At a Time Like This

by Catherine Dunne

  I’ve decided to tell the girls tonight, at Claire’s party. Our twenty-fifth anniversary as girlfriends. It’s a long time, with a lot of water under the bridge. I’ve decided to tell them now that Megan has come looking for me.

  I think that a lot of secrets will be revealed this evening. I know that Maggie is building up to something, and Georgie was very evasive the last time we all met. As for Claire, I feel sorry for her sometimes, despite all her talents and her beauty. I think that she would have loved to be a mother. I may be wrong, but I think that’s why she’s had so many men. Sometimes, I’ve caught something in her eyes when she looks at our children. I don’t mean just my children, I mean all eight of our children, Maggie’s and Georgie’s and mine. It’s not anything that the others would know to look for, or even recognize if they saw it. It’s the look of loss, the hurtful reminder that other people’s children can be when you haven’t got any of your own. It’s how I used to look, I know, after I lost Megan. All my boys were wonderful, don’t get me wrong. But there was still something missing. Even though my three are all grown up now, the sight of a pink dress or a doll, or some lace-edged baby sock still has the power to move me.

  I watched a programme on television recently about earthquakes. The scientist described the conditions that forced the earth to violence and upheaval. He described the shock to the earth’s core as seismic. Seismic. The minute I heard the word, I knew that that was the one I had been looking for, down all the years. I’d heard it before, of course, and knew what it meant. But I had only applied it to geological upheavals. Now I knew better. My loss of Megan was seismic. That’s how I can recognize that kind of loss so clearly in Claire’s blue eyes.

  I know that she is going to be the most hurt by what I have to tell her this evening. Her gentleness has made me think about this a lot, but I can’t help it. It’s the others I need to tell, and she’s part of the others. In fact, even if I don’t tell her, even if I try to keep it from her, one of the others will tell her anyway. And the truth is, part of me wants to see her realize that all the gorgeousness in the world doesn’t get you what you want. That sometimes just being plain and ordinary is good enough.

  I’ve played by the rules all my life. I deserve my sons and now my daughter. Claire broke the rules. She broke all of them, so many times. Take that awful time with Ray. I’ll never forget the night she told us. Such a terrible evening. Even for Georgie, the soup was foul and the bread stale. Her coq au vin tasted of nothing, nothing at all. Claire was distressed, and smoked her way through the whole evening. Maggie was harder on her than I’ve ever seen her before. But something about that evening stayed with me, and niggled at me over and over again. Whatever about Claire, I saw something in Georgie that night that I didn’t realize at the time, but that I now believe was relief.

  I wasn’t able to say much back then, on the night of the terrible food and the even more terrible revelations, because Georgie wouldn’t let me. And so I watched the others instead. That has always been my job in the group. To shut up and observe. Nobody’s ever interested in what I see or what I think. But it’s strange, the way life can sometimes turn things around to your advantage. I have become a really good observer over the years and that is precisely because no one else could be bothered with my ‘take’ on anything. Nora was always the dull one. Nora was the silent one. Nora was always the one who didn’t matter. There was this belief that anything I saw, anything my intuition told me or anything I observed in others, was simply not worth listening to. And so I sat and gathered secrets.

  And my secret from that night is, that even while Claire was confessing to her disgraceful affair with Ray, it was Georgie who looked like the guilty one. I saw that expression on her face when she joined us at the table, once those poor, sad little twins were finally in bed. I don’t believe that Georgie has ever been a good mother, not in the true meaning of the word. She has always been too selfish.

  Now, it has taken several years for this bit of hindsight to take shape. In fact, I’m not sure when it was that I realized what I saw on that difficult evening. It took a while to dawn on me that what I saw was Georgie’s relief that she wasn’t the one to have been caught. That time. Nothing to do with Ray, of course. That’s not what I mean. But I’m sure there was someone else around. I’m positive she’d been unfaithful to Pete. The reason I’m so sure is because I saw it happen again, and perhaps even again. I am not so stupid as the others like to think I am. And this time, I had all the benefits of a ringside seat.

