Читать книгу Best Love, Rosie - Nuala O'Faolain - Страница 17

Sometime during the evening the phone rang. I thought it was Markey of course. ‘Rosie? That you, Rosie? Hello? Peg, there’s something wrong with this. Are you meant to press the green button, hello? This is Monty O’Brien speaking. May I speak…?’

‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing, really,’ Monty said. ‘Nobody’s dead or anything like that. It’s just Min. Little bit of a kerfuffle here. Your auntie was found out at the airport, in the ladies to be precise, and the security people there got Reeny’s number off her and Reeny’s in Spain and I answered the phone so they asked me if I could come and fetch her. I went out for her with Peg, but she wouldn’t come home. She said she has a ticket to New York and she’s going and that’s that. The New York flight tomorrow – no, wait now, that’s today, isn’t it? She said she’s had her passport in her handbag since she went to Nevers with the parish. We rang the Sunshine place but the woman there wouldn’t take her back, so we booked her into a guesthouse down the road that has a shuttle van because Peg has to go home to her da and I’ve a tournament first thing in the morning. So that’s the story.’

‘Had she been…?’ No, I wouldn’t ask. Instead I said a long thank-you to the two of them. ‘So let her come, and welcome! I’ll only be here for what – five days? Monty, could you go in and open a tin for Bell till we get back? They’re in the cupboard – oh, you know. Yes, leave the bathroom window open. See you Tuesday and thank you and I’m really sorry for the trouble. She sure is a hoot!’ I ended, attempting a pleasant little laugh.

But I banged down the phone, then jumped out of the bed and pounded the floor over and back to the window, trying to contain myself.

You’re always ruining everything! I was shouting inside. Always! Even when I thought it was going to be my first day at school you ruined it. I was on the floor and I’d grabbed the new schoolbag that had nothing in it and you said, ‘No, no, you can’t go till you’re four,’ and you walked away. You walked away! You were always trying to be wherever I wouldn’t be. When I was a child you made me go out and play all the time. You didn’t want me near you…

But this wasn’t that, was it? This time, wasn’t she trying to be near me?

And certainly she’d never wanted that before. Even three or four years ago, when I went from Brussels to deepest Burgundy on Sunday trains to meet her when she was on a trip to the tomb of Saint Bernadette of Lourdes, she still didn’t welcome me.

She was standing in the hall of the railway station in Nevers, small and furious, in the buttoned grey raincoat and matching sou’wester hat that she put on, even when it wasn’t raining, if she was going to be with respectable people.

‘I was waiting ages,’ she said.

You could have sat on that,’ I said, pointing to the wide step of the weighing machine. She gave me a theatrically sarcastic look. ‘You could have spread a piece of paper down over it!’

‘Where would I find a piece of paper,’ she said, ‘when I don’t speak the language? I can’t stay out too long,’ she added. ‘We have to be back at the bus at 4 o’clock on the dot – there’s a very nice man in charge of our bus. He has the same name as what’s-his-name that used to be the real gentleman type – the real ballroom-dancing type— ’

‘Maurice Chevalier?’

She nodded impatiently, as if it had been perfectly obvious who she’d meant. ‘Him.’

Then she told me that one of the ladies from Dublin had paid two euro yesterday for a cup of hot water to put her teabag in, but the lady might have got it wrong because she didn’t know how much money she’d had to begin with because her daughter sewed it into her hem.

‘I wish I knew how to talk a foreign language,’ Min said miserably, as we walked out into the grey town. ‘Sure you might as well otherwise be in Kilbride.’

And… yes! What was it she’d said next? It came back to me now. She’d said, ‘The only language I can talk is English. So the only faraway place I could ever go to is America.’

I settled with my Proust on the white sofa, while a pigeon on an overhang just below the window fluffed its feathers and looked at me shrewdly. In the light of a streetlamp I could see into the vacant lot across from the Harmony, where behind the hoarding a homeless person was hauling something across the broken ground to where a pile of bedding as untidy as a magpie’s nest lay beside a fire. The clouds massed over the buildings across the river were pale, but as I watched they turned grey-black and the lights on the far shore dimmed. Oh! The rain-shower moved towards me across the choppy river and I waited, transfixed, until it dashed onto the window in front of me. Such a beautiful thing, the lights coming back through the watery glass as it cleared, sparkling more diamond-bright than ever.

