The Lives of Women

by Christine Dwyer Hickey

  The pub – a dirty dive: damp, clumpy sawdust over a black-speckled floor. An ungentlemanly stink from the gentlemen’s toilets. A man on his own, throwing rings at a board. Further away, another lone man, using both hands to forklift his glass from the table to his face.

  The barman told them it was too early to open the lounge: if they wanted a drink, they’d just have to put up with it – counter service only. Oh, but Mrs Shillman much preferred these old fashioned bars, so full of charm and character – wouldn’t he agree?

  He looked at her with a blank, pasty face and waited for her order. Elaine followed her mother to a table. Mrs Shillman began seeing to the drinks. A large gin and tonic for herself, a large vodka and lime for her friend and ‘What about you, Elaine dear, what would you like?’

  Elaine would like nothing. Elaine would like to go home, get into bed, put her head under the covers. But she didn’t want to spoil things and so ordered a Coke. But no, her mother said, a Coke was out of the question; a soda water was the only thing for an invalid’s delicate stomach. Then she lit up a cigarette and sent a good thick whack of it across the table.

  Elaine turned her face to the window. In the hospital she had forgotten about seasons; now she saw it was summer outside. People passing by, coatless and sleeveless. Girls in sunglasses. Children in shorts and sandals. Inside, the barman swiped a tea towel over his sweaty face. A man in shirtsleeves pushed through the door and shouted for a chilled pint of lager. Her mother fanned her throat with a beer mat; Mrs Shillman drew the side of her glass along her forehead. Elaine pulled her big winter coat about her and blew into the cold cup of her hands.

  She followed the minutes on the clock behind the bar until ten of them had edged by. Mrs Shillman wondered, then, if they wouldn’t be better off having one for the road to allow the traffic a chance to clear? The traffic at this hour can be simply horrendous, she said. Her mother considered this for about a half a second before heartily agreeing, her face dropping then at the realisation that, this time, she would be the one to go up to the counter.

  Her mother was unused to pubs, to walking across bar-room floors and standing at a bar counter, waiting on a strange, sweaty man to notice her there, before ordering a round of drinks in broad daylight. There would be the worry of fumbling through her money – her housekeeping money at that. The worry of how to get the drinks safely back to the table. And the worry too that some -how she was being watched – by her husband, the neighbours, Mr Hanley even, who had once told her she was his idea of ‘the perfect lady’.

  For a moment Elaine considered offering to go up to the bar on her behalf. But she felt exhausted suddenly and more than a little bewildered. The room was too big and too brown. There were too many red stools bleeding into her vision. And everywhere she looked she saw dirt: cigarette stubs on the floor, beer splashes on the wall, a bluebottle sniffing a crusted blob of mustard on the table. And as for the noise! The rubber rings banging off the ring board. The woman on the television screaming out the news. Martha Shillman yelling a story about her husband called Shillman and a funny incident that had occurred on a golf course in a city she’d never even heard of.

  From the corner of her eye, she kept a nervous watch while her mother’s shape moved gingerly across the floor, the trembling tray of drinks in her hands. She was back then, lowering the tray, shaken but safe and far from defeated.

  Elaine pulled her eyes away from the room, up, up towards the yellowing ceiling. Four round vent holes cut into the uppermost corner of the wall; four long fingers of sunlight poking through, lifting and trickling through the afternoon dust. She stared into it until the room had dessicated into a soft glittery spin.

  Far below, the sound of the two women sucking and blowing; their conversation compact and happy, like two little girls, she thought, who had learned how to smoke. Neighbours’ names strayed out from their chat – familiar names in unfamiliar circumstances.

  And here she realised the second big change: for the first time in her married life, or at least for as far back as Elaine could recall, her mother had started to make friends.

