by Cathy Kelly
She made it over to the bar where one of the members of the cast was camping it up happily, doling out drinks and banter.
‘Vodka martini,’ snarled Kitty, leaning on the bar.
‘You’ll have to give me a kiss first,’ he growled.
Kitty glared at him. ‘Consider yourself kissed,’ she said. ‘No, change that. Consider yourself fucked. Now give me a bloody martini!’
He gulped. ‘Coming right up.’
Kitty stood at the bar and drank her martini. She wanted a cigarette, but smoking indoors was now forbidden by the health and safety fascists, and she felt too tired to go out on to the terrace. Why did she feel so tired all the time? It wasn’t fair. In her mind, she was still eighteen and raring to go, adept at throwing come-hither glances at any man who passed her way.
If someone had asked the eighteen-year-old Kitty what she’d be doing when she was in her sixties, she’d probably have shrieked with horror.
She’d be dead by then, she’d have said breezily. Forty was ancient, sixty-plus was a hideous thought. Sixty was ancient Aunt Tilda with her mothy old mink, the hint of thermal underwear visible from under her blouses and a reddened complexion from being outdoors in all weathers deadheading flowers and separating the irises.
Tilda was mouthy, bossy and to be avoided at all times. The second martini–super strength because the idiot at the bar had finally copped on–made it all clearer to Kitty. Normally, vodka didn’t make her maudlin, but tonight it did. Kitty wondered if she had turned into Tilda. She wasn’t the sexy dame of her youth: she was the irritable woman who’d managed to upset both her daughters. Well, one far more than the other.
Bloody guilt. It wouldn’t go away. Kitty found her cigarettes and lit up inside. Let someone try throwing her out for smoking in the hotel. Anyone foolish enough to try clearly didn’t know Kitty Nelson very well.
16
The Past
KITTY
When Kitty was young, men were said to be after only one thing. If you gave it to them, you were entirely ruined and only foolish women did so. Even in the slightly rarefied and unconventional atmosphere of Cardinal Martinez House, the boarding school which Kitty attended, everyone believed this to be the case. Go the whole way with a man at your peril.
Kitty was reasonably aware of how animals procreated. After all, someone who came from a farm and had older brothers could hardly be ignorant of the fact. So she knew what this was all about. But what she couldn’t understand was the power the sexual act appeared to give men. They were in charge of it all, not women.
‘Why is it that men are always supposed to be looking for sex?’ she said to her friend, Dervla. ‘It’s like we’re cattle, stupid things who don’t know how to say no. Or…’ she paused because this was a very shocking idea to even consider, ‘is it all a ploy to stop women considering that we might enjoy it ourselves?’
Dervla and Kitty were friends partly because they were on the same wavelength, but also because they were considered by the school staff to be the biggest troublemakers in their class and therefore spent a lot of time together, sitting outside classroom doors, having broken some rule or another.
‘You never hear anything about anyone enjoying it,’ Dervla said thoughtfully.
‘That’s part of the conspiracy,’ Kitty said, with spirit. Dervla was on her side. ‘They tell us it’s supposed to be no fun at all, like they say about having a drink or a cigarette. No fun at all. But what if it’s great fun?’
Kitty knew of a girl from home who’d gone the whole way and actually had a baby. She’d never met the girl, because Kitty was the daughter of a wealthy farmer and the girl was from the cottages down by the railway where, Kitty’s mother remarked with disdain, ‘they breed like rabbits’. There didn’t seem to be much sign of anyone enjoying sex there, despite the obvious evidence of it going on. When Kitty went past the cottages, there was an air of squalor and poverty about many of them. Not like most of the rest of the town where people took pride in their homes and gardens.
Kitty saw the girl with her baby and, for one moment, she thought of going up to her and saying hello or ‘well done’. Kitty couldn’t imagine the hell at home if she became pregnant.
