by Maeve Binchy
“You'd like the two of us to look after that baby?”
“Well, we could be together there, we could get to know the baby, he or she would get to know us. Yes, there are ways in which I'd like it a lot.”
“Help me, Nora. I want to do the best.”
“Do the best for you, Aidan, not for me.” Nora went out into their little kitchen. “We won't want much to eat this evening after all that marvelous spread, will we? How about an egg on toast later?”
“Help me, Nora,” he said again.
“Every step of the way—but you have your mind made up to go back there. Why should I add to your stress?” She was calm and peaceful.
“But you would prefer if I gave it up?”
“One of the reasons I love you so much is that you never tried to change me. You never asked me to dye my hair, or wear more conventional clothes, or anything. I'm not going to do that to you either.”
“I'm looking for guidance …”
“No, my love, you are not. You are looking for my total support, and you have it,” she said.
“I see Aidan Dunne in the waiting room,” Fiona said. “He hasn't an appointment today”
“No, but they might have come in for one of the demonstrations. Johnny and Lavender are doing their stuff this morning,” Barbara said.
“Right. Isn't Aidan's wife something else? She's a real character,” Fiona said.
“When we're old, will we be like that?” Barbara wondered.
“Well, if we had fellows who were as mad about us as Aidan Dunne is about her we'd be all right,” Fiona said.
“You do have someone like that…” Barbara was glum. “The rest of us forgot to get thin, so we don't.”
“Fiona, do you think I could have an examination today? I know it's not my regular day,” Aidan asked diffidently.
“Isn't that what we're here for?” Fiona was cheerful. She brought Adan into the cubicle and sat him up on the bed.
“I'll take your blood pressure first,” she said.
“Is it okay?” he asked anxiously.
“It's a bit up on last week. Jump up on the scales here for me,” Fiona continued, relaxed and soothing.
“No, your weight hasn't changed, no sign of fluids here. Any stress or anything in the last day or two?”
“No—I learned I'm going to be a grandfather, but that's all good.”
“You bet it is. Congratulations. Nothing to raise the blood pressure there.” Fiona was delighted for him.
“So I wonder why I don't feel so great,” he said.
“Is your wife here with you, Aidan?”
“You know Nora—she's always here with me. She's gone to talk to Lavender while I'm with you.”
“Suppose I ask Declan to have a quick look at you?” Fiona suggested.
“Great,” said Aidan.
Declan was calm also. “BP is certainly a lot raised,” he said. “Let's work out why that is.”
“Am I going to have another heart attack?” Aidan asked.
“I doubt it very much. It could be medication—or is anything else worrying you?”
“I am worried about something, but it's not enough to raise my blood pressure,” Aidan said.
“Could you tell me what it is and we'll decide whether that's right or not.”
Declan was frank and honest with him. But Aidan could not talk to this boy who was the same age as his children. He needed someone nearer his own age.
“Could I talk to Clara about it, Declan? It's a sort of middle-aged thing.”
“Of course—but you know Clara. That's not exactly the way to put it to her.”
“I'll be more tactful,” Aidan promised.
“Do you want Nora there?” Declan asked.
“Not really, if it's possible.”
“Leave it to me,” Declan said.
Clara took one of the consulting rooms and sat down with Aidan. Declan had meanwhile spirited Nora Dunne away to talk to Hilary. They needed good pictures on the walls to lend some extra vision to the place. Could Nora help them about getting prints or posters?
“But Aidan?” she said.
“Is having his checkup,” Declan said very firmly.
“What is it about, Aidan?” Clara asked.
“How old are you, Dr. Casey?”
“Aidan, I have asked you to call me Clara and you usually do and I am in my very early fifties, so I presume this is going somewhere?”
“I didn't feel at ease talking to Declan. He's too …well, young.”
“He's very good, Aidan.”
“Yes, of course. But he wouldn't understand about whether I should give up work or not…”
“Tell me about it,” Clara said.
She was a good listener; she nodded and encouraged and in the end the whole anxiety had been laid out. He was afraid of some of those thugs who had changed the face of the school where he had been so happy. He did get anxious and lose his self-confidence when they mocked him publicly. Yet he could not give up his career because of a heart problem.
He could not leave Nora without anything to live on.
He couldn't let a bunch of underprivileged sixteen-year-olds cut off his whole life. He would not accept charity and have his son-in-law wheeling and dealing, taking money from one pocket and putting it in another.
Clara listened with a sympathetic face but offered no solution. This was something that Aidan Dunne would have to sort out for himself. He needed something to happen that would help him make up his mind.
Rescue comes in the most unexpected way.
Frank Ennis had chosen this very moment to make an unexpected tour of the heart clinic to show it to fellow board member Chester Kovac. Clara gritted her teeth in annoyance. How typical of him to barge in at the wrong moment. Not for him the courtesy of a phone call or the making of an appointment. Oh, no indeed. Frank regarded the heart clinic as a minor and unimportant part of his great empire. What could he want, bringing this philanthropist round to inspect the premises now, of all times?
