The Christie Affair(24)

Now, faced with the worst grief of her life, our mother didn’t walk. She was unable to move. Louisa, too, had taken to her bed and refused to leave. Colleen’s death could not be solved by anything.

But Megs and I walked just the same. ‘Da won’t let us have a funeral,’ she told me.

‘Why ever not?’

By the time we reached the bridge, I knew the story. Colleen had been pregnant. The fellow had gone off to war and never answered her letters.

‘Who was he?’ All I could think of was the boys she’d turned away, without ever seeming remotely tempted.

‘He told her he was a philosophy student,’ Megs said. ‘She met him at the library. Perhaps he was a cad or perhaps he was killed in the war. Either way, when Da found out about the baby, he turned Colleen out of the house.’ Her face was pale, dark eyes lustreless. Hating to tell me there was something we could do – we girls – that would rob us of our father’s love. I’m not sure I ever saw my father smile again after Colleen died, but it may be that I just stopped looking at him. When he hardened himself against one daughter he hardened the rest of us against him. His wife, too.

Under a dull sun on Waterloo Bridge I stood arm in arm with the one older sister I had left. ‘ “It was only love,” ’ Megs told me. ‘That’s what Colleen said. Da said it was a sin and a disgrace. She said, “No, Da. It was only love.” ’

‘How could he?’ I never thought, How could Colleen? I knew about love by now. It was easy to imagine taking the same path as Colleen. But my father’s? I closed my eyes and tried to picture the young man clever enough to enchant my smart and beautiful sister, then callous enough to abandon her. He must have been killed, I decided.

Megs kept her anger focused on our father. ‘I suppose he figured he had one to spare.’ Her voice sounded empty and resigned. How many of us would Da go through before there wasn’t one to spare?

Megs and I let go each of other and leaned forward, staring down into the water. Colleen had walked here, taking the South Bank route, I knew that’s how she would go, and still nothing had been solved. Megs and I had walked the same way and still our sister was gone forever. As I look back now, with my view from the future, I see two young, brown-haired girls, small in the scope of things, and all around them machines of war, galvanizing themselves from every corner of the globe to encroach upon their world. But in that moment Megs and I didn’t see it. Never in living memory had a war touched English soil and it still seemed impossible, the way it wouldn’t years later, when the second one came along.

All I had at the time was the view from behind my own eyes. A foggy summer day in the city. Megs and I, exhausted from our walk, and from our loss, leaned against each other. I wished I could cry but my insides were leaden with the same flat, hollow ring of Megs’s voice. If I’d had flowers, I would have tossed them, to flutter down into the water, the same spot where Colleen had flung herself into the Thames.



Years later I would see a film, Brigadoon, and it would remind me how I held Ballycotton in my head during the war: protected, perfect, untouchable. Safe from the ravages of time and progress. Hiding in the clouds, waiting for my return.

In London the world was empty of its young men. My mother finally got out of bed and took me to have my portrait made. I was surprised when she walked into the kitchen, dressed for the day.

‘Put on your best dress,’ she told me. ‘We’re going to have a picture made in Forest Hill, to send to your Irish soldier.’ She finger-curled my hair and gave me Vaseline for my lips and eyelashes.

On the bus my mother blinked and blinked, unaccustomed to the natural light that poured through the windows. She’d stayed inside so long. ‘Oh, Mum,’ I said.

‘Never you mind.’ She grabbed onto my hand. ‘We’re going to take care of you, Nan. My darling girl. And you mustn’t be crying. He doesn’t want to see tears in his picture, I’ll tell you that.’

I thought Finbarr wouldn’t mind seeing tears. I’d never known him to mind anything. Still, I smiled dutifully at the camera, sitting on the photographer’s stool, sincere in my happiness as I imagined looking at Finbarr’s cheerful face. Some days later I went on my own to collect it. It was a pretty picture, so much prettier than I was in real life, I worried he’d be disappointed when he saw me again. My smile showed off the good luck of my straight, white teeth. In the letter I sent along with the picture, I wrote in tiny, crowded print. Paper was scarce during the war and I wanted to tell him the truth about everything. Over the next four years I wrote to him regularly and dutifully. I wrote about what had happened to Colleen and how I couldn’t look at my father anymore, nor he at any of us. I wrote simple things about school and my friends. I wrote how the war had reached us in London with the Zeppelin bombing, and how Megs wanted to work as a nurse but Da wouldn’t let her and in this case Mum agreed. I admitted I knew his danger was much greater but I was terrified of the aerial attacks. ‘Nothing could be crueller than attacking from the sky.’ As my pencil moved carefully, sparingly over the page, I held in my head the same Finbarr from peacetime. In my mind, his smile broke open as easily as ever. He wrote back, saying he hoped to get enough leave, and save enough money, to come to London. He kept the picture of me tucked into his sleeve during battle and tacked beside his bunk at night. I imagined the edges frayed and worn. He’d touch my cheek before sleeping and tell me goodnight. I wished I had a picture of him.