The People Next Door (3 page)

Yvonne looked at his wet eyelashes and his red, swollen eyes and his stupid, hopeful face and she knew that no amount of talk would change a thing, not if they talked until they were old. But she nodded and said ‘OK’ because he had a bruise on the back of his hand, and because she’d made him cry, and because she didn’t know how to say no.

And then, just two days later, he’d taken the train
to Dublin for a meeting, and the next time she’d seen him had been in the hospital mortuary in Athlone.

His face was unfamiliar, they’d hidden the worst of the injuries under a thick layer of some tan-coloured cream, and his brown hair was parted on the wrong side. She had reached under the sheet, lifted his icy cold hand and turned the palm over. The bruise had almost completely faded. She could barely make it out.

When they got home from the cemetery, Magoo was waiting at the back gate. As soon as the car rounded the corner of the lane he stood, stretching each leg in turn. He darted between them while they were getting out, barking happily, then trotted ahead of them up the path and stood hopefully by his empty bowl, black tail swinging in a wide arc, wet tongue lolling from his panting mouth.

Yvonne picked up the bowl and refilled it from the outside tap. Magoo ducked his head and began to slurp loudly.

The phone began to ring as Clara was turning her key in the back-door lock. ‘I’ll get it.’

Yvonne stood in the fading light, reluctant now to leave this glorious day behind. The air was wonderfully heavy with the scent of someone’s freshly mown lawn. She listened to the
slop-slop
of Magoo’s eager lapping as her gaze drifted around the garden.

Clara reappeared. ‘Mum, it’s Greg. I’m off for a bath.’

Greg – she should have guessed. He never forgot Brian’s anniversary. Yvonne lifted the receiver, smelled
the citrus body spray Clara had taken to using lately. ‘Hi.’

‘Hello there.’ Greg’s deep, slow voice. ‘Just thought I’d give a shout, see how you’re doing.’

‘We’re fine, Greg. You’re good to ring.’

Brian’s first cousin, and now one of Yvonne’s oldest friends. Like her, he’d been born in Belford and had lived there until he’d gone to a seminary in the midlands straight after school. He’d lasted just two years, before leaving for a sister of one of the other seminarians. When that relationship had ended, after little more than a year, Greg had moved to Dublin. He was still there, teaching music in a private – Yvonne assumed terribly exclusive – secondary school on the south side. As far as she knew, he’d never met anyone else in the years since the seminarian’s sister.

Greg was tall, fair and short-sighted, with delicate, almost feminine features and a surprisingly deep voice. He played a variety of instruments and his knowledge of classical music was encyclopedic. He was quiet by nature, good with children and animals, and utterly dependable.

Three or four times a year, sometimes more often, he made the trip back to Belford to visit his few remaining relatives – a married sister, a few cousins on the other side of the family, his Uncle Jim and Aunt Peggy – and on each of these visits, he called on Yvonne and Clara.

Greg had been Brian’s best man, had stood next to Brian watching Yvonne as she’d forced herself to walk up the aisle, heart sinking, in the awful frilly dress her
mother had pleaded with her to wear because it would hide her figure from the busybody aunts, her father’s twin sisters.

‘When are you coming down again?’

‘Well, we’re getting holidays on Friday, and then I have a couple of weeks of summer school, but after that I was thinking of Belford for a few days.’ Greg rented the small top floor of a house owned by one of the school’s governors. ‘I’ll give you a shout.’

Yvonne smiled. ‘Do that.’ She was glad he’d kept in touch, glad that he hadn’t been put off by what must have seemed like rudeness on her part, when he’d called around to see her a few days after the funeral. When she’d sat silently and left most of the talking to him, feeling the air thick with what wasn’t being said.

Because he never once mentioned his cousin, never spoke about Brian at all. Instead, he’d told her about the other seminarians.

‘Simon can speak eight languages and he’s never been outside Ireland, imagine.’

‘Mmm.’ As if she cared about Simon or about any of them.

‘And Tim left school at sixteen and went straight to the States, worked on building sites in New York for twenty-one years, and then one morning he woke up and knew he wanted to be a priest. Says he was never so sure of anything in his life.’

‘Right.’ She’d wondered how much longer he was going to stay.

