Sheltering Rain (49 page)

“Is she—is she—?” Her voice faltered.

“Well, I'm no expert, but it looks like she's not got long left,” said the man. “We can't waste any time. Where is there a phone?”

Ignoring his protestations, Sabine pushed her way in through the door, hardly aware of the chaos of the front room, the smell of dust and stale food that confronted her. She had to see Annie. She kept walking determinedly, her chest tightening with fear as she tried to ignore the unearthly sounds coming from the kitchen. No one had told her about noise; when people killed themselves in films, they were always silent about it.

But there was no blood, not on the ceiling, anyway, just a sort of discolored water all over the pale-blue lino of the kitchen floor, and Annie sitting in the middle of it, clutching onto a cupboard door with both arms, as if trying to haul herself over it.

“Annie?” she said.

“Oh,
Gooooodddddddd
. . . .” Annie, seemingly oblivious, let out a long, low moan. She looked like she was concentrating on something Sabine could not see. She looked puce with effort. She did not appear to be dying.

“She's not dying,” Sabine announced to the man, who had reappeared behind her.

“Of course she's not dying,” he said impatiently, his hands flapping as if he were shaking water from them. “She's having a bloody baby. But I'm a loans clerk, not a doctor. And I told you—we need to get an
ambulance
.”

Sabine stared at Annie, reeling slightly as she attempted to take in the significance of what the man had just said. Then “stay with her,” she said, lurching for the door. “I'll get help.” And her blood pumping in her ears, she began sprinting back up the road toward Kilcarrion.

K
ate leaned heavily against the desk, staring at the sepiatinted photograph she still held in her hand, at her own broad toothy smile, open, unknowing. At Tung-Li's moon face staring back at her, his apparent awkwardness before the camera now infused with a greater symbolism; his unusual features—because they were unusual, now Kate looked carefully at them—now explained.

“Why didn't you tell me?” she said, eventually. Her voice, when it came, sounded frail, tremulous.

Joy, who sat beside her on the chair, her head bowed, lifted her face wearily.

“There was nothing to say. What would I have told you?”

“I don't know. Something. Something that perhaps would have explained—oh, I don't know.” She shook her head. “Oh, God, Mummy . . . all this time . . .”

It was dark outside, and the two wall-mounted lights cast gloomy, chiaroscuro shadows on the walls, highlighting the lengths of now-near-empty shelves, the few remaining boxes still to be sorted. An old framed map of Southeast Asia had come off the wall and stood, its glass fractured within its frame, against the wall.

“What happened to him?” said Kate, still staring at the photograph. “To both of them?”

“They didn't go back to China. When we came back to Ireland I found Wai-Yip a good position with a Black Watch family up in the New Territories. I think she was much happier there, really. She was nearer to her family. And things were . . .”—Joy took a deep breath—“simpler.”

Kate stared at the photograph again, and then placed it carefully on top of the box, leaving her fingertips lightly upon its surface. She paused, as if deciding whether to turn it over, but left it face upward.

“I can't believe this . . . ,” she said, almost to herself. “I can't believe Daddy . . . I thought you were perfect,” she said. “I really thought the two of you had this perfect love.”

“No one's perfect, Kate.”

The two women sat in silence at right angles to each other, listening to the distant sounds of activity in the stable yard. For once, Kate noted, it didn't seem to stir Joy into some kind of action.

“Why did you stay?” she said, eventually. “It was practically the sixties by then, wasn't it? People would have understood. We would have understood.”

Joy frowned, a hand raised to her hair.

“I did think about it. But there was still quite a stigma about it, back then. And despite everything, I decided I was doing the right thing. I thought this way you children would grow up with a proper family. Without having to cope with people whispering, and pointing, and talking. . . . And we had built a life together. I suppose we liked the same things.”

She turned to look at Kate, and her expression softened. “Both of us loved you so much, you know. Your happiness was everything to us. And although your father hurt me terribly . . .”—here she winced slightly, and Kate realized with a sense of shock how close to the surface that betrayal still sat—“I decided that my own feelings were actually not the most important thing, in the end.”

