The People Next Door (33 page)

She couldn’t not have invited Peggy to Jim’s birthday dinner. The man was going to be eighty on Tuesday week, and Yvonne and Clara were marking the occasion. They were cooking his favourite pork chops. They were leaving cloves out of the apple sauce, adding lots of black pepper to the mashed turnip, and boiling the potatoes in their skins.

After dinner they were serving the lemon meringue pie his mother used to make, and when they had finished eating they were going to present him with the grey cashmere scarf and matching gloves that had just appeared in the menswear section of the department store where Clara worked.

They couldn’t leave Peggy out, however much Yvonne wanted to. So Clara had phoned and invited them both and, much to Yvonne’s dismay, Peggy had agreed to come.

And now Greg wasn’t even going to be there. He was stuck in Dublin trying to get a bunch of teenagers ready for the stage. On the other hand, it might be for the best if he wasn’t there – it might seem to
Peggy like they were rubbing her nose in their engagement.

Yvonne sighed into the saucepan of turnip.

Clara looked over. ‘Cheer up – they’ll be gone in a couple of hours.’

Yvonne groaned. ‘Oh, God – two whole hours. What’ll I say to her?’

‘You’ll ask her how Christmas went, and you’ll admire whatever she’s wearing, and you’ll ply her with sherry. I’ll tell her all about my wildly exciting life until she dozes off.’

Yvonne laughed. ‘Try to make that happen in the first ten minutes, OK?’ She let a good half-minute go by before adding, ‘So your life’s wildly exciting, is it?’

Clara smiled. She pushed a masher into the pot of cooling apple chunks.

Yvonne decided to take her silence as permission to keep going. ‘Somebody nice on the scene?’ No harm in asking, now and again. Clara wouldn’t tell her unless she wanted to.

‘Somebody nice?’ Clara glanced at Yvonne, still smiling. ‘You mean a nice man, I presume?’

‘Just wondering, that’s all.’ Yvonne emptied the steaming potatoes into a warm bowl. ‘Doesn’t matter really, none of my business.’
But I’d love to know.

Clara lifted the masher and began to pick bits of apple from it. ‘Well, as it happens, there is someone, and he’s very nice.’

Yvonne tried not to look surprised. Clara was actually volunteering information – the sky outside must be full of pigs. ‘Oh, that’s good.’ She opened
the oven and put the potatoes on the bottom shelf.

Clara hesitated. Then she said quickly, ‘It is good. It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me, actually.’

Yvonne closed the door and stood up. ‘Sounds serious.’ Look at them. Look at Clara, bursting to tell her. Did she ever think she’d see the day?

‘It is serious. But …’ she paused, and after a few seconds she said, ‘Look, Mum, it’s a bit – complicated at the moment. I’d rather not say too much more about it just yet.’

‘No, of course not.’ Complicated?

Clara put the masher into the sink. ‘Here. You’ll need that for the turnips. By the way, what’s the news of Grainne?’

‘Not good. Justin phoned his sister, she was due in this afternoon. Sounds like this is it.’

Just then the doorbell rang. They both groaned.

‘I’ll go.’ Clara unwound her apron and threw it onto a chair. ‘I’ll tell them you’re in the middle of something delicate.’

Yvonne listened to the exchange of greetings in the hall as she hung both aprons on the hook by the fridge. What did she mean, complicated? What could be complicating things? Yvonne’s mind ran quickly through the possibilities. He could be married. He could have a drug problem or some other addiction. He could be much older. He could be living abroad. He could be divorced with children. None of them, except the first two, seemed too serious.

So he was married or he was an addict – and there wasn’t a thing Yvonne could do to protect Clara from
him, except pray that her daughter would have the sense to finish it before anyone – before Clara – got hurt.

Maybe Yvonne would have been better not knowing. Maybe it was no bad thing that Clara liked to keep her cards close to her chest. Maybe Yvonne could have lived without a brand new worry.

She opened the kitchen door, checked that she was smiling, and steeled herself for two hours of extreme diplomacy.

In an uncharacteristically thoughtful gesture, Grainne didn’t die until after her daughter had arrived from Spain and was standing at her mother’s bedside, with Grainne’s son, his pregnant wife and a nurse from the Cancer Society.

