Chestnut Street (16 page)

“It’s James, you know—he’s a junior in Gerry’s office. He’s often spoken about him. James invited me here for the few days, actually. He and I have known each other for about a year and he was thinking that we might get engaged soon.”

“And would you like that?” asked Ronnie.

“Yes and no. I’ve seen so many people’s marriages break up, I don’t want to rush into anything just to say, ‘I’m married.’ When I was sixteen I used to think that it would be lovely to be married; you would have one up on your friends, and that they would all say to each other, ‘Imagine that Marion O’Rourke is married!’ I don’t think like that anymore. I mean it’s committing yourself to one person and one way of life; you’ve got to be pretty sure. James says we can wait a bit—he just wants us to be respectable in front of my father and doesn’t give a damn if we live together. Nobody
in that office is too excited about relationships; hardly anyone has a conventional marriage.”

“No, that’s right,” said Ronnie grimly.

“So, I come here for the odd weekend and he comes to see me, and in the meantime he has his work and I have mine, and if I could get a nice teaching job here, I’d come here, but I think that it’s foolish just to go in and live with someone and expect everything to be marvelous, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes,” said Ronnie.

“I mean, you still teach dancing and everything, don’t you, Miss Ranger … Ronnie? It would be a crime if you weren’t teaching. Think of all the good you’ve done everybody all along the way.”

And slowly and sadly Ronnie tried to think of all the good that she had done for everybody along the way while Marion’s calm, round face looked at her pleasantly and encouragingly.

He was her only son and she knew that nobody would be good enough for him. Not if one of the royal family were converted and the marriage took place in St. Peter’s in Rome. Yet she wanted so much for him to be happy. He had been her whole life. For twenty-two years, since he was a little six-month bundle in her arms and her husband had come in that evening with stars in his eyes and said he was leaving home.

Maureen had been too proud to go back home to Chestnut Street, back to Dublin to the family and friends who would have supported her, sympathized, clucked at the faithlessness of men. There would have been a life, all right, a granny, aunts, uncles, cousins for the baby, Brian. But Maureen had rejected it. Her pride would not let her take the I-told-you-so’s, spoken or just hanging in the air. They had warned her about the handsome man she had loved so instantly and passionately. She had refused to hear a word against him. She had flashed the engagement ring at them triumphantly. Now, they had been wrong, hadn’t they? He
did
want to marry her and honor her until death did them part. Or, as her mother said caustically, until something marginally more interesting turned up.

Something marginally more interesting had turned up when Brian was six months old. The handsome husband had left. But Maureen knew with grim pleasure that he hadn’t stayed long in that nest either. Long enough to father a daughter. After that there were no more children.

He had been an exemplary father, the handsome bounder, he had paid the maintenance, had sent birthday and Christmas presents, had sent postcards and letters, and turned up four times a year for pleasant, cordial visits.

“There’s no way I can ever be a father to you, Brian,” he had said. “I gave up that right when I abandoned you as a baby. But I would like to be your friend whenever you need me.”

He spoke of Maureen with admiration and distant affection as if she had been a faraway cousin, he always praised her, so that she could never, with any sense of fair play, rail against him. She had long stopped loving him, and his compliments only made her smile. A bitter smile, remembering how much she had believed them in the old days, not realizing them to be part of the easy charm that was his stock in trade.

“You should go back to Dublin,” he told his son many a time.

“Why?” Brian wanted to know, not unreasonably. He knew it was his mother’s hometown, yet they never visited it. Relatives rarely came to see them from that side of the sea.

“It’s a great city,” Brian’s father explained, his handsome face lighting up with the good memories. “I’ve been back a few times for work. It’s got a good feel about it, sort of citylike in some ways, with all those huge buildings and bridges over the river, but still it’s like a small town too; you keep meeting people you met yesterday. You’d like it, even as a Londoner I liked it.”

Maureen hated the ease that this man could show about her own city. She had made herself an exile because she couldn’t face their pity and their protective concern, not even for her father’s funeral. But he who had caused it all went back lightly and saw only its good, remembering none of the false promise of the time.

Brian had grown handsome like his father, but she liked to think that he had grown caring and sensible too, qualities he must have inherited from her. He had known that money was always tight, that his mother had worked in a chemist’s selling cosmetics not because she loved this but because it paid the mortgage on their house. Brian knew that there wouldn’t be holidays in Spain like many of his school friends had, nor expensive leather jackets, and not even the mention of a motorbike.

But he did have a bed-sitting room of his own, where his friends were always welcome, and when he began to go out with girls, they too were warmly received at the house. His mother didn’t ask were they Catholics and was it serious. As mothers went, Brian thought, he had been very lucky in his. She was quite glamorous-looking, only twenty years older than he was, nice red-brown hair and freckles. What his father called a Dublin face. He wished his mother had more friends, men friends, even. She couldn’t be totally past all that sort of thing in her early forties. Not if you were to believe all you read these days.

And now Brian was in love, really and truly in love … this time with Paula. He couldn’t believe that she loved him too. She was so beautiful and so sought after. She was playing the lead in the small pub theater where Brian worked as an administrator. People were flocking to see her in this new play. Even the critics from national papers had come to see it. The wall of the pub had a glass case with all the reviews. One review had talked about Paula as a future star and had congratulated Brian by name for his discovery. Brian had a dozen copies of that paper; he carried them everywhere. To have his name and Paula’s together in print. To have himself congratulated on discovering her, even though it was not strictly true, was heady stuff.

