The Lives of Women

by Christine Dwyer Hickey

  It would take me an hour to clean up. But the bit is between my teeth now and I don’t have an hour to spare. I have to drive into town today. I need to drive into town today.

  Mrs Larkin can clean it up – that is, if Mrs Larkin is in today. I can never be certain because she tends to do things in her own Mrs Larkin way.

  For the first few weeks, she came in the mornings. Then one Friday morning, she just didn’t show.

  On Friday afternoon, the doorbell rang.

  I said, ‘I thought you came in the mornings?’

  ‘It depends,’ she said, taking off her coat and carefully arranging it on the hanger. ‘I explained to your father – he knows.’

  I’m not all that sweet on Mrs Larkin. I just don’t like her being in this house, the fact that she knows it better than I do and appears to be so at home here. I don’t like the way she wears her good coat to work and hangs it so carefully on a hanger, nor the way she changes her high heels for a pair of slippers that she keeps on a shelf under the stairs, along with her perfectly laundered aprons. I don’t like her carefully made-up face, nor her discreet shade of lipstick; the way she keeps opening her mouth as if she’s about to say something and then appears to change her mind before abruptly moving off. And I don’t like the fact that she now has her own front-door key.

  I come across her sometimes when she’s towing the hoover around the house and I know she’s looking at me from the side of her eyes.

  I don’t know anything about her – if she’s still married, or if she’s a widow, where she lives even. Sometimes she arrives on foot; sometimes she gets out of a fairly decent car. I don’t know why such a woman would work as a cleaner and maybe that’s what I don’t like most of all.

  I stand for a while and consider the kitchen, then decide to leave it. A few weeks ago, I wouldn’t have dreamed of leaving it in this state, but I’m done trying to impress Mrs Larkin.

  I write a note: Please leave cookery books etc. as they are. Am in middle of sorting them.

  I let the dog out, bring the phone into the sitting room and place it beside my father, then go upstairs and begin to get ready.

  Since my return, I’ve only ventured into town on a few occasions and that was by taxi. Sitting in the back seat, watching the suburbs give way to the city, it was like I was a kid again, going for my weekly hospital check-up. I kept expecting to see Mr Slater’s ghost flapping along in the distance.

  I never brought much back: a few bits of cheese, a bottle of wine, a few softback books. Sometimes I just wandered around. I could just as easily have gone by bus. But to stand at the bus stop in full view of the traffic – neighbours driving by (Is that…? Surely it’s not? My God, it is! What does she want here? What does she want…?)

  I have taken his car to the supermarket a few times, always asking for permission first – as if there’s the remotest chance he’ll be using it himself. He won’t be driving again, nor will he ever sell his car. To sell it would be to admit defeat. And so the car will remain on the driveway until he dies, or even beyond then.

  The first time I took it out, it had been sitting on the drive for such a long time. The windows were filthy, the body work coated in dust, the doors reluctant to budge. The seat groaned when I sat into it. A cobweb was laced across the rear-view mirror. An old car, a car that had been left to rot in all weathers, a car that had been all but forgotten. And yet, at the first turn of the key, it sparked up.

  I’m looking forward to driving it into town, to sitting in the traffic listening to the radio like anyone else. To twisting it up through the corkscrew ramps of the car park, all the way to the highest floor where I can look over the city, try to find my place within it. Then coming out and walking around in broad daylight.

  Away from this neighbourhood, I could be anyone.

  Somebody’s wife. Somebody’s mother. I could linger on the upper floors of a department store, I could be any other middle-aged woman, looking at all those clothes that I can afford at last, but no longer really want.

  I could have coffee somewhere, maybe fall into a conversation. My son, you see… My daughter always says… My husband, you know. My mother.

  I could be part of one of those conversations that I have so often overheard. Later I would look for that delicatessen. That hidden church. The fishmonger’s. Buy turbot. Foie gras. Mustard seeds.

  On the way into town, I get caught in a traffic jam and for some reason start thinking about Paris. Or the last time I saw my mother anyway, which was in Paris, where we stood late at night, watching the boats pass under the Pont Neuf arches. It could be one of those songs, something crooned out over a lounge piano or wrung out of an old man’s accordion. I sing it into the car: The last time I saw her was Paris… but it sounds neither funny nor ironic and so I stop.

  The two of us standing there, leaning over and looking down on the river; boats sliding beneath us. The piped music. Lights on water, lights on boats, the flashing lights of cameras, the happy waving hands of Japanese girls. And our silence.

  A week before I was due to receive my final diploma – le grand – Serena phoned me.

  ‘Your mom wants to see you. She wants to come to Paris.’

  ‘Here? She wants to come here! To see me here? Why though? Why?’ My voice panicked and getting ready for tears.

  ‘I don’t know, she just called.’

  ‘Maybe she wants to be here when I get my diploma? Would that be it? Would it? Serena – did she say?’

  ‘She didn’t. Well, you know how she is when she calls? On and then off again.’

  ‘Does she… does she want me to go back – do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know, sweetie, I don’t.’

  ‘Oh. Oh God. What’ll I do? Do I have to?’

  ‘No, of course you don’t have to.’

