The Lilac Bus

by Maeve Binchy

  She hoped that Mikey Burns wouldn’t be too loud tonight with his schoolboy jokes. He was a decent poor fellow but he was hard to take at any length. The trouble was that if you made no response to him he thought you hadn’t heard and said it all again, and if you did manage a laugh he got encouraged and told you a few more.

  She arrived just at the same time as Rupert: that was good, they could sit together in the back seat. It looked a bit standoffish if you were to keep a seat for anyone, but she really couldn’t bear to be nudged by Mikey the whole way to Rathdoon or, even worse, to hear that solemn tedious little Nancy Morris telling her how to get free soap by buying toothpaste on a Wednesday or some such hare-brained scheme.

  He was a good boy, Rupert: yes that was exactly how she would describe him if anyone asked her. Good. He was an only child of parents who were middle-aged when he was a toddler and who were old now that he was a man of twenty-five. His mother was sixty-seven and his father was seventy this year. But Rupert said there were no celebrations, his father was bedridden now and was failing by the week. Rupert said it was harder and harder each time he came home because he had this vision of his father as a hardy man with views of his own on everything, and then when he got into the big bedroom on a Friday night it was the same shock, the same readjustment – a paper-thin man with a head like a skull, with nothing alive except the big restless eyes.

  Judy had known Rupert since he was a baby and yet she had only got to know him since the bus. He had always been a polite child. ‘Good morning, Mrs Hickey. Do you have anything for my pressed flower collection?’ Protestants were like that, she had always thought in her good-natured generalisations: pressed flowers, politeness, neat haircuts, remembering people’s names. Mrs Green was so proud of her Rupert, she used to find excuses to walk him down the town. The Greens had been married for twenty years when Rupert was born. Celia Ryan’s mother in the pub had whispered that she gave Mrs Green a novena to St Anne that had never been known to fail, but because of her religion she had delayed using it. The moment she had said it, Catholic or no Catholic, St Anne had intervened and there you were, there was Rupert.

  Judy told him that one night on the Lilac Bus and he laughed till the tears came down his face. ‘You’d better tell me about St Anne and what class of a saint she is. I suppose I should be thanking her that I’m here, or speaking sharply to her when times are bad.’

  Judy often smiled at Rupert’s quaint ways. He was wonderful company and the same age as her own son, Andrew, miles away in the sun of California. But she could never talk to Andrew like she talked to Rupert – in fact she could never talk to Andrew at all over the years. That was the legal agreement.

  Judy wondered would you recognise your own child.

  Suppose she went to San Francisco now and walked through Union Square, would she immediately know Andrew and Jessica? Suppose they passed her by? They would be grown man and woman, imagine, twenty-five and twenty-three. But if she didn’t know them and they didn’t know her, what was all the point of giving birth and holding a child inside you for all that time? And suppose they did recognise her, that something like an instinct made them stop and look at this fifty-year-old woman standing in the sunshine . . . What would they do? Would they cry ‘Momma, Momma’ and run to her arms like a Hollywood film? Or would they be embarrassed and wish she hadn’t turned up? They might have their own idea of a momma back in Ireland. A momma who was just not suitable. That’s what Jack said he would tell them. Their mother hadn’t been able to look after them – no other details. And when they were old enough to hear details and understand them, they would be given Judy’s address to write to and she could send them an explanation if she felt able to. She never felt able to because they never wrote. For years and years she had been rehearsing it and trying out new phrases, like practising for a job interview or a school essay.

  Little by little she realised they were eighteen, nineteen, twenty. Well old enough to ask about an unsuitable mother. Well old enough to be told. But no request ever came.

  She didn’t even write to Jack’s brother after a while. Jack’s kind big brother who had given them all a home on the West Coast of America but who had always tried to patch up the split. He had told her nothing in his letters except to assure her that the children were settling in to their school and that all was for the best.

