“Tomorrow evening, about seven, I think. I’ll have to check. I’m debating whether or not to pick him up and tell him face to face.”
“He’ll run a mile if he sees you sitting there waiting for him! He’ll know something’s up!” Fin laughed.
“Well, I don’t really want to sit in the house waiting for him and I think I have to face him.” She took another sip of the anaesthetising ruby-red liquid. “I’ll decide in the morning,” she concluded, tired of thinking.
“What about your mum and the girls?”
“Yeah . . .” Esmée was vacant, drifting in her response as she considered how her family might react. They knew nothing of her problems with Philip. As far as they were concerned, she and Philip had the perfect marriage. Boy, were they in for a shock! “I was going to call in to Mum in the morning after I drop the kids off. She’ll pass the word. I don’t know if I could face the girls, not just yet anyway.”
She loved her sisters and they were great fun on their own but dynamite when together. Esmée could imagine their reaction and that in itself was reason enough to make her break out in a cold anxious sweat. But whatever they might do, however they might react, for her there was no going back. The girls, along with her mother and brother would just have to deal with it. With self-appointed bravery she raised her glass defiantly.
“The future!” she toasted.
But as she put the delicate glass to her lips, for a second time that evening she was flooded by the troubled feeling that something – something on the fringes of her perception – was badly amiss.
Chapter 5
Esmée pulled into the driveway of her mother’s dormer bungalow and parked beneath the sprawling yellow canopy of the laburnum tree. The short pebble path led her to the front door and, using her own key to let herself in, she closed the door firmly behind her.
“Mum!” she called into the hushed silence of her old home.
Putting her bag and keys down onto the ancient mahogany sideboard that had guarded the front door for what felt like centuries, she leaned without thinking towards the gilt-framed mirror to inspect her reflection.
Fixing one of the many loose strands back into the tussle of her hair, she called out once more. “Mum, where are you?”
With their father dead, she and her sisters tried to visit their mum as often as possible. It had been a sudden and utterly unfair end to her dad’s rich and still vigorous life. A decorated and dedicated garda, Frank Gill was shot down in cold blood during a bank raid that had gone horribly wrong, and his death had devastated her mother.
“I feel like this,” she had said, referencing a single sock she caressed with her fragile fingers, refusing to let it go, its match lost somewhere in the vortex of the hot-press. “I’m useless without him.” And refusing to discard anything that still had his smell, kept the sock and everything else in the closet in Penny’s old room.
It took a few years before she really began to cope and eventually move on with her life. There were bridge clubs and book clubs and gardening clubs and pensioners’ days out almost every other week, but even so the girls kept a close eye on her and tried as much as possible to occupy even a small space within the impossible and very apparent void.
Frank and Sylvia Gill adored each other through all the years of their marriage and, as Esmée’s father had regularly boasted, it had been love at first sight. Her heart swelled as she remembered the affectionate looks her parents shared on the night of their last anniversary dinner. Had it really been just three weeks later that they were gathered as a family again to mourn him? If Esmée had not witnessed their kind of love, their kind of true love, she would never have believed it possible. Their intense but tender affection and compassion for each other, even after all those years, spilled over onto their children to whom they had promised that no matter where they would end up in the world, this house, their house, would always be their home. So much was this notion actively impressed on them that in the early stage of Esmée’s planning she actually considered moving herself and the kids back to this, her home. It would only have been for a short while, a stopgap of sorts, but in the end she decided against it. Mainly because she knew that her mum would not approve of her plan and would do her damnedest to change her daughter’s fragile mind. She predicted that her mother would be bound by her instinct and experience to brand it “a madcap ridiculous idea in the extreme”. And after her mother’s many years of wedded bliss, how else could Esmée imagine her mother would behave? Was it reasonable to expect her to understand?
Esmée’s difficulties were a secret. In the beginning she had confided in her brother Tom who lived in London, had sought his advice, but not recently – recently she had distanced herself from him, for very pertinent and painful reasons. But she hadn’t told her mother and sisters anything; she was sure that, for them, a failed marriage constituted a failed wife. As far as they were concerned, she was happily married, living in a nice house with her nice, successful and handsome husband with their two nice and beautiful children. It was all very nice. How much more “nice” could she ask for? And sure why would it or should it be any other way?
Resigned and nervous, she walked down the hall of her family home in search of her mum, instinctively inhaling the smell of the house: vanilla and sweet tobacco. It was a wonderful, welcoming and comforting smell that she had so often tried to replicate with posh candles and scented potpourri, but it was never the same. Eventually she realised that the lifetime of happy memories captured in an aromatic atmosphere was impossible to replicate no matter how hard she tried.
In the kitchen a warm mug of coffee sat half full on the countertop, telling her that her mother wasn’t far away, and from the window above the sink she spied her kneeling, tending to the flowerbed at the far end of the garden. These late spring days, it seemed, were spent nurturing the responsive shrubs with beautiful results. She truly did possess the proverbial green fingers and everything she touched really did flourish with a minimum amount of effort. It was innate; she was a plant whisperer, the patience for which Esmée just did not inherit. The only thing her mum wouldn’t do was mow the grass – that had always been her dad’s job and now that responsibility was sorrowfully fulfilled by young John Sullivan from down the road who for a student’s ransom of eighty euro a month tended the front and back lawn once a week.
