Homecoming (42 page)

Phil didn’t appear shocked. ‘I have to warn you, it’s all changed. Kilmoney was a decent-sized town if you look at the 1911 Census. Some six hundred and fifty people lived there. But, as you know, there was a lot of emigration after that. There was a slowing down of emigration during the American Depression, but of course, many people from Connemara took the Mail Boat to Britain. They’d work for a few years and come home. Then off again when the work here dried up.’

Megan was silent in the back of the car. It sounded so grim, so frightening. Work meant food in those days. Having a job was the difference between living and dying. She looked out at the stunning countryside around her and shivered at the thought of how different it must have looked to people with nothing to live on.

‘There was seasonal employment for people in the big houses when the aristocracy came to their country estates in summer and autumn, but that began to die off too. The young men and women left the village, they wanted something else for their futures. Four of the big houses went empty during the Emergency – World War Two,’ he explained to Megan.

‘A fellow by the name of McGeraghty opened a small distillery a few miles from Kilmoney in 1953, and that kept the town alive a little longer, but the fire in 1958 destroyed the church and the local school, and it was all over then. It’s a bit of a ghost town now, just a main street with a couple of houses and a very nice little hotel named The Sheep’s Head. Run by a Kiwi couple. They do good business bringing walking tours up the mountains, and sending fishermen off in the right direction. You can even bring your dogs with you.’

Eleanor laughed. ‘We’ll have to stop there,’ she said. ‘I like the sound of these people.’

‘They’re a decent pair of skins,’ Phil went on. ‘I’d hate to see you upset, Mrs Levine, when you see the place. The old stone cottages are in rack and ruin. The tourists love it, picking their way through the ruins and imagining it all fifty years ago, but it might be upsetting for you.’

Eleanor smiled bravely. ‘Let’s just see it all. Have you worked out where my home was?’

‘More or less,’ Phil replied. ‘It’s a ruin, I have to tell you. But you were expecting that, weren’t you?’

‘Do you know, I’m not sure what I’m expecting,’ Eleanor said.

The lonely main street was a bit of a shock to Eleanor. To visitors, it probably looked pretty with a few cottages and a couple of bungalows on either side of the road, along with a small petrol station, and at the end, The Sheep’s Head, painted white with black timber on the walls and colourful window boxes. Behind a small monument were black gates to a very old cemetery with nothing but a bare patch of ground where the church used to be.

To someone who could remember a public bar, the post office with the grocery attached, and the big grey church set back from the road with a hill graveyard beside it, Kilmoney looked almost deserted. As if someone had described the village badly to a artist, who’d then drawn only half of it in.

Eleanor found her hand covering her mouth as she looked around, trying to recall landmarks and wondering if her memories of the place were accurate at all. People romanticised places, she knew that. Had she?

‘It’s cute,’ said Megan from the back seat, watching Eleanor carefully. ‘But very different?’

‘Very,’ breathed Eleanor.

‘The O’Neill homestead was out on the Clifden Road,’ Phil went on, driving straight through. ‘We can stop later for tea. Let’s see the house first.’

It had been nearly three miles from the church to Eleanor’s home. Three miles the family had walked many, many times. On Sundays, holy days, for christenings, marriages and burials.

She looked in vain for something she remembered as they drove out of the town and along a barren stretch of road with rushes on either side, and boggy, heather-strewn land that led to a couple of small ponds. Did she recognise those trees? Was that hump-backed bridge the one she remembered, or was her memory tricking her?

She felt a surge of sadness at how different it all seemed. Where was the comforting sense of homecoming?

And then the Land Rover turned right down another long road and then left in what was once a gateway. Two stone gateposts marked the entrance and a stone track with grass in the middle led to the ruins of a stone house in a small glade of trees.

Home. At that instant, Eleanor remembered. She could see her childish self skipping down the lane after school, rushing to see her mother and father, and Granny. She could remember holding on to her mother’s arm as they walked down after Christmas morning Mass, frost covering the lane with diamond brightness, towards the small house with turf smoke rising out of the chimney.

She no longer wanted to cry, she wanted to run down the lane the way she used to.

‘Can we stop here so I can walk down?’ she said to Phil.

