The Shelter of Neighbours (14 page)

‘You're pregnant,' said the doctor, getting impatient.

Martha wanted to put the child's name down for Mulberry Primary School, the Protestant school that Mitzy had recommended.

‘Jesus Christ!' said Seamus. ‘He's not even born. He doesn't have a name.' He thought for a second and added, ‘He mightn't be a boy.'

‘The school is co-ed,' said Martha. That was a word still in currency at that time. ‘Luke, if he's a boy; Lucy, if he's a girl.'

They didn't have the scans then that let you know the sex of the baby. You just had to wait the whole nine months and find out what it was when it was born.

‘What's wrong with the local national school?' Seamus started to light his pipe, which he was soon going to have to give up, for the sake of the baby, although he didn't realise it. ‘St Bernadette's.'

‘It's too rough,' said Martha. Mitzy had said the children from Dunroon Crescent who'd been democratic and tried it – it was in the middle of Lourdes Gardens – got beaten up by the other kids every day of their lives. And they got bad results in their Leaving later on because their primary education had been so traumatic.

‘Crap,' said Seamus, shaking his head disbelievingly.

He taught in a rough school himself. He ran one, in fact: he was a headmaster. Before he opened his school in the mornings he drove around to the houses of three or four of the worst cases, honked his horn and waited for them to come out and get into the car. He drove around, resenting the price of the petrol – it had gone up to nearly two punts a gallon. But if he didn't drive around and round them up, they would never attend. Seamus's ambition was to get fifty per cent of his ruffians into good secondary schools and half of them on into third level, an ambition that he eventually fulfilled, almost.

Seamus didn't want his child to attend his own school, though not because it was the roughest school in the country – which, Martha was pretty sure, it was – but because he just didn't want a conflict of interest. But he was down on snobbishness of all kinds and especially snobbishness where education was concerned. That business of sending your child to a Protestant school got his goat. (He was an atheist, something which of course he, as a schoolteacher, had to keep quiet about. His separation they could just about stomach, as long as he kept quiet about it. He was a Catholic atheist.)

Martha didn't argue further. Two weeks later she took a morning off work – in those days it was like a sparkling gem of a present to herself, one free morning – and walked to the school.

It was surrounded by a high grey wall and spreading chestnut trees. A gravel drive led from a simple white gate up to the front door. The stones crunched under her feet, and twice she trod on a shining chestnut, which split like an apple under her shoe. The oldest part of the school was built of rough cut stone, with a slate roof, and the weathered plaque over the door said:
mulberry school
1890
. The new bits had flat roofs and windows with red wooden frames. On one side were two tennis courts and on the other a playground with an old swing and a wooden seesaw. Children were playing in the playground when Martha arrived. Children were actually chanting ‘SeeSaw Margery Daw' and ‘Red Rover, Red Rover, I call Sarah over!' Their voices rose into the clear autumn air and to Martha the old rhymes sounded like the songs of angels.

It turned out that you couldn't put down the name of a child who had not been born, or even of a child who had been, until he or she was three. Mitzy had been wrong about that, or maybe just exaggerating for the sake of effect, the way good storytellers do. ‘Contact us on the day of the third birthday,' the secretary said. She smiled at Martha, who looked very young that day, in her new denim maternity dungarees, her snow-white jumper. Martha's hair tended to frizz, but pregnancy had tamed it to a wavy mane. The hormones had a similarly beneficial effect on her skin. There was none of the patchy redness that plagued her; even her freckles had vanished. ‘Don't worry,' the secretary said kindly. Her own severely bobbed white hair was held back with a pink plastic slide and this plastic slide made Martha's eyes fill with tears and her mouth with the unmistakable comforting taste of rich tea biscuits. She knew Mulberry School was just what she wanted for the child in her belly.

