The Truth Club Page 7

  ‘Sally, did you hear me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is that all you have to say?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Diarmuid. I’m in an attic.’ I don’t know why I should use this as an excuse. ‘That’s very… good to hear. But if you want to see her, you should. I wouldn’t want to stop you.’ What I mean is that if he still loves her I want to know it now, not later.

  ‘I don’t want to see her.’

  ‘Really?’ My heart lightens.

  ‘I want to see you.’

  I smile with relief. ‘I want to see you too.’

  ‘Becky isn’t even in Dublin any more.’

  ‘Oh. Has she gone back to New Zealand?’

  ‘No, she’s in Galway with her new boyfriend.’

  I wonder if Diarmuid can hear me smile.

  ‘I can’t meet up for a few days, I’m afraid,’ he continues. ‘I promised Mum I’d help her with some tiling in the bathroom. I’ll phone you.’

  After the call, I realise something. I realise that Diarmuid is getting used to being alone. He’s not just waiting around for me to make up my mind. He has his own life and his own plans – and that’s just how it should be. I have changed the way he loves me, diluted it by all this questioning.

  He has learned to live without me. I can hear it in his voice.

  Chapter Six

  Fiona and I are walking briskly along a pier; she changed her mind about trekking through the hills, thank goodness. It is a bright June evening – the same bright June evening on which Diarmuid said he wouldn’t see Becky again, and I realised I wasn’t pregnant.

  My period arrived after Diarmuid’s phone call. I didn’t know if I was happy or sad until I found myself sobbing in my parents’ toilet. The tears arrived before I knew why I was crying. But, as I felt the tight twist of fear loosen inside my heart, I realised I was relieved. It didn’t seem like the right time. It wouldn’t have been the right kind of answer. But what would be? Had I even been asking the right questions?

  I managed not to be lured into Fiona’s house before we started this walk. She wanted to show me some new baby clothes, but I knew I would end up eating leftover cheesecake or moussaka, so I said we should meet at the pier. This would have been a good solution if an ice-cream van hadn’t been located directly beside me as I waited – and I had to wait a quarter of an hour, because Fiona was late. People were queuing, walking past me licking the creamy cones, and it seemed to me suddenly that ice-cream was one of life’s compensations. Buying one was seizing the day. Everyone died eventually, and perhaps one of the things they’d regret was all the ice-creams they hadn’t bought. I virtually ran up to the van and ordered a large cone with a piece of chocolate flake stuck into it. Then I ate it as if I’d never had an ice-cream in my life.

  When Fiona arrived, she looked unusually untidy. There was actually a small tomato stain on the front of her turquoise sweatshirt, and her hair was tied back with a shoelace. She looked like she had had the baby already and had succumbed to the tender, exhausting chaos. ‘I don’t think I’ll be able to walk very far,’ she mumbled. ‘I’m so bloody tired. And it’s so hot!’

  It wasn’t all that hot, actually, but naturally I didn’t say this. ‘Are you sure you really want to go for a walk?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course I do,’ she said, somewhat brusquely. Then she added, ‘Look, when the baby is born, don’t go on about whether it looks more like me or Zak. I hate that kind of stuff.’

  ‘OK,’ I said slowly. Fiona can be a bit grumpy, very occasionally, but this was a whole new level. She was scowling furiously.

  ‘So let’s start this walk, shall we?’ she announced, striding ahead of me. ‘And don’t get pissed off if I suddenly have to pee.’

  She was in such a foul mood that I expected her to pee in the middle of the promenade if she felt like it. It must be the hormones.

  ‘I hate it when people start comparing noses and eyebrows,’ Fiona hissed. ‘A baby is just a baby. He or she doesn’t have to look like anyone in particular.’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ I agreed, deciding to let her get on with it. I also decided not to tell her about the dream I had last night, in which I was giving birth myself. I was panting and groaning and heaving, and sweat was coming off me in buckets. At last it was over. ‘What is it?’ I asked Diarmuid, flushed with exhilaration. ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ He held my hand tenderly, his eyes brimming with tears of joy. ‘Oh, Sally, darling, it’s a mouse. A beautiful white boy mouse.’ And the weird thing was, I wasn’t even that surprised.

  ‘They always say the baby has someone’s smile,’ Fiona continued. ‘I hate that too. The baby has his own smile. The baby is an individual.’

