The Love of My Life

by Louise Douglas

  The light of the watery sun on the sea was scorching my eyes. Marc was just a silhouette against the light. He was one of thirty or forty silhouettes, I wasn’t even sure which one he was. So I turned away and climbed back up on to the grassy path and pulled myself to my feet.

  I looked straight into the face of Mrs McGuire, the cleaner at Marinella’s.

  She was standing on the path, not six feet away from me, snug in a long coat, sheepskin boots and a headscarf, and her arm was looped through that of a younger version of herself. She looked slightly perplexed and I realized that she recognized me, but couldn’t place me. I turned away quickly, but not fast enough, for Marc was already behind me, one hand on my waist, his voice in my hair.

  I didn’t speak, just turned and walked away from him and Mrs McGuire.

  I kept my back to them, walked away back up on to the path, and then, going as fast as I could, headed south. After about half a mile I stopped and sat down, my chin on my knees, looked out to sea and waited for Marc. He came soon enough.

  ‘Did she recognize me?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Marc. ‘But it was pretty bloody obvious we were together. Shit.’

  He picked up a pebble and lobbed it out over the cliff-edge. I had a vague memory of Luca doing something similar a long time ago.

  ‘What can we do?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing.’ He delved into his pocket and pulled out his cigarettes. ‘Do you want one?’

  I shook my head. Marc sat down beside me, and I cupped my hands around his to help him keep the match alight long enough for the tobacco to catch. He took a long drag and looked out towards the horizon.

  ‘Funny to think that if you jumped in now you’d have to keep swimming until you reached America. Maybe that’s what we should do.’

  I smiled, picked at the grass.

  ‘She’s bound to say something, Marc. To your mother, if not to Nathalie.’

  ‘I know.’

  Marc blew a gust of smoke into the wind. It blew back in my face. He leaned over and kissed me. ‘Of all the dramatic cliffs in all of western Ireland …’ he said.

  ‘Don’t joke about it. Aren’t you worried?’

  ‘Of course I’m bloody worried. But it could be worse. Mrs McGuire doesn’t know you. I’ll just say you were a friend of Steve’s or something. I’ll say we were just messing around. I can talk my way out of this.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’

  ‘Well I can’t tell the truth, can I?’

  ‘It’s a sign,’ I said. ‘It’s a sign that we must stop this, now. Before anyone gets hurt.’

  ‘It’s not a sign,’ said Marc. ‘It’s doesn’t mean anything. Don’t get paranoid.’

  I knew though. I knew that somehow or other Mrs McGuire would be the undoing of us.

  forty-two

  Romeo and Juliet’s was the place to go drinking and dancing and pulling in Watersford. At one time it had been the old Top Rank, and probably before that it had been a dance hall or a bingo hall or something. The club was over some of the post-war, less nice shops in Watersford, in a non-residential district where there was nobody to be disturbed by hundreds of drunk young people spilling through the streets shouting and laughing and arguing and having energetic, standing-up sex into the early hours. Inside drinks were expensive and hard to come by (the queues at the tiny little bars were extensive) and, as we couldn’t rely on being bought drinks straight away, Anneli and I had come prepared with several glasses of Bacardi and Coke in each of our bloodstreams and a quarter of vodka tucked into the waistband of my skirt. It didn’t show beneath my winter coat. The doorman looked in our handbags but wouldn’t have dreamed of body-checking. Not in those days.

  Girls were allowed in free before 10 p.m., so at 9.55 we tripped through the external glass doors and then climbed the carpeted stairs with golden ropes looped along the flocked walls on either side, feeling like princesses. We exchanged our coats for raffle tickets in the cloakroom which was to the side of a large, open lobby area at the top of the stairs, and then followed the noise through swinging double doors into the club itself. Inside it was dark and warm and packed and throbbing with sound so dense it was like a physical presence. The dance-floor was already heaving – predominantly with girls taking advantage of the ten o’clock rule. The boys would come later, once the pubs closed. Anneli and I went to the ladies’ and shared a cubicle where we had a wee and a large swig of neat vodka each. It burned my stomach and made Anneli retch and giggle. We had to queue for the mirror to put on new lipstick. There was a huddle of bare arms and hair and perfume. Everyone was drinking from illegally imported bottles. It reminded me of the staff cloakroom at Wasbrook’s, only there was less powder and more swearing.

