“I’ll think about it,” she said finally.
“I could do it for you,” suggested Bree.
“He’d recognize you,” said Nessa scathingly. “He does actually know you.”
Bree grinned at her. “I know. But I could do a bit of following on the bike. He doesn’t know the bike. He should, of course, but he doesn’t. He hardly knows the difference between a Vespa and a Harley.”
“I think he does.”
“He doesn’t notice cars or bikes,” said Bree patiently. “If you want I can follow him for you for a couple of days.”
“What about work?” asked Nessa.
“I can take some time off.”
“I don’t know.” Nessa picked at her thumbnail and split it. She bit the jagged edge.
“Think about it,” said Bree. “Let me know.”
Nessa nodded. “OK.”
“He’s a shit,” said Bree again.
“Maybe not,” said Nessa. “I could be totally overreacting. He’s good to me, Bree. He’s always been good to me. And to Jill.”
“I know,” said her sister. “But sometimes that’s not enough, is it?”
Nessa exhaled slowly. “No.” She wiped her eyes again. “But what about you?” she asked. “What about you and the slinky dress?”
“Forget about me and the damned slinky dress,” said Bree. “I’ll give Cate a buzz tomorrow. Maybe she’ll come shopping with me.” She smiled at Nessa. “Can you imagine Cate and me in a clothes shop? The poor girl will be having hysterics.”
Nessa smiled faintly too. “Probably.” She stood up. “Come and have a look in my wardrobe anyway. I don’t really have slinky but I do have dresses.”
“Nessa, I don’t want to hang around while you’re upset. It doesn’t matter about the dress.”
“Please,” said Nessa. “I want you to look.”
“OK.” Bree nodded. “Then I’ll leave you in peace.”
“I don’t know about that.” Nessa sighed. “It was cathartic having you here and spilling my guts.”
“How long have you known?” asked Bree curiously.
“It seems like forever,” said Nessa. “But only a few days.”
“And you’ve kept it to yourself.”
“I didn’t know who to talk to about it,” said Nessa. “I didn’t know who to call. I thought you and Cate would laugh at me. And I didn’t want to shatter Mum’s illusions—” She covered her mouth with her hand.
“What?” asked Bree.
“I just wondered,” said Nessa slowly, “when me and Jill were in Salthill. Staying with Mum and Dad. Was he with her then? Did he have her back to this house?”
“Don’t think like that,” Bree told her. “You’ll go crazy if you think like that.”
“I’m going bloody crazy anyway,” said Nessa tautly as she walked out of the living room and up the stairs.
14
Neptune in 4th house
Chaos can rule at home both in organization
and looking after children.
It was nearly ten o’clock when Bree got back to her flat. Adam still hadn’t arrived home by the time she left Nessa’s, having looked at some dresses and then helped put Jill to bed. For the first time, Bree had realized that Nessa’s clothes—while not as up-to-the-minute as Cate’s—were clearly expensive and that slinky dresses didn’t exactly come cheap.
She took off her leather jacket and flung it onto the bed. Tomorrow, she thought, I’ll tidy up the flat. Definitely. After all, if I bring Michael back here and I’m wearing a slinky dress I really don’t want to have him take it off me and drop it in a pile with my oil-stained T-shirts and grimy socks.
She was looking forward to her date with Michael. She’d never gone to an expensive restaurant with anyone before, she’d always preferred quantity to quality and so had her other boyfriends. This was going to be very different. More grown up. Maybe it’s time, Bree mused, that I began to think of myself as grown up.
Her mobile phone rang and she retrieved it from her jacket pocket.
“It’s me,” said Cate. “You rang a million times. And then you went to Nessa’s. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” said Bree. “At least, nothing when I called you.”
“There’s something wrong now?” Cate’s voice was anxious.
“Not exactly,” said Bree. “I was ringing because I wanted your advice about—”
“My advice!” Cate interrupted her. “What do I know about six-stroke engines or whatever it is you work on?”
