The Green Road by Anne Enright Page B

little office and some time later, whistling in the afterglow, he might get the children up and out for school. Constance liked stretching between the sheets to the sound of their chatter, only to pause and remember what she and Dessie had been up to, a couple of hours before. She kept the memory of him inside her all day. It was there now, if she wanted to think about it, washed as she was, with her underarms scraped for the doctor, and naked to the waist under her hospital gown. Who would have thought? Constance was not a fabulous looking woman, and Dessie was not a fabulous looking man, and that was the laugh of it, really. They were lucky. Because what was the point of looking sexy if you never got any sex, as happened often enough. Even to Lauren, who was always turning men down.
    Constance remembered telling her about Dessie, the way she sort of hooted.
    ‘Dessie? Dessie McGrath?’ Then later she said, ‘He’s really nice.’ And she meant it. And she sounded sad.
    On the other side of the corridor, the technician in the white coat came out carrying an envelope and the woman who followed her ducked her head as she turned towards the next queue on the banquette. She lifted her fingers to her breastbone, with her head inclined, like some painting of the Virgin Mary that Constance remembered. She tipped herself lightly there as though to say, My life is not my own.
    ‘So who’s getting married?’ Constance said to Margaret Dolan.
    ‘Sorry?’
    ‘The wedding.’
    ‘Oh, the wedding. My daughter.’
    ‘My goodness,’ said Constance. ‘Mother of the bride.’
    ‘Hah,’ she said. She leaned forward, so her bare back swelled out of the open gown and she rubbed her hurt hands together.
    ‘I have a girl,’ said Constance.
    But the woman did not hear. She was talking about the bridesmaids, who would be in lilac to match the bride’s black hair. She was worried about her daughter’s asthma, the way her sinuses blew up on her whenever she was stressed.
    ‘Oh dear,’ said Constance.
    Other people’s children can be very dull, her own mother liked to say. And it was sort of true. Constance remembered Lauren the year she moved to Strasbourg, sitting in the kitchen with a big glass of white, talking about ski trips and restaurants and skinny French women with their horror of plastic surgery. One child teething and the other going behind the sofa for a quiet poo, and Lauren sort of elaborately unsympathetic to all this, talking about the difference between a pink tinted foundation and one that was a bit more yellow.
    ‘What age is Rory, again? Three?’
    Even her own mother listened without listening.
    ‘Oh, I can’t remember,’ she would say, when there was some little problem. ‘It’s a long time ago.’
    But it was not a long time ago for Constance, who was still in it. Whose children were coming up to teenagers now, with no gap – or none that she could discern – between breast-feeding and breast cancer, between tending and dying. Who did not know what else she could do.
    ‘Do something!’ said her mother.
    Rosaleen believed a woman should be interesting. She should keep her figure, and always listen to the news.
    ‘Like what?’
    ‘Take up horse riding.’
    ‘Right,’ said Constance. Her mother had always wanted a daughter who looked good on a pony, or a daughter who did ballet, like a daughter in a book. Rosaleen always had a paperback on the go, opera on the radio, cuttings rooting in pots on the windowsills and overflowing on to the floor. Which was hardly the McGrath style – living, as they did, in bungalow bliss down the road.
    ‘You are so lucky,’ she used to say. Meaning something else entirely.
    But she was also right. Constance was lucky. Trips to New York were just the tip of the iceberg, Constance was spoilt with tickets to Bruce Springsteen and the Galway Races, a leg of lamb brought home on Friday, chocolates if she wanted them or No chocolates! As soon as they could afford it