City of Hope (3 page)

John gripped his trousers at the waist, his braces flapping at the hips, his shirttails caught under his arms flying out behind him like wings. He hopped as he gathered speed, accommodating his bad leg.

I got such a fright when I saw him coming toward me that I automatically turned the car key again and, as if I were making a “getaway” in an American gangster film, stupidly put my foot on the accelerator, causing the car to jump forward again, hitting my head off the low roof and pushing the front of the car into the hedgerow, so that Veronica had to jump to one side to avoid me.

“Where are you going, Ellie?” he asked through the open window.

“To Paris,” I said. I had frightened myself, and was annoyed that he had thrown me with his sudden appearance. “To work—you fool. Where do you think I was going?”

He opened the door.

“Come on, Ellie, you can't drive.”

I had never liked being told what I could or could not do. Not by my parents, when they had refused to let me play with John as a child and I had been caught climbing a tree in his breeches; not by the rich socialite who had employed me as her lady's maid in New York; or by the leering men in the Manhattan typing pool where I had worked subsequent to that; or by the bossy aul' bitches who judged and jeered at me when I returned to my “poor lame husband” after the war.

Most of all, I disliked being told what to do by John. Which is why, in his wisdom, he either bowed to my wishes or, at the very least, prefaced his requests of me with a polite pleading for my own welfare. That I didn't prettify my own demands of him with the same please-and-thank-yous did not occur to me, certainly not in that moment. I was hotheaded, spoiled perhaps, but that was my entitlement as a modern woman. I didn't smoke in public, or wear a feathered hat to Mass (as I would have liked to have done sometimes) for his benefit—but I was not going to be told by anyone to get out of a car that I had bought with my own money and had shipped by my own arrangement from England.

“I can so drive.”

“No,” he said firmly, “you can't. Look at Veronica, you nearly ran her over.”

“Yes,” the silly girl said brightly, pulling at the front of her dress coquettishly, as if I wasn't there. “She nearly killed me.”

I resisted reprimanding her. The child got away with saying the worst possible things on account of being somewhat simple, although in her dealings with my handsome husband John I sometimes suspected she was putting it on.

“I am perfectly capable of driving, John.” I nestled down into the driver's seat to make my point. “I lived in New York, remember?”

My assertion that I had picked up knowledge about driving through my sheer proximity to cars and traffic for a time in my twenties always amused John, which irritated me. But instead of fobbing me off, as he usually did, he opened the door of the car and got in beside me.

“You can't persuade me, John, I am determined to . . .”

“Don't go into town today, Ellie,” he said.

Although his voice was gentle, in the tone of a pleading request, I answered it as a demand.

“Don't be ridiculous. It's a Monday.”

“I know,” he said. John looked worried and tired. There were the beginnings of dark circles under his eyes. It was the first time I had truly noticed how drawn he looked. “Just take the day off. We could go for a walk . . .”

“A
walk
?”

My voice sounded cruel to my own ear and I realized I felt not irritated, but angry. John was trying to lure me away from who I had become—a successful businesswoman who spent her days away from the home. I needed to work, he knew that. I needed the distraction of other people, of being too busy. It was our unspoken agreement that I would not spend my days in the company of the ghosts of our unborn children. If that meant not spending my days with him, either, well then, that's the way it had to be. The time for dwelling and wishing and grieving was behind us—behind me. I would not go back. I would not go for walks across the fields we had walked as children, and be reminded of what we did not have. I would not pick armfuls of bluebells from the woods, or search for rabbit holes, or cross streams in a single adult stride and search their dim banks for wild garlic, or sit with him quietly on top of a purple bog hill and look across his land and imagine. The small girl in the yellow pinafore for whom I had fancifully sewed four years ago, sitting by my fire ripe with joy and expectation, with a daisy chain trapped in her long, tangled curls; our baby son chasing after John, a stick for searching rabbits scraping his stout legs as he ran; John with an infant wrapped around his shoulders, pointing to the stars on a soft summer evening, with another clutching at my milky breast—those dreams had taken me over and had almost destroyed me. I could look at my husband and love him, and I could live in our house—I could even close the door of the nursery and forget what was behind it. But the land itself, the playground John and I had explored and enjoyed as children, was saturated in memories of what had been, and was a constant reminder of what would never be again. Nature itself reminded me of the unnatural lack in our coupling, renewing itself with every season—rebirth, growth, the seemingly eternal sturdiness of the trees we climbed. The trees I had hoped our own children would climb. I needed to work so that I could forget.

“I'll go for a walk with you, John,” Veronica said, appearing at the window.

“Go and open the shop up,” I said crossly, “it's near nine.” As she stood gaping, waiting to be asked again, I shouted, “Go, girl!” And she hurried down toward the low building in front of our lane. “I can't take the day off, John—I have things to do.”

“I know,” he replied, but he didn't move, just said again, “I'd like us to spend the day together today.”

Whatever silly notion he had in his head, he could forget it.

“Either drive me in or I'll drive myself, John—but it's nine already and I've got to go.”

He looked at me, and when he saw I wasn't going to change my mind, his features hardened and he got out of the car, closing the door behind him.

“Drive yourself into town so,” he said.

“I'll be back early.”

I kept my voice cheery and light, but I knew I had upset him. More than that, my refusal to take the day off had unsettled something in him. That's the nature of love that I found hardest to fathom. The way it can endure the heat and fury of a big fight, and yet the small details—a sideways glance, an untimely comment—can throw it off balance and strike dread into the heart. I thought about changing my mind. He had never made that request so directly before. Perhaps he had something important to say? Whatever it was, I decided it could wait.

“See you later?”

