secret was to wait until McCann paused for breath and then get your goodbyes in fast. Peadar braked as the horsebox slowed even more.
‘If he’s got three sites going at once then that’s Nolan’s problem,’ Peadar interjected. ‘He can switch workmen around all he likes once he meets his commitments to us, because he knows he’s not getting another red cent until I can see my face shining in the floor tiles.’
Peadar replaced the receiver, making a deliberate show of switching the phone off.
‘Sorry about that,’ he apologised.
‘No, it’s reassuring,’ Alison replied. ‘Once I’m sure McCann is still in Dublin I know he can’t pop his head out of the petrol tank if we stop to fill it up somewhere along the way.’
Peadar smiled, knowing her views on the vice–principal. She used to tease him in bed by inventing blind dates for McCann, her favourite being to pair him off with Mother Teresa.
The Enid Blyton tape had run out. Alison turned it over. Pip, Fatty and Daisy continued outwitting the fat policeman, Mr Goon, on side two. Danny was fascinated though he had heard it a dozen times before. Shane was happy beside him, playing some game with Paddington Bear. And Sheila … Sheila was simply happy, like it was a gift she’d been born with. Sheila, with the same jet–black hair as herself, whom they very nearly didn’t have. They had even seen a doctor about Peadar having the operation before finally deciding to go once again. Three boys would have been too much, but Alison had been certain from the moment Sheila was conceived that there was a girl inside her. Never mind that she had felt the same about Shane for nine months and told anyone who asked her. This time she’d known in her bones and kept the secret to herself.
She turned to smile at her daughter as Peadar edged in and out, trying to glimpse the winding road ahead where a gap was developing between the jeep and horsebox and the cars in front. Sheila smiled back, almost conspiratorially. Sheila who never lost her temper, even when a note arrived before the start of the Easter holidays ten days ago stating that Jean O’Connor in her class had meningitis and Alison had driven her daughter crazy, shining lights in her eyes and searching for a rash at every hour of the night. Sheila who would be her companion when the boys and Peadar were off at football games. Boys leave home and leave their mothers, but girls never quite do. They row and argue in their teens, worrying their mothers senseless, but in the end gradually become friends and confidantes in a way that no son could ever be. That’s what she had missed, with her own mother dying of cancer when Alison was twenty–two. The pendulum had never swung back. There was so much they could have talked about now, so many questions Alison would love to ask. She reached one finger out and Sheila’s hot hand wrapped itself around it, twiddling with the eternity ring she loved to turn in the light.
‘Are we there yet, Mama?’ she asked.
Alison shook her head as Peadar indicated and pulled out. At once she knew something was wrong by the intake of Peadar’s breath. Alison looked around. He was on the wrong side of the road, just where the white line started to break up. A blue van was coming towards them, but there would be time for Peadar to pull in again in front of the jeep pulling the horsebox. The problem was the black BMW with lights flashing behind them. She had noticed the bearded driver’s impatience earlier on and sensed how his constant swaying made Peadar nervous. Now the driver was trying to simultaneously overtake them and the jeep. The man was beeping furiously, screaming at Peadar through the glass like it was his fault. Peadar veered in front of the jeep, putting his foot down to try and create enough space before the BMW swerved into the side of them. The blue van flashed past. Alison screamed, waiting for the crash but somehow the BMW had managed to squeeze in behind them, mainly because the jeep braked hard, sending the horsebox swaying about on the road.
The BMW’s lights were only inches from their back bumper, feet away from her children. Peadar was rattled, shouting at Alison for screaming, cursing the lunatic behind them. The BMW pulled out again without indicating and sped into the distance. Alison could see two teenage girls looking back at them vacantly through the rear window.
Peadar said something and she snapped back. Then they both went quiet, anxious not to frighten the children more. She raised the volume on the tape, sat back and stared ahead. Peadar went slower than usual, even though the road was clear. Cars overtook them, flashing back at twenty and thirty miles above the speed limit. He looked across after five minutes and took her hand in his free one.
‘It wasn’t my fault,’ he said quietly. ‘I’d never take chances with you all in the car. It was that lunatic.’
She squeezed his hand and said nothing. What would it matter whose fault it was if they were all dead on the roadside? She wished they were in the hotel already, the children splashing about in the pool and her outside in the Canadian hot tub. The tape ended. Three voices called out different requests, but she ignored them, not even looking for music on the radio. She needed silence to get her wits back. She wanted to close her eyes as she always did at some stage of this journey and become a child again, counting off the miles in the clank of wheels as the train brought her mother and father and herself on that one magical holiday to Fitzgerald’s.
They didn’t stop again on the way down and the children were quiet, leaving her to her memories. Arklow was now by–passed and Enniscorthy wasn’t too slow. As Peadar picked up speed along the banks of the Slaney with the asylum perched on the cliffs above them, she searched for the Gingerbread Man tape. There was something about the snatches of classical background music and the narrator’s voice saying ‘at the blip turn the page’ that conjured up for her the pent–up expectation of every journey they had taken on this road. She could remember playing it for Danny when Shane was a baby and then for Shane when Sheila was teething beside him in the car. Even at home when she put it on and closed her eyes she could see this stretch of road and feel the spring sunshine through the windscreen as the car sped along these last few miles.
The boys protested at the choice of tape but she told them that it was Sheila’s turn to hear something.
‘Just twenty miles,’ Peadar told Danny, ‘and we’re there. No more towns or anything, just open road.’
Wexford town was long by–passed, taking the Rosslare traffic away from those cramped medieval streets she had first glimpsed as the train trundled slowly over wooden quayside sleepers the summer she was twelve. Holding a bottle of Guinness by the neck, her father had pulled down the carriage window and stared out, lost in memories of which she had no part.
Weeks before, when the notion of a special holiday to mark his silver wedding anniversary arose, her father had been adamant about doing it in style by taking his wife and young daughter down to Fitzgerald’s. It was the first time she had ever heard of the hotel, but he began describing it as like a palace. His own father had taken him there by train from Waterford for lunch when he made his Confirmation in the 1930s, an extravagant day trip they had spent years talking about. And the summer after he left school at fourteen he had got a kitchen job there, living in, and bathing on the private beach every evening.
Standing at the train window, he had seemed to change before her eyes. Hidden fragments of his life tumbled out that she strove to piece together. This was the first occasion when she properly understood that parents had previous lives and secrets. Listening to him had reminded her of a boy with his nose pressed against a shop window. Always on the outside, describing the clothes guests wore to dinner back then, the size of the dining room, the musicians who played. All as glimpsed from a kitchen sink, between the swish of a swing door opening and closing as waiters came and went. Now he had decided to return with his wife and daughter in his own private triumph.
Alison could remember the tiny station at Rosslare and the steep hump–backed bridge where the sea suddenly glistened into sight. They had walked the
