James looked haunted, aged, not the man who had left the house this morning.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, the words sounding useless. Sorry was too small a word to cover the huge regret for having hurt him.
‘I should have told you years ago, but you know what they say, there is no point telling about an affair if the only thing you do is salve your conscience.’
‘Then why did you leave this here for me to find?’ he asked hoarsely. ‘To salve your conscience by admitting you’d slept with another man or to hurt me by showing me his pictures of you.’
Even as she’d left the sketchbook and the painting there for him to find only hours before, Christie had agonised. But she knew she had to do it. James would be home by seven, so she’d put Carey’s work on the kitchen table where he would see it, and she’d gone to sit in the Summer Street Cafe, staring blankly into an untouched coffee until it was time to go home and face him.
It was one of the hardest things she’d ever done but the truth had to be laid bare now. There could be no more secrets. ‘I didn’t want to keep this from you,’ she said. ‘And,’ she paused, ‘I was always scared you’d find out and it would destroy us. I couldn’t bear that possibility.’
‘You kept your dirty little secret well. I hadn’t a clue,’ he replied, with fingers clutching the sketchbook tightly as if at any minute he might fling it across the room, regardless of its worth. ‘Ana does she know what her beloved sister did? And why did you tell me now?’
Christie didn’t know why - she only knew that she’d felt this intense compulsion to tell the truth to her husband. Beyond that, she hadn’t thought rationally. Once she’d told him, he could do what he wanted with the information and she would have to take the consequences. ‘It’s different with Ana,’ she said, thinking aloud. ‘She didn’t really love him. She was fed up with all those doctors, remember? They had no lives outside the hospital and they just wanted someone to date occasionally.’
‘I
remember,’ James said grimly. ‘You were the one who urged her to get a new life, to meet new people and she met him.’ He snarled the word and Christie had no doubt that if Carey Wolensky had been in the room at that moment, James would have killed him.
‘You said he was the wrong sort of guy for her, controlling, crazy, remember that too?’ James demanded.
‘I remember,’ Christie replied. ‘He was all of those things and he was wrong for her.’
‘But not wrong for you?’ James snapped. ‘He was wrong for me too,’ Christie said evenly.
She’d never seen James like this before, but then she had never admitted adultery to him before. ‘She didn’t really love him,’ Christie said, and she was pretty certain of that.
When Carey had left Ireland abruptly, Ana hadn’t really cared. Soon afterwards, she’d met Rick, the great love of her life.
‘Are you going to tell her what happened?‘James asked.
‘No, I don’t think she needs to know.’ That guilt would have to live with her for ever.
‘But I did?’ He sounded so angry, was clearly barely holding on to his fury and pain.
‘Yes, you did,’ she said. ‘If Ana knew, it wouldn’t destroy our relationship. We’d go on. But the secret would destroy you and me. I heard he was coming back to Ireland for an exhibition and I was crucified with doubt and fear. I had to have the secret out, to tell you.’
‘To tell me what?’ James said. ‘That he’s here and you’re running off with him, to the land of millionaires? Is that it?’
He looked angrier than she’d ever seen him before and Christie felt humbled by his love for her, destroyed by her betrayal of this good, decent man. But she had to continue her explanation, so James could understand.
‘I went to see him yesterday,’ she said, ‘and that’s when he gave me the sketchbook and the picture. I’m not leaving you for him, there was never any question of that, James.’
‘Well, that’s good to know,’ he said sarcastically.
This
wasn’t going the way Christie had planned. ‘James, I wanted you to know about the past and that’s all it is: the past, not the present. I’ve been so anxious about it and I realise that a secret like this can’t be hidden, it’s always going to be there and it would be better for us to get it out in the open, for me to tell you.’
‘Why?’ James demanded. ‘To make me realise that thirty-something years of marriage have all been a sham?’
‘No, they haven’t,’ Christie replied. ‘There’s nothing sham about our marriage, there never was.
It was a moment of madness, stupidity.’ She threw up her hands. ‘I can’t explain.’
It was impossible to explain that Carey had stood for the wild passion of art that she’d loved, something she’d had to suppress inside herself in order to live the life she had. Perhaps if she hadn’t met James and married him and had two small children, perhaps then she could have lived happily in Carey’s bohemian world. But James, Shane and Ethan meant that that path could never be for her.
