Best Love, Rosie. Nuala O'Faolain

any news yet?’

      ‘One agent said she’d get back to me and I’ll follow up again today.’

      ‘OK. Thanks,’ I whispered. ‘Keep in touch.’

      Singing was coming from the bathroom. Oh, yes, Saturday. I’d begun to insist at the end of February that Min get up on Saturdays. I said the bed had to be aired. She obeyed because I took her out to breakfast.

      She was singing “Là ci darem la mano’ in her own home-made Esperanto. God alone knew what she thought that song was about, or any of the songs in Italian or French or, come to that, English that she made word-like noises to.

      I sent her back upstairs to fetch her woolly hat and we went out into a wind that slapped us.

      ‘O know you the land where the lemon trees bloom?’ I said while we waited, shivering, to cross the main road. ‘Italy,’ I clarified.

      ‘Well, away with you to Italy,’ Min said. ‘What’s stopping you?’

      I didn’t bother answering that.

      The man in the newsagent’s in the shopping centre flirts with every woman who comes in. He tried with Min even though she didn’t just look sixty-nine – she looked sixty-nine and quite odd. But she took no notice; said, ‘Yes, yes!’ impatiently and found the newspaper for me as quickly as possible, because she knew that if I had something to read I’d stay in the coffee-shop longer. I glanced at the news while she sat beside me surveying the scene, nodding, smiling and frowning at this or that like a kindly potentate. I knew what she was doing. When I was with her in public my nerves grew taut. I had to fend off the thought that someone looking at the two of us might think she was my mother and believe they could see in her what I would become.

      Then I had to fend off the thought that no one ever did look at us.

      Then I had to admit to myself shamefacedly that by ‘no one’ I meant no man. Kilbride just didn’t have the kind of men who’d look with interest at a pair of women like myself and my aunt. Where, indeed, did? I was a proud feminist when I was young and I stirred up interest everywhere I went. But I never gave a thought then to what the passing of time might do to my self-sufficiency. It was only recently, after the affair with Leo cooled down, that I saw how I’d fallen out of a world that had men looking for women, and into a world that had mostly women in it, and gay men, and men very satisfied with their marriages. That world my boss in Luxembourg, a very bitter woman, told me about on my first day after I’d been posted there for a while by the Information Unit: of how demographically there were nine single women to every single man in that little country.

      ‘And they’re young women, mostly,’ she’d said, looking at me.

      The café was peaceful. An old lady on Min’s left was making smiling faces at the infant sprawled in a buggy in front of a young woman who was chatting away to another young woman facing another buggy, who never took her eyes off her own calm baby. Both girls wore jeans and high heels and looked as comfortable in their roles as if they’d been practising them for a thousand years. Compared to them, what was the point of me and Min? Of the earth’s resources being wasted to keep the two of us going? Today she’d insisted on a twist of chiffon scarf around her neck. ‘A touch of colour at the neckline,’ she said importantly, ‘is always flattering.’ I often wondered where she picked up the various little pronouncements about femininity which she issued as if they were holy writ. I only ever saw once – from far away and indistinctly – Stoneytown, the place where she grew up. All it had been even before it was abandoned was a terrace of grey houses and one more house out on its own on a rocky shore at the very tip of the headland where the Milbay River meets the sea, fifty miles south of Dublin. Not much chiffon around in those parts, I dare say.

      We sat at our end of the banquette. Min’s head was bent over her plate: she’d eat scrambled egg with appetite here whereas she wouldn’t touch it at home. Her hair a vivid chestnut today, because of the recent visit of the hairdresser who did the elderly ladies for free. She got out of bed for that with alacrity. But once when I said, laying on the enthusiasm, ‘There, Min! The hairdresser! There’s an example of something you’re receiving that you wouldn’t receive if you weren’t a pensioner!’ the bleakness of her glance in reply made me truthful. ‘What can be done, for God’s sake, Min?’ I burst out at her. ‘I can’t stop things being the way they are!’

      Though for all I know, growing older isn’t what’s depressing her. A lot of people just accept life as it comes. I don’t know how.

      ‘I’ll go and see what the desserts look like, will I?’ I said. ‘We might as well treat ourselves.’

      Meanwhile the old lady, whose face had retreated around her mouth, leaving her teeth too big, had risen a bit unsteadily to her feet. ‘I have to go to the toilet,’ I heard her say to one of the young mothers.

      ‘Well – go,’ the young woman said. ‘You’re well able to go on your own.’

      ‘By myself?’ the woman said. She stood indecisively, holding on to the back of a chair. ‘Where is it?’

      I went up to the counter and brought back a fruit salad and an apple tart.

      ‘Excuse me, is this lady with you?’ A man in a manager’s suit was now speaking loudly and accusingly. Behind him, the elderly woman was holding her handbag up to her face as if to hide it, her eyes shut but a tear rolling down beside her nose. ‘She was found in the kitchen. Customers are not allowed in the kitchen.’

      ‘I was lost!’ she cried in a cracked voice. ‘I didn’t know where I was!’

      ‘It’s all right! Stop crying, for God’s sake,’ the young woman said; but the old lady couldn’t stop.

      ‘Oh, shut up!’ the young woman snapped at her, so sharply that even the manager recoiled.

      ‘I’m bursting myself, Missus,’ Min was on her feet. ‘I know where it is.’

      She stepped around the buggy and was leading the old lady away before I had the tray down on the table.

      We were nearly home when Min said, ‘What time is it?’

      ‘Twelve-thirty,’ I said. ‘Early,’ I added in case she hadn’t noticed my tone of voice.

      ‘Are you finished the page with the crossword?’ she asked.

      In other words, she was going to go to the pub, no matter how early it was.

      ‘We could go into town,’ I said. ‘Look around the shops, maybe buy Bell a new basket because that one is falling apart.’ They say you shouldn’t tell someone to stop doing something unless you can offer them something else to do. ‘Or we could go somewhere in the car. It’d be great to get out of Dublin.’

      ‘What’s wrong with Dublin?’ she said. ‘I’ll be home in an hour.’

      And with that she turned in to the Kilbride Inn.

      I got the bus into town and went around the self-help section of Eason’s. And it’s not that I’m teetotal. I love a couple of glasses of wine if the food deserves it. In the old days, of course, a few bottles wouldn’t be too much, if it was a long lunch full of skirmishes and blushes and silences and hands that jumped apart from the shock whenever they touched. Never again? Is that what I had to accept? Yes it was.

      Don’t think about it.

      Nothing. Nothing to help with ungovernable nostalgia for long, boozy lunches with people who fancied you. Nothing to help you cope with regret.

      And that evening, my project touched rock bottom.

      From: [email protected]

      To: [email protected]

      Sent: 2.05 a.m.

      I tried out the 4-F thing with various people who just sniggered. I’m afraid there’s a problem with the letter F!

      However one agent asked about you and I said you were as smart as