Poor Mo, silenced now.
She gets out of the car, standing back to allow a young woman with a buggy to pass by on the path before approaching the front door that Finn had painted the same shade of maroon every second year. Could do with a fresh coat now: maybe Daphne and Una will do it between them some Sunday.
She lets herself in, feeling the cooler air in the deserted little hallway. So empty it feels, so impersonal, without Mo clattering around. She takes off her jacket and makes her way to the kitchen, where she finds the spray polish and cloth sitting where she’d left them on the worktop after her last visit.
It’s not much, but it’s something. She works her way through the silent house, banishing dust from windowsills and tables, dado rails, shelves and mantelpieces. She wipes the glass fronts of the framed photos – Leo, Finn, Una, Susan, Daphne; the weddings, the birthdays, the Christmases – that pepper the walls of Mo’s bedroom. She kept them close, all the important people in her life.
Daphne pauses at the most recent one, taken by George on the afternoon of the grand opening last December. There they all are, Isobel, Una, Daphne and Mo, grouped underneath the shop sign, arms interlocked. Huddled in coats and scarves and hats – it had been bitterly cold – but all dressed in their finery underneath, all waiting to begin the new adventure.
All over for Mo now, never again to check invoices or tot up outgoings or calculate tax returns. The adventure ended for her the day she collapsed in the back room of the charity shop, six weeks ago tomorrow. Just finished her tea, Daphne was told by Martha, one of Mo’s fellow volunteers. Stood up to go out the back for a smoke, and that was it.
The last bit was wrong, of course – Mo didn’t smoke. But Daphne said nothing. What did it matter now?
The cemetery, on the way back to the office, is mellow in the late April sunshine, headstones gleaming. ‘Still miss you,’ Daphne tells Finn. ‘Never forget you. Five years ago today, never forget that either. Happiest day of my life – but you know that already.’
She squints upwards, sees a pair of sparrows flit by. It was sunny on the morning of their wedding too, but by the afternoon the rain had arrived, trailing down the hotel windows as they ate their first meal as man and wife. Chicken she had, or maybe fish. Food the last thing on her mind.
She wonders if she’ll marry again, like Finn did. He’d found love a second time too. Maybe it keeps going around, like the random acts of kindness he was so fond of. Maybe if you wait long enough it comes back to you.
Driving through the town, looking forward to her lunch with Joanna now, she stops at a zebra crossing and watches a straggling line of paired-up little children in uniforms of navy and white as they pass in front of her. Junior or senior infants, she guesses. Six years old at the most.
She watches them hopping and skipping their way over the stripes, hair and ribbons bouncing, sees one of the accompanying adults say something sharp to two little boys who have paused to examine an object on the road, causing the ones behind to bump and stumble into them. So unintentionally enchanting at that age, hardly out of babyhood, still all innocence and curiosity.
Thirty-seven. She’s only thirty-seven. There’s still time.
ISOBEL
The cuckoo springs from its clock and chirps twice as she turns the door sign from Closed to Open and undoes the latch, already regretting the spring onions in her lunchtime salad. She loves the kick they add to the tomatoes and cucumber, but the last thing customers need is a salesperson breathing oniony fumes all over them. Hopefully she’ll find a few mints in her bag.
She remains at the door to watch a somewhat dishevelled line of little schoolchildren passing on the path, twenty or so of them, she reckons, bookended by a pair of adults. She follows them down the street, past the dry-cleaner’s and the chemist and the bookshop and the new apartments, until they finally drop out of sight.
She recalls Daphne at that age. A few months past her fourth birthday when she started school, the hem of her blue pinafore dress landing on the skinny little knees, schoolbag heartbreakingly huge when they’d drawn her arms through the straps and fastened it in place.
Isobel’s hand clasped tightly as they stood side by side at the classroom door that first day. Jack busy with pre-test driving lessons, Isobel’s hotel shift not due to start till four, so the task had fallen to her to bring their daughter into school for the first time.