Over the years, Martha did not get to know the neighbours as well as she might have. That was largely owing to her personality – the words people used about her were ‘reserved', if they were nice people, like Mitzy, and ‘a cold fish', if they had sharper tongues, which Linda Talbot, for instance, had. But she put it down to something else entirely: to logistics, to timetables. She was a worker, away from home for ten hours a day, in the Department, where she was a Higher Executive Officer in the Prisons Division (she was moved to Family Law when it expanded and got very busy in 1997 after divorce came in). Mitzy and most of the other women on Dunroon Crescent were full-time mums, apart from Audrey Bailey, who was single and eccentric, and taught in Mulberry Manor, and Clara, who spent her day in her shed, removing unwanted hair and giving facials. (No planning permission, a bone of contention with some, but they didn't report her because they felt sorry for her. Single mum.) That's because most of them were about ten years older than Martha. At the time Martha was doing the Leaving they were busy getting married and starting their grown-up lives. By the time she had graduated from college they had had their first babies. It wasn't that they had not gone to college themselves. Some were well educated. Mitzy, for instance, had a degree in science, and Linda had studied Latin and Greek in Trinity, though you'd never think it. Audrey of course had a
ba
in English and something else. German? But as far as Martha could see, they'd never felt either ambition or pressure to have long-term jobs, or careers, as she and her friends called their work, whatever it was.

In the ten years that separated Martha from Mitzy all those rules had changed. Whereas before, you had to stay at home and look after your children, now you were supposed to go to work and find a childminder for them. Whereas before, you changed your name to your husband's, now you were expected
to keep your own – perhaps, after a while, adding his to it, which resulted in a lot of double-barrelled names and people wondering where it would all end. In three generations, would all surnames have sixteen components? Molly Maguire-Murphy-Sweeney-Byrne-O'Connor?

Mitzy and her peers would have felt guilty, and their husbands, too, if they had jobs. ‘He has her out working', was a phrase you might have heard about a man whose wife was a schoolteacher, say. As if he were exploiting her. It was almost as bad as beating her up when you had too much drink taken. But for Martha and her friends it was the exact opposite. They would have felt guilty if they'd stayed at home. It wasn't just that that seemed old-fashioned, and a betrayal of the fight for equality, which it did. But if they decided not to keep their jobs, people would have thought they were lazy. Their own husbands would have thought that, and their mothers-in-law. In some cases – not so many – their own mothers would have.

When Martha and Seamus moved to Dunroon in the eighties, Conor Moriarty was eight and Siobhán was five and Lauren was two. Five looked old, to Martha, for a child, when her baby was not yet born. She would see Conor and Siobhán walking to school when she was on her way to catch the train. They were both tall and athletic, and to Martha they looked very independent, able to go to school on their own, while her baby was still rocking around in a puddle of fluid inside her body. And she was rocking inside the train, still feeling sick.

The train. Work. Sleep. The train. Work. Sleep.

Martha saw the sense of working, and she often said she liked her job. She knew that life had changed for the better, for women, and would as soon have given back the new entitlements to equality and jobs as she would have handed in her voting card. But at the same time she was consumed with envy of Mitzy, and the other Dunroon Crescent women. She envied them their freedom. She envied them their time. She envied them their chance to work on their houses and gardens and their hobbies, and, after a while, to be with the children.

She wanted to go to their coffee mornings. Not that they had formal coffee mornings, as such, they're an American thing or a figment of novelists' imaginations. But some of the women occasionally got together, little groups of them, or couples. There were best-friend partnerships, just like in school. All this friendship, chatting, laughing, went on during the day when the men and the children were out of the way. When they came home, there would be no time for such frivolity. Then the women of Dunroon Crescent would go back into their kitchens and look after their families.

On Dunroon Crescent, Martha was like a man or a child, heading off in the morning and coming home on the train at night. So it took a long time to get to know the neighbours. And if you spend too long getting to know people, you never become close friends. The moment when people can change an acquaintanceship into a friendship comes soon enough in the chronology of a relationship, and if you don't seize that moment, it won't, as a rule, come again. Time is a factor, and timing. Lots of people know this instinctively, even when they're very young. But Martha didn't and she let various opportunities pass.

