Nora Webster (13 page)

“What did she do?” Fiona asked.

“I’m not sure I should have started this story,” Una said.

“Go on,” Fiona said.

“Well, they all knew that one of the Sacred Heart’s things is that she doesn’t take a dinner break. She works right through the
day without eating. I suppose this makes her very cranky by four o’clock. And up to this time she used to hang her coat up in the corridor where all the other coats were hanging. Breda’s daughter hated her so much that she spent a week collecting dogshit and then she filled both pockets of the Sacred Heart’s coat with what she had collected sometime in the morning, and then at four she asked the Heart, or whatever her name is, if she could leave fifteen minutes early since it was her last day and the Heart told her that she most certainly could not and she was to go back to her desk forthwith. The Sacred Heart was working late that evening so none of them ever got to see what happened. Maybe she didn’t notice until she was on her way home and she put her hands into her pockets.”

“Were they big pockets?” Conor asked.

“So now she hangs her coat in her own office,” Una went on, “but the funny thing is that she wore that same coat to work the next morning as though nothing had happened. It’s an old brown coat and she may still have it for all I know.”

“Yuck,” Fiona said.

“I’d say that Dobbs girl had no luck for doing that,” Nora said.

“Oh, she married one of the Gethings of Oulart, he’s a very nice fellow, and they have a new bungalow. He has his own business. I’ve played golf with her a few times and you couldn’t meet a nicer girl. She’d had enough, that’s all.”

“It would have been worse if it was cowshit,” Conor said.

“Or b-bullshit,” Donal said.

On the way to Bunclody, Aine, in the front passenger seat, asked her if she knew that Una was going out with someone in the golf club.
Aine’s friend in the back seat confirmed that her mother, who was in the golf club, had also heard the news.

“Una?” Nora asked.

“Yes, that’s why she is in such good humour. We asked her when she came upstairs but she just blushed and said that there was always too much talk about people in the golf club.”

Nora calculated that since she was forty-six, Una was forty, or would be soon. She and Catherine had decided some years before that Una would never marry, but would remain working in the offices of Roche’s Maltings and living in the house where she had lived with her mother until her mother’s death.

“So you don’t know who the lucky man is?” Nora asked.

“No, but we told her that if she didn’t tell us soon we were going to spread a rumour that it was Larry Kearney. She was raging, but still she didn’t tell us.”

Larry Kearney was, she knew, a drunk in the town who often sat on the ground outside the public houses he was barred from entering. Years before, when Catherine and Una had gone to a golfing hotel in County Cavan with Rose Lacey and Lily Devereux, they had to have their tea one evening with a Dublin couple who were very snobbish and had spoken of their posh golf club in Dublin. They boasted about themselves until Lily Devereux said in a grand voice to the Dublin husband that he was the spitting image of a man in Enniscorthy, one of the best golfers in County Wexford, and his name was Larry Kearney and she wondered if they were related in any way. Catherine had to run out of the restaurant howling with laughter, closely followed by Una.

“What are you laughing at?” Aine asked her as they passed through Clohamon.

“Has Larry Kearney joined the golf club?” she asked.

“No, don’t be silly.”

Later, Donal and Conor came with her to the train Fiona would take back to Dublin. As the boys were standing on the metal bridge, Nora noticed that Fiona seemed sad.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“I hate going back,” Fiona said.

“Is there something wrong?”

“The nuns, the dorm, the whole training college. Everything really.”

“But you have friends there?”

“Yes, and we all hate it.”

“You’ll be in London in the summer and then it’s just one more year and then you can come home.”

“Home?”

“Well, where else would you go?”

“I might stay in Dublin and do a degree at night.”

“Fiona, it’s very hard for me here. I just don’t know if I’ll have enough money.”

“Do you not have the pension? And the money from the house in Cush? And are you not starting in Gibney’s?”

“Gibney’s are paying twelve pounds a week.”

“Is that all?”

“He was very brusque about it, the son Thomas. He more or less said that I could take it or leave it. His father and mother were all smarmy. But he’s the money man. That’s how business works, not that I know anything about business.”

“I suppose I could look for a job down here,” Fiona said quietly.

“We’ll wait and see anyway,” Nora said.

Fiona nodded and then Conor announced that the train was coming.

“I’m sorry about the house in Cush,” Nora said.

“Oh, I’ve forgotten about that,” Fiona said. “I was upset that day, hearing the news, but I am okay about it now.”

She picked up her small suitcase.

As they drove back home, Donal said that he had checked the
Sunday Press
and there was another film on the television that night.

“What’s it called?” she asked.

He was silent, she knew, because whatever the name of the film was he could not say it.

“Hold your breath and take it slowly,” she said.

“
L-lost Horizon
,” he said.

