by Claire Allan
She helped me choose the flowers and loved every second of poring over the tiny details of the wedding until I was happy they were just right. “We should do this for a living,” she had laughed – and I had laughed, too, originally. Mark had laughed and Daddy had laughed and then Rose and I had looked at each other – both with that wicked glint in our eyes – and the idea for The Dressing Room was born. I would oversee operations – Rose would do as much as she felt able and we would work together.
We had already sourced our premises, plotted our colour scheme and started working on the renovation of the old building – thanks in part to a heritage grant and also to a whacking great business loan from the bank – by the time I walked down the aisle and saw Rose in her not-too-big hat, smiling at me and waiting to take Daddy’s hand as I took Mark’s.
I’m not saying I didn’t miss my mother that day – but it was more because I was hurt she didn’t see fit to be there than any sense that her presence would make the day feel more complete.
We didn’t speak much after that. We sent cards, the occasional text. There were a few awkward lunchesand one pretty disastrous Christmas dinner, that being the last time we had broken bread together. Shortly after, she had relocated toLondon and hadn’t seen fit to come back until now.
She may well have been my mother but that woman, who now stood before me in the shop Rose and I had built from scratch, was not my mammy.
“I’m busy,” I told her.
She looked around at the empty reception and back at me and I felt as if I was ten years old and having to justify my very existence.
“I have a client in the dressing room. I’ve just nipped out to check on something.”
“It won’t take long,” she said, walking towards me as my inner deflector shield shot up around me. I was feeling vulnerable enough at the moment – rejected enough – without having my mother come back into my life and trample all over my stomped-on heart.
“Mother,” I started, stopping as I heard Rose’s footsteps on the stairs behind me. This for some reason made me feel nervous – as if I was about to be caught cheating on my stepmother – even though Rose had never, ever in my presence said one negative thing about the woman who had actually given birth to me. I glanced behind me and back at my mother, like a startled rabbit stuck in the headlights of a very fast oncoming car. I made to speak but realised that I had completely lost the ability to form any kind of coherent sentence.
“Violet,” Rose spoke first, looking at me with a serene smile on her face and then back at my mother whose lip had curled in a most unattractive manner.
“What a surprise,” Rose continued. “Sure isn’t it lovely to see you. This is the first time you’ve been here – in Kitty’s shop, isn’t it? Isn’t it gorgeous? Hasn’t she done well?”
My mother nodded and offered another cursory glance around the reception. “I’ve heard it’s very popular,” she said.
“It is,” I said, almost boastfully, at once annoyed with myself for feeling the need to impress her. “Rose and I have done a good job, even if I say so myself.”
I was surprise to see the slight hurt in my mother’s eyes but, as soon as it had passed she plastered a smile on her face and was agreeing, reaching her hand out to Rose’s to shake it. She hadn’t offered her hand to me. Or a hug. You would have thought after five years she might have wanted a hug. I looked at her. She hadn’t changed much over the last five years. Her hair was a little longer, and a little more blonde perhaps. She wore the same kind of eclectic floaty expensive clothes she always wore – the kind of clothes which Rose wore – only Rose would go for pastel colours while Mum would opt for sludgy beiges and grey. I should really tell her those colours did her no favours.
“I wasn’t expecting to see you,” I said.
“I should have called,” my mother replied, sitting down and leaving me under no illusion whatsoever that she was not about to leave any time soon. “But I didn’t know if I would be welcome, if the truth be told, so I figured that surprising you would be the best course of action.” She smiled that same strange, half-forced smile at the end of her sentence and I almost felt sorry for her. Of course I felt more sorry for me, who had experienced enough surprises in the last few weeks to last me a lifetime. A month or two, or a year or two, or even a decade or two of no surprises whatsoever would go down just nicely.
“Well, Violet, how about I make us a cup of tea while Kitty deals with our clients and then, sure, we can take it from there?” Rose offered as I stood with not a notion of what else to say.
