Homecoming (8 page)

‘Miss O’Callaghan, what happened to your eyes?’

Connie would not be able to resist a joke under the circumstances, which the fifth years loved, and which the principal, Mrs Caldwell, hated.

‘You’re too familiar with the girls, Ms O’Callaghan,’ she’d sniff.

Connie no longer cared about the principal’s dressing downs. She liked being able to have fun with her pupils and the day she could no longer crack a joke, she’d give up teaching.

Now, she dressed in navy, with black tights, her voluminous grey coat and flat black shoes. Unlike her sister, who was of fairy proportions, Connie had taken after her father’s side of the family and was five nine in her socks. Another reason it was hard finding a man. The world was full of small men who took it as a personal insult to their masculinity if a woman was taller than them. Comments about Napoleon only enraged them further.

‘Did you find it?’ Nicky hung on the door jamb, half asleep, wearing bed socks and a stripey nightie. Her highlighted hair was sticking out at all angles, yesterday’s mascara was creased round her brown eyes, but she was still pretty. Connie never thought for a moment about whether it was difficult having a sibling so gorgeous. In her eyes, Nicky was just Nicky, the baby sister Connie had longed for and had mothered ever since she was born.

‘No, I didn’t. Start running a bath now if you want to wash without developing hypothermia.’

‘Crap,’ muttered Nicky. ‘I need to wash my hair.’

‘What time are you due in work?’ Connie asked. ‘Patsy will fit you in for a quick wash and blow-dry, I’m sure.’

Both sisters loved the old-fashioned hair salon round the corner.

Nicky rubbed her eyes. ‘Yeah, I suppose.’

Connie whisked a brush through her hair, it was her crowning glory, their mother liked to say. Her hair was shoulder length, the rich brown of a cinnamon stick and glossier than any L’Oreal commercial. Her eyes were large like her sister’s but they were a plain old brown and didn’t flash with amber fire the way Nicky’s did. Compared to Nicky, Connie knew she was ordinary and she didn’t mind, because Nicky deserved all that was good and wonderful. But sometimes, just sometimes, Connie wished she was beautiful too.

Unlike the rest of the planet, where being paired-up was practically compulsory for everyone from humans to swans, it was easy to be single in St Matilda’s. Many of the teachers had been there donkey’s years and the place was split fifty-fifty between married and single. The scattering of nuns from the convent helped. Old Sister Benedict, who’d been in the order since the Pope was in short pants, froze in horror if she so much as heard anyone discussing boyfriends. The equally old but entirely adorable Sister Laurence looked fondly on any talk of the opposite sex, but believed – as she often told wide-eyed girls in her religious education classes – that men were innocent folk and intelligent women knew better than to rely on them for anything.

‘A career, girls, a career is the answer!’ was her mantra.

Nobody in the staffroom set up dates and nobody in the school looked down on anyone for being single, apart, perhaps from Sylvie Legrand, who had wanted to get married since she knew such a thing existed.

Today was Sylvie’s last day at St Matilda’s before her wedding. Sylvie taught French, chemistry and, unofficially, how to wear a scarf like a good Parisian. Chic was a hopelessly inadequate word to describe her. Connie felt another word needed to be invented, something with greater scope to encompass how utterly glamorous Sylvie managed to be for all that she wasn’t particularly good looking.

It was a talent, Connie decided.

‘You look tired,’ were Sylvie’s welcoming words to her in the staffroom.

Tactless was another inadequate word to describe Sylvie – or perhaps the tactlessness was just an absence of Irish flummery.
Plámás
, as it was named in the Irish language. Plaw-maws. Even if a person were half dead and in urgent need of medical assistance, in the Irish rulebook it was customary to say, ‘You’re looking
great
!’

Connie liked the Irish kindness better, but then which one of them was getting married in a few days and which one was pathetically single? Maybe men liked straight-talking women and didn’t rate ones who were trained to say the right thing instead of the honest thing.

She might have saved herself years of boredom if she’d said, ‘I don’t fancy you,’ within minutes of each new date instead of spending weeks working up to saying something kinder that approximated to the same thing.

‘I stayed up late watching the
Mad Men
box set,’ Connie admitted to Sylvie now. There was no point lying to her French colleague, she’d get it out of Connie, one way or the other.

