Whitethorn Woods

by Maeve Binchy

Or maybe I might even change my name out there and call myself a normal Irish name like Deirdre or Orla.

  It wasn’t such a mad dream, was it? Earning my own living, doing something respectable, worthy even, like getting people their breakfast. It wasn’t as if I wanted to dance naked on tables. But you’d think I wanted to fly solo to the moon. How could I even consider living in a dangerous place like New York City? The matter would not even be discussed. I couldn’t understand why we had no relations in America – some marvellous family of cousins where I could go at weekends and have barbecues and clambakes and go to ball games and all the things I loved about America from the movies.

  But no. Alone in Ireland the O’Learys seemed to be without any emigrant wing of the family. No parcels of amazing American clothes ever came our way. No uncles and aunts with funny accents and permanently worn cream-coloured raincoats. And my mum and dad didn’t even begin to realise what a treasure they had in me. They wanted me to come to this place called Rossmore.

  They should have been on their knees thanking God that I was seventeen, a virgin, a non-smoker, only a very occasional drinker. And that all this was fairly rare in my crowd. I would pass my exams, I wouldn’t have screaming matches at home. I was even reasonably pleasant to my poisonous sister Catriona even when she prised open my dressing table drawer with a knife to get at my make-up. And to my very annoying little brother Justin who used to bring potato crisps into my room and stink the place out because he thought he had less chance of getting caught there.

  So what did they really want as an eldest daughter? Mother Teresa of Calcutta?

  Anyway things were pretty glum in the O’Leary household this particular June because of everything. I said very politely, no thank you, I did not want to join everyone on a lovely family holiday in Rossmore. I said even more politely that I did not think this was throwing their generosity back in their faces, just that I did not fancy walking along a river bank or going through thorny woods or ensuring that Catriona and Justin didn’t break their necks at the amusement park. And no, I didn’t think that I would make lovely friends of my own during two weeks there. And if they just said yes I’d be right out of their hair and into a lovely New York diner up to my elbows in pancakes and bagels.

  And they asked me please not to mention any of this again since it simply wouldn’t happen.

  So I went up to my room, locked the door against Catriona and Justin and looked at my face in the mirror. I wasn’t bad-looking, not gross or hairy or full of spots or anything. I wasn’t good-looking either but I had a friendly face – one that would have pleased all the clientele in the diner, specially because I had a good memory and I’d remember people and know instantly if they wanted a cappuccino to go or extra jelly on their toast.

  I don’t normally listen to the radio, I play CDs to myself. I’d really love a cheap television set in my bedroom but Dad said we’re not made of money and not to be ridiculous. But anyway I turned on this radio programme and there was some ancient one solving problems. You know, the way they pretend to be young and hip and with it and get all the words wrong. So some crazy girl had written in saying that her mother was a mad suspicious old bat and she couldn’t go anywhere or do anything. So I yawned to myself and said, ‘Tell me about it,’ but I did wonder why she thought the old one on the radio would have anything to say that would be remotely useful.

  The old one said, yes it was desperate that old and young people didn’t understand each other but there was a solution. Oh yes, I thought, of course there’s a solution. Give in, give up, lose the argument, lose hope.

  I waited for her to come out with this but instead she said: ‘Your mother is lonely, dear, lonely and confused, confide in her, make her your ally.’

  Sure, really great idea. I start making my mum my ally and in two minutes she’ll say, ‘You’re not getting round me, do you hear?’

  ‘Tell your mother about your concerns and your worries about the world, ask her about hers. She may not respond immediately but, my dear, she will respond in time. Mothers of teenage girls may look confident but in fact they are often anxious and beached creatures. Be interested, pretend an interest at first and a real interest will follow. You are on the eve of making your mother your great, great friend. Act at friendship first and then as time goes by it will become real …’

  What kind of a world do these old ones live in? Imagine – she’s paid serious money to go on the radio and talk all this nonsense. I mean, give us a break here.

  Then the old one went on to talk about two best friends who had a fight and she told the one who had written in to make the first gesture to hold out her hand and say, Look, I don’t want to fight … Which was of course the right advice but she’d probably read it somewhere. Mothers lonely and beached. Huh.

  They had had a row, Mum and Dad, we all knew that, it showed itself by over-politeness at supper. I didn’t know what it was about and I didn’t really care.

  ‘Take your elbows off the table, Catriona, and show some respect for the great meal your mother has made for all of us …’

  ‘Don’t all talk at once, children. Your father has had a long and very tiring day …’

  I didn’t know what it was about, honestly, I didn’t care. They sometimes had these coldnesses. But it would pass. I pretended to take no notice. Catriona and Justin, of course, who have the brains of a flea between them, did notice and commented on it.

  ‘Are you having a fight with Daddy?’ Catriona asked.

  ‘No, darling, of course not,’ Mum said in an awful tinny voice.

  ‘Are you going to get divorced, Daddy?’ Justin wondered.

  ‘No, Justin, eat your supper,’ Dad said.

  ‘Which of you will I go with?’ Justin asked, looking from one to the other anxiously.

  ‘Nonsense, Justin, how could a couple with such a wonderful son as you possibly get divorced?’ I said. I was being sarcastic but Justin doesn’t get irony.

