by Colm Toibin
“I’ll drop in again some day when I’m in the town.”
Nora made her way down the stairs and around the house to the car. It was still the afternoon. When she looked at her watch she saw that her visit had not lasted even half an hour. There was still time to go to Wexford, if she wanted, and do some shopping before she went home.
CHAPTER THREE
Jim, her brother-in-law, sat in an easy chair on the other side of the fireplace. He waited until the boys went into the front room before pulling the sheets of paper from his inside pocket and handing them to her.
“Do you still want to use those prayers?” he asked.
“I do,” Nora said.
“We were hoping you might have changed your mind.”
Margaret, her sister-in-law, smiled.
“Jim doesn’t like them,” she said to Nora, almost confidentially, as though Jim were not in the room. “For your mother’s and for ours, God knows, we just had the simple prayers on the memory cards.”
“It would cost more as well,” Jim said.
“Well, it would be a small thing for Maurice,” Nora said. “And it would be something I’d like.”
“We don’t know those prayers at all,” Margaret said.
Nora looked at the sheet Jim had handed her and began to read. “‘Too young to die, they say. Too young? No, rather he is blessed in being so young thus to be made swiftly an immortal. He has escaped the tremulous hands of age.’ It says something. He has been made swiftly an immortal.”
“Why don’t you print that yourself?” Margaret suggested. “And we’ll do the other plain one ourselves. We have old relations out the country, the crowd up in Kiltealy, and the Ryans in Cork, and they would think it was too strange, Nora. They’d all like a simple memory card to remember Maurice by.”
“Would they not think we had fallen out if we do separate memory cards?” Nora asked.
“They know how close we all are, Nora, especially now.”
“That might be the best solution,” Jim said.
It was clear to Nora then that he and Margaret had discussed this in detail before they arrived. She was pleased at the compromise and glad that she had not given in to them when they wanted simple plain memory cards with the same old prayers as everyone had.
The silence was soon broken by a knock that came to the door. One of the boys answered, and all three adults listened closely as they heard a woman’s voice in the hallway. Nora quietly put the sheets of paper away; she could not tell who it was. She walked across the room and opened the door.
“Oh, Mrs. Whelan, come in,” she said. “It’s lovely to see you.”
Maurice was dead six months now and the visitors had eased off; some nights no one came and she was relieved about that. She did not know Mrs. Whelan well, and did not think that Maurice had taught any of her sons in school. She wondered if they might have gone to the vocational school, and was not sure if they were still in the town.
“I won’t stay,” Mrs. Whelan said. Having greeted Margaret and Jim, she finally agreed to take a chair, although she would not remove her coat or her scarf.
“Just I have a message for you, so I won’t delay, and no I won’t have a cup of tea or anything. I’ll just give you the message. I work for the Gibneys now, I don’t know if you know that. Anyway, Peggy Gibney asked me to tell you that she would love to see you, and so would William, any day after dinner. She’s always there, but if you said the day then she would certainly be there.”
Nora noticed Margaret and Jim eyeing Mrs. Whelan carefully; they could tell that this invitation was not casual. Even though she had been in school with Peggy Gibney, she had not seen her for years. And, before she married, Nora had worked with William in the office of the flour mill the family owned when his father ran the firm. Now William was the owner of everything, not only the mill but also the largest wholesale business in the town. He and Peggy did not send out invitations for no reason, she knew. Having moved into his father’s old house and inherited everything, he had become remote, or so she had heard.
“Whatever day would suit them, Mrs. Whelan,” she said, “that day is fine with me.”
“Will we say Wednesday then? At three? Or half three?”
“Wednesday will be fine.”
Mrs. Whelan refused tea again, and insisted that she would not stay. In the hall, alone with Nora, she began to whisper.
“They’d like you to come back to the office. But maybe don’t mention that when you see them. Let them tell you themselves.”
“Is there a job vacant?” Nora asked.
“Let them tell you all that,” Mrs. Whelan whispered.
When she returned to the back room, Nora knew that Margaret and Jim were searching her face for a sign of what had been said in the hall. When Nora sat down, neither of them spoke for a moment as they waited for her to tell them. She put more coal on the fire as a way of lifting the tension.
“The Gibneys are doing very well, I believe,” Margaret said. “They are branching out into all sorts of things besides the mill. All the farmers go there to the farm providers and then you often see queues of vans at the cash-and-carry. And the wholesale does a great trade. The sons are very go-ahead.”
“They are a force to be reckoned with all right,” Jim said.
Soon, Donal and Conor came into the room to say good night, and Jim and Margaret stood up, saying it was time they went home. Nora led them out into the hall.
“So we’ll do the two separate memory cards then,” Jim said. “With maybe the same photograph.”
Nora nodded and said nothing.
She opened the front door. As Jim passed her he handed her an envelope almost surreptitiously.
“Just to tide you over,” he said. “Say nothing about it.”
“I can’t take money from you. You’ve paid for everything.”
