John Johns kept his word. He would not look at me in case I made him more weary. The way he blocked me out made the children’s eyes wide with worry. Bridie could see it too but she kept her counsel and talked louder and laughed more to take the edge off the hostilities. More tea than ever was stewed, more cakes bought, more treats laid on as she did her level best to sweeten the air. The boys were half taken in when their mouths were stuffed with chocolate eclairs and jam tarts, but not Serena. Serena knew something had started to rip.
She pulled us together every chance she could. She held his hand and mine and dragged us closer to her on the couch; when she was kissing us goodnight she pulled our heads together, her little muscly arms roping our necks. She insisted that every bit of the book she was reading aloud needed both our attention.
I could just about stand it in the daytime when I had them all as a buffer but in the bedroom he kept his back to me. The salve of our kind of loving in the nights at Johns Farm was wearing thin. The panic started in my toes and threatened to boil up all the way to my eyes. He didn’t touch me for a month, a whole month. I longed to creep my hand across the sheet but I didn’t. Instead I lay rigid, arms by my side like a demented soldier. I wouldn’t buckle first, No Siree Bob! I could wait him out. This was a siege.
When the self-pity washed over me I blamed him for being childish, him for being unreasonable! How could it be my fault what Father Pat O’Connell had said? It was a miracle he had even remembered me. It’s not my fault, I screamed at him without making a sound. He couldn’t hear what I couldn’t voice. I was weary too, but I was weary because I couldn’t stop looking at him. He kept his eyes from me until I let Serena down.
She had to go to the convent for her interview but I couldn’t force myself out of the house and up the lane. She wanted me to come, begged me, but I couldn’t. What would I say to Sister Pious? The thought of walking through the big pillared gates, along the drive and through the glass doors to the assembly hall made me shake.
I’d be walking back to the life I once had when I’d just settled myself in this one. I hunted through my list of sad, sorry excuses for doing nothing but in the end I stuck with my most-used one: I just can’t. Serena hadn’t cried or played up; she just nodded because she still had Dada. Dada was not so accepting.
– Why can’t you grow up, Mary?
– You don’t understand …
– You’re damned right I don’t understand! She needs you today, don’t you care about that? Don’t you want to step up to the plate just once?
– I just can’t …
Bridie stepped in to get him to drop his voice. The boys were milling about by the doors to the orchard, pretending they weren’t listening. Serena came out, all brushed hair and shiny shoes, and walked past me to take his hand. They walked out of the half-door together but I didn’t wave them off. I couldn’t move because Granny Moo was standing in the shady space between it and the window. Her head was rocking violently from side to side like a metronome, tick, tick, tick, tick.
John didn’t turn back to me in the bedroom. He kept himself to himself both night and day and I knew that I would have to be the one to break cover. Late one summer’s evening, we waded into the water to get the worst of the dust off us after we moved the cattle from the hill field to the river field. I stumbled and soaked myself through a dress that Lizzie had sent from England in the post. A grey cotton thing – to match my eyes, ha ha ha – with tiny pink roses dancing around the hem. It came off over my head as light as a feather as he watched me but he didn’t just watch for long. He picked me up and made for the shade of the big sycamores on the far side.
The last of the sun rippled around us, picking out the beads of water in his hair. I put my face in the hollow at his collarbone. I could be yours and you could be mine, I thought as we moved together. I had hung on to the news that some nights I couldn’t have been more his and discarded all the other words that had hurt me.
I wanted a way to bind us together again. I needed it for the sake of the children who didn’t like the chill in the kitchen. Bridie advised a bit of action – always better than words, she winked. I knew I was pregnant as we walked home through the river field, the last of the lilac cuckooflowers nodding in the dusk. Within weeks, the acid nausea of morning sickness, always absent when it was one of the boys, convinced me it was another little girl I was carrying.
I knew that he might not be best pleased but my head kept telling me that it didn’t matter! Nothing mattered except the precious girl growing beneath my heart. That she was his filled me with joy. I’d give him something he’d never known he wanted: a daughter with his own blood running through her veins. I’ll take the slap when it comes; she’ll be worth it. She will set me back on the right road with her father, on the right path of my life. She is the step I have to take.
Then she left me.
I called out to John, screamed for him, where I lay bleeding in the vegetable garden. He came running from the river field but he was already too late. He rushed me to Omagh Hospital but nothing could be done. It was over. I wasn’t even kept in overnight so we had the long drive home to suffer in the dark, just the two of us alone. We both knew it had happened when we made love on the cool of the river bank. We both knew that I knew what I was doing. We both knew that I’d planned it, I was an old hand at getting knocked up. But now our water baby was gone and we mourned the loss of her. I would have called her Roisin, my little rose.
– Why didn’t you tell me? said John.
– What difference would it have made?
He would never be mine. The second-worst bout of bronchitis I had ever suffered followed on her heels and I was pinned to my bed for a fortnight. I washed the black and red antibiotics down with mouthfuls of Benylin and never refused a hot toddy of whiskey when John offered it at night. Daddy came with a half bottle of medicinal poteen that was supposed to be rubbed on my chest but I drank it as well, punched with plenty of sugar. I reckoned the best way to survive was to stay drunk. Mammy didn’t come at all; she was busy cleaning as she’d got herself back on the list to hold the Stations of the Cross at The Hill. Net curtains don’t bleach themselves, y’know?
