by Maeve Binchy
‘I was noticing this last night: it’s in a very bad way, we mustn’t let the place go to rack and ruin around us.’ She was sweating and puffing. Celia let her at it. She went back into the kitchen and made more tea. Eventually her mother had to come back in.
‘There, that’s much better,’ she said.
‘Good,’ said Celia.
‘I saw that Nancy Morris, a proper little madam that one. “Hallo Mrs Ryan” if it suits her, and wouldn’t give you the time of day if it didn’t. I pretended I didn’t hear her. She has her mother scalded coming home every weekend.’
‘I’m sure,’ Celia said. Mrs Ryan’s jaw dropped.
‘Oh not like you. I mean it’s grand that you come home, and you’re such a help.’
‘I’m glad you think so this morning. It was a different tune last night,’ Celia said.
‘Oh you wouldn’t need to mind me on a Friday night, the place gets so crowded and they’re coming at you from all sides. I probably sounded a bit impatient, but didn’t I thank you for doing the glasses, didn’t I bring you a cup of tea in bed?’ She was pleading now, almost like a child.
Celia took the bucket and the brush away from her gently and closed the door behind her. She lulled her to the table with soft talk. She didn’t want the woman to bolt from the room.
‘Of course you brought me a cup of tea in bed, and I know that deep down somewhere you are grateful to me for coming back and helping out, but that’s not the point, Mam, not the point at all. You don’t remember anything about last night, not from about nine o’clock on, that’s what I’d say.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘You were well gone when I arrived – that was before ten. You fought with a man and said he’d only given you a fiver not a ten. You told young Biddy Brady that you didn’t want a whole crowd of her girl friends cluttering up the pub tomorrow – fortunately Bart got us out of that one. You spilled a whole bottle of lime juice and you wouldn’t let anyone wipe it up so that the counter was sticky all night. You couldn’t find the tin of potato crisps and you told a group who had come here for the golfing that you didn’t give a damn whether you found them or not, because they smelled to you like a child’s fart. Yes, Mam, that’s what you said.’
Her mother looked up at her across the table. She showed no signs of getting up to run away. She looked at Celia quite calmly.
‘I don’t know why you are saying all this,’ she said.
‘Because it happened, Mam.’ Celia begged her: ‘Believe me, it all happened, and more and much more other nights.’
‘And why would you make this up?’
‘I didn’t. It was like that; it will be like that again tonight, Mam, you’re not able to cope. You’ve had a drink already today, I can see. I’m only telling you for your own good.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Celia.’ She was about to stand up. Celia reached out and held her there. Hard by the wrist.
‘I haven’t written to the others yet: I didn’t want to alarm them, I thought it might pass. I thought it was only weekends when you were under a bit of pressure. Mam, you have to accept it and DO something about it.’
‘Others?’
‘Maire, Harry, Dan.’
‘You’re going to write all over the world with these tales?’
‘Not if you can help yourself first. Mam, you’re drinking far too much, you can’t control it. What you’re going to have to do is …’
‘I’m going to have to do nothing, thank you very much indeed. I may have had one too many sometimes and all right I’ll watch that. Now will that satisfy you? Is the interrogation over? Can we get on with the day?’
‘PLEASE Mam, listen. Anyone will tell you, will I get Bart in here to tell you what it’s been like? Mrs Casey was saying, Billy Burns was saying, they were all saying … it’s getting too much for you here …’
‘You were always prudish about drink, Celia, even when your father was alive. You didn’t realise that in a bar you have to be sociable and drink with the customers and be pleasant. You’re not cut out for a pub the way we were, the way I am. You’re too solemn, too sticky for people. That’s always been your mistake.’
There was no point in putting CLOSED on the door, she wouldn’t talk. The most she would admit was a drop too much on some occasions. She denied all the scenes, she remembered none of the conversations.
