“Marion, you’re going to have to call me Ronnie,” she said firmly. “I won’t let anyone in this restaurant realize that a grown-up, sophisticated woman like you was once my pupil.”
Marion beamed with pleasure. The meal got off to a good start. They talked about the town, the restaurant, the fact that more women ate out alone, the nonsense of having a full menu in English and then “café” instead of “coffee.” They talked about making your own wine, growing your own tomatoes, a film that had won awards for no reason, a by-election that had been a surprise. They talked about Marion’s job; she was a teacher, apparently.
“Do you teach dancing?” asked Ronnie. Really, this must be the reason the nice, bright girl had sought her out. Either she wanted to get some advice about where else to teach, or she wanted to compare notes about what it was like.
“You can’t be serious?” said Marion, startled.
“Well, why not?” said Ronnie. “I mean, I taught dancing for years—it’s not like being a lavatory cleaner or an astronaut, it’s a job a lot of people do.”
“I teach in a primary school,” Marion said. “I’ve been there two years now. We have a half-term—that’s why I’m away at the moment. But you can’t have thought for a moment that I’d have been able to teach dancing … me … were you joking?”
Ronnie was a bit confused. “Well, you said on the phone that you remembered and liked the dancing classes, and that you wanted to thank me.… I sort of had the idea that maybe you’d followed in my footsteps or something.”
Marion looked at her levelly.
“Miss Ranger, Ronnie, I mean, I’m sixteen stone weight. I weigh two hundred and twenty-four pounds with nothing on. That would be some dancer.”
“You don’t look it, but I don’t see that it would have made all that much difference, anyway. Dancing teachers don’t have to weigh in like boxers.”
Marion laughed. “I don’t look it because I wear tents. And I’m sitting down, but the reason I wanted to meet you and thank you was actually to do with my weight. You see, when the dancing classes started, I couldn’t bear to join them. Sister Brigid said that it would be six pounds a term for the course …”
“She only gave me three pounds a pupil,” spluttered Ronnie.
“Oh, the balance probably went to the church building fund,” said Marion. “Anyway, my father, who thought I must have everything, insisted. I remember the first day dreading it. I was so fat and ungainly, and even drill classes were a horror, gym was a nightmare, and I thought that dancing would be the worst of all.”
Ronnie looked at this calm girl sitting in front of her, but then we were all confused when we were kids.
“So, on the first day of the class I pretended to be ill, and I hid in the cloakroom until the lesson was over, and then I just came home and pretended I’d been. My father was so interested in it all and kept asking me what we had learned. I felt such a shit, thinking of him wasting his hard-earned six pounds on nothing, that the next day I determined to go. We were all lined up and you were teaching us the steps of the samba. I remember it vividly the way you rocked backwards and forwards and the whole group were doing it soon, and then the bit I dreaded came where we had to pick partners and learn to do it as a couple. I knew nobody would ask me, and I’d already worked out that there was an uneven number so I knew I’d be the one left out. But before we actually got into twos, you came over and took my hand as your partner and the music started again. You kept shouting over the music, ‘Not so stiff, relax, let your bodies move, not just your legs, for God’s sake.’ They were all a bit stilted like puppets, and as you and I were dancing, we went past other couples and you gave them instructions. All the time you and I were dancing it perfectly. You asked me my name. Then when some of the others were still getting it wrong, you said, ‘Let yourself go, girl, for heaven’s sake—do it naturally with some rhythm like Marion and I are doing it.’ For the first time in my whole life I was there not looking pathetic and foolish. Nobody in the room thought you were pitying me—you had picked me before I was the last one left out.
“Miss Ranger, you have no idea how important that was. And it didn’t end there—the next day and the next and the next. You sort of automatically accepted that I was your partner and sometimes when steps were difficult … like that side bit in the tango, you would say, ‘Marion, for heaven’s sake, you go over that side and show one lot, and I’ll try and drum it into this lot here.’