‘No bother.’ He parked quickly. Megan and Eleanor got out, and Phil diplomatically stayed with the car.

Megan’s hand slipped into Eleanor’s, for which she was grateful.

‘Is it familiar?’ asked Megan softly.

‘Yes.’ Eleanor knew that even her voice was light now. ‘I used to run down this lane like a thing possessed. I was so close to my mother that I’d run home from school to see her. I’d sometimes get a lift on a cart from the village, and I’d be home quicker than usual. I’d run to find her and I’d be so happy that I was early. I could spend more of the day with her. The ducks used to come round here to that bit of boggy ground and look for snails,’ she said, pointing to a spot just before the trees. ‘My mother preferred them to stay round the back of the house, but it was useless trying to stop them. The water barrel was here. It was very soft water. Mother used to wash my hair in it rather than the water from the spring at the back of the house.’

They were at the house now.

Megan saw a ruined stone cottage with an assortment of small outhouses all in states of disrepair.

Eleanor saw what had been the home she loved. She touched the remains of the lintel of the doorway, closed her eyes and said a small prayer.

‘Keep them all safe, Our Lady,’ she whispered.

The rooms seemed so small now.

‘This was the kitchen,’ she told Megan animatedly. ‘The range was here. A big black thing, it ate turf like a monster, but the heat out of it was amazing. We had to blacken it every week because the top went white from the heat. It killed my mother to leave it when we went to America. She loved that range, it was so much easier to cook on than the fire. Her chair was here and she’d sit and sew at night, by lamplight. My grandmother, my father’s mother, would sit on the other side of the range and make knitted lace.’

She pointed out the bedrooms, and the outhouse they used as the dairy. ‘I’ll let you borrow my mother’s book, Brigid’s Recipe Book,’ she told Megan joyfully. ‘Wait till you read all about making butter. It was such hard work. I can barely remember a lot of that stuff, but it’s all in the book.’

‘I’m sorry your husband’s not here to share this with you,’ Megan said. ‘Nora has great faith. She believes the dead are with us, watching over us. Maybe your husband’s here with all the rest of your family, smiling at us standing here.’

Eleanor stared at her in astonishment. ‘That’s exactly what I was just thinking. This great sense of peace has just come over me. I haven’t felt like that in a long time, not since Ralf died.’

‘Tell me about him. Did you have children?’ Megan linked arms with Eleanor again.

‘He was an optician. Levine and Sons, established 1925 by his father,’ Eleanor said, eyes shining. ‘Except that, from us, there were no sons. We have a daughter, Naomi, and she married a wonderful man named Marcus Filan. They have a daughter, my grand-daughter Gillian, who’s nineteen – well, twenty now. She’s wonderful.’ Eleanor’s face softened with pride.’

‘What do they think about you being away from New York for so long?’

Eleanor sat down on a bit of broken wall.

‘They hate it. I needed to get away from everything. I couldn’t stand being in my apartment without Ralf. He had a mild stroke and then, a month later, a massive, fatal one. We thought he was fine, he was on all the meds, but it still hit him. I thought –’ Eleanor broke off and looked at the ruined house all around her. ‘I thought that coming to Ireland might ground me, remind me of something precious. I was feeling so lost and alone and I didn’t want to be a burden on Naomi or Gillian. I ran away.’

‘Sounds like the sort of thing I might do myself,’ said Megan softly, crouching down at Eleanor’s feet. She laid her hands on the older woman’s arm, comforting.

‘The problem with running away is that the problem runs with you,’ Eleanor sighed. She kept looking round the room, as if scared that the sense of peace would vanish when her eyes stopped brimming over. But no, it was still there.

The second stroke had happened so quickly, in spite of all the drugs Ralf was on. She’d been there this time, sitting beside him with the television on. That’s what they did now: sat in front of the television watching documentaries on subjects that might have once interested him. War ones, science ones, archaeology ones that Eleanor might have watched too. Anything. She didn’t see the screen really, and she was quite sure he didn’t either. His eyes, dark eyes that had loved her with fierce passion, gazed blankly at the television, no longer burning with that inner fire.

