Students were always getting crushes on Grey. The two of them joked about it, because it seemed so funny, despite Shona’s stories. Grey was miles away from the image of a fusty academic with woolly hair, badly fitting jackets and mismatched socks. When they had first met, five years previously, when she was finding her feet in the city, Maggie herself had found it hard to believe he held a doctorate in political science. At a start-of-term college party, he’d stood out among the soberly dressed professorial types. He wore jeans, and, around his neck, a couple of narrow leather coils from which hung a piece of obsidian that glittered like his cloudy grey eyes. Maggie had heard of Dr Grey Stanley, a brilliant thinker who’d resisted attempts by various political leaders to advise their parties and who was the author of several widely read articles on the state of the country. Nobody had mentioned how jaw-droppingly handsome he was.
‘Hey, Red,’ he’d said, tangling long fingers in the tendrils of her auburn hair. ‘Can I get you a glass of the vinegar that passes for wine round here?’
Maggie, tomboy extraordinaire whose shoulder-length hair was one of her few concessions to femininity, would normally have given the death glare to any strange guy who dared to touch her. But this man, all heat and masculinity so close to her, made it hard to breathe, never mind shoot murderous glares. She exhaled, suddenly glad she’d
worn the black camisole that hung low on her small breasts, the fabric starkly dark against her milky white skin. Her skin was true redhead type, so white it was almost blue, she sometimes joked.
Grey stared at her as if milky white with a smattering of tiny freckles was his favourite colour combination. The party in a draughty hall on the Coolidge College campus was full of fascinating, clever people with IQs that went off the scale, and he’d chosen her. Even now, no matter how many times Shona told her she was beautiful and that Grey Stanley was lucky to have her, Maggie shook her head in denial. It was the other way round, she knew.
‘Maggie
As she slammed the cloakroom door shut and slid the lock, she heard Grey’s anxious voice outside. He rarely called her Red any more. Red was the girl he’d fallen in love with, the feisty redhead who was fiercely independent, who needed nobody in her life, thank you very much. She was so different from the Park Avenue Princesses, she must have struck him as a challenge he couldn’t resist. But five years of coupledom had surgically removed her independence and now, she realised, she had become like a tiger in a zoo: lazily captive and unable to survive in the wild.
She leaned over the toilet bowl and the cloudy remains of her lunchtime chicken wrap came up. Again and again, she retched until there was nothing left in her except loss and fear.
She was the old Maggie again, the one who hadn’t yet learned to hide her anxiety under an armour of feistiness. Stupid Maggie who’d never imagined that Grey would cheat on her. Just like Stupid Maggie from years ago. It was a shock to feel like that again. She was so sure she’d left it all behind her. The memory of those years in St Ursula’s, when her life had been one long torment of bullying, came to her. She’d had four years of hell at the hands of the bullies and it had marked her for ever. Now she was right back there reeling from the shock, sick with fear.
When she could retch no more, she sank on to the floor. From this unusual vantage point, the bathroom had turned out well, she realised. The colours were so pretty and it was so carefully done. Even Grey had said so.
‘You’re wasted in the college library,’ he’d laughed the day she finished it. ‘You should have your own decorating business. The Paint Queen: specialising in no-hope projects. Your dad could consult.’ Grey had seen and admired the planetarium ceiling in her old bedroom in the house on Summer Street.
‘Lovely,’ he’d said and joked that her parents were sweetly eccentric despite their outwardly conservative appearance.
Grey’s parents were both lawyers, now divorced. He’d grown up with money, antiques and housekeepers. She couldn’t imagine his French-cuff-wearing father ever doing something as hands-on
as painting stars on the ceiling for his son. Or his mother, she of the perfect blonde bob, professionally blow-dried twice a week, breathlessly explaining about winning 75 in the lottery and planning what she’d do with the money, the way Maggie’s mum had.
‘My parents are not eccentric,’ Maggie had told Grey defensively. ‘They’re just enthusiastic, interested in things …’
‘I know, honey.’ Grey had been contrite. ‘I love your mum and dad. They’re great.’
