Between Sisters (31 page)

‘I wanted to be a teacher when I was young,’ Marguerite said hesitantly, feeling Jim’s arm around her soft cotton blouse.

‘Why haven’t you?’ Jim asked.

It was very simple, the way he saw it. He’d told her about his mother, Pearl, and father, Bernie, and somehow their home life sounded idyllic: as if a person could emerge from such a home to be anything they ever wanted to be.

‘You could be, if you wanted to,’ he went on.

In the face of such belief in her, interest in her – something Marguerite hadn’t felt in many, many years – she felt herself fall in love with not just Jim, but with his family, his life, his hopes and dreams. With him, she could be a different woman: the woman she wanted to be and not this girl who became crazy as soon as she picked up the glass.

Pearl had seen lots of girls come and go in her son Jim’s life. There had been the lovely nurse, a sweet girl from County Donegal with a beautiful accent and a kindness about her that made Pearl wish Jim would choose her.

Of course, mothers had nothing to do with it when it came to sons choosing their brides, or even their girlfriends, come to that.

The kind Donegal nurse had gone and Jim had moved on to a less suitable girl called Yvonne, who liked going out to discos, dancing and generally partying until the sun came up. She had permed blonde hair that kept getting stuck to her lip gloss, and appeared to wear nothing but hot pants or very tight jeans.

‘Life is for living,’ she told Pearl one evening when Pearl had invited her around for dinner.

Bernie had been very quiet that evening, although it was hard to be anything but because Yvonne could talk enough for four people.

‘I didn’t know what to say,’ he’d confessed to Pearl later that night. ‘Lovely girl and all that, but … but sort of lively, almost too lively. Hard to get a word in edgeways.’

Pearl had been very glad when Jim had moved on from Yvonne. He was seeing sense at last.

After that, there was the student from college who was studying business, like Jim. Lavinia played tennis, her father was a solicitor who played golf, and they all lived in a mansion in Foxrock.

Edie, who happened to be there when this paragon came to visit, was wildly impressed.

‘Lovely sort of gel,’ said Edie, whose accent reached pre-war British Empire standards in certain company.

‘Yes,’ said Pearl truthfully, because she thought Lavinia was a sweet girl, but it was clear that Lavinia was merely having fun dating the sort of people her parents would find unsuitable. Delaney Gardens, with its hodgepodge of one-time council houses and citizens who considered third-level education a thrilling notion, was wildly unsuitable for the likes of Lavinia.

‘She’ll marry a boy from her father’s firm who plays in the same golf club,’ Pearl said to Bernie, and indeed it wasn’t long before Lavinia dropped Jim and moved on to a Hugo, who was nearly a scratch golfer, ‘Whatever that is’.

‘What sort of girl do you think he’ll bring home next?’ asked Bernie, who thought it was all great gas.

He didn’t mind what sort of woman their son turned up with as long as Jim was happy, and Pearl said she didn’t mind either – in theory. But in practice she found she worried greatly about the women who came through the door. At least that was one good thing: Jim brought his girlfriends home. He was tall and dark-haired like his father. ‘Black Irish’, as they used to say: descendants of the Spaniards from the Armada hundreds of years ago. He had the pale skin, the blue eyes, the raven hair and eyebrows of the Spaniards, and women seemed to find him irresistible.

Then came Marguerite. She’d slipped into their lives quietly, without the fanfare the other girlfriends had merited. Jim was sort of vague about where he’d met her.

‘At a college party,’ he’d said, and Pearl had wanted to ask was Marguerite at college too or was she just at the party. There was a difference. Pearl was very proud of her son having gone to college. He was the first member of the family to have gone on to third level and it made her so happy.

‘Imagine, our son in university,’ she’d say to Bernie in the evenings when they’d sit out on the veranda he’d made from the old wooden packing boxes.

Bernie would be out there, hammering in a nail that had come up or putting up a hanging basket for Pearl. He always wanted to be busy. Never sat down. The only time he really sat was late at night when he’d sit down for a few minutes with his pipe and smoke it. Sitting on the front step and looking out over Delaney Gardens, where the kids played in the gardens or raced up and down on their bicycles, was when he was happiest.

‘I know,’ he’d say to her. ‘Imagine that, our lad going to college. My mam would have been very proud to know that.’