  It is no more than three years ago. The reason I can be so certain of the timing is because it was Robbie’s twenty-first birthday that June. I had bought a navy and white dress for the party and that’s what I was wearing that Sunday a few weeks later when I saw Georgie. Frank and I had gone out to lunch in Castleknock. He had chosen the restaurant, he said, as a kind of double celebration. It would be our private party to celebrate our eldest son’s coming of age and also to remember the first real date we had ever had. He’d booked us a table at a sophisticated Chinese restaurant and kept it as a surprise. When we arrived, he turned around to me and grinned.

  ‘The best in the city, I’m told – and a very long way from the Sunflower in O’Connell Street.’ And it was, oh my goodness, it was. The dim sum was, well, that doesn’t matter for now. What matters is that I saw her. Georgie. My eyes were drawn to the imposing figure at the kerb, just outside the restaurant window. I saw a tall, fair-haired woman dressed in a white linen trousersuit. At first, there was just something familiar about the way she stood. Her back was to me, and she was waiting to cross the road. I was admiring her figure and thinking how good this woman looked in white because it is a very difficult colour to wear, particularly if you are a blonde. Some subtle sequins marked the hem of the jacket and also the cuffs of the sleeves. I could see them glint in the sunlight from where I sat. That little sprinkling of sequins was Maggie’s and Georgie’s trademark for their summer collection that year.

  Personally, I think that sequins are vulgar, no matter how tiny they are. I remember a blue top that I really liked with sequins sewn around the neckline. I bought it because I liked the shape and then spent a whole evening picking out the sequins and replacing them with small knots of embroidery. I was very satisfied with the results and in fact, I still have that top, years later. I still wear it on occasion. I’ve never understood this two-or-three-collections-of-clothes-a-year business, although Maggie and Georgie have done well out of it. I was just about to tap Frank on the arm, to say: ‘Look at that woman. She’s the image of Georgie, and I bet that’s one of their suits that she’s wearing.’ The lights changed then and the woman turned her face. I saw that it was her.

  I don’t know why I was so shocked, except that the feeling brought me back to that awful evening around her table when Claire confessed to sleeping with Ray. It had been the same sort of internal explosion then as now. I can recognize bad behaviour when I see it. I was certain that this woman, who was now definitely Georgie, was up to no good.

  ‘Are you ready to order, my dear?’ Frank asked me, just as the last flash of trouser-leg disappeared across the road and down the opposite pavement. I was itching to turn my head to see where she went but I didn’t dare.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m going to have exactly what I ordered in the Sunflower all those years ago, but this time, the food will be real!’

  We had a lovely afternoon, Frank and I. In fact, I almost forgot about Georgie. But once we drove out of the car park, and down the same direction as the woman in the suit, I couldn’t help myself and I started to look out for her. There were rows and rows of houses and the occasional large pub. Then we passed a small shop that seemed to specialize in motorbikes. I looked at it closely as we drove by. I had plenty of time to look because the pedestrian lights changed to red as we came up to the crossing. It was one of those places where the shop was at ground level and had a small flat above it. I remember thinking that it probably smelt of grease and e
ngine-oil. The door opened, and at just that instant, I caught a flash of white. Trouser-leg; linen; I’d bet my life on it and would have bet my life on it even then.

  I knew then for certain that it had to be Georgie. I sat back, feeling as though I had been slapped. What on earth was she doing in a place like that? The door closed behind her and Frank and I drove off. I said nothing to Frank because my heart was pounding so much.

  I did mention it to her once. I wanted to see her reaction.

  ‘What a lovely suit, Georgie,’ I said, feeling brave, the next time we met. We were all at Maggie’s. Ray was away on business and we always had dinner at her house when Ray wasn’t there even if it wasn’t Maggie’s turn. It was an unspoken rule, once what had happened between him and Claire happened. Although none of us ever talked about that. It was such a long time ago. But I know that their affair left its shadow. I know that things were never the same between us all afterwards. I’m not one of those people who shrug their shoulders at all sorts of bad behaviour. Some things are just plain wrong.

