Doctor's Wife (2 page)

    Burglars. Or worse? Ever since the bomb in the
Aber-corn, anything at all made her jump. She stood mouse quiet,
listening, until, oh, God, thank God, she saw who it was. A girl
moving about in the spare room.

    “Did I scare you?” the girl asked, discovering Mrs.
Redden and the look on Mrs. Redden’s face.

    “No, not at all.”

    The girl, a Yank by the sound of her, had on blue
jeans and a peasant blouse you could see through. A big backpack
sat open in the middle of the spare room. The girl picked up a
comb, a hairbrush, and some makeup things. “I was supposed to be
out of here an hour ago, but I got tied up on the phone. You’re
Peg’s friend from Belfast, right?”

    “That’s right, yes.”

    “I’m Debbie Rush.”

    “Sheila Redden,” Mrs. Redden said, and there was one
of those pauses.

    “So,” the girl said. “How are things in
Belfast?”

    “Oh, the usual.”

    “It must be rough, right? Are they ever going to
settle that mess?”

    Mrs. Redden smiled what she hoped was a friendly
smile. Yanks. Kevin had an American aunt who was over on a visit
from Boston last summer: she would wear you, that one. Of course,
this girl probably worked with Peg. That would be it.

    “I guess you’ve just got to get the British out of
there,” the girl said.

    Mrs. Redden did not honor this with an answer. “Do
you work in the office with Peg?” she asked.

    “At Radio Free Europe?” The girl began to laugh. “No
way. I’m a friend of Tom Lowry’s. He’s a friend of Peg’s and, when
there was a foul-up on my charter flight home, he spoke to her
and—she’s really nice—she let me crash here until you came.”

    At once Mrs. Redden felt guilty. “I’m putting you
out, then?”

    “No, no, it’s all right. I’m going to a hotel
tonight and tomorrow I get a flight, I hope.” The girl hoisted the
backpack, wrestling it onto her back. Her breasts stood out under
the sheer blouse. Mrs. Redden helped straighten the backpack on the
girl’s shoulders.

    “Oh, thanks,” the girl said. “I’m glad I’m going
downstairs, not up. How about those stairs?”

    “Good for the figure,” Mrs. Redden said.

    “Yes, right.” The girl, gripping her backpack
straps, turned and marched like a soldier into the hall. Mrs.
Redden hurried to open the front door. “Well, it was nice meeting
you,” the girl decided.

    “I’m sorry to be putting you out like this.”

    “No, no, have a nice vacation. See you.”

    Mrs. Redden, holding the door open—she didn’t want
to close it until the girl had gone, it would seem rude— watched
the blond head bobbing down and around and down and around, until
the staircase was empty.

    •

    Four hours later, when Mrs. Redden and Peg Conway
were celebrating their reunion with dinner at La Coupole, two
homosexuals, coming through the restaurant, stopped, stared at Mrs.
Redden, whispered to each other, then bowed to her in an elaborate
manner.

    “You don’t know them, surely?” Peg asked.

    “No, of course not.”

    “They must have taken you for someone else.”

    “Or maybe they think I’m a man dressed up in a
frock.”

    Peg laughed. “You’re mad, why would they think
that?”

    “On account of my height. The way I stick up out of
this banquette.”

    “When are you going to get over that notion about
your height?”

    “You never get over it,” Mrs. Redden said.

    “Speaking of queers”—Peg Conway began to laugh
again—”I wonder what ever happened to Fairy Rice?”

    “Wasn’t he the end?” They laughed together,
remembering: he had been a fellow student at Queen’s who wore a
sweater as long as a short dress and sat in the front row at
lectures, polishing his fingernails with a chamois nail buffer.
“His old mum died,” Mrs. Redden said. “I saw the death notice in
the
Belfast Telegraph
a couple of years ago.”

    “Do you remember her haunting the Students’ Union,
waiting to give him his lunch in a picnic basket?”

    They laughed.

    “I heard he went to England,” Mrs. Redden said.

    “Fairy did?”

    “I think so.”

    “Tell me,” Peg said. “Have you and Kevin ever
thought of emigrating?”

    “Oh, Kevin would never leave Belfast.”

    “Why not?”

    “It would mean starting all over, working up a new
practice. Besides, he never wants to travel. It’s taken me two
years to get him to join me on this holiday in Villefranche.”

