Chapter Seven
Tuesday

JUST AFTER Cate had left the house that morning to drive to Belfast, she’d met Brian on the road, walking towards her. She stopped the car and rolled down the window.
 ‘I’ve a bit of news for you,’ she said, and watched his smile fade with apprehension. ‘I’m going to have a baby.’
 ‘Christ Almighty!’ Cate smiled foolishly in spite of herself, and drummed her fingers on the steering wheel, while Brian stood looking at her for some moments.
 ‘Well,’ he said eventually, ‘as the old saying goes, these things happen in the best-regulated families. How’s your mammy taking it?’
 ‘Much as you’d expect.’
 ‘These things sort themselves out in time,’ he said, after another pause. ‘I’ll call up and see her later this morning.’
 ‘Oh, I think I’d give her a wee while yet,’ Cate said hastily. ‘I’m clearing out myself for a night, to stay with Helen and give Mammy a chance to think it through.’
 ‘It’s as bad as that?’
 ‘I suppose so,’ Cate replied, suddenly miserable. Brian leaned towards her. ‘Ach, daughter, this is the worst bit. I mind the time ... I mind ...’ He looked away. ‘Your mammy’ll come round to it. It’s always a shock at first, so it is.’
 ‘You’re telling me.’ He told her to look after herself. As she drove away she realised that she felt brighter for having spoken to him, without being able to explain to herself exactly why that should be.
 For a moment she even wondered if she felt well enough to head off somewhere for the day; maybe to County Down, that would be good, ending up in Belfast just in time for Helen’s arrival home from work. But she dismissed the idea in the very moment it came to her. She’d slept badly the night before; perhaps she’d need to take a nap for an hour or two in Helen’s place this afternoon. On top of that, she still felt wretched with [81] morning sickness. That at least was one of the benefits of having told her family what had happened: she would no longer have to go through the charade of having to pretend to be well when she felt terrible. God, but Sally was decent! She’d come tapping on Cate’s bedroom door this morning with tea and toast. Having that before she got out of bed had been a good help, as opposed to coming downstairs on an empty stomach and trying not to gag when her mother asked her would she like some scrambled egg. She’d always been great, Sally, and Cate felt guilty now for having taken her so much for granted in the past. The way she’d handed over her car keys, too, without making a big deal about it.
 But that was nothing new either. Often, when Cate was home for a week in the summer, she’d go out for the day with her mother and Sally in Sally’s can They always liked to go to such places as the Glens of Antrim or the Giant’s Causeway, somewhere you could see magnificent scenery. They would have a picnic, or Cate would treat them to lunch in a hotel. But Sally realised (although she didn’t pretend to understand) that Cate liked to go to other places too. ‘The keys are there,’ she would say, nodding towards where they hung, near the stove. ‘Off you go, if you want.’
 And off Cate did go, many times, driving for hours through the countryside alone, trying to fathom Northern Ireland in a way which wasn’t, if you still lived there, necessary. Or advisable, she thought. Or possible, even.
 Swatragh and Draperstown; Magherafelt and Toome; Plum-bridge and Castledawson: her family couldn’t understand her interest in these places. She drove through pinched villages where the edges of the footpaths were painted red, white and blue, where there were Orange Lodges and locked churches; through more prosperous towns with their memorials from the Great War and their baskets of lobelia and fuchsia hanging from brackets from the street lamps, with their Tidy Town awards on burnished plaques and their proper shopfronts. She drove through villages where unemployed men stood on street corners and dragged on cigarettes, or ambled up and down between the chip shop and the bookie’s, past walls which bore Republican graffiti or incongruously glamorous advertisements on huge hoardings. She saw Planter towns that had had the heart bombed [82] out of them; ‘Business as Usual’ signs pasted on the chipboard nailed over the broken windows of The Northern Bank and Williamson’s Hardware. Now and then she would see a Mission tent, or a temporary road sign indicating the way to a ‘Scripture Summer Camp’. She drove along narrow roads between shaggy wet hedges of hawthorn and beech. Once, somewhere in South Derry, she saw a field where a few pale cattle stood up to their knees in nettles and scutchgrass before a ruined building with ‘INLA rule’ painted on it in crude white letters. The cattle stared at her mildly as she passed by.
