Time Present and Time Past

by Deirdre Madden

  While they were gone Beth had prepared a meal for the evening, salads and cold meats, but on their return Martina said that she wasn’t hungry. She wanted to change into her night clothes, even though it was still quite early, and Christy said why not, told her to unpack and settle in. And so she went upstairs while they ate. When she came down again, in nightdress and dressing-gown, Christy brought her tea and toast in to where she sat by the fire. She smiled at him then, and Beth realised that it was the first time she had seen her smile since she had arrived.

  ‘I might sleep late in the morning, if that’s all right,’ she said, and they both told her to do as exactly as she pleased.

  Beth can’t remember much of Martina’s presence in the house in the following days, partly because she maintained a low profile, but primarily because, ever since, Beth has focused on her memories of Christy at that time to the exclusion of most everything else.

  The day after Martina arrived was a Monday, and in the afternoon Christy and Beth had gone to a garden centre to buy bedding plants: lobelia, violas, million bells. Christy had read the newspaper out in the garden after breakfast on the Tuesday, and then later in the day they’d planted up the flowerbeds. On Wednesday they’d had lunch out, soup and sandwiches in a cafe near home that Beth particularly liked. But she can remember some of the details from those days with preternatural clarity: the blue shirt he’d been wearing on the Monday; the pottery bowls in which the soup had been served; the way when she went to him in the garden with his paper he’d reached out and taken her hand, put it against his face and held it there for a moment, then kissed it before releasing her again with a smile.

  And when she thinks about it now she can indeed remember Martina being there, almost as a ghostly presence to begin with, but becoming more apparent as time passed. She insisted on cleaning out the fire on the Tuesday; she helped Beth fold linen from the hot-press, and cooked dinner for them all on the Wednesday night. She told Christy, who in turn told Beth, that she had been in touch with the place where she worked to say that she wasn’t well and wouldn’t be in for the rest of that week, and was that all right?

  ‘I told her I would ask you,’ he said, ‘but that as far as I was concerned, she could stay here for as long as she needed. She looked troubled and uncertain at the thought of going back.’ Beth agreed with him that if Martina needed a haven at that time then it was good that they could provide one.

  But the main thing she remembers about those days are the ordinary activities in which she and Christy were engaged, and which had formed the texture of their daily life throughout the years they were together: doing crosswords, sewing a button onto a jacket for him, making scones, the cat sleeping on the sofa, the radio playing, Christy reading a library book. On the Wednesday night he had gently brushed her hair away from her face before they got into bed and he kissed her; he had wished her sweet dreams, as he always did. And then he fell asleep, never to wake up again.

  Afterwards, she would be glad that his life had had such a gentle ending, without pain or fear. Afterwards, she would realise that it was an extraordinary stroke of good fortune that Martina was staying with them, so that she, Beth, had help immediately to hand when it happened. Afterwards, she would be surprised at how easy the transition was when Martina moved in permanently with her, how right it seemed and how well it worked. But all of these realisations came long afterwards. At the time Beth’s grief and shock had been such that she had thought she too might die.

  All of that was more than ten years ago, and this is the reality of her life now: old age, Martina, and this house, where the morning sun warms the fur of the sleeping cat, and touches everything it falls upon with eternity.

  THIRTEEN

  Fintan is on his way to visit his mother, having put it off for as long as is conscionable. Joan is one of those people who drain energy from those around them. She does this to such a degree that sometimes, when he is with her, Fintan feels that he is caught up in a science fiction story, and that his mother is an alien masquerading as an elderly Dublin woman, who siphons off energy to convert it into – what? Inert gases? An alternative fuel? Some kind of anti-matter? Fintan has no idea. All he knows is that he habitually leaves her company feeling so depleted that he thinks he might have to lie down on the pavement, outside the apartment block where she lives, until he has recovered. So unpleasant an experience is this that he avoids visiting her until the guilt provoked by staying away (‘Maybe you’ve forgotten where I live?’) begins to outweigh the misery of actually going there.

