This Charming Man

by Marian Keyes

  But she was waving and calling, ‘Paddy, over here,’ and didn’t hear me.

  Paddy looked around the pub with his blue seek-and-destroy gaze, spotted Dee, then me sitting next to her, frozen like a rabbit caught in headlights. For a long neutral moment he watched me, before deciding to unleash his devastating smile.

  Another Dee Rossini scandalhad just broken, but this one was far, far worse than any of the others: her boyfriend – yes, she’d had a secret boyfriend all along, I should have known, what kind of journalist was I? – had sold his story to the Sunday Globe, probably the most scurrilous of the red-tops. And it was chock-full of the most cringe-inducing details about their sex life. According to him (his name was Christopher Holland and he claimed he was selling his story because he was tired of ‘living a lie’), Dee was ‘mad for it.’ Any time, any place, anywhere. (The ‘anywhere’ bit was because they had once – once – done it in her back garden.) She particularly liked it ‘doggy-style’, he said.

  The front-page splash kept referring to her as ‘Kinky Dee’, but just in case there was any danger that she’d come across as a sexy minx, there was other, even more gruesome, information: she didn’t shave her legs more than once a fortnight; her bra and pants rarely matched; the soles of her feet were so hard and yellow, if she rubbed them together for long enough she could start a fire; she had cellulite on her stomach. In other words, she was a normalforty-something woman.

  The first I knew of it was the headline screaming, ‘KINKY DEE AND ME’, in the newsagent’s on Sunday morning. Mesmerized I picked up the paper and a quick scan showed that the levelof detailwas unprecedented. They must have paid this Christopher Holland a fortune to spill his guts in such a treacherous fashion. I pitied Dee as I had never pitied anyone before and it made me itchy with shame that I was a journalist. Even the fact that I knew the journalist – it was Scott Holmes, the Kiwi who’d been my boyfriend while I was trying to not be in love with Damien – made me ashamed.

  The thought of having to endure an exposé like this myself sent my intestines into a twisty spasm. Could anyone endure having the honest details – and I’m talking honest, down and dirty, not soft-focus pretendy-stuff – of their sex lives published on the front page of a Sunday paper? Christ alive, wouldn’t you die?

  Still standing in the shop, I opened the front page – and literally recoiled. Filling the full length of page three was a photograph where they’d stuck Dee’s head on a picture of a flabby woman with a stubbly bikini area and mis-matched underwear. It made everything a thousand times more terrible. From now on, whenever people thought of the leader of New Ireland, that’s the image their mind would send up from the vaults.

  It was unquantifiably damaging. Much more so than the ‘corruption’ stories because even though Dee was a single woman and was entitled to have sex with whoever she liked, how could you watch her on telly shaking hands with famous types and not wonder if her knickers matched her bra?

  ‘This isn’t a library,’ a voice said.

  Quickly I turned around. The flat-eyed man behind the counter was watching me. He indicated the Sunday Globe. ‘You going to pay for that?’

  ‘Yeah, but…’ I couldn’t let go of it long enough to go to the counter and cough up. The compulsive story had me in a death grip. Still reading, I jingled in my pocket for change and clanked down an uncounted handful beside the till. ‘Help yourself,’ I said.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said snippily, sliding coins into his hand.

  He used to be a lot nicer to me when I was a smoker. I’d been such a dependable source of income, but since Damien and I had given up the cigs, no matter how much we spent on withdrawalconfectionery – and God knows it was a considerable amount – your man had probably had to kiss goodbye to his retirement villa in Portugal.

  On I read, dumbfounded by what was said: the day Dee had been appointed Minister of Education, she’d ‘demanded’ sex four times; she loved to be dominated; she didn’t like oral, apparently she thought it was ‘boring.’

  She’d have a hard time coming back from this. She’d always seemed strong, independent and in control; now she seemed ordinary and flawed – and a very poor judge of character, to choose a boyfriend so disloyal.

  (The very worst thing, in my opinion, was the cellulite on her stomach. I was ashamed to admit it, but it dimmed her lustre slightly for me – and I loved her. So what effect must it be having on people who were more ambivalent?)

