Mothers and Sons (8 page)

‘I’m glad now you came,’ she said.

A
T NIGHT
, when the children went to bed, she left them time to undress and talk amongst themselves before she came upstairs to the girls’ room first and then to Gerard’s room. She made it seem casual, but it was part of their ritual now, something that George’s death had not interrupted nor interfered with. She asked them questions and listened to them, which she could not do when they came in first from school. She told them who had been in the shop and then they told her about school and teachers and friends. She was careful never to criticize them or offer too much advice, she tried to sound more like their sister than their mother. So when Gerard told her that he would like to beat the shit out of old Mooney, who taught him Latin and science, she merely said quietly: ‘Oh, you shouldn’t say that, Gerard.’

‘So what should I say?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know. God, I really don’t.’

She laughed.

‘Well, that’s what I’d like to do,’ Gerard said, putting his hands behind his head.

‘It’s OK to think it,’ she said. ‘I suppose I just wouldn’t say it to too many people.’

She knew Gerard’s timetable and she knew whom the girls sat beside in school and whom they liked and disliked. She told them, in turn, about clothes she might buy, a coat she had seen. But there were two things now which she never discussed with them in these short nightly talks. They never mentioned George or how he had died; and she never told them that she had stopped making payments to the bank and was paying only the suppliers she thought were essential, and that she was hoarding whatever cash she gathered in the bottom drawer of the chest in her bedroom under the good sheets. She believed that Mr Wallace would move slowly against her, even when he found out, as he surely would, that she was cashing cheques in the Croppy Inn. It would be a while before he realized that he should have foreclosed on her at the earliest opportunity. He would never see another penny from her and she would reply to none of his letters when they came. She would save the money in cash so that no other bank could hand her money over to Mr Wallace. In six months, she would have enough to move to Dublin and rent a house and live in peace while she learned typing and shorthand or some other skill which would help her to get a job.

She began to imagine herself as secretary to a businessman, taking his phone calls and announcing visitors and typing his letters and dressing beautifully, the essence of efficiency. Someone like Tony O’Reilly, or the man who ran Aer Lingus or the Sugar Company. She told no one at all about her difficulties or her dreams, even her sister and
brother-in-law. She sat at the cash register in the supermarket and at the end of each day she put the cash where no one would find it.

H
ER MOTHER-IN-LAW
had still owned the shop when George wanted to open a supermarket, the first in the town. Nancy took no part in the negotiations between mother and son, but she wished now as she drove towards Bree at eight o’clock on a Friday night that she had become involved. Her mother-in-law wanted all the old customers looked after, the ones who lived out in the country who had had accounts for years and had their groceries delivered every Friday, and the others who came into the town on a Saturday and had a drink in the little bar to the side of the shop and paid their bills when it suited them. George put his foot down about the spirit grocery. He was, he insisted, keeping the licence but making the old bar into a storehouse. People would have to go elsewhere for their drink on a Saturday night, he told his mother. And they decided that they would over time phase out accounts completely and ask their customers to pay in cash. But on the question of deliveries, George had to give in. Good customers of long standing who had no transport of their own could not be left stranded, he agreed with his mother. And now both George and his mother were dead and Nancy was left driving towards Bree alone in the second-hand station wagon loaded with boxes of groceries.

When she married George first, he spent Thursday and Friday nights making these deliveries, doing ten or fifteen a night, not arriving home until late. Slowly, over the years,
however, the orders had fallen away. Some customers had moved into the town, others had bought cars. She noticed that some of these old faithful customers in recent times avoided their supermarket. Even when they met her or George on the street, they seemed sheepish and distant, anxious to get away.

Nancy was left with seven or eight customers, mostly old people who had the same order every week and had the same comments to make on each visit. Some of them, she knew, did not order enough for her to be their main supplier, and she often thought that they were continuing to deal with her for the sake of charity. It was they who felt sorry for her. Yet they were so friendly and grateful when she came to them on Friday nights that she did not have the heart to tell them it would really suit her not to have to drive along mucky lanes to them once a week as though she were the district nurse. After George died would have been the easiest time to call a halt, it would have seemed natural for no more deliveries to be made, but that was the very time when she was foolishly determined that nothing should change, that everything should be run as before. She did not know then that George had left her at the mercy of his bank manager.