Daphne had looked up at her mother with eyes that swam. Do I have to go in? she asked, and Isobel, feeling like the worst kind of monster, told her yes, she did, and look at all the fun the other children were having, and didn’t Daphne want to join them?
She didn’t. You come too, she insisted, so in they both went – and within ten minutes Daphne had become engrossed with the dressing-up corner, and her mother was able to slip away. And from then on, she and Jack had taken it in turns to drop her to school and pick her up afterwards.
Of course, when Daphne was six, the responsibility had become Jack’s alone.
She finds her bag, locates the end of a packet of mints. Mo was a terror for the mints: you couldn’t leave a pack around or they’d be gone. Quiet without her on Friday afternoons now, her time for dropping in and doing her thing in the back room. Coming out when she had finished, pottering about the shop floor for half an hour or so.
Making a nuisance of herself at times, if the truth be told, moving things around, upsetting Isobel’s careful displays, getting in the way when customers were trying to browse. Imagining she was helping, no doubt – and, in fairness, she did make herself useful in some respects, replenishing the stocks of bubble wrap, tissue and carrier bags when they were running low, sweeping up without being asked, emptying the bin.
But if an unsuspecting customer enquired about a product, Isobel would cringe at the responses. Mo would blithely admit that she couldn’t see the point of chocolate stirrers for coffee – wouldn’t something made of chocolate melt the minute you put it near a hot drink? She would be equally dismissive of coloured-paper lanterns, designed to hold a nightlight – don’t tell her putting a lighted candle into a paper container wasn’t asking for trouble.
The mantelpiece was good enough for us, she told a customer who enquired about miniature pegs to hang Christmas cards, barely a week after they’d opened. Another time she laughed, actually laughed, when a woman asked if they stocked pink toasters. Anyone who didn’t know her would think she was trying to sabotage sales.
But of course she wasn’t. Above all of them, Mo wanted the reincarnation of her precious Leo’s shop to do well. Shame she seemed incapable of filtering what came out of her mouth; shame she couldn’t be chained to her adding machine in the back room, and only let out when the shop was empty.
It had certainly taken the two of them a while to get along. Before Isobel had learned to accept Mo’s presence on the shop floor – surely the accountant didn’t have any business there? – she would assign her various harmless tasks in an effort to keep her occupied and out of the way of the customers. It wasn’t long before Mo objected.
I’ll thank you not to order me around, she said tartly, after a simple request to move a few empty boxes into the back room one day. You’re the employee here, not the boss. For goodness’ sake, such a fuss she’d made. Isobel pulled back after that, anxious not to give Mo any cause to go complaining to Daphne. She learned to accept the older woman’s forays into what she considered her territory, to grit her teeth when she overheard the tactless comments and over time, they achieved a tolerance of one another that was shaky at best.
Still, now that Mo is gone, Isobel almost misses her about the place. She doesn’t miss the tea she’d make though – strong enough to stand a spoon in. The china mugs Isobel had provided for their breaks – after throwing out the awful chipped articles that had preceded them – needed a thorough scrub after a round of Mo’s tea, so badly would they be stained.
Isobel drifts through the empty shop, plumping cushions, straightening boxes of notecard
s, refolding scarves, tweaking the paintings straight. She stands and regards the seascape that nearly sold yesterday, one of her favourites. It’s a steal at seventy-five euro: the movement in it, the drama – but the artist’s name is largely unknown, and after nearly two months on display, it’s still for sale.
Mo, not surprisingly, didn’t mince her words when it first appeared on the shop wall. You’re charging seventy-five euro for a few daubs of blue and white? she asked, her expression almost comically disbelieving. I could do better than that myself. A toddler could do better than that. Isobel managed not to rise to the bait, knowing any argument would fall on deaf ears.
