by Karen Perry
‘Good Lord,’ Alan said.
‘I wanted to let you know – let the department know. She’s my student, after all, and I didn’t want there to be any …’ I hunted about for the right word ‘… any misunderstanding.’
‘Right,’ he said, sounding slightly fazed. His eyes darted over my face and I wondered if he was making some kind of mental reassessment of me, some private speculation as to my personal life. A bead of sweat rolled down my back.
‘Have you mentioned this to anyone else in the department?’
‘Not yet,’ I answered, wondering whether I should tell him what McCormack had said.
‘Because she’s one of your students, we’ll need to declare a conflict of interest when it comes to grading papers, assessments, exams … fulfil all the necessary protocols.’
‘Protocols?’
‘Inform the registrar, the ethics committee, and let me see who else …’
‘An ethics committee?’
‘It will only have to be noted. Nothing to worry about.’
‘What about confidentiality?’
‘It’s assumed.’
He picked up his notebook and pen and got to his feet. I understood the meeting was over. At the door to his office, he spoke a few words of reassurance, making me feel even more as if I’d done something wrong. In fact, the bureaucratic minefield I was walking into was tinged, the way Alan put it, with a moral code, which it appeared I had unwittingly broken.
I had confessed to Caroline, owned up to my kids, revealed all to the university, but where was the expiation of whatever guilt I had felt? When would the burden of the past lift? My wife’s shock was one thing, my children’s surprise another. I could deal with those twin pressures, given time, but the university’s way of punishing me was soul-destroying – all the paperwork that would need to be filed, the ethics committee, the protocols and standards that were required to be met – like a figurative black mark against me, like ash on the forehead, or a scarlet letter.
That Sunday, there was the usual flurry of activity in the morning, but this time the day’s machinations held a certain edge, a serration to the light of early afternoon and the energy that went with it. Zoë had accepted my invitation to come for lunch and, with her arrival imminent, I felt an air of nervous anticipation hanging in the house.
The doorbell rang.
I called out that I would get it. Behind the frosted glass, there was the outline of a slight figure, hooded, waiting, expectant. I pulled open the door. She had been glancing back at the garden, surveying the clumped hydrangeas, the wine-red spread of acers, and as I said her name, she turned and her eyes met mine. An uncanny tremor of déjà vu passed through me, and with it a fleeting memory of Linda on my doorstep on one of those feckless nights in Belfast, her voice emerging from the past: You said I could drop by. The answering kick of my heart.
‘I hope I’m not late,’ Zoë said, smiling nervously. ‘I was in town and lost track of time.’
‘Not late at all.’ I stood back so she could enter.
I closed the door and turned to find her looking around the hall, her eyes travelling upwards. She was a little flushed. She was holding a bottle of wine and a small bouquet of flowers. As if suddenly remembering them, she held both out to me. I took them from her and thanked her. For a moment we simply stood there.
‘Zoë, hello,’ Caroline said brightly, coming out of the kitchen and wiping her hands on a tea-towel.
They shook hands, exchanging some pleasantries I didn’t quite catch. I was still a little shaken from the déjà vu. I felt as if I had asked not just Zoë into our lives, but the shadowy aura of Linda, too.
‘I hope you’re hungry,’ Caroline said, hanging Zoë’s jacket in the hall, then ushering her into the kitchen. ‘David’s been toiling over a hot stove all day.’
‘She’s joking, by the way,’ I said, but the truth was I had gone to some lengths in preparing the dish, making extra effort. Earlier that morning, Holly had made a passing comment about how I was fussing. ‘It’s goulash.’
‘Something the soldiers ate in the trenches of one or other war, isn’t that right?’ Caroline jibed. She gestured for Zoë to sit on one of the barstools and started cutting the foil from the neck of a wine bottle. ‘Red or white?’ she asked Zoë.
‘I’d prefer white, please.’
