As love for Eddie withered in Hugh’s heart, it flourished in Annette’s. Her involvement with the father of Claire’s schoolfriend gave her a flustered, clandestine feeling. She felt as though a nerve she had believed dead had suddenly resurrected and come throbbing back to life. Her conscience, on the other hand became, as it were, comatose.
She took dangerous and exciting risks. Once when Eddie called late at night, she allowed him make love to her on the living-room floor, where either of her children might have chanced upon them at any moment. It was only later that she realised the window blind was not fully down. Would it have made any difference if she had known? Probably not, Annette decided.
She was like ground that has not been tilled or watered for a long time but, when the hard crust is turned over, reveals rich arable soil. Under his practised touch she was becoming the woman she had once long ago dreamed of becoming.
Annette accepted that her behaviour was crazy, irresponsible. Honour, loyalty, commitment were only words and meant nothing to her anymore. In the end it came down to her own desires versus that of her family’s well-being, his wife’s and children’s happiness.
‘Why do I love him? Do I love him?’ were questions Annette asked herself constantly. There was no convincing answer. She loved the feeling he inspired, if not the man. That was the only sure thing.
Once again her household, which had already weathered two domestic upheavals, suffered from her neglect. Her children no longer expected things to be orderly like in other people’s homes and accepted that their mother was different. Annette did, indeed, feel different. She was overwhelmed by her awakening sexuality. She had never really been loved before, she told herself. Well, not in the truly sexual sense, except perhaps for an unrequited love affair she had experienced while at college.
So here she was again, Annette told herself, waiting in another night for Eddie, on edge, smoking too much, with Claire upstairs doing her homework and Christopher in bed listening to his Walkman. Eddie was becoming like a drug, she thought. The more she had of him, the more she had to have. She wondered how she would endure the night if she did not see him.
It was after school on a Friday afternoon in May and Sheena loitered with Claire outside her house. ‘Want to come in and play with the new puppy for a bit?’ Sheena asked.
Not that Sheena was all that keen on the pup - it left messes and chewed things - but she knew how fond Claire was of Hugh and thought she might be missing him.
Claire hesitated, then nodded. ‘All right.’
With a pleased smile Sheena led the way into her house. ‘Look who’s here,’ she called, going ahead of Claire into the kitchen.
Hugh looked up from the table where he was doing his homework. He stared at Claire in dumb embarrassment, a tide of red sweeping over his face.
Sheena noticed her brother’s confusion and grinned. It was just as she had suspected. Hugh was soft on Claire. Sheena debated whether to rag him over it and then decided to keep her derision for another time. Not that she wasn’t quite fond of her young brother but some of Terry’s scornful attitude towards Hugh had rubbed off on her.
‘Hello Hugh,’ Claire said quietly. ‘Can I see your puppy?’
‘He’s not my pup,’ Hugh said abruptly, turning back to his books. Now it was Claire’s turn to flush.
‘Come on.’ Sheena pulled her towards the door. ‘I’ll show you. He’s out in the garden.’
As soon as they were gone, Hugh regretted his rudeness. He got up and went to look out the window. The girls were at the end of the garden, standing under the apple blossoms. He thought they made a pretty picture, dark and blonde heads pressed close together. He wished now he had been nicer to Claire. He felt all mixed up, one part of him longing to run down the garden and share in the fun of the puppy, the other aloofly standing by, hating it and everything it stood for. He turned slowly away, holding in his mind the sight of Claire standing under the flowering apple tree, stroking the puppy on her shoulder. He went to the table and slumped down.
Hugh picked up his pen and sat turning it idly between his fingers and staring into space. But as soon as he heard the back door opening he grabbed up a book and stuck his face into it. He heard Claire’s quiet voice uttering his name as she passed through on her ay to the hall and in his mind he echoed her soft goodbye, but no words left his lips.
Jane’s suspicion that the bullying had started up again was correct. Hugh had come to dread the moment each morning when he set off for school. Actually, the jeering and name-calling had never really ceased, only been suspended for a time. Now, added to the stigma of spectacles, was Hugh’s weight. He was rounder, chubbier than his classmates, the perfect target for all those ‘Hey Fatty’ jokes.
Hugh detested his body and was convinced that, no matter what he wore, he looked fat and ungainly. At not quite twelve he was into men’s sizes already. In another year or two he would be tall enough to carry it off and, with his fine eyes and good skin, he was already showing signs of the man he would become. But all Hugh could see when he looked in a mirror was his fat rounded shoulders in the outsize school sweater and the size thirty-eight trousers, wider and baggier than anyone else’s in the class. He could have got away with a size smaller but Jane was genuinely concerned about the harmful effect of tight, constricting pants on a growing boy. Hugh was mortified.
When Hugh returned to school after Easter, the going got rougher. Like blood on a wounded animal the bullies scented his misery and harried him unmercifully, vying with each other to see how far they could provoke him. They knew of his friendship with Claire, and Mark, the ringleader, who lived on their road, had somehow found out about Annette and Eddie.
‘Your old man and her old woman are banging each other,’ Mark told Hugh, making a lewd gesture with thumb and forefinger.
‘You’re a liar,’ Hugh said. ‘A bloody liar.’
‘Watch who you’re calling names.’ Mark adopted a threatening stance.
‘Liar!’ Hugh repeated, his voice very high now and on the verge of tears. Apprehensive too, knowing what he already did about his father and Claire.
Mark, sensing some inner uncertainty, pressed his advantage. ‘Okay, don’t believe me then. Go see for yourself. Look in the window late at night, the way I did, and see who’s a liar.’
Hugh swung a punch at him but Mark was very quick. They wrestled each other and then, conscious of his glasses, Hugh backed away and they stood facing each other, panting. ‘Specky-four-eyes!’ Mark said scornfully. He gave Hugh a last disdainful push and walked away.
Hugh stared after him, choking back tears. Then, without really knowing why he did it, he took out Claire’s picture from his inside pocket and tore it up. As the pieces fell from his hand, a wind sprang up and blew them about the gutter.
That night when Eddie went out for his bedtime stroll Hugh followed him. Eddie draped a scarf about his neck and shouted to Jane that he wouldn’t be long. She had already gone up to bed. With her extra hours at the clinic she was perpetually tired these days and constantly popped vitamins for energy. Once she had cleared away the remains of the evening meal she couldn’t wait to get her head down.
Hugh kept well behind his father and dodged into gardens to avoid being seen. At the top of the road Eddie did a quick turnabout, came briskly down the other side and went into Shannon’s porch, where the door opened. Hugh had not seen him ring the bell. He hung about in the shadow of the hedge, then slipped up the path and round the side.
