Something in Common (13 page)

Fuck it. She threw back the blankets and swung her legs out of bed, rubbing the sting of tiredness from her eyes before making her way through the blackness to the door. She opened it quietly, meeting the muted light of the lamp that was plugged into the landing socket for Alice’s benefit. She paused, listening for her daughter’s breathing on the other side of the always-ajar bedroom door – and there it was, a rhythmic series of abrupt inhalations, as if Alice, in her dreams, was being repeatedly surprised.

Helen padded downstairs in the half-dark, yawning, fingers trailing along the wall, meeting the bump of the mounted family photo halfway down. A second-wedding-anniversary present from Cormac, a professional shot of the three of them. The only time he’d got it wrong.

The photo itself was inoffensive, Helen’s curls still there, tumbling loose over the bodice of the blue and green gypsy dress she’d worn, her scarlet toenails poking from white cork-soled platform sandals, an ankle bracelet of tiny multicoloured love beads above.

Cormac’s hair was long and thick too, his
smiling face showing no sign of the ruin it was to become, his arm around her shoulders as they sat side by side on the photographer’s white couch. And nineteen-month-old Alice, perched on her father’s blue-jeaned knee in her best yellow dress and matching headband, had beamed obligingly at the puppet the photographer had waved at her. A perfectly fine family snap, nothing wrong with it.

But Helen had always hated having her photo taken and her smile, each time she looked at this one, appeared horribly false. ‘Think sunny thoughts,’ the photographer had urged, which of course had increased her desire to tell him exactly what he could do with his camera. The only reason the photo remained on the stairway was that Cormac looked happy in it, and Helen needed to keep seeing that.

She reached the bottom of the stairs and felt her way along the wall to the light switch. In the kitchen she tipped the contents of the bin onto the lino and rummaged through them until she located the crumpled envelope on which Sarah Flannery had written her address.

A little worse for wear now after its three days in the bin, stained with coffee grounds and ketchup, greasy with butter and damp with moisture, but the rounded purple letters were still legible, just about. The address was becoming familiar, Helen’s third time to use it.

She copied it onto a fresh envelope, wording the accompanying note in her head. The fridge gave a shudder as she fed a sheet of paper into the typewriter – but as her fingers moved to their accustomed positions on the keys she changed her mind and pulled out the page again. Better do this one by hand.

For the past three days she’d been feeling increasingly uncomfortable. As she’d scraped the new fine-tooth comb across Alice’s scalp, shushing the child’s protests, as she’d deposited the tiny black grubs into a basin of water, as she’d applied the bottle of foul-smelling liquid afterwards to kill off any leftovers, she knew she’d been needlessly cruel to Sarah Flannery.

It was one thing to trash a badly written book – fair game, once it was out there on the shelves – and quite another to lash out at someone whose only offence had been to offer what had, after all, been a fairly mild criticism of Helen’s review. She’d had a lot worse things written and said to her after nearly three years of making her honest opinions known to the general public.

Sarah Flannery was undoubtedly a bit of a softie, and possibly couldn’t write a book to save her life, but she hadn’t deserved the letter Helen had written. For all Helen’s faults – and she recognised and acknowledged every one of them – she strove to be fair, and in this case she’d failed. She’d been angry, and she’d lashed out at Sarah Flannery, who’d chosen the wrong day to cross her path.

She had to put it right, or run the risk of never sleeping through the night again. She unscrewed the fountain pen she’d treated herself to with Breen’s first cheque, and began to write.

There. It was prim and horribly stilted, but it would have to do. She folded the page and slid it into the envelope. She’d post it later, on the way home from dropping Alice to school, and that would be an end to it.

She turned
off the light and left the kitchen. If she fell asleep in the next ten minutes she’d get a good two hours before the alarm went off. Less than ideal if she was to do justice to the thousand words Breen had demanded on the Wood Quay situation, but it would have to do.

‘T
hat forsythia wants tidying up,’ Martina said. ‘It’s a disgrace.’

‘Cutbacks, I’m afraid. Apparently the nursing home has no money to pay a full-time gardener. But I’m sure Matron would be happy to let you do it, if you wanted.’

‘
Me?
I’m a resident, not the hired help. I’m paying well to stay here.’

‘Well, of course, but you’d enjoy it, wouldn’t you? And it would look so much better. You could be happy that you’d improved it.’

Martina sniffed. ‘I can tell you I have no intention of going near it.’

‘Right …’

Silence. Sarah checked her watch: another ten minutes and she’d have to get going with the apple buns for tea. She cast about for a new topic of conversation, and found it.

‘Imagine Elvis is dead a year already. Hard to believe, isn’t it?’

Martina snorted. ‘That fellow? No loss.’ She pulled her grey cardigan more tightly around her. ‘All that shaking himself around, and marrying that poor child when she didn’t know any better: disgusting. He should have been arrested.’

Sarah hid a smile. ‘It was his anniversary last week. Helen O’Dowd wrote a bit in the paper about him.’

‘Who? Never heard of her.’

‘She’s a
journalist. She does book reviews on Sunday too. I thought it was quite good, what she wrote about Elvis. Quite touching, even if you didn’t like him.’

No response. Martina frowned out at the forsythia. Sarah tried again.

‘Actually, I wrote a book,’ she said. ‘Well, half a book.’ Maybe that would get a reaction.

Martina turned. ‘What – a cookery book?’

