Hush Hush

by Mullarkey, Gabrielle

  Angela pulled up stubborn tufts of grass. ‘So where does that leave us? You’re always busy working or paternalising. I think the longest conversation I’ve had with you was on the plane.’

  Conor’s scowl deepened with contrition. ‘Look, Angela, forget the fatherly breast-beating bit. I’m sorry. Can we start this afternoon again?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Let’s go away!’ he said impulsively. ‘Just the two of us. If Rachel’s bloke can run to Paris in April, I can do my bit. How about Ireland?’

  ‘You serious?’ Angela peered at him. ‘What about Shane?’

  ‘He’s always angling to spend a weekend with Matty Hyde. Matty has a mother who bakes things, feels sorry for Shane, and is endlessly susceptible and shockable when it comes to practical jokes. Shane loves it round there.’

  ‘You and me ‒ just the two of us ‒ in Ireland.’ An expedition laced with promise and danger. Forty-eight hours of enforced togetherness in a stone-clad cottage, Conor coming on to her after several pints of ice-breaking Guinness.

  ‘Angela, what do you say?’ She felt a stroking tickle on her wrist and jolted. Conor was touching her with a grass stem. ‘I was thinking, the weekend after next. I can clear the decks at work and turn off my mobile, so they can’t spring any last-minute surprises. Please. I owe it to you. There are things I want to talk about.’

  From Conor, this was a soliloquy. She wavered.

  ‘Gimme a kiss,’ murmured Conor, transferring the grass stem to her ear-lobe.

  ‘What, here? In the church car-park?’

  ‘More privacy than at my place.’ Or yours, he could’ve added, haunted by the spirit of St Robert. Uncharitable! He winced.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He kissed her. It was gentle, exploratory stuff. Angela risked opening her eyes to make sure that Conor’s were shut, his red-gold lashes perfect crescents against his cheeks. One arm held her elbow lightly, for support. His free hand tickled her hem-line and crept under it, but almost as a courtesy to her femininity, describing fond little arcs on her thigh as if she was a great big strokable kitten.

  He unclasped her and brushed her nose with his sandpapery chin. ‘Do you think,’ he murmured, resting his chin on top of her head, ‘that a kid is always better off with two parents, whatever the circumstances?’

  Angela held her breath. ‘What circumstances?’

  ‘You know, if there’s a legacy of a troubled marriage. Is it right to foist a nuclear family on the kid again if he’s got used to the single-parent set-up?’

  ‘Conor, I’m the last judge of that sort of thing. But ‒ if the couple can make a go of it, why not? Everyone wins.’

  He jumped up and pulled her with him. He smiled into her flushed face, his green eyes deepening against the paler, winter-shrunk green of the grass around them.

  Angela suppressed an inward thrill. He was sounding her out about becoming a family with Shane. His lack of subtlety was touching in its transparency.

  ‘Shane,’ Conor began, as they cruised onto the motorway, ‘would you mind if I went off for a weekend with Angela? I thought you could stay at Matty’s.’

  ‘I’m hardly in a position to refuse anything, seeing as I’m in the dog-house.’

  ‘Ach well, I’d still like your blessing. I’m old-fashioned that way.’

  A ghost of a smile lit Shane’s face. ‘As long as I don’t have to be Crispin the frigging page-boy at a shotgun wedding a few months later.’

  Conor laughed, his rumbling bear laugh that made Shane smile, whatever his underlying mood. He looked down and fiddled with the CD player, so Conor wouldn’t see it.

  Conor gripped the steering wheel. ‘I understand Mum’s talked to you about the possibility she might return to England.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Shane casually, bony knuckles tightening.

  ‘Her suggestion is, we divide the house into two flats, her living on one floor and me on another, you moving freely between both. That would seem preferable to her living nearby, and me farming you out for visits.’

  ‘A pass-the-parcel kind of thing?’ muttered Shane. ‘Yeah, sounds well rubbish all right.’

  ‘So you’d go for the house-sharing plan?’ sighed Conor. ‘She told me she’d sounded you out, and you were interested.’

  Shane stared hard at him. ‘D’you still love her or what?’

  Conor changed lanes too abruptly. The car behind flashed its lights. ‘Or what,’ he chose in a flat voice.

