‘Gerry Moore, I haven’t seen you looking so respectable for years. And Emma …’ They greeted him with little jokes and little laughs; both of them patted their flatter stomachs while the man said they must have been at a health farm, they looked so well. Emma said she owed hers to her bicycle and Gerry said that, alas, he owed his to laying off the booze. It was like the first hurdle in an obstacle race. Emma knew from the whispers between the couple that there would be many more. The news would get around, people would come to inspect, to see if it was true. Gerry Moore, that poor old soak, back to his former self, you never saw anything like it, doesn’t touch a drop now, made a fortune last year, back on top as a photographer, you never saw anything like him and the wife. Please. Please, God. Please let it happen.
* * *
Father Vincent called around on Saturday night and knocked for a long time at the door. The car was gone, Emma’s bicycle was there, and there was no reply. He assumed they must all be out at some family gathering. But that child had seemed so white and worried, he hoped that Gerry hadn’t broken out immediately and been taken back into the home. He debated with himself for a long time about whether to leave a note or not. In the end he decided against it. Suppose poor Gerry had broken out and been taken back in, it would be a sick sort of thing to leave a welcome home card. Father Vincent wished, as he often did, that he had second sight.
Paul came home from Andy’s and turned on the television. Helen came in shortly afterwards; they sat with peanut butter sandwiches and glasses of milk and watched happily. They heard voices, and a key turn in the lock.
‘Oh Lord,’ said Paul, ‘I’d forgotten he was back, pick up the glass, Helen, give me those plates. We’re meant to be running a tidy ship here!’ Helen laughed at the imitation of her father’s voice, but she looked out into the hall anxiously to make sure that Daddy wasn’t drunk.
* * *
It was very expensive having Gerry home. Emma realised this, but couldn’t quite think why. She realised that he wasn’t spending any money on drink; apart from that one Saturday night out they didn’t entertain people. Gerry bought no clothes or household things. Why then was her money not stretching as far as it used to? A lot of it might be on stationery and stamps. Gerry was as good as his word about writing to people with ideas – just bright, cheery letters which said, without having to spell it out, I’m back, I’m cured and I’m still a great photographer. Then he liked to cook new things, things that he wouldn’t associate with alcohol. Together they had spent a great deal of money on curry ingredients, but then he had tired of it, and said it wasn’t worth all the trouble – they could slip out and buy a good curry if they needed one. She didn’t grudge it, but she had been so used to accounting for every penny carefully, putting this little bit there towards the electricity, this towards the gas, and that towards the phone. She didn’t know what she was going to do when the next bills came in. And talking of bills, what the phone bill was going to be like made her feel weak around the legs.
Gerry had been talking to somebody in Limerick for nearly fifteen minutes one night, and he mentioned calls to Manchester and London. She had said nothing; she just prayed that the rewards and results of all these phone calls might be felt by the time the telephone bill came in.
* * *
Gerry’s mother thought that he wasn’t himself at all since he came out of that place. He had gone up to see her and the visit was not a success. She had bought a naggin of whiskey for him specially. It was in the glass-fronted cupboard there beside the china dogs. Ah, go on, surely one wouldn’t do him any harm.
‘No, Mother. That’s the whole point. I’ve got something wrong with my insides, it turns to poison in me. I told you this. Emma explained …’
‘Huh, Emma. High-brow talk. Allergy addiction. I’m sick of it.’
‘Yes, Mother, so am I,’ Gerry’s patience was ebbing, ‘but it happens to be true.’
‘Look, have just the one and we’ll quit fighting,’ his mother had said.
‘It would be easy for me to say Thank You Mother, to hold it here in my fist and when you weren’t looking to throw it away. But I can’t do that. I can’t bloody do it. Can you have the wit of a halfwit and understand that?’
‘There’s no need to shout at me, I’ve quite enough to put up with,’ his mother had said, and then she had started to cry.
‘Listen, Mother, give me the bottle you so kindly bought for me. I’ll give it to Father Vincent for his sale of work, he can use it on the tombola or something. Then it won’t be wasted.’
‘I will not. If I bought whiskey it will be there to offer to someone who has the manners to take it.’
No other subject managed to bring them on to the same plane. Gerry left, and hoped that nobody who lived on earth had such a poor relationship with a parent as he had. That was the day that he went home and found Paul fighting with Emma in the kitchen. They hadn’t heard him come in.
‘But WHY, if you could tell me WHY I might do it. He’s not an invalid, he’s not soft in the head, so why does he want to play happy families sitting down to supper together every night? If I go over to Andy’s after supper it’s too late, then the evening’s spoiled.’
‘Ask Andy here.’
‘No fear.’
Gerry came in and looked at them, first one and then another.
‘Please spend the evening with your friend tonight, Paul. Emma, can I have a word with you in my study when you’re ready?’
He walked on upstairs. He heard Helen, giggling nervously.
‘That’s just the voice that Reverend Mother uses when she’s going to expel someone,’ she said, stifling her laughs.
* * *
‘The boy is right. I am not soft in the head. I get weary of all these family meals, if you must know.’
