A Taste for It

by Monica McInerney

  Bernadette got the conversation flowing without any bother. “Yes, Maura has been whipping up a storm all around Clare with her great Australian wine and food.”

  Dymphna looked around her barshelves with an exaggerated grimace. “I’m afraid we’re not getting much call for wine from any country in here just yet. No call for it from the locals, and we’re not exactly on the real tourist trail yet, if we ever will be. What we need is a reclusive pop-star or a moving statue miracle to get the tourists flocking in. All we’ve got to impress the visitors with is our great Irish charm and that old fellow down the road doesn’t help a scrap there, I’ll tell you that.”

  Bernadette interrupted her. “Not much for the young ones here then, I guess. Are you a local yourself?”

  Dymphna answered cheerfully. “Lord no, your great-grandparents have to have been born and bred here before you can call yourself a local,” she said. “My husband and I bought this pub about fifteen years ago. I’m from Wicklow myself. Of course, our kids didn’t stick around. One’s in Dublin, one’s in London, the other in Nicaragua of all places.”

  Maura ventured a question, taking a deep breath and hoping the fibs would flow freely.

  “I worked in a hospital in Australia for a while with a lady who was from around here – maybe you knew of her? Her name was Catherine Shanley. I think she would have been about your age.”

  The woman stopped serving and cocked her head to one side. “What did you say her name was again?”

  “Catherine Shanley,” Maura repeated.

  “And you met her in Australia?”

  Maura nodded.

  Dymphna thought for a while. “Shanley’s a common enough surname around here, and I think quite a few young ones from this area went to Australia. But she would have been before my time, I’d say. I can’t say I remember hearing her name or not – sorry, love.”

  “Oh, well, that’s a shame,” Maura said quickly, but conscious of a rush of relief. The search would end here, but she could at least tell Nick – and herself – that she had tried.

  But Dymphna was still thinking. “Hang on a moment, let me ask someone else if they knew your friend. She’s lived here all her life.” She called out to a woman carrying a mop and bucket through to the other side of the bar.

  “Eileen, do you remember a Catherine Shanley, born here about sixty years ago? This young lady here worked with her in some hospital in Australia.”

  The older woman came over. “Australia, did you say?”

  Maura nodded.

  “I went through school with a Catherine Shanley. Though she called herself Kate sometimes, or even Katie, depending on her mood. Ah, she fancied herself that one, you’d never know from one day to the next what name she’d answer to. We all had to call her Cecilia one week, when she decided she preferred her confirmation name to her real name. She wouldn’t answer to anything else, not even when the teacher called her.”

  Eileen put down her mop and looked right at Maura. “Where did you say you met her – nursing?”

  Maura nodded, not daring to add anything else, and hoping to God she wasn’t the spitting image of her mother.

  To her surprise Eileen gave an unpleasant laugh. “Well, that’s a bit of a comedown for that one, that’s for sure. She had great plans for herself. You’ll see me in Hollywood, Eileen, she’d say to me one week. Or another week it would be the Olympics – she was going to be the world’s greatest female sprinter. Or the best painter. Aye, she really fancied herself.”

  “So whose daughter was she?” Dymphna asked Eileen, evidently getting into the spirit of the conversation. Bernadette gave Maura a reassuring smile. It was off and running without much help from them after all.

  “John and Rosa – they used to live in that stone cottage just outside the town.” Eileen said. “You remember Rosa, Dymphna – the old one who cleaned the church for years.”

  Maura gave Bernadette a quick look before she spoke again. “Yes, that would be the Catherine I met, she said her parents’ names were John and Rosa.” She paused for a brief moment. “Are they still living here?”

  Eileen shook her head. “No, John died about ten years ago and she didn’t last that long after him. God rest their souls.”

  Maura was conscious of only the barest shimmer of feeling at the news.

  Eileen was curious now, the mop forgotten. “You met Catherine nursing, did you say? I don’t remember Rosa saying she was a nurse over there. Mind you, I don’t think she heard from her very much. I can’t imagine her as a nurse, not that one. She wouldn’t have struck me as the nursing kind, more likely to fill her patients up with sleeping tablets and head out for a night, she was.”

