Читать книгу Best Love, Rosie - Nuala O'Faolain - Страница 11

I was in bed with Leo on Christmas morning in a chilly pensione near the docks in Ancona. It took courage to unpeel from his back and slide an arm out from under the duvet to ring my aunt in Dublin.

There was no reply, so I tried next door.

‘Hello? Reeny? That you? Yes, of course it’s Rosie. Merry Christmas, sweetheart, and every good wish for the New Year! I’m in Italy. Yes, with a friend – what do you think I am – mad? It just wasn’t worth going home for the short break they give us at work. Listen – Min isn’t answering her phone. Would you mind going out the back and calling up to her window? It’s eleven in Dublin, isn’t it? And I know she’s going in to you for the turkey and sprouts. Shouldn’t she be up and about?’

‘Ah no, she’s fine,’ Reeny said. ‘Don’t you worry. She was in here last night watching Eastenders. But she’s becoming a bit odd, Min is. There’s days now she doesn’t get out of bed even though there’s feck all wrong with her. And – I don’t want to ruin your holiday but I was going to tell you the next time I saw you – there was a bit of trouble there recently when she had a few drinks on her. The guards brought her back from the GPO of all places – nobody knows how she got from the pub into town – because she fell and she couldn’t get up. Well, it was more that she wouldn’t get up. She kept telling everyone she had to post a parcel to America. Anyway they were very nice and they brought her home, though the guard told me they’d a hard time stopping her hopping out the door of the patrol car, and only that she was a little old lady they’d have handcuffed her. She hasn’t been out all that much since, and a few of the women talking about it in the Xpress Store were saying that maybe Rosie Barry should come home…’

‘But Min doesn’t want me!’ I said, laughing.

‘I know she doesn’t,’ Reeny said. I stopped laughing.

Reeny didn’t notice. ‘But that’s the way they are with depression,’ she went on. ‘I saw a fella talking about it on the telly. They don’t know what they want.’

‘Tell her I’ll ring her tonight, Reeny, and that she’s to answer the phone no matter what. And how are you doing? Is Monty with you?’

Monty was Reeny’s son, a big shy golf fanatic, somewhere in his forties, who my friend Peg had been going out with for decades. His father walked out on him when he was a little boy, and I always saw the golf thing as something he’d protected himself with while he struggled to make a man of himself. ‘Tell him Santy’s going to bring him a hole-in-one.’

Beyond Leo’s shoulder I could see a corner of the Adriatic – brilliantly blue and white-capped from a stiff wind that was making the shutters rattle. There’d been an attempt at making love earlier, but neither of us had been committed enough to keep going. It was a good thing, I supposed, that we weren’t afraid to show it when we were half-hearted. Still, low sexual energy was bad for the soul. Not to mention there were two more days to go in an under-heated room and there was nothing to do in Ancona when such attractions as it had were closed for the holiday.

Christmas Day. The very words used to shimmer.

‘Leo!’ I tried to wake him nicely by curling my arm around his belly and stroking him gently. ‘Leo, sweetheart – go and see if the signora will make us a cup of coffee.’ Lifting myself on my elbow, I was as shocked as if I’d touched a live wire to see that he was wide awake and staring at the window.

The next day we went to an organ recital in an exceptionally draughty unused church, where Leo disappeared into his completely attentive mode. You could stick pins into him when he’s listening to music and he wouldn’t notice.

Things would have to change, I saw with bleak clarity as I sat there growing colder and colder. We were once – but I didn’t want to think about the marvellous lovers we’d once been. I could barely admit to myself that it was becoming harder and harder to lure him away, now that he had lost his villa, inland from Ancona, that he had hoped to turn into a small luxury hotel.

I thought about Min instead.

