Hush Hush

by Mullarkey, Gabrielle

  Angela yawned, stretched, shuffled into the kitchen. She avoided, at all costs, looking at the flower stalks sticking out of the bin.

  Chapter Eleven

  At the back of the bus, Sadie spread the battered little card over one knee. Most of the message was illegible. It started out boldly with, ‘Dear Angela, please for …’ then vanished frustratingly under a melange of damp stains and runny ink. The mind boggled. Please forgive me, but Kate’s need is greater …? Please forget me and get on with your own life? In the bottom right-hand corner, the letter ‘C’ had clashed with a globule of pesto sauce, elongating into a Book of Kells ‘L’, the sauce posing fancifully as a fire-breathing snake wrapped round the base of the character.

  But Sadie remained convinced it was a C. The flowers had still been fresh, so couldn’t have been long in the bin. A delivery that very morning perhaps? Whatever the content of its message, the card and flowers had provoked a violent act of closure from Angela. But you never knew with Angela. Conor might’ve written, Please forage about in the wardrobe for your best glad rags, and meet me for dinner next week. She was the type to hack off her nose to spite her face, wallow in self-pity and contempt for human nature, and ignore olive branches and second chances as they followed her down the street, screaming for attention. Angela expected the worst, so that if it materialised into the merely bad, she’d be able to cope.

  Yes, but wait! Look what had happened after years of marriage to her soulmate. He’d very possibly done the dirty on her! No wonder she found it hard to heed the pleas or excuses of a bloke she’d only known five months!

  Blinking out of the bus window, Sadie hastily pocketed the card. She heaved herself up and tottered to the front. ‘Sorry, I’ve just missed my stop. Can you drop me anywhere here?’

  The bus driver declined to pull in, but stopped suddenly in the middle of the road. The rubber doors hissed and folded back. Sadie clambered down with as much haste and dignity as she could muster. It was a secret dread of hers that one day soon, a boy-racer bus driver would squeal away while her trailing foot still rested on the bottom step.

  Her destination was only a ten-minute walk away, though her visit was impulsive, and it’d be just her luck to find her quarry out.

  As dusk set in, she began a rather tired walk down the respectable, spring-green avenue.

  Flat 5A had deep bay windows and ‘1803’ carved into rosy brickwork over the mullioned front door. In the last five years, this area had become a sought after location for the London overspill. The flat was worth at least six times its original value at the time Rachel had bought it. Rachel opened the front door, bearing a precarious pile of toast on a plate. Sadie’s relief that she was in clashed with dread at the impending confrontation.

  ‘Mrs F, come in! I’m in a bit of a rush. Got a date waiting for me in town and I’m already late. Treat ’em mean and keep ’em keen!’

  Sadie followed her silently into the thickly carpeted interior. Rachel was dressed for going out. To match her pale gold hair, she wore a pale gold dress patterned with an intricate red zigzag design, like the flag of some emergent nation. She seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of beautiful dresses.

  Sadie eased downwards into one of Rachel’s comfortably deep armchairs. She had no intention of hurrying or apologising for the interruption. ‘I suppose we’ll see that dress on the mini-market stall next year.’

  Rachel looked down at herself, slightly puzzled. She’d detected Sadie’s unwillingness to be no trouble at all. ‘I don’t know if …’

  ‘Was it really necessary to flog Conor that pink and black dress, knowing he’d present it to Angela? Did you get a perverse pleasure out of humiliating her that way?’

  Rachel blushed prettily as if she’d just been paid a compliment. Hers was not a face to fold into ugly creases of fear or anger. ‘You’d better explain that one to me, Sadie.’

  ‘I saw you!’ hissed Sadie, leaning forward. ‘That night, in town. I saw you getting into a taxi with Robert. At the time, God forgive me, I thought it was a man who looked like Robert. I only got a side-on view. And all I saw of you was a tall woman with pale hair. But after what Angela’s just told me, it all fell into place. You had an affair with Robert, didn’t you?’

  Please deny it, an inner voice begged. Please give me a cock-and-bull plausible story that I don’t have to swallow but I can take away and ponder at length.

  Instead, panic and confirmation filled Rachel’s face. ‘Angela knows?’ she squeaked.

  Sadie’s heart crumbled. ‘She suspects Robert of infidelity. She’s targeted that poor woman who works at Hartley’s.’

