Robbie thought Elizabeth had not heard the announcement. Except for a brief pause, she continued picking pea pods from the climbers as if nothing had been said. Margaret was sitting on a wooden deck chair in the back garden and had made coffee. The Bodum suddenly captivated Robbie’s attention as his mother and Adam studied his face.
‘It will seem quite unexpected to you, Robbie, I know,’ Adam said from where he stood next to Robbie’s mother with his hand on her shoulder.
‘No, no, not at all,’ Robbie said.
‘You think I’m past it, do you?’ his mother said, pinching his leg playfully.
‘Past it? No, it seems you have discovered a new lease of life since I last saw you.’
‘Yes, that’s a good way of putting it. A new lease of life.’ She looked up at Adam. ‘And this man here is to thank for it.’
‘Very good.’
‘I’m sure it will take a bit of getting used to. It’s certainly not conventional.’
‘No, certainly not.’
‘But we have to do what makes us happy, right?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Well Adam makes me happy and I don’t care who knows about it. I know those biddies in the town talk about us but that’s just because they don’t have the guts to get out of their unhappy marriages. They’re probably jealous of us.’
Adam nodded.
‘You can’t choose who you love, can you?’
‘No,’ Adam said, bending over to kiss her on the cheek. Margaret stretched her bare legs out in front of her. The sun was high in the sky and the absence of wind made it feel like a true summer’s day. Adam disappeared inside to get cups from the kitchen.
‘I know I’ve changed a lot since you last saw me,’ Margaret said. ‘This must all be quite difficult for you but I just want you to know that you don’t need to worry. I’m happier now than I ever was and you just have to trust me on that one.’
She patted his leg and turned to Elizabeth.
‘Are you so wrapped up in your own little world over there that you didn’t hear our news? We’re getting married, darling.’
Robbie watched his sister rock back on her heels and gather the pods in a silver colander before standing and turning to face them. The look on her face was impossible to decipher.
‘Lizzie?’ their mother said. ‘I thought you’d be excited.’
‘You’re still married, Mum,’ she said quietly, pressing the plunger down on the coffee pot.
‘Well …’
Adam reappeared. ‘We have tried to sort that out but John refuses to sign the papers.’
‘So what will you do?’ Elizabeth asked.
‘Well, there’s no law to stop us getting engaged. We’ll work out the finer details in time but I couldn’t wait any longer,’ Adam said.
‘Well, what can I say? Congratulations.’
She hugged her mother first and then Adam. Robbie stood up and moved in to shake Adam’s hand and give his mother a kiss on the cheek. When Elizabeth had poured four cups of coffee, they toasted the couple’s future happiness. Margaret was giddy from the confession and filled any gap in their conversation with inane details about her relationship with Adam, their ideas for the wedding and anything else that sprung to her mind.
‘Oh, and I was thinking, Robbie. By the time a date is set, Amy will be walking. She could be our flower girl.’
‘Hmm?’
‘A flower girl, at the wedding – do you think Hannah would agree to it? I never thought I’d get to have another wedding and it’ll be just how I’d always dreamed, without Granny’s interference. I wanted a flower girl then, remember I told you, Adam? Well, anyway, she wouldn’t hear of it.’
Elizabeth reached out to put her hand on Robbie’s shoulder and announced that they had to go. After arranging to take his mother to Sainsbury’s the next day when Adam was away, Robbie collapsed into the passenger seat of Elizabeth’s car.
‘Well, there you are,’ he said as they pulled out of the driveway. ‘I’ll bet you didn’t see that coming?’
Elizabeth laughed.
‘If you’d been here the last few years and watched how Mother has made the impossible possible time and time again, you wouldn’t be so flabbergasted now.’
‘I was wondering why you weren’t flipping out back there.’
‘I honestly don’t think I have the energy for our family any more. Have you ever heard the like of it?’
‘Everyone thinks their family is crazier than the next.’
‘Well, do you know anyone else whose mother is marrying a car mechanic five years her junior when she should be playing Bingo and drinking tea with her widowed friends?’
