What She Wants

Now she held Bill’s driver in her hands and tried to remember the all-important grip. Was it too late to take up golf at the age of fifty-eight? Bill would have loved her to. Maybe he could see her, was grinning with that irrepressible twinkling grin of his to see her holding his clubs in that professional manner. She liked the idea of Bill grinning wherever he was.

The bell rang. Virginia raised her eyes to heaven. Tourists, she’d lay a bet on it. Kilnagoshell House had been a noted bed and breakfast establishment in the past and people with fond memories of it kept turning up on the doorstep, smiling and wondering if she had a double with bath for two nights and ‘do you still make that lovely black pudding for breakfast?’

When she’d moved into the house four months ago, she’d smiled apologetically in return, saying ‘sorry, no, it’s not a B & B any more.’

Now, she felt like throwing burning tar out the top windows and yelling ‘leave me alone!’ every time a fresh influx of visitors arrived with their five-year-old B & B guidebooks and hopeful expressions on their faces. It was beyond her why the owners had sold up in the first place. Judging from the amount of walk-in custom they were getting, even in October, they could have run a hundred-bed hotel and still be busy.

She put the driver carefully back in the golf bag and walked round to the front door where a gleaming people carrier was parked. Four people were standing on the gravel.

One man was stretching aching limbs and another was hauling bulging suitcases from the vehicle. A small, dark-skinned woman was peering at a guide book, reading out bits in heavily-accented English, while a taller woman looked over her shoulder.

‘Can I help you?’ inquired Virginia.

‘Excuse me for not phoning,’ said the woman with the guide book. Italians, Virginia thought, judging by that lyrical accent with its exotic rolling consonants. ‘We hope you have rooms we can rent tonight.’

‘I’m afraid this isn’t a bed and breakfast any more,’ Virginia said apologetically polite in spite of herself.

The foursome looked crestfallen.

‘We have been driving for so long,’ said one of the men tiredly.

‘There is another place you can stay in the village,’ Virginia offered and went on to tell them about Mrs Egan’s De Luxe B & B down the road, just the other side of Red-lion. No, it wasn’t in the guide books but if they needed somewhere in the locality, Mrs Egan would definitely have rooms.

She felt sorry to be turning them away; they looked exhausted and she was no longer sure if it was fair to direct people to Mrs Egan’s premises. She’d met Mrs Egan in the butcher’s and hadn’t liked either the way she ordered the cheapest rashers for her breakfasts, or the way she snapped at the butcher himself, a friendly giant of a man who didn’t deserve to be given out to because he’d forgotten to put aside a leg of lamb for her.

From what the constant stream of visitors said to her about Kilnagoshell, Virginia felt it had been a welcoming place where nothing was too much trouble and where the owners wouldn’t have dreamed of giving guests fatty, cheap rashers for their breakfast.

The foursome wearily packed up their belongings and waved at her as she watched them drive away. Virginia waved back, thinking that she mustn’t look quite as decrepit as she felt if these people wanted to stay with her. In her mind, she was still light years away from the tall, handsome Virginia Connell who’d always been perfectly dressed, not a silvery grey hair out of place as she helped out in the local Oxfam shop. That Virginia was the old one. The replacement was darker, sadder, with hollows under her hazel eyes and pain etched on every inch of her fine-boned face. She didn’t bother any more setting her thick hair in the gentle waves that managed to look so elegant: she tied it back in a taut knot. But that would have to change. She’d lived as a recluse for long enough and if she was to put a tentative foot back into the real world, she needed to look normal instead of like some loopy old dear with Miss Havisham tendencies.

She closed the garage and went inside to the kitchen to pull on her walking shoes and old waxed jacket. The waxy smell always reminded her of Oscar. He’d been such a darling little dog, a soft fawn coloured spaniel with velvety ears and a melancholy expression that made him look like a dog from a chocolate box. Every weekday of his life at half eight in the morning, Virginia had taken Oscar for his walk and when the weather was wet, she’d worn this very waxed jacket. Oscar had only to see it to go berserk, circling her feet with delight, barking and bouncing deliriously. The jacket still smelled of him. Virginia still tortured herself with the thought that if only she’d kept walking him after Bill’s death, Oscar might have still been alive.

It was her fault, all her fault. With enough exercise, Oscar wouldn’t have been so keen to escape the garden and run out onto the main road. She was glad that her local vet had offered to bury his silky little body in their plot in the mountains, otherwise he’d have been buried in the garden in Pier Avenue and she hated to think of the new owners digging him up in some garden revamp and dumping him.

‘Get another dog, Mum,’ Laurence had advised. ‘You and Dad always had dogs, you need one. It’ll be company for you; go on, you really should.’

