‘Oh, yes. I phone her about once a month. We talk about men and gardening and cakes.’
I don’t know what to say to this. It is just another reminder that April is a complete mystery to me – and maybe Aggie is, too, since she didn’t even mention these conversations.
‘Is she there now? Can I have a word with her?’ April asks.
‘No. I’m sitting in a garden. She’s… she’s indoors with a… a friend.’ As far as I know, April isn’t interested in gardening or cakes… but maybe she talks about men because she’s got a boyfriend. She never tells us if she’s in love or not. ‘Why do you talk to her about men?’ I try to make it sound casual.
‘Aggie says she doesn’t want me to get married young. She says she thinks the family were a bit too keen for you to marry Diarmuid.’
I stare at a spindly geranium.
‘She worries about you. She says you talk a lot about Diarmuid, but you don’t sound happy. She says it sounds as if you’re trying to sound happy, just to please her.’
Oh, bugger. Aggie has always been able to see through me. ‘Of course, I haven’t told her that you’ve left him. You can tell her that yourself.’
I take a deep breath. ‘Look, I haven’t left Diarmuid – not really. We might get back together any day now.’
‘If you really loved him, you’d be with him,’ April says flatly. ‘You wouldn’t be able to stay away.’
‘I’m with Aggie in a pub,’ I say quickly. Suddenly I want April to know. ‘She tried to run away from the home, but I found her. We’re with someone called Nathaniel; he’s a man I met at a reception. Mum and Dad and Marie said Aggie should go straight back to the home, but we didn’t listen to them. There’s a dog here, too, called Fred.’
I’m waiting for April to be impressed. This is the kind of thing she’d do. I want her to know that sometimes I take a stand, that I can be brave, like her. Deep down, I have always yearned for April to like me.
There is a long pause; then April says, ‘You’d better take her back soon. She’s a frail old woman, Sally. And she’s a bit crazy. I mean, she must be, to have done that.’
‘What?’
‘Fecked off from the nursing home. Where on earth did she think she’d end up?’
I clutch the bench’s wooden armrest. I shouldn’t have told her. I should have known she wouldn’t get it. It’s a sideways situation, and she is looking at it straight on.
‘Aggie’s given me some cake recipes,’ April continues; briskly moving onto another subject is as close as she comes to being tactful. ‘I tried the one for marble cake the other day. It was lovely. I had it with a friend on the beach.’
I know by the way she says ‘friend’ that the person is more than a mere acquaintance, but I suddenly don’t care who he is or what he means to her. I want to go back to Aggie and Nathaniel and Fred. I look in at them, through the pub door. Aggie is drinking her tea, so slowly that we might still be here at midnight.
‘Aggie said the marble cake was DeeDee’s favourite,’ April says. ‘That’s not why I baked it, of course.’
I decide to tell her she was wrong about DeeDee being alive. April is so good at sounding right that I want to remind her that being convinced isn’t the same thing as being accurate. ‘By the way, April,’ I say, ‘DeeDee is dead. Marie told me so just the other day. She died in Rio de Janeiro fifteen years ago.’
Aggie has reached for her handbag and is looking around, wondering where I’ve gone. I get up from the bench. I shouldn’t have spoken to April for so long. I suppose I had some forlorn hope that we might actually end up having some sort of conversation.
‘Of course DeeDee’s not dead!’ April is almost spluttering with indignation. ‘I heard Marie talking to her on the phone before I left for California – and that was only three years ago.’
I glare at an empty beer glass. What on earth is April on about now?
‘She virtually screeched, “DeeDee!” She was in the sitting room and she didn’t know I was in the kitchen; she thought I was out in the garden, having a cup of tea with Uncle Bob.’
‘You’re wrong,’ I say firmly. ‘It must have been someone else.’
‘No, it was DeeDee. Marie said the name over and over. Then she said, “Where are you? Where are you, DeeDee?” She was sobbing.’
‘That’s nonsense,’ I declare, mainly because I don’t know what else to say.
‘It’s true. Girl Guide’s honour.’
My breath catches. My chest feels tight with disbelief. April was once an unruly Girl Guide, and when she says, ‘Girl Guide’s honour’, she is telling the truth. It actually means something to her. ‘So… so Marie lied to me?’
