The Misremembered Man (18 page)

Madame lit another cigarette. Lydia could feel her heart pounding. The clairvoyant continued, her great magenta eyelids cast down as she resumed the study of her palm.

“Now, dis fella or buy that you’re gonna meet is a bit rough and ready, but he has a good heart and good hearts is rare in dis world. And he likes a wee drink and a joke and a smoke and a laugh like the rest of us, daughtur, but the two of yeh will be close, whether yeh like it or not—for ’tis he I see in the hand dat you’re showin’ me daughtur, if yeh understan’ me?”

Lydia shifted uneasily.

“Now, I see an older woman here, close to yeh, she is, and she would need ta be takin’ t’ings easy, because she worries a lot and worry isn’t good when yeh get to a sartin age.

“But apart from dat, dere’s nothing, daughtur, dat yeh should be worryin’ yourself about…because the future’s bright if yeh choose to make it so yourself. D’you understand me, daughtur? And I wouldn’t be tellin’ yeh a word of a loy, but I wish yeh all the luck and happiness and good t’ings dat’s due to yeh, because t’ings haven’t been so aisey for yeh, but t’ings are gettin’ aisier—’cause dat’s what I seen in de hand you’re after showin’ me.”

Madame Calinda took Lydia’s hand in her own and squeezed it tight.

“Good luck to yeh, daughtur.”

Lydia thanked her and got up. She had never had an experience like it and really didn’t know what she was feeling. She had entered the painted booth as a test of courage—for a laugh, really—and had come out again confused and incredulous. How could Madame Calinda have known about her father, her mother? The fortune-teller had held up a mirror that she had no desire to look into.

She retraced her steps back up the hill, saw the sun seat she had vacated and decided she could not sit down there again to read. Something had altered. The experience with the clairvoyant had created a subtle shift in her perception of things, so much so that no matter how much she tried to discount her as a fraud, the accuracy concerning her father, she knew, would return again and again to haunt her.

She hurried along the path, conscious that she probably had stayed out longer than the hour she’d promised her mother in the note. The sun had come out again but there was a distinct chill in the air. She drew her cardigan tighter as she made her way round the bend that led back to the seafront.

It was then that she saw the strange man from the guesthouse again; he was walking toward her. The yellow harem-like shoes were unmistakable. He seemed to be eating something from a bag. Candy perhaps, and as he drew nearer, she saw that his eyes were red, perhaps from the wind or…Lydia had the distinct impression that he’d been weeping. All at once she felt an enormous compassion for him. She smiled and said hello.

He looked at her as if seeing her for the first time, and returned her smile.

“Cold, isn’t it?” Lydia managed to say, and it was only then that she noticed the scar.

“Aye, so,” he answered, holding his hair down and shoving the bag of candy into his pocket. She was suddenly conscious that she’d caught him off guard. She smiled again and continued on her way. She knew that he stood looking after her as she went.

She was aware also, as she hurried back to the Ocean Spray, that the ancient wound to the man’s face bothered her. For the rest of the evening she found herself wondering, from time to time, about the story that surely lay behind it.

E
ighty-Six was rarely allowed inside the big, gray stone house. He was not allowed to sleep there or to eat there, but was kept outside like the farm animals, to work in the fields and sleep in the barn.

Arnold Fairley turned out to be a fat, brutish boy, not much older than himself, but much stronger and taller. When he first met Arnold he thought maybe he could be his friend, but soon learned that, as in the orphanage, friendship on the Fairley farm was as unwelcome as an angel in Hades.

Each morning, Eighty-Six woke up to the crowing of the rooster. His settle bed was in the corner of a shed, separated from the rest by a partition of rusted zinc. The area was used for storing tools and parts of farm machinery. At night there was no light, but that from the moon or the stars. It was perhaps just as well. To have seen their evil faces time and time again, when they came for him, would have been unbearable.

He scrambled out from under the horse blanket, his nightmares still circling him like black ominous birds, their wings beating against any joy that tried to rise. For there was no joy in the boy’s life. As the years passed, he knew this to be the terrible truth; as sharp and fierce as the faces of the Fairleys, as hard and immutable as flint.

There was no need to dress because it was often so cold that he was forced to sleep in his clothes.

