‘Oh no, none of that.’
He was nonplussed.
‘So what are you going to do?’ he asked.
‘Stay here, as I told your friend.’
‘But not for ever?’
‘Of course not, just tonight.’
‘Then tomorrow night after work … you’ll be home?’
‘Yes indeed, and you’ll be packed.’
‘Anna, don’t be so dramatic.’
‘Absolutely not, calmness itself. Stay there tonight of course, no, for heaven’s sake there’s no need to go immediately. Just tomorrow evening. Right?’
‘Stop this, Anna, I love you, you love me, I’m not lying to you.’
‘And neither am I to you, Joe, about tomorrow night. Truly.’
She hung up.
When he called back ten minutes later, she answered the phone herself.
‘Please don’t be tiresome, Joe. That’s a great word of yours … tiresome. You hate when people press you on things and ask you about things that concern them, tiresome you call it. Maybe I’m learning from you.’
‘We have to talk …’
‘Tomorrow after work. After my work that is, you don’t have any work, do you? We can talk then for a bit like about where I’m to send your mail, and there won’t be any answering machine messages so you’d better set something else up.’
‘But …’
‘I won’t come to the phone again, you’ll have to talk to my father, and you always said he was a nice bloke with nothing to say …’
She went back to the discussion. She saw that her mother and father were wondering about the phone calls.
‘Sorry for the interruptions, I’ve been having a row with Joe Ashe, my boyfriend. It’s very antisocial to bring it into this house, if he rings again I won’t talk to him.’
‘Is it serious, the row?’ her mother asked hopefully.
‘Yes, Mother, you’ll be glad to know it’s fairly serious as rows go. Possibly final. Now let’s see what people should have to eat.’
And as she told them about a very nice woman called Philippa who ran a catering business, Anna Doyle’s mind was far away. Her mind was back in the days when things had been new and exciting and when her life was filled to every corner by the presence of Joe.
It would be hard to fill up all those parts again.
She said that they could ask for sample menus and decide what they wanted. They would write to everyone in very good time, individual letters, personal letters with the invitation, that would mean it was special.
‘It is special, isn’t it? Twenty-five years married?’ She looked from one to the other hoping for reassurance. The cosy claustrophobic sense of family that the Doyles had managed to create around them. To her surprise and regret it didn’t seem to be there tonight. Mother and Father looked uncertain about whether a quarter of a century of marriage had been a good thing. This was the one time in her life that Anna needed some sense that things were permanent, that even if her own world was shifting the rest of civilization was on fairly solid ground.
But maybe she was only reading her own situation into it all, like those poets who believed in the pathetic fallacy, who thought that nature changed to suit their moods, and that skies were grey when they were grey.
‘We’ll make it a marvellous occasion,’ she told her father and mother. ‘It’s going to be even better than your wedding day, because we’re all here to help celebrate it.’
She was rewarded with two smiles and she realized it would at least be a project for the great yawning frighteningly empty summer that lay ahead of her.
2
BRENDAN
BRENDAN DOYLE WENT to the calendar to look up the date that Christy Moore was coming to sing in the town twenty miles away. It was some time next week, and he thought he’d go in to hear him.
He had written it down on the big kitchen calendar the day he had heard it billed on the radio. To his surprise, he realized that today was his birthday. It came as a shock to think it was already eleven o’clock in the morning and he hadn’t realized that it was his birthday. In the olden days he would have known it was his birthday weeks in advance.
‘Only three weeks to Brendan’s birthday,’ his mother would chirrup to anyone who might listen.
He had hated it when he was very young, all the fuss about birthdays. The celebrations. The girls had loved it of course, wearing smart frocks. There were never any outsiders there; Brendan couldn’t remember having a real party, one with other children and crackers and games, just the family all dressed up and crackers and jelly with whipped cream and hundreds and thousands on it. There would be presents from all the others, wrapped properly, with little tags, and birthday cards as well which would all be arranged on the mantelpiece. Then there would be a photograph of The Birthday Boy all on his own, maybe wearing a paper hat. And then one with the rest of the family. These would be kept in the album, and brought out triumphantly when any guests arrived. The first of the birthdays, Brendan, wasn’t he getting so big? And then this was Helen’s birthday, and then Anna’s. Look. And people looked and praised Mother. She was marvellous they said, marvellous to do all that for them, go to so much trouble.
His mother never knew how he hated it. How he had hated the singing, and seeing her clapping her hands and running for the camera during the ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’.
He wished they could just sit down and get on with it instead of all these antics and actions. As if they were all on stage.
And all the secrecy too. Don’t tell Auntie Maureen about the new sofa. Why? We don’t want her to think that it’s new. Why don’t we want her to think that? We just don’t want them saying we put a lot of store by it, that’s all. But it’s gorgeous, isn’t it? Yes, but we don’t want them to say that we think it’s something special, when Auntie Maureen asks about it just say “Oh the sofa, it’s all right’,” as if you weren’t impressed. You know.
