Homecoming

She’d loved it when they would wander out for dinner in one of the neighbourhood restaurants, then sit talking for hours after they’d finished eating. With a professional eye, Eleanor watched couples who were long married and had nothing to say to each other and felt sorry for them with their uncomfortably silent meals. She and Ralf never had that problem: they never stopped talking. Being interested in the person you were married to was one of life’s great gifts.

Eleanor heard the clock at St Malachy’s on the other side of the square ringing noon. It was a sound she’d always associate with her childhood. The family home in the tiny west coast village of Kilmoney had been two miles from the local church, and when the Angelus bell rang at midday and six in the evening, everyone stopped what they were doing to pray.

In Golden Square, only a few people would do that.

From her vantage point, Eleanor could see a lot of Golden Square. She hadn’t chosen the apartment because of the locale, but now that she was here, she loved it. There were few of these old garden squares left in Dublin city, the letting agent had told her, and even in the property slump houses here still sold pretty quickly. The garden itself was boxed in by old iron railings with curlicued tops. At each end was a pair of black-and-gold gates with an elegant design of climbing vine leaves. Eleanor had seen something like them in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and she was sure they were valuable. They stood sentinel over the flowers, the benches and the children’s playground inside.

Despite the modern shops and businesses on one corner of the square, there was something olde worlde about the redbrick houses and the Georgian villas. Most were divided into flats now, but they still looked as though a kitchen maid in long skirts might run up the steps each morning at dawn to set the fires.

Eleanor had arrived there by accident, but she found she liked Golden Square a lot. And there were, she believed, no accidents in life. Things happened for a reason.

She’d moved in two days after Christmas, even though the young letting agent had implied that she must be mad to want to move in during the holiday.

‘This is what suits me,’ Eleanor had said, using the calm psychoanalyst’s voice that had worked for so many years with her patients.

Suitably chastened, the letting agent had driven her to the apartment from the hotel where she’d spent Christmas. Though he was careful not to say so aloud, he wondered why anyone would want to spend Christmas or even New Year away from their families. Perhaps she didn’t have a family, he decided, and at that moment, vowed to be nicer to his own mother because one day she’d be an old, white-haired lady – though perhaps not one as fiercely determined or as straight-backed as this one. So he went along with Mrs Levine’s plans, betrayed no surprise when she explained she was Irish by birth despite her American accent, and concluded she must be a little mad, as well as being rich. She clearly had plenty of money to have stayed in a five-star hotel over Christmas, and she hadn’t quibbled over the rent for the Taylors’ apartment on Golden Square.

It was, she’d said, when he’d taken her to view it on Christmas Eve, exactly what she was looking for: somewhere central, without stairs in the home itself, although she was able to manage the ten steps up from the path to the front door of the gracious old villa-style house. She’d wanted somewhere elegant and well-furnished and the Taylors’, with its lovely paintings and its old-fashioned furniture, was certainly that.

It was a very peaceful place to live and there was so much to see when she sat in the big bay window and looked out over the square itself.

She still liked people-watching.

‘Stop already,’ Ralf used to whisper when they were at cocktail parties on the Upper East Side and Eleanor’s face assumed that still, thoughtful expression he knew so well. ‘They’ll notice.’

‘They won’t,’ she’d whisper back.

They didn’t, amazingly. Her analytical gaze was invariably interpreted as polite attentiveness.

Golden Square, for all that she’d only been there a week, was a wonderful spot to indulge her hobby. She might not practise professionally any more, but she could enjoy observing the world.

Directly opposite Eleanor’s apartment she’d noticed a striking-looking woman in her fifties with shoulder-length tawny hair come in and out of a narrow white house, sometimes accompanied by a tall, kind-looking man. On Eleanor’s few trips out, she’d visited the square’s tearooms, a picturesque red-curtained premises named Titania’s Palace, and the woman had been there behind the counter, smiling at all, doling out teas and coffees with brisk efficiency and calling people ‘love’ and ‘pet’.

Eleanor considered the comforting effect of being called ‘pet’. It was a nice way to speak to an older lady, better than the senior citizen label ‘ma’am’, which always made her feel as if paramedics were shadowing her with an oxygen mask.

And the woman in the tearoom wasn’t being condescending when she used ‘pet’ – it came naturally; she had a gentleness that reached out to people.

‘Would you like me to carry your coffee over to the table for you, pet?’ she’d asked Eleanor, the kind face with its fine dark eyes and dark brows beaming out over the cash register at her. She reminded Eleanor of someone, an actress, Ali MacGraw, that was it.

Yes, she was incredibly nice, Eleanor thought as she murmured, ‘Yes, thank you.’ She wasn’t quite up to social interaction yet. She was still in that place of mourning where she liked watching the world but wasn’t ready to let it in.

Maybe, she thought with a rush of black despair, she’d never let it in again.

