They set off at eleven, Owen happily (a jaunt with Quinny!), and Irene expected them back within the hour. When lunchtime came and there was no sign of them, Irene began to fret. The barber’s was only in the village, a ten-minute walk away. She considered putting Fergal in the pram and going in search of them, but Rory would be in from school for his lunch so she couldn’t leave. When Rory arrived, she pretended nothing was amiss; she fed him and he went back to school. She put Fergal down for his nap – it was 2.30 now, and for the first time she gave in to panic. Where could they be? Had there been an accident? She thought of ringing Liam at the office, but she didn’t. She didn’t want to disturb him, and she didn’t want to be accused of scaremongering, once more making a mountain out of a molehill where Quinny was concerned. Anyway, she felt vaguely implicated – why hadn’t she brought Owen to the barber’s herself and left Quinny with the baby? Wasn’t it Fergal that Quinny was employed to mind, in the first place?
Rory came in from school and asked mildly where Owen and Quinny were.
‘They’re having a day in town,’ Irene lied.
The lie emboldened her: this is what she would say to Liam. Already she was thinking ahead. This way it would appear as if the trip was sanctioned, instead of their toddler son being missing for the best part of the day and Irene having done nothing about it.
At six she heard the key in the door and rushed into the hallway, praying it wasn’t Liam, because now she was more afraid of his censure than the fact that Owen was missing. A tousled-looking Owen appeared, holding Quinny’s hand. He was filthy. There was grime on his face and chocolate stains around his mouth. His baby curls, she noticed, were still intact.
‘Thank God,’ she said, forgetting to be cross with Quinny. ‘I was out of my mind with worry. Where have you been?’
‘We went up the Pillar,’ Owen declared proudly.
Irene looked at Quinny.
‘Nelson’s Pillar?’
She was expecting a rush of apology, some abject excuse for keeping the child out for seven hours, some explanation, but Quinny said nothing.
‘I’ll bring him up for his bath, Missus,’ was all she said as if she was simply resuming duties.
She led Owen upstairs. (He kicked up a terrible fuss when Irene insisted on a bath, but with Quinny, he was always docile.) By the time Liam came home, a scrubbed and dressing-gowned Owen was having his tea with Rory, and everything was back to normal. Irene was relieved she didn’t have to explain her neglectful part in the affair. But she was determined to get to the bottom of it. Tomorrow, she would tackle Quinny.
But she didn’t. She interrogated Owen instead.
‘We were on the bus,’ he said. That was a novelty for him. ‘On the upstairs.’
‘And what about Nelson’s Pillar?’
‘It was dark,’ he said, ‘but Quinny held my hand.’
Irene had never been inside the Pillar. There were 168 steps that wound up in a spiral to a viewing platform at the top. Liam had wanted to take her during their courtship, but Irene hadn’t liked the sound of it.
‘You can see for miles from up there,’ he had said.
But it was the enclosure Irene was afraid of, the seeping granite walls, the imprisonment of it.
‘And what did you eat?’ Irene asked, because Owen was fond of his food.
‘Crips,’ he answered.
‘Crisps,’ she corrected, though usually she found his lisp endearing.
He nodded.
‘And chocolate?’ Irene prompted, remembering his muddy mouth. ‘And what else?’
His brow furrowed in concentration.
‘Quinny has a little boy,’ he volunteered.
‘What do you mean?’ Irene said, and she shook him.
‘I’m her little boy,’ Owen said and smiled cheesily. It was the closest Irene ever came to striking one of her children. She raised her hand, then let it fall.
Over the following weeks there were several more disappearances, though none as alarming as that first time. If Irene asked Quinny to run to the shops, she would always take Owen with her, and the errands took longer than they should have. She would take detours to the park (Owen loved the swings). They went to view the building site. Eight new houses were being built on to the end of Prosperity Drive. There were pyramids of gravel and sand on the road and the churning of cement mixers all day. She took him to the sheep field – Quinny seemed to know all the secret places in the neighbourhood – and into the grounds of St Jude’s, the cancer hospital at the end of the avenue. Owen came back from that expedition excitedly proclaiming he’d seen the bald children. Irene had ruled St Jude’s out of bounds precisely because there were children there, sick and dying children whom she didn’t want Rory or Owen exposed to.
