Homecoming (25 page)

‘You’ve never lain down with a cool cloth on your head in your life,’ Nicky said crossly. ‘You work really hard.’

‘Yes, but when I’m finished work, it’s finished. For Gaynor, it never finishes.’

Connie was thinking of this as she sat in Gaynor’s kitchen with a glass of wine and watched her friend supervise the kids doing their homework at the table in the dining room, shoo the dogs out from underfoot, and cook osso bucco at the same time.

Connie loved going to Gaynor’s. It meant being in the bosom of a family without having to actually do anything. Everything happened around her.

‘Did you learn that poem? You know you’ve got drama tomorrow,’ Gaynor said, stepping over a dog to stir the selection of saucepans on the stove.

Connie, who never used more than one saucepan at a time at home, watched with fascination.

‘Yes,’ moaned Josie, Gaynor’s eldest, who was thirteen and had transformed overnight from an awkward child into a lanky fair-haired goddess with long slender legs and doe eyes. How did that happen, Connie wanted to know. It had never happened to her. She’d gone from being a plump, too-tall child to being a plump, too-tall teenager without any of the transformational beauty along the way.

Was there a new breed of humans on the planet? It was on the tip of her tongue to ask Gaynor if her daughter was some beautiful alien, but instead she drank more of her wine, ate some crisps and told Gaynor about Nicky’s wedding dress.

‘It sounds nice,’ Gaynor said absently, still multi-tasking. ‘I didn’t think she’d get married so early, though. They don’t these days, do they?’

Connie didn’t want to talk about social mores in the younger generation. She wanted to confide in Gaynor, one of the few people she felt she could bare her soul to, about how Nicky’s forthcoming wedding was making her feel.

‘I’m thrilled for her, but it does make me think about Keith,’ said Connie quietly. She didn’t want Josie to hear. In her experience, teenagers were deaf at all moments apart from when some highly sensitive information was being imparted, whereupon their listening abilities cranked up to CIA standards.

‘Keith?’

Connie tried and failed to stifle her annoyance. ‘Yes, Keith – the man I was going to marry, remember?’

She needed to discuss this, to get it out of her system with someone who’d known Keith and what he meant to her. Perhaps then she could move fully on, the way she and Eleanor had discussed.

‘Oh God, yes, Keith.’ Gaynor didn’t stop what she was doing. In one swoop, she drained the whole pan of pasta.

‘You haven’t forgotten about him?’ Connie said, aware of a certain shrillness in her tone.

‘Of course not,’ Gaynor said. ‘But, Connie, that was a long time ago, you’ve moved on. I don’t know why you’re still even talking about him. You should have wiped that moron from your mind years ago.’

‘Yeah, kick him to the kerb,’ remarked Josie from the homework corner. ‘Like, old boyfriends are losers. Forget him and move on.’ She waved one hand in a complicated, MTV-inspired move that said:
It’s OVER, girlfriend!

‘I was going to marry him,’ hissed Connie, purposely ignoring Josie.

‘Years ago,’ said Gaynor, leaving the sink to throw the pasta into another saucepan.

‘Well, yes – well, no, actually. Only eight years ago.’ Connie did the mental arithmetic. She was thirty-nine now, she’d been thirty. ‘Nine years, OK, nine years but–’

‘–but,’ interrupted Gaynor, ‘you should have moved on.’

She stopped cooking, came to stand in front of Connie, and for the first time since her friend’s arrival, picked up her own wine glass and took a huge gulp. ‘Connie, I am bone tired of this conversation. Speaking as one of your oldest friends, I want to tell you that. Keith is long gone and you are still on your own because you haven’t moved on. You think you have, but you haven’t. You are stuck in the past and you have no interest in new men because nobody will ever match up to your mythical list of perfection. I don’t know how you came up with that list in the first place, because it’s not as if Keith was perfect, but you’ve set the bar so high, no man can ever match up to it.’

Connie forced herself to breathe. ‘Gaynor, that’s an awful thing to say. Of course I’ve moved on.’

‘You haven’t.’ Gaynor took another swig of her wine. ‘Kids,’ she roared, ‘do your homework in your bedrooms. I want to talk to Connie alone.’

‘New hair, Connie,’ advised Josie as she gathered up her books. ‘The long bob is so over.’

