Chapter Three
 SUNDAY

OVER THE YEARS, the kitchen was the only room in the house which had not undergone significant change. Lino had given way to thick carpet in the bathroom; the red brocade curtains in the parlour had been replaced with pale blinds; the bedrooms had lost their austerity and become chintzy and floral sprigged. They’d had a conservatory built at the side of the house for their mother; they’d had central heating installed. Only the kitchen was left untouched, and that was deliberate. Their father, who had been happy with other changes made, had always held out over that. ‘To tell you the truth, I can’t see anything wrong with it the way it is,’ he’d say to any suggestion proffered; and after he died, neither the sisters nor their mother desired to make any change to the room: they wanted it to remain as he had known it.
 The kitchen was the biggest room in the house; and was dominated by a stove, on either side of which was an old-fashioned built-in press, of cream-coloured wood, with strong shelves, and thick ribbed glass in the cupboard doors. The press on one side of the stove held crockery and food; the other press held books, ornaments, and the framed photograph of their father which Cate had noticed the day she arrived home. Against the wall farthest from the window was a comfortable old sofa; over by the window itself there was a huge deal table and some straight-backed chairs. Helen was sitting on one of these chairs, drinking tea and gazing out at a stretch of grass, where a few ducks were struggling along in blustery sunshine. They’d had the birds for their father, who liked duck eggs, and after he died, their mother and Sally hadn’t the heart to get rid of them, so the ducks continued to wander around the farmyard for no real reason. Because nothing had changed there was something timeless about the kitchen, and Helen liked that. In her rare moments of nostalgia she could sit there and half-close her eyes and imagine that it was twenty, twenty-five years ago, that if she were to go over to Uncle Brian’s house now she would find it, too, as it was [21] in the past; that if she listened at the kitchen door there she would hear voices: Granny Kate and Uncle Peter, and the voices of children, one of whom was herself. But she could never make the illusion last as long as she desired, and was conscious only too soon of how things had changed.
 Brian and Lucy hadn’t bothered doing anything with their house for years and years: the only room they had changed was the kitchen. About a year earlier they had had it completely modernised: the stove ripped out, fitted pine units installed, a vinyl floor covering laid over the red quarry tiles. Sally and their mother had gone over to see it one evening when it was all finished. Sally told Helen that their mother had baked a cake to take with her and had steeled herself before she left, but that she and Lucy had both cried and that their mother had kissed Lucy and told her that she’d done the right thing, because life had to go on. Helen had been invited over too, but she didn’t go: she never went to Brian’s and Lucy’s house now.
 She set great store by this hour on a Sunday morning when her mother and Sally were out at Mass and she had the house to herself, although strictly speaking, she wasn’t alone today: Cate was still there. She told Sally she wouldn’t be going out this morning as she didn’t feel very well; and so far she hadn’t ventured downstairs at all. Had she been well, she would certainly have gone to Mass: she always did when she was at home, and there was, for Helen, something about that which didn’t add up. After Cate moved to England, Helen suspected for a long time that she only went to Mass when she came home to save face and not hurt her parents; that she probably hadn’t been across the threshold of a church since she arrived in London. But then Helen had gone to visit her sister, and had been surprised to learn that not only was Cate a regular churchgoer, but that she even had a religious picture hanging in her apartment: a classy reproduction icon, to be sure, rather than a cheap, kitsch print. It was clear, however, that it was important to Cate, and that she didn’t have the picture just for show.
 But by her own admission, Cate’s religion was a ramshackle thing, a mixture of hope, dread, superstition and doubt; upon which she depended to an extraordinary degree: or so it appeared to Helen. Sally, on the other hand, had a faith which, like much [22] else in her life, ran in a straight and unfractured line direct from her childhood. For Helen herself, her main regret on this subject was the hurt she had caused her father; for he had had a faith which she respected, seeing in it both dignity and integrity, although it was a faith she could not share. She stopped going to Mass not long after she started university, and he had been deeply aggrieved. Was this the end result of all her study and learning? He argued and pleaded with her through that first autumn term, but when Christmas came and still she refused to go to church with the rest of the family he realised how serious she was about it. ‘You’re a grown woman now,’ he said to her that Christmas Eve. ‘We’ve done what we can for you; you’re free now to live your own life as you see fit.’ He never mentioned the subject to her again, never tried to coax or persuade her. But many years later, after he was dead, they found a little notebook in which he wrote down every month the intentions for which he particularly wanted to pray, and from which it was clear that he had constantly hoped for two things: that there would be peace in Northern Ireland, and that Helen would return to the Church. Had it been anyone else, even in her own family, who had written that, Helen would have been livid.
