Chapter 24
Jane was just emerging from her cabin when John came back down the corridor, still singing his cobbled together version of, ‘Hark! Hark.’ The timing wasn’t a coincidence.
‘Just the person,’ she said and he smiled at her. ‘How was the shower?’
‘It was fantastic,’ John replied, towelling his head. ‘That tiny bathroom is grander than any other room I’ve ever been in in my whole life. I feel like a new man.’
‘Then would you like to join me in the bar for a little post-wash brandy?’
John appeared puzzled. ‘Is that a thing?’ he asked, as if it really could be a custom in the world of the intelligentsia brigade.
‘I think in the situation in which we all find ourselves, we are entitled to believe it is indeed a thing,’ Jane answered him with a trill of laughter.
‘I’d rather have a whisky if I had a choice.’
‘Of course you have a choice. Everyone else is busy and I don’t like drinking alone.’ She put on her best manipulative sad face.
‘I’ll keep you company then.’
‘No need to change yourself, just come as you are in your robe, Mr Smith,’ said Jane, leading the way to Lutine.
Vincent was looking at Elizabeth and vice versa as if they were telepathically trying to work out what had just happened.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Frank, resignedly. ‘It was nothing you said.’ It wasn’t the first time Grace had taken a perfectly innocent comment to be a bullet with her name on it.
He didn’t ‘owe’ them an explanation but he gave it to them anyway, because it was frothing inside him and he needed to let it out.
‘Five years ago our son died. Grace has never gotten over it.’
Vincent searched inside him for some suitable words but were there any?
‘I’m not telling you that to make you feel uncomfortable at our expense, but just to give you a bit of context,’ Frank continued. ‘He was a soldier. She was terrified he’d be killed in action one day; I think she was waiting for it to happen from the moment he joined up.’
‘I’m sorry for your loss, Frank,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I’m not sure how you’d truly get over that.’
‘Well, you don’t. You learn to live with it because you have to,’ said Frank.
‘I’m sorry as well, Frank.’ Vincent didn’t even want to think about getting your head around that. He remembered his mum saying to him when she was at the end, ‘It’s how it should be, Vinny, because I couldn’t have lived if you’d gone first.’
‘She’s become a different woman. If you knew the Grace before you wouldn’t recognise her today. She was always laughing, fun to be with, like a ray of sunshine. I feel like I don’t know her any more.’ His voice wobbled and brought him up sharp. He sounded like a man on the edge.
‘Oh, Frank, how very sad for you both,’ Elizabeth said, for the want of saying something, even though she knew that anything would sound lame, trite, inadequate.
‘I better go and find her,’ said Frank, getting up quickly, aware he was giving too much of himself away.
He would do again what he had so many times before, knowing it would change nothing because his wife had built prison walls around herself and she wouldn’t let him in. And also she refused to come out.
‘That’s quite a measure, John,’ said Jane, lifting her eyebrows in surprise at the tumbler he had just brought over to her. ‘I’ll be on my back if I drink all this.’
He had poured himself the equivalent measure in whisky as for her calvados and had no such qualms. He sat next to her on the sofa and looked out of the window.
The snow had stopped, the fog had cleared a little but any visibility had been swallowed up by the early winter dark now.
And right on cue she heard it again, cutting through the distance, that bell ring-ringing, in the distance.
John pressed his back into the sofa and closed his eyes.
‘It’s like heaven, this,’ he said after savouring it for a few long moments.
‘Do you believe in heaven?’ Jane asked him.
His eyes jerked open and he turned to her.
‘Don’t you?’
‘No, I’m afraid I don’t. I think this is all we have and so we should make the very best of it.’ Jane took a sip of the calvados. It was as if she could taste her memories.
‘You believe in God then, Jane?’
Her turn to throw the question back at him. ‘Do you?’
‘Yes.’ There was not an iota of doubt in his voice.
‘You know when I was a boy you just say it, don’t you, I believe in God without thinking about it.
You go to Sunday school and learn all about the Bible.
And then you grow up, and you start to think, “If there’s a god, how come he let this bad thing happen?
” And somehow, along the way, you stop saying that you believe in God.
But if you’re lucky, you meet someone who tells you that the bad stuff isn’t God’s fault, he gave us a world to make the best of and the worst of…
and we have. We can’t blame him for it all when things go wrong.
But I like to thank him when they go right. ’
He took a long sip at his whisky, pulled his thick robe tighter around himself and made a sound of real contentment.
‘Who was it who enlightened you?’
‘A priest in the prison. We’ve had a couple of them over the years, but this one…
there was something special about him, Father Joseph, a goodness that came out of him.
He didn’t try and ram religion down anyone’s throats, didn’t breathe fire and damnation, but he could hold you in the palm of his hand just with his presence. He is the man I want to be.’
‘A priest?’ Her tone said she didn’t believe him.
‘You see a lot of life in prison, Jane. You see how the smallest of actions can change people for the better and the worse. Father Joseph was like a balm on everyone when he was there, and he was only there for a couple of months, but his legacy was long-lasting. He made a real difference.’
Jane wet her lips in preparation.
‘I called you Mr Smith earlier on and you never noticed.’
John jerked a little. ‘Did you? No, I didn’t.’
‘It was just a name plucked from the air, wasn’t it? John Brown, easy enough to remember. May I call you Henry now so we can be done with the pretence?’
Frank presumed Grace had gone to her cabin but when he knocked on it, there was no answer and so he opened it but she wasn’t there, ignoring him, which would have been entirely plausible.
He pushed on, through ‘Sigismund’ and ‘Mingun’ where the cabins were all locked so she could only be in ‘Yongle’, and she was.
Standing in the far corner, facing it, like a child who had been admonished by a teacher.
