by Anne Doughty
I read it twice, perfectly aware of Karen’s small, hard eyes watching me. Valerie never sent me party invitations. There was no need. She always rang to make sure I’d be free before she chose the date in the first place.
‘I think Colin must have forgotten to tell me when she rang about it,’ I said quietly. ‘But there’s no harm done. Are you and Neville picking up anyone, or have you a spare seat?’
‘Oh, we can fit you in going. But we may leave early. I don’t like Mummy being kept up too late. Perhaps Valerie will drop you back if you stay on to talk. I’m sure she’s got lots to tell you.’
She was smirking now and I was even more determined not to let her see how uneasy I was feeling.
‘Of course,’ I said brightly. ‘When have Valerie and I not had lots to tell each other?’
I got myself out of her kitchen, but she went on standing at her door.
‘I think you really should have a nice, long talk to Valerie,’ she went on as I swung my leg over the fence. ‘I’m sure it will do you good. You and Valerie always seem to agree about everything.’
I closed my own door firmly behind me, hurried to the phone and dialled Valerie’s number. It was engaged. I tried again and counted the rhythmic bleeps in an attempt to calm myself. I remembered that Bob sometimes made calls to clients on a Saturday morning and they could go on a long time. After a while, I got tired of dialling, so I rang Colin’s hotel and left a message asking him to make his promised call before eight o’clock. I tried Val again. Still engaged. I found the number of a local plumber and spoke to his wife, a friendly woman who couldn’t give me much hope for a visit today, but was most sympathetic. Then I tried again.
Dear Bob. He must be designing a mansion. I pulled out the drawer in the telephone table and began to sort the contents between attempts.
Like an archaeological excavation, I thought to myself, as I lifted out the directories and went down through layers of bus and train timetables, flights to London, local pamphlets offering gardening and rubbish disposal services, and bits of paper with mysterious telephone numbers in Colin’s handwriting. At the very bottom, I found a brand new calendar for 1967. Someone must have given it to Colin when we moved into Loughview. I dialled again and began to flick over the months of our first whole year back home. After three more attempts, I got to July.
‘The best of summer weather on a crowded Irish beach,’ it said under the picture. I laughed aloud, delighted by what I saw in front of me. On a great curving beach under a brilliant blue sky, with flocks of those little white clouds that make the sky look even brighter and more glorious, two tiny figures were walking along in the shallow water. The two little figures could have been Valerie and myself, for the picture was of our beloved Tra-na-rossan, our very favourite beach in Donegal.
The first time we had had a holiday together, just the two of us, we had spent more than half of our precious week on that beach.
‘Where shall we go, Jenny? Alan says we can have his car while he finishes his lab work. Shall we go round Ireland? Or cross to Scotland and head for John o’Groats? What d’you think?’
I could hear her now, her voice so full of excitement. It was typical of Valerie to think we could go round Ireland in a week in Alan’s ancient car when we’d only just got our licences and were still terrified of driving in the centre of Belfast. But we’d worked it out together, set off with the car full of cameras and art materials and picnic things so we could feed ourselves and keep our money for finding interesting places to give us bed and breakfast.
It was July 1961, one of those weeks when the sun shines every day, a rare thing indeed on that wild north-western coast. We stayed in cottages and farms and were made so welcome. We rode in the turf carts and went out in the fishing boats. Kindly women filled our Thermoses with milk or hot water and whole families advised us when the car was reluctant to start.
On our fourth day, an old lady told us how to find Trana-rossan. We left her straggling village and drove out over a sandy lowland towards a rocky outcrop which she said had once been an island. The road ran on to the east of it, along Mulroy Bay, and then dived down precipitously between two low thatched cottages and became a rough track. Val was convinced we’d gone wrong and I was equally convinced we’d do something awful to Alan’s car. But after a bone-shaking descent, we found ourselves on another sandy lowland. To our left, by a stone wall, a thread of path ran across a steep slope dotted with sheep and wind-blown bushes. It answered to the old lady’s description.
