7

Ewan returned from his waterside walk, and as he entered his sitting room and moved to warm his hands at the slumbering log fire, his mobile phone sang out its silly, demanding jingle. He grabbed it and jammed it to his ear, his voice so tight he could hardly force a response. Timothy’s statement was short, with no preamble of greeting.

‘Father Ewan, my beloved mother has just passed away.’

The term used in the grief counselling profession is ‘anticipatory death’; something widely thought of as a buffer to the pain. Not true. Ewan shook. Invisible hands clutched his limbs and poked alien fingers into his flesh. The space behind his ribs turned to a block of ice that dropped to his bowels, and the room blurred. With a steely effort he compelled himself to full concentration, determined to absorb the sounds and senses of the moment. Lucifer, his cat, mewed loudly at his feet, the old station clock ticked with enhanced resonance, and the fire crackled. She’d made perfect, nut-brown toast for him at that fire, sitting cross-legged like a schoolgirl, and holding forth the slices with a long brass fork. Then, with thick butter and lashings of her home-made damson jam, they’d devoured the whole loaf.

Forcing himself back to the moment, he mustered up his usual priestly script; a kind and soothing tome that threw in God’s good grace and eternal love.

‘Timothy,’ he concluded. ‘Please be assured that I’m here for you, at any time of the day or night, should you feel the need to talk. That’s not just an empty promise. I really mean it.’

‘Thank you, Father,’ Timothy replied graciously, ‘and thank you for everything you did for my mother. Her life was wholly enriched by your wisdom and support.’

‘She was a brave and gracious lady. I shall mourn her passing intensely.’

‘Father Ewan, I know she asked you to bless Morgana’s old handbag and to make sure it went with her. Were you planning to attend her cremation?’

‘I most certainly will attend, and carry out all her wishes.’ ‘Thank you, Father. I’ll contact you in the fullness of time.’

‘Goodnight, Timothy, and God bless you.’

‘Goodnight, Father Ewan.’

Momentarily Ewan swayed. After pouring himself a slug of neat whisky, he stumbled over to his American rocking chair and howled, unashamedly, like a wolf. He raised the glass, swallowed hard, and rocked gently back and forth. What exactly had she done to him in that chair on that hot September afternoon so many years ago? Seduced him. Torn up his vow of celibacy. Stolen his virginity. No. It had all been complicity. He’d beamed his message as brightly as the Southwold lighthouse, and she’d answered. For what must have been the hundredth time, he opened her last letter and read again her rare, written words:

4th March 2008

My adored Ewan

It’s a sunny, frost-sharp afternoon and although Andrew Gibson has insisted on bed rest, I continue to defy him. Instead I’m here in the drawing room, sitting by a slumbering fire, and looking out over the beauty of The Manor grounds. At my feet Anthea is curled up on the hearthrug in a comatose feline bliss – no doubt Lucifer is doing the same. At the bottom of the lawn I can see the swans gliding serenely on the lake. Hundreds of daffodils are in tight bud, and the tops of the bare oaks are bent low by a vicious wind. How lucky I am to be spending my dying days in such luxury, but what would I give to throw myself on the wings of that wind and be transported to your arms? Today Tim has driven up to the Cotswolds to pick up a dozen Garrya Elliptica trees to plant as my final memoir. Dear old Cora has just left, so with a rare afternoon alone, it’s a perfect time to write to you. Not only to write to you, but to start a painful journey I’ve decided to make to the inside of myself.

These written words must surely be my last to you, as my hands are getting weak. Speech too is becoming difficult, and soon the time will come when we can no longer talk on the phone. I’m slowly being completely removed from you. I’ve never written to you before to tell you how much I love you, but please allow me to do so now. Ewan, I love you, but there are no words that can do justice to its width and depth. My love for you is without parameters. Not only have you given me so much love in return, you gave me your beautiful young body and have never rejected me, despite the tick of the clock.

The purpose of this letter is simple. Throughout the years you’ve patiently put up with my manic changes of mood, and given free rein to my selfishness. You tried so gently to decipher my mind, but I was tiresome and flippant. Can I tell you why? Ewan, everything you know of me is one long con trick, but now I’m poised for the final retreat. I can’t go to my grave (urn, actually) withholding the deception. At last I feel strong enough to apply your wise, unique therapy.