‘Yes, I suppose she did,’ April says airily. ‘I don’t know why you’re so surprised, Sally. She was desperate to stop you pestering her about DeeDee; it must have seemed like a convenient way to stop you asking all those awkward questions. Why do you care about DeeDee so much, anyway? I think you only find her fascinating because she isn’t here. You’d get bored with her after a few hours if she was actually in your sitting room.’
I’m too shocked to feel the sting in April’s comments. DeeDee is alive. Part of me is happy, delighted that I might actually meet her, but part of me is dismayed. ‘Marie lied to me.’ I am almost in tears. ‘That’s an awful thing to lie about.’
‘Our family lies about lots of things, haven’t you noticed?’ There is a crisp anger in April’s voice – almost as if she’s been lying about something too. ‘Please don’t make a big deal of it, Sally. It’s completely understandable, in the circumstances. Don’t even mention it to Marie; it would upset her. Just forget it. DeeDee’s gone. If she wanted to see us, she would contact us.’
‘But she has! If what you’re saying is true, she contacted Marie!’
‘Only to ask if Joseph was dead. She’d run into some distant acquaintance of an acquaintance, who’d heard he had “gone to a better place”, so she wanted to know if Joseph had died or moved to Barbados. She put the phone down almost as soon as Marie told her he was dead.’
‘Did she say where she was?’
‘No, and she made Marie promise not to tell anyone she’d called. Marie only told me because I’d overheard anyway. I had to promise not to tell anyone, too.’
I don’t know what to say.
‘Marie thought DeeDee would at least send Aggie a condolence card, but she didn’t. She sounds like a heartless bitch, frankly.’
Nathaniel is standing beside me, studying me quizzically. ‘I wish you’d told me all this before,’ I say brusquely. ‘I have to go now.’
‘What about a haddock?’ April says.
‘Haddock?’ The line has got kind of gurgly.
‘Not haddock, hammock.’ April bursts out laughing. ‘I think Mum might like a hammock for her birthday.’
‘Look, April,’ I say through gritted teeth. ‘You send her something yourself, and I’ll tell her it will arrive late. I have to go now.’ I turn off the phone.
‘You look angry,’ Nathaniel says, as we walk back into the pub.
‘I am. I’m furious – and happy, at the same time.’
‘Why?’
‘Because DeeDee isn’t dead.’
‘That’s good news, isn’t it?’ I feel the heat of his breath on my cheek.
‘Yes. But I can’t believe Marie lied to me.’ I sigh. ‘And, anyway, I don’t know what to feel about DeeDee any more. I mean, I might as well not know she’s alive; I’ll never find her.’
‘How can you be so sure of that? You found Aggie.’
Butterflies have started to dance in my stomach. I’m filled with an impossible, wonderful yearning. Perhaps I could. Perhaps I could find her, after all. I ache to know her story and her mysteries. She is the crucial missing piece in the family jigsaw. If she’s a heartless bitch, like April says, I want to know what made her that way. I can feel the shape of her absence, the huge gap she has left behind. We need DeeDee. We need her big heart and her con
tradictions. We need to forgive her, even though I don’t know what we’d be forgiving.
Aggie is dozing on her chair. ‘Why doesn’t she tell me more about DeeDee?’ I whisper.
‘Maybe she thinks you mightn’t look for her if you knew the truth,’ Nathaniel whispers back. ‘It’s just a feeling I get. She hasn’t said anything about it.’
Aggie stirs as we approach her. We have to virtually lift her into the car. Fred is scampering around excitedly; he loves car journeys. When Aggie is sitting sleepily in the front seat, he installs himself on her lap.
Nathaniel’s car jerks forwards and grunts and groans and, at one point, seems to be muttering expletives in French. Nathaniel pats the dashboard affectionately. Soon we are chugging noisily along the road.
‘Oh, well… back to the real world,’ I sigh.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Everything that’s just happened doesn’t feel quite real. It’s been like a… a sort of holiday.’
His glance is deep, penetrating. ‘What if it’s more real than this other real world you’re talking about?’
‘Would you like a mint, dear?’ Aggie turns round and offers me a very crumpled bag of sweets. I take one and stare silently out the window.
