Skin Deep

by Liz Nugent

  Mrs Russell then said, ‘We’re proud of both our boys, aren’t we?’

  A millionaire! Peter didn’t play it down either, like people normally did if they got a compliment. He corrected his father to say that he and his friend Daniel were actually setting up a company of their own. You could tell that Mr Russell was prouder of Peter than poor Harry.

  ‘Ah yes,’ I said, ‘but Harry’s going to play for Mayo.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Russell, and I could feel Harry squeeze my knee under the table. I stole a glance at Peter, who was not directly in my eyeline, and was a little startled to find that he was staring directly at me. He looked away quickly and we avoided looking at each other for the rest of the meal, but it had made me a bit uneasy, as if he had been passing judgement on me, and found me wanting. There was tension in the room. I wasn’t sure if it was the rivalry between the brothers or their parents, but I liked it.

  As we started our dessert, Mrs Russell asked me if I’d like some chambermaid work in Carrowbeg Manor on weekends.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ I said, ‘but, well, I’ve got my Leaving Cert exams coming up in June. Maybe in the summer?’

  Mr Russell spoke up, relieved, I think. ‘Now, aren’t you the smart girl, putting your studies first?’

  Peter nodded and I felt it was good to have his approval.

  ‘What are you going to do in college?’ he said, the first words he spoke directly to me.

  Harry began to speak for me: ‘Delia’s not going –’ but I interrupted him. It seemed terribly urgent to say it.

  ‘Medicine,’ I said. Medicine was what the two really smart girls in my class were hoping to study. That, or law.

  Aunt Moira’s cousin, Theresa, had a shoe shop in Ballina and she had agreed to take me on after the summer, if I passed my exams. And I thought that would suit me because Ballina was closer to the island. There were college types and non-college types in my class, and I was always assumed to be in the latter group. My grades were slightly above average but I had no lofty ambitions for a career. Not until now.

  Peter smiled with a hint of sarcasm. ‘Really?’ He didn’t believe me.

  Harry swivelled towards me. ‘Medicine? You never said that before, I thought you were …’ and I felt myself blush to my roots, and he saw and changed the subject quickly, but Peter continued to look at me; I could feel his gaze and his curiosity and felt a cold well in the pit of my stomach.

  To divert attention from me, Harry leaped up and played the piano. He was good at it. I watched his fingers fly across the keys. His father sang a Billy Joel song and his mother joined in, but Peter picked up a newspaper. He was too good for singing songs, it seemed. I could sing a little and had done so sometimes with Harry, but I was too embarrassed to sing in front of the family. Later, when I said goodnight to everyone, I held on to Peter’s handshake for a fraction longer than necessary, and tried to make him look at me. He did not appear to notice. Still, I had had a good night. I could sense friction.

  Afterwards, walking me home, Harry said, ‘You didn’t need to say that about medicine, you know, to impress my parents? They already know I’m not college fodder either. I think they like you anyway, even my mother!’

  ‘What do you mean? Of course I’m going to study medicine.’

  ‘What? But you never mentioned –’

  ‘I don’t have to tell you every single thing that goes on in my head, do I?’

  ‘No, but it’s a big deal, you’d have to go away …’

  I changed the subject.

  ‘Your brother is quiet, isn’t he?’

  ‘Oh yeah, Peter’s a snob. I’m jealous of his brains and he’s jealous of my girlfriend.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I saw him looking at you. He’s never had a girlfriend that I know of. Too busy gambling other people’s money or whatever he does in London. He’ll be back in the summer for two weeks to tell us what we’re all doing wrong in the hotel.’ I noted Harry’s resentment for the first time.

  ‘He seems … nice.’

  ‘Nice? It’s OK if you don’t like him. I don’t blame you. He’s very … I don’t know, superior?’

  Superior appealed to me. I knew Peter thought I was beneath him. I didn’t want him sneering at me.

  When I got home that evening, Uncle Alan and Aunt Moira were waiting anxiously.

  ‘How did it go, love?’

  ‘Were they nice to you?’