The woman yesterday appeared quite taken with the painting, but seemed to lose interest when she read the price tag. She said she’d think about it, and she’d need her husband to see it, but Isobel only heard excuses. Tragically, most people haven’t a clue about art: one customer actually stated a few weeks ago that she was buying a painting – a beautiful watercolour of a yacht race – purely because some red sails in it matched her couch. Not a clue.
Admittedly Isobel didn’t know much about art herself before she married Alex. She could recognise a Renoir or a Picasso or a le Brocquy – who couldn’t? – and she was quite fond of Jack Yeats, Paul Henry and Vermeer, but that was about it.
When she first encountered it, the first thing that struck her about Alex’s house was that it was full of paintings. They were scattered about the walls, the bulk of them by contemporary Irish artists, most of whose names were unfamiliar to Isobel. Some of the works appealed to her, more didn’t, but she remained noncommittal, not wanting to reveal her ignorance.
Alex went to exhibitions; he read reviews. When he came home with a new painting Isobel would ask, What do you like about it? Wanting to learn, wanting to see what he saw – but more often than not he’d shrug and say, It’s hard to define.
It took her some time to realise that he wasn’t interested in art for art’s sake. It was a commodity to him, something he could make money from, nothing more. But as long as she was surrounded by so much of it, Isobel thought she might as well try to learn a bit more about it. She began to attend exhibitions too, sometimes with Alex, other times alone. She began to see, and appreciate, and discern.
She’d been the one to suggest that they include a few paintings in the shop, back when they were hunting down craft suppliers and deciding what to fill it with. She’d taken on the job of contacting artists and agents, and gradually she’d narrowed her choices to half a dozen and arranged them in a corner. She’s pleased with the result, feels they add to the quality of their offerings. Only two have sold since they opened, the yacht race and one other, but they’ll all shift, she’s sure of it, when the right people come in.
And if the seascape is still unsold when her birthday comes around in September, she might just treat herself to it.
Her birthday. Sixty-one this year, just another number. But that’s the thing, isn’t it? They’re all just numbers. The trick, she’s discovered, is to treat them with equal nonchalance, laugh them away when they come around.
She thinks back to this time last year, and how much she dreaded turning sixty. Like it was somehow going to change her life for the worse – as if it could have been much worse than it already was.
And in the event, by the time sixty happened, everything had changed. She’d left Alex, she’d moved into the apartment, she’d handed in her notice at Phyllis’s shop – and finally, finally, she and Daphne were reconnecting.
You can stay here, Daphne had said, until you find a place to live – and Isobel had clutched at the offer, and the tentative hope it engendered in her. She’d moved in the following morning, stayed for ten days, cooked dinner for Daphne and Una each evening, and viewed several rental properties with Daphne, until the one-bedroom apartment behind the cathedral became available.
And now she wakes up to bells every Sunday, and she and Daphne talk most days, either on the phone or in person. Mistakes are being forgiven, resentments cast aside. It’s slow and it’s painstaking but it’s happening: Isobel can feel it each time they talk, each time they exchange a smile, and she rejoices that it’s finally coming to pass.
But vastly improved as her situation is now, it wasn’t without its challenges. Being single again has taken plenty of getting used to. She’s had episodes of loneliness, plenty of them, particularly at the start of her split from Alex, particularly at night – but on the whole it was such a relief, it still is, to have left her old life behind. How did she last ten years with so little love to keep her company?
Until now, the process of dissolving her second marriage has run smoothly. Her solicitor has done what was required, and spared her the details. A separation agreement was quickly reached; a divorce will be arranged in due course. She might have known emotion wouldn’t feature highly in any negotiation involving Alex.
She’s accepted every condition that’s been set, yielded to every demand – who cares what she has to leave behind, as long as a line is eventually drawn through the misadventure that was their marriage? You’re entitled, her solicitor keeps saying – he’s inordinately fond of that phrase – but she wants nothing from Alex. She expects nothing.
