“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.
Dennis was getting more and more irritated, and Ruth more frightened. There was a son by his previous marriage, a nice, shy, nervy sort of boy of about seventeen at the time, I think. Ruth would write him ten-page letters telling him that she would not try to replace his mother, but she did want to be friends. He worked on a farm, which his father thought was idiotic and Ruth thought was lovely. She drove a hundred miles to see him, and they had a conversation that must have been staggering, knowing Ruth and not knowing the shy boy, who hadn’t a clue about this strange, eager woman with her flood of words, and must have thought her part of his father’s smart set, and even smarter than most because she had managed to get a wedding ring.
He wouldn’t come and stay, but Ruth had done up a room for him and bought prints of horses and country landscapes for it, and kept sending him cards asking would he like a red or blue carpet. And this wasn’t great for the son because they were postcards, and his employer kept asking him was he going to leave or wasn’t he—could he make up his mind?
I was going to say nothing happened for a few years, but of course that’s ridiculous—something must have happened every hour of every day. I just didn’t know what it was. People said Ruth and Dennis were very suited and lived a very dull life. You’d always see his photograph in the paper signing things; you’d never see anything of Ruth. Andy, her stepson, never came to live in his room, though it was always called “Andy’s Room.” Ruth’s parents visited the house less and less. Ruth tried to join the Samaritans but was told that they were very grateful for her offer but she wasn’t the stuff they needed. She was apparently philosophical and forgiving about this too and said that of course they needed balanced, reliable people. She never complained—she kept promising and planning and interfering.
The Mary who had lent her the money ages back met her and had a lunch where Ruth kept promising to use her influence to get Mary’s husband promoted, and Mary had seven sleepless nights until she felt free to think that Ruth had forgotten it.
I saw her recently and she said she knew someone who was a great friend of a prize-winning writer and she would write to him to get me an introduction, and to this day I am afraid she might have.
She sent someone a bottle of wine by post that broke; she bought rose bushes for a cousin with no garden; she sent me money for a woman I had told her about and I had to tell her that the woman wouldn’t accept charity and I would have to give it anonymously through the proper organization, and she was sad because she wanted to become a friend of that woman.
She apparently had only one row with Dennis, or one she speaks about: he got a presentation of a watch and he said he didn’t know what to do with it since he already had one. Beaming with happiness, she reminded him it was one she had given him for his birthday, shortly before they were married, and he laughed and said that that was only a trinket—he had exchanged it for one that looked a bit similar but would work. The trinket that Ruth had paid so much for was the reason for her borrowing from us all those years ago.
Sadly, she realized that the whole thing had been a bit misty; she wasn’t much good at anything. Perhaps this was just the one moment she allowed herself a bit of self-pity. But she told me that if she hadn’t done much for Dennis she was going to rectify it and that’s why she had driven off to find Andy last week; and he said for God’s sake to leave him alone, he wished her no harm but he was over twenty-one and he found that her “your-father-really-wants-you-deep-down” remarks were amateur psychology and professional meddling. And he said to her the kind of thing she was always saying to others: “Why don’t you have children yourself and leave me out of it?”
And her eyes had been a bit blurred with tears and she swerved the car to avoid a dog and hit a cyclist instead, and he had two broken ribs and she had a lot of bruising only, and a broken wrist. Which is how she ended up in the hospital.
But she was busy pleasing people still. She asked me to put the flowers in a mug, not to disturb the nurse, and I did, and it was some sterilized thing that the nurse wanted and there was aggro about that, and she said she had arranged for a restaurant to send in meals for Dennis while she was in hospital and they were all going bad because he kept eating out, and she didn’t bother telling the doctor about the dreadful headaches she had, because, really, the man had so much to do with looking at her wrist, and anyway, headaches were just headaches, weren’t they. And please, why wouldn’t they let her go and see the poor cyclist and tell him it was all her fault and she would pay for everything for him to get better? And did I have So-and-so’s address because her husband had just died and she wanted to tell her that there was a very nice widower, a friend of Dennis’s, who was just aching to get married again.…
It was very easy to bore Will. He bored very quickly and had what could be called a short fuse for topics that didn’t interest him. Nostalgia was one of these topics, and families and other people’s problems. So Gina reminded herself of this several times a day. No point in telling him about the way the autumn leaves fell in Chestnut Street, making a golden carpet that rustled and sighed as you walked. Will would shrug. Golden leaves—who needed them? But she loved him so much it didn’t matter what he thought about leaves.
