“Do another test in a week or two,” Maureen advises. “You have to be sure.”
They’re in Maureen’s kitchen on a Saturday morning, the rays from a late March sun bathing the room in a low-intensity glow.
“I think I’d travel to England if it tested positive.”
“Would you though? Would you have an abortion?”
The features on Ellen’s face twist. “Would I? I don’t know! I’d have to do something.”
“Really? I know there’s an element of shock. Mind you, I don’t know if Paddy and I would have married without the incentive of the baby. We hadn’t a notion of getting hitched.”
“Just as well I’m not pregnant then because Eugene and I aren’t getting married.”
“Does Eugene know about this?” Ellen shakes her head vehemently. “Will you tell him?”
“Why would I? It was a false alarm.”
“You should say to see how he reacts.”
“Why? To scare him off?”
“Giving him a jolt would be a good test, if you’re serious about him.”
Ellen snorts contemptuously. “You have babies on the brain, Maureen. Man — woman — love — commitment — baby, that’s the way your mind works.”
“Tick tock, tick tock, biology’s clock is ticking away. Maybe Eugene would like children.”
“We’ve only started to be a couple, Maureen. It could end tomorrow. I’ve no intention of tossing babies into the equation.”
“You think it’ll end?”
“Can you see a future in it?”
“Why do you think you’ll split up?”
“I don’t know that we will, but it’s the age thing. Twelve years, Maureen. It’s no joke.”
“I wouldn’t worry. The French writer Colette seduced a seventeen-year-old when she was in her fifties, and he was heartbroken the day she died. An American writer — I can’t remember the name — was married to a woman he thought was ten years older than him. When she died, turned out she’d lied, and there was an age gap of eighteen years, but it didn’t matter. He never recovered from her death. We’re always trying to put people into categories. It’s much more random and haphazard than we imagine.”
“Well, obviously, I’m in favor of that theory.”
“But, Ellen, what if you were pregnant? Imagine that there’s a high probability you’d never be able to conceive again. For argument’s sake, say you are, and that this is your absolutely one-time-only shot at motherhood.”
“It’s early in the day for this sort of speculation.”
“Your only opportunity. Forget Eugene. Forget your job. Forget everything else. Now, do you want a baby?”
Ellen frowns. “I don’t suffer from baby hunger. I’ve seen you going ‘Coochie, coochie, coochie’ and tickling babies you haven’t been introduced to. Remember when Nesta had her last baby? I pretended to admire him, asked her to let me hold him, all the stuff you told me, but I didn’t feel anything. It was all show.”
“Are you sure that you’re not going to end up being one of those women who ‘forgot’ to have a baby?”
“Well, I can’t take out my crystal ball and have a good old rummage about in the future, can I? Besides, babies are trouble. Children are a worry. Then they bugger off and dump you in a nursing home. What’s the point?”
“Is wanting a life that is nothing but comfortable the best course of action?”
Ellen shakes her head slowly. “Of course, silly me! Why didn’t I realize? My life’s way too perfect. I should bugger it up by having a baby to make Maureen happy!”
“Don’t turn all snooty on me.”
“Why you have to keep banging on about it. We know I’m not pregnant.”
“But what if you were faced with it?”
“Well, then I’d know what I felt.”
“You’re like a blind person where children are concerned,” Maureen says impatiently.
“You’ve always liked kids, Maureen. You’re programmed to want them.”
“I’m glad I had them… because they broke me open.”
“Broke you open,” Ellen says caustically. “Bits of Maureen here, there, and everywhere?”
“Emotionally, put me through the wringer. Brought me to life in a way I’d never been alive before.”
“So? So what? Hurrah? Look, I know about the old-style Catholic idea that people improve through hardship and suffering. But I’m not sure about it. What about the woman who gives birth to a physically or mentally disabled baby?”
“Challenged.”
“What?”
“A physically or mentally challenged baby,” Maureen says.
“Yeah. Okay. Well, that woman’s suffering would heighten her awareness of life, but does it enhance her quality of life? It might be detrimental to her.”
