The Green Road (11 page)

‘Isn’t it the best?’ said Dan. ‘Isn’t it incredible?’

‘Lovely,’ she said. Thinking,
Is it for this you left?

Was it for the ice cream?

She thought that Dan was a bit of a hypocrite for liking things so wildly, or pretending to like them. And she started to feel inadequate to the menu in her hand. They went to a kind of brasserie that served a modern take on Jewish food, all gefilte fish and matzo balls, and that was supposed to be ‘amazing’ too. But it was just
food
. It was a long way to travel, she thought, for dumplings. Her enjoyment was soured, Constance knew, by the years she had spent yearning to go, and not going, selling condoms to men who did not want to sleep with her – the Baggot Street years, time she spent pretending to be a student, when she really wasn’t a student, she was a shop-girl, which was to say, a girl who was waiting to get married. Four years out of school the waiting (which had been dreadful) was over. Constance was courted by Dessie McGrath every time she went down home and she ended up going down home more often, just to feel his arms about her.

And she still liked the feel of them. Balding, blunt-spoken Dessie McGrath. Three children on, he had moved sex to the mornings – even this morning, indeed – because it set him up for the day, he said. Constance would sleep again afterwards while he went down to his little office and some time later, whistling in the afterglow, he might get the children up and out for school. Constance liked stretching between the sheets to the sound of their chatter, only to pause and remember what she and Dessie had been up to, a couple of hours before. She kept the memory of him inside her all day. It was there now, if she wanted to think about it, washed as she was, with her underarms scraped for the doctor, and naked to the waist under her hospital gown. Who would have thought? Constance was not a fabulous looking woman, and Dessie was not a fabulous looking man, and that was the laugh of it, really. They were lucky. Because what was the point of looking sexy if you never got any sex, as happened often enough. Even to Lauren, who was always turning men down.

Constance remembered telling her about Dessie, the way she sort of hooted.

‘Dessie? Dessie McGrath?’ Then later she said, ‘He’s really nice.’ And she meant it. And she sounded sad.

On the other side of the corridor, the technician in the white coat came out carrying an envelope and the woman who followed her ducked her head as she turned towards the next queue on the banquette. She lifted her fingers to her breastbone, with her head inclined, like some painting of the Virgin Mary that Constance remembered. She tipped herself lightly there as though to say,
My life is not my own.

‘So who’s getting married?’ Constance said to Margaret Dolan.

‘Sorry?’

‘The wedding.’

‘Oh, the wedding. My daughter.’

‘My goodness,’ said Constance. ‘Mother of the bride.’

‘Hah,’ she said. She leaned forward, so her bare back swelled out of the open gown and she rubbed her hurt hands together.

‘I have a girl,’ said Constance.

But the woman did not hear. She was talking about the bridesmaids, who would be in lilac to match the bride’s black hair. She was worried about her daughter’s asthma, the way her sinuses blew up on her whenever she was stressed.

‘Oh dear,’ said Constance.

Other people’s children can be very dull, her own mother liked to say. And it was sort of true. Constance remembered Lauren the year she moved to Strasbourg, sitting in the kitchen with a big glass of white, talking about ski trips and restaurants and skinny French women with their horror of plastic surgery. One child teething and the other going behind the sofa for a quiet poo, and Lauren sort of elaborately unsympathetic to all this, talking about the difference between a pink tinted foundation and one that was a bit more yellow.

‘What age is Rory, again? Three?’

Even her own mother listened without listening.

‘Oh, I can’t remember,’ she would say, when there was some little problem. ‘It’s a long time ago.’

But it was not a long time ago for Constance, who was still in it. Whose children were coming up to teenagers now, with no gap – or none that she could discern – between breast-feeding and breast cancer, between tending and dying. Who did not know what else she could do.

‘Do something!’ said her mother.

Rosaleen believed a woman should be interesting. She should keep her figure, and always listen to the news.

‘Like what?’

‘Take up horse riding.’

