Richard looked embarrassed. ‘Think of it as a small wedding present.’
She put her hand against his cheek for a moment. ‘You’ve always been so kind to me, haven’t you? Even when I had all that trouble as a kid, you helped me out. You know I did it, don’t you? Susan P told me never to tell you for definite. Well, I’m ignoring her advice because I want you to know that I count myself very lucky to have you as my friend. Even if you are an Old Bill.’ She laughed to take the emotion out of her words, and make him understand more than she was saying.
‘Can I kiss the bride, do you think, or do I have to ask your husband’s permission?’
Cathy laughed. ‘Of course you can kiss the bride. I can’t think of anyone else I would rather kiss.’
She was teasing him and it broke his heart. As she stepped into his embrace, expecting a peck on the cheek, his arms enveloped her and then he was pressing his mouth hungrily to hers and her lips were parting in answer to his.
It was a deep kiss, a sensual kiss, and inside she felt herself responding to him, which made her frightened. He held her to him like a vice; she could feel the hardness of his belly and the strength of his arms. Then the fear left her and she relaxed and kissed him back.
So much passion going into one kiss with a man old enough to be her father, and whom she had always looked on in that light.
Sexual attraction was still hard for her to comprehend. Cathy had felt it with Eamonn, never with Tommy. Now she realised she was in its grip again, with the last man on earth she’d have dreamed of. They kissed for what seemed an age before Cathy gently freed herself from his grasp. Her breathing was erratic and her heart beating a tattoo inside her chest.
In the half-light Richard looked younger, and his deep-set eyes were fathomless as she stared into them.
‘I love you, Cathy,’ he said hoarsely. ‘God help me, I always have. And if you were honest, you’d admit you feel the same way. You don’t kiss strangers like that, love.’
He pulled her to him tightly, and once again she felt safe inside his arms, warm and protected. They stayed like that until the shrill ringing of the telephone forced them apart. Cathy walked to the counter and answered it automatically, before it brought out Casper or someone else. She didn’t want to be caught with Richard in the darkened shop.
‘Hello?’
The voice on the other end of the line made her go pale. It was Eamonn calling from New York.
‘Happy wedding day, Cathy. I hope you’ll both be very happy.’
She was stunned. ‘How did you know? Who told you?’ Her mind was whirling.
‘Tommy did, love - I speak to him all the time. I just want you to know that there’s no hard feelings, eh? Let’s still be friends. We’ll have to see one another in the future when I come over to liaise with your husband and I’d like to think there was no animosity between us. After all . . .’
Without speaking, she put the phone back on its rest then took it off the hook.
He had lied to her. Tommy had lied to her. All his talk of shunning the men of violence had been a sham. Money was everything to him as it was to Eamonn. Now she had tied herself to a man who had lied to her, deceived her. He’d known that lying over something so serious would break her heart if she found out. She placed her hands protectively over her belly and felt tears fill her eyes.
Richard watched the changing emotions on her face and pulled her into his arms once more.
‘Tell me what’s wrong,’ he urged. ‘Who was that on the phone, love? Come on, you can tell me anything, you know that.’
And as she looked up into his loving eyes, his kind concerned face, she knew she could never tell him a word of this. The consequences would be too far-reaching, might even endanger him. Tommy would break her neck as soon as look at her if she ever spoke of what she knew, but he still believed she didn’t know what he was up to and that was for the best.
As Richard held her to him the door to the club opened and Desrae and Casper walked into the shop.
‘What’s going on here then?’ Desrae’s voice was loud.
‘A little too much to drink, and a bit emotional, eh, Cathy?’ Gates’s voice was carefully calm. Cathy looked gratefully into his eyes. Casper placed the phone back in its cradle and she stared at it as though it might jump off the counter and bite her.
‘Leave her with me a second, Desrae, then I’ll bring her back inside, OK?’ Gates’s voice was a quiet command and Casper, sensing something was afoot, took Desrae’s arm and guided him back inside the club.
Surrounded by pornographic books and films, posters of undressed women and men with other men in provocative poses, Richard took Cathy into his arms once more. Holding her to him tightly, he said, ‘Listen to me: no matter what happens, no matter what you do, I’ll always be there for you. Remember that, won’t you? I am here for you, darling.’
