Stand by Me (9 page)
She couldn’t breathe. She was getting ready to meet Brendan, coating her eyelashes with Maybelline Great Lash so that they appeared wider and bigger, because she knew that he liked her eyes like that, and then, quite suddenly, as she looked at her reflection, she realised that she wasn’t breathing. She opened her mouth and tried to suck in some air, but she couldn’t. She could feel herself starting to tremble and she tried to steady herself by resting her hands on her narrow dressing table. But she couldn’t feel her hands and she couldn’t feel the dressing table and she still couldn’t breathe.
It was Evelyn who ran up the stairs to Dominique’s room when she heard the loud thud and the clatter of falling objects, so it was Evelyn who Dominique saw when she opened her eyes.
‘What happened?’ she asked.
‘You tell me.’ Evelyn looked at her with concern. ‘Did you fall? Bang your head?’
And then it all came back to Dominique and she remembered that she was pregnant and that she was going to tell Brendan that night but she hadn’t been able to breathe and that was why she’d fainted. And she knew that even if she could breathe, she wouldn’t have much time for it, because if she told her mother she was pregnant, Evelyn would kill her.
But she didn’t need to tell her. Suddenly Evelyn stared at her with knowledge dawning in her eyes.
‘Is there something I need to know?’ she demanded.
‘Like what?’ Dominique could only mumble as she struggled to her feet and then sank into the old armchair that had been donated to her room a few years earlier.
‘You know what,’ said Evelyn.
Dominique said nothing.
‘I’ll get you some water.’ The concern had gone out of Evelyn’s voice, replaced by an undercurrent of hardness. She left the bedroom and returned a few seconds later with a glass of water. Dominique sipped it slowly.
‘So?’ Evelyn stared at her.
‘Leave me alone,’ said Dominique.
‘You collapsed in your bedroom,’ said her mother, ‘and I want to know why.’
‘You’ve guessed why.’
‘Tell me.’
‘What do you want me to say?’
‘I want you to tell me if there’s something wrong with you.’
‘Depends on what you mean by wrong,’ said Dominique.
She knew she was playing for time. Not wanting to have to say it out loud. The thing was, being pregnant and unmarried wasn’t the absolutely major deal it had been ten years earlier, when Dominique remembered Sandra Sheehan, from three doors down, being sent away somewhere to have her baby in secret. She had heard the whispered conversations about Sandra, a pretty teenager who’d babysat her occasionally when she was smaller. All she’d known then was that Sandra was ‘in trouble’. She had assumed that ‘in trouble’ meant the same to Sandra as it did to her - that she’d broken something or told a lie or been disobedient. It wasn’t until a couple of years later that she realised exactly what sort of trouble Sandra Sheehan had been in. She hadn’t seen Sandra since. She’d no idea where she was now. But she did know that her baby had been adopted.
Yet only a few years after Sandra’s pregnancy, Minnie Carpenter, from the other end of the street, had - as Evelyn once said - flaunted her pregnancy and her single status and nobody had said a word. So it was OK now, wasn’t it, to be pregnant and not married? It wasn’t such a terrible thing. It wasn’t so awful.
She swallowed hard and told Evelyn that she was expecting a baby. And her mother slapped her across the face.
‘I warned you!’ Evelyn’s face was white with fury. ‘You stupid, ungrateful, sinful girl. I warned you!’
Dominique opened her mouth but didn’t get the chance to say anything.
‘You were brought up properly,’ Evelyn raged. ‘We taught you right from wrong. You were raised in a loving, Christian home with Christian values. And this is how you repay us. By dressing like a tramp and sleeping with the first boy you meet.’
‘It’s not about repaying you!’ Dominique found her voice again. ‘It’s about me, and how I want to live my life. And it’s about Brendan too.’
‘Oh, don’t be so bloody silly!’ cried Evelyn. ‘You think he loves you? You think he really wants to marry you?’
‘Yes.’ The tears were coursing down Dominique’s face. ‘Yes he loves me and yes he’ll marry me.’
‘And if you believe that, you’re even more stupid than I thought,’ said Evelyn.
Her hands were shaking as she picked up the phone and called O’Neill’s bar, which was where they’d arranged to meet that night. She was left waiting for five minutes, and she thought that perhaps Brendan wasn’t there yet, but then she heard a rustling noise and the receiver was picked up and she heard him say, ‘Domino?’
‘Hi.’ Her voice was shaky.
‘Domino. Are you all right?’
‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘I’m OK.’
‘You don’t sound it. Why aren’t you here?’
‘I . . . wasn’t well earlier,’ she said.
‘What was the matter? You sound dreadful now.’
‘Oh, Brendan ...’ She sniffed. ‘I’m sorry.’
There was a silence at the other end of the phone. And then he replaced the receiver.
She didn’t want to admit that Evelyn had been right. That she’d been a naïve, stupid girl who’d got carried away and slept with her boyfriend and made a basic, basic mistake. She was supposed to be more intelligent than that. But clearly she wasn’t. She’d managed to ruin her life before it had even started.
She was surprised by the ringing of the doorbell, and even more surprised to hear Brendan’s raised voice. Evelyn had answered the door, and she was clearly giving him a piece of her mind.
‘I’m here to see Domino,’ she heard him say. ‘If you don’t want to let me in to the house, then tell her to come out here to me.’
She opened her bedroom door and came downstairs.
