A Few of the Girls (24 page)

Or Kitty: “Aren't you only going to Australia on this open ticket because everyone else is? You really want to go for three months and then come back and settle down.”

Or to Nora: “Your job sounds terrible. Don't tell me you're getting any satisfaction out of it. You're only doing it to keep up the mortgage on this place, aren't you?”

And to Frank: “You're your father's son, Frank, that's for certain. He could never make a decision to save his life. You'd love a smaller place entirely but you have some notion that everyone wants this pile of red brick and that you owe it to them, and so you frown and wince over bills and estimates. I see you; you can't hide anything from Girlie.”

By the Friday before Christmas, Girlie had the household near a collective nervous breakdown. Only Martin remained outside her influence.

“Why aren't you sulking and flouncing with me the way everyone else is?” Girlie said to him as she left the house to get into her limousine as usual.

“You haven't annoyed me like you've annoyed all of them,” he said simply.

“Do you want to come out for a drive with me?”

“No thank you.”

“Please?”

“No thank you, Girlie. I don't like shopping, I don't have any money left, I don't want you to give me money, and I won't tell you things about myself that will make you know what's wrong and then torture me like you do the others.”

“I don't go shopping,” she said. “Come on.”

Martin got into the car and they drove out to Wicklow Gap. As soon as they were miles from anywhere, the car stopped and the driver brought them white linen napkins, a box of smoked salmon sandwiches, and a bottle of wine.

“I don't drink,” he said.

“You do today,” said Girlie.

“Why did they call you Girlie?”

“I was the only girl in a family of six: they weren't very bright,” she said.

“Why are you so awful to them all? They're doing their best to give you a happy Christmas.”

“What I'm saying is true.
You
know that, don't you?”

“It might be,” he agreed.

“Well, don't you hate poisonous little Lucy? Sean's much too good for her, and Kitty is as nervous as a cat about seeing the world, and your mother hates that damn job, and your father's in a state of panic about the new roof he thinks the place needs.”

“Well, why don't you give them money then? You've got lots of it.”

“Money wouldn't solve their problems, it has never solved a problem.” Girlie spoke very definitely.

“That's easy to say when you have it.” Martin was brave.

“No, it's true: if I gave Sean money he'd buy that horrible prissy little thing an even bigger ring, and Kitty would have to see the Kalahari Desert as well as the Outback when all she wants to do is to have a laugh with her friends in the sun. Your father would get the roof done and worry about something else; your mother would give up work and feel guilty and beholden to me. Much better make them see what's wrong. What do you worry about, Martin?”

“I won't tell you.”

“Why not? I have been utterly honest with you.”

“Okay, but you've got to answer a few questions first.”

“Shoot.”

He paused. Should he ask her about her husband? The one who left her all the money? Should he ask about how much she had left? Why she had come to visit them?

“Are you dying of something?” he asked suddenly, surprising himself.

“Yes,” she said.

Wicklow Gap looked beautiful as it always did. But, of course, he had never seen it from a heated limousine eating smoked salmon sandwiches and drinking white wine, and he never would again.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“Sure,” said Girlie. “Now tell me what's worrying you.”

He told her that next summer he would be fifteen and they wouldn't let him have a tent and come out to places like this and spend the night under the stars. They were afraid he'd get murdered or rheumatism or something. She listened with interest and without comment. Then she gave back the glasses and the box of crumbs to the chauffeur and they drove to the shop in Dublin that sold the most expensive kind of tent in the world.

“They'll kill me for getting you on my side,” he said.

“I was always on your side,” said Girlie. She didn't need to tell him not to talk about their conversation. Some things never need to be said.

It was a very strange Christmas. Nora said to Frank that a lot of this stuff about Being Prepared was for the birds. Look at all the great things that had turned out this year when they couldn't have prepared for any of them.

They had decided to put the house on the market. Sean and Lucy had postponed their wedding indefinitely. Kitty said she'd be back from Australia at Easter.

And Martin, he had been a positive saint with that dreadful old Girlie, who had bought him an entirely inappropriate tent and said what did it matter if he got pneumonia from sleeping out-of-doors, weren't there antibiotics for it nowadays? Which was actually true when you came to think of it.

“Do you think she liked it here? She's as odd as two left shoes,” Frank said.

“I think she liked it too much. We should be prepared—she may well come again next year,” Nora said.

And Martin just looked out the window into the garden and said nothing at all.

I knew that I could never marry George the day I found out he took little packets of sugar and sauce from restaurants to put in the store cupboard at home. He said they were ideal for picnics. I said, We don't go on picnics. He said that small economies like this amounted to huge profit in the years to come. Then he folded four paper napkins and put them into his briefcase and I knew I could not spend any time married to this man.

