The Shelter of Neighbours (23 page)

When Conor was three, Polly got a chance to move to Copenhagen with the bank, and she took it. As she had hoped, nobody cared whether you were a single mother or not in Denmark. In fact, it seemed that most mothers were single, at least the ones she came across; it was almost something to brag about. They had grimly bobbed hair, dressed in corduroy pants and big green parkas, and smoked cigars. Some of them had jobs in the bank, but usually they were doing degrees in impractical subjects. Women's studies or ethnology or Greek and Roman Civilisation. The state paid for their education, and paid them social welfare and child welfare while they were in college. All the talk was of feminism and women's rights and the country was packed with crèches and kindergartens, where children were looked after free, by students and nurses and women from Turkey, in what looked like luxurious surroundings. After a while, Polly left the bank and went to college at last, like all the other single mothers. She chose film studies, and eventually became a scriptwriter, writing soaps for the Danish television channel, then documentaries, which brought her all over the world: Faroes, Shetland, Greenland, Iceland. In Greenland she met Karl, who was hiking around the old Norse settlements, taking photos, and did not mind that she had Conor, although he had no intention of having any children himself, as Polly found out soon enough. By then Conor was twelve. He grew up, became a scientist, a marine biologist. After working for a few years in Denmark, he went on a round-the-world trip, and ended up in Australia, and got a visa and a temporary post at a university doing research on the breeding habits of pilot whales. He is still there.

Polly sits at her window, in her own bungalow, and listens to the fire whispering in the grate, to the wind whispering outside, whistling around the eaves. She has been here for longer than she had planned to stay, and has decided to stay for one more week. She is going to begin work here, sketching the basis for a programme of some kind about the region: the Gaeltachts of Ireland, maybe, a topic she is well suited to covering but has always avoided. The house is warm and cosy, and now the valley seems to hold her, too. People she runs into in the shop nod to her and say hello, do not avoid her, as she thought they were doing initially. A few have recognised her and chatted to her about old times. Nobody mentions Paddy Mullins, or asks about the baby, but when Polly mentions that she has a grown-up son, they do not seem surprised. Eileen probably spilled the beans, or Katherine. It doesn't matter, they are interested in him, too, they want to hear about Australia and the whales. Lots of the local young people do round-the-world trips as a matter of course in their gap year; half the population of twenty-somethings seem to be in Thailand or New South Wales. Nobody cares about what used to be called unmarried mothers now, either. There are heaps of them, even in the Gaeltacht. Still, nobody mentions Paddy Mullins. Maybe they forget he existed.

Polly tries to tell her mother about Conor, since she has told almost everyone else. ‘I have a child,' she says. Her mother cocks her head, and smiles uncomprehendingly. Her ability to lip-read is most erratic. ‘He's Paddy's child,' Polly continues. ‘Paddy Mullins, the boy who drowned. Do you remember?'

‘Would you like a cup of tea?' asks her mother. It is the first time she has offered Polly any refreshment. She gets up and walks across the kitchen to the range.

‘I was in love with Paddy Mullins,' Polly says.

Her mother smiles and says, ‘I was thinking of baking an apple tart.

She finds the end of her mother's story.

When they had gone a few miles, William said, ‘I've a terrible headache, love.'

‘Stop,' she said. ‘Stop and have a rest. What hurry is on you?'

‘I can't stop,' he said. ‘There is a long journey ahead of us. I'm taking you home.'

So all she could do was take out her handkerchief and she tied it around his forehead and she gave him a kiss. His head was as cold as ice and she felt frightened when she touched it. But she said nothing. And he galloped on until they were passing her own father's house. And she shouted and asked him to stop.

‘Why would you want to stop?' he asked.

‘The moon shines clear

The horseman's here.

Are you afraid, my darling?'

And he spurred on the horse.

But the horse would not move an inch. The horse stopped at her father's gate and refused to move. He spurred and he whipped but it didn't matter. The horse had a mind of its own.

So – ‘Go on inside,' he said, ‘and sleep in your own bed tonight. And I'll be here waiting for you first thing in the morning. I'll sleep in the stable, myself and the horse.'

She kissed him goodnight and did as he told her.

And when she went inside, her father was there and he was surprised to see her. But she took courage and told him what had happened. She said William had come for her, and she could not live with anyone else.

Her father turned pale. ‘William?' he said.

‘Yes,' said she. ‘He's outside, asleep in the stable.'

‘That's impossible,' said her father. ‘William died a year ago.'