‘St Jude’s is no place for him,’ she said to Quinny. But what was meant as a reprimand came out feebly, and still Quinny made no apology.
‘Nita asked us in,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that right, Oweny?’ His name is not Oweny.
Nita Dark lived in the gate lodge at the entrance to the hospital. Mother of a little coloured boy who was in Low Babies with Owen. Irene was not sure she approved but Owen and Mo were friends, so she couldn’t exactly forbid the association. But she didn’t want to encourage it either. The first day he’d come home from school, Owen had asked why Mo was a different colour.
‘He’s a baby from the missions,’ Irene had lied, furious at having to defend Nita Dark’s unsavoury morals. ‘He’s from Africa.’
Trust Quinny to pal up with Nita Dark, of all people.
‘She’s a brave woman,’ Quinny said as if reading Irene’s mind.
‘Or foolish,’ Irene said.
Quinny made a dissatisfied pout, like a child being corrected. Then she lifted Owen up and carried him off to give him his lunch. Irene felt wrong-footed. As always with Quinny, they never got to talk about the real trouble.
The day, that day, it was Liam who found her. He had Owen in his arms and as soon as he put the key in the front door he could smell the gas.
‘Stay back,’ he shouted at Irene and Rory, who were trailing in behind him. But in his panic he carried Owen into the kitchen so Owen saw.
‘Holy Jesus!’ Liam cried and shut the door on the sight.
‘What is it?’ Irene asked.
‘Quinny is praying,’ Owen said.
It made them notorious. The house where the maid had gassed herself. What could drive a girl to do such a thing? Irene saw that question in the eyes of her neighbours. An unwanted pregnancy. That’s what they thought, Irene was sure, and they would look at her and wonder why she hadn’t exerted her authority more firmly. How could she explain that was not it at all? With Quinny the worst had already happened, before she had ever darkened the Devoys’ door. It was nothing I did, Irene wanted to say, but of course, this being Prosperity Drive, no one came out with any such accusations.
She and Liam went to the funeral in a country church near Kells, though Irene didn’t want to.
‘We have to,’ Liam said, ‘we were in loco parentis.’
‘She was the maid, Liam, for God’s sake.’
The maid who had tried to purloin her son and then did this to them! Brought disreputable death into their midst. Quinny couldn’t even be buried in consecrated ground because of what she’d done. She was taken away after the funeral to God knows where.
Her parents were there, her father a rough-looking man unkempt with grief, her mother a version of what Quinny might have become. Fleshy, jowly with startling high-built black hair. Quinny also had two brothers, it turned out. Grown men, large, bewildered.
‘I thought you said she was an orphan,’ Irene hissed at Liam as they travelled gingerly up the aisle of the church to extend their condolences.
‘I said a home,’ Liam said crossly, Mr Etc. suddenly a stickler for distinctions, ‘a mother and baby home. She gave the child up.’
‘Oh,’ Irene said, wondering why he hadn’t told her before.
Chastened, she kept her head bowed beneath her black mantilla. She let Liam do the talking when they shook Quinny’s mother’s hand at the top of the church. This new knowledge should have helped, but it didn’t. She had known nothing really of Quinny, nothing at all.
A lot of things happened that year. There was the Rising commemoration, which went off without a hitch and won Liam a promotion. The railway stations were renamed for the signatories of the Proclamation. The Pillar was blown up by hotheads who said Nelson shouldn’t be lording it over them. Irene was secretly delighted; another place associated with Quinny reduced to ruin. At the end of the year, the new houses being built at the end of the street were finished. As a result, everyone on Prosperity Drive got a new house number. The Devoys lost Number 27 and inherited 10 instead. Quinny’s associations were gradually dwindling.