  Sadie was warming her slippered feet against the lower bar of her fire. She accepted a cup of tea from Angela. ‘You look radiant, if I may say so.’

  ‘Oh.’ Angela put a hand to pink cheeks. ‘All that fresh air.’

  Sadie slurped her tea. ‘The kid wasn’t so bad. I was expecting Darren from The Omen.’

  ‘Damien, Ma.’

  ‘Whatever. Needs a good dose of mothering. Shame you’re not the maternal type, but effort can make up for natural inability.’

  Angela stiffened. ‘Thank you, mother.’

  ‘Oh, don’t get me wrong. You’re getting on with life. Conor McGinlay came looking for you, remember, and you went out with him to try it for size. There’s no disgrace in moving on, with your memories of the dead fond and intact.’

  ‘So would you be looking for another man if you were ‒ um ‒ younger?’

  ‘No,’ sniffed Sadie. ‘But we’re discussing you. I enjoy being on my own. You don’t.’

  ‘Talking of you being alone,’ said Angela swiftly, ‘what about getting you this mobile phone? Don’t look like that, Mum! I don’t want anything happening to you. And come to think of it, shouldn’t we be getting you a walking stick?’

  Sadie gnashed her dentures. ‘I told you, I’m not ready for the bath chair and ear trumpet yet. When’s your next date with Conor?’

  ‘He’s ringing me,’ said Angela, sounding casual.

  ‘Just tell her you and I are going off for the weekend,’ suggested Rachel, dunking a chocolate finger in her tea.

  She could do this elegantly. Bits of biscuit never broke off and sank without trace.

  Angela enjoyed a visit to Rachel’s flat. Its elegant simplicity reeked of well-spent money, much like Rachel herself. Angela had recovered from her frisson of jealousy at the mini-market. Rachel, she now accepted, had gone out of her way to be nice to Conor. Nothing more.

  ‘I’d rather be straight with Mum than act as if I’ve something shameful to hide,’ declared Angela boldly.

  ‘Not worth it with Catholic parents,’ said Rachel briskly. ‘It’s like trying to explain electricity to a caveman. It’s much kinder to collude in their blissful state of ignorance. My mother still thinks I go on platonic dates with my “nice young men”, kissing goodbye on the doorstep after a night at the pictures. At thirty-seven! I’m sure she doesn’t really think that, but as long as no one forces her to confront the unpalatable truth, she’s quite happy.’

  ‘But Ma’s a paid-up member of the KGB,’ grumbled Angela. ‘In six months’ time, she’d pounce on one of us and ask some apparently innocuous question about our weekend in Ireland. Then she’d pounce on the other one, separately, ask the same question, and compare data. Besides, as two thirty-something women, it’s high time we stopped indulging her prejudices.’

  ‘OK,’ said Rachel. ‘Come clean with her. Tell her you’re off to trip the light fantastic with C McGinlay Esquire, recently unwedded bachelor of the parish.’

  Angela hesitated, then snatched another chocolate finger. ‘I’ll think about it.’

  Chapter Eight

  Her mobile phone went off as the Tube emerged from subterranean gloom and travelled above ground en route to the airport.

  Angela took a while to register that her Ode to Joy ringtone (which had seemed like a safe bet from the list of available options) was emanating from the front pocket on her holdall, where she’d packed her pants.

  She’d shoved everything in the holdall, even her slimline shoulder bag, consigning tick
et and loose change to her coat pocket. The tap-dancing frogs bag, so very ‘her’, according to Conor, had been left at home. As a coming-of-age gift, it now struck her as suitably silly and girlish on its day, because she’d been a silly, girlish twenty-one-year-old. She hoped that girl wasn’t the ‘very you’ pinpointed by Conor.

  ‘Botheration!’ she muttered now, hastily unzipping the holdall’s front pocket before she missed the call. Overstuffed with grey-gussetted smalls, her one and only thong leapt out on a rising crescendo of Joyfulness and onto the shoe of an Outraged of Tunbridge Wells type, who lowered his Daily Telegraph and blinked in alarm at what appeared to be a dead, exotic jellyfish tentacled to his toe-cap.

  ‘Sorry!’ Angela pounced on the strip of shocking-pink satin that now matched her complexion.

  Ye gods! The thong had been a ‘joke’ anniversary present from Rachel seven years ago. Languishing ever since under balled socks and scattered hairgrips in a bedroom drawer, it had taken advantage of its only outing to make its debut in the Friday evening rush-hour.