Chapter Twenty
There is a row of gleaming cars outside the nursing home. I recognise my parents’ car, and Marie’s – and, oh God, there’s Diarmuid’s. I freeze.
Nathaniel looks at me. ‘What’s up?’
‘Don’t go into the driveway for a moment. Stop here. I don’t want them to see us.’
‘Who?’
‘My parents and my aunt… and my husband. They’re here. They’re all here.’
‘Oh, bugger.’
Aggie is almost asleep in the front seat. She stirs and looks at us. ‘Where are we?’
‘We’re back at the home, Aggie,’ I say gently.
‘Oh, good, I’m parched. We must all have tea on the lawn.’
‘We’re not at The Gables,’ I say softly. ‘It’s the nursing home.’
‘Oh, feck.’
Nathaniel smiles and pats Aggie’s arm.
I stare warily at the cars. They must all be in the large sitting room twiddling their thumbs and waiting for us, getting their questions ready – and there will be questions, loads of them. They’ll be relieved that I found Aggie, of course, but they’ll also be angry that I disobeyed them. And when they see Nathaniel, they’ll put two and two together and get fifty. They’ll think I have become a woman with fancy men.
‘Let’s just get it over with,’ Nathaniel says. ‘You found her. Surely they should be grateful.’
The pebbles crunch in the driveway. A nurse bolts out the door as soon as we park, and three more arrive to help lift Aggie out of the car. They glare at me and Nathaniel reprovingly. Aggie is almost asleep now; there is a contented little smile on her face. Nathaniel reaches for her walking frame, and I collect her handbag and the bag of mints that has fallen from her pocket.
Marie, Mum, Dad and Diarmuid are staring at us from the hallway. ‘Oh, Aggie,’ they chorus, showering her with kisses. ‘Oh, Aggie, are you all right?’ She waves at them vaguely as the nurses bustle her down the corridor towards her bedroom. ‘We’ll be with you in a minute, Aggie dear,’ they call after her. ‘When they’ve got you nice and settled.’
Then they turn to stare at me and Nathaniel, as if we were the ones who made a run for it. Diarmuid’s eyes are looking particularly steely and, frankly, not that surprised.
Dad takes a few steps towards us and cautiously extends his hand towards Nathaniel. ‘Hello,’ he says, trying to place some order on things. ‘I don’t believe we’ve met.’
‘This is Nathaniel,’ I say. ‘He’s… he’s just a friend.’
Why on earth did I say that? The words have a guilty ring to them. And Fred has started to sniff Marie’s crotch. She pushes him away roughly and says, ‘Where did you find her?’ She sounds as though she suspects that, far from rescuing Aggie, I may have snuck her out of the nursing home just for a lark.
‘In a special place she showed me once. It’s beside the beach, in a sort of clearing down an overgrown path. It’s…’ I stop. They look befuddled enough already.
‘Well done, Sally.’ Diarmuid kisses my cheek and gives Nathaniel a cold glance. He is remaining admirably calm, in the circumstances.
‘Yes, thank God,’ Mum says. ‘None of us would have looked there. Aggie could have been lost… forever.’ At this point she bursts into tears and Dad takes her hand.
‘I tried to phone you, Diarmuid,’ I say gently. ‘But your phone was out of range, so…’
‘So you phoned Nathaniel.’ There is no edge to his voice; it is simply a statement of fact. Everyone looks at me. Poor Diarmuid. You can see it on their faces.
I don’t want to say Nathaniel rang me; it sounds too incriminating. ‘I… I needed someone with a car in case we needed to search the roads.’
‘If you can call that thing a car,’ Marie mutters to my mother. ‘It looks like it belongs on a scrap-heap.’
I glare at her. ‘Nathaniel lives down the road from here, and his girlfriend is a… an acquaintance of mine.’ Why didn’t I just lie, like April would have, and say Eloise was one of my closest friends? ‘Her name is Eloise and she makes cabinets.’
‘How nice,’ Marie says, with crisp politeness. ‘Did she join you?’
‘No… she’s…’
‘At a trade fair in Paris,’ Nathaniel completes the sentence for me.
‘Diarmuid’s phone wasn’t out of range when we rang,’ Marie says, rather pointedly. ‘He raced over as soon as he heard.’