As she drove, she went through all the names of the people she still had to visit: Paddy Duggan, who lived on his own in a tithe cottage which had not been cleaned since his mother died; Annie Parle and her soft sister from near the Bloody Bridge with five gates to open and close before you reached their old farmhouse; the twins Patsy and Mogue Byrne, who ate potatoes and butter for their dinner every day with boiled rice and stewed prunes for their
sweet. Neither of them, she thought, ever took off his cap. The six Sutherlands, a sister, three brothers and a wife of one of the brothers, and a cousin or an aunt who was upstairs in bed, they got all their bread from her on a Friday, paid her once a month, and never ordered anything else except jars of Bovril and large pots of strawberry jam – they each had their own, they did not share. And poor smiling Mags O’Connor, alone by the fire with two dogs, in a two-storey house down a long rutted lane, she must have had money or a pension from England because hers was the biggest order of all, including duck loaves and grapefruit juice and Mikado biscuits and tins of salmon and jars of chicken and ham paste and sandwich spread.

By ten o’clock she had only Mags O’Connor and the Sutherlands to visit. She was cold and tired and wished she knew how to tell these customers that they should find another way to have their groceries delivered. As she approached Mags O’Connor’s house, she noticed that there were two cars parked; one of them had an English registration. When she got out of the station wagon, a sheepdog came and wagged its tail, followed by another who nosed up against her. She took the boxes from the back seat of the car and went towards the door which was, as usual, half open.

‘Well, will you look who’s here?’ Mags always used the same greeting.

‘This woman,’ she said to the three visitors who sat at her kitchen table, ‘this woman is the saving of my life. I don’t know where I’d be without her. How are you at all, Nancy?’ she asked.

Nancy greeted her and waited.

‘It’s fresh and well you are looking,’ Mags as usual said as the boxes were put into the corner.

‘You’ll have tea, Nancy,’ she went on, ‘because I have people here who’ll make it for you.’

She was a big-framed woman who normally seemed gentle and ready to smile, but now she looked imperiously at her visitors.

‘We’ll all have tea,’ she said, ‘and wait until I introduce you now to my two nieces, Susan from Dublin and Nicole from Sheffield and then Frank there who’s married to Nicole and not an Irish bone in his body and no worse for that, although you’d better not tell anyone else I said that.’

Nancy wondered if she had been drinking but realized that the company had made her talkative.

‘Use the good cups and saucers now,’ she said as the two nieces set about making tea, ‘and sit down here, Nancy, I was telling them all about you and poor George and I was just saying that old Mrs Sheridan was the nicest woman in the whole town, there was no one as nice, and of course you’re very nice too. I was saying that too, wasn’t I, girls? So I suppose the gist of what I was telling them was that all the Sheridans were very nice and are still very nice. So it’s a pity you weren’t listening at the door, you would have heard nothing bad about yourself.’

Nancy wondered if she was imagining this. In the silence which followed she thought she saw one of the nieces with her back to them shaking with laughter.

‘Oh, show me the red book before I forget,’ the old woman said, ‘till I see how much I owe you. I keep my money by my side, so I’d be very easy to rob. Philly Duncan up the lane does go to the post office for me every
so often. If it wasn’t for you and for him and for that wireless there and Shep and Molly, I’d be in the County Home.’

She took a breath and then sipped her tea.

‘So how are you at all, Nancy?’ she asked.

‘I’m very well, Miss O’Connor, very well.’

‘It’s always nice to see you. I wrote to the girls here and I said it as well to Philly Duncan that Nancy won’t give up. I know the Sheridans and she won’t give up, she’ll be out here, or she’ll get someone to deliver. They were always great business people, the Sheridans.’

