Lessons in Heartbreak (16 page)

‘I had no problem with gratitude. It was just that gratitude was a one-way street. My mother and my father worked hard up at Rathnaree and they just accepted that they’d never receive any gratitude for it. They got exactly what they were due, nothing more. The Lochravens liked to say their servants were part of the family, but they weren’t treated like that. They were just words, and words mean nothing. Oh, don’t mind me, Anneliese,’ she said. ‘I used to think if you were rich and from the gentry, you had it all. I know better now. Life hurts them the same way as it hurts us all.’

Anneliese thought of that now, as she turned off the road, up a narrow, hedge-lined lane to Lily’s cottage. It was such an enigmatic thing to say, but there had been a sense that Lily had a lot more to say if she were asked.

Anneliese wished she’d asked now. A person didn’t get to Lily’s age without learning a lot of life’s wisdom and, right now, Anneliese could have done with some wisdom. After losing her only child, Anneliese had never known how Lily didn’t crul up into a ball of bitterness and die.

It had been a long time since Lily’s home had been a forge but the name stuck: the Old Forge. Her father had been a blacksmith, the last in a long line of blacksmiths, who had come to work for the Lochravens. In his time, it had been a working forge, complete with picturesque horseshoe-shaped door and the tang of hot metal in the air. Eventually though, the forge itself had shifted to Rathnaree with its huge stables. Over the years, the original forge had been absorbed into the
family home, until it was hard to tell where the forge ended and the house began.

There was a herb-filled front garden, because Lily loved herbs, and a fine big vegetable garden at the back that she no longer had the energy to dig or sow. When Lily’s husband, Robby, had been alive, the couple had kept cows and hens and Lily had become proficient at selling free-range eggs, making her own butter, doing anything to get by in the lean years when Robby hadn’t been able to find much work as a carpenter.

He was long dead, at least twenty years, Anneliese thought, remembering Lily on that bleak day in St Canice’s, when winter rain had lashed against the church’s stained-glass windows and Lily’s face looked as if it had been carved from the same wood as her husband’s coffin as she stood and stared at it.

All I’ve done is lost a husband, and he’s not lost for ever, he’s just run off with someone else
.

She tried this idea out in her mind, seeing how it felt. Edward wasn’t gone for ever: he had just chosen to leave her. Was that worse or better than if he died? Because if he died, and he still loved her, she’d have that comfort to help her along as she dealt with the pain of being on her own. Yes, she grinned, feeling some crazy sense of relief, in the midst of all this madness, death certainly trumped separation.

On the outside, the forge looked much the same as it had in those pictures Anneliese had seen of Edward and Alice standing outside it as children, laughing as they stood beside the big rain barrel where Lily kept the water that the family used for everything from washing their hair to bathing. Inside it was different, full of character and warmth in the way only someone like Lily could fill a house, with lots of books and pictures of the family, and flowers, mixed with herbs from her garden, scenting the air. There was a beautiful bathroom too.

‘I always swore that, if I had to live in this house, I’d have an inside toilet,’ Lily used to tell Anneliese. ‘When we were kids, we were used to it, nobody had indoor toilets. Except up at Rathnaree; they had the most amazing bathroom installed for Lady Irene, all marble and mirrors replacing the old wooden panelling and a huge cracked tub. None of us had ever seen anything like it. I think everyone on the estate went in to have a look. It was just sheer luxury. I swore, one day I’d have a bathroom like that!’

And she had, thought Anneliese, with a smile. Well, it wasn’t quite like the fabled Rathnaree marble version, but it was pretty luxurious: pure white tiles and a swirling chocolate brown Deco pattern running along the edges. She was glad that Lily had had her lovely bathroom, it was nice at the end of your life to have had the things you dreamt of having. You could look at them before you died and say, ‘I wanted that when I was twenty, and now I have it!’