People started drifting in around lunchtime. Celia watched her mother accept a small whiskey from Dr Burke who had come in to get some drink to celebrate his son’s engagement. Celia wished that Dee’s father would lean over the counter to her mother and say ‘Mrs Ryan, your eyes are all bloodshot and there are big lines under them; for your health’s sake you must give up drink.’ She wished that Father O’Reilly would come down from the presbytery on a home visit and tell her that for the good of her soul she must go and have some treatment and then take the pledge. But doctors and priests didn’t interfere enough these days maybe.
The phone box was way at the end of the bar, quiet and discreet. No wonder half of Rathdoon made their calls from there rather than beside the eager ears of the post office people.
Emer was just getting the lunch. They had all been to the pictures last night on her winnings and tonight they might go again. Videos had gone through the roof: even the kids realised that a video was out of the question.
‘What will I do with her?’ Celia asked.
‘She doesn’t admit it to herself?’
‘No. I gave her chapter and verse – what she said, what she spilled and broke, who she insulted. Not a word does she believe.’
‘And you can’t get support troops in.’
‘Not really. Bart will be too polite and anyone else would be embarrassed.’
‘I suppose you’ll have to wait.’
‘I can’t wait any more and neither can she. It’s terrible. There MUST be some way. How do people come to see things? Is there no way of hurrying it up?’
‘Well, I did hear of a man who signed himself in for treatment the moment he saw himself on a video of his daughter’s wedding. He had no idea that he was so bad until …’
‘That’s it. Thanks Emer.’
‘WHAT? You’re going to turn a video on your mother in Rathdoon? Have sense.’
‘I’ll tell you about it on Monday.’ Celia was gone.
Mrs Fitzgerald invited her in. Yes, Tom was here. They were having a pot of coffee – would Celia join them? She felt they had been having a chat, that she shouldn’t interrupt. She said she’d only be a minute. Yes he did have a small cassette recorder, and yes a blank tape … or a tape that she could record over. What was it – something from the radio? No, OK, it didn’t matter. Look, it was easy to work. No, he didn’t mind being without it until they were on the bus again. He was puzzled, but he didn’t ask any more. She took it back to the pub.
There was so much clutter under the pub counter that the small tape recorder passed unnoticed.
Celia used it judiciously, half an hour on one side and half an hour on the other.
She even moved it out in her hand to be closer to her mother when the solo singing began and Mrs Ryan was screaming a tuneless racy version of a song which she hardly knew. She let it play for the insults to Bart Kennedy and for the bad language.
At one stage Tom Fitzgerald came into the bar, he saw his recorder and said, ‘Is that fair?’
‘You have your standards, I’ll have mine,’ she snapped, and then much more wearily: ‘She doesn’t know, you see, she really doesn’t know.’
‘She’s not going to like it,’ he said.
‘No.’
‘When will you … ?’
‘Tomorrow morning, I’d say.’
‘I’ll come in around lunch and pick up the pieces,’ he smiled. He had a very, very nice smile.
Her mother sat stonily through the first few minutes. She railed with anger at the arguments and the bad language. Then she decided it was a fake and when she heard her maudlin
conversation about what a great man her husband had been, tears of shame came into her eyes.
She folded her hands on her lap and sat like some timid employee waiting to be fired.
Out of the little tape recorder came the voice of Mrs Ryan as it called on Biddy Brady’s engagement party to shut up and let HER sing. Tears fell from her closed eyes as the voice came out in its drunken, tuneless wail. Celia started to turn it off.
‘Leave it,’ her mother said.
There was a long silence.
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Ryan, ‘I see.’
‘If you wanted to, we could say you had pneumonia or that you were off to see Dan in Cowley. That would sort of cover it up.’
‘There’d be no point in covering it up. I mean, it’s only more lies isn’t it? Might as well say what it is.’ Her face was bleak.
‘Sure you’re halfway there, Mam, if that’s the way you think – you’re nearly better,’ said Celia, leaning across the small dark tape recorder to hold her mother’s hand.