If Caroline was feeling the strain, she hid it well. I noticed she had taken care with her appearance – she was wearing a smart fitted dress, high heels, and diamond earrings winked beneath her neatly curled hair. While there was no doubting her attractiveness, next to Zoë’s casual beauty there seemed something over-formal and made-up about her. She poured the wine into three glasses.
Jazz was playing on the stereo – easy listening, nothing to distract us from getting to know each other, but if everything did break down and go quiet we wouldn’t have to cringe in our own silence. Above the low melody, I could hear the rumble of feet on the stairs. Robbie came in.
‘Zoë, this is Robbie,’ I said. He held up his hand in a gesture only teenagers can pull off – a kind of salute.
All morning, the notes from his cello had filled the house. Not the beautiful sonorous sounds of performance, but the harsher false starts of practice. Still, there had been something familiar and reassuring about them.
‘Hi,’ Zoë said, a little apprehensively. She smiled and took a timid step back as if to fully observe her half-brother.
Holly followed, but positioned herself behind one of the kitchen chairs before saying hello. She had been unusually withdrawn in the days since I had broken the news about her half-sister, not her usual ebullient and confident self. I felt a jab of uncertainty. All of us seemed unsure how to negotiate the terms of these newly discovered relationships. In some respects, we reverted to the buttoned-up awkwardness of polite exchange that had marked the time after Caroline and I had patched things up post-affair, when we talked to each other in front of the kids with a forced civility, maintaining the pretence for their sakes that our marriage was solid. I imagined it to be how distant relations talked after having being introduced for the first time – awkward, circumspect and full of artifice.
That being said, Caroline remained resolute. She took command of the situation, enlisting Holly’s help with putting out the food, instructing us all on where to sit.
‘You have a beautiful home,’ Zoë offered politely, albeit with a wavering voice. Her eyes were casting around the kitchen and family room. Light flooded in through the glass doors and the skylight. The weather was unusually fine for October.
Robbie asked Zoë where she lived, and blushed a little when she answered.
‘I rent a small flat in Rathmines. Just a bedsit, really.’
‘What made you want to come to Dublin?’ he asked.
She shrugged, ‘I’ve always liked it, since I was a child.’
‘Did you come down much?’
‘I have cousins in Greystones, so sometimes we’d stop off in Dublin on the way to visiting them. Mam and I used to go shopping on Grafton Street.’
I tried to picture it: Linda holding the hand of a little girl, gazing in the windows of Brown Thomas or Marks & Spencer. Dublin is a small city. Would it have been so far outside the bounds of possibility that I might have bumped into her? Would she have introduced me to her daughter if I had? Told me the truth, or tried to pretend Zoë wasn’t mine? Would she have said anything at all?
‘How are you finding UCD?’ Caroline asked, once we had started eating. I was afraid all the questions would make Zoë feel she was being interrogated. She was nervous enough as it was.
‘It’s good. I’m still finding my way a little,’ she said, smiling shyly. ‘But I’m enjoying it.’
There were further questions about her lectures, what clubs she had joined, the part-time job she had picked up in the students’ union shop. She answered them all patiently, and politely, even if there was a note of hesitancy in her voice, as if she did not trust herself
completely to say what she thought was expected of her. We were distracted by the food, passing bread and dipping into the salad. To all appearances everything was going well, but beneath the small-talk there was something else, an unspoken tension – a kind of undercurrent of suspicion so that, no matter what Zoë was asked, I heard the sub-textual rip-tide, the undercurrent of what was really meant: Why are you here? What do you want?
It was a relief to hear her ask a question of her own and deflect some of the intense scrutiny she must have felt: ‘Who plays the cello?’ she asked.
She had finished eating, making a neat cross of her cutlery on the plate. The cello was leaning against the wall to the side of the sofa.
‘That’s mine,’ Robbie told her.
‘He’s in the National Youth Orchestra,’ Caroline said proudly. ‘You should hear him play some time.’
‘He thinks he’s Yo-Yo Ma,’ Holly said, with a smirk.
Robbie told her to shut up, and she pushed her glasses back up to the bridge of her nose. It was the first time she’d spoken since Zoë had entered the house.
