Whitethorn Woods Read online

  ‘No, I think I’ll be around here until you are old and grey,’ I said.

  ‘I hope not, son, it would be nice for you to meet someone you chose rather than living with us, people you didn’t choose at all,’ my dad said.

  And I got a sudden chilly feeling that I never would meet anyone I knew was right for me because I realised I could never make up my mind.

  I just went with things that fell into my lap. Like Uncle Sidney getting me to drive a taxi and going with this girl because she was someone’s sister or that girl because she was the mate of some pal’s girlfriend. I played football on a Sunday because someone else had set up the team and booked the place to play, I bought my clothes in a place where Gerry, a friend of mine, worked. He always held a few things back for me when they had a sale.

  ‘You could look really well, Hugo, if you tried,’ he said to me a couple of times. ‘You have that thin pointy face that women go for. You should wear good leather jackets.’ But then Gerry is a very cheerful fat guy who says nice things to people all of the time.

  He wouldn’t know whether I looked good or like the back of the Rossmore to Dublin bus. So I don’t go out much testing my so-called good looks.

  And oddly, apart from Chrissie, I never really met anyone I’d like to get to know a lot better. And even with her. Well, I wasn’t sure.

  It would be foolish for us both to get our hopes up if we weren’t really sure. I mean, Chrissie was great fun and she was fascinating about flowers and everything, but for ever? All day and all night? I don’t know.

  And neither did Chrissie, to be honest. We had both told each other that nothing was worse than people trapped in loveless relationships. Chrissie saw that all the time. She said that a good sixty per cent of the brides that she dealt with over wedding flowers were all wretched.

  I knew that so many of the people I drove were miserable too and seemed to fight all the time. Particularly those going on vacation. They often actually seemed to hate each other.

  Anyway the night after my mum had gone off to the Gulf to get a tan and buy a gold bracelet, and my dad had gone to feed little broken fawns with bottles of warmed milk and bind up the wounds on donkeys’ backs, I worked an extra shift. I was thinking it would be really nice to have someone who just adored you and would fight your corner, like happens in the movies.

  And then I was going past this Italian pasta place where people were coming out into the street, most of them fairly drinky as it happened. You want to be careful of a fare like that. Uncle Sid always said, turn off the meter but slow down to see if they can stand and pay what they will owe you and especially to keep a beady eye out for those who might get sick in your cab.

  A nice young fellow came out and hailed me, he was sober anyway, American or Canadian maybe. Very polite.

  ‘I wonder if I could ask you to take this young lady home?’ He gave me a tenner, well above the fare to where she was going.

  The young lady was weaving round the place, but she didn’t look like a barfer – you get the feeling when they’re going to throw up – she hadn’t that kind of aura about her, if you know what I mean. Anyway she fell into the taxi on her knees, which was a poor start.

  He climbed in and straightened her up, very tenderly.

  I asked him, was he going to come with us possibly? I was thinking he might be useful at the other end hauling her out again.

  ‘No, I wish I could but, you see, Monica … is there … and it is Monica’s night really and we do live in the same direction. You’re all right, Emer – wake up, darling, wake up and talk to the nice driver.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk, Ken, I want to sing to the driver,’ she said mutinously.

  ‘Is that okay, driver?’ he asked me anxiously.

  ‘Sure, Ken,’ I said. ‘I’ll sing too.’

  ‘I hate Monica, Ken, you’re much too good for her, she has a face like a marshmallow and she paints as if she dipped another marshmallow into pinks and blues and yellows. She’s a really terrible gross person, Ken, it’s just that you can’t see that.’

  Ken seemed anxious for Monica not to hear this description and he looked at me wildly. I often think this job is a bit like being a diplomat and a marriage counsellor all rolled into one.

  ‘I’ll be off now,’ I said.

  ‘Take care of her, she’s very special,’ he said to me. And we were gone. She sat grumbling in the back, asking why if she was so special was he going to take home that Monica who had a face like an almond bun.

