‘Jesus Christ, that fucking hurts.’ Hurtling towards the shrill ring of the phone in the hallway, Alison had stubbed her toe on the saddle of her bedroom door. She had been in a deep sleep, dreaming of Dan Abernethy, but the persistent ringing had forced her to rouse herself and abandon his delicious face at the counter of the Daisy May. She fumbled for the landing switch. When she finally reached it the light flickered for a second and gave a little tinkle before the bulb blew. Still the phone kept ringing and still there was not a sign of life from Ciara’s room. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get it!’ Alison said a touch savagely as she hobbled past Ciara’s door on the way down the stairs.
‘Is that you, Ciara?’ a girl’s voice whispered urgently when Alison picked up the receiver.
‘No, this is Ciara’s flatmate, Alison. I’ll get her for you now. Who will I say is looking for her?’
‘This is Leda.’ Ciara’s sister’s voice was barely audible and Alison felt instinctively that she was in some sort of trouble. A loud knock on Ciara’s door brought no response. Eventually, after much hammering, a dishevelled Ciara in outrageously loud pink satin pyjamas emerged looking viciously sulky.
‘Someone better be on fire. That’s all I am saying. What fucking time is it anyway?’
‘About three, I think. It’s Leda. She seems a bit upset.’
‘It’s the middle of the shagging night. I’m a bit upset myself.’
The pink apparition disappeared down the stairs and Alison rolled back into her still mercifully warm bed to resume an imaginary romance with Dan. She fell asleep to the lull of conversation from the hallway.
A short note in Ciara’s handwriting had been left tagged to the kettle next morning when Alison got up to make breakfast. ‘Have to sort something out at home so getting the seven o’clock from Busáras. Will be back Sunday night, sorry about the weekend, Ciara x.’
Waves of panic washed over Alison. She and Ciara had decided to stay in Dublin for the weekend to go to the cinema, visit the National Gallery and generally act like first-year students delighted to be away from home. It had been Ciara’s idea. In fairness, nearly everything was. Alison had broken the news to her mother at the bus stop in Caharoe the Sunday night before.
‘Ciara and I are thinking of staying in Dublin this weekend, Mam – you know, to get a few of the long essays started. Is that all right? I’ll be home the following Friday.’
Cathy Shepherd hesitated and Alison knew her mother was steeling herself to say the right thing. Her dearest wish was that going to college would make Alison grow in confidence and even though the thought of her only child being away for two whole weeks made her fit to faint she pulled herself together.
‘Of course, love. You’ll be careful, won’t you? You will need extra money.’ Cathy started to delve in her cavernous handbag and produced a carefully folded twenty-pound note from a zipped pocket. ‘Ring if you think you are going to run out and I’ll send you some more in the post.’
‘I’ll be grand, Mam, honestly. I have wages from the Daisy May coming to me on Friday so I won’t be short.’
Watching her mother watching her was driving Alison mad and ever closer to tears. Trying to pretend to be brave was hard on the nerves and the last thing she wanted to do was start getting weepy in front of her mother, who was looking decidedly shaky herself. God, how she wished the bus driver would actually let them on the bus instead of leaving them to stand there in the freezing November cold. Eventually the bus did pull away from the pavement and Alison breathed a sigh of relief. Two buses and a train journey and she would be back in the flat in Ranelagh and in Ciara’s uplifting company. She had Rose and her shifts in the Daisy May. Her college work was hard but not by any means beyond her. Thanks to her dad’s GP practice there was enough money for all her college needs, so she didn’t feel short of anything. She was on talking terms with a good few people in her class, owing in no small measure to Ciara, who had the knack for chat and in whose company Alison tried mostly to stay. Somehow if Alison could join up the scattered dots of her Dublin existence she might manage to have a life outside Caharoe.
Faced a few days later with Ciara’s note, Alison momentarily thought about phoning home with the change of plan. Her mother would be delighted. She was halfway down the stairs when she pulled herself back from the safety net into which she was about to plunge headlong. ‘Come on, Alison, don’t be such a chicken,’ she chided herself. How hard could it be? It was Wednesday. Four nights and Ciara would be back to the flat. In the meantime she could actually catch up on study. There was no law against going to see a film on your own, was there? The time would fly by if she kept herself busy. ‘Pull yourself together,’ she tutored herself, with only a shard of confidence, before quickly retreating up the stairs.
Cathy Shepherd had stood on the Main Street in Caharoe until the bus carrying Alison back to Dublin disappeared from her view. Only then did she start the short walk to Michaelmas House on the edge of the town square. Her woollen coat was buttoned up right to the collar to protect against the bitter wind and maybe also against a rising loneliness that threatened to engulf her.
