Authors: Grace Wynne-Jones
Chapter
One
Something weird happened yesterday
when I was talking to my
sister April on the phone. She said, ‘I wonder what happened
to Great-Aunt DeeDee.’
I said, ‘I thought she was dead.’
‘Oh, no,’ April replied. ‘She went missing. Just left home, when
she was in her early twenties, and told no one where she was
going. No one’s heard from her since.’ Then April added
something that was entirely typical of her. She said, ‘You
know
that, Sally. For God’s sake, where have you been for the last
thirty-five years?’ She was asking where I’ve been all my life, since
I am thirty-five, though I’m often told I look younger. That’s one
of the things I cling to – that people say I look younger. I don’t see
it myself. When I look in the mirror I see honey-coloured hair, brown eyes, highish cheekbones, and wrinkles and crow’s-feet and grey hairs.
‘Of course I’ve
heard
of DeeDee,’ I said. ‘But only a few times.
Nobody ever seems to talk about her.’
‘Well, they wouldn’t, would they?’ April said. ‘After what
she did.’
‘What did she do?’
‘I don’t know, but I get the impression people are really pissed
off with her.’
‘How do you know all this?’ I demanded. I’m the one who is supposed to be privy to the family secrets.
‘I’ve known it for
years,’
April replied, without going into
detail. ‘Look, could you tell Aunt Marie I can’t get to her big do?
I can’t believe she expects me to fly over from California for a finger buffet. I have my own life.’
She knew, of course, that I wasn’t going to say this verbatim to
Aunt Marie. She knew I would find a way to be more tactful.
Aunt Marie, who is my mother’s sister, feels she needs to corral
family members every few years and frog-march them into some
sort of intimacy. Somehow we all fit into Aunt Marie’s front room, though it’s quite a squeeze. I usually end up saying, ‘Oh,
really? How interesting!’ to the various younger relatives who are
involved in important-sounding courses. I seem to come from a
family that has a great involvement in further education. Then, of
course, there are the ones who are methodically working their
way up the Civil Service; they sound impressive too, especially the
ones who have to make regular trips to Brussels. And there’s a cluster of lovely bright young women who have married nice decent men and are having children or expecting them, and are teachers or social workers or aromatherapists.
I’d absorb more of what they were telling me if I weren’t so
fixated on trying to make a good impression myself. In some ways
these gatherings feel like school reunions, at which we check up
on one another and measure one another’s achievements. But in another way they are nothing like school reunions, which are
softened by genuine affection and curiosity and giggles about daft things in the past. Many of the people in Aunt Marie’s front room
are almost strangers. It says a lot for the force of her character that we show up at all. We are not the sort of large extended
family that gathers for the fun of it. It’s not that we don’t like each
other; it’s just that we have other things to do, and other people to do them with.
I am beginning to dread Marie’s next big get-together, because
my separation from Diarmuid is bound to crop up in conver
sations, and there is no way I can make that sound impressive. At
the last gathering I had just met him, and my parents must have m
entioned it to someone, because suddenly the room was buzzing
with the news that ‘Sally has found a man!’ Naturally I had found
men before, but people had never got quite so excited about it. I
suppose it was because I was over thirty and they felt I had better
get a move on in the marriage stakes.
They were, of course, thrilled when I walked down the aisle.
They gave me things like alarm clocks that make tea, and hostess trolleys, which are all now carefully stored in the smart suburban
house that Diarmuid and I bought together and where he still
lives. The main thing I seem to have gained from my marriage is
a very comfortable orange sofa that’s too big for my small sitting-
room. I enjoy lying on it when I watch TV.
My phone conversation with my sister ended when she said she
had to go to a meeting. April was ringing from an office in San Francisco. She is twenty-four and she has started to look Californian – I know this from the very
occasional photos she sends our parents; she hasn’t come back to
Ireland since she left three years ago. Her hair is sun-bleached blonde, her skin is golden-brown and her small snub nose looks
cuter than ever. Her smile still has that steely, determined look to
it, but her teeth are whiter. She has also acquired that wiry, lean
look people get when they jog regularly and visit the gym and do
Pilates. I have, naturally, not told her that I force myself to get exercise by occasionally walking an imaginary dog called Felix along a nearby beach. She is an important person in real estate, or it could be banking; it’s hard to keep track of her career. Not
too long ago she was involved in the vacation industry. April is a
young hotshot manager, so her skills are easily transferable.
