The Happiness Glass Page 11

In this different sort of life there are no answers, only questions.

  Because. Before. Until.

  The Weight of Happiness

  A nurse has arrived to change the dressing on Lily’s shin. This one is Irish, with a face in which round eyes hold an expression of bright wonder, like the eyes of a baby, or a kitten. She moves without haste, checking the previous day’s readings.

  “Now, will you tell me your name?” she says.

  Lily answers this trick question absentmindedly. “Lily Brennan,” she says, although no one has called her by that name for years.

  Some of the nurses frown when she gets it wrong, but not the Irish nurse.

  “And my name is Frances,” she says, and her voice doesn’t change as she peels back the dressing and inspects the ulcer. “It’s lovely and bright out today.” Frances tears open a fresh dressing. “Cold though.”

  Lily’s shin is mottled, purple and green, and still weeping. Yesterday she heard the dreadful Miss Fiddy stage-whisper to one of the cleaners that poor Mrs Raines’s leg was not too good. The skin is as puckered and translucent as the onionskin paper on which she once wrote long letters home. Lily closes her eyes and pictures the wound flowering beneath the bandage: it has a wicked sheen that reminds her of a set of Chinese rice bowls she once owned.

  Lying back in her chair, time rushes over her like a river – it was in Wilcannia that her mother had cut and sewed a black circular skirt that was to have a deep band of embroidery around its hem. Through the silent stretch of desert nights Ginny had sat with her head bent over the fancywork, hanks of silk thread slipping from her lap like brightly coloured flowers. When Lily’s father came home from a trip he would give a hand with the embroidery. They worked from opposite sides, heads close under the kerosene lamp, with the black skirt stretched across their knees. Textiles last, thinks Lily, and she wonders what became of that skirt – all their hours of effort.

  The Irish nurse strokes her wrist as she searches for a pulse, and Lily surfaces out of the past with a smile.

  “When this leg heals, I’m getting out of here,” she says, surprised at her own certainty.

  “Oh! And where will you be going?”

  She looks into Frances’s wide-awake eyes. “Why home, of course. Australia. Where else would a woman my age want to go!”

  The nurse blinks twice and looks away. “That’ll be nice for you,” she says.

  Lily closes her eyes again, while Frances wraps the blood pressure bandage and pumps in air. She sees the softly rounded hills at home, their summer grasses bleached against the flawless sky, and the pilot flame of her resolve burns brighter. As soon as the leg is better. She should have gone back years ago.

  The blood pressure bandage wilts, sighing air, and Frances pats her arm.

  “There, that’s you done, Lily Brennan.”

  Lily is the woman whose daughter went away. Although she rarely speaks of Gina, everyone knows the story. Behind her back she is poor Mrs Raines whose daughter went out one morning and never came home. Many people, she is certain, believe in a monstrous secret that will one day come to light. For what else but some scalding private hurt could compel a daughter to leave without a word, without a note? What, after years of love and care, could make a daughter decide to disappear?

  Her thoughts drift, as they often do, to birthday parties when Gina was small. October: the Northern Hemisphere autumn, with colours turning and the dark coming in early. What she remembers is the cheerful leap of flames in the fireplace, and plates of fairy bread, and star-shaped sandwiches. She always stayed up late to ice the birthday cake – once, a My Little Pony castle, with ice-cream-cone turrets. Her pleasure next day as Gina puffed her cheeks and blew out the candles more than balanced out her tiredness, for there had been happiness in the room at those times.

  Even now, Lily struggles to believe that her relationship with Gina is over. She wonders what she and Tom could have done differently; most of all she wonders how a child so unstintingly adored was unable to absorb their affection, and she pictures their love in this failed transaction as something like the molecules in trans-fats, for which, she has read, the human body has no receptors.

  Gina left without warning. Later they would learn of preparations made in secret – a small, roll-along suitcase hidden in a locker at the bus station, belongings sold or disposed of – but at the moment of her departure they were ignorant of their impeding loss. Once they realised, there had been the agony of waiting for news, she and Tom pacing the silent house, confused and disorientated. How many times had she opened the door of her daughter’s bedroom and slipped inside to run her hands over the cold sheets, to stare into the empty wardrobe and inhale her perfume. In those first few days it had felt as if Gina had died. At around three each morning Lily would rise from bed, leaving Tom to sleep while she huddled in a chair in the study. Those nights had been bottomless, tormenting, waiting in the thudding silence until she lost all hope of light. Rescued by the birds, at their first stirrings she had tottered downstairs to make tea.

