Chestnut Street (43 page)

Was Michael right about the price of property being on the slide?

Was Tom flying much too high?

Was it time to say something, and, if so, what would it be?

Nuala managed to wait until lunchtime next day before she rang her daughter.

She knew at once from the sound of Katie’s voice.

“I just hoped that the beef casserole was all right?” Nuala asked brightly.

“It was terrific, Mum, as usual,” Katie said in a flat voice. “And I’m so very sorry you had to send your own taxi. There was some kind of mixup or confusion in our firm—we’re changing them anyway.”

“How did the dinner go? Tom’s parents in good form?”

“Not really, Mum. They’re not like you, they’re like Dad. Difficult and they’re full of views and what people should do and what they should have done.”

“Oh, and what was their main problem?” Nuala asked.

“They want us to cancel this party, Mum. We’ve been working on it for months. They say it’s ludicrous and that everyone knows we are broke. Everyone’s broke, Mum, it’s only by putting on a big show that you get them to have confidence in you. Tom’s mum and dad don’t get that. They say we should quit now. Imagine the humiliation of it. We haven’t an intention of doing that.”

“And did it end all right?”

“Not really—they’re not like you, Mum.”

Two weeks after the party, which had not been the huge success that they had hoped for, Katie and Tom faced reality.

Nuala listened as they told the story.

They would sell the house quickly, as quickly as possible.

They could get out of the office premises easily, since the man who owned the building was getting out of the country.

Katie could get a job teaching. Tom would find something. Anything.

Great Christmas ahead.

“And where will you live?” Nuala asked.

They would rent somewhere. A room, maybe. They were in very deep with the mortgage; even when they sold the house there would be more to pay. No room now for fancy living.

Nuala took a deep breath.

Years of saying nothing had paid off but now it was time to say something.

“I’d love it if you were to stay here,” she said. “Eventually we could divide the house—you know, make one flat upstairs, one down. But for the moment would you come and spend Christmas here?”

There was a silence.

Tom shook his head.

“I can’t, Nuala. I already owe you for the deposit,
and
I don’t know what kind of a job I can get and where and as what …”

She paused.

“They are looking for people to push trolleys in the hospital,” she said. “Maybe it’s not what
you
were looking for …”

They both looked frightened and lost. She hoped she had not insulted him in a way that would put her on the side of the enemy, like his parents were already and Katie’s father too.

Then she saw the hope in their eyes. “Oh, Mum, that would be great,” Katie said.

At the same time Tom came towards her, tears in his eyes. No practiced charm anymore, just gratitude and love.

“You were always so wise, Nuala, since the very start—I said it to Katie. ‘Your mother has all the wisdom in the world,’ I said. I’ll go to the hospital tomorrow and see if I can get the job and we would be honored to stay here. Honored, lucky and proud.”

Christmas had often been hard since Michael left; now it looked a lot easier.

She would go back to saying nothing—people seemed to regard it as wisdom.

How wonderful.

The first time I met her was when she had arranged to go on holidays to three separate places with three separate people all at the same time. She couldn’t say no to any of them. Not to Eve, who had just been jilted three days before her wedding and really needed a holiday companion; nor to her sister, who was considered too young to go abroad alone; nor to the crowd at work who needed one more to make up the number in order to get the reduction.

She went nowhere that year, but stayed at home on Chestnut Street. The group went off without her, each paying a grudging two pounds extra; her sister sulked at an Irish seaside resort and said that the world was out there waiting if only she had been able to get to it; and Eve said loudly and often that this life was peopled only by other humans who let you down when you needed them.

I think that Ruth hardly ever did anything in her life without trying to please someone, and with the strange justice of the world, she ended up pleasing very few people and making herself miserable. She is in hospital now, and that’s because she tried to please someone too, but a lot happened before she was admitted to the ward last week.

Ruth was very, very funny about her job in the civil service; she always said that you were sacked automatically if you thought. Thinking was the one crime. If she saw how the work could be made easier for everyone she daren’t say it for fear of disapproval from seniors, who said the younger generation of service people were beyond talking about. If she saw how it could be done quicker they were all afraid that someone might be sacked; if she saw injustices and unfair promotions of people being passed over it was better to say nothing—you were branded a troublemaker and could be sent somewhere awful yourself.

But Ruth was not able to sit forever saying nothing, and in an effort to help a much older man get the promotion he deserved, she did everything in her power and attempted a lot beyond it. She went around to his house and convinced his wife and himself that he was being humiliated, she told her own immediate boss, she threatened to tell the papers about it, and she begged people to sign a petition. With nine brave signatures on the piece of paper she was called in to the supervisor’s office and was told that the man was a hopeless alcoholic; worse, because he was a secret drinker, it was a choice between leaving him where he was doing little harm or getting rid of him. Now she had filled everyone’s heads with dreams of power and nightmares of corruption and nepotism. Reluctantly she listened to proof. It was too late: the man now felt it a matter of principle and resigned over it all; he died two years later.

“He was nearly sixty,” we all told her hopelessly. “He would have had to die sometime from all that drink—his liver was very bad.”