  And so this Saturday afternoon finds him on the DART, that is, the suburban train that sweeps around Dublin Bay from Howth in the north, to Glenageary in the south, where Joan lives, and beyond. There is at least the consolation of coming to the stop where he usually gets off to go to work, and staying in his seat as the train moves off again.

  Joan will be expecting him. He phoned yesterday morning to see if a visit today would suit her, as Joan can’t stand spontaneity in any form. He is bringing her gifts: a packet of smoked salmon from one of the several fish shops along the pier in Howth, and a large bouquet of sunflowers, both items having been purchased by Colette that morning. Fintan doesn’t know why women love flowers so much. Colette had suggested that Rob send his girlfriend Mags a bouquet for her recent birthday, a gesture which triggered a flood of such rapture – ‘Nobody ever sent me flowers before! Nobody! There were roses! Twelve of them! Pink ones! I cried!’ – that Rob had found it faintly alarming. (Niall to Rob: ‘And to think that you might have given her a gift token.’)

  Fintan is deeply grateful to Colette for having bought the fish and the flowers. He thinks now of what his life would be without Colette, and has a sudden vision of himself walking around with no head, an image as compelling as it is ridiculous. He is still troubled by his encounter with Conor the previous week, although Colette herself has been briskly dismissive of his concern regarding Emma’s parents, telling him that every marriage is a law unto itself, and that many break down for reasons incomprehensible to those outside them. Further, she remarked that every marriage (‘And I mean every marriage, Fintan’) carried within it the seeds of its own possible destruction, and that the failure to recognise or admit to this increased the risk. Colette can still surprise him, even after all these years and three children together. Sometimes he thinks that is what is wonderful about her. Sometimes it worries him.

  Fintan’s mother lives in an apartment block a short walk from the DART station. It is older than the one in which Conor lives, not as contemporary and stylish but with mature gardens around it, and a settled community in which Joan feels at home. She has been living here for many years now. With her husband dead, Martina gone and Fintan married she had sold the family home, an attractive old house also in Glenageary, and bought this place. It is one of a few things which Fintan feels Martina is unreasonable to hold against Joan: the family home was much too big for one person, and what Joan has now is more practical and easier to maintain, even though Fintan himself secretly regrets the loss of the home in which he grew up, and avoids the road where it is. The thought of other people living in there unsettles him.

  Joan comes right out to the front door of the building to let him in and to greet him. He kisses her and she exclaims with delight at the bouquet.

  ‘Such flowers! They’re like the sun itself! They’ll light up the room for me.’ They exchange pleasantries and small talk as he follows her down the hall to her ground-floor apartment, and he asks himself, as he sometimes does initially when they meet, why he had dreaded so much going to see her; for she seems – she is – a perfectly pleasant old lady, not the passive-aggressive, manipulative little head-wrecker he imagines when he is away from her, although he wonders how long it will be before the first signs of conflict appear. Almost immediately, the slow attrition begins.

  ‘And you don’t have Lucy with you?’

  Fintan says no, that Colette has taken her to the hairdresser’s.

/>   ‘Well that’s a disappointment, I had been looking forward to seeing her.’

  One–nil. As he sits down on the sofa he realises that he is still holding the paper bag with the fish in it, so he hands it to her.

  ‘Smoked salmon. You couldn’t have brought me anything more welcome.’

  An equaliser in the second minute. She takes the packet of fish from the bag and waves it at him sternly.

  ‘Now if you could get that son of yours to eat some of this, it would do him good. He can’t be getting the protein he needs from those nuts or greens or whatever it is that he lives on.’

  Two–one.

  Niall, who is now in his first year at university, became a vegetarian around the time he learnt to read and write. What amazes Fintan about this is not Niall’s fidelity to his regimen so much as the refusal of others to accept it, even after all these years. Moreover, Niall shows a patient acceptance of endless comments and questions that even Fintan can see are foolish and tiresome. If people gave Fintan as much grief about rump steak as they do Niall about mung beans, he would tell them where to get off. Niall attempts to convert no-one to his cause, but will politely discuss the subject if asked to do so.

