In White Ink

by Elske Rahill

  He was much older than her. Until recently, her mother had explained, he had been dedicated to a woman who suddenly married someone else. He had no children. She had hoped to marry a solicitor – that had been her mother’s secret ambition for her – but she knew she had to be practical, and, according to the nice suit he was wearing, and her father’s familiar attitude with him, he was good at what he did. She liked his clean, oval nails and the gentle way he passed the salad bowl that first evening when he came to her parents’ house for dinner. By the time the leg of lamb came out she had made up her mind. She smiled at him softly over the pavlova roulade, and said that she never drank anyway, so she could drive him home. A year later he took her to dinner one Friday evening and asked the waiter for his best champagne, before proposing calmly.

  After eighteen months of planning, the wedding day went off without a hitch.

  She had never quite given up her romantic notions, though. Sometimes, if she was very early collecting the girls from school, she would read novels about true and forbidden love in the car before going to wait in the clós. They were about affairs between rich ladies and workmen, or romances set in Victorian times. Sometimes she read racier ones too. And sometimes, but not often, when the girls were at school and the au pair was out, she climbed into bed with a small wooden box of real Turkish Delight – translucent, sugar-dusted little cubes of emerald green and red, which she popped into her mouth whole – and watched a DVD with Colin Firth in it. But she made sure to be a good wife. She always had his coffee on when he woke, she prepared a wonderful meal every evening, and she continued to have her hair done and look after her skin. She understood that the little things mattered. When Graham had a work do, Kathleen was always the most attractive and well-dressed wife in the room, and she knew Graham appreciated it by the way he introduced her as ‘my lovely wife – yes, I know, she’s a little out of my league!’ She could engage in conversation with his female colleagues too. ‘I was a career woman myself,’ she would laugh, ‘...in a previous life!’

  Kathleen once found a brown envelope on a shelf in Graham’s office, in amongst his books. It contained cards and letters and odd little keepsakes; a paper hat from a Christmas cracker, train tickets, a piece of ribbon. There were photos in there too, of the woman he had loved, whom he never spoke about. It comforted her to see that even back then the woman was far looser around the middle than Kathleen was now, and it looked as though she had bad skin. Nonetheless, there was one photo where Graham was smiling at the woman in a way Kathleen had never seen him smile.

  She had made the right decision, though, marrying Graham. Her first impression had been spot on – he was a decent man through and through. It took them seven years to conceive. They had all the tests but still the doctor couldn’t tell them why it didn’t happen. Kathleen kept it to herself. She knew people would suspect – she suspected it herself – that it was her coldness that was to blame. She hadn’t the warmth, perhaps, the passion to make anything grow in her. Graham kept it all very quiet just as she asked. She knew that some men shied away from all the investigations, but not Graham. He attended all the tests and meetings and funded every treatment without question. He was a good husband and a good father. And he had his head screwed on. He researched the property market and didn’t take big risks – they hadn’t been hit as badly as some by the recession – and he looked after his daughters, saved for them, planned ahead. When Cliona was born, it was he who had suggested the au pair to help Kathleen with the housework, and she had to admit she enjoyed how the other women envied her when she mentioned their holidays in Portugal and the South of France. Not package holidays either. ‘My Graham,’ she would say, worrying sometimes, even as she spoke, that the girls would find the familiarity of her tone incongruous with the grim-faced man they had met, who, even after twelve years, still nodded at Kathleen politely, and looked through her like a stranger when she told him things about her day, ‘my Graham insists on doing it right. A villa in the South of France, he says, or nothing at all. And I have to confess... it is just gorgeous!’

  Kathleen had said to Graham before, though, that they would encounter problems if they sent the girls to a non-fee-paying school, but he wouldn’t listen. He was all about saving their trusts for college and sending them to the coláistí. The Irish second levels got the best leaving results, he said, and there was no point even putting the girls’ names down, unless they sent them to one of the feeder Gaelscoils. No point at all.

