Light a Penny Candle

by Maeve Binchy

  ‘We’ll make that bridge class go with a swing, Henry and I. Watch out for lively bridge players!’

  Elizabeth laughed.

  ‘It’s great to see you laughing again, I thought you never would. Why can’t you live on here when you get a job, instead of spending all that money on a flat? It would be marvellous.’

  ‘No, it would ruin things. I’d feel dependent and you’d feel crowded. Where’s Manchester Street? Is it on the way to Manchester?’

  ‘No, it’s not, it’s very central – near Baker Street. You could never afford a flat in Manchester Street, could you?’

  ‘It sounds nice, small and central. They have a minimum let of two years. Is that normal to you, or does it sound fishy?’

  ‘I think people do it, but Aisling, you can’t possibly sign a lease for two years. You’ll be gone back long before then.’

  ‘How many times do I have to tell everyone? I’m not going back.’

  *

  She got the flat and the same week she got a job, receptionist to three doctors in Harley Street. She was able to give Henry Mason and Elizabeth’s father as references, and she told the doctor who interviewed her absolutely directly that she had recently left her husband in Ireland, and recently signed a lease for two years for a flat in Manchester Street. One act seemed to cancel out the other in terms of suitability.

  ‘Am I to take it that the marriage is irretrievably broken down?’ the doctor asked. ‘I ask simply to ensure that you might not wish to disappear should a reconciliation take place.’

  ‘No. It is completely over. I am reverting to my maiden name, O’Connor, and whatever else we can be sure of in this life we can be sure that I will not resume my marriage.’ Unconsciously her hand went to the small scar on her lip.

  The doctor smiled. She was an engaging girl and had perfectly adequate office experience.

  ‘Will you be getting a divorce, Miss O’Connor?’

  ‘There’s no divorce in Ireland, doctor,’ she said.

  ‘I forgot,’ he said. ‘What do people do?’

  ‘If they’re lucky, they come over here and get themselves a fine job in a doctors’ practice,’ she said laughing.

  They told her she could start next week.

  Johnny said he would help her settle in. She said she could afford fifty pounds out of her savings to make the place look nice. That was plenty, Johnny said. They would hunt for some nice bookcases in second-hand furniture shops, and he knew already where they could get her a pair of armchairs … She spent most of the weekend with Johnny dragging her away from the windows of department stores where she was eyeing modern furniture with envy. She wrinkled up her nose at the kind of things Johnny was pointing out.

  ‘We have old rubbish like that, rooms of it above the shop, and no one would touch it.’

  ‘Have you really?’ Johnny was eager.

  ‘Oh yes, Mam would give it to you in order to get the place cleared out.’

  ‘I always meant to go to Ireland and investigate that side of things. Elizabeth didn’t want to go in the old days.’

  ‘Didn’t want to go?’

  ‘I mean, not on business, she thought it would look a bit too sharp, a bit profiteering.’

  ‘Why didn’t you come? You could have come to my wedding.’

  ‘I wasn’t asked,’ said Johnny.

  Aisling thought quickly. ‘No, that’s right, you weren’t – we were worried about numbers. You didn’t miss much.’

  ‘Elizabeth enjoyed it.’

  ‘Yes, I enjoyed it too, to be truthful, as a wedding it was fine. It’s just the marriage that was so rotten.’

  ‘Yes, well, we won’t talk about that any more. Look at this cane rocking chair. Do you think you could clean it up? And put a funny cushion on it here and another there? It would look super beside the window, and you could sit and watch the world of West One go by below.’

  ‘It seems a disgrace to be buying this kind of thing when it’s rotting at home.’

  ‘OK. I’ll drive you back to Kilgarret in the van and we’ll fill up with second-hand furniture and leave. How does that suit you?’

  ‘Oh stop that nonsense and let’s buy this ridiculous thing.’

  ‘If the Squire saw you carrying this up the stairs he’d have a fit,’ Johnny said when they got it back to her flat and he was puffing behind with a table and an old tea trolley.

