Lilac Bus (18 page)

Judy was lying curled up like a cat. She wasn’t pleased to see him – in fact she nearly sent him back straight away. She was like Jimmy really but without the persuasive charm: Jimmy made it seem reasonable; Judy made it seem like a duty.

But she meant it: she got up and stretched and said she was going to go out and walk in her husband’s wood. Jack Hickey’s wood she called it. She said he should talk about anything, anything to show his father that he was trying too.

But what could he say? He couldn’t tell him that his heart was tearing with the barbed wire of jealousy in case his male lover might have been unfaithful. Then NOBODY could tell a father that about a lover of any sex. But Rupert was worse off: he couldn’t talk about his life, about the beautiful gentians that he and Jimmy had planted and how the willow gentian had burst into a whole pool of dark blue flowers last July and they had taken photographs of each other admiring it. He found it hard to talk about the garden without mentioning Jimmy because the two were
twined together, like the house, like cooking, like holidays and reading and laughing and the things people did for heaven’s sake.

Annoyed with Judy for being short with him, he walked home. He passed the Kennedys’ shop and saw a big handsome girl being ushered in. The red-headed Kennedy boy, Eddie, was looking at her with a foolish grin: they must be courting. She was very attractive; how simple life would have been if only he had been born to court a big handsome girl who would bring life and laughter into his quiet house.

Suddenly he thought of Jimmy in the house. Jimmy pausing at the door to touch the clematis and cup it in his hands with admiration. Jimmy saying to Rupert’s mother that she should sit down and put her feet up and let her big ugly son and himself make the meal for a change. Jimmy telling Rupert’s father tales of the boys’ school where he taught, and the fees and the extras and the awful school concerts. Jimmy walking casually down the road with him to Ryan’s for a drink before dinner while the carbonade was in the oven. Jimmy would lighten their house better than any strapping girl from a well-to-do farm outside town.

‘I was just thinking,’ he said to his mother when she let him in the door again as if she had been hovering. ‘Could I bring a friend home next weekend?’

After that it was easy. His mother said she was glad that she had got good notice because she would clear out the guest room. It had been something she had meant to do for a long time but never had the heart somehow. And his father said that it would be very interesting to meet someone who taught in that school because he had known a lot of people in his time who had been there and they were all united in never having a good word to say for it but having done extremely well as a result of being there.

Then a sudden shock. Suppose Jimmy didn’t want to come?

‘I hope he’ll be able to make it; I didn’t think of asking him,’ he stammered.

‘Why don’t you ring him?’ his mother suggested. His mother. Who made trunk calls as one might try to get in touch with another planet. Cautiously and without much hope of success.

‘God, isn’t that lovely to hear you?’ Jimmy said.

‘I’m ringing from home,’ said Rupert.

‘Well, I hope so. I did think sometimes you went off to exotic places without me, but I decided to trust you.’ Jimmy’s laugh was warm. Rupert swallowed.

‘It’s lovely here this weekend and I was wondering . . . I was wondering . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘I was wondering if you’d like to come down next week and stay, you know?’

‘I’d love to.’

There was a pause.

‘You would? You would, Jimmy?’

‘Sure I thought you’d never ask,’ Jimmy said.

Her friend Emer used to call it the Dancing Bus. All over Dublin people got on buses on Friday night to go home to great dances in the country. It had been a revolution, they said – culchies choosing to go home because the crack was better there than in Dublin. And they had the advantages of a bit of freedom in the city during the week and not losing touch with the home place either.

Celia laughed at the thought of her bus being a Sweetheart Special. She told Emer when they had cups of tea in the day room about the cast that turned up at a quarter to seven every week. Emer had sighed in envy. It sounded great, a nice spin across to the West, a weekend with no washing and housecleaning and trying to tell the three teenagers that there wasn’t enough money for anything and trying to tell her husband who had been out of work for three years that there was plenty of money for everything. Emer had a sister married in the town that was seventeen
miles from Rathdoon. Wouldn’t it be lovely to go off there once in a while? Oh Lord, she’d love it.

