by Sarah Harte
‘Only a fool is always happy,’ I said to him one day, as he lay on the sofa listlessly, feeling sorry for himself. ‘We all have our ups and downs. It’s how you navigate the downs in life that counts.’
I’d been quite pleased with that little speech. Not that Dylan gave much of a response. I’d told myself I wouldn’t do it but I found myself comparing him to my students and their life chances, the level of determination that some of them displayed. I wondered if Frank and I had succeeded in raising a young man who was constitutionally allergic to work.
As I said, with sobriety came a certain mental clarity. With the clarity came realizations, not all of them welcome. Had I infantilized Dylan? As a parent you were supposed to set your children free. You were not to cleave them to you and use them as a buffer against reality, against your life and what it did or didn’t have in store for you.
I’d stumbled across a sketch Dylan had done of Biba, a study, really. It had been buried under a pile of dirty clothes. Done in pen and ink, it caught her perfectly – the knowing look in the eyes, the slightly hard prettiness. It was neither savage nor sentimental. It was good. It was a ray of hope.
Now Colleen Eireann tunnelled through the cluster at the foot of the tree with a decoration in her hands. She was all hopped up on sugar. ‘Can you put this at the top for me?’ she asked Dylan, jigging up and down on the spot.
‘Sure,’ he said, taking it from her and reaching up.
‘No – over there, next to the big red bow,’ she said, arms flailing like chubby windmills. She instructed him in a bossy, sibilant voice that, again, reminded me of Karen.
Dylan fought to keep the smile from his face but he couldn’t resist her cuteness. My beloved lazy strap of a son, whom I would have to get heavy with.
It could wait until after Christmas, I thought, returning Karen’s smile.
I was sitting in my bed, looking at past exam papers, when Ella waltzed in. I took off my reading glasses – I needed them now: first stop reading glasses, next stop incontinence pads and Zimmer frame. I would become more and more decrepit. I tried to redirect my thoughts. I didn’t allow myself to think like that any more.
Ella sank into an armchair and drew her knees towards her chin. She was dressed in a T-shirt and knickers, her hair in a messy ponytail, and munching a chocolate biscuit, her iPhone clutched in her hand. I had not given her my preoccupation with weight, I hoped. But how would I know? Maybe she weighed herself in secret and went without food and hated her lovely body. I didn’t think so – I didn’t believe her sense of self-worth was enmeshed with her weight – but it was hard to know.
There was a slight preamble about Karen’s girls. I knew by the faux-casual set of her shoulders that she was working up to something.
‘You were great with your cousins,’ I told her. ‘I’m so proud of you.’
The remark hung between us but it didn’t sag. And she didn’t brush the comment off. There was a warm silence that made my insides go gooey. I hummed a little tune in my head – ‘My Girl’. Belt up, Anita. But, no, I was right to be happy. I had this sense that Ella and I were not far off being allies. I didn’t want to dwell on it too much for fear of sabotaging it, but there had been a definite shift between us. Ella had decided I wasn’t all that bad.
‘I saw Dad today,’ she said, twirling a strand of hair around a finger, her eyes sliding from my face.
‘Great.’
‘You don’t mind?’ she asked, scrutinizing me. ‘I thought you might think it was disloyal.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said. ‘Sure Dad has been here for a cup of tea. You’ve seen me talking to him.’ I was delighted. And I wasn’t surprised: the bond between Frank and Ella was so strong.
She gave me a smile that I wished I could frame. Sad, I know, but true.
Ella leant against the armrest and shifted in her chair so that I knew she had something else to say. Then she got to the point. ‘She left him, Mum.’
‘Oh.’ I blinked at her. I’d thought something like that might be coming. Things had not been right there, I had sensed. Frank had been angling to come back, but I had given him short shrift. In true Frank style, he’d raised the subject repeatedly until I’d had to bawl him out. ‘No,’ I’d said to him one day, ‘it doesn’t work like that. You’ve had your fun and then you want to come waltzing back to the little wife who’s waiting? I’m sorry, Frank, but things change.’
