Lilac Bus (3 page)

‘So do I, but you can never remember anything to tell me!’ Nancy cried in complaint.

‘Ah, will you stop that nonsense, sure aren’t you here the whole time? You only go up to Dublin for a couple of days in the week. Poor Deirdre’s on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.’

‘Poor Deirdre has a husband and three children and a freezer and an icebox and a sprinkler in her garden. Poor Deirdre indeed.’

‘Couldn’t you have all that yourself if you wanted to? Stop grudging things to your sister. Have some bit of niceness in you.’

‘I’ve plenty of niceness.’ Nancy felt her lip tremble.

‘Well stop giving out about Deirdre then, and go on, take a sheet of paper and put it in with mine. It’ll save you getting a stamp and everything.’

Her mother shoved a writing pad across the table. Nancy hadn’t even sat down yet. The big suitcase with the hard corners was in the middle of the floor. She felt this was a shabby welcome home, but she was also a practical person. If she scribbled off a page to Deirdre now, well it would save her having to do it some other time, and it would please her mother who
might go and bring out some soda bread and apple tart if she was in a good humour. Nancy wrote a few lines hoping that Deirdre and Sean and Shane and April and Erin were all well, and saying she’d love to come over and see them all but the fares were desperate and it was much easier for them to come over this way because of the pound and the dollar. She told Deirdre about Mr White’s new car, and Mr Charles going to Russia on his holidays and Mr Barry’s wife having a new handbag that was made from the skin of a baby crocodile and had cost what you wouldn’t believe. She added that it was nice to get back to Rathdoon at weekends because . . . She paused at this point. It was nice to get back to Rathdoon because . . . She looked at her mother sitting at the table frowning over the letter writing. No, that wasn’t why she came home. Her mother was only mildly pleased, and if she wasn’t here there was the television or Mrs Casey or the bingo or half a dozen other things. Sometimes on the long summer evenings, Nancy had come home and found the house empty and her mother out at ten o’clock. She didn’t come home for the dance like Celia did, or Kev or Mikey on the bus. She had not got what you’d call friends in Rathdoon.

She finished the letter, ‘It’s nice to get back at the weekends because the Lilac Bus is really very good value and you’d spend a small fortune in Dublin over the weekend without even noticing it.’

Her mother was packing up for bed. No tea, no apple tart.

‘I think I’ll just make myself a sandwich,’ Nancy said.

‘Did you have no tea? Aren’t you very disorganised for a high-up receptionist?’ said her mother, who went to bed without a word of goodnight.

It was a bright sunny September Saturday. The tourists were mainly gone but there were always a few golfers around. Nancy wandered up the street with no plan. She could have bought a newspaper and gone to the hotel to have coffee, but apart from the money altogether she wouldn’t do that. It was being uppity going in there sitting as if you were the type. No. She saw Celia’s mother washing the step of the pub. She looked older, her face was lined like that gypsy-looking Judy Hickey’s. She called out a greeting, but Celia’s mother didn’t hear, she kept scrubbing. Nancy wondered was Celia still in bed or was she helping to clean up inside. Celia worked weekends in the pub, that’s why she came home. Her mother must have made it worth her while, because it was a hard job to stand on your feet all weekend there after having stood on your feet as a nurse all week. But you’d never know the time of day with Celia, she was so tight with information or anything at all. It was odd to see her talking away to Tom on the bus last night; usually she looked out the window
with a moon face. Not like Dee, who was so full of life and so interested in everything. Nancy often wished that things were different, and that she could call on Dee at the weekend, or go off somewhere with her. But she wouldn’t dream of going up to Burkes. Not in a million years would she call on the house. The surgery was a different matter, that was the way things were.

She passed Judy Hickey’s cottage and saw signs of great activity out in the back. Big packing boxes were laid all round, and Judy was wearing old trousers and had her hair tied up in a scarf. The house itself was shabby and needed a coat of paint but the garden was immaculate. It was odd that so many people watered and weeded and kept the birds off for Mrs Hickey, Nancy thought; she wasn’t the kind of woman that you’d think people would like at all. She only went to Mass one Sunday in four, if that. She never spoke of her husband and children. They had gone away years ago when the young lad was only a baby; Nancy could hardly remember the time there were children in that house. Anyway, up and away with the father and the two children and not a word out of the mother. She never got the court to give them back to her; people had said there must be some fine secrets there that they didn’t want to come out, otherwise she would surely have gone to law. And for years her working in this shop which sold things gurus used out in the East and things that must be disapproved of,
ginseng and all that. Still Judy Hickey seemed to have more friends than a few. Even now there were two of Kev Kennedy’s brothers helping her, and last week Mikey Burns was there with his shovel. Young Rupert would probably have been in the team but his father was very sick and that’s why he had been coming home every weekend.