Brendan didn’t know, he had never known. They always seemed to be hiding something from somebody. From the neighbours, from people at school, from people in the parish, from Maureen Barry, Mother’s great friend, from Frank Quigley who worked with Father, who was meant to be the greatest friend of the family. And specially from everyone back in Ireland. Don’t tell this to Grannie O’Hagan, and never let a word of that be said in front of Grandpa Doyle.
It was quite simple to live by Mother’s and Father’s rules if you understood that nothing was to be said outside the family.
Brendan thought that there was very little of importance said within the family either.
He remembered his birthday the year that Father had lost his job. There had been huge secrecy at that stage of their lives. Father used to leave the house in the mornings at the usual time and come back again as if things were normal. What was it all for, Brendan had wondered then and wondered still.
And here in Vincent’s farm, the smallholding on the side of a hill where his father had grown up, he felt even more remote from the man than he had done when he lived in Rosemary Drive pretending that he was bright at school, pretending that he was going to get A levels and go to university. When all the time he knew he was going to come back here to this stony place where nothing was expected and nothing claimed to be what it was not.
He had never been Uncle Vincent, even though he was the oldest of Father’s brothers, he was Vincent from the start. A tall stooped man, much lined and weatherbeaten. He never spoke until he had something to speak about. There was no small talk in the small house on the side of the hill, the house where Father had grown up one of six children. They must have been very poor then. Father didn’t speak of it or those times. Vincent didn’t speak of any times. Although a television aerial waved from almost every small farm in the countryside hereabouts, Vincent Doyle saw no need of one. And the radio he had was small and crackly. He listened to the half-past six news every evening, and the farm report that went before it. He sometimes came across some kind of documentary on the Irish
in Australia, or some account of the armies of Napoleon coming to the West of Ireland. Brendan never knew how he tracked these features down. He didn’t buy a daily newspaper nor any guide to look up what was on. And he wasn’t a regular enough listener to know what was being broadcast when.
He wasn’t a hermit, a recluse or an eccentric. Vincent always wore suits. He had never come to terms with a world of jackets and trousers. He bought a new suit every three years, and the current one was moved down a grade, so that one day it would have been the good suit for going to Mass and the day after a new purchase it would have been relegated to a different league. It could be worn when he went to tend the sheep, and even when lifting them in and out of his trailer.
Brendan Doyle had loved this place that strange summer when they had come for the visit. Everyone had been very tense all the way over on the boat and train, and there were so many things to remember. Remember not to talk about sitting up all night on the way to Holyhead. Remember not to talk about the crowds sitting on their luggage or people would know they had gone steerage. Remember not to say that they had waited for ages on a cold platform. There were to be no complaints, it was all to have been fun. That was the message that Mother kept repeating over and over during the endless journey. Father had said almost the opposite, he had told them not to go blowing and boasting to their Uncle Vincent about all the comforts they had in London. Brendan remembered asking a direct question; he had felt slightly sick before he asked it, as if he knew it wasn’t the thing to say.
‘Well – which are we? Are we rich like we’re pretending to Grannie O’Hagan, or are we poor like we’re pretending to Uncle Vincent and Grandpa Doyle?’
There had been a great pause.
Horrified, his parents had looked at each other.
‘Pretend!’ they had cried almost with one voice. There was no pretending, they protested. They had been advising the children not to gabble off things that would irritate their elders or bore them. That was all.
And Brendan remembered the first time he saw the farm. They had spent three days with Grannie O’Hagan in Dublin and then a long tiring train journey. Mother and Father seemed upset by the way things had gone in Dublin. At least the children had behaved properly, there had been no unneccessary blabbering. Brendan remembered looking out the window at the small fields of Ireland. Helen had been in disgrace for some horseplay at the station, the main evil of it was that it had been done in the presence of Grannie O’Hagan. Anna was very quiet and stuck in a book. Mother and Father talked in low voices over and over.
Nothing had prepared him for the sight of the small stone house, and the yard with the bits of broken machinery in it. At the door stood his grandfather, old and stooped, and wearing shabby old clothes, a torn jacket and no collar on his shirt. Beside him was Uncle Vincent, a taller and younger version but wearing a suit that looked as if it were respectable.
‘You’re welcome to your own place,’ Grandpa Doyle had said. ‘This is the land you children came from, it’s a grand thing to have you back from all those red buses and crowds of people to walk your own soil again.’
Grandpa Doyle had been to London once on a visit. Brendan knew that because of the pictures, the one on the wall taken outside Buckingham Palace, and the many in the albums. He couldn’t really remember the visit. Now as he looked at these two men standing in front of the house he felt an odd sense of having come home. Like those children’s stories he used to read when an adventure was coming to an end and they were coming out of the forest. He was afraid to speak in case it would ruin it.
They had stayed a week there that time. Grandpa Doyle had been frail, and hadn’t walked very much further than his front door. But Vincent had taken them all over the place. Sometimes in the old car with its bockety trailer; the trailer had not changed since that first visit. Sometimes Vincent couldn’t be bothered to untackle it from the car even though there might be no need to transport a sheep, and it rattled along comfortingly behind them.