He crouched under the window and looked through the space beneath the blind. What was he doing here anyway? Hugh wondered, in self-revulsion. He was a bloody peeping-Tom like that shithead Mark. He felt hot all over. What if anyone saw him? He’d really be in trouble. He was about to turn away when his father came into the room. Eddie crossed to the sideboard and poured himself a drink. He sat down on the couch.
Annette appeared in the doorway. She was wearing a silk, belted kimono. Hugh thought she looked very pretty. She walked across the room until she stood in front of Eddie. Smiling, she untied the belt and let the kimono slip off her shoulders. It fell in a crumpled heap on the floor. Hugh’s heart did a double-take. She was naked.
Eddie said something to her. He leaned forward and pulled her on to his knee. Annette laughed and looked over his shoulder. It seemed to Hugh that she looked straight into his eyes. After a moment she stood up and with a slight swing of her hips, crossed to the lamp and switched it off. The room was dark now. Hugh could just make out their two figures coming together. He backed away so hard that he overbalanced and sat down in the wet grass. His heart thundered in his ears. It was useless, hopeless. His breath caught in a sighing sob. He had been sure that Mark was lying. It was excruciatingly painful for Hugh to find that his greatest tormentor, a foul-mouthed bully whom he feared and despised, could fling mud at his father and make it stick. As Hugh ran home, he could see nothing ahead only dishonour.
The summer term was half over when the pro-lifers came in a group to Claire’s school and delivered their propaganda lecture on the sanctity of procreation and birth. There were four of them: three women and a man. Since the amendment had been successfully carried in the recent abortion referendum they were campaigning the schools with fresh zeal. The man, skeletal and morose, carried the grisly jar containing the pickled body of the three-month foetus. He placed it on the rostrum, where it remained throughout the lecture.
The women each took it in turn to speak, standing before the rostrum and giving statistics and detailed descriptions of babies conceived and aborted. From womb to incinerator. One girl began to cry and another made retching sounds as though she was going to throw up. Sheena scornfully whispered to the girl on the other side of her.
Claire sat in the front row and looked at the jar. She felt there was something vaguely counterfeit about the contents. She stared at it, believing yet not believing. Had that thing really once been inside someone, brought into being by the fusion of two seeds? She saw them like tiny peppercorns. Claire felt sick in the pit of her stomach and she hadn’t felt sick in weeks. Not since before her painful periods were treated.
No! She veered away in panic. She never allowed herself to think of that time anymore She stared hard at the pickled thing. It began moving tiny tentacle-like fingers and uttering piercing cries. It was alive. The jar swam before Claire’s eyes. She heard someone moaning and it was a full minute before she realised it was herself.
Sheena was full of Claire’s collapse when she got in from school. It was Jane’s day for surgery and she was in the kitchen, taking a break between patients and, at the same time, hastily putting together a sandwich for Hugh, when her daughter came rushing in.
Sheena flung down her schoolbag and with her usual flair for drama, described the events of the morning, making it all sound more horrific than it actually was. She graphically described the ghoulish bottle on the rostrum and the effect it had on the class. ‘Three girls fainted,’ she exaggerated, enjoying the attention she was getting. ‘Imagine! A dead baby in a bottle.’
Jane heard her in horror. She cast a quick glance at Hugh, not happy about him listening to any of this but trying to make sense of what Sheena was saying. ‘What baby... what bottle?’ she asked.
‘An aborted baby,’ said Sheena. ‘Yuck! It was awful. I think that’s what sent poor old Claire off her rocker. She suddenly stood up and started screaming.’ Sheena’s mouth trembled. ‘It was awful, really awful, Mummy. I just didn’t know what to do.’
Oh God! Jane thought. What terrible timing. Poor, poor Claire. She began trembling with anger. How dare they, how dare these people go about terrifying children.
Hugh listened gravely, his eyes huge in his face. He nibbled at the sandwich Jane absently thrust at him, then his appetite suddenly gone, put it down and went to get his schoolbag and begin his homework. He found it difficult to concentrate, beset by images of dead babies floating like ships in bottles and of fair-haired Claire standing up at her desk, mouth open, screaming. Sometimes the image changed and became the one he saw every night when he put out the light and lay down to sleep. Normally it did not bother him during the day. This was something new. He was tortured by the memory of Claire’s heart-broken sobbing, punctuated by helpless pleading. He felt like weeping himself. His head began to throb. He pushed away his books and laid his head down on the cool wood of the table.
Someone had left the door open. The puppy waddled in and whined about Hugh’s ankles, gnawing fretfully at the toe of his slipper. The poor animal was starved for affection. It was not even an especially lovable dog. The runt of the litter, no-one had even bothered to give it a name.
The pup’s whining increased the ache in Hugh’s head. ‘Eddie’s a proper bastard!’ he said out loud, staring into the puppy’s face. ‘And this bloody animal is his fault too.’ He pushed it away but it kept coming back, pathetically wagging its stumpy tail and trying to push its nose in Hugh’s hand.
Hugh regarded it morosely. The poor beast would be better off dead, he thought. His eyes pricked with tears. Like poor bloody Hero, kicked and beaten by that shit of a postman. Well, now she was at peace. No-one should have to put up with this miserable, stinking existence, Hugh thought. A few drops of chloroform and it would be all over.
Looking at the pup Hugh saw Hero. And Hero was doomed to die. The judge had said so. He found himself trembling at the thought of what he must do.
‘Poor Hero,’ he said, stroking the pup’s head, fondling its ears. ‘Poor old girl. Don’t worry. I won’t let anyone but me do it. I’ll miss you but you’ll be better off.’
There was still enough chloroform in the bottle. Hugh stuck it in his pocket and went out to the back, whistling for the pup to follow. It waddled trustingly after him.
Hugh performed the deed quickly and humanely. He was surprised at how soon the puppy became lifeless, confused by some lingering memory of tussling with the full-grown animal. He looked at the bottle in his hand with an expression of distaste, then flung it from him and turned to go back inside.
The lights of his father’s Rover lit the driveway. Hugh went in the back door. In the toilet he washed his hands, taking a long time and methodically scrubbing each finger, like he’d seen his father doing after stitching a patient. He dried his hands on the towel and went into the kitchen. Everyone, except Sheena, who had gone to her piano lesson sat about the table.
When Jane placed his dinner in front of him, Hugh took a potato and mashed it into the stew the way he liked it. He felt very hungry now and ate ravenously. He was finished before any of them. Hugh sat back and watched the others eating. His mind seemed to be floating in a different sphere. He heard their conversation as if from a distance, and although he listened with attention, even interest, none of it made much sense. The only thing he seemed able to latch on to was Claire’s name.