Nancy sighed and passed on. A half-thought that she might help too had come in one side of her mind but flashed quickly out the other. Why should she dig and get dirty in Judy Hickey’s garden for nothing? She had better things to do. When she got back home and there was a note on the kitchen table, she wondered what better things she meant. Her mother had scribbled that Mrs Casey had called to take her for a spin. Mrs Casey had learned to drive late in life and had a dangerous-looking old car which was the joy of her heart. It had brightened life for many people including Nancy’s mother, indeed there was talk of a few of them coming the whole way to Dublin in it. The plan had been that Mrs Casey and Mrs Morris would stay at the flat. After all, Mrs Casey was Mairead’s aunt. Now there would be no flat and no Mairead. Nancy’s heart lurched at the memory of it all.

And nothing for the lunch and no mention of when the spin would be over, and nothing much in the press or in the little fridge, nothing you could eat. Nancy put on two potatoes to boil and went across to Kennedy’s shop.

‘Can I have two small rashers, please?’

‘Two pounds is it?’ Kev Kennedy’s father didn’t listen much to people: he was always listening to the radio in the shop.

‘No, just two single ones.’

‘Huh,’ he said picking two out and weighing them.

‘You see my mother hasn’t done the shopping yet so I don’t know what she wants.’

‘You can’t go far wrong on two slices of bacon,’ Mr Kennedy agreed, morosely wrapping them in greaseproof paper and putting them in a bag. ‘She’ll never accuse you of getting the family into debt over that.’

She heard a laugh and to her annoyance noticed that Tom Fitzgerald was in the shop. For some reason she didn’t like him hearing her being made fun of like that.

‘Oh, Miss Mouse is a great one to live dangerously,’ he said.

Nancy managed a smile and went out.

The afternoon seemed long. There was nothing on the radio, and nothing to read. She washed her two blouses and put them out on the line. She remembered with great annoyance that nobody, not even her mother, had remarked on her perm. What was the point of getting one if people didn’t notice? Paying good money for one of the newest perms. Well, paying money if she had had to: fortunately she hadn’t. At six she heard the banging of car doors and voices.

‘Oh, there you are, Nancy.’ Her mother always seemed surprised to see her. ‘Mrs Casey and I’ve been for a great drive altogether.’

‘Hallo Mrs Casey. That’s nice,’ Nancy said grumpily.

‘Did you get us any supper?’ Her mother looked expectant.

‘No. Well, you didn’t say. There wasn’t anything there.’ Nancy was confused.

‘Oh, come on Maire, she’s only joking. Surely you’ve something made for your mother, Nancy?’

Nancy hated Mrs Casey’s arch voice treating her as if she was a slow-minded five-year-old.

‘No, why should I have? There was no food there. I presumed my mam was getting something.’

There was a silence.

‘And there was nothing for lunch either,’ she said in an aggrieved tone. ‘I had to go over to Kennedy’s to get rashers.’

‘Well we’ll have rashers for our supper,’ Mrs Morris brightened up.

‘I’ve eaten them,’ Nancy said.

‘All of them?’ Mrs Casey was disbelieving.

‘I only got two,’ she said.

There was another silence.

‘Right,’ Mrs Casey said, ‘that settles it. I wanted your mother to come back with me but she said no, that you’d probably have the tea made for us all and she didn’t want to disappoint you. I said it was far
from likely, judging from what I’d heard. But she had to come back, nothing would do her.’ She was halfway back to the door. ‘Come on, Maire, leave the young people be. . . . They have better things to do than getting tea for the likes of us.’ Nancy looked at her mother, whose face was set in a hard line of disappointment and shame.

‘Enjoy your evening then, Nance,’ she said. And they were gone. The car was starting with a series of jumps and leaps.