  On the tenth day there had been a note.

  Please, don’t search for me. I want to be alone.

  Lily has kept the single sheet of paper, although she has not looked at it for years.

  She has lost the trick of sleep. It is a cruelty of growing old, and the one she most bitterly resents. Consciousness presses on her, so that the merest flicker of light or sound draws her to the surface, and she understands that she has been floating there all along, just below the threshold rather than coddled in the deep. Through nights as black as Newgate’s knocker (as her mother would have said) she listens to the wind moan and whistle along the nursing home’s grey-tiled corridors.

  Avalon stands on Ramsey’s windswept promenade. She and Tom would pass its gaunt façade when they walked the dog, and there had been no premonition then that one day she would gaze out from an upper window across the dull grey expanse of the Irish Sea. She was sent here from the Cottage Hospital to convalesce after a minor stroke. It was to be for a month or two, the doctor said. But recovery has not been as swift or as thorough as Lily would have wished, and there have been complications with mobility. The loss of her independence is a death of sorts, though she does not regret leaving the tall, narrow house on the quayside – the House of Lasts, as she thinks of it, being the last place she lived with Tom, the last place where they saw the old Gina.

  That house had been Tom’s model for the tall, narrow doll’s house he had once built for Gina. Years later, some impulse had made Lily sink to her knees in the top-floor bedroom to peer in its windows – the little house had been left as if in the aftermath of a burglary, with its dining chairs flung down on their backs, the kitchen dresser upended and its collection of miniature groceries scattered. Lily had reached in to where the family of porcelain dolls, once kept busy by Gina, lay face down on the drawing-room carpet – the mother, the father, the girl-child. In the nursery, the porcelain baby was squashed under the cot mattress. Lily had set about straightening the dusty figures, positioned their cold white limbs so that they could balance on the righted chairs while she tidied the rooms. When she had finished she closed the door of the bedroom, and never went in there again.

  She uses the hated walking frame to reach the dining-room. The tables are covered with cloths in faded pastels, and at one of them a pair of withered men stretch tortoise necks over plates of beef and mashed potato. They don’t look up as she hovers in the doorway, but a woman with groomed, bouffant hair and a pearl-grey cardigan makes frantic gestures. Dining-room etiquette demands that Lily share the woman’s table. It is impossible to avoid company.

  “Sit here!” Miss Fiddy pats the empty chair seat nearest her own. “I’ve saved a place for you.”

  Lily smothers a sigh and hobbles forward.

  Miss Fiddy’s eyes are narrowly set and too small for her face. “I’m glad your leg is on the mend,” she says. “It’s nice to have someone of one’s own sort to dine with.”
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  Lily considers her companion’s tin-coloured hair; she eyes the wool cardigan and pleated grey flannel skirt, and wonders, not unkindly, what makes Miss Fiddy think they are alike. With her dampened, unruly curls, Lily feels dishevelled and almost dizzily unconventional. Even the string of amber beads she picked up at the last moment feels exotic and somehow risky in the presence of this pearl-grey woman – in all her life, Lily cannot remember wearing anything grey.

  A girl with pudding-basin hair and podgy arms clears the men’s plates and returns carrying bowls heaped with a chunky dessert. The men grasp clean spoons and set to work without a word. When the door swings shut behind the waitress, Djuna, the young, blue-haired nurse pushes through it; she has changed out of her uniform into a shocking-pink skirt over black trousers, and a top that exposes two inches of creamy midriff. Miss Fiddy’s breath escapes in a hiss, accompanied by a warning nudge of her elbow.

  Behind Djuna hovers a man in an open-neck shirt. His thinning hair has been slicked back with water, and the teeth marks of the comb are still visible. Dewy and exposed, his face has the appearance of a peeled fruit. Mr MacInerney, the retired mortician. Lily avoids looking at his hands.