‘I thought with my being out all day and you getting back into a routine …’
‘You thought, you thought, you thought … what else is it in this house except what you think?’
She looked at him in disbelief.
‘I mean it, Emma, morning, noon and night …’
Two large tears fell down her face and two more were on the way down like raindrops on a window. She didn’t even brush them aside; she didn’t try to deny it, to reason with him, or to agree with him. She just looked beaten.
‘Well, say something, Emma, if you don’t agree with me say something.’
‘What is there to say?’ she sobbed. ‘I love you so much and everything I do seems to hurt you, God Almighty, how can I do what will please you? I’m obviously doing all the wrong things.’
He put his arms around her and stroked her hair. ‘Stop, stop,’ he said. She cried into his chest.
‘You’re very good. I’m really a shit, a terrible shit.’ She made a muffled denial into his shirt.
‘And I love you too and need you …’
She looked up at him with a tear-stained face. ‘Do you?’
‘Of course,’ he said.
Downstairs, Helen said, They’ve gone into the bedroom, isn’t that odd?’
Paul said, ‘He can’t be going to expel her then.’ Helen said, ‘What do you think they’re doing?’ Paul laughed knowingly. ‘I’ll give you one guess,’ he said.
Helen was horrified. ‘They can’t be. They’re much too old.’
Paul said, ‘Why else have they closed the door?’
‘God, that’s awful, that’s all we need.’
Father Vincent called just then. Helen was so embarrassed when she recognised his shape through the door that she ran back for Paul.
‘I can’t tell him what we think,’ she said. ‘You couldn’t tell a priest something like that.’
Paul let him in. ‘Mum and Dad are upstairs at the moment, having a bit of a lie down. If you don’t mind, Father, I won’t disturb them.’
‘Of course, of course,’ Father Vincent looked confused.
‘But can I get you a cup of tea, coffee?’ The priest said he didn’t want to
be any trouble. ‘A drink?’
‘No, no, heavens, no.’
‘We have drink. Dad insists it be kept there for visitors.’
Father Vincent stayed for about ten minutes with no drink and hardly any conversation. When he was at the porch again, he looked timidly at the stairs. ‘If your father has taken a turn for the worse and your mother wants any help, she only has to call on me.’ Paul said that he didn’t think Mother wanted any help just now, and when the door was safely closed he and Helen rolled around the sitting room floor laughing at the idea of leading Father Vincent upstairs, knocking on the bedroom door and calling out that Father Vincent wanted to know if Mother wanted any help or could manage on her own.
Gerry and Emma lay in their big bed and Gerry said, ‘It’s been so long, I was afraid to, I was afraid, in case …’
Emma said, ‘You were lovely as you were always lovely.’ She lay counting the days since her last period; she was safe, she had to be safe. The very notion of becoming pregnant, now, was too much to contemplate. She had stopped taking the Pill two years ago. It was said to have some side effects and women were warned not to stay on it for ever. And what on earth had been the point of taking the Pill when there was simply no risk of becoming pregnant?
* * *
Jack was sorry that Gerry was back. It sort of put a stop to his Monday visits. He used to visit Gerry on a Sunday and then took the bus to their house on a Monday night after work to report on what he saw, what he said, what was said back to him and what he thought. The first couple of times they had been eager to know what he reported because they still hadn’t got used to life without Gerry. Then, after that, it had become a little ritual. Emma used to cook a nice meal, and then they would all wash up. Jack would sit down in the comfort of a nice big sitting room, not his own cramped little bedsitter. They used to watch television, while Emma sometimes did mending; the television set was turned low so as not to disturb the two children who did homework. All through April and May Jack had been involved in their life. There was no excuse for him to come any more.
He had liked those evenings sitting there with Emma; she had been so nice and interested in everything he had been doing at work. It was so cosy. Gerry must have been a madman, stark staring mad to throw away all his money and his good living and spend time drinking with a crowd of eejits. You wouldn’t mind a man who had nothing at home, but a man who had Emma. It was past understanding.
* * *
It seemed a very long summer for everyone. Father Vincent spent a lot of time wondering what he had done to offend the Moores; every time he went there those two young children, who had seemed nice and normal at one stage, were exceedingly silly with giggles. Gerry wanted to hear no inspiring tales of how others triumphed, he had said curtly, and Emma was too busy to say more than the time of day. She had taken some home typing and had rung him once to enquire whether there was any parish work to be done on a professional basis. He had said they would always be glad of some voluntary help, but she had said sorry, that she was not yet in a position to be able to offer that.
Mrs Moore thought that Gerry had become short-tempered and intolerant. Her grandchildren never came near her, and that Emma seemed to be too busy even to talk to her on the telephone.
Paul fell in love with Andy’s sister, but Andy’s whole family, sister and all, went to Greece for a month. If Paul had two hundred pounds he could have gone out to visit them. His dad had said he could bloody earn it if he wanted it, and his mum had said he must be a selfish little rat to think that money like that was available for a holiday for him.
Helen was very bored and very worried. She had become very ugly suddenly, she thought, after years of looking quite reasonable; now, when it was important, she had become revolting-looking. In books people’s mothers helped them when this kind of thing happened, lent them make-up and bought them dresses. In real life her mum told her to stop snivelling, there would be time enough for that later.