 She saw signposts for places which had once held no particular significance but whose names were now tainted by the memory of things which had been done there: Claudy, Enniskillen, Ballykelly. She drove and drove and drove under grey skies and soft clouds. The towns and fields slipped past her until she felt that she was watching a film, and then she realised that if she had been asked to pick a single word to sum up her feelings towards Northern Ireland she would be at a complete loss, so much so that she didn’t even know whether a negative or a positive word would have been more apt.
 As she drove to Belfast this morning, she remembered how, during these summer drives, she would sometimes fantasise about moving back to the north to live there, particularly when she saw a house which took her fancy: always a magnificent stone house with ivy growing on it, maybe with a garden running down to a river, the whole thing surrounded by lime trees and oaks. She’d look at a high distant window and imagine herself standing there, looking out from another life. But it didn’t amount to anything, this fantasy; she would do as much if she were on holiday in the Cotswolds or in Tuscany, and build a vague life for herself around some house or market or town half-glimpsed and as quickly forgotten, both the fact of the place and the thought it had stirred.
 Once, during one of her summer drives, she had stopped to buy some petrol in a village in Fermanagh, and she’d been particularly taken with the place. It had been a bright morning and she remembered flowers and an air of quiet prosperity, neat shops, outside one of which bunches of carrots hung with their leafy tops intact. She thought that this looked like the kind of [83] place to which so many of the people she knew in London would like to move, and it belied the idea many of them would have had of life in Northern Ireland. But later that day, while she was listening to the car radio, she heard a report which said that a man of twenty, an RUC reservist, had been shot dead while working in his father’s vegetable shop in that same village. And although she didn’t want to pass through the place again when she was driving home that evening, she had no choice. By then the weather had broken; and the plastic tape which the police had tied to lamp-posts to cordon off the area flapped and strained in the strong wind and rain. An army checkpoint had been set up and every car was being stopped and the whole thing was ghastly and depressing. She thought of the young man dead and felt ashamed of her own easy sentimentality earlier in the day.
 But she was careful never to talk to her family, especially to her mother, about the idea of her moving back to the north, for she was afraid that it might be taken seriously.
 Past Antrim, she turned on the car radio and listened to the news headlines. A man had been shot in his home in North Belfast during the night. A few more bleak items followed, and then the weather forecast, which said that it would be ‘mild and fair’, although Cate could already see dark clouds gathering. Once when she was home she’d remarked to Helen that she thought the forecasts were often inaccurate in Northern Ireland. ‘It’s probably deliberate,’ Helen had replied. ‘If they read out the average day’s news here and then said at the end of it, “Oh, and by the way, it’s going to bucket rain for the next twenty-four hours,” it might be more than people could take.’
 She switched off the radio again and slotted in a cassette, but as she approached Belfast and the traffic got heavier and more complicated she turned the music off too, the better to concentrate. Lorries thundered past on either side of her. ‘Ulster still needs Jesus’, it said in large letters on the side of a church. Far in the distance to her left she could see a cemetery and beyond that Belfast Lough. She drove on, down past the docks and the yellow gantries. She rather liked seeing this part of the city, although she never day-dreamed about living in Belfast. She drove over the Westlink to reach Helen’s office, and it took all of her skill to negotiate her way. She’d driven this in the past, [84] but had asked Sally to talk her through it again that morning before she left the house. She almost missed her turning and ended up on the road to Dublin. The part of the lower Falls where Helen had her office always reminded Cate more of her mother than of her sister, although it had changed a lot since the time she had lived and taught there. Cate was never comfortable in this part of town; she always felt nervous and conspicuous and was afraid that something would happen there. Knowing that this was a prejudice didn’t help her greatly.
