Chestnut Street (15 page)

Tonight she was going to say something to Gerry about the whole setup. Tonight she was going to sit calmly for the twenty minutes he might allot for a drink and explain that she was getting a very poor share out of everything they were meant to be having together. But she must say it calmly, because if she showed any emotion, he would say that she was behaving like his wife … with all the hidden menace that this remark implied … like the threat that she too would be abandoned. But Ronnie would be left with no car, no children, no dogs, no allowance. Ronnie, in fact, would be the one who would have to go. This was his house, not hers.

Perhaps she should leave it until they had more time; twenty minutes was not long enough to explain to his handsome, intelligent face all that was wrong, without seeing the flash of impatience and annoyance come across it. But when would they have time? This weekend was his one-a-month back with the family, so that the children wouldn’t grow up without knowing their father. If only she had something to do herself, she was sure she would make fewer demands, and indeed feel less need to make them.

The phone rang at that very moment, and she half expected it to be Gerry saying he had decided to change in the office, but it was the hesitant voice of a girl or a woman who sounded a little unsure that she was onto the right number.

“I’m looking for a Miss Ranger, who used to teach dancing at St. Mary’s a few years ago. I may not have the right number.”

Ronnie was stunned. Nobody ever rang her at Gerry’s place. She had never given the number to any of her decreasing circle of friends. They phoned her at the dancing school if they wanted her.

“Yes, but how did you know where to find me?” she asked guiltily. She was afraid that Gerry would come in at that moment and realize that someone had penetrated his own net of secrecy.

“It’s very complicated,” the voice said. “My name is Marion O’Rourke, and I’ve often wanted to find you, and just by chance I was having lunch with a man who works with Gerry, and he said, making conversation, you know, that Gerry lived with a woman called Ranger who was a dancer, so I thought I’d give it a go anyway. I’m delighted I found you in.”

Ronnie felt outraged that a pupil, someone she had taught, some girl she couldn’t remember, should have found her so easily. She felt even more annoyed that one of Gerry’s colleagues should mention, “just making conversation,” that Gerry lived with a dancing teacher. Where was the secrecy, where was the need to keep everything quiet now?

“I was wondering,” Marion went on, oblivious to the effect she was having, “would you like to have a meal with me sometime? I’d love to have a chat with you about old times, and I’m only here for a few days. It would be great to see you again.”

Ronnie was even more perplexed. It couldn’t be a plot? This wasn’t by any awful chance Gerry’s wife, wanting some kind of showdown?

“What old times?” she asked ungraciously.

The girl sounded hurt and embarrassed. “I’m sorry, Miss Ranger. I suppose it does sound funny—it’s just that … well, I owe you a lot, and I wanted to say … well, to thank you for teaching us dancing so well and to tell you a bit of what it meant to me—that was all.”

Ronnie was guilty at once.

“I’m very sorry … er … Marion. Of course that would be nice. It’s just that I never expected to be thanked or anything by a pupil. There are so many of them, you know, and they usually forget.”

Marion laughed, feeling cheered. “That’s right—we forget that we aren’t just as important to a teacher as the teacher is to us. You probably remember the people who taught you, but have forgotten all about us. Anyway, if you
are
free, in the next day or two I really would like to meet you … if you wouldn’t be bored.”

She sounded nice and straightforward, and easygoing. Ronnie hadn’t talked to anyone like that for quite a time. Marion O’Rourke? No, not an idea who she was. Half the girls in that St. Mary’s had Irish names anyway, including that bitch who ran the place, Sister Brigid, who had fought her for every penny, and ended up asking Ronnie for a contribution to the church building fund. In a way, it might be nice to meet someone from that life; they could have a few laughs about it.

“I’m free this evening,” she said suddenly.

“Great!” Marion was delighted. They made arrangements to meet at a restaurant. Ronnie wondered how they would recognize each other, but Marion assured her that everyone remembered their teachers, so she would do the identifying.

It put off any confrontation with Gerry and it saved her having to think of what to eat that night. She would have to leave now to get to the restaurant by seven, so Gerry could run his own bath and pour his own vodka and tonic.

