‘Oliver Joyce,’ he’d said, in a voice as dark as cocoa, looking her over with lazy cat-green eyes. ‘I like your writing.’ He wore an open-necked black shirt under a grey suit, and shoes with no socks, which she’d never seen before. Dark hairs poked out from the open V of the shirt. He had a dangerous feel to him.
‘Any connection to James?’ Helen had asked, swimming pleasantly after a generously poured free whiskey on an empty stomach.
He’d lifted one shoulder. ‘I’ve read
Ulysses.
Does that count?’
It did with her. They’d sneaked off to his hotel room an hour later, gone out afterwards and eaten oysters, and washed them down with Guinness before making their way back to his room for the rest of the night. Picking Alice up from her parents’ house the following evening, Helen had felt bruised and exhausted and wonderfully satisfied.
He was thirty, recently escaped from a six-year marriage, and living on the far side of Dublin with one of his brothers. He wrote for a variety of publications, reporting mainly on Ireland’s music scene: the phenomenon that was U2, the new Celtic punk sound of the Pogues, the family from a Donegal Gaeltacht who were bridging the gap between Irish traditional music and pop rock.
He didn’t own a tie. His hands were always warm. He claimed to be a quarter Spanish on his mother’s side. Helen didn’t give a damn about his ancestry, or his fashion sense. He was insatiable, and he knew his way around a woman’s body – not that he limited himself to women, if you could believe him. He was the first man she’d brought to her bed since Cormac.
Her parents would have hit the roof if they’d known – bringing a man home with Alice in the house – but Helen had little choice if she wanted his company at night.
Not surprisingly, Alice
objected.
‘I don’t like him.’
‘Why not?’
‘He smells. And he calls me Allie.’
‘It’s aftershave, and tell him you prefer Alice.’
But Helen kept them apart as much as she could. He wasn’t permanent, she knew that. And he certainly wasn’t husband material, which was fine by her: she wasn’t looking for another of those, too afraid of the possibility of pain that love and marriage second time around would expose her to. Oliver was a diversion, no more than that. He’d leave her when somebody younger caught his attention, and she’d let him go with no regrets, or not many.
Her life had settled into a comfortable routine, very different from the wild early years with Cormac. Mornings were generally spent researching in the library or meeting up with interviewees while Alice was at school, afternoons and evenings were for writing up articles and reading.
Once a week there was usually a visit to the theatre to check out a play she’d been asked to review, Alice left in the capable hands of Anna, her long-term babysitter who thankfully still lived across the road. Oliver occasionally accompanied her to the plays, but more often than not she went alone.
Maybe she’d mention him to Sarah in her next letter. She hadn’t said anything yet, sensing that the happily married Mrs Flannery wouldn’t approve. If Helen was sure of anything, it was that Sarah had saved herself for her wedding night. She could imagine her getting undressed in the bathroom, pulling on a long white nightie before presenting herself, blushing, to her new husband.
Talk of promiscuity of any kind would probably scandalise her – but maybe it would also serve as a diversion, give her something else to think about, however briefly. And she must be used to Helen’s outspokenness by now.
She found her car
keys and opened the kitchen door. ‘Alice,’ she called, and The Smiths stopped singing upstairs. The Smiths were one of the very few things mother and daughter had in common, much to Alice’s disgust.
‘Have a good day,’ Oliver said, topping up his coffee. ‘I’ll give a shout, yeah?’
No arrangement, no plan. He never made a plan. For all she knew, he was going straight from her bed to another.
‘It’s my birthday,’ she said to Alice, as they drove to school.
Alice turned to her. ‘Is it? You never said.’
‘I’m saying now.’ Helen took her place behind a line of cars waiting to turn right. ‘Anyway, you know it’s a week before yours.’
‘Is that why he stayed over?’
Helen inched forward. ‘He has a name.’
No response.
‘I’m twenty-one again,’ Helen said. ‘Isn’t that great?’
‘Whoop-de-doo,’ Alice replied, waggling her fingers at a boy who was pedalling past them on a bicycle. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘he’s eating icecream in the rain, the dope.’
‘Ice-cream for
breakfast,’ Helen said, not looking.
