There were package weekends to Dublin, and they found themselves booked on one. Brian said it could be considered work for him because he and Paula could go and see whatever fringe plays were showing. Paula said she heard there were some new boutiques she wanted to tour, and Brian said he was definitely going to see the Book of Kells, and Paula said she was going to take a train out ten miles down the coast because there was a James Joyce museum there, and then she was going to a singing pub, and perhaps, if pressed, she might stand up and perform.
They were going to go and eat cockles and mussels in restaurants, they would go to the Guinness brewery and drink the real stuff made with Liffey water. There was the house where Oscar Wilde was born, and the one where George Bernard Shaw lived. The more they talked, the more ridiculous it seemed to Brian that he had never been in this city before. And the more Maureen dreaded their return.
“Will it have changed much, do you think?” Paula asked as they were checking in at the airport.
“It’s twenty years since I left. It will have changed utterly,” Maureen said, her voice sounding very Irish as she said the words. She sat in silence on the plane, and the young couple didn’t try to get her to join their chat. She thought of her mother’s voice. Clipped and curt, as it had been over the years on the few occasions she had telephoned. But of course it would be good to see her, and for her to meet her grandson for the first time. Yes, indeed. And was this girl the fiancée. No, nothing so definite. Quite. Quite.
And they would be staying in a hotel to get value from the package deal. Certainly.
And had Maureen any objection to meeting her sisters and brothers after a quarter of a century, almost, or would it be all right to see them?
Maureen had stammered that she didn’t want anything special organized. Just if they happened to be around, she would love to see them all, that is, if they wanted to see her.
“Well, you’ll see them on Sunday lunchtime,” her mother had said.
Apparently after Mass on a Sunday they all still gathered at their mother’s home. There was often a match on a Sunday nearby, and there were always fifteen or twenty in for soup and a drink. It had been a tradition and they all enjoyed it, Maureen’s mother said crisply. Nothing to do with duty or formality, just a family meeting easily without making demands. Someone brought a salad, someone brought cheese, another brought wine, another a few bottles of beer. Only an hour or two, but pleasant. Still, of course Maureen probably had her own ways beyond in London, and everyone must live according to the way they had decided.
Maureen fumed at that. It was so patronizing; she had not decided to be a deserted wife for twenty-two years. It had been decided for her. Her thoughts were confused and unhappy when they landed in Dublin.
The road around the airport was a highway now; it had been a crowded, windy road when she had left. The signs were in kilometers as well as miles, the petrol was sold in liters, there were big new hotels in their own grounds, there were gaps where old buildings had been taken down. The bushes were still green, the letter boxes were green. But the phone boxes had changed and were mainly blue and white.
The city center had changed since she had left Dublin in her flush of love and hope. She felt gray and empty not being able to explain anything of this place, where she had lived half her life. She was as dull to these bright youngsters beside her as she must have been to Brian’s father. The gray stone buildings of her native Dublin made her seem duller than ever.
She sent them off to explore on that Friday; later they would meet at the theater. She wanted to wander alone. She wanted to harden her heart for Sunday lunchtime, when her sisters would look with disapproval at the punkish girl that her son had chosen as his life companion, without any mention of church or chapel to seal it.
She walked down the Liffey quays, where she had run as a schoolgirl, and paused, pleased to see that some of the old secondhand bookshops, with their little outdoor tables for display, were still there. She looked up at the law buildings, and the big dome of the Four Courts, which had always seemed so huge to her but now looked like a properly proportioned building. She even giggled to herself as she passed St. Michan’s Church, where they had gone as schoolgirls to shake hands with the skeletons. Down in the vaults, for some reason never satisfactorily explained, some of the mummified bodies had survived intact. Perhaps she should tell Paula and Brian about this place. With a shock she realized that she did indeed think of them as a couple now.
She arrived at O’Connell Bridge. It was sunset. She looked down the Liffey. It wasn’t the most beautiful city in the world, but it looked well at sunset on its river, as all cities do. It had grace, and perhaps Brian’s father had been right—maybe it was the right size for a city. Not too many to get lost in, not so few that you’d feel suffocated.
She turned away from the red gold on the River Liffey and walked on, almost unthinkingly. She wondered what her life would have been like if she had stayed here. Would she know everyone, as the crowds seemed to do, nodding and waving and greeting one another as they got on and off buses and crossed at busy traffic lights.
Would she have married an Irishman who spent a lot of time at the match or in the pub, like her sister’s husbands seemed to do? They came back home in the evenings, of course, and stayed there for life, unlike her own husband. Would she have had a son as good as Brian, a sense of pride that she had brought him up so well and all on her own?
She hadn’t needed friends and a social life and a big family and a lot of carry-on like that. She had been fine. She swallowed a little. And she would be fine, even when Brian left to go with Paula, which would not be long away now.
She hardly noticed that her steps had taken her to the area where she’d lived. She was now only two streets from her home. She stopped, startled that her journey should have led her here almost accidentally.
