The Truth Club Page 23

  ‘I know. You should have told me about Charlene earlier.’

  ‘I almost didn’t tell you about her at all, but I couldn’t stand you putting yourself down like that and making me sound so… so bloody virtuous.’

  ‘Were you planning to seduce me this evening?’

  ‘No, honestly… I just meant to give you the music box. But you seemed so pleased and so fond of me again, and…’ He looks at me a bit bashfully. ‘The old chemistry came back for a while, didn’t it?’ I cannot dispute this.

  He clenches his jaw. ‘Maybe, if I’m honest, I also told you about Charlene because I wanted to see how you’d react.’

  ‘Oh, Diarmuid.’ I sigh. ‘Maybe we’ve said enough about it all for the moment.’

  After a moment he murmurs, ‘Come back to me, Sally. Come back to me and let’s try to forget this happened.’

  I look numbly at a patchwork cushion. I can’t believe what he’s suggesting.

  ‘What about Charlene?’ I whisper.

  ‘I can’t live with her.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because we’re too different. She comes from an entirely different culture.’

  ‘County Wicklow?’ I peer at him like I might peer at a strange creature in a zoo, a creature whose habits and predilections are still something of a mystery.

  ‘She’s from South Africa. And I don’t feel ready, anyway.’

  ‘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 sunglass
es 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 window 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.

  Because I see, now, that when my parents turned their love to April I decided something. I decided that, when it came to love and I had a rival, I would always end up second best. I would not be the first choice, but the backup. That’s why it made perfect sense to marry Diarmuid, even though I thought he preferred Becky, and it’s why I can accept Nathaniel’s love for Eloise so calmly: because it’s what I know. It’s what I’m used to.

  I gaze up at the skyscrapers. I used to think I wanted love like the house we had in California – love that was big and rambling and somehow cosy too; love with lots of rooms and sunshine, and weird sentimental stuff laid out on the mantelpiece. But the house lacked storage space and the wooden floorboards creaked, and the big lawn often got too brown and wild and scraggly. That’s why we left California eventually: Mum began to long for a semi-detached home in the Dublin suburbs. She wanted to go home to a house that was orderly and tidy, and this is what she now has. And maybe she’s right; maybe that kind of home is better. It makes life simpler. You don’t have to decide what colour mug you want, because they’re all the same, and Mum and Dad must save hours each month not having to mow the lawn. As you get older, you begin to long for convenience. Maybe love is like that too: when you get to a certain age, you need it to be tidier. That’s why I should be glad Nathaniel has Eloise. He is too boisterous and messy for me. Life with him would never be settled.

  The cab reaches the hotel. It’s a tall white building with potted palms on each side of the large glass door. I pay the driver, and the hotel’s uniformed doorman puts my small suitcase onto a trolley. I follow him into the foyer. It’s cool and airy, and there is a large glass chandelier hanging from the high, sky-blue ceiling. The reception desk has a white marble top, and the auburn-haired woman behind it is immaculately manicured and smiling at me somewhat fixedly.

  ‘I’m Sally Adams,’ I say. ‘My friend Fiona O’Driscoll made the booking, so it could be under her name. She’ll be arriving in an hour or so.’

  ‘Fine. I’ll just check for you.’ The woman smiles. She’s wearing very shiny red lipstick, and I’m so tired that I can’t help staring at it. It has obviously been applied with great care; you can see that she used a lip-liner to emphasise every curve.

  As she’s reaching for the keys to my room, I feel someone nudging my elbow. I turn around sharply and find myself facing April.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  ‘You know how you keep telling me I should be more open?’ April says. ‘Well, I’ve decided that maybe you’re right. It’s time you knew.’

  ‘Knew what?’ We’re sitting in the hotel’s swanky lounge, and I’m drinking a cup of tea. I am light-headed with jet lag. I feel as though I’m dreaming – but April does look very real, sitting there in her trim navy trouser suit. I can even smell her. She always wears very expensive perfume. She looks very blonde and tanned and grown-up.

  ‘I’ve bought Mum’s birthday present.’

  ‘Oh.’ I sit back in my seat. I don’t know why she should think this is a secret, but the workings of April’s mind have always been a mystery to me. ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘Will you take it back with you? I don’t know if it’ll arrive in time if I post it.’ She opens her handbag and hands me a small box. ‘It’s a diamond brooch. I think she’ll like it.’

  ‘Goodness, yes. I’m sure she will.’ I stare at the box. It is exquisitely wrapped in gold paper and has curly pink ribbons cascading from its top.

  ‘It was expensive.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure it was. She’ll be thrilled with it.’

  ‘It’s a kind of guilt-gift, really. I know I’ve upset her.’

  I think of Diarmuid’s music box. ‘Why would you say that?’

  ‘Let’s have some champagne.’

  ‘OK…’ I look at her warily as she bounces to her feet and marches towards a waiter. I’m feeling drunk already, but seeing April again surely calls for some kind of celebration. I still can’t quite work out why she flew over from California on the spur of the moment. Perhaps the brooch rea
lly is very expensive and she wanted it delivered personally.

  ‘This is such a lovely surprise, April,’ I say as she returns. ‘You must have dashed to the airport as soon as I phoned.’

  ‘I have some business to do here anyway.’ Her voice is crisp and toneless.

  The champagne arrives, and the waiter opens it expertly with a quiet pop. I put down my cup of tea and reach for my glass. April empties hers in one determined gulp.

  ‘You look great,’ I say.

  ‘You’ve put on weight… but it kind of suits you.’ She gives me a calculating glance. ‘I’m sorry about Diarmuid. I didn’t quite know what to say to you about him. And, anyway, I think marriage is outdated, don’t you?’ She fills her glass again. ‘What we have these days is serial monogamy. Most people just aren’t meant to stick with one person forever.’

  I want to disagree with her. I want to say that sticking with one person forever must be wonderful, if you know how to do it. It’s a skill – I know that now. It’s not just icing and cake; it’s also weird casseroles and leftover quiche and low-fat biscuits.

  ‘I’ve got used to being a partial wife.’ I smile at her. ‘In a strange way, it sort of suits me. The sudden reconciliations can be quite exciting… and sexy. And you get nice presents.’

  ‘Do you think you’ll stay a partial wife?’

  ‘You know something?’ I stretch my legs out languorously. The champagne is already going to my head. ‘If Diarmuid agreed to it, I just might. Some people do that, you know. They get married and live in different houses.’

  ‘It wouldn’t suit you,’ April says. ‘You’re too much of a romantic for that kind of thing. You’d begin to yearn for long, rambling midnight conversations about the meaning of life and love and laundry.’

  ‘Laundry?’ I tilt my head sideways. It feels very heavy suddenly.

  ‘You want to understand everything, Sally. Haven’t you noticed that? I bet you could already write a thesis on why you got engaged to Diarmuid and why you married him and why you left him. I bet you already have about a thousand theories.’