Michaelmas was one of a quartet of grand houses standing like imposing sentry keepers around the green in Caharoe. It had been their home for twenty years and Cathy thoroughly loved it. The grand navy front door with its glistening brass fittings reminded her of the week of their wedding when she had lovingly painted it, covering her hands with specks of gloss paint that were murder to clean off.
When Richard had first shown her the house out of which he operated his fledgling GP practice she had been shocked by its near-derelict state. The waiting room and surgery, which Richard had allegedly decorated, were the only rooms that were remotely habitable. Even that was a pretty impossible stretch of the imagination. Richard slept on a couch in a room at the back of the house with at least three layers of bedding to defeat the cold. It was there, in that spartan room, that they had first wrapped up in the delicious warmth of each other’s bodies under a sea of shabby quilts. It was there also, one evening a few months after they had first met, that Richard had asked her to marry him and live with him in Caharoe.
‘Here? In this dive?’ Cathy had asked in mock incredulity. It was worth it to see his face but the look of total joy on her face told him the only answer he wanted to hear. ‘Yes, I will marry you, Richard, but this place needs a serious shake-up. I love you but you live in a hovel.’
‘It’s not great, is it?’ Richard had said, looking at the wall opposite them from where the hideous flock wallpaper hung precariously, planning its path of descent.
‘You keep treating the sick people of Caharoe and I will make sure they don’t vomit at the sight of the house. Is that not a fair deal, Dr Shepherd?’
‘Deal.’ Richard grinned before pulling her beneath the quilts again.
Hugh Lalor, the solicitor who lived in one of the other corner houses of the square, had recommended a builder to Richard when he had first bought the house. Richard had transcribed the details diligently, meaning to do something some day, before filing the information with all the legal papers regarding the sale. Cathy soon unearthed them and so began her transformation of the ‘barn’, as she had taken to calling Richard’s house. She approached Lovett’s Hotel across the square and asked if Richard’s surgery could move there temporarily while its permanent home was being refurbished. Tadhg Lovett was delighted by the prospect. His lounge, ordinarily empty during the day, would become a flurry of tea-drinking and ham-sandwich-eating and his handful of hotel rooms, usually only inhabited by the odd returning emigrant, would have a purpose.
‘Business is business wherever it comes from,’ he said, shaking Cathy’s hand to seal the deal. ‘And tell me now, miss, are you the doctor’s housekeeper or secretary? It’s just that I have a bad knee that I have been meaning to get checked.’
Cathy imbued her smile with a friendship she was finding hard to muster. ‘I am Richard’s fiancée, Mr Lovett, and I am sure he would be happy to look at your knee if you can make it across to us. Otherwise he does house calls, whatever best suits the patient’s needs.’
‘Ah, sure I’ll wait until he moves over here for the few weeks. He can have a look at my knee in passing, in between jobs. I should get a discount really, seeing as he will be my lodger.’
‘Richard won’t see you suffer with your knee, Mr Lovett.’ Cathy took herself back to the barn before she said something smart. Caharoe was a small place and it was better to keep on the right side of everyone. God, this doctor’s wife thing was shaping up to be great fun altogether.
Tadhg watched her tall, sweeping figure cross the street. ‘Fiancée, if you don’t mind. Did you ever hear the like of it?’ he said to no one in particular, but he was already plotting the sliced-pan order for the sandwiches required for the makeshift surgery and its hungry patients.
The builders took down the partition walls that a previous owner had erected, restoring the original proportions of the house. When all the months of structural work had been completed Cathy took to the decorating with feverish intent. She and her younger brother Donal came most evenings that summer to paint, sand and varnish every surface. Richard supplied the money for the restoration work and brought roughly made picnics to the workers. He was totally useless but he sat keeping them company. If a song he loved came on the battered paint-stained radio he would release Cathy from her vice-like grip on the paintbrush and waltz her around the room. Donal would turn scarlet and look away embarrassed, painting even faster while his sister and Richard danced. When exhaustion overtook them they would sit on a bare floor sipping bottled beer and eating egg sandwiches followed by slices of jam sponge or cream rolls from the bakery on Earl Street.
It took all of that summer to get the house and surgery completed but Cathy enjoyed every minute of it. Tadhg Lovett sold a mountain of sandwiches and had his knee fixed into the bargain. Cathy barely had time to get ready for their wedding, which was set for 29 September, Michaelmas Day. She chose a simple shift dress to the knee in the softest shade of ivory. She wore no veil and her long dark hair hung loose around her shoulders. She carried a clutch of fiery orange-blossomed crocosmia picked for her by her mother. Not for the first time Richard stood captivated by Cathy’s radiance. That day he was sure he was the luckiest man alive.
As a wedding present for them both, Cathy got a brass nameplate made for their barn. She read it now twenty years later surrounded as it was by the climbing bark of mature wisteria and clematis.
