by Faith Hogan
Amanda selected a Scotch, reserve, oak aged and sealed with a black wax impress. She needed to thank Tess Cuffe and she had a feeling it was now or never. Something about her, when they met each evening on their opposite circuits of the square, had softened. Amanda couldn’t go so far as to say the woman liked her, but it was as though much of the venom had been released between them. Perhaps it was time to make some kind of move towards a truce. Long gone was the hope that they might ever be friends, much less that Tess might step in as some kind of surrogate grandmother to her children. God, she’d been so naïve when she came here first.
She had a feeling the bottle of whisky probably cost more than Tess Cuffe earned in a week. She smiled at the notion that Tess would enjoy it at Richards’ expense, then tucked it under her arm and headed for the flat beneath.
‘Oh,’ Tess said by way of welcome, ‘what do you want?’
‘I come bearing gifts,’ Amanda said, producing the bottle from beneath her jacket. ‘Well a “thank you” bottle at any rate.’
‘If I said I was all gifted out, you probably wouldn’t believe me,’ Tess said wearily and Amanda thought she looked tired, as though she’d emptied half her fight out and stored it in a jar for another day.
‘It’s late, I’m sorry, I just wanted to say thanks, really for… you know, taking me in that night…’ Amanda smiled, it was strange to be standing here, holding, what was, essentially a peace offering. ‘It’s whiskey,’ she pushed the bottle into Tess Cuffe’s hands. ‘One of Richard’s, he never drinks them. Honestly, I could probably make a year’s grocery money if I flogged the lot on eBay.’ Her voice strung out between them, a nervous link chain she hoped Tess would grab hold of.
‘Well,’ Tess considered the bottle for a moment, then took it in her hands. ‘You really didn’t need to. I have plenty, it’s not as if I…’ her voice tapered off, as though she knew she might end up saying too much. ‘Would you like to come in?’ She stood back in the porch.
Amanda wasn’t sure if she was asking because she’d like her to visit or because it was polite and they’d been standing looking at each other for so long she didn’t really have much of a choice. ‘Are you sure? I mean, I wouldn’t want to impose.’
‘Come on. We can open this and have a nightcap.’ Tess’s smile was just a little wicked, as though she might realise just how much more resistance she had to the stuff than Amanda could muster. In the light of her living room, Tess held the bottle from her to inspect it properly. ‘It certainly looks expensive,’ she said, then narrowed her eyes. ‘It doesn’t mean it’s any good of course.’
‘I wouldn’t know.’ Amanda flopped into the velvet couch again, noticed the sleeping cat on the end. A month ago, that cat would have been something else to get up her nose. After all, she would have reasoned, poor Richard couldn’t stand them. Funny, but now she looked at the cat, it suited here, as though it had always been hanging about the place.
‘Oh, he’s not mine,’ Tess said quickly as though reading her thoughts. She placed two glasses down before them, pulled hard on the cork, but it wasn’t budging.
‘Here, let me.’ Amanda yanked it off with the ferociousness of one committed to liberating the contents, if not because she needed it, but rather, like a maître d’, she wanted to gauge its reception with an expert. She watched as Tess poured the costly liquid into their glasses and then inhaled the contents for a moment. She looked different today, her hair somehow softened, her face held serenity at odds with her papery reddened hands. She closed her eyes as though she might fathom all its secrets from its aroma.
‘That is good.’ Tess smiled mischievously at Amanda. ‘Taste it.’ She pushed the glass forward and Amanda sipped slowly. This time, warmth radiated through her gently, pleasantly, as though it might smooth away the chill from her core.
They sat for a little while in silence, Tess broke it when she asked. ‘How have you been?’ There was an honesty to her words and the concern that lingered in her eyes struck Amanda as genuine.
‘I could say I’ve been fine, but…’
‘I saw you working in the Square, remember,’ Tess said. ‘How are you really?’
‘I did something. Something, I hadn’t planned to, but I just sorted of ended up there.’
‘Where?’ Tess leaned forward now.
‘I went to see an investigator.’
‘That might be the wisest thing you’ve ever done,’ Tess said quietly and studied her glass intently.
