Like One of the Family (3 page)

Claire's parents paid her little attention. The truth was that while they were not unkind to her, they were going through a rough patch themselves and had little emotion left over for anything else. Her mother was silent and abstracted most of the time, deep in her own thoughts. Her father was less and less at home, and when he was there he devoted his time to Christopher, who had always been his favourite. Comfortably ensconced on the couch, the pair of them watched the Wimbledon finals and any other ball that hopped. Claire, passing through on her way to the kitchen, would hear their voices rising to varying pitches of excitement as they recorded the scores. She wondered what it would have been like if Christopher had been a girl instead of a boy. And went back across the road to play with the McArdles.

Sometimes Sheena dropped over to Claire's house but mostly left it to Claire to call on her. There was always some activity going on in the McArdle's garden and little or nothing happening in the Shannon's. Claire could see that two deckchairs plonked out in the wilderness wasn't all that inviting,. Nor was the inside of the house any better. The kitchen was poky, with a damp odorous dishcloth permanently draped on the sink, and there was never any iced lemonade like in Sheena's house. It might have been different if her mother had gone out of her way to make Sheena welcome but any exertion these days seemed beyond Annette. The odd time she remembered to buy biscuits Christopher made short work of them, snacking before the television.

At first Claire was disappointed by Sheena's failure to return her visits; it was all so lop-sided somehow. Then she was relieved. It kept her relationship with the McArdles separate, which was what she had really wanted all along. She held on to the hope that when she and Sheena returned to school and Terry was no longer about, it would be the same for them as before.

One consolation was her friendship with Hugh. Although he was two years younger he was surprisingly sensitive for his age. He owned a cocker spaniel called Hero and let Claire help feed and groom her. By degrees, Claire learned more about the dog. Hero had started out as Terry's dog – she was given to him for his tenth birthday - but became Hugh's when Terry got tired of taking her for walks. Or so Terry made out. But this wasn't the real reason. According to Hugh, Terry was secretly galled at having a dog that wouldn't answer his whistle or obey his commands to sit or beg so he made a great show of giving her away. From what Claire already knew of Terry she could well believe this.

Towards the end of June, Hero gave birth to a sizeable litter, too many for her to be able to feed by herself. Hugh fixed up a bed in the tool-shed with plenty of fresh straw from a nearby riding stables and borrowed a doll's feeding bottle from Ruthie and filled it with warm milk. Claire was thrilled when he asked her if he would like to try her hand at feeding them.

It was evident that Hugh had his parents' dedication to preserving life and his father's skill with his hands. Watching him dose Hero with vitamins, Claire was amazed how he got her to accept the tablets. It was all done so smoothly. She was sorry when the pups got bigger and Hugh no longer needed her. She had never enjoyed anything so much in her life.

During their coffee sessions in the locked kitchen Jane McArdle sometimes chatted to Claire about the children's father and Claire couldn't help feeling curious about Dr Eddie McArdle. She tried to conjure him up from his children's faces. Hugh and Ruthie were so like Jane it was a safe bet the twins resembled him
.
She wondered what he would think of her when he returned and found her in his house every day. Would he object to having an extra child about the place, an extra mouth to feed? She felt sensitive about such things, having once heard her mother speak crossly when a schoolfriend regularly lingered on past mealtimes. ‘Hasn't she a home to go to?' Annette had grumbled, annoyed at having to stretch the shepherd's pie to five portions when it was barely enough to feed four people to begin with. At the same time Claire recognised that the McArdles were different. They didn't calculate so finely - didn't have to! She had already seen evidence of this in the generous way Jane included her in all the picnics and treats she laid on for her own family.

Claire began to see Dr McArdle as a slightly romantic figure, physically a cross between Sheena and Terry, yet inexplicably grim and brooding, with granite-hewn features and jutting eyebrows. She was reading
Jane Eyre
at the time and had unconsciously cast him in the role of Mr Rochester.

It was a shock to find how closely he resembled a romantic hero.

