‘It’s Carl who should be mortified,’ said Lucinda. ‘Everyone else is getting a good laugh out of it.’
‘Between him and Colette, though, I’m a laughing stock. I’m not a good mother,’ added Sarah. ‘And it’s all Jenny’s fault.’
‘You’re a normal mother and you can’t blame any of your imagined shortcomings on Jenny.’
‘See, that’s the thing,’ said Sarah. ‘She had experiences she kept to herself, and if she hadn’t – well, everything might have been different for both of us.’
‘Her experience was dramatically different from mine, though,’ conceded Lucinda. ‘There wasn’t much she could’ve done for me. Pascal stepped up to the plate. George legged it.’
‘All the more bizarre that she hasn’t married him since.’
‘Maybe there’s a reason,’ Lucinda said. ‘Maybe he’s married already.’
‘I think we would have known.’
‘Hey, what’s one more secret?’
‘Don’t even go there.’
‘Perhaps it was hard to do,’ said Lucinda. ‘You know how it is with a lie. You get tangled up in it and somehow it seems easier to go along with it than admit the truth.’
Sarah knew what Lucinda meant. But it didn’t mean that she still wasn’t angry with her eldest sister.
Chapter 18
‘So this isn’t going to be easy,’ Jenny told Steffie.
‘Harder than admitting you and Dad never got married?’ asked Steffie.
‘Yes.’
Steffie was unsettled by the sudden seriousness in her mother’s voice.
‘Why are you telling me? Why not everyone?’
‘Because it concerns you most of all,’ said Jenny.
Steffie looked at her in puzzlement.
‘How?’ she asked.
Jenny took a deep breath.
By the time they’d been together a few years, Jenny and Pascal didn’t talk about getting married any more. They were too busy with two children and two homes to give much thought to something that had become vaguely irrelevant to them. Jenny thought that perhaps Pascal had forgotten that the apostolic benediction wasn’t real and the rings they wore on their wedding fingers were the cheap ones they’d bought in a shop in Rome. In many ways it was how she thought of it herself. After all, they lived their lives as though they were married. What difference would a piece of paper actually make? So she allowed the subject to fade into the background while she busied herself with Roisin and Davey and spent her free time doing charcoal sketches of the children and turning Aranbeg into the place that one day, far into the future, they’d retire to.
Pascal was equally committed to Aranbeg, but he was also doing extremely well at work. Jenny celebrated with him each time he was promoted, and was thrilled when he was chosen to be Ireland’s representative at a month-long symposium and study group in Brussels. She brought the children to the airport to wave him goodbye and then decamped with them to Aranbeg, not caring that they were missing the last two days of the school year. Roisin and Davey were delighted to be back in Wexford, while Jenny decided to enrol in an art class to improve her technique. Even though Pascal had insisted they frame some of her sketches, she didn’t think they were good enough to be on the walls of the house. Her plan was to have mastered portraits by the time he came home.
It had been a long time since she had done anything solely for herself, and she was excited when she arrived for her first lesson. She listened intently as the teacher, Johnny Macken, talked about the intricacies of the human form, and what they’d be working on during the course. It was only as he described what they’d be doing that she realised they’d be drawing nudes. She was annoyed with herself for feeling slightly embarrassed, and dismissed her thoughts by wondering how difficult it would actually be to draw a naked person.
And then the model arrived and she gasped. Because, fully clothed, he was the most attractive man she’d ever seen in her life. A blond, blue-eyed demigod, in a white T-shirt and ripped jeans. He went behind a screen and emerged wearing nothing more than a small towel around his waist. Jenny knew she wasn’t the only one who was stunned by him. She could feel the tension crackling around the room as she studied the lean body and washboard abs so taut they made the Calvin Klein jeans man look flabby and unfit. When she glanced around the room she could see that everyone’s eyes were fixed on the model. She wasn’t surprised.
Johnny Macken, however, appeared completely unmoved by such perfection. He began the class, talking to them about the line of action and how to sketch in the abs as a single unit before defining them.
