‘She loves it when you come back.’
‘We have nothing to say to each other. After a day, she goes on the computer and I read my book. I can read my book in Vancouver. I tried last week to get a flight but there were no seats.’
‘But what do you hope to say to each other?’
‘I don’t know, something to carry back. The truth is I don’t know what mothers say to their daughters, that’s the problem. Really we have no history.’
‘Don’t cry.’ His sister was tough but she’d never eliminated that volatility, that self-surrender. She was victimised by what she felt, as if her feelings came from somewhere else. They surprised her. It was like watching someone get tasered.
‘Why? People will think I’m sad about leaving.’
‘Aren’t you?’
‘Sad, relieved, frustrated beyond belief. All of the above, I suppose.’
‘Is it silly to ask you to come back now? We could say the flight was cancelled. Stay a few more days, Margie. Don’t get on the plane like this.’
‘And you think she’s not right this minute breathing more easily now I’m gone? You’re so innocent, Paddy. There’s a lot you choose not to see.’
‘Is that the same as innocence?’
‘Maybe not, I don’t know.’
‘I know she thinks about you a lot.’
‘Yes of course. It’s part of the problem. When she sits at her computer and I’m downstairs with my book, she’s thinking about me all the time. It accounts for the tension. With me too, I read a chapter and I forget what I’ve just read. Basically we don’t seem good for each other. We remind each other of some problem.’
‘What problem?’
‘That’s just it, what is the problem?’
A few months after they’d divorced, his mother, who’d never behaved in any way that was obviously anti-Bridget, said to Paddy, ‘She had no imagination, Bridget.’ They’d been sitting in the kitchen of the old house, in the last of the evening’s sunlight, while the silverbeet boiled in a pot. He was staying for tea. She invited him out of consideration and kindness and concern. He was not especially well.
He baulked at the plainness of his mother’s sudden judgement. It wasn’t that she was wrong. What disturbed him was that she’d felt this and concealed it from him. Not for the first time he was irritated by the distance from which she delivered her verdicts, her skill at foreclosing someone’s character while her own remained invulnerable, beyond discussion. Her humility was in the end not only a shield but also a powerful weapon, and under the cloak of her own negligibility, she could be brutal. Who was she, this person who desired so much to be nothing? He was suddenly drawn to argue with her, contradicting the truth of her statement about Bridget.
Well, let’s face it, you were never supportive of her, he said. You gave her no chance. He walked to the pot on the stove and lifted its lid with a fork, dropping it when steam came up at him.
She had asked what he meant.
What did he mean? he wondered.
He said, You presented her with that curious and ugly smile that really means I can’t stand you. Do you think she was too stupid to see that? You never took her seriously even though you were relentlessly kind and understanding.
He couldn’t look at her and she remained sitting, one of her shoulders in sunlight, as if pinned to the wall by his terrible harangue. There was always that caution and carefulness and you never gave her anything, any moment of true emotion but always humoured her, as if she was a simpleton. He had to leave the room but he couldn’t. Not a sound or movement came from her, which he found doubly infuriating. You always looked amused when she spoke. The truth is, that’s the way you’ve always been. You can’t bear that we’ve grown up. You act nicely and there’s a deep hole in you. The caution is you stepping neatly around this hole. You give decency a bad name. You drive people away. You have no friends. An adult woman with no friends, who’s ever heard of such a thing?
The lid on the silverbeet pot danced a little and spat at him. He felt it on the back of his hand.
They remained fixed in position for a while. Then she stood up and moved towards him. He stepped away, dizzy with the fright of what he’d just done.
‘I need to turn this down,’ she said at the stove, speaking to no one in particular.
After that, he’d not talked to his mother for weeks. He walked about in a state of unhappiness that was physically painful. He had an ache in his side and it hurt to twist in one direction. It was never spoken about again. Oh, it was not forgotten, he didn’t imagine. What was?
Medbh swept the peelings from the garlic and the onions into the bin. Paddy thought: even disposing of the rubbish, she seems more skilful than us. She was rinsing the eggplant and drying it on paper towels. ‘Funny, I don’t associate you with boats.’
‘What do you associate me with?’ he said.
‘A chair.’ She shrugged apologetically.
‘A chair?’
‘Sorry. Just thinking about your office, your newspaper column. Work. What about me then?’
He was wounded. ‘I associate you, Medbh, with a defiled corpse. But a strangely happy one.’
‘That was the old Medbh.’
‘Anyway,’ he said, still feeling tender from her image and finding an outlet in a new stridency, ‘there are precedents for this sort of thing. Go to Russian movies, or Swedish ones, they don’t talk for hours. Someone washes a cup, it lasts days. They look out the window and see themselves as children running through a field, endlessly. I can’t watch them. And I can’t watch silent movies. Just can’t. I’ve tried. The great classics of the silent era. The silent era, they call it. I’ve got to leave the room.’
Medbh was flipping the eggplant slices skilfully around to coat them in oil. ‘It’s probably why you became a speech therapist.’ She looked at the ceiling, as if the idea had come from there.
