Chapter 21
Heather
‘That sounds perfect,’ Heather said as she and Finbar walked out towards the graveyard, where Constance was standing at Maggie Macken’s grave.
It hadn’t taken very long to agree the details and at least she felt happy that now, finally, she was doing something that her mother couldn’t but be pleased about.
‘Oh, Constance, this is…’ She looked up at Maggie Macken’s headstone.
It was a fine column of carved granite with a verse etched into the stem: Listen for me on the autumn breeze, see me in the showers that fall across the hillside, sit by me on a summer’s day in the shade of an old yew tree and remember that I have loved and lived and let you not cry that I remain only a whisper on the morning dew. ‘It’s beautiful.’
‘She wrote it especially. I think she was inspired by Yeats, but of course, it’s a much longer pilgrimage to make, off the mainland, so really, no-one has ever sat here in the way she might have hoped,’ Constance said a little sadly.
‘I think anyone who does would be moved by those lines,’ Heather said and although she was here to bury her own mother, something pulled at her heartstrings, because without Maggie Macken, neither of them would have any connection to this place.
Suddenly, she was overcome with a feeling of deep gratitude to the woman for dragging her family out of Galway to this place all those years earlier, and she said as much to Constance.
‘Oh, I don’t think there was any dragging involved. Your grandmother was happy to come. It was hard times to be a single parent and the city was no place to raise a child on your own,’ Constance said. ‘My mother knew that only too well.’
‘They must have been close? Maggie and Sylvie?’ Heather asked later that night.
Her mother never spoke about her own parents.
It was as if Sylvie and Norman Wren had only existed as mere shadows, so long before that they hardly counted any more.
It was a shame. Heather wanted to know about them and Constance was now the only one who could tell her.
They were sitting on deckchairs that Ros had resurrected from somewhere and set up near the back door.
From here, you could see right out to the crest of the horizon.
‘I think they both just had a terrible shock, after the well and all and…’ Constance hesitated, perhaps realising that Heather had no idea what she was talking about. ‘Hasn’t your mother told you the story of how we became so close?’
‘No, I just assumed that you grew up together here,’ Heather said, reaching to the ground and picking up the bottle of red wine before topping up both their glasses. ‘I’d love to hear it.’
‘It’s not my favourite story to tell, but anyway, it’s how we ended up here, so I suppose, if you’re interested, you should know it.
We had been living in a little house in Galway, on the road out of the city towards Salthill.
Apparently, it’s what they call an up-and-coming area now.
Dotty and her parents lived next door. Your grandmother was a great cook, far more a homemaker than my mother; it’s a pity you’d hardly remember her, I’m sure. ’
Constance sighed now, as if thinking back was almost making her tired.
‘Anyway, the house on the other side of us had a wilderness of a garden and an old disused well at the end of it. As small girls, Dotty and I were thrown together while my mother wrote and hers kept house. I hated it there. The other kids along the road would tease me, but they wouldn’t dare if Dotty was nearby.
Your mother had the courage of a lion. I didn’t see it at the time, of course, only later when I realised. ’
Constance’s gaze drifted off and there was a moment when Heather thought she might say something, but she simply sighed and then smiled before beginning again.
‘One day, I was in the garden and some of the boys broke through. I knew I was for it if they caught me and I made my escape through the fence. Anyway, I ended up falling into the old unused well.’ She sipped her wine before going on.
‘I must have bashed my head, but the next thing I remember was waking up and everything was dark. I mean, the sky was full of stars, but I was down so deep, I could only just make it out. I was missing for days. My mother told me there were search parties sent out all across the city, they didn’t realise I was just a few hundred yards away.
Your grandmother thought they’d never see me again.
My own mother was afraid to think at all.
She walked the streets with a photograph of me, showing my face to strangers, hoping that someone had come across me.
And then Dotty, by some miracle, found me.
I’ll never forget her voice, calling my name.
Constance, Constance, please if you’re down there, let me know.
I thought I must be dreaming it at first. I mean, I was down there days, two long days and nights.
I was probably in shock, certainly fatigued beyond measure and most likely dehydrated too. ’
‘Oh my God, Constance, you poor little thing, so young, you must have been terrified,’ Heather said and she reached out and stroked Constance’s arm.
The bond between her mother and Constance made sense now.
How devastating it must have been all those years ago when it severed; she could understand how an experience like that could draw them together in a way beyond normal friendship.
‘Ah, I gave them all quite the shock. My mother feared I’d never be quite the same again.
’ Constance’s lips lifted into a wry smile and, for a moment, Heather had the strangest feeling that there was something very important she was holding back.
‘She had just signed her first big publishing contract. We’d come into more money than she had ever dreamed possible and she thought that getting away from Galway might help me recover.
She was right, of course. With a bit of minding and a good rest and moving away from that place, I suppose I was fine, mostly. ’
‘I can’t imagine. But, after that, you all moved here?’
‘My mother brought me for a holiday. We stayed in the hotel. It was going to be just a holiday. Of course, while we were here, she heard that Ocean’s End was up for sale.
Your grandfather took off, a few weeks before we were due to leave the house in Galway.