‘Stop,’ Anneliese said out loud. She was talking as if Lily was already dead, and she wasn’t. But Lily was very old, and maybe this was the way for her to go. Quickly was always better for the person who died, but it was horrible for those left behind. It would break Izzie’s heart if her darling gran died before she had a chance to say goodbye.

Anneliese wondered if she should have offered to phone Izzie to tell her the news. She had an idea from her last conversation with Lily that Izzie was away on a shoot: Mexico, New Mexico…she wasn’t sure about the place or time – time had escaped her these past few days. She barely knew which day of the week it was.

If Brendan hadn’t phoned Izzie to tell her what had happened, she would when she got to the hospital. But now she had to rush, not stand here looking at old photographs and thinking back on Lily’s life. That was no good for anybody. She hurried upstairs into Lily’s bedroom and packed some
nighties, underclothes, bed jackets and soft slippers.
Hurry
, a voice inside was telling her.

Lily looked so frail in the hospital bed when Anneliese walked into the intensive care unit. Even though she’d thought about the possibility of Lily not waking up, the realisation hit her forcibly when she saw that frail body lying doll-like under the covers, winking and beeping machines all around her. The ICU was as quiet as a church with nurses hurrying back and forth, quietly and efficiently, while patients lay still in the ward’s four beds. There was no sign of Brendan at his mother-in-law’s bedside and Anneliese was glad for that. She didn’t want to have to comfort Brendan. Instead, she could sit quietly on the chair beside the bed and look at Lily. The older woman’s eyes were closed and yet she looked more than asleep; the animation that normally shone from her face was absent today. She’d always seemed somewhat ageless in normal life, yet now she looked like a very old lady, with fragile bones and skin delicate as tissue paper. A drip needle was stuck into the back of one of her fragile hands and Anneliese winced at both the pain of the needle and the ache of the bruise that had already settled around the sharp metal.

‘Oh, Lily,’ she said, taking Lily’s other papery hand in her own and stroking it. ‘I’m so sorry, darling. I’m so sorry you’re here and that I haven’t been talking to you. Things have been so dreadful with me and Edward, and I didn’t know how to tell you. I’m sorry, that’s not fair. And now, you’re here and I don’t know what you’d want me to do. We never talked about this. I don’t know if you want heroic measures to bring you back, or if you’re happy to go, my love. I wish I knew. You deserve the dignity of choice.’

It was odd, because Lily could talk about anything. Not for her the ostrich-in-the-sand mentality or thinking that if you didn’t face an issue, it would disappear. Lily faced everything
head-on. But death, and what to do in the run-up to death, was one of the last taboos.

Anneliese held the old woman’s fragile hand and prayed for guidance. She wasn’t equipped for this, not now. Because of Edward, she felt as fragile as Lily herself.

‘Oh, Lily, what do you want me to do?’

Cosmetics contracts were the holy grail of the industry. There might be huge kudos at landing a photoshoot for
Vogue
but the honour was supposed to make up for the lack of cash involved in such a high-profile shoot. Editorial was great for a model’s portfolio, but mascara ads meant a whole lot more cash.

Once a model had signed on the dotted line with one of the cosmetic giants, she never had to worry about badly paid photo-shoots again. Cosmetics contracts guaranteed a lot of money up front and some security in an industry not known for it. A contract made a model more valuable in that a million billboards made her famous, made her a name. Once a model became a name and not just another slender beauty, she had a chance at the big time: more advertisements, television, endorsements. When that happened, everyone – including the model’s agency – got to laugh all the way to the bank.

The day after she’d stared at Joe and his wife outside the museum and had felt her life crashing painfully around her, Izzie had to put her pain aside for a big meeting with a cosmetic company client about a mega-million-dollar campaign aimed at teenagers. The Jacobman Corporation wanted a new
model to front their new cosmetic line and Perfect-NY were, through a fabulous piece of luck, in the running to find the girl.

