He's Got to Go

by Sheila O'Flanagan

  She leaned against the wall and closed her eyes.

  “Changes have been in the air for some time now but you haven’t felt deeply enough to make any decisions,” read Nessa. “The conjunction between the Moon and Saturn can make you feel pressurized. Gradually you realize that you must shift your focus. Discussions with others will enable you to recognize opportunities for what they are.”

  I don’t want to shift my focus, she thought miserably. I like my focus the way it is. And does this mean that if I start talking to him about his other bloody woman it’ll give him the opportunity to tell me it’s all over between us?

  I don’t want it to be over. She looked at the magazine again. I don’t want everything I’ve worked for to be swept away.

  “No matter how much you’ve pondered on recent decisions, be prepared to reassess your position,” said Adam’s horoscope. “You’re chafing at delays and situations where other people make decisions. Discussion is vital.”

  Talk. Discussion. Communicate. As if I don’t know all that crap already. But I don’t want confrontation. She rubbed her arms. I hate confrontation. I always have. I don’t want to tell Adam I need to talk to him and suddenly have a row about his other woman.

  She took another biscuit from the barrel and nibbled on it. Then she opened the Golden Pages.

  She was surprised at the number of detective agencies operating in the country. Nearly all of them undertook what they called marital and family law investigations. Some of them even specialized in marital and family law investigations. As well as discreet covert surveillance. Nessa found it hard to think that she was even contemplating having Adam watched, discreet or otherwise. The agencies promised photographic evidence too. She smiled grimly at the thought of someone taking photos of Adam engaged in a spot of tongue shoving down the postcard woman’s throat.

  But it was an idea. Better than accusing him and allowing him to tell her that she was losing her marbles and that there was no other woman. She had so little to go on that it wouldn’t be difficult for Adam to tell her that she’d got it all wrong. And for him to somehow cover his tracks (if that was what he wanted to do) afterward. He could say that Portia Laing didn’t even know him and that she was clearly mixing him up with someone else. Nessa wouldn’t be able to prove anything different. She’d have caused trouble for nothing.

  Nessa felt another spurt of hope. Maybe Portia was mixing him up with someone else. She said she’d seen Adam with this woman but how could she be sure it was him? She’d hardly spent more than a minute cursing and swearing at him for banging into her father’s car before he’d gone to work. She might, in fact, have made a simple mistake.

  Nessa felt a wave of relief sweep over her as she reassessed what she’d heard Portia say. She had no doubt that the girl had seen someone and that the man was Adam’s age, maybe even looked like Adam but, with the memory of the car incident still in her mind, Portia could have imposed Adam’s face on the actual man concerned. So she’d told a story about Adam which really related to someone else. That made sense, reasoned Nessa, after all, she still didn’t have any evidence with which to accuse Adam. Except for the postcard. But the postcard meant nothing.

  She walked into his tiny study and opened the book on time and management studies again. The postcard was exactly where she’d left it. “Wish you were here, xxx A.”

  “Lots of innocent explanations,” she said out loud. “Lots.”

  The phone rang and she nearly jumped out of her skin. She looked at it warily, half expecting it to be “xxx A” although she realized immediately that she was being silly. But she reached out for it as though it was radioactive.

  “Hello.” Her voice was tentative.

  “Hi, Nessa.” Cate’s voice was equally tentative.

  “Hi, Cate.” Nessa didn’t say anything else.

  Cate wasn’t sure exactly what she wanted to say either. She took a deep breath. “Bree phoned me yesterday,” she told Nessa. “She said she was in your house.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “She’d been looking for me earlier,” explained Cate. “But I was at meetings and I couldn’t phone her back. Then Finn and I were having dinner so I…” Her voice trailed off.

  “I showed Bree some dresses,” said Nessa. “She has a hot date apparently.”

  “She said you had some lovely stuff.”

  “Not your kind of thing, though.”

  “Different styles,” said Cate. “We always had different styles.”

