The Better Woman (2 page)

With precise handwriting Peggy wrote the price of each item on a sheet of butcher's paper. She underlined the figures and, her expression intense with concentration, manually totted them up.

‘That's ten pounds forty pence. Sure, the ten will do.'

‘God bless you.'

Mrs Burke handed over the cash and, her cane basket full to the brim, made for the door.

‘Shouldn't you wait on until the rain passes over?' asked Peggy.

‘Sure, a bit of rain never did anyone any harm,' replied Mrs Burke. Then, realising the tactlessness of her words, she flashed a silent apology with her eyes and left, the door swinging shut behind her.

Sarah watched her grandmother become immediately busy with wiping down the counter. The old woman's face was devoid of emotion, her mouth a line of efficiency. But her eyes weren't as sharp as usual. Memories blurred their blueness.

The rain had in fact done a lot of harm to Peggy Ryan and her family. In 1944 her beloved husband had caught pneumonia after a bad soaking. Billy had not recovered and Peggy had been left alone to manage their small son, Tommy, and the family business. Twenty-five years later, Tommy skidded his motorbike off the Mallow Road. The coroner's report cited a severe downpour as the cause of the accident. Visibility had been poor and the road surface slippery. The only mercy was that Tommy had been killed on impact. Once again Peggy was left with a small child to rear – Sarah – and the business.

Peggy scoured the countertop until she had her memories under control. She stepped back and, still holding the cloth, put her hands on her hips.

‘You'd better get out of those damp clothes before you catch your death.'

‘Yes, Nan. I'll be back in a tick so you can take your break.'

Sarah exited the shop through the back door, which led directly
into the kitchen of the private residence behind. She ran the tap at the sink and lowered her head to drink from its flow. Then she left her new muddied sneakers by the back door and went upstairs to change.

‘Are you sure that's right, girleen?' asked Mr Glavin, one of the more cantankerous customers.

‘Yes.' Sarah nodded vigorously.

‘But you didn't write down the numbers,' he said, looking very suspicious.

‘I can add in my head,' she told him.

‘I like to see the evidence before me.'

Sarah, well trained in customer service by her grandmother, didn't argue. ‘Right you are.'

She wrote down the figures on the butcher's paper and did the long addition out loud. Once complete, and her earlier total confirmed, she used scissors to cut out the sum.

‘There you are, your receipt,' she said and smiled brightly as she handed it over.

He gave it a brief glance before shoving it deep in his trouser pocket. Then, without saying a word, he strutted out of the shop, clearly annoyed that he hadn't got the better of her.

Later on that night, when they were sitting down to a dinner of floury potatoes and fried lamb chops, Sarah told her grandmother about Mr Glavin.

‘He's an awful sourpuss,' Peggy agreed. ‘But he's the customer and you should write down the sums for him if that's what he wants.'

They started to eat. The potatoes were lovely but the chops were tough. Peggy was a good cook but sometimes the meat, which came from the butchers in the next village, was of poor quality.

‘We should get a cash register,' said Sarah, pushing her half-eaten chop to the side of her plate.

‘What would we want with one of those?' Peggy sniffed.

‘We could give customers like Mr Glavin a nice printed receipt,' replied Sarah, having thought it through. ‘We could also use it to keep record of the day's takings.'

‘Those contraptions cost a fortune,' Peggy remarked. ‘Money is tight enough as it is.'

‘It would be well worth the investment,' was Sarah's reply.

Peggy thought that her granddaughter sounded more like an adult than a twelve-year-old schoolgirl. Sarah was too old for her age, both intellectually and physically. She was always top of her class. ‘Brains to burn,' one of her teachers had said. This was no news to Peggy. Sarah's mathematical abilities had made themselves evident from a very young age. She'd been helping out behind the counter for three years now, but she'd worked out how to count money and calculate a customer's change long before that. Peggy didn't know where the girl got her brains from. Her father, bless him, was no Einstein. And her mother, well . . .

