“Of course I’m not jealous of her. She’s just my little sister.”
“Half sister.”
“Sister, half sister. Tomahto, tomayto.”
“Does Charlie get on better with her than you do?”
“Are you a language expert or a trainee psychologist?”
“I just wondered.”
“He feels the same way about her as I do.”
“Conflicted and jealous?”
“I’m not. Really, I’m not.”
“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
“The man is a Shakespearean show-off, methinks.”
He smiled. “I can do Yeats, Heaney and Hardy too, if you like. Laurel and Hardy, even. I’m like a literary jukebox.”
I took a sip of my drink, thought about it, looked across at Aidan and decided to tell the truth. The truth that had just become blindingly clear to me in that moment.
“You’re right. I am extremely jealous of Jess. She drives me absolutely crazy. She always has.”
Aidan laughed. And so did I. It felt brilliant, so wonderful, to say it, to admit it to someone. For as long as I could remember, I’d felt bad for not instantly loving Jess, for finding her annoying, for not responding to her in the same joyous, admiring way as everyone else. And yes, I’d felt hurt that Mum and Walter showered her with so much attention, and I felt bad that I couldn’t sing or dance or enchant people like she could. I could read a lot, and I liked cooking, but they were all dull pursuits compared to the fireworks she could produce. She was much more beautiful than I was too, all dimples and curls and cuteness. I was like Pippi Longstocking next to her Shirley Temple. But I’d never said it out loud before, not even to my friends at school, at university. I’d hoped that if I kept agreeing with everyone when they said “Isn’t she adorable?” I would start to believe it myself.
But not now. Here, in this London beer garden, I told the truth. “I’m insanely jealous of her.”
Another smile from Aidan.
“She ruined my life.”
An eyebrow lift.
“She’s the most spoiled, overindulged, cosseted—”
“Don’t hold back, will you?”
“Infuriating, attention-seeking, self-absorbed—” I was laughing now. “I mean it.”
“I can see that,” Aidan said. “So, in a nutshell—you hate her.”
I nodded, happily. “I really hate her.”
“Despise her?”
“Completely.”
“Grand. Let’s kill her, so.”
“Great idea. Thank you. Would you do it?”
“Of course. Do you want me to take Charlie out at the same time? Two for the price of one?”
“Not Charlie. I love Charlie. But Jess, yes. Did you mention price? You’ll charge me?”
“It’s murder. Of course I’ll charge you. What do you think this is, a charity? I’m an impecunious student, remember. Now, do you want her to suffer or will I make it quick?”
I pretended to give it some thought. “Quick but very painful would be good.”
“A poison-tipped arrow?”
“Perfect, thank you. How do I repay you?”
“With a kiss,” he said. Just like that.
I felt that unsteady feeling again, a kind of swirl, up and down my body. It wasn’t the alcohol.
“Before or after you murder her?” I asked.
“Where is she?”
“Australia. Melbourne.”
“And we’re in London. A geographical obstacle. Let’s do the kiss now, and I’ll do the murder next time I’m in Australia.”
So we kissed. Across the table. For a few seconds, which became a minute, which was the most extraordinary minute of my life. Until someone shouted, “Get a room!” and Aidan laughed and I felt the laugh against my lips. If it was possible, I would have kept kissing him for the rest of that night. But we stopped and I blinked and he did too, as though we were coming out of a kind of trance. Months later, when we talked about when and how we knew, about when we’d first realized that this was going to be serious between us, we both said that kiss.
We had one more drink that night. Then his mobile rang. It was Lucas, not checking up on us, but to say there’d been a call to the house from a client in “something of a state.” One of the students was having a pre-exam meltdown. Was there any chance at all that Aidan could—
“I’ve had three drinks, Lucas. Your niece has led me astray.”
I held up four fingers.
“Sorry, Lucas. Four drinks. But I can still stand, if that’s helpful.”
Do you mind?
he mouthed at me.
Of course not,
I mouthed back.
Go.
I was glad of a chance to stop and think about what had happened between us.
He told Lucas he was on his way and hung up. I watched as he switched straight back into work mode, all serious where he had been playful. “I’m sorry, Ella. I don’t want to go.”
“I don’t want you to go.”
“This is just intermission, then? Part two tomorrow? Same place. Eight?”
“Same place, eight,” I said.