  ‘lf the Squire saw me now he’d probably find it difficult to remember my name. I gather his little burst on the dry didn’t last very long. …’

  Aisling wrote a long letter to Mam every week for five weeks, pages and pages going over all the reasons why she could not start again, and why it was unfair to expect her to do so just in order to please public opinion. Mam wrote spirited letters back explaining that public opinion was the last thing she was trying to please. If she had been trying to make an impression on Kilgarret, she wrote, she would have forbidden Eamonn to get in with that crowd living out in a wilderness with the Dalys; she would have forced Aisling to study and go to university and she would have had a coat of paint on the house in the square every five years. She did none of these things because they would all have been for show. What she did want was for Aisling to see that she had broken a promise made to another human being, and that the human being was making every effort; and all she had to do was to meet him half-way, or even a quarter of the way.

  Then there was the letter saying that Ethel Murray had been taken into hospital suffering from high blood pressure, strain and her nerves.

  Then there was the letter saying that Tony had gone back on the drink after three and a half weeks. His letters to Aisling had been returned unopened which was bad enough; but when Jimmy Farrelly called in to him and suggested that they organise some kind of settlement for Aisling that was the last straw.

  Then there was the letter saying Ethel Murray was much better and sitting up with some colour in her face again … but she couldn’t be told about Tony having broken his pledge until she was stronger.

  And one day there was a letter in a typed envelope which Aisling opened because she thought it was from the solicitor.

  It was from Tony.

  Please Ash, please come back. It’s only now I realise what it must have been like for you. I’ll go to a clinic and get myself cured properly from the drink. I’ll go to a hospital too in Dublin or in London and let them examine me all over to see why I can’t do the sex act. I’ll drive you to and from work every day, and buy a new record player that you once asked for. If you don’t come back I will kill myself and for the rest of your days you will know that you could have saved me from doing that.

  I love you and I realise I was a terrible husband but all that is over now and when all is said and done you are still my wife. And if you come home soon it will be better than it ever was.

  Love, Tony

  Dear Tony,

  This is the last letter I am ever going to write to you so I urge you to believe what it says. I am never coming back to live with you. Never. I have no further recriminations, you know them all. I have every possible ground for an annulment of our marriage; if you would like this we can start proceedings. I understand there is a priest in the Archbishop’s House in Dublin that we write to with the full details. However, at the moment I don’t even feel that I want to do that. I have no intention of remarrying so we could leave the annulment side until one or other of us does wish to marry again.

  I do not want you to write again making promises that you could or would not keep. I am not a higher person than you, there is no need to humble yourself. I am just as selfish – I left because I couldn’t take the unhappiness any more. I am going to give you some advice, just as I would give advice to someone I only knew for a short time. For your own sake cut out drink because I think it’s affecting your liver already. You have had pains that I think are the beginning of liver damage. I would try to take more interest in your firm, because very shortly firms like Murray’s are going to
be hard put to it to fight supermarkets and big chain stores. It would be wise to examine very carefully what you are doing and where you are going.

  And lastly: mothers. Both your mother and my mother are worried sick about us. Yours is in hospital thinking that you’ve given up drink forever, mine is working in our shop thinking every time she looks across the square she will see me getting off the bus, coming back to start everything all over again. I’m writing to both of them, nice cheerful letters, but this is not a cause for hope, they are not to be allowed to think that I will come back, because I will not. I have started a new life. But they are both so good and have given up so much of themselves to think about their children it would be good if you could make it a bit easier for them by not threatening suicide or saying that your life is over. Because it is not. You have plenty of talents and when I remember all the times we used to laugh and go to the pictures and go for drives … you had a lot of happiness then. Maybe it will come back.

  I am not going to discuss money or settlements or dividing up the contents of the house. I just want to wish you well genuinely, and to tell you that no promises, threats or entreaties will make me change my mind. Our marriage is over as definitely as if the annulment had arrived from Rome.

  I wish things had been different for both of us.

