Sent: 7.10 p.m.
Brilliant.
Working title: Ten Thoughts for the Middle of the Journey.
Dinner tomorrow – I’ll come to your hotel
around 7.00.
Sleep well, Rosie.
Wot larks!
6
Sometime during the evening the phone rang. I thought it was Markey of course. ‘Rosie? That you, Rosie? Hello? Peg, there’s something wrong with this. Are you meant to press the green button, hello? This is Monty O’Brien speaking. May I speak…?’
‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing, really,’ Monty said. ‘Nobody’s dead or anything like that. It’s just Min. Little bit of a kerfuffle here. Your auntie was found out at the airport, in the ladies to be precise, and the security people there got Reeny’s number off her and Reeny’s in Spain and I answered the phone so they asked me if I could come and fetch her. I went out for her with Peg, but she wouldn’t come home. She said she has a ticket to New York and she’s going and that’s that. The New York flight tomorrow – no, wait now, that’s today, isn’t it? She said she’s had her passport in her handbag since she went to Nevers with the parish. We rang the Sunshine place but the woman there wouldn’t take her back, so we booked her into a guesthouse down the road that has a shuttle van because Peg has to go home to her da and I’ve a tournament first thing in the morning. So that’s the story.’
‘Had she been…?’ No, I wouldn’t ask. Instead I said a long thank-you to the two of them. ‘So let her come, and welcome! I’ll only be here for what – five days? Monty, could you go in and open a tin for Bell till we get back? They’re in the cupboard – oh, you know. Yes, leave the bathroom window open. See you Tuesday and thank you and I’m really sorry for the trouble. She sure is a hoot!’ I ended, attempting a pleasant little laugh.
But I banged down the phone, then jumped out of the bed and pounded the floor over and back to the window, trying to contain myself.
You’re always ruining everything! I was shouting inside. Always! Even when I thought it was going to be my first day at school you ruined it. I was on the floor and I’d grabbed the new schoolbag that had nothing in it and you said, ‘No, no, you can’t go till you’re four,’ and you walked away. You walked away! You were always trying to be wherever I wouldn’t be. When I was a child you made me go out and play all the time. You didn’t want me near you…
But this wasn’t that, was it? This time, wasn’t she trying to be near me?
And certainly she’d never wanted that before. Even three or four years ago, when I went from Brussels to deepest Burgundy on Sunday trains to meet her when she was on a trip to the tomb of Saint Bernadette of Lourdes, she still didn’t welcome me.
She was standing in the hall of the railway station in Nevers, small and furious, in the buttoned grey raincoat and matching sou’wester hat that she put on, even when it wasn’t raining, if she was going to be with respectable people.
‘I was waiting ages,’ she said.
You could have sat on that,’ I said, pointing to the wide step of the weighing machine. She gave me a theatrically sarcastic look. ‘You could have spread a piece of paper down over it!’
‘Where would I find a piece of paper,’ she said, ‘when I don’t speak the language? I can’t stay out too long,’ she added. ‘We have to be back at the bus at 4 o’clock on the dot – there’s a very nice man in charge of our bus. He has the same name as what’s-his-name that used to be the real gentleman type – the real ballroom-dancing type— ’
‘Maurice Chevalier?’
She nodded impatiently, as if it had been perfectly obvious who she’d meant. ‘Him.’
Then she told me that one of the ladies from Dublin had paid two euro yesterday for a cup of hot water to put her teabag in, but the lady might have got it wrong because she didn’t know how much money she’d had to begin with because her daughter sewed it into her hem.
‘I wish I knew how to talk a foreign language,’ Min said miserably, as we walked out into the grey town. ‘Sure you might as well otherwise be in Kilbride.’
And… yes! What was it she’d said next? It came back to me now. She’d said, ‘The only language I can talk is English. So the only faraway place I could ever go to is America.’
I settled with my Proust on the white sofa, while a pigeon on an overhang just below the window fluffed its feathers and looked at me shrewdly. In the light of a streetlamp I could see into the vacant lot across from the Harmony, where behind the hoarding a homeless person was hauling something across the broken ground to where a pile of bedding as untidy as a magpie’s nest lay beside a fire. The clouds massed over the buildings across the river were pale, but as I watched they turned grey-black and the lights on the far shore dimmed. Oh! The rain-shower moved towards me across the choppy river and I waited, transfixed, until it dashed onto the window in front of me. Such a beautiful thing, the lights coming back through the watery glass as it cleared, sparkling more diamond-bright than ever.
Soothed, I took my emergency apple from the secret compartment of my suitcase and ate it while I read about the first time the narrator saw Saint-Loup. Then I brushed my teeth again and – by now raising an imaginary hat to Min – got back into bed.
It happened some kind of carnival troupe was flying into Terminal 4, and so Min arrived in America amid a welter of little kids dressed up as mice and adult-sized costumed bears carrying purple fairies on their backs. I watched as she stepped, neat as an elf herself, through the sliding doors of the arrivals lounge, and stopped to look wonderingly up at the escaped balloons that jostled lightly under the glass of the roof. So much her ordinary self that she looked extraordinary, wearing the ancient black sweater which she always referred to, with a self-important pursing of her mouth, as her ‘best’. She had a little repertory of women’s conventional expressions; the frowning way they all scrutinise a piece of clothing; or the way they all coo over another’s woman’s baby; or the stern look at a man on a market stall when he’s picking out the tomatoes they’re buying. I knew that my own expressions copied Min’s. But where did Min acquire hers?
She’d stopped again to watch a very big black man who had a marmalade kitten in the breast pocket of his jacket. He was talking to another man as if there wasn’t a kitten there, peering from side to side in keen inspection of its surroundings. Min looked on like a child: immobile, impassive. Her hair, that often got matted when she’d been in bed for a long time, had been brushed and pinned back, and it still had a richness even streaked with white and silver that caught the eye. Altogether she cut a sturdy little figure, with a bulging shopping bag in one hand and her ancient black moleskin coat that smelt of mothballs over her arm.
‘Minnie!’ I called to her, as a trio of tip-tapping young women daintily pulled aircrew bags across her path. ‘Min,’ I called again, at which her head turned unhurriedly. She might have been fascinated by her surroundings but she was perfectly self-possessed.
‘I was going to keep my money in my knickers, Rosie,’ she began without a preamble, ‘but I got talking to an Irish lady who lives over here and she told me there isn’t the same level of theft at all. They want for nothing here, she said, the most of them, so they don’t have any call to feck things. I had two pairs on, to slip the wallet between, but when she told me that I took one off in the toilet. Sure I can’t be going around afraid of my own shadow.’
It was an afternoon of high wind blowing in strong gusts that bowled people along, clutching hats and skirts, across the roadway to the parking lot. Min had dropped back, and I turned to see her watching the small plume of smoke that was coming from a trashcan attached to a pole, and the two heavy men in uniforms who were circling it, speaking self-importantly into walkie-talkies. They were waiting for