  ‘We were so discreet,’ mumbled Rachel. ‘What were you doing in town that night?’

  Sadie replied in a flat, iron-hard voice, ‘I’d done the evening shift at the newsagent’s. My boss Gupta gave me a lift home and detoured through the town to point out an empty shop-front he had his eye on.’

  ‘It was just the once,’ said Rachel quickly. ‘No affair and nothing planned in the first place. It just ‒ happened. I went to book a holiday at Hartley’s that afternoon. Robert saved me from the sweaty clutches of Ian Bradley. He offered to look up a few prices for me and have them ready for me next time I came in. So I offered to collect them at the end of the day, and give him a lift home as well.’

  ‘Sadie frowned. ‘But someone like you ... wouldn’t you just book a holiday online?’

  ‘Support your local travel agency!’ Rachel punched the air feebly. ‘My date had blown me out for the evening, but I’d already booked a table at Tosca’s. So I decided to take Robert, as a thank-you for his Sir Galahad impression. Thought if I phoned him first, he’d find excuses to put me off, but if I turned up dressed to go, he’d feel inclined to cave in.’

  ‘How well you knew him,’ observed Sadie dryly.

  ‘Well, be fair, Mrs F, I’d known him even longer than he’d known Angela. I mean, Angela met him on the evening of that wedding. I’d met him in the afternoon, before Ange turned up to spend the weekend with me.’

  Sadie sat stone-faced.

  Rachel sighed. ‘Anyway, he said he’d ring Ange first to tell her he’d be late. I said, “Ask Ange to come too, they can easily set an extra place, and we’ll make it a real night out.” He disappeared into the back office without answering. I had no reason to suspect he’d cooked up some fairy story. He told me later that he’d pretended to be at some industry do with Ian.’

  ‘The pair of you did have it planned between you, so!’

  ‘No, no. Silly old Robert made it more complicated than it need ever have been.’ Rachel clucked almost affectionately. ‘God, if he’d just been honest like I expected him to, and told Ange that his dinner date was with me, that I came into Hartley’s to book a holiday and that I needed cheering up after a man let me down, do you think I’d have touched him with a barge pole later on in the evening? Look, I never expected to get the hots for a man I’d known for years. I thought dinner à deux without sexual overtones would be just the pick-me-up I needed after my date blew me out.’

  ‘A novel experience for you?’ snorted Sadie.

  ‘The other thing happened by accident,’ continued Rachel, as if Sadie hadn’t spoken. ‘I accidentally touched his leg under the table, and he thought it was deliberate. Not that he made a move on me. But he looked at me in a new, expectant way, just for a millisecond. Or maybe I imagined it.’ She shook her head. ‘I began to tease him ‒ naughty, I know. When the taxi dropped me at my place, I asked him in for a night-cap ‒ just to see what he’d do.’

  ‘Spare me the gory details!’ Sadie stood up, too agitated to sit. ‘Why, for God’s sake, did you have to play with fire with your best friend’s husband? I don’t suppose Robert knew what hit him.’

  ‘I didn’t have to twist his arm! We’d both had a fair bit to drink by then. He was mortified and wringing his hands before I’d even called another taxi to take him home. Said it would kill Ange to find out, if she didn’t kill him fir
st.’

  ‘Funny you should say that,’ said Sadie coolly. ‘Angela accused him of adultery the night before his massive heart attack. I think it’s fair to say the two events were linked. Ever since, my daughter’s been tortured with guilt. For all she knows, her accusation might not even be true. They had a huge row, and she blames herself for packing him off into the afterlife with a flea in his ear. While you get away scot-free, ye strumpet!’ Sadie’s vernacular resorted to its Irish origins when she was deeply stirred. Her bottom plate jumped in sympathy.

  Rachel smoothed a fold of her dress over one tanned knee. ‘Come now, Mrs F, you’ve never believed that folk get away scot-free in this world. “Everyone has their woes sooner or later” is one of your favourite maxims, no doubt stitched into a sampler and hanging over your bed next to a rather lurid Sacred Heart.’

  ‘Don’t you talk down to me!’ screeched Sadie, as she saw before her Rachel’s patrician Englishness asserting itself, to distance her terrible act from any impact it might have on backward micks. ‘Don’t make out I’m overreacting after what you’ve done to my Angela and her marriage! You should be down on your knees begging forgiveness. Walking barefoot round Lough Derg until your feet are shredded and bloody! And you make sure you stay away from my Angela for the rest of her life. Ye slut!’

