But that summer, it seemed at first that Monica had lost her instinct when it came to her mother. She remembered very clearly the day she came through the front door, felt the flat, dampened air of the house and assumed her mother was out. Doing the altar flowers, perhaps, lighting a candle for somebody, visiting one of the neighbours down the street. Monica let her satchel slide to the floor, chewing the end of her plait, and walked into the sitting room where she was confronted by the sight of her mother stretched out on the good sofa, in the middle of the day, asleep, with her hands crossed over her, her feet on the upholstery. Monica could not have been more astonished if she’d come in and found her serving tea and scones to the Pope himself.
She waited in the doorway a moment longer. She stared at her mother’s sleeping form, as if to be sure that this was her mother, that she was really sleeping, that this wasn’t one of her elaborate jokes, that she wasn’t going to spring up in a moment, shouting, ‘Fooled you, didn’t I?’
Her mother was asleep. At four o’clock in the afternoon. The paper was folded next to her. Her chest rose and fell and her mouth was slightly open, taking small sips of air. When Michael Francis crashed in through the back door a few minutes later, Monica was still standing there. She hushed her brother frantically and they both stood and stared at the unbelievable sight of their mother napping in the middle of the day.
‘Is she dead?’ Michael Francis whispered.
‘Course not,’ Monica snapped in fear. ‘She’s breathing. Look.’
‘Will I go and fetch Mrs Davis?’
They had been told to call on the next-door neighbour if there was ever an emergency. Monica considered this option, her head on one side. Although Michael Francis was ten months older than her, it was generally left to her to make all the decisions. They were in the same class at school; people took them for twins. He was older but she was more responsible. She and her brother had forged this arrangement between themselves and never questioned it.
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘Mammy wouldn’t want us to.’
‘Who’ll make our tea, then?’
Monica scratched her head. ‘I will.’
Michael Francis stood at the sink to scrub the potatoes and Monica did her best to peel and slice them. Michael Francis fidgeted and fretted as he rubbed at the tight, muddied skins.
‘What will we do if she doesn’t wake up?’ he said, his voice low and scared.
‘She will,’ Monica said, pushing her hair out of her eyes.
‘Will we make tea for her as well or just for us?’
‘For her as well.’
‘What will we have with the potatoes?’
Monica had to think. ‘Fried eggs,’ she said decisively, because she knew they had eggs: she’d seen them that morning in the covered dish, and she knew how to make fried eggs. She was sure. She’d seen her mother do it often enough.
‘Fried eggs,’ Michael Francis repeated to himself, under his breath, in a satisfied way. All was right in his world if he knew what he’d be having for tea. He set to scrubbing the potatoes with a renewed vigour but his elbow made contact with the waiting saucepan and it fell to the lino with a clang.
‘Michael Francis!’ Monica hissed.
‘Sorry.’ His eyes, she knew, would be filling with tears. He had, their mother always said, a thin skin. You couldn’t shout at him or he got too upset. Something like a dead bird or a pony with a limp could set him off. A cissy, their father called him sometimes, and said that he needed toughening up. Monica had been obliged, several times, to give what their mother called a piece of her mind to some of the boys in their class; they could be very hard on Michael Francis, who was bookish and, although big for his age, useless at fighting. She sighed and gave him a nudge. ‘It’s all right. I don’t think Mammy—’
From the sitting room they heard a voice. A faint, soft voice. Nothing like their mother’s booming tones. ‘Is that my darlings in there getting the tea on?’
They looked at each other. Michael Francis wiped his face on his jersey sleeve. Then they ran through to the sitting room. Their mother was still lying as she had been but her eyes were open and she was holding out her arms to them. ‘You’re a pet and you’re a pet,’ she said to them. ‘Fancy the two of you making the tea for me. I’d say you’ll need ice cream after this. Will one of you run to the shop and get a block?’