  Out in the club again, we found somewhere to sit. It wasn’t a desirable spot, a bench against the wall tucked away almost behind one of the little bars, not on the mezzanine where the older, wealthier, more confident clubbers leaned and preened and sipped their cocktails, but on the bottom floor, where the music was so loud we could only communicate by speaking right into the other’s ear, with one hand cupped around our mouths to protect the words.

  We didn’t have to wait long before two young men came over and offered to buy us drinks, which we accepted of course. We couldn’t hear a word they said. The DJ was playing disco hit after disco hit. My young man, a square-shouldered, shaven-headed soldier with bitten-down fingernails and metallic breath, kept trying to kiss me, which I didn’t much like, so when we finished our drinks Anneli and I slipped away on to the dance-floor. We hadn’t been there five minutes when somebody stepped on Anneli’s foot, and that somebody was Luca. He was there with Marc and a small group of Portiston boys and the younger members of the town’s Sunday League football team. I looked all round, but there was nobody else. There was no Nathalie.

  We couldn’t hear one another. Luca’s face was green and then blue and then red and then covered in silver raindrops in the disco lights. But we laughed and embraced and he shouted in my ear that this was his informal stag night.

  ‘Not the proper one with Pop and my uncles and cousins. We’re going to bloody Naples to meet up with the rest of the Felicone mafia. This is my getting-hammered-and-falling-over stag night,’ he shouted.

  ‘No stripper?’ I shouted back.

  ‘Not yet,’ he replied, ‘but I live in hope.’

  It was natural that we would dance together. Why wouldn’t we? I felt on fire, it must have been the vodka hitting my bloodstream, I was mad for dancing. I shimmied and I shivered and I flicked my hips and I glowered out from under my hair (a look that I’d practised for hours in front of the mirror and that I thought was alluring), and then some stupid song would come on – ‘Thriller’ or something – and we were together, doing the actions, laughing so much I thought my mouth would split at the corners and I knew Luca was looking at my chest and that my small breasts were pretty in the lacy confines of a tight, low-cut little top and I was so, so happy.

  When Luca’s hair was stuck to his face and his shirt was dark with sweat stains, he indicated that we should leave the dance-floor to cool off for a moment. We went out of the double doors to the lobby, where the draught from the entrance was chimneyed up the staircase. It was blissfully cool. I leaned up against the flock wall, easing my feet out of my tight shoes. There was a blister on the side of my little toe. Luca knelt to examine it and told me it wasn’t terminal. He blew on my foot to cool it down. There were lots of other people milling around, people snogging, people crying, people shouting at one another. To our right, a girl was being sick into an overgrown plant pot which contained a plastic tree done up with red fairy lights. Her friend was holding her hair back away from her face and rubbing her back sympathetically. The sick girl had lost a shoe and her tights were horribly laddered. I turned away.

  Luca stood up and lit a cigarette and took a drag and then somehow the cigarette was gone and he was kissing me, his hands in my hair, his mouth sour with tobacco all over mi
ne and I could feel him pressed hard against me. For the first time in my whole life, I felt I was exactly where I was supposed to be, doing exactly what I was supposed to do. I heard the doors into the club open and expel a burst of noise and heat, and then shut somewhere to my right, and glanced over Luca’s shoulder to make sure nobody we knew was in the lobby, and nobody was.

  ‘Oh God, Liv,’ Luca gasped into my ear, leaning against me. ‘Let’s get out of here …’

  ‘No, no, shush,’ I whispered, touching his damp face with my fingertips and then dropping my hand down to the zip of his jeans strained tight. Nobody could see, Luca was covering me with his body and the wall was behind me. My right leg was bent at the knee, my bare foot on the wall. ‘It’s your stag night, you can’t disappear.’

  Luca groaned. ‘Don’t do that, please don’t do that.’

  ‘Shhhh,’ I said, undoing the zip and working my fingers into the tropical heat of his pants.

  Every atom of my body was zinging. I felt like a universe of nerve endings, all of them sparking and twitching. Luca nuzzled his face into my neck, his mouth was on my ear, he was breathing deeply and quickly like somebody who is afraid.