She left a note. “Gone to have supper with an old friend. See you later on, love darling, Ronnie.” She was quite pleased with it. It showed nothing of the tension she had been feeling ten minutes earlier. She put on her cape and a little makeup, and headed out into the cold evening wind.

She looked around the restaurant expectantly. There were four women sitting alone at tables amongst the other mixes of couples
and groups. It interested her that women went out alone so much or were prepared to sit in restaurants alone waiting for companions. It wasn’t something she thought she would do herself. Perhaps I’m getting terribly old-fashioned and set in my ways, she thought suddenly.

From one table a girl with black curly hair and a black-and-white caftan waved enthusiastically. She had a great grin on her face and a bottle of white wine already opened on the table.

“Miss Ranger, you haven’t changed a bit—seven years and you look just the same.”

Seven years, thought Ronnie. She must be about twenty-three or twenty-four. Nice open manner—I can’t remember her from a crowd of kids in blue uniforms tied around the middle with pure blue sashes. Well, the convent didn’t kill her anyway; she escaped from Sister Brigid fairly unscathed.

“Marion, you’re going to have to call me Ronnie,” she said firmly. “I won’t let anyone in this restaurant realize that a grown-up, sophisticated woman like you was once my pupil.”

Marion beamed with pleasure. The meal got off to a good start. They talked about the town, the restaurant, the fact that more women ate out alone, the nonsense of having a full menu in English and then “café” instead of “coffee.” They talked about making your own wine, growing your own tomatoes, a film that had won awards for no reason, a by-election that had been a surprise. They talked about Marion’s job; she was a teacher, apparently.

“Do you teach dancing?” asked Ronnie. Really, this must be the reason the nice, bright girl had sought her out. Either she wanted to get some advice about where else to teach, or she wanted to compare notes about what it was like.

“You can’t be serious?” said Marion, startled.

“Well, why not?” said Ronnie. “I mean, I taught dancing for years—it’s not like being a lavatory cleaner or an astronaut, it’s a job a lot of people do.”

“I teach in a primary school,” Marion said. “I’ve been there two years now. We have a half-term—that’s why I’m away at the moment. But you can’t have thought for a moment that I’d have been able to teach dancing … me … were you joking?”

Ronnie was a bit confused. “Well, you said on the phone that you remembered and liked the dancing classes, and that you wanted to thank me.… I sort of had the idea that maybe you’d followed in my footsteps or something.”

Marion looked at her levelly.

“Miss Ranger, Ronnie, I mean, I’m sixteen stone weight. I weigh two hundred and twenty-four pounds with nothing on. That would be some dancer.”

“You don’t look it, but I don’t see that it would have made all that much difference, anyway. Dancing teachers don’t have to weigh in like boxers.”

Marion laughed. “I don’t look it because I wear tents. And I’m sitting down, but the reason I wanted to meet you and thank you was actually to do with my weight. You see, when the dancing classes started, I couldn’t bear to join them. Sister Brigid said that it would be six pounds a term for the course …”

“She only gave me three pounds a pupil,” spluttered Ronnie.

“Oh, the balance probably went to the church building fund,” said Marion. “Anyway, my father, who thought I must have everything, insisted. I remember the first day dreading it. I was so fat and ungainly, and even drill classes were a horror, gym was a nightmare, and I thought that dancing would be the worst of all.”

Ronnie looked at this calm girl sitting in front of her, but then we were all confused when we were kids.

“So, on the first day of the class I pretended to be ill, and I hid in the cloakroom until the lesson was over, and then I just came home and pretended I’d been. My father was so interested in it all and kept asking me what we had learned. I felt such a shit, thinking of him wasting his hard-earned six pounds on nothing, that the next day I determined to go. We were all lined up and
you were teaching us the steps of the samba. I remember it vividly the way you rocked backwards and forwards and the whole group were doing it soon, and then the bit I dreaded came where we had to pick partners and learn to do it as a couple. I knew nobody would ask me, and I’d already worked out that there was an uneven number so I
knew
I’d be the one left out. But before we actually got into twos, you came over and took my hand as your partner and the music started again. You kept shouting over the music, ‘Not so stiff, relax, let your bodies move, not just your legs, for God’s sake.’ They were all a bit stilted like puppets, and as you and I were dancing, we went past other couples and you gave them instructions. All the time you and I were dancing it perfectly. You asked me my name. Then when some of the others were still getting it wrong, you said, ‘Let yourself go, girl, for heaven’s sake—do it naturally with some rhythm like Marion and I are doing it.’ For the first time in my whole life I was there not looking pathetic and foolish. Nobody in the room thought you were pitying me—you had picked me before I was the last one left out.

