Chapter 2: Man Proposes, Usually

Emer swooped down on me like a golden eagle on the shorn lamb.

That is such a good image that I’m tempted to let it stand but if this book is to be the honest statement I intend, I owe it to you to give some explanation. In the first place, I hardly fit the description of a shorn lamb. I certainly didn’t feel victimised at the time and, despite all that has happened since I don’t feel like a victim now. I knew a bit about women even if my experience was somewhat skewed.

On reflection, that must be true of every man: we all generalise from the individuals we meet. Even serial seducers like Casanova must have a ‘type’ that they prefer. When I asked Bobby if he knew any nice girls he admitted that he did but avoided them like the plague. Having learned at a very early age not to argue with my mother, I adopted that as my approach to all women. In practice, that meant that I made no advances towards women but waited in the background until they sought me out. Emer did just that in a most calculated and efficient manner.

If I wasn’t a sacrificial lamb, Emer was every inch the golden eagle. I had been working for her for three years before she acted, and in that time I had seen her perhaps a dozen times. She was then and still is, the Chief Executive Officer of a company Forgall Products based in a warehouse on an industrial estate in a Lincolnshire market town. It was Uncle Jim who found me the job driving for them; I had been driving articulated lorries across Europe and as far as Turkey when Mother became ill, and I had to find employment close enough to home to allow me to care for her.

Jim serviced the company’s vans, and he knew that they had problems retaining delivery drivers. I was interviewed by the transport manager and the warehouse man, standing in the loading bay at the back of the building. The transport manager – I never did learn his name – began by telling me the hours and wage rates for the job; he was a pudgy guy in his mid-twenties with a conspicuously high opinion of himself.

“You will not enter this building beyond the loading bay,” he told me next.

The other man, Bert as I found out later, was dressed in a brown lab coat and he intervened at this point to say that I had to be allowed access to a toilet and the only one available was inside the main storage area. The suit pondered that for some time before he graciously agreed that his company should obey the law, but he told me not to abuse the privilege. I was beginning to understand why there was such a high wastage rate amongst drivers. He was offering a pound an hour less than most firms but the location suited my needs, so I was ready to agree to work for them.

“My mother is about to undergo treatment for a serious illness, and I may have to cancel a shift at short notice.”

The transport manager was outraged at the very idea, telling me that his company expected total loyalty from its employees and that the job offer was withdrawn. Bert looked at me, shrugged and escorted me to the gate. Mother was recovering from an operation to remove the malignant growth that was sapping her life force; once she was fit enough, she would be plunged into the horrors of chemotherapy. I shrugged in response to Bert and walked away still unemployed.

It must have been a Wednesday because Bobby was there when I called into the garage to tell Jim the outcome of the interview. He wasn’t training because his team had played a mid-week fixture the day before. Bobby had scored a rare goal with a header from a corner, and he had come to the garage looking for a few mates to help him celebrate. I was nothing loath; the fact is that I was having great difficulty coming to terms with Mum’s illness and I dreaded going home.

We were almost at the pub when my phone rang, and Bert asked me if I could be at the warehouse at four the next morning to take a delivery to Wales.

“He’s still wet behind the ears,” Bert explained about the transport manager, when he assured me that the job offer was genuine. “Most drivers don’t bother to show up and the CEO likes your honesty.”

I didn’t understand any of that, except that I had a job if I turned up twelve hours from then. Bobby wanted me to come in for just the one drink, but I knew that I wouldn’t have stopped at that, so I excused myself and went home. Mum had spent the day in her office clearing out her desk; she would go on working as long as possible, but she was already arranging things for her final departure.

This was the hardest fact for me to deal with. She loves life but she has accepted that there is very little more left to her. She is utterly realistic about her prospects, but I can’t bring myself to accept that the end is inevitable. Even the language we use is different: I talk about curing the cancer, and she will only talk of remission, a temporary halt to the relentless ticking off of her final hours.

Perhaps it would be easier if we had been a really loving mother and son, where I could understand and share her emotions, but she seemed in many ways to be the same cold-hearted bitch sick as she had been before the diagnosis. At the same time, I could sense her vulnerability and the need for human companionship that only I could fulfil. I wasn’t sure I had the emotional or moral strength to support her in her extremity. I had spent too many years hiding my feelings, my hopes and my aspirations from her.

She talked cheerfully that night and I managed to match her quip for quip until I could go early to bed with the excuse of an early start. The following morning, I was at the back of the factory by ten minutes to four. Bert was there and he threw the truck keys to me while he opened the loading bay. I backed up and between us we had the truck packed and ready to go by half-past four.

“I’ll let you in to use the toilet before you go. I should swear you to secrecy but there’s bugger-all to see!”