 Sometimes she felt that this hour on a Sunday morning was the only time when she could — what? Think straight? Could she even do that now? In the past, she would have said that it was the only time that she knew any peace, when she could truly relax. But that wasn’t true any more either, except in so far as the pace of her life slowed down sufficiently at the weekends for her not to be in such strict control of her own thoughts, as she was during the week. She was able to let her mind off the leash, as though it were a dog, but the difficulty was that she no longer knew how the dog would behave, whether it might not turn on her and savage her. Maybe David was right. ‘You work too hard, that’s the problem with you,’ he said. ‘The eighties are over, Helen. It’s not cool to be a workaholic any longer.’ But there must be more to it than that. She’d worked every bit as hard five years ago, but she’d been able then to spend her Sunday mornings thinking about movies she wanted to see or the book she was reading at any particular time, or even about work itself and the cases upon which she was engaged, with a cooler eye and [23] more detachment than was possible when she was in Belfast. Now the thoughts that pressed in on her were the sort of things that you expected when you woke at the hour of the wolf, when your mental resistance was down and you couldn’t get back to sleep again: thoughts of failure and inadequacy, of past wrongs that could never be righted; and knowing that many of them were trivial and that she was seeing them out of all proportion was no help against them. She’d said to Cate that her trips home at the weekend had been a safety valve, but it wasn’t true: it was more of an entry into a danger zone, as though there were a hairline crack in her otherwise steely self-containment, and to go home was to push against that crack with her fingers and feel it yield and fear that some day it would split open completely. She realised this more fully today than ever before, and it frightened her. She got up from the chair and tried to distract herself.
 The tea she was drinking had gone cold, so she threw it out and made a fresh pot. Some of the interior-decor magazines Cate had brought home were sitting on the press, and she lifted them on to her lap and started to leaf through them, but soon became bored. She’d taken no great interest in furnishing the house she’d bought in Belfast, a place to which she felt no particular attachment. She’d needed a roof over her head, there was no more to it than that; and if anyone ever spoke to her using the word ‘home’, her thoughts instinctively turned to her family home in the country, even though it was years since she had lived there, and she would probably never live there again. She’d bought furniture and curtains in the same frame of mind in which most people bought pints of milk and loaves of bread: she needed them. She bought clothes with the same consideration of necessity rather than pleasure, something about which Cate had nagged her for years. She gave Helen gifts of clothes, blouses and scarves much more glamorous and luxurious than anything Helen would ever have bought for herself. They’d actually had a row about it the last time Helen was over in London. Cate had tried to persuade her to go to one of those agencies where they tell you what colours suited you and what sort of clothes you ought to wear, an idea Helen had dismissed with a contempt she at once saw was excessive. ‘You know I only can wear a [24] particular type of thing because of my job,’ she said, to soften the rejection, but Cate was having none of it. ‘That’s all the more reason why you should enjoy your clothes off duty, rather than just lie around in jeans and a jumper all the time. Hell, it’s only a bit of fun, I’m not saying these things are the be-all and the end-all in life.’ But Helen still refused.
 It was only now, when her life had shrunk to little more than duty, coldly and honourably fulfilled, that she understood what Cate meant. She knew that her sister had been watching her since they were children; had watched her austerity close around her like a sheet of ice. Cate herself was proof of the validity of her own argument. Certainly there were women who didn’t add up to much more than their jacket and lipstick, but Cate wasn’t one of them. Helen could see why people gravitated to Cate, why they liked her, but also why they shied away from Helen and found her intimidating. Cate was on the side of life, and it was painful to Helen to have to admit that that was not true of herself.
 On the Saturday evening Cate had picked up one of the magazines and riffled through it, saying, ‘Oh, there’s a letter here I saw the other day and I must read it to you. I laughed out loud when I saw it. Here we are: “Dear Décor Help-Desk, I have a needlework box with straight legs. It looks very pretty, but lately it occurred to me that it would look even nicer with cabriole legs. Can you tell me the address of a stockist, and perhaps a craftsman in my area who could do the necessary work?”’ Cate had thrown the magazine aside and chuckled, while their mother said, ‘Isn’t it extraordinary how little some people have to trouble them in life?’