But Virginia wouldn’t dream of it. A dog was something to care for and she was far too afraid of losing anything else to commit to any new responsibilities. As it was, she was possessed of a great fear that something would take the boys, Sally or baby Alison away from her. A fat tear fell onto the jacket’s worn corduroy collar. Virginia wiped her eyes fiercely. She wouldn’t cry, she wouldn’t. She’d go for her walk and try and forget Oscar.

She walked briskly down the avenue, past the beech trees with their glorious russet leaves. The last glow of autumn was still everywhere; trees and bushes holding onto their golden leaves, the single copper beech still a fiery bronze in the middle of the silver birches. In another month, the landscape would have changed totally, Virginia knew, with banks of leaves underfoot and every tree stark and bare against the hills. But for now, it was magnificent. She crunched through a stretch of road strewn with chestnuts. The boys had loved chestnuts, she thought fondly, picking one up and rubbing it until it gleamed like mahogany.

Onto the main road, she marched firmly towards Redlion. Her house was a mile from the village and she’d decided that she should walk there and back every day, if only to buy a newspaper. It was all too easy to bury yourself and see nobody.

She liked Redlion: it was quaint and somehow untouched. The winding main street, called, for convenience, Main Street, probably looked much the way it had fifty years ago, with small terraced houses on either side interrupted only by shops and pubs. There were three pubs, rather a lot for a small town, tourists were always saying in surprise. Virginia knew from experience that visitors were fascinated by the number of pubs in Irish towns. She remembered a friend of Bill’s from London being astonished by that. They’d taken him on a short trip down to Kilkenny and he’d kept remarking on the fact that they’d driven through several tiny hamlets that consisted of a scattering of houses, but which still managed to support two pubs.

‘How do they stay in business?’ he’d asked Bill in bewilderment.

Bill had laughed his warm, deep laugh and told his friend that he was in Ireland now and the usual rules didn’t apply. ‘There are different sorts of pubs for different people,’ Bill explained. ‘The old farmers might use one because it hadn’t changed since they were lads, and the younger people might go for another one with music and bar food. Real ould pubs only serve drink and cigarettes, you see. At the first sign of music, bar food or young women in short skirts, the ould fellas would take their custom elsewhere.’

Madigans in Redlion was a real ould pub in Bill’s definition of the word, Virginia thought. With its red and white lettering over the door and an elderly Guinness sign hanging outside, it looked like the pubs of her childhood.

On her walks, she’d often seen men in heavy boots, farm clothes and old caps ambling in for a quick lunchtime pick-me-up of porter. Her father, who’d been a farmer, had been fond of the odd lunchtime drink himself and she reckoned he’d have liked Madigans, which was the sort of place where you could happily go in with your trousers held up with baler twine and nobody would pay you the slightest bit of attention. The only part of the experience that required utter and complete attention was the pouring of the pint, which could take ten minutes of the barman’s loving art, meaning that wise drinkers ordered the next pint a good fifteen minutes before they’d need it, giving it that much needed time to settle.

The Widows, on the other hand, was a modern phenomenon complete with a bar food menu as exotic as you’d find anywhere. It had traditional music nights, quaint Oirish interior decor straight out of The Quiet Man, and a proprietor who understood that money in the pub business was trying to please all the people all the time. Virginia had been in there a couple of times and had marvelled at the modern take on an old-fashioned idea.

Virginia had never walked as far as the third pub, which was right at the other end of the village over the humpbacked bridge. That would be her mission today, Virginia resolved: to walk right through the village. It would make it a longer walk, certainly three miles all told.

She passed the painted sign that told her Redlion was twinned with a French town she’d never heard of. Redlion wasn’t at its best in the lashing rain but on a clear autumn day, the village was pretty and somehow timeless. Virginia walked past the chemist with its big side entrance for animal foodstuffs, past a row of whitewashed houses with a brightly painted blue one in the middle, and along past Lucille’s, a fashion emporium with a window display that changed weekly and was always wildly glamorous. This week, Lucille was showing off low-cut tops and mohair sweaters with an animal print theme. The centrepiece was a fake fur coat in dramatic leopard print with a matching Russian style hat. Virginia resolved to watch out for the ensemble at Mass. She wasn’t quite sure who actually bought any of Lucille’s extravagant outfits, but she knew she’d recognize anyone who did at fifty paces.

She walked on, keeping her eyes trained firmly on the distance in case she met anyone on her side of the street. People were very friendly, always smiling and saying hello, but she didn’t want to get dragged into friendships, and answering a simple ‘isn’t it a grand day?’ could be disastrous. Replying would mean a full-blown conversation and she didn’t want to talk to people, she wanted to be left alone.

