Something in Common

by Meaney, Roisin

  H. O’Dowd

  When she had finished reading it, Sarah remained still, her gaze fixed on the scrawled signature. How could anyone be so cruel? Why would someone who’d never even seen Sarah’s manuscript advise her to burn it? Had Sarah made Helen O’Dowd so angry with her criticism that she’d felt compelled to write such a horrible letter in response?

  She sat on the hard kitchen chair and forbade herself to cry. They were strangers to one another. Helen O’Dowd meant nothing to her, and Sarah wasn’t going to give her the power to upset her. She had enough to cry about right now without wasting tears on a spiteful, vindictive letter.

  Easier said than done. A drop splatted onto the page. Sarah brushed another away before it had a chance to fall, and squeezed her eyes shut. If Helen O’Dowd had any idea of the work Sarah had put into the book, if she knew the hours that had been spent on it, the dream Sarah had of one day seeing it sitting on a bookshop shelf, surely she wouldn’t have been so cruel about it.

  She opened her eyes and folded the letter, left it on the table and went back to her washing-up. She worked until every plate and cup and glass was clean and back where it belonged, the fridge was filled with leftovers and a pile of dishes and platters that didn’t belong to her was sitting on the table, ready to be returned.

  She went out to the garden – still bright at almost nine o’clock – and placed the mound of half-eaten sandwiches on the bird table that Christine and Brian had given her on her last birthday. Back inside she wiped down the draining-board and swept the floor.

  She undid her apron and draped it over the side of the sink. She sat at the table again and unfolded Helen O’Dowd’s letter, and forced herself to read it through a second time.

  I suggest you take your little goody-goody clichéd characters with their happy little lives and stamp them out.

  The characters weren’t goody-goody, far from it. Mrs Hastings the housekeeper had a really sharp tongue on her: look how she regularly reduced poor Betsy, the under-housemaid, to tears. And Lord William Delahunty was a proper philanderer – that was obvious from the way he’d seduced Betsy in the woods, having proposed to Lady Penelope Smith just the week before—

  She stopped. It wasn’t exactly bursting with originality, she knew that. She wasn’t writing the next War and Peace. She didn’t for a minute imagine she was going to set the literary world alight. She was writing a gentle story, a comfort read if you like. Something you’d reach for at the end of a trying day—

  She came to another stop. Gentle story. Comfort read. Even to her own ears, it sounded like she was writing the literary equivalent of a hot-water bottle.

  She looked down at the letter again. Clichéd characters … send the readers of the world to sleep …

  The characters were clichéd. She’d read countless novels with identical people in them, blunt-spoken housekeepers and timid, vulnerable housemaids and upper-class cads who took advantage when they got the chance. She was addicted to period dramas, and all she was doing, all she’d been doing for what seemed like forever, was regurgitating various scenes and characters and storylines from books she’d already read. There was nothing new in what she was producing; there wasn’t an ounce of originality or creativity in it.

  Helen O’Dowd was right. Without having read a word of Sarah’s book, without meeting her or even speaking to her on the phone, she’d hit the nail on the head. Trouble at Thornton Manor, or whatever title she might finally have settled on, would do nothing but send readers to sleep. It was as lacking in originality and freshness as To Kill with Kindness had been.

  Sarah sat for a while longer, as the fridge gave its every-now-and-again bubbly whirr, and a sudden dribble of water fell from one of the kitchen taps, and a dog barked sharply a few gardens away.

  At length she got up and left the room. She climbed the stairs and opened the door of the smallest bedroom. She stared at the thick bundle of handwritten pages that lay on the desk she’d brought with her from home, and she thought of the hours she’d sat there, the countless words she’d written and scribbled out and rewritten. The pages she’d discarded, the scenes she’d replaced. All worthless, all for nothing.

  She lifted the bundle and brought it downstairs to the kitchen. Someone was singing about matchstalk cats and dogs on the radio. She took the lid off the bin and began tearing the pages into quarters, a dozen or so at a time, and tossing them in.