  And for a while, it had seemed as though they’d made the right choice. Kathleen had put her best foot forward – if you’re going to do it, do it right... She had organized parents’ mornings. She had helped out at the fundraisers. She was on the parent-and-teachers’ board. Her eldest, Roisín, won the school Irish dancing competition two years running, and pretty little Cliona was invited to all the boys’ birthday parties. It was Kathleen who always organized the gift for the teacher at Christmas and the end of the year, tactfully requesting only five euros per person – the rest she would chip in herself, and, of course, the teachers knew it. But there it was again – the same old problem. For even though the school professed to be Catholic (and they didn’t all profess such a thing nowadays) and was situated in a good part of Dublin, there were children from broken homes in Cliona’s class, there were families on social welfare, and even a little boy with long hair who belonged to a single mother. People like that couldn’t be asked to chip in more than five euros. So it was Kathleen who took the hit.

  The single mother bothered Kathleen somewhat. It was her brazenness. She skidded about smugly in a battered little Fiat as though it were a Rolls, and stood in clós waiting for her malnourished-looking kid. She would lean casual-as-you-like against the wall, smiling away in her skin-tight miniskirts and knee-high boots without a care in the world. The way she kissed her child as well, and tousled his hair, all sweetness and joy – you’d swear she was the world’s best mum. That’s if you didn’t know that the poor kid had never met his father! Some of the mums said it was a married man who had fathered the child, and that was why he wasn’t on the scene. People talked. The kid was bound to hear it someday, and what kind of life was that for a child?

  As Graham had quite rightly pointed out, though, there were no non-nationals at Gaelscoil. At least there was that. It wasn’t a question of racism. Kathleen simply didn’t want her child held back because Bubba Mac Zuzu at the Educate Together couldn’t understand a word of English. That was fair enough, Kathleen thought, and the other mums all agreed.

  In a way, it was because of the single mother and the broken homes that the whole idea had taken off in the first place. Kathleen had been in to talk to the múinteoir about it. She wasn’t hugely religious herself, she said, but she went to mass, and, well, it was worrying, the things that Cliona was coming out with. Cliona said the long-haired kid had run crying to the teacher when Cliona told him that ladies couldn’t have babies until they got married and prayed for one. ‘That’s not true,’ he had said, ‘my mam isn’t married and she has me.’ Mam. Apparently, whichever múinteoir was on clós duty had said sometimes that was true and all families were different and some Educate Together, hippy-dippy, happy-clappy nonsense like that. Now, these múinteoirs were supposed to be in charge of the children’s moral education as well. Cliona would be doing her communion next year, and that everything-goes attitude was totally outside the school ethos, as far as Kathleen was concerned.

  Ger agreed. She said she would raise the issue at the next committee meeting. But when the day came, and Ger asked Kathleen to outline her concerns, some of the mums looked at each other under bowed heads, chewing their lips. Ger assured her she was taking the issue seriously, but her cheeks raged puce and she kept flitting off the subject all the same.

  ‘Show me your friends and I’ll show you who you are,’ her granny Kath used to say, and sometimes Kathleen thought of this when she met with the girls. It was her duty as a mother, of course, to put in the effo
rt, but sometimes she wondered if she should really be keeping company with messy women like Ger; disorganized women who dubbed themselves easy-going, who laughed with their heads thrown back and made jokes about their weight. Kathleen smiled politely at Ger’s jokes – what else could she do? – but if she looked like Ger she wouldn’t be laughing about it. Ger sometimes broke wind at coffee with the girls, and then chuckled. She made Kathleen feel prissy and pernickety. And anyway it was all a façade – the easy-going thing. Ger had gone to a lot of trouble to have a new dress made up.

  Well that’s how it started, really – Ger and her wedding dress.