‘She’s a bit disturbed,’ Jane said quietly to Eddie, with a warning frown around the table. Hugh wondered why his mother bothered to lower her voice. By now, all of them knew what had happened in Claire’s school that day. And all the boys in his own school, thought Hugh, knew about his father and Claire’s mother. He watched his parents almost dreamily. So far, he told himself, he was the only one to know the most terrible piece of scandal.
Jane was saying. ‘Might be a good idea if one of us was to pop over later and find out how she is.’
Eddie nodded.
‘Perhaps you’d go,’ Jane suggested. ‘By the time I’ve cleared up it’ll be too late. You don’t mind, do you?’
‘Not at all.’ Eddie took some bread and neatly wiped gravy from his plate. He smiled pleasantly about the table, inclining his ear to something Terry was telling him. Hugh was no longer dreamy, his attention fully focused. His father was going over to see Claire.
He mustn’t go, Hugh thought worriedly. He’ll only hurt her again. All his calm deserted him. He felt hot and confused, churned up. The throbbing in his head, which had eased a little, began painfully pulsing again. Beside him Terry was noisily declaiming the need to study for the summer tests and Ruthie wailing that her tongue was burnt.
‘Don’t be impolite,’ Eddie told her as she spat hot stew onto her plate.
Hugh strove to collect his thoughts. He knew there was something he must do. Hero? No, he’d dealt with her and she was at peace. Something else. His father. Yes. That was it. He got up and left the room.
‘Don’t be long, Hugh,’ Jane called after him, thinking he was going to the toilet, ‘I’m just about to put out dessert. Your favourite. Apple crumble.’
Apple crumble, Hugh thought absently. That’s nice. He went into Eddie’s surgery and crossed to the far wall. The guns gleamed dully in the glass case. He found the key on the ledge above the case and fitted it in the lock. It turned smoothly. Eddie always kept the locks well oiled, like his guns.
Hugh carefully lifted down his father’s shotgun and sat it between his legs to load up. He knew exactly what to do. Hugh slid the cartridges into the breeches and snapped the gun closed. It was a heavy, solid weight on his arm. He went back to the kitchen, carrying it correctly, safety catch on, the way his father had shown him.
Jane was dishing up hot apple crumble and the air was spicy and clove-scented. She half-turned her head. ‘Come on, Hugh,’ she said encouragingly. ‘There’ll be none left if you don’t hurry.’
Hugh sat down on a chair just inside the door. No-one was paying him any heed. He eased off the catch and took a firm grip on the gun. The kitchen sounds were a steady accompaniment to the throbbing in his head. He got his father carefully in his sights and, as Eddie had shown him, slowly squeezed the trigger.
Claire opened her eyes as the urgent wailing note of an ambulance siren sounded close to the house then faded in the distance. Annette came out of her doze and glancing at her daughter’s face, was relieved to see that she was awake at last.
The girl had lain on her back in the same fixed position all afternoon, her blonde plaits, each one tidily resting on her collar-bone, framing her pale face. She was like an effigy of some martyred saint, Annette thought with a sigh.
Even as she watched, Claire closed her eyes and slept again.
At midday, Sister Whelan had rung Annette at work to tell her that her daughter had thrown some kind of fit in class and she was sending her home in the care of one of the teachers. When Annette reached home she found the pair of them already waiting for her in the front room. She had been shocked at the state of her daughter and noted, with concern, her trembling hands and nervous, wandering stare. The teacher gave her a somewhat garbled account of the pro-lifers’ lecture and Claire’s hysterical reaction.
Annette was incensed. ‘What in God’s name are you trying to do?’ she demanded. ‘Frightening the life out of fourteen year old girls with morbid stories of sex and abortion and putting entirely wrong notions into their heads. Is it any wonder Irish girls grow up deeply inhibited about sex?’
The teacher, barely out of the teachers’ training college, stammered a reply. She hadn’t much liked the idea herself, but the nuns thought the girls should be aware. Annette nodded grimly. Claire had been nervy and intense of late, prone to nightmares. On more than one occasion Annette had heard her daughter calling out in the night, and had half gotten out of bed, prepared to go to her if she called again.
She realised her own nerves were strained too.
Annette shifted tiredly on her chair and decided that it was time for Christopher to come up and take a turn at the bedside. She went to the door and called him.
‘The match is on. Do I have to?’ he asked, resentful at being dragged away from his beloved sport.
‘Too bad,’ Annette said shortly, thinking there was always some match on. Normally she would have made an effort to jolly him out of his sulks but she thought that if she did not have a drink and a cigarette soon she would be a hospital case herself.
An ambulance went speeding along Nutley Lane, siren screaming, and came to a halt in the unloading bay outside the accident department. It was one of many ambulances on that summer evening, carrying casualties to hospital in response to emergency calls.
When the driver jumped out and ran to open the rear doors, the paramedic kept the oxygen mask in place over the face of the unconscious boy and assisted the driver to lift the stretcher out of the ambulance and carry it through the swing doors of the emergency unit. When it was taken over by hospital staff, the ambulance men turned swiftly about and went back into the ambulance to bring out the second casualty, only to find that he had died on the way to the hospital.
Jane sat in a screened-off part of the emergency unit, her eyes, red and swollen from weeping, fixed on her son’s face. Hugh still wore the bloodstained pants he had been wearing when admitted to the hospital. His upper torso was swathed in bandages and there were two drips set up by the bedside. Everything possible had been done to save him, but his injuries were so severe that there was little hope of his recovery.
Nearby, a nun sat praying with an audible click of her beads. Terry, who had accompanied his mother in the ambulance, stood just inside the screening curtain, his eyes also trained on Hugh.
Terry tried not to think of the scene in the kitchen but it kept coming back to him in vivid bursts, the colours and sounds magnified and distorted in his head like fireworks viewed up too close. Hugh, his father, Ruthie screaming. It had all been so incredible and shocking as to be unreal. Like some gunman had stepped out of the films he often watched in the cinema and entered their house to bring death to them all. Only it had been no outsider but his young brother who had shot their father and then turned the gun on himself. The sensation Terry had had of being part of a gangster film was reinforced when the squad car had pulled up outside the house in answer to the telephone call he’d made immediately after summoning the ambulance. Two Gardai had come into the house and assisted his mother, who was desperately trying to resuscitate Hugh and give aid to his father. Terry had stood in a daze, gazing at the carnage all about him. Now he kept thinking how Hugh had always hated it when anything was killed, which made the whole thing impossible to understand. How had he brought himself to do such a thing? And why? None of it made any sense. Terry gulped and the wall he had erected around his emotions crumbled and disintegrated under the onslaught of feeling that suddenly engulfed him.