“Just to tide you over for the moment,” he said, and she understood by his tone that her returning to work in Gibney’s after an absence of twenty-one years would not only meet with his approval, but somehow fulfil his expectations. Before he walked down the steps he looked at her knowingly and she wondered, since he knew everyone in the town, if he had had a hand in arranging Mrs. Whelan’s visit.
When they had left, she sat back in her chair and thought about Gibney’s. She remembered, after her father died, the nuns, Sister Catherine especially, coming to the house and asking her mother if there was nothing that could be done, nothing at all, if enough money just for three years’ more schooling for her could not be found, and then she could even get a university scholarship, but she would certainly get a well-paid job in the civil service. She knew that her mother had tried, and in trying had managed to fall out with both sides of the family. She knew that her mother had no money, and so, since it was known how clever she was, she could be found a job in Gibney’s instead of staying at school. She began there when she was fourteen and a half; once she was fifteen, she took shorthand and typing classes in the evening so that she could improve her chances of promotion. In the first few years, when she was paid, she handed over her entire wage packet to her mother, whose small shop was badly stocked, who sold cigarettes in ones, and who augmented her income by singing in the cathedral at weddings when people had enough money to pay her. In those years, her mother, herself and her two sisters lived on almost nothing until Catherine and Una too found jobs in offices in the town.
For eleven years, then, Nora had worked five and a half days a week in Gibney’s, barely tolerating her mother at home and at work operating with an efficiency that was still remembered. In the years when she was married and had children she had never dreamed that she would have to go back; the job there seemed like the distant past. She had only one friend from that time, and she, too, had married well; she and her husband had moved away. Both Nora and her friend viewed the office in Gibney’s as a
place where they had spent years working merely because the right chances did not come to match their intelligence, an intelligence that, as married women, they had cultivated with care.
She thought of the freedom that marriage to Maurice had given her, the freedom, once the children were in school, or a young child was sleeping, to walk into this room at any time of the day and take down a book and read; the freedom to go into the front room at any time and look out of the window at the street and Vinegar Hill across the valley or the clouds in the sky, letting her mind be idle, going back to the kitchen, or to attend to the children when they came home from school but as part of a life of ease which included duty. The day belonged to her, even if others could call on her, take up her time, distract her. Never once, in the twenty-one years she had run this household, had she felt a moment of boredom or frustration. Now her day was to be taken from her. Her only hope was that the Gibneys, when they met her, would not, in fact, have a job for her. Returning to work in that office belonged to a memory of being caged. She knew though that she would not be able to turn the Gibneys down if they offered her something. Her years of freedom had come to an end; it was as simple as that.
She looked again at the prayers she had chosen for Maurice’s memory card. The words lifted her for a moment from the consideration of how she was going to make a living, of how much she had lost, but when she looked again at the prayers, tears filled her eyes and she was glad that Jim and Margaret were not here and that the boys had gone to bed as she read the opening words: “We give them back to Thee, O God, who gave them to us.”
That was, she thought, close to what had happened. She had given Maurice back; there was almost nothing more to be said. She ran her eyes down the second prayer again. “People sometimes talk in their foolishness of such a one cut off in the prime of life. He is not cut off. Rather he is, if one could vary the metaphor, hurried into the prime, the fullness of life. He is lifted out of this life of ours, which is but a waiting till death shall find us. He is taken out of this. He has escaped, this man of whom they say to us that he is stricken in the midst of years. Too young to die, they say. Too young? No, rather he is blessed in being so young thus to be made swiftly an immortal. He has escaped the tremulous hands of age.”
The words, she thought, seemed to be too certain. Wherever Maurice was at this moment, he would long for the comfort of this house and for her, as much as she longed for the past year of her life to be wiped away and for him to return to them.
On Wednesday morning she went downtown and had her hair done, talking to Bernie in the hairdresser’s about a new system of dyeing hair she had read about, wondering if it was time that she did something about the grey.
“I wouldn’t like it blue,” she said.
“I know what you mean,” Bernie replied.
“And if it was too black then it would look dyed. And I was never blond, everyone in the town knows I was never blond. Is there a good brown, so that it might not look dyed?”
“I could try this one.” Bernie showed her a package with a photograph of a woman with curly brown hair that looked natural.
“Maybe just start off with a small bit?” she said.
“The instructions say to use the whole thing. I’ve used it before. It’s very popular. You would be surprised who has it.”
“Well, try it so,” Nora said.
Once the dye had been applied, Bernie put a nylon net on her head and left her to flick through some magazines. When she saw that she would not be home in time to cook a proper dinner for the boys, she regretted having come here at all and knew that she would have to go soon. She signalled to Bernie, who was now busy with two women who had come in together and appeared to need to consult each other about each clip of the scissors.
“I’ll be right with you,” Bernie said.