But the girl looked bone tired, with untidy fair hair and shabby clothes, and the baby was crying loudly, a noise that gave Kitty a headache. She gave a half-smile and walked away. There was no sign from the girl that an important step for women had been made either in having sex or having a baby outside the marriage department. Kitty overheard a friend of her mother’s saying that the parish priest had been down at the girl’s door, hammering on it and demanding that her parents cast her out or else they’d be in on the sin. Incredibly, they’d refused. Kitty knew without a shadow of a doubt that if the priest had hammered on her parents’ door, they’d have shoved her and her pregnant belly out the door like a shot.
When Kitty was nineteen, she got a job in the office typing pool of her father’s accountant in Dublin. There had been war when she said she wanted to leave home, particularly after the trouble she’d got into in France the year before. She’d visited Bordeaux on the exchange programme and had begun a lifelong love affair with all things French. A few girls from school had gone too, but it didn’t seem as if they had any fun at all; too prim and proper, they’d been. All determined to be indoors whenever Madame said they had to be. Blind obedience to rules held no interest for Kitty. Rules were made to be broken.
Madame had thrown her out when she discovered that Kitty had seduced her ‘sweet and innocent’ seventeen-year-old son, Charles. Charles wasn’t the slightest bit sweet or innocent, but his mother thought he was, and that was what counted.
‘Out!’ she shrieked, shoving Kitty and all her belongings out the door. ‘You ’ave to leave, we never vant to see you again.’
Charles, the coward, had looked miserably out from an upstairs window as Kitty had trailed down the drive, carrying her suitcase. His papa was peering out another window, looking equally miserable.
Kitty had had high hopes for Papa too. She fancied the idea of an older man, but it was not to be.
It was then that Kitty went to Paris for the first time. Paris in 1959 was where it was at. There was no provincial carryon like at home in Ireland, where people you barely knew would comment on your behaviour in the street because they were ‘older and better’ and hence perfectly entitled to tell you off for smoking or wearing red lipstick. In Paris you could smoke, wear red lipstick, kiss whomever you wanted, wherever you wanted, and nobody took the slightest bit of notice. Kitty fell instantly in love with the city. She was also broke and, after two weeks, ended up at home, with her wings clipped by her mother.
‘You’re a little tramp!’ her mother had hissed. Mother had received a letter from Madame about Kitty, leaving her in no doubt as to what had gone on. ‘Did you have relations with that boy?’
Kitty considered lying but decided against it. Truth was important. ‘So what if I did?’ she said. ‘We were careful.’
Charles had been more than careful, he’d been wonderful. Kitty wrote Dervla a letter telling her what they’d suspected all those years ago: ‘Sex is fantastic!!!’
When Kitty made it plain that she was going to Dublin to work with or without her parents’ help, they relented and her father found her both the job and a room in a house where other nicely behaved young girls lived with a widowed ex-teacher who had strict rules and permitted no carrying on. Nora Slattery foresaw trouble with Kitty, but it was hard to pin anything on her. Kitty always appeared to be home at curfew and she was always off to work on time in the mornings, hair perfect and wearing a nice, if a little too tight, twin-set.
But there was something there, Nora knew.
At work, Kitty engaged in mild, girlish flirtation with the senior partner, but she reserved her serious seduction skills for the junior partner, the very handsome and very married Mr Lynch. With Mr Lynch’s admiring eyes upon her, Kitty’s skirts got shorter, her sweaters
got tighter and her lipstick got redder. She didn’t bother too much with the work itself, much to the chagrin of the dignified spinster who ran the typing pool. Miss Roche never lost her temper when Kitty arrived late back from lunch. Miss Roche had seen it all. Young girls came and they went. Once they got married, they left for good.
‘It’s not fair that we have to stop working just because we get married,’ Kitty pointed out. ‘Most of the men in the office are married and they keep working.’
‘Married women have to look after their husbands,’ said Miss Roche, who’d never had the chance to get married herself and therefore enjoyed the one area of 1960s society where not being married was a positive.
‘Why can’t men look after themselves?’ said Kitty crossly.
‘That’s women’s work,’ Miss Roche said.
