The Women Who Ran Away: Will their secrets follow them?

by Sheila O'Flanagan

  ‘You mean she wanted him back?’

  ‘Actually, no,’ said Deira. ‘I don’t think she did. But she didn’t want to make it easy for him either. She was forever phoning up, complaining about things, asking for more money for either Mae or Suzy – for essentials, she’d say.’

  ‘But surely the divorce settlement dealt with all that?’

  ‘Eventually it did,’ Deira conceded. ‘But prior to it, she was relentless. Even afterwards she kept demanding things, and he wasn’t willing to get into a battle with her because he didn’t want to antagonise the girls.’

  ‘You said you wanted him to have a good relationship with them. Does he?’

  ‘On and off,’ replied Deira. ‘They’re certainly in a better place now than they were at the start, but it’s been tough. At first Marilyn wouldn’t let them visit the house, but after a while Gavin managed to persuade her to allow them to come if I wasn’t there. I used to stay with my friend Tillie those times. Sometimes for a few hours, sometimes for a weekend.’

  ‘That must have been difficult.’

  ‘I didn’t mind initially, but afterwards I came to resent it,’ said Deira. ‘When I’d get home, I’d find things had been moved around or hidden away. Occasionally they’d have squeezed out the contents of my make-up into tissues that I’d find in the bathroom waste bin. Once they mashed up a brand-new Bobbi Brown palette I’d been silly enough to leave behind. They pulled the heels off a pair of Prada shoes too.’

  ‘Oh Deira! That’s awful.’

  ‘They were angry,’ said Deira. ‘They blamed me. I understood.’

  ‘Didn’t Gavin say anything? Do anything?’

  ‘I never told him,’ said Deira. ‘I didn’t want them to have a row. I reckoned they’d grow out of it.’

  ‘Did they?’

  ‘Eventually. The visits became less fraught and we got on better, although we never really became close. That’s partly why . . .’ She broke off and closed her eyes.

  Grace recognised the signs of someone trying to keep herself under control. She’d had to do it often enough over the last few months, not wanting to burst into tears in front of Aline or Fionn or Regan. She’d had to be strong for them. Strong for herself, too. She’d refused to allow herself to cry; not when the police came, not when she identified Ken’s body and not at his funeral. The anger helped, of course, while staying dry-eyed became something to hold on to, something to get her through the difficult days. And then it became an end in itself. My husband drove his car off a pier and I didn’t cry, she’d think. And she’d feel proud of herself for that. She wondered if the young woman in front of her felt the same.

  When Deira opened her eyes again, she saw that Grace was watching her, quiet and serene.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I got a bit . . .’

  ‘That’s OK,’ said Grace. ‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’

  ‘It’s just that . . .’ Deira rubbed the corners of her eyes. ‘It’s stupid really. Nothing special. Nothing I should be crying over.’

  ‘If you need to cry, you need to cry,’ said Grace. Seeing other people cry made her feel good about her own ability to remain dry-eyed. It reinforced her feelings of strength. Of being somewhere that Ken’s actions couldn’t reach her.

  Deira used one of the paper napkins on the table in front of them to wipe her eyes.

  ‘I loved him and we were happy; like you said, we were a power couple, and we were working through the problems with Marilyn and the girls. Everything was perfect until we talked about starting a family. Well, to be strictly accurate, I talked about it. He listened. He said no.’

  ‘Straight out?’

  ‘Straight out,’ confirmed Deira. ‘He said that he already had a family.’

  ‘But you and Gavin were a family too,’ protested Grace.

  ‘I know. And when I reminded him of that, he agreed with me straight away. But he said he couldn’t possibly upset the girls further by having children with someone else.’

  ‘I can see where he was coming from,’ said Grace. ‘But he was bloody insensitive all the same.’

  Deira picked at the paper napkin. ‘After I talked about having a baby, he made an even bigger effort to get Mae and Suzy involved in our lives. He insisted that Marilyn allow them to come on holiday with us and have them over more often.’

  ‘But that’s not the same as you having a baby of your own!’ exclaimed Grace. ‘Surely he could see that?’

  Deira shook her head. ‘His children, our children. He seemed to think it was all the same.’

