The Lives of Women (20 page)

 

I turned left and stayed northbound for maybe four hours, only stopping when I needed to – once at a gas station, another time at an isolated roadside bar that turned out to be closed down and where I ended up peeing around the back, between old beer kegs and crates of empty bottles. When I could go no further without driving the car right into the sea, I found a hotel for the night. Next day I began moving west. And there I stayed, just another Yank of a certain age on a solo vacation. During the day I went touring; in the evenings I ate dinner and sometimes drank a little too much. If I happened to fall into a conversation, I invented myself – once I was a teacher, another time a librarian. I was here on my own because my friend and would-be travelling companion had broken her leg a few days previously, but had insisted I go anyway. I always felt the need to explain or even apologise for my lack of a companion and each time had to wonder what it is that makes us so ashamed of being alone?

 

I had coffee by the fireside of a country house hotel on a day of relentless rain and hooked up with an elderly Swedish couple. Later
we went for a walk through the sodden grounds where the woman slipped and fell on her back and stayed there laughing in a patch of wet grass, her old face in an anorak hood, plump and crumpled with joy, while her husband and I, now also laughing, tried to haul her back up on her feet. That evening they invited me to join them for dinner. And I remember looking at them and thinking – here I am with these two elderly, laughing strangers, while my own mother is dying in hospital and my father is inching around an empty house in a wheelchair, and I can't honestly remember when I last had this much fun.

In a grim hotel in a dismal town, I hooked up with a hefty Lithuanian barman. He had a hairy back and gave an even-sized grunt each time he shoved himself into me. ‘Shove away,' I thought, ‘just don't take all night.' I was too drunk to care and, besides, the sex wasn't the point – and I'm not sure what was really, except that I needed to feel the weight of a man on top, crushing me.

 

Every day I checked the death notices and waited. And then one morning, in the corner of a musty dining room somewhere on the north-western seaboard, I found out that my mother was dead.

Greatly missed by her daughter Elaine… I read and almost laughed out loud.

Greatly missed! After thirty-four years I was over it.

I folded the newspaper, ordered more coffee and sat for maybe an hour. I remember the room: thin salmon-coloured tablecloths, red plastic carnations, one to each table; thick brown velvet drapes coated with ancient cigarette smoke. But I can't remember myself
in the room – how I was feeling or what I was doing. I may have been sobbing – although I doubt it. I may have just sat there staring out through a veil of soft rain at the steady, grey sea.

And then, two days later – as if there was the slightest chance of making it to the funeral – I drove back down country like a maniac.

I call in to see Mrs Ryan about twice a week. We have tea – sometimes she'll have cake or I'll bring in some biscuits. Often we'll just have the tea and she'll smoke two cigarettes. Shortly after the second one, she'll begin to yawn and then I'll know it's time to think about leaving.

For the first few weeks I called on the same days, at around the same time in the afternoon, and then she asked me not to do that any more.

‘Oh it's not that I'm on a timetable or anything,' she laughed, ‘I just don't want to start expecting you – you know?'

And I thought of the fence at the end of the garden and wondered if it was still there and, if so, had it ever been mended.

I always liked Mrs Ryan, a calm-eyed, timid sort of woman with a touch of steel in her bones. Like Maggie Arlow, she had seemed somewhat removed from the other women, although for entirely different reasons. When I was a kid, I used to go to the shops for her and she would insist on giving me something for my trouble, pressing a coin or a bar of chocolate into my hand and showing far more gratitude than this small deed warranted.

In her heartache over Jilly, she had been very much alone and, I suppose now, the fact that I visited Jilly, spoke to her and even played with her in my own clumsy, one-sided way, stood me in good stead with Mrs Ryan. She didn't have to feel ashamed of her daughter in front of me anyhow, and that must have meant something.

The night of the ‘unfortunate tragedy' – as Serena came to call it – it was to Mrs Ryan's house that I ran in the middle of the night, banging down the door and waking her. She calmed me down, hugging me until I stopped jerking like a caught fish. Then she had me breathe into a brown paper bag. Mrs Ryan was the one to call the ambulance and then she held my hand while she spoke on the phone to my father and, without letting go of it, led me down her back garden and up mine, towards his dressing-gowned figure standing stark against the fluorescent light of our kitchen.

 

Since the first visit, I've known Jilly was dead, but it takes a few further visits before I bring up the subject again – not out of any indifference on my part but because of the frantic way Mrs Ryan hops from subject to subject like a basketball player trying to block an opponent, and I simply can't get past her.

One evening she opens the front door and, instead of leading me into the kitchen, invites me to follow her into the sitting room. There is a fire in the grate. Two glasses of sherry are waiting on the coffee table, along with a plate of neatly sliced cake. She hands me a glass, raises the other one and wishes me a happy birthday. I can't believe she has remembered and I don't know how to feel about
this but, in any case, I have to turn away. My eye catches on a photograph across the room; I go to the sideboard and lift it. For a moment there is silence.

‘That was taken the day before she went into the home,' Mrs Ryan finally says.

‘The home?'

‘It became impossible to mind her.'

‘Of course.'

‘I still have the dress – you know. God, the trouble I had getting it on her. The way she was all folded into herself. And all angles. The elbows on her! And as for those knees! I managed in the end – though I don't suppose she even noticed.'

‘But you did.'

‘Oh yes.'

I come back to the sofa, and sit beside Mrs Ryan, accepting a piece of cake. She lights her first cigarette and begins to explain.

