‘All right, Polly?’ he said, his arms still about her, with tenderness in his voice.
‘Yes, of course.’ She wanted to thank him again, and to explain that she was thanking him because he had respected her feelings and stood by her. She wanted to ask him not to go back and apologize, but she couldn’t bring herself to do that because the request seemed fussy. ‘Yes, of course I’m all right,’ she said.
In the sitting-room the babysitter woke up and reported that the children had been as good as gold. ‘Not a blink out of either of them, Mrs Dillard.’
‘I’ll run you home,’ Gavin said.
‘Oh, it’s miles and miles.’
‘It’s our fault for living in such a godforsaken suburb.’
‘Well, it’s terribly nice of you, sir.’
Polly paid her and asked her again what her name was because she’d forgotten. The girl repeated that it was Hannah McCarthy. She gave Polly her telephone number in case Estrella shouldn’t be available on another occasion. She didn’t at all mind coming out so far, she said.
When they’d gone Polly made tea in the kitchen. She placed the teapot and a cup and saucer on a tray and carried the tray upstairs to their bedroom. She was still the same as she’d always been, they would say to one another, lying there, her husband and her friend. They’d admire her for that, they’d share their guilt and their remorse. But they’d be wrong to say she was the same.
She took her clothes off and got into bed. The outer suburb was what it was, so was the shell of middle age: she didn’t complain because it would be silly to complain when you were fed and clothed and comfortable, when your children were cared for and warm, when you were loved and respected. You couldn’t forever weep with anger, or loudly deplore yourself and other people. You couldn’t hit out with your fists as though you were back at the Misses Hamilton’s nursery school in Putney. You couldn’t forever laugh among the waiters at the Ritz just because it was fun to be there.
In bed she poured herself a cup of tea, telling herself that what had happened tonight – and what was probably happening now – was reasonable and even fair. She had rejected what was distasteful to her, he had stood by her and had respected her feelings: his unfaithfulness seemed his due. In her middle-age calmness that was how she felt. She couldn’t help it.
It was how she had fallen, she said to herself, but all that sounded silly now.
The Death of Peggy Meehan
Like all children, I led a double life. There was the ordinariness of dressing in the morning, putting on shoes and combing hair, stirring a spoon through porridge I didn’t want, and going at ten to nine to the nuns’ elementary school. And there was a world in which only the events I wished for happened, where boredom was not permitted and of which I was both God and King.
In my ordinary life I was the only child of parents who years before my birth had given up hope of ever having me. I remember them best as being different from other parents: they were elderly, it seemed to me, two greyly fussing people with grey hair and faces, in grey clothes, with spectacles. ‘Oh, no, no,’ they murmured regularly, rejecting on my behalf an invitation to tea or to play with some other child. They feared on my behalf the rain and the sea, and walls that might be walked along, and grass because grass was always damp. They rarely missed a service at the Church of the Holy Redeemer.
In the town where we lived, a seaside town thirty miles from Cork, my father was employed as a senior clerk in the offices of Cosgriff and McLoughlin, Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths. With him on one side of me and my mother on the other, we walked up and down the brief promenade in winter, while the seagulls shrieked and my father worried in case it was going to rain. We never went for walks through fields or through the heathery wastelands that sloped gently upwards behind the town, or by the river where people said Sir Walter Ralegh had fished. In summer, when the visitors from Cork came, my mother didn’t like to let me near the sands because the sands, she said, were full of fleas. In summer we didn’t walk on the promenade but out along the main Cork road instead, past a house that appeared to me to move. It disappeared for several minutes as we approached it, a trick of nature, I afterwards discovered, caused by the undulations of the landscape. Every July, for a fortnight, we went to stay in Montenotte, high up above Cork city, in a boarding-house run by my mother’s sister, my Aunt Isabella. She, too, had a grey look about her and was religious.
It was here, in my Aunt Isabella’s Montenotte boarding-house, that this story begins: in the summer of 1936, when I was seven. It was a much larger house than the one we lived in ourselves, which was small and narrow and in a terrace. My Aunt Isabella’s was rather grand in its way, a dark place with little unexpected half-landings, and badly lit corridors. It smelt of floor polish and of a mustiness that I have since associated with the religious life, a smell of old cassocks. Everywhere there were statues of the Virgin, and votive lights and black-framed pictures of the Holy Child. The residents were all priests, old and middle-aged and young, eleven of them usually, which was all the house would hold. A few were always away on their holidays when we stayed there in the summer.
In the summer of 1936 we left our own house in the usual way, my father fastening all the windows and the front and back doors and then examining the house from the outside to make sure he’d done the fastening and the locking properly. We walked to the railway station, each of us carrying something, my mother a brown cardboard suitcase and my father a larger one of the same kind. I carried the sandwiches we were to have on the train, and a flask of carefully made tea and three apples, all packed into a sixpenny fish basket.
In the house in Montenotte my Aunt Isabella told us that Canon McGrath and Father Quinn were on holiday, one in Tralee, the other in Galway. She led us to their rooms, Canon McGrath’s for my father and Father Quinn’s for my mother and myself. The familiar trestle-bed was erected at the foot of the bed in my mother’s room. During the course of the year a curate called Father Lalor had repaired it, my aunt said, after it had been used by Canon McGrath’s brother from America, who’d proved too much for the canvas.
‘Ah, aren’t you looking well, Mr Mahon!’ the red-faced and jolly Father Smith said to my father in the dining-room that evening. ‘And isn’t our friend here getting big for himself?’ He laughed loudly, gripping a portion of the back of my neck between a finger and a thumb. Did I know my catechism? he asked me. Was I being good with the nuns in the elementary school? ‘Are you in health yourself, Mrs Mahon?’ he inquired of my mother.
My mother said she was, and the red-faced priest went to join the other priests at the main dining-table. He left behind him a smell that was different from the smell of the house, and I noticed that he had difficulty in pulling the chair out from the table when he was about to sit down. He had to be assisted in this by a new young curate, a Father Parsloe. Father Smith had been drinking stout again, I said to myself.
Sometimes in my aunt’s house there was nothing to do except to watch and to listen. Father Smith used to drink too much stout; Father Magennis, who was so thin you could hardly bear to look at him and whose flesh was the colour of whitewash, was not long for this world; Father Riordon would be a bishop if only he could have tidied himself up a bit; Canon McGrath had once refused to baptize a child; young Father Lalor was going places. For hours on end my Aunt Isabella would murmur to my parents about the priests, telling about the fate of one who had left the boarding-house during the year or supplying background information about a new one. My parents, so faultlessly regular in their church attendance and interested in all religious matters, were naturally pleased to listen. God and the organization of His Church were far more important than my father’s duties in Cosgriff and McLoughlin, or my mother’s housework, or my own desire to go walking through the heathery wastelands that sloped gently upwards behind our town. God and the priests in my Aunt Isabella’s house, and the nuns of the convent elementary school and the priests of the Church of the Holy Redeemer, were at the centre of everything. ‘Maybe it’ll appeal to our friend,’ Father Smith had once said in the dining-room, and I knew that he meant that maybe one day I might be attracted towards the priesthood. My parents had not said anything in reply, but as we ate our tea of sausages and potato-cakes I could feel them thinking that nothing would please them better.