  Anyway, the four of us met earlier than usual. It was one of those late July evenings when it’s warm enough to sit outside on a patio or a deck. It was one of the few times when the air actually smells like summer. The sort of night that makes you go outside and enjoy it because you know it may not come again. That particular dinner happened to be the Friday after Frank and I had had lunch in Castleknock. I touched the hem of Georgie’s jacket, and I swear that I could see her flinch. ‘I haven’t seen this before,’ I said. Aren’t the little sequins a lovely touch?’

  She smiled at me then and examined the sleeves as though she was looking for something. Doing that allowed her to move away from me. It was only a step or two, but it was enough for me to notice.

  ‘Thanks, Nora,’ she said, ‘it’s one of a new line Maggie and I are developing. It’s the first time I’ve worn it.’

  ‘Really?’ I asked. I remember thinking that the surprise in my voice was particularly well done. ‘I thought I saw one just like it last weekend. And the woman looked very like you, too, from the back.’

  Georgie looked amused. Her glance said: ‘No one looks very like me, not even from the back. I’m a one-off

  ‘Oh, yes?’ she said then, in that polite, patronizing tone that she kept just for me. ‘Where was that?’

  ‘In Castleknock.’

  I watched as her face closed. One eyelid blinked and I recognized that guilty tic from almost ten years earlier. I was satisfied then because I just knew that I was right.

  She looked at me. Her mouth was still smiling, but her eyes looked paler.

  ‘Castleknock?’ she said with one of her little frowns as she pretended to concentrate. Then she shook her head. I felt its dismissal. ‘Must have been somebody else.’

  I said nothing.

  Just then, Maggie called out that the gazpacho was served and would we all hurry up and come outside or the ice cubes would have melted.

  Georgie threw me a glance over her shoulder as we went out on to the deck. I thought I saw a glimmer of respect in it and something else, too, that I can’t put my finger on. That makes me feel uneasy. But I still can’t pin it down. In fact, her look said that maybe I was not the fool she had taken me to be all these years. That was enough for me. I felt pleased. I rarely, no never, came away from any meeting with Georgie feeling that I might have won.

  We had our meal and our wine and our nightcap, the same as we’d always done. But I thought I caught Georgie looking thoughtful on a couple of occasions throughout the evening. My new sense of having scored some point against her kept coming back to me. After more than twenty years, I felt that the balance of power might have shifted a little, and I’m honest enough to say that I liked that.

  However, I’m also sufficiently old and wise to know that things with Georgie are never simple. Nor with Maggie. And certainly not with Claire. But I don’t mind. I have Megan to be grateful for, all these years later. At least my secret carries no shadow of shame. I was only a youngster, a foolish eighteen-year-old child, when I made my mistake. I can now look forward, in every sense, because I have finally had my past come full circle.

  Exactly one week ago today, I got her letter – Megan’s, I mean. I’d been cleaning up leaves in the front garden. The sort of sludgy ones that hang around under the shrubs once autumn is done, but you can’t see them until everything else is bare. That kind of straggly bareness that the frosts of late February bring. Frank had told me to leave them, that he would rake them up at the weekend, but all that morning I’d felt edgy. I couldn’t settle to anything. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I decided that a blast of cold air and exercise might do me good. So I pulled on my woolly hat and my gardening gloves and stepped outside on to the grass.

  ‘Morning, Mrs Fitzsimons.’

  It was Tom, our postman. ‘Good morning, Tom. Cold enough for you?’

  ‘It sure is, Mrs Fitz. And they say there’s worse to come. Forecast is for snow.’ He smiled and showed me a bundle of letters. ‘You’ve got quite a haul today. Will I leave them in the porch for you?’

  I don’t think I answered him. I hope he didn’t feel that I was rude. But the truth is, I was staring so hard at the letters he held in his hand that it seemed to take away my power of speech. Right on the top of the bundle was a blue envelope. All I could see was the American stamps and the looped, curling handwriting. How could I have known? I don’t know how, but I did. I remember peeling my gloves off slowly and then holding out my hands.

