Mrs Mulvaney by Hilary Bailey

Author:Hilary Bailey
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448209354
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-11-22T16:00:00+00:00

Part 3

We buried my father the day after Christmas in the windswept cemetery that had so frightened me as a small boy. The tall grass among the tombstones was stiff, drooping with frost. It was bitterly cold. As they lowered my father’s coffin into the icy ground I felt like crying out, ‘You can’t leave him here.’ It seemed too bleak, too cold, too desolate, too lonely. It was like a betrayal to leave him there all on his own, abandon him and go back together to a warm house for food. I had not seen him get weaker or lie in bed ill for a long time or die. Now I almost believed he was there, alive in the coffin. It was only when we turned and left the churchyard and I turned round and looked for him that I began to part with him. As we were going through the gates of the churchyard, he was not there, standing among the gravestones. And I still wondered, at the back of my mind, where he was, and I still half-expected to find him crossing the yard when we got home, he, knowing that we were going to come, and us, knowing that he would be there waiting. Even when we pulled up the latch and went inside I still thought he must be somewhere in the house. He had always been there before.

On New Year’s Day, ten days after the bomb explosion, a week after my wife had rejected me and taken the children, and four days after my father’s funeral, I was on the road back to London. I had scarcely had time to mourn but I had wept. Now I was miserable, but purged, as if the poisoned ducts in my head had been drained and the first trickles of clear water were beginning to flow through those still-swollen and infected channels.

I had not liked leaving my mother and uncle behind at the farm. To them, of course, it seemed natural to stay, but an instinct, and I think it was a sound one, would have had them in the car, with their luggage and on the way home with me that day. I knew that my mother could keep the farm going and live there with Joe for a long time, but that after the grief for my father would come a slowly increasing misery and loneliness. Sooner or later they would have to leave.

I had already sent Naomi a telegram to say that my father was dead. Now I felt I must stop at Stonebridge to tell the children – they had been fond of my father and the mere notification of a fact means little to children. Someone had to talk to them. I hoped, too, that Naomi would come back to London with me but pain, as it sometimes will, had cleared my head. She might come later, although it was unlikely. She would not come now. When I arrived she was not there – she had gone out for a walk.

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