He knelt by the bedside. He could not escape saying his morning prayers. Mrs. Fairley had placed a picture of the Sacred Heart above the bed. The beseeching face of Jesus looked down on him, a slender finger pointing to his open, crimson heart. Eighty-Six fumbled the blue plastic rosary from his pocket, ran the beads through his cold-stiffened fingers and mumbled the Our Father and a Hail Mary aloud into the echoing depths of the barn.

When he finished, he took his tin bowl and spoon from the shelf beneath the picture and made his way across the yard, through the quickening light of dawn. It had rained in the night. Little rivers coursed over the yard and rows of delicate rain-beads trembled on the greenery. He hated the rain, hated the thought of pulling the mucky tubers from their watery pits, hated the squelching mud and the slippery basket and the rain streeling his face and dribbling down his neck. When it rained, he could never get dry. When it rained, everything slowed and Farmer Fairley got angry.

He waited on the stone step outside the back door, peeping now and then through the amber-lit window of the kitchen. Inside he could see the Fairley family at the breakfast table. Beyond them a fire blazed in the grate. He longed to be inside in the warmth, imagined toasting his fingers at the leaping flames and seeing the vapor rising from his sodden clothes. Like everything in his young life, this was yet another unreachable dream, something held from him by the wretched world of adults, those who stood between him and the child he deserved to be.

Arnold Fairley saw him and stuck out his tongue, then resumed cutting up and gorging on his enormous fry-up, smirking to himself as he ate. Eighty-Six stood and stared, his stomach hollowed out with hunger, his feet and hands bleached blue with cold.

Then he heard the latch lift as the back door was drawn open. Constance Fairley was standing in the doorway, her hand stretched out impatiently for his vessel.

He carried the bowl of porridge back to the shed, under his jacket to shield it from the rain, and sat back on the dirty mattress to eat it. He ate quickly because he did not know when Farmer Fairley would appear and order him out to the field. Often he did not get time to finish the food, and then was accused of refusing to eat “the Lord’s good sustenance.” Mrs. Fairley rewarded him for such a wasteful attitude by not giving him breakfast the following morning. It was useless protesting his innocence because he’d get beaten for his insolence instead. One way or another, the Fairleys would find a reason to beat him.

When things were slack on the farm, or if Farmer Fairley had to go away on business, the mistress would make use of him in the house. This did not happen often, but the boy would pray for the shelter of the warm rooms and just a glimpse of the great hearth fire, even if he never got to sit by it.

He would scrub the floors on his hands and knees, beat the rugs, wash the windows and pound the bed linen in the tin bath at the outdoor pump. All those heavy chores he knew intimately; his identity lay in the dirt others left behind and his salvation lay in cleaning it up.

At night, lying curled up in the settle bed, the rain hammering on the corrugated roof, he prayed that they wouldn’t come. He’d lie there, praying and hoping and fitfully sleeping, only to find again and again that he’d awake into the nightmare he’d tried to run from. He’d feel a hand over his mouth, the fetid breath in his face and the pressure of a man’s body on top of his.

Some nights it was Fairley, some nights it was his son, and sometimes the two of them brought strangers into the darkened corner with its dead air, where they drank from the same bottle and laughed with the same mouth.

He never knew who the others were, only that their sins against him were the same. The only thing he clung to was the relief he felt when it was over. Then he would cry and wait for daylight to render clear the image of Christ’s face—the holy picture above his bed, the only witness to his suffering and their terrible, evil crimes.

P.
S. Thank you for saying my writing was nice
.

Lydia, at home again in Elmwood, returned the letter to the envelope and smiled to herself. Mr. McCloone did not sound like the sharpest knife in the block, but there was something endearing about the honesty of his reply.

She had already sent him a short answer—acknowledging the urgency of that final statement, “none of us is getting no younger and time is going on”—and had arranged to meet him in two weeks’ time. Although, if she were being honest, she did not envision him as a suitable candidate for her purposes, she felt that she owed him a meeting at least.

Her experience with Frank Xavier McPrunty had colored her judgment, from a bright, sunny yellow toward a dull, ominous brown. Meeting a partner in that way was probably not a good idea. But at the same time, she appreciated the folly of judging future encounters in the light of that one huge disappointment. Yes, she would meet Mr. McCloone out of curiosity, if nothing else. And she would commandeer Daphne’s services as chaperone once more.