When she came over to remove the net, Bernie told her not to worry, or look too closely, as the real change would come only once the drier and a brush and comb were used. Nora was aware that the two women Bernie had been looking after were studying her closely. Nora wondered if she should not have consulted other women before getting her hair dyed for the first time, but she couldn’t think of anyone she could have asked. Both of her sisters, she presumed, dyed their hair, but she had never heard them talking about it. Slowly, as she watched Bernie working with the hair drier, she realised that she was being given the hairstyle of a much younger woman, and that the women watching it all happen knew that and were taking it in with considerable satisfaction.
The more Bernie worked, the more her hair seemed to look like a wig. She knew that the dye would take time to wash out, but, in the mirror, she could see how pleased Bernie was with her own work. There would be no point in complaining.
“Is it not a bit young for me?” she asked.
“I think you look great,” Bernie replied. “This cut is very fashionable at the moment.”
“I’ve never had a fashionable cut before,” she said.
When it was finished, she knew that anyone who saw her on the way home would think that she had lost her mind, or that she was trying to look like a young woman rather than someone who was recently widowed.
“It’ll take a few days to get used to,” Bernie said. “But no one has grey hair anymore.”
“Does the dye not look very unnatural?”
“In a few days it will lose that look and people will think that you’ve had it all your life. You look very worried but I promise you that by the weekend you’ll be delighted with it.”
“You can’t wash it out, can you?”
“No, but it will fade, and I guarantee that you’ll be back here in a month for the same again. I’ve never known anyone to go back to the grey. But maybe the next time we’ll think of putting some highlights in. They’re all the rage now as well.”
“Highlights? Oh, I don’t think so.”
Outside, she lifted her head high and hoped that all the women in Court Street and John Street would be busy cooking and that none of them would be standing at the door. She prayed that she would meet no one she knew. In her mind she went through the worst possible encounters, the people who would most deplore the idea that, with her husband six months in the grave, she had dyed her hair a colour it had never been before. She thought of Jim, and knew that she would have to face him and Margaret within a week. They would not know what to think.
As she saw Mrs. Hogan from John Street walking towards her, Nora could not tell whether Mrs. Hogan simply did not recognise her, or if she wanted to get by her without making any comment. Just as Mrs. Hogan approached her, she seemed almost to jump. Her face quivered and then she stopped.
“Well, that will take some getting used to,” she said.
Nora tried to smile.
“Was it Bernie?” Mrs. Hogan asked.
Nora nodded.
“I heard she got some new packets in all right. God, I must go to her myself.”
If Mrs. Hogan, in her apron and a pair of very worn-looking shoes, felt that she had the right to comment on Nora’s hair, then there was, Nora felt, no reason why she could not comment in reply.
“Well, you know where she is,” she said drily, looking at Mrs. Hogan’s hair, clearly suggesting that it could benefit from some treatment. It took Mrs. Hogan a moment to take in the possibility that she was being insulted.
The encounter made Nora feel brave. She would stop for nobody else, but she knew that what had happened was a mistake. She wondered if she had ever done anything like this before in her life, acted on a whim without any thought for the consequences. Before she was married, she remembered, as she came back from work one day at dinner-time, she found a stall of old books outside Warren’s Auctioneers at the bottom of Castle Hill. As she perused the books she found a volume of poems by Browning, one of whose poems she had loved in school. She was flicking through the pages when she was joined by ol
d Mrs. Carty from Bohreen Hill. They both checked the price of the book which was written in pencil on the inside page. It was far too high, and, in any case, she had no money. They both walked away and moved together along Friary Place and up Friary Hill. As they parted at the top of the hill, Mrs. Carty handed her the book from under her coat.
“No one will miss that,” she said. “But don’t tell anyone where you got it.”
Walking home with her new hair dye reminded her of walking into her mother’s house with that volume of Browning’s poems. It was the same feeling of guilt, the same feeling that someone would follow her and find her out.
Quickly, when she arrived home, she boiled some potatoes and opened a tin of peas and put three lamb chops on the pan. When the boys arrived the potatoes were not ready. She waited upstairs, calling down to let them know that their dinner would be a bit late. She sat in front of the mirror at the dressing table and tried to work out if there was anything she could do to her hair to make it look more normal. She wished she had told Bernie not to use the lacquer, which was sticky and had a sweet smell.
As soon as the boys saw her they both became quiet. Donal looked away while Conor moved towards her. He reached up and touched her hair.
“It’s all hard,” he said. “Where did you get it?”
“I had my hair done this morning,” she said. “Do you like it?”
“What’s under there?”
“Under what?”
“Under what you have on your head.”
“What I have on my head is my hair.”
“Are you going to go out?” he asked.
Donal glanced at her again and looked away.
Nora was not sure what she should wear to the Gibneys’. If she dressed up too much then it might look as though she did not need a job and that she was coming to their house as an equal, merely on a social visit. But she could not wear old clothes either. The problem of what to wear would never go away, she realised. If she went back to the office there, she would be seen by everyone as a friend of William and Peggy Gibney. There were still people there whom she had known all those years before but had not kept in touch with. She was sure that they would resent her or feel strange about her, were she to appear back working with them.
