This Charming Man

by Marian Keyes

  ‘Paddy, ask me where I was last night.’

  ‘I couldn’t give a shit.’

  ‘Just ask me.’

  ‘Okay, Marnie.’ In a monotone, ‘Where were you last night?’

  ‘In bed. With Sheridan.’

  She was confident that his jealousy would send him hurtling back to her, more devoted than ever.

  ‘Sheridan?’ he asked sharply.

  ‘Yes, I’ve slept with another man.’

  But it transpired that he didn’t care that she had slept with someone else; he cared that it was with Sheridan.

  ‘Sheridan?’ Paddy’s face was contorted with wild emotion. ‘He’s the only person in the world I trust, and you’ve… corrupted him.’

  She wasn’t surprised when he hit her. She stumbled against the wall, and he punched her again, this time sending her staggering to the floor. But when he kicked her in the stomach, she knew she’d gone too far.

  In a frenzy he kicked her in the ribs, in the chest, in the face. She tried to protect her head with her arms but he peeled them off and stamped on her right hand.

  ‘You’re a stupid, useless bitch and this is your own fucking fault.’ He was panting from exertion as he stood over her, curled in a ball beneath him. ‘Say it. You’re a stupid, useless bitch and this is your own fucking fault.’

  He was pulling his leg back for another kick. No. She didn’t think she could take another one and still live. The toe of his boot slammed her stomach against her spine. She retched, retched, retched, retched, nothing but bile left.

  ‘Say it!’

  ‘I’m a stupid, useless bitch,’ she whispered, tears streaming down her face. ‘And this is my own fault.’

  ‘Own fucking fault. Can’t you get anything right?’

  When she came round in hospital, wired up to instruments, she’d expected Paddy to be sitting by her bed, his head bowed in penance.

  But only Grace was present. ‘Where’s Paddy?’ she rasped.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Marnie assumed he’d just popped out for a cigarette or to get a drink.

  Foreboding lay heavy upon her. It was going to be hard for them to come back from this. He’d have to do something, go for counselling, get professional help, to ensure nothing like this happened ever again.

  Then she discovered that Paddy hadn’t just popped out for a cigarette. He wasn’t at the hospital. He hadn’t been there at all.

  ‘Does he know I’m here?’ she asked Grace.

  ‘I’m sure he knows you’re in hospital,’ Grace said. ‘That’s the only place you could be. Assuming you were still alive.’

  Marnie didn’t understand. ‘Hasn’t he phoned?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  He was too ashamed of what he’d done, Marnie realized. She’d have to go to him, but she was physically incapable. The list of her injuries went on for two pages. Grace insisted she read it: a cracked knuckle (from when he’d stamped on her hand); contusions to the liver; bleeding from the spleen; severe bruising to the ribs and clavicle.

  A terrible thought occurred to her. ‘Grace, do Ma and Dad know?’

  ‘No. I couldn’t get hold of them.’

  Thank you, God.

  Ma and Dad were on holiday in France with Bid.

  ‘Grace, please don’t tell them.’

  ‘Are you mad? Of course I’m going to tell them.’

  ‘You can’t, you can’t! They’d try to stop me being with him.’ An even more frightening scenario unfurled. ‘You haven’t… you haven’t told the police?’

  ‘… No… but…’

  ‘Grace, no, no, no you can’t!’ Tears of panic and frustration rushed from her eyes. ‘Please, that would be the worst thing ever –’

  ‘But the nurse says he might do it again.’

  ‘He won’t do it again. Grace, you don’t understand. That’s just him and me, how we are with each other.’

  ‘But look at you! You’re in hospital. He did this.’

  ‘Grace, you couldn’t. It would be like turning in a member of the family. Paddy’s one of the family!’

  ‘But look at what he’s done to you.’

  ‘Grace, I’m begging you, swear to me that you won’t tell them. Or Ma and Dad. It’ll be okay, it’ll be okay, it’ll never happen again, I swear to you.’

  Eventually she extracted a reluctant commitment but Grace drew the line at helping Marnie from her bed and down the corridor to the phones.

