by Maeve Binchy
'Of course he does, and he'll love you too again when you get your figure back.' Rosemary was wearing her very slim-fitting trouser suit and looked like a tall elegant reed. She meant it to be reassuring, Ria thought, but because she felt like a tank herself it was unsettling.
As were the visits from pretty little Orla from the big estate agency, that would have been greatly frowned on had her bosses known of them. And Ria's mother came too, full of advice and warnings.
The only one who didn't come was Hilary. She was so envious of Tara Road that it pained her to come inside the door and see the renovations. Ria had tried to involve her in the whole business of looking for bargains at auctions, but that didn't work either. Hilary became so discontented at the size and scope of her own house compared to Ria's that the outings would end in disaster. The wonderful day when they bought the huge sideboard was almost ruined because of Hilary's tantrum.
'It's so unfair,' she said. 'Just because you have a great big empty room, you can buy great furniture dirt cheap. It's only because nobody else has these mansions that nobody wants it.'
'Well, isn't that our good luck?' Ria was stung.
'No, it's the system—you're going to get that sideboard for nothing…'
'Shush, Hilary, it's coming up in a minute. I have to concentrate. Danny says we can go to three hundred pounds—it's worth eight hundred, he thinks.'
'You're going to pay three hundred pounds for one piece of furniture for a parlour you don't even use? You're completely mad.'
'Hilary, please, people are looking at us.'
'And so well they might be looking at us, that thing could be crawling with woodworm.'
'It's not, I checked.'
'It's daft this, believe me.'
The bidding had started. Nobody was interested. One dealer that Ria knew by sight was raising it slowly against a man who ran a second-hand furniture shop. But they would both have the same problem unloading it. Whose house would have room for it?
'A hundred and fifty.' Ria's voice was clear and strong.
The others stayed in for a minute or two and then dropped out. She had the Victorian serving table, as it was described, for one hundred and eighty pounds.
'Now! Wasn't that marvellous?' Ria said, but the dead, disappointed face of her sister gave no answering flicker.
'Look, Hilary, I just saved a hundred and twenty pounds, why don't we celebrate? Isn't there something you'd like—you and Martin? Go on, we'll bid for that if there is.'
'No thank you.' The voice was stiff.
Ria thought of the huge celebration there would be in Tara Road when she told Danny the good news about the sideboard. She couldn't bear to think of her sister going back to that pokey little house, to that sad, joyless Martin. But she knew there was nothing she could do. She would have liked to stay, and with the money she had saved maybe spend fifty pounds on some nice glass. There were a couple of decanters that might go cheaply. But the mockery would be too great. Hilary would remind her that they were people who had had tomato ketchup and a bottle of Chef mayonnaise on their sideboard when they were young. Not a ship's decanter. It would take the joy out of it.
'Let's go then, Hilary,' she had said.
And since then Hilary had not been around to the house at all. It was childish and hurtful, but Ria felt that she had been given so much she could afford to be forgiving and tolerant. She wanted to see her sister and talk to her the way they used to before all this money and style got in the way.
Danny was working late in the office, there were still five days to go before the baby. Ria decided she would drive to see Hilary. She didn't care what snide remarks would be made by her sister about the smart car. She wanted to talk to her.
Martin was out; he was at a residents' meeting where they were organising a protest. Hilary looked tired and discontented.
'Oh it's you,' she said when she saw Ria. Her eye was drawn to the car at the gate. 'Hope that will still have tyres on it when you leave,' she added.
'Hilary, can I come in?'
'Sure.'
'You and I didn't have a fight about anything, did we?'
'What are you going on about?'
'Well, it's just that you never come and see me. I ask you so often it's embarrassing. You're not there when I go to Mam. Not one word of good wishes over all this. We used to be pals. What happened?'
Hilary's face was mutinous like a child. 'You don't need pals any more.'
