Time Present and Time Past

by Deirdre Madden

  The bongos astound him. He had not known until today that such a creature existed, and now here are three of them. What must it be to be a bongo? A kind of antelope, its hide is a sensational golden toffee colour, like nothing he has seen on an animal before, offset by a tuft of coarse hair, like a short mohican, running the length of its spine, and cream stripes on its flanks. The bongos are ambling around on their neat hooves, seemingly indifferent to their own beauty.

  The zoo has been redesigned over the years, and Fintan is surprised at how few traditional cages there are; makes a mental note to mention this to Niall, who had been predictably unenthusiastic about today’s outing. There is an attempt to mimic as far as is possible the natural habitats of the animals. Some of the animals have taken sly advantage of this and are lying low, uncooperative. The snow leopard has been provided with a stony outcrop under which it has withdrawn, where it is curled up sleeping, so far back that it is barely visible. Fintan thinks that the animals should consider themselves lucky that it is not his colleague Imelda who is running the zoo. He imagines her calling the snow leopard in for a meeting. I’m afraid this doesn’t appear to be working for us. We’re going to have to refresh your position.

  In contrast, the Sumatran tiger is scrupulously working out the full terms of its contract. Enclosed behind a sheet of plate glass, it is pure energy; it is sudden death wrapped in orange and black fur. Even Emma and Lucy shriek when it roars at them, inches from their faces, before it turns and slouches away again.

  By the time they have seen monkeys and flamingos and penguins and otters, and a great many other animals, they are all three ready for lunch.

  Fintan loves chips, and the ones they serve in the zoo are the business, shovelled out generously; not like those ridiculously thickly cut ones he is always irritated to find on his plate in fancy restaurants, arranged to form a little crate. The girls are having sausages too.

  ‘Are they organic?’ Emma asks, and Fintan fights the urge to reply, ‘Was last night’s pizza?’

  ‘I really don’t know.’ This is a lie.

  ‘Mommy only lets me eat organic meat.’

  ‘I’m sure she won’t mind, just this once.’ This is also a lie. It is, moreover, an act of male solidarity. ‘Do you want salt? Vinegar?’

  As they eat, he watches the girls. It makes him feel guilty to remember how annoyed he had been when Colette told him another baby was on the way. Rob and Niall were half-reared by then, and while he got on well with them, he didn’t feel he’d been such a roaring success as a father that he had any desire to repeat the experience. Night feeds, nappies: the very thought had made him want to howl, and that was before any consideration of the financial implications. By the time the baby was due Colette had been much happier about the situation, but Fintan had still been uneasy and apprehensive.

  From the first moments of Lucy’s life, it had been a love such as he had never imagined. So beautiful! So soft! So new! So tiny! And one day when he leant over her and smiled, she smiled back. At him! Fintan Buckley! Her daddy! That she was a girl rather than a boy meant that she wasn’t a challenge to him; she wasn’t a machine-gun hail of question marks in the way his sons had been to him, much as he loved them. If Lucy was in herself a question, it was one of those strange, mystical Zen questions that Niall had once told him about, impossible questions to which there was no logical answer; questions that were answers in themselves. Lucy was the sound of one hand clapping. All he has to do is love her.

  As he thinks this, he is looking at the other little girl, at Emma, who is for her own father the locus not just of a love similar to Fintan’s for Lucy, but of a suffering of concomitant intensity. She is frowning with concentration now as she squeezes ketchup out onto her chips, but she often frowns, Fintan has noticed. She does not have Lucy’s levity of spirit. The fractured marriage of her parents has left its mark.

  ‘I’ll take you home to your daddy after this.’

  But the girls are having none of it. They want to go to the little farm; they want to go to the shop.

