Hush Hush

by Mullarkey, Gabrielle

  ‘You must’ve left the plane at warp speed without checking you had everything. I would’ve assumed anything left was mine.’

  ‘Blimey. Well, thanks for bringing it round.’ That was a lucky stroke, attaching an address tag. She didn’t usually bother for hand luggage. One of Robert’s little habits that died hard with her. ‘Did you have far to come?’ she asked belatedly.

  ‘Loxton,’ he grunted. ‘Fifteen minutes in the jalopy.’ He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. ‘Sorry just to turn up, but obviously, without a mobile number ‒’

  ‘And we had no reason to exchange those,’ she reasoned primly. ‘Er, cup of tea?’

  ‘No thanks. Things to do.’

  ‘Angela? Who’s your friend?’

  Angela groaned as Sadie trotted up to the door, right on cue. ‘We haven’t been introduced,’ she said breathlessly to Fish-Jumper. ‘I’m Angela’s mother.’

  He allowed his large brown hand to be pumped up and down, glowering at Angela from under thick, rust-coloured brows.

  ‘Oh, sorry Mum, this is … er … it’ll come to me in a second.’

  ‘Conor McGinlay,’ he snapped. ‘And remind me again. You are …?’

  ‘Angela Carbery,’ supplied Sadie. ‘You mean, I’ve doorstepped you two on your first meeting? I’m so sorry to intrude.’

  ‘Angela and I met yesterday,’ drawled Conor with a momentary gleam in his eye. ‘She failed to recognise me with my clothes on.’

  Angela threw him a furious look.

  But Sadie actually laughed. ‘I like a man with a sense of humour! So you two met in Morocco?’

  ‘Angela chatted me up on the plane coming home,’ hissed Conor McGinlay intimately, and dug Sadie in the ribs. ‘Now I see where she gets her spark from!’

  Sadie pinkened coyly. ‘Get away with you, flatterer! Now, I mustn’t hold you two up, if you’re going out to lunch. You might have said on the phone, Ange.’

  Angela glared. ‘But I ‒ we ‒ there’s no …’

  ‘Get along, the pair of you!’ Suddenly, Sadie was in the hallway and Angela out on the porch with Conor. ‘You don’t want an old biddy cluttering up your first date after your holiday! I’ll crack on with the unpacking while you’re gone, love, load up the washing machine. Don’t suppose you’ll bother otherwise!’ She waved merrily and shut the door in their faces.

  Conor wiggled a mobile brow at Angela. ‘Forceful little thing, isn’t she?’

  ‘You were a big help, with your sexual innuendo.’

  ‘Ach, she was tickled pink that her spinster daughter might have been up to naughties abroad.’

  ‘I’m a widow, not a spinster!’ She held up her finger in an unintentionally rude gesture, flourishing the band of gold topped by a solitaire engagement ring.

  ‘Sorry!’ Conor McGinlay’s brown face flushed a shade deeper to match his wiry, rust-coloured mop of hair. ‘I’m not known for my subtlety. You hungry?’

  ‘Not really. I’ve just had breakfast.’

  ‘I’ve just had a big fry-up. Tell you what, we’ll go for a spin to keep your mother happy. She’ll never let you into your own house again until she sees proof of you making an effort.’

  ‘I can’t see anything! My lenses ‒ remember?’

  Conor eyed the front door. ‘I can’t see your mum letting you back in with that excuse.’

  Angela raised the letterbox flap and squinted into the hallway. ‘Ma! Open the door. I can’t go out, cos I’m blind as a bat. Ma? You listening?’

  Sadie’s aproned midriff shuffled into view. She opened the door a crack and thrust out a dusty glasses case. Then the door shut again.

  Angela opened the case and winced. She’d forgotten what Deirdre-from-Coronation-Street dinner-plates they were, complete with pale pink plastic frames. ‘I can’t be seen dead in these,’ she announced, snapping the case shut.

  Conor McGinlay proffered a guiding arm with slow and deliberate flamboyance for the benefit of her narrowed gaze.

  ‘I need a coat to go anywhere,’ she stalled. ‘It’s brass monkeys.’

  He peeled off his navy fleece.

  Before he could hand it to her, and score even more points for gentlemanly conduct, Angela shoved on the glasses and hurried down the path ahead of him, looking into the grass verge as she went. Already, she’d reverted to her pre-lens stance of hair over face and face bent over a minute examination of pavement cracks.