‘Right,’ said Constance. Her mother had always wanted a daughter who looked good on a pony, or a daughter who did ballet, like a daughter in a book. Rosaleen always had a paperback on the go, opera on the radio, cuttings rooting in pots on the windowsills and overflowing on to the floor. Which was hardly the McGrath style – living, as they did, in bungalow bliss down the road.

‘You are so lucky,’ she used to say. Meaning something else entirely.

But she was also right. Constance was lucky. Trips to New York were just the tip of the iceberg, Constance was spoilt with tickets to Bruce Springsteen and the Galway Races, a leg of lamb brought home on Friday, chocolates if she wanted them or No chocolates! As soon as they could afford it Dessie found a girl to help with the housework, and if one sister-in-law went to Prague, the other went to Paris, because in the years she had known them the McGraths did well and then better yet. There was no stopping them. If Constance got her chairs reupholstered, some other Mrs McGrath would discover minimalism, and a third would be into shabby chic and, somehow, she would have to start all over again.

‘They are driving me nuts,’ she would say to her mother and the pair of them would laugh at the jumped-upness of the McGrath clan, the auctioneer, the quantity surveyor, the builder and even Dessie himself, who made pergolas and fences for gardens all the way to Galway.

‘So pretty,’ said Rosaleen.

Constance had not told her mother about the mammogram. And that was fine. There was no need. But it was on days like this she missed her girlfriends, who had their own lives and their own troubles in distant towns. Because Constance had two sons who told her nothing and a husband who told her nothing and a father who told her nothing and then died. And, of course, Dessie had forgotten about the lump. Incredible as that might seem. He forgot she was in for tests this morning, because he always forgot about things like that. They made him too anxious. At 5 a.m. they slipped into the bathroom and then got back into bed – and this would be the last time they made love, Constance thought, before she was diagnosed with cancer or told she was in the clear. It was particularly tender, life and death sex: it was very fine. Then, while she was stuffing lunches into the children’s schoolbags and he was pulling his keys off the hook, he said, ‘What are you up to?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Today?’

‘Why?’ She kept her voice careful, just to be sure.

‘No reason. I’m away to Aughavanna, is all, to check things over this afternoon, so I might be back a bit late, if that’s OK.’

‘Off you go,’ she said, and he kissed her, and goosed her, and was out the door.

A couple of years ago, Constance got her wisdom teeth out, and she must have said it a hundred times, she needed a lift home because they wouldn’t let you drive after the sedation. When the day came Dessie said, ‘What?’ He said he would rearrange everything, he would do it right away, and he started panicking and going through bits of paper until Constance told him not to bother. She just drove herself over there, and got the teeth out without the drugs. It was painful all right, but not exactly a disaster.

‘I like to know where I am,’ she said to the dentist, who promised to stuff her with local anaesthetic. Then she got up out of the chair, her jaw banging like a gong, and she got into the car, and drove back home.

Her mother was outraged.

‘You should have called me,’ she said. But Rosaleen liked to say things like that, when the opportunity to help was gone.

‘He cares too much,’ Constance said. ‘That’s the problem. He loves me too much,’ listening to her mother’s silence on the other end of the phone.

There was, of course, a fair amount of boasting in the complaints she made to her mother. Dessie’s caring was legendary, and Constance herself was indestructible: those two things were well known.

‘God you are indestructible,’ said Rosaleen. She made it sound like an insult.

Because Rosaleen was actually depressed, Constance thought, there was no other word for it. She was two years a widow and Constance felt her mother leaving, now, all the time.

‘So smug,’ she said, when Constance rattled on about the kids – which admittedly, she did non-stop.

‘So smug.’

Her own grandchildren.

Oh all your geese are swans.

And why not? Why not have children who were wonderful?

Everyone was so disappointed, these days, Constance thought, it was like an epidemic. Lauren was clearly disappointed with her life in Strasbourg, her Prada trousers notwithstanding. And Dessie viewed his fortieth birthday as a personal insult, he couldn’t understand it was happening to him – never mind the trips to New York and the Galway Races, and the house he was finishing now, out in Aughavanna with more space than Constance wanted or could fill. He had one of those little cherry blossoms already planted; big, solid pink pompoms on this little sapling in the middle of the lawn. Horrible. Her mother clearly thought it was all vulgarity rampant.