‘I never went to see her, you know – years and years of looking after her and I never went near her. You probably think I'm a terrible mother?'

‘You must know I think the opposite.'

‘Too painful you see. People forget how painful it is… how seeing her there with all the others… She died a year later. Forty-five years of age. This used to be her room – do you remember?'

‘Yes, I do.'

‘Her bed over there – so I could get around it. You used to love pressing the button on it when you were a little one. Up down, up down. And the wheels on it. You used to help me to push it.'

‘I remember.'

‘Poor old Jilly. You know – they told me she'd be lucky to reach puberty? All those years, I kept her alive. I wonder sometimes… Oh well.'

‘And what about Tom?'

‘Tom? He lives at the other end of the country.'

‘Married?' I ask

‘To a witch,' she says and laughs her head off.

‘And Mr Ryan?'

‘Oh, he left me, years ago – you heard that surely?'

‘No, I never hear anything. I guessed though.'

‘Did you?'

‘Well, he's not here – is he? And if he'd died you would have said.'

‘Oh no, he didn't die. Just did a flit with a typist out of his work.'

‘I'm sorry,' I say.

‘Hooo-ooo,' she laughs again, ‘no need to be.'

She lights up her second cigarette.

‘You weren't upset then?'

‘More embarrassed than anything, I'd say. Embarrassed by myself for a start. My own stupidity.'

‘But why? You had no need to be—'

‘Of course I had. I wasted my life. We only get the one. And I wasted it. Giving it up, to this… to this man I hardly knew. I was twenty-one when I married. I had my few friends, a job I liked. Started at seventeen and was promoted twice, you know. In those days, you had to leave work when you got married. Yes. Give everything away. Your job. Your independence. Even your name. And when he left, I thought – well what a waste of bloody time that
was! A stupid, shameful waste. I'll admit, though, at first I was a little worried about money. How would we manage? But we did manage of course. The new one, you see… well, I didn't imagine she'd be keen on him throwing too much our way and the thoughts of having to chase after it, month after month… I was cute, though – I told him stuff your maintenance, just sign over the house.'

‘And he did?'

‘Oh yes, of course he did, anything for a quick getaway. I remortgaged it too. Up to the chimneys. They'll let me stay here till I die, then the bank will own it. I leave nothing behind, just enough to bury me, that's all. Do I give a damn? No, I don't. But if you're asking me did I miss him, the answer is no, Elaine. I didn't. Not in my bed. And certainly not around the house. He blamed me for Jilly, you know, never forgave me. Like it was a trick I played on him. Do you know what he said to me during our last conversation – I mean, after he'd just told me he was leaving? “I only married you anyway because you were pregnant.” Wasn't that a lovely thing to say, as you walk out the door? I wouldn't mind but there was no need. I wasn't stopping him from leaving. I wasn't shouting at him nor calling him names. “I only married you because you were pregnant.” And do you know what I said right back up to him? I said, “And why do you think, now, that I married you?”

‘And that was the truth. If I hadn't been pregnant, I'd have dumped him. I'd well gone off him by then. Well, when you're young, you think sex is love – don't you? Different nowadays – you can test each other out in the bed and no one thinks the worst of
you. Get each other out of your systems. Ready to finish with him and then I found out Jilly was on the way. Poor Jilly, the way he couldn't even bring himself to look at her.'

 

If I was to talk to anyone about what happened all those years ago, it would probably be to Mrs Ryan. I have come close to it once or twice, but have always stopped short of the door. She is elderly, and I'm not sure it would be fair to burden her in order to unburden myself. I could trust her, at least – and it's good to know that. Just as she once knew she could trust me.

When Mrs Ryan found out she was pregnant on Thomas, apart from the doctor, I was first to know. I knew even before her husband did. I saw her coming out of the doctor's surgery on the far side of the village, when I was on my way home from school one day.

He was a new doctor, young and thought not to have enough experience. I remember being a little surprised to see Mrs Ryan leaving his surgery as, like the rest of the women in our estate, she usually went to Dr Townsend.

I said, ‘Oh, hello there, Mrs Ryan,' as she came out the gate. She looked at me, stupefied, and then her eyes filled up and out dropped all these big tears. I followed her brisk walk around the corner and sat down beside her on a garden wall. When she'd stopped crying, she told me she was pregnant. She was afraid, she said. Terrified, was the word she used. Afraid the baby would be like poor Jilly, afraid of her husband and what he might say.

‘But it's not your fault!' I began and then blushed at the dark
blurry image that had come into my head of a man and a woman doing something strange and dirty in a big double bed. She laughed and touched my hot face with the tips of her fingers.

‘Do you know what I wish sometimes?' she said. ‘I wish I could just start all over again. Not all the way back to when I was a baby. But to your age, say – that age when everything is still possible. Before…'

‘Before what, Mrs Ryan?' I asked her.

‘Ahh, before all that other stuff,' she muttered and then blew her nose.

She didn't ask me to keep it a secret, but I did anyway. A few weeks later, my mother stepped away from the back bedroom window.

‘Do you know,' she said, ‘I could swear next door is expecting again.'

‘Expecting what?' I asked.

‘Oh, really, Elaine,' my mother laughed, ‘I forget sometimes how innocent you are.'

 

When I was in hospital, Mrs Ryan came to see me one day. She brought me a comic and a bottle of Lucozade. The comic was too childish for me – but she would have no way of knowing that.

She would have had to get two buses to visit me. She would have had to pay someone to babysit Tom and for the special nurse to come and mind Jilly.