City Girl

by Patricia Scanlan

  One evening, just after tea, there was a phone call for her. Now who was that, she wondered? Annie Mary, with whom she had resumed contact, had rung earlier in the day to make arrangements for the weekend and she wasn’t expecting anyone else.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello, Maggie MacNamara. It’s Terry Ryan. I’m ringing from Fagin’s Pub. If you’ve nothing better to do how would you like to join me for a drink?’

  ‘From Fagin’s in the village?’ Maggie’s eyes widened with surprise.

  ‘That’s right. If you give me directions I’ll collect you if you like, or else I’ll wait for you here. The Guinness is pretty good.’

  Maggie laughed. ‘Stay where you are, I’ll see you in ten minutes.’ She ran up to her bedroom, brushed her hair, washed her face, changed her dress, and put on a bit of lipstick. Imagine Terry Ryan ringing her from Fagin’s. She’d forgotten all about him. Her spirits lifted and she found herself looking forward to seeing him again. Although Leonard wrote and phoned telling her that he missed her and giving her all the news from City General, Maggie knew that she would not be returning to New York. It was time to move on. Once she had taken care of her mother she would resume her career and her independent lifestyle. Meanwhile, she was going out for a jar in Fagin’s and she was looking forward to it.

  She’d forgotten how good-looking Terry was, and how attractive his black twinkling eyes that were now smiling appreciatively into her own.

  ‘Well, you’re a sight for sore eyes,’ he greeted her. ‘Excuse me for not getting in touch before now like I said I would, but I was no sooner back than I had to go to London on business and I haven’t had a minute to myself.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ she smiled. ‘I was so busy myself I never gave it a thought.’

  Terry’s face fell in mock dismay. ‘You mean you weren’t pining by the telephone. What a shock for my ego!’

  Maggie laughed. ‘I’m sure your ego is well massaged if your reception at the airport is anything to go by.’

  Terry laughed. ‘That’s what I like about you, Maggie. You’re a straight talking woman. Now, where’s the best place hereabouts to go for dinner?’

  He took her to dinner in Arklow and she enjoyed his company immensely. It had been so good to get out and do something out of the ordinary that she had readily agreed to his suggestion that they meet again. She began to look forward to their dates, which took her out of the monotony of her domestic lifestyle. Terry provided an ear to listen to her moans and usually after being with him for ten minutes she was laughing and light-hearted, ready and eager for fun. And fun they had. Terry knew how to give a girl a good time. He wined her, dined her and she never knew where he was going to bring her. It was always a surprise. Although he could and did act the successful young businessman around town there was a boyishness about Terry that Maggie loved. They didn’t go in much for the sophisticated night club scene. Instead, he would bring her to the Zoo or sometimes they would go out to Greystones where they would fish from the beach, Terry yelling at her when she got the lines all tangled up in knots while all she did was laugh. At Christmas he took her to Funderland and Maggie felt like a child again. They went on all the rides and swings, gasping in delight as they sat on top of the big wheel and saw the lights of Dublin sparkling in the velvet night beneath them. Screeching with laughter, they shot down the big curving slide together and for a while she felt carefree and happy with no worries or cares to burden her.

  Terry had that effect on her. He had a knack of making everything seem like a big adventure and he made her return to Ireland much more bearable. Maggie knew that he fancied her like crazy and she was flattered. She had told him all about Leonard, and said that she wasn’t sure she was ready for another relationship but he brushed aside her excuses.

  ‘I’ll make you forget that boyo,’ Terry assured her and Maggie had to laugh at him.

  There was an openness of spirit, a naturalness and honesty about Maggie that men adored, and Terry was no exception. She didn’t place men on pedestals. They were human and fallible as she was and she never held high or false expectations having seen and experienced so much of human nature, especially during her years of nursing. Watching Terry with other women she knew that he was no Leonard. Fidelity would not come easy to Terry. She knew he saw other girls when she was stuck deep in the country but somehow, when he was with her at the weekend, she could push it all to the back of her mind and enjoy her time with him.

