Time Present and Time Past

by Deirdre Madden

  She leaves the Green by Fusiliers’ Arch, crosses the road and walks down Grafton Street past all the buskers: past a man pretending to be a statue and another man making enormous soap bubbles that quiver and wobble; past a group playing traditional Irish music. It’s quite busy in town today. There are shoppers and tourists; there are young women wearing those little sheepskin boots that look like slippers, together with short skirts and opaque tights. It’s an odd look, Joan thinks. They’re probably students from Trinity, for some of them have satchels over their shoulders that gape open, showing folders and books.

  She goes into Brown Thomas and walks through the glittering cosmetics hall, where girls in black dresses and high heels attempt to spritz her with the latest expensive new perfume. Skinny Minnies all of them, and wearing far too much make-up, they remind Joan of Martina at the same age. It isn’t a happy thought. She sweeps imperiously past them, and heads for the escalator.

  Joan finds herself reflected in mirrors everywhere. She’s a handsome woman, big boned, with strong features, and she takes pride in her appearance. Although she’s in her seventies now she could pass for late sixties. A snappy dresser, she’s looking today for a new suit for the spring, something that will take her on through to the summer. She likes classic, rather formal clothes, Basler, Jaeger, things that don’t date.

  As she browses through the rails she notices two women, one about her own age and one a good deal younger. It’s clearly a mother and daughter out shopping together, because they look quite like each other. The mother has just come out of the changing room, in a dress with a big label hanging on the back of it, and the daughter is giving her opinion. Joan has never liked shopping with other people, certainly not for clothes, and certainly not with Martina. Very occasionally she’ll go shopping with Colette, but only for things for the house. Colette helps her bring home in the car items that would be too big for her to manage on her own. But Joan knows her own mind. She either likes something or she doesn’t. Beth, on the other hand, is a born ditherer. Joan suspects that she wouldn’t have a clue how to dress without Martina’s help; why, she even used to let Christy tell her what colours she should wear, because she couldn’t make up her mind for herself.

  After looking around for a while, she settles on two possible options, both of them in summer-weight wool. One is a dress and matching jacket in black-and-white houndstooth; the other a skirt suit in a soft turquoise colour. She feels that she would get more wear out of the houndstooth, but she likes the other one much more. The colour is flattering and is more suitable, she thinks, for the season that’s in it. She tries both of them on, and quickly settles on the turquoise one. It’s an easy decision to make.

  Once she’s paid for the suit and it’s been presented to her in a striped carrier bag, she browses around the store a little more, and then goes out onto Grafton Street and looks in a few more shops, at shoes and scarves.

  By now she’s ready for some tea, and so she heads through the arcade that leads onto Dawson Street, and goes up Molesworth Street to the National Museum, the cafe of which is a favourite place of Joan’s. You can almost always get a table there, even though the room is small; and it has a certain elegance with its chandelier, the chain supporting it swagged in silk. Another advantage, she thinks, as she waits for her pot of Earl Grey, is that you’re almost certain to be left in peace. The risk of running into someone you know in the museum is very slight.

  She sits down with the tea and waits for it to draw. There’s a younger woman at a nearby table with an enormous buggy. It’s quite ridiculous, the size of it: you could invade Iraq in a thing like that, Joan thinks. There’s a changing bag hooked onto the handles of the buggy; and the front is all hung with toys, trinkets and little mirrors, like a pagan shrine. Joan pours her tea and savours its citrus fragrance.

  An elderly man sitting on the other side of her politely asks for a salt cellar off her table, and she passes it to him with a smile. They talk to each other for a few moments before the man continues with his meal. Joan quite likes talking to strangers: fellow passengers on the bus or the DART; people walking their dogs along the seafront near where she lives, or sitting on park benches. She likes that glancing interaction, where nothing is at stake. People don’t know who you are; there’s no emotional baggage, no intimacy. Joan hates the very word, with its connotations of privacy violated, of things that shouldn’t even be thought of being dragged into the open. Intimate friends: who in their right mind would want such a thing?

