The Years That Followed

by Catherine Dunne

  the things we know now

  “Catherine Dunne’s accomplished, character-driven fiction has gone from strength to strength and locale to locale in eight successive ­novels. . . . The Things We Know Now is . . . a deftly written account of the successful second marriage of a Dublin man, Patrick Grant, to Ella, a psychotherapist, and the heartbreaking tragedy that befalls Daniel, their teenage son. Multivoiced and painfully dark, it reads like a Shakespearean yet quietly feminist tale. It’s also very much a mystery story—with a decidedly brave, if risky, beginning, which Dunne brilliantly pulls off against considerable odds. . . . What makes this particular mystery story such a gripping read, however, are the lengths to which we readers are kept intrigued and tantalized all the way to the final pages.”

  —Sunday Independent

  “The Things We Know Now finds Catherine Dunne in top form, tackling one of the great challenges facing Irish society today while maintaining her gift for exploring complex family dynamics.”

  —Books Ireland

  “Catherine Dunne’s moving new novel looks at what happens when tragedy forces one couple to uncover their son’s other life. . . . Throughout this powerful novel, Dunne shows a keen and compassionate eye for the complexities of family dynamics. . . . She writes brilliantly about the [family’s] pain and bewilderment. . . . Their all-consuming grief and rage are superbly evoked.”

  —Irish Times

  missing julia

  “A compulsive page-turner that held me engrossed deep into the night. Dunne is a very talented storyteller, and, as the threads of the tale unraveled and the tension built, I found it impossible to resist the urge to race on towards the revelation and climax. . . . There is darkness and suspense aplenty in Missing Julia, but so too is there raw emotion in all its stark, vulnerable and fragile humanity.”

  —Irish Times

  “Her writing is captivating.”

  —Irish Independent

  at a time like this

  “A wonderful and utterly convincing evocation of friendship over the years.”

  —Irish Examiner

  “At a Time Like This is an uncompromising read which offers a masterful insight into the complexities that exist between friends, and how forgiveness and understanding are paramount to the survival of any friendship. A fascinating read.”

  —Ulster Tatler

  the walled garden

  “The Walled Garden is that great rarity: a flawless novel.”

  —Express

  “A hugely gratifying book; something to feed the spirit again and again.”

  —Irish Independent

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  For Fergus, with love

  PROLOGUE

  calista

  Extremadura, Friday, July 14, 1989

  * * *

  The July heat is an anvil. The sky its usual oppressive blue. The landscape of Extremadura trembles and shimmers, retreating where it can from the unforgiving glare of noon.

  Calista splashes cold water on her face, pats herself dry with a towel. She makes sure to pat gently: no point in helping to make things worse than they already are. She raises her eyes to the mirror and stops, as though startled by what she sees there. She leans closer. Her unflinching brown eyes look back at her. With one finger, she traces the sudden circles, the newly wrinkled flesh at the corners of her eyes. All those fine lines, she thinks; they will soon be fissures. My face will one day look like some arid Indian riverbed.

  Calista is at once reminded of Maroulla, of how she used to look. The woman seemed to age all at once. It was as though she had stepped straight from youthful to elderly with no gracious hinterland in between. Calista sees now on her own cheeks those same faint explosions of red: tiny veins threading their way towards one another. A premature labyrinth of expired blood. Her breath catches for a moment. Calista hates this, the way she looks so much older than she should.

  She replaces the towel on the rail, smoothing its folds. Before she turns away, she runs her fingers through the silver bob of her hair, tucking a strand or two back into place. She’s vain about her hair: proud of its thickness and its defiant steely hue. She still wants, still needs this daily reminder, this visual marker of the time when, overnight, her hair turned from black to gray. The potency of that transformation is not to be forgotten.

  And Calista has never wished to forget; dyeing her hair would, in some way, have been a betrayal of Imogen and all that had gone before.

  She walks quickly through her bedroom and out the double doors onto the upper terrace, where she moves at once to the shadiest spot. The breeze—such as it is—which coils itself around the hills is at its best here; there is, today, the faintest scent of pine. Calista eases herself onto the lounger, which is placed at the perfect angle to catch every current of cooler air. It also allows her an unrestricted view of the gates of the house, while at the same time hiding her from sight. She lies back and rests her arms across her chest, fingers interlaced.

  Like a corpse might look once it has been laid out, she thinks. And she smiles.

  Tomorrow, perhaps, or the day after, she will drive down to Torre de Santa Juanita and have a glass of rosé with Rosa. Rosé with Rosa: it had made the young woman laugh the first time they’d met. The way that she, Calista, rolled her Spanish r’s. Just like a native, Rosa had said and grinned.

  But I am not a native, Calista thinks. I do not come from here. Sometimes it feels that she is from very far away, centuries away, and she has merely dropped in to finish some ancient story before disappearing again. She feels sad for a moment, sad for how Rosa and her family will feel when all of this blows wide open, as it surely must. Calista has a stab of something that feels like fear. She begins to breathe deeply, slowly, calming herself.