“Miss Ranger, you have no idea how important that was. And it didn’t end there—the next day and the next and the next. You sort of automatically accepted that I was your partner and sometimes when steps were difficult … like that side bit in the tango, you would say, ‘Marion, for heaven’s sake, you go over that side and show one lot, and I’ll try and drum it into this lot here.’

“And amazingly everyone accepted that I was a good dancer and they used to ask me to show them the steps in the cloakroom and when we had school dances at the end of term … no boys, of course, just ourselves; the music was heathen enough for the nuns without having real live men in the place. But at these dances, people were always asking me to dance with them; I couldn’t accept all the girls who wanted to dance with me. And I can actually date all the growing up I did from that point. I used to hide, I used to get red over nothing. Whenever we were reading
in class and someone would come across the word
fat
I would be scarlet thinking they were all looking at me. Then I used to dread hearing about Falstaff, or about Caesar saying, ‘Let me have men about me that are fat … yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look.’ I thought the whole class was thinking about me. You really did a lot, so I just thought I’d tell you.”

Ronnie looked at her carefully. Yes, Marion had a chubby face, she had more than one chin when she laughed, her hands on the table were round and plump rather than long and tapering. Beneath the folds of that caftan there could well be rolls of flesh. But you’d have to be in a pretty weight-hunting mood to think, ‘This is a fatso.’ She looked so calm, Ronnie thought for the twentieth time; yes, that was definitely the word that described her. Could she really have undergone all these horrors, and did Ronnie really save her from them, or was it some romanticized tale to describe leaving the normal tortures of adolescence?

As if Marion had read her mind, she said, “You probably think I’m exaggerating all this, and that all convent schoolgirls were wretched and miserable, but it’s not like that. Fat girls were rubbish at school; the others may have been insecure too but they took it out on the fat ones. There were only two other fat girls in the school. I can remember their names to this day—one of them was in the dancing class but she was a very sulky girl anyway, and she had a best friend, so the two of them just giggled and didn’t really learn, and the others laughed at her attempts to dance when you got us all to do the basic steps of a slow waltz. Nobody, no one person, laughed at me, because you said, ‘Right, Marion, off you go; watch her feet, everybody.’ And they did—they watched my feet with something like respect for the first time in my life.”

Ronnie didn’t know what to say. Eventually she said, “I don’t know whether this will make you feel better or worse, but I just don’t remember you. I suppose that means you can’t have
seemed
fat and pathetic to me. I’m not very kind, you know; I couldn’t have been doing it out of pity. I probably just found you, the one
kid who had a sense of rhythm and used you to help me. You shouldn’t really thank me for being kind, because I don’t remember being kind. It’s not in my nature.”

“I know,” said Marion frankly. “You weren’t very kind or interested in us, really. You weren’t like Sister Paul, who always went out of her way to be nice to the less fortunate ones. If you had raging acne or came from a very poor family or were fat, Sister Paul took you under her Christian charity wing. It was patronizing and embarrassing beyond belief. But you were quite indifferent, and a bit hard—that’s what made me think, I really might look normal to you, and that’s what made all the difference.”

Indifferent, and a bit hard. A tough, self-interested, rather sour young woman. That’s what I was then, that’s what I am now, Ronnie thought. No wonder Gerry expects me to be able to take things the way they are. He probably assumes that when my self-interest takes me elsewhere I’ll move off from him, and that he is entitled to act the same way. Even this grateful schoolgirl saw what I was all those years ago.

“How did you know a friend of Gerry’s?” Ronnie asked suddenly.