The Stone House Read online

  Kate said that God was a bastard and were there not enough old people dying in the world and starving children in Ethiopia and round the world to do him without taking little Sean?

  At night lying in their beds they couldn’t help but overhear their father pleading with their mother to come and lie with him and give him another child, but Maeve Dillon firmly closed the door on him. Months later she moved into Sean’s old room, leaving their father to sleep in the big bed on his own.

  Their father was lost and lonesome, and soon reverted to his old ways, staying out late, going to meetings arranged in local bars and pubs and hotels and coming home late smelling of drink. Moya hated it when he began to cry and talk of ‘the little fella’ and what might have been.

  ‘You know you still have us, Daddy,’ she’d gently try to remind him as she made him tea and scrambled eggs on toast.

  ‘Moya girl, you’d not understand what it feels like for a man to lose his son,’ was all he’d say, staring into the bottom of the blue and white mug. Moya pitied him. Witnessing his raging grief, she felt that she was partly to blame for what had happened and the awful sadness that Sean’s death had caused.

  Chapter Eight

  THE SUMMER OF the wasps was one all of them would remember. Instead of their parents coming together in their grief and sorrow, a gaping void of anger, blame and coldness had grown between them as Maeve and Frank Dillon went through the day-to-day small family rituals unable to comfort or be kind to each other.

  Moya distanced herself, as she studied for her Leaving Certificate, closing her bedroom door as she focused on French and English and Art, losing herself in the works of the Renaissance artists, Michelangelo, Raphael and Donatello. Kate knew that Moya still blamed herself for what had happened, that no matter what anyone had said, she still considered herself a part of the domino-like chain of awful events that resulted in her small brother’s death.

  Her mother visited Dr Deegan every few weeks and was on small yellow pills that calmed her and helped her to sleep and bury the rage that still engulfed her from time to time. Aunt Vonnie patiently listened to her talk and encouraged her to go for walks and drives and get some fresh air as she began to take tentative steps back to normal life. Their father, withdrawing from family life, lost himself in projects, developing the Old Mill, putting in a tender to bid for building a new area health clinic, and investing in a raft of businesses, including shares in a racehorse.

  ‘He’s gambling and drinking and never home,’ their mother complained. ‘He won’t even sit in a room and talk to me.’

  Kate sensed her father’s fear that, if he did sit down to talk about little Sean and how he felt, like a tall tree he might topple over and end up on the same yellow pills from Dr Deegan that her mother was on.

  ‘Men always feel they have to be strong, and bottle things up,’ Aunt Vonnie said, shaking her head. ‘It does them no bloody good, but they do it anyway. Joe’s the exact same!’

  July was sweltering hot. Romy, wanting to stay out till midnight and hang around the town like a stray, was packed off to Connemara to Irish college with three friends.

  ‘It’s not fair,’ she’d complained. ‘My Irish is crap and I won’t be able to speak to anyone for nearly a month.’

  ‘That’s why you’re going,’ insisted Maeve, as she packed Romy’s underwear and spare jeans and a rain jacket into the navy suitcase. ‘Living and talking constantly with the other students and going to the classes is bound to improve it. Besides, you’ll enjoy yourself.’

  ‘You’ll have a great time,’ promised Kate. ‘I loved the Gaeltacht and the ceilis at night are great crack!’

  ‘And good kissing practice,’ confided Moya. ‘That’s where I met my first boyfriend.’

  ‘I suppose,’ agreed Romy. ‘Anyways it’d be good to get away from this morgue of a place.’

  ‘Don’t let Mammy and Daddy hear you say that!’

  ‘Why not? It’s the truth!’