 ‘I can see Aunt Rosemary writing a letter like that,’ Sally said, ‘or at least finding nothing odd in it.’
 Helen had said nothing, but she’d thought about Sarah Maguire, whose youngest son, Oliver, she was defending on charges of shooting a taxi driver. She was probably only in her mid fifties, but looked much older. She thought of her careworn face, her timid, pleading manner: Mrs Maguire probably wouldn’t have been able to begin to imagine a life where she would have the luxury to think about a thing like that.
 For some time now Helen had been hearing movements [25] upstairs. There were footsteps on the stairs, and then the kitchen door opened. Over her nightdress, Cate was wearing a fluffy white bathrobe edged in white satin.
 ‘How are you feeling?’
 ‘Not great.’
 ‘Mammy’ll be disappointed. I know she’s planning to make you a fry when she gets back from Mass. She bought the sodas and rashers specially.’
 Cate grimaced and swore gently. ‘Can I have a cup of that tea?’ she asked, nipping across the cold tiles in her bare feet and taking the heel of a white loaf out of the bread bin. ‘This’ll do me nicely.’ Helen looked at her shrewdly as she passed her the tea, and Cate noticed the look. ‘Cheers, Helen, I’ll go and get dressed,’ she said as she scampered back across the floor. ‘I’m fine, really.’ Helen listened to her footsteps as she went back up to her room.
 Crossing to the press, Helen picked up the photo of her father and looked at it closely. In her sitting room in Belfast she had a framed photograph of herself and her father standing on the lawn at Queen’s on her graduation day. How proud he’d been! She’d been the first person in her family to go to university, and in her excellent results and the speed with which she’d subsequently risen in her profession she’d far surpassed her parents’ hopes or expectations. She held the photograph tightly. It was black and white, and her father was a young, smiling man in it. It was only a snapshot, but captured his kindliness. He’d had the same brown eyes as his father and both his brothers. She could see why her mother liked that particular photograph so much.
 The last weekend Helen saw her father, she’d been having trouble with her car. It had developed a tendency to stall when she slowed down, but she was too busy at work to take time off and get something done about it. ‘Why don’t you take my car to Belfast for the week,’ he’d said, ‘and I’ll limp into Antrim with yours and get it fixed for you.’
 ‘Oh thanks, Daddy,’ she’d said, ‘you don’t know what a help that would be to me. You restore my faith in men.’ She meant it as a joke, but unusually, he took it quite seriously and replied, ‘Well, there can’t be much right with the men that’s going now [26] to make a fine woman like you say a thing like that.’ The remark hurt her, as suddenly and abruptly as if he had reached out and pressed his fingers on an old wound which she had long since believed to be healed, but which his touch revealed to be as raw and painful as a fresh cut. The sudden tears that came to her eyes embarrassed her. He saw this, and for her sake pretended not to notice. ‘Don’t you worry, Helen, I’ll get it seen to and paid for,’ he said, ‘and we can get it all settled between us when you’re home next weekend.’
 But before the week was out, he had been killed.
 She set the photograph down, and from the shelf above lifted down a black book with The People’s Missal stamped on the cover in gold. The letters were faint now, rubbed away through use, and when she opened the book a piece of brittle white palm fell out of it. The book was stuffed with memorial cards: old, dark ones, dense with print, and more modern ones which were brightly coloured. They’d put the missal for safe keeping up beside the other books which had belonged to her father. She glanced along the titles: Flora and Fauna of Northern Ireland, Field Guide to the Birds of Lough Neagh, Monuments of Pre-Christian Ireland, Celtic Heritage. The fiction was on the shelf above: Call My Brother Back by Michael McLaverty, Alexander Irvine’s My Lady of the Chimney Corner, and collections of short stories by Liam O’Flaherty and Frank O’Connor. There were some of Granny Kate’s books mixed in with them: Gone with the Wind and Rebecca. They’d been passed along to their father after Granny Kate died because no one in Brian’s house had been a reader, and it had seemed right that any stray books in the family as a whole should ultimately make their way to their father. Even when she was at university she hadn’t met anybody who loved books and cherished them as much as her father had done. When she was still a child, Helen remembered her father taking her along to hear Seamus Heaney read in Magherafelt. When was that? Sometime in the early seventies, it must have been. He’d bought at that reading one of the several collections of Heaney’s poems which he owned, and as Helen reached up to lift down a copy of North, she noticed a figure standing at the kitchen window.
