Masters of the House (20 page)

The beautiful regularity and efficiency of the domestic routine in Calverley Row left Matthew and Annie with quite a lot of spare time to pursue their own interests. They soon caught up with their classmates at school, so the work that Auntie Connie decreed over the summer paid off. Annie's outside interests, apart from ballet, were mainly domestic: She was already training for the housewifely role she was destined (and wanted) to fill—a role that was becoming old-fashioned in the early eighties. She took lessons in sewing and dressmaking from Mrs Harcourt and also helped Auntie Connie to redecorate the house. Matthew played football energetically and successfully, but he also penetrated further and further into the philatelic mysteries that fascinated Peter Leary. That meant he could spend quite a lot of time in the Leary household.

On the surface it was a household not unlike his own before the death of their mother. After Peter came Sally, the girl in Annie's year at school, and after her came Martin, a lively boy of nine.

“When I found out what was making them come,” said their father, on one of his rare appearances when Matthew was around, “I made sure I stopped it.” And he added rather pugnaciously, “priests or no bloody priests.”

Matthew thought that rather an unpleasant thing to say when his children were around, calculated to make them feel unwanted. His mother had always been careful what she said
when pregnant, though the older children had known that the last pregnancy was unplanned and unwanted, as well as medically inadvisable. The remark was typical of Jim Leary, however. He made no effort to be loved.

But mostly Jim was an absent force in the household, being either on duty at the fire station or sleeping when he had been on the night shift. Then the house was unnaturally quiet, all the children being old enough to honour the house rules.

“Dad's got a heavy hand,” said Peter, which again shocked Matthew. He had to admit that his dad, with all his faults and inadequacies, had never struck any of his children.

Mrs Leary was a dumpy body, someone whose attractions had long faded and whose life was now centred on bringing up her family, feeding and clothing them on a smallish income, setting them a good example and keeping them on the straight and narrow. In this she was not unlike Ellen Heenan, and she was similarly successful. Matthew took to the family at once, and recognised it as a nice, normal unit, one he could fit into without any feeling of strangeness. Beneath her comfortable exterior, Bridget Leary had a steely backbone: If she said a thing was to be done, it was done; if she said something was out of the question, the matter was never raised again. Matthew not only recognised the pattern from his own life; he knew instinctively that it was a pattern that could be replicated in millions of working-class homes over the centuries: the mother as ruler, arbiter and moral centre of family life. It was a pattern which Annie, when she married in 1987, began unconsciously repeating in her own family life.

In such a unit the father can come to seem something of an intrusion. Ellen Heenan had never allowed that to happen in her family, helped by the bluff good nature of her husband.
When he was home there were usually laughter and uproarious physical games. Matthew thought that would probably be how it was with Rob and Grace if they were ever to have a family. But in the Leary family Jim was unquestionably some kind of outsider. Matthew wondered whether this was because he seemed seldom to be there, whether his wife had tried to sideline him after his affair with Carmen O'Keefe, or whether there was something in him that kept him apart, made him the odd man out in the family, as Dermot, until he went mad, had never been.

It was months before Matthew could make up his mind on this because he didn't see enough of Peter's father to judge. The first thing he decided was that when he was around, and only then, Jim Leary was the head of the family in the sense that what he said went—without disobedience or even questioning. No doubt the heaviness of his hand had something to do with this. If the family was sitting around in the evening watching television, Jim might suddenly get up and say, “Bloody rubbish. Can't hear myself think,” and turn it off. There was no appeal against this, and none of the children would attempt one. Bridget would say something like “It was pretty silly, wasn't it?” and the children would turn back to books or games or, in the case of Matthew and Peter, the pile of stamp albums in the sideboard.

