Sheila was asleep before the car slowed on the narrow road twisting through woodland slopes into Ashford. They would have to wake her now when they reached Mount Ussher Gardens and the child might grow cranky later in the journey. Danny was quiet. Last year he would have prattled away until he fell asleep, pointing out passing tractors to the stuffed giraffe he once took everywhere with him. He still cuddled into that tattered giraffe after bedtime stories and sometimes stumbled into their room at night, half asleep, upset that his beloved toy had fallen behind the bed. But Alison knew this was the last year the giraffe would make the journey to Fitzgerald’s.
She had told him not to read in the car but Danny had taken out the Shoot football magazine which he now ordered in the newsagent’s instead of his Batman comic. He was intently studying match reports of obscure English third division games. She could see their names highlighted in the dense text on the page he had turned over. Southend, Doncaster, Brentford, teams and towns that could have no meaning for him. Yet his eyes seemed mesmerised, absorbed in a foreign language that took him further and further away from her. Danny, her firstborn, a gentle child never quite fitting in anywhere but happy to hover on the edge of some horde of boys. How much longer before he stopped climbing into her bed for a dawn cuddle? But he still needed her and would for a long time to come. That’s why she had to be here for him and for them all. That’s why, during the previous three months, she had been too scared to talk to anyone.
‘I know what happened, Mammy,’ six–year–old Shane had informed her recently as she pushed him on a swing. ‘Danny must have fallen at school and banged his head. That’s why he started liking football.’ Shane had swung his feet in the air, satisfied at solving the mystery of his brother’s conversion to soccer and, with it, his abandonment of the endless games of Batman and Robin he’d once devised for them both.
Shane was more babyish than Danny had been at that age but tougher as well. He’d always known his own mind. Danny was malleable, but even at a few hours old when Alison had put Shane to feed at her breast she’d felt a resistance in his neck. She’d let him go and his tiny mouth had found her nipple by itself. Shane would grow up in his own time as his own man, with nothing to prove to anybody. For now he clutched his Paddington Bear proudly in the car and would refuse to eat everything except bread when they reached Mount Ussher Gardens.
The car park just beyond Ashford was on a dangerous bend. You were almost past before you saw the entrance. A German camper van was leaving. Peadar eased into the free space and she cautioned the boys against jumping out with so many cars about. Peadar got them out and put their coats on. Sheila was sleeping so peacefully that Alison was tempted to tell them to go ahead while she remained in the car until the child woke. But something – the engine being turned off or the shudder made by the slipstream of a truck thundering past – caused Sheila’s eyes to open. Danny would fly into a rage and sometimes get sick if woken, but Sheila just smiled now as if delighted to see her mother anxiously leaning over her.
Alison unstrapped her. Peadar and the boys had already passed the antique shops. Stopping at Mount Ussher was part of the ritual too, the midway point between Dublin and Wexford when she could finally relax. A week of preparation went into these five nights away. Washing, sorting clothes, packing. It always took longer than expected, with Peadar hovering while she frantically crossed things off her list and their tempers flared up.
In previous years the journey to this point was spent wondering what had she left behind, if the windows were double–locked or the alarm definitely on. But this year felt different. Suddenly she didn’t care if the house burnt down when they were away. At least the battered kitchen would have to be replaced then.
The sun emerged after a squall of rain. Everything glistened as she walked, holding Sheila’s hand, beneath the archway of climbing plants to the tea rooms. The air felt like a benediction: the wet leaves, the excited laughter from her sons, the trees swaying in the gardens beyond. In January, when Dr O’Gorman’s cold hand had examined her breast, Alison had felt sure she would never stand here again, except as a dying woman or one scarred for life.
Why had she never told Peadar? She would tomorrow night, sipping complimentary Irish coffees on the long sofas in Fitzgerald’s. He would take her hand, near tears, and scold her for not having spoken. He would not trivialise it by going over the details repeatedly. She liked the clear–cut way that he absorbed information. He would ask one or two questions then lapse into silence, squeezing her hand before suggesting they return to the room. Holding hands, they would walk up the long corridor, where a baby always cried behind some door, and pay the babysitter off early. Their lovemaking would be silent so as not to wake the children, but with an edge caused by the knowledge of how fragile their world together was. Finally and fully she would have his attention.
She had been right to carry the dead weight of this worry alone. The weeks of waiting would have gnawed at Peadar. He would have hated the powerlessness of being unable to do anything, just like he had dreaded having to watch impotently while Alzheimer’s drained away his mother’s personality. Fear would have come between them, cancer taken possession of the house, filling their dreams and waking thoughts. In some lost fragment of his childhood, which she had learnt never to intrude upon, she was sure that his terror at not being in control was born.
But although in January she had been concerned about the tiny lump on the underside of her breast, she had expected reassurance from Dr O’Gorman and confirmation that it was just a cyst. Instead he had insisted on a mammogram. The public waiting list was months long. It was simpler to go privately, using the children’s allowance money she kept in a separate account. She was a nurse herself she’d informed the radiographer: he could tell her straight out. But people’s attitudes changed once they realised you had left nursing to work as a stay–at–home mother. She’d had to return to Dr O’Gorman, who would make Eeyore the donkey seem cheerful. He had insisted that the only way to ensure the cyst was benign was to remove it.
Even then, in mid March, she never told Peadar. She had lied instead on the morning of the procedure, claiming that she was going to help out Ruth, whose marriage had broken up, by staying with her overnight. The operation was in the same hospital she’d worked in. They had treated her like royalty – in at nine a.m., woken in mid–afternoon to be told the cyst was benign and sent home in time to read stories to Sheila. She couldn’t stop trembling in the taxi, released from the scenario where she would have to tell Peadar how her breast was to be removed and that, even then, they didn’t know how far the cancer had spread.
Instead she simply told him that Ruth hadn’t needed her to stay over. She had hoped he wouldn’t want to make love because of the soreness, but, during the previous months Peadar had never even noticed the small cyst develop, never mind now become aware of the tiny neat stitch on the underside. Lately he was too preoccupied in his world of contractors and architects. It hurt her when he barely noticed how much weight she had lost since Christmas, how pale she had looked or how red her eyes were at times.
When he did notice anything, it was to accuse her of sulking, being grudging in her support when he needed it most. He knew that he wasn’t pulling his weight at home, he would say, but the school extension was almost built. Just these final crucial weeks and then the damn thing would be finished. An achievement nobody had thought possible. After that he’d be at home so much that she would grow sick of him. So why this long face and brooding, he would ask, just now when he’d so much to cope with? Then always, as if promising a child a treat, he would add, ‘And remember, we’ll have five whole nights to ourselves in Fitzgerald’s.’
Five nights. Was this all her life boiled down to? On a dozen occasions she had bitten her tongue, tempted to scream at him. Yet these five nights would make up for so much. This scare would bring them closer together, by reminding them