‘....pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, Amen.....’
It is over now, Jane thought, and her tears began to flow again. She pressed her handkerchief over her eyes and doubled over in a wild paroxysm of grief, mourning for her husband whom she had deeply loved and would never get over, and her son whom she had also loved and been unable to help in his darkest hour
The old nun came forward and laid a gentle hand on her shoulder. Her eyes were compassionate and she waited with patient detachment until Jane regained control of herself and got unsteadily to her feet.
Terry gravitated towards his mother and she allowed him to take her arm, then stooped over the bed and gazed sorrowfully down at Hugh. She smoothed back the heavy auburn hair, the same rich colour and texture as her own, from his forehead and bent and kissed the beloved, pale face. ‘My dearest, my son,’ Terry heard her whisper and his own tears began to flow in nervous sympathy, not only for the lifeless body on the bed who had done such a shocking and incomprehensible thing, but for his father, lying equally lifeless and still, in another part of the emergency unit.
Sheena had stayed at home with Ruthie, both of them in the care of the woman police officer who had arrived at the house just minutes before the ambulance had left for the hospital. Sheena sat in the front room, holding her little sister close and trying to soothe the child in her first wild hysteria and fright. She had been barely conscious of the police woman, who divided her time between speaking on the telephone and conferring with the two Gardai in the kitchen while they were writing out their reports. Sheena was overwhelmed by her own desperate grief and incomprehension, and her mind ran in shocked circles, questioning and laying blame, so that she hardly noticed the little body relax at last in her arms as Ruthie slept. She had come home to find the house in an uproar. Just inside the kitchen door, she stumbled over her mother, down on her knees beside Hugh’s fallen body, desperately attempting to staunch the blood flowing from the wound in his chest. Her father lay nearby, his features twisted in agony.
‘Daddy, my Daddy,’ Ruthie sobbed, trying to reach the prone figure, wriggling and struggling in Terry’s grip. Sheena had wanted to go to him too, but when Jane looked up, her eyes wild and tragic as she worked over the unconscious body of her son, and told her to take the child at once from the room, she had obeyed. And as she did, she heard Terry urgently telephoning for an ambulance.
Now Sheena sat on the couch, holding her sleeping sister in her arms and waiting out the long-seeming span until her mother and her twin returned from the hospital. The police woman had made tea several times and kindly offered to take Ruthie from her to give her a chance to move about but Sheena had dumbly shook her head, desperately needing the warm live feel of the little body close to her own. At last she heard the key turning in the lock, and then they were coming tiredly into the darkened room where she sat and when she raised her frightened eyes to Jane’s and Terry’s faces she knew, without being told from their stricken expressions, that her father and her brother were dead.
Jane went through the days of mourning and burial with her usual quiet competence, handling the funeral arrangements, legal formalities and social obligations which fell on the widow of an esteemed and highly qualified medical man. The hardship of her situation was not eased by the journalists who were lying in wait for her whenever she left the house. And when the excitement and speculation about the killings began to die down, there was the ordeal of the inquest to be got through, bringing in its wake the resurgence of unwelcome publicity. On this extremely distressing occasion Jan had cause to be grateful yet again for the reticent support of Teresa Murray, whose non-judgemental attitude impressed her more than any amount of syrupy sentiments.
Jane was outwardly composed but inwardly she bitterly railed against the loss of her husband and son, and mourned the terrible waste of their lives. Even with the pills she prescribed for herself she could not sleep, and except for brief snatches of rest taken at odd moments during the day, remained awake for the three days and nights following the tragedy. Throughout the day she was possessed of an unnatural calm, but behind her closed bedroom door at night she lay suspended in a kind of limbo, alternating prayers with weeping, her love and misery rending her as she relived those last cataclysmic hours, over and over again.
The days and nights of grieving took their toll on them all. At the church and cemetery, and afterwards at the hours, relatives and colleagues came to pay their last respects. Ruthie was querulous, only understanding in part what had happened, and Sheena was furious and frantic in her grief. She had relied upon her father, blossomed and basked in his approval. Although not seeing him as some deity, like her younger brother had, Sheena had nevertheless counted on him. He had called her the belle of the ball and she had hoped always to be that for him. She had been reft by the sight of his agony as he lay prostrate on the floor, shuddering in pain. For the rest of her life, she thought, that memory would remain with her. For her brother she could not yet feel anything but hatred for what he had done.
Terry had had, perhaps, the greatest affinity with his father. They had shared a sporting interest and a fighting code. Eddie had been his mentor and guide and he an apt and willing pupil. He had loved and admired his father and dreamed one day of being his match. He felt bereft and cheated before his still irreconcilable loss. He saw his mother’s great sorrow and pitied her, but felt heartened by it too, for her desolation was but an echo of his own. For those few days, he did his best to support her, comporting himself in a manner older than his fourteen years as he supported her up the aisle of the church and afterwards at the graveside, while all the time, within himself, he held at bay the storms threatening to annihilate him. Later he was the one who attended the inquest with her - Ruthie was too young to be a witness and Sheena had not been present - and he gave his account of what had happened on that evening in the kitchen. He had spoken with an awareness of his new responsibility as the only man in that sadly depleted household. He could tell by his mother’s expression that she was proud of him, and after the verdict had been given – manslaughter followed by suicide when the balance of the mind was unsound – and they were travelling home in Teresa’s car her whispered words of affection and her warm embrace compensated for the stress of standing in the witness box and recounting the horrors they had lived through.
Some days after the burial as she was going down to the washing line Jane tripped on something lying in the grass and, bending down, discovered the puppy’s limp body and the empty bottle. With a sigh, she went back inside filled with fresh horror and regret, and bitterly blamed herself for not realising there was something gravely amiss with her son. When Terry came in from school he got a shovel and buried the pup.
Jane stayed up, grieving and dry-eyed, until the small hours, and was still unable to comprehend what terrible trauma could have induced a gentle boy like Hugh to take his father’s life and his own along with it.
Annette was in mourning too. On the night of the tragedy she had been expecting Eddie to drop over later in the evening. She had left Claire sleeping and was sitting before her dressing table, freshening her make-up, when Christopher, whom she had sent to the shop for the evening paper, came crashing up the stairs full of the McArdle slaying. Annette was totally unprepared. Dead. Both of them. She stared white-faced at her son, not sure that he hadn’t somehow got it all terribly confused. But no, Christopher said, there was a Garda car right now parked across the road in McArdle’s driveway and there were neighbours standing all about saying that Hugh had blasted his father with a shotgun and then taken his own life. The ambulance had left for the hospital ages ago, Christopher said, and now the Garda cars were coming and going all the time. Claire, weakly eavesdropping from the landing, caught the tail end of her brother’s disclosure and was unable to take any of it in. In her great confusion of mind, she assumed it was Hugh’s new puppy that had been killed. It would be weeks before the full enormity of the tragedy would strike her.