  During coffee with the girls, Ger had taken a laminated wedding picture from her handbag and sighed before handing it around. ‘Look what I found in the bits and bobs drawer! I’d never fit into that dress now – would I girls?’ The bride in the photo was slender with pink cheeks. A lipstick smile neither happy nor sad but pretty with a kind of bravery. And it made an ache in Kathleen’s chest to recognize – in the little creases around the eyes, in the dimples, in the small hands – big, dough-faced Ger. It made Kathleen’s stomach tighten so that she couldn’t finish her latte. That afternoon she had screamed like a ban sí because the kids were laughing too loudly in the back of the car. She had noticed, in her rear-view mirror, that the blue lines under her eyes were worse than ever. When she got home she pressed seventy euros into Marillia’s hand and asked her to take the kids to Wagamama and Leisureplex, even though it was a school night. Then she had climbed under the duvet with a few little pieces of rose-flavoured Turkish Delight and watched the whole of Pride and Prejudice on the new wall-mounted flat-screen.

  That night, while everyone slept, Kathleen lay looking at her husband’s back. His skin was very white and there were a few sparse black hairs between his shoulder blades. He hadn’t showered before bed, and his skin gave off a sour, oily smell. At 2 a.m. she crept down to the hallway and poured a glass of Chianti. She sat on the cold polished-oak floor with the glass and gazed at her own wedding snap, tastefully framed and presented on the hall table for all to see. She thought of poor fat Ger with the beautiful Thai au pair.

  ‘Did she not have a photo with her CV?’ Ruth had asked.

  ‘I would worry,’ Kathleen had said, ‘about an au pair like that... Does she go about in her nightie?’

  ‘Ha!’ Ger had said, picking up a mini croissant and pushing it through her pillar-box lips – and she a diabetic – ‘I wish she would! One less job for me to worry about!’

  It was that kind of attitude, of course, that led to messy houses, poorly adjusted children, wandering husbands, but, thought Kathleen, but... That young, slim Ger in the photo, with the excitement in her cheeks, with her uncertain lips turned up very slightly at the edges, with the tense dimples and the disappointment already creeping into the corners of her eyes – hadn’t she been a good girl, trying her best? Weren’t they – all of them on the GCN Parents’ Committee – good women, good mothers trying their best? Staying married, staying faithful, staying respectable? What gave her the right – the young single mum – ‘she’s a researcher,’ Ruth had said as though she knew what that even meant – what gave her the right to swanny about in a rickety tin can and no trousers on, call her bastard Blaise, of all things, Blaise – to swanny about like Lady Muck as though she had no shame in the world with her wild black hair and her pert little ass?

  Kathleen had spoken to Cliona. She had explained that some people weren’t taught right from wrong by their mummies and that those people should be avoided. The child agreed that the kid would not be invited to her magical genie and bouncy castle party in June.

  What thanks did they get, people like Kathleen and Ger, for doing the right thing? Why did they deserve to feel unattractive and useless and petty? If it weren’t for people like them there would be no parents’ committee, no present for the teacher at Christmas.

  In her wedding snap Kathleen sat with Graham in the vintage car and they each held a champagne flute. That car had cost a fortune, but Kathleen’s mother had said you only get married once, and it should be the best day of your life, and her father had said he would spare no expense for his only daughter’s wedding. She had blonde ringlets and she wore a tasteful half veil. Her smile was proud, as though she was receiving a prize. Kathleen tried to remember how she had felt when the picture was taken, but she couldn’t even remember the photographer. She remembered the wedding night, when they retired to the penthouse suite. Neither of them was too drunk. She had been glad of that. She had searched Graham’s eyes while she undressed and when he mounted her she had smiled and thought, I am as beautiful now as I will ever be. She had smiled and searched his eyes and said, ‘I love you,’ with all the passion she had imagined she would one day feel for her true love. She remembered feeling a fool, because Graham’s eyes were the same after the wedding as before – of course they were – flat and mild and giving nothing away, looking at her bottom and breasts like a spectator, and her voice sounded ridiculous when she said it, ‘I love you,’ shaking her head slightly, with too much emphasis on the word ‘love’, like an old-fashioned actor, and she had felt, just for a moment, that it was not she who had craftily orchestrated her destiny, but someone else. She had felt, just for a flash, when Graham’s eyes shifted away from hers, when she said it again, ‘I love you,’ that she had been duped, that she had been made a fool of.