‘Why always the box sets?’ demanded Sylvie, who tended to get more exotically French, losing all sense of grammar, when she was irritated. ‘Why not the wine bar or the salsa classes, huh?’

Sylvie had dragged Connie to a tango class once. It had not been a success. As with life in general, there hadn’t been enough men to go round and few of them were tall enough to partner Connie.

‘I like box sets,’ Connie pointed out. ‘And I’ve given up wine bars and salsa classes for good. Anyway, you can make me look less tired later, for tonight. I’ll need a lot of that under-eye-bag-banisher thing you use.’

It was Sylvie’s hen night that evening and the teachers who were invited were all going to Sylvie’s house first to get ready. Connie suspected it was so that all of them would be turned out to her French friend’s high standards and not let her down in the restaurant.

It would not be a wild, crazy night, partly because it was a week night and partly because Sylvie didn’t like wild nights. It was to be a dinner in an elegant French restaurant in the city. No mad drinking in a crazy bar, and definitely no wearing of L-plates and fake wedding veils for Sylvie.

In a few days, Sylvie would fly home to Paris for her wedding to the gorgeous Isaac, a tall, dark Belfast man with saturnine good looks and a low, deep voice. She’d met him at a rugby match in Dublin and he’d swept her off her feet. Only a few of the staff, Connie included, would be attending the wedding. The principal had been very annoyed that it was taking place in the middle of term, but Sylvie had somehow talked her round. Isaac’s brother would be home from Australia, Sylvie’s sister would be back from Argentina: with family dotted around the globe, the time suited perfectly. Sylvie didn’t want a little thing like work to get in the way.

Tonight, Sylvie would look stunning, no matter what she wore. Connie herself planned to dress in a pair of black jeans with a loose chiffon blouse, which hid a multitude. Thirtynine was definitely a watershed in terms of figure. Connie couldn’t seem to shift that extra bit of fat around her middle.

Luckily, Connie never felt any hint of envy towards her friend. Sylvie was just Sylvie, you couldn’t change her.

Connie’s mother didn’t see it the same way and was forever anxiously telling her daughter that there was no point hanging around with a glamorous woman like Sylvie, because all the men went mad for her, and no wonder Connie was still on her own.

‘With friends like that, how do you expect to find a man? The coal won’t shine beside the diamond, will it?’

There wasn’t really an answer to that. Her mother didn’t mean it to be cruel: just honest in a worried way.

Perhaps once Sylvie was married, her mother would look round and find something else to blame for Connie’s inability to get a man. Connie sighed at the thought.

‘I won’t have time to make you all up,’ Sylvie was protesting. ‘There are eight of us. I am not Wonderwoman.’

‘You are to us,’ laughed Connie. ‘All right, I’ll plaster a bit more make-up on later. We won’t let you down.’

‘Tell me again: what do you mean, you are giving up wine bars?’ Sylvie demanded. She was like a dog with a bone when it came to Connie’s single status. ‘You will be alone forever if you do not try. Do you think men lurk on the streets waiting for us to find them?
Non!
We have to look for them!’

‘I have looked,’ protested Connie. ‘I’m exhausted looking. I want him to start looking for me.’

‘How will he find you, if you are at home watching television?’

‘He’ll have a ladder and he’ll see me in my window,’ sighed Connie. ‘I don’t know. I give up, Sylvie. I’m taking this month off.’

‘You need a facial,’ said Sylvie, peering at Connie’s face with a beady eye. ‘You are all congested. Too many pastries. Look at your pores!’

‘You can make me look fabulous tonight and hide my big pores,’ said Connie, and hurried off to her class.

The day flew.

Her congested pores notwithstanding, Connie had a quick sandwich and a cup of tea at lunch in the staffroom where a cake was cut for all those people who wouldn’t be coming to the hen night. Then she headed to the library because it was the only quiet place to do some marking.

After lunchbreak, she had the first years, followed by double history with the fifth years, which she wasn’t looking forward to because she was too tired for their antics. You had to be in the whole of your health for a giddy bunch of sixteen-year-olds.

Today, there was wild excitement because they’d got something planned as a send-off for Miss Legrand, who was their class teacher.

