Alcoholism and denial

Alcoholism and denial are presented not as isolated private failings but as patterns sustained by family responsibility, concealment, and a community’s partial knowledge. Gina Lavery’s drinking has shaped Cushla Lavery’s life for years, yet Cushla habitually minimizes it until a crisis makes the hidden evidence visible. The same experience that makes her alert to Gina’s condition also distorts her judgment of Michael Agnew’s drinking and helps normalize her own participation in drinking with her mother.

Gina’s drinking and the work of concealment

Cushla understands Gina’s drinking as longstanding: for as far back as she can remember, her mother has been prone to episodes of drunken melancholy. Cushla usually plays it down, not to protect Eamonn Lavery, but because she feels responsible for caring for Gina and ashamed that she cannot keep her sober. The denial is therefore bound up with care. To name the problem plainly would also mean confronting the limits of Cushla’s efforts to control it.

Gina’s attempts to conceal her drinking depend partly on maintaining an appearance of ordinary respectability. She tries to stay out of the bar and does not leave the house without make-up and a fur coat. Cushla recognizes that this performance has not fooled everyone: people who encounter Gina at the hairdresser’s, the butcher’s, and even at church may have noticed. Cushla recalls Betty McGeown’s face when Davy McGeown said that Gina could hardly walk; Betty did not appear surprised. Knowledge circulates beyond the family, but recognition does not automatically become open acknowledgment.

When Cushla finally tells Eamonn what she has seen, she recounts the bottle drinking, the many spent cigarettes, and the failed attempt to apply lipstick. Eamonn responds that she is exaggerating. His disbelief meets Cushla’s own previous minimization, showing how the family can both know and resist the same facts. Gina’s condition is not a new discovery for Cushla; what changes is her willingness to describe it without softening the account.

The hidden bottles become evidence

A later crisis turns concealment into a physical inventory. Cushla returns home and finds Gina alone in the bathroom, disoriented and needing help. Cushla tends to her, cleans the room, helps her out of the bath, covers the cut on her eyelid, and settles her in bed. These practical tasks place Cushla once again in the role of caretaker, but this time she also searches for an explanation of what has happened.

A bottle of Gordon’s gin under the bed prompts her to look further. She finds empty half-bottles among Gina’s clothes, quarter-bottles tucked into small handbags, and more bottles hidden among Eamonn’s jumpers and in the spare room. In the kitchen, five are inside the fish kettle and three are behind a pipe under the sink; another has been concealed in the toilet cistern. Cushla gathers the bottles in the hall, then adds one with some gin still in it from the sitting room. By the time she pauses, twenty-nine empty Gordon’s bottles stand together in the light from the front door.

The discovery changes the scale of what Cushla can deny. The bottles are not a single lapse or a misunderstanding but evidence distributed through rooms and ordinary household objects. Their hiding places also suggest the labor involved in keeping the drinking out of sight. Cushla thinks about Gina going to buy alcohol and about how humiliating that might have been for her; the thought brings sympathy, but it does not undo the force of the inventory. Gina sleeps while Cushla gathers the evidence, and Cushla’s attempts to reach Michael by telephone receive no answer. The scene leaves her with the knowledge and the task of deciding what to do with it.

Michael’s drinking and Cushla’s uncertain judgment

Cushla’s recognition of Gina’s drinking does not make her a reliable judge of every other drinker. Penny has mentioned Michael’s drinking, and Cushla is startled by the suggestion. She reasons that he drinks as other people around her do and that it seldom shows: he speaks without slurring, his complexion gives no obvious sign, and he handles a car smoothly. She then questions her own standard of comparison. Raised in a pub and living with an alcoholic mother, she may have learned to regard as normal a level of drinking that would otherwise concern her.

The novel keeps that uncertainty intact. Cushla’s observations establish why Michael’s drinking is easy for her to discount, but they do not establish a diagnosis for him. Her assessment is limited by familiarity: outward competence becomes reassurance, while the drinking culture she knows supplies the measure by which she judges him. The contrast with Gina is important. Gina’s drinking eventually becomes unmistakable through its consequences and the concealed bottles; Michael’s remains something Cushla questions but cannot confidently interpret.

Michael later tells Cushla that his wife, Joanna Agnew, is an alcoholic and is being treated for depression. He describes periods when Joanna is so unwell that he finds her curled on the floor, and says that she has been admitted to hospital for another course of electric-shock treatment. He also explains that her periods of greater wellbeing sometimes allow family activities, including the lunch at which he brings Joanna and their son. Cushla asks whether the time she and Michael spent together was possible because Joanna was in hospital and their son was at school; Michael confirms that it was. Alcoholism here exists alongside depression, treatment, and the pressures of family life, rather than as a condition the narrative reduces to a single visible sign.

Shared drinking and the limits of denial

The boundary between Cushla’s role as Gina’s caretaker and her own participation in drinking becomes especially unstable after Michael’s death. The previous evening, Gina produces a bottle of Teacher’s that she has taken from the bar, and mother and daughter drink together at the kitchen table. Gina tells stories about Michael, including his arrest on an early civil-rights march and his generosity on the night his son was born. The stories make Cushla feel close to him while she is drinking; the next morning, the memory feels mawkish and indecent to her.

Cushla asks Gina to call Bradley at the school and say that she is ill. Gina does so, while lightly mocking Cushla for missing work because of drink. Cushla is left with the physical discomfort of a hangover and the knowledge that Michael is dead. Gina brings her Kali Water, which Cushla drinks directly from the bottle. The moment does not establish that Cushla shares Gina’s alcoholism, but it makes visible how easily drinking can pass between them as companionship, practical care, and a means of getting through distress.

Across these episodes, denial is neither simple ignorance nor a single person’s deliberate deception. Cushla sees more than she admits, Gina hides alcohol while remaining legible to others, and Eamonn resists Cushla’s account even after she describes its details. Michael’s composed appearance complicates Cushla’s judgment, while the account of Joanna’s illness places alcoholism within a wider family crisis. The novel repeatedly sets acts of care beside acts of concealment: Cushla tends to Gina, gathers the bottles, and still drinks with her. The evidence becomes harder to evade, but exposure alone does not supply an easy cure or release Cushla from responsibility.