The Shelter of Neighbours (17 page)

The shortcut signs work up to a point but she finds herself retracing her steps for much of the way, going past the sofas and the kitchens and the home offices, and all the rest, at a brisk pace. And now everything looks different. What was cheering and delightful in the morning, looks dusty, tawdry, in the evening. The Ektorp and the Karlstad and the Jenny Lind chair – which she had loved earlier, wanted to bring home with her – have lost the vitality that made it possible to envisage them in her own house, part of its personality, part of the furniture. They look flimsy now, insubstantial, like stage props, or like furniture in a folk museum. Second time round, all the life has drained out of them.

She is trying to find her way out of the bathroom section when Tomas appears.

She knows it is him, even though she has not seen him for thirty-odd years. She hides behind a shower enclosure and looks at him.

He has not put on weight, which means that you can assess the effect of the years on him accurately – there is no distortion apart from the one. The same frame, the same features, but aged, like a tree in winter. No flaming autumn for the human race. Tomas's hair is grey and white, a bit thinner than back then but still present and correct. Nothing disastrous has happened to his face. The skin is redder, or darker; it has the thickish, leathery look men's skin gets – the opposite of the translucent, baggy thing that happens to women. (Hers has not started doing that, not yet. Maybe under the eyes. When she looks in the mirror, she sees the same face she saw thirty years ago.) He has glasses, fine gold-rimmed ones. That is new. She has glasses, too, just for reading, and she is wearing them now, because she cannot read the labels without them.

He obviously works here – he is wearing a work suit and has one of those green plastic clipboards that managers in shops carry under their arms.

He loved archaeology, his dream was to excavate something in Greece, she cannot remember what.

Oh well. Archaeology. One of those luxury subjects that does not necessarily lead to a career. Though he was good, he believed in himself and the subject. He was determined to make it.

They should talk. But now the exhaustion of the long day overcomes her, and she cannot act. Does she really want to hear about his shattered dreams – or remind him of them? – because, like hers, they will not have shattered in some big, brilliant crash. That is not what happens. The dreams slowly fizzle out, drip by drip, so that you hardly notice until … now. What were her own dreams? Apart from him?

Another thing that she feels, rather than thinks. She is not looking her best. Her hair is a mess. And she wore clothes she does not like much, in the rush of getting up and out this morning. The linen skirt with the uneven hem does nothing for her, or the white T-shirt that has gone greyish in the wash.

To escape for a moment, gain time, she slips into one of the display bathrooms and pretends to be fascinated by the taps on the bath.

Tomas passes this bathroom and looks right in through the fake door.

He sees Ingrid. She turns her head and they stare at one another across a funky square toilet bowl.

She decides at that moment. She is going to speak to him. Of course she is. He was the love of her life.

Then her mobile rings, loud in the little space, playing the Nokia tune.

Tim. He has landed in Boston. He's waiting at the carousel for his luggage – his last queue of the day, he hopes, because somebody is coming to collect him and drive him into town.

She hears these details as if they were messages from another planet, referring to someone she has never known.

While she is on the mobile, Tomas nods politely, the way you would nod at someone you half-recognise but cannot put a name to, and walks away before she has the conversation. When she emerges from the bathroom, he has disappeared.

They sat on a bench by the river at the end of April. The riverbank was filled with the home-made rafts that students had constructed for the madcap race down the rapids, which would take place on Walpurgis Night, the last of April. Igloos, wigwams, flying saucers, polar bears – all kinds of things had been constructed from plywood and stuck onto the flimsy rafts. Toadstools. Shoes. The river flowed sweetly, the ducks bobbed on the water, unconcerned about the mayhem that would erupt in a day's time. Tomas put his arm around her shoulder, and pulled her close to him. It was the first time this had happened to her, ever, the first time ever her body had felt the warm embrace of a man she was in love with. Joy shot through her from head to toe. The river, the silly boats, the ducks, the red bridge, the yellow houses on the other side, leaped into life, as if someone had plugged them into a high voltage stream of energy. The world was switched on.

She had long fair hair, pale skin, a shy but hopeful look in her eyes. The person on the bench, wrapped in the arm of Tomas.

She looked a completely different person from the Ingrid who is now unlocking her car, driving out the slip road, heading back to Dublin. Looked. Was.

