Araby

by GRETTA MULROONEY

  ‘Marriage was never meant to last as long as it’s supposed to now.’

  ‘How d’ye mean?’

  ‘People live much longer. In the past, an average marriage lasted maybe twenty years. People died off. Look at your own parents; your mother was only married for a comparatively short time.’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ she said; ‘while ye’re married ye should work at it.’

  ‘Well, not everyone can.’

  ‘Put yeer trust in Our good Lord on high, pray to him daily and ye can do anything,’ she said, sitting back with her cup.

  Our conversations were programmed to wander in this hopeless circle. What was it a friend had once said to me? Never try to argue with a religious zealot, it’s like struggling through a maze.

  ‘D’ye know,’ she said to me suddenly, ‘I could just smoke a cigarette. Would they have one, d’ye think?’

  ‘What, just one?’

  ‘Yes. Ask the waitress.’

  I’d known her have the odd cigarette before, at whist drives or with her sherry at Christmas. It signalled that she was taking things easy, feeling maybe a little daring. I approached the waitress who didn’t bat an eyelid at my request, but came back with a king-size cigarette and a box of matches. My mother lit up and took inexpert small puffs, barely inhaling. She crossed her legs and propped her elbow on the table, holding the cigarette in the air. She was like a teenager, full of bravado.

  ‘Let’s make tracks now,’ she said when she’d half smoked it, ‘or the day will be gone. Ye take the road to Rosscarbery from here.’

  We headed off with the windows wound down. I could sense her growing excitement as we approached her secret destination. She gestured at the huge signs proclaiming road improvements funded by grants from the European Economic Community.

  ‘This has all changed entirely since I was a girl. The roads used to be full of ould potholes, ye had to be careful not to twist yeer ankle. God bless and save them European fellas!’

  A couple of miles outside Rosscarbery she told me to stop. ‘Let me get me bearings now, ’tis years since I was here.’ She frowned and held up a finger, her lips moving silently. ‘Go right up here, then there’s a road to the left.’

  I moved off, driving slowly. We cruised for ten minutes while she clutched at the dashboard, growing anxious. There was no sign of a road to the left.

  ‘Saint Anthony help us,’ she said. ‘Everything looks different, I can’t picture where we are. Stop at that place up ahead, look.’

  She was opening the car door before I’d pulled up, and beetled along the path of a cottage set back from the road. I watched her knocking, then stepping forward as a woman opened the door. There was some conversation. The woman stepped down the path with my mother, gesticulating. As I watched, a cat padded around from the side of the house, disappeared through the front door and reappeared after a minute with a large chop flopping from its jaws. It shot off out of view. It was like a silent film; the woman pointing, my mother nodding, the cat sneakily seizing its opportunity while its owner, her back turned, was absorbed in another matter. I started to laugh. I was still laughing when my mother got back in the car.

  ‘What ails ye?’ she asked.

  I shook my head. ‘Tell you later.’ It was a story she’d relish on the way home. ‘Do you know where we are or is the mystery trip continuing?’

  ‘That one told me they changed the road signs about ten years ago. We go on up here, turn right, then left. She was very interested in who we were, the nosy ould scut. Did ye see her eyeballs out on stalks taking a good gander at the car? I pretended I was over from England and gave her a false name. I’d say she’s the talking newspaper for the parish.’

  ‘What name did you say?’

  ‘Flanagan.’

  I pressed my lips together. She was priceless and without shame.

  After a few minutes my mother said, ‘That’s it! Drive on past a bit.’ We passed a small unremarkable cottage with a peeling yellow door.

  ‘Stop now!’ she commanded after fifty yards. She pulled down the mirror on the sun visor and neatened her hair. ‘Wait here for half an hour, then turn around and come to that house we passed. Keep yeer mouth shut when ye’re in there and don’t be giving any information. Just follow me own lead. Have ye got that?’

  I nodded, a bit dazed. My mother headed back up the road; I watched her disappear in my rear-view mirror. I pulled the car in close to the side and got out to stretch my legs. The silence was tangible. What was she up to, I wondered? Whatever it was, it had fired her with a rare energy and made her a congenial companion. I didn’t mind her waywardness and her orders today, they were entertaining.

