Temptation
Page 14
She didn’t even try phoning Peadar as she got herself ready. If he wanted to talk then at least he knew where she was. With every evening the babysitter got chattier but Alison wanted to get away and not have to talk about last night.
The dining room seemed quieter this evening. Chris had either finished eating or not yet come down. She wondered if he had carried on drinking all afternoon. She treated herself to hot oysters with cucumber and butter sauce, then breast of Chicken Hibernia. The iced water was nice and she asked for a second jug. But it seemed to reactivate the rum in her system instead of diluting it. Jack Fitzgerald came over to check she was all right.
‘Sally told me what Chris Conway did,’ Alison said. ‘That was nice.’
‘It was,’ Jack Fitzgerald agreed. ‘He did it this morning when paying for himself.’
‘But I thought he was staying till Friday?’
‘He said he wanted to pay up front in case he slips away early. He’s a free man, I suppose, able to come and go as he pleases.’
Alison finished her meal and walked down to the Slaney Room where tonight’s band was setting up. It was a quarter to ten. Women from various groups smiled as if in sympathy with her plight, inviting her to join them. Their looks made her feel good about herself. But she went upstairs where it was quieter. Chris must have eaten earlier and now sat in his usual place. Feeling decisive, she ordered an Irish coffee for herself and another liqueur for Chris from a lounge girl before walking over to sit uninvited beside him.
The drinks arrived and they sipped them in what at first seemed like companionable silence. But Chris wasn’t just quiet tonight: she realised his mood was sombre. It drained her of the nervous euphoria the earlier rums had caused. She saw herself more plainly, not as someone coping heroically with three children on holidays but a woman pampered by her husband’s money in a luxury hotel. For all that people talked about valuing stay–at–home mothers, this was her true status here. Almost every other woman present held down an outside job, shunting children between crèches and childminders. They mightn’t say it aloud but some even regarded her giving up a career to mind children as a sort of betrayal.
Out among the distant lights of Wexford town battered wives in hostels would kill for the chance to mind their children here. Mothers whose partners had died or done a runner. Coping with life’s random throw of the dice. Happiness lost in one turn of a steering wheel or glance of temptation in a crowded bar. Surely Peadar wasn’t crazy enough to risk their happiness? Was she? How much reassurance did she need that she still existed as herself? Sleep well. Maybe Peadar was driving beyond Rathnew now, with the dark mountainy road falling before him.
The band started playing. Chris hailed a lounge girl, asking for the same again. The drinks came and he let the girl keep the change, though it was an enormous tip. But Alison felt it wasn’t done to impress her, any more than his generosity to Sally had been. He hardly seemed to notice the money.
‘Did you sleep this afternoon?’ she asked.
‘I don’t sleep much. I can’t bear the dreams.’ He stared down at the dancers below. ‘Often I’m in a car out of control, spinning. I look across and see three heads staring at me from the dashboard, convinced I’m going to save them.’
Alison put her hand across the small table. She touched his fingers, felt his wedding ring. She wanted to comfort him or maybe stop him talking. He allowed her fingers to rest on his for a moment. Then he moved his hand away.
‘Not all dreams are bad,’ Chris said. ‘Some are just ordinary moments, walking them to school or cooking dinner. I don’t know how long dreams last, but at least I’m with them that long.’ He sipped his whiskey. ‘The mundane ones are worse actually. Insidious. Creating such an illusion of normality that when I wake I’m not sure which world is reality and which is nightmare. That can be hard, the momentary hope you hate yourself for.’
Alison felt a sudden resentment, like she had been suffocating for days inside the vacuum of his finely controlled grief.
‘It hasn’t exactly been all roses for me.’
He looked across. ‘I’m sorry,’ he replied, ‘I’ve become self–absorbed. But Peadar’s done well, hasn’t he? You always seemed made for each other.’
‘Did we now?’