‘Her hair is fine,’ snarled Gaynor.

‘Mom, if she only got a proper cut, it would be fierce, but there’s no shape, no product…’ Josie finished with a shrug, as if to say
no hope.

‘Go, kids.’

They all shuffled off, leaving Connie and Gaynor behind.

‘I am your oldest friend,’ Gaynor said in a softer voice. ‘As soon as you told me that Nicky was getting married, I knew what it would do to you…’

‘It’s not doing anything to me,’ squeaked Connie. ‘That’s not what I wanted to talk about –’

‘It is, love.’ Gaynor put her hand on Connie’s, which somehow seemed even more ominous. ‘I told Pete you’d be in bits –’

‘You told Pete!?’

Pete was Gaynor’s husband. Connie had been with Gaynor the day she’d first met him, she’d been Gaynor’s bridesmaid, she’d taken Gaynor on her first post-baby weekend and left Pete taking care of six-month-old Josie. She adored Pete, but it was part of the fabric of their friendship that she and Gaynor could discuss him. She suddenly felt ridiculous to realise that, of course, it worked both ways. Gaynor would discuss Connie with Pete. They would talk about how poor, sad Connie would be miserable when her little sister got married and moved out.
Poor lonely Connie with three sets of twinkly lights over her dressing table
– Gaynor had seen them and said they were lovely, but
she
didn’t have twinkly fairy lights. She had photos of her children and a studio shot of her and Pete on their tenth anniversary.

Self-awareness flooded through Connie.

‘I don’t want you to be sorry for me,’ she said hoarsely.

‘I’m not.’

‘You are! You, with your fabulous family and your saucepans and –’ Connie waved an encompassing hand around the cosy kitchen with all its happy-family paraphernalia: kids’ drawings on the walls, school notes Blu-tacked on to the fridge, photos of the whole family on their summer holiday in Greece. ‘You have all this and I have twinkly lights over my dressing table. I’m a cliché, right? All I need now is to start adopting stray cats and I’ll be the perfect, mad unmarried woman. If I can get the cats to pee all over the house, so the whole place stinks of it, so much the better. The best bet would be if someone did a television show on people being mean to cats, and they ended up at my house with the seventysix cats I can no longer afford to feed so people could look at me and say “Didn’t she used to be normal?”’

‘I’m sorry,’ Gaynor said, horrified. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m so blunt, too blunt – I’m sorry, Connie.’

‘You’re right,’ Connie said bleakly. She got to her feet. ‘I hate to turn my back on your cooking, Gaynor, but I can’t stay. I’d be no company.’

‘Please don’t leave,’ Gaynor begged. ‘I put my foot in it, both my feet. Pete says I don’t know what I’m saying half the time, I just let my mouth run on –’

But Connie had her coat on. She didn’t want a goodbye hug, so she hurried to the door and waved. ‘I’ll phone,’ she said, and she made it out on to the footpath without breaking down.

Gaynor’s street was quiet now. It was after six in the evening and cars lined the street. Lights burned in all the houses and as she walked to her car, Connie could see family life going on in the homes she passed. There were kids watching cartoons, women walking in upstairs rooms with babies cradled to them, teenagers grumbling as they took the family dog out for a walk, doing their after-school duty. It all came down to this, didn’t it? Family. Marriage. A significant other. Without that, you were nothing.

There would have been no point explaining to Gaynor that Keith had blocked her from moving forward, that she had sabotaged herself because she’d been hurt by him, and now she planned to change. No point explaining all that.

Gaynor was married with kids and she thought anyone who wasn’t, knew absolutely nothing. Connie’s inner journey would sound daft to Gaynor.

Connie slammed the door on her car and managed to extricate it from the tiny parking space without banging into any other cars. Gaynor’s words rattled round inside her head.

She would never be so hurtfully blunt. Why did Gaynor think she could speak like that to Connie? Had singledom become such a recognisable social handicap that people felt obliged or justified in commenting upon it? Couples always wanted to know when singles were going to meet a man, settle down and have babies – or had they decided she hadn’t a maternal bone in their body?

‘Yes,’ Connie wanted to say. ‘I hate sex, I loathe men and, as for children, I couldn’t eat a whole one!’

