Chapter 33
THE THIRD OF JANUARY. ONE YEAR WITHOUT HIM.
At midday, Father Phil came to Chance House and said Mass again in the studio for the Cotter family, and Lydia’s parents who’d arrived the day before. Afterwards he stayed for lunch in the dining room, with everyone gathered around one of the big tables, close to the fire.
Lydia served little bowls of leek and potato soup, and she set out wooden boards with cold meats and cheeses and chutneys and fruit. Greta had given her a big loaf of sourdough, and a coffee cake for dessert. It was simple food. It was all they wanted.
They were quiet, their voices soft. They spoke of Damien.
They pulled up their memories and brought him into the room with them, and Tom sang a song about an elephant that packed her trunk and left the circus, because it had been Damien’s party piece as a young child.
They cried a little and laughed a little, and Lydia was glad to have them around her, the ones who’d loved him the most.
After they’d gone home, and her parents had started on the road back to Dublin, she and Tessa worked on the jigsaw that Susan had given Lydia for Christmas – Tessa, it turned out, was a big jigsaw fan – and later they ate potato cakes and sweetcorn fritters in dressing gowns as they watched an old Hitchcock film, with Naomi curled up and dreaming in her nest.
It had been a good day. It had been a sad, sweet, good day. After saying goodnight to Tessa, Lydia climbed into bed with the envelope Andrew had given her, and finally felt ready to open it.
She leafed slowly through the photos, wiping her eyes often as she gazed at all the happy faces, setting aside the ones of just her and Damien. When she’d seen them all she returned to that pile, and went through them again.
The moment when they met at the altar. Her lilac dress, his grey suit, their smiles in profile.
The rings being exchanged, Jack just captured as he scuttled back to his mother.
Their first kiss as husband and wife.
The two of them emerging hand in hand from the sacristy, their union made official.
Standing on the church steps, entwined because of the cold – and because they loved each other very much.
Walking on the red carpet to the front door of Chance House, Damien turning to laugh at someone behind him. Some smart comment, maybe.
Lydia being carried across the threshold, holding her bouquet high, Marian’s red wrap slipping from that shoulder.
The two of them sitting side by side in the dining room, the place lit softly by tea lights and fairy lights and candles. Looking into one another’s eyes, oblivious to anyone else.
In each other’s arms for their first dance. You’ve got all my love.
And maybe her favourite, a view of them taken from behind as they stood beside the remains of Greta’s carrot cake later in the night, her head resting on his shoulder as she leant into him, his head tipped towards hers, arm around her waist. Fitting together perfectly, like she and Naomi did now.
She returned them to their envelope and set it down on the bedside locker. She went to sleep with Coldplay running through her head, and the feel of his arms around her.
A week later, Brendan called to Chance House with a request – and on the last Sunday in February, Lydia granted it.
In the morning she covered two of the tables in the dining room with the usual white cloths, adding the ruby-red table runners that Marian had found.
In the apartment she showered and dressed while her mother, back with her father for the occasion, got Naomi into the navy velvet dress that Kathleen had given her for Christmas.
A little roomy, despite her slow and steady weight gain over the previous months.
A little more formal, with its white lacy collar, than Lydia would have chosen, but Kathleen would be happy to see it on her.
Andrew stood waiting in the church porch with his camera. Lydia’s father double-parked, like they all did on Sundays, and Lydia watched as Andrew approached the car. She liked him in a suit, all washed and scrubbed – but then, she liked him in everyday clothes too. She liked him, period.
He took photos like he always did as they emerged from the car, not waiting for them to pose, capturing them as they really were. ‘Look at you,’ he said to Naomi, as Lydia lifted her from her seat. ‘Like a princess.’
‘We’re not late, are we?’ Lydia’s mother asked. ‘They’re not here yet?’
‘Not yet. Go in out of the cold’ – so they entered the church and made their way up the aisle to the two front pews reserved for family. The one on the left already contained Marian, Tom and Jack, and Marian’s parents, so Lydia and her family took the opposite one.
Kathleen’s book club friends, all hats and nodding feathers, smiled at Lydia from the pew just behind, and she hoped fervently that Naomi wouldn’t make a grab for one of the feathers if the opportunity arose.
Within minutes, a stir ran through the church, and the organ struck up with ‘Love Is The Sweetest Thing’, Kathleen’s surprise choice for their entrance.
The congregation rose as Father Phil appeared on the altar, and everyone turned to watch Brendan and Kathleen processing slowly up the aisle, Kathleen in a tan skirt and jacket, a hand resting on her husband’s arm, her hair newly cut and set into curls.
Brendan was in the grey suit he’d worn for Lydia and Damien’s wedding, and for Damien’s funeral, and when he’d come to the hospital for a first look at his granddaughter, and on the occasion of her christening. His all-purpose suit.
The couple reached the top and took seats in the chairs set out for them at the altar. The ceremony commenced, part Sunday Mass, part renewal of vows.
We decided, Brendan had said, when he’d come with his request to Lydia, that it would be a good thing to do, after last year. We felt it would . . . turn a sort of corner.
Forty years married today. So lucky, Lydia thought, as she heard them renewing their decades-old vows, to have had each other for so long.
To have survived as a couple for that length of time, weathering the storms they’d met along the way.
Weathering the biggest storm any parents could endure last year.
They had gone through hell, and had survived together.
The family and their guests, twenty in total, adjourned afterwards to Chance House for lunch – but before they ate, everyone was ushered into the yoga studio, where Gareth was waiting with a projector screen.
‘Tom gave me a bunch of photos,’ he said, when everyone was seated, ‘and asked me to put together a kind of slideshow to mark this occasion, so here we go.’
The lights were turned off. The room fell silent as the story of a marriage unfolded, from Brendan and Kathleen’s wedding day through the births of the boys and their growing-up years.
Toddlers on the back of a donkey, with Brendan hanging on to them; Tom looking mutinous at the school gate, new bag on his back; Damien missing a small front tooth, grinning at a towering ice-cream cone Kathleen was handing to him.
The years moved on, through birthday parties and holidays and Christmas celebrations, through visits to Santa and school trips and graduations.
And later, Tom and Marian emerging from a church, confetti flying around them; Marian with shorter hair holding a tiny swaddled Jack outside the church, Tom’s arm around her waist; Jack standing by the school door, holding his mother’s hand and looking happier than his father had on the same occasion.
And one photo, just one, of Lydia and Damien on the church steps after their wedding. One, they’d decided, was enough.
After the last slide, the projector was shut off and the lights came on – and just as Lydia was about to slip away to see if Cathy’s lunch was ready, Brendan got to his feet and turned to face everyone, and thanked them for coming, and thanked Gareth for the slide-show.
‘As you all know,’ he went on, sliding hands into trouser pockets, ‘our family suffered a great loss last year. But we have lovely memories, and we have each other, and a wonderful son and two great daughters-in-law, and two beautiful grandchildren. And without Kathleen, I would have none of those, so I want to thank her for the forty years we’ve spent together. ’
That was it. That was as much as he wanted to say. As Kathleen got to her feet to join him everyone clapped, and for an instant, Lydia caught her mother-in-law’s eye.
And both of them smiled.