  Even Mags had been on at Niall lately: ‘But when you smell a rasher do you not just think you’d love one?’ ‘No.’ And then he had spoken of what he called ‘the politics of food’. Fintan had been overhearing this and listening idly, as Niall clearly and patiently explained how it took so much land and energy to produce food for farm animals and that, given how many people there were in the world to feed now, it was much more logical to simply eat plants, rather than feed plants to animals and then eat them. To his surprise, all of this made perfect, logical sense, even to Fintan, who would as soon eat his own shoes as renounce meat.

  ‘You have to admit’, he says now, ‘that Niall does look well on his vegetables.’ The younger son is clearly the healthiest member of the family. He is slim, with sleek shiny hair and clear skin. While the rest of the Buckleys cough and snuffle their way through the winter, Niall rarely catches a cold or flu. But Joan will have none of it.

  ‘A man needs to eat meat,’ she insists. ‘You’ll be glad to know’, she continues, ‘that there’s good ham in those sandwiches, not rabbit food,’ and she nods at a laden plate on the table. ‘Baked ham.’ Fintan is indeed cheered to know this. ‘I’ll go make the tea, and I’ll put these flowers in water.’ Refusing his offers of help, she goes off to the kitchen.

  While he is waiting for his mother to come back, Fintan stands up and wanders around the room, inspects the family photographs that are on display. There is a large picture of Rob from his school days, in his rugby gear, and a much smaller one of Fintan and Niall in the back garden in Howth. There is a photograph in a silver frame of Colette, and another of Joan herself holding Lucy in her christening robe, a family heirloom. Someone – he can’t remember who – had once told Fintan that displays of family photographs give you a more reliable sense of the real regard in which people are held than anything that might be professed, and, looking at the pictures, he thinks that this is fair comment. The room is comfortable without being cosy, and is furnished in neutral colours – beige, cream and touches of chocolate brown. There are Lladró figurines, two small oil paintings of seascapes, and a standard lamp with a pleated shade. These are the only things in the room that Fintan remembers as also having been in his family home when he was a child.

  Joan comes back, first with the sunflowers which are a shock of sudden brightness in the room; and then returns with the teapot, which is under a padded cosy in the shape of a country cottage, complete with chimneys and embroidered window boxes. Fintan remarks upon it, says that it looks like something Beth might have, and Joan narrows her eyes as she pours the tea.

  ‘Who do you think gave it to me? It’s practical though, I have to admit that.’ She settles back in her armchair with her cup and plate and she sighs. ‘I don’t know how Beth lives in that dark, dingy little house, truly I don’t; and I don’t know why she doesn’t do something with it, now that she has a free foot. Take down those picture rails, and that wooden panelling in the hall. All those nasty woolly pictures; all that embroidered stuff: I’d get rid of it. Nice pot of magnolia paint would make a world of difference to that place. I’ll never forget the first time I went there. I thought I was dreaming. I thought I’d made a mistake and ended up in some kind of folk museum, with houses from a hundred years ago. Olive-green walls. I ask you!’

  ‘I think Beth has always really liked it,’ Fintan protests weakly.

  ‘If Christy liked it, Beth would like it. She’d have followed that man into the sea. And he didn’t want to change a single thing his mummy had made or bought. A little mummy’s boy, that’s what he was.’

  Joan has never quite recovered from the shock of Beth’s marriage, of her sudden refusal to be the dowdy spinster, the maiden aunt no longer.

  Sometimes when he is in meetings with Imelda at work, Fintan plays a little game with himself, scoring points for each phrase as it comes up: five for ‘going forward’, ‘challenges’ and ‘thinking outside the box’; ten each for ‘low-hanging fruit’ and anything that ‘washes its own face’. He plays a similar game with Joan. If she refers to Christy with her habitual phrase, Fintan will allow himself an extra cake.

  ‘Getting married!’ Joan says. ‘I’ll never forget it. Beth coming to me. “I’ve met a very nice man. I’m getting married.” And her past fifty already. “Christy, his name is.” A most insignificant man, that was what I thought when I met him.’

