Grievance. Marguerite Alexander

Catholics are all angels, and all the others are now animals. He’s just turned the traditional model on its head.’

      He wants to ask her, ‘Then what, for Christ’s sake, is the reality, or your reality?’ but knowing that will get him nowhere, says, ‘In his own way, Steve’s an old romantic. He may subscribe to a cool, post-structuralist approach, but you could see that he fancies himself as a bit of a Swift – an outsider who uses his mordant wit and superior intelligence to see further and deeper than an insider.’

      ‘I don’t think he’s at all romantic,’ says Phoebe. ‘I’d heard so much about him that I was expecting something more…’ Unable to find the word she wants, she lifts her arms, then drops them to express her disappointment, only just missing, in their cramped surroundings, the empty cups and plate on the table. ‘I thought he was a bit of a cold fish.’

      ‘So what was he like – close up and personal, I mean?’ asks Nick.

      ‘He looked older,’ Nora says. ‘Tired, as though a couple of hours’ work had exhausted him.’

      ‘I suppose he’s getting on a bit. It’s hard for ageing rebels like him to know what to do with themselves, with younger generations yapping at their heels. Do they go back on everything they’ve believed in, like those Old Labour people trying to look comfortable in a New Labour government? Or do they find a new cause for themselves? I guess that’s why he’s taken on Ireland. At the moment it’s sexier than Marxism, but I’d say he’s a bit of a latecomer to the game. Wouldn’t you, Nora?’

      Nora merely shrugs, as though she’s reached the limit with this particular conversation. What she doesn’t say is that, throughout the session, Steve kept reminding her of her father. She doesn’t say it because she hasn’t yet found a way to talk about home, and to explain the resemblance she would have to tell her entire family history.

       Ballypierce

      Nora’s earliest precise memory is of a day shortly before the birth of her brother. She remembers that the baby’s imminence hung in the air that afternoon, charging the atmosphere and releasing in her father a restless energy. Always a boastful man, his pride in himself, and in her, seemed to know no bounds. And while she is sure, without having a clear memory of them, that there were other, similar occasions before that afternoon, she knows that there were none afterwards. This, she thinks, is why she remembers the afternoon so clearly, that it marked the end of an era: with Felix’s birth, another, altogether different, phase in their lives began.

      She remembers sitting on the counter in her father’s shop, surrounded by a group of admiring men. The pretext for her being there was that her mother needed to rest. Her father had come home for lunch, as he was in the habit of doing when it was just the three of them, leaving in charge one of the succession of young women that he had working for him. His routine was sufficiently established for people to know not to take in their prescriptions over the dinner hour, when many of the other shops, which couldn’t afford extra help, closed. Her mother had told him that the midwife had called, that her blood pressure was up again and she needed rest.

      ‘Will I take the wee girl back with me, Bernie?’ he had asked.

      ‘Since when have you needed my permission?’ her mother had replied.

      It was acknowledged between the three of them that she and her father were a team, and while her mother boasted of this to her acquaintance – the degree of interest that Gerald took in his four-year-old daughter was sufficiently unusual to arouse the envy of other women – her resentment at being excluded sometimes surfaced at home. Nora was hoping that the baby would be a boy, not for herself or her father, who were perfectly content, but for her mother. She and the baby boy would then form another self-contained team and the family would be perfectly balanced.

      So Gerald took her back with him and she spent the first hour or so sitting at a little desk that Gerald had rigged up for her in the corner, drawing and doing a few sums that he had set her. Really, this was only marking time until a sufficient crowd had gathered, mostly other shopkeepers who had left their wives, now released from kitchen duties, in charge while they slipped out for half an hour.

      Without understanding at that point precisely why, she knew that it was a mark of her father’s importance that his shop acted as a magnet for men with time on their hands during the slow, early-afternoon hours before the schools were out. Ballypierce was a largely nationalist town where incomes were low and trade rarely buoyant. But Gerald, who had grown up and gone to school with many of the other traders, was a great man among them, a pharmacist who had gone to Belfast to study. They could leave their shops, but he had to stay at his post to make up prescriptions, apart from the hour dedicated to lunch, when he insisted on a home-cooked meal. He was one of the few whose family didn’t live above the shop, having chosen instead a new bungalow, built to architect’s specifications on a hill at the edge of the town with a view over the valley. The flat above the shop was let so he was a landlord in addition to his professional status.

      People might not have jobs but they still became ill and needed medicines that the Health Service funded so, whatever else was happening, the Doyles were always comfortable. And Gerald, instead of joining the Protestants at the golf course or sailing club, as he was entitled to, had stayed one of them, always ready for good craic, always pleased to see an old friend who dropped in. By comparison with others in the town, his shop was like a palace, with large plate-glass windows on both sides of the door, all the fittings built to the highest standards, always sweetly smelling from the soaps and perfumes and ladies’ cosmetics, and gleamingly clean, because Gerald insisted on the highest standards of hygiene and had been known to sack a girl whose hair always looked unwashed. And when the party was under way, Gerald would send his assistant into the little kitchenette to make them all cups of tea.

      That afternoon Nora was lifted on to the counter, the one with the little room behind it where Gerald made up his prescriptions. She was wearing a navy blue smocked Viyella dress with matching tights – Gerald had requested that Bernie change her before they left – and her hair was tied back into a tight ponytail. When Gerald had started this routine, as soon as she could walk and talk and had no need of nappies, she would recite a few nursery rhymes or count to a specified number, but since he had taught her to read she was always required to show off her current level of attainment. That afternoon she read from a simplified picture-book version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

      ‘You’re a great girl, so you are,’ said Malachy McGready, the greengrocer. ‘It’s no wonder your daddy’s so proud of you. But if he gives you books like this to read, you’ll start to think you’re a wee Brit. You won’t find many Susans and Edmunds around here.’

      Gerald gave a satisfied little smirk, having come prepared for just this rebuke. ‘Don’t you know who C. S. Lewis was?’ he asked. ‘Your man was born in Belfast and ended up a professor at Oxford.’

      This was greeted with smiles all round, not so much that one of their own (they were by no means convinced that a man who wrote like this could be so described) had achieved so much in the wider world but because Gerald had outmanoeuvred them yet again. These afternoon gatherings, whether Nora was present or not, were not so much exchanges between equals, as enactments and affirmations of Gerald Doyle’s superiority, and if he had ever been caught out or bettered, they would have felt keen disappointment. Malachy’s scepticism was, none the less, a necessary component of the drama.

      ‘Is that what you’re after for the little lady here – for her to be a professor at Oxford? What’s wrong with Queen’s, or Trinity, if she must leave home?’

      ‘I want the best for her, and she deserves it. And if when the time comes the best is still Oxford, then we’ll have to make the sacrifice.’ As he spoke, Gerald looked down fondly at Nora, who sat swinging her legs and munching a biscuit.

      ‘But tell me, Gerald, your man, Lewis,’ said Malachy, who had picked up the discarded book and was peering at it to make sure that he had the