City of Hope (28 page)

“Terrible.”

“Well, exactly, I shall sue them, of course. Anyway I suddenly realized that the only person I really wanted to be with, to tell all of this to, to share my misfortune with, was you—my dearest, oldest friend. . . .”

She gave me a smile that was so fake I almost laughed out loud. Sheila was such a terrible liar. She had spent our entire schooldays failing to charm her way out of trouble with the nuns. She was stealing the biscuits from the larder for some dear, sweet, crippled man whom she had met on the grounds and who had mysteriously disappeared. The raunchy novel was not hers—she was minding it for a friend of her mother, whose husband would beat her if he found it. She did
not
pinch Sinead O'Toole—the girl was a fantasist! Then she would invite the nun to look into her eyes: are these the eyes of a pincher? A liar? The answer was, of course, yes, but Sheila was so inherently bold that lying was simply a necessary part of life.

“So I went back to The Plaza, expecting to find you still there . . .”

“After all that time?”

“Why not? Where else would you be living, if you had the money?” She thought better of it. “Except here, of course—this is lovely.”

She looked around unconvinced, then remembered herself and fixed a smile onto her face.

“Anyway, I stayed there for a full week in all style, then ran out of money and started my proper search for you. The doorman still had a forwarding address, and a nice man in an office in the village dropped me up here himself—can't remember his name—and here I am!”

Mr. Williams. Delivering me another homeless, penniless desperate soul—albeit in the most unlikely of packages.

I would keep her in suspense, worry her into thinking I would not take her in, for a few moments more at least. That I was still angry enough at the way she had treated me. I stubbed the cigarette under my heel and noticed then the large trunk and two smart suitcases standing at the base of my front steps.

“Darling Ellie,” she said, flinging her arms around my neck, “let's never fight again. I've been
devastated
since we fell out, my darling, oldest, dearest friend.”

I could have argued it out with her and tried to make her understand that it was, of course, all her own fault. But I knew Sheila better than that. Stubbornness and pride would drive her away and, if she was as down on her luck as I believed she was, then she would not be able to cope for one night without a roof over her head. Especially with all that baggage! Doubtless that was why she had brought it with her and, in any case, I knew this was as close to a contrite apology as I was ever going to get.

I walked across the road and called for one of the lads to carry her cases in, then stepped aside and opened the door of my home for her.

I brought Sheila straight into the kitchen and told her to help herself to tea. I had to get down to the shop, I said.

“Stay and talk,” she said. “Don't leave me here all on my own!”

“Sheila, don't be petty. I have to go and let the other women know there is somebody else in the house.”

I had to warn Bridie she was here. I knew the old woman would not be impressed, and if she came home and found Sheila here without warning, Lord knows what she would do or say.

When I told her, Bridie lost it. “I'll not step one foot inside the house, I'll move in with Anna and Mario. I'll not take her bossing me about!”

She was genuinely upset, her face blowing up bright puce, her portly frame puffing out until I thought she might explode. Perhaps it was as important to her as it was to me that the past was left where it was. Perhaps she too had drawn a line under her comfortable life as the Adams' housekeeper after her husband had died, and did not want to be reminded of those days. She had been uncertain about seeing me again, but then I had brought her into fresh new circumstances, better than the ones that her husband's unfortunate investments had led her to. It was a betrayal of sorts, bringing Sheila back into Bridie's life after all she had done for me, and I was anxious to reassure her.

“You're in charge of the house, Bridie, you know that. Sheila being there won't change things, I promise. You're as much the boss of her now as ever you were, and I'll be on hand to make sure she doesn't give you any lip.”

Anna and Maureen, anxious to continue the drama, closed up the shop and we all walked quickly back up to the house. Bridie told them stories of Sheila's cheek and insubordination as the spoiled Isobel Adams' personal maid: “She thought she was a lady herself! Pfft. Mind you, she learned her manners from the worst of them. Our ‘mistress'—not that she deserved such a title—she was all lipstick and lounging, and no care for the house, no class of any kind!”

As we reached the door I warned Bridie, “Remember, however it appears, she is desperate. That's why I have taken her in. Sheila has found herself in very reduced circumstances and has nowhere else to go.”

When I opened the front door, we were greeted by the sound of loud jazz and uproarious laughter. We walked unnoticed into the kitchen, and found Mario and Sheila dancing the jitterbug, and Matt standing on a chair by the radio shelf, turning the volume dial with one hand and clapping the other to his thigh like a disabled seal. There were two upturned chairs on the floor and an opened bottle of wine on the table.

“Now!” Bridie said and turned on her heels. Utterly vindicated, she was thoroughly delighted with herself. Maureen did not know what to make of it and gave me a half-smile, but Anna—mild, pretty, maternal Anna—started screaming in Italian.

“Porca puttana!”

She leaped over the chair and across the room in one move, then grabbed Sheila around the throat and pushed her up against the wall.

Mario tried to placate her: “Anna,
cucciola mia,
” but his words came out in a kind of amused pleading and he made no attempt to remove her grip from Sheila.

Matt didn't know what to do. So I went over and wrenched Anna off.

“Jesus!” Sheila cried, her hands holding her neck. “The woman's a lunatic!”

Anna growled at her, “Bitch!
Puttana!
”

“. . . she broke my necklace!” Sheila wailed.

And that was how it was for the next few weeks. Sheila came into our happy, well-managed lives and brought her uniquely destructive manner of mayhem with her. She flirted with Matt until he became convinced that he could make me jealous by pretending to be slightly in love with her. She took advantage of Maureen's kind nature, until she was treating her fellow Irishwoman like her personal maid. She struck up the role of an older sister to the pretty, but easily led Nancy, encouraging the young mother to go about in garish makeup and neglect her young child in favor of finding a lover. “Ellie doesn't have any children—you could give the baby to her until you find a rich husband, then come and take him back. If you still want him,” I overheard her say. On a number of occasions she went out of her way to upset Anna so that, at least twice, Anna came at her with a knife. Sheila always did it in company so that she knew no harm could come to her, and only ever to make Anna look bad. And Sheila offended Bridie on such a regular basis that the old woman quickly tired of getting upset and actually became so stoic in dealing with her that one might almost have imagined them friends.

