Only We Know

by Karen Perry

  Her eyes are unblinking. ‘I saw the two of you together. At the Morrison. I saw you on the terrace, Katie Walsh, taking the night air, and holding hands with my husband.’

  A beat. My mouth is dry. The statement sits heavily between us. She brings the cigarette to her lips again, waits.

  I want to tell her that it wasn’t what she thinks it was – but how can I explain it? How can I describe how it feels to be bound to another person by something so awful that you have to put distance between you? Still, I’m drawn to him because he is the one person who knows …

  ‘Look, Julia. Whatever you saw, there was nothing going on between us. It was nostalgia, that’s all. A childhood affection …’

  She frowns and shakes her head, dismissing what I said. ‘Oh, I don’t care. Really. Right now, I couldn’t give a damn. Ridiculous, isn’t it?’ she says, giving a burst of dry laughter. ‘I’m at the stage now where I would almost be happy to hear that he was off with some other woman, rather than what I’m imagining.’

  ‘What do the guards think?’ I ask.

  ‘A couple of them came from Forensics to take samples – fingerprints, carpet fibres.’ She enunciates each word clearly with almost a trace of bitterness, and beneath her cool veneer I’m surprised to glimpse a bubbling fury. ‘As for the detectives, they’re remaining tight-lipped. Giving me the usual spiel – they’re following a couple of lines of enquiry, keeping an open mind, blah, blah, blah. They come here with their questions – just like you, I suppose – and draw their own conclusions. Only, they have the decency to call to the front of the house,’ she adds pointedly. ‘They don’t come prowling around the back.’

  ‘I didn’t expect to find you here, Julia. I wanted to get some fresh air before heading back to the office.’

  ‘How lucky to stumble across me, then.’ She smiles up at me but it’s an angry grimace that fades quickly. Dropping her head, she looks about her at the rocks among which she is sitting and, her voice quieter now, somewhat subdued, she says: ‘This is where I come for a sneaky cigarette.’

  Her softened tone encourages me a little, so I move closer and perch on a rock near her.

  ‘We quit smoking, Luke and I. It was our New Year’s resolution.’ Glancing down at the pack of Marlboro Lights in her hand, she lets out a hollow laugh. ‘He’s better at it than I am. More disciplined. So when I want to smoke, I come down here.’

  ‘He doesn’t know you haven’t quit?’

  Her eyes flash. ‘I can have my secrets too.’

  Something about the way she says it, guarded yet provocative, pushes me to ask: ‘And Luke? Did he have secrets?’

  She frowns again and turns towards the sea, its grey-green flatness, so still and benign this morning. ‘I suppose. Luke is quite protective of me. He likes to shield me from bad news. We have an old-fashioned marriage, in that sense. Any problems he has, he likes to deal with them himself.’

  ‘Were there problems?’

  She shrugs, biting her lip. ‘There are debts. Business debts I’m not supposed to know about.’

  ‘And are the sums significant?’

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose they must be. Enough to keep Luke awake at night. And then there’s this thing with the media, the publicity, Luke getting political … that night on The Late Late Show … I thought it was a mistake.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s so nasty. Ruthless. And once you step into that arena, they seek out every flaw, every misdemeanour.’

  Her eyes meet mine and the cool facade slips a little. I take out my own cigarettes and offer her one, then light up myself.

  ‘Julia, what happened that night, after the party?’ I ask tentatively.

  She looks as if she’s weighing up the wisdom of speaking to me, but I can feel it in her: the temptation to talk. She takes a deep breath, briefly closes her eyes, then begins, her voice low and steady, and I get the feeling she has gone through this countless times in her head over the past forty-eight hours.

  ‘We left the party around one and came straight home. We were both a little drunk and Luke seemed distracted. Moody. But I didn’t think too much of it. He can be like that sometimes, particularly after social events. Sort of deflated, you know? I’ve learned that it’s best to leave him alone when he’s like that. He said he needed to make a phone call so I went upstairs to bed. I took a sleeping pill and was out cold until almost nine a.m. When I woke, he wasn’t beside me and I could see he hadn’t slept there.’