After history class, there was to be a small party for her departure. Needless to say, not a shred of work was being done and as Connie watched her students pretend to read about Charles Stewart Parnell, she knew they were all communicating with each other about the party. Notes, sign language, whispered sentences – if only they were as good at history as they were at plotting.

There was absolutely no point in trying to counter this behaviour. A wise older teacher had once told Connie that a class is like a tidal wave and once it turns, it turns. ‘Save the lesson for another day, or you’ll go insane with impotent rage.’

She’d also told Connie that deafness was a useful aid for teachers too.

So Connie admired the girls’ party hairstyles and thought about how it felt like the end of an era. When this school year was over, Sylvie would be leaving St Matilda’s for good. It seemed like only yesterday that the two women had started out as new teachers in the school together. Now Sylvie would be gone to start married life with her husband in his home city, Belfast, and Connie would stay on at St Matilda’s, growing old with the nuns.

The school bell rang lustily, taking Connie by surprise. She liked to give pupils a five-minute warning near the end. But today, it didn’t look as if the fifth years cared. They leapt to their feet and swept the books off their desks at high speed.

‘Bye, Miss O’Callaghan,’ they murmured as they raced out, dropping their textbooks on her desk.

So many of them were impossibly glamorous, Connie thought. Their long shaggy hair was exquisitely styled each morning. Outwardly, they looked like confident young Valkyries. It was only through teaching the girls that a teacher would learn how young and worried they sometimes were.

It seemed as if half the school was crammed into the fifth years’ classroom by the time Connie made her way there. Sylvie was sitting on the desk surrounded by cards and with a giant sparkling gift bag on her lap.

‘Please tell me this is a present and not something to do with a tampon and red ink from the art room?’ Sylvie said loudly.

The assembled girls roared with laughter.

‘You laugh, huh? But poor Mr Shaw, he did not laugh,
non
?’

Only Sylvie could get away with a joke about the trick played on the quiet maths and physics teacher.

‘
Non, mademoiselle!
’ the girls roared back.

Finally, Sylvie unwrapped the package inside the gift bag. It contained two Irish crystal champagne glasses with a bottle of champagne.

‘There is writing,’ Sylvie exclaimed. ‘
For Mademoiselle Legrand, for the most romantic day of your life, Year Five.
I love it, girls!’ she cried.

Connie, who’d been expecting a jokey present or even a red satin negligee with white marabou – it was from the fifth years, after all – choked back a tear. Why this touched her after a whole day thinking about Sylvie’s hen night, she had no idea. But suddenly, she realised that Sylvie was going to have the most romantic night of her life next month when she got married, while she, Connie, had no hope of ever sharing something so special with a loved one. Sylvie would now have what Connie wanted so much: her own family. Sylvie and her husband had bought a pretty three-bedroomed house in Belfast. Everyone had seen the photographs.

The second bedroom was to be a spare bedroom and Sylvie was going to keep her clothes in it like a proper dressing room, she’d informed Connie. The third bedroom was to be the nursery.

‘I will paint it yellow. Yellow is good whether it is a boy or a girl,’ Sylvie pointed out.

Connie had said nothing but thought again of how wonderful it must be to be able to plan your life with such confidence. Sylvie was getting married and she was sure that a baby would follow. She’d probably got her eye on a diamond band in Tiffany’s to mark the birth of said baby.

Connie had nothing planned for the rest of her life.

She’d never cried watching
Gone with the Wind
or even
Sleepless in Seattle
, but now, standing at the back of the fifthyear classroom, she wanted to burst into tears.

Nicky O’Callaghan beamed as she skipped down the steps of the house and hopped into the driver’s seat of her car. She almost waved at the silver-haired, older lady who lived in the apartment below hers, and who was sitting in her bay window, looking out on to the square. Such was her happiness, that Nicky wanted to smile and wave at everyone. But the woman wasn’t really staring at Nicky in her car: she was gazing into the middle distance, there but somehow not there.

She did, however, send a bright glinting smile at the man at the roadworks where she got held up for ten minutes. Nicky’s smile was infectious.

The man at the roadworks looked back suspiciously. It was unheard of for gorgeous blonde women with glossy red lips to grin at him with delight when he was on kango-hammer detail for roadworks that brought the traffic down Amiens Street to a standstill.