I, on the other hand, am a freelance journalist who has
somehow ended up specialising in interior decoration and pets, with the occasional article on refugees and other worthy social issues. Since my separation, I also sometimes interview people who write self-help books and grill them on the secrets of a c
ontented marriage. I make a kind of living from it, but freelance
journalists aren’t that well paid; and the big thrill of seeing my
name in the paper above articles about bathroom tiling has, to tell
the truth, sort of waned. Another thing is that loads of people want to be freelance journalists, because it’s supposed to be so interesting, so you can’t afford to be too bolshie with editors, because there’s a horde of young eager beavers who would be
more than willing to replace you. In an ideal world, April would
regularly say, ‘Oh, I wish my job was as interesting as yours,’ but
she doesn’t. She has her own lovely sea-view condominium, a sports car and loads of handsome men taking her out for sushi. She is happy – and I keep feeling she shouldn’t be, because she never seems to want to talk about anything that really matters. Come to think of it, my parents are rather like that too.
The conversation about DeeDee was typical. Even though April said she wondered what happened to DeeDee, she didn’t
really want to go into details, ponder who DeeDee was and why
she left; according to her, things are as they are, and it’s pointless
analysing them. Sometimes I envy her blithe indifference, but
most of the time it just makes me feel lonely, so it’s just as well I
hardly ever talk to her. If you start talking about feelings to April,
she always finds a way to make you feel foolish. When I tried to
talk to her about the break-up of my marriage, for example, she said, ‘Oh, well, these things happen sometimes. You’ll find
someone else. Go and have a facial. That always cheers me up.’ I
think she was trying to be kind.
DeeDee has been popping into my mind ever since my
conversation with April. This is rather inconvenient, because I’m
currently trying to write an article about bathroom accessories.
Also, every so often I ask myself
why
I am writing about
bathroom accessories when I have no real interest in the subject.
Four years ago the editor of
The Sunday Lunch,
Ned Wainwright, said he wanted more articles for the ‘Home’ section, and I said, ‘Oh, what kind?’ with a big fake-interested smile. Freelance journalists can’t afford to be too fussy. I didn’t think I’d end up
with a column – which, of course, was wonderful;
is
wonderful. I need the regular income, to pay for my mortgage and those extra
little luxuries such as food, electricity and clothes. It’s just that,
quite a lot of the time, I wish I were involved in something else.
This happened with my marriage, too. I’m beginning to wonder if it’s a ‘psychological pattern’. Perhaps I’ll always have these dreams of elsewhere. Maybe I’ve inherited some of DeeDee’s feckless genes.
As I said, since my break-up with Diarmuid I have interviewed
a number of authors of self-help psychology books. Some of them
say that people who aren’t compatible should part, and some of
them say that people who aren’t compatible should work out why
they aren’t compatible and try to make some appropriate
changes; then, apparently, they may find they are far more compatible than they thought. Sadly, none of them offer advice on husbands who suddenly become obsessed with mice.
That’s what happened with Diarmuid. He’s a carpentry
teacher, and he wanted to be able to teach biology too; so he started this biology course, and the mice thing just took off. We
hardly ever saw each other because he was so busy studying mice.
Sometimes he brought them home for the weekend, and gradually
they moved in permanently. I started to feel sorry for them. It’s
not that I like mice all that much, but I hated seeing them in that
cage. So one night, after a row and too much wine and wild, romantic music, I set them free in the tool shed. Diarmuid and I parted shortly after that. If we get divorced, I suppose the mice
may be mentioned as a third party. He managed to lure them back
using mature cheddar cheese. I still feel a bit angry with those mice. I feel, deep down, that they should have made a run for it.
When I left, I told Diarmuid I needed time to think things over.
I didn’t quite know what I was going to be thinking about, but it s
ounded like the sort of thing a woman bolting out the front door
with a large cream suitcase should say. I liked the dramatic exit, but the whole effect was watered down somewhat because I had
to keep returning for things like my hair-dryer and my jumpers and my transistor radio. And, naturally, Diarmuid and I got
chatting, and I ended up hugging him because he was sad; I was
sad myself, which is why I let him kiss me and run his hands
tenderly through my hair. He kept saying he was sorry about the
mice, which I noticed were still in the spare room and looking
pretty contented despite their lack of freedom. He even said he’d
get rid of them, but I said we could talk about that another time.
Because what I was realising was that, even if Diarmuid made lots
of ‘appropriate changes’ to help our ‘compatibility’, I still wasn’t
sure I’d want to go back to him.
We separated over half a year ago, and I’m not any clearer about whether I should go back to him. I’m not even sure why I feel like this, because I’m thirty-five and old enough to know I’m not going to find the perfect man and he is such a decent, loving guy. I
sometimes feel I don’t miss him enough. But I miss the home we
bought together. It’s an ordinary suburban house, but it’s
detached and in a leafy area, and it has a big garden with nice shrubs and trees and scented plants. We wanted to move to the
country after we had our two kids, but for the time being we were happy to live in a house near the Dublin mountains. We could see
the countryside through our bedroom window. The main
bedroom has an en-suite bathroom. I bought lovely thick white
towels. The carpets still have a new, bouncy feel to them.
Diarmuid now shares our home with a tenant called Barry, who’s
Australian and keeps wanting to have barbecues.