Mothers and Sons (11 page)

Two days later, she received a letter from the health officer pointing out the breaches of the health regulations. That same morning, she opened a letter from the bank’s solicitors initiating legal proceedings against her.

That evening she drove around the corner to the Irish Street, afraid that if she walked she would meet someone who would ask her about the chip shop, or complain about the litter. She knocked on Ned Doyle’s door and, when his wife answered, she inspected Nancy slowly and cautiously.

‘I don’t know if he’s here,’ she said. ‘I’ll check. I think he went out.’

Nancy stared at her, stony-faced.

‘I’ll go and check,’ she said.

Ned Doyle came out into the hallway in his stockinged feet, his shirt open a few buttons at the chest, his hair ruffled and an
Evening Press
in his hand.

‘Oh, Nancy, you’ve caught me at a bad time now,’ he said. ‘But come in.’

He opened the door into a small carpeted front room whose table and sideboard were covered with boxes and papers.

‘I won’t keep you long, Ned,’ she said.

Sweeping papers and brochures from an armchair, he motioned her to sit down. She wondered for a moment what to do, knowing that she would be able to explain to him better what she wanted while standing. Nonetheless, she sat down and he sat across the table from her on a hard chair.

‘So you know why I’m here, Ned?’

‘I do, Nancy. There’s no point in saying I don’t. There are a lot of complaints from the merchants in the Monument Square about noise and litter. And of course the regulations, there are all the regulations.’

She wished she were standing so she might be able to keep her eye fixed on him more keenly. She felt that she had no dignity sitting opposite him like this. All she could do was leave silence.

‘I think it was ill advised, Nancy, opening the chip shop.’

She said nothing, but listened to the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece. On the wall opposite there was a photograph of Ned shaking hands with de Valera.

‘I would have thought,’ he said, ‘that George had left you comfortably off.’

‘Is that right, Ned?’

‘And you know a shop like that,’ he looked worried for a moment and hesitated before he continued, ‘a shop like that, selling chips after the pubs close, I’ll put it to you this way, it wouldn’t have been the sort of thing you’d associate with the Sheridans.’

‘I’m not one of the Sheridans, Ned.’

‘I’m not suggesting there’s anything wrong with that, Nancy.’

‘I know that, Ned,’ she said, holding his gaze.

Again, there was silence between them, but she knew she must be the first to speak now, that she had forced him to avert his eyes. She sensed his regret at what he had said.

‘So is that what Fianna Fáil does? Puts widows out of business?’

‘Now, Nancy.’ He put up his hand.

‘Is that what it does, Ned?’

‘Nancy, you opened without planning permission and you consulted nobody.’

‘You’ll have trouble if you try and close me down, Ned.’

‘Nancy, it isn’t up to us.’

‘Oh, is it not? Who’s the government, then? Who runs the county council and the urban district council?’

‘You can’t ride roughshod over the law, Nancy.’

‘Can you not? What law gave the car park to Dunne’s Stores? I’d say that took courage, Ned.’

She realized as soon as she said it that she had gone too far. He now had the advantage and he held it, nodding to himself silently, looking worried. The Sheridans had always supported Fine Gael; she knew that he knew that. He was aware of everyone’s allegiance. But Fine Gael had no power now; all the power was in the hands of Fianna Fáil.

Quickly, she found the letters from the bank outlining the extent of her debts and the letter from the bank’s solicitor threatening her. She handed them to him. He took his glasses from the breast pocket of his shirt and read the letters. Nancy, watching him, thought she was the same age as Ned; she remembered that he had left school when he was very young and wondered how he had managed to run Fianna Fáil in the town, becoming even more powerful
than any of the elected politicians. For a second, she thought to ask George, who would always know these things, forgetting that he was dead.

‘Oh, Nancy,’ Ned said, ‘how did you get yourself into this mess?’

‘Look at the date of the first letter, Ned. George left only debts, and his mother was the one who signed the forms. So it was the Sheridans who left the mess. George left me with three children and huge debts.’

She had never thought of it as starkly before, but she knew now that the bluntness of her statement was more effective than tears.

