do? Shure I had it all arranged with her own man and the undertaker down the road from the home. Hasn’t she upset the whole applecart?’
I knew he was badly shaken the moment I snatched up the phone in the bedroom where I was already packing. The steady, well-rounded tones that made him such a success with the patients in his Belfast consulting rooms had disappeared. I hadn’t heard Harvey sound like this since we were both children.
‘What d’ye think, Sis?’
I wasn’t surprised he’d had arrangements already made. For two years she’d been bedridden and almost immobile. She’d been at death’s door so many times that the kind-hearted staff at the nursing home became embarrassed about calling us yet once more to the bedside.
‘What exactly does it say, Harvey?’ I asked.
‘“I wish to be interred with my own family in the Hughes apportionment situated in Ballydrennan Churchyard, County Antrim, and not with my deceased husband George Erwin in the churchyard adjacent to Balmoral Presbyterian Church on the Lisburn Road.”’
He read it slowly and precisely, so that I could imagine her penning it, her lips tight, her shoulders squared. The more angry and bitter she was about something, the more formal the language she would use. In a really bad mood, she’d end up sounding like a legal document as she piled up words of sufficient weight and moment to serve her purposes. Consistent to the very end, I thought, as I listened.
‘And there’s a bit about the flowers,’ he added dismissively.
‘Oh, what does she say about flowers?’
‘She wants flowers. She says this idea of asking people to send money to some charity or other is a lot o’ nonsense and quite inappropriate.’
‘She would, wouldn’t she?’ I laughed wryly. ‘Shall we send a pillow of red roses, Harvey? Or one of those big square wreaths that say “Mum”, like the Kray brothers’, when they were let out of prison for their mother’s funeral?’
I heard him expostulate and made an effort to collect myself.
‘Sorry, Harvey, I’m not quite myself at the moment. I just can’t believe she’s gone. I’m all throughother, as she might say. In fact, when you rang I was standing here with one arm as long as the other when I’m supposed to be packing.’
He laughed shortly, but seemed comforted.
‘You’re the boss, Harvey. You backed me when Daddy died,’ I said gently. ‘If you want to go ahead with the Lisburn Road as planned, I’ll not object. We’re the only ones concerned, let’s face it.’
‘You’re shure, Jenny?’ he went on, a trace of relief already audible in his voice.
I stared round the disordered bedroom where two cases sat open and small piles of panties, Y-fronts, shirts and blouses were already lined up. I sat down abruptly, sweat breaking on my forehead.
‘No, no, I’m not sure, Harvey,’ I said weakly. ‘The minute I spoke, I knew it wouldn’t be right. Isn’t it silly? Can’t we even get free of her when she’s dead?’
In different circumstances, a countrywoman wanting to be buried with her family in the place where she was born could be a matter of sentiment. But there was no question of that with our mother. She’d never gone back to Ballydrennan after her father died, not even to visit her sister Mary who lived with her family only a few miles away. What was more, she’d never had a good word to say about the place. No, there was no question of sentiment. Only of spite.
Daddy had done all he could to give her what she wanted while he lived. When he died, he’d left her with a house, a car and a decent income. Now, one last time, she was rejecting him in the most public way possible. But something at the back of my mind told me we had to go through with it.
‘Harvey, I’m sorry, but I think we’ve got to do it. I can’t give you a single good reason why we should, but I have to be honest,’ I confessed. ‘I’m not being much help to you,’ I ended up lamely.
‘Yes, you are, Jenny. Being honest’s the only way. Took me a long time to see you’n Mavis were right about that. But you were. I’m much beholden to you, as they say,’ he added, with a slight, awkward laugh.
‘Maybe there has to be one last time, Harvey,’ I said quickly. ‘But it’ll make a lot of extra work for you.’
‘Don’t worry about that, Jenny,’ he replied easily. ‘Ring me when you’ve got your flight time and I’ll pick you up at Aldergrove.’
Two days later, in the crowded farm kitchen of our only remaining Antrim relatives, I took a large glass of whisky from the roughened hand of one of the McBride cousins and wondered how I could add a good measure of water without attracting attention. Before I could move, a huge figure embraced me.
‘Ach, my wee cousin.’
Jamsey McBride had always seemed large to me. When he’d carried me about on his shoulders as a little girl, he’d been like a great friendly bear, his remarkable physical strength offset by a surprising gentleness of manner.
‘Jamsey!’ I replied as the whisky sloshed in my glass.
‘Ach, shure Jenny, how are ye? Begod, shure I haven’t laid eyes on ye since your poor fader went. God rest his sowl, he was the best atall, the best atall. That mus’ be neer twenty year ago now. Dear aye, ye’ll see some changes in this place since last ye wor here. Aye, changes an’ heartbreak too.’
His eyes misted and I looked down into my glass to give him time to recover. Jamsey’s eldest son had been killed by paramilitaries early in the eighties and he still couldn’t speak of it without distress.
‘Now drink up, woman dear,’ he urged me after a moment. ‘Shure ye’ll be skinned down at the groun’. Yer fader usta say that wee hill the church stan’s on was the caulest place in the nine glens.’
So I drank my whisky as obediently as a child and listened to the ring of his Ulster Scots and tried to keep the tears from springing to my own eyes. No, it was not sorrow. Not tears for my mother or her passing, or even for Jamsey’s son, whom I had barely known, but tears of regret for the world I once knew, the people and places of my childhood.
Standing there in the large modern house that had replaced the low thatched cottage where my aunt and uncle began their married life, I mourned my links with the land and that part of my family who still lived closest to it. For these were people my mother had no time for, people whose hard-working lives she despised, whose successes and failures she treated with indifference or contempt.
A red-faced figure appeared at my elbow, the neck of a bottle of Bushmills aimed at my glass.
‘No, Patrick, no,’ I protested, laughing. ‘If I have any more, I won’t be able to stand up in church, never mind kneel down.’
He laughed aloud, clutched me by the arm and turned me to look across the crowded kitchen.
‘Jenny, is that yer girl over there forenenst that good-looking dark-haired lad?’
‘Yes, that’s Claire and her brother Stephen,’ I nodded. He winked at me, and pressed his way towards the next refillable glass.
Jamsey
