Maeve's Times (39 page)

Nowadays, people possibly had different goals, but it was complicated trying to work out what they were.

Mrs Perfect’s husband told her to stop fussing round like an old hen when she said something totally innocent like how they need to get up at six o’clock on Christmas morning to have everything ready.

She had actually said it so that he wouldn’t come home at all hours from a do like he did last Christmas Eve.

That’s when he snapped at her and called her an old hen. He said the children were in headlong flight from her because she made such an almighty fuss over everything. All people wanted to do at Christmas was get on with it, for heaven’s sake. Why couldn’t she take that on board?

He had apologised, of course, for his outburst, and said it was harsh of him, particularly when she went to so much trouble and wore herself out for everyone else. All he had been trying to say was that a tin of soup would do people fine rather than weeks of boiling bones. He hadn’t meant to sound bad-tempered.

And of course Mrs Perfect had forgiven him, her mother always said that men hate a woman who sulks.

But it is worrying her.

None of her four children and their ‘partners’, as they call them, is going to be with her for Christmas Day this year. Is this pure chance, or the way things happen, or is it more sinister? Does she fuss them all to death?

At the Christmas drinks party this week she wondered were people annoyed with her and even slightly pitying rather than impressed with her perfect home.

Who moved the goalposts?

And when were they moved?

Mrs Perfect thinks we should have been told.

The response to ‘Death in Kilburn’ was such that Maeve made it the basis of a play
, Deeply Regretted By
. First produced as a television drama by RTÉ in December 1978, the play won a Jacob’s Award that year, the award for best script at the Prague TV Festival, and was chosen to represent Ireland at the Prix Italia and the New York TV Festival.

P
atrick went into hospital on December 1st. He was sure he would be well home for Christmas, because it was only a light form of pneumonia, they told him. Modern drugs cured that kind of thing easily.

They didn’t cure Patrick. He died on Wednesday, 7th, without very much pain.

Stella was negotiating about the Christmas Turkey when the news came from the hospital. She couldn’t believe it, she kept thinking that it was a huge hospital and they must have made a mistake.

She asked the priest to come with her to the hospital. He was a nice new priest who had come to the area a couple of years before, he wasn’t attached to the parish church, he worked in welfare.

Father O’Brien went to the hospital with Stella and he asked all the right questions. It was a viral pneumonia, it hadn’t responded to antibiotics. Nothing could have been done, his coming into hospital had just meant that he died with less discomfort and he had aids to his breathing up to the very end. They were very sorry and they gave Father O’Brien and Stella cups of coffee out of a machine without asking them to pay for them. They told them to sit there as long as they liked.

Stella said they had better send telegrams to his mother and his brothers in the west of Ireland, and Father O’Brien brought her back to his office to do this. They gave his office number as somewhere to ring, because Stella and Patrick didn’t have a phone.

She went home by herself to tell the children when they got back from school. They had four children, and they all came home around four p.m. She bought a cake for tea because she thought it would cheer them up, and then she decided that it was too festive, the children would think they were celebrating or something, so she brought it back to the shop and they gave her the 65p back.

On Thursday December 8th, the feast of the Immaculate Conception, the children were off school anyway. They sat around in the house while a neighbour made cups of tea for Stella and told her that she should thank her maker every hour of the day that Patrick hadn’t been on The Lump like so many other men, and that there would be something to feed his wife and children now that he was gone.

Stella agreed mechanically, felt a sense of cold all through her stomach. She still thought that Father O’Brien might run in the door with his face all smiles, saying that it was a mistake, that it was another Patrick who had died of this thing that drugs couldn’t cure.

But Father O’Brien was having a very different kind of conversation. Two men had arrived in his little office. They were Patrick’s brothers, they had got the night boat over and come up on the train to Euston. It was their first time in London.

They hoped Father O’Brien would understand why they had come and appreciate the urgency of what they were doing. They were bringing Patrick’s body back with them to the west. They had been given the name of an Irish undertaker who arranged funerals across the channel and they were going to see him now.

