Chapter Six #4
The closest Lena willingly comes to cooking is making blackberry jam, which she does at the end of every summer, with berries from the brambles that grow rampant along the verges.
She started off doing it because to her tastes the shop-bought jams were all sugar and no flavor, but she found a satisfaction stronger than she expected in the process: gathering this place’s overlooked wild bits and pieces, with no permission needed from anyone, to make something she loves.
She wonders if this is how the old wise women got their start, showing appreciation for their home places and sidestepping the regime via jam.
She takes a dozen jars out of her kitchen cupboard, packs them into a cardboard box, and loads them into the boot of her car, with some old cushions to keep the box from sliding about.
She hopes to God Almighty she won’t need all twelve, but she might as well be prepared for the worst. The dogs, excluded, give her heartrending looks from the front window as she drives off.
As well as being better than the shop-bought stuff, Lena’s jam has practical uses.
Dropping round with a spare jar of jam is unassailably innocent—odd, coming out of the blue, but then everyone knows Lena is odd.
And it comes with built-in boundaries: generous enough that she’ll be invited in for a cup of tea and a chat, but minor enough that, even within the complex Ardnakelty barter system, no one will feel an obligation to repay the favor.
She starts off with Michelle Healy. Michelle is minding her toddler grandson and she mainly wants to talk about her daughter Georgia, who is apparently considering ditching the child’s father and getting together with some fella who walks like a duck, and what should Michelle do about it?
Michelle is the kind of relentless oversharer who makes words fall out of other people’s mouths in response; even Lena, practiced at saying nothing, barely manages to keep herself to something vague about not pressuring kids in case they push back.
At least Michelle is frazzled enough, what with preventing the toddler from launching himself off furniture, that she doesn’t register Lena moving the conversation from Georgia’s love life towards Rachel Holohan’s.
Michelle heard that Rachel had a bit on the side, all right, but no one said who it was; and anyway Michelle only heard it from Julie Quinn and sure Julie’d believe anything, that’s the problem with this place, if Georgia goes off with that duck-footed fecker everyone’ll think she was riding him all along and he’s the baby’s dada and what should Michelle do about that?
Julie Quinn, surrounding herself with a jungle of houseplants since the last of her kids emigrated, would be happy to talk all day about anything Lena fancied.
She heard from Laura Barry that there were rumors going around about Rachel, but she feels bad for listening, because her Niamh was pals with Rachel, and Niamh says there’s no way.
Niamh can’t get time off work to fly home for the funeral; she’s all the way over in Birmingham, on her own, grieving her friend.
The thought makes Julie’s eyes well up. Lena holds her hand, with its bitten nails.
Julie gives her a potted begonia on her way out.
Laura Barry, who was the boss bitch in school and never liked Lena, is the only one to give her funny looks, but the jam forces her to provide twenty minutes of stilted chitchat, including the information—delivered with wide doll-eyes and a little pursed mouth, like Lena is committing a social gaffe by bringing up the subject—that Yvonne McCabe did mention Rachel had been spreading her wings a bit, but Laura doesn’t think it’s really fair to speculate, and did Lena want another cup of tea or… ?
Yvonne McCabe, still in her work clothes, is genuinely delighted to see Lena.
She rousts a squad of noisy teenagers out of her kitchen, opens the jam on the spot, whips out scones to go with it, laments what this will do to her diet, and wants to hear everything Lena’s been at since they last talked.
It takes Lena forever to pick her way out of that and onto Rachel.
Yvonne heard from Doireann Cunniffe that Rachel might have been messing about a bit, but sure why wouldn’t she, if she was going to spend the rest of her life stuck to that gobshite?
Yvonne reckons he can’t even do the business without admiring himself in the mirror the whole time and patting himself on the back at the end.
Lena laughs before she knows she’s going to.
Doireann Cunniffe is easy. She spills the whole story practically without assistance, which is lucky, because Lena is very close to being done with this.
Doireann is also the only person who has no doubt that the rumor is true, because she heard it direct from Clodagh Moynihan, who heard it direct from Rachel herself.
