Two Fridays in April

by Roisin Meaney

  Not at all. She felt abashed that she’d assigned an ulterior motive for his visit – and ashamed that she’d also blamed him a little bit for the loss of the car.

  Nice of him to drop in. Not many would have thought of it.

  The bungalow isn’t mine, by the way, he added. I should probably have mentioned that. It belonged to our uncle – he died a few months back and left it to us. It hasn’t been lived in for over a year – he was in a nursing home. Which would account for the state of it. Not the neglected home of a recently separated man, as she’d imagined, but the abandoned home of a dead man. Explained a lot.

  She watched the door close behind him. She should have mentioned that she already had a prospective buyer – she and George were due to view it that afternoon. No matter: she’d phone him later.

  But the viewing never happened. George phoned to cancel, saying he’d changed his mind about looking for a house. I’ve decided to put it off for a while, he told her. Just for a few months. I feel I should stay with my father for a bit. Typical of him to put someone else first.

  Daphne is so glad he found Louise, or Louise found him. She was touched when he confided in her, around November. A parent in the class, he said, or she was, until June. Delightfully shy about telling her, shuffling his feet, rubbing his grinning face. It’s going well, he said, the grin widening. We’ll see, he said, looking mighty pleased with himself.

  In the meantime there was plenty of interest in the little bungalow, although the smallness of it put some viewers off, and the absence of a proper back garden was another sticking point. But enquiries continued to come in, and Daphne became accustomed to travelling to Bridestone Avenue, where she was always careful to remove her car keys from the ignition.

  And sometimes Tom was there before her, having plugged in a heater or two. And on one occasion, after the viewers had left, he suggested coffee in the little hotel a few streets away, and although Daphne didn’t take him up on it – another appointment waiting – she found herself considering his offer later that evening, and thinking that he mightn’t be the worst to spend an hour with.

  Not that she was looking for anyone, for coffee or anything else. And maybe he wasn’t either: maybe he’d simply made the offer out of politeness. For all she knew he already had a partner.

  And then one afternoon, around the middle of July, when the bungalow had been on their books for a little over three months, her phone rang and it was him, and the sound of his voice caused a funny little jump that she assumed had more to do with the coffee she’d just had.

  You’re not going to like this, he said, and she thought he was going to reject the offer that had just been put on the bungalow. Couldn’t blame him, well below the asking price.

  We’ve decided not to sell the house, he went on. In fact, Louise is going to move into it with Josh, her son.

  Oh … Ridiculous to feel deflated – that kind of thing happened all the time. Well, thank you for—

  I wondered, he said, if you’d let me buy you dinner, or lunch or something. Just to say thanks for all your help.

  Oh, there’s no need—

  But I’d like to.

  And so, it seemed, would she, because she found herself agreeing to let him take her out. No harm in it, just a meal with a friend. Probably never clap eyes on him again.

  They live with me, he told her over bowls of pasta. Louise and Josh. The father isn’t on the scene, he never was. He did a runner when she got pregnant so I moved her in with me. It wasn’t a problem – I live alone, there was plenty of room – but at this stage they should really have their own place.

  I wanted her to take the bungalow when Uncle Stephen died, but she was adamant we should sell. She had this daft notion that she’d be doing me out of my inheritance. Now she’s changed her mind, which I’m glad about. Makes perfect sense for her to take it.

  After dinner, he walked Daphne to her car. He shook her hand. We should do it again sometime, he said, and she didn’t object, so they did it again about ten days later, and again a week after that.

  So wary she’d felt to begin with though, so afraid of venturing down that road for the second time. So understanding he’d been, so patient when she’d turn away as he moved closer, not ready for that. Not yet.

  So wonderful to allow herself finally to accept that what she thought she’d never feel again was making its slow, steady way back to her. He’s not Finn, he’ll never be Finn – but she never expected to find another Finn.

  Funny how things turn out. Wonderful how things can turn out.

  The kitchen door opens.