  Maura felt her indignation rise. She had no idea if Catherine had always been a nurse, be it a good or a bad one, but she didn’t like this woman’s tone.

  “Oh, Catherine was a wonderful nurse, in fact she was the Assistant Matron in the hospital,” she heard herself say. “She even won awards. There was a whole file of letters from people writing to thank Catherine for the wonderful job she had done looking after their relatives.”

  Maura felt Bernadette turn and look at her.

  Eileen’s eyes narrowed. “Well, perhaps she’d had a change for the better during her travels. All she used to say to me was ‘You wait and see, Eileen, I’ll make my mark in the world, I’ll rise above this place’. I was sick of hearing her say it. She fancied herself, that one,” Eileen repeated, with a loud sniff.

  The door behind them opened and an overweight fellow, looking in his mid-sixties, shambled in, straight to the other end of the bar. Dymphna had started pulling his pint of Guinness before he had sat down. He grunted a hello at them all. “Ask him about Catherine Shanley, he knew all about her,” Eileen said surprisingly. With another loud sniff she picked up her mop again and went through to the other bar.

  Dymphna leaned over toward them. “That’s Jim McBride, Eileen’s husband,” she said in an undertone to Maura and Bernadette. “Not that you’d guess, eh? She thinks he drinks too much. He thinks she cleans too much. I like the pair of them – she keeps my floors clean while he keeps my till full.”

  She suddenly spoke louder. “Jim, this is – what were your names, loves?”

  Maura and Bernadette introduced themselves.

  “Maura here worked with Catherine Shanley in Australia, and was in here asking about her. Do you remember Catherine at all?”

  The old fellow turned around, a beaming smile on his face.

  “Ah, Catherine,” he said wistfully, “there was a great young one.”

  They all heard Eileen’s grunt from the other room. She wasn’t missing a word.

  “You were a good friend of Catherine’s in Australia, did you say?” Jim asked Maura.

  “I only knew her for a few months, really,” Maura said quickly. “She was a nurse at a hospital I worked in. She mentioned she was from here so while I was in the area I thought I’d have a look around.”

  Jim shook his head. “Ah, she was a great girl altogether. She had great spirit, like mercury, or quicksilver – you’d try to get your hands on her and you wouldn’t be able to hold her.” He gave a cheerful, musical laugh, the sound quite unexpected from someone his age.

  Bernadette reached under the table and squeezed Maura’s hand.

  “I bet she stirred up trouble in that hospital. I can’t imagine Catherine taking orders from anyone.” He laughed his young man’s laugh again.

  Maura added more embroidery to her imaginary tapestry of Catherine’s life.

  “Well, she was the one in charge when I met her, so I don’t know about that. She was a wonderful teacher though, all of the student nurses said she was an inspiration. She was so patient, always ready to go that extra mile for them,” she added for good measure.

  “Really?” Jim mused. “Well, yes, she had a way with people.”

  Eileen suddenly appeared behind Jim. “I already told her that Catherine fancied herself.” With another sweep of
her mop, she flounced into the men’s toilets, making a loud noise of disgust as she did so. The door was propped open with a bar stool.

  Jim leaned back against the bar and rolled his eyes. “Thirty-five years we’ve been married and she’s still jealous of Catherine.” The laugh rolled out of him again.

  “Jealous?” Bernadette asked.

  Jim laughed again. “Me and Catherine were childhood sweethearts. Sure, it only lasted about two years, and we were just kids. But then she left me high and dry and I had to settle for second best, didn’t I, Eileen?”

  The toilet door slammed in answer.

  “You went out with Catherine?” Maura asked, her eyes widening.

  “Ah, in the rosy days of youthful sunshine,” the old man said, closing his eyes dramatically. “But I just wasn’t good enough for her in the end. She left me for Dublin, then I heard she emigrated. So she ended up in Australia, eh?”

  Maura nodded, tensing in expectation of his next question.