Soothed, I took my emergency apple from the secret compartment of my suitcase and ate it while I read about the first time the narrator saw Saint-Loup. Then I brushed my teeth again and – by now raising an imaginary hat to Min – got back into bed.

It happened some kind of carnival troupe was flying into Terminal 4, and so Min arrived in America amid a welter of little kids dressed up as mice and adult-sized costumed bears carrying purple fairies on their backs. I watched as she stepped, neat as an elf herself, through the sliding doors of the arrivals lounge, and stopped to look wonderingly up at the escaped balloons that jostled lightly under the glass of the roof. So much her ordinary self that she looked extraordinary, wearing the ancient black sweater which she always referred to, with a self-important pursing of her mouth, as her ‘best’. She had a little repertory of women’s conventional expressions; the frowning way they all scrutinise a piece of clothing; or the way they all coo over another’s woman’s baby; or the stern look at a man on a market stall when he’s picking out the tomatoes they’re buying. I knew that my own expressions copied Min’s. But where did Min acquire hers?

She’d stopped again to watch a very big black man who had a marmalade kitten in the breast pocket of his jacket. He was talking to another man as if there wasn’t a kitten there, peering from side to side in keen inspection of its surroundings. Min looked on like a child: immobile, impassive. Her hair, that often got matted when she’d been in bed for a long time, had been brushed and pinned back, and it still had a richness even streaked with white and silver that caught the eye. Altogether she cut a sturdy little figure, with a bulging shopping bag in one hand and her ancient black moleskin coat that smelt of mothballs over her arm.

‘Minnie!’ I called to her, as a trio of tip-tapping young women daintily pulled aircrew bags across her path. ‘Min,’ I called again, at which her head turned unhurriedly. She might have been fascinated by her surroundings but she was perfectly self-possessed.

‘I was going to keep my money in my knickers, Rosie,’ she began without a preamble, ‘but I got talking to an Irish lady who lives over here and she told me there isn’t the same level of theft at all. They want for nothing here, she said, the most of them, so they don’t have any call to feck things. I had two pairs on, to slip the wallet between, but when she told me that I took one off in the toilet. Sure I can’t be going around afraid of my own shadow.’

It was an afternoon of high wind blowing in strong gusts that bowled people along, clutching hats and skirts, across the roadway to the parking lot. Min had dropped back, and I turned to see her watching the small plume of smoke that was coming from a trashcan attached to a pole, and the two heavy men in uniforms who were circling it, speaking self-importantly into walkie-talkies. They were waiting for the fire tender, I heard one of them say, when a boy walked up and emptied his can of Coke into the smouldering trash. The wind then took the can which the boy had dropped and blew it, bouncing and rattling, across the road.

The black taxi driver pulling in beside us was laughing uproariously as a huge fire-truck thundered up. But Min had been struck by something else. ‘Did you see that?’ she said. ‘A whole can of Coke when he could easy have got water.’

Typical. Never asked me how I was, or whether by any chance there was anything I’d rather be doing than hanging around Kennedy Airport to attend to her. Never apologised for all the trouble she’d caused. Didn’t enquire where she’d be sleeping. But … it was such a change to hear her talk after the silence of Kilbride! She was babbling even, perched on the very front of the seat, her head swivelling this way and that.

‘Rosie, aren’t the houses awful small? You wouldn’t think houses would be that small in America. When the people are so big – the ones that come to Ireland, anyway. And— ’

As we were coming over a rise, the driver interrupted her to say that there was Manhattan now.

‘It’s nearly the same as the Sorrento!’ Min cried.

And she was right. A version of a Manhattan skyline was picked out in red tiles on the wall of the Sorrento Fish & Chip, and all our lives we’d had nothing else to look at while Enzo riddled the chips out of the fryer and whooshed them into paper bags. A magic shape doesn’t have to be exact.

