Light A Penny Candle (36 page)

‘You would not. We’re great, the pair of us,’ she said.

The house in Clarence Gardens looked a bit dusty and unwelcoming when they came back. It needed the
windows
opened and fresh air to come through it. Elizabeth said that it was an oddly-shaped house. It seemed to trap a lot of dead heavy air all the year round. In winter it was cold and musty and in summer it was hot and musty. She wondered whether it had anything to do with the walls. Aisling said she wondered were they going to talk about the weather for the rest of her visit or could they have a normal conversation again? Elizabeth’s father came in just then and said he was delighted to see them back, the place had been very empty without them. Elizabeth said to Aisling later that Father was even more of a trial when he was being interested in things than when he was not, and Aisling said that the divil wouldn’t please someone as crotchety as Elizabeth.

Johnny too was pleased to see them back. He said that London had been very dull without them, nobody laughed, people retired early to bed. He hoped that the whole problem had been sorted out and everything was all right now. What problem, they had wanted to know, alarmed. Well, the whole question of marriage and whether it was a good idea or a bad idea or the only solution or the last refuge. They looked at him blankly. But Johnny had thought that was one of the main reasons that Aisling had come over in order to sort out her complicated love life. Heavens above it can’t have been very serious or pressing if she’d forgotten all about it already. In his innocence he thought that this was what they had gone off to discuss.

*

Elizabeth took Aisling to see the college of art. It was the summer holidays but some vacation courses were under way so they could wander about. She pointed out the classrooms, the studios, the workshops. In one of the classrooms a boy stood posing for the life class naked. They could see him through the door. Aisling was astounded. Did Elizabeth have to draw naked fellows like that? Never! And put in everything? Go on. And girls too? Absolutely naked? But couldn’t you learn how a person was made and their muscles and all even if he wore underpants? Wasn’t everyone’s mickey more or less the same?

Around this part of the visit things began to get clearer for Aisling and she remembered that everyone at home would want to know all she had been doing in London. She had better see some sights. She thought too that she had better try to integrate Elizabeth back into the life she was leading before all this drama. She assumed that it revolved around Johnny and this is what Elizabeth wanted to return to. Aisling could ask Johnny take her on a spin in the van the next time he was going somewhere exciting. He thought this was a great idea and said they must all go off to the Tower of London just in case he decided to move Stefan’s business down there! He invented a ridiculous reason why they should go everywhere a visitor might want to see. He found a real reason to go to Brighton and Aisling clapped her hands with excitement to see a huge beach. They went for a swim and splashed each other for hours in the water.

‘People won’t believe that there’s real beaches in England,’ she screamed happily.

‘Oh Aisling stop making the Irish out to be ridiculous. Of course they know there are beaches here.’

‘No, they don’t. They really don’t. I never heard anyone tell of an English seaside before. It’s great so it is.’

Elizabeth and Johnny exchanged affectionate glances about her, and Johnny put out his hand to touch Elizabeth as Aisling swam off on her own.

‘I miss you. I don’t suppose that you could slip away for a bit, Nick and Tom won’t be …?’

Elizabeth smiled regretfully. ‘Oh no, not while Aisling’s here. …’

‘She wouldn’t mind.’

‘No, out of the question. It’s not the kind of thing that I’d do, that anyone would do when they have a friend to stay. …’

She made herself seem both firm and light-hearted about it. And Johnny understood, he laughed goodnaturedly.

‘You’re a good hostess, you keep all the rules. “The perfect hostess does not abandon the guest in order to satisfy carnal desires with a Loved One.”’

Elizabeth laughed happily. ‘That’s it, it’s Rule Three.’

‘Whatever you say, but when the guest has gone back to the Emerald Isle. … I warn you I’ll be insatiable.’

‘Oh good,’ said Elizabeth.

Mrs Norris had explained that no relations must take place for two weeks. By then, she said, things could proceed as normal.

*

‘You know you really broke your promise about telling me what it was like … sex … making love… doing it,’ Aisling said.

‘Funny, I knew I was breaking my promise. The very first night I lay there and wondered had you in fact made love a long time ago and not told me, because there really is something very … I don’t know … something so personal it would be upsetting really to try to describe it.’

