2000 - The Feng-Shui Junkie (47 page)

He’s acting like I’m being unreasonable. Like he expects me to dismiss his liaison with Nicole as so much adolescent swagger.

“Try saying sorry.”

“I have no problem with that.”

“Right then; say it.”

He sighs.

He has a problem with it.

“
I’m sorry
. Now. Are you happy?”

We fall silent. Just the wind through the slightly open french windows. Mother and Sylvana are obviously still in the kitchen, but they have stopped talking. Knowing them, they’re tuning in to every word.

“I don’t want you in my life any more, Ronan.”

I’m fingering the envelope in my inside jacket pocket, ready to pull it out.

“I accept that going to France was an overreaction on my part.”

“I gave you your last chance. Remember? That day on Dun Laoghaire pier?”

“I made a mistake and I’m coming home now. My bags are outside.”

“It’s gone.”

“What’s gone?”

“Home.”

“What do you mean, gone?”

“The apartment is no longer yours.”

“Please explain, Julie.”

“I sold it.”

“You sold it?”

“Precisely.”

He’s turning white before my eyes.

“Okay,” he says, nodding. “You sold our apartment…We’ll get over that. When did you…?”

“To my mother.”

“
What?
”

He’s turned grey now. Concrete-grey. Mushroom-soup grey.

“Surely you prefer to keep it in the family?”

“You sold it to
her?
”

“Watch your tone.”

He runs a hand through his hair and glares at me, and when he’s finished glaring he stalks over to the drinks cabinet.

“This is our apartment; you had no right.”

“I’m a lawyer. Don’t talk to me about morality.”

“I signed nothing.”

“You didn’t have to. I had the place transferred into my name first.”

He gapes.

“How did you manage that?”

“It wasn’t easy, though learning to forge your signature helped.”

“I can have it tested.”

“I’m being kind to you, Ronan, so don’t fight me on this. After deducting the mortgage, I technically owe you forty-two grand. I’ll be sending you a cheque for twenty-two grand next week. I’ve made a small deduction for nervous suffering.”

“Julie, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s discuss this rationally.”

“Hadn’t you heard? I’m not rational.
Mother!
”

“What are you doing?”

“It’s over.”

Mother walks into the lounge. “Yes, dear? Did you both want a cup of tea?”

“Julie, I’d like to talk to you in private.”

“We’ve said all we have to say.”

Ronan turns to face the window and starts to stroke his chin again. Now Sylvana silently enters the lounge and stands quietly behind the aquarium, chewing something.

“I can’t talk with your mother here, Julie.”

“Don’t mind little old me.” She grins.

“I am moving my things back in, Gertrude,” he says, addressing the window.

“After all the nice things you said about me in that letter?”

“Yes, well…”

She sits down on the couch. “I meant to tell you, Ronan,” she says. “Julie sold this apartment to me. We had no idea you were returning.”

He’s just nodding to himself, arms folded.

“Anyway,” she continues, “this place is working out a treat. I’ve turned your old bedroom into a kind of safety-deposit vault for my valuable nineteenth-century furniture.”

“And your antique lawnmower, Mother.”

“Oh, yes – I had it specially polished; it’s the one my father used to use in the thirties. And there’s an easel in there too, which Julie was good enough to give me, though it was in a pretty worn state. I’ve been painting during those long weeks, when Julie refused to call out and visit me. I find I have a small talent for art. I never realized it before.”

Sylvana is grinning away at me behind Ronan’s back.

“I’ve dreamt of living in a place like this,” Mother continues, “with the balcony and the wonderful sea view, the marble floor in here, the leather couches and, of course, the Jacuzzi. You put such an amount of thought into the interior design, Ronan, it’s truly lovely.”

Cutting a relaxed pose as he stares through the window, Ronan is trying to pretend this isn’t bothering him. “So where are you living, then, Julie?” he says. “Flat-sharing with that large friend of yours, I take it?”

“I’ll thank you not to speak about my friend like that.”

“Your slim friend.”

The face on Sylvana.

“I am renting a penthouse apartment in another part of town.”

“Where?”

“That’s a permanent secret.”