The clock on her bedside locker told her that it had just gone 7.15, still too early to get up. She lay back on the pillows, delighting in the comfort and familiarity of her own bed and surroundings. They had returned from their week in Portaluce three days earlier, and Lydia was beginning to feel that another holiday was probably in order—to help her recover from the effects of her most recent one.

The Ocean Spray was indeed a fine establishment, but despite its opulence and grandeur there was something distinctly clinical about the whole place. One simply did not feel at home there. Perhaps it was Auntie Gladys—in fact, she knew for certain it was Auntie Gladys. Places, of themselves, were rarely at fault, but rather the people who inhabited them.

Dear Gladys—even though she loved her dearly, Lydia was conscious of the immense chasm that existed between them. There seemed to be no common ground on which they could meet and really get to know one another.

Gladys inhabited a transient world of high fashion, cocktail parties and gentlemen, while she, Lydia, moved in the more sober world of books and duty and doing the right thing. It was plain to see that, of the two, the older woman was having more fun. She had taken the art of “living a little” to extraordinary heights, and deep down Lydia knew that she wanted to “live a little” like that as well.

While in the kitchen preparing her mother’s breakfast, she pondered her situation more deeply. What would happen if she suddenly decided to collapse the walls of her tight little world and indeed “live a little?”

As she slipped an egg into the bubbling saucepan and inverted Lettie McClean’s egg timer, Lydia decided no drastic changes were possible while her mother was still alive. Who would carry out those little humdrum, but necessary, tasks if she, Lydia, were not around? Who would help her to dress, fetch her magazines, tend to her when ill, ferry her to her appointments, answer her queries, listen to endless eulogies about her dear dead father?

She sat down thoughtfully to butter the toast, aware that
this
daughter was indeed the indispensable rock which her mother leaned on, and looked to for her very survival and support. But what if the rock were to suddenly roll away and slip into the full torrent of life? What might happen then?

These questions gnawed at Lydia from time to time. But lately there’d been a change. And she did not know why—perhaps it was the act of placing her ad in the newspaper, her Aunt’s urging, or indeed the fortuneteller’s predictions—but it was only now that she felt able to confront such issues head on and analyze what they meant.

How did other women like her mother fare, she wondered; those childless ones—childless, or indeed widows, those whose sons and daughters had married early and flown the nest? Those who had no one to tend to them. She speculated that such women had superior reserves of strength. They’d had to learn the harsher lessons of life. Such courage and independence had sprung from circumstances not necessarily of their choosing, but through such experiences they understood that to be bound by another’s needs and wishes was perhaps, in essence, a far more fearful state than being on one’s own.

Her mother and aunt had lost their parents in a car accident, when Gladys was still a teenager, and this tragic occurrence had forced the orphaned daughters to grow up very quickly. They did what they felt was all they could do at that tragic, vulnerable time: They had married the first men who came along, finding and securing substitutes for their dead protectors in the raw, harsh world they had so suddenly been thrust into.

Elizabeth had unfortunately met a man who would hold her back from exploring that world and, as a result, such fears of the unknown, such restriction, had been passed on to Lydia. Gladys, on the other hand, had married light-hearted and easygoing Freddie.

Lydia remembered his round, laughing face and his eagerness to play games with her when she was a child. He was so unlike her father: a free, cheerful spirit who encouraged gaiety and enjoyment, scattering great handfuls of it wherever he went.

How interesting, she mused, that we pick up and repeat the qualities of those closest to us, like walking reflections, whether they be good for us or not. But, thought Lydia, our freedom lies in being aware of this very fact and in shattering those illusions that do not suit us.

She considered the toast, gone cold now because of her musings, and decided it would do. Her mother only ever nibbled a corner of it anyway.

She mounted the stairs with the laden tray and went quietly into the bedroom. She could barely make out the shapes of the furniture in the curtained darkness, but no matter. She knew the geography of the room so well that locating the bureau by the window where she normally placed the tray presented no difficulty.

“Good morning, Mother!” she trilled, throwing open the heavy drapes. “Wakey, wakey.”

There was no movement or answer from the bed.

Unusual.

Lydia frowned, then felt panic rising. She ran over and pulled back the covers.

“Oh my God, no!”

