No Drinking, No Dancing, No Doctors, page 2
Beulah found most of the Poleite ways easier though. Radios and television were distractions and she was pleased to keep them out of the house. There was nothing wrong with sewing and reading of an evening. She still wore her long black hair twisted up in a bun. Even if she went against the rules now and had it cut, how could she possibly walk into a hairdresser’s? She wouldn’t know what to do, what to say, where to sit. The way hairdressers had big wide glass windows for the whole world to see her hair, all wet and plastered to her head, or whorled all round in curlers or folded into stiff tin-foil packets. Who in their right minds would want to be exposed like that? Furthermore, she’d have to stick her head into the washbasin, and how would she know that it was clean, and God knows who’d stuck their head in there before her.
She knew that people said she dyed her hair and she thought herself that it was a kind of a curse the way her hair had stayed black and youthful over the ageing face beneath it. Brushing it out at night, she stopped sometimes in front of the mirror in amazement. The blackness of it and her yellowy white face underneath, creased as an old skirt. Was this her face? And these her painful thumbs?
Hand washing had nothing to do with the pains in her hands. Why did Hester keep saying it? Why couldn’t Hester leave things alone? Why couldn’t she leave Beulah alone? Hadn’t Beulah agreed all those years ago to start up the B&B? The greasy smell of rashers and the clatter of Hester talking to the guests. God knows what they did in the beds. No wonder Beulah had to belt the sheets against the wall when they were gone. Although they hardly ever had guests, from time to time there was the nagging fear that some might turn up. If she heard the sound of a car slowing down at the top of the drive, Beulah would run up in her Wellingtons and if they were strangers, take her hair down and shake it in the way she imagined mad people did. Cars speeded up again.
Beulah had always done her quiet best to discourage guests, once wearing Louis’s old broad-brimmed hat and standing outside the dining-room window, making faces at a timid family from Roscommon who’d got lost on their way to the Cork-Swansea ferry. They cowered so much over their breakfast that they even irritated Hester, who had no idea of the tricks Beulah was playing behind her back.
Beulah knew her hands were as strong as ever, there was just that ache around the thumbs. She should never have told Hester about the X-ray. Now Hester wouldn’t be able to stop talking about it and there was a whole week to wait for the results.
The day Beulah went to see Dr Costello, the surgery was full. She had to wait a long time but he always saw her without an appointment. She thought that she’d be full of health after going to surgery. ‘Oh, that man is better than a tonic!’ Nellie Sheehan used to say. ‘And he’s so sincere.’
Infidels often spoke about vitamin tablets and tonics and God-like doctors. Beulah listened enviously. She, too, wanted to have ‘rude health’ and to be ‘absolutely flying’ and ‘full of beans’.
At first her stomach was full of a kind of a vicarious excitement that might have meant that she was full of beans, but she soon realised that it was only excitement because she was flying in the face of the Poleites. She didn’t think that she could feel excitement after John’s death, but she did. And after the excitement wore off, she didn’t feel any better. Joe Costello grew older and greyer and more tired. She began to wonder was rude health what she had before she started going to him.
But it didn’t matter how many times she went to see him, she never lost the sense of anticipation. She never stopped being disappointed that he didn’t pull a miracle like a soft white rabbit out of a hat.
‘I’ve a pain in my hands. It’s not arthritis, is it?’
‘Sit down, Beulah.’ He had less and less time to talk these days. He went straight for the drawer of the desk. Usually when Joe was busy, it was to get out his prescription pad. This time, he took a yellow form from the top drawer on the right-hand side of his desk. There’s only one way, Beulah, to check it out and that’s an X-ray. Now there’s nothing to worry about in an X-ray these days.’
‘No,’ lied Beulah, thinking if only he touched her hands she would be cured.
The tiniest amount of X-ray, the quarter of a blink of an eye.’ He handed her the X-ray form. ‘Come back in a week for the result.’
‘Mind yourself, now,’ he said, as she reached the door. She walked out, wondering if he would ever have the time to examine her properly again.
