Barefoot Over Stones (3 page)

Alison now handed Ciara a list of cleaning materials that she had compiled as a means of opening the awkward conversation. Ciara didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Alison was eyeing her so seriously that she knew she had to respond, with sincerity if possible. The list was half a refill page long: toilet cleaner, Jif, bleach, fabric softener and washing powder. It went on and on. God, they might as well go to Dunnes and do a trolley dash through the cleaning products aisle.

‘Do you think maybe this is a bit over the top, Alison? Maybe we could start small and build it up over the year?’

‘That’s kind of a basic kit that any house would need, Ciara. I asked my mam to help me with
it at the weekend.’

‘Right, I suppose if you think we need it. My budget is a bit tight so we will have to buy it over a few weeks if that’s all right.’

‘Well, Mam sorted me out with a few extra bob when I was at home so I can just get it all this week and you can get me back whenever you have it. Mam tried her best to buy the stuff in Caharoe at the weekend. I had a hard job stopping her until I reminded her that I couldn’t carry it all the way back here on my own. Besides, I told her that you would probably want to come with me to get it.’

‘If you want me to, yeah, I suppose I could, but I wouldn’t know what most of these things were if they came up and slapped me on the face.’ Ciara was doing her best to show interest but she was failing miserably. ‘I mean, forgive my ignorance, but what in the fuck is bicarbonate of soda?’

‘It’s for baking really but Mam says it’s great for stain removal and would be handy for soaking dishcloths and dusters.’

‘A few hundred packets of it might sort out this vomit-inducing swirl we like to call a carpet,’ Ciara said, hoping that humour might lighten the atmosphere a little. Alison looked at the dreary browns and yellows patched together with indeterminate stains. It looked a bit like the compost heap that rotted and heaved at the back of the garden at Michaelmas.

‘It is shockingly bad, isn’t it?’

‘Woeful, Alison, woeful, but sure we will just have to make the most of it.’

Alison motioned to the corner of the room, which they rather grandly referred to as the kitchen. In reality it was a counter top masking a grim line of yellow melamine units. ‘Would a cup of tea and a biscuit help, do you think?’

‘Jesus, I thought you’d never ask. My head is fucking wrecked from Toilet Duck and Mr Sheen. Whatever happened to a sink full of hot water and where the hell was I when life got so bloody complicated?’

‘Jesus Christ, that fucking hurts.’ Hurtling towards the shrill ring of the phone in the hallway, Alison had stubbed her toe on the saddle of her bedroom door. She had been in a deep sleep, dreaming of Dan Abernethy, but the persistent ringing had forced her to rouse herself and abandon his delicious face at the counter of the Daisy May. She fumbled for the landing switch. When she finally reached it the light flickered for a second and gave a little tinkle before the bulb blew. Still the phone kept ringing and still there was not a sign of life from Ciara’s room. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get it!’ Alison said a touch savagely as she hobbled past Ciara’s door on the way down the stairs.

‘Is that you, Ciara?’ a girl’s voice whispered urgently when Alison picked up the receiver.

‘No, this is Ciara’s flatmate, Alison. I’ll get her for you now. Who will I say is looking for her?’

‘This is Leda.’ Ciara’s sister’s voice was barely audible and Alison felt instinctively that she was in some sort of trouble. A loud knock on Ciara’s door brought no response. Eventually, after much hammering, a dishevelled Ciara in outrageously loud pink satin pyjamas emerged looking viciously sulky.

‘Someone better be on fire. That’s all I am saying. What fucking time is it anyway?’

‘About three, I think. It’s Leda. She seems a bit upset.’

‘It’s the middle of the shagging night. I’m a bit upset myself.’

The pink apparition disappeared down the stairs and Alison rolled back into her still mercifully warm bed to resume an imaginary romance with Dan. She fell asleep to the lull of conversation from the hallway.

A short note in Ciara’s handwriting had been left tagged to the kettle next morning when Alison got up to make breakfast. ‘Have to sort something out at home so getting the seven o’clock from Busáras. Will be back Sunday night, sorry about the weekend, Ciara x.’

Waves of panic washed over Alison. She and Ciara had decided to stay in Dublin for the weekend to go to the cinema, visit the National Gallery and generally act like first-year students delighted to be away from home. It had been Ciara’s idea. In fairness, nearly everything was. Alison had broken the news to her mother at the bus stop in Caharoe the Sunday night before.