‘The outer calf is higher than the underside,’ he said. ‘Don’t forget that. And don’t forget where your light is coming from.’
Jenny was finding it hard to put out of her mind the fact that, apart from Pascal, the model was the only man she had ever seen naked in her life. Well, almost naked, because the towel was now placed with careful artistry over his groin. She tried to keep her eyes on his perfect face, perfect torso and perfect legs. But they were continually drawn towards the towel and what lay beneath.
After a while, however, she found that she was concentrating on the drawing rather than the man. She worked hard to get the swell of his biceps and the curve of his neck exactly right. And his face – she wanted to capture the expression in his eyes. The one that seemed to be saying that he was a descendant of the gods. She spent a lot of time on his eyes but she was dissatisfied with the result. Compared to the living man, her picture was flat and lifeless. She eventually put down her charcoal in frustration.
‘Pretty good, Jenny,’ said Johnny when he came to look at her efforts. ‘You’ve captured him very well.’
‘But not well enough,’ she told him. ‘I’ve got the pose, but I haven’t got him.’
‘That will come,’ said Johnny. ‘Gregory will be here again next week.’
Jenny didn’t know how she’d wait a whole week to see him again. Every inch of him was already seared into her brain. She wondered if they’d have the opportunity to speak with him, but as soon as the class was finished, he disappeared behind the screen and walked out of the back door before they’d even realised he’d gone.
She spent the next few days sketching him, filling her artist’s pad with close-ups of his eyes, his nose, his mouth, his torso, his arms and his legs. She concentrated on each individual part of him, hoping that she could bring them all together to represent the complete person. When she arrived at the workshop the following Saturday, she was eager to get it right this time.
He sat in the same pose and with the same expression while they worked with quiet determination.
‘Better,’ said Johnny when she’d finished. ‘Better lines, better definition.’
‘I still haven’t got the essence of him,’ she said in frustration.
‘Put yourself inside his head,’ said Johnny. ‘Think what he’s thinking.’
‘I don’t know what he’s thinking, that’s the problem.’
Johnny grinned. ‘Try to figure it out.’
Jenny considered Johnny’s words as she went home. What was going through Gregory’s mind as he sat in front of them? The past? The present? The future? Someone he’d once loved? Someone he’d lost? What gave him that look of invincibility, of being separate from the rest of the world? Of not needing to be a part of it. Regret? Contentment? She worked her way through all those emotions as she sketched and sketched again.
For the third and final week his pose was different. He stood with his back to them, this time without any towel. It was easier to draw him when she didn’t have to think about his expression, Jenny thought, and yet she knew that it was still the same. Still remote and still inaccessible.
‘You’ve nailed it this time,’ Johnny said. ‘Great work.’
‘You think?’ She looked at the drawing, not seeing where she’d done well, only the errors she’d made.
‘Definitely.’
‘Everyone else has done bette
r.’
‘Not much,’ said Johnny. ‘Maybe others are technically stronger. But yours has personality.’
He clapped his hands and thanked them all. Gregory had disappeared behind the screen again, but this time he came back into the room and looked at the drawings.
‘They’re good,’ he said as he studied them. ‘Really good.’ And then he stopped in front of the one Jenny had done the previous week, of him sitting staring into the distance, and frowned. ‘Was that really how I looked?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I can’t get your expression right. I tried very hard. But you’re like a male Mona Lisa.’
Gregory laughed. ‘I’ve been called a lot of names, but never Mona Lisa.’
‘You’re … Australian?’ she hazarded.
‘I’m from New Zealand,’ he said. ‘Here for a few weeks to study agricultural methods.’
‘And sidelining in modelling?’
He grinned. ‘I’ve done it before. Apparently I have a good body to draw.’
‘That’s true.’ She thought she sounded like a groupie and she blushed. ‘But that expression … What the hell were you thinking?’
‘You want to know? You really want to know?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have coffee with me and I’ll tell you,’ he said.