  Of course she couldn’t say it to anyone, they’d only take it up wrongly, but she loves being a widow. That isn’t for a moment to say that she’s glad her husband Terence died; it’s rather that she’s very happy living alone, and never having to please anyone but herself. Joan never tires of her own company.

  As she drinks her tea she remembers the Trinity girls she’d seen on Grafton Street earlier. Did they know how lucky they were to be at university? Joan would have given anything to have gone to college, but her father hadn’t believed in education for girls. Business, politics, economics, law, even: Joan would have loved to study any one of those subjects, and she’d have had the brains for it too, for she’d been a smart young woman. It had annoyed her beyond measure that Martina had had every opportunity to study and had made nothing of it. Terence had always said she wasn’t academic, but he had doted on her and made excuses. It was just laziness, as far as Joan could see. Martina had never been interested in anything other than lipsticks and dresses, boys and going to dances. Even Fintan could have done better as far as education went. He got his law degree, he was clever and hard-working and had quite a good job now, but he didn’t have the right personality, Joan thought, he had been too soft-hearted to ever end up as a judge or a barrister. Still, she has great hopes for his sons, for Rob in particular.

  She and Beth had both entered the civil service after they left school. If it was good enough for their own father, the logic had run, it should have been good enough for them. They’d started at quite a lowly level, in clerking posts, and Beth, in all the years she spent there, had never made any great progress. She’d had no real interest or aptitude; it had never been anything more than a way to make a living. But Joan had been ambitious. She’d worked hard, studied at night, sat exams and moved slowly up through the grades.

  What if my life had been different? she wonders now, gazing into her tea cup and staring at the leaves, as if trying to predict her own future instead of reassess the past. What if I had never married? But in those days the only way for a woman to be respected was to get a ring on her finger. Joan had always known that. She’d hated being stuck living at home, but back in the day you couldn’t just move out to a place of your own. She’d used to envy the girls in the civil service who were up from the country, for even though they were only in boarding houses or sharing dingy little flats together, at least they’d had their freedom and their privacy.

  Terence Buckley had been a young teacher lodging in a house two doors down from Joan’s family home, and her connection with him had started in small talk when they met on the street. It’s odd, but she suspects that she thought about marriage before he did, even though when it came to the point it was he who had had to persuade her. He’d been a decent man, gentle and soft spoken, so she’d known she would be fine with him. She didn’t want anyone who was short-tempered like her father; she didn’t want anyone who had a stronger will than her own. She hadn’t been looking for trouble; she’d wanted a home that was truly hers; wanted to get away from her wretched, bickering parents. The big problem had been the marriage bar. In those days women had been obliged to give up their civil service jobs when they got married, so it hadn’t been an easy decision to make. She’d thought about it for a long time before deciding to throw in her lot with Terence.

  She’d been correct in her assessment of him, for he’d turned out to be a good husband and father; a steady worker who ended up a headmaster, and an excellent provider for the family.
Marriage in fairness hadn’t been so bad. It was the children that had been the real problem.

  But no, she thinks immediately, stealing a glance at the monster buggy beside her, that wasn’t true: it was the having of the children she had hated. To this day she can hardly bring herself to walk past the National Maternity Hospital. She regards it as she feels the citizens of Moscow must have regarded the Lubyanka during the Purge: as an imposing civic building in the centre of the city, within the walls of which truly unspeakable things were happening day and night. She hadn’t had too hard a time of it with Fintan for she hadn’t been sick when she was expecting him, just tired all the time, and then when he was ready to be born she didn’t realise what was happening until the last gasp; she’d almost had him right outside the hospital, on the pavement of Holles Street. It was the second time around that she had really suffered.