With the exception of Terry, the McArdle family absorbed the grief and shock. Jane seemed to accept her loss with an almost philosophical forbearance which at first puzzled Terry and then angered him.
In a way Terry was even more jealous now of his younger brother than when he was alive. Terry believed in retribution. Observing his mother gazing fondly and regretfully at Hugh’s Confirmation photographs - the most recent pictures to be taken before his death – it seemed to him that Jane felt it not matter what terrible things people did to each other. If they died early enough they would be enshrined for ever in memory. With Jane apparently determined on sanctifying Hugh, and Sheena pretty much taken up with looking after Ruthie, Terry felt left out in the cold.
So Terry avoided his family and perhaps they, occupied with comforting each other, neglected him. He hardly ever mixed anymore with his schoolmates, but found other friends. There was a reason for this.
At the time of the killings wild rumours circulated about the that before his death Eddie McArdle had been having an affair with some woman in the locality. Terry spent half of his time in hot denial, the other brawling with his persecutors. He was, not like Hugh, sensitive on the issues of integrity and honour. He held a very tolerant view on all things sexual and if it hadn’t been for the terrible manner of Eddie’s death, he might have even been rather secretly proud of his father’s sexual prowess.
Terry never told his mother the reason for his brawling. She had suffered enough already. He preferred to let her think it stemmed from his love of fighting, anything but the truth. Terry may not have been idealistic and introspective like Hugh but he had his own code of behaviour. So he dealt with his problems in the only way he knew how. Jane had got to the stage when she met Terry at the front door with the bottle of mercurochrome in her hand. These days his handsome brooding face, so like his father’s, was constantly bruised and battered. She worried in case the damage might be permanent.
Terry often wondered about the identity of his father’s amour. Stephen Rigney, a boy in his class, swore he knew her identity. Stephen was the elder brother of Mark, the ring-leading bully in Hugh’s year.
One afternoon Jane made herself go into Hugh’s room and sort through his belongings. It was a task she had been dreading, but she steeled herself and set to work, methodically clearing drawer after drawer. She found poignant reminders of the child she had loved and lost. Hugh was a sentimental hoarder. All his summer and Christmas report cards since he began school were stacked in an Oxo tin. Jane, reading through them, saw that he had been consistently top of his class in everything but maths. She mourned the terrible waste of his young life and forced herself to continue.
He had kept his First Communion and Confirmation cards and his red Confirmation ribbon, worn so proudly on the day, was carefully enshrined in its box. To celebrate they had all gone out to a restaurant for lunch, followed by a trip to town to see the latest Harrison Ford adventure film. Later Hugh had said in all seriousness, ‘Thanks for a wonderful day, Mum. I wouldn’t mind dying now it was so great.’ Jane clamped down on her lower lip to keep from crying aloud the keening, despairing cry of all women down through the ages, when confronted by their dead. She doubled over, striving to regain control, knowing if she ever once allowed herself let go she could never get going again. Gradually she calmed.
She opened the last drawer and lifted out the contents. These were mostly comic papers and drawings. The top sheets were sketches of Hero and her pups, some lightly pencilled, others shaded and completed down to the last detail. Jane was particularly struck by a sketch of a horse, head upflung, mane flying, perhaps glimpsed from a moving car, the pose beautifully caught in a few bold strokes. She had always been proud of Hugh’s artistic gift, but she hadn’t realised just how good he was. ‘Oh the waste,’ she sighed again, ‘the terrible waste.’
No! she wouldn’t let herself go down that road again. She lifted out the last bundle of sheets and idly glanced at them. They were drawings of persons unmistakably engaging in the act of fellatio.
Jane was horrified by the explicitness of the phallic drawings and the accompanying captions. They were not, as she’d first thought, erotic messages, but revengeful declarations.
Closer inspection revealed Claire’s name scrawled everywhere with affection, Eddie’s with loathing. Jane clutched at a memory. Claire sick and despondent in the holiday bungalow, eyes full of despair. ‘Oh dear God!’ Jane moaned. Bile rushed to her throat. She felt trapped in some terrible nightmare.
It was Eddie’s child. She rose from the bed and rushed into the bathroom to hang over the hand-basin, heaving and retching until all the sickness had drained from her body. Throat aching, she straightened up and pushed tendrils of hair from off her perspiring forehead. She felt shaky and ill. Slowly, she went back to Hugh’s room and sat down on the bed, striving to make sense of her thoughts.
Oh God, what had she done? It occurred to Jane that in her rush to mend the wrong done Claire by, as Jane had thought, Claire’s own father, she had killed her husband’s child, the half-brother or sister of her own children. Tears spilled down her face as she thought of how much she had wanted another child after Ruthie was born. She had experienced an early and difficult menopause, suffering constant headaches and a loss of sexual desire, until gradually she had ceased all lovemaking. Was that what had driven Eddie to seek satisfaction elsewhere?
Jane still could hardly believe it. A mere child and her husband. And to think he hadn’t even taken precautions to protect her from pregnancy. She felt shamed and distraught, heartbroken too in a way, for it effectively turned Eddie into man she had never really known. A kind of monster.
She wiped her eyes and, carrying the sacks of rubbish to the garden, made a bright, burning bonfire of them. Oh, how differently everything might have turned out if only she had glimpsed the drawings in time, she thought in anguish. Truly, they bore all the signs of a deeply disturbed mind. Watching the leaping flames Jane felt infinitely older and sadder than she would have ever thought possible, even on the day of the funeral.
Jane found herself dwelling obsessively on all that had happened, continually retracing in her mind the lead-up to each incident and recalling words and gestures and accompanying glances. She knew this was not healthy, but she was past prescribing for herself. It was as if she was preparing to give evidence at a court of inquiry, at which she was the self-appointed judge, jury and prosecution for the defence, all rolled into one. And the more Jane dwelled upon the past, the greater was her jealousy that Claire had had sex with Eddie and conceived his child. Erotic images of Claire and her husband, at various stages of arousal, with their limbs sensually entwined, tortured Jane, and she felt weak with hatred for the pair of them. Sometimes she tried telling herself that sexual abuse was not inspired by love, and tried to convince herself that she had no real reason to feel such jealousy of Claire. That Eddie hadn’t really loved the girl, but had merely indulged his lust. What a load of rubbish! She told herself the next minute. As if that lessened the offence. Anyway what did she know about what Eddie thought or felt? The only thing she did know was that middle-aged Eddie hadn’t shown much love for anyone but himself in seducing a teenage girl. Painfully conscious of her own ageing body, Jane was filled with fresh envy. She felt a sudden rush of anger towards her dead husband.