But the dead maid remained lodged in Irene’s mind. And in Owen’s too, Irene was sure, though the running after strangers in the street did stop, and her name, so often invoked in the early days, also fell away. But some things stuck. Even years afterwards, and with another new baby in the house, Owen still called the nursery Quinny’s room. Irene felt his loyalty to the dead maid as a constant rebuke, as if there was blame attached. When the time came for Owen to be sent off to boarding school, she quietly welcomed it. There had been scenes with Rory; tears, hers, her eyes red for days on end. The gap he left at the dinner table, his unslept-in bed in the boys’ room, his favourite books in Owen’s or Fergal’s hands, wounded her, as if there’d been a death in the family. But with Owen, there was reprieve. Now there would be no more Quinny ambushes. If that’s what it took to be finally shot of her, Irene thought, hardening her heart, then so be it.
‘See,’ Liam had said to her when she deposited Owen dry-eyed in the big dormitory. ‘I told you it would get easier.’
Nearly three decades later, when Owen brought Kim home and announced he was marrying her, the ghost of Quinny rose again. Not that Kim looked in the slightest bit like Quinny, apart from her hair, long and silky and down to her waist. Otherwise, though, she was petite and sallow, a trained pharmacist. And oriental, for God’s sake. One of those unfortunate boat people.
‘You can be the daughter my mother never had,’ Owen said to Kim in that half-mocking way he talked about her, in her presence. ‘Isn’t that right, Irene?’ (He had long ago stopped calling her Mum.)
But Irene would not make that mistake again. Looking at her future daughter-in-law, she felt only a disowning surge of triumph. She worried how Liam would take to the prospect of little Vietnamese grandchildren in the Devoy family line but, unlike him, she could afford to be magnanimous; she was not seeking to gain a daughter, but to lose a son, this time for good.
CLAIMS AND REBATES
Afterwards, in the hotel, he dreamt he saw Norah rise from the bed beside him and go to the window. Or, at least, it was a transparent version of her, one that he could see right through. Yet, when he looked in the bed, her back-turned body was also there, all solid flesh. The wraith-like Norah at the window was like a film ghost; he even remarked upon it in the dream. But he was too terrified to call out in case he might alarm this frail version of her and she would be trapped for ever outside the body that was still lying beside him. Then he woke and found himself alone.
* * *
Her innocence had provoked him. No, it was stronger than that, it had offended him. She had no right to be out in the world parading her raw, sheltered bloom like that. He blamed it on her clothes. That black roll-neck sweater, a blue pinafore and a pair of tights too tan for the rest of her pale complexion. Her shoes, brand new, were pinching her. As soon as she was shown to her desk she slipped her feet out of them and he saw her flexing her instep, her toes squirming within their ochre prison. He looked away. Oh God, another modest, convent-educated child! He could see the home she came from, a half red-brick on a respectable cul-de-sac with a kitchen hatch, a melamine breakfast counter, exuberantly floral wallpaper in the bedrooms; the same kind of house he was now condemned to, full of worthy suburban striving and cast-iron respectability.
He had always preferred the girls from the country; their fumy loneliness (damp bedsits, laundry dried indoors) gave them an edge, a certain racy recklessness. He had had dalliances with several of them – none current. These were usually one-night stands, which, nevertheless, required some kind of courtship ritual – a trip to the cinema, an hour or two listening to mournful Janis Ian records beforehand and a great deal of reassurance afterwards that it wouldn’t affect their jobs. In the throes he was Hugh, but afterwards they reverted to calling him Mr Grove. There might be some awkwardness in the office for a while, but it was more often on their side than his; he actually liked the post-coital air of tension and their pliant uncertainty. But he could not imagine someone like Norah Elworthy succumbing in this way; she would be hard work.
The Redundancies section was situated in a large ground-floor room of a five-storey block overlooking the canal. On sunny days, swaying leaf-dapple lent spattered visual relief to the office but the prevailing mood was a stunned grey. A military formation of dove-coloured filing cabinets split the room in two. On one side was Hugh’s kingdom, Claims; on the other, Rebates. There were typing-pool rows of desks, the girls – they were mostly girls – all facing the one direction; facing him, in fact. It was not a popular section, not sexy in other words, though it fairly oozed with the pent-up frustration of twenty-seven girls finding themselves in the sparse company of seven men, who, like him, were for the most part years older. As a result, they did not stay long. They applied for Careers – with out-of-office trips to conventions in large hotels and visits in the mobile unit to schools, or Equal Opportunities, a newly opened section on the fifth floor with glossy brochures and a ministerial pet project, or if they were seriously ambitious they transferred out.