‘I love you, James, I’ve always loved you. What I had with Carey was just stupid and crazy and I knew it at the time and …’
‘And you posed for him, naked,’ James spat out, looking back at the picture. ‘This is you. I looked it up on the internet just now. He’s famous for these mysterious Dark Lady paintings. You knew I wouldn’t know about them. Art doesn’t interest me, so you were pretty safe with your secret. You knew I was never going to notice a painting by this man and realise, that’s my wife lying there naked, because I would have recognised you anywhere.’
‘I know,’ she said soberly, ‘it made it easier that you weren’t interested in art. It must mean something to you now that I am telling you, that I trust you enough to say all these things to you.’
‘Trust?’ he said. ‘What’s trust, Christie? I thought we had trust, but I was wrong. What was wrong with me? Was I too safe, too boring, too dependable, with my government job? Did you really want another life with someone else? Have you been waiting for bloody Wolensky to come and claim you all these years? Were there secret phone calls and trysts? Tell me!’
‘No,’ she shouted. ‘I haven’t seen or heard from him in twenty-five years. I wasn’t waiting for him.
If I’d wanted a life with someone else, I would have left to be with him when he asked me, but I didn’t.’
‘Oh, so you gave up the chance to run away with the great artist, for me and our dull life?’ said James coldly. He got up abruptly, stared at her, as if she was a stranger. ‘I don’t know what to say to you, Christie. I’ve been looking at that book for what seems like hours, looking at pictures of you from every conceivable angle. Drawings by a man who looked at you in the way only I was supposed to look at you. Maybe at our age you’re not supposed to care, maybe you’re supposed to be beyond all that jealousy. But you know what, I do care. I care so much it hurts here.’ He struck his chest fiercely. ‘I don’t know if I can forgive you or him. Where is he anyway?’
‘No, don’t go near him,’ Christie said. ‘That’s how I have the sketchbook and the picture. He wanted to give them to me, he’s dying.’ She said it quickly, in case James rushed out into the city, searching for Carey Wolensky with a view to killing him.
‘He’s terminally ill, James. He wanted to find me and say goodbye, that’s all. I knew he was coming, that’s why I’ve been so anxious lately.
Anxious that he’d come and ruin our lives. That’s when I realised I had to tell you myself because I couldn’t live with the fear, the fear of losing you.’
‘Well, there’s a pity,’ said James with uncharacteristic harshness, ‘because you’ve lost me anyway.
I’ll leave you with your lover’s grubby little pictures. Wolensky can come here any time he wants now, because I won’t be here. Isn’t that what you want? Oh yes, you can talk to our sons and tell them what happened.’
‘James, we don’t need to bring Ethan and Shane into this,’ Christie begged. ‘This is not about them, this is about us. Please don’t let’s involve them.’
She couldn’t bear it if her two sons learned of this. She couldn’t bear them to look at her with disgust and anger, to think of what she’d done to their beloved father. She thought of Faye: how she’d been terrified of letting Amber know the truth about her past life, and Christie understood it completely.
Could there be anything worse than having your darling children stare at you with disgust, where once they had looked at you with pride?
‘Please don’t say anything to them,’ she begged. ‘I’m not saying anything to anyone,’ James snapped. ‘I need some time to myself. I’ll be on my mobile phone. I might go fishing.’
He hadn’t gone fishing for years. She couldn’t imagine where his fishing boxes and tackle were.
Suddenly, she realised that that was hardly a problem and that James probably wasn’t going fishing anyway. He just needed to get away, to be anywhere, except near her.
‘I understand,’ she said humbly, ‘and I’m sorry.
That’s all I wanted to say, I’m sorry. It was a huge mistake and there is nothing else I can say except I love you. It was a mistake. He was a mistake.
But I didn’t go with him when he asked me to, I stayed here with you.’
‘And I’m supposed to be grateful for that fact?’
James said. ‘Because right now, I don’t feel very grateful. I just feel very angry.’
‘Will you phone me tonight so that I know wherever you’re going, you got there safely?’ Christie asked, not wanting to think of him driving recklessly.