Her tone caused Chris to make a self–deprecating gesture. ‘Peadar always knew what he wanted. He still does by the look of him. An express train going straight from A to B.’
‘How did you know I wanted to go there with him?’
‘Are you saying you didn’t?’ he asked. ‘Surely there have been stops in between where you could have got off.’
There seemed a deliberate undertone in the remark.
‘This isn’t one of them,’ she replied sharply.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he professed. But his eyes unnerved her. Chris had always been incapable of moving in a straight line. Everything was a mental game of chess, where you never knew what was coincidental or planned. Maybe he’d expected Sally to tell her and manoeuvre him into a better light. She remembered him cajoling people into switching rotas so he could get out on a library van with her, then vehemently denying having done so.
‘Did you know I was going to be staying here?’ she asked.
‘What?’ He sounded genuinely surprised.
‘Peadar and I always stay here on this week. Any staff member could tell you. Did you plan all this?’
‘All what?’ Chris was angry now. ‘Did I drive Peadar’s builder bankrupt? Tamper with my wife’s car? You’re in the bloody phone book, Ali. If I wanted to talk to you that badly I could have simply called.’
‘How do you know we’re in the phone book?’
He glanced away, in sudden check. ‘Old habits die hard. Every year when the new phone book comes in I check. It’s not spying, it’s …’
‘What?’
‘Habit. Memory.’ He looked back. ‘I wouldn’t have come if I’d known you were here. It wouldn’t be fair.’
‘It’s a free hotel,’ Alison said, then laughed at the irony. ‘Well, free if you can afford to pay.’
‘There’s nobody freer than me. There’s nothing I couldn’t do now, nowhere I couldn’t go. I’m a rich bloody man. I didn’t even want the money my partner gave me for the business. Just sitting in the bank. Money from selling the company, from Jane’s insurance policy and God knows how much the house will fetch. The type of nest egg you slave for twenty years to build up by skimping and saving. Now there’s nothing I can think to do with it and no one to pass it on to.’
‘Where will you live now?’
‘Why?’
‘I want to know.’
‘I told you, I’m going away, starting again.’ He beckoned the lounge girl. ‘Have another drink.’
‘The babysitter is expecting me.’
‘Let her wait.’
‘I don’t want her to wait.’
‘I’m sorry.’ He ordered for himself and the girl walked away.
‘I don’t mean to sound so sharp,’ Alison apologised. ‘Sometimes Danny wakes with night terrors. I like to be there, just in case.’
‘I understand. I’ll sit up for a while.’
There was something vaguely comical about his apologetic tone.
‘You do that. Enjoy your few drinks.’
‘You know I stopped twice on the way here,’ he said, ‘even turned the car at Arklow and drove several miles back towards Dublin before I found the courage to go on. I’m glad I did now. It’s the right thing. But believe me, my presence here has nothing to do with you. Remember that. Lives overlap, events recur but differently. I’m as happy tonight as I’ve been for a long time. These last days I’ve had time to think things through, very calmly. Meeting you has been wonderful, God alone knows how often I hoped we would. But we’re different people now, driven in different ways. I want you to understand that.’
She understood the words, but not what Chris was saying. Alison stood up. He stared at her, as if re
quiring a response. She nodded uneasily and he smiled.
‘Tuck those kids in tight, you hear?’
‘I will,’ she replied. ‘Don’t drink too much. Thanks for helping with Danny today … and for last night.’
He looked at her again in a way she didn’t understand but felt she should. She had meant to thank him for driving to the hospital, not for the kiss. Or had she? Chris seemed about to speak, then looked down, deliberately absorbed in watching the flame flicker up the rolled tobacco as he lit a cigar. She turned and descended the stairs, past the dancing couples, and every step made her uneasier, filled with a foreboding she could not articulate. She was missing something, a clue buried in his words.
