I saw him nod at DeVere and the waiter closed the wine list.
‘Shiraz,’ said Aidan.
I nodded as he took a warm roll from the basket on the table and broke it in half, scattering crumbs across his plate and on to the green linen tablecloth. He frowned and dabbed at those crumbs with the tips of his fingers. I’d always liked Aidan’s fingers because they were long and sensitive and did wonderful things to my body. Less and less in the last few years, though.
He glanced up and caught me watching him.
‘What?’ he asked.
I shook my head.
‘I should have booked the Mariner’s Reef tonight,’ said Aidan.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Twenty-five years. More appropriate to have the classier restaurant, don’t you think?’
I shook my head. ‘I’m not a classy woman.’
He laughed. ‘Of course you are.’
‘Not really.’
‘You know, it still bothers you, doesn’t it?’ He looked at me curiously. ‘Your so-called humble beginnings.’
‘Not that humble after all,’ I said. ‘And no, Aidan, it doesn’t bother me in the slightest.’
‘What then?’ He frowned. ‘You’ve been behaving oddly ever since we got here. As though you’re not really enjoying yourself.’
Our starters (both of us had chosen crab) were placed in front of us. I squeezed fresh lemon over mine.
‘The children went to a lot of trouble,’ said Aidan. ‘The least you can do is enjoy yourself.’
‘I didn’t ask them to.’ My words were sharper than I intended and I saw a flash of surprise in Aidan’s eyes.
‘I think it shows that we reared two wonderful kids,’ he said after a moment’s hesitation.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m glad we did that.’
‘Lots of people said it wouldn’t work,’ said Aidan. ‘They thought that we were too young and that the strain of the twins would be too much for us. But they were wrong.’
I nodded.
‘What they forget is that you can make things work if you try hard enough.’
‘Depends on what outcome you want, I guess,’ I said.
‘What more could we want?’ He smiled at me and then slid his hand into his jacket pocket. He took out a small red box which he pushed across the table towards me. ‘Just something,’ he said, ‘to let you know how much I appreciate you and everything you’ve done.’
I took the box and opened it. A pair of diamond earrings in a silver setting sparkled under the light of the table’s candle. I touched one of them and the colours seemed to crackle beneath my fingers.
‘They’re beautiful,’ I said.
‘I got them yesterday,’ he told me. ‘When you were talking to that old dear. I went into town and bought them.’
I’d noticed he’d gone missing for a while but it hadn’t bothered me. Aidan was never very good at sitting on a beach anyway.
‘Happy anniversary,’ he said, raising the glass of shiraz.
I bit my lip. I didn’t know what to do. To ruin everything or not? I hadn’t intended to, not on this trip, but it was as though my emotions were in a mental washing machine, tumbling this way and that, getting caught up in each other until I didn’t know how I was supposed to feel.
He was looking at me with a puzzled expression on his face.
This wasn’t where I’d intended to be. For today, for my wedding anniversary, I’d planned to go to a beauty salon and have a million different things done to me so that I’d look ten years younger. For Christmas . . . I hadn’t known what I was going to do about Christmas. Everyone wants the perfect family Christmas. But the twins were both scheduled to work on Christmas Day. We wouldn’t have had a perfect family Christmas anyway. And what was the point in pretending any more?
We were never really going to be the perfect family. We looked it, of course. But then lots of families look perfect when you know, deep down, that they can’t possibly be. We weren’t perfect because Aidan didn’t really love me and I didn’t really love him. We respected each other, more or less. And we cared about each other. There were times when we had great sex together. But love . . . we’d never fallen in love.
I lifted my own glass slowly.
There had been other women. I knew that. Over twenty-five years is three a lot? I’d found receipts in his jacket. I’d overheard snatches of hurried phone calls. I’d seen a gift-wrapped box at the back of a drawer that had never been given to me. Three women. That I knew of.