  Since I’d interviewed her, we’d become sort-of friends because we kept bumping into each other in the red-wine part of our local off-licence and a couple of times we’d nipped next door to Kenny’s for a quick drink. Only a week ago she’d even had Damien and me over for dinner and treated us to some of her expensive off-ends pasta. (No nicer than the ordinary stuff, if you ask me, but all the same I was touched that she obviously thought highly of us.)

  I stood outside the newsagent’s in the cold – it was perishing for mid-November – and rang her. ‘Dee, I know you’re screening your calls, but it’s Grace Gildee and I just want you to know – ’

  She picked up. ‘Grace, it’s me.’

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘A bit wobbly,’ she said, her voice shaking. ‘But I’ve got through worse than this.’

  ‘They’re bastards,’ I said with feeling. ‘Did you know it was coming?’

  ‘Hadn’t a clue,’ she said. ‘Totally embargoed. I was with Christopher on Friday night, he didn’t say a thing. Naturally,’ she added with a bitter laugh.

  ‘I’ll support you any way I can.’ I meant both personally and professionally.

  ‘Thanks, Grace. You don’t mind about the cellulite on my stomach?’

  ‘No,’ I said stoutly. (What’s the harm in a white lie?) ‘I do not. Every woman has cellulite; they’ll be relieved to find out that even someone as fabulous as Dee Rossini has it.’

  ‘Yeah, but on my stomach, Grace. It’s not like on your thighs, everyone has it on their thighs. Having it on your stomach is nearly as bad as having it on your… your… eyelids. On your ears, even. Can you get it on your ears?’

  ‘Dee, you are a survivor of domestic violence, you help hundreds of other women, you’ve set up a political party and you’re a force to be reckoned with. Don’t let a little bit of cellulite on your stomach become more important than all those achievements.’

  ‘Okay, you’re right.’ She took a deep breath to settle herself. ‘Anyway it’s really not much, you can only see it if you squeeze it.’

  ‘Would you like me to come round?’ I asked. The implication was clear: I was offering not just as her friend, but as her tame journalist. This was her chance to give her side of the story to a sympathetic ear.

  ‘I’d love to see you,’ she said. ‘But don’t come here. Let’s go to Kenny’s. I’ve done nothing wrong.’

  ‘If you’re sure.’ God, she was great. Tough as old boots. ‘I’ll meet you there in five.’

  I rang Damien.

  ‘What’s keeping you?’ he asked. ‘Where’s my stuff?’

  ‘I’m on a story.’

  ‘What? You only went to the shop to buy sweets.’

  I gave him a quick resumé of the situation. I was surprised he didn’t already know. Damien was a compulsive news hound, constantly checking the internet for breaking news. ‘The one morning I have a lie-in…’ he grumbled.

  We’d planned an easy day, in bed, reading the papers, keeping safe. We were both a bit fragile. It had been little Maximillian’s christening the day before and the weight of the chip on our shoulders as we’d moved among Damien’s warm, clever, glamorous, terrifying family meant that this morning we’d woken up exhausted – and actually, I have to admit, haunted by a strange feeling of disquiet, almost dread. Too much contact with Damien’s family did that to me.

  (Or it might have just been a hangover. We’d had an awfullot of Martinis at the post-church shindig in Christine and Richard’s.)

  ‘I’m meeting Dee in Kenny’s,�
� I said. ‘Then I’ll have to go straight into work.’

  Damien groaned. ‘That’s shit for you! And what about me? What about my fizzy snakes?’

  ‘You’ll have to do without them. Sorry.’

  Jacinta Kinsella had left a message while I’d been talking to Damien. I rang her back. From the word go, Jacinta had been withering about my friendship with Dee, but today, when it mattered, when every paper in the country would be tripping over themselves to talk to Dee Rossini, I had access all areas.

  ‘Milk her dry,’ she said, over the sound of children shrieking and screeching in the background. ‘And I’ll talk to Big Daddy about the front page.’

  A broadsheet, even a mid-market one like the Spokesman, wouldn’t normally devote a front page to what was essentially a frivolous story about a politician’s personal life, but this was too big to ignore.

  ‘Will you be in later, Jacinta?’

  ‘Me?’ She sounded shocked. ‘Grace, you are Chief Features Writer.’ She emphasized the capitals. ‘I can’t keep holding your hand for ever.’

  ‘Fine, fine.’