  ‘I’ll take them,’ I said.

  I went straight into the kitchen and switched on the kettle. I could feel the knot in my stomach begin to tighten. One bit of me wanted to call Frank, at once, to tell him to come home and be with me while I opened the letter. Another bit of me wanted to be on my own, to have a solitary, private meeting with my daughter’s words. And that’s the bit that won. I stood at the counter and made myself a cup of tea, very slowly, while the envelope rested on the breakfast bar just beyond my reach. I kept looking at it, trying to guess its contents, unable to stretch out my hand and grasp it. Blue and silent, it lay before me and bridged a gap of almost twenty-seven years. It was the only connection I had left between the young me and the me that now sat in a bright and safe suburban kitchen, surrounded by all the things that make up an ordinary life.

  I cried when I read Megan’s words. Who wouldn’t? About how her Mom and Pop had supported her search for her birth mother; about how they had praised my unselfishness in giving up my baby to a better life; about how they hoped that they also might meet me, in time. And my beautiful daughter sent photographs of herself, too. Dozens of them. Her letter was so careful of me. She wrote that she was coming to Ireland anyway to ‘check out Trinity’ before spending a semester there in the autumn – or the ‘fall’ as she called it. She stressed that I was not to feel forced into a meeting before I was ready, that she would wait.

  Before I was ready! Knowing she was here, even for the shortest time, how on earth could I walk up Grafton Street, or pass the front gate of Trinity or wander through Stephen’s Green without watching for her face everywhere I went? Watching for our face, in fact. Of all my children, she is the one who resembles me the best.

  I think that one of the things in her letter that moved me most of all was that her American family had decided to keep her name. That comforted me, the fact that she had always been herself, always Megan, always present in her name every time I have thought about her over twenty-seven years.

  Frank’s joy was indescribable. He grabbed my hands and I watched as his eyes filled. He kept saying my name over and over again. ‘Nora, Nora, that’s wonderful, simply wonderful.’ His kind face and his tears and his search for the right words made me realize all over again what a good man I had married.

  ‘We must bring her to Ireland,’ he said, ‘the boys have to get to know their sister. Let’s do it soon, very soon – no, let’s you and I go and see her first, or you meet h
er first and then we both will – and then after that, maybe she might like to come and stay . . .’

  ‘Slow down,’ I had to say to him. We were both laughing and crying by then. ‘She’s already coming to see us. She’ll be in Ireland in a week’s time!’

  ‘A week?’ He looked as excited as a child. ‘Where will we take her? What can we do to make her feel welcome – she’ll be staying with us, won’t she?’ He was pacing, lifting up her letter and putting it down again as though he was looking for something.

  I had to shush him, to get him to calm down a little. Which he did, once he had the time to absorb the news. Every so often, he’d take my hand and murmur, ‘It’s wonderful, Nora, just wonderful. All our prayers have been answered.’

  That night, we told Robbie and Chris and Matthew. I think they were more bewildered at first than anything else, especially Matthew.

  ‘But why did you have to give her away? Why couldn’t you have kept her?’

  I found that I couldn’t speak. I was glad that Frank did it for me.

  ‘They were very different times, son,’ he told him. His voice had gone all quiet as he answered Matthew’s question. He looked over at me and I knew he was remembering that night in Clontarf when I had cooked for him. The night I had first told him about Megan. ‘There is no shame about being a single mother now,’ he said, ‘but there was then. Nana and Grandad Murphy had some very fixed ideas, just like a lot of people.’

  Robbie and Chris listened to Frank, too, the way they always did. I felt a lump in my throat as I watched all their faces.

  ‘Your mother would have wished otherwise,’ Frank went on. ‘But it wasn’t possible for her to keep Megan. She did what she believed to be best for her child, just as she has always done, for all her children. And now,’ he said, with a great beaming smile and rubbing his hands together the way he always did when something delighted him, ‘she gets her reward. And you get the sister you never knew you had.’