In fact, she was so used to being square and dull-looking she was quite unaware that she had changed and had begun to look very attractive indeed.
The men who came to stay in Ryan’s Commercial Hotel noticed, though. Maura had many an occasion to raise her voice sharply and speak in clear firm tones when men asked for an extra blanket, or complained of some imaginary fault in their rooms, just in order to give her a squeeze.
By the time she was eighteen years old, Mrs Ryan suggested to her husband that they put her behind the bar. She’d be able to attract custom. To their surprise, Maura refused. She’d prefer to continue the work she was doing, she had no head for figures. She would need a lot of smart clothes if she was to be in the public eye. She would be happier making beds and helping in the kitchen.
‘At least, wait on the tables,’ Mrs Ryan asked. But no, if her work was satisfactory she would prefer to keep in the background.
Breda Ryan shrugged. They had tried to better her, a girl from the cottages, poor Paudie Brennan’s child, and yet she wouldn’t seize the opportunity. Mrs Ryan had always thought that if the whole wealth of the world was taken back and divided out equally, giving the same amount to each person, you’d find in five years that the same people would end up having money and power and the same people would end up shiftless and hopeless. In a changing world, she found this view very comforting.
Maura didn’t want to change because her life suited her just the way it was. She had three square meals a day. She could even choose what she wanted to eat in a hotel, which she mightn’t have been able to do in a private house. She had the excuse which she could give her mother and father that the hotel needed her night and day. As a barmaid or waitress she might be expected to live out. And she wanted nothing to interfere with her savings and her plans.
Whenever she took the children she minded for walks she would always go the same way, past the places that she would buy when she had the money. There was the little gate lodge to The Glen. It was totally disused. People had lived there once, but now the ivy grew in the windows. That would be her first choice. Then there was the little house near where Miss Ross lived. It was painted a wishy-washy grey, but if Maura had it she would paint it pink and have window boxes full of red geraniums on each side of the hall door.
There wasn’t much time for talking to friends these days. Not if you had to save as hard as Maura did. And she didn’t go dancing – dances cost money, lots of money. First you had to buy something to wear, then the price of the bus fare to the town, and the admission to the dance hall, and the minerals. It would run away with your savings.
Maura had never been to a dance by the time her young sister Geraldine was ready to leave Shancarrig and join their sisters in England.
‘Come on, just as my goodbye,’ Geraldine had urged.
‘I’ve nothing to wear.’
The sisters had remained friendly over the years as Maura had worked on in the hotel and Geraldine had worked in the office in the sawmills.
‘I’ve plenty,’ Geraldine said.
And indeed she had, Maura discovered. The bedroom they had once shared would never have held a second bed these days, with all the clothes strewn around it. Maura looked in wonder. ‘You must have spent everything you earned on these,’ she said.
‘Don’t be mean, Maura. There’s nothing worse than a mean woman,’ Geraldine said.
Was she mean? Maura wondered. It would indeed be terrible to be a mean woman. Yet, she didn’t think she was mean. She gave a pound a week out of her wages to her mother and she always brought a cake or a half pound of ham when she came home to tea. She seemed to be giving Geraldine the price of the cinema for as long as she remembered. All she had been careful about was not spending on herself.
But perhaps that too was mean.
She fingered the dresses. A taffeta dress with shot silk in green and yellow colours, a red corduroy skirt, a black satin with little bits of diamanté at the shoulders. It was like Aladdin’s cave.
‘Do all your friends have clothes like this?’ she asked.
‘Well, Catherine Ryan from the place you work, she’d have different things. You know, well-cut, awful-looking garments you wouldn’t be seen dead in. Some people have a ton of stuff. We swap a bit. What’ll you wear?’
Maura Brennan wore the black satin with the diamanté decorations and set out for the dance in the big town. She looked at herself in the mirror of the ladies’ cloakroom. She thought she looked all right. It was hard to tell what fellows would like, but she thought she’d get asked up to dance and not be left a fool by the side of the wall.
