Mothers and Sons

by Colm Toibin

  ‘A going concern,’ he said, but he left no room for her to reply. It was neither a comment nor a question, but it was left hanging in the air above them both. He stared at it now until he said it again.

  ‘A going concern.’

  This time, there was a hint of doubt, disapproval even, in his voice.

  ‘I mean, that it would be easier to sell it as a business,’ she said.

  ‘Have you sought advice?’ he asked.

  ‘No. I have been running the business as best I can and now, since I got a letter from you, I have come to see you.’

  Speaking like this gave her courage, made her feel almost defiant.

  ‘Running is a good word all right,’ he said, pursing his lips again. ‘Now if the manager of Dunne’s Stores or Davis’s Mills or Buttle’s Barley Fed Bacon came in here and told me they were running a business then I would know exactly what they meant.’

  His voice tapered off, but not before she had detected for the first time a Cork accent. She held his gaze as she wrote another word, the rudest she had ever attempted, beginning at her knee and moving upwards.

  ‘One of my problems, and I hope you understand it,’ he began again, joining his hands in front of him like a man being interviewed on television, ‘is that I don’t have all day. Now I have three cheques with your signature on them out there somewhere, and they might seem for small amounts to you, but those amounts are not small to us. However, we will honour them too. And that’s the end, no more cheques. And instead of cheques, what I’d like to see are repayments every month on the dot without fail. That’s the sort of business I run.’

  He opened a drawer in his desk and found a diary or an address book, he put it in front of him and flicked through it. He became absorbed in it for several minutes before he looked up at her.

  ‘Do you get me, Mrs Sheridan, do you get me?’

  It did not occur to her to cry, but later she wondered if she had broken down at this point and become the stricken widow whether he would have stood up and comforted her and suggested a more lenient policy. Instead, she became more aggressive.

  ‘So I go now, is that right?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, if you don’t mind,’ he said, his Cork accent suddenly sounding pronounced.

  SHE WENT HOME and wrote down the names of all her suppliers, deciding which of them was most likely to tolerate late payment, and which of them she most needed to continue supplies. She marked them in order of priority. She thought first of opening another bank account in Bunclody or Wexford, and getting a chequebook from them and cashing her cheques there. But it occurred to her that all these bank managers would be in cahoots; they would know what she was trying to do. Instead, she took fifty pounds from the cash register the following day and, leaving Catherine in the shop, she drove to Wexford, walked into the Munster and Leinster Bank and asked for a bank draft for fifty pounds in favour of Erin Creamery, her milk supplier. The assistant made out the draft without asking any questions, charging her two pounds extra. She went home and posted the draft to the creamery. This, she thought, would keep them quiet for a while.

  She waited for days to see if she would catch a glimpse of Betty Farrell from the Croppy Inn wandering past her window. Or if she would meet her in the square. Betty had come to her several times at the cash register when there was no one in the shop and held her hand and looked into her eyes and told her that if she ever needed anything, she was just to ask. Nancy had thought of it as a kind way of expressing sympathy, but she had been struck, nonetheless, by Betty’s saying the same thing each time.

  In the end she phoned her and arranged that she would call into Farrells’ at the end of business the following day.

  She was surprised, when Betty answered the door, by her clothes, and wondered if she had specially dressed up because she knew Nancy was visiting. She was wearing a thin loose woollen suit in a sort of light purple colour that Betty had never seen before. And when Betty led her upstairs to the floor over the pub she was surprised by the largeness of the two rooms with interconnecting doors, and the newness and brightness of everything. There was a tray on a side table with china.

  ‘You sit down there now, Nancy,’ Betty said, ‘and I’ll go and wet the tea.’

  Nancy had never been upstairs in this house before. She knew Betty from the street or the square or the cathedral or whist drives. She had known Jim, Betty’s husband, all her life, but Betty was not, she knew, from the town. As Nancy looked around, she noticed that the rug on the floor was faded, yet the fading seemed to have added to the richness. The wallpaper was the same; it looked old and faded without looking shabby, and this meant, she thought, that it was new and had cost money.

