She turned to smile at her daughter as Peadar edged in and out, trying to glimpse the winding road ahead where a gap was developing between the jeep and horsebox and the cars in front. Sheila smiled back, almost conspiratorially. Sheila who never lost her temper, even when a note arrived before the start of the Easter holidays ten days ago stating that Jean O’Connor in her class had meningitis and Alison had driven her daughter crazy, shining lights in her eyes and searching for a rash at every hour of the night. Sheila who would be her companion when the boys and Peadar were off at football games. Boys leave home and leave their mothers, but girls never quite do. They row and argue in their teens, worrying their mothers senseless, but in the end gradually become friends and confidantes in a way that no son could ever be. That’s what she had missed, with her own mother dying of cancer when Alison was twenty–two. The pendulum had never swung back. There was so much they could have talked about now, so many questions Alison would love to ask. She reached one finger out and Sheila’s hot hand wrapped itself around it, twiddling with the eternity ring she loved to turn in the light.
‘Are we there yet, Mama?’ she asked.
Alison shook her head as Peadar indicated and pulled out. At once she knew something was wrong by the intake of Peadar’s breath. Alison looked around. He was on the wrong side of the road, just where the white line started to break up. A blue van was coming towards them, but there would be time for Peadar to pull in again in front of the jeep pulling the horsebox. The problem was the black BMW with lights flashing behind them. She had noticed the bearded driver’s impatience earlier on and sensed how his constant swaying made Peadar nervous. Now the driver was trying to simultaneously overtake them and the jeep. The man was beeping furiously, screaming at Peadar through the glass like it was his fault. Peadar veered in front of the jeep, putting his foot down to try and create enough space before the BMW swerved into the side of them. The blue van flashed past. Alison screamed, waiting for the crash but somehow the BMW had managed to squeeze in behind them, mainly because the jeep braked hard, sending the horsebox swaying about on the road.
The BMW’s lights were only inches from their back bumper, feet away from her children. Peadar was rattled, shouting at Alison for screaming, cursing the lunatic behind them. The BMW pulled out again without indicating and sped into the distance. Alison could see two teenage girls looking back at them vacantly through the rear window.
Peadar said something and she snapped back. Then they both went quiet, anxious not to frighten the children more. She raised the volume on the tape, sat back and stared ahead. Peadar went slower than usual, even though the road was clear. Cars overtook them, flashing back at twenty and thirty miles above the speed limit. He looked across after five minutes and took her hand in his free one.
‘It wasn’t my fault,’ he said quietly. ‘I’d never take chances with you all in the car. It was that lunatic.’
She squeezed his hand and said nothing. What would it matter whose fault it was if they were all dead on the roadside? She wished they were in the hotel already, the children splashing about in the pool and her outside in the Canadian hot tub. The tape ended. Three voices called out different requests, but she ignored them, not even looking for music on the radio. She needed silence to get her wits back. She wanted to close her eyes as she always did at some stage of this journey and become a child again, counting off the miles in the clank of wheels as the train brought her mother and father and herself on that one magical holiday to Fitzgerald’s.
They didn’t stop again on the way down and the children were quiet, leaving her to her memories. Arklow was now by–passed and Enniscorthy wasn’t too slow. As Peadar picked up speed along the banks of the Slaney with the asylum perched on the cliffs above them, she searched for the Gingerbread Man tape. There was something about the snatches of classical background music and the narrator’s voice saying ‘at the blip turn the page’ that conjured up for her the pent–up expectation of every journey they had taken on this road. She could remember playing it for Danny when Shane was a baby and then for Shane when Sheila was teething beside him in the car. Even at home when she put it on and closed her eyes she could see this stretch of road and feel the spring sunshine through the windscreen as the car sped along these last few miles.
The boys protested at the choice of tape but she told them that it was Sheila’s turn to hear something.
‘Just twenty miles,’ Peadar told Danny, ‘and we’re there. No more towns or anything, just open road.’
Wexford town was long by–passed, taking the Rosslare traffic away from those cramped medieval streets she had first glimpsed as the train trundled slowly over wooden quayside sleepers the summer she was twelve. Holding a bottle of Guinness by the neck, her father had pulled down the carriage window and stared out, lost in memories of which she had no part.
Weeks before, when the notion of a special holiday to mark his silver wedding anniversary arose, her father had been adamant about doing it in style by taking his wife and young daughter down to Fitzgerald’s. It was the first time she had ever heard of the hotel, but he began describing it as like a palace. His own father had taken him there by train from Waterford for lunch when he made his Confirmation in the 1930s, an extravagant day trip they had spent years talking about. And the summer after he left school at fourteen he had got a kitchen job there, living in, and bathing on the private beach every evening.
Standing at the train window, he had seemed to change before her eyes. Hidden fragments of his life tumbled out that she strove to piece together. This was the first occasion when she properly understood that parents had previous lives and secrets. Listening to him had reminded her of a boy with his nose pressed against a shop window. Always on the outside, describing the clothes guests wore to dinner back then, the size of the dining room, the musicians who played. All as glimpsed from a kitchen sink, between the swish of a swing door opening and closing as waiters came and went. Now he had decided to return with his wife and daughter in his own private triumph.
Alison could remember the tiny station at Rosslare and the steep hump–backed bridge where the sea suddenly glistened into sight. They had walked the few hundred yards to the hotel, him in front with two heavy suitcases, she and her mother straggling slightly behind. She had felt a nervousness for her father. He seemed out of his depth, striding forward with a frighteningly boyish eagerness. Even at twelve she sensed he was going to be disappointed by the fact that nobody knew him, no one recalled his hands scrubbing pots in scalding water, nobody would understand the momentous nature of his return.
Yet all this she only fully understood years later, when Danny was two and Alison spent a week in Waterford after her father’s funeral, sorting out clothes and personal effects, filling in the gaps of his life through them. He had known poverty in Waterford as a boy and later on in London. Yet he always took whatever work would provide a home for his wife and his two London–born sons. The younger boy was ten before he returned to Waterford to work in the glass factory and the afterthought or mistake occurred that became her. That was a question you didn’t ask your parents back then, even if in adolescence the doubt had tortured her.
Either way all she knew was love, unburdened by the expectations that Peadar seemed to carry from his earliest years. She still remembered hearing her father rise an hour before the rest of them, the bolt being drawn back and his boots on the path disturbing her childhood sleep as he set off for the early shift. Surely he was sick sometimes but she never recalled it. He had simply got on with what had to be done for his children. But that trip to Fitzgerald’s had been for him alone. It was the moment when he could rest among the soft armchairs and know that his life’s main work was done, with one son married, a second finishing his apprenticeship and his only daughter due to be the first member of his family to ever complete secondary school.
She, meanwhile, had been preoccupied with discovering the swimming pool, the crazy golf, the private beach and the food. She had known her first kiss at Fitzgerald’s, sitting on a rock at twilight near the steps up from the beach. Three days of intense expectation with a thirteen–year–old boy from Newry had built up to that moment. The feel of his tongue for the eternity of a second before she turned and ran off, back up the steps into the safety of childhood. How could you explain