Funny thing is that house prices in Kimmage soared in the intervening years. It still doesn’t have the cachet of Terenure or Templeogue, but it’s not a cheap place to live any more. When Mam died and I sold the house at auction, I couldn’t believe the bidding for it. All of my life I’d felt a bit let down by my address when so many people I met lived in more affluent suburbs, but things had changed dramatically. And it still took a bit of getting used to.
But that night, the night when Aidan Rourke walked me home and then came into the house for a cup of tea, I felt inadequate. My sparkly dress couldn’t take away from the shabbiness of our house, from the fact that the carpet had threadbare patches near the sofa and that our cupboards were Formica rather than real wood. It’s amazing how many stupid and irrelevant things rush into your mind when you bring someone new into your home territory. I was measuring number three Davitt Villas up to whatever Aidan’s Terenure address was and it couldn’t match up. I didn’t need to see Aidan’s house to know that mine fell far short of his. I knew it instinctively.
And so, when he kissed me, in our small and neat but painfully inadequate living room, I felt honoured. So honoured that I didn’t stop him as his fingers slid upwards along the slit in my dress to the top of my legs. So honoured that I was happy to let him ease the zip slowly downwards and shrug my dress from my shoulders. And I know it sounds stupid to feel honoured that I lost my virginity to him on our brown cord sofa, but I did.
Afterwards I just felt lucky that Mam had taken a sleeping tablet to help her drop off that night. The doctor had prescribed them for her but she rarely took them, always fearing that she’d become addicted even though her only addiction was to daily Mass. But the night of the party I’d told her to damn well take one because I’d be late home and I knew she didn’t really like being in the house on her own at night. For once she’d listened to me. And I felt very, very lucky.
I didn’t, of course, feel lucky eight weeks later when I realised I was pregnant. I hadn’t even considered the notion of getting pregnant, which I know sounds incredibly naïve but was actually the case. It was my first time. How many people get pregnant their first time? It’s an unfair trick of our bodies, this desire to procreate. And it’s totally unfair that in the midst of doing something great like making love to Aidan, I really should have been thinking about what else was going on.
I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t tell my mother. It would kill her. I couldn’t confide in Madge, even though by then she was my best friend. I couldn’t tell anyone. But of course I had to. I had to tell Aidan. After all, he was the father of my child and we were actually going out together. He’d called me the day after the party and asked to meet me for a drink. And that was how he became my boyfriend.
But even now I can’t believe that he married me. I’m quite sure he didn’t want to. He was only twenty, after all. I was nineteen. Yet when I told him about the baby, there was no question in his mind.
My mother, when I eventually told her, wanted things done as quickly as possible because she was overwhelmed by the shame of it all. (It was still definitely shameful twenty-five years ago to be pregnant and unmarried, no matter how confident you tried to be about it.) But I didn’t want to rush up the aisle. I wanted to give Aidan options. I told him that I’d rather wait until after the baby was born. Besides, I said, I was already feeling fat and bloated, already loading on weight. I’d feel a total fraud getting married when I was bursting out of the dress. Why not wait? I suggested. He wasn’t keen on that idea. He felt that asking me to marry him before having the baby made it all right. I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid if I argued with him that he’d change his mind, and I didn’t want him to change his mind. After all, I was in love with him.
So we compromised. We got married in a registry office. A quiet, unimportant day with only our parents there. (Despite her shame, my mother was being as supportive as she could. Aidan’s parents were more furious than ashamed, but they felt it was their duty to attend. Later, I grew to like them and I became more friendly with Colleen Rourke than with Mam. I hate saying that. But it’s true.)
The registry office ceremony was awful, and I didn’t actually feel married afterwards. But I was and so our baby wouldn’t be born with the illegitimate stigma that still surrounded single mothers and their children. At the time of our marriage I still thought I was having one baby. It wasn’t until a few weeks later that I discovered I was having two.
