Standing at the bedroom door, Sarah studied her sleeping child: Evie’s long dark eyelashes fanning across her cheek, her black hair in a tangle across the pillow, a smile on her lips. Sometimes it took her breath away just to look at her. Her daughter was utterly, totally beautiful.
‘Mummy, are you watching me?’ a sleepy voice asked.
‘Of course,’ she replied, clambering into bed with her and pulling the pink gingham quilt up around them.
‘Why?’
‘Because I love you, and when you’re asleep and dreaming you make all kinds of funny faces.’
‘What are they like?’
Curled up beside her daughter, she demonstrated and Evie giggled aloud.
‘I was dreaming up a dog,’ Evie said slowly, her blue eyes shining. ‘A big white dog, with soft hair and a black nose . . .’
‘That was a nice dream then,’ Sarah agreed. Evie was going through a doggy phase. Sarah had searched the mothering manuals, but there was no mention of what to do about a child who was so obsessed about getting a dog that she even dreamed about them.
‘His name is Snowy.’
Sarah just could not afford to take on a dog at the moment with all the costs involved: food and injections and vet’s bills. Evie didn’t understand how tight their finances were and how a hungry dog could be the last straw that would upset the delicate balance of their budget.
‘Some day, pet, we’ll get a dog,’ she promised, ‘but not just yet.’
‘When?’
Sometimes she wished that Evie wasn’t so clever. ‘Well, we can’t get a dog while Granny still has Podge. He’s a very old and slow cat and it wouldn’t be fair to him to have a new young dog running around the place and in the garden. It would scare him, wouldn’t it? The dog would probably bark at him and chase him and I think poor old Podge might not even be quick enough at running to make it up a tree. It would be cruel. Do you see?’
‘I see, Mummy.’ Evie nodded, giving a big disappointed shrug of her shoulders.
‘What’s that for?’ Sarah joked. ‘Your granny’s cooking us a lovely dinner today and Grace and Anna and Oscar from next door are coming over too.’
‘Can I wear my pink dress and my new pink tights then?’ pleaded Evie, bouncing up and down with excitement in the bed.
‘Of course, but you have to have a bath after breakfast and wash your hair,’ Sarah bargained as her daughter covered her in kisses before jumping out of bed.
Sarah watched her bounce out of the room and smiled to herself. It was funny how the worst thing that could have happened to her had ended up being the best. Finding out at nineteen, in the middle of college, that she was pregnant had seemed a disaster. A baby had been the last thing she wanted, but now – well, she couldn’t imagine life without Evie.
She had been madly in love with Maurizio, an Italian exchange student in the year above her. He was over from Milan for six months studying media technology. Small and dark and very handsome, he had asked her to show him how the contrary college photocopying machine worked and she’d ended up helping him copy his project. He had repaid her with coffee and a sandwich in the student café afterwards. Maurizio told her that Irish girls were the most wonderful creatures in the world. Sarah had, of course, believed him. She was so crazy about him that she could barely breathe. When she told him that they were going to have a child he had asked her to move back to Italy with him – live in a student house in Milan, transfer from her Art and Design course in Dun Laoghaire to college there.
‘Wait till the baby is born,’ her mother and father had advised. Sarah, overwhelmed by their support and love and insistence that they would help cover all the costs of having a baby, had agreed.
Maurizio had returned to Milan and his studies, coming to Dublin for three days when baby Evie was born. Evie had his dark, almost black hair and long eyelashes and, Sarah suspected, a little of his Italian temperament, but her blue eyes, heart-shaped face and fair Irish skin were a carbon copy of her own looks. At first Maurizio had sent some money and she had made the effort to visit his parents in Italy for a week. It had been a disaster. His father wasn’t well, the Carlucci family’s apartment in central Milan was on the tenth floor and smaller than she expected; Evie’s waking for night feeds woke the whole family and probably half of their neighbours too.
She had returned home exhausted. Maurizio only made it to Dublin for five days that summer to see his daughter. He was doing a masters degree, transferring to Rome; he was excitedly looking forward to the future. Sarah realized that Evie and herself were not part of it. There had been no big fight or angry words, they had simply drifted apart. Over the years his contact with his child had lessened, his financial support dwindled, leaving Sarah disappointed but not really surprised.
Motherhood had totally changed her. When Evie was born she had insisted on being with her all the time, refusing to hand her baby over to a crèche or someone else to mind. The maelstrom of emotions she felt for this small being who was so dependent on her made her decide to quit her course, stay home and be a full-time mother.
‘Are you sure that’s what you want?’ her father had asked.
‘I’m sure.’
She was still sure, and didn’t regret an hour or a day that she had spent devoted to her small daughter. Her parents had been more than generous, turning the basement of their house into an apartment for herself and Evie, refusing to accept any rent for it.
‘Sure, all we were doing was storing stuff there, and who in God’s name needed a table-tennis room,’ Leo Ryan had pointed out as two bedrooms, a small sitting room and a bright kitchen had been created and painted up with new heating and new fittings installed. When Evie was two and a half Sarah had gone back and finished her course at night, her mother encouraging her to get her qualification and babysitting on Tuesdays and Thursdays for her as she wrote her thesis and took on her final year project.
She lived on the small income she got for working part-time in the local national school, which meant she was broke most of the time. She helped out with their library and gave art classes to the older children. The odd design job came her way through old college contacts and if she needed extra money her friend Cora, who ran a successful catering company, was always glad of an extra pair of hands either in the kitchen or serving at some of the fancy Dublin parties she catered for in people’s homes. Still Sarah had no regrets. She watched as her friends’ careers began to take off, and knew she wouldn’t change places with them for the world, for she had Evie.