  Conor McGinlay, fleece flung over one wrist, whistled as he unlocked his car.

  They ended up with coffees in a drive-thru McDonald’s.

  ‘Not like you to forgo a nosh-up,’ observed Angela, falling back on the one characteristic she remembered about him. ‘By the way, you drive like a maniac.’

  He stirred his coffee aggressively. ‘I do not! I’m merely assertive.’

  Angela made patterns in spilt sugar with her fingertip. She bet he was assertive in every situation ‒ including bed. Hands as big as shovels gripped his coffee. He was stocky rather than huge, weather-beaten but not haggard. His mouth was a fine, rather sensitive specimen and his eyes a deep jade green. A bristly stubble matched his thatch of luxuriant, wavy, collar-length hair. Rachel would’ve called him ‘moreish’.

  ‘Giving me marks out of ten, are you?’ he muttered.

  Angela looked down at the table. She must’ve been staring.

  That gave Conor McGinlay his chance to look at her. Second impressions: tall, thin, no boobs to speak of, marvellous skin (courtesy of the Irish blood, no doubt). Dead straight, shiny brown hair with a centre parting. The glasses magnified eyes of a pale, translucent blue. Not a raving beauty, but then, neither was he. She was restful to look at. Like a watercolour you wouldn’t mind hanging over the fireplace. Christ, I’m a sexist, he realised, and grimaced.

  ‘Lousy coffee,’ he said to Angela, who caught him in mid-grimace.

  ‘How come you were holidaying alone?’ she asked abruptly. Might as well get the answers to Rachel’s key questions.

  ‘I wasn’t on holiday. I go around the world helping to build hotels. I’m a civil engineer. How come you haven’t got a tan?’

  ‘Oh.’ Blood rushed to her pale face. ‘I just go red and peel. My husband was the same.’

  ‘Er ‒ how long ago did he ‒?’

  ‘Over a year,’ she replied quickly. ‘Heart attack. We’d been married sixteen years. No kids or pets.’

  ‘You did better than me. My wife left me.’

  Angela’s tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. She hadn’t expected that. He was big and bluff ‒ maybe he’d hit his wife?

  ‘It was a civilised parting,’ he shrugged dejectedly. ‘I was always gallivanting off to build hotels, and she got sick of being stuck at home with Shane, our son. She warned me often enough before she took off. Can’t say I blame her for calling my bluff. Shane lives with me. Kate lives in New York. She wanted a clean break. She’s very creative, a graphic designer. They were keen to snap her up over there and make her feel appreciated again.’

  ‘So, you have a son?’ echoed Angela feebly. ‘H-how old?’

  ‘Fourteen now,’ grunted Conor. ‘Stroppy adolescent runs rings round me. Course, I’m battling the guilt of absent father syndrome half the time. My cleaning lady, Mrs Turner, moves in for the duration when I’m away. She loves being there and she keeps a gimlet eye on Shane. It’s not ideal, but I have to work.’

  ‘Well ‒ yes, of course. Don’t we all?’

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘Sub-editor,’ muttered Angela shyly. ‘Women’s mag. Boring old desk job. Start a new one tomorrow.’

  Conor nodded absently. He was fidgeting now, eager to be gone from this set-up. He hadn’t fooled himself. He couldn’t small-talk a woman any more.

  ‘You’re Irish,’ she reminded him shyly, apparently seeking confirmation.

  ‘Yeah. Both your parents or just your ma?’

  ‘Both. Dad’s dead now. My husband, Robert, was half-Irish and half-Welsh.’

  ‘
A Celtic conspiracy,’ he nodded. ‘Kate was as English as flapjacks. Her dad was a fire and brimstone, slightly to the right of Attila the Hun low-churcher who threw a wobbly when she married a bog-trotter. I didn’t realise it at the time, but my racial inferiority was my main attraction. One in the eye for Der Führer.’

  Angela got up, sensing his restlessness. ‘Are you and Kate divorced?’ she asked nosily, information-gathering for Rachel (she told herself).

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, and sadness leapt out of his mobile face. ‘Paperwork came through five months ago. Her dad was right about us for the wrong reasons. A crying shame we ever got married. And I say that with her best interests at heart.’

  She made Conor McGinlay drop her off at the bottom of her road. His car was a big, four-wheel drive thing. She couldn’t put a name to it, though Sadie and Rachel would want to know.