  ‘Did they turn their noses up at you?’

  ‘Oh, Alan, of course they didn’t! Why would they? Sit down and tell us all about it!’

  ‘Their house is much bigger than this. And they have a housekeeper. And we had proper silver knives and forks and crystal glasses.’

  Uncle Alan sighed deeply. ‘Don’t be getting notions,’ he said.

  But I was getting notions.

  7

  For the first time, I was thinking about my future. Did I want to go back to the island? The pull of home was strong. I hadn’t been in so many years. Every time I suggested it, Aunt Moira and Uncle Alan looked stricken, like I was betraying them. I had sent letters in the early days to the boys in my class on the island, but they never wrote back. If I went home, what would I do there? But did I want to work in a shoe shop in Ballina? What if I did do medicine? Why shouldn’t I? I remembered how proud Dr and Mrs Miller were of their daughter Clara, who was training to be a doctor. She’d probably be fully qualified by now. So there were already some women doctors. I thought I’d like to meet Clara sometime in the future and prove to her that I was just as good as her. I was taking all the right subjects for it anyway, just at the wrong level.

  I decided I was going to be a doctor. I borrowed the higher-level books I needed from the library. I was good at science. I began to take my Leaving Cert studies much more seriously and cancelled many outings with Harry in order to revise at weekends. I made a concerted effort to get rid of my island accent. I had to remove the turf from my mouth. A doctor would never speak like I did. Aunt Moira and Uncle Alan were amused by this. Aunt Moira commented that I should take more breaks and go out a bit more, that too much studying could be bad for me and that they would still love me no matter what my results were, but Uncle Alan said I was right to keep my head down and that it was nice to have a scholar in the house as he had never had much time for schooling. Uncle Alan had left school at age fourteen. I think he regretted it, and it was unsaid, though obvious, that he felt he had married above his station. Photographs of Aunt Moira’s merchant ancestors on the sideboard showed them dressed in some finery. Uncle Alan said his family could never have afforded a camera, though he had one photo of his father pushing a dustcart. Aunt Moira made sure that photo was displayed alongside her own family photos. She declared that her family loved Uncle Alan the moment they met him because they knew he’d be decent and kind to her. Uncle Alan always smiled wryly at this version and I got the impression that he may not have been as welcome as Aunt Moira liked to claim. It was Uncle Alan who had determined that I should stay on at school until the Leaving Cert, when a lot of girls left at age fifteen.

  In February, I told him I wanted to go to college, and he was thrilled about that but the deadline for applications had just passed. I was told it was too late. I took to my room and did not eat. After four days, they were distraught and called upon Harry to reason with me. I refused to see him. They said I could repeat the year and try again, but I was adamant. They must find a way. I was going to study medicine that autumn.

  Aunt Moira and Uncle Alan had a meeting at the school. My headmistress was surprised by my change of direction but reluctantly agreed that I would certainly be smart enough for university, though she thought aiming for medicine was far too ambitious. I would have to change from pass to honours in two subjects and she didn’t think there’d be enough time to catch up. I swore I was able for it, and that I’d already been studying the relevant books. Uncle Alan said he’d pay for grinds to make sure I could catch up. The he
admistress wrote letters to the Department of Education on my behalf to see if I would be allowed to make a late application. Finally, in April, we got a positive response. Aunt Moira asked me if I was sure I wanted to do this. I told her I was.

  ‘I suppose that when you’re a doctor, you won’t be giving us the time of day. Sure, you’ll probably never come back to this town.’

  I said nothing, but I saw the sadness in her face. ‘Harry would be sad to lose you. So would we.’

  I was determined to go to Trinity in Dublin, though I applied for medicine in all the colleges that offered it.

  Harry didn’t understand my sudden enthusiasm for Dublin and college.

  ‘You said you wanted to go back to the island,’ he said. ‘Why the sudden interest in medicine?’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better than managing a shoe shop?’ I decided to play the loving niece. ‘Uncle Alan and Aunt Moira would be so proud. I owe them. They have been good to me. I’d be an important person in this town, or on the island, if I went back there.’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose.’ He was disappointed, I could tell.