“I’m not sure what that is but we can look at the beginning anyway.”

“The one last week was queer frightening,” Conor said.

“Did you like it though?” she asked.

“I told the class about it in school and Mr. Dunne said I shouldn’t have been up so late.”

“Why did you tell them?”

“We all have to tell a story. It was my turn on Friday.”

“Is t-that in Irish or in English?” Donal asked.

“In English, stupid.”

“Don’t call your brother stupid,” Nora said.

“Sure, how would you say
Gaslight
in Irish?” Conor asked.

As soon as she read the description of the film in the newspaper, Nora recognised what it was. She remembered the name “Shangri-
La” and was sure that she and Maurice had once laughed at a house in Dublin with that name on the gates. They had wondered if the owners had ventured out into the world only to discover their real age. As she remembered the film, it seemed a fantasy, harmless compared to
Gaslight
, and when the boys asked if they could watch it she agreed, saying that they could go to bed if they got bored.

But as soon as the film began there was something sharp and strange about it. First, it was the music; and then the plane crash itself was frightening, almost hard to watch it was so realistic. When the first break for advertisements came, the boys asked her to tell them the story.

“It’s like Tír Na nÓg,” she said. “It’s Shangri-La and people don’t get old there. Some of them could be a hundred or two hundred but they look young.”

“As old as Mrs. Franklin?” Conor asked.

“Yes, and older. She would look like a young girl once she entered Shangri-La. But it’s just a film.”

Slowly, however, as the film went on, she saw that no matter what they watched, it would remind them of their circumstances more than anything that had been said all day in the house. She did not know whether it was right or wrong for her to sit like this with them in a silence broken by the dramatic music and the soft voices coming from the television. She could not recall the name of the actor playing the lead part; she did not think she had seen him in anything else. He was a type, reliable, strong, romantic, filled with openness and curiosity.

During the scene where the Lama began to weaken and it was clear that he would die, Conor moved close to Nora until she gave him a cushion and he sat on the floor near her. Donal kept away. He seemed to her even more involved with this film than with
Gas
light.
When the break came, he watched the advertisements and did not even look over when Conor asked questions that she tried to answer.

She knew what was coming in the film; she had not remembered it until now—the three characters leaving, walking over the high mountains in the hope of being rescued and taken back to England. And then the woman’s face wizened as soon as they moved out of the sacred space of Shangri-La. And then her death, and the hero’s brother jumping to his own death in horror, followed by the rescue and the return to England.

It was the last part of the film that caused Donal to become restless on his chair. The hero wanted to go back, wanted to leave the world and everything familiar and walk until he found it again, the place away from the world where no one could ever locate him and where he would not miss his home but experience instead the paradise where he would not grow old. The message in this was so obvious that Nora did not have to wonder what the boys were thinking about, they were thinking that this was what their father had done. She was thinking it too, and it registered the same for all of them, she thought, so that when it was over, there was no need to mention it. They turned the television off and she set about preparing dinner for the next day while the boys went to bed.

The following morning, as she walked across the town to go to work for the first time, she felt that she was being closely observed. She had been up early and had spent some time choosing the clothes that she would wear. She had to make sure that they were not too glamorous, but not shabby or dowdy either. It was not cold enough to wear one of her two woollen coats, so she found a red raincoat that she had bought before Maurice became sick and that she had never worn. It was too bright and might have looked better on a younger woman but it was the only coat she had that was not too
heavy on a morning like this.

Now, as she reached Court Street, she knew it was a mistake. She passed women on their way to work in St. John’s Hospital and men on their way to work in Roche’s Maltings. All of them looked at her with her dyed hair and her red coat. She hoped to meet no one she knew well, no one who would stop and talk and ask her questions. She slipped down Friary Hill and along Friary Place to avoid meeting anyone. She crossed Slaney Place and got to the bridge with relief. She was almost there now. Once she arrived at the office building, she was to ask the receptionist for Miss Kavanagh. There was no point, she thought, in trying to be warm and friendly with Francie Kavanagh. They had never liked each other, and they would not like each other now. All she could hope for was that the news that she had been offered the job by William Gibney himself in the presence of his wife, Peggy, and that Maurice had taught the Gibney boys in school might make Francie Kavanagh have some manners.

When the receptionist asked for her name, she found herself speaking too grandly, causing the woman to glance up at her. That tone, she thought, would be no use here. She concentrated now on becoming quiet and mild, but also efficient and in full control of herself. She had no idea what work she would be doing. Thomas Gibney had said that that would be something for Miss Kavanagh to decide, but no matter what she was given to do, it would be new for her and take time to learn. She waited at the reception as some office workers passed her in the narrow corridor. Most of them were women and much younger than she was. A few of them looked like schoolgirls.