Desperately Seeking - By Evelyn Cosgrave Page 0,63
greeted Mum in unison.
‘Oh, hello, dears,’ she said, squinting at us. ‘Is it that time already?’
‘It’s nearly quarter past,’ I said. ‘We got held up arguing over the houses.’
‘Oh, well, your father just keeps on working. He works all day and then he comes home and starts working again. I have absolutely no life… Oh, sorry, Keith, dear, you don’t want to be listening to my woes. So, you were arguing over the houses? Kate needs to be told what’s what, Keith. She’s always being awkward for the sake of it.’
‘Oh, Mrs Delahunty,’ Keith can never get up the nerve to call my mother by her Christian name, no matter how much she tells him to, ‘we have to argue. It’s the only way we know what we want.’
‘Don’t be silly, Keith. You know best in these things.’
‘Mum!’
It never ceases to amaze me how she can come out of a row with Dad about how nobody listens to her and nobody cares what she thinks to tell another man to do exactly the same thing to her daughter.
Keith could sense the temperature rising so he admired the garden. Dad did the work but Mum was proud of it too. She just wished the work had been done by a gardener.
‘Both of the houses we looked at had nice gardens,’ Keith said. ‘I could really see myself doing something with them. I must get a few pointers from Mr Delahunty on the best way to start.’
‘Oh, David will know what to do.’
At this point Dad joined us and took Keith off to show him something he had done with a creeping rose that was quite spectacular. Dad was fond of Keith; I think he found his company soothing.
‘Lucy was here the other day,’ Mum said, as soon as they were out of earshot. ‘She brought a friend with her.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes, a very nice girl. Iris – Iris Considine. I think I knew her mother at one time. They used to live near us in Ballykeefe. She was a lovely girl, very nice manners.’
‘Oh, Iris…’
‘It was nice of Lucy to bring her. I don’t know why you all stopped bringing your friends round.’
‘So,’ I asked, all innocence, ‘what was she like?’
‘Iris? I told you, a lovely girl.’
‘Right. Did Lucy have any news?’
‘She’s worse than you – she never has any news. But she was looking well. I worry about her sometimes.’
‘Oh, Lucy’s fine, Mum. She can take care of herself.’
‘It’s not a question of that, it’s more… Well, I never know if Lucy’s happy. Out of all of you, she’s the hardest one to read.’
‘Oh.’ Had I misjudged my mother? Was she really taking that much notice? ‘Mum,’ I said, after a while, ‘Keith and I came over to talk about dates for the wedding. We wanted to make sure we didn’t clash with anything else that was going on.’
I was amazed by my own consideration, but in fact I was just eager to start talking about the wedding. When I’d mentioned the idea to Keith he was decidedly less excited than I’d thought he would be. ‘What’s the matter?’ I had asked. ‘I thought you were dying to get this sorted.’
‘I am,’ he said, ‘but I have a lot on my mind at the moment with work. I’d rather think about it when I’m less hassled. Why don’t you have a chat with your mother? We can go from there.’ I had agreed, but I wasn’t happy about it.
Mum, meanwhile, had loads to say on the matter.
‘Well, I presume you’re thinking about next summer. I don’t agree with winter weddings, not when people have to travel. Summer is the time to get married. Now, June can be lovely, but the weather’s dicey and, besides, your father’s always busy in June. July, I like, but you have a cousin getting married next July. Then August can seem a long time to wait once the summer arrives but it…’ She wittered on and on with her non-objections to all the possible times for getting married.
Maybe Keith was right and this wasn’t a good time to talk about it. I changed the subject and enquired after the rest of the family, which I dread doing because you never know where it will lead. But it seemed everyone was doing well at the moment; no aunt was having a menopausal crisis, no cousin had been caught doing anything newsworthy, no uncle had done something terrible to an aunt.