‘Last week a young boy wasn’t thrown through the windscreen of a car because the ruddy driver had too much to drink.’
‘Riley,’ I gasped, ‘tell me you didn’t?’
It was in poor taste, I know, but I think I kind of wanted it to be, for Father’s sake, so he began a conversation with his mother as though I had never spoken. Riley shook his head incredulously, whether at my inappropriate humour, or because he’d failed to wet his lips with Father’s precious wine, I wasn’t sure but either way he lost the bet. Riley reached into his pocket and handed me a twenty-euro note. Father looked at the transaction disapprovingly.
‘I owed her money,’ Riley explained.
Nobody at the table believed I could possibly have loaned anybody any money so it all backfired on me. Again.
‘So,’ Mum began, as soon as Edith had finished setting up and we were all settled. She looked at me. ‘Aoife McMorrow married Will Wilson last week.’
‘Ah, I’m so delighted for her,’ I said enthusiastically, stuffing a bread roll into my mouth. ‘Who’s Aoife McMorrow?’
Riley laughed.
‘She was in your tap-dance class.’ Mum looked at me, utterly surprised I’d forgotten my time-step acquaintance from when I was six years old. ‘And Laura McDonald had a little girl.’
‘Ee-I-ee-I-oh,’ I said.
Riley and Philip laughed. No one else did. Mum tried to but didn’t get it.
‘I met her mother at the organic fair yesterday and she showed me a photo of the baby. Beeeauuuutiful baby. You’d eat her. Married and a mother all in one year, imagine that.’
I smiled tightly. I felt Riley’s intense stare urging me to be calm.
‘The baby was ten pounds, Lucy, ten pounds, can you believe it?’
‘Jackson was nine pounds two ounces,’ Philip said. ‘Luke was eight pounds four and Jemima was eight pounds six.’
We all looked at him and pretended to be interested, then he went back to eating his bread.
‘It’s a lovely thing,’ Mum said looking at me and scrunching her face up and hunching her shoulders. ‘Motherhood.’
She was looking at me like that for too long.
‘I was married by the time I was twenty,’ my grandmother said as though it was some major feat. Then she stopped buttering her bread and looked me dead in the eye. ‘I finished university when I was twenty-four and had three children by the time I was twenty-seven.’
I nodded as if in awe. I’d heard it all before. ‘Hope they sent you a medal.’
‘Medal?’
‘It’s just an expression. For doing something … amazing.’ I tried to hold back on the bitter sarcastic tone that was just dying to get out. It was on the sidelines warming up, begging me to let it go on as a substitute for politeness and tolerance.
‘Not amazing, just the right thing, Lucy.’
Mum came to my defence. ‘Sometimes girls have babies in their late twenties now.’
‘But she’s thirty.’
‘Not for a few weeks,’ I replied, pasting on a smile. Sarcasm took its training top off, got ready to run on to the pitch.
‘Well, if you think you can have a baby in a fortnight you’ve a lot to learn,’ Grandmother said, biting into her bread.
‘Sometimes they’re older these days,’ Mum said.
My grandmother tutted.
‘They have careers now, you see,’ Mum continued.
‘She doesn’t have one. And what precisely do you imagine I was doing in the laboratory? Baking bread?’
Mum was put out. She had baked the bread on the table. She always baked the bread, everyone knew that, especially my grandmother.
‘Not breastfeeding anyway,’ I mumbled, but it didn’t matter, everybody heard me and they were all looking at me, and they weren’t all happy looks. I couldn’t help it, the substitutes were on the pitch. I felt the need to explain my comment. ‘It’s just that Father doesn’t strike me as a breastfed man.’ If Riley’s eyes could have widened any more they would have popped out of his head. He couldn’t help it, whatever laugh he’d been trying to keep in came out as a bizarre-sounding splurge of happy air. Father picked up his newspaper and cut himself off from the unfavourable conversation. He rustled it open in the same shuddering motion that I’m sure his spine was doing. We’d lost him, he was gone. Lost behind more paper.
‘I’ll check the starters,’ Mum said quietly and gracefully slid from the table.
I didn’t inherit Mum’s gracefulness. In fact Riley did. Suave and sophisticated, he oozed charm and even though he’s my brother I know he’s a real catch at thirty-five. He’d followed Father into the legal profession and was apparently one of our finest criminal lawyers. I’d overheard that being said about him; I hadn’t experienced his talents first-hand, not yet anyway but I wasn’t ruling it out. It gave me a warm and tingly feeling thinking my brother held a get-out-of-jail-free card for me. He was often seen on the news going in and out of court with men with tracksuit tops over their heads and handcuffed to police officers, and many was an embarrassing time when I’d silenced public places to shout proudly at the TV, ‘There’s my brother!’ and when I’d received glares of anger, I’d have to point out it wasn’t the man with the tracksuit top over his head accused of doing inhumane things but the dashing one in the fancy suit beside him but by then nobody cared. I believed Riley had the world at his feet; he wasn’t under any pressure to get married, partly because he’s a man and there are bizarre double standards in my house and partly because my mother has an unusual crush on him which means no woman is good enough for him. She never nagged or moaned but had a very distinct way of pointing out a woman’s flaws in the hope of planting the seed of doubt in Riley’s mind forever. She would have had more success if she’d simply used a flash card of a vagina when he was a child and then shook her head and tutted. She’s excited he’s living it up in a swanky bachelor pad in the city and she visits him on the odd weekend when she gets the opportunity to fulfil some sort of odd thrill. I think if he was gay she’d love him even more, no women to be in competition with and homosexuals are so cool now. I heard her say that once.
Mum returned with a tray of lobster cocktails and after a shellfish episode at lunch in the Horgans’ home in Kinsale, which involved me, a tiger prawn and a fire brigade, she also carried a melon cocktail for me.
I looked at my watch. Riley caught me.
‘Don’t leave us in any more suspense, Mum, what have you got to tell us?’ he said, in his perfect way that brought everyone back from their heads to the table. He had that ability, to bring people together.
‘I won’t have one, I don’t like lobster,’ Grandmother said, pushing the plate away in mid-air before it had even reached the table.
Mum looked a little disheartened then remembered why we were all there and then looked at Father. Father kept reading his newspaper, unaware that his lobster had even been planted before him. Mum sat down, excited. ‘Okay, I’ll tell them,’ she said, as if that was ever under dispute. ‘Well, as you all know, it’s our thirty-fifth wedding anniversary this July.’ She gave us all a where has the time gone by look. ‘And as a way of celebrating, your father and I …’ she looked around us all, eyes twinkling, ‘have decided to renew our vows!’ Her excitement overtook her voice for the last three words and ended in a hysterical high-pitched shriek. Even Father lowered the paper to look at her, then noticed the lobster, folded away the paper and started eating it.