  ‘Were you concerned?’

  ‘No. It’s not unusual. When he gets like that, he kind of goes in on himself, needs to be alone. I assumed he’d slept in the spare bedroom or fallen asleep in his study.’

  ‘Did you check on him?’

  ‘No. I figured he needed to sleep it off. So I went for my run. It was only when I got home that I realized something was wrong.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘The spare bedroom was empty. His car was still there, but I thought he might have taken the train into the office. I went to ring him, but his phone was on the kitchen counter. That was when I went into the study.’

  She pauses, biting her lip. Her eyes are fixed on some point in the middle distance and I try to imagine the horror of what she’s seeing in her mind’s eye. When she speaks again, there’s a ripple of distress in her words.

  ‘He loves that room, all the old furniture in it. I call it his man-cave. He had all these photographs framed some years ago and hung them on the wall behind his desk. And there’s a cabinet where he keeps various things – awards, trophies, framed certificates and newspaper cuttings, stuff relating to his work, objects of pride. When I stepped into that room I saw that the cabinet was open, the entire contents strewn on the floor. And every single picture on the wall was smashed to pieces.’

  I watch her sucking in her breath, composing herself, and I see for the first time how upset she is.

  ‘There was such anger in that room. Such violence. Whoever had done it must have been deranged with fury. I saw all that glass, those broken frames and lumps of granite, and I felt afraid. And that was before I noticed the blood.’

  She closes her eyes, squeezing them shut as if trying to block out the image. When she opens them again, she doesn’t look at me. ‘Luke is … well, he’s more fragile than you’d think. He has a vulnerable side.’

  I think of Reilly’s story about the hotel room, the destruction. ‘Could he have done it himself?’

  ‘He suffers from depression,’ she tells me in a flat voice. ‘Did you know that?’

  ‘I had no idea.’

  ‘He hides it well,’ Julia says. ‘And it’s intermittent. And never this bad. Never enough to suggest …’ she falters, but she’s said enough for me to understand.

  ‘Is it possible he did this?’

  Her eyes meet mine. ‘No,’ she says.

  ‘Is he happy?’ I ask her then.

  Briefly, confusion crosses her face. ‘Yes. For the most part. Although this past year has been difficult. Since his mother died, it’s been hard for him. He would have done anything for her. Even though their relationship was complicated.’

  ‘Complicated?’

  She frowns, leaning forward, trying to formulate the words to express her meaning.

  ‘Yes. You see Luke is so different from his mother, in looks and in personality. Not like Nick, who never had to try very hard with Sally because he’s so like her in almost every way. There was a natural bond between them. Luke and Sally … well, it was different. He loved his mother, of course, and she loved him. But it always seemed to me that he was forever striving to please her and yet, no matter what he did, she held him at a distance. Not in any overt way, just this very subtle coldness despite her love for him.’

  As she talks, a scrap of memory surfaces from nowhere. I was nineteen years old and sitting in the kitchen of the Yates’ house up in the Wicklow hills. It was some time in the first weeks when Nick and I were reviving our friendship. Ireland can be funny li
ke that – you lose touch with someone, assume you’re never going to see them again, until one night you’re in a student bar with your friends and across the room you see a face through the smoke and gloom, a face from childhood, a face that brings with it a jolt of recognition so strong that you just stand there, transfixed. That was how it was with me and Nick. That first reunion, so awkward and clumsy, Nick with his habitual shyness, barely able to look up at me while I jabbered away, simulating casual confidence, and all the while a great hole of uncertainty was opening inside me. And then it was like we couldn’t stop running into each other – parties, discos, on campus at UCD.