  As instructed, I turned the car and presented myself at the yellow door. A middle-aged woman in a see-through purple plastic mac and wearing pink rubber gloves and a shower cap on her head opened it.

  ‘Ah come in,’ she said, ‘yeer mother’s here. Did ye get yeer Aspirin all right?’ She took me straight into a kitchen that smelled of boiling cabbage.

  My mother was sitting at the table and nodding at me encouragingly. ‘I told Ita ye’d had to go off and get something for yeer headache.’

  I played along. ‘Oh yes, I’m a bit better now.’

  ‘And ye’re Rory?’ asked Ita, putting her gloved hands on her hips.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Me youngest,’ my mother added, ‘the last of me little nest.’

  ‘Tay?’ offered Ita.

  ‘Please,’ I said.

  ‘Ye’ll have to drink up quickly, Rory, so ye can be back for that appointment,’ my mother said significantly, consulting her watch.

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘What time do ye have to be back?’ Ita was pouring me syrupy brown tea from a huge soot-encrusted pot. Her mac rustled as she moved.

  I took the mug, wondering if my mother had interrupted her in the middle of cleaning or whether her get-up was the day-time fashion in this part of the county. I did a quick mental calculation. ‘Four,’ I said.

  ‘And have ye a fast car?’ she asked.

  ‘Not so fast, but not too bad,’ I equivocated. I was doing pretty well, I thought, hoping that the nature of my appointment wasn’t going to be pursued.

  ‘Ah well, ’tis good enough for ye to have the wheels. I’m stuck for a bit of ould transport out here.’

  The tea was like treacle. I felt it slithering down and sticking to my stomach walls. Ita rummaged in a tin and brought out a pale shop-bought sponge cake with fluorescent orange icing.

  ‘Here,’ she said, hacking off a hunk and presenting it to me in her gloved hand, ‘make an impression on that.’

  She seemed truculent, I thought. The rubber glove was grimy and through a hole in the tip of one of the fingers I’d spied a dirty nail. I bit into the unwanted cake. It was stale but mushy, a fascinatingly awful combination. The icing exploded in a chemical extravaganza on my tongue.

  ‘And the children, Ita, how are they?’ my mother enquired. I noticed that she had avoided the cake and was toying with her tea. I suspected that before my arrival she’d offered me up as a man who was always desperate for a bit of iced sponge.

  ‘Oh, the usual. Sarah’s gone to England where the streets are paved with gold. Tommy’s at an agricultural college.’

  ‘That’s grand.’

  ‘Maybe. I did what I could for them anyway.’

  There was a dank, gloomy atmosphere despite the fire and the rattling kettle. A huge open pot stood on an Aga, steaming steadily; I spotted the knobbly end of a bacon knuckle sticking out of it and guessed that was where the cabbage also lurked. I eyed my mother and she pushed her chair back.

  ‘It was grand seeing ye, Ita. Sure the time’s flown altogether.’

  Ita scratched under her shower cap. It had a dolphin motif around the crown and her movement seemed to set them swimming. She stood at the door as we started the car, her hands stuck in her pockets. My mother gave a cheery wave, then ran a hand a
cross her brow once we’d accelerated away.

  ‘Bless all the saints in heaven, that was hard going.’ Her tone held satisfaction, though. ‘Ye did grand, Rory; a real Larry Olivier.’

  ‘Are you going to tell me who she was?’

  ‘Only if ye promise not to say anything to anyone about her.’

  ‘Not even Dad?’

  ‘No.’

  I shrugged. ‘Okay.’

  She lowered her voice and glanced around, as if there might be an eavesdropper in the back of the car. ‘That’s Nellie’s youngest girl, Ita.’

  I thought back to Nellie’s neat living-room in Liverpool and the way she’d arranged the food in serving dishes. ‘But didn’t Nellie have her children here adopted through the nuns?’

  ‘She did. But me mother persuaded them to give her Ita after Nellie had taken off to England. She went up to the convent and begged. The nuns hadn’t found parents for her so they agreed.’

  ‘Hang on a minute. Did Nellie know?’

