Two Fridays in April (2 page)

When she eventually managed to open the envelope she found a receipt inside from a holiday company. She looked at it uncomprehendingly, saw their two names, and Rome, and flight times. It meant nothing to her. They’d made no travel plans.

And then she noticed the departure date, 29 April, and it suddenly made sense. A surprise gift for her birthday, and what would have been their third wedding anniversary. She’d never been to Rome.
I’ll take you sometime
, he’d promised – and here it was, his final present to her. Heartbreak layered on top of heartbreak.

The marmalade jar is almost empty. She gets to her feet and crosses the room and scribbles on the blackboard that’s screwed to the wall beside the shelf of cookery books.
Floor cleaner
is already there, and
toothpaste
and
coffee. Marmalade
, she writes, the chalk clacking over the surface like a cockroach.

As she returns to the table she hears sounds from the room above: the soft bump of footsteps crossing the floor, the rattle of curtains along their pole, a door clicking open. She slots two more slices of bread into the toaster and pushes down the lever.

Mo moved in with Daphne and Una the day after Finn was buried. She didn’t even phone to say she was on the way, just turned up on the doorstep in the middle of the morning, her face shiny with tears or with rain, someone’s unwanted handbag wedged under her arm, someone else’s battered blue suitcase sitting on the path beside her.

I thought I might stay here for a while
, she said, her voice hard and steady despite her wet face, despite the fact that her only son, her only child, had been lowered the day before into a hole in the ground – and Daphne was too numb, too stiff with grief, to find a way to say no, so she lifted the case and brought it inside, and Mo followed.

And there the three of them were: his daughter, his mother, his wife, living under the same roof but connected only by their loss of him, broken with misery, stumbling as best they could through the unimaginably deep void he’d left behind.

And five days later, Mo had moved herself out as abruptly as she’d arrived, again offering no explanation. She simply materialised on the threshold of the sitting room one afternoon, the blue case all packed up again.

I’ll be off home now
, she said.
I’ll give a ring, see how you’re doing
– and Daphne stopped shovelling ashes from the fireplace and sat back on her heels and regarded the rigid little figure in the doorway. Blue scarf wrapped tightly around her neck, black
quilted jacket, burnt-orange sneakers below grey tracksuit bottoms.

You don’t have to go
, she told her – what did it matter who lived where now? – but Mo went anyway.

For the first few agonising weeks and months Daphne would lie in bed each night and think,
How did I get here? How did I end up in this life?
She would imagine the days stretching endlessly ahead, each one beginning with a fresh wallop of misery that left her empty and flaccid as a pricked balloon, and she wondered how many more she was expected to endure.

Time played tricks. An hour would seem never-ending, a month would pass in a blink. She would find herself in a supermarket with no recollection of having travelled there, or sitting in a queue of cars with no clue as to where she was headed. She would stand at crossroads for unknown periods of time, lost in her grief, heedless of the green man that lit up every so often across the street.

Along with the almost unbearable pain of losing Finn, there was the added anguish of all that had to be done in the aftermath of his death. Closing his bank account, applying for his death certificate, switching bills and health insurance into her name, cancelling his standing orders and his cycling club membership and his magazine subscriptions.

Tidying up the life he had abandoned, smoothing it over like it had never happened. Each task was like driving another nail into his coffin; each form added insult to injury by forcing her to tick
widowed
instead of
married
. How she’d adored being married, being someone’s wife. Now she was nothing, she was nobody’s.

She didn’t ask for Mo’s help with any of it, and Mo didn’t offer. When they began to meet regularly again, when Daphne finally felt able to reinstate Mo’s weekly invitation to dinner that had been in place while Finn was alive, his name rarely came up. They talked about everything but the man they’d lost.

In February, ten months after his death, Daphne opened an envelope from the city council and found a cheque for a substantial sum paper-clipped to a brief typewritten note of condolence. It stung as painfully as an unexpected hard slap across her face.

