City Girl

by Patricia Scanlan

  ‘Ya like that, love. I always know how to turn you on!’

  Maggie sighed, amused at the incongruity of it all. Her husband’s ego was as big as her belly when she was in her ninth month. Terry thought Warren Beatty had nothing on him.

  ‘Mammy, what’s Daddy doing to you?’ An inquisitive voice spoke from the distance as two eyes observed them with interest from the door of their bedroom.

  Giving a satisfied gasp, Terry rolled off his wife and Maggie said mildly and truthfully, ‘Daddy’s doing absolutely nothing to me. He was trying to get out of my side of the bed. Now go and get your pyjamas off. I’m coming to wash you in a minute. And don’t wake Fiona.’

  The sarcasm had sailed over her husband’s head, as she knew it would, as he relaxed in the afterglow of his husbandly performance. ‘You’re some woman, Maggie!’ he said, smiling at her and swatting her rump as she got out of bed.

  ‘I know,’ she responded dryly, but she leaned over and gave him a kiss. Sometimes she reflected, she didn’t have three children, she had four. And often Terry was the biggest child of all.

  ‘Tell you what,’ he said magnanimously. ‘You go and get ready for that old exercise class of yours. I’ll get the kids ready for playschool and feed the baby. How about that?’

  ‘Thanks Ter,’ she said, knowing Josie, the woman who came on Fridays, would be along at eight and that it would be she who would oversee breakfast for the twins and nappy changes for the baby.

  ‘Blessed art thou among women to have a hubby like me,’ Terry informed her modestly as he leapt athletically out of bed, pausing to admire himself in the mirror.

  ‘No flab there,’ he observed in satisfaction, patting his lean flat belly. ‘Not bad for a forty-year-old! I don’t need fancy exercise classes. I’m telling you, Maggs, a couple of games of squash a week and that’s all you’d need to keep trim. And it would be much cheaper!’

  ‘Ah don’t take all the good out of it,’ Maggie snapped back.

  ‘Well, it’s alright for Richard Yates. You should see the money he’s earning.’ Terry was Richard’s financial consultant.

  ‘And what’s more,’ came the voice from the bathroom, ‘he doesn’t have three little mouths to feed and clothe. He’s too bloody cute!’

  There was a silence as toothbrush assaulted teeth; then, ‘And you know something else? He’s driving around in a brand new BMW with the plastic still on the seats because he’s too mean to tax the bloody thing until the start of the month. He wouldn’t give you the steam off his piss the cute hoor . . .’

  Maggie threw her eyes up to heaven as she brushed her gleaming locks. Was it any wonder she was sorely tempted to have an affair with Adam? She missed him badly while he was away in London, but he’d be back next week, and her generous mouth curved in a smile as she thought of what she had to tell him. It was the most exciting thing! And it was because of his advice that it had all happened. Wait until she told the girls!

  She was so looking forward to their weekend away. What bliss! A bed to herself, a full night’s sleep. No babies to be fed or snoring husbands to keep her awake. Time to talk, and confide and laugh. Thank God for Devlin and Caroline, real honest-to-God friends. Not like Marian Gilhooley. Forget her, she’s not worth it, Maggie told herself firmly. She was going to have a carefree weekend and she couldn’t wait!

  Twenty minutes later Maggie sailed out the door. Friday was hers and had been since she had found out about her husband’s affair with Ria Kirby, the hard-faced bitch! She felt no guilt as she heard the twins squabbling and Terry bellowing at them. It was a beautiful morning. She heard the baby start to wail. For a moment Maggie was tempted to turn and go back in. Her maternal heartstrings tugged. It had taken her a long time to get to the stage where she could leave for the day and think nothing of it.

  ‘No, dammit!’ she muttered aloud. It wouldn’t kill Terry. It was twenty to eight, he’d only have to put up with it for twenty minutes. She’d been the perfect wife and mother for long enough. All the years of giving to her family, in Wicklow, to Marian Gilhooley, her so-called friend, to Terry and her children. Well it was time now for taking. Time for her. Time to begin her life again. Briskly Maggie strode to her car, meeting the postman en route.

  ‘Hello Mrs Ryan, letter for yourself.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said calmly, but as she took the long slim envelope he handed to her, she wanted to throw her arms in the air and do a dance.

