Something in Common

by Meaney, Roisin

  Thanks for the new recipes. The beef casserole worked, and will be a regular. The meatballs fell apart a bit, but tasted fine with the tomato sauce. I’m still pinching myself that I’m cooking stuff from scratch, and that it’s edible – and now that I’m on a roll, any easy white-fish recipe? I’m guessing I could do a bit healthier than the battered cod the local chip shop cooks for us on Fridays.

  Thanks again,

  H

  PS Still humbled that you forgave my rant about your book. Please don’t let it stop you trying another one some time – what do I know?

  1983

  Sarah

  The bedroom wallpaper was getting on her nerves. She couldn’t understand how it had ever appealed to her. Rows of silly daisies in lavender and blue marching up the walls, trapped within pompous gold swirls and curlicues. All the go in 1977, bedroom walls covered with colour and loud patterns. She could update it now by adding a border, like Christine had done in her house, but she was heartily sick of it.

  She tried to think back to the time she’d chosen it, coming on for six years ago. Revelling in her newly married status and eager to put her stamp on Neil’s house, which had marvellously become their house. She remembered buying new curtains for the sitting room, rearranging the contents of his kitchen presses, replacing his shockingly dilapidated mop and ancient vacuum cleaner, throwing out the vast numbers of empty bottles and jars and paint cans that had been living under his stairs for what looked like years.

  All the details were there, but the emotional memory of that time refused to return. She couldn’t recall what pure happiness felt like. She couldn’t imagine ever feeling happy again.

  ‘You don’t need to stay in bed,’ the doctor had told her. ‘In fact, it would do you good to be up and about’ – but the thought of getting up held no appeal. What was there to get up for? What was the point of getting dressed? Easier to stay put and hate the wallpaper.

  ‘We can try again,’ Neil had murmured last night, both of them lying sleepless, side by side but not touching. ‘You’re only thirty-two, we’ve still got lots of time.’

  Sarah had made no response, the tears sliding silently down her face. The thought of another failure was impossible to contemplate – not now, not yet, maybe never – but the prospect of admitting defeat brought fresh, sharp anguish.

  ‘And they’ve told us there’s no medical reason why we can’t have a baby. I’m sure it’ll happen for us.’

  She’d turned onto her side, away from him, and pressed her wet face into the pillow, willing him to stop talking. No reason why they couldn’t have a baby, apart from the fact that her womb kept rejecting the idea. It let her get started, it allowed her a few weeks of hope, it waited until the doctor had confirmed it – and then, a week or two later, it changed its mind and emptied itself out. It rid itself of her baby, and left her hollow and useless and destroyed.

  Three times it had happened, in six years of trying. Three lots of hoping and dreading and praying – real prayers, down on her knees by the bed, like she used to do as a child – that had all come to nothing, ending with cramps that folded her in two, and blood that came out of her in clotted waves, and tears. So many tears.

  The third time was just five days ago, the same day that Karen Carpenter had died, a month before her thirty-third birthday. The world was mourning a tragic young singer who’d starved herself to death while another barely begun baby was draining out of Sarah.

  She should have been a mother of three now. Two boys and a girl, maybe, or a clutch of daughters, too early to tell when she’d lost them. Neil taking boys to football matches, Sarah teaching all three how to cook – no reason why the boys shouldn’t learn, with all the talk of equality now. The kitchen table strewn with eggshells and jars of spices and cake tins, the house full of laughter and delicious scents.

  A dog chasing a ball around the garden, a cat sitting on the windowsill. Birthday parties, days out at the zoo, picnics, bedtime stories. A family making memories that she and Neil could pull out in old age and be warmed by. Torture … torture to conjure up the life that was being denied to her, and yet she couldn’t seem to stop doing it.

  She reached for a folded sheet that sat on the bedside locker. She opened it and reread the letter that had come earlier that morning, in response to the brief, heartbroken note she’d sent the day after it had happened. Helen must have written back by return of post.

