The Lives of Women E-Book

Christine Dwyer Hickey

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 358

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

The stunning new novel from Christine Dwyer Hickey, bestselling author of Last Train from Liguria. 'One of Ireland's most lauded modern writers, Christine Dwyer Hickey teases out the strands of her story... It leaves the reader with the aftertaste of regret for their own what might have been...' - Daily Mail Following a long absence spent in New York, Elaine Nichols returns to her childhood home to live with her invalid father and his geriatric Alsatian dog. The house backing on to theirs is sold and as she watches the old furniture stack up on the lawn, Elaine is brought back to a summer in the 1970s. She is almost sixteen again and this small out-of-town estate is an enclave for women and children while the men are mysterious shadows who leave every day for the outside world. The women are isolated but keep their loneliness and frustrations hidden behind a veneer of suburban respectability. When an American divorcee and her daughter move into the estate, the veneer begins to crack. The women learn how to socialise, how to drink martinis in the afternoon, how to care less about their wifely and maternal duties. While the women are distracted, Elaine and her friends find their own entry into the adult world and the result is a tragic event that will mark the rest of Elaine's life and be the cause of her long and guilt-ridden exile. Insightful and full of suspense, this is an uncompromising portrayal of the suburbs and the cruelties brought about by the demands of respectability.

Leseprobe

Praise for Christine Dwyer Hickey:

‘One of Ireland’s most lauded modern writers’ Daily Mail

‘A national treasure’ Paul Lynch

‘A talented and original writer’ Irish Independent

‘Christine Dwyer Hickey writes such beautifully poised prose’ Graham Norton

‘Hickey’s writing is gorgeously lyrical’ Sunday Business Post

‘Christine Dwyer Hickey is nuanced and exceptional at character and voice’ Sinead Gleeson

‘Everything about the writing is so carefully balanced – thought and action, feeling and movement, drama and suspense. She leaves space on the page, giving her characters the freedom to behave unexpectedly and to occupy the mind of the reader even when they are offstage’ Irish Times

Also by Christine Dwyer Hickey

Our London Lives

The Narrow Land

The Lives of Women

Snow Angels

The House on Parkgate Street and Other Dublin Stories

The Cold Eye of Heaven

Last Train from Liguria

Tatty

The Gatemaker (The Dublin Trilogy 3)

The Gambler (The Dublin Trilogy 2)

The Dancer (The Dublin Trilogy 1)

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Christine Dwyer Hickey was born in Dublin and is a novelist and short story writer. Her recent novel The Narrow Land won two major prizes: the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the inaugural Dalkey Literary Award. In 2020 her 2004 novel Tatty was chosen for UNESCO’s Dublin: One City One Book, having been previously longlisted for the Orange Prize. In 2012 The Cold Eye of Heaven won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. Her work has been widely translated into European and Arabic languages. She is an elected member of Aosdana, the Irish academy of arts.

First published in trade paperback in Great Britain in 2015by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition first published in Great Britain in 2025by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Christine Dwyer Hickey, 2015

The moral right of Christine Dwyer Hickey to be identified asthe author of this work has been asserted by her in accordancewith the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may bereproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in anyform or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of boththe copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, charactersand incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’simagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living ordead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

No part of this book may be used in any manner in the learning,training or development of generative artificial intelligence technologies(including but not limited to machine learning models and largelanguage models (LLMs)), whether by data scraping, data mining or usein any way to create or form a part of data sets or in any other way.

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A CIP catalogue record for this bookis available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978 1 80546 441 9

E-book ISBN: 978 1 78239 006 0

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To Bonnie,with love

Let not your hearts be seduced.BOOK OF DEUTERONOMY

1

Winter Present

November

HAD I NOT GONE searching for the number of some dead roofer called Fenton and found the attic room in need of an airing, I may not have heard a thing. Or had it been summer and the trees in the back yard stuffed with leaves, I’d hardly have even noticed. It’s years since I’ve ventured that far into the culde-sac anyhow, and since my return I’m rarely out on the road – not without the hard shell of a car around me. And so, unless one of the neighbours managed to nab me at the gate, say on bin day, or just as I was taking the dog back in from his walk, or unless Fat Carmel got wind of things and started fishing for scraps to add to her pot, weeks may well have passed before the news finally wound its way to me. By then, who knows – this business with my father could well have been over, and I could have gone back to New York. By the time my next visit came around – if it ever came around – the house backing on to ours would no longer matter.

