until the New Year, the two cats packed off, much to their disgust, to a local cattery.

‘Are you going to talk to any of them?’ Breen asked. ‘Are you going to introduce yourself?’

‘No.’

What was the point in meeting them? They had nothing in common except Sarah, and she was gone.

They drove slowly through
the winding country roads, behind a dark-green, mud-spattered Ford Escort with a Kildare number plate. The car grew warm. Helen opened the buttons on her coat and tried not to think about the space that Sarah would leave behind.

The funeral cortège turned onto a bridge, not attractive in the least. As she looked through the horrible mesh fencing at the river below, an image flitted for an instant across her mind – a falling cigarette, a bicycle – gone too quickly for her to grab hold and make sense of it.

She reached across and laid the back of her hand against Breen’s thigh. He glanced over.

‘OK?’

She nodded. He
covered her hand with his. They reached the end of the bridge and drove off.

R
eading is so much more than the act of moving from page to page. It’s the exploration of new worlds; the pursuit of adventure; the forging of friendships; the breaking of hearts; and the chance to begin to live through a new story each time the first sentence is devoured.

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