Chestnut Street Read Online Free

and maybe a small matching hat but probably not, just a mantilla in the church and then nothing on the head. This garden-party thing was the stuff of dreams.
    Maura feared it might be so, but she was also quick to criticize the melon and ginger and the permanently playing accordionist as pretty much creatures of fantasy as well.
    And then they were seventeen, and they all went their ways, Deirdre to do nursing in Wales, and Mary to the tech to do a course in bookkeeping, and then to work in her parents’ shop, and Maura to Dublin, where she did a secretarial course, and enrolled as a night student in UCD.
    They all met every summer and they laughed and talked like the old days. Deirdre reported from Wales that everyone was sex-mad and that no one, literally no one, waited until the first night, and they made remarks like:
    “Blodwyn’s getting married.”
    “Oh, really—I didn’t even know she was pregnant.”
    Mary and Maura listened in wonder to the tales of such a free and easy society.
    Mary said that they could all say what they wanted to about Paudie Ryan, but his spots were gone now and he was a perfectly reasonable fellow.
    “Paudie Ryan?” Maura and Deirdre chorused in disbelief. But Mary was unyielding. The other two had gone off to Wales and Dublin and left her. She had to go to the pictures with someone, for heaven’s sake. Paudie Ryan’s father owned the other grocery shop in the town. Maura and Deirdre sensed a merger might be in the air.
    Maura’s mother said that a wedding was indeed very much on the cards between Mary and Paudie. She nodded about it a lot with an approval that drove Maura mad.
    “Very best thing for both of them. Very sensible of them. The right thing to do for their families, for their futures.”
    Her head seemed to be going up and down, nodding with pleasure like clockwork. Maura was incensed with rage.
    “God Almighty, Mam, you’re talking about them as if they were crowned heads of Europe …”
    “I’m talking about them as two privately owned groceries with the threat of the supermarkets hanging over us all—why wouldn’t we all be pleased?”
    Maura knew there was little point in talking to her mother about love. It wasn’t a subject that had much future in a conversation. In fact it always ended the same way, in a snort. “Ah, love. Love is the cause of many a downfall, let me tell you.”
    She never told her. And Maura didn’t really want to know. It seemed to underline what she had always believed, which was that her own parents tolerated each other and lived in a state of barely contained neutrality, which they saw as their destiny.
    Love certainly seemed to have little to do with what had brought them together, which appeared to have been her mother’s dowry and her father’s ability to run a hardware store. It wasn’t anything she could discuss with her family. Maura’s elder sister was a nun. Her big brother, as silent as her father, worked in the shop, and her young brother, Brendan, the unspeakable afterthought, twelve years younger than herself, was a nightmare.
    As the years went on, Maura felt that her real life was in Dublin. She earned her living by typing people’s theses and even manuscripts of their books. She met the kind of people that she would never have met at home. Professors, writers, people who often went into pubs in the middle of the day for hours and stayed up all night to write or study. People who didn’t go to Mass; people who had companions rather than wives, friends rather than husbands.
    She met people who worked in television and radio, who were actors and politicians, and found that they were all very normal and easy to talk to, and lots of them lived desperately racy lives and didn’t go home to their own homes every night.
    Maura pretended not to be shocked in the beginning and very soon she didn’t have to pretend anymore; it was the sixties, after all, and even Ireland was changing.
    She fell in love with a man who