  “Where is she now, do you know? Married with a clatter of kids outback somewhere?”

  “She died a few years ago,” Maura said quietly. “I don’t know much more – we lost contact really, after I finished working at the hospital.” She was amazed how quickly the lies were flowing. She noticed that Jim seemed quite upset by the news that Catherine had passed away.

  “Has she any family left here at all?” Bernadette broke in, sensing Maura’s discomfort.

  “Oh, Lord no, I don’t think so,” the old man answered. “Her parents are long passed away and she was the only child. And now she’s gone too.” He shook his head regretfully.

  “There wouldn’t be that many left in this village any more that would remember any of them,” Dymphna said. “Sad isn’t it, the price of emigration, whole families just disappear, nothing left behind of them.”

  Maura felt strange suddenly, her lips locked tight.

  Dymphna spoke again. “It’s like I was saying before, we’re not on the tourist track. In a few years even more of our young ones will have moved on. If you don’t want to farm or run a shop or a pub, there’s not much here to keep you.”

  Maura found her voice. “No, I guess not.” Turning to Jim, she asked, “Would you have a photo of her? I’d be curious to see what she looked like when she was younger.” She knew it was an odd question, but she had left caution behind. Her heart was beating quickly, as if she was on the verge of a discovery.

  “Would you now?” the old fellow said. “Ah, isn’t her image engraved in my mind. Golden hair soft as silk, flowing straight down to her waist, a face like an angel, a voice like molten gold . . .”

  Eileen stomped back in. “What a load of rubbish! She had short red hair and she looked as much like an angel as you look like Pierce Brosnan.”

  Jim winked at Maura. “Oh, just an old man getting things muddled.” He pinched Eileen’s cheek affectionately. “No, love, sure didn’t I marry the best-looking girl in town, and you know it.”

  Maura and Bernadette looked closely at Eileen. It was hard to tell what she might have looked like as a young woman. Years of scowling had permanently set her face in a spiderweb of wrinkles.

  Jim went on. “No, Catherine was a grand-looking girl. Cheeky eyes. As Eileen said, short red hair. She cut it off when she was just a girl – her mother wanted her to wear it long and in a fit she cut it off to spite her one night. Ah, she was a bold one, that one. You’d tell her to do one thing and she’d do another, just out of badness.” He sighed in affectionate memory. Meanwhile, Eileen had virtually scrubbed the tiled floor to the bare earth below.

  Bernadette nudged the conversation along again. “So you don’t have a photo then?”

  “Ah, sure, it’s what, over forty years ago now? I’d hardly seen a camera back then.”

  Eileen grunted. “She’d be in one of those photos in the exhibition,” she muttered in Maura’s direction.

  Maura spun around, trying not to appear over-enthusiastic. She’d arouse their suspicions if she became any more curious about someone she had briefly worked with years before.

  “Which exhibition is that?”

  Dymphna remembered it too. “That’s right, in the local parish hall. It’s a display of old newspaper cuttings and photos and school reports from the last fifty years in the area. It’s the closest we get to a heritage centre. I told you, we had to do something to get the tourists in.”

  Bernadette finished her tea and looked at her watch. “Well, we’ve got a few minutes before we have to get going – we may as well take a look, do our best for local tourism, eh?” She smiled at Dymphna.

  Thanking them all for their help, Maura followed Bernadette out into the milky sunshine, blinking rapidly to try to release the tension behind her eyes.

  Bernadette looked at her carefully. “Do you want to have a look or do you want to just get out of here?”

  Maura took a breath. “Let’s have a look.”

  They looked down the street. An elaborately painted sign reading Heritage Centre was attached to the front door of an old stone building. Bernadette walked in first, dropping several pound coins into the basket by the door and smiling at the obviously bored teenager sitting reading a glossy magazine. She seemed relieved when they declined her offer of a guided tour.

  The budget had obviously been used up on the entrance sign. The exhibition consisted of four display boards, decorated with about a dozen large photocopies of newspaper clippings. In one corner stood a store dummy dressed in a strange selection of fancy dress and period costume and in another corner was an old tractor wheel and three hay bales.