Ria was not going to let this go. 'Like hell I don't need a pal. I'm scared stiff of having the baby in the first place. People say it's terrifying and that no one admits it. I'm worried that I mightn't be able to look after it properly and I'm afraid that Danny's taken on too much and that we'll lose everything. At times I'm afraid he'll stop loving me if I start whining about things, and you dare to tell me I don't need a pal.'
Things changed then. Hilary's frown had gone. 'I’ll put on the kettle,' she said.
Orla called round to Tara Road. One of the bedsitter tenants explained that both the Lynches were out. Danny was probably at his office. Ria had taken the car somewhere. Orla thought she would call on Danny at his office. She had been drinking since she left work; she didn't feel like going home yet. And Danny might like to go for a pint. And he was extraordinarily attractive.
Nora Johnson read the letter for the third time. They were selling the shop where she worked. There were some expressions of regret. And explanations of the changing needs of consumers. But the bottom line was that, come the beginning of November Nora Johnson, was going to have no job.
Rosemary smiled at the man across the table. He was a big customer at the print shop. He had asked her out many times. Tonight was the first time she had said yes and they were having dinner in a very expensive restaurant. They were doing a colour brochure for him. It was for a charity heavily supported by businessmen. It would be a good point of contact. Others might see and admire their work. Rosemary had spent a lot of time and trouble making sure that the finished product would be right.
'And do you have the full list of your sponsors so that we can set them out for you with some suitable artwork?'
'I have them back at my hotel,' he said.
'But you don't have a hotel room,' Rosemary said. 'You live in Dublin .'
'That's right.' He had an easy, confident smile. 'But tonight I have a hotel room.' He raised his glass at her.
Rosemary raised her glass back. 'What an extravagant gesture,' she said.
'You're worth only the very best,' he said.
'I meant extravagant not to have checked first whether the room would be called on.'
He laughed at what he thought was her grudging admiration. 'You know, I had this premonition that you would come to dinner with me and end the evening with a drink back at the hotel.'
'And your premonition was exactly half right. Thank you for a delightful dinner.' She stood up ready to leave.
He was genuinely amazed. 'What makes you come on like this all promises and teasing and then a bucket of cold water?'
Rosemary spoke clearly. She could be heard at the nearby tables. 'There were no promises and no teasings. There was an invitation to dinner to discuss business, which was accepted. There was no question of going to your hotel room. We don't need business that badly.'
She walked head high from the restaurant, with all the confidence that being twenty-three, blonde and beautiful brings with it.
'I didn't mean to be stand-offish,' Hilary was saying. 'It's just that you have everything, Ria, really everything… a fellow like a film star… Mam says he's too good-looking…'
'What does Mam know about men?'
'And you've got that house and the flash car outside the door here and you go to places and meet celebrities. How was I to know that you might want someone like me around…?'
As she was about to answer that Ria got the dart of pain that she knew was waiting for her some time next week. The baby was on the way.
Gertie had b
een out to get fish and chips. She laid the package on the kitchen table while she went to get the plates that were warming in the bottom of the oven. She had a tray with tomato ketchup, knives, forks and napkins ready.
She had not understood Jack's humour. With his arm he swept the paper-wrapped parcel off the table. 'You're only a slut,' he shouted at her. 'You're not fit for any decent man's house. A woman who can't put dinner on the table but has to go out to the chipper to buy it.'
'Oh no. Jack, please, please,' Gertie cried.
He had picked up what was nearest to hand. As ill luck would have it, it was a heavy, long-handled scrubbing brush.
When Martin Moran came back from the residents' association a young boy from next door was waiting with the news. 'There's a baby being born,' he said excitedly. 'Your missus didn't know how to drive the car so my da drove them to the hospital. You missed all the fun.'
They couldn't find Danny. He wasn't at Tara Road. He wasn't at the office. Ria gave Hilary Barney McCarthy's telephone number in case he might be there but his wife Mona said that he wasn't at home, and she hadn't seen Danny at all. He had wanted to be at the hospital. They had been through it all so many times.
Ria wanted him beside her now. 'Danny!' she screamed with her eyes closed. He had said so often that this was their baby, he would be there for the birth. Where in God's name was he?