  ‘Oh all right then,’ he said happily and attacked the rest of his supper.

  I helped Mum stack the dishwasher.

  ‘That was good of you, Lucky,’ she said.

  ‘Oh you know. Men!’ I sighed.

  She looked at me suddenly and I thought I saw tears in her eyes. But I didn’t want to get soft in the head and make her my great, great friend like the old one on the radio said.

  Next morning Dad said I was a terrific daughter, and since he had been saying I was a scourge from on high for the past few weeks I got worried and thought maybe they were going to split up.

  So I said nothing. I’m getting good at shrugging.

  Dad wasn’t home for supper next day and Mum was locked up with her sister in the dining room. I tried to listen until I saw Catriona doing the same so I ordered her to go upstairs and not to be so appalling as to listen to other people’s private conversations.

  Dad came home very late. I tried to listen at their bedroom door but there was nothing to hear. Just total silence.

  The next day I decided to do something different. The days were tedious now because we had reached such a stand-off.

  Mum had a job working in a children’s boutique: it was mornings only, so that she could be home to police us all in the afternoons. I had nothing to do so I went along to the boutique (we were never allowed to call it a shop). She was alarmed as old people always are when they see someone from home. She thought something was wrong.

  I told her that nothing was wrong, just that there was a new pasta bar near by and that maybe she might feel like us having lunch there together. And her face lit up like the Kish Lighthouse.

  During lunch, Mum said, ‘It’s hard on you, Lucky, having to come to Rossmore with us this year.’

  I hadn’t told her yet that there wasn’t a chance I would go on such a dreary holiday with them. But for some reason I remembered the old one on the radio talking about mothers being beached and lonely. It was worth a try if I could get what I wanted.

  ‘It’s probably
not all that easy for you either, Mum,’ I said.

  She looked at me with a long look. ‘No, sometimes it’s not, Lucky,’ she said. She paused as if she were going to say something very important. So I waited. I wondered, would she tell me that Dad bored her to death or she had a toy boy or that I could go to New York, but actually she said none of these things.

  ‘Things have a way of working out, you know,’ was what she said in the end. It was so dull and so useless I hadn’t an idea what to say.

  So I said, ‘You might be right, Mum,’ and she smiled at me and patted my hand and knocked all the linguine off my fork. I felt like life was over if this was all she could say and I kicked a stone the whole way home, which was stupid because I took the whole front off my fairly new shoes.

  Mum was going shopping but I said I had things to do, I was afraid I might kill her stone dead in the supermarket if I went with her. Instead I went home and lay on my bed and wished that I was forty-three, or something ancient with all my life behind me. I turned on the radio and it was some awful thing about James Joyce and all the mad foreigners who come over here.

  There was this girl interviewing some Yank girl who was spending her sixteenth birthday traipsing round with her mother, following the whole journey they made in Ulysses. Well, I thought, bad as Mum is – and she is pretty barking mad – she’d never make me do that.

  And this one, June, with an Italian name – Arpino or something – said she had had Irish relations called O’Leary and they were originally from the dreary Rossmore, which we were too, from the North Circular Road, which is where Dad’s family is from. And suddenly I got this thought. Could she be my cousin?

  Could June Arpino and her family get me out to New York to work in a diner?

  I listened like mad for more information. She was staying in that budget hotel, the place that looked like a prison in Eastern Europe. I rang the radio station and they told me she, this June Arpino girl, wasn’t there, that it was an interview done earlier in the day; but they gave me the phone number of the hotel and said that half the country seemed to have been phoning in and they were all heading for the hotel.

  Imagine! Maybe they all wanted her to get them jobs in a diner. People are so odd.

  So I might go as well, it would be a laugh.

  Mum knocked on the bedroom door. She said she had been looking at skirts for herself but none of them fitted her for some reason so she had bought one for me instead. It was nice actually, pink velvet – not like the things she usually gets which a child in an orphanage in the nineteenth century would be ashamed to wear.

  ‘Did Dad ever have anyone who went to America, anyone from the North Circular Road?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, his uncle went over an insult or some cracked thing, no one can remember what it was. And no one knows where they are, so they’re no use to you, love, for your diner plans, I’m afraid.’ She genuinely did look sorry.

  ‘I think I’ve found them,’ I said and told my mum. Amazingly she seemed interested, and pleased. Excited even.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she agreed.

  The hotel was as awful on the inside as from outside. Absolutely full of people, and would you believe it, some of Dad’s dreadful cousins were there too, and they were all roaring at each other with excitement, and there in the middle of it all were two Americans who had to be June and her mother.

  June was the image of me, we were like sisters. And she was wearing a pink velvet skirt. Mum and the others were screeching away, with Mum telling all kinds of terrible personal details about how she had a fight with Dad and he never apologised and she was sick of always being the one who ended up saying sorry.

  So June’s mother suddenly weighed in and said that if she had her life all over again she would certainly have made some kind of apology to June’s father rather than letting him go off with a trashy young woman and having two more kids …

  June and I talked to each other so that we wouldn’t have to listen to all this historical stuff. She was a whole year younger of course, but with her being American it sort of levelled out – they mature more quickly over there. And we thought, wasn’t it extraordinary that we were related and had never known the other existed.