She didn't believe him. How could she, the poor girl? So her father took her out. He had to do it. He took her to the graveyard and he took a shovel and he dug and dug. And there was William, in his coffin, dead and decayed. And around his poor head her handkerchief was tied, the handkerchief she'd tied around his forehead only the night before. Yes. And it was stained with blood. So she had to believe him then.

The story is in a collection of German ballads, which she finds in one of the bedrooms. So how did her mother learn that? Had she read the book or were the stories flying around in the air like migratory birds, landing wherever they found suitable weather conditions, a good supply of food? What a gloomy story! Polly shivers and shuts the book firmly, feeling the dead hand of William like ice on her forehead.

That night Polly rings Conor and tells him she is here. She hopes he will say he will come over, but since he lives in Brisbane, he is not likely to come today or tomorrow. It is nice to talk to him, though, and to tell him what she is doing. She does not tell the truth, that her mother will not listen to her story. He listens, with appreciation, although it is early morning in Australia, and he has just woken up to a summer's day. He appreciates the drama of her news, Polly can tell that, and suggests that she go and visit Muriel, if she is still alive. Muriel, his paternal grandmother. Maybe Muriel is not deaf? Polly finds herself saying, yes, she will do that, and then she rings Karl to tell him she will stay on in Ireland for another week or perhaps two.

Something happens in the valley now, that takes Polly by surprise.

The Christmas lights go on.

All the little houses come alive.

Coloured lights fill every window, are strung along the edge of the roof, are draped in the hedges. Santa Clauses climb up fairy ladders to chimneys, reindeers glow in the bare gardens. Red and green and blue lights flash and twinkle in the deep dark winter valley; some of the bungalows seem to be jumping, they flash so much.

In the old days there was one candle, lit on Christmas Eve, in every house. When you walked through the valley to Midnight Mass, you saw these candles flickering in every window, the stars flickering overhead. Now the houses are flashing and jumping in a myriad colours glowing against the black sea and sky and mountain, brash and, it seems to Polly, beautiful. ‘We're here!' the lights seem to proclaim. ‘We've survived, we're not going away!'

She finds Muriel easily. She lives in the house she lived in thirty years ago, Paddy's house. It is, as Polly expected, decorated, though not as extravagantly as some of the other houses. There are coloured lights on a hedge by the gate, and another string around the door.

Muriel is watching
tv
when Polly calls. She's alone. Polly guesses, correctly, that Paddy's father is dead. It strikes her that the valley is full of widows. Muriel is wearing jeans and a jumper, and she is still small and thin. To Polly's surprise she speaks Irish, but with a north Dublin accent. ‘Of course I speak Irish,' she says. ‘I've been here for fifty years. I'd have been out of the loop altogether if I hadn't learnt it, wouldn't I?' Her manner is chirpy, friendly, but with an underlying toughness, an urban edge that is different from anything you get around here. She offers tea and biscuits straight away; she turns down the
tv
but she does not turn it off. Polly opens her mouth and starts to explain why she is here. Muriel listens, half-smiling, her eyes thoughtful rather than sad. Then she takes Polly in her arms and holds her for a minute, against her woolly jumper, her thin body. Polly, of course, cries. She cries and Muriel pats her hand and says, ‘Yes, love, yes.'

They drink the tea.

Muriel talks about herself, about Paddy. He was a very quiet boy, but always good-humoured, she could talk to him more easily than she could ever talk to anyone, much more easily than she could talk to his father. His father is dead now, too. He – Paddy – had a depth of understanding. He was more like a daughter than a son. On the night he drowned, he had kissed her goodbye, which was unusual, but she only remarked on it afterwards. It was a calm night, he had been out in much rougher weather and returned home unscathed. The truth about his death would not be known, but she had heard there had been a row on board, another young man had attacked Paddy; Paddy got thrown overboard and hit his head on a rock. The real story would never be told; the other man was the son of the owner of the boat; Paddy was dead, anyway, and the fishermen would never inform on one of their own. The whole story about going aground was made up, a sham. Fiction.

There are no tears from her. She tells the story calmly, pausing occasionally for dramatic effect or to let a shocking point sink in. It is a story she has told before, many times, in spite of her protestations that it is confidential, a secret. Probably, she told it to Paddy's father, and who else? Her best friends, her close relations? The story is polished. What is true is its terrible core, that Paddy, the son she could talk to, is dead. And even this no longer disturbs her. But of course it all happened so long ago. Paddy drowned thirty years ago. How could she cry? Tears do not last that long. Paddy has been transmogrified into a hero: a brave, strongly drawn character in a story that she has half-remembered, half-invented.