  Now, in retrospect, I wonder how much of it was coincidental, or whether we had sought each other out. But the day I’m remembering, a group of us from college were out hiking in the hills, when a sudden downpour sent us all running for cover and Nick suggested we go to his parents’ house. I can still recall the sickness I felt as the nerves gathered in my stomach, reluctance holding me back. The house was not far and we could dry off there and get something to eat. Everyone else was going along with the idea so I couldn’t object – it would seem odd, and I would draw too much attention to myself. So I had sat with the others in that house, trying to relax, trying to pretend that it was not strange to be there, Nick making sandwiches while the others lounged around the kitchen table, chatting and smoking, and all of a sudden Sally Yates walked in. Hair shoulder-length and still dark but with a glamorous streak of grey at the temple, her body thickened now in middle age yet still curvy and louche, the same easy sway of the hips. Her clothes had the chic I remembered from childhood, a cardigan thrown over her shoulders, shoes that were strappy and heeled. And she greeted us with a smile so hazy it seemed almost medicated.

  ‘Oh, how lovely!’ she had said. ‘To meet my Nicky’s charming new friends.’

  Nick blushing furiously while his mother’s gaze drifted over us.

  And then she saw me. Her smile tightened and she said, her voice cool with astonishment: ‘Katie Walsh. I don’t believe it.’

  The last time I had seen her was at the airport in Nairobi with my mother, a witness to their stiff farewell.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Yates.’

  ‘Well, now. This is a surprise.’

  I could see the struggle going on inside her, and I knew the others saw it too. A silence had fallen over the table.

  ‘And how is your father, Katie?’

  ‘He’s fine.’

  ‘Good. Good. Please remember me to him, won’t you?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Not a word about my mother. But, then, Sally had said everything she had wanted to say about her. I remember the card that had come after Mam died, icy in its formality, not a trace of tenderness in the neat hand, the carefully chosen words of condolence.

  And there was Sally Yates, smiling tightly at me in the kitchen of her home, turning on her charm and departing gaily with a warm word for everyone – but just before she left the room, I caught her glancing back at Nick, caught the anxiety in her eyes, the flash of warning, and I had the sense that later she would pull him aside, question him about me, and then, in that silky way of hers, advise him to stay away from me – that it was for the best.

  ‘She was a complex woman,’ I say to Julia now, hearing a little ice in my own voice.

  ‘She was. I keep forgetting you knew her.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t, really. At least, not in recent years. But when I was a child – ’

  ‘You spent that summer with them. In Kenya.’

  She says this suddenly, and I’m momentarily taken aback. I hadn’t realized she knew this. Instantly, the question pops into my head: Does she know what we did?

  ‘Yes. That’s right.’

  She sits still, the breeze blowing strands of hair across her face, her eyes never leaving mine. There is a challenge in them; she’s waiting for me to tell her something about that time, about what happened, and I have no idea how much she knows of it, how much Luke has shared with her, but either way I don’t want to get into it. In my head, the iron doors come sliding down, cutting off the route to that memory.

  ‘Come up to the house,’ she says, after a minute, getting to her feet. ‘There’s something I want to show you.’

  I follow her up the path, and in through a side door. A narrow passageway opens suddenly onto the living room where the seaward wall is made of glass. Through it I can see the trees in the garden dripping from the recent downpour, and beyond them the green swathe of a briny sea, the sky a dim metallic grey bearing down heavily. The décor is all angles and hard surfaces. An echoey silence hangs heavily in the vaulted space. I follow Julia, wondering what’s happened to the heavy who was guarding the gates. Marble floors, high ceilings, a great deal of wrought iron curving around the staircase.

  Just before we reach the vestibule and the two massive old doors, she stops and turns to a mirrored cabinet against the wall, and from it she takes something. When she turns to me, there is a photograph in her hand. ‘When I went into the study yesterday morning and found that – that mess, I also found this.’ She turns the picture over in her hands. ‘It was on his desk, propped up against the computer monitor.’

  She takes one last look at it, then hands it to me.

  As soon as my gaze falls upon it, I feel the belt around my neck.