Mr. Kovac was a very charming man. He was full of praise for everything. He shook Aidan Dunne's hand and apologized for interrupting a consultation. Frank Ennis wouldn't have noticed that he was interrupting anything. Chester Kovac also spoke to Ania in Polish; his father was from the old country, he said. He said he had just met a most interesting lady called Nora and discussed pictures with her. He was going to take some of her ideas back to his own health center in Rossmore.
“That's my wife,” Aidan said proudly.
“Really? And have you been long married? Do you have children?”
“No, we met late in life, we are not very long married, but very happily married,” Aidan said simply.
“Then we share something, Mr. Dunne. We are both lucky men. I too married late in life and have a wonderful wife called Hannah. And has this clinic helped you, Mr. Dunne?”
“I can't begin to tell you how much. Everyone here has been terrific. It's such a reassurance.”
“I see that in the reports. In fact, I'm thinking of having something very similar in my own place in the country. It's not just city folk who have strain and stress, you know …”
“No, but it can be tougher in the city, with the traffic, the gangs and the hooligans.”
“Don't I know? Why do you think I left New York? I only come to Dublin once a month for these board meetings in St. Brigid's. Sometimes Hannah comes too and we go to a theater and stay overnight, but it's nice and peaceful to be home again.”
“Have you sort of retired, Mr. Kovac?” Aidan Dunne asked.
“Yes, I think I have, but I'm busier than ever. We had a great bit of good luck, two years back. My wife's niece Orla had a baby sort of unexpectedly, and there was a problem about raising her. So we gave her a room in the house and during the day Hannah and I look after the child while Orla goes to her classes in Rossmore. Then she comes home and takes her away.”
Clara looked very carefully at the floor. Across the room she could
see the stocky figure of Father Brian Flynn, who had come to collect his friend Johnny. She felt a great urge to go over to him and tell him that she was coming straight back to the Church this minute. There was a personal God and that personal God had intervened just at the right time.
Chester Kovac was talking about how he and Hannah and their dog, Zloty would go for walks in the Whitethorn Woods wheeling the pram, and now that the little girl was old enough to toddle along with them it was better still.
“When you have so much happiness yourself it seems mean-spirited not to share it,” he said. Then something in Aidan's face made him stop. “Here I am, prattling on about things that aren't relevant to your life at all. Forgive me,” he began.
“No, please. It could be relevant. It could be very relevant. My daughter is going to have a baby, you see. She and her husband want us to look after it, but I didn't think …” His voice trailed away.
“I know—I was the same way before little Emer was born. I thought it would be all little red puckered faces and screaming and nappies. But it's not—it's fascinating!”
“I was afraid we'd be too old …”
“So were we,” Chester said. “But it makes us feel young.”
“I thought it was charity, finding us a job, channeling money at us.” Aidan had told Chester everything now.
“Believe me, it's you who will be doing the charitable thing, a member of the family giving love and care to a new baby”
Aidan saw Hilary and Nora coming toward them. When she saw Adan's face Nora knew at once that a decision had been reached. And that he was happy with it.
There were a lot of good-byes, exchanging addresses and shaking hands with Chester, and heavy promising to go to Rossmore one day so that they could see for themselves. Nora had no idea what they were going to see, but she managed to sound enthusiastic.
Declan came out just as Nora and Aidan were leaving. “Hey someone should take Aidan's blood pressure,” he said.
“No need, Declan,” Clara said. “I'd say it's perfectly fine now.”
“So we're into just guessing these days?” He laughed.
“Listen—if you'd witnessed what I just did, you'd be down on your knees thanking the Almighty for keeping an eye on us,” Clara said.
“I knew this place was too good to be true,” Declan said. “It's been a religious cult all along and no one ever told me.”
In the shopping precinct Aidan and Nora sat at the sandwich bar. They held hands and their coffee got cold as they talked excitedly about the years ahead. The child that would know them from the word go. The days free to teach children who really did want to learn Latin. A suitable place for signora to give little conversation lessons in Italian for executives. Grania and Tony could go out to work with guilt-free hearts every day.
Life couldn't get much better.
For the first time in their careful, frugal lives, Nora and Aidan left unfinished coffee behind them. They were anxious to get the bus and go and share their great news with the baby's parents. They were impatient for the child to be born. How could they all wait until September?
Chapter Seven
Peter Barry had always been cautious and careful. It was essential as a pharmacist that you should not be slapdash or reckless, and he was proud that he kept all aspects of his life under meticulous control.
His daughter, Amy, had inherited none of these qualities. She was much more like her late mother: feckless, casual and unconcerned. Laura had been so hopeless about keeping records and having control of money that Peter had taken the whole thing over himself. He had immaculate accounts books. The bookkeeper and the accountant said that he didn't need anyone to oversee his figures; he had the whole thing under control.
Laura had been the arty one. She had known how to spread a piece of Indian cotton on the back of a sofa and make it look regal. She had always done the windows in the pharmacy for him. Laura had made beautiful clothes for Amy when she was a toddler. No other four-year-old had such dresses.