  This evening she wondered about them both, Andrew and Jessica – golden Californians now. Were they married? Very probably. Californians married younger, divorced sooner. Was she a grandmother? Very possibly. His name might be Hank or Bud or Junior. Or were those all old names? Why did she think it was a grandson, it might be a girl, a little girl in a sunhat like Jessica had been the day they took her away. She had a Californian clock in her mind always, ever since they left twenty years ago. She never paused and said, ‘I wonder what time it is out there,’ she always knew. It was coming up to a quarter to eleven in the morning for them. It was always that when she came round the corner to the Lilac Bus. And she didn’t know if they were married or single, working in universities or as domestics. She didn’t know if they were happy or wretched, she didn’t even know if they were alive or dead.

  She slipped neatly in beside Rupert on the back seat, passing young Dee Burke who had been looking so troubled for the last Lord knows when, it was amazing she hadn’t cracked up. Past the odd young Nancy Morris. What a cuckoo in the nest that little one was – her mother was a grand little woman altogether, and Deirdre who had gone to the States was very nice, whenever she came back, full of chat. The brother in Cork was a nice lively fellow too. What had come over Nancy to make her so prissy or whatever it was she had become?

  Rupert was wearing a new jacket which obviously thrilled him to the core. It just looked like an ordinary teddy boy jacket to Judy, but then she was the first to admit she knew nothing about smart clothes. Dee Burke had gone into ecstasies over it and Rupert had flushed with pleasure.

  ‘It’s a birthday present,’ he whispered as the bus started. ‘I’ll tell you all about it later.’

  She didn’t want to hear all about it on the bus, not while her hip was aching and her head was throbbing, and that young Morris girl might well pretend not to be listening but was only two feet away from them. She felt old tonight. She was years older than everyone on the bus except Mikey Burns and she was a good few years beyond him too. She was twenty years older than the young couple who had set up the health shop and who would be dismantling it within six weeks unless there was a miracle and they discovered the Elixir of Youth and bottled it in expensive but appealing packaging. Surely she was past all this rattling backwards and forwards across the country. Surely she should have some peace and settle down, in one place or the other.

  She rooted in her big bag and gave Rupert a small parcel. ‘It’s Green Tea,’ she said. ‘Just a little to see if you like it.’

  His eyes lit up. ‘This is what you make the mint tea, the proper mint tea with?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, a handful of fresh mint, a little sugar in a glass, and you make the tea separately in a silver pot if you have one and then pour it on the mint leaves.’

  Rupert was very pleased. ‘I’d been making it with tea bags since we came back from Morocco, and it tasted really terrible, but out there it was like heaven. Oh I AM grateful to you Judy.’

  ‘It’s only a little,’ she said warningly.

  ‘Look on it as a sample. If we like it we’ll come in and buy kilos of the stuff and make your shop do a roaring trade.’

  ‘It would need it.’ She told him about the kind of trade they were doing. He was reassuring, it was the same everywhere.

  He worked in an estate agency. Things were very slow. Houses that would have leaped off the books weren’t moving at all. And there were shops closing down all over the place. But these things went in phases, he said. Things had to get better soon, the kind of people who knew about these things were confident, that’s what you had to remember. Judy said wryly that the kin
d of people who knew about such things could probably still afford to be confident, they had so many irons in the fire. It was the rest of the world that was the problem.

  They felt like old friends the way they talked. She asked him to come and advise for a bit at the cutting of the elderflower, and to help choose some of the dried rosemary and lemon balm for the little herb pillows she was making. Rupert said that for the Christmas trade she should make dozens of those and sell them herself to big shops in Grafton Street – they would make great Christmas gifts. Fine, Judy said, but what about her own shop, the shop she worked in? That’s the one she wanted to help, not big stores which would make money anyway.

  He told her about a politican’s wife who had come into the auctioneer’s and enquired politely about the location of her husband’s new flat. Somehow they all knew that this flat was not a joint undertaking and that the wife was trying to find out. Everyone in the place had copped on and they all became vaguer and more unhelpful by the minute. Eventually the woman had stormed out in a rage. And they had drafted an immensely tactful letter to the politican pointing out that his nest had not been revealed but was in danger of coming under siege.