Alison paid off the babysitter and sat in semi–darkness, watching her children sleep. She missed Peadar, not just his company but his reassurance. She wanted the feel of somebody beside her tonight. She wanted to phone him. Her earlier suspicions were crazy. He would be working late with spreadsheets littering the kitchen table. She told herself that her voice might wake Danny, but this wasn’t the real reason she didn’t phone.
A last drink would help her sleep but she didn’t want to leave Sheila alone, even for the time it would take to visit the bar. Room service would be too embarrassing, making her sound like an alcoholic. She kept meaning to get undressed, but fussed around instead, arranging clothes, fixing blankets, pacing around the bathroom, slowly driving herself insane.
What the hell was she missing? Lives overlap, events recur but differently. Trust Chris Conway to talk in bloody riddles. She sat on the stool before the mirror and took off her earrings. Her eyes looked tired. She removed the scarf from her neck and undid the buttons on her blouse. She had to confess that she had got dressed up for Chris. Meeting him again was like being forced to sit in judgement on herself. The reality of now versus the image he had carried about for twenty years.
At least in this half light the dichotomy did not seem so great. The mirror made her face and neck appear young. Her figure hadn’t changed so much, she told herself, or at least not in this light. Her bottom was bigger but her breasts looked the same. Not that Chris would know. The closest his hand had come was three or four inches from touching them during that lunchtime on the beach at Loughshinny twenty years ago.
She wondered if he sometimes ventured those final inches in his mind, speculating on what could have happened next. There was red stitching in her bra that day when her T–shirt rode up in their horseplay. Red thread circling the pink–white cloth that was almost transparent. More white than pink or at least paler than the flushing pink of her nipple, visible to them both through the bra, erect in the sea air.
Chris had been a coward. Shyness was a polite word for pure cowardice. To have gone so far and then stopped, remembering she was somebody else’s possession. Why then, if it infuriated her, did she still remember the moment so vividly? Why was it that occasionally in the years since, when Peadar sleepily reached for her breast, it was Chris’s hand she wanted to imagine slowly circling her nipple?
Chris Bloody Conway. She couldn’t even say that he was one of the few men with whom she’d actually had a relationship, not like the two she’d slept with, during her time apart from Peadar. The forty–year–old radiologist who had been her only one–night stand – how ancient he had seemed. Alison still didn’t know why she had slept with him – just three weeks after breaking up with Peadar – except that it made absolutely no sense and she had told herself she was finished with sensible behaviour. But really there were three people in his apartment that night, as she imagined Peadar there, forced to witness her actions and accept she had a mind of her own, even if only for doing crazy things.
Stephen was different, six months later on, not just an impulse of revenge on the rebound. Stephen with untidy locks of curly hair and oil streaks on his jeans from his motorbike. The feel of the wind in her dress, tucked right up between her knees so that her legs were on display as she rode as his pillion passenger. She hadn’t cared if Peadar or anyone saw her then. French kissing in doorways off Grafton Street at closing time, never knowing where his hands would stray. Making love in the Pine Forest above Rathfarnham. That irresponsible excitement, no longer being treated as a girl, but a woman. She’d had to go on the Pill. Peadar might have been content with condoms, even after the initial accident, but Stephen was having none of it. He had taken it for granted that she would look after that side of things, just like he took it for granted that she would happily perform oral sex. ‘Jaysus, haven’t I washed it,’ he’d argue, ‘what more do you want? If that bleeding ex–boyfriend of yours said he didn’t want it then he was a bleeding liar. There isn’t a man born alive not dying to come on the tip of your tongue.’
And she had done it too, done what she’d refused to do for Peadar, and grown, if not to like it, then at least to enjoy the anticipation of what would come afterwards. Even today she still didn’t know enough about men to judge if Stephen was exceptional in bed, but something about his carelessness excited her like she had never been stirred before or since. It was in his indifference as to whether his housemates downstairs heard her cry out when he ploughed into her on Sunday afternoons, and the way he rolled their bodies over so the wet stain was always on her side of the bed when he came.