But it occurred to her that Grey had been right. Her parents weren’t worldly or astute. They were endlessly naive, innocents abroad, and they’d brought her up to be just like them. Blindly trusting, She put her head on her knees and tried not to think about anything. Numb the brain. Concentrate on a candle burning. Wasn’t that the trick?
There was noise outside in the hall, muffled speech, the front door slamming. Grey’s voice, low and anxious, saying: ‘Maggie, come out, please. We should talk, honey.’
She didn’t reply. He didn’t try to open the door but she was glad it was locked. She had absolutely no idea of what she’d say to him if she saw him. There was silence for a while.
After half an hour, he returned, sounding harder this time, more lecturer than contrite boyfriend. ‘I’m going out to get us some That takeout. You can’t sit in there all night.’
‘I can!’ shrieked Maggie, roused to yell at him with an unaccustomed surge of temper. How dare he tell her what she could and couldn’t do.
‘You can stay in there all night,’ Grey said patiently, in the voice he used to explain difficult concepts to stupid people at parties, ‘if that’s what you want to do, but you ought to come out and eat something. I won’t be long.’ The front door slammed again.
Gone to phone his nubile student, perhaps? To say that Maggie would get over it and then it would be business as usual.
We’ll have to use your place instead of mine.
Grey mightn’t like it so much if he had to bonk his lover in some grotty student digs, though. He liked the smooth crispness of clean sheets, a power shower and wooden floors where you could comfortably walk barefoot without wondering how many other zillions of people had walked barefoot on it before, shedding flakes of dry skin. He’d been brought up in luxury. Before she’d met Grey, Maggie had known nothing of the world of Egyptian cotton sheets with a 400-thread count. To her, sheets came in only two varieties: fitted and flat.
Maggie stuck her ear up against the door and listened. Nothing. She unlocked the door, came out and looked around the apartment, thinking that it no longer looked like the home of her dreams, only an identikit apartment trying hard to be elegant and different, but still looking exactly like its neighbours.
Everything she had achieved had been done on a budget, from the bargain basement African-inspired coffee table to the Moroccan silk cushion covers she’d bought on a street stall and which were now woolly with loose threads. Despite the kudos of being an ultra-clever doctor of studies whose lectures were always packed, Grey wasn’t paid well.
The library paid less. But Maggie was used to not having money. She’d grown up that way. Making do, managing: they were the words she’d lived with as a child. There had been great happiness in her home, for all the lack of hard cash and the shiny new things some of the other girls had. Money wasn’t important to her. Love, security, safety, happiness were. She’d tried so hard to make their home beautiful, the heart of their love. What a waste of time that had been.
Sinking down on the low couch, still numb, she wondered what she should do next. Storm off? Or wait for Grey so she could rage at him that since he’d cheated, he should be the one to go.
Maggie’s Guide to Life didn’t cover this one.
He’d tell her not to be stupid. She could almost hear him saying it, in measured tones that made any argument he laid out sound entirely plausible.
Honestly, Maggie, listen to yourself. There’s absolutely no point in being hasty. Think about this, don’t give in to some primitive emotional response. It was just sex.
Just sex. One of Grey’s endlessly philosophising colleagues had probably written a paper on the subject: how just sex was occasionally justifiable. If the partner in question was away; if the potential bonkee was particularly gorgeous; if nobody would ever know.
Even with her eyes open, Maggie could still see Grey and the blonde on her bed, imagine it all: the blonde’s moans of pleasure as she rose to orgasm; Grey saying: ‘Oh baby, oh baby, that’s so good.’ The words he murmured to Maggie, her words. But they’d never be truly hers again.
Although there was nothing left inside her stomach, Maggie felt she might be sick again. No, she wouldn’t wait for him to explain it to her. Grabbing her handbag from where she’d dropped it so happily what felt like a lifetime ago, she ran out of the apartment. If she was somewhere else, a place where every single ornament didn’t remind her of Grey, she might be able to work out what she’d do next. A bus was coming down the road, the bus to Salthill where she could walk on the beach. Without hesitation she ran to the stop and got on.
On Summer Street, the sun had shifted in the afternoon sky. Christie Devlin’s back garden was bathed in a golden glow that lit up the velvety roses and turned the cream-coloured trellises a glittering white. It was the sort of afternoon Christie loved.