In the apartment above hers lived two sisters whom she hadn’t met yet, but whose names she’d learned from the postman. The younger woman, Nicky, a petite blonde, appeared by her elegant suits to have a high-powered career, although Eleanor couldn’t guess what. Connie was tall, wore sensible clothes and marched out to her car in the mornings in flat shoes and bearing piles of schoolbooks, looking every inch the capable teacher.

Watching her, Eleanor decided that Connie carried herself like someone who had no time for femininity or girlish flounces. Perhaps she’d never been told she was in any way attractive. Eleanor had certainly seen much of that in her practice. The lessons people learned in youth sank in so deep, they became almost part of a person’s DNA. It could be hard to change.

Nicky was, by contrast, confident and pretty, like a flower fairy. She had a boyfriend, a tall slim lad who followed her round like a puppy, or held her hand when they walked through the square to the convenience store. The sisters fascinated Eleanor: they were each so different.

Over the way lived the chiropodist whom her doctor – well, she’d had to introduce herself to the doctor, it made sense at her age – had recommended.

‘Nora Flynn, she’s very good, you’ll like her. No time for prattle or sweet talk, Nora. But she’s excellent at what she does, runs a great practice.’

Eleanor liked to take care of her feet and she’d had one appointment with Nora already.

Nora was exactly what the doctor had said: good at her job and not a prattler. She didn’t enquire why Eleanor had moved to Golden Square. She merely talked about bad circulation, the cold of these early January days, and how people still didn’t understand the need to look after their feet. Eleanor had since seen Nora out walking her dogs in the square. The chiropodist wore very masculine clothes, yet talked to her little dogs like a mother to small children.

Eleanor hadn’t made it across the square to The Nook yet, although she could see the little convenience store from her window. She didn’t really need it, what with internet shopping. She ordered online and a nice young man from the supermarket delivered it and carried everything into the house for her. When he saw there was no one to help her put it away, he’d asked her where it all went and laid everything on the correct counter, so she wouldn’t have to bend down to lift the bags.

That day, after he’d gone, Eleanor had nearly wept. It was the kindness that got to her. Rudeness, she could handle, but any kindness breached her defences and she felt as if she might sob on a total stranger’s shoulder.

Next door to her building, she could just see the steps down to a basement flat where a big bear of a man lived with his daughter. Eleanor occasionally saw him taking the little girl – a tall, skinny child with red curly hair – to school. He seemed happy when he was with her, but when he was alone he looked different: deeply sad and unreachable.

Eleanor felt an overwhelming urge to find out what was wrong and help.

Ralf, her darling husband, used to gently chide her for trying to fix the world:

‘It’s not your job to make them all better.’

Eleanor remembered the early days of psychotherapy in college and the desire to improve the lives of everyone she met.

People weren’t just people to her, they were potential cases of obsessive compulsive disorder, Electra complex, or separation anxiety.

Everyone in her class had thought like her.

They’d had to stop going to the main campus cafeteria for a whole month because they’d all become fixated on one of the waitresses who, in their eyes, was suffering from a psychosomatic wasting disorder and they wanted to help.

Eventually, someone confessed to Professor Wolfe, their tutor, and wondered what should they do?

Professor Wolfe hadn’t taken this the way they’d hoped.

‘Why do you think you can help this waitress?’ he asked, head to one side, fabulously detached. ‘What makes you want to help her? Has she asked to be helped?’

‘I bet if you asked him the way to his office, he’d put his head on one side and say “Why do you need to know?”’ grumbled one of Eleanor’s classmates.

‘He’s right, though,’ Eleanor had sighed. Psychotherapeutic help wasn’t a bandage you put on a cut. It was a tool for life and it couldn’t be applied unless the person wanted it applied. All the psychoanalyst could do was gently help the patient find their own particular tools; it was up to the patient to use them.

‘Everyone can’t be mad,’ said Susannah, her roommate in college, who’d studied molecular biology and had heard many of the late-night ‘who do we think suffers from X or Y?’ conversations. Susannah saw life in absolutes. She was a postdoctorate student working on cancer research and there was no room for emotion. Things worked or they didn’t. The mice died and you moved on.

‘Mad is not an expression we tend to use in psychoanalysis,’ Eleanor had said, laughing.

‘You could have fooled me,’ Susannah said.

There was a birthday card in Eleanor’s treasure box signed Susannah, Mrs Tab Hunter. Susannah had been obsessed by the fifties movie star, but you couldn’t call her mad.

Eleanor wondered where Susannah was now. They’d lost touch around about the time Eleanor and Ralf got married. Susannah went off to live in Switzerland to work at a university there. Eleanor pictured her: still tall, eccentric and in love with people she saw only on cinema screens.

A gust of wind made the branch of the rowan tree outside the window bang against Eleanor’s window. The tiny scarlet berries on the holly bushes beneath it were all gone now. Sometimes a lone robin sat on the tree and look quizzically at Eleanor, as if asking for food.