  Christ, I can’t believe it. It shouldn’t happen, not to someone like you who spends her time trying to make everyone else in the goddamn world happy. You of all people don’t deserve this crap.

  Helen, as direct as ever. Helen, whose honesty Sarah clung to.

  I’m racking my brains here to find something to make you feel less horrible, but there isn’t anything. All I can tell you, and I know it’s cold comfort, is that this time will pass. You won’t forget, and it will always be painful, but things will get better than they are now, and you’ll be stronger. And you will laugh again. Trust me: I know what I’m talking about.

  And Sarah did trust her, because Helen did know what she was talking about. Because Helen’s husband had died.

  He got cancer, she’d written, a few months after they’d begun to exchange letters. He was thirty-three. I was a basket case for a while, but life went on. I had Alice, I had no choice. And that was all, and Sarah had never asked any more, sensing that questions would not be welcome.

  This morning’s letter had been stuffed into a peculiar cardboard container that appeared to have been glued together using pieces of an Ajax box – Stronger than dirt, Sarah read on one side of the blue and green card – along with a small jar that was wrapped in newspaper.

  ‘Eight Hour Cream’, the jar’s label read. ‘Relieves chapped lips, soothes grazes and minor burns, moisturises and softens skin.’ It had a slightly musty smell, but it was something to do as Sarah lay in bed. It passed a few minutes, every so often.

  Don’t know if you already use this – I can’t survive without it. Did you know Elizabeth Arden was the first woman to be featured on the cover of Time magazine? She was a suffragette; she marched with 15,000 other women past her salon in New York, and they all wore red lipstick as a sign of strength. Don’t you love her?

  In five years of letter writing, one or two each a month, they hadn’t met, even though they lived about an hour’s drive apart. Neither of them had suggested a meeting, nor had they exchanged photographs, although the same small head and shoulders shot accompanied most of Helen’s articles.

  Impossible to make her out clearly, with her face in three-quarter profile and her gaze tilted down so you couldn’t see her eyes. Her dark hair was cut close to her head, pixie-like, and the colour of her skin suggested dark eyes too. It was as if she was trying to be unrecognisable. Not necessarily a bad thing, given some of her views – surely deliberately controversial sometimes – and the awful things she still said about books or plays that didn’t appeal to her.

  You’re heartless, Sarah would write after a typically unflinching review, but Helen remained unrepentant. I’m a critic, she’d reply, I’m paid to be heartless. And besides, someone has to compensate for all the allowances you make, Mrs Benefit-of-the-Doubt.

  They were different. They were as different as it was possible for two women to be. They shouldn’t have fitted together, but somehow they did. Something kept them writing to one another – maybe it was the very fact that they were such opposites; maybe they recognised in the other what was lacking in themselves. Whatever the reason, Sarah welcomed Helen’s letters in all their bluntness, particularly at a time like this when she felt so bereft, so alone. Helen understood sadness.

  The bedroom door opened and Neil appeared with a tray. Could it be lunchtime already? Sarah hoisted herself up to sitting, although the last thing she wanted to do was eat. But he was trying his best, and he was in mourning too, even if he was better at hiding it.

  ‘Soft-boiled egg,’ he announced, laying the tray acros
s her lap. ‘Toast and tea.’ He sniffed. ‘What’s the smell?’

  ‘Helen sent cream.’ She looked without appetite at the food. He’d cut the buttered toast into strips, chopped the top off the egg. Making it as easy as possible for her, as if she were a small child learning to feed herself. She picked up a piece of toast – and let it fall back onto the plate.

  ‘Sarah,’ he said gently, ‘you have to eat, love.’

  She didn’t have to eat. She didn’t have to do anything except wake up each morning and wait for the night to come back. But she reached again for the toast and bit into it and forced herself to chew and swallow, conscious of his eyes on her. She took a spoonful of egg – he’d forgotten the salt – and a sip of tea.