And so it went on. When Jane was not castigating Eddie in her thoughts she was railing at Claire. Without being fully aware of it, her grief at her son’s death was gradually being replaced by a baser emotion. No longer was Jane able to see Claire as she once had, as a victim, abused and taken advantage of. Instead, mentally she derided her, calling her sly and sluttish, fanning the flame of her anger and resentment to the point of exhaustion.
It was only in calmer, more rational moments that Jane dimly perceived what was happening to her and felt horror at the awfulness of her own reactions. But most of the times she tended her resentment like an ailing plant, discovering fresh excuses and justification for keeping it alive.
One day Ruthie confessed how much she was missing Claire and wished she would come and play with them all again. Jane’s overwrought burst out in a senseless tirade. She hardly knew what it was about, something about little girls learning to play with nice children of their own age and not depending on brattish teenagers for company.
‘You don’t like Claire-bear anymore, do you?’ the little girl said with pitiful perspicacity and, with a sorrowful glance, she left the room.
Jane felt a deep sense of shame. She covered her face with trembling hands, stricken at what she was becoming. How could she have reviled the girl, she asked herself, and before Ruthie who loved her so? Jane’s eyes filled with tears, she felt worn out with the tussle going on in her soul. She was haunted by a vision of Claire as she had seen her last, nervous and wretched, and she began to cry in earnest. In that searing moment of clarity Jane recognised that she had nothing left in her to give but hate and began to feel truly frightened. Oh God, she prayed, let me have the peace of forgiveness, anything rather than go on like this.
It was Jane’s first step towards recovery, in the slow process of healing. While more time would elapse before she was able to bring herself to visit Claire, and even longer again before her old affection for the girl returned, the unhappy vengeful spirit that had possessed her for weeks was banished at last.
For Claire the weeks passed in a kind of dream sequence of waking and sleeping, not always able to differentiate between them. Whenever she opened her eyes, her mother was sitting on a chair near the bed. Annette held a book in front of her but seldom turned the page. Sometimes she was weeping but, on seeing that Claire was awake, she would make an effort to smile and enquire how she felt.
Claire’s head felt swollen and heavy as though filled with hot pebbles. She wondered what she was doing in bed during the day and why her mother was sitting there. It would seem to suggest she had been ill, but from what and for how long? Once or twice the doctor came, the one they used to go to before the McArdles came to the road. He was an elderly man, kindly and loquacious. So she was sick, she thought, but when she asked him what was the matter with her he only patted her head and told her she was fine and had no need to worry about a thing.
Claire tried hard to pierce the fog in her mind but the harder she strained the more confused her thinking became. Eventually she remembered being in the classroom listening to a lecture. Gradually, the strands of fog parted to reveal more details until she recalled the whole frightful day. What puzzled her now was why Annette was weeping. She tried to stay awake long enough to put the question but her lids grew heavy again and she slept.
Claire dreamed she was on her hands and knees in a dark underground tunnel, trying to crawl to a higher level, but the space got smaller and smaller until her head wouldn’t go through the opening. She sensed something big was moving along fast behind her but there was no room to get out of its way. She was about to be crushed when she woke up.
She turned on the bedside light, then her eyes were hurt by the glare so she turned it off again. She called weakly to Annette, but it was Christopher sitting, dozing in the chair.
Next time Claire awoke her father was sitting in the chair reading a newspaper. She tried to him something of her confusion but he just smiled at her and told her not to tire herself out with talk. As she lay there looking at him her lids grew heavy and to her dismay she couldn’t keep awake long enough to ask him how he was or when he would come again. When she awoke and found him gone, hot tears of disappointment slid from under her lids. It was so long since she had seen him, and now who knew when he would come again.
And then she was dreaming that she was trying to get back to the holiday bungalow. She was pushing an enormous pram along the seafront with all the McArdles in it. They were laughing and talking amongst themselves and didn’t seem to notice her. She wondered why none of them got out to lessen the load or to lend her a hand. She pushed with all her strength but then she got very tired and let it roll away from her. She lay down on the road. A car came along and she tried to struggle out of its path but she was too weak and it went right over her. Strangely, she felt no pain, only a tremendous relief.
She was telling Jane all about her other dreams. She was lying on the couch in Jane’s surgery and Jane was sitting beside her, jotting everything she said down in a notebook. And then Jane was gone and Eddie was bending over her, examining her. He wore a white coat over his shirt and tie but had no pants on and was trying to make her suck his cock.
She awakened, sobbing and crying, struggling against the blankets which were tucked too tightly, not sure if she were still in the dream, trying to shake it off but remaining anguished and scared. It was dark outside the window. Slowly, she got out of bed, leaning against the wall until the blackness receded from her eyes. Holding the banister, she went down, carefully placing each foot on the stairs.
At first she thought the house was empty it was so quiet, then she heard her mother’s voice in the kitchen. She pushed open the door. Annette and Jane were sitting opposite each other, sipping drinks. ‘Why Claire,’ Jane said, half-rising, her expression concerned, ‘I was on my way up to see you.’
Annette got up to bring Claire back to bed. Claire felt suddenly aware of her crumpled night-dress, the sour odour of her body. Shamed, she allowed herself to be led upstairs. She felt exhausted from the effort. A few minutes after her mother had gone out of the room Jane came in and sat on the chair.
‘Claire, dear,’ she said. ‘How do you feel?’
‘Sleepy,’ Claire answered truthfully. ‘Am I very ill?’ she asked. ‘Is that why you’re here?’
Jane looked pale and tired. She gave Claire a long, pitying look.
‘No love. I just wanted to see you. It’s been a long time.’
Claire felt uneasy. She didn’t know what month it was, let alone what day of the week. There was something in Jane’s subdued manner that frightened her. The light in her eyes seemed to have gone out, her mouth was serious. Uncomfortable, Claire looked away.
‘How is Sheena... Hugh?’ she asked.
Jane’s voice was steady as she said, ‘Sheena’s very well... she and Terry are doing their summer exams...’
Were they into June already?
‘.... and Ruthie, in her own way, struggling along.’
‘What about Hugh?’ Claire asked again.
‘You must hurry and get well,’ Jane said. ‘This year we’ll be going to the cottage a little earlier and we hope you’ll come with us.’
Back to Waterford. How could she?
‘There’s plenty of time yet,’ Jane said, as if reading her thoughts. ‘You’ll be fully recovered by the time we’re heading off. Your mother has promised to come too, later on, so we’ll have that to look forward to.’