  ‘You have internal bleeding,’ she said. ‘You’re not well enough to stand.’

  Marnie waited until Grace had left and, wheeling her drip along the lino, inched painfully to the public phones, but when she got no reply from Paddy’s number she was overtaken by a kind of vertigo, like she was about to topple off a high building and just tumble, tumble, tumble, feet then head then feet then head, air whistling past her.

  The following day she said, ‘Grace, he’s not answering the phone. Please will you go to his house?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Please, Grace, I have to see him.’

  ‘No. I won’t tell Ma what he’s done, but I’m not going to his house.’

  Marnie lasted another twenty-nine hours before the compulsion became irresistible. She pulled the drip from her arm and left the hospital without telling anyone and caught a taxi to Paddy’s house. The peculiar father answered the door, seemed shocked by Marnie’s bruises and bandages and said in answer to her desperate questions, ‘He’s gone. Since last Wednesday.’

  ‘Last Wednesday?’ Four days!

  ‘Packed a bag and off he went.’

  ‘Packed a bag? You saw him? Why didn’t you stop him?’

  ‘He’s a grown man.’

  ‘Where did he go?’

  ‘I haven’t an iota.’

  ‘But you must know!’

  ‘He tells me nothing.’

  ‘I need to look in his room.’ She limped up the stairs.

  It still smelt of him but his clothes and books were gone.

  ‘Grace, should we go to the police?’

  ‘Good idea. He should be arrested.’

  ‘No, I meant a missing persons thing.’

  ‘He’s not a missing person. He left. His dad saw him.’

  ‘But where is he?’

  ‘Wherever it is, it can’t be far away enough.’

  ‘He could be in London.’ Already she was thinking of going there.

  ‘No,’ Grace said. ‘You can’t go after him. He could have killed you. He hasn’t even bothered to find out that you’re still alive –’

  ‘Because he’s scared, that’s why he left –’

  ‘No, because he doesn’t care.’

  ‘I have to see Sheridan. He’ll know.’

  But Sheridan either didn’t know or wouldn’t tell. Marnie was never sure.

  Inconceivable though it was that Leechy would know and she wouldn’t, she swallowed her pride enough to ask, but Leechy didn’t know either. In fact, Leechy had the cheek to look almost as wretched and nervy as Marnie.

  Paddy didn’t reappear. Days, then weeks passed. All through the summer months Marnie remained on high alert, every cell trembling with tension, desperate for his return. October was her focus; he’d have to come back then, to start his training at the Bar.

  Until then, the agony of summer had to be endured. The sunny weather and long evenings of July and August took an eternity to elapse. Every morning she woke to dazzling mocking brightness; it laid her bare and raw. But she knew that the chill of autumn would eventually arrive. The air would change, the seasons would slip down a gear and Paddy would come back.

  He tried to blank her in the street. ‘Don’t come near me. You disgust me.’

  He kept striding while she did her best to keep up with him. ‘Paddy, it’s okay, I forgive you.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For… beating me up.’

  ‘That?’ He was incredulous. ‘That was your fault.’

  Was it?
But she didn’t have time to decide because he was moving so fast and she was so hungry for information. ‘Where have you been all summer?’

  ‘New York.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Having fun.’ The way he said it let her know that the fun he’d had had been of a sexual nature.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me where you’d gone?’

  He stopped and looked down on her from his great height. ‘Because I didn’t, and don’t, ever want to see you again.’

  She had that toppling sensation again, like she’d fallen and was tumbling over and over.

  ‘You’ll have to get over him,’ Grace said, as if it was as simple as just deciding to change the sheets on a bed.

  ‘If I could, I would.’ She’d have happily cut off her arm if she thought it might stop the pain. But she was tiny and powerless against its terrible might.

  During the summer months she’d had the expectation that her suffering was finite. Now she understood that her agony could last for all of eternity and nothing would happen to interrupt it.

  ‘Have some self-respect,’ Grace urged.

  ‘I’d love some,’ she said quietly. ‘If I knew where to get it I’d be there like a shot.’

  ‘You just need to decide you have it.’