  ‘Indeed,’ I agreed. All this was reminding me rather too clearly of April’s arrival and how we all gawped at her.

  ‘I’ve told Erika she has to stop this thing with Alex,’ Fiona is now telling me. She’s sitting on a bench and panting. Her legs are sprawled out in front of her. She is making absolutely no attempt at decorum.

  ‘It’s hard to know what to say to her,’ I sigh, sitting down beside her.

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ Fiona snaps. ‘She’s being idiotic. He’ll never leave his wife. They never do.’

  ‘But they behave as if they might,’ I say. ‘And he does seem to have a lot of the… the qualities she’s been looking for.’

  ‘I won’t talk about him any more when she phones,’ Fiona says. ‘I simply won’t encourage it.’

  I look at some chewing gum on the ground. I thought pregnancy was supposed to make women placid. What’s happened to the sweet, understanding Fiona – the Fiona who knows that people can want all sorts of things they shouldn’t?

  She gets up, arduously, and places a hand on her back. We set off on our walk again. It seems to me Fiona shouldn’t be walking; she should be at home, watching something silly and escapist on the television. Maybe she sometimes takes this self-discipline stuff just a bit too far. I assume she’ll get round to my marriage at any moment. Heaven knows what she’ll say, but it is unlikely to be flattering. If Diarmuid were to be as bolshie as Fiona’s being just now, I’d find it far harder to forgive. Why do we expect so much more from lovers and husbands than from friends?

  The pier is suddenly full of brisk walkers, people who do this kind of thing regularly and at a certain time; people who know the benefits of sea air and exercise. Dublin’s proximity to the sea is one of its greatest comforts, especially now that the city has got so sleek and modern and uppity. There is still this space where things are as they have always been; this great expanse of water, with the tall, striped towers of the Pigeon House in the distance. We rely on so many things to remain unchanged, but so few of them do. We so often base our lives on things that are bound to alter.

  Fiona sits down on one of the benches again and says, ‘I think I’ll just take a breather.’ She is puffing and panting. I smile at her. Suddenly I hope with all my heart that her baby is healthy and bonny and doesn’t drive her demented by screeching at all hours of the night. I feel protective of her. I wonder what I would do if she started her contractions here, now, on this pier. I would probably mutter something about deep breaths while I summoned help. Just for a moment, I feel a small surge of panic.

  This subsides when Fiona gets up again and we resume our walk. She seems unusually preoccupied this evening. I almost ask her what’s on her mind, but another look at her face tells me she isn’t quite ready to speak about it, whatever it is. It’s probably normal worries, worries that anyone who is expecting a baby might have. Any minute now the calming baby hormones will kick in again, and she’ll be serene and smiling and glowing.

  A young couple walks past us. They are so close together, pressed against each other’s bodies. His arm is around her back protectively. She has a daisy chain in her hair. She is laughing, and he is watching, drinking in the look and the smell of her – the shape of her mouth, the goofy, incomparable sweetness of her gummy teeth. She is everything to
him in that moment. The diamond on her finger sparkles.

  I cannot bear to watch them. It is petty and miserly of me to turn away; but it’s just that I’ve never had that. I’ve never had that closeness with anyone. I don’t even know how it’s done. How can people become so unselfconscious – lost to everyone except each other, sealed so blissfully in that sweetness? It’s what I always wanted most, and what I grew to know I’d never find.

  And the thing is, I never knew I wanted this icing so much until I married Diarmuid. It loosened something inside me – all the dreams I thought I’d tucked away and sensibly forgotten. I will have to forget them again somehow. I must find a way. Because then I will be the Sally I knew again, and not this bewildered stranger.

  Fiona seems to be gulping. I look at her with consternation. We’re not even near a bench. ‘What is it, Fiona?’ I take her arm.

  ‘Oh, Sally…’ Her eyes are wide and plaintive. ‘Did I make you marry Diarmuid?’

  ‘Why on earth would you say that?’ I exclaim. ‘Of course you didn’t!’

  ‘But you caught the bouquet at my wedding. I wanted you to catch it. I threw it in your direction.’

  ‘Erika made a grab for it too.’ I smile. ‘This is nonsense, Fiona. Surely you must see that.’

