Chestnut Street (18 page)

And as the years went by, men being men said to one another that it was strange Nora hadn’t married, she was quite a nice-looking girl. Not bad at all, they would say with some surprise and shake their heads. Their only criterion for getting married was being nice-looking so if Nora had passed that test wasn’t it odd that she hadn’t gone the distance?

And women being women used to say that Nora kept her private life to herself unless you asked her and if you did ask her she
said, like everyone else, that all the good men were long gone and had usually been nailed down by an appalling vixen.

When Nora went home to Chestnut Street, she started mentioning Dan a bit.

Dan was a teacher she’d met when she was doing an educational story. She had gone to his school with a photographer, and Dan had been impressed that Nora had checked the names of those posing for the group photograph herself. She had her notebook out and confirmed their names, left to right, writing everything down.

“I thought the photographer did that,” Dan said.

“On normal markings we do.” The photographer was easygoing and resigned. He explained that in the office, they were all used to Nora. She was a cross to bear but in all other ways she was normal. Everyone was allowed one obsession.

Dan thought she was delightful, the way she blew her hair out of her eyes and her pencil flew across her notebook in the hieroglyphics of shorthand.

“I didn’t think people still used that,” he said as they walked in easy conversation through the school grounds.

“Only ancient ones like myself do,” Nora confessed. “It’s from the era of belted raincoats, and hold the front page. You wouldn’t remember that.”

“I’m as old as you are,” Dan said, stung.

“I’m nearly forty,” Nora said.

“I’m thirty-six and a half,” said Dan.

It was the real thing. More real than anyone in the office had ever known. Nora began to lose weight and talk to the youngsters about how many calories there were in so-called low-fat yogurt. She took serious advice on hair color and opted for highlights. She examined her clothes critically; she said she didn’t want to be palmed off with useless comforting things like fashion being what you chose to wear, what you felt comfortable in. She said she didn’t give a damn about comfort—she wanted to be stylish and
fast. She was certainly reading informative literature about cosmetic surgery, if perhaps falling short of the final commitment. But she said these were desperate times; she was going to meet Dan’s mother and didn’t want to look older than her.

“She could hardly have conceived at the age of two or three,” Nora’s friend Annie said, but Nora took no notice whatsoever of Annie, who had married, unwisely, as it turned out, but at the age of twenty-one and had no need for rejuvenation in the high passion of her courting.

At Dan’s mother’s house Nora made thirty-seven ageist jokes, putting herself down. She mentioned cradle snatching seven times and said she had never really got used to the talkies, and she found more peace in black-and-white movies because Technicolor hurt her eyes. To Dan’s bewildered mother, Nora pretended that she had done her early reporting during the First World War and had cut her teeth on the suffragette movement.

On the way home, Dan stopped the car and asked her to marry him.

“You’re too young—you don’t know your own mind,” Nora said.

“In the forty or fifty good years we may have ahead of us, it would be a huge relief to me if you didn’t have to keep this up the whole time,” Dan said.

“Will they be good years?” Nora hardly dared to believe it.

“I think they will if we could drop the geriatric patter.” Dan was thoughtful. “I can see you interrupting my speech on our wedding day with a few references to weddings you remember with the czars or maybe if it’s a bad day you might go back to the Brehon laws.”

“Wedding?” Nora cried. “You mean a wedding with people looking at us?”

“No, no,” Dan reassured her, “there will be nothing like that. There will be instructions on the invitation that they are to arrive blindfolded.”

They fixed on a day only two months ahead. Nora opened her mouth to say that at her age every minute counted if you were to beat the sell-by date, but she remembered what Dan had said, so she didn’t say it.

Nora gave herself only one hour a day to talk about her wedding plans; she was worried that her work was suffering because she thought so much about Dan with love and hope, and about the wedding day with dread.

Annie was mystified. “It’s only a day, for God’s sake. You look great—what on earth is worrying you?”

“If you could point me to a shop that says ‘Everything for the Aging Bride’ then maybe I’d calm down.” Nora’s face looked tragic. The girls in the office directed Nora to the trendy boutiques. They told her to shut up or they wouldn’t organize an office collection for her. She had to sneak time off to tour the boutiques. They were all staffed by eleven-year-olds. She found herself apologizing and backing out.

“Only having a look,” she would squeak, acting like a shoplifter.

Eventually she realized she would have to come to some decision. The day was drawing nearer and she had reached no conclusion, since she had had no conversations, let alone fittings, in these frightening places.

“I’m looking for something for a wedding,” she said eventually in a high, shrill voice unlike her own.

The young assistant seemed to look at her as if it was a very gross suggestion.

“A wedding?” she repeated doubtfully.

Nora had promised to stop wisecracking about age only to Dan. There had been no agreement that she had to stop making such pleasantries when she was not in his company.

“Not strictly a mother-of-the-bride outfit, but I do have a key role so it needs to be smart,” she said.

“Friend of your daughter’s, is it?” The eighteen-year-old was trying to be helpful. Nora’s heart was like lead.

It was, of course, a nightmare—they kept asking her what the bride was wearing. She kept saying she didn’t know. She had now announced that she was going to be matron of honor, and the bride was her dearest friend.