  The South-East basked in glorious summer weather. Rossmore’s holiday cottages and hotels were packed with visitors, the beach and cove crowded with families in swimsuits and shorts sunbathing and jumping in the sea. Most mornings Maeve Dillon walked down to the church to ten o’clock mass, going into the graveyard to say prayers on her way back. It was the routine of some of the elderly and the widows of the parish. Kate wondered why her mother had opted to join them. At home, she donned a sloppy T-shirt and a pair of beige trousers and spent the day in the garden, weeding, tidying, planting and pruning. The garden was a myriad colours and shapes, climbing full-headed roses tumbling from the walls as delphiniums and lupins burst from the flowerbeds. She broke for lunch, which was salad and brown bread served on the round wrought-iron table on the patio, even for visitors. Kate helped by mowing the lawn and at night hosing the garden and watering the parched plants. Moya refused to get her fingers and nails dirty with garden work.

  John Joe, the local handyman had been down to the house removing a wasps’ nest from the overhead beam at the corner of the french windows, and had spotted another one hanging from the eaves above Romy’s window.

  ‘’Tis the heat, Mrs Dillon, has brought them all out this year. I’ve never seen the like of it. McHugh’s discovered one in an air vent for the pub and sent one of the young barmen up on the ladder to try to do it. Drove the wasps crazy! And Cyril McHugh had to stand two rounds of free drinks for the customers after the swarm invaded the place. There was even one under the deck in the tennis club. They’re bloody everywhere!’

  ‘Well you just get rid of it safely, John-Joe, before my daughter comes back,’ she instructed.

  As the heatwave continued Kate swam and played tennis in the evenings with a few school friends. As often as she could she went sailing with Uncle Joe and the boys, who kept a small yacht moored off the pier. Lying in the grass half dozing and reading she watched lazily as her mother set to with the secateurs on an overgrown pyracantha bush in the corner of the garden, clearing away branches, and the undergrowth. Moya, spreadeagled, lay in the full sun in a tiny bikini trying to tan herself.

  She remembered the heat and the haze and her mother’s sudden ‘Oh!’ of surprise as the paper-like rugby ball shape tumbled from a spiky overhead branch, floating for a second before splitting and shattering in the air, the wasps flying in every direction, falling on her mother’s hair and head and face and covering her bare arms as she frantically tried to brush them off her. Moya jumped up screaming, wrapping the towel she was lying on around herself as Kate flayed uselessly at the wasps with the cushion she’d been sitting on, her mother screaming trying to escape them.

  The wasps moved en masse, clinging to her skin, the buzzing loud in the still summer air as her mother screeched and yelled. Kate grabbed the towel off Moya and whacked crazily at them, desperate to get them off their mother, ignoring the stings on her own hand as she tried to knock them off with the towel.

  ‘Get the hose or a bucket of water!’ she shouted.

  Moya raced back with the hose, then rushed to the kitchen door to turn on the tap, as Kate sprayed her mother with the water, the force managing to loosen some of the wasps, that dripped soggily in clumps onto the grass, others taking off into the air. She sprayed the wasps off her mother’s clothes but others were left in her hair and her ears and around her neck. She looked awful, barely able to speak.

  Moya ran into the house to phone the doctor, but Mary Deegan told her it was her husband’s half-day and that he was out on the golf course and uncontactable. Their neighbours the Costigans were gone to France for a month: Moya and Kate were being paid to feed their cat and water Mrs Costigan’s potted geraniums. The octogenarian Lily Murphy who lived beside them was deaf and couldn’t drive.

  ‘We have to get her to the doctor or the hospital,’ said Moya, worried.

  ‘Phone your father. He can drive me,’ murmured Maeve Dillon through lips that were already swollen.

  There was no reply from their father’s office but
it could be that he was talking to someone and didn’t bother picking up.

  ‘I’ll go and get him, Mammy, I’ll only be a few minutes,’ shouted Kate, grabbing her bike and flying off down the gravelled driveway, pedalling as fast as she could, heart racing, to the village. She couldn’t believe it – his office was shut, the key turned in the lock. She ran into Paddy Powers bookmakers but there was no sign of him; McHugh’s public house hadn’t seen him either. She’d spotted his big silver Mercedes parked down a laneway. He must be in the town, but where? She looked up and down the street panicking. Half the place was shut as it was Wednesday half-day. Even Lavelle’s café had the blinds down. She thought of Sheila O’Grady. She was friendly with her mother and had an old Renault 4, maybe she could drive her or help her. She raced down the lane to O’Grady’s narrow two-storey house and knocked on the front door, then chased around to the side, calling Mrs O’Grady’s name. She’d been in the house a few times before, collecting Romy or bringing messages from her mother, and now she could hear the radio blaring as she pushed down the handle of the back door. ‘Mrs O’Grady, please can you come up to the house and help my mammy?’ she called.