  ‘But you felt left behind when I married Zak. I know you did. You said, “All our friends are married now, apart from me and Erika.” You sounded so lonely. That’s why I said I was sure you’d meet someone soon – and you did. I planted the idea in your head.’

  ‘Stop it, Fiona,’ I scold. ‘My marriage is not your responsibility. Believe it or not, I made the decision myself.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, really.’ I pat her back. We are approaching another bench. ‘Let’s sit down for a while,’ I coax. ‘And then let’s go to your house. I bet you have some scrumptious moussaka or chocolate cake just waiting to be devoured.’

  Fiona clutches her stomach and rocks back and forth in her seat. Oh dear God, maybe she’s about to give birth. I imagine myself shouting, ‘Push!’ in the middle of Dun Laoghaire pier and ordering people to go off and boil water and fetch blankets.

  ‘What is it?’ I ask warily. ‘Is it… the baby?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh.’ I gulp. ‘Well… try to breathe deeply. And –’

  ‘Oh, no, I don’t mean in that way.’ She smiles wanly. ‘I mean in… another way.’

  ‘OK…’ I say slowly. ‘What other way?’

  She looks at me. Her eyes are wide and stricken, terrified. ‘I have to tell someone. I just have to tell someone.’

  ‘Tell me, then!’ I am almost airborne with consternation.

  ‘Oh, Sally, this… this isn’t Zak’s baby.’

  Tears are coursing down her cheeks.

  Chapter Seven

  ‘This pavlova is absolutely delicious.’ This is the first thing I say to Zak as he comes into his own plush sitting-room. ‘I love sweet things. Diarmuid prefers savouries.’ As I say this, I realise it pretty well sums up my marriage.

  Fiona is studying me anxiously, from a large, round cane chair. It has a huge plump cushion and many people, including myself, have been known to fall asleep on it after over-indulging at dinner parties, but Fiona is almost too alert. Her whole face is tense, and her smile is far too wide and rigid. We have just returned from our walk, though the last half-hour of it was spent with me comforting Fiona while she howled on a bench on the pier.

  I feel the secret is crawling over us all like bees. I fear that at any minute I’ll shout, ‘Ouch!’ and Zak will ask me what’s wrong, and I will blurt out that Fiona became pregnant in a fertility clinic in the United States when she was at that conference about databases. I’ll say that I realise Fiona should have told him this, and that she would have, only she didn’t want to upset him by telling him he had slow sperm – not the type that can suddenly get a move on and stop dawdling, like he thinks, but really slow sperm. And then I will say that I know she was wrong and beg him to forgive her. ‘Because it’s amazing the things people don’t tell each other, Zak,’ I will add. ‘We’re a very strange species. I have a great-aunt who seems to have disappeared entirely, and no one even wants to discuss her.’

  I don’t say this, however. What I say is, ‘Do you know what I learned the other day? I learned that mice share ninety-nine per cent of their genetic sequence with humans. Can you believe that?’

  Zak smiles at me. ‘Yes, I heard that too. That’s why they’re so useful in research.’

  I must get off the subject of genes. I can’t believe how Freudian that remark was. I hardly ever discuss mice. Why am I talking about them now?

  ‘I let them loose in the tool shed.’ What on earth has got into me? I’m still gabbling on about them.

  ‘What?’ Zak enquires, reaching out to pat Fiona tenderly on the shoulder.

  ‘Diarmuid’s mice.’ I take a gulp of wine. ‘He spent so much time with them. He was helping one of his lecturers with research that wasn’t even on his course. I don’t know exactly what the research was, but he gave different ones different food, and he had to look at them regularly and make notes. I think it was something about nutrition and ageing…’

  Zak and Fiona are both looking at me slightly warily.

  ‘Some of them certainly seemed more springy than others,’ I gabble. Since when do I use words like ‘springy’?

  ‘That’s interesting,’ Zak says. ‘The whole area of nutrition and health really needs more research.’

  ‘But all these food scares are really infuriating,’ Fiona says. ‘I mean, we end up guzzling stuff that we’re told is good for us – and then, more often than not, someone comes along and says we shouldn’t eat too much of it because it’s loaded with pesticides or metals or drugs.’

  ‘That’s why most of the stuff we buy is organic,’ Zak says. ‘Especially now.’ He gazes lovingly at Fiona’s stomach.

