Dublin 4 Read Free

office.
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    Ruth O’Donnell hadn’t got her invitation because she was away. She had gone to a farmhouse in Wales for a complete rest. She could have gone to an Irish farmhouse, but she wanted to be sure that she didn’t meet anyone she knew. It wouldn’t be a complete rest if she met people. She wanted to be absolutely on her own.
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    Carmel waited until the end of the Gay Byrne show. During the Living Word she put on her coat and took out her shopping basket on wheels. She neverliked to miss Gay; once she had been able to give him a small cooker for a one-parent family. She hadn’t spoken to him himself but the girl on the show had been very nice, and they had sent a nice girl to collect it, or else she was from the organisation which had asked for it. It had never been made quite clear. Carmel had sent in one or two entries for the mystery voice competition too, but she had never been called on to guess it. She didn’t like to leave the house before the Living Word . It seemed rude to God, to walk out just when the few short minutes of religion were on.
    She knew she should really listen to programmes like Day by Day which followed it, they would make her informed, but somehow she always felt her mind wandering and she never quite understood why people got so hot under the collar about things. Once she had said to Sheila that it would be nice to have someone sitting beside you to tell you what was going on in life, and Sheila told her to shut up, otherwise everyone would say they had learned nothing after all those years with the Loreto nuns … She thought that Sheila had been upset that day but she couldn’t be sure.
    It was bright and sunny out, a nice autumn day. She pushed her tartan shopping bag on wheels in front of her, remembering when it had been a pram that she pushed. She used to know many more people in those days. She was always stopping and talking topeople, wasn’t she? Or was that memory playing tricks, like thinking that the summers were always hot when she was young and that they had spent their whole time on Killiney beach? That wasn’t true, her younger brother Charlie said that they only went twice or three times a summer; perhaps the other memory wasn’t true either. Perhaps she didn’t stop at the bottom of Eglinton Road when she pointed out to the girls where the buses went to sleep in the bus home, perhaps there had been nobody much around then either.
    She looked at the prices of wine in the off-licence and wrote down the names of some of them so that she could make her list and selection later on. She then spent a happy hour looking at books in the big book shop. She copied down recipe after recipe in her little jotter. From time to time she got a look from one of the assistants, but she looked respectable and was causing no trouble so nobody said anything. Seared in her mind was a remark that Ethel had once made about a house where she had dined. ‘The woman has no imagination. I can’t understand why you ask people round for prawn cocktail and roast beef … I mean, why not tell them to eat at home and come round later for drinks?’ Carmel loved prawn cocktail, and had little glass dishes which it would look very well in. They used to have trifle in them when she was young. She had kept them after things had been divided up between herself and Charlie butshe had never used them. They stood gathering dust, eight of them, at the back of the cupboard in the scullery. She would make another kind of starter, not prawn cocktail, and she would use those selfsame glasses for it, whatever it was. She rejected grapefruit segments and worked it out methodically. You couldn’t have pâté, that would have to be on a plate, or soup, that couldn’t be in a glass, or any kind of fish of course … no, it had to be something cold you ate with a spoon.
    She would find it eventually, she had all day, she had twenty-nine more days … there was no rush. She must not get