“I assume the rent is extortionate.”

“Actually, I managed to purchase it recently.”

“Oh, I see: from the sale of this place.”

“Selling the Porsche helped.”

He inclines his head slightly towards me. “You sold my Porsche.”

“It took a ride.” (Mother.)

“It had a strong sex drive.” (Sylvana.)

He jumps around to see Sylvana for the first time. He glares at her and very politely asks her to leave the apartment, because we are having a family discussion. She refuses to budge. She just stands there staring cheekily at him, chewing peanuts from the palm of her hand.

“You can hardly blame me for selling the Porsche, Ronan. Remember, I had come home one day to witness Nicole’s lemon-yellow brassiere on the front doorknob.”

Sylvana: “Hanging loose.”

Mother: “You know, yellow is a good colour for the hall; it’s far too dark as it is. I put sunflowers there last Tuesday and I must say they were lovely.”

“Yes, Mother, yellow is nice. But not on the front doorknob in the form of another woman’s Wonderbra.”

Ronan: “She hung it there herself.”

Sylvana, grinning: “I should think that exonerates him, Julie.”

“What you were
thinking
of when you took her home, Ronan. You’ve never answered that. What was going on in your head? Did you think that little of me? Going out with Nicole under my very nose, every second feeding me a pack of lies? Telling me you were extracting teeth in your surgery when you were sunbathing with her by the pool? Denying it when I brought it up. Lying about the fantastic state of the apartment after Nicole cleaned it, about the tropical fish, your wristwatch, the conference in Paris…Telling me she was history while she was sitting beside you on the boat, or should I say the plane. History!”

Sylvana: “He’s a historian as well as a dentist.”

“Was it worth it? Destroying our relationship like that?”

“I don’t blame you for reacting this way.”

“
Get out
.”

“Look…”

“And take this before you go.”

I flip the envelope out of my jacket pocket.

“What’s that?”

Everybody is staring at the envelope in my hand. No one knows.

“Mother and Sylvana, are you listening?”

They tell me they’re listening.

“I just want to say – with Mother and Sylvana as witnesses – that our marriage is over. For good. This is not a threat. It’s a fact. There is no possibility of reconciliation between us, Ronan. Does everybody hear this?”

Mother and Sylvana both murmur their agreement.

I hand the envelope to Ronan.

“I think it’s time for you to leave now, dear,” Mother tells him softly, getting up. Sylvana follows her back into the kitchen.

Ronan has taken the divorce petition out of the envelope. As he reads it, the paper makes crinkling sounds.

This is it.

I am calm. I feel confident.

The tangled filaments of history are now quickly unravelling into a pattern of meaning, encompassing me and my mother before me, joined by our triumphs, our joys, our sorrows, our failures.

With Ronan, I am now doing what I have made it into a life crusade to do – should history ever repeat itself. What I desperately wished Mother had done, that night when Father returned home the second time after two years’ absence.

I remember that night. I was doing homework upstairs in my room and I heard voices. I sat on the top step and peered down into the hallway. It was him. He and Mother were whispering. They moved into the living-room. I went downstairs and listened.

There were long periods of silence behind that door, interrupted by questions from her, and explanations and denials and professions of love and sincere apologies from him. “You wouldn’t be saying that if I hadn’t caught you,” I heard Mother say. I could hear my father’s soothing promises.

I wanted to burst in there and tell Mother he was a liar and a cheat, and she wasn’t to believe him and she should throw him out. But she let him back, after everything that had happened.

And I was right: it did happen again.

She suffered, almost, so that I would be strong.

I can hear her now, in the kitchen. Pottering and clinkering with cups and saucers and plates, crinkling open a packet of biscuits. I can hear the gradually augmenting whoosh of the electric kettle. Coffee. I could do with a cup of strong Colombian coffee. Colombian anything, in fact. I am beginning to feel totally exhausted.

I walk slowly up to Ronan. He is still reading the divorce petition, page by page, intent, concentrated, unblinking. He doesn’t look at me, although I am now right in front of him. He is concealing emotion, although his eyes seem glossy, moist, soft. They tell me that he’s taken aback, upset. But he won’t communicate with me, acknowledge openly that things haven’t gone as he’d expected. It would, I suppose, be an admission of defeat.

