City Girl

by Patricia Scanlan

  A second wail joined the first and wearily Maggie slipped out of bed and went into the babies’ room. Scooping her two bawling treasures from their cots she eased herself into the single bed in the corner. It was cold and unwelcoming, which added to her irritation, and she felt quite sorry for herself. In the next room she could hear her husband snoring loudly and she felt like throttling him. No such thing as equality of the sexes for her darling Terry! Maggie unfastened the top of her nightdress and smiled in spite of herself as two hungry little mouths fastened on her nipples like two ravenous piranhas. At least tomorrow was Friday and she would see Devlin and Caroline. The thought comforted her. She loved their get-togethers. They were imperative to her sanity. How glad she was that she had persuaded Devlin to leave London and come home. At least they had one another to share the delights of child-rearing. The babies suckled contentedly, their downy little heads resting against her breasts and, settling herself more comfortably against the pillows, Maggie gave herself up to the joys of motherhood. She must remember to bring a tart and a casserole for Devlin. Honest to God but there were times when Maggie was sure she was going hungry. Of course Devlin had such pride! There was no room for pride in friendships – that was one lesson that Maggie had learned from hard experience. Pride was a destroyer, a barrier that she had crossed once and which she could safely say would never come between her and anyone.

  She suddenly felt sad. Where was Marian now? Had she, too, got married? Did she know the joy of holding a child to her breast? Maggie had written to her once, asking her to reconsider her decision to end their friendship, telling her that she would always be there for Marian and that the door would always be open for her to come back. She never received a reply and had heard nothing from the other girl since. She could be dead, for all Maggie knew. Did she ever think of Maggie? Probably not! Had Marian just used Maggie and her parents while she was at boarding school? They were questions she had asked herself over and over again. She would never know the answers. Time and the friendship of Caroline and Devlin had healed the hurt for Maggie, but not knowing why was something that would always puzzle her.

  She sighed, observing the two sleepy little heads nestled close against her. Her children would have to learn for themselves the hard lessons of life. Unfortunately, there were people who would use and abuse others; that was the way of human nature. Her arms tightened their hold on her two feeding babies. What on earth had made her think of Marian Gilhooley after so long? Between Marian and Devlin and Caro there was no comparison. No fairweather friends they. Through thick and thin they had stuck with one another as their lives had changed over the past few years.

  Had any of them envisaged how things would turn out? Devlin living in a high-rise flat with her illegitimate daughter. Caroline, wealthy, wanting for nothing yet obviously unhappy in her marriage. And herself . . . she made a wry grimace. She, who had been the most exuberant of the trio, travelling, living life to the full, had at the age of thirty-one had her wings well and truly clipped. The fetters of wife and motherhood had slipped around her so slyly that she hadn’t been aware of them. It was only when she remembered how life had been that she realized quite how dramatically she had changed. Was it worth it, she often wondered, watching her suckling twins.

  Maggie knew, no matter how hard she tried to suppress the knowledge, that she was not content with her life as it was. Being a wife and mother were not enough to fulfil her. She missed her job, badly. She was torn between the desire to take up the reins of her career again and the need to be at home for her children. On no account did Terry want her to employ a child-minder. But, then, he didn’t have to give up his career. He wasn’t imprisoned within the four walls of the house with only the babies for company. Yet she knew that if she did go back to work she would worry about the twins. She wouldn’t be there to see their first tentative footsteps. Another woman would have that pleasure. Her mother had always been there for Maggie and the boys. She was the first person they saw when they came in from school, standing at the cooker preparing their dinner, ready to listen to all their excited chatter. How much she had taken her mother for granted. Had Nelsie ever got fed up cooking, cleaning, caring? Did Maggie have the right to deny her children the stability of motherhood while she searched for fulfilment? Did they have the right to expect her to give up her own desires? What was fair? What was right? Maggie didn’t know and Terry was no help.