‘Rubbish,’ snorted Kitty. ‘As if a man can’t cook if he puts his mind to it.’
Kitty’s favourite reading at the time was a battered copy of Married Love, which explained the mysteries of the female menstrual cycle and when it was safe to make love without getting pregnant. Unfortunately, Mr Lynch’s favourite reading was Fanny Hill, the eighteenth-century erotic masterpiece, which meant they failed to pay proper attention to the advice Kitty was getting in Married Love.
With Mr Lynch’s car parked down by the beach and the car light on, they sipped whiskey from the bottle and read passages of Fanny Hill to each other. Kitty felt that she was finally reaching the glory of her time in Paris again. This was what life should be about: being wild and free, avant garde, enjoying fabulous love-making with a fabulous man. Who cared if he was married? Such strictures were for the old guard, and Kitty was one of the new, modern people.
‘I’ll pull out in time,’ gasped Mr Lynch. Kitty didn’t care what he did, as long as that glorious rippling feeling continued arching through her.
When her period failed to come and her breasts swelled up painfully, Kitty cursed Fanny Hill, the beach and Married Love’s so called ‘safe period’.
‘Are you insane? I’m not having a baby with you,’ hissed Mr Lynch, looking less like an Adonis and more like a man on the verge of apoplexy. ‘Get yourself sorted out. London’s the place. You can get it,’ he paused and gave her the gimlet stare she’d only ever seen him give a very rude client, ‘fixed over there.’
‘Fixed?’ Kitty demanded. ‘That’s your baby you’re talking about.’
‘How do I know who else you were sleeping with?’
Kitty stared him down. ‘Nobody, you bastard,’ she hissed.
‘You’re the one with the bastard, not me,’ he snapped. ‘What about that green young college bloke you go out with? It could be his?’
She’d told him that she’d never slept with Anthony Nelson. Anthony had been raised to respect women, he treated his elder sister like a lady. He would have passed out with shock if Kitty had laid a hand on his knee, never mind any higher.
‘You talk about this, and I’ll tell everyone you’re a little tart and you’ve been after me for months. Who do you think they’ll believe?’ he taunted her.
Kitty didn’t see the point in answering back. It seemed he wasn’t a modern person after all. Kitty thought of her parents and the shame they’d feel if she arrived home pregnant.
It was time to phone Anthony. They might go on a date, a long one that ended up on the beach.
Kitty’s little girl Iseult, and Lisette’s little girl, Saffron, went to the same nursery school and Kitty, Lisette and some of the other mothers got into the habit of having coffee together in the mornings after they dropped the kids off.
It was Kitty’s turn to play hostess, and she’d left Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique open on the coffee table so that perhaps they could all talk about the ideas in it. Betty was right, women weren’t the only ones who could iron and cook. Women had so much power in them, but the patriarchal society had kept them in chains. It wasn’t fair. Women like Kitty had so much promise, yet here she was, stuck at home with nothing to do but buy luncheon meat for Anthony’s sandwiches and keep the house clean. She adored Iseult, who was funny, clever and the image of Kitty herself, but there had to be more to life, hadn’t there?
Lisette didn’t want to talk about books but had no problem talking about patriarchy.
She was married with three children and a husband who felt he deserved a medal if he occasionally made a pot of tea.
‘“There you go,” he says whenever he does anything, anything. And if he puts a cup away, or puts his plate on the drainer, he expects me to thank him.’
‘You think that’s bad?’ snarled Phyllis, a one-time teacher who’d had to resign because of the State decree that female civil servants had to give up their jobs when they married: the so-called marriage bar–yeah, called that because it drives you to the bar for a drink, she used to say. ‘Seamus told me that if I budgeted the housekeeping money better, I’d be able to buy myself a few fripperies. All because I said I was fed up with having nothing nice to wear, ever, and that I’d be the only one at the office party in the same dress for the fourth year in a row.’
