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Authors: Eílís Ní Dhuibhne

The Shelter of Neighbours (9 page)

BOOK: The Shelter of Neighbours
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Such arrangements are not common, but from her chats in the library, Sara knows that odd arrangements are on the increase. Separated couples do not make the clean break that was de rigueur in the past. Now it is all right to re-create a domestic limbo, to bring the new partners home to the old partners, to realign the family players into a formation that looks like a
ménage à trois
, or
à quatre
, or
à dix
. High drama is out of fashion. Nobody screams, ‘Betrayal!' They regroup, grinning and murmuring, ‘Think of the children!'

Lisa is short and roundly built. She keeps her fair hair tied in a bun on the top of her head and, of course, she has a fringe. Surprised blue eyes. Face pink as a cupcake. She doesn't have a new partner, as far as Sara knows. But she could have; she's attractive enough, in mind and body.

Lisa looks calm and relaxed when she arrives. She bounces into the cool, dim hall.

‘Welcome back!' she laughs. ‘Was it good?'

‘Very good,' says Sara.

The sun is still shining, so they go to sit at the back of the house, on a terrace overlooking the suburban valley. Sara's house is built on the side of a steep enough hill, one of many houses scattered among the trees. All the gardens are nature gardens: patches of hillside. They aren't separated by fences, but everyone knows exactly where their boundary is, and they never step over it.

They drink a glass of champagne, which seems appropriate for such a sunny, glowing afternoon, and suits Lisa's clothes. She is dressed in a very summery, girlish outfit: a long, flowery cotton skirt, a pink top with lace around the neckline. Also, a straw hat with a floppy brim and a small white daisy in its pink band. She is tanned, and she has lost weight since Sara last saw her, about six weeks ago. Her whole appearance suggests that she has good news, and the hat hints at what the good news involves: love.

‘I got married,' Lisa says. She smiles and raises her glass.

Sara's face does not drop but her response is slower than it might be. She forgets to raise her glass as she stares past Lisa's hat at a blue hydrangea down at the end of the garden and takes a few seconds to let this information sink in.

‘Congratulations!' She jumps up, all smiles, and kisses Lisa on the cheek, which smells of Chanel No. 5, not a perfume Lisa ever wore before. (She used to smell of washing powder and sweat.) ‘That's wonderful!' She sits down again and gulps some wine. ‘Who is …' How do you best put it? The lucky man? ‘Who … em … is it?'

It occurs to her that it could just be her former husband. Remarrying your ex is an event that occurs among the children of the old library users; three or four of her regular readers have experienced this over the past few years (they, the old mothers, don't get invited to the second weddings, which are very low key). But would remarrying Anders call for such a physical transformation? The perfume, perhaps. But would marrying your ex call for a hat, with a flower in the brim? Probably not. Anders would think that hat was silly.

‘He's someone I met on holiday,' says Lisa. ‘You remember, Kirsten and I went to Turkey?' Kirsten is the younger daughter; she's doing media studies, like most people's younger daughters. ‘To a resort on the Black Sea. Well, she made friends with some young folk at the hotel and I was left to my own devices most of the time.' That would be Kirsten all right. ‘Pottering around the bazaar, sitting on the beach in solitary splendour. Well, I often had to eat alone! You know how it can be for single ladies!' She giggles gleefully, no longer one of them.

‘Oh yes.' Sara sees, incongruously, a boiled sausage in a nest of sauerkraut. ‘I know, all right.'

Lisa pauses and looks at her, smelling a story. But she is too eager to tell her own to delve.

‘I was sitting outside a restaurant, eating lunch, happy as a clam. It doesn't bother me to be alone, especially during the day.'

Sara laughs.

‘I mean, eating during the day. Eating dinner at night in a hotel is different. I don't like being alone for that. You know what I mean.'

Sara nods.

‘Anyway, there I was, sun and wine, sardines and bread. This man came up to my table and asked if he could join me. The tables were otherwise full. Cheeky devil, I thought, but for some reason, possibly wine-induced, I said yes. Anyway, one thing led to another and now I'm married. To someone I picked up in a restaurant. It's unbelievable.'