And so that’s what happened. Celia had to work weekends, one in every four. So she gave her place on the bus to Emer. It had suited them all, and Emer said her family in Dublin were so grateful to see her back on a Sunday night that they never complained about anything, they just made her a coffee and said they’d missed her. Of course Celia did go to the dances at one time, and they were great altogether: you got a first-rate band to come to a place where the people drove in for miles and there would always be a big crowd. She used to dance with Kev Kennedy’s brother, Red, sometimes, but she much preferred Bart, the eldest of that family. He was so solid and reliable. You never quite knew what he was thinking but he was always there. In fact you never had to ASK him to help, he seemed to know when it was necessary and turn up. Emer said he sounded a very suitable sort of man indeed, but Celia thought not. She said he wasn’t interested in settling down and she wasn’t going to set her sights on another one who was a permanent bachelor. She’d had enough trouble getting over the first. Emer had sighed supportively and wondered why as a married woman she was trying to encourage others to join the club. It certainly wasn’t what it was cracked up to be, and in many ways it wasn’t much good at all.

But Celia only laughed at her. Emer was thirty-eight
and sounded tough and cynical but deep down she would die for that handsome, whinging husband of hers and those tall rangy kids who got bigger and needed more clothes every time you looked at them. Celia wasn’t going to be put off love and marriage by any of Emer’s protests; it was what she wanted. Not urgently, not immediately, not at any price, but she wanted it sometime. Despite what she had seen of it in her own family.

She could hardly remember a day at home when there hadn’t been some kind of a row. A lot of them were in public too because if the whole of Rathdoon was coming into the pub from eleven o’clock in the morning on, then they would have to be aware of the shouts and the disagreements and the sight of Mr or Mrs Ryan coming flushed with anger from the back room into the bar and serving a pint, only to disappear again and fight the point further. Celia had often heard that children grew anxious and withdrawn when their parents fought in the home. But that’s not what happened to the Ryans. They grew up and went away, that was all. As soon as they were able to get out, out they got. Her eldest sister had joined a band of Australian nuns who had come to Ireland looking for vocations. Looking for very young vocations, since Celia’s sister had only been sixteen. But the offer of further education had been attractive as well. She wrote home from time to time incomprehensible letters of places and things that
were never explained. Then the boys had gone too. Harry to Detroit and Dan to Cowley in England. They wrote rarely, hard sorts of letters with a kind of graspingness they never had as youngsters – how a bar in Ireland must be a gold mine now. Harry had read in Detroit that Ireland was booming since the Common Market, and Dan had been told in Cowley that having a publican’s licence in the West of Ireland was like having a licence to print money. These letters hurt Celia: there was much more than a hint, there was a direct statement that Celia and her mother were doing very nicely out of the family business, thank you. When she saw how things really were she felt she should laugh, but before she laughed she should weep.

Five years ago when her father died people said that at least one blessing was that Kate Ryan had always been more or less running the business single-handed and so there’d be no doubt at all that she’d be able to carry on. It wasn’t like some establishments where the wife had always been in the background. No, poor Kate had been managing on her own while the husband drank down at one end of the bar with his own little circle.

And poor Kate had carried on for a good bit. In the summer she’d hire a young fellow to wash glasses and there was always Bart Kennedy to give a hand if things got very busy. No, she was fine. There was no
shortage of customers, and mercifully drink wasn’t the kind of thing that came and went in fashions – people always loved drink. Apart from the first week of Lent, the custom was always steady and at weekends it was roaring. There was no opposition, and you’d never get another licence for a place as small as this. Rathdoon was unusual in that it had only one pub; other places might have had three. There had been talk once that Billy Burns was thinking of applying for a licence; he had been interested in buying a place about twenty miles away and asking to transfer that licence to Rathdoon, but nothing had come of it.