Her mother’s house was only a couple of hundred yards away. The house where she had been born, where she came back each day after school, and then from the teachers’ training college, until the day when she told them she had met this marvelous man and was in love. The house where she had refused to finish her training as a teacher, saying she could always take it up again in England if she wanted to.
The house where her mother had told her this marriage would not last and that she was going to wreck her life. The house where she would go on Sunday, with her son raised in a single-parent home and his punk girlfriend, shortly to be his live-in lover. To prove that they had been right.
She walked closer to see the house. No harm could come from looking at it. She supposed it had got shabbier in the years. But no, it looked surprisingly bright, its red brick well pointed as if it had been maintained properly, window boxes neatly kept and brass that shone. The curtains looked smart too. Maureen didn’t know whether to be pleased or sorry.
Again, she felt her feet take her across the road. It was something that was outside her own will that made her climb the six steps and knock on the door.
Her mother answered, seventy now, not fifty, lined but not frail. She wore a smart red cardigan and a red checked shirt. She didn’t look at all surprised to see Maureen.
“Come on in—you must be tired.”
“No, no, not a bit. I think it’s the newness of everything … or the sameness. Seeing everything again. I must have walked miles.”
“Where did you go?” Her mother hadn’t kissed her, exclaimed or shown any emotion other than pleased welcome.
Maureen told her the route, and they talked as friends who hadn’t met for a long time, which was what they seemed to be.
“You’re still on your own?” Maureen looked around.
“So are you all week, I imagine.” Her mother was always dry.
“Yes, I go out to work, of course.”
Her mother nodded. “Yes, well your father provided well for me; I didn’t have to.”
There was a small silence, but it wasn’t hostile.
“And you see th
e family on Sundays—that’s nice.”
“It is nice. It’s very nice, and the odd time during the week too. But in a way I owe you that.”
Her mother was pouring the boiling water into the teapot. Maureen felt the years slip away. It was the same big brown teapot of her youth, or else one exactly similar. Imagine that teapot having survived when so little else had.
“Why do you owe that to me?”
“I was too sharp with you, I laid down the law too much when you went off with that chancer …” She paused as she saw the pain on Maureen’s face. Then she continued again. “No, Maureen, it’s myself I’m being harsh with now, not you. I was far too definite with my predictions and my laying down the law. If things had been fudged and vague I wouldn’t have cut you off from me, lost you forever.”
The teapot was brought to the table. It was the same teapot, surely.
“I had too much pride,” Maureen offered.
“We all have pride; we’re full of pride when we’re young. When you left without a backwards glance I thought, I’ll lose them all that way unless I soften a little. So I did. I didn’t give out about Kathleen’s fellow drinking, or about Dermot not going to Mass anymore. I didn’t say a word about Geraldine’s ‘friend’ who she goes to dancing class with. After you left me I learned my lesson. That’s why they come to me on a Sunday. They think I’m grand nowadays, Maureen; they all have a good word to say for Mam. Dermot put up those window boxes for me, Geraldine’s ‘friend’ digs the garden, Kathleen’s fellow puts a tie on him for two hours a week and comes in here and behaves like a normal human being and Kathleen can’t thank me enough for it.”
Maureen listened, dumbfounded.
“And in a way, child, that’s what you’ll be doing with this Paula one, isn’t it? Pretending.”
“It’s hard,” Maureen said. “Why do we have to do it?”
“Because life is a bargain, I suppose,” said her mother. “Because that is what they all meant about give and take. You give your approval whether you mean it or not, and you take their affection.”
“But you were right about me,” Maureen said. “He didn’t love me, he never intended to stay with me forever.… You were right.”
“He probably did love you at the time, and he did think he would stay. At the time.” Her mother’s voice had never been so gentle.
“But you were right to have tried to stop me. You could see from the outside that it wouldn’t work.”
“Was I right? I lost you for all your adult life. That doesn’t seem such a clever thing to have done. Still, I suppose I mightn’t have kept the others without you. So for that I am always grateful.” She stretched out and touched Maureen’s hand.
“And what should I do about Paula? Pretend I think she’s ideal for Brian?”
“I’m long past telling you what to do.”
“No, really, I want to know.”
“I think then you should go on as you are. Taking no real view one way or another, but letting him know you’ll always love him, whatever he does. I didn’t let you know that.”
“But she’s just dazzling him—she’ll leave him like I was left!” Maureen cried.
“Look at it this way,” said her mother. “She’ll be leaving from a less formal situation than you were. I don’t suppose they’ll be getting married exactly or anything. Just living together. That’s easier to dismantle. I’d encourage that if I were you.”
The sound of church bells for evening devotions rang out as they had rung all the years of Maureen’s childhood. She had thought of them as just one more set of rules. Like school bells, like bells in teachers’ college, like telling you what you should do and where you should be. Tonight they sounded different, a gentle, mellow sound, telling you that there was something there for you if you needed it.
She kissed her mother on the cheek and held her to her for what seemed like a long time because it was an embrace between two women who had never held each other like that before. Then she left the house saying nothing else, and walked with a light step to meet her son and his girlfriend at the theater. And afterwards she would walk through Dublin with them, knowing that this Paula probably did love Brian at the moment, just as Brian’s father had once loved her.