I touch him on the arm, to reassure him, almost, then I say goodbye and start walking away. I stop at the glass door to the hall and look back once, but he doesn’t turn round.

It is the last time, I know, that Ronan and I will be in this room together, with the view we know so well: the blue sea and the harbour, and the boats docking and embarking, and the horizon, the sunrises and the sunsets, the seagulls flitting about in the high sky.

The lounge where he makes his last stand is a tomb. Encasing two happy years of married life.

Just a souvenir.

Mother will turn it once more into a paradise.

Ronan’s head is still tilted over the document. Not once does he turn round, not even after I whisper goodbye one last time. I walk out of the front door, leaving it resting on the latch, quietly. Then I begin to run, down the stairs, as fast as I can go, tripping, jumping, racing down, floor by floor, repeating over and over in my mind something I wanted to tell Nicole but couldn’t, not before I’d cleared the slate with Ronan first, a proposal I must put to her at all costs, before she leaves the country.

I burst out through the lobby doors and sprint across the car park, and dive into my car and accelerate out of Ronan’s life for ever.

W
hen I get back home – my
real
home – I close the door behind me and place a jasmine plant on a chair in the hall.

I purchased it on the way back here, in a local garden centre. It’s for Nicole. I remember what she said about jasmine. She said it was the plant of friendship. I couldn’t find any reason
not
to buy it for her. So I bought it.

Standing in the hall, I listen through the stillness. There’s no sound. She must be having a rest in the bedroom. It’s a quarter to two. Her flight to Amsterdam is at three. I will have to drive her and Debbie to the airport immediately. As I promised.

Nicole would understand how I’m feeling right now. She has gone through so much. Her life has been a whip hide of pain. Only she knows what it’s like to love Ronan. And separate from him. She is a beacon of light through all this bleakness, this grief.

In the hall mirror, I look like a dirty window-pane slashed by rain. I can’t let her see me like this. She’d only become all caring and sympathetic. That, I know, would finish me off.

When I walk into the lounge, there’s a note on the dining-table, lying adjacent to the two mandarin ducks.

Dear Julie
,

Please forgive me for leaving so suddenly, but I thought it best to call a taxi just in case you were delayed with Ronan
.

I’m so unhappy, Julie. I’ve hurt you so badly. I’ve only ever wanted people around me to be happy, but all I’ve done is gone and destroyed people’s lives. I should have finished with Ronan the second you walked into the
Cafe de Flore.
But I didn’t have the guts because of Debbie. Now Ronan has dumped me and it serves me right. I know what it feels like. I’d forgotten how much it hurts
.

I wanted to tell you all this today, face to face, but it’s easier in a letter. I took away from you the person you loved, the person who loves you. I made you leave your home. When I saw you today in your new apartment it made me so sad, to think that you were all alone. It’s not right that you should have to live like that
.

That’s why I’m so glad you went back to see Ronan. I know it sounds foolish, but I really want things to work out between you both. All I can do is hope and pray that things went okay just now. I know you and I know him (at least I think I know you both, just a little) and I know you were made for each other
.

I don’t expect you ever to forgive me. I’m sure that you will want me out of your life for good and how can I blame you for that? I don’t blame you for anything, Julie. I didn’t listen to a word of what Ronan said about you being underhand. You weren’t. You were trying to protect your marriage and all the time I was destroying it
.

I know you won’t want to contact me again, but to me you’re still a friend no matter what. I just wish we’d met in different circumstances, because to tell you the truth, it always felt good talking to you
.

I won’t bother you again
.

Love from Nicole and Debbie

I stuff the letter in my pocket, dash into the kitchen, grab a plastic bag, run back out into the hall, lift up the jasmine plant carefully and put it in the bag. Crying, I race back out of the front door and slam it behind me.

At two thirty I arrive at the airport, having taken every short-cut known to woman. I park my car in the multi-storey car park, a giant cold graveyard, and race with my jasmine plant towards the terminal building. I cross the road and enter the sliding dark-glass doors.