It wasn’t the amount of the compensation; that hardly registered with her. It was the implication that money, that a number followed by a series of noughts on a cheque, could somehow lessen her sorrow.

Sorry about one of our lorries killing your husband
, it said to her.
Buy yourself a new handbag, go on a little cruise, you’ll be grand
. She wanted to rip up the cheque and send it back to them, or set fire to it and watch it turn to ash – but it was Mo, brisk, unsentimental Mo, who forbade it.

Don’t be stupid
, she said.
Put it in the bank, forget about it, pretend it’s not there. Some day you’ll be glad of it, or Una will
. So to keep the peace a new account was opened and the cheque lodged, and there it sits gathering dust, and Daphne would rather crawl across a mile of broken glass than touch a cent of it.

The bicycle shop didn’t reopen. In the past year not one of them has gone near it. From time to time Daphne pictures the brand-new bicycles still lined up inside, coated by now with dust no doubt, their shine completely gone. The accessories lying in drawers or hanging on hooks, the helmets and pumps
and locks and lights and puncture-repair kits that nobody can buy. The bell above the door that had as much music in it as a twanging rubber band is still and silent now, a ghost herald with no arrivals to announce.

Their neglect of the premises disconcerts her whenever she thinks of it, scratches at her like rough wool against her skin. They should do something with it, the family business founded by Leo nearly fifty years ago, but she lacks the energy or the will to figure something out. And there’s never a mention of it from Mo, so presumably she feels equally unable to make a decision about it.

And today is the second of April again, and it is their three hundred and sixty-fifth day without him, and Daphne is trying very hard not to let the memories of a year ago rise up and swamp her. And so far, barely half an hour into her day, she is having no success at all with that.

The kitchen door opens.

‘Morning,’ Daphne says, summoning a smile. ‘Happy birthday.’

Una shoots her a look she can’t read and mumbles something, pushing her hair from her face as she crosses to the worktop that holds the toaster and the kettle. Wonderful hair she has, the warm sheen of burnished old gold, falling past her shoulders in a glorious tumbling, curling mass. It’s damp: she must have washed it in the shower.

‘There’s toast on,’ Daphne says – and as if it heard her, up it pops. Una takes it out without comment and clicks the kettle on, yawning. She opens the fridge, finds the peanut butter.

Seventeen today, her birthday tainted now by association:
hardly surprising that she shows little enthusiasm for it. Both their birthdays ruined from now on, Una’s because of his death, Daphne’s because of her wedding on the day she turned thirty-two, and the heartless anniversaries that will keep coming around now without him, reappearing every so often like a painted grinning horse on a carousel, forever reminding her of her loss.

Una spoons instant coffee into a mug. Never touched coffee until Finn died: now she starts each day with it, presumably because he did too. As she takes her seat Daphne notes her lightly flushed face, the puffy skin around her eyes. Crying for him, like Daphne had cried earlier. Instinctively she reaches for the girl’s hand – but Una moves it smoothly towards the milk jug before contact is made, leaving Daphne feeling hurt and foolish.
She’s a child; let it go
.

She indicates instead the package on the table by Una’s plate. ‘I got you something small. I have the receipt if you want to change it.’

Bought a few days earlier in a little boutique near the estate agency, the amount on the price tag not that small, but worth it if Una likes it. Of course it might never be worn or exchanged, its non-appearance serving as another unspoken rejection.

Una glances at the package, wrapped in yellow paper. ‘Thanks,’ she says, making no move to open it. She twists the lid off the peanut butter, dips in her knife and slathers a glob of it onto the toast. Only a year and a bit away from her Leaving Cert, noncommittal about future plans. Showing some artistic flair certainly, but seeming uninterested in taking it further.

Have you thought about college?
Daphne asked her a few months
ago.
Any idea what you want to do when you leave school?
But Una just shrugged and said she hadn’t decided, and Daphne backed off and hasn’t brought it up since.

