Chapter 11
Present
Kip was seething.
He hadn’t realised how angry he was until he spotted Ros walking with a bunch of kids across the bog at the back of the nursing home.
Blythe had gotten her way again.
It wasn’t just that. As far as Kip could see, it was worse that Siggy just accepted it. Not that he’d been much of a rebel himself back in the day. God knows, he’d have stood on his head in the freezing snow if that made his mother happy.
But his mother was not like Blythe.
God love her, but his mother asked for nothing in life. The one thing that drove her was to see her two sons settled down and happy. She’d never made a demand on them, beyond a promise not to turn out like their father.
‘Ah, Kip, come on, if you keep walking round here like that, people will think that someone has cancelled the World Cup this year.’ Shane McPherson was dropping flowers into the nursing home.
‘There’s no end to your generosity.’ He was joking with him.
The flowers had come from the Church of Ireland ladies who’d put on a great display the previous day for a visit from the archbishop.
‘I thought you were working for the other side?’ Shane was the administrator in the local Catholic church.
‘My job as warden in one church seems to mean I’m responsible for all of them,’ he laughed.
‘Always good to be in demand, I suppose.’
‘So, what’s up?’
‘Nothing.’ He liked Shane, but he couldn’t even begin to put into words what was bugging him. ‘Just got out of the wrong side of the bed I guess today.’
Wrong side of the bed, indeed.
He’d have to have it out with Blythe. They couldn’t go on like this, it was stressing him out – the idea that in a matter of months, Siggy would be finished school and heading for college.
She hadn’t even told Blythe where she wanted to go.
Of course, she’d told Kip. It had taken quite a bit of cajoling to get it out of her. They’d been in the garden, Siggy sitting at the still water pool, her feet hanging over the side, while Kip filled cement in between the crazy paving which the frost had cracked in places over winter.
She was hoping to study art history in Galway.
‘That’s nothing to keep secret, surely?’ He’d patted her head.
‘But what about Mum?’
‘What about her?’ And that’s when he realised. Siggy’s forehead had furrowed into a thousand lines, far too many for a kid with her whole life ahead of her. She was genuinely afraid to tell Blythe that she hoped to leave the island.
She had a dream. Maybe just like Blythe.
‘I’d like to be working in one of those big auction houses, you know, buying and selling antiques and art and…’ Siggy’s whole expression changed when she spoke about it.
‘Well then, that’s what you have to go after.’
‘Easier said than done.’
‘Do you not think you’ll get the points?’ It was all about points, apparently. It was like a foreign currency to Kip. He’d lost interest in school long before the leaving cert. You didn’t need points or university education to score a try – and he’d scored plenty of them.
‘Dad!’ She laughed. ‘It’s an arts degree – it’s not rocket science, I’ll definitely have the points.’
‘I had to ask.’ He shook his head. ‘Anyway, your mother will be fine. It’s good to know you have a plan, I mean, I bet there’s plenty of others who have no idea what they want to do.’
‘Probably.’ She shrugged. ‘Although it doesn’t feel like it. Damian O’Brien wants to study Chinese in Austria.’ She laughed at that, because maybe she had only just realised how crazy that sounded – so far as Kip knew, the lad had never gone further than Dublin in his life.
‘I think you’d make a great…’ He stopped. ‘Auctioneer?’
‘Art Dealer – I think.’ She smiled at him.
‘Do you want me to tell your mother?’
‘No. I’ll do it, but close to the time, I think, because I really can’t face the next year of…
’ She stopped. They were kindred spirits, he knew that.
Maybe he spoiled her, a little, behind Blythe’s back.
Only with small things, like a fiver here or picking up a bar of chocolate or a magazine for her if he was on the mainland.
He tried to be a good father. Some things were beyond him, he’d never read Siggy a bedtime story, but he’d made her laugh, told her tall tales about comical creatures that lived in the still water pool at the end of the garden and he’d never once lost patience with her, even on those days when he had run out of it for everything else in the world.
There wasn’t a thing he wouldn’t do for her and for Blythe.
But surely, it was time to start letting Siggy make her own way a little more in the world.
Surely, it was time for her to get a chance to stand on her own two feet, to have enough freedom so if she was going to fall, it was close enough to pick her up.
The other kids her age were regularly going to the mainland to pubs and clubs and getting up to all sorts.
It was enough to scare him witless, he didn’t want to think of his daughter getting drunk any more than Blythe did, but at the same time, it was part of growing up.
Of figuring out limits, boundaries; Kip remembered fondly it was the scrapes and shenanigans from his youth that bonded him with friends who had been as good as brothers when he was miles away from home.
Of course, Blythe had none of that. She’d always been the sensible one.
Everyone on the island knew, the weight of a whole family – a dynasty really, had fallen on her shoulders before she’d even had a chance to finish college.
Kip suspected, she’d probably never really, truly cut loose.
Not in the way that kids did now, not in the way that they did twenty or thirty years ago.
Blythe had somehow moved from childhood to adulthood without pausing in between.
It was no good. It was making him sick with worry. He tossed and turned most nights, thinking of what awaited Siggy when she finally flew the nest. How on earth would she survive when she’d hardly been out of Blythe’s sight for more than a school day?
Kip stopped. That little voice rose up in him again – Blythe always gets her own way.
He hadn’t even had a say in the child’s name.
He’d always planned to call his first daughter after his mother – Rose.
It was a lovely name. But somehow, it had fallen down the list of baby names from first to second and then, if she looked like a Rose, well, maybe…
In the end, Blythe had decided – Gisela Sigried, after her grandmother.
Kip had stood there, at the altar, staring wet-eyed at this beautiful baby, still hardly daring to believe that she was his, that they were a family.
It was later, when he realised it – his mother’s name had been forgotten. There were no more daughters.
And all these years later, it made him angry, but he knew it only made him angry because of everything else. All those other arguments that they’d never had over the years, quite simply because it was easier to give in than to disagree.
Well, Blythe, he thought to himself then. One day soon, you won’t be getting your own way, because I’ll be damned if you’ll make a prisoner of your own daughter the way Rae was made a prisoner of for that old mausoleum on Hope Square.