Time Present and Time Past

by Deirdre Madden

  To begin with she had enjoyed her job almost as much as her days off. She didn’t have a lot of experience in fashion retail when she went there, but she was fortunate in her new colleagues, who helped her. She’d quickly made friends with two other girls, Sally and Nell, who had already been there for a while; and although their supervisor Miss McKenzie had been a bit stern at times, she hadn’t been the worst. Martina had shared a flat in Camden with Nell for a couple of years; they’d used to go drinking and dancing with Sally.

  But of course nothing stays the same forever. Sally had changed her job and then Martina bought her own little apartment. Nell got married and had twins, moved out of London to somewhere in the distant suburbs; Martina can’t now remember the name of the place. She’d lost touch with Nell over the years; and although she still occasionally hears from Sally, who also married and had children but has since divorced, they haven’t met for ages. Martina doesn’t want to meet either of them again, but there are no hard feelings. It’s just that she would rather remember them all as they were, back in the day on the shop floor, impeccable with their gilt name tags and high heels; drinking tea and laughing beside the grey metal lockers in the staff room, or out together for cocktails in some fashionable bar.

  It’s getting on for nine o’clock now. She goes over to the phone beside the till and rings Fintan, who picks up immediately.

  ‘I’m glad it’s you,’ he says. ‘I thought it might be my colleague Imelda. I hope there’s nothing wrong.’ It’s an odd hour, she knows, for her to be ringing him.

  ‘Do you remember that photo I gave you, of us in the North when we were children, with Granny and the horse? It set me thinking about Edward again, and last night I just decided I would ring him to see how things are.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought you would even have a number for him.’

  ‘I rang directory enquiries.’

  ‘And you got him?’

  ‘I did, yes. I was speaking to his wife, Veronica, first, and then he came on the line. Oh Fintan, it was great, but it was so strange. He’s the loveliest man. I felt that he was a stranger but that I knew him, if that doesn’t sound crazy. We didn’t talk to each other like strangers.’

  ‘It would be incredible to see him again, after all these years.’

  ‘Well, that’s what he suggested, and that’s really why I’m calling. He wants us to go up for a visit. He said he’d speak to Veronica about a suitable date, and I said I’d speak to you.’

  ‘It would be incredible,’ Fintan says again.

  They discuss when they might go north, and Martina remarks, ‘I don’t know why we lost touch in this way, why we let things drift. Maybe it was partly due to my being out of Ireland for so many years.’

  And then Fintan surprises her by saying hesitantly, ‘I don’t think I ever told you this, but I’m so glad you came home again from London. To live, I mean.’

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘you never told me that before.’

  ‘Because of the way it happened – I mean it was a confused period, maybe you weren’t even planning to come back, so by the time I realised you were home for good you’d been here a while. I suppose I sort of took it for granted then. But I was thinking about it the other day and I realised how much I’d miss you if you were still away.’

  ‘Ah, go on out of that; you managed well enough without me for years,’ she says, trying to lighten the mood, but Fintan will have none of it.

  ‘That was then. Time changes things, and at this stage in the game I can’t imagine only seeing you once or twice a year. It would be just awful. The kids are delighted you’re here, and you’re a true friend to Colette.’

  ‘If I’d actually had a sister I couldn’t have been any closer to her,’ Martina says, capitulating to his sincerity, matching it. She’s glad they’re speaking on the phone and not face to face, glad too when Fintan begins to back off.

  ‘It’s just something that came to me. I thought I might mention it to you.’

  She thanks him, promises again to keep him informed about Edward, and they say goodbye.

  She’s very touched by what Fintan has just blurted out, even though she’s been back in Dublin for quite a few years now. The family hadn’t ever consciously registered her return or commented much upon it. Certainly it hadn’t been lost on her that the only people who were sensible to there having been something wrong – seriously wrong – with the circumstances of her coming home were her in-laws: Christy, and then, much later, Colette. And as for Joan, she thinks with some bitterness, why, she wouldn’t care if Martina left Ireland again in the morning, never to return.