  ‘If you keep your hand there one more second I will come,’ he whispered.

  ‘One …’ I whispered back.

  A little later, we returned to the dance-floor. Luca looped his arms around me and breathed thanks and wonderment into my hair.

  It was terribly crowded in the club now, there wasn’t room to dance and Luca looked dazed and fawn-like. Marc kept trying to dance with me, which was getting on my nerves. I wanted him to go away. In fact I wanted all of them to go away, and to leave me and my darling on our own. It didn’t happen, though. The millionth time Marc’s face bobbed up grinning in front of mine, I picked up Anneli’s handbag with what was left of the vodka in it and headed for the ladies’.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked, trotting after me on her high heels. ‘Did Luca say something? Did something happen?’

  ‘No, nothing,’ I said. There was a queue outside the ladies’, sick-looking girls panda-eyed with mascara. The music was beginning to thrum in my head. I did a quick check to make sure no staff or bouncers were watching, and had a good swig of the vodka. Then another. The bottle was almost empty. The floor was sticky with spilled drink.

  ‘Something’s going on,’ said Anneli. ‘You’re not telling me something.’

  I wiped my lips with the back of my adulterous hand. Oh, the smell of him. I shook my head.

  ‘Something’s different. You’re different.’

  ‘No, no, nothing’s changed.’

  Anneli bit her lip. I stepped towards her but she stepped back, away from me.

  ‘You kissed him, didn’t you?’

  ‘Or he kissed me. Oh, it was nothing. He’s drunk.’

  Anneli frowned.

  ‘Don’t look like that. It didn’t mean anything.’

  ‘You’re not going to do anything silly, are you?’

  I gave a high little laugh. Even to me it sounded artificial.

  ‘No, of course not,’ I said.

  ‘He’s engaged, Liv. He’s getting married in eight weeks. You get in the way of that now and it’ll be a million times worse than what happened with Mr Parker.’

  I took her hands in mine. My pornographic hands on her pure ones.

  ‘Anneli, I promise I won’t do anything wrong.’

  Later, Luca and I slow-danced to ‘If You’re Looking for a Way Out’. His lips were in my hair, tasting my shampoo, his big, bony hands holding me close to him. Marc was dancing with Anneli. She kept her face determinedly turned away from us; Marc kept watching, watching.

  At the end of the song, most of the other couples on the dance-floor started to kiss, those deep, wet, tongue kisses of drunk people who don’t know each other well. Luca and I, however, stepped decorously back away from one another. Anneli was pointing at her watch and to the door: our taxi would be outside.

  I picked up my bag and waved my fingers at Luca.

  ‘Can I see you tomorrow?’ he mouthed. ‘Can you come to Marinella’s?’

  I nodded. ‘I’ll come for coffee when I wake up.’

  And I did. And that’s where it really started.

  forty-three

  The plane journey back to Watersford felt like a long, extended goodbye and the thought of what might happen once we got back filled me with unspeakable dread. I’d been horribly twitchy at Shannon Airport in case Mrs McGuire was returning on the same plane. She’d told Marc she was on holiday with her daughter for the whole of the following week, but that didn’t convince me that we were safe. She might, out of some dog-like sense of loyalty to Angela, come to the airport to spy on us.

  ‘And what if we bump into any of your friends from the stag night?’

  ‘We won’t! Most of them went back this morning and the rest have gone on to Dublin.’

  ‘But they might have missed their plane.’

  ‘Liv, stop it. You’re wearing me out.’

  ‘You’re not taking this seriously enough.’

  ‘Why are you suddenly going all paranoid on me now?’

  ‘Mrs McGuire saw us.’

  ‘She doesn’t know you. She doesn’t know there was anything untoward going on. And even if she suspected, what’s the worst that could happen?’

  ‘Oh, nothing much. Just the end of your world.’

  Marc shrugged and scowled and turned away. He walked off towards the duty-free shop and I sank back on to a chair and covered my eyes with my hand.

  Once on the plane, reassured that nobody we knew was on board, I tried to enjoy the view from the window, the ice crystals on the glass and the magical lightscape of the top surface of the clouds, but the wine felt like acid in my stomach and every little jolt and creak of the plane made my heart race and prickled my fingertips. Marc, I think, was feeling the same. He held my hand on the armrest that separated us and asked me far too many times if I was all right. I was dreading the parting at the airport, dreading having to linger at the baggage carousel while he walked out into the arms of Nathalie, or Maurizio.

