The music
had been her choice, lots of Madonna and Eurythmics and Billy Joel, all her favourites. The party hadn’t ended till well after midnight, past one by the time she and Neil had got home.
She’d received beautiful presents too, perfume and ornaments and photo frames and spa vouchers. Earlier in the week Helen had sent the new Ballymaloe cookbook that everyone was talking about – ‘hope it’s not coals to Newcastle’.
The children had stayed the night with their cousins, Christine’s in-laws on babysitting duty. They’d been dropped back home at lunchtime the following day, along with colouring books, crayons and a box of chocolates for Sarah. All fine, all perfectly according to plan. On the whole, everything had gone splendidly.
It was just Noreen.
It wasn’t that she’d done anything wrong; there’d been nothing to suggest that she hadn’t enjoyed the evening. She’d seemed genuinely surprised to see her family and friends there when she’d walked in – maybe a little taken aback initially – but she’d thanked Sarah very cordially for having included her, and accepted the gifts people had brought with what looked like real enthusiasm.
She’d looked well too, or as well as she could, given the turquoise dress that didn’t really flatter her complexion, the hair that still needed a decent cut, the face completely bare of makeup, apart from lipstick. Still, she’d looked perfectly pleasant.
And it wasn’t as if Sarah had expected her to be bowled over by Dan, who you could see had made a real effort, even got his hair cut for the occasion – but Noreen hadn’t seemed in the least bit interested in getting to know him. Sarah had introduced them, and the three of them had chatted for a few minutes – and really Sarah had said lovely things about both of them, how invaluable Noreen was to them at home, how Dan had sped her off to the hospital when she’d gone into early labour with Stephen – and then she’d made some excuse and left them to it, and the next time she’d checked, barely five minutes later, Dan was back with the nursing-home crowd he’d come with and Noreen had vanished.
Sarah had
spotted her eventually, dancing with Neil to Whitney Houston, and thought,
Not much point in taking to the dance floor with someone else’s husband.
But maybe she wasn’t looking for a new romance, maybe she was afraid to fall in love again, after the heartbreak of her husband’s death. Still, it had been a disappointment.
No matter – Noreen was old enough to know what she wanted, and Sarah should probably have minded her own business. Thank goodness she’d said it to nobody, apart from Christine and Neil. She was going to put it from her mind now and move ahead with the far more important matter.
‘Can you take my two for the night on Friday?’ she asked Christine. ‘I need some quality time with Neil.’
‘No problem. Everything OK?’
‘Fine. We just never seem to get time to ourselves, that’s all. Would you mind coming to collect them, maybe around five?’
She said nothing about what she was planning: that was between her and Neil for now. Time enough to share when she, all going well, found herself pregnant again.
A little girl this time, maybe. Neil, she was sure, would love another little girl.
S
he wasn’t
getting better. It wasn’t going away. Two days in bed – or was it three? – sticking to the sweaty sheets that she didn’t have the energy to change. Head pounding, throat burning, face flaming, back aching. Making her way every so often on stupidly shaking legs to the bathroom to slurp water from her cupped hands, the kitchen with its glasses much too far away.
Putting Frank off when he phoned, unable to summon up the energy for him. She’d wait until she started feeling better, let him come over at that stage and look after her.
And then, when she was hovering between waking and sleeping, the doorbell rang. She ignored it. It rang again. She swore weakly and turned over. A few minutes later the phone by her bed jangled into life, making her start painfully. She reached out a shaky hand and lifted the receiver.
‘Hello?’ Her voice sounded strange, more croaky than it should be.
‘It’s me,’ someone said. ‘I’m next door. Can you come down and let me in?’
Next door? It made no sense. Malone lived next door, but he was in a nursing home.
‘Can you get downstairs? You can take your time, I’ll wait.’
She dropped the receiver back into its cradle. This was part of a dream, she was asleep. A minute later, just as she was sinking gratefully into oblivion the doorbell rang again, and someone shouted something that sounded like ‘Help!’ She pulled the blankets over her head to drown them out, breathing in her own cloying musky scent.
When the
phone rang a second time, she let it ring until it became apparent that it wasn’t going to stop. She levered herself out from under the blankets and reached for it wearily.