It was a huge slice of business for Perfect-NY and exactly the sort of job that Izzie didn’t want to be doing the day after her heart had been broken.

As she marched into Jacobman’s giant office block on Madison, she looked the part – on the outside. She was fashion perfect in black Marc Jacobs with her hair sleeked back, wearing a solid four ounces of Bobbi Brown nude make-up in order to look as if she was wearing no make-up at all.

On the inside, however, she was tired, dead-eyed, and felt as if she had barely enough energy to lift her coffee cup to her lips.

The meeting was in the Jacobman Corporation’s third boardroom – the first and second ones were big enough to host a Yankees game – and there were only four people present: Izzie, representing Perfect-NY, two people from the SupaGirl! range and a Jacobman bigwig, Stefan Lundberg.

Cosmetic companies spread their net wide when looking for the right girl for their products. But Perfect-NY had been invited to showcase any of their girls who filled the brief because the current Mrs Rick Jacobman Jnr had once been a model at Perfect-NY and had, astonishingly, never forgotten the agency which had launched her career, a rather short one which had then launched her into the arms of Rick, heir to the Jacobman millions. Around the model agencies, Svetlana Jacobman was seen as a model who’d won the ultimate cosmetics contract. Even with a cast-iron pre-nup hanging over her should it all go horribly wrong, Svetlana had joined the ranks of the truly rich.

‘Yeah, she’s fresh-faced, but she’s sorta kooky, isn’t she?’ snapped one of the SupaGirl! executives, tossing aside the third model card they’d looked at. ‘We’re not about kooky. We want a normal American teenager.’

On the other side of the boardroom table, Izzie stuck her nails into the palms of her hands to make herself keep schtum. Normal teenager – yeah, right. She’d seen the brief, and no matter how they pretended they were looking for normal, what they really wanted was a fifteen-year-old goddess who’d never seen a zit in her life in order to advertise oil-free foundation.

‘Lorelei is actually very versatile,’ Izzie said, once she’d managed to get her temper under control.

‘We’re not about kooky,’ agreed the other SupaGirl! person, who looked about twelve years old and was clearly a yes-woman for the other executive.

‘No, definitely not. Let’s skip her. Who else have you got?’ snapped the first executive.

After another half hour of this, Izzie had only four models left to show them and couldn’t face doing it, and being rejected again, without a hit of caffeine. Perfect-NY weren’t getting an early chance to place one of their models with SupaGirl! after all. This whole thing was a PR exercise to please Svetlana Jacobman and the bitchy executive had never had any intention of doing business this way.

‘I need a coffee,’ Izzie said, forcing a smile on to her face and rising abruptly from the conference table.

‘Yeah, me too,’ said Stefan, following her.

Outside the conference room was a small kitchen that was, nevertheless, bigger than the one in Izzie’s apartment.

‘No good so far, but hey, you never know, we might hit gold yet,’ Stefan said as he leaned against the door jamb and watched Izzie making her mind up between machine espresso or filter. She’d known him for a few years; he was good looking in an outdoorsy way, but he was too obvious: blond hair carefully gelled, shirt opened to show his impressive chest. Izzie had a vision of him in front of the mirror in the mornings, working out exactly which button to open down to on his
shirt. She hated that: she preferred her men rougher, as though they could afford nice suits but really couldn’t be bothered trying to look so smooth. Unfortunately, that type of guy clearly couldn’t be bothered about her either, if Joe Hansen was anything to go by.

Irritation with Joe spilled out on to the general population.

‘I’m not holding out much hope for us hitting gold,’ she snapped. ‘Your Laurel and Hardy team don’t seem to like any model I show them.’

‘Ouch. Laurel and Hardy. That’s harsh. Bad day?’ said Stefan.

‘You could say that.’ Izzie went for filter coffee. She might start to shake if she had any more espresso inside her.

‘Man trouble or office trouble?’ Stefan asked.

Izzie shot him a glare. Stefan was straight, therefore not allowed to broach the ‘having man trouble?’ conversation.