Sadly, it was the day before our wedding.

And also I was, though nobody else knew this, two months pregnant.

So this was a bit of a problem, but not as much a problem as marrying someone who was already building up a serious collection of marmalade portions. It was a nightmare, of course. My parents were very insistent that I should know all about the nonrefundable deposits on the hotel, the number of wedding outfits that had been bought, the people who had traveled long distances. They reminded me, as if I needed to be reminded, that I was their only child. And that the gifts would have to be returned, and a huge amount of gossip would result from it.

George tried to tell me I was having a nervous breakdown, common before weddings, he believed, and that it would all look very poorly in his office, where his chances of promotion might be adversely affected.

At no stage did he say he loved me and couldn't live without me.

At no time did my parents say they wanted me to do whatever would make me happy.

It was forty-eight hours I would never want to live through again, and relationships with everyone were severely damaged. Except, of course, with Eve, my unborn daughter, who did not know what was going on.

By the time she was born I had moved to another town far away. I returned all the gifts, wrote twenty-seven letters of apology, and tried to tell my speechless parents that we had all done the right thing. Then I left home two days after the canceled wedding. I told nobody that I was pregnant. I got one job as a hotel receptionist from eight to four every day, another teaching Internet for Beginners from five to seven, and I minded people's babies from seven thirty to midnight. I wrote a letter to my mother each week, giving her very little real information but keeping channels open. After all, they would be grandparents and I didn't want to spring that completely out of the blue. But they must never know the truth.

And George must never know that the child was his. That would never do: he would be back in my life with free samples of baby biscuits or disposable nappies.

So I wrote to my parents saying that I had been in a relationship which was now over and that I was delighted that I was going to have a child. They wrote back, totally bewildered, and said that if they lived to be one hundred years old they would never understand me.

My mother said that if I wanted her there for the birth she would come. I did want her, badly, but then she would know how old Eve was and that George was the father, and they must never suspect this.

I knew that the moment they held Eve in their arms it would be all right, so I waited until she was four months old, then I turned up on their doorstep and put her straight into their arms. And of course they loved her at once and they stopped trying to understand me and tried to understand her instead.

They were absolutely wonderful grandparents, and we moved nearer to their home so that they could see more of little Eve. I had got into the habit of working very hard, so I sort of thought three jobs were the norm, and every year I took my mother and father and Eve on a holiday abroad. Our albums show us all in Italy, Spain, and Greece.

Perfect family, happy little girl, secure and loved. Eve was great at school too. Glowing school reports, in the top of her class, enthusiastic, lots of friends. Sometimes, not very often but sometimes, I felt guilty about George. He was the child's father, after all.

He had never known her little arms around his neck; he couldn't swell with pride when she got a gold medal in front of the whole school. But then, if he were allowed to be her dad, he would be filling her up with nonsensical ideas about saving money and the importance of possessions.

No, better the way things were.

George had married, so I heard, someone who obviously didn't care about the way he collected jams and little packets of vinegar, maybe even helped him do it. He was going steadily upwards, he didn't need Eve in his life.

Of course, now that she was eleven, she did ask a bit about her father. But she seemed perfectly satisfied that I had once loved a young man but we had turned out not to be suited. He had gone away before I knew I was pregnant.

“Why could nobody find him?” Eve asked.

“Very difficult, back then.”

And that seemed to be enough.

Everything was just fine until that girl Hilda came to Eve's school. They were best friends from day one, which was Eve's twelfth birthday. And Hilda was a very unsuitable friend for my beautiful daughter.

For one thing she didn't have a brain in her little dyed head. For another, she was unable to dress winter or summer in a way that didn't expose most of her stomach. She had nose piercing and belly-button piercing and toenails painted scarlet. She had a way of shrugging and saying “whatever” that drove me mad. Particularly since the little shoulders of my Eve had started to shrug in a deeply irritating way.

There was a lot of talk about Hilda's mum and what fun she was and what a terrific house they had and how Hilda's dad, who was divorced from her mum, came to visit Hilda every weekend and took her to fantastic places.

And suddenly Eve wondered why her dad did not come and provide treats like a theme park or an indoor swimming pool. Eve wanted to know why didn't I join the golf club or the tennis club or play bridge with people or go to fashion shows like Hilda's mum did. Honestly, I could have done without all that.

Yes, I would love to have joined the tennis club. Loved it. But it would have meant big fees and a posh racquet, nice shoes, and buying rounds of drinks and maybe entertaining people I met there. Despite my three jobs there just wasn't the money for all that.

I needed to get endless amounts of school uniforms for Eve, and a laptop and an iPod and leisure clothes. And there was the holiday with my parents and Eve, and there were fares and dental work and expensive haircuts every six weeks for Eve. But of course I didn't say any of this because it would sound so whining and self-pitying. Instead I smiled brightly and said that heavens, no, I was much too busy to play tennis.