Danny had been about to leave his office when Orla King arrived. Pretty as a picture but definitely slurring her words. He didn't need a conversation with her just now. But Danny Lynch was never rude.
'Would you like to go to the pub for the one?' Orla asked.
'No, sweetheart. I'm bushed,' he said.
'A pub livens you up. Come on, please.'
'You'll have to forgive me tonight, Orla.'
'What night then?' she asked. She ran her tongue over her lips as she smiled at him.
He could either go at once, risking a scene and possibly leaving unfinished business, or he could offer her a drink from the bottle of brandy he kept for Barney. 'A small brandy then, Orla. But just three minutes to drink it then we both have to go.'
She had won, she thought. She sat on his desk with her legs crossed as Danny went to the cupboard and found the bottle. Just then the phone rang.
'Oh leave it, Danny. It's only work,' Orla pleaded.
'Not this time of night,' he said, picking it up.
'Danny, are you alone? This is Polly Callaghan. It's urgent.'
'Not really, no.'
'Can you be alone?' '
'It will take a few minutes.'
'I haven't time… Can you just listen?'
'Of course.'
'Have you your car?'
'No.'
'Right, Barney's here. He has chest pains. I can't call the cardiac ambulance to come here, I want to call it to your house.'
'Yes, of course.'
'But it's a question of my getting him there.'
'I'll get a taxi to you. I'll make the other call first.'
At this stage the petulant voice of Orla could be heard. 'Dan-ny, come off the phone, come over here.'
'And you'll get rid of whatever companion you have with you?'
'Yes.' He was clipped.
And even more clipped dealing with Orla. 'I'm sorry, Orla sweetheart. Brandy's over… I have an emergency.'
'You don't call me sweetheart and then ask me to leave,' she began.
She found herself propelled towards the door, while Danny grabbed his jacket and phoned an ambulance all at the same time.
She heard him give the Tara Road address. 'Who's sick? Is it the baby arriving?' she asked, frightened by his intensity.
'Goodbye, Orla,' he said, and she saw him running down the street to hail a taxi.
Barney was a very grey shade of white. He lay in a chair beside the bed. Polly had made unsuccessful attempts to dress him.
'Don't worry about the tie,' Danny barked. 'Go down and tell the taxi man to come up… to help me get him down the stairs.'
Polly hesitated for a second. 'You know the way Barney hates anyone knowing his business.'
'This is a taxi man, for Christ's sake, Polly. Not MI5. Barney'd want to get there quicker.'
Barney spoke with his hand firmly holding his chest. 'Don't talk about me as if I'm not here, for Christ's sake. Yes, get the taxi man, Polly, quick as you can.' To Danny he spoke gently. 'Thank you for getting here, thank you for sorting it out.'
'You're going to be fine.' Danny supported the older man easily and warmly in a way he would never have been able to hold his own father.
'You'll look after everything for me, the way it should be?'
'You'll be doing it yourself in forty-eight hours,' Danny said.
'But just in case…'
'Just in case, then. Yes, I will.' Danny spoke briskly, knowing that was what was wanted.
At that moment the taxi man arrived. If he recognised the face of Barney McCarthy he gave no sign. Instead he got down to the job of easing a heavy man with heart pains down the narrow stairs of an expensive apartment block to take him to another address from which the ambulance would collect him. If he had worked out the situation he had seen too much and been too long in the taxi game to let on anything at all.
Hilary waited in the big shabby room outside the labour ward. From time to time she made further unsuccessful stabs at finding Danny. There was no reply from her mother's house when Hilary rang. She didn't know her mother was sitting there with the letter telling her that her working life was over.
Nora Johnson was too despondent to answer the telephone until she had pulled herself together and decided what she would do next.
'Danny!' That was the scream before the baby's head appeared. The sister was speaking and she could hardly hear. 'All right, Ria. It's over, you have a beautiful little baby girl. She's perfect.'