Beulah wondered about Joe as she plaited her hair and walked downstairs to the little scullery where a handful of broderie anglaise cloths lay soaking in Lux. She remembered him when he was young, talking about bones and muscles and blood corpuscles. It was a language forbidden to Beulah and she was drawn to Joe’s words. It made his face come alive, his brown eyes burning as if there was fire behind them. A pity she couldn’t have gone to him then. When he was such a fervent believer.
Beulah winced with pain, it would be too bad to have exchanged her own beliefs for some other system that was also on its way out. Beulah swished the cloths, her big hands moving in and out of the cold water. She stood for a long time, pushing the cloths through the water, until her hands grew wrinkled and shrunken like a monkey’s paws. When the pain grew unbearable, she began to wring out the cloths slowly and carefully.
She thought about Christmas, when she and Hester would get the ladder and take down the creaking B&B sign from the pole at the end of the lane. They would begin the baking. Puddings, cakes, pies. Hester’s special porter cake. They weren’t taking any guests for the month of December. Beulah had been forceful about that.
‘What about the lost and desperate travellers?’ asked Hester.
They’re the only ones we ever get.’
‘But it’s been ten years now since we’ve had anyone, it wouldn’t kill us to help out in the season of goodwill towards all men?’
‘They can drop like flies on the main road for all I care,’ said Beulah. ‘And isn’t the family the most important of all at Christmas?’
Hester wasn’t really sure what was most important at Christmas, there was no minister to ask these days and while Hester was wondering, Beulah drove her point home and won. The B&B sign was coming down. Hester agreed that there would be enough to do now with Leah and Beccy coming for Christmas.
Beulah had always looked forward to Christmas. No more greasy fry-ups and guests chatting on and on to Hester about taxation and travellers, she still remembered every dreadful detail from the last guests they had in 1987. Soon she would be taking down the curtains and sitting out in the lovely October sunshine, with a big bath of suds. An Indian summer they were having.
Hester hummed behind her, carefully disentangling tinsel and paper chains. ‘We’ll have to go to town for new stuff.’
Beulah thought that she would bring out her box of starch. Just the right kind of thing to be opening at Christmas time with its picture of a robin on the front of the box. She didn’t use it all the year round because Nellie Sheehan had run out of starch down at the Cross and she said she couldn’t get it anymore, that the wholesalers didn’t have it. Beulah wondered if that was true. She liked Nellie so she hoped that she was lying.
A holly wreath hanging on the newly painted front door. The smell of ironing, three damask tablecloths, twenty-four napkins. Everything would be crisp and white like frost and snow. Everything pure and homely, grand thoughts to be having, until her thumbs twinged again and Hester’s complaints about the state of the decorations became the most annoying scratchy talk that she’d ever had to endure.
Chapter Three
Beulah and Hester never mentioned to each other the possibility that Leah wouldn’t turn up for Christmas at all, that she would cancel at the last moment, as she did in 1985 and 1986 and 1988. And 1990 and 1994 and two years ago in 1995. Left them high and dry with their turkeys and pickles and pies. Their Christmas cake and their plum puddings. They couldn’t even bring the wasted food up to Nellie Sheehan, who was in touch with poor people, because they couldn’t bear her to pity them.
Beulah and Hester didn’t like this kind of food themselves so they threw the whole lot out. Carefully, late at night, in sealed bags in case Danny Fox was watching. The turkey was the worst of all, it was like trying to get rid of a murdered body.
‘If we had a dog, now . . .’ Hester breathed grimly as she tied yet another black bag around the lumpy parcel.
Beulah and Hester ate Denny’s Irish Stew from a tin, cooked ham, fish fingers and rashers. They couldn’t stand plum pudding and Christmas cake. They ate lemonade swiss roll and crunchies and their special treat was when they went to town and bought four little trifle cakes in white pleated paper cases from the confectioner’s. Neither did they use damask tablecloths and starched napkins, but those, at least, weren’t wasted, they could be used again.