‘Are there no assets? No investments or savings?’ Ned asked.

‘Nothing, except what’s in that letter.’

‘You could sell.’

‘The debt is more than the value of the property.’

‘Yes, but since it’s a debt to the bank, they would make a deal on it.’

‘And what would I do then, Ned, where would I live?’

He handed her back the letters.

‘So what do you want me to do?’ he asked her.

‘Tell them to back off.’

‘Who?’

‘Tell the planning man and the health man to leave me alone, and tell the merchants in the square, as you call them, the truth. Ask them if they would like to have me on the street, because that’s where I’ll be. Instead of the litter, it’ll be me.’

‘It’s a lot to ask, Nancy,’ he said.

She was on the point of telling him that it had been
done before, but she knew to say nothing now, play poor and humble.

‘Well, I’m out on the side of the road with three children,’ she said sadly.

‘Give me a few days,’ he said, ‘but I can promise nothing. You should have consulted us before you opened.’

She could not contain herself.

‘Sure I know what you would have said.’

She stood up.

When he opened the door for her, he hesitated in the hall for a moment.

‘Still, despite all the troubles,’ he said, ‘the country’s come far, haven’t we, Nancy, I mean we’ve come a long way.’

This stayed in her mind for days as his way of saying that he would help her. The implication, she thought, was that Ned and she both had been born in houses which knew nothing about banks or solicitors or planning permissions, and now they were freely discussing these matters. This had to be progress, especially, she thought, if something could be arranged.

A
WEEK LATER
, he came to tell her that he could help her, but it would have to be done carefully and quietly. She was to apply for planning permission and, if it was refused, she was to appeal. It would take a long time, he said, but she would not be closed down. In return, she was to comply with all the health regulations. Again, she could move gradually, promising more each time. She must write immediately, he said, to the health officer announcing that
she would comply with each and every one of his instructions. It would be a while before he came back, and bit by bit she could satisfy his demands. He was a difficult man, the health officer, Ned said.

That day she made a promise to herself that she would go and see Betty Farrell and apologize or explain. Several times Betty had passed the shop but not given her customary wave. Nancy did not need cheques cashed now, since, with the chip shop, she had plenty of cash, too much indeed for safety. She therefore made an appointment with the bank manager and, later that week, took with her in cash, when she went to see him, one month’s payment on the loan, promising to pay the same each month until the debt was cleared. On the way across the square she had prepared a speech for Mr Wallace, planning to end by telling him that he could take it or leave it. Instead, his friendliness prevented her from making any speech at all, instead merely handing him the money, which included dirty and crumpled notes, watching him counting it, taking the receipt, shaking his hand and leaving.

S
LOWLY, SHE LEARNED
which opening hours were the most profitable, discovering that she could do business at lunchtime between twelve and two and then close until eight in the evening and stay open until the pubs shut, and later at the weekend. She wondered why no one knew how much money could be made from a chip shop, but she told no one, not even Birdseye, how high the profits were.

When she told him, instead, that the supermarket was a liability and she was going to close it, he asked her to wait.
He had another idea, he said, and he would come back to her when he had the detail worked out.

‘You listened to me the last time,’ he said, ‘and if you have any sense you will listen to me again.’

When he came back the following week, he told her that she should close the supermarket and open a shop selling spirits, wine, beer, cigarettes and nothing else.

‘I have wine here,’ she said. ‘No one ever looks at it, most of it is rancid it’s been there so long. There’s no trade in that at all.’

‘That’s the coming thing,’ he said. ‘People are going to start drinking wine and they’re going to drink beer at home. You can take it from me.’

He sent her a friend of his, also from Waterford, who showed her the results of market research.

‘Be the first in the town,’ he said. ‘Fill the window with wine and beer, with special offers, and they’ll be in like flies. It’ll beat selling corned beef and washing-up liquid. The profit margins are high if you get the right wholesaler. And it’s a good clean business. And you don’t have to open until eleven in the morning.’

Once more, she told no one except Nicole, Mags O’Connor’s niece, whom she discovered was home for good. When she met her on the street, she said that she was closing the shop.