  They see the baby animals: the piglets, the chicks and the lambs. They go to the shop where they buy trinkets and toys. Lucy chooses two brightly coloured lollipops for her brothers. Yes, Niall, Fintan thinks, there are E numbers in them, and who knows what else. If you ask me, they look as if they might be radioactive. Emma buys her father a zoo mug with a picture of a gorilla on the side of it; and, for his office, some pens, a rubber and a pencil sharpener, which are, if anything, more colourful than Lucy’s lollipops.

  As they leave, they see that the photograph taken on their arrival has been printed up with a colourful frame, ‘Dublin Zoo, 2006’, and is available to buy. The girls are unimpressed, but Fintan insists on having it as a souvenir.

  And then they head for home.

  *

  The door of apartment eight is opened by someone Fintan has never seen before in his life: a rangy man, skinny, even; with strawberry-blond hair and a pale complexion, with none of Fintan’s ruddiness. This stranger greets Fintan as if they have met previously; and Emma addresses him as ‘Daddy’. He insists that they go in for a moment, and when Fintan says hesitantly, ‘Thanks, Conor,’ the other man replies, ‘No worries, Fintan.’

  In their absence, Conor has clearly tried to put a shape on things. He’s washed, shaved and dressed himself. The granite island has been cleared, and there are a series of plastic Superquinn shopping bags on the floor beside the fridge, full of food for tonight and ready-meals for the week ahead. The dishwasher is humming.

  The children have evidently enjoyed the zoo much more than Fintan had thought, and they bombard Conor with a torrent of enthusiasm about it all: the chips, the piglets, the bongo, the owl, the lot. Conor is smiling as he listens, but Fintan can see behind his smile a deep melancholy; and as the other man looks at his daughter, Fintan sees again that wounded, all-consuming love that he had noticed earlier.

  At the door when they are leaving, he again has to fight the urge to give the other man a hug. Conor shakes his hand hard, and claps him on the back.

  ‘Thanks for looking after her and giving her such a good time.’

  ‘Don’t mention it.’

  ‘Take it easy, Fintan.’

  TWELVE

  On the morning of the day that Fintan takes the children to the zoo, Beth and Martina are also engaged with animals, albeit of a more domestic kind. The cat has caught a mouse. Or rather, it is in the process of catching a mouse, and it is Beth, standing at the kitchen window, still in her dressing-gown, who notices it first. She points it out to Martina who is just about to leave for work.

  The cat and mouse are sitting close together and neither of them moves. Then the mouse makes a sudden run and the cat is after it, stops it with her paw. She picks it up in her mouth and jumps up onto the windowsill. The effect is horrific and hilarious in equal measure, for the drooping body of the mouse makes for the cat a walrus moustache, so that it looks like an old gent in a Victorian photograph. Beth and Martina both shriek at the sudden closeness of the cat and the mouse, inches away on the other side of the pane of glass. The cat hops down again and releases the mouse, but it doesn’t run. It rears up on its back legs, waving its paws in the air while the cat sits, immense, over it. She pretends to look away and still the mouse does not move. There is almost something complicit in it, the mouse hypnotised by fear, so that it seems to conspire in its own fate.

  Martina grabs a brush from behind the door. ‘I can’t bear this,’ she mutters, and goes outside. ‘Shoo! Shoo! Bad cat! Leave the mouse alone!’ The cat holds its ground as Martina waves the brush at her. The mouse runs a little distance and then stops again, as if it can’t understand what’s happening. The cat slinks off to get at it, defying Martina, who shouts at her again and goes after her with the brush. ‘Stupid mouse,’ she says, ‘run! Run!’ and finally it does, slipping behind a dustbin and disappearing.

  Martina is in bad form when she comes into the house, even though she
has saved the mouse. Beth protests gently, saying that it’s the cat’s instinct, and that better she go hunting than that the place be overrun with mice.

  ‘I know, I know,’ Martina says, ‘but it’s the cruelty of it, the way she plays with them that I can’t stand.’ She kisses Beth goodbye and leaves for work. As soon as she has gone, Beth opens the back door and lets the cat into the house.

