The Railway Station Man (2 page)

They were invariably right.

Jack was born during that time. Eight pounds four ounces, all faculties intact. I suppose I was happy and anxious. All young mothers are anxious, most of them are probably happy, niche found, creativity fulfilled, something to love bundled fretfully in their arms.

There was also a little girl. She died soon after birth, a victim of warring blood. I remember quite sharply the pain of watching her die, not because I loved her, there hadn't been time for that, but because of the fact that she had been offered no choice but death. I don't mean to swoop into sentimentality, merely to state the facts, and though the fact of her short existence has no bearing on what happened eighteen months ago, her conception and her death are a part of me.

About ten years later we moved from Dublin to Derry where Dan became the head of the mathematics department in a large grammar school. I remember so little of those years. It's probably just as well or otherwise I might bore you with tedious domestic details. It is a curious reflection on more than twenty years of marriage that all I remember with clarity was the ending of it, and even that memory is electric still in my mind for what most people in the world would consider to be the wrong reasons. It was shortly before Christmas in 1975 and I was alone in the house. I was sitting in front of the fire. I could feel the heat spreading through me. Around me on the floor were the Christmas cards. Daniel always complained that I left them too late for politeness. He was out visiting the parents of one of his sixth-form pupils. I even remember the name of the boy. George Cranston. His father was an Inspector in the RUC. My shoulders had been stiff for days and the warmth was mellowing them. The bell rang. I put the top on my pen and placed it carefully on the floor beside the unwritten envelopes and got up and went and opened the door. A policeman and a policewoman were standing on the step.

It's strange how immune you always feel to violence, devilry. Snow mixed with rain feathered their caps. In the car parked in the driveway behind them some sort of a radio crackled.

‘Yes?' I said.

‘Mrs Cuffe?' he asked, moving his hands nervously as he spoke.

‘Yes.'

‘May we come in a minute?'

‘Of course. It's a horrible night for standing on doorsteps.'

I moved back into the hall and they came in through the door. He took off his cap and banged at it for a moment with his hand. Snow drops sprinkled onto the carpet and melted. The policewoman closed the door and they stood looking at me as if waiting for me to speak first.

‘I'm afraid we have some bad news for you …'

‘I think,' said the woman, interrupting him, ‘we should go into the fire. I think you should sit down.'

‘Bad news' The words didn't have any meaning to me as I spoke them. ‘What's bad news? I mean – I think you'd better tell me here. Now.'

‘There's been an accident. Your husband's been shot.'

I laughed.

‘Cuffe's my name. Helen Cuffe. You must have got the wrong person.'

The policewoman took me by the arm and pushed me into the sitting room. I looked at the piles of envelopes and cards on the floor.

‘I was writing Christmas cards …' I gestured towards them.

‘Your husband has been shot,' she said.

‘Dan?'

‘Yes.'

‘But how? Why? Dan?'

‘He was with Inspector Cranston. Leaving his house. They were …'

‘Yes. That's where he was. He went to see George Cranston's father.'

‘It seems like they were trying to get the Inspector, but they got …'

‘Dan?'

‘Your husband has been injured.'

‘Is he … is he all right?'

‘They've taken him to the hospital.'

‘Is he all right?'

‘We don't know any more than that. That's all we were told.'

‘Shot.'

I wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it, but I didn't think they would understand.

‘Would you like to get your coat?' The policewoman touched my arm. ‘It's cold out. We'll take you on over to the hospital.'

I nodded and went towards the hall again.

‘Nothing like this has ever happened before. To me … to us … I feel a bit confused.' I pulled my coat out of the press in the hall. ‘Are you sure …?'

‘Yes. Quite sure.'

The policeman took the coat from me and held it while I fumbled my arms into the sleeves.

‘I don't think anyone would want to shoot Dan.'

The policewoman held my bag out towards me.

‘Is your key in this?' she asked. ‘You'll need your key.'