‘Now you’re making it more mysterious than ever. I’ll never know. You were my only hope.’

‘But I told you, I was sure you knew and everything and weren’t telling me for the same kind of reason. …’

‘Holy God, Elizabeth, how would I know in Kilgarret? How on earth would I find out about having sex the whole way with someone?’

‘Well, I didn’t expect to either … you make this sound like Paris or something. This is a London suburb … there’s not much sin going on here either.’

‘Have you forgotten what Kilgarret is like? Everyone knows where everyone is all day and all night. It’s like being in a goldfish bowl. I mean, without even being like policemen or suspicious, people know what you’re doing twenty-four hours a day … “I saw you down at the river the other night” … “Josy Lynch says she saw you in Moriarty’s chemist”. The whole town would know when you were having your period.’

‘Or I suppose when you weren’t,’ said Elizabeth.

‘Certainly. I don’t know how I’d have organised what you had to do. There’s nobody that would know.’

‘But what do they do?’

Aisling said nothing.

‘They must do something, it must happen.’

‘Yes, but. …’

‘Oh go on. Tell me.’

‘Well, either a fellow would marry them and talk would die down in a year or two, or in a dire case the girl might go off to the nuns.’

‘Up in the school? Never?’

‘Oh Lord, no, not those nuns. Nuns in some country place. They run homes for unmarried mothers, and the girls sort of work there and earn their keep, then when the baby is born it’s given for adoption and the girl comes back. She usually says she’s been to her granny’s. It’s a known expression, going to your granny.’

‘It must be a very lonely sort of thing to have to do.’

‘Yes, it’s not great certainly. The whole fear of it would put you off going the whole way, even if you weren’t afraid of losing the boy anyway.’

‘Are people still afraid of losing people by sleeping with them?’

‘Yes, definitely. I wouldn’t sleep with anyone if I had serious designs on them, because if I was serious about some fellow and did sleep with him, he might think I was a tramp. I’m not saying he’s right, but that’s Kilgarret law.’

‘And would you think he was a tramp, or a male tramp … or whatever we’d call it…?’

‘No, that’s different. You know about men not being able to control themselves, having this urge implanted in them by God. Yes, I do think it’s true actually. You know the way they want to do it with everyone. That’s God’s plan … or nature’s plan if you want to call it that, of seeing that the human race goes on. Men are mad to do it everywhere and women have to take control of them and insist that they only do it within matrimony and that’s society. …’

Elizabeth was rocking with laughter.

‘You’d be marvellous as a nun, honestly you would, telling all the girls about the facts of life like that. They’d never recover.’

‘But honestly isn’t that what they told us, in different words?’

‘Yes, very different words.’

‘I know it sounds ridiculous and complicated but that is the way things seem to work in Kilgarret anyway if not in the rest of the world.’

‘Do you blame all those nuns becoming nuns? I think I’d become a nun if I thought all those men were rampaging the town, made to do it everywhere.’

‘Spiking their seed all round the place … waiting for unwary females. …’

‘Aisling
honestly
.’

‘But that’s it, it’s just a game, and it’s like bridge or poker or whatever, people who know the rules and only take the right risks.’

*

Aisling was distressed to see Elizabeth cooking the books.

‘It’s very hard for you to understand,’ Elizabeth had explained. ‘Uncle Sean wouldn’t in a million years question what you spent or what Aunt Eileen spent … there’s no question of having to account for this and that. Father has the mind of a bank official who has to balance the books at the end of the day. He wants to balance the housekeeping too.’

‘But you’re cheating him. You’re keeping money. If he finds out … he’d be upset. Why don’t you just ask him for more?’

‘He’s got a small mind, he thinks in small terms and small sums and petty accounts. He never checks whether a tin of Spam costs three shillings or it doesn’t, but he does add the total up in front of me. Anything I save I earn, I don’t steal his money, I just think of ways of saving it and then I keep what I save. That’s all.’

Aisling studied the accounts. ‘Yes, I see. But it’s a bit petty on your side isn’t it? It’s not very generous … or the way people go on in a family.’

