Dublin 4 (18 page)

The score was exactly as Rory described it for a long time.

‘I suppose you think it’s silly not to,’ Pat had said.

‘Silly, no. Wasteful, yes,’ Rory had said. ‘It’s up to you entirely what you would like to do. I don’t ever believe in putting on the pressure. Too much of what’s wrong is wrong because people felt forced to do things for approval. But I think you’re wrong. It would give us both so much pleasure and it would hurt exactly nobody. We aren’t betraying anyone, we can be sure that we aren’t irresponsibly conceiving a child we don’t want. So wasteful is all I think I’d say it was.’

She adored Rory, his intensity and his boyish enthusiasms. She went to the Family Planning Clinic. She knew the doctor who was on duty that day. It was a friend of her father’s. ‘Glad to see you, that’s a
good sensible girl,’ the friend of Dad’s had said. No explanations asked for, no curiosity, no condemnation. It was all so simple. Why hadn’t Cathy done this? They had clinics, even in her time.

Cathy was still a mystery. There she was, living at home so calmly. If anyone ever asked about the Common Market Legal course she was meant to have done, she would shake her head and say that she hadn’t done it after all, she had worked for the Council in East London. Mum had been right in her way to have kept things simple, to have rocked no boats. Cathy came back and stepped in more or less where she had got out. It was just that time, all those months that remained as inexplicable. What had she been doing, what had she been thinking? She was so placid now, sometimes going out to the theatre with Ian, sometimes with other people. Holidaying with two girls in the Greek islands, sitting with Mum and Dad sometimes in the evenings looking at television.

Pat had insisted on Rory discussing it. ‘Is it natural for them not to mention it? Is it normal? I mean, there she is at home, and nobody ever once refers to the fact that she left home pregnant and stayed away from home for fourteen months and came back and everything is as you were.’

‘Um.’ Rory was reading.

‘But why, why do they say nothing? It’s like not noticing someone is naked or not referring to
someone being in a car crash or in gaol. It’s not real.’

‘Um. I know,’ he said.

‘But they don’t seem to want to know, it’s only me, it’s only me that wants to know.’

‘Well, why don’t you ask her then?’ Rory said.

*   *   *

‘Cathy, did you have any problems with the Pill, you know, have you had to change brand or anything?’

Cathy looked up from the papers she was studying. She was sitting at the big desk in her bedroom, which she had converted into a kind of study.

‘No, I was never on the Pill, so it didn’t occur.’

‘Never on the Pill, at all?’

‘No.’

‘How amazing.’

‘Pat, you are twenty, going on twenty-one. You aren’t actually a wise old sociologist commenting on the funny things society does.’ Cathy laughed good-naturedly as she spoke.

‘Yes, but … not ever?’

‘Not ever. If I
had
been, that little incident which you may remember would never have happened …’

‘Yes, well, after the little incident … ?’

Pat felt she was treading on a minefield. She had to remain light-hearted and casual.

‘Oh, after the little incident, I didn’t … how shall
I put it … well, I didn’t actually need the services of a contraceptive.’

‘Not ever?’

‘No, not ever.’ Cathy smiled, relaxed and calm as if they had been talking about the replanting of the herbaceous border.

‘Oh.’

‘So I’m not much help. But you could go to the Family Planning Clinic, tell them if it doesn’t suit you. They’ll change it.’

‘Yes, good idea. Cathy?’

‘Yes?’

‘Remember that time … the little incident … what happened?’

‘How do you mean, what happened?’

‘I mean, did you go through with it? Did you have the baby?’

‘Did I what?’

‘Did you have the baby? In London?’

‘Hey, what is this? A joke?’

‘No, seriously. I wish you’d tell me. I hate us all pretending, it’s so artificial.’

‘Tell you what?’

‘When you went off to London, did you actually have the baby?’

‘No, of course I didn’t, are you feeling all right? What an extraordinary question to ask. Have a baby? Where is it, then, if I had it, was I meant to have left it in a telephone box?’

‘Well, what did you do? Did you have an abortion?’

‘Seriously, is this some kind of game? Of course I didn’t. What on earth are you saying … ?’

‘But you
were
pregnant.’

‘No, I thought I was. I wasn’t.’

‘You were, Dad knows, he said so when you were gone.’

‘Oh no, he can’t have, I wrote telling them it was a false alarm.’

‘He didn’t believe you.’

‘Listen, don’t start stirring up a lot of trouble over nothing. It was nothing. Why all this interrogation?’

‘Is that what put you off the whole thing, fellows and making love?’ Pat asked. ‘They say people can get very depressed.’

‘I
didn’t
have an abortion, and I wasn’t very heavily into fellows and making love, and I haven’t gone off fellows.’

‘That’s all you’ll say.’

‘Jesus Lord, what is this, Pat, one of Rory’s revolutionary tribunals? You’ve asked me about ten questions. I’ve answered all of them honestly – which is rather good of me since
none
of them are any of your business.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘No, you’re not, you want some awful group where everyone sits and tells the most god-awful, self-centred, boring details of what they did and what they thought and what they felt and what they did then, and what
they thought then and what they felt then … honestly, I can’t stand that kind of thing. Even Woody Allen laughs at it, for heaven’s sake. It’s not going to solve the world’s problems.’

‘What is?’

‘I don’t know, but a lot of people’s are solved by playing down dramas rather than creating them.’

‘And is that what you’re doing?’

‘I’m refusing to invent them, refusing to make myself into a tragedy queen.’

‘I’m sorry I spoke.’

‘I’m not, but I’m glad you’ve stopped.’ Cathy grinned.

Pat gave a watery grin back.

