The Christie Affair(36)

‘I know who you are.’

I could tell she wanted to say something about Seamus and Jack. Perhaps offer condolences. Perhaps blame them – Finbarr would have gone over there, wouldn’t he, before they’d fallen ill. She slid the cup of tea in front of me without offering milk or sugar.

My eyes roamed the small kitchen. There were two doors – the one I’d come in, from the outside, and the one leading to the rest of the house, firmly closed.

‘Is Finbarr here?’ I asked his mother. ‘Is he all right?’

‘He’s here and he’s not all right and he doesn’t need you upsetting him.’ She sat down to her own tea. From the way she refused to let her eyes rest on me longer than a few seconds I could tell it was an effort to refrain from kindness. Did she know? About me? Or was her coldness due to worrying over her only child?

‘Is it the flu?’

‘It is and you mustn’t catch it. We must get you out of this house straight away. I’ve been tending him day and night; I could be carrying it myself. I’m sure I am.’

‘If I could just see Finbarr—’

‘You can’t.’

‘I could stand in the doorway.’

‘Are you deaf, girl? I said no.’

‘Nan,’ I said. ‘My name’s Nan. Finbarr wants to see me. I know he does.’

She looked away, towards the shuttered window. She had black hair like Finbarr’s, streaked through with grey. Like his would be one day. I’d thought her rosy cheeks were caused by the cold but up close I saw there were little broken blood vessels along her cheekbones. Careworn. She would have been beautiful once. Finbarr told me she wished she’d had a hundred children. Now here I was offering her one more.

‘Where’s Alby?’ I asked.

‘Traded off for provisions during the war.’

Would they have written to tell him? Or had Finbarr arrived home and found Alby gone? I imagined him whistling around the house till his father finally gathered the strength to admit what had been done. Finbarr would have worked extra hours at every farm near Ballycotton, first to earn my passage home and then to buy his dog back.

I reached into my bag and pulled out one of Finbarr’s letters. ‘Look,’ I said, holding it towards her. ‘He wants to marry me. He sent me money to come here. So we could be married.’ I pointed to the words on the page. ‘He promised.’

She stared at me, unmoved. I shook the letter under her eyes. A horrible feeling, when something you think holds power turns out to be useless.

‘And don’t you know,’ said Mrs Mahoney, ‘that’s what a man says, to get a woman to do what he wants. The trick is in saying no. That’s how you get a man to marry you. Before. Not after.’

How did she know? It must have been my urgency that gave me away. I was as thin as I’d ever been. Still, there was no use arguing. ‘He wrote this after,’ I said simply, then put my head down on the table. I was so tired. And suddenly horribly, horribly hungry.

‘Don’t you cry,’ she said.

As if it hadn’t occurred to me until I heard the words, that’s exactly what I did. Great, guttural sobs, filling the small house. For a moment I felt embarrassed, but then I thought, if Finbarr heard me, perhaps he’d will himself out from wherever he was, and come into the kitchen. He’d tell his mother the truth. He’d insist on marrying me that very day. But no matter how I sobbed, he didn’t appear, and his mother didn’t soften. I cried until I fell asleep, my head resting on my arms.



‘At least let me give her something to eat,’ Mrs Mahoney said to her husband, willing to expose softness when she believed I couldn’t hear.

I opened my eyes to see Finbarr’s parents, standing by the door that led to the rest of the house as if they meant to guard it from me. If he’d inherited his joyful air from either of them, it was gone from both now. Still they had made him, these two people, they had made Finbarr and raised him in this small, dirt-floored house. I love you and thank you rose in my throat, but I choked the words back. They wouldn’t want to hear them from me.

‘Let me give her a glass of milk and some bread,’ his mother said. ‘And there’s stew left over from last night. The poor girl, in the way she is, she must be famished.’

I lifted my head, feeling the creases in my face. My eyes felt swollen from sleep and crying. The poor girl. I recognized Mrs Mahoney’s new sympathy as a bad sign. If she no longer needed to steel herself towards me, my fate was no longer in her hands. Somebody else had taken over.

Mr Mahoney sat in the chair beside me. He wore an oilskin coat and smelled of fish and salt air. His wife set to bustling, making me a plate.

‘If you’d just let me see him for one moment,’ I said. ‘All I ask is one moment.’ And then it would all be clear to everyone. They’d never seen us together. They couldn’t know. If they did, they would understand.

Mr Mahoney put his hand on my arm. Slim, like his wife, but much taller, with a full, ruddy face, hard bitten by years on the sea. When he spoke it was with the brogue that still sounded like music to me.

‘Listen,’ he said to me. ‘Nan, is it?’

I refused to nod. Shouldn’t he know by now it was Nan? Of course he knew.

‘I know you’d like to speak with Finbarr. But he’s not in a way for that now. He can scarcely lift his head from the pillow.’