‘Ciara and I are thinking of staying in Dublin this weekend, Mam – you know, to get a few of the long essays started. Is that all right? I’ll be home the following Friday.’

Cathy Shepherd hesitated and Alison knew her mother was steeling herself to say the right thing. Her dearest wish was that going to college would make Alison grow in confidence and even though the thought of her only child being away for two whole weeks made her fit to faint she pulled herself together.

‘Of course, love. You’ll be careful, won’t you? You will need extra money.’ Cathy started to delve in her cavernous handbag and produced a carefully folded twenty-pound note from a zipped pocket. ‘Ring if you think you are going to run out and I’ll send you some more in the post.’

‘I’ll be grand, Mam, honestly. I have wages from the Daisy May coming to me on Friday so I won’t be short.’

Watching her mother watching her was driving Alison mad and ever closer to tears. Trying to pretend to be brave was hard on the nerves and the last thing she wanted to do was start getting weepy in front of her mother, who was looking decidedly shaky herself. God, how she wished the bus driver would actually let them on the bus instead of leaving them to stand there in the freezing November cold. Eventually the bus did pull away from the pavement and Alison breathed a sigh of relief. Two buses and a train journey and she would be back in the flat in Ranelagh and in Ciara’s uplifting company. She had Rose and her shifts in the Daisy May. Her college work was hard but not by any means beyond her. Thanks to her dad’s GP practice there was enough money for all her college needs, so she didn’t feel short of anything. She was on talking terms with a good few people in her class, owing in no small measure to Ciara, who had the knack for chat and in whose company Alison tried mostly to stay. Somehow if Alison could join up the scattered dots of her Dublin existence she might manage to have a life outside Caharoe.

Faced a few days later with Ciara’s note, Alison momentarily thought about phoning home with the change of plan. Her mother would be delighted. She was halfway down the stairs when she pulled herself back from the safety net into which she was about to plunge headlong. ‘Come on, Alison, don’t be such a chicken,’ she chided herself. How hard could it be? It was Wednesday. Four nights and Ciara would be back to the flat. In the meantime she could actually catch up on study. There was no law against going to see a film on your own, was there? The time would fly by if she kept herself busy. ‘Pull yourself together,’ she tutored herself, with only a shard of confidence, before quickly retreating up the stairs.

Cathy Shepherd had stood on the Main Street in Caharoe until the bus carrying Alison back to Dublin disappeared from her view. Only then did she start the short walk to Michaelmas House on the edge of the town square. Her woollen coat was buttoned up right to the collar to protect against the bitter wind and maybe also against a rising loneliness that threatened to engulf her.

Michaelmas was one of a quartet of grand houses standing like imposing sentry keepers around the green in Caharoe. It had been their home for twenty years and Cathy thoroughly loved it. The grand navy front door with its glistening brass fittings reminded her of the week of their wedding when she had lovingly painted it, covering her hands with specks of gloss paint that were murder to clean off.

When Richard had first shown her the house out of which he operated his fledgling GP practice she had been shocked by its near-derelict state. The waiting room and surgery, which Richard had allegedly decorated, were the only rooms that were remotely habitable. Even that was a pretty impossible stretch of the imagination. Richard slept on a couch in a room at the back of the house with at least three layers of bedding to defeat the cold. It was there, in that spartan room, that they had first wrapped up in the delicious warmth of each other’s bodies under a sea of shabby quilts. It was there also, one evening a few months after they had first met, that Richard had asked her to marry him and live with him in Caharoe.

‘Here? In this dive?’ Cathy had asked in mock incredulity. It was worth it to see his face but the look of total joy on her face told him the only answer he wanted to hear. ‘Yes, I will marry you, Richard, but this place needs a serious shake-up. I love you but you live in a hovel.’

‘It’s not great, is it?’ Richard had said, looking at the wall opposite them from where the hideous flock wallpaper hung precariously, planning its path of descent.

‘You keep treating the sick people of Caharoe and I will make sure they don’t vomit at the sight of the house. Is that not a fair deal, Dr Shepherd?’

‘Deal.’ Richard grinned before pulling her beneath the quilts again.