  She had managed to unsnag the phone – complete with warbling choir invisible – from some knicker elastic, bend down to scoop up her thong and press ‘answer’ on the Nokia’s fascia, when the ringing abruptly stopped.

  Typical! She flicked to ‘recent calls’. Sadie!

  Why was Sadie ringing her?

  Instantly and predictably, she was gripped by panic.

  In the end, Sadie had acquiesced to the idea of a mobile phone. ‘Your mum’s well able to handle a bit of newfangled technology,’ Rachel had reasoned. ‘And you can enter all the essential numbers into “Contacts”, then just tell her where to find the list. Simples.’

  Well, yes and no.

  She highlighted Sadie’s own number and returned the call.

  It was answered on the fourth ring. ‘Hello, this is Sadie Carbery speaking,’ Sadie enunciated crisply.

  Relief swept through Angela. ‘Mum, you all right?’

  ‘Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?’

  ‘Well, you tell me, seeing as you called me.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘Yeah, just now.’

  ‘Oh – must have been when I put the washing bowl down on the thing. Must have set it off.’ Sadie made her phone sound like a temperamental burglar alarm.

  ‘Well, you know, be careful with it, Mum. And keep it with you at all times. Bring it to bed with you.’

  ‘I dread to think what it must be costing you, Ange.’

  ‘It’s OK, I told you, it’s pay as you go. You only pay for what you use,’ she added, knowing Sadie would grasp that concept more easily. ‘A tenner every so often is hardly going to break my bank, and means you don’t have to rely on the landline ‒ hang on.’ She’d become aware of a worrying development.

  The Tube train had halted and was now sliding backwards, rapidly, into the tunnel from which it had emerged. ‘Mum, I’ll probably lose the signal in a minute, so I’ll try and ring when I get back fro… botheration!’

  As she did lose the signal, a voice crackled over the Tannoy, announcing that, due to a ‘fault’, the train would return to and terminate at Hyde Park Corner.

  Hyde bloody Park Corner! Angela glanced at her watch. She’d miss the plane!

  She’d better ring Conor, who’d be waiting at the airport – damn it, no signal!

  Everyone else seemed positively Zen about this interruption to their intended journey, except for apoplectically inclined Outraged of Tunbridge Wells – and the source of his concern appeared to still be the scandalously pink thong, which was, she noticed, still clutched in her hand.

  She stuffed it quickly back into her holdall, regretting its last-minute inclusion for Dutch courage. ‘After all,’ she silently addressed Outraged, ‘I know Conor’s booked a double room at the hotel in Wexford. I told him to go right ahead. Not that sex was mentioned, you understand; I said – get this – that it made sense economically! This pink thong sums me up, really, all gesture and no action. Pretending I’m a woman with racy underwear to call on, when I’m a woman afraid to have sex with him in case I’m useless at it, and equally afraid to deny him in case he gets bored and moves on.’

  Outraged, luckily, finally returned to his paper to check how much his house was worth, so Angela could return to the problem at hand.

  She was going in the wrong direction and her flight left in less than two hours.

  To make matters worse, the Tube train continued its crawlathon without stopping, holding its passengers prisoner all the way.

  At Hyde Park Corner, they were turfed off and advised to stay on the platform to wait for further announcements.

  Angela paced and chafed, considering her limited options.

  She could hail a cab – too pricey and it was the rush-hour.

  Bus? She was hazy about London bus routes.

  When the message board flashed up a Heathrow train in 10 minutes’ time, she decided her best bet was to board it.

  But by the time she’d rolled above ground again, the plane looked a lost cause. She managed to pull out her phone without detonating the coiled spring of smalls, and called Conor. He was going to kill her. In fact, he was probably going to leave without her.

  He’d left her two messages. The first one: ‘Where are you?’ Nervous laughter. ‘Changed your mind about coming?’

  She hesitated before listening to the second message: this was probably the one where nervous laughter had turned to deep annoyance.

  ‘Ange,’ he said, ‘I don’t know if you’re still coming, but just so ye know, flight’s been delayed by two hours. So there’s still time to change your mind back again.’ Pause. ‘If applicable. See you shortly. Or not, as the case may be.’

  She frowned. He was certainly hedging his bets.