That was another huge shock to everyone, poor Sylvie just being abandoned like that with a daughter and no way of making ends meet.
So, when we were to pack up our lives my mother convinced Sylvie to come with us and the rest, as they say, is history.
She offered her a job, keeping house and a small cottage in the garden for both of them.
It must have seemed like the perfect solution. ’
‘And my grandmother?’
‘She probably found it different at first, but she was happy here, certainly, there was never any mention of going back. We were all as pleased as each other to get out of Galway, I think. At the time, a husband just doing a moonlight flit, well you can imagine, lots of tongues wagging about her at every turn and I’m not sure Sylvie could even afford to go on living there.
She’d never really had a job, so the offer of staying here was probably the answer to all her problems.’
‘My mother told me that her parents divorced,’ Heather said.
‘Oh, did she indeed?’ Constance smiled sweetly but she looked as if she could have bitten her tongue off. She made a little noise; probably best to change the subject. ‘Actually, the more I think about it, I think your grandmother loved it here. Do you remember the cottage in the kitchen garden?’
‘Why, yes, I had completely forgotten about that…’ Heather said then. How could she have forgotten that? Her mother bringing her along, showing her the window that had once been her bedroom, Heather standing on her tippy-toes to try and make out anything buried in the darkness within.
‘You’d hardly notice it now. It’s completely grown over, of course.
’ Constance looked down towards the end of the garden.
Ros had cleared a path so you could walk all the way to the border fence.
On either side, she’d cut back as many of the high brambles as she needed so there was a view of the sea beyond.
To the left, there was the remains of the walled-in garden, smothered beneath a thicket of weeds and brambles.
‘Of course, it was through the kitchen garden. I must go and take a look at it, one of the days when I’m here,’ Heather said softly and maybe that was the moment. As the sun dipped lower in the sky, a little part of her thought that life would be wonderful if she never had to leave this spot.
*
She’d been here just over a week when the parish priest came across to perform a ceremony to bury her mother.
It didn’t feel like a week, it felt somehow as if she’d been here her whole life.
She and Constance had slipped into an easy routine that pulled her back to a time she’d long forgotten.
Back then, when she came to visit with her mother, she had dearly loved Constance.
They’d always just clicked, of course, she could see it now, Constance took an interest in people.
Young or old, it didn’t matter, she just loved to spend time and she listened, really listened to people.
Heather could see it with Ros and with Finbar.
It was obvious they both adored her. She even managed to weave her magic over the parish priest, who almost missed the boat ride back to the mainland, so intent was he on chatting to Constance when they sat drinking glasses of Guinness after the funeral lunch that had only been attended by the three of them with Finbar and Father Rory.
‘It was a beautiful ceremony, probably the nicest funeral I’ve ever attended,’ Heather said and it was true. ‘Thanks, Constance, and you too, Ros.’
‘There’s no need to be thanking me at all,’ Constance said in that plain way she had of speaking. ‘It should be the other way round, if right was right.’
‘You should be thanking me?’ Heather didn’t understand.
‘For bringing Dotty home to me, of course,’ Constance said softly.
‘And I was just glad to be here for you,’ Ros said, sipping her Guinness.
She still hadn’t finished her first glass and Heather thought she’d never met a young woman like her.
‘The readings were beautiful.’ Ros had been quiet the whole time, as if the funeral had brought back memories of some sad time in her short life and she couldn’t quite shake off the melancholy of that time before.
Strangely, Heather realised that her mother’s funeral had not been a sad one for her.
Rather, it felt as if Dotty was in some way coming home, which was strange because Constance was quite emphatic that when they were young girls, Dotty couldn’t get off the island quickly enough.
Now, all Heather wanted was to hear stories of what her mother’s life had been like on the island all those years ago because, somehow, the woman Constance remembered seemed to be a much nicer person than the woman Heather had known.
Finbar lent his jeep to Heather while he ferried Father Rory back to the mainland.
That way she could drive Constance home, and he told her to hold onto it until he called her, he wouldn’t need it for a day or two at least. Heather was slightly taken aback.
In her whole life in London, no-one had ever just handed over their car keys just like that.
‘You seem to keep forgetting, you’re not in London any more, Heather,’ Constance said gently and Ros only smiled and nodded. Maybe it was some part of the reason why Ros wanted to stay on the island so badly.
‘Keep reminding me, I’m very happy to be here with you both,’ Heather said softly, because she couldn’t imagine feeling this sense of ease if she’d just buried her mother in some dreary London cemetery.
As the sunny day sank into an overcast grey evening, Constance confided to Heather she’d prayed for dry weather. There was some local old wives’ tale about it being unlucky to have rain hit a coffin before it went into the ground.
‘It can rain all it wants now,’ she said after the final shovelful of clay had been patted into place on her mother’s grave.
Watching that had probably been the hardest part for Heather, but it was the way things were done here and she just had to accept it was what her mother would have wanted.
So they’d stood silently by the graveside while two local men went about tucking her mother into the earth as if making up a hotel bed for her, with the utmost care and efficiency.
Yes, island life was completely different to anything she had ever experienced in London and Heather thought that none of that was a bad thing at all.