As she drove on to Golden Square, she started to cry. A grey pick-up truck was in the place where she usually parked outside her house. Connie glared at it, tempted to drive into it with rage. It would be easy. Just lean on the accelerator, push…

A man came out of a garden gate nearby, one of the big old houses that were mostly apartments. He moved towards the truck and Connie gave him her death stare. Stupid man!

It was the man with the red hair and the young daughter.

He turned and looked at her, as if he’d felt her piercing gaze, and then he ambled over to her car, making a motion with his hand to say
roll down your window.

Normally, Connie followed strict ‘all strangers are axe murderers’ rules but tonight, something devil-may-care took over. It would be a foolish axe murderer who’d attempt to get the better of her tonight. He’d get a few whacks with his own axe.

‘Yes?’ she barked.

To his credit, he didn’t blink but said: ‘I know you usually park here. When I got here and your car wasn’t parked, I thought you might be out. I’ll move to the back lane.’ There was resident’s parking on the lane behind the houses but it meant a longer walk to your front door, and most people tried to find a spot outside their door.

Under normal circumstances, Connie would have said no, don’t move, it’s fine. It was hardly her space, after all. Just that she liked to park there and was usually home in time to do so.

But tonight, reason had deserted her.

‘Good!’ she snapped and rolled up her window.

When he moved the truck, she parked and then stomped inside with her head held high.

What was the point of trying to change your life? Nobody noticed. Even Gaynor thought she was a hopeless case with twinkly lights over her dressing table. She might as well sink into that hopelessness, forget about men and a future, and just buy the seventeen cats.

12
Other feasts

Olivia, who came to Kilmoney as a lady’s maid with one of the ladies in the big house, taught Agnes how to make rugelach and matzo balls. Joe’s mama loved them both, and Joe was astonished because he said she never used to like anything foreign – by which he meant anything that came from outside of Connemara- but I reckon that might have been his father’s influence. I never met his father, but he sounds like a man who wanted everything his own way.

Joe’s mama was such a gentle soul, she wouldn’t have stood a chance. Most likely it was Joe’s father didn’t like anything foreign and she just went along with that.

Olivia was a sweet girl, but sad. There had been a man she’d loved but he’d gone away, and she’d ended up working as a maid. She and Agnes were great friends, and many times, when Olivia’s mistress was in the big house for August, Olivia came to us for dinner.

Olivia cried when she saw the feast the first time she came. Myself and Agnes had done it all quietly and
Agnes had spent ages making a little candle holder with the seven candles like Olivia had told her about. The chicken soup was simple enough, a lot like my own mam’s broth but with more garlic and without the barley. There was no way I could get my hands on pomegranates. I did my best, but all Mikey Jr from the shop could come up with was oranges, and I made the cake with them instead. There wasn’t much call for pomegranates in our part of the world, and Mikey Jr was still talking about them the day we left for America. He did his best for Olivia, though. ‘She’s a fine-looking woman, for all that she’s not a Catholic,’ he said to me.

Which was almost a declaration of love for a man like Mikey Jr, married as he was to morning Mass, confession every Saturday and the life of the Little Flower of Lisieux.

‘Unleavened bread,’ said Olivia, walking round the table and touching it all reverently. Cooking is food for the soul, we agreed.

In Geraldine Kerrigan’s world, everything had a place. Once a thing slotted into that place, they were there forever. Like the car keys in the slightly cracked Belleek china bowl on the table in the hall.

Woe betide Juanita, Geraldine’s twice-weekly cleaning lady, if she moved them.

‘Juanita,’ Geraldine would say loudly. Juanita didn’t speak English too well and Geraldine liked to think that volume would improve matters. ‘Juanita, no keys on kitchen table. In the bowl! Bowl!!’

Sometimes, Geraldine spoke longingly of Red Oaks, her childhood home, where there had been several maids, not just one person coming twice a week to carelessly spray far too much furniture polish on the piano. Then she’d grow annoyed with herself for getting all misty about the past. Her mother would have risen above it all, and so must she. That was true nobility: the ability to rise above all life’s trials. Her mother had been one of the Fitzgeralds of Lismore and dealing with tragedy and joy with the same stoicism was what the Fitzgeralds were known for.