Maeve Binchy - Tara Road

'Oh, he couldn't have…' Ria was shocked.

'Well he did it before, that's why she wears her hair long to hide it. He'll kill her in the end. But she won't be told, not by me anyway. She thinks I'm an interfering old bat. She might listen to you.'

'Where's Mister Callaghan?' Ria asked Gertie when Polly had left the shop.

'There never was one, it's only a courtesy title. Did she tell you that Jack did this to me?'

'Yes. How do you know?'

'Because I see it in your face. And she's always on at me to get rid of him.'

'But you can't go back to him if he hit you.'

'He doesn't mean it. He's so sorry, you have no idea.'

'Did he just come in and punch you in the face?'

'No, it wasn't like that. It was an argument, he lost his temper. He didn't mean it.'

'You can't take him back.'

'Look, everyone in the world's given up on Jack, I'm not going to.'

'But you can see why everyone in the world's given up.'

'I tell you, he cried like a baby he was so ashamed. He said he didn't remember picking up the chair.'

'He hit you with a chair? Jesus, Mar, and Joseph.'

'Don't start, Ria. Please don't start. I've had my mother and my friends and Polly Callaghan. Not you as well.'

Just then Rosemary came in to look at wedding hats and the matter had to be dropped. Rosemary had been invited to a society wedding, she said. It was now seriously time to get a man. She wanted a hat that would take every eye in the place away from the bride.

'Poor bride,' said Ria.

'It's a jungle out there,' said Rosemary.

The baby was due in the first week of October.

'That will be Libra, that's a good star sign. It's got to do with being balanced,' Gertie said.

'You don't believe all of that, do you?'

'Of course I do.'

Ria laughed. 'You're as bad as my sister, Hilary. She and her friends spent a fortune on some woman in a caravan, they believed every word out of her.'

'Oh, where is she? Let's go to her.'

'I will in my foot go to her.'

'She might tell you if it's going to be a girl or a boy.'

'Stop it. I don't want to know that badly.'

'Ah, come on. And we'll get Rosemary to come too. What'll she say?'

'She'll tell me that I'm pregnant, she'll see that from my stomach. That you're involved with a fellow who can't keep his fists to himself; she'll see that from your face. And that Rosemary's going to marry a rich man, it's written all over her. And we'll have given her good money for that.'

' Please ,' Gertie said. 'It'll be a laugh.'

Mrs. Connor had a thin, haunted face. She did not look like someone who was being handed fistfuls of fivers and tenners by foolish women in exchange for a bit of news about the future. She looked like someone who had seen too much. Maybe that was all part of the mystique, Ria thought, as she sat down and stretched out her hand.

The baby would be a girl, a healthy girl, followed some years later by a boy.

'Aren't there going to be three? I have three little lines here,' Ria asked.

'No, one of them isn't a real child-line. It could be a miscarriage, I don't know.'

'And my husband's business, is it going to do well?'

' I'd have to see his hand for that. Your own business will do well, I can see there's a lot of travel, across the sea. Yes, a lot of travel.'

Ria giggled to herself. It was twenty pounds wasted, and the baby would probably be a boy. She wondered how the others had got on.

'Well, Gertie, what did she tell you?'

'Not much, you were right. She was no good really.'

Rosemary and Ria looked at each other. Rosemary was aware of Jack and his lifestyle by now.

'I expect she told you to walk out on your current dark stranger,' Rosemary said.

'Don't be so cruel, Rosemary, she did not say that.' Gertie's voice sounded shaky.

'Listen, I didn't mean it,' Rosemary said.

There was a silence.

'And what about you, Rosemary?' Ria wanted to break the tension.

'A load of old nonsense, nothing I wanted to know at all.'

'No husband?'

'No, but a whole rake of other problems. You don't want to be bothered with it.' She fell silent again and concentrated on driving the car. As an outing it had not been a success.

'I told you we were mad to go,' Ria said.

The others said nothing at all.

Barney McCarthy was a frequent visitor to Tara Road. Ria learned that he had two married daughters who lived in big modern houses out near the sea. Barney said that neither house had a tenth of the character that this one had. But the girls had insisted. They wanted places that had never heard of damp. They got no pleasure from going to auctions and sales and finding treasures. They just liked to accept delivery of brand-new suites of furniture, fitted kitchens, built-in bedroom cupboards. He spoke with an air of resignation, it was simply the way people were.

'It sounds as if he pays for it all,' Ria suggested to Danny.

'You can be sure he does, those two guys aren't lighting any fires anywhere—getting married to rich women, that's the only energy they used up.'

'Are they nice?'

'Not really, anyway not to me. And why should they be?

They're not in business with him like I am. They resent me like hell.'

'Don't you mind?'

Danny shrugged.

'Why should I mind? Listen, Barney's got us a perfect Victorian brass fender from an old house his people are demolishing, and proper fire-irons. He says they're just right, the genuine article; the fender would cost two hundred pounds at a sale.'

'And why do we get them for nothing?' Ria asked.

'Because to everyone else they're just junk from a house. They'd go on a scrap pile. We really are getting that front room into shape.'

Danny was right. It was unrecognisable now. Ria often wondered what would happen if old Sean came back and saw what they had done to his shabby old storeroom. They hadn't got the carpet of Danny's dreams yet, though they kept looking, but they had found what they thought was the perfect table. It was called a 'mahogany tripodular breakfast table' in the catalogue. That meant it had three feet, they realised; it was exactly right for this room. They discussed it for ages. Was it too small, should they go for a real, proper dining table? But four could sit around it easily and even six at a pinch. They would be entertaining more as time went on.

Ria said that she had lost all contact with what was real and what was fantasy. 'I never saw ourselves as owning anything like this, Danny.' Her arms swept in the whole house. 'I never thought we'd have a front room like this in a million years. How do I know whether we might not end up with a dining table for twelve and a butler.'

They laughed and hugged each other.

Danny Lynch from the broken-down cottage in the back of beyond, and Ria Johnson from the corner house in the big shabby estate were not only living like gentry in a big Tara Road mansion, they were actually debating what style of dining table to buy.

The day the round table was delivered they brought up two kitchen chairs and a bowl of flowers and sat across from each other holding hands. It was a warm evening, their hall door was open and when Barney McCarthy called he stood for a few moments looking in at them, happy and excited.

'You do my heart good, the pair of you,' he said.

And Ria realised how his two sons-in-law must indeed hate Danny, the favoured one, in many ways the heir apparent.

Barney said that Danny and Ria needed a car. They began to look at the ads for second-hand motors. 'I meant a company car,' he said. And they got a new one.

I'm really afraid to let Hilary see this,' Ria said, patting the new upholstery.

'Let me think… she'll say that the depreciation starts the moment you put it on the road,' Danny guessed.