Two Fridays in April Read online

  Roisin Meaney was born in Listowel, County Kerry. She has lived in the US, Canada, Africa and Europe but is now based in Limerick city. She is the author of numerous bestselling novels, including Love in the Making, One Summer and Something in Common, and has also written several children’s books, two of which have been published so far. On the first Saturday of each month, she tells stories to toddlers and their teddies in her local library.

  Her motto is ‘Have laptop, will travel’, and she regularly packs her bags and relocates somewhere new in search of writing inspiration. She is also a fan of the Random Acts of Kindness movement: ‘They make me feel as good as the person on the receiving end’.

  www.roisinmeaney.com

  @roisinmeaney

  www.facebook.com/roisin.meaney

  ALSO BY ROISIN MEANEY

  After the Wedding

  Something in Common

  One Summer

  The Things We Do For Love

  Love in the Making

  Half Seven on a Thursday

  The People Next Door

  The Last Week of May

  Putting Out the Stars

  The Daisy Picker

  Children’s Books:

  Don’t Even Think About It

  See If I Care

  Copyright © 2015 Roisin Meaney

  The right of Roisin Meaney to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in Ireland in 2015 by HACHETTE BOOKS IRELAND

  1

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 444 799538

  Hachette Books Ireland

  8 Castlecourt Centre

  Castleknock

  Dublin 15, Ireland

  A division of Hachette UK Ltd

  338 Euston Road, London NW1 3BH

  www.hachette.ie

  Contents

  About the Author

  Also by Roisin Meaney

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Friday, 2 April (One Year Later)

  Daphne Darling

  Mo Darling

  Isobel Franklin

  Una Darling

  Daphne and Mo

  Isobel and Daphne

  Una and Daphne

  Friday, 29 April (A Year and A Bit Later)

  Daphne

  Isobel

  Una

  Everyone

  Acknowledgements

  Coming Soon From Roisin Meaney

  One Summer

  After the Wedding

  Something in Common

  This book is dedicated to random acts of kindness,

  and the excellent people who commit them

  As he pulls down the security grille he hears a wolf whistle. ‘Stop that now,’ he says, not turning around, crouching instead to stab the key into its lock.

  A second whistle. Longer, with more feeling. He shakes his head, smiling. ‘Cut that out.’ He straightens up and looks to his left and sees Sean Daly planted in the doorway of the neighbouring butcher’s shop, arms folded.

  ‘Suits you,’ Sean says, eyeing the lavender bicycle. Grin on his puss.

  ‘Una’s birthday present.’ He swings a leg over the saddle. ‘Easiest way to deliver it.’

  ‘What’s this she is now?’

  ‘Sixteen today.’

  Sean shakes his head. ‘Doesn’t be long passing. Haven’t seen her around here for a while.’

  ‘No – she gave that up.’

  He still misses the muffled thump on the shop’s rear door that heralded her arrival each weekday afternoon, her bike propped next to his against the back wall as soon as he let her in. He misses the way she’d fling her schoolbag on the floor and lean against the counter to tell him about her day, smelling of the apple shampoo she’s grown out of now too.

  He misses their cycle home together at closing time, after she’d done her homework in the little room behind the shop, after he’d bagged the takings and put them in the safe. All in the past, since she decided she’d prefer to go down the town with her pals after school than hang around with her old man. As it should be, but still he misses it.

  ‘Won’t feel it,’ Sean says, ‘till she’s bringing home the boys.’

  ‘Jesus, the fun’ll begin then.’ He pushes off, raising a hand. ‘Be good, see you tomorrow.’

  But of course he won’t. He’ll never see Sean again.

  It’s bright and crisp today, just the way he likes it. He’s the polar opposite to Daphne, who can’t get enough of the heat, who packs a picnic anytime it looks like there might be a bit of sunshine on the way. Hot weather seeps the energy out of him, leaves him sweaty and wilting. This is the kind of day he loves: cool enough to fog your breath, but nicely lit by a watery sun. Perfect day for a cycle.

  He whizzes past the crawling rush-hour vehicles, weaving with ease, despite the too-small bike, around the various obstacles he encounters: the odd pedestrian straying onto the road, a discarded splayed umbrella, the scattered mushy remains of someone’s bag of chips in the gutter.

  Passing parked cars, he watches for signs of an imminently opening door, reminded as he always is of the day he and Daphne met. Her face when it happened, the shock on it, as if she’d been the one to go flying instead of him.

  He wonders if he’s been forgiven since the morning, and thinks he probably has: she’s not one to stay mad for long. She didn’t ring him back, though – she must have seen the missed call, heard the message he left. Busy, probably – or letting him stew a bit longer. He wonders if she’s doing a lemon cake for the birthday, his favourite. Although Una prefers chocolate, so he hasn’t much hope.

  He’s conscious of the comical figure he must cut, astride a bicycle clearly the wrong size for him, like a huge man squeezed behind the wheel of a Mini. His knees jut out, denied the space to straighten as he pumps the pedals. And the colour of it, not exactly manly. Who cares though? Soon be home. Might give someone a laugh, no harm.