Sometimes her impulsiveness was less dramatic and worrying but equally misplaced. She went to see the headmistress of a school where I taught, saying that I would like Saturday mornings off and I looked tired and she wondered could the timetable be arranged to suit me. That was a beautiful one to try to explain away for a few terms afterwards. She kept ringing the ex-boyfriend
of someone we all knew, saying that she suspected this girl was going to become a nun as a result of the breakup. Words will never describe the confusion and embarrassment caused by all this, but Ruth came out the loser anyway. She bought two tickets for a package holiday for her parents and cried for a week when they wouldn’t go on it at two days’ notice, and she lost her deposit to the travel agency, which made her parents feel terrible about it too.

She took on the position of treasurer for a voluntary committee, was always late for meetings, kept losing the subscription book and saying, “Well, I’m sure you paid anyway,” and filling in the gaps with her own money. They took the treasury away from her and gave her publicity, and she would swear that posters would be up in pubs and shops but would get involved talking to someone with a problem in the first port of call and the rest of the propaganda never saw a wall at all.

She was very reassuring, though. “Of course you should bring that dress back to the cleaner’s—I’ll come with you. You have to be firm; it’s better for everyone in the end.” But she wouldn’t come or couldn’t come, and you would be left looking foolish saying, Yes, yes of course chemicals could only do so much, yes indeed, sorry.

She was the one who would volunteer to give a party for some returned emigrant, but he would be well back in the new land again before she ever thought of him, and yet all the time she meant well from the bottom of her big generous heart.

There’s no point in saying I like her; everyone likes her. You couldn’t dislike someone as full of goodwill as that. She never talked much about herself, which is another rotten reason why you like people. She just said the job was beyond belief, but she got a lot of reading done, and was even thinking of doing a postal course in something during working hours. You never thought of saying that she should better herself, because she seemed just fine where and how she was.

She was never boring about her men either, just exuberant. “Yes, it’s Geoff—remember I told you I met him in Killarney. He’s got the most dreadful friends who all call each other by their surnames, but that’s not the worst thing in the world, I suppose. They play a lot of squash. I’m terribly fond of him, and he gets on very well with my family … but you never know, do you?” And you don’t, because six months later it was, “Michael, a guy who was on this hike thing I told you about: well, he’s not what you’d call very responsible but he’s so kind and good and loves animals, and he is thinking of setting up a sort of dogs’ hospital in his area, if he could get a vet to work part-time for nothing. Do you know any vets, by any chance?”

I was very surprised indeed when she asked two of us for a loan. She couldn’t say what it was for, but she would pay us back. Whoever said you shouldn’t lend money unless you can afford not to get it back was right, because we got some, and then we never saw Ruth anymore. She was too embarrassed to come anywhere we might be, and though it wasn’t the margin between survival and death, it was enough of a barrier to make us think, “What on earth can she have needed it for? And why can’t she pay it back?” And, you see, society being as it is, you can’t ring someone and say just that. They think, reasonably, you are pressing them for the money. So we never asked, and felt a bit cross, and a little bit anxious. But to be honest, I think more cross than anxious.

She married the most unexpected man in the world. Oh, all right, doesn’t everybody, but Ruth’s marriage was out of sight. He was twenty years older than her, separated (or divorced or something vague enough to be mysterious), very wealthy and fairly well known in his own field. They got married in London and had a huge cocktail party afterwards where I hardly knew anyone, least of all Ruth, who was fawning and impressing and telling the most unbelievable things to people: “Yes, I used to work in administration, very interesting, very challenging, but of course I’ll have so much entertaining to do now I won’t be working anymore.” She
gave me the money in an envelope quietly and furtively and said she was desperately sorry and that after two years there should be interest on it, but to thank Mary and give her the money and she hoped we hadn’t been starving.

“Dennis knows lots of people,” she said, with her usual impulsiveness. “You must come around lots and lots, and have dinner and things and meet loads of people. Some of them are single too,” she added darkly, commenting on my unmarried, manless state with disapproval. “You’d never know.”

And indeed, you never would, because it was for once one of the promises Ruth kept. I was deluged with invitations to meet Dublin’s most eligible men, until it became a joke between us all and I would say when we were introduced, “Could you ever marry me immediately and get it all over with?” Which I thought was funny and they usually thought was uneasily funny and Ruth thought was a scream. Dennis didn’t think much of it. But then I didn’t think much of Dennis either, so that evened itself out.

Ruth went on being disorganized and inviting all the wrong sort of people for dinner, and saying that the dessert was going to be fabulous, and it would be raw or burned, and Dennis’s displeasure was greater and greater, and anyway I went off somewhere on holidays and they forgot about me, or at least maybe they forgot or maybe they struck me “off the list.” But I heard that Ruth was still trying urgently to please him, and to please her parents, whom he didn’t like, and to please all her old friends, who would have understood anyway. She made a few classics during those years, like telling a woman who had been trying to have a baby for seven years with no luck that she should “stop this selfish life and settle down and have three children one after the other.” She also gave a surprise party for Dennis on a night when he had a board meeting and didn’t turn up until midnight, when all the guests were drunk and all the food was gone. She alienated her younger sister forever by telling her that she “ought to know” that her fiancé had had a child by someone else, something we’ll
never know or care whether it was true or not. But her sister and fiancé cared to the extent of breaking off their engagement, and Ruth’s sister went to America, from where nobody hears much about her.