Amanda could hardly believe she had struck out and it had taken until she sat in this little flat before she told anyone about her impulsiveness. And that was what it was. A spur of the moment, not properly thinking decision to meet with a professional investigator and spill her guts out about her marriage. ‘It’s not to find out anything…’
‘No. I mean, of course not.’ Tess cleared her throat. ‘You already know,’ she said softly.
‘Yes.’ Amanda looked at this woman who she’d hated for so long and suddenly the penny dropped. ‘You knew?’
‘I…’ Tess studied the glass in her hands. ‘I came on them, pure chance, the kind of fluke encounter that could only happen in this claustrophobic city.’ She shook her head and then looked at Amanda. ‘What is it about Ireland, everyone knows everyone and if they don’t then they’re probably related?’
Amanda couldn’t think straight, but she sipped her drink, sat for a moment trying to pull it all together. ‘When?’ she whispered.
‘Just a few days before you ended up sobbing on your naughty step. I suppose, I was still in shock myself, I didn’t know how to say it. I knew the last person you’d want to hear it from was me,’ Tess said in a voice tinged with disquiet that made it unfamiliar. ‘I just… I’m sorry, it was too hard and too convoluted. You and I, we’ve been so…’
‘Horrible?’ Amanda breathed. ‘We have, truly. I’ve been the worst, just backing him up for a quiet life when I knew it was wrong.’ She looked around the little flat, ‘I couldn’t understand how this place could mean so much to you.’ She laughed now, a hysterical sound in her own throat. ‘And yet, I wanted it so much – how could I have been so…’
‘I thought you were an awful bitch. I didn’t sleep properly here for months, afraid of what you both might do next to get me out,’ Tess said and, for a moment, Amanda thought she might cry.
‘Oh, God.’ Amanda felt a shock of pain rise within her. ‘Does he know you know?’ It emptied her out, the idea that his disloyalty had almost come full circle. At the same time it all made sense. Why else would he have agreed to refurbish her bathroom? ‘Of course he does.’ The words tripped from her. ‘He knows you know and he’s… the work on the flat, he’s trying to buy your silence. I’ve been such a fool.’ Amanda shook her head and this time she thought the tears would never stop, because this was an even greater betrayal in some ways.
‘No, Amanda,’ Tess said and she reached her arm around Amanda’s back until her sobbing ended. ‘The real fool here is Richard; he’s the one throwing away so much more than he knows.’
*
Amanda’s love affair with spring began when she moved to Swift Square. Perhaps it was because she had given up work and she had time to watch the seasons, and while much of her day was taken up with renovating the house, it was the garden that drew her towards the end of each day. Back then, the Square seemed as if it might be a project too large to take on. Rust-eaten railings, once painted black, chased about its perimeter. Then, it was little more than a shortcut, a maze of uneven broken paths through unofficial discarded allotments. Years of neglect and misuse rendered it a wilderness within the elegant if neglected square.
Amanda could clearly remember the first afternoon she’d walked into it. It was the day they’d finally re-hung her front door. Inside their home was still a ramshackle building site slowly mining into the derelict edifice she’d set her heart on. She had needed to get out. It was not yet a home, although she’d convinced Richard to move in to the two rooms th
at were just about sealed off from the cold Dublin air. Each morning she woke to a procession of plumbers, electricians, tilers and carpenters weaving through her grand plan.
The Square garden, when she entered it, felt like paradise, a wonderland she discovered through the rabbit hole of the broken railings. It turned out to be far bigger than she thought at first. It stretched out as far as a football field, but it was so overgrown, the weeds dwarfed out the space. If she’d known before she started work on it, she might have been more daunted. Woody lavender, lemongrass and honeysuckle shook off their scent after a summer shower and she sat, gingerly, on the edge of a huge curved rock within the perfume, listening to a city grumbling and losing itself in its own frenzy. The garden bit into some essential part of her, so she ached to bring it back to what it could be again. It was a chance to be creative, she only realised it after she had finished.
