‘Why not. Say, six o’clock?’
‘Great. Where?’
‘What about Conway’s, across from the Rotunda?’
As simple as that.
She watched him reach down and put some coins on a piece of cardboard in front of a girl sitting cross-legged, a baby in her lap. She saw him speak to her, then walk on. Under Merchant’s Arch, under the looming mass of the Central Bank and across Dame Street. She knew now where he was going. She followed more slowly, stopping to gaze into shop windows, checking how she looked, how she might seem to him after so many years. A young couple stood in the middle of Grafton Street. They were kissing open-mouthed like goldfish. Their eyes were closed. She had never kissed him like that in public, not giving a damn who saw them. Always hidden, always a secret. But people must have known. She had said that to him. Asked him.
‘Doesn’t she, your “wife”?’ She hesitated before she said the word. Putting inverted commas around it.
‘No,’ he said. ‘She doesn’t.’
‘But how can she not? I’d know, if it was me. I’d sense it in you, when I touched you. When we . . .’ She stopped then. His look told her all she needed to know. Be careful, it said. Don’t presume too much.
The windows in the street were filled with impossibly thin mannequins, their arms and legs unnaturally bent and twisted. They reminded her of Mary, with their putty-coloured bodies and their hip bones protruding. Her own face swam up as she passed a display of black knitted dresses. She had never thought the two of them were alike, but others did. Must be the mannerisms, the gestures, the speech patterns, she always said. The learned behaviour. Not the parts that come to you whether you want them or not, like the shape of your nose or the gap between your front teeth, the colour of your hair or your height, your build. They came from him. She always said that, told Mary. You’re very like your father. Much more like him than me. Physically that is. And she had heard Mary passing this on to her friends.
‘Mummy says I’m just like my daddy. Just like him. She says she’s always amazed when she looks at me, when I’m sleeping. I’m the dead spit.’
‘Dead spit, what’s that?’’
‘You know, like peas in a pod.’
She had brought Mary here to the Shelbourne Bar, one day not long after they had arrived. They had come into town to get out of the house, away from Catherine’s complaints. They had walked around the shop trying on clothes. Margaret had wanted to buy Mary a dress, but they had nearly fallen out over styles and colours. Eventually Margaret had handed her some money and said, ‘Here. Buy what you want. Meet me in an hour.’
‘Where?’
‘Um.’ She thought for a moment. ‘I know, the Shelbourne. Up to Stephen’s Green. Turn left, big hotel. Go in through the revolving door, past reception. The bar’s at the back.’
‘Not one of the sad dumps you used to go to when you were a penniless student?’
‘No, Smarty-pants. Now get lost.’
And Mary had liked it. They had sat at the marble bar and drunk gin and tonics with slices of lime, and helped themselves to handfuls of peanuts. Mary had pulled faces at herself in the mirror behind the row of spirits bottles, which were ranged in order of height, like soldiers on parade. She had pulled open her carrier bags to show off the skimpy tops and tight jeans she had bought, and ‘Look at this, isn’t it just gorgeous?’ a deep red suede skirt. And Margaret had wondered, just for a moment, if she should tell her the truth. But the impulse had passed. There was no point, really. Not now. It would only upset her, upset everyone.
He was sitting on the far side of the bar, side on to the door. Two men were with him and a woman. Young, very blonde, wearing a fitted red jacket with a long gold chain looped around her neck. Margaret didn’t recognize them. She pulled herself up on a high stool. If he had turned in her direction he might have seen her, but the room was dark, her face as she sat with her back to the light from the lobby, in shadow. She ordered a drink. She watched his hands. She remembered his fingers, long and narrow, the nails clipped short. They hovered now over a stainless-steel bowl of peanuts, then picked them out delicately one by one. He lifted a pint of Guinness, his skin pale against the black liquid. He turned to take the first sip, and licked the froth from his top lip.
‘How can you drink that stuff?’ Her voice, younger, happier.
‘What stuff?’
‘That stuff.’