‘Oh God, she’s going to miss you now. She loves Friday, because that’s the day you come.’

‘Tell her I’ll come out and see her,’ she said. But she knew, as with her promise to herself to go and see Betty Farrell, that it was unlikely. By now, Betty and Jim Farrell
had walked by her several times on the street without speaking to her.

Some of her suppliers had stopped delivering to her because she owed them too much money. She waited until a few days before she closed to tell the others. None of them would accept returns, so she arranged for Birdseye’s friend to take the non-perishable goods for a knock-down price. And a week later, with some new shelving and brighter lights, installed by another friend of Birdseye’s, she opened Sheridan’s Off-Licence and filled the window with signs for special offers. Even in the first week, her turnover was higher. Catherine seemed to prefer her new merchandise. She had never tasted wine before, she said, but she liked the taste of it. The wholesaler had given her some free samples. One day when Nancy spoke to her, she almost smiled.

‘Christmas,’ Birdseye told them when he dropped in to see them, ‘Christmas is when you’ll clean up.’

B
Y THE END OF
the summer Gerard realized how much money she was making. For most of his holidays he had run the lunchtime trade in the chip shop on his own, and he had come to understand, better than she did, what supplies were needed, how early to order them and how much they cost. While she kept all the figures in her head, and knew by the mounting cash in her chest of drawers how much money she was making, Gerard set about writing it all down, the daily income in seven neat vertical lines, and the weekly outgoings in wages, supplies and other costs. He continued this even after he went back to school.

‘Do you pay tax on it all?’ he asked. She told him that she did, although she had put no thought into paying tax. He frowned. The following day he came back to her and said, in the voice of his father, that he had made enquiries and she should get an accountant. He had been told, he said, that Frank Wadding was the man. He would do her taxes for her.

‘Who did you make enquiries from?’ she asked. ‘I hope you’re not telling anyone our business.’

‘I asked questions, that’s all. I told no one anything.’

‘Who did you ask?’

‘Someone who might know.’

Since he had begun to deal with the cash, he quickly noticed that when she had paid the bank and the Credit Union their monthly payments, a large amount of money was missing. That day when he came to her, his tone almost accusing, she regretted having given him so much responsibility. She had no choice now but to tell him that the building in which they lived and did business was re-mortgaged and that they were, despite the money they were making now, heavily in debt. When he asked her for precise figures, she realized that he had completely ignored the story of what she had been through, and the effort she had made. He was busy counting.

T
HE ACCOUNTANT’S
desk was too big for him; he wrote down every figure on a notepad, and then considered it all in silence, nodding like an old man.

‘Some things are clear anyway,’ he said eventually. ‘The loans will have to be restructured so that the interest can be
offset against tax, and you’ll have to set up a limited company and pay yourself a salary. And you’d better get that cash out of the house as fast as possible.’

He wrote these points down as soon as he mentioned them.

‘And we’ll need to keep in close touch, say once a week, for the next few months so that all your accounting procedures can be put in order. You have, on the face of it here, a very valuable business.’

T
HE GIRLS TOOK
no interest in either the off-licence or the chip shop; Gerard’s interest in both was so intense that Nancy had to ban him working in the chip shop, except on Saturdays, during term time. But since his grasp of the figures was better than hers, his weekly accounts meticulously kept, she let him prepare the figures for the accountant and deal with the bank, much to Mr Wallace’s delight.

‘That Gerard of yours,’ he said to her one day when he met her in the square, ‘will be a millionaire before he is twenty-one.’

When she asked him for a chequebook at their next meeting he immediately agreed.

Her main business was on weekend nights. When the pubs and the disco closed they were three or four deep waiting for fish and chips and burgers. She worked as hard herself as the two girls she employed, and no matter how drunk or impatient her customers were, she remained polite and friendly. She loved taking money from them, loving handling the coins and notes, and this was something she had never once felt in the supermarket, the zeal surrounding
the cash register. Some of them were rowdy, and others so drunk that they were either going to abandon the fish and chips on some window ledge or vomit in the Monument Square. She took their money and smiled at them.