A Little Bit on the Side (16 page)

‘Beautifully expressed Jimmy,’ said Jack. ‘Very poetical. One of the wild songs of your dear native land is it?’

Jimmy just smiled, and fell silent again before starting off on a new tack that rather took Jack by surprise.

‘As a lifelong atheist Jack, what are your thoughts about the concept and merits of the confessional?’

‘Bloody hell, this is a bit sudden and serious Jimmy. What’s brought this on?’

‘Well apart from my younger brother, which wasn’t quite the same, I suppose it’s my father’s death. You know: the first real personal loss. Oh I’m not talking about the bloody priest and a clutch of Hail Marys, but don’t you ever feel that there are some memories, events and actions from the past, that sort of thing, that you’d like to share with someone, get off your chest if you like, but for a variety of reasons not with those nearest to you? A sort of secular absolution.’

‘You’re not going wobbly on me are you Jimmy? Feel the need to clear your conscience on the distilling do you? Don’t tell me I’ve been chumming up with a closet Catholic all these years.’

‘No I’m being serious Jack. Let me just tell you a story before we go back in. It won’t take long.’

‘Sorry Jim — fire away.’

‘Well you already know how Celia and I came together, but before I burned my bridges with the family by walking out on that God-awful mass for poor young Danny, I had what I suppose you’d call a childhood sweetheart. We were much the same age, went to the same school, and had known each other from the early days.

She was a lovely girl, Caireen. Just like the legend,
Caireen of the Dark and Curly Hair,
that was her. Quite different from Celia: brown eyes, about five foot and a bit, and if not self-effacing, then very quiet. But she’d a voice so soft and sweet, and a trick with her talking, a sort of defect of speech I suppose, that quite caught my heart. She was a Catholic like the rest of them of course, but unlike many she stuck with me after I walked out on the mass and all that, and for almost three years we exchanged letters when I was away, and whenever I was back in port I got up there to see her if I could.

I wouldn’t say that there was ever any spoken understanding between us, but other things being equal it would probably have gone that way. I know that apart from the odd dance and social she wasn’t seeing anyone when I was away.

Then I met Celia, and that was it. It was quite different: I was bowled over, and knew right away it was for good. For a few months I dodged the issue with Caireen. But eventually I tried to find the right words to let her know how things stood, and wrote to her. Unsurprisingly I got no reply. That would have been late on in 1944, and with all the commotion and uncertainty that came with the end of the war and my new life with Celia, I pretty well forgot about it’

When Jimmy paused here, Jack thought that he’d said all that was on his mind.

‘Well that’s something that’s bound to happen from time to time Jim. No call for a confessional there surely?’

‘No that’s not it Jack, it’s what happened years later. In 1963 I’d been up with Kevin for a couple of nights for the local derby, and we were walking back to the station when, out of the blue, he turns to me and says, “You won’t have heard, I suppose, that young Caireen Moore died a month or so ago. I remember the two of you were quite close for a while in your younger days.”’

‘Christ, Jack, I don’t think I’d given Caireen a thought for ten years or more, and yet I felt as though someone had punched me in the chest. She’d only have been thirty-nine.

I don’t think Kevin would have said anything more if I hadn’t pressed him, but I couldn’t help myself, and what little there was he knew. Although Caireen had apparently taken the end of our affair much worse than I might have supposed, she recovered well enough in time it seems, and couple of years later married another local lad: and so it would end you’d think.

But I was grieving as though I’d only seen her yesterday, and I couldn’t get over the fact that she’d died so young: felt it as though in some strange way it had something to do with me. I didn’t say much to Kevin, but all the way home on the train I could think of nothing but Caireen.

I could see her again quite clearly, just as I’d left her when I caught the train back to join the ship. It was early August, and we’d had two glorious days together. She came to the station to see me off, and I remember her standing there bare-headed in a summery lemon-yellow dress that shone out like a beacon in the crowd. I thought it looked like new, but knowing the times, it must have been something handed down from her sister from before the war, but she really did look lovely. And as we left, she just gave one long wave of goodbye, and then stood there smiling until I passed out of sight, but not out of mind for a long time it seems.