We set off together, a light breeze and a murmur of sound hinting at what we would find. But when we came over the brow of the rocky promontory and looked down on the deserted bay, shimmering in the morning light, it was even more magical than we had imagined.
‘Jenny, I shall remember this moment for the rest of my life.’
All I could do was nod as I took in the scene before me. The sun beat down on the shining white sand, the waves splashed softly at the edge of the calm, swelling sea, and high above me the skylarks soared, tiny specks in the bright sky, duplicating, dancing and deceiving, when I tried to look up into the dazzling light. Their song tumbled down around me, a cascade of perfect, rounded notes that seemed only to intensify the soft murmuring silence all about us.
‘Jenny, I have to fetch my things. I can’t wait. Do you mind?’
‘I can’t either. Come on, it won’t take a minute.’
We hurried back to the car, rummaged round for what we wanted, picked up sandwiches and Thermos and returned as quickly as we could, almost afraid the vision might vanish if we delayed.
Val poured out sketch after sketch and I wrote page after page of my Donegal Journal. I took some pictures to go with what I’d written and then went back to scribbling furiously again.
‘What are you going to do with all that, Jenny?’
‘All my scribbles?’
‘Mmm.’
‘A story, perhaps. A novel, maybe. But that’s really just a dream.’
‘Why should it be?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. You have to be very clever to write novels.’
‘But you are clever, Jenny. Alan says you’re the only woman he knows worth talking to. Apart from me, that is.’
‘Did he really? Goodness, and I’m always thinking what an idiot I must sound whenever he talks chemistry. I have to hang on by my eyebrows.’
‘I’m lucky, he knows I’m a duffer so he doesn’t bother.’
‘No, you’re not, Val. You mustn’t say things like that. Look at those marvellous sketches you’re turning out, as if it were easy.’
‘But it is easy, and I am a duffer. Honestly, Jenny, I don’t mind any more. Not now they’ve taken me at Art College.’
She was smiling so easily, sitting in a small hollow she’d made in the shingle, her board across her knees. With the sunlight catching her hair, it looked even more golden than usual. Her bare arms were already honey-coloured and freckled. I couldn’t recall ever having seen her look so happy.
‘You know something, Jenny,’ she said musingly, without looking up from her work, ‘there’s only one thing more I want to make me happy after I meet Prince Charming.’
She paused for effect, took up a clean sheet of paper and swept a piece of charcoal in a long curve across it.
‘And what’s that?’
‘You to marry Alan,’ she said soberly. ‘Then you’d be my sister and we could all live happily ever after.’ She turned towards me and smiled and with a few deft strokes put me into her picture.
‘I take it you have consulted him,’ I retorted, laughing, as I put my writing things back in my duffle bag.
‘I don’t need to. I just know. I have a feeling.’
‘Must be the heat. Poor Alan. I don’t know how a sober soul like him managed to get a sister like you. Come on, let’s go and paddle. There’s a nice hole under this bush to tuck our things in.’
We flew along the beach, kicking spray from the tiny waves till we’d alm
ost soaked each other. Then we lay on the soft sand, steaming slightly.
‘Shall we remember this when we’re old, Jenny?’
‘Of course we shall. This is what one of my favourite writers calls a “moment of being”. I don’t think they very often turn up for two people at once. We’re very lucky, Val. Whatever’s in store for us, we’ve had so much that is good.’
I dialled again. This time the phone rang. I found myself smiling, already hearing the sound of Val’s voice. I would ask her if she remembered that day on Tra-na-rossan and how we never got any further on our grand tour of Donegal because we loved it so. But the phone went on ringing. And ringing. I could almost see it vibrating in her empty hallway. She had gone out. I had missed her again.
There was nothing for it. I would just have to cope by myself with that horrible uneasy feeling somewhere down in the pit of my stomach Karen had created. Surely nothing Val would ever have to tell me could come between us. Surely not. I just couldn’t imagine how it could. But then, had I ever imagined anything could come to spoil the ease and happiness Colin and I had once had?
