Читать книгу Best Love, Rosie - Nuala O'Faolain - Страница 13

Tessa and Peg and I went for ice cream after the movie even though the skirt of the pink suit I was wearing was already showing some strain. ‘You wear that to the pictures?’ Tessa had said incredulously. All very well for her, she’s a foot taller than me and stick-thin and has successfully modelled herself on Jackie Kennedy, little A-line frocks and all.

‘I have to wear it sometime,’ I said defensively, ‘or I’ll get no value out of it at all.’

I’d had no luck with that suit. Min, who was with me the day I bought it, informed the sales assistant that I must be off my head, that anyone with any sense picked a colour that didn’t show the dirt. I remarked that I’d seen nomadic women in the desert near Isfahan who wear lots of pink and are covered in dirt and still look wonderful, and Min gave me her what-a-pain-in-the-arse-you-can-be look. I can’t say I blamed her. Still, as I said to her, I did happen to have lived in all kinds of places and to have seen all kinds of things; and I could hardly stop them coming into my head just to be nice to a person who’d hardly been anywhere.

Min laughed heartily. ‘Miss Hoity-Toity,’ she said.

The ice cream at least stopped me sniffing: I’d cried so hard at Babe that Tessa moved to the row behind us on the grounds that she was getting wet. She looked attractively fit in grey leggings and a white singlet under a thick fleece with her legs strong on bouncy trainers. She never mentioned her exact age, but she must be nearly sixty-two, preparing for the old-age pension, though you’d never think it. A lock of pure silver, like a badge of honesty, swept back through her generally salt-and-pepper hair that I thought was natural but which Peg said might be a clever dye job.

‘Four miles on the treadmill this morning,’ Tessa said. ‘How about that?’

‘How do you not go crazy from boredom?’ I asked. ‘But it sure pays off. You look like a sexy games mistress.’

‘The games mistress at my school was a fat nun,’ Tessa said. ‘Have you got the bridge book? Did you do your homework? Bridge is going to save us from Alzheimer’s. And you’re lucky, you have nothing to do all day.’

‘No it won’t,’ Peg said sharply. ‘If you’re going to develop Alzheimer’s you’re going to develop it.’

Meaning, of course, the fact that her mother had had Alzheimer’s before she died had nothing to do with the fact her mother had never read as much as a newspaper, much less played a complicated card game. Peg always got defensive about her parents.

‘I do not have nothing to do!’ I protested. ‘I have an ambition. I’m thinking about writing a little book, a self-help book, you know like you find at the front of bookshops – ten ways to win your man or the four infallible tips for making a million? I bought a few self-help things for Min about depression and that’s where I got the idea. I mean, I’ve written booklets and articles and publicity handouts. I can do it. So I’m going over to New York in June to see can I break in to the market. I mean, America is where they love those kind of books. By Irish people. Markey Cuffe is going to help me.’

The two of them stared at me. Words, apparently, failed them.

‘Did you say you’re writing a book about depression?’ Peg eventually asked. ‘With Flo Cuffe’s son that sent her all the money?’

‘Not depression.’

‘Well, on what?’ Tess asked.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘I was wondering about growing old. I don’t mean old like old people, I mean how about the changes people like us face, who aren’t old at all but aren’t young either? Don’t people need help with that? Even a small thing, like the brown spots that come out on the backs of your hands – that comes as a shock. You wait for them to go away but they’re never going to. And do you know what I saw in The Irish Times today?’ I took the cutting out of my pocket.’ “The average Irishwoman aged forty and over wants to weigh less than she did at twenty. Most women aged forty and over hate their naked body, according to a new survey, scoring it three-and-a-half out of ten compared with seven out of ten for the body of their youth.” Isn’t that terrible, girls? Hate!’

But Peg, who wore the same chain-store clothes since she was a girl, having moved maybe three sizes up over the decades, just smiled in an absent-minded way. Today she had blue jeans on her stocky, competent bottom-half and a blouse with a little frilly collar and puff sleeves on her top. Still, she was pushing it with a blouse as tweetie-pie as that.

