Departures by Jennifer Cornell Page B

pushing gently, sometimes catching hold of the swing as it came back to him and clasping her tight around the waist so that she sat suspended for a moment with her feet unable to touch the ground before he let her go and she swung out again towards the sea. Don’t push so high, she’d tell him, and then she’d pump her legs madly and make herself go higher still.
    There were swings at Newcastle, too, but only the frame remained, the seats and chains having long ago disappeared in that mysterious way to which most public facilities seem prone. While my father waited at the bottom of the slide with outstretched arms, I held Nicola’s hand as she slid down to meet him and told Stephen when he asked me that the swings were inside for the winter and if we came again in spring he could play on them then. It was warm for the season and we stayed late, loathe to ring my uncle and get ready to leave. When we got into Belfast on Sunday night it was after ten, though the light in Harry’s parlour was still on. My father could see him seated at his desk and decided to leave him be. By half past the hour we were all in bed.
    When my father found him the next morning Harry was already three days dead, blue-skinned and as stiff and straight as the chair he’d died in. His expression in death was neither peaceful nor disturbed; he’d had a heart attack while replying to his daughter, yet neither of their letters revealed anything that would have brought it on. While Stephen fetched the doctor, who rang the hospital and the police, my father gathered the pages and put them away with Harry’s other papers before the officials arrived. When they got there, the constables took my father’s statement and the doctor took his pulse, checked us all for signs of shock, and sent someone down to find George. Then the medics took Harry away.
    I remember the funeral and the viewing before it as a pathetic affair, dimly lit and poorly attended. Geordie had not bothered to ring his cousin in Australia, having decided, under the circumstances, that the funeral should take place as soon as possible and with the minimum of fuss. Harry had no family left in Belfast to make recriminations or to raise the issue of Eleanor’s will, but Geordie knew the accusations were sure to come as soon as Melanie heard the news, and he had no intention of being taken unprepared. Even before he’d seen the undertaker he’d paid a visit to his solicitor to discover if his share of Harry’s savings had been compromised by the death.
    In a room with mustard walls, plush russet carpeting, ornamental brass fixtures, and casual, sling-back chairs, Harry’s coffin was incidental, its lid propped up behind it against the wall. The four of us arrived in the same black frocks and trousers we had worn when my mother died and had not put on since. Following my father’s example, we each peered briefly into the coffin and moved our lips like his before going on to clasp the cold hands of Harry’s nephew, who sat alone in the front row and accepted ouroffers of sympathy without a word. In the hallway where we waited while they nailed the coffin shut, I watched my father turn to Geordie and begin to speak, but Geordie cut him short and turned away. The solicitor stepped in then, a tall man in an iridescent suit. Something made me leave Stephen with Nicola and cross over, imbued with a sense of purpose I’d seen once on my mother’s face when she’d defended my father against a man who’d pushed him outside a restaurant in Shaftsbury Square. We’d gone out for supper on a wet night when I was still the only child, and after the meal we called a taxi to take us home. The man came out from a bar across the street and stood for a moment swaying in the rain before he came over to us. Orange bastard, the man said gratuitously, and then he’d pushed my father and knocked his glasses and his hat to the ground. My