The Teacher at Donegal Bay

The door opened. She marched across to the fireplace, a smirk on her face. ‘My goodness,’ she exclaimed, ‘you’re sitting here all in the dark. Harvey rang a little while ago. They’re coming for Sunday lunch. Isn’t that nice? And Susie was asking for you, Jenny, so I said I was sure you’d be able to come, as Colin is away. Harvey will pick you up while I’m getting the lunch. I thought we’d have a leg of lamb for a change. What do you think, George?’

Chapter 5 (#ulink_3cf17bf1-abe8-5c7b-9aaf-daafda0c7e91)

I pushed the front door closed with my elbow, stepped over a pile of envelopes and dropped briefcase and basket on the seat in the telephone alcove. ‘Thank God to be home,’ I said aloud.

There was an icy chill in the hall and a pervasive, unpleasant smell hanging in the air. It felt as if I’d been gone for a month. I kept my coat on and went into the kitchen. It was exactly as I had left it at a quarter to seven this morning when Colin suddenly announced that we had to leave an hour earlier than usual, because he had to pick up his father on the Antrim Road for their nine o’clock flight.

Earlier, I was surprised and delighted when he wakened me with a mug of tea. Sitting up in bed, listening to him cooking his breakfast, I drank it gratefully and hoped it was a peace offering after the awful row we’d had the previous evening. Relaxed and easy as it was still so early, I went down in my dressing gown and to my surprise found my fruit juice and cornflakes sitting ready for me.

Now, I scraped the soggy residue of the cornflakes into the polythene box where I keep scraps for the birds and put it back in the fridge. I’d been halfway through them when he told me. That gave me precisely fifteen minutes to shower, make up, dress, organise the papers I’d abandoned in my study the previous evening and be ready to leave. The alternative was to leave on foot, twenty minutes after Colin, and spend an hour and a half travelling, three buses and a train.

I shivered miserably and tried to put it out of mind as I studied the control panel for the central heating boiler. It looked perfectly all right. On: morning, six till eight. Heat and water. Back on: Five. For getting home, early evening. Off, ten thirty. By which time we were usually in bed. I looked at my watch. It was only ten fifteen so why was it off?

‘Oh, not one more bloody thing,’ I said crossly as I tramped round the kitchen in frustration. The air was still full of the smell of Colin’s bacon and egg. I prodded the switch on the extractor fan. To my amazement, it began to whir. It hadn’t worked for weeks. I almost managed to laugh at my bad temper, but then I caught sight of Colin’s eggy plate. The very thought of the relaxed way he’d announced the change of plan made me furious again.

‘Come on, Jenny, concentrate. It was working this morning,’ I said firmly.

Among the many delights of Loughview Heights, as advertised in the colour brochure from any McKinstry Brothers agent and free to all would-be customers, was a range of modern conveniences ‘guaranteed to impress your visitors’. What the brochure didn’t say was that they also broke down at the slightest provocation. There’d been such a crop of failures recently I was ready to exchange them for reliable Stone Age technology like paraffin lamps and water from a well.

I stared at the control panel again. Somewhere at the back of my weary mind a thought formed. I was missing something blindingly obvious. I peered at the minute figures on the dial. Then the penny dropped. Slightly to the right of the control box was a large switch. It said ‘OFF’.

‘Off?’ I exclaimed incredulously. ‘Who’s bloody OFF? I’m not OFF, I’m here and I’m freezing.’

I pushed it down. The loud click echoed through the dark, empty house. A red light flowered. There was a woosh and a shower of tiny ticks, like rain splattering a window. I shivered, cleared and stacked the breakfast things, and went through to the lounge and found an even worse mess.

I stepped round the ironing board and drew the curtains across the black hole that echoed the chaos around me. I switched on the table lamps and turned off the top light. Even with softer lighting, the walls looked almost as grubby as they did under the glare of the overhead fitment. I pushed a pile of Colin’s papers, magazines and instruction sheets off an armchair and sat down.