  ‘Morning,’ Daphne says.

  ‘Happy birthday to you,’ Una replies. ‘Going to be a nice day.’

  ‘I think so … Thanks for the presents, they’re wonderful.’

  ‘Glad you like them.’ Una takes a mug from the draining board, spots the photo on the windowsill. ‘You remember that picnic?’ she asks.

  ‘I do. I’d forgotten it until I saw that.’

  ‘We played Twenty Questions, remember?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Dad was hopeless, kept asking the wrong kind of questions. I knew he was doing it on purpose.’

  She talks about him now, she often mentions him. There’s a lovely fondness in her voice when she does. She isn’t done missing him, any more than Daphne is, but she’s coming along.

  At the start of June last year, two months after her birthday, she told Daphne about Theo.

  It just happened, she said. We were friends, that was all, and then, I don’t know … it … changed. He’s nice. He’s lovely … It’s OK, isn’t it? Looking anxiously at Daphne, wanting very badly for it to be OK, so Daphne told her it was, not at all sure how she felt about it.

  A year later they’re still together. Daphne has met him – he’s been to the house several times. On his first visit he brought a red geranium that’s getting ready to bloom again; on his next, a box of very good fudge that he made himself. He never comes empty-handed.

  He was ill at ease in Daphne’s company at the start, his eyes sliding away from hers, his neck blotchy with embarrassment. Afraid she didn’t want him there, probably. She felt sorry for him, as much a victim of circumstances as she herself was. He’s still a bit shy with her, but not as much. He’ll relax eventually, if he and Una last.

  ‘The peanut butter’s nearly gone,’ Una says, scraping in the jar with her knife.

  ‘I’ll put it on my list.’

  ‘I can do the shopping after school: you shouldn’t have to on your birthday.’

  Daphne smiles. ‘It’s fine – I have plenty of time today.’

  A couple of viewings this morning, a visit to the cemetery, lunch with Joanna from work, some filing, some phone calls – and this evening, dinner served up by George in his new surroundings.

  At twenty to nine she gets to her feet. ‘Time to go,’ she says, and Una finishes tapping at her phone screen and pushes back her chair.

  ‘Can I drive?’ she asks, as she’s done every morning for the past week, and again Daphne tells her no, not yet.

  As they pull up outside the school, Daphne’s phone begins to ring.

  ‘Get that,’ Una says, opening the door. ‘I’ll see you later.’

  ‘Happy birthday,’ Isobel says. ‘Everything all right?’

  ‘Everything’s fine, just dropping Una at the school.’ Returning the girl’s wave through the window, watching like she always does as Una disappears into the crowd. ‘What about you?’

  ‘All well, finishing my cuppa, getting ready to open up. I’m looking forward to the meal this evening.’

  ‘Me too. Hope George isn’t regretting his offer.’ She thumbs at a mark on the dashboard. ‘I would have been happy to switch it to my house.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, you can’t host your own birthday dinner. George will be fine – I bet he’s dying to show us all what he can do.’

  It’s healing too, the wound that Isobel’s departure had opened up
between them all those years ago, the running sore it had become. The first tentative step taken on the night of the anniversary, with Daphne’s offer of a bed to Isobel, but it wasn’t until a few months later, long after Isobel had settled into the apartment Daphne had found for her, that an opportunity presented itself that would allow a real reconciliation to take root. Because of the circumstances, Daphne likes to think Finn had a hand in helping them to bury the past – but Mo deserved a bit of the credit too.

  Ask your mother, she said to Daphne, when the idea of reopening the bicycle shop finally began to take hold. She’s used to working behind a counter in that fancy place. So the suggestion had come from Mo – but without Finn and his father, there would have been no shop to begin with, and no need for them to be casting around for someone to work in its new incarnation.

  Despite things having thawed somewhat between them, asking Isobel to become involved with the shop hadn’t appealed initially to Daphne. Such a big step – were they ready for it?