“We all make choices,” Maureen says, clipping her words. “I happen to think the more you experience of life, the more you confront what’s difficult, the more alive you end up being. You evolve. Isn’t that what it’s all about?”
“That’s the greatest load of balls I’ve ever heard. I’m surprised you didn’t suggest that I’d live on forever in the child and its descendents.”
“You’re still a child, Ellen.”
“Haven’t you heard of prolonged adolescence, Maureen? We don’t grow up now. We don’t accept the responsibilities of adulthood. We don’t want to grow old. Life’s too sweet.”
“I never thought I’d see a resemblance between you and your mother, but I do now,” Maureen says glumly. “Self-obsessed, not wanting anything to disturb the calm of your life. You’d resent a child.”
“Were I to have a child, I’d know to make it feel loved, but it’d be bloody irresponsible to produce offspring just to see how I’d react. What if I rejected it? Lots of ‘what ifs.’ In the end, I’m me and you’re you. And I resent the implication that I resemble my mother. All the other stuff I don’t mind.”
“I take that back, but you’re not necessarily out of the loop with the pregnancy thing. Do another test next week.”
That night, Ellen dreams that she’s staying in Maureen’s house. She’s on the point of discarding the testing kit and its packaging when she notices a wavering blue line in the glass part of the tube. She shakes the tube and the line breaks up. She wonders what that means. Is she really pregnant? False reading, she thinks. It has to be. The line re-forms. She’s mesmerized by it. What will she tell Eugene?
Maureen laughs. “That’s putting it up to you,” she says.
Now Ellen is awake. She sits up in bed. The room is unfamiliar. She can’t find the light switch. She can’t see anything. Her hand knocks something over. Her heart is running its own Olympics.
“Are you okay, dear?” comes Kitty’s voice. “You cried out.”
For a moment Ellen thinks she has blundered into another dream until she remembers that she’s staying in her mother’s apartment. “I’m okay. I’m grand,” she says.
“’Night, dear.”
“Goodnight.”
Kitty puts down her paintbrush. “Stop being so fidgety, darling. Just another few minutes.”
Ellen sighs. “Why didn’t you stick to landscapes?”
Kitty purses her lips. “Portraiture has always interested me. My tutor suggested I give it a go.”
Kitty must be the tidiest painter ever. Her overalls are, naturally enough, spotless. When she finishes, she’ll wheel her easel into a corner and clean her color palette. The tools of her hobby will be stored unobtrusively beside the dresser in the kitchen.
“Your mouth is turning down again.”
“I’m wilting.”
“Lift the edges of your mouth. I’m trying to give you a nice expression.”
“It doesn’t matter if I have a scowl.”
Kitty clicks her tongue in irritation.
The apartment is full of Kitty’s paintings — her early botched representations of vases of flowers, the worrying gradients of the horizons in her first
landscapes, and later competent renderings, when she had mastered drawing and perspective. She has sold a number of paintings at the summer exhibition on Saint Stephen’s Green. Her work graces walls in the houses of quite a few friends who haven’t chosen to hide the paintings in obscure places.
Ellen respects her mother’s limited talent but she doesn’t like the palette of colors Kitty works from. When not doing watercolors, she uses pastels. Still, the portrait will be recognizably Ellen. “My daughter,” Kitty will say to anyone who asks, and they’ll probably imagine a close relationship.
“Christy has picked up a job,” Kitty says as she dabs at the canvas.
“I knew he would. I wasn’t worried.”
“Aren’t you going to ask about it? You wouldn’t care if he disappeared off the face of the earth tomorrow.”
“I’d attend the memorial service. Anyway, who’s he working for?”
“You’ve a heart of stone, Ellen. No finer feelings. He’s with Sergeant and something or other. It’s a big company, not as exclusively arty as the previous place, which he’s disappointed about, but they’re less likely to fold than a small firm.”
“And how’s his love life?”
“He’s with a very nice girl. Why? Are you jealous?”