*   *   *

‘So you see, she’s
got
to be lying. Somewhere along the line she told a lie.’ Pat frowned as she ticked the items off on her fingers.

‘There are times you can be very boring, Pat,’ said Rory.

She was hurt and upset. ‘You’re often analysing what people say and why society forces us to tell lies and role-play. Why is it boring when I do it?’

‘Because it’s repetitive and it’s slapdash.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, you haven’t even included all the possibilities, have you?’

‘I
have
. Either she was not pregnant, or she was and she had either a baby or an abortion.’

‘She could have had a miscarriage, you clown.’

*   *   *

All that had been a year ago. Pat remembered the conversation word for word. They had been all at the turning points of things somehow. The very next day, the day following the interrogation, Cathy said that she and Ian were going to get married. The news coincided with a letter from Ethna. She was leaving the order. And everyone might remember that she had spoken quite a lot of Father Fergus. Well, Fergus was in Rome at the moment and the laicisation process was well under way. She and Fergus would be married in Rome during the summer. Then they would come home, possibly try to get a teaching job. It shouldn’t be hard. Both of them had a lot of qualifications and a lot of experience.

‘It’s all working out as you want, isn’t it, Mum?’ Pat had said.

‘It’s what all you girls want that’s important, you know that,’ Mum had said; she was laughing at herself a little, and she tried to take the triumphant look off her face.

That time had been a turning point for Pat too. Rory had told her about the South American woman, Cellina. Pat had liked Cellina; she had helped her to organise a solidarity campaign for fellow students back home, and she had introduced her to Rory. She
had been pleased when Rory had liked Cellina. She had never seen exactly how much he had liked Cellina until he told her.

She had stopped taking the Pill. To use Cathy’s marvellous, old-fashioned phrase, she felt she didn’t need the services of a contraceptive. She did a lot of work on her thesis, and she did a great deal of work at home too. A family wedding for Cathy, with the Kennedys screaming their delight as loudly as Mum and Dad. Then there was the trip to Rome. Why not? If Ethna was doing something as huge as this they must all be there, and they were. Mother had Ethna back, and she had Cathy back.

But she was about to lose Pat. Temporarily perhaps, who could tell? Rory had come back from Bonn where he and Cellina had been living. He had come home alone. They had met a lot during the two weeks he was back. It seemed silly and wasteful not to go to bed with him. They were giving each other a lot of pleasure and they weren’t hurting anyone, since Cellina would never know. And were they betraying anyone? The word betrayal is such a subjective one.

But now Rory had gone back to Bonn, and Holles Street, which is never wrong over such things, had said Positive. And Pat had learned enough over the years not to believe the Problem Pages. It would be best if she went to London, on her own. Connected with work. And the possibility
of getting into the London School of Economics – yes, that would be a good one. She had often spoken of the LSE. Mum and Dad would be interested in that as a project.

And as long as she wrote regularly and seemed happy, that was the main thing.

Seven people woke up that morning and remembered that this was the day Gerry Moore came out of the nursing home. He wouldn’t be cured, of course. You were never cured if you were an alcoholic. Four of them shrugged and thought that perhaps he wasn’t really an alcoholic – these things were so exaggerated nowadays. There was a time when a man took a drop too much, but now it was all endogynous, and in the glands, and in the bloodstream, and there were allergies and addictions that had never existed before. Two people knew very well that he was an alcoholic, and the remaining one, waking up that morning, looking forward to his release, had never believed for one moment that there was anything the matter with Gerry. He had gone into that home for a good rest, and that’s all there was to it.

*   *   *

Gerry’s mother was seventy-three, and there had never been any scandal in her life before and there wasn’t going to be any. She had reared five boys on her own. Three of them were abroad now, all of them making a good living; only two were in Ireland, and of those Gerry was easily her favourite. A big innocent bear of a man without a screed of harm in him. He worked too hard, that was the problem and in his job, Gerry had told her often, the best place to meet clients was in pubs. A grown man couldn’t sit like a baby in a pub, drinking a pint of orange juice! Naturally a man had to drink with the people he talked to. They wouldn’t trust him otherwise. His health had broken down from all the anti-social hours, that’s what he had told her. He had to go into the nursing home for six weeks for a total rest. No one was to come and see him. He would be out in the first week of May, he had said. Now it was the beginning of May and he’d be home, as right as rain. That’s if anyone could be as right as rain in the house his precious Emma ran for him. Stop. She mustn’t say a word against Emma, everyone thought Emma was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Keep your own counsel about Emma. Even her son Jack had said that Emma was a walking saint. Jack! Who never noticed anyone …

*   *   *

Jack Moore woke up that morning with a leaden feeling in his chest. He couldn’t identify it for a
while. He went through the things that might cause it. No, he had no row going on with Mr Power in the showrooms; no, he had no great bag of washing to take down to the launderette. No, there had been no bill from the garage for his car – and then he remembered. Gerry came home today. Insisted on taking a bus home in his own time, no, he didn’t want anyone to collect him, didn’t want to look like a wheelchair case. Anyway, he had to start taking control of his own life again. Jack knew that the visit to the nursing home was going to be a big talking point, a drama, a bit of glamour, just like losing his driving licence had been. Gerry had held them spellbound with his story of the young guard asking him to blow into the bag. The jokes that Gerry had made had cracked a smile even in the Gardai. It hadn’t done any good in the end, of course, he had been put off the roads for a year. Emma had taken twenty-five driving lessons in ten days: she had passed her test. She drove the car, remembering to take the keys out of it when she was going to leave both the car and Gerry at home. Emma was a saint, a pure saint. He hoped her children appreciated her.

*   *   *