‘But he’s lived all his life here,’ said Father O’Brien. ‘Won’t he want to be buried here where his wife and children can visit his grave?’

‘No,’ said the older brother. ‘He’d want to be buried in the parish church at home, where his wife and seven children can visit the grave.’

Oh dear God, thought Father O’Brien to himself. Here we go. ‘Well I think you’ll have to discuss this with Stella,’ he began.

‘We don’t know anything about Stella,’ said the brothers.

‘I’ll take you to Stella’s house,’ said Father O’Brien firmly.

The brothers agreed reluctantly that if it would avoid trouble they supposed they’d better go.

Father O’Brien got someone to look after his telephone and they walked off past the shops that were all lit up with Christmas lights and plastic holly sprigs. Father O’Brien got rid of the children and the neighbours and sat through the worst conversation of his 15 years as a priest.

Somehow anything he had to take before was easier than watching a woman realise she had been deceived for years, seeing the peeling back of layer after layer, realising that on five occasions when Patrick had gone home alone to see his old mother he had managed to conceive another child.

He could barely look at Stella’s face when the halting, inarticulate sentences came out of the brothers, each one filling in a dossier of deceit and weakness and double dealing.

‘What’s she like … your sister-in-law?’ Stella said eventually.

‘Like?’ Well she’s a grand girl, Maureen. I mean she’s had a hard life what with Patrick having to work over here and all, and not being able to get home except the once every summer.’

‘But we were married in a church,’ said poor Stella. ‘We must be really married, mustn’t we, Father?’

There was a throat-clearing silence and Father O’Brien started to talk about God understanding, and Stella being truly married in the sight of God, and nobody being able to make hard and fast judgments about anything, and his voice petered out a bit.

The brothers were even more restless than Father O’Brien. With some kind of instinct that he still doesn’t know how he discovered, he suggested that he take them for a pint because the pubs had just opened, and that he would come back and talk to Stella later.

He settled them in the corner and listened. The story was simple, Patrick’s funeral had to be at home, otherwise it was not a funeral. Otherwise his whole life cycle would have no meaning. It would be like being lost at sea not to be brought home to rest.

And that Englishwoman couldn’t possibly come home with him and behave as a wife. They had nothing against the poor creature, it was obvious there had been some misunderstanding, but Father could see, couldn’t he, how much scandal there would be if she came the whole way over in black and brought her children with her, it would be flying in the eyes of God.

Father O’Brien’s pint tasted awful.

And then there was the mother to think of, she had worked her fingers to the bone for the family, she was 83 now, they couldn’t have a common-law Englishwoman turning up at the Mass, now surely that was reasonable enough, wasn’t it?

Stella was sitting where he had left her. She couldn’t have moved from the table, and the door was on the latch the way he had left.

‘Maybe there’s a case for what they want to do?’ he began.

‘Sure,’ said Stella.

‘It has nothing to do with the rules or laws or what the neighbours think, maybe there’s just a case for letting him go back there to rest. It will give a lot of other people a lot of peace ….’

‘Oh yes, that’s true,’ said Stella.

‘And we can have a proper Mass for him here, too, you know,’ said Father O’Brien desperately.

‘That would be lovely,’ said Stella.

‘I’ve got to go back and tell them if you agree,’ he said glumly.

‘What do you think is best?’ she asked sadly.

‘Well, I don’t think anything is best, it all looks terrible and bitter, and I feel hopeless, but if you ask me what I want, I want Patrick to be buried here with you and his family all there to say goodbye.

‘If you ask me what would bring the greatest happiness to the greater number then I think that you should let him be buried in Ireland.’

‘It’s a bit hypocritical, isn’t it Father? Up to this morning you regarded us as a good Catholic family, part of your flock. Now suddenly I am an “outsider”, a woman living in sin, someone who can’t go to a funeral in Holy Catholic Ireland in case I give scandal.