  “Ah, Vesta,” he calls, “how’s Mr Arkwright’s Girl Friday today?”

  He chuckles, and Miss Fiddy’s manicured fingers contract into a fist. She lifts her chin and stares away out of the window.

  “Uh oh,” he says, “bad day at the office.”

  Mr MacInerney pulls out a chair at the next table. He wears leather slippers without socks, and Lily’s eyes skitter over purple veins threading yellowish skin.

  “Here’s your dinners.” The waitress, red-faced and sweating, bears a tray loaded with steaming plates.

  “So coarse,” breathes Miss Fiddy. “I don’t know how Matron puts up with it.”

  Lily imagines she means the food, until she sees that the woman’s baleful grey eyes are hooked on the man at the neighbouring table.

  Djuna helps herself to a plate of corned beef from the waitress’s tray.

  “Oh, Milly,” exclaims Miss Fiddy, “How many times do I have to say I want salad or vegetables.”

  The waitress rolls her eyes. “Your dinner’s on the way,” she says, “this is Mr MacInerney’s.”

  “You won’t put gravy on it,” Miss Fiddy insists.

  Milly’s nose rises a fraction. “Of course not!”

  Her face has a simple, naked look, and her button eyes wander, as if searching for something. Not for the first time, Lily wonders if Milly is quite right in the head. Her own plate is delivered, with two slices of purple beef in a pool of parsley sauce, surrounded by peas, carrots, and sprigs of cauliflower. Meanwhile, Djuna and Mr MacInerney embark on a conversation full of joking references to Djuna’s hair and Miss Fiddy’s vegetables.

  Under cover of their laughter, Lily asks Miss Fiddy how she is getting on with transcribing her old employer’s memoir. Last night she had heard through the wall the steady peck peck of her ancient typewriter, bequeathed to her, so Miss Fiddy has said, when Arkwright and Co. finally upgraded to computers. The sound had reminded Lily of typing at the kitchen table in the house on Tinakori Road, and fleetingly she had felt those spaces pressing around her, had sensed again that house’s self-contained yet lonely echo.

  “Oh, very well indeed,” says Miss Fiddy. “Mr Arkwright led such an interesting life.” Her grey eyes shine as she leans sideways and whispers, “George.”

  “Pardon?”

  “George Arkwright. I was his personal assistant for thirty-seven years. We started out together.”

  Lily has heard this many times, but feigns polite interest.

  “I found a file yesterday which contained the first letter Mr Arkwright ever dictated to me. It was the day I got the job. I remember he looked at it and said, ‘No mistakes right from the off, Vesta. That’s what lifts you above the common herd.’”

  The old men push their empty plates into the centre of the table and unfold from the chairs, and as they shuffle out the door they nod a shy farewell. Miss Fiddy dabs at her eye with a handkerchief.

  Djuna lifts her nose towards the kitchen. “I thought I smelled cabbage.”

  “Matron has a private menu, which includes cabbage soup.” Mr MacInerney grins. “I gather it’s the latest miracle diet.”

  Djuna nods in a resigned way. “We’ll be smelling lots of it then.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” says Mr MacInerney. “You know how fickle Beattie is. Her fads never last.”

  Miss Fiddy’s head snaps sideways at his use of Matron’s first name. “If you ask me, some fads seem to have lasted rather too long.”

  Mr MacInerney turns with a teasing smile, and the bristle of grey hairs in his sideburns shift as he leans towards her. “And which particular fad do you have in mind, Vesta?”

  Miss Fiddy stares in resolute silence at a vase of silk flowers on the windowsill.

  “I hope you’re not rather indelicately referring to our Matron’s insatiable sexual appetite,” his voice is low and liquid, “which requires twice or sometimes thrice daily–”

  Miss Fiddy leaps from her chair, scattering cutlery. At the door, she collides with Milly and a tray of dessert bowls.

  “Hey!” cries the little waitress. “Watch out!” And staring after Miss Fiddy’s retreating back she calls reproachfully, “You haven’t had sweets yet.”

  Mr MacInerney’s eyes glitter with perverse amusement.

  “You shouldn’t rattle her perch,” says Djuna.

  “Vesta tends Mr Arkwright’s sacred fire so religiously.”