Eddie McArdle was broad-shouldered and powerfully muscled, with curly grey-black hair and a beautiful sad smile, which seemed to suggest that no matter what dreadful secrets you told him he would not be surprised or shocked.

He arrived home from Germany one morning, not long after Jane had set off to collect him at the airport, having somehow got her lines of communication crossed. The children were playing in the garage when he suddenly appeared in their midst. Claire was lying on her back - they were enacting a childbirth scene - and Sheena was instructing her to “breathe deeply” and “bear down, my dear” while Terry pressed the stethoscope against the cushion Claire had shoved under her dress. The twins were noisily encouraging her to moan and scream and when they saw their father, they didn't stop but, pleased to have an audience, exaggerated their antics.

‘Good God, is this what you get up to?' he asked, genuinely appalled.

Claire struggled up, feeling mortified. She saw herself as he must see her; an almost grown girl, legs sprawled, playing childish games. Her face reddened as she pulled the cushion from under her dress and quickly hid it behind her. She gave an involuntary cry and held her stomach.

‘Labour pains reoccurring, no doubt.' Dr McArdle sounded sarcastic.

Tears in her eyes, Claire stared down at the ground. Her tummy really hurt. She must have opened the wound.

‘It's my tummy... I think I've pulled my appendix scar.'

He stared at her for a moment. ‘Come into the house,' he said, more gently.

Still clasping the cushion, Claire followed him into Jane's surgery, where he motioned for her to lie down on the couch. She put the cushion on the floor and eased herself up on to the couch. She felt a little shy, lying there, staring at the walls. There was the sound of water running as Dr McArdle washed his hands.

He came over and sat on the edge. ‘Let me see.' His hands were gentle as he pulled up her dress and peeled back her pants. Claire stared fixedly at a spot on the wall behind his right ear. She wondered desperately which knickers she had put on that morning. Annette was very lax these days about taking her shopping, or indeed, doing anything that required effort. With school holidays she had practically abandoned all pretence at housekeeping.

‘Nothing too catastrophic,' he murmured, blotting a globule of fresh blood. ‘You'll survive.'

She made to sit up but he gently pushed her back on the couch.

‘Hold on. A swab of Betadene and you'll be right.' He stood up and crossed the room.

She looked down at herself, her stomach bared, her faded cotton pants pulled down, revealing pale skin. Oh no, there was a hole in them. She flushed, wishing she could cover herself. Sheena wore flowered sets of lingerie. She wished desperately to have had underwear like Sheena's. She looked away miserably. He was back.

‘Be prepared,' he warned. ‘It's cool.'

She gasped as the solution drenched her warm skin. Quick competent fingers swabbed the area and with a grunt he straightened up. She let her breath out slowly. He turned away to put the stained dressing in the pedal bin, giving her time to rearrange her clothing before turning back.

‘How old are you, Claire?'

She was surprised he knew her name.

‘Thirteen.'

‘I would have put you older. Got your periods yet?'

She stared at him. She felt hot, confused. No-one ever talked about such things, especially no man. She nodded dumbly. There had been brownish red staining a couple of times so far. Annette had discreetly left a packet of sanitary pads in her room some time before. She told him.

He nodded. ‘I have some booklets I can give you. Sheena found them helpful. She has hers almost a year.'

Claire looked down at her hands. She and Sheena had not spoken yet of such things.

‘You're both fairly young starting. Means you'll go on longer. Possibly have babies in your fifties... if you want that.'

She shook her head. Was she really having this conversation? She tried to imagine sharing the same dialogue with her father and failed. But then her father wasn't a doctor.

‘It seems rather old,' she ventured.

‘No accounting for tastes, is there?' He smiled at her. ‘Modern young women want to put it off as long as possible. Careers first, babies later. You won't be like that, will you, Claire?'

Careers! Babies! She didn't know how to answer him.

He laughed, reading her thoughts. ‘That's all a long way off... still, maybe not so far away.' He looked at her consideringly. ‘You are mature for your age... your body strong, well developed. You are already taller than Sheena by an inch, I should say.'