The rooms would be scrubbed clean of all the old stains, the dust and damp of the vacant years cleared away. While this new family – the now owners – would have had time to peel off the skins of paper and carpet and paint, and to smear all the rooms with its own ethological scent. And I wouldn’t have to keep thinking about something that happened more than thirty years ago, and the old ghosts would not now be whimpering at the far side of my back wall.

As it stands, I did open the attic window into the gaudy light of a winter sun, and the view over the bare trees and across the back lawns could not have been clearer. And so that’s how I know, and can’t pretend not to know, that the Shillman house has been sold; that the Shillman house can finally be called something else.

The patio doors have been pinned back, the side entrance gate removed. The upstairs windows, stripped bare of curtains, are wide-open gills sucking on air. From the interior some sort of a machine is screeching. And men in overalls are coming and going, turning the house inside out, streeling its guts all over the lawn.

All day I’ve been returning to the window – even the dog is beginning to wonder, shadowing me upstairs to the landing then cowering at the bottom of the spiral stairwell that leads to the attic room. ‘What are you doing up there?’ his whine seems to say. ‘What the hell are you doing?’

I’m drinking my mid-morning coffee while two men do a Laurel and Hardy routine down the patio steps, the Shillmans’ grey leather sofa like a dead hippo between them.

I’m back with my lunchtime sandwich, watching a young hay-haired man, stretched out on the same sofa, spouting cigarette smoke overhead like he’s some sort of fountain.

I’m licking the yoghurt off the back of my spoon as, one by one, a whole family of mattresses is flung against the back garage wall and the bones of old beds, cots and bunk frames are stacked up alongside them.

More than once I return to the young man on the sofa and wonder when young men started looking this good.

By twilight I’m polishing the dust off my father’s old binoculars.

I see it all now: the four-sided bookcase they had shipped from India; the pony-skin rug that used to hang on the dining-room wall. The contents of the Shillman kitchen, the contents of the Shillman living room, always referred to as a lounge.

I am struck by the amount of belongings: boxes and boxes of belongings, many of which have already been emptied, contents arranged into heaps on the lawn. Books, toys, coats, boots, riding helmets. Shoes. Tennis rackets. Skateboards. Schoolbags. More coats. It’s as if the Shillmans closed the door behind them with little more than the clothes on their backs.

Hay-head slips into view then, soft mouth and strong hands filling the lens. I watch as he hoists Mr Shillman’s golf bag onto his shoulder, then picks his way around the boxes and piles to the end of the boundary wall. He lifts the bag and lowers it into the gap between the Shillman house and the Caudwells’. (Jesus – that gap! I’d forgotten all about it). And I watch, again, the innocent, easy-hipped saunter of him as he makes his way back up the garden path and disappears into the side entrance around to the front of the house.

By now the bare windows on the Shillmans’ house are stark yellow squares on an inky dusk. Other houses around show a flimsier light through curtains and blinds. Everything braced against darkness: pegs clenched on clothes lines, garbage bins backed to the wall, witchy long fingers clawing out from emaciated trees. The rusty old swing in the Jacksons’ garden is sturdy as a hangman’s gallows. In the Caudwells’, a rolled up patio umbrella has turned into a hooded monk.

It occurs to me, then, that I may not be the only one looking down from a window, that the Shillman house is visible from at least four other houses – or at least it used to be when I was the local babysitter. The thoughts of sharing this moment with one of the old neighbours: Anne Jackson or Bill Tansey or – God forbid – Miriam Caudwell.

I move from the window, lay the binoculars down, my wrists aching from the old-fashioned weight of them.

I know I should leave well enough alone: go back downstairs, do what I am supposed to do, which is to feed and medicate both father and dog. From the landing, a long drop of leftover rain flops tiredly into the bucket, reminding me the reason I came up here in the first place: to find the number of a roofer my father is convinced is still alive – a man I recall as already quite old when I was a child. All afternoon he’s been patiently waiting, hand by the phone, to make his first call in weeks. I could, at least, make an effort.