John was already gone, his back to me, walking slowly up the lane toward the house. I turned the key in the ignition and lurched the car awkwardly into first gear.

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

On the drive in I felt bad at the way I had left things. My husband and I fell out with each other rarely, and almost always on the subject of my putting work before home. The day was bright and dry, an important detail, as I had no idea how to operate the windshield wiper. It had been wrong of me to leave John alone, and in bad form, and the beauty of the sun filtering through the hedgerows and heavy trees, dappling the road in front of me with golden spots, was spoiled by guilt over my rejection of him.

I brushed the thought aside, deciding that I would come home early and perhaps call in on Maidy and bring her back with me to stay with us for a few days. A few of Maidy's big dinners would put him back in good form, surely, and the rhubarb patch at the back of the house was already bearing huge pink sticks of fruit. I didn't have the time to harvest it myself, but my mother-in-law would surely pot up some of her delicious jam. I'd bring her up some crystallized ginger and a few bags of sugar from the shop and leave her to it.

The fine weather and plans to restore bliss at home put me in a better mood. I had been right to put my foot down. John would soon come around to the way of me driving myself. It would leave his mornings freer, and it wasn't the first time I had got my own way and been proven right. I had gone to America against his wishes soon after we got married, to earn the money to pay for his hip operation after he was shot in the war, and without which he might never have walked again. When he refused to join me there, I had come home. Eventually. Albeit cutting short a new life of adventure and freedom—but our love had been born again, and I had held the skills and attitudes of my time away to build us a wonderful, affluent life in Ireland. I had always believed that money was freedom, and the grinding poverty of our early years of marriage had taught me that. John disagreed with me, but we rarely argued the point, and although it had been almost ten years since I had come home, we never discussed my time away from him. The three years in New York had passed quickly, for me at least. Young as I was, I could have come home earlier, but became caught up in myself with the fashions of the time and dancing, and some small romance that had long since faded into insignificance against the comfortable mix of fire and home that John inspired in me. John didn't ask about any indiscretions I might have committed during my time away from him, and I didn't offer any. But sometimes I got the urge to “confess” to him how I had almost gotten swept away by another man. John knew everything about me, had shared every memory of my childhood, every small detail of our lives together, except for those missing three years in America. I knew that any revelation would only disrupt the steady flow of our marriage, but there were times when I felt like clearing out the litter of my memories—sharing the attentions of other men with him, so that I could truly let them go; but also, and perhaps more darkly, let him realize all I had given up for him. All I could have been, if I had stayed in America; all he had lost, in refusing to leave his precious farm and join me there. In a cruel corner of my heart I still wanted him to see all that I was without him, so that he might love me even more, knowing that he almost lost me.

I was fully satisfied in our love, but I always yearned for more. Ambition fueled my success in business, but it was a failing in my marriage.

I drove cautiously as I neared the town, heeding John's warning about other cars; I concentrated on keeping the wheel firmly pointed at the center of the road. By the time I got to the steep hill at the top of Kilmoy town, it was just after half past nine and I was feeling rather pleased with myself. Although the weather was furiously changeable in this part of the country, it had stayed dry and the sun gave complement to the gentle thrum of our town coming to life.

When I had returned from America ten years previously, Kilmoy had been recovering from the ravages of our Civil War and six hundred years of oppressive British rule. It was a dead, grim, gray shell of a place compared with the excitement and glamour of the life I had briefly lived in New York. I had settled back into the town, revising my fashionable wardrobe and my new modern ideas, still holding on to enough of them to build a successful business and establish myself as a respected shopkeeper. My expectations had adjusted to fit back into the humbler lifestyle of an Irish countrywoman. In the last few years, it seemed, life in Kilmoy had raised itself up to meet me. Although we were still far behind England and America in terms of money, and our people were still emigrating in their droves, life was not as miserable as it had been when I left.

Since the treaty had been signed, and the ensuing Civil War had burned itself out, our new leader, Éamon de Valera, had restored a pull-together order in the country of my birth, and everyone was making a special effort to recover. The houses and shops on the main street of Kilmoy had been painted and the streets paved. The grimy shop windows of our down-at-heel drapery and grocery shops were revamped and, on market day, the farmers who traded their livestock had even organized a rotation for washing down the newly tarred roads with buckets of soapy water, to clean them for the townspeople in the coming week. A new spirit of hope prevailed. The World War was over, and Ireland was free—our neighbors in the six counties of the North that were still under the control of the British were soon forgotten. Even John had left his politically passionate youth behind him to join in building de Valera's respectable, peaceable new Ireland. The only reminder was his slight gait, the results of shot hips during his service in the Irish Republican Brotherhood.

I drove down the steep hill (my hand cautiously holding the handbrake), past the low cottages on its edges and the grander two-story homes closer to the town center, finally parking the car in one sharp sweep on the paving in front of my premises.

At the first signs that our town was on the brink of thriving, I had cashed in the dollars I had saved just before the Wall Street Crash and used them to buy this tall, narrow building. It had been rented to an old solicitor who had since died. The English landlords had left the building to turn derelict and were anxious to offload it, so I bought it for just a few pounds. John, a trained carpenter and handyman, renovated it in a matter of months (anxious as he always was not to be distracted from the business of his farm, he could be relied upon to complete my commissioned biddings quickly, if not without complaint!).

I loved our country-cottage home, and the small building with the corrugated roof that still housed our first shop, but this smart building in town was a source of tremendous pride for me.

The glossy navy door to the side of the shop front had a brass plaque to its left on the smart gray plaster advertising “Hogan Ladies' Secretarial Services and College.” The stairs were immediately inside the door, carpeted in a striking swirling red pattern—kind on the feet of the dozens of typists, students and customers who trooped up them every day.