Chestnut Street (14 page)

And Molly did love Gerry and wanted to be his wife and be with him always. And Molly adored Billy and Sean. They were the children she had dreamed of, real little personalities both of them, adorable, and so funny she hadn’t realized they would be such an entertainment.

And there was no way she could continue with her work in a busy advertising agency; she had
wanted
to be at home while the children were growing up—it had been her choice.

So she told the doctor truthfully that she didn’t have any anxiety gnawing away at her.

He gave her a mild sleeping tablet, and suggested warm milk at bedtime. It didn’t work. The nights were getting longer and more wakeful. Under Molly’s big dark eyes there were now big dark shadows. The woman at the cosmetic counter told her about coverup cream that hid the dark circles. She was sympathetic. Molly felt that many women might have come to her for the same cream. When you were wearing full makeup certainly it worked; you looked less tired. But it was not a magic cure.

Molly didn’t go on about it to people. Gerry had a complicated journey to work; they lived on Chestnut Street so that they could have a garden for the children. He had his day’s work to
do—things were more pressured in the company than they used to be, and Molly, Billy and Sean were depending on his salary, so he had to stay on top of his work. He didn’t want to be hearing dreary tales about how his wife who had the time of Reilly all day, couldn’t sleep at night.

Molly didn’t want to tell the two friends who she still saw from work; they would crow and say that she should
never
have left the agency.

She didn’t want to tell her neighbors—they would ask about it all the time and it would be added to the list of familiar topics they covered every day in more or less the same order. No point in telephoning her sister far away and telling her. So instead she wrote to her American friend, Erin, who lived in Chicago. She and Molly had been writing to each other for nearly twenty years, having started when they were nine and their convent schools had tried to broaden horizons. Erin had never been to Ireland despite her name; she was married to Gianni, who had never been to Italy despite
his
name.

One day they would come and would stay with Molly and Gerry for three nights before going to look for her roots and then to Italy to find where Gianni’s people came from.

This had been talked of for years. It would never happen, any more than Gerry and Molly would ever pack themselves and the two children on a plane to the Midwest of America. Still, it was good to dream.

“We are much too young to be writing each other letters about symptoms and aches and pains,” wrote Molly. “I’m only mentioning it because I don’t want to be dreary to people round here. You don’t count because you are thousands of miles away. And also because you might have a solution. Like you knew what I should wear at Billy’s christening and what to cook for Gerry’s thirtieth birthday.”

Erin wrote back swiftly. “Tell me is it serious, this sleeplessness, because I
do
have a magic cure. But it’s not one that should
be used lightly, not for just one night here and there. If it’s real sleeplessness, then I’ll send you the cure.”

Molly thought about it: yes, it was real.

“It’s serious. Please, please send the cure.”

During the long nights she wondered what it might be. An herbal tea? An oil you massaged into your temples? A candle you burned in the bedroom? But when it eventually came, it was a letter. Some old-fashioned, spidery handwriting, real pen and ink, obviously very ancient.

It had belonged to Erin’s grandmother, who had come from Ireland, of course. She had given this to some friends and it had always worked. They had come to plant trees for her or give her gifts of thanksgiving. At Grandmother’s funeral more than a dozen people said that they had her sleep cure. Erin wrote about it reverently and with awe.

“It should work for you, Molly. It came from Ireland and now it’s going back there. I really hope it does.”

Molly sat down to read what the old woman had written. Perhaps she had not been old when she wrote it. Maybe it was something that had been passed on to her. If she had left Ireland and gone to make a life for herself in the United States there might have been many a sleepless night involved for her.

Molly read the advice slowly. It was a detailed instruction about how the cure would take three weeks and you had to follow every step of it. First you had to buy a big notebook with at least twenty pages in it, and stick a picture on the cover, something connected with flowers. It could be a field of bluebells or a bunch of roses. Then on the night you couldn’t sleep you must get up quietly and dress properly as if you were going out visiting. You had to fix your hair and look your best. Then you made a cup of tea and got out the notebook with the flowers on the cover. In your best handwriting you wrote “My Book of Blessings” on it. That first night you chose just one thing that made you happy. No more than one, and choose it carefully. It could be a love, a
baby, a house, a sunset, a friend. And you wrote one page, no more, no less, about the happiness that this particular blessing brought you.

Then you spent a whole hour doing something you had meant to do, like polishing silver, or mending torn curtains, or arranging photographs in an album. No matter how tired you felt, you must finish it, then undress carefully and go back to bed.

Don’t worry if sleep doesn’t come immediately. There are still nineteen nights more of the cure.

Molly thought the whole thing was idiotic. She felt that Erin’s grandmother must be a simple-minded old bat to think that this would work, but she had promised Erin that she would follow the rules.

Night after night she felt ridiculous as she planned new outfits to wear for her small hours’ rendezvous with a notebook covered in daffodils. And she thought up little jobs to do.

She dug out the home framing kit and put up pictures of Gerry, Billy and Sean all over the bathroom. She gathered together her recipes and made a Molly’s Cookbook. This meant that she found herself cooking new and different things instead of the same old favorite. She listed the books she had meant to read, cut out reviews of them and began to visit the library again when she took the children for a walk. While she was there she borrowed a book on flower arranging and did some spectacular arrangements.