First Richard, this house and then Alison had been the focus of her life.
She stood hesitating before she put her key in the front door. Her heart was breaking with loneliness for Alison and tears welled in her eyes. Richard was across at Lovett’s knocking back whiskey as he always was on a Sunday night. When exactly had it happened? When had her life shrunk to such a small, predictable package of care and duty? As she turned the key on an empty Michaelmas House Cathy Shepherd decided to go easy on herself. She was lonely, that’s all, and it was best not to dwell on things that could not easily be changed.
Throughout the week a small part of her hoped Alison would change her mind and come home for the weekend. She was not ready to think of her stint in Dublin as anything other than a temporary arrangement. Alison phoned on the usual days and her form was very good. Cathy managed not to ask her to change her mind. ‘It will be good for her, help her to find her feet,’ she told a very dubious Richard. If she said it often enough she might just convince them both, she hoped.
Cathy held it together until the following Saturday, comforted by the routine at the surgery. All the regulars, of whom the practice had scores, dragging in their dead legs and arthritic joints on a weekly basis, enquired after Alison. How was she doing in Dublin? Was she living far from the college? Cathy found herself delivering confident assertions that Alison was doing just fine. She had moved in with a lovely girl, Ciara, from Tipperary, and was doing well at her course. All true, she reminded herself if her certainty wavered even for a moment.
She and Richard shared a bottle of red wine on the Friday night and when he admitted that he too was missing Alison that made Cathy feel less pathetic.
‘Maybe we could visit her in Dublin some weekend, see the den of vice and squalor she has landed herself in?’
‘Ah, show a bit of faith, Richard! I’m sure Alison found a grand flat and to be honest I wasn’t as keen as you were on Bea Duggan. She seemed terribly sour.’
‘You see, Cathy, that’s exactly what I liked about her. She looked stubborn, looked like she wouldn’t tolerate any late hours or bad company. Sour can be a good trait in a landlady.’
‘God, you can sound like a right old misery guts when you want to.’
‘I’m entitled to be miserable when I have had Tadhg Lovett’s septic toe presented to me on three separate occasions this week, only one of which happened in the privacy of my surgery. Honestly, I am dreading the moment and the hour when he discovers a boil on his backside, because I won’t be able to get a drink in this town without offering to lance it first.’
Cathy collapsed in fits of laughter at the unbearable mental image and felt light-hearted for the first time in days. It could be the wine gone to her head but she didn’t really care. Midnight came and went while they chatted and cuddled together in front of the open fire, still alive with the vivid colours of the shrinking turf.
Saturday was shaping up well enough too. She had planned to see an art exhibition in the Jenkin Gallery in Cork with Rena Lalor. Cathy knew in her heart that Rena would humour her with about ten minutes at the gallery before her insatiable thirst for the city boutiques and department stores would overcome her and have to be quenched by an empowering excursion down Patrick Street. And so it was. Rena smooched with the gallery owner while gasping in a seemingly new-found appreciation of the artist’s vision. She was particularly taken by the red planet at the bottom of a painting of warring lovers. It was, she thought (aloud, naturally), symbolic of their love transcending this world. Neither Cathy nor the gallery owner pointed out to her that it was just a sticker marking the painting sold. Cathy didn’t because she couldn’t bear to burst her friend’s exuberance and the gallery owner refrained because he was already mentally lodging the cheque from what he expected was a certain sale. When Rena found out that her warring lovers were sold she picked out another close to it which Cathy was sure she had not even given a second glance. With the painting bought and promptly forgotten Rena was ready to move on to her sartorial prey.
Being in Rena’s company was like being in a tidal wave of consumerism. She always needed an outfit for a forthcoming occasion. She and Hugh were on a continual round of race meetings, charity socials and fund-raising dinner dances. The Lalor legal practice was thriving and was drawing clients from all over the southwest. ‘You have to entertain the clients,’ was Hugh’s mantra after one or two swiftly downed tumblers of the doctor’s whiskey. ‘They expect it and they expect to see my Rena in a new rig-out.’ He would stare at Rena in between gulps and his gaze consisted of one part devotion to several parts lechery. Cathy could just about tolerate Hugh Lalor when he was sober but his drink-fuelled playboy act threatened to make her stomach turn. Richard would often give her a good-humoured wink as if to implore that she turn a blind eye to Hugh’s antics. She knew Richard was very fond of him and for her husband’s and Rena’s sake she usually held her tongue. She knew her friend relied on shopping to fill lonely hours when her husband and son had no time to talk, so busy were they with professional lives that required her inclusion only on an intermittent basis. Shopping for the social calendar had become her salvation and consequently her chief topic of conversation. Last year’s dress for the Galway Races could do Tralee Races at a push but it could never go back to Galway and would not have been stylish enough for Punchestown or Fairyhouse in the first place. There was an etiquette involved in dressing for these outings and through these shopping trips Cathy was getting a master class, even though she was not remotely interested in ever going to such places.