She was delighted by the tollbooths. ‘They should do that in Dublin,’ she said – ‘make everyone pay to come in and give the money to everyone who lived there already!’

There was nothing she didn’t have a comment on: a white stretch-limo, music pounding from it; the people who streamed in front of us at stoplights and the different kinds of hats they wore; the number of dry-cleaning shops; a panhandler singing and joggling his paper cup who she said would make a fortune at home, he looked so happy.

I pointed out the UN.

‘Where’s the Irish flag?’ Min said. ‘Wrap the green flag round me, boys!’

‘That Ireland,’ the driver said. ‘That is one sufferin’ country.’

‘Ah it’s not so bad now,’ Min said. ‘It’s gone very quiet since President Clinton came over and made the Northerners talk to each other.’

Is that so?’ he said. ‘Well, thank the Lord Jesus for that.’

‘Where are you from?’ she asked.

‘I’m coming from Sierra Leone, Ma’am,’ he said. ‘In Africa. A sufferin’ country, too. Which you understand, coming from Ireland.’ He was silent for a moment and then he said, ‘But you tell me the good Lord is sending you better times. May it please the Lord Jesus to send His peace to Sierra Leone, too.’

‘Oh,’ Min said, ‘you’re right there.’

‘Let us pray,’ he said.

We were on the West Side Highway now and near the hotel.

‘Our Father,’ the driver began, ‘which art in heaven…’

We picked up the prayer and finished it with him.

She did agree that our room was like something out of Hollywood. ‘A white carpet! Thank God I don’t have to clean it.’ And she also remarked that the girl at the desk was the image of your one who was married to Bobby in Dallas. But otherwise, she had gone back into her old silence, and her eyes kept straying now to the window where the sky showed a wild mixture of magenta and black above the chasm of the highway and the river. I began to feel the usual soreness. ‘Dreams That are Brightest’ had been the one I liked best of the opera aria 78s she used to play on her wind-up gramophone, and this was as near as we were ever likely to get to make a dream come true. Surely she might say something like that? We were on holiday in a room that had a white sofa as long as the window for looking at the astonishing sky, and two big beds covered in silk and velvet throws and cushions, and a telephone beside each bed and one in the bathroom. It was beyond a dream – that one day we would be in such a room, in such a city. And a man who looked like Clint Eastwood – like he looked when he was in his prime, not now – was taking the two of us out to dinner. She had me to thank for that, too.

But ‘What happened back home?’ was all that, within our etiquette, I could say.

‘Ah, that Sunshine was a terrible place,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t put your worst enemy in that place. You should have heard them crying! And we had to sit in front of the television all day and watch the racing.’

‘You had a room of your own,’ I began. ‘You didn’t even have to come out except for meals. And if you were going to run away you needn’t have caused all that trouble in the airport; you could have gone home. If you’re well enough to turn up in America, you were well enough to go home.’

But it so happened that I brushed against her as I was saying this. She was in the kitchen alcove, fumbling in her shopping bag for the teabags she’d nicked from last night’s guesthouse, and there wasn’t room for the two of us when I leaned across her to fill the kettle. So my side touched her side. And when it did, I almost exclaimed aloud. Because I felt from her slight body a deep, anxious quivering that she could not control, even to keep it hidden from me. She was as nervous as a dog. That must be why she’d stopped talking: it must be taking all her energy to keep her face and voice normal. I ran the tap so that she wouldn’t know I knew. I’d glimpsed how much there was, from her point of view, to fear. My anger, now that she didn’t have the presence of the taxi driver to protect her. My questioning; my control over this place. The loss of the expertise she had in her own house.

And there were other challenges. Here was a woman of nearly seventy who’d always lived as simply as anyone well can. Who every week, when she cashed her pension, divided most of the money between the tins marked ESB, Bell’s Food, Gas, Insurance Man and TV Licence and put the rest in a zipped purse in the innermost pocket of her handbag, and that was her administration, done. And here she was flying the Atlantic for the first time, going through US immigration for the first time, making tea with an American kettle for the first time.