Vincent used to go off to see his sheep twice a day. Sheep had a bad habit of falling over on their backs and lying there, legs heaving in the air; you have to right them, put them the right way up.
Anna had asked was it only Uncle Vincent’s sheep that did this or was it all sheep? She didn’t want to speak about it when she got back to London in case it was just a habit of the Doyles’ sheep. Vincent had given her a funny look but had said quite agreeably that no harm could come from admitting that sheep fell over, it was a fairly common occurrence in the breed, even in England.
Then Vincent would stop and mend walls; sheep were forever crashing through the little stone walls and dislodging bits of them, he explained. Yes, he confirmed to Anna before she had to ask, this too was a general failing in them as a species.
In the town he brought them into a bar with high stools and bought them lemonade. None of them had ever been in a public house before. Helen asked for a pint of stout but didn’t get it. Vincent hadn’t minded. It was the barman who had said she was too young.
Even way back then, Brendan had noticed that Vincent had never bothered to explain to people who they were; he didn’t fuss and introduce them as his brother’s children, explain that they were over here for a week’s visit, that in real life they lived in a lovely leafy suburb of North London called Pinner, and that they played tennis at weekends in the summer. Mother and Father would have managed to tell all that to almost anyone. Vincent just went on the way he always did, talking little, replying slowly and effortlessly when he was asked a question.
Brendan got the feeling that he’d prefer not to be asked too many questions. Sometimes, even on that holiday, he and Vincent had walked miles together with hardly a word exchanged. It was extraordinarily restful.
He hated it when the week was over.
‘Maybe we’ll come back again,’ he had said to Vincent as they left.
‘Maybe.’ Vincent hadn’t sounded sure.
‘Why do you think we might not?’ They were leaning on a gate to the small vegetable area. There were a few drills of potatoes there and easy things like cabbage and carrots and parsnips. Things that wouldn’t kill you looking after them, Vincent had explained.
‘Ah, there was a lot of talk about you all coming back here, but I think it came to nothing. Not after they saw the place.’
Brendan’s heart skipped.
‘Coming back … for more than a holiday do you mean?’
‘Wasn’t that what it was all about?’
‘Was it?’
He had seen his uncle’s eyes looking at him kindly.
‘Yerra, don’t worry yourself, Brendan boy, just live your life the best you can, and then one day you can go off and be where people won’t be getting at you.’
‘When would that day be?’
‘You’ll know when it arrives,’ Vincent had said without taking his eyes away from the few rows of potatoes.
And indeed Brendan had known when the day arrived.
Things changed when they went back home to London after that visit. For one thing Father got his job back, and they didn’t have to pretend any more that he had a job when he hadn’t. And there had been all kinds of terrible rows with Helen. She kept saying that she didn’t want to be left in the house alone. She would interrogate them all each day about what time they were going out and coming back, and even if there seemed to be five minutes of unaccounted-for time, she would arrange to go and meet Brendan when school finished.
He had tried to ask her what it was all about, but she had shrugged and said she just hated being by herself.
Not that there was ever much fear of that in Rosemary Drive. Brendan would have loved some time on his own instead of all the chit-chat at mealtimes, and getting the table ready and discussing what they ate and what they would eat at the next meal. He couldn’t understand why Helen didn’t welcome any chance of peace with open arms.
Perhaps that was why she had gone to be a nun in the end. For peace. Or was it becau
se she still felt the need to be with people, and she thought the numbers were dropping at Rosemary Drive, with Anna moving out to her flat and Brendan a permanent resident in Ireland?
It was strange to have lived for so long with this family, and lived so closely during weeks, months, years of endless conversation and still to know them so little.
Brendan had decided to go back to that stone cottage on the day that his school ran a careers exhibition. There were stands and stalls giving information about careers in computing, in retailing, in the telephone service, in London Transport, in banking, in the armed forces. He wandered disconsolately from one to another.
Grandpa Doyle had died since that family visit when he welcomed them to the soil they came from. They had not gone home for the funeral. It wasn’t really home, Mother had said, and Grandpa would have been the first to have agreed. Uncle Vincent wouldn’t expect it, and there were no neighbours who would think it peculiar and talk poorly of them for not going. There had been a special Mass said for the repose of his soul in their parish church and everyone they knew from the parish sympathized.
The headmaster said that a decision about how to spend the years of one’s life was a very major decision; it wasn’t like choosing what cinema to go to or what football team to support. And suddenly like a vision Brendan realized that he had to get away from this, he had to escape the constant discussions and whether this was the right decision or the wrong one, and how he must tell people he was a management trainee rather than a shopworker or whatever new set of pretences would appear. He knew with the greatest clarity that he had ever possessed that he would go back to Vincent’s place and work there.
Salthill, 26 Rosemary Drive, was not a house that you walked out of without explanations. But Brendan realized that these would be the very last explanations he would ever have to give. He would regard it as an ordeal by fire and water, he would grit his teeth and go through it.
It had been worse than he could ever have imagined. Anna and Helen had wept, and pleaded and begged him not to go away. His mother had wept too and asked what she had done to deserve this; his father had wanted to know whether Vincent had put him up to this.