I stand rubbing my wrists for another while then step back up to the window. Not a sound nor a movement indoors or out. There is only the stir of old turf club badges as I lift the binoculars back up to my face.

Whatever I see now reminds me of something: an occasion, a moment, a feeling. Rachel’s old-fashioned boarding school trunk. Michael’s orange Colnago racer. Danny’s yellow tricycle. There’s the hats Mr Shillman brought back from Texas. The Russian candelabra he once told Agatha a story about and made her cry.

There’s the black rag-rug that their ‘girl from the country’ made, and the glass cocktail cabinet with the crack up the middle. Mrs Shillman’s desk where she wrote her letters; and the painting Serena gave to her, and later regretted, one afternoon of heavy drinking.

I see the green roll of an army sleeping bag and my heart begins to tighten. I see Karl’s haversack and my blood turns cold.

Next day I take the dog walking on what was once Arlows’ land – the last place I should be, considering the night I’ve just put in: scattergun dreams and rooms filled with lost faces. A dozen jittery trips to the bathroom in between. I was late up and late bringing breakfast to my father. He didn’t complain – he never would; at times I think he’d as soon have me starve him to death.

Over the years Arlows’ place has been sold off in parcels and patches, ‘so houses like yours could crawl like reptiles all over my land’, as Maggie Arlow, rosy with gin, once said to me.

On a few acres of land the Arlows had probably forgotten they even owned, Mr Jackson built our little estate more than fifty years ago, holding one house back for himself – two rows of good-sized no-nonsense family homes with a cul-de-sac looping off the middle – and for a long time it was the only housing estate around here.

All that is left of the Arlows now, their house and its grounds, orchard and stableyard, is the rear view they once enjoyed over the valley and the random stone wall to the front. The wrought-iron gates have been removed but the pillars remain and now serve as an entrance to the final development to be built around here, maybe fifteen years ago, or at some stage, anyhow, during my long absence. And if Maggie thought our reptiles were bad, I don’t know what she’d make of these dormer bungalows with their Tudor notions, plonked all over what was once her driveway and front lawns.

The valley itself, now a council-owned park, is still good and rough around the edges. Pathways and cycle tracks are etched into the slopes. Where the paddocks once were, there are mown grass patches. A proper car park sits near the entrance along with a map indicating where the wildlife can be found. At the squat stone bridge where the river splits, the ruins of Hoxtons’ house still stand, not looking any worse for wear than it did when I was a child. Over a ditch in a nearby field, there is a tree railed in by four brass bed-ends: here lies the shrine to the dead tinker-man.

Fat Carmel has her own take on the wildlife down here and frequently sings it for me in that sugary Welsh accent of hers whenever I drop by her shop to pick up my father’s newspaper. Campfires are her speciality – Rizla papers and scraps of tin foil mean the fire has been made by junkies. Broken glass and burnt beer cans indicate the ordinary everyday drunks. She tells me all this as if I couldn’t have figured it out for myself.

To listen to her, you’d think she was down here every night of the week with her torch, instead of sitting alone in her flat above the shop, munching unsold cakes and sausage rolls for dinner.

It could be a blow-in’s interest, of course – she has, after all, only lived here for ten years – or it could be a simple need to belong, but Carmel seems to have this need to be at the centre of things, even from a distance, and even in retrospect: the who-lives-wherefor-how-long-and-who-with of it all. She will find out about the Shillman house and much more besides – of that, I am certain.

When I was a kid, I practically lived in Arlows’ valley. But since my return at the end of August, it’s been an occasional spur-ofthe-moment visit. Not because of the obvious dangers – junkies and drinkers at their little campfires don’t bother me in the least. People do walk their dogs – you might even see the occasional morning jogger. But the unspoken rule of the neighbourhood is: come mid-afternoon, leave the park to those who belong in the shadows.

Even my father – a man of few words that grow fewer each day – has been moved to open his cake-hole on the subject.

‘Don’t go down there, it’s dangerous,’ was about the extent of this once-off warning. I didn’t like to ask if he meant dangerous in general, or dangerous for me.

For me the only danger down here is memory.