There was a lengthy silence, as Kate sat in the cold, unloved room, trying to bend her long-held beliefs around this new knowledge. She felt briefly, irrationally, angry, as if it had been her exclusion from this secret that had caused all the problems between them.

“Does Christopher know?”

“Of course Christopher doesn't know. And I don't want him to know. I didn't want either of you to know.” Joy sounded, momentarily, like her old, brusque self. “You're not to say anything to him. Or Sabine. There's far too much rubbish about telling everybody everything, these days.”

Her voice, although truculent, held something else. Something almost tearful.

Kate stood, looking at her mother for a few moments, slowly recognizing the love story that she had missed. Then she stepped forward and for the first time since she had been a child, took ahold of Joy, gently enfolding her in her arms, allowing her mother time for her habitual stiffness to be replaced by something more yielding. She smelled of horse, and dog, and something sweet and lavendery underneath. After some moments, she patted Kate's shoulder absently in return, as if comforting an animal.

“All these years . . .” Kate said, into her quilted jacket, her voice breaking. “All these years, and . . . I could never live up to you.”

“I'm sorry, darling. I didn't mean for you to feel that way.”

“No. I didn't mean that. All those years, and I didn't know that you were suffering. I didn't know what you had had to put up with.”

Joy pulled back and wiped at her eyes, straightening her shoulders.

“Now, I don't want you exaggerating,” she said, firmly. “Your father is a good man. I didn't have to put up with so much, as you call it. He loved me, in his way.” When she looked at Kate, her gaze was defensive, faintly challenging. “He—he just—”

“Couldn't help himself?”

Joy turned away from her, toward the window.

Kate glanced next door, to where her father was dozing in his drug-fueled slumber, feeling a cold fury toward the man who had betrayed the only person she had ever thought him capable of loving. “And you never made him pay for it,” she said, bitterly.

Joy followed her daughter's glance, and then reached out, taking her hand. It was roughened, weathered by ages of determined activity.

“You're not to say a thing to him. You're not to bother him. Your father did pay, Kate,” she said, and her voice held a melancholy certainty. “Both of us paid.”

T
here was no one in the downstairs kitchen, or the drawing room, so Sabine, now almost light-headed with adrenaline, ran through the house, slamming doors and yelling for Mrs. H, making the dogs bark and scrabble in pursuit. “Where the hell is everyone?” she yelled at them, throwing open and shutting the doors of the pantry and the boot room. The house felt still, watchful. The snug and breakfast room were also uninhabited, their silence amplifying the sounds of her brief entry, making them reverberate around the furniture.

Her lungs now tight from her exertions, Sabine ran up the stairs two at a time, her boots catching on the threadbare stair carpet so that she slipped and slithered on her way up, having to clutch at the banister twice to stop herself from falling. All the time, the vision of Annie loomed before her, bowed over by her own suffering; her expression distant, as ever, but this time somehow focused. Somehow primeval.

Oh, God, where was Mrs. H? Annie needed her mother. That much was clear to anyone. She certainly needed someone more than Anthony . . . whatever his name was. Sabine paused briefly on the landing, looking for the vacuum cleaner, or some other clue that Mrs. H had recently been there. Then she stopped.

Lynda.

Why hadn't she thought of Lynda?

She would know what to do. She could take care of it all. Sabine threw open the door of her grandfather's room, her mouth already open and prepared to deliver her urgent message. But she met only the blank, unpixilated gaze of the off-turned television set, and a neat array of plastic cups and pill bottles, a silent reminder that the nurse had already left for home. Her grandfather's skeletal profile emerged from the layers of bedding and pillows, undisturbed by the commotion, deep in chemically induced slumber.

She didn't even bother to close the door. With a sobbed expletive of exasperation, Sabine now ran along the corridor, flinging open each door, and shouting for Mrs. H, her mother, her grandmother, anyone as she did so, fighting with each step a rising sense of panic about the scene she had left behind. What if that man went away? He had looked like he was desperate to leave. What if everyone had gone out? She could call an ambulance, but she didn't know how to help. And a little part of her didn't really want to go back to that noise, that blood, all by herself.