Ellen laughs. This is typical Kitty. Conversations with her take little twists and turns. They’re a scenic route of impressions, jumping from this topic to that, a mishmash of random provocations.
“There, you can move.”
Ellen yawns, stands up, and checks her watch. “You said half an hour — that was nearly two hours!” she complains.
Kitty smirks and stands back from the canvas.
Ellen ponders Kitty’s rendering. An abstract of an angled head and torso — three-quarters angle — is daubed with light brushstrokes of pallid grays, yellows, and orange, light hair, dark brows, and lurid spots of consumptive color on the cheeks. Still, it’s a pretty Ellen. It corresponds to Ellen’s idea of how she looks, perhaps how she always looked but didn’t realize, but certainly how she sees herself now. “That’s good,” she comments. “You’re in control of your material.”
“Do you really like it?” Kitty asks. Ellen can tell she is flattered by the praise.
“Indubitably. I look weird but I like it.”
Mother and daughter smile at each other. Ellen would like to stretch this moment, to eternalize it, before its inexorable deterioration, before Kitty lobs in an undermining comment, or makes some outrageous statement calculated to throw Ellen into a frenzy. She has learned to receive all her mother’s taunts with surface equilibrium and knows how to fast-track a conversation back into the shallows of small talk.
Often Kitty is disappointed when she can’t elicit extreme reactions from Ellen. Sometimes — rather wistfully — she’ll say, “We used to have such fights, darling” or “You’ve iced over, Ellen. I think you don’t have any feelings at all.” It’s not for lack of trying on Kitty’s part — teasing, she calls it — but Ellen is adamant that she won’t be drawn into a row.
“I’ll heat up a nice little something from Marks and Sparks tonight. There’s another bottle of Chablis in the fridge,” says Kitty.
“I was going to treat you.”
“Wouldn’t hear of it, dear. Let’s be frugal.”
“Frugal it is.”
Kitty isn’t normally an aggressive woman, but a persistent lingering disappointment — with life or with Ellen — makes her fractious in her daughter’s company. Ellen is the butt of all her nastiness, that insidious awfulness that nobody else witnesses. For as long as Ellen can remember, her mother has been dissatisfied with something or other concerning her daughter, sighing over Ellen’s outfits, figure, friends, and interests. Ellen has never cracked the riddle of what exactly her mother wants from her, but she knows that Kitty won’t ever find her satisfactory.
The previous night they went to a film and ate in one of the Temple Bar hostelries, a lively Italian-owned restaurant Kitty had booked. They were given a table by a window that faced out onto the River Liffey with a view of the constant comings and goings of natives and tourists. Kitty fancies herself as a Bohemian and likes to wander about Dublin’s self-styled Latin quarter whenever she can. At heart, however, she’s a suburbanite, nursing her prejudices, cultivating her image, fond of her comforts, and dabbling in the arts.
She has a satisfactory time of it, meeting friends for lunch, regularly taking short breaks for the over fifty-fives to France, Italy, Portugal, and Greece. She suffers a distinct shortage of family. Originally from a public housing estate in Crumlin, she is the only child of long-dead parents who were themselves solitary children. Their legacy to Kitty was an education. Kitty’s contribution to her social elevation was to cultivate a middle-class accent. A dead husband, a live child: that is her lot. Ellen is her only kin, Matt her only in-law. She often reminds Ellen of this, with her “You’re all I’ve got now, dear” and “We two will have to stick together.” Ellen foresees this phrase being used with increasing frequency in years to come, and dreads the apocalyptic moment when Kitty will beg her to live with her, or insist on living with Ellen.
“And how is Matt getting on?” Kitty asks over salad and rolls at lunch. She has never bothered much about Matt although she claims to find him attractive. Ellen suspects that she doesn’t fancy the idea of being associated with a farmer. Kitty has an instinctive disdain for anything that smacks of hard labor and a horror of finding herself in a situation which wouldn’t satisfy her yen for material comforts.
