Lilac Bus (10 page)

‘And would it suit you, Mary, if I were to be about the place?’

‘Would it suit me? Wouldn’t I love it, isn’t it what I always wanted? There’s always been a living for us all in that take away alone, you’ve seen the takings, and if we were working in it together . . .’

‘Well then, I’ll come back at Christmas, that’s the best. I might even get myself made redundant up at the bank, and have a lump sum. Those fellows up in the bank, the porters, are fierce organised, you’d never know what kind of a deal they’d get for me.’

‘And wouldn’t it be dull for you, after Dublin?’

‘No, don’t I come home for nearly half the week as it is?’

‘And maybe finding yourself a girl?’ She was hesitant.

‘I think brother Billy was right on that one, the
time is past.’ He smiled an ordinary smile, not a screwed up one.

Rupert Green passed the table. ‘Did you see Judy Hickey at all?’ he asked.

‘No, I’m afraid we were talking, I didn’t notice,’ Mary said.

‘She could be round the corner behind the pillar there,’ Mikey pointed. Biddy Brady’s party had linked arms and were singing ‘Sailing’ and Celia’s mother was arriving with a golf club as if she were about to brain them but as they all watched horrified it turned out that she had no such intention: she was about to join in the singing, and was in fact calling for one voice only, her own.

‘I’ve met everyone from the Lilac Bus except the one I set out to meet,’ grumbled Rupert. ‘Dee Burke was just flying out the door, Miss Morris looks as if she’s had a skinful, Kev is cowering in a corner, and the rest of the cast is at the counter canoodling.’

‘If she comes in what I’ll tell her?’

‘Oh I’ll find her, I have to tell her something extraordinary.’

Mary and Mikey looked politely interested.

He was gone.

‘It’s probably about some toadstool or mushroom; they’re always talking about herbs and elderflowers and things,’ Mikey said. Mary laughed and tucked her bag under her arm.

‘Won’t you want another man?’ he said suddenly. ‘I mean you’re still young. Won’t living with a brother-in-law cramp your style?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I won’t. I mean, even if I could have one and I can’t. But I think I’m through with all that sort of thing. I think I just want a bit of peace and for the children to be able to grow up happily enough and for me to have a place here, you know, just like you said, not running away. That will do me.’

He remembered the dream that he had on the bus: the dream where there had been no wife but he was in charge of the children sending them on little messages up and down the street. He realised now there had been no Billy in the dream either. Some of the details were different, of course, but the central part was the same. He would be safe at home with them all. And there would be no demands made on him as a man. He could be just himself, and he’d be as welcome as the sun that came in the windows.

There had been four customers in the shop that afternoon, Judy had been taking note recently and writing it down in a little book. After lunch two students came in and spent almost half an hour reading books on herbalism and the art of home-made wines. An elderly man bought a copper bracelet for his arthritis and said that when the savages who came into his house and robbed him blind were leaving they pulled his copper arm band off in case it had been valuable. A woman with a tight hard face bought some Evening Primrose oil and asked could you dilute it with ordinary vegetable oil or baby lotion to make it go further.

It was a matter of weeks now before they had to close. Judy’s heart was heavy as she walked toward the Lilac Bus. She was tired too, and not in form for a long drive to the West. She had been tempted to opt out. To go back to her little flat and have a long long bath listening to some nice music on the radio. Then
to put on her caftan and her soft little slippers and lie there until the aches in her limbs and the build-up of a headache behind her eyes was gone. Fine advertisement I am for a health shop . . . she smiled to herself as she strode on towards the bus. Aching and creaking and bankrupt. No wonder people live such unhealthy lives if they see what good living leads to!

She hoped that Mikey Burns wouldn’t be too loud tonight with his schoolboy jokes. He was a decent poor fellow but he was hard to take at any length. The trouble was that if you made no response to him he thought you hadn’t heard and said it all again, and if you did manage a laugh he got encouraged and told you a few more.

She arrived just at the same time as Rupert: that was good, they could sit together in the back seat. It looked a bit standoffish if you were to keep a seat for anyone, but she really couldn’t bear to be nudged by Mikey the whole way to Rathdoon or, even worse, to hear that solemn tedious little Nancy Morris telling her how to get free soap by buying toothpaste on a Wednesday or some such hare-brained scheme.

He was a good boy, Rupert: yes that was exactly how she would describe him if anyone asked her. Good. He was an only child of parents who were middle-aged when he was a toddler and who were old now that he was a man of twenty-five. His mother was sixty-seven and his father was seventy this year. But Rupert said there were no celebrations, his father
was bedridden now and was failing by the week. Rupert said it was harder and harder each time he came home because he had this vision of his father as a hardy man with views of his own on everything, and then when he got into the big bedroom on a Friday night it was the same shock, the same readjustment – a paper-thin man with a head like a skull, with nothing alive except the big restless eyes.

Judy had known Rupert since he was a baby and yet she had only got to know him since the bus. He had always been a polite child. ‘Good morning, Mrs Hickey. Do you have anything for my pressed flower collection?’ Protestants were like that, she had always thought in her good-natured generalisations: pressed flowers, politeness, neat haircuts, remembering people’s names. Mrs Green was so proud of her Rupert, she used to find excuses to walk him down the town. The Greens had been married for twenty years when Rupert was born. Celia Ryan’s mother in the pub had whispered that she gave Mrs Green a novena to St Anne that had never been known to fail, but because of her religion she had delayed using it. The moment she had said it, Catholic or no Catholic, St Anne had intervened and there you were, there was Rupert.

Judy told him that one night on the Lilac Bus and he laughed till the tears came down his face. ‘You’d better tell me about St Anne and what class of a saint she is. I suppose I should be thanking her that I’m
here, or speaking sharply to her when times are bad.’