  The twins were almost asleep, sated, untroubled by worrisome thoughts. She smiled down at them. It was such a pleasure to see them gaining weight. They had been so frail and tiny at their birth that she had feared for their lives. A while later, having winded them and changed them, Maggie dropped into an exhausted sleep noting that it was already six a.m. A howl of outrage shocked her into wakefulness and tears of frustration rose to her eyes. It was only seven! They should have stayed in Saudi, she thought miserably. At least she would have had servants to attend to Terry and the housework.

  Her son lay contorted with colic and she did her best to comfort him. Being a nurse she knew the attack would pass but it was distressing for the child and she felt powerless to do anything. Crooning softly to him, she rubbed his back and tummy as she paced the bedroom floor, noticing glumly that it was lashing out of the heavens and that she’d never get her washing dry today. By the time she had the baby settled it was time to get Terry’s breakfast and reluctantly, Maggie gave up the notion of getting any more sleep. Bleary eyed, she slapped rashers and sausages on the grill, cut up a grapefruit and burned two pieces of toast.

  ‘Shit!’ she cursed as the distinctive smell of burned toast pervaded the orange kitchen. She hated this kitchen! All bright oranges and yellows. They were living in a rented house on a large housing estate in Templeogue and out of it she thought they would never get. She felt so closed in. There were hundreds of young children and teenagers. The noise level was incredible. Maybe the rain was a blessing in disguise; they wouldn’t be out kicking ball and screaming and roaring from early morning to after midnight. Many was the night she had tried in vain to get the babies to sleep, even get to sleep herself, but the racket outside made it impossible. Thank God the summer holidays would soon be over and maybe there’d be some respite.

  ‘Are ya trying to set the kitchen on fire, Maggs?’ Terry enquired cheerfully as he noted the little puffs of smoke emanating from the ancient toaster.

  ‘Oh shut up!’ She just wasn’t in the mood for Terry’s humour this morning.

  ‘Jesus, Maggie, but you’re becoming a right grouch,’ her husband informed her indignantly as he stuck his head into his Irish Times.

  Thirty-three

  The twins were almost a year old before Maggie began to feel she could cope. Thankfully, after much nagging, Terry bought a house out in Castleknock on the north side of the city, a big detached four-bedroomed house with good gardens front and back. Maggie decorated it in soothing pastel colours and compared to the hideous orange and yellow monstrosity they had inhabited in Templeogue, the new house was a castle. By dint of very hard work, Terry was making a great success of his business, which was expanding rapidly. He expected her to entertain his clients at the drop of a hat. They had many a hot argument about his nasty habit of arriving unexpectedly with some stranger for dinner.

  Maggie was a great cook. She was a creative person, and to her cooking was an art, but she liked to have notice that visitors were coming so she could spend time preparing a special meal with all the trimmings. She knew Terry never thought of things like that. Bringing someone home wasn’t such a big deal in his eyes. She knew her husband felt that it was up to her to take care of things on the home front just like his mother had. That’s what marriage was all about, in his opinion. All he wanted, and was it too much to ask, he enquired testily, when they were having an argument over his attitudes, was to come home after a hard day’s work, relax over a drink and have a tasty dinner. If a client came with him what difference did one more mouth make?

  ‘What about w
hat I want?’ Maggie demanded. ‘Do you ever think about that?’

  Terry was shocked. Hadn’t he given her a lovely home, didn’t she have her own cheque book, plenty of food on the table, time to come and go as she pleased while he slaved away to provide for her and the children? What more could she possibly want? He genuinely couldn’t understand her attitude. ‘If my mother had had a tenth of what you have, she would have thought she was in heaven. You know it’s no joke at work. The pressure is killing me. All you have to do is take care of the babies and get a dinner. The rest of your time is your own,’ he said indignantly.

  ‘I am not your mother and these are the Eighties you’re living in, Terry. I am your wife, not your housekeeper. And I have a life to lead too and, believe me, I have precious little time to myself,’ Maggie told him furiously one evening after he complained when he came home with a friend and found her surrounded by talcs and nappies and his dinner not yet cooked.