  “She’s going shopping,” Nessa said. “Late-night opening tonight so she’s bound to get something.”

  “I gave her some tips,” said Cate.

  “It’s funny, isn’t it, thinking of her in a slinky dress.”

  “I told her not to go for slinky. I said that loose cotton would be nicer.”

  “Cotton!” Nessa sounded disgusted. “She wants to look gorgeous, not sensible.”

  “She can get something really nice in cotton,” said Cate. “It doesn’t have to look like day wear.”

  “Bree has a lovely figure,” protested Nessa. “She could wear voile or satin.”

  “But she can’t carry it off,” stated Cate. “She’d clump around the place in satin and look uncomfortable. I wanted to help her look glamorous and feel OK at the same time.”

  “It’s up to her,” said Nessa tiredly.

  “Sure.”

  There was silence. Nessa picked at the corner of the “xxx A” postcard while Cate, who was doing up some accounts figures on her Excel spreadsheet, accidentally cleared a row of numbers.

  “I’d better go,” said Nessa. “I promised Jill I’d bring her swimming later.”

  “Bree said that you might have a problem.” Cate’s words tumbled over each other. “With Adam.”

  “Did she?”

  “Yes,” said Cate.

  “What sort of problem?”

  “She said you thought that he might be seeing someone.”

  “Elegantly put.” Nessa closed the book on the postcard before she ripped it to shreds.

  “If there’s anything I can do, Nessa…”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It doesn’t matter anyway,” said Nessa. “I’ve been making a fuss about nothing. That girl was mixing Adam up with someone else.”

  “How d’you know?” asked Cate. “Have you talked to him?”

  “No,” said Nessa. “But I thought about it again and, you know, she hardly even saw Adam. So I don’t know how she could be sure it was him.”

  “Why would she say it if she wasn’t sure?” asked Cate.

  “She was talking to a friend,” explained Nessa. “She was telling a story. How much better for her to make it someone she’d met recently than any old bloke.”

  “I suppose you might be right,” said Cate doubtfully.

  “I was upset last night,” said Nessa. “I overreacted to something. Bree happened to be here and caught the brunt of it. It’s nothing.”

  “Well, if you discover that maybe it’s more than you think…”

  “It’s not,” said Nessa firmly. “Absolutely not. Me and Adam are rock solid. Just like you and Finn.”

  Cate said nothing. She thought she was going to cry. She didn’t want to cry, certainly not in the office and absolutely not in front of her sister. But she could feel the lump in her throat and the sting of tears in her eyes. Is it my hormones, she wondered? Is this what happens to pregnant women? Do they all cry at the drop of a hat? Do we all cry at the drop of a hat, she amended.

  “Cate?” Nessa broke the silence. “Are you still there?”

  “Yes.” Cate cleared her throat.

  “I’d better be going,” said Nessa again.

  It wouldn’t be fair to burden Nessa with her problems when she had problems of her own, thought Cate. Besides, Nessa would be terribly judgmental. Not that she could really blame her. Nessa had wanted a second child so much that Cate couldn’t see her sister sympathizin
g in the slightest with her horror of finding herself pregnant now. Pregnant and engaged. Where would be the problem, as far as Nessa was concerned?

  “Can we meet?” Cate surprised herself by asking the question. She rubbed the back of her neck. She hadn’t been able to stop herself even though she’d made a decision not to tell Nessa anything. What the hell was wrong with her?

  “Meet?”

  “Meet,” said Cate impatiently. “You and me.”

  “What for?”

  “I want to have a chat with you.”

  “What about? I’ve told you, me and Adam are sorted out.”

  “It’s nothing to do with you and Adam,” said Cate. “The world doesn’t only revolve around you and Adam.”

  “If you’re going to talk to me like that—”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” said Cate. “I didn’t mean it.”

  “Just like you didn’t mean it the night you borrowed my blue angora jumper and spilled Malibu and orange down the front?”

  “Nessa, I spent months apologizing to you for that!”

  “The one item of clothing I had that you liked so you borrowed it and then ruined it.”