The shopping today was proving a welcome distraction when she would normally have spent the day with Alison while Richard was at the golf club. She was standing in the middle of the Winthrop boutique waiting for Rena to release a flurry of shop assistants from active service when a midnight-blue-coloured silk skirt caught her eye. It was ages since she had bought anything for herself. She had lots of clothes, expensive and well-tailored items that suited her job as the practice manager and the doctor’s wife but something about the frivolity of buying something gorgeous because she loved the look of it appealed to her. It was a size ten. It should fit, but she invaded Rena’s kingdom in the dressing rooms just to make sure. It fitted beautifully, showing off her slender waist.
‘My God, that is fabulous on you,’ shrieked Rena when she spotted Cathy twirling happily, almost decadently, in front of the mirror. Rena was taken aback. Cathy has the figure, she thought to herself a bit sourly, but she wouldn’t allow jealousy to fester. Everyone deserves to look well, she lectured herself silently while deciding to take the blouse she was trying on in all three colours. (‘It’s well cut,’ she would find herself telling the shop girls as if she was selling the merchandise herself.)
‘You have to buy it, Cathy, you just have to,’ Rena went on. ‘It’s calling for a touch of flamboyance though, if you don’t mind me saying so. A nice blazer and a hat maybe. The right match would set it off to a T.’
They emerged from the changing room. Cathy carried the blue skirt and three girls struggled under Rena’s assorted purchases.
‘You know what, Rena, I will buy it but I don’t need a hat. Remember we don’t move in the same social circle as you and Hugh. The odd GP conference is the stellar point of our social calendar and hats don’t really get a look in there.’
‘Well, it’s not for the want of asking you. I am sick, sore and sorry of trying to drag you both along to the races or the charity balls. We would always find you a spot at our table. You would enjoy it, you know, if you just gave it a chance.’
‘Ah, you never know, maybe we will,’ Cathy said good-humouredly, but she was quite sure that hell would freeze and possibly thaw again first.
It wasn’t until the bell for seven o’clock mass was ringing that Cathy pulled her car into the driveway of Michaelmas House. Rena had left most of her bags in Cathy’s car. It helped Rena to bring home her shopping piecemeal because that way she would not have to acknowledge the sight of the complete haul. The guilt of that had often outweighed the retail therapy itself. She would collect them during the week when Hugh was tucked away in his office at the back of the house. It wasn’t that he minded her spending, she had to admit. If it bothered him he never said as much. It was more that sometimes her capacity for spending money shocked even herself. The painting had been an extravagance. She would look out for the next bank statement and bin it. Maybe she would even give the painting to Cathy. Cathy loved that arty-farty racket. Well, she’d only bought it because she was in Cathy’s company, hadn’t she? It was her fault really. That conclusion comforted her somewhat. She wasn’t sure that nude ladies had a place in the home of a prominent solicitor. What in the name of God had she been thinking of?
There was always a flurry of traffic around Caharoe in the run-up to mass and then a slow drift afterwards as the street emptied into the pubs. The lights of Lovett’s Hotel were reflected in the low-lit windows of Michaelmas. Soon the languorous hum of conversation and laughter would grow steadily louder and Cathy and Richard would hear it as they prepared and ate dinner. He would tell her anything he had heard at the golf club, snippets of local gossip that Hugh Lalor never seemed to be without. She would fill him in on the art exhibition that she had seen and all of the exploits with Rena. They would talk lightly of Alison, trying to be positive, trying not to be lonely.
After the ritual dash to the television for the headlines Richard would say, ‘I will knock across to Lovett’s for one.’ Some drink, Cathy often thought, as he was rarely home before midnight. Tonight, she had decided, would be different.
‘Wait for me, I’ll come too,’ Cathy announced. Richard looked a bit stunned but a little bit delighted too, she thought. Mostly stunned though, it had to be said.
Alison rang at ten when she got home from an early showing at the Savoy. The phone rang out as she pictured the hall table at Michaelmas and the carpeted steps of the stairs where her mother sat when she settled in for a long conversation with Rena or one of her sisters. The table lamp, always lit from nightfall, would cast her in a soft and flattering light. Her shoes would be kicked off and her long legs would be curled under the folds of her skirt. As the phone rang Alison thought that she must persuade her mother to buy some new clothes for herself. Maybe she would come shopping to Dublin some Saturday when Dad was playing golf? She would suggest it if her mother ever answered the blasted phone. When Cathy didn’t pick up Alison had nobody to tell that she had just seen possibly the worst film ever made.