Suddenly she became self-conscious. She glanced towards the door. As if recollecting the time he went at once to open it. ‘Off you go. You can take your cushion with you.' He sounded amused.

She blushed and retrieved it. He waited until she was through the door then closed it gently after her. She walked back to the garage, her head in a spin. No one had ever described her so intriguingly to herself before. She felt as if she were being created afresh and was drawn, almost against her will, to view herself as he did.

That night Claire stood on her bed, her feet sinking in the soft mattress, and looked in her dressing-table mirror. She badly wanted to see herself, all in one go. It was the first time such an idea had occurred to her.

By bending her neck and crouching she was rewarded by a foreshortened frontal: first midriff and thighs, and then lower and upper torso. Her hips and thighs had lost their childish thinness and looked nicely rounded. Her breasts were beginning to get fat. When she arched her body, they gently budded the bodice of her cotton dress. Was this what he had meant by well developed?

Next she angled the mirror so that she could see herself lying down on the bed. With her head resting on the pillow, she pulled up her dress and down her pants and looked critically across. In the months since the baby's death she had filled out and was no longer a little girl.

She dreamed that night, as in the period after her appendix operation, that she was in the operating theatre, except that this time he was the surgeon standing beside the table. She was aware that her hospital gown was ruched up leaving her naked below the waist, but each time she modestly tried to pull it back down he told the nurse to pull it up again. In the end she just lay there and let them. She remembered the dream long after she woke up.

In the days after, when Claire passed the surgery, she felt a faint excitement as though behind the panelled door Eddie was waiting to continue their conversation. Now during her coffee sessions with Jane she encouraged the older woman to talk about him, avidly absorbing every detail of his life.

Jane, who never needed any persuading to talk about her family, was pleased at her interest and painted a generally accurate, if slightly biased, account of the doctor and the man.

Eddie was a brilliant surgeon and had been awarded several medical gongs for his research into ectopic pregnancy and the effects of certain drugs on bone formation in the developing foetus. He divided his time between his consulting rooms in Merrion Square and the city nursing homes. One day of the week he operated at the hospital. Jane said he was treated like a god by his woman patients and bullied and adored by his receptionist, who had been his faithful watchdog for thirteen years. This paragon managed to keep his appointment book filled without overcrowding it. New patients were encouraged to pay in advance of consultation and maternity cases prior to their six week check-up. No-one ever slipped past her and Eddie could not have functioned without her. Jane laughed and professed to be madly jealous of her. Claire asked Sheena later if this were true, but Sheena just laughed herself and said that the woman was almost sixty years old and the only threat she had ever posed was to her father's waistline.

‘Somehow babies always seem to get themselves born around mealtimes,' Sheena explained. ‘She worries about Daddy and stuffs him with take-aways.'

‘Yeah,' agreed Terry, who was listening. ‘He's getting to be a right fatso!'

Claire was struck by how casually the twins regarded their father. By comparison Hugh worshipped his father and was afraid of disappointing him. He thought of becoming a vet when he grew up but worried it would disappoint his father if he didn't follow in his footsteps. Claire thought if only Terry had some interest in medicine it would have let Hugh off the hook, but Terry was not the academic type. His was a bold and adventurous spirit and when he grew up would more than likely become an explorer or a soldier. Terry climbed effortlessly to the top of the thirty foot chestnut tree in the garden, swinging daringly on a branch and shouting boastfully down to them all, while poor Hugh got dizzy and sick if he so much as went on to the garage roof to recover a tennis ball. Claire understood and empathised with Hugh's fear of heights, but at the same time she couldn't help feeling a sneaking admiration for Terry's fearless show of courage.

Claire got in the habit of hanging about her own gate around the time Eddie came home in the evening. But as soon as she saw his car turning into the road she would go at once into the house. One evening she lingered on the pavement, throwing her ball at the wall. When he had stopped his car and got out she pretended suddenly to notice him.