‘But you’ve always been so contented, Tess!’ I said, while Peg simultaneously exclaimed, ‘But I thought you liked being single!’
‘Remember the smell of the gorse around that place you used to rent up in Kilternan?’ I said. ‘Remember the party you threw the year the snow came right up to the windows? Remember Boody’s was closed when the pipes froze and a gang of us got out to you somehow with a case of wine and enough smoked salmon to open a shop?’
‘That was thirty years ago, Rosie,’ Tessa said.
‘Thirty?!’ Peg said in a low voice.
None of us moved.
‘I figured out that I wanted to make people’s lives better,’ Tessa said. ‘That’s why I’m training for counselling. I mean, I was in the union for that too, but there was a whole load of Neanderthal men to get around first. But it isn’t just other people I want to counsel –’ she gave a little cough – ‘well, actually, I want some insight for myself.’
She went on after a moment. ‘So I’m thinking of linking up with Andy.’
I think my mouth must have fallen open. Andy! Andy was a kind of brother. Who, when he came up from the country to visit his mother Pearl, mended our broken appliances and brought us eggs and so on. But nobody had ever thought of him as a man. In fact, he had a slow, vacant manner that drove me, for one, nuts, even though I knew perfectly well that he wasn’t vacant, that he was in fact a thoughtful person and a decent one.
‘Does Andy know?’ Peg said after a minute.
‘He doesn’t,’ Tessa said. ‘But who else is going to make an offer to a small farmer nearly sixty-four years of age, a real hard worker, but very quiet? The farm’s not big enough for a young one who’d want a family and anyway he’s always on the road collecting his animals for Africa. Auntie Pearl is well into her eighties and she worries about him night and day. And, like’ – Tessa paused, because she never said anything sentimental if she could avoid it – ‘I’d like her to die happy, the old lady,’ she said, shyly. ‘It would mean a lot to me.’
‘But, Tess!’ Peg and I said at the same time, before I continued by myself. ‘Tess, you’d have to sleep with Andy. Clothes off, same bed, husband-and-wife kind of thing.’
‘I know that, thank you,’ Tessa said sarcastically. ‘I know what it entails, even if we are related.’
‘But Tess, what about Andy? Have you asked him?’
‘Nobody asks Andy anything,’ she said. ‘Andy is told.’
Once again there was absolute silence in the car.
The evening star had already gone under the horizon but the pavement ahead and the branches of the apple tree in Reeny’s yard that the kids didn’t bother to rob any more were bleached by chilly April moonlight. I couldn’t stop shivering in the house, waiting for the radiators to warm up. Min crept around turning them off no matter how often I told her we could afford the heating. Yes, she’d been down: the kettle was still hot and the kitchen radio was playing softly, someone singing Handel:
‘The trumpet shall sound, And we shall be changed, We shall, We shall, We shall be changed.…’
Marrying was different when you were too old for babies. Tessa could easily be a granny, couldn’t she, say if she’d had a daughter at twenty and that daughter had a daughter at … yes. A great-granny, even. Andy would have been a lovely father, too. Would he think about that – that if he married Tessa his chance at that was lost? He mightn’t be what you’d call attractive, but he was as kind as you could imagine. That’s why everyone pushed him around. His place in Carlow used to be a sort of depot for all kinds of pets. One of his cats, for instance, he’d found in a sack on a riverbank, with a leg broken. The leg had knitted in such a way that it dragged after the cat with the paw turned outwards, but it was a wonderful cat. He had beautiful, black hens that a Lady Something had left him in her will, as a fellow-enthusiast of rare breeds. And he looked after a floating population of horses and donkeys.
Almost every one of his pets had to be sent away when he put himself on call to drive his truck to England whenever there was a plane ready to take the No-Need animals to Africa. But not one of us had ever really thought about what the loss of his menagerie might have meant to him. That was what was so shocking about Tessa saying she was going to marry him: no one had ever taken his feelings seriously.
Andy could easily father a baby. It makes no difference to babies what their fathers look like. They gurgle away anyway, don’t they? Saul Bellow looked like a sick basset-hound there towards the end, but his girlfriend was delighted to have his baby. Charlie Chaplin still looked great if you liked small old men, but God he was eighty-five, wasn’t he, the last time? Wouldn’t you think his willie would be just too tired to stand up? And then he’d hardly said hello to the child and he was dead. They said it was the Irish air caused the baby – he and the wife were on holiday in Kerry nine months earlier. Rostropovich. Did Rostropovich father a baby or was that some other Russian cellist with age spots? Not that growing older doesn’t make some men even more attractive. Look at Bill Clinton: gorgeous to begin with and even more gorgeous since his heart thing. Women in their sixties had real beauty too, a few of them, but not the kind he had – not the kind that made your belly contract. People don’t crowd around women his age, wanting to devour them.
I was climbing into bed when I remembered that once, outside Trinity College, a man was standing beside me waiting for a break in the traffic, and when we accidentally looked towards each other, I realised it was Paul Newman: grey cropped hair, eyes still marvellously blue in a handsome face, body limber under the perfect business suit as he set off across the street. Wait’ll I tell Min that Butch Cassidy’s out there somewhere! I thought. But after a moment I decided that he was a bit too tailored for me. A bit too perfect, whereas I liked my men rumpled.
I started to laugh at the thought of it – a nobody Irishwoman who lived with her aunt in Dublin turning up her nose at Paul Newman because he was too well-groomed.
But I drifted into sleep thinking about Tessa’s last words.
Of how she’d swung around in the driver’s seat just as I was stepping out of the car, and looked at Peg and me, and said, ‘I see it in our counselling sessions all the time. People are dying of loneliness every day.’
4
I took a deep breath before I went upstairs. ‘Min – where would you like to go while I’m in New York next month?’ I was standing at the window, tidying the curtain into even folds. My tone of voice was a carefully chosen shade of ennui. ‘I have to go over there but it’s only for a week.’
Nothing.
‘I have to go to New York. It’s work, not pleasure.’
Nothing. I turned around and caught sight of myself in the mirror. Talk about dull-looking. All I needed was a flowered pinny and rubber boots and I could pose as a simple Irish housewife, circa 1950. A good haircut was the least I needed before Manhattan.
‘We’re not getting any younger, Min. I need to find work I can do at home. My lump sum is disappearing at the rate of knots…’
‘I’m young enough, madam!’ She shot upright in the bed, and Bell gave a startled wail. ‘You go off wherever you want to and I’ll stay here in the comfort of my own house.’
‘As a matter of fact you didn’t even have central heating till I put it in,’ I said. And, I added silently, I bought out the leasehold for you as soon as I was earning good money – how come that never gets mentioned? ‘But anyway, you can’t stay here on your own.’
‘Yes I can. I was here for years and years