‘Isn’t it the best?’ said Dan. ‘Isn’t it incredible?’
‘Lovely,’ she said. Thinking, Is it for this you left?
Was it for the ice cream?
She thought that Dan was a bit of a hypocrite for liking things so wildly, or pretending to like them. And she started to feel inadequate to the menu in her hand. They went to a kind of brasserie that served a modern take on Jewish food, all gefilte fish and matzo balls, and that was supposed to be ‘amazing’ too. But it was just food. It was a long way to travel, she thought, for dumplings. Her enjoyment was soured, Constance knew, by the years she had spent yearning to go, and not going, selling condoms to men who did not want to sleep with her — the Baggot Street years, time she spent pretending to be a student, when she really wasn’t a student, she was a shop-girl, which was to say, a girl who was waiting to get married. Four years out of school the waiting (which had been dreadful) was over. Constance was courted by Dessie McGrath every time she went down home and she ended up going down home more often, just to feel his arms about her.
And she still liked the feel of them. Balding, blunt-spoken Dessie McGrath. Three children on, he had moved sex to the mornings — even this morning, indeed — because it set him up for the day, he said. Constance would sleep again afterwards while he went down to his little office and some time later, whistling in the afterglow, he might get the children up and out for school. Constance liked stretching between the sheets to the sound of their chatter, only to pause and remember what she and Dessie had been up to, a couple of hours before. She kept the memory of him inside her all day. It was there now, if she wanted to think about it, washed as she was, with her underarms scraped for the doctor, and naked to the waist under her hospital gown. Who would have thought? Constance was not a fabulous looking woman, and Dessie was not a fabulous looking man, and that was the laugh of it, really. They were lucky. Because what was the point of looking sexy if you never got any sex, as happened often enough. Even to Lauren, who was always turning men down.
Constance remembered telling her about Dessie, the way she sort of hooted.
‘Dessie? Dessie McGrath?’ Then later she said, ‘He’s really nice.’ And she meant it. And she sounded sad.
On the other side of the corridor, the technician in the white coat came out carrying an envelope and the woman who followed her ducked her head as she turned towards the next queue on the banquette. She lifted her fingers to her breastbone, with her head inclined, like some painting of the Virgin Mary that Constance remembered. She tipped herself lightly there as though to say, My life is not my own.
‘So who’s getting married?’ Constance said to Margaret Dolan.
‘Sorry?’
‘The wedding.’
‘Oh, the wedding. My daughter.’
‘My goodness,’ said Constance. ‘Mother of the bride.’
‘Hah,’ she said. She leaned forward, so her bare back swelled out of the open gown and she rubbed her hurt hands together.
‘I have a girl,’ said Constance.
But the woman did not hear. She was talking about the bridesmaids, who would be in lilac to match the bride’s black hair. She was worried about her daughter’s asthma, the way her sinuses blew up on her whenever she was stressed.
‘Oh dear,’ said Constance.
Other people’s children can be very dull, her own mother liked to say. And it was sort of true. Constance remembered Lauren the year she moved to Strasbourg, sitting in the kitchen with a big glass of white, talking about ski trips and restaurants and skinny French women with their horror of plastic surgery. One child teething and the other going behind the sofa for a quiet poo, and Lauren sort of elaborately unsympathetic to all this, talking about the difference between a pink tinted foundation and one that was a bit more yellow.
‘What age is Rory, again? Three?’
Even her own mother listened without listening.
‘Oh, I can’t remember,’ she would say, when there was some little problem. ‘It’s a long time ago.’
But it was not a long time ago for Constance, who was still in it. Whose children were coming up to teenagers now, with no gap — or none that she could discern — between breast-feeding and breast cancer, between tending and dying. Who did not know what else she could do.
‘Do something!’ said her mother.
Rosaleen believed a woman should be interesting. She should keep her figure, and always listen to the news.
‘Like what?’
‘Take up horse riding.’
‘Right,’ said Constance. Her mother had always wanted a daughter who looked good on a pony, or a daughter who did ballet, like a daughter in a book. Rosaleen always had a paperback on the go, opera on the radio, cuttings rooting in pots on the windowsills and overflowing on to the floor. Which was hardly the McGrath style — living, as they did, in bungalow bliss down the road.
‘You are so lucky,’ she used to say. Meaning something else entirely.
But she was also right. Constance was lucky. Trips to New York were just the tip of the iceberg, Constance was spoilt with tickets to Bruce Springsteen and the Galway Races, a leg of lamb brought home on Friday, chocolates if she wanted them or No chocolates! As soon as they could afford it Dessie found a girl to help with the housework, and if one sister-in-law went to Prague, the other went to Paris, because in the years she had known them the McGraths did well and then better yet. There was no stopping them. If Constance got her chairs reupholstered, some other Mrs McGrath would discover minimalism, and a third would be into shabby chic and, somehow, she would have to start all over again.
‘They are driving me nuts,’ she would say to her mother and the pair of them would laugh at the jumped-upness of the McGrath clan, the auctioneer, the quantity surveyor, the builder and even Dessie himself, who made pergolas and fences for gardens all the way to Galway.
‘So pretty,’ said Rosaleen.
Constance had not told her mother about the mammogram. And that was fine. There was no need. But it was on days like this she missed her girlfriends, who had their own lives and their own troubles in distant towns. Because Constance had two sons who told her nothing and a husband who told her nothing and a father who told her nothing and then died. And, of course, Dessie had forgotten about the lump. Incredible as that might seem. He forgot she was in for tests this morning, because he always forgot about things like that. They made him too anxious. At 5 a.m. they slipped into the bathroom and then got back into bed — and this would be the last time they made love, Constance thought, before she was diagnosed with cancer or told she was in the clear. It was particularly tender, life and death sex: it was very fine. Then, while she was stuffing lunches into the children’s schoolbags and he was pulling his keys off the hook, he said, ‘What are you up to?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Today?’
‘Why?’ She kept her voice careful, just to be sure.
‘No reason. I’m away to Aughavanna, is all, to check things over this afternoon, so I might be back a bit late, if that’s OK.’
‘Off you go,’ she said, and he kissed her, and goosed her, and was out the door.
A couple of years ago, Constance got her wisdom teeth out, and she must have said it a hundred times, she needed a lift home because they wouldn’t let you drive after the sedation. When the day came Dessie said, ‘What?’ He said he would rearrange everything, he would do it right away, and he started panicking and going through bits of paper until Constance told him not to bother. She just drove herself over there, and got the teeth out without the drugs. It was painful all right, but not exactly a disaster.