Somebody needed to be keeping an eye on her if she’d reached the point where she disgraced herself in public, and with Reeny these days caretaking an apartment complex in Spain, for the first time since the two of them were young women she wasn’t always at hand in the house next door. There was also the fact that in a few months I’d have finished my contract as a writer with the Information Unit of the EU in Brussels and I’d have a lump sum if I left – enough to keep me while I took my time looking around for the next job. Some of my colleagues actually retired at fifty-five, the ones who’d never liked their jobs and were good at saving. I couldn’t retire, and I didn’t want to. But I’d have enough with the lump sum to keep going for a year or two – maybe even three, if I went back to Dublin.

And – I sent my tongue on a delicate walk around behind my teeth – the dentists in Dublin spoke English. W. H. Auden said that thousands have lived without love, not one without water, but he might well have mentioned teeth. I had no future of any kind if I didn’t look after the ones I had left.

It was completely dark now outside the single slender window, high up in a peeling, ochre wall. A navy-blue sky, with one winking star. There’d been a cheerful-looking trattoria on the way to the recital and we could go there as soon as we’d collected a heavier sweater and more socks from the pensione. Then, bed…

And what about all that? What about cafés and sex and sixteenth-century windows? One of the great things about Brussels was that I could very easily take a train to meet Leo. And I couldn’t bear to be long away from him, even now. I kept my hair a tactful ashy-blonde colour, and bought my clothes in boutiques in the Flemish-speaking part of Belgium where even chic women loved bread and butter as much as I did and had the same build, and when I walked along beside him with my tummy held in and an interested smile on my face I felt like a woman alive in the world. In Italy, where we met more often than anywhere else, quite a few men had a good look at me before they turned away.

But in Kilbride in Dublin… My birthday wasn’t till September but I’d be fifty-five then – barely tipping towards the second half of the decade, but heading that way. There’d never been unmarried women my age in Kilbride who considered themselves to be still in the game. Or maybe there had been, but they were too smart to let anybody know it.

The audience were applauding with tremendous vigour. They must be trying to warm up. Leo gave me one of the smiles he didn’t know were lovely as he got to his feet. Music made him happy – well, music up to about the time women stopped wearing long skirts, no later.

Oh. An encore.

We all sat down again.

Home’s most powerful lure, all the same, was an image, not an argument.

If I went home to look after her, there was a certain way Min might be. I was charmed by her face anyway – so small and white, the black eyes so round and childlike. But I’d seen long ago what it could look like when it opened like a leaf in the sun.

When I was a child, before my father died, the three of us used to go every summer to a wooden shack called Bailey’s Hut, out on the shelly grass beyond the last wharf of Milbay Harbour. My father’s mother, Granny Barry, could borrow us The Hut for our holiday because she worked for Bailey’s Hardware and Builders’ Providers.

There was no running water, so we brought a jerrycan of tap water for making tea and otherwise we used the rainwater in the barrel at the door. My father would also use the rainwater to wash Min’s hair.

‘Right you are, Ma’am!’ he’d say, when she said this would be a good day to give her hair a good wash. He’d bring a basin of warm water out onto the grass, and then a bucket of rainwater. She’d kneel in her old skirt and her pink under-bodice that had a stitched cone on each side for her breasts. He’d sit on a box and with her head in his lap, he would shampoo her, using the tips of his fingers. ‘Mind that stuff in my eyes!’ she’d say. Then he’d leave her kneeling, her head bent, and he’d delicately pour the first trickle of rainwater onto her head and she’d jump and say ‘Ouch! That water’s freezing!’ But as he went on, the water flowed more evenly. She used her hands to distribute the water around her hair and he followed her with his stream of water and poured it where her hands went, exactly. Then he put down the bucket, and wrapped the towel firmly around her head. She lifted her blinded face, and he dabbed it very gently with a smaller towel.

Her hair would dry then in the sun, combed forward to fall over her face, her thin shoulders peeking out at each side. Or she’d brush it in the hot air currents from the Aladdin heater they kept in the corner of the room behind chicken-wire, where I couldn’t touch it, and it would take on volume and gloss and vibrate as if energy ran through it.

He’d say: ‘See your auntie’s hair? Your auntie Min has beautiful hair.’ He’d sound wistful. He’d sound as if he were talking about something long in the past, though she was right there in front of him and was not going to leave.