I drifted in and out of sleep to find John sitting beside me in the armchair, his eyes just shadows. I wished he’d ask me how I was. I’m torn in two. Half of me is with her, the other half is here with him and everything we’ve made together. But he didn’t ask and I didn’t tell.
Bridie told me she’d found him crying in the orchard. She’d not seen him crying since he came home from England that time. He was never able to cope with loss, she says. He’s softer than he lets on, she says, as if that makes it any easier on me. The bed under the barn eaves fairly reeked of booze and misery by the time I emerged a few weeks later into what I hoped would be a tolerably new world.
It wasn’t, of course. Northern Ireland was still bubbling away but among the reports on 300-pound, 500-pound and even bigger bombs the news was eaten up by the talk of talks. The SDLP’s John Hume and Sinn Féin’s Gerry Adams were centre stage because they had reached an agreement; they had a vague way forward and everyone was sitting up and paying attention. John Major seemed to be doing his best to listen – I’d always had a soft spot for him since he kindly mentioned that we were British citizens too and imagine the outcry if people in Surrey or Sheffield took to murdering each other in the streets over political differences? The talks didn’t stop the IRA or the UDA from killing some more civilians: old habits die hard.
The children were glad to have me back in the kitchen though I was too tired to cook anything more than eggs on toast. We don’t care, Mammy, as long as it doesn’t have black bits, says Daniel and the rest of them nod. I was still Mammy but emptier. John came in from the fields and sat down with them without a word of any kind and they eyeballed the pair of us for signs of improvement. There weren’t any. I’d have to do something about that. I knew what growing up in a house of black moods and stony silences does for the soul.
That night, emboldened by the prospect that change was in the air, I plucked up enough courage to start our own truce.
– The children shouldn’t see us like this …
– Like what?
– Like we can’t be … civil?
– Civil? Civil? Mary, you’re a treasure, do you know that? We’ve been married for nearly twelve years and have five children between us and civil is all you’re aiming for?
– Six!
– Six what?
– We have six children between us!
I picked the wrong time to tot things up. He looked like he’d been punched in the stomach. But I couldn’t put her aside so easily and I was damned if I was going to allow him to. The quick, clean cry of a fox somewhere in the river field startled us both to breathe in again.
– You needn’t worry about my memory, Mary. I’ll never be able to forget how many children I have.
– That’s good then? That’s good?
– It’s perfect! Tomorrow we’ll get straight back on with the civilities!
When I talked I got it wrong, when I didn’t talk I got it wrong. I couldn’t do or say right for doing and saying wrong. I wanted to keep her alive for a little while longer but John didn’t share that feeling. He wanted her buried. The sadness was like heartburn: sour and hot. We got up the next day and got on with the civilities.
Bridie taps me on the back of the neck when she finds me drooped over a sink or a table or a spade in the vegetable patch and tells me it gets easier. But it won’t get easier anytime soon because John has decided to cut off any possibility of me having another baby to hold. He disappeared first thing one day without so much as a goodbye and Matthew dropped him back on the street long after the sun had dropped between Sessiagh and Glebe.
The deed was done and he had a bag of frozen peas held to his vasectomy scar the day the IRA announced a three-day ceasefire in the wake of John Major and Albert Reynolds’s Downing Street Declaration which demanded that it would permanently renounce violence if peace was ever to be delivered between the main midwives of Dublin and Westminster. It was the kind of news that would have stopped me in my tracks on a normal day but this was no normal day. This was the day that he shut me out forever, the day he denied me the chance to heal my shattered heart.
Bridie was having a little snivel, cracking on that she was glad that there was a break in the Troubles, but there was to be no break in my troubles and that’s all I cared about in this moment. I had to know how he could ignore me and the rock in my chest with such seeming ease.
– Why didn’t you tell me? I said.
– What difference would it have made?
I would never be his. I hid my disappointment with every ounce of brilliance as he did. I had let him down and he had let me down: we were both flat as pancakes. There was nothing to add; our rage leached into the stone floor instead of ripping the roof off. We turned our attention to the television and the talk of Gerry Adams being allowed to go to the USA at some stage: Bill Clinton was keeping his visa under review. Bridie jawed constantly from her armchair that she would never live to see peace in this ridiculous life and we had to agree with her, it seemed like a pot of fool’s gold at the end of a rainbow.
After a while, John turned again to face me in the bedroom but the pleasure of it is not without its pain. He has stopped kissing me and keeps his eyes closed. He won’t forgive me anytime soon for making out that he was my jailer when the half-door to Johns Farm has always been on the latch. Though I paw at his skin I am still blocked out. It’s a lonely, cruel business but neither of us seems able to put it aside. We never referred to our little Roisin-that-never-was again, though she treads the air between us on gossamer wings, getting more ragged by the day. I paid for her with more than half of my heart. Does his ache as much as mine?