So Many Ways to Begin (21 page)

39     
Hospital admissions card, 1945 (Discovered 1976)

I'd have been lost without her and no mistake, Dorothy told them, a few weeks after the funeral, when they were gathered at Julia's house to help Laurence sort through all the things she'd left behind. I couldn't believe it, she said, the first time she invited me here for dinner; gesturing around her as if to say, this house, I mean, just look at it. It wasn't what I was expecting, she said, laughing, not when everyone else lived in those dingy old nurse's rooms. They sat around the kitchen table, Dorothy, David and Eleanor, Susan, eating the sandwiches and cakes Laurence had laid out, and she told them all about when she'd first met Julia and how much Julia had helped her out. Laurence hovered in the background, listening, waiting to restock any empty plates, putting the kettle back on for a fresh pot.

They'd had little in common when they first met, making hospital corners on the beds of a whole wing of new wards, but that hadn't kept them from making friends almost immediately. Something just clicked with us, Dorothy said. I never knew what it was, she was like my sister more than anything else. She showed me round London, and introduced me to people, and toughened me up. I was only eighteen when I started nursing, I needed a bit of toughening up, she said, laughing, gathering up the last few cake crumbs on her plate. Laurence started to clear their plates away, asking if there was anything else anyone wanted. They shook their heads. I hated it for months, Dorothy went on, couldn't stand it, the work, and the people, and the effort involved in just getting from place to place, but I didn't dare go back. Where I came from, people didn't do that. She laughed again. I must have seemed like a real country girl when we first met, she said, but Julia soon fixed that. She turned me into a proper Londoner. I still feel like one even now, she said, shaking her head and smiling, running her thumb along the smooth worn edge of the table.

They sat quietly for a few moments more, and then David said well, should we? And they stood up, ready to get on with the job in hand, moving back through the musty hallway with its rolled-up carpets and stacked picture frames, working their way through each room and sorting everything into categories: boxes of clothes, boxes of bric-a-brac, magazines, newspapers, printed documents, handwritten documents, photographs, jewellery, items of value, items mentioned in the will. Laurence stood around awkwardly, collecting up the mugs from the table, walking back and forth between the rooms without really doing anything, picking up the occasional ornament and putting it back down, his hands hovering uselessly above papers and boxes he seemed unable to touch. Eleanor, seven months pregnant, did what she could and sat down whenever the others insisted. And although they all tried to keep each other moving, and tried not to stop and think, they each came across something which caught them out, something which snagged a loose thread of memory and tugged them to their knees. Julia's wedding dress, still wrapped in tissue paper in the attic. A photograph of Dorothy holding a one-year-old Susan, both of them clutching their thick rubber gas masks. A cigarette holder. The two telegrams. A birthday card David had made at school, with
To Auntie Julia
smeared across it in flaking orange poster paint. Her old nurse's watch. Half a dozen pairs of mislaid spectacles, gazing blindly up at them from beneath magazines, cushions, handbags. And towards the end of the afternoon, while everyone else was back in the kitchen drinking more cups of tea, he found what he'd been unknowingly looking for all along, tucked away at the bottom of a suitcase in the attic, waiting for him.

The suitcase was full of old papers - programmes from some of the plays Julia's mother had been in, a stack of appointment diaries, thick bundles of bank statements and tax certificates. But once he'd sorted it all into piles, ready to take downstairs, there was something left over. He listened to the voices of the others floating up from the kitchen, Susan saying something about the smell of Julia's tweed coats that she remembered from when she was a little girl, Dorothy laughing, and he thought, for only a brief moment, about putting the slip of card back where it had come from. He wondered if his mother even knew about it.

A hospital admissions card, headed
Royal London White-chapel,
29th March 1945.

Brisk blue handwriting, the details spread neatly across the dotted lines.

Mary Friel. D.O.B. 14.11.11. Maternity.

There was an address, a King Edward Avenue in St John's Wood, but it had been crossed out in red pen, the words
prob. false
written above it. And there was a signature,
Mary
Friel,
the writing scratched and faltering, the
e
and the / of
Friel
falling beneath the dotted line.

