Overwhelmed with loneliness and homesickness she stared at the sun dancing on the waves as crowds of holidaymakers took to the water, swimming and surfing and splashing around. This was such an alien landscape.
‘Happy Christmas!’ yelled Carl, one of Rob’s friends, wearing red Santa swimming trunks and a silly red hat.
Romy, trying not to cry, told him to ‘Feck off!’
In the New Year Rob and some pals wanted to go up north to Cairns and the Reef for a few days. Romy took holidays and joined the surf pack on the move. The Reef blew her mind, the colours, the shapes and the azure blue sky and tropical landscape like nothing she had seen before. She didn’t need much persuading from Rob to don goggles and a mask and do some diving. After two weeks she had returned to her job and her commissions from Tilda’s, unwilling to throw away her work to up sticks and move with Rob and his cronies to follow the surf further north.
The business grew and grew, Tilda taking almost as much as Romy could make, the rest orders from those who had seen her designs on the internet. She cut back her hours in the bar to concentrate on creating handcrafted pieces of silver and bronze. With ferocious intensity she had written a cheque to her father for the sum of one thousand pounds, returning his blood money with no note or letter.
Weeks turned to months and eventually Rob reappeared with a broken collarbone. Temporarily out of action, he was planning his next campaign. It was good to have him back in her life again and Romy promised herself that the next time, wherever he travelled she’d go too.
Chapter Twenty-one
MOYA HAD AN appreciation of things that were beautiful and balanced and as she and Patrick moved into their first home she endeavoured to surround herself with such things. Simple heavy glassware bought from the factory in Jerpoint, Stephen Pearce pottery and a classic Wedgwood dinner service. A Brian Bourke painting and a Bobby Ballagh print – small pieces but items that made her feel that the three-bedroomed home they’d purchased in Dundrum’s leafy suburbs, a house like a hundred others, the garden a mass of builder’s rubble waiting to be cleared, was something special.
Stretched across their enormous bed Moya pored over her brand-new recipe books to find interesting dishes to entertain their family and friends with, while Patrick tried his best to distract her.
Each weekday morning, Patrick dropped her off at Stephen’s Green close to Taylors, the big art auction house where she now worked, typing up catalogues, talking to owners and checking details on paintings and sculptures and artefacts that they handled. Insurance, delivery, security, as works of Yeats and Orpen and Louis le Brocquy – all the Irish and international art beloved by collectors – passed through their rooms. She loved to listen to the experts detail the brushwork, the influences, the studios where paintings originated as she dealt with the nitty-gritty mundane details essential in looking after such valuable works. Growing up, she had attempted to paint, to capture the beauty seen with the eye and transfer it to the canvas, but the results were disappointingly dead and flat and soon Moya realized that, despite Sister Angela’s encouragement during art class, she would never be an artist. However, she had an ability to recognize and appreciate the work of others even if she could not emulate it and painters and their work continued to fascinate her.
At lunchtime she ran around to the shops buying steak or pork chops and selecting fresh vegetables from the greengrocer’s in South Anne Street for their evening meal or, if she had time, browsed around the latest fashions in Brown Thomas. Otherwise she had lunch with a colleague or some girlfriends. Marriage was bliss. Night after night lying in bed with Patrick exhausted from lovemaking as they tried to conjure up new ways to pleasure each other, she realized that she had never been so happy and that being married suited her.
Within a year and a half Fiona Mary Redmond was delivered without any complications or fuss in Mount Carmel, a private hospital. Both sets of parents were overjoyed and had made the pilgrimage to see their first granddaughter.
‘She’s absolutely beautiful,’ declared her mother, ‘the very spit of you when you were a baby.’
Moya had to admit that Fiona was the prettiest baby by far in the nursery. Patrick and herself were mad about her and dying to get her home. Minding the baby and keeping the house running smoothly took up most of her time. Returning to work at the end of her maternity leave she found herself stretched trying to manage it all. Patrick was promoted and needed to work longer hours as he dealt with a portfolio of new clients and their investments, trying to stay on top of deal after deal, throwing a fit almost at the suggestion that he give her more of a hand.