I remember the way blackberry picking left the tips of my fingers flayed, and sitting in the grass trying to work out which was the blackberry’s blood, which was my own. I remember pinkeen fishing, the twist and turn of the net in water that was green and luscious with river dirt. And the shock of that cold-rotating slap after slap on my face when rolling down a hill packed with snow. And later, of course, much, much later, the spot where we used to stash the flagons of cider in the afternoon before returning that evening to drink them.

I remember the drunken paddling in the river. The boys daring each other to climb up and dive off the rusty old cattle bridge, and the bruise under Karl Donegan’s ribs that was shaped like a map of Australia. I remember the smell of horse shit on the air when I lay in the long grass beside him. Patty’s American voice in the dark. The tight glow of a cigarette tip; the loose red bud of a joint and the slight crackle as it took light and began to burn. The trees growing dense with menace at nightfall. And most of all, I remember the night before they sent me away, hunkering behind the wall of Hoxtons’ bridge, as I looked up at dozens of flashlights wobbling all over the bowl of the valley, and thinking, I’m drowning now, I’m at the bottom of the ocean; in a moment I’ll be dead, and here is the last thing that I’ll ever see: this shoal of electric jellyfish floating over my head.

I come down here to try to cure or maybe kill something, in a hair of a dog sort of a way, but all I ever do is remember. Days of brooding then follow. Brooding on the past, on the horror of being young: on all the stupidity and ignorance and misplaced loyalty that goes with the territory. Then I start with the thinking. I think about what it was like to be living here at that time. I think about Karl and Paul, about Patty and Serena. About Jonathan. I think about all the others. About my mother and the other mothers. About my father and the other fathers and non-fathers alike. About the unimportance of children and the importance of men. I think about the lives of women.

And so that’s why I tend to avoid it, not because my father thinks it’s dangerous or because Carmel’s junkies are going to skin me up and smoke me. I avoid it because I never come away from here feeling any less than sick in heart, stomach and of course mind. And yet, every once in a while, this is exactly where I find myself.

I whistle for the dog, whistle again, then turn on the pathway leading down to the stone bridge. I pass last night’s campfires and a few medallions of melted green plastic from the bins the kids have stolen and burned out to get stoned on the fumes. I see the rags of small plastic bags caught on the hedgerows, bearing supermarket logos of what Carmel calls ‘those German baaaastard dives, intent on killing our youth with their mind-twisting, liver-corroding, cheap liquor’.

And I see, lying naked on the grass, two large bars of chocolate bought solely for their heroin-friendly foil which, unless I am very much mistaken, have come from her ‘bargain basket’ of out-ofdate, or very nearly out-of-date, sweets.

I look back up to see the dog appear on the crest of the hill, blond and black and frisky-looking, and then kick the chocolate away in case he is tempted.

I whistle again. And he comes in a canter down the hill, for that moment or two joyful and so much younger than his years.

He arrives to heel, an old dog again, half-blind and utterly exhausted, then he folds himself down on the ground and looks at me sideways, as if ashamed of his own frailty. And I find myself wondering which I will be left with in the end, the dog or my father, then try not to think which one I’d prefer.

When the dog has recovered, we continue downwards, taking our time, him cocking his leg every few seconds along the way, me trying to keep my thoughts vague and away from the reach of the past. On a ditch, a pair of knickers, slight and tangerine coloured, lie like a delicate and wounded bloom. And on the far side of the trees, I can hear the river breathing. A few seconds later there is a sound of rowers returning upriver, back towards the city: the coxman’s call, long and short, long and short. Nearer and louder. Come on boys – let’s push. Now let’s puuuushhhh.

I imagine the determined young profiles grimacing with each jagged movement and the muscles of their arms puffing up to the task. Bare legs splayed with first hair, folding and unfolding from the knee. Skin damp with winter sweat. I feel a vague pity then that I don’t quite understand: maybe for the girl who wore the tangerine underwear and whatever disappointment she may have felt after the event. Or maybe for the middle-aged woman who is standing here in my shoes.

A long blade of sound swishes by. I close my eyes to look at it. And there is the boat, honed and completely mastered, as it cuts up river, like a tailor’s scissors cuts through a bolt of new cloth

We come to the ditch at the tinker’s shrine and I decide to cross over and take a proper look at it. Clipping the lead onto the collar, heaving the poor dog over and up, we both stand there and stare in, one of us panting slightly more than the other.