‘I wouldn’t call it terrible, Rosie,’ she said mildly. ‘There’s a lot of things I’d call terrible before I called that terrible.’

‘What, like?’

‘Well, cruelty, say. Cruelty to children, say. Or to animals, even.’

‘Oh sure,’ I said. ‘But if hating ourselves is ruining our lives there’s cruelty here, too. Women are being cruel to themselves on behalf of whoever hates women so badly that they can’t accept their bodies whatever way their bodies happen to be.’

I was breaking an unwritten rule. The three of us never talked to each other about our physical selves. Weight, we talked about, nothing else. Though when we were young Tessa and I would sigh and giggle and lift our eyes to heaven and shake our heads at the goings-on of men; and Peg did the same, later, before she settled down with Monty; all this as if we understood each other so perfectly that we didn’t need to use words. But the truth was that we would not use them. Our intimacy was based on reserve.

And so I’d brought along the cutting on purpose, to see whether we could move closer than that. How was it that the passage of time, all-destructive in so many other ways, didn’t lessen the powerful ideal of being thin? The women in the study, after all, were older women; they weren’t out there on display looking for a mate. Was it a modern woman’s fate, to turn against her own body? Did my friends look with pain and astonishment at the signs of ageing, the same as I did?

‘C’mon Peg,’ Tessa said without taking her eyes off me – as if I were dangerous. ‘Ask me a question.’

Peg opened the book. ‘In calculating the value of a hand,’ she read out, ‘what points are given for the ten of spades in a hand where Ace, King, Queen, Jack of spades are the only honours?’

‘Do you count it at all?’ Tessa said anxiously after a pause.

You do not. Good girl. Now, Rosie. What does an opening bid of one club signify?’

‘That must be further on than page five,’ I said, ‘I’m only at page five.’

‘We have to learn while we’re still in our prime,’ Tessa said. ‘It’ll be too late afterwards.’

‘I hate those words, “too late”,’ I said vehemently. ‘Too late for what? If I do manage to write something, it won’t be in the shops till I’m nearly sixty, but what will that be too late for?’

‘What shops?’ Tessa said.

‘What?’

‘What shops?’

‘All the shops. Everywhere.’

‘Like – like How to Win Friends and Influence People?’ Peg asked.

‘Like Sex and the Single Woman?’ Tessa asked.

‘Well, that sort of thing,’ I began.

‘But what do you know about anything!’ the two of them said in perfect unison, as if they’d rehearsed.

‘Well, that’s just it!’ I said. ‘I’m just like all the other poor schmucks who don’t know what’s happening to their bodies and their brains, nor what to do about it!’

They were silent again.

‘And anyway,’ I said, ‘I have to do something about myself. You two seem to be content with the way things are for you, but I’m not. I mean, leaving Min out of it, what do I have in mind for my own life? Nothing, is the answer.’

There was an uneasy silence as we got into Tessa’s car and queued to exit from the car park. Tessa was pretty contemptuous, usually, of women who ‘let themselves go’. She might think that the least an overweight woman could do is hate herself. But I couldn’t really predict what she’d think, even though we were old friends. When I knew her first, when I got a job in Boody’s Bookshop after leaving The Pillar Department Store, Tessa was having some kind of relationship with Hugh Boody, even though she was the shop steward and he was the boss. For years the two of them went to the opera together all around Europe. We girls who worked in the store were inclined to believe that was all it was, a friendship based on love of singing. We were young. We thought they couldn’t be sleeping together because Tessa looked like Audrey Hepburn and Hugh Boody, who looked like a gentle horse, was twice her age.

Their relationship had fascinated Min. ‘Where are they now?’ she’d say. ‘Where are they now?’ A temporary secretary once saw a receipt for a room in Parma for Signor and Signora Boody, but of course that signora could have been Mr Boody’s real wife, a lady with grey hair and an English accent who never remembered our names.