‘You mean the black stuff?’
They were in the bar of the Angler’s Rest Hotel, Pontoon, Co. Mayo. The third Sunday in September 1974. The day of the All Ireland football final. Dublin playing Galway. A perfect autumn day. The sun still shining, but somewhere a prickling of the nape of the neck which says, watch out, winter’s coming.
‘Here,’ he handed her his pint, ‘have a taste.’
She slipped her mouth over the place on the glass where his had been.
‘Ugh!’ The bitterness hit her tongue. He took the glass from her and kissed her, sweetening her with his saliva. The afternoon slipped by. The sun moved from window to window across the bar. Cigarette smoke turned the light the shifting grey of the lake outside. The television in the corner flickered its black and white story. Dublin scored fourteen points and beat Galway. She stood and cheered and he caught her round the waist and guided her up the stairs to their room.
When she was pregnant even the smell of Guinness made her sick. And she remembered, years later, a party in Takapuna. Someone had got hold of a case of bottled stout.
‘Come on, you Irish,’ they all said, ‘show us how it’s done.’ And she had drunk for politeness, then gone to the toilet and put her finger down her throat.
He called the barman over and ordered another drink. There was laughter and jokes, voices harmonizing. His a rich bass, the younger man a golden tenor, the girl’s a light soprano. He slapped a handful of silver on the marble counter top, and a tenpence piece spun on its edge towards her. He reached for it, stretching out as he slid over. Then he looked up, in the direction of the silhouetted woman, expecting more laughter.
She could see it in his face. He was going to flirt with her. She knew his way of crinkling up his eyes, like a small boy. He was just about to say something. Then he stopped. Silence. Awareness. Confusion.
‘Hallo,’ she said.
‘Hallo,’ he replied.
The coin spun off the bar and hit the tiled floor. It spiralled into a corner and collapsed on its face.
‘Forgive me,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to interrupt you. But I need to talk to you.’
He came and stood beside her. She tried to stand, but the muscles in her calves had collapsed. He took her right hand. It fitted, as always, snugly into his palm. He said nothing, just stood and looked, his eyes moving across her face like a mother gazing at her firstborn. The others watched, curious.
‘I don’t know what to say.’ He ran his thumb over hers.
‘Say nothing.’
‘Go and sit down. Over there.’ He waved his hand towards an empty corner. ‘I’ll join you.’
‘No, not here. Can you come to meet me? Later tonight. At my parents’ house in Monkstown.’
‘Are they still . . .?’ The question hung.
‘No, they’re both dead.’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘It’s very important. It has to do with—’ She paused, and took a sip of her drink. ‘It has to do with our daughter.’
‘What?’ The word came out of him with a nervous half-laugh.
‘Please. Don’t say anything else. Here.’ She handed him a piece of paper. ‘In case you don’t remember. Address and phone number. Please. It’s very important.’
She left him then. Looking after her. Folding and unfolding the paper in his hand. Wondering as she had had to wonder. How could this happen? Why now? With no warning.
It was just getting dark as she left the hotel. It had begun to rain again. Margaret pulled her collar up around her face, but she didn’t feel cold any longer.
She had stood beside him and he had warmed her, filled her with bright light. So it had been, always. So it was still.
38
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘Don’t believe it, or don’t believe me?’
‘It, you, any of it. The whole thing is crazy.’
The room was dark. It was cold for April, and she had gathered apple logs from the back of the tool shed and lit a fire, which hissed and spat as the resin rose bubbling to the surface and ran down the wood like liquid honey.
It was late when he arrived. She had been surprised by the heavy knock on the front door. There had been no sound of a car in the narrow road, nothing but the whoosh and whistle of wind and sea, and the occasional spatter of rain flung like a handful of shingle against the front windows.