  There’d been the so-called morning sickness that had lasted all day, every day, for pretty well the whole nine months, until she thought she would surely bring up her own liver and lights, because it didn’t seem possible that there could be anything else left inside her that she hadn’t vomited up. She’d been pregnant over the course of a summer, an unusually close and humid summer, which had added greatly to her discomfort. Labour had lasted for three days, three days of indescribable pain and humiliation. And then the baby, when she finally brought it home, had colic. It wouldn’t sleep and it whinged all the time, ‘a gurney baby’, as Terence’s mother up in the North had called it. She’d only realised then how easy a time of it she’d had with Fintan and even later, as a little boy, there’d never been any trouble managing him, for he’d been an obedient child, Joan thinks, tractable. But she doesn’t like to remember those early days of motherhood, not even now, so many years later.

  She finishes her tea and decides that she’ll head for home soon. She won’t need to do any cooking tonight, having had a solid lunch with Beth, just put out a few cold cuts and some bread, maybe cheese and some fruit. Everything she needs is in the house, and there’s red wine too. She’ll have a glass, just the one, then she’ll read the paper, do the crossword and watch the news on television before having an early night.

  There are worse things to be than a widow in your seventies. Sometimes Joan wonders if there’s anything better.

  THREE

  As promised, Colette has roasted a chicken. She has cooked small potatoes; she has steamed carrots and green beans. When Fintan goes into the kitchen their younger son, Niall, is there with his mother, preparing salads. The back of his tee shirt reads, ‘. . . do all the other trees laugh?’ Niall is a strict vegetarian. He eats with the family but makes his own meals, an arrangement that has been in place without rancour for years now. Fintan, who is interested in all food, approaches and looks in the pottery bowls on the worktop. Niall has made a three-bean salad with a vinaigrette dressing; a green salad; quinoa with tomatoes, red onion and mint. Fintan says, ‘The beans look tasty, Niall.’ Niall turns to him and smiles amiably. ‘Yeah, but you’re not getting any, Dad.’ The front of his tee shirt reads, ‘If a tree falls in the forest . . .’

  Lucy arrives in the kitchen, followed by Rob, her eldest brother, just as the chicken is being carried to the table. Rob is small and pale and dressed all in black which makes him look sinister, a look he might well be cultivating, Fintan thinks. The whole family is now here for dinner, and this is not an unusual event. It is something Fintan has always encouraged ever since the boys were small. He is not a strongly paternalistic man, at least he thinks so, but, in his fondness for seeing his family gathered around a table laden with food, he is as traditional as Bob Crachitt. Rob brings the serving dishes with the vegetables while Colette sets a stack of heated plates beside Fintan, who is now sharpening the carving knife.

  Like her husband, Colette could do with losing a little weight. She is also rather a plain woman, something of which she is acutely aware, but which other people almost never remark upon because she is inordinately kind, and this kindness, suffusing her face, makes her look more attractive than many a cold beauty half her age. She is wearing a dreadful old jumper with a hole in the elbow, a green Aran knit that she bought on a holiday in Connemara when the boys were small. It looks a fright, and Colette knows this, but it is comfortable as a second skin. She hands Fintan a two-pronged fork with a folding safety guard, and he begins to carve the fowl, as Lucy digs serving spoons into the vegetables.

  ‘This is great, Mum,’ Rob says.

  ‘It looks like a chicken in a cookery book,’ Lucy says brightly, which it does, with a charred half-lemon protruding from its rear end, and its varnished breast scattered with sprigs of thyme.

  When Rob was born it had been a shock to Fintan, who realised immediately he knew nothing about babies. With hindsight he saw that he had expected something fragrant and beguiling, something more like a teddy bear than the vital little animal that Rob turned out to be.

  While still in his cot he had the thousand-yard stare of a hostile banker. His physical strength and his strength of will astounded Fintan. At six months the baby sucked his thumb, and Fintan discovered that he couldn’t dislodge the digit from his mouth by using gentle pressure; was alarmed to realise that he couldn’t do it even if he applied brute force: Rob was still able to resist him. Fintan took to calling him ‘Stalin’, but Colette didn’t see the joke, and made him desist. Unlike her husband she was skilful with the baby. She could hold him at her hip with one arm while engaging in some complicated domestic chore with the free hand; could sling him artfully over her shoulder and make him burp; could make him stop crying any time she wanted by cunningly distracting him with small stuffed toys. It was a relief when, around the time of Rob’s first birthday, Colette said she was expecting another baby. Yes, let’s have another go at this, Fintan had thought. Let’s get it right this time.