He sat slowly on the chair by the small dormer window and looked at it for a long time in the failing evening light. He tried to convince himself that it was something other than what he knew it must be. He tried the name for size, and it felt heavy and alien on his tongue.
Friel.
David
Friel.

He tried to imagine the young girl whose handwriting this was, and the much older woman she must have become. He traced the shapes of the letters with his thumb, hoping for more clues than those few words could give.

Friel.

He practised saying the name, whispering it to himself in that large bare room littered with piles of paper. He wondered why even the date of birth was uncertain. And the hunger came back once more, the hunger to know, the hunger that had never really gone away.
Friel. Mary Friel.
David
Friel.

An accident, like the Mildenhall ploughman tearing through thick frosty soil to haul out the treasured silver plates with his bare hands. An accident, like Julia's original slip of the tongue.

40               
Scrapbook w/postcards, tickets, maps, etc., 1979

He walked from the dock to the bus station, following the directions on a map he'd brought with him. The streets were quiet and dark, as if people were waiting until the last possible moment before heading out for work, keeping their heads down and their lights low. The people who'd come off the boat with him walked quickly, holding umbrellas or newspapers up against the rain. A police Land Rover hurtled past, a skirt of steel-plating around its wheels, metal grilles across its windows, hurling up spray from the road. A man watched him from inside a dark blue news-stand, cutting open bundles of newspapers. Another man came out of a side street ahead of him, pushing a handcart blooming with cut flowers in black buckets, and he tried to nod good morning but the man ignored him. He came to a hotel with all its front windows boarded up, found his bus waiting in the bus station behind it, and took his seat.

Later, he stuck the tickets and maps and handwritten directions into a scrapbook, along with the other remnants of the journey - postcards, bus tickets, beer mats, notepaper printed with the addresses of bed and breakfast guesthouses - and he imagined someone, someone smiling, wrinkles creasing around their eyes and away from the corners of the mouth, someone saying look how close you came, saying ah but you're here now though.

He woke up with no idea of how long he'd been asleep or how far the bus had travelled. From the window he could see long sloping fields of wheat and open pasture, large white farmhouses and open-walled barns set back from the road, mournful-looking long-haired cattle standing unexpectantly in the damp corners of fields. It could have been the southwest of England, or Wales, or Northumberland, except for the hard-edged accents of the other people on the bus, or the union flags which hung limply from every other telegraph pole along the road. The hills got higher, and the fields on either side became more barren, littered with rocks and striped with marshy puddles. Sheep sprang away from the roadside, mud stained halfway up their legs, colliding with each other as they hurried away from the bus. Valleys fell away to one side, steep-sided and channelled out by narrow streams. They reached the top of the ridge, passing through a small town, and as they came down the other side, the driver changing down through the gears and leaning heavily on the brake, he saw Londonderry appear below them, hooked to the near side of the river by a long narrow bridge, ringed by a wall which no longer held the whole city within it. He changed buses in Londonderry, crossing the border soon afterwards. A soldier got on to the bus to look at the passengers. Another one walked around outside, crouching at each corner to peer at the axles, glancing up at the tops of the surrounding hills, waving them through with a swing of his heavy black gun.

So he didn't tell her about the soldiers or the Land Rover when he spoke to her on the phone that evening. He told her about the hills, and the flags, and the sheep, and he told her about his first darkened view of Belfast in the morning.

What's the weather like? she said. Where are you now? He could hear Kate in the background, saying she couldn't hear, saying it was her turn to talk now.

It's been raining all day, he said. I'm in Donegal Town. The room's a bit small but it's clean and everything. He could hear voices in another room, and see someone moving around in the lounge, setting tables for breakfast. She asked how long he was going to stay, what he was going to do.

I don't know, he said, a couple of nights here, I think, so I can try and work out where to go next. He read the names in the visitors' book on the table beneath the phone, turning a few of the pages. How're things at home? he asked.

Fine, she said quickly. You know, fine. Weather's nice. Your mum said she might come round tomorrow.

