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‘I won’t have time to make you all up,’ Sylvie was protesting. ‘There are eight of us. I am not Wonderwoman.’
‘You are to us,’ laughed Connie. ‘All right, I’ll plaster a bit more make-up on later. We won’t let you down.’
‘Tell me again: what do you mean, you are giving up wine bars?’ Sylvie demanded. She was like a dog with a bone when it came to Connie’s single status. ‘You will be alone forever if you do not try. Do you think men lurk on the streets waiting for us to find them? Non! We have to look for them!’
‘I have looked,’ protested Connie. ‘I’m exhausted looking. I want him to start looking for me.’
‘How will he find you, if you are at home watching television?’
‘He’ll have a ladder and he’ll see me in my window,’ sighed Connie. ‘I don’t know. I give up, Sylvie. I’m taking this month off.’
‘You need a facial,’ said Sylvie, peering at Connie’s face with a beady eye. ‘You are all congested. Too many pastries. Look at your pores!’
‘You can make me look fabulous tonight and hide my big pores,’ said Connie, and hurried off to her class.
The day flew.
Her congested pores notwithstanding, Connie had a quick sandwich and a cup of tea at lunch in the staffroom where a cake was cut for all those people who wouldn’t be coming to the hen night. Then she headed to the library because it was the only quiet place to do some marking.
After lunchbreak, she had the first years, followed by double history with the fifth years, which she wasn’t looking forward to because she was too tired for their antics. You had to be in the whole of your health for a giddy bunch of sixteen-year-olds.
Today, there was wild excitement because they’d got something planned as a send-off for Miss Legrand, who was their class teacher.
After history class, there was to be a small party for her departure. Needless to say, not a shred of work was being done and as Connie watched her students pretend to read about Charles Stewart Parnell, she knew they were all communicating with each other about the party. Notes, sign language, whispered sentences – if only they were as good at history as they were at plotting.
There was absolutely no point in trying to counter this behaviour. A wise older teacher had once told Connie that a class is like a tidal wave and once it turns, it turns. ‘Save the lesson for another day, or you’ll go insane with impotent rage.’
She’d also told Connie that deafness was a useful aid for teachers too.
So Connie admired the girls’ party hairstyles and thought about how it felt like the end of an era. When this school year was over, Sylvie would be leaving St Matilda’s for good. It seemed like only yesterday that the two women had started out as new teachers in the school together. Now Sylvie would be gone to start married life with her husband in his home city, Belfast, and Connie would stay on at St Matilda’s, growing old with the nuns.
The school bell rang lustily, taking Connie by surprise. She liked to give pupils a five-minute warning near the end. But today, it didn’t look as if the fifth years cared. They leapt to their feet and swept the books off their desks at high speed.
‘Bye, Miss O’Callaghan,’ they murmured as they raced out, dropping their textbooks on her desk.
So many of them were impossibly glamorous, Connie thought. Their long shaggy hair was exquisitely styled each morning. Outwardly, they looked like confident young Valkyries. It was only through teaching the girls that a teacher would learn how young and worried they sometimes were.
It seemed as if half the school was crammed into the fifth years’ classroom by the time Connie made her way there. Sylvie was sitting on the desk surrounded by cards and with a giant sparkling gift bag on her lap.
‘Please tell me this is a present and not something to do with a tampon and red ink from the art room?’ Sylvie said loudly.
The assembled girls roared with laughter.
‘You laugh, huh? But poor Mr Shaw, he did not laugh, non?’
Only Sylvie could get away with a joke about the trick played on the quiet maths and physics teacher.
‘Non, mademoiselle!’ the girls roared back.
Finally, Sylvie unwrapped the package inside the gift bag. It contained two Irish crystal champagne glasses with a bottle of champagne.
‘There is writing,’ Sylvie exclaimed. ‘For Mademoiselle Legrand, for the most romantic day of your life, Year Five. I love it, girls!’ she cried.
Connie, who’d been expecting a jokey present or even a red satin negligee with white marabou – it was from the fifth years, after all – choked back a tear. Why this touched her after a whole day thinking about Sylvie’s hen night, she had no idea. But suddenly, she realised that Sylvie was going to have the most romantic night of her life next month when she got married, while she, Connie, had no hope of ever sharing something so special with a loved one. Sylvie would now have what Connie wanted so much: her own family. Sylvie and her husband had bought a pretty three-bedroomed house in Belfast. Everyone had seen the photographs.
The second bedroom was to be a spare bedroom and Sylvie was going to keep her clothes in it like a proper dressing room, she’d informed Connie. The third bedroom was to be the nursery.
