Chapter 6
FINALLY, FOUR WEEKS TO THE DAY AFTER THE accident, Brendan came.
He looked a decade older, in a blue jumper she didn’t recognise, and his usual denim jeans that were baggier than before.
‘Lydia,’ he said quietly, just that. No hug, no handshake.
He sat at the kitchen table and didn’t touch the tea she’d made for him.
For ten minutes or so the symphony on the radio was the only sound in the room, until finally he spoke.
‘I’m wondering will you be heading back to live in Dublin,’ he said, a world of pain in his eyes.
‘I will, Brendan. I’ll have to sell this house. It’s all wrong for me now. My father says I should sell it as it is, and let whoever buys it finish the renovations.’
He shook his head. ‘You’d make a big loss trying to sell it now – nobody would be keen on working from someone else’s plans. I’m not telling you what to do, but in my opinion you’d be better off letting us finish the job. There’s only a few more months in it, and you’ll get a better price then.’
She was glad to hear him make the offer himself. ‘That’s what I’d prefer too. Start again whenever you’re ready, and let me know when the next payment is due.’
‘I will, I will.’ He got to his feet and shrugged into the jacket he’d draped on the back of his chair. ‘Are you managing alright yourself?’ he asked, fumbling with the zipper.
She took the ends from him and slotted them together and pulled up the zip. ‘I am, Brendan.’ She felt a communion with him, both lost in their grief. ‘How’s Kathleen?’ she asked, knowing she couldn’t leave it unsaid.
‘Only middling,’ he said, which didn’t tell her much, but she didn’t enquire further. She knew the older woman’s grief must be as all-encompassing as her own: maybe it was best they had no contact. What possible good could they be to one another now?
After Brendan left she rang her father and told him that the work was resuming. ‘I’ll stay here until it’s done, and then I’ll put it on the market.’
‘Whatever you feel is best,’ he said, making it plain that it wasn’t what he felt was best. ‘Come and see us again soon.’
‘I will.’
She’d been back once, just four days ago.
She’d stayed a night. Her mother had told her she was too thin, and had cooked Lydia’s favourite sweetcorn fritters, and her father had said she was too pale, and had given her a month’s supply of iron tablets.
Take them with food, he’d said, and Lydia had suspected his main reason for suggesting them was to get her to eat.
But he meant well, and she was taking a tablet each morning with breakfast.
Next day the renovations resumed, and she became accustomed again to the sounds of the workmen drilling, hammering, calling.
She didn’t feel able to go out to meet them, and sensed anyway that it would only embarrass them, but the noise they made had a reassuring quality to it, and Brendan took to dropping into the apartment for a few minutes each day, just to sit with her, and that provided its own small comfort too.
February moved along, the weeks without Damien growing in number. Time didn’t matter to her. She rose when she woke from the half-sleep of her nights, and went to bed when she grew weary of trying to fill the hours.
She rarely felt hungry, even if she ate nothing from breakfast to evening, which happened unless Marian or Greta or Susan came by around lunchtime and urged food on her. Dinners were meagre, eaten purely from habit.
The crosswords she’d loved made no sense now, the clues meaningless. Reading remained beyond her: the words on the page might as well have been hieroglyphs. Once she took out a pack of playing cards – they’d loved gin rummy and twenty-five – but solitaire was too sad; even the name brought tears.
Another day she tore the plastic film from a jigsaw box that had been sitting on the kitchen table for a while. Who had brought it? She couldn’t recall. She’d never made a jigsaw, had never felt the urge to fit little pieces of card together, but she’d thought it might help to use up time.
The picture was of a rowing boat moored at a pier, with mountains behind it.
The boat was blue and the water a different blue; the mountains were dark blue and purple, and the sky was pale blue threaded with white.
It took a while to turn the five hundred pieces right side up, but then the idea of trying to recreate the picture was too much, and she swept them back into the box and found space in a drawer for it.
In the evening she would turn on the television – something undemanding, a game show – and her mind would wander, and as the credits rolled she would have no idea how the game had gone.
Once, she took clothes from the washing machine and bundled them into the dryer but forgot to switch it on, and they sat there for three days before Marian discovered them, and they had to be put through the wash again.