    “I remember he used to like a good time, though,”
Peg said. “The races, do you remember?” As she said it, she saw
him, Sheila’s big lump of a husband, standing in the members’
enclosure at the Curragh, a reserved-stand tag in his buttonhole,
lifting his field glasses to look down the track.

    “Gosh, yes, that used to be great fun. Driving to
Dublin, spending the night in Buswells Hotel, then all day Saturday
at the races, and a grand meal before we drove home. But, he has no
time now.”

    “A person should make time.”

    “It’s hard for him, though,” Mrs. Redden said. “I
mean, with this group practice. And now he has an extra job as a
surgical consultant to the British Army. They have him down to
their H.Q. in Lisburn three or four times a week. It’s too much
work for one man. And it hasn’t improved his disposition, I can
tell you.”

    Peg Conway was not listening; she was watching the
door. All evening she had been hoping Ivo would show up, but now it
seemed unlikely. She said, “Talking of Ville-franche, I spent a
terrific, dirty weekend in the South of France recently.”

    Mrs. Redden was embarrassed. “Oh?”

    “His name is Ivo Radie. He’s a Yugoslav.”

    “A Yugoslav,” Mrs. Redden said. So there
was
a new man.

    “A refugee. He teaches English and German in a
grotty little private school in the sixteenth arrondissement. At
any rate, he’s an improvement on Carlo.”

    “What happened to Carlo?”

    “Don’t ask. That wife of his can keep him. Ivo is
divorced, at least.”

    “Ivo Radie,” Mrs. Redden said, as though trying out
the name.

    “I met him by the merest fluke,” Peg said. “Hugh
Greer—you remember Hugh Greer?”

    “Of course,” Mrs. Redden said. Hugh Greer, a Trinity
prof. Peg’s big early love.

    “Well, Hugh had this American student in Dublin, a
boy called Tom Lowry. He asked Tom to look me up when he came to
Paris this summer. So Tom did, and then he invited me around for a
drink at his flat. And his roommate was Ivo. So, in an odd way, I
met Ivo because of Hugh Greer.”

    “You still keep in touch with Hugh, then?”

    “Yes. Poor old Hugh. He has cancer, did you
know?”

    “Oh, God. What kind?”

    “Lung.”

    “How old is he?”

    “About fifty. Listen, would you like to meet
Ivo?”

    Mrs. Redden thought: What could you say? “Yes, of
course,” she said.

    “Good. I’ll tell you what. We’ll finish here and go
to a café called the Atrium for coffee. Ivo and Tom’s flat is just
around the corner from there. I’ll ring now and see if Ivo can join
us,” Peg said, getting up at once, very purposefully, to march off
to the
cabinet de toilette
where the telephones were. Mrs.
Redden watched her go, then, in her shy, furtive way, glanced at
the people in the next booth, an aristocratic-looking old Frenchman
and his young son, both eating Bélon oysters and sucking juice from
the shells. She thought of the first time she had ever been in La
Coupole, that summer she was a student at the Alliance Française.
Her Uncle Dan showed up in Paris and took her to lunch here to meet
a young man who was the Paris correspondent for the
Irish
Times
. After lunch, they went on, all three of them, to a
garden party at Fontainebleau, at the house of some Swedish
countess who was a friend of Uncle Dan’s. Uncle Dan knew everybody.
Cancer, he died of. Hugh Greer has it now. On the day of Uncle
Dan’s funeral I traveled alone on the train to Dublin. Kevin had to
stay behind to operate. Everybody who was anybody was at the
funeral, the cardinal in his crimson silks, sitting in the
episcopal chair at the side of the altar during the Mass, and at
Glasnevin cemetery I saw De Valéra: he took his hat off and stood,
holding it over his chest as the priest said the prayers for the
dead. Lemass, the Prime Minister, was beside him and every other
government minister as well, the whole of the diplomatic corps,
everyone. When the Irish Army buglers sounded the Last Post after
the prayers, I was sitting in a big rented Daimler with Aunt Meg. I
wept, but she didn’t, she just sat watching it all, her cane rammed
between her knees as though that was what was keeping her up
straight, and as soon as the bugles were lowered, she said,
“Fruitcake, I forgot them. I ordered seven from Bewley’s. Tell Mrs.
O’Keefe to lay out five with the sherry and sandwiches. Sheila, are
you listening?”