It is obviously an ongoing work of art, this shrine: some trinkets are weather-beaten, others appear to be recent additions. Blue is the colour – all shades of blue. From a high, thick branch, a huge set of wooden rosary beads hangs, and from lesser branches, other more delicate sets dangle like Christmas tree decorations. Along with pieces of threaded glass and wind-chimes, they tinkle and whisper. Blue and white ribbons are spiralled around the bedposts. Inside the rails, in the centre of the plot, there is a small statue of a piebald pony and, behind it, a framed photograph of the dead man. He has a look about him of Burt Reynolds in his heyday. I’m guessing he either died here or was injured here and later died. I guess, too, that this shrine is dedicated to his spirit and that his body lies in another place – a plot in a formal cemetery or in an urn on a shelf in a tinker’s caravan. The small carved cross stuck into the earth gives the year but, for some reason, not the month of his death. Long after I left anyhow. Long before I came back.

Whoever he was, and however he died, great lengths have been taken to ensure that he is never lonely. Plastic see-through Holy Marys filled to the chin with holy water are posted around the tree. Little toy angels guard his picture. In a blue heart-shaped frame, a small girl, a daughter – or by now, more likely, a granddaughter – is frilled to the brim in a white first holy communion dress. A glass jar, etched into the clay, is stuffed with what appear to be small folded notes which I take to be messages for Burt. In another jam jar, a single tight-headed rose reminds me: November has arrived, month of the dead.

I am moved by the love that’s expressed at this shrine and continues to be expressed, fourteen years after the tinker has died. And I am moved, too, by the lack of shame in his death. Even a death that may well have been by murder, or as a result of some sort of violence anyhow, deserves to be both cherished and mourned.

Apart from two weddings in upstate New York, I haven’t stepped inside a church since I left here and, if I can help it, never will. Nor can I say I believe in, or even approve of, prayer. But I say a prayer here for Karl. I say a prayer for Rachel. I even say one for Paul and Jonathan. And Agatha, of course – I say a special prayer for her.

In my half-sleep, I sometimes see myself walking. A long, narrow path that veers into the distance. The ground is uneven, gnarled by the reaches of old tree roots and ancient worn-down stones. On one side of me, a high grey wall shawled with ivy. On the other, a stand of oak trees.

I stop and turn to look back along the considerable way I’ve already come. There’s a figure in the distance that has also stopped to turn and look at me. She is young, but not a child.

Or again, just as I’m about to doze off – on a crowded city street at rush hour: hundreds of faces coming towards me, each, in its own way, distinctive. Yet only one stands out. There is something about her, a certain expression – what it is, I couldn’t say.

I have this overwhelming need to understand her anyhow; to know who she is or why she is here. To know her story. To forgive it, even, if that’s what it should come to.

But how do you tell the story of yourself as you were more than thirty years ago? How do you know what you were like then? The workings of your troubled mind and heart – how do you begin to resolve all that?

I have looked at a photograph – the only photograph I could find in all the rooms of my parents’ house. She has the same eyes as mine. The same blood and bones. Her name is my name. I know she’s supposed to be me. But no matter how many times I pick up the photograph and no matter how long I stare into that bleak, adolescent face – all I can see is a stranger.

2

Summer Past

May

HER NAME IS ELAINE. She writes it on top of a page in one of the journals she keeps under her bed. My name is Elaine Nichols.

It physically hurts her to write these few words, but seeing them crawl out from under her twisted fingers – that brings her pleasure too.

The doctor has said writing will help her hands come back to full use, and so her father brought up to the hospital a block of unused legal journals, parcelled in smooth brown paper.

Each morning, as soon as she wakes, she reaches for the rubber ball on her bedside locker. Her hands will have clawed overnight and be stubborn as steel; the ball will help coax them back to life.

The first words of the day are always the toughest. As the day moves on and her hands start to loosen, the words will become easier to release, less measured. No matter which journal she happens to be on, no matter how many pages she uses in one day, she always starts with the same thing. My name is Elaine Nichols.

Whatever else she may forget in her life, she knows it won’t be that name.