What
could Mrs Casey have heard, what did she mean? The only person she could have heard anything from was Mairead, or Mairead’s mother. What could they have been saying – that Nancy was irritating? Was that it?

She didn’t want to be in when they came back but where could she go? She had arranged no lift to the dance: she would as soon be hanged as to go out on the straight road and hitch all the way to the night entertainment which she wouldn’t enjoy anyway. She supposed she could always go to Ryan’s pub. She’d be bound to know people and it was her own home town and she was twenty-five years of age so she could do what she liked. She put on one of her freshly cleaned blouses which she ironed with great care. She decided the perm was an undoubted success and gave herself a spray of the perfume she had bought her mother last Christmas and set out.

It wasn’t bad in Ryan’s; some of the golfing people were buying big rounds, shouting at each other from the counter: what did you want with the vodka, Brian, did you want water with the Power’s, Derek? Celia was behind the counter helping her mother.

‘You don’t usually come in here,’ Celia said.

‘It’s a free country and I’m over twenty-one,’ Nancy said snappishly.

‘Oh Jesus, take it easy,’ Celia had said. ‘It’s too early for the fights.’

There was a phone in a booth and she saw Dee Burke making a call; their phone must be out of order at home. Nancy waved but Dee didn’t see her. Biddy Brady who had been two classes below Nancy at school had got engaged and she was celebrating with a group of the girls. The ring was being passed around and admired. She waved Nancy over to the group, and rather than sit on her own she went.

‘We’re putting a sum into the kitty each and then the drinks keep coming and we pay for it until the money runs out,’ said one girl helpfully.

‘Oh, I don’t think I’ll be here all that long,’ Nancy said hastily, and noticed a few odd looks being exchanged.

She waved at Mikey Burns who was carrying two drinks over to a corner.

‘Have you any pub jokes?’ Nancy asked, hoping he might stop and entertain them for a moment.

‘Not tonight, Nancy,’ he said, and didn’t even
pause. Mikey! Who would do anything for an audience! He was heading for the corner, a woman with her head down sat there, it looked like Billy Burns’ wife.

Billy was Mikey’s brother, the one that got the looks and the brains and the luck people said.

There was a bit of commotion behind the bar and Celia’s mother seemed to be shouting at her. It was hushed up but Celia looked very anxious. One of the Kennedy brothers had stepped in behind the bar to help wash glasses.

Nancy felt a bit dizzy. She had drunk two gins and orange which she had bought for herself and two as part of Biddy Brady’s celebration. She had had nothing to eat since lunchtime. She decided to get some fresh air and some chips in that order. She could always come back. She sat on the wall near the chip shop and ate them slowly. You could see the whole town from here: the Burkes’ house with all that lovely creeper cut away from the windows so neatly. She thought she saw Dee leaning out of a window smoking but it was darkish, she couldn’t be certain. Then there was the Fitzgeralds’ drapery, Tom’s family’s business. His two brothers and their wives worked there, as well as his father. They had a craft shop now attached to it, and they made up Irish tweeds into skirts for the visitors. Mrs Casey lived about a mile out so she couldn’t glare at her windows and imagine her mother eating lamb chops and
looking at television, counting the days with Mrs Casey until the
Late Late Show
came back from its summer break. When they had been planning the Dublin trip they had wanted Mairead and Nancy to get them tickets for the show, and Mairead had actually written and found out what the chances were. Nancy had thought it was madness of the first order.

It was chilly and the last chip was gone. She walked back to Ryan’s and thought she would go in the side entrance and visit the Ladies’ on the way. She nearly fell over Mrs Ryan who was sitting on the step.

‘Oh, it’s
Miss
Morris,’ the woman said with a very snide little laugh.

‘Goodnight, Mrs Ryan,’ said Nancy a bit nervously.

‘Oh Miss Morris, Miss Mean Morris. Mean as all get out, they say about you.’

She didn’t sound drunk. Her voice was steady and cold.

‘Who says that about me?’ Nancy was equally cold.

‘Everyone. Every single person who ever speaks your name. Poor Biddy Brady’s crowd of girls, just to mention a few. You sat down and took a couple of spirits off them and walked off. That’s class, Miss Morris, strong men have wanted to be able to do that and they’re not.’