I was round the Lincoln by-pass before the rush hour and well on my way to mid-Wales when the working day began for most people. I enjoy driving and my journey relaxed me; there was enough to do to stop my mind dwelling on Mother’s illness. The five-tonne truck I was driving was like a toy lorry compared to the articulated rigs I once drove although I soon enough found myself in narrow country lanes where even the five-tonner was a bit of a squeeze.

In the past, I generally collected from and delivered to warehouses with men and handling equipment to take the effort out of loading and unloading. Bert and I had loaded up this morning using only the tools provided by nature; it was easy enough since the boxes we were handling seldom weighed more than five or six kilos. Things were different at the delivery end as well.

The first shop I stopped at was in a side street in a Welsh resort town. The shopkeeper had coned the area in front and an old man came out and directed me where to park. When I went round to the back of the truck, he had been joined by an equally ancient woman. She rode up the lift on the tailgate to inspect the goods.

“Oh dear, these look quite heavy. I don’t really like asking Henry with his back. He’s my toy boy, you know.”

She talked on, barely stopping to take a breath, while I took the boxes into their funny little shop and I put the goods on the lowest and highest shelves while they made a performance out of brewing tea. She is eighty-two and a widow – ‘But still hopeful, dear’ – while he is a stripling of seventy caring for his wife of nearly fifty years but now lost to dementia. The shop was overcrowded with souvenirs; I was familiar with museum shops, but this little shop stocked anything that would encourage a tourist to spend, from kiss-me-quick hats to hand-crafted pieces that could become tomorrow’s antiques.

By the time I left, I was a rather chastened young man. Henry devoted himself to the woman he adored who no longer recognised him; suffering comes in many forms to people of all ages and who are doing their best to handle the consequences – except me, and I resolved then and there to stop feeling sorry for myself. Bledwyn, the shop owner, was a pillar of steel supporting her old friend in his time of trial, although she looked as if you could blow her away with a breath.

I drove away smiling. In all my time delivering for Forgall Products I never went into two shops exactly the same, but they all shared what I can only describe as a common spirit. We served outlets from Cornwall, through Wales and the Lake District into Scotland. All were serving the tourist trade, and they were all staffed by wonderful people. More often than not they were wildly eccentric, wearing outlandish clothes and engaging in serious discussions of magic and divination – I’ve had my fortune told so often that I could probably do a reasonable Tarot reading of my own. Friendly and affectionate themselves, they are frequently astonished when a customer is rude to them.

They were all, without exception, welcoming and grateful to me for doing all the work associated with the delivery. After a day carrying boxes, unpacking and stacking goods in inaccessible places, I sometimes felt that I was the only fit person in Britain. At the end of my first day, I was shown to an attic room by the owner of the last shop I delivered to. Bert had arranged for me to have bed and breakfast there. The bed was comfortable, the breakfast was wonderful, and they insisted on giving me dinner the night before – to thank me for doing the fetching and carrying.

Driving lorries across national borders is a High-Tec business but now I had moved back in time with my trusty sat-nav about the only twenty-first century device on display. If the shops had computer systems, they kept them well hidden from me; you are more likely to find an abacus than an i-phone. Once I became accustomed to my customers, I would carry popular lines with me that I could sell on the doorstep; after my first year in the job, most of the orders were phoned through to me and I passed them to the front office through Bert.

‘You don’t ask us silly questions about order numbers. We just tell you what shelf it was on and you know right away.’

The relationships I built up with the customers were very important to me at that time. Mum was losing ground despite her valiant efforts to conquer the disease; often the treatment would leave her tired and despairing. My contact with the shopkeepers enabled me to keep my perspective. They taught me that it is living that matters; sooner or later we are all going to die but we can choose the way we deal with that reality. ‘Dignity’ was a word often on their lips when they talked about dying.

At home, I was able to accept, at last, that Mum was going to succumb to the disease and we both tried to make the time we had as fruitful as possible. At first, we continued to visit galleries and museums but even when Mum became confined to a wheel chair, we spent all our free time together. Despite what I had said at my interview, there were only a handful of occasions when I cancelled a shift. Going to work became a touchstone for us, the customers as much as Mum and me: while I could turn up for work as usual, things weren’t that awful.

When I did have to pull out of a trip, there was a wave of sympathy embracing us in our trouble. The shopkeepers along the route I was due to travel would phone others on my other routes. When she had recovered, Mum would spend the day on the phone reassuring people she would never meet but who loved her anyway.

We were allowed into the hearts of those people simply because I delivered goods to them; they would ask after Bert since I spoke about him. He was still my only point of contact with Forgall Products. The transport manager who had interviewed me had long gone to be replaced by similar looking young men. Bert let slip that they were faithful followers sent down to win the affections of the CEO. He refused to explain what he meant, claiming that he’d already said too much. I gathered that his lowly position arose from an incident where he had been deemed unfaithful.