  ‘Men are such fools.’ Grace’s tone was heartfelt.

  ‘At least my relationship with the girls improved to the point that they stopped trashing my stuff,’ said Deira. ‘Gavin was pleased that we all seemed to be getting on.’

  ‘But . . . but . . . didn’t you tell him it wasn’t enough?’

  Deira shook her head. ‘I knew the girls were enough for him. He hadn’t left them just to do the same thing all over again. We were a different sort of family, he said. A family of two adults. He didn’t want to upset it by bringing a baby into the mix. He reminded me that I didn’t know anything about babies. That he was the one with experience. That they totally disrupted your life. That you never got to give them back.’

  Grace raised an eyebrow.

  ‘I know. Put like that, it sounds selfish. But he didn’t mean it to be. He was pointing out how we were currently living compared with how we’d live if there was a baby.’

  ‘Didn’t you discuss it at the start? Before you moved in together?’

  ‘We should have. But it never occurred to me. I was so in love and I guess I thought that over time the baby thing would happen. Besides, a lot of our emotional energy was taken up with his bloody divorce.’

  ‘But in the end you agreed with him about the baby? Or did you?’

  ‘I had to,’ said Deira. ‘He wasn’t going to change his mind. And . . . well, children had never been a priority for me. It wasn’t something I wanted to rush into. So deciding I wanted a baby was a bit left-field. Anyhow, Gavin was right about my lack of experience. My home life was disjointed. I would probably have been a hopeless mother.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Grace. ‘You’re a kind person. You would have done just fine. You could still do just fine,’ she added, ‘if that’s what you want.’

  ‘I’m nearly forty and currently single,’ said Deira. ‘Besides, I believed that having a baby wasn’t only for me. It was for both of us.’

  ‘So you split up over it?’ Grace’s voice was full of sympathy.

  ‘No,’ replied Deira. ‘I was in baby mode for the best part of a year, but in the end, I got over it. I decided Gavin was right, we didn’t need a child. Even if deep down his daughters still regarded me as the Wicked Witch of the West, they were at least civil around me. Gavin and I were a strong unit. I was happy to live the life we were living. I made my peace with it. Besides,’ she added, ‘at that point Bex, my niece, was in her teens and wanting to come to Dublin all the time, so she spent quite a few weekends with us. Between her and Gavin’s girls, we had plenty of young people around. They were exhausting, to be honest, and maybe they did put me off the idea a bit.’

  Grace said nothing.

  ‘Not entirely,’ conceded Deira. ‘But after they’d gone, Gavin would say to me that if we had a child of our own, they’d be there all week and never go home to someone else.’

  ‘It’s different with your own.’ Grace thought of Aline, Fionn and Regan. She was happy that all her children were doing their own thing, and grateful that Aline dropped by regularly, while the other two FaceTimed her once a week (at least, since Ken’s funeral; before that it had been less often), but even though she was glad to have time to herself, she sometimes missed the bustle of sharing the house with them. Although she hadn’t raised the subject yet, she was thinking of putting it up for sale, because she didn’t need a four-bed detached home with a long garden. She needed som
ething like Deira had – an easy-to-maintain mews, or an apartment. Something a lot smaller, at any rate, so she wasn’t rattling around like a lost soul.

  ‘Oh, I know it would have been different if we’d had our own baby,’ said Deira. ‘But I put it out of my mind. I decided it wasn’t for us and I was OK with it.’

  ‘Did the subject ever come up again?’ asked Grace.

  ‘Never in the last five years,’ said Deira. ‘We were both very busy. Even if we’d wanted a baby, we didn’t have time for one. That’s what I thought, anyhow.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘I also thought Gavin and I were solid together. He was the one who planned this holiday, who wanted us to drive through France with the roof down. He made me think . . .’

  Deira broke off again and used another napkin to dry her eyes.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m like the fecking Powerscourt Waterfall these days. Anyhow, I was totally confident that we were as happy as it was possible to be. Until six weeks ago, when Gavin came home and told me that he was leaving me.’

  ‘What! Just like that?’