I never forgot the way she lifted her unguarded face to his. He held it between his two hands for a few moments when she was waiting for him to dab the wet off, and she, who was always so wary and brisk, allowed herself to be held. Her eyes were closed but she rested in his care like a seabird coming down onto the water.

That was the face she might turn on me. She might be like that with me.

I’d take the lump sum.

I went back at the end of the summer, and for the first two or three months I didn’t do much more than sit at the old kitchen table. It was as if I’d entered one of those forests in fairytales which surround the castle where the princess sleeps, where no leaves move and no birds sing. I was slowly thinking – you wanted this and you got it, but what do you do now? It was as if I’d been fractured from my own experience – as if most of what I’d learnt in thirty years of living and loving and working around the globe wasn’t relevant to where I’d now arrived.

Nothing happened. It was an event when Bell the cat walked across the table an inch from my nose on her way from the window to the stairs to go up to Min. She walked past again on her way back out. Sometimes she condescended to mew to show she wanted her dinner served up. There was nothing to stop me spending a long time wondering whether she really disdained me, or whether the situation was more complex than that. She could have chosen to walk around the edge of the room, after all.

‘I always know where to find you, Rosie,’ Andy Sutton said, and being Andy he said it every time he came to the house. Andy was in his early sixties, but he seemed even older because he looked after us all, including my friend Peg, and my friend Tessa, whose cousin in fact he was. Andy worked for a charity called No-Need and in summer he collected goats and hens and rabbits and pigs around Ireland and drove truck-loads of them across to Gatwick Airport in England, to be flown out to places that were so poor that the people could cope with only the smallest livestock. The rest of the year there were regular meetings at No-Need headquarters and he came up from the country for them and stayed with his mother Pearl, a few streets away in Kilbride.

He’d open the front door and stick his head into the kitchen.

‘Is Min asleep?’ he’d whisper.

And I’d whisper back, ‘She either is or she’s pretending to be.’

‘Do you never move from that table?’ he’d say, and go out the back to check the thermostat on the boiler or to fetch the ladder to change a high light-bulb. Or he’d stagger back into the room under a sack of logs from the trees on his farm.

My aunt, upstairs, would detect a presence and soon the madly animated voices on her transistor radio, or the sweet swoops of singers – she turned up the volume for singing – would filter down through the ceiling. Then whoever was in the kitchen could talk normally.

Other times, the quiet would be broken by dance music from next door and I’d know that Reeny was back from Spain and that she’d be in any minute to see us, tanned and jovial and carrying ham, or peaches, or chocolates – some gift that wasn’t alcoholic. And once in a while the fellow who did old-age pensioners’ hair in the home brought his gear in and I’d hand the kitchen table over to him. And every two weeks I’d tactfully go to the library when a psychologist and some sort of nurse assistant came to see Min as part of a service for elderly people with depression that Reeny – a virtuoso manipulator of the welfare system – had discovered. Reeny filled in the questionnaire too, but when the team came to assess her she had to admit that she’d only signed up because she liked getting something for nothing.

‘Your aunt is very low in herself,’ the psychologist would say reverently, when I was seeing her out.

‘She goes to the pub too often,’ I’d say.

But the lady didn’t want to hear that. She stuck strictly to her own turf.

I’d turn back in to the kitchen and pick up my book, and the sound would come from upstairs of Min scrolling from station to station on the little transistor she kept on the pillow, so near to her face that it was half-covered by the frizz of wild, colourless hair.

And I could tell too from the rhythm of her heels on the stairs – I’d had the old carpet taken off and the wood stripped and varnished – whether she’d finally got out of bed for some plan that included me, or whether she was going to the pub.

‘Rosie!’ she’d exclaim in a friendly way as she came down the last two steps. ‘What has you sitting so quietly?’

This was a rhetorical question, of course, and it made no difference whether I answered or not. During the autumn I had the back door open to the yard. I loved that, the lozenge of light on the kitchen floor, the little yellow curtains swishing softly in the warm breeze; and she’d smile too at the genial scene. But as it grew colder her eyes would go immediately to the hearth.