  Reaching terminal one, she pelted along the moving walkways as fast as she could, dragging her holdall like a dead weight (who knew a few optimistically selected glad rags could weigh so much?), bursting into ‘departures’ dishevelled and wild-eyed.

  She saw him by Costa Coffee. He looked up at the same moment, his expression hard to read, but he covered the ground in a few strides to wrestle the holdall strap from her shoulder. ‘Right. So. You made it. Thunderbirds are go, as Shane would say. Right then. Good.’ And his face cracked slowly into it heart-tilting smile.

  She marvelled all through the journey that he’d been not angry but scared that she’d stood him up. He drove the hire car skilfully through plangent, steady rainfall, to their hotel in Curracloe, a good two hours’ by car from Dublin airport. Or so it felt. Angela could see nothing and felt disoriented. Beyond town centres, there were no lampposts or fairy-lit urban sprawl to illuminate the dark contours of night.

  ‘How come you never learnt to drive?’ asked Conor.

  ‘Oh, Robert gave me a couple of lessons and didn’t rate my chances.’

  ‘Spouses don’t make the best instructors.’

  ‘I hit a bus shelter. He lost his no-claims bonus.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Conor. Angela studied the map with a travel torch. Might as well try and look useful after confessing to such inadequacy. She hoped he wouldn’t ask about her last visit to Ireland, which was shrouded in the mists of enforced forgetfulness.

  She and Robert had stayed in Kinsale, but en route to the gastronomical capital of Ireland, Robert had run over a chicken, mistaking the jolting thud for a hidden pothole, it had ‘pissed down’ as the guidebook hadn’t put it (preferring the euphemistic ‘soft weather’) and, to top it all, Angela had eaten a dodgy shellfish and vomited over the rocks in Kinsale harbour, in full view of camcording American tourists. The row developed when she realised that Robert was snapping her, too.

  ‘Conor,’ she asked suddenly, ‘do you see me as a plastic?’

  ‘Tag? Gnome? A plastic what, Ange?’

  ‘Paddy, of course. Surely Shane’s been lumbered with the name by some of your family in Dublin?’

  ‘If he had been, he wouldn’t tell me. Let�
��s see.’ He drummed his fingers on the steering-wheel. ‘Have you got an Irish passport?’

  ‘No, couldn’t be bothered. I needed to go on a school trip at short notice when I was sixteen, so I nipped down the post office in Wilmesbury and filled out a form for a twelve-month thing, complete with lions and shields and rampant loyalty to queen and country. Are you disappointed in me?’

  ‘As disappointed as a man could be in a plastic who’s sold out.’

  He laughed when she slumped down in her seat.

  ‘Look, I’ve lived in England for donkeys’ years, so my pure-alloy Irishness must be degrading to a baser metal. Maybe iron rather than plastic.’

  ‘Pig-iron, if you’re a paddy,’ corrected Angela. She felt reassured enough to try her hand and struggling eyesight at map-reading again.

  ‘Fraid we won’t see the lie of the land before morning,’ said Conor, swinging between a pair of gothic stone pillars. ‘But the forecast wasn’t too bad. This is supposed to be a half-decent joint, so they should still run to dinner, even though it’s gone nine.’

  Half-decent! It was palatial compared to the B&B in Kinsale. Once the seat of a C of I bishop, Clariton House was a grey Georgian mansion where rotting wall tapestries hung on repanelled walls and modern plumbing rumbled soothingly behind antique porcelain cisterns. The sort of place she and Robert had often passed out driving, musing, ‘I wonder who stays in a pile like that?’ and decided complacently, ‘Golf-mad Yanks who think any house over fifty years old is heaving with ghosts!’

  Looking back, Angela saw their dismissiveness for what it was. A bit of harmless jealousy that their budget couldn’t run to four-star Georgian piles.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ asked Conor suddenly, turning from the reception desk with a smile. Angela looked away hurriedly at a tapestry. She couldn’t very well say, ‘my honeymoon,’ or even, ‘how moreish you look in that well-cut overcoat, with your dampened-down curls and your fisherman’s jumper, how very much at home you look in this imposing old house,’ an odious comparison with poor, dead Robert. Upstairs, Angela hurried into their en suite room and pulled out her mobile to hide her shyness. ‘Mind if I ring Mum to check she’s OK?’