  She smells the cigarettes on the breath of the house the minute she walks through the door, and finds in every room long forgotten ashtrays. A cut-glass square in the hall, a marble slab on the kitchen windowsill and, in the sitting room, a chrome bowl perched on one leg. By her mother’s bed there is a souvenir from Paris and on the bathroom ledge another from London: mementoes from two ‘glorious’ holidays in the years before she married, when glorious holidays would become a thing of the past. The Parisian ashtray had a picture on the base of a slinky black cat smoking from a holder; Elaine can vaguely recall eating jelly babies out of it when she was very small.

  She walks through the house, remembering the rooms. Her mother is never far behind with offers of tea, toast and ice-cream. In between, she chatters to Elaine about all her new friends.

  They had stopped her out on the road. They had sidled up to her when she’d been paying the grocery bill in McKenna’s. They had paused at the garden wall while she was clipping the hedge. The more confident ones had marched straight up the driveway and rung the doorbell, often bringing a little gift in their hand – Mrs Hanley with her books, Mrs Tansey with her talc and bath-cube set and Mrs Townsend, who, as the doctor’s wife, presumably carried enough authority as it was, came with one arm as long as the other.

  Other women soon followed – most of whom her mother had hardly even spoken to beyond a nod and a smile delivered at a distance, a compliment on a freshly painted door maybe. At most, a goochy-goo into the pram of a new arrival.

  There had been get-well cards and a holy medal; a set of hankies from that Mrs Owens; a bottle of cologne from the woman with the funny teeth who lived next to the Prestons. Chats that had started at garden gates soon progressed into hallways and ended at kitchen tables. Teacups and cake crumbs had barely been cleared away, ashtrays barely emptied, dinners just about shoved into the oven in time for a husband’s return from work.

  At first her mother had been a little wary of all this attention. As Elaine well knew, she had always been torn between the desire to make friends and a fear of strangers knowing too much of her business. But really it had been out of her hands – in fact there’d been no need to make any effort at all on her part: there had been none of the usual anxiety about trying too hard, or indeed not trying hard enough. Everyone had been simply marvellous – except for Mrs Ryan next door, who had consistently let herself down by sticking her head over the back garden wall like a labourer’s wife each and every time her mother happened to go out to hang a few clothes on the washing line.

  Martha Shillman, on the other hand, never let herself down. Martha Shillman had outdone the lot from the start, calling in one evening when Elaine’s father was at an evening race meeting, with a bottle of wine in each hand. Coincidentally, it was the same night that Elaine’s fever had reached its crisis point.

  How her mother would have survived that awful night – those touch-and-go hours, when she could have no idea if her only child would live or die and, if she did live, if she’d be a vegetable for the rest of her days – she would never know, were it not for Martha Shillman keeping her company as she’d sat, worried out of her mind, by the telephone.

  It’s her first evening home. Elaine lies on the sofa. Her mother blows grey chiffons of smoke into the sitting room and, giddy with hunger, vodka and too many fags, tells her all this.

  She is on her way up to bed when her father’s car pulls into the driveway, smearing the walls and floor of the hall with its grainy white light. Her mother is in the kitchen organising Elaine’s pills and filling water into a hospital-style carafe, bought specially for the occasion.

  The front door swings opens and there he is suddenly, a dark figure in a dark doorway.

  ‘Oh!’ he says when he sees her.

  He stares at her for a second, turns to close the door and comes back. ‘They discharged you, then. And when…?’r />
  ‘This afternoon.’

  ‘I see and how did…?’

  ‘Mrs Shillman.’

  ‘Ahh. And how are you feeling…? Shouldn’t you…?’

  ‘I’m just going up now.’

  She looks for his binoculars, his donkey-brown derby hat, the coat he usually wears to the races. But he carries only the tools of his trade: a stack of ribboned papers under his arm, wig dangling from the tip of his fingers, barrister’s cloth bag in the other hand. In fact, he looks as he always does when he arrives home after working on a late consultation or after spending the day in a courthouse on the country circuit.

  He takes a step forward. For a moment she thinks he might be going to embrace her. But then her mother comes bustling out of the kitchen and, placing one hand on Elaine’s back, turns her towards the stairs. Her father steps back.