Everything seemed back to normal. They finished making the tea; they ate it; they had their ice cream, cutting slices off the striped block, yellow-brown-pink; their father came back and had his tea. But the next day, after school, she was asleep again. At the weekend their father took them – alone – to the park so that their mother could ‘rest’. Monica scuffed her toe against the ground as she sat on the swing. She eyed her father as he sat on the bench, hidden behind a screen of newspaper. She looked over at Michael Francis, who was flinging a ball into the air and catching it against his chest. She wanted to get up off the swing, cross the grass and say to her father, what’s wrong with Mammy, what’s happening? But her legs wouldn’t carry her, she couldn’t form the words, and even if she could, she wouldn’t have been able to say them to her father, wouldn’t have been able to listen to his answers.
It was her father who told them a few weeks later that their mother was ‘expecting’. She and Michael Francis looked up at him from the rug in front of the fire grate. He seemed taller than ever, waiting there at the edge of the room, his hair standing upright from his head, like the flame on a match. Expecting. Her head was filled with a vision of a railway station, full of people looking down a track to see if their train was arriving yet. An animal, alert, eyes wide, on its hind legs. A person crouched next to a letterbox, waiting for the post. Expecting.
‘You’ll need to help her a great deal in the next few months. Understand?’
They nodded from habit. They knew this was the correct response to being asked if they understood.
‘She’s not to lift a thing. Shopping bags. Buckets of water. Nothing. You must do all that for her. Understand?’
They nodded again, in unison.
‘She’s to rest every day and you mustn’t disturb her.’
‘Yes, Daddy,’ Monica said.
She watched her mother every minute she was with her. She became scared to go to school, not wanting to leave her mother for a moment. If her mother lifted a plate, a cup of tea, her knitting, Monica shut her eyes. She would not see it occur. Something terrible could happen to her mother at any moment. She’d gathered this from eavesdropping on the hushed conversation her mother had with other women over the back wall, outside church. It was dangerous, she’d learned. After all those other times. The doctor had told her never again, it wasn’t worth the risk.
Monica stopped sleeping. She lay awake, threading her fingers into the blanket edge, then out. In, then out, in, then out, until the blanket edge was rucked up around her knuckles. She listened for the sounds of her parents going to bed. She listened out for them scrubbing their teeth in the bathroom, for her mother to climb into bed, for her father to lock the front door. She lay awake after she heard her father start to snore, like an engine struggling uphill. She listened for whatever else she might hear: a late cyclist in the street, the milk van in the early grey dawn, a neighbouring cat yowling at a back door. Whatever it was they were expecting, she wanted to be ready.
She found out what it was by listening in on a conversation between her mother and her aunt Bridie. They were visiting Bridie on a Saturday afternoon; Monica was meant to be minding her cousins in the back garden while her mother and Bridie caught up over a pot of tea. But the cousins were whiny and dull and she found it more interesting to sit beside the kitchen door, in the small space beneath the mangle, hidden from all eyes. Her mother and Bridie had had a long chat about one of their other siblings who was, apparently, ‘in with a bad lot’; they discussed the shocking price of shoes for the children; there was a lot of sighing over something Monica’s mother referred to as ‘o
ne of Robert’s black days’; Bridie told a long story involving a bus to Brighton – Monica wasn’t concentrating at the beginning so couldn’t ascertain the story’s significance. Then Bridie said, in a cosy sort of voice, ‘Now, when’s this baby due again?’
Monica picked at the green paint on Bridie’s skirting-board. She pushed her fingers as far as they would go into the mangle’s rollers until it began to hurt too much. And she listened, she stilled herself with the act of listening. She learnt that her mother had lost babies, many babies. Monica imagined her mother carelessly dropping these infants from a shopping basket, or from her coat pocket, like stray pennies or a loose hairpin. There were murmurs about a baby buried somewhere, without a baptism, but Monica had been unable to hear whether it was a baby of her mother’s or some other woman’s.
She held her mother’s hand very tightly on the way home. She examined her mother’s familiar form carefully, right from her good Sunday-and-visiting shoes, all the way up to the hat on her head. Expecting.