  To attempt to distract herself from her thoughts she goes into the storeroom, and brings out a carton of cashmere cardigans she hadn’t been planning to put out yet. She might as well: there’s room on the shelves, and it comforts her to see and to touch the pink and cream softness of the wool, the small, neat buttons. Perhaps she might put a couple of them aside for Colette to look at. Colette had once told her that Fintan wasn’t just her husband but the only man she’d ever been involved with in her entire life. It hadn’t greatly surprised Martina, indeed merely confirmed what she had sometimes thought might be the case. It did, on the other hand, make her grateful for the variety of her own emotional life. While she does on occasion envy Fintan and Colette everything they have together – their strong marriage, their children, the home they all share – she also at times thinks how tremendously boring she herself would find it all.

  She stands by the life she has led, and she honours it. There’s her career for a start: everything she achieved in becoming a buyer in London, and then the shop here in Dublin. Apart from a bit of temping and translation back in her twenties, Colette has never worked outside the home. Martina doesn’t believe there’s anything – no husband, no children – that could have compensated for the satisfaction she has had from her working life. And as for her relationships – well, there have probably been more of them than was ideal, and she still doesn’t know why none of them had finally developed into something permanent, but there had been great times in many of them and even the bad ones had never been that bad.

  And the thing that had ruined everything, that hadn’t even been a relationship, it had just been a disaster. Martina doesn’t want to think about it, but the touch of the wool in the cardigans is reminding her now of that time. She is thinking of Christy handing her the rug and her taking it. She doesn’t want to think of that time. Think of something else. Think of something else. She looks again at her watch. Nine-twenty. She could open ten minutes early. With luck someone will walk in off the street and distract her; cancel the rising panic she feels. Looking at herself in the mirror, she takes comfort again in the green silk dress and the amber beads. She wipes her eyes. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. She looks the part. Everything will be fine. She’s ready to perform.

  Crossing to the door, Martina turns over the small white wooden board hanging there – OPEN – and begins her day.

  ELEVEN

  There’s a little unpleasantness when Fintan and Lucy arrive at Emma’s house to collect her, because Emma isn’t there.

  ‘Didn’t that man ring you?’

  ‘What man?’

  Emma’s mother rolls her eyes. ‘Her father of course. She’s with him this weekend. He knows that you’re taking her to the zoo because I heard Emma telling him about it on the phone. She’s really looking forward to it, so don’t let him talk you out of it.’

  ‘Where does he live?’

  She scribbles an address on a scrap of paper, adds a phone number at Fintan’s request, and gives it to him. He goes back to the car with Lucy and calls the number, but it goes to voicemail, so he decides to head straight over.

  The given address turns out to be a white apartment block with neatly landscaped gardens. They ring the bell for number eight, and Lucy shrieks into the intercom, ‘It’s me, Emma!’ A man’s voice replies, ‘First floor,’ and they are buzzed in, go up in the lift.
Stepping into the carpeted hallway, Fintan has the impression of being in a slightly creepy hotel, where anything might be happening behind the rows of closed and numbered doors. There is the sense of the presence of others – muffled music in the distance, the sound of voices, but there is no-one to be seen.

  The door of number eight opens. Light and noise escape in a sudden burst, and Lucy darts in before Fintan can stop her, past the man who has opened the door.

  Standing before Fintan is Fintan himself. That is, a younger Fintan, in his early thirties, dishevelled and unshaven, wearing a navy towelling bathrobe, but Fintan to the life: with his dark hair, blue eyes and slight paunch; his face displaying (although Fintan would not know to define it thus) the same combination of high intelligence and an innocence so incorrigible that it can sometimes look like stupidity. It is, to Fintan, a horrible sight. It is like being forced to sit opposite a large mirror in a restaurant and watch oneself eat.

  ‘I’m Conor,’ says this other Fintan.

  ‘I’m Fintan,’ says Fintan. The other man closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose hard, then opens the door wide.

  ‘Come in,’ he says. ‘I’m afraid we’re running a bit late.’