She had carried on with her task. Systematically, relentlessly, clearing the house of all its possessions. The hall was filled with plastic bags, labelled. Ten, with Catherine’s clothes, bags, shoes, hats, were for the Simon shop. Another five, stuffed with sheets, towels and blankets, were for the Vincent de Paul. Tomorrow night after she came home from the trial she would start on the books, newspapers and magazines, carefully packing them into the stack of cardboard boxes that were waiting in the kitchen. They would go to Oxfam. And the furniture and pictures, like the house, would be auctioned. When she left here, when the trial was over, she would take nothing with her and leave nothing behind.
He came into the house with a wary expression. For once he seemed ill at ease. She hadn’t remembered him like that. She felt that it should have given her solace but it just made her feel faintly sick, the way she had in those early months of pregnancy when even familiar smells made her mouth fill with bile, and unexpected movements, the lurching of a bus around a sharp corner, covered her forehead and the palms of her hands with a clammy sweat.
She gave him a drink. Scotch, no ice and a drop of water, and they sat on either side of the fire in her mother’s old armchairs, their covers faded and fraying. Like a parody, she thought, of the happy couple sharing the events of their busy day.
She didn’t speak immediately. She sipped from her glass and watched the fire. It was glowing an even red. She prodded it with the poker and a flame shot to the surface, like the flattened head of a cobra, turning this way and that, and then sinking back down into its coils.
When she told him about Mary, he didn’t respond. She had been careful what she said. She knew his barrister’s mind. She’d had arguments with him before, where she’d seen how he could use his attention to detail, his ability to pick on the tiniest scrap of information and turn it to his advantage. But this time he said nothing.
And then. ‘I don’t believe it.’
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Well, I can’t prove it to you. The physical evidence isn’t available any longer. You’ll just have to take my word for it.’
‘And why should I do that?’
She looked at him, anger beginning to gather itself somewhere in the pit of her stomach. ‘Why should I lie to you about something as important as this? I never lied to you before.’
He turned towards her, the firelight catching the wrinkles around his eyes and winking in the grey spangled through his black hair. ‘Didn’t you?’
It had been here in this house that she had told him she was pregnant. October 1974, the weekend before Hallowe’en. It was her intern year. She had been living in a flat in Pembroke Road. She’d got a phone call from her father. She was out of breath and slightly dizzy by the time she’d run down three flights of stairs to stand in the cold, dirty hall, holding the greasy black receiver to her ear, her gaze wandering over the numbers scribbled in blunt pencil on the tattered wallpaper.
‘I’m taking your mother to Paris for the weekend. You will come and stay in the house while we’re away, won’t you? You know how anxious she gets. You know how she frets. She’s convinced that the minute we’re on the Monks-town Road some dreadful thing will happen to all her precious furniture.’
They had left a fridgeful of food but she didn’t feel like eating. Patrick was to come and see her on the Saturday afternoon.
‘It’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘I have to take James to rugby at three, so I’ll be with you by three-fifteen, three-thirty at the absolute latest, and I don’t have to pick him up until five.’
But he didn’t arrive. And he didn’t phone. She went to bed with a book and fell asleep almost immediately. A deep sleep as if she was drugged, filled with images, bright colours and strange shapes. She could feel herself reaching out, trying to find, to understand, to get, to do. Struggling but not succeeding. When she woke hours later her legs and arms were so heavy and stiff that she lay for a while, moulded to the bed, until the sound of the phone dragged her upright. He was full of whispered apologies. James had fallen and twisted his ankle. He’d had to spend the whole afternoon in the casualty department in St Michael’s in Dun Laoghaire. He hadn’t been able to get to a phone, but he’d come tomorrow, definitely without fail. Crea was going to a birthday party with the boy and wouldn’t be home until late. And he hung up, quickly, without saying goodbye.
The next day they lay in her narrow bed. The autumn sun was warm through the window. He pulled back the sheet to look at her. He kissed her nipples. She pulled away.
‘What is it, my love?’
‘They’re just very sensitive, very tender.’