  ‘But wouldn’t I? Really?’

  ‘You’d be off in Dublin for years though. You might never come back. I’d miss you.’

  I kissed him on the lips. ‘I’d miss you too,’ I lied.

  The weeks leading up to and including the exams came and went in a delirious rush. I crammed right up until the last minute, up at dawn on the exam days, studying until midnight on the days in between. There was fire in my belly. Both Aunt Moira and Uncle Alan became concerned as I refused to stop for meals, survived on tea and toast while I worked, and banned Harry from visiting.

  Gemma got annoyed too. ‘You’re getting fierce ideas about yourself. First you manage to reel in Harry Russell, one of the richest lads in town, then you start talking all different and now you’re going to be a feckin’ doctor?’ Gemma had always defined me by my relationship with Harry. Up to that point, I had been the poor little orphan girl to her. But what I now wanted had nothing to do with Harry, nothing at all. Gemma was hoping to get enough points to do an arts degree in University College Galway. She wanted to be a teacher and she had always been the smarter of the two of us and I think she liked it that way.

  On the day of the last exam, when my whole class was going to celebrate in town, I went home and crawled into bed, exhausted, and stayed there for the whole weekend. I couldn’t tell how I’d performed. I had taken in so much information in such a short space of time and then regurgitated it back out on to my exam booklets that I forgot everything I learned just as quickly, and if you’d asked me to draw an alimentary canal a week after my biology exam, I wouldn’t have known where to start. Uncle Alan and Aunt Moira were relieved my ordeal was over, and Harry was pleased to have his girlfriend back. He and his mother persuaded his father to give me a summer job in the hotel.

  Chambermaid work was fine once you got used to it. Changing sheets, making beds, cleaning bathrooms and scrubbing toilets were all bearable because I knew it was going to be temporary. I knew that I’d be off to Dublin soon and that I’d be the town’s success story. I could write the headline myself in the Mayo News: ‘Tragic orphan girl triumphs in exam success’. Harry and I saw a lot more of each other now. Often, he’d sneak up on me at work as I bent over to empty a bin or drain a sink and he’d grab me by the waist and throw me down on to the bed and we’d kiss and grope and play a little.

  Peter came home on his holidays for two weeks shortly after my eighteenth birthday with ideas about getting a new machine for the hotel to run the bookings and invoicing, but his mother said they’d no room for it and nobody who’d know how to use it, and didn’t they have a phone and a letterbox, and they’d already bought a photocopier the summer before at Peter’s insistence and every time it broke down a fella had to come from Dublin to fix it. Peter and she clashed about what defined progress, Peter saying, ‘Mark my words, computerization is the future. Every forward-thinking company in London knows it, and we have the space for it in the hotel. That storeroom behind reception is big enough.’

  His father took his side as usual. Harry stayed out of it. ‘Peter’s the smart one, but he’s always thinking of the future and never thinking of now,’ Harry said. Peter’s holiday was a working one in the hotel’s high season.

  That look we had exchanged over the dinner table at Christmas time was not forgotten by either of us. He watched me and I watched him, both of us ducking away from each other’s eyes when caught, but always aware, circling each other. We rarely spoke, but I felt his eyes follow me down corridors and up the stairs. I wasn’t sure how to interpret it. He finally had a girlfriend, by all accounts. Harry didn’t believe she existed. ‘Oh yeah,’ he said, ‘Peter’s got a great imagination.’ Peter never smiled at me, never deliberately engaged me in conversation, but he watched me. Maybe he thought I wasn’t good enough to be in the family hotel; maybe he thought a girl with no background didn’t belong with his brother. I’ll show him, I said to myself, when I’m a doctor, on the front page.

  The morning the results came out, all the girls were going to the school to get them, but I was rostered to be working in the hotel from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. I told Aunt Moira and Uncle Alan that I didn’t mind, and we’d organized a celebration dinner at home that evening with Harry included. Aunt Moira would go up to the school and collect the results when it opened.