Judy often smiled at Rupert’s quaint ways. He was wonderful company and the same age as her own son, Andrew, miles away in the sun of California. But she could never talk to Andrew like she talked to Rupert – in fact she could never talk to Andrew at all over the years. That was the legal agreement.

Judy wondered would you recognise your own child.

Suppose she went to San Francisco now and walked through Union Square, would she immediately know Andrew and Jessica? Suppose they passed her by? They would be grown man and woman, imagine, twenty-five and twenty-three. But if she didn’t know them and they didn’t know her, what was all the point of giving birth and holding a child inside you for all that time? And suppose they did recognise her, that something like an instinct made them stop and look at this fifty-year-old woman standing in the sunshine . . . What would they do? Would they cry ‘Momma, Momma’ and run to her arms like a Hollywood film? Or would they be embarrassed and wish she hadn’t turned up? They might have their own idea of a momma back in Ireland. A momma who was just not suitable. That’s what Jack said he would tell them. Their mother hadn’t been able to look after them – no other details. And when they were old enough to hear details and understand them, they would be given Judy’s address
to write to and she could send them an explanation if she felt able to. She never felt able to because they never wrote. For years and years she had been rehearsing it and trying out new phrases, like practising for a job interview or a school essay.

Little by little she realised they were eighteen, nineteen, twenty. Well old enough to ask about an unsuitable mother. Well old enough to be told. But no request ever came.

She didn’t even write to Jack’s brother after a while. Jack’s kind big brother who had given them all a home on the West Coast of America but who had always tried to patch up the split. He had told her nothing in his letters except to assure her that the children were settling in to their school and that all was for the best.

This evening she wondered about them both, Andrew and Jessica – golden Californians now. Were they married? Very probably. Californians married younger, divorced sooner. Was she a grandmother? Very possibly. His name might be Hank or Bud or Junior. Or were those all old names? Why did she think it was a grandson, it might be a girl, a little girl in a sunhat like Jessica had been the day they took her away. She had a Californian clock in her mind always, ever since they left twenty years ago. She never paused and said, ‘I wonder what time it is out there,’ she always knew. It was coming up to a quarter to eleven in the morning for them. It was
always that when she came round the corner to the Lilac Bus. And she didn’t know if they were married or single, working in universities or as domestics. She didn’t know if they were happy or wretched, she didn’t even know if they were alive or dead.

She slipped neatly in beside Rupert on the back seat, passing young Dee Burke who had been looking so troubled for the last Lord knows when, it was amazing she hadn’t cracked up. Past the odd young Nancy Morris. What a cuckoo in the nest that little one was – her mother was a grand little woman altogether, and Deirdre who had gone to the States was very nice, whenever she came back, full of chat. The brother in Cork was a nice lively fellow too. What had come over Nancy to make her so prissy or whatever it was she had become?

Rupert was wearing a new jacket which obviously thrilled him to the core. It just looked like an ordinary teddy boy jacket to Judy, but then she was the first to admit she knew nothing about smart clothes. Dee Burke had gone into ecstasies over it and Rupert had flushed with pleasure.

‘It’s a birthday present,’ he whispered as the bus started. ‘I’ll tell you all about it later.’

She didn’t want to hear all about it on the bus, not while her hip was aching and her head was throbbing, and that young Morris girl might well pretend not to be listening but was only two feet away from them. She felt old tonight. She was years older than
everyone on the bus except Mikey Burns and she was a good few years beyond him too. She was twenty years older than the young couple who had set up the health shop and who would be dismantling it within six weeks unless there was a miracle and they discovered the Elixir of Youth and bottled it in expensive but appealing packaging. Surely she was past all this rattling backwards and forwards across the country. Surely she should have some peace and settle down, in one place or the other.

She rooted in her big bag and gave Rupert a small parcel. ‘It’s Green Tea,’ she said. ‘Just a little to see if you like it.’

His eyes lit up. ‘This is what you make the mint tea, the proper mint tea with?’ he said.

‘Yes, a handful of fresh mint, a little sugar in a glass, and you make the tea separately in a silver pot if you have one and then pour it on the mint leaves.’

Rupert was very pleased. ‘I’d been making it with tea bags since we came back from Morocco, and it tasted really terrible, but out there it was like heaven. Oh I AM grateful to you Judy.’

‘It’s only a little,’ she said warningly.

‘Look on it as a sample. If we like it we’ll come in and buy kilos of the stuff and make your shop do a roaring trade.’

‘It would need it.’ She told him about the kind of trade they were doing. He was reassuring, it was the same everywhere.

He worked in an estate agency. Things were very slow. Houses that would have leaped off the books weren’t moving at all. And there were shops closing down all over the place. But these things went in phases, he said. Things had to get better soon, the kind of people who knew about these things were confident, that’s what you had to remember. Judy said wryly that the kind of people who knew about such things could probably still afford to be confident, they had so many irons in the fire. It was the rest of the world that was the problem.

They felt like old friends the way they talked. She asked him to come and advise for a bit at the cutting of the elderflower, and to help choose some of the dried rosemary and lemon balm for the little herb pillows she was making. Rupert said that for the Christmas trade she should make dozens of those and sell them herself to big shops in Grafton Street – they would make great Christmas gifts. Fine, Judy said, but what about her own shop, the shop she worked in? That’s the one she wanted to help, not big stores which would make money anyway.

He told her about a politican’s wife who had come into the auctioneer’s and enquired politely about the location of her husband’s new flat. Somehow they all knew that this flat was not a joint undertaking and that the wife was trying to find out. Everyone in the place had copped on and they all became vaguer and more unhelpful by the minute. Eventually the woman
had stormed out in a rage. And they had drafted an immensely tactful letter to the politican pointing out that his nest had not been revealed but was in danger of coming under siege.