    Mrs. Redden looked again at the old Frenchman and
his son, who had now finished their oysters and were drinking Loire
wine and mopping up the oyster shells with thin slices of buttered
brown bread. She turned and saw Peg coming back through the huge
room, giving a thumbs-up sign from afar. The Yugoslav must have
said yes and so we’ll end up at this Atrium place, the three of us.
Mrs. Redden smiled at Peg, but into her mind came Uncle Dan’s grave
the last time she had visited it, alone, two years after his
funeral, a stormy day with lightning and thunder, no cross on the
grave, nothing about who he was, just a slab of gray Connemara
marble laid flat like a door on the earth. His name: Daniel Deane.
1899-1966. She bought a few carnations in a shop beside the
cemetery. Uncle Dan liked to wear a carnation. The cemetery
attendant gave her a little blue glass vase. Red carnations in a
blue glass vase, she left on his grave.

    •

    At the Atrium Peg chose a table with a good view of
the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Mrs. Redden was again reminded of the
French way of sitting, not really facing your table companions, but
all of you turned around to watch the passersby. The Yugoslav had
not yet shown up.

    “I love just being here, just watching the people,”
Mrs. Redden said, staring at the parade on the pavement
outside.

    “Most of this lot would be better off at home
studying, than lallygagging around in fancy dress,” Peg said. “Next
week is end-of-term exams at the Sorbonne. Thank God, I’m not a
French parent.”

    But Mrs. Redden wished
she
were. Here your
children could go where they pleased, without your worrying about
bombs, or their being stopped by an army patrol, or lifted in error
by the police, or hit by a sniper’s bullet. If Danny lingered at a
school friend’s house until after dark, usually he had to spend the
night there.

    The waiter came.

    “Listen,” Peg said. “If we want a cognac, let’s
order and pay for it before Ivo comes. Otherwise, poor lamb, he’ll
insist on standing treat.”

    “All right, but only if you’ll let me pay,” Mrs.
Redden said. “
Deux cognacs et deux cafés, s’il vous
plaît
.”

    “
Bien, Madame
,” the waiter said.

    Maybe it was the cognac, or maybe it was the
prospect of Ivo’s joining them, but there was now a noticeable
heightening of Peg’s spirits. “So, tomorrow night you’ll be in
Villefranche in the same hotel you were in on your honeymoon. It
means one thing. You liked it the first time.”

    This annoyed Mrs. Redden, although she did not show
it. At nearly forty years of age, you’d think Peg would have grown
out of her schoolgirl mania for talking about sex all the time. But
no fear.

    “You’re blushing,” Peg said.

    “Oh, stop it.”

    “Listen, Sheila, I envy you. I suppose you’re one of
the few people I know who’s still happily married. Certainly you’re
the only one who’s going off on a second honeymoon—how many years
later?”

    “Sixteen.”

    “God, is it that long?”

    “Danny’s fifteen. We were married in 1958.”

    “So, you’re what? Thirty-eight. You don’t look
it.”

    “I am thirty-seven until next November,” Mrs. Redden
said, laughing.

    “Ivo’s four years younger than me. I suppose that
sounds really decadent.”

    “Oh, nonsense,” Mrs. Redden said, but thought,
I
couldn’t do it, but then, I’m not Peg, she’s done all
the things I never had the guts to try, going on to London for
postgraduate work after getting her M.A., then the U.N. in New York
with the Irish delegation, and now Paris, and this big money with
the Americans. She lives like a man, free, having affairs,
traveling, always in big cities, whereas, look at me, stuck all
these years at home, my M.A. a waste. I don’t think I could even
support myself any more. “You know,” she said to Peg, “it’s working
and traveling that keep a person young. It’s sitting at home doing
nothing that makes you middle-aged in your mind. I was just
thinking about it the other day. It’s as if the only part of my
life I look forward to now is my holidays. There’s something
terribly wrong about that.”

    “I suppose,” Peg said, but Mrs. Redden noticed that
she wasn’t really listening. Someone had come into the café and now
Peg was signaling to him. Mrs. Redden stared at the newcomer: four
years younger than her, who does she think she’s kidding? Ten years
is more like it. The boy was very tall, with long dark hair and a
pale, bony face. He wore a brown crew-neck sweater, brown corduroy
trousers, and scuffed desert boots of the sort Mrs. Redden’s own
son had bought last year. He smiled as he came up, throwing his
head back to toss the long hair out of his eyes in a gesture once
used only by girls.