He kissed them again, licking the dark areola, nibbling at them until they stood up, tight like overripe raspberries. She gazed around at the faded flowery wallpaper. She looked over his shoulder at the lampshade, dusty, covered in horses’ heads. When she was little she had given them names, Beauty and Silver, Cascade and Dancer, Topsy and Polly, culled from books set in English villages where girls called Bunty and Charlotte ate egg and cress sandwiches that Cook had packed in a wicker hamper.
‘Hey,’ he said, ‘what’s wrong? You’re not with me.’
‘I am, I am,’ she protested, sitting up and pulling him into her, wrapping her legs around his waist and sliding her wetness up and down on him until his eyes lost focus and words no longer came out of his mouth.
Afterwards he slept, his head heavy on her breast, his stubble pressing into her soft skin, making it itch. Then she, too, slept and woke, her face crushed against the bones of his shoulder blades, her right arm slung over him, her hand between his thighs. She remembered that she moved away, and lay on her back, and he moved with her, slipping his arm underneath her shoulders and cradling her to him, so that now her face rested on his breast, one small brown nipple within reach of her tongue. And then she told him, and when she had finished she kissed him gently, squeezing the soft flesh with her fingers so that his nipple popped into her mouth, and she teased and tickled it with her lips. And waited for his response.
Did he say anything? She couldn’t remember the words, but she remembered that he moved, shifted his body slowly, deliberately. Foot, ankle, knee, thigh, hip, waist, rib, arm, shoulder, neck and head. Away.
He got out of bed and began to dress. He didn’t look at her. His movements were methodical, systematic. He lifted each item of clothing carefully from the neat pile on her old rocking chair.
‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ he said.
‘What? I don’t understand. Done what?’ She sat up, the sheet falling away from her. She stretched out her arms and plucked at his shirt-tails.
‘You shouldn’t have lied to me. You told me, I thought we had an understanding. That this would never happen.’
She remembered the taste of the tears as they slipped down her face. They dropped onto her hands, faster, faster. ‘It was a mistake. I don’t know how. I didn’t plan it. But now that it has happened, I feel it, the baby, our baby, growing inside me.’
Still he didn’t look at her. His zip made a crisp, sharp sound as he pulled it up, tucking his shirt neatly inside his trousers. He picked up his leather belt and slid it carefully through the keepers in his waistband. He pulled
it tight. He picked up his wallet and his watch from the dressing table. She remembered she had begun to beg then. She had forgotten the words she used, but she could taste the vomit in her mouth and smell the fear from her own body. She got out of bed, and stood in front of the door. She remembered she tried to stop him, but he pushed her out of the way, his tweed jacket brushing her skin as he passed. His anger surrounded him, protecting him. She couldn’t understand what had happened. It was as if, suddenly, she was blind or deaf or dumb. The world as she used to know it no longer had any meaning.
‘Stay,’ she said. ‘Stay, just for a few minutes. We can talk about this. Decide what we’re going to do. Please, stay.’
What was it he had said, as he turned back, his car keys jingling in his hand, the front door already open behind him?
‘I’ve always been very straight with you. You know how I feel about my child, my responsibilities. I really have nothing more to say.’
‘But you’ve always said you loved me.’
She was standing so close to him now that she reached out her hand and held it gently against his cheek. He lifted his hand and took hers. He pulled it away and let it go. It dropped down at her side. He slammed the door behind him as he left.
‘That’s the Kish light, isn’t it?’
‘That’s right. Flashes twice, white, every thirty seconds.’
‘And the Baily to the north?’
‘Flashes once, white, every twenty seconds.’
‘And Dun Laoghaire, West Pier?’
‘Three green flashes every seven point five seconds.’
‘The East Pier?’
‘Flashes white, twice, every fifteen seconds.’
‘And the Poolbeg?’
‘Occulted, red, twice, every twenty seconds.’
‘What?’
She picked up the bottle of whiskey and topped up her glass, gesturing towards his. ‘It means it’s a constant red light, but it darkens, it ‘occults’, twice every twenty seconds.’
‘I’ve never heard the word used that way before.’
Mary, Mary Page 23