‘How about a little nap, Min?’ I suggested.

To which she obediently wrapped herself in a Harmony Suites bathrobe many sizes too big and went asleep instantly on the coverlet.

I stayed on the other side of the room.

I was going to be sleeping a few feet away from her.

That hadn’t happened since Bailey’s Hut. The partition between the two rooms there didn’t reach to the ceiling and when I woke in the early morning I’d hear my father snoring or breathing loud and shallow or mumbling. Once, I heard him singing. I liked his night noises the same as I liked everything about him. When he was showing me how to swim, with me on his back, we snorted and spat and coughed and threw water at each other and fell in and out under the waves and his body was a safe thing that made me fearless. But Min didn’t swim. Min didn’t really go in for touching people at all. The reason I remembered every detail of a night she stayed up with me, on the rug in front of the fire carefully dropping warm olive oil into my ears, was that it was exceptional. She touched me in a matter of fact way every day, of course, dressing me and undressing me. But that night was the only time she wasn’t hurrying. And she wasn’t giving me instructions. She just turned me gently first onto one side, then onto the other.

Then one year a sports field opened a little farther out the wharf road from The Hut, and Min had the idea of her and me using the shower in its changing room – because we had an Elsan chemical toilet but no running water in The Hut. She said that if anyone caught us sneaking through the fence with shampoo and soap and a towel in a supermarket bag we’d be laughing stocks but we’d be clean laughing stocks. So for a few years the two of us took a shower every evening.

We were never caught. We’d wait in the late summer light for the last shouts from the sports-field and for the caretaker to cycle back to Milbay town past our wire fence. Then we’d make a run for the pavilion across the dark grass. Min would hoosh me up and I’d slide my hand inside the window and open it outward. Then I’d let her in and we’d undress in the dark and squeeze under the showerhead, bumping against each other all the time, soapy limbs vying for the one trickle of warm water.

I was never as close to her body again until, in the years after Daddy died, when we hadn’t a penny, and the rates man used to call every quarter, and we had to pretend we weren’t in. We’d squash into the cupboard under the stairs as soon as we got the word he was coming along our street. We were used to it, and he was used to it and Reeny next door, leaning against her doorjamb while he knocked and knocked on our door a few feet away, was used to it. I usually brought the hairbrush into the closet and gave my hair a good brushing. I was quite happy in there. He’d peer in the letterbox and we’d have left the door to the kitchen open and he could see there was nobody there. Then he’d go away.

But it was around that time that Min started going to the pub. She ironed all day, to keep us going, because she wasn’t entitled to a widow’s pension – she hadn’t been married to my da – so until I started in the Pillar we had only supplementary welfare to live on. After five or six hours of ironing she went up to the pub. Then she got into the habit of it.

That was the end of wanting to be near her. Nowadays, when I went up to the Inn myself in the hope that she’d come home with me, she sometimes linked my arm or even tried to hold my hand on the way down the street. And I hated that. Her fingers felt like claws. You don’t mean it, I’d think. You’ve been drinking. It’s not love. I’d make her arm drop from mine as soon as I could, not caring if she realised what I was doing.

I looked down on her now where she was deeply asleep on her side with one arm over her face and the other by her side. Before she slept she’d gathered her important things close beside her on the bed. Her battered tin spectacles case. Her wallet of leather worn as thin as paper. No fewer than six miniature salt and pepper pots acquired on the plane. A small snapshot in a perspex cover of Reeny and Monty leaning on the wall between our backyards, with Bell when she was a kitten perched between them. A blue plastic bottle in the shape of the Madonna that was presumably full of water blessed at Lourdes. Her hand lay near these objects, as if to quickly defend them. The flesh at the knuckles was loose and the back of the hand was sprinkled with brown spots.

If you came at her through the modesty of her belongings, it seemed absurd to be as angry with her as I often was. The hand, with its grimy fingernails, was as small as a child’s. Was she not childlike? I knew Min had no idea how to behave like most women – how to dress herself to be attractive, how to chat, how to use the little, insincere words everyone used to be polite. I knew she’d had no instruction in those things. There was no one to instruct her. Her mother died when she was ten and – because of that – her elder sister, my own mother, ran away.