When I’m gone you’ve promised to bless Morgana’s bag, and to make sure it’s burnt with me. Before you do, you’ll find something inside it to read. My confession. My story. Why now, you may ask? The answer is that it’s only now, when I don’t have to look you in the eye, that I can do it. You may find yourself reading muddled ramblings because I haven’t started yet, and I don’t know how it’s going to come out. All I know is that I’ve not much time left and I won’t waste words.

I love you, Ewan. ’Til we meet again, and I hope we will. (No – that’s not really a change of heart, but it’s something I want to believe in today).

Marina

Clumsily he returned the letter to its worn envelope, unable to concentrate on her strange talk of confession. She was gone, and in terms of life itself, he too, might as well be gone. The irony was almost laughable. Who could give bereavement counselling to a sinning priest and fellow counsellor? His only choice, apart from drinking from the poisoned chalice, was to apply his own tough methods to survive.

The McEwan School of Grief Therapy was based on a simple text:

Grieving is an arduous journey to find peace, and the stages are thus: disbelief, pain, anger, healing, and acceptance. Your journey will be one of perseverance and fortitude, and can only be achieved through discovering your identity. To know yourself is to understand yourself, and memory is the only key. To go back in time, to the beginning of your life, and work forward in strict narrative order.

It’s like a route march that has to be endured, but there are no points or penalties. Remember the allegory of the tortoise and the hare. Gradually, as you begin to find yourself, acceptance will overcome you. Days will become weeks, weeks will become months, and months will become years. The threads of normal life will be picked up, and slowly plaited together, until a seamless time comes. Your grief at last becomes painless, but your memories remain, forever after, as an indelible, golden time.

His consulting room was a bright, warm conversion of the Abbey’s Chapter House, and although an intrinsically religious setting, it held no depictions of apostles, virgins, lambs or infant kings – the early Cistercians believing that artistry and ornamentation distracted the mind from duty and devotion. Therapist and patient faced each other at a seated distance of exactly six feet, and his initial session ran for two hours. Whilst seeming brutally long, his skill was such that the anxious interviewee always emerged feeling as if time had suddenly run out.

Marina Proudfoot had been the worst failure of his career. In their first session he’d stilted through thirty minutes of her bland expression and monotone replies before asking her if she wanted to stop. She shook her head and turned away to avoid his questioning face… But this sort of remembering her was a nonsense. He couldn’t dwell on cherry-picked episodes of their relationship. For God’s sake, Ewan, stick to the script. ‘To go back in time, to the beginning of your life, and work forward in strict narrative order.’

Thus, he closed his eyes and fought to cross the Rubicon.

Every night, in the blind black hours, he crept into the darkest corners of his childhood and dredged up the memories. Fragmented and detached, they barged their way into his senses like the poorly tuned crackle of a cheap radio. A limping nun and a hump-backed priest. Mr Toad, who knew how to talk big. A damp, basement room in a place called Jericho. The whistle and steam of a train journey. But these were just the ephemera of a confused mind. It was the big one that assured his insomnia. The boomp-boomp of a body bouncing down the stairs was no invention?

In confusion he would lie there, sweating and turning, assuring himself that in the morning he’d take that quantum leap to further knowledge, but knowing that in daylight he’d be too cowardly to pursue it. Perhaps, as the years had passed, he’d embroidered the scenes with the stitches and threads of fancy, but whatever the memories were, he knew them to be true.

January 1965

His name was Patrick. Patrick O’Dowd. His mammy said that, now he was five, it was time for him to go to school. The nuns said he wasn’t allowed to go to the school in Jericho, so he had to go St Clement’s on the bus.

‘It’s a bloody long way,’ Mammy said, ‘but if we don’t behave ourselves, that’s my poxy job and their shitty old food vouchers down the pan. It’s a real pain in the neck.’ He thought it must have been the cold wind at the bus stop that gave Mammy the pain in the neck.