In the last few months, Sarah's face and figure had become more defined. She was tall for her age, her body lithe from all the running. Her straight chestnut hair fell below her shoulders, its colour so rich and its texture so thick that it alone could have made the most plain-faced girl look pretty. Sarah's face was by no means plain. Her hazel eyes, fringed by thick lashes, dominated its oval shape. Her nose and lips were in perfect proportion, her pale skin free of the usual teenage blemishes. She could easily pass as sixteen or seventeen.

It was her emotional maturity that Peggy worried about the most, though. Sarah took life too seriously. She was always trying
to prove herself, be it at school, at running, or at the shop, as if she felt she wasn't good enough as she was. Her thoughts ran deep and she didn't always share them. She was a lot like her mother. And that frightened Peggy.

‘Investment indeed,' she muttered. ‘What kind of things are they teaching ye at school these days?'

After dinner Peggy, weary after a long day, retired to the front room with a cup of tea. Sarah washed up. It didn't take long. Two plates and two cups, a pot, a frying pan and some cutlery. She hung the damp tea towel from the oven door, wiped down the table and laid out her schoolbooks.

She did her maths homework first: fractions – easy. Irish next: ten sentences to read and translate. English: a poem to learn off by heart. She was reciting the lines of the poem when she heard a knock on the kitchen door: John.

‘Hi.'

His anorak was slick with rain. He unzipped it and hung it off one of the hooks on the back of the door.

John was the only other twelve year old in Carrickmore and Sarah's best friend. His parents owned Delaney's, the pub across the road. Like Sarah, he went to school in Kilnock, a neighbouring village five miles away. The bus left on the dot of half past eight in the morning. The driver didn't wait for anyone.

‘Single file please,' he'd order as the children jostled to be first on the bus.

The best seat was the back one and Sarah always sat there with John. Sometimes they'd talk the whole way along the narrow potholed road to Kilnock. Other days they would hardly exchange a word. It didn't matter either way. They were best friends and sometimes friends didn't feel like talking. They both understood this.

After school, John practised the piano and Sarah did her run. Then John helped out at the pub and Sarah with the shop. But John always called around after dinner. Sarah rarely went to his house. His mother wasn't very welcoming.

Tonight John was early, a sure sign that he was having trouble with his homework. This was further evidenced by the copybook he extracted from the inside pocket of his anorak.

‘I can't do the fractions.' He pulled out the heavy chair at the head of the table and sat down with a despondent thump. ‘Can I see your answers?'

Sarah opened her copybook at the right page and put it in front of him. His brow furrowed as he compared her answers to his.

‘I've got it wrong again,' he sighed.

John struggled at school only because his head was in the clouds. He sat in class, a faraway look in his eyes, his fingers drumming the edge of the desk in a beat that only he could hear. He was going to be a professional pianist when he grew up. Sarah didn't yet know what she was going to be, other than someone very, very important.

Sarah put out her hand. ‘Let me see yours.'

He obliged and she looked closely at his pencilled workings.

‘Look, this is where you went wrong.'

Their heads close together, hers brown and his fair, she demonstrated how to multiply the fractions. This was their last year at school together. Next year John's parents were sending him to boarding school in Dublin. There he would have access to master classes at the Royal Irish Academy of Music and his promising talent could be nurtured into something magnificent. Mrs Delaney often said that her son was meant for great things. But that wouldn't stop Sarah from missing him terribly. The weekends would be the worst. No tennis at the park or wheelies
on Whitfield Road. Just the thought of John going away was enough to make Sarah feel desperately lonely. She did her best to block it out.

1984

‘Nan, I have an idea.'

Peggy regarded her granddaughter somewhat warily. Sixteen years old now, Sarah was full of ideas, some of them feasible, all of them well beyond her years.

‘What is it now?' Peggy asked with a sigh, for she found Sarah's bright ideas draining. Peggy was seventy-four years of age and content for things to stay just as they were.

‘We should sell meat.'

