Chestnut Street (5 page)

“But it’s our life!” cried Larry. “We’ve always said, believed that the world is the way it is because people did a whole lot of things
without even thinking what they meant in order to please other people. That’s what makes love lose its meaning.”

“I know.” She spoke from the heart.

She did know and she agreed with him. Real love had nothing to do with Deirdre pretending to David’s family that it was all a fishing holiday, just so that Deirdre’s family could sleep easy in their beds.

The next weekend she went home, she told her mother that she would be bringing a friend to stay for Deirdre’s wedding.

“She’ll have to share your room,” Maura’s mother said. “Your sister will be home for the weekend; you know how she loves a wedding.”

“It’s a man friend,” Maura said and had the pleasure of watching her mother’s face change color.

“Well, why in the Lord’s name didn’t you say so earlier, and we could have booked the hotel? Now it’s full with all those Welsh people coming for the wedding.”

“Can’t the holy nun share with me? It’s only a night.”

“Maura, I’ll thank you not to make fun of your sister and the vows she took—you know she can’t share a room, not since she went into that nun’s cell.”

“God, Mam, it doesn’t matter where he sleeps. He can sleep in the dining room, can’t he?”

“He cannot. And tell me is he by way of being a boyfriend?”

“Mam, I’m twenty-five going on twenty-six—you don’t call it that nowadays.”

“What do you call it, might I ask?”

“A friend, like I said … Larry’s a friend.”

“It doesn’t do getting your name up with a man like this and just telling people that he is a friend, and really I don’t know what your father will say.”

“I don’t know what that expression means, ‘getting your name up’ with someone, and you and I know very well what my father
will say; he will say nothing, as he has said for the past thirty and more years.”

“You’re a very difficult young woman, Maura. I’m not surprised that no man has seen fit to take you on.”

“Mam, Larry is coming to Deirdre’s wedding. I don’t care whether he sleeps with you or with me or with the nun, but could we drop the lectures.”

And later Larry said, “I’m looking forward to it all. And if there’s anything I can do to help, you must let me know.”

It was too late to say that the most helpful thing would be to stay in Dublin, so Maura smiled wanly.

“Entertain the Welsh,” she said. “That might be the best help.”

Maura and Larry drove down together. There was barely time for introductions before Maura left for Deirdre’s house to get ready. Deirdre was very over–made up, her white lace dress a little loose around the waistline to hide the very good news that had been confirmed a couple of months ago.

“I hear you brought a fellow,” she said as she put on her eye shadow.

“A sort of a fellow,” Maura admitted, not daring to think about the conversations now taking place between her mother and Larry. “You look lovely, Deirdre.”

But the bride had little time for compliments.

“Just pray that David’s family stay good humored,” she said. “You’ve never seen them when they glower; it’s a terrible thing to see.”

Deirdre had hired an accordionist, as she had planned to do all those years ago. He was a man with a very, very red face, and there was some doubt expressed about his staying power.

“Don’t worry about him,” Maura said to Deirdre. “He’ll be fine when the time comes.”

She didn’t think it necessary to tell the bride about to depart for the church that the accordionist was on a high stool in the hotel already getting himself in the mood. His first few squawks were so
disastrous that a shuffle of embarrassment began to ripple around the wedding party. Somewhere in the body of the dining room, Larry was quietly asking did anyone have a guitar, and to her horror, from the top table, Maura saw her lover and her poisonous young brother, Brendan, heading out together. No scenario could have been as bad as this. Minutes later, she saw in disbelief, Larry begin to strum and to sing in a very uncertain and shaky voice the first three lines of “Men of Harlech.” As if by magic the Welsh chests swelled up and the hotel dining room echoed to the sounds of a male voice choir singing their hearts out. They barely paused to swallow the soup and roast chicken as they thundered through “The Ash Grove” and “We’ll Keep a Welcome in the Hillsides.” Larry kept “Bread of Heaven” till just before the wedding cake and the speeches. By this time the wedding was such a thundering success that David’s family hardly wanted to go off fishing at all; they wanted to spend a week singing in this hotel.

Maura was not a serious drinker, but the strain had been rather a lot for her, and mercifully she was so reached by it all that she did not realize the sleeping arrangements involved Larry, the one and only great love of her life, sharing a room with her brother Brendan, the most smelly and horrible person in Ireland.

Maura slept a drunken, disturbed sleep and woke with an inexplicable thirst and a need for rehydration, unaware that Brendan had been filling Larry in on the situation. He thought Larry was one of the Welsh contingent. He made an attempt to explain Ireland to him. He told about the hardware shop, and how his father didn’t speak much at home, but loved talking to farmers about tractors.

He told how his big brother didn’t know how to get girls and was always making grabs at them, which they hated. How his eldest sister saw visions up in the convent, and how his other sister had missed the boat. He didn’t know what boat, but there was some boat she should have caught somewhere, and then she would have got married like all her friends did, and all her mother’s
friends used to come to the house and sympathize because Maura had missed the boat.

Brendan said that he was going to be a famous guitarist himself and was very interested in the notion that he might learn a few basic chords and perhaps even read music one day.

Larry and Maura were leaving around lunchtime, Maura with an unaccustomed hangover, Larry with a new understanding about life in a small town.