‘Where’s Parma?’ Min asked when I told her, making me point the name out on a map of Europe. Though I don’t know that Min really understood how maps work – seeing she always made me show her which bit was Ireland.

Tessa and Hugh Boody were – whatever they were – for a long time, and his name would come into the conversation every time I came back to visit, until one day, about ten years ago, when Min in her roundup of gossip said she’d kept the newspaper with a write-up about Mr Boody, and a picture of him at the races only a week before he died.

‘He’s dead!’

‘He died in a taxi,’ Min said. ‘The poor taxi man must have got an awful fright.’

She got the obituary for me and I read it later, up in my room.

I thought about writing a proper note of sympathy to Tessa, but before I did she heard I was back, and called to the house to see me. I intended to hold her hand or something like that and say I was sorry, but I didn’t get round to it and eventually she said that she missed Hugh a lot, but that she’d been able to retrieve the money on their season ticket to Covent Garden. It was the perfect reminder I always got, sooner or later when I came back to Kilbride, of how people there kept certain emotions to themselves. You were allowed to be dramatic, but not really revelatory.

We were crawling now towards Kilbride, stuck behind a mobile home with a GB plate, when I said, to lighten the mood, ‘Bloody English. Eight hundred years of brutal oppression and now this.’

‘Nine hundred,’ Peg said, ‘because we’re in the 2000s now. Did you know that it ended up that a Catholic wasn’t allowed to own a horse? That’s what my da told me. That’s one of the reasons he always kept a few horses when he could find somewhere around Kilbride to graze them. He didn’t even like horses. But he did it because the English came over and they took our land and they kept us down by force and they treated us worse and worse the longer they were here.’

‘I didn’t know you felt like that, Peg,’ I said, surprised. ‘I knew you were a Catholic – I mean, a real Catholic, sure we’re all the other kind. But I didn’t know you waved the green flag, too.’

‘What’s wrong with being a Catholic?’ Peg said truculently. ‘I go to Mass on a Sunday. Monty goes to Mass when he stays in our house. Eighty-something per cent of the population of the Republic of Ireland go.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with being a Catholic,’ Tessa said in a soothing voice. ‘Rosie didn’t say there—’

‘She implied.’

‘She didn’t imply.’

‘If I didn’t, I meant to!’ I yelled. ‘I don’t know how you can kneel there, Peg – kneel – in front of a man who calls himself a priest, who belongs to an all-male organisation that specialises – specialises – in bullying and frightening women. The Taliban of their day they were, and still are wherever they can get away with it. Telling poor African women with twenty AIDS-ridden children to be thankful to God they haven’t committed the sin of contraception! Sitting on their fat arses in Rome as if it’s the most normal thing in the world to sit around in frocks, making up things for God to say. No wonder I left Ireland. Everyone should leave Ireland. Women particularly should get the hell out from underneath the gunmen and the priests— ’

‘The priests aren’t God!’ Peg cut across me. ‘It’s all the people together who are the Church, and God is in the love they have for each other.’

‘Tell that to the Pope!’ I cried. ‘Tell that to some poor woman crawling along with a prolapsed womb! Tell— ’

‘Jesus Christ!’ Tessa shouted. ‘Will you two shut up!’

I took deep breaths as silently as I could. Peg always got angry with me at least once a meeting. It always upset me, too. I’d tried suggesting to her a few times that though she had never left her childhood home, I didn’t feel that I was any better than her. I’d said that though I’d travelled, travel is mundane enough when you have very little money. But it hadn’t been mundane. There was a morning, a very early morning – and the memory of it is only one of thousands of memories – when I waited for a bus in a taverna in a village in the Mani, where the Greek men stood in the half-dark at the counter drinking their coffees and rakis, and the lamp flickered in front of a wall of icons, and a golden dawn moved across the cobbles of the old square towards the open door. Was I not indeed enviable, because there had been moments like that? If it had been the other way around, and it was me who had never travelled, I’d surely have envied Peg.