And one man. I swirled the red wine in the glass in front of me. My man. Brett. I’d known him for six months and it was a mad passion. Even now, thinking about him made my stomach contract. It was for Brett that I wanted to look ten years younger. Brett, the yoga instructor at the gym who could bend his body into innumerable poses and who knew my body better than I knew it myself. Brett with the long dark hair and the soft dark eyes. Brett, whose touch sent me into a frenzy of desire. Brett who told me he loved me.
Brett who’d asked me to live with him.
Brett who loved me.
Wasn’t I entitled to something for myself after all these years? After giving up my job to take care of the twins? After always putting Aidan and Aidan’s career first because, let’s face it, he’d married me. He hadn’t left me to fend for myself. He’d done the decent thing and so I had to do the decent thing too and look after him. Be the perfect wife to his perfect husband. I was obliged to do that. I had no choice.
And now the kids had grown up and, OK, they hadn’t exactly moved away yet but they would soon, and I wanted some time to myself. I wanted to do my own thing. Resume my life. The life I’d wanted to have before the dark blue dress and the chiffon skirt with the sparkly stars. I wanted to get a job. I wanted to have sex in unusual places. (With Brett I already had. We’d made love in the open air; in the gym’s private sauna; on the train to Belfast . . . it had been exciting. Not like with Aidan. Not the chore that our love-making had become.)
I didn’t know why Brett loved me. But I knew that I loved him. And I wanted to be with him. It wouldn’t matter to Aidan. He could cope on his own. He was always better at coping than me.
‘Gráinne?’ His voice was gentle.
My fingers closed over the jewellery box with the diamond earrings.
‘Twenty-five years,’ he said. ‘Ups and downs in those twenty-five years. Good times and bad times. But we made it this far.’
But I could have a different twenty-five years. With Brett. Twenty-five years of someone loving me because of me, not because I was the mother of their children. Not because I knew not to buy the brand of washing powder that brought them out in a rash. Not because I was always there for them, even when they’d betrayed me with another woman.
Would Brett betray me?
Probably.
Would I betray him?
I hadn’t thought I’d betray Aidan. But what did he expect with his late nights and his other women? What did he think would happen? That I’d sit at home and forgive him every single time?
‘We got a message earlier,’ said Aidan. ‘From the twins. Wishing us a happy anniversary.’
I swirled the wine in my glass again. I could smell the black fruit and pepper aromas of the shiraz.
‘They’ll be in debt for the rest of their lives.’ I didn’t look up from the glass.
‘They wanted us to remember this trip,’ he said. ‘It was good of them.’
‘We should have told them to keep their money,’ I said.
He put his own glass back on the table.
‘This isn’t what you wanted, is it?’ He sounded sad.
‘It’s lovely,’ I said, ‘but no.’
‘It wasn’t what I wanted either.’
We never talked, Aidan and me. Not about ourselves. Not about what we wanted or what we felt. We talked about the children. We talked about his job. We talked about the house. But not about each other.
He was balding. I’d noticed it over the last few years
but it was only now I realised how high his forehead had become. How it had actually merged into the crown of his head. And how grey his hair was. So was mine, of course, but I camouflaged it with a salon dye every five weeks.
He’d had three women. I’d only ever had him. Until Brett.
‘The grass is always greener,’ he said.
I looked up at him, startled.
‘You think that something will be better, more exciting, will give you what you’ve always looked for. But it doesn’t.’
‘No?’
‘We did good with the kids. Both of us.’
I nodded.
‘We didn’t do so well with each other.’
There was a lump in my throat.
‘I wasn’t always the best husband.’
I said nothing.
‘And maybe it’s not to my credit that I never left. Maybe it would have been a fairer thing to do.’
Still I said nothing.
‘I didn’t stay because of the kids, though. I stayed because of you.’
A bit late, I thought, to throw that one at me. I’d been devastated each time I’d found out about another woman.
‘I made excuses for myself,’ said Aidan. ‘I told myself that I’d been trapped into a marriage that I didn’t want. That I’d been too young. That life had played a dirty trick on me.’
‘I didn’t have that luxury.’ I regained my voice. ‘I was too busy to find someone to make excuses about.’
He nodded. ‘But no matter what,’ he said, ‘it was a good twenty-five years.’