Ria felt more tired than she had ever been. Danny had not been here to see his daughter born. The fortune-teller had been right, it was a little girl.
Orla King felt that she was now losing her mind because of drink. Not only did the guilt of trying to seduce a man on the night that his wife was having their first baby hang heavily on her, but the subsequent confusion in her brain worried her. She knew that Ria must have been at home because she heard Danny call the ambulance to Tara Road. But then she heard from everyone else that Ria was at her sister's house and they had to get a neighbour to drive Ria's car to the hospital as Hilary couldn't drive. Orla knew now that she was hallucinating and having memory failure. She went to her first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.
And on the first night she met a man called Colm Barry. He was single, handsome and worked in the bank. Colm had dark curly hair and dark sad eyes.
'You don't look like a banker,' Orla said to him.
'I don't feel like a bank clerk, I'd rather be a chef.'
'I don't feel like being a typist in an estate agency, I'd like to be a model or a singer,' Orla said.
'There's no reason why we shouldn't be these things, is there?' Colm asked with a smile.
Orla didn't know whether he was making fun of her or being nice, but she didn't mind. He was going to make these meetings bearable.
On that night when Gertie saw Jack raising the great scrubbing-brush that might have split her head, she picked up a knife and stuck it straight into his arm. They both watched helplessly and amazed as the blood poured on to the packet of fish and chips he had flung to the floor. Then she took off her engagement ring, laid it on the table, got her coat and walked out of the house. From a phone box at the corner of the road, she rang the police and told them what she had done. In the emergency ward Jack assured everyone that it had been purely domestic and that nobody was making any accusation against anyone whatsoever.
For a very long time Gertie refused to see Jack, and then, to everyone's disappointment, she agreed to meet him just once. Jack had been put off the road for drunken driving and consequently sacked from his job. Gertie found a chastened
and sober man. They talked and she remembered why she loved him. They asked two strangers to be their witnesses and they were married in a cold church at eight o'clock one morning.
Gertie left Polly's just before Polly Callaghan sacked her. She was absent too often; it was no longer reasonable to expect them to keep her on the payroll. Jack had bouts of sobriety, never lasting very long. Gertie grew white-faced and anxious. She got a job in a launderette just round the corner from Tara Road where there was a flat upstairs. It was a living but only a bare living.
Gertie's own mother washed her hands of the whole situation. She said that she just hoped Gertie had good friends who would tide her over when times got really bad. Gertie had one friend who tided her over a great deal: Ria Lynch.
Hilary Moran never fully forgave Danny Lynch for not being with his wife that night. Oh, she had heard that there were explanations and confidences that had to be kept, and Ria certainly bore no grudge. But nobody else had heard the great wailing as Ria had waited for him to come to her during the long hours of labour. It made her feel even more strongly that she had got a good man in Martin. He might never reach the dizzy heights of Danny Lynch; he was certainly not as easy on the eye. But you could rely on him. He would always be there. And when Hilary had a child Martin would not be missing. She hoped that they would have children. The fortune-teller had been wrong about living amid trees. She might be wrong about them having no children as well.
Barney McCarthy recovered from his heart attack. Everyone said that he had been so fortunate to have it come upon him when he was with quick-witted, resourceful Danny Lynch who wasted no time in getting him to hospital. He had to take things a little more easily these days.
He had wanted to involve Danny more in his business, but met with unexpected resistance from his family. Perfectly natural resentment, Barney thought to himself. They obviously feared that Danny was getting too close to him. He would have to be more diplomatic. Show them that he was not going outside the family.
Sometimes he felt that his daughters seemed sharper with him, less loving. Less uncritically supportive. But Barney did not allow himself the luxury of brooding about people's moods. These girls owed him everything. He had slaved long hours and years to get them their superior education and degrees. Even if they had heard something about Polly Callaghan they were unlikely to rock the boat. They knew that he would not leave Mona, that the household would continue undisturbed. He enjoyed his dealings with Danny Lynch, but for everyone's sake he just had to make sure they were less public as time went on.