“You left the place,” he would say. And Gina loved him so much she would snuggle up and agree. And of course she had left five years ago to live with him in London. She had said goodbye to kind, decent but introverted Matthew, the local vet, who admired her but never declared himself. He had seemed disappointed that Gina was leaving but said nothing to persuade her to stay.
She had left her life as a schoolteacher living a quiet life in the basement of her parents’ house, which they called the “self-contained flat.” In fact, Mother and Father came through her self-contained flat six or eight times a day as they went to the garden. Once she had suggested having a door on the stairs for privacy. “What on earth do you want privacy for?” her mother had asked. And Gina never had the heart to tell her.
It had not been difficult for Gina to get a teaching job in Lon
don, and children were great no matter where they were. She missed not knowing their families, as she had in Dublin, but that was a small price to pay.
Will made her very much part of his life, which was a researcher on a television talk show. It was his job to find new exciting people as guests and book them on. It was very stressful dealing with agents and managers and PR people. Gina did a lot of message-taking and e-mailing when she wasn’t at school or marking papers. He wished she could do more. He particularly disliked her habit of going back home once a month.
“It’s ludicrous, Gee—you’re just getting them into the habit of expecting you,” he begged. “I don’t go round annoying my mother all the time.”
Will’s mother was forty-eight and a glamour puss, Gina’s mother was seventy-three and becoming very forgetful. Gina’s father was a frail seventy-eight who walked unsteadily. There was a great difference in their situations.
Will didn’t know how much they looked forward to her visits, kept things behind the clock on the mantelpiece to show her, listed their problems so that she could solve them in the hours she was there.
Her brothers didn’t come back to Chestnut Street—well, not more than once or twice a year.
David was a financial consultant in Edinburgh, married to the beautiful and wealthy Laura. They had an elegant home in Morningside, where they entertained a lot. A life too full to involve trips down south.
James had an Internet business in London. He lived with terrier-like Kate, who encouraged him to work a fifteen-hour day. So there was very little time to go home and no time whatsoever to meet his sister. Gina had been lonely in London when she went there five years ago and wrongly hoped that they might welcome her to their home.
But Will was too busy to take all that into account; he was under huge pressure at the moment. There had been a tiny rumor that the talk show where he worked might be axed next year—it just wasn’t getting the right ratings. Will wanted to jump ship before that happened, and even well before it was even known. He had his eye on a Hollywood talk show; he even knew the man who might be able to hire him. His eyes shone with excitement when he talked about the whole thing.
And Gina, with a lump of lead in her heart, nodded and agreed that it would be a huge step up and that Will deserved it. At the same time she wondered exactly what love meant to him. He thought she would drop everything and come with him. It was simple: they loved each other. And Gina had already dropped almost everything to come to London. So what was there to get heavy about? Could he not understand that since it was impossible for her to come back from California to keep an eye on her parents, she just couldn’t go with him? It wasn’t lack of courage, it was gratitude. They had married late in life and been good to their three children. They must not be abandoned now, when they needed someone around.
Gina sighed heavily as she got off the bus on the High Street. She would do a little shopping before going home. Father liked those currant buns, which she would toast for him. Mother loved fingers of shortbread. They could have bought these things themselves or asked Mrs. Cloud to do so, but years of denying themselves things had got them out of the habit of buying little treats.
In the supermarket she met Matthew Kane. He always had a smile for her.
“What was the best thing that happened to you at work this week?” he asked her unexpectedly.
“Let me think. The most disruptive, anti-social kid I ever taught said she was going to enter a poetry competition. That really cheered me. And you?”
“A lovely ginger cat with a big smile and a big lump that turned out to be benign in the lab report and I was able to tell that to the children who own him.”
“So, it’s not been a bad week, all in all,” Gina said cheerfully.
They didn’t talk about private lives so she didn’t tell him that actually it was a very worrying week indeed. Mother had sounded more distracted than ever on the phone. Father less able to cope than usual. Mrs. Cloud was never there when Gina had called.
Will was up to high doh because his American contact was in town and Gina must be back to cook a pie in their flat—Americans went crazy over a home-cooked pie. And she was to glam up for the night as well.