She has been sick for months. At the end of January she went down with a virus and now it is almost summer. One Saturday morning she’d felt a bit off. By afternoon, she’d had to cancel a babysitting job for the Jacksons – something she hated to do, knowing full well that Junie Caudwell would be in like a light, making the Jackson twins love her more with her bag of sweeties, her big blonde curls and crolly-dolly eyes. For a while she had tortured herself with images of Junie up in the bathroom sniffing Mr Jackson’s aftershave, or twirling around in his big leather chair, or even kissing the photograph of him on the mantelpiece with his tanned face and rolled up shirtsleeves, taken in some far away place like Saudi Arabia.

By Sunday morning she’d forgotten all about the Jacksons and June Caudwell. By Sunday morning she’d hardly known her own name. She’d woken to find a three-headed version of her mother at the end of the bed, asking if she fancied scrambled eggs for breakfast.

It seemed only a few seconds later when she’d opened her eyes to a different light. Thick grey dust at the window, a globe of red from the silk lightshade above, and her mother, back to the one-headed version, standing by the bed holding a plate, in a voice, slightly hurt, asking why – why had she eaten nothing all day?

‘Even the eggs, you haven’t touched. And just how? How do you expect to get well if you won’t even make the smallest of efforts?’

And then her mother, scooping cold eggs onto cold toast, had begun eating them herself.

At some stage an ambulance was called. Later she would remember being wheeled out to it; night sky above and the voices of strangers.

She would remember, too, Doctor Townsend coming from across the road and climbing into the ambulance ahead of her, a hem of pyjama leg showing under the end of his trousers along with a hard knob of ankle. After that she had gone down a hole and disappeared into a delirium.

She was gone for a long time. She crossed a desert and was almost drowned in a crimson sandstorm. It filled her eyes, nose and throat.

A man pulled her out of the storm. He wore a large scarlet turban and had a big silver moustache. When he spoke, it was through a hole in his neck. When he smiled, there was an arc of gold-speckled teeth instead of an Adam’s apple.

There were goats on the journey. Sometimes in a herd, but mostly alone. She hated the goats. The way they shot out of nowhere, nudged her nightdress back with a cold, damp snout, gave a few bleats, before biting down on her buttock and disappearing again. She liked the man, though, and his safe brown arms with their mane of fine silver hair.

The man whispered words into her ear – right down into it. The words were small, warm shapes made of air. She could feel them entering her head, winding their way around and nesting in her brain. She knew they would always live there, that they would grow strong and never leave. They would become part of her. She also knew she would never quite hear them, never mind understand their meaning.

When she came through to the other side, there wasn’t much flesh left under her skin, her hands were crippled and her legs were two hockey sticks that showed no interest in walking. She was in quarantine, in a small square room with a glass wall on either side. There had been a baby in the room to her right. Beyond it, similar rooms that seemed to go on forever: layers of glass and the movement of nurses. Hers was the second-last room on the row. On her left, in the last room, was a man in paisley-print pyjamas.

Three months later the doctor said she was in recovery.

She had wanted to ask what that meant exactly, but the doctor’s back was turned to her, and he hadn’t been speaking to her anyway, he’d been speaking to her mother. Over his shoulder she could see her mother nodding away, touching her hair and looking up at him sideways as if she’d been expecting him to ask her to dance.

In his opinion the girl was greatly improved but by no means completely recovered. Nonetheless he would consider discharging her, depending on the results of a few last minute tests.

‘Well, of course, Doctor,’ her mother was saying. ‘If you think that best, of course…’

For a young girl to be stuck so long on her own… The loneliness – you see? It gets to them. ‘She is what now?’ he asked then, reaching for the chart at the end of the bed.

‘Seventeen in December,’ her mother said.

He lifted the chart and squinted into it. ‘Sixteen,’ he corrected, ‘and a young sixteen at that – would I be right?’

‘Well, yes, Doctor, indeed. Like myself, she’s an only child and, well, we are inclined to be a bit reserved.’

The previous few months had been the loneliest of her life. Days had gone by without a single visitor and only the baby seemed to make sense to her – the two of them lying on their sides and gazing at each other through the glass wall. Different sized nurses had passed through her illness, night into day and back again, but there’d been no conversation beyond a few generalities that only seemed to concern the weather or her bowels. There had been little or no interest shown in her at all, except by the man in the paisley pyjamas who had made her skin crawl, the way he sometimes stared in at her.

