When All Is Said(46)

That left him open-mouthed. I let my eyes linger on him for as long as physically possible before turning to rejoin the women.

Look him in the eye, Maurice, always look him in the eye.

Nothing more was said on the matter through lunch. We left as soon as our food was eaten. But when we got home, Sadie would not let it rest.

‘Can you just not get rid of it to be damned, Maurice? Sure what use is the coin to you? It means nothing to us, when obviously that man is obsessed.’

‘He got the better of me when I was a youngster, but he’ll not do it now.’

‘What are you, ten? Noreen has more sense than you sometimes. Bring it back and tell him you found it on the land a couple of years back or something, and it was only seeing his one today that reminded you.’

‘Right so, and while I’m doing that are you going to tell Noreen that we’re reneging on our bargain? ’Cause I’ll tell you something for nothing – I’m not.’

My hand thumped the table, spilling the tea from our cups into the saucers. We watched the rest of the Sunday game in silence, not mentioning another word about it for as long as she lived. Meanwhile, Noreen sat in her bedroom with her newest treasure, among her many others, oblivious to the storm she had created.



* * *



I’m not a hundred per cent sure what Noreen did with those coins day in day out. Pour them on to the floor, sift through them and then put them back in again, I suppose. She had such a collection. Jar upon jar, full to the brim. At first those jars were very ordinary and then as the years went on they got more refined. Sadie’d often come home from shopping having found some fancy one that she’d wrap, but not before dropping in a fifty-pence piece, or whatever the shiniest one might be at the time.

You loved her obsession. Do you remember when you were small you insisted Aunt No-no got pocket money just like you? You’d give it to her on the Saturday when you got yours. And, of course, at Christmas, there had to be the special trip to Dublin to buy the finest of jars for her. You’d be so proud arriving home with the latest one.

‘Well, now isn’t that grand,’ I’d say, when you waylaid me in the kitchen later that evening.

‘This is the best one ever,’ you’d beam.

And you were right, each year it was. And each year Noreen would not disappoint you and would squeal with laughter, opening her jar and looking inside to see what coin she had. And when you moved away, you never forgot her. It became as much of a pastime for you as for Noreen – the jars and the hunting down of new and different coins especially as you could get your hands on all kinds of interesting foreign ones by then. There was no one like you in her eyes at those moments when you produced some unusual specimen. I often felt my halo slip a little when she hugged you.

When she died, she left us her legacy of almost one hundred and fifty jars. When alive she only ever travelled with her three favourites: an old jam jar her mother had given her when she was five; a jar engraved with her name that Sadie had given her on her fiftieth birthday and then finally that one that you and Rosaleen gave her at your wedding. It was a beauty, I have to say: a photo of the three of you on the front of it. You and Rosaleen on either side of her taken on the settee at home in the front room when you got engaged. It was full to the brim of dimes and quarters. You must’ve been saving them for years. And to give it to her at the wedding, that was a stroke of genius. There it sat awaiting her arrival at her place at the top table. We all stood back to watch her reaction. Even the pair of you had slipped in to see it. She didn’t disappoint and hugged you both until you had to disentangle yourselves in order to go back out to make your official entrance.

Of course, we lived in fear of those precious jars breaking. Sadie worried constantly about them and therefore so did I. We were like parents tormented by the loss of a child’s favourite toy, the one they had to have to go to sleep at night. I remember thinking that exact thing when years later, on a visit home from the States, young Adam, who was possibly no more than three at the time, lost his toy duck, ‘Ducky’, a soft teddy yoke, on a shopping trip to Dublin. Will you ever forget it?

‘They rang everywhere they’d been, Maurice,’ Sadie told me when I came in later that evening. ‘But no one had sight nor sound of it. Kevin had to go back up to every shop until he found it down the side of one of those kiddie rides in the shopping centre, you know, the big one on Stephen’s Green. It was like they’d won the lotto, when Rosaleen saw him come in with it. My goodness, I could hardly take the stress of it,’ Sadie said, holding a hand to her heart.

After that Rosaleen scanned the Internet to find an exact replica for fear it might happen again. She never needed it in the end but says now she’ll keep it and give it to Adam when he has his first baby. Well, Sadie thought that was just a lovely idea. But then again there was very little Rosaleen could do that Sadie didn’t approve of. You don’t hear of that much now do you? Mothers and daughters-in-law getting on like that.

In the end we bought a case for Noreen’s three special jars. There they sat, safely enclosed in bubble wrap, ready for any journey. Noreen would carry that case proudly across the car park to where I waited to bring her home for the weekend, with Sadie following on behind with life’s actual essentials, that Sadie, not Noreen, had packed. She was a ticket. Her own woman, as they say. She pretty much ruled our lives, but truthfully her burden was light.