Tara Road

by Maeve Binchy

  For Nora Johnson the day that her granddaughter was born was also the date that she had been told her job was over. She made a decision not to tell any of the family about it, not until she had tried to find another position at any rate. But it wasn't easy, and in the first weeks of Annie Lynch's life her grandmother was facing rejection after rejection. There were few openings for a woman of fifty-one with no qualifications.

  Wearily and without much hope she went for an interview as a carer-companion to an elderly lady who lived in a big house in Tara Road which had a purpose-built little granny cottage in the grounds. It turned out extremely well. They took to each other on sight. When it became known that Nora had a daughter living in Tara Road the old lady's family suggested that maybe the post should be a residential one. Nora could sell her own house, have a nest egg and live close to her daughter Ria.

  Ah, but what about her security and her future? Nora had wondered. Where would she live when, in the fullness of time, the old lady she was looking after had left this earth? It was arranged that she should have first refusal on buying the little house when that day came.

  Polly Callaghan remembered the night that Annie was born because it was the night she thought she was going to lose Barney for ever. She had loved him without pausing to count the cost for twelve years, since she was twenty-five years old. Not once did she stop and say that it was folly to love a man who would never be free.

  She did not weigh up the very likely possibility of finding herself a single man who would be delighted to provide her with a home and family. Polly Callaghan, glamorous, articulate and successful, would have been the object of interest to many a man.

  But the thought had not crossed her mind. She knew she had had a lucky escape that night. Barney had only just been got to Intensive Care in time, but he had agreed to change his lifestyle, give up the cigarettes and brandy. Walk more, behave like he might actually be mortal instead of invincible. Polly had been urging this for years, while his wife had provided comfort food and no such structure.

  Now at last he had got the warning that he needed to jolt him into action. Barney McCarthy was only in his forties; he had years of living ahead of him.

  Polly had been grateful to Danny Lynch for his speedy response. Grateful yet disappointed in him. He obviously had a girl with him in his office when she had called that night. Polly had heard her giggling. Polly was not one to sit in judgement on a man having an affair outside marriage. But she thought that Danny was fairly young to have started. And it was, after all, a night when you might have expected him to be with his wife who was having their first baby. Still, Polly was philosophical. That's men.

  Rosemary remembered very well the time that Annie Lynch was born. It had been something of a turning-point in her life. First there was that loutish man who had booked a hotel bedroom and had assumed that she was going to share it. And this was the time she felt unexpectedly attracted to a man called Colm Barry who worked in the bank near where she worked. He had always been helpful and encouraging about how she should handle her business. Unlike some people in that branch he had never urged caution and restraint, which was the immediate response of others in the bank. He seemed even a little disenchanted with the whole idea of the bank. He was just genuinely helpful, and seemed admiring of Rosemary's skills in expanding the business. He must be about thirty, a tall man with black curly hair which he wore a little long on his collar. The bank didn't approve, he said with some satisfaction.

  'Does it bother you what the bank thinks?' Rosemary asked.

  'Not a bit. Does it bother you what other people think?' he asked in return.

  'It has to a bit at work because if they see a youngish woman they're inclined to ask to speak to a man. Still! In this day and age I have to try and give off some kind of vibes of confidence I suppose. So in that way it bothers me. Not about other things though.'

  He was easy to talk to. Some men had that way of listening to you and looking at you, men who really liked women. Men like Danny Lynch. Colm had sorrowful eyes, Rosemary thought. But she really liked him. Why should women always wait to be asked out? She invited Colm Barry to have dinner with her.

  'I'd love to,' he said. 'But sadly I'm going to a meeting tonight.'

  'Come on, Colm. The bank will survive without your being at one meeting,' she said.

  'No, it's AA,' he said.

  'Really, what kind of car do you have?' she asked.

  'No, the other lot, Alcoholics,’ he said simply.

  'Oops.'

  'No, don't worry. Think me lucky that I do go, that I get the support that's there. That's why I'm able to refuse a beautiful blonde like you.'

  'For tonight,' she said with a big smile. 'There'll be another night, won't there?'

  'Yes, of course there could be another night. But now that you know the score you might be a little less interested in having dinner with me.' He was wry but not apologetic, just preparing himself for a change in attitude. Rosemary paused long enough for Colm to feel that he could speak again and end things before they had begun. 'We both know that you must find someone who is… let's say substantial. Don't waste time on a loser like a drinky bank clerk.'

  'You're very cynical,' Rosemary said.

  'And very realistic. I'll watch you with interest.'

  'I’ll watch you with interest too,' she said.

  Mona McCarthy always remembered where she was when she heard that Barney had been taken into Intensive Care. She was in the attic rooting out a children's cot for young Ria Lynch. She had just got an anxious phone call from Ria's sister saying that the girl had gone into labour and they were looking for Danny. Then half an hour later Danny had rung to say that Barney was absolutely fine but they had thought it wise to err on the side of caution and have an ECG. And she could come into the hospital whenever she liked; he was sending a car for her straight away. 'Where did it happen? Is it bad?' Mona asked.