‘No, a novel, set in the past. About people who lived in a Big House, you know, kind of an
Upstairs, Downstairs
story.’

‘Oh, that was good. The Bellamys … and the housekeeper, what’s this her name was again?’

‘Mrs Bridges.’

‘That’s right. She was priceless.’

‘Yes, well, mine was about another—’

‘And that strap who ran off with the footman. And the butler, Mr Hudson, he was great.’

‘He was,’ Sarah said. ‘He was very good alright.’

Just as well, probably, that the conversation had veered away from the manuscript she’d destroyed. Four months on, the loss of it still caused a small pang.

When she’d told the others about tearing it up, the reactions had been pretty much as she’d expected. It had been a week or so after her mother’s funeral. The family was gathered in Christine and Brian’s conservatory, the sun slipping down behind the line of spruce trees at the bottom of their garden. They were letting mugs of coffee go cool, punctuating the silence with brief murmured exchanges, each of them still battered from the emotions of the previous week.

Sarah’s admission, slipped into one of the pauses, had caused a stir.

‘You tore up your book, just like that?’ Christine had asked incredulously. ‘The whole thing is gone in the bin, after a letter from someone you don’t even know? What possessed you?’

‘I can’t
believe you let her influence you like that,’ Neil had said. ‘You’ve never met her, she hadn’t read a word you’d written. How on earth would she know what you’re capable of?’

Her father’s reaction had been more measured, but he was saying pretty much the same. ‘If you felt yourself that the book wasn’t going anywhere that’s one thing, but to tear it up because of what someone else says seems a little … impulsive. I hope you won’t regret it.’

Sarah had made no reply, reluctant to admit that she was already regretting it. Why had she been so rash? Why hadn’t she at least slept on it before ripping up over two years of thinking and plotting and writing and correcting? All that effort, destroyed in a few minutes because some stranger had suggested it mightn’t be any good.

She said nothing to them about the second letter, slipping through the door a few days after the first. Short, handwritten, astonishing.
I’m writing now to apologise unreservedly … I hope you can forgive my thoughtlessness.

Helen O’Dowd, apologising unreservedly. Too bad the damage had already been done. Reading the few brief lines, Sarah hadn’t been sure if this letter made the situation better or worse. She’d felt a twist of anger, directed towards both of them. What right had Helen O’Dowd to criticise something she’d never seen, and how could she herself have been so foolish as to be led by it?

I wish you all the best with your book
– a fat lot of good all the wishes in the world would do, now that the book no longer existed. Too little, too late – and in the week that her mother had died too, just to make things worse.

For the rest of that day Sarah had felt crotchety, clattering dishes in the nursing-home kitchen on her first day back to work since the funeral, aware that the rest of the staff were keeping their distance. Let them – for once, she wasn’t concerned with making sure everyone else was happy.

By the end
of the day, though, she’d talked herself back into a more resigned state of mind. What was done was done: no point in crying over it now. And this second letter showed, didn’t it, that Helen O’Dowd had a conscience, that she wasn’t as ruthless as she seemed? That had to be a good thing.

So she’d put it behind her, and life had settled back into its normal rhythms, except that everything was sadder without Mam around. Sarah went to work each day and phoned her father when she got home, inviting him to dinner at least twice a week. Hinting, every so often, that the offer to move in with her and Neil was there, if he was too lonely on his own.

And every now and again she would see Helen O’Dowd’s name on a piece in the newspaper, and it would remind her of the book that had never been completed. Maybe she’d try another one some time, but for now all that was in the past.

‘So what happened to it?’

Martina’s voice broke into her thoughts. ‘What happened to what?’

‘Your
book
that you were writing.’

‘Oh … I tore it up. It was no good, really.’

And there was the truth of it, no matter how much she might regret its absence or resent Helen O’Dowd’s part in its destruction. But there were other things she was good at. She was a cook, and she loved it. And she was a wife, and she seemed to be good at that too.

And maybe, just maybe – a jab of excitement at the thought – she was on her way to being a mother for the first time. Too soon, much too soon to be sure, she was less than two weeks late, but every day that went by gave her more hope. Almost a year since the wedding – surely it was time. And if it happened,
when
it happened, she thought she’d make a pretty good mother.

‘There’s that boy of Mary’s,’ Martina said, watching a Sunday visitor walk from his car. ‘You’d think he’d cut his hair. It’s a disgrace.’

Poor Martina. Sarah got to her feet. ‘Well, I’d better get the apple buns made, or you’ll have no tea. Thanks for the chat.’

Tipping butter
into sugar, she thought again about trying to write another book. Just because she’d failed the first time didn’t mean she’d never succeed. She might take a more modern approach, set it in the present day. Make it a bit racy, even, like Edna O’Brien.

She imagined Helen O’Dowd doing a review, slicing it to ribbons, declaring that Sarah should keep a diary if she wanted to write. Then again, maybe Helen O’Dowd was no good at cooking. Each to her own.

And then the very next week she opened the paper and saw
Slave over a hot stove? Not me
– and below, Helen O’Dowd’s name. She began to read.

Sarah read the article with growing disapproval. A child who was being brought up on fish fingers and sausages and not a single vegetable – Helen O’Dowd couldn’t seriously think a blob of ketchup counted as one. Apart from the fact that tomatoes weren’t technically vegetables, she must realise that what came out of a ketchup bottle couldn’t possibly be compared in terms of nutritional goodness to a ripe, juicy tomato.