 ‘It’s only me,’ Brian said, as she unlocked the back door for [27] him. They’d long since given up the habit of leaving the door on the latch during the day. Their mother was anxious unlocking it unless she knew for sure who was on the other side, and at night even Helen was afraid when the doorbell rang late and unexpected.
 ‘Hello, Brian, how are you keeping? Take a seat there.’ ‘Thanks, Helen, not so bad, and yourself? It was Katie I called to say hello to, is she out at Mass yet?’
 ‘No, she’s upstairs, but I think she’ll be down in a minute or two,’ Helen said, getting an ashtray for Brian and offering tea. The kitchen was full of a deep golden light now, every mote of dust showing clear as it floated and fell. Helen talked to her uncle in a desultory way about Cate’s return, and the weather, but they soon fell into a silence that wasn’t altogether comfort-able. Whenever possible now, she avoided being alone with Brian. She remembered sitting with him on the kitchen sofa at three o’clock in the morning during her father’s wake, drinking neat whiskey, neither of them speaking. He’d looked suddenly older when his brother was killed: until then, Helen had thought it was a cliche to talk about people ageing overnight.
 ‘It was my fault,’ he’d said abruptly, lifting his gaze from the floor tiles and looking Helen hard in the eye. ‘It was me they wanted. I’m to blame.’
 ‘You’re never to say that again, Brian. It’s not true and you know it.’ He’d passed his hands over his eyes and looked away. How had he known what she was thinking? He’d never repeated those words to her but since then the idea had always lain between them like a coiled snake, making a distance, a coolness, a fear that had never been there before. She lost Brian too, that night: she did to some degree hold him responsible, and that he also blamed himself was of no real help to her.
 Helen was glad now when Cate appeared, in black leggings and an oversized tee-shirt, her long straight hair pulled back into a pony tail. ‘Fit and well you’re looking, Katie,’ Brian said, which Helen thought was flattering of him, as Cate actually looked frail and wan. She watched her sister as Cate, beaming, chatted to their uncle.
 ‘Will you come over and see us sometime, Katie?’ Brian said [28] wistfully, and Cate bit her lip the way she’d done when she was little and was told to do something she didn’t want to do. ‘Oh, Brian,’ she said, ‘I don’t know if I can.’
 ‘It would be great for Lucy,’ he said, coaxing.
 ‘I will, I’ll come. But maybe not for a while. Maybe I’ll come with Sally?’
 ‘And your mammy, too,’ Brian said. ‘We’ll make a night of it, I’ll get Una to take a race over from Magherafelt.’
 ‘I’d love to see Una,’ Cate said. There was the sound of a car pulling up at the front of the house, and Brian at once stood up to leave. ‘That’s Mammy and Sally now, won’t you wait to see them?’ Cate said, but he waved his hand.
 ‘Ah, sure your mammy’s tired looking at me, I’m in and out of this house far more than I should be, since I can’t sit at peace in my own. Tell her I was asking for her, Sally too,’ and as they heard the key turn in the front door, he slipped out by the back.
 ‘You’ll have had your fill of relatives by tonight, Cate,’ Sally said when she heard Brian had been there. ‘You know Uncle Michael and Aunt Rosemary are coming over this afternoon to see you, don’t you?’
 ‘At least you’ll get that visit out of the way near the start of your time,’ Helen said. ‘You’ll be hearing all about the christening. Can you believe they called the baby Michael, too?’
 ‘There’s no sense in it,’ said their mother. ‘Three people in the same family all with the same name: four if you count my father. It’s so confusing, isn’t it? The son got called Wee Michael and then he was Young Michael; now they talk about Baby Michael and Daddy Michael, until you haven’t a clue who’s who. Talk about carrying on the family name! I never heard such a load of nonsense, you’d think they were royalty or something.’
 ‘Or one of those people in the American Mid West that call themselves things like Wilbur E. Hackensack IV,’ Helen said.
 ‘We all got asked to the christening,’ Sally said. ‘It was more like a wedding, with printed invitations and a meal in the Adair Arms.’