As for me, not a day went past when I wondered how this crazy woman and I had ever become friends. Yet I loved her and, in her own strange, deluded way, I knew that Sheila loved me, too. It was an old love, fueled by the familiarity of time. I had realized that such a love—good or bad, from whichever corner it came—was too precious ever to let go of.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY
-
TWO

Winter came unexpectedly early, before the leaves had fully fallen from the trees. I woke with the sharp tang of cold on my skin and, rubbing my arms, jumped from the bed and instinctively went to the window. The street was covered with a light dusting of frost.

I checked my watch and it was nine. I had slept through, but the shop was closed today. Mario and the men would have been down there from dawn, laying new floors and making some adjustments to the kitchen. If they made an early start, Matt assured me we would have to close the business only for one day. Matt himself was up on the roof of the house opposite. We had arranged for someone to come in and fix the broken slates, so that Matt could go down and oversee the work on the shop.

We wanted to make sure that all of the houses were at least protected properly from the elements before the ice and snow came. The snow in New York was ferocious. Not the mild, occasional event we had back in Ireland. In Kilmoy snow arrived for just a few days, a week at most, and only every third year or so. The novelty of it generally outweighed the temporary hardship of the additional cold and having to take the animals indoors. Like an annoying relation come to visit, by the time you remembered that you didn't like snow very much, it was gone. New York snow, I remembered from my time here, was inevitable and relentless.

I caught myself wondering at its imminent arrival, and realized that two full seasons had passed since I came here. It seemed like a long time to have been away, and yet a short time given all that had happened. So much since John had died and yet, somehow, it was not enough. Not enough for me to feel ready to go back; not enough for me to fully realize he was gone, to be ready to say goodbye. How many snows would come and go before I was ready? I was on the other side of the world, embedded in a fresh life with new people, and yet if I looked into my core, I was still standing, shocked, in my cottage kitchen looking at the corpse of my dead husband. I had cried, and said out loud that he was dead, and had ranted against the injustice of it. I had seen glimpses of hope, had experienced brushes of realization that life goes on, moments when I felt alive—happy even. Yet still these small steps amounted to nothing against the yawning, heart-wrenching knowledge that John was not in my life anymore. My relationship with Charles, my personal and financial investment in the community—no matter how much work, romance, adventure, achievement I stuffed into each day—each experience amounted to a mere drop in the ocean compared to John's passing.

I quickly dressed, throwing on an old dress, cardigan and boots.

“The frost makes the world as pretty as a cake,” Maureen said as I passed her in the hallway.

“Not us, though, it seems,” I said, looking down at my working boots poking out from under the plain dress. “Any drama this morning?”

In other words, what had Sheila been up to? Maureen smiled broadly. Sheila may have been our only topic of conversation these days, but much as she was a source of stress, her shenanigans had a strangely unifying effect on the rest of us. She gave us all something to talk about, and when I was worrying about what Sheila might say or do next, I was not worrying about myself.

“There's a strange man in the kitchen—she's been entertaining him.”

It must be Matt's roofer.

“Trust Sheila to keep him hanging around the kitchen. I'd better get down and make sure he's fed and out the door. Matt will be waiting for him, and we need to get that roof sealed before the weather turns any worse.”

I found Sheila alone in the kitchen, in a silk robe drinking coffee. There were coffee grains all over the table and a splash of milk dribbling down onto the floor. I took a cloth from the sink and dabbed it, tutting like an old nun.

“Maureen said the roofer was here?”

She didn't look up.

“A man was here all right—he's gone.”

“Did you tell Matt?”

“Which one is Matt?”

“Jesus, Sheila!”

She looked up and laughed.

“I'm only joking, it's just that you have so many men wandering around the place here, it's hard to keep track.”

“I don't suppose you fed him?”

She went back to her magazine.

“No, but he feasted his eyes all right—seedy type.”

“Perhaps if you didn't walk around the house half naked?”

“Perhaps if you kept a civilized house where a lady might enjoy a bit of privacy?”

Bridie came in.

“You're no lady, and you don't know the meaning of the word ‘civilized.' ”

“There's plenty of privacy up in your room,” Maureen snapped from behind her. “Where's the man that was here?”

“How the hell should I know?”

“Well, you seemed to be entertaining him happily enough.”

“I can't help it if I'm attractive to men.”

“Lord knows you make enough of an effort at it.”

“Says the woman who couldn't even hold on to the father of her brats.”

Maureen's husband, Patrick, still had not returned, and Maureen was worried that if he did come back to look for her, it would be to Central Park and he would not be able to find any trace of her. So as soon as Maureen was settled, we had returned to the area where I had found her and approached a vagrant who seemed as though he was more or less resident there, although Maureen had not seen him there before. We showed him a photograph of Patrick, which he studied with great care, then we gave him cigarettes and money and two pieces of cardboard (in case he should lose one) with our address clearly written on them. He told us that he would watch out for Patrick most carefully, and perhaps if we were to come to him again with more cigarettes—and whiskey in a week or so?

When we hadn't returned with more money ten days later, he rode the train up to Yonkers and arrived at our door, demanding his “rightfully earned fees,” saying that we had hired him as a “private investigator.” He had even acquired a trilby hat to drive home his point (I imagined him stealing it, amid great fuss, from a businessman on the train), which he wore on top of his filthy matted hair.