‘Is it the size you’re having trouble with?’ the girl asked in her strong Northern accent.
‘Oh, it’s the whole lot if I’m being honest. Would this be suitable for a fella of twenty?’ Ann asked, guessing the girl could be no more than sixteen or seventeen herself.
‘It’d be perfect – sure, I bought one for my brother, it’d go with anything. How tall is he?’
‘He’s around six foot.’
‘And is he . . .’ The girl puffed out her chest and cheeks and lifted her arms from her sides.
‘He’s broad on the shoulders but there’s not a pick on him.’
‘God, he sounds lovely,’ the girl said, ‘send him in to me. Is he blonde or brunette?’
‘Oh, he’s tall, dark, and handsome.’
‘That’ll do me grand,’ the girl said. ‘Take the large and if there’s any bother keep the receipt and he can just exchange it.’
Ann sighed and looked at the price tag again.
‘It’s lovely and Christmassy too, the red,’ the girl said.
In the atrium of the shopping centre was a fountain surrounded by plastic palm trees. Small children tossed coins into the water. Above the fountain hung a sign listing all the shops and what floor they were on. Ann craned her head back and read through the list to see if there was a shop that might sell wrapping paper. She thought it mean of that boutique to charge her £40 for a jumper and not offer to wrap it. A lot of shops were offering that now, the free gift wrap. She’d spotted some paper behind the counter, but she’d been too shy to ask and there was a queue building up behind her and so she’d taken it from them wrapped in a bit of tissue paper and placed in a stiff cardboard carrier with string handles, the logo of the shop, ‘Taylor’s’, emblazoned on the side. Still, the smart bag would look good under the Christmas tree and all she’d have to do was buy a bit of paper. But she couldn’t see a shop on the list that might sell gift wrap. She stared up at the three floors of shops that surrounded her.
Ann took a piece of notepaper from her handbag and unfolded it – eleven names. They were mostly nieces and nephews, a few of her friends who worked at the hotel, and now Shaun and his kids had been added to the list. Next to Carl she’d written ‘sketchpad and pencils’. Next to Barry, she’d written ‘aftershave’. Barry was the most difficult and surly of teenagers but he was certainly easy to buy for. He’d just started going to the disco in Glenties on a Friday, and whenever he left the house, the sweet, overpowering stench of cheap deodorant drifted off him. And then she spotted Shaun’s name at the top of the list with nothing written beside it.
When she’d spoken to him on the phone that morning, he’d told her he would invite Colette to the house for Christmas Day. She could come in the morning for a couple of hours, open the presents with the boys. By the time Ann came around three o’clock, Colette would be gone. He was doing it for Carl, he said. In the past couple of weeks, he had started playing up, crying at bedtime and agitating for a meeting with his mother. He had asked Shaun, ‘If you knew Mammy wasn’t living with that man in Dublin anymore would you let her come home?’ But of course Shaun already knew Colette and that man were no longer an item, it was the first thing she’d told him when she came back to the town. But it had gotten Shaun thinking. Carl’s questions were getting right to the heart of the matter, and Ann could tell Shaun was finding it more difficult to blame Colette when she’d told him herself that she’d made a terrible mistake.
He’d said he was sorry and he hoped this didn’t cause her any upset, but she told him that he had to do what he thought was right and it could only be a good thing to allow the boys to see their mother. She’d disagreed with his insistence on keeping Colette away from Carl, but didn’t feel it was her place to say anything. Whatever he decided, she would fall in with his plans, she said. And to her pat responses, he’d said, ‘I love you.’ It was the first time he’d said it. His tone was flat, with no pageantry to it, the way he might have made any plain statement of fact. Yet she couldn’t bring herself to believe it, angry that he had chosen this moment. All she’d offered by way of response was a lie. She’d told him that she was driving down to Mayo for the day to visit her aunt.
She loved him, she was certain of that. She would not spoil all of this with her need and jealousy and anger. She had too much to be grateful for. For the past twenty-five years her Christmases had been spent at the table of some relative or friend and now she had someone who cared for her, who was as good a man as she could hope to find, and she was going to spend the day with him or part of it at least. But she had spent so much of her life at the behest of other people that she knew how quickly things could change. His next call might be to tell her that he and Colette had reconciled. And then all the presents that she’d bought would stay huddled in the hall cupboard in her little house as a reminder of her foolishness.