  Calista knows that she needs to hold her nerve: this is no time for confidences. She glances at her watch. She’ll rest now, just for a little while.

  * * *

  Somewhere in the distance, the phone rings. Calista sits up at once. She looks around her, alert, poised to spring. It is as though she is searching for answers in the bright air that surrounds her. It’s too soon, surely, much too soon. Can it be over already?

  Calista leaves the terrace and walks carefully down the stairs. She will not rush. She knows that the answering machine has already kicked in; she will take as much time as she needs. Calista makes her way along the hallway, drawn by the machine’s winking red light. She hesitates for a moment and rests one hand at the base of her throat. She can feel the rapid, steady thump of her heart, its beat pulsing through her fingers. With her free hand, she presses “play.” Then she stands back and waits. In that still, single moment between silence and speech, Calista savors the feel of the cool sandstone tiles under her bare feet.

  There is just the one message, as she’d expected. Very few people have this number. “Aphrodite,” a man’s voice says. “It is done. The transaction is completed.”

  Calista plays the message again. And again. Then she deletes it. She has a fleeting, vivid memory of a man’s face in a mirror—a face she would prefer to forget. She presses “play” one more time to make sure that no trace of this, or of any other message, remains. Then she turns away. Each step she takes now feels new and significant.

&nb
sp; So, Calista thinks as she climbs the stairs. She makes sure to hold fast to the curved handrail as she ascends; it wouldn’t do to lose her footing now, not after all this time. She finds that her hands are trembling, that her legs seem to have lost some of their usual strength. I am so tired, she thinks suddenly, surprised by the realization. But at least this new certainty is good.

  Every day for four years, Calista has imagined this moment. She has wondered how she’ll feel, how she’ll begin to shape a new life, how she will fill the years around it: this absence she has craved for so long.

  For an instant, the air around her seems to pause. The house holds its breath. Calista stops, allows the evening to enfold her. She will sit for a while on the small chair that nestles in the corner of the half landing. It invites repose. She can look out over the countryside from here.

  Just for a few moments. Just until what has happened begins to become clearer. Until she and the house can breathe together once more.

  pilar

  Madrid, Friday, July 14, 1989

  * * *

  Pilar startles as the door to the street swings shut behind her. She reaches out and tries to grab one of the handles, but the three bags of vegetables she’s carrying make her clumsy, slower than usual. The early morning silence ruptures as the door slams; metal clangs against metal. Pilar winces as she feels the sudden vibration under her slippered feet. It is as though the whole building shudders. She takes one anxious moment to watch and wait, in case a pane of glass shatters. But nothing happens.

  She shrugs to herself and turns away. So what if the residents complain? What more can she do? She has already called Juan Pablo to fix the closing mechanism: that door has been acting up since last Thursday. One of those intermittent faults that started several weeks back. The kind that Juan Pablo keeps grumbling about because they are so difficult to repair. The kind that frustrate Pilar more than anything else in the building.

  The sound of the telephone in the portería is shrapnel in the morning air. Pilar hurries across the foyer to answer it, struggling to keep the plastic bags under control. “Sí, señora,” she says. “En seguida.” Immediately. At once. Now.

  Sometimes Pilar wonders whether the residents of her building know any other words. Most of them don’t even see her, of course—this is what Pilar has come to believe. She is an unseen presence: someone who takes in the post, runs errands, keeps the building secure. She makes sure that the residents are spared those unpleasant daily reminders of all that she does for them. Rufina comes every morning only when everyone has already left; no one sees her mops and buckets. No one stumbles into the silent, moving shadow that cleans the dog shit off their floors and polishes the chrome handles of their apartment doors.

  Pilar makes her way back across the marble floor, heading towards the lift. The cool, air-conditioned atmosphere is welcoming after the furnace that rages outside. Even at six in the morning, the heat at the market was oppressive. Pilar had felt a slow stickiness crawl between her breasts and underneath the heaviness of her hair. Stallholders fanned themselves; damp half moons bloomed under the sagging armpits of their T-shirts. There was a musky, animal scent everywhere: sweat trapped by the awnings that had been placed there to defeat the sun.

  All the women were complaining, most of them loudly, about prices; about the corruption of their elected officials; about all that public money about to be wasted on the forthcoming elections—who needed politicians and their fancy suits! You couldn’t open a newspaper these days without finding out about some scandal or other. Water, planning permissions, taxpayers’ money used to fund junkets abroad. The intense heat added a bitter edge to the women’s complaints, more fuel to the fire of their satisfied indignation. Pilar had the feeling that even the most stoic of these elderly, black-garbed shoppers had begun to lose their patience. Never mind mid-July, they were all agreed; these temperatures were still not right, still not normal.

  There are afternoons when Pilar feels that all the oxygen has been sucked out of the air, that it has been replaced by the gritty red dust that is slowly exhaled by long, clammy daylight hours. It settles everywhere around the building, this red dust: above the doors, on the tops of skirting boards. It lurks on the treads of the stairs, too; no matter how often Pilar has Rufina dust and mop and brush all the horizontal surfaces she can find, she cannot defeat its constant rusty presence.