  It’s not as if you’d be there with her all the time, Mo pointed out. You’d hardly have anything to do with her really. And we’d be keeping the business in the family, which would be good. Whatever way you looked at it, the idea did seem to make sense – so Daphne put her reservations aside.

  A craft shop, she told her mother the following night. It was a week before Isobel’s birthday: hard to believe she was going to be sixty. Knick-knacks, bits and pieces for the home, jewellery, knitwear, gift ideas, that sort of thing. Everything Irish, everything designed and produced here. Would you be interested?

  Her question was met with silence. Isobel, it would seem, wasn’t interested in a new job, didn’t fancy being under compliment to Daphne. She was working out how to say no.

  You’re opening a shop? she asked eventually.

  Well, not me personally – I’m going to keep on working at Donnelly’s, but we’re using the compensation money to set it up, and Mo will handle the accounts. Una wants to work there on Saturdays until she—

  And you want me to be involved?

  Well, Mo thought you might be interested, yes.

  You’re asking me to work there? You’re offering me a job?

  Only if you’re interes—

  I am, Isobel said. I will. I’d love it. Thank you. I’d absolutely love it. Thank you.

  And that was that: they had their assistant.

  But Mo was wrong in thinking that mother and daughter wouldn’t have much to do with one another. On the contrary, Isobel and Daphne were thrown together a lot more. They had to be: everyone had to pitch in to get the place ready. And Isobel did as much as anyone else, helping to source products, using her many contacts to spread the word, doing her bit when it came to painting and decorating. Truth be told, she made herself pretty useful.

  And little by little, she and Daphne are unpicking the past, filling in the blanks.

  I worked there Monday to Friday, Isobel told her. The cinema we used to go to every fortnight, remember? My job was behind the ticket desk. Terribly boring, but it was all I could get.

  I lived in a small flat, she told Daphne, above a shoe-repair and key-cutting shop. The noise of those machines they used, the screech of them, was worse than a roomful of wildcats. I had one bedroom, and a kitchen-cum-sitting room. Miserable little place, tiny bathroom. Glorified bedsit, really, but it was cheap, and I could walk everywhere.

  They haven’t discussed the intimacies. There’s been no mention of how Isobel regards her two failed marriages, no talk of Con Pierce the dentist, or Isobel’s abrupt departure from her family.

  And in her turn Daphne hasn’t talked about Tom, how he’s helping her to be happy again. She and Isobel simply haven’t reached that place yet.

  But once, almost at the end of a lunchtime conversation, Isobel said, I loved them, you know, those Saturday afternoons we spent together. I’d look forward to them so much – and Daphne felt a sting of remorse as she recalled her dread of those same encounters, her endurance of whatever activities Isobel had lined up, her relief when the arrangement finally petered out.

  They have a long way to go, a lot of making up to do. She thinks they’ll manage it. She hopes they’ll manage it.

  Getting the craft shop off the ground wasn’t all plain sailing. One promising supplier declared himself bankrupt, leaving them little time to find an alternative. Another dropped them with scant warning when a bigger customer came along. Road works on the street outside caused damage to a water pipe that created havoc for deliveries for more than a week.

  And at the beginning of November, six weeks before the shop was due to open, the inevitable happened, and a new grave was dug in the cemetery. Poor Leo, at peace finally after his years of what must have been bewildered isolation. Mo, of course, was thrown into fresh mourning, which she battled with her customary vigour, still continuing with her shifts at the charity shop, still turning up afterwards at the work-in-progress that was the craft shop to tut over invoices and complain about redecorating costs.

  But eventually things had come together, and as the grand opening approached, Daphne found herself wondering how Isobel and Mo would get along once the business was up and running. So different, the two of them, and Mo’s legendary sharp tongue a challenge for any co-worker. But to her relief the two women trucked along, seeming to get on fine – or if they didn’t, they weren’t sharing it with their financial backer.

