The Shelter of Neighbours (19 page)

As soon as he speaks she recognises the voice. She takes a good look at him, as he stands there on the uneven rocks, with the sky all blue behind him. His grey hair turns black before her eyes. His young face emerges from his old face, where it is buried, to be discovered by those who know how to find it.

Pádraig. She was ‘going with him' (that's what you did then, you went with a person) from the 10th March 1972, which is when she met him at a dance in college, till the 15th June 1974, when he went elsewhere. To America, just for the summer. She was to go, too, and if she had, she might still be with him. Going with him, to wherever people who stay together go in the end. But at the last minute she got cold feet. Her mother was encouraging, but her father had reservations. The
us
. Anything could happen there. What if Pádraig abandoned her? What would she do then? ‘Ara, couldn't she just catch the plane and come home?' said her mother. ‘And he won't abandon her, what would he do that for?'

The religion thing was never mentioned. But it was there, nevertheless, unvoiced, like a huge mountain hidden in fog. (They didn't know – how would you? – that when the fog cleared, the mountain would have disappeared, melted away like sugar in water.)

In the end she didn't go to America. She just couldn't face being away from home, from her mother and father and the house she had lived in for such a long time. She wasn't ready to leave.

During the first weeks, Pádraig wrote letters and postcards. There was no question of telephone calls from America in those days. After a month, the letters stopped coming. And she never heard from him again.

‘Yes,' she says now. So she is still recognisable. She wishes, how she wishes, that she looked smarter. She hasn't even bothered to comb her hair. The green cardigan is about twenty years old. The sleeves are black with coal dust, from emptying the ashes, something she noticed yesterday but she wore it, anyway. And the trousers are work trousers, not sporty-looking, not feminine. (She remembers that Pádraig had preferred skirts on girls.) Her hair is a rat's nest. If she'd even stuck a scarf on to cover it up. But how could she have known that half of Dublin would have the same idea as herself? Would heed the weather woman's advice to get out and enjoy the good day? She hadn't thought she'd meet anyone at all on the mountain. Still less this man whom she hasn't bumped into since June 1974.

‘How are you?' he asks, in a calmer, kinder tone.

His voice had always calmed her down, made her feel all right. He was the only person who could do that for her. Ever. She had loved him much more than her father or her mother or her brother or anyone she met in later life (two other men, including Brendan). The realisation, which should have come to her that summer all those long years ago, is like a light going on in her brain. A light that makes her feel very sick and very well at exactly the same time.

‘I'm grand', is what she says.

‘We should meet sometime in more comfortable circumstances,' he says, smiling. ‘Can I give you a call?'

‘That would be nice,' she says. ‘I'm in the phone book.'

‘Under your own name?'

She admits it.

‘Yes, my own name. Bailey, Audrey.'

‘I can remember that!' he says, grinning. He looks up at the top of the mountain. ‘Well, don't let me keep you from your climb. This last bit is hard but it's worth it.'

‘I'm sure it is,' she says.

After forty years, he doesn't want to keep her from her climb.

She wants to scream, stay, stay. She wants to grab him by the black anorak and keep him here on the side of the scree.

Already he has started to go down the slope, facing away from her this time. Even though there are several people trying to get past her, she stands for a full minute watching him retreat. The back of his head. His trim body in its black jeans and anorak. A woman is coming towards her now, down the sugary slope. Something tells her this is Padráig's wife. Younger than him. And good-looking. Lots of women who are not good-looking have husbands. But not husbands like him, successful and presentable and talkative. They always get pretty wives and if you're not pretty, you just won't do.

Audrey never said this to herself before. It's simple when you realise it.

Someone should tell the girls at school.

Or maybe they know that. They know so much. And so much has changed. Nobody cares whether you're Catholic or Protestant. Nobody cares whether you're married or single, either. (The girls paint their eyes, though, and diet, and care dreadfully about clothes. So they do care about something, although it's not quite clear what, or why.)

Audrey reaches the top. And there are the twelve German girls, in their light, white blouses, their long hair blowing in the wind. They are standing on the crest of the Sugar Loaf in a circle. They must have passed her by when she was taking her rest on the ridge beneath.

Last Friday she had 4C for English, last class of the week. It's never easy. They get so giggly and so damned silly. But she knows how to deal with them. Mountains of work if they dare to step out of line, she threatens them with. Not that they bother doing it, that's the trouble. She has to send them to the Principal then. And the Principal is getting fed up with her, but what can she do? it's not her fault. She was late for class on Friday, she'd stayed too long with 1B. They've been in the school for less than two months, so they haven't learnt to be brats. She was nearly ten minutes late. The door was closed and there was the usual cacophony of noise inside the room. Bracing herself, she opened it.