  The kitchen was warm, with the windows wide open and two plates and two cups on the table. She started to walk towards the hall, stopping suddenly at the curve of the staircase where two large men’s leather shoes were neatly placed, the laces open, the brown leather familiar. A beige suit jacket was hanging from the banister. It was her father’s: she recognized it from the tear at the corner of the pocket, which he’d kept asking her mother to mend.

  She stood in the hall listening. What was her father doing in O’Grady’s? They were upstairs, she could hear talking, laughing and other sounds. Sounds she couldn’t believe. She wanted to run away and hide, close the back door and disappear, but she thought of Moya back in the wasp-filled garden with her mother and called his name.

  ‘Daddy!’

  She could hear the sudden silence, the whispers.

  ‘Mammy’s hurt. She needs you!’ she shouted urgently. ‘You’ve got to come now!’

  ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph!’

  Mortified, she escaped and stood out in the lane beside the door waiting for him.

  ‘What the feck are you doing here?’ he demanded.

  ‘The wasps attacked Mammy and I came to get help.’ The words came out in a torrent as she watched him fix his belt and pull on his shoes. ‘A wasps’ nest fell on her and she’s covered in stings. She’s real bad, Moya’s with her but she needs to go to the doctor or the hospital.’

  She flinched at the image of Sheila O’Grady in a flowery dressing gown, her hair loose around her shoulders, passing him his jacket and pushing her father out the door.

  ‘How did you know where I was?’

  ‘I looked everywhere for you. I saw your car.’

  ‘It’s better you say nothing to your mother about this, do you hear me, Kate? You know how she is.’

  In the heat and sun and quiet of the lane she saw the expression on his face, the wary look in his dark eyes, the threatening stance in his heavy shoulders.

  ‘You’ll say nothing about this to your mother! Promise.’

  She nodded.

  ‘It’s between us, then.’

  He was trying to make her his accomplice. He need not have worried, because Kate was determined that nobody should know what an utter bastard her father had become, least of all her mother.

  Unwilling to get into the car with him, she went to retrieve her bike and cycled home, slowly. She stopped for a few minutes to get her breath back and to quell the awful feeling of nausea and nerves that almost made her fall to the ground. How could her daddy do this? She had always believed him to be a bit blunt and rough in his ways but at least hardworking and honest and now she had caught him out in a lie! Her mother had no idea he was involved with another woman, least of all someone she knew. Kate didn’t know what to do. She was sixteen years old and already disillusioned. She had always trusted and looked up to him and now she felt disgusted by him. She tried to compose herself as she cycled the rest of the way home.

  Luckily her mother and father were already gone, had left for the hospital and Moya, standing in the cool of the kitchen in her bikini, made Kate sit down as she put Caladryl on the stings on her arm and hand. Momentarily she was tempted to confide in her sister, share the burden of unwanted knowledge about her father’s sexual behaviour and expose his affair, but the thought of the impact of such a disclosure on their fragile family was too much to bear and instead she decided to keep it quiet, keep it secret.

  They returned a few hours later, her mother’s face and arms and hands and legs swollen. Her eyes, half closed, were so puffed she looked like a prize-fighter. She’d had injections and been treated in the local casualty department, all the stings removed.

  ‘She’s shocked and she needs to rest,’ said their father, helping her upstairs. ‘You girls make her a cup of tea and some toast.’

  She felt like a traitor as she watched him put his arm around her mother, her body against his, totally dependent on him as they slowly climbed the stairs. Kate knew at that precise moment she hated him and would never trust him again.