“And amazingly everyone accepted that I was a good dancer and they used to ask me to show them the steps in the cloakroom and when we had school dances at the end of term … no boys, of course, just ourselves; the music was heathen enough for the nuns without having real live men in the place. But at these dances, people were always asking me to dance with them; I couldn’t accept all the girls who wanted to dance with me. And I can actually date all the growing up I did from that point. I used to hide, I used to get red over nothing. Whenever we were reading in class and someone would come across the word fat I would be scarlet thinking they were all looking at me. Then I used to dread hearing about Falstaff, or about Caesar saying, ‘Let me have men about me that are fat … yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look.’ I thought the whole class was thinking about me. You really did a lot, so I just thought I’d tell you.”
Ronnie looked at her carefully. Yes, Marion had a chubby face, she had more than one chin when she laughed, her hands on the table were round and plump rather than long and tapering. Beneath the folds of that caftan there could well be rolls of flesh. But you’d have to be in a pretty weight-hunting mood to think, ‘This is a fatso.’ She looked so calm, Ronnie thought for the twentieth time; yes, that was definitely the word that described her. Could she really have undergone all these horrors, and did Ronnie really save her from them, or was it some romanticized tale to describe leaving the normal tortures of adolescence?
As if Marion had read her mind, she said, “You probably think I’m exaggerating all this, and that all convent schoolgirls were wretched and miserable, but it’s not like that. Fat girls were rubbish at school; the others may have been insecure too but they took it out on the fat ones. There were only two other fat girls in the school. I can remember their names to this day—one of them was in the dancing class but she was a very sulky girl anyway, and she had a best friend, so the two of them just giggled and didn’t really learn, and the others laughed at her attempts to dance when you got us all to do the basic steps of a slow waltz. Nobody, no one person, laughed at me, because you said, ‘Right, Marion, off you go; watch her feet, everybody.’ And they did—they watched my feet with something like respect for the first time in my life.”
Ronnie didn’t know what to say. Eventually she said, “I don’t know whether this will make you feel better or worse, but I just don’t remember you. I suppose that means you can’t have seemed fat and pathetic to me. I’m not very kind, you know; I couldn’t have been doing it out of pity. I probably just found you, the one kid who had a sense of rhythm and used you to help me. You shouldn’t really thank me for being kind, because I don’t remember being kind. It’s not in my nature.”
“I know,” said Marion frankly. “You weren’t very kind or interested in us, really. You weren’t like Sister Paul, who always went out of her way to be nice to the less fortunate ones. If you had raging acne or came from a very poor family or were fat, Sister Paul took you under her Christian charity wing. It was patronizing and embarrassing beyond belief. But you were quite indifferent, and a bit hard—that’s what made me think, I really might look normal to you, and that’s what made all the difference.”
Indifferent, and a bit hard. A tough, self-interested, rather sour young woman. That’s what I was then, that’s what I am now, Ronnie thought. No wonder Gerry expects me to be able to take things the way they are. He probably assumes that when my self-interest takes me elsewhere I’ll move off from him, and that he is entitled to act the same way. Even this grateful schoolgirl saw what I
was all those years ago.
“How did you know a friend of Gerry’s?” Ronnie asked suddenly.
“It’s James, you know—he’s a junior in Gerry’s office. He’s often spoken about him. James invited me here for the few days, actually. He and I have known each other for about a year and he was thinking that we might get engaged soon.”
“And would you like that?” asked Ronnie.
“Yes and no. I’ve seen so many people’s marriages break up, I don’t want to rush into anything just to say, ‘I’m married.’ When I was sixteen I used to think that it would be lovely to be married; you would have one up on your friends, and that they would all say to each other, ‘Imagine that Marion O’Rourke is married!’ I don’t think like that anymore. I mean it’s committing yourself to one person and one way of life; you’ve got to be pretty sure. James says we can wait a bit—he just wants us to be respectable in front of my father and doesn’t give a damn if we live together. Nobody in that office is too excited about relationships; hardly anyone has a conventional marriage.”
