The Lilac Bus

by Maeve Binchy

  ‘Then the documents. Jack was going to take the children to his brother unless I signed a sworn statement that I agreed I was an unfit person to act as their mother any longer. The Sergeant could charge me, as soon as Jack had the place sold, his plans made and was off to California with the babies. He begged me to think of the children.’

  ‘He did that and yet took them away from you?’ Rupert was confused.

  ‘Yes, you see his point was that I was a drugs criminal, that wasn’t a good start for any child: they’d be better without me. A deal had been done, kind wise people had seen extenuating circumstances, it was up to me to make the most of them.’

  She looked out the window for a while.

  ‘I didn’t think it would be for ever. I was frightened, I was sure it would all die down. I said yes. He sold the place, well he sold it to that gangster, remember, who conned everyone and went off with a packet. Then the Liquidator or whatever sold it to the nuns and they made it into the conference centre. So now you know the story of the Big House and all the bad people who lived there until the present day.’ He hadn’t realised that she was once mistress of the big Doon House where she now lived in the gate lodge. Today the house had priests, nuns and laypeople coming to do retreats, have discussions. And sometimes there were ordinary conferences that weren’t religious at all: that’s how the community made the costs of the place. But it was usually a very quiet type of conference where the delegates weren’t expecting much of a night life. Rathdoon could offer Ryan’s Pub and Billy Burns’ chicken and chips; people usually expected more if they came a long way to a conference.

  ‘I had to leave Doon House within a month. But he tricked me in one way. Even with the slightest hint of a drugs offence in those days you couldn’t get into the States. They wouldn’t give me a visa. And in order to make the distance as great as possible between poor Andrew and Jessica over there and their mad mother over here Jack arranged that I be charged with a minor offence: possession. It was a nothing, even here, and compared to what I could have been charged with, which was dealing, it was ludicrously light. But then the deal had been done, don’t forget. And even being charged with possession kept me out of the States.’

  There was another silence.

  ‘Wasn’t that a bad trick to play on you?’ Rupert said.

  ‘Yes. Yes. I suppose he thought like the people who burned people in the Inquisition . . . that they were doing the right thing. You know, rooting out evil.’

  ‘It was very drastic, even for the sixties wasn’t it?’

  ‘Will you stop saying the sixties as if it was the stone age. YOU were born in the sixties, don’t forget.’

  ‘I don’t remember much about them,’ Rupert grinned.

  ‘No. Well I suppose you’d call it drastic; Jack would have called it effective. He was a great man for getting the job done.’ She spoke with scorn: ‘That’s all he cared about. That’s done, he’d say proudly. It was the same coping with me. But Rupert, did you not know all this before? I mean, I don’t want to make out that the whole town talks of me morning, noon and night, but I would have thought that you must have heard some drift of it?’

  ‘No, never. I knew that the children had gone away with their father and I think I asked why but I was never told.’

  ‘That’s because you’re so nicely brought up! They’re too well bred in your house, they’d never talk of other people’s business.’

  ‘I think my mother’d be glad to if she knew about it. And it’s not only us. I once asked Celia why you didn’t have your children, and she said there was some desperate row years ago when judges were even worse than they are today. That’s all, nobody knows about the . . . er . . . the smoke and things.’

  ‘I don’t know whether to be pleased or disappointed,’ Judy laughed. ‘I always thought people believed I was up to no good with all the herbal remedies, bordering on the witch doctor nearly.’

  ‘I’m afraid people think that’s very worthy, we’ll have to make your image more villainous for you,’ Rupert said.

  ‘Oh for ages the unfortunate guards used to come and inspect my herb garden. I had a map of it for them in the end, and told them they must come in whenever they liked and that I would explain anything that looked a bit amiss. Then by the time I went to Dublin, they’d more or less written me off as a dangerous drugs pusher.’

  ‘You mean you’re in the clear at last, after twenty years?’