She looked serious, her jaw set, as she poked the fire.

‘And they always have the best things, sure you couldn’t beat their bread, it’s the freshest, and there’s nothing they don’t have, but I believe there are big changes in the town, plenty of traffic I hear and plenty of money. And I do hear the advertisements for Dunne’s Stores on the wireless, but I wouldn’t like them at all now, they wouldn’t be from the town and they wouldn’t know anyone. They’ll never catch on, Nancy, those Dunnes.’

When the tea had been finished, Mags O’Connor asked Nancy if she would like a small glass of sherry.

‘It’ll help you on your way,’ she said.

By the time Nancy had refused, a tray had appeared, carried by one of the nieces, with a bottle and five small glasses.

‘And I asked the girls, and they’re very good, I asked them to get you a little token of thanks.’

Mags produced a small package wrapped in shiny red paper and handed it to her.

‘Now you’ll have to remember it’s just a token,’ Mags
said as Nancy opened the package and found a bottle of 4711 perfume. Mags smiled and nodded her head as Nancy thanked her.

‘Oh, the Sheridans were always very nice people,’ she said.

It was after eleven when Nancy left the house and it had begun to rain. By the time she reached the road she knew that if she turned left she could be home in twenty-five minutes when maybe Gerard would be still awake. If she turned right, she would have three miles more and then another lane to the Sutherlands, to deliver them three large pans and four batch loaves, six pots of jam and six jars of Bovril. She realized, as soon as the idea came into her head, that she would turn left and go home. She could still, she thought, sell the bread in the supermarket the next morning.

N
ANCY WAS AMAZED
one night the following week when Gerard asked her if she was going to get married again. She told him it was the last thing on her mind.

‘Oh now,’ he said. ‘That’s not what I heard.’

Eventually, after much withholding and teasing, he told her how he and his sisters had seen their mother three times in the recent past in deep discussions with Birdseye, the commercial traveller.

‘We were just speaking about business, Gerard,’ she said. ‘Don’t be going on with nonsense.’

‘That’s what they all say,’ he replied.

Over the days that followed he made a point of leaving a packet of Birdseye custard at her place at the table. He was not to be stopped so she ignored him, surprised by his
confidence and his cheek and unsure how to respond to him.

She did not want him to know anything about the conversations with Birdseye, who was the most popular and talkative commercial traveller who came to the shop. He ended each sentence with ‘Mrs’ as though it were a Christian name. Even when George was alive he would single her out and talk to her at great length when he came to get his order, telling her the news and knowing a good deal about the plans for expansion and the inner workings of Dunne’s Stores. He was small and chubby, with a large and friendly face. George had always laughed at him when he was gone, saying that he was a born salesman, that you would buy from him because he seemed so harmless.

She did not know why he was the one to whom she explained her circumstances. Maybe it was his harmlessness, and his living a distance away where no one knew her was certainly a factor, but more than anything she knew that he would listen to her, and that not a detail would be lost on him. She did not tell him about the cash mounting slowly in the bottom drawer because she could not gauge what his response to that would be. But she told him the rest, and he stared at her as he concentrated on each word, waiting for the next piece of information.

‘I’ll come back tomorrow, Mrs,’ he said. ‘Will you be here at four? I’ll come back tomorrow and I’ll have plenty to say to you then, Mrs.’

He came back the next day when Catherine was also working and he whispered to Nancy as soon he arrived, asking if he could see the store which was across the
hallway. The old counter of the spirit grocery was still there and the window with the curtains drawn which gave on to the square, but the room was full of junk. He studied it silently, taking it all in.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘I was right yesterday, Mrs, but I needed to sleep on it, and I rang a fellow I know, I didn’t tell him what town it was, but he agreed with me, Mrs, so I have it now. There’s only one thing you can do. Low investment, Mrs, and quick money. That’s the name of the game.’

They stood in the dusty old room. He looked at her, like a small animal about to pounce, and she held his eye. She was taken aback by his seriousness and his certainty.