‘That’s a great fire you have there!’ she’d say absent-mindedly, and she’d have already moved in to perch on the little blue armchair and pick up the tongs to add a few lumps of coal, or, if the fire was sullen, to carefully poke a few sticks into it at points where, when they lit, they would transform the whole thing. She was a genius at fires. ‘Thank God for coal!’ she’d say, shuttling fine slack onto her creation with the lightest of touches.

Sometimes, carried on by enthusiasm, she’d even refer to the fire in the range of the house she grew up in, in Stoneytown, out on Milbay Point.

I came to attention whenever she said that name. It was a quarry-workers’ settlement on the edge of the sea that she dismissed, but that to me was as exotic as Shangri-la.

‘Freezing we’d be in that oul’ place,’ she’d snort. ‘If the boats couldn’t make it over from Milbay to take the stone, we used to have no coal,’ she’d say, and she’d draw her chair right up to our fire with a dramatic shudder. ‘We could be weeks waiting on a bit of coal!’

I used to wonder why the fire mattered so much to her. Then one day I realised that in remote parts of Ireland in the dark, poverty-stricken 1930s, the fire was life itself. The range in a kitchen must have been the god of the house. People were completely dependent on it for cooking, for baking bread, for heating, for drying. There were woods near Stoneytown, Min conceded, but surely to God I knew that beechwood was no good for burning in a range?

She’d have her coat on ready to go out. But she got such satisfaction out of coaxing the fire to a blaze that she’d prop her big handbag on her lap and sit there peacefully looking into the flames, her face made young again by their pink reflections.

Not every day, but two or three times a week, she’d strain up then to the little mirror in the scullery to swipe on lipstick and drag a brush through her hair. A lot of people smiled quite unconsciously when they saw her because she was only four feet, eleven inches high and her eyes were as dark as a marmoset’s. I knew that she was nothing like as cute as she looked, but I often smiled at her little ways, too. Helplessly.

Then she’d carefully detach the page with the crossword from the rest of yesterday’s newspaper and go off to the Kilbride Inn. She did yesterday’s crossword because the answers were in today’s so she could look them up if she was stuck. It was accepted that I wasn’t welcome to accompany her.

I’d say to myself, why does she bother going up there? She only sits by herself anyway. I don’t understand her. And I don’t know that much about her, either, beyond the fact that her mother died when she was ten, and her father disappeared a year or so after I was born. Then I’d think – what does it matter whether you understand her or not? You’re stuck with her, anyway. She’d been a mother to me since the week I was born, but there’s no law that says you have to understand even a mother, much less an aunt who took over when her sister died. And I’d think, without resentment, it doesn’t bother her that she doesn’t understand me. What’s more, most of the people in the world don’t try to understand each other. Analysis is a disease of the Western, educated classes.

And yet – I remember examining this thought slowly, sitting in the quiet kitchen with Bell for once content to be on my lap – people can accept that the partners they choose are separate, other people. They can make love – I had, often – without having a clue to what was going through their lover’s head. They can look down on the dead body of a wife or husband and think, ‘I never really knew that person.’ But the woman who brought you up? I never in my whole life met anybody who didn’t feel entitled to know that woman.

I doubted if I would recognise any of the places in Min’s inner landscape. And what did she know of the miasma of images that kept me sitting dreamily at the kitchen table, as I wandered lazily among them. The seashore at dusk near Dakar, with the big crabs ambling down the sand into the even line of white foam. Clack-clack they went, and the waves went shush-shush. Or the oilcloth on the table on the grass outside a farmhouse on the Rigi and the taste of sharp cheese grated over fried eggs. Or schoolchildren, in Flanders, coming towards me in the dark on their way to school, on a causeway between fields of winter mud; the way the glow of their fluorescent armbands hung in the air as ghostly seagulls fed on the empty fields all around and dawn suffused the horizon. There was nothing to be done about the manner in which these images imprisoned me in solitary experience. It was life itself that had made me as distant from her as she, tip-tapping up to the pub with God knows what thoughts in her head, was distant from me.

