The Shelter of Neighbours (18 page)

She hasn't gone far along the narrow track when she sees cars. Something is happening – some country event. There are lots of cars, parked along the side of the road, which is wide enough for two only. Families stand around their boots, eating sandwiches and drinking tea. It must be a point-to-point, Audrey thinks. She's not quite sure what a point-to-point is. But all these people look as if they're waiting to see horses, or dogs, hunting some animal across the bog. They don't look as if they came to the side of this narrow road just to eat their sandwiches and then go home. To Audrey, other families have always seemed purposeful, in control of their lives, their Sunday afternoons.

She drives carefully along the free side of the road. After half a mile or so, there's a gap in the line of cars. And suddenly, out of the blue, the mountain appears. That familiar sandy peak. The Sugar Loaf – unless there is some other mountain around here. The Little Sugar Loaf? Or that one with the name that sounds like ‘Juice'? Funny name for a mountain. Though it sort of goes with Sugar Loaf.

Whatever it is, the peak is close to the road, and not high. I'll be up that and down again in less than half an hour, Audrey thinks, as she starts to plod across the springy turf. The sun shines in a clear sky, but she's wrapped up in her warm green cardigan, and she put on her green parka, too. Just in case the temperature is lower at the top. (On Mount Etna, where she was in the summer, there was snow.) The landscape is exhilarating – the hill, fields with cattle and sheep, spread behind. Hundreds of people are walking up and down the hill. Half of Dublin is here. On its crest there's a line of things that looks like burned spruce trees. Or crucifixes.

She overtakes a family: a mother and father, with two small children in tow.

‘Are we there yet?' the little boy says, whining.

They have hardly left the carpark. He looks to be about three, so he may not know it's a cliché. Though children are so precocious now, it's possible that he does and is being ironic.

‘Not yet,' his mother says patiently.

His father looks at the boy in exasperation. ‘We're going up there,' he says, and points to the peak. ‘See where those people are? Up there.' He points at the crucifixes and utters the words with slow, exaggerated patience.

‘All the way up there?' the boys whines. ‘Will you give me a carry?'

‘That'll be fun for you!' says Audrey, smiling at the father. ‘He's no light bundle!'

The father nods, but doesn't say anything. The little boy looks alarmed. He runs back to his mother and takes her hand. The mother gives Audrey a sharp, questioning glance.

She hurries on.

A big group of girls, long-haired, mostly blond, clad in light summery clothes, blocks the path. They stand right across it, so Audrey can't pass. One of them, dressed all in white, comes tentatively towards her, holding out a camera.

‘Yes, yes, of course!' says Audrey, without waiting to be asked. Relieved, although she knew nobody could attack her, here, with half of Dublin to witness it.

The white girl goes back and stands with her crowd.

‘Smelly Sausages!' says Audrey, and the girls smile, but they don't laugh. So she says it again and takes another one. They don't laugh this time, either.

‘I should take one more,' Audrey says to the white girl. ‘I didn't hear a click.'

‘I did,' says the girl, with the trace of a German accent.

‘Sure I'm half-deaf,' says Audrey, and waits for them to laugh. But they don't. They give a little smile and look away.

It takes her an hour to reach the foot of the final peak. It's further away than it looks. She's sweating by the time she gets there – it's much too hot for the cardigan and the parka. The parka she takes off – she doesn't feel like removing the cardigan; then she'd just have to carry it. Most people are in their T-shirts. She looks up at the peak – a mound of rocks. Scree. Grey stones tumbling down the slope – that's what the sugar is. The peak, which looks like the point of a needle from her garden, is about twenty square metres in circumference, at least. It's a little platform at the top of the stony scree.

Audrey feels just a tiny bit light-headed, and also a bit queasy. Altitude sickness? The mountain is five hundred metres high – she noticed this when she was looking at the map – but maybe some people can get altitude sickness at that height? She wonders if the Twin Towers were five hundred metres high. Probably about that. You wouldn't get altitude sickness at the top of a building that you worked in every day, even one that a plane could crash into and destroy. It must be her heart.