  *

  Ger went for the idea immediately. The others giggled but they wanted to do it as much as Kathleen and Ger. ‘Just for the laugh,’ Ger had said, and the others had blushed and nodded, ‘just for the craic...’ That was one thing Ger was good for – getting people on board. She made them embarrassed to say no. Ger talked a lot, but it was Kathleen who had spoken to the priest and arranged to borrow the red carpet from the Chapel. Ger had a new wedding dress made, and so did Becky – exactly the same as the originals, but much bigger. ‘If we’re going to do it,’ said Kathleen, ‘let’s do it right!’ But Kathleen didn’t even need to alter her dress. Her body slid easily into the cool satin bodice. The limousine idea was hers. She suggested a stretch limo to bring each of the Brides Again to her house for the evening. Every girl must have their own limo ride. Every girl must feel special. But then there were complaints about the cost. There was a recession on, they all said. Ger had already spent a fortune having her dress remade. Then there was the alcohol, the food, the babysitters...

  Kathleen’s girls headed away that afternoon with the au pair to Trabolgan for the weekend, and Graham would be getting in late after a business trip. The trip had been planned for six weeks. He had bought a new suit for it, and a new razor, and it was going to involve four days away. He couldn’t tell her what time his flight was coming in at – it was all organized by the business – but he probably wouldn’t be there until after everyone had left. It was a women-only event. She suggested the mummies had their husbands look after the kids – ‘Don’t we deserve one night, girls?’ She had a great solution too, to the cost of the food. Each of the girls would bring the first dish they had made as a married woman. There were nine of them coming – Kathleen would make the canapés, Ger the entrées, there were two women on starters, three on main courses (one carnivore, one veggie, one gluten-free) and two on desserts. Then the only things they needed to chip in for were the champagne and the limousine. There had been no charge for borrowing the red carpet. ‘It’s a good cause,’ the priest had said.

  But there was coughing and muttering about the limousines. It was the usual suspects – Ruth, and the other one with grey streaks in her hair who never wore make-up – Gráinne. They said they’d pass on the limo.

  ‘I think you might be going a bit far now...’ said Ger.

  ‘Come on girls,’ Kathleen said. ‘If we’re going to do it let’s do it right!’

  Kathleen suggested hiring only three cars. Each car could make three trips and the cost could be split... Then Ger had to push it. It was too expensive. It was a silly expense. O
ut of pure desperation, Kathleen had suggested just one, it was much cheaper if they just hired one for the evening to pick them all up. The two stick-in-the-muds grumbled their consent.

  ‘But each bride rides alone in the limo with a glass of pink champagne,’ said Kathleen. ‘The driver picks one up, and drops her, then goes to get the next one... We can start the canapés while we wait.’

  Ger said she’d collect everyone’s contribution and they would balance it all out at the end.

  By the time the evening came it seemed as though it was all going to tick along nicely. Marillia’s friend, another Spanish au pair, came to help for the evening. She did a great job cleaning the house, and decorating it with silver ribbons and white balloons. She spread the red carpet all the way down the hall and out into the bark-mulch driveway. It seemed as though the limousine plan would be fine. Kathleen had asked all the girls to text their addresses a week before so that she could give them to the driver. Then she had called the limousine firm. She had organized a pink stretch limo. It was a little more expensive than the girls had agreed, but Kathleen would make up the difference herself. It was worth it.

  While she waited, Kathleen walked about the house in her dress and make-up. She found herself wandering into the hall over and over, and gazing at her wedding picture. All day she had been thinking of something silly that upset her last year. It was the kind of one-off glitch that all marriages have; the kind of thing she knew she shouldn’t dwell on, but she couldn’t stop her mind from returning to it, over and over.

  It was that time at the theatre. Graham was quieter than usual at the interval, staring into his glass after he had emptied it, tilting it about so that the ice swirled and clinked in the dregs. When she went to the ladies she understood. Standing in front of her was the lady from the photographs. She had, as Kathleen had rightly noted, a thick waist and pink spots under her skin, especially on her chin. She had felt Kathleen looking and she turned and smiled. She had something that Kathleen couldn’t put her finger on; some glint, and from her smile Kathleen knew that this was the sort of unbeautiful woman a man could fall in love with.