  Deira nodded. ‘He said things had been going wrong for a while. That this wasn’t the life he wanted. I asked what was the life he wanted, seeing as he’d always told me he was living it with me. He said something warmer, more nurturing.’

  ‘More nurturing!’ exclaimed Grace. ‘For heaven’s sake! Surely he was getting all the nurturing he needed?’

  ‘You’d think,’ said Deira. ‘Actually what he meant was that he wanted someone who put him first all the time. Someone who wasn’t focused on her career, like me.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘I’m obviously the most stupid woman on the planet, but I didn’t even imagine that he was having an affair. Can you call it having an affair when you’re not married to the person you’re living with? Anyway, he was seeing someone else.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Grace. ‘That must have been devastating.’

  ‘What was devastating,’ said Deira carefully, ‘was the fact that she was pregnant with his child.’

  Grace’s expression was a mixture of shock and sympathy. Without even thinking, she reached across the table and took Deira’s hand. Deira squeezed it, unable to speak. Other than with Tillie, this was the first time she’d told the entirety of the story to anyone. To Gillian, and all of her acquaintances, she’d merely said that she and Gavin had split up. Gill’s response had been to ask if there was anyone else, and when Deira, unable to lie point blank, had said yes, that Gavin was now living with a new girlfriend, she’d come back with ‘once a cheater always a cheater’, a phrase that had been like a knife in Deira’s guts. Because of course now she understood what it had been like for Marilyn when Gavin had left her. And though she’d always comforted herself by believing that his marriage to his former wife had been doomed from the start (we married too young, he’d told her; we didn’t know what we were letting ourselves in for), there was nothing anyone could say to her now that made her feel anything other than a fool.

  ‘That’s awful,’ said Grace.

  ‘I believed him,’ Deira told her. ‘When he said he didn’t want children because he didn’t want to make Suzy and Mae feel unwanted, I believed it. When he said he wanted to live in an adult home, I believed it. When he said he was happy, I believed it. I let his words influence me and what I wanted because I believed, I really did, that I couldn’t ask for more when I already had true love. How could I have been so damn stupid? I was there for him when he wanted me and then when he wanted something else he was quite prepared to get rid of me, the same as he did with Marilyn.’

  She eased her hand from Grace’s hold and took another napkin. ‘And the thing is . . .’ She sniffed and blew her nose, ‘the thing is that I’ve wasted the best years of my life on him. The years when I could have had a child of my own. When it would have been possible. All that time he was saying no and my eggs were shrivelling up and dying, we could have had a baby. But he didn’t want it. Not then. Not with me. And now, with Afton’ – she almost spat out the name – ‘he’s “over the moon with excitement”, at least according to his Insta-fucking-gram page. Instagram! He never bothered with it before. He called social media “a window into the narcissistic soul”. But Afton is a PR woman, who frames her entire life in photographs, and of course he’s now completely into posting pictures of his perfect life. There was one of both of their hands on her fucking bump!’ At which point Deira started to cry again.

  The sympathy Grace felt for her increased. It was so damn easy for people to tell you that you had plenty of time to start a family after doing the things you wanted to do, but life wasn’t like that. It hurtled past when you weren’t paying attention until suddenly you realised that policemen didn’t only look younger, they were younger, and that you didn’t recognise a single tune on the radio. And that somehow the exciting, energetic stuff you’d put off doing was now being done by other people while you rubbed Voltarol onto your aching back.

  She could only imagine the depth of the hurt that Deira was feeling now that her ex-partner was doing what Deira herself had wanted, but with another woman.

  ‘Not just another woman,’ Deira said, when Grace made the comment. ‘A twenty-five-year-old woman. She’s the same age as I was the first time I met him, and younger than both his daughters!’

  ‘How do they feel about it?’ asked Grace.

  ‘Mae sent me a text after he moved in with Afton. She said that now I knew what it felt like. But she also said she was sorry about what had happened and that her dad was a complete arse.’

  ‘I can’t imagine it’s easy for them,’ said Grace.

  ‘No,’ agreed Deira. ‘I guess Marilyn will be OK – she’s been in a relationship for the past few years – but I doubt the girls will get the opportunity to tell Afton what they think of her or ruin her clothes and make-up.’