Esmée put on the kettle and went out onto the deck. Hearing the French doors slide open, her mother turned and looked up.
“Ahh, Esmée, sweetheart!” she exclaimed, a genuine smile lighting up her face. Sitting back onto her heels while resting the trowel and mucky gloved hand on her knee, she shielded her eyes from the sun with the other and smiled up at her daughter. “I didn’t hear the car – did you walk?”
Her mother lived only half a mile away and on sunny days, just like this one, Esmée would often drop in, having walked the kids to school.
“No, Mum, not today,” she replied, stepping off the deck and onto the uneven, slightly parched lawn to walk towards the gleaming woman.
Bending low, Esmée planted a kiss on her mother’s soft plump cheek that smelt, as always, of perfume and powder.
“Give me a hand up, love.”
Esmée took the extended hand and gently hoisted her mother upright.
“What’s up, Mum?” she asked, noticing the insufficiently discreet wince as her mother used her bent knee to support and push herself up.
“Oh, it’s nothing!” came the flippant reply. “I’m just getting old, that’s all!” She laughed with forced gaiety as she took hold of Esmée’s arm and steered her through the garden, pointing out the progress of her prized gladioli as a distraction.
But even as they inched forwards, Esmée could feel her mother’s weight pressing on her arm and made a mental note to mention it to her youngest sister Penny, a nurse at one of Dublin’s general hospitals. Tightening her arm muscles to bestow a little extra support, Esmée helped her mother complete the short amble towards the h
ouse.
“How are the kids today?” Sylvia asked. “I missed you at the weekend. Penny and Conor were here yesterday for dinner. We did call but there was no answer at the house. Did you not get the messages?”
“Ehh, no, we were out most of the day,” Esmée lied flatly, not sure what else to say to this unexpected question. She hated lying to her mum and was very much aware that the purpose of her visit today was to break the inevitably unwelcome news.
Together they passed into the kitchen through the garden doors, leaving them open in order to enjoy the temperate breeze that nudged and moved the reluctant air inside.
The kettle was just boiling. Perfect timing.
“Let’s have a cuppa,” her mother announced, conclusively diverting her daughter’s uncomfortable attention.
Esmée, not unlike the cornered criminal with no option but to confess, wandered restlessly around the familiar dining space of the kitchen, dragging her fingers across the thick pine table and matching honey-coloured dresser as she passed them by. Undecided as to whether she should sit or stand, she could feel her mother watching curiously as Esmée fidgeted and toyed with the tiny china figurines, collected over years and huddled together on the dresser shelves, their delicate, colourful shapes polished and proud.
This is a bloody nightmare, Esmée’s inner voice shrieked, putting one ornament down only to swap it for another. How the hell am I going to do this?
The pain was obvious on her face as her eyes moved desperately about the room, looking for something else to focus on, settling eventually on one of the many-framed pictures that hung in the informal family gallery on the tired and once delicately patterned wall. She saw herself, her brother and two sisters captured in a smiling instant. She must have been about fifteen when the picture was taken – that would have made Tom seventeen, Lizzie twelve and Penny ten. Looking at the grinning group, she cast her mind back to remember that moment, a snapshot in time. Held by the slightly faded smiling faces, she wondered how they, her siblings, would react to her situation. Despite their differences – with sisters being sisters there had been a few – and the girls were very close. She saw them at least twice a week and spoke to each of them almost every other day and, while every now and then they would squabble and bicker, it was never for very long – no sooner was it started than it was over.
But with Tom it was a little different. They, Esmée and her brother, had a pretty big falling-out when he left his wife for another woman, and things had been strained ever since. If he hadn’t left of his own free will Rachel probably would have kicked him out anyway, having caught him in a compromising embrace with a young lady friend at least half his age. At the time Esmée had been so disappointed in him. How long was it now, she asked herself – six, maybe seven months? Close enough that she could easily recall her feeling of absolute disgust. Selfish really, she knew, but she just couldn’t believe that he had turned out to be just the same as Philip. She felt betrayed and a little humiliated by the very person, the only person, she had trusted to talk through her fears about Philip’s adultery. He was her big brother who had always protected her and she, in return, looked up to him, respected and admired him. Together they had spent hours talking, discussing her suspicions about Philip and what she should or shouldn’t do. He talked her through the worst moments and helped her cope. He had comforted her and jeered at her husband when all along he was doing the same thing to his own wife. He had, she decided, betrayed her too. He had let her down. He had let himself down. Adding insult to the already salted wound, his young lady friend disappeared after a matter of weeks. He had let everything go, lost it all, and for what? A quick shag with a slapper called Jacinta, if memory served her right. The outcome of their final confrontation was mutual silence: phone calls, spontaneous visits, casual texts, they all came to an abrupt and concrete end. She refused to listen to what she thought were childish, clichéd excuses. Her instinct at the time was to call Rachel, to console and advise her. But she never did call. Why? Because despite her big brother’s poor and reprehensible behaviour she couldn’t be disloyal to him like that, and so she chose instead to punish him by distancing herself from him and, in doing so, she served only to punish herself more. She missed him so much, now more than ever, and it hurt.