They were in the study. Sabine thrust open the door, not really expecting to find anyone in there, and had stopped, panting, as she confronted the sight of the two women, holding on to each other.

She stood for a second, trying to take in a scene that she knew couldn't possibly be real. Still conscious of the evening's events, she looked away from her mother. Then she remembered herself.

“Where's Mrs. H?”

Her grandmother had pulled away from her mother, and pawed at her sticking-up hair.

“She's gone to town. To see someone about Annie, I think.” She looked almost embarrassed to be found in such an intimate embrace.

“I've got to speak to her.”

“Well, she won't be back here this evening. She left early. I think Mack came to pick her up.” The two women stared at Sabine, who was now hopping from leg to leg in agitation.

“What on earth is the matter?”

“We need to get her. It's Annie—she—I think she's having a baby.”

There was the shortest of silences.

“What?
”

“A baby? Are you sure?”

Outside the door, infected by the excitement, one of the dogs had begun to bark.

“Annie can't have children,” said Joy, unconvinced.

“Sabine? Are you sure?”

“Look, come
on
. I'm not making it up,” said Sabine, pulling at her grandmother's sleeve. “She's in the house. With one of the guests. But there's stuff on the floor and everything and he says he's only a loans clerk but she hasn't got long to go and we need to get an ambulance and Annie's phone isn't working.”

Joy and Kate exchanged looks.

“He's all by himself,” said Sabine, reduced to near tears by their stupid, frozen faces. “Annie needs help. You've got to come
now
.”

Joy placed her hand against her face, thinking, and then strode toward the door, propelling the younger women before her. “Kate—you run down there with Sabine. I'll ring an ambulance and gather up some things here. Oh, my goodness, I'll try and ring Mack as well. I'm sure we have one of those mobile telephone numbers for him somewhere. I'll get Thom to find it.”

“You lead the way,” said Kate, as she followed her daughter's rapid descent down the stairs, almost falling over the dogs as she went. “Oh, that poor woman,” she said, putting her hand out to pat Sabine's shoulder. “Thank God you found her.”

A
nthony Fleming was doing a little dance on the step outside Annie's house, a curious jig, accompanied by the merry waving of arms, a Morris dancer, out of time with some mental tune. At least that was how it looked from afar; when Sabine and Kate got close, sweating, and breathing hard from their sprint, it revealed itself as an anxious shifting of weight, a desperate, fumbling plea for help from arms that clutched hold of Kate's lapels when she ran up the steps.

“Are you a doctor?” he said, his face pale and anxious.

“The doctor's on his way,” said Kate, coughing. “Where is she?”

“Oh, God . . . oh, God . . .” Anthony Fleming began wringing his hands.

“Where
is
she?”

Ignoring him and Sabine, Kate pushed her way through the living room into the kitchen, and casting around until she spied her, swiftly crouched down by the squat form of Annie, who was now hanging on to the base of a kitchen stool, rocking backward and forward, and letting out low, keening noises that made the hairs on the back of Sabine's neck stand on end.

“You're all right now, you're all right, Annie,” Kate repeated, holding on to her, smoothing her hair. “You're doing really well. It's all going to be fine.”

Sabine stared at the kitchen, at Annie's long skirt, which lay discarded and soaked in the corner by the sink, at some stained scrap of pink fabric that may have been her knickers. There was pale, watery blood everywhere. It made her think of the time her grandfather had fallen into the vegetable casserole. She realized she had begun to shake again.

“I don't know anything about babies,” Anthony Fleming kept repeating, his hands wrestling with each other. “I do only bank loans. I came back only because she had somewhere safe to put my bike.”

Sabine couldn't answer him. She just kept staring at Annie, who, lost in some private world, was now hanging on to Kate, her eyes open yet unseeing, her face occasionally contorted as she let out another bovine cry. Kate, glancing behind her at her daughter's shocked face, tried to smile.