Even now I still think of it as a deeply personal loss. Just can’t quite work out why. I feel better for telling the story to someone else, but you can probably understand why I couldn’t say anything to Celia.’

Finished at last, he drained what was left from his glass and turned to Jack, perhaps in hope of consolation, certainly in expectation of comment. Jack emptied the remains of the bottle into their glasses before replying.

‘Jimmy,’ he said. ‘It’s sad that your Caireen had to die so young, and perhaps you loved her more than you realised, but the circumstances hardly call for absolution or penance.

I apologise profusely for ever calling you a soulless bugger, for now I see that deep at heart you’re just another melancholy, sentimental old Celt, dreaming sad, nostalgic dreams of what might have been, but never was. You’re like Yeats’ Sad Shepherd, full of self-pity and looking for comfort from the stars. Stop wallowing in a reverie of your lost romance. Shed a few tears for Caireen if you have to, and then forget her. Don’t ever mention it to Celia, and for God’s sake read a little of your nation’s poetry.’

Jimmy response was first a searching, hard and uncertain look directly into Jack’s face, and then a long, loud roar of laughter.

‘By Christ, Jack, you’re a bloody hard man, but you’re better for the soul than a dozen confessionals and canting Jesuits. Come on, they’ll be ready for us by now. Let’s go and eat.’

As they walked back to the house in the last of the fading light Jim returned for the last time to his original theme.

‘So you’ve never felt the need yourself Jack for the comfort of a secular confessional. Been a spotless life of moral rectitude has it?’

‘Nothing I can’t live with Jimmy. Minor misdemeanours, little meannesses that I regret, a bit of schoolboy pilfering at Woolworths, and of course a professional life of perfidious venality: all rather small beer — no calvados.’

When Jack looked at Celia as she left with Jimmy to travel up for the funeral, he could see why Caireen would have had to be quite a girl to stand up to the competition. Fifty next birthday, she could have been ten years younger. Tall and athletic of build, clear-eyed, lithe and vigorous, with scarcely a trace of grey in her dark auburn hair, she looked and moved as she might have done when she caught Jim’s eye in her service days.

From a shopping trip to Wolverton she had returned with a formal two-piece suit in a deep midnight blue (no problem with cash there either, thought Jack), and as Kate said afterwards, left for her first encounter with Jimmy’s mother looking every inch a thoroughbred from the Roedean stables.

In Liverpool the door was opened to them by Sorcha, Jimmy’s younger sister.

‘Ah Jimmy, Jimmy, it’s been a long, long time, but I’d still have known you if I we’d met on the street … and you must be Celia. It’s lovely to meet you at last’ She gave them each a kiss and a warm handshake.

‘Too long Sorcha, too long,’ said Jim, returning her greeting with a kiss and a bear-hug. ‘Shouldn’t have left it for this to meet up again should we, but better now than never. A chance for things to be different in the future.’

‘Please God they will,’ said Sorcha. ‘Celia, you come through with me to the back and meet the rest of them. Jimmy, you’ll find Dad in the front room if you’d like a few quiet moments with him by yourself, then come through and join us. Just follow the sound of the chat and you’ll find us alright.’

Jimmy opened the door to a room in near darkness, with heavy curtains drawn, and the only brightness the light from a single candle burning on the mantelpiece alongside a crucifix.

‘Dear God who’s that?’

He paused in the doorway, startled to see a figure sitting quietly in an easy chair beside the empty fireplace. And then, on looking more closely, ‘Is that you Uncle Michael? For just a moment I thought it was the Da come back. I’d forgotten just how much alike the two of you were.’

‘So we were, so we were Jimmy, and the older we got, the more alike we got, but he’s laid out there behind you, and I, for my sins, am sitting here mourning him, and thinking of the grand old times we had together as boys. How are you Jim, how are you?’

‘Oh I’m fine Uncle Michael. Sad, as we all are at the occasion, but pleased, as he would be, that it’s brought us all back together.’

‘Now or never wasn’t it Jim? Do you mind how long ago it was? Thirty-six long years and a war, and you were still a boy. I can see you now sitting in the shadows when we got together at the farm, and helping yourself to a sip from a glass here and a pull on a glass there. Do you still have a taste for the stuff?’