“Okay,” my mother replied, slowly standing and following Rose up the stairs while I stood in the reception and resisted the urge to throw myself on the floor and have a full-on temper tantrum.
Stay calm, I urged myself, as I walked, my hands shaking, backinto my second-time-lucky bride and tried to make her experience memorable for the right reasons.
The conversation between my mother and Rose was flowing when I eventually joined them in the workshop. Rose was showing my mother the wall where we had pinned pictures of our beautiful brides alongside the various thank-you cards and notes we had received over the last few years. Beside the pin-board were a couple of framed pictures, images of us at the local business awards, grinning at our achievements.
“You really have done very well,” my mother offered, turning to look at me.
She still made no effort to hug me. Then again I made no effort to hug her either. I was all done with hugging.
“I don’t understand why you are here,” I said, perhaps a little too brusquely. I saw Rose give me that ‘calm down, dear’ look she did so well.
“I wanted to see you. Is that so hard to believe?” my mother sniffed.
“Actually, it is – given our history. You must know that.” She hadn’t asked how I was. She hadn’t asked after Mark. She hadn’t told me she missed me. I crossed the room and sat down behind my desk and lifted a paper clip, nervously uncurling it.
“Touché,” she said, that awkward smile on her face again. “But look, Kitty. The thing is . . . well . . . I know, I’ve been awful . . .”I snorted and she didn’t even blink, just carried on talking, “I’m only realising now how awful I was.”
As she spoke I was aware of Rose leaving the room. My place in hell was probably assured by the fact I was more concerned about where Rose was going than what my mother was telling me.
“But I’ve been getting things together. I know I’ve been selfish. I’m trying to make amends. And I’m making big changes in my life. Kitty, I’ve met someone. We’re very happy and we want to get married. And I’d love you to be there. In fact, I’d love for you to help me choose my dress – here, of course, in The Dressing Room. I’ve come home to tell you that I want things to be different between us. I want my wedding to be a new beginning – for me and you, and Ivy too of course.”
I thought of Ivy, how my anger towards our mother paled into insignificance against Ivy’s, and I felt my face redden. “Have you seen Ivy?” I asked, thinking that she couldn’t have. She would most likely have a black eye or at least a harrowed look on her face if she had.
My mother shook her head, the nervous smile gone. “No. No . . . I was thinking . . . if it wasn’t too much to ask . . . you could help me with that as well.”
I flicked the paperclip across the desk.Sweet Jesus. I had enough going on in my life without helping my mother build her bridges – bridges she hadn’t just burned in her wake but incinerated.
“I . . . don’t know.”
My mother pulled a chair over and sat down opposite me, across the table. The physical barrier between us was nothing compared to the emotional one.I rubbed at my eyes. Christ, it never rained but it poured.
“I’m not sure I have the energy for this right now,” I said, trying to stop my voice from breaking. It was around that point that I realised, even though this woman opposite me had become a virtual stranger, there was still a part of me that wanted so much for her to
take me back in her arms and tell me it would be okay, that she loved me and that, indeed, I was worthy of being loved. But I looked at her – sitting there, thinking she could just walk in and we could pick up where we had left off – and I felt like screaming.
“In fact I know I don’t have the energy for this right now,” I said. “Mum . . . please. Just not now. Can you go?”
“Can we talk later?” she asked, her voice breaking, a pleading look in her eyes which made me want to scream.
“I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
“Think about it,” she said, pushing a business card in my direction with her mobile number on it. “I’m staying with your granny. You can get me there if you need me.”
I nodded but couldn’t think of anything else to say, so I watched her leave, sat back in my chair, poured a glass of pilfered-from-the-fridge Prosecco and downed it quick enough to make the bubbles catch in my throat and make me gag.