  Fintan follows him through the hall and into a spectacularly untidy kitchen, where the two little girls are already standing by a vast open fridge. There is the sound of a television coming from another room. The kitchen, which is flooded with light from big windows, has a central island topped in granite, and is furnished with tall silver stools. Emma pours orange juice from a carton for herself and Lucy, before they scamper off together to the room where the television is. Like a man in a dream, Fintan observes all of this in dismay, but is powerless to do anything. He had told Lucy on the way over that they wouldn’t be going in; that they would collect Emma and go straight to the zoo.

  Amongst many other things there are two pizza boxes on the central island, with ‘Pepperoni’ scrawled on them in black marker; and a bowl of sodden breakfast cereal, which has stained brown with chocolate the puddle of milk in which it is sitting: the kind of unwholesome fare that Colette refuses to have in the house.

  ‘Coffee?’ the other Fintan asks, wandering over to a fancy chrome machine on the counter. Again, like a man enchanted, Fintan feels that he cannot refuse.

  ‘Sorry about the mug,’ Conor/Fintan says. ‘It’s the only one that’s clean.’

  ‘No problem,’ Fintan says, adding milk to his coffee from the Avonmore carton sitting open on the counter. Pooh Bear looks out from the side of the mug: the Disney Pooh, yellow and dumb in his bum-freezer red jumper. There is a sudden surge in noise from the television as Emma comes back into the room.

  ‘Daddy, can I give Lucy a yoghurt?’

  ‘You can do anything you want, sweetheart.’

  Fintan watches the other man watch the little girl as she opens the fridge and rummages inside. There is a look on Emma’s father’s face that Fintan can scarcely endure: a kind of love, shot through with pain and longing and desperate need.

  ‘Raspberry. Yummy! Yummy!’ She pulls out a drawer and takes a spoon, goes back to the other room, to the television, with her father’s eyes still fixed on her.

  ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’

  ‘By all means. It’s your house.’ Fintan watches as Conor/Fintan lights up. Again, the resemblance is unnerving. They sit in silence for a moment, and Fintan looks again around the kitchen. This is domestic chaos on an industrial scale. He can just about find space on the island for his Pooh mug amidst the wreckage of a week’s worth of rushed breakfasts and lousy dinners. The jacket of yesterday’s suit hangs over the back of a chair; the silk snake of the tie lies coiled on the floor beneath it. The apartment is so coolly minimalist in its design, and yet so unrepentantly squalid, that Fintan cannot help but admire the other man for his sheer chutzpah in having comprehensively trashed the place, as a revolt against being forced to live there. Fintan salutes his refusal to be reasonable; his rejection of this chilly box as his home.

  ‘What are the girls watching?’ he asks then, primarily for the sake of saying something. The other man ferrets out a plastic DVD case from the mess on the island and passes it to him.

  ‘Stuart Little.’

  The second most famous mouse in the history of cinema looks out from the lid, preppy in his chinos and sneakers, with his incongruous rodent’s face. Fintan turns the box over and reads the parental warning on the back: ‘Contains scenes of mild peril.’

  ‘It’s a good movie,’ Conor/Fintan says unexpectedly; and before he can help himself Fintan has replied, ‘Yes, but Babe is better.’ He is grateful when Emma’s father does not reply ironically to this, but says, ‘The pig one? Yeah, that’s good too.’ He picks up the DVD box from where Fintan has set it down on the granite island again, and gazes at it through his cigarette smoke.

  ‘How do they do that, anyway?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘The mouse,’ Conor/Fintan replies. ‘Get it to wear trousers and shoes and stuff. Get it to talk. I mean, I know it isn’t a real mouse – well, maybe it is a real mouse, like, a film of a mouse, and then they do something with computers, you know? What is it they do?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ Fintan says. He doesn’t like to admit that he has never thought about this before now; that when he had watched the film at home with Lucy he had, in a way, taken Stuart at face value. ‘I don’t know much about computers.’