Towel-wrapped, Monica padded carefully over the bare wooden boards into the bedroom. The number of times she’d spiked a splinter into the flesh of her feet, but if Peter even heard mention of the words ‘fitted carpet’, he jammed his hands over his ears. So she had to put up with it.
Monica flicked through the hangers in the wardrobe (triple-doored, walnut-veneered, late Victorian, procured from a probate sale in Gloucester). Dressing was a particular difficulty in this weather. What to wear that was decent yet cool enough? Monica considered a shirtwaister in a crimped fabric, a halter-necked top in orange seersucker, a striped all-in-one with a zip up the middle, before settling on a frilled dress in lawn cotton. One of Peter’s favourites. He said it made her look like a milkmaid. Apparently this was a good thing. They had gone together to a boutique in Oxford to buy these clothes; shopping with a man was not something Monica was used to. She had always gone with her mother or her sister; she wasn’t one for shopping alone, found it hard to make up her mind, could never decide if something suited her or not. So she had taken Gretta or, in later years, Aoife, who, despite dressing like a tramp, was surprisingly good at knowing what looked right on people. Monica wasn’t at all used to the idea of coming out through the curtained door to display yourself to a man waiting in a chair, to elicit his approval before you even knew yourself whether you liked it. Joe had hated shopping, would never have gone with her, even if she’d asked.
Monica pushed the tiny pearl buttons through the frills and into their holes. So many of them and all so small. She’d forgotten that. She faced herself in the dressing-table mirror (art deco, oak, with a rosewood inlay) and pushed her earrings into place (marcasite and ruby, flower design, 1930s). She hadn’t wanted children. She’d known that. She’d told Joe so. Right from the start. But it seemed that he hadn’t believed her, that he’d thought she’d come round, that she’d change her mind. She’d told Peter, too, and he had said, fine, don’t fancy doing it all again anyway. Peter came with a ready-made family, with spare children, she’d hoped she might slot into their lives almost as if they were her own. It had seemed perfect, really, when she’d thought about it: children without having to give birth to them.
She hadn’t ever wanted children and yet she had. She had and she did.
She pulled the brush (enamel-backed, silver-handled, initialled ‘H’, another probate sale) through her hair, again and again. A hundred strokes a day, her mother had always decreed. Keeps it healthy.
‘Careful’ was the word she used. Monica was careful with herself. She had learnt to blank out what she didn’t like to see; there was a trick she had perfected, a slight narrowing of the eyes so that the lashes rendered the scene soft, furred at the edges, an ability to slide her pupils sideways should anything untoward come her way. She had a problem, she’d realised recently, with children of about three or four.
It wasn’t a baby Monica wanted. It was a child. She had no desire for those cocooned beings in blankets, terrifying in their fragility, insistent in their demands, so new as to be still redolent of bodily fluids, of milk and blood, all the gore and effort and violence of birth. No. She couldn’t have done it, couldn’t have gone through what her mother had with Aoife.
Monica liked Michael Francis’s youngest, Vita. Not the boy, who looked too much like his mother – that rather moony forehead. Vita was a real Riordan; Gretta was always saying how she was the spit of Aoife at the same age. ‘But mercifully without all the weirdness,’ Monica had once added, and her mother had laughed and said, ‘True enough.’ The last time Monica had seen her, Vita had taken her hand and shown her a doll’s house. Tiny rooms, precisely arranged, books with real pages lined up on the shelves, a cook preparing a painted ham in the kitchen, a dog curled up on a minuscule hearth rug before a crackling polythene fire. Monica had thought then, as she pressed her eye to the window with its own flowered curtains, that she would have liked a little girl with a doll’s house, a girl with hairslides and red T-bar shoes, like Vita’s. Monica had seen a charming miniature sideboard in the window of a toyshop and had gone in and bought it and sent it to Vita and she’d received a crayoned card by return. Claire was good about that sort of thing; Monica appreciated a thank-you letter. Who wouldn’t?