  ‘Poor stupid woman,’ said Judy. ‘She should have let him install a harem in there if it kept him happy.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have let him do that, you’d have too much spirit,’ Rupert said admiringly.

  ‘I don’t know. I let a man walk away with my two babies twenty years ago. That wasn’t showing much spirit, was it?’ Judy said.

  Rupert gasped. Never had Judy Hickey mentioned the amazing happening that the whole town knew about in garbled versions. He had asked his mother who had said that nobody knew the whole ins and outs of it, and that Rupert’s father who had been the local solicitor then also, had been very annoyed because nobody consulted him, and he was the obvious person to have been brought in on it. But there had been something about a Garda charge and a lot of conversation and a solicitor from Dublin coming down for Jack Hickey and then documents being drawn up and Jack and the two children going to America and never coming back.

  ‘But people must know WHY,’ Rupert had insisted.

  His mother said there were more explanations than there were days in the year.

  She had been only six years married and twenty now without her man and her children, but she always kept the name Hickey. It was in case the children ever came back, people said. There was a while when she used to go into the town seventeen miles away and ask at the tourist office if you could get the lists of American tourists or just those with children. There was a while she would go up to the bus tours that sometimes came through Rathdoon and scan the seats for nine-year-old boys with seven-year-old sisters. But all that was long in the past. If it was so long in the past, why had she mentioned them now?

  ‘Are they on your mind then?’ Rupert asked gently. She replied as naturally as if she was in the habit of talking about them. She spoke with no more intensity than she had talked of the mint tea.

  ‘They are and they aren’t. We’d probably have nothing to say to each other at this stage.’

  ‘What kind of work does he do now? He’s not retired, is he?’

  ‘Who? Andrew, he’s only your age. I HOPE he hasn’t retired yet.’ She looked amused.

  ‘No, I meant your husband. I didn’t know whether your children were boys or girls.’ Rupert felt he had put his foot in it.

  ‘Boy and girl, Andrew and Jessica. Andrew and Jessica.’

  ‘Nice names,’ he said foolishly.

  ‘Yes, they are nice names aren’t they? We spent ages choosing them. No, I’ve absolutely no idea whether Jack Hickey is working or whether he is lying in a gutter being moved on by big American cops with sticks. And I don’t know if he ever worked in California or whether he lived off his brother. I never cared. Honestly I never gave him a thought. It sounds like someone protesting, I know it does, but it’s funny: I have great trouble remembering what he looked like then and I never until this moment wondered how he’s aged. Possibly got fatter. His elder brother Charlie was a lovely man, he was fat, and there was a family picture I remember, and the parents were fat.’

  Rupert was silent for a moment. Such obvious indifference was chilling. You could understand hate or bitterness even. You could forgive a slow fire of rage and resentment. But she talked about him just as you would about some minor celebrity who had been in the news one time. Is he dead or alive? Who knows, who remembers? On to another topic.

  ‘And do the children, well . . . do Andrew and Jessica keep in touch even a little bit?’

  ‘No. That was the agreement.’

  If he was ever to know, it would be now. He inclined his head slightly to see if anyone else was listening. But no, Dee was fast asleep with her head at an awkward angle, and that awful Morris girl was asleep too. The others were too far ahead to hear.

  ‘That was a harsh sort of agreement,’ he said tentatively.

  ‘Oh they thought they were justified. People used to think it was quite justifiable to hang a sheep stealer, don’t forget.’

  ‘Is that what you did?’ he asked smiling. ‘Steal a sheep?’

  ‘Would that it had been so simple. No no, I thought you knew, I thought your father might have told you. No, I was a dope peddler. That’s even worse than anything, isn’t it?’

  She looked like a mischievous girl the way she said it. He felt she couldn’t be serious.

  ‘No, what was it about really?’ he laughed.