  It was certainly different second time around. So placid was Niall that he quickly became known as ‘The Potato’. He lay in his pram smiling and cooing, gazing into space, as if he hadn’t noticed that he had been born, as if he was still in some Edenic, prenatal world where everything was beautiful and good. Complete strangers stopped in the street to peer in at the beaming baby; and he grew into a blissed-out toddler who was happy to share his toys and treats with all-comers. To his dismay, Fintan wasn’t completely at ease with all of this, and couldn’t help finding Niall’s extreme gentleness, his even temper and his Buddha-like smile slighty spooky. He found himself wondering if there could have been some kind of mix-up in the maternity ward, so that they had brought home someone else’s baby. Aged five, when told to say goodbye to Joan on a family visit, Niall took her hand and said solemnly, ‘Granny, I hope you will always have love and peace in your heart,’ a moment that has passed into family legend and which Niall himself now finds hilarious. (Rob: ‘You totally mad little hippy.’) At six he made the connection between animals and meat and displayed an unexpected moral rigour about it, pushing his rashers and sausages around the plate, refusing to eat, and weeping inconsolably for the fate of the poor pig when pressed to do so; even at times displaying an uncharacteristic sharpness and sarcasm, holding up a chop on his fork: ‘What did you have to kill to give me this?’ The family doctor reassured them, and gave Colette diet sheets as they realised they had no choice but to accept the tiny vegetarian in their midst.

  In the meantime Rob had continued to grow into a tough little alpha male, and Fintan, to his shame, found it hard to connect with either of them. He felt like Charlie Chaplin in The Kid when he gives Jackie Coogan a gentle boot in the arse, trying to get shot of him, trying to make out that he wasn’t responsible for this little tyke. It had been a relief when Colette had indicated that the family was complete with the two boys.

  Niall now looks pointedly at Fintan’s heaped plate.

  ‘Weren’t you having lunch out today, Dad?’

  ‘Yes, but I didn’t have anything much, and anyway, that was ages ago. I saw Granny and Beth in the restaur
ant, quite by chance.’

  Rob laughs ironically. ‘Lucky you. And how was Granny? Sweet as ever she is?’

  ‘Granny was fine,’ Fintan says evenly, glancing meaningfully at Lucy and then back at Rob with narrowed eyes, mutely warning him. ‘She sends her best, as does Beth.’

  ‘Where did you go?’

  Fintan names the restaurant.

  Rob says, ‘Cool,’ and he laughs. ‘Fair play to Granny and Beth for doing things in style.’ It is a restaurant he likes: unlike his brother, who is somewhat ascetic, he is developing expensive habits and tastes. Colette names another place which she prefers and they fall to talking about restaurants as they eat, then about how the day has been.

  They all do a double take when Niall says, ‘I saw a woman on Grafton Street today with no skirt.’ Lucy whoops with delight.

  ‘What was she wearing then?’ Fintan and Rob ask simultaneously, and they all laugh.

  ‘Her knickers. And a pink sash thing over her blouse, like a beauty queen, you know? And a tiara. She was with a bunch of friends. They were all wearing sashes too, with “Tracy’s Hen Night” printed on them, but they didn’t have tiaras and they all had their skirts on. I know what you’re thinking,’ he adds, looking frankly at his brother, ‘but to be honest, it wasn’t a pretty sight. You were lucky you missed it.’

  ‘But why?’ asks Lucy, who is still laughing. ‘Why was the woman going down Grafton Street in her knickers?’

  ‘Because she’s getting married,’ Colette says. ‘Eat your carrots, please.’

  ‘But why?’ Lucy asks again. ‘Did you do that, Mum, before you got married? Did you walk down the street with no skirt?’

  ‘I did nothing of the sort!’