Cathy allowed herself to be held and caressed by him, knowing there were some things she could never tell anyone, even Desrae.
She had a secret from Tommy and he had a secret from her. What a way to start a marriage! What a way to face the rest of your life, because she knew that now she had married him, he would see her dead before he’d see her with another man.
It was this knowledge that frightened her most of all.
BOOK FOUR
‘Frisch weht der Wind der Heimat zu; - mein Irisch Kind, wo weilest du?’
‘Freshly blows the wind homewards; - my Irish child, where you are dwelling?’
-
Tristan und Isolde
, Wagner, 1813-83
‘Be all my sins remembered’
-
Hamlet,
William Shakespeare, 1564-1616
‘I love thee with the breath, smiles, tears, of all my life! And if God choose I shall but love thee better after death’
-
Sonnets from the Portuguese
, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1806-61
Chapter Thirty-Five
NEW YORK 1987
‘For fuck’s sakes, Deirdra, will you get the kids out of my fucking study and into the garden? Everywhere I look there’s brats. Now do what I ask you. Immediately.’
Deirdra, her long red hair dyed now, doe eyes a startling green still but her figure heavy from constant childbirth, walked into Eamonn’s study and said pointedly: ‘It’s your only daughter’s birthday party. Of course there are children all over the place. What did you expect me to do - not invite her friends, their parents, what? You tell me, Mr Big Man, you seem to know everything.’
‘Don’t be funny, Deirdra. All I ask is that you keep them out of my study, that’s all.’
She shook her head, making her full red cheeks wobble like jellies. ‘We have nine children. This house is
always
full of children, you fool of a man. What’s another twenty or so, I ask you? Anyway, if Norah goes in there you never say a word. It’s only the boys you’re ever cross with.’
Eamonn frowned. ‘Because they’re little bastards, that’s why. Anyway, where the fuck is Jack Jr? He was supposed to be here by now - I told him three-thirty.’
Deirdra shrugged. Her eldest son, named for his grandfather, held no interest for her. In fact, none of the children did.
‘How do I know where he is? Out whoring like his father does, I expect.’
Eamonn closed his eyes and took a deep breath. His wife goaded him constantly and it was wearing. He looked at her as she stood before him. There was no trace left of the seventeen-year-old girl he had married. Deirdra was old before her time.
He knew her weakness and used it shamelessly. His wife was sex mad, at least with him anyway. The heavier she grew, the more sex she wanted. She did nothing for him, her big fat body did nothing for him, and they both knew that. But still he gave her what she called her due, or had until recently.
Now he gained a perverse satisfaction from seeing her ask for it, beg for it. He liked to refuse.
He loved his children and she professed to love them too, but in reality she had no interest in them once they hit three. Deirdra liked babies but he was fucked if she was getting any more from him. Nine children were enough for any man. The college fees alone would keep a small country going for a year, but Eamonn had the money, it wasn’t that. It was the fact that he didn’t really want her as the mother of his children.
Already Norah, the only girl, was getting too like her mother. Emulating her, with her pseudo-intellectual friends and her pathetic pretence that she understood exactly what they were saying. Deirdra was in fact a sandwich short of a picnic, seriously challenged in the brain department, and he really should point that out to her.
But today wasn’t the time.
There was a party for the kids, and the parents would all be here soon, and Eamonn would have to play the convivial host no matter how much he was dreading it. Today he did not need a party of any kind. Especially one that Deirdra had arranged. She would have squandered a fortune on the arrangements, and would make sure that everyone knew just how expensive it had all been. For someone who had always had money, she had an uncanny knack of acting like a parvenu.
As she stared at him from her green eyes - once her best feature, now covered in too much shadow and false eyelashes - he felt the usual tightening in the base of his neck. She really was a pain. Her tiny tits were encased in a padded bra, but her hips still looked as if they could easily carry a wide load. Her waist was thick, her arms and legs over-plump. Even her neck had a small roll of fat around it, as did the rims of her eyes. She looked like a little red-headed pig, he thought, smiling.