TOM
He remembered the day he painted the Lilac Bus. It had been a sort of dirty beige before, and there was an exhilaration about pointing the spray can at it and seeing it change before his eyes. His mother had been appalled. It looked so vulgar and called attention to itself. That was about the worst crime in her book – attracting attention. The good went by unnoticed and understated; the bad were flashy and loud and painted their vans this silly mauve colour. Tom’s father just shrugged. What could you expect? he asked his wife in a tone that meant the one thing he really didn’t expect was an answer. Tom’s father hardly ever spoke to Tom anymore: he spoke about him, in his hearing.
‘I suppose that boy believes that money grows on trees … that boy thinks we should have the itinerants living in our garden … that boy feels that work is beneath him.’ Sometimes Tom answered; sometimes he let it pass. It didn’t really matter which he did. His father’s mind was fixed anyway: that boy was a waster, a left-wing long-haired layabout. A purple minibus was only what you’d expect.
It wasn’t what Tom expected. He just decided one day on a whim, one day when the washing didn’t seem to be making the van look any better. And he LOVED it now that it was lilac-coloured: it had much more personality and more life. That was when he decided to go into the transport business. It wasn’t exactly legal of course, but suppose they did have an accident: an insurance company would have a hard time proving that he wasn’t driving seven friends home for the weekend. No money was ever seen to change hands in Dublin. He didn’t stand at the door selling tickets as the bigger bus people did. They were the same people all the time, give or take one or two a month. It wasn’t a moneyspinner or anything; he paid for his petrol and cigarettes out of it, that was all. But it did mean he could smoke as much as he liked and he could come home every weekend to Rathdoon, which was what he wanted to do. the Lilac Bus had made all this possible.
Tom knew all about his passengers’ lives in Rathdoon, but very little about what they did in Dublin. He had thought of finding out where they all lived and dropping them home rather than leaving them in the city centre at ten o’clock on a Sunday night but something told him that they might prefer the anonymity of the city to be kept absolute; they mightn’t want the others to see their digs or their rooming houses or their set-up. More than once Tom had noticed a small fair-haired fellow in tinted glasses in a car parked near where the bus began and ended its weekend run. He would wave eagerly to Rupert Green. Now Rupert very clearly might not want that known. It was only because Tom had X-ray eyes that he had noticed the car. And his eyes had sometimes caught Dee Burke slipping into a big car and the arms of an older man. The older man had never been mentioned by Dee or by anyone in Rathdoon, so it was safe to assume that he was a secret older man not a legit one. No amount of watching or guessing could tell him what young Kev Kennedy was so afraid of. It hadn’t always been that way: he used to be a very nice young fellow, and the only one of that family to get up from the kitchen table and leave their father and their slices of bread and ham and the radio on from Goodmorning to Closedown. But for the past year or so he was in bits.
Celia lived in a nurses’ house. Six of them shared a place which was apparently highly successful. They had two television sets, a washing machine and an ironing board always in position in the back room. Celia had said there was never a cross word exchanged in that house – it was an ideal way to live until they married and had homes of their own. Nancy Morris shared a flat with that nice bouncy Mairead Hely; how Mairead stuck it was a mystery. He had met her one night at a party and she told him that Nancy’s newest trick was to watch out for food tastings in supermarkets and rush in before they closed and have paper cups of soup or bits of cheese on toothpicks and then to come home triumphantly to the flat and say, ‘I’ve had my supper.’ That night, and it was about three months back, Mairead had said that she was gathering up her courage to ask Nancy to leave, but she couldn’t have gathered it yet. Poor Mikey was so nice Tom would have driven him home willingly, but he just laughed and walked to a bus stop with the never failing sense of good humour that was so hard to take. Judy Hickey took a bus the same direction and Tom often saw them talking together as he turned the Lilac Bus and drove off home.
None of them knew where his home was, that was certain. Long ago he had developed a gift for not answering direct questions so skilfully that people thought they had been given some kind of answer but didn’t ask again. When Nancy Morris had asked him how much he paid a week for his flat, he said it was hard to work out, and that was that from Miss Morris. Rupert once asked him which side of the city did he live, and Tom had said that he was sure Rupert must know the trends in what people wanted. He often thought that it was interesting looking at people in cinema queues for example and wondering where they lived; he supposed that if he were working in an auctioneer’s like Rupert, he’d think it even more interesting. Rupert agreed and had talked cheerfully about the unexpected ambitions of a lot of the people who came into his office. He never again asked Tom where he lived, and he didn’t sound as if he had been rebuffed.