Kitty was conscious that Anthony wasn’t in this band of smug husbands who thought their contribution to married life stopped at earning money. He often cooked, saying it relaxed him, and he was good about tidying up afterwards, because he knew he used four times more saucepans than she would. Kitty wasn’t a fan of cooking and she was fond of the dinner-in-a-pot where you threw a bit of cheap meat, vegetables and stock in together and cooked it slowly. The Thrifty Housewife book said it should turn out tender and delicious. Kitty found that cheap meat still tasted like leather, no matter what she did with it, but it only used one pot and that was the whole point.
But still, Anthony was a man, responsible for slowing down her progress in the world. Without him, she’d have achieved something big, like Simone de Beauvoir or somebody.
The women talked about another mother who was pregnant with her fifth child.
‘Poor cow,’ said Phyllis. Phyllis had two kids and felt that was enough, but neither the Church nor Seamus agreed with her.
Seamus had come from a long line of devout Catholics and thought interfering with fertility was like dancing with the devil. Phyllis had tried to get the contraceptive pill from her doctor on the grounds of regulating her cycle but he, too, had turned out to be of the doctrinaire variety.
‘Mrs Maguire, children are God’s gifts to us. It is against God’s law to tamper with procreation. I’m surprised at you–’
Phyllis had retreated before he got going properly.
‘We should get it abroad. London, that’s the place for it,’ said Kitty. She was scared at the thought of getting pregnant for the second time. She hadn’t messed up on the safe period again, but it was tricky.
‘Isn’t the pill bad for you?’ wondered a new woman in the group.
The others glared at her.
‘What’s bad for you is dropping a baby every year,’ snapped Kitty. ‘One’s enough for me, thank you very much.’
1983
Kitty called the conservatory her space. It wasn’t much of a conservatory, more of a lean-to with pretensions, but it had a glass roof and plants, and it was where she kept her books–the Female Eunuch and some of her Virago Modern Classics. She’d read them all but hadn’t found anything new she wanted for ages. One of the mothers had made the fatal mistake of giving her a bodice-ripping historical romance to read and Kitty had been spitting at the next coffee morning.
‘It’s a fairy story, for God’s sake,’ she’d shrieked. ‘That’s what’s wrong with women today; we were all raised on fairytales and most of those are totally misogynistic. The men are always in charge of things in these books. Ludicrous, that’s what it is!’
Things had never been quite the same at the regular coffee mornings since the great orgasm talk, when the speaker that Lisette and Kitty organised, a woman named Pandora, concluded her presentation by passing around small mirrors and inviting
people to find a quiet corner or, if they were totally comfortable with their femininity, ‘just do it in the middle of the room’, and examine their female beauty.
‘You mean, look up my you-know-what with a mirror?’ squawked a girl called Rita.
‘Naming your body correctly gives it dignity,’ intoned Pandora, clearly used to such interruptions. ‘Embrace your womanhood, admire your labia, your vulva and your vagina.’
‘Thought a vulva was a car,’ sniggered someone else, who’d drunk too much to even hold on to the little mirror and kept dropping it on the floor.
Even Kitty, four martinis and a cigar along–mere coffee wasn’t enough for this morning–wasn’t entirely sure about the self-examination bit. It wasn’t that she hadn’t seen herself; she had. During one of her early love affairs she had studied herself using a cheval mirror, and really she considered what she saw with the thought of the man in question looking at it later. But that was different, in the heat of lust. She was no prude, she’d had lovers and she knew it was all in working order in that department, but she still felt that Georgia O’Keeffe’s painted flower versions of female sex organs were prettier than the real thing. Men’s bodies, now they were beautiful.
Kitty was bored, she realised. Bored with her life and bored with not having a job. But, as her friend Mairead bluntly pointed out to her one day, she wasn’t really qualified to do anything.
Only Mairead would get away with saying such a thing, Kitty reflected.
Mairead was not the sort of woman to attend a ladies’ coffee morning. She worked in an architect’s office, kept all the architects doing what they were supposed to be doing, and knew she was generally considered a bit of a bitch.