  Aisling.

  Bit by bit they realised in Kilgarret that Aisling had left Tony. Mam had been so vague and non-commital that Maureen thought Aisling must have gone to hospital with a miscarriage. As the time passed she suspected that Aisling was having fertility treatment.

  Tony had been grumpy when people asked where Aisling was. ‘Oh, wouldn’t you know, gone off to Dublin and London to her friends,’ was all he would say.

  Donal, anxious to return the five pounds after the night out, had even called to the bungalow. He had met a wild-eyed Tony asking had he any message from Aisling. In the bungalow itself he had seen all the blood-stained towels and cloths which had been thrown into a basket in a corner of the kitchen. ‘What on earth happened?’ Donal asked, his voice in a screech with fear.

  Haltingly and unconvincingly, a tale of a row and provocation and a slight cuff on the ear was told. Donal stood up unsteadily.

  ‘You’re a great ignorant lout, Tony,’ he said. ‘Aisling’s much too good for you, I hope she’s begun to realise that at last.’ Donal went back to Mam and saw by her face that she knew already. ‘I won’t ask questions, Mam,’ Donal had said, ‘but if there’s anything I can do I will.’

  ‘When we try to get them back together, maybe you’d talk to Aisling about how upset he is,’ Mam had suggested.

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t do anything to get them back together,’ Donal said surprisingly. ‘No, Mam, I’ve seen this coming for a long time. He behaved like a drunken bum in London, but we all closed our eyes to it.’

  Eamonn said, ‘The talk in Hanrahan’s is that Aisling’s run out on Tony – could that be true, Mam?’

  ‘No, there’s a bit of trouble but it’ll sort itself out,’ Mam said. But as the weeks went on Eileen’s mouth became a thinner line and the sunny hopes that it was a matter of no consequence began to fade. When people asked about Aisling she shrugged and said, ‘You know what young people are like these days, there’s no knowing what they’ll be up to next.’

  The night that Tony came up to the shop and broke the window with a big stone he had carried from Hanrahan’s back yard, Eileen was actually sitting in her eyrie. If she had been nearer to the window she would have been badly injured and possibly killed. A crowd gathered and the sergeant took Tony down to the station. Eileen said that it was to be overlooked; Tony was sent home in a squad car to the bungalow which was dark and cold. Eileen begged the sergeant not to tell his mother, it would upset her so much. Mr Meade arranged for a glazier to come first thing in the morning and fit a new window. Father John heard about it and wrote Eileen a letter which was meant to be soothing but in fact turned out to be an attack on Aisling for having deserted her marital duties. But apart from these happenings, life in Kilgarret was able to absorb the scandal of Aisling’s flight. And a lot of people wagged their heads comfortably to each other and said that it just went to show that money and good looks don’t necessarily bring you happiness.

  The spring came to London and Elizabeth became much bigger. She said it was now impossible for anyone to get into the little lift with her and that when she and Henry came back from any outing he had to walk up the stairs. This was not quite true but her protruding stomach was very noticeable. She left the school at Easter and came home tearfully with a huge teddy bear the children had given. She had promised to return and show them the baby in September, she said that if it was a beautiful baby she might prop it up in the art room and they could all paint it. The children loved this idea but she knew it would never happen. Next September there would be a new art teacher who would hate this doting mother returning and looking for the limelight.

  In the last weeks she felt she would never have been able to cope without Aisling. She had taught Aisling to cook more adventurously, surprised that she knew only the very basics.

  ‘What would I have had to cook for? At home Mam always had a girl to cook for us, and when I entered married bliss it wasn’t long before my husband decided he would prefer to drink his breakfast, dinner and tea rather than eat them.’ Aisling shopped, and chopped vegetables and set tables while Elizabeth had rests and put her feet up. She found her legs swelling if she stood around too much. ‘You do too much entertaining, what are you having Simon and his yukky sister and brother-in-law for?’ She chopped bits of pork expertly and threw them into a casserole as she talked.

