turn back in to the kitchen and pick up my book, and the sound would come from upstairs of Min scrolling from station to station on the little transistor she kept on the pillow, so near to her face that it was half-covered by the frizz of wild, colourless hair.
And I could tell too from the rhythm of her heels on the stairs – I’d had the old carpet taken off and the wood stripped and varnished – whether she’d finally got out of bed for some plan that included me, or whether she was going to the pub.
‘Rosie!’ she’d exclaim in a friendly way as she came down the last two steps. ‘What has you sitting so quietly?’
This was a rhetorical question, of course, and it made no difference whether I answered or not. During the autumn I had the back door open to the yard. I loved that, the lozenge of light on the kitchen floor, the little yellow curtains swishing softly in the warm breeze; and she’d smile too at the genial scene. But as it grew colder her eyes would go immediately to the hearth.
‘That’s a great fire you have there!’ she’d say absent-mindedly, and she’d have already moved in to perch on the little blue armchair and pick up the tongs to add a few lumps of coal, or, if the fire was sullen, to carefully poke a few sticks into it at points where, when they lit, they would transform the whole thing. She was a genius at fires. ‘Thank God for coal!’ she’d say, shuttling fine slack onto her creation with the lightest of touches.
Sometimes, carried on by enthusiasm, she’d even refer to the fire in the range of the house she grew up in, in Stoneytown, out on Milbay Point.
I came to attention whenever she said that name. It was a quarry-workers’ settlement on the edge of the sea that she dismissed, but that to me was as exotic as Shangri-la.
‘Freezing we’d be in that oul’ place,’ she’d snort. ‘If the boats couldn’t make it over from Milbay to take the stone, we used to have no coal,’ she’d say, and she’d draw her chair right up to our fire with a dramatic shudder. ‘We could be weeks waiting on a bit of coal!’
I used to wonder why the fire mattered so much to her. Then one day I realised that in remote parts of Ireland in the dark, poverty-stricken 1930s, the fire was life itself. The range in a kitchen must have been the god of the house. People were completely dependent on it for cooking, for baking bread, for heating, for drying. There were woods near Stoneytown, Min conceded, but surely to God I knew that beechwood was no good for burning in a range?
She’d have her coat on ready to go out. But she got such satisfaction out of coaxing the fire to a blaze that she’d prop her big handbag on her lap and sit there peacefully looking into the flames, her face made young again by their pink reflections.
Not every day, but two or three times a week, she’d strain up then to the little mirror in the scullery to swipe on lipstick and drag a brush through her hair. A lot of people smiled quite unconsciously when they saw her because she was only four feet, eleven inches high and her eyes were as dark as a marmoset’s. I knew that she was nothing like as cute as she looked, but I often smiled at her little ways, too. Helplessly.
Then she’d carefully detach the page with the crossword from the rest of yesterday’s newspaper and go off to the Kilbride Inn. She did yesterday’s crossword because the answers were in today’s so she could look them up if she was stuck. It was accepted that I wasn’t welcome to accompany her.
I’d say to myself, why does she bother going up there? She only sits by herself anyway. I don’t understand her. And I don’t know that much about her, either, beyond the fact that her mother died when she was ten, and her father disappeared a year or so after I was born. Then I’d think – what does it matter whether you understand her or not? You’re stuck with her, anyway. She’d been a mother to me since the week I was born, but there’s no law that says you have to understand even a mother, much less an aunt who took over when her sister died. And I’d think, without resentment, it doesn’t bother her that she doesn’t understand me. What’s more, most of the people in the world don’t try to understand each other. Analysis is a disease of the Western, educated classes.
And yet – I remember examining this thought slowly, sitting in the quiet kitchen with Bell for once content to be on my lap – people can accept that the partners they choose are separate, other people. They can make love – I had, often – without having a clue to what was going through their lover’s head. They can look down on the dead body of a wife or husband and think, ‘I never really knew that person.’ But the woman who brought you up? I never in my whole life met anybody who didn’t feel entitled to know that woman.
I doubted if I would recognise any of the places in Min’s inner landscape. And what did she know of the miasma of images that kept me sitting dreamily at the kitchen table, as I wandered lazily among them. The seashore at dusk near Dakar, with the big crabs ambling down the sand into the even line of white foam. Clack-clack they went, and the waves went shush-shush. Or the oilcloth on the table on the grass outside a farmhouse on the Rigi and the taste of sharp cheese grated over fried eggs. Or schoolchildren, in Flanders, coming towards me in the dark on their way to school, on a causeway between fields of winter mud; the way the glow of their fluorescent armbands hung in the air as ghostly seagulls fed on the empty fields all around and dawn suffused the horizon. There was nothing to be done about the manner in which these images imprisoned me in solitary experience. It was life itself that had made me as distant from her as she, tip-tapping up to the pub with God knows what thoughts in her head, was distant from me.
My memories certainly didn’t suggest any particular path I could follow into the future. I’d open my laptop and google the agencies I’d always got my jobs from – UNESCO, Overseas Aid, World Opportunity, the European Parliament. And I’d drift off into fantasy. Myanmar, now. How about trying to get into Myanmar? Rangoon must be a worn, humid version of somewhere like Valletta, say, in the 1950s. Tropical, but with stone clock-towers and municipal flowerbeds. British gentility overlaid on foreignness in a thick, humid atmosphere. But would it be right to work in Myanmar? There was a job going in Adelaide. I could manage a foreign language bookshop in Adelaide standing on my head. Someone told me that the wines in Adelaide were marvellous. Or Maracaibo. They wanted somebody to run a big school there where they taught the oil workers English. Men. But Latin men… It had always been hard to be the way they wanted, even when I was young and I was trying to please.
Guatemala was my best bet. I was just about the most qualified Teacher of English as a Foreign Language in the world, and the beautiful town of Santiago was full of TEFL schools. I downloaded an application form for Santiago Atitlán. But there was no urgency to what I was doing. My hands would fall idle.
It takes a while to come back to a place.
When I was moving countries every few years or so, I acquired the privileges of an expatriate with every move. I could invent myself everywhere I went. But my women friends in Kilbride never let me get away with anything. They were, apparently, experts on how I should behave, though Peg – who was always around because she was Monty’s girlfriend – was six years younger than me; and Tessa, who’d been my friend since my first day working in Boody’s Bookshop, was at least six years older.
She’d been the shop steward back then and had taken a brisk line with all of us, as she still did with me. Soon after I came back there was a party for her, because she was taking early retirement from the union, to which I wore a fabulous little Italian black suit I could still just about fit into, and three-inch heels.
You really dressed up, didn’t you?’ Tessa said, when we were having a post-mortem. ‘Everyone was talking about you, Rosie, though I suppose that’s understandable, you’re still news. And that black suit is sensational. But what do you think? Could it do with a little something at the neck?’
And, in a seemingly neutral tone of voice, Peg said, ‘A lot of the girls there had come straight from work so they couldn’t dress up.’
‘Oh, give over!’ I laughed at them. But they weren’t even conscious of how they were always trying to teach me what a single woman in her mid-fifties was supposed to be like in Kilbride, Dublin, Ireland. One of