  ‘Well, I enjoyed that,’ he said in a tone that implied the opposite.

  Angela squirmed out of the passenger seat, overcome with nerves and shyness. Was she supposed to say, ‘Me too?’

  ‘We must do it again some time,’ grunted Conor at the dashboard.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘You, me, go out,’ he repeated, in Tarzan-like staccato. ‘If I’m not stepping on toes. I mean ‒ your husband. Got a phone number?’

  As she turned away, she was ninety-nine per cent certain that she was going to feign deafness. But the stray one per cent ‒ curiosity? A lifetime habit of responding politely to strangers’ requests? ‒ got the better of her.

  ‘Zero, seven seve‒’ she began to gabble, just as Conor crunched his gears, preparing to depart.

  ‘Come again?’ he shouted above a tortured gear-box.

  Angela turned and fled.

  In Angela’s rarely used dining room, Sadie ladled out her famous fish pie. Angela poured two glasses of full-bodied Moroccan wine. ‘McDonald’s!’ chided Sadie. ‘You could’ve steered him towards a Harvester at least.’

  Angela bridled. ‘Why would I want to steer him anywhere?’

  ‘And fancy meeting him on a plane like that!’

  ‘Someone had to sit next to me.’

  ‘Your sarky gene is surfacing, lovey! Cheers.’

  Sadie tipped a stream of wine under her unreliable dentures. ‘And he came round with your luggage and asked you for a date? Well done, Ange! I wouldn’t have thought you capable of such subtlety. You were always a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of girl.’ Sadie pondered, then qualified this. ‘You’re honest.’

  Angela decoded. ‘You think I left my bag behind to give him an excuse to look me up? A variation on the dropped hanky? I’m afraid you were spot-on with your original analysis. I’d never be that “subtle”, or sad, as I prefer to call it.’

  ‘I liked him,’ prevaricated Sadie. ‘I liked him a lot.’

  ‘He’s a divorced Irish Catholic with a teenage son and an ex-wife who fled to New York to get away from him. How can you like him? Robert led a life of blameless morality in comparison and all you did was berate him for being a half-Prod Welshman with a suspected interest in ferrets.’

  ‘Angela!’ Sadie looked genuinely shocked. ‘I wish you wouldn’t talk like that, twisting the facts.’

  Angela found solace in her wine glass. ‘Be honest, Ma. You’re giving Conor McGinlay the benefit of very large doubts because he’s one of your own.’

  ‘I just think …’ Sadie hesitated.

  ‘Yes. Yes?’

  ‘If he rings, you should hear him out. A social life beyond gossiping with Rachel wouldn’t go amiss, Ange.’

  ‘I don’t see Rachel doing that badly in her successful, single life.’

  ‘Rachel is …’ Sadie eased off her shoes under the table and sought for words that skittered away as wine seeped into her brain. ‘Rachel is a lovely girl, but she’s too cynical about men. I bet she still cries into her cocoa over letting that nice doctor slip through her net.’

  ‘She plucked him out of her net and threw him back in the sea, where other fish are said to be plentiful.’

  ‘My point, is, she’s scared of commitment. You’ve already proved suited to it.’

  ‘I don’t know, Ma.’ This was sounding all too plausible.

  Sadie chewed fish pie carefully. ‘Make an effort on your next date with Conor. Looking the part is so important, and your glad rags are mostly rags these days. Will you let me buy you something nice?’

  ‘No, Mum!’ Angela shoved her plate to one side and stomped out to the kitchen. She plunged her spoon into an M&S tiramisu, briefly wishing it was Sadie.

  In her teens, Angela had tried to keep her dates a secret from Sadie. But once Sadie weevilled out the truth, the advice was the same: ‘Shoulders back, chest out, tummy in. A man hates a girl who droops. Don’t wear a skirt with a slit up the back in case he thinks you’re easy.’ (Sadie pronounced it ‘azey’.) ‘Always have your nails trimmed because a man notices bitten nails. Always carry a hanky, spare tights and enough change to call for a taxi and tip the driver. You should never, ever go on a date without a handbag of essentials.’

  Angela used to pause on her way out the front door to tick off a checklist of handbag contents, adding loudly, ‘Compass, map, spirit level, Kendal mint cake, cuddly toy …’ until a goaded Sadie would fly out of the sitting room and shoo her on her way.