Ann looked at the list again, then stuffed it back in her handbag. She would focus on the boys. Shaun would be happy with whatever she bought, but the right present could improve her standing with his children, who for the moment suffered her presence with a poorly concealed impatience. Carl was a talented artist. She saw the pictures he brought home from school. He had a real facility for drawing and yet he spent all his time playing computer games, and nobody commented on this. She checked the sign again and saw that there was an art shop on the second level, and she made her way to the bank of escalators that zigzagged between the floors.
Ann lifted her leg and withdrew it a few times before she felt confident enough to place her foot firmly on the escalator. She had difficulties with escalators, getting on them and getting off them – they gave her a kind of vertigo and she always felt like she was going to go toppling forwards or backwards. She held on firmly to the rubber banister, and as someone passed her on her left-hand side, she clutched the strap of her handbag. She wore the strap across her body. Claire from the hotel had been to Dublin and was minding her own business walking down O’Connell Street when some young fella grabbed the bag off her and tore a few ligaments in her shoulder while he was at it.
As she stepped off at the top of the escalator an announcement came over the loudspeaker and she felt her heart seize up for a moment. She swayed in place. ‘Could Hilary Carlisle please come to the main desk in the atrium, where her son is waiting for her.’ And then it was like everything steadied all at once and her mind was alert to each sound and movement happening around her. The danger had not arrived. Every time the loudspeaker went she was anticipating a bomb scare. You saw it on the news all the time – droves of people being ushered out of churches and cinemas and shopping centres. And not just scares, real bomb attacks that killed and maimed dozens of people. There was a ceasefire at the moment but usually if you listened to the radio or turned on the television at all you’d think the roads in Northern Ireland were ripped to shreds by bombs. All she could see when she looked around her were people going about their business, laden down with shopping bags. There were a lot more people than she was used to, and there might be a civil war of sorts going on but everyone seemed to be well off. And she supposed that fear was a thing you got used to in the same way as anything else. Like grief or anger or shame – you either moved past it or you lived with it for so long that you didn’t know the difference anymore.
Was that what had happened to Colette? Ann had known Colette for years. You couldn’t miss a woman like Colette in a town like Ardglas. Colette of the black hair. Colette of the blue eyes. Colette of the long bones – always to be seen in an outfit that seemed intended to make her look as dowdy as possible. But you couldn’t mask a beauty like Colette’s. So handsome, and she always seemed to be in good humour. She had a smile for every person she met and asked questions and was interested in people. Some people carried their grief with them – and that was not Colette. Some you could tell how much they’d suffered just by looking at them. Ann did not doubt that she must feel the pain of what had happened to her. Sometimes when Ann had run out of things to pray for, when she had worked through her own list of grievances, she would pray for other people. She would pray for her niece who had had four miscarriages and who sometimes took to her bed for days at a stretch. She would pray for Ellen Lafferty, whose son had made his bed the night before his final exams and hanged himself from the tree in the back garden. Now Ellen was hardly fit to move, she was so bowed by grief. Then there were the three Callaghan children, whose parents were killed in a car accident when they were teenagers and who’d practically had to raise themselves. But not once in her life had it occurred to her to pray for Colette Crowley. She’d never entered her mind. And now Colette was all she thought about.
She’d been in the bookshop in Donegal Town a couple of weeks ago, stocking up on Christmas cards, when in the corner of her eye she saw a sign for ‘local authors’. One of Colette’s books was face-out on the shelf. She checked to make sure no one was looking and took the book down. She admired the faded black-and-white photo of Colette on the back. It was like looking at her through parchment paper. There was one poem called ‘Cycle’ that was clearly about menstruation. There were a number of poems about how the responsibility of raising children had thwarted her creative ambition, which Ann thought a bit rich. Shaun said they’d always had a childminder and a cleaner. In a second volume that had been published over ten years earlier there was a poem about a beautiful young hero who drowned himself because he mistakenly thought the woman he loved had forsaken him. It was written like one of the old Irish legends, with all of nature being called upon to convey the sorrow and heartbreak of the woman. Ann thought it a right old dirge.
