When All Is Said(47)
Noreen died in 2007, not long after the incident in the hotel. She was seventy. Fell on her way to her breakfast with the carer by her side, the one she liked the best, Susan was it? Collapsed into the woman’s arms. Blood clot in the brain. The loss hit your mam hard. She became lost in a silence I hadn’t witnessed since Molly had died. It was months before she smiled properly again or was able to laugh about the things Noreen got up to.
You’ll remember it was a small ceremony, her funeral. Just us, you and Rosaleen standing each side of your mam, holding her hand, a few neighbours and some of the people who looked after Noreen from the home, and of course Jenny and May returned from England. We brought her home to Annamoe to be buried with her parents. I think Sadie found that bit the hardest, being parted from them all. At first we made the trip to their grave every second weekend and then it lessened as time went on and we got older. I know Sadie did her best for her all through her life, but I’m not sure she agreed with me on that. She was so self-contained that sometimes I think I missed the full extent of the hurt and guilt. I did my best to be on guard for it. But having spent half my life distracted by what was outside – my deals, my empire – I often forgot to see what lay inside and how precious it was.
Chapter Five
9.20 p.m.
Fourth Toast: to you, Kevin
Jefferson’s Presidential Select
You’ve always been good at sending me the rare whiskies. On my birthday, I’ve been assured of an unusual beauty waiting for me on the kitchen table when I get in. When she was around, Sadie would stand there all proud, like she’d flown it over the Atlantic herself.
‘Look what’s arrived,’ she’d say. Always that. Her eyes dancing with joy – her smile as bright and warm as a day for foaling.
She’d sit and watch me unpack it. And then ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’, once the wooden box was opened. Running her fingers up and down the bottle, over the label, her hands lingering on the silky material covering the plastic casing. She’d take it between her fingertips and rub it gently with her thumb. There was that one where the material was deep orange, you might remember it yourself.
‘Isn’t it lush, Maurice?’ she’d said. ‘You could bite into that and almost suck the goodness out.’ Sometimes I wondered what was going on in my wife’s head. Can’t remember which bottle it belonged to. She kept all of them, the boxes, would you believe? Piled up in the back of the wardrobe, apparently. I never knew until I came across them after she’d died. I sat on the bed the morning of their discovery, with the door open for a while, just staring. Fifteen in all. All that pride packed away behind her coats. Days and weeks it took me, to decide how to keep hold of what those boxes meant to Sadie. Ladders. That’s what I thought in the end – that they could make the nicest little steps for Adam or Caitríona. Up to those big bunk beds of theirs. So I took them out; sat on the old footstool, the one Sadie used to put her feet up on while she watched her soaps, do you remember it? An old wooden packing box that a spare part for the tractor came in one time.
‘Are you using that?’ she had asked, having come into the shed one day with a letter that had arrived for me.
‘That?’ I said, pointing at the wooden crate. ‘I was going to break it up for the fire.’
‘I’ll take it. I have a bit of old carpet that’ll do just the job to cover it.’
‘For what?’
‘A footstool. The price of them is just ridiculous over in Duncashel. No, this will do nicely.’
Forty years we’ve had that footstool. Still perfect. The carpet is a blue flower affair, offcuts from your bedroom. So I sat there on it, the night I cleared the wardrobe. Each box I took out I spent time over, trying to remember when you’d sent them. When I opened the box where the orange silk had been, I could see it was gone. Stripped of its lush lining. The inner plastic laid bare like a chicken picked clean. I couldn’t figure it out. I just sat looking at it, turning the box over as if the very act might give me a clue as to why Sadie had done it. And then it occurred to me, I’d seen that orange material somewhere different. But it took me a while to find it in my memory. In the end I only had to turn my head and lay a hand to the dressing table and there it was. A purse in which she held her hair pins. That’s what she’d made – something practical and something where she could touch the lush softness every night. I’ve kept it. Saved it from the storage boxes. It’s with me now, in my bulging pockets alongside my father’s pipe. If anyone were to frisk me now they’d wonder what in the blazes I was at.
Francie is making the ladders for the children for me. He’s working his magic as we speak. They’ll be ready in time for when you come, which won’t be long now – a matter of days.
For me, though, it wasn’t just the drink but the literature about the making of the whiskies that was important. Each leaflet I read from cover to cover. I wondered what it felt like to be a distiller and to have created such perfection. Master craftsmen, all. Creating beauties at which men sighed. I wondered at their lives, their names: Dan and Rust and Carter, I imagined. I saw them all as quiet men, contented in their simplicity, sitting on porches, rocking in chairs, listening to radios and crickets as evening turned to night. Hands as big as shovels but nimble as stonemasons’. Before I took that first sip, I always raised my glass to them, off there sitting on their stoops – men, alongside whom I’d have happily passed the time. ‘God bless the hands,’ I always said, when I held their creation up and watched it move with grace and balance around my Waterford cut-crystal glass, a wedding present from Sadie’s Aunt Maura, she was always at pains to point out in that worried voice of hers whenever I held it. ‘God bless the hands.’