‘T
hanks for replacing the tyre,’ she said to Neil.
‘No problem.’
‘The bike is much steadier now.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ he said, and that was all. They’d stopped talking like they used to, and it was her fault. She’d pushed him away when he tried to get close, kept pushing until he’d stopped trying. In the six weeks since the miscarriage they hadn’t once made love. Her fault, completely hers.
‘Neil and I are drifting apart,’ she told Christine, over the phone. ‘We never talk now.’
‘I wouldn’t worry about it – Aidan, leave him
alone.
Sarah, hang on a sec.’
She heard wailing in the background, and more sharp words she couldn’t make out from Christine. She waited, watching a woodlouse making its careful way across the floorboards.
‘Sorry,’ Christine said, returning. ‘I wonder if Rolf Harris would like his two little boys back.’
‘You’re busy.’
‘Not at
all – they’re just acting the cod, as usual. What were we saying? Oh yes, Neil. Listen, you’ve been through a rough patch, it’ll pass.’
‘I hope you’re right.’
‘Of course I am … Sarah, you know that woman in Kildare I was talking about?’
‘Yes.’ The woman in Kildare had been brought into their conversations at least once a week since the miscarriage.
‘I told you, did I, that Dorothy Furlong went to her last year after her husband died, and she said she helped her a lot?’
‘Yes.’
‘Would I just give you her number? I can easily get it from Dorothy. I’ll be meeting her on—’
‘No, don’t do that,’ Sarah said quickly. ‘If I decide I want to talk to someone I’ll let you know.’
‘Promise you’ll think seriously about it?’
‘I will.’
But she didn’t want a counsellor. She couldn’t bear the thought of some stranger, however highly recommended, picking apart her grief, feeding her tissues as she cried for her lost babies. Stirring it all up once a week, sixty minutes of regurgitated sadness in some drab little room with framed certificates on the walls, and maybe a photo on the woman’s desk of the children she’d had without any bother at all.
Better to get on with things. Better to go to work each day and fill her mind with recipes and menu plans. Better to chat as usual to the nursing-home residents, who looked at her so pityingly each time she went back to work after a miscarriage – all except Martina, who treated her exactly the same as she’d always done, for which Sarah was profoundly grateful.
‘You’re back’ – her only comment when Sarah had returned the last time, and that had been it, apart from asking, somewhat accusingly, if Sarah had lost weight. Bless Martina, who didn’t force her to keep saying she was fine, honestly.
She checked the
time on the kitchen clock. Five minutes before she needed to leave for work, enough to refill her cup and read Helen’s latest letter, which had just arrived.
Lashing rain here. I’m looking out at my neighbour clipping his hedge with a plastic bag stuck on top of his head, silly man. Thinks more of his precious garden than he does of anything else, apart from his scruffy old cat. He’s the one who bangs on the wall when I play my music – I think I’ve told you about him. Bet you’re thanking your lucky stars you don’t live next door to me: I’m not what you’d call ideal-neighbour material.
Sarah smiled. Helen’s letters were such a tonic. She wouldn’t put it past her to have invented this next-door character just to have something entertaining to report. Plastic bag on his head, indeed.
She turned the page.
Now, brace yourself: I have a confession to make. I’ve taken a lover – isn’t that what they say? And get this – he’s thirty. Yes, I said thirty, which makes him even younger than you, and all of eleven years my junior. (Forty-one yesterday, hurrah.) I met him a few months ago at a press thing, and we’ve been an item ever since. It won’t last, of course, but I have to say I’m having a whole lot of fun. He knows what’s what in the bedroom. Let’s leave it at that, and spare your blushes. We’re both free agents, Missy, so stop judging.
Alice isn’t impressed, needless
to say, but these days nothing I do would find favour with her. She’s turning twelve next week, one step closer to her teens, God help us all.
Hope you’re not too shocked: I know you’re a much better-behaved person than I am. What can I say? I have needs, and he’s fulfilling every one of them.
Helen had a lover, a man eleven years younger than herself. She was having sex – lots of sex, by the sound of it – with a man she barely knew. He wasn’t her husband; he hadn’t committed to her in any way. On the contrary, it sounded like their relationship, or whatever you’d call it, could come to an end at any minute.