  ‘More like a marshmallow really,’ I corrected her. She was delighted with me.

  ‘That’s exactly what she’s like. Exactly. How clever you are to notice.’ She smiled happily to herself and repeated it over and over: ‘Like a marshmallow’, as if she had not come up with the phrase herself. ‘Hey, Ken asked me to sing to you – what would you like?’ she asked eventually.

  ‘Why don’t you choose.’ I was polite as always.

  She was a nice girl, late twenties maybe, long straight fair hair. She had drunk far too much wine but seemed pleasant about everything except Monica with the flat face.

  ‘Ken is very nice, you see, he knows taxi driving is a dull job and that you might want to be entertained on the way back, that’s why he suggested it. I’ll sing “By the Rivers of Babylon”.’ And she did, quite well as it happens.

  I suggested we sing ‘Stand by Your Man’. She told me that men were foolish and didn’t need people to stand by them, what men needed was a wake-up call. But we sang it anyway, and a few more.

  Then I was afraid she was going to go to sleep and we might have trouble identifying her house or if it was a flat which one it might be. So I made every effort to keep the conversation going, by asking her, what did men need to be woken up to.

  ‘To the fact that they usually have perfectly good women just within an arm’s length and they never seem to see them,’ she said crossly. She told me at confused length about this guy Ken and how he had been taken in by Monica’s sheer silliness and had wrongly believed that that stupid woman needed looking after. She didn’t think that they were sleeping together but you never knew with men. And tonight could be the night. Tonight could be the very night they might do it. In Monica’s horrible house at 35 Orange Crescent. She was pretty glum about that.

  ‘Maybe he’s too drunk to do it tonight,’ I said, thinking that would help.

  ‘No, he hardly drinks at all. He was the sober one who paid too much for the meal for everyone.’

  She was brooding heavily about it all. She said she had been to pray at St Ann’s Well and St Ann hadn’t bothered at all. St Ann had let the truly awful Monicas of this world prowl round and destroy people. Taking them home to ravish them on the way.

  ‘Well, I imagine he just saw her home, you know, and then went home himself,’ I soothed her as best I could.

  ‘But he doesn’t see me, that’s the problem. What’s your name by the way?’

  I told her I was called Hugo.

  ‘Hugo – that’s a bit fancy, isn’t it?’

  ‘Is it? I don’t know. I always thought it would look good on a CD or outside a gig where I would be playing. I had my dreams, you know.’ I didn’t usually talk about myself. I was surprised at myself. But what the hell, she was one drunken woman, I might as well have been reciting the Highway Code.

  She was prepared to fight with her shadow. ‘Well, why didn’t you do something about your dream then?’ She was like a small angry terrier dog on the back seat. ‘My family wanted me to be a teacher or a nurse, they didn’t want me to do arty things, but I fought for it, and tomorrow I have this interview for a huge job, and I hoped that Ken would come home with me tonight and pat me down instead of going to 35 Orange Crescent and patting down that stupid marshmallow as you so rightly called her.’ She was near tears now.

  I had to stop that at all costs.

  ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I suppose men are a bit hopeless, cagey … whatever. It’s just that we don’t want to get
into something which may be wrong and there will be a load of grief and aggravation getting out of it. That’s all it is really.’

  ‘That’s such bullshit,’ she said. ‘I bet there’s some nice girl who has hopes of you, Hugo, some foolish insane girl who thinks you could be a singer if you weren’t so cautious, who thinks she might make you happy if you’d let her in. The world is full of women like that. I don’t know where we’d stretch to if you put us all in a line. Really I don’t.’ She shook her head at the tragedy of it all.