“Don’t be stupid,” said Bree. “Clearly I was looking for your advice as a fashion guru. But—”
“I don’t believe I heard that,” said Cate. “Fashion. You?”
“You don’t have to sound so surprised,” Bree said irritably. “I wanted to ask you about dresses. But you weren’t available so that’s why I went to Nessa’s.”
“Nessa!” Cate’s voice was scathing. “What would she know about fashion?”
“Not a lot about the sort of gear you wear sometimes,” agreed Bree. “But she has some nice clothes, Cate.”
“Money will always buy you nice things,” said Cate scornfully. “But not style.”
“I never realized before how patronizing you could be,” said Bree. “Well, not true, because you were always a patronizing sort of cow, weren’t you?”
“I’ll pretend you didn’t say that.”
“Oh, you were,” said Bree. “Looking down on me for being your grubby little sister.”
“You are little. You are grubby.”
“Still?”
“You said it.”
“I don’t think I want to talk to you.” Bree was annoyed.
“Fine,” said Cate. “I only rang back because you sounded so urgent. But I didn’t realize it was just to get at me.”
“Actually things are different now. I do need to talk to you despite the fact that you’re a bit of a bitch,” said Bree slowly. “It’s about Nessa.”
“What’s wrong with Nessa?” asked Cate. “Did she discover that her next-door neighbor got new curtains and now she has to get new ones too?”
Bree couldn’t help smiling even though she knew that it wasn’t a very sympathetic thing to do. “It’s nothing to do with curtains,” she told Cate.
“What, then?”
“She thinks Adam is having an affair.”
Cate was silent. Bree could hear occasional static on the line but nothing else.
“Are you still there?” she asked.
“Adam having an affair?” Cate couldn’t keep the shock out of her voice. “You’re joking.”
“Clearly not,” said Bree. “And if you’d seen the state Nessa was in you’d know that she was taking it seriously too.”
“But what makes her think he’s having an affair?” asked Cate.
Bree told Cate about the conversation between Portia and Terri that Nessa had overheard in the sauna, as well as the discovery of the postcard from “xxx A.”
“Jesus wept.” Cate could hardly believe it. “Poor old Ness.”
“She doesn’t know whether it’s true or not,” explained Bree. “She keeps thinking that maybe these two girls were talking about someone else even though she knows deep down it couldn’t possibly be. And she’s also wracking her brains to think of someone whose name begins with A that they both know.”
“What makes her think she knows this person anyway?” asked Cate.
“Nothing,” said Bree. “I think she just wants to feel that she might know them. Although why she’d want to feel like that is a mystery to me.”
“What’s she going to do? Confront him?” asked Cate.
“She hasn’t decided yet,” said Bree.
“Will I phone her?”
“I don’t know.” Bree was doubtful. “If you call her now she’ll think that I hardly had time to get home before ringing you with the lowdown. You know what she’s like. She’ll think I couldn’t wait to ring up and gloat about the fact that he
r perfect marriage isn’t so perfect after all.”
“Probably.”
“So perhaps you could leave it until tomorrow at least.”
“Might be best,” agreed Cate.
“Let me know how she is,” Bree asked her. “I said that if she wanted me to trail Adam and spy on him I’d do it.”
“Spy on him?”
“Nessa fondly imagines he’d spot me if I followed him on the bike but you know Adam, Cate. He hasn’t a clue. So I could check it out next time he tells her he’s going to be late home.”
“Presumably he wasn’t at home earlier?”
“He was meeting clients allegedly,” said Bree. “God knows how many times he’s used that excuse.”
“Poor Nessa,” said Cate again. “She must feel terrible.”
“She didn’t look great,” admitted Bree. “She’d put on makeup because she’d clearly been crying like mad but it made her look worse, if anything.”
“Why would he do it?” asked Cate. “He has a good family. Nessa loves him. I thought he loved her.”
“See what thought did.”
“Oh, Bree. Don’t be so bloody cynical.”
