At a Time Like This

by Catherine Dunne

  Anyway, this fridge was stuffed with what will now become the comforts of home: bresaola, pasta all’ uovo, olives, rucola and a dizzying array of fruit. Standing in demure single file along the shelves of the fridge door are six bottles of Verdicchio. I made a present of some to Claire, after my last trip, but I know she still prefers Prosecco. I have to say I was a little disappointed the night we shared the bottle I’d brought back to her. I’d been filled with anticipation as she opened it, but it didn’t taste quite as it does here. Something essential was missing.

  ‘That’s because it’s a local wine,’ was Claire’s opinion. ‘Best drunk in its own home, with heat and sun and proper food to show it off. Shouldn’t force it to travel.’

  I think she might be right. ‘A bit like you used to feel?’ I teased her. ‘When you didn’t want to leave home? And look at how you blossomed.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘But I had all the right conditions.’

  Once I’d finished my settling-in process, I poured a glass of nicely chilled Verdicchio and took myself out on to the small balcony off the main living room, the one that looks out over the southern part of Volterra. I sat, for perhaps two hours, or maybe three, looking around, listening to the stillness inside my own head. It felt good. I came in when I began to get drowsy and lay down on the bed that Paola had made up exactly to my instructions. I slept.

  It was Paola’s soft footstep outside the bedroom door that finally woke me this morning. Despite the leisurely bath, the travel weariness, the joy at being home, I still couldn’t sleep last night. When I did drop off, I fell full-tilt into nightmare. It was a heart-pounding, body-sweating experience that stunned me into wakefulness and kept me on high alert until the small hours. I lay there, trying to control the fear, trying to understand the significance of what had happened in that dark universe of bad dreams. I was desperate to recall all the books I had once read about the interpretation of situations and symbols. I was determined to fight panic with philosophy. I was able to remember that appearing undressed in public in a dreamworld indicates a crushing sense of vulnerability; that falling means uncertainty and fear about what lies ahead – all pretty obvious stuff, I should think. Nevertheless, nothing worked, nothing calmed me. I am still no wiser this morning. Well, a little wiser, perhaps, about the dream’s meaning with reference to the past, but what it might mean for the future continues to elude me.

  I was in an aeroplane. So far so dull, you might say, given that that is how I’d spent most of the day. But, for some reason – one that was clear to me in the shadows of sleep, although I now no longer remember – we had stopped in mid-air, mid-flight, and were hovering above the blue sea below. The Captain’s voice could be heard, tinnily, over the PA system. I can even remember his name; an ordinary name like John O’Reilly, something Irish and reassuring like that. He was telling us, in that overly-soothing voice that most of us know heralds disaster – particularly when you’re a couple of miles away from solid ground – that he was having difficulty getting the stairs to the aircraft, and he asked for our patience while he and his crew resolved the problem.

  Stairs to the aircraft? Thousands and thousands of feet above the sea? Fear slammed into my chest like a fist. How could all these other passengers just sit there, reading their papers, as though things like this happened every day? I remember that I left my seat and fled towards the cabin staff, aware that my breathing had quickened, that my palms had begun to sweat. The chief stewardess was standing at the now open cabin door, and she turned to greet me. Her ludicrous blonde beehive – a remnant of sixties’ bad fashion – had come undone. Strands of dyed hair flung themselves wildly across her face, threatening to extinguish her features.

  ‘Would you like to escape, Madam?’ she asked me, smiling through the yellow mass. As though this were the most normal request in the world. Which I suppose it is, in the underworld of crashing aeroplanes and all the murky logic of the unconscious. I noticed that she was holding on to the stairs, keeping it in place with just one hand. ‘Yes,’ I said, although I knew that my voice was barely audible.

  ‘Go ahead, then,’ she said, as she nodded encouragement. She looked more like a kindergarten teacher urging her young charges towards the playground than a highly-trained professional intent on saving lives. ‘You probably have a minute or two.’

  I descended the stairs with leaden legs, focused on nothing other than my own survival. I didn’t care about anyone else, couldn’t care about anyone else. The stairs veered wildly from one side to the other, metal clanging against metal, until I fell off, catapulted into the sea below. My yellow jacket kept me afloat and then I wept with relief. I was alive. I had survived after all.

  Then in that Technicolor slow-motion that only dreams have, I watched as the plane broke in half and fell out of the sky, descending gracefully towards the ocean below. I tried to swim away from the wreckage, but I wasn’t strong enough. I kept being pulled back into its watery slipstream, back and back and back until I was dragged below the glittering surface. I felt the water course chokingly up my nose, down my throat, filling my mouth with a cold saltiness. That’s when I woke, gasping for air, weeping, sweating, my skin prickling with cold as I threw off the thin coverlet I used more for the comfort of its weight than its warmth.

  Even if I assume that the aircraft symbolizes my old life breaking in two, how is it possible to drown in the safety of home?

  I must have dozed off later in the morning, because the next thing I knew I was listening to Paola make her way to the kitchen to prepare coffee. Her footsteps were real, grounded, part of the waking world. I felt grateful. I pulled the damp sheets off the bed and made my way to the shower.