  Involuntarily, Fintan’s eyes flicker towards the plate of cakes. He chooses two, then turns to his mother to defend Beth’s late husband. Not liking Christy, Fintan thinks, is like finding a dark side to St Francis of Assisi. He has had this conversation with Joan many times before.

  ‘I can’t agree with you there, Mummy. I thought he was a wonderful man, so kind and gentle, the perfect match for Beth. He made her very happy in the years they had together. And as regards the house, it’s not quite as fusty as all that. Even in Christy’s day, they had a stereo, a little telly and so on. They did make some changes over the years, and there’s been more done since Martina moved in.’

  ‘Martina! She fell on her feet, didn’t she? Coming back like that, once she’d got tired of London, as I knew she would someday, when the gallivanting was over. Martina was one of those girls who thought they’d be young forever.’

  ‘I think it has all worked out for the best,’ Fintan insists. ‘Martina and Beth look after each other. They’re very happy together.’

  ‘Enough of that,’ Joan says dismissively. ‘Tell me this now, Fintan: how are you?’

  She is sitting opposite him and she stares directly into his eyes as she asks this question. What does Joan see when she looks at her only son? Someone who is not quite a failure, but not quite a success either. Given who and what he is, together with what he has done and achieved in his life, one can only wonder at the criteria which she is applying. But Fintan is aware of her judgement, as of yore, and wilts under it.

  ‘I’m good,’ he says, unconvincingly.

  ‘And that wonderful wife of yours?’ There is no irony in this question. Although Joan thinks he could have done better – much better – on the employment front, and perhaps have raised a second son less weedy than Niall, she has no reservations about his choice of a wife. Over the years she has grown to be very fond indeed of Colette. This is a testament in itself to Colette’s extraordinary qualities – although even she had failed to make a good initial impression on her future mother-in-law, the first words Joan had ever spoken to her when Fintan impulsively brought her to Joan’s door on a rainy day having been: ‘Wipe your feet.’

  Fintan reports that Colette is well, and Joan asks after Rob, another favourite, in whom she sees Fintan’s own considerable intellect, uncompromised by a soft heart. She admires Rob for his steely personality, and predicts a prosperous future for him. Each o
f the Buckleys, Fintan thinks as he talks now to his mother, is either a hawk or a dove. Rob is a hawk, Joan too. There is even something hawkish about Martina, which is possibly one of the reasons why she doesn’t get on with Joan: there are more similarities between them than either would wish to admit. Fintan’s father had been a dove, Niall is one, and Beth too of course.

  After work last night he had gone to meet an old friend for a drink. The man concerned had texted to say he would be twenty minutes late, which didn’t unduly bother Fintan, waiting on a banquette with his pint of Guinness. Sitting nearby he noticed a young woman dressed, like his colleague Imelda, for the corporate world in a navy trouser-suit and a pale-blue blouse with the collar out over the jacket. She was in her early twenties and pretty; but there was a hardness about her eyes, the set of her mouth, so that the prettiness was undermined by something unattractive in her personality, as Colette’s plain features were redeemed by her kindness. On the table before the woman was a packet of cigarettes, a lighter and a glass of white wine. She was frowning at a mobile phone in her hand, jabbing at it, texting. Looking at her, she seemed to him vaguely familiar, but at first he couldn’t place her. Perhaps she had temped with his company? He didn’t think so. She had a snub nose and a high forehead. The phone she was holding rang and she answered it. ‘I saw him, yeah. Last night. Yeah, I know, but I don’t care. “Lucy,” he said to me, and I said, “Don’t you ‘Lucy’ me. If you think I’m letting you away with what you did last Saturday you can go and . . .” ’

  And at that, Fintan realised with a shock who he was seeing.

  A hawk, then, he thinks now with sorrow. Lucy will be a hawk. He has long since accepted that there are aspects to his sons’ lives and personalities that he doesn’t know about, and with which he has no desire to engage. But he still finds it hard to think of the adult into which Lucy will grow.