The first time Marguerite had come to their house for dinner, Pearl had sensed something in the young girl; it was something Pearl couldn’t quite put her finger on. There wasn’t a thing out of place in Marguerite’s behaviour. In fact, she behaved so perfectly, it was like she thought she was meeting the queen. She was full of pleases and thank yous, hopped up from the table every third minute to see if she could do something, never seemed to sit still, but not in the active way Bernie was always on the move. He liked to be doing things, while Marguerite moved because she seemed afraid that if she sat, someone might yell at her.

That was it
, thought Pearl, shocked when she realised what had been troubling her about Jim’s new girlfriend. Marguerite was anxious, like the Maguires’ dog across the road, who’d run away, and when she’d returned a week later, she’d been terrified of her own shadow. People had mistreated the dog while she’d been away, everyone decided, watching her quivering with fear.

Though Marguerite had poise and politeness, she reminded Pearl of that poor, scared dog.

She didn’t think Jim would stick with Marguerite, for all that she was so very beautiful: that oval face, those shaped eyebrows, the big brown eyes with the lustrous lashes, and the wild dark hair curling down her back, with paler brown tinges in it, sort of like a lioness’s mane, but darker. She was too exotic for Jim, anyway. She wore unusual clothes, the sort of stuff you might get in a second-hand shop or Dublin’s Dandelion Market. She was just too different for their family; too different for Jim and for Delaney Gardens.

When there hadn’t been any mention of Marguerite for quite a while, Pearl decided that her son must have split with the girl and she felt sorry for her. Marguerite wasn’t at college, as it turned out. She’d a job as a waitress in a café in town and she worked long, hard hours. Home was some place in the country and she’d never been forthcoming about it, even though Pearl had politely asked about Marguerite’s people at the meet-and-greet dinner.

‘She doesn’t talk about her family.’ Jim had shrugged. ‘Not everyone wants to talk about where they’ve come from, Ma.’

Yes, Pearl had felt sorry for Marguerite, left out of the lovely charmed world they lived in in Delaney Gardens. They might not have much but they had happiness and love and good neighbours who’d look after them.

Jim was still going out to parties and seeing friends and seeing films. But there was no mention of Marguerite. Pearl decided she’d be the sort of mother who wouldn’t pry. One of those modern ones.

‘You’re mad,’ said her sister Edie, who liked poking her nose in where it didn’t belong. ‘I’d want to know everything he was getting up to. Young people today, you don’t know what they’re doing. The world is full of young pups and they need an eye kept on them. I’m not saying your Jim is a pup, because he’s not, but you don’t know who he’s hanging around with every night. I’d want to know all the details. I’d want to know every night where he was, who he was with—’

‘You can’t do that,’ said Pearl.

Edie annoyed the heck out of her sometimes. For a woman with no children, Edie had very firm opinions on how to raise them.

‘He’ll tell me about who he’s going out with soon. It’s not that Marguerite one, anyway.’

‘Good,’ said Edie. ‘Didn’t like the sound of her.’

‘She was nice,’ Pearl said. ‘Just anxious. Like she was scared.’

So they were all surprised when Jim came home his face alight, and told them he was going to marry Marguerite.

‘Get married?’ said Pearl, having to sit down on the couch in shock. ‘But why, love?’

‘She’s going to have a baby, Ma – my baby.’

Marguerite knew that without the pregnancy hormones surging through her blood, she’d have been scared stiff of the wedding. But she wasn’t. She had Jim beside her and his mother, Pearl. Marguerite was almost as in love with Pearl as she was with Jim. She’d moved into Pearl and Bernie’s house in Delaney Gardens and she loved it there.

‘It’s just for the moment, Mum,’ Jim had said, ‘until we get settled with a place ourselves.’

‘No, it’s fine,’ said Bernie firmly. ‘We want you, Marguerite and the baby to be safe and happy.’

Marguerite knew that Bernie and Pearl weren’t delirious that their only child was getting married because his girlfriend was pregnant, but she was determined to do the right thing, to be the most wonderful mother, the best wife and the most incredible daughter-in-law.

She knew what happy families were like. She’d seen them before, from a distance. She’d seen her school friend Eithne’s family, so she knew how it was done. She could be a part of that, and her darling child could be a part of that too. This was a new start.

