Full House [Quick Read] (5 page)

‘I’d love to go back,’ Liam said.

‘Then we will,’ Dee said.

They got out more paper and did more sums. How much could they charge a lodger? They knew what people paid for a room round here. It would be a great help filling up the china jug for the holiday in Sicily.

‘It will be great,’ Dee pronounced. She sounded much more confident than she was. There would be many battles ahead, she knew.

The first battle was with Rosie. She stormed in the door just as they were eating their lamb chops.

‘That smells nice,’ she said, ‘but I’ll only have them if you cut off the fat, I hate even looking at it. Wait until I tell you what his new plan is. To sell the house.
Sell? Now?
Nobody is buying houses now. Does Ronan live in the real world, I ask you? If you’re doing tomatoes, I’d like them lightly grilled, not swimming in fat.’

Dee looked at her daughter, beautiful, well groomed, her shiny blonde hair expertly cut – one of the perks of the job. Her face was without concern or care for anyone except herself. Dee wondered how her daughter had become so spoiled.

‘Did I tell you I was starting work in the mall next week, Rosie?’

‘Yes, I think you did, Mam. Where are the others? Why aren’t they here?’

‘Anthony went to get a pizza, I think.’

‘Is he bringing it back?’

‘No, I think he’s eating it there. And Helen has gone to see her friend, Maud. She’s thinking of staying there with Maud and Marco while you’re away in London.’

‘She never is. Why?’

‘To give us a room to let.’

‘But that’s
my
room too!’ Rosie cried.

She looked to her father for confirmation. But for once he didn’t run to her defence.

‘You won’t be using it, Rosie. You’ll be in a hotel in London. Surely you’d like your mother and myself to try and make something out of an empty room?’

‘But it’s not an empty room. It’s our home,’ Rosie said.

Isn’t she a little minx, Dee thought to herself. Using the very phrase her father always used. Swiftly she changed the subject.

‘I’ll be able to see you in the mall in the afternoons. I’m going to be doing afternoon shelf-stacking. You know, goods they have run out of in the morning – and you stand near the door of the supermarket, don’t you?’

‘Mam, if you even approach me when I’m doing my work, I’ll … well, I don’t know what I’ll do … You’re going to stack shelves, right?’

‘Right.’

‘In a yellow nylon coat? Right?’

‘I think so, possibly, yes.’

‘That’s what they wear,’ said Rosie. ‘I see them from time to time, when they come out for a smoke. Mam, you wouldn’t talk to me, would you?’

Something happened to Dee at that moment. Her voice became very cold.

‘No, Rosie, I wouldn’t. Believe me, I wouldn’t go near you, approach you, or say hello to my own daughter. It would be out of the question.’

‘Rosie doesn’t mean it like that, Dee,’ Liam, the peacemaker, began.

‘No, but I do. I wouldn’t cross the mall to talk to someone like Rosie.’ There was something about the way she said it that made Rosie uneasy.

‘Listen, Mam, I’m a bit upset, you know, Ronan being such a clown and everything. Let’s just have supper and forget it.’

‘Your father and I have just had our supper. You must have yours wherever you please. And if you are having it in your room, then would you think about putting your clothes into storage? We will need that room from Monday, the day after you leave.’

Rosie began to speak but her mother would have none of it.

‘And no, Rosie, I will
not
forget it. I’ve had a long day cleaning office floors, washing stains off table napkins, cleaning bathrooms and vacuuming long halls. I’m pleased that I got myself a few more hours stacking shelves. I never wondered before why I did it for years and still do it and face years more ahead doing it. But tonight I wonder. And since I get up at four in the morning, I think I’ll go to bed now where I can wonder more about it …’

‘Aw, Mam, don’t take it like that!’ Rosie called to her mother, who was already halfway up the stairs. There was no reply.

Rosie looked at her father.

‘I’m with your mother on this one,’ he said simply.

‘If you had wanted rent for the room, you should have asked,’ Rosie said. ‘We can’t all be inspired or something.’

‘Goodnight.’

Rosie had never seen her father’s face so closed, so unloving.

This had been some day. They must have a crisis meeting soon. Things were far from normal round here.

Chapter Five

They would have to have a council of war. Rosie knew that for certain. She went to her room and called Helen at Maud and Marco’s place.

‘We’re just sitting down to supper,’ Helen complained.

‘Lucky old you, there’s nothing to eat here.’

‘I know, Mam’s taken a real sort of turn over something. She wouldn’t even listen when I tried to tell her …’

Rosie decided she must interrupt or else she would be talking about Helen’s school trip for the rest of the night.

‘You’re right, she
has
taken a turn. But, wait for it, Dad says he’s with her on this. He just walked out of the room, and wouldn’t discuss it.’

‘Discuss what?’

‘They’re letting our room.’

‘She only says that – she doesn’t mean it.’ Helen sounded stunned.

‘She does mean it. I’ll be gone to London and she says you prefer to live with Maud and Marco … one empty room. Solution – let it to a lodger.’

‘Yes, maybe, but not forever, that wouldn’t be fair.’

‘Fair? Who wouldn’t it be fair on?’ Rosie asked.

‘Us!’ Helen said. ‘It’s our home.’

‘I don’t think that one’s going to work much longer,’ Rosie said.

‘Well, it mightn’t work for
you
. But then
you
have a home to go to and a husband who keeps coming around to ask you to come back. I have nowhere, nothing except a huge debt to a travel agency. I can’t afford anywhere to live.’

‘You’re twenty-two years old, and you have a teacher’s salary. Other teachers who are not from Dublin have places to live.’

‘Yes, but they don’t have big unfair debts to travel agencies.’

‘You only got that debt today.’

‘So what? I still have to pay it.’

‘We have to have a meeting, Helen.’

