Leaving clare, p.30
Leaving Clare, page 30
* * *
What Mrs O’Shea had left unsaid, Edward had no trouble in voicing as they sat at the kitchen table together having their first cup of tea of the day. All three members of the household had pitched in and helped clear up the worst of the mess. When the end was in sight, the Scotswoman had insisted that Leonora and Edward leave her to finish off and go and have their breakfast.
“You’re telling me that you fell asleep downstairs and left the bath running for hours?” he asked incredulously.
The tone of his voice made Leonora shrink inside her dressing-gown. “Unfortunately . . . yes,” she said in a low, strained voice. How could she defend herself? There was no denying what had happened.
He shook his head. “The damage . . . the furniture and the carpets and floors!”
“I know, I know,” she said, her hands coming up almost to cover her ears. “I don’t need to be told – I’m aware it’s entirely my fault.” She took a deep breath. “But in my defence, I’ve never had anything like that happen in my life before.”
“That information doesn’t exactly help us deal with the mess we have here,” Edward said, shrugging his shoulders. “But maybe we need to look at why it happened.”
Leonora looked back at him. “I simply fell asleep waiting for the bath to fill. It was a stupid accident – but an accident nonetheless.”
He paused, looking straight into his mother’s eyes. “Had you been drinking again?”
Leonora felt a cold hand clutch at her heart. “What do you mean?” she asked indignantly.
Edward was unflinching. “I’m asking you straight out: were you drinking when this happened?”
“I can’t believe you’ve asked that,” Leonora said in a low, shocked tone. She stood up out of her chair. “I refuse to be interrogated like this in my own home and I damn well resent my own son accusing me of being a drunk!”
“It’s not just me who has concerns over your drinking. Mrs O’Shea told me that she found a bottle of whiskey beside the armchair where you were sleeping. When I went in later, there was a mug lying on the floor which you had obviously dropped.”
Leonora felt something snap inside her. “I’ve given you the respect of listening to you, Edward, but I’m certainly not listening to criticism from my housekeeper. I’m going to have a word with Mrs O’Shea right now.” She pushed her hardly-touched plate of toast disdainfully towards the middle of the table and tightened her dressing-town around her. If she couldn’t relax and have a drink in her own home at the end of the day, then her life had indeed sunk to a new low. In fact, it suddenly sounded almost unbearable to her.
“We’re only concerned about you,” Edward called as his mother swept out of the kitchen and headed down the hallway to the bathroom where the housekeeper was still mopping up the excess water.
“Mrs O’Shea!” Leonora called in a high, authoritative voice she rarely used.
“I’m coming, I’m coming!” the housekeeper called back.
Leonora reached the bathroom door to see Mrs O’Shea holding her mop aloft, her face and neck red with all the exertion. She kicked a damp, rolled-up bathmat out of the way. “We’re nearly there now . . . I think I’ve managed to soak the worst of it up.” She looked at Leonora’s stony face. “Was there something you wanted?”
“Actually, Mrs O’Shea, I want a word with you.”
“Yes?” Mrs O’Shea was looking alarmed.
“Edward tells me that you have some concerns about my –”
“Oh, hold on a wee minute!” Mrs O’Shea said, flustered and flapping a hand in the air. “I just want to open the window to help to dry the floor while we’re standing chatting.”
“I haven’t actually come to see you for a cosy chat,” Leonora said sharply, then halted as the elderly house-keeper turned towards the window.
Then Leonora watched in frozen horror as, catching her foot under the rolled-up bath mat, Mrs O’Shea went face down onto the wet floor.
“Edward!” Leonora shouted along the corridor. “Edward, come quickly!”
By the time they had helped the housekeeper up into the kitchen and cleaned the worst of the blood up, it was quite apparent that she had broken her arm and possibly her nose. Leonora had worked very hard to keep her outward calm but inside she felt panic-stricken and laden with guilt. She knew perfectly well that if she hadn’t gone down to the bathroom in such a manner poor Lizzie would not be in the state she was in now. And however strongly she denied it to anyone else, she could not deny to herself that her drinking had caused the whole dreadful situation.
“I think we need to get you straight to hospital, Lizzie,” Leonora said in a firm but gentle tone.
“I’ll be fine,” the Scottish woman protested.
“We have to get that arm seen to. Don’t you agree, Edward?”
“Most definitely. I’ll drive and you two can sit in the back.”
“Oh, I don’t want to cause any fuss,” Mrs O’Shea said, her voice muffled due to the fact she was speaking through the handkerchief that Leonora was still holding to her bleeding nose. “And I hate hospitals . . .”
“You’ll be a bloody sight safer there than you are at home,” Edward muttered to himself.
Leonora half-caught his words and stifled the indignation that shot up inside her. He really was pushing the point too far.
“You’ve nothing to fear from the hospital,” she told the housekeeper. “I’ll be with you, and I’ll make sure you’re well taken care of.”
Mrs O’Shea looked up at her employer with anxious eyes. “You won’t leave me?”
Leonora bent down and put her arms around the older woman. “No, Lizzie, I promise I won’t leave you. I’ll be there as long as you need me.” And she meant it sincerely. It was the least she could do when she was to blame for the whole sorry situation.