‘Ssh,’ she told it. ‘Go away.’
‘It’s me again.’ The same calm voice. ‘Can you get downstairs, or will I call for an ambulance?’
Suddenly it all became clear. Malone was sick: he needed an ambulance – that was why he kept calling.
‘I saw the dandelions,’ she said. ‘Are you OK?’
‘What?’
‘The cat,’ she said. Something about the cat she should say, but it kept sliding away from her. She closed her eyes and let the receiver fall onto the blankets, dimly aware that it was still making little squawking noises. She lay back, trying to swallow the rock that had lodged in her throat. She wanted water, but it was too far away.
Time passed. Alice wandered in, wearing a bulletproof vest over her clothes. ‘They’re cutting my hair when I’m asleep,’ she told Helen. And here was Breen, hands dug into his pockets, glaring at her from the top of the wardrobe. ‘You have a mouth on you like a toilet,’ he growled. ‘You were born with an ulterior motive.’
‘I got a blue elephant from you,’ Alice said to him. ‘I fell off the monkey bars in the park.’
‘I saw you,’ Helen told him, ‘outside the restaurant,’ but he mustn’t have heard because he made no reply, just shimmered away. Helen closed her eyes again and dreamed of her father in his judge’s wig shovelling coal into a huge furnace that roared flames at her.
And now there were different noises. There were people around her – Frank was there, his big face frowning as he looked down at her, his bushy eyebrows drawn together, and someone, some man she didn’t know, was sliding something cold into her mouth and lifting her wrist, his hand cool against her burning skin, calling her Helen, and he was pushing up her eyelid to shine a light that hurt her eyes, and hands were underneath her, she was being lifted onto something that smelt like tyres, and she was moaning because she wanted to stay where she was and sleep, and because it hurt, all her bones hurt and her throat ached, and they were covering her with a blanket and wrapping it like a cocoon around her, and she was so thirsty, and they were telling her she’d be fine, Helen, and not to worry now, and stay with us, Helen, and they were bringing her down a mountain, everything tilting as they wobbled her down, and the blessedly cold air on her hot face now, and still everything hurting, hurting, as they brought her into a small beeping room and laid her down gently in her cocoon and closed the door, slammed the door too loudly, like Alice, and then the room was moving and she was lying down in the moving room, and somewhere behind the beeping she could hear an ambulance siren, and someone was holding her hand, someone was stroking her hand and it hurt to be stroked, and she wanted water more than anything in the world.
And after
that, a jumble of doors and lights and moving and voices, and then a sting in her arm.
And after that, nothing.
‘I
’m
desperately sorry. It just happened. It wasn’t something we planned.’
Sarah watched his mouth opening and closing, his top teeth flashing into view every so often. He never showed his bottom teeth when he talked. She knew this about him, as she knew so many things. They’d been married for more than thirteen years, plenty of time to learn pretty much all there was to know about someone.
‘We didn’t set out to hurt anyone, that was the last thing we wanted. I’m really sorry.’
Her chicken and bacon lasagne in its pretty blue and white pottery dish sat untouched on the table between them, the cheese topping congealed. The tongs lay beside the bowl of green salad, the little white jug of dressing – oil, vinegar, mustard, garlic, honey – still waiting to be added.
‘I had to tell you,’ he said. ‘I can’t live a lie any more.’
Phil Collins was singing something about paradise on the radio. Hailstones tapped against the window, showers of them off and on all day. Sarah abruptly remembered her bicycle still leaning against the back wall of the house, abandoned when Stephen had come running out to her as soon as she’d got home from work, waving a still-wet painting he’d done with Noreen.
‘Say
something,’ Neil said.
She hadn’t had a clue. She’d been blind and deaf. He’d fallen in love with someone else, he’d been in love with her for months, and for all that time Sarah had lived with him and argued with him and slept with him and sensed nothing at all.
Hadn’t even taken much notice of the fact that they hardly made love any more, had put it down to hectic lives and nothing else. Blind and deaf she’d been.
‘Please,’ he said. ‘Just say something.’
She found her voice. ‘Who is she?’