It did no good dwelling on these things. There would be no children. It had been her decision and it was the right one, ultimately. Monica was sure of that. Earrings in, hair done, lipstick applied, but not too much as Peter didn’t like the taste of it, Monica stood up from her dressing-stool, ready to face the evening.
By the time Peter came in – in a pair of filthy overalls, reeking to high heaven of white spirit – she had the table laid with a white linen cloth, candles lit, the silver salver filled with shelled almonds, just as he liked.
‘Darling,’ she murmured, as he came through the kitchen door and almost went to kiss him but remembered her frock in time, ‘what have you been doing?’
‘I had a brilliant idea.’ Peter tossed a handful of nuts into his mouth. ‘Remember that pine table I told you I’d got hold of last week? Well, I suddenly thought in the night . . .’ Peter continued to talk. Monica watched his mouth moving, eyed the oil stains on his overalls, wondered whether they’d got through to the clothes underneath, asked herself how soon she could request that he take off the overalls so that she could check, noticed his black-rimmed fingernails sifting through her nuts. He was still talking about how he and his helper had set about the table with some metal chains to give it ‘that worn-in patina’ that people were starting to go crazy for. Monica thought that she had to say about the cat soon, otherwise it would seem strange. She had to tell him. She had to get it out.
‘Peter,’ she interrupted.
‘. . . don’t know why I’d never thought of it before. Buy new stuff or recent stuff and then just duff it up a bit. No one will know the difference. It’s genius.’ He seized her round the waist, his overalls pressing up against her tiny pearl buttons, like rows of frozen tears. ‘Your husband is a genius.’
‘Darling—’
From the hall, the phone rang again. Peter released her and made as if to go and answer it.
‘Leave it,’ she said, and she was, inexplicably and suddenly, crying, the tears coming from nowhere, spilling down her cheeks, dripping on to the high collar of her dress. ‘Peter,’ she sobbed. ‘Peter, listen—’
He was there right away, cupping her face in his palms. ‘What’s the matter? What happened?’
The phone was still ringing. Who on earth was plaguing her like this? Why wouldn’t they go away and why couldn’t she stop crying today?
‘What’s the matter?’ Peter said again.
Monica found she was about to say: Aoife came, Aoife saw. The words were ready in her mouth: it would have been almost three.
But she managed not to. She managed to stop them, to swallow them down, she managed to change them into: ‘The cat died.’ She got these words out instead; she managed to say them to her husband, to the fat
her of the children who had loved the cat.
The phone rang again while they were having dinner: a rather successful casserole Monica had made. She’d got a new recipe from a magazine, which said to add dried apricots. She didn’t normally like sweet things in savoury dishes but this had come off quite well.
Peter went to answer the phone. She poured herself a touch more wine, the red liquid glugging throatily from the bottle. She tore a crust off the bread and ate a mouthful of the soft innards. She had that washed, tremulous feeling you get after a bout of crying. Like a London street after the cleaners had been down it; dark, wetted, cleansed.
Suddenly Peter was back in the room, standing beside her chair. She turned in her seat to look up at him.
‘Monica . . .’ he began, laying a hand on her shoulder.
She didn’t like that voice; she didn’t like his grave face. ‘What?’ she said, flinching away from his touch. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s your brother on the phone.’
She continued to stare at her husband. ‘What’s happened?’
‘You’d better talk to him.’
Monica sat for a moment, then darted out of her seat. Halfway across the room, she was aware of the floorboards rippling and undulating beneath her shoes, felt herself to be on the verge of collapse. She had suddenly realised why the day had been odd, why she’d been on the brink of tears, why the air around her had felt charged, frayed. She knew. She knew what Michael Francis was about to say. She knew what it was but she didn’t want to hear it. Something had happened to Aoife. A car accident, a drowning, an overdose, a murder, a horrible illness. Her brother was ringing to tell her that their sister was dead.