by Tara Heavey
‘I don’t know him, Mrs Prendergast, but I doubt we’d be on the same wavelength. I am flattered you thought of me in that way.’
‘Don’t be. His girlfriend is an abomination. Awful vulgar girl. Anybody would be better than her.’
Aoife smiled and shook her head. Good old Mrs Prendergast. She must be feeling better. So, no need to tread so carefully. ‘Can I ask you a question?’
‘What?’
‘Why are you selling the land to Uri?’
Mrs Prendergast sighed. ‘A number of reasons.’
‘Care to elaborate?’
Mrs Prendergast sighed again. ‘Well, he asked me, for one thing. At the start, I really just wanted to get rid of the land. It wasn’t so much about the money – until Lance got wind of it. It reminded me too much of the past and it was weighing me down. And then, you know, I became fond of the garden again. And the roses. And finding the time capsule made me think of things in the past that weren’t so bad. Then Lance was so rude to Uri. I suppose I wanted to make it up to him.’
‘What’s all that about? What does Lance have against Jews?’
‘I think it goes back to his childhood. When Lance and I first had to fend for ourselves, times were hard. I’d sometimes have to take valuables down to the pawnbrokers. They were Jewish and Lance would come with me, of course, and, I don’t know, I think it left a bad taste in his mouth. Which is ironic, because if it wasn’t for that pawnbroker, I’d have had difficulty putting food on the table.’
Mrs Prendergast stood up quite abruptly. ‘Anyway. Back to work. I’m off to plant some myrtle.’
‘Where?’
‘Don’t worry. I’m staying within the confines of the rose garden.’
‘I’m not worried. But why would you plant myrtle in the middle of a rose garden?’
Mrs Prendergast drew on a pair of gloves that had been hidden beneath the swing seat. At first, Aoife didn’t think she was going to get an answer, which wouldn’t have been out of character in a woman who was capable of unimpeachable politeness at one minute and mind-blowing rudeness at the next. Aoife stood up and stretched, already thinking about what she was going to do next.
‘It’s my name,’ said Mrs Prendergast.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Myrtle. It’s my name.’
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
‘How… unusual. It’s lovely.’
Mrs Prendergast snorted. ‘Liar.’
Both smiled furtively. Aoife watched the older woman as she walked away from her, straightening her back. She called after her, ‘Does this mean I can call you –’
‘Mrs Prendergast.’
‘Right.’
31
God, she loved it – everything about it. The low ceilings. The thick swirls of cigarette smoke that hung in the air, having nowhere to escape to. The hormones bouncing off the walls. The scent of Johnnie Walker on the breath of the men she danced with. Not as overpowering as it had once been, in the days when you were obliged to be squished against the man in the death grip of the slow waltz. She thanked God in heaven for whoever had invented the jive. It made everything seem much lighter – much freer.
It was 1957 and London was booming. Rationing was out, prosperity was in. Harold Macmillan told his people that they’d never had it so good and they believed him. It was on the night of 4 October 1957 that Myrtle met Martin Prendergast. An auspicious date – chosen by the Soviets to launch Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to be sent into space.
She’d noticed him from the very beginning. She’d heard his booming voice, watched him throw back his head and laugh voraciously. He had a natural lust for life that compelled her. And what he had, she wanted. She set her heart on it, fixed her gaze on it, made him notice her in her own quiet, determined way. She wasn’t the prettiest girl there, she knew that, but she had something – she knew that too. And it was this certainty that drew Martin to her, of his own volition, he thought. She held his gaze – just long enough – then went back to being aloof, a role she inhabited well. She waited for him to make his inevitable move.
‘Would you like to dance?’ He held out his larger-than-life hand. His eyes laughed at her, challenging her. She recognized his accent and her stomach lurched. Irish. Forbidden. As she stood up, she felt as if she were falling.
His hands were rough and she knew immediately that he worked with them. From his face, he spent a lot of time outdoors in all weathers. His eyes creased at the corners every time he smiled, which was often and always at her.