  At last, it had actually arrived! She knew it was coming, but for it to arrive today made everything perfect. She couldn’t wait to tell Adam and the girls; they had been so encouraging. It would mean nothing to Terry, she’d tell him later. In a daze of excitement Maggie drove to her morning rendezvous with Devlin and Caroline at CITY GIRL.

  Devlin’s Story – I

  One

  She knew she was pregnant. No doctor had confirmed it yet but she knew, just as thousands before her had known and thousands after her would instinctively know that their bodies were no longer theirs alone, their wombs no longer just parts of their anatomies but vibrant living things that for nine months would dictate to and rule over the host body.

  Devlin felt an awful fear deep in the pit of her stomach. Her period was five days overdue. But she was on the pill, it was impossible to get pregnant on the pill.

  ‘No it’s not. Maggie Ryan got pregnant on the pill,’ a little voice in her mind whispered maliciously. Devlin sat up in bed.

  ‘Oh Jesus God please don’t let me be pregnant. Holy-Mary-Mother-of-God-pray-to-Jesus-for-me,’ she babbled, deriving some comfort from the prayer of her childhood to which she now turned only in moments of deep distress. She waited a moment, as if expecting her period to appear miraculously; maybe it had come in the night. Devlin inspected her knickers; they were as pure and virginal as the driven snow and frustration rose in her. Getting out of bed she paced the floor of her bedroom.

  ‘It’s not fair, I don’t want to be pregnant. Why should it happen to me? God Almighty I only did it once and I didn’t mean to. Colette and Brian have been doing it for over a year every night of the week. How come you didn’t pick on them? Oh God please let my period come!’ she prayed silently, hopefully.

  She had to get out of the flat; being on her own was driving her crazy. Caroline had gone away with Richard for a long weekend. She supposed she could go home but the thought of facing her parents in her present state chilled her; she knew guilt would be written all over her face. Lydia, her mother, would probably start picking on her and she just couldn’t face it right now. Panic assailed her and she sat down on the bed. There must be something she could do.

  ‘I mean for heaven’s sake it’s my body, my body, my body.’ She whispered the words like a mantra, rocking backwards and forwards on the bed and hugging herself. A thought struck her. She flew downstairs, almost breaking her neck in her haste to get to the sitting-room.

  Yes! Oh thank God! Grabbing the half-empty bottle of gin Devlin didn’t even bother with a glass. She flew back upstairs almost crying. Rushing into the bathroom she turned on the taps of the bath. Why didn’t I think of this before? she chided herself.

  ‘That’s abortion,’ a mean little voice was saying in her brain.

  ‘Don’t listen. Don’t think about it,’ she muttered feverishly as she waited for the hot water to explode through the pipes. The water remained stubbornly cold. She checked the immersion heater which was switched off, and cursed angrily. Viciously she snapped it on, frustration and misery written all over her face, knowing that the water wouldn’t heat for at least fifteen minutes.

  I suppose I could start on the gin, she mused doubtfully. Devlin wasn’t too sure exactly what gin was supposed to do. She knew a scalding hot bath was supposed to bring on an overdue period and maybe you were supposed to put some gin in the bath as well. Well, there was no harm in trying it both ways. Taking a big slug of gin she spluttered and gasped as tears came to her eyes.

  Devlin caught sight of herself in the mirror,
naked except for the treacherously white briefs, her slim body tanned golden after a holiday on the Algarve. Blonde hair bleached by the sun lay tousled around her face and aquamarine eyes, big and frightened, glittered with tears as she stared at the gin bottle clutched in her hand.

  ‘This has to be the pits,’ she groaned and depression enveloped her in a cloud of torment. She took another slug of gin. It didn’t feel so bad this time so she took another.

  An hour later Devlin sat in her very hot bath to which she had added a measure of the gin just in case. The bathroom was steamed up and the sweet cloying smell of the gin seemed to be everywhere. She was very very drunk and starting to feel extremely sick.

  Just as well Caroline’s gone away for the weekend; she’d be horrified, Devlin thought woozily. Caro, her flat mate, was easily shocked and very innocent. She’d probably faint if Richard put his thing near her, that was, she thought nastily, if Richard had a thing.