  Danny was calm and soothing. 'He was at home with me, in Tara Road, we were working all evening. It's fine, Mona. Believe me, he's in great shape, telling you not to worry. You'll see for yourself when you come in.'

  She felt better already. He was an amazing boy, Danny, so well able to calm her down while he should be in high panic himself over his wife's labour.

  'And Danny, I'm delighted to hear the baby's on the way, how is she?'

  'What?'

  'Ria's sister brought her in, she…'

  'Oh shit, I don't believe it.' He had hung up.

  'Danny?' Mona McCarthy was confused. Hilary had said she couldn't find Danny at Tara Road. Now Danny had said he had been there all evening. It was a mystery.

  Whenever Mona McCarthy had been faced with a mystery she reminded herself that she was not a detective and there was probably some explanation. And then she put it out of her mind. She had found this to be a satisfactory way of coping with a few mysteries over the years. And after Barney recovered, she never asked him any details about that night.

  Any more than she ever asked him to tell her about where he had dinner when he came home late or how he spent his time in hotels when he travelled. On several occasions she had to side-step conversations with her husband, conversations which looked as if they were heading towards a definition of mysteries and even confrontations. Mona McCarthy was much less simple-minded than most people believed.

  Danny Lynch never forgot the frantic rush from one hospital to the other. And the look of reproach in his sister-in-law's face and the sight of his little daughter in the arms of an exhausted and tearful Ria.

  He cried into Ria's dark hair and took the baby gingerly into his arms. 'I’ll never be able to make it up to you but there is a reason.' And of course she understood. He had to do what he did, he hadn't known her time had come.

  He had not known it was possible to love a little human being as he loved Annie. He was going to make his little princess a home that was like a palace. Princesses deserve palaces, he said.

  'You'd never think we
lived in a Republic with all this chat about princesses,' Ria would tease him.

  'You know what I mean, it's all like a fairy tale,' Danny would say.

  And in so many ways it was.

  There was enough business coming in. It meant plenty of hard work but Danny was able for that. Barney was being a little more discreet about his involvement with him.

  Ria was wonderful with little Annie. She even put her into the car regularly and drove her down to see her grandparents in the country. Danny's parents seemed very touched by that. His mother knitted the baby silly hats and his father carved her little toys. There had been no knitted hats and carved toys when Danny and his brothers were growing up.

  He had a truly beautiful daughter, a house that someone of his education and chances could only have dreamed about. He had a wife who was loving and good to him.

  Life had been very good to Danny Lynch.

  Ria had never forgotten that Danny was not at her side when the baby was born, but she had heard the story of how Barney McCarthy's life and reputation had been saved. There was no way Danny could have known that the baby would come so early. Ria had very mixed feelings about the way Barney was being protected in his double life. She hated being a party to deceiving the kindly Mona McCarthy.

  But all this took very much the back seat compared to her love for the new baby. Ann Hilary Lynch weighed seven pounds one ounce at birth and was adorable. She looked up trustingly at Ria with her huge eyes. She smiled at everyone and they passed her around from one to another, a sea of delighted faces, all of them thinking that they were special to the baby.

  And all Ria's fears and worries that she had blurted out to her sister Hilary seemed to have been groundless. She was able to manage her baby, and Danny loved her more and more as time went on. He was a doting father and her heart was full as she saw him take his little daughter by the hand through the big wild garden which they had never tamed. There were too many other things to do and so little time.

  She grew up a sunny child in a happy home, her blonde straight hair like her father's falling into her eyes.

  There had never been proper pictures of Ria as she grew up. Often she had wished she had snapshots of herself as a toddler, as a ten-year-old, as a teenager. But apart from the occasional picture of a first communion, confirmation and a visit to the zoo her mother had not kept any real record. It would be different for Annie. Everything would be there, from the hospital to her triumphant arrival in Tara Road, her first Christmas at home… all the way along the line.

  And Ria took pictures of the house too. So that they would all remember the changes, so that Annie would not grow up thinking things had always been luxurious. Ria wanted her to see how she and the house had in a way grown together.

  The day before the carpet arrived, and then the day it was in place; the day they finally got the Japanese vase Danny had always known would be right; the huge velvet curtains which Danny had spotted at the windows of a house which was being sold at an executor's sale. They measured them and found they fitted exactly. Danny knew they'd go for nothing, it was always the same when distant relatives were selling up. They just wanted the place cleared quickly; there were massive bargains to be had.

  Ria sometimes felt a little guilty about it, but Danny said that was nonsense. Things were only valuable to those who wanted them.

  Most of their life was lived in the big warm kitchen downstairs, but Danny and Ria spent some time every day in the drawing room, the room they had created from their dreams. They delighted in finding further little treasures for it. When Danny got a raise in salary they went out and bought something else. The old candlesticks that were transformed into lamps, more glass, a French clock.