When they got to the school they had to wait a long time in a freezing corridor before a limping nun appeared, hobbling towards them like an injured black crow. Mammy bobbed and touched her titties. ‘Good morning, Sister Evangelica.’

‘Take off his mac, Miss O’ Dowd, and hang it over there,’ the black crow snapped. Mammy took off his gabardine raincoat, but then the old hag picked up his pullover at the shoulder and hauled him up on his toes. ‘And what, pray tell, do you call this item of filth?’

‘They gave it to me at Notre Dame,’ Mammy said, whirling her head so sharply her thick, silver-blonde hair flew round her shoulders like the flop of a mop. ‘It was spanking clean on this morning, same as all his clothes. Can I help it if he spilt his Farex and I didn’t notice?’

‘In the name of our sainted lady, Farex is baby food.’

‘Well, Patrick likes it,’ said Mammy. And he did like it. Mammy made it with evaporated milk and put a big dollop of golden syrup in the middle. He swirled it round and round with a pudding spoon and drank it from the bowl.

‘Miss O’Dowd, five-year-old boys don’t eat Farex.’

‘Well, this one does, and I’ll thank you to call me Mrs O’Dowd.’

‘Oh, to be sure you are, and I’m Princess Margaret. Now off you go to your work. We’ll expect you to be standing outside at half past three, and don’t be a minute past. We’ve more to do than entertain your son after the bell.’

Mammy kissed him and hugged him tight and told him to be a good boy. He didn’t feel like crying so he couldn’t understand why he did.

‘Don’t cry, my lovely,’ said Mammy, ‘or you’ll start me off, and I can’t go to work with two big red eyes, can I?’ She looked at her watch and gasped. ‘Heavens, look at the time. I can’t be late. Don’t worry. It’ll all be grand, and home time will be here in a flash.’ She ran down the corridor clicking her high heels.

When she’d gone, the old nun grabbed him again, holding onto his wrist with two white, bony fingers and led him up the corridor to a classroom. Nun’s skin was always white and waxy and papery thin. Mammy said it was because the priests sucked all their blood out of them.

‘This is a new boy,’ Evangelica said to the class. ‘Patrick O’Dowd. Not only is he wearing a filthy jumper, but it’s grey. Now what colour are our jumpers supposed to be, just in case Patrick hasn’t noticed?’

‘Green,’ shouted the class, all happy and beaming in their clean, green jumpers.

The teacher was an old priest with a humpty-back called Father Ignatius, and he showed him to a seat at the back of the class. ‘There you go, son,’ he said. ‘You sit by Brendan and Sheila, and it doesn’t matter a tiddlers what colour your woolly is.’

Halfway through the morning, the tinny clang of a brass hand-bell rang out, and Evangelica reappeared.

‘Get your coat on, child. Go out and get some colour into that pasty face.’ He followed the other children to the playground where Father Ignatius was handing out little bottles of milk, but he was jostled to the back of the queue by a gang of hard-faced boys, and by the time he got to the front, there were none left. Nobody asked him to play. Sheila called him specky-four-eyes and said he smelled of piddle. Brendan said he was evil and ugly because his top lip was slanty and scarred, and if anyone looked at him they would be struck dumb and die.

At dinnertime the serving ladies in the canteen were huffy and said there was nothing for him to eat because they didn’t know he was coming, and in any case, his mother hadn’t paid. ‘This is Patrick O’Dowd,’ said Evangelica in very loud voice. ‘He gets free dinners because his mammy’s a right good for nothing. Isn’t it obvious she never feeds him? I’ve seen more meat on a butcher’s pencil, so you’d better find him something in case he faints.’ They found him some cold carrots and gravy, and some soggy rice pudding with loads of skin.

Just before home time he sat with his head on his hands, dreaming dreams, while Father Ignatius read a story called The Wind in the Willows. The words were lovely and he was swept up by the adventures of Ratty and Moley and the Badger. He laughed at the doings of Mr Toad, and wished he was brave enough to talk ‘big.’ Father Ignatius was nice. He looked as old as God and his nose dripped. He wore one normal boot and one boot with a big sole, but he didn’t limp as badly as Evangelica. ‘If it’s not too icy tomorrow,’ he said, ‘we’ll go over to Angel Meadow. I’ll take you all along the backwater and through the rushes tall, and we’ll try to find a real water rat in the river.’