‘You think so?’
He nodded again. ‘I loved you. I didn’t think I did at first. But later . . . I loved you.’
But sometimes it isn’t enough. I was going to say that to him but I didn’t, because if I said it about Aidan I should also say it about Brett.
‘Do what you have to do, in the end,’ he told me. ‘But enjoy this holiday now.’
‘How do you know I’m thinking of doing anything at all?’ I asked.
‘We’ve been married for twenty-five years,’ he said. ‘More than that, really, when you count the registry office. Of course I know things.’
I smiled faintly.
‘So consider this a little time out,’ he told me. ‘From whatever.’
‘You’re being very calm.’
‘I always am,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t mean I don’t feel things.’
‘What do you want from me?’ I asked.
‘I want you to pretend that we’ve only just met,’ he said. ‘That it’s the first time all over again.’
‘I can’t do that,’ I said.
‘I want you to make love to me in a boat.’
I looked at him in surprise.
‘There’s one tied up to the jetty.’
‘I know. But . . .’
‘Or in the hammock near the beach.’
‘Aidan . . .’
‘I want you to believe me when I tell you that there’s never been anyone else.’
‘Don’t lie to me,’ I said.
‘Never anyone else who mattered.’
He’d never talked to me like this before. Brett talked to me like this all the time.
‘Can we save it?’ he said.
‘I don’t know,’ I told him.
‘I want to try.’
I never thought I’d hear him say that. And I thought of my friend Madge whose first husband had broken her heart. She’d married the second one for his money. ‘Love is for fools,’ she’d said.
I know why love is for fools. Because it makes us do foolish things. And sometimes we don’t know what we really want.
‘The thing is,’ said Aidan, ‘we’re here on this island. We might as well enjoy it. Regardless of what happens when we get home.’
‘You think so?’
‘Why not?’ he said. ‘What’s the point in being miserable?’
I smiled a little.
‘So . . . we pretend?’
‘If that’s what it takes.’
‘OK,’ I said.
We should never have got married. And yet it hadn’t been the worst mistake of my life. Maybe I hadn’t actually made the worst mistake of my life yet. Maybe I’d never make it. I really didn’t know.
‘So – happy anniversary,’ he said, raising his glass again.
And I clinked my glass against his as I wished him a happy anniversary too. Even though I still didn’t know whether I’d try the greener grass or not.
PHONE A FRIEND
I had a headache. The sort that the advertisers describe as a tense, nervous headache, where you know that it’s the fact that your shoulders are knotted up which is making the pain start at the back of your neck before pounding at your temples. My shoulders had been knotted up for hours and my head was aching because it had been a terrible day, one where nothing I could do was right. First off, I was late for work: leaves on the line or some kind of pathetic railway excuse for the train not showing up. I clattered into the office knowing that it was going to be busy and then spilled the double-mocha coffee I’d grabbed on the way in all over the brochures I’d spent ages getting together the previous evening for a presentation my boss was giving in an hour’s time. So it was back to the printer and the photocopier and the binder – by eleven my head was already splitting.
Christine, my boss, was less than sympathetic and didn’t accept the leaves-on-the-line excuse for my lateness. She blamed it on what she called my erratic, juvenile lifestyle of late nights and too much drink. Sometimes she had a point when she ranted at me but not today. The night before hadn’t been a late night. It should’ve been because I was supposed to be going out with my boyfriend, Ian, but he’d phoned to say that he was busy and he couldn’t make it and he’d see me tonight instead – maybe. Ian’s phone call worried me. It was the third time he’d been too busy to meet me in the last month and I was getting the impression that he was cooling off on things. I didn’t really want him to cool off on me. Ian is strikingly attractive, well-fancied by every girl who sees him, and (the icing on the cake) he’s loaded. Not exactly personally loaded but his folks have a huge house on Sorrento Road with its own gym, swimming pool and, I kid you not, full-time housekeeper. Ian was a good catch and I didn’t intend to let him go without a fight. Besides, I was crazy about him and it wasn’t just because of his looks and his money. It was because we had good times together and our late nights were usually very late and very exciting. The trouble was that he also had a very exciting life when he wasn’t with me. He works in advertising and he’s forever going to media bashes at trendy places. Last night, besides being too busy to call me, he’d also been photographed at the opening of the latest hotspot nightclub with a gorgeous ginger-haired girlette hanging out of him. The picture had been in the Independent. When I asked about it he simply laughed and said that she was part of the package. I was afraid to ask what the rest of the package actually was.
