The Honey Queen (33 page)

The 1970s bungalow on the other side of Mullingar had never felt as if it had been Peggy’s home, any more than the many other houses she’d lived in over the years while her father dragged them all over the country in the endless search for a job in a garage where he’d be appreciated for his full worth. As she grew older, Peggy knew such a job did not exist, for in her father’s warped mind, nobody ever appreciated him. And in reality, he was too volatile and too self-obsessed to ever achieve anything in any job. Tommy Barry was a tinderbox of rage and there was no telling when he’d ignite.

As she drove in the bungalow’s gate past a vast hedge that had clearly never been cut in its life, she realized that she felt absolutely no sense of attachment to this house. The houses on each side of her parents’ were beautifully maintained and she imagined how much they must hate this run-down premises between them. But there would be nothing they could do, any more than there was anything Peggy could have done. Her father had no interest in painting the outside of the house, clearing the garden and cutting the grass, trimming the hedge. Those were jobs for ‘fools’.

Many people were fools in her father’s eyes. If not fools they were people who had got ahead in life because they already had a chance. They were related to someone in power. They knew someone in the system. Or they’d been born with money. What could a poor man like him hope for, from a big family, denied his rightful inheritance? Nothing, that’s what. He wouldn’t play by their rules. No not he, not Tommy Barry. He’d do it his own way, thank you very much, and to hell with them all.

Peggy parked in front of the house and saw her mother’s attempts at a little garden on the scrubby ground. There were two little conifers in pots outside the front door and clearly her mother had taken great care of them, for their silvery-blue pine needles grew healthily. The lawn was full of weeds and overgrown. She could see the old push lawnmower leaning up against the side of the house, as though her father had had the mind to cut the grass one day and then suddenly changed his mind. She could imagine him speaking: ‘What’s the point?’ And he’d be off. Off with his mates, off where he’d be appreciated.

His car wasn’t there and Peggy felt a surge of pleasure that she was going to see her mother on her own. It happened so rarely. She took her overnight bag out of the boot, and the bag of gifts she’d brought for her mother, glad that with her father out she wouldn’t have to sneak them in by the kitchen door later. She rang the doorbell and listened for her mother’s quiet, tentative footsteps.

Opening the door, Kathleen’s heart almost stopped for joy. There on the doorstep, as welcome as a warm sunny morning after rain, was Peggy. Even though Peggy had never missed her birthday, there was always the fear that this year she might not bother. And now, because Tommy had decided to go away overnight to the races, for a glorious twenty-four hours she would have her daughter all to herself.

‘My sweet child,’ she said, reaching forward bony hands through which blue veins were visible. She drew Peggy into her embrace and held her as tightly as she possibly could. Kathleen would have cried if she knew how, but she no longer did.

Instead she leaned against the strength of her daughter, the way she had for many years. ‘I knew you’d come for my birthday,’ she said. ‘I knew you’d come.’

‘I always come, you know that,’ Peggy said.

‘But with the shop and everything I thought you’d have moved on and wouldn’t want to come back here,’ Kathleen said, and Peggy wanted to kill her father for making her mother feel so worthless that she’d think her daughter would miss her birthday.

‘Where’s the man of the house?’ said Peggy, unable to disguise the scorn in her voice.

‘Away at the racing overnight,’ said Kathleen in delight. ‘I have you all to myself.’

Peggy picked up the two bags she’d brought from the car and carried them inside. Her mother tried to take her overnight bag, but Peggy wouldn’t let her. Kathleen was so thin, so frighteningly thin. Peggy tried to remember if she’d ever looked like this before. All the bones on her face seemed too close to the surface, the pale skin stretched too tightly.

‘Look at you!’ said Kathleen delightedly, when they were in the kitchen with the kettle on. Peggy sat down on the old fireside chair and memories came flooding back.

The chair’s cover was now threadbare in places, but the odd hint of velvet gleamed on it still. It was heaped with worn cushions and once upon a time, in a previous house, Peggy’s dog, Clover, used to curl up on it, her tiny little whippet-cum-sheepdog body quivering with delight.

Of course, she never was allowed to sit there for very long. Tommy would give a fierce yell that would frighten anyone.

‘Is that dog on the seat again?’ Tommy would roar. ‘Off! Off with you!’ And if Clover couldn’t move fast enough, she’d get a kick.