  In the bedroom, her mother unpacks the bag she earlier packed, and tells her more of the neighbourhood gossip. A father and son have just moved into the house with no number on its door. The son long and streaky, the father’s face a sullen sight whenever it drives by. No sign of a mother.

  The Osborne house has been let at last, new people expected any day. That awful Gerry Caudwell got drunk and vomited into the Slaters’ hedge and his father just been given another promotion in the police force – pity he couldn’t police his own children while he was at it. June Caudwell just dropped out of her secretarial course and gone off to work as an au pair – in Brussels of all places! You wouldn’t mind so much if it was Paris. Oh and Agatha’s mother has bagged a part in a London play – there was a very good piece in the paper about her. The photo didn’t do her any favours, though – made her look blurred instead of beautiful.

  Elaine takes a pill from her mother’s fingers and pushes it between her lips, then she sucks down on the side of the plastic tumbler her mother’s hand is holding to her mouth. She gets under the covers. Her eyeballs feel swollen; her lids thick and dry as blotting paper.

  Her mother potters about the room, putting things out on the dressing table and chipping at drawers, closing and opening the wardrobe door.

  There is a question Elaine would like to ask her. She tries to arrange the question in her mind, to get the words to line up and come out of her mouth, one by one and making sense.

  Her mother says, ‘What dear? You’re mumbling now. I can’t understand what you’re saying. I didn’t tell what—? I didn’t tell who?’

  Elaine closes her eyes and sees her father’s tired face suspended in the doorway of the hall. She sees him as one of those Roman masks the Hanleys have attached to their back wall. A mask cast in grey plaster – the shape of an ‘oh’ on its lips. Her mother comes over to the bed and tucks her in. The covers feel too tight around her, the bed too close to the wall.

  The doorbell rings at intervals and all afternoon women pass through the house: footsteps from the hall to the kitchen, footsteps on the stairs. A face looms around her bedroom door, says a few words – always the same kind of words – then slips out of sight again. Footsteps tipping back down the stairs before disappearing into the warm scent of buns and the ticking of teacups. From the kitchen, her mother’s over-excited voice flutes through the ceiling.

  At some point the telephone rings. She is falling asleep when this happens, her thoughts beginning to warp. She doesn’t hear her mother answer the phone or know how long has passed before her voice is calling up the stairs saying something about Mrs Hanley. Elaine shakes herself awake. Is Mrs Hanley on her way up the stairs? Is that what her mother has just said?

  Mrs Hanley is not beautiful like her actress sister and not pretty like her niece Agatha. She is too wide at the forehead and her mouth is too small. Her eyes are dark and stare hard at you when she talks to you and even harder when you speak back. She came to see Elaine in hospital once; it was in the early days when she had just begun her recovery. She brought her grapes and a brand new book – a special gift, she called it. ‘It’s about obsession, madness, love – all that jazz,’ she said with a small, mysterious smile.

  Mrs Hanley went out to the sink on the corridor and washed the grapes herself. Then she came back in with a small plate she had sent the cranky tea-lady to fetch. As she patted the grapes dry with a tissue and laid them gently on the plate, she told Elaine she was glad that Agatha had her as a friend. ‘You’re very kind,’ she said, ‘you and Rachel both.’

  Elaine had wanted to say their friendship with Agatha had nothing to do with kindness, that they liked, no loved, Agatha as much as they liked or loved each other. But she has always found it hard to say anything to Mrs Hanley without feeling stupid.

  That was when Mrs Hanley took the book out of her handbag. ‘It’s about how our past turns us into the people we become,’ she said. ‘It’s about someone you already know from another book – I won’t say who it is, but do let me know when you guess.’

  Elaine hadn’t particularly liked the sound of the book and had put it to the end of the queue and then forgotten all about it. She wonders how far down the box it is now and worries in case Mrs Hanley has come to discuss it.

  But when the door opens, it’s her mother standing there, leaning in, breathless and maybe annoyed at having to leave all her new laughing friends in the kitchen.