‘I’m sorry, girls,’ Peg whispered. ‘I don’t know why everything’s getting to me these days. I’m taking Saint John’s Wort but I don’t think it’s doing me any good. I think I’ll go back to acupuncture.’

‘Acupuncture is only a distraction,’ I said. ‘We have deep needs, all three of us, and— ’

‘You’ve hit the nail on the head!’ Tessa interrupted me. ‘Needs! Why don’t we talk about my needs. Actually, I do have a bit of news you might be interested in.’

‘Tess!’ we said. ‘What?’

‘But since I’ve just spotted the only parking place within an ass’s roar of Rosie’s house…’

‘Oh, Tess baby!’

‘Wait!’

‘Hurry up, can you, Tess?’ Peg said. ‘I promised I’d get back to my dad before eleven.’

‘I’m tired telling you that you make a martyr of yourself to that man,’ Tessa said, turning off the ignition.

I settled myself in happy anticipation. I enjoyed Tessa very much, and whatever it was she was going to do, it would be a practical, intelligent action. She acted where I brooded.

She waited a moment before addressing us.

‘Girls, I am not satisfied with the way things are; the way Rosie said I was. I’ve decided to make a change.’

A bell somewhere far away rang the hour. Markey used to know each Dublin bell so well that he could tell you which church it belonged to.

‘I would have told you,’ Tessa said. ‘But, you know, I wasn’t sure till today that I’d go through with it. But this morning I was in a bit of a confrontation with Paschal Kelly, director of the Counselling Training Centre – El Creepo as he is called by his staff – because I happened to say that I was thinking of going to a hotel for a spa break and he made a smart remark about you single people being free to follow your fancy but married men, alas, having commitments they could not escape. He actually said “Alas”. Anyway, I said, “Paschal, your kids are somewhere around forty years old, so if they’re still a burden to you there’s something dreadfully wrong.” But it got me thinking again, all the same, about being single, about the difference between it and being married.’

‘But you’ve always been so contented, Tess!’ I said, while Peg simultaneously exclaimed, ‘But I thought you liked being single!’

‘Remember the smell of the gorse around that place you used to rent up in Kilternan?’ I said. ‘Remember the party you threw the year the snow came right up to the windows? Remember Boody’s was closed when the pipes froze and a gang of us got out to you somehow with a case of wine and enough smoked salmon to open a shop?’

‘That was thirty years ago, Rosie,’ Tessa said.

‘Thirty?!’ Peg said in a low voice.

None of us moved.

‘I figured out that I wanted to make people’s lives better,’ Tessa said. ‘That’s why I’m training for counselling. I mean, I was in the union for that too, but there was a whole load of Neanderthal men to get around first. But it isn’t just other people I want to counsel –’ she gave a little cough – ‘well, actually, I want some insight for myself.’

She went on after a moment. ‘So I’m thinking of linking up with Andy.’

I think my mouth must have fallen open. Andy! Andy was a kind of brother. Who, when he came up from the country to visit his mother Pearl, mended our broken appliances and brought us eggs and so on. But nobody had ever thought of him as a man. In fact, he had a slow, vacant manner that drove me, for one, nuts, even though I knew perfectly well that he wasn’t vacant, that he was in fact a thoughtful person and a decent one.

‘Does Andy know?’ Peg said after a minute.

‘He doesn’t,’ Tessa said. ‘But who else is going to make an offer to a small farmer nearly sixty-four years of age, a real hard worker, but very quiet? The farm’s not big enough for a young one who’d want a family and anyway he’s always on the road collecting his animals for Africa. Auntie Pearl is well into her eighties and she worries about him night and day. And, like’ – Tessa paused, because she never said anything sentimental if she could avoid it – ‘I’d like her to die happy, the old lady,’ she said, shyly. ‘It would mean a lot to me.’