With guys like him – straight, women-mad with access to a corporate gold card – man conversations always ended up with him offering himself, clothed or otherwise, as a shoulder to cry on.

‘I don’t have man trouble, because I don’t have anything to do with men.’

‘Pity.’

‘Pity, schmity.’

‘You sure you don’t want to talk?’

‘Stefan,’ she snapped, ‘I’m not talking about this with you. We are not friends.’

‘Ouch.’ He feinted grabbing his bruised heart at that.

Izzie laughed. ‘What I like about you is that I can say anything and you can take it.’

‘I’d love you to say anything to me, but you always turn me down. Like that time I asked you to have early drinks with me before the Ford party…’

‘I had to work. Besides, when I turned up, you’d found yourself a date.’

She’d been tempted by the invitation at the time, during another date-drought, before she’d given up on men altogether. But Stefan had cut a swathe through more than one model agency. She’d often wondered if he had his own wall with model cards on it and a merit-rating system.

The night in question, she’d showed up at the party to find him being consoled by a Texan model who had legs up to her armpits, a curtain of platinum hair down to her coccyx and a body made for lingerie adverts.

‘She was on the subs’ bench,’ he said. ‘You were first team.’

‘You’ve an answer for everything, Stefan,’ she sighed. ‘You do realise that if it was anybody else but me, you’d be facing a sexual harassment suit right now? You’re lucky I’m so easy-going.’

‘You, easy-going? Hey Irish, never get hard-going, will you?’

‘Let’s concentrate on what we’re doing.’

‘Not over coffee,’ he groaned. ‘We’re supposed to be doing the brainstorming in the conference room.’

‘It’s hard to think creatively with that pair wrecking my buzz. Can’t you hire executives whose facial muscles allow them to smile?’

‘Point taken. They are kinda miserable. Hard to believe, but there’s a lot of competition to get on to the SupaGirl! team. Great package, great healthcare, gym in the basement…’ Stefan pretended to flex a muscle, ‘…guys like myself, looking decorative and available for dates because hot girls from the model agencies keep turning them down –’

‘That’s it!’ Izzie banged her cup down, spilling coffee on to the counter. ‘A
competition
. What about a find-a-model-for-SupaGirl! competition?’

Even as she was saying it, her mind was flipping the idea over. Was it a stupid idea or a clever one? There was such a fine line between the two.

‘Brilliant!’ said Stefan, clearly not thrown off track by his meanderings being interrupted. Izzie wanted to give him a hug. He might be a macho male in some respects, but he was an out-and-out professional.

‘Absolutely brilliant. Publicity and launch in one fell swoop.’

No, hugging would be a mistake, she reckoned. Stefan might misconstrue it. She patted his arm instead in a filial gesture. ‘Glad you like the idea.’

‘Like it? I love it.’

‘Perfect-NY will represent the girl who wins and we’ll help you set up castings all around the country,’ Izzie went on. No point in her coming up with a fabulous idea and letting the SupaGirl! executives take over.

She almost danced out of the building an hour later and was on her cell phone to the office before she’d got a cab.

Everyone was on a call, so she left messages on people’s voicemails and then sat back on the scuffed black seat and realised that she had nobody else to phone. Carla was her closest friend and she’d just left an ecstatic message on her voicemail.

But there was no one else to talk to. No special someone to phone and murmur that she’d had a brilliant idea, nobody to tell her they were proud of her. Gran loved to hear about her work, but she felt a shaft of misery at the idea of phoning home in order to connect with people who loved her. The deep gloom that had lifted briefly in the conference room descended again.

Before Joe, she’d never needed to phone anyone to tell them her news. But she’d got used to it with him, and now, without him, she felt the lack of it deeply. Damn the rest of the coupled-up world. She was fed up with them.

When she got to the office, the team happily discussed Izzie’s idea before people raced off on their lunch breaks.