  I feel a surge of panic. If he starts talking about the baby, I might just burst into tears. ‘He lured them back,’ I gabble. ‘All he had to do was leave some cheese in the cage and they all wandered back into it. They put up no fight whatsoever.’

  ‘Well, I suppose they’d got used to the comfort,’ Zak comments. ‘It can’t be easy being a mouse, especially a wild mouse. I don’t even know what they eat. I suppose they get seeds and things, and leftovers.’

  There is a long pause. Then he says, ‘I’m going to make hot chocolate. Would you like some more pavlova, Sally?’

  ‘No. I’d better go,’ I say. ‘I think I’m a bit drunk, actually. This wine seems to have gone straight to my head.’

  ‘It always does that.’ Fiona smiles.

  ‘Yes… yes, I know,’ I sigh. ‘I’m the cheapest drunk in Ireland.’

  But, as Fiona and Zak head into the kitchen to make hot chocolate, I don’t attempt to prise myself from the embrace of their deep, seductive sofa. Because I am suddenly realising that, if I weren’t the cheapest drunk in Ireland, I would probably never have married Diarmuid.

  I encountered Diarmuid at a party given by a woman called Gladys, whom I’d met at an evening class about restoring antiques. Gladys and I both joined the class hoping it would be full of hunky men with tool-belts, but it wasn’t; it was full of women hoping to meet hunky men with tool-belts. I don’t know why we were so surprised. At the end of the term Gladys decided to have a party, and I went along to it – rather reluctantly, because there was a good film on the telly. I had reached the point of singledom where I never expected to meet a half-decent single man again.

  I’m shy at parties, and not a great talker, so I tend to end up chatting to people I know, or helping with the washing up, or handing out sausage rolls. But Gladys was determined we would all have a good time, and she was virtually pouring the red wine down us forcibly. So by the time I reached Diarmuid, who was sort of cowering in a corner by a cheese plant – he’s shy at parties too – I stuck a plate of Ritz crackers loaded with egg swirls under his no
se and said, ‘Hi there, beautiful stranger!’

  It wasn’t that I thought Diarmuid was stunningly handsome, though he is attractive. I just liked the idea of saying that particular sentence to someone. I was feeling skittish and feckless, and I kept bumping into people and saying, ‘Oops!’ and then giggling. Gladys’s Chilean wine must have been industrial strength.

  Diarmuid gulped when I called him ‘beautiful’. Then he took one of the crackers and looked at me dubiously. I could see he thought I was a brazen and completely un-shy sort of woman, and he wasn’t entirely sure what to say.

  Because he was saying nothing and everyone in the room now had a Ritz cracker with egg swirl, I asked him how he had met Gladys, and he said she was a friend of his brother’s. Then he asked me how I had met Gladys, and I explained about the evening class. I told him the main thing I’d learned was that life is too short to attempt to re-upholster your own armchair.

  ‘I know quite a bit about re-upholstery,’ Diarmuid mumbled bravely. He was knocking back the wine himself and seemed to have formed the impression that I was not about to bite him. ‘Actually, I teach carpentry.’

  ‘So you own a tool-belt!’ I shrieked with delight. I was now extremely sozzled. ‘Gladys…’ I shouted across the room. ‘I’ve found Tool-Belt Man!’

  ‘Go for it, honey!’ Gladys yelled back. ‘Ask him where he keeps his drill.’

  Gladys and I snorted with mirth, and a number of other female antique-restorers also giggled and stared at Diarmuid. It is much to his credit that he didn’t walk off at that point. He just smiled shyly and said, ‘So what do you do?’

  ‘I’m a journalist,’ I said. ‘I write lots of stupid articles about any old thing at all.’

  ‘I don’t believe that,’ Diarmuid said. ‘I bet your articles are very interesting.’

  And that’s when Gladys came round with the big plates of spaghetti bolognese, and I sobered up enough to realise that I was talking to a single man who really seemed quite nice. He took my phone number; I didn’t think he’d call, but he did, the very next day. We had a pizza and went to a film that Saturday, and that’s how it started. And the really stupid thing is that, if Diarmuid had been someone I really fancied like crazy – someone I thought was sex on legs – I probably wouldn’t even have offered him an egg-whirled Ritz cracker. Even the wine wouldn’t have got rid of my embarrassment. But, because I had no particular feelings about him, I waltzed up to him brazenly and behaved as though I had been instantly attracted to him.