He reached for his mobile phone, needing to show how lightly he’d been touched. ‘Because I hate F.W. Murnau?’ He turned it on and now read his mother’s text. ‘Oh no,’ he said. Medbh asked him what was wrong and he told her about Teresa missing the weekend away. The change in subject helped him recover immediately. ‘But she was okay when you saw her? She said she’s feeling better.’
‘She didn’t mention it,’ said Medbh. She was opening the oven door. ‘But I didn’t know your mother was … French?’
He sent a text back and then looked up. ‘French?’
‘Is it? Her accent?’ Medbh arranged the eggplant on the oven rack, checked the grill setting, half-closed the door, and went to the fridge. She took out a plastic container of fresh mozzarella. At the bench, she began to slice the cheese. ‘Isn’t she a bit French or something?’
‘Not that I’m aware of. French? Why do you say that?’
‘Just the accent.’
‘What accent?’
‘So you’re not French, either of you.’
‘I did it to the fifth form. My mother, to my knowledge, has had no dealings with the French language at all.’ He thought of her Internet game, the circles of European diplomacy, something there she’d picked up on while wearing her headphones? ‘She’s been sick too of course.’
‘Yes.’
‘Au revoir, she said at the end.’
‘You still want the job, Medbh? My crazy French mother. Next week, she could be Russian. Dressed in scarves. Asking you to clean her samovar.’
The street-level door buzzer sounded on the intercom. Paddy checked his watch. It was his two o’clock. He pressed the button on the door keypad, ‘Come on up,’ he said. There was a snatch of street noise and a voice saying, ‘Thanks.’
He turned to Medbh. ‘It’s Julie with her little boy Caleb.’
She held her hand up to stop him. ‘Confidential,’ she said.
‘Le petit garçon.’ He moved towards the door.
Medbh looked up from her slicing. ‘Because did she think Medbh was French? The name.’
‘No. How? We’re all from Ireland originally, our lot. She has a granddaughter called Niamh.’
‘Ha, that’s what I was going to be called but they went for a totally different set of problematic consonants instead.’
8
Helena arrived home late that evening, which was becoming a habit as the review approached. They’d already submitted many documents to the Ministry: budgets, business plans, projections. Someone would come soon to spend the day at the school, observing a class, and there would be sessions with a randomly selected group of interview subjects drawn from students past and present. ‘My mind keeps going back to Janet Frame,’ she told him. ‘As a young teacher, with the inspector at the back of the class, she runs from the room and never comes back. It’s in the film. She runs into the trees, she’s free.’
‘And a little bit mad,’ he said.
‘She’s not mad to run though, under that gaze.’
‘I don’t think you’d even think of running. You’d return the gaze with interest. It’ll be the inspector who’ll run into the trees.’
‘But that doesn’t sound very good either. Anyway, I hope it’s a man.’
‘Why?’
‘Women are tougher,’ she said.
There was no doubt this Ministry person, man or woman, would find that Helena ran a thoroughly professional organisation with a high degree of client satisfaction. But it was still worth telling Helena this every night. At Christmas she got sixty or seventy cards from happy graduates.
It was after ten and Paddy had eaten his half of the dinner Medbh had prepared for them. A leek and bacon flan that had survived its reheat perfectly.
He was back in the office, working on his column. If anyone asked him how long it took to write the column, he always said it was only six hundred words, not long. In truth they took ages, days. The more astute questioners would wonder whether it was harder to write with that level of compression, and Paddy would agree with this. Again, the truth was different. Right then, four hundred words would have suited him, two hundred.
Helena kissed him on the forehead and he put his arms around her waist. Paddy’s head was pushed against her stomach and she stroked his hair. A perfect evening arrangement. Her clothes carried the chill of the wind, and also some ricey fragrance she’d collected in the Thai takeaways just around the corner from the school. She hadn’t phoned him to say she wouldn’t need her half of Medbh’s dinner, which was still waiting in the turned-off oven.
‘Green curry chicken?’ he said.
‘Do I stink?’ she said.
‘I could eat you, or at least your coat. How perfect is the most perfect language school in all the land tonight?’
‘Far from perfect.’ She slumped down in one of the chairs. ‘How goes the glottal stop?’
‘It’s stopped.’
‘What exactly is the glottis?’ She’d asked through a yawn.
Paddy stood up and moved over to her. ‘Open that wide again and I’ll explain.’
‘I don’t think I can open anything.’
He began to unbutton her coat. With her sitting, however, this was surprisingly difficult to do. She pushed his hands away abruptly and stood up. ‘Let me,’ she said. She pulled at the buttons. ‘I’m sorry, all day I’m with people who can’t do what I ask them to do and so I have to do everything myself. I don’t mean you.’
‘No but then you come home and your beloved can’t even get the buttons undone on your coat. Where can a person find decent help these days? We could ask Medbh to stay and she could put us both to bed.’
‘Sorry, Patrick. How was your day? Or did I ask that already? Sorry. It was Medbh’s first day with your mother. Dora reminded me at work, I’d totally forgotten. We should have reminded Teresa.’
He thought at once of the French business. It seemed too odd, too diverting for now. ‘Dora came to your work?’
‘They want to make a silent film.’