Chapter 7
There was far more to do upstairs than I imagined. As I changed the sheets on the double bed, I remembered both the single beds needed doing as well, thanks to Colin’s Australian uncle and his ‘useful contact’ from British Steel. And that meant moving all the linen I’d parked there when I found the hiccupping bottle in the airing cupboard. I hate making beds. By the time I’d finished, the landing looked like a hotel corridor early in the morning, a scatter of wastepaper baskets, a pile of towels and a forgotten morning-tea tray parked amid the drifts of crumpled sheets.
I summoned up all my patience, folded the laundry into a neat pile, went down and stacked it in the garage, and came back and started in on the bathroom. My patience shredded when I discovered the grey dust on the shower curtain wasn’t discoloured talcum powder after all, but a mould. It proved even harder to shift than the ring I found round the bath. While I was down on my knees, scrubbing away at that, I had a close up view of the carpet. Its once pleasant dusky pink was so full of well-tramped talcum powder, it shone smooth. It needed a stiff brushing to raise the pile before it was worth vacuuming.
Still sneezing from my efforts on the bathroom carpet and thoroughly irritated with the time it had taken to make it look half decent again, I opened the door on the last of the upstairs rooms. Colin’s office.
While my study had been intended for ‘the nursery’, complete with teddy bear wallpaper and white, wipeable furniture, when the show house was furnished, this room of Colin’s had actually been set up as an office. It contained the only pieces of furniture I might have chosen myself: a large Swedish-designed desk in teak with matching adjustable shelving and a pair of pale grey filing cabinets which toned nicely with the darker grey carpet. Leaning wearily against the door frame, I looked in at the chaotic mess of papers and objects which covered all the surfaces and spilled over into piles on the floor.
I strode across to the wide window ledge and looked at the plants I had chosen to bring a little colour to the room. Even in the watering tray where they stood, there was a scatter of Biros and small tools and the dismantled pieces of an electric plug. The yucca and the cacti which Maisie had given Colin were fine, if somewhat dusty, but the blooms on the bright scarlet geraniums had dropped. The tiny shrivelled remnants lay scattered among the debris below the wilted foliage.
‘What is the point? Whatever is the point?’ I fumed as I carried the geraniums into the bathroom and filled the basin with tepid water. I soaked them well, left them to drain, and went back across the landing. I stood by the door and tried to steady myself.
‘All right, so my room is tidy, Colin’s is a mess,’ I reasoned. ‘Isn’t that a personal difference one should accept?’
I put together every single sensible thing I’d read about accepting that different people had different needs. Clearly, our needs were different, so why was it such a problem for me? It certainly didn’t seem a problem to Colin.
I went back to the window and looked out over the garden. The lawn needed cutting, I’d done no weeding or tidying for four weekends now, and so far today I still hadn’t found five minutes to go down and look at my chrysanthemums. ‘If I start to sort out this lot, I’ll never get outside,’ I muttered, glaring at the stacks of magazines, catalogues, newspapers and household documents piled up on the surface of the desk.
I knew what the writers in the women’s magazines would say. Do what you want to do and let him sort out his own mess. Why should the state of his room have any effect on you? It was his room and his mess, wasn’t it? End of story. But it didn’t help me any. Either I couldn’t forgive him for killing off my favourite geraniums, or the state of the room was spelling out something that I really couldn’t yet bring myself to face.
I remembered the weekend, weeks back, when he’d said he was going up to have a good sort-out. I’d encouraged him, asked him if he’d like a little colour to set against the shades of grey and the dark tones of the teak. ‘Yes, yes, that would be lovely,’ he’d replied enthusiastically. I’d stopped what I was doing, lifted the geraniums carefully from the garden, scrubbed the nicest of my terracotta pots, settled them in and brought them up to him. I’d found him reading a motoring magazine which he dropped hastily when I appeared.
‘Just checking on something,’ he said quickly, taking the flourishing plants from me and placing them carefully on the window ledge. ‘Super, Jenny, I’ll have this place straight in no time.’