‘For Christ’s sake, do you want me to tell the senior partner I have to go home to mind a baby!’
Moya had to give up attending art exhibitions and lectures in the evening unless they were essential, not wanting to ask her childminder Denise to spend even more time with the baby. Friday nights meeting Patrick for a drink after work also went by the board as she rushed home to their daughter.
Patrick’s parents led a busy social life and were unavailable to babysit but once every three weeks they invited them to Sunday lunch, where Annabel praised Fiona’s progress and remarked what an intelligent and bright child she was. Kate helped out if she was really stuck but Moya knew her sister was uncomfortable in the house and preferred to avoid being around Patrick. Moya often wished for a return of the old closeness and fun that they’d shared, but suspected she’d hurt Kate too deeply for it to happen.
Fiona was just starting to walk and take her first steps when she discovered she was pregnant again, and nine months later their son Gavin was born. A long lanky baby with his father’s features, he was almost as good as his sister.
‘Maybe you should think about staying home,’ suggested Patrick. ‘The childminding is costing a fortune and the two of them are such a handful, maybe it would be better if you concentrated on looking after them.’
His career had taken off and he was now travelling away at least once a month and couldn’t even be relied on to be home. Looking at the big eyes and baby faces of her two small children, it was an easy decision for Moya to make and with few qualms she gave in her notice and stayed home with Gavin and Fiona.
She enjoyed motherhood and the freedom to do what she wanted once she didn’t mind having two small people in tow. She met other young mothers in the same situation, as they mapped out meetings and lunches and play sessions and shared walks and trips to the park.
The growing family moved to an old house in Sandymount.
‘But it needs so much work!’ she worried, looking at the builder’s quote.
‘Listen, it’s got Regency charm and is a lot closer to my office. Besides, even your father agrees we should double our money on it in a few years’ time.’
Patrick was still working night and day and was rarely home, barking at the children and shouting at her when he did appear.
Hurt, she decided to surprise him. One night she arranged a babysitter and dressed up in an expensive black Joseph top and skirt and knee-high boots, joining the throng inside the Shelbourne and searching for him in his regular spot, the Horseshoe Bar. She was talking to Gerry Gorman, a tax specialist, when she spotted Patrick up at the counter. Excusing herself to go and say hi, she had to almost push a pretty young woman in a grey suit who was flirting with him and hanging on his every word out of the way. Patrick, embarrassed by her arrival, introduced her to Jenny, one of the new graduate trainee accountants.
Moya pasted her biggest, widest smile on her lips and slipped in beside him as he ordered her a drink.
That night when they got home they had the biggest row they’d ever had since they got married, Moya accusing him of going off with other girls.
‘I swear to God, nothing has ever happened between us. It’s just a few drinks and a laugh. It means nothing,’ he insisted. ‘Moya, you know that you’re the only one I care about.’
Relieved, she had believed him, deciding they loved each other too
much to be unfaithful. However, she wasn’t stupid and now began to join him for dinners with clients, attend functions with the senior partners and their wives, and host drinks and small dinner parties in their home.
She missed working, and once Fiona started school and Gavin was able to go to playgroup was thrilled to get a part-time job in a small local gallery, the Martello. They specialized in limited edition prints and etchings and two or three times a year held an exhibition. Moya took on the task of organizing these events and built up a collectors list to target for future sales.
Sylvia Toner, the owner, had a good eye and instinct for what would work or not work, and the two of them worked well together, with Sylvia saying little if Moya had to make the odd dash to the school or the doctor.
‘Kids are kids,’ she’d sigh, looking at a photo of her own brood of four when they were younger.
Fiona was making her first Holy Communion the year Patrick told her of the job offer in the London office.