I wasn’t much interested in the company, to tell you the truth. They made it clear that I was to stay on the outside and I had enough on my plate with the deliveries and Mum. Looking back, I’m pretty sure that Bert wanted to confide in me but when he clammed up, I shrugged and left him to it; that was the way I had lived my life since the age of twelve. I wouldn’t have shown any interest at all but for two incidents that happened about six months apart.

When Mother died, she had a huge funeral attended by most of the legal profession and all her former clients who were not at that moment doing time. I managed to keep myself in check for most of the day, but I burst into tears when the undertaker gave me the cards that had been attached to the wreaths; many of them were clumsily written, imaginatively spelled and containing mawkish sentiments but they represented a huge and heartfelt effort by her former clients. I understood then for the first time why my Mum had stood in court defying reason to plead for these people.

There was another card that attracted my notice from ‘The management and staff of Forgall Products, in deepest sympathy’. There had been a notice in the paper, of course, but I had taken annual leave just before Mum finally left me, so I was astonished that the company had paid any attention to my troubles. I was sure that Bert wouldn’t have told them; he came to the service bringing with him a wreath from my customers, making sure that I knew he had contributed.

Later that night, when I had gone to bed in the empty house, I had a flash of intuition. I call it that now but, at the time, I remember convincing myself that it was probably indigestion. About six months before the funeral, I had been filling the bottom shelves for a customer in Devon when the CEO of Forgall Products walked in. I was crouched down facing up some bottles when I became aware of very high and narrow heels about a foot from my free hand.

Once I moved my hand out of the danger zone, I carried on, eventually straightening up and making my usual complaint about being too stiff nowadays. I was almost touching a truly striking woman who was giving me an amused glance. Sadie, the shopkeeper, was standing behind her mouthing something at me.

“I’m Emer Monach and you must be the Jack I’ve heard so much about.”

I had seen her before, perhaps five times in all, but only at a distance before this. She had seemed tall then since she was the same height as the men she was with. Now, having started at the floor, I could see that she was petite using the very high heels to compensate for her lack of inches. She was dressed in a pencil skirt with a matching fitted jacket over a cream blouse. Tights I guessed although they could have been hold-up stockings – there were certainly no signs of any support marring the line of the skirt. What I could make out of her figure was sturdy – not thin but certainly not fat.

So far, so ordinary but then my eyes lifted to her face and the magic happened. Taken feature by feature she is not pretty but she is beautiful in the totality. Her skin is the colour a shade darker than ivory – almost like parchment – but it visibly encloses health and vitality. It is a cliché to say that a woman’s skin glows but in Emer it really did; you could sense the warm blood coursing through the veins and capillaries just under the skin.

On that first time I was close to her, she had turned her head to talk to Sadie, so I had a chance to study her profile without my staring bothering her. Her great eagle beak of a nose arrogantly dominated us, although her perfect little ears were almost as compelling. By all aesthetic rules, her nose is much too big, but it is essential to the understanding of her character. Many women would have tried to hide it by bringing their hair forward to frame their faces, but Emer pulled her hair back proclaiming her pride in her most prominent feature.

Once I noticed her hair, I could look at nothing else. At that time, I saw it as red gold but since then I’ve become less certain. In some lights and in some moods, it can be an almost fiery red, but I’ve seen it loose, falling over her face as she sat with Aine when the colour was like ripe wheat. At that first meeting she wore her hair up, pleated and pinned on top of her shapely head. I stood feasting my eyes, inhaling the freshness of her presence, while she spoke to Sadie.

Then she turned, smiled vaguely in my direction and was gone. She had spoken half a dozen words to me, and I don’t think I said anything in reply. Sadie was laughing at me, putting her finger under my chin to close my mouth which she said was hanging open. Sadie weighs about ninety kilos and it was all shaking with amusement at my plight.

So, you see that my dream on the night of the funeral was wish fulfilment really, rather than intuition. She must spend time talking to the shopkeepers we supply so it was likely that we would run into one another at some time. When I mentioned the meeting to Bert, he didn’t think she spent much time at the shops being more involved with our overseas suppliers. Perhaps Sadie was advising her on a new product line.

Three months later I was forced to change my opinion. Ms Monach arrived at a shop I was visiting in the Lake District. It was my final call of the day, and I was chatting with the owner having completed my chores, when she walked in. She beamed at us.

“You have the shop looking lovely,” she began, shaking hands with the owner. “I just happened to be passing and saw our lorry outside, so I decided to look in. Are you happy with our products?”

Her hair today was in two rolls over her ears making me think of a little Swiss girl in a dirndl frock for some reason. I hardly noticed what she was wearing but I thought her nose looked a little less formidable. Then she gathered herself, her nose thrust forward aggressively, and she stooped, her talons piercing me.