The Christie Affair (11 page)

The memory of our child’s beauty had no healing power. None of it was Finbarr’s fault and still I sent him away. With Ireland embroiled in its war for independence, he left Great Britain for Australia, where nobody would expect him to fight for any country, and he could work training herding dogs. He had wanted me to go with him but I refused. Just this past September I had written to him at the last address I knew, to tell him about Archie, the marriage I believed was impending, and my reasons for stealing another woman’s husband. I owed him that much, but I never heard back. Perhaps the words I wrote repulsed him, written by a woman he’d never imagined I could
become. Or perhaps he’d simply moved again, to America, or back to Ireland. Beyond it all. A place I could never reach.

It was too soon for Agatha to move beyond anything. I packed my warmest clothes, boots and hats and gloves, so I could go for walks while I was in the country. Perhaps if I found a deserted road, I would even run. I tried to picture Agatha, running beside me, the two of us invisible to the outside world and finally equals.

I folded a skirt and thought: she headed to Godalming so she could confront Archie and me, make a great scene in front of the Owens. In her unaccustomed Sturm and Drang she’d driven off the road, then left her car and wandered out into the frigid night. First thing tomorrow morning I’d hear the news, her body had been found frozen in the hedgerow, or in the nets they used to drag the Silent Pool.

I folded a cardigan, a gift from Archie, the softest cashmere I owned, and thought: right now, Teddy might be playing upstairs at Styles. She might be reading
Winnie the Pooh
. Not knowing Agatha had gone.

Do you ever think about the Irish boy?

Only every day of my life.

I wrapped a pair of walking shoes in a scarf. She’d boarded a ship to America and now sat snug in a first-class cabin. The whole world and a new future ahead of her. Me having provided the impetus she needed to escape.

I snapped my suitcase shut. That was that. No more thoughts of my lover’s wife, or even Finbarr, could intrude. Whatever happened next, in its aftermath my life with Archie would begin. I had one week to myself before then. I planned to immerse myself fully.

Here Lies Sister Mary

I
MIGHT HAVE STAYED
in Ireland during the war if Colleen hadn’t died. As soon as I received word I knew the exact moment it had happened. I’d been walking with Brutus up from the barn, my hair loose, clapping my hands together to rid them of saddle soap. Daylight was waning while mist descended as companion to the coming dusk. And a chill came over me out of nowhere, like I’d been plunged into icy water. ‘Someone walked over my grave,’ my mother used to say.

When I received the telegram days later, nothing could keep me from home.

‘It doesn’t say how,’ I sobbed to Aunt Rosie, holding up the wired letter, a few lines, pennies saved. ‘She’s only nineteen. Why doesn’t it say how?’ And, of course, I thought, if she’d come to Ireland instead of me, she would have been safe.

Rosie thumped my back in comfort, looking solemnly at Uncle Jack. It had to be grave indeed, for someone so young to die of something that couldn’t be told in a telegram.

‘You ought to stay here with us,’ Aunt Rosie said. ‘There’s nothing you can do to fix this. And you’ll be safer here than in London.’

Perhaps I would not have rushed back to England if only I’d
been told how Colleen had died. But it was the kind of news, posing the kind of question, that prevented sitting still. The only thing I could bear was being on the move. On the boat from Dublin I stood on deck gripping the handrail, refusing to smile at soldiers. ‘Come now, lass,’ an old woman hissed at me. ‘It’s your duty to send them off with happy memories.’

All I could think about was getting home to Colleen. I knew this was illogical, and yet I felt determined to see my sister. At the same time I had this sense, a vision, that as I headed to England she was on another boat heading to Ireland, both of us on the choppy Irish Sea, travelling in opposite directions, sailing past each other without so much as a wave.

When I arrived home my mother was in bed. She sat up and hugged me close but wouldn’t say a word.

‘What happened?’ I asked my father.

He took me by the shoulders, his fingers digging in in a way that made him foreign to me.

‘She ran wild,’ he said.

‘Colleen? Wild?’ I’d never heard something so absurd.

‘I won’t have my girls running wild. None of you, do you hear, Nan?’ He let go of me. His face looked changed and would be forevermore. As if someone else had stepped into his body, taken it over. I felt a tug of fear that once I knew Colleen’s story, the same would happen to me.

Megs came and took me by the elbow, her dark eyes and pointed features much like my own; she was the exact same height as me. Colleen had been the tall one. Megs and I walked through London in the summer fog, from the East End to Waterloo Bridge. ‘Walking’s the thing for grief,’ Megs said.

These were my mother’s words. ‘Walking’s the thing for grief,’ she had told us. And Colleen had looked up from her book and said, ‘
Solvitur ambulando
.’ At Mum’s blank expression Colleen translated the Latin: ‘It is solved by walking.’ And Mum laughed and said, ‘My clever girl.’

Now, faced with the worst grief of her life, our mother didn’t walk. She was unable to move. Louisa, too, had taken to her bed and refused to leave. Colleen’s death could not be solved by anything.

But Megs and I walked just the same. ‘Da won’t let us have a funeral,’ she told me.

‘Why ever not?’

