by Maeve Binchy
He had got a lot of honours in his Leaving, much more than the brothers who were well on their way to being merchant princes: expanding to other towns, opening new branches, developing their mother’s much mocked idea of a craft shop in other centres all over the West. Tom was pronounced brighter than any of them by the masters who had taught all the Fitzgeralds, but he was adamant and very firm for an eighteen-year-old. He had all these bits of paper to prove he was educated, now could he get on with his own life? He thanked his father as warmly as he could for the grudging offer of university fees, but still it was no. All he wanted was to be left alone. He wouldn’t go to the bad, he would come home regularly if they liked so that they could see him and satisfy themselves that he was still normal. He would hitch. He would sign on for the dole each week, and NO that would not be an almighty disgrace in Dublin. Who would see him or know him for God’s sake, and NO it was not unfair, that’s what people did nowadays: the rich paid taxes and there was at least bread and a roof for those who weren’t rich. We didn’t let them die in the streets today, stepping over them saying wasn’t it a pity they didn’t have the get up and go to find a good job and earn their living. NO, he did not intend to stay on national assistance for ever. And, YES, he was very grateful for the offer of a place in the family firm but we only had one life and that was not how he was going to spend his.
And wasn’t it lucky that this is what he had decided to do? What on earth would have happened if he hadn’t been around?
It had been very easy to live cheaply in Dublin. For a while he lived with a young couple who gave him a bed and some food; they didn’t have all that much themselves. He taught their children every evening, two nice bright little boys. He went over everything they had done at school and helped them with their homework. But he didn’t really like it because he felt they should be out playing instead of doing more and yet more. They knew enough, he kept telling their worried young parents, they’re fine: don’t pack their heads with facts and more and more. The parents didn’t understand. Surely the best thing was to get a good start, to be in there with a better chance than the others? But they were only ten and nine, it was YEARS before they would need to be in there fighting the others for places and points and positions. No, the pale mother and father hadn’t got on in their lives because they had nobody to guide them; they weren’t going to let the same thing happen to the children. He left them amicably. He worked as a gardener for an old lady and slept in her garden shed for a year without her knowing. She never knew in the end, and he had moved his camp bed and primus stove long before the funeral so nobody ever knew.
He worked in a night club as a sort of bouncer. He was slim and not the typical bouncer material but he had a look in his eye that was as important as muscle. His boss who was one of the sharpest men in Dublin was anxious to keep him on, promote him even, but it wasn’t the life Tom wanted. He left again amicably and before he left he asked the sharp boss what was good about him. He’d like to know just for his own record. The Boss said he owed him no explanation if he was leaving but OK, Tom had a look in his eye that said he would go the distance. People didn’t mess with him. Tom liked this reference just as he had liked the old lady saying he was a loving sort of gardener, and the nine-year-old boy saying that he made Latin so much more interesting than they did at school because there was none of this treating it as a language – more as a puzzle really. But these were not written references. Each new job had to be found on charm or effort; each time he had to go in cold.
He had a summer in Greece driving a minibus, not unlike the Lilac Bus, over mountainy roads, taking holidaymakers to and from airport and hotels. He had a summer in America working at a children’s camp with seventy discontented youngsters who would all rather have been at home. He had a winter in Amsterdam working in a souvenir shop. He had a funny three months in London working in market surveys – going up to people on the street with a clipboard and asking them questions. He had a different kind of three months in London working as a hospital orderly; he found it harrowing, and his respect for nurses went way, way up. He had been on the point of telling Celia about those months, several times, but he never told stories about what he had done – it led to questions and questions often needed answers.
He didn’t think of himself as a drifter, and yet for nine years, since he had left school, he had done nothing with any purpose or any permanence. Still, he wouldn’t have missed any of it, not even those strange days in the hospital pushing elderly frightened people on trolleys through crowds, all speaking different languages, all the nationalities under the sun working in the hospital and coming in as patients. And now it meant that he could look after Phil, for he had no job to give up, no real lifestyle to interrupt.
Phil was the nicest in his family, there was no doubt about it. They all agreed on that, just as they all agreed that Tom was the oddest and the most difficult. Phil was the nearest to him in age: she was almost a year to the day older than he was. All the six Fitzgeralds arrived within seven years, and then the young Peg stopped producing a new baby every season. There were pictures of them all when they were toddlers and Tom always thought it looked like a nursery school rather than one family. But his mother had always said it was great to get it all over at once. You had a period when they all seemed to be unmanageable and then suddenly they had all grown up. Anyway Phil had always been his special friend, and in the great sixteen-and seventeen-year-old arguments about Tom not joining the firm Phil had been very supportive. She had been in the big town seventeen miles from Rathdoon learning shorthand and typing at the time, it had been agreed that she should work in the office rather than the shop. But she used to come home at weekends during her commercial course and encourage Tom to live his own life. She had a big round face, Phil had, and she was always laughing. Years ago he remembered her dancing with Red Kennedy and getting a lecture that the Kennedys were perfectly nice, not a thing wrong with them, but she should set her sights a little higher. Phil had said indignantly that she wasn’t setting her sights at Red Kennedy or at anyone, she was just dancing with him, but there had still been a lot of head shaking.