She wonders, as she drives past the Mountains of Mourne, in the sunlight that has emerged now as the day is drawing to an end, if he could find her address, her contact details, by tracing her credit card. Probably they are not supposed to do that. But probably it is possible. It is possible. He saw her. He could trace her, if he felt like it. It is very easy to track people down, anywhere in the world, these days.

The hills in the distance shine with that luminous, mellow green shade they get in the evening light. Impossibly beautiful and melancholy. Shadowy.

What would it have been like? Her other life.

She could have had more than one other life. Any of us could. We make choices, readily enough, thoughtlessly enough, at a time when we have choices to make. Before we know it, we are stuck with the consequences of one or two of them. Forever. Ingrid is thinking about the life she gave up, without really realising what she was doing. About her birthright. Her life in Sweden.

She drives along very fast. Towards the South, towards Dunroon Crescent, where she has lived for much more than half her life. Getting home as fast as ever she can to the people she loves.

But.

How she longs to go back.

Then the woman on the weather forecast says: ‘Try to get out and enjoy the good weather tomorrow.' She gives a big, motherly smile and points at the little suns that are dotted all over the map. Tonight she is wearing a velvet jacket: a deep mellow plum colour. And earrings. She must be going on to something after the news – Audrey imagines her at a party, holding a crystal glass of champagne, chatting to elegant people near a roaring log fire. Or maybe eating dinner in some cosy restaurant, the candlelight flickering, the forgiving light making everyone look beautiful.

This woman has been doing the weather for ages. She has always smiled brightly, even when telling the nation to expect more unsettled weather, issuing gale and flood warnings. But she has never before said, get out and enjoy it. Not that Audrey, who has hardly ever in her life missed the nine o'clock news followed by the weather, can recall.

It seems right to take her advice.

It's October. The summer was dreadful. In two weeks the clocks will go back, at the same time as the leaves fall thick and heavy from the trees, which are now in their autumn beauty.

Sunday morning. Honey-coloured sunlight pours into the front room. Get out and enjoy it, the advice rings in her ears, like a command from a kindly tyrant. But Audrey can't, not yet. There is far too much to do. She has to prepare her classes for tomorrow. Audrey has been teaching English in Mulberry Manor for thirty-three years but she still always has to prepare every day. She can never find her notes. Her mother used to raise her eyebrows at her.

‘If you spent a few days tidying up, you'd save yourself a lot of time in the long run,' she'd say.

‘Ah, will you stop annoying me!' Audrey would respond. ‘If I had time to tidy up, I'd tidy up, but when would I get the time?'

Her mother had no answer to that. But she set her mouth in a straight line like a one-inch zip. That was how she expressed disapproval, or dismay, or despair.

The truth was, Audrey really was very, very busy. Preparing, correcting copybooks. Exams. And she had her busy social life. She did salsa dancing. Drama. Belonged to a choir, although she wasn't much of a singer. She had her piano lessons, too, at least until the teacher said she was moving to another country and could no longer take private pupils. Audrey had asked if she could recommend another teacher, but no, she could not.

She drinks her coffee – she can't face the day without a few strong mugs, although the doctor has told her she'd be less anxious if she cut it out altogether, but that's easy for him to say, and she's sceptical about that coffee taboo. Fashions change so often, in health, as in everything else. It's not so long ago that doctors were sticking disgusting leeches to sick people and bleeding them to death. Doctors differ and patients die, she says to herself, as she drinks her third mug. She's sitting on the only chair in the kitchen that is not piled with newspapers, letters, schoolbooks, essays or exams by pupils, some still in Mulberry Manor and some long gone. Long graduated from university. Two are dead, but their compositions still survive in the archive of Audrey's kitchen. Audrey never likes to throw anything out. When she was alive, her mother occasionally insisted on doing a blitz, clearing at least one room in the house so they'd have somewhere to sit in comfort, or to place a guest. Not that they often had a guest, apart from Ben, Audrey's brother, who lives in England and used to come home to Dunroon Crescent about once a year. (You'd think England was the far side of the moon.) As Audrey's mother got older, she wasn't able to do much herself, and no amount of her sulks could get Audrey to tidy up. She just never had the time. That was the long and short of it.

She goes to her desk, still wearing her dressing gown. It's fluffy turquoise with a big brown stain on the side. It doesn't look very attractive but nobody sees her, so what matter? She knows the brown stain is just hair dye. Iced Chocolate. It's a good dye, her hair is always shiny and natural-looking – if young, shiny hair is the definition of natural – for at least a week. After that, it turns the dead black of ink. Or black clay. Her hair was always her crowning glory, the one beautiful thing she had, so she doesn't want to let it go grey before she has to. Iced Chocolate is the answer. It's close to her real colour, that is, the colour she had until she was about forty-two or -three, which is when it started to fade. (She doesn't know what its real colour is now, because it's always covered with Iced Chocolate.) The hairdresser might give a more lasting shine but it would cost ten times as much as the home stuff. A hundred euro for highlights and blow dry. You can buy six fluffy dressing gowns for a hundred euro. In Penney's. Which begs the question, how much do the women who make the dressing gowns get? Audrey asks this question sometimes, usually of some class in school. But it doesn't stop her buying all her dressing gowns, and most of her other clothes, too, in Penney's. She can't really be expected to solve all the problems of the world on her own. She's busy enough solving all the problems of Mulberry Manor.

Tomorrow they'll be doing John McGahern,
Amongst Women
. It's a hard enough novel even for sixth years but they'll have to make the most of it. She'll ask them which characters they find most interesting. And they'll say Rose or Maggie, Sheila or Michael. They'll all pick a different one. That's what she likes about the novel, that everyone has their own favourite character. Hers is Luke, the son who runs away and stays away. He's intriguing because he is never in the book. And she admires his guts. Anyone can run away, but it takes real courage to stay there.

The sun is around at the back of the house by the time she's even got herself dressed. Hot enough to sit out. The garden looks great in this forgiving light. Nasturtiums climb over everything – the fence, the hedge, the trees, the lawn. They're even creeping over the yard and into the drain, they're incorrigible, they'd grow anywhere, even in a sewer! The yellow dahlias, too, are exuberant. They are a special tough kind of dahlia, those, which would survive anywhere. Some of them are pushing up the slabs on the patio, so strong are they, and growing through them – the nasturtiums are doing their best to strangle them, but good for the yellow dahlias, they're holding out. So are the nerines, which her mother planted the spring before she died. Their bubble-gum pink is a pleasant shock in the autumn palate of dark reds and yellows. Bulbs, they are, which are great in a garden, they just look after themselves. Like weeds, which is what most of the garden is covered with – but weeds is just another name for wildflowers. Audrey's garden, once her mother's pride and joy, has been transformed to a nature reserve. Not appreciated by the neighbours, but beloved of hedgehogs, urban foxes, insects of all kinds. And mice and rats (they have a nice nest in the old compost heap, lovely and warm).

She could easily spend the day here. Enjoying the weather and maybe going so far as to do a bit of gardening. Even for a nature reserve, it's getting overgrown. The nettles at the back of the garden make it difficult to get to the big bin tucked away behind the shed, where she throws the empty bottles. Her mother had plenty of time to look after the garden and she went on doing that till she had her heart attack. Audrey could get someone in, but why would she? They rip you off and what do you get for it?

The Sugar Loaf she can see from the front garden. It rises from a nest of green hills, the Dublin Mountains and the Wicklow Mountains, a dramatic peak that looks like a volcano, although it has never been a volcano, she knows, from listening to
Mooney Goes Wild on One
on the radio. (She used to listen a lot to the radio, before she mislaid it. It must have got thrown out by mistake. Or else it is buried under papers somewhere in the kitchen.) Audrey has seen the mountain almost every day for fifty years, ever since they came from a house in the inner city to live in Dunroon, on the outskirts, when she was four and Ben was two. They moved out of town because their father had got a promotion and that's what people who were doing well did in those days. They said goodbye to the old Victorian terraces and colonised the new white estates built on the fields and farms all around the edge of the city. Audrey can remember the excitement of all that, how pleased she and Ben and her mother were with the big windows, the bright rooms filled with light. The enormous, bare garden.

During that fifty years – her life – she has driven close to the Sugar Loaf dozens of times and seen people walking up the road that winds to its summit. But she has never climbed it. Not even when she was a child. When she and Ben were kids, their parents brought them out on a drive almost every Sunday. They'd drive to some field or beach. Then they'd eat tomato sandwiches and sweet biscuits, drink sugary orange juice, in the back of the car or sitting on a rug spread on the ground at the side of it. There was a flask of hot tea for Mammy and Daddy. They called that a picnic. When it was over, they'd turn around and drive back home. They never climbed a mountain or went for a hike or anything like that. They never even went for a swim in the summer because Daddy had a thing about water. (His grandfather, a policeman in the country, had drowned – he had been pushed into the sea by a smuggler he was apprehending. This happened when Daddy was four years old, in 1918. Daddy's earliest memory was of seeing somebody empty the water out of his grandfather's rubber boots. He'd never forgotten it.)

Audrey had revived the Sunday drives when Daddy died ten years ago. She did it to give her mother a change of scene, at the weekends, and to ease the tension that could arise when they were both cooped up together in the house for too long. Of course, they'd never climbed the Sugar Loaf. Her mother couldn't have, at that stage. She was old, she had a weak heart, and arthritis, and various other complaints (as she called them, although she never actually complained but bore her pains in silence).

It is almost three o'clock by the time Audrey gets away. She doesn't know where the day has gone to. She has managed to get dressed but she has not managed to finish her preparations for tomorrow's classes. She's slower than usual today. When she opened the McGahern novel, her heart sank and her head swam. She couldn't engage with Maggie and Moran and Rose and all of them. All she could see was 6C sitting in their desks, like flowers in a bed of weeds, eager to get space and light, eager to escape from school and get started on life. Their big, kohled eyes full of contempt for people like Audrey, locked in the school forever.

She drives out to the main road and stops at the little garage on the Bray Road, where she has filled her tank for the past thirty-odd years. He's the only garage left around here now, anyway; the other three sold up, as sites for apartments, over the past year or two. If she doesn't fill here, she has to drive to Bray. Here's usually a cent cheaper than the Bray garage, she's noticed. One hundred and fifteen cents here, that means it's one hundred and sixteen in Bray – she'll try to look when she's passing.

As soon as she passes the Dunroon shopping centre, the Sugar Loaf disappears from view. After about ten minutes' driving, it occurs to her that she doesn't actually know where it is. Not in the way you need to know where a mountain is in order to climb it. Audrey often does this – sets off in her car, sure she knows the way to some place, only to realise en route that she has no more than a general clue as to its whereabouts. She has to ask at the filling station outside Bray (where the petrol is actually one hundred and seventeen cents a litre!). The young fellow is Chinese and has never heard of the Sugar Loaf. Or so he says. Can't be bothered telling her the way, probably, is more like it.

Of course, she knows the mountain can't be far away; otherwise she wouldn't see it from her front garden. She drives along, glancing to the right all the time, to see if she can spot it over the cars and trucks that roar along the motorway. Eyes off the road, she swerves out of her lane twice. A driver honks at her, and another gives her that sign with his fingers that means ‘Fuck Off!' Obviously, someone with road rage syndrome. The Sugar Loaf remains elusive.

At Kilmacanogue, on a hunch, she turns right towards Glendalough. Then she does a sensible thing, the sensible thing she should have done at home before she set out. She decides to consult a map.

Parking outside a bungalow, in a little lay-by, she searches for the map of Ireland. There are ten of them at least in the car, on the front seat and in the glove compartment and on the back seat, mixed up with some other things made of paper, and some not (there's an apple butt on the seat, and a packet of chicken liver pâté she bought two years ago). She picks up the cleanest map and looks at it. Yes, she seems to be headed in the right direction. In fact, if she is reading the map correctly (she's not all that good at reading maps), she could be halfway up the Sugar Loaf already. According to the map, this road she's on is on the side of the mountain. She looks out. The bungalow is an ordinary one, with a tiled roof and a little tarred patch of yard in front, two green wheelie bins and an old fridge at the side. Behind it is a slope covered with heather and furze. That could be a mountainside all right.

There is a tiny little thin blue line off this road, and the spot called Sugar Loaf on the map seems to be somewhere between this road that she is actually on, and that little thin one. The L1031.

To her surprise she finds the L1031 without difficulty.

It's nearly as narrow as the line on the map. Just a track, really. There is nothing to indicate that the Sugar Loaf is on it. You'd think there would be a sign at least, but no. They expect you to be divinely inspired as usual. Sugar Loaf. She goes along, anyway. She has no choice once she starts – turning back wouldn't be easy on this narrow track. It runs through flat fields, with sheep in some of them and cows in others, and a bog. That must be Calary Bog. She always liked that name. She doesn't know why.