My memories certainly didn’t suggest any particular path I could follow into the future. I’d open my laptop and google the agencies I’d always got my jobs from – UNESCO, Overseas Aid, World Opportunity, the European Parliament. And I’d drift off into fantasy. Myanmar, now. How about trying to get into Myanmar? Rangoon must be a worn, humid version of somewhere like Valletta, say, in the 1950s. Tropical, but with stone clock-towers and municipal flowerbeds. British gentility overlaid on foreignness in a thick, humid atmosphere. But would it be right to work in Myanmar? There was a job going in Adelaide. I could manage a foreign language bookshop in Adelaide standing on my head. Someone told me that the wines in Adelaide were marvellous. Or Maracaibo. They wanted somebody to run a big school there where they taught the oil workers English. Men. But Latin men… It had always been hard to be the way they wanted, even when I was young and I was trying to please.

Guatemala was my best bet. I was just about the most qualified Teacher of English as a Foreign Language in the world, and the beautiful town of Santiago was full of TEFL schools. I downloaded an application form for Santiago Atitlán. But there was no urgency to what I was doing. My hands would fall idle.

It takes a while to come back to a place.

When I was moving countries every few years or so, I acquired the privileges of an expatriate with every move. I could invent myself everywhere I went. But my women friends in Kilbride never let me get away with anything. They were, apparently, experts on how I should behave, though Peg – who was always around because she was Monty’s girlfriend – was six years younger than me; and Tessa, who’d been my friend since my first day working in Boody’s Bookshop, was at least six years older.

She’d been the shop steward back then and had taken a brisk line with all of us, as she still did with me. Soon after I came back there was a party for her, because she was taking early retirement from the union, to which I wore a fabulous little Italian black suit I could still just about fit into, and three-inch heels.

You really dressed up, didn’t you?’ Tessa said, when we were having a post-mortem. ‘Everyone was talking about you, Rosie, though I suppose that’s understandable, you’re still news. And that black suit is sensational. But what do you think? Could it do with a little something at the neck?’

And, in a seemingly neutral tone of voice, Peg said, ‘A lot of the girls there had come straight from work so they couldn’t dress up.’

‘Oh, give over!’ I laughed at them. But they weren’t even conscious of how they were always trying to teach me what a single woman in her mid-fifties was supposed to be like in Kilbride, Dublin, Ireland. One of them would say ‘Are you going to the Eleven O’Clock?’ as if they somehow failed to remember that I didn’t go to Mass at all. And when I brought Andy along to the cinema, because he had given me a lift into town, they hardly spoke, even though they’d known him all their lives the same as I had. As good as telling me it wasn’t the done thing to bring a man along on a girls’ night out.

I knew that they were shaping me for the community, and that there was concern for me in that. But I kept the card my friends at the Information Unit in Brussels had added to the binoculars they presented me with, at a farewell feast in a Flanders tavern, where we danced all night to waltzes from a mechanical organ. ‘Thank you for all the fun you brought into our lives,’ the card said. There was a promise in the words. I might be a bit down now, but I had been up, and I would be up again.

I talked to the cat.

‘Ulysses was away for twenty years and his dog waited for him. Did you know that? Argos, the dog? He was so old he’d turned white but he waited for his master and when at last he saw him come home he allowed himself to die. ‘Thinking of dying, Bell, now that I’m back?’

She looked up from licking her fur to flick me an insolent look.

Apropos of dying, the insurance man wanted to know, did I want to top up Min’s funeral insurance? For the first time, money began to worry me. Then the bill for the new central heating came. Then one day Min remarked, in a voice with genuine longing in it, how there were lovely legs of lamb in the butcher’s, but at a terrible price. I had some substitute work in Kilbride Library every week that brought in a little cash. And I had enough savings for another year at the rate we were going, even though I’d bought a small second-hand car to take Min around in – not that she’d yet agreed to be taken around. I had a bond I could cash, even, to have the backyard glassed over and tiled if she ever said ‘Yes’ to the plan. If the yard was really nicely done, maybe she wouldn’t go to the pub so much.