‘Talk then.’ Evelyn looked between them. ‘Talk for all the good it will do.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Dominique again as she led him into the unwelcoming front room. ‘She’s furious with me. I’ve let her down, you see. All of her parish friends ...’ She shrugged.
‘First of all, let’s get things straight,’ said Brendan. ‘Have I guessed correctly? Are you pregnant?’
‘Oh God, I’m so sorry about that too.’ She rubbed at her eyes. ‘It’s my problem.’
‘Do you have such a low opinion of me?’ Brendan looked at her intently. ‘Do you think I’m just going to walk away?’
‘I’ll understand,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t as though we were . . . well, you know.’
‘Hey, Domino, I told you I loved you. I meant it.’
‘Brendan, I’m pregnant. It’s a whole new ball game.’
‘True. But if we’d got married the day I met you, people would be asking us now if there was “any news”.’
Her smile was watery.
‘This isn’t the way I wanted it to be,’ he admitted. ‘But I love you, Dominique Brady. You’re the girl for me. And I want kids. Lots of ’em. If we’ve had an early start, so what?’
She stared at him.
‘You said you loved me too.’ He looked at her with the same slightly anxious look he’d worn when he’d first asked her out. ‘Did you mean it?’
‘Of course I meant it,’ she said. ‘It’s just that . . . I thought that guys didn’t want to settle down. That you wanted to kind of play the field and stuff.’
‘I’m twenty-eight,’ he said. ‘I’ve given the field a bit of a going-over already.’
She laughed shakily.
‘So how about it?’ he said. ‘How about cheering up your ma and da and telling them that we’re engaged and that they don’t have to worry about their future grandchild? Though I have to say, Domino, they’re the most old-fashioned people I’ve ever met in my entire life. They haven’t moved out of the fifties, you know.’
‘I know.’
‘Well?’
She’d always imagined that a marriage proposal would be more romantic than this. But, she told herself, it was being proposed to by the right man that was the important thing. And so she smiled at him and told him that he was the only man in the world for her and that she loved him with all her heart. And then he kissed her in the drab front room, while two generations of Bradys stared unblinkingly at them from the frames of their black and white photos.
Chapter 4
The wedding was arranged for the following month. Dominique rang Maeve and asked her to be her bridesmaid, and Maeve shrieked with an excitement that was a little more muted when Dominique told her about her pregnancy, although she didn’t tell her about the horrible, horrible night when her mother had found out and when she’d feared that Brendan had hung up on her for ever.
‘Of course it was a shock,’ she admitted to Maeve now. ‘And I know I should’ve been more careful. Even when we were . . . you know . . . there was something in the back of my mind telling me that I might regret it. But I don’t, Maeve. I really don’t.’
‘I realise you’re madly in love with him,’ said Maeve. ‘All the same, Dominique – a baby!’
‘It’s not ideal,’ agreed Dominique. ‘But the thing is, I love him and I want to get married to him and he loves me too. He really does. So what’s the point in waiting?’
‘He’s a bogger, though.’
‘He’s the sweetest, nicest person you ever met,’ Dominique told her. ‘I want to marry him, Maeve. I really do. It’s nothing to do with being pregnant.’
‘Fair enough, so,’ said Maeve. ‘I bet everyone in our class in school would be shocked if they heard you were getting married.’
‘I bet they would too.’
‘So where are you going to live?’
‘We’ve bought a house.’ Dominique couldn’t keep the excitement out of her voice. ‘It’s in Firhouse, near Templeogue. Brendan knows the builder and we’re getting a really good deal on it. Although he says that when he makes lots of money from his own construction company, we’ll move somewhere bigger and even better.’
‘You have it all worked out.’
‘Yes,’ said Dominique. ‘We have.’
Gabriel wrote to say that he would come back from Valladolid for the wedding. His letter to Dominique told her that all of God’s children were loved, even those who had slipped off the path. She gritted her teeth as she read it and then screwed it into a tight ball before throwing it in the bin. She didn’t want to hear Gabriel’s pious thoughts. At least she was living her life, not locking herself away in a monastery or whatever, doing nothing but praying. Anyway, she thought with a sudden flash of amusement, between the prayers of her parents and those of Gabriel, her immortal soul was probably just fine. If she believed in all that claptrap. Which she didn’t.
Brendan brought Dominique to Cork to meet his family the day after he’d given her a simple gold engagement ring with a small solitaire diamond.
Dominique, stressed by her mother’s disapproval and her father’s grim looks, was delighted to escape from Dublin for a weekend, although she was nervous about meeting the Delahaye family for the first time.
‘Your parents might hate me,’ she said.
‘They won’t hate you,’ Brendan assured her. ‘They’ll be delighted to meet you.’
Dominique wasn’t so sure about that. No Irish mother liked to think that her son was marrying a woman because she was pregnant, even if he insisted that they were going to get married anyway. Dominique feared that Lily Delahaye would think that she’d trapped her son and that she’d despise her for it. It was bad enough that her own mother thought of her as some kind of immoral trollop, without her future mother-in-law harbouring the same notions. But she didn’t say this to Brendan.
The day they travelled down to Cork was warm and sunny, and Dominique felt unexpectedly light-hearted as the train wound its way through the unfolding countryside with its patchwork of green fields. She’d been to Cork a number of times on holiday with her parents, and she liked it (although, as a Dubliner, she could never admit to that). She noticed, though, that Brendan’s accent grew broader with every passing mile, so that by the time they arrived at Kent station, to be greeted by his younger brother, Greg, who was picking them up, she could hardly understand a word he was saying.
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