She wondered how long it would take for her mum to call and tell him what she had done? The spiteful little girl inside her hoped he would feel guilty. She hoped that when he saw the devastation of their, his and Philip’s, combined infidelity, by the natural laws of cause and effect he would be sorry for his own as well as Philip’s actions. Maybe now he would understand why she couldn’t be around him, why she had to separate herself from him.
“Esmée?”
She didn’t immediately register her mother’s voice nor did she immediately understand the stunned and anxious expression etched on her face. Confused and distracted by her mute rant, it took her a few moments to realise that the cause of her mother’s apparent horror was the tears that were flowing freely down each side of her face. She was crying, there in the kitchen, in front of her mother. She was crying. And it was freaking her mother out.
“Esmée? Whatever’s the matter?” Embarrassed, not really knowing what to say or what was best to do next, Sylvia moved intuitively to embrace her weeping daughter. Esmée never cried. She was the strength of the family, always had been, keeping an eye on the girls, fixing things, making things right. It was just what Esmée did. She never cried – well, if she did no one ever saw it. Especially not her mum! After Frank’s death her eldest daughter had been the tough one, holding everyone and everything together, reversing the roles and mothering both her and her two sisters. So this discovery was alarming, to the point where Sylvia instantly knew that whatever it was, it had to be significant. Taking her daughter by the shoulders she turned her to face her, eager to comfort and anxious to understand.
“Esmée dear, whatever’s happened? Please tell me.”
Despite herself, Esmée couldn’t help the deep sob that erupted like a stifled belch from between her trembling lips. She instinctively moved into the comforting circle of her mother’s arms, unfettering the emotion that she had sworn she wouldn’t, shouldn’t expose.
“Oh Mum, it’s such a mess!” Esmée’s head found the curve of her mother’s shoulder as the dam that had thus far restrained the tears so efficiently finally gave way. It had been a long time since she had been held like this, had her back rubbed and consolatory words whispered gently in her ear. She was twelve all over again and it felt good to be mothered. She too recognised the reluctant reversal of roles, knowing that normally it was she who gave the hugs and platitudes and reckoned that it was only right now for her to be on the receiving end of such a familiar embrace. Memories of her childhood sparked in her mind: that comforting touch, those safe, warm arms, her mother’s fresh smell, the transfer of emotion from child to parent, willing the bad things to disappear forever, to make it all right. Yes! It felt good and she didn’t want to let go.
Reluctantly her mother extracted herself from the embrace and taking a tissue from what, when they were kids, seemed like a never-ending store compactly concealed up her sleeve, she handed it to Esmée.
“Esmée, please talk to me, tell me what’s wrong,” she implored.
“I’m sorry, Mum,” Esmée sniffed, wiping her eyes. “I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
“What? Didn’t mean for what to happen? Come on sit down, love. Talk to me!” Sylvia moved her towards the table and, pulling out one of the heavy timber chairs, steered Esmée into it. Setting a second in front of the first, she sat down opposite her daughter.
“Now!” she begged, firmly taking hold of her daughter’s knees, and to a certain degree, control of the situation.
Sniffing and regaining her breath, Esmée looked at her mother and considered for a moment exactly what she should say and how she should say it. But the words refused to come out, choosing instead to rush around inside her head, like ram
pant stormtroopers on an international exercise, forming silent statements, none of which made any sense at all. Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath, steeling herself for her mother’s predictable reaction, willing herself to be calm as she looked into the beautiful grey eyes in an intensely worried face.
“Mum . . .” She paused, regaining some of her composure. “Mum, I’ve left him.” There! It was out! As simple as that. It felt surprisingly good. Four words forming a remarkable yet basic statement. Taking courage from those first and surprisingly painless words, she scuttled on, pushing the words out before her pluck gave way. “The children and I have moved out. I’ve left him, Mum.”
She felt her mother flinch and visibly recoil, a confused look crossing her face.
“Jesus, Esmée, what do you mean? Left who?” The question was obviously rhetorical as she continued to interrogate. “Moved out! Where? Why?”
Words failed Esmée. She simply didn’t have the vocabulary to explain it properly, the answers being far more complex than their corresponding simply presented questions. It was just too hard, probably impossible, to find a concise way of telling her mother that she had just had enough. And was that reason enough? Could she communicate this to her mother efficiently without it sounding childish, trivial or naïve – or, worse, all three? All she could do was shake her head slowly, lowering it to look at the thinning hands that covered her own, observing the translucency of the ever-loosening skin and avoiding the obvious disappointment and grief that glazed her mother’s face.
“My God, Esmée, I knew things weren’t good between you and Philip but I never imagined for one minute they were this bad.”
“How did you know?” Esmée shot back, astonished by her mother’s perceptive comment, forgetting for a moment the drama of her position.
“I’m your mother, Esmée, and I know these things.”
Esmée once again found herself in a closed and emotional embrace and, joined together across their knees, they sat in silence for some time letting the information stew and thicken and, for now, there were no more tears.
Dark Mirrors Page 4