It was even harder when the children came. Then her life was so busy she never had time to be with the neighbours, at all, at all. She rushed through her days, from early morning to late at night. There was hardly time to sleep, in those days, when she had no trouble at all doing it, when she, too, became unconscious the second her head hit the pillow.

When she had lived on Dunroon Crescent for more than sixteen years, Martha started to cut down on work. She and Seamus had got married as soon as the divorce legislation came through. Being married gave her a sense of security, oddly enough. Also, their mortgage was nearly paid. Interest rates had dropped and salaries had gone up and Martha and Seamus had more money than they needed. For the first time they were never in the red. It was the era of the Celtic Tiger – that is how Martha experienced it, at first: the debt to the bank diminished, then vanished, without her doing anything about it. Later, the affluence affected her in other ways. More holidays. Their holidays used to be down the country, in the west of Ireland. They'd rent a damp bungalow near some windswept beach, or, less often, they would drive around the country – ‘getting to know our own country', they called it – and stay in B & Bs, also bungalows, though with more expensive, frillier curtains and bedspreads than the rented places. Now they began to use hotels. Cheap hotels at first. Soon Martha became a connoisseur. In particular, she had high demands where bathrooms were concerned, and bathrooms were what changed most, she noticed, during the time of the prosperity, every year becoming bigger and more and more beautiful, until in the end they were the most palatial and ornate rooms in the entire land, nicer than any other part of the house or hotel – like the tombs of the Pharaohs (whose mosaics and carvings they often emulated).

But the best thing about the healthy economy was that it created thousands of jobs, and that conferred a new sense of freedom. Being employed was no longer a privilege – there was more than enough work to go around for the first time ever, it seemed. Nobody wanted to work in the Public Service any more; the big money was to be made elsewhere. So the Public Service enticed people in with better pay and better conditions. Flexitime, career breaks, parental leave, term-time leave – all these inducements became available. Management was bending over backwards to make life easier for parents – by which was meant, mothers, although they pretended it was for fathers, too. In the Four Courts, women were doing four days, three days; one young woman in Family Law was doing a one-day week. (She had twins; the crèche would have cost more than her salary, even though they gave her a ten per cent reduction on the second twin. And of course she lived in one of the new housing estates in Portarlington, sixty miles away from Dublin, and had to get up at six in the morning on the days she worked.)

After nearly eighteen years of full-time work, Martha decided to give herself a break and try the three-day week. So she was at home on Fridays and Mondays. She had time for herself – which she interpreted as time for the house and the garden, for Seamus and Robbie (a giant of a boy aged fourteen who needed mothering as much as he needed a broken leg). And for the neighbours.

But things had changed for the women on Dunroon Crescent. Now that Martha had time to befriend them, her neighbours were all out working. Women who had seemed destined for a life devoted to children and housework and tennis and gardening, who had indeed seemed to disdain any other kind of life, were going back into teaching, they were taking up jobs as receptionists and bankers, and in computers. Ingrid Stafford was in college, getting a law degree – there was a lot of work in conveyancing because the property market was so strong.

Even Mitzy had a career of her own.

She had started when Lauren went to secondary. She didn't want to apply for a job. ‘I don't think anyone would take on an old hag like me,' she said, caressing her fingers, which were long and nimble, white as marble. She was in her early fifties.

Martha nodded. Anyone over fifty
was
ancient then, as far as she was concerned.

‘I'm going to buy an old house and do it up,' Mitzy said.

‘That makes sense,' said Martha, although it didn't really. ‘You have a flair for decoration.'

Mitzy agreed: it was obvious. Her house was perfectly, effortlessly, beautiful.

‘But will you make money on it?' Martha wondered. She had heard that doing up your house was something you did only for yourself. You couldn't expect anyone to pay extra for a house just because it looked nice inside.