After that, I hadn’t heard from him for a couple of days. But then he’d been back like a bad smell, banging the same old drum.
‘I met her once,’ Ella confessed, flushing, ‘by mistake.’ Her voice became acid. ‘They were in the supermarket playing happy families. Cornelscourt. I was on my way back from Dalkey.’
An image of the scene drifted into my head. Poor Frank, I thought, suppressing a smile. He would have been terrified. Ella had always been able to quell him with a glance.
Her mouth twisted into an ugly shape. ‘She had a tight top, and boobs and big hair and too much makeup. She was so obvious-looking, Mum.’
I shook my head. ‘I’ve seen her too. But you don’t need to run her down like that. Would you have accepted her any more if she’d had beautiful clothes and a figure you admired and you liked her look?’
‘No,’ she admitted, and shoved out her bottom lip.
‘Well, then, it’s not really relevant.’ I didn’t like Fiona Keane. I didn’t like the way she had behaved. And there was a part of me that had tagged her the Whore of Babylon, that had tried to find her wanting in loads of ways and pass judgement on her perceived flaws – chunky thighs, wide hips, small eyes – but there was another part of me that did not want my lovely daughter to participate in the routine kicking that women doled out to each other. ‘I’m just sick of the constant negativity that women display to each other,’ I told her.
‘Fair enough,’ Ella said, putting her hands up, ‘though I wouldn’t exactly have had you down as Germaine Greer, Mum.’
I smiled and shrugged my shoulders.
There was a pause. Ella never gave up a fight easily. Sure enough, she concocted another way of making her point as I’d known she would. ‘Dad went for her. That’s all I meant. She was such a tired, jaded cliché. I’d imagined something else.’
I decided to park the subject. There were things I could have said but not to my daughter. I wouldn’t speak of the classic masculine weakness that was as old as the hills. I wouldn’t say that men responded to youth and nubility no matter what age they were. That even when they were in their dotage their age-spotted old heads swivelled to greet a pair of bouncy boobs or shapely hips, that they retained the desire to fertilize fresh, untilled soil, that they still thought with their appendage when they could no longer hold it to pee.
‘I played my part in the breakdown of the relationship too,’ I said. ‘It mightn’t look like that from the outside.’
‘The drinking, you mean?’
I felt a little winded when my daughter named the fact of it so casually. ‘Yes, partially. Although you might argue that the drinking was a symptom rather than a cause.’ I paused. ‘There are loads of wonderful things about my life. I’m a lucky woman. But I’ve been unhappy with aspects of it. I drank for lots of reasons I’m unravelling now. Sometimes people get stuck in a rut or a way of thinking and find it hard to beat their way out. They get lost. Drinking can become habitual.’
She nodded. She was listening intently. Enough of that, I thought. She didn’t need to be made old before her time.
Then she said, ‘It’s good you’re doing something with yourself.’ She traced some shape on her knees. ‘I don’t know. I’m still a kid basically.’
‘You’re a young woman,’ I corrected her.
She pulled a face. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I see Lainey’s mum and Pia’s mum and I just kind of think that I don’t want that life. Climbing in and out of their four-by-fours with their perf
ect hair and nails and their rictus grins.’
‘Like me, you mean.’
She gave a noncommittal shimmy of her shoulders. ‘Not like you now. Like you before. If you read Tennessee Williams you get that whole Blanche DuBois thing, faded belles clinging to their beauty. I guess I don’t want that to be a narrative of my life. Lots of girls I know do, but I don’t.’
Oh, the wonderful naïveté of youth. Life didn’t always go to plan. The years rolled on and suddenly you found yourself in a place you’d never thought you’d be. Of course I didn’t make these banal observations. She wouldn’t have believed them anyway. And it was good that my daughter was so spunky.
‘About my drinking, Ella,’ I said. ‘I don’t know if I’m an alcoholic. I know that I’ve been drinking too heavily for some time. So I’ve decided not to drink for a while.’ I braced myself for what was to come, for the closed-in look her face got.
