Recipes for a Perfect Marriage (31 page)

So loudly and insistently was my inner hysteric shouting that I didn’t hear my mother come in.

‘Oh, I’ll take that,’ she said, snatching the notebook out of my hand and walking straight past me to the sink, where she proceeded to fill the kettle. ‘I have nice ham from the butcher’s and a fresh loaf, so if you can wait five minutes for lunch, it’s ham sandwiches. And before you start, no, I do
not
have any pesto!’

Was it me, or did all mothers do this: cram so many mixed messages into one short statement that their children need twenty years of therapy just to understand what they’re saying?

I was momentarily surprised by the amount of effort it took my body to move away from the fireplace where I was still leaning and face my mother’s busy, kettle-filling, sandwich-making back.

‘I read the list,’ is all I said. I left out the phone-call notes. It would have been too harsh to overload us both with practical details.

There was a moment’s silence, which I hoped she was going to fill with the solemn details of her news by sharing it with me properly.

‘I hate that pad. I don’t know what possessed me to buy it when I have drawers full of lovely notelets that I never use.’

With that, she pointedly flicked open the kitchen bin and hurled the teddy bear and his ten-runged ladder into it.

My mother had a habit of being apologetic over little things, but stubborn and defensive over big things. For example; she deeply regretted making me give up ballet lessons but ‘had her reasons’ for not telling me why my father left. So, what possessed me to buy that hideous notebook? I was going to tell you about the cancer in my own good time.

Sometime in the next six months, presumably.

Still, the notepad was in the bin now. Problem solved, eh? I let rip. My opening gambit would have been so different if I had held on to myself. It could have been ‘There is no need to carry this alone, Mum. I’m here for you.’ Or I could have created a comfortable distance by using her name: ‘Eileen, I know about the cancer.’

Instead I opened my mouth and out came ‘How –
how
– could you put telling me you had cancer below returning a blouse to Shirley? HOW!?’

It could only get worse after that.

‘Shirley lent me that blouse over a month ago – it was important.’

‘And telling me you had cancer wasn’t important?’

‘Of course it was – that’s why it was on my list.’

‘Not as important as Shirley’s blouse, though – or going to the cashpoint, or ringing Dennis about the tiles in the bathroom?’

‘That’s not how it works. It’s just a list – the order doesn’t mean anything.’

‘Of course it means something. Everything fucking
means
something.’

I believed that. That everything meant something. But I shouldn’t have said the word ‘fucking’. She went tight-lipped and determined.

‘How dare you talk about Shirley like that? Shirley is my friend!’

So wrong on so many different levels. Shirley was more of a bad influence than a friend.

‘I
do not
want to talk about Shirley. Don’t try to sidetrack me by talking about Shirley.’

‘Well – you brought up her name.’

‘Only in the context of something else.’

‘You’ve never liked Shirley. I don’t know why – she’s always saying how nice you are.’

‘You’re doing it again! Trying to distract me into talking about Shirley!’

‘You’re the one whose got a problem with her – you’re the one who keeps saying Shirley, Shirley, Shirley...’

‘YOU’VE GOT CANCER!’

‘STOP SHOUTING AT ME!’

And I
was
shouting at her. I was towering a full foot over my tiny, frail mother who had cancer and I was yelling at her. I was ashamed of behaving like a bully, but I still did not want to stop, wanted only to pick her up and shake some sense into her, or the cancer out of her.

Mum’s lip quivered and from behind my rage I noticed that her hand was shaking, with the butter knife still in it. She looked down on the worktop, fumbled a slice of bread out of its packet and resumed making our sandwiches. Her actions had slowed down; the clipped determination was gone, but I didn’t want to see that. She was offering me space now, inviting me to sit and have lunch quietly. She was defusing the anger by busying herself and the air in her cluttered kitchen felt light in anticipation of our talking.

But because it was Eileen offering the space and not vice versa, I couldn’t accept it. My pride wouldn’t let me, or perhaps I just wasn’t ready to hear her say it yet. I knew, even as I turned my back on my mother and walked out of the door, that I was wrong. That I was hurting her, and myself. But then that was one of the disappointing things I had learned during my stint in therapy. Knowing what to do is one thing; doing it is something else.

