Prosperity Drive (12 page)

‘I thought you said she was an orphan,' Irene hissed at Liam as they travelled gingerly up the aisle of the church to extend their condolences.

‘I said a home,' Liam said crossly, Mr Etc. suddenly a stickler for distinctions, ‘a mother and baby home. She gave the child up.'

‘Oh,' Irene said, wondering why he hadn't told her before.

Chastened, she kept her head bowed beneath her black mantilla. She let Liam do the talking when they shook Quinny's mother's hand at the top of the church. This new knowledge should have helped, but it didn't. She had known nothing really of Quinny, nothing at all.

A lot of things happened that year. There was the Rising commemoration, which went off without a hitch and won Liam a promotion. The railway stations were renamed for the signatories of the Proclamation. The Pillar was blown up by hotheads who said Nelson shouldn't be lording it over them. Irene was secretly delighted; another place associated with Quinny reduced to ruin. At the end of the year, the new houses being built at the end of the street were finished. As a result, everyone on Prosperity Drive got a new house number. The Devoys lost Number 27 and inherited 10 instead. Quinny's associations were gradually dwindling.

But the dead maid remained lodged in Irene's mind. And in Owen's too, Irene was sure, though the running after strangers in the street did stop, and her name, so often invoked in the early days, also fell away. But some things stuck. Even years afterwards, and with another new baby in the house, Owen still called the nursery Quinny's room. Irene felt his loyalty to the dead maid as a constant rebuke, as if there was blame attached. When the time came for Owen to be sent off to boarding school, she quietly welcomed it. There had been scenes with Rory; tears, hers, her eyes red for days on end. The gap he left at the dinner table, his unslept-in bed in the boys' room, his favourite books in Owen's or Fergal's hands, wounded her, as if there'd been a death in the family. But with Owen, there was reprieve. Now there would be no more Quinny ambushes. If that's what it took to be finally shot of her, Irene thought, hardening her heart, then so be it.

‘See,' Liam had said to her when she deposited Owen dry-eyed in the big dormitory. ‘I told you it would get easier.'

Nearly three decades later, when Owen brought Kim home and announced he was marrying her, the ghost of Quinny rose again. Not that Kim looked in the slightest bit like Quinny, apart from her hair, long and silky and down to her waist. Otherwise, though, she was petite and sallow, a trained pharmacist. And oriental, for God's sake. One of those unfortunate boat people.

‘You can be the daughter my mother never had,' Owen said to Kim in that half-mocking way he talked about her, in her presence. ‘Isn't that right, Irene?' (He had long ago stopped calling her Mum.)

But Irene would not make that mistake again. Looking at her future daughter-in-law, she felt only a disowning surge of triumph. She worried how Liam would take to the prospect of little Vietnamese grandchildren in the Devoy family line but, unlike him, she could afford to be magnanimous; she was not seeking to gain a daughter, but to lose a son, this time for good.

Afterwards, in the hotel, he dreamt he saw Norah rise from the bed beside him and go to the window. Or, at least, it was a transparent version of her, one that he could see right through. Yet, when he looked in the bed, her back-turned body was also there, all solid flesh. The wraith-like Norah at the window was like a film ghost; he even remarked upon it in the dream. But he was too terrified to call out in case he might alarm this frail version of her and she would be trapped for ever outside the body that was still lying beside him. Then he woke and found himself alone.

* * *

Her innocence had provoked him. No, it was stronger than that, it had offended him. She had no right to be out in the world parading her raw, sheltered bloom like that. He blamed it on her clothes. That black roll-neck sweater, a blue pinafore and a pair of tights too tan for the rest of her pale complexion. Her shoes, brand new, were pinching her. As soon as she was shown to her desk she slipped her feet out of them and he saw her flexing her instep, her toes squirming within their ochre prison. He looked away. Oh God, another modest, convent-educated child! He could see the home she came from, a half red-brick on a respectable cul-de-sac with a kitchen hatch, a melamine breakfast counter, exuberantly floral wallpaper in the bedrooms; the same kind of house he
was now condemned to, full of worthy suburban striving and cast-iron respectability.