  ‘I don’t know: sometimes I see the imprint of heavy boots round the camomile beds. Eternal vigilance.’

  ‘Do you hate Jack Hickey for it?’

  ‘No, I said to you I never think of him. But you’d probably find that hard to believe, especially when I think of the children a lot, and to all intents and purposes I don’t know them at all. They’re strangers to me.’

  ‘Yes,’ Rupert obviously did find it hard to understand.

  ‘It’s the same with your mother, you know. Even though she doesn’t let on, she thinks of you every day up in Dublin, she is aware of you in a way that it’s hard to explain.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so.’

  ‘I know it, I asked her once, just to know whether I was odd. She said that when you were away at school it was the same and at university and then when you went into the company. She says that often in her day she pauses and wonders what Rupert’s doing now.’

  ‘Heavens,’ he said.

  ‘Not for long, just for a second, you know, not brooding. But I expect you don’t pause and wonder what she’s doing.’

  ‘No, well I think of them a lot, of course, and since Father’s been so badly and everything. I DO think of them of course,’ he said somewhat defensively.

  ‘Stop getting upset, I was only using you as an example. Even if Andrew and Jessica had lived with me until they were grown-up they might still be away and not thinking about me any more. It’s the way things happen.’

  ‘You’re dead easy to talk to, I wish I could talk to my mother like I talk to you. She’s much older of course,’ he added tactfully.

  ‘She is indeed, she could nearly be my mother too, but that’s not the point . . . You can never talk to your own mother, it’s a law of nature.’

  She smiled and looked out the window, and when that Nancy Morris started talking sense for once about how to relax neck muscles she joined in. She was afraid that young Rupert Green had too much of the Meaning Of Life and the Wronged Woman’s viewpoint. She decided to let him snuggle back into his expensive Italian jacket and dream whatever his dreams were.

  She always got on better with young people. Someone once said she should have been a teacher but she said no, that would have been putting herself on the other side of the desk from them. But she had much more young friends than people her own age. Bart Kennedy, for example. She could talk to Bart till the cows came home, and she only exchanged the time of day with his father. Kev Kennedy up there in the front of the bus, he was another story: it was very hard going having a chat with Kev. He’d remind you of a young lad who’d been posted at a doorway to give a warning when the master was approaching. And she liked Celia and Dee, she thought, looking round the bus. And young Tom Fitzgerald, he was a great lad. You couldn’t like Nancy Morris but she wasn’t young anyway. Despite her years she was an old woman and always had been.

  And the young people of Rathdoon had always been a great help to her with the things she grew in the small bit of land that Jack Hickey had given her twenty long years ago. She was DIFFERENT to other people, they told her: she didn’t pass judgement on them all, she didn’t tell them they should be married, or settled down, or more provident or less drinky. And even though they may have thought she was half cracked they came and helped her dig and pick and dry and pack.

  She never found the house lonely, no more than the flat in Dublin. Not after all this time. She liked her own company, she ate meals at odd times, she would listen to music at midnight if she liked. In the flat she wore padded earphones and thought she must look
like some ageing raver if anyone could see her, but it was a house with many bedsits and flats and you couldn’t wake civil servants and people who worked in big office blocks by playing your music through their walls. She did not feel the need of headphones in the lonely little lodge that was all Jack Hickey gave her from the big house. There was nobody near enough to hear, and the birds seemed to like hearing concertos and symphonies. They came and sat on the fence to listen more carefully.

  The first time Tom had dropped her there he said he’d wait till she turned on the light. She had been pleased. He had enough nature in him to make sure that she got in safely. But then he was like all the youngsters she knew nowadays, far more natural and a lot more decency in them than the bombasts of her time. Like young Chris and Karen who ran the health shop. They cared so much about it, they never wanted to be rich, to find a good line in anything which would be a snazzy seller and move quickly. They knew none of the jargon of the middle aged businessman, and because they were idealistic and simple about things they were going to go to the wall. Her heart was heavy thinking about them. Maybe over in California somewhere Jessica and her husband, if she had one, were starting a health shop. Suppose they were in difficulties, wouldn’t it be great if some kind older person were to help?