He looked back on the old pictures. Amy was like a little princess. But of course in recent years she looked like a terrorist or a member of the Addams Family, with her matted hair and white makeup and black straggly clothes.
It was impossible to know what would have happened if Laura had lived. Would they have been great friends and conspirators, the two of them ganging up on silly old Daddy? Or were his customers right when they said that teenage daughters hated their mothers even more than they hated their fathers? He would never know.
Amy was in her last year at school. But she had warned him not to expect any kind of good results. She hadn't been able to study because all they were offering in that school was “pure crap.” If only her father could be in her classroom he would realize that it was rubbish, meaningless, nothing.
He had felt utterly inadequate and completely at sea when he went to the parents-teachers meeting. Her teachers, one after the other, told him that Amy was no trouble in class but paid no attention in any subject—she just stared out the window.
He suggested that she attend one of those sixth-form colleges or cram colleges.
“For what?” Amy had asked. “To learn more crap, except at high speed?”
Everything was an effort. It was an effort to get up and go to school. An effort to wash her clothes in the washing machine.
They lived in a small apartment over the pharmacy. It had been part of the new mall's plan to mix housing with commercial zoning in an effort to make the place more human and avoid the empty-precinct syndrome. Amy grumbled because they didn't have a garden.
“Who would keep the garden if we had one?” Peter asked, not unreasonably.
Amy shrugged. She had a good line in shrugs. Expressive and defeated and then moving swiftly on to the next issue, which in this case was going to a seaside resort in Cyprus to celebrate her graduation from school.
“But you tell me you have nothing to celebrate, Amy.”
“All the more reason to go and cheer myself up,” she said. But nothing ever cheered her up.
It was eight a.m. and she was showing him a brochure about a holiday that cost some astronomical sum of money. Peter was adamant. He was not going to finance two weeks of Amy staying in a hotel, entering wet T-shirt competitions and partying all night.
“What are you doing it all for, Dad?” she asked him, her black-rimmed eyes looking at him as if she had never seen him before.
“Doing all what?” he asked.
“Oh—standing in a white coat looking at prescriptions and tutting over things and spending hours talking to reps from drug companies.”
“Well, it's my work.” Peter was bewildered.
“Yes, but what's it for, Dad, if it isn't for me?”
“It is for you—but not for you to go to Cyprus.”
“Okay, that's your final word, is it?”
“Yes, it is, Amy. And I'm going to work now.”
“To make more money to give me when I'm too old to enjoy it.”
“People are never too old to enjoy it,” Peter said.
“Oh, they are, Dad,” Amy said. She didn't say any more, but she obviously thought that her father was the perfect example of the point she was making.
She didn't really speak to him that day. She was polite but distant. She thanked him when he cooked their meal but announced that she was going out with a school friend. The next morning she read a magazine during breakfast, washed up her own cereal bowl and left at the same time as Peter did.
“This is silly, Amy. Where are you going?” He was worried. A silence had never gone on for twenty-four hours before.
“To get a job!” Amy called over her shoulder.
He saw her walking through the shopping precinct. It seemed such a short time since he had held her by the hand at her mother's funeral and promised that he would look after her. He hadn't delivered on that promise. He had tried, but his own daughter looked at him with the eyes of a stranger.
It had been
so simple when he was that age. His father had just assumed that his two boys would study pharmacy, and they did. Then, as now, it was very fiercely competitive to get a place on the course. Though chemists often told each other that they were just glorified shop assistants, they did have a pride in it all. They were people of authority.
Of course it had been so different in his father's time. In his small-town, one-chemist shop, Mr. Barry Senior was able to do so much more than Peter was nowadays. It wasn't said aloud, but everyone knew that Mr. Barry was as good as any doctor. He could give a child with a bad chest a course of antibiotics without needing to wait for a doctor's prescription; he could take a piece of broken glass out of a finger or tell you if a weak ankle was a sprain or a break. He made his own elixirs, which people came from far and near to get because they had such faith in them. And he had a cough medicine that worked pure magic.
His father knew there wouldn't be enough work for both boys in the shop. He was in an agony of indecision about which of them to take in, but as it happened Peter wanted to move to Dublin, and his brother, Michael, had gone to live in Cork.
Problem solved.
But not forgotten.
In Cork, Michael often bewailed the fact that he hadn't made a bid for the family business. In Dublin, when Peter came upstairs in his shopping precinct premises after long hours in the shop, he wondered why he hadn't either.
When his wife died, their father eventually sold the business to a young, thrusting assistant who had turned it into a gold mine. Then Mr. Barry Senior went to live in a bungalow in the west of Ireland where there was good fishing. He had taken up with a “lady companion.”
Peter drove over to see him once a year.
On his latest visit, the place was warm and comfortable. Ruby, his father's friend, had cooked a lovely meal, and had talked of their going on a cruise.
A cruise!
Peter and Amy had spent the night and as they drove home the next day, there was some discontent niggling away inside him. A feeling that somehow his father had done altogether too well out of this deal. He even bragged about the old shop and spoke proudly about how many square feet had been added to the original premises.