  It took just a few minutes. She didn’t think about what she was doing. When she’d finished, she replaced the lid and left the kitchen without looking back.

  Helen

  She reached out and checked the luminous face of her watch again: five eleven. This was ridiculous, her third sleepless night in a row. Not good, and not normal. Most of the time she slept like a stone, had to drag herself awake in the mornings, cotton-woolish until her first coffee. Even while Cormac had been sick she’d slept through most of the nights, despite the horror of their situation waiting to tumble afresh into her head each morning.

  Fuck it. She threw back the blankets and swung her legs out of bed, rubbing the sting of tiredness from her eyes before making her way through the blackness to the door. She opened it quietly, meeting the muted light of the lamp that was plugged into the landing socket for Alice’s benefit. She paused, listening for her daughter’s breathing on the other side of the always-ajar bedroom door – and there it was, a rhythmic series of abrupt inhalations, as if Alice, in her dreams, was being repeatedly surprised.

  Helen padded downstairs in the half-dark, yawning, fingers trailing along the wall, meeting the bump of the mounted family photo halfway down. A second-wedding-anniversary present from Cormac, a professional shot of the three of them. The only time he’d got it wrong.

  The photo itself was inoffensive, Helen’s curls still there, tumbling loose over the bodice of the blue and green gypsy dress she’d worn, her scarlet toenails poking from white cork-soled platform sandals, an ankle bracelet of tiny multicoloured love beads above.

  Cormac’s hair was long and thick too, his smiling face showing no sign of the ruin it was to become, his arm around her shoulders as they sat side by side on the photographer’s white couch. And nineteen-month-old Alice, perched on her father’s blue-jeaned knee in her best yellow dress and matching headband, had beamed obligingly at the puppet the photographer had waved at her. A perfectly fine family snap, nothing wrong with it.

  But Helen had always hated having her photo taken and her smile, each time she looked at this one, appeared horribly false. ‘Think sunny thoughts,’ the photographer had urged, which of course had increased her desire to tell him exactly what he could do with his camera. The only reason the photo remained on the stairway was that Cormac looked happy in it, and Helen needed to keep seeing that.

  She reached the bottom of the stairs and felt her way along the wall to the light switch. In the kitchen she tipped the contents of the bin onto the lino and rummaged through them until she located the crumpled envelope on which Sarah Flannery had written her address.

  A little worse for wear now after its three days in the bin, stained with coffee grounds and ketchup, greasy with butter and damp with moisture, but the rounded purple letters were still legible, just about. The address was becoming familiar, Helen’s third time to use it.

  She copied it onto a fresh envelope, wording the accompanying note in her head. The fridge gave a shudder as she fed a sheet of paper into the typewriter – but as her fingers moved to their accustomed positions on the keys she changed her mind and pulled out the page again. Better do this one by hand.

  For the past three days she’d been feeling increasingly uncomfortable. As she’d scraped the new fine-tooth comb across Alice’s scalp, shushing the child’s protests, as she’d deposited the tiny black grubs into a basin of water, as she’d applied the bottle of foul-smelling liquid afterwards to kill off any leftovers, she knew she’d been needlessly cruel to Sarah Flannery.

  It was one thing to trash a badly written
book – fair game, once it was out there on the shelves – and quite another to lash out at someone whose only offence had been to offer what had, after all, been a fairly mild criticism of Helen’s review. She’d had a lot worse things written and said to her after nearly three years of making her honest opinions known to the general public.

  Sarah Flannery was undoubtedly a bit of a softie, and possibly couldn’t write a book to save her life, but she hadn’t deserved the letter Helen had written. For all Helen’s faults – and she recognised and acknowledged every one of them – she strove to be fair, and in this case she’d failed. She’d been angry, and she’d lashed out at Sarah Flannery, who’d chosen the wrong day to cross her path.

  She had to put it right, or run the risk of never sleeping through the night again. She unscrewed the fountain pen she’d treated herself to with Breen’s first cheque, and began to write.