  Judy only had a life interest in her gate lodge, she couldn’t sell it even if she wanted to. She only rented her bedsitter in Dublin, she had no savings. Once she had saved the fare to America and kept the post office book thumbed and touched so often it was almost illegible. She had it always in her handbag and would finger it as if it were the ticket to the States. But not now. And she would love so dearly to be able to contribute to Chris and Karen and their dream. Because it was her dream, that shop too. They could make her a director or some such nonsense. If only she had a small lump sum and a regular little subsidy for them instead of taking a small wage from their very sparse little till.

  She told Rupert not to waste his weekend coming up to help her in the garden. He had come home to be with his parents and he might as well stay in Dublin if he didn’t spend his time with his dying father and give his mother some lift by being in the house all weekend. She was very firm about this, even when he said he’d like the work and the exercise. There’d be plenty of time for all that later. Let him not waste the last months or weeks of his father’s life digging and hoeing in a stranger’s garden.

  ‘You’re not a stranger, Judy, you’re a friend,’ Rupert had said. She had been pleased at that too.

  It was a bright sunny September Saturday. The place seemed to be full of activity. You got weekends when that happened, when Rathdoon seemed to hum with excitement and you got other weekends when not even a tornado coming down Patrick Street would shake them up. She saw Nancy Morris prowling up and down as if she was looking for lost treasure, Kev Kennedy was in and out of his father’s shop with a face on him that made it clear the Mafia had put out a contract on him that morning. Every time you stepped out on the road there was someone driving into town that would nearly mow you down. Mrs Casey’s ramshackle car with Nancy Morris’s mother in it, Mikey Burns going round the place with a set face on him, either doing messages or taking his brother Billy’s children blackberrying. He was preoccupied to a degree she had never known. She saw Celia too during the day driving a car with the intent look of someone in a rally. Her mother was beside her and the back of the car was filled with some kind of luggage under a rug. Tom Fitzgerald came in for a couple of hours to help in the garden, saying that since he hadn’t had one single cross word from any member of his family or their spouses he felt things were too good to be true and he wouldn’t risk staying in their company one more minute in case the whole thing would fall apart. She saw Dee Burke driving her mother to town, her face empty and sad, her mother talking away without seeing any emptiness at all beside her. Imagine anyone thinking the country was quiet. Some weekend she must ask Karen and Chris to come and stay – some bank holiday, if they were still in business.

  Red Kennedy came in to help his brother Bart.

  ‘Would these make a lot in Dublin?’ he asked, looking at the little boxes of seeds.

  Judy reflected: ‘Not a lot, in a way, we’re just the wrong size. If it were a one-woman operation selling them at the side of the road, yes there’s a living; otherwise it should really be huge nurseries and big chain stores and all that. Still we struggle on.’

  But it underlined to her the fruitlessness of it all, and the waste of effort not just from her but from decent young fellows like Bart and Red, like Mikey last week and Tom Fitzgerald’s nephews when they were home from school. Was it really fair asking them to help in such a doomed business venture. They never did it for money, there wasn’t any, but even in terms of their enthusiasm was it wrong to take so much of that as well? She thought of Chris and Karen in Dublin, anxious and also anxious on HER behalf. They felt they owed her a place and a living because she had been so solidly supportive for them. How she wished that there had been a letter from a firm of American solicitors saying that the late James Jonathan Hickey of San Francisco, California had left her a legacy and that her two children were going to fly over and deliver it personally. She often had fantasies about the children arriving, but this was the first time she had thought about the money. Yes, she’d even take a legacy from Jack even if the children didn’t deliver it. Anything to help Chris and Karea.

  Soon she called a halt to the work. Judy’s great success was that she stopped her helpers before they got tired.

