‘Would you not worry about how we managed to pay for it?’ demanded Carina when I couldn’t help but murmur that it was surely way outside their earning power (both of them worked in the media – Carina as a researcher for an independent TV company; Callum in radio). ‘It’s something that we wanted to do for you and Dad. You’ve always been great to us and I know we forget your anniversary all the time. So this is a kind of accumulation of all of them. Besides,’ her dark eyes twinkled at me, ‘it’s your silver wedding anniversary. You deserve a great break.’
‘Actually,’ added Callum, ‘we wanted to send you somewhere called Silver Sands. But we couldn’t find anywhere.’
I smiled as widely as I could. ‘It’s very good of you,’ I told them. ‘Both your dad and I appreciate it very much.’
Well, I’d no idea how Aidan would feel about it. But he’d have to appreciate the gesture if nothing else.
When I told him he frowned slightly (as I’d expected) and murmured that it wasn’t a hugely convenient time to go away. And I nodded in agreement and said that he was right but that the children had gone to a lot of trouble to organise it and so the least we could do was to be totally appreciative and accept such a wonderful present as gracefully as possible.
Sometimes I still have the power to make Aidan do what I want. This was one of those times. He nodded thoughtfully and then phoned Callum to say that it was a wonderful gift and we were delighted with it.
Which is why, despite the fact that I’d made other plans, I was sitting in the sea-front restaurant of the hotel at 7.30 on the evening of our wedding anniversary and looking out over the inky blackness of the Caribbean Sea. It wasn’t completely black, of course. The underwater lights illuminated the area closest to the restaurant while, further out, the reflections bobbed on the surface of the gently lapping water, occasionally breaking into glittering shards of colour thanks to a stronger than usual wave before settling back into beads of light again. Meanwhile, in the restaurant, the impeccably trained waiters and waitresses moved swiftly and unobtrusively between the tables, making sure that every whim of every guest was catered for.
At our table, the wine waiter, DeVere, was discussing the merits of the cabernet sauvignon over the shiraz with my husband. Aidan is a bit of a wine buff and so I didn’t take part in the conversation but allowed my eyes to wander over the rest of the diners. When you’re at an all-inclusive hotel, particularly a relatively small and certainly exclusive one like White Sands, you tend to get to know your fellow guests fairly quickly. At least you get to recognise them enough to nod at them every morning, every lunchtime and every evening in a kind of complicit ‘Look, I know that there are probably loads of brilliant local restaurants out there but I’m spending a fortune to stay here and, well, what the hell!’ kind of way. I’d already spoken to the older woman, Esther, who was here on her own and who reminded me very much of those Miss Marple TV programmes. The ones starring Joan Hickson, not the more recent ones. Esther looked like Joan Hickson in the role and acted like her too – slightly dippy but not really, if you get my drift. I felt as though she was altogether stronger than she let on. I’d also spoken to the guy on his own with his son who’d arrived the previous day. He seemed really nice but terribly jumpy and I guessed that it was probably the first time he’d ever been on his own with the kid, even though the boy was about nine or ten years old.
I wondered how Aidan would have been had he ever gone on holiday on his own with the kids. Funny, I wasn’t even able to imagine that, because Aidan just wasn’t the sort of guy who thought that taking the kids away on his own was something a bloke should ever do. Sounds crazy now (at least I think it does, because more and more men talk about wanting to be proper fathers to their kids and wanting to spend time with them), but back when Aidan and I had the twins, the concept of a New Man was one who poked the fire while you fed, bathed and changed the baby before washing the dishes from the meal you’d just cooked. And having done that, he felt as though his work was done. Maybe I’m being unfair on loads of guys in their forties and fifties. But I’m talking about my experience and the experience of most of my friends. Things did change over the next twenty years or so. But not as dramatically as many women would have us believe.
Thing was, of course, I didn’t mind what Aidan’s contribution was. The fact that he was there at all was enough for me. My life without Aidan would surely have been a whole heap worse.
