The Honey Queen (32 page)

Peggy felt she ought to say something comforting. She was at a loss though. She’d never known that sort of love with her father. Still, she couldn’t remain silent.

‘You had someone you loved greatly in your life, in both your lives,’ she said to Fifi and Geraldine solemnly. ‘That’s priceless.’ She paused, feeling her own eyes brim. ‘Not everyone has that, you know.’

‘I know, I know,’ said Geraldine, dabbing her eyes with a tissue she’d found tucked in her sleeve.

‘Yes,’ said Fifi, with a calm, thoughtful look at Peggy. ‘Not everyone has that. Now, since that little minx has gone to bed and I think she is actually asleep, I’ve got some Häagen-Dazs ice cream in the freezer: strawberry cheesecake.’

‘Oh no,’ said her mother, ‘my Weight Watchers diet is going out the window. Just because you’re like a whippet and can eat what you want doesn’t mean the rest of us can.’

‘I’d love some ice cream,’ Peggy said suddenly, feeling as if the only thing in the world she wanted was Häagen-Dazs – preferably the whole tub.

Peggy had been extra sick the next morning. She wondered if it was the Häagen-Dazs. She had some crackers beside her in the car and she nibbled them gently, sipping water too. She hadn’t been able to face breakfast. Not after all the throwing up. She had a plastic bag in the passenger well, too. Just in case. She was planning to go on the main road for a bit of the way and then get off and try some of the back roads because – and it was very strange – she just didn’t feel up to driving on the big scary motorways with the baby inside her. Cars zooming past made her feel anxious and exposed and she wanted to go slowly and carefully now that it wasn’t just her.

After an hour’s driving, she turned off on to one of the more country routes. It would get her home all the same, but it would take a while longer. She still hadn’t stopped for a cup of tea or some toast, even though she was hungry. She wasn’t sure if she’d be able to keep anything down except the crackers and water. She sighed, knowing her mother would have been cooking all day in readiness for the visit. It would taste like ashes in Peggy’s mouth.

Sixty-five miles away in an ugly bungalow, Kathleen Barry emptied the kitchen bin again. She’d done it the night before but there was still a strange smell lingering and she had to get rid of that. She had her gloves on because Tommy had made some comment about her nails the other day. Just one of his acidic throw-away remarks, but she knew what he was saying. The nails were a bit of a mess, hence
she
was a mess. She’d love one day when she was older, maybe, or if Peggy came with her, to go and have a manicure.

She’d always wanted a manicure, but she’d be too ashamed of her hands. Imagine showing them to one of the beautiful young girls in the beauty salons in town. You needed to start with the whole manicure thing when you were much younger, didn’t you, and Kathleen had never started at all. She’d never had a facial either. Peggy used to be quite into all that stuff and used to beg her to come with her, beg her.

‘We could go away, Mam, overnight somewhere. We could save up and go to one of those spas and have a few treatments done.’

It was hard to resist Peggy when she said things like that. She was tall and beautiful with gleaming skin. So much energy and vitality, and Kathleen had wanted to say,
Yes, let’s do that
, but she knew there’d be a price to pay because Tommy wouldn’t want her going off.

He might
say
it was all right, but then he’d change his mind and it wouldn’t be. He’d be angry and his anger would infect the house and Kathleen’s very bones with fear.

So she never said yes to Peggy when she asked her to go on the girl–mother trips.

She knew she was letting Peggy down, and she couldn’t bear to see Peggy looking at her sadly, betrayed. There had been too much of that over the years.

Kathleen would do whatever would make Tommy happy. He had to be happy at all costs. She couldn’t bear it otherwise, couldn’t bear it.

He hadn’t been happy the night before, even though he’d had great plans for the next few days when he was going off to the races with his pals.

The main problem was that his evening had been disrupted – which meant hers had been too.

He’d said he was going to stay out and have a few pints in the pub with the lads from work.

‘I’ll eat when I’m out with the lads,’ he’d announced that morning at breakfast as Kathleen served him the three rashers, two fried eggs and four sausages he had every day. The doctor had advised him against fried breakfasts, but doctors knew nothing, Tommy said. It was all a money-making scam to get people on to tablets for the rest of their lives.