  Another thing they argued about was sex, or rather the lack of it. Maggie was the first to admit that their sex life had suffered since the birth of her twins. Before she’d got pregnant Maggie was always ready to make love. She’d been a wild uninhibited lover and she knew that Terry had never looked at another woman once they’d started to sleep together. But her pregnancy had changed things. As she got bigger and more ungainly she hadn’t felt like making love and she had seen Terry looking at other women in the compound with that old familiar light in his eye. He had started working late, leaving her alone with only Mehemed and the house boy for company. And she’d seen that sly bitch Ria Kirby, who lived on the floor below them, flirting with him. She’d tried to ignore it all, hoping that things would sort themselves out when she’d got over the birth and they were back home.

  She’d got over the birth, they had come back home, but things didn’t improve. Although Terry was eager to resume their active sex life, and she was also, Maggie found that by the end of the day, and with her sleep constantly interrupted, she was exhausted. Making love was the last thing on her mind and Terry just couldn’t understand it.

  Marriage certainly hadn’t been what they had both expected. There was a lot of adjusting to do and it seemed to Maggie that she had to adjust the most. Her life had changed much more than her husband’s. Somewhere along the line her identity had disappeared. Now she was Terry’s wife, Michelle’s and Michael’s mother and caring daughter to her parents who, now that she was back home in Ireland, expected her to visit regularly. Once a week she would drive down to the farm where she would help to hoover and polish, do the weekly baking as well as take care of the twins. Then she would drive home, put them to bed and turn around and make a meal for herself and Terry. It seemed that everyone wanted something of her and there was nothing left for herself.

  A few months later she found that she was pregnant with her third child and well and truly smothered in her suburban rut. Each day she would get up, give her husband his breakfast, feed and bath her infants, do her washing and housework, bake, mend, garden, it was a never ending routine that often had her at screaming point. Even doing the weekly shopping in the enormous shopping centre ten minutes away was a break for her. Maggie even found herself listening to Gay Byrne and enjoying his programme on the radio like thousands of other Irish housewives. It was something she had always vowed she would not do! She would not become another bored housewife dependent on a daily radio programme for stimulus and entertainment. When she lived at home her mother used to drive her mad about Gay Byrne! Nelsie listened to him religiously each weekday. Well, her daughter was not going to follow in her footsteps. Every morning, Maggie would deliberately tune into a pop station immediately she heard the annoying jingle that preceded the GB Show. One morning though, she had forgotten to do this, and a letter that was being read out over the airwaves caught her attention.

  A woman was complaining that now that summer had arrived she would have no peace on the street because of the kids out kicking ball until all hours. She also told Gay that she lived in fear of her life of her windows getting broken and that she hadn’t a flower left in her garden. The broadcaster had made light of her complaint, saying hadn’t she little to moan about – kids were always bouncing balls and she must be exaggerating. Maggie found herself getting mad. The nerve of him! Wasn’t it all right for him living in secluded splendour out in Howth. He wouldn’t be troubled by ball-kicking. Maggie knew exactly what that woman was going through. Hadn’t she gone through it in Templeogue. Maggie sat down and wrote a letter in support of the other woman’s complaint, and to her great satisfaction it was subsequently read out on the programme. From then on she was hooked on the show which covered such a wide range of interesting topics. At least if she was a housewife, she was an informed housewife, she told herself a little wryly. And so the bland routine of coffee mornings, playschool rosters, chore-filled mediocrity that was her existence continued, broken only by her visits to Devlin and Caroline.

  With the girls Maggie could escape for a while from the everlasting routine her life seemed to have turned into. She felt she was neither happy nor unhappy – she was just existing. Where once she had lived life to the full, had crammed every minute with experiences, she now had the sense that the fast-flowing river of life was passing her by and she was stranded, clogged like a reed against a weir and going nowhere. Where once she had chafed against entertaining Terry’s clients, she now found herself looking forward eagerly to meeting new people after the stultifying boredom of being alone with two small children day after day.