  “I paid you back.”

  “It wasn’t the same.”

  “Do you want me to say sorry all over again?” demanded Cate.

  “No.” Nessa sighed. “What do you want to talk about?”

  “Not on the phone,” said Cate. “I don’t want to talk to you on the phone.”

  “Is everything all right?” Nessa frowned. This didn’t sound like Cate at all.

  “I don’t know,” said Cate.

  “You’re not sick are you?”

  “Of course not,” said Cate. “I just—I wanted your advice on something.”

  “My God!” Nessa laughed shortly. “You and Bree both. Given that she was talking about fashion—a subject that we’ve already established I know very little about—what do you want to discuss? Piston rings?”

  “No,” said Cate. “Just some stuff, that’s all.”

  “Well, OK,” said Nessa. “What do you want to do? Drop around?”

  “No.” Cate’s tone was vehement. “Let’s meet for a drink. How about tomorrow night?”

  “I’ll have to check and see if Adam is in,” Nessa warned her.

  “God Almighty, Nessa, you’re as much entitled to be out as he is,” snapped Cate. “Just tell him to be in.”

  “I don’t just tell Adam anything,” said Nessa.

  “Maybe you should.”

  Nessa shrugged. “Perhaps. Let’s assume he’ll be in. Where d’you want to meet? Can you come out to Malahide?”

  “Sure,” said Cate. “Smyth’s? Say about eight?”

  “Sounds OK to me,” said Nessa.

  “See you then,” said Cate and hung up.

  Nessa stared at the handset and listened to the dialing tone. She’d never known Cate to be so abrupt. But if Cate thought that she was going to Smyth’s tomorrow to talk about Adam, she had another think coming. She wasn’t going to let Cate pick at her marriage and tell her what she should and shouldn’t do. Cate might have said that she was looking for advice but Cate was the girl who spent most of her youth dishing out unasked for advice herself. Usually, Nessa conceded, rather good advice about makeup and clothes and boyfriends. But not advice that Nessa bothered to heed.

  Anyway, she can’t give me advice about my marriage, Nessa decided as she walked out of the study and closed the door behind her. I love Adam. I trust Adam. We have a good, strong relationship.

  She told him about her drinks date with Cate while they were watching the evening news. He’d arrived home early that night with a box of Terry’s All Gold.

  “I wish I could confess that I’d rushed out and bought them for you in a fit of mad passion,” he told her, his eyes twinkling. “But one of our clients sent us a hamper of goodies to thank us for some particularly hard work that we did. We divided up the spoils and I got the chocs.”

  “Thanks for bringing them home.”

  “Oh, I know that the way to a woman’s heart is through a box of chocolates,” he told her. He put his arm around her and hugged her to him. Then he kissed her gently on the lips just as Jill walked into the kitchen and made exaggerated sounds of being ill at the sight of her parents’ embrace. Which somewhat ruined the romantic moment that Nessa so desperately craved.

  There hadn’t been time for additional romantic moments. Jill wanted her food, so did Adam, and Nessa knew that she wouldn’t have any peace until they’d eaten. After dinner, they all sat down to watch TV.

  “Why did Cate pick tomorrow?” asked Adam after she’d told him. “It’s bloody awkward, Nessa.”

  “Tomorrow suited her,” said Nessa. “Why is it awkward?”

  “I’ve a few things to do,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting to be home before eight.”

  “I never tell you to be home early,” said Nessa.

  “I know.”

  “So you can make it tomorrow,” she said.

  He looked sideways at her but she was gazing at the TV screen.

  “Don’t tell me that this is one of your sisterly crises,” he said. “Remember that time you and Cate got together for a pow-wow about Bree? Because you thought she was doing drugs?”

  “We never thought she was doing drugs,” said Nessa impatiently. “She was living with someone who was. We were worried about her.”

  “Don’t interfere,” warned Adam. “She didn’t speak to you for ages last time.”