I nodded and took the bag from her hand. Forty-seven pounds that bag had cost me, I thought at that traumatic moment. I remembered how I had lied to Dan about the price. I smiled at the thought. They watched me smile. I wondered what I should be doing, saying.

‘I suppose you're used to this sort of thing?'

They edged me across the hall.

‘It's bad times, Mrs Cuffe,' said the constable opening the door. The snow still whirled in the wind. A rotten, stinking night to be shot.

‘Will I turn out the lights?' asked the woman.

‘No.' I got into the back of the car. ‘I hate the dark. I hate coming into a dark house.' I remembered that I hadn't got a handkerchief and wondered would I need one. Uncheckable tears flow in the cinema. Maybe at any moment that might happen. I had no precedent, nothing to measure up to. It was cold. The flakes shone under the street lights or whirled black in the shadows. Uncouth gaps in the street's façade meant war. Snow whirled in the gaps, lying now on the roads and on the birds sleeping along the railing by the river, heads folded down into their bodies.

The soldiers on the bridge peered into the car and nodded us on.

‘Why would anyone shoot Dan?' I asked again as we drove up the hill towards the hospital. I asked it just to break the silence. They didn't reply. Why should they. I knew the answer.

I laughed.

‘Maybe it was a dissatisfied pupil.'

They didn't move. Their heads remained stiff, staring out of the windscreen. Didn't smile, gesture. My hands were so cold in their silence. We drew up at the entrance for the ambulances.

No Parking, it said. Ambulances Only. A tall man was standing at the door. I knew the moment I saw his face that Dan was dead.

We took him to Dublin and buried him beside the little girl in Mount Jerome. He had had no choice either, I thought, as I stood by the grave, but then, I told myself, we none of us have that choice. Dan's mother clung to my arm as if she needed my support. My hands were still cold. That is the one thing I know I remember. All the rest is a vague jumble in my mind. Did I feel sorrow? Anger? I hope I felt both of these emotions, but I'm not very sure. My hands were cold. No matter what I did over that two weeks I couldn't warm them. I would wake in the mornings to find these two cold hands clenched across my warm breasts. They felt as if they belonged to someone else. One of my teachers at school had had flat white hands. They looked always as if no blood moved through them. If she touched me I used to find myself shivering with some kind of panic. I was worried by the thought that my hands might become like hers.

I worried about Jack. He seemed curiously unperturbed, rejecting almost contemptuously any comfort that I held out towards him. He stood beside his grandmother at the funeral in his school suit, wearing Dan's black tie. His face was very white, but quite composed. He used to go up to her room in the evenings after dinner and I could hear their voices rumbling on, laughing even at times, being comfortable with each other. The day he went back to school I got on the bus and returned to Derry.

The house was just as I had left it that evening. Two piles of Christmas cards on the floor in front of the dead fire, a fine dust on all the furniture. I threw the cards in the dustbin and cleaned out the fireplace. Somewhere not too far away there was an explosion, the floor trembled under me, the windows rattled. I knew at that moment that what I had been hiding for the last few weeks from myself as well as the people around me was an amazing feeling of relief, liberation. As I cleared out the fireplace I wondered about guilt and decided against it, where was the point or the time for guilt. In the distance the fire-engines raced to a fire, ambulances, army vehicles. Glass cracked and split. The flames burst out through windows flickering into the street.

I was startled by my own happiness. The first thing I did after I bought this cottage was to build a small glass porch onto the front, not so much to protect me from the wind, but so that I could walk past packed shelves of plants each time I used the front door. On summer evenings when I water the geraniums they release a warm sweet smell that clings to my hair and clothes. That is the full extent of my gardening activity. I have never had any aptitude for weeding, grubbing, digging. There is room in the porch for one wicker chair. This has become the property of the cat. He curls and stretches on the two green cushions, digging his claws in and out of the covers, which have become feathery and pock-marked with this treatment.

I sold everything that had been in the house in Derry, apart from my books and, of course, Jack's curious mess. It seemed the right thing to do. A lot of people turned up at the auction and pawed with a certain evil excitement through the labelled contents of the house.