‘No,’
he said. ‘I don’t want to talk to you, Christie. I can’t, I have to think.’
‘I don’t want our marriage to be over,’ she pleaded. ‘I can’t tell you that either,’ James said.
He stormed out of the room, but for once the dogs didn’t get up to follow him halfway up the stairs, torn between the humans they loved most.
Instead, they lay on the floor, noses on their paws, big dark eyes looking soulfully and worriedly up at Christie.
‘I know, babies,’ she said. ‘Daddy’s upset. But it’ll be OK.’ She talked to them like she’d talked to her children when they were small. You always told children that things would be OK even if they weren’t going to be. Christie didn’t know how this would all pan out. Her gift of vision was blank.
She wished she could look into a crystal ball and see James coming home, forgiving her, throwing his arms around her, saying it was all in the past and they could forget it. But that might never happen. She’d done what she thought was the right thing, because she couldn’t live under the fear for ever. But now the fear that James would one day find out about her infidelity had been replaced with an entirely different type of fear. The fear that James would leave her for ever. Had she done the wrong thing after all?
Faye, too, felt lost and alone, waiting in New York for news of Amber. She’d meant to go home sooner: she’d been there nearly a month and it was costing her a fortune. But leaving would be like giving up on Amber and she just couldn’t do it.
She rang Ella each evening, hoping that Amber might have rung her friend with details of where she was, but no such luck. It was as if Amber had fallen off the face of the earth. Now that she’d made her choice, she was going to stick with it, not talking to friends, family, anyone, she’d cut them all off. Like mother, like daughter, Faye thought endlessly, remembering how singleminded she’d been all those years ago, before she’d become pregnant with Amber. Then, she wouldn’t listen to anyone. She should have known that Amber would have inherited that trait too.
Alone in New York, she had plenty of time to think. She wasn’t a shopper, so she bypassed the stores that would have left Grace in paroxysms of delight. Instead, she forced herself around the sights.
She visited Ground Zero one day, and stood there silently and felt ashamed of herself. She might not know where Amber was, but she was pretty sure she was alive. She’d simply chosen not to have contact with her mother any more. Whereas the people who had died here were gone for ever. She could and would see Amber again. The Ground Zero families were not so lucky.
Faye left with a new sense of determination.
There had to be something else she could do to find Amber: that was the first thing on her list.
And the second was to move on. She hadn’t had so much time on her own in years, time to look at herself. She found she didn’t like what she saw.
Getting back to her comfortably familiar hotel room, she phoned Grace’s office answering machine and left a message.
‘Grace, this is Faye, I need your help. When you get this, will you ring me at the hotel? We can talk and I’ll give you all the details.’
Grace phoned at eight p.m. Irish time. ‘You’re in late,’ said Faye.
‘Well, my fabulous partner and second-in-command is on leave,’ retorted Grace, ‘so somebody has to keep the home fires burning. But you don’t want to hear my problems. How’s the search going?’
‘Not well,’ Faye replied. ‘Whatever deal the band had going is off, so God knows where they are. I imagine they’ll be looking for another production company. Amber’s friend, Ella, says that Karl Evans - he’s the guy Amber’s fallen for - is very determined to succeed, so it’s unlikely they’d just give up … But it’s a whole other world here and I can’t get much information. I thought maybe you could ask around at home, see who knows of the band or their manager?’
Grace knew everybody, senior policemen, politicians, business movers and shakers. If anybody could track down Ceres and Karl, it was Grace.
‘Give me all the details,’ Grace insisted, businesslike. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
Faye felt a weight lift off her shoulders; she wished she’d asked for Grace’s help ages ago.
Three hours later she rang again. ‘I think I’ve found them,’ she said.
‘Do you know what day it is?’ Amber asked Karl.
They were sitting by the pool at a small table enjoying breakfast. The rest of the band were around them, all looking bright and energetic even though it was half past eight in the morning.
There was no drinking or carousing now. Life had turned serious. They were working on their album, had been for the last three days. Amber had never doubted Karl’s ability but she had never seen him so focused, so dedicated. And so happy. But she was finding it hard to see the person she loved filled with a joy that had absolutely nothing to do with her. It made her feel lost and alone.