The only unbelievable part of the story is that he married her, Sara thinks. Suddenly she remembers a woman she knew when she lived in London, before she came here. Sara was teaching then, and this woman was a fellow teacher, one of the single ladies who seemed to be so numerous back then – now she knows that they seemed numerous in schools and hospitals and libraries because they were the only women who had jobs. The married ones were all at home, glad to be there and smug about it, too, as she recalls, since marriage was still considered a victory for a young woman, her passport to economic security and a good life, an escape from the schools and the offices.

This woman – whose name was Bridget – began to joke about having married the school gardener, who was called (incredibly) Paddy. Maybe the conjunction of the names planted the idea in her head? Bridget described the wedding in great detail: what she wore (an off-the-shoulder cream silk dress, a cream hat with a silvery veil and mauve flowers), what he wore, what they ate (roast lamb with mint sauce, sherry trifle or strawberries and cream for dessert). The honeymoon was in Tenerife and they had put a deposit on a dinky little house in Wimbledon.

The story went on for weeks, becoming more elaborate, and more embarrassing for everyone in the staffroom. Their main concern was Paddy, that he should not get wind of it – it wasn't likely, since he never came to the staffroom, having a shed in the grounds, where he stored his tools and drank his tea. But it turned out that Bridget was the person they should have been worried about. One day she didn't come to work. She'd taken an overdose of sleeping pills. At the funeral they shrugged and said they'd never suspected that she was depressed, she always smiled so much and loved a joke. She drank, of course, some added, as if that explained a lot.

So did Lisa. Maybe she is making it all up.

‘He's called Tacumsin,' she is saying. ‘He's divorced and is a lawyer.'

Sara wants more specific details. She asks where the wedding took place.

‘In the registry office in this city,' says Lisa, seeing her game. ‘The marriage is as valid as boiled potatoes.'

‘So, has he moved in with you?' Sara feels more concerned, not less.

‘No,' says Lisa. ‘I'm going to move in with him. In Istanbul.'

What about your job and your precious children? Sara needs to know. Not to mention your friends, your country, your home? And that now-you-see-him-now-you-don't ex-husband of yours?

‘It's ME-time!' Lisa closes her eyes and smiles in the direction of the sky, where the sun is beginning to sink into the velvety trees. She opens them wide and speaks quickly. ‘I've already handed in my notice to the library, so there's no need to worry about that. The kids will stay in the house here; I don't need to sell it and they can look after themselves, really.'

So. Tacumsin is not a con man, after your house and salary, and access to the best social welfare system in Europe?

‘He's rich,' Lisa says. ‘Isn't it lucky? He's got a big apartment in Istanbul and a summer place by the sea. His former wife took their house, which is a kind of palace.'

‘Have you seen the apartment?' Sara doesn't have to ask about the palace.

‘I've seen the summer apartment,' Lisa says. ‘Sara, don't be so suspicious! He's bona fide. He loves me! I know it's hard to believe.'

Sara murmurs something, which Lisa doesn't pay any attention to.

‘I'm a big girl, I can look after myself,' she says. She gives Sara a big kiss on the lips and hugs her. ‘Look, you come and see the apartment for yourself. And meet Tacumsin. Come around Christmas, do a bit of shopping. How about it?'

‘That would be lovely,' says Sara, with as much enthusiasm as she can muster.

‘I am so happy,' says Lisa, and she laughs aloud, a laugh of pleasure and triumph. Or bliss.

Sara doesn't ask what age this man is, or what he looks like or what he's like in bed. But the last she can guess.

In the spring of this year, Sara went alone to a strange restaurant. This was in a city in the south, in another country, where she attended a conference on the digitisation of library records. For the past two years, digitisation of library records has been the main topic at all the library conferences. Sara doesn't find it very enthralling as a subject. (Why can't they just copy the books, instead of talking about it as if it were rocket science?) But she goes to the conferences because she likes the free trips to nice cities. She goes to three or four a year, and has seen most of the capitals of Europe, and a few others, in this way, at the expense of the nation. She always stays on for a few days after each conference to look around. This she was doing on the occasion in question, keeping to her room in an old hotel in the centre of the old town. The hotel was described as ‘charming' on the Internet, which seemed to mean there was old furniture in the bedrooms – one baroque chair in a dusty shade of pink in hers; the head of the library had a grand piano in his, apparently, and a four-poster bed. There were faded old prints on the walls. Also, the hotel had literary associations: in the lobby hung a portrait of a famous writer who liked to stay there: Franz Kafka.