Celia had been thinking about Billy Burns during the day for some reason. She had woken with that silly tune on her mind, ‘Where have you been all the day, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?’ and she thought it fitted Mikey’s brother down to the ground. Mikey was such an innocent old eejit, and there was something a bit too smart about Billy. Nothing to do with his setting up another pub or not. In fact if he did that might be a solution to a lot of their problems. If her mother’s pub went downhill due to legitimate competition that would be an honourable way out. If her mother drank Ryan’s into the ground that was a less honourable way altogether.

But you couldn’t say anything even vaguely like this to Celia’s mother. Other people were hitting it a bit hard these days, other people were making fools of themselves and running up debts: there were men
in Rathdoon who had big pores in their noses and red and blue veins in their cheeks from drink; there were women in Rathdoon who went into the big town seventeen miles away to do the shopping, but Kate Ryan could tell you that it was little shopping they did except half a dozen half-bottles hidden under the teatowels or whatever they bought as an excuse. Half-bottles were easier to hide and they were easier to dispose of. Kate Ryan could tell you of those who came in at night for just one drink, Mrs Ryan, and she had seen them topping it up from their handbags. They didn’t want to be seen ordering more than the one. But Celia’s mother would have no tales of a woman who didn’t even have to hide it because she had it there on her own shelves, and she was surrounded by it as her way of earning a living for twelve hours a day.

It had been such a shock the first time she saw her mother drunk. Mam had been the one who didn’t and Da had been the one who did. It was like left and right and black and white. To hear those slurred words, to have to cope with an inarticulate argument – Celia had been quite flustered and not at all the calm Nurse Ryan that could cope with anything on her corridor. The next day her mother had made great excuses, frightening excuses. It was food poisoning: she had eaten some of that chicken paste out of a jar; she was going to write to the
manufacturers and enclose the label. Not only had it made her sick several times during the night but it had also affected her mind in some way. She couldn’t remember clearly, she couldn’t piece everything together. When Celia said agreeably enough that the chicken paste might well have been bad but it was probably the drink that made her forget the night before, she flew into a rage, one of those real rows like there used to be when Da was alive. It was NOT drink. Could Celia kindly tell her what drink she was referring to? Had Celia seen her mother sitting down to have a drink even once last night? Celia shrugged. She thought it might have been just this one time. Let it pass.

Three weeks later she came home for the weekend, and her mother was mixing up the gin and the vodka, forgetting to take the money from people and letting the pints overflow while she went to deal with someone else. It was then that Celia decided she had better book herself onto the Lilac Bus and come home every weekend that she could. This had been going on for a year now and her mother was getting worse and worse. And the really bad thing was that she wouldn’t admit it, not for one moment. Not even to herself.

In the hospital Celia had seen dozens – more than dozens, probably hundreds – of people who were trying to help people who wouldn’t help themselves.
There had been endless conversations about old men who wouldn’t go into sheltered accommodation and had set fire to their kitchens three times and old women who had broken their hips over and over because they wouldn’t ask anyone to help them across a street. There were shrivelled anorexics who wouldn’t eat, there were ashen-faced coronary patients who had insisted on doing overtime in stress-filled jobs and eating huge meals filled with cholesterol. There were women worn out with the fourteenth pregnancy, there were the mothers of the schoolchildren who had overdosed, there were the wives of the men whose livers had packed up despite a hundred arguments that alcohol was poisoning them slowly to certain death. Always she had sounded sympathetic, always she had appeared to understand. But inside there was a bit of her which said that they couldn’t have tried hard enough. If Celia had a daughter who was desperately unhappy at school and who had lost four stone in weight, she wouldn’t hang around – she’d try to cope with it. If she had a father who couldn’t cope, she’d have him to live with her. Only now was she beginning to realise that it was not to be so simple. People had minds of their own. And her mother’s mind was like a hermetically sealed box in the vault of a bank.