Miss Custle was a powerful, grey-haired woman in a London Transport uniform which smelt of other people’s cigarettes. Earlier in her life there’d been a romance with someone else on the Underground, but without warning the man had died. Shocked by the unexpectedness of it, Miss Custle had remained on her own for the next thirty years, and was given to gloom when she recalled the time of her loss. Among her colleagues on the Underground she was known for her gruffness and her devotion to the tasks she had performed for so much of her life. The London Under-ground, she occasionally stated in Bridget’s living-room, had become her life, a substitute for what might have been. But tonight her mood was brisk.
‘When a child’s adopted, Mrs Lacy, there’s no way it can be reversed. As I told you last evening, dear.’
‘Yes, I do know that. I said it to them.’
‘Trying it on, they was.’
With that, Miss Custle rose to her feet and said good-night. She never stayed long when she looked in for a cup of tea and a biscuit because she was usually tired. Her face took on a crumpled look, matching her crumpled uniform. She would iron her uniform before her next turn of duty, taking ages over it.
‘Good-night, Miss Custle,’ Bridget said, observing the weary passage of her lodger across the living-room and wondering just for a moment what the man who’d died had been like. One night, a year or so ago, she had told Miss Custle all about her own loss, not of course that it could be compared with death, although it had felt like it at the time. ‘Horrible type of woman, that is,’ Miss Custle had said.
Bridget cleared up the tea things and unplugged the television lead. She knew she wouldn’t sleep properly: the visit of Norma and her husband had stirred everything up again, forcing her to travel backwards in time, to survey again all she had come to terms with. It was extraordinary that they’d thought she’d even consider handing Betty over to them.
In her bedroom she undressed and tidily arranged her clothes on a chair. She could hear Miss Custle moving about in her room next door, undressing also. Betty had murmured in her sleep when she’d kissed her good-night, and Bridget tried to imagine what life would be like not having Betty there to tuck up last thing, not haying Betty’s belongings about the house, her clothes to wash, toys to pick up. Sometimes Betty made her cross, but that was part of it too.
She lay in the darkness, her mind going back again. In the countryside of Co. Cork she had been one of a family of ten, and Liam had come from a large family also. It had astonished them when years later they had failed to have children of their own, but in no way had the disappointment impaired their marriage; and then Betty’s presence had drawn them even closer together. ‘I’m sorry,’ Liam had said in the end, though, the greatest shock she’d ever had. ‘I’m sorry, dear.’
Bridget had never seen the woman, but had imagined her: younger than she was, a Londoner, black hair like silk, predatory lips, and eyes that looked away from you. This woman and her mother had bought the newsagent’s where Liam had worked for all his years in London, the manager more or less, under old Mr Vanish. The woman had been married before, an unhappy marriage according to Liam, a relationship that had left her wounded. ‘Dear, it’s serious,’ he had said, trying to keep out of his voice a lightness that was natural in it, not realizing that he was opening a wound himself. In everything he said there was the implication that the love he’d felt for Bridget, though in no way false, hadn’t been touched by the same kind of excitement.
The newsagent’s shop was in another neighbourhood, miles across London, but in the days of old Mr Vanish, Bridget would just occasionally take Betty on a number 9 bus. When the woman and her mother took over the business some kind of shyness prevented the continuation of this habit, and after that some kind of fear. She had been ready to forgive Liam, to live in the hope that his infatuation would be washed away by time. She pleaded, but did not make scenes. She didn’t scream at him or parade his treachery, or call the woman names. None of that came easily to Bridget, and all she could wonder was what life would be like if Liam stayed with her and went on loving the woman. It wasn’t hard to imagine the bitterness that would develop in him, the hatred there would be in the end, yet she had continued to plead. Six weeks later he was gone.
For a moment in the darkness she wept. It was true what she’d said to her visitors that afternoon: that she felt nothing now. It was true, yet sometimes she wept when she remembered how together they had weathered the strangeness of their emigration or when she thought of Liam now, living in mortal sin with the woman and her mother above the newsagent’s, not going to Confession or Mass any more. Every month money arrived from him, which with Miss Custle’s rent and what she earned herself from cleaning the Winnards’ flat three times a week was enough to manage on. But Liam never came back, to see her or to see Betty, which implied the greatest change of all in him.
Memories were always difficult for her. Alone now, she too easily remembered the countryside she had grown up in, and the face of the Reverend Mother at the convent, and Mrs Barry’s squat public house and grocery at a crossroads. Emir Ryall had stolen her Phillips’ atlas, putting ink blots over her name and substituting her own. Madge Foley had curled her hair for her. Liam had always been in the neighbouring farm, but until after they’d both left school she’d hardly noticed him. He’d asked her to go for a walk with him, and in a field that was yellow with buttercups he had taken her hand and kissed her, causing her to blush. He’d laughed at her, saying the pink in her cheeks was lovely. He was the first person she’d ever danced with, in a nameless roadside dance-hall, ten miles away.
It was then, while she was still a round-faced girl, that Bridget had first become aware of fate. It was what you had to accept, what you couldn’t kick against: God’s will, the Reverend Mother or Father Keogh would have said, but for Bridget it began with the kind of person you were. Out of that, the circumstances of your life emerged: Bridget’s shyness and her tendency to blush, her prettiness and her modesty, were the fate which had been waiting for her before she was born, and often she felt that Liam had been waiting for her also, that they were fated to fall in love because they complemented each other so well, he so bouncy and amusing, she so fond of the shadows. In those days it would have been impossible to imagine that he would ever go off with a woman in a newsagent’s.
They were married on a Saturday in June, in a year when the foxgloves were profuse. She wore a veil of Limerick lace, borrowed from her grandmother. She carried scarlet roses. Liam was handsome, dark as a Spaniard in the Church of the Holy Virgin, his blue eyes jokily darting about. She had been glad when all of it was over, the reception in Kelly’s Hotel, the car bedecked with ribbons. They’d gone away for three days, and soon after they’d returned they had had to emigrate to England because the sawmills where Liam had a job closed down. They’d been in London for more than twenty years when the woman came into his life.
Eventually Bridget slept, and dreamed of the countryside of her childhood. She sat on a cart beside her father, permitted to hold the reins of the horse while empty milk churns were rattled back from the creamery at the crossroads. Liam was suddenly there, trudging along in the dust, and her father drew up the reins in order to give him a lift. Liam was ten or eleven, a patch of sunburn on the back of his neck where his hair had been cut very short. It wasn’t really a dream, because all of it had happened in the days when Liam hadn’t been important.
Norma’s husband came on his own. ‘I hope you’ve no objection, Mrs Lacy,’ he said, smiling in his wide-eyed way. There was a wave in his fairish hair, she noticed, a couple of curls hanging over his forehead. Everything about him was agreeable.