‘I love the cello,’ Zoë told him. ‘Can you play that Elgar piece?’
Robbie leaned his elbows on the table and gave her a half-grin. ‘Not really. I’m trying to learn it but it’s, like, super-hard.’
‘We played it at my mam’s funeral – not a live performance, just on the stereo. Still – it was beautiful.’
No one said anything. I had a groundless feeling at the thought of Linda dead in a box, the room swelling with the sound of those melancholy strings.
‘Sorry to hear about your mum,’ Robbie said quietly.
‘Thanks.’
‘It must have been shit,’ he added.
‘It was,’ she said, a little distressed, ‘but I’ve been busy since it happened, moving down here and starting college.’
‘What about your family in Belfast?’ Caroline asked.
Zoë brushed the hair from her eyes, ‘Well, there’s just Gary – he’s my stepfather.’
‘He must miss you.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Oh?’ I asked, surprised by the change in her manner. ‘Why not?’
‘We don’t really get on.’
‘You don’t?’
She thought about it, no doubt aware of the weight of our stares. ‘I dunno. We never kind of hit it off.’
‘When did he and your mother marry?’ Caroline asked.
Zoë shifted in her chair: ‘When I was six.’ She picked up her fork and fiddled with it. After a moment’s hesitation, she continued: ‘He was nice at first – always buying me sweets and toys and that. But after a while, he just got bored of me.’
‘That’s awful,’ I said.
Caroline asked: ‘He and Linda had no children together?’
‘No. I think Gary really wanted to have kids of his own, but when it didn’t happen, he just grew despondent. Kind of jealous, too.’
‘Jealous?’ I asked.
‘Of me and Mam. Our closeness. Especially towards the end, when she was sick.’
‘It must have been very difficult for you,’ Caroline offered, but I was more interested in the jealousy she had mentioned. There was something beneath the strained politeness, something she wasn’t saying that worried me: I didn’t like the sound of Gary one bit.
‘Your stepfather,’ I said, ‘do you hear much from him?’
She shook her head. ‘Not since I came down to college. I think he’s glad to have me out from under his feet.’ Then, almost as an afterthought: ‘I’m glad to be out from under his feet, too.’
‘Really?’ I asked.
‘The way he used to go on sometimes, his temper …’
‘His temper?’
The question startled Zoë, as if she hadn’t realized she had spoken her thoughts aloud. ‘Maybe “temper” isn’t the right word. It’s more subtle than that. Oh, I don’t know,’ she said, dismissing her words with a wave of the hand.
‘Passive aggressive?’ I suggested.
She made a remark about how delicious the food had been. It was clear she didn’t want to discuss the matter further.
Caroline got up to make the coffee while Robbie cleared away the dishes. The topic was dropped, but I didn’t forget it, even when the conversation returned to safer subjects: Zoë and Robbie discussing the various bands they were into, what films they liked, Holly answering to what her favourite subjects were in school. All seemingly congenial chitchat, but there was still an almost palpable tension running through the blood of the conversation, like a contagion. Nothing, it seemed, not wine, light-hearted chat, or even dessert, could dispel it. Or maybe that was just the way I saw it because what she had said about Gary’s jealousy and temper stayed with me, and brought out in me a kind of protective zeal I had not expected to feel for her.
We finished our coffee, Robbie saying, ‘Can we go sit in the comfy chairs?’ and everyone got to their feet.
Caroline, clearing the last of the table, was reaching across to take Zoë’s cup when her hand brushed against the stem of my glass, which I had recently refilled. It toppled, sending out a splash of Burgundy, some of which hit Zoë’s midriff, the rest spilling over her placemat and dripping on to her lap. She leaped to her feet.
‘Oh, Christ!’ Caroline exclaimed. ‘I’m so sorry!’
‘Here,’ I said, handing Zoë a paper napkin.
‘It’s fine,’ she said, dabbing at her T-shirt.
‘God, I’m so clumsy,’ Caroline said. ‘Here, let me get you some soda water.’