  ‘Bad cat! Bold!’ she says, but she doesn’t really mean it. The cat stares up at her insolently. ‘Poor little mouse.’ With her tail high, the cat stalks off into the living room. Through the open door, Beth can see her settle down and start to wash herself, systematically and comprehensively.

  Beth makes tea and sits at the kitchen table, drinking it, and thinking about Martina and how inordinately upset she seemed to be by what had happened in the yard, even though the mouse had escaped; even though Martina can’t stand mice. After all these years together, there are still times Beth finds it hard to second-guess her. She’s tender-hearted, but she’s a complicated woman too, Beth thinks. While she had never expected that they would end up living together, the pair of them – who could possibly have foreseen that? – nor had Beth ever thought that Martina would simply marry and have a family and be happy.

  How could she have easily found love when she hadn’t been loved by her own mother? It pains Beth to think this, but she knows it to be true. She remembers Martina as a small child, remembers her trying to solicit attention from Joan on many occasions and being rebuffed. Beth had found herself compelled once to remonstrate with Joan about it when Martina was about four. They’d been at the beach together and Martina had come up, excited, pleading with her mother to come and see the sandcastle she’d made, and Beth had been taken aback at how coldly Joan had dismissed her. She’d watched the little figure plod back down the damp sand towards the sea and, meek as she was, Beth couldn’t let it pass.

  ‘It wouldn’t hurt, just to go and look at it, and it would mean a lot to the child.’

  ‘If ever you were to have children of your own, you’d understand that you can’t be giving in to them at every end and turn.’ The barb found its mark. Without another word Beth stood up and walked down the beach to where Martina was standing, barefooted and forlorn, beside the great hump of her sandcastle.

  ‘Will we go and look in a pool? We’ll lift the weed, and we might find a crab or a shrimp.’

  Was it any wonder that as she got older Martina had started to play up, to be headstrong and petulant? What other way did she have of making her mother pay attention to her?

  Fintan of course had always been different, a softer, more biddable child than Martina; and Joan had never seemed to have it in for him to the same degree that she did for her daughter. Beth remembers Joan saying around the time that he went to university, ‘Fintan has good functional intelligence.’ It was a phrase that struck Beth as both accurate and damning. It admitted his good mind, but suggested a lack of originality and imagination. The life he has now is the one that might have been predicted for the nice, rather ordinary little boy she remembers: the good steady job, the solid marriage, the children.

  The cat is still washing itself, repeatedly licking its paw and wiping it over its left ear, so vigorously that the ear is turned inside out. Beth picks up her tea and carries it into the sitting room, the better to observe the cat, and also to avail herself of the morning light, which is powerful. It affords the strange little room, and all the objects in it, a kind of grandeur. Beth settles herself on the sofa, and the cat continues washing its face.

  The marriage that had produced Beth and Joan hadn’t been the happiest, as the family would euphemistically put it, when they spoke of it at all. It had left Joan militant – she wouldn’t be bullied or harassed by her husband, the way her own mother had been – and it had left Beth fearful of men; wary of relationships, let alone marriage. She found a job in an office, and after their parents were dead and the family house was sold, she rented a small apartment. If, as life went on and she entered middle age, it felt lonely to put her key in the door each evening and know that she was going into an empty flat, the consolation that at least she would not be walking in on an argument was an increasingly bleak one.

  She’d been at a symphony concert in the National Concert Hall one night, on her own because she had no-one with whom to go, and had found herself sitting beside a man, about her own age, with blue eyes and sandy hair. He’d asked if she would like to borrow his programme, not realising that she had one herself; and so they had fallen into conversation about the music they were to hear that night, and about the concert season, for which they both had subscriptions. He taught music in a secondary school, he told her, but it was more than just a job, music was his life. The concert began, and when they talked again in the interval they discovered that they both had tickets for another concert taking place in two weeks’ time. He suggested that they meet beforehand; and so that second evening began with tea beneath the great crystal chandelier and concluded with drinks together in a hotel across the road from the concert hall, where they made plans to meet again.