‘I will paint it yellow. Yellow is good whether it is a boy or a girl,’ Sylvie pointed out.
Connie had said nothing but thought again of how wonderful it must be to be able to plan your life with such confidence. Sylvie was getting married and she was sure that a baby would follow. She’d probably got her eye on a diamond band in Tiffany’s to mark the birth of said baby.
Connie had nothing planned for the rest of her life.
She’d never cried watching Gone with the Wind or even Sleepless in Seattle, but now, standing at the back of the fifthyear classroom, she wanted to burst into tears.
Nicky O’Callaghan beamed as she skipped down the steps of the house and hopped into the driver’s seat of her car. She almost waved at the silver-haired, older lady who lived in the apartment below hers, and who was sitting in her bay window, looking out on to the square. Such was her happiness, that Nicky wanted to smile and wave at everyone. But the woman wasn’t really staring at Nicky in her car: she was gazing into the middle distance, there but somehow not there.
She did, however, send a bright glinting smile at the man at the roadworks where she got held up for ten minutes. Nicky’s smile was infectious.
The man at the roadworks looked back suspiciously. It was unheard of for gorgeous blonde women with glossy red lips to grin at him with delight when he was on kango-hammer detail for roadworks that brought the traffic down Amiens Street to a standstill.
He chanced a wink at her as the lights finally turned green and she managed to edge her Mini Cooper forward and off down the bare expanse of road ahead.
And she winked back! He decided he’d chance the lottery at lunchtime. It was definitely his lucky day.
Nicky wanted to wink and smile at everyone today. Not that she didn’t smile a lot anyway: she had a lot to smile about, she knew. But today was special.
Today was her first day as an engaged woman. Last night, after the book launch, Freddie had taken her out to a late dinner.
There was rarely much in the way of food at book launches, just nibbles and wine, so if you stayed too long, you ate nothing, drank too much and made a holy show of yourself in front of your colleagues, your boss, and if you were spectacularly unlucky, press photographers too. Nicky was far too clever to fall into that trap, so she drank water at launches and ate afterwards.
She’d been telling Freddie all about the author’s speech, and how gratifying it was to have been thanked by the author.
‘Scarlett’s the first author I’ve edited from the start of her career. I feel like I’ve been a part of everything that’s happened, I can’t tell you, Freddie, how amazing that feels…’
When she’d started in Peony as an editorial assistant five years ago, she’d had to prove herself by spending a lot of time doing the vital but painstaking copy-editing work that took place after the author and their main editor had agreed on a final manuscript. Scarlett Ryan was the first author she’d been let loose on, so to speak, and when Scarlett’s debut novel had been a success, she’d insisted that Nicky was part of that success.
‘Dominic, the managing director, was there and Scarlett kept saying how much she owed me and what a fabulous editor I was! She said I’d showed her how to find her true voice. It was wonderful.’ She stopped long enough to take a sip of wine.
‘This is delicious,’ she remarked appreciatively. ‘Expensive, I bet. I thought you were broke, Freddie. Are we celebrating something?’
And that’s when it had happened. Freddie, wunderkind of Mesmer Marketing, boyishly handsome with his floppy dark fringe, hopeless at laundry but sterling when it came to doing dishes, had slipped off his chair in the fashionable Le Pinot Noir bistro, got to his knees and whipped a small box from his inside breast pocket.
Normally, nothing surprised Nicky. She was legendary for it. She noticed everything, from how low they were on milk in the office fridge, to how up-to-date the department was with getting through the slush pile of manuscripts. But in the excitement over Scarlett, she hadn’t registered Freddie’s air of excitement. She noticed it now, along with the glint of something that sparkled.
‘It’s a diamond,’ she said in shock, fingers brushing Freddie’s as she held the small blue box.
‘Do you like it?’
The ring was clearly new but made to look old, with a small round diamond surrounded by teenier specks of diamonds in a platinum band. For all her fondness for labels and fashionable clothes, Nicky was a romantic at heart. Huge diamonds meant nothing. This tiny but beautiful ring was proof of Freddie’s love for her. He’d gone and chosen it himself, which was quite something because Nicky had strong opinions on such things.
‘Here,’ she said, holding out her hand. ‘Put it on.’
With shaky fingers, he took the ring from the velvet surround and slid it on to Nicky’s delicate finger.
‘Oh.’ They both sighed as they admired it.
Nicky was so petite that on her finger, the tiny ring looked totally at home.