She sits down to takes a rest.

Maybe she shouldn't go up any further.

The view from here is good, anyway. The cars are a necklace of black diamonds strung gently around the foot of the mountain. There is Powerscourt, nestling in its dark woods. The big hotel at Kilternan in a patchwork of fields. Her landscape, where she has lived for most of her life. It's lovely, she thinks, gratefully. Of course, she's always known that.

Someone sits beside her. An older woman – older than Audrey.

‘Stay here and we'll be down soon,' says someone. She is a comfortable-looking person, in a tracksuit. She settles the woman, who is clearly her mother, into a fold-up chair.

‘I'll be grand,' says the older woman. ‘It's lovely here. Take your time, enjoy the view from the top.'

The younger woman kisses the older woman and starts to climb the mountain. She has two children, a boy and a girl, who also kiss the older woman and shout: ‘Bye-bye, Granny, bye-bye, see you in a while!'

Last year, Audrey and her mother had been down there at Powerscourt one Sunday afternoon. An overcast day, it was not looking its best. But her mother had loved it.

‘You go and walk for as long as you like,' she said to Audrey. ‘I'll sit here and wait, I'm grand.'

She sat on an iron seat in the garden, looking down at the steps, the statues, the fountain. The flowers. The Sugar Loaf, soaring over the garden, as if built for it as a suitable backdrop.

Audrey had walked dutifully through the gardens, looked at a few unusual trees with labels on them, tripped across the tiny bridge in the Japanese gardens. The things everyone does at Powerscourt. But the grey day depressed her. In the pets' graveyard she was overwhelmed with loneliness. A sense of being totally lost, abandoned, although there were people all around. Within ten minutes she was back with her mother.

‘I'd love a cup of coffee,' her mother had said.

She seldom asked Audrey for anything. She loved having cups of coffee in cafés but knew Audrey didn't share her taste for this form of amusement and usually refrained from asking. This day was different, for some reason. She hadn't been out of the house for weeks, and she was overjoyed to see something different from the four walls of the messy sitting room. She was overjoyed to see the gardens and the fountain and the great house. To see the Sugar Loaf soaring over all that.

‘
ok
,' said Audrey gruffly.

They went into the café. Of course it was packed, as Audrey knew it would be. Everyone in stuffing themselves, escaping from the nasty weather. She put her mother at a table in the corner – lucky to find one – and queued for coffee and cakes.

For about twenty minutes. That's how long it took to get two coffees and one slice of chocolate meringue gateau and cream.

By the time she got back to her mother, Audrey was as cross as a bear. She snapped and snapped. But her mother didn't mind. She was used to Audrey's snapping. She no longer heard it – like someone who lives beside a railway track and doesn't hear the trains roaring by every five minutes. She sipped her coffee and ate her chocolate meringue gateau slowly, with great enjoyment. She was happy. Anyone could see it. She glowed. In love with the fields and the flowers and sky. In love, yes, with the chocolate cake.

Audrey didn't hear her own snapping, either. While she was doing it, snapping away and drinking her coffee, she was thinking, it's great to see her having such a good time. I must bring her on a holiday somewhere before the end of the summer. Wales, say. Somewhere that would be easy to get to, but a different country. They could go over on the ferry, bring the car. Go up to the top of Mount Snowdon on the Mountain Railway and drink coffee up there, look down over Wales. And Ireland. They say you can see Ireland on a clear day from the top of Snowdon.

Her mother had been finding the summer long and gloomy. The garden was out of bounds most of the time, because of the rain. She had to sit in the house, listening to Audrey snapping at her, eating sandwiches for dinner more often than not – Audrey didn't bother cooking much since Daddy died. The sandwiches weren't bad. Ham and cheese, smoked salmon. Crisps on the side and often a bit of salad from a bag. Audrey had her wine to wash it all down, which seemed to make a difference. But her mother didn't like wine. So she had nothing but tea to flavour the sandwiches. It got monotonous.

