‘Nor you, now that I look, Margaretta.’
But her tone is nervous, and her confidence melts as they stand among the tourists and the angry stripes. How odd to meet here, she says, knowing it is not odd at all, since everyone’s a tourist nowadays. She wishes they had not met like this; why could not Margaretta just have seen her and let her pass by?
‘It’s lovely to see you,’Margaretta says.
They continue to look at one another, and simultaneously, in their different moods, their distant friendship possesses them. Two marriages and their children are irrelevant.
The Heaslips’ house was in a straggling grassy square, dusty in summer. A brass plate announced the profession of Dr Heaslip; the oak-grained hall door was heavy and impressive, with brass that matched in weight and tone the nameplate. Near by, the Bank of Ireland was ivy-covered, less gaunt because of it than the Heaslips’ grey stone façade. Other houses, each detached from its neighbour, were of grey stone also, or colourwashed in pink or cream or white. In the approximate centre of an extensive area of shorn grass, green railings protected an empty pedestal, which Queen Victoria in her day had dominated. A cinema – the De Luxe Picture House, as antique as its title – occupied a corner created by the edge of the square and the town’s main street. Hogan’s Hotel filled the corner opposite.
One day in June, during the Second World War, a day when the brass plate shimmered in warm sunshine, a day Laura for all her life did not forget, Mrs Heaslip said in the drawing-room of the house:
‘Laura, this is Margaretta.’
Laura held out her hand, as she had been taught, but Margaretta giggled, finding it amusing that two small girls should be so formal.
‘Margaretta! Really, what will Laura think? Now, do at once apologize.’
‘We’re all like that in Ireland,’ Margaretta pronounced instead. ‘Bog-trotters, y’know.’
‘Indeed we’re not,’ protested Mrs Heaslip, a thin, tall woman in a flowery dress. With some panache she wore as well a straw hat with a faded purple ribbon on it. The skin of her face, and of her arms and legs, was deeply brown, as if she spent the greater part of her time outside. ‘Indeed, indeed, we’re not,’ she repeated, most emphatically. ‘And do not say “y’know”, Margaretta.’
They were nine, the girls, in 1941. Laura had been sent from England because of the war, called in Ireland ‘the emergency’: there was more nourishment to be had in Ireland, and a feeling of safety in an Irish provincial town. Years before Laura had been born, her mother, living in Ireland then, had been at a boarding-school in Bray with Mrs Heaslip. ‘I think you’ll like it in Ireland,’ her mother had promised. ‘If I didn’t have this wretched job I’d come with you like a shot.’ They lived in Buckinghamshire, in a village called Anstey Rye. In December 1939, when the war had scarcely begun, Laura’s father had been killed, the Spitfire he’d been piloting shot down over the sea. Her mother worked in the Anstey Rye clothes shop, where she was responsible for the accounts, for correspondence with wholesalers and for considerable formalities connected with clothing coupons. It was all very different from Ireland.
‘That’s what’s called a monkey puzzle, y’know,’ Margaretta said in the garden, and Laura quietly replied that she knew a monkey puzzle when she saw one.
Unlike Mrs Heaslip, Margaretta wasn’t thin. Nor was she brown. She was pretty in a sleepy, careless kind of way: her eyes were sleepily blue, her cheeks carelessly dimpled, her red jumble of hair the most beautiful Laura had ever seen. Margaretta would be astonishing when she grew up –what, Laura imagined, looking at her on that first afternoon, Helen of Troy must have been like. She felt jealous of the promise that seemed to be in every movement of Margaretta’s body, in every footstep that she took as she led the way through the garden and the house.
‘I am to show you everything,’ Margaretta said. ‘Would you be enormously bored to see the town?’
‘No, no, of course not. Thank you, Margaretta.’
‘It isn’t much, I’ll tell you that.’