Phil was what they called a fine girl in Rathdoon, Mrs Fitzgerald used to say that she’d slim down when the time came. Hadn’t Anna, the eldest of the family had a lot of puppy fat too. But Mrs Fitzgerald always thought that there was some kind of law which said that a girl needed to be nice and slim and attractive when she was thinking of choosing a husband and settling down. It was just the way things were. But Phil didn’t notice some magical trick of nature: she remained plump and round-faced and never developed the hollow cheeks and small waist which were generally agreed to have been important when her sister Anna attracted and married the very suitable Dominic whose family made tweeds.
Tom had never thought she was too fat; he had told her that several times when he came home for the weekend. He said she must be losing her marbles to think she was a fatty, and cracked to think that she had no friends because of this.
‘Who are my friends then? List them,’ she had cried.
Tom couldn’t, but he said he couldn’t list any friends of his family for God’s sake, he was away, he didn’t live here. She MUST have friends. No, she claimed, she didn’t. That was when meaning to be helpful he had suggested this Singles type of holiday. Everyone went on their own, there were no loving couples to start out with but hopefully plenty of them on the way back. Phil had read the brochure eagerly and decided that she should go on it.
‘Don’t tell anyone it’s a singles special,’ her mother had advised. ‘It looks a little pathetic. Say it’s an ordinary holiday in Spain.’
Tom never knew quite what happened, but it wasn’t a success. Phil said that Spain was all right, and the weather had been fair, but nothing else. Later, much later, he heard that all the girls except Phil had been topless on the beaches, that almost everyone on the group charter had enjoyed a close physical relationship with one or more other people on the sam
e group charter – again, everyone except Phil – and that there was no question of meeting people and dancing with them and talking to them and getting to know them. This was apparently a much more swinging type of holiday than some singles outings, and swinging meant going to bed with people, people who were total strangers.
But Tom didn’t know all this at the time. Phil had come back quiet and non-communicative. He noticed shortly after this that she seemed to have lost weight, but he didn’t say anything, because he had been the one to tell her that weight wasn’t important. If he admired her now, she would believe that he had only been kind before. Phil didn’t go to the dance any more and she didn’t go out to the sea with a crowd of girls like she used to. But to be honest, he didn’t notice these things at the time; it was only afterwards he remembered it all.
Phil had come to Dublin on one of the day excursions by train from the town. It was a bit of a killer: the train left at 9 a.m., you were in Dublin at noon and then the train back was at 6 p.m. So it was some concentrated shopping before they all fell back with sore feet and bulging parcels to go home again that night. Phil always rang Tom if she went on one of these marathons, and he came to meet her at the station in his minibus which was a dirty beige in those days. She looked very pale, and said that she had been having really terrible pains like a knife on the train, so bad that the people in her carriage said she should go to a hospital or a doctor since she had been crying out with the sharpness of them. Tom looked concerned and just at that moment she bent over again doubled up with pain and letting out a long low scream, so his mind was made up. He drove her to the out-patients of a hospital. He was quiet and firm. He got her seen before anyone by saying it was an emergency. As her brother, he signed the permission to operate for a burst appendix and he was there when she woke up to tell her that it had all been fine, and it was over and all she had to do now was to rest. Her troubled face smiled at him sadly. Their mother came up the next day with a suitcase of things that Phil would need, a lot of reassurance, sighs of how good God was to let it all happen when Tom was there to take charge, and messages of love, boxes of chocolates, bottles of lavender water from the rest of the family.
She was recovering quite well Tom thought. Well, her strength was coming back quickly and he was very startled when one of the nurses said she would like to talk to him about his sister. Privately. She had made a report to the people who should know already, like the matron and the surgeon who had operated, but this was now something that must be taken further, through Miss Fitzgerald’s own doctor perhaps.
He was alarmed. The nurse spoke reprovingly, as if poor Phil had been caught stealing in the wards. What was it? Well, the nurse had noticed she spent a long time at the lavatory, and she had asked her about constipation or diarrhoea. Apparently neither, but she was still in there for a considerable time, so the nurse had listened at the door. Tom felt his heart beating: what horror was he going to be told?
It was what the nurse had suspected. Vomiting, retching. Two or three times a day.
‘What’s causing it?’ Tom cried. He had no idea what the tone of shock was all about. Why wasn’t he being told this by a doctor?
‘She’s doing it herself,’ the nurse said. ‘Eating chocolates, biscuits, bananas, slices of bread and butter. You should have seen the papers and the empty boxes. And then vomiting it all up.’
‘But why on earth would she do that?’
‘It’s called bulimia; it’s like anorexia nervosa – you know, where people starve themselves to death if they can. It’s a form of it. They binge and gorge and then they make themselves sick to get rid of the food they’ve eaten.’
‘Phil does this?’
‘Yes, she’s been doing it for some time.’