At home time ice-cold rain was spitting, and Mammy was outside, stamping her feet and drawing her coat collar up over her face. Evangelica called out to her, ‘I think a pair of fur-lined boots would serve you better than those silly shoes in this weather, Miss O’Dowd, though why I care escapes me.’ She handed over a brown paper carrier bag. When they were on the bus Mammy took out a pair of clumsy, fur-lined ankle boots, with thick rubber soles, and brass zips up the middle. She put her tongue out and made a face. ‘If she thinks I’m wearing those hideous things she’s got another think coming. See me clumping around like some old granny. They’d think I was doing a Father Ignatius!’ Mammy burst out laughing. He laughed too. Then Mammy flung her arms around him, and pulled him onto her knee, and they laughed and laughed.

The second day he remembered was the day his gran went off her head. Gran lived in Howard Street, and they used to go to see her on Tuesdays. Mammy always said, ‘We’re going to be very busy today, darlin’, and I think we’ll give that old school a miss. We’ll go up to Gran’s and see if we can wheedle a sub out of the old bag.’ Sometimes the nuns came knocking on the door, looking for him. ‘Patrick’s been ill today,’ said Mammy. ‘Terrible tummy pains.’

‘You’re a liar, Molly O’Dowd,’ they said. ‘You’ll rot in hell, you wicked girl.’

Every time they went to Gran’s there was a quarrel. Gran called Mammy ‘a scrubber’ once, and they had a fight. A real fight. They were always fighting like boys do, but it was true. Mammy was a scrubber. She went to the Convent of Notre Dame on the Woodstock Road every morning, and she’d get a tin bucket of hot soapy water and a brush. She tied some cloths around her knees, spent all morning scrubbing the floors, and on Fridays she got some money in a small brown envelope.

‘Old cows,’ said Mammy. ‘All week with my hands in suds for a piggin’ pittance.’ Sometimes they gave her a bag of clothes for ‘the boy.’ ‘They can stuff their hand-me-downs up their tight arses,’ she said, but he always ended up wearing the clothes.

On the day they went to Gran’s for the last time, Mammy sat down at the kitchen table. It was a cold, quarry-tiled kitchen that smelled of gas and Jeyes fluid. She took out a mirror and started to powder her nose, but Gran came up behind her and shoved her shoulder, and called her a vain little tart. The mirror flew out of Mammy’s hand, crashed down on the quarry tiles and smashed into a thousand pieces. ‘There!’ she yelled. ‘That’s seven years’ bad luck you’ve given me now.’

‘You make your own bad luck, Molly,’ Gran said, pointing a finger. ‘That little bastard, for instance. Pity you don’t know the difference between a lucky black cat and a randy Tom, and even more of a pity you couldn’t finish off his face properly. Hares only cross the path of the wicked.’

Mammy suddenly jumped up with tears running down her face. She made a lunge at Gran and screamed so loudly his ears hurt. ‘I’ll kill you,’ she yelled. ‘I swear to God I’ll kill you. How dare you belittle him? He’s a beautiful child. Isn’t his life going to be tough enough without you rubbing bloody salt in the wound?’

It all happened so fast. Mammy picked up a saucepan and tried to hit Gran over the head. Gran ran up the stairs and Mammy ran after her. They started struggling with each other on the landing, snapping and snarling like two dogs in the street, but he wasn’t afraid. It had happened so many times before and he thought it was quite exciting. But then Mammy’s foot and Gran’s foot got all muddled up. Gran toppled over and came tumbling down. Boompboomp-boomp.

Mammy flew down the stairs two at a time, but at the bottom she had to jump over Gran. ‘Come on,’ she yelled. ‘We’re off.’ She grabbed her bags and pushed him by the shoulder through the front door. She slammed it so hard behind her the windows wobbled, and then she turned round and shouted through the letter box, ‘Don’t expect me back this side of Christmas, you vicious old bitch.’