‘What’s the joke? Me, I suppose.’ Her voice sounded hurt.
‘Don’t be so stupid, I was just thinking of our Norah being a whole eight years old today.’
Deirdra laughed then, a happy little sound. ‘Christ, eight! The time goes so fast.’
Not fast enough, was Eamonn’s opinion, but he wisely kept it to himself. His wife walked towards him on her impossibly high heels and tried to put an arm around his neck. He moved expertly away from her.
‘Come off it, Deirdra, the kids will be on top of us in a minute.’
‘Come upstairs, the au pair can watch them. Come on, Eamonn, it’s been ages.’
He pushed her away roughly. ‘Leave it out, love, I have a mountain of work to get through before I can have a bit of fun at the party. Are your mum and dad definitely coming?’
She nodded, pouting in disappointment. ‘You’re getting it somewhere, Eamonn, because you’re not asking me for it.’
He sighed heavily. ‘Leave it, Deirdra. Not now, eh?’
Before she could answer the twins burst into the room, faces bright and green eyes full of tears.
‘Daddy, Daddy, Dennis is driving us all mad! He’s got a slug gun.’
Eamonn put his head in his hands and sighed heavily.
Eight sons and they were all limbs of Satan.
The Dochertys’ house on Long Island was beautiful, ablaze with chandeliers, the rooms all high-ceilinged and embellished with ornamental plasterwork. The decor was subtle because Eamonn had warned the gay decorator that if he saw any hot pinks or Dayglo oranges he would personally take the man outside and shoot him through the back of the head. Something in his voice had penetrated the man’s Valium trance and he had heeded the warning. The result was a very lovely, spare and understated house.
Deirdra hated it.
Eamonn loved it.
As usual he had won.
As far as he was concerned, the house was his finest achievement. Worth over two million dollars, it was also a shrewd investment. With fifteen bedrooms, eight receptions, a ballroom and two kitchens, it was ideal for the Dochertys and their nine children.
The gardens were massive, over five acres, and all securely walled. The only access was through security gates. Eamonn wanted it to be the American equivalent of a country estate and acted the Lord of the Manor in his own home. He also had a flat in Upper Manhattan where he met his girlfriends, and kept a long-term mistress off Bleccker Street. She was called Jasmine, a tiny blonde actress who spent most of her time resting. But she gave great head, and her tits were not only stunning but bought and paid for by him, so that Eamonn felt he’d made another good investment.
All in all life was good.
Now, dressed in a dinner suit, he looked every bit the successful man as he greeted his guests - though in the back of his mind he felt a black tie dinner for a child’s eighth birthday was going a bit too far. He would have preferred the kids to have had jelly and ice cream and a few games. Fuck knows, the two Norland nannies cost him the national debt and the au pair wasn’t cheap either. Why couldn’t they have arranged something?
But he smiled as everyone arrived, and made small talk, and kept his eye on Deirdra who liked to drink a bit too much and was liable to cause a scene if she overindulged.
It was just on nine-thirty when he thought his eyes were playing him up. Standing at the top of his sweeping staircase, he could have sworn for a moment he saw Cathy Connor. He had just glimpsed her out of the corner of his eye.
He had come upstairs to belt the living daylights out of the twins who had found a tube of icing and drawn a large pink penis on Norah’s birthday cake. He personally had found it hilarious; the caterers, another load of tight-assed fags his wife had hired, had found it disgusting. The twins had just been found out. Liam, aged ten, had grassed them up without a second’s thought.
It didn’t matter how hard Eamonn tried to instil his East End values into the boys, they just ignored him. Eamonn had told them time and time again: You never tell on family or friends. He doubted they would ever learn that lesson.
Making his way hurriedly downstairs again, he walked into the ballroom and scanned the throng of people.
Everything was decorated in lemon and silver: lemon yellow balloons proclaimed ‘Eight Today’ on them, and silver balloons announced ‘Birthday Girl’. The birthday girl herself was dressed in lemon and silver also and being on the plump side like her mother, looked like a fat girl always does in lace and bows: stupid.