Her parents arrived for the wedding. Pearl had thought it a little strange that Marguerite didn’t want the wedding in her home town, but Marguerite, who’d found she was remarkably good at lying over the years, because she’d had to do it so much when she was a kid, said her mother was a bit of an invalid and had never got involved in the local community. Marguerite had implied that Veronica Donnelly’s invalidity was more along the lines of the physical rather than the mental. God forbid that Marguerite hinted at the reality.

Marguerite didn’t have Eithne there. It was almost the first thing her mother said when she turned up at the church.

‘Where’s Eithne? I want to see Eithne,’ she’d said plaintively. ‘She’s a lovely girl; I don’t know why you’re not more like her.’

Marguerite, dressed in the long, flowing white dress that she’d loved picking, felt her heart sink. Da said he’d made sure Mum had had her meds, but Marguerite wondered if he hadn’t gone a touch too far. There was such a fine line between making sure Veronica wasn’t manic and keeping her calm, because there was an anxiety in her that even drugs couldn’t quench, and sometimes she became fixated on certain things. Today it was Eithne.

Pearl came up at that moment and threw her arms around Veronica. ‘Veronica, you look lovely. So nice to see you again. Wasn’t the dinner last night just fabulous?’

Marguerite blessed Pearl from the bottom of her heart. The dinner hadn’t been fabulous because her mother had sat there, tense and anxious, drinking slowly even though Marguerite’s father had tried to stop her. After a certain point she’d become what she’d described as ‘the life and soul of the party’, which everyone else thought was charming, but which Marguerite and Tony knew was very dangerous.

‘Why didn’t your brother come?’ said Jim, sitting beside his wife-to-be, nuzzling into her long, dark hair.

‘America’s a long way away and who knows, if he leaves he mightn’t get back in. You know the way things are getting with the immigration,’ Marguerite had said.

It was funny how all the lies as a child meant she had an answer for everything.

Mam is a bit high-spirited; she gets sad sometimes; she likes being by herself.

All those lies to cover up. If only Mam could be a bit normal today.

Marguerite had had no bridesmaid. Pearl had helped her to put the flowers in her hair and Pearl’s friends, Gloria and Annette, had assisted with crocheting a tiny little handbag and making a beautiful posy of ribbons and flowers for her wedding bouquet.

‘You’re like a queen,’ Annette had said, and Marguerite had beamed. If only she’d had a mum like these women.

As Da walked her down the aisle, she told herself to stop looking at where her mother sat, to stop worrying, to focus instead on the new life in her belly and on Jim standing, tall and strong, at the top of the aisle. It was all going to be perfect. She’d got away from home. She hadn’t had a single drink since she found out she was pregnant. She could keep away from alcohol for her baby, even if it was impossible to keep away from it for herself alone. She was fine. Everything was going to be fine.

In the small church hall, decorated to look festive and weddingy by Pearl and her friends, the DJ, Annette’s son, played all the songs of the time. With her long hair flying as she twirled, Marguerite danced with Jim. The DJ was playing ‘Dreams’ by Fleetwood Mac. Dreams could come true, Marguerite thought, held in her husband’s arms. She knew her mother had gone back to the B&B where her parents were staying, so there was no need to see her again. That part of the wedding was over. That part of her life was over. It could only get better.

Cassie was such a sweet child. Even as a baby she was just happy and sunny. There were no problems with colic and not too many sleepless nights. She slept through the night once she was past two months old, which was incredible, according to the women in the mother and baby group in the church hall. Pearl had urged her to go.

‘It would be good for you to get out of the house,’ Pearl had said kindly. ‘You might get bored sitting here with just your mother-in-law looking at you.’

They still hadn’t got a place of their own. It would take time, Jim said. Time before they found the perfect spot.

Marguerite was impatient to have her own home. For all that she loved Pearl, it was difficult living with her because she could feel Pearl’s eyes on her all the time. Not judging exactly, just watching with a sort of pity, and Marguerite hated that.

She hated that she’d begun drinking again. She hadn’t meant to; it had just happened. A sherry one day when she was no longer breastfeeding, and suddenly the hunger for alcohol was upon her again. She’d managed to escape the next day on the pretence of going for a walk on her own, leaving the baby with Pearl, while she bought some cheap gin.