Hush Hush

by Mullarkey, Gabrielle

  ‘Go for it. I’ll ring Shane at Matty’s.’

  Angela only half-listened to Sadie’s complaints about the mobile and Maud Ambrose’s ‘nosiness’. She was looking down at the blue-and-white bedspread under her knees, silky and raised, its downy thickness reassuring evidence of its cost. Tonight, she’d lie under it with Conor, between fringed blue lampshades and under a ceiling studded with plaster cabbage roses. Soon, this room would resonate in memory with an outcome still unknown.

  ‘Loo flush is temperamental,’ reported Conor, returning from a gurgling bathroom. ‘You have to open the cistern lid and hold the ball-cock above the waterline to let it refill. Shall I complain?’

  ‘Well,’ blushed Angela. After all, he was paying. She had offered, forcefully, to go Dutch, but he’d insisted that the whole weekend was on him. ‘A wonky loo’s all part of the old-world charm, I suppose. The bed dips in the middle too, but I don’t mind that, either.’

  He seemed relieved that she’d mentioned the bed. ‘I usually sleep facing the window,’ he revealed.

  ‘Fine,’ she said, and scattered her cosmetic essentials (carefully vetted) on the alternative bedside table. In its top drawer, she found a Gideon bible and a leaflet about the house, smelling of camphor. On the front was a sepia photo of the bishop and his family on the front lawn, a dour man flanked by corseted women in plume-heaped hats, parasols struck into the ground like at-ease rifles.

  Their eyes squinted in a golden evening of long ago. ‘His wife and three daughters,’ read Angela aloud. ‘Look at that view!’

  Sepia hills sloped away behind the colonnaded porch, intersecting pleats of burnt sienna. The sea and Curracloe beach lay in the opposite direction. ‘It’s much like that now,’ claimed Conor. ‘Wait until morning.’

  It was too late for dinner, so they ordered sandwiches and tea up to the room. Cheese and chutney doorsteps arrived for Angela, cold bacon for Conor, with a steaming brown pot of tea and turf-dark stacks of moist brack, the shiny raisins reminding Angela of turf beetles. When she and Owen were kids, they’d spent summers scrambling over their grandfather’s turf stacks and down his haystacks on his County Clare homestead. Angela, in truth, had spent a lot of time running away from Owen, or extracting his palpable hits ‒ beetles rendered legless and sharp haystalks ‒ from the back of her dress.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ asked Conor for the second time that evening.

  She looked up in confusion.

  His eyes were fixed on her with the green intensity of a cat’s. But his smile was nervous. ‘Sorry ‒ I’m clumping my hobnails all over your innermost thoughts.’

  ‘No, you’re not ‒ I was just thinking about when I was a kid, on my grandad’s farm in the summer holidays, down in Clare.’ She picked the plumpest raisin out of her brack and laid it on the plate-edge. ‘He was a miserable bastard, my grandad, a tyrant. I don’t know why Mum went back there, summer after summer, to blacken his range, clean his house, soak his callused feet, put up with insults by way of gratitude. Do you know, the only summer we didn’t go over, my aunt came over from the States to visit him instead, and he wouldn’t open the front door because she was wearing trousers! Honest to God. She had to walk to the next farm and call a taxi back to Ennis.’

  ‘Don’t tell me ‒ like a good, martyred Irish daughter, she returned the next day in a tweed skirt, bringing a nice bit of black pudding for his brekky and a king-size humble pie for herself,’ smiled Conor.

  Angela grinned. ‘How did you guess? He let me and Owen run amok over his crops, to be fair. Gave it in the neck to Mum, I suppose, when we were out of earshot.’

  Angela sat back, thinking. ‘That’s not me, you see, turning the other cheek. I’d have told him where to stick his attitude. What about Shane? He must have grandparents over here.’

  Conor straightened. ‘My ma in Dublin is all that’s left. Kate’s parents in England ‒ they don’t want to see Shane.’

  Angela started. ‘Why not?’

  Conor’s brows knitted. ‘It’s complicated … her dad didn’t approve of me, remember? When he got wind of Kate’s relationship with me, he gave her the “never darken our door again” speech if she went ahead and married me.’ He swallowed a gulp of cooling tea. ‘That was the green light, as far as Kate was concerned. Not that I knew her dad’s essential gitness made her mad keen to hang onto me. Not at first, anyway. I’ve no idea if her mum’s just as reactionary. Her dad rules the roost and what he says goes. He’s cast Kate into the outer darkness, so her child doesn’t exist either. Bringing Shane up Catholic (Kate was very keen on the idea) was probably the last in a long line of straws for her old man.’ He shrugged. ‘We even drove up to Northumberland to announce our engagement. Old git wouldn’t let us in the house.’ He grinned balefully at Angela. ‘And Kate wasn’t wearing trousers.’