The old lady’s face was a deathly green. Lydia gasped.

“Oh, please, God,
please
, I’m sorry for all those thoughts I had just now.” She began to weep. “I didn’t mean any of them. Please, God, please don’t let my dear mother…” She could not finish the sentence, dared not say the word, lest its very utterance turn the situation into unconscionable fact.

She put out a trembling hand to her mother’s throat and felt for a pulse. The skin was warm. She gasped with relief; there was a weak, throbbing beat.

“Oh, thank
God
. Thank God.” She replaced the covers and dashed downstairs to the telephone in the hallway.

The receptionist’s voice was sharp and businesslike. “Good morning. Dr. Lewis’s office.”

“Oh please! This is Lydia Devine.” She started to cry again.

“Yes, now calm down. What seems to be the trouble?” There was little sympathy in the woman’s tone.

“It’s my mother,” Lydia managed to say through her tears. “She’s taken a turn. I think she’s perhaps…” She broke down again.

“Is she breathing?”

“Yes, just barely.”

“Right. Very well. Stay by her side. Continue talking to her. The doctor will be with you right away.” She hung up.

The dial tone droned in Lydia’s trembling hand. She slumped against the wall and let the receiver fall back into its cradle.

The delay between the phone call and the arrival of the doctor seemed interminable, as Lydia tried to absorb the shocking reality of what had happened.

She sat by the bedside, her mother’s hand in her own, and tried to speak through her tears. Elizabeth’s eyes were closed, her breathing was so shallow it seemed as though she were hovering in some kind of otherworldly realm, subject only to its alien rules and laws.

When the doorbell finally rang, she was so locked inside the darkness of her own grief that she barely registered the sound. The hollow, insistent ringing sent tremors through the house. Finally Lydia recognized it for what it was and the reason for its urgency. She hurried down the stairs. A stranger stood on the step.

“I’m Dr. O’Connor. I’m covering for Dr. Lewis.” He held out a hand.

Lydia found herself staring at a tallish, terribly thin man with a lugubrious yet handsome face. It was the kind of face which had no doubt acquired its grimness through having to deal with the sick and infirm; a face used to delivering bad news and sad prognoses, and occasionally an alert to impending death.

“I’m Lydia,” she said self-consciously. “Lydia Devine. My mother’s upstairs.”

He exuded a marked air of authority and professionalism, and mounted the stairs with a straight-backed, measured grace.

“What’s her name?” he asked, bending over the bed.

“Elizabeth.” Lydia stood on the other side, her hands pressed together, staring down fixedly at her mother. “Will she be all right?”

He didn’t answer, but instead took a stethoscope from his bag and spent several seconds checking her pulse rate and heart, his eyes shifting between the patient and his wristwatch. He straightened, satisfied, and returned the stethoscope to the bag.

“How has she been lately?”

“Tired. We’d just got back from a week’s holiday, and I noticed she was sleeping a lot and eating very little.” The doctor kept his eyes on her as she spoke. Lydia took a handkerchief from her sleeve and mopped a tear, conscious of how awful she must look. It is odd, she thought idly as though another were monitoring her thought processes, that we care about appearances at the most inappropriate of times. “Sometimes she complained about being dizzy.”

“I see. We’ll have to get her to the hospital right away.” He lifted his bag and made for the door. “I’ll need to ring an ambulance.”

He dialed the number from memory, said a few brusque words, hung up and turned to her.

“The ambulance will be here in fifteen minutes.”

Lydia started to cry again. “She’s going to die, isn’t she?”

He laid a hand gently on her arm. His sensitive manner was strength-giving, at odds with his severe appearance.

“Now, nobody’s going to die,” he said softly. “You need to sit down, Mrs. Devine.”

“Miss,” she corrected him—and immediately wondered if she’d sounded too forward.

They went into the drawing room. He sat down in the armchair; Lydia chose the sofa.

“Your mother’s had a stroke. The next forty-eight hours are critical in that respect.”

“You mean she could die?”

She searched his face, waiting to hear the worst. He was wearing a crumpled navy-blue suit. She noticed the careless knot in his gray tie, and the creased shirt. No woman to check those things obviously, she thought—and was at once ashamed to be thinking such frivolous thoughts at such a dramatic juncture. She could feel her face growing hot.