  Three months into their relationship they started to sleep together and the long lustful nights she spent with him seemed to recharge her for the week of dreary ordinariness that left her limp and drained and ready to scream with boredom. She felt so smothered after her life in New York. Even her love of nature seemed to be failing her and the long punishing walks she took with her dog could not comfort her as they once did.

  One day she was striding along, swinging an old bit of a bush she had found by the side of the road. It was early summer. Everything was fresh, the hedgerows and trees growing more voluptuously green each day. Passing a field of blazing yellow rape Maggie paused to gaze at it. A light breeze ruffled the crop and it looked like a rippling golden lake surrounded by fields of emerald green. There she stayed for a long time trying to quieten her restless spirit. Then her dog became impatient and with a deep sigh Maggie resumed her walk, her legs long and tanned in her denim shorts, her burnished copper hair blowing behind her in the breeze. A car drove past, stopped and reversed.

  Maggie had almost gasped aloud in disbelief as she recognized the man who got out of the car. In the years that had passed since she had last seen him, Joe Conway had become gross and florid. His eyes were red and bloodshot and although it was only mid-morning she could get the whiff of whiskey off his breath. Maggie was horrified when he took her in his arms and tried to kiss her. She recoiled sharply and told him to remember that he was married. In truth she pitied the unfortunate girl who was his wife. Maggie had seen enough of drink-related problems and heard enough gossip to know that Joe was an alcoholic.

  He had been furious at her rejection of him. ‘You stuck up whore!’ he roared after her as he staggered back to the car. ‘You think you’re great don’t ya? You always thought you were better than us, even though yer Dad’s only a penny halfpenny farmer. You’re a big headed bitch!’

  Watching the car weave its way down the road Maggie felt unutterably sad at what had become of her former lover. He’d had everything going for him and it looked as if he was letting it slip through his fingers. Who would have foreseen that Joe Conway, the catch of the county, would end up like this. The encounter disturbed her, made her think and assess her own life. Where was she going? What was she doing? She had paid her dues, she told herself firmly. It was time to take up the reins of her own life and get moving.

  Fourteen

  Two months later, six months after her return to Ireland, with her mother well on the road to recovery, Maggie gently but firmly told the family that she was going back to nursing in Dublin. Her father could well afford to get a woman in to help for a couple of hours a day and her mother was a fine healthy woman. She told them that she would visit them often but it was time for her to start working again. They had protested but Maggie was determined. Despite the health cutbacks, she had been lucky to secure a good job in her old training hospital and it seemed as though her years in New York and her time at home were all a dream.

  She found a nice flat in Sandymount and settled back to life in Dublin and it was during this period of her life that she made friends with Devlin and Caroline, friendships that would endure with women whose lives would intertwine with hers in the future. She remembered so well the night they were moving into the flat below her. Maggie had lived in the house for about three months and the elderly woman in the flat below her was a real dipsomaniac. Maggie had once come in from hanging out clothes on the line to find her swigging the Bacardi Terry had brought her on his last trip to London. From then on she nev
er left her door unlocked. For a while Mrs Ford would be fine and when she was sober she was an elegant cultured lady. But when she went on one of her batters she became slovenly and foul mouthed. She had a family, two sons and a daughter, and once, after a particularly bad binge, she had knocked herself out by falling against the fridge. Hearing the thud, Maggie had gone to investigate and found the poor woman unconscious, a lump as big as a golf ball rising on her forehead. She got her in to hospital, informed the eldest son of what had occurred and the following evening the son called on Maggie to say that the family were putting the mother in a nursing home and that the landlord would be letting the flat again. Maggie had been on tenterhooks wondering who would arrive next. After her experiences with Mrs Ford she was quite wary.