‘How lovely,’ she said to Dessie. Driving him up the wall.

When Constance told her mother she was getting married, Rosaleen said Dessie was ‘an eccentric choice’, which was an odd thing to say, because Dessie was just the opposite, really. Twelve years on, they were very thick.

‘Have you had enough, Desmond?’

Sometimes Constance felt she was actually in the way.

‘Cut him another slice of that cake, Constance. Will you have another slice of cake?’

Her mother would put her hand lightly to Dessie’s forearm, she would glance over her shoulder at him, with some backward-flung piece of charm. It was a hoot to watch the pair of them. Two drinks and they’d be off laughing in a corner: Dessie buttered up, plumped up, lifting the jacket on to her shoulders from the back of the chair, ‘You have to hand it to her’, as though Rosaleen was an opponent worth considering, for a man like Dessie. Then, as soon as he was through his own front door, saying, ‘That woman’, because she had played him, yet again.

Though she managed it less and less, it had to be said, since her own husband died.

Constance was very worried about Rosaleen. She was still out in the old house in Ardeevin and it was still letting in the rain, she had a hundred small things wrong with her, none of which you could name. This had always been the way with Rosaleen, but she went to some new quack in Ennis who told her not to eat broccoli, or to eat lots of broccoli, Constance could never remember which. The GP, meanwhile, said her bloods were coming back fine, so Rosaleen was fighting with the GP whom she had never liked – nor his father before him, she said. Everything was off. She was tired all the time.

The stupid thing was that if you agreed that there was, clearly, something wrong with her, Rosaleen would snap that she was perfectly fine. Or if, in the middle of some intense medical discussion, you suggested she get a scan of the offending organ, whichever one it was, then Rosaleen would look quietly affronted, because of course the thing that was wrong with her was not the sort of thing you could just see with a machine.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she would say, turning to look out the window, and a small smile would come, as though she enjoyed being so misunderstood.

Constance did not think there was a cure for grief, but she did think an anti-depressant might cut the worst of it. She was on a little Seroxat herself, since her father got sick and she wouldn’t be without it, but it was not something you could ever suggest to your mother.

Daddy said he felt fine.

‘I feel absolutely fine,’ he had said. Twelve months and two courses of chemo later, he was dead. So a healthy man was in the ground, and a woman who felt mysteriously unwell was driving about the countryside, switching on the windscreen wipers every time she wanted to turn left. Coming home, then, to a house that was falling down around her ears.

Dessie wanted to develop a site out at Boolavaun, that was one of the things Rosaleen teased him about, he had some scheme. He would get the cash to her, and Rosaleen would sign the land over – he would buy it, in effect – and the money would plug the holes in her roof and keep her in nice skin cream. But Rosaleen seemed to like the holes in her roof. She seemed to like saying, ‘What will I do? I don’t know what to do.’ She liked panicking with pots and buckets and having them all run around for her, calling Constance every time it rained. Calling Constance when the mousetrap went off, saying, ‘I think it’s a rat.’

Constance who had cancer. Or who did not have cancer.

What was the word she was looking for?

‘No.’

What do you mean, ‘No’?

‘No, I am busy. No, I have more important things on. No, I will not do this for you now. No.’

‘Margaret Dolan!’

The woman beside Constance lunged towards the floor to gather her basket and her bag and her empty water bottle, and her gown opened to show her back, which was creamy and huge. Constance had the urge to touch it. She wanted to lay her head on the expanse of it, say, ‘Stop. Hush.’ And when Margaret Dolan paused, she would reach down to take her scarred and pudgy hand, and feel her own hand squeezed in return.

‘OK,’ said Margaret Dolan and she heaved herself, with some difficulty, up off the seat.

‘Well,’ she said, turning slightly to Constance. ‘Here goes nothin’!’

‘Take it easy now,’ said Constance.

The empty space she left behind was still occupied by the sharp, peculiar smell of her sweat.

‘Keep drinking the water!’ said Constance, at the last minute, just before the door closed, and the woman from Adare shot a small glance her way.