  She shook her head. ‘Grace, there is nothing so frightening… or humiliating as loving a man who no longer loves you.’

  ‘It happens to everyone.’ Grace was defiantly practical.

  ‘I’m not everyone. I’m not normal.’

  She was an emotional haemophiliac. She couldn’t heal. Every bad thing that had ever been done to her – going right back to her first day at school when she’d been separated from Grace – she carried, each wound as fresh and painful as if it had happened yesterday. She never got over anything.

  ‘And let’s face it, Grace, even if I wasn’t a fuck-up –’ she actually managed to laugh –‘even if I was the most well-balanced, sunny-natured person alive, Paddy de Courcy would take some getting over.’

  She passed through the following nine months – her final year in college – like a ghost. She graduated and barely noticed. Time passed. A year. Two years. Three years on and the torment of his absence remained the most important fact of her life. It was as if she was paused, waiting for his return to click her life back on and for forward propulsion to begin again.

  Years later, when she looked back at that time she wondered why she hadn’t simply killed herself. But she had been too stunned with pain to have had even that volition.

  News reached her that Paddy and Sheridan were sharing a house and it was like a knife in her gut: why had he forgiven Sheridan but not her?

  Only one thing mitigated her pain in the smallest way: Paddy wasn’t with Leechy.

  Through the worst of the post-Paddy times Ma and Dad had been quietly, sensitively supportive. They never pressed for details on the end of the romance, they never asked why Leechy no longer called around. It was Dad who suggested she tried out living in a different city for a while, and Marnie was surprised by how the idea infused her with fresh energy. Her life was so wretched in Dublin that starting again in some other place might clean it up, render it usable. She considered San Francisco then Melbourne, then, beaten back by visa requirements, ran out of steam and thought herself lucky to have got as far as London. Where she also surprised herself by getting a half-decent job as a mortgage broker. But, still reeling from the loss of Paddy, she embarked on one doomed romance after another, lurching from man to man, trying to right herself.

  She read self-help books and saw counsellors and listened to subliminal tapes and – trying not to cringe – repeated validations in front of the mirror, in a ragged quest for healing and self-respect. Her wounds were impediments she tried to ignore but, despite her valiant efforts, they thwarted her by revealing themselves to the very people – usually men – she was trying to conceal them from.

  After a time Ma and Dad began dropping an occasional mention of Paddy, relating – almost with pride – his political ascent. Clearly they had no idea of the agony it caused her to even hear Paddy’s name; they would never have done so if they’d known. They thought – perfectly reasonably – that her relationship with Paddy had happened so long ago that surely she must be over it by now.

  At some stage she accepted that she’d be spending her life without Paddy but – she caught a glimpse of it from time to time – a small despicable part of her continued to wait. She visualized it as a room which had been shut up and preserved exactly as it was when he went away and was waiting for the right circumstances for the door to be flung open, the dust-sheets to be snapped off the furniture and the light to flood in.

  Grace

  I rang Damien. ‘Marnie says she’ll do it ifthere are other women.’

  I must have sounded as dismal as I felt because he said very gently, ‘Grace, you don’t have to do this.’

  ‘I gave Dee my word.’ She’d guilted me into saying I’d try to put something together; and when I said I’d do something, I did it, even when I didn’t want to.

  ‘I shouldn’t have told you about the story.’ Damien was grim. ‘I thought you could just tell Dee. I’d no idea you’d get embroiled in… all this. This de Courcy business.’

  ‘Maybe I won’t be able to find Lola Daly.’

  ‘Maybe you won’t.’

  Then I could walk away with a clear conscience.

  ‘Keep me posted,’ he said.

  ‘I will.’ I hung up, then got to my feet and, with great reluctance, approached Casey Kaplan’s desk.

  ‘Casey, you know how you told me who John Crown was and I was so grateful to you?’

  ‘You weren’t that grateful.’

  ‘You stole my Madonna story. I was as grateful as I could be. Can you help me again?’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘I need to find someone. Her name is Lola Daly, she’s a stylist.’

  ‘Yep, know her.’

  ‘You know where she is?’

  ‘No.’