  Dear Mrs Flannery

  A few days ago I wrote to you in anger, and I said some things which I now regret. As you know from my review of To Kill with Kindness, I’m not one to mince my words: I prefer to speak the truth as I see it, and hang the consequences. In your case, however, my anger was wrongly directed and my remarks, particularly in the area of your writing, wholly unwarranted. I’d been annoyed at something else entirely, and you simply provided an outlet for my anger.

  I’m writing now to apologise unreservedly, and I hope you can forgive my thoughtlessness.

  I wish you all the best with your book.

  Sincerely,

  Helen O’Dowd

  There. It was prim and horribly stilted, but it would have to do. She folded the page and slid it into the envelope. She’d post it later, on the way home from dropping Alice to school, and that would be an end to it.

  She turned off the light and left the kitchen. If she fell asleep in the next ten minutes she’d get a good two hours before the alarm went off. Less than ideal if she was to do justice to the thousand words Breen had demanded on the Wood Quay situation, but it would have to do.

  Sarah

  ‘That forsythia wants tidying up,’ Martina said. ‘It’s a disgrace.’

  ‘Cutbacks, I’m afraid. Apparently the nursing home has no money to pay a full-time gardener. But I’m sure Matron would be happy to let you do it, if you wanted.’

  ‘Me? I’m a resident, not the hired help. I’m paying well to stay here.’

  ‘Well, of course, but you’d enjoy it, wouldn’t you? And it would look so much better. You could be happy that you’d improved it.’

  Martina sniffed. ‘I can tell you I have no intention of going near it.’

  ‘Right …’

  Silence. Sarah checked her watch: another ten minutes and she’d have to get going with the apple buns for tea. She cast about for a new topic of conversation, and found it.

  ‘Imagine Elvis is dead a year already. Hard to believe, isn’t it?’

  Martina snorted. ‘That fellow? No loss.’ She pulled her grey cardigan more tightly around her. ‘All that shaking himself around, and marrying that poor child when she didn’t know any better: disgusting. He should have been arrested.’

  Sarah hid a smile. ‘It was his anniversary last week. Helen O’Dowd wrote a bit in the paper about him.’

  ‘Who? Never heard of her.’

  ‘She’s a journalist. She does book reviews on Sunday too. I thought it was quite good, what she wrote about Elvis. Quite touching, even if you didn’t like him.’

  No response. Martina frowned out at the forsythia. Sarah tried again.

  ‘Actually, I wrote a book,’ she said. ‘Well, half a book.’ Maybe that would get a reaction.

  Martina turned. ‘What – a cookery book?’

  ‘No, a novel, set in the past. About people who lived in a Big House, you know, kind of an Upstairs, Downstairs story.’

  ‘Oh, that was good. The Bellamys … and the housekeeper, what’s this her name was again?’

  ‘Mrs Bridges.’

  ‘That’s right. She was priceless.’

  ‘Yes, well, mine was about another—’

  ‘And that strap who ran off with the footman. And the butler, Mr Hudson, he was great.’

  ‘He was,’ Sarah said. ‘He was very good alright.’

  Just as well, probably, that the conversation had veered away from the manuscript she’d destroyed. Four months on, the loss of it still caused a small pang.

  When she’d told the others about tearing it up, the reactions had been pretty much as she’d expected. It had been a week or so after her mother’s funeral. The family was gathered in Christine and Brian’s conservatory, the sun slipping down behind the line of spruce trees at the bottom of their garden. They were letting mugs of coffee go cool, punctuating the silence with brief murmured exchanges, each of them still battered from the emotions of the previous week.

  Sarah’s admission, slipped into one of the pauses, had caused a stir.

  ‘You tore up your book, just like that?’ Christine had asked incredulously. ‘The whole thing is gone in the bin, after a letter from someone you don’t even know? What possessed you?’

  ‘I can’t believe you let her influence you like that,’ Neil had said. ‘You’ve never met her, she hadn’t read a word you’d written. How on earth would she know what you’re capable of?’