Not that she drank more than a very little at her lunchtime session, as far as I knew. But she’d have changed, all the same, by the time she came home. She’d be ever so slightly wrong. And sometimes something would bother her and she’d stay up at the Inn longer than a couple of hours. Then she’d come home and start doing something around the house, full of false elation, and my heart would be in my mouth, seeing how clumsy the drink made her. And a few times she came home and went to bed in the afternoon but got up again later and went out, and when she came back she had a smile like a grimace. I couldn’t look at her. She had only done that three times to date, which was nothing compared to Mrs Beckett two doors up who was an alcoholic, not to mention a whole lot of the local men. But the thing was, I never knew when it might happen.

At the beginning, I sometimes went up to the Inn whether she asked me to or not. From the door I’d see her on the other side of the lounge, across a floor full of empty chairs and tables. I’d see the outline of her wild hair against the window there that she opened whenever she felt like it, as if she owned the place. She pulled an invisible space around herself in that big room, as if she was in a car and going somewhere. But she wasn’t going anywhere. She had nowhere to go. It shocked me to see her, so that I was already hopelessly full of emotion as I crossed the greasy carpet. Even before she’d look up with her child’s face.

But she didn’t want me there.

The only time I caught a glimpse of her inner life had been in September, when there was a Mass of Commemoration on the first anniversary of 9/11. For the few days before it she talked a lot, telling me about that dreadful day and how she glanced at the television and thought the plane flying into the tower was a game, and she couldn’t find Reeny’s number in Spain, and the stew she had on was burnt so badly that she had to throw out the saucepan, and Andy Sutton brought down the bedroom chair and went over to get Mrs Beckett because she only has RTÉ One, and Tessa came in after her work and made chicken sandwiches, and Andy went up to the Kilbride Inn for a dozen beers and a bottle of vodka because people were calling to the house all night. And all along the terrace front doors were open and you could hear the blare of television sets, and Enzo’s son brought down fish and chips though the Sorrento didn’t normally deliver, and then the boy stayed, watching the television with his mouth open.

‘I had a terrible fright right at the beginning,’ she said, ‘when I remembered Markey Cuffe, that was your big friend when your nose was always stuck in a book, Florence Cuffe’s boy that went to New York. I was asking everyone where did he work; he grew up out our back lane and he easily could have been dead; a lot of people around here had people over there they were mad with worry about and there was nothing they could do, the phones were all clogged up, you couldn’t reach America. But then I found the cards I’d put away since last Christmas because he always sends a big one with gold on it and the address of his business, and it was in Seattle. Sure I know all about Seattle, Reeny and me used to watch Frasier.’

The whole of Kilbride, apparently, was going to the Commemoration Mass, and Min was ready early. She put on a moleskin coat so ancient that I could remember it on her coming into the Pillar Store when I started there at age sixteen.

‘Min,’ I began, but she cut me off.

‘That coat cost hundreds of pounds,’ she said grandly. ‘That coat was in your father’s mother’s wardrobe when I was clearing it out, and it had hardly been worn.’

‘But, Min—’ intending to point out that it also smelled strongly of mothballs.

‘And you,’ she said, looking me up and down disapprovingly, ‘you’ve a chance to wear your good skirt. Go on up and change. Throw us down the high heels and I’ll give them a polish.’

In the church she was crushed against me by the crowd. Her eyes were closed and she took no notice of the liturgy. Instead – I was so close to her that I couldn’t help but overhear – she prayed and prayed under her breath. ‘Lord, Lord,’ I could hear. ‘Lord have mercy. Our Lady, help them.’ I never knew anything like it from Min. Imploring was the very last thing she ever did.

The point she returned to earnestly, as if she said it often enough I’d understand, was that they were ordinary working people, the dead. ‘They weren’t doing any harm,’ she’d say, looking at me, still baffled at the injustice. ‘They were doing their best. They were going to work.’