Peggy blinked. ‘
Butchers
sell meat, child. We're not qualified –'

‘We don't have to be,' argued Sarah. ‘The supermarkets in the city do it – just plain things like chicken and chops, prepackaged. If we source them fresh, they'd keep for at least a week –'

‘Why would people buy meat from us?' Peggy cut in. ‘There's a perfectly good butchers in Kilnock.'

‘Nan,' Sarah's tone was admonishing, ‘you've said many a time
that the butchers in Kilnock are only so-so, and that you'd buy somewhere else
if you had the choice
.'

Peggy couldn't disagree: the girl had quoted her verbatim. It always took her some time to warm to her granddaughter's ideas. It had taken nearly twelve months before she'd agreed to the cash register. She loved it now, though, pressing the buttons and letting the machine do the adding up.

‘I'll think about it,' she promised. ‘Now, time to close shop.'

Sarah took her cue and walked over to the door. She flipped the sign around so it read CLOSED. The sun, low in the sky, streamed in through the glass panes and outlined her profile: the soft fall of her hair, the roundness of her breasts, her long flat thighs. Peggy, watching on, felt momentarily out of her depth. The child that she had reared was totally gone, replaced by this young woman. How was she to guide her? Ensure that she made the right decisions? Make certain that she was strong enough to take life's blows? And that she knew right from wrong by today's standards? Sarah was the spitting image of her mother and that worried Peggy the most.

God help us all, I hope Sarah doesn't end up having the same problems as Kathleen
, Peggy prayed, not for the first time.

John's fingers struck the keys, leaving a trail of loud, crashing chords. Sarah stood by the doorway, unnoticed. She didn't know the name of the piece, she knew very little about classical music, but she loved to watch John play. The way he hunched over the piano. The way he bobbed his fair head to herald a change in the tempo. The way his long elegant fingers scaled so quickly up and down the keys. During the school holidays he'd practise for hours and hours on end.

‘You're so dedicated,' she'd say in admiration.

He'd shrug. ‘If I'm serious about competing, then four hours a day is the minimum I should be doing.'

John had his sights on the RTE Musician of the Future award. He was giving himself two more years to get to the required standard.

‘Nineteen eighty-six, that'll be my year to win it. Then offers will come in from all over the world.'

‘What about Trinity College?' Sarah had asked. ‘I thought you were going to do a Bachelor of Music there.'

‘Mum's idea!' He'd thrown his eyes to heaven. ‘She wants me close to home so she can keep her beady eye on me.'

John finished the piece softly, his foot pressing on the pedal to mute the sound, his head hanging as his fingers eased out the last chord.

‘Bravo!' Sarah clapped and he looked around with surprise.

‘I aim to please.' His face, with its summer tan, broke into a smile.

‘Welcome home.'

John had spent the first few weeks of summer on a student exchange in France.

‘Merci,' he replied.

‘How was it?' she asked.

‘Magnifique!'

Sarah came further into the room. Plush with rich red curtains and swirly patterned carpet, it was very different to her grandmother's plain front room.

‘Play me something I know,' she said, standing behind him.

He immediately launched into ‘Karma Chameleon'.

Laughing, Sarah clapped her hands over her ears. ‘Anything but that.'

Without a second's thought he switched to ‘Red Red Wine'.

‘Better,' she said when he looked to her for approval.

He lolled his head, pretending to be drunk.

Sarah giggled, glad he was home and that she had her friend back.

‘You make a very believable drunk,' she told him.

He grinned. ‘The best thing about the trip to France was the wine. The family had it every night – kids and all – it was like water to them.'

‘Really?' asked Sarah, her eyes wide.

‘Yeah,' he replied. ‘I got to like it. You should try some.'

The thought occurred to them both at the same time. ‘Tonight?' he suggested.

She nodded. They didn't have to agree on a place. All their previous misdemeanours had been carried out in the same place: the park.

That evening, when the shop had closed, Sarah went upstairs to her bedroom. A small box-shaped room, its décor was depressingly old-fashioned. The walls were covered in floral paper and the floor in a plain green carpet. Redecorating hadn't been one of the ideas she'd managed to sell to her grandmother just yet.