Mothers and Sons (12 page)

When the complaints persisted about the litter and the vomit, she made a point of cleaning up the Monument Square herself once the chip shop had been closed, moving around with a box for the litter and later with a bucket of soapy water and a brush for the vomit. Even though she did this quietly at three in the morning, everyone on the square got to know about it, and she learned that some of them were sorry that they had said anything.

Slowly, people in the square, those who owned shops, began to understand how well she was doing. And word got around too, with the help of Ned Doyle she believed, how much debt she had inherited. They stopped complaining about the litter. Ned Doyle called by one day and told her that she had everyone’s admiration for keeping the business going for Gerard.

When she watched Gerard working in the chip shop on a Saturday, or keeping the accounts, she realized that he presumed he would be taking over the business in time, just as his own father had taken over the business from his grandmother. This explained, she thought, why his Christmas report had a complaint about him from each teacher. He believed that he did not have to bother paying attention in anyone’s class.

She was sorry now that she had not told Gerard from the very beginning what her plan was, what came to the front of her mind every time she tapped the cash register in the chip shop or banked the takings from the off-licence.
All her life she had been on display like this; from the time of her mother’s small shop people had been able to gawk at her as much as they liked, or look past her. She dreamed now of Dublin, the long roads with trees on the sides and house after house almost hidden. In Goatstown and Stillorgan and Booterstown, there were people who lived in houses and no one greeted them with a mixture of familiarity and curiosity every time they went outside their own door. No one knew all about them, no one felt free to waylay them to stop and talk. They were just normal people who lived in houses. And that was what she wanted, that was why she was working, to become like them. To pay off her debts and save enough money and then sell up, and go to Dublin where no one would know anything about her, where she and Gerard and the girls would be just people in a house. She dreamed of a life in the future in which no one could stand in front of her with money in their hand and command her attention.

When, after Christmas, she travelled to Dublin with the girls so they could take advantage of the sales and spend the day wandering between Switzer’s and Brown Thomas, she noticed that they had both grown taller and needed bigger sizes in everything. She was surprised by the suddenness of this, as though it had happened on the way to the city in the car. As they appeared from the fitting room wearing new clothes and she complimented them and made them turn and examined the prices and the reductions, she realized that she had not looked at her daughters in six months. She wondered if, when she went home, she would find that Gerard too had grown without her noticing.

Gerard remained steadfast in his determination not to
study, despite the curfew she placed on him and the banning of him from even appearing in the chip shop. He had not grown, but had developed a walk of his own, a sloping, confident walk performed best when he had his hands in his pockets. He began to speak to people, including people three times his age, in an almost cheeky and quite familiar way. She felt a great tenderness for him as she watched him trying to become a figure about the town.

She tried to have a normal dinner ready for the children when they came home at one o’clock, leaving the girls she employed to work in the chip shop, making an appearance there only when the children had gone back to school. The problem was what to do after three o’clock. She was never needed in the off-licence, where Catherine was slowly getting to know some of the wines; she was often to be found smelling the wines and rolling a small amount around in the bottom of a glass. With the wholesalers, Catherine organized a wine-tasting course in the hotel which had become very popular. With Nancy, she only wanted to talk about a new variety of French wine which had arrived, or the inferiority, in her opinion, of Blue Nun. Nancy grew weary of her, but increased her salary as sales went up.

Thus she went to bed in the afternoon. And her sleep, she thought, must be as deep as the sleep of the dead, heavy and dreamless. When she heard the children coming in from school, she made a promise to herself that she would sleep for half an hour more, but not any longer. Even as spring came, however, she found that she was in bed until six o’clock and still found it hard to shed the sheer pleasurable heaviness of the few hours of oblivion she had just
experienced. She hated opening the chip shop again at eight, and found the weekends almost unbearable. The thought of the money, however, kept her going.

Frank Wadding the accountant continued to advise her, noting a rise in profits in the off-licence and a steady income from the chip shop, enough, he said, for her to have her debts cleared in two years, enough also, he added, for both businesses to be very valuable were she ever to sell them or borrow on the strength of them. When she asked him precisely how much they were worth, he hesitated and said he could not put an exact figure on them, but when she pressed him, he gave her a rough estimate. She realized that, were she to sell the business, she would be able to pay the bank and the Credit Union off and buy a house in Dublin without having to work another day.

A
T THE END OF
the next summer holidays, which Gerard had spent in the off-licence when Catherine was away, and then in the chip shop when the girls who were working there took holidays, Gerard had, with Frank Wadding, worked out a more elaborate accounting system to avoid tax and a more efficient way of dealing with cash. As he was going back to school, Nancy suggested to him that he should aim towards accountancy. He shrugged and said he knew as much about accountancy as he ever wanted to.

It was strange, she thought, how little George ever entered their conversation now. Just over a year ago she knew that every single person who saw her pitied her, sometimes avoiding her so they would not have to sympathize with her one more time, or sometimes crossing the
street to shake her hand and ask her meaningfully how she was. Now, she was the woman with the chip shop and the off-licence and the new car and the smart clothes. Her two daughters could have anything they wanted, and her son, even though he was only sixteen, had begun to wear suits.

But despite the money, nothing could be done about the smell of cooking oil all over the house, right up to the bedrooms. She did everything, she put in new fans, she put a new door at the bottom of the stairs, she had the whole house repainted. When she complained to Birdseye, who took a continued interest in her welfare, he told her it was a small price to pay. But when the girls began to smell their clothes before they went to school and would only wear freshly dry-cleaned clothes when going out with their friends, it became a serious matter.