She pulls her cardigan closer around her shoulders—the house is overheated, but Doireann is always cold—sniffs up the drop at the end of her nose, leans in close enough that Lena can smell her hair spray, and talks a mile a minute in a breathy undertone.
Clodagh would never have said a word, only she’s off her head with worry about her Eugene, with people putting it about he was stepping out on Rachel, and isn’t there a terrible lot of uncharitable types around here who love to think the worst?
and at least Rachel had the decency to feel guilty and come clean to Clodagh, although she wouldn’t say who the fella was but sure Doireann supposes you can’t blame her, and Clodagh’s that kindhearted she never breathed a word to Eugene, just told Rachel it had to end, and isn’t it a lesson to all of us that you never know what someone might be hiding, no matter how innocent they look.
By the time Lena can disentangle herself from the spreading morass of unrelated gossip—Georgia Healy’s been seen out and about with a new fella, and Doireann always had a hunch there was something about that baba, and Doireann’s hunches are never wrong, it gives her the shivers sometimes—she’s right on the verge of faking some medical emergency, if she had the brainpower left.
She drives home with all the car windows open, so the wet earth-smelling wind can blow her clean.
Her mind is flooded with voices and names and crockery patterns.
It’s been thirty years since she talked to any of these women beyond cordial chitchat in Noreen’s shop.
She’s raw, like every one of them stuck to her and ripped bits off when she pulled away.
She never wants to see blackberry fucking jam again.
Within twenty-four hours all those women will have talked to each other, and to everyone else.
Come here, you’ll never guess who called round to me…
They’ll comb through the conversations and spot the overlaps.
Then they’ll dig out possible explanations to pick over, and choose the ones that suit their own desires: Lena is a ghoul, and a filthy-minded one at that; Lena is feeling guilty because Rachel went to her and she did nothing to help; That Time of Life is sending Lena off her rocker; she’s obsessed with Rachel because Rachel was Sean Dunne’s secret love child.
There isn’t a single thing she can do about any of it, only sit still and let them tattoo her all over with their favorite patterns.
She got what she was after, anyway, or at least some of it.
There’s not a chance in hell that Rachel told Clodagh Moynihan she was cheating, and only a fool like Doireann Cunniffe would believe that—Clodagh picked her mouthpiece well.
Tommy never needed Cal to find out whether Rachel was running around on Eugene; he knows fine well she wasn’t.
Probably he wants to find out what was in her mind, but meanwhile he wants that rumor spread; either to make Eugene into the poor innocent victim, or to keep people looking at that instead of at something else, or both.
Lena still reckons Rachel did this to herself, but she has a growing certainty that the Moynihans had some hand in it, more than she first thought. Something means they can’t afford to let this death be; they need to get it in their grip and bend it, full force, to the shape they want.
She’s well aware of what this means. She needs to back off, fast and far, and let the Moynihans and Mart Lavin’s lot fight it out to have their way with all that’s left of Rachel Holohan. Every bit of good sense she has, as well as thirty years of hard training, is tugging her to do it.
She’s not going to. Underneath the rawness, a small part of her is sparking with triumph: she’s getting somewhere. She pictures the look on Trey, the dawning change as she realizes this place’s rules don’t have to rule her.
Lena’s phone buzzes—Cal, probably, wondering if she’ll be over for dinner. Lena ignores it. The only thing she wants less than jam is people; even Cal.
She realizes that she’s not going to tell him any of this. He’d bring it straight to Mart Lavin, to be knitted into whatever cunning piece of intricate manipulation Mart currently has underway.
One of the reasons Lena first wanted Cal was because nothing about him came from Ardnakelty.
Every man she’d ever known had grown up twisted by the unceasing pulls of this place or one exactly like it.
She knew Cal must have his own slants and twists built in, like everyone else, but she welcomed those because they had not one thing to do with this place.
He came to her clean of it. Now here he is, waist-deep in its tangles.
Lena is doing this for Trey, not for Mart Lavin’s use or anyone else’s. She speeds up, to strengthen the wind coming into the car. She’s nowhere near the river, but her head is bursting with its sound, the roar and the jabber.