Chestnut Street (21 page)

Maggie lit up a cigarette.

“Don’t tell me it’s a no-smoking taxi or I’ll jump into the Liffey,” she said.

“I don’t mind, but is it good for the baby?” Kevin said.

“Of course it’s not good for the baby,” Maggie snapped at him. “Any more than living in a flat in the center of the city is, or the belching fumes of diesel or her mother having to go out to work every day.”

“So what does your husband think about it all—is he a smoker?”

“No, you must be psychic. He hates it, and he says I’m damaging her little lungs at one remove, and that it’s a bad example, and I’m not allowed to smoke in front of his two great louts of children. Not that he cares about her little lungs when she’s bawling with them at three o’clock in the morning. He even goes to sleep in a different room because he has to work. There’s nothing said about me having to work.”

“Well, could you give up work?” Kevin was interested and caring.

“No, because he’s not my husband, he’s my partner, and when you live with a partner you go out to work. It’s the wife who sits at
home and collects the money. That’s reality. That’s the way things are.”

Her face was angry and upset. Was it five long years since he had seen her first? He had been annoyed with her then, a home wrecker, selfish. Yet here she was, a forty-year-old with a baby, and very little security.

“Roll on November,” she said, and inhaled her cigarette down to her toes.

“November?” asked Kevin innocently.

“The referendum—the divorce referendum, twenty-fourth of November,” she said, and looked out at the traffic.

In Kevin’s house there was a bit of aggravation about which way to vote.

Phyllis was voting yes. She wanted people to have the right to start again if they made a mistake. She didn’t want to punish them.

Kevin wasn’t so sure. If you made things too easy, fellows upped and went. He was going to vote no.

“Women could up and go just as soon as men,” Phyllis said with spirit, Phyllis, who would never get up and go from her wheelchair and would never want to be a day without Kevin.

“I’ve seen a lot of unhappiness as a result of divorce and people leaving their homes,” Kevin said, shaking his head.

“Well, if you have, you haven’t seen it in Ireland because there isn’t any divorce here yet.” Phyllis spoke with authority.

They debated not going out to vote at all, since one would cancel out the other, but neither of them wanted that.

“My side needs it more than yours,” Phyllis said.

“I’m not totally convinced that you’re right,” Kevin said. He had been listening a lot in his taxi and thought that a no vote was much less than certain.

On the day of the referendum he had Phyllis tucked in the front of the taxi.

They saw a woman holding a baby.

She hailed them and seemed disappointed when she saw the taxi was engaged.

“I know where she’s going. I think I’ll stop for her,” Kevin said.

Maggie and her daughter, Elizabeth, fell gratefully into the back of the cab.

Phyllis talked to everyone whom she met, and Maggie was no exception. By the time they got to the apartment block Phyllis had discovered more about Maggie’s life than Kevin would have discovered in a decade—Maggie’s mother had her heart scalded; her boss was getting cross about time off to mind the baby; she had hardly any friends left and had just voted yes, and if the referendum passed, her life would change for the better.

“Good luck to you,” Phyllis said. “That man’s marriage is well dead by now and he can start again properly instead of just messing about.”

“Yes, that’s what I say. I suppose it will take a year or so, but then the world will settle down.”

“I expect the two of you are planning it already?” Phyllis said eagerly.

“He hasn’t said anything, but I expect he’s thinking about it.” Maggie bit her lip.

“Well, of course he is,” Phyllis said. “Of course, what kind of a man wouldn’t want to look after you and the little girl properly?”

Maggie’s face was rather troubled.

Kevin suddenly agreed. “Ah, yes, of course he’ll marry you. What else would he be living with you for and having a child with you, if he weren’t going to marry you?”

Phyllis looked at him with surprise. You never knew what way Kevin would turn.

“And why isn’t he voting with you?” Kevin asked.

“He has to see his big dreary children today,” said Maggie. “He probably won’t be home, with me, until late tonight.”

From his vantage point at the rank, Kevin saw Ronan going into Lorraine’s house. He had a tray of winter pansies. She brought him out a mug of something as he worked. They laughed together as old friends. There were no signs of the big dreary children that he was meant to be visiting. Kevin smiled to himself.

He would work late tonight. Phyllis would watch endless television discussions on the referendum and then, as far as tomorrow was concerned, he would be glued to the results nonstop.

He thought about Maggie alone with Elizabeth in her flat.

He thought about how life never turns out like you think and hope it will.

On November 25 Kevin saw Ronan coming out of his office.

By now Ronan sort of recognized Kevin and would say, “There you are again,” to show that he was aware they had met.

“It’s going to be close,” Kevin said.

“Too damn close,” Ronan said.

Kevin looked puzzled. “Well,” Ronan went on, “it would be better if the whole country was one way or the other. This way it’s divisive.”

“That’s true. Anyway I expect even if it does pass, most people won’t bother getting divorces at all, most people have their own arrangements made by now, perfectly adequate arrangements.” Kevin could sense Ronan eager to agree.

“It’s interesting that you should say that—it’s my own view precisely. If it ain’t broke why fix it, that’s what I say, or am going to say if the matter is brought up.”