Brian had a feeling that his mother didn’t like Paula.

Nothing had been said, nothing ever would have been said. But he knew his mother well enough to sense a freeze. He couldn’t think why. Paula was so polite and courteous every time he brought
her home. It wasn’t that she was an actress; his mother had met and coped with many actress girlfriends before. It hadn’t anything to do with his staying over nights in Paula’s place, because since he had been eighteen she had told him he was a grown-up and must consider himself a free agent.

He wished that his mother would settle down to a girlie conversation with Paula. He would leave them alone a bit, and perhaps a friendship would develop.

Paula and Maureen sat at the kitchen table. Brian had made an excuse and left them for an hour.

Paula looked at the attractive woman with the red-brown hair and freckles on her nose. Why had she never married again? It wasn’t that she was a religious maniac or anything—she seemed quite normal, nicely dressed too, and well groomed. Of course, she worked in a place where she could get free samples and everything. She was perfectly pleasant, but Paula knew that Maureen didn’t want her for Brian.

Maureen looked at the striking girl with the jet-black hair pulled in a spiky frame around the pointed white face. She was a modern beauty, small, graceful and with a confidence that Maureen envied even from a generation away. And she was going to have Brian.

They fought for subjects that would not make them fall into roles. Paula tried not to be the love object and Maureen tried hard not to be the mother watching the only son leave the nest. They did all they could to skirt around it.

Paula talked of her family, who lived in the East End and who all thought it was highly uncertain to be an actress. They’d have liked to see her in a small dress shop, where she could move upwards and become the manageress. Still, they thought it was much more steady, Paula ventured cautiously, now that she had got herself an Irish bloke who had a job in administration. Sounded very safe.

“Do you think of Brian as Irish?” Maureen asked with interest. Her son had never been in her native land.

“Well, of course I do—that’s where you’re from, and his father hasn’t been much part of his life.”

“We don’t go back to Dublin. We think of ourselves as Londoners, I suppose,” Maureen said slowly.

“Wouldn’t you like to go to Dublin?” Paula asked. She thought she was on safe ground here; she wasn’t prepared for the look of anxiety and pain on the older woman’s face.

“Too many ghosts, I suppose, too many explanations,” Maureen said.

“Like do they not know that you and Brian’s dad split up?” Paula asked, bewildered.

“They know but they don’t talk about it. If we went back, then I suppose we’d have to talk about it.”

“Well, the longer you leave it, the harder it’s going to be.” Paula was cheerful, then suddenly a thought struck her. “Hey, why don’t we all go together? Then I’d take the spotlight off you—they’d all be so shocked at me, they’d have no time to think of you and divorces a hundred years ago.”

With a sudden shock of recognition Maureen saw in this girl some quality she had seen all those years ago in the man she married. A quick enthusiasm that just dismissed all other difficulties. It would be impossible to refuse anything to Paula, as it had been impossible for her to refuse that bright, cheerful man all those years ago. Brian would refuse her nothing. She would break Brian’s heart.

There were package weekends to Dublin, and they found themselves booked on one. Brian said it could be considered work for him because he and Paula could go and see whatever fringe plays were showing. Paula said she heard there were some new boutiques she wanted to tour, and Brian said he was definitely going to see the Book of Kells, and Paula said she was going to take a train out ten miles down the coast because there was a James Joyce museum there, and then she was going to a singing pub, and perhaps, if pressed, she might stand up and perform.

They were going to go and eat cockles and mussels in restaurants, they would go to the Guinness brewery and drink the real stuff made with Liffey water. There was the house where Oscar Wilde was born, and the one where George Bernard Shaw lived. The more they talked, the more ridiculous it seemed to Brian that he had never been in this city before. And the more Maureen dreaded their return.

“Will it have changed much, do you think?” Paula asked as they were checking in at the airport.

“It’s twenty years since I left. It will have changed utterly,” Maureen said, her voice sounding very Irish as she said the words. She sat in silence on the plane, and the young couple didn’t try to get her to join their chat. She thought of her mother’s voice. Clipped and curt, as it had been over the years on the few occasions she had telephoned. But of course it would be good to see her, and for her to meet her grandson for the first time. Yes, indeed. And was this girl the fiancée. No, nothing so definite. Quite. Quite.

And they would be staying in a hotel to get value from the package deal. Certainly.

And had Maureen any objection to meeting her sisters and brothers after a quarter of a century, almost, or would it be all right to see them?

Maureen had stammered that she didn’t want anything special organized. Just if they happened to be around, she would love to see them all, that is, if they wanted to see her.

“Well, you’ll see them on Sunday lunchtime,” her mother had said.

Apparently after Mass on a Sunday they all still gathered at their mother’s home. There was often a match on a Sunday nearby, and there were always fifteen or twenty in for soup and a drink. It had been a tradition and they all enjoyed it, Maureen’s mother said crisply. Nothing to do with duty or formality, just a family meeting easily without making demands. Someone brought
a salad, someone brought cheese, another brought wine, another a few bottles of beer. Only an hour or two, but pleasant. Still, of course Maureen probably had her own ways beyond in London, and everyone must live according to the way they had decided.