Over the years, she could honestly say that sitting on her much-loved bench on a spring morning, before the city rumbled into life, with a mug of tea in her hand, was as if she was sitting in heaven. For all the money they’d spent on their home, this little corner, surrounded by the bees in summer and the robins in winter, was her favourite place on earth. Richard ploughed a fortune into their own back garden, with an exterior designer on speed dial for every possible aesthetic emergency, but this remained a nirvana when she most needed to get away.
She had been happy here, with the old Italian, digging out beds, selecting shrubs, pulling in sponsorship from needy causes that hadn’t stood the test of time like this place. They spent about nine months from start to finish. It took a full-term pregnancy to get it right. Of course, it wasn’t perfect, not like the garden Richard paid so much for, but perhaps it was why she loved it so greatly. Every single plant here, she’d put her hand on at some point, either to save it or to set it. She and Antonio had tea and sandwiches on her rock each day, before the picnic tables arrived and they’d squabbled, laughed and watched the sun go down together, satisfied with a day well spent.
‘You are smiling too much for it to be honest.’ A deep voice penetrated her thoughts, Carlos Giordano regarded her with a smirk.
‘I was thinking about your father and when we worked together here,’ she said, shading her eyes from the morning sun intent on seeking out cracks in the heavy clouds overhanging the square.
‘He will be glad to know he can make you smile like that.’ He dropped down on the bench next to her, a little closer than perhaps he should, but the proximity only made her tingle unexpectedly.
‘It was just a very happy time, doing this garden, I was thinking how much I enjoyed it all.’ She found herself smiling at him and assumed he probably had the same effect on every woman he met. He was obscenely handsome and, more than that, unpretentiously charismatic.
‘Well, you are welcome to start again.’ He smiled at her. ‘I can’t guarantee the same charm as my father had for you, but there’s certainly plenty of work planned if you think you’re up for it.’
‘I…’ Amanda regarded him for a moment, was he insinuating that she was too old to take on the garden again? ‘Of course I’m up for it. What is it that you’re planning on doing to it?’
‘Oh, the council have big plans,’ he said, laughing at her and she couldn’t help but notice how his dark eyes crinkled so you knew that there was warmth behind his smile.
‘Well, we’ll see about that, won’t we?’ They wouldn’t be messing with her garden unless she was happy with it. ‘When can I see the plans?’ The last thing she wanted was some council official deciding they were going to pull her lovely garden apart only to come out and get their picture taken before applying for a promotion.
‘How about if I call round to you later with the drawings?’ He nodded across towards her house and she wondered for a moment if it wasn’t some kind of crazy chat-up line.
‘Well, I…’ She could feel herself blushing, her new thing, damn it, on top of everything else. ‘I’ll meet you here, okay?’ she said, getting up as quickly as she could before her face was completely scarlet. ‘Three o’clock suit you?’
‘Fine,’ he said, getting up and calling after her, ‘I’ll look forward to it.’
Chapter 28
Forty-eight years earlier…
They arrived together, Douglas and Nancy. Nancy looked different, the same, but transformed from when she’d left the flat earlier. She was radiant, glowing, suddenly grown-up, in a way that Tess couldn’t put her finger on. Tess was standing at the kitchen sink doing her vocal exercises, trying to reach to the bottom of her diaphragm, but her voice just wouldn’t behave. The exercises were meant to help, but really, the stress was knotting her from deep within. She hadn’t sung properly in months, just limped through the Christmas assessments. The all-important end of year examinations were only days away and Tess was drowning beneath it all.
‘Douglas,’ she breathed when she turned around. He was standing with the light at his back, it feathered about him, as though he was a silver saint. When she looked at him now, he reminded her of one of those superheroes from the TV – a Simon Templar with a slightly taciturn glint when you fell into his bad books. His hair, golden and heavy, flopped roguishly across his left eye and, as always, she wanted to reach out and push it to the side. She was delighted to see him. What had she thought? That Nancy brought him back for her. A little gift to make everything right? ‘What are you doing here?’ And then she noticed their hands. Interlaced in a way that couldn’t be easily pulled apart.
‘Nancy said it would be better coming from both of us.’ Douglas had the grace to keep his voice empty, even if his words were loaded.