Jessica Black was sitting on the teacher's desk. She was draped in a big red coat, which looked just like Audrey's coat, however she'd managed to get her hands on it. Her hair was pulled back into a bun and she had painted a big black moustache on her face.

‘Girls, girls, girls! Quiet please, girls. You're so bold,' she said.

‘Please, Miss Bailey, where does your big black moustache come from?' Rebecca Murphy said. ‘Can we shave it off for you?'

‘No,' said Jessica Black. ‘If you did that, I wouldn't be the ugliest woman in the school, would I? Now, open your novel, girls. I hope everyone has read Chapter Five?'

There are clouds in the distance, over Enniskerry and Powerscourt. A few swathes of rain, like cobwebs hanging in the valley. But they won't make it here. The woman on the weather promised. All sun and no rain. Those veils of rain will evaporate before they reach this mountain.

She takes off her green cardigan.

The German girls are dancing now on the crest of the mountain, in a ring, their white blouses fluttering, their hair floating on the wind. She knows she should go and offer to take a photo of them now that they are at the top of the mountain. Before and after. If she were a different sort of person, she would do that. It would be easy. It would be a kind and friendly act.

But she doesn't.

She sits down on the heather.

In the clean air the laughter of the German girls sounds like a nice nocturne by Chopin or John Field. It is the very sound of human delight. On her bare arms, on her bare face, the sun is warm and sweet, like the breath of someone you love dearly.

Below, the cars glide noiselessly along the N11 like toys. Then the sea. Bobbing sailboats, and the big white ferry slowly making its way eastwards. Pale blue, dark blue, azure. On the horizon a bumpy grey line, and a triangular peak rising out of the bumps.

It could be some sort of cloud formation. But she knows it's not. It's Wales, and the triangle is Mount Snowdon. They say you can see it, on a really clear day, from the top of the Sugar Loaf. She had always heard that, but she had never really believed it. Who would credit that you can actually see another country from the island of Ireland, which always seems so far away from the rest of the world?

The house is a holiday house, one of dozens dotting the landscape around here, each one perched in its own scrap of field, overlooking its own septic tank. Polly can see the chunks of thick white pipe sticking up from hers, her tank for the moment. The pipes are the main feature of the field, or garden, or patch of lawn, or whatever it might be called, which surrounds the house. The other feature is the well, a concrete block with black pipes emerging from it and snaking across the grass to a hole in the wall of the kitchen.

Polly had lived at home in this valley until she was almost eighteen. Her father was a teacher in the village school, and her mother a stay-at-home mother. She baked, milked cows, scrubbed the house, and was very particular about her religious duties, although not, thought Polly (not called Polly then, but Póilín), very seriously religious. Anyway, she made fun of the ladies who became
ex officio
keepers of the church, arranging the altar flowers and pandering to the priest and his every need, although she must have known that such women were found everywhere, were essential to the efficient running of the parish. Without them, there would certainly have been no flowers, no choirs, no special ceremonies on local feast days. Without them, the priest would have provided the bare necessities – Mass on Sunday, confession once a week, no frills. ‘My New Curate', Polly's mother called the local women who provided all that decorative trimming of song and flowers and extra special prayers. However, she would never have missed Mass herself on Sunday; wearing a showy hat and white gloves, she and Polly sat with Polly's father in the first pew. This was the time when men and women sat on different sides of the church, but Polly's mother protested; she sat on the men's side. It was not a blow for gender equality but quite the opposite. She sat there to proclaim her superiority to all the other women, in their headscarves and dark old coats, or their trousers and anoraks. In the parish, she felt like royalty, and Mass was the appropriate context in which to give public expression to this attitude.

The family observed other essential religious formalities, some seemingly private in themselves but linked by invisible threads to the social and cultural web that enmeshed everybody. For instance, they said the rosary every night after tea, praying for the souls of the departed dead and also for living souls to whom they were closely related or who had power and prestige. They prayed for their cousins, the Lynches and O'Sullivans, in Cork and Tipperary, and for Eamon and Bean de Valera, and they prayed for the Taoiseach, and they prayed for the Archbishop of Dublin and the Bishop of their diocese. They prayed for the Inspectors of Education, who would descend on the school once a year and ask the pupils insultingly silly questions, and for the county football team. It seemed to Polly that this praying strengthened their connections to these people; it seemed to her that she had some role when the county won the All-Ireland final in Croke Park. She might have been a cheerleader, not that she knew the word then. She was a silent supporter speeding her team to victory, and she had a hand, too, in the running of the country. Then sometime in the late sixties, the rosary stopped. It seemed as if all Irish families reached some communal decision overnight, or as if someone in a position of authority had issued an edict and all the Catholics of Ireland obeyed it. Could there have been some telepathic referendum? Anyway, it stopped.