“Why don’t you ask her what she’s wearing?” asked the increasingly confused assistants.

“I don’t like to ask,” said poor Nora piteously.

They wanted to know if the bride would be wearing white. Nora had poured scorn on that one.

“It’s a pity,” said the boutique manager. “If she were wearing white, you could have worn anything.”

“I think she’ll wear white if I ask her to,” Nora said desperately.

They found this a truly confusing wedding, but they kitted her out incredibly well, considering they had been given absolutely no information and a dozen contradictory signals. The dress and hat were stunning.

“I think you’ll outshine the bride entirely,” said the boutique manager.

“Ah, to hell with the bride,” said Nora and saw that they took rather a long time to verify her credit card. She didn’t blame them for assuming she was barking mad. It would have been the only reasonable explanation.

She collected the dress and the hat and the shoes the day before the wedding. They all stood around admiring her.

“What kind of a bag will you have?” they asked.

Nora had forgotten the bloody bag; she couldn’t carry her huge office shoulder bag, and any evening bags she had at home would be wrong. There was nothing in the shop that suited. Then, one of the assistants lent hers.

“You can drop it in the day after,” she said generously.

Nora opened her mouth to say she would be on her honeymoon
and then closed it. Anyway, Annie could bring it back for her.

The day was a blur. Dan’s mother, who had been keeping her distance a bit after the first startling meeting, was full of praise.

“You look absolutely lovely,” she said.

Nora had a remark ready about the picture of Dorian Gray in her attic but bit it back. Her colleagues praised her to the hilt; they had even arranged to have a wedding picture in tomorrow’s paper. Nora was about to help the photographer set it up.

“I can do it, Nora,” he said. “There’s only two of you—I can write the caption.”

And as she looked at the way Dan was watching her, she smiled, her first real smile of the day. It was going to be great, forty or fifty years, maybe; it was something she never thought would happen to her. She sighed a deep sigh of happiness.

Annie took the bag back to the boutique the next day. They were agog in the shop. They had seen the photo in the paper.

“She married him herself!” said the boutique manager in outrage. “I knew there was something fishy about it all. She said ‘to hell with the bride’—nobody with any feeling would have said that.” Annie hadn’t an idea what they were talking about, but she could trust Nora to have got mixed up in a shop where everyone was mad.

“Was there a scene in the church, you know, like
Jane Eyre
?” asked the girl who looked as if she should still have been at school. Annie was dying to be out of the place; she had a hangover and a nineteen-year-old unsatisfactory marriage to worry about.

“No, no scenes,” she said tersely.

“Didn’t they have to read new banns or anything?” These assistants were beginning to doubt that the institution of marriage could survive with people like Nora around.

Thinking that her head was worse than she suspected, Annie started to leave the shop.

“Is that why she didn’t come back herself—she’s actually gone off with him?” they asked.

“Of course she’s gone off with him, on her honeymoon.”

The baby-faced manager was a liberated woman—she said she always liked to see women be assertive—but this was ridiculous. “You should not be assertive at the expense of a sister,” she said. “My one hope when I saw the picture was that they had written the wrong caption.”

Annie knew that she now needed both a cure and an appointment with an analyst. With all the strength she could muster she said, “It was not the wrong caption. Whatever mistakes Nora made in her life, and she made many, including choosing this place to buy her wedding outfit, she was never responsible for a wrong caption in her life.”

She left unsteadily, watched by the staff of the boutique.

“Do you think
she
was the one who was meant to be the bride?” one of them said as they saw Annie teetering away.

Molly Sullivan said that the new baby was a little star. She was no trouble at all and she was always smiling.

Shay Sullivan said the new baby was a star picker of winners; it pointed its little fist at the horse on the list that was going to win.

So she became known as Star and everyone forgot that her real name was Oona. Star forgot it herself. At school when they read out the roll call they always said, “Star Sullivan?” On the street where she lived, people would shout over to her, “Star, would you do us a favor and mind the baby for me?” or run to the corner shop, or help to fold a big tablecloth, or find a puppy that had gone missing. Star Sullivan had a head of shiny copper hair, a ready smile and a good nature, and she did everything that she was asked to.

There were three older than Star in the family and none of them had her easy, happy ways. There was Kevin, the eldest. He said he was going to work in a gym, eventually own his own sports club, and he fought with his father about everything.

There was Lilly, who was going to be a model one day and had no interest in anyone except herself.

There was Michael, who spent more time in the head teacher’s office than he did in the classroom. He was always in trouble over something.

And then there was Star.

Often Star asked her mother, would there be another baby coming? Someone she could push in a pram up and down Chestnut Street. But her mother said no, definitely not. The angel who brought babies had brought enough to Number 24. It would be greedy to ask for more.

So Star pushed other people’s babies and played with their cats. On her own.

Chestnut Street was a lovely place to play because it was shaped like a horseshoe and there was a big bit of grass in the middle beside some chestnut trees.

Some of the people who lived there went to great trouble to keep it looking nice. Others just sat there at night and drank lager and left the cans.