The girls walked slowly through the wide main street, Margaretta drawing attention to the shops. All of them were cluttered, Laura noticed, except one, connected with a bakery, which seemed to sell, not bread, but only flour and sugar. They passed Martell’s Café, Jas. Ryan’s drapery and Medical Hall, Clancy’s grocery, which Margaretta said was a public house as well as a grocer’s, the Home and Colonial, a hardware shop and a shoe shop, other public houses. They paused by a window full of exercise-books and bottles of Stephens’ ink, which Margaretta said was her favourite shop of all. The window was strewn with packets of nibs and pencils, packets of rubber bands, rulers, pencil-sharpeners, and Waterman fountain pens in different marbled colours. There was an advertisement for Mellifont Books, and some of the books themselves, with garish paper covers: Angela and the Pixies in the Children’s Series, Murder from Beyond in Crime and Detection. The shop, Margaretta said, was called Coffey’s although the name over the door was T. MacCarthy. She liked it because it smelt so pleasantly of paper. Clancy’s smelt of whiskey and sawdust, the butcher’s of offal.
‘How’re you, Margaretta?’ Mr Hearne greeted her from his doorway, a heavy man in a blood-stained apron.
‘Laura’s come from England,’ Margaretta said by way of reply.
‘How’re you, Laura?’ Mr Hearne said.
In the weeks and months that followed, Laura came to know Mr Hearne well, for she and Margaretta did all the shopping for the household. ‘Meat and women,’ the butcher had a way of saying, ‘won’t take squeezing.’ He used to ask riddles, of which he did not know the answers. His wife, Mrs Heaslip said, was frequently pregnant.
The sweetshops of the town became familiar to Laura also, Murphy’s, O’Connor’s, Eldon’s, Morrissey’s, Mrs Finney’s. Different brands of icecream were sold: H.B., Lucan, Melville, and Eldon’s own make, cheaper and yellower than the others. Murphy’s sold fruit as well as confectionery, and was the smartest of the sweetshops. Margaretta said it smelt the nicest, a mixture of vanilla and grapes. They all sold scarlet money-balls, in which, if you were lucky, you got your money back, a brand-new ha’penny wrapped in a piece of paper. They all sold boxes of Urney chocolates, and liquorice pipes and strips, and Lemon’s Nut-Milk Toffees and Rainbow Toffees. In their windows, boxes of Willwood’s Dolly Mixtures were laid out, and slabs of Mickey Mouse Toffee, and jelly babies. Best value of all was the yellow lemonade powder, which Margaretta and Laura never waited to make lemonade with but ate on the street.
That first summer in Ireland was full of such novelty, but most fascinating of all was the Heaslip family itself. Dr Heaslip related solemn jokes in an unhurried voice, and his equally unhurried smile came to your rescue when you were flustered and didn’t know whether it was a joke or not. Mrs Heaslip read in the garden – books that had their covers protected with brown paper, borrowed from the library the nuns ran. Margaretta’s two younger brothers, six and five, were looked after by Francie, a crosseyed girl of nineteen who came every day to the house. Eileen and Katie between them did the cooking and cleaning, Katie for ever up and down the basement stairs, answering the hall door to Dr Heaslip’s patients. Eileen was quite old – Margaretta said sixty, but Mrs Heaslip, overhearing that, altered the estimation to forty-five – and made brown bread that Laura thought delicious. Katie was keeping company with Wiry Bohan from the hardware’s. Margaretta said she’d seen them kissing.
Dr Heaslip’s motor-car, unlike the others in the town, which for the most part were laid up because of the emergency, was driven every day out of the garage at the back by a man called Mattie Devlin. He parked it in front of the house so that Dr Heaslip could hasten to it and journey out into the country to attend a childbirth or to do his best when there’d been an accident on a farm. ‘Ah, well, we’ll do our best’ was a much-employed expression of his, issued in a tone of voice that did not hold out much hope of success though in fact, as Laura learnt, he often saved a life. ‘She’s out there ready, Doctor,’ Mattie Devlin every morning shouted up through the house at breakfast-time. He then began his day’s work in the garden, where, to Mrs Heaslip’s displeasure, he refused to grow peas, broad beans or spinach, claiming that the soil was unsuitable for them. He grew instead a great number of turnips, both swedes and white, potatoes, and a form of kale which nobody in the family liked. He was a man in a striped brown suit who wore both belt and braces and tucked the ends of his trousers into his socks when he worked in the garden. He never took off either his jacket or his hat.