Polly's mother was different from the other mothers in the valley. Polly would have found it difficult to pinpoint in what this difference resided, but, if pushed to select one word, would have said ‘old-fashioned'. Her mother did not like to wear make-up; indeed, she never even owned a lipstick. Her clothes were slightly out of date – excessively elegant white lace blouses and long skirts – when other, younger mothers had slacks with straps under the insteps and tight polo-neck jumpers. She never wore trousers, even though a lot of her work was out of doors with the cattle and in her garden. At night she liked to do embroidery, executing tiny white flowers on white table runners, broderie anglaise, although she called it Mountmellick lace.

Polly's mother was snobbish. She was not a native of the valley, but of a big town, where her family had been leading lights in the Irish language movement. It was thanks to this that she had come to the valley to learn its dialect, and there met Polly's father. Now she lived in a simple way, but she still considered herself and her family a wide cut above most of her neighbours, and this sense of difference coloured every single aspect of her life. That was probably why she did not wear lipstick or mascara, or slacks, and it is definitely why she did not go to bingo on Thursdays with all the other women. Polly accepted her mother's self-assessment, and believed that she was more ladylike, more refined, more valuable, than other people's mothers, although she often felt more comfortable in those other people's kitchens than she did in her own.

The view is sublime. That's what Polly was told all the time she was growing up. That she lived in the most beautiful place in Ireland was drummed into her, along with tables and catechism and alphabet. She believed it as certainly as she believed that God made the world, or that Ireland ununited could never be at peace, or that Gaelic was the one true language of Ireland and eventually would be spoken by every Irish citizen. In fact, she probably believed in the beauty of the place more profoundly than in any of those other tenets of the local faith. It seemed verifiable. The crashing waves, the grey cliffs, the purple mountains; did these not, in their awesome wild grandeur, constitute perfect beauty? But even then she felt drawn to nature in its more intimate manifestations: a tern breaking the surface of the sea, a seal poking its shiny nose above the black water, hares boxing among the rushes at Easter. The little flowers that bloomed from May to November in a relentless routine of colours. Primroses, violets, orchids. Saxifrage, the colour of bloodshot eyes. Eyebright, selfheal. But she was not enjoined to admire such details. They were taken for granted, like the hidden natural resources, the still unpolluted wells, the little farms that kept the valley humming in tune with the seasons. Somehow she deduced that all of this minor nature was commonplace, perhaps occurred in places that were not the most beautiful place in Ireland, perhaps in places not in Ireland at all.

There are no flowers in the fields now, because it is December. Rushes sprout like porcupines among the tussocks, and the rusty tendrils of montbretia spread themselves here and there in limp abandon. Otherwise nothing. What a month to choose for a dramatic return! Polly turns from the window and decides to light a fire, the traditional antidote to the gloom outside. When the briquettes are blazing in the grate and she is sitting in front of it, with a glass of red wine in her fist, she feels happier. Unlike its garden, the house is attractive, designed according to some international template for country cottages, with wooden roof beams, rough white walls, a slate floor. The fire makes it perfectly cosy.

When she was twelve, Polly went to secondary school in the nearby town, travelling by bus every morning and evening. The bus was a new idea; until recently anyone who could afford to go to secondary school from this area would have had to board, and Polly's mother wanted her to go away, as she had, to a convent in the middle of Ireland, where she would learn to recognise how superior she was to her neighbours. But her father opposed this; he wished to encourage his pupils to avail themselves of the new educational opportunities. Polly had to set an example. She had to use the free bus. Her mother agreed reluctantly. If she had had the faintest idea of what went on in the bus, her resistance would have been stauncher. It was much more vulgar than a bingo hall. It was worse than the pub, to which her mother never went; it was as bad as the disco that was held in a hotel outside the town on Saturday nights. Boys on the bus teased, cursed and swore. Girls huddled in the girls' section and either pretended not to pay any attention to the barrage of insults and mock endearments that was constantly fired at them from the boys' section, or they encouraged the boys, subtly, by glancing at them in a knowing, sly way, or overtly, by joining in and giving as good as they got. ‘Give us a kiss.' ‘Have you got your Aunt Fanny?' ‘Fancy a carrot? Try this on for size.'