It wasn’t hard today. The village was quiet. At this time of year, the tourists were few and far between. But Virginia knew that once Easter came, the place would be crammed with people stopping at the Widows for a plate of smoked salmon and a blast of traditional music. They clambered out of cars and buses in droves to admire the painted houses and the quaint arts and crafts shop which did a roaring trade in hand-knitted sweaters, bits of lace, plaques with Irish family names on them, and odd pottery bits and bobs made by the hippies who lived in a commune far up the mountains. The hippies were tolerated, Virginia knew thanks to overhearing a conversation in the post office, because they kept themselves to themselves.

But the hard-working local people with businesses were always nervous of a whole tribe of crusty travellers arriving and setting up messy shop in a field somewhere and ruining the successful business of tourism.

Virginia had seen one of the hippie women once: tired-looking with yellow dreadlocks, tattoos on her arms and a child glued to each hip. Close by, a business-suited young woman marched out of the estate agent’s and climbed into her Mercedes sports car, rushing and ignoring everything around her. Both would have looked out of place in the Kerry of Virginia’s youth.

Today, Virginia had the place pretty much to herself, apart from a couple of women standing outside the butcher’s with their striped plastic bags, having a chat now that they’d bought the dinner. As she walked, her hip twinged a bit. Why you got arthritis in one hip and not the other, Virginia didn’t know, but that was no excuse for not getting her daily walk. She walked firmly on. She was nearly half way there after all.

The phone was ringing furiously when she got back and she raced into the hall, still in her leaf-covered walking boots.

‘Mum,’ said the chirpy voice of her daughter-in-law Sally in London, ‘how are you?’

‘Fine, Sally,’ Virginia answered, pleased to hear from the only member of her family who didn’t say hello with the expectation that Virginia would burst immediately into depressed tears. ‘How are you lot? Is Alison still ruling the roost with Dominic wrapped round her little finger?’

Sally groaned. ‘Don’t ask. He ruins her. She’ll have a bike, a pony and a toy motorbike before she’s two if Dominic has anything to do with it.’

They chatted away for a few minutes, talking about how Jamie had been in London and had come round to dinner one night with his new girlfriend, ‘very pretty and clever. Dominic kept teasing that she was much too clever for him.’

Virginia smiled a little wistfully. That was what she missed: being a proper part of her sons’ lives, being there to meet new girlfriends and give her opinion on them. Laurence, who was a dentist, had told her about Barbara, the fabulous dental nurse he’d only just met and how Virginia would love her to bits, but the three of them hadn’t managed to meet up yet. Still, she mustn’t dwell on things. She’d chosen a new life because it was a break from the pain of the past. What was the point in whingeing about parts of the old life that she missed?

They talked about Alison’s sleeping pattern or rather, her non-sleeping pattern; how tired Sally was from looking after her and working from home; and how much she and Dominic were looking forward to their skiing holiday in Austria over Christmas.

‘Virginia,’ Sally said suddenly, sounding anxious. ‘We won’t go to Austria if you’d like us to come to you, you know that. I don’t want you to think that we wouldn’t want to come to you. We’ll cancel Austria and hop on the ferry…’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Virginia interrupted. ‘I wouldn’t dream of it. You need a proper holiday as a family, not one where you’re forced to visit me. I’ve told you I’m spending Christmas here this year and you’re all to stop feeling guilty about it.’

Virginia thought of a fridge magnet she’d seen: ‘my mother is a travel agent for guilt trips.’ She’d laughed heartily at the idea because it had been a fair description of her own mother.

Therefore, Virginia had been determined never to lay guilt trips on her three boys. Even in the darkest days after Bill’s death, she’d refused to let herself beg for their help. Laurence had stayed with her for a week but then she’d sent him back to his apartment in Swords.

‘I’m the mother and you’re the child,’ she’d told him firmly. ‘It’s not your job to mind me. I’ve got to get on with it myself.’

By the same token, Dominic and Sally deserved to spend Christmas any way they liked without worrying about her. Besides, she felt even more wretched than ever when the kids were tiptoeing around her. The joy of having them to stay was overwhelmed with the sense that Bill should be there too, which was just too painful.

At least when she was on her own she could deal with her grief on the bad days. If that meant spending the entire day crying with her face as red and raw as beetroot, then she was free to do just that. When there were other people around, pride made her stifle the tears.

Virginia changed the subject. ‘I’ve just come back from a long walk and I’m looking forward to having a hot bath and curling up with my new book.’ This wasn’t entirely true. Virginia hoped that a hot bath would ease her aches but she couldn’t cope with reading any more. Her favourite novels just made her cry at their memories of happier times. She managed the newspaper and that was it. Even the crossword reminded her of Bill asking for help with eight across.

‘It’s great that you’re walking again,’ said Sally. ‘Is your hip bothering you much?’