Shaun had removed Colette’s belongings from the house so there was little there to remind her. Still, Colette’s choices were everywhere and so some idea of her hung around. The china in the cupboards, the linens on the bed, the tiles in the bathroom, were all of such a particular and peculiar taste they could only have been the choice of one person. Shaun rarely mentioned Colette, but one night when they were lying in bed, Ann had felt brave enough to ask him what their marriage had been like. He told her it had ended the day their son died. Cot death, he’d said, and even though she’d known that already it had sent a chill through her to hear him say it. Colette went into shock, refused to accept what had happened. She took to her bed. She could hardly feed herself for the first few weeks. There were days, he’d said, when he honestly thought she was going to die too, that she’d never get past it. Nobody was allowed near the house and if they showed up she ran them from the door. And he didn’t know what to do for her. She began to drink heavily but when she discovered she was pregnant with Barry she stopped. And when they did begin to emerge from it, they could barely look each other in the eye, they were that ashamed of how they’d behaved, of their complete failure to provide each other with even a morsel of comfort when they’d most needed it. Since then, they’d shared a home and a bed, raised their sons together, but they were like guests, politely inhabiting each other’s lives.
And then he spoke of how strange and new it felt to exist in the world without Colette. For twenty years, wherever they went, the fact of Colette’s presence drew attention to them. And then she was gone, and he was invisible. And because of his proximity to her for so long he had never really considered what this had been like for Colette. Was it any wonder she expected life to just make way for her, to adjust to her shape? He had lived like the custodian of a prize, he said, and it felt good to be free of this responsibility, to be nothing other than himself for once.
After Shaun told her all of this, she spoke about her husband, Robert, and how he’d liked to swing his fists – how he only ever hit her on her body so that no one saw the marks. And then he went out on the boat he fished on one Sunday night and never came back. The Guards arrived at the door to tell her that he’d gone overboard in bad weather off Tory Island. The search and rescue operations they conducted back then weren’t up to much, and because the body was never recovered she couldn’t even have a proper funeral for him. The council provided her with a small house but even the upkeep on that cost money and she had to feed and clothe herself and make a life. She managed to stay out of trouble, to never complain, to appear happy but not too happy, and to hold on to some kind of respectability. This was her currency. People felt sorry for her. She could see it in their faces. But the truth was she was glad to be free of her husband and she did not miss him. She’d felt ashamed about telling this to Shaun.
Ann stepped onto the next escalator and held her breath. She began to count as she glided upwards towards the glass ceiling of the shopping centre and everything around her became bathed in a new light. She caught sight of herself in a shop window – just a brief glimpse of a middle-aged woman in a bright yellow ski jacket. She’d had her highlights done the previous week and the colour had settled a bit and she was happy with them. She was slim, she always had been, and running around the restaurant all day had helped her to maintain her figure. She’d been the recipient of many a leer down through the years from male customers who knew of her extended widowhood and thought she was game. But Shaun Crowley was known as a quiet, even-tempered man and she’d been surprised by the matter-of-fact and straightforward way he went about the whole thing. Not a bit shy. It was like he asked women out all the time.
Eight, nine, ten – the second floor of the shopping centre was quieter and the shops were of a different sort, smaller units selling fabrics and picture frames and stationery. She felt the tension in her body easing as she approached the art shop and then she heard the clinking of cutlery and crockery. The café on the top floor looked so warm and inviting under the glass roof and the blue sky and she thought a cup of tea would fortify her before she carried on with the rest of her shopping. There was just one more escalator and she stepped onto it with purpose.
The girls behind the counter wore little white trilbies with a black band and green-and-white striped aprons. They looked like they worked in a butcher’s, she thought. They were all pink in the face from the steam rising up out of the enormous bains-marie. She collected a tray and queued and ordered a small pot of tea and a donut. The place was nearly full but there was an empty two-top at the back. She sat facing away from the counter first but then she was looking directly at the escalator and getting eyeballed by every person it delivered to the top. So she switched seats but then she was looking around her at the busy café. She felt self-conscious sitting there on her own. She reached into her handbag for the crossword cut from a copy of The Irish Times she’d found in the hotel. She never bought The Irish Times, The Independent maybe, but Shaun bought it every day and they did the crossword together in the evening. She loved doing puzzles but The Irish Times crossword was a bit more challenging than what she was used to and she thought she’d need a bit of practice. There were a few answers filled in already but she was having difficulty with eight down, eight letters, ‘Euphemism for hardships’. She took a sip from her tea and looked up and there was Izzy Keaveney standing in the queue with the boys. Carl had his back to her but she knew it was him from the little black puffer jacket he wore. Shaun had told her that Izzy was taking the boys away shopping but he had said nothing about them going to Enniskillen. But that was not the kind of thing Shaun would think to ask. And then Carl turned and smiled and she almost didn’t recognise him because Carl never smiled. Clever Carl, the fairest of them all. Carl, the love of his father’s life. And he was smiling at someone – a tall woman approaching them with a Taylor’s carrier bag swinging from the end of her finger.