I met him at work. Back in the late 1970s lots of girls met their future husbands at work. Work was one of the biggest social events that existed in our calendars because there wasn’t an awful lot else to do. A few tawdry night-clubs, maybe. Getting chatted up in a dingy bar (and most of them were dingy even if they’d stippled the walls, painted them white and hung red lampshades from the ceiling in an effort to make it look faintly exotic). Meeting a guy at night class – honestly, that’s what the magazines of the day recommended. The only night class I ever went to (car maintenance for beginners) was crammed with women hoping to meet men. Work, if you worked in a big organisation, was the best option by a mile. And I worked in a big organisation. I worked in a bank.
Getting a job in the bank was like winning the jackpot. The pay was good and so were the conditions. People treated you with a level of respect. You dealt with money at a time when nobody had very much. It’s changed now, of course. You probably get more respect at a supermarket checkout than as a bank teller. (And fewer supermarket checkout workers have been replaced by machines too.) But I was thrilled when I turned up for my first day’s work. Doubly thrilled because I was in head office, and that had a certain cachet about it too. I wasn’t working in some poky little branch. I was in the modern new glass and steel building which housed a couple of hundred people all feeling slightly proud of themselves for having got a job here in the first place.
I met Aidan Rourke at my very first Christmas party. I’d been with the bank six months and was loving it. Not because of the work (although I was already studying for the banking exams because you got paid extra if you got the qualification), but because for the first time I was surrounded by people whose main aim in life was to earn enough money to have fun. Fun hadn’t been a big part of my home life. That wasn’t anyone’s fault. But, you see, I lived on my own with my widowed mother, and she wasn’t the kind of person who believed that life should be fun. She’d got religion when Dad had his first heart attack. And she stuck with it after he died. (Even after I told her that she was wearing out her knees in the church and what was the point of going to Mass every day when her prayers about Dad recovering hadn’t actually been answered?) Anyway, me and Mam didn’t see eye to eye about religion. Or illness. Or having fun.
So having fun at work was a big eye-opener. And apparently the most fun event in the entire calendar was the Christmas party. We started talking about it in October.
It was in the Burlington Hotel, a popular spot for office functions because of its vast ballroom and its ability to chuck a couple of hundred turkey and ham dinners at hungry revellers in no time. I don’t actually remember the food, but I do remember dancing to Abba and Rod Stewart and Slade and kicking up my heels in my party frock.
My party frock was the talk of the evening. I hadn’t intended it to be, of course. But when I’d gone in to town, expecting to buy something cheap and cheerful in Dunnes, I’d seen the perfect dress in the window of Richard Alan. It was the darkest blue with tiny silver stars on a chiffon skirt over a silk body. It had shoestring straps and a slit up the side. It was absolutely gorgeous. Naturally it was far, far more expensive than I could afford. But I’d got my first credit card that day and . . . well . . . The dress put me close to my limit. I had to have it, though. I knew it was absolutely perfect for me. So I went in and bought it and then spent the rest of my money on a pair of silver sandals that (quite honestly) were a bit tacky but which I thought were good with the dress.
At the party, where almost everyone else had bought chain-store dresses and ta
rted them up with glittery jewellery, I stood out. I know I did. There were a few snide remarks about the slit in the side from some of the girls, but most of them simply gasped at the gorgeousness of my dress and made me feel like a million dollars.
Which is why I danced with loads of guys that night. Including Aidan Rourke.
I guess he’d have been seen as a good catch. He was already a few steps up the promotional ladder. He was working in the international department. And he wasn’t at all bad-looking. Nothing tremendous. Nothing heart-stopping. But good enough for me, all the same.
I’d arrived at the party with a gang of my girlfriends but most of them left before me. That’s because I was still sitting talking to Aidan Rourke when Juliet Shanahan came over and said that they were clubbing together for a taxi and if I wanted to come I’d better come now. But I was actually sitting on Aidan’s lap at the time and I muttered to her to go on without me, that I’d manage fine on my own.