* * *
Leonora was true to her word. She and Edward stayed with the housekeeper while she had several sets of X-rays done on her arm and her nose, and then while she went to theatre to have her badly broken arm reset and put into a plaster cast.
It was late evening by the time Mrs O’Shea came round from the anaesthetic and then she insisted that both of them go home.
“I’ll be fine,” she told Leonora, “and I’ll sleep easier in here if I know you’re in your own beds in Glenmore House.”
“But I know you don’t like being on your own in hospital,” Leonora protested.
“Well, now I’m here, I don’t mind it so much,” said Mrs O’Shea. “The wee nurses are in and out to me every few minutes, and they’re so nice and friendly. It’s not at all like I imagined – I’ll be fine.”
Leonora looked back at her housekeeper and her thin frame shrouded in the white hospital bedclothes reminded her of a young, vulnerable child. She was suddenly reminded that Lizzie O’Shea didn’t have a blood relation anywhere near her to visit or one they could even contact about her accident. Willie was the only one she talked about regularly and he was hardly in a fit state to visit anyone.
“You’ll be fine,” Leonora said emphatically. “The doctor said that your arm will be as good as new when the cast comes off.” Then, before she had time to think better of it, she leaned forward and – for the first time in all the years that they’d known each other – she kissed Lizzie gently on the cheek and was pleased to see her flush with pleasure.
When she and Edward arrived back at Glenmore House Leonora was prepared for almost anything.
“We need to have a serious talk, Mother,” Edward said as they walked into the house.
“Yes,” was all she said but she gave an involuntary shudder which he noticed.
“If you put the kettle on,” he suggested, “I’ll round up an electric fire for the sitting room. Then we can have our supper in there.”
“There’s all that baking that Mrs O’Shea did last night,” Leonora said, half to herself. “It hasn’t been touched yet . . .”
A short while later Leonora came into the sitting room with a tray with sandwiches, cake and mugs of tea. She put them down on the coffee table which stood in front of the empty fire grate. To the side of it stood the electric fire that Edward had plugged in.
“Mrs O’Shea should be a lot better by tomorrow,” Edward said, a hopeful note in his voice.
Leonora gave a small sigh as she handed him a mug of tea, saying, “I really hope and pray that she is.”
“She’s a strong, hardy type of woman. She won’t give in too easily – it’s only a broken arm when all’s said and done. There’s a good few years left in her yet.”
A sudden picture of the stricken, pale-faced Lizzie lying in the hospital bed flew into Leonora’s mind and made her chest tighten. There was a small silence during which she tried to think of something to say that might make things better, but nothing fitting came. Instead she lifted her mug to her lips with a shaky hand and took a small sip of tea.
“Are we going to have to get you some kind of help?” Edward suddenly said.
Leonora’s eyebrows shot up. Surely he wasn’t suggesting that she needed to speak to someone about her drinking? A doctor or someone in the same line of work as Andrew. Her heartbeat quickened – and then she was flooded with an overwhelming sense of guilt. He was within his rights, of course, to suggest it after what had happened last night – all the damage that had been done to carpets and furniture, not to mention poor Lizzie.
“What do you mean?” she asked in a low voice.
Edward waved his hands around the room. “You’re not going to be able to manage all this on your own. Now that Mrs O’Shea’s out of action, you’re going to have to get someone to help you sort things out properly.”
Leonora swallowed a sigh of relief.
“There are carpets that are going to need cleaning or replacing and the linoleum in that bathroom and the laundry room will have to be lifted to allow the floorboards to dry out.” He shrugged. “Of course I’ll get Tommy Murray to help me to shift furniture and lift carpets and that kind of thing, but there are certain things that you need a cleaning-woman for. Mrs O’Shea isn’t going to be able to do much for months.”
Leonora nodded her head, wondering how long they could evade the inevitable discussion. “I will sort something out in the morning. I can ring the women who help at the church – they might know someone down in the village who would be glad of a few hours’ work.” She pursed her lips together. “Lizzie might even be able to recommend somebody from her own church.”
Leonora felt a sense of frustration about the fact that she was going to have to get a total stranger in to help in the house, when she could have had Rose Barry actually living in the house with them and she knew instinctively the girl would fit in beautifully. But Diana had told her that it wasn’t worth asking Rose because she was too tied to her family in County Clare – so that was that.
There was another silence, during which Leonora handed the plate of sandwiches to her son. Their eyes met for a second and then Leonora suddenly felt a sense of shame wash over her. Had it really come to this? Had she really sunk so low that she would put her son in the embarrassing position of having to preach to her about her drinking?
No, she decided. It was totally unfair of her to leave the problem with him. She had never behaved like that with Andrew. They had always faced issues fair and square. Even when the cold war came between them, Andrew had immediately owned up and taken full responsibility for the mistakes he had made.
It was unthinkable and cowardly that she should evade responsibility for all that had happened in the last twenty-four hours and Edward had more than enough weight on his shoulders as it was.
