Moving On

Wedding

Wedding

‘WE INVITED GRANNY AND GRANDPA SHEEHAN,’ Joan said. ‘I felt we should. They sent a cheque for a hundred pounds, and said sorry they couldn’t make it. We won’t be telling them when the baby is born. They clearly want out of our lives, so let them be out.’

Their father’s parents knew where he was, of course. He wouldn’t have cut them off too. But they’d quietly drifted away from their granddaughters after he’d left. It used to hurt when Ellen thought about it, but not any more.

They still sent birthday and Christmas cards to Joan and Ellen, the messages always in Gran’s writing. From Gran and Grandpa Sheehan , hope all’s well, everything fine here, love to your mam. Better, Ellen thought, that they’d ignored those occasions too. The cards felt dutiful, nothing more.

‘How do I look?’ Joan asked.

‘You look wonderful.’

They were about to leave for the church. Her cream dress with its full skirt hid her small bump. Ellen had tied her sister’s pale brown hair into a topknot and persuaded her to sweep a little blusher onto her cheeks. The morning sickness hadn’t quite abated.

‘Thanks again for the perfume,’ Joan said. ‘It must have cost a bomb.’

She looked happy, Ellen thought. She’d found what she wanted. The little diamond in Seamus’ ring winked as she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.

At the church, as they waited for the ceremony to begin, Ellen was introduced to Kevin, her mother’s . . . friend? Boyfriend? Partner? Nothing sounded right. Balding and shy in a pinstriped suit, he told her he’d been looking forward to meeting her. ‘Patricia speaks very highly of you,’ he said, nodding and blushing. It sounded like something a person would say to be polite.

Their mother walked Joan up the aisle as Joan’s teacher friend Louise played the organ. For some reason, Ellen thought of Ben. Yes, the piano, the music degree he’d wanted to get. She allowed herself, just for a second, to imagine that she was the bride on her mother’s arm, and Ben the groom waiting at the top of the church for her.

She watched the pair progressing slowly up the aisle, and thought how sad it was that their father was missing his younger daughter’s wedding. How awful it was that he’d left them, and walked off into another life. What would Ellen say if she ever met him again? She had no idea.

The weather was kind to them. After the buffet meal, after they’d cut the wedding cake, and after Seamus’ father had given an unexpectedly funny speech, guests drifted out to the garden and sat in small knots on borrowed seating under a clear blue September sky.

In the evening, when everyone had left, and the bride and groom had driven off to spend the night in Shannon’s Hotel, and Ellen’s mother had gone to bed, Ellen and Frances sat in dressing gowns at the kitchen table. Frances had been given Joan’s room for the night, but she and Ellen weren’t yet ready for sleep.

She’d be seventy-one in a week’s time, the skin on the backs of her hands beginning to blotch and crimp. She’d retired from the country house hotel on her seventieth birthday.

‘Did you never find someone, Frances?’ Ellen asked. She’d had a few glasses of wine; it seemed like a question she could ask, and late enough in the day to ask it.

‘I did, but it wasn’t to be. Too many things went against it. That was a long time ago. It’s history now.’

Silence fell. Ellen didn’t press for more.

‘By the way,’ she said, just remembering, ‘I got a new job, with a new company. It’s a nice step up from the old one.’

‘That’s wonderful news,’ Frances replied. ‘Well done; I always knew you’d go far. You can tell me all about it in the morning. Now,’ rising, ‘I think it’s time for bed.’

They walked together up the stairs. In her old room, Ellen sat on the edge of her single bed as memories crowded in. For twelve years she’d slept here. In this room she’d moved from a child to an adult, weathering life’s small everyday challenges until a big one had upended everything.

Without planning to, she slid a hand between the base of her bed and the mattress. She pulled out an envelope, limp with age, just as she had done every night years earlier. She looked at her name in the familiar handwriting before slowly drawing out the single sheet. She knew what it said by heart, but she unfolded it anyway.

Ellen, my dearest girl,

It breaks my heart to leave you and Joan, but it’s become impossible for me to stay. Please look after your mother, and try not to think too badly of me. I’m so sorry.

Always your loving father

How she’d puzzled over it, wept over it, raged over it. What did he mean, it had become impossible for him to stay? How could he write that and not explain it? And why had he not kept in touch? Surely he knew how much his leaving, his unexplained leaving, would wound the daughters he’d professed to love?

Ellen had gone to pieces after he’d left. She’d become uncharacteristically rebellious, breaking every rule she could get away with. At weekends she’d stayed out later than she was allowed, often getting home not completely sober, shouting at her mother to leave her alone if she was challenged.

She’d taken up smoking, forcing herself to pull the hot smoke into her lungs, persisting until it began to feel like something she needed. She’d also begun to steal from shops, a thing she hadn’t had the nerve to try up to this.

Everyone had made allowances. Everyone had felt sorry for her. Her mother lectured, but didn’t punish. Nothing anyone said made a difference – until the day she’d felt a hand on her shoulder as she left a boutique with a silk scarf pushed up her sleeve.

That, and all that had followed – the arrival to the shop of a guard whose daughter was in her class, the mortifying journey home in a squad car, her mother’s incredulous face when she opened the door – had brought her to her senses. She’d quit smoking and stealing and skipping classes, and life had limped along until she’d left school with mediocre exam results.

She’d found a job she had no interest in, just to keep her mother quiet, and her only happy times were when she was with Claire, experimenting with make-up in her friend’s room, hitching their skirts higher on the way to discos, thumbing lifts to shop in nearby towns. In her determined pursuit of fun, and her insistence on Ellen accompanying her, Claire had made it easier.

She looked down at his note again. In the first awful weeks she’d been desperate for a letter, or an address, or anything at all that would connect her with him – but now she wasn’t sure what she wanted. Joan had said she wouldn’t let him in if he turned up at the house.

Ellen was beginning to be afraid she’d do the same.