‘I wasn’t lying and I do believe in fidelity, really,’ Grey said helplessly. He sat on the edge of the armchair, running a hand through his hair. He had such long, sensitive fingers, like a pianist, fingers that could elicit a ready response from Maggie. He still looked handsome and desirable, with sexily rumpled hair as if he’d been so lost in his books he had forgotten to comb it. Maggie, who spent all her time surrounded by books, had always found this combination of brains and beauty utterly captivating. She could totally understand Ms Peachy Skin wanting to sleep with him. Grey was gorgeous, clever, and powerful within his sphere, all wrapped up in one package.
Just not faithful.
‘I love you, Grey, I don’t look at other men,’ she said. ‘I don’t think about anyone else but you, I almost don’t see anyone else but you. If there was anyone else there, if Brad Pitt and George Clooney and Wesley Snipes and anyone else you can think of were there for the taking, you know what?’ She paused. ‘I’d still say no.’
‘I know, I’m sorry, so sorry.’ The long piano-player’s fingers ran through his hair again and for a flicker of an instant, Maggie thought of his hands running through the girl’s hair in the throes of passion, twisting it and pulling gently like he did with Maggie.
‘I love your hair,’ he’d mutter when they were naked together. Maggie almost never cut it now. Grey loved its length lying tangled on the pillow as he hung over her, cradling her face before he kissed her. He thought she was feminine and sexy, things Maggie had never felt in her life until he’d come along and made her feel them. Now he’d taken all that away.
When her mother or Shona or other people said she was beautiful, she didn’t believe them. They loved her, they were being kind to her. But when Grey said it, she had believed him. He made her beautiful because she glowed from being with him.
That he had so much power over her made her feel helpless now. Going back to the sort of woman he’d had before her made it a double betrayal a
blonde with curves that Maggie would never have. She felt so hurt that she wanted to hurt him too.
‘You’re lying. You’re not sorry, only sorry I got home early and ruined it all. You screwed her. In, Our. Bed,’ she said slowly. ‘That’s not love and respect.’ She paused. ‘Were there others?’
A strange look touched his face briefly, a look of sheer guilt, and it was gone so quickly that only someone who loved his face and knew it in every mood would have noticed. But Maggie was that person. She noticed.
‘No,’ he said. She didn’t believe him.
The armchair seemed to rise up to greet her. Collapsing into it, she hugged her knees to her chest, a gesture that said ‘keep out’.
There had been others, of that she was sure and she wasn’t strong enough to hear about them. Her mother was ill, crying and not coping. Her father was asking for her help. Maggie’s world was topsy-turvy ‘Just tell me, what’s so hard about fidelity?’ she whispered, afraid she knew the answer.
It had to be her fault. This confirmed what she’d known all along. She’d always felt lucky to have Grey, astonished that he was with her.
Someone like Grey could manage faithfulness with other people, with one of those icy blondes, but not with her. For one of those women, the right sort of wife for a man with a political future in front of him, he’d have got married. But Maggie obviously wasn’t the right sort of wife for him. She was an experiment between the Carolyn Bessette Kennedy types, the trophy women. She wasn’t worth giving up other women for. That was what this was all about.
The demons of anxiety and the self-doubt she’d grown up with rushed back howling into her mind and it was as if they’d never been away.
‘I’m sorry, Maggie, I swear this will never happen again, never.’ He looked up at her but Maggie was away in her head, remembering the years when she’d lived with a permanent clench of anxiety in her gut.
Sunday nights were the worst, when the weekend was careening to an end and Monday loomed, Monday with Sandra Brody and her taunting crew
who’d made it their mission in life to destroy Maggie Maguire. Maggie had never done anything to them but that didn’t appear to matter. Maggie was the chosen scapegoat. Daily verbal torture and cruel tricks were her punishment. The self-loathing because it had to be her fault, hadn’t it? felt
just like it did now.
‘I’m sorry, Maggie,’ Grey repeated. ‘I don’t know why I did it. I wouldn’t hurt you for the world.’
‘Really?’ she asked with a bitter laugh. Why was he bothering to pretend? She’d prefer it if he told her the truth: that he loved her but just not enough. She wasn’t quite good enough.