Jack never really moved in here with me. He preferred to take on the role of visitor, making quite short and almost formal visits to see me. Most of his holidays he chose to spend with his grandmother in Dublin. I think he must have recognised, without any words being spoken, my reaction to the death of his father and possibly been deeply hurt by it. I hate to think that I caused him pain. Maybe I merely bored him to the bone. Perhaps if he had been allowed to live we might have grown into some kind of understanding, a closeness.

Who can ever tell?

He could hear her shuffling round the kitchen. Her clogs or rope soles flapping as always at the heels. The murmur of her voice as she talked to the cat. The inscrutable yellow eyes would stare back at her as she spoke. Then they would close, a slow curtain falling. If he shut his eyes and dug himself further under the clothes, he could pretend maybe that this was a dream. I am not in Knappogue, the back of beyond, I am wrapped in my bed in number eleven, Trinity College, Dublin. Warm and comfortable city sounds thrum in my ears. People breathe in the next room, cough, piss in the lavatory down the passage, try to spit hangovers out of their heads with the toothpaste. Sometimes when his eyes were shut he could remember his room in Derry. That was his pride, his safe joy. When he had had to rip the posters and the pictures from the walls, exposing the pale patterns underneath, he had felt such desolation. He had had to empty all the drawers and the shelves, pack into cardboard boxes all his books, records, tapes, papers, throw out old clothes, the past's broken toys. He had felt so vulnerable as he stood there in the dusty, empty room with the pale empty patterns on the walls.

‘It'll be all right Jacko,' she had said behind him. ‘We'll put the whole thing together again. Everything will be all right.'

‘I don't understand why you're leaving here.'

She had laughed and left the room.

She was like that. Inscrutable was a word he had often applied to her.

He could hear her now, coughing. She smokes too much, he thought. She stubs out her cigarettes on plates and saucers. Dead butts and ash beside the crumbs or forlorn in the spilt tea. Filter tips float eternally in the lavatory. Father had hated that. He would rant and rave a bit and tell her she would be dead before she was fifty. She just used to laugh, bend down over the lavatory and pick the butt out with her pinced fingers.

‘I'll see you out,' she had once said.

She had been right.

He heard her going out of the back door.

The bottom of the door scraped on the kitchen tiles. It had been like that ever since she moved in. She never seemed to notice that you have to push the door quite hard to open it, nor the noise it made as it scraped on the floor. It gritted his teeth. He supposed that perhaps he should do something about it, but he always felt that doing odd jobs around the place committed him to the house in a way that he didn't wish to be committed. She had run out of cigarettes. The early morning pattern. He could never understand how it was that smokers allowed this to happen so frequently. She would prowl around the house looking for the hidden cigarette, a half-smoked one in a saucer somewhere, one shoved into the back of a drawer. The car was always the last hope. Sometimes she would find one, a box even, lying on the shelf under the dashboard. If she didn't she would get into the car, just as she was in her dressing gown, hair uncombed, and drive to the village. Of course if he were up and about he would offer to go for her. But he wasn't. He was tucked in his bed listening. There, the car door banged. The engine coughed a little, as she did so often, before it started. Probably a piece of red dressing gown trailed out under the door as she drove away.

She would never have lived like this if father had been still alive. He had been a neat, well-ordered man. He believed in tradition, in keeping up appearances. ‘Within the structures' he used to say to her, ‘you can be vague, careless, introspective, anything you like, Helen, but you must keep within the structures. Otherwise things fall apart.' He had, of course, been a mathematician.

Father had felt she needed protecting from some destructive demon that he could see inside her. He had tried to explain it to Jack one afternoon as they played golf at Portsalon. Pillars of driving rain interrupted their play, sweeping relentlessly down the lough. Five minutes later it would be over and the grass would sparkle and steam under a hot bright sun.

‘Your mother'll be getting wet,' he had said as they stood under a tree near the fourth green. ‘I bet she hasn't a coat or a scarf or anything with her.'