  Lazy bitch.

  Dee’s arrival in Kenny’s generated a low rhubarby murmur. Not many in at ten past twelve on a Sunday morning, just a few men with drink problems.

  ‘… doggy-fashion…’

  ‘… she did it with a dog?…’

  ‘… no, like a dog…’

  ‘… did she bark?…’

  ‘… that’s right and she chewed slippers and retrieved sticks. What do you think, you cretin…’

  Dee looked good: dark jeans, crisp white shirt, chic, drapey-collared cardigan and matte red lipstick. And if she heard the comments, she elected not to hear them. She was a trouper.

  She ordered coffee. ‘I can’t be seen to be hitting the hard stuff, much as I’d appreciate it. Okay, here’s how it is.’

  She laid it out for me: she’d been talking to Sidney Brolly, New Ireland’s press officer, who’d decreed that she do just one interview. With me. And yes, I was pleased. I wouldn’t have wished Dee’s situation on anyone, but it had happened and I could help with damage limitation. There was to be no rebuttal of the charges of cellulite or hard-soled feet and a wall of silence was to surround Christopher Holland. Quiet dignity and a focus on all that was positive about Dee Rossini was to be the order of the day.

  ‘They’ll be calling for my resignation in the Dail tomorrow,’ she said gloomily.

  ‘For what? For having hairy legs?’

  She squeezed her eyes shut. ‘For a loss of public confidence. For behaviour unbecoming an elected servant. Basically because I have sex.’

  ‘But you’re not married. And I take it this Christopher isn’t married? So what have you done wrong?’

  ‘Nothing – in theory. But in practice…’ She meandered into silence, then exclaimed, ‘Oh Grace, I really don’t want to go. There are so few female politicians. And you should see our new manifesto – we have brilliant woman-friendly policies, really far-reaching: longer maternity leave, a massive child-care programme…’

  ‘What would happen if you were forced to resign?’

  ‘Worst-case scenario: the whole New Ireland party could be so discredited by my sex life that the Nappies would be forced to pull out of coalition with us. But the Nappies don’t have enough TDs to stay in power so the government would have to be dissolved and the country would have to go to the polls now instead of next year. The long and the short of it: my cellulitey stomach could bring down the government.’

  ‘But that’s crap! Don’t resign. Just tough it out. Keep telling yourself that you’ve done nothing wrong.’

  Her mobile rang. She checked the number. ‘It’s Sidney, I’d better take it.’

  She listened in silence, her expression growing more thunderous as time passed. ‘If that’s how it has to be,’ she eventually said and snapped her phone closed. ‘Sidney wants me to do a photo-shoot,’ she said angrily. ‘Styling me for the weekend pages. He thinks it’s vital to counteract that fucking composite on page three.’

  ‘He’s right.’ I wondered if she’d go mentalat me.

  More in sorrow than in anger she said, ‘I’m not in a girl-band, I’m a politician. It shouldn’t matter if I have three heads, all of them cellulitey, so long as I do my job properly.’

  ‘It would never happen to a man.’

  That was when she said, ‘Oh here’s Paddy.’

  There he was, suited and wide-shouldered, blocking the doorway, putting me at a panicky disadvantage. I’d fallen out of bed, not expecting to be in the world for more than the five minutes it took to go to the shop… I hadn’t even combed my hair.

  Normally Damien was the one who went to the shop on Sundays. The only reason I’d gone today was because he’d claimed he couldn’t walk properly because he’d hurt his knee playing five-a-side football on Friday night.

  I began shrinking into myself as Paddy wove his way through the men with drink problems, cutting the alcoholic air with his sharp cologne. I despised myself for caring what he thought; I didn’t need him to find me attractive, but I didn’t want him to see me vulnerable.

  ‘Dee,’ he said, giving her a quick hug. He was so vibrant, like there was more life force concentrated in him than in normal people, as if he’d got a double dose.

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ she said. She indicated me. ‘Do you know each other?’

  There was a horribly awkward moment. I was waiting for Paddy to come up with some platitude and he was waiting for me. ‘What?’ Dee asked.

  ‘Of course we know each other,’ Paddy said easily. ‘Hello, Grace, lovely to see you.’

  He bent down to kiss my cheek politely. I held my breath. I didn’t want to smell him.