  She returned home from work to find a friendly blonde girl and a quiet brown-eyed girl struggling through the front door with an assorted array of black plastic sacks full of all their bits and pieces. The blonde girl was cursing beneath her breath as the bottom fell out of one of the sacks and half a dozen saucepans, and a frying pan and kettle spilled out on to the floor. The brown-eyed girl, catching Maggie’s amused eye, had taken a fit of the giggles at the expression on her friend’s face and eventually they all ended up laughing. Maggie had offered to help them carry in their stuff and had introduced herself, delighted that they were the two girls who were moving in underneath her.

  Devlin and Caroline were their names and by the time she had helped them move in and brought them upstairs to her own flat for a cup of tea she knew that they were all going to get along fine.

  And get along fine they did. The extrovert Devlin and the shy Caroline took to Maggie as she took to them. This was their first attempt at living away from home, their first flat, apart from a disastrous place where they had stayed for a few weeks in Rathmines. And soon it seemed that they had known each other for years. Maggie, being older, was the one they turned to for advice, which she always gave readily, and for the first time since Marian Gilhooly she enjoyed a sense of comradeship with the girls, as they became friends and began to share each other’s lives.

  Her relationship with Terry developed and deepened too. He had such great enthusiasm for life and living that he often carried her away on a tide of ebullient daydreams. He asked her to marry him. When she reflected on it later on, she sometimes felt that it was his dreams of travel and adventure and making a fortune in a foreign land that influenced her to accept. He wanted to work in Saudi and being a wanderer at heart, like him, she thought it seemed like the perfect match. As well as which, she thought philosophically, she was heading for the big Three O and her biological clock was ticking slowly but surely away. It was time she thought of making a commitment. She had sowed her wild oats and enjoyed every moment of it, had no apologies or regrets, but marriage would be a new phase in her life, a turning point.

  Maggie was excited about her wedding. Between them Terry and she had many friends and they had hired a bus to bring them all down from Dublin to the farm in Wicklow. In a little country church with rainbow-coloured sunbeams dancing through the stained-glass windows, the altar wreathed in honeysuckle and hibiscus, they had plighted their troth, surrounded by families and friends.

  Far away in hot dusty Saudi Arabia, Maggie smiled as she remembered. After the ceremony they had gone back to the big white and pink marquee that had been erected in one of the luscious green meadows near the house. They had served a buffet and her mouth watered as she remembered the huge hams baked in honey and decorated with cloves, the turkey, duck, and pheasant slices laid out on big platters, the loaves of fresh homemade bread, the dozens of different salads. The tables had been covered with crisp snowy white tablecloths and decorated with sprays of dusky pink roses that grew in wild profusion on the farm. The weather had been kind and it had been a happy carefree day which even her mother’s little protestations of exhaustion did not spoil. Leonard had sent a telegram wishing her joy and happiness and a gift of the finest table-linen. Maggie was delighted at the genuine good wishes of her old lover. Terry and she had spent their honeymoon in a tiny whitewashed villa in Rhodes before flying out to Saudi to start their new life.

  Maggie had been very happy the first year of their married life. Both of them were working. Life with the other Europeans and Americans seemed to be one big round of parties and barbecues. She had learned how to scuba dive and spent many happy hours exploring the warm underwater attractions of the reefs in the Gulf. Then she had got pregnant. Her husband had blamed her entirely for the pregnancy, which made Maggie sizzle with rage. He never wanted to be worried about contraception, leaving all the worrying to her. He hated using condoms, preferring Maggie to take the pill. And of course, she had forgotten to take it one night. They’d been at a party where some delightful illicit alcohol had flowed freely and by the time she got home, the pill was the last thing on her mind as she eagerly returned her husband’s passionate kisses. They had made love and fallen asleep and it was only the following night that Maggie realized what had happened. Unfortunately the damage was done, and Maggie was well and truly pregnant. They had got over the shock but Maggie found it hard to forgive her husband’s attitude when he found out that she was so unexpectedly pregnant.