  Her new friend Christy, she discovered, had been the only child of an exceptionally happy marriage. They had made a quaint little family, slightly odd, and Christy knew it, freely admitted as much: ‘People used to call us “The Three Bears”.’ He was devoted to both his parents and had nursed them through their final illnesses. He had had a serious girlfriend, he told her when he knew her better, but with the pressure of his job and his sick parents something had to give, and it was the relationship that didn’t make it. And so here he was now, alone in middle age, still living in the house which was not just where he had grown up, but his father before him.

  ‘The House Time Forgot’ was how he described it to her before he brought her there for the first time. ‘It’s a peculiar place, but you’d expect that in my home, now wouldn’t you?’ She’d realised that that was fair comment. He was sweet-natured, he was kindness itself, and that he was also slightly eccentric didn’t bother her at all.

  Beth had been well warned, then, about how strange the house would be, but she hadn’t been prepared for its extraordinary appeal. Even as she remarked upon the old-fashioned details – the leather-bound books in the bookcase with their gold-stamped spines, the wooden obelisk of the metronome on top of the piano, the oval mirror with bevelled edges – she was more aware still of the atmosphere of the room. There was a sense of deep peace, as if the happiness of decades was annealed into the very air. All the love, all the contentment had lingered on. And it was not on that same day, but it was in that room that Christy was to ask her, in a circumspect way, to marry him: ‘Do you think you would like to live here? With me? Forever?’

  He’d insisted that they have a proper wedding: nothing too showy, that wouldn’t have been their style, but not a hole-and-corner affair either. Beth bought a lilac suit, and there had been a string quartet in the church. A reception for twenty-five people was held in one of the best restaurants in Dublin, with champagne and an elegant white cake. They went to Venice for their honeymoon; and the morning after they returned a tiger kitten in a basket was delivered to Beth, a surprise wedding present from Christy and the first of the succession of cats that would share their life together in the following twenty years, concluding with the failed mouser lying at Beth’s feet this morning, who has finished washing herself and is now fast asleep.

  Christy had believed that everything happens for a reason. He said that when something bad happened, something good would always happen as a result; and that although the good thing would not justify or negate the bad it was important to recognise and value it. He would have been very happy to know that Beth is now living with Martina.

  Beth can remember those last days very well too, because she has made a point of doing so. She has taken the time over the years, as she is doing now, to rehearse in her mind exactly what happened.

  She dates it from the Sunday. She had gone up the street for
an hour or so, to visit one of the neighbours, whose daughter had had a new baby. Beth had been invited to see it, so she’d left home with a small gift after lunch, and got back again at about four. Christy had all the dishes done and was sitting beside the fire he had promised to have lit by the time she got back. But he’d looked very serious and he asked her to sit down. She’d asked then if there was something wrong.

  ‘Martina’s here. She’s upstairs sleeping.’

  Beth can remember how astonished she had been, for Martina’s visits home had always been long in the planning, the dates circulated months in advance. Never once had she turned up unannounced like this.

  ‘Martina? But why? What’s she doing here?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Did you ask?’

  ‘Ah no, and please don’t be asking her yourself either. She’s upset about something. She’ll tell us in her own good time if she wants. She’s booked into some hotel out at the airport, but I’d rather she stayed here. Would you be all right with that?’

  ‘By all means. But is she ill?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t think so.’

  But when Martina had come downstairs some time later looking shattered and wan, Beth wasn’t convinced, for she had the air of someone getting out of bed for the first time in a week, after a bad bout of flu. There was something timid and quiet about her. Christy had behaved as if everything was perfectly normal, talking about the music on the radio, and saying that when she was ready he could take her out to the airport hotel to collect her things; pulling Beth into the conversation and saying that they were both delighted that she would be staying with them, and Beth agreeing.