Every night she wrote about a different blessing.

Things like the night Gerry finally told her he loved her, when his face was white and red alternately, in case she might not love him too.

Like the moment after Billy was born when she held him in her arms.

Like her parents’ silver wedding anniversary, when they had said that they knew their daughters would be as happy as they were and everyone had cried.

Like that time in the advertising agency when the boss said
that Molly had saved all their jobs by her quick thinking and they had all raised a glass of Champagne to her for winning the account.

The twenty days were up. There were still dozens of blessings that she hadn’t written about. She read over what was already there with interest. How strange that there was only one from the office; the others were all about the family.

Her house was brighter, her life more organized, she had learned that she had a real gift for flower arranging and would do some professionally for the local hotel.

Of course she still couldn’t sleep. Or could she?

Disappointed that the twenty nights were over, and there was no need to get up and do these night tasks, she prepared for the hours of tossing and turning and, to her surprise, found that it was dawn. She had slept for seven hours.

It must be a fluke, a coincidence.

A silly idea about a book of blessings couldn’t really work. Not seriously.

She must write to Erin about it.

One week later she had news from her friend in Chicago.

“Now that you are sleeping again, we must really put our minds to the next project. In a year’s time we will be thirty, and we live in an era where people are going to other planets and we haven’t worked out how to cross the Atlantic Ocean. If it’s only a matter of getting the fare, then we must do it. My old Irish grandmother had some kind of magic about doing that too. After all, she made her own way to the New World all those years ago. I’ll see if I can find anything in the papers. Or maybe you had a grandmother somewhere with some magic that we could lean on now when we need it.”

And slowly, Molly began to realize that the magic might not have come from the grandmother, that it might have come from the fertile mind of Erin, who could write letters that made you spellbound.

Ronnie Ranger had been having a hell of a day. She eyed the gin bottle several times but it was too early. Three o’clock in the afternoon of even a very bad day was too early. And anyway she must keep some wits about her for this evening’s scene. So, the gin would give her the courage to say what had to be said, but it would also release the tears, the self-pity, the whines. Another cup of coffee, and maybe an onslaught on the house. You can speak with more confidence from a house that doesn’t look as if it’s run by a slut.

Gloomily she got out the vacuum cleaner, sulkily she sprayed polish on dusty surfaces with rings of coffee or wine on them. Wearily she emptied wastepaper baskets and pushed a lackluster mop around the kitchen floor. The place looked better, certainly, but she could get no lift from this. How nice it would have been to be a woman who became excited by the results of hard housework, how great to look around a cleaned-up nest and feel a glow of pride. Perhaps Gerry was right—she wasn’t the kind of woman to make a home for a man, or for anyone. She should go on being a career girl and live in a modern service flat with a lovely old Cockney dear who would come in and do for her every second day, like her sister Frances.

But what career? At thirty-eight, a washed-up dancer. Too old, too tired and, if the truth had to be faced, too bad a dancer to be a winner, or even to earn a decent living. So it had to be a home … well, a home, of sorts. There weren’t any alternatives.

Gerry would be home at six, for an hour. He would have a bath, change, take a quick drink and then go out again. There were these clients, you see, they were only in town for a few days, it was very important to see they had a good time. Not all work was done over desks in offices, you know, a lot of it was done on expense accounts in restaurants. He wished he could take her, but Ronnie knew the score … they were all incredibly old-fashioned in his setup, they would want to know why he hadn’t taken his wife … and that would means lots of explanations, Ronnie could understand that surely, couldn’t she?

She could. But she didn’t like it. Two years ago, when she had moved in with him, there were never client’s dinners. A year ago, when the dinners had begun, they were over at eleven and he would rush home; nowadays they often involved his having to stay the night in the hotel with the people because it was simpler.

Ronnie was just like a wife, she thought to herself, but like the worst kind of wife—she had no security, no confidence that he loved her, would stay with her and look after her, no respectability in a world that seemed to care little or nothing about respectability … except so far as Gerry’s business associates were concerned. There were a hundred ways in which she was beginning to think of herself as a loser, and very few ways where she could see she was winning. It was ironical that she, who had always scorned her friends’ settling for compromise marriages, should envy them now. Even Gerry’s wife, somewhere out in the green belt with her two children, her two dogs, her generous housekeeping money and her circle of friends, was better off.

Ronnie, earning a pittance by doing the administrative work at a local dancing school, wasn’t well off at all. It was only three days’ work at the most a week, it wasn’t well paid and Gerry expected
her to dress well and serve expensive food. He paid for the place on Chestnut Street, and all other bills.

She had given up teaching dancing in schools for this. It hadn’t been a great sacrifice giving up the teaching … driving around for three hours here, and four hours there. Great unmusical, unrhythmic lumps of girls who didn’t really care about what she was teaching, but imagined themselves swaying at some disco. Dealing with headmistresses about fees, filling in income tax returns, knowing that she was never going to make it herself and never seeing a pupil who would either.