  Oh God! She was going to be sick. Drunkenly she stood up in the bath swaying in the steamy heat and barely making it to the toilet. She noisily retched feeling that everything inside her was coming up. The violence of the attack left her dizzy and weak and grabbing a towel she wrapped it around herself and crawled into the bedroom on her hands and knees. Somehow she managed to haul herself into bed, where she passed out. It was three hours before she came to from her drunken stupor and she felt as though there was a fireworks display going off in her head. For a while Devlin just lay there not daring to move, not even sure if she was dead or alive. Then the telephone rang. Harsh, piercing, the sound penetrated her throbbing head with a savage intensity. Sticking her head under the covers she tried to ignore the sound and eventually it went away. Silence descended once more and she dozed off to sleep. When she woke again she felt much improved, although her mouth tasted vile and her head was muzzy and heavy.

  Dragging herself out of bed she made a cup of very strong coffee and decided to go down to the seafront. She had to think and the sea had always calmed her. Catching sight of the calendar in the small kitchen of their flat, Devlin stopped in front of it, grimacing ruefully. This day three weeks ago she had been on a beach in Portugal with not a care in the world and here she was feeling decades older, having just experienced the most awful shock in her entire life. She looked at her watch. Three fifteen. It was on this day two weeks ago at around this time that Colin had impregnated her. Colin Cantrell-King MB, MD, FRCOG, gynaecelogist to Dublin’s gentry Employer and impregnator of Devlin Delaney.

  Heavy-hearted, Devlin tidied away her coffee cup in the untidy but friendly little kitchen that she shared with her best friend Caroline Stacey. They had been lucky to get such a nice flat after the awful grotty hole they had first moved into in Rathmines. What a rip off that had been. The shower hadn’t worked properly; you were either scalded or frozen to death. The beds were lumpy, the walls damp and the landlord was a right gurrier. They had stuck it a month before they were off again scouring the evening papers where they found this jewel of a flat in a big old house on the Sandymount seafront overlooking Dublin Bay. It was clean and airy and they had a bedroom each as well as a sitting room and kitchen. It suited them both perfectly and was fairly close to their working locations.

  Looking out the kitchen window, Devlin could see that it was a beautiful late summer’s day. In the distance the distinctive ESB towers at Ringsend were bathed in sunlight and children danced up and down in the warm puddles of water left by the outgoing tide, screaming with pleasure as they wriggled their toes deep in the wet squelchy sand. The Shelly banks! That’s where she’d go: down to the ‘Shelliers’ to watch the tugs tow in the huge cargo ship that had just appeared as a dot on the horizon of the bay.

  Leaving the flat she began to walk towards Ringsend, turning right before she got to the village so that she was heading down past the attractive new homes built on land triumphantly reclaimed from Dublin Bay, down towards the Glass Bottle Co. and then on to the river, that long blue winding vein that flowed right through the belly of the city and on out to sea. Devlin sniffed the air that was laden with the smell of Dublin and the sea and began the long walk down the Pidgeon House Road towards her destination. On her right, small terraced houses faced the panorama of dockland. Cranes, containers, small boats ploughing up and down the river and gulls circling and screeching. Soon the tugs would be heading out down the river to meet the big ship coming to its journey’s end. Her pace quickened; she wanted to be there to see it all.

  Deliberately she emptied her mind of all worrisome thoughts. Only this was important now. Don’t think about anything else. Not that you’ve taken the day off work because you couldn’t face the thought of going in when Colin wasn’t there. Don’t think that you’ll be in the house alone until Caroline gets back. Don’t think . . . don’t think!

  Down past the ruined dwellings of the coastguards, past the coalyards. Her tense face relaxed briefly into a smile. Once she’d been to a party on a ship in the days when Ireland had possessed a National Shipping Company. She’d been dating one of the second officers from Irish Shipping and one day his ship had sailed proudly into its mother port having traversed the wide powerful Atlantic. She had seen the pride on his face as he stood uniformed and smart on the gangway to meet her for the party the crew were throwing. It had been a wonderful party and she had seen the pink gold sun rise over the city of her birth from the impressive bridge of the vessel. They had been good times, before unemployment had become rampant and an air of hopelessness had enveloped the towns and cities of the country as jobs got fewer and the dole queues swelled like big malignant growths.