Kevin paused for a moment to think. What he said now could be quite important. It might even make a big difference. He could come down in favor of fair play for the wife or the partner, but not both.

He nodded sagely. “Of course, if you’re in a proper relationship it doesn’t need bits of paper, and registry office marriages and amendments to the Constitution. Any reasonable woman would understand that, surely.”

Ronan leaned forward, listening.

“Could you say that again? I’m going to have a bit of an ear-bending tonight.”

Kevin said it again and added more.

There was a lot of celebration in the kitchen. Phyllis and her friends were raising a glass to the new Ireland.

But Kevin wasn’t thinking about it; he was thinking of the people who traveled in his car.

He knew that he must not be foolish about all this. Ronan would not return to the red-brick house where he had planted the winter pansies, but he would visit often and easily.

And Lorraine, the woman with the kind eyes, would not have her husband back to live. But there would surely be a little unworthy feeling of satisfaction that there was no second wedding day, no second wife, even though the law of the land had changed to say that there could be a second.

And Kevin smiled to himself, thinking of the small but not insignificant part he had played in bringing more peace to the troubled gray eyes of Lorraine.

He decided not to think at all about the dark, anxious eyes of Maggie. He wasn’t God. He couldn’t solve everything.

Lisa had paused in the big store and watched the people buying cards for Father’s Day. Every year she did this, and often went up real close to listen to what they were saying.

“I think he’d like this one—there’s a lovely poem,” a girl might say.

“He doesn’t ever read the verse,” her sister would reply.

Or she might see women in their sixties buying them. Was this to send to an old man far away in a nursing home? Or for their own husbands, maybe? She had never bought a Father’s Day card because she never had a father. Well, she had, of course, twenty-five years back. But he had not been interested enough to want to know anything at all about her. She had long stopped asking her mother.

It was only a question that made Sara, her mother, sad.

“He never fell out with you, Lisa, he never saw you; it was me he fell out with.”

Over the years Lisa had learned that he had been a student, and his family was wealthy, and ambitious for him. They would not have wanted him to have married Sara, a seventeen-year-old girl from Chestnut Street who worked in a factory. They wanted
him far away from the relationship, so they even left the country. They were not to know what a determined young woman Sara was, strong enough to raise a child alone and to become manager of a firm of contract cleaners.

So somewhere in America she had a dad, a man who would be forty-four now, maybe a big businessman living in a white wooden house with children of his own who would send him cards on Father’s Day.

Would he ever think of the child who had been born a quarter of a century ago, a child who longed to meet him just once. Once would do and for him to say that she had turned out so well.

For Lisa
had
turned out well. She was the personal assistant to a very senior executive who also happened to be a good and kind man. Mr. Kent, who respected her enormously and gave her more and more responsibility at work. He urged her to take more courses and saw that she got credit for everything she did.

“Always trust your instinct,” he would advise. “Listen to the first thing that comes into your head—it’s often the right thing.”

“I think he fancies you,” the other girls said.

But Lisa knew this wasn’t so. Mr. Kent was a widower who was now very happily married to his job. He spent long hours in his office, and had never given her the slightest indication that he was interested in her. Which was just as well, really, because he was very old; he might even have been over fifty. He often asked her if she had fallen in love yet or if she would leave the company to marry and bring up babies. Lisa would always laugh easily and tell him that she had never truly loved anyone at all more than herself.

“Too set in my ways, really. I love my own flat, my own freedom. I was brought up to be independent; you should blame my mother.”

Mr. Kent knew Lisa’s mother, Sara; her company had the contract to clean their offices. Mr. Kent had put more business her mother’s way. He was a thorough gentleman.

He was not a man who would understand how she felt mistrustful of young men and their promises of commitment. It was as if the disappearance of her own father at the very moment he knew of her future existence had made her unwilling to trust any men at all.

There was a very pleasant young man called James around at the moment but she knew she was frightening him away by her refusal to believe that he could be sincere. She couldn’t be full of suspicions and misgivings forever, James had warned her. What a terrible, terrible waste that would be. But Lisa would not tell this to her kind boss, Mr. Kent; instead she would jokily blame her mother.

“Sara was wondering if she might have brought you up to be too independent,” Mr. Kent said.

Lisa was surprised. Her mother rarely spoke of her private life at all to any customers. Least of all, she would have thought, to Mr. Kent.

He saw that she was startled and hurried to explain.

“We often talk together at the end of a long busy day. She often comes in to supervise the cleaning team then. She is even more proud of you than I am.”

“Well, she did a great job,” Lisa said. “And you completed it. I wouldn’t have got half this distance without your encouragement.”

“Perhaps I pushed you too hard. Maybe I made you concentrate too hard on work, so much so that you forgot to consider all the young men around you?”

He sounded genuinely anxious.

“And, Lisa, I had another reason for caring that neither your mother nor I are putting too much pressure on you.”

“You had?” She was very confused. His voice sounded entirely different now. This wasn’t a normal office conversation.

“I didn’t mean to tell you but I see you’ve guessed.”