A Keeper(57)

Patricia looked down at the little red face and was relieved to not be worrying about some distraught mother wailing over an empty pram. At least this was her home and Edward was her father. She realised that the person she still needed to be worried about was herself. She was the one who needed to be rescued, not this baby.

Edward burst back into the room brandishing the bottle as if returning to the front with orders from a general.

‘Here you go.’

‘Thanks.’ Patricia sat in the chair that Edward had been occupying and Elizabeth vigorously latched herself to the rubber teat. Her father sat on the bed. The baby’s hunger and now her happy rhythmic sucking seemed to act as a balm on the room. Neither Edward nor Patricia felt nearly as stressed and upset as they had just a few minutes earlier.

‘She needed that,’ Edward said with an admiring grin, as if eating was a talent.

‘She did,’ Patricia agreed and then they sat in silence for a few minutes. She watched Edward watching Elizabeth.

‘How did she die?’

‘Mary? She died giving birth to that one.’

Patricia absorbed this information looking down at the baby slurping happily, oblivious to all the sadness and pain she had been born into.

‘She started to bleed and they couldn’t stop it. By the time the ambulance came it was too late. She was gone.’

Patricia couldn’t help but have some sympathy for this man. He wasn’t a bad person, just na?ve. Too innocent to live in this world, especially with his life being dictated by his mother. Patricia wondered if Mary had been held against her will.

‘How did you meet Mary?’ she asked, trying to disguise her suspicions.

‘Just by chance, and we hit it off.’

Edward wasn’t lying. It was true, they had met by chance but that wasn’t the whole story or even their first encounter.

What he didn’t say was that they had been connected many years before. When he saw her behind the counter in the chemist’s Edward hadn’t recognised her at first. She was just a woman dressed in black standing at the dispensary. He had asked for the regular prescription of the pills his mother had been on since James drowned. It had been Mary who had noticed him.

‘Edward?’ she had asked uncertainly, a smile brightening up her thin, pale face. Suddenly he saw the ghost of a young girl he had known.

‘Mary?’

They spoke then. She told him about her new job, there in the chemist’s. The grandmother who had raised her had passed away so she thought it was time to make her own way in the world. She asked about Mrs Foley and Edward found it wasn’t painful to talk to her. The words came easily. He was enjoying himself.

A stranger might have seen a man and a woman shyly flirting across a counter but what drew them together that day wasn’t a physical attraction or romantic chemistry. What connected them was what they had shared. They had both lost James. Mary had been his girlfriend at the time of the accident and his death had affected her deeply. At the funeral, despite her youth, she’d taken on the role of de facto widow and people shared their sympathy with her in almost the same way they did with the family. She had taken to wearing black and vowed to never love another.

So many years had passed, but in each other’s company they felt alive. They understood one another because they both knew what they had lost. Edward found that he had invited her out to the farm one Sunday; his mother would like to see her. This was true. Mrs Foley had always been fond of Mary. James had begun to get himself a bit of a reputation locally with the girls so it was a relief to his mother when he started to go steady with someone. She went out of her way to praise Mary. ‘A grand capable girl,’ was her seal of approval.

Edward hadn’t really expected her to say yes, but one Sunday, not too long after the meeting in the chemist’s, she was sitting at the kitchen table dunking the Marietta biscuits she had brought into her tea. Conversation had been general. The farm, her grandmother’s passing, the new job, but soon the talk had turned to James.

Edward and his mother never spoke of the missing brother and son, but the presence of Mary in the house gave them permission. They feasted on memories of the young man they had all adored, but there had been no tears. They laughed about the time he hadn’t put the hand brake on and the car had ended up blocking the entrance to the Garda barracks in Clonteer, the way he had named all the cows after the neighbours, how Dora the collie had continued to sleep on one of his old jumpers till death had claimed her too.

They arranged to meet again. A film in Clonteer. A walk along the headland on a Sunday. These weren’t referred to as dates, but they knew they didn’t want to lose each other. When Edward had kissed her it was as if a spark of James had been reignited. In truth, their brief little romance wasn’t with each other, it was a celebration of a love they shared. Asking her to marry him seemed like the right thing to do, for his mother, for Castle House, for James.

Sometimes it was hard to recall, but there had been happy times. Mary stepping her way carefully across the fields, her belly growing, a picnic lunch for them to be shared sheltering against a high hedge. The three of them sitting around after dinner talking about the future. Old Mrs Foley had picked the site for her bungalow and she had found a design she liked from the book of plans. The sound of Mary’s breathing when he woke in the night. The smell of her hair fanned out on the pillow next to his. Castle House had been transformed. It had all seemed too good to be true.