  Maura quickly found the most likely photograph – a slightly faded, enlarged school group photograph, titled In Twenty Years Time? The caption explained that the children, boys and girls aged between ten and twelve, had been invited to come to school dressed as their dream occupation. Some were dressed as nurses. One or two were in cowboy gear. One was in a full nun’s habit, looking solemnly out from the headgear.

  Holding her breath, Maura quickly scanned along the rows of names. She found the one she was looking for. Catherine Shanley was at the end of the front row, staring defiantly into the camera. According to the caption, she had come dressed as a movie star. She was in a badly-fitting sparkling dress, in shoes at least twice her size, with a tiara balanced precariously in her mop of red curls. She even had a ratty-looking fur stole around her neck.

  Maura looked at it closely, memorising every detail, trying to get a sense of the woman her mother might have been from the bright-eyed child in the photograph. Her stomach felt tense and she knew her hands were clenched at her sides, as she silently cursed the poor quality of the photocopied photograph.

  Bernadette came up beside her and looked closely at the photograph. Matching the name in the caption she squeezed Maura’s arm, before laughing aloud.

  “Well, there’s an expression I’d recognise. Look at the mischief in that one.”

  Maura had noticed the resemblance herself. She felt a sudden tightening in her throat. Jim in the pub had been right. This girl had obviously had great plans for herself. She’d wanted to be something. But instead she’d ended up alone and pregnant and dead before her time, out in the middle of nowhere in rural Australia.

  Her mother.

  “Do you want another cup of tea, or a look at your grandparents’ old house?” Bernadette whispered beside her.

  Maura shook her head, unable to speak.

  “Do you want to go back to Ardmahon House?” Bernadette asked gently.

  Maura nodded, gratefully feeling Bernadette’s arm around her shoulders as they walked to the car.

  They had driven a few miles out of the village when a look over at Maura made Bernadette pull over.

  “Are you okay?’ she asked.

  Maura nodded, attempting a smile. It faltered on her lips. Turning toward Bernadette, she burst into huge racking sobs.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Bernadette smiled her thanks as M
aura passed another section of one of the Sunday newspapers across to her. The remains of their breakfast of bacon and eggs were on trays at their feet, their armchairs pulled in close to the sitting-room fire.

  Maura finished the colour magazine she had been reading and stretched luxuriously, wriggling her toes in the warmth of the fire.

  “I’m exhausted,” she said, yawning, closing her eyes. “That was a big night last night.”

  “Oh, I didn’t think it was too bad,” Bernadette looked across. “What was it, two spilt bowls of soup, one complaining sourpuss and one returned meal because the mountain pepper sauce was too hot? Nothing a complimentary glass of your brother’s excellent Cabernet Sauvignon didn’t put right.”

  Maura kept her eyes shut. “No, you’re right of course. We’ve just had a dream-run up till now, so I guess I was surprised to have any problems.”

  She didn’t explain the real reason she was so tired. She’d had great difficulty sleeping since their afternoon in Catherine Shanley’s village. Her mind was busy during the days, distracted by the intensive preparations in the kitchen for the two full houses in the restaurant on Friday and Saturday night.

  But come midnight or one o’clock, as she climbed into bed, all the conversations in the pub and the image of the little girl in the film-star costume kept coming back into her mind. She would eventually fall asleep, only to have fitful troubled dreams of herself lying sick in a small hospital in Ireland, being nursed by Catherine, or turning up at the village pub to find Catherine serving behind the bar. And last night she had dreamt vividly again of Terri’s death. She had woken up crying, as though it had just happened.

  Bernadette poured them each another coffee, still reviewing the previous evening. “The table of eight were great gas, did you get much of a chance to talk to them? They were mad about your food – the older man said he’d been out to Australia three times before but this was the best Australian food he’d ever tasted.”

  Maura roused herself with effort. “It’s those Irish ingredients,” she answered, “nothing to do with the cooking.”