He had always preferred the girls from the country; their fumy loneliness (damp bedsits, laundry dried indoors) gave them an edge, a certain racy recklessness. He had had dalliances with several of them – none current. These were usually one-night stands, which, nevertheless, required some kind of courtship ritual – a trip to the cinema, an hour or two listening to mournful Janis Ian records beforehand and a great deal of reassurance afterwards that it wouldn't affect their jobs. In the throes he was Hugh, but afterwards they reverted to calling him Mr Grove. There might be some awkwardness in the office for a while, but it was more often on their side than his; he actually liked the post-coital air of tension and their pliant uncertainty. But he could not imagine someone like Norah Elworthy succumbing in this way;
she
would be hard work.

The Redundancies section was situated in a large ground-floor room of a five-storey block overlooking the canal. On sunny days, swaying leaf-dapple lent spattered visual relief to the office but the prevailing mood was a stunned grey. A military formation of dove-coloured filing cabinets split the room in two. On one side was Hugh's kingdom, Claims; on the other, Rebates. There were typing-pool rows of desks, the girls – they were mostly girls – all facing the one direction; facing him, in fact. It was not a popular section, not sexy in other words, though it fairly oozed with the pent-up frustration of twenty-seven girls finding themselves in the sparse company of seven men, who, like him, were for the most part years older. As a result, they did not stay long. They applied for Careers – with out-of-office trips to conventions in large hotels and visits in the mobile unit to schools, or Equal Opportunities, a newly opened section on the fifth floor with glossy brochures and a
ministerial pet project, or if they were seriously ambitious they transferred out.

Claims was designated as the trenches of the Department. They were assiduous handmaidens to the depressing times. Every news bulletin heralded shortages, the oil crisis, a roll call of factory closures and lay-offs but it was they who attended to the minutiae of the wreckage. Their currency was thousands of manila folders fatly stuffed with sheaves of forms, the coffined remnants of lives returned to statistics. Their clients weren't people any more but redundancies, empty vessels making no noise. If an economic upswing ever came, which Hugh seriously doubted, he wondered how he and his ‘team' would be deployed. (Personnel insisted on such terminology as if Hugh were managing a bunch of athletic champions, not a disparate and unhappy crowd of lowly clerks.) Hugh liked to think his girls liked him. He was not one of those section heads who stood by the attendance register with a stopwatch taking down the names of latecomers when the line was drawn in the book at 9.15 every morning. He had trouble himself rising and since he did only a rough approximation of a nine-to-five day, he could hardly impose strict punctuality on his staff. This apparent laxity made him popular with his girls and efficient in the eyes of the powers that be and it spared him the torturous procedure of having to listen to a catalogue of preposterous excuses related to their female complaints. It was 1976 and they felt emboldened to use their hormones as justification for every failing. That was fine by him; he just didn't want to hear about it.

Hugh was, just at the moment, sort of separated. Marriage, he had discovered much to his secret relief, was a revolving door. In the four years they'd been together, Elaine had thrown him out numerous times, but he had never believed it to be a permanent state. He felt a similar impermanence when he was back in her good books and living at home;
in fact, the uncertainty was the only thing that made marriage bearable.

Elaine had once been one of the girls in the office, which gave her an unfair advantage. She knew how he was; she had been one of his graduates. She'd been a blowsy overripe kind of girl with her large hair and a smutty laugh. She had flirted with him from the start while acting as if she didn't give a toss about him. If it was a strategy, Hugh had to concede now, it had worked. It was the first time he had seen tenacity decoupled from neediness and he couldn't resist. He was nearly thirty-five; it wasn't that he no longer wanted the freedom of the single life, he just didn't want to be a sad, ageing Lothario, mistaken for what the tabloids called a confirmed bachelor. A distinct danger, since he still lived with his mother.

Hugh had spent his childhood behind the perfume counter in Switzers where his mother worked; he adored it. He would take the bus into town after school, then sit on the tub-like stool the girls used to reach the higher shelves and do his homework perched at stocking level to the swish of satin slips. When they had a spare moment, the girls would help him. They had unexpected gifts – Sylvia could do tots in her head, Marie helped him with his comprehension. He loved their porcelain visages, these surrogate aunties. He'd never seen them less than perfect, although he had often witnessed his mother take her make-up off. She always waited till bedtime to revert to the pale and wan version of herself, bleached and blanched and somehow smaller than life. The girls on the Revlon counter – beauticians, they called themselves, a word too close to mortician for Hugh's liking – were like his own harem of painted paramours wearing white coats to make them look like pharmacists. Like dress-up tarts in a porn mag. When Miss Hyde, the floorwalker, did her rounds, the girls would push Hugh's head down and hide him among their skirts so that Dolly's secret would not be discovered. That
was what Hugh was – his mother's secret. The time came, of course, when he graduated from the comforts of the Revlon counter and progressed into surly adolescence, but his attachment to perfume persisted. He didn't hold with eau de toilette or body spray; none of those light fragrances. No, he wanted cloying, heavy musk he could drown in. Norah Elworthy wore no perfume, he noticed. When he was close to her, she smelled of apples from her lunch. (Like the rest of them she was watching her weight.)