‘Grace,’ he said softly, going through the too-familiar motions of trying to soothe her, even though he knew he wouldn’t manage it. His hand came out to her and when it made contact she sprang away as if his touch revolted her.
‘Don’t.’
He didn’t know what to say because everything had been said and nothing had made a difference. Nearly everything, because he had always dressed up the truth in warm clothing and the only thing left was to strip it back, expose it even though he knew what the consequences could be.
‘Billy—’ He got only as far as the name before she rounded on him.
‘Don’t say his name.’
‘He was my son too. Billy O’Carroll and no one is to blame for what happened to our son.’
Grace stabbed her finger at him, her face a mask of fury.
‘You and your cowboys and soldier games, shooting at each other, making him guns out of wood. YOU feeding him all that macho crap…’
It was an old argument and his answer to it had always been the same: that the childhood games they had played which had brought them so much pleasure, dressing up as sheriffs and outlaws and soldiers had nothing to do with their twenty-five-year-old son dying.
‘He drove himself, Grace, he wanted to be the top. Whatever he did, he would have pushed himself to the limit, beat his own bests, made—’
‘He wanted you to be proud of him, that’s why he pushed himself beyond what his body was capable of,’ she spat.
‘I was already proud of him and he knew I was, he had nothing to prove to me.’ Frank’s voice rose beyond what it had ever done when talking to his wife. ‘It was no one’s fault, Grace. Not the army’s, not mine, not yours, not—’
She laughed, a hard, brittle sound. ‘Why would you even say it wasn’t my fault? I never wanted him to go into the army, I begged him not to. YOU encouraged him.’
Frank’s voice was at its highest pitch. ‘Because that’s what he wanted to do. He’d never wanted to do anything else in his life but join up. Do you think I didn’t want him to be safe? Do you think I didn’t worry?’
‘Not as much as you should have done.’
‘HE WAS MY SON.’
‘HE WAS MY SON MORE THAN HE WAS EVER YOURS. I carried him’—Grace’s hands folded over her stomach—‘in here.’
Frank thumped at his heart with his fist.
‘And I carried him in here and I always will. My boy, my little boy, and I feel his loss every single day. My heart keeps breaking and trying to mend but you don’t see that because I hide it, I’m trying to be strong for both of us and I’m tired of it, Grace; I’m tired of this same scene between us.
We brought him up to live his dreams – his – not yours, not mine and he did that.
Don’t you think I would have been happier if he’d been sitting at a desk?
But we gave him a life to do with as he wanted and he did and he was happy. ’
Grace’s face contorted. ‘How can he be happy being dead?’
‘He lived, he loved, he had a beautiful woman, a beautiful child on the way—’
‘Don’t you dare mention them to me, I don’t want—’
But Frank did, because it was time.
‘She’s gorgeous, Grace. Ella wants you to see her. Billie May O’Carroll. Our son’s little girl. Our granddaughter.’
Grace slapped her hands over her ears. ‘No no no NO.’
‘She is his, she is ours. Come with me next time.’
Next time.
The words stood out in the air as if someone had drawn a highlighter pen over them. And Grace jumped straight on it.
‘Next time? What do you mean next time?’ She knew, of course; there was no misinterpreting them. ‘You’ve seen her? In person?’
How could he deny it now? He didn’t want to carry the burden of secrecy any more.
‘Yes, I’ve seen her and I will carry on seeing her.’
Grace visibly gasped. Something drifted across the front of her mind.
‘Where is she?’
The moment he had dreaded. ‘Cromer. She’s in Cromer.’
The penny dropped. A huge, lead-weighted penny.
Grace’s voice now, the volume ripped away but no less rabid for it.
‘That’s why you wanted the pub as much as you did. Because it’s about five fucking miles away from them.’
‘Yes,’ said Frank. There, it was out.
Grace’s eyes widened as thoughts zapped around her head, fizzing and sparking fire like live wires. ‘You manipulative bastard,’ the insult cold and quiet.
It was half the truth but not the whole of it.
He hadn’t liked the other pubs they’d been to see, but as soon as he had walked into the Salty Cockle, with the cute-as-buttons Salty Mussel cottage at the side of it, he knew it was the right place, he felt it.
And it was, not the least because the locals had accepted them, and they were a bunch of insular funny buggers but they had totally folded the O’Carrolls into their community.
And living there, he could easily sneak away and see Ella, the woman his son loved, and her child – Billy’s child.
And it had been like having a version of him back because his son had made her and would always be part of her and Frank would not give them up.
He didn’t want to hide that he was seeing them any more; he didn’t want to sneak off to visit as if they were a dirty secret – it was too big, too important, too precious a relationship.
‘She has his blue eyes, Grace.’
‘That makes it worse, don’t you understand? I don’t want to see them in her, I want to see them in HIM.’
‘He’s gone, love.’
‘Don’t you think I fucking know that?’
The look on Grace’s face was one he hadn’t seen before and he thought he had seen every combination her features were capable of creating. She was like a wild, wounded creature, stripped of her skin, unable to breathe without pain.
‘Please. See her.’
‘No, I won’t… It would… kill me to be reminded of what I had lost, seeing him in her face, but it not being him and he is all I want to see. Don’t you get that?’
‘I thought it would too but it didn’t, it was the opposi—’
‘No no NO.’ She sliced her hands, cut off his words, took a breath. ‘You should respect my feelings.’
Frank took a breath. ‘And you should respect mine. I’m not stopping seeing them, Grace.’
‘Then you have a choice to make, Frank. Them or me.’
And he answered grimly, his anger on a rein but it was straining more than it ever had before with her. ‘Don’t make me choose, Grace,’ the inference clear. Then he turned and walked away from her.