Authors: Grace Wynne-Jones
‘
Ready for what?’
‘Ready to live with someone else. What about us, Sally? What
about our marriage?’
‘That’s something you should have asked yourself before you
slept with another woman.’ I look away from him. He looks so lonely – lonely and lost and sad – and all I can feel is very, very tired.
Chapter
Twenty-Five
‘Diarmuid slept
with Charlene
.’
‘
He slept with a
bean?’
‘
Oh, for God’s sake, Erika, why would Diarmuid sleep with
a bean?’
‘That’s what it sounded like.’ Erika is sounding extremely groggy. I must have woken her up.
‘He slept with
Charlene.’
‘Good.’ Her voice is thick with sleep. ‘That’s great.’
‘What do you mean, that’s great?’
‘Now you can run off with Nathaniel and no one will mind.’
She yawns. ‘What time is it?’ Erika tends to go to bed at ten-thirty
unless there is a good reason not to.
‘Midnight. I’m sorry for phoning you so late. Diarmuid only left ten minutes ago.’
‘How did you find out?’
‘He told me.’
‘Great!
So now he can’t deny it. You can run into Nathaniel’s
arms and no one, not even Diarmuid’s bitch of a mother, will be
able to scold you.’
‘I don’t plan to tell everyone,’ I reply, somewhat primly. ‘And,
anyway, Nathaniel doesn’t want me to run into his arms. He has
a girlfriend.’
Erika bursts into tears.
‘What is it, Erika?’
‘It’s nothing,’ she howls into the phone.
‘I knew he had a girlfriend,’ I say softly. ‘Please don’t get so upset about it.’
‘It’s awful,’ she wails. ‘Every wonderful man has someone else.
I can’t stand it.’
There is a long pause. Then she says, ‘Alex doesn’t want to see
me any more. He rang this evening, just after my massage client
left. I’ve been in bed since. I drank a whole bottle of wine.’
‘Oh, Erika.’
‘I bet it was the camping that did it,’ she sniffles miserably. ‘When they survived camping together, they probably realised they could stay married.’ I still don’t know why Erika thinks camping is so terrible, but this isn’t the time to point out that
some people actually enjoy it. ‘He said he’d prefer to be with me
but he couldn’t bear leaving the children.’
‘What about her and her yoga teacher?’
‘He’s gay. I should have known it by the prim way he carried
his yoga mat.’
‘Oh, dear. I’m so sorry.’
‘That’s it now,’ Erika declares. ‘I’m single forever. I’m on the
sideboard.’
I try to cheer her up, but after half an hour I realise I should at
least make some attempt to pack for New York.
‘I’m sorry, Erika, I have to go. I’ve got to pack.’
‘Why?’
‘I have to go to New York. It’s a last-minute assignment.’
‘
When?’
‘Tomorrow morning.’
‘Tomorrow morning?’
‘Yes.’
Erika takes a deep breath; then she says firmly, ‘I’m coming with you.’
I don’t know how this happened. It is seven o’clock on a sunny
July morning, and I am in Fiona’s car, on the way to the airport.
Erika is in the car too. We are all going to New York because we
need to shop for shoes.
Of course, I’m also going to New York to interview three people about furniture and accessories, but that seems a mere
extra. And Fiona is also going to New York because her husband
may leave her at any moment. She is absolutely convinced of this:
once he gets the results of the blood tests, she says, he’ll be off like
an Olympic sprinter. He’s taken some days off to help out with
Milly, and Fiona is leaving him with her in the hope that they may
‘bond’ more closely. This won’t prevent him from divorcing her,
she claims, but it would be nice if they could remain friends.
Erika is going to New York because she needs a new pair of flip-
flops – they’re the only shoes she can afford at the moment, especially since she borrowed the airfare from Fiona. She rang
Fiona as soon as she spoke to me, late last night, to ask if she could
borrow the money, and Fiona said she wanted to go to New York
too. She’s booked us all into some fancy hotel her company has
some arrangement with. She and Erika are on a slightly later flight.
‘New York, New York…’ We’re trying to sing the song, only
we don’t know the words, so Erika starts to shout, ‘West Cork,
West Cork!’ She’s a little overexcited. ‘We’ll just forget about men
entirely,’ she suddenly declares. She knows about Milly now;
Fiona told her last night. She was naturally gobsmacked, but she
seems to have adjusted to the news. ‘We’ll go horse-riding and start a drag boy band and sing songs about cats.’
Erika’s slight hysteria is partly caused by the fact that she’s
terrified of flying and feels we
might
arrive in New York. She has
about fifty kinds of calming herbal tablets with her.
‘It’s nice to be in this mess all together,’ Fiona says. ‘We might
as well enjoy our failures. Life has passed us by, hasn’t it? It hasn’t
been what we thought it would be at all.’