 She hadn’t been to Helen’s office before, but had little difficulty finding it. A green door beside an off-licence (‘Handy at the end of a long day,’ Helen used to remark laconically) opened on to a narrow flight of stairs, once she had rung the bell and the buzzer had sounded. At the top of the stairs she turned right into a tiny room where a young man and a woman with a baby were sitting forlornly on a couple of worn-out chairs. The walls were covered in beauty board, and a spider plant was expiring in the corner. Cate could see now what Helen meant about the off licence. The offices in which Cate worked in London were actually quite functional and drab, given the glamorous image of the magazine; but this was something else. A door on the far side of the room opened and a man in his early forties came out. ‘Now, Mr and Mrs ...’ he started to say, and then he noticed Cate. ‘Oh, hello, Helen said you would be calling,’ he said, and ushered her through to his office. ‘I’ll see you in a minute,’ he threw over his shoulder as an afterthought to the waiting couple, and closed the door. The office was perhaps slightly bigger than the waiting room, but looked smaller because of the buff folders which were everywhere: two desks were piled high with them, they were heaped on the window-sill, piled on a chair, scattered across the floor. It was like something out of Dickens, Cate thought, and it shocked her to think of her sister spending her working life in such a place.
 ‘Helen had to go down to the Crumlin Road to see someone this morning. She left this for you,’ Owen said, opening a drawer and taking out a key, which he handed to her. Cate had only met Owen a couple of times before, but he was always very friendly towards her. ‘More than he is to me,’ Sally had once said grumpily. ‘He wouldn’t give me the light of day if he could [85] help it. I’m just a wee primary school teacher; what is there to be gained by knowing the likes of me?’
 ‘My wife Mary was showing me that interview you did with Robert De Niro last month,’ Owen went on. ‘Very impressive!’
 ‘Oh, that,’ Cate said. ‘You know how it is, these things always sound much more exciting than they actually are. De Niro’s notoriously difficult to interview.’
 ‘Ah, go on out of that, don’t try to tell me that meeting film stars is less glamorous than this,’ and Cate, glancing around at the worn carpet, the dingy filing cabinets and the buff folders, took his point, and made no such denial. Owen followed her glance, and picked up a folder from the desk. ‘Helen was reading a thing out to me the other day about what they call the paperless office, and saying “Why can’t we have one of those?” We had a good laugh about it.’
 Cate forced a smile. ‘Be sure and thank Helen for me,’ she said, ‘and tell her I’ll see her this evening. I won’t take up any more of your time; I know you have people waiting.’
 ‘They’re well used to it,’ Owen said, as he crossed to the door. ‘If you’re around later in the week, give us a ring. Mary would love to have you over for an evening.’ Cate gave him one of her marvellous smiles, and fled. When she got into the car she realised that she felt miserable again. Everything around her looked bleak, and she couldn’t find it in herself to rise above it. She wasn’t usually like this, she thought, as she turned on the ignition.
 Her spirits didn’t lift when she pulled up outside Helen’s house a short while later, with its stark garden adorned by a lone tree in a tub. It depressed her to think of her sister driving over every evening from that office, that horrible office, to this place, which was so wrong for her. Even Helen hadn’t been able to stand up to social pressure, even she conformed. She wasn’t like Owen who threw himself blindly and shamelessly into the quest for social approval like an otter leaping into a river; nor like Cate herself, whose very career and standing with her colleagues depended upon her ability to read the signs of the times more quickly and fluently than most, and to endorse them with enthusiasm. Helen should have stayed in Andersonstown, where she’d been living when she first started to work with Owen, [86] Cate thought. She’d liked it there, but the pressure to conform had been too much, even for an idealist like Helen. Cate let herself into the house and found no comfort in the bare hall and the chilly sitting room. She stood for a few moments trying to decide what changes were needed: a stronger, warmer colour for the walls, to begin with. The room was big, it could take it. Maybe some sort of urn over in that corner, or there needed to be more focus on the fireplace … This was a habit of Cate’s, she couldn’t help doing it, even in houses more successfully furnished than this. She did it to other women too, assessing their clothes, their hair, their make-up, professionally, but not unkindly, she liked to think.