‘I know.’ She looked at him intently for a moment but not really because he was on her mind, he saw that. ‘We must make sure they stay together.’
‘It’s the slit in your vocal cords, part of the larynx, close it completely and you’ve probably said something like chillun. All God’s Chillun Need Love. Glottal stop. Why do you think they might split up, apart from the fact that Dora would be a very difficult person to live with, while also being rewarding of course?’
Helena was very still, eyes wide, alert for something. Paddy wasn’t convinced she’d heard what he’d said.
‘What is it?’ he said.
She returned her attention to the room and looked straight at him. ‘Yes, in Arabic, that makes a consonant. The glottal stop is a consonant.’
‘You knew all along,’ he said. ‘Why’d you need me for?’
‘I’d forgotten I knew it. Iyob works in the office. Duh!’
Iyob was from Syria. He’d moved from graduate at the school to administration. He’d come to the apartment for a work party one time. Had he worn a bow tie?
‘Maybe you should be writing this column. But then again, I thought Arabic was more pharyngeal, putting it near the epiglottis. Front wall of the pharynx articulates with the back wall, no?’
‘Iyob is actually one of my headaches at present. Tonight I’m generally not in favour of the glottis or the epiglottis or any other glottis. With apologies to Arabic culture around the globe. In fact I’m not so keen on any of the languages of the world, not even my own. Now I need to be pointed towards bed. I’m in search of utter darkness.’
‘And silence,’ he said. He was thinking also of Sam. It was not the time to bring up Helena’s indiscreet talk of his patients. They lived in a small town. ‘Why do you think Dora and Medbh are in danger of splitting up?’
‘No reason. But we must always be on guard.’ She took the hand he offered her. ‘Show me the way,’ she said, her eyes closing.
He led her to the bedroom. ‘Dora came to your work. She never comes to your work, does she?’ There was a sort of agreement mother and daughter had reached.
Helena groaned. She was feeling under her pillow for her nightie. ‘Oh, Paddy, I gave her a job. A few weeks ago. In a moment of weakness. With the pressure on from the thing.’
‘The Ministry thing.’
‘Data entry. Please don’t say anything right now about it.’
‘How’s it going, the data entry with Dora?’
‘You know, I like having her around.’
‘Maybe this will be the making of her.’
She looked at him blearily. ‘I’m way past knowing whether you’re being sarcastic.’
He knew sadly no other way to be. The daughter was Helena’s Achilles tendon, which was a Lant saying. He, Lant, had snapped his years back on a flight of icy steps. The tendon was now his Achilles heel, he said. Between them, they said tendon. It was juvenile and as persistent as most juvenilia. Dora made her mother hobble, he thought. Having left Max, having forged a new solo life, having been unavailable twenty-four seven for her young daughter, Helena now watched Dora’s adult misery with a troubled conscience. What if what if. He understood it, he did. It was the contemporary dilemma: the haunted woman. Also he saw the daughter understood it too and refused to concede that she was a maker of her own life, that her lines were not being written daily by her kind and loving mother. Because that was what bugged him: Dora was loved and still acted as if crippling deficiencies in this realm were keeping her from her goal. She’d cripple someone back. Okay, he should have felt more sympathy for the girl given his own experience. They had Margie in their family, making his mother, come to think of it, also the contemporary woman.
He went into the bathroom and put toothpaste on Helena’s toothbrush. She came in and took it from him.
‘It’s got the stuff on it already,’ she said, looking at her brush, unimpressed. ‘You did it for me.’
When he was married to Bridget he’d done this during the periods she’d been sick in bed but he’d never done it before w
ith Helena and it seemed to have happened in some sort of flashback. Had he forgotten for a moment where he was?
‘Ma got sick,’ he said. ‘Stomach bug, she had to cancel with Stephanie. She spent the whole weekend in bed.’
‘That’s dreadful, why didn’t we know? She was just through there all the time.’
‘This is part of her “I don’t want to be your new best friend, I don’t want to knock on your door” thing.’
‘You should have checked on her.’
The accusation surprised him, annoyed him. ‘But I thought she was away! If I’d known, of course I would have checked.’
She’d started to brush, though she spoke a few words mid-brush.
‘I can’t understand you,’ he said.
Helena was too tired to read even a page of People that night. Her light was off when he looked in after a few minutes. She was already sleeping deeply, pushing air at a steady rate through her nostrils, her lips slightly parted and vibrating. How much oxygen did she need for this sleeping? Sometimes, as now, she looked half-drowned, pale and with one hand caught oddly behind her ear, as if she’d been flung on the sheets. It was unfair to catch her like this and also one of the great privileges, he considered, of cohabitation. What has she seen of me asleep, he thought, what ugliness?
He found himself looking carefully at her neck. Nothing had changed about her neck of course. Yet her self-criticism had somehow made a difference. It was, he saw, slightly malpositioned with regard to her body. Lying down, this appeared more obvious. His cruelty was disturbing to him. Not for the first time, he blamed it on his failure with Sam. What did it mean—that he had such a limited supply of sympathy the boy could exhaust it? Yet he’d felt cruel at times towards him also.
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