  Almost before he knew it, her good looking sailor had been made redundant, as the government had liquidated the shipping company, leaving some of its crews under arrest in foreign ports, its workforce destined for the dole and the liquidator earning thousands a week. The arrested crews had eventually been repatriated and Devlin had marched down O’Connell Street one Saturday with them and their wives and mothers. The men were proud and dignified in their braided uniforms and white-topped caps. All they wanted was justice and their dues but sure who had listened to them? The ordinary man and woman in the street wished them well but they were only one protest group among many on the streets of Dublin.

  Devlin felt a bitterness rise within her. Frank had emigrated to America and how could she blame him? She too had seen the long queues waiting at the dole office once a week. Not that she had ever really wanted for money – her parents were well off— but how people without any other means existed on social welfare was beyond her.

  Glumly she walked on down past the power station, around the dump where birds scavenged like something out of a Hitchcock movie, then down the road where the sea lapped up against the rocks and she could see Sandymount, where she had come from. On she walked, the wind rippling her thick blond hair, the sun caressing her still tanned face, oblivious of the children with their mothers, the lovers sitting in their cars, the old men smoking their pipes chatting and reminiscing with their lined weatherbeaten faces, keeping a close eye on the fast approaching cargo boat. She passed the fishermen and boys hooking their mackerel and bass with excited grunts of satisfaction and sat down halfway along the narrow finger of the South Wall that penetrated the bay for two miles. She concentrated on the nautical activity in front of her as the two small tugs pushed and pulled the enormous ship up the river. The powerful throb of the engines, the white-capped wash breaking against the wall over which her legs dangled and drenching her with spray made her forget the huge black shroud of worry that enveloped her. Fascinated she watched as the ship glided majestically past her, so near that she could see the men on deck. All too soon it was gone, up into the heart of the decaying dockland and out of her sight. If only she could get on a ship and sail out of Dublin, leaving all her worries behind her.

  She’d have to tell Colin. He would know what to do; he was always so firm and decisive, exuding an aura of calm authority. It was one of the things she fo
und so attractive about him. Then she remembered. He wouldn’t be back for a few days. He had gone to Paris with his wife.

  Misery attacked her again, so physical that she could feel it stabbing her like a knife in the heart. Colin had told her that his was a marriage of convenience when Devlin had said that she didn’t go with married men. He had laughed and told her that he loved her innocence. Why hadn’t she listened and believed the nuns when they had warned about ‘married men’ and ‘rampant lusts.’ Had she listened she wouldn’t be in her present predicament. She remembered how Sister Dominica had been so pleased for her when she had heard that Devlin had secured a job as private secretary to Mr Cantrell-King.

  ‘A wonderful man, my dear. You know several of the sisters have had little jobs done by him.’

  Theirs was one of the better off religious orders. Southsiders, of course.

  ‘And my dear, you know he gives very generous donations to the Order every so often. You’re a very lucky girl indeed, Devlin. Come now, let us go and give thanks to the Lord. It’s not easy getting jobs these days.’

  Devlin had given thanks not only to God but to her Dad, who happened to be Colin Cantrell-King’s bank manager. When Colin mentioned that his secretary was leaving to get married, Gerry Delaney told him that Devlin had recently been made redundant from her secretarial post in a small arty publishing firm but that she was well qualified.

  ‘Excellent! Send her along for an interview,’ Colin had instructed.

  Devlin, desperate for a job that would get her out of her mother’s hair, had prepared very carefully for the interview, making sure that she looked well groomed and elegant but not overdressed for the occasion. Usually she took interviews in her stride but she was nervous as she faced the tall good-looking man in front of her. Her mother was driving her crazy with her constant nagging and drink-induced rages. She need not have worried. She did an impressive interview and her references were excellent. She was given the job along with a generous salary. CCK, as she had privately christened him, was an extremely busy gynaecologist, whipping out wombs that needed whipping out and some that didn’t! Delivering babies, some that were wanted and some that were not. Comforting menopausal and premenstrual tensioned females and charging hefty amounts to the many affluent fur-coated private patients who came from all over the country, day in day out, to his rooms in Fitzwilliam Square.