‘She said she was heading out,’ Min once, very reluctantly, told me, ‘and when I asked why she said “I’m not staying in this place without Mammy.” ’

The dead speak through us, Freud said. And then Min’s father had disappeared a few years later, when she was already taking care of me up in Dublin.

Was it possible to see things a little differently from usual, in this wonderfully new place? Take touch, for example. When Min had fumbled for my hand on our way home from the pub, mightn’t that be something she was trying to say, that she could not say unless she unlocked herself with alcohol?

I lifted her limp hand and held it for a moment.

Nothing. No gush of feeling. I didn’t feel a thing. All the same, it was the first time I had voluntarily touched Min in many years.

‘And beer?’ the waiter said. ‘Cobra beer from India?’

Min might have been Markey’s own mother, so tenderly had he seated her in the Shalimar Balti House, making sure she was comfortable enough before calling over the waiter to explain the menu to the visitor from Ireland.

I waited to see what she’d say about the beer. The barmen in this city were hardly going to be like Decco in the Kilbride Inn, letting her sit there all afternoon, and then nominating one of the men who’d come in for a pint on their way home from work to give her a lift to the corner of our street. Look at her now – oh, I hoped she wasn’t going to drink too much! She looked as young now as if she’d been only hiding during the bad years, rather than growing old. Seated bolt upright with shining eyes, and giving Markey a hard time about ordering the Indian dishes that would be most like Irish ones.

Sometimes at home her eyes shone, too, when she came back from the Inn. But that elation had nothing to do with where she was. The exact opposite was the case. The drink at home got her to a place that wasn’t home, to a place where she could be not herself.

‘Fine,’ Markey nodded absently at the waiter. ‘Min – beer? Water? Tea?’

‘Tea will do. With a drop of milk, don’t forget.’ Of course, Min had known Flo Cuffe. There was a Mr Cuffe in London, the father – people said he was a Protestant and the family had run him off – but Markey hardly ever went over there and when he did, all he was interested in was making it to the second-hand bookshops on the Charing Cross Road. But he loved his mother. He handed her up all his wages – he got a civil service librarian job straight after school and went to college at night – even though she would send off nearly the whole amount to some priest she knew who ran an orphanage in Calcutta.

She’d had an influence on my own life, too, Flo had.

Three years after Markey left Ireland I was in my first year at college – thanks to support from Hugh Boody, my boss in the bookshop where I now worked. I was coming home very late one night from some crisis at the student magazine I helped out on, when a form approached through the mist full of refracted light that had settled on the black street. And when we met on the median I saw that the figure was Mrs Cuffe.

‘Who’s that? Is that Min’s Rosie?’ she said, looking up at me from under her hat. ‘I’m late for Mass, Rosie. I think the clock must have stopped.’

She was so distressed that I had to be careful, so I looked elaborately at my watch. ‘I think the clock was maybe fast,’ I offered casually. ‘Because it’s not late you are – you’re actually a bit early for the Eight O’Clock.’

‘I’ll wait in the church,’ she said in a panic-stricken voice. ‘I’d rather wait than maybe be late.’

‘The only thing is, but,’ I said, ‘they won’t be opening the doors for a while yet. And you could catch your death in this oul’ drizzle waiting outside.’

‘You’re right!’ she said, looking up at me helplessly. ‘But if I go home the clock’s broken.’

So I persuaded her to come with me. Min came down from bed when she heard me talking, and I saw her taking in the fact that Flo had a shoe on one foot and a boot on the other. She knocked on the wall and Reeny came in in her dressing-gown and the two of them started to build up the fire and make tea and talk in an everyday, unhurried way to the old lady.

And that was when Flo had influenced me. I suddenly saw myself standing there, useless. The women didn’t need me. I didn’t fit in.

Markey’s mother eventually said, shamefacedly, that she must have forgotten to eat her dinner she was that hungry, and they made her scrambled eggs and toast with the crusts cut off. And when she began to grow sleepy, they put coats on over their nightclothes and took her across the back lane to her own house. They tried to extract Markey’s telephone number in America from her, but she didn’t know where she’d written it down, so they said they’d come back in the morning. Then they took her into her bedroom, and settled her down with her prayer book and a bottle of Coke before they left.