‘I was thinking,’ said Freddie, ‘let’s get married soon. We don’t have the money for a big bash, so we could have a small wedding. Nobody will mind, everyone’s broke, things are different now.’ He rushed on. ‘That way, we can save money for somewhere to live. What do you think?’
She touched her newly beringed hand to his cheek.
‘I think that’s a great idea. I was never a fan of those big, expensive weddings,’ she said gently, she, who had once upon a time dreamed of two hundred guests, a live band, wall-to-wall cream roses and a marquee decorated in floaty white muslin. Now that the time was here, all that seemed quite immaterial. They would be married and that was all that mattered.
People in the restaurant clapped as they watched Nicky gently kiss her fiancé.
Neither of the pair took a blind bit of notice of the rest of their meal. They talked about limited guest lists and how they’d present the plan to their respective parents to ensure there was no griping over endless second cousins once removed who now wouldn’t be invited.
In the taxi on the way home, they sat in joyous silence and held each other. Nicky honestly had never felt such peace.
Now all that remained was to tell her sister. Nicky knew that Connie would never begrudge her happiness. On the contrary, Connie had always wanted everything for her little sister. But this was different. This was telling the person she loved second best in the world that she was getting married – something Connie had always longed to do but had the opportunity snatched away from her by that waster Keith.
Connie had always done everything first: moved away from the family home in Wexford, gone to college, got a job, bought her own place. Now, for once, Nicky would be breaking new ground first and for Connie that was bound to be hard.
She’d be abandoning Connie too. The apartment in Golden Square belonged to Connie, although Nicky paid rent, but they’d lived there together since Connie had bought it ten years before.
For the first time in years, Connie would be totally on her own. Would she be all right? Nicky wondered.
When she got home after the hen night, Connie went into Nicky’s bedroom where her sister was half-watching an old film, and lay down on the bed next to her. Several unaccustomed glasses of wine sloshed around inside her, along with dessert wine – Sylvie had insisted, although it was sickly sweet – and what with the wine and the melancholy, she began to cry.
‘I’m so happy for her about the wedding and everything,’ Connie sobbed. ‘I love Sylvie and she deserves to be happy, but Nicky, don’t I deserve it too?’
Nicky had looked so stricken that Connie sobered up at high speed, and apologised.
‘I’m fine, honestly. Everyone was getting maudlin by the end of the night, and I kept thinking about Keith – not that I’d want him back, or anything, but you know, it was my chance to settle down and…’ She stopped talking. She couldn’t, wouldn’t, say anything about her diminishing chance to have a baby. It was too painful to speak out loud, even to Nicky. Better to keep it hidden in her heart.
‘Oh, Connie, I’m so sorry.’ Nicky still looked stricken.
Connie clambered up the bed to hug her sister. ‘Don’t mind me, I’m a mad old lady, I’ll turn into one of those ferocious spinsters of the parish and you can get married and have eleven children, and I’ll drive them all insane. We can take over the whole of this house and all the kids in Golden Square will be afraid of me. Mad Miss O’Callaghan who lives with her sister and the eleven children. What do you think?’ she grinned at Nicky, who gave her a very halfhearted grin back.
Eventually, Connie got off the bed.
‘I’ll have a terrible headache in the morning,’ she said. ‘Please, I beg you, get me out of bed at seven thirty. Mrs Caldwell will be like a weasel if the hen-night people are late in.’ The Principal considered good time-keeping to be on a par with saving the world from destruction.
‘I’ll wake you,’ Nicky said, in such a voice of gloom that Connie spent the next hour in bed berating herself for worrying her sister. Some people got what they wanted in life and some didn’t. it was futile to cry over being a have-not rather than a have. Life wasn’t fair. She knew that.
And finally, exhaustion got the better of her and she dozed off.
5 Potatoes (#ulink_57f41d51-0bf6-5b31-9de3-820ea3e39dc9)
The famine road isn’t far from our house. It’s a stony route to nowhere, built to give men a few coppers when the countryside was riddled with potato blight. Perhaps your generation won’t hear much about the famine – it’s true, we’ve grieved enough about it, but it would be a pity if people forgot the past.
Ireland isn’t the only country to have suffered starvation. Agnes said she heard them talk at the Fitzmaurices about the people out in Africa who have nothing. There are little babies with bellies big from hunger. It must break a mother’s heart to watch a little one starve and not be able to find a crumb to feed it. It would break mine. A bit like the people eating grass here when there was nothing else.