Maura’s mother clucked around the car.

“Will we be seeing you around again? I mean, will you and … er … Maura be coming back here together?” she asked, eyes darting from one face to the other.

Maura wanted to reach out from the car and, with all the strength that remained in her weak body, deliver a stinging blow to her mother’s chin that would knock her senseless.

“He lives in Wales,” said Brendan, amazed that people could be so stupid.

“Not all the time,” Larry said diplomatically. “And if I were invited, I would love to come back here again and again and get to know you as I hope Maura and I will get to know each other too.”

Maura looked at him weakly; this was worse than she had believed possible—now their expectations were really high. Three miles down the road he stopped and asked her to marry him.

“You’re doing it out of pity,” she said.

“No, I’m doing it because it’s right,” he said.

“Ask me later when I’m better,” she said.

“No. Tell me now.”

“It’s only a day, one day out of our lives; yesterday wasn’t bad.”

“If you think that wedding day was good, you ain’t seen nothing yet!”

He told her that he wanted the church full of people in big hats like the one she had worn.

It was only one of the many aspects of the dream they both shared.

Fay barely knew that she
had
an uncle. He hadn’t come to her father’s funeral, he never got in touch with her and her brother, Finbarr, about anything at all. He had not been mentioned by anyone in the family.

So it was a total surprise when she got the letter from a district nurse way at the other side of the city asking if Fay could become involved in the matter of her uncle, Mr. J. K. O’Brien of 28 Chestnut Street. Mr. O’Brien was, at present, in hospital and quite frail. He could be released only after a conference with a relative. Her name had been given as his only surviving relation.

At first Fay was about to say it was a mistake. She didn’t know anyone in Chestnut Street, but then her name was O’Brien and on her mother and father’s wedding certificate the best man’s name had been written down as James Kenneth O’Brien. He could be her father’s brother. But why get in contact now?

Fay was going to be twenty-five on her next birthday. What could explain the silence, coldness and distance of a quarter of a century? She would ask her own brother, Finbarr, but he was away. He worked as a steward on a liner and was often gone for months at a time.

“Don’t get involved, Fay, I beg you,” her friend Suzanne advised. “You’re too kind, too easygoing. This old guy will want you to clean his house, wash his smalls, do his shopping, all in the name of family. But where was he when you needed him?”

“I didn’t need him,” Fay said.

“Yes you did, when they came and took the house from under you after your father died …”

“To be fair, there were a lot of debts and he hadn’t paid the rent for a while,” Fay said.

“Yeah, but a couple of hundred from Uncle James Kenneth would have helped.”

“He might not have had it.” Fay was defensive.

“If he lives in Chestnut Street he has it. Those houses are going up in value every day; remember that before you agree to do every hand’s turn for him, Fay.”

The girls had been friends since school. They worked side by side in a dry cleaner’s and lived on dreams that one day two handsome, rich American men would come in to have their elegant suits pressed. Their eyes would meet the eyes of Fay and Suzanne and the next thing would be dinner, almost the next thing would be marriage and then there would be a life of ecstasy in Malibu.

But these men never turned up, so Suzanne and Fay shared a bed-sitter and saved some money every week to spend on a holiday in Ibiza in case the American movie men had taken their sharp suits there instead.

“I’ll go and meet the nurse anyway,” Fay said.

Nurse Williams was brisk and to the point. Mr. O’Brien had suffered a mild stroke; they needed to be sure that there was someone to keep an eye on him, to make sure that he took his medication, that he ate sensibly and looked after himself. Often it was a matter of post-stroke depression, and if this were to be avoided they
would need to be sure that he wasn’t left to wallow around on his own.

“I don’t think you understand, Nurse. This isn’t a loving extended family. I never saw the man in my life, and he never remembered me or my existence until he needed me.”

“He remembered you and agreed that we get in touch only after a lot of probing on our part and a great deal of reassurance that you would not be put out. We told him it would only be a formality.”

“And would it? Be only a formality, I mean?” Fay asked.

“No, to be honest, I think it would be more of a commitment, unless of course you could come to some arrangement with his neighbors.”

“What are they like?”

“Well, Mr. O’Brien has bad luck in one way. The neighbors on either side are absentee landlords, people who own the property but rent their places, so the cast keeps changing. Some teenager down in Number Eighteen feeds his cat for him. I know that there’s a nice, but fairly scatty, hippie girl nearby in Twenty-Six, and a rather earnest couple in Number Twenty-Five, but perhaps you could make further inquiries …”

“What do they call him? ‘James’? ‘Jim’? ‘Kenneth’?” Fay asked.

“I’m afraid they call him ‘Mr. O’Brien,’ even us. It’s what he wants,” Nurse Williams said apologetically.

“Everyone?”

“Yes, everyone.”

“Heigh-ho,” said Fay.

“I’m Martin O’Brien’s daughter, Fay,” she said to the small man in the hospital bed.

“And where did he get a name like that for you?” the man said.

“He and my mother baptized me Mary Faith. I chose Fay.”

“Huh,” he said.

“And what do people call
you
?” she asked.

“You won’t be here long enough for it to matter,” the man said.

“Are you normally this charming to everyone or is it only because I am your brother’s daughter that you’re making a special effort with me?” Fay asked.