‘She was never the same after that night, so she wasn’t,’ Min had taken up the story for Markey. ‘I remember Reeny telling you on the phone that you didn’t have to come home, that any of us who had houses with back doors onto the lane would bring Flo her dinner and so we did and it worked out great. She loved her grub, your ma did, and she lived in comfort in her own house until a month before she passed on, and by that stage she didn’t know who she was – you know that yourself.’

Min was earnest as I’d seldom seen her.

‘Honest to God, Marcus, she hadn’t a care in the world. For years when you’d go into the house – you’d just knock and go in – you’d hear her talking away and she’d say Oh Mrs Connors or whatever your name was – she knew who everyone was – I was just talking to The Little Flower. That’s Saint Teresa. Or Saint Bernadette. Or I was just talking to Blessed John Sullivan – that’s a priest there was in Dublin that was very holy – and he was telling me about Heaven. It was never God or Our Lady, I don’t know why. Maybe she wouldn’t have been as comfortable with them. And she had friends from the days when she used to clean the church and from the Sodality and the Third Order of Saint Francis and they were always calling in. And give the priests their due, they brought her back water blessed in Rome and rosary beads from Medjugorje and things like that. And she had money galore, with all you sent her. It wasn’t anyone’s fault what happened to her in the end. Her poor old brain just wore out.’

‘That cottage was more than a hundred years old,’ Markey said after lifting his bowed head.

‘None of us could get over it,’ Min said. ‘It was the grandest little place. It was always warm in there, no matter what it was like outside. Is there any more tea?’

‘Two-foot walls,’ Markey said.

‘I can see why a Protestant would have wanted to escape out of there, all the same,’ I remarked.

They both looked at me coolly.

Markey was so strikingly handsome that nearly everyone who passed the booth looked back at him and then at her, a small woman with silver and grey hair piled up in a haphazard cottage-loaf above a face alight with response. The pair of them were having a great time bantering about Kilbride, the way it used to be when there were hardly any cars and the milk was delivered in rattling bottles and the bread van did the rounds.

He’s so much more relaxed with her than with me, I thought. Seated close to her. Laughing with pleasure at her. Maybe he savoured a woman of his mother’s generation? Or maybe he remembered how he and I had nearly been a couple and that made him wary of me still.

He must have known, the day we went walking down to the Pigeon House, that it would devastate me to be told that he was leaving Ireland – and not sometime in the future, but that very night. Maybe that was why he was being so nice to me about this inspirational booklet idea. Maybe he wanted to make up for that great hurt. Like I’d said in my first ‘Thought’, miracles of restitution offer themselves in middle age.

‘Rosie’s going to write a little book about how to make the most of the middle part of life,’ Markey was telling her, full of enthusiasm.

‘She’s what?’ Min said. ‘Rosie is?’ She surveyed me sternly. ‘Sure what does she know about it? She’s only a young one.’

‘Can’t I find out from you?’ I smiled at her.

‘Yes, now’s your chance, Min,’ Markey said to her. ‘What do you think about middle age? Compared, say, to being decidedly young or definitely old?’

But Min couldn’t rise to the change of subject. Jetlag had caught up with her, and I could see she wanted to bow out of the evening. ‘I was nearly a writer myself, once,’ she said vaguely. ‘I lived in a house that James Joyce the writer lived in. The first time I was ever in Dublin, the bus from the country stopped in Rathmines which I thought was the middle of Dublin so I asked the driver to let me off and there was a sign in the window saying “Room to Let”. So I had a room there for a few days when the baby’ – she gestured abstractly towards me – ‘was still in the hospital. Anyway, there was writing on a stone outside my window which said that James Joyce had lived there between when he was two and five. So I often thought, he must have learned to write while he lived there. He couldn’t have been a writer if he didn’t learn to write. And if I’d have written anything when I was staying there, I’d have been a writer too.’