A Keeper(2)

‘Hi, Noelle! Terrible day, isn’t it?’

‘It is. It is. I thought it was you! It was the hair I noticed first.’ Noelle emitted a small shriek, to indicate how pleased she was by her perceptiveness. ‘You must have had a fierce drive. We didn’t know you were coming back.’ There was a slight accusatory tone in her voice.

‘I didn’t know myself,’ Elizabeth lied. ‘Zach has gone to see friends so I thought I’d come back and sort out the house before term time starts up.’ This was also a lie. Her son had gone to visit his father on the west coast. She wondered why she hadn’t just told the truth. Was she saving herself from embarrassment, or Noelle?

‘You should have let us know. We’d have put the heating on for you. You’ll come down for dinner now, won’t you?’

‘You’re very kind but I won’t. I grabbed a few bits and pieces on the way out of Dublin and all I really want to do is sleep. I’ll call down tomorrow. You should get in, Noelle, you’re getting soaked.’

‘Well, if you’re sure, and if you get up there and change your mind just come down. We’re still eating Christmas! We missed having your mother this year of course.’ Noelle pushed the corners of her bright red lips down to indicate the sort of regret you might show a toddler that had banged their knee. ‘Anyway, welcome home!’

Elizabeth forced a smile and waved. Judgemental bitch. Did Noelle not understand that she could never make Elizabeth feel any guiltier than she already did? The horrible tug of war between being both the single child of a dying woman and a single parent living thousands of miles away was finally over and she had to admit she was glad. Elizabeth put the car into gear and drove on.

The road opened out into what was known as The Green, even though it was just a narrow wedge of paving in the middle of the road with a park bench and two litter bins. Just beyond that the town’s only set of traffic lights turned red. Elizabeth stared out at the wet, deserted street, the windscreen wipers wearily slicing away, and a strange fury bubbled up in her. She slammed her hand hard against the steering wheel. Not five minutes back in Buncarragh and all the feelings that had made her flee the place had come flooding back. It didn’t matter how hard she had studied or who she had invited to her birthday parties, she was always made to feel less in this town. Poor Liz Keane. Growing up with no daddy. It was surprising how often the word ‘Father’ came up in a convent education and every time it did she had felt all eyes on her.

Now she was a single mother herself – worse, Zach’s father refused to do anything as useful as disappear – she understood how strong her mother must have been to endure all the sideways glances and wagging tongues that stopped abruptly as she pushed her pram along the streets in the 1970s. She sometimes wondered if the humiliation of her own married life was a form of punishment for being so judgemental of her mother when she was a girl. Oh, how she had hated her mother for not having a husband! What sort of woman couldn’t manage to get a man? She examined her friends’ parents. These women weren’t as pretty as her mother, with their unkempt hair and sometimes not even a smear of lipstick, and yet they had all managed to find someone to say ‘I do’, someone to hold their daughters’ hands as they walked in large broods after mass. The memory of her and her mother clicking along the pavement from the chapel to their house while car windows stuffed with sweaty small faces gawped at them still brought back a deep pang of loneliness. That feeling of being somehow incomplete. No daddy, no siblings, no sense of being a real family.

Christmas. No wonder Elizabeth hated it so much. Knowing that everyone else was surrounded by boisterous clans squashed around tables on mismatched chairs while she and her mother sat in Sunday silence scraping at plates. Of course, her aunt and uncle had issued invitations to join them and her three cousins but her mother always refused. ‘We’ll just have a nice quiet family Christmas. The two of us. Let them get on with it.’ As an adult Elizabeth understood her mother’s pride and all the guilt she must have endured, but as a child she felt she was being punished. She always thought her mother had put appearances – the house, her hair, new school shoes – above her actual happiness.

Nobody, certainly not her own mother, had ever sat her down and told her the story of her father in detail, but over the years she had gleaned the main thrust of the tale.

Her mother, Patricia, had nursed her grandmother until she died, at which point most people considered her to have missed the boat when it came to men. She was the spinster sister and aunt, nothing more. But then, out of the blue came news that she was dating and almost before people had time to absorb that fact came word of a wedding. Her mother had left Buncarragh to begin her newly married life. However, within a suspiciously short space of time she had abruptly returned, carrying the baby Elizabeth in her arms. There was no sign of any husband. The rumour mill went into overdrive. The husband had beaten her, the mother-in-law had driven her out, there had never been a wedding. The fact that she had retained Keane as her surname only added to the mystery and scandal. Nobody knew the truth. When Elizabeth was older she had tried to talk to her mother about what had happened to her father but was always given the same stock answer: ‘He died very young, but he was a lovely man, a kind man.’ If Elizabeth persisted her mother assured her that he had been an only child and that there was no other family. She imagined her family tree as a couple of bare branches with an ancient vulture perched on one of them.