  By early this afternoon, I’d begun to feel calmer. I started thinking about the letter I’d posted to Maggie at Frankfurt airport. I tried to calculate when she might receive it. I want her to feel secure. I’m not worried about the business end of things because I am sure I left everything there in good order. Nevertheless, dreams like last night’s tend to take the ground from underneath your feet, in more ways than one.

  It’s strange. Even though Maggie has never been here, it is her presence I sense around me above anyone else’s. Perhaps it’s because she is the one I feel most guilty about leaving behind. I look around at all the small details of her thoughtfulness: scented candles, tiny paintings brought from her travels, the throw from India that graces my sofa. I hoarded all her gifts over the last three years, never displaying any of them in Dublin. I wanted to keep them, to preserve their charms for just such an occasion as this. And then there’s what I wear: from trousers to tops to suits to dresses – we designed and made them together, all of them. We tried and tested everything, to see what worked, what didn’t. Maggie is, quite literally, stitched into the fabric of my life, and I into hers.

  I came very close to telling her about my leaving, but it was the night she fell apart in Leitrim, the weekend she finally told Ray that she’d had enough. It was one of those moments when the truth was on the tip of my tongue but I couldn’t bring myself to heap any further upset on her. She was already overloaded.

  Was there ever a time when we were not so close, Maggie and I? Yes, of course, but not very often and never for very long. Doesn’t that happen to everyone, that ebb and flow of friendship? I think we’ve done pretty well, all four of us, in fact, to have kept in touch as regularly as we have done over the past twenty-five years. I say four, but really Nora is a non-event as far as I’m concerned, and always has been. The rest of us have passed the years in ever-changing constellations of twos and threes, but for me, Maggie has always been the Pole star.

  The one disconnected time I can remember is when Maggie went her own determined way after we left Trinity. She enrolled at the Grafton Academy and became immersed in the business of making patterns, stitching buttonholes, learning to use a sewing machine for God’s sake – things she already knew backwards. I figured she’d become fed up with all those petty restrictions soon
enough. Maggie didn’t need craft: she was more than ready for art. But she was stubborn.

  ‘It’s my foundation, Georgie,’ she said to me, on one of the many occasions when she refused to join me in running my boutique in Dalkey. ‘I need to know that I know what I need before I do anything else. I’m the plodder, don’t forget: I have to have something substantial behind me before I can go out on my own.’

  I couldn’t convince her and that frustrated me. From the Grafton Academy, she went to Brown Thomas and became a buyer. I thought I knew better than she did and waited until she became bored with it. But she didn’t. Instead, she astonished me, astonished all of us. Within eighteen months, she had become their senior buyer, and I despaired of her ever coming to work for me.

  ‘You’re right to despair,’ she said to me one night, over our customary bottle of wine. There was just the two of us. She was smiling. I’d noticed recently that she had become somehow smoother in her appearance: a glossier, more sophisticated version of herself. ‘I’ll never work for you. Maybe, if the circumstances were right, I might work with you. But that would take a lot of thrashing out.’

  I remember I looked at her, embarrassed in her company for probably the first time in our lives. Because I had made a slip. I’d never meant to say ‘work for me’, had always meant ‘with me’, but perhaps Freud knew more than I’ve ever given him credit for.

  And so, she made me wait. Or at least, that’s what it felt like. In latter years, I think I can appreciate more that Maggie did what she had to do for herself – and that I didn’t necessarily figure in all of her equations. That the decisions she made were not about me, but about her. Nevertheless, I had to wait out the Brown Thomas years, and finally the Karen years before I got what I wanted.

  Karen was Maggie’s cousin. She owned a boutique, and at the time that Maggie went into partnership with her, the business was ailing. The stock was tired and old; Karen hadn’t the foresight to move with the times. Maggie transformed all of that. She brought all she had learned at Brown Thomas to her new venture, all her financial expertise, all that creativity ready to burst at the seams. I hounded her, I admit it. I needed her on board, couldn’t expand my business without her. But being Maggie, she didn’t make her move until she was ready. Finally, she called me.

  ‘I’m really excited, Georgie,’ she told me. ‘I think that there is a chance for us to join forces now. I’m going to email you some designs and some customer requests and I want you to look at them. Then come and meet me.’

  I couldn’t wait. Maggie’s call had made me feel, for the first time in years, challenged, enthused, excited even. Not a familiar feeling for me. I tend more towards the controlled.

  ‘Everything okay?’ I asked her, on the day I visited. She looked tired, and that made me anxious. I was afraid that it meant I mightn’t get what I’d come for. It was one of those quiet October Mondays, late in the afternoon, at a time when only the most resolute of boutiques hopes for business. Maggie met me at the front of the shop, motioning towards Karen, who was clearing a rail just inside the door. She was folding garments with exquisite care, placing them into beds of tissue paper and cellophane.

  ‘Be careful,’ Maggie warned me. ‘Mind the door. It tends to slam if you don’t hold on to it. Should be fixed by the end of the week.’

  I nodded at Karen. ‘Hi, how’s it going?’