‘I’m Martin,’ he said, her blue felt skirt swishing against his legs.
‘Marnie.’
‘Marnie?’ It was a struggle to hear over the music.
‘That’s right.’
‘Is it short for something?’
‘Just Marnie.’
‘Hello, Just Marnie.’
She smiled demurely and looked away, anxious not to reveal the effect he was having on her.
In those days, she didn’t call herself Myrtle. She had disowned her name and her restrictive background in the process. Marnie was her new persona, the person she aspired to be and believed she was when you peeled back the middle-class layers. Her parents, her upbringing, her education: everything had prepared her to be the person she now rejected. Martin was her passport out of herself. She recognized this instantly. Her parents would hate him. At least, her father would.
He was tall, stood head and shoulders above her. His hair was black and his eyes were blue. What she thought of as Irish blue, a vibrant, all-singing, all-dancing blue. Nothing like her own insipid slate-blue-greyness. Everything about him was so alive. He made her feel alive and it wasn’t a sensation she was prepared to relinquish.
When the dance was over, they were reluctant to let go of each other.
‘Can I buy you a drink?’
‘That would be lovely, thank you.’
He smiled at her, as if he found what she said both delightful and amusing. Which was how he made her feel in general. As if he saw the self she had always known she could be, which had been clamouring its whole life to get out. How was she to know that he made every woman feel that way? And at that moment how was she to care?
They had their drink, talking intermittently and smiling continuously. And then chaos was unleashed, the room in uproar. A raid! The police in one door, Martin and Myrtle out of the other and into the night, laughing and running, hand in hand. Then, without saying anything, Martin held open the door of a coffee shop and she ducked inside. It was one of the new breed of Soho espresso bars, not the old, classic Italian style. The décor was loud and shiny and tasteless – the epitome of cool. The clientele were a blend of beatniks, teddy boys and art-college types. He ordered coffee while Tab Hunter’s ‘Young Love’ played on the jukebox.
‘Where are you from?’
‘County Mayo.’
‘Is that in Ireland?’
‘It surely is.’
He smiled at her again. His voice was a rich, deep baritone. She wondered if he could sing. Surely someone with a speaking voice so lilting, so lyrical –
‘Where are you from?’
‘I’m from here. London.’
To Myrtle, this was embarrassingly boring. (To Martin, it – she – was impossibly exotic.) Each was what the other aspired to be.
‘A genuine London girl. Next you’re going to tell me you were born within the sound of Bow bells.’
‘Not exactly.’
Not exactly was right. Myrtle – named for her paternal grandmother – had grown up in the affluent suburb of Woodford, with her parents and one younger brother. It seemed crucial now to conceal this from Martin, whose background, she guessed correctly, was a million miles away from where he was right now.
‘Tell me about County Mayo.’
‘Nothing much to tell.’
‘There must be something. What part of Ireland is it in? Is it near Dublin?’
‘Miles away. On the west c
oast.’
An image appeared in her mind from her grammar-school geography book. ‘Did you live in a thatched cottage?’
‘I did.’
She raised her shoulders to her ears and her expression became gleeful. ‘How romantic.’
His laugh was short and mirthless. ‘You wouldn’t think that if you had to live in one.’
‘Why?’
He leaned back in his seat and put one foot up on the chair beside her, an action she found both intimate and cocky, although it seemed unconscious on his part.
‘We had nothing growing up. Nothing. And the only people left living in the thatched cottages now are the old people. The whole west of Ireland is empty.’
‘How do you mean, empty?’
‘Emigration. I went home for my sister’s wedding last summer and the priest said it was the first wedding in the parish for seven years. There are only two directions for the young to go in and that’s west to America or east to England.’
She could tell he was trying to keep the bitterness out of his voice, but she could hear it still, biting at the edges of his words.