‘Yes!’ Erika and I agree cheerfully. We don’t point out to Fiona
that her life has been spectacularly successful. It is not a day for details. For example, they think my marriage is over – and so do
I, only I can’t seem to tell Diarmuid. It’s almost as if I’ve got used
to being a partial wife. Maybe it’s the only way I can stick being
married. Married to anyone at all.
I feel a thrill of excitement as I admire the suspension bridges and
the soaring buildings, from the cab taking me to our hotel. I feel the caress of hot, muggy, agitated New York air. I look up at the
huge sky. New York. I am in New York. Even the air seems bouncy and alert, electric. So many people, so many colours –
people skateboarding, walking to work in smart suits and
trainers, dog-walking, eating bagels. Big brownstone buildings,
old and grand. Scary-looking strangers. Smiles. A huge, exultant
mixture.
I reach into my bag for my purse – I want to get the fare ready
– but my fingers close over a notebook. I’ve somehow brought the
recipe notebook with me. I must be careful not to lose it. The paper is dimpled; the roof of Nathaniel’s car leaks slightly, and when he found the notebook on the floor it had got a bit damp after some rain. I put it back in my bag carefully, find my purse and keep it ready in my hand.
I sit back in my seat. The strong New York sun is streaming
through the window, and everything seems bright and shiny; the windows on the buildings we pass are gleaming like fluorescent
bulbs. I put on my sunglasses and wonder if it was a bad idea to ring April from Dublin airport. I told her I was coming to New
York, and she said I should fly on to California and visit her, but
I said I couldn’t. I said I was too busy. It’s the kind of thing she
probably would have said herself; but I don’t talk to her like that.
I’m the one who’s usually more polite and sensitive. She even sounded slightly hurt. I’ll never understand April – but I wish
she’d come home occasionally. My parents miss her terribly, but they don’t say it. I’ve always known they love her more than me.
That’s why I needed Aggie so much when I was younger: with her,
I never felt second best.
My parents didn’t love April more at first. When she was born,
they were both understandably reluctant about her. My father
could hardly bear to look at her; and my mother cooed and
clucked over her dutifully, but her heart wasn’t really in it. She
was tired and sad and scared. Sometimes, when April cried, Mum held her and cried too. It wasn’t the most ideal introduction to the world, and one could almost sense April’s outrage. Even then, she
was a fighter. Her demands grew louder; she screeched and hollered and punched the air with her tiny hands.
My father normally ignored this. He glanced at her and walked
away, waiting for someone else to attend to her. But then, one day,
Mum was out getting something from the store and I was left to
look after April, and she wouldn’t shut up. Her face was puce and
her whole body was taut with anger. I lifted her up and cradled her, but she wriggled around so much she almost fell out of my
arms. My father came over and told me to put her back in her cot;
Mum would be home any minute. When he spoke, April fixed him with her big brown baby eyes.
Something happened in that moment – something that made
him take her from me and hold her, rather warily. His arms were
stiff and angular; there was no tenderness in them. But April leaned her plump little cheek against his chest anyway, with a
deep sigh. All of her body suddenly relaxed, and his did too. Dad
moved slowly to a chair and sat down, resting his chin on her head. They just sat there, silently. And when Mum came back they were both fast asleep.
My reverie is interrupted as the cab driver leans out the w
indow and shouts an expletive at another motorist. He’s gruff and burly, and the hunched look of his back does not encourage conversation. I look out the window again and drink in the skyscrapers, the gleaming Hudson River, the green tops of the trees in Central Park in the distance. But I am still thinking of
April. She has always been a puzzle to me. I want to love her, but
I don’t know how. I don’t know how to reach her.
I let my mind return to that day when Dad surrendered to his
love for her. My mother was so relieved that the baby who could
have parted them had somehow become their strongest link. April
needed love, and she wasn’t going to go without it. Where
another child might have grown quiet and listless and resigned,
she had grown more determined. You couldn’t help admiring her
spirit, her cunning baby instinct that love could, in certain
circumstances, be demanded. And, once my father found he could
love April, something softened in him. He no longer looked at
Mum with that hard glint in his eyes. And so they stayed together,
even though I could see Mum often dreamed of leaving. They stayed together because of April, not because of me.
It makes no sense, of course. If you were to look at it straight
on, you could see that clearly Dad should have remained dubious
about this baby, who probably wasn’t even his. But the heart
doesn’t work in that way. It has its own reasons. And when April
began to look more and more like him, it seemed like a kind of
miracle. It was almost as though she had chosen him as her father
when she could have chosen someone else.
I don’t know why being in New York is suddenly reminding me
of all this. New York is so different from California, it could almost be another country. As the cab growls its way towards
central Manhattan, I suddenly have a terrible yearning to be back
in the golden hills outside San Francisco. I want to see April again, but I also want to find the part of me I lost.