But as the winter set in she went out less and less.

‘What’s wrong?’ I’d say. ‘Would you not get up?’ I’d say to her. ‘The car is outside the door, will I give you a lift up to the pub?’ I asked her would she like to go to the Canaries, to take a bit of sun. To London. We could look at the clothes in the sales. I said, Will we buy a dog?’

She sprang into life. ‘Certainly not!’ she said. ‘Bell hates dogs.’

‘Bell!’ I said, bitterly, as Bell’s striped face with its level, golden eyes peeked out from the blankets under Min’s chin. ‘I think that cat is telling me to go back where I came from,’ I said, but Min said nothing.

I dropped the idea of doing up the yard and took out private health insurance in case Min needed hospitalisation. But all that did was disqualify her for the services of the welfare psychologist who used to come to the house. When we found that out, Min was for once delighted with me.

‘Good girl!’ she said approvingly. ‘I didn’t know how to get rid of her. It’s her that needs her head examined, not me.’

But that meant we were doing nothing at all about the situation. So I went in to town to Eason’s bookshop and went through the self-help section – a place I’d never been before – looking for something that might help us. I brought home Listening to Depression: How Understanding Your Pain Can Heal Your Life and Depression: the Mind-Body Approach. For a while I read them to her every night, and she’d say they were great books, very interesting. But she’d go asleep after a few pages.

Our Christmas was very quiet and New Year’s Eve dragged a bit, too, though there was wild good cheer on the television. Min was in bed and I sat at the kitchen fire and did my best to laugh at myself. Why couldn’t I have been Angela Gheorghiu, the Romanian soprano? I muttered to an imaginary audience. To take just one example. Why was I born in goddamn working-class Dublin? Why couldn’t heiress Doris Duke be born here and me in Newport or wherever it was? What difference would it have made to the universe? Why not me to be beautiful and rich and famous and wooed by tall, handsome men in wonderful long overcoats with fine silver hair that curls against their finely modelled necks? Placido Domingo, that kind of man. Why couldn’t I have been the kind of woman Rilke fell for? All furs and a brilliant mind. With a castle. Those women didn’t have to look after their aunts. Rilke didn’t have to look after his aunt; as a matter of fact he refused to look after his mother. Rilke had it easy compared to people who have no choice but to look after their elderly relatives; a subject, by the way, on which in spite of it happening to nearly everyone, there is no literature. No writing, even, never mind literature.

I’d come across a thing on the Internet, a list of resolutions that if you stuck to them would help control your depression. Now I printed them out and took them up to Min with a cup of tea and a slice of Reeny’s Spanish-style fruitcake. It was cosy in her bedroom with the new gas heating and the curtains closed against the winter night, and Bell surveying matters from her basket on the dressing-table and the transistor talking to itself on the pillow.

I began the lesson. ‘OK. Number One. Spend my time building on my strengths rather than patching up my weaknesses.’

‘Fair enough,’ Min said after a pause. ‘But what weaknesses does the person who wrote it mean?’

‘Whatever ones you have,’ I said. ‘What ones do you have?’

There was a longer pause.

‘She doesn’t mean, does she,’ Min said tentatively, ‘like having a weakness, say, for butter on my potatoes?’

‘No, I don’t think so. We’ll leave that one, will we, and try Number Two. Ask myself every day, “What do I need?” and then take a step to meet that need.’

‘That’s a great one!’ Min said enthusiastically. ‘Say I needed to bring Bell to the vet, I could ask you to ring him up and make an appointment!’

‘Is there something wrong with Bell?’

‘Not a thing – is there, Bella? Don’t hide under the bedclothes, Bella. Come up here where I can see you.’

‘The next one is Make a list of activities that are delightful and do one every week.’

‘No problem there,’ Min said. ‘I was thinking of going to Mass somewhere else than Kilbride church. I don’t like that oul’ Father Simms. That’s weekly.’

‘OK,’ I said cautiously. ‘That’s good. That’s action. Now, Number Four. Admit that I don’t know is what it says.’

