Lying in Wait(53)

The idea of posting the Annie letter from Athlone made sense, I suppose. If they went looking for Annie after receiving it, her family would have an extremely wide hinterland to search.

Bridget had given up asking me to come and meet her family, so when I was the one to suggest it, she was delighted. The preparations started weeks in advance. The date of the visit was coincidentally set for Annie’s birthday in July. Bridget and her mother exchanged letters daily on the upcoming ‘arrangements’ to be made. Bridget had two younger sisters who both lived at home in their three-bedroom house. For my two-night visit, they would share a room while Bridget slept on the sofa downstairs and I would have Bridget’s childhood bedroom. Bridget said we were to pretend to be virgins. Her mother was apparently in a knot of anxiety. Did I eat fish? Because they always had fish on Fridays. They were changing the curtains to fix the draught in the bedroom. Would I attend Mass with the family on Sunday morning? Would I go with Bridget to visit her granddad in the local nursing home? There were protocols being put in place. I was being treated like visiting royalty. I don’t know what Bridget had told them, but it was clear that my impending arrival was the cause of much fuss. I hate fuss. I tried hard not to be irritated by Bridget’s excitement.

My mother thought it unreasonable that I was going away for two nights.

‘Two? In Athlone? What will you do there?’

‘I don’t know, Mum, but it would be rude to just arrive on Friday night and leave on Saturday.’

‘I’ve never been to Athlone.’

‘You’ve never been anywhere.’

She huffed a bit. ‘All you have to do is post the letter. Get the early bus back on Sunday?’

‘I’ll try.’

‘Bring an extra sweater. It’s always cold down the country.’ It was July. I suppose she must have been outside Dublin at some stage.

We set off for Athlone on the bus on Friday after work, together with all the other rural immigrants along that route to the midlands and further west to Galway, making their weekly pilgrimage home with bags of laundry over their shoulders. I had the letter in my inside pocket, ready to be posted at the first opportunity. Bridget had prepared sandwiches and bought sweets for our two-hour journey, and there was a scheduled toilet stop in Kinnegad. Her camera clicked away as we rolled out of the city, and she chattered excitedly.

‘You know that outside Dublin, dinner is called tea and lunch is called dinner? And you drink tea with every meal and between meals and before bed? Josephine is fourteen and very nosy, but you don’t have to answer any of her questions, and Maureen is fanatical about reading, so she’ll have her head in the books all weekend. Dad won’t say much, but Mam is very religious and will want to know who your parish priest is and all that.’

Mum and I had stopped going to Mass after Dad died. We had always disliked going. Our parish priest had visited and asked us to return, and we swore we would but had somehow never quite managed it.

‘Oh well, don’t tell my mam that! She’d have a heart attack.’

When we disembarked in Athlone, a creature appeared out of the crowd at the station, wearing a headscarf and a buttoned-up-to-the-neck raincoat with a handbag (plastic) dangling over the crook of her elbow. She grabbed Bridget fiercely by the shoulders and hugged her close, then turned to me.

‘You must be Laurence. We’re delighted to have you, delighted, only delighted! I said to Bridget’s father this morning, I said, isn’t this only fabulous, getting to meet Bridget’s young man at last? After all, you’ve been going steady for a good while now, a good while, I said to Bridget’s father.’

She was nervous. I guessed that normally, in these situations, the young man in my position would have been the one on trial, but in this case she clearly felt she was the one being judged. Any nerves I had disappeared.

‘It’s very nice to meet you. I’ve heard a lot about you.’ This was probably true, though I only remembered what Bridget had told me on the bus journey.

Mrs Gough apologized that it was a ten-minute walk to the house and whooped with admiration when I offered to carry Bridget’s bag as well as my own. ‘A real gentleman, that’s what you are now, a real gentleman so you are.’

The house was a grey one in the middle of a terrace of other grey ones on a narrow street. A wooden front door stood sentry beside a single window, while two windows above looked down on us. Net curtains fronted every window, despite the fact there was nothing about the house that would make one curious enough to look inside.

The interior of Bridget’s house did not improve my impression of the place. Drab, ordinary, colourless and cramped. I always knew I lived in a big house, but I didn’t expect small houses to feel so, well, small. From the front door, I could see the back wall of the house. There was a front room and a back kitchen and a narrow stairway to the right. Bridget’s photos were everywhere, framed in the sitting room, Sellotaped to the fridge door in the kitchen, tucked into the frame of the mirror on the wall. We left our bags at the foot of the stairs and were ushered into the kitchen, where the overwhelming smell of boiled cabbage threatened the egg sandwich that had been idling in my upper intestine since lunchtime. ‘Get in there out of the cold, the kettle’s not long boiled, you’ll have a cup of tea.’ It was a statement rather than an offer. I was compelled to sit in a straight-backed stained armchair beside an old range. It was clearly ‘Father’s chair’.