Hush Hush

by Mullarkey, Gabrielle

  ‘Whiskey, and pour one for yourself,’ advised Rachel, following her into the kitchen. ‘I don’t want to sit. I want to get this over with.’

  Angela paused. ‘I sort of guessed Marshall was married. Has his wife found out?’

  ‘No. Sadie found out.’ Rachel looked down at her shapely nails. ‘So I thought you’d better find out before she decides to spread the word on my behalf. It’s about me and another married man, actually.’

  ‘But what’s Ma got to do with it?’ Angela had forgotten all about the whiskey.

  Rachel looked up at her, blue eyes couched in shadows. ‘I’d prefer it if you guessed.’

  ‘Guess what? Come off it, Rachel. I never was a code-cracker.’

  ‘Fuck it, anyway,’ said Rachel with feeling and took a deep breath. ‘I had a one-night stand with Robert. I was the one who had dinner with him. If I had any idea that you suspected him all along, I’d have come clean before now and spared you the guilt of an unproven accusation and a pointless grudge match against that woman in the travel agent’s. May I sit down?’ Suddenly, Rachel was standing on ceremony, stressing the formality of her announcement and the chasm she’d just opened up between them.

  Angela sat down instead. She simply gaped at her best friend, whose beauty was now distorted by the ugliness of deception, her scalloped nails the claws of a mistress hooking spoken-for men. ‘You utter fucking bitch,’ she managed at last in a tone of wonder. ‘How many other women’s lives have you wrecked?’

  ‘Oh, so you’re suddenly sorry for Marshall’s wife, I take it? But if I’d just confessed to a split-up with him, you’d have been all sympathy, without a thought for the relieved wifey who’d got him back.’

  ‘You absolute bitch,’ repeated Angela in a daze. ‘All those months of fucking guilt. I was hardly able to think straight. Every memory of him was poisoned by suspicion. And you … hang on! Jesus, Mary and Joseph and a cast of thousands, how did Ma find out?’

  Rachel told her, grateful for a chance to side-step the issue of her utter fucking bitchiness. Angela wanted to flay her best friend’s perfect features. But she was stopped by the realisation that Rachel would let her. Rachel would take her punishment on the chin and not fight back. She had no heart for self-justification because she had no sense of guilt, only a disinterested awareness of upsetting less dispassionate people with her behaviour. She had no heart at all.

  ‘You,’ said Angela, trembling, ‘are a vapid, empty excuse for a human being. At least poor Robert would’ve felt guilt afterwards. Oh my God. Oh, dear God!’

  The tears spilt out of Angela’s eyes in a purgative torrent. She put her hands over her face, perversely ashamed of her loss of control in front of Rachel.

  Rachel flapped a clean paper hanky, glimpsed by Angela through wet fingers as she sobbed. She ignored the hanky, so Rachel put a hand on her heaving shoulder and left it there, a light, consoling touch, almost coolly impersonal and awaiting its next instruction from Angela’s body language.

  Angela’s shoulder pitched and tossed under the hand’s dry-leaf weight. To think that she was weak enough to let Rachel comfort her, to let Rachel slip back into the role of patiently abiding counsellor when she herself had triggered the breakdown!

  ‘Fuck off out of it, Rachel!’

  ‘I can’t just leave you like this, Ange.’

  ‘It’s a bit late for your touching concern.’

  ‘Look, Robert was in bits over it. I invited him to dinner, got him very drunk and came on to him like the Tasmanian she-devil. I practically trussed and bound and raped the bloke, to be honest. My date had blown me out and I was feeling vengeful towards men in general, while needing a bit of sexual reassurance.’

  Angela wiped her face with the back of her hand. ‘Then why,’ she snivelled, ‘didn’t you hitch your skirt for passing lorry drivers, like every other local tart? Or try a dildo?’

  ‘I don’t know, I really don’t. Except, I didn’t plan it. And Robert certainly never had it in mind.’

  Angela grabbed the hanky off the kitchen table and blew her nose. ‘The bloody swine! Telling me I was paranoid, going off on a tangent about Mum. He needn’t think he’ll get away with this, just because he’s snuffed it! I’ll dig him up and have him cremated! He was always scared of naked flames. Wouldn’t go near a barbecue or a bonfire in case a sausage exploded.’ She choked on a harsh laugh that turned into a sob.

  ‘I’ll make you a sandwich,’ offered Rachel. ‘I’d be grateful for something to do, and if I know you, you won’t bother to eat tonight otherwise.’

  ‘Oh you do know me, that’s the problem. You and him both. You risked jumping into the sack together because thick old Ange was so easy to fool.’

  ‘It was never like that.’

  Angela stood up, suddenly bereft of fight. She stumbled out of the kitchen and up the stairs to the womb-like sanctuary of her duvet, wrapping it round her and fattening its fourteen-tog cotton with her tears. If there was ever a time when she needed Conor McGinlay, this was it. Not so much to comfort her (after all, the whole fiasco didn’t show either her marriage or her husband in a light that flattered her wifely qualities), as to remind her that she’d moved on, regained control of her life.

  But as Rachel’s confession had made clear, her comeback from Robert’s death had been as brittle as the icing on Miss Havisham’s wedding cake, nibbled away by the sharp teeth of self-deception until it finally crumbled to dust when the shutters were flung open on the truth. She’d never forgiven Robert for hiding something or herself for doubting him. How did you come back from that contradiction?

  Still crying, she drifted off to sleep.

  When she awoke, a cold toasted cheese sandwich sat on the bedside table, next to a cup of scummy tea. Her stomach rumbled its protest over her emotional objection to sustenance. A healthy appetite was hardly part of the pining process. After a moment’s hesitation, she wolfed down the cold, greasy sandwich and lukewarm tea, perfectly spiked with just the right amount of sugar. Well, Rachel wouldn’t neglect an intimate kindness like that, would she? The tears came again but this time, her mind worked in tandem with her swirling emotions.

  Hobbling downstairs in the duvet with the dirty crockery, she switched on the kitchen light. Rