Peggy could not have been more grateful for Kathleen’s mistake; all she had left was her dignity and to that she would cling like a drowning woman.
Now she said, ‘I was wondering, doctor, if you could write a letter to the dock board and get it stopped, them moving in, on account of my nerves? They might listen to you. You could write that them moving in will make me very sick, that I might die, or something.’
She knew she should tell him they were being evicted in a week’s time and if that happened, nothing mattered anyway. But if she said it out loud, it would make it real and it would definitely happen; if she just kept it quiet, maybe she could sort something out in the time remaining. Maybe Maura would send her a postal order. Maybe she could pawn enough to hold them off… Her voice had trailed off and she knew the answer before Dr Cole spoke, so she lunged straight into the remainder of her woes in an attempt to persuade and deflect him.
‘And if all that wasn’t enough going on, it’s my husband, Paddy. He’s a lazy git; he won’t go to work and so he hasn’t had a full week in six months and we’ve got no money. He won’t get out of bed, we’ve got no food in and I can’t go to the priest again. You must know about Paddy; he says he’s coming down here every week and you are waiting for him to be under a doctor at the hospital, a specialist, and it’s all taking so long…’
Peggy reached a tearful crescendo and Kathleen pushed a handkerchief between her fingers.
‘How are you keeping up with the rent, Peggy?’ she asked.
‘I’m managing,’ said Peggy as she dabbed at her eyes.
As Kathleen watched Dr Cole writing down everything Peggy had told him, she thought how like his father he had become. Every day of the week, Brendan Cole had half a dozen Peggys in his surgery, women who came to see him about problems which had little to do with their health and more to do with the circumstances they lived in, so the sight before him today was a familiar one. Peggy blew her nose noisily into the handkerchief, dabbed at her eyes.
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Nolan,’ he said. ‘I can’t write a letter to the dock board instructing them what to do with their own property, I just can’t. I can have a word with your Paddy, though, if you think it will help? Because I have seen your husband and I think there must be some mistake. I can find nothing wrong with his back and I certainly haven’t referred him to the hospital.’
Peggy gasped and looked as though she were about to faint again.
‘Look, there are two solutions to this problem. The first is for me to have a word with Paddy. I’ll check him out again, but I’m afraid that isn’t going to have any impact on how often he goes down the steps, or on who your new neighbours are, so you will have to think of something else to deal with that one. Have you spoken to the dock board, to Mr Heartfelt?’
Peggy looked horrified. ‘No, no, I’m not going there, I’m not, ever again.’
‘That’s where she was, Brendan – I mean, Dr Cole – she must have been asking them herself, were you, Peggy? Is that why you paid your rent down there?’
Peggy lied to her friend for the second time and nodded.
‘And what did they say?’ asked Dr Cole.
Peggy looked up. ‘They didn’t get a chance, I fainted,’ she said.
‘Well then, you may simply have to consider keeping yourself to yourself when they move in; don’t give Sergeant and Mrs Wright any cause to address you.’
Peggy repeated his advice disbelievingly, ‘Keep yourself to yourself…’ while she screwed up her face in a look of amazement. No one, absolutely no one on the four streets, kept themselves to themselves. Even the children joked that sometimes they forgot where they lived or who their actual mother was, they spent so much time in and out of each other’s houses. Mothers likewise joked that they forgot which kids were their own. Kathleen could see this was all going nowhere.
‘Are there no tablets, doctor?’ she asked.
‘For bad neighbours?’ Dr Cole almost smiled at his mother’s old friend. He remembered the Deane farm where they got their eggs and milk, he could almost smell it if he closed his eyes. He and Liam had attended the village school together but while he had studied and studied, Liam had been just the opposite, had hated school with a passion, preferring milking and hay making to composition. ‘Well, Peggy, I can give you tablets for your nerves, but I would rather you tried to sort the problem out for yourself first.’
‘What would you give me?’ Peggy looked interested.
‘He means the Valium,’ Kathleen said to Peggy in a half-whisper. ‘You don’t want to be taking those, they made Alice sleep all day, when she was bad, you know, before…’
Dr Cole shot Kathleen a look which was clear in its meaning; she was to stop talking. Dr Cole knew all about Paddy and his bad back, his gastric stomach, his gout, his lungs, his terrible headaches. He was in the surgery almost every other week, looking for an excuse not to report for work. He decided that if Paddy’s behaviour was having such an impact on Peggy, it was time to be a bit firmer. He would threaten to really send him to the hospital.
Peggy’s lip began to tremble again at the thought of the state they were in. She had never felt so alone in her entire life. The fear of the mess she was in, the challenge ahead, made her feel as though she were detached, floating through each scene of her everyday life. Surely, this was a bad dream and soon, she would wake? A picture of herself and the kids out on the street, with their furniture piled around them, came into her mind…
‘Look, Peggy,’ Dr Cole said, ‘when you feel yourself losing control, try and take some deep breaths and put into perspective what is happening around you instead of panicking; you will feel much better for it. Tell your Paddy to come and see me.’
Peggy looked deflated. ‘I would be a lot better, doctor, if Maura were still here. I do miss her and it’s as if everything just keeps going wrong all the time.’
‘Ah, Mrs Doherty… A lovely woman. She’s moved back home, hasn’t she?’ he said to Kathleen. Dr Cole felt deeply sorry for Peggys in his surgery, women who came to see him about problems which had little to do with their health and more to do with the circumstances they lived in, so the sight before him today was a familiar one. When help was needed he had women he could call in on, and Maura Doherty had been at the top of his list. Peggy wasn’t the only one who missed her. ‘Tell your Paddy to come and see me, Peggy, and maybe you should drop Maura a line, a nice letter back would be something to look forward to; she’s always full of good advice and wouldn’t that just make you feel better now?’
‘Oh, I did, Dr Cole. Kathleen helped me to write a letter, didn’t you, Kathleen? I just haven’t had a reply. I think Maura is busy getting on with her new life now.’ To Dr Cole, she sounded deflated. Only Peggy knew it was despair.
Dr Cole gave her an encouraging smile. ‘Listen, if you stop sleeping, or find your nerves are getting worse, come back and see me, because we can’t have you fainting again.’
‘Thank you, Brendan – I mean Dr Cole,’ said Kathleen. ‘And when you are writing to your mammy, send her my best; a kinder woman never walked this earth, Peggy, ’tis no wonder he became a doctor himself.’
Brendan Cole allowed himself a smile as the door closed and then picked up the phone to his receptionist. ‘Can you get me an outside line, Cynthia? It’s an international call. Give me ten minutes, please, and if you could just pop to the post office for me, with today’s hospital referrals, that would be grand.’ He waited for Cynthia to make contact with the exchange and then to buzz him, once the operator was on the line. He knew that the Dohertys had bought the Talk of the Town – Maura had told him on her last visit to have Harry’s chest checked and he had thought it the most ridiculous idea, but had kept his opinion to himself. He would ask his mammy to see that Maura dropped Peggy a line. She lived in Galway with his sister for half of the year and she had a telephone. He had an idea that Peggy needed a ray of sunshine in her life, something which, in his experience, could deliver better results than the
little yellow tablets they might have to resort to if Peggy didn’t improve.
Chapter Thirteen
Eric began his milk money collection at six o’clock every Friday evening, but when it came to the local shops and businesses, he called on a Wednesday, straight after he had finished his morning round on his way back to the dairy. His last stop was always at Cindy’s, the hairdresser. There was no fancy name painted on the hoarding above her window, it was simply Cindy’s and if it hadn’t been for the sink with the rubber spray hose attached to the taps, two pink overhead dryers, the swivel chair perched in front of the large mirror and the spider plants along the windowsill next to a display of light-faded Woman’s Own and Woman’s Weekly magazines, no one would have known what service Cindy offered inside her shop which was on the end of a row of prefabricated units, hurriedly erected after the war.
Nelson’s parade boasted greengrocer’s, butcher’s, fishmonger’s, a hardware store, Simpson’s the tobacconist and paper shop, the chippy, Cousin’s the baker, the betting shop and, finally, the hairdresser. Cindy was the only woman who worked on the parade to wear make-up and sheer stockings every day, had a hemline which appeared to be creeping upwards at an alarming rate, and she never went to church. Cindy wasn’t married, by choice and there wasn’t a woman on the four streets who didn’t know that Cindy was taking contraception. Yet, despite the fact that she was often whispered about over kitchen-table gatherings, not one of them had withdrawn their custom as a result. This was due, in large part, to the fact that Cindy had covered herself in a veneer of respectability and credibility, provided by good-looking Reg, her long-suffering boyfriend, the well-respected local garage owner and mechanic who, it was said, popped the question every Saturday night, half an hour after the official Anchor closing time and five minutes before he hopped into her bed.
Reg was the closest the community had to a successful self-made man, evidenced by the fact that he was never slow to put his hand into his pocket in the pub. People were in awe of the hours he worked, the cash he flashed, and the number of young men he employed who called him ‘the big boss man,’ and, despite all his obvious attributes, his absolute failure to persuade Cindy to walk up the aisle astounded everyone.
‘She’s strong-willed, that one, but surely not strong enough to resist the likes of Reg? Who could do that? Tell you what, he can slip between my sheets any day,’ Peggy would say in the presence of Maura and, for all her holiness and jangling of rosary beads, Maura laughed as loud as all the others.
‘Peggy, stop, would you!’ Maura would exclaim in mock condemnation, and in order to outrage Maura even more, a sport in itself, Shelagh would chip in, ‘She got that wrong there, didn’t you, Peggy? She means between her legs, Maura, not her sheets.’
And that would make the tea spray from Maura’s mouth and the laughter would be so loud the children would run in from the backyard to see what all the noise was about, then someone would shoo them back out with a broken biscuit in hand and put the kettle back on. When the women ran out of others to gossip about, or times were hard and problems tough, as they often were, they always had the tales of Cindy to cheer them up. There was only one woman on the Dock Road who didn’t experience a tinge of jealousy in the company of Cindy, or spend hours discussing her audacity, and that was Eric’s wife, Gladys.
‘She’s not normal,’ Gladys, with her sallow skin and curled thin lips, would often say to Eric. ‘With all that muck on her face. If it wasn’t for the fact that Reginald is a well-respected businessman and desperate to make an honest woman out of her, she would have a name for herself, that one would. That man saves her with his intentions alone. She’s very lucky indeed that she has him – half the girls around here would love to be in her shoes. He could have anyone he wants, so God alone knows why he bothers with her. Brazen as you like she is, her skirt near up to her knickers. It’s a disgrace. Brazen.’
Eric fought not to frown. He had often thought that Cindy was a delight to look at, a feast for the eyes and a free and independent spirit, someone to be admired because, as Maggie Trott had often said, ‘No one leaves Cindy’s company without feeling all the better for having been in it – and it’s not just the hairdo that does it.’
As Gladys agitated, Eric had often thought how much more civil life would be if every man were lucky enough to be married to women like Maggie Trott or Cindy.
‘How do you collect that one’s money?’ Gladys had barked at him during her last rant about Cindy, squinting and looking sideways at him. Until recently, that look would have made Eric feel quite unwell. His mouth would dry, his bowels turn to water and his heart would race, but no more. Her bite had lost its sting of late and Eric had no idea how or why. It was as if her words now ran over him, rather than piercing him with their malice as they once had.
‘She leaves it in a used envelope underneath the empties,’ he’d lied. If he had said, ‘I call in and we have a good old natter and a laugh,’ he wasn’t quite sure what Gladys would have done next.
*
Cindy tapped her cigarette ash into the sink with her polished nail and, with expert precision, turned the tap on to extinguish the butt before she flicked it into the bin behind the sink. Then, turning the tap off, she shook in a liberal grey cloud of Vim and began to rub to remove the smell of the ash and perming solution from the sink before the next customer came in. She had over an hour until Maggie Trott arrived for a perm and set. The entire process would take three and a half hours and Cindy often commented that she spent more time with some of her customers than she did with members of her own family.
Glancing in the mirror, she frowned at her reflection. She wore her strawberry blonde hair backcombed into a cloud that tucked in just behind her ears. Reg often complained about the amount of time Cindy spent on her own hair.
‘Reg, if my hair doesn’t look marvellous, why would anyone want to come to my hairdresser’s, for goodness’ sake? I’m a walking advertisement,’ she would retort.
Turning off the hose, she rubbed her hands down the front of her coverall to dry them and patted an errant lock of hair back into place. Her make-up looked dewy from a morning spent with an overhead dryer blasting out into the small space, so she took out her handkerchief and dabbed her nose. The colour of her skin complemented her hair, and powder-blue eyeshadow enhanced the bright blue of her eyes. She was pretty and she knew it and was proud of the fact that she had passed twenty-one and was still single, a rare bird indeed on the Dock Road.
‘By the time we get married, I’ll be collecting my pension,’ Reg joked, every time she rejected him.
‘Reg, I keep telling you, stop asking me,’ she would reply, as though Reg bored her. But he would do it again, with a bouquet of flowers in his hand or as he had last week, with a new Ingersoll watch in a padded box. He had bought the ring two years ago and she had told him to keep it safe somewhere, but that he was never to ask her again with a ring unless she gave him permission. The women of the four streets often begged her to regale them with this story.
‘Well, you’re playing a very dangerous game, my girl,’ Kathleen Deane said to her, more than once. ‘He’ll be getting down on one knee to someone else one day soon. You’re playing with fire, you are, Cindy.’
Alice, her daughter-in-law, had taken a different approach when she had been Cindy’s age and, a woman of few words, she would smile at Cindy, approvingly.
‘If I had my time again, I wish I’d told our Paddy to stick his ring up his arse too,’ Peggy had once said.
‘Really?’ Deirdre had replied. ‘And where is that ring Paddy hooked you with, then, Peggy?’
Once again Peggy had found herself on the wrong end of the laughter, until Maura had patted her hand and chipped in, ‘Who needs a ring when you have a heart as big as and better than any diamond, like our Peggy has, eh?’ And the laughter had stopped dead.
Cindy matched her disdain for marriage with an equal degree of kindness towards others and there were plenty who wer
e in need of it. She was admired by the women who would sometimes call into the shop, not to have their hair done, but to while away the time and natter, because a natter with Cindy made them feel better – and whether Cindy had a customer in the chair or not made no difference. On the rare occasion when Maura had had her hair cut, Cindy would tell her, ‘Come in on Wednesday morning when I’m quiet and I’ll do Peggy for free – just check her hair for nits the night before for me with your toothcomb,’ and no more needed to be said.
Cindy was a phenomenon. She was on birth control, had faced down the priest and come to no harm. She still lived and breathed, had not been struck down by lightning, and the priest, despite frequent references from the pulpit to the evils of vanity, fumed in vain. Cindy was a walking miracle and, what was more, she and Reg went out at night together – he never went to the pub alone. He bought her presents, obviously adored her – and not one woman could quite work out how it was she did it.
Now she popped the Vim tin on the shelf at the back of the shop, as the spin dryer came to the end of its cycle and she began to remove the washed and bleach-stained towels from the day before, just as the shop bell rang.
‘Eric, love,’ Cindy exclaimed as he walked in, the coins in his leather bag clinking, the collection book in his hand with the pencil wedged in a thick brown rubber band to keep the page open. ‘I thought you were a customer and I was thinking, please God, no, I can’t be doing with anyone arriving early today – it’s me washing and cleaning day and if I don’t get these hung up now, they won’t be dry for the morning. How are you?’
Eric opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. He frowned, his head tilted slightly to one side. He was about to say, ‘I’m just fine, Cindy, how are you?’ as he always did, but the words had stuck in his throat.
Coming Home to the Four Streets Page 15