  ‘I told you. I was the local drugs person.’ She spoke without pride or shame. Just as if she was saying what her name was before she was married. Rupert had never been so startled. ‘You do surprise me,’ he said hoping he was managing to keep the shock out of his voice. ‘But that was YEARS ago.’

  ‘It was the sixties. I suppose it is years ago, but your lot aren’t the first to know about drugs, you know – the sixties had their own scene.’

  ‘But wasn’t that only in America and England? Not like now.’

  ‘Of course it was here too, not in huge housing estates, and not kids and not heroin. But with brightish, youngish things, at dances, and people who just left college who had been abroad, and it was all very silly, and to this day I think perfectly harmless.’

  ‘Hash, was it?’

  ‘Oh yes, Marijuana, pot, a few amphetamines, a bit of LSD.’

  ‘You had acid? YOU had acid?’ He was half-admiring, half-shocked.

  ‘Rupert, what I had was everything that was going, that wasn’t the point. The point was that I was supplying it, and I got caught.’

  ‘Why on earth were you doing that?’

  ‘Out of boredom in a way, I suppose. And the money was nice, not huge but nice. And there was a lot of fun too, you met great people – not dead-wood people like Jack Hickey. I was very stupid really. I deserved all that happened. I often think that.’ She had paused to muse.

  Rupert mused with her for a bit. Then he spoke again:

  ‘Were you doing it for long? Before you were caught?’

  ‘About eighteen months. I was at a party and we all smoked something, Lord knows what it was called – I thought it was great, Jack had said nothing at the time, but when we got home he roared and shouted, and said that if this ever happened again, and what he’d do and what he wouldn’t do.’

  ‘Had he refused it then?’

  ‘Ah you didn’t know our Jack, not at all, he had passed the poor little cigarette with the best but he had kept his mouth closed and only pretended to inhale. He was sober and furious. Oh, there was a barney that went on all week, then the ultimatum: if I ever touched it again . . . curtains, he’d take the children off to America, I’d never see them again, no court in the land . . . you could write it out yourself as a script and it would be right, it would be what he said.’ Rupert listened, fascinated. Judy’s soft voice went on:

  ‘Well, Jack was dealing with the livestock. It wasn’t like a farm, you know, the house then, it was like a r
anch: there were only livestock – no milking, no hens, no crops, just beasts in the field – buy them, graze them, sell them. We had poor old Nanny, she had been my Nanny in the days of old decency and she minded Andrew and Jessica, I used to go here and there. Gathering material for a book on the wild flowers of the West. Gathering bad company more likely. Anyway, because I had my little car and because I went here and there what could be more natural than I go to Dublin or to London as I did twice to get some stuff for people. Others suggested it, I took it up like a flash.’

  ‘It’s like a story out of a book,’ Rupert breathed admiringly.

  ‘A horror story then. I remember it as if it was yesterday: acting on information received, warrant, deeply embarassed Mr Hickey, a person of such importance as yourself, absolutely sure there’s nothing in it, but have to apply the same laws to the high as to the low, and if we could get it all over as quickly as possible wouldn’t that be for the best? Dear, dear, heavens above, what have we here, in MRS Hickey’s car, and MRS Hickey’s briefcase in the bedroom. And hidden away behind MRS Hickey’s books. Well, he was at a loss for words and perhaps Mr Hickey could come up with some explanation?’

  She was like an actress, Rupert thought suddenly. He could see the Sergeant or the Superintendent or whoever it was. She could do a one-woman show, the way she was telling the story, and it was without gesture or emphasis since it was being told in a low voice not to wake the others as the minibus sped through the evening.

  ‘It took for ever. And there were people down from Dublin and there was a TD, someone I didn’t even know Jack knew. And Jack said that the whole place was becoming too much for him anyway and he had been thinking about selling it for a while, but if there was this scandal then people would know he was doing it under a cloud and the price of the place would drop right down. They were all businessmen, even the guards, they could understand that.