When All Is Said(69)

‘You’ve never thought of giving up?’ I ask, so quietly I wonder has she managed to hear my words. I wait to watch her mouth form the answer.

‘Too weak willed,’ she replies, with a smile that transforms her face into something beautiful, ‘it would take a stronger woman than me to bow out of this world.’ She pauses and turns to me, ‘But you didn’t answer my question. What is your secret?’

‘Whiskey.’

She laughs out long and loud. I haven’t a clue why. I never meant it to be funny. I meant it to be true. But still her lips broaden and it’s infectious. My own begin to do the same. Soon my insides are vomiting up the laughter. And we laugh together. Laugh our desperation into the foyer, around the youngsters coming and going. Laugh until it’s robbed our breath. Laugh so we must pinch the tears back from our eyes. Laugh so we must keep hold of the couch as if we’re in danger of falling off. When it starts to subside, we slouch against the velvet back and quieten down, letting our serious heads return.

‘The thing I miss most about Jason is not what he said or did,’ she says, her hand long gone from mine, lying flat against her chest now, ‘it was his very breath, beside me in the room or the next room or somewhere in this place, I didn’t care. It was simply knowing he was there, that meant the world to me. I didn’t need him to do anything other than just be alive. Is it the same for you?’

I look at her and cannot release the words for fear of the tears that might insist on flowing. So I nod my answer. Nod like a mad demented dog. Nod to my knees, to my drumming fingers, down into my very soul. Closing my eyes, I hold back the tsunami and nod.

We are quiet now. And an image of Sadie comes to me. Her kneeling down out the back of the house at her rockery. Her pride and joy it was. And she is trying to get up. Her knees were bad, you see, arthritis, just like mine. She reaches her hand to a large stone and tries to pull herself up but she can’t. She waits a minute then tries again. She looks back to the house but she can’t see me standing at the kitchen window. I wave to her to wait. I wave to say, hold on, I’m coming. But before I leave the window, she has tried again and this time, succeeded.

‘Emily has never breathed a word about your arrangement over the hotel, you know,’ Hilary says, ‘she wouldn’t, she’s a good girl. But I’ve known since the very beginning, the night you offered her the money to save this place. I overheard it all in the office.’

She leans into me with a grin and looks for all the world like a little girl who is at last getting to reveal a secret she has kept sacred for far too long. I can’t speak and even if my throat and mouth allowed the words through, I don’t know what they’d say.

‘Do you know the truth is, I let you save me,’ she says, whispering it to me, grinning. ‘Isn’t that wonderful, Mr Hannigan? You saved me – a Dollard – as you like to call me,’ she laughs, lifts her head to the ceiling, then back down to her hands. ‘I couldn’t leave here after he died. Well, when I say couldn’t leave here I mean, him, of course – Jason. He was my world. He seeps out of every inch of these walls. He loved this rack-and-ruined place. Nothing and no one could dissuade him from the idea of it being a hotel, especially not me.’

She smiles sadly and looks about.

‘She would have sold it, you see – Emily, when she came home, when Jason was dying. I knew she was thinking that way and I couldn’t have everything he had worked for taken away from me. And then you came along on your white steed. Ironic, don’t you think? You might finally have been rid of us Dollards, instead you ensured we stayed.’

Her smile widens.

‘I could have laughed. You don’t think I’d forgotten, do you? You don’t think I’d forgotten how you’d treated Jason that night he stood at your door begging for money for us. He never lived it down. Never.’

Her head, serious now, shakes from side to side, her compassion for me gone.

‘You brought a good man low, Mr Hannigan. A good, decent man. My man. It was you who condemned her here, do you know that? My poor daughter. Condemned to this life of servitude, to me, to them,’ she says, her outstretched hand indicating those passing, on the way to smoke their cigarettes. She swallows hard and adds: ‘And I let you.’

She begins to shake and snivel. Christ, I can’t be doing with more tears now. She quivers away beside me while I shift in my seat, looking around to see who’s watching. But everyone seems too caught up in the clatter of the night.

‘I’m done with the Dollard beatings a long time ago, Hilary. I’m not taking any more now.’

‘But no, you misunderstand me. It is me who is to blame. What kind of parent lets her daughter sacrifice her life like that?’ she asks, crying now, like I might have the answer. Me, the parenting expert!

My hand begins to rummage in my full pocket. And with difficulty I free my handkerchief that surrounds my little bag of pills, pull it out and place it in her hand.

‘Here,’ I say quietly, looking away from her, giving her as much privacy as I can.

Hilary blows her nose then considers me for a minute.

‘I need you to do something for me, Mr Hannigan,’ she finally says, her urgency worrying me, ‘buy this place. Buy it. Force Emily to sell to you or to anyone, I don’t care. Be the ruthless man you are and force her out. This place has done us enough damage.’ She moves closer to me, right in towards my face, searching me out, her hand back on mine. I look closely at her wrinkles that fan out from her pleading mouth, merging with those tumbling down from her eyes. She is so close that I can feel her breath and hear its pace quicken. ‘Please, Mr Hannigan, set her free.’