Martin went on to tell her how he had chosen the latter, lured by tales of work to be got and money to be made by building on the ruins of blitzed London. He’d started out labouring – backbreaking work that might have broken the heart of a lesser man. But not Martin. He kept his head down and worked, listened and learned. At night, he drank pints with the other Paddies on the Kilburn High Road. And it was those Paddies he recruited on to the first crew of Prendergast Construction. At first contracts were hard to come by, but he persevered and built up his reputation as a reliable, hard-working professional. The jobs started rolling his way, and, after a decade of hard graft, he was rolling in it.
What he didn’t tell her was that he was ready to take a wife. A wife in keeping with his new station in life. A wife to aspire to. A life to aspire to. Myrtle. Or Marnie, as he knew her then. He was looking to join that which she was champing at the bit to escape: the Establishment. To him, she was an ethereal Grace Kelly figure. A class act. He wanted some of that for himself. He knew he had her, just as she knew she wanted to be had.
As Myrtle listened to Martin’s account of all that had gone before, something struck her quite forcefully: how brave it was of him to reveal so much of himself to her. So much that might easily have sent a nice middle-class girl like herself running in the other direction. But his story had the opposite effect, as Martin had known instinctively it would. She admired his courage. She admired his grit and determination. But, most of all, she admired the muscles that were straining under the material of his suit. Straining to get to her.
Someone selected ‘All Shook Up’ on the jukebox. They smiled at one another.
‘Do you like Elvis?’
‘I just love him.’
‘Do you want to come and see Jailhouse Rock tomorrow night?’
‘All right.’
Years later, when Myrtle heard the expression ‘whirlwind romance’, she thought of her early days with Martin, their courtship. Listening to Long John Baldry in the Soho coffee houses, jiving all over London to Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Andy Williams and Johnnie Ray. Their day trip on the Flying Scotsman, inadvertently taking in a lungful of acrid smoke as she stuck her head enthusiastically out of the window. Their picnic on Margate beach, chasing their windbreaker, laughing like loons as it was carried off on a strong breeze. Everything was fun and games, drinking and party-going. She knew he’d have to meet her family sooner or later – and later rather than sooner, if she had her way. But Martin was pushing for it. She wasn’t sure why. Curiosity? The misguided belief that he’d be accepted into the fold? She tried to explain to him what her father was like.
‘He can be quite – difficult.’
‘How do you mean?’
She sighed. How to explain? ‘He’s very stern. Almost Victorian in his outlook. And he’s Scots Presbyterian.’
‘So?’
‘So he’s not too keen on Catholics.’
‘Leave him to me. I’m good with parents.’
Myrtle felt a painful sensation in her chest. How many girlfriends had there been before her? How many sets of parents had he charmed? And how many girlfriends were there to come? That wasn’t all that troubled her. She doubted her father would be the pushover Martin anticipated. She guessed how he would rate him: flash, arrogant, an unreliable type.
‘What’s your mother like?’
‘Pathetic. No mind of her own. Does everything he tells her to.’
She resented the way Martin looked at her then – with disapproval in his eyes, presumably for the disrespectful way in which she had spoken of her mother. He didn’t know the extent to which she’d felt let down – rejected – so many times. All the times she had looked to her mother for support and it had never come, when she alone had had to stand up to the vagaries of her father’s temper. She herself would never live like that, in fear of the man she was supposed to love.
‘Mothers are my speciality,’ was all Martin said.
She remained doubtful. Her younger brother, Roger, was the only member of the family likely to be impressed by Martin’s worldliness.
An invitation to tea was procured that Saturday. They turned into the cul-de-sac where Myrtle had spent her formative years. ‘Stop!’ she shouted.
Martin slammed on the brakes of his new Humber Hawk. ‘What?’
‘I have to tell you something.’
‘Jesus, Marnie. What is it?’
‘Stop the car.’
‘It is stopped.’
‘I mean turn off the engine.’