‘We have this cook called Teresa, she’s been there for years. One of her sons was going for the
priesthood when he got meningitis. She still talks about him now and again. He loved her tomato soup.’

Tomato soup. She was being eaten up with guilt, she felt like the lowest form of life, and he was talking about tomato soup.

She’d sat across the living room from him and picked at the skin around her nails and wondered if Clara was behaving herself for Granny O’Mahony She tried not to look at her watch while he was talking.

He’d left, finally, and come back the following afternoon. And the one after that. He played with Clara and he drank tea and he talked to Yvonne about everything but Brian. And then one day, maybe a week later, maybe two, when she couldn’t bear it any more, Yvonne had interrupted him in the middle of the kitchen, in the middle of a sentence – something about a laundry mix-up – and said loudly, ‘It wasn’t like it seemed, you know, with me and Brian.’

The words had resonated in the room. Greg said nothing, didn’t look surprised, even. He watched her face through his thick glasses and said nothing.

‘It wasn’t like everyone thought.’

He waited, long legs crossed at the ankles. In the sitting room, they could hear Clara speaking to her dolls: ‘No, you can’t go to the shop, you’re too small. I’ll get you a Curly Wurly when I do the shopping, alright?’

Yvonne leant against the worktop and picked at a loose thread in the cuff of her jumper. ‘I just don’t want you to—’ She twisted the thread around her finger and pulled. It was surprisingly resistant.
She unwrapped it and looked at the thin red line it had left on her skin. She lifted her head and glared at Greg. ‘I was going to leave him. I was planning to go. I told him, just a few days before.’

It was the first time she’d said it out loud to anyone except Brian.

‘We should never have got married, it was a mistake.’

She hadn’t even told her parents.

‘I didn’t love him.’

The words fell from her mouth and left her wonderfully empty, like she felt after vomiting. Empty. Purged.

Across the room from her, Greg sat calmly. After a few seconds, when Yvonne said nothing more, he nodded. ‘It happens.’

And in those two words she heard absolution. The relief was so enormous that she dropped her face into her hands and sobbed, big full tears that streamed out of her, and Greg walked over and gave her his hanky, then went into the sitting room to Clara, closing the door quietly behind him.

And even though he didn’t say much afterwards, and the subject rarely came up between them again, she knew he understood and didn’t blame her. And because of it, she could begin to stop blaming herself. It happens.

After she’d hung up, after Magoo was fed his supper and brought in for the night, after the kitchen was tidied, after she’d finished the paper and caught the news on the radio (a bomb in the Middle East, another politician in trouble, two more road deaths in
the past twenty-four hours), Yvonne O’Mahony locked the back door and climbed the stairs.

No sign of Clara, no sound from her room. A soft murmuring from the pipes, the scent of lemons wafting damply from the empty bathroom and curling around the landing.

Yvonne left the light off in her bedroom, crossed to the window and looked out. It had begun to rain, a soft, heavy fall. The moon was up, almost full. She could see the wet, silvery outlines of the three long, narrow back gardens, separated from each other by the golden privet hedges that some long-gone residents had planted.

The knobbly shapes of the pair of apple trees next door, planted by Dan and Ali two years before. A ribbon of lawn, badly in need of a cut, running down to the trees, with a tilted rotary clothesline skewered through the middle of it. At the top of the garden a small patio, weeds pushing between the old paving slabs, shiny now in the rain. On the far side, a half-built brick barbecue topped with black plastic, a small round wrought-iron table and two matching chairs. A black wheelie bin in the corner.

Number nine’s back garden, furthest away, was easily the best kept of the three. Beyond the patio decking – gas barbecue, gas heater, wrought-iron furniture – a wide bed of perfectly behaved flowers led down to a collection of neatly pruned shrubs framing an immaculate rectangle of lawn.

At the bottom, a shed built in the same red brick as the house, full of Kathryn’s carefully cleaned tools, hanging in spirit-level-straight rows.

‘You’re so anal,’ Yvonne had told her. ‘Get a life.’

Kathryn had just smiled. ‘You’re so jealous. Your shed’s like a bomb hit it. At least I can find things.’

‘Exactly – if I can’t find the tools, I can’t weed.’

‘Oh dear – jealous
and
lazy. I don’t know why I hang around with you.’