‘I suppose the children are bastards as well. Everything that went before is all written off.’

‘There’s nobody who could say one word against you, Stella,’ he began.

‘Except that my husband was really my fancy man, and I can’t go to his funeral, myself and the four love children stay here while the wailing and the drinking and the praising and the caterwauling goes on in the west of Ireland, isn’t that right?’

‘It’s not like that.’

‘It is like that. And someone would say what a great man he was and how hard it is that emigration causes the break-up of families for so many people …. I’m not English, Father, I was born here but my parents were Irish, and know about funerals, I’ve heard them talk about them.’

‘No one said life was fair,’ he said. ‘It’s been very cruel to you this Christmas.’

‘Tell them they can have him,’ she said. She didn’t come to the door, she wanted no Mass in Kilburn.

The brothers arranged with the undertaker and the body was taken to London Airport and flown to Shannon and driven up the west coast and two weeks before Christmas on a cold Sunday afternoon Patrick was buried in a churchyard a mile from the house where he was born.

O
f course their names are not Sean and Maire, but they
are
from the south-west of Ireland and they are out in Cape Town on a holiday.

And when they arrived at their hotel they were asked did they want to make a booking for St Valentine’s Day. Special dinner.

‘Ah, we’ll sort that out later,’ said Sean.

After all, it was January 24th – three full weeks before the saint’s feast day. This was serious advance planning that was being called for.

‘Touting for extra business, looking for a quick buck,’ Sean said to Maire on that first night. ‘That’ll be it, believe me.’

And Maire said ‘fine’, and that’s all she said.

The hotel didn’t tout for business in any other way. It let them bring wine into their room, it pointed out a cheap laundromat, it let them make sandwiches out of the breakfast buffet.

But the following Saturday it asked them again, ‘Made your plans for St Valentine’s Day?’ And Sean, who by this stage had got a suntan and was thinking in rands, not punts, thanked them politely but said there was no real rush.

And then they began to read the papers.

Page after page showed the restaurants that are completely booked up for February 14th. They watched the talk shows at night on television, heated debates … is it all too much this Valentine fuss, or is it wonderful and symbolic?

Does it mean that 364 days a year your loved one does
not
think about you, but that’s OK if there’s one day that the loved one
does
made a fuss?

The flower shops all over town have had huge warning notices up urging people not to leave it until the last minute. The South African phone service, Telekom, has huge ads showing empty flower buckets outside florists, and giving the grim reminder ‘Phone First’.

Everything seemed to be referring to the day. Slimming machines were offered at 10 per cent off if you ordered them before The Day. Building societies were offering 16 per cent Home Loans on any love nest where the paperwork was done in time for St Valentine. There were so many heart-shaped Valentine balloons, paper flowers, teddy bears, gold-wrapped chocolates, satin and sequinned offerings in the newsagent’s that Sean and Maire could barely find a picture of Table Mountain to send to annoy the folks back home in the rain.

Saturday night would be their last night. Sean did not want to be wandering the streets of Cape Town, his nose pressed against windows where lovers or pretend-lovers were toasting each other in sparkling wine at £2 a bottle and them unable to get anywhere to sit down.

He booked.

‘All right, yes, a Valentine special,’ he said awkwardly. He had never sent a Valentine to Maire. Not in 39 years of marriage. It wasn’t the way for them, or their kind. They were people who worked hard and got on with it.

Not fancy words and poems and flowers.

Irishmen of his class, his age, didn’t go in for that sort of thing. That was for romantic-novelists, card manufacturers, flower sellers, confectioners, restaurant owners. They were the people who made the money out of it. Didn’t Maire
know
he was fond of her? They had been married nearly 40 years, raised a family. You don’t have to say these things with lots of red and white decorations for them to become real, Sean believes. And had Maire ever sent him a Valentine’s Day card, did he think?

Well, in the past when the children were at a silly age she might have thrown an old Valentine on the table and they all had a laugh and wondered who it might be from ….