‘It’s all right – really,’ she said, laughing to show it was no big deal. Her cheeks had pinked and she put the napkin on the table.
‘Do you want to borrow one of my T-shirts?’ Caroline offered.
‘Ah, no, thanks,’ she said, then gestured towards the door. ‘I’ll just go to the bathroom, give it a bit of a scrub. That’ll be enough.’
She left the kitchen. I picked up the napkin and began to mop up the spilled wine. Some of it had dripped on to the floor and I bent to wipe it away.
‘I can’t believe I did that,’ Caroline said, in a half-amused kind of way.
Her response annoyed me. It was almost as if she took some kind of pleasure in what had happened. As if it was a small triumph for her.
‘Unfortunate,’ I commented.
‘Shall I open another bottle?’ she asked, oblivious to my prickliness.
I stepped past her and threw the sodden napkin into the bin. ‘Hardly worth it now, is it?’
‘Oh, God. You’re not angry because I spilled your wine, are you?’ Her voice still held that slightly mocking tone.
‘Her first time here … I don’t want her put off by us knocking wine over her.’
‘It’s not the end of the world, David. No point crying over spilled Burgundy.’
Caroline’s efforts to defuse the situation made me more agitated. ‘Maybe I should check on her. Make sure she’s okay.’
Caroline made a little noise of irritation at the back of her throat. ‘You stay here and finish tidying up,’ she instructed. ‘I’ll check on Zoë.’
She disappeared out of the kitchen and Holly joined Robbie on the couch. The TV was on, and the two of them were absorbed. I continued with the clear-up until I heard feet on the stairs. Coming out into the hallway, I saw Zoë descending. When she caught sight of me, she smiled broadly. ‘Thanks so much, David,’ she said, reaching the bottom step and taking her coat from where it was hanging on the newel post. ‘This has been really lovely.’
‘You’re not going already?’
‘Afraid so,’ she said cheerfully. ‘I’ve an essay to hand in tomorrow, so I need to go home and work on it.’
Caroline was on her way down the stairs.
‘Let me give you a lift,’ I said, helping Zoë into her coat.
‘I can walk home,’ she said, laughing at my offer. ‘I don’t want to put you to any trouble.’
‘No worries,’ I said, and s
he rewarded me with a grateful smile.
While Zoë turned to thank Caroline for the meal, I put my head around the door and told the kids she was leaving. Robbie came out to say goodbye, but Holly remained on the couch. I decided not to make an issue of it.
‘Sorry about the wine,’ I said, once we were alone in the car. ‘Caroline isn’t normally that clumsy.’
She told me not to worry, laughing it off.
I felt real affection for the strength she had shown: it was no mean feat to walk into another’s family home and join the established rhythms of their life as seamlessly as she had. It showed real maturity. ‘I know that can’t have been easy,’ I said.
‘It was really nice to meet everyone.’
‘I hope you didn’t feel we grilled you too much.’
‘Not at all,’ she replied. ‘It was nice getting to see another side to you.’
‘How do you mean?’
She shrugged. ‘Outside college, the private you, that’s all. How you are with your family.’
‘Well, I hope you can get to know all of us better.’
‘I’d like that. Holly and Robbie are lovely. Robbie’s so like you.’
I wondered had she been hoping to see traces of herself in his or Holly’s face, some linking traits that marked them out as her siblings.
Neither of us spoke for a few minutes, the car filled with silence as I drove through Rathgar village towards Rathmines. While the afternoon had passed off well, I still felt a lingering sadness. It had started the moment she mentioned Linda’s funeral. Briefly, I thought about how different our lives might have been had Linda made contact: a phone call, a letter – that was all it would have taken. Instead, she had decided to raise Zoë alone. What was so terrible about me that she’d felt she couldn’t get in touch?
We turned the corner into Rathmines, passed the neon shop-front signs blinking in the dark, the fast-food joints, then a charity shop and the church with its copper dome. She directed me down a side-street and we turned on to a terrace of Georgian houses that had seen better days. I pulled the car up alongside the kerb.