When Jim said he needed to “hear himself think” what he meant as often as not was that he wanted to do his football pools or study the racing columns of the
Sun.
Matthew gathered from Peter that his mother was kept on a rigid amount for all the household expenses, and the rest of his wage was inalienably Jim's to spend as he liked on beer or small-time gambling. He didn't smoke, needing to keep fit for his job; but this didn't
stop him from enjoying a pint or two regularly at his local. His big pleasure was not drinking but betting, and the nearest he came to being in a good humour was when he had had a win on a horse. Then he might—but more probably would not—add a 50p coin to his children's pocket money.

He regarded his elder son's stamp collecting as a form of gambling and approved of it for that reason.

“One day you'll come up with a penny black,” he would say to Peter, “in one of those job lots you get from the dealers. Then all our fortunes will be made.”

“Bloody fool,” said Peter privately to Matthew. “The penny black's the only rare stamp he's heard of. If I did get hold of one I'd keep quiet about it till I was well away from
him.
I'd let my mother have her share, but I wouldn't let
him
get his hands on it.”

“Do you hate him?” Matthew asked naively.

“I despise him,” said Peter, not grandly but stating a fact. “He's nothing.”

It was perhaps this attitude in his children that led Bridget Leary to support her husband in his assertions of parental authority. He had irretrievably damaged his standing with his affair—or was it affairs?—but her bolstering of him was an attempt to glue the family structure together again. It was not reciprocated. When she was not around, her husband would speak of her with something like contempt. “Your mother's in the grip of the priests,” he would say. “By heck, what are they to have silly women hanging on their every word?” Or he would characterise her as a blinkered person with no wider vision: “Your mother's happy just grubbing along day by day,” he said to his daughter Sally in Matthew's hearing. “Her eyes are on the ground, and she can't lift them to the horizon. Now I'm not
like that.” What vision he saw in the skyscape he never revealed, but Matthew suspected it was a big win on the pools.

The remark about priests was in line with one of his constant themes, the scorn of religion. “What's religion ever done for mankind, beyond setting them fighting one another?” he asked in one of his grander philosophical forays. “Church? That's for women. They like men with no balls,” he would say if the question of churchgoing came up. That was a crudely expressed version of Dermot Heenan's attitude, which Matthew had always found puzzling. If religion was true, it was true for all men as well as women, surely? “If I want lectures on what I can and can't do,” was another version of the same thought, “I wouldn't go to someone who's never done it in his life.”

This sneering at the church was part of a constant pattern of denigrating his wife and women in general. It was done on a barroom level, but forceful and unremitting. Peter told Matthew it had been going on for as long as he could remember but had got particularly bad since she had forced him to church and confession after his affair with Carmen O'Keefe.

“How did she do that?” Matthew asked.

“Sheer force of personality. Oh, she did threaten now and then to leave him, but he knew that if the family broke up it wouldn't be her doing. No, she just insisted—not nagging, but being firm. He's a bully, but he's got no staying power. In the end he caved in and went.”

But having caved in he got his revenge in those mean little jabs at her religion and her attitude to life, which had by now become a monotonous refrain. It was a happy little family when he was not there, edgy and watchful when he was. Peter said he couldn't wait to get out of it.

“After all, Mother doesn't need my protection,” he said. “If I stayed I'd want to take him on, and that would upset her more than anything.”

There was no way, Matthew had to admit eventually, that Jim Leary was ever going to talk about his affair with Carmen O'Keefe. Merely to approach the subject would be to invite an aggressive response, perhaps a violent one. And even if he had been other than the limited, very physical man that he was, how
could
one bring up the subject of an affair he had had with the father of a school friend?

One day in the early spring of 1980 Matthew said to Peter, “Aren't you going to be seventeen soon?”

“Yeah, in June. Why?”

“You can get a provisional driving licence then.”

“I know. I suppose I could. But driving doesn't grab me the way it does some kids.”

“You could get a car.”

“Buy one? Where would I find the money for a car?”

“Trade some stamps. You've got some quite valuable ones there even if you don't have a penny black.”

“What would I do that for,” asked Peter, mystified, “when I'm not really bothered about driving?”