“No, that’s right,” said Ronnie grimly.
“So, I come here for the odd weekend and he comes to see me, and in the meantime he has his work and I have mine, and if I could get a nice teaching job here, I’d come here, but I think that it’s foolish just to go in and live with someone and expect everything to be marvelous, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes,” said Ronnie.
“I mean, you still teach dancing and everything, don’t you, Miss Ranger … Ronnie? It would be a crime if you weren’t teaching. Think of all the good you’ve done everybody all along the way.”
And slowly and sadly Ronnie tried to think of all the good that she had done for everybody along the way while Marion’s calm, round face looked at her pleasantly and encouragingly.
He was her only son and she knew that nobody would be good enough for him. Not if one of the royal family were converted and the marriage took place in St. Peter’s in Rome. Yet she wanted so much for him to be happy. He had been her whole life. For twenty-two years, since he was a little six-month bundle in her arms and her husband had come in that evening with stars in his eyes and said he was leaving home.
Maureen had been too proud to go back home to Chestnut Street, back to Dublin to the family and friends who would have supported her, sympathized, clucked at the faithlessness of men. There would have been a life, all right, a granny, aunts, uncles, cousins for the baby, Brian. But Maureen had rejected it. Her pride would not let her take the I-told-you-so’s, spoken or just hanging in the air. They had warned her about the handsome man she had loved so instantly and passionately. She had refused to hear a word against him. She had flashed the engagement ring at them triumphantly. Now, they had been wrong, hadn’t they? He did want to marry her and honor her until death did them part. Or, as her mother said caustically, until something marginally more interesting turned up.
Something marginally more interesting had turned up when Brian was six months old. The handsome husband had left. But Maureen knew with grim pleasure that he hadn’t stayed long in that nest either. Long enough to father a daughter. After that there were no more children.
He had been an exemplary father, the handsome bounder, he had paid the maintenance, had sent birthday and Christmas presents, had sent postcards and letters, and turned up four times a year for pleasant, cordial visits.
“There’s no way I can ever be a father to you, Brian,” he had said. “I gave up that right when I abandoned you as a baby. But I would like to be your friend whenever you need me.”
He spoke of Maureen with admiration and distant affection as if she had been a faraway cousin, he always praised her, so that she could never, with any sense of fair play, rail against him. She had long stopped loving him, and his compliments only made her smile. A bitter smile, remembering how much she had believed them in the old days, not realizing them to be part of the easy charm that was his stock in trade.
“You should go back to Dublin,” he told his son many a time.
“Why?” Brian wanted to know, not unreasonably. He knew it was his mother’s hometown, yet they never visited it. Relatives rarely came to see them from that side of the sea.
“It’s a great city,” Brian’s father explained, his handsome face lighting up with the good memories. “I’ve been back a few times for work. It’s got a good feel about it, sort of citylike in some ways, with all those huge buildings and bridges over the river, but still it’s like a small town too; you keep meeting people you met yesterday. You’d like it, even as a Londoner I liked it.”
Maureen hated the ease that this man could show about her own city. She had made herself an exile because she couldn’t face their pity and their protective concern, not even for her father’s funeral. But he who had caused it all went back lightly and saw only its good, remembering none of the false promise of the time.
Brian had grown handsome like his father, but she liked to think that he had grown caring and sensible too, qualities he must have inherited from her. He had known that money was always tight, that his mother had worked in a chemist’s selling cosmetics not because she loved this but because it paid the mortgage on their house. Brian knew that there wouldn’t be holidays in Spain like many of his school friends had, nor expensive leather jackets, and not even the mention of a motorbike.