  ‘At least they can be a bit more mature about it, even if they hate it,’ remarked Grace.

  ‘Which is more than I’m being.’ Deira sniffed. ‘But it’s so bloody demoralising. He swans out of my life with a gorgeous woman on his arm, and she gets the one thing I sacrificed for him. And not that I want a man in my life ever again, but I’ve given up my chances of having a child for nothing.’

  ‘You’re still a young woman,’ protested Grace.

  ‘No,’ said Deira. ‘I’m not. Not when it comes to my damn eggs, at any rate. Fertility-wise, I’m a shrivelled old crone.’

  ‘I’m sorry it didn’t work out,’ said Grace. ‘And I know it’s more difficult to have a baby when you’re older. But you never know, you could meet someone else – and there’s always IVF.’

  ‘I look at men,’ Deira said. ‘I look at them and I think, are you the one? Are you the man who could father a child for me? Are your little swimmers strong enough to find my diminished crop of eggs? Could you make a baby for me? It’s another reason I came on this trip. I thought that away from Ireland I might meet someone and sleep with him and get pregnant and I’d have a baby.’

  ‘Oh.’ Grace was taken aback.

  ‘I know it’s crazy,’ said Deira. ‘Even as I ask those questions I know it’s insane. Besides, being a mum, single or otherwise, is what I want, not what the baby deserves. How would I cope as a lone parent? Is it even right to want to? So I’m torn between wanting to shag every man I see and telling myself that I’m a selfish cow who’s terrorised by her stupid biological clock. And IVF is practically useless for a woman my age. You wouldn’t think that, would you, the way they talk about it so cheerily, but instead of all these pictures of older mothers with their cute babies, they might as well tell you to stop fantasising and get a dog or a cat. Or even a bloody hamster.’

  Grace didn’t know what to say. Her heart went out to Deira, who was in such distress, but she knew she didn’t have any solution to the physical and moral dilemma that the younger woman was in. When she was younger, Grace had had rigid opinions about what constituted a f
amily and how children should be raised. But over time her perspective had shifted and her views had mellowed.

  ‘The worst of it is that when older men father kids, they’re regarded as some kind of stud,’ added Deira. ‘Gavin is fifty-seven. But if a woman of fifty-seven was lucky enough to get pregnant thanks to IVF, she’d be looked at in horror and disgust.’

  Grace nodded. Deira was definitely right about that. ‘You’re a long way from fifty-seven yet,’ she pointed out.

  ‘I’ve still wasted the best years of my life on him.’

  ‘Oh no.’ Grace shook her head. ‘You can’t say that. You’ve spent a small proportion of your life with him, and certainly not your best years. They’re still to come.’

  Deira gave her a watery smile. ‘Thanks, but I don’t think so. I’m washed up, Grace.’

  ‘I don’t want to say you’re being ridiculous, but you are,’ said Grace. ‘You’re thirty-nine, not ninety-nine. You’ve loads of good years ahead of you. And you know what, maybe you will meet someone lovely on this trip and it’ll be great and—’

  ‘Honestly, I don’t need it to be great. I’m not interested in men. The sex is the only thing I care about,’ Deira told her. ‘But right now, I have a more pressing issue than getting pregnant.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Gavin and Afton are away for a week,’ Deira replied. ‘A family wedding in Glasgow. I don’t know how it happens that weddings take a week now, but there you go. Anyhow, they flew there on Friday evening. And I . . .’

  Grace looked at her expectantly.

  ‘I took the car.’

  It took a moment for Grace to realise what she was saying.

  ‘The Audi? The convertible? That’s his car, not yours?’

  ‘It was our car. But when he moved out, he took it. His view was that I was in the house so he’d have the car. He said his solicitor would eventually get in touch with me about everything. I don’t think he deserves jack shit, to be honest. When I heard he was going away with Afton at the same time as we’d booked to come here, I thought – why not take it? The whole reason for planning this trip was to drive through France with the roof down. He said he wanted to do it before he was so old that people laughed at him. Driving sports cars is probably the only thing older men get laughed at for! I told him not to be silly, that he was still young . . .’ She swallowed hard, unable to continue.