They haven’t met since the night she left his house, although she’s caught sight of him a few times. Across the floor of a bookshop as he scanned the shelves in the new-releases section; pulled up at traffic lights, one finger tapping on the steering wheel in the way she remembered so well; emerging from a restaurant one lunchtime with a few of his work colleagues.
Quite possibly he’s spotted her too on occasion, but so far they’ve managed not to come face to face. She’s relatively certain it will happen eventually, the city being too small for them to avoid one another indefinitely. She’ll deal with it when the time comes, greet him civilly and hope he does the same.
Her apartment is compact, but cleverly designed and perfectly adequate. She’s learnt to put up with various neighbourly sounds coming at her from above and below; she’s got the knack of earplugs at night. There are no obstacles that cannot be overcome: it took her long enough to learn that lesson.
And this job, this golden opportunity that landed like a gift in her lap a week or so before her birthday, has given her new heart. The hours are long; her feet ache after a day spent mostly standing, but it’s nothing that a hot bath and a glass of wine can’t cure. The wages are generous, and by and large the work is enjoyable.
Behind the counter her phone rings. She takes it from the shelf and sees George’s name. So good that they haven’t lost touch since she left his father.
‘Hello, dear.’
‘Isobel – can you talk?’
‘I can.’
‘We’ve just discovered we don’t have enough cutlery for this evening. Any chance you could bring us three of everything when you come?’
‘Of course I can.’ His first proper dinner party: about time, twenty-eight next month. She must remember to get flowers on her way home. ‘Do you need anything else? Plates, glasses?’
‘Hang on, I’ll double check—’
Her phone had rung one morning, about a week after she’d left Alex. It’s George, he said, as if she might already have removed his name from her contact list. As if she might have left him along with his father.
I heard what happened, he went on. I haven’t called to ask why, I just want to say that I hope we can still be friends. I don’t want to take sides in this.
Relief washed through her. I’m so glad, she told him. I wanted to call you, but I was afraid you mightn’t want to keep in touch …
Of course I do, he replied, sounding genuinely surprised, and Isobel was ashamed of herself for doubting him.
She didn’t ask him about his father. Alex’s name wasn’t mentioned during their brief conversation.
I’m going to stay on here for a while, George said. There’s no rush with my getting a house. It can wait.
She felt bad. It’s becaus
e of me, you feel you have to stay.
No, not at all – I’m just postponing it for a bit, that’s all. I’m in no hurry. And in the event, he stayed on in the house with his father for an entire year – but look how it’s worked out.
Maybe, all things considered, she did him a favour.
His voice is in her ear again: ‘Isobel, we’re OK for everything else, except … would you have any of those long skinny candles?’
She smiles. ‘I certainly would. Do you need candlesticks?’
‘No – we found a load of flowerpots in the shed; they’ll do nicely. Come a bit early and I’ll show you around before the others get here.’
Isobel hasn’t seen the house yet: George has only been living there for a week or so. It’s small, Daphne has told her. A bungalow, two bedrooms. Needs a bit of modernising but there’s a nice little side garden, and a garage.
Daphne knows the place well: she was the first of them to come across it. She valued it when it was put up for sale just over a year ago, had her car stolen from right around the corner on the very same day.
The house wasn’t sold; it was reclaimed by one of the people who’d inherited it. She decided she’d move in after all, along with her little son who just happened to have George for a teacher. And at some stage romance blossomed, and now George has moved in too, leaving his father to live alone, for however long that will last.
‘You busy?’ George asks, and Isobel tells him it’s been quiet so far this afternoon.
‘But on the whole it’s going well, right?’
Yes, she told him. On the whole, everything was going well.
‘Does it come in blue?’
The woman holds an olive green cushion with an owl motif in rusty oranges and browns on the front. ‘I don’t care for the green, but I think I’d like it in blue.’
Her face is shiny and very pink. A dark brown fringe draws a dead straight line across the tight skin of her forehead, an inch above her eyebrows. What appears to be a tiny diamond in her left earlobe winks when the light catches it.
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