  Invitations to Maggie and Terry’s dinner parties were much sought after in their circle. Although she had a tastefully decorated dining room, Maggie much preferred to entertain in her warm spacious kitchen. Not for her the elegance of Cordon Bleu cuisine. Maggie was not a country girl for nothing. Her mouthwatering roasts and casseroles and pies were always devoured by her very appreciative guests who would then relax, elbows on the large circular pine table, sipping from their brandy-filled goblets. The after dinner discussions were always lively and amusing and she made sure to have a good cross section of guests.

  Several times she invited Devlin to stay overnight with the baby so she could join the party and it always did her heart good to see her friend dress up and enjoy herself for a few hours. Terry was always especially kind to Devlin and for that she loved him. He never judged people, not like Richard, the bastard, who had been exceedingly cool to Devlin during one of their soirées. Terry had become Richard’s investment consultant and although he was doing well for himself, her husband could not help but be impressed by the amount of money Richard and some of his other clients were earning. Richard was making over one hundred thousand pounds a year, he informed Maggie one evening as they were preparing for a dinner party.

  In spite of Terry’s carefully acquired successful-man-about-town veneer, Maggie knew he had never quite lost his boyhood sense of inferiority. It was this country-boy complex that pushed him on and on. Status and material wealth were important to Terry and it frequently annoyed him that he couldn’t match the Yateses’ glittering lifestyle. Maggie couldn’t have cared less whether she drove a battered old Renault or a Rolls Royce. As long as she got to where she wanted to go she was happy. She dreaded each occasion that Richard presented Caroline with something new. Richard loved to boast and always brought it to Terry’s attention. The ear-bashing she would then get would usually end up in a row as Maggie tried to impress upon her husband that she didn’t give a fig if Richard had spent three hundred pounds on a leather jacket for Caroline. What her friends or neighbours or anybody else had, meant nothing to Maggie. What Maggie craved more than anything else was time. Time of her own, for herself, when she could do as she pleased. It was the one thing that seemed to elude her. There were the needs of her husband and children to be taken care of. Her family in Wicklow were a constant drain on her time with her mother frequently arriving on her doorstep on a day trip to the city and expecting Maggie to drop everything and escort her
around. There were times when the utterly harassed Maggie really envied the childless Caroline and the husbandless Devlin. Now with this new baby on the way she’d have even less time!

  Ironically it was her pregnancy that gave her a liberation of sorts. She was in her fifth month and as in the previous pregnancy their love life was suffering. She knew that Terry found pregnancy a sexual turnoff. Maggie accepted this quite philosophically. Terry was solicitous of her comfort and for him, quite caring, especially after the awful pregnancy she had endured before. Although this pregnancy was much easier on her, healthwise, she found taking care of two lively toddlers very tiring. She promised herself that this was going to be her last child. Three were more than enough. Nor was she ever going to take the pill again. She hadn’t gone back on it after her first pregnancy because she had been breast feeding for so long, and it hadn’t been too much of a shock to her to get pregnant again. She wanted to have her children close together because it was much easier to rear them, but after this one, Terry was going to have to have a vasectomy, or she was getting her tubes tied. No more messing around her internal rhythms with the pill. And there was certainly no way she would consider an IUD, as Terry suggested when she told him she didn’t want to go back on the pill. She’d like to see him having his insides mucked about by foreign bodies! It was easy for her husband to suggest she use the pill or the IUD. She wasn’t getting any younger, and she had been using contraceptives since her late teens and she was fed up with it. His body wasn’t affected and it was either a vasectomy or tied tubes from now on, she informed him firmly, much to his dismay.

  It was about ten days after this conversation that she came home to find her husband making love to another woman. To discover that little slut Ria Kirby in her bathroom! In her house! Making love to her husband! This was the most devastating experience of Maggie’s life. Nothing that she had ever experienced before had prepared her for the pain and trauma of Terry’s betrayal of her and there had been a row to end all rows.