It was the small matter of Sive that had clinched the situation with Elaine. Regardless of the compensations of the perfume counter, fatherless Hugh didn't want a disowned child out in the universe. It wasn't even as if Elaine pleaded or begged. That was not her style. After months of uncomplicated fun (she had lasted way longer than anyone else) she simply broke the news and left a pregnant silence. So Elaine became the one for whom he surrendered his old life. Or tried to. Their first separation had occurred after Sive was born. He blamed it on the new baby and the terrible sleeplessness: the only brand of sleep deprivation Hugh had known before was the kind born of night-long drinking sprees or hectic dawn sex, but this tiredness was of a different tenor. Even when he did manage to sleep, it was a shallow, uneasy kind, not the deep, dumb, dreamless slumber of the over-sated. When he woke, Elaine would be pacing the floor with the small, angry creature that was his daughter latched to her shoulder like some physical disfigurement. Sive dictated everything, their sleeping, their waking, their very conversation; that is if Elaine had been capable of finishing a sentence without leaping up to answer the baby's call even when it was just a tiny whimper. The house was taken over by pastel mounds of miniature clothes, piles of nappies, rows of bottles and teats, vats of sterilising fluid. The amount of baggage one child involved appalled him. And whereas Elaine had transformed into a mother overnight – she was clothed in rolls of doting maternal
flesh – Hugh was just a sleep-deprived, more irritable version of himself. Except in one thing. When he imagined this peeved baby growing up into a girl and being at the mercy of some bastard like him, it made him want to bolt … he took Angie from Reconciliation out on the town and found himself out on his ear.

In the intervening years he had spent as much time apart from Elaine as with her, but since Hugh Junior's birth, Elaine had become more intransigent and each temporary separation was longer than the one before. The September day that Norah Elworthy started in Claims, Hugh realised with a start that this time they had been apart for six months.

The girl was hopeless at calculation. Jesus, why did Personnel send him innumerates! She needed a lot of hand-holding – that must have been why Dan Gildea was constantly hovering about her, poking manfully on her adding machine. But he had to concede that she was good with the public, often distressed and irate ex-workers who already felt aggrieved before they picked up the phone. To them Norah Elworthy was sweetness itself: efficient, calm, soothing. She excelled at assuagement. She was the human face of Claims. (Jesus, he was beginning to sound like one of those slogan-spouting poofs from Personnel.) Was it something as simple as her voice that made him change his mind about her? Was it that she was sitting directly in his line of vision, so that he spent 40 hours a week gazing at her? It certainly wasn't her wardrobe, which still looked like the garb of a defrocked novice – skirts like lampshades, rubbed-looking sweaters, a rain mac the colour of mud. But she had the kind of blank clear face that belonged to someone to whom nothing had happened yet. Such clarity, the tame clothes, the chaste bob cut of her hair, the total unknowingness that she had breasts and, despite her beached quietude, a certain allure. He wanted to be the one to tear all of it away; he wanted to see her tested.

He started to take note of who she was friendly with. Well, it was important for him to know of alliances and loyalties in his team. There was Ellie Fox, a soft motherly woman ten years his senior who seemed to take Norah under her wing. She went for coffee with Maggie Joy, a flaky girl, bright but lazy, who came to work in denim skirts and tarty blouses, and she had long conversations with Martina Beale, a cool thirty-something with coltish limbs and hair the colour of tawny toast. Not forgetting Dan Gildea, of course, that weed from Rebates, whose lantern jaw and lank, foppish hair made him seem like a seedy predator. What on earth did she see in him? Once, Hugh had spied them sitting by the canal having sandwiches at lunchtime and they were often together in the canteen. This caused him some alarm. He couldn't say why. Dan was harmless. Hugh wasn't even sure which team he played for but he felt duty bound to take Norah aside and warn her off.