But she just smiled at me and said, so that I almost felt short-changed, ‘Good.’
‘I just wanted to say that I’m very sorry. I hope in time you can forgive me.’
‘Sure,’ she said.
As in, End of.
But then she said, letting her leg dangle down from the armchair, ‘Christopher called you a lush.’
‘Did he now?’ I said, feeling hot at the thought.
‘I whacked him across the face.’
‘Oh, Ella.’ I was torn between being appalled and delighted.
‘It was when we were breaking up and I wouldn’t change my mind about dumping him. He got rebarbative about my family.’
I could imagine that all right.
She snorted. ‘He also said that you matched your art to your furniture.’
‘Maybe he was right,’ I said. He probably was.
‘It’s not the point,’ she said. ‘The thing about Christopher is that, for all his liberal claptrap, he resents social mobility.’
I smiled, delighted as always by my daughter’s brightness.
‘He cares about women making baskets in South America and tea pickers in India but he’s totally mired in snobbishness.’ She went on, ‘He’s a self-righteous, hypocritical pain in the arse. You can totally tell he’s going to end up in the Kildare Street Club, like his father, with a big fat cigar in his hand, sipping claret.’ She snorted. ‘He’s already been there. Claimed it was an exercise in post-modern irony.’ She added, with a grin, ‘As Dad might say, “My hole.”’
Changing the subject, I said. ‘What did you say to Dad and Fiona Keane when you met them?’
‘Not much. I cut her dead. I was pretty cold, I guess.’
So it had been as I imagined. Ella would have been flinty-eyed, with a ramrod back, as stiff as if rigor mortis had set in. She would have been the Queen of Mean.
‘Afterwards, when she’d gone out to the car, I asked Dad if he was olfactorily challenged.’
I raised an eyebrow.
Ella waved a hand in front of her face. ‘She reeked of perfume.’
We smiled.
‘It didn’t take her long,’ Ella said, two vertical lines appearing on her forehead, ‘to leave once he didn’t get his planning. Now that he’s poorer.’
‘She lost a baby,’ I said gently. ‘Don’t forget that.’ When you were a mother you were obliged to say even-handed things. You had to say things like respect your teacher even though you privately thought the teacher was an uptight snooty cow who needed to get with the programme. Or: I’m sure you’ll benefit from the experience when you thought the obligatory activity in question sounded boring as hell. Mothers had to say dull, commonsense, fair things.
Ella rearranged her slender limbs. She was beautiful in a refined blue-stocking sort of way. There was something sensuous about her, too, though. It was the fact she was so buttoned up, I thought. It was not hard to imagine boys wanting to undo her. She dressed in a simple way that offset her looks. She had none of the coarseness I’d had when I was younger – an image of Karen and me floated into my head: in our white stilettos, ankle chains and lemon mini skirts, with large cheap black plastic belts slung around our middles. But Ella had always had money – although money didn’t buy taste, I thought. Nor did it explain her poise. She’d got that from Ma. Ma had had natural poise.
‘Do you think you might take Dad back?’ she asked, chewing a knuckle.
The question wrongfooted me. Ella leant her supple young body towards me. She could see my surprise at her volte face. ‘I know what I said before. But, Mum, maybe he just made a mistake.’
I looked at her sadly. ‘It doesn’t work like that, Ella.’
‘But do you love him?’ she asked, that expressive brow furrowing.
Her tone was a little imploring, I thought. She wanted me to love her father, to take him back into the familial fold. But maybe children always wanted their parents to be together, no matter what age they were.
‘Of course I love him. I’ve been with him so long. He gave me you. But it’s not that simple,’ I said.
‘Oh,’ she said plaintively.
She was waiting for me to speak. There was still hope in those eyes. I considered how to frame an answer. Ella would be like a dog with a bone. That was what a teacher had said about her once in a positive way: that when it came to understanding something or mastering a problem she was dogged. I didn’t know what the answer was. I considered various options. Possibilities came to mind, many of them unsuitable for her ears.