And the Sunday newspapers continued to arrive, and she never opened them.
A few weeks after the work resumed she saw Gareth again out the back. He appeared every few days. Without stopping to think she took her jacket from its hook and pulled on one of Damien’s woolly hats and went out.
He was stringing yellow twine around short canes he’d stuck into the ground, creating a rectangle that ran the length of the recently completed patio. He glanced up and gave her a smile, but said nothing.
She sat on the studio windowsill and watched him work.
She presumed he was marking out the flowerbed they’d wanted there.
He must have taken a decision to make a start, probably needing to get going with the planting.
She remembered how chatty he normally was; she supposed he didn’t feel he should talk now, or not until she did.
Should she let him go ahead with the development of the garden? What was the point now? Then again, why not? She knew he enjoyed working out of doors, and a garden, however unfinished, should help with the sale of the house. He might as well keep going.
She let her gaze roam beyond him to the stone shed.
No Noel today: he worked Monday to Friday, and it was Saturday.
The shed walls were more than halfway up now, too high for him to perch on them for his breaks.
A space had been left for the door, another for a single window in the wall that faced the sea.
She looked past the shed to the ocean that stretched all the way to the next continent, and the faint yellow ribbons at the horizon as a pale sun made its descent.
Still the days came and went, bringing sunshine and rain as they always had.
Still the nights threw stars into the sky.
Still the sea washed to the shore and pulled away from it. Still the wind rose and fell.
The world carried on as if nothing was wrong. How was that possible?
‘How is what possible?’ Gareth asked, and she realised she’d said it aloud, and she shook her head and got up and went back inside.
She felt bad. He was so nice.
A few mornings later, her phone rang. She saw her father’s name and sighed. Every other day he phoned, or her mother did. She knew she should be grateful that they were checking in but the calls, full of their careful questions, invariably left her unsettled.
‘Dad.’
‘Hello, love. You OK?’
No, she was not OK. She was tired and she had no appetite and her stomach was queasy and her heart was in pieces. ‘Yes.’
‘Just wondering,’ he said, ‘how the work is coming along.’
‘They’re here every weekday,’ she told him, like she’d said the last time he called. ‘They’re working away. I don’t bother them.’
‘And they’re still on track to finish in the summer?’
‘Yes. Brendan says late May or early June.’
Brendan had said no such thing because Lydia hadn’t asked. The last thing she wanted was to put him under pressure.
‘And you’re still resolved,’ her father said, ‘not to put the house up for sale till then?’
‘I am.’ Every time they had the same conversation, just different words. Different approaches.
‘Your mother and I have been thinking,’ he said.
She closed her eyes.
‘We could give you a deposit now for a new place in Dublin, and you could take out a short-term loan to buy, just till the other was sold.’
‘No, Dad.’
‘Hang on. We’ve actually found a lovely apartment, close to your old—’
‘No!’ It came out too sharply. ‘Sorry, Dad, and thank you for the offer, but you must let me do things my way, in my own time. I’m trying to get through the days here.
I’m trying to keep from falling apart, and you and Mum need to back off right now.
I’m staying in Chance House till it’s finished, and that’s that. ’
Before he could respond, she hung up. Before he could ring back she left her phone on the kitchen table and yanked her jacket off its hook in the hall and let herself out. She skirted the cluster of workmen’s vans and cars in the driveway and walked rapidly up the lane.
At the top she swung left, away from the village, away from everyone. She marched along the road, half running, half walking, no thought in her head but to keep moving.
When she grew tired she slowed her pace, pressing a hand to her stomach in an effort to combat the familiar sickish feeling.
Just an orange she’d had for breakfast, and still it was complaining.
Maybe an orange hadn’t been enough to absorb the iron tablet, or maybe all the stress and grief had given her an ulcer.
Within a short while she became aware of the cold. She’d come out without hat or scarf or gloves, and it was a day for all three. She turned back, shivering. She dug her hands into her pockets, still unsettled by the phone call.
Why was he pushing her so much? She was going back to Dublin, that was a given – but she couldn’t think about viewing apartments now. She was nowhere near ready for all that. She couldn’t decide on a new toothbrush, let alone a new place to live. Why couldn’t they let her be?