“Hilda's mum thinks some women work so hard they don't see the woods for the trees. Or the trees for the wood…or something,” Eve said.

I wanted to hug her—she was only a little parrot, repeating the phrases of her empty-headed but exciting little friend. Surely I, who had coped with so much, could cope with this? Of course I could. It was harmless; it was called growing up. It was only when Eve said she wanted to go shopping with Hilda in the mall on a Friday afternoon that an alarm bell went off in my head.

Of course I let her go, but when I began to think about it, I remembered that Eve didn't even like shopping, and I hadn't given her any money to buy things. Maybe I could slip down there and give her something. I could go around five, between my job as a doctor's receptionist and my job at the cash desk in an Italian restaurant. I would have an hour to myself then.

I saw them before they saw me.

Eve's blouse was tied up under her bra, leaving her stomach bare; her jeans were low over her hips and she was wearing not her nice school knickers but a thong. I could see it only too well. Her eyes were black with some kind of heavy makeup; her lips were scarlet.

She was standing with a lager can in her hand talking to a group of admiring young male gangsters and criminals.

She was smoking.

I felt faint.

I wished for the first time in over twelve years that I had let George play some part in Eve's upbringing. Collecting little individual milk portions or not, he could scarcely have made a worse job of it than I had. What was I to do?

I staggered away without them spotting me and managed to put in my hours at the restaurant.

Eve was sitting at the kitchen table when I got back. She looked pink and white and normal.

“You look very tired,” she said sympathetically. “You work too hard, I'm always telling you.”

“Yes, you are.” I sat down.

“I'll get us some tea. Was it a bad day?”

“So-so. Did you do a wash?”

“Sure, there were a few things I needed, so I put in tea towels and table napkins to make up the load.”

Yesterday I would have thought this was sweet-natured. Today I realized it was just concealing the evidence: the rolled-up shirt, the numbers of face flannels it must have taken to remove that makeup.

“Did you buy anything?” I asked faintly.

“Only a thong. It's not very comfortable but I'll be able to wear it on the beach when the weather gets hotter.”

“Yes, of course,” I said.

Eve looked at me, startled.

“I think I'll take my tea to bed,” I said. I lay there for hours with my eyes open. Who did you consult over something like this? I thought about my mother. No, she would eventually say the unforgivable something about my bringing this on myself since I had decided to bring up Eve alone as a single parent. I couldn't tell my mother about it.

I didn't have to, as it happened. The very next day, a Saturday, just before lunch, I was doing the ironing when my mother called in on a pretext to give me a recipe which I didn't need and she didn't need to deliver. I sat and waited to know what it would be about.

It was about Eve, my mother said eventually.

“Ah,” I said. It's a useful little word; it means everything and nothing.

“And her new friend, Hilda.”

“Ah, indeed.”

My mother came out straight and said she thought that Hilda, whom she had only seen twice, was rather a flashy little girl, not the right friend for our Eve.

It was such a marvelously old-fashioned word,
flashy.
I don't know what I would have said.
Tarty
?
Trampish
?
Vulgar
? Were these too destructive descriptions of Hilda—who was, after all, only a child?

Maybe
flashy
was more accurate.

I unplugged the iron and opened the sherry bottle. If my mother thought it was a trifle early in the day she said nothing.

“What do I do?” I asked humbly.

“Well, it needs to be planned carefully,” Mother ventured.

“Whatever I do will be wrong: if I say she can't see Hilda then Hilda becomes a martyr and Eve wants to meet her more than ever. It's just that Eve is just twelve,
twelve years old,
and she was dressed like a young prostitute yesterday in the mall!” I'm afraid I cried a bit then and my mother poured a refill.

“Do you remember your friend Rosemary Roberts when you were about fourteen?” she said unexpectedly.

“She was never a friend,” I explained. “She was in our class at school. I used to hang around a lot with her but I got bored by her in the end and used to avoid her.”

“Ah,” said my mother.

“Why do you ask about her?” I wanted to know.

“When you were fourteen she was
your
unsuitable friend and there was no one to turn to so I wrote to an agony aunt in this magazine…” My mother's face looked somewhere between proud and slightly guilty.

But it wasn't a similar case. I was
never
a friend of that Rosemary Roberts. My mother had got it wrong.

But she went on calmly, “You see, Rosemary always wanted you to go on these ‘dares,' that's what
she
called them.
We
called it shoplifting. So in order not to have you going out on dares, we kept inviting her to our house. Lord, she was there morning, noon, and night for a while; we even invited her on holiday to Brittany with us when we went camping. Don't you remember?”