  He touched his lips to my cheek, then – did I imagine it? – blew on it softly. Had he actually had the nerve?

  His eyes were laughing.

  His touch sat on my face, like an unbearable itch. I wanted to wipe it away with a lavish smear.

  ‘Things are not good, Paddy,’ Dee said, straight down to business.

  He shook his head. ‘It’s a compliment. They’re scared of you. They’re taking you seriously.’

  ‘But who is “they”? Christopher wouldn’t have had the cop-on to do this off his own bat. Who put him up to it? It’s time we dealt with it properly.’

  I rested my head on my hand, trying to inch my sleeve up my face and surreptitiously wipe it.

  Paddy watched me, moving his eyes from my sleeve to my cheek.

  He knew.

  ∗

  Dee went to the loo, leaving Paddy and me alone. He looked far too big for the little stool. Neither of us spoke. He flicked a quick glance over his shoulder, checking that Dee was out of earshot, then he said, with low urgency, ‘Grace, I –’

  ‘How are your wedding plans going?’ I interrupted.

  ‘Grace, can’t we –’

  ‘No,’ I said, too loudly, causing a couple of drunken heads to jerk up off their chests. I dropped my voice. ‘Just answer the question.’

  He stared at my mouth. ‘You never answer my calls.’

  That was typicalof him: he hadn’t rung me in weeks.

  ‘Why won’t you talk to me?’ he asked. The way he was staring at my mouth was making me uncomfortable.

  Suddenly he said, ‘I can smell you, Grace. And you know what you smell of?’

  I knew what he was going to say.

  ‘You smell of sex.’

  Under my sweats, prickly heat flushed down my body and my nipples shot to attention. ‘Shut up,’ I said quietly. ‘Just shut up.’

  ‘Whatever you want,’ he said lightly. ‘Your wish is my command.’

  ‘You would have said that no matter what I smelt of – paint-stripper, lamb curry…’

  He shrugged, his shoulders beautiful in his suit.

  Recovering myself, I said, ‘So tell me, Paddy. How are your wedding plans going?’

  ‘Fine, all fine. But that’s Alicia’s are
a, really.’

  ‘How is the lovely Alicia?’

  ‘Wonderful. But that was a strange profile you did of her, Grace. She was disappointed that you weren’t… warmer.’

  I gave a short bark of laughter. ‘Well, Alicia insisted on me, so what did Alicia expect?’

  ‘She expected you to be a professional. As did I.’

  I looked at him with contempt. ‘I was a professional.’

  ‘We expected you to keep your personalfeelings out of it.’

  ‘I did.’ I hadn’t wanted to interview her, but when I’d been coerced into it I’d decided that the best way to manage it was to pretend to myself that I’d never met her before. But she hadn’t bothered to mask her smug triumph and I suppose, as a result, I couldn’t help letting my bitterness leak through. Not that I wrote anything terrible, as such. Just not very nice.

  Cigarettes punctuated everything; they declared things started and they declared things completed. Whenever I sat down to write an article, my starting ritualwas to have a cigarette. Since I’d given up, I hadn’t been able to type anything without a nagging feeling that I’d sneaked in ahead of the starter’s gun, that I shouldn’t have started yet. And when I finished the job, I had no sense of completion because a cigarette wasn’t there to declare the task done. In the seven long weeks since I’d become a non-smoker, I was perpetually troubled by the weight of unfinishedness, a sense that I was dragging around all of the jobs that weren’t properly completed.

  But hard as it was, I couldn’t give in because even though I wasn’t a superstitious person, I couldn’t shake the black fear that if I went back on the cigarettes, Bid would die.

  After I’d – eventually – filed my stories on Dee, I stopped off at the cinema – they have the biggest range – and bought Damien a big bag of pick’n’mix, shovelling in a hefty selection of cola bottles, gummy dinosaurs and jelly strawberries, to make up for abandoning him on a Sunday when he had a banjaxed knee, nicotine withdrawaland no sweets.

  He was on the couch, looking grumpy and watching the twenty-four-hour World War Two Channel – not its officialname but, whatever it was, it seemed to run round-the-clock documentaries on the Nuremberg rallies and the bombing of Dresden – with his knee stretched out on a chair.