“You could
say
that's what you're thinking of doing,” explained Matthew patiently. “You don't have to do it. . . . Kevin Holmes puts old bangers together and gets them on the road. The sort of car teenagers buy. . . .”

Peter looked at him with a glance of calculation. Getting to talk to Kevin Holmes was one of the things they had often discussed.

“I suppose I could
pretend
to want a car.”

“Just bring up the subject sometime when your dad is there. And I am, too.”

It was three weeks or so before that opportunity arose. It was one afternoon after school when Bridget Leary was in Leeds buying summer clothes for Sally from a discount store. She had a sharp eye for what was simply shoddy and what was slightly less so. She had to have, on the money her husband gave her for housekeeping. Jim was on nights and had just got up after his sleep. He was in the living room poring over the racing pages, and Peter waited till he looked up from them to get a marking pencil before he said to Matthew, “I think I'm going to start looking for a car.”

“A car?”

Jim Leary brightened up at once. Cars were important to him. There were cars he lusted after in his heart in the way other men lusted after women—not so much for their bodies as for the symbolic standing they gave their escorts. He openly envied people who had such cars and resented the fact that they were out of his reach. A car for Peter gave him something in common with his son. His wanting to own one gave him the signal that his son would soon be a man.

“Why not?” said Peter, apparently still absorbed with his stamps. “I can get a provisional licence in June. There's boys at school who have licences already, and I could practice with them.”

“There's the little matter of money to pay for it.”

“I've got some pretty valuable stamps. I could trade them and get a car.”

“
Have
you, be God,” Jim whistled, now full of admiration. A hobby which turned out to be a moneymaker appealed to him.

“What you need is an old
banger,” said Matthew. “To practice in while you only have a provisional.”

“That's it, something to tinker with,” said Jim.

“There's that bloke in Stanningley gets old bangers on the road,” said Matthew. “There's kids from school have got cars from him. Kevin Holmes.”

A shadow crossed Jim Leary's face. He was almost incapable of hiding his feelings because he so seldom saw the need to.

“Oh yes? Isn't he from church?”

“Yes. The Christmas and Easter type, anyway.”

“I know the chap you mean,” said Jim, apparently casually. “Drinks in the Golden Fleece in Stanningley. I've met him there after shifts. Garageman, is he?”

It was obvious he knew exactly who and what Kevin Holmes was. He was a very bad pretender.

“That's right. Dad always used to go to him because he was church,” lied Matthew, provoking an obvious sneer from Jim Leary. “And he does up old bangers—or used to, anyway.”

“Hmm. I could ring him up and see if he still does.”

“That's an idea. Would you, Dad?”

It was uncharacteristic of Peter to ask his father to do anything. Jim Leary smelt no rat, however. He seemed pleased. Peter raised his eyebrows at Matthew as his father went into the hall. They heard him rather laboriously flicking through the Yellow Pages. Peter's brother Martin was in the room, and they enforced silence on him when they heard Jim dialling.

“Hello, is that Bradford Road Garage? Who am I speaking to? Oh, well my name is Jim Leary.” When he got a response to this, his voice lowered. “Yes, well I've heard about you an' all. Water under the bridge, eh? . . . No, I don't—I don't think anybody does.” Then the voice resumed its natural forcefulness. “Reason I'm ringing, I've got a lad about to be seventeen and thinking about his first car. Makes you feel old, doesn't it? In no time I'll be over the hill. . . . So you do do second-hand cars, do you? . . . The fact is he's a bit of an expert on stamps, and he's
going to trade some to get this car. That's the ticket, isn't it—know what you want and go after it. Chip off the old block.” Peter, in the living room, screwed up his face. “But the truth is he won't have a lot of money. . . . Right. . . . Right you are. . . . So if I send him along, you think you can fit him up. . . . Well, I'll do that. We must get together sometime. Talk over old . . . times. Right. Thanks very much. Good-bye.”