Audrey didn't bring her on a holiday. Because a very strange thing happened last summer. A man in the choir, Brendan, asked Audrey out, and then he asked her to go on a holiday with him, to Sicily. Brendan was fat and had big, sticking-out ears. Still, he was nice enough. Audrey didn't want to go – she couldn't leave her mother for so long. But it was her mother who insisted. She phoned Ben and persuaded him to come over to stay for the week Audrey would be away. Audrey was sure everything would go pear-shaped, in Ben's incompetent hands. But when she came home, the two of them, Ben and Mammy, were sitting in front of a blazing log fire in the front room, which he had cleaned up, listening to nice music, and looking as happy as larks.

The hotel in Sicily was great. Five star, with a lovely pool surrounded by mature palms, and a view of Mount Etna, conveniently erupting. The food was good, although the wine was a bit expensive, and of course they drank a lot of it. On the second day, after settling in, they went up to the volcano in a bus. Audrey loved that, even though Brendan shivered when he got out of the bus, and instead of climbing upwards with the other tourists, they had to head for the café to have a cappuccino, then get the bus back down again. But it was great even halfway up – you could see for miles around, the gorgeous coastline, the deep green interior.

After that day, things started to go downhill. Brendan became far too fond of getting massages from the Chinese girls who worked the beaches. They were pests, you couldn't get a minute's peace from them. As soon as you settled into your lounger one of them was over, with her straw hat and little simpering smile, whispering, ‘Massage, massage?'

‘Go away, go away!' Audrey had said to them, swatting at them with her towel, as if they were flies.

Brendan had laughed at her. At first. Then Audrey started refusing to go to the beach, saying she preferred the pool, anyway. She told him the story about her grandfather and the boots. So he had to put up with it – he couldn't force her and he wouldn't go to the beach alone. But it annoyed him. When they came home, he never contacted her. He stopped attending choir practice.

That was at the end of August. Her mother had a heart attack on the first of September, the first day of school, and a month later, she died. The Sunday in Powerscourt, it turned out, was her last day out. Ever.

She used to come here as a girl. Audrey's mother. She had often talked about that. With her best friend, Myrtle, who worked with her in a grocer's shop, she would cycle out to Enniskerry on Sundays. They would go to the Powerscourt Waterfall, and stand under it, getting splashed all over with the water that cascaded down the side of the cliff. Then they'd have tea in a café in the village, if they had a shilling to spare. Myrtle and Audrey's mother, in their gabardine coats and headscarves, laughed a great deal. There was a black-and-white snapshot of them on the mantelpiece, them and their bicycles with the waterfall behind, laughing their heads off. This was in the 1940s because by 1950 they were both married and no longer worked in the shop or cycled out to the country on their bikes. This place had been on her mother's map, all her life. Just as it is on Audrey's. The place you could go to on a Sunday for a drive or a walk or a climb or a cycle.

Audrey looks up at the top of the mountain. The things that looked like trees or crosses from below are just people, standing on the crest. Happy to have got up there. Now she knows that is where she has to go.

She says goodbye to the granny, who doesn't answer because she has fallen asleep.

You have to clamber up the rocky slope. It's steep. But Audrey finds this bit easy. She used to love climbing frames when she was small. There was a good one in the park in Dunroon, beside the graveyard. ‘You're my little monkey, you're my little monkey,' Daddy used to say. He used to bring her there to get her out of her mother's hair sometimes. ‘My monkey,' he would say, catching her from the top of the frame and swinging her, swinging her, in the crisp bright air, so her skirt flew out in the wind and she screamed with delight.

There's a constant stream of people going up and coming down the rock face. They all use the same track. You have to move out of the way all the time to let someone coming down pass.

She is about a third of the way up, her eyes fixed on the rock face in front of her, when someone bumps into her and nearly knocks her down.

A man.

He apologises, then stares at her. He is long-legged, dressed all in black, like a spider. Dark grey hair. The kind of face that is called distinguished in a man. There is something familiar about him. He must be somebody's father, someone she has met at a Parent–Teacher meeting. They usually recognise her, although she can't possibly be expected to remember all their names and faces.

‘It's you,' he says abruptly. This is not a thing the students' fathers say to her.