  He zooms past a travel agency, thinking of the surprise he’s planning for the end of the month, and his heart does a small skitter. She won’t be mad then – she’ll be far from mad when he breaks it to her. Be nice for them to get away on their own, his mother on standby to move in with Una for the few nights, sworn to secrecy.

  He turns off the main road, circles the green, tips a hand to his forehead as he passes the church. Five minutes he’ll be landed. Una gone bowling with pals, not due home till later, he’ll give the bike a bit of a rub with the chamois before she sees it. Leave it in the hall so it’s the first thing she claps eyes on. Daphne might have a bit of ribbon to tie around the handlebars for a laugh.

  He approaches the corner shop, thinks about stopping for a bar of the Turkish Delight she loves – peace offering, in case he needs one. But then he decides against it: forgot to bring a lock for the bike, better not chance leaving it outside. He can always duck back on foot if she’s still a bit frosty.

  He whirrs around the corner, onto their road.

  A bin lorry roars towards him.

  A cat comes flying out from Buckley’s garden.

  The bark of the dog that’s ch
asing it is the last thing he hears.

  FRIDAY, 2 APRIL

  (ONE YEAR LATER)

  DAPHNE DARLING

  The day he died, they had a row about the butter. Afterwards, when the horror of it all wouldn’t stop replaying itself in her head, like some forgotten reel of film endlessly and uselessly looping back on itself in a silent projection room, it was that final stupid argument, it was her snapped Why can’t you ever remember? that caused her insides to curl and wither with anguish. She fought with him on the day he died.

  She pours tea from a yellow pot and adds milk. She stirs, lifts the cup and sips. It’s not quite eight o’clock. She woke before the alarm this morning, and her toes are cold inside their navy wool socks – she hates the cold – but she heard the thrum of the boiler starting up in the utility room a few minutes earlier. Heat is on the way.

  As if the butter mattered a damn. As if his forgetting to leave it out of the fridge the night before should have merited a comment, let alone annoyed her. As if it should have stopped her reaching up on tiptoe to press her lips briefly to his, to cradle his face between her palms for a second like she always did just before she left for work – but it had stopped her, it had.

  There was no goodbye kiss that day, no tenderness at all between them, the day she looked at his living face for the last time. She picked up the beautiful vintage leather briefcase he’d got her for Christmas and left the kitchen – did she even say goodbye? – and he made no attempt to follow her.

  She still can’t remember when they last kissed. It kills her; it just plain kills her.

  Mo never once offered sympathy. Mo wouldn’t know sympathy if it hopped up and bit her on the behind. Of course she was grieving herself, but she didn’t have to sound so uncaring. Cut that out right now, she would order sharply when Daphne was drowning in remorse. It was a row; married couples row all the time. You think I never had words with Leo? Get some sense. You weren’t to know – how could you know what was going to happen?

  And unfeeling as her tone was, not a trace of softness in it, Daphne would clutch at the words and pull what comfort she could from them – married couples row all the time, you weren’t to know – and she would manage somehow not to go under.

  The toasted bread jumps up, causing a corresponding jolt in her chest. She doesn’t want breakfast, she never feels like it now, but every morning she makes it and eats it because that’s what people do. She goes through the motions, sleepwalking her way through life since he left. She lifts out the toast, drops it onto a plate, reaches for the butter.

  The morning of his funeral an envelope addressed to him slid through the letterbox and landed face up on the hall floor. The sight of his name brought a wash of despair so intense she thought she was literally going to fall apart, to disintegrate into small bloodied chunks of bone and flesh. She sank onto the bottom step of the stairs, clammy and nauseous with grief, hugging her knees with frozen hands, heedless of her crumpling black dress.

  When she eventually managed to open the envelope she found a receipt inside from a holiday company. She looked at it uncomprehendingly, saw their two names, and Rome, and flight times. It meant nothing to her. They’d made no travel plans.

  And then she noticed the departure date, 29 April, and it suddenly made sense. A surprise gift for her birthday, and what would have been their third wedding anniversary. She’d never been to Rome. I’ll take you sometime, he’d promised – and here it was, his final present to her. Heartbreak layered on top of heartbreak.

  The marmalade jar is almost empty. She gets to her feet and crosses the room and scribbles on the blackboard that’s screwed to the wall beside the shelf of cookery books. Floor cleaner is already there, and toothpaste and coffee. Marmalade, she writes, the chalk clacking over the surface like a cockroach.

  As she returns to the table she hears sounds from the room above: the soft bump of footsteps crossing the floor, the rattle of curtains along their pole, a door clicking open. She slots two more slices of bread into the toaster and pushes down the lever.

  Mo moved in with Daphne and Una the day after Finn was buried. She didn’t even phone to say she was on the way, just turned up on the doorstep in the middle of the morning, her face shiny with tears or with rain, someone’s unwanted handbag wedged under her arm, someone else’s battered blue suitcase sitting on the path beside her.