He closed his eyes a moment. There were things he wasn't saying, and he wanted to say them. He wanted to tell her how he felt now that he was finally there, that he was at once excited and disappointed, that he'd been surprised to feel no sense of homecoming; how utterly lost he had in fact felt when he'd arrived. But he wasn't sure if she wanted to hear these things, or if she wanted him to be there at all, and so he said nothing.

And how's Kate doing? he said.

Well, she's fine, she said. You want to speak to her? He said that he did, and he listened to Eleanor holding the phone out, leaning over to Kate and asking if she wanted to speak to her daddy. He heard the soft whump of the sofa cushions, and pictured Kate burying her face in them, trying to hide herself. Eleanor spoke again. She's gone all shy on you, she said, a smile in her voice. She misses you, you know, already.

I know, he said. He hesitated, looking to see if the woman was still setting the tables in the dining room, lowering his voice. And you're okay? he asked.

Yes, she said. I'm fine. He heard the edge of her voice tighten, and knew that she'd closed her eyes.

You've been making sure you take them then? he said. You haven't missed any? There was a long silence, without even the sound of Eleanor's breath reaching down the phone line to him, and he wasn't quite sure if she was still there. Eleanor? he said.

Yes David, she said. Yes, I have. He heard Kate running into the kitchen and dragging a stool across the floor, and he heard Eleanor telling her not to do that, the phone lowered away from her face. I've got to go, she said, speaking to him again.

Right, he said, okay. He started to say look sorry, I didn't mean to, and he heard something breaking in the kitchen, a plate or a glass, and Kate screaming in surprise, and Eleanor telling her not to move. He said I love you, I'll be home soon, over the noise, but he wasn't sure if she'd heard.

He walked away from the square, past a small ruined castle and across a river, looking for the town library. It was closed. There was no museum. He walked along the river to a jetty, watching some men unloading armfuls of netting from their boat. He went for a drink in a bar, barely able to see for a moment as he stepped in from outside, blinking quickly and asking for a stout. At the edge of town, just off the Ballybofey Road, in a steeply sloping field beneath an oak tree, he found a memorial stone to the famine dead, buried together there beneath his feet.

Kate said hello to him on the phone that evening, but sank into a breathy silence when he said hello back, when he asked her what she'd been doing, as if she couldn't quite believe it was him at the end of the line.

He phoned Anna, and she said oh hello, I was wondering how you were getting on. It's been quiet at work without you there, she said, half-laughing, are you heading back soon? He told her he'd be a few more days yet, there was still plenty left to see. She said well we all miss you, speaking, as she often did, as if she meant something else, something more, and he wondered again if there really was something more to be meant. The teasing sound of her voice when she spoke like that reminded him of her fingers trailing through the hair on the back of his head, or of her breath moving across his cheek when they looked over layout diagrams together, leaning over the desk, her elbow pressed against his.

He said anyway, I was just phoning to see if there'd been any post for me, any messages I need to deal with?

She said no, nothing that can't wait. We can cope without you, you know, she added, laughing.

Oh, no, yes, of course, he said. Well, okay then. I should go.

Take care then, she said as he hung up.

They stopped outside a pair of shops and a garage. There was a man sitting on a bench outside one of the shops, a black dog curled up by his feet. There was a long burgundy car poking out of the garage workshop, the bonnet open, two men leaning over the engine together. The driver turned to him.

Are you getting off then? he asked. David looked at him, and back out of the window.

Is this Kilrean? he asked.

It is, the man said, pointing at the door to clear up any confusion.

He phoned Eleanor each evening, a stack of small coins ready beside the phone, and told her what he'd done that day, where he was, who he'd seen or met or spoken to briefly. He turned each coin over in his hand as he spoke, looking at the dates and designs embossed on them, the harps and salmons and bulls. I know it seems strange but it feels like it's worth it, he said. I know she might not even be here but at least I'm getting a look at the place. It's some thing, he said uncertainly. I love you too, he said each evening. Tell Kate I'll be home soon, tell her I love her, tell her to be good. He always paused a moment before putting the phone down, listening to the click and buzz of the broken connection.