  ‘That was… that was… Mrs… Mrs Hanley on the phone. Look out the… You’re to look out. The window. Honestly!’

  ‘Why?’ Elaine asks, but her mother just makes a few impatient points at the window.

  Elaine gets out of bed. When she goes to the window she sees Agatha standing at the Hanleys’ front step, already waving.

  ‘Agatha!’

  ‘Oh that’s right, yes, she’s here for the summer.’

  ‘How long has she been here?’

  ‘I don’t know. A few weeks maybe. But now, you can’t see her yet. No visitors for at least a fortnight – remember?’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘No, you did not!’

  ‘I was sure… Did I not?’

  ‘You never tell me anything!’

  ‘What are you talking about? I’m always telling you things.’

  ‘You never tell me anything I want to know!’

  Agatha is wearing a new yellow dress and, beneath her sunglasses, there is her smile. She is holding a large sign to her chest: ‘Welcome Home Elaine!!!’

  Mrs Hanley stands beside her. If Mrs Hanley wasn’t there, Elaine would open the window and hang out of it to call across the road to her friend. She would do it even if her mother said, ‘For God’s sake, you’re like someone out of a tenement in Naples!’

  She can feel Mrs Hanley’s eyes on her. Elaine lifts her hand, shyly waves. Then waves again. The sign slips in Agatha’s hand and Mrs Hanley straightens it. Mrs Hanley leans into Agatha and says something. Agatha gives one more wave then begins to turn away.

  Elaine stays at the window until she sees the Hanleys’ front door close and the shadows pass over the glass of the porch.

  There was a sea in the title, she remembers now. A wide sea or a wild sea, she can’t remember which.

  For days she remains on hospital time; waking not long after dawn, reaching for the rubber ball on her bedside table, squeezing it.

  Until her father’s slow step begins through the house and the world beneath her window hatches out of the suburban silence.

  Each day is just like the last one.

  The men leave around the same time each morning, except for Mr Jackson, who is usually first out of the traps, and Mr Donegan, who plays in the orchestra and goes out as everyone else is coming back in. Front doors snap and car doors gnash and from the house next door she hears Jilly Ryan imitate each engine in long, throaty arcs.

  Men, mostly in suits, some with briefcases bricked by their side. Mr Hanley in sports jacket and mouse-coloured trousers. A scarf thing – a cravat – noosing his neck. ‘Because he’s an architect,’ her mother once told her when she was around
eight and going through a stage of asking questions about Ted Hanley.

  If two men appear at the same time, a few words may drift across a wall or over the road – rumours of a heatwave; something vaguely sporty; the gist of a radio news story half-heard while shaving. Abstract things that go on somewhere behind these houses, beyond these rooftops. Way out there, anyhow, in the big, broad world where the men live the hours of their day.

  The men call each other by first name. Or even the short form of first name: Bill, Jeff, Terry. Lar. Bob. Bob – her father.

  Doctor Townsend, they usually call ‘the Doc’, although her father, Shillman and Hanley – the only other ‘genuine’ professionals (as her mother would have it) – refer to him as Gordon.

  She hears everything from this front upstairs bedroom: every hall-door slam, every echo of a slam. Every gate, every footfall, every word that drifts under her window. She hears the forced jaunty notes in the early morning mouths of the men.

  *

  Once the men are out of the way, the next rank can start coming through: secondary school girls with freshly brushed hair and pleated skirts to the knee. The shuffly steps of spotty Karl Donegan, schoolbag squeezed hard to his chest. From the Townsend house, beautiful Paul comes through the side entrance and carefully closes the tall gate behind him. And from the house with no number on its door, the new boy, the boy with the tired eyes cuts over the garden and vaults the wall like a colt, taking with him her heart squeezed in his fist.

  And now the small children. They come wriggling out of their houses, flat footsteps stomping down driveways, schoolbags banging off backs. Little birdie voices joining other birdie voices and disappearing in a swarm towards the village school. Byyyyeeee. Byyyyeee. A wave to a mother shadowed in a doorway, like someone ashamed.