 As it was now, the most striking feature of the room was a large framed photograph of Helen and her father on the lawn at Queen’s, Helen in her academic gown with her scroll in her hands. She and her father were smiling at each other in such a way that the picture would have appealed even to someone who had met neither of the people in it: the affection between them lifted it above the usual run of graduation photographs. Staring hard at Helen’s image, Cate remembered the words her cousin Una had used when she collected Cate at the airport that night two years ago. ‘Helen’s just gone to pieces,’ was how she’d put it, when Cate asked after her mother and sisters, and when Cate saw Helen, later that night and in the following days, the phrase had come back to her as being horrifyingly accurate.
 Beside the graduation photograph, which sat on top of a book-case, there was another, much smaller picture: a framed blackand-white snapshot showing the three sisters when they were children, sitting on the back step of the house, eating sliders. Cate, smiling, took it in her hands and sat down on the sofa to study it in detail. Charlie Quinn’s daughters. Anyone could easily have recognised each of them from their adult selves, the similarity was almost comic.
 The first year Cate had been in London, a colleague had remarked to her in mid December that she would be spending Christmas with her parents, and that her sister would be there too.
 ‘Not that it matters much to me,’ the woman added, ‘we’re not very close to each other.’ [87]
 ‘When did you last hear from her?’ Cate had asked, and the woman had frowned and thought for a moment.
 ‘I don’t think we’ve been in touch at all since a New Year’s Eve party last year, now I come to think of it.’ Cate was so amazed by this she hadn’t known what to say. It was just around this time that she’d changed the spelling of her name, and the family didn’t like it: Helen was being particularly prickly and difficult, but no matter how awkward it was between them the idea of their not being in touch for a whole year, and it being such a matter-of-fact thing, struck her as impossible. She could see that the other woman had noticed her reaction, even though Cate still made no comment.
 ‘It’s no big deal, you know,’ her colleague said. ‘We have nothing in common with each other.’
 But this only mystified Cate further. What did she have ‘in common’ with Sally and Helen, except that they were sisters? Surely that was the whole point of family. It was to change strangers into friends that you needed some kind of shared interests, beliefs or aspirations, but with your sisters, what you had ‘in common’ was each other. Looking back on this now, years later, she was even a bit ashamed to realise how much she’d taken her own family for granted, how unremarkable she’d found the tremendous warmth and love in which she had grown up. She’d always known that childhood was important, and to catch a glimpse into the unhappiness of other people’s lives had shocked and unsettled her.
 She replaced the photograph on top of the bookcase and went into the kitchen, little knowing that Helen had cleaned it since the weekend, and that what she found so untidy was a significant improvement on what had gone before. Out of the few things available there, she prepared something for herself to eat. There was some bread and cream crackers, but the bread was hard, and the crackers were soft; so she had a cup of instant soup and an apple. She washed up her cup and spoon afterwards, and cleaned around the stove and sink too, thinking vaguely that this might make Helen even a little bit more kindly disposed to her: Cate knew that she needed all the help she could muster.
 When she had finished in the kitchen, she made herself a pot of tea and took it back into the other room, where she settled [88] down on the sofa to read. An hour or so later, having tired of her book, she rummaged through Helen’s video collection, and decided to watch The Third Man. When it was over, she had something more to eat. Had it not been for the rain which was now steadily falling, she would have gone for a walk; but instead she sat down on the sofa again, and picked up her book. Immediately, an irresistible sleepiness came over her. She took off her shoes, put a cushion under her head, and within moments she was in a deep sleep, from which she was awoken some hours later by the sound of the phone ringing.
 ‘It’s me.’ When Cate’s family called each other up on the phone, they never identified themselves by any other means than this phrase, and the recipient of the call was never confused or baffled, for even a moment, as to which member of the family was speaking to them. ‘Oh, hello, Helen.’
 ‘Are you all right?’
 ‘Yes, fine, great,’ Cate lied, for she had been hauled out of a dream about the man whose child she was expecting, and felt disoriented now to be listening all of a sudden to Helen talking about what time she expected to be home. She would stop off and get pizzas to save them having to cook and would that be all right, and did she want a Four Seasons or a Pepperoni, and Cate was saying yes, yes, whatever you want, whatever you think best. And then suddenly the conversation was over, and she was sitting there holding a buzzing receiver, and trying not to cry.