Mr Bradshaw next door was sweeping his path, but he stopped and his mouth hung open. ‘Blimey!’ he said. On the other side Miss Primandproper was polishing her doorstep and she jerked up sharply.

‘Fishwife,’ she hissed. ‘Now I’ve heard it all. That really takes the biscuit.’

‘You buggers can both shut your faces,’ bawled Mammy.

She then shoved him out into the street so hard he fell over on the pavement. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, child, get up!’ she yelled, and marched down the road talking to herself. She went so fast he had to run to keep up with her.

‘What’s the matter with Gran, Mammy?’ he asked.

‘She’s off her head, darlin’. Completely and utterly off her head, and that’s the God’s honest truth.’

When they got home, Mammy said, ‘Well, we didn’t get our sub after all, did we, so it’ll have to be fishcakes and spaghetti again.’ He didn’t mind at all because it was his favourite tea. Then afterwards she got out his colouring book and crayons. ‘Would you like to do some colouring in now, sweetheart?’

‘Please, can we have The Wind in the Willows first?’ he asked. He’d become such a good reader he could read nearly every word himself, but it was much nicer to sit on Mammy’s lap and listen. She said the words just like she was a really, really posh lady off the wireless, and she made it all so exciting.

… The Rat, much excited, kept close to his heels as the Mole, with something of the air of a sleep-walker, crossed a dry ditch, scrambled through a hedge, and nosed his way over a field, open and trackless and bare, in the faint starlight. Suddenly, without warning, he dived; but the Rat was on the alert and promptly followed him down the tunnel to which his unerring nose had faithfully led him to. It was close and airless, and the earthy smell was strong…

Mammy sighed loudly. ‘Mole’s house sounds a bit like this place, doesn’t it? A damp dump in the bowels of the earth. How I wish we could close our eyes and be whisked away out of it.’

‘Toad Hall!’ he said, sitting bolt upright on her knee, flushed and smiling with excitement. ‘One day we might live at Toad Hall.’

‘Oh, yes,’ she replied. ‘That’s just what I’d like. A great big house in the country, with a whopping great garden where you could go out to play, and you could run and run and run until you were so puffed out you couldn’t run any more, and when you stopped to get your breath, you still wouldn’t be at the end. Fat chance of that happening because your Mammy’s a fool.’ She sighed again. ‘Oh, Patrick, your daddy could have been so many things. A Texas millionaire or an English Lord or an Indian Prince. Why did he have to be a fish porter from the Covered Market?’

He’d heard this story so many times, but he couldn’t understand it. His daddy didn’t go to America and make a lot of money, he failed to become a member of the Royal family, and he didn’t change the colour of his skin and wear a turban, so why, if he has so many other choices, did he hump fish?

‘Miss Primandproper called you a fishwife today,’ he said. ‘Perhaps she knew my daddy,’ but then there was a hard knock on the door. It was a man wearing a belted raincoat and a trilby hat. On either side of him stood two big policemen with serious faces, poking their tongues through their lips.

‘Miss O’Dowd,’ said the man. ‘I’m Chief Inspector Butler. I’ve got some very grave news. Your mother’s been found dead at the foot of the stairs. Her neighbours, Mr Bradshaw and Miss Lamb, said there was some sort of domestic incident this morning, involving yourself. Could we possibly have a little chat?’ One of the policemen took the puzzled little boy out of the room to sit at the bottom of the stairs, and after a while Inspector Butler came out to talk to him. ‘How old are you Patrick?’

‘Five.’

‘It’s sad about your gran dying, isn’t it?’ He nodded. ‘You saw her this morning, didn’t you?’ He nodded again. ‘You and your mammy were probably the last people to see her alive. Now Patrick, do you know what happens to people who don’t tell the truth?’

‘They rot in hell.’

‘That’s right. But you’re only a little boy. Little boys don’t go to hell. Do you know what happens to them?’

‘No, I don’t know.’

‘The nuns eat them for their tea. Now I don’t want anything horrible to happen to you. I want you to grow up to be a big boy. So tell me the truth, Patrick. What was your gran doing the last time you saw her?’