  I thought I saw her eyes beginning to close in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘I do have a friend, Chrissie,’ I shouted, trying to keep her awake, ‘but I’m not certain that it’s the real thing and I don’t think she’s certain and it would be silly to get into something we might have to get out of.’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, Hugo, you are one dumb fool. Who can be certain of anything on this earth? I ask you. I never met such a ditherer. In about forty years I’ll meet you again and you’ll be exactly the same as you are now, older of course, and bald, and you won’t have one of those sharp thin faces that would look so well on a CD, you’ll have a fat cautious face and wear a greasy checked cap. But basically you’ll be the same.’

  I wasn’t going to get annoyed with her. I asked her what she thought that I should do. Oho, she knew that too.

  I was to go round to Chrissie’s house tonight and say I was prepared to give it a go, that life was short and love was good and that we would both give it our best try.

  ‘I might,’ I said.

  ‘You won’t,’ she told me.

  ‘Why don’t you say all these things to Ken?’ I asked her with some spirit.

  ‘Because I just couldn’t bear it if it didn’t work,’ she said very truthfully.

  Then she got out of the taxi and teetered about a bit. I got out to steady her up and help her up the few steps outside the hall door. There was a bit of fumbling with her key but eventually I got her into her flat.

  ‘You’re quite a good singer,’ she said as she left me. ‘Yes, quite good. You’d need to work on your repertoire but you can certainly hold a tune,’ she said before she crashed indoors.

  It was a quiet night as I was driving around when I saw I was near Orange Crescent. I remembered what she had said about my being a ditherer. I’d show her.

  I rang the doorbell.

  Marshmallow Monica came to answer it. She wore no shoes but she did have all her clothes on. Maybe I was in time.

  ‘I’ve come for Ken,’ I said.

  Ken came out, bewildered.

  ‘You ordered a cab,’ I said.

  He was very polite but confused, there must have been some mistake. I was adamant. How else would I have known the name and the address, I had come specially, a long way, to collect him.

  ‘Well, perhaps, Monica, since the driver has come for me … I should really go with him.’

  There was a poutish display of bad temper from the Marshmallow, but I had him in the cab. I would now drive him home.

  ‘Emer loves you,’ I said.

  ‘No she doesn’t, she loves her career,’ he said sadly.

  ‘You’re wrong,’ I said. ‘You’re so very wrong. When she wasn’t singing she was telling me how much she loved you.’

  ‘She’s drunk as a lord of course,’ Ken said.

  ‘I think it’s the same drunk or sober,’ I said. ‘And she’s going to have some hangover tomorrow, maybe you should go round and straighten her up for that interview she’s going to.’

  He looked thoughtful. ‘Are you into therapy or crisis intervention in your spare time?’ he asked me.

  ‘No, I’m into singing. Do you know anywhere I could get a gig by any chance?’

  It’s a funny old life. It turns out that Ken’s students were having a disco in the art college the following night. Their live guy with a guitar had let them down. We had an audition in the cab. I sang three numbers for him and Ken said fine, I was hired and he gave me the address where I should show up. He asked me if I had a girlfriend because there would be a nice do afterwards.

  I said I had a nice girlfriend called Chrissie, and maybe he could take Emer to celebrate her having got the job in the gallery. He looked as if he had never thought of doing anything like that.

  You know, Emer was right.

  Men don’t need women to stand by them, that’s not what they need at all. They need someone to give them a boot up the bum when all is said and done.

  And magic well or no magic well, I’d have been unlikely to get that from St Ann.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Anniversary

  Part 1 – Pearl

  I’ve always loved looking up things, silly facts, useless information. If I only had a computer I’d be at it all day. If we were the kind of people who would go to a pub quiz I bet I’d do well, even win prizes. If I only had the nerve to try and get on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? I think I’d do quite well. Honestly I do. I’ve often got all the questions right when the real contestants didn’t know them.

  Brainbox Pearl, they used to call me at school, but that was just at school. Girls in my street didn’t go on for what was called further education. My family had come over from Ireland to make a fortune in England like so many Irish did during the 1950s and 1960s. We were originally from a place called Rossmore, which was a very poor sort of place back then. But it had changed utterly now. You wouldn’t believe the style some of my cousins lived in back there now. My Bob was originally from Galway, we had met at an Irish ceilidh dance.