‘It’s too good an opportunity to refuse.’
‘But what about the kids, and school?’
‘Moya, they’ve got great schools over there. Fiona and Gavin will love it. We’ll be able to get a big house, make money, invest! It’s just the opportunity that I’ve been waiting for.’
She could see the excitement in his face, the challenge, the hope of better times. Putting aside her own reservations she flung her arms around his neck, congratulating him, breaking open the bottle of champagne she stored in the fridge for such an occasion.
‘London’s a big city, way bigger than Dublin,’ cautioned Sylvia. ‘Are you sure it’s the right move?’
‘It’s the right move for Patrick.’
‘But all your family are in Ireland.’
‘Except for Romy, and God knows where she is!’
‘That’s what I mean.’
‘Friends and family can visit. It’s not the end of the world! We’ll be back and forth the whole time and we’ve decided to rent out the house for a year at least to see how things go.’
‘What about work?’
She shrugged. ‘I haven’t thought that far ahead, Sylvia, to be honest.’
‘Well I have,’ Sylvia said, opening the drawer in her desk, ‘and I’ve prepared a reference for you, a recommendation as such. You know I worked in London for ten years. Maybe it will count for something.’
Looking at Sylvia with her blond hair trailing all over the place, her plump wrists and fingers covered in silver jewellery commissioned from impoverished art students and the striking array of canvases and work around the small gallery, Moya knew she would really miss the place.
The company had paid their relocation costs, removals, air fares, and first three months’ rent as they packed up and moved across the water to a new life in London. The children had acted up terribly, from the minute they arrived in St Albans. They missed going out to play and Moya found the neighbours, although welcoming, more reserved than she’d expected. Fiona and Gavin watched out of the huge living-room window at the empty green and open space devoid of children.
‘I want to go back home and play with Aoife and Rachel and Lucy,’ sobbed Fiona, missing her best friends from St Brigid’s School. Moya patiently tried to explain to her that in the new school in St Albans she would soon make new friends.
‘You’ll still see Aoife and Rachel and Lu when we go home on holidays.’
‘But I want to see them now!’ her eight-year-old had bawled, inconsolable.
Gavin’s teacher had called her in to say she was worried about him and that he was withdrawn and somewhat hostile to the other children in his class.
‘Hostile?’ she’d screamed at Patrick when he’d come home on the train from work. She was exhausted trying to unpack and sort out the red-bricked four-bedroomed house they’d rented, with an option to buy, trying to make it homely and put away the chintz and swagged curtains from the previous owners and paint the walls in colours to her taste.
Living far from the city centre, she rarely went into London to join Patrick and his new colleagues after work, for the kids were too unsettled to be left with a variety of strange babysitters.
Her mother and father made the effort to come over to London for a long weekend, Patrick putting on the charm and booking theatre tickets for the four of them to go to The Phantom of the Opera one night, and dinner in the Savoy another. Fiona and Gavin were so overjoyed to see their grandparents, they made no fuss about being left with Amy, one of their neighbour’s eighteen-year-old daughters.
‘Granny, promise you’ll wake us up and tell us all about it the minute you come in,’ insisted Fiona, sitting on the couch in her pink kitten pyjamas and slippers.
‘I promise, pet,’ said Maeve Dillon, wishing the children had more friends to play with like at home.
Moya wept the day she drove them back to Heathrow.
‘Are you sure you’re all right, Moya girl?’ her father asked concerned, his face close to her, anxious as he hugged her goodbye.
Moya blinked back the tears, homesick as the shamrock-painted plane took them away from her.
Six weeks later she discovered she was pregnant again. Disbelieving, she asked the doctor in the clinic to recheck the results. Patrick was so delighted with the news he’d taken her to the Ivy to celebrate.
This time she was tired, irritable, not able to sleep. Her pleas to return to Dublin for the birth were ignored.