  “It’s nothing to do with Bree,” said Nessa. “Besides, she got over it. And she knew that we were only acting in her best interests.”

  “Giving anonymous tips to the police wasn’t exactly in her best interests,” said Adam.

  “We didn’t!” Nessa turned to him. “We told her that we’d consider it.”

  “And she told you to sod off as far as I remember.”

  “Yes, but she left him in the end! Anyway,” added Nessa, “I told you. It’s nothing to do with Bree. Cate and I are going for a drink together, that’s all. It’s probably wedding stuff.”

  Adam grinned. “She’s going to quiz you about the length of her veil and things like that, is she?”

  “No,” said Nessa dryly. “More likely she’s going to ask me if it’s all worth it.”

  “Of course it is,” said Adam.

  “For men,” conceded Nessa. “She might want to know if a woman gets anything out of it.”

  “You got a lot,” said Adam.

  “I got you,” said Nessa.

  “Exactly.” And although her husband smiled at her and even though she’d decided that her marriage was rock solid after all, Nessa found it very difficult to smile back.

  Bree wasn’t sure that Michael would consider her new outfit slinky but she rather liked it all the same. She’d taken Cate’s words about being comfortable to heart and had discounted four dresses which she’d tried on as being too tight, too low-cut, too short and too scratchy. She knew, too, what Cate meant about her not being able to carry off slinky. There’d been a pale pink slinky creation which she’d imagined would fit the bill perfectly but, as soon as she’d squirmed into it, she knew that she didn’t have what it took to carry it off. Slinky required walking in a different way—a kind of gliding motion that Bree couldn’t quite master. She knew that she strode across a room instead of walking daintily across it which spoiled the effect of the shimmering fabric. She needed something that could make her look like a person who didn’t spend her days up to her neck in oil while still allowing her the freedom to walk like a normal person instead of a model. This left her with a deep purple skirt and matching shoe-string top which could easily be mistaken for a dress. It was something of a compromise but it was a flattering outfit and one that made her look a little more vulnerable than usual. She quite liked how she looked in it even though she felt that the girl who looked back at her from the mirror was miles away from the girl she actually was.

  She’d
forgotten, of course, that she needed to buy shoes as well. The shoe shops had been another minor nightmare. She knew that she needed proper shoes instead of the trainers or desert boots she favored but she’d been embarrassed by the fact that her feet were a wide fitting and the shoes she’d wanted didn’t come in a wide fitting. Eventually she’d found a pair that were reasonably comfortable (even though the heels were definitely too high for her) and that matched her outfit. After buying them she nipped into the Body Shop and treated herself to a new foundation, eyeshadow and lipstick.

  And if he doesn’t jump on me after this little lot he never will, she decided ruefully as she walked out of the shop laden with carrier bags and made her way back to the flat.

  16

  Mars in the 1st House

  Impulsive, hot-headed but energetic and positive.

  Nessa didn’t know how she’d find Cate in the crush. The fine weather that had dominated most of the summer had quite suddenly given way to a day when gray clouds had rolled in from the sea and threatened rain. So instead of sitting in beer gardens or spilling out onto the pavement as they’d grown accustomed to, people had thronged indoors into the bars and lounges and Smyth’s was crowded. She stood on tiptoe and tried to scan over the heads of the crowd for a sight of her sister.

  She jumped in surprise as she felt her phone vibrate in the pocket of her trousers.

  “I’m the other side of the bar,” said Cate and Nessa looked across the room to where Cate was waving at her. She waved in return and pushed her way through the mass of people, swearing loudly as a girl in platform shoes stood on her toe.

  “Not a good choice,” mouthed Cate as Nessa reached her. “I can hardly hear myself think.”

  “D’you want to go somewhere else?” asked Nessa.

  Cate nodded and the two of them jostled their way out of the bar again.

  “Sorry,” said Cate. “I’m clearly getting old. The racket in there was unbelievable.”

  “Friday night’s always like that,” said Nessa. “I should’ve remembered, suggested somewhere else myself.”