  ‘Your father phoned again,’ he said, crossing to the window. ‘I told him you were asleep.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘And Christine wants to call around. She thought you might like to see Aidan and Tom.’

  ‘No,’ Sarah said quickly. ‘I hope you put her off.’

  ‘She said she’ll phone again later.’

  ‘Tell her I’m not up to it yet. Tell her I’ll be in touch when I feel better.’

  She couldn’t face them, it was too hard. Aidan running to her like he always did, two-year-old Tom tottering after his big brother. And Christine, growing a third baby in her hospitable womb, five months to go until she held him in her arms.

  It was too much. It was too unfair.

  But Christine meant well. Everyone meant well. Matron at the nursing home, telling her to take what time she needed, they’d manage. Neil’s mother, Nuala, bringing rock buns and Milk Tray. Nobody at all mentioning the miscarriage, everyone acting as if the pregnancy had never existed. Everyone except Helen.

  ‘It’s nice out,’ Neil said, looking down on the garden. ‘Not as cold as yesterday, and the rain has finally stopped.’

  ‘Oh.’

  She couldn’t give a damn about the weather. Let it rain till kingdom come for all she cared.

  ‘The cherry blossom will be budding soon.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  He turned to face her. ‘By the way, Shergar’s been kidnapped. It was on the radio just now.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Shergar, a racehorse. He won the Epsom Derby two years ago, by ten lengths. You must remember, it was big news.’

  A horse, kidnapped. She smiled weakly at her boiled egg. ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘He’s worth a fortune. They think it might be the IRA.’

  ‘Really.’

  But she’d lost interest in Shergar and his problems. She laid down her spoon, unable to face more food.

  ‘Would I run you a bath?’ Neil asked.

  ‘No.’ Her fingers tightened around the edge of the blanket. She pushed the tray aside. ‘Just … give me more time, OK?’

  He crossed the room and sat on the bed. ‘Darling, it’s been nearly a week.’ He reached for her hand and held it between both of his. ‘It’s not doing you any good, lying here moping.’

  She resisted the impulse to snatch her hand away, to tell him to shut up, leave her alone. She’d never told him to shut up, never. They rarely rowed.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ she said, watching his fingers curled over hers. ‘I’ll get up tomorrow, OK?’

  ‘And you’ll think about going back to work? Maybe next week?’

  ‘Yes.’

  But the prospect of going back to work seemed marginally more challenging than climbing Mount Everest on her knees. She eased her hand from his and slid back down, pulling the blankets around her.

  ‘I’d like to sleep now,’ she said, closing her eyes. She felt the mattress lifting as he stood, heard the soft clink of cutlery on crockery as he took away the tray. She listened to the sound of his footsteps, muffled by the carpet. The gentle click of the door closing, the low thud of his feet on the stairs.

  She would get up tomorrow because he wanted her to. She would have a bath and wash her hair and put on clean clothes. And some time in the afternoon she would phone the nursing home and tell Matron she’d be back on Monday. Life would go on. That was what it did.

  Life went on, no matter what happened. Princess Grace dead, all that beauty wiped out in seconds when her car had smashed into a mountain last year. No holiday home in Mayo after all.

  John Lennon gunned down outside his home, the IRA blowing up bandsmen and horses, wars and floods and famines all over the world, and still the sun came up each day and people carried on.

  But not everyone carried on, did they? She remembered the woman she’d met on the bridge the day she’d done the interview for St Sebastian’s, eight years ago now. She remembered the horror she’d felt when she’d realised what the woman wanted to do, what so many people did, year after year. Throwing themselves into rivers or over cliffs, climbing onto chairs to hang themselves from rafters, swallowing bottles of pills.

  The bridge was still there. Sarah cycled over it anytime she went to visit her father. In eight years the only change had been a fresh coat of paint to the railings every now and again. There was vague talk of a reconstruction, but so far nothing had been done.