Chapter sixteen
Erin
I wasn’t used to wearing much make-up. I generally wore only a quick slick of foundation and maybe some loose powder to stop the foundation sliding off my face by 4p.m. If I was going out for a very special occasion I might have added some eye shadow, mascara and lip gloss into the mix. I wore full make-up so infrequently I was pretty sure the Clarins eye palette in my make-up bag had been there for longer than the length of my entire relationship with Paddy . . . and maybe even a good deal longer than that. I did not own an eye pencil. And lip liners had no place in my world, never mind bronzers and the like. So I felt as if I had gained an extra two pounds in weight as Katie, our in-house stylist, transformed me from mild-mannered journalist to cover girl. Or at least picture-in-the-magazine girl. I looked in the mirror and thought my face looked strange – good-strange. Not really like me, or at least not like the me I was used to looking at every day. My hair had been tamed as well – sleeked with a slight wave, very 1950s glamour girl. Katie had poured me into a very figure-hugging outfit as well which I was worried wouldn’t pass the sitting-down-not-bulging-out test. Paddy had been primped and preened too although, with nothing more than a mild fuzz thanks to chemo and common-or-garden male-pattern baldness, his hair didn’t need much work. He had a bit of make-up put on him, which I knew I would tease him about later, and he had been dressed in a very fancy suit. Even though he was frail from his battle with illness, he looked edible, and I found myself distracted from the nerves of what we were about to do by thinking very much about what I would like to do later. He looked at me and smiled, a twinkle in his dark eyes, and I felt myself blush.
I would never have thought for one second he would have wanted to do these articles. But he had shocked me to my very core by reacting with enthusiasm while I had cringed and stuttered my way through recalling the conversation I’d had with Grace earlier that day.
“Why not?” he had said, sitting back across the table from me and grinning.
“Because, you know, it would get personal. I wouldn’t be in control of it. Not really. Grace and Sinéad, well, they know what they want and they want us to bare our souls.”
“I wouldn’t be opposed to a bit of soul-baring,” he said, sincerely.
“Really?” It was hard to hide the shock in my voice. Of course I knew Paddy was the kind of man who wore his heart on his sleeve. He didn’t shy away from talking about his illness. He had even talked about it quite eloquently at his pre-op party – but that was in front of friends and family. People who knew. People who cared. People who were unlikely to laugh about it all behind our backs. People who were close enough to the situation to really care about what was happening to us and not just see what we were saying as some form of entertainment they read while waiting to see the dentist or while getting their hair cut. I know, by thinking that way, I was largely disregarding my own profession but this was personal. This was not telling someone else’s story. This was not being objective. Much as I wanted to be, I could not be objective about my boyfriend’s testicles and his battle with cancer.
“Erin, we both have to be on board with this. And we have to do it for the right reason. I’m not saying yes because I think it would do your profile good and put you in Grace and Sinéad’s good books. I’m not doing it because I think you would make a brilliant job of it because you don’t even realise what a good writer you are. I’m not doing it for any reason other than the fact I’m one of the lucky ones.”
I looked at him as if he was slightly mentally disturbed. The lucky ones don’t get cancer, surely. The lucky ones leave this world with all their bits intact.
He must have noticed the look of disbelief on my face as he reached his hand across the table and took mine. “I am lucky, Erin,” he said as I shook my head. “I have you, and I’m getting through this and we’re getting married. Jesus – I couldn’t be luckier. We caught this cancer in time.”
I had to resist the urge to shrug my shoulders or shake my head or give any indication whatsoever that perhaps things weren’t brilliant. And that we wouldn’t beat it. Chemo wasn’t just handed out willy-nilly, excusing the genitalia-related pun.
“Not all are lucky. Not all men have girlfriends who march them to the doctors, or stick by them, or agree to marry them not knowing what they might be facing –” His voice hadstarted to break and I could feel his strong, big, heavy, manly hands tremble just that little bit.
“So we tell our story. You tell our story. You get men to look after themselves. You show them that it doesn’t have to be the end. Tell them that we are going to have the biggest, best wedding we could hope for. Most of all, Erin Brannigan, tell the world I love you and you love me. What more could I want?”