‘That I don’t know what?’ Min said belligerently. ‘I do know.’

‘What do you know?’

‘I know lots of things. I left school the day I was fourteen.’

‘I’m aware of that, Min. You’ve told me that five hundred times.’

‘But that doesn’t mean that I don’t know things.’ She was growing aggrieved now.

‘Min!’ I said. ‘Who ever said you didn’t? You’re well able to do the hard crossword, for example, and you used to write me the greatest letters. Anyway, the last one is – Say “NO” to myself on occasion and to others on many more occasions.’

‘No,’ Min said.

‘No what?’

‘No to whatever eejit wrote those rules. No, they’re no bloody good. No, I’m not going to do any of them.’

‘That’s right!’ I danced around the bed. ‘Right on, Sister!’

A bell to welcome the New Year began to ring. The first joyful binging and bonging came from Christchurch Cathedral, two or three miles away on its hill in the middle of the city, and then a wave of other bells gathered, rolling towards us from church to church down the Liffey and along the dark streets and across the canal and onto the roofs of our enclave of low brick terraces and little lanes. And suddenly all the ships in Dublin Bay on the other side of Kilbride blew their sirens to welcome midnight in competition with the bells. I threw the window open so that the room filled with a mad cacophony of hooting and pealing, and Min got ‘Auld Lang Syne’ on her radio and the two of us sang along and Bell began the New Year by stalking out the bedroom door in outrage.

From: RosieB@eirtel.com

To: MarkC@rmbooks.com

Sent: 11.25 a.m.

Dear Markey,

I got this address from your Christmas card from Seattle – I hope you don’t mind me using it. I’m contacting you from – guess where? Right. Same old house. I came back because Min had become very reclusive and she was drinking (but only a little bit at the moment, fingers crossed).

Do you remember Colfer’s shop? Mr Colfer who took about half an hour to serve a person anything? Well Peg, his youngest, who’s a friend of mine and has been going out for ever with Reeny’s son Monty (do you remember Reeny? She was very friendly with your mam though she isn’t a bit religious) – anyhow, Peg gave me two books for Christmas – one by a priest I once went on a protest march with, and one by an American woman who used to be married to Seán Bán Breathnach who used to do the commentary on football matches in Irish. Books written to help you through life.

Peg told me that both those writers are now millionaires, and that it’s because people think they’re Irish – well not exactly Irish but Celtic. (It seems people think the Irish fall out of bars and thump each other, whereas the Celts have more class).

The question I want to ask you, Markey, is: Could I not write a book that would give advice to people about how to get through life?

I am as Celtic as the next person. And I am an experienced writer – I attach my CV and you will see that over the years, in a variety of jobs, I have written every kind of promotional and educational and informational material. And I BADLY WANT work that I can do at home, where I can keep an eye on Min because sometimes I think she’s very depressed.

I realise that Rare Medical Books is a book business, not a publisher, but you must know people in the American publishing world? Would it be possible for you to put me in touch with an agent who specialises in this kind of thing? I know this is a long shot but frankly, Markey, from what I’ve seen, a baby could do better than most of the people who write these books. Their strong point seems to be their perky, optimistic tone, but I believe I could imitate that.

To give you an example:

Rosie Barry’s Four-F Programme for the Middle Part of the Journey!

Are you as rich in experience as you are still young at heart?

And do you sometimes feel that neither the challenges nor the rewards of these vibrant years the world calls middle age have had the attention they deserve?

The Four-F programme builds on your wisdom, your joy and the love for others that a life well-lived has taught you. Don’t let the years take you where you don’t want to go. Instead:

Frolic like you always did!

Fear nothing!

Make every day a Fiesta.

And don’t forget, but Forgive!

Thank you in advance, Markey, for any help you can give. Don’t forget that if anyone in the self-help world would like to meet me to discuss this or any other idea, I can easily go to New York.

I haven’t written to you since I sent you a card from Warsaw about Chopin a very long time ago, but I have thought about you and talked to you in my head many, many times.

Rosie Barry