  The bridge wasn’t far from their house, about twenty minutes on a bike. She could wait until Neil had gone back to work, she could be there by mid-afternoon. She could prop the bike against the railing and climb—

  She shook her head sharply, cutting off the thought. No, never, no matter how sad and bleak everything became. There was always hope – wasn’t there always hope? There was always the possibility that tomorrow things would be better. But right now it was so hard to go on remembering that, so hard to keep the darkness from taking over.

  She propped herself up on an elbow and reached again for Helen’s letter. She read it for the umpteenth time, her lips forming the words silently. She clung to them; she wrapped them around her like a much-loved, tatty old dressing-gown.

  Helen

  On the morning of her forty-first birthday Helen O’Dowd observed herself without joy in the bathroom mirror. A web of lines splaying from the outer corners of her eyes: permanent residents now, whether she laughed or not. More lines, an accordion of them, scored into the skin above and below her lips. Nearly a quarter of a century’s worth of smoking to thank for those, begun behind the bicycle sheds in school with Maura Curran and Frances Lynch when they were all seventeen, and not stopped since.

  Long before she met Cormac she’d been on twenty a day, blackening her insides with the poison from thousands of cigarettes. And yet it had been Cormac, smoker of just the occasional joint, whose lungs had been withered away by cancer, years before his forty-first birthday.

  She tamped down the flare of pain his memory still caused and patted the loose skin beneath her chin – when had that happened? And look how crêpey the skin of her neck had become, and the ugly criss-cross of creases meandering down her chest. Some sight, at ten past eight in the morning.

  Her appearance wasn’t helped in any way, of course, by the night she’d just had. Too much alcohol, too many cigarettes, not nearly enough food: repeated often enough – and she was still repeating it as often as she got the chance – it was bound to put years on anyone.

  Forty-one admitting to thirty-six, the only thing she didn’t tell the truth about. Forty-one, on the verge of sliding disgracefully into middle age.

  Sarah was one of the few people who knew her real age. Sarah, in fact, probably knew more about Helen than anyone, including Helen’s parents. Especially Helen’s parents. She wasn’t sure exactly how it had happened, but over the course of the last few years she and Sarah had become friends.

  Never meeting up, maybe that was how they’d managed it. If Sarah spent ten minutes with Helen she’d probably want to run for the hills – and Helen might well feel the same. Chalk and cheese, that’s what they were.

  But however opposing their personalities, the truth was that on some level they clicked. Sarah was impossibly romantic, always believing the best of people, always r
eady to trust the stranger. But maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. Maybe people like her balanced out cynics like Helen.

  So they’d continued to write after the last of the recipes had been sent, they’d fallen into a correspondence that seemed agreeable to both, and with each letter that passed between them they connected a little more. And while Helen often shook her head at what she regarded as Sarah’s hopeless naïveté, she found herself looking forward to the letters with the Kildare postmark.

  Scanning the paragraphs of the first few letters, the overriding feeling they conveyed to her was happiness. Here was a happy person, in love with her husband, fulfilled in her job. The kind of person you’d love to hate – but hating Sarah, with her enormous capacity to see goodness everywhere, was impossible.

  When she’d lost the first baby, only a few weeks after she and Helen had been corresponding, she’d been upset, of course, but also philosophical. These things happen to so many, she’d written. Please God next time I’ll be luckier. But two years later it had happened again, and it was heartbreaking to witness her struggle to stay positive then.

  Reading about the miscarriages, sensing the raw grief within the lines, Helen had felt real sympathy. You didn’t need to meet Sarah to know that she was a mother waiting to happen. What rotten Fate had decreed that she should be denied the chance, over and over, while the likes of Helen, who would never win a parenting prize, could have got pregnant so easily?

  She’d conceived without trying, coming off the Pill just a few months before Cormac’s sperm had done the business – and there was Sarah, desperate for a baby, but only able, it appeared, to miscarry them.