  ‘Whew!’ breathed Angela. ‘So Shane’s never met them?’

  ‘Their loss,’ grunted Conor, his mobile features working overtime. ‘They wouldn’t come to the wedding, so I had to give my parents a cover story that they saw through in ten seconds flat. Kate’s charm made up for her parents’ snub, but the past is always there, the uninvited guest, the bad fairy at the christening, waiting its moment to scupper the future.’ He stared broodingly at the teapot and then reached for it. ‘Another cuppa?’

  ‘No, thanks.’ Was he right? Was the past the final arbiter of hopes and dreams? Or was it really another country, peppered with minefields and watchtowers to stop you escaping over the border to freedom?

  She used the bathroom first, brushing her teeth rigorously and scrambling into a middle-of-the-road nightie that was sprigged with rosebuds à la Little House on the Prairie, but laid claim to non-salacious modernity with spaghetti straps and a short hemline. She slipped into her whitest pants, hoped chin-whiskers wouldn’t sprout overnight and opened the bathroom door.

  Conor lay fully dressed on top of the crumpled duvet, eyes shut, breathing down his nose. His socks were different shades of blue, and one was balding at the heel. She smiled. Conor opened his eyes.

  ‘My God, the state of me compared to you,’ he grunted, heaving himself off the bed. Angela claimed it instead, clambering under the sheet and catching her toes in the top seam. She wondered when she’d last cut her toenails, then pulled the sheets up to her chin, as Conor grabbed his bag off a chair and disappeared into the bathroom. She took his comparison of their relative states of readiness for bed as the closest she’d get to a compliment on her night attire. Would he wear pyjamas?

  He didn’t look like a pyjamas man, but he didn’t look the au naturel type either. She heard him fill the sink, followed by a long silence. She turned over and covered her ears with the pillow-corners. It wasn’t right or fair, or a good augury for the night ahead, to tune in to a man’s ablutions.

  Next thing she knew, the bed was dipping next to her as he climbed in beside her. She removed her pillow-muff. By the time she turned round, he had the sheets drawn up to his own chin, which gleamed with freshly mown stubble. ‘I have to shave sometimes before I go to bed,’ he explained, embarrassed.

  ‘Oh right.’ She hesitated. ‘Just when you go to bed with women, you mean?’

  ‘You make it sound like I’ve had a haremful.’

  ‘Sorry, didn’t mean to.’ Oh God, what now? They’d lost the lazy conviviality they’d shared over sandwiches and a pot of tea.

  ‘Is that a squashed insect on the ceiling?’ asked Conor suddenly.

  ‘Where?’ She squinted upwards. The bedside lamp on his side, still on, threw long shadows across the bumpy plaster surface.

  ‘Oh my God!’ she gasped. ‘It moved! It’s not squashed at all.’

  Conor threw back the sheets and jumped on to his pillow, so that he was just tall enough to stroke the ceiling with his fingertips. Angela inched away from his legs, curving hairily out of a pair of boxer shirts. His bare back was covered in much finer hairs, thank God.

  ‘It’s an earwig out on the razzle,�
�� he reported. ‘I think it’s supposed to be tucked up at home under that loose bit of cornicing over there.’

  ‘Kill it, Conor, I hate them!’

  He jumped higher, slapping his hand against the ceiling. ‘Damn, missed the bugger. I think it’s fallen on your head, Ange.’

  ‘Argh!’ She dived under the sheets, shuddering. She screamed again when something tickled her neck in the darkness.

  ‘Hah, got you!’ laughed Conor, and she came up for air to find his fingers stroking the back of her neck. ‘Don’t worry, I whipped his ass good.’

  ‘Really?’ she trembled.

  ‘OK. God’s honest truth. It was just a trick of the light on a ceiling stain. There was no earwig. Though what the poor things ever did to you …’

  ‘His ‒ ancestors used to get into my pants when they were out on the line.’

  ‘Well, can’t say I blame them.’

  Angela laughed. ‘I walked into that one.’