Ten minutes later I went off to get my coat and walked back into the now almost deserted ballroom. There was no sign of Aidan. There was no sign of anyone I knew very well. I cursed myself for thinking that he’d hang around for me.
It was freezing outside. I wished I’d worn tights with my silver sandals, but of course I hadn’t because the toe-seam would have looked horrible and ruined the effect. Now my toes were almost as blue as the dress with the cold. I pulled my tweed coat further around me and shivered.
‘Which way are you going?’ asked Aidan Rourke.
I hadn’t heard him come up behind me.
‘Terenure,’ I said.
‘Excellent.’ He waved at a taxi, which slid to a halt beside us. ‘We can share. I live in Templeogue.’
I grimaced. I’d been fudging things a little when I’d said Terenure. I lived in Kimmage. In the same area, certainly. But Terenure was a lot more desirable than Kimmage as an address. I directed the taxi-driver as far as the Kimmage Cross Roads, where the districts of Terenure, Templeogue and Kimmage intersected, and then I told him to let me out.
‘Hey, we’ll go as far as your house,’ said Aidan.
I shook my head and told him that I wanted to walk. I needed some fresh air, I said. I wanted to clear my head. Before I knew what had happened, Aidan was out of the cab too and walking alongside me. I debated whether or not to walk up Fortfield Road but I knew that I would only be making things worse. So I turned down the Lower Kimmage Road and shrugged slightly. I waited for him to say something, but he didn’t. He kept his arm around my shoulder as we turned into the side road which led to our red-brick terraced house. And he nodded in agreement when I asked him in for a cup of tea. (I should, of course, have said coffee. But we didn’t have any.)
Funny thing is that house prices in Kimmage soared in the intervening years. It still doesn’t have the cachet of Terenure or Templeogue, but it’s not a cheap place to live any more. When Mam died and I sold the house at auction, I couldn’t believe the bidding for it. All of my life I’d felt a bit let down by my address when so many people I met lived in more affluent suburbs, but things had changed dramatically. And it still took a bit of getting used to.
But that night, the night when Aidan Rourke walked me home and then came into the house for a cup of tea, I felt inadequate. My sparkly dress couldn’t take away from the shabbiness of our house, from the fact that the carpet had threadbare patches near the sofa and that our cupboards were Formica rather than real wood. It’s amazing how many stupid and irrelevant things rush into your mind when you bring someone new into your home territory. I was measuring number three Davitt Villas up to whatever Aidan’s Terenure address was and it couldn’t match up. I didn’t need to see Aidan’s house to know that mine fell far short of his. I knew it instinctively.
And so, when he kissed me, in our small and neat but painfully inadequate living room, I felt honoured. So honoured that I didn’t stop him as his fingers slid upwards along the slit in my dress to the top of my legs. So honoured that I was happy to let him ease the zip slowly downwards and shrug my dress from my shoulders. And I know it sounds stupid to feel honoured that I lost my virginity to him on our brown cord sofa, but I did.
Afterwards I just felt lucky that Mam had taken a sleeping tablet to help her drop off that night. The doctor had prescribed them for her but she rarely took them, always fearing that she’d become addicted even though her only addiction was to daily Mass. But the night of the party I’d told her to damn well take one because I’d be late home and I knew she didn’t really like being in the house on her own at night. For once she’d listened to me. And I felt very, very lucky.
I didn’t, of course, feel lucky eight weeks later when I realised I was pregnant. I hadn’t even considered the notion of getting pregnant, which I know sounds incredibly naïve but was actually the case. It was my first time. How many people get pregnant their first time? It’s an unfair trick of our bodies, this desire to procreate. And it’s totally unfair that in the midst of doing something great like making love to Aidan, I really should have been thinking about what else was going on.