  ‘I put my foot down, Nancy,’ Betty said when the tea was poured. ‘I said to Jim: “We’re doing up this house, or we’re building out the country where no one will know our business.” But sure Jim was born here and wouldn’t budge. So I brought in the decorators and I looked around a few auctions. There’s a very good dealer in Kilkenny. He’s the best.’

  Nancy observed that Betty’s nylon stockings were sheer and were a strange no-colour, neither dark nor completely see-through. When they had spoken for a while about their children, and about the problem of living in the town where you had no garden, Nancy knew it was time to tell Betty why she had wanted to see her. She began by recounting her visit to the bank manager.

  ‘Oh, he’s a so-and-so,’ Betty said.

  ‘So you don’t bank with him?’

  ‘No, Jim has always been with the Provincial.’

  ‘Betty, I don’t want to explain the ins and outs of this, but I need someone to cash cheques for me, not my own cheques, but customers’ cheques, people I know.’

  ‘Bring them up here, Nancy,’ Betty said, ‘or send Catherine up with them, or we’ll send down for them, as often as you like, or whenever you like, and we’ll cash them. That’s what neighbours are for.’

  ‘Are you sure now?’

  ‘Well, I should ask Jim,’ Betty said, ‘but I know what he’ll say. He’ll say exactly what I just said. He was in school with George and sure he’s known you since you were born. Wasn’t he great with your sister in England?’

  ‘Oh, he was,’ Nancy said, ‘but that was a long time ago.’

  ‘Well, we’d like to help you, that’s all,’ Betty said.

  ‘I’d be very thankful and it won’t be for long.’

  ‘You were always very capable, Nancy,’ Betty said. ‘Jim always told me that, since the time you were on the Cathedral Committee, that you had the makings of a real businesswoman.’

  ‘Did he say that?’ Nancy asked sharply, but Betty did not answer her, instead smiled vaguely and crossed her legs and sat back in her armchair with a warm sigh.

  ‘I’m glad now you came,’ she said.

  AT NIGHT, when the children went to bed, she left them time to undress and talk amongst themselves before she came upstairs to the girls’ room first and then to Gerard’s room. She made it seem casual, but it was part of their ritual now, something that George’s death had not interrupted nor interfered with. She asked them questions and listened to them, which she could not do when they came in first from school. She told them who had been in the shop and then they told her about school and teachers and friends. She was careful never to criticize them or offer too much advice, she tried to sound more like their sister than their mother. So when Gerard told her that he would like to beat the shit out of old Mooney, who taught him Latin and science, she merely said quietly: ‘Oh, you shouldn’t say that, Gerard.’

  ‘So what should I say?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know. God, I really don’t.’

  She laughed.

  ‘Well, that’s what I’d like to do,’ Gerard said, putting his hands behind his head.

  ‘It’s OK to think it,’ she said. ‘I suppose I just wouldn’t say it to too many people.’

  She knew Gerard’s timetable and she knew whom the girls sat beside in sch
ool and whom they liked and disliked. She told them, in turn, about clothes she might buy, a coat she had seen. But there were two things now which she never discussed with them in these short nightly talks. They never mentioned George or how he had died; and she never told them that she had stopped making payments to the bank and was paying only the suppliers she thought were essential, and that she was hoarding whatever cash she gathered in the bottom drawer of the chest in her bedroom under the good sheets. She believed that Mr Wallace would move slowly against her, even when he found out, as he surely would, that she was cashing cheques in the Croppy Inn. It would be a while before he realized that he should have foreclosed on her at the earliest opportunity. He would never see another penny from her and she would reply to none of his letters when they came. She would save the money in cash so that no other bank could hand her money over to Mr Wallace. In six months, she would have enough to move to Dublin and rent a house and live in peace while she learned typing and shorthand or some other skill which would help her to get a job.