  His fingers moved off her neck and explored her shoulder, their progress invited by the flirtatious dip of her flesh under the concealing sheet.

  ‘Mm,’ she said, because it felt nice and she thought he should know.

  He hesitated, then rolled over quickly to switch off the light. Angela sighed with satisfaction. That was much better, the hypnotic touch of flesh on flesh made mysterious by darkness. She’d never been one for doing it with the lights on, which struck her as a form of sensory deprivation. Thank goodness that Conor, complete with clean-shaven jaw and subtle hint of aftershave, felt the same way.

  Slowly and irrevocably, she inched towards him.

  Angela was up and dressed when he opened his eyes.

  Conor stumbled out of bed, hair rumpled, skin goosepimpling.

  ‘Did you mind me getting up first?’ Angela asked. ‘Bathroom’s free for you.’

  ‘Thanks.’ He threw her a quick grin that diffused her nerves, and shut the bathroom door. She willed herself to relax. It was OK. He wasn’t embarrassed, regretful or cautiously aware of being her first and only since Robert. Twenty minutes later, they descended to breakfast.

  Angela had never known what it was like to make an entrance with a man who drew second looks. She herself was accustomed to going unnoticed. Anyway, she would’ve hated to stand out. Beauty was freakish, the way it set women apart from humdrum pleasantness of aspect and made them a slave to preserving it. But she’d always fancied basking in the reflected glory of a handsome escort. Robert had been like her ‒ ordinary and patently relieved about it.

  Now, as they sat down to covered dishes and napkins so starched that they crackled, Conor said, ‘You look stunning in that blue dress, Angela. It matches the view behind you.’

  She whirled round to hide her blushes. Through the window, sea, sky and surrounding hills were swatches of overlaid blues. Closer to home, golfers were already wheeling their little shopping trolley things between giant urns on the front lawn.

  ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ remarked Angela non-committally about the view. She’d worn the same dress to lunch at his place. Surely he remembered?

  Conor smiled, said nothing, lowered his eyes to a plate of soda bread. Her heart resumed its normal rate. She was grateful that he hadn’t held her eyes and uttered that slick line, ‘It’s certainly a beautiful view from my perspective.’

  He probably wouldn’t know how to ‒ thank God.

  After breakfast, they went to the beach ‒ pale, empty; claimed only by the wind. Angela ran straight onto it, slipping off her shoes, then flying across the hard, blond pleats of sand to run full pelt into hissing wetness at the edge. ‘Jee-sus, it’s cold!’ she yelled over her shoulder.

  Conor followed more cautiously. His loafers bit deeply into the sand. Angela cavorted like a kid, the wind flattening her dress against her thighs. He glimpsed the thin grace of her body, the V of white knickers under her dress, the dark aureoles of her cold-hardened nipples pushed out against her bra. She was alive with innocent enjoyment of a small pleasure, wholesome and sexy. His scrotum tightened and he bent down quickly to unlace his shoes.

  ‘The wind hurts your ears!’ called Angela, scampering on ahead, kicking wavelets. He paddled in her wake, leaving a careful gap. But she was oblivious, leaning down to pluck half-buried shells out of the sand, tickle slimy heaps of seaweed with a wary toe. Finally, she ran up to him with her cache of fractured, still-beautiful shells, darker inside than out, whorled edges fringed with navy and cobalt rings.

  ‘You can pick out your favourite!’ she laughed. ‘Choose one for Shane.’

  He chose the one he thought she liked the least.

  When they’d had enough, they retreated to the beach steps. Angela flapped at her sandy feet with her hand.

  ‘Let me,’ ordered Conor, and grabbed her nearest foot in a gentle vice, wiping it carefully with a clean breakfast napkin he produced from his trouser pocket.

  ‘You needn’t.’ She squirmed, embarrassed.

  ‘Sit down and hold still, or I’ll end up taking off a toe by accident.’ He laughed. ‘That’s what I used to say to Shane when he wriggled about while I was cutting his toenails.’

  He dropped one foot, grasped the other. Angela lapsed into silence. The simple act of kindness had its own sensuality; the rhythmic pressure of his big, warm hands on her slightly ticklish feet; the intimate care he took to prise every grain of sand from between her toes. At long last, she was able to stuff her none-too-attractive feet back into her shoes. ‘Is it time for elevenses?’ she asked hopefully, made hungry by the tearing wind.

  Conor looked at his watch. ‘Quarter to ten sounds right for elevenses to me.’