In December that year, after the twins had been born, we combined a christening event for them and a church wedding for ourselves. The priest was young and understanding. I guess that he’d realised that times were changing and that the established churches needed to do whatever they could to hang on to their flocks. And if that meant christening the babies and marrying their parents on the same day, he was going to do it.
The church wedding became, in the eyes of everyone who knew us, the real wedding day. And it was the December date that we celebrated every year afterwards, so that we almost forgot that another date even existed. On the times that we did celebrate, of course. Aidan wasn’t much for marking birthdays and anniversaries. And it became less important to me too, over the years. More important was the twins and how they were getting on with life, which was, in fact, pretty well. Because (in some ways to our surprise) Aidan and I were good parents. Sure, he wasn’t exactly the world’s best around the house, but he was great with the kids. A natural. He liked being with them. He had more patience with them than me and enjoyed bringing them to the park or to places like the Natural History Museum or art galleries where they were well behaved and appreciative. They were always well behaved with Aidan. They played up more with me.
Staring out over the gently lapping water, I simply could not believe that twenty-five years had gone by since I married Aidan. I really couldn’t. They’d gone in a blur of having the twins and then looking after them; of Aidan getting promoted; of moving house (three times!); of my mother’s final illness; of Aidan’s father’s stroke; of Colleen Rourke’s recovery from a mystery ailment after his death (which everyone knew was depression but which led to her living with us for over a year, which, to be honest, was a bit of a strain no matter how much I liked her); of all the things that go on in your life when you’re not really paying attention.
I didn’t pay attention to my life. I didn’t have time. There was always something else to be doing. And now here I was thinking about it again, as I had for the past few months, realising that huge swathes of it had simply passed me by when I was concentrating on something else entirely.
Aidan’s hadn’t passed him by. Aidan had done really well – he’d moved job twice but had been headhunted back to the original bank again. He had an office on the fifth floor. The prestigious floor. The one that everyone wanted to have an office on. He was paid well and he spent the money on our home and our children. And on me too, I guess, because he regularly bought me gifts of jewellery or perfume. He was a good husband.
And we’d been together for twenty-five years.
I saw him nod at DeVere and the waiter closed the wine list.
‘Shiraz,’ said Aidan.
I nodded as he took a warm roll from the basket on the table and broke it in half, scattering crumbs across his plate and on to the green linen tablecloth. He frowned and dabbed at those crumbs with the tips of his fingers. I’d always liked Aidan’s fingers because they were long and sensitive and did wonderful things to my body. Less and less in the last few years, though.
He glanced up and caught me watching him.
‘What?’ he asked.
I shook my head.
‘I should have booked the Mariner’s Reef tonight,’ said Aidan.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Twenty-five years. More appropriate to have the classier restaurant, don’t you think?’
I shook my head. ‘I’m not a classy woman.’
He laughed. ‘Of course you are.’
‘Not really.’
‘You know, it still bothers you, doesn’t it?’ He looked at me curiously. ‘Your so-called humble beginnings.’
‘Not that humble after all,’ I said. ‘And no, Aidan, it doesn’t bother me in the slightest.’
‘What then?’ He frowned. ‘You’ve been behaving oddly ever since we got here. As though you’re not really enjoying yourself.’
Our starters (both of us had chosen crab) were placed in front of us. I squeezed fresh lemon over mine.
‘The children went to a lot of trouble,’ said Aidan. ‘The least you can do is enjoy yourself.’
‘I didn’t ask them to.’ My words were sharper than I intended and I saw a flash of surprise in Aidan’s eyes.
‘I think it shows that we reared two wonderful kids,’ he said after a moment’s hesitation.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m glad we did that.’
‘Lots of people said it wouldn’t work,’ said Aidan. ‘They thought that we were too young and that the strain of the twins would be too much for us. But they were wrong.’
I nodded.
‘What they forget is that you can make things work if you try hard enough.’
‘Depends on what outcome you want, I guess,’ I said.