By the time we reached the bridge, I knew the story. Colleen had been pregnant. The fellow had gone off to war and never answered her letters.

‘Who was he?’ All I could think of was the boys she’d turned away, without ever seeming remotely tempted.

‘He told her he was a philosophy student,’ Megs said. ‘She met him at the library. Perhaps he was a cad or perhaps he was killed in the war. Either way, when Da found out about the baby, he turned Colleen out of the house.’ Her face was pale, dark eyes lustreless. Hating to tell me there was something we could do – we girls – that would rob us of our father’s love. I’m not sure I ever saw my father smile again after Colleen died, but it may be that I just stopped looking at him. When he hardened himself against one daughter he hardened the rest of us against him. His wife, too.

Under a dull sun on Waterloo Bridge I stood arm in arm with the one older sister I had left. ‘ “It was only love,” ’ Megs told me. ‘That’s what Colleen said. Da said it was a sin and a disgrace. She said, “No, Da. It was only love.” ’

‘How could he?’ I never thought,
How could Colleen?
I knew about love by now. It was easy to imagine taking the same path as Colleen. But my father’s? I closed my eyes and tried to picture the young man clever enough to enchant my smart and beautiful sister, then callous enough to abandon her. He must have been killed, I decided.

Megs kept her anger focused on our father. ‘I suppose he figured he had one to spare.’ Her voice sounded empty and resigned. How many of us would Da go through before there wasn’t one to spare?

Megs and I let go each of other and leaned forward, staring down into the water. Colleen had walked here, taking the South Bank route, I knew that’s how she would go, and still nothing had been solved. Megs and I had walked the same way and still our sister was gone forever. As I look back now, with my view from the future, I see two young, brown-haired girls, small in the scope of things, and all around them machines of war, galvanizing themselves from every corner of the globe to encroach upon their world. But in that moment Megs and I didn’t see it. Never in living memory had a war touched English soil and it still seemed impossible, the way it wouldn’t years later, when the second one came along.

All I had at the time was the view from behind my own eyes. A foggy summer day in the city. Megs and I, exhausted from our walk, and from our loss, leaned against each other. I wished I could cry but my insides were leaden with the same flat, hollow ring of Megs’s voice. If I’d had flowers, I would have tossed them, to flutter down into the water, the same spot where Colleen had flung herself into the Thames.

Years later I would see a film,
Brigadoon
, and it would remind me how I held Ballycotton in my head during the war: protected, perfect, untouchable. Safe from the ravages of time and progress. Hiding in the clouds, waiting for my return.

In London the world was empty of its young men. My mother finally got out of bed and took me to have my portrait made. I was surprised when she walked into the kitchen, dressed for the day.

‘Put on your best dress,’ she told me. ‘We’re going to have a picture made in Forest Hill, to send to your Irish soldier.’ She finger-curled my hair and gave me Vaseline for my lips and eyelashes.

On the bus my mother blinked and blinked, unaccustomed to the natural light that poured through the windows. She’d stayed inside so long. ‘Oh, Mum,’ I said.

‘Never you mind.’ She grabbed onto my hand. ‘We’re going to take care of you, Nan. My darling girl. And you mustn’t be crying. He doesn’t want to see tears in his picture, I’ll tell you that.’

I thought Finbarr wouldn’t mind seeing tears. I’d never known him to mind anything. Still, I smiled dutifully at the camera, sitting on the photographer’s stool, sincere in my happiness as I imagined looking at Finbarr’s cheerful face. Some days later I went on my own to collect it. It was a pretty picture, so much prettier than I was in real life, I worried he’d be disappointed when he saw me again. My smile showed off the good luck of my straight, white teeth. In the letter I sent along with the picture, I wrote in tiny, crowded print. Paper was scarce during the war and I wanted to tell him the truth about everything. Over the next four years I wrote to him regularly and dutifully. I wrote about what had happened to Colleen and how
I couldn’t look at my father anymore, nor he at any of us. I wrote simple things about school and my friends. I wrote how the war had reached us in London with the Zeppelin bombing, and how Megs wanted to work as a nurse but Da wouldn’t let her and in this case Mum agreed. I admitted I knew his danger was much greater but I was terrified of the aerial attacks. ‘Nothing could be crueller than attacking from the sky.’ As my pencil moved carefully, sparingly over the page, I held in my head the same Finbarr from peacetime. In my mind, his smile broke open as easily as ever. He wrote back, saying he hoped to get enough leave, and save enough money, to come to London. He kept the picture of me tucked into his sleeve during battle and tacked beside his bunk at night. I imagined the edges frayed and worn. He’d touch my cheek before sleeping and tell me goodnight. I wished I had a picture of him.

Two men had failed my sister. First the philosophy student and then our father. But I knew Finbarr would never fail me. He would crouch in the trenches with my smiling face tucked into his sleeve, and he would think about the day on Ballywilling Beach. He’d remember our goodbye kiss and put his fingers to his lips.

‘I love you, Nan,’ Finbarr wrote. The letters were a celebration on the page. I’d never heard him say it aloud. ‘Wait for me.’

As if I’d ever do anything else.