For all that she had grown used to the hospital. She liked being on her own. She liked, too, not having to put up with her mother’s habit of asking endless questions about everything and anything that happened to wander into her head. Or being nagged into constantly eating just to keep her company. She liked the small portions they served here. The little silver bowl of jelly and ice-cream for dessert every day, and the way she was given her own little pot of tea. She liked that she didn’t have to share. She had her radio and her two pillars of books – one short, the other tall – and knew she could rely on Mrs Hanley to keep them coming.

Her mother, for all her suffocating ways, had only come to see her twice a week: once when her father drove her after church on Sunday, and for an hour or so every Wednesday afternoon when she came by herself. For the week-day visit she took a taxi and it had been clear from her jigging about that she couldn’t wait to get back to her housework. On Sundays, she put in more of an effort, bringing a bag of homemade buns along with a compendium of games. Elaine always looked forward to these visits, but no sooner had they started when she wished they were over. Her father in the corner of the little room, plucking cake flesh out of the buns and reading the Sunday newspapers. Elaine and her mother by the bed, half-heartedly rattling dice in a plastic cup and pushing coloured buttons up ladders and down snakes.

The doctor brought the good news in person. Her tests had come back. She was to be discharged this very afternoon.

She’d been reading one of Mrs Hanley’s novels at the time and her heart had been thumping on some faraway beach in the South of France.

His sudden appearance gave her a fright. For some reason, she felt ashamed of the book, turning it over and covering it with her hand. She’d had trouble understanding him or even why he should be addressing her in the first place. She kept looking around, expecting her mother to be standing there behind her in the doorway.

The doctor sat side-saddle on the end of the bed and called her ‘young lady’. He tapped his thigh as he spoke. There would be certain conditions, of course: a weekly check-up in the outpatient department. Bed rest and quarantine for a further two weeks. After that, afternoon naps and early to bed to allow her immune system to build itself up. ‘In short, young lady, you will be a hot-house plant, but at least you’ll be a hot-house plant in the loving comfort of your own home where your own people can take good care of you.’

Then he wished her good luck and sauntered off down the corridor, leaving her bereft.

She had thought about getting up and shouting down the corridor after him. She thought of all the things she might say: ‘But I don’t feel better, Doctor. I don’t feel ready.’

Or, ‘Please, can’t I just stay for another week, a few days even? Oh, please?’

Or, ‘I’m not going! Do you hear me? I’m just NOT!’

But she stayed as she was, clutching her book in her old lady’s hands and staring down at a photo of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who stared blandly back with his girlish eyes and thin sardonic smile.

It had been strange to find herself standing in clothes again. It had been strange to be standing at all. Her yellow jumper poured off her like thick custard, her jeans barely stayed up on her hips. Even her shoes seemed too big. Next door, a nurse had lifted the baby, making his little hand wave at her through the glass. And she felt this warm, sharp gush come into her chest as if she might be going to cry, although she couldn’t see why – because how could she love him when she’d never even touched him and probably wouldn’t recognise him again, should their paths ever cross in the outside world?

Her mother piled books into a cardboard box and praised Mrs Hanley’s good taste. She said she hoped there’d been no spillages – jam or tea stains or such like – because the books, of course, would have to be returned.

‘But Mrs Hanley said…’

‘Oh now, I’m sure she didn’t mean—’

‘No, no, she said, she said…’

‘Now really, we can’t expect. At least not forever.’

‘They’re mine! I’m telling you, she said they were mine.’

‘All right, all right. Calm down. Surely you’re not going to start crying over a few old books! Tell you what, I’ll pop over, offer them back and see what she says.’

As her mother began rolling clothes into the hold-all, Elaine felt a chill in her stomach. She remembered, then, the way her mother would sometimes come back from the shops pinkened by the news of some medical woe: this man’s cancer, that woman’s pleurisy, the butcher who had a daughter who had a friend who had a neighbour who had a baby who’d just died.

Now, bustling around the hospital bed, the little grin on her face said it all – there would be weeks of playing nursies ahead. Her daughter would become her project. Her something to talk about. Her something to do.