  ‘Do calm down, Mrs F.’ Rachel was coolness itself, but Sadie noticed, just in time, a tell-tale bead of sweat gathering on her hairline. ‘I don’t mind you putting all the blame on me, because Robert’s not here to yell at. But just remember, it takes two to tango. And you must feel vindicated in all this. You never liked him. You never thought him top-drawer husband material. Not if you’re entirely honest about it.’

  ‘You’re arguing like a Jesuit,’ snarled Sadie, secretly appalled that her tolerance of Robert had been seen through so thoroughly by Angela, Rachel and ‒ worst of all ‒ Robert himself.

  ‘I think you started blaming me for things way back. You think it’s my fault that Angela met Robert at all, because it was at a wedding I’d invited her to. And if she hadn’t met him, you and Fenton might’ve persuaded her to go to college.’

  ‘He encouraged her to give up work and vegetate at home for four years,’ mused Sadie, lulled by the seductive truth of Rachel’s words.

  ‘I happen to know that was entirely Ange’s decision!’ said Rachel sharply. She sighed. ‘Look at me, Mrs F. What do you see?’

  Sadie looked at her grudgingly. ‘A viper in the bosom.’

  ‘Oh today, I’m a viper. On a good day, I’m a clothes horse. Perfect Rachel with her perfect life. I wonder if you and Angela have ever seen past that.’

  Here it comes, scowled Sadie. The fabricated claim of a loveless childhood with lots of material possessions but not the one thing she really craved. Only it wouldn’t wash. Sadie had never felt comfortable around Matt and high-falutin’ Ginny Cockburn, but she knew that they loved Rachel. ‘Meaning?’ she snapped.

  ‘If you look perfect on the outside, people don’t want to hear or believe that you’ve got problems on the inside. It’s just selfish to whinge when the gods have given you so much, and your problems can’t be as bad as theirs. Angela’s my best friend. I’ve confided loads to her. But I still cried in secret when I heard girls at school sniggering about my over-developed chest, calling me the local bike, just because I had the equipment if I fancied making use of it. I was the first in my class to need a bra, and I was punished for it. Then there were the bullies who decided Rachel Cockburn needed taking down a peg because she wasn’t ugly and spotty. If problems didn’t exist for me ‒ as far as other people could tell ‒ they made it their business to invent some.’

  ‘So folk were jealous of your beauty and gave you a hard time, not bothering to consider that you had feelings too. Very sad, Rachel. But a poor excuse for doing the dirty with Robert.’

  ‘You still don’t see!’ Rachel slapped her brown leg angrily. ‘I had a moment of weakness. I’m tortured by it every time Angela plonks herself down in that very chair and pours out her heart and soul. God only knows why she didn’t tell me about her row with Robert on the night before he died, but thank God I’ve been spared that.’ She paused. As far as Sadie was concerned, she was pausing for effect. ‘Why do you think I didn’t marry Kevin?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ confessed Sadie, unwittingly intrigued by this outburst. ‘Because you like to play the field, I’d always assumed.’

  ‘That’s the way perfect Rachel would have it.’ She rose and gazed dispassionately into a mirror. ‘The real reason is that Kevin saw right through me, teased me about my hang-ups, tried to get me to tell all about the school bullies and cry it out of my system on his manly shoulder. If I’d married Kevin, I’d have had to be real all the time.’

  ‘But see here.’ Sadie sat down again, shocked by her compassion for the hussy adulteress. ‘Everyone needs someone they can be completely at ease with. It’s too tiring, keeping up an image all the time.’

  ‘It suits me. I am my image now. Marshall’s a married man, you know. They all are since Kevin. And they have to be married men with no desire to leave their wives. They just have to want a change from reality, an hour or so with the image their wives used to keep up, before marital boredom and babies set in.’

  ‘That makes you a ‒ a prostitute,’ said Sadie firmly. ‘Even you deserve better. Think of your immortal soul, lovey.’

  ‘I’m a bad Catholic, Mrs F. I’ve never been convinced of its existence. The body as perishable wrapping for the priceless treasure inside? It just sounded like another swipe by the ugly brigade at anyone whose wrapping wasn’t plain brown paper. Can I give you a lift home? I really am late for my date with Marshall now.’