Eventually, Clover became too afraid to curl up on the soft velvet any more. Now Peggy could never sit there without thinking about Clover and how much she’d cried when the little dog had run away for good. Peggy had been eleven at the time and she’d wished she could run away too.

‘You really do look lovely, Peggy,’ Kathleen said, as the kettle boiled and she got down the nice biscuits for her visitor. ‘Looks as though you’re eating properly at last,’ she went on, not noticing the irony of a woman as thin as she was remonstrating with her daughter for slenderness.

Now was her moment, Peggy thought. Her father being away meant it was the perfect time to break the news to Kathleen. It wasn’t as if her mother would come to Redstone to stay with her, to talk to her, to tell her all the things a mother told her only child when that child was expecting her first baby.

‘I have put on some weight,’ Peggy admitted.

Almost unconsciously her hands slid down to caress the faintest hint of curve in her abdomen. It was tiny, so tiny nobody else could possibly notice it except Peggy, who looked at herself sideways in the mirror every chance she got, feeling the strange fullness of her breasts, breasts that had always been rather nonexistent. She got up to help Kathleen make the tea.

‘No, don’t move, Peggy, I’m doing it all. You’re so busy with that shop of yours.’

So Peggy sat and watched her mother race around, opening cupboards, looking for plates and cups. Everything in the cupboards was lined up as perfectly as if a ruler had been used. Every cup handle was at exactly the same angle. Every tin faced exactly the same way. Because that was the way Tommy Barry liked it.

He’d never picked up a sock or put a wash on in all the years she’d known him – his wife did everything.

It was still an ugly kitchen, Peggy thought. Bright yellow cupboards, an ugly black-and-white chequered linoleum floor and the cheapest wallpaper going: off-white wallpaper with bits of wood stuck into it, giving it its name, woodchip. The idea was that you painted over the wallpaper to give it some identity. Naturally, it was the same off-white as when the Barrys had moved in. Paint was a waste of money, according to her father, and her mother didn’t dare argue.

Peggy thought of how much she’d loved painting the shop. The joy she’d felt opening those wonderful tins of lavender emulsion. Watching it go up with slow steady strokes, thinking of the future it meant, the pleasure it gave her to recreate the room exactly to her liking. Her mother had never known that pleasure. Instead her mother lived in a house that hadn’t changed one iota in the eleven years since she’d moved in.

It was a warm sunny day and Peggy would have loved for them to eat lunch outside, but there was nowhere suitable. The patio was a wreck, with broken paving slabs and no seating. Unless they hauled the kitchen table and chairs outside, they’d have to sit on the grass.

‘Let’s get a blanket, Mam,’ she suggested, ‘and have our lunch out here, near the roses.’

After they’d put the blanket down, she asked her mother to show her the roses. There was only one tiny rose bed, but Kathleen had planted several varieties and even attached a trellis to the wall so they could scramble up it. It was obvious to Peggy that the trellis was her mother’s handiwork because of the inexpert way nails had been bent into the painted brickwork. Her father couldn’t even be bothered to do that for her.

‘I got these from a catalogue,’ her mother said enthusiastically, pointing at a couple of very young roses in front. ‘The David Austin catalogue – oh, Peggy, I must show it to you.’

Peggy heard the joy in her mother’s voice and felt the sadness again. Her mother needed so little to keep her happy but even that had to be in stolen time.

‘And this one I think of as yours,’ Kathleen went on, pointing out a bush with slender stems waving gently in the breeze, topped with tiny mother-of-pearl white rosebuds. ‘Isn’t it beautiful? I got that last year with some of the money you gave me for my birthday. I call it Peggy’s Rose.’

‘Oh, Mam,’ said Peggy, putting her arm around her mother’s waist. ‘I wish you had the sort of garden you deserve. I wish – I wish so many things.’

She stopped because there was no point trying: she’d said everything over the years and still her mother refused to listen. It appeared to hurt Kathleen so much when Peggy said anything about leaving her father that Peggy had vowed on her last visit not to do it any more. Kathleen was like a person kidnapped who’d convinced themselves that the kidnappers, despite their bad treatment, were really looking after her. Stockholm Syndrome, they called it in kidnappings. Peggy wondered what it was called in emotionally abusive marriages.