Although I’d spoken to him already that morning, I’d tried ringing him again during the few moments of unfrenzied office activity later in the day, but I kept getting his voice-mail, and I didn’t want to leave a message. I didn’t wish to appear madly needy but I wanted him to know that where he was and what he was doing mattered to me. Because, as far as I was concerned, Ian Travers wasn’t going to join my list of the ones who got away. His name wasn’t going to appear after Les, John, David, Stephen, Alan, Michael, Stuart, Dermot, Declan . . . God, I thought miserably as I got onto the train to Sandycove, my track record was utterly abysmal.
I wondered why. It wasn’t as though I kept picking out the same type of loser in a different body in some kind of co-dependent want-to-get-hurt type of relationship. You know the type of thing the self-help books accuse you of. They were all very different kinds of blokes; some were fun-loving party-types; some were more intellectual; and some (God help me) were sporty. Going out with Stuart had meant spending Saturday afternoons on the touchline watching him get covered in mud at the local rugby
ground and wondering exactly how dangerous a sport it was – it seemed to me that the major skill was not in scoring a try but in being able to walk intact off the pitch afterwards. I think it was my inability to find any positives in the sport whatsoever that finished me and Stuart off even though he was actually a kind and decent sort of bloke.
Anyway, I was determined that my relationship with Ian would be different. And mostly it was, especially since he wasn’t the sporty type either. But I didn’t make the mistakes I’d made with Alan and Michael either. I wasn’t too clingy or too possessive. I didn’t moan at him about going to launches instead of having romantic meals for two. I never freaked out when he told me that he was working with models/actressess/whatevers. I trusted him. And I wanted to be with him. I wanted him to be The One.
A girl sat in the seat opposite me. We were lucky to have seats at all, it was six o’clock and the train was crowded. But sometimes you get lucky. I was kind of hoping that finding the seat was an omen for what would happen in the future. (I like omens and signs. I wouldn’t say that I was superstitious exactly but if I see one magpie I look around frantically until I see another one. And I don’t walk under ladders – well, something could fall down on you, couldn’t it, so it’s actually a superstition that makes perfect sense.) Anyway, I thought that finding a seat was telling me that I would find my place with Ian too. I wondered if the girl who’d squeezed into that last available space had any karmic thoughts about it herself.
She was pretty in a way that I could never be. Her curly, fair hair tumbled from beneath a denim baseball cap. She wore a shocking-pink jacket over a plain white T-shirt and her long legs were encased in the tightest jeans imaginable. I had a horrible, fleeting thought that she’d be more suitable for Ian and his media life than me. You see I’m a bit overweight, with short dark hair, and short stubby legs . . . I’m making myself sound totally unattractive and I know I’m not but sometimes, despite my good features like huge blue eyes and a kind of button-nose which loads of men think is cute, sometimes I just feel ugly. And looking at the Barbie clone opposite me made me feel very ugly indeed.
She was listening to a personal stereo. I’ve got a bit lost on the whole personal music bit and so I’ve no idea whether people’s music is now on MP3 players or Walkmans or cassettes. But the funny thing about it is that no matter what system they’re using and no matter what kind of music they’re listening to, it all sounds exactly the same when you hear it echoing from their so-called personal headsets. A kind of thunka-thunka-thunka bass with a tinny treble overlaying it. I mean, it could be gangsta-rap or disco-diva stuff but the beat still sounds the same when you overhear it. I thought she was a bit disco-diva myself but that was just guessing. Regardless, the relentless tuneless sound was getting to me. I could feel my shoulders bunch up again and the headache take up another prominent spot at the back of my head.
From The Heart Page 6