  There were huge glasses of her elderflower wine which some said was better and reached you more powerfully than anything that was pulled as a pint down in Ryan’s. They sat on a wall in the sun and drank it, and the Kennedys went home.

  It was dark in the small house and she felt well when she had washed the earth off. She lay out on her window seat with her hands behind her head.

  ‘You look like a cat,’ Rupert said as he came in. The door was never closed in summer, never locked in winter.

  ‘That’s good. Cats are very relaxed,’ Judy said.

  ‘Are you relaxed?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘Not in my head. My head is worrying about inessential things like money. I never worried about money before.’

  ‘I suppose it was always easy to get it before.’

  ‘Yes, well in the old days I told you how I got it, but since then I haven’t needed it much. Now, I’d like to keep the shop open, that’s all.’

  Rupert sat down on a rocking chair that squeaked. He got up immediately and went for the oil.

  She thanked him, but said his mother had a rocking chair, he should be sitting on that.

  ‘There’s nothing to say, I had to escape for a little bit,’ he pleaded.

  ‘Only a little,’ Judy said.

  ‘It’s just that he tried to talk. He asks are there many houses on the market and things.’ Rupert had a face full of pain.

  ‘But isn’t that good? He’s well enough, alert enough to know. Kind enough to care.’

  ‘And mother says, that he really likes having me home. But it’s nothing. Nothing at all.’

  ‘Only if you make it nothing for them.’ Judy lost her sympathy. She stood up and stretched.

  ‘Listen to me Rupert Green, not one more minute of your father’s time am I taking. I’m going for a walk in Jack Hickey’s woods.’ He looked hurt.

  ‘Please boy, please. Think of all those years when you’ll say if only I could have just sat there and talked about any old thing. And for your mother, please. I’ll meet you and you can buy me a pint of that synthetic stuff they call chilled wine down in Ryan’s.’ He brightened up.

  ‘Will you? That would be nice.’

  ‘When he’s asleep, when he’s had some return from you.’

  ‘I’m not THAT bad.’

  ‘No, but he was nearly fifty years of age when you arrived in his life and he had to be woken up with your teething and your screaming and then you didn’t come into his office: he co
uldn’t put Green and Son. It’s Green and MacMahon. Go on, sit with him, talk about anything. It doesn’t matter if it seems formal and meaningless, you’re there, you’re trying . . . that’s all that matters.’

  ‘And what time will we go to Ryan’s?’ He was eager.

  ‘RUPERT! Will you give over, this is not a date. Ryan’s is not a cocktail lounge, it’s the only bar in Rathdoon, I’ll be down there when I feel like it and you come when your father’s well asleep and you’ve had a bit of time with your mother.’

  ‘Around nine or so?’ he said desperate to be specific.

  ‘Around nine or so,’ she said resignedly.

  She put on her boots. It was a long time since she had walked the woods. The three nuns who ran the ecumenical conferences and the diocesan seminars in the big house knew vaguely that Mrs Hickey in the gate lodge had once lived in the big house. They were always polite to her and encouraged her to wander around if she ever felt like it. They were possibly relieved that the wildish looking woman in the gypsy style headscarves didn’t take them up too often on their offer. She never went anywhere near the house but she had told them it was nice to be able to feel free to walk under those old trees and pick flowers. Sometimes she would leave a great bunch of bluebells at their door, wrapped up in damp leaves. She never rang or asked to be entertained in the parlour. It was an ideal relationship.

  Today she walked more purposefully. She didn’t just stroll following a whim or a line of young saplings. No, today she knew where she was heading.

  It was still there in among the ivy covered trees. Wild now, but hidden from the most determined searchers because of that old fallen tree. It looked as if there was nothing beyond. She eased herself over the tree and stood once more in her own little marijuana grove. She saw the cannabis plants that she had begun twenty-two years ago, many dead, many seeded and wasted. Some living though, some needing only a little attention.