It was Gerard who alerted her, almost proudly, to the news that the girls were called Chips by their colleagues in school, and by the boys in his school. When she asked them about it, the girls blushed and said nothing, blaming Gerard for telling her. They said it was hard to smell the cooking oil themselves, but everyone else could. When Nancy asked them if they minded this, they shrugged. It was clear to her that they were mortified by it.

In her mind, she had already sold both businesses and the house above them. She had paid off her debts and bought a house in Booterstown where no one knew them and where no cooking oil would ever be used. She would have a garden with roses and lavender, she thought. All she was doing now was saving money; every penny made would be put in the bank and would get them through a year or two or maybe more until she found a job.

In November, Gerard arrived home one mid-morning as Nancy was dealing with supplies on the telephone. He was wearing a suit and looked much older than his years. He put his school-bag down.

‘I won’t be needing that anymore. I told Mooney to fuck off and then they called Brother Delaney and I told him to fuck off. I told them all to fuck off. You can expect a visit from them, but I’m not going back, that’s the end of it.’

She saw that he was close to tears.

‘Gerard, you are going back to school,’ she said. ‘And I don’t want to hear any more bad language in this house.’

‘Sure, isn’t that all we hear every night of the week?’

‘Yes, and it’s paying for your education, but I still don’t want any coarse language in this house.’

‘Some education!’ he said.

‘Well, if you want to go to boarding school, you can do that, but you’re going somewhere.’

‘I’m not. I’m finished with school.’

Suddenly, he had become brave.

‘Well, you needn’t think you are working here. This is my business and I’m not having you.’

‘You can’t run it without me,’ he said.

‘Watch me, watch me,’ she said.

I
N THE END
Gerard apologized to the school and over the next few months an uneasy peace reigned, interrupted only by his Christmas report, almost worse than the previous year.

‘Aren’t you lucky to have him?’ Birdseye said when he called. ‘He’ll make a great fist of the business. It’s in the
blood. I remember his grandmother here, she was a real businesswoman. And you’ll be able to put your feet up, take holidays and everything.’

She imagined herself trapped, an old woman fussing in the shop where she was not wanted. Or stuck in a bungalow out the country, a little car on the tarmac drive, with nothing to do all day as Gerard, married now and with responsibilities, egged on by his wife, explained to her that he would need the business made over to him if he were going to stay there. She thought that the smell of cooking oil would follow her into the grave.

All over the town it had happened, businesses being passed on from generation to generation, the sons, as soon as they went to school, fully sure of their inheritance. They learned to stand behind a counter with no nervousness or timidity, to open their shop in the morning with ease and pride. In their late teens, they settled into the rhythms of middle age.

She noticed that Gerard had dropped most of his school-friends and this seemed to have made him more cheerful, almost hearty. What he loved more than anything was meeting one of the other shop-owners from the town and stopping to talk with them, making jokes, exchanging banter, or discussing a new development or a piece of news. She knew that the personality he displayed was brittle and invented. It would slowly harden; over a number of years he would grow into himself.

She watched him. From her bedroom window in a late spring afternoon she found herself taking him in as he moved from the shop, where he had dropped his school-bag, across the square, smiling at everyone. He was open
and friendly, at home here. She noticed Dan Gifford coming out of his electrical shop; she observed Gerard spotting him too, and making a beeline over to him. As the two of them started to talk and laugh, she saw Gerard putting his hands in his pocket and sticking out his belly. The expression on his face was knowing and comfortable, mildly amused.

As she began to dress herself and prepare for the evening’s work, she knew that this next battle would be the hardest, but she had no doubt about her own determination. Within a month or two, she would have a For Sale sign placed on her property in the Monument Square. She was ready, she thought, for a new beginning.

O
NE
S
ATURDAY
, before things became busy in the chip shop, she told the three children that she was selling and they were moving to Dublin. She tried not to be too precise about when they would sell, or when they might go to Dublin, but she made sure to say that they would all have to go to new schools, which, she hoped, might make them understand that this was real. The girls asked various questions about where they would live and what they would do. She tried to be very direct with them so they would believe that she had everything worked out. Gerard’s face grew red, but he did not speak. Later, when he came to help out in the shop, he behaved as though nothing unusual had happened.

The girls made jokes about the move, and asked further questions over the weeks that followed. They found out about schools and even wrote to one girls’ school and
received a brochure in the post. Gerard did not mention it, and grew grimly silent if the subject were raised in his presence. Nancy realized that he had told no one because he had no one to tell as he was no longer very friendly with any of his schoolmates and he was not close enough to any of the businessmen in the town to whom he looked up so much.

She saw Frank Wadding a few times and left him in charge of getting the right auctioneer to come to value the house. She was glad that the visit happened while Gerard was at school, but she knew also that it might have been better had she confronted Gerard with the auctioneer taking measurements of the rooms in the house. That evening, as they were eating, she found that she could not tell them that the auctioneer had been. It would be a way of torturing Gerard, she thought, who was still behaving as though the plans to move from the town to Dublin did not exist.

One Saturday a few weeks later, she knew as soon as he came into the house that someone had told him that she was definitely selling the business. He seemed on the verge of tears, he hardly ate anything. All his swagger was missing. He left the table early. When she was alone in the kitchen, the girls having gone to their bedroom, he came to the door and hovered just inside the room.

‘I won’t be able to work in the shop tonight,’ he said in a low voice.

‘That’s fine, Gerard.’ She turned and smiled at him. ‘There’ll be the two girls and myself, so it’ll be enough.’

He had never before missed a night when he had arranged to work.

‘They’re all talking about us selling,’ he said.

‘Is that right?’

‘I thought you were joking, just talking about selling up as a way of making us study harder, especially me,’ he said. ‘Making me feel that the business wouldn’t be here for me to fall into. I didn’t think you were serious.’