‘That’s what’s called a monkey puzzle, y’know,’ Margaretta said in the garden, and Laura quietly replied that she knew a monkey puzzle when she saw one.
Unlike Mrs Heaslip, Margaretta wasn’t thin. Nor was she brown. She was pretty in a sleepy, careless kind of way: her eyes were sleepily blue, her cheeks carelessly dimpled, her red jumble of hair the most beautiful Laura had ever seen. Margaretta would be astonishing when she grew up –what, Laura imagined, looking at her on that first afternoon, Helen of Troy must have been like. She felt jealous of the promise that seemed to be in every movement of Margaretta’s body, in every footstep that she took as she led the way through the garden and the house.
‘I am to show you everything,’ Margaretta said. ‘Would you be enormously bored to see the town?’
‘No, no, of course not. Thank you, Margaretta.’
‘It isn’t much, I’ll tell you that.’
The girls walked slowly through the wide main street, Margaretta drawing attention to the shops. All of them were cluttered, Laura noticed, except one, connected with a bakery, which seemed to sell, not bread, but only flour and sugar. They passed Martell’s Cafe, Jas. Ryan’s drapery and Medical Hall, Clancy’s grocery, which Margaretta said was a public house as well as a grocer’s, the Home and Colonial, a hardware shop and a shoe shop, other public houses. They paused by a window full of exercise-books and bottles of Stephens’ ink, which Margaretta said was her favourite shop of all. The window was strewn with packets of nibs and pencils, packets of rubber bands, rulers, pencil-sharpeners, and Waterman fountain pens in different marbled colours. There was an advertisement for Mellifont Books, and some of the books themselves, with garish paper covers:
‘How’re you, Margaretta?’ Mr Hearne greeted her from his doorway, a heavy man in a blood-stained apron.
‘Laura’s come from England,’ Margaretta said by way of reply.
‘How’re you, Laura?’ Mr Hearne said.
In the weeks and months that followed, Laura came to know Mr Hearne well, for she and Margaretta did all the shopping for the household. ‘Meat and women,’ the butcher had a way of saying, ‘won’t take squeezing.’ He used to ask riddles, of which he did not know the answers. His wife, Mrs Heaslip said, was frequently pregnant.
The sweetshops of the town became familiar to Laura also, Murphy’s, O’Connor’s, Eldon’s, Morrissey’s, Mrs Finney’s. Different brands of icecream were sold: H.B., Lucan, Melville, and Eldon’s own make, cheaper and yellower than the others. Murphy’s sold fruit as well as confectionery, and was the smartest of the sweetshops. Margaretta said it smelt the nicest, a mixture of vanilla and grapes. They all sold scarlet money-balls, in which, if you were lucky, you got your money back, a brand-new ha’penny wrapped in a piece of paper. They all sold boxes of Urney chocolates, and liquorice pipes and strips, and Lemon’s Nut-Milk Toffees and Rainbow Toffees. In their windows, boxes of Willwood’s Dolly Mixtures were laid out, and slabs of Mickey Mouse Toffee, and jelly babies. Best value of all was the yellow lemonade powder, which Margaretta and Laura never waited to make lemonade with but ate on the street.
That first summer in Ireland was full of such novelty, but most fascinating of all was the Heaslip family itself. Dr Heaslip related solemn jokes in an unhurried voice, and his equally unhurried smile came to your rescue when you were flustered and didn’t know whether it was a joke or not. Mrs Heaslip read in the garden – books that had their covers protected with brown paper, borrowed from the library the nuns ran. Margaretta’s two younger brothers, six and five, were looked after by Francie, a crosseyed girl of nineteen who came every day to the house. Eileen and Katie between them did the cooking and cleaning, Katie for ever up and down the basement stairs, answering the hall door to Dr Heaslip’s patients. Eileen was quite old – Margaretta said sixty, but Mrs Heaslip, overhearing that, altered the estimation to forty-five – and made brown bread that Laura thought delicious. Katie was keeping company with Wiry Bohan from the hardware’s. Margaretta said she’d seen them kissing.
Dr Heaslip’s motor-car, unlike the others in the town, which for the most part were laid up because of the emergency, was driven every day out of the garage at the back by a man called Mattie Devlin. He parked it in front of the house so that Dr Heaslip could hasten to it and journey out into the country to attend a childbirth or to do his best when there’d been an accident on a farm. ‘Ah, well, we’ll do our best’ was a much-employed expression of his, issued in a tone of voice that did not hold out much hope of success though in fact, as Laura learnt, he often saved a life. ‘She’s out there ready, Doctor,’ Mattie Devlin every morning shouted up through the house at breakfast-time. He then began his day’s work in the garden, where, to Mrs Heaslip’s displeasure, he refused to grow peas, broad beans or spinach, claiming that the soil was unsuitable for them. He grew instead a great number of turnips, both swedes and white, potatoes, and a form of kale which nobody in the family liked. He was a man in a striped brown suit who wore both belt and braces and tucked the ends of his trousers into his socks when he worked in the garden. He never took off either his jacket or his hat.
Sometimes when Dr Heaslip was summoned on a call that involved a journey in his car he would invite the girls to accompany him, but he was insistent that they should make themselves as inconspicuous as possible on the back seat in case their presence should be regarded as a misuse of his petrol allowance. When they arrived at whatever house it was that required his skill he relaxed this severity and permitted them to emerge. ‘Go and look at the chickens and cows,’ he’d urge. ‘Show Laura what a chicken is, Margaretta.’ If the day was fine and the farmhouse not too far from the town, they’d ask if they might walk home. Later he would pass them on the road and would blow his horn, slowing down to give them a lift if they wanted one. But they usually walked on and no one particularly minded when they were late for whatever meal it was. Their plates of meat and vegetables would be taken from the oven and they’d eat at the kitchen table, gravy dried away to nothing, mashed potatoes brown. Or tea, at teatime, would have gone black almost, keeping hot on the range.
Headstrong and impetuous, Dr Heaslip described his daughter as. ‘Not like yourself, Laura. You’re the wise virgin of the two.’ He repeated this comparison often, asking Mrs Heaslip and sometimes Katie or Eileen, even Mattie Devlin, if they agreed. Margaretta ignored it, Laura politely smiled. Nothing much upset the Heaslip household and nothing hurried it. Mrs Heaslip’s only complaints were the manner in which her daughter spoke and Mattie Devlin’s ways with vegetables.
They went to it, as they did to all the films at the De Luxe Picture House, which hadn’t yet acquired Western Electric Sound, so that the voices were sometimes difficult to hear. Dr Heaslip and Mrs Heaslip attended the De Luxe almost as regularly as Margaretta and Laura, who went three times a week, every time there was a change of programme. At breakfast the next day the girls reported on what they’d seen; Dr and Mrs Heaslip then made up their minds.