Her cup clattered down onto the saucer and tea spilled over the table. The crossword soaked into the beige Formica surface,
the blue letters dissolving into inky blotches. She kept her head down. The tea spread slowly, pooling at the raised metal
edge that skirted the table. She looked up from under her brow. There was a plastic fern on the ledge in front of her, a poor
camouflage. The down escalator was on the opposite side of the café so she’d have to walk past them to get to it, or wait
until they’d left. But she’d managed to avoid Colette for the three months since she’d been back in the town and she was not
going to allow this to be their first encounter. She could hide in the toilets, she thought, and she looked over her shoulder
and beside the door to the ladies was an elevator. Elevators made her claustrophobic but she decided she might have no other
choice. She looked over at them again and saw that Colette and Carl had gone ahead to find seats. An elderly couple getting
up to leave offered their table to Colette and she thanked them and sat down opposite Carl, smiling at him. Ann saw that Colette
was so absorbed in her son she could have stomped past them shouting at the top of her voice and Colette wouldn’t have looked
up for a second. And then Colette reached into the Taylor’s bag and with a flourish ripped something out of it. She was like a matador, dangling a piece of red material in front of Carl’s face. A jumper – the exact same one Ann had bought Ronan. Ann lifted her handbag and brought the strap down over her body. She edged out of the seat slowly and kept her gaze lowered and headed in the direction of the elevator. As the doors closed, she shut her eyes and counted to ten. It was only when she opened them again on the ground floor that she realised she’d left Ronan’s present under the table in the café.
Chapter 14
Colette laid the piece of gift wrap flat on the kitchen table and stood the bottle of whiskey at its centre. She had no idea what to do. Should she lift the paper up and smother the bottle in it and fasten a ribbon at the top like she was wrapping a hamper? She took a sip from her wine and stepped back and surveyed the table once again. She approached, placed the bottle on its side, rolled it up. She twisted the excess paper and put a ribbon at each end and what she was left with was a kind of demented-looking Christmas cracker. There was something about this that pleased her. Shaun wouldn’t care about the wrapping anyway.
Shaun had been the hardest person to buy for. Whatever she brought had to be a carefully selected peace offering. Anything too extravagant or too sentimental could upset the balance in the relationship she hoped to re-establish. Shaun liked a single measure of a rare and expensive whiskey while he watched the nine o’clock news. As a gesture it was ordinary enough to be dismissed as meaningless and intimate enough to suggest something.
She refilled her wineglass and checked her watch. It was a quarter to two and she would stop drinking by four. She had some pasta that she could reheat in the microwave for dinner and she would drink plenty of water. She would be well-slept and clear-headed when she went to visit her sons the next morning. It was the excitement of seeing them really that had made her want a glass of wine, the festive feeling that had come over her while wrapping their presents.
There was a knock on the door.
‘Who is it?’ she asked, and she heard a small, high-pitched voice give a response she couldn’t make out. ‘Give me a second,’ she said and went to the bathroom mirror. She ran her tongue over her front teeth and scratched off the dark dregs that were stuck to her lips. She placed her wineglass in the kitchen sink and opened the door to find Madeleine Mullen chewing on her thumbnail and leaning on one hip and mouthing something Colette had to get her to repeat several times. Finally she pulled her thumb away from her teeth and with some aggression said, ‘Mammy says there’s a phone call for you down at the house.’
‘Oh God, Madeleine, I’m still in my dressing gown, could they not leave a message?’
‘No, she said it’s urgent.’
Shaun or her mother, she thought, they were the only two people who ever called her here. Her heart began to pound.
‘Right, I’ll be there in one moment,’ she said, but Madeleine was already walking away.
Colette ran into her bedroom and grabbed a pair of old jeans that was thrown across the end of the bedframe. She pulled them on under her dressing gown and threw a jumper on over that and knew she must look quite mad with the dressing gown flapping around her like a torn skirt and the cord hanging from her waist. There was a pair of plimsolls by the door that she put on without any socks, and as soon as she passed through the gap in the wall and began descending the hill, she felt the shoes and the ends of the jeans dampening. When she reached the bottom of the hill Dolores was standing at the front door staring at her.
‘Oh, Dolores!’ She laughed. She pulled the ends of her hair out from under the neck of her jumper and tossed her head. ‘You’ll have to forgive me – Madeleine caught me in my déshabillé,’ she said in an exaggerated way, repeating the phrase her mother used when she opened the door to some unexpected visitor.