Of course, even though I’m not a typical hyper-emotional woman, I had cried and told him I loved him too and then, when he had gone to bed exhausted, I had texted Grace to let her know that we would do it. This was followed by a call to Jules during which she veered back and forth from telling me it was a far, far better thing we were doing and telling me that we were clearly off our heads. “Your whole life, in a magazine!” she said incredulously before jumping almost seamlessly to a squeal of excitement that I would be getting a make-over and free new clothes for a photo shoot.
“I always wanted to get a proper photo shoot done,” she said, “but the only way I think it will ever happen is if I take to glamour-modelling or the like.”
I thought of my poor, flat-chested sister and laughed and she laughed too and then, because I really didn’t want to over-think things too much, I changed the subject and we spent a good half-hour debating the merits of McSteamy versus McDreamy and wondering why no doctor we had ever come within twenty miles of had ever, ever looked even half as sexy as either.
When I eventually went to bed I had one those strange pre-wedding dreams where I imagined things took a strange and disastrous turn. This time, I was sitting at the altar – my dress hitched up, peeling potatoes in preparation for the wedding breakfast. I woke at four, still delirious, shook Paddy and told him that we should ring the hotel and make sure they ordered in extra spuds just in case. He laughed, kissed me on the forehead and told me that particular dream would definitely need to make it into one of the articles.
And thus we found ourselves, dolled up and trying to take the whole photo-shoot thing very seriously while Grace looked on from behind the photographer urging us to channel our inner Posh and Becks.
“There’s no need to look so terrified of each other!” she called as I looked at Paddy who was trying not to laugh. “You both look fantastic. Sure, aren’t you madly in love?”
“Of course we are.” I grinned nervously at her. “It’s just that we’re used to being madly in love with each other in the privacy of our own home.”
“It’s not a porno shoot,” Grace laughed.
I heard Paddy lose the will to hold in his laughter beside me. I almost, almost elbowed him in the ribs but I was sure doing that to someone with cancer would be considered very bad form indeed.
“Your giggles aren’t helping,” I smiled at him, a bubble of laughter rising up in me. Christ, he looked handsome. So handsome that I kind of wished it was a porno shoot. Not that, you know, I’d do a porno shoot. I’m not that kind of girl, honest . . . but still, how amazing, how healthy he looked . . . with that smart suit and that touch of make-up . . . I realised how I wanted him. As my urge to laugh turned into a nervous giggle, Paddy reached across and kissed me lightly and suddenly there was no one else in the room – or so it seemed – and if there was a clicking of a camera, or more encouraging pep talks from Grace, I didn’t really notice. It was okay then. I was relaxed and I knew that the pictures would be stunning. To me, they would be perfect.
I felt a little overdressed and definitely over-made-up as Paddy took me for dinner when the photo shoot was done. “Sure, looking as good as this, we might as well make the most of it and hit the town,” he’d said.
Of course I knew by ‘hitting the town’, he meant dinner and then home to rest, but dinner and home to rest sounded good to me. We had become quite reclusive these last few months, which was understandable, and in recent weeks we had definitely noticed that people had stopped asking us to go out. It was as if we had put a “Please do not ask as refusal may offend” sticker in our social calendar and everyone was staying well clear.
The thought of dinner anywhere other than our kitchen table or living room had me almost dizzy with excitement.
“Champagne?” he said, with a smile. “It feels like some sort of celebration.”
I smiled. “Champagne sounds good. Champagne sounds absolutely perfect in fact.”
It would simply be the proverbial icing on the cake to what had been a pretty wonderful day. “Great,” he replied. “And you can have a dessert after and all – let’s push the boat out.”
I laughed. He knew better than anyone that there was never any question that I would not have left that restaurant without a dessert. A dessert was a must – an essential. A necessity. In fact, the first thing I did when I got the menu at any restaurant was check out the desserts.Even if I was on a diet. Even if I had vowed that nothing that did not contain at least two of my requisite five-a-day would pass my lips, there was always, always room for dessert. In fact, as we waited for the waiter to bring us our drinks I was already salivating at the prospect of a slice of Baileys Cheesecake.