What has happened to them? It’s like they’ve gone back to the bad old days when they were first introduced to one another, a month or so after Daphne met Finn. Una was twelve: Daphne could sense her wariness, and it made her apprehensive in turn. If she and Finn ended up together – and already he was becoming frighteningly important to her – how would she cope? She knew nothing at all about twelve-year-old girls, least of all how to be a mother, or stepmother, to one of them.

But when she eventually confided her fears to Finn, shortly after he’d proposed and she’d accepted, he brushed them aside.
It’s been just the two of us for a long time
, he said.
She’s got used to it, that’s all. She’ll come round, wait and see. She’s had it tough, her mum dying when she was so young, and then the bombshell I had to drop when she was old enough. Poor kid, she’s been through a lot
.

So they married – and like Finn had promised, Una eventually accepted Daphne’s presence in their lives, and things were fine, if not always perfect. They were never like a real mother and daughter, that would have been too much to expect – but Daphne did the best she could, and it seemed to be enough.

To her relief, she wasn’t called on to teach the facts of life; when she forced herself, after weeks of procrastination, to bring up the subject, Una immediately headed her off, telling her they’d learnt it in school – but Daphne provided sanitary towels when the need arose, she brought Una shopping for her first bra, she persuaded Finn to allow a mobile phone when the girl was begging him for it.

Of course it went without saying that Una had a stronger bond with Finn than with Daphne – but she and Daphne were friends, weren’t they? Connected through Finn, united by their mutual attachment to him, but friends too in their own right. They had plenty of good times, the three of them.

And then Finn had died, and Una retreated to her room, emerging only when bullied downstairs at mealtimes by Mo in those first few days. After Mo packed up and went home, Daphne forced herself to keep up the routine and put some kind of a dinner on the table each evening. She and her stepdaughter sat silently across from one another, shell-shocked with misery, bereft without him, and totally unable to communicate their heartbreak to one another.

And in the year since his death, not a lot has changed. A trembling kind of harmony has settled between them, but they may as well be fellow patients in a doctor’s waiting room for all the intimacies or confidences they exchange these days.

Daphne does her best, attends the parent-teacher meetings, gives pocket money on Friday, feeds and clothes this child, this almost-woman who’s ended up in her care, but beneath their polite, meaningless interaction the cold, ugly truth exists: they didn’t choose one another. Their only connection was through Finn, and now he’s gone. And while Daphne does feel a fondness for Una – how could she not have grown attached to the girl who played such an important part in Finn’s life? – she feels unable to demonstrate that fondness in the face of Una’s nonchalance.

She knows virtually nothing about Una’s life. Friends who would have called to the house in the past – Ciara, Jennifer,
Emma – haven’t appeared since Finn died. Una has dinner in one or other of their houses at least once a week, but she keeps turning down Daphne’s offers to feed them in return. There’s no sign of a boyfriend either, which is not to say he doesn’t exist.

The two of them need to talk, that’s what they need to do. They need to sit down some evening and really talk, really open up to one another, break down whatever wall has grown up between them – but Daphne simply can’t bring herself to broach the subject. She’s afraid of the rejection her approach might well be greeted with, afraid of being hurt any more.

So she never ventures far, never takes it beyond where she feels safe. ‘You OK?’ she asks now, because Una cried alone upstairs this morning, and because it’s her birthday.

‘Yeah.’

A short silence falls, broken only by the muted tick of the clock above the sink, and the tiny sound of Una chewing and swallowing.

‘Today will be tough,’ Daphne dares to say eventually. ‘Try not to dwell too much on it.’

Something she can’t define – an uncertainty, a mild alarm – flits across the girl’s face. ‘I’ll be fine,’ she replies shortly, thrusting her chair back as she gets to her feet, the movement making Daphne feel like she’s the one who’s being pushed away.

‘You haven’t finished.’ Barely half a slice of toast gone, her coffee mug still three-quarters full.

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘You forgot your present.’

Una scoops up the package wordlessly. At least she’s taken it.

School shoes thump on the stairs. Daphne stands and begins to clear the table. Twenty-five to nine, nearly time they were going anyway.