Half the time she hadn’t even liked him and sensed that, at heart, he didn’t care. One Sunday afternoon she had stuck a note on the bedroom mirror and left him as he slept after sex. She would have kept going too, back home to be consoled by her flatmates, if a bus had ever turned up at that poxy estate he lived in, perched in the foothills of the Dublin Mountains. After an hour shivering in the cold she’d had second thoughts and went back to give him another chance. Stephen hadn’t even seen her note in his hurry to watch a football match on television. His big sleepy grin when she walked in, and then his baffled expression when he saw that she was empty–handed and hadn’t actually gone out to buy more beer.
Her thoughts were disturbed by solitary footsteps coming down the hotel corridor, slow and undoubtedly male. What in God’s name was she doing sitting up, half naked, thinking about other men? Had she locked her door after the babysitter left? The footsteps drew nearer, an even, cautious tread. It could be anyone, couples didn’t always return to their rooms together. But she knew it was Chris. Why was he walking so slowly? And why did she still remember the unfelt weight of his hand not touching her breast, when she could think of Stephen now and feel only indifference? The sweat–drenched girl moaning in Stephen’s bed was someone else, a brief–lived stranger. But, just now, Alison felt that the incarnation of the girl who lay on Loughshinny beach was still alive inside her, alongside the child of twelve being kissed on the strand at Fitzgerald’s. Even her nipples felt as if sea air was stiffening them again.
She had taken her blouse off. Surely in God’s name she didn’t want Chris to enter? ‘Thank you for last night.’ Could he have taken her up wrong? He had endured four months of loneliness. Who could blame him for seeking some human comfort? She would not allow anything to happen, but supposing it did, would it carry this same sense of betrayal for him? Was betrayal of a dead partner as hard as that of a living one? Why was she even thinking like this, just because of one kiss? She had never looked at another man nor wanted the touch of one before. But Chris wasn’t just another man. He felt like a ghost, the igniter of a phantom pain so ingrained in her life that she had ceased to be aware of it. The loss of that girl who she herself had been. Where the hell was Peadar this night and just what was he doing? Could she be certain of him or certain of anything any more?
Chris’s words taunted her. Lives overlap, events recur but differently. But second chances didn’t come with three children asleep in a room. The footsteps stopped, just short of her door. Perhaps it was the man across the corridor, checking his kids. But there was no click of a key. She wanted to check if the door was locked, but that would look worse if Chris opened it, like she was coming half way to meet him.
Throughout that summer his hair had grown so lank that – half teasing – she had threatened to cut it next time they went out on a van. Leaving for work that morning, she had brought a pair of scissors in her bag. Peadar hadn’t phoned for two nights, too busy cresting his latest Everest. If anything was going to happen, then this was the day. Even the driver sensed the electricity between them, how their hands found ways to brush against each other as they served borrowers all morning.
At lunchtime she had placed a chair on the sand. The driver laughed, wandering down the deserted strand with a pitching wedge and golf balls. Chris could have been a good–looking guy if he took the care. Alison had given him a haircut she knew he would never have chosen for himself. It brought out the softness in his face that he tried to hide behind a tough–man stance. She had trimmed his beard too, though she longed to shave it off and see what he actually looked like – around fifteen years of age, she suspected.
But she never felt so close to him as when cutting his hair. The smell of his skin, the way his nostrils seemed to try to breathe her very essence in. Once or twice she’d turned deliberately so her breasts were inches from his face. Their horseplay was never more intense than when he chased her down the sand afterwards, her cadging piggybacks on his shoulders, each trying to throw the other into the waves. Alison stole his jacket, taunting him flauntingly until his rugby tackle brought her down. She had turned onto her back, laughing, and tried to wriggle free as sand caught her T–shirt and pulled it up. Her skin, how white her flesh was back then. Her favourite bra she had chosen deliberately that morning. And Chris’s face inches from hers, his hands trying to pin hers down.