 ‘And do you know what Aunt Rosemary did at it, Cate? She was sitting beside Sally and when the meat was served she turns to her and says, “I’m afraid this piece of beef is rather fatty, and the doctor told me that under absolutely no circumstances should [29] I eat fatty meat. Would you ever mind changing with me?” And poor Sally had to hand over her dinner.’
 Sally smiled. ‘I didn’t really mind so much,’ she said.
 ‘Well, I’d have bloody minded,’ said Helen, who had been telling the story. ‘If she didn’t want the fat, all she had to do was cut it off and leave it. I saw the two plates and the only difference was that Sally’s bit of beef was bigger. She’s as bad as ever she was about her health. She’s got one of those designer allergies now; I don’t remember what it is she pretends she can’t eat.’
 ‘Those allergies are very real,’ Cate protested, but Helen waved her hand dismissively.
 ‘Hers isn’t. She’s as healthy as a clam. Honest, Cate, it’s a kind of hobby for her.’
 ‘She told me,’ their mother said, ‘that the only vegetables she could eat were pimentos and aubergines.’
 ‘I rest my case,’ Helen said.
 ‘I felt like saying to her: “Aren’t you lucky this has only come on you now, and not thirty years ago, when you couldn’t have found an aubergine in Ballymena for love nor money?” ‘
 Cate chuckled. ‘God, you shouldn’t have told me all this. If she starts to talk about her diet this afternoon, I’m not going to be able to keep a straight face.’
 They arrived not long after lunch, Uncle Michael all nerves, Aunt Rosemary all effusiveness; and were ushered into the par-lour rather than into the kitchen. There’d always been a tension in their relations with their mother’s family, quite unlike their free and easy attitude to their father’s people. Even as small children they’d known it, long before they could understand or articulate it, picking up the unease amongst the adults as horses and dogs can sense the coming of an earthquake. It was all like a foolish game, Helen now thought, a game in which their stakes had increased over the years as the sisters made good in the world. Aunt Rosemary was particularly fascinated by Cate, whom she wrongly believed to have changed out of all recognition, for Cate had never been as flighty or lazy as Rosemary had once thought her. She’d gone to London with her husband for a short holiday the previous year, and had made a point of arranging to see Cate, who knew instinctively what was required of her: tea at the Ritz, a guided tour of the shops in Bond Street [30] and Knightsbridge, assistance in obtaining tickets for a Lloyd Webber musical. As soon as they got back to Ireland, Rosemary had phoned Cate’s mother to say what a wonderful time they’d had.
 ‘You must be so proud, with two such successful daughters,’ she said, but their mother replied sharply, ‘I’m proud of all three of them.’ That was another difference now: how their mother’s attitude had gone from timidity when she was with her family and resentment when she was away from them; to indifference when they were absent, and confidence when they were there. It was her brother and his wife who didn’t know fully how to handle the changed situation. Now it was their turn to feel ill at ease and to shift uncertainly on the sofa. Helen pitied them too the horrible stale, sweet sherry that their teetotal mother kept in the parlour sideboard from one year’s end to the next, and which she offered to them in mercifully tiny glasses.
 As had been predicted, much of the talk was about Young Michael and Baby Michael, while Helen looked coolly at her uncle, who was frequently referred to behind his back as Oul’ Michael. He’d recently retired from his job with an insurance firm; and Helen remembered how her father used to call him teasingly ‘a good overcoat man’. But although they’d never been comfortable with each other, there was no real malice in his attitude towards his brother-in-law. On the contrary, it was he who had insisted on maintaining as good a link as possible with the family in Ballymena. ‘Blood’s thicker than water,’ Helen had heard her father saying for years before she understood what it meant. Michael stared at the carpet, while his wife prattled on beside him; and Helen could find it in her heart to feel sorry for her prosperous, red-faced uncle.
 Looking across the room, she noticed that Cate was also paying scant attention to the conversation around her. She had accepted but not drunk a glass of sherry, and now she was gazing into it, frowning, which, together with being withdrawn in company, was most uncharacteristic of Cate. Helen wondered vaguely how long she was going to wait before breaking her news to the family; and in thinking this, she realised how completely she’d guessed Cate’s secret. It couldn’t remain a secret now for too much longer. [31]