‘You’re different, Maggie,’ Grey began and sat at her feet, pulling both her hands from around her knees, trying to make her hold him. ‘I love you, I never meant to hurt you. I am so, so sorry. Can’t you forgive me?’
She whisked her hands away, but he laid his dark head on her chair, pleading, imploring. It would be so easy to reach out and touch him, make it all go away and start again. Go on holiday, sell the apartment, move somewhere else, anything to paper over the crack. Maggie felt her fingers reach out, an inch away from brushing the softness of his hair.
Marriage that
would be the ultimate Band-Aid. A sign that they were together despite it all. Her mum would love it if she got married. Poor Mum, always hoping for the fairytale ending for her daughter. But Grey had never discussed marriage with her. Perhaps she wasn’t worth that, either.
Maggie’s hand stilled on its way to his hair. She could forgive Grey, she could forgive him almost anything. But then it would happen again. Other women, who’d work at the university and pity her, understanding that a prince like Grey wouldn’t be satisfied with just one woman. That was the price a woman like Maggie had to pay to be with a man like Grey. Why hadn’t she realised that there was a trade-off, a price?
She pulled her hand away. She couldn’t pay that price.
Suddenly, her running shoes seemed very inviting. Even home, the confines of Summer Street where her life had never been storybook perfect, was better than this.
It was familiar, somewhere she could lick her wounds. Shona and Dr Phil were probably wrong about running away. Now, staying was the hard option and running was easy.
Christie had cooked a beautiful goulash by the time she heard James’s key in the lock.
Goulash in honour of her dear Hungarian friend, Lenkya, who’d once said, ‘You can kill a man or cure him in the kitchen.’ This had been nearly forty years before, when Christie’s culinary expertise extended to making porridge or boiling eggs.
‘Cooking is the heart of the home and is the
place where the woman is queen,’ Lenkya pointed
out in the husky Hungarian accent that would
have made the phone book sound fascinating,
should she ever want to recite it.
Lenkya had lived below Christie in a house on
Dunville Avenue that contained a veritable warren
of bedsits.
‘If you can kill in the kitchen, I’ll end up in the
dock for murder,’ Christie had said merrily.
She was darkhaired then and when she and
Lenkya walked the half-mile to Ranelagh to buy
groceries, people often mistook the two women
with their flashing dark eyes, hand-span waists
and lustrous curls for sisters.
‘You should learn to cook,’ said Lenkya, who
could rustle up the tenderest stew from a handful
of root vegetables, a scattering of herbs and a
scraggy piece of meat. ‘How have you never learned
before this? In my country, women learn to look
after themselves. I can grow vegetables, raise
chickens, kill chickens, pouf -‘ She twisted both
hands round an imaginary chicken’s neck. ‘Like
that. If you are hungry, you soon learn.’
‘My mother cooked for all of us, my father, my
brothers and sister,’ Christie told her. It was harder
to explain the family dynamics which meant
cooking was the only power her mother had ever
had. Under Christie’s father’s thumb all the time,
it was only when Maura was in front of her stove
that she was in charge. If it was possible to kill
or cure a man in the kitchen, Christie wondered
how her mother had resisted the impulse to kill
her overbearing husband.
James hadn’t known Lenkya well, but he’d been
benefiting from her cooking expertise ever since.
Food was all about love, Christie knew now.
Feeding your family, giving them chicken soup
when they were sick, and apple cake to take away
the bitterness in their mouth when they were
lovelorn: that was how you could cure them. Love
and healing flew out of her kitchen into her home.
Her life was nothing like her poor mother’s and
she had no need of killing.
‘Hello, Christie.’ James put his arms round her
and held her tightly. He smelled of the train, of
dusty streets and other people’s cigarette smoke.
He looked, as he so often did these days, tired and
in need of a long, long sleep.
‘Hard day?’ Christie took his briefcase and
jacket, resisting the impulse to push him up to their
room, tuck him into bed and make him stay there
until the exhausted look had gone from his face.
‘Ah no, fine,’ he said, removing his shoes and
pulling on the old leather slippers he kept on the
second step of the stairs. ‘The trip takes it out of
me, I don’t know why. I’m sitting on the train half
the day, not driving, so I should be in fine fettle.’