Hugh Lalor, the solicitor who lived in one of the other corner houses of the square, had recommended a builder to Richard when he had first bought the house. Richard had transcribed the details diligently, meaning to do something some day, before filing the information with all the legal papers regarding the sale. Cathy soon unearthed them and so began her transformation of the ‘barn’, as she had taken to calling Richard’s house. She approached Lovett’s Hotel across the square and asked if Richard’s surgery could move there temporarily while its permanent home was being refurbished. Tadhg Lovett was delighted by the prospect. His lounge, ordinarily empty during the day, would become a flurry of tea-drinking and ham-sandwich-eating and his handful of hotel rooms, usually only inhabited by the odd returning emigrant, would have a purpose.

‘Business is business wherever it comes from,’ he said, shaking Cathy’s hand to seal the deal. ‘And tell me now, miss, are you the doctor’s housekeeper or secretary? It’s just that I have a bad knee that I have been meaning to get checked.’

Cathy imbued her smile with a friendship she was finding hard to muster. ‘I am Richard’s fiancée, Mr Lovett, and I am sure he would be happy to look at your knee if you can make it across to us. Otherwise he does house calls, whatever best suits the patient’s needs.’

‘Ah, sure I’ll wait until he moves over here for the few weeks. He can have a look at my knee in passing, in between jobs. I should get a discount really, seeing as he will be my lodger.’

‘Richard won’t see you suffer with your knee, Mr Lovett.’ Cathy took herself back to the barn before she said something smart. Caharoe was a small place and it was better to keep on the right side of everyone. God, this doctor’s wife thing was shaping up to be great fun altogether.

Tadhg watched her tall, sweeping figure cross the street. ‘Fiancée, if you don’t mind. Did you ever hear the like of it?’ he said to no one in particular, but he was already plotting the sliced-pan order for the sandwiches required for the makeshift surgery and its hungry patients.

The builders took down the partition walls that a previous owner had erected, restoring the original proportions of the house. When all the months of structural work had been completed Cathy took to the decorating with feverish intent. She and her younger brother Donal came most evenings that summer to paint, sand and varnish every surface. Richard supplied the money for the restoration work and brought roughly made picnics to the workers. He was totally useless but
he sat keeping them company. If a song he loved came on the battered paint-stained radio he would release Cathy from her vice-like grip on the paintbrush and waltz her around the room. Donal would turn scarlet and look away embarrassed, painting even faster while his sister and Richard danced. When exhaustion overtook them they would sit on a bare floor sipping bottled beer and eating egg sandwiches followed by slices of jam sponge or cream rolls from the bakery on Earl Street.

It took all of that summer to get the house and surgery completed but Cathy enjoyed every minute of it. Tadhg Lovett sold a mountain of sandwiches and had his knee fixed into the bargain. Cathy barely had time to get ready for their wedding, which was set for 29 September, Michaelmas Day. She chose a simple shift dress to the knee in the softest shade of ivory. She wore no veil and her long dark hair hung loose around her shoulders. She carried a clutch of fiery orange-blossomed crocosmia picked for her by her mother. Not for the first time Richard stood captivated by Cathy’s radiance. That day he was sure he was the luckiest man alive.

As a wedding present for them both, Cathy got a brass nameplate made for their barn. She read it now twenty years later surrounded as it was by the climbing bark of mature wisteria and clematis.

First Richard, this house and then Alison had been the focus of her life.

She stood hesitating before she put her key in the front door. Her heart was breaking with loneliness for Alison and tears welled in her eyes. Richard was across at Lovett’s knocking back whiskey as he always was on a Sunday night. When exactly had it happened? When had her life shrunk to such a small, predictable package of care and duty? As she turned the key on an empty Michaelmas House Cathy Shepherd decided to go easy on herself. She was lonely, that’s all, and it was best not to dwell on things that could not easily be changed.

Throughout the week a small part of her hoped Alison would change her mind and come home for the weekend. She was not ready to think of her stint in Dublin as anything other than a temporary arrangement. Alison phoned on the usual days and her form was very good. Cathy managed not to ask her to change her mind. ‘It will be good for her, help her to find her feet,’ she told a very dubious Richard. If she said it often enough she might just convince them both, she hoped.