‘Hey, you going out for lunch?’ Carla asked her.

‘No.’

‘Good. I want to talk to you.’

Carla led a dead-eyed Izzie out on to the fire escape for a bit of privacy.

‘Yeah, what’s up?’ said Izzie, wrapping her arms around herself. She felt cold – no matter what she did, she hadn’t been warm since last night. It was like the combination of rain and sheer emotional pain had sent a chill into her bones. Even the buzz from the SupaGirl! idea couldn’t warm her up.

‘There’s a bit of prime gossip going around,’ Carla said, ‘’bout a certain married Wall Street gentleman who’s having a hot thing with a model-agency booker. Seems somebody’s driver said to another driver who said it to a hairdresser who told a client – possibly lots of clients. Hey, you know this town, everybody loves to talk – and this particular everybody happens to be a friend of mine and said it to me.’

‘New York whispers are like Chinese whispers, only deadlier, huh?’ Izzie quipped nervously. There was no way Carla could know about her and Joe.

‘Tell me it’s not you,’ Carla said.

Izzie bit her lip. It was only a momentary pause, but it was enough for Carla.

‘Oh fuck, it
is
you, isn’t it?’

Izzie didn’t want to look Carla in the eye. She couldn’t face the reproach she knew she’d see there. How could she explain this?

I didn’t know the full story that first day – dumb, I agree, but I didn’t know. I didn’t think. He was so charming and sexy and we connected, and by the time he said he was with his wife but not with her, well, I was hooked…

‘Izzie, you cannot be serious! What has happened to you? I should have known,’ Carla raged. ‘I knew something was wrong and I hoped you’d tell me what it was, but I never
thought it was a man. A married man! Are you nuts? How many women do we know who’ve gone that route, and it always ends up bad. Always. The only person who wins is the guy.’

‘Look, he’s married, but they’re not together –’ began Izzie, thinking that it was a bit rich that her secret was out now that she’d finally decided it was over between her and Joe.

‘Puhleese!’

‘It’s not like it sounds,’ snapped Izzie. ‘You know me, Carla: I’m not the sort of woman who’s looking for a
Fortune
500 guy to tear him away from his wife so I can cut up my subway pass and never work again. I just thought he was a guy, he liked me, we saw each other and –’

‘– and he told you it was over with her?’

‘Living separate lives. Together for the kids.’

Carla actually hit her forehead with the palm of her hand, the international ‘you are a moron’ gesture. ‘And you believed him?’

‘Yes! He’s not a liar, honestly.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me about him, then? I heard nothing ‘bout Mr Wall Street. Why? Because you
knew
something wasn’t right, didn’t you? And you knew I’d talk you out of it.’

Izzie shot her friend an anguished gaze. ‘I thought it was the real thing, Carla. You can’t fake love, and he loved me. I loved him.’

‘So why not tell me?’

‘It was all so complicated. He loves his kids and he wants to make it all right for them, Carla. He’s not a bastard, honestly. He’s the real deal and I knew he needed time,’ she said lamely.

‘Time? Yeah, time to play an away game until he rolled back to his wife.’

Izzie burst into tears, a move which startled both of them.

‘Jeez,’ said Carla.

‘It’s over anyway,’ Izzie said, weeping. ‘I believed him about needing time and then I found out he was going to a party with his wife, and it didn’t seem like such separate lives any more, so I finished with him.’

‘That’s something,’ Carla remarked.

‘No, it’s not,’ sobbed Izzie. ‘Because I’ve never felt worse in my whole life. I still believe him, but it’s too much, too complicated. I can’t be involved in that and I had to get out before…’

She couldn’t finish the sentence.
Before she fell so painfully in love with him that she’d stay no matter what
, was what she wanted to say. Except she’d already done that, it seemed. She didn’t care what was going on in Joe’s life, she just wanted to be part of it. Her moral compass was broken and she didn’t care.