  She began to imagine herself as secretary to a businessman, taking his phone calls and announcing visitors and typing his letters and dressing beautifully, the essence of efficiency. Someone like Tony O’Reilly, or the man who ran Aer Lingus or the Sugar Company. She told no one at all about her difficulties or her dreams, even her sister and brother-in-law. She sat at the cash register in the supermarket and at the end of each day she put the cash where no one would find it.

  HER MOTHER-IN-LAW had still owned the shop when George wanted to open a supermarket, the first in the town. Nancy took no part in the negotiations between mother and son, but she wished now as she drove towards Bree at eight o’clock on a Friday night that she had become involved. Her mother-in-law wanted all the old customers looked after, the ones who lived out in the country who had had accounts for years and had their groceries delivered every Friday, and the others who came into the town on a Saturday and had a drink in the little bar to the side of the shop and paid their bills when it suited them. George put his foot down about the spirit grocery. He was, he insisted, keeping the licence but making the old bar into a storehouse. People would have to go elsewhere for their drink on a Saturday night, he told his mother. And they decided that they would over time phase out accounts completely and ask their customers to pay in cash. But on the question of deliveries, George had to give in. Good customers of long standing who had no transport of their own could not be left stranded, he agreed with his mother. And now both George and his mother were dead and Nancy was left driving towards Bree alone in the second-hand station wagon loaded with boxes of groceries.

  When she married George first, he spent Thursday and Friday nights making these deliveries, doing ten or fifteen a night, not arriving home until late. Slowly, over the years, however, the orders had fallen away. Some customers had moved into the town, others had bought cars. She noticed that some of these old faithful customers in recent times avoided their supermarket. Even when they met her or George on the street, they seemed sheepish and distant, anxious to get away.

  Nancy was left with seven or eight customers, mostly old people who had the same order every week and had the same comments to make on each visit. Some of them, she knew, did not order enough for her to be their main supplier, and she often thought that they were continuing to deal with her for the sake of charity. It was they who felt sorry for her. Yet they were so friendly and grateful when she came to them on Friday nights that she did not have the heart to tell them it would really suit her not to have to drive along mucky lanes to them once a week as though she were the district nurse. After George died would have been the easiest time to call a halt, it would have seemed natural for no more deliveries to be made, but that was the very time when she was foolishly determined that nothing should change, that everything should be run as before. She did not know then that George had left her at the mercy of his bank manager.

  As she drove, she went through all the names of the people she still had to visit: Paddy Duggan, who lived on his own in a tithe cottage which had not been cleaned since his mother died; Annie Parle and her soft sister from near the Bloody Bridge with five gates to open and close before you reached their old farmhouse; the twins Patsy and Mogue Byrne, who ate potatoes and butter for their dinner every day with boiled rice and stewed prunes for their sweet. Neither of them, she thought, ever took off his cap. The six Sutherlands, a sister, three brothers and a wife of one of the brothers, and a cousin or an aunt who was upstairs in bed, they got all their bread from her on a Friday, paid her once a month, and never ordered anything else except jars of Bovril and large pots of strawberry jam – they each had their own, they did not share. And poor smiling Mags O’Connor, alone by the fire with two dogs, in a two-storey house down a long rutted lane, she must have had money or a pension from England because hers was the biggest order of all, including duck loaves and grapefruit juice and Mikado biscuits and tins of salmon and jars of chicken and ham paste and sandwich spread.

  By ten o’clock she had only Mags O’Connor and the Sutherlands to visit. She was cold and tired and wished she knew how to tell these customers that they should find another way to have their groceries delivered. As she approached Mags O’Connor’s house, she noticed that there were two cars parked; one of them had an English registration. When she got out of the station wagon, a sheepdog came and wagged its tail, followed by another who nosed up against her. She took the boxes from the back seat of the car and went towards the door which was, as usual, half open.

  ‘Well, will you look who’s here?’ Mags always used the same greeting.