It came as a shock to her to realise that she hadn’t had coffee alone with a man other than Pascal since before they’d gone to Rome together. She didn’t know any men with whom she could have coffee. But it was nothing more than a friendly drink. So she said yes.
Chapter 19
Steffie refilled the glasses as Jenny paused for breath. She hadn’t said a word while her mother had been speaking, but now she looked at her with a wary expression in her eyes.
‘Do I really want to know what’s coming next?’ she asked. ‘Or can I guess?’
‘I never meant to have an affair with him,’ Jenny told her. ‘I loved your dad, I really did. I still do. But Gregory was like no one I’d ever met before.’
‘I guess nude New Zealand sheep farmers aren’t ten a penny in Wexford,’ said Steffie. ‘How long did it go on for?’
‘Until just before your father came home from Brussels,’ said Jenny.
Their affair had been intense and all-consuming. From the moment they’d walked out of the coffee shop together and she’d driven him to the converted outhouse on a farm about fifteen minutes away, she’d known that she was going to sleep with him. And as soon as they’d stepped over the threshold, they began peeling the clothes off each other, Jenny finally touching the body she’d drawn so many times, feeling the bumps and the curves and the ridges that until now she’d only known in two dimensions.
It was too late to walk away.
Besides, she didn’t want to.
‘I don’t think you should be telling me this, Mum.’ Steffie was doing her best to hide her embarrassment. ‘You don’t need to justify it to me. You had an affair. I’m not happy about it, but I realise that these things happen sometimes. Does Dad know?’ A thought suddenly struck her. ‘Is that why he never married you? He was too upset?’
‘It was a long time ago,’ said Jenny. ‘Pascal doesn’t bear grudges, you should know that.’
‘Did you keep in touch with Gregory? Do you … do you still love him, is that it? Did you not leave Dad because of us?’
‘Of course I don’t still love him. What d’you take me for?’ Jenny shook her head. ‘It’s not that at all, Steffie. It’s … Let me explain.’
The day before he left was a glorious Thursday when the sky was blue, the meadows green and the heat of summer hung in the air. She was lying, sleepy and sated, in the tangle of sheets on his bed when he propped himself up on one arm.
‘Are you sure you don’t want to leave that old man of yours and come with me to New Zealand?’ he asked.
She thought of the dream she’d once had to travel the world, to live in Rome, to be a painter. She’d done none of these things. She’d settled down with Pascal and become a housewife, although not the sort of domestic goddess type that so many other women seemed to be. Her life outside the home was limited, and her paintings merely adequate despite what Johnny Macken might have said about them. Gregory was giving her the opportunity to embrace a new life, to be a different person. To be the Jenny she’d thought she could be.
Or was he? As she gazed at him, she reflected that by going to New Zealand, she’d simply be replacing one man with another. Because she’d be living with Gregory on his sheep farm, wouldn’t she, and that surely wasn’t any more glamorous than living in Ireland. When he came back from a day doing whatever it was that sheep farmers did, he’d want her to have dinner waiting for him. It was all sultry sex now, but it wouldn’t stay that way. She was foolish but she wasn’t stupid. Besides, there were the children to think about. Leaving Pascal wasn’t impossible, but how could she walk away from Roisin and Davey?
She knew the answer to that.
She couldn’t.
She knew that he knew that too. That Roisin and Davey were actually his passport to freedom, because no woman ever walked away from her children. At least, no woman that she knew. And she wasn’t going to be the first.
It was late by the time she arrived home. She walked into the kitchen, her hair unkempt and her eyes bright.
‘Are you all right, Mum?’ asked Roisin. ‘We were getting worried.’
‘Worried? What on earth were you worried about?’
‘It’s nearly seven o’clock,’ Roisin said, unable to mask her anxiety. ‘You’re never out at seven o’clock.’
‘I’m so, so sorry.’ She gathered the two of them to her and hugged them, inhaling the scent of them, knowing that she would never have left them. ‘I met a friend and we were talking and I didn’t realise how late it was. Give me a second to comb my hair and then I’ll make dinner.’