The first man who came over was Gerry O’Sullivan, the new barman in Ryan’s Hotel.
‘Well, don’t tell me you’re the same girl that I see in the kitchen in the back of beyond where we work,’ he said, stretching out his arms to her.
And then the night flew by. They danced everything, sambas and tangos, and rock and roll, and old-time waltzes. She couldn’t believe that it was time for the National Anthem.
‘I have to find my sister and her friends,’ she said.
‘Aw, don’t give me that. I’ve the loan of a car,’ he said.
He was very handsome, Gerry O’Sullivan, small and dark with black hair and an easy laugh. But there was no question of it. They had all given five shillings to get their lift there and back in a big van.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow in the hotel,’ she said, thinking that might cheer him up. She was wrong.
‘Tomorrow you won’t be looking like this, you’ll be dressed like a streel and emptying chamber pots,’ he grumbled, and went off.
Maura said very little on the way home. Geraldine’s friends passed around a bottle of cider, but she shook her head. She supposed he was right: that was the way she dressed and that was what she did for a living.
‘I’ll write from England,’ Geraldine said. Maura knew she wouldn’t, any more than the others had.
A few days later Gerry O’Sullivan found her alone.
‘I only said that because I was so mad wanting to be with you. I had a very bad mouth and I’m sorry.’ He was so handsome and so upset. Maura’s face lit up.
‘I didn’t mind a bit,’ she said.
‘You should have minded. Listen, will you come to the dance again, on Friday? I’ll bring you there and back. Please?’ She looked doubtful, because this time she literally didn’t have anything to wear. Geraldine had taken her wardrobe across the sea to England. ‘I’ll be very nicely mannered all night long,’ he said with a grin. ‘And it’s Mick Delahunty’s Show Band and he won’t be back this way for a good bit.’
She decided she could take the cost of one party dress from her savings. And the following week she took another, and the price of shoes and a nice bag. She’d never have her house at this rate, Maura told herself. But she found herself saying that you only live once. Gerry O’Sullivan told her that she was the loveliest girl in the dance hall.
‘Don’t be making a jeer of me,’ she said.
‘I’ll show you I’m not making a jeer of you.’ Gerry was indignant. ‘I’ll not dance with you and see how you’ll be swept away …’ Before she could say anything he picked a girl from the waiting line and began to dance.
Red-cheeked and unsure Maura was about to step aside but from three directions arms were stretched out and faces offered a dance. She laughed, confused, and picked the nearest one. He had been right. She was the kind of girl men danced with.
‘What did I tell you,’ he murmured in the back of the car that night. He seemed excited by the thought of other men wanting Maura and not being able to have her. His own intention of having her had now become a near reality. No protestations were going to be any use, and in honesty Maura didn’t want to protest any further.
‘Not in the car, please,’ she whispered.
‘You’re right.’ He seemed cheerful. Too cheerful, in fact. From his pocket he took out one of the hotel keys.
‘Room Eleven,’ he
said triumphantly. ‘There’ll be no one there. We’ll be fine as long as we keep the light off.’ Maura looked at him trustingly.
‘Will it be all right?’ she asked in a whisper.
‘I’ll not let you down,’ Gerry O’Sullivan said.
She knew he spoke the truth. She knew it again five months later, after many happy visits to Room Eleven and even Room Two, when she told him she was pregnant.
‘We’ll get married,’ he said.
Father Gunn agreed that it should be as speedily as possible. His face seemed to say that it would be no better or worse than a lot of marriages he was asked to officiate at with speed. And at least in this case they seemed to have a deposit for a house, which was more than you might have hoped for in some cases. Father Gunn talked about it to Miss Ross.
‘It could be a lot worse, I suppose,’ he said.
‘She’ll never settle in a poor house. She wanted to be well away from those cottages. She had her eyes on great things,’ the teacher said.