‘But, Tess!’ Peg and I said at the same time, before I continued by myself. ‘Tess, you’d have to sleep with Andy. Clothes off, same bed, husband-and-wife kind of thing.’

‘I know that, thank you,’ Tessa said sarcastically. ‘I know what it entails, even if we are related.’

‘But Tess, what about Andy? Have you asked him?’

‘Nobody asks Andy anything,’ she said. ‘Andy is told.’

Once again there was absolute silence in the car.

The evening star had already gone under the horizon but the pavement ahead and the branches of the apple tree in Reeny’s yard that the kids didn’t bother to rob any more were bleached by chilly April moonlight. I couldn’t stop shivering in the house, waiting for the radiators to warm up. Min crept around turning them off no matter how often I told her we could afford the heating. Yes, she’d been down: the kettle was still hot and the kitchen radio was playing softly, someone singing Handel:

‘The trumpet shall sound, And we shall be changed, We shall, We shall, We shall be changed.…’

Marrying was different when you were too old for babies. Tessa could easily be a granny, couldn’t she, say if she’d had a daughter at twenty and that daughter had a daughter at … yes. A great-granny, even. Andy would have been a lovely father, too. Would he think about that – that if he married Tessa his chance at that was lost? He mightn’t be what you’d call attractive, but he was as kind as you could imagine. That’s why everyone pushed him around. His place in Carlow used to be a sort of depot for all kinds of pets. One of his cats, for instance, he’d found in a sack on a riverbank, with a leg broken. The leg had knitted in such a way that it dragged after the cat with the paw turned outwards, but it was a wonderful cat. He had beautiful, black hens that a Lady Something had left him in her will, as a fellow-enthusiast of rare breeds. And he looked after a floating population of horses and donkeys.

Almost every one of his pets had to be sent away when he put himself on call to drive his truck to England whenever there was a plane ready to take the No-Need animals to Africa. But not one of us had ever really thought about what the loss of his menagerie might have meant to him. That was what was so shocking about Tessa saying she was going to marry him: no one had ever taken his feelings seriously.

Andy could easily father a baby. It makes no difference to babies what their fathers look like. They gurgle away anyway, don’t they? Saul Bellow looked like a sick basset-hound there towards the end, but his girlfriend was delighted to have his baby. Charlie Chaplin still looked great if you liked small old men, but God he was eighty-five, wasn’t he, the last time? Wouldn’t you think his willie would be just too tired to stand up? And then he’d hardly said hello to the child and he was dead. They said it was the Irish air caused the baby – he and the wife were on holiday in Kerry nine months earlier. Rostropovich. Did Rostropovich father a baby or was that some other Russian cellist with age spots? Not that growing older doesn’t make some men even more attractive. Look at Bill Clinton: gorgeous to begin with and even more gorgeous since his heart thing. Women in their sixties had real beauty too, a few of them, but not the kind he had – not the kind that made your belly contract. People don’t crowd around women his age, wanting to devour them.

I was climbing into bed when I remembered that once, outside Trinity College, a man was standing beside me waiting for a break in the traffic, and when we accidentally looked towards each other, I realised it was Paul Newman: grey cropped hair, eyes still marvellously blue in a handsome face, body limber under the perfect business suit as he set off across the street. Wait’ll I tell Min that Butch Cassidy’s out there somewhere! I thought. But after a moment I decided that he was a bit too tailored for me. A bit too perfect, whereas I liked my men rumpled.

I started to laugh at the thought of it – a nobody Irishwoman who lived with her aunt in Dublin turning up her nose at Paul Newman because he was too well-groomed.

But I drifted into sleep thinking about Tessa’s last words.

Of how she’d swung around in the driver’s seat just as I was stepping out of the car, and looked at Peg and me, and said, ‘I see it in our counselling sessions all the time. People are dying of loneliness every day.’