  ‘No. Me mother put Ita with a simple ould cousin of hers in Durrus who said nothing because she got some of the allowance. But she went down there to see her regular and looked after her as if she was her own.’

  ‘Did Ita never want to meet her mother?’

  ‘She didn’t need to.’ There was a pause. ‘She thought Nana was her mother.’

  I drove on, feeling Ita’s poisonous cake giving me the headache I was supposed to have had previously.

  ‘I just wanted to see her,’ my mother mused. ‘’Twas the first time in years and I won’t bother again. I promised me mother I’d never spill the beans about her. That’s why you’ve got to stay quiet.’

  ‘Why would it matter now? Your mother’s dead and Nellie’s dead. Dad could know; he’s hardly likely to rush off and tell Ita.’

  ‘A promise is a promise,’ my mother said firmly. ‘Me mother, God rest her soul, wouldn’t be aisy in her grave if she thought I’d spread the word. I’ve only told ye because I know ye’re a dark horse. I can never get any information from ye.’

  We bypassed Cork. I pondered on the huge capacity my mother’s family had for flirting with deep plots and shadowy deeds.

  ‘How come she wasn’t there when Nana was buried?’

  ‘She was in hospital having Tommy. I sent her a mass card. ’Twas she put up the grave stone.’

  I was piecing it together. ‘So she thinks you’re her sister although in fact you’re her aunt.’

  ‘That’s right; well, a half-sister. Nana told her she had a different father, she was illegitimate.’

  ‘She was. Is.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s just that she didn’t know her true mother.’

  ‘Wisha, Nana was her true mother; didn’t she pluck her from the orphanage and keep her and feed her.’

  ‘So I was there as a nephew, but I’m actually a cousin.’

  ‘I suppose. I hadn’t thought of it like that. Sure what matter, ’tis all the same blood.’ My mother nudged me. ‘That ould cake had seen better days.’

  ‘I liked the shower cap.’

  ‘I don’t know what me mother would say if she saw her now. Stop in Fermoy, I want to get some of them oaty biscuits.’

  ‘Where are we going to say we’ve been if Dad asks?’

  She leaned towards me. ‘Around and about the countryside, looking at me ould haunts. That’s only a biteen of a white lie.’

  I waited for her outside the shop in Fermoy, rubbing my tender temples and regretting that icing. You could say this for my mother; life with her was rarely dull.

  NINE

  Biddy’s plane was an hour late. I drank over-brewed coffee at the airport and watched landing lights descend through the darkness. Any delay now made me twitchy. My mother had slept a good deal of the day, taking sips of drinks when she woke. At times she was alert, but mostly she looked distant. Father Brady had called again, this time administering the last rites. The nurse had delivered huge nappy-like incontinence pads. My father said he’d see to those. He was tired and worn-looking. My mother had been restless throughout the previous night. He’d had to call me at one point because she was trying to get out of bed; there was the dinner to make, she was saying, the chops would be burning, you had to keep them on a low heat.

  ‘I’ll look after the chops, Kitty,’ he’d told her, holding her arms.

  ‘Dermot, Rory?’ she said, ‘is your father there?’

  ‘I’m here, Kitty, it’s me.’

  ‘No, he’s having an operation. The poor man’s being pinned together.’

  ‘That’s all over now,’ I’d said. ‘He’s here, Dad’s here.’

  We’d settled her back, straightening the tangled sheets.

  ‘He’s a hopeless saver, he can never keep a bit of money, never a bit at all. There’s the insurance man to pay.’ She’d tried to sit up again. ‘Will one of ye pay him?’

  ‘I will, I’ll pay him now,’ I’d lied, and that seemed to satisfy her.

  I wanted my father to swap places with me and get some rest in my room, but he refused. He’d have plenty of time, too much time to rest when she’d gone, he’d said. I’d woken every hour, listening in the darkness. He was up most of the night, either seeing to her or making tea. At one point I heard him talking. I got up and tiptoed from my room. He was kneeling on the living-room floor, praying, a lighted candle in front of the statue of the Sacred Heart. At dawn he was in the garden, wandering the path and smoking. I took a scarf out to him.

  ‘Here, have some sense, your chest is weak.’

  ‘Thanks. She’s sleeping a bit now. Maybe she feels safer with the light.’