‘Well, faith and she should have her eyes on being grateful the fellow married her and putting her mind to raising the child and being glad they have a roof over their heads.’ Father Gunn knew he sounded like a stern old parish priest from thirty years ago, but somehow the whole thing had him annoyed and he didn’t want to hear any fairy stories about people having their eyes set on great things.
Maura decided to work until the day before the wedding. She looked Mrs Ryan straight in the eye and refused to accept any hints about the work being tiring in her condition. She said she needed every penny she could earn.
Mrs Ryan was cross to be losing a hard-working maid, and at the same time having an attractive barman marry beneath him because of activities obviously carried out under her own roof. She began to look more sternly at her own daughters, Nessa and Catherine, lest anything untoward should happen in their lives.
Nessa, the same age as Maura, had been all through Shancarrig school with her. ‘What should I give her as a present?’ she said to her mother.
‘Best present is to ignore it and the reason for it,’ Mrs Ryan snapped.
This reaction ensured, of course, that Nessa would go to great trouble to find a nice present. She rang Leo Murphy up in The Glen. Maura, putting away mops and buckets in the room at the end of the corridor, heard Nessa on the phone.
‘Leo, she was in our class. We have to do something. Of course it’s shotgun. What else could it be? You choose something, anything at all. Poor Maura, she expects so little.’
That’s not true, Maura thought as she put away the cleaning equipment. She didn’t expect so little, she expected a lot and mainly she got it. She had wanted to stay in Shancarrig rather than emigrating like the rest of her brothers and sisters, and here she had stayed. She had wanted the one handsome man that she ever fancied in her life, and he had wanted her. He was standing by her now and marrying her.
She had got more than she expected. She certainly hadn’t thought that she would be having a baby and yet there was one on the way. The very thought of it made her pleased and excited. It took away the ache of sorrow about the place they would be living in.
With Gerry and a baby it wouldn’t matter anyway.
*
Leo Murphy and Nessa Ryan gave her a little glass-fronted cabinet.
She couldn’t have liked it more. She stroked it over and over and said how lovely it would look on a wall when she got her own treasures to put in it.
‘Have you any treasures yet?’ Nessa asked.
‘Only a doll. A doll with a china face and china hands,’ Maura said.
‘That’ll be nice for the baby …’ Leo gulped. ‘If you ever have one, I mean,’ she said hastily.
‘Oh, I’m sure I will,’ Maura said. ‘But the baby won’t be let play with this doll. It’s a treasure, for the lovely cabinet.’
She could see that the girls thought their money had been well spent, and she was touched by how much they must have given for it. As part of her continuing fantasy about a house, Maura used to look at furniture and price it. She knew well that this cabinet was not inexpensive.
Maura hoped that Geraldine would come home from England. She even offered her the fare, but there was no reply. It would have been nice to have had her standing as a bridesmaid, but instead she had Eileen Dunne, who said she loved weddings and she’d be anyone’s bridesmaid for them. And with a great nudge that nearly knocked Maura over she said she’d do godmother as well, and laughed a lot.
Gerry’s brother came to do the best man bit. His parents were old and didn’t travel, he said.
Maura saw nothing sad or shabby about her wedding day.
When she turned around in the church she saw Nessa Ryan, Leo Murphy, Niall Hayes and Eddie Barton sitting smiling at her. She was the first of their class to get married. They seemed to think this was like winning some kind of race rather than having been caught in a teenage pregnancy. When they went to Johnny Finn’s for drinks Mr Ryan from the hotel came running in with a fistful of money to buy them all a drink. He said he came to wish them well from everyone in Ryan’s Commercial Hotel.
There was no word of the haste or the disgrace or anything. Maura’s father behaved in a way that, for Paudie Brennan, could be called respectable. This week he happened to be friendly with Foxy Dunne’s father, so the two of them had their arms around each other as they sang tunelessly together in a corner. If it had been one of the weeks when they were fighting, things would have been terrible – insults hurling across Johnny Finn’s all afternoon.