He switched off the ignition and turned to look at her. ‘You’re not having second thoughts about me meeting your parents?’
‘No. I mean, yes, I am. Second, third and fourth. But that’s not it.’
‘What, then?’
She sighed. ‘You’ll probably find that my family call me Myrtle.’
The corner of his mouth twitched. ‘Why would they do that?’
Another sigh, deeper than the last. ‘Because it’s my name.’
‘Then why did you tell me it was Marnie?’
‘Myrtle! Wouldn’t you lie if you had a name like that?’
He stared hard at her. Oh, God, what must he think? To lie about something so fundamental. Then he started to laugh, as if it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. He threw back his head. He even brought his hand down so hard on the steering-wheel that the horn sounded.
‘Careful!’ She looked around, anxious that they didn’t draw attention to themselves. She imagined all the twitching curtains.
When he’d composed himself, he took her face in his two hands and kissed her firmly on the mouth. ‘You’re something else.’ Then he restarted the engine and drove slowly down the street to number forty-eight.
‘These are for you.’ He handed a bunch of peach-coloured gladioli to Myrtle’s mother. Myrtle could tell she was impressed, but that was irrelevant.
They were shown into the front room, where her father and brother were watching Hancock’s Half Hour. The older man’s eyes never left the TV screen. Martin advanced confidently, his hand outstretched. ‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Ferguson.’
For one terrible moment, Myrtle thought her father would refuse Martin’s hand. He certainly thought about it, of that she was sure – she could almost hear him thinking it. But at the last second he shook it perfunctorily, glancing up briefly from the television at which he stared with fierce concentration. He didn’t rise from his armchair. Myrtle knew this to be a slight. Her whole family did. If Martin recognized it as such, he didn’t show it. Instead, he sat in the remaining free armchair, not waiting for an invitation to do so that would never come.
Myrtle perched uneasily on the arm of the sofa. She glanced anxiously at the rigid form of her father, then at Martin. The chair in which he sat sagged low in the middle. He looked ludicrously large in it, his knees looming up to his chin. Myrtle thou
ght he seemed ridiculously out of place. Something about the two worlds in which she co-existed coming together and clashing discordantly.
‘I love this programme,’ said Martin, nodding at the TV screen, in which they could make out the figure of Tony Hancock through the snowy haze.
Roger grinned in agreement. Mr Ferguson remained silent as a stone.
‘Do you like Double Your Money?’ Martin asked Roger.
He had just opened his mouth to reply when his father interjected: ‘We don’t appreciate that kind of American rubbish in this house.’
The other occupants of the room shifted uncomfortably while Tony Hancock and his canned laughter filled the roaring silence.
‘I see you drive a Simca, Mr Ferguson.’ Martin had decided to change tack.
Myrtle recognized, with a sinking feeling, that he still thought he was in with a chance.
‘And what do you drive?’
‘A Humber Hawk.’ The pride was evident in Martin’s response.
Myrtle’s father made an indefinable sound. It might have been a snort. But its meaning was clear. Don’t think much of that.
Myrtle’s unease grew. She knew they shouldn’t have come.
‘You’re Irish.’ It was an accusation.
‘Yes, sir.’
Martin’s easy confidence was deserting him. She could see it and it pained her, even though she had known it was inevitable.
‘What’s your full name?’
‘Martin Prendergast.’
‘What class of a name is that?’
At this point, Roger excused himself and left the room. Myrtle longed to follow him, dragging Martin by the arm as she went.
‘I don’t know what –’
‘Are you a Catholic?’
‘Yes.’
Mr Ferguson pursed his lips and took up the newspaper that had been lying on the table beside him. He opened it with a snap, obliterating his face as he did so. Martin and Myrtle looked at one another, Myrtle with real dismay, Martin with evident growing anger. ‘I don’t see what –’
‘I suppose you work on a building site.’
‘I have my own construction company.’ He stood up. His efforts to get out of the chair would have been comical in any other circumstances.