Grainne’s ex-husband wasn’t there. He was fifty-seven miles away in Limerick, watching a DVD with the woman who had replaced Grainne all those years ago. Perhaps the mother of his first two children – he had three more now – crossed his mind as he sat watching Helen Mirren play a remarkably accurate Queen of England, perhaps not.

In the end, it happened quietly, without fuss. Grainne simply drifted away from whatever halfway place she’d wandered into over the past few days, her chest lifting and falling so slightly, her breath coming and going so gently, you’d have been hard put to notice it. Her eyelids twitching every few seconds, her papery skin blanched of colour. Her cracked lips opening and closing silently, as if she was saying her Act of Contrition.

The nurse, holding her wrist, said gently, ‘Ann, Justin …’ They moved closer, bent to their mother in turn and touched her waxy forehead with their lips. And it was over, and Grainne was dead.

They sat for a while in the bedroom, not speaking. The curtains were half closed, the room dim in the fading wintry light. Kathryn had her hand on Justin’s arm, her thumb stroking his inner wrist. Ann sat at the other side of the bed, arms wrapped across her chest, chewing her bottom lip. The nurse stood near the door, her head bowed.

Nobody cried.

Eventually they got up and moved downstairs and the nurse went away, and Justin rang Dr Lynch and his father, and Kathryn rang Yvonne, in the middle of dinner with her in-laws.

In the kitchen Ann made tea, and ham and cheese sandwiches, and then went back upstairs to send an email to Suze from Justin’s computer.

As Kathryn, feeling unusually hungry, was biting into a sandwich, she felt a distinct nudge in her abdomen, and a minute later, another.

And she said ‘Oh’ and put down her sandwich and took Justin’s palm and held it against her swelling stomach. When the nudge came again, his face crumpled. He put his head on her shoulder, and finally wept.

She held him and rocked him gently and said, ‘Ssh, darling, I know, it’s OK. I know. I know.’

From the relative obscurity of his position at the outer end of the fourth pew from the top of the church – much to his relief, Justin hadn’t insisted that he sit with the rest of the family – William Taylor observed the people who had come to see off his ex-wife.

Across the aisle from him sat a pretty blonde female, he guessed in her early twenties. She wore a turquoise coat that ended just below her hips, a foot or so shorter than the lime green skirt underneath it. One side of her dark blonde hair was held up with a pale green clip that flashed whenever it caught the light from the stained-glass window above her head. William had caught her eye briefly as she sat down, but her gaze had swept past him without interest before she turned to speak to the woman who’d gone ahead of her into the seat.

The mother, he guessed. Similar build, same slightly upturned nose, same high cheekbones. Not unattractive, but of course outshone by the daughter. Wearing a navy coat that was serviceable if not
fashionable, and a thick red woolly scarf wrapped a few times around her neck.

They were joined, just before the mass started, by a tall man with receding fair hair, glasses, fiftyish – the husband? – in a well-cut light grey suit under a dark grey overcoat, and the black tie that some people wore to funerals. (William wasn’t wearing a black tie – he’d never owned one, thought them far too morbid.) The older woman leaned across in front of her daughter to put a hand on his arm – yes, the husband – and whispered something. He nodded.

Directly in front of William, two men sat. The younger man, thirtyish, had light brown hair in dire need of a good cut, and a worn-looking tweed jacket over faded denim jeans. No black tie there.

His companion, quite a bit older, wore a toffee-coloured coat that was at least two sizes too big for him, if the shoulders were anything to go by, and a blue woollen scarf that had unfortunately been introduced to a washing machine at some stage.

On the seat beside him lay a very strange hat. Considerably worn, retaining little of its original shape, brim frayed and dipping, crown dented in several spots. Impossible to make out the original colour – maybe light brown, but now mottled, a grubby mixture somewhere between grey and tan.

William could only assume that the man was blind, although he hadn’t seemed to need assistance getting into the seat, and there was no sign of a white stick. It wasn’t as if he needed a hat anyway, with that head of thick white hair, some of it standing on end now.