Every time I pass that famine road, I thank the Good Lord for what we’ve got. Thanks for you, Eleanor, thanks for my beloved Joe, thanks for Agnes, the best sister ever. I get on my knees to say thanks for all the gifts I’ve been given. To some people, I haven’t got much, but I know I’ve had the best of life.
Sister Benedict in the convent says not to feel guilty over our luck in life. We all have our crosses to bear,she says, even though not everyone can see them. All lives have some pain.
This isn’t the story the canon says, mind you. Pain is what you get for sinning, according to him.
The canon has lived a sheltered life and sees every sin as worse than the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah put together. You should hear him at funerals. Most poor corpses are two inches from hellfire, to hear the canon speak. I don’t think he’s in his right mind. There’s no joy in the man. God is kind, my mam used to say. I like to pray to that God and not the canon’s one.
It’s strange that the potato blight killed so many and still we live off the potato. Your father never thinks it’s a proper dinner unless there are potatoes in it. Agnes is the same, for all the fine meals she’s had at the big house.
My mam’s Cally is the best dish you’ll ever have with potatoes. There’s many names for it, Colcannon is one, but in this part of the West of Ireland, we call it Cally. Take some nice floury potatoes and boil them in their skins. When they’re falling apart, tear the skins off, mash them, make a round shape on the plate and then pour the sauce into the middle – melted butter, with a little hot milk and some chopped spring onions. Then eat. When life is falling apart all around you, this is as good a comfort as any, I promise you.
Every morning since she’d arrived in Golden Square a week ago, Megan had woken to the noise of building work coming from across the street. The sounds of drills, diggers and builders laughing were comforting, familiar. There was always somebody building or extending something on her street in London: she was used to it as the background of birdsong and bleating horns from the street below.
So every morning, waking to the building hum, she enjoyed a sliver of time thinking that life was still glorious. She’d stretch, revelling in the feel of her body between the sheets, the body that Rob loved. For one misguided second it seemed that the day lay ahead of her with dazzling brightness: Rob’s smile as he saw her, the director’s smile as he told her that her performance was breathtaking…
Then she’d wake up properly and real life shoved out her fantasy dreamworld. Everyone hated her, her career was over and her heart was broken.
The next step in the morning routine would be awareness of something furry shifting on top of the duvet and then a rough tongue would lick whatever part of Megan was out of the covers.
‘Cici?’ she said the first morning and the shape had wriggled with delight.
Leonardo liked to lie on the floor on the other side of the bed and Megan’s sleepy voice was all he needed to start his welcoming proceedings.
Both dogs would clamber on top of her, licking and wagging their tails eagerly.
After a week, they had the routine down to a fine art. With enough licking and snuffling, they could force Megan out of bed and into the kitchen to give them dog biscuits, and then, once she’d had her morning coffee and cigarette, she might take them for a walk. Nora, of course, would have gone to work.
It was her own fault, she knew, for setting a precedent that first day. But today she had a mission to accomplish on the walk. She’d decided she needed a disguise.
It took ages to clip the leads on because the dogs were dancing about so much, but she wanted to take them with her because she figured she’d looked less strange wearing glasses she didn’t need and a dark bandana to cover her hair if she was hauling two dogs along. Mad people often had dogs. Once out of the door, the dogs pulled towards the garden in the square but Megan dragged them in the other direction.
There was a highly glamorous hairdresser’s about half a mile away, all smoky glass and exquisite hairstylists. She wouldn’t go there. They’d take one look at her and know exactly who she was, and in the fashionable clubs of the city – which they would frequent – the news of both her arrival and her new hair colour would be that night’s gossip. On the west side of the square, however, tucked in front of the Delaney council flats, was Patsy’s Salon, a place that had probably looked old and faded twenty years ago but which she’d noticed the night she’d arrived. She’d found the number in the phone book yesterday but it just rang out. So today she took a chance and went to make an appointment. If Patsy’s was closed, she’d just buy a home dye kit.
Patsy’s was remarkably busy for a place that clearly hadn’t been redecorated for many years. There were three baby-blue basins, all being used, and two women under dryers, talking loudly to each other over the noise.
One girl was delicately putting Velcro rollers into a very elderly lady’s silvery purple hair.
Megan stood for a moment watching.
‘Can I help you?’ said a woman with curled hair an unnatural red, who emerged from the back of the shop.
She had to be fifty, and boasted an hourglass figure all poured into very tight Capri jeans and a red gingham blouse fastened by buttons which looked to be under considerable strain. Megan would not have been surprised if the woman had launched into the chorus of ‘D.I.V.O.R.C.E.’ right there and then.