  ‘I could come with you,’ the other man says suddenly. ‘To the zoo. We could all go.’ Fintan says nothing but stares back at him in silent dismay. To spend all day around this woeful, stricken man would be like a penance for some terrible sin that Fintan doesn’t remember committing. ‘It wouldn’t take me long to get ready.’ This is so clearly untrue of his rank, unshaven companion that there is no point in Fintan even commenting on it. Fintan/Conor knows it too; admits as much by stroking his stubbly jaw. ‘I don’t get to see her very often,’ he says. ‘The next weekend I’m due to have her I have to go to London for a conference. Her mother won’t let me make it up – I mean, she won’t give me extra days for the days I’ll miss.’ Fintan goes on staring at him, mute with pity, until the other man capitulates. ‘Maybe it would take me too long to get ready.’ His voice is hesitant. ‘Maybe I should stay here and try to get, like, sorted out.’ He looks uncertainly around the kitchen.

  ‘That might be an idea,’ Fintan says. ‘Plan a nice meal with her this evening, something she really likes, and get in another DVD. You know, maybe it’s better to have a shorter amount of time with her, but for that time to be really good and enjoyable for you both.’

  The other man laughs sarcastically. ‘Yeah, quality time,’ he says. ‘I’m sick of people talking to me about quality time. Fuck that for a game of conkers.’ He grinds out his cigarette on a dirty plate, gets down from his stool and walks over to the door of the room where the television is. Fintan follows him sheepishly.

  ‘How’s the film going, girls?’

  ‘It’s almost over, Daddy.’ As they watch, the credits begin to roll on the enormous television screen. The music is upbeat and loud. Stuart and a little boy are brushing their teeth. Stuart and the little boy are dancing. Fintan finds himself once again suspending his disbelief where Stuart is concerned. Emma’s father takes her back into the kitchen to get her ready to go out; to comb her tousled hair and give her money. She goes to fetch her trainers from her bedroom, and through a series of open doors Fintan catches a glimpse of a room all pinkly girly, with a net canopy over the unmade bed and a white feathered dream-catcher on the wall. When Emma is finally ready to go, her father enfolds her in his arms, with the same hungry, needy love that Fintan had observed earlier.

  ‘You have a lovely time, Princess, and come home safe to Daddy soon, won’t you?’

  ‘We won’t be too long,’ she says soothingly, as though he were the child and she the departing parent. ‘I’ll bring you back a nice present.’

  In the car the girls
settle into the back, clipping themselves in, chattering about the movie; about whether or not yoghurts are nicer than Petit Filous and why pots of Petit Filous are so much smaller than pots of yoghurt; while Fintan sits there wondering if he is going to be able to drive, so overcome is he by what he has just seen. That a life might be so purgatorial and yet still have in it such things as Stuart Little DVDs and granite kitchen islands stuns him. He imagines seeing Lucy for only a couple of days every week, and that with a bad grace on Colette’s part. He thinks of what it would be to come home in his suit, with his briefcase and his BlackBerry, night after night, to that empty apartment, with its big telly and shiny appliances; with its deserted pink room. He fights the urge to go back to the apartment and give the other man a hug.

  *

  The first thing that happens after they have bought their tickets at the zoo is that someone takes their photograph. It’s been years since Fintan was here, not since Niall and Rob were tiny. He even has faint memories of visiting the zoo himself as a traditional First Communion day treat. Most Dublin men of a certain age have, like Fintan, in their family archive, photos of themselves in a little suit with short trousers, a rosette of white ribbon pinned to their lapel; and the background taken up by the lower reaches of a giraffe, or the considerable expanse of an elephant’s rear end.

  He finds that he enjoys the zoo much more than he had expected; certainly more than the two girls, who are both very much of their time and are already sated with extraordinary experiences, particularly Emma: ‘I saw lions last year. In Kenya, on safari with my mommy. Lions and zebras.’ They are not greatly impressed by the animals here: they glance in the enclosures and pens and then hurry on, while Fintan stands transfixed by a snowy owl: an explosion of luxurious white feathers from which stares out an eerie, bad-tempered little face. So much for Stuart Little, he thinks. Who needs a mouse in sneakers and chinos when real animals look like this?