They looked at one another and started to laugh until they cried. Elizabeth stopped the car, gripped the steering wheel and threw her head back while Robbie tried to catch his breath. Each time their laughter died down, one of them would start to giggle and set them both off again. Neither rolling down the car window, nor slapping one another on the arm could stop the hysteria and it was not until a tractor chugged past and blared its horn that the two could sober up.
They were parked on the quiet Blackskull Road and a flock of geese came in to land on a large pool of water that had formed in the bottom of one of the fields. Robbie and Elizabeth watched the birds as they skidded on the wet grass, attempted to dive beneath the pool’s shallow surface and started to fight with one another out of frustration. Robbie took his sister’s hand and they stayed that way until the tractor passed by again and the driver shook his fist at them.
Wendy’s reaction to the news was less than positive. After settling her grumbling father into the armchair in the living room, she appeared in the doorway of the spare bedroom where Robbie and Elizabeth had decided to start going through some of the rubbish that had accumulated there.
Their mother had called the room Narnia when the children were younger and joked that it was possible to get lost for days among the odds and ends that had been gathering dust for generations. The room had three outside walls, which made it impossible to keep warm in the winter. The ceiling slanted from the door downwards and the light bulb, which had blown years before, had never been replaced. Robbie and Elizabeth used an extension cord to bring a bedside lamp into the room and were tucked away in a corner with a box of their childhood toys when Wendy interrupted them.
‘Look what we found, Wendy,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Come over here to the light.’
Elizabeth held out a small, toy monkey that had gathered so much dust, its fur was more grey than brown. Wendy did not speak as she fingered the toy, lifting its small plastic thumb to fit in the hole that was designed for its mouth.
‘Monkey,’ she finally said.
‘They’re all here. I had no idea Mum had kept them all.’
Wendy hovered above them, watching as Elizabeth lifted one toy after another from the box and snatching the ones that were hers.
‘It feels like so long ago,’ she said.
‘Let’s not work out how long ago,’ Robbie said. ‘It would only depress us.’
‘What are we supposed to do with all this?’ Wendy said, scanning the mountains of unwanted things around them.
‘We were talking about it earlier and decided that there is no time like the present to sort it all out,’ Robbie said.
‘Besides,’ Elizabeth added, ‘there might be some stuff we’d want to keep.’
Wendy sighed.
‘Sorry, but I don’t have time for this. I’ll have to leave it to you two. I’m exhausted after the afternoon I’ve had with Dad. We only drove to Ballynahinch for ice cream and back but you’d think I’d taken him to a torture chamber given the way he complained. He didn’t even eat the ice cream; his appetite is completely ruined.’
‘They warned us about that.’
‘And he still looks yellow to me.’
In the poor lighting, it looked to Robbie as though someone had placed their hands on either side of Wendy’s face and pulled the skin until it hung like the jowls of a turkey around her neck. Her clothes had the remnants of their father’s ice cream on them and her eyes looked as though they would be much happier closed. With her hands on her hips, she stood above him and Elizabeth and seemed like a formidable character. Robbie struggled to think of a time when she had soft edges and a less volatile temperament.
‘We need to tell you something,’ he said as she turned to leave.
‘What?’
‘For God’s sake, Robbie, just spit it out. I don’t have time for this.’
‘Adam and Mum are getting married.’
Her hand went immediately to her chest and there was a sharp intake of breath. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Elizabeth looking at him but he kept watching Wendy, frozen and surrounded by junk.
There was a large crash as she pushed a box of old newspapers to the ground. Robbie and Elizabeth watched in horror as she lashed out at the things around her; kicking the wheels of an old pram, spilling the contents of a bag of Christmas decorations and tearing a path through the mounds of old coats, sun-bleached curtains and picnic blankets until she reached the far wall and there was nowhere else to go. She slid down the wall and collapsed in a heap on the floor as the dust settled. They could hear their father calling up to them from the living room but when he stopped there was no noise except for Wendy’s laboured breathing. Hidden from view by several large boxes, Robbie and Elizabeth sat silently. She had tears in her eyes and he was gripping a stuffed bumblebee so hard that its eyes were bulging and his knuckles white. Wendy’s quiet sobs carried across the room, soon joined by Elizabeth’s and the eerie out-of-tune melody of a jewellery box.