There were two kinds of girl on the bus: slags and swots. The slags wore thick beige make-up over their acne, and had long spiky eyelashes, a sort of badge of slagdom for all the world to see. Their hair was usually artificially coloured or streaked, or looked as if it was, although one might wonder why this should be, since they were aged between twelve and eighteen. But maybe they coloured their hair as they coloured their eyes, just to show the world who they were, just to show that they were defiantly, proudly sexual, just to show that they were not like the swots. The swots wore no make-up, and their hair was usually left severely alone and tied back from their faces with bands or ribbons. Or it was short, although that became more and more unusual as the sixties dragged to a close. The swots sat together at the front of the bus, quietly chatting among themselves about teachers and homework, and ignoring what was going on around them. The slags chewed gum ostentatiously, with the slow, long chews slags specialised in, and cast their sidelong, odalisque looks at the boys. The looks were also slow, slowness being one of the chief slag characteristics. What's the rush, their sauntering swagger seemed to say arrogantly. Time belonged to them and they had lots of it.

Sometimes a boy and a slag, who were going together, tried to share a seat and hug and kiss en route, but this was not allowed by the bus driver. Girls and boys were not supposed to sit together. The bus driver was a man aged about sixty, Micky the Bus, who, though old, was sharp as a razor. He tolerated almost everything, except sitting together and canoodling. If he caught a couple breaking his one rule, he threw them off the bus. It was against the rules of the Department of Education, but that didn't bother Micky. He knew, quite rightly, that the Department would never find out what he had done. He knew that his word was law on this bus. This was before the days of litigation and before the days when children or teenagers were aware that they had any rights at all. Nobody would have dreamed of questioning Micky's absolute authority on his own bus, not even the beigest, blondest slag.

Once in town, boys and girls separated, going to their gender-specific schools – girls to the nuns and boys to the Christian Brothers. They never really understood what went on in the different schools, and this mystery about how the other half actually spent their day added spice to their lives. Polly, long before she was interested in any specific boy, felt it when they got out of the bus at the bank and the blue-clad boys all walked off in one direction, gaining dignity when revealed to their full height, their long, thin, blue and grey bodies moving purposefully up the hill to the grey castellated structure that looked like a fortress or a prison. She found them interesting then, and intriguing, as they disappeared into the secrets of their days.

There was a loneliness about going in the other direction, with the flock of girls in brown skirts and blazers, to a place as ordinary as a bowl of cornflakes. Polly felt that where she was going lacked importance, although, as soon as she got there, everything that transpired seemed important enough, and challenging. She was a good student.

A good student. She had to be, to satisfy her mother and father. And it was not easy to keep it up. Not because she was not clever, or interested in her work, but because her friends did not approve of her academic achievement. Polly was in danger of going too far, which would have pleased her parents but outraged the girls in her class. So when she found herself speeding up – finding that she could enjoy reading history, or botany, derive a pleasure from learning and understanding, which was true satisfaction, not just the fulfilment of an urge to please some adult – she sensed some sort of danger. She held back. It was not so hard to do, and involved nothing more onerous than not reading as much as she was supposed to, half-doing her homework instead of doing it properly. Doing well was easy, it was a habit she could see her way into clearly, as if doing well were a clean, shining river, down which she could sail effortlessly once she had caught the wind. But not doing well was even easier. All she had to do was fail to hoist her sail, slide along under the work instead of gliding on top of it. She espoused the mediocrity that was what girls in that school, at that time, aspired to, even the best of them: her friends Katherine and Eileen, both of whom had been her closest friends since she was four years old and to whom she was bound by ties of eternal loyalty.

Polly has a week to spend in Ireland, and during that time she is going to face the devil. She has read somewhere that in everyone's life are seven devils, and only when you meet them and overcome your fear of them can you find your guardian angel. (It was a novel about Chile, which she read in Danish: devils, angels, saints and sinners have lead roles in Chilean folk belief, according to this novel.) Her mother. That is one of her devils, the one she is going to meet and talk to, regale with the story of her life, Polly's version. Until Polly tells this story to her mother, she will be unfree, ununited, unwhole. She is not acting under psychiatric instructions. She does not need a psychiatrist to tell her this elemental truth. There is unfinished business between herself and her mother, between herself and this valley, and time is running out.

But there are distractions. She takes time settling in. She has to find her bearings. She has to find the shops. It is easy to fill the time with routine tasks when you are in a strange place, even if it was once a place called home. The first days she spends trying to heat the house, and organise the water supply. The water is cloudy, white like lemon squash, full of clay or lime or something worse, and the central heating does not function. Men in caps come and mutter darkly in Irish to one another and hammer at the pipes, and Polly has to be at home to let them in.