‘This isn’t a family, Father has never been generous. A big open heart like yours or Uncle Sean’s or Johnny’s he’d find frightening. He’d think that your household was on the brink of chaos because nobody knows exactly to the last penny how much it costs to feed and clothe you all. He’d never take into consideration that your mother feeds half the beggars that come to the door, and that she dressed and fed me for nothing for five years, and that she sends presents and gifts and has pence always in her
handbag
for anyone she thinks might need one. No, Father would be alarmed by that. He’s alarmed by all the marvellous food you brought from Ireland. Three times he asked me should we pay you. I think I should have said yes, it would have calmed him down.’

‘You talk about him very coldly, don’t you? You used to want him to be nicer and happier and everything. You used to want him to change?’

‘Oh yes I did. I used to think I could change him, that we could become like a picture of a Happy Family. “Mr George White, banker, and his only daughter Elizabeth, estranged wife in North of England but isn’t it wonderful how well they all manage in their ways.” But it didn’t work. You can’t change people, they go their own way. … Johnny says there’s more unhappiness caused in the world by people trying to change other people than anything else.’

‘Does Johnny say that? Why?’

‘Oh he gives examples. His friend Nick loves football, Nick’s girlfriend Shirley wants to settle down, go and look at furniture in the shops. Shirley wants to change Nick, make him stop playing football; Nick wants to change Shirley and make her come and watch football. They fight about it all the time. …’

‘Well, if old Shirley’s got to pound around buying all the furniture on her own, and let loverboy Nick play football … is that Johnny’s solution …?’

‘Something like that, yes, then they wouldn’t fight. …’

‘God, he’s more selfish than I thought,’ said Aisling. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry it slipped out. I didn’t mean it.’

Elizabeth’s eyes filled with tears. ‘He’s not selfish. He didn’t come to Mrs Norris with me because he didn’t know, he’ll never know. He didn’t stop me going there because he wasn’t told the situation. Now you can’t say he’s selfish not to have been divinely inspired, can you?’

Aisling apologised. ‘I’m always saying the wrong thing, because I don’t think before I speak. I don’t understand things either … but that never stops me interfering. When I think of all those years you stayed with us and you never interfered or hurt anyone. You only patched up quarrels instead of causing them. I feel very thick and stupid coming in here … telling you how to behave to your father, telling you what your boyfriend should and shouldn’t think.’

‘Oh, but if you knew how I hate your going back. I don’t know how I’m going to carry on without you. It’s so lovely talking and sharing and knowing that you’re interested in everything … I’ve missed that so much, I’ve had a big hole in my life. …’

‘So have I. …’

‘But you’ve a whole family … Aunt Eileen. …’

‘Yes, but not about the things we talk about, you and I.’

‘I know.’

There was a silence.

‘Letters aren’t really any good are they? They don’t explain much. I can’t see Kilgarret through your letters, but maybe it will be better now that you know how interested I am in even little things. …’

‘Yes, and now that I know all the cast over here…
maybe
you’ll write about them properly … and not all this “nice” and “super”. …’

‘And you must cut out all that “nothing much has happened in the last six months” bit.’

‘Oh I will, I’ll keep you informed of every groan and grunt in the back seat of the car. …’

‘Aisling, I’ll be so lonely without you.’

‘Of course you won’t. Haven’t you got Johnny?’

Johnny took them both to the pictures on Aisling’s last night. And to a fish supper afterwards in a big noisy place with marble tables and high ceilings and a great smell of vinegar and batter. No, he wouldn’t hear of any contribution, this was his treat. Elizabeth beamed, glad to see his generosity and big-heartedness shown so obviously to Aisling.

‘Anyway,’ said Johnny. ‘It’s a goodbye present.’

‘Gosh, I’ll have to keep coming and going if I get goodbye presents like this all the time.’

‘It’s not only for you,’ said Johnny easily. ‘I’m off too. I’m going to take a train to the Mediterranean Sea … so it’s a joint goodbye.’

‘You’re going to what …?’ Elizabeth’s face was red and then white, just like it used to be when she was new at the school and the nun had asked her a question she couldn’t understand.

‘We only arranged it today … Nick’s got a few weeks off. He works in a car firm, Aisling… and his boss says business is slow if he wants to go now, he can have half-pay
for
five weeks and then a guarantee of his job back. He’s jumping at it.’