‘Cholesterol problem my backside,’ he muttered grimly.

Tommy’s going out meant that Kathleen would have a lovely free evening where she could watch what she wanted on the television and please herself.

She’d been sitting on the couch watching an old
Miss Marple
episode she’d recorded. She loved
Miss Marple
, loved the gentleness of it, despite the murder bit. People were polite to each other in Miss Marple’s world.

And then, just at an exciting bit when a friend of Miss Marple was telling her a vital fact, Kathleen had heard Tommy’s car pulling into the driveway. She’d felt instantly guilty: guilty for sitting down, guilty because any time her husband was near her, guilt automatically began coursing like poison through her veins. Whatever Kathleen was doing would turn out to be the wrong thing when Tommy saw it.

The wrong thing varied from day to day. Sometimes, he said watching the soaps was a sin.

Other times, he told her it was ridiculous to be knitting with the television off when she could be watching the news and informing herself. What did she want – to be stupid all her life?

Then, on those very rare occasions when he brought someone home from the garage where he worked, the only thing that would please him was to see her in the kitchen.

‘She’s a great cook, my wife,’ he’d say, patting his own belly. It wouldn’t occur to him that an outsider might think it strange that this great cook was so thin she’d obviously never eaten her own food, or if she did, never sat long enough to let it settle on her bones.

At the sound of Tommy’s car, she switched off
Miss Marple
and ran to open the door. He stormed inside and Kathleen made herself small against the wall as if disappearing might help.

Then she followed him through to the kitchen and sat nervously on one of the chairs.

Tommy was ranting. He was the senior electrician in the garage, he had years of experience, but nobody ever thought about him, did they? No, it was all about themselves. That’s why he’d never prospered in work, never got any advancement. Everyone was out for what they could get themselves, weren’t they?

Eventually he got to the point. That Richie at work had done it again, taken the overtime that was Tommy’s due.

‘The bastard,’ Tommy hissed, ‘the bastard.’

On her seat, Kathleen fingered the frayed edge of the cushion and tried to imagine herself somewhere else. There were cushions on sale in town for four euros, nice flowery ones. But she couldn’t spend the money. Tommy might not like them. It was easier not to buy anything unless he was with her because if he didn’t like something, he’d tell her so endlessly and all the good would be taken out of the purchase.

He was at the fridge now, wrenching open the door and looking in it as if a feast might appear miraculously instead of the few bits of sliced ham and the hard-boiled eggs Kathleen had prepared earlier.

‘I didn’t make you dinner because you said you were going for a couple of pints after work and you’d grab a bite in the pub,’ she ventured.

She’d had a little salad herself without any of the ham and now she was glad, glad it was there so he could have it. His rage about the overtime might go into overdrive if there was no decent dinner.

‘I’m not hungry for that stuff,’ he said, slamming the fridge shut. ‘Tea. Make me a pot of tea and I’ll have some scones.’

Kathleen rose quickly, flicked on the oven with one hand and the kettle switch with the other. There were no scones but she could make them in an instant. Better if he didn’t
know
she hadn’t any, though. She’d meant to make some, but it had been busy at the tea shop today and she’d been too tired when she’d got home to think of baking.

‘Why don’t you sit in the living room and watch the news to take your mind off work, Tom,’ she soothed now, ‘and I’ll get you some nice tea and scones.’

She needed him out of the kitchen so she could bake the scones. Five minutes and she’d have them in the oven. He’d have his tea and scones in a quarter of an hour.

‘No, I’ll sit here,’ he said, settling in the big carver chair and pulling a newspaper out of his pocket. ‘I’ll have that jam too, the one you got from work.’

‘Right.’ While he read the paper, Kathleen darted from cupboard to cupboard, taking out cups and the teapot, somehow managing to measure out flour, margarine and baking powder on the section of counter beyond her husband’s field of vision. Years of practice meant it took hardly any time to get the mixture ready. The kettle gave one final hiss and went silent, but Kathleen was carefully adding a drop of milk and an egg to her big cream Delft bowl, then mixing it with a knife.

‘The kettle’s boiled,’ said Tommy truculently. ‘Are you deaf?’