  There was no sense that this room was kept to impress people. It was not a parlour as Hilary had so scornfully dismissed it. The heavy framed portraits that they bought for the walls were other people's ancestors not their own. But there was no pretence, they were just big pictures of people who had been forgotten by their own. Now they came to rest on Danny and Ria's walls.

  Ria did not go back to work. There were so many reasons why it made more sense to be at home. There was always a need to drive someone somewhere, or pick them up. She did one day a week in a charity shop and another morning in the hospital helping to entertain the children who had come with their mothers because there was nobody else to mind them.

  Danny's office wasn't far away. Sometimes he liked to come home to lunch, or even to have a cup of coffee and relax. Barney McCarthy came to see him there too. For some reason the two of them didn't meet in hotels as much as they used to. She knew the kind of food he liked to eat nowadays and always gave him a healthy salad and some poached chicken breast.

  Ria would leave the men to talk.

  Barney McCarthy often said admiringly in her presence, 'You were very lucky in the wife you got, Danny. I hope you appreciate her.'

  Danny always said he did, and as the years went by Ria Lynch knew this was true. Not only did her handsome Danny love her; as the years went by he loved her more than ever.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Rosemary's mother said that Ria Lynch was as sharp a little madam as you'd meet in a day's walk. 'I don't know why you say that,' Rosemary said. But she knew very well what caused her mother's irritation. Ria was married, well married too. This is what Mrs Ryan wanted for her daughter and she transferred her disappointment to attacking Ria Lynch.

  'Well, she came from nothing, from nowhere, a corporation estate. And look at her now, mixing with Barney McCarthy and the wife and living in a big house on Tara Road.' Mrs Ryan sniffed with disapproval.

  'Honestly, you'd find fault with anyone, Mother.' Since she was a toddler Rosemary had been told to say Mother not Mam like other girls did. They were people with class, she had been led to believe.

  But as she grew up Rosemary realised that there really wasn't much sign of classiness in their lives. It was much more in her mother's mind and dreams, memories of a grander lifestyle when she was young and resentment that her husband had never lived up to her hopes.

  Rosemary's father was a salesman who spent more and more time away from a home where he never felt welcome. His two daughters grew up hardly knowing him except through the severe thin-lipped disappointment of their mother who managed to make sure they realised that he had let them all down.

  Mrs Ryan had great hopes for her two elegant daughters, and believed that they would marry well and restore her to some kind of position in Dublin society. She was bitterly disappointed when Rosemary's sister, Eileen, announced that she was going to live with a woman from work called Stephanie, and that they were lovers. They were lesbians and there would be no secrecy or glossing anything over. This was the 1980s and not the Dark Ages. Mrs Ryan cried for weeks over it and agonised as to where she had gone wrong. Her eldest daughter was having unnatural sex with a woman. And Rosemary was showing no sign at all of landing the kind of husband who might change everyone's fortunes.

  No wonder she resented the good luck of Ria, a successful husband, a house in a part of Dublin that was becoming increasingly elegant, and an entry to the best homes in the city because of the patronage of the McCarthys.

  Rosemary had moved into a small flat as soon as she could afford to. Life at home was no fun at all but Rosemary visited her mother every week for a lecture and a harangue about her failure to deliver the goods.

  'I'm sure you're sleeping with men,' Mrs Ryan would say. 'A mother knows these things. It's such a foolish way to go on, letting yourself be cheap and easily available. Why should anyone want to marry you if they can get it for free?'

  'Mother, don't be ridiculous,' Rosemary said, neither confirming nor denying anything that had been said. There was not a great deal to confirm or deny. Rosemary had slept with very few men, only three in fact. This was more because of her own personality, which was aloof and distant, than from any sense of virtue or innate cunning.

  She had enjoyed sex with a young Frenc
h student and had not enjoyed it with an office colleague. She had been drunk on the two occasions when she had made love with a well-known journalist after Christmas parties, but then so had he been drunk so she didn't imagine it had been very successful.

  But she didn't burden her mother with any of these details.

  'I saw that Ria coming out of the Shelbourne Hotel as if she owned it the other day,' Mrs Ryan said.

  'Why don't you like her, Mother?'

  'I didn't say I didn't like her, I just said she played her cards right. That's all.'

  'I think she played them accidentally,' Rosemary said thoughtfully. 'Ria had no idea it was all going to turn out for her as well as it did.'

  'That kind always know they don't take a step without seeing where it leads. I suppose she was pregnant when she married him.'

  'I don't really know, Mother,' Rosemary said wearily.

  'Of course you know. Still, she was lucky, he could easily have left her there.'

  'They're very happy, Mother'

  'So you say.'

  'Would you like to come out and have lunch in Quentin's one day next week, Mother?'

  'What for?'

  'To cheer you up. We could get dressed up, look at all the famous people there.'

  'There's no point, Rosemary. You mean well but who would know us? Who would know what we came from or anything about us? We'd just be two women sitting there. It's all jumped-up people these days, we'd only be on the outside looking in.'

  'I have lunch there about once a week. I like it. It's expensive, of course, but then I don't eat lunch any other day so it works out fine.'