On the other hand, Brendan’s profession as a teacher gave him social standing and respectability. He didn’t survive long enough to clock up a pension, but an insurance policy paid off the mortgage on the house they were living in when he died. Reluctantly, Kitty returned to work in a public library. It was better than being a shop assistant.
Everything Ellen has been told about her father makes her think of him as the strong one in her parents’ marriage. Kitty, with her pretty ways and feminine wiles, would have latched on to that strength. She sometimes wonders how they adjusted to each other, or if they did. Were disagreements and rows a feature of their union? Ellen has a vague memory of her mother crying, but whether that was because she’d had a fight with her husband, or because her husband had died, she has no idea. Matt wouldn’t have borne Kitty’s machinations. They would have irritated the life out of him.
“Matt’s okay now. He was off form for a while after Julia’s death but he’s coming round.”
“He should never have married Julia. She wasn’t fit to lick his boots. It was an arranged marriage. The mother forced him into it. Brendan told me.”
“It certainly wasn’t a happy union. Still, he’s free to make something of his life now that she’s gone.”
“I don’t understand why you choose him over me,” Kitty says petulantly, with one of her sudden mood swings.
“Choose Matt over you?” Ellen echoes with a carefully constructed frown. She’s on immediate alert, her neck so tight it feels brittle.
“Yes, throwing in your lot with him, instead of being here with me. I can’t think what I’ve done to deserve it. It’s quite a slap in the face, I can tell you. Humiliating, in fact.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Kitty. It’s not as if I see that much of Matt. Be honest. You and I don’t get on. It’s best when we live at a remove from each other.”
“Oh, darling, that’s not at all true,” Kitty protests. “We make a great team. Wouldn’t it be lovely if we could hang about like sisters?”
“Too much rivalry, Kitty. We’d kill each other!”
Kitty laughs. “A shame, isn’t it?” she sighs. She sounds wistful.
Ellen hopes that Kitty isn’t coiling up for another attack. She knows that at the back of all of this girlish posturing is a deep loneliness. Her mother’s life is mostly surface. She wants everything to be right but feels emotionally isolated.
Kitty once hinted that she had suffered many disappoin
tments in her time. Ellen supposes that her mother’s glooms stem from the realization that her life has failed to live up to her imaginings. She offsets this by fabricating a virtual world in which she plays an improbably important role. The cultivated, sensitive, intelligent, beloved, and moneyed Kitty — her best self — lives this life. Bits of it she salvages through her interest in books and art. She compensates for lack of money by dressing well and eating little. However, she’s convinced that she has been cheated out of an alternative life, where — Ellen is sure about this — she lives in one of the grand Southside city houses with a fawning husband, successful children, and healthy bank balance. Kitty is always anxious to establish her superiority to others, convinced of her greater sensitivity, refinement, and taste in relation to other people. She’s like a waitress who has tried and failed to make it in acting, treating her customers disdainfully because she knows that she will outshine them the day her talent is recognized.
“You’d find it an awful drag having to live with me,” Ellen says. “It’d be a letdown.”
“I suppose that’s true,” Kitty says. “You’ve let me down in many little ways.”
“Well, I’m glad they’re only little ways,” Ellen says vigorously. “I’d hate to be a big disappointment.”
“Don’t sulk, dear. Sit down and pour another glass of wine.”
In less than twenty-four hours Ellen will sit into her car and drive back to Ballindoon, blessed peace, and Eugene.
“I’m your mother, darling, but you never confide in me,” complains Kitty. “You’re a closed book. I don’t know anything about your hopes and dreams. I don’t even know if there’s romance in your life.”
“Nothing to tell,” Ellen retorts cheerily. “My life is boring.” She can’t bring herself to reveal anything to Kitty. She can almost hear her mother’s shriek of “You so-and-so. Never breathed a word. Now, you have to tell me everything about this Eugene,” and her unconscious pouting as she grooms and preens, imagining herself as a rival for the affections of Ellen’s new man.
Eugene said, “Haven’t you told her yet?” when Ellen and he kissed goodbye the previous day.
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