I love your father, but I’m not sure I’m in love with him any more.
You cannot just skip over a betrayal like that.
I can breathe now.
For the first time in years I have space.
I hated that term ‘space’. It came from the same selfish, egocentric lexicon as ‘because I’m worth it’. But the fact remained that even if I had been able to forgive him, Frank took up a lot of oxygen in our relationship.
I have carved out a life for myself. It’s not much but it’s a start. I feel excited and hopeful. I feel me. So I think that would probably have to be a no.
My daughter was watching me. I groped for the right words. But just then divine salvation came: Ella’s mobile burst into joyous life. Saved by the gong.
Ella smiled, her head revolving the other way. It had to be lover-boy. She got up and walked around in little circles, laughing lightly. A faint pretty flush began to spread from her neck towards her face. Then she was smiling at me. ‘Later, Mum,’ she mouthed. ‘Cheers.’
Wriggling the fingers of one hand at me, she sashayed towards the door and I blew her a kiss. The circle of life went on.
I didn’t know how I felt about Frank being deserted by Little Miss Big Knockers, I thought, turning out the light. I slid down in the bed. The knowledge provoked conflicting emotions in me, too complicated to unravel.
17
Ella roared down the stairs that she was coming. I was standing in the hall with my coat on, waiting for my children. We were going to Mass. Frank had got his wish and had made it back into the house after all. But he’d done it by ambulance.
The call had come when I’d been at my Christmas lunch with the staff from school. We’d been in a restaurant on Georges Street. The waitress had just set down baskets of bread. Animal was not there so I had felt a little self-conscious. He’d gone home to Kerry for the holidays. ‘That wouldn’t be my sort of craic,’ he said, blinking at me with a sly smile. ‘I’ll be walking on the beach in Ballyferriter.’
I’d been eyeing the wine with a sort of longing and trying to concentrate on something the young English teacher with the sticky-out ears was saying when my phone rang. Frank had had a heart attack. Hurling an explanation at the English teacher, I’d dashed out onto the street, my arm outstretched, a roaring in my ears. I was halfway to the hospital before I realized I’d left my bag and coat in the restaurant.
The taxi man was very kind when
I explained I’d no money. ‘Don’t you mind about that, pet,’ he said, when I told him I would send him what I owed. ‘We’ll say a little prayer for your husband,’ he’d said.
So we did. Me, the big cynic, saying Hail Marys and Our Fathers and Glory Bes all the way to the hospital. Apart from my brief pious stint as a child, I’d been completely disconnected from religion since I was a teenager. But as soon as the shit hit the fan I went scuttling back, which said something. Maybe that I was a dyed-in-the-wool hypocrite prepared to use religion as a crutch, or perhaps that old habits died hard and, no matter how you disengaged from your traditions, you never really left the tribe you’d come from.
I’d followed the tiles on the floor to the ICU, dazed and frightened. Don’t let him die, please. I knew then that I loved him and that I had never stopped loving him. The idea of him dying was too much to bear.
When I got there Frank was hooked up to an ECG machine. The ICU nurse was nice, a big, fleshy woman with a shelf for a chest and nicotine-laced breath. But she was kind and adept at handling traumatized relatives. It had happened when he’d been in the shower. First he’d thought it was heartburn. Then it had got a lot worse. Finally he’d managed to crawl to the telephone. My mobile had been off. ‘You were the person I rang,’ he had said. ‘I thought I wouldn’t get the chance to say goodbye.’ Tears rained down his face and my eyes filled. ‘I wanted to say I was sorry.’
He had been distressed then, of course. We’d spoken a little over the following five days. Gradually he’d become more bluff. But he had been rattled by the episode and I could see he was less certain of himself.
He spent five days in the hospital. Karen had dropped off flowers. I’d come across her in the lobby, arguing with the woman behind the reception desk, a solid-looking citizen with widely spaced bulging eyes – she had been bristling. ‘Verna’ was written mutinously on her badge.