‘And did this cause her appendix to burst?’
‘Oh no, not at all, that was something totally unconnected. But maybe lucky in a way. Because at least now you know and the family will know and help her try to fight it.’
‘Can’t you just tell her to stop. Can’t we all tell her it’s … it’s revolting – it’s so senseless.’
‘Oh no, that’s not the way, that’s not what they’ll say at all when she goes in.’
‘Goes in where?’
‘To a pyschiatric hospital. It’s a mental condition, you know, it’s got nothing to do with us.’
The nurse wasn’t quite correct. It did have a little to do with them because Phil was admitted to the psychiatric wing of that same hospital and there was a medical side to her treatment as well as all the therapy and group discussions on the psychiatric side. She had been very relieved at the beginning to know that other people did the same thing. She thought she was the only person in the world who had ever done it, and she felt a great burden of guilt taken off her shoulders. She never felt guilty about the self-induced vomiting: she said it was the easiest thing in the world. If you just put your finger in the right place down your throat it happened automatically. But she did feel guilty about stuffing herself with the food. Especially eating in a lavatory – that was the thing she felt shameful about. She wasn’t ready at all to talk about why she did it. Tom was told that she would undoubtedly do it again and again before she was cured. Before she came back to reality and accepted that she was perfectly fine as she was. The help and support of a family at a time like this was crucial. If Phil was to see that she was a person of high esteem in her own family that would go a very long way towards helping her have a good image of herself again. The family, yes. But Lord God the Fitzgerald family. At this time.
Poor Phil couldn’t have picked a worse time to call on them, Tom thought grimly. It was the very period that the newspapers were full of the case about the armed raid on the post office in Cork and the subsequent conviction and sentencing of Teddy Fitzgerald their cousin, who had worked in the business with the family. That had been a heavy cross. Then there was the infidelity of Dominic, the highly suitable husband of Anna the eldest. There had been many a tale of a relationship and finally the birth of a child which Dominic grudgingly acknowledged as his, even though it was born not to his wife but to one of the most unsuitable women in the West of Ireland, tinkers who had settled down and according to Mrs Peg Fitzgerald the only thing worse than a tinker on the road was a tinker who had settled down. So there was that disgrace. And there had been a few other things too, none of them as shocking but all of them adding up to a general family anxiety. It was the wrong time to hear that a member of the family was now entering on to a long period of psychiatric treatment and would need their support.
Mrs Fitzgerald made her point of view absolutely clear. There would be no talk about Phil whatsoever. This was final. Phil had recovered from her burst appendix, she had been convalescing, she had been visiting friends, she would come back shortly. Meanwhile they would get a temporary girl for the office. Mrs Fitzgerald would go to Dublin once a month to give this support that the hospital said it needed, Tom would go to see her as often as he could, and that was it. It would not be discussed; they had quite enough problems already without adding this one. And what would it do to Phil’s chances of getting a husband if it was widely known she had been in a mental institution? No more arguments.
Tom was sure that this was not what the doctors meant by family support: hushing it all up, making it into a greater shame than Phil already felt it was. He was certain that his mother’s monthly visits – full of assurances that nobody knew, no one suspected, people had been fooled and hoodwinked, cover stories had been invented – were all the worst thing for his sister who would listen with stricken face and apologise for all the trouble she had caused. Sometimes his mother would reach out awkwardly and take Phil’s hand.
‘We love you … um … very much. You are much loved, Phil.’ Then she would draw her hand back, embarrassed. She had been told by the psychiatrist that this was a good line to emphasise, but she recited it as if it were learned by heart. They were not a demonstrative family, they had never hugged or kissed e
ach other. It was hard for his mother to reach out and say that to Phil. And bewildering for Phil to hear it, just before her mother gathered her gloves and handbag and started to leave.
He went to see Phil every day, every single day and he telephoned her on each Saturday and Sunday. His mother said that she would telephone except that there was nothing to say, but Tom found things. After all he knew her much better: they had been meeting each other constantly, and he was able to pick from a variety of things to say. He never felt as if he were talking to someone who wasn’t well. He didn’t talk down to her, he would never apologise profusely if he hadn’t been able to ring or visit, just briefly. He wouldn’t let on that he thought his presence was essential to her. He treated her as if she were as sane as he was.
They talked about childhood a lot. Tom remembered his as happy enough, too much talk about the business, a bit too much of covering over and not letting the neighbours know this or that, and keeping our business to ourselves. Phil remembered it quite differently. She remembered that they were always laughing, and that they had all been sitting round the table together talking to each other, though Tom said they couldn’t have been. There would have to have been either their mother or their father in the shop. Phil remembered them going on great outings to the sea and picnics; Tom said he honestly could only remember one. Phil said they used to play games like I Spy and the Minister’s Cat, and Sardines, where one person had to hide and when you found them you squeezed in like a sardine beside them. Tom said that was only at parties. But they didn’t fight over the memories; they talked them over like an old film that you’d seen years ago and everyone could remember bits of, but nobody could remember all of.