  The colours are faded, and there is a crease down the middle as if the photograph has been folded for some time. Three youthful faces captured in the golden light of a summer’s day from the distant time of my childhood. Luke, Nick and I are sitting on a wall, the yellow-green of high grass in the background, a blue sky flecked with clouds above. Luke wears a black U2 T-shirt and he is the only one of us staring at the camera. Smirking. Nick wore his hair long that summer, and he is looking at the ground, his face almost hidden. He is smiling but, unlike his brother, seems bashful, secretive even. I am sitting next to him, face turned to my right, my attention caught by something off camera. My hair is long and raggedy, bleached golden by the sun, and my bare arms are brown, my face a riot of freckles. I am the only one who isn’t smiling.

  ‘How old were you when that was taken?’ she asks.

  I answer straight away: ‘Eight.’

  I know instantly. It was the summer when everything changed. ‘This was on his desk, you say?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But why?’ The air in the hall feels suddenly chilly.

  ‘I really couldn’t say,’ she answers, her eyes level and examining. ‘All I can tell you is that until yesterday I had never set eyes on that picture.’

  I examine the photograph again and see that my hands are shaking.

  ‘You know, until recently, I was barely aware of you,’ she goes on. ‘And yet, in the last few days, you keep cropping up. What exactly is your relationship with my husband?’

  ‘Not that,’ I say quietly. ‘It’s not what you’re thinking.’

  I can’t bring myself to return her gaze, but I can feel her eyes on me, the air between us pulled taut.

  ‘And the photograph?’

  ‘I’ve no idea why it was there,’ I say briskly, thrusting it back at her but she holds up her hand.

  ‘Keep it. Please.’

  I pull my notebook out of my bag, then stuff the picture into it, trying to cover up how shaken I am.

  She holds the door open for me and watches as I walk out.

  On the step, I turn to her. ‘That phone call Luke made – who was it to?’

  She shrugs in reply.

  ‘Nick is coming,’ she says then.

  I pause on the step. ‘Nick? Nick’s coming here?’

  ‘You seem surprised.’

  My heart is hammering. ‘When?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  With that she closes the door softly, and I am left standing on the limestone step where the sun finds my feet and travels up to my face. Beyond the walls there is silence from the street, and someone in the house must have pressed a button because the gates sl
owly open of their own accord. The scrum of journalists has gone, dispersed as quickly as the rain. The warm air holds the sweet, heavy scent of some flower I don’t recognize, and standing there by the closed door, a strange vertiginous feeling comes over me. For Nick to return brings home to me, with crushing certainty, just how serious this is. Then I cross the cobblelock driveway, walk out into the street and hurry away.

  4. Nick

  I’d intended never to go back. Ever. When I sat on the plane after my mum’s funeral and felt it making its steep ascent, I closed my eyes and released my breath – I felt as if I’d held it the whole time I was home. Never again, I told myself.

  Now here I am, barely a year later, another flight, another intake of breath, only this time I’m not alone.

  Lauren sits beside me, quietly absorbing the great expanse of sky. It seems like the first time we have been alone since our wedding. The past couple of days have been a blur of anxiety and activity – booking flights and hotels. In a way, I’m glad to be on this flight. I can be still and quiet for a few hours and I know I can do nothing until the plane lands and the whole thing cranks up again.

  The plane dips a little as it hits a pocket of air and I give Lauren’s hand an involuntary squeeze, shoot her a smile of reassurance, which she returns before settling back in her seat, eyes closed. The truth is, I’m nervous as hell. I’ve barely slept since I heard the news. My body is swamped in fatigue and I’m too hyped up to rest, nerves jangling, anticipation dancing through every fibre.

  ‘You’ll let me know,’ Murphy had said hoarsely, ‘as soon as you hear anything?’

  His face was lined and swollen when he saw us off at the gate, passing his cap from one hand to the other.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Come here.’ He’d pulled me into his embrace and I’d briefly dropped my head to his shoulder, felt the coarse weave of his cotton shirt against my face. ‘He’ll be all right, Nick. You’ll see. Chances are he’ll be waiting for you at Arrivals.’

  ‘Yeah. I’ll bet you’re right,’ I’d said, but we both knew that was a lie.

  As the plane bumps from one pocket of air to another, the captain announcing that the turbulence will soon pass, all I can think of is the blood. It was the one detail that had jumped out at me when I’d finally got to talk to Julia.