  Fool.

  ‘Last sighted in Dublin in September,’ I said. ‘But she’s fallen off the edge of the earth. She doesn’t answer her mobile, but the number hasn’t been disconnected. That’s all I have. I know it’s not much but could you put the word out among, you know, models and those types, socialites, It girls, see ifanyone has been using her?’

  Only his eyes moved. He was scanning them over my face in a searching way that I was meant to find disconcertingly sexy. He nodded slowly. ‘Okay.’

  ‘For real?’ Could he actually find her? Or was he full of shit? I was depending on the full-of-shit option.

  ‘Might take time.’ He lounged back into his chair. ‘The difficult we can manage. The impossible could take a bit longer.’

  I returned to my desk and picked up the phone, then put it down again when I saw Casey approaching.

  ‘What?’ I said impatiently. ‘I can’t give you any more information. I’ve told you everything I know.’

  He dropped a piece of paper on my desk. ‘She’s in County Clare. A backwater called Knockavoy.’

  Ten full horror-struck seconds elapsed before I could speak. ‘You know already?’

  ‘Got it in one. First call I made. Some days you get lucky,’ he added modestly. ‘I met SarahJane Hutchinson last night. She was looking hot. Mentioned she was being styled from County Clare these days. Seemed sorta likely it was by our girl.’

  I couldn’t speak.

  ‘Happy?’ Kaplan prompted.

  ‘Thrilled,’ I said faintly.

  I’d thought Lola Daly would be impossible to locate. In my worst imaginings I hadn’t thought that she’d be found with just one phone call.

  I was seized with desperate frustration. Bloody Casey Knows-Everybody Kaplan. Why had Big Daddy decided we needed to be sexed up? Why had he hired Casey Kaplan? Why had my path ever crossed his? Look at the disaster he had wrought on me! I’d have to drive to County Clare. And Christ alone kne
w what other terrible shite was poised to rain down on me.

  I laid my forehead on my desk for a brief soothing moment then, pushing against my palms as leverage, lifted it again. My skull was very heavy.

  ‘What’s up?’ Kaplan asked.

  ‘How long –?’ My voice was faint and croaky, so I started again. ‘How long would it take me to drive to, what’s the name of the place? Knockavoy?’

  ‘Dunno,’ Kaplan said. ‘Only time I went to Clare was by helicopter.’

  I mentioned a vague memory of driving there some bank holiday weekend; it had taken seven hours.

  ‘Oh God, no,’ Lorraine piped up. ‘It won’t take anything like that. Not since they’ve opened the Kildare bypass.’

  ‘The Kildare bypass is great,’ Tara said.

  ‘A godsend,’ Clare agreed.

  ‘I don’t know ifit makes that much difference,’ Joanne remarked.

  ‘TC?’ I asked. It was odd that TC – i.e. a man – hadn’t weighed in with his opinion of how long a journey would take, boring us all to death with detailed discussions of possible routes, roads, etc.

  He wasn’t listening. He was humming to himselfas he aligned handfuls of printouts, knocking them against his desk and punching them with neat holes. He was full of industry, focused on some task that was absorbing all his focus.

  ‘Leave him,’ Lorraine said. ‘He’s getting ready for his big profile on Friday. You’ll get no sense out of him.’

  ‘Nothing new there,’ I said, but he didn’t rise to even that.

  TC began putting his pages into a beautiful red binder.

  ‘Where d’you get that lovely folder?’ I asked, seizing on the diversion. ‘I’ve never seen one like that in the stationery press.’

  ‘Correct,’ he said brightly. ‘You wouldn’t have. Bought it myself. With my own money.’

  He smoothed his hand lovingly over the soft red cover and I asked him, ‘Who’re you interviewing? That you’re going to all this trouble for?’

  ‘The most beautiful girl in the world.’ He smiled dreamily.

  ‘And she is?’

  ‘Zara Kaletsky.’

  He continued to hum and stroke his red folder. Lorraine was right: I’d get no sense out of him today. I stared in his direction for a few more seconds, unwilling to accept that I hadn’t been able to annoy him, but he was impermeable.