  ‘You were right about the frost.’ A clear, bright morning was breaking, carrying the kind of cold that was hard on my father’s drying joints.

  ‘I was, so.’ He inhaled deeply. ‘She was a bit like that the night before you were born. Not confused, of course, but restless. ’Twas very hot and she couldn’t get comfortable. She had me fetching iced water every five minutes.’ He scuffed at the hard ground. ‘Fifty-one years we’ve been together. Did I ever tell you how I met her, at Hyde Park Corner?’

  ‘She told me. You were listening to the man from the Flat Earth Society.’

  ‘That’s it. She pushed in front of me. Her hair was shiny and she was wearing this sort of scarf; ’twas the colour of it caught my eye, a class of a cloudy blue. Very jaunty, she looked. When I heard her accent I was delighted. London was a lonely kind of a place.’

  Jaunty; I could picture her, elbowing her way forwards to get a better look, her hair brushed until it sparked, her scarf done in a stylish bow. In their wedding photo she looked very modish; slim, in a dark fitted suit with a tilted hat and a spray of lily of the valley on her lapel. My father held himself formally, his expression reserved, but she smiled confidently at the camera, her gaze direct.

  I shivered in my dressing-gown.

  ‘You go on in,’ he said. ‘I’ll just finish this fag. I’m often out here at this hour, watching the world go by. There’s a robin pops out around now, I keep a bit of bread for him in my pockets.’

  I bought minty chewing gum to take away the taste of the coffee and drifted back to the ground floor of the terminal. Biddy’s plane was due in ten minutes, a monitor said. I circled the tall bronze statue of the hurler inside the main door, recalling the barn-like young man my mother had attempted to entertain when he’d stayed with us one night in Tottenham. A hurling team from Kilkenny had come over to take on a local group of enthusiasts, The Chuchulains, in a kind of lads of Erin vs. exiles match. Father Corcoran had masterminded the event; in his youth he’d played the game for Ireland and had an array of silver cups in the presbytery. We so rarely had anyone staying the night that we all felt jittery. My mother, of course, having rushed to the front of the queue with an offer of hospitality when overnight bunks were requested, had come home and panicked; what would this fella be like, would he snore, would he expect towels in the room, would he be a country
eejit with no sense and dirty habits?

  The day of the match, a Saturday, I came down for breakfast to a sight so unusual I rubbed my eyes in disbelief, wondering if my first illicit puff of a cigarette the night before had affected my brain. My mother was on her knees with a scrubbing brush, cleaning the kitchen floor.

  Furniture had been dusted and polished, the Hoover was out, windows sparkled, piles of clothes were cleared away, the stack of ironing that had been festering damply for a month had been completed. When I made some comment on how nice the front-room looked she wiped her brow and said she wasn’t having any fella from Kilkenny going home and saying that a Cork woman didn’t know how to entertain a guest. Her home county’s reputation was on the line and wouldn’t be found wanting.

  My father, like me, took no interest in hurling or any sport, but we were pestered by her into going to the match. She couldn’t possibly attend, she had far too much to do, but we were to take a tin full of ham sandwiches she’d made for half-time.

  ‘Do they have half-time in hurling matches?’ my father asked, being difficult because he’d planned to spend Saturday afternoon with his vegetables.

  ‘They must do,’ she said. ‘They always have half-times with them things.’

  ‘Have we got to bring him home afterwards?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, of course! How else would he find his way here? Now, will I use the willow pattern plates for dinner?’

  My father gunned the car, muttering that you’d think the Shah of Persia was visiting with the fuss that was being made. At the school field where the match was being held, we handed the sandwiches to one of the women who was running the refreshments stall and looked about us. Burly men swinging hurling sticks were running around and thwacking balls to each other in a warm-up. Children skittered along the edges of the field, screaming encouragement. There were cries of ‘Up Kilkenny!’ and ‘Come on now, Chuchulains!’ My father and I eyed each other.

  ‘How long will the match last?’ he asked a spectator.

  ‘Oh, about two hours in all, with presentations at the end.’

  ‘I could drop you at the library and head off to the allotment for an hour, then pick you up. We’d be back to get your man.’