‘Are you mad? I can’t take time off work,’ argued Patrick. ‘And how would I get to Dublin in time if I was stuck in the London office? It makes no sense, Moya!’
She knew it made absolutely no sense but it was just pure animal instinct that made her want to be home.
Liz and Ruth, two English friends, reassured her that her English hospital care would be second to none and she had nothing to worry about. Her obstetrician, a serious fifty-year-old, also did his best to allay her worries.
‘Mrs Redmond, you have had two previous deliveries that were perfectly normal, and there is nothing to indicate any difference this time. Relax and enjoy the next few weeks,’ he advised, patting her bump.
She had tried to relax, buying a pile of Jilly Cooper and Maeve Binchy books to read, and a tape of soothing sea sounds to listen to at night. When she was shopping in her local Sainsbury’s, much to her embarrassment her waters had burst: the baby was not due for another four weeks.
Patrick had come immediately from the office and held her hand as their second son was delivered: Daniel Patrick, a small four-pound-two-ounce baby with a pinched face, who was whisked off to the confines of an incubator on the fourth floor.
‘He’s so small,’ she kept saying, beside herself with worry.
‘He’ll grow,’ promised Patrick, massaging her shoulders as she sat in the high hospital bed. ‘You’ll see he’ll be taller than me, yet.’
Late at night, alone in the fluorescent-lit nursery staring into the Perspex glass cot, Moya, afraid, knew who he reminded her of. It was Sean, her little brother.
Chapter Twenty-two
COMING HOME FROM St Thomas’s Hospital without her baby felt strange and unnatural, for Daniel was still in an incubator in unit 5, the premature baby unit. Moya went back and forth to the hospital twice a day to feed him, her tiny son reminding her of a small battered bird in the glass cage, eyes shut firmly against the world. Patrick had to return to the office and she was hugely relieved when her mother arrived over from Ireland immediately to help with the children.
‘Mammy, I don’t know what I’ll do if anything happens to him.’ Her mother held her as Moya broke down and wept for her newborn son.
‘Hush, pet, the doctor says he’s a strong little fellow.’
If standing in the special care baby unit Maeve Dillon noticed any familiarity between her grandson and her own deceased child she made absolutely no mention of it.
Fiona and Gavin were thrilled to have their granny in residence and pestered her to tell them stories and do things w
ith them. She brought them to Randall’s Lane to collect conkers and to the park to feed the ducks and play on the swings, making Rice Krispie buns and teacakes with them when they got home. Covered in chocolate and cake mix they declared her ‘the best granny in the world’.
In between hospital visits her mother made Moya rest and sleep and try and get her energy back.
‘Danny will be home any day now, Moya,’ she reminded her. ‘And if you don’t rest and sleep you’ll be too exhausted to cope with him.’
After an almost endless three weeks, baby Danny was declared fit enough to be brought home, Moya almost collapsing with relief as they got into Patrick’s new silver Mercedes and drove home to the house in Randall Crescent.
The children had done drawings and put up balloons to welcome their new brother home, and Patrick insisted on opening some champagne.
‘We did it for the other two, and God knows this little guy deserves it just as much!’
Sipping the sparkling champagne, Moya tried to banish her concerns for her new son as she held him in her arms.
Danny was a tetchy baby and a poor feeder. Moya had to devote hours every day to looking after him, not sure what she’d have done if her mother hadn’t insisted on staying on for a few more weeks to help out.
‘Mammy, are you sure you don’t mind staying on?’
Maeve Dillon looked at Moya’s exhausted face and scrawny shoulders, and her two grandchildren who were acting up and a bit jealous now that their little brother had finally appeared home, and knew exactly where she was needed.
‘Your father will manage fine on his own,’ she laughed. ‘You know how he likes any excuse to go and have a pint and eat in McHugh’s or the Harbour Inn, and Vonnie and Joe will invite him over on Sunday for lunch and keep an eye on him.’
The Stone House Page 16