It’s funny how, when you look back, it is often the small things that are really important. As a child I believed in magic. Then, when I was eleven, a pair of red trousers changed everything and made me start to see the world as it really was.

I was born in 1943 in a terraced cottage in Ballamore, a small town on the west coast of Ireland. Fifteen miles to the east was a flat-topped mountain, and to the west we were five miles inland from the sea – next stop America. At one end of our road was Ballamore Cathedral, tall, grey and grand, and at the other, in its own lush gardens, was the Bishop’s Palace. My mother said we lived in the safest place in the world because no matter which way we looked – up or down our street, behind or in front of our house – we were hemmed in by God’s greatest achievements. Mountain and sea, church and clergy – they were the outer and inner perimeters of my early life.

My family name was Gardner and my father was Senior Clerk in the town hall, which was considered a very good job, but not so good that we looked down our noses at people. Civil servants were respected without being considered snobbishly middle-class, privileged through education rather than money; it was an enviable position. We were neither looked down upon by the doctors and solicitors nor envied by the poor. I went to school alongside children who had to share shoes and came to school hungry. The poor people lived at the top end of town and sometimes, when my sister and I walked past their houses on our way home from the cinema, they would throw small stones at us and shout, ‘Big shots!’ When we told our mother she would tell us to thank God we weren’t one of them – and we did. I grew up knowing I was lucky to have been born into the family I was.

The house we lived in was on a street called The New Line, on account of the houses being newly built by the town council when my parents had moved there some ten years before. Because of his job, my father was given one of these houses for a peppercorn rent. We had a bathroom upstairs with running water, two bedrooms and a box-room, and downstairs we had a dining room, which was our main living area, a drawing room for entertaining important guests like visiting clergy, and a small scullery, where my mother prepared food and washed the pots and clothes. In the dining room was a range where my mother did all of the baking and cooking. Our house was considered luxurious by my mother’s family, who lived out in the country. Once, a coarse man who was married to a cousin of my mother’s said, ‘You’ll get calluses on your arse from sitting down all day.’ Her family thought my mother’s life was too easy, with water ‘inside in the house’ and her having a ‘contraption’ to cook with rather than an open hearth.

But my mother did not sit down all day. I had a younger brother and sister, and between cooking and cleaning for us all, Mum was constantly complaining that we had her ‘robbed of every ounce of energy’ she ever had. I did what I could to help her. My jobs included cleaning the ashes out of the range every morning and carrying the kettle of hot water up to the bathroom for my father’s morning shave, but by far my favourite job was being sent up town to get my mother’s ‘messages’.

Every Saturday morning, Mam gave me two shillings and sent me up to Mrs Durcan’s shop. The money was to pay for my father’s newspaper bill plus our comic books and my mother’s weekly
Woman
. Durcan’s had a bakery out back, so while half of the shop was given over to tobacco and papers, the other comprised a counter weighed down with delicious cakes. The smell was something else, and I soon got into the habit of sneakily spending some of my mother’s change on a delicious sugary doughnut. The first time I bought one, Maidy Durcan, who had a stern face and a starchy manner, said, ‘Does your mother know you’re buying doughnuts, Eileen Gardner?’ Like most children, I was shy talking to adults and only blushed in reply, but Maidy took my money anyway. There was no love lost between my mother and Mrs Durcan (‘Tell that woman nothing if she asks you!’ Mam shouted after me as I left each week), but at the age of eleven I knew that Maidy Durcan wouldn’t tell my mother for fear she’d miss the tuppence worth of business. I felt guilty sometimes, because I knew that my mother only went to Durcan’s because they were the only shop that supplied English magazines and papers. Mam baked a soda cake every day, but when she had visitors and needed yeast bread to impress them, she made a point of buying it ready-sliced in Carey’s grocery shop – even though she knew the bread in Durcan’s was superior. My weekly doughnut was the only purchase given to the Durcan bakery each week and I knew my mother would be furious with me if she found out I was giving Maidy money.