Nora had once worked on a newspaper where they printed a picture of a couple’s golden wedding anniversary with the caption DON’T KNOW WHY THIS MUST GET IN, APPARENTLY HE’S A BIG PARTY SUPPORTER. That particular issue became a collector’s item, heads had rolled and nobody ever wrote down any instruction that could not be printed as it stood.
The next paper she worked for believed wrongly that its editor was a charismatic, and so the front pages were filled with pictures of arm-waving congregations. It was only when the editor was heard to say that the best caption for the twentieth such picture should be GOD—NOT AGAIN that people realized they had misinterpreted his allegiances. But not soon enough to alert those who thought that GOD—NOT AGAIN was exactly the three-word snappy line they needed under the picture and printed it.
So by the time she had made it to a national daily, Nora was only too well aware of the dangers of the wrong caption. She was almost paranoid about scraps of paper with any misleading information on them being left around the place. The others laughed at her. They tried to tell her that she was in the big time now, not in a Mickey Mouse weekly paper. But Nora said that mistakes could happen anywhere, and that if you had lived through the misery of that couple whose golden wedding was destroyed by the reference to their political clout, you too would be careful. If you had been part of the team that dealt with the hurt telephone calls and letters over the seemingly blasphemous caption to a picture of innocent worshippers, then you would regard caution as your watchword.
Nora had other watchwords too. She was uncompromisingly honest. Her weekly expenses could never have been criticized by the harshest of auditors, nor referred to as splendid fiction like so many of other journalists might have been.
Whenever she was sent to cover a rally or demonstration, Nora made a huge and concentrated effort to count the number who turned up rather than accept the word of authorities, who usually said there was a trickle of protest, and the organizers, who said it was a seething multitude.
She would not write glowing pieces about the magical quality of some free cosmetic, she never praised a hotel that gave her a free lunch and hinted at a free weekend. She didn’t butter up those in high places who might have the power to give her a better job, a brighter window to sit at, a bigger byline. Everyone on the paper liked Nora. They accepted her obsession with getting the right caption as a kind of nervous tic, like the way some people had to have an undrunk cup of coffee growing cold on their desk before they could begin to type a story, and others who kept saying, “You know what I mean,” after every sentence.
And as the years went by, men being men said to one another that it was strange Nora hadn’t married, she was quite a nice-looking girl. Not bad at all, they would say with some surprise and shake their heads. Their only criterion for getting married was being nice-looking so if Nora had passed that test wasn’t it odd that she hadn’t gone the distance?
And women being women used to say that Nora kept her private life to herself unless you asked her and if you did ask her she said, like everyone else, that all the good men were long gone and had usually been nailed down by an appalling vixen.
When Nora went home to Chestnut Street, she started mentioning Dan a bit.
Dan was a teacher she’d met when she was doing an educational story. She had gone to his school with a photographer, and Dan had been impressed that Nora had checked the names of those posing for the group photograph herself. She had her notebook out and confirmed their names, left to right, writing everything down.
“I thought the photographer did that,” Dan said.
“On normal markings we do.” The photographer was easygoing and resigned. He explained that in the office, they were all used to Nora. She was a cross to bear but
in all other ways she was normal. Everyone was allowed one obsession.
Dan thought she was delightful, the way she blew her hair out of her eyes and her pencil flew across her notebook in the hieroglyphics of shorthand.
“I didn’t think people still used that,” he said as they walked in easy conversation through the school grounds.
“Only ancient ones like myself do,” Nora confessed. “It’s from the era of belted raincoats, and hold the front page. You wouldn’t remember that.”
“I’m as old as you are,” Dan said, stung.
“I’m nearly forty,” Nora said.
“I’m thirty-six and a half,” said Dan.
It was the real thing. More real than anyone in the office had ever known. Nora began to lose weight and talk to the youngsters about how many calories there were in so-called low-fat yogurt. She took serious advice on hair color and opted for highlights. She examined her clothes critically; she said she didn’t want to be palmed off with useless comforting things like fashion being what you chose to wear, what you felt comfortable in. She said she didn’t give a damn about comfort—she wanted to be stylish and fast. She was certainly reading informative literature about cosmetic surgery, if perhaps falling short of the final commitment. But she said these were desperate times; she was going to meet Dan’s mother and didn’t want to look older than her.
“She could hardly have conceived at the age of two or three,” Nora’s friend Annie said, but Nora took no notice whatsoever of Annie, who had married, unwisely, as it turned out, but at the age of twenty-one and had no need for rejuvenation in the high passion of her courting.
At Dan’s mother’s house Nora made thirty-seven ageist jokes, putting herself down. She mentioned cradle snatching seven times and said she had never really got used to the talkies, and she found more peace in black-and-white movies because Technicolor hurt her eyes. To Dan’s bewildered mother, Nora pretended that she had done her early reporting during the First World War and had cut her teeth on the suffragette movement.