Ring Road: There’s no place like home. Ian Sansom
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underwear from a catalogue from one of Frank Gilbey’s lingerie shops, a catalogue which some of the younger girls had been passing around at the Health Centre. The garments remained in her bedside drawer, however. She was worried Mr Donelly might take a heart attack.) Above all, to her greatest satisfaction, she had become a councillor, elected in 1999, standing as an Independent, with a large – 1026 – majority, so even now, in her retirement, she was busy.
On Mondays there were council meetings, and she liked to get her shopping done and clean the house, and then things really picked up on a Tuesday with more meetings and Aqua-Aerobics and a visit to her mother – Veronica, ninety and double incontinent, but her mind still as sharp as a razor – in the sheltered accommodation off Gilbey’s roundabout on the ring road. Wednesdays there weren’t usually any meetings so she might change her books at the library and meet her friend Greta for coffee in Scarpetti’s. Thursdays she had her Italian conversation class with Francesca Scarpetti at the Institute, a class Mrs Donelly had been attending now on and off for about five years, with no discernible improvement in her accent or any increase in vocabulary, and despite the fact that, like most of the class, she had never been and had no intention of ever going to Italy. People attended the class mostly to meet old friends and to listen to Francesca speaking Italian: it sounded so romantic, even when she was only asking the price of a pizza. When she opened her mouth and those sweet words came out, for a moment time seemed to stop, and you’d forget about your troubles and about our small town, and you could imagine you were somewhere else, somewhere bigger and better, with someone else, and possibly not even yourself. At the end of each course the class would all drive up to the city and go to an Italian restaurant, where Francesca insisted they order in Italian, and they would sit around drinking red wine and laughing, and they might as well have been in some piazza in Rome, or in a villa overlooking fields of sunflowers. The course was well worth the money, just for that one night. It was worth it just to be able to speak Italian to the waiters, unembarrassed, with no husbands around, to have the waiters lean forward, smiling at your accent, and have them nod and say si, si, signorina, and va bene, and desidera?
On Fridays she had to miss council meetings because she took Emma and Amber for the day, her son Mickey’s two girls, aged just three and eighteen months, while his wife Brona went to the Institute, where she is training to be a beautician. Brona was always very well turned-out, and the children were too, and Mrs Donelly was proud to push the little ones round town, although she did not really approve of Brona’s spending so much on the children’s clothes – hers had always made do with second-hand and hand-me-downs – and she also wished that Brona would lay off a little on the tanning. Brona visited Lorraine’s Bridal Salon and Tan Shop once every six weeks for what Lorraine called the ‘St. Tropez’, the kind of tan usually only available on the Riviera in high season, but available in our town all year round. The St. Tropez is a full body treatment that involves exfoliation, body moisturisation, application of the cream and body buffing. It costs £45 for a half-body and £80 for the whole, and Mickey had been so appalled after the first time, when Brona had returned looking like someone had picked her up by the legs and dipped her in chocolate that he’d agreed to pay the extra for the full monty. The colour can be customised and Lorraine had got it about right after the first few treatments. Brona has explained to Mrs Donelly several times that the effect of the St. Tropez was more realistic – and thus more expensive – because it contained a special green pigment, which avoided the orange tinge of some cheaper, inferior tanning applications, and Mrs Donelly did not have the heart to disagree, or to tell Brona otherwise.
On Saturdays Mrs Donelly always made it to the club with Mr Donelly for a few drinks and sometimes a meal, and on Sunday nights she liked to go to the cinema with her old friend Pat, just like they had done when they were teenagers, growing up in town together, before the children had got in the way and they’d missed about twenty-five years of films between them. Fortunately it wasn’t too difficult to pick it up again.
In the old days, of course, they’d have gone to one of the three cinemas in the centre of town, the Salamanca, the Tontine, or the Troxy, and then they’d have visited a coffee bar afterwards, maybe the old ABC Espresso Bar on Bridge Street, which boasted the town’s first Gaggia espresso machine and offered not only coffee but also Ferrarelle mineral water and Hill’s Gingerette and West Indian Lime Juice. In the ABC they’d have then removed their coats to show off their tight-fitting pink cashmere jumpers to boys with quiffs wearing skinny ties, who would be listening to Frank Sinatra and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers on the jukebox. Now they wore mostly pastels and leisurewear, and went to the multiplex on the ring road – the Salamanca, the Tontine and the Troxy all having been demolished and replaced with a Supa Valu supermarket (the Salamanca), a car park which has recently, controversially, become Pay and Display (the Tontine), despite a campaign in the Impartial Recorder, and forty starter homes in a development called the Troxies (the Troxy).*
It was the destruction of the cinemas, those sacred places, that really made Mrs Donelly sit up and take notice, and begin to take an interest in local politics. She was too late to save the cinemas and too late, probably, to save the town. By the time she was elected, the ring road had already been built and Bloom’s was under construction. Too late, Mrs Donelly realised that the town she loved was being torn apart and destroyed, and that behind its destruction was the man she had once loved: Frank Gilbey.
Mrs Donelly and Frank Gilbey had been a courting couple, years ago. They were the couple that everyone talked about and everyone wanted to be. They used to go to the big dances at the Quality Hotel and Morelli’s, the dance hall at the top of High Street, which burnt down the year that man walked on the moon and which is now Roy’s Discount Designer Clothing Warehouse. Even in those days there was something special about Frank: he had a bigger quiff than the other boys and his drainpipe trousers were tighter.
From a distance – a short distance, naturally, in our town – Mrs Donelly had watched Frank Gilbey’s inexorable rise, with his lovely wife, her old friend Irene, alongside him, and there were times, of course, when she wished it could have been her: the foreign cruises, the trips to America, their famous weekend city breaks, the beautiful clothes. She’d been into the church, once, when Frank’s and Irene’s daughter Lorraine had married the bad Scotsman, and the flowers! The flowers alone must have cost nearly £1000. The town had never seen the like. Mrs Donelly sat at the back and imagined herself as the mother of the bride, dressed smartly, though not in the coral pink chosen by Irene, she thought. The two-inch heels were a mistake, also, for the larger lady.
It would never have worked, though, Mrs Donelly and Frank. They were incompatible, not least because she was a Catholic and back then it still mattered. Frank was a Protestant, which is probably what she liked about him: his was definitely a Protestant quiff and Protestant trousers.
Mrs Donelly saw a lot of him still, around town, although less so as the years went by and their paths diverged – hers into her little job at the Health Centre, and the children and holidays in a caravan by the sea, and his into property management and his homes in several counties and abroad.
She didn’t exactly become a councillor because Frank Gilbey was a councillor, but it did give her pleasure to feel herself his equal and adversary, and she enjoyed seeing him at meetings and in committees.
Frank Gilbey, of course, had other reasons for becoming involved in local politics: sentiment was not an issue for Big Frank Gilbey. Frank always described the town hall to Mrs Gilbey as ‘the best club in town’ and certainly it was more exclusive than the golf club, although it consisted largely of the same people. The difference was that in the golf club all you got to do was play golf: in the council you got to wield power. Sometimes Mrs Donelly and Frank got to sit on the same committees and wield power together, which was more fun than playing eighteen holes and a long way from necking in the back of the Troxy.
These days, at the multiplex Pat and Mrs Donelly would buy their tickets from a machine, Pat would buy a tub of salted popcorn and never eat it all, and they’d sit close to the screen and watch the film, and then they would drive home again to their husbands, who preferred TV, or the pub. Some of the actors had changed on the big screen since the old days, and there was a lot more