‘Sweet and fragrant from my own still uncle, just like yours.’

‘Then we’ll take the chance to have a few together before we go, and now I’ll leave the two of you by yourselves for a while. We’ll have plenty of time for chat later.’

Alone with his father Jim switched on a light and turned to the open coffin where the old man lay handsomely dressed in white shirt, dark tie and a fine grey suit: and by now he found that he was well over his grieving, and could look at his father composedly, if not entirely without emotion.

A bloody sight better dressed than I ever saw you in life. I suppose that’s for the neighbours, and as usual you could do with a shave. Why the hell do they say that anyone makes a lovely corpse? There’s nothing less lovely than death, but by and large you don’t look too bad Da. Pity life couldn’t have been happier when I was young, but over the years we shared a few good times on the terraces, and at Kevin’s with a jar or two afterwards. Could have been worse I suppose. And now they’ll be sending you off with the usual jamboree tomorrow, but this time I’ll just sit at the back and keep my thoughts to myself. It’ll make bugger all difference to you Da, will it? And I’m past caring. All passion spent. Is that what they say?

Had he been thinking all that, or standing there talking to a corpse? He wasn’t sure, and didn’t care. He felt easier in his mind now and ready after thirty-five years to meet his mother again. Switching out the light, he took one last look at his father by the flickering light of the candle, and then turned towards the noise of the others gathered in the room at the back.

As he opened the door to the babble of chatter and laughter, he took in the scene at a glance: all family obviously. Michael, Seamus and his aunt Mary over from Ireland with three of the cousins he’d met at the farm all those years ago: now middle-aged men like himself. Sorcha and her husband, Kevin with his wife, but still a few to come.

His mother he saw sitting alongside Celia, and apparently won over, if that had been necessary, as she had her hand on Celia’s knee and was engrossed in whatever they were talking about. He knew from Kevin that she was off the booze, doctor’s orders a few years earlier, and he wondered whether that had done anything to sweeten her disposition.

As Jim moved into the room she caught sight of him and stood up. An old woman now, she looked smaller and diminished in stature from the heavy-handed, overbearing mother he remembered, and not so sour-faced. Ah well, we all change with the years, he thought, and as he moved towards her he was sure that he could detect a mute entreaty for reconciliation in her eyes, and he welcomed it.

‘This is a sad way to be meeting after all these years Ma,’ he said, and for the first time since his early childhood, bent to give her a kiss.

‘So it is son, so it is. But it’s good to see you Jimmy boy. I’m sorry things went the way they did.’

‘So am I Ma, but that’s behind us now. You’ve been having a good chat with Celia have you.’

‘I have, and now I’ll go back to it, and leave you to catch up with the Cork and Dublin brigades.’

And that was how the rest of the day was passed: filling in the gaps left by the years, not only with those over from Ireland, but with others of the family as they arrived, until Jimmy and Celia left to spend the night in the nearest hotel, Sorcha’s accommodation being fully occupied.

Jimmy passed the following morning giving Celia a conducted tour of the dockland area that he remembered from his childhood and the war years, ending up at the Albert Dock, now empty and deserted, where all the talk was of revitalising the area by turning the dock-side and buildings into a new maritime museum.

Moving on to the snug bar of the Baltic Fleet they snacked on a bite and a beer before returning to Sorcha’s in good time before the coffin was closed, and this time Celia joined Jimmy for a final farewell. For Celia this was an entirely novel experience of death’s last rites. At the few family funerals she had attended things had been much more sanitised and at arms’ length: the deceased, if seen at all, viewed in the muzac-enhanced solemnity of the undertaker’s parlour, and certainly no open coffins at home with their very real reminders of mortality.

‘He must have been a fine-looking man when he was young,’ she whispered to Jimmy, who took one last, long look at his father before nodding silently and turning away.

As the cortege slowly made its way through the neighbouring streets on its short journey to the church where Jimmy had turned his back on religion half-a-lifetime earlier, he looked out without recognition, interest or emotion at a neighbourhood that had been utterly transformed since the days of his childhood. Of all that he remembered only the church, as if to mock him for the rejection, stood untouched and unaltered by war or the years.