  It rained, on and off, for the rest of the day. They took the hire car up blackberry-hedged lanes and down sandy paths that led to deserted strands. They poked about in tumble-down cottages and rescued windblown garlands of dried flowers in a famine graveyard, fastening them against the memorial tablet with a large stone. It was a million miles from home, work ‒ and her queasy honeymoon in Kinsale, thought Angela.

  Back in the hotel room, Conor announced he was taking her out for dinner. ‘I’ll have to get changed,’ fussed Angela, hoping her green linen dress had withstood the rigours of the holdall.

  ‘Er ‒ I bought you something.’ Clumsily, Conor fished about in his own luggage and drew out a lop-sided parcel of tissue paper, held together with string, presenting it like a side of fresh beef.

  Angela tore at the string. Out tumbled folds of cerise raw silk, sobered with a hint of black velvet. ‘Is it too dressy?’ asked Conor anxiously. ‘I asked Rachel’s advice. I bought it on her stall. She said it was your size and colouring.’

  Yes, she recognised it now. Rachel had worn it to a Christmas drinks party at the hospital, to which Angela had been invited. A scallop-edged black velvet bodice tapered into a puffball of pink silk. It was beautiful, costly, technically a cast-off ‒ which Conor wasn’t to know. Angela met his anxious gaze in the mirror.

  ‘It’s gorgeous!’ she exulted. ‘Thank you so much.’

  There was a second of mutual embarrassment before she moved towards him and kissed him lightly on the mouth. The dress rustled protestingly between them. ‘I’ll go and change,’ she said, realising that it had been meant for tonight, and that it would look a bit odd with her raincoat thrown over the top. If she remembered rightly, Rachel had teamed it with a fake-fur black stole.

  When she emerged, shyly, from the bathroom in her butterfly transformation, Conor was perched on the side of the bed, talking into his mobile. He turned, still talking. His eyes glittered with a cool appraisal that sent shivers up her spine. ‘Yes,’ he said into the phone. ‘I’m looking at the costing specs now. What? No ‒ not tonight. You’ll have to wait till I’m back in the office on Monday. I mean it, Joe!’

  He tossed his phone on the bed, opened his arms. Angela went into them.

  ‘Work rang me, the buggers,’ he apologised into her hair.

  ‘I didn’t hear the phone ring. I was
running a bath.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ His chin nudged down a velvet strap. ‘I know it’s only been on you five minutes, but mind if I take this dress off again?’

  ‘No,’ she trembled.

  She had to help him with the side-zip. It got stuck in fine threads of silk and a tussle developed. They fell in a heap on the bed, Conor’s big, dark-red head buried in pink layers as stiff and springy as a dancer’s tutu. His head disappeared under the layers altogether. Angela heard him panting as he unrolled the top of her black Dior tights. She was panting herself by now. She remembered his hands stroking her feet, firing her blood in other places. Conor suddenly paused. ‘What’s this?’ he asked in a tone of wonder.

  From between her legs came a great bark of unflattering laughter. His head reappeared. ‘I didn’t know you’d come straight from an audition at the Folies Bergère!’

  Angela shoved him away, sat upright, pink-faced and annoyed. He’d uncovered the shocking pink thong. ‘Not the classic line to come out with when you discover a sexy undergarment on the woman you’re undressing.’

  ‘Trying to undress.’ He sat up, the moment of passion past. ‘How did blokes manage in days gone by, with all those hooks and eyes on corsets, and twenty-six petticoats to get through? There must’ve been a handbook, a gentleman’s guide to frustration-free stripping. Begs another key question.’

  ‘Which is?’ Angela’s tone was dangerous.

  ‘How did they cope with what a woman actually looked like? The reality was probably a far cry from the illusion created by tightly-laced bodices. It must’ve been a shock for the bloke to discover love handles, orange-peel thighs, wobbly great unleashed bosoms.’

  ‘No such hidden mysteries on me,’ snapped Angela crisply.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ muttered a stricken Conor, then looked at her face and burst out laughing. ‘I’m sorry, but that ‒ thing you’re wearing!’

  ‘Thong.’

  ‘It was unexpected. And you must’ve blitzed your bikini line with a Flymo to leave enough bare skin either side of the pink bit. Your poor pubes look like a freshly-plucked chicken! Sorry!’ he gasped again, clamping a hand to his traitorous mouth. His eyes were deeply apologetic, but hilarity lurked behind them.