‘Travelling is exhausting,’ Christie insisted. ‘There’s a difference between sitting in your own
armchair at home and sitting on a train at the
mercy of leaves on the track, worrying about
missing your meeting.’
‘I’m hardly Donald Trump,’ he joked.
‘He has a limo, I’d say, so he’s not at the mercy of the leaves.’ Christie handed her husband a glass of iced tea. ‘And someone else to drag his briefcase around after him. How did the meeting about the emissions go?’
‘We’re getting there. But one of the people was sick today, so there’s a chance we’ll have to go through it all again.’
‘For heaven’s sake,’ exclaimed Christie. ‘Surely if they’re sick, they have to catch up with the rest of you, not the other way round.’
‘You know how it works, love,’ said James. ‘For some people, the more meetings there are, the better. Then nothing actually gets done, but lots of minutes are typed up and the department’s accounts’ people are kept busy printing out expenses cheques for tea and coffee. Global warming won’t kill the planet: bureaucracy will,’ He followed her into the kitchen and sat down on a low stool to pet the dogs, who’d been clamouring for love since he arrived.
He normally knelt on the floor to pet them, she knew. His hip must be bothering him again. Not that James would ever say so. Christie knew many women with husbands whose flu symptoms were always at least on a par with Ebola, if the patient was to be believed. She was the lone dissenting voice with a husband who never magnified his illness to the power of ten, which worried her because James could be having a heart attack in front of her and he’d probably say he had ‘a bit of an ache’ and that a moment sitting down would cure it. How could you look after a man like that?
‘Now, what was that all about this morning?’ he asked when Tilly’s inner ears had been rubbed to her satisfaction and Rocket had snuffled wetly all over his shoes to establish that no other dogs had been admired that day.
‘What was all what about this morning?’ said Christie, feigning innocence.
‘You know, the phone call when I’d only just left the house.’
‘I was having an anxious day, that’s all,’ she relented. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to worry you but I had this awful feeling that something bad was going to happen to us.’
James pulled her over on to his knee and the dogs whimpered in outrage. This was their time for cuddling, not Christie’s. Tilly stormed off to her bed to sulk.
‘You can’t take my weight on your hip …’ Christie began. She knew it was stiff, she could see from the way he’d been walking that morning.
‘Oh, shut up about my bloody hip, woman,’ James said and held her tight. ‘I love you, you daft creature, d’you know that? I love that you still worry about me.’
‘Yes and I love you too, you daft man,’ she replied. ‘Even if your hip is aching and you won’t mention it.’
‘It’s only a twinge.’
‘I don’t believe you. You’d be in agony, and you’d still say it was only a twinge. You’re not impressing anybody with your stoicism,’ she said crossly.
‘It’s not agony.’
‘If your arthritis is playing up, it’s not good to have me on your lap,’ she said.
James laid his head against her cheek. ‘The day I can’t manage to have you on my lap,’ he said, ‘get them to shoot me.’
‘They couldn’t shoot you,’ Christie murmured, hugging him. ‘You’re an endangered species.’
‘Like the dodo?’
‘The poor dodo’s been and gone, sorry. You’re more of a white tiger: rare and special.’
‘You say the nicest things,’ he replied, his lips close to her cheek.
‘Impossible man,’ sighed Christie, kissing him on the forehead and getting up. ‘I made goulash.’
‘Lenkya’s recipe? Great, I love that.’ James sat down at the table expectantly. ‘Whatever happened to her? She hasn’t been in touch for years, not since Ana was involved with that artist fellow and they were all here for the big exhibition in Dawson Street. Remember that? How many years ago is it?’
Christie opened her mouth but no sound came out. Fortunately the phone blistered into the silence and she leaped to answer it.
It was Jane from the Summer Street Cafe, with news that poor Una Maguire had been carted off in an ambulance after a fall.
‘I knew you’d want to know,’ said Jane, ‘and that Dennis might not get round to telling people.’ Which was a kind way of saying dear Dennis would be too flustered to brush his teeth and might need some hand-holding. Christie was good at that: calm in a crisis.