Des felt the summer was long too. He had nothing but admiration for Gerry – he sat there with the best of them, bought his round like any man, but it wasn’t the same. Des could never relax like he had, he couldn’t get it out of his head that he was waiting for Gerry to start, to catch up on the rest of them. It was restless drinking with him. God damn it, Gerry was very extreme; when he was going on the batter he was a fierce drinker, got them barred from several places, but now that he’d had a fright, instead of taking it nice and easy like any normal person and just watching it, here he was like a bloody Pioneer, sitting there with a glass of lime and soda or whatever he drank nowadays.
Gerry found the summer slow. He found the replies to his letters even slower, and the offers of any work were the slowest of all. How could the whole photography world have collapsed without his noticing it? There must be people getting work; he saw their pictures in the advertisements, on the television, in the magazines. ‘Maybe,’ Emma had said, ‘maybe you should show them what you can do now, rather than old portfolios, maybe you should get a collection for another book together?’ But did Emma have a clue of any sort how long it took to put a book together? You didn’t go out with a camera and snap 150 things and mark them pages one to one hundred and fifty. There was a theme, there was an interest, there was a commission: a lot of the pictures had been done and paid for already in somebody else’s time. Oh, it was all so slow getting back, and it had seemed so very fast, the fall down the ladder. Or was he just being melodramatic?
Emma realised one day during that endless summer that she had no friend. Not no friends but not even one friend. There was nobody she could talk to about Gerry. There never had been. Her mother had thought he was a little too flash for her and her father had wondered about security. But no matter who had asked her to marry them her mother would have seen flashness and her father suspected insecurity all around him. She never talked to her sister about anything except her sister’s five children, all of whom seemed to be doing spectacularly well in exams at any given season of the year. She couldn’t talk to her mother-in-law, she certainly couldn’t talk to that Des Kelly, who always looked at her as if she were a particularly dangerous kind of snake. Poor Jack was so kind and anxious to help, but really the man was so limited, he couldn’t have a serious conversation about Gerry’s future to save his life. She had formed an unreasonable dislike of Father Vincent who used to be quite a friend of theirs ten years ago. He had always been quick with liberal attitudes and a broad spectrum but that was not what she needed now. She needed specific advice. It was now four months since Gerry had come home from that nursing home; he had not earned one penny from his trade of photography. To complain about that seemed untimely and ungracious because after all, the man had not touched one drop of alcohol either. There was no point in going to the nursing home and asking the doctors. They had asked her to be co-operative and not to boss him around. She thought that she was doing that part of it. But Lord God, how long would it go on? Already the small debts were building up – paradoxically more frightening than when he had been drinking and the bill from the off-licence would arrive. Those drink bills had a terrifying unreality about them. Today’s bills, high telephone charges, photography equipment, printing costs, expensive cuts of meat, they had a ring of permanency. And what Emma wanted to know was how long to go on. How long did the ego have to be flattered, the image of self restored? How soon, in other words, could she tell him that there was a job going in a photography studio in town, a very down-market photography job for the great Gerry Moore, but she knew the man who ran it needed an assistant? Did she dare yet tell Gerry, suggest it to him, say that it would be a good idea for a year or two and he could build up his contacts after work? No, it must be too soon, otherwise why would she feel sick at the stomach even thinking about it?
That September they went to a wedding. They didn’t know the people well and in fact they were rather surprised at the invitation. When they got there and discovered that they were among four hundred people
it became clear that the net had been spread fairly wide. It was a lavish do and there was no effort spared to see that the guests had a good time.
‘Isn’t it marvellous to give two kids a send off like this – they’ll remember it all their life,’ Gerry had said. Something about the way he spoke made Emma look up sharply from her plate of smoked salmon. She stared at his glass. He was drinking champagne. She felt the blood go out of her face.
‘It’s only a little champagne for a wedding,’ he said. ‘Please. Please, Emma, don’t give me a lecture, don’t start to tell me it’s the beginning of the end.’
‘Gerry,’ she gasped at him.
‘Look, it’s a wedding. I don’t know people, I’m not relaxed, I’m not able to talk to them. Just three or four glasses and that’s it. It’s all right, tomorrow it’s back to the everyday business of drying out.’
‘I beg you …’ she said. He had held his glass out to a passing waiter.
‘What do you beg me?’ His voice had turned hard and the edge of it, the cutting edge, had a sneer as well. ‘What could you possibly beg from me, you who have everything?’
His voice was loud now and people were beginning to look at them. Emma felt the kind of dread and panic that she used to know as a child when she was at the carnival. She hated the carnival each year – the bumpers, the chairoplane and the ghost train. Most of all she hated the helter-skelter, and this is what it felt like now. Fast and furious and not knowing what lay ahead.
‘Could we go home, do you think?’ she asked faintly.
‘It’s only beginning,’ he said.
‘Please, Gerry, I’ll give you anything.’
‘Will you give me champagne, and fun and a bit of a laugh? No, you’ll give me a lecture and a flood of tears and then if I’m very good a piece of shepherd’s pie.’
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