Some customer, it must be. Some woman who’d invited him into her garden, who’d come out to him with cups of tea and slices of cake. Younger than Sarah, with no stretch marks, with breasts that didn’t sag.
He made no reply, his gaze sliding down to the lasagne.
‘Who is she?’ Louder. A drumming in her ears, her hands pressing into the table to stop them from shaking.
‘It doesn’t matter who she is.’
She rose abruptly and reached across to snap off the radio. ‘Who is she? Tell me.
Tell
me.’
‘Sarah, you don’t want to know. It won’t make any—’
‘Tell me,’ she cried. ‘I have a
right
to know.’
The silence stretched between them. She felt her pulse banging somewhere in her chest as she watched the man he’d become, this stranger sitting at her table, unable to look at her.
Finally, when she was on the point of shouting at him again, he lifted his head.
‘It’s Noreen,’ he said quietly.
Sarah’s mouth dropped open. The hail shower died away as quickly as it had come, the silence in the kitchen absolute as she tried to process the nonsense of what he’d said.
‘Sarah, I’m really—’
‘That’s not
remotely
funny. You really scared me – and it’s cruel, making fun of Noreen like that.’
‘I’m not—’
‘How could
you do it?’ she demanded. ‘She lost her husband – and she’s so great with our kids. I thought you liked her. And how could you
pretend
you’d fallen in love with another woman? That’s really horrible.’
He got to his feet, stood in front of her. ‘Sarah, please stop. Please listen to me. I’m not pretending.’
‘Of course you are,’ she said angrily. ‘You don’t expect me to believe you’re in love with
Noreen
, for God’s—’
‘I am,’ he insisted loudly. ‘Whether you believe it or not, it’s happened. I love her, I’m sorry. I love Noreen, and she loves me.’
Sarah glared at him. ‘I want you to
stop
it,’ she said. ‘Why are you
insisting
—’
‘Sarah, I am. We’re in love. It’s true, I swear it. Look,’ he said, ‘I hate having to tell you this – neither of us meant it to happen, honest to God. But I’m not pretending. It’s the truth.’
And as he spoke, as the look on his face finally forced her to realise that it wasn’t some kind of sick joke on his part, she felt the blood draining so quickly from her face that she swayed, dizzy from it. Noreen?
Noreen
?
He moved towards her but she backed out of his reach. ‘Get
away
from me,’ she told him in a voice she didn’t recognise, grabbing the edge of the sink for support.
‘Sarah, I’m so sorry, we never—’
She breathed deeply, trying to recover her balance. Without warning, her hand balled into a tight fist. With all her strength she lunged forward and punched his face as hard as she could. As her fist made contact, a sound, a throaty grunt, came from deep within her.
His head snapped back, the impact of the blow sending him toppling down into the chair he’d just left. Sarah’s hand exploded with pain, causing her to cry out sharply.
‘Jesus—’
His hands flew to his face. He drew them away and looked at the blood on them.
‘Get
out,’ Sarah said, her voice still alien to her. ‘Get out. Get
out
.’ Her hand throbbing, her heart going mad inside her. ‘Get out. Get out.’
He met her eyes for an instant, hands cradling his nose, blood trickling between his fingers, before getting to his feet and staggering from the room. She heard the front door opening and closing. She waited, her breath unspeakably loud and ragged, until his car started up, until the noise of it was utterly gone.
She turned to the sink and ran the cold tap on the back of her hand until it went numb. She ducked her head and sloshed water onto her face and neck, drenching her top and the kitchen floor. She blotted her face with the towel and slumped onto a chair.
Noreen.
He’d fallen in love with Noreen, who was fifty and plain and badly dressed. An image came unbidden into her head of the two of them sitting cross-legged on the sitting-room floor, holding tiny plastic cups.
Noreen. How could he? How could they?
She regarded her knuckles, which were bright red. Thoughts jumped into her head, collided together.
She’d shared her birthday party with Noreen just under a week ago; she’d bought her a picnic basket.
She’d told Neil she was trying to find a man for Noreen. She thought they’d been driving to the supermarket at the time, Stephen and Martha preoccupied in the back of the car. She strained to remember what his response had been, but couldn’t.