Claims was designated as the trenches of the Department. They were assiduous handmaidens to the depressing times. Every news bulletin heralded shortages, the oil crisis, a roll call of factory closures and lay-offs but it was they who attended to the minutiae of the wreckage. Their currency was thousands of manila folders fatly stuffed with sheaves of forms, the coffined remnants of lives returned to statistics. Their clients weren’t people any more but redundancies, empty vessels making no noise. If an economic upswing ever came, which Hugh seriously doubted, he wondered how he and his ‘team’ would be deployed. (Personnel insisted on such terminology as if Hugh were managing a bunch of athletic champions, not a disparate and unhappy crowd of lowly clerks.) Hugh liked to think his girls liked him. He was not one of those section heads who stood by the attendance register with a stopwatch taking down the names of latecomers when the line was drawn in the book at 9.15 every morning. He had trouble himself rising and since he did only a rough approximation of a nine-to-five day, he could hardly impose strict punctuality on his staff. This apparent laxity made him popular with his girls and efficient in the eyes of the powers that be and it spared him the torturous procedure of having to listen to a catalogue of preposterous excuses related to their female complaints. It was 1976 and they felt emboldened to use their hormones as justification for every failing. That was fine by him; he just didn’t want to hear about it.
Hugh was, just at the moment, sort of separated. Marriage, he had discovered much to his secret relief, was a revolving door. In the four years they’d been together, Elaine had thrown him out numerous times, but he had never believed it to be a permanent state. He felt a similar impermanence when he was back in her good books and living at home; in fact, the uncertainty was the only thing that made marriage bearable.
Elaine had once been one of the girls in the office, which gave her an unfair advantage. She knew how he was; she had been one of his graduates. She’d been a blowsy overripe kind of girl with her large hair and a smutty laugh. She had flirted with him from the start while acting as if she didn’t give a toss about him. If it was a strategy, Hugh had to concede now, it had worke
d. It was the first time he had seen tenacity decoupled from neediness and he couldn’t resist. He was nearly thirty-five; it wasn’t that he no longer wanted the freedom of the single life, he just didn’t want to be a sad, ageing Lothario, mistaken for what the tabloids called a confirmed bachelor. A distinct danger, since he still lived with his mother.
Hugh had spent his childhood behind the perfume counter in Switzers where his mother worked; he adored it. He would take the bus into town after school, then sit on the tub-like stool the girls used to reach the higher shelves and do his homework perched at stocking level to the swish of satin slips. When they had a spare moment, the girls would help him. They had unexpected gifts – Sylvia could do tots in her head, Marie helped him with his comprehension. He loved their porcelain visages, these surrogate aunties. He’d never seen them less than perfect, although he had often witnessed his mother take her make-up off. She always waited till bedtime to revert to the pale and wan version of herself, bleached and blanched and somehow smaller than life. The girls on the Revlon counter – beauticians, they called themselves, a word too close to mortician for Hugh’s liking – were like his own harem of painted paramours wearing white coats to make them look like pharmacists. Like dress-up tarts in a porn mag. When Miss Hyde, the floorwalker, did her rounds, the girls would push Hugh’s head down and hide him among their skirts so that Dolly’s secret would not be discovered. That was what Hugh was – his mother’s secret. The time came, of course, when he graduated from the comforts of the Revlon counter and progressed into surly adolescence, but his attachment to perfume persisted. He didn’t hold with eau de toilette or body spray; none of those light fragrances. No, he wanted cloying, heavy musk he could drown in. Norah Elworthy wore no perfume, he noticed. When he was close to her, she smelled of apples from her lunch. (Like the rest of them she was watching her weight.)
Prosperity Drive Page 9