She’d felt so old then; old and cornered, the way she imagined old people must feel when they find themselves trapped by the mercy of others. A few months ago she’d been a chubby adolescent, and now here she was, a skin-and-bone adult, watching her mother stuff toiletries into a washbag, squeezing and plumping the sides with the palms of her hands, drawing the edges of the zip together: tug, tug, tugging until it finally closed over and everything had been forced to stay jammed inside.

There would be changes. New chair in her bedroom; new set of towels waiting on the bedside table; new rug on the floor. The garden puffed up with early summer. The shed painted a thin shade of green. In the garage, a chest freezer that growled like a peevish beast.

The two biggest changes concerned her mother.

For one she’d started to smoke again. In her youth she’d been an occasional smoker but had always assured Elaine this had only been to give herself something to do while waiting by the wallflower wall at tennis club dances. And it helped show off her hands, which she considered to be her best feature. It had been an excellent means, too, of striking up a conversation – a man might offer a cigarette, one would accept and then naturally a conversation would follow. Elaine had always imagined these conversations taking place against black-and-white settings and conducted in fruity uppercrust accents – ‘Care for a cigarette?’ ‘How kind, don’t mind if I do.’ ‘I say, what perfectly lovely hands you have!’

Now it seems her mother was back on the cigarettes, only this time she meant it.

*

While they were waiting for the nurse to complete the paperwork, her mother broke the news about her new smoking life. It had started as a way to calm her nerves while Elaine had been at the height of her illness. When she was taken off the critical list and declared out of danger, she had decided to stick with it because Martha Shillman told her it was a great way of keeping the weight down. Instead of the afternoon bun, she’d been reaching for the packet of fags. Two cigarettes in and all thought of the bun would go flying out the window. Already she could feel her skirts beginning to loosen their grip. Martha Shillman had been right all along. Martha Shillman was no fool in such matters.

Martha Shillman’s name, Elaine had already begun to notice, was cropping up quite a bit in recent conversations.

She’d been expecting to see her father’s car on the hospital forecourt. At the same time, she hadn’t been all that surprised to find, instead, Martha Shillman in her husband’s car, grinning out over the steering wheel. Even so, Elaine had decided she should probably ask.

‘Your father? Oh – who knows? Too busy, I suppose. Off racing, no doubt. Anyway, thank goodness for Martha Shillman, says you.’

On the way home they went in for a drink. Really it was just to have a fag in comfort, Martha explained. ‘Shillman goes mad if you smoke in the car. I wouldn’t mind, but he thinks nothing of stinking us out of house and home with those bloody awful cigars of his.’

She had forgotten that Mrs Shillman called her husband by his surname. She had forgotten too about the amount of make-up she wore and the fug of her perfume. Her mother, she noticed, was wearing more make-up than usual and had also doused herself in perfume, and it not even Sunday.

Elaine opened the back window of the car and half-listened to the conversation up front. Mrs Shillman was explaining something to her mother about China, using a story heard in diplomatic circles to illustrate the point. Mrs Shillman, Elaine knew, was an intelligent woman. She spoke fluent French. She knew about politics. She had once taken a correspondence course in psychology and often wrote letters to the letter page in newspapers; some of them had even been published. Even the men listened to her in mixed conversation. While she spoke about China, her mother made muttery, agreeable sounds. Elaine felt a pang under her ribs. Her mother wasn’t an intelligent woman – in fact she could be quite stupid. That was something else she had almost forgotten.

The pub – a dirty dive: damp, clumpy sawdust over a black-speckled floor. An ungentlemanly stink from the gentlemen’s toilets. A man on his own, throwing rings at a board. Further away, another lone man, using both hands to forklift his glass from the table to his face.

The barman told them it was too early to open the lounge: if they wanted a drink, they’d just have to put up with it – counter service only. Oh, but Mrs Shillman much preferred these old fashioned bars, so full of charm and character – wouldn’t he agree?

He looked at her with a blank, pasty face and waited for her order. Elaine followed her mother to a table. Mrs Shillman began seeing to the drinks. A large gin and tonic for herself, a large vodka and lime for her friend and ‘What about you, Elaine dear, what would you like?’