When she was gone Claire wondered again about Hugh. She suddenly thought of the day she called to see his puppy. He’d been abrupt, not exactly rude. Embarrassed. But why? He hadn’t wanted the puppy. The thought was followed by a vague, terrifying memory about the puppy, and something about Eddie. She tried but the fog had come down again and she couldn’t remember.
Her father had to come and visit her before Claire found out that they were both dead. Why hadn’t someone told her?
‘You were ill, Claire,’ Jim said, sitting on the side of the bed, holding her hand. ‘It wasn’t the time to trouble you with something so tragic.’
No wonder Jane hadn’t answered her when she asked about Hugh. Poor Hugh. Her head felt hot and heavy, as if the pebbles were overheating again.
‘Why did he do it?’ she asked, her voice breaking.
‘No one knows, Claire,’ Jim said. He stroked her hand, studying her face anxiously. ‘Try not to dwell on it, love. It seems the poor kid was bullied at school and just flipped under the strain.’
Claire thought that her father was looking very well. He was wearing a blue, short-sleeved shirt. The colour suited him. His breath was free of alcohol. He had even cut down on cigarettes. She wondered who washed his hankies and socks now that he had left home. She felt a lump in her throat. She wanted to kiss him but didn’t want to be the one to do it first.
‘You get yourself better,’ he said, when he was going. Everyone was telling her that. As if she didn’t want to! She nodded. ‘You’ll come and visit me soon,’ he said. ‘I’ve got this great thing for making lemonade. I’ll stock up on flavours in the meantime. Chris can come too and we’ll have a party.’
Claire tried to smile but it went all wobbly. She wished he would stay and just go on talking. It seemed so long since they’d had a proper conversation. Years. And now he was going and he hadn’t even kissed her.
‘Hey,’ Jim said, coming back over. ‘Give me a glimpse of those pearlies.’ It was an old joke between them. She smiled in spite of herself. He bent down and kissed her forehead. Claire clung to her father, not wanting to let him go.
When he had gone she lay back with closed eyes, mourning for Hugh, remembering him that last day forlornly watching herself and Sheena through the kitchen window. And Eddie. His last words to her? She wished with all her heart she could remember.
In the middle of July Claire went with the McArdles on their summer vacation to the seaside. She sat in the back of the Rover with Ruthie and Sheena, quiet and withdrawn, dreading the moment of arrival at the bungalow.
The previous week her father had rung and asked her over to his flat. Annette was convinced that Jim was living with the woman who had ousted her and strongly condemned any association with the enemy. Longing to accept, Claire had hesitated, but in the end had braved her mother’s displeasure and gone. It had been a pleasant visit. Her father had cooked up rashers and sausages and bought in a chocolate cake.
‘I’m on flexitime this week,’ he told her when she asked how he had found time to shop. ‘I go to work at eight and finish at two.’
Claire felt sudden jealousy for his new way of life. Why couldn’t he have arranged his life this way for them? Paradoxically, he had abandoned his family in order to become like other fathers.
‘This bothers you?’ Jim asked.
She had not known what to say.
‘You think I’ve selfishly gone off and left you?’
‘I didn’t say that,’ she managed at last to get out.
‘You don’t have to.’ He sighed. ‘In some ways I wish to God I hadn’t left but there seemed no other way. Was no other way.’
‘You said it was only for six months,’ she reminded him, almost accusingly, although she had never really believed in it herself.
‘I suppose it was wishful thinking,’ her father admitted.
Claire had suddenly hated the woman, whoever she was. It was all her fault, she thought miserably. She had come between her parents at a time when their marriage was too shaky to withstand her, when Annette was too sad and dispirited to fight back or even recognise the danger. If only the baby hadn’t died, Claire thought.
‘You have your life ahead of you to do with what you want, Claire,’ her father had said as he kissed her goodbye. ‘Don’t forget that. You’ll be cleverer than we were. You won’t allow anything to spoil it.’
Claire glanced out at the passing landscape and blinked away easy tears. It seemed her life was already spoiled.
The holiday site was unchanged, the local people as friendly as ever, although now their warmth was tinged with pity. Nobody wanted to be the first to say anything but expressed their sympathy in gruff throat-clearings and lowered glances. Jane was aware of the warm tide of feeling but elected not to give them the opening they sought.
Claire found the hardest part was not as she expected, crossing the threshold, but the absence of Hugh. The bungalow struck her as cold and remote without him and, outside of it, she seemed to see him in every turn of the road.
When they were alone Sheena hugged and kissed her, swearing with tears in her eyes that she had never been lonelier in her life as in the weeks of Claire’s illness. Like Jane, she looked grey and tired. It was as though the bloom had gone from her skin, the sparkle from her life. In the privacy of their room, lying together under the one quilt, Sheena told her that Ruthie had begun wetting her bed and for weeks now she had been getting up at night to change her.
Terry had got in with a gang of neighbouring boys, Sheena said, and was disappearing off all the time to drink beer with them in a waste lot behind the sports complex. Jane was worried out of her mind but was afraid to be too harsh in case she alienated him. Terry had always been stubborn and only had to be told not to do something to go out of his way to do it.
‘I can’t understand him,’ Sheena admitted, with a catch in her voice. ‘He is so moody and withdrawn that we’re afraid to say anything to him.’
Claire listened sympathetically in the darkness, guessing from all Sheena said that she was really missing her twin. But most of all, from what Sheena did not say, it was clear she was missing her father.
Jane was missing Eddie too, even more than she had imagined she would on this first trip back to the cottage. Her worst time was when she closed the bedroom door each night. On previous holidays that had always been the moment when she and her husband would lie close together, their fingers linked, and mull sleepily over whatever antics the children had got up to during the day. Now taking up so little space on her own in the big bed that had been their soft haven, Jane felt beleaguered by the phantoms that returned with the fall of darkness to haunt her.
If Claire saw Hugh in every turn of the road Jane was convinced that she saw her son in every corner of the cottage. In the mornings when she emerged from her bedroom she fully expected to find him crouched beside the freshly lit fire, his head to one side as he carefully placed each additional briquette on the flickering pile. With an almost unbearable pang she recalled how pleased he used be for any little word of praise she would give him.
Then there was Claire. At seeing her back in the setting where the seeds of the tragedy had been sown the previous Easter, Jane was affected so painfully that she was almost in danger of regressing where the girl was concerned. Soon, however, in the reality Claire’s gentle, self-effacing nature, all Jane’s earlier resentment faded entirely away. She now clearly saw how unbalanced her attitude had been when, half-crazed with sorrow, she had unfairly placed blame on a child for the misconduct of an adult. She felt such contrition that she longed to make it up to Claire and resolved never to give the poor girl any further cause than she already had to regret her links with their family.