 The dream had been horrible. She had never dreamt about him before, she even thought about him far less often than she would ever have believed likely in such circumstances. She had, however, dreamt frequently about the child, and that wasn’t pleasant either: always the same, of going into a nursery and seeing a cot at the far side of the room, with the child sitting in it, in a straight-backed, rather adult posture. When Cate approached it, the child would turn and look at her in a some-what sceptical way, which always made Cate feel glad that it was too small to be able to talk, because it looked as if it would have plenty to say if it could.
 In this new dream, the child’s father had looked pretty sceptical too. They were sitting together in a restaurant to which they [89] had often gone, but which she would never have considered for a moment as a suitable venue for breaking the news to him. But it appeared that that was what she had just done, and he was reacting as she had feared he might, without ever really thinking that he would. In her dream he was surpassing her worst imaginings, denouncing her loudly, so that everyone could hear. The whole place fell silent, the sound of conversation and the clatter of cutlery dying away, and although people pretended not to listen she knew that everyone was agog. How could they fail to hear his loud accusations of selfishness and deceit, and what would they make of her own failure to argue against this? She couldn’t find a word to say in her own defence, although as soon as she awoke, it was all she could do not to start blurting out excuses and explanations to her sister.
 Not that she’d needed to explain herself, up until yesterday, for in reality he had been kind to her, and had offered her all the help and support she wanted, which was none; she only intended to go on with her life without him, and she wondered afterwards why she had told him at all, why she had risked trouble. The only reason that she could dredge up was that it wouldn’t have been either fair or decent to keep him ignorant of the situation, and that had been of enormous importance to her, to be able to tell herself that she was acting with fairness, and decency. But now, in the aftermath of her dream, she was no longer so sure about this.
 There were two clear points which Cate could not reconcile. One was that she would never admit she had deliberately set out to get pregnant; she’d have sworn that by all she held dear. The other was that when she received the results of her pregnancy test, she’d felt a rush of pure delight. And she’d never have admitted that to anyone, either.
 What had happened? Was it just because of the age she had reached? She didn’t think so; nor did she like to. She didn’t like to make a connection between this and her father’s death, but everything was different now because of that. Even while her life had appeared to go on much as before, to her it was utterly changed, in ways she would never have expected. Her initial reactions had surprised her. The grief and anger she felt she could understand, but she couldn’t explain why, on returning to [90] London, she’d flung herself back into life there as if her own life depended on it. One of the first things she did after the funeral was to arrange to have her apartment redecorated in pale colours which gave a greater sense of light and space. She sometimes bought more flowers than she had vases for; she became seriously interested in food and invited people round to dinner more often than ever before. She bought herself some new clothes which, even by her own extravagant standards, were outrageously expensive. But when she was with her friends she could sometimes see that they weren’t at ease with her the way she was, that there was something about all this which didn’t add up. So sometimes she went alone at nights amongst strangers, and she watched the crowds surge in the West End, she craved noise and brightness and colour.
 And yet, for all of that, her life had gone sour. The grief was always there. It was as if for years she’d been walking on a tightrope, but had been so skilled and gifted that she hadn’t even known she was doing it. Now she had suddenly swayed, had looked down and seen that she might well fall, and fall a long, long way. Worse, people wouldn’t care, it would be little more than a curious spectacle to them; and some people would be quite happy even to shake the rope.
 There’d been a coolness and reserve with some of her colleagues after the funeral, and it was something more than the English being less comfortable with the bereaved than the Irish were. What they were thinking only dawned on her slowly, and it was so horrible that she shrank away, afraid of having to confront it until she was forced to do so; and of course it wasn’t long before that happened.
 One day, about three weeks after she returned to work, a journalist who had often done freelance work for the magazine in the past had called in to discuss a supplement which had been commissioned in Cate’s absence. As she looked through the initial work he’d brought along she remarked, ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t in on this from the start, but I was in Ireland; and she didn’t know why she added, ‘My father died.’