  I thought I might stay here for a while, she said, her voice hard and steady despite her wet face, despite the fact that her only son, her only child, had been lowered the day before into a hole in the ground – and Daphne was too numb, too stiff with grief, to find a way to say no, so she lifted the case and brought it inside, and Mo followed.

  And there the three of them were: his daughter, his mother, his wife, living under the same roof but connected only by their loss of him, broken with misery, stumbling as best they could through the unimaginably deep void he’d left behind.

  And five days later, Mo had moved herself out as abruptly as she’d arrived, again offering no explanation. She simply materialised on the threshold of the sitting room one afternoon, the blue case all packed up again.

  I’ll be off home now, she said. I’ll give a ring, see how you’re doing – and Daphne stopped shovelling ashes from the fireplace and sat back on her heels and regarded the rigid little figure in the doorway. Blue scarf wrapped tightly around her neck, black quilted jacket, burnt-orange sneakers below grey tracksuit bottoms.

  You don’t have to go, she told her – what did it matter who lived where now? – but Mo went anyway.

  For the first few agonising weeks and months Daphne would lie in bed each night and think, How did I get here? How did I end up in this life? She would imagine the days stretching endlessly ahead, each one beginning with a fresh wallop of misery that left her empty and flaccid as a pricked balloon, and she wondered how many more she was expected to endure.

  Time played tricks. An hour would seem never-ending, a month would pass in a blink. She would find herself in a supermarket with no recollection of having travelled there, or sitting in a queue of cars with no clue as to where she was headed. She would stand at crossroads for unknown periods of time, lost in her grief, heedless of the green man that lit up every so often across the street.

  Along with the almost unbearable pain of losing Finn, there was the added anguish of all that had to be done in the aftermath of his death. Closing his bank account, applying for his death certificate, switching bills and health insurance into her name, cancelling his standing orders and his cycling club membership and his magazine subscriptions.

  Tidying up the life he had abandoned, smoothing it over like it had never happened. Each task was like driving another nail into his coffin; each form added insult to injury by forcing her to tick widowed instead of married. How she’d adored being married, being someone’s wife. Now she was nothing, she was nobody’s.

  She didn’t ask for Mo’s help with any of it, and Mo didn’t offer. When they began to meet regularly again, when Daphne finally felt able to reinstate Mo’s weekly invitation to dinner that had been in place while Finn was alive, his name rarely came up. They talked about everything but the man they’d lost.

  In February, ten months after his death, Daphne opened an envelope from the city council and found a cheque for a substantial sum paper-clipped to a brief typewritten note of condolence. It stung as painfully as an unexpected hard slap across her face.

  It wasn’t the amount of the compensation; that hardly registered with her. It was the implication that money, that a number followed by a series of noughts on a cheque, could somehow lessen her sorrow.

  Sorry about one of our lorries killing your husband, it said to her. Buy yourself a new handbag, go on a little cruise, you’ll be grand. She wanted to rip up the cheque and send it back to them, or set fire to it and watch it turn to ash – but it was Mo, brisk, unsentimental Mo, who forbade it.

  Don’t be stupid, she said. Put it in the bank, forget about it, pret
end it’s not there. Some day you’ll be glad of it, or Una will. So to keep the peace a new account was opened and the cheque lodged, and there it sits gathering dust, and Daphne would rather crawl across a mile of broken glass than touch a cent of it.

  The bicycle shop didn’t reopen. In the past year not one of them has gone near it. From time to time Daphne pictures the brand-new bicycles still lined up inside, coated by now with dust no doubt, their shine completely gone. The accessories lying in drawers or hanging on hooks, the helmets and pumps and locks and lights and puncture-repair kits that nobody can buy. The bell above the door that had as much music in it as a twanging rubber band is still and silent now, a ghost herald with no arrivals to announce.

  Their neglect of the premises disconcerts her whenever she thinks of it, scratches at her like rough wool against her skin. They should do something with it, the family business founded by Leo nearly fifty years ago, but she lacks the energy or the will to figure something out. And there’s never a mention of it from Mo, so presumably she feels equally unable to make a decision about it.

  And today is the second of April again, and it is their three hundred and sixty-fifth day without him, and Daphne is trying very hard not to let the memories of a year ago rise up and swamp her. And so far, barely half an hour into her day, she is having no success at all with that.

  The kitchen door opens.

  ‘Morning,’ Daphne says, summoning a smile. ‘Happy birthday.’

  Una shoots her a look she can’t read and mumbles something, pushing her hair from her face as she crosses to the worktop that holds the toaster and the kettle. Wonderful hair she has, the warm sheen of burnished old gold, falling past her shoulders in a glorious tumbling, curling mass. It’s damp: she must have washed it in the shower.

  ‘There’s toast on,’ Daphne says – and as if it heard her, up it pops. Una takes it out without comment and clicks the kettle on, yawning. She opens the fridge, finds the peanut butter.