  Sadie had turned every first date of Angela’s into an interview for a dream job that would never be offered again. To rebel, Angela had probably gone too far the other way, turning up for dates in scuffed shoes and trailing hem-lines, round-shouldered and peering at her feet, even after the duckling-to-swan transformation afforded by contact lenses. It had been sheer chance that she’d met Robert at a wedding, when she’d been competing with Rachel to look her best.

  She carried the wobbly mounds of tiramisu back into the dining room. ‘It’s too soon after Robert to start dating. And now I’ve got this new job to cope with.’

  ‘Wouldn’t Conor be a pleasant distraction?’ hazarded Sadie, with an answer and a new question for everything.

  Gloomily, Angela shoved her glasses up her nose, leaving a cream-smeared fingerprint on the plastic lens. Her verbal parrying was not at its best in glasses. She bent her head to avoid Sadie’s beady eye, studying formations raised by her spoon on the stippled texture of beige mousse.

  Conor drove uphill in fourth gear for a whole minute before he even noticed. He changed down with a growl to match the protesting gearbox. As unmitigated disasters went, he gave his meeting with Angela Carbery a healthy nine out of ten. Despite a retentive, incisive memory, he had only the vaguest recollection of the phone number she’d tossed over her shoulder. She’d surrendered it unwillingly, perhaps made it up on the spot. The question was, should he bother taking things any further?

  He pulled into the next service station and topped up with petrol. As he stood in the queue to pay, he noticed that the young woman behind the till had a beautiful smile, flashed indiscriminately at every customer.

  Conor decided that that was the problem with women, or rather, his problem with women. Since becoming single again, he couldn’t read between the lines of a beautiful smile to distinguish between women who felt sorry for him, women who liked him as a friend and women who fancied him.

  He’d taken a chance on Rosie. He’d only gone into her shoe shop to buy a pair of brown nubuck shoes. But he hadn’t seen anything he liked, apart from Rosie. At the door, he’d taken advantage of the fact that they were alone in the shop and turned to blurt out, ‘Fancy coming out some time?’

  He’d taken affirmative action. It had worked ‒ and ended in disaster.

  ‘Fifty-five quid,’ the woman behind the till said to him, and ladled out her smile as if it came free with petrol tokens.

  He handed over his debit card. He saw the woman’s wedding ring on her finger and thought of Angela. The ball was firmly in his court. If he wanted to see her again, he’d have to take affirmative action again. It was a watershed moment. Should he or
shouldn’t he?

  Back in the car, he thumped the dashboard in frustration. Goddamit, there came a time to stop worrying about the impression he made on the opposite sex, and just go for it on the assumption that he had as much to offer as they had to give. He’d have to make the next move. Which meant recalling that number she’d given him … he found a pen and crumpled Post-it note in the glove compartment, shut his eyes and gave it his best shot.

  Chapter Four

  ‘And this,’ said Val, ending her guided tour, ‘is the sacred stationery cupboard of popular legend. Mandy in admin sleeps with the key under her pillow. You have to fill out a form in triplicate for a paper-clip, so if I were you, I’d label my stapler, mouse and anything that isn’t nailed down.’ Val’s voice dropped an octave. ‘People here are so possessive. Petty, I know.’

  Angela nodded sagely. It was her first day, and office politics were thickening before her once again. Could she even trust clear-eyed, blonde-rinsed Val, a mother of three with thick ankles and guileless charm? ‘Love many, trust few, always paddle your own canoe,’ as Sadie had it. Caution dictated that a serpent nestled in the bosom of the one you felt most inclined to trust. Val was therefore a prime suspect. She understood so well.

  ‘I understand just how you feel, coming back to work after a few years off,’ she said, leading Angela back to the subs’ end of the open-plan office. ‘I took five years out having Ricky and the twins, and Marla’s had a year off with Barnaby.’ She dropped her voice again to add, ‘Marla’s a bit two-faced. All over you one minute, criticising your time-keeping the next. Just be aware of it. She’s under strain at home. I know people shouldn’t bring their private lives to work, but Marla’s husband is unemployed and resents her success as a woman. He spends all her earnings to highlight his disaffection.’

  ‘Right,’ said Angela, dropping into her swivel chair.

  She made frantic mental notes. Marla, keep on right side of. She clicked her mouse, calling up the page they were easing her in with, and smiled at her fellow sub, Pauline, across the desk. Pauline stared back.