 ‘Yes, I know,’ the man replied. ‘I read about it in the papers.’ Cate lifted her head from the material she had been glancing through and stared hard at the man, but he stared back coldly [91] at her, and did not speak. ‘He thinks my father was a terrorist,’ she said to herself. ‘He thinks that he brought his fate upon himself; that he deserves the death he got.’
 Afterwards, she couldn’t remember how she’d brought the exchange between them to a close. She remembered sitting at her desk leafing through the pages he’d left with her, not seeing them, and wondering if your heart could literally turn to iron in your chest, for she felt like that was what was happening to her. She didn’t think she could contain her anger, she surprised herself at how calmly she was able to say to a colleague who came into the room, ‘We’ll go through with this project because it was commissioned when I was away, but I don’t want to use him again in future. The quality of his work has gone down; we need fresh talent for the magazine.’ But when her colleague protested (as well she might have done, Cate knew, for there was absolutely nothing wrong with the man’s work), it was then that her temper broke.
 ‘Did you hear me?’ she said, banging the desk with her fist. ‘I’m in charge of this department. What I say goes, and I say that he won’t work for us again. Is that clear? Is it?’
 She could see how the other woman was shaking with fright as she left the room after this unexpected outburst and Cate’s own hands were trembling as, sitting alone now, she covered her eyes. She knew that she was in the wrong. Later, she might apologise to the other woman, but she wouldn’t go back on her word about the journalist. So she was being unfair: well, life was unfair and if he didn’t know that, it was time he found out. Yet even as she recognised and nursed her own meanness of spirit, she was appalled by it. Her anger this afternoon came from the same source that had caused Sally, gentle, good-hearted Sally, to say words Cate could never have imagined coming from her: ‘I hate those people, and I hope somebody kills them.’
 When she left the office at the end of that day, she felt inexplicably weary. Usually, she would unthinkingly join the rushing river of commuters which had shocked and disturbed her when she had first arrived in London, but which was so much a part of the city that it now seemed barely worthy of mention. Having become a part of that phenomenon herself, she had been mildly surprised at the strength of Sally’s reaction when she visited her: [92] ‘When they say “rush hour” here, they really do mean it, don’t they?’
 But on this particular evening, Cate felt as though she had just arrived in the city, and was unable to cope with it. On Hungerford Bridge, people jostled her and impatiently pushed her out of the way. The tracks sparked blue as a packed train pulled slowly out of Charing Cross. She could see the faces and bodies of people pressed up against the glass of the windows, like bottled fruit. The rumbling weight and proximity of the passing train unnerved her. Abruptly, Cate pulled herself out of the flood of people, into one of the recessed areas of the bridge, where she leaned against the railings and looked down at the green water sliding past. Then she raised her eyes to take in the huge, glittering city: the festoons of white lights swaying along the South Bank, the dark winter sky, the dome of St Paul’s and the lit, clustered buildings all around it: the whole unstoppable engine of the city itself.
 In her apartment, there was a vase of stiff, thornless yellow roses. Before leaving for work that morning she had gently inclined one of the flowers towards her, and stared into the heart of it, into the dense arcs of pure colour. Had there ever been another such rose? Yes indeed: she remembered the fat, soft yellow roses her grandmother had grown, and which still grew: Brian would bring them to Cate’s mother in slack bouquets, the stems sheathed in tinfoil. The roses would grow and fade and grow again; the tree would force out leaves and then buds and then roses, no matter who lived or died, no matter who saw the blossom, or cared for its existence. And the city before her, she now realised, was as fragile as the roses, constantly renewing itself, but a finite thing, an illusion. And although she could not remember making any conscious decision there, later, when she thought about why she wanted to have children she would always remember that evening when she stood upon the bridge; and how, on returning to her apartment she found upon the table scattered yellow petals. The only explanation she would ever be able to give was this: ‘I wanted something real.’
 She turned and looked at the clock. In no time at all now, Helen would be back. [93]