There was also the element of sin to consider. I avoided sinning as much as possible, but for a Catholic child in those days, sinning was a very complicated business. Technically, spending my mother’s money without consent was classified as stealing, but unless it was something big like a purse or a cow or a donkey, stealing was only a venial sin, punishable by extra time in purgatory. Purgatory was heaven’s waiting room but it wasn’t nice, full of flames and horned devils – like hell, we were told. The only real advantage purgatory had over hell was that you knew you weren’t going to be there for all eternity so you could console yourself that you
would
get to heaven eventually, once all your earthly sins had been atoned for. The smart Catholic would start this process while they were still alive by saying prayers called indulgences. I had received a book of indulgences for my eleventh birthday and was working my way through it determinedly. I knew that one indulgence prayer said three times in immediate succession would buy me a fortnight off purgatory. It wasn’t much when you considered how long eternity was, but I had estimated that one doughnut amounted to about two months in purgatory and reasoned that not even an all-powerful, all-punishing God could justify more than that. So by saying four sets of indulgences (which could be one prayer said twelve times), I was off the hook. It seemed a small price to pay for my delicious, illicit doughnut.

It was during one of my covert doughnut-eating sessions that I first saw the picture of the lady in the red slacks. It was a fine day and I had settled myself down among the ruins of the monastery behind the cathedral. It was a quiet, some said haunted, spot, and one of the few places in the small town where I could be guaranteed privacy. I liked it there because it was close to God’s house, the cathedral, and yet it wasn’t
in
His house. All through my childhood, I had felt a deep love and devotion to the Blessed Virgin, and God and I enjoyed an easy understanding. I didn’t commit any big sins – like murder or sex – and He didn’t go too hard on my minor misdemeanours like doughnuts. My favourite expression was ‘God moves in mysterious ways’, and my best friend Breege and I loved to glamorize everyday coincidences by turning them into ‘signs from God’. If we saw three swans on the river together, we knew that it was going to be sunny on Saturday. If there was a crow sitting on the railings by the Blessed Virgin’s statue, the number of Hail Marys we could say before it flew away was the number of children we were going to have. Breege would point out the signs, but I was the one who would get the ‘spiritual feeling’ that determined what the sign meant. We often discussed how I knew all these extraordinary things. I said I didn’t know, I just
felt
it. As if God was inside my head, telling me facts like ‘If you step on three pavement cracks you will burn in hell for all eternity,’ or ‘If the petals fall off that rose in the next week, someone in the town is going to die.’ When my mother read the death notices in the paper and pointed to somebody that she knew who had died (which was every week, as she knew everybody in the town), it only strengthened my belief in my own abilities as a prophet. While there was no way of knowing if the pavement-cracks theory was really true, neither of us took any chances. Breege said that if God was talking to me like that it meant that I was really special and would probably become a nun.

As I was settling down to my doughnut, the
Woman
magazine that was on the top of my pile of papers flicked open. It settled on a page that featured Father Peyton, the famous ‘Rosary Crusader’, standing next to the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. They were in a big park and there seemed to be hundreds of people in the background, but all I could see was the woman. She had blonde hair drawn back into a bun and an enigmatic smile, as if she knew something that nobody else did. It occurred to me that if the Blessed Virgin were alive at the time she would probably have looked like that woman. I felt certain that God was sending me a message. The caption said the woman’s name was Grace Kelly, and in the picture she was wearing a cream sweater and a pair of red slacks. Slacks were like men’s trousers, except they were worn by ladies in magazines. My mother didn’t wear slacks, nor did any of the women in our town. But suddenly I felt an overwhelming desire to own a pair; a pair of red ones just like in the picture. I decided I would go home at once and ask my mother to make them for me.

Five weeks, three days and seven hours later – that was how long it had taken me to persuade my mother to order the pattern from England, buy the red cotton from Foyles’s and then actually sew them – I was curling my fingers around the handle on my mother’s wardrobe door, tapping it in anticipation, holding off for a few more seconds the glorious moment of seeing myself in her full-length mirror.