I’d had plans for those walls this weekend. Tuscan. A rich, earthy colour that might even bring out some quality in the hideous, mustardy velvet curtains. The tins of emulsion had been sitting in the garage since the summer. But it looked as if my mother had put paid to that little scheme. I sized up the walls again. Allowed for the mass of the stone fireplace and the picture window. Calculated how long it might take me to remove the adjustable shelving and all the books and objects by myself. Shook my head sadly. Bitter experience had taught me things always take longer than you think. The tin says ‘one coat’. But when I did my study, the same dirty white had grinned through one coat. Some bits had ended up needing three coats.

If I didn’t have to go to Rathmore Drive for Sunday lunch, perhaps I could have just managed it. But there it was. I did. One more weekend, to follow all the others. Something on. Not something we wanted to do, but one more ‘must do’ among all the many ‘must dos’ that had come to dominate our life.

I tried to remember when we last had a weekend when we could just be together, sit over breakfast, talk, drink cups of coffee, or pull on boots and walk down to the loughshore. We had had so little time together recently it wasn’t surprising, really; Colin could be so thoughtless and I could get so anxious and agitated about things never getting done.

The room was beginning to warm up slightly, but the hot air pouring through the vents was blowing Colin’s scattered papers all over the place. Wearily, I got up and gathered them together. Half were specifications for the new factory in Antrim, now his special project. I’d seen them so often, I knew them by heart. Then I found the instructions for making the homebrew. A pile of photocopies – Which reports on new cars. And down at the bottom of the pile still on the sofa I found an overflowing ashtray full of Neville’s cigarette stubs and ash from Colin’s cigar. At least that accounted for the peculiar, stale smell in the room. Accounting for the furious row we had when Neville finally left would not be so easy.

Neville had appeared from next door before we’d finished supper. He was laden with packets and boxes which he deposited all round the kitchen wherever there was a space. The weekly shop still hadn’t been put away, nor the supper dishes stacked, when he breezed in, but Colin shooed me away. Not to worry, he said, he’d sort things out while they were getting the brew going. No problem.

I retreated to my study and tried to read essays. Not exactly what I had planned, when Colin was going to be away all weekend. But I couldn’t concentrate. From downstairs, great bursts of laughter rose at regular intervals, together with an unpleasant smell which made me think of sodden haystacks steaming in the hot sun after heavy rain.

Time passed. There were noises on the stairs. ‘Mind how you go, Colin, old lad. You’ll give yourself a hernia, you will.’

‘Steady on, Neville. Watch where you’re putting your airlock. You can harm a young lad like that.’

By ten o’clock I felt desperate. I set off to go and tell Neville there was packing to do and plans to make for the weekend.

Colin hailed me halfway down the stairs. ‘Oh, Jenny, just in time. We’ve made some coffee. Are there any biscuits?’

The kitchen was exactly as I left it, only now there were sieves, bowls and large saucepans, full of the drying residue of boiled hops, stacked all over the floor, and the pedal bin was overflowing. I picked out the biscuits from the carrier where Colin had put them himself, declined coffee, and started to clear up.

It was nearly eleven by the time Neville went and Colin strode back into the kitchen, looking pleased with himself. ‘Oh, Jenny, you shouldn’t have washed up. I’d have helped.’

‘That’s what you said at eight o’clock,’ I replied sharply.

‘Well, it doesn’t matter, does it? I’ll do it now.’

‘Yes, it does matter. It’s nearly eleven and we haven’t had a moment to ourselves all evening and you still have your packing to do.’

He came and put his arms round me and nuzzled my ear. ‘Oh, come on, Jen. It’s not that late,’ he began persuasively. ‘I won’t be two ticks packing. You go on up and have a nice shower and I’ll be in bed with you in no time.’