I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t tell my mother. It would kill her. I couldn’t confide in Madge, even though by then she was my best friend. I couldn’t tell anyone. But of course I had to. I had to tell Aidan. After all, he was the father of my child and we were actually going out together. He’d called me the day after the party and asked to meet me for a drink. And that was how he became my boyfriend.
But even now I can’t believe that he married me. I’m quite sure he didn’t want to. He was only twenty, after all. I was nineteen. Yet when I told him about the baby, there was no question in his mind.
My mother, when I eventually told her, wanted things done as quickly as possible because she was overwhelmed by the shame of it all. (It was still definitely shameful twenty-five years ago to be pregnant and unmarried, no matter how confident you tried to be about it.) But I didn’t want to rush up the aisle. I wanted to give Aidan options. I told him that I’d rather wait until after the baby was born. Besides, I said, I was already feeling fat and bloated, already loading on weight. I’d feel a total fraud getting married when I was bursting out of the dress. Why not wait? I suggested. He wasn’t keen on that idea. He felt that asking me to marry him before having the baby made it all right. I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid if I argued with him that he’d change his mind, and I didn’t want him to change his mind. After all, I was in love with him.
So we compromised. We got married in a registry office. A quiet, unimportant day with only our parents there. (Despite her shame, my mother was being as supportive as she could. Aidan’s parents were more furious than ashamed, but they felt it was their duty to attend. Later, I grew to like them and I became more friendly with Colleen Rourke than with Mam. I hate saying that. But it’s true.)
The registry office ceremony was awful, and I didn’t actually feel married afterwards. But I was and so our baby wouldn’t be born with the illegitimate stigma that still surrounded single mothers and their children. At the time of our marriage I still thought I was having one baby. It wasn’t until a few weeks later that I discovered I was having two.
In December that year, after the twins had been born, we combined a christening event for them and a church wedding for ourselves. The priest was young and understanding. I guess that he’d realised that times were changing and that the established churches needed to do whatever they could to hang on to their flocks. And if that meant christening the babies and marrying their parents on the same day, he was going to do it.
The church wedding became, in the eyes of everyone who knew us, the real wedding day. And it was the December date that we celebrated every year afterwards, so that we almost forgot that another date even existed. On the times that we did celebrate, of course. Aidan wasn’t much for marking birthdays and anniversaries. And it became less important to me too, over the years. More important was the twins and how they were getting on with life, which was, in
fact, pretty well. Because (in some ways to our surprise) Aidan and I were good parents. Sure, he wasn’t exactly the world’s best around the house, but he was great with the kids. A natural. He liked being with them. He had more patience with them than me and enjoyed bringing them to the park or to places like the Natural History Museum or art galleries where they were well behaved and appreciative. They were always well behaved with Aidan. They played up more with me.
Staring out over the gently lapping water, I simply could not believe that twenty-five years had gone by since I married Aidan. I really couldn’t. They’d gone in a blur of having the twins and then looking after them; of Aidan getting promoted; of moving house (three times!); of my mother’s final illness; of Aidan’s father’s stroke; of Colleen Rourke’s recovery from a mystery ailment after his death (which everyone knew was depression but which led to her living with us for over a year, which, to be honest, was a bit of a strain no matter how much I liked her); of all the things that go on in your life when you’re not really paying attention.
I didn’t pay attention to my life. I didn’t have time. There was always something else to be doing. And now here I was thinking about it again, as I had for the past few months, realising that huge swathes of it had simply passed me by when I was concentrating on something else entirely.
Aidan’s hadn’t passed him by. Aidan had done really well – he’d moved job twice but had been headhunted back to the original bank again. He had an office on the fifth floor. The prestigious floor. The one that everyone wanted to have an office on. He was paid well and he spent the money on our home and our children. And on me too, I guess, because he regularly bought me gifts of jewellery or perfume. He was a good husband.
And we’d been together for twenty-five years.
From The Heart Page 5