James had phoned to say he’d caught an earlier train and should be home by seven instead of nine. The postman had arrived with a late-afternoon bounty of the gadget catalogues Christie loved to devour at night, picking out useful things she’d buy if she could afford them. The dogs, too tired of the heat to clamour for another walk, were content to lie in the shade of the kitchen door, dreaming happily, two sets of paws twitching.
Sitting on her tiny terrace with a cup of iced tea, Christie was supposed to be marking art history essays for tomorrow morning, but she couldn’t concentrate.
The heat, the glory of her garden, James coming home early, none of it mattered. Nothing except the fear that sat hard and stone-like in the pit of her stomach, telling her there was something very wrong.
In her kitchen seven houses away, Una Maguire was standing on a chair looking for a spare tin of baking powder in the larder cupboard beside the fridge. She’d decided to bake a Victoria sponge for the church fair and there had been only a scraping of powder in the old tin.
‘Dennis, have you been at my cupboards again?’ she yelled good-humouredly at her husband. It was a joke. As their daughter, Maggie, was well aware, Dennis Maguire barely knew how to open the cupboards in the kitchen and his only domestic duty was washing and drying. He never put away the dishes he’d dried. Una did that.
For years, it had been Maggie’s job in the production line of washing and drying, but she was long gone with her own life, and the duty fell to Una again.
‘Never touched them,’ Dennis yelled back from the living room where he was putting the final touches to the model of a Spitfire that had taken two weeks to complete. The construction was entirely accurate: Dennis had checked in his Jane’s Aircraft Guide.
‘Don’t believe you,’ teased back Una, overreaching past a pack of semolina because she was sure she’d seen the red metallic glint of the baking powder tin. With a swiftness that surprised her,
the chair tilted, she lost her footing and fell to the floor, her left leg crumpling underneath her.
The pain was as shocking as it was instantaneous. Cruelly sharp, like a blade neatly inserted.
‘Dennis,’ whimpered Una, knowing that she’d done something serious. ‘Dennis, come quickly.’
In the comfort of her bedroom at number 18 Summer Street, Amber Reid lay in her boyfriend’s arms and heard the sound of the ambulance droning up the street to the Maguires’ house. Amber had no interest in looking out the window to see what had happened. The world didn’t exist outside the tangled sheets of her bed, still warm from their lovemaking.
‘What are you thinking?’ she asked Karl.
She couldn’t help herself, even though every magazine she’d ever read said that this sort of question was a Bad Idea. She didn’t think she was a needy person, but there was something about this intimate moment after lovemaking, that made her want to know. She’d been a physical part of Karl. She wanted to be inside his head too, inside for ever, always a part of him.
‘Nothing. Except how beautiful you are.’
Karl shifted, laying his leg over hers, trapping her.
As fresh heat swelled in her belly, Amber realised that there was nothing more erotic than the feeling of naked skin against naked skin. Just lying there after the most incredible lovemaking was almost beyond description.
She ran questing fingers along his powerful chest, feeling the curve of his muscles, the sensitive nubs of his nipples, so different from hers.
She’d seen men’s bodies before, but never fully naked except on a canvas or on a plinth carved from finest Carrara marble. And marble felt different from the warm, living beauty of a man’s body beside hers, inside hers. Desire rushed through her veins again. Why had nobody told her lovemaking could be like this? All those talks about pregnancy, AIDS and being emotionally ready, nobody had said how utterly addictive it all was.
‘We should get up,’ Karl said. ‘It’s after six. Your mother will be home soon.’
Half six, Amber had said. Her mother ran her life on a strict schedule. Half six home, change out of her office suit by 6.35, dinner on the table -pre-prepared from the night before, obviously -by seven.
Amber used to love the comfort of their evening routine. It made home seem like a refuge. No matter how much life changed in the outside world, her mother put dinner on the table at seven. But lately, Amber found herself telling Ella that when she moved out of home, she’d never have a schedule as rigid as her mother’s as long as she lived. Life was about being a free spirit, not a slave to the clock or the powers of good kitchen cleaning products, or having to hear the oft-repeated phrase ‘a good education and you can go anywhere, Amber’.