  ‘Do you think I should?’

  ‘I can’t answer that question.’

  ‘Well, your opinion then – at least give me that?’

  ‘You’re twenty-two years old, sweetheart. It’s your mother we’re talking about here. You’re going to have to do whatever it is your heart tells you to do.’

  ‘Oh, Serena,’ I said, ‘I don’t even know what that means.’

  I told my room mate, a beautiful and enthusiastic Dutch girl called Mina, whose robust good humour often wore me out. ‘That’s wonderful!’ she cried. ‘I’m so happy for you. You must cook for her. Then show her all the sights. She will come to the ceremony! I will take photographs of you! We can put the best one in a frame. Later you will go to dinner. You must feel wonderful, after all!’

  ‘Yes. Wonderful.’

  ‘How long has it been?’

  ‘Oh, about five months,’ I lied.

  For once Mina looked sad. ‘A long time so.’

  ‘Yes, a long time,’ I agreed, half-wishing that I’d told her the truth was more like five years – just to see her reaction.

  Serena was to call me back at the end of the week; I would let her know my decision; then she would call my mother and in turn let her know if I wanted to see her. But of course, my mother got there first.

  A few days later, there was a note in my post box written on hotel notepaper.

  E – I’m staying in the Hotel du Louvre, if you’d like to meet there the day after tomorrow at 6.30. If that doesn’t suit you can phone me at the hotel. Leave a message if I’m not in – S.

  I called Serena.

  ‘It’s like one of those fucking notes she used to leave on the kitchen table,’ I whined. ‘After five years, this is what I get. And I still don’t know what to do.’

  ‘If you don’t go, you could regret it. But on the other hand…’

  ‘Serena, that is no help to me. No help at all.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry. I truly am. But if you do decide to go—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Be careful.’

  ‘What do you mean be careful?’ I asked her.

  ‘Just be careful
. Protect yourself. Before you leave your room, I want you to imagine yourself putting on your invisible armour.’

  ‘Jesus, Serena!’

  ‘And remember I love you.’

  ‘Please, you know how I hate you saying that.’

  ‘I know, sweetie, I know. But I do.’

  I had one sleepless night: I would go. I wouldn’t go. But then, why wouldn’t I go? No big deal. And just why the fuck should I go anyway? Of course, I would go, even if it was just to let her know exactly what I thought of her. Go? How could she even have the nerve to ask? I certainly would not!

  And even if I could bring myself to go, how could I face her after the terrible thing I had done?

  The night was halfway through when I realised I was simply terrified of my mother. Terrified, as if she was going to take out a big stick and beat me. Terrified that I would start crying and disgrace myself. That it would turn into one of those early phone calls, with me pleading to go home and her coldly telling me to pull myself together.

  An hour before I was due to get up, I finally fell asleep. I had a dream we were in a big bed together, the bed in the middle of the lobby of her hotel. She kept squeezing my face and trying to make me eat sweets. I’m not opening my mouth, I kept saying, and she answered, Yes you are, otherwise, how would we all be able to hear you? Everyone in the lobby looking at us. Patty’s father waddling across the floor. ‘For Chrissake, give your mother a kiss…’

  I woke up crying and when I eventually managed to get out of the bed, I don’t know what got into me, but everything had somehow changed. I had erased the past five years from my mind. And here I was now, making plans for our few days together. We could do the whole tourist thing – if that’s what she wanted. We could retrace her steps from that holiday she had before she was married, when she’d bought her le chat qui fume ashtray. We could walk from her hotel to Notre Dame – she would want to go to Notre Dame, I was certain. We would stroll down the leafy quayside – stop to look at the books in the stalls. ‘They are called bouquinistes,’ I would tell her, ‘here since the sixteenth century. The only city in the world that has bookshelves for river walls,’ I would jauntily add.

  She would tell me a little about that holiday she had when she was maybe my age – what she had seen, and what had changed, who she was with. I would take her to dinner every night, small, discreet little bistros, where we would be the only ones speaking English. I would show off my French, my knowledge of food. She would be impressed, proud even. At college I asked my tutors for advice and even made a list of suitable bistros. Beyond all that, I could see nothing.

  In the lobby of the Hotel du Louvre, there were other women sitting alone, on sofas and soft chairs, women waiting on taxis, women waiting on men. There were other women smoking. In fact, there were two or three other women who fitted more with the image in my memory. She had shrunk to about half her former size. She wore trousers – I had never seen her in trousers before – and heels. Her hair was a different colour. She looked nothing like the woman I remembered, and yet I would have known her anywhere.

  From across the lobby she had seemed so much younger. Up close – when I finally brought myself to look at her – her face, without its plumpness, was wrinkled, her neck had begun to yield.

  We didn’t embrace. She waited for me to come right over and stand before her, and then she half-stood as if she’d only that second seen me. But she must have seen me – I was the only one of my age in the lobby. We barely looked at each other. This awkwardness will pass, I told myself, we’ll settle down, everything will become normal. She had been shopping: carrier bags at her feet from department stores on Boulevard Haussman; a large stiff bag at her back bearing the Lafayette logo. ‘Oh, just a little gift to myself,’ she said and patted it, but made no attempt to explain or show me this little gift. I asked her if she’d like a drink before dinner.