Mammy appeared in the doorway. She was crying. Her head was wobbling, and she was twisting a hanky in her hands. She was looking really frightened so he knew he had to tell the God’s honest truth. If he didn’t, he would be eaten by the nuns. ‘She was completely and utterly off her head,’ he said.

Mammy then told him he was going away for a holiday. ‘It won’t be for long,’ she said. ‘Just until I get things sorted out.’

‘Where am I going, Mammy?’

‘Somewhere lovely. There’ll be other boys and girls there, and you’ll have lots of fun. Father Ignatius is coming over to get you.’

‘Will it only be for a little while?’

‘Just a holiday, my lovely.’

‘Why are you crying, Mammy?’

‘I’m not. I’ve got something in my eye. Now you’ve to be a very good boy.’

Mammy packed his bag and Father Ignatius came to collect him. She said she had to give an extra big kiss and cuddle to her very grown-up boy who was going on a holiday.

‘Here,’ she said. ‘You can take your colouring book, and when you get back home, you can show me what you’ve done. And make sure you take care of your glasses. You don’t want to go over the edges, do you?’

He couldn’t remember the holiday, but he remembered two nuns taking him to a noisy train station and meeting two jolly, smiling people on the platform. He’d met them lots of times before, and they were called Mr and Mrs McEwan. They’d taken him to the London Zoo, to see Guy the gorilla, and to a teashop called Lyons Corner House, where he had a big ice cream called a knickerbocker glory. They spoke with gentle Scottish voices, and they were very nice. The nuns said he could now call them Mummy and Daddy. Mummy McEwan kissed his cheek and Daddy McEwan ruffled his hair. They told him that his name was now Ewan McEwan, and wasn’t Ewan a really nice name, and a much nicer name than Patrick?

‘Well, goodbye, Ewan,’ the nuns said as he got on the train. ‘Make sure you’re a good boy and say your prayers, and look after that new puppy that’s coming for you.’

The train wheezed and whistled when it moved off, and Mummy McEwan lifted him up beside her on the seat. ‘It’s going to be a long journey,’ she said, ‘so I’ve brought you a book to help pass the time. I’ve been told you can read very well.’ He’d soon finished the book and said that, although he was very fond of Rupert Bear and all his friends, he would much rather read The Wind in the Willows. ‘Well, we’ve a child prodigy here all right, Duncan,’ she said.

‘I’m not prodigy,’ he said. ‘Sister Evangelica said I was so skinny she’d seen more meat on a butcher’s pencil, and my Mammy said I was belittle.’

‘Then we better get cracking and fatten you up,’ Daddy McEwan said. ‘Look, we’ve bloater paste sandwiches, a fine pork pie, a Battenberg cake and a flask of hot tea. Tuck in, son.’

At the end of the journey, there was a lot of noise and clatter when they got off the train, but when the whistle blew and the last carriage had disappeared out of sight, there was a perfect stillness on the platform. He could hear a blackbird singing and someone whistling, and in the background was the sound of yacht’s chandlery clinking in the wind.

‘This place is called Woodbridge,’ Mummy said. ‘Your Daddy is to be the head of the English department at a school near here called Waldringhythe Abbey. We’ve a lovely house to move in to, and it’s near the seaside. That’ll be fun, won’t it? And here’s another thing that’s going to be a lot of fun…’ A station porter was walking towards them with a basket.

‘One puppy, madam. One rather damp puppy, madam.’

‘He’s a present for you, Ewan,’ said Mummy. ‘A golden retriever and you can choose his name.’

He thought carefully. ‘Iggy-Piggy,’ he said. ‘It’s what my mammy called Father Ignatius.’

A smiling, waving priest then appeared to meet them, and there was a flurry of handshaking and words of welcome. ‘You must be Ewan,’ the priest said to him. ‘I’m Father Paulinus. My, that’s a fine pup you’ve got there. I can just see him racing up the banks of the Deben.’ They got into a big black car called a Humber Hawk, and the soft, warm puppy scrambled up over his chest and shoulders to lick his face.