  Elizabeth sat in the kitchen with her feet on a little beaded footstool that Johnny had found for her. ‘You’ve no idea how much pleasure it gives Henry. He feels somehow that he’s their equal if he can have them to dine at his home … What are you doing?’

  ‘The recipe says a little cider. …’

  ‘But that’s half a bottle you’ve put in.’

  ‘That’s a little, isn’t it? A lot would be a full bottle.’

  The baby was two weeks overdue.

  ‘I feel unreasonably annoyed,’ Aisling said as they sat in the flat looking out at the park one July day.

  ‘Funny, I don’t mind, I feel sort of dreamy and as if it’s borrowed time … oh I do hope that there won’t be anything wrong with it.’

  ‘You’d have just as much love … or more, they say. But let’s not start preparing for that sort of thing … Mam sent you her love by the way, in today’s letter. And I got one from Dad, too.’

  ‘What did he want?’

  That’s what I wondered, but in fact it was just a chatty letter: your mother tells me that since we’re not going to see you at home in Kilgarret the only way I can keep in touch with you is to write to you … I think he always felt guilty when Mam did all the writing to poor Sean in the army and he didn’t.’ Aisling looked suddenly at Elizabeth, whose face was contorted in a kind of grimace. ‘What is it?’

  ‘That’s the second time … oh, oh. …’

  ‘Right, get your coat, the case is in the hall.’

  ‘Henry, what about …?’

  ‘I’ll telephone him from the hospital, come on.’

  ‘Suppose we don’t get a taxi …?’

  ‘Put on that smart summer coat. It was bought for great occasions like this. …’ Aisling ran to the window and leaned out. Four stories below a taxi was passing by. The taxi driver heard the piercing whistle and saw the redhead waving from the window. ‘We’ll be right down,’ she shouted.

  He had pulled in outside the main door of the building when they emerged. Taking one look at Elizabeth, he groaned, ‘Blimey, just my luck. Another mad dash to the maternity ward, and I thought I was going to have this gorgeous dolly all to myself.’ He drove very quickly and Aisling held Elizabeth’s hand and said babies were never born in taxis, first babies were always slow in delivering – people always thought that th
e contractions were faster than they were. ‘You must admit,’ she said to Elizabeth as they turned in the gate of the hospital, ‘you really must admit that I’m very knowledgeable about childbirth for someone who has not even known the delights of sexual intercourse.’

  Elizabeth was still laughing when they came to meet her in the corridor.

  Henry arrived at the hospital, white-faced. In the waiting room he and Aisling hugged each other.

  ‘They say it will only be a few minutes now. You’re in time. You’ll see the baby first. I was afraid I would.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have mattered.’ Henry was stuttering with excitement.

  The nurse opened the door.

  ‘Mr Mason …?’

  ‘Yes, yes, is she all right?’

  ‘She’s fine, she’s perfect, she wants to show you your beautiful daughter.

  ‘Eileen,’ said Henry.

  ‘Eileen,’ said Aisling.

  Eileen was the most beautiful baby in the world. Anyone could see that. She was also the best-tempered.

  ‘Did all those Brendan Ogs and Patrick Ogs look like this?’ Elizabeth asked as she stared with adoration at the sleeping bundle in her arms.

  ‘Nothing at all like this. They had red, bad-tempered Daly faces looking for notice and attention, and pushing their way on in the world at the age of one day. Eileen is gentle and well bred. You can see that. Look at her expression.’

  They looked at the perfect little face and Aisling traced her finger lightly over the tiny hands with their little nails.

  ‘It’s impossible to think of her ever doing anything remotely bad, isn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose they thought that about us too when we were born.’

  ‘Well, we didn’t do much bad did we? We had a bit of bad luck along the way and we coped with it. That’s all we did.’

  ‘Yes, that’s all we did. Are you listening Eileen? That is all your mother and your Aunt Aisling did.’

  ‘I can’t understand what you’re having her christened for if you don’t believe any of it.’