Ralf was gone. She could feel him slipping away from her with each passing day, no matter that she clung to his frail body and wished him better. His speech seemed to be worse. He could barely move his left hand at all, and when she spoke to him, she could see a total lack of comprehension in his eyes. He should have stayed longer in the nursing home, but she’d insisted he come home. She could pay a nurse to come in. She needed him here. Except, he wasn’t really here.

Eleanor had often thought she’d die before him and she hadn’t wanted to. Men withered and died when their wives died, she knew that. Women were stronger. Hadn’t her mother survived all those years in New York without her father?

But the reality was crushing and different. Eleanor watched Ralf disappear and she wanted to go with him too.

When the second stroke had come, there had been one moment when she’d held him tightly and thought – hoped – the old Ralf had been there for one second. Then he’d gone for good.

‘Mr Levine,’ said the nurse, coming back from the kitchen where she’d been getting Ralf’s lunch.

‘He’s gone,’ Eleanor sobbed. It was over, she was over.

Naomi and Gillian insisted she stay with them for the week after the memorial service. Years earlier, Ralf had made it clear that he wanted cremation.

‘More ecologically sound,’ he’d said.

If he’d wanted a rocket to the moon, Eleanor would have done her best to organise it. But now that he was gone, there was nothing for her to organise.

Naomi had taken time off from the business to care for her mother.

‘Mom, you must eat. A little chicken soup, something?’

‘Thanks, honey, I’m not hungry.’

‘Just sit with us for lunch?’ Naomi had begged.

Eleanor shook her head. She was too broken to sit with Gillian and Naomi and attempt to chat. It was beyond her, even though it would have comforted them to know she was recovering in some way. For the first time ever, she couldn’t comfort them. It was as if her transformation from nurturing mother person to old woman was complete. Everything had been leached from her with Ralf’s death. Her very being had changed.

Eleanor felt stiff and old. In December it was chilly in New York, even in Naomi and Marcus’s warm apartment with its views of the river. Eleanor sat on the white ottoman and looked out at the Hudson and the grey skies.

Gillian wanted to remember her grandfather. Rejoice in his life.

‘Gran, can I put on Gramp’s favourite CD, the Chet Baker one?’

Ralf had gifted his love of music to his grand-daughter and her iPod boasted an eclectic mix of old and new.

Eleanor nodded. She didn’t really care. Nothing touched her.

But when the mellow strains of Chet Baker reached her, she gasped. The music speared into her. It was unbearable.

‘Naomi, I need to go home,’ Eleanor said. ‘I’ll be better there, honestly.’

She’d let Gillian pack for her, while Naomi fussed and said why didn’t she stay.

‘I’ll be better at home,’ Eleanor insisted. She didn’t know why, but she needed to be away from people.

In the apartment, she knew that she couldn’t stay there either. Every shred of furniture reminded her of Ralf and the life they’d had. Every cup was one he’d drunk from, every painting one he’d bought or hung on the wall.

There was no peace in either home.

And it was then the thought came to her: her true home, where she’d been happy when she was young. She and Ralf had talked of going there so often. She might find some peace in a place where he’d never been. And if she didn’t find peace, she had options.

It had taken only days to arrange.

Naomi had been horrified.

‘Mom, don’t do this, please,’ she’d said, sitting on the bed in her parents’ apartment while Eleanor slowly packed things in her two suitcases. ‘You’re too upset to go alone. Wait, and I’ll come with you after Christmas.’

‘No.’ Eleanor knew how to be firm and to sound as if she was coping, even when she wasn’t. Even if it meant lying to get away, she would do it. ‘You stay here. I need to be on my own, Naomi. I’m not senile or stupid. Being eighty-four doesn’t make a person incapable of travelling on their own.’

In the end, there had been nothing Naomi could do about it. Eleanor had promised to phone every week.

‘I’ll be fine,’ she insisted. ‘I don’t need to be taken care of, Naomi. I’m not at that stage yet.’ And never would be, she added in her mind.

Sitting in the remains of her old home in Kilmoney, she felt that sense of peace flooding through her. It was like drinking cool water after being parched. The relief flooded through her again. The burden in her chest seemed to be genuinely lifting. Something or someone was taking the pain away.

Ralf, are you here?
she asked silently.