“It’s hard not to be.”
Cate sighed. “Is it just a dream?” she asked. “The whole idea of getting married and living happily ever after?”
“You’re asking the wrong person,” Bree told her. “I’m still waiting for Mr. Might Be Right. And you should know, Cate. You’re engaged.”
“You wanted to ask me about clothes?” Cate changed the subject back to Bree’s original reason for phoning her.
“It doesn’t really matter,” said Bree dismissively. “I was looking for a place to buy a slinky dress.”
“What!”
“Why does everyone sound so surprised when I ask about dresses?”
“You know perfectly well why,” said Cate crisply. “I’d say you were about four the last time you wore a dress.”
“The red one,” said Bree.
“You even remember!”
“Only because it was so uncomfortable. Every time I bent down you could see my knickers.”
“Sometimes that’s the point of a dress,” Cate told her.
“Not when you’re four,” said Bree.
“Well, no,” admitted Cate. “That used to be my dress, didn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Bree. “Bloody hand-me-downs. Why on earth Mum kept it that long I’ll never know.”
“Of course you do.” Cate sounded amused. “Mum always liked the idea of being thrifty about clothes.”
“That’s probably why I’ve been scarred for life about dresses,” said Bree glumly. “Anyway, I’m going out and I need a dress and I wanted to know was there anywhere good I should check out.”
“What sort of dress?”
“Slinky,” repeated Bree. “And preferably one that doesn’t show my knickers.”
“I’m sorry,” Cate told Bree when her laughter had subsided. “I just don’t see you in slinky.”
“At least Nessa made the effort,” said Bree irritably. “Even though her heart is broken.”
Cate was silent. For a moment she’d forgotten her own trauma. She loved the moments when she forgot, when everything seemed OK again.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “What do you want it for?”
Bree explained about her date with Michael Morrissey and his desire to see her legs.
“You don’t really want slinky,” said Cate. “Slinky is what you think you should wear but it’s really not you. You want something less sophisticated than slinky.”
“You mean I’m not elegant enough to carry it off?” demanded Bree.
“Slinky is Catherine Zeta Jones,” said Cate. “You’re more Kate Winslet.”
“Great,” said Bree. “Is that before or after she went down with the Titanic?”
“Oh, don’t be silly,” said Cate briskly. “You’ve got to be realistic. Wear a dress, certainly, you’ll look great in a dress. But not something that clings.”
“Cate, I’m a size ten and a bit,” said Bree. “You’re making me sound like a mountain. What the hell size are you?”
“Eight,” said Cate dismissively. “But a small eight.”
“I’m a ten, Nessa is a fourteen and you’re a small eight.” Bree sighed. “That probably means six. You’re too thin, Catey.”
“You’ve said that before.”
“I know but—”
“Look, do you want my advice or not?” asked Cate impatiently.
“All right.”
“It’s summer,” said Cate. “It’s still warm. Wear something reasonably loose because then you won’t keep checking it to see if it’s gaping anywhere. When you’re a bit heavier—”
“I—am—not—heavy.” Bree enunciated every word.
“OK,” amended Cate. “When you’re not a stick insect you can’t afford to swan around in diaphanous stuff. I think you should get a nice cotton dress. And go for a definite color. A warm one with your complexion. Actually a deep pink or purple would be nice.”
“Pink!”
“You did ask.”
Bree sighed. “And where should I shop?”
“Anywhere,” said Cate. “There are loads of places. Do you want to spend a lot of money? Is he that important to you?”
“I don’t have a lot of money to spend,” said Bree.
“Try somewhere like Mango,” suggested Cate. “They’re not bad. Or Oasis.”
“Thanks,” said Bree. She sighed. “I feel really guilty talking about getting dressed up when Nessa is so unhappy.”
“Don’t,” said Cate. “She wouldn’t want you to feel guilty.”
“I know,” said Bree. “But I can’t help feeling it all the same.”