‘We’re in love,’ Nancy whispered in her tinny tiny voice. ‘Douglas and I are going to…’
‘You can’t be in love with Douglas, Nancy. That’s ridiculous. You know how I’ve felt. You’ve seen, these last few weeks, you’ve known all along, and even if I didn’t say anything you knew that this can’t be…’ It was a bad dream, surely Tess would wake up now, laugh about it later.
‘Tess, we’re in love. Douglas has asked Father if he can marry me. We…’ She held out her left hand, a narrow gold band sat on her third finger. Tess saw the glint of a small diamond, a cluster of glassy sparkles. For a moment, she held her breath, how could something so small destroy so much? It was just gold and gemstones, after all. ‘We are getting married.’ It was a statement of fact; all agreed before there was anything that Tess could do about it. They must have spent months planning this. Months of meeting behind her back, talking, holding hands, falling in love. Oh, God, Tess thought the room was going to tilt over, maybe the whole world was capsizing around her. Had Douglas been in love with Nancy while Tess was throwing herself into his arms for all those nights on the way home from the Sunset Club? There was no fear of Nancy letting herself down like that.
‘But I loved you, Douglas…’ the words fell from her, the last bit of dignity draining from her now. ‘I thought…’
‘Whatever you thought, Tess. I told you, in the end, I couldn’t marry someone like you. I don’t love you…’ He looked then at Nancy. His bride-to-be had always been the second-rate version of Tess. She couldn’t sing or entertain people with her lively wit, but she was ladylike, remote and it turned out, not quite so uncomplicated as Tess had always assumed. ‘I’ve never loved you.’ The words were cruel, not so much in what they meant, but more what she could see in his eyes. He despised her. She was little more than scum beneath his shoes even as she was turning herself inside out for him.
‘You’ll meet someone else, Tess. You’ll meet some nice boy and fall madly in love with him and you’ll look back on this day and laugh about how silly this whole mix-up was,’ Nancy said. A small encouraging smile quivered on her lips, as though all would be well, if they just called it a mix-up. What did Nancy know of love, Tess wondered for a moment, what did she know of falling in love, was she capable of the kind of passion Tess had within her?
‘This will n
ever be right, Nancy. You knew how I felt about Douglas.’
‘You never put it into words, Tess. You never said,’ Nancy answered as quick as a flash.
‘Honestly, have I ever needed to? You knew, after the Christmas Ball, you knew my heart was broken. You knew and you…’ Tess thought, that this was the worst part of it all, worse than losing Douglas, ‘you betrayed me. You betrayed me, whereas Douglas just broke my heart.’
‘Oh, for goodness sake, there’s no need for this melodrama,’ Douglas said.
‘Maybe you should leave, Douglas,’ Tess rounded on him. It would be better if he left now, before she completely fell apart. Without him here, maybe she could talk to Nancy, explain why she couldn’t marry him. If she knew how Tess felt, or what had happened between them all those nights, maybe…
‘I think we should both leave,’ Nancy said, turning on her heels. ‘I’m going back to Ballycove, until the wedding. It’s in July, by the way, the sixteenth.’ And then, they were gone, pulling closed the door behind them.
Tess stood, rooted like a hundred-year-old oak tree, her feet planted in the ground, her heart gnarling at the betrayal. It was unthinkable. Oh, my God, it was devastating. For a moment she forgot to breathe and then gasped, but that only brought the whole horror of it into starker reality. Douglas was going to marry Nancy. Surely, she would wake up from a terrible nightmare at any moment now. She heard the tap trickle ruthlessly behind her and knew, in some deep part of her, that the terror choking the air from her lungs was real and it was something that she would have to live with every single day of her life.
She stood there, for a long time, waiting for the news to settle, trying to take it in. She had lost Douglas; worse, she had lost him to Nancy. Nancy, who never put a foot wrong; who had always been the plain Jane, goody two shoes of them both. Douglas had fallen for Nancy in spite of all of that, or maybe, he had fallen for Nancy because of all those things. Nancy was untouched, refined and, ultimately, wife material, whereas Tess apparently was not. Of course, there was no making sense of it, not there and then, not for a very long time afterwards.