As the priest walked onto the altar and everyone stood, William turned his attention to the pew second from the top, which was occupied by a very interesting female indeed. Her curly auburn hair was pulled off her face and secured with a bright red ribbon. She wore a long, dark green woollen dress almost to her ankles, under which a pair of very pointed red boots poked out. The upper half of her body was cocooned in a voluminous, and very warm-looking, black and green shawl, which was secured on one shoulder with a chunky silver brooch.

William had been introduced to Suzannah earlier, in Justin and Kathryn’s house. ‘Suze,’ she’d corrected Ann, almost managing to give it two syllables, so richly drawling was her accent. ‘Everyone calls me Suze.’ She’d fixed him with a pair of dark green eyes and put out her hand towards him. ‘So you’re Ann’s dad.’

And you’re Ann’s lover, he thought. You’re the woman my daughter sleeps with every night. He could see what attracted Ann, what would probably attract quite a number of women – and men too. Suzannah wasn’t pretty. Her nose was too small for her face, and her teeth, surprisingly for an American, were slightly crooked, a few shades darker than perfectly white. But her hair, when it wasn’t pinned up, tumbled about her shoulders, and she met your gaze head on with those remarkable eyes, and spoke with an assurance that caught your attention and made you listen.

The biggest mistake of William Taylor’s life had been marrying Grainne Nesbitt when they were both twenty-seven. She hadn’t even been pregnant – Justin
hadn’t arrived for another four years – but Grainne had been pretty in a fragile kind of a way, and she had made it no secret that she thought he was simply wonderful. He’d been reeling from being thrown over by the girl who had gone on to break his older brother’s heart too, and somehow marriage to someone so gratifyingly adoring had seemed like the most sensible course of action.

It took him just under two months to realise his mistake, to understand how disastrous their union had been. Her neediness drove him distracted. Her preoccupation with her health and her tendency to burst into tears if he said the wrong thing irritated him beyond belief. He’d considered his options.

Divorce seemed the obvious way out, but his halfhearted enquiries dampened his enthusiasm for it. Far too much fuss, and an alarming lack of privacy about the whole business. So, characteristically, he decided on the route of least resistance, and took his pleasure where he could find it outside the home.

He was in the middle of his third affair when Grainne, unaware of his extramarital activities, became pregnant with Justin, during one of their increasingly rare episodes of intimacy. He had, in fact, barely got back to work after a lunch hour in his mistress’s bed before Grainne phoned the office from her doctor’s surgery and told him he was going to be a father.

It had made no difference to his lifestyle, apart from having to leave a dinner date when Grainne phoned him to tell him her waters had broken.

The marriage had stumbled on, with William increasingly absent from home on one pretext or another. Ann was born two years later, leaving Grainne preoccupied with two small children, and William even freer to pursue his outside interests.

When Ann was four, William’s business partner had introduced him to his girlfriend, soon to be his fiancée. A week after the engagement was announced, she and William had absconded, leaving an impressive trail of destruction behind them. Five years after that, William had applied for a divorce, having already produced two new children with the woman who, despite being nine years younger, was his match in every other way.

He was pleased at how his first son and daughter had turned out. The fact that both seemed fairly well balanced and content – their current bereavement apart, of course – helped him to feel better about having had practically no hand in their upbringing.

For years after the divorce, William’s only contact with Justin and Ann had been through infrequent, stilted letters and birthday cards with five-pound notes, and later ten-pound notes, tucked inside, and horribly formal meetings on neutral ground at Christmas, when everyone sat around politely and tried to find something to say.

But look at them now, each getting on fine, as far as he could see, despite his lousy parenting. He could glimpse, three rows ahead, Kathryn’s shoulder touching Justin’s. No doubt they were holding hands; those two were very touchy-feely. And what a shame
Suze wasn’t brave – or brazen – enough to sit next to Ann and hold her hand; that would have given the good people of Belford plenty to talk about.

News of Kathryn’s pregnancy had pleased William. The idea of his first-born son becoming a father was satisfying – if Fate or God or whatever, didn’t intervene and ruin everything again. William hadn’t seen Kathryn much over the years, but he decided that he approved of his son’s choice; you had to admire anyone who’d survived having Grainne as a houseguest for the past two years. He’d love to know how the two women had got on – and Justin, who must have been caught in the line of fire every now and again.