  Her father’s reaction had been more measured, but he was saying pretty much the same. ‘If you felt yourself that the book wasn’t going anywhere that’s one thing, but to tear it up because of what someone else says seems a little … impulsive. I hope you won’t regret it.’

  Sarah had made no reply, reluctant to admit that she was already regretting it. Why had she been so rash? Why hadn’t she at least slept on it before ripping up over two years of thinking and plotting and writing and correcting? All that effort, destroyed in a few minutes because some stranger had suggested it mightn’t be any good.

  She said nothing to them about the second letter, slipping through the door a few days after the first. Short, handwritten, astonishing. I’m writing now to apologise unreservedly … I hope you can forgive my thoughtlessness.

  Helen O’Dowd, apologising unreservedly. Too bad the damage had already been done. Reading the few brief lines, Sarah hadn’t been sure if this letter made the situation better or worse. She’d felt a twist of anger, directed towards both of them. What right had Helen O’Dowd to criticise something she’d never seen, and how could she herself have been so foolish as to be led by it?

  I wish you all the best with your book – a fat lot of good all the wishes in the world would do, now that the book no longer existed. Too little, too late – and in the week that her mother had died too, just to make things worse.

  For the rest of that day Sarah had felt crotchety, clattering dishes in the nursing-home kitchen on her first day back to work since the funeral, aware that the rest of the staff were keeping their distance. Let them – for once, she wasn’t concerned with making sure everyone else was happy.

  By the end of the day, though, she’d talked herself back into a more resigned state of mind. What was done was done: no point in crying over it now. And this second letter showed, didn’t it, that Helen O’Dowd had a conscience, that she wasn’t as ruthless as she seemed? That had to be a good thing.

  So she’d put it behind her, and life had settled back into its normal rhythms, except that everything was sadder without Mam around. Sarah went to work each day and phoned her father when she got home, inviting him to dinner at least twice a week. Hinting, every so often, that the offer to move in with her and Neil was there, if he was too lonely on his own.

  And every now and again she would see Helen O’Dowd’s name on a piece in the newspaper, and it would remind her of the book that had never been completed. Maybe she’d try another one some time, but for now all that was in the past.

  ‘So what happened to it?’

  Martina’s voice broke into her thoughts. ‘What happened to what?’

  ‘Your book th
at you were writing.’

  ‘Oh … I tore it up. It was no good, really.’

  And there was the truth of it, no matter how much she might regret its absence or resent Helen O’Dowd’s part in its destruction. But there were other things she was good at. She was a cook, and she loved it. And she was a wife, and she seemed to be good at that too.

  And maybe, just maybe – a jab of excitement at the thought – she was on her way to being a mother for the first time. Too soon, much too soon to be sure, she was less than two weeks late, but every day that went by gave her more hope. Almost a year since the wedding – surely it was time. And if it happened, when it happened, she thought she’d make a pretty good mother.

  ‘There’s that boy of Mary’s,’ Martina said, watching a Sunday visitor walk from his car. ‘You’d think he’d cut his hair. It’s a disgrace.’

  Poor Martina. Sarah got to her feet. ‘Well, I’d better get the apple buns made, or you’ll have no tea. Thanks for the chat.’

  Tipping butter into sugar, she thought again about trying to write another book. Just because she’d failed the first time didn’t mean she’d never succeed. She might take a more modern approach, set it in the present day. Make it a bit racy, even, like Edna O’Brien.

  She imagined Helen O’Dowd doing a review, slicing it to ribbons, declaring that Sarah should keep a diary if she wanted to write. Then again, maybe Helen O’Dowd was no good at cooking. Each to her own.

  And then the very next week she opened the paper and saw Slave over a hot stove? Not me – and below, Helen O’Dowd’s name. She began to read.

  Cooking is not an activity that turns me on in any way. I fail to understand the attraction of spending hours preparing a meal that takes ten minutes to eat – all that chopping and whatever else cooks do, for such little return – so I’ve never bothered to learn how to do it. Consequently, I’ve never managed to cook anything that anyone in his or her right mind would want to eat.