  She grinned at me, her large face broadening into a smile of welcome. ‘Rushed off our feet.’ And she gestured to the empty shop. ‘But I’m not complaining. Christmas madness will happen soon enough.’

  ‘We’ll be in the back,’ Maggie said, ‘if the hordes arrive.’

  Karen waved in our direction without even looking up. I followed Maggie into the small workroom that I knew she and Karen used for alterations – nothing structural, of course, only the usual changes to hemlines or sleeve lengths: anything else they sent out. Maggie would have known that they were far more valuable front of shop than practising their sewing skills in a cramped and ugly back room.

  She opened the steel door into the small yard and lit a cigarette. She stood on the step, blowing smoke out into the evening air. Then she waved at it with her hand, sending it further out into the cold. This was years before the smoking ban, but even an inveterate smoker like Maggie knew that any potential customers wouldn’t appreciate the smell of stale tobacco.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘What’s the story?’ I leaned down and pulled the drawings she had emailed me from my briefcase.

  ‘Do you like them?’ she asked.

  ‘Only so much they kept me up all night,’ I said. And she grinned. ‘Is this it, Maggie? Are you telling me you’re ready? Because these designs are sensational. They’re exactly what my customers will buy and I already stock all the high-end accessories to go with them. Are you and Karen really ready?’

  Her gaze was steady. ‘I’ve already bought Karen out,’ she said. ‘It’s my business, in every sense.’

  I couldn’t help it. I was stunned. Maggie showing this much foresight? Then I realized how much she must have learned by serving her apprenticeship with others. Wise woman: she had learned all she needed to know at someone else’s expense.

  ‘All Karen needs is a job,’ she went on, ‘and I’ve guaranteed she can have it, for as long as she wants. So that has to be part of any deal between the two of us – that’s you and me. She’s the best salesperson I’ve ever come across. Shite at accounts, mind you, but that’s okay.’

  We both laughed. And so, finally we became partners. But partners in a very different way from the one I had imagined. She invited me to join her. I didn’t need to think about it. I sold up Dalkey and came to her and Karen’s place in Ranelagh. She was a good negotiator, Maggie, and we hammered out an agreement that took care of us both. More than business, we were each aware of the potential catastrophe of fractured friendship.

  ‘Let’s avoid it at all costs,’ she said to me. ‘I’d rather we haggled now than fight in five years’ time. Let’s have it all out in the open, now, no holds barred.’

  In the end, the negotiations went on for six hard weeks. We were both glad when they were over, and we treated ourselves to a weekend in Paris the day after we’d signed.

  ‘Exclusivity will be our thing,’ she said to me, as we sipped coffee at a pavement café on the Left Bank and watched the stylish and bohemian worlds strut their stuff before us. ‘Doesn’t matter how much it costs: women will always buy exclusivity. No discounts, no stuff brought in for “sales” – nothing like that. Top dollar all the way.’

  That weekend I discovered that, in her own way, Maggie was every bit as ruthless as I was. She was an exciting person to work with, too. She’d lose herself, her brittleness, in the heady excitement of creativity. ‘What about this?’ she’d say, pinning a swathe of colour against a shape that was just not working for us; or she’d lift a hemline, drop a shoulder. Immediately, I’d see her design transformed.

  I grew to understand a Maggie I didn’t know I knew. I’d always loved her, now I came to respect her, her judgement, her considered approach to problems that might have seemed insuperable to others – even to me. It is a cliché to say it, I know, but we went from strength to strength.

  It was as though separately, our minds worked well and productively, creatively. But together, we were more than the sum of our parts. Our skills seemed to explode when we joined forces. We had the wealthy women of Dublin and, latterly, Belfast and Cork, clamouring for our designs. We could charge what we liked. Nobody cared. Our ‘ImagIna’ label – a combination of both our names: ‘Mag’ for Margaret and ‘Ina’ for Georgina, a potent allusion, we felt, to both imagination and image – set the Irish fashion world alight. And if I exaggerate, well, I feel entitled to. They were heady days – of manic work, publicity, promotions – and sales beyond our wildest calculations.

  We laughed, often, she and I, about the fact that the prices on our handwritten labels elicited not shock, but a kind of reverence, a respe
ct that both of us found outlandish. We never pushed it too far: Maggie’s careful market research saw to that. But we milked it. Oh yes, we milked it. And as for our final . . . well, let’s call them ‘collaborations’, they were nothing short of startling.

  I shall miss her, and I know she’ll miss me, particularly at first. Forty years is a long time. But I’ll make it up to her, one way and another. For the foreseeable future, though, we’ll just have to be patient.

  In the meantime, I shall keep writing to her, and tell her more and more as the need evolves. I trust her to keep my secret. That’s one of the great things about Maggie’s and my friendship. We have never needed to explain anything away.

  We understand. We know how to wait.

  And now my bath is ready. Right on time, my phone lights up, its vibrations pushing it across the table towards me. I flip back the cover, ready to smile.

  But the words are not what I expect. They hint at probable delay, at potential trouble. It seems that things are not what they seem. The final line, of love and longing and poetry, is meant to soothe and reassure. But it does just the opposite. And I cannot call back. That has been agreed between us.