  ‘We can’t do this any more,’ I whispered.

  Marc squeezed my fingers.

  ‘I never meant to have an affair with you,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t say that.’

  ‘Well that’s what it is.’

  ‘No it’s not. Affairs are tacky and dirty.’

  ‘That’s what other people would say about us.’

  ‘Liv, please, there is no point worrying about things that haven’t happened yet. Forget Mrs McGuire. She only saw you for a moment. She didn’t recognize you. And even if she did, it would still be a big leap of imagination for her to work out that we were together.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be a big leap,’ I said. ‘It would be the only logical conclusion.’

  Marc sighed, let go of my hand and put his head back on the headrest. My ears popped. In our safe, private, high-altitude dusk, we were starting the descent into Watersford.

  ‘Is that what you want, Liv? Do you really want us to stop seeing one another?’

  ‘No. I don’t know. I don’t want to be without you but …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Stopping is the only possible ending to you and me.’

  ‘We don’t have to stop until we’re ready.’

  ‘We have to stop before anybody gets hurt. Nathalie, I mean.’

  Marc shrugged. ‘I don’t know why you worry about her. She doesn’t care much for you.’

  ‘She has no reason to.’

  As we came down through the cloud, the plane banked to the left and, through the window, we could see the lights of the traffic circling the roundabout to come into the airport. Nathalie was probably in one of those cars. She’d have timed the journey perfectly. She’d be listening to some classical music. Her hair would be shiny, her breath fresh, her clothes pressed. She’d be tapping her short fingernails on the steering wheel. She’d have left the chil
dren at home, in the flat above Marinella’s, being looked after by their grandparents. Baby Ben would be in his cot, in his blue bunny pyjamas, lying on his back, his arms thrown out at either side of his head, breathing milkily through rosebud lips. And the other two, probably, would be watching TV in the living room. Kirsty would be curled up on the sofa, her feet tucked beneath her, twirling a strand of dark hair round her perfect little fingers. Billy would be on his stomach, on the carpet, his chin in his hands, grubby socks falling off his fat little feet behind him, transfixed by the screen. My mind was made up.

  ‘I want to stop, Marc. I want to end this here.’ ‘Whatever you want,’ he said, but he didn’t sound convinced.

  forty-four

  Luca and Nathalie were due to be married on Christmas Eve. Luca and I started seeing one another at the end of October. By the beginning of November, we were lovers. By the end of November, Luca told me that what we had wasn’t just the final wild-oat-sowing of a soon-to-be-married man. A painfully cold autumn was gearing up for a record-breakingly icy winter. Privacy in Portiston was all but impossible for me and Luca. Despite Angela and Nathalie’s double-act of coldness and unfriendliness, I frequented Marinella’s with increasing regularity, simply to enjoy the reassuring feeling of being near Luca. At work, I daydreamed and idled. After a disastrous hour in the glassware department one Saturday morning, the supervisor said I was neither use nor ornament and sent me home, assuming I was sickening with the flu. In truth, I’d smuggled Luca into my bedroom the night before and we hadn’t slept for a moment, our delight at being naked together totally spoiled by the fear of discovery. Every creak of that prudish old house sounded like my mother’s footstep on the stair, every whisper of wind outside startled us.

  Sooner or later, we knew we would be found out. Our desire was spurring us on to acts of increasing recklessness. One Sunday, we fucked standing up in the tiny courtyard at the back of Marinella’s, and then Luca went back inside to serve roast dinners to a coach party from Lytham St Anne’s. Another time, when Angela and Nathalie had gone to Watersford to sort out exactly what was required of the wedding photographer, Luca summoned me to the ferry ramp and we had ten minutes of extremely cold bliss in my old haunt. Luca was still wearing his Marinella’s uniform and when he left his trousers were streaked with oil and the green of seaweed. Occasionally he managed to come to Watersford on some errand or other, and would meet me at Wasbrook’s and then we could enjoy the privacy of his old car for half an hour. We never once discussed the future.