  My dad worked on the roads and we all got jobs in factories or shops, and were considered dead lucky not to have gone into service in houses like our mothers had back in the old country as they called it. We all married at nineteen. By the latest. It was just what you did.

  Just like everyone else here we had two children by the time we were twenty-one. We all went out to work automatically, none of the men we married could earn enough to run a household single-handed. Nobody complained.

  We were much more English than Irish. We supported English football teams, Bob and I did. Once a year we took the train and the boat and then another train back to Rossmore. My first cousin Lilly was exactly the same age as I was. They were very poor in those days and she used to envy me what she called my smart clothes.

  Smart clothes! My mam had a catalogue on our street, that’s how we were dressed. They used to laugh at our English accents when we went back to Rossmore but we didn’t mind. Our gran was very nice, she used to make Lilly and me go up to this well in the woods where they had a statue of St Ann and pray that we got good husbands. It was even more important for me to pray hard, because of living in England, where I might meet someone outside the faith.

  And it must have worked, the holy well, because of course I met Bob which was great, and Lilly met Aidan which was also great. Back in those days we didn’t have the money to go to each other’s weddings, but we were both very happy and we wrote each other letters a lot about our lives.

  I was expecting Amy at about the same time as she was expecting her first baby, Teresa, so we had a lot of things to write about. Then the most terrible thing happened.

  I mean, it’s like something that happens to other people, not anyone you’d know. Someone stole Teresa right out of the pram and she was never found and never ever brought back. The poor little dog was barking away and there were hundreds of people in the street but nobody saw anything.

  Nothing was ever the same after that. I mean, I couldn’t keep talking to her and telling all about Amy after all she had been through. Then after Gran died we didn’t go back to Ireland any more. We lived a very happy life here in the north of England and when John was born everything seemed complete.

  We did the Pools first every week, and then the Lottery, and we planned how to spend all that money when we won it. There would be a cruise of course first, then a villa on the Mediterranean and a big house on the posh side of town here; there would be a n
ice small house with a garden for our parents. As for the children! Well, all the plans we had for them!

  They were going to go to the most expensive schools, have music lessons, dancing classes, learn to ride ponies, to play tennis. They were going to have everything we never had. And more still!

  To be fair to us we did more than dream for our children, certainly Bob and I did. We knew that the big win just might not happen and we desperately wanted them to have more chances than we did. So we had a fund and every week we put aside a sum for them. Ever since they were born. In the post office a nice little sum grew for Amy and John.

  I had read in a book that you should give children plain classic names if you wanted them to get on. The names that we liked might be dead give-away, working-class names later on. So Amy and John they were. Two gorgeous children, but then everyone thinks that about their own.

  They got a brand-new bicycle each when the time came, not broken-down reconstructed ones. We took them to theme parks and on their birthdays they could ask friends round to the house and we got them burgers and a video. We got John a computer which he kept in his room. I would love to have used it but John was a very knowledgeable fifteen-year-old and I didn’t want to mess it up on him.

  We sent Amy to a very expensive secretarial college. The fund was stretched greatly for these two things because I worked on the checkout at a supermarket and Bob was a van driver and these are not jobs that pay hugely well. But in fact it was a great investment for the children.

  John turned out to be very gifted in technology and got a great job in what they call IT so it had been well worth getting him that computer at an early age. Amy’s expensive secretarial course was a great investment as well; she got a very fancy job as a receptionist in a big company and then moved even further upwards to be somebody’s personal assistant.

  Both of them in London! Imagine!

  They came to see us the odd time but of course they didn’t bring their friends home any more. They lived their own lives, independent, successful, that’s what we had struggled so hard for. I mean, we knew they couldn’t bring people back as a matter of course, not to our little terrace. And by the time Amy was twenty-four and John was twenty-three they were both living in flats with other young people, which was as it should be.