  ‘This woman,’ she said to the three visitors who sat at her kitchen table, ‘this woman is the saving of my life. I don’t know where I’d be without her. How are you at all, Nancy?’ she asked.

  Nancy greeted her and waited.

  ‘It’s fresh and well you are looking,’ Mags as usual said as the boxes were put into the corner.

  ‘You’ll have tea, Nancy,’ she went on, ‘because I have people here who’ll make it for you.’

  She was a big-framed woman who normally seemed gentle and ready to smile, but now she looked imperiously at her visitors.

  ‘We’ll all have tea,’ she said, ‘and wait until I introduce you now to my two nieces, Susan from Dublin and Nicole from Sheffield and then Frank there who’s married to Nicole and not an Irish bone in his body and no worse for that, although you’d better not tell anyone else I said that.’

  Nancy wondered if she had been drinking but realized that the company had made her talkative.

  ‘Use the good cups and saucers now,’ she said as the two nieces set about making tea, ‘and sit down here, Nancy, I was telling them all about you and poor George and I was just saying that old Mrs Sheridan was the nicest woman in the whole town, there was no one as nice, and of course you’re very nice too. I was saying that too, wasn’t I, girls? So I suppose the gist of what I was telling them was that all the Sheridans were very nice and are still very nice. So it’s a pity you weren’t listening at the door, you would have heard nothing bad about yourself.’

  Nancy wondered if she was imagining this. In the silence which followed she thought she saw one of the nieces with her back to them shaking with laughter.

  ‘Oh, show me the red book before I forget,’ the old woman said, ‘till I see how much I owe you. I keep my money by my side, so I’d be very easy to rob. Philly Duncan up the lane does go to the post office for me every so often. If it wasn’t for you and for him and for that wireless there and Shep and Molly, I’d be in the County Home.’

  She took a breath and then sipped her tea.

  ‘So how are you at all, Nancy?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m very well, Miss O’Connor, very well.’

  ‘It’s always nice to see you. I wrote to the girls here and I said it as well to Philly Duncan that Nancy won’t give up. I know the Sheridans and she won’t give up, she’ll be out here, or she’ll get someone to delive
r. They were always great business people, the Sheridans.’

  She looked serious, her jaw set, as she poked the fire.

  ‘And they always have the best things, sure you couldn’t beat their bread, it’s the freshest, and there’s nothing they don’t have, but I believe there are big changes in the town, plenty of traffic I hear and plenty of money. And I do hear the advertisements for Dunne’s Stores on the wireless, but I wouldn’t like them at all now, they wouldn’t be from the town and they wouldn’t know anyone. They’ll never catch on, Nancy, those Dunnes.’

  When the tea had been finished, Mags O’Connor asked Nancy if she would like a small glass of sherry.

  ‘It’ll help you on your way,’ she said.

  By the time Nancy had refused, a tray had appeared, carried by one of the nieces, with a bottle and five small glasses.

  ‘And I asked the girls, and they’re very good, I asked them to get you a little token of thanks.’

  Mags produced a small package wrapped in shiny red paper and handed it to her.

  ‘Now you’ll have to remember it’s just a token,’ Mags said as Nancy opened the package and found a bottle of 4711 perfume. Mags smiled and nodded her head as Nancy thanked her.

  ‘Oh, the Sheridans were always very nice people,’ she said.

  It was after eleven when Nancy left the house and it had begun to rain. By the time she reached the road she knew that if she turned left she could be home in twenty-five minutes when maybe Gerard would be still awake. If she turned right, she would have three miles more and then another lane to the Sutherlands, to deliver them three large pans and four batch loaves, six pots of jam and six jars of Bovril. She realized, as soon as the idea came into her head, that she would turn left and go home. She could still, she thought, sell the bread in the supermarket the next morning.

  NANCY WAS AMAZED one night the following week when Gerard asked her if she was going to get married again. She told him it was the last thing on her mind.