So Polly tells her story of Paddy, and for her it is a fresh story, it is the first time she has told it to anyone, and so her tale is not as polished, not as well paced, not as neatly composed as Muriel's. Still, it takes on a certain formality: Polly has to decide, as she sits on the fireside chair, keeping her eyes off the silent
tv
screen, where to start. The bus, the pier, the park? School? She decides, or memory decides, or Muriel, or the pressures of the moment, the pressure to relate, the pressure to sympathise, the pressure to attract compassion, the pressure to confess, the pressure to create, what to leave in, what to exclude.

The fact is, no matter what she decided, Muriel would be fascinated by this story of her son, which she had not heard before, not at all, although of course people had let her know of Polly's existence, had hinted at the reason for her sudden departure from the valley. But those were rumours, snippets of gossip, that had the power to disturb but not to enthral, console, nourish. So now she listens intently, her whole body still, concentrated on listening. For this story she is the perfect audience, and the story is shaped by her listening as much as by Polly's telling: Paddy's story belongs to the two of them. And why did Polly not understand that until Conor pointed it out?

When the story is finished, Muriel and Polly sit in silence. The coloured lights on the fuchsia bush twinkle against the black sea and the black mountain and the black sky. They sit in silence. They let the story settle. And for minutes it is as if he is here again, on this earth. Alive, seventeen. He is not on the pier or in the park or on the mountainside, but on the bus. He is sitting on the bus, silently staring out the window, motionless as a seagull on rock, lost in a boy's dream.

The day after Frank died I went to the bank, withdrew half our savings, and put all the money in a suitcase in the attic (wrapped up in a pair of used pants – I was banking on a burglar balking at rummaging through smelly knickers). There were several reasons why I did this – one, Frank and I had talked about not having all our eggs in one basket, but, typically, hadn't got around to doing anything about finding another receptacle for any of them. And two, last week Martha, in the book club, said the banks were good for a year at the most. And when they'd go bust, you'd get no warning, was what she said. You'd turn on the news one morning and that would be it. (This was when we were having the wine and snacks, after we'd discussed the novel for half an hour, saying how much we hated it, which is the most common reaction in our book club to most of the novels we read.) The book club spent a good bit of time wondering where you could put your money for safe-keeping, if you had any, that is. Some said the post office. The post office is backed by a German bank and Germany is in a better state economically than us. Others said, spend it. Under the mattress, said Clara, who is inclined to be cynical.

In the bank, they wouldn't give me all our money, and it was not easy getting my hands on even half of it. They tried to persuade me to transfer to a different kind of account with better interest rates. Then they started to give me stick. Why did I need so much cash? the girl – Georgina, they're nearly all called something like that – asked, with a smile as warm as a carving knife. When I told them Frank had dropped dead of a heart attack while climbing a hill in Wicklow yesterday and I needed money for funeral expenses, Georgina shut up and handed it over. Her little mask of a face was pale. I should be kinder to these people. She was probably too young to know that it was much more than anyone needs for a funeral (not that death is by any means cheap).

There's a photograph of me beside the hearse, smiling, with all the wreaths in the background heaped up like a bright bank of chrysanthemums at a debs' ball. I, in my dark green winter coat, have one gloved hand on the coffin. I must have felt I was still holding hands with Frank. I knew he was dead and about to be buried, but I must have felt that contact of a sort was still possible. At least his body was still close to me. I was putting my hand on the coffin the way you put your hand on your partner's knee, as you both drive along in the car on a long journey – to reassure him. I'm still here, I love you, thanks for doing all this boring driving and please go right on doing it. Or the way you put your hand on his forehead, in bed, when you wake up in the early hours of the morning, to reassure yourself that he's still breathing. Thanks for staying alive.

Only now he wasn't.