He smiled. Then he leaned over and he touched my cheek and he left. He didn’t kiss me again. If he had, I don’t think I would have let him leave.
That was how it started. Easily, warmly, quickly. That was how it kept going. I’d had boyfriends before, but they’d always been short-term relationships, generally beginning at uni parties when we were both a bit drunk and then petering out before they properly started. There was one relationship in Melbourne that began in a more promising way—we were match-made by friends—but that soon became uncomfortable too, as if we were both wearing the wrong size shoes.
I’d always felt I was to blame. I’d never known how to behave, how to be a girlfriend. I’d read somewhere that you learn how to be a woman from watching your mother, but that was no help to me. I was the complete opposite of my mother. I was tall; she was small. She wore bright colors; I liked dark shades. Her way with Walter was giggles, flirting, big eyes and helplessness. Her way with my father had only seemed to be arguing. As a teenager, I’d talked about it with Charlie. We were both children of broken marriages. How were we going to get it right ourselves?
“Don’t ask me for advice,” he said. “I’m just a fat kid. No one will ever fall in love with me. I’ll be lucky if I get even the scrapings.”
“But what do men like in a girlfriend?”
“I told you, I haven’t a clue.” After more prodding he told me he thought what he would like was someone who would be like his best friend, but added, “It would also help if she was hot, so I could show her off to my friends. If I had any friends.”
Charlie had heaps of friends. I wasn’t the only one who found him great company. He was also very popular with the girls. He just hadn’t told me in case I “got a complex,” he admitted later.
But when I was with Aidan, I didn’t feel like I was trying to be anything. I was just me. I talked to him like I talked to Charlie, except the difference was I never wanted to kiss Charlie. I wanted to kiss Aidan all the time. Make love with him all the time. We slept together two weeks after our first date. In his room the first time, my room the second. Lucas gave us knowing glances when we came down for breakfast, the other tutors teased and made racy remarks, but we didn’t mind. We laughed. We loved it. For the first three months of our relationship, we couldn’t physically get enough of each other. I’d never felt anything like it. If he touched my hand, I’d want to go to bed with him. It was as if every cell came alive when he was around. It wasn’t just physical. There didn’t seem to be enough time to say everything I wanted to say to him, or enough time to hear all his stories. I wanted to look at him all the time. I thought he was the most handsome—no, the most
beautiful
—man I had ever seen. He wasn’t a male model. Far from it. His face was a bit wonky, really, his nose a little big, his hair unruly, but when he smiled at me, it was as if something magical happened. I thought he had the most perfect face I’d ever seen.
He felt the same way about me. That was the incredible thing. He thought I was beautiful, sexy, clever, funny. He asked me question after question and listened so intently to my answers. He remembered everything I told him. He drew stories out of me—about Lucas, my dad, about Walter. He thought the story of Mum being discovered in a shopping center was hilarious. He insisted on sitting down with me one day to watch all the
MerryMakers
DVDs she’d sent.
“She’s funny,” he said at the end. “A complete head case, obviously, but she’s really funny.”
She was, I agreed. “And what did you think of Jess? Adorable? Talented? Funny too?”
“Absolutely,” he said. “Much more adorable and talented and funny than you. And it’s obvious your mum loves her much more than she loves you. I’d say Charlie does too. And Walter. It is Walter, isn’t it? Or Wolfgang? Werner? Whichever one, I’d say he thinks she is
wunderbar
.”
“I should have kept you to our murder pact.”
“Oh, no. I couldn’t do it now,” he said. “Not now I’ve seen her in action on your mother’s show. A nation would go into mourning. Can I start her fan club or has someone beaten me to it?”
I poked my tongue out at him and then I laughed. He made me laugh a lot.
I was already booked to go back to Australia for Christmas. Aidan came with me. “You don’t want to be in Ireland for Christmas?”
“Let me think. Gray skies and freezing temperatures. Sunshine and warmth. How can I choose?”
“You won’t miss your own family too much?”
“I’ll battle on bravely without them.”