Some of the other librarians had stayed on after the conference, too, and were visiting a Nazi concentration camp at Mauthausen, near Linz, about an hour's journey from the city. Sara decided to forego the experience. She wasn't attracted to concentration camps, as tourist destinations, and this wasn't one of the well-known ones. She'd never heard of it, in fact. So she spent her free morning tramping around the museums and art galleries. These were many and magnificent and had been built by the emperors to store the collections they had taken from other countries, sometimes looting, sometimes buying (at cheap prices). She had seen the feather headdress with which Cortez had been presented by a great Mexican king. And, more oddly, a reconstructed house from Greenland. It was part of the Inuit collection. Just a little wooden house, not an igloo, probably something made from a pre-fab in a packet and put up by some Greenlander in the 1950s or thereabouts. It was of Scandinavian design, a bit like the summer houses around Thomas's lake, or a bit like their garden sheds. Just one room, with a range and a few sticks of furniture, some pictures of Christian saints, the kind you see in Ireland.

Thomas wrote a historical novel about it, Greenland, about a Norse settlement that had died out in the Middle Ages, nobody knows why. Sara had visited the site of the settlement with him. Brattahlid; now it has an Inuit name but she and Thomas called it by the Old Norse one, which is easier to remember. At Brattahlid people live in concrete apartment blocks, which look as if they were built by some Soviet apparatchik who'd strayed over from Siberia. But there had been a village with a little shop, so maybe there were some small houses, too. Thomas had been very excited by the place, and she had become infected by that. She'd read all about the old settlement, and the new settlement, too. She could have written a book about it herself, by the end of the visit. But she didn't. She has always believed she could write a novel, if she wanted to; she watches Thomas doing it, it looks easy enough, easier than lots of things. But she has never bothered. Why should she? There are enough books in the world – thousands, that nobody ever reads, in the library where she works.

She hadn't thought about the Inuit for years. The sight of that little house, so humble and simple, in this museum, transformed from basic cabin to work of art by virtue of a change of venue, was deeply moving. Her interest in the people of that bleak, icy country revived.

But not for long. As is the way with such moments of inspiration, in museums, her profound feelings were replaced by more mundane considerations the second she stepped out the door. Lunch. She wanted to eat some local dish – her colleagues had eaten at an Italian restaurant, a Greek trattoria, a French bistro, but hadn't tried the native cuisine. Maybe with good reason – the city is famed for its cakes, not its dinners. But there was an old-fashioned, stodgy-looking restaurant near the museum, and she decided to try that, now that she was alone.

When she stepped inside, she knew she had made a mistake. It was a dark, cluttered room. Thick curtains shut out daylight and the place looked smoky, even though nobody was smoking. The tables were covered with heavy green cloth, the walls panelled with dark wood. It looked more like a pub than a restaurant, but it was crammed with people eating. Waiters ran around frantically, balancing trays and plates heaped with food. Sara decided to leave, to go back to the Italian place in the hotel. But before she could escape, a waiter came and insisted he could find her a table. He asked her to sit on a sofa near the reception desk and she felt obliged to obey him. Five minutes went by. Eventually, another waiter came and smiled as he pushed Sara towards a table. It wasn't empty. Would she mind? She would, but she agreed, anyway, and next thing found herself seated opposite a man who was eating some sort of stew, not presented with any attempt at style. She buried her head in the menu and ordered what looked like the most local dish; the menu was handwritten and the writing wasn't very legible, apart from which she only understood some of the words. She also ordered a glass of wine – the man had one.

He gave her a friendly smile. That is where she made her first mistake: she returned it.

He looked like the kind of food she was looking for: local and authentic. Black hair, skin like polished copper. His shirt was snow white, with billowing sleeves, framed in a waistcoat of black boiled wool, or felt, which was the most typical cloth of the country. Sara could only see him from the waist up, so unfortunately could not take note of his trousers: probably not made of leather, probably perfectly ordinary black trousers, or jeans, although knee breeches would have complemented the folksy look of the waistcoat. He was like a woodcutter in a fairytale; he reminded her of Red Riding Hood's father. This country was rich in fairytales, forests and wild animals, abandoned children. Looking at him, sipping his glass of white wine, you could see where those characters had come from.

BOOK: The Shelter of Neighbours
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