  At about ten o’clock, I was coming back from the laundry room laden down with a stack of pillowcases, blankets and fresh towels when I heard Peter calling my name. I told him I’d no time to stop and chat, but he followed me into one of the bedrooms.

  ‘I’ve news for you,’ he said. ‘Your Aunt Moira just rang … she wanted Harry to be the one to tell you … I can’t find him –’

  ‘What is it? Is she all right?’ I was on high alert, his voice was grave and I knew something was wrong.

  ‘Don’t go getting yourself worked up, everyone’s safe, it’s not the end of the world, but –’ His clipped accent irritated me.

  ‘What is it?’ I almost screamed at him.

  ‘Your exam results. They were good, just not good enough for medicine. Moira thought you might be disappointed?’

  I stood, waiting for the punchline, or for Harry to burst through the door and jump on me. It was just the kind of thing he’d do.

  ‘Delia?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Do you understand? You got mostly Cs, one B in biology, that’s not bad at all, just … not good enough for medicine. Did you seriously put nothing else on the application form? I mean, you could definitely do an arts degree with those points.’

  I slumped on to the bed, realizing finally that this was no joke. Peter sat on the bed beside me. He put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Don’t be like that. Didn’t you have a little job lined up in Ballina? In the shoe shop, Harry said. And to be honest, it was a bit mad to try and cram for all As in five months.’

  Harry must have told him.

  ‘I could have told you it wouldn’t work.’ His tone was so condescending that I saw red. He had ignored me since he came home and now, when I had proven myself unworthy, he deigned to be sympathetic.

  I reached out and slapped him as hard as I could. I’d made a fool out of myself, deluded myself, raised my hopes and expectations for no reason but to make him think well of me. My cheeks burned with humiliation.

  The force of my blow threw him flat on the bed. He was stunned. ‘What the –’

  ‘It’s all your fault!’ I screamed at him. ‘I’m nobody. I wanted to be important like you! You made me think it was possible.’

  He sat up and I pushed him again forcefully, and at first I thought I might kill him but he put his arms up, first in a gesture of submission, but then reaching out and holding my face in his hands. I did not think. I put my mouth on his mouth and my first thought was that our lips fitted together perfectly. I should have stopped there, and I could feel his shock, and as my hands roamed his body I c
ould feel his arousal. He kissed me back and a strange excitement took hold of me. Soon we were fumbling with each other’s clothes and, at some stage, he broke away to lock the door. At some stage, he said, ‘We shouldn’t be doing this.’ At some stage, I told him it was my first time, and he became more confident. At some stage, I said, ‘Don’t stop.’ At some stage, we clung to each other and I cried out and he put his hand over my mouth to muffle the sound. And at some stage, he pulsed inside me, and it felt right.

  Afterwards, we got dressed and he held me as I cried, but I didn’t even know what I was crying about. I had just lost my virginity and Peter certainly wasn’t going to respect me now. He thought I was just a cheap chambermaid. I was doomed to work in a shoe shop. I was never going to make the front page unless they were going to do a feature on the Most Deluded Girl in Town. I went into the bathroom and washed myself. I avoided looking at my face in the mirror.

  Peter was hovering awkwardly near the door.

  ‘What will we do?’ he said.

  ‘You’re supposed to be the smart one, the one with all the answers.’

  ‘So you never … with Harry?’

  I shook my head.

  He grinned then and punched the air.

  ‘Stop,’ I said. ‘Was this to spite Harry?’

  ‘We did this, together. But what will we do, I mean … about us?’

  I looked at him properly now and this time he didn’t look away. I realized I could play him.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘this never happened.’

  ‘OK, but, Harry, if he finds out …’

  ‘Who is going to tell him? Not me.’

  He looked at the ground then, and the bravado dripped away.

  ‘It’s stupid, I suppose. I mean, I’m living in London, and you …’

  ‘I what?’

  ‘You just … you wouldn’t fit in.’ There it was. I didn’t belong in his world.