  ‘Oh, I don’t drink any more,’ she said.

  I ordered tea and we talked about Paris. She asked me which area I lived in and if I was enjoying the ‘cookery course’. She said she’d been to the Louvre that morning but had been a little disappointed in the Mona Lisa. ‘The size of it, for one thing,’ she said. ‘And sly looking, I thought. Not beautiful at all.’

  It was a conversation between strangers. No, it was less than that – strangers will offer a little glimpse to one another: something from their past, the name of a family member, a neighbour. There was none of that. She did ask after Patty once and I told her Patty had moved to California four years ago, as soon as she’d graduated from secretarial college.

  ‘Oh yes, of course, I knew that.’

  And I did ask after my father, once.

  ‘Oh, busy as ever, you know. Busy.’

  I longed to ask her about so much else: the Hanleys, the Townsends, the Shillmans, the Caudwells. I longed to know what had happened to Karl and Paul. Mr Slater even. Anyone at all. But I knew better. Instead I told her about the bistro that had been recommended to me.

  ‘Far?’ she said in a dreamy way and it occurred to me that she may have been on tranquillisers.

  ‘About a twenty-minute walk, but a nice walk, along the river where the bookstalls are, we could—’

  ‘Well, I’d better change my shoes so.’

  She didn’t invite me up to her room, just gathered her bags and said, ‘I won’t be long.’

  As I waited, I thought about an evening a long time ago when I was a child, shortly after Brenda Caudwell had broken the news and sent it flying through the school that, at nine years of age, Elaine Nichols slept in the same bed as her mother, while her father slept in another room on the opposite side of the house. I had been simmering about it for days and then one evening had marched into the sitting room and made the announcement that, in future, I wanted to sleep on my own.

  ‘Your own bed do you mean?’

  ‘My own room.’

  ‘Oh, now, don’t be silly.’

  ‘I’m not being silly. I want my own room. We have enough of them. And if you won’t let me, then I’ll just have to ask Daddy about it, that’s all.’

  Abruptly she had turned away from me and said, ‘Shhhhh. I’m watching this.’

  And for the next few minutes, she pretended to be engrossed in a television programme. I stayed standing right by her armchair and waited until she spoke again.

  ‘Well now – where were we? Oh yes. You can certainly have your own room. Of course you can have your own room. That’s no problem at all. If you’re sure you won’t be frightened of monsters and murderers and ghosts and witches and all the other scary things that come in the night.’

  ‘I won’t be frightened.’

  ‘Are you certain about that now? Because once we make the move, there is no going back.’

  She looked at me carefully and I carefully looked back.

  ‘I want. My. Own. Room,’ I growled.

  She slept on the sofa for a couple of nights then quietly moved into the spare room at the back of the house. Gradually she began to speak to me again. My clothes were washed and ironed, my room made spotlessly clean. My meals were always on the table. Snacks continued to be offered in between. But it would never be the same between us.

  The first day I started school, my mother had taken me there by the hand. By the time I was nine, nothing had changed: every morning, I walked tall in the midst of the herd of mothers and infants and occasional senior infants, while children my own age ran loose around us or maybe held the hand of younger siblings they themselves had been entrusted to take to school. And at the end of each day, when I came through the gate, I would find my mother standing under the trees across the road.

  But after she moved into her own room, I would go to school on my own, and the space that she had for so long made her own, across the road under the trees, would remain obstinately vacant.

  12

  Summer Past

  August

  THE FIRST TIME ELAINE gets drunk, she gets sick all over Karl Do
negan. She remembers:

  Sitting by the river on a midsummer’s evening. Patty showing Jonathan how to roll a joint. Rachel and Paul arguing over who owns which bottles and how many should be left in the haversack. Brenda Caudwell standing with her face scrunched up, angrily squirting a can of fly spray at the midges. A voice saying, ‘I can’t believe you actually brought a can of fly spray down here…’

  Karl lying on his stomach, arms stretched into the river, holding a big brown bottle in each hand into the water to cool them down. His T-shirt slipped up his back. Somebody saying: ‘What’s that bruise on your side?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Karl says quickly, pulling the bottles back out of the water.

  Elaine cranes to see it. ‘It looks like a map of Australia,’ she says and then vomits on top of it.

  The vomit stinks of rotten apples; a sour fizzy liquid pours into her nostrils and down the back of her throat; she feels she might be drowning in it.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, oh.’ She can hear her own voice some way behind her, gulping out the apology.

  Karl taking off his T-shirt. His back embroidered with acne, some of it already melted into his skin. He wipes her mouth with the clean side of the T-shirt then leans into the river and swishes it around. He pulls out the T-shirt and bangs it off the stones,

  ‘This is the way they wash clothes in India,’ he says.

  Jonathan nodding as if he’s agreeing with everyone, even when no one is saying anything. Then he takes the joint off Patty and sucks on it.

  ‘That’s it,’ Patty says, ‘hold it in, hold it in. Now, you’ve got it. Now.’