Chapter Nine

Iinda Casey wished she had lived at another time. A time when her talents would have been appreciated. She

-‘ could have been a royal mistress, or a kept woman in a luxury apartment or even a wife to some gentleman landowner who encouraged her to have a small town house in Dublin.

But no, she was of the here and now, in a world where

everyone, men and women, had to go out and work for a

living. Were they meant to thank the Women’s Lib people for this? A world where relationships were full of compromise, where marriages didn’t last. And a world that said you should be grateful day and night because you had a place to live, an education and were young and reasonably good-looking.

Linda didn’t think that was nearly enough.

But try telling that to anyone and see how far you got. Not very far with her mother. Mam seemed to have transformed herself into some kind of advertising campaign for how a well groomed, middle-aged woman should live. She had seen her mother sponging jackets with lemon juice, putting shoe trees in her shoes to keep their shape, polishing her handbag, and creaming her neck with some heavy unguent. And for what! Mam was still a sad, driven person. So what if she looked good? Inside, she was like everybody else, a mess.

Linda couldn’t really remember when Mam and Dad had

got on well. Her sister Adi, who was two years older, said she could, but then Adi was so sentimental: trees had feelings and we shouldn’t sit on leather sofas because an animal had died to make a covering for us to sit on. And as for Adi’s boyfriend Gerry … He was a total nutter! Adi had made herself into a complete doormat for him.

Linda would never put on an act like that for any man, no matter how wonderful he was. But she hadn’t met many

wonderful men. Or any wonderful man, to be honest. Wherever they were, they weren’t in Dublin.

She had been out three times with this fellow called Simon, which by Linda’s standards was almost a life commitment.

Simon was attractive. He had a rich daddy, a doting mummy and a job in his uncle’s estate agency where he had very little to do. But Simon was accustomed to going out with women

who paid their way. They didn’t actually halve the price of meals or anything, but sometimes these girls would host a couple of hours’ drinks in a hotel or take half a dozen people to lunch in an Italian place. Linda hadn’t a hope of being able to keep up with that pace.

‘You’re basically a daddy’s girl, Linda. You’re looking for someone to look after you,’ he had said, before heading off to new conquests.

He was so wrong. She was not a daddy’s girl. She called her father ‘Alan’ for heaven’s sake. That showed you how little she thought of herself as his baby daughter.

He had been selfish and childish always.

Her mother had been mad to stay with him for as long as

she had. Linda would have thrown him out much earlier. Dad was so immature. He wasn’t going to stay the distance with Cinta, the one they called the ‘bimbo’, especially now that there was a new baby imminent. It was so gross to have a baby step-sister or step-brother. And Dad would expect lots of

ootchy-kootchy gurgling once the baby was born. He would eventually lose interest in it as he did in everything.

Linda’s mother had once said bitterly that Alan’s philosophy was ‘yours till death do us part or something marginally more interesting comes along’. Mam could be quite funny

sometimes. Most of the time, of course, she was like a sergeant major running the household as she did her clinic.

She had recently gone on an economy drive. There was

hardly anything to eat in the fridge. And also there was this emphasis on Linda getting a job. That had never been important before. She had intended to take a year off and travel the world before looking for a job. But her mother had been very forceful about it. Either Linda went off and saw the world, leaving her room ready for her mother to let to someone else, or else she stayed and contributed to the household.

There was no decision. Linda didn’t have any money to

travel the world and neither parent was going to donate

anything to the trip to Thailand, Cambodia and Australia that she had been hoping for. She didn’t want to get a job in the civil service or a bank or an insurance office. She wasn’t like her mother, with a passion for medicine in general and cardiology in particular. She didn’t want to teach like her sister Adi. She was so different from her sister that Linda often wondered if she might be adopted. Adi was so easily pleased with everything and she loved all those screeching children in the school. She gave a portion of her salary to Mam every month and then put some towards Saving the Whale or what-I

ever.

Adi and Gerry were saving to go to some desperate place to protest about clubbing seals or frightening deer or something.

Imagine! They were saving to do that! Linda wouldn’t have gone if someone had paid her to go. And if she had any money at all she was out to buy shoes or to go through a thrift shop.

She had found the sweetest little fox tail thing, which of course

she had to keep well hidden in case the two ‘Friends of the Earth’ saw it and brought a pack of baying protesters around her. She had hidden it from her mother also. It wasn’t Clara’s kind of thing and anyway she would undoubtedly wonder

aloud how it was that Linda had money to buy this kind of nonsense but not enough to contribute to her keep.

But now she had a part-time job in the record store, so

at least her mother couldn’t grizzle as much as she used to.

Sometimes there was even cooked ham or a casserole in the fridge, which Linda was allowed to share.

And of course Mother had been very good-tempered because of this sort of dalliance she had with Peter, the handsome chemist man. A dalliance was a good way to describe it.

They went to the theatre, on picnics and entertained each other to meals. They even went on holiday together, to Italy. Adi and Linda had thought he was perfectly fine but then it had all ended suddenly. Probably because Mother was pushing for an engagement ring. But even if she had been dumped, Linda’s mother was in remarkably good form. She was very hyper about some ghastly fundraising thing at the clinic.

Linda had referred to it as a cake sale and her mother had been apoplectic.

‘It is not a cake sale! It’s a serious attempt to raise money that the hospital should have given us in the first place. We want to publicise the lecture course and so we’re inviting the media and all the movers and shakers in the medical world and business people. Everyone in the clinic is giving their all to it and I will not have you dismiss it as a cake sale!’

Linda had been startled. ‘Sorry, I wasn’t listening. I got it wrong.’

‘You never listen. You care about nothing and nobody,

except yourself

‘Hey, Mam, that’s a bit strong.’