She went upstairs and looked at herself in the mirror over the sink. Her eyes were red because she’d cried on the way home. She’d known it would come to this, that he’d leave and she’d stay, but she felt as though her heart would break all the same. She told herself that she hadn’t really been in love with him, that it had been nothing more than a brief fling, but it had never felt like that. It had been real and glorious and liberating and wonderful. And she was saying goodbye to those feelings because she really didn’t have a choice.
It seemed to her that she was always doing things because she didn’t have a choice. Because she’d backed herself into a corner so that there was only ever one way out.
‘You look a lot better now,’ said Roisin when she returned to the kitchen, her hair brushed, her lips glossed and her body spritzed with Nina Ricci.
‘I’m absolutely fine,’ Jenny assured her.
It wasn’t until nearly seven weeks later that she realised she was also pregnant.
Chapter 20
It took a moment before it sank in, and then Steffie stared wide-eyed at her mother.
‘Pregnant. With Gregory’s baby?’
Jenny nodded.
‘Oh my God,’ said Steffie. ‘So what did you do— Oh!’
It had taken even longer for the full weight of what Jenny had said to register.
‘You mean – you were pregnant with me? I’m the baby?’ Her words were strangled.
‘Yes,’ said Jenny.
Steffie could feel the blood draining from her face. Her heart was pumping and there was a rushing sound in her ears. The focus of her vision narrowed so that it seemed that she was looking at Jenny through a tunnel. She felt sick.
‘Are you all right?’ Jenny’s voice was anxious.
Steffie pressed her fingers against her eyes and rocked her body backwards and forwards.
‘Steffie?’
‘Don’t talk to me. Not yet.’ She was finding it hard to speak. She couldn’t formulate words to encapsulate her thoughts. She wasn’t even sure what she was actually thinking. All she knew was that everything she had ever thought about hersel
f was untrue. Pascal, the man she’d always looked up to, wasn’t her father. Roisin wasn’t her sister. Davey wasn’t her brother. And Jenny, her mother, the person she’d loved and trusted most in the world, had betrayed all of them. She’d betrayed Pascal by sleeping with another man. She’d betrayed Roisin and Davey both by her actions and by her inaction in telling them that she and Pascal weren’t married to each other. And she’d betrayed Steffie by all of that and, more shockingly, by only now revealing that Pascal wasn’t her father.
Steffie continued to rock silently on the bed as she tried to put order on the chaos in her head. Roisin and Davey were still her half-sister and half-brother, she told herself. They were still related to each other. It wasn’t such a big deal. Not really. Yet Pascal. Her dad. But not her dad. She wasn’t related to him at all. She wasn’t, as she’d always thought, half him and half Jenny. She was half Jenny and half a man who lived on the other side of the world. She didn’t want to believe that. She didn’t want to believe that Pascal wasn’t really her father. It couldn’t be true. People often said that she looked like him. They said she had his nose. And his chin. And that she had the same trick of rubbing her fingers across her eyebrows when she was worried. She was doing it now. She snatched her hand away from her face and stared at Jenny.
‘Are you positive about this?’ Her voice shook. ‘The thing is, if you were sleeping with this man but you were with Dad too – well, you could be wrong, couldn’t you?’ She was saying the words while at the same time knowing that Jenny would never have told her this if it wasn’t true.
Jenny shook her head. ‘He was away,’ she reminded her. ‘For a month. The dates didn’t add up. And later, I did a test. I’m really sorry, Steffie.’
Steffie swallowed hard a couple of times. She could feel tears welling up in her eyes but she didn’t want to cry. Because if she cried, her mother would try to comfort her, and she didn’t want Jenny to comfort her. She didn’t want the comfort of someone she no longer believed in. She got up from the bed and went to the window, where she stared out over the garden. The rain was pummelling down harder than ever and the mosquito torches they’d placed so carefully earlier looked bleak and forlorn.
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