‘Just a moment, love,’ trilled Kathleen, and rushed to the kettle at speed, throwing teabags into the pot and putting it on the stove to heat. Tommy liked his tea stewed, thank the Lord.

He’d only need a few scones, so she cut out six, and had them in the oven in a flash.

In order to delay things, she switched on the radio where the evening news programme was still on, and then made a great effort with laying a nice cloth on the bare kitchen table and setting out a plate, knife, mug, butter and the jar of blackberry jam somebody had given her in the café.

All the while, he sat there reading, not helping or saying a word, waiting like the lord and master for the feast to be put in front of him.

Just a few minutes more, she thought with relief, and the scones would be cooked. Piping hot, she’d say.

At that moment, he turned and caught her tidying up the flour and the bowl.

‘You had to make scones?’ he demanded.

‘I thought hot ones would be nicer,’ she whispered.

‘Too lazy to bake when you got home from that daft job,’ he said angrily. ‘It’s not as if you do anything but talk to your pals all day in that café.’ He was always dismissive of the place where his wife worked eight-hour shifts, cleaning tables, mopping up spills, hauling great trays of dishes over to the dishwashing machines. ‘The least you could do would be to bake a few buns. But no, that would be too much trouble.’

He got to his feet, folding up his paper.

‘I’m going out to the pub. I don’t want your bloody scones now. I don’t like them hot, as well you know.’

He marched off and Kathleen heard the front door slamming, and his car heading off.

She was shaking, but then, she was always shaking. She jumped at loud noises at work. If anyone dropped a plate, Kathleen would get such a fright that she’d need to sit down for a moment. And if anyone shouted – she hated shouting – she’d flatten herself against the wall, as though trying to disappear.

Occasionally, she recognized that it wasn’t right, the way he treated her. Peggy had said it for years, but then Peggy had never got on with her father, even though Kathleen had done her best to make it better between them. Tommy had lashed out with his tongue often enough at his daughter too, but Peggy had learned to cope with him and he didn’t reduce her to a bag of quivering nerves.

Not everyone lives like this
, Peggy used to say.
Leave him before he destroys you. He tells you it’s all your fault, that you make him angry, that you cause all the problems. But you don’t – he does. And he’ll never see this.

I love him
, was all Kathleen could say in return.
Where would he go if I threw him out? Who’d look after him?

She had married Tommy Barry and marriage was a sacred thing, not to be thrown away lightly. Her mother had stayed with her father, and he’d been a devil, truth be told. All marriages had their problems and it wasn’t as if Tommy hit her. He’d never so much as raised a hand to her, had he? That was something.

Outside Mullingar, Peggy decided to take a break to settle her nerves. There was a pub she knew and she parked and walked in. She’d done this in the past. It allowed her to catch her breath before she actually went home. She ordered tea and buttered toast, then went into the bathroom. In the mirror she looked the same. But inside she felt so very different. Precious. Feeling precious wasn’t something Peggy was familiar with. Her mother was precious to her, but really, there’d never been anyone else who’d made Peggy feel an incredible warmth inside. Until David, she thought, then shoved that thought from her mind. And now the baby.

The pregnancy book she couldn’t seem to put down in the evenings had said her baby was bigger than a kidney bean by this stage. Moving up to the size of an apricot. Little apricot, she muttered to herself as she locked the toilet door. My little apricot. There was always a moment of fear when she went to the toilet in case she found blood on the toilet tissue, but there was none. Little apricot was safe.

Peggy hadn’t seen children in her destiny. She’d met lots of wonderful families, people like Fifi, Geraldine and Coco, who lived together in harmony. But Peggy had always felt that this particular path wasn’t for her. You had to come from happiness to make it. It was that simple. Worse, people chose what they were used to, that was what it said in the self-help books. The same books tried to say that you could do it differently if you really worked at it, but Peggy knew they were wrong. What was in you was in you.

What was in her was what had been put there as a child and as a teenager, and there was no getting away from it. She wanted little apricot so badly and yet … a tiny, frightened part of her wanted the choice to be taken away from her, for there to be blood in the toilet bowl. For little apricot to slip away so that Peggy wouldn’t have to choose.