‘Well, now isn’t that grand,’ I’d say, when you waylaid me in the kitchen later that evening.
‘This is the best one ever,’ you’d beam.
And you were right, each year it was. And each year Noreen would not disappoint you and would squeal with laughter, opening her jar and looking inside to see what coin she had. And when you moved away, you never forgot her. It became as much of a pastime for you as for Noreen – the jars and the hunting down of new and different coins especially as you could get your hands on all kinds of interesting foreign ones by then. There was no one like you in her eyes at those moments when you produced some unusual specimen. I often felt my halo slip a little when she hugged you.
When she died, she left us her legacy of almost one hundred and fifty jars. When alive she only ever travelled with her three favourites: an old jam jar her mother had given her when she was five; a jar engraved with her name that Sadie had given her on her fiftieth birthday and then finally that one that you and Rosaleen gave her at your wedding. It was a beauty, I have to say: a photo of the three of you on the front of it. You and Rosaleen on either side of her taken on the settee at home in the front room when you got engaged. It was full to the brim of dimes and quarters. You must’ve been saving them for years. And to give it to her at the wedding, that was a stroke of genius. There it sat awaiting her arrival at her place at the top table. We all stood back to watch her reaction. Even the pair of you had slipped in to see it. She didn’t disappoint and hugged you both until you had to disentangle yourselves in order to go back out to make your official entrance.
Of course, we lived in fear of those precious jars breaking. Sadie worried constantly about them and therefore so did I. We were like parents tormented by the loss of a child’s favourite toy, the one they had to have to go to sleep at night. I remember thinking that exact thing when years later, on a visit home from the States, young Adam, who was possibly no more than three at the time, lost his toy duck, ‘Ducky’, a soft teddy yoke, on a shopping trip to Dublin. Will you ever forget it?
‘They rang everywhere they’d been, Maurice,’ Sadie told me when I came in later that evening. ‘But no one had sight nor sound of it. Kevin had to go back up to every shop until he found it down the side of one of those kiddie rides in the shopping centre, you know, the big one on Stephen’s Green. It was like they’d won the lotto, when Rosaleen saw him come in with it. My goodness, I could hardly take the stress of it,’ Sadie said, holding a hand to her heart.
After that Rosaleen scanned the Internet to find an exact replica for fear it might happen again. She never needed it in the end but says now she’ll keep it and give it to Adam when he has his first baby. Well, Sadie thought that was just a lovely idea. But then again there was very little Rosaleen could do that Sadie didn’t approve of. You don’t hear of that much now do you? Mothers and daughters-in-law getting on like that.
In the end we bought a case for Noreen’s three special jars. There they sat, safely enclosed in bubble wrap, ready for any journey. Noreen would carry that case proudly across the car park to where I waited to bring her home for the weekend, with Sadie following on behind with life’s actual essentials, that Sadie, not Noreen, had packed. She was a ticket. Her own woman, as they say. She pretty much ruled our lives, but truthfully her burden was light.
Noreen died in 2007, not long after the incident in the hotel. She was seventy. Fell on her way to her breakfast with the carer by her side, the one she liked the best, Susan was it? Collapsed into the woman’s arms. Blood clot in the brain. The loss hit your mam hard. She became lost in a silence I hadn’t witnessed since Molly had died. It was months before she smiled properly again or was able to laugh about the things Noreen got up to.
You’ll remember it was a small ceremony, her funeral. Just us, you and Rosaleen standing each side of your mam, holding her hand, a few neighbours and some of the people who looked after Noreen from the home, and of course Jenny and May returned from England. We brought her home to Annamoe to be buried with her parents. I think Sadie found that bit the hardest, being parted from them all. At first we made the trip to their grave every second weekend and then it lessened as time went on and we got older. I know Sadie did her best for her all through her life, but I’m not sure she agreed with me on that. She was so self-contained that sometimes I think I missed the full extent of the hurt and guilt. I did my best to be on guard for it. But having spent half my life distracted by what was outside – my deals, my empire – I often forgot to see what lay inside and how precious it was.
Chapter Five
9.20 p.m.
Fourth Toast: to you, Kevin
Jefferson’s Presidential Select
You’ve always been good at sending me the rare whiskies. On my birthday, I’ve been assured of an unusual beauty waiting for me on the kitchen table when I get in. When she was around, Sadie would stand there all proud, like she’d flown it over the Atlantic herself.
‘Look what’s arrived,’ she’d say. Always that. Her eyes dancing with joy – her smile as bright and warm as a day for foaling.
She’d sit and watch me unpack it. And then ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’, once the wooden box was opened. Running her fingers up and down the bottle, over the label, her hands lingering on the silky material covering the plastic casing. She’d take it between her fingertips and rub it gently with her thumb. There was that one where the material was deep orange, you might remember it yourself.
‘Isn’t it lush, Maurice?’ she’d said. ‘You could bite into that and almost suck the goodness out.’ Sometimes I wondered what was going on in my wife’s head. Can’t remember which bottle it belonged to. She kept all of them, the boxes, would you believe? Piled up in the back of the wardrobe, apparently. I never knew until I came across them after she’d died. I sat on the bed the morning of their discovery, with the door open for a while, just staring. Fifteen in all. All that pride packed away behind her coats. Days and weeks it took me, to decide how to keep hold of what those boxes meant to Sadie. Ladders. That’s what I thought in the end – that they could make the nicest little steps for Adam or Caitríona. Up to those big bunk beds of theirs. So I took them out; sat on the old footstool, the one Sadie used to put her feet up on while she watched her soaps, do you remember it? An old wooden packing box that a spare part for the tractor came in one time.
‘Are you using that?’ she had asked, having come into the shed one day with a letter that had arrived for me.
‘That?’ I said, pointing at the wooden crate. ‘I was going to break it up for the fire.’
‘I’ll take it. I have a bit of old carpet that’ll do just the job to cover it.’
‘For what?’
‘A footstool. The price of them is just ridiculous over in Duncashel. No, this will do nicely.’
Forty years we’ve had that footstool. Still perfect. The carpet is a blue flower affair, offcuts from your bedroom. So I sat there on it, the night I cleared the wardrobe. Each box I took out I spent time over, trying to remember when you’d sent them. When I opened the box where the orange silk had been, I could see it was gone. Stripped of its lush lining. The inner plastic laid bare like a chicken picked clean. I couldn’t figure it out. I just sat looking at it, turning the box over as if the very act might give me a clue as to why Sadie had done it. And then it occurred to me, I’d seen that orange material somewhere different. But it took me a while to find it in my memory. In the end I only had to turn my head and lay a hand to the dressing table and there it was. A purse in which she held her hair pins. That’s what she’d made – something practical and something where she could touch the lush softness every night. I’ve kept it. Saved it from the storage boxes. It’s with me now, in my bulging pockets alongside my father’s pipe. If anyone were to frisk me now they’d wonder what in the blazes I was at.