  She was having such a difficult pregnancy too. She’d hated having to give up work but she had to because of the constant nausea and sickness. Even after the usual three months the sickness had not abated, much to her dismay, and as well as feeling miserable she found the days long and soul-destroyingly boring. The servants wouldn’t allow her to lift a finger and indeed would become quite annoyed should she even attempt to tidy up.

  She was a stranger in her own kitchen. Mehemed, the cook, would shoo her from the room with much lamentation and eye rolling should she even try to make herself tea and toast. Needless to say Terry loved it all. He couldn’t get enough of it, the pampering, the fussing. Maggie wondered how he would adjust to life without servants when they finally decided to return home. One thing was sure: she was certainly not going to treat him like a lord. Domestic duties would be shared, she had told him jokingly on several occasions, but somehow she didn’t feel that he was taking her seriously.

  Hunger gnawed at her stomach. Maggie sat straight up on the bed. Dammit! I’m going to make an omelette, she told herself firmly. Throwing on a loose cotton wrap she marched into the kitchen, all cool white tiles. Under the eagle eye of her cook, the house boy was polishing the huge copper pots and pans so that they gleamed spotless. Ignoring the hurt soulful cocker-spaniel eyes of Mehemed she proceeded to cook for herself a delicious savoury omelette. Her mouth watered as she sat down to eat it. If only she could get the idea of corned beef and cabbage out of her head. It was such a strong craving sometimes. Still her creation looked delicious. She was about half way through it when nausea overtook her. Tears of self-pity stung her eyes as she deposited her lovely fluffy creation down the toilet. Retching miserably, she vowed she would never become pregnant again.

  Glumly she made her way to the lounge and caught sight of Mehemed hovering around wearing his best ‘I told you so’ expression as he offered her a glass of water. It’s a pity I didn’t puke all over him. That would knock the superior smirk off his face, she thought nastily, as she studiously ignored him. Changing her mind she marched into the bedroom and slammed the door, knowing she was being childish. It wasn’t the cook’s fault that she was so miserably pregnant. She felt so frustrated and full of anger. It was OK for Terry – he didn’t have to put up with Mehemed, he was out working day and night. Nor did he have to listen to the inane yap of the other wives. Waves of resentment surged through her. It was a man’s world, of that there was no doubt. All she could do at present was either vegetate in the apartment or, worse, sit listening to the gossip down at the pool.

  Maggie hated the backbiting and bitchiness that was part of life on the compound. She was too direct a person to enjoy the subtle innuendoes and snide character assassination that some women indulged in. She coul
dn’t care less if so and so was having an affair with such and such. It was none of her business what other people got up to. Let them lead their own lives and she would lead hers. It was the hypocrisy that really sickened her. She had seen them being so nice, so charming to some poor unfortunate and then five minutes later when she was gone, the venom would come out and every aspect of her life would be torn to shreds.

  ‘Dreadful figure! Shouldn’t wear those awful bermudas. Husband’s an alcoholic, you know. Mark fancies her! Don’t ask me what he sees in her.’ It went on and on. Oh, she couldn’t face going down there. God knows what they said about her behind her back.

  Opening her dressing table drawer she pulled out a large red notebook, sat down and read the previous day’s entry. Giving a deep sigh she started to write. Maggie liked writing her thoughts down. She had kept a diary for as long as she could remember. In it she could pour out all her rage and frustration, although it seemed lately that these emotions were the only ones in her life. Her diary in New York had been so lively and exhilarating. Head bent, soft auburn hair tumbling around her shoulders, Maggie wrote until her fingers were stiff. Catching sight of herself in the mirror she grinned. She certainly looked like a demented novelist. A thought struck her, leaving her open mouthed. Well she certainly had the time to try writing a novel . . . She could write one about life on the compound! All human life was there. The sex! Drama! Intrigue! It couldn’t be rivalled by Hollywood. And those Saudi Arabian sheiks!