But he did have a bed-sitting room of his own, where his friends were always welcome, and when he began to go out with girls, they too were warmly received at the house. His mother didn’t ask were they Catholics and was it serious. As mothers went, Brian thought, he had been very lucky in his. She was quite glamorous-looking, only twenty years older than he was, nice red-brown hair and freckles. What his father called a Dublin face. He wished his mother had more friends, men friends, even. She couldn’t be totally past all that sort of thing in her early forties. Not if you were to believe all you read these days.
And now Brian was in love, really and truly in love … this time with Paula. He couldn’t believe that she loved him too. She was so beautiful and so sought after. She was playing the lead in the small pub theater where Brian worked as an administrator. People were flocking to see her in this new play. Even the critics from national papers had come to see it. The wall of the pub had a glass case with all the reviews. One review had talked about Paula as a future star and had congratulated Brian by name for his discovery. Brian had a dozen copies of that paper; he carried them everywhere. To have his name and Paula’s together in print. To have himself congratulated on discovering her, even though it was not strictly true, was heady stuff.
Brian had a feeling that his mother didn’t like Paula.
Nothing had been said, nothing ever would have been said. But he knew his mother well enough to sense a freeze. He couldn’t think why. Paula was so polite and courteous every time he brought her home. It wasn’t that she was an actress; his mother had met and coped with many actress girlfriends before. It hadn’t anything to do with his staying over nights in Paula’s place, because since he had been eighteen she had told him he was a grown-up and must consider himself a free agent.
He wished that his mother would settle down to a girlie conversation with Paula. He would leave them alone a bit, and perhaps a friendship would develop.
Paula and Maureen sat at the kitchen table. Brian had made an excuse and left them for an hour.
Paula looked at the attractive woman with the red-brown hair and freckles on her nose. Why had she never married again? It wasn’t that she was a religious maniac or anything—she seemed quite normal, nicely dressed too, and well groomed. Of course, she worked in a place where she could get free samples and everything. She was perfectly pleasant, but Paula knew that Maureen didn’t want her for Brian.
Maureen looked at the striking girl with the jet-black hair pulled in a spiky frame around the pointed white face. She was a modern beauty, small, graceful and with a confidence that Maureen envied even from a generation away. And she was going
to have Brian.
They fought for subjects that would not make them fall into roles. Paula tried not to be the love object and Maureen tried hard not to be the mother watching the only son leave the nest. They did all they could to skirt around it.
Paula talked of her family, who lived in the East End and who all thought it was highly uncertain to be an actress. They’d have liked to see her in a small dress shop, where she could move upwards and become the manageress. Still, they thought it was much more steady, Paula ventured cautiously, now that she had got herself an Irish bloke who had a job in administration. Sounded very safe.
“Do you think of Brian as Irish?” Maureen asked with interest. Her son had never been in her native land.
“Well, of course I do—that’s where you’re from, and his father hasn’t been much part of his life.”
“We don’t go back to Dublin. We think of ourselves as Londoners, I suppose,” Maureen said slowly.
“Wouldn’t you like to go to Dublin?” Paula asked. She thought she was on safe ground here; she wasn’t prepared for the look of anxiety and pain on the older woman’s face.
“Too many ghosts, I suppose, too many explanations,” Maureen said.
“Like do they not know that you and Brian’s dad split up?” Paula asked, bewildered.
“They know but they don’t talk about it. If we went back, then I suppose we’d have to talk about it.”
“Well, the longer you leave it, the harder it’s going to be.” Paula was cheerful, then suddenly a thought struck her. “Hey, why don’t we all go together? Then I’d take the spotlight off you—they’d all be so shocked at me, they’d have no time to think of you and divorces a hundred years ago.”
With a sudden shock of recognition Maureen saw in this girl some quality she had seen all those years ago in the man she married. A quick enthusiasm that just dismissed all other difficulties. It would be impossible to refuse anything to Paula, as it had been impossible for her to refuse that bright, cheerful man all those years ago. Brian would refuse her nothing. She would break Brian’s heart.