Leonora decided to take the bull by the horns. “Edward . . . I am so sorry about all this and I take full responsibility for the mess the house is in and for what has happened to poor Lizzie . . .”
Edward’s eyes came to meet hers again and Leonora saw the young, confused boy in them who didn’t want to criticise his mother. This served to intensify her guilt.
“You really don’t need to say anything,” she went on. “I hold my hand up to all your accusations about my drinking habits. You’re perfectly correct, I have been leaning on it rather too heavily and this incident has really brought it home to me with a bang.”
“What’s brought it all on?” Edward asked quietly. “You never used to drink like that when my father was alive . . . is it because you miss him so much?”
Leonora swallowed hard. How could she explain that she drank to drown all the anger that had built up inside her before Andrew had died? How could she explain that she was angry with his father for dying before making things better again?
“I don’t really know why,” she said, evading the question. “The only reason I can pin-point is that I felt a drink helped me to sleep.” She raised her eyebrows and shook her head. “And it wasn’t really causing a problem until unfortunately I fell asleep in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“I think that it was a case of an accident waiting to happen . . .”
Leonora lowered her eyes to the floor.
“I noticed your voice slurring on a number of occasions when I spoke to you on the phone when I was in America,” he said.
Leonora felt a small dagger pierce her chest as she remembered the phone call she had made to him late at night – the phone call with the crossed wires. The phone call that revealed all about Edward and Christopher Hennessey.
“In fact,” he went on, “I mentioned it to both Diana and Jonathan but thankfully they said you had always been okay when you’ve been visiting.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Leonora said, the strain of the recent long hours evident in her voice. “I was beginning to lose confidence in my judgement over the whole situation. I was beginning to think that everyone saw me as a complete drunk . . .”
“Now there’s no need to talk in such an extreme way, Mother,” Edward told her, leaning over to pat her hand. “No-one has said anything of the kind – although Mrs O’Shea did say that she was ‘a wee bit concerned’ about you drinking on your own late at night.”
Leonora closed her eyes. Please, please . . . let it go. “I really do understand . . .”
“Apart from everything else,” Edward went on now, “we have to think of your health. Your heart condition . . .”
She caught her breath. Yet another horribly wrong thing she had done. Yet another hole she had dug for herself. She had hoped that at some point she would find the right time and the right situation to confess that she had exaggerated her heart problems in order to bring Edward home. But this was not the right time. She couldn’t approach such a sensitive – such an explosive – situation now. It would simply look as though she were trying to divert the attention away from her own behaviour and focus on his.
“Yes, yes,” she said. How much more can I take of this? The point has been well and truly driven home. I have made mistake after mistake, and now I’m paying for it.
Chapter 34
Hannah felt a huge surge of excitement as her uncle’s car headed through the town towards the railway station at Tullamore. But for the moment she would show no sign of her feelings – she would keep them under control until it was safe to let go. In twenty minutes’ time she would be on the train to Galway and gone from here forever. Her cousin Paul would be waiting for her at the end of her journey, to take her to Slattery’s Hotel in the centre of the city where she would start off her new life working as a chambermaid for the summer.
She would have over three months working in the hotel alongside Paul and then she would pack her belongings and move across the city to college where she would start a secretarial course – a course which would qualify her for a worthwhile career and would give her the means to earn a decent, independent living. Hannah would be eternally grateful to her old schoolteacher, Miss Flynn, who had organised all this for her.
Only a short time ago things were so very different, so bleak and dark that she could never have imagined a way out.
* * *
The morning that her mother had so viciously attacked her she had lain unconscious on the floor for nearly fifteen minutes. Her mother had panicked and phoned an ambulance and by the time that Hannah had started to come round she was on her way to the local hospital.
Her father, who had been in the town on farming business, had come rushing up to the hospital when he heard the news, to be told that his daughter had all the classic signs of concussion with double vision and vomiting and would have to remain there for observation.
Hannah’s mother had been white-faced and tight-lipped about the whole situation and, when forced to recount the incident, had concocted a story about how Hannah had been cleaning windows and had clumsily fallen off the chair and banged her head.
It was a few days after she was released from hospital before Hannah got the chance to tell her father the truth.
“I didn’t fall off the chair at all,” she had said, blinking back the tears. “Mammy attacked me when she read my results – she hit me around the head and the face and then she knocked me backwards and I fell over the chair and banged my head.”
Her father’s hands came up to halt her. “Now, now, Hannah,” he said, shaking his head. “This has all got out of hand – it was only a bit of an argument that got out of hand.”
“No, Daddy!” Hannah said, the tears she had fought springing into her eyes. “Why do you never believe me? You know it’s not just a bit of an argument. You’ve seen what my mother can be like!” There was a choke in her voice now.
Every time she went to her father for support and a sympathetic ear he always tried to make out that she was exaggerating. He always evaded the main point Her two brothers weren’t any better – they just told her that she should walk out when her mother started and come back when she’d cooled down. But while that tactic might work with the lads, Hannah knew that a show of defiance like that from her would never be tolerated – it would only make her mother worse. “You’ve heard the way she goes on to me,” she said now. “She really really hates me.”