I study Diarmuid. I can’t tell what he is feeling; his eyes have that distant look in them again. Where has he been all afternoon? He looks at me without warmth or reproach. When did he learn to hide himself so well from me? Has he always been like this and I just didn’t see it?
Marie darts off down the corridor to check on Aggie. She returns almost immediately. ‘She’s half asleep,’ she says. ‘The nurses say she seems all right… in the circumstances.’ She gives me an accusing look and I stare at her stonily, thinking of how she lied about DeeDee. I feel like screaming at all of them, DeeDee’s alive – and I don’t care what you say, I want to find her!
‘We’ll have to do something about the lock on the front door,’ Dad says. ‘Apparently Aggie managed to slip it off the hook when no one was looking.’
They start talking about locks and doors. They make it sound as though the solution to Aggie’s situation is to make sure she doesn’t escape again. Diarmuid even looks at the lock, comments on its sturdiness and makes some suggestions about replacements.
‘I’d better go,’ Nathaniel says, when they have been talking about locks for a full ten minutes.
‘Yes,’ Dad agrees swiftly. ‘Thank you for… giving our daughter a lift.’
Suddenly I yearn with all my heart to leave with him. I can’t stand this. They love Aggie; why can’t they show it? Why don’t they want to hear about what happened? It was an adventure – a strange, sad adventure, but an adventure nonetheless. I wish I could tell them how she laughed in the pub, how she told us that she once ran into the ocean with all her clothes on. I wish I could tell them that, for one whole hour this evening, she was happy.
‘Goodbye.’ I glance up at Nathaniel. ‘Thanks.’
‘You’re welcome.’ I rest in the depth of his gaze for the briefest of moments. Then he departs swiftly, with Fred gambolling at his heels.
‘Well done, Sally,’ Dad says when Nathaniel has gone. ‘Well done for finding Aggie.’
‘Yes,’ Marie agrees. ‘It was clever of you to remember that special place. Where is it, exactly?’
I don’t want her to know where it is. I want it to be Aggie’s special place, our secret and Nathaniel’s. ‘Oh, it’s just down the road from here,’ I say vaguely. ‘It’s wasteland now, covered in used condoms.’ Marie wrinkles her nose in disgust.
We all troop in to say goodbye to Aggie. I lean over to kiss her cheek, and when I reach for her hand I feel her give mine a gentle, conspiratorial squeeze. She’s awake, but she doesn’t want their questions.
‘I love you, wild Great-Aunt Aggie,’ I whisper very softly in her ear.
Outside in the car park, Dad jangles his keys. ‘Well, I suppose you two will be off for a drink somewhere.’ He looks at Diarmuid and me hopefully.
‘Or a meal,’ Marie adds quickly. ‘That Indian place down the road is fabulous. You’d love it.’ She is darting excited glances at us. Her voice is quivering with emotion. ‘I had the chicken biriyani. It was almost enough for two, and –’
‘Come on, Marie,’ Mum interrupts. ‘We’d better go.’
They drive off speedily, clearly not wanting to interrupt this tender moment – though why it should be tender I’m not entirely sure. After all, I did arrive here with another man; a man who has a girlfriend called Eloise, but another man nonetheless. Maybe they think this will awaken Diarmuid’s proprietorial side, make him want to fight for me, or maybe they think he’ll want to comfort me after a worrying afternoon.
‘Do you want a lift to the bus stop?’ he asks.
‘Sorry?’ I peer at him like someone trying to read in poor light. ‘I’d drive you home, only I’ve promised to meet someone. In fact, I’m already late.’
Who? I want to ask. Who have you promised to meet? But I don’t.
‘We’re going to revise together. The exams are tomorrow.’
‘Oh, yes – of course.’ I wonder if this person is a man or a woman. I wonder if this person is Becky and he’s lying about the revision, lying about her being in Galway with a new boyfriend.
‘I’m sorry. We must meet up soon to… discuss things.’ He hugs me, kisses me on the nose like I’m a kid sister. ‘Do you want that lift to the bus stop?’ He’s talking so casually, as though nothing has happened. ‘Or I’ll ring you a taxi if you want. Is there a particular company you use? Do you have the number? I’ll pay, of course.’
‘No.’ I manage to smile at him. ‘The bus stop is just down the road. I’d like the walk.’
The Truth Club Page 18