Dee Burke had told him that her brother was living in sin and wasn’t it monstrous that boys could get away with it and girls still couldn’t really. She had asked him suddenly, ‘Maybe you live in sin too. Do you?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he had said, ‘I’m very confused about sin; they never explained it properly at our school, what about yours?’ Dee had said gloomily that they never stopped explaining it at her school and they were all so sick of it by the time they left, they had hardly the energy to commit any, which might have been the aim all along. But she still didn’t find out what his lifestyle was. And down in Rathdoon he was spoken of as the one Fitzgerald boy that didn’t join the family firm, the only one who didn’t want to build an empire. He did something arty up in Dublin. But in any gathering of three if his name came up there would be three different theories on what he did. It gave the lie to the obsession with gossip that small towns were meant to have automatically, Tom thought. There was Dee with her older chap, Rupert with his boy friend, Kev with his gambling debts or whatever it was and no one back home knew a thing about any of them. Or about Tom. In Rathdoon only one person knew how Tom lived and why: his mother.
Nobody would guess that in a million years. His mother tutted with the best, sighed over his clothes and bus – genuine sighs. She really would have preferred a nice inconspicuous bus and more conservative clothes: nice neutral colours, stone-coloured trousers and brown jackets like her other sons wore. Suits, white shirts, restrained ties for Mass on Sunday. When his father railed about the young generation in general and That Boy in particular Tom’s mother was gentle in her reproach. Anyone looking on might have thought she agreed with her husband. Who could have known that Tom was her lifeline?
She was a handsome woman, Peg Fitzgerald. Fifty-two, very well groomed; you never saw a hair out of place on Mrs Fitzgerald. She wore knitted suits, in lilacs or dark green, and a go
od brooch to tone in with whatever colour it was. In summer she wore lighter linen suits but they were the same colours and she had looked the same for years. She had three perms a year in the big town, and she had a shampoo and set every Friday morning of her life with little Sheila O’Reilly, the niece of the Parish Priest. Sheila didn’t do much business in Rathdoon, but she never seemed to mind. She was always cheerful and if there were no heads of hair to deal with she did knitting instead and made a little out of that as a sideline. She wished there were more regular customers like Mrs Fitzgerald, who wanted their hair done the same way at the same time every week.
Mrs Fitzgerald was in the shop every day. The craft shop side of it had been her idea and was very successful. Any time a tour bus stopped there was a heavy electronic buzzing of tills in the Fitzgerald Craft Centre. There were shawls, lengths of tweed, pottery – a very wide range to suit all tastes. It was also the place where the whole of Rathdoon bought birthday presents for each other. Peg had difficulty persuading the family that it was a good idea, but now they looked at her with a new respect. She was a firm believer too that things should be kept in the family. When the boys married it was understood that their wives would work there. In fact one potential daughter-in-law broke off the engagement because she said all she would get from the marriage contract was to be an unpaid shop worker instead of the bank official that she was. Tom had thought that showed some spirit but the rest of the family including the jilted brother all combined in thinking they had a lucky escape if that was going to be her attitude.
From the outset Tom had said he wouldn’t work in the shop; there had been no fight about it, only scorn. He had said reasonably he thought that it was better for his three brothers and two sisters if they knew from the word go that he would not be joining them. Then they could make their own plans without any question marks hanging over him. He decided this as long ago as his school days. But they had thought it was like being an engine driver and took no notice. What he would like to do was go to Dublin and live. Just live, not necessarily DO anything until he found something he’d like to do, and then maybe America or Paris or Greece. If you didn’t have high living standards and want a comfortable house and a lot of possessions and rich food you could live very cheaply. They had thought it was a phase.