At that moment the thought of a shower and of getting to bed without any further delay was utterly appealing. I nodded wearily but decided to finish drying up the saucepans while he packed. I heard him fetch his weekend case from the cloakroom and run upstairs whistling cheerfully. I bent over to empty the pedal bin.

The night air was cold as I replaced the lid on the dustbin, but looking up I saw the moon appear suddenly from behind a great mass of cloud. Light spilled all around me. A spray of yellow chrysanthemums gleamed in the big flowerbed at the end of the garden. Beyond the dark mass of the shrubs and the climbers I’d planted to hide the solid shape of the fence, the lough lay calm, a silver swathe laid across its dark surface. On the far shore, where the Antrim plateau plunged down to the coast, strings and chains of lights winked along the coastline like pale flowers edging a garden path. The still, frosty air was heavy with quiet.

‘Jen. Can you hear me? Where are you?’

Reluctantly, I went back into the house and found Colin peering down over the banisters. His good spirits had vanished and he wore a patient look that did nothing to hide his irritation.

‘What have you done with my white shirts, Jen? I can’t find them.’

‘Which white shirts?’

‘Any white shirts. They aren’t in the drawer,’ he went on quickly. ‘I’ve looked.’

‘They’re probably all in the wash,’ I replied steadily. ‘I’ve been handwashing your drip-dries since the machine packed up. There are two or three of those on the fitment in the bathroom.’

‘But they’re blue,’ he protested impatiently.

‘Since when has there been a rule about wearing white shirts at conferences?’ I asked crossly.

I went back into the kitchen, opened a drawer and pulled a pedal-bin liner off the roll. I heard him pound downstairs and turned and saw him glowering in at me.

‘Jenny, you know perfectly well I always wear the white ones for conferences,’ he said with a dangerous edge to his voice. ‘What the hell am I supposed to do? Wash my own?’

‘Colin, if you had let me ring someone two weeks ago about the machine neither of us would have to wash your shirts. But you wanted to fiddle with the damn thing. I told you I’d rather we paid to have it done so we’d have some time to do other things. But you said no. You’d order the part. You’d fit it yourself. Well, if you had, the drawer would be full of shirts. So don’t go blaming me.’

The wretched pedal-bin liner wouldn’t open. I stood there struggling with it as I watched him change gear. The glowering face disappeared and his tone was sweetness itself as he started to explain that he wasn’t blaming me. I just didn’t understand how difficult his position was. Didn’t I grasp what a big responsibility this new Antrim contract was? Couldn’t I see that he was run off his feet, he was so busy? And just how important it was for his future. He couldn’t really use office time to make domestic phone calls, now could he? Besides, he was out on site so much. Surely I didn’t expect him to be responsible for everything, even his own shirts.

Something about that rapid change of expression, perhaps, or something about that sweet-reasonable tone made me angrier and angrier. At one point, I nearly threw the roll of pedal-bin bags at him just to get him to stop. But I managed not to. Instead, I insisted he had plenty of other shirts. That he could have checked last night he had exactly the shirts he wanted. At the very least, he could have checked before he and Neville made both the kitchen and the bathroom unusable.

‘Why on earth did you have to invite Neville in on the evening before a conference anyway?’ I ended angrily.

‘Because I prefer not to spend all my time working, unlike some people,’ he threw back at me.

‘Unlike some people?’ I repeated furiously. ‘And what about these last three weekends? Who was working then?’

He went quite white, but I scarcely noticed as the pent-up resentment of the last weeks poured out of me.

‘Entertaining your wretched uncle from Australia because Maisie thinks he might just leave you something. And the bloke from British Steel, who might just wangle you a contract,’ I shouted. ‘Or maybe that doesn’t count as work because you could relax and wave your cigar around just like your father does while I lay on the meals. I suppose you think that’s what women are for. And I suppose you think I enjoy providing cut-price entertainment for McKinstry Brothers instead of having some time for us, like any working couple.’