“I’ll phone her tomorrow,” promised Cate. “And I’m really looking forward to hearing about your date.”
Bree laughed. “It’ll probably be a complete disaster. Anything I plan always ends up a complete disaster.”
“Not everything, surely,” said Cate.
“You’d be surprised,” Bree told her.
Cate replaced the receiver slowly and turned toward Finn who’d been pretending not to listen to her conversation with Bree but whose eyebrows had shot up when the word “affair” was mentioned.
“Nessa thinks Adam is having an affair,” she told him.
“I gathered as much.”
“The bastard!” Cate was surprised at how angry she felt.
“Maybe you’re all jumping to conclusions.”
“It sounded pretty definite to me.”
“It’s not your problem, Cate. You have to let them work it out.”
“I know,” she said impatiently. “But Nessa’s my sister and if that fucker has upset her—”
“There’s two sides to it,” Finn reminded her.
Cate looked at him. “You’re saying it might be her fault?”
He shook his head. “Only that nothing’s clear cut.”
Tell him now, she urged herself. Tell him while he’s caught up with looking at two sides to an argument. While he knows that nothing is clear cut. Tell him that he’s going to be a father.
He yawned. “I feel bloated after all that nan bread,” he told her. “And tomorrow’s an early morning. I’d better get to bed.”
“I’ll follow you,” said Cate.
“Sure.” He kissed her on the lips. “Goodnight.”
“Goodnight,” she said.
Nessa was in bed when Adam came home. She pretended to be asleep when he slipped under the sheets beside her. Once his breathing became regular and even, she slid out of the bed and took his shirt out of the laundry basket. She sniffed it. Cigar smoke and Chinese food, she decided. And Polo aftershave, which she’d bought for his birthday. She couldn’t smell perfume. So maybe tonight had been a night with clients after all. Cigar smoke and Chinese smelled like a business thing not an illicit liaison.
Oh, what the hell would I know, she asked herself despairi
ngly. I’m only the fool of a wife.
15
Moon/Saturn aspects
Cautious, possibly pessimistic in outlook,
lacking self-confidence, difficulties with relationships.
Cate was already awake when Finn’s alarm clock went off the following morning. She listened as he did his usual thump around the apartment, banging into things, letting doors slam shut and actually singing (if that was what you could call the noise he was making) in the shower. Doesn’t he know by now how bloody loud he is, she asked herself. Does he actually do it deliberately? But she didn’t move as he came back into the bedroom and adjusted the blinds so that pale early morning light filtered into the room before he got dressed. Unlike many people who presented radio programs and who sat behind the mike in faded woolly jumpers or slogan-emblazoned T-shirts, Finn liked to wear a suit on his show. He felt that it set him apart, as someone who took the issues seriously. Businessmen come into the studio, he told Cate once, and they’re wearing the corporate image. I want to make them feel as though they’re talking to a person who understands what it’s like to be running a big company.
He swore under his breath and Cate knew that he’d messed up his tie. Despite wearing the suits, he actually hated ties. He knocked against the side of the bed as he left the room and she gritted her teeth. One day she was going to tell him that he always knocked into the side of the bed. And that if all the previous noise he made didn’t wake her, that certainly did.
She opened her eyes as he closed the bedroom door. Five minutes and he’d be gone. She’d get up then, she thought. Lying here awake was driving her crazy. The hum of his voice through the closed door made her frown. Was he on the phone to someone at this hour? She propped herself up on her elbow and strained to listen.
“Finn Coolidge. The voice of a nation.”
He was saying the words, she realized. The slogan from his TV show. Repeating them with a number of inflections so that each time he said them the emphasis was different. She felt a lump in her throat. It meant so much to him. It was his dream and it was coming true.
His voice stopped and she heard the apartment door open then bang shut behind him.
She lay in the bed for a while, unable to move. Then, suddenly, she sat up. She rushed into the bathroom and only barely made it before she threw up, violently, into the sink.
He's Got to Go Page 17