  “But you do go out of your way to bait her.”

  “I’m only trying to inject a little realism.”

  The nurse tucks a wisp of blue hair in place. “It’s true her fella passed on a good while ago. I’d have thought she’d have accepted it by now.”

  “Ah, but there’s the Widow Arkwright; Vesta has sworn to outlive her.”

  “Old Mrs A is over ninety. She might snuff it any time, from what I hear.”

  Mr MacInerney shakes his head. “Tough as old boot leather, my dear. A drop of arsenic in the tea is Vesta’s only hope, I’m afraid.”

  Lily shivers. She has no appetite for the salty, bruised-looking meat with its viscous sauce. On the nights after Gina’s departure she had often wished for death. In dreams, or more often in the depths of her shabby velveteen chair, she had explored the possibilities: something painless, swift, an efficient erasing.

  “Why not put Mrs A’s name up for your Snuff Club?” says Mr MacInerney.

  Djuna shrugs. “She’s not famous.”

  He leans towards Lily. “This child and her friends pay a dollar a week to a snuff fund,” he says. “It’s a list of people they expect to die, and when one of them does, whoever holds that name gets a little windfall of cash.”

  Djuna chews a thumbnail. “I’ve got the Queen.”

  To wish death on anyone is wicked and dangerous, thinks Lily. Wishing dreams don’t count; dreams are beyond control. Her eyes come to rest on Mr MacInerney’s long hairless wrists, and his nails, with their perfect white-moon cuticles. It is terrible to think of going on, day after day, among these strangers. Once, she would have written them into a story, but Lily has forgotten that she is a writer. No, not forgotten, but who can keep writing when life becomes weirder than fiction?

  Lily’s shin sets up a steady throb, a drumbeat of discomfort beneath the bandage that threatens to erode her resolve. Suddenly short on courage, she summons the memory of her Aunt Sylvie at a night trotting meeting, elegant in a tweed suit with a pencil skirt: Sylvie’s horse has completed a couple of laps when it falls right in front of her. The horse coming behind falls too, and without a moment’s hesitation, this aunt, who is then in her seventies, vaults a low fence onto the track and wades into the wreckage to sit on her horse’s head and prevent further injury. When the crash squad arrives to relieve her, Sylvie stands up and strolls back to the stands. Lily reminds herself n
ow, as she often has before, that she comes from a line of women who can wrestle down a horse and sit on its head, all without snagging a stocking. Ignoring the pain in her shin, she straightens her spine – if she can only concentrate, the leg will heal. She will ring her brother in Tasmania.

  “Do youse want sweets?” says Milly.

  Gina’s twenty-first birthday passed, and still they heard nothing. Lily, hot-wired with grief, went with Tom to an office in Douglas near The Rover’s Return, where a private investigator, Mr Naseby, wrote down all they could tell him about their daughter. Lily had not known what to expect of a private eye, but she supposed the bulky, ex-policeman, with his drinker’s nose and dandruff, was better equipped than they were to discover Gina’s whereabouts.

  After three weeks Mr Naseby informed them that their daughter was in Manchester. She worked in a pet shop tending puppies and kittens, tanks of goldfish, and cages filled with small, brightly-coloured birds. There was an address, and Tom proposed a surprise visit.

  “Let me go alone,” Lily pleaded. “If it’s just me, she might–”

  There had been hours of queasiness on the Isle of Man Steam Packet to Liverpool, followed by a bus ride from the docks to Lime Street station. After an hour the train deposited Lily in an unfamiliar city. Its clamour and speed were overwhelming; its rain-lashed streets had a tough, industrial feel – after so many years on a salt-scoured island she was astonished at the sheer depth of grime.

  Gina rented a single room in a student building. You had to ring a bell at the entrance and wait. It was late on a Monday afternoon when Lily rang, and Gina answered through the crackling intercom.

  She opened the front door wearing tight black jeans and a batik print shirt Lily had never seen before; her face was moonlike in its paleness.

  “I knew you’d come,” she said.

  Lily longed to gather her up and hold her close, but Gina stepped back into the gloom of the hall.

  “There’s no lift, I’m afraid,” she said. “And quite a lot of stairs.”