Beulah and Hester agreed that it was the expense that was galling, that they didn’t really mind, even though they had been dying to see Beccy. Especially after all the interesting snippets that Leah had been dropping over the phone; ‘No, her hair is gone dark, yes like a raven and very long. I think she’ll go in for science, but they tell me she’s very fond of religion too, isn’t that unusual for someone nowadays? She’s learning the flute, she won three medals for Irish dancing. She’s reading George Eliot.’
‘Leah would never trick us again, would she?’ Beulah asked, the morning of her X-ray appointment, when the two of them sat beside the range drinking tea, custard creams lying ignored on the plate.
‘Leah was never like that, she was never a blackguard,’ Hester said. ‘She must have her own troubles.’
‘What troubles could she possibly have with her grand job and her daughter grown up?’ Beulah snapped. ‘Beccy is eighteen and we haven’t seen her since she was three. She might as well be in Australia!’
Leah had always been difficult. She had resented Beulah’s attentions to John. Beulah hadn’t known at the time. If Leah could have come out straight with it instead of hanging around with Hester and making it look like she preferred Hester and didn’t care too much about Beulah. If only she hadn’t waited until after John’s death.
‘It’s too late, now, Mama,’ she said, when Beulah put her hand out beside the coffin.
‘Young people can be cruel,’ Hester said. ‘Give her time.’
But Beulah knew only too well about young people. Hadn’t she been one herself once? A young cruel person. And always paying the price when it was too late. She didn’t want it to be too late for Leah. But she was far too proud to plead again.
‘You have to try harder,’ said Hester. ‘Don’t you know that she’s as proud as yourself?’
‘And doesn’t that mean that it’s only useless to be trying at all?’
‘Beulah, she hasn’t just lost her brother, she has lost her twin. You know John was a big part of Leah.’
‘Isn’t it funny now that Beccy likes religion,’ said Hester.
‘Ah, it’s not the same thing as being religious, though. I would say that Beccy has a studious interest, the same as her father had. She would like to be examining us now like insects or something. There’s a lot of people like that around nowadays, and they’re mostly looking for faults. The infidels get a lot of them, Nellie Sheehan told me, going round trying to embarrass everyone.’
‘Well, infidels have a lot to be embarrassed about,’ sniffed Hester. ‘What about the way we were treated in school?’
Beulah didn’t bother to answer. She knew Hester well enough to know that she’d run a mile from any kind of an investigation. She was thinking about Leah’s husband, Peter. Leah pushed Beulah away at John’s funeral. She said that Peter was her only support. She only said it to hurt her, Beulah knew that and Hester said so. As if a twenty-six-year-old girl as determined as Leah wasn’t capable of picking up her bags and going off to Dublin on her own. ‘You never held my hand when we were walking over Patrick’s bridge,’ said Leah, ‘and I was terrified that I’d fall between the pillars into the Lee. You always held John’s hand, though. Too much, I’d say.’
Peter was red in the face with embarrassment and pity as he took Leah outside before John’s body was confined. He squeezed Beulah’s arm and drove carefully away. He was quiet and he didn’t say much but he was very good to Leah. When Peter died of cancer, Leah kept saying that she had lost her best friend. He was a friend to Beulah too and perhaps that was why it was after his death that Leah stopped visiting.
‘Wasn’t it strange, too, that Peter got lung cancer when he was so careful?’ Hester said to Beulah, reading her mind the way she often did.
‘Getting cancer is not a form of carelessness,’ said Beulah. ‘And he was not a sinner, either. Dr Costello says that the whole country would be jumping with health only for the cigarettes.’
‘Hannah and Bertie wouldn’t have allowed the marriage,’ insisted Hester. They would have checked him out. Wasn’t he related to the O’Neills? Do you remember Uriah O’Neill and the chicken feed and the gangrene?’ her voice trembled.
‘What has that got to do with anything?’ Beulah tried to be kind, she knew that Hester was still disappointed about losing both the O’Neill twins. ‘Gangrene and lung cancer are not related, I don’t think anyway.’
‘Cigarettes are the worst of all,’ she added more firmly.