And Father Gunn and Father Barry were there smiling and talking to people as if it were a real wedding.
Maura didn’t see anything less than the kind of wedding day she had dreamed about when she was at school, or when reading the women’s magazines. All she saw was Gerry O’Sullivan beside her, smiling and saying everything would be grand.
And everything was grand for a while.
Maura left her job in the hotel. Mrs Ryan seemed to want it that way. Possibly there would be social differences now that Maura was the wife of the popular barman, instead of just the girl from the cottages cleaning the floors and washing potatoes. But Maura found plenty of work, hours here and hours there. When it was obvious that she was expecting a child many of her employers said they would be lost without her. Mrs Hayes, who hadn’t wanted her in the start, was particularly keen to keep her.
‘Maybe your mother could look after the child, and you’d still want to go out and work?’ she said hopefully.
Maura had no intention of letting any child grow up in the same house as she had herself, with the lack of interest and love. But she had learned to be very circumspect in her life. ‘Maybe indeed,’ she said to Mrs Hayes and the others. ‘We’ll have to wait and see.’
It seemed a long time to wait for the baby, all those evenings on her own in the little cottage, sometimes hearing her father going home drunk, as she had when she was a child. She polished the little cabinet, took out the doll and patted the bump of her stomach.
‘Soon you’ll be admiring this,’ she said to the unborn baby.
It was Dr Jims Blake who told her about the baby boy. The child had Down’s syndrome. The boy, who was what was called a mongol, would still be healthy and loving and live a full and happy life.
It was Father Gunn who told her about Gerry, and how he had come from the cottage to the church and told the priest he was going. He took the wages owing to him from the hotel, saying his father had died and he needed time off for the funeral. But he told Father Gunn that he was getting the boat to England.
No entreaties would make him stay.
Maura remembered always the way that Father Gunn’s thick round glasses seemed to sparkle as he was telling her. She didn’t know if there were tears behind them, or if it was only a trick of the light.
People were kind, very kind. Maura often told herself that she had been lucky to have stayed in Shancarrig. Suppose all this had happened to her in some big city i
n England where she had known nobody. Here she had a friendly face everywhere she turned.
And of course she had Michael.
Nobody had told her how much she would love him because nobody could have known. She had never known a child as loving. She watched him grow with a heart that nearly burst with pride. Everything he learned, every new skill – like being able to do up his buttons – was a huge hurdle for the child, and soon everyone in Shancarrig got used to seeing them hand in hand walking around.
‘Who’s this?’ people would ask affectionately, even though they knew well.
‘This is Michael O’Sullivan,’ Maura would say proudly.
‘I’m Michael O’Sullivan,’ he would say and, as often as not, hug the person who had asked.
If you wanted Maura to come and clean your house you took Michael as well. And as they walked from job to job each day Maura used to point out the houses that she loved to her son – the little gate lodge, ever more covered with ivy and choked with nettles, that stood at the end of the long avenue up to The Glen, and there was the one near Miss Ross which she was going to paint pink if she ever bought it.
At night she would take the doll with the china hands and face out from its cabinet and the two cups and saucers she had been given by Mrs Ryan. There was a little silver plate, which had EPNS on the back, that Eileen Dunne had given when she stood as godmother to Michael. She said that this meant it wasn’t real silver, but since the S stood for silver Maura thought it deserved a place in the cabinet. There was a watch too, one that belonged to Gerry. A watch that didn’t go, but might go one day if it were seen to, and would hang on a chain. When Michael got to be a man he could call it his father’s watch.
Most people forgot that Michael ever had a father; the memory of Gerry O’Sullivan faded. And for Maura the memory began to fade too. Days passed when she didn’t think of the handsome fellow with the dark eyes who had cared enough to marry her, but hadn’t got the strength to stay when he knew his child was handicapped. She had never hated him, sometimes she even pitied him that he didn’t know the great hugs and devotion of Michael his son, who grew in size but not greatly in achievement.