At the end of Roddy Doyle’s novel of domestic violence, “The Woman Who Walked into Doors” (1996), Paula Spencer finally fights back after decades of physical abuse, braining her husband Charlo with a frying pan when she sees him looking “that way” at their daughter, Nicola.
“My finest hour,” she said. She couldn’t fight Charlo on her own behalf, but she found that she could fight him on behalf of her child.
And now it is 25 years later, COVID-19 and lockdown have swept Ireland, Charlo is long dead and Paula is doing well. In “The Women Behind the Door,” the third in Doyle’s Paula Spencer trilogy (the middle novel is called, simply, “Paula Spencer”), she is in her mid-60s and hasn’t had a drink in years.
She’s moved from cleaning offices at night to working at a dry cleaner’s during the day. Her four children are grown and gone, she has a friend named Mary and a sometimes-boyfriend named Joe who laughs at her jokes.
She is particularly proud of Nicola, her eldest, the “goddess,” the achiever. “At her lowest ebb, Paula can look at Nicola and think to herself, Not everything’s been a disaster.”
That’s a clue that disaster will hit, and it does. On the day that Paula comes home from a giddy outing with Mary, Nicola shows up at her front door, catatonic. She has left her husband and children. She’s moving back home.
What happened? It’s a question that takes the entire novel to answer, and the journey is filled with anguish, tempered by wisdom and humor.
“The Women Behind the Door” is a novel of hauntings — Charlo’s voice is in Paula’s head, though he’s been dead for decades. Alcohol is never far from her thoughts, though she no longer drinks. The past swims through her brain: memories of beatings and benders, weeping children, money spent on vodka instead of food. And guilt. Oh, the guilt. The shame.