It would have been great to have someone to tell. But Matthew Kane was not the person and this was not the time.
She let herself into 30 Chestnut Street and smelled sour milk and bad food. Her heart skipped a beat until she heard their voices calling out a greeting to her. It turned out that they had sacked Mrs. Cloud since she was much too expensive, and that they were managing fine on their own.
The kitchen table was covered in half-opened, half-eaten food, the door of the refrigerator open, no washing had been done and the sink was full of dirty dishes. Gina looked around in disbelief.
A huge wave of self-pity came over her. She was a woman of twenty-nine, she had been a reasonably good daughter and sister, she had loved one man since she was twenty-four and been faithful and good to him, she taught children conscientiously all day. Why was she being punished as if she were an evil-doer? It was so very, very unfair.
The wave of self-pity washed backwards and forwards over her for about two minutes and then it went away and she got down to work. She toasted the currant buns and then suggested they go into the sitting room while she did a little tidying up. They accepted this as if she were just someone a little overfussy.
For two hours she cleaned the kitchen and gathered all the rotting food into several black sacks with disinfectant. She filled the washing machine, scraped the burned food off the cooker. She made them scrambled eggs on toast and called them in to supper.
“This is very nice,” Mother said.
“Nice to have hot food in the evening,” her father said approvingly.
Mother talked endlessly of people who were coming in later this evening. The “girls,” she called them. She listed names that Gina had never heard before. And then went to get her nice stole so that she would look well when they came.
“Who are they, Father?” Gina asked fearfully when she left.
“They’re the girls she worked with in the bank fifty years ago; she thinks that’s where she is now, you see. She can’t quite place me at times,” he said and he looked like a bloodhound, his face was so sad.
They went to bed and Gina sat alone in the kitchen. She made the list of foods she would buy and stock for Mrs. Cloud, of what arguments to present to Mrs. Cloud so that she would agree to ignore her dismissal and come back and hold the fort. She would have to persuade David and James to take a more active part. And they hadn’t forgotten Mother and Father in their hearts, surely? The beautiful, elegant Laura in Scotland would not prevent David from helping. Surely? The eager, hardworking Kate in London wouldn’t stop James from coming to help in the decision. Surely?
Her mother came into the kitchen.
“Are we having a midnight feast?” she asked in a girlish tone.
“Sure, Mother.”
Gina got them some milk and shortbread. They ate companionably.
“I hope I get married,” her mother said.
“We all hope to get married sometime,” Gina agreed, knowing that her mother’s mind had wiped out three decades of a happy marriage.
“You know the way I feel about it,” her mother confided. “You can have all the fun and all the infatuations you like, but when it comes to it, you know. You can see clearly that it’s wrong for you, like a big, clear light.”
“And did you see things clearly?” Gina asked.
“Well, I think that I did.” Her mother spoke as if she were talking to an equal, not to her own daughter. There was a girlish sense of confiding about it all.
“I used to love the assistant manager, you know, but you were right, all of you, my friends—he didn’t really love me at all.”
“Did he love someone else?” Gina asked gently.
“No, I don’t think he did.” Her mother was matter-of-fact. “It was just that all of a sudden I realize
d that I was no part of his life.”
“So what will you do now? Now that you know this?” Gina whispered.
“I won’t rush into anything, that’s for sure.”
“No, no,” Gina agreed.
“It’s very feeble to think that you only exist if you have some slavish relationship with a man.”
“No, I agree entirely.” Gina had never had a conversation with her mother like this before in her whole life.
“So I’m going to consider myself free from now on. I’m going to regard the end of this obsession as a liberation, and if I do see other people I might like, I’m free to look at them.”
“And is there anyone out there that you might like … do you think?”
“There is a nice man—I don’t think you’ve met him. He’s called George, very quiet, doesn’t push himself forward like the assistant manager, but he’s very interesting to talk to. Now that I see things more clearly I’ll have time to talk to him properly, you see.”
Gina smiled with tears in her eyes as her mother’s seventy-three-year-old face smiled coquettishly. But mainly Gina smiled because Father’s name was George.
Gina was up early in the morning. She begged Mrs. Cloud to hold the fort.
“I’ll be back then—I’ll get things sorted,” she said. Then she went to the supermarket to buy what was needed for her parents. She also bought a very expensive pie. It was lamb and apricot—it would take forty minutes to heat.