  She steps inside the lift now and presses the button for the second floor. Señor and Señora de Molinos live in the apartment on the right-hand side. She is a little haughty, that one, and Pilar believes that her surname suits her. When agitated, the woman waves her arms around, reminding Pilar of a squat, fat windmill. Her husband is quiet, balding, polite. He raises his hat as he passes the portería, morning and evening. It is a small courtesy, but a constant one, something that Pilar has come to rely upon. She dumps the vegetables at her feet now, prepares herself to press the doorbell. Her fingers are white and pinched from the stretched, painful handles of the plastic bags. Her right hand tingles uncomfortably.

  Señora de Molinos is waiting. She wrenches the door open even before Pilar rings. “Gracias,” she says, her dimpled hands already reaching down for the bags at Pilar’s feet. Her “gracias” is overly sibilant. No matter how hard she tries, Señora de Molinos cannot hide her origins. Somewhere around Almería, Pilar reckons; somewhere in the dirt-poor Andalusian countryside. Pilar has learned how to smell poverty, to winkle it out from wherever it lurks, underneath all of her residents’ ruses; she is not that easily fooled. And the woman makes Pilar’s point for her this morning: she is dressed—overdressed—ready for the street, at this hour! Her too-black hair is piled high on top of her head, glistening stiffly. The scent of the lacquer mixes unpleasantly with whatever heavy perfume she’s wearing: Opium, Pilar thinks. A perfume for dark nights and cold days. A perfume for a much younger woman.

  Pilar looks at the señora’s summer dress, straining lumpily across her belly. She sees the red nails, the none-too-subtle eyeliner, the smudged line of shadow. She sees the spiky, unsightly clumps of mascara, and Pilar cannot but wonder what sort of youth the señora is so valiantly trying to recapture.

  “Gracias,” the señora says once again, nodding and smiling. But all the while, her eyes have been darting above the portera’s head, across the landing to her neighbors’ door, watching, always watching, as though she is about to be caught in some indecent act.

  “You’re welcome,” Pilar says, inclining her head to one side, giving the woman her practiced smile. She doesn’t linger; the señora never likes her to linger. Pilar doesn’t waste her energy, not any longer, in trying to understand the oddities of her residents.

  She reaches down and hands the two remaining bags of onions and aubergines to the señora. She’ll collect the money at the end of the week, as usual. And she has to be fair: the señora does at least say “thank you,” and adds a little something extra on Fridays. It’s not much, mind you, but at least it’s a token.

  Pilar has always graded her residents carefully. At the top of her chart, there are those who are generous, sometimes more than generous. Señor Alexandros, for example—or Mr. Alexander, as he prefers to be called—and his elegant wife, Madam Sandra. Mr. Alexander can be arrogant and bad-tempered, for sure, but he is never tight-fisted.

  He can afford to be generous, as can all of Pilar’s residents: this is not a building, or a neighborhood, for the financially fainthearted.

  * * *

  A few years back, Pilar developed a stoop. Not a real one, of course. She is not yet that old. Almost fifty, she has already outlived her mother. Her father is still alive, in his native village of Torre de Santa Juanita, deep in the Extremaduran countryside—or at least he was three months ago. Pilar still sends money home from time to time, although she has long since stopped trying to influence how her father spends it. Her brothers were supposed to take care of him once he was too old to
work the land. But the older and more infirm he got, the angrier her father became. He is a man who does not like to be looked after.

  Pilar feels sorry for her eldest brother, Paco, who lives in the home place. She has little time, though, for the other two, Javier and Carlos, who still live, resentfully, in that same small village they’ve known all their lives. Paco never married; it is he who will inherit the olive groves. The wives of Javier and Carlos are as bitter about this as the olive flesh they help to harvest. Pilar has seen it on too many occasions: the contempt in their eyes, their thinly veiled aggression towards gentle Paco, their endless squabbling over money.

  And in the midst of it all, her father, Miguel, sits like some feudal lord, surrounded by his vassals. Truculent; overbearing; unwilling to hand over the reins. Pilar often wonders how Paco stands it.

  As well as her father’s rage, it seems to Pilar that the more competent her three brothers became, the more their father envied them. When his sons became adults, it was as though he saw in their burgeoning lives a mockery of his own diminishing one. He refused to leave the farm after Pilar’s mother died. He stayed; he still stays. He lashes out, again and again. Once she’d left home, Pilar rarely returned to visit. And if it weren’t for the promise she’d made to Señor Gómez all those years ago, she would have stopped going back altogether.

  There are days even still when Pilar feels guilty for leaving. Over the years, she often felt that she was living on undeserved time in Madrid. Time granted to her in exchange for escaping her father, her brothers, her village, her mother’s fate.

  Pilar always knew that her real life had been wrenched away from her more than twenty years ago; she knew it even at the time. Whenever she came close to reclaiming it, it slipped away from her again. On those occasions, she blamed herself bitterly for her own lack of courage. She came to know the ashy taste of regret.