  Mum rang Dad on her mobile and he turned up half an hour later and the first thing he said was to Mum, that he was sorry he was so difficult and Mum kissed him in front of everyone. And in minutes there he was shaking hands with all of his cousins and telling them Mum was the best wife in the world.

  June was just great.

  I told her I had two beds in my room if she wanted to stay with me. We might even go down to this mad Rossmore place which had a wishing well never known to fail. My mum said she’d like to have a word with the saint at that well because the first husband she had sent had not turned out to be that great. Maybe he was only a rehearsal, maybe the real husband might be still out there waiting. It was hugely embarrassing at her age of course but June and I could cope.

  And June’s mother said that of course they could change the air ticket and after their holiday here with us, and the visit to this Rossmore place, I could go back and stay with them in New York. They knew a terrific diner where I could work. A really respectable family place.

  Mum and Dad weren’t so sure at the start but June whispered at me that I should remind them that the alternative was going to Cyprus or Majorca and throwing my knickers away at the airport. So that sort of concentrated their minds. It wasn’t definite yet. There was still a journey to go down that road. But with my new cousin June I was sure I’d swing it.

  I caught Mum looking at me a bit soppily.

  ‘You’re not drunk, Mum?’ I asked her anxiously.

  ‘No, not remotely. Do you remember what I was saying to you this morning, Lucky?’ she asked in an awful Mary Poppins voice.

  June and I had been talking about how easy it was to keep mothers happy if you just talked their language. They didn’t know you were parroting it back.

  ‘You said things have a way of working out,’ I said.

  And Mum’s face lit up with pleasure. ‘You see, you remember! You really are my greatest friend, Lucky,’ she said. ‘I’ll miss you so much when you go to America.’

  And I smiled back. It was a complicated smile, built on many layers.

  First it was the smile of huge relief. I had won the battle, I was going to work in a New York diner. My mother had admitted as much.

  Then it was the smile of a friend as the old woman on the radio had advised us all. She had said that it would work wonders. She had said in her talk that at first it would be an act, but after a time we would find that we actually meant it. That was an amazing thing about being grown up, time passes quickly.

  I was beginning to feel that it wasn’t a pretence any more.

  When I said all that bit to my mum that she was my greatest friend too, I meant it. I wasn’t acting any more. I did mean it.

  Maybe I was very lucky and didn’t need to change my name after all.

  CHAPTER 11

  Tell Me Why?

  Part 1 – Emer

  Tell me, why did I have to get one of those huge digital clocks where you could see the figures from the other side of the Rossmore Hotel? Why couldn’t I have had a small travel clock like normal people instead of this big thing the size of a dinner plate beside my bed with red numbers changing every minute?

  I have been watching it now for four and a half minutes while it changed from 9.08 and a bit to 9.13 a.m. I vaguely remember setting the alarm for 9.30. I have a sort of cloudy memory of doing that. My thinking was that if I got up at nine-thirty I could be showered, dressed, have a coffee and be on the road by ten.

  It’s really important that I be on the road in good shape today. I have an interview for the job that I’ve wanted for years: director of the Heartfelt Art Gallery, a marvellous outfit where I have yearned to work for ages. I had a lot of the right qualifications but there was always someone else in the job. Now the guy who had run it
for the last three years was off to Australia. Today I have my interview.

  So, tell me why had I not gone to bed early, sober and alone?

  I can’t move, you see, because it would wake him up.

  And then he might think I was signalling that I wanted it all over again. I must lie here motionless until I sense the alarm is going off and after one quick blast of its horrific noise I will quench it and leap out of bed all in the same movement and run to the bathroom.

  I’ve got nothing on, obviously, so I’ll have to move quickly. There will be no lovely luxurious time while the fizzing drink cures the head and the coffee sends out soothing noises and smells from the percolator. No, it has to be very brisk and businesslike. As if this is the most normal thing in the world to have invited the taxi driver in and gone to bed with him.

  Tell me, why didn’t I leave him in his taxicab like ninety-nine per cent of the population would have done? Why couldn’t I have done that too?

  I suppose I could blame it on the reception I was at. They had this absolutely rot-gut wine – it practically tinkled down your throat it was so rough. And no food, of course. Not even a biscuit or a crisp to soak it up. It just went on down there in my stomach doing its evil work, sloshing about into every vein and gut and bit of muscle tissue, gradually moving its way remorselessly up to the brain to paralyse it completely. There was that, and of course the fact that I really hated Monica, the woman whose paintings were being shown.

  I had always hated her, long ago back at art college, long before she made silly fluttery eyes with Ken on my birthday, at the meal I was paying for. When she knew that I liked him.

  And now I hate the way she smiles with her mouth but not her eyes. I hate the way she gets noticed and fêted and admired, and how everyone was standing in line to buy her paintings. There were red dots everywhere to show that they had been sold. Like measles all over her awful chocolate-box paintings.

  Well, why did I go? you might ask me. Why did you not stay away and prepare for your interview? Why indeed.