But that's the thing I didn't take in for quite a while. Not really. For a month – at least – I kept thinking that he had just gone away on a trip, or just to work or the shop, and that he'd be home at any moment. Then the recollection that he was dead would assault me, like a robber jumping out of a bush and knocking me on the head. It's often like that, I've heard, from other women whose partners have died. It takes a while for you to realise what death actually means. Which is, that he's not coming back. Ever. When this dawned on me – ‘dawn' is the wrong word, it sank in, heavily and slowly like a stone burrowing its way down into the earth over hundreds of years – I also thought that it was all harder for me because I'm an atheist. I was probably wrong about this. I'm sure it's awful for everyone, even ardent believers. For me, though,
never
really does mean
never
. Also, I know that he can't hear what I say or see what I do, which I think is a very comforting aspect of the afterlife belief – the sense that the dead are with you all the time. (In fact, if you believe the whole shebang, nobody is ever dead; it's just that you can't see them while you're still in the land of the living, but they're around all the same, hidden behind a curtain that's going to roll back the minute you die yourself and take your place on their side of it, to strut your stuff in the play that goes on for all eternity.) Atheism is tough on the emotions, which is no doubt why most people don't go in for it. The fact that someone you loved and lived with for thirty-five years no longer exists in any way whatsoever, just as he didn't exist before he was born, is almost impossible to tolerate. (Although it's very easy to accept that he didn't exist before he was born. Eternity has a starting line for individuals, apparently, but not a finishing one.)

When you begin to reach towards the realisation that he's completely gone is the moment you're in the deepest trouble. Then you're in the dark water, and there you'll very likely stay, floundering around, for quite a while.

You need your family at a time like this. But Jamie, our son – well, I can't even think about him. Somebody told him about what had happened but he wasn't at the funeral, not he.

All I had were my neighbours and a few friends.

And they're no replacement for your husband. They're like a few crumbs when you're starving to death. They're deeply inadequate and their company and the diversions they provide are deeply disappointing. They know this.

They also know that they are better than nothing.

The first week after Frank's death, my sister telephoned me every night to ask how I was, and my brother phoned a few times a week. Even my niece, who is twenty-six and engaged to be married and making a film about horses, phoned. Twice. Two of my friends from the book club and three from the office where I used to work called, too, and of course I got a heap of emails. One old colleague, who lives not too far away, actually dropped in, unannounced, just to say hello and have a chat. I almost cried then, I was so grateful. Such a small thing, but nobody calls by any more these days without phoning. Not where I live anyway, out in the suburbs. That visit brought me back to my childhood, when dropping in on a friend, a neighbour, was the most normal thing in the world. Though of course then most people didn't have a phone, let alone email, so they had to come in person if they wanted to have a chat, which is, I notice, an aspect of the neighbourliness thing most people conveniently forget when they're bemoaning the loss of the good old days. They had to be neighbourly because they didn't have a phone, much less Facebook or whatever.

The only people who call in to me casually on a fairly regular basis are Tressa and Denis, who live two doors down. (The person who lives next door I never talk to. Never. She's peculiar – didn't even come to the funeral. Suffers from the depression, I'd say, though she just comes across as a nasty piece of work. Audrey, she's called.)

Tressa and Denis are about ten years younger than me. They have no children. I don't know if that's got anything to do with it, but Tressa is one of those women who makes everyone feel happy. I try to put my finger on what it is she's got – it's not just that she's encouraging and positive, although that's part of it. It's never enough on its own, though. I've tried it, and I know I come across as insincere. Which I am – because I'm seldom more interested in anyone else than I am in myself. That's what it is, I suppose. Tressa is genuinely interested in other people, not altruistic merely, but genuinely, profoundly curious, in the nicest possible way. She makes you believe you are an interesting person and that your stories are worth listening to, whereas the majority of us do the opposite. Also, she looks very nice without being too attractive, which is part of the package – she has the sort of looks you'd describe as ‘pleasant'. A roly-poly, no waist, with bright blond hair sticking up on her head like hedgehog prickles, big saucer blue eyes, skin like vanilla ice cream, the soft kind. She likes to wear biscuit and pink tracksuits when she's at home, and navy blue trouser suits when she's at work. Sort of androgynous clothes, though she's enormously feminine-looking. Motherly. (I'm more androgynous myself, muscular and dark, with my big nose and bony face. If it wasn't for my long hair and skirts, I'd pass for a little old man.)

Denis is nice, too. Not motherly. Not fatherly. Boyish. Very funny. He'd make a cat laugh. He'd make a widow laugh and that's what he did, the day of the funeral. That's how funny he is, and clever. A natural comedian.

You'll wonder what the joke was, maybe. But I'm not going to tell you, because jokes never work when I retell them, and this one involved mimicking, of gestures. He was mimicking teenage girls walking on the high heels they wear when they go out. There, I've told some of it, anyway, and it doesn't work but it was hilarious the way he told it. It was the mimicking of the mincing steps that made me giggle. The contrast between Denis, a fifty-year-old, not too tall, slightly chubby and balding man, and the sixteen-year-old bombshells he was imitating, made the joke. Not the contrast. The miracle. The unlikely miracle of the fifty-year-old Denis becoming a sixteen-year-old twit of a girl, which is what he could do, for a minute. That's what he could do. Transform himself into anything, for the sake of a joke.