  Chapter Nine

  ‘CLEVER KATE’, THAT’S what her mother had always called her, branding her the brainy one of the family. Kate however wished that she was beautiful, like Moya who drove the boys crazy with her dark hair and wide eyes and perfectly proportioned body with her long legs and natural grace. Instead she had been gifted with a round face and pale blue eyes and wavy light brown hair that was the very devil to control and came from the Dillon side of the family where the women were noted for their strong wholesome looks and big feet and hands. She was considered fair and sensible and totally reliable and at least not given to the crazy mood swings and behaviour of her younger sister Romy, who didn’t believe in rules and timetables or doing the right thing!

  From the minute she could read, Kate had stuck her face in books, driving Mrs O’Donnell the local librarian mad with her constant filling in of request forms for new books. At St Dominic’s Sister Goretti and the rest of the nuns had encouraged her academic abilities as she found study and learning so easy. She often ended up helping her friends Sarah and Aisling with their maths and science homework. For fun she played hockey and sang in the school choir, which meant forty girls got to jaunt around different parts of the country in a rickety school bus singing their hearts out before ending up in Dublin competing in the final round of the annual Feis Ceoil. On prize day, at the end of the school year, Maeve and Frank Dillon would sit bursting with pride in the packed school hall with the rest of the parents, clapping loudly as she went up to receive two or three prizes, Maeve’s eyes sparkling as the nuns complimented her on Kate.

  ‘Aye, she’s a bright girl!’ her father would say.

  ‘And a wonderful daughter and friend,’ beamed her mother.

  Kate, embarrassed, felt a strange mixture of guilt and relief as she saw them standing together, still a pair.

  Nuala Hayes, the school career guidance teacher, had called Kate in with her parents to discuss her options for when she left school. She had already made up her mind as to what she wanted to study and where. She had toyed briefly with the notion of medicine as she enjoyed biology and chemistry, but knew she lacked the constant dedication to the well-being of others to be a good doctor. Law would be her first choice. Her grandfather James Ryan had been the head of a busy solicitors’ practice in Waterford. He had a keen legal brain and the love of a good court story and she could still remember him even in his old age sitting discussing legal challenges and precedents with his elderly friends in the front drawing room. Kate was curious as to what could keep her grandfather so entertained and interested for most of his life. He used to tease her about her sense of fairness and justice when she insisted that even a bag of sweets be divided up equally or that the washing up be shared.

  ‘Kate will follow in my footsteps
,’ he’d joke, producing a mint humbug from the tin in his desk for her, ‘mark my words.’

  She had done aptitude tests, and read every information leaflet and booklet in the careers part of the library, researching what she wanted to study.

  ‘She’s always worked hard and done her homework,’ her mother said proudly, patting her knee.

  ‘Law in Trinity College is what I want to do,’ said Kate, relishing the challenge and exciting prospect of studying in Dublin.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘A hundred per cent,’ she replied.

  Nuala Hayes smiled. Kate Dillon was a wonderful student who would do the school proud. It was good to see a young girl with her career decided, compared to half the students who were a bag of nerves and hadn’t a clue what to do and had parents who were planning on them being brain surgeons and teachers when they would be lucky to scrape through the Leaving Cert exams. She smiled as she stood up to see them out. Frank Dillon was a self-made man who was determined his daughters would have the opportunities he hadn’t, and was keen on sending them all to third level. Kate and her family were proof positive of the benefits of good parenting.

  Her mother had cried in September when Kate packed up her things and got ready to go to college. She’d worked in the hotel on the harbour as a waitress for eight weeks of the summer holidays, going to Salthill in Galway with her friends for a week to celebrate the Leaving Certificate results.

  ‘Mammy I’m only going to Dublin, for heaven’s sake,’ she’d joked. ‘Moya’s already there and I’ll be home as often as I can, promise.’

  ‘I know, it’s just that you are growing up so quickly,’ admitted her mother ruefully, hugging her.

  She’d landed herself on her big sister Moya and her flatmate Louise, for the first term. Moya had just finished her arts degree in UCD and was busy job-hunting.

  ‘What kind of work do you want to do?’ Kate teased out. Moya had studied History of Art and French and had her sights set on a job that would use her skills and talents.