How could she have known that Leah had wanted more care? Hadn’t Leah stood up for herself, hadn’t she given the master a black eye the day he tried to push her around the classroom like he had done to generations before her. It was the talk of the village. Beulah wouldn’t have known if Nellie Sheehan hadn’t congratulated Leah in front of a big crowd in the shop.
‘The only one to beat that old blackguard,’ said Nellie, handing out a big bag of Emerald toffees to Leah.
Everyone in the shop had been taught by Master Reilly and they formed a ring around the counter, all wanting to talk about him. It was like a convention. Beulah couldn’t understand why they wanted to remember all the vivid details. She tried to usher Leah out, but the crowd were having none of it. Martin Dunne was talking about the time Master Reilly had tied Frank Taylor to a tree for eight hours and he fainted clean away and had to be carried off by his mother in the evening like Mary recovering Jesus’s body from the centurions. The time he had locked small Pat Murphy into his cupboard. The sharpness of the creases on his trousers, the dead straight lines on his face, the cruelty that went on and on. Even the good people got at least four slaps a day.
‘Ah, lads, why?’ asked Nellie and she wasn’t looking for an answer.
‘Because,’ Danny Fox was in like a shot, ‘he fecking enjoyed it.’
‘Language, Danny!’ thundered Nellie.
‘And no one challenged him,’ Danny went on as he rolled up his sleeve. ‘I’ve scars, do you want to see them?’ he bent down to Leah.
‘Yuch,’ said Leah and pushed her way out of the shop, with Beulah hurrying along behind her. As the door jangled shut, she could just make out Nellie moaning at Danny, ‘Why oh why do you have to ruin every good conversation?’
Leah opened the bag of Emerald’s straight away and began to chew fast as if her life depended on it.
‘Did you really hit Master Reilly?’
Leah wouldn’t look at Beulah, she kept chewing and looking straight ahead. ‘It was a mistake, I put my hand up to protect myself. He had never pushed me around before and I’d seen the others putting their hands up before. But I must have done it too hard. He got an awful fright and fell back. He thought I meant it, his eye was red and pink and purple nearly straight away. It was then that I gave him a black look so that he’d think I did it on purpose. He hasn’t been near me since Tuesday.’ Leah unwrapped another Emerald and shoved it into her mouth before she finished chewing the first one. ‘Haven’t you noticed how long the nails have grown on my right hand? I can’t cut them with my left hand.’
Beulah didn’t know what to make of that. All she could think was that she was dying for an Emerald, the scent of vanilla and chocolate drifted on the wind but Leah never offered.
Now, of course she realised what Leah was trying to say. She wanted Beulah to cut her nails and notice her hair and maybe a dozen other things that Beulah couldn’t have realised when Leah seemed so independent. John always asked for help. But maybe she had been more interested and ready to help him anyway. John, in Beulah’s eyes, was a small Louis, another chance, How could Beulah have known that Leah wanted her hand held going over Patrick’s bridge? It was John’s soft hand she remembered sliding into her fist. His shiny brown hair falling to one side like a brown beret. All she had wanted to do was to keep John alive and a boy forever, with short pants and no beard.
Chapter Four
Beulah drove up to the county hospital, Monday afternoon, an hour before her appointment. A cautious driver, she had learned to drive late in life, after John’s death, around the same time she had taken up with medicine. But she still felt that her car was a kind of mechanical pony. She worried that it would not be able to make the steep hill, that it would slip down. She was afraid to take her hand off the steering wheel to change gears and the car roared in pain as she pressed hard on the accelerator. She murmured to it, ‘Come on, now,’ and it climbed the long winding road to the hospital.
Down below, the river ran its blueish stream between the golds and reds and the evergreens. It made her dizzy to look at it. When Beulah arrived on the level ground of the hospital car park, she noticed that her hands were wet with perspiration. She pulled into a space quickly, turned the engine off and at the same time bent over to get a tissue out of the glove box. The car gave a sudden buck. Trembling, Beulah put the gearstick into neutral and grasped handfuls of tissues, wiping her face and hands. She looked around the car park then and checked in the rear mirror, luckily no one was watching. She was always afraid that the car might be taken off her for dangerous driving.