It never occurred to me then or at any other time that I liked Denis in any sexual way. He wasn't sexy. Funny men aren't. They're the men I like but I don't feel attracted to them – it takes something else, some gravity, to get me hooked. (Frank couldn't tell jokes. He did tell them – well everyone does, occasionally. But usually they weren't very funny, or they fell flat and he'd insist on explaining them laboriously, unable to believe that his audience had understood the point but not laughed.) Not that I was feeling attracted to anyone on the day of my husband's funeral, and hadn't, either, for years before that. Not very often, anyway, or for long, or to any effect. (Not even to Frank, but that's normal, I suppose.)

Tressa often asked me into their house for dinner in the weeks following the death, and I always went in. Dinner, I was finding, was the toughest time. I could get through the day.
Getting through
, the phrase says it all. But getting through satisfied me for the moment. Although I couldn't see light at the end of a tunnel, I believed intellectually, if not emotionally, that it was there, perhaps a few years away. Everyone told me it was, anyway. I believed that in the end I'd feel a bit better, that I'd not be getting through the days, that I'd enjoy the days again, as I'd always enjoyed them before, ever since I met Frank and married and stopped worrying about being a lonely singleton – an anxiety that had spoiled my youth, actually, which I regret, deeply, because of course my youth is dead and buried, too. (Wouldn't it be great if it were there? The younger you, waiting for you to slip back into its lovely skin when you passed over? Now that's an afterlife I could fancy, an afterlife that let me have another go at life and make it work right this time.)

After the first month, when I stopped imagining that Frank had gone on a trip somewhere and would turn up for dinner, I had a short breakdown for about a week. Stayed in bed. Moped.

Then I got bored. The days are very long when you stay in bed, moping. And it all gets so hot and sticky and stale, and you can't sleep at night because you've been half-asleep all day. So I forced myself to get up and began to pull myself together.

This was four months after Frank died.

For a start, I asked Denis and Tressa into my house for dinner.

Tressa hugged me when I issued the invitation, which is a very strange way of saying I stood at the garden wall and said, ‘Why don't you come in to me for dinner this evening, then, for a change?' She had to step over the wall, which is only about two feet high, to hug me. But she did that.

I dressed up, for the first time since the death. I'd got used to pulling on the same pair of jeans every day, and sticking on a black T-shirt or jumper. But I selected one of my old favourite hippyish skirts from the wardrobe, and a white Victorian blouse, and I did my face and pinned up my hair nicely. It wasn't easy to do all this tarting up – it felt pointless, and my body seemed stiff and almost paralysed as I rubbed in the foundation cream, mascara-ed my eyelashes. It was as if I was performing these tasks underwater, in a kind of jelly that resisted my every move. But I did it and in the end when I looked at my reflection I felt pleased enough.

But I couldn't muster up the energy to cook. This is the thing: I had always loved cooking. But I couldn't bring myself to do it. Not real cooking. The details of making a complex dish dismayed me. Herbs, garlic-chopping, caramelising onions, the steps you have to take … they struck me as disgustingly trivial. Like playing at having a tea party with doll's cups and saucers, when you are four or five. (Which means, I see now, that my heart was understanding death and what time means. Because when the heart is forgetting it, it takes joy in playing at tea parties, and chopping parsley and doing trivial things. Real life, at its best and most enjoyable, is trivial. It's only death that's serious.)

I roasted a chicken. That's all. Added a few things I'd bought – potato salad, coleslaw, olives, in plastic boxes from the shop. It was
ok
. And of course we drank more wine than usual – usually we had one bottle between the three of us, on an ordinary evening, when they'd be going to work next day. But this evening, which was special, we had more. And that helped. Talking, joking, Denis was funny as always.

You might think, she cried, she wept, because of the wine. But I didn't. I laughed because of it. That's the effect wine has always had on me and I was very glad to see that it still had.

In the spring, a few days after I had recovered from my bout of depression, Denis dropped in to see me, alone. I'd just come back from my morning walk and was still in my coat when he knocked. It was midday.

‘I walk every day now,' I said. ‘Rain or shine. Just to get the endomorphins going.'