  Sadie gaped at her momentarily. She’d come here, fired with righteous anger. Now she was confused ‒ and a little scared ‒ by the hollowness at the centre of perfect Rachel. Sadie could almost hear the wind whistling over a sea of inner vastness that was either too shallow to plumb or too deep to fathom.

  But she and even Angela had been happy enough to foster Rachel’s image. Rachel was such a good listener and dispenser of advice. They’d refined her image, projected their feelings onto her ‒ even predicted her responses to bolster their own conclusions. They’d used her in the same the way that Sadie used Binky.

  They’d shied away from the chance of getting close enough to realise, as Kevin had, that Rachel was just as capable of unhappiness and cankered feeling as everyone else.

  But getting close to Rachel would’ve tainted her observer’s role, brought the counsellor and clothes-horse down to the level of the rest of humanity.

  Perhaps if she and Ange had tried harder ‒ harder even than Kevin ‒ to access the real Rachel under the protective layers, some moral imperative would’ve stopped her from sleeping with Robert. ‘No,’ said Sadie finally, thinking aloud. ’I can’t accept that we’re to blame. Everyone’s responsible for their own actions.’

  ‘Well, of course,’ agreed Rachel, peering at her closely. ‘It’s called free will. Are you serious about banishing me for ever from Angela’s sight? Won’t she wonder why I’ve pulled the plug on our lifelong friendship?’

  Sadie hadn’t thought of that, and admitted as much. ‘But she can’t stay in the dark for ever. I’ll have to weigh up which pain would be harder to bear, knowing about you or living the rest of her life wondering about Robert.’ Sadie glanced at Rachel sharply. ‘But stay away from anyone she meets in the future.’

  ‘Is it all off with Conor?’ asked Rachel politely. ‘I promise you, I only sold that dress to him because he took a shine to it. And he was completely impervious to my standard flirtation. He saw the real me all right, and backed off. I think he heard me hissing with a forked tongue when I spoke.’

  ‘I don’t know the state of play between him and Angela,’ said Sadie briskly. ‘Angela’s wary of him because he’s a complicated package of a man. Whereas with Robert, they both knew she could’ve done better, so she felt secure in
his gratitude. Which makes his betrayal all the more shattering.’

  Sadie shut her trap belatedly and made for the door. She must get out of the habit of treating Rachel as a confidant. It wouldn’t be easy after all these years, and Angela would carry on doing it. Unless and until Sadie put a stop to it. God help her, it was a poisoned chalice all right. Angela had lost her husband. She probably wouldn’t thank a righteously angry mother for taking away her best friend as well, never mind exposing her dirty secret.

  ‘For what it’s worth, I’m sorry,’ said Rachel on the doorstep. ‘I’m sorry Angela has to cope with guilt over Robert’s death. That’s why I’ve been dying for her to find happiness with someone new.’

  ‘Well now,’ said Sadie. ‘When all’s said and done, your concern is touching and duly noted.’ It was an uncharacteristic flourish of targeted sarcasm. She felt pleased with it as she walked away.

  ‘Who is it?’ yelled Angela, sloshing tea dregs into the sink. She’d just completed her first day back at work and was too bone-tired to walk to the door and find out for herself. If it was Jehovah’s Witnesses, they’d soon tire of trying to offer salvation through the letterbox.

  ‘It’s me, Ange,’ a strangely listless-sounding Rachel called instead. She made no comment about the fact that the doorbell still wasn’t fixed.

  Angela tugged open the door, sighing. ‘Evening, Rache. Look if this is another pep-talk about my love life, can it wait till I’m up to dealing with it? You can imagine what Mum’s been like.’

  ‘It can’t wait, no,’ said Rachel, with unusual crispness. She moved past Angela into the hallway, unwinding her soft woollen scarf with fumbling fingers. They weren’t just fumbling, Angela noticed. They were shaking. And her hair, usually immaculate, had a slightly greasy sheen. It had to be Marshall.

  Angela’s mind raced with possibilities. The likeliest was that he’d called time on the relationship ‒ perhaps the first man to do so in a long while ‒ and Rachel had reached that age and stage where it was no longer water off a perfectly exfoliated back. At once, Angela was all concern. Rachel was owed a long, girly listen-to about her life. ’Plonk yourself down, Rache. Tea or something stronger?’