Yvonne turned back to her own garden, looked out at the humped darkness of it. Just beyond the patio, her pathetic collection of herbs – a bush of woody rosemary, a little patch of struggling basil, some half-decent parsley, tilting chives, a few clumps of thyme and the mint that kept threatening to choke everything else. It was her least favourite herb – she loved the smell but hated the taste – and it was only there because Clara had insisted: ‘Mum, there is no way you can have roast lamb without mint sauce.’

Beyond the herbs the same strip of lawn as next door’s, only slightly less bedraggled here – and in need of a cut. She might do it tomorrow. A clothes line running down one side, strung between two poles. At the bottom, the weary-looking wooden shed, then between it and the back gate the two red gooseberry bushes that Greg had planted the week Yvonne and Clara had moved in. Hard to believe it was almost seventeen years ago now – no wonder the bushes were a bit straggly.

It had felt like a refuge, the first time she’d stepped into this red-brick house. On the far side of town from the tiny flat she and Brian had been renting. Cheap enough for the compensation money to cover most of the cost because of the state it had been in.

Walking behind the estate agent through the
musty-smelling rooms, Yvonne had hardly noticed the peeling wallpaper, the dripping taps, the cracked tiles. Before they’d even gone upstairs, she’d decided to put in a bid. Tiles could be replaced. They’d deal with the damp. And anyone could paint a few walls.

She had a job, she was earning. After Clara was born she’d taught herself to type from a book, on the typewriter Brian had brought home for next to nothing when the office was having a facelift. Between the feeds and nappy changes, she’d tapped at the keys until she felt confident enough, when Clara was eight months old, to answer an ad for a typist in the local paper. When Brian died Yvonne was on her third job, as secretary to two architects, and able to afford the repayments on the small mortgage she’d taken out to buy and refurbish number seven Miller’s Avenue.

Just then, her neighbour’s back door opened and two figures stepped out on the patio, bringing with them the murmur of male voices. It was too dark to see them clearly but she recognised the shape of Dan, pointing down the garden. The other man seemed to be wearing a hat of some kind. She wondered if he was a relative, come to keep Dan company for a while maybe.

Poor Dan.

After a minute, she pulled the curtains, switched on the bedside lamp, started undressing – a shower, at last – and thought again about the ridiculous thing she was definitely not planning to do.

In her bedroom, Clara gently tissued off the honey face mask she’d applied in the bath. She soaked a cotton pad in toner and wiped away the residue. She unscrewed her jar of night cream, dipped her fingers in and stroked it slowly over her face.

When she’d finished, she stood and undid the belt of her dressing gown. It slid from her body and pooled on the floor. She looked into the long mirror on the wardrobe door, took in the full breasts, the flat stomach, the puff of dark blonde hair beneath it.

Dirty girl.

She flicked off the light, crossed in the darkness to her double bed, slid between the pale blue sheets and closed her eyes.

‘… and there’s parking at the end there. You drive down the lane beside number seven and it swings around the back of these three houses.’ Dan O’Farrell waved in the general direction of the bottom of the garden, and as Kieran Delaney chewed his gum and pushed his hat up a bit further and pretended to see whatever was down there, a light switched on in an upstairs room next door threw a pale lemony patch onto the lawn. Something rustled in the hedge near them. Kieran wondered if it was a rat. They weren’t too far from the river here.

He thought of something. ‘Where’s one to six?’

‘Pardon?’

‘This house is number eight, isn’t it? And I’m assuming your neighbours are seven and nine. So where’s one to six?’

‘Oh.’ Dan paused. ‘I never really thought about it, I’m only here a couple of years myself. I suppose the apartment block down the way – maybe it replaced the original houses.’

Was there something slightly odd about this man, or
was Dan imagining it? He’d seemed normal enough on the phone that afternoon, hadn’t asked too many questions, said he’d be around later to see the room. Dan hadn’t realised that later meant nearly eleven o’clock.

‘Oh, hello – Kieran Delaney. I rang earlier.’

Around Dan’s height. Biggish nose, small, even teeth, dark eyes just visible under a mustard-coloured cowboy hat. Older than he’d sounded on the phone – Dan’s first impression was fifty, at least. Wearing loose navy corduroy pants, brown shoes and a crumpled green T-shirt with ‘Kilkenny Cat Laughs 2002’ on the front. Hardly your average prospective tenant.