  Using the compensation money to fund the new business made perfect sense, of course it did. It’s what Finn would have wanted, Mo had insisted, back when they were still tossing the idea around, back when Daphne was still so unsure about the whole idea. He’d have loved to see the shop open again, and his family still running it – and eventually, when Mo was joined in her corner by Una, who had jumped at the thought of the shop reopening, Daphne gave in.

  It had sat restlessly with her for a while, the fact that she was making use of the money she’d sworn never to touch. But seeing the closed-down shop slowly brought back to life, and the enthusiasm with which Una threw herself into the project, she had to acknowledge that Mo was right. It’s what he would have wanted.

  And after four months, despite everything, the shop is still there, still trading every day between the hours of nine thirty and five thirty – and, according to the accountant they had to call in to replace Mo, they ended last month in profit for the first time. A small profit, admittedly, but a milestone nonetheless. They’re going in the right direction.

  The name was Una’s idea. Dad’s bicycle was blue, she said, so The Blue Bicycle it became, even though bicycles are one of the few things they don’t sell. But they’re all agreed that it, and its accompanying logo of a bright blue penny-farthing – another of Una’s creations – lend the place an appealing quirkiness.

  So much has changed in a year. Not all of it for the better, of course – there was Leo, and then there was Mo – but on the whole it’s treated them more gently than the one that went before. Time is marching on as it always did, but these days, most of the time, Daphne manages to march along with it, and to regard whatever may lie ahead with more hope than dread.

  When she gets to work she finds birthday cards waiting on her desk from Mr Donnelly and Joanna. William, typically, is on the road, chasing up business somewhere beyond the city. The estate agency continues to putter along, each month bringing its share of fresh successes and disappointments.

  At eleven Daphne leaves the office and travels across town to show a first-floor apartment to an elderly widow whose family home has become too large for her to manage. ‘It’s just the garden,’ she says, following Daphne listlessly through the clutch of rooms, looking without enthusiasm at the tiny balcony. ‘I don’t mind giving up the house, it was always a bit draughty, but I’ll miss the garden so much’ – and Daphne, who has already shown the woman’s house and its beautifully tended grounds to three interested parties, closes the file on the apartment and tells her about Mrs Clohessy’s little cottage u
p the road from her, complete with small, neat back garden, that’s about to be sold privately by the family. If Mr Donnelly heard her …

  She locks up the apartment and bids farewell to the widow and drives through the city to a familiar narrow street, lined on each side with redbrick terraced homes, each differently coloured front door leading directly onto the path. She pulls up outside number five and sits for a minute, listening to the soft ticking of the cooling engine as she looks out the house where Mo lived until six weeks ago.

  She recalls the first time Finn took her there, a couple of months after they’d begun seeing one another. She’d met Mo just once before, the day she’d delivered the apology lemon cake to the bicycle shop, and the memory of the older woman’s frosty reception on that occasion had made her approach their second encounter with more than a little wariness.

  Don’t mind if she’s a bit cool, Finn said. It’s just her way, she won’t mean anything by it – but Daphne still prickled with anxiety.

  With just cause, as it turned out: all through the forty-five-minute visit, during which Mo served a pot of dark brown tea and a plate of ginger nut biscuits in her little sitting room, Daphne was acutely conscious of a stiffness in her hostess’s manner, a pursed-lips attitude that screamed disapproval of her son’s choice of companion. Finn did his best, bless him, but his sterling efforts to keep the conversation going did little to lessen the tension that kept Daphne on the edge of Mo’s tweedy couch throughout, nibbling the biscuit she’d felt obliged to accept – she wasn’t a fan of ginger – and drinking tea that was much too strong.

  In time, things had got better, of course. Daphne had grown accustomed to Mo’s brusque manner: they’d learned to get along after a fashion. They never became close – too different, maybe – but they tolerated one another’s company. On occasion, they even enjoyed it.

  And on Finn’s anniversary last year, when she learned of Mo’s miscarriages, Daphne gained a new understanding of and sympathy for the bluntness and lack of warmth that had so often bewildered and hurt her in the past.