As like as not, they were now dead. Even if I’d caught them in time, I’d have to cut them back and they wouldn’t flower again till next year.
Viciously, I pulled the vacuum cleaner into the room, switched on and shoved it round the small area of carpet still visible. I dragged out the swivel chair one-handed to get at the kneehole area and spotted three copies of a past edition of the Ulster Tatler on its dark grey seat. I switched off, picked them up, and dropped down on the chair myself.
‘Three bloody months,’ I proclaimed to the silent vacuum cleaner. ‘That’s how long these magazines have been sitting on this chair.’ I flipped one open just to make sure it was what I thought it was. I found what I was looking for. A two-page spread. On one side William John McKinstry, cigar in hand, with a collection of the great and the good at a top hotel. On the other, banner headlines which read: ‘Proud of his working-class origins’. The article below charted his progress ‘From Backyard to Boardroom’, quoted him freely on the virtues of hard work and foresight, and carefully avoided any mention of his absolute ban against employing anyone in his organisation who was not a Protestant.
Colin had bought three copies so he could send them to the Canadian relatives. And here they were. Abandoned and forgotten. Like the geraniums. I shook my head, put them back on the chair exactly as I had found them, and walked out of the room. I closed the door firmly behind me, carried the vacuum to the bottom of the stairs and picked up my poetry books from the table beside the phone.
‘Lunch, Jennifer, lunch,’ I said to myself as I made for the kitchen. ‘You’ve had quite enough of messes for one morning.’
I made some coffee and a cheese sandwich, and sat down at the breakfast bar with a pair of scissors and the parcel I’d collected from Karen. A whole little pile of books from the Poetry Book Society. The R.S. Thomas I’d been expecting, some volumes from their backlist I’d bought with Daddy’s birthday money, and a fresh copy of Death of a Naturalist because the copy I’d been using in school was dropping to pieces.
I love new books, especially new poetry books. I sat and gloated over them, picking them up one at a time and reading a little here and there. I promised myself a long read tomorrow, when I got back from Rathmore Drive. But my good intentions weakened. I was halfway through Derek Mahon’s ‘Spring Letter in Winter’ when it dawned on me that the doorbell was ringing.
Confused, I put the book down and blinked at the kitchen clock
as if it might tell me something about the unknown caller. I glanced back again at the lines I had just read, as if the book itself would disappear in the time it took me to answer the door.
Two years on and none the wiser
I go down to the door in the morning twilight.
It was three o’clock in the afternoon, but the words echoed in my head as if I had just received an urgent message. I hurried down the hall. Perhaps I too was two years on and none the wiser.
The brown figure on the doorstep had his back to me and was looking down the Drive towards a battered blue van parked by the kerb. I couldn’t think what on earth he might want. As he turned towards me, a drip from the end of his nose fell among the oil stains on his dungarees. His pale eyes flickered towards mine momentarily and then darted away, as if he feared a refusal.
‘Hello,’ I said brightly as I focused on his too-large dungarees and the bag of tools he carried in one hand.
‘Washer,’ he said abruptly.
‘Oh, Mr Taggart. I am pleased to see you,’ I said, honestly. ‘Your wife said you’d hardly manage it today. Do come in.’
He eyed the hall carpet uneasily as he began to wipe his feet meticulously on the outside doormat. One of his boots was a heavy surgical one. They were both perfectly clean.
‘Oh please, don’t worry. It’s only clean dirt, as my father would say.’
A flicker of a smile appeared in his watery blue eyes and he limped down the hall behind me.
‘And you needn’t worry about this floor either. I’m not doing it till I’ve caught up on the rest of the washing. That’s if you can fix the wretched thing.’
He hesitated at the kitchen door, his eyes moving over my half-eaten sandwich and empty mug of coffee.
‘I’m disturbin’ yer lunch, missus.’
‘Not at all. I should have had it hours ago but some of my jobs took longer than I’d expected. Would you like a cup of coffee? I was just going to make some more. It won’t take a minute.’