‘What more could we want?’ He smiled at me and then slid his hand into his jacket pocket. He took out a small red box which he pushed across the table towards me. ‘Just something,’ he said, ‘to let you know how much I appreciate you and everything you’ve done.’
I took the box and opened it. A pair of diamond earrings in a silver setting sparkled under the light of the table’s candle. I touched one of them and the colours seemed to crackle beneath my fingers.
‘They’re beautiful,’ I said.
‘I got them yesterday,’ he told me. ‘When you were talking to that old dear. I went into town and bought them.’
I’d noticed he’d gone missing for a while but it hadn’t bothered me. Aidan was never very good at sitting on a beach anyway.
‘Happy anniversary,’ he said, raising the glass of shiraz.
I bit my lip. I didn’t know what to do. To ruin everything or not? I hadn’t intended to, not on this trip, but it was as though my emotions were in a mental washing machine, tumbling this way and that, getting caught up in each other until I didn’t know how I was supposed to feel.
He was looking at me with a puzzled expression on his face.
This wasn’t where I’d intended to be. For today, for my wedding anniversary, I’d planned to go to a beauty salon and have a million different things done to me so that I’d look ten years younger. For Christmas . . . I hadn’t known what I was going to do about Christmas. Everyone wants the perfect family Christmas. But the twins were both scheduled to work on Christmas Day. We wouldn’t have had a perfect family Christmas anyway. And what was the point in pretending any more?
We were never really going to be the perfect family. We looked it, of course. But then lots of families look perfect when you know, deep down, that they can’t possibly be. We weren’t perfect because Aidan didn’t really love me and I didn’t really love him. We respected each other, more or less. And we cared about each other. There were times when we had great sex together. But love . . . we’d never fallen in love.
I lifted my own glass slowly.
There had been other women. I knew that. Over twenty-five years is three a lot? I’d found receipts in his jacket. I’d overheard snatches of hurried phone calls. I’d seen a gift-wrapped box at the back of a drawer that had never been given to me. Three women. That I knew of.
And one man. I swirled the red wine in the glass in front of me. My man. Brett. I’d known him for six months and it was a mad passion. Even now, thinking about him made my stomach contract. It was for Brett that I wanted to look ten years younger. Brett, the yoga instructor at the gym who could bend his body into innumerable poses and who knew my body better than I knew it myself. Brett with the long dark hair and the soft dark eyes. Brett, whose touch sent me into a frenzy of desire. Brett who told me he loved me.
Brett who’d asked me to live with him.
Brett who loved me.
Wasn’t I entitled to something for myself after all these years? After giving up my job to take care of the twins? After always putting Aidan and Aidan’s career first because, let’s face it, he’d married me. He hadn’t left me to fend for myself. He’d done the decent thing and so I had to do the decent thing too and look after him. Be the perfect wife to his perfect husband. I was obliged to do that. I had no choice.
And now the kids had grown up and, OK, they hadn’t exactly moved away yet but they would soon, and I wanted some time to myself. I wanted to do my own thing. Resume my life. The life I’d wanted to have before the dark blue dress and the chiffon skirt with the sparkly stars. I wanted to get a job. I wanted to have sex in unusual places. (With Brett I already had. We’d made love in the open air; in the gym’s private sauna; on the train to Belfast . . . it had been exciting. Not like with Aidan. Not the chore that our love-making had become.)
I didn’t know why Brett loved me. But I knew that I loved him. And I wanted to be with him. It wouldn’t matter to Aidan. He could cope on his own. He was always better at coping than me.
‘Gráinne?’ His voice was gentle.
My fingers closed over the jewellery box with the diamond earrings.
‘Twenty-five years,’ he said. ‘Ups and downs in those twenty-five years. Good times and bad times. But we made it this far.’
But I could have a different twenty-five years. With Brett. Twenty-five years of someone loving me because of me, not because I was the mother of their children. Not because I knew not to buy the brand of washing powder that brought them out in a rash. Not because I was always there for them, even when they’d betrayed me with another woman.
Would Brett betray me?
Probably.