They ate ham sandwiches and drank cool water as they sat beside Kathleen’s beloved roses and Peggy filled her in on all the details of her life. She rarely wrote letters because her father would intercept them and read them first. Phoning home was a hazard as her father might answer, and Kathleen didn’t own a mobile and was nervous of using the café’s phone at work.

‘And is there – is there a man on the horizon?’ Kathleen said wistfully.

‘That’s complicated,’ said Peggy slowly. ‘Very complicated, in fact. I’ve news, Mam,’ she said. ‘I’m pregnant.’

Her mother was the first person she’d actually told. Saying the words made it all seem so much more real. Suddenly, little apricot inside her wasn’t just a little apricot.

‘Oh, darling!’ said Kathleen breathlessly, and she reached over the remains of the sandwiches to hug her daughter. Peggy could feel the thin ribs like xylophone keys.

‘And what about the father?’ said Kathleen excitedly.

Peggy knew she had to proceed delicately. She didn’t want to hurt her mother, but there was no kind way of saying that her childhood had put her right off having the father around. ‘It didn’t work out,’ she lied.

‘Peggy! I’m so sorry,’ her mother said, distraught. ‘But you can come and live here, with us, we’ll take care of you …’

‘No,’ Peggy interrupted fiercely. ‘No,’ she said again, in more gentle tones. ‘I’ve got it all figured out, Mam. I can manage now that I have the shop and Fifi, my sales assistant. Things are going so well. But …’

She thought about what she’d wanted to ask her mother. This visit was about more than bringing her mother a birthday present. ‘I wonder if you’d come and live with me and help me with the baby?’ she asked quietly. She knew it was so unlikely the answer would be yes, but she had to ask.

The blood rushed to Kathleen’s pale cheeks. Anxiety flared in her eyes. ‘No, Peggy, no,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t leave your father. You know that. He needs me. I’m sorry, I—’

‘It’s fine,’ said Peggy, as if it really was. ‘Fine, honestly. I’ll manage.’

She got up off the blanket and went back into the house, calling over her shoulder: ‘I’ve got something for you, Mam.’ She returned with a small cake with
Happy Birthday to the best mother in the world
written in delicate icing. Sue from the shop across the road had spent ages working on it.

In the other bag was a bottle of perfume, scented with grapefruit and lime blossom. Something so beautiful and expensive that her mother would never own such a thing unless Peggy had given it to her.

‘We have to celebrate with cake and then you have to cover yourself in perfume,’ said Peggy, determined to make this a happy event. She wouldn’t let the shadow of her father ruin it, no way.

They talked all day, with Peggy carefully staying away from the vast range of subjects that might upset her mother, and when they went to bed that night, Peggy wanted to cry at how worried she felt. It was worse than ever now: her mother was like a prisoner, in thrall to the rage and temper of her father, always trying to convince herself and Peggy that things were fine, really.

Peggy thought about the baby growing inside her, and how that baby had a father too. A father who had no idea of her existence. Over the last couple of weeks Peggy had begun to feel that this wasn’t right. A couple of times she had gone so far as to drive past the townhouse where David lived, but she had fought off the crazy desire to go in and tell him. She knew it was crazy. What was the point?

Peggy had been so sure she knew what was right that it had come as quite a shock to find something inside her asserting that her actions were all wrong. She didn’t like it. It skewed everything. Despite all her carefully laid plans to run her life precisely the opposite way her mother had run hers, everything was coming unravelled.

The next morning, Peggy had planned to leave by noon, so she’d have some time with her mother and then be on the road before there was even a hope of her father returning.

But fate wasn’t on her side. At eleven, she and Kathleen were in the front room looking through the hand-knitted baby clothes Peggy had worn as a baby, when they heard the front door slam.

‘Hide it all, quick,’ hissed Kathleen, but they weren’t quick enough.

Tommy Barry burst into the room, the smell of smoke and cheap beer all around him.

He’d aged in the year since Peggy had seen him. He looked angrier and more bitter than ever now, his mouth a permanent sneer.

‘So you’re back,’ he said. ‘After something, are you?’

Then he looked down on the bed where all the baby garments were laid out. His eyes swept over his daughter’s figure and the sneer turned into a snarl.