That decided, Jane made a determined effort to put past sorrows behind her. She treated Claire with great gentleness and was eventually rewarded by seeing her become, if not light-hearted, at least not as troubled as before.
Annette joined them in Dualeen at the end of July, planning to stay a week, even two. With school closed for the summer she was not tied to any particular routine and was finding it lonely on her own with Christopher away in the Gaeltacht.
After a few days it was clear to everyone that Annette was drinking too much. Claire was ashamed of her mother’s raucous laugh and unsteady gait in front of Sheena. There were times when she almost hated her. Jane was concerned but didn’t like to say anything. After all, Annette was the guest.
One evening, having drunk more than usual, Annette became sad and vengeful. She began talking in a wild, provocative manner. She couldn’t seem to keep off the subject of Eddie, probing ever deeper, trying to gauge the depth of Jane’s sorrow and plainly irked by what she considered Jane’s smug assumption that Eddie had loved no other woman but herself.
If she only knew, Jane sighed, knowing only too well that she had no cause to be smug but, nevertheless, determined to keep up the illusion of her husband’s fidelity.
‘How can you take so much for granted, Jane?’ Annette asked impatiently. ‘He was in a profession where he met lots of women. He wouldn’t have been human if he hadn’t taken advantage of it.’
Strangely, this thought instead of casting Annette down afforded her a certain satisfaction. If she had been just one of many in Eddie’s life so, too, had Jane. Annette was getting an almost sexual thrill out of the conversation.
‘Please let’s change the subject,’ Jane begged at last, unable to hold back her tears, at a loss to know why Annette was behaving in such an unpleasant way. Just what was Annette trying to do to her? Wasn’t it enough to have suffered the loss of her husband and son without having to justify that loss? She looked at Annette’s half-empty glass and decided not to give her any more whisky.
Terry came in and took an apple from the fruit bowl. Jane absently told him to wash it first. He went out munching.
Annette raised her glass to her lips, missed and slurped it over herself.
‘Oh hell,’ she said, and began to cry.
‘What is it?’ Jane asked.
‘I have to tell you,’ Annette sobbed, looking at Jane through a fog of tears. ‘I don’t want to hurt you but I have to tell you.’ In her maudlin state she began to believe what she was telling Jane was inspired by repentance, and not malice.
Jane listened without a word. Annette stopped crying. She looked frightened. ‘I know you must hate me,’ she gabbled. ‘It was like a kind of sickness. I know now that’s what it was. When I let Eddie make love to me, I was trying to compensate for Jim’s indifference. I told myself I didn’t care but deep down I really did.’ She waited as if expecting Jane to contradict this. When she remained silent Annette hurried on, pouring out more and more of her passion for Eddie, how much she’d suffered when he had died. She began to cry noisy, harsh sobs, her face contorted and ugly.
Jane struggled to control her emotion. Forget she tried to steal your husband. Try to think of her as a patient. She leaned over and pressed Annette’s shoulder.
‘I never meant to tell you,’ Annette sobbed. ‘I never would have only I was so miserable.’
She continued to cry noisily into her handkerchief.
‘I think we could both do with some coffee,’ Jane said, getting up. She went down the passage to the kitchen. Terry was standing like a statue beside the laden hall-stand and she passed by without noticing him. She desperately needed to be by herself. Behind her calm facade Jane felt a kind of helpless rage that Annette should have the gall to tell her right to her face that she had been having an affair with her husband. She struggled to tell herself it wasn’t malice prompting Annette but a kind of sorrowing bravado.
Like hell it was!
Jane took milk out of the fridge and closed the door. She pressed her hot forehead against the cool melamine and drew a shocked, sobbing breath. In God’s name what did Annette expect? Her blessing on her adulterous affair?
Jane made a pot of coffee and automatically put cups on a tray. Was there ever to be an end to these nasty surprises? Bitterly she thought of her dead husband and son. Was she to be left with nothing? Not even those tender memories of her early love for Eddie and their years of toil and laughter. It seemed to her that everything she had ever prized was being gradually taken from her, stripped away bit by bit. Jane’s eyes darkened with pain. Surely to God she deserved better than this?
She thought of the almost triumphant manner in which Annette had revealed details of Eddie’s infidelity. Jane realised what she had never realised before, that Annette was intensely jealous of her, only up to this she had managed to conceal it. With drink, however, it had all come spilling out like so much sewer water. Jane recalled her earlier surprise at how much Annette was drinking. Now she saw the reason behind it.
Claire, Annette, Eddie. A tragic, terrible triangle.
‘Oh Eddie,’ Jane moaned in wounded misery. ‘What deep, dark shade was in you that I never even suspected?’
Not now, she thought in panic. I can’t possibly think of it now. Later, much later, when alone she would take it out and examine it. She heard Annette’s sandals clipping unsteadily down the passage, coming to find out what was keeping her, and quickly straightened up. She took a firm grip of the tray and went to meet her.
Terry stole on up the stairs to bed. Annette Shannon and his father. He struggled to take it in. His father and Annette Shannon. Claire’s mother.
He had a flash of memory. Stephen Rigney, in his class, boasting that he knew the name of the woman his father had been involved with. She had a teenage daughter who was a real looker, he’d said. Terry stood shock-still as he thought of Claire, asleep upstairs. Quiet, bookish Claire with a mother like that. He wondered if she knew Claire was awakened by Ruthie’s cries. She got up and helped the little girl out of bed. Together they hurried to the bathroom. Sheena heard her sister’s wails but soon went back to sleep, glad to be relieved of the burden for one night.
Ruthie sat on the toilet, her damp nightie ruched about her waist. ‘Finished,’ she said sleepily and eased herself off the seat.
Claire guided her carefully back to their room and wrapped her in a blanket while she remade the bed. The sheet was not very wet as Ruthie had fortunately woken at once. As Claire deftly turned the bottom sheet and tucked the damp patch under the mattress, she heard the door open. She looked around and saw Terry standing there. He stared at her, solemn-faced and silent.
He had hardly spoken a word to her since the holiday began. He was either rude and withdrawn, or else boisterously high and sitting on the wall talking to Susan Deveney, the over-developed teenager from the next cottage.
‘Sheena is asleep,’ Claire told him, but Terry just nodded and continued to stare at her. She felt acutely conscious of him as she helped Ruthie back into bed and bent down to tuck the little girl in. Conscious too, of her own brief attire: because her only nightdress was in the wash, she had resorted to wearing an old school blouse which barely extended to her thighs; her cheeks grew hot. Ruthie yawned and fell asleep at once. When Claire slowly straightened up from the bed and shyly turned around, Terry was gone.