Whitethorn Woods (39 page)

   But then maybe she might be deaf herself? Courtesy demanded that I should reply in sign language but I decided to speak aloud as well to show I could.

   She had asked me, was I lost?

   I said, using both ways of talking, that no, thank you, I was waiting for my parents, who had both gone to the bathroom and that then we were going to go for an assessment. She said that was fine and she'd see me later because she was going to be taking part in it all.

   She looked around the big hall and gave a sort of a little sigh.

"You must like it here," I said.

   "I do. Very much," she said and there was something sad about the way she spoke as if she was going to be leaving soon. You have to try so hard when you're deaf to pick up the words, you end up picking up loads of other things as well.

   My mum and dad were so nervous and they kept getting confused, answering the questions they had to answer, which were just ordinary things for filling in a form. I wanted to scream that
I
was the one being tested, I was the one meant to have the language problems, and that if they could see my mum at the checkout in the supermarket, she was so fast she was like a wizard, and my dad was so reliable in his company that he had the keys to everywhere and if people got locked out they had to come to him. They didn't look like reliable people—they looked like people who couldn't remember if they owned their house or rented it, and they seemed to have trouble remembering what age Fergal and Cormac were.

   Anyway the woman with the black curly hair came in to join us and she said her name was Caroline and she would go through a few things with me. She would ask me some questions.

   Well, first I thought it was a kind of a joke. They were things like a five-year-old would know about—the colors of traffic lights and about who was the taoiseach of Ireland and who was prime minister of England and the president of the United States and what animal did St. George get involved with; then a little harder, like in what part of your body would you find a cuticle or a retina. And then a few puzzles about the speed of a train or the length of a platform.

   They asked me to tell them about Rossmore and so I told them of all the fuss over the bypass road that would cut through Whitethorn Woods. I said I was in favor of it really because it is so hard to cross the street there at the moment with all the huge lorries, and that really places should want progress rather than looking back. They seemed interested but of course it was hard to know.

   Caroline asked, did I want to ask anything myself, so I asked about the signing and what was their policy on it, and she said that a lot of deaf people liked talking in sign because it made them relaxed so St. Martin's didn't discourage it, they just used it as a second language. And that seemed fine to me.

   Then she said she had a hard question: If a house painter was going to paint the numbers on a housing estate from one to a hundred, how many times would he paint the number nine. I looked at her, waiting for the real question. That was it.

   I kept looking at her, waiting.

   "That's it. There's no catch," she said. But there had to be a catch. Anyone would know the answer to this one. They couldn't let you into a great school like this or keep you out over something like this.

   She asked me to write down the answer on a piece of paper and I did. When she looked at it she nodded and folded it over and involved everyone else in the room.

   "What do
you
think?" she asked the principal.

   The principal said nine. The assistant principal said ten. My mother said eleven. My father said definitely eleven, because there would be two nines in ninety-nine.

   Caroline smiled at them all and asked, "Do you know what Melanie said?"

   They all looked at me and I felt my cheeks go scarlet.

   "I'm sorry," I said. "I thought you meant every single time he painted the figure nine . . ."

   "I did," said Caroline. "And you were quite right, the only one in this room who did get it right."

   They all started playing with their fingers: "Nine, nineteen, twenty-nine . . ."

   Caroline put them out of their misery. "Melanie said twenty times, the rest of you all forgot ninety-one, ninety-two, ninety-three, et cetera. Well done, Melanie."

   My mum and dad were beaming at me and giving me a thumbs-up sign. The principal and the assistant principal, to give them credit, were laughing and a bit ashamed of themselves.

   Then they came to the identifying-objects bit.

   They were all on cards, and to be honest it was very easy at the start: rabbits and houses and sunflowers and buses and things. And we moved on to what might have been the slightly harder things. Now I didn't want to get too confident but these weren't too bad either. Things like a truck, or a food mixer, or a violin, or a saxophone.

   But there was one I couldn't work out at all.

   It was shaped like a triangle. I turned the card round a bit until I could get a better look at it. No, I still couldn't see what it might be, the drawing was very simple, too simple; there were no real clues.

   "I'm afraid I have no idea," I said apologetically.

   Caroline looked disappointed. I could see it in her eyes.

   "Take your time," she said.

   But the longer I looked at it the more confused I felt. Who would know what it was? I glanced at my parents and to my amazement I saw they were holding hands very tightly. My dad's eyes were closed and my mum had that slightly exasperated look she sometimes had at the checkout when people were being stupid or fumbling in their handbags for their money. I realized that they knew what this thing was. I couldn't believe it, how did they know? You'd need to be inspired to know.

   "No hurry," Caroline said again. She had big eyes, and she was willing me to know what it was. The others were startled that I didn't know, I could see that.

   They shuffled a bit as if to say that maybe my good performance so far had all been sheer luck or getting questions I knew. They couldn't even work out a simple problem about how many nines the guy painted and yet they knew what this thing was.

   I stared at the triangle until my eyes hurt. Was this what was going to keep me out of a great school? Did this stand between me and a terrific education? Would I be back in my old school, peering and straining and missing a lot of it? Would I be back in the concrete schoolyard and not here going to play hockey three times a week and with my own flower bed? I had been planning what to plant in it, tomato plants up against the wall and lots of dwarf conifers and winter pansies in the front for all the year-round color.

   "No, I'm sorry, it really has defeated me," I said to Caroline.

   "Just guess," she begged.

   "Well, it is only a guess," I warned her.

   "That will do fine," she said.