We’d been together for six months by then, but I still hadn’t met his family. It was the one subject we didn’t speak about much. I knew the details, of course—he had one older brother, his parents were now in their early sixties, they lived in Carlow, a county to the south of Dublin, still in Aidan’s childhood home. It wasn’t that he’d had a tragic
Angela’s Ashes
–style Irish upbringing, or a battered-by-the-priest one either. He said it had been happy enough. Not much money, but he’d had good teachers at school who recognized he had a gift for languages, first in Irish, then in French. He was the first in his family to go to university. His father had worked in a drapery; his mother had stayed at home. No, neither was an alcoholic, he assured me. They were just ordinary, hardworking, regular parents. His brother, Rory, was a self-made success story, managing director of a car-hire company that was now one of the best known in Ireland.
“I’d really like to meet them,” I said one afternoon.
“They’d like to meet you too. My mother especially.”
“Do your parents know about us? About me?”
He nodded. “I record all our conversations and send them the tapes each Friday.”
He always deflected questions about his family with a joke. “I mean it, Aidan. I really would like to meet them. I’d like to see Ireland too.”
“And so you will, Arabella, so you will,” he said. “If I survive meeting your family first.”
We had two weeks in Melbourne together. He loved Australia: the warmth, the big sky, the sounds of the birds, the relaxed people, the casual turns of phrase, especially the way shop assistants farewelled him with “See you later.” Where were we going to meet up again? he wondered. He and Walter got on well, especially when Aidan spoke in German. Mum flirted with him and made lots of bad Irish jokes that he pretended to laugh at. Jess welcomed him as a new member of her audience. She’d even prepared a performance especially for our arrival. We were barely in the door from the airport, still getting to grips with the bright light and summer heat, when she’d ushered us all into the kitchen where she’d arranged a row of chairs. First she danced an Irish jig. Then she sang a soulful version of “Danny Boy.” As she took a dramatic bow and we applauded, Aidan leaned across to me and whispered, “Does she do children’s parties too?”
I loved him even more in that moment.
We rented a car after Christmas and drove up the coast to Sydney. On New Year’s Eve, we stayed in a cheap hotel without even the hint of a harbor view. On New Year’s Day we took the coast road back to Melbourne. He asked me to marry him when we were halfway there. While he was driving. I had to ask him to pull over.
“Did you just ask me to marry you?”
He nodded.
“Just like that?”
Another nod.
“Yes, please,” I said.
“You can change it,” he said later that night as we lay in bed in an ordinary roadside motel. “If you want to make it more romantic when you’re telling your friends and family. You can say we were climbing the Harbour Bridge and I threw myself off and as my parachute opened, you could see I’d hand stitched the words ‘Will You Marry Me, Ella?’ onto it.”
“I’m not telling anyone anything.”
“Because it was too ordinary? Because you regret saying yes? Because I turn your stomach?”
“Because it was too good.”
I met his parents a month after we returned to London. We flew to Dublin, rented a car and drove down to Carlow, two hours away. Aidan laughed when I kept saying how green the fields were. But it looks just like Ireland should, I said. I was amazed to see road signs and place-names in English and Irish. Aidan pronounced each of the Irish words for me. I loved the sound of them. We passed a thatched cottage with whitewashed walls and he patiently took photographs of me in front of it.
His own family house was an ordinary bungalow on an ordinary suburban estate outside the town of Carlow. His mother was quiet, welcoming, kind. His father was more difficult to like. He barely drew breath from the moment we arrived. I put my foot in it almost immediately, purely through nerves, by making the mistake of saying the south of Ireland was part of the UK.
“We fought for that term ‘republic’ and you Australians should do the same thing,” he said to me.
I knew Aidan’s mother’s name was Deirdre and his father’s was Eamon, but I called them Mrs. and Mr. O’Hanlon. Aidan apologized for the formality, but I liked it. The formal terms matched their house. It was so orderly compared to my own family’s and to Lucas’s house in London. There was a formal sitting room, which they called “the good room.” Meals took place at specific hours. Mr. O’Hanlon sat at the table while Mrs. O’Hanlon fetched and carried. There was no grace before meals—Mr. O’Hanlon had very strong views about the Catholic Church too. He listened to the radio news on the hour, turning up the radio until it was finished, regardless of whether there was a conversation in progress or not. Over the weekend I heard a lot about British imperialism, Australian republicanism, American conservatism, German efficiency, the incompetence of the Irish government, the foolishness of the local council and the shocking state of the roads. They were lectures, not discussions. He didn’t seem to care what his wife or Aidan thought, let alone what I thought. We were just his audience.