‘No we don’t, I have to go and have my supper. Mam and Dad more or less pushed me out of St Jarlath’s Crescent. I don’t want to be pushed out of here as well.’

‘I’ll round up Anthony and we’ll meet tomorrow.’

‘Where? At home?’

‘Don’t be stupid, Helen.’

‘Well, where then?’

‘I’ll think. I’ll text you,’ Rosie said.

‘Everything OK?’ Helen’s friend Maud asked as she served the pasta.

‘Don’t ask what’s all right and what’s not, let’s just eat!’ said Marco, smiling.

Oh, wouldn’t life be great if everyone was as easy-going as Marco and Maud, thought Helen. Perhaps it
was
unfair to expect Mam to put food on the table all that time, but as Dad said, it
was
their home.

And if the finger should be pointed, why was it at her? Helen was the only one of them earning a proper living. Anthony had never worked. Never. Rosie had gone and got married – that lasted ten minutes and then she was back hustling for victims in a shopping mall. At least Helen had studied, done her exams, trained as a teacher. They should be
pleased
with her, rather than suggesting she leave her room free. Last year at her graduation they had said they were so proud of her. Why weren’t they still proud? Why did they ask her to go away so that they could let her room? It was a mystery.

‘Stop frowning, Helen, you’ll get dreadful lines in your face and Rosie will drag you in to get them removed,’ Maud teased her.

‘Helen will never have dreadful lines on her face. Stop frightening her!’ Marco said. ‘She will be lucky like you were, Maud, and meet a marvellous Italian love …’ Marco put his arm around Maud’s neck. ‘She too will find a magical Italian for herself, just like you did!’

‘Oh, Marco!’ Maud pretended to be shocked. ‘You believe that a man is the solution for everything. You are ridiculous!’

Ronan said that he would drive Rosie to the airport.

‘I’m going for six weeks to London. I am a free person, leading a free life,’ she insisted.

‘I know that, Rosie. I am saving your bus fare, that’s all.’

‘My company will pay for that.’ She sounded more confident than she felt.

‘Let me save them the fare instead,’ he offered, rattling the car keys.

‘Oh no, I’d get nothing but how great everything was until I walked out. I don’t want one word about how good it was … It was hellish, that’s what it was.’

‘I don’t remember it as all bad,’ he said.

‘You don’t because you were out the whole time and I was cleaning the place and cooking for you and ironing. My God, the ironing of a clean shirt every day …’

‘I could do the ironing,’ Ronan said.

‘You could, you always could have, but did you? You never did. Never, not once.’

‘I would now.’

‘No, you’d do it for two days. Then you’d be off out again.’

‘Rosie, I went out to work, for you and for me. You knew that’s what I did. I never said I’d stay at home all day and play house.’

‘But you were
never
at home.’

‘I had to visit customers, I told you that you could come with me.’

‘Stand in pubs and be pawed by drunks? No thank you.’

‘But that’s my job, selling packets of snacks to pubs. Pubs – that’s where I work, Rosie. Be fair!’

‘Fair? I was
very
fair. You should know what
some
women would do, then you’d say I was fair. I walked away, said we’d made a mistake, that it wasn’t working. What’s unfair about that? It was the truth. We were fighting all the time.’

‘But we
must
have loved each other, to get married?’ Ronan was puzzled.

Rosie felt weary. ‘Listen, when I get back from London we
will
talk again, Ronan. Really we will. That’s if I have a place to lay my head. My mother is starting to turn my home into a guest house and is going to boot us all out.’

‘Why is that?’ Ronan liked his mother-in-law: it didn’t seem in her character to do such a thing.

‘I don’t know, money, I think.’

‘Well, why don’t you all pay her something?’

‘It’s our
home
, Ronan. You don’t pay at home.’

‘I did when I lived at home,’ Ronan said.

‘That’s because your family are half mad,’ Rosie said, but she felt uneasy.

Dee and Josie looked forward to going to see their client, Miss Mason.

Miss Mason told them that it was her sixty-fourth birthday. They both pretended to be amazed. In fact they had thought she was around eighty. Miss Mason looked so frail and didn’t go out to work. How could she be so young?

They made a fuss of her, slipped out and got a small cake and sang ‘Happy Birthday’ with their mugs of tea.

She clapped her hands and said it was all marvellous. She said that her niece Lily was coming to see her around teatime, so Josie and Dee prepared a little tea tray for the occasion.

Lily lived in the country but apparently she was changing her plans. She was going to come and live in Dublin and she would be looking for somewhere to live. Dee and Josie had met Lily a few times. She was a tall, pale girl in a long cardigan, very fond of her aunt and always bringing her some well-chosen gift. A footstool, a magazine-rack for beside her chair, a really good reading light.

‘I could offer her a room in my house for a few weeks until she finds her feet,’ Dee suggested suddenly.

Josie’s jaw fell open. ‘But you don’t have a free room. St Jarlath’s Crescent – they’re all three-bedroom houses, aren’t they?’ she said to Dee, puzzled.

‘I do indeed have a room. Liam’s painting it today. It’s the girls’ old room.’

‘And where are the girls?’ Josie was finding Dee very hard to follow these days.

‘Rosie’s going to London to do a sales course in cosmetics.’

‘And Helen?’

‘She’s staying with a friend.’

‘Well now, wouldn’t that be great then?’ Josie was pleased to see things working out well for Dee.

‘So
is
there a room, Dee?’ Miss Mason wondered.

‘It would be simple, but she’d be very welcome.’

‘She’s a nurse, so she wouldn’t have a fortune, but she’d pay the going rate. I’d love her to stay with you, Dee. She’s a trusting girl and I feel like a mother to her. I don’t want her here because she’d be looking after me, not having a life of her own.’