Sarah wasn’t shocked, not really. Everyone seemed to be at it: every problem page she read had letters on the subject of sex, both inside and outside marriage. Sometimes she wondered if she was the only adult female on earth who wasn’t planning to have more than one sexual partner in her lifetime.
But Helen had lost her husband when she was still a young woman, and this was the first mention of any kind of romantic attachment in all the time they’d been writing to one another. Maybe no man had shown an interest in her since she’d become a widow, maybe this thirty-year-old was the only one. Who could grudge her the chance to be physically intimate again, even for a little while?
And if they were both free agents, like Helen said, they were presumably hurting nobody – except poor Alice, who seemed to be affected by this new development. Hopefully, she didn’t realise he was sleeping in the same bed as her mother; surely Helen was being discreet in that respect. But even so, to be introducing a man into their home, when the chances were he’d be gone in a matter of weeks, or months, didn’t seem right to Sarah.
She laid the letter
aside and got to her feet. Helen would live her life as she saw fit, and raise her daughter in her own way, and Sarah would mind her own business. What right had she anyway to criticise someone else’s mothering skills when she wasn’t a mother herself, when she hadn’t gone through the undoubted challenges associated with bringing up children?
She felt the familiar pinch of sorrow as she pulled on her coat. When she wrote back to Helen, she wouldn’t mention her qualms about Alice. She’d be glad her friend was happy, and leave it at that.
And tonight she’d cook Neil his favourite rib-eye steak; she’d attempt to make amends for being so distant with him. He was a good man, a good husband. None of this was his fault.
I’ve taken
a lover
. She smiled faintly as she left the house, pulling the door closed behind her. Honestly, so dramatic.
S
he opened the sitting-room door and was met by the blare of the television. Alice lay sprawled across the couch, her hair wrapped in a towel. Helen picked up the remote control and reduced the volume considerably. No reaction.
She stood for a minute, arms folded, watching the characters on the screen.
Coronation Street
still going strong, older than Alice, more than twenty years on the go. A man appeared whose face Helen dimly recognised – in it from the very start, wasn’t he, from the first ever episode? He looked older but no happier, a lifetime of on-screen struggles. She wondered if he ever confused his two lives, if he ever addressed his real wife by his pretend wife’s name, ever woke up in the night and listened for the sound of glasses clinking in the pub next door.
She’d
watched
Coronation Street
– she’d watched all the soaps – in the months after Alice was born, when all she and Cormac had had the energy for, between the never-ending rounds of feeding and burping and nappy-changing and singing to sleep, and fevers that came and went with frightening speed, was sitting on the couch in a half-trance with the cause of all the upheaval on one of their laps, ignoring the little glass bottles and rubber teats and Liga-encrusted bowls piled in the kitchen sink, the bucket of steeping nappies outside the back door.
Cormac had mostly dozed his way through the programmes, but Helen had watched as people had fallen in love and married and cheated and divorced on the screen in front of her; as delirious with exhaustion as she’d been, she’d recognised the improbability of the storylines and cringed at the uninspired dialogue and the two-dimensional characters.
When the bewilderment of having to cope with a new and completely helpless human had abated, and life had more or less returned to normality, they’d left the soaps behind and never gone back. But here Coronation Street still was, visiting sitting rooms twice a week, impervious to Helen’s lack of interest.
‘What’s for dinner?’
‘Quiche, ten minutes.’
The recipes she’d got years earlier from Sarah had become their staple diet.
Twelve will be plenty
, Helen had written.
That’ll be enough for a fortnight’s worth of dinners, with one night off a week for beans or scrambled egg on toast, or fish fingers for old times’ sake.
You can make your own fish fingers
, Sarah had pointed out in her next letter.
They’re really easy, and much more nutritious.
Or I can buy them in Quinnsworth and have a night off from cooking
, Helen had replied, and that had been that. Now she had a dozen dishes that included pork ribs, mushroom stroganoff, salmon puffs
(wrap the fillets in ready-made puff pastry – I won’t tell!
) and ham and leek quiche.