   "It
could
be Cheshire," I said doubtfully. "A slice of Cheshire taken from the block but it might be Cheddar. I'm torn between the two of them."

   And then everything changed. They all seemed to be dissolving into tears and shaking one another's hands and hugging me. Caroline had as many tears on her face as Mum and Dad had. Apparently after all my nearly killing myself trying to work out what variety it was, the word "cheese" was all they had wanted me to say. Imagine. They didn't even know what kind of cheese it was, they just wanted the word. And the fact that I thought this was too easy a question had just settled everything.

   They showed us the dormitories and the dining hall, and my mother and father had stopped being nervous and were acting like normal people again.

   Caroline said, "See you at the start of next term then."

   I said, "You are coming back then?"

   She looked at me, astounded that I seemed to know there had been a doubt about it, although it had been written all over her face, and she said yes, she was, that she had just decided it this very day. About ten minutes ago. And she looked a lot less troubled somehow.

   As we went home on the train Mum and Dad got out a paper and pen to work out why the painter painted nine twenty times, and I looked at the card with the silly triangle of mousetrap cheese drawn on it, which Caroline had given me as a souvenir of the day.

When we were young we had this aunt who came to the house all the time. She was my mum's younger sister but we never called her Aunt or Auntie because she said it made her feel ancient. We always called her Shell.

   She was a real glamour puss, Shell was, and she told me and my sister, Nancy, all kinds of things that our mum wouldn't ever have told us, like that men just loved girls to wear very high-heeled black shoes and to have very big shiny hair and wear bright red lipstick. Shell kept all these rules herself and she was gorgeous and there were always men around her. But never the same man for any length of time, as my mum said, because apparently Shell was a bit flighty. She was always heading off somewhere for a while and always coming back.

   Flighty or not, she was dead interested in us and plucked our eyebrows and got us push-up bras. She told Nancy and me that the world was full of opportunities and we must grab them all, which was so different to what everyone else told us. Our mum and dad were always telling us about studying hard and keeping our heads down, and that was what the grannies said too and they said it at school.

   But Shell was her own woman. Life was full of promise, she said, and we must be ready to seize whatever came our way. She made us feel great and excited, but only one thing worried me.

   Shell often said to me, when we were on our own, that I shouldn't bother getting a career or anything. I was a looker, she said, and I'd marry when I was twenty, just let me be sure to get a decent fellow with plenty of money. I didn't like any of this, well, you don't when you're twelve, do you? I mean, saying that because I had a prettier face than Nancy, that I shouldn't study and she should . . . it was a bit . . . I don't know . . . making looks out to be everything or nothing.

   But you don't argue with Shell so I said nothing, just nodded and agreed with her.

   When I left school I got a place in a training college and learned to teach the deaf. Nancy went to university and studied economics and politics. Shell was with a very rich guy at this stage and she gave us both a holiday; Nancy went on an art appreciation tour to Italy and I went on a skiing holiday in a posh resort, which was where I met Laurence.

   Laurence was a lawyer in a very well-known law firm. He was a big, handsome, warm man with dark curly hair and a great smile. And he had everyone around the dinner table in fits of laughter every night. The girls who ran the ski chalet said they would give him a free holiday any time, he was such fun.

   He told me the very first night that I was just r
avishing
—that was the word he used—so often I almost began to believe it . . .

   Shell had always said that some men were too perfect to be true and that the wise thing to do was to look for their flaws at the beginning, then you wouldn't get so let down later.

   Okay, let's look for his flaws, I said. He was very handsome and they say handsome men are vain. He didn't appear to be, but I had to remember that as a possible flaw. He was a little impatient with people who were slow on the slopes or who didn't get the drift of the conversation at dinner. But for me he had all the time in the world, and he was interested in everything about me, my studies, my family, my hopes and dreams—and very interested in going to bed with me.

   I told him that I didn't do that on holidays.

   "Why did you come on this holiday then?" he asked, irritated.

   "To ski," I said simply.

   Surprisingly he accepted that and stopped bothering me about sex. I assumed that I would never hear from him again so was very surprised when he called two weeks after we returned from our holiday.

   He lived only fifty miles away from me in a place called Rossmore so we had dinner a few times, and then he brought up the matter of whether I might come away with him for a weekend to a hotel in the Lake District of England.

   I said, that would be great, thank you, that I'd love it.

   It was great and I did love it.

   He brought me to meet his family and they were posh but not overpowering.

   And I brought him to meet my family and naturally Shell turned up to inspect him. Out in the kitchen she put her fingers in a bunch up at her mouth and blew a kiss in the air.

   "Exquisite, Caroline, that's what he is. Didn't I always tell you you'd be married before your twenty-first birthday and not to bother with a career?"

   I looked at her openmouthed. I
had
a career. I was going to teach the deaf, beginning with my probationary year the following September. What did she mean that I was not going to bother with a career?

   But as usual with Shell, you say nothing. So nothing was what I said.

   And as it happened things turned out differently. Laurence and I got married in September and there was such fuss getting the house and doing it up, everyone considered it better if I didn't start my probationary year at once. The next year I was pregnant so I couldn't start then.

   After that, well, I was looking after Alistair, so it would have been idiotic to try and fit in teaching hours with that. Then when he started going to his first school and I looked for some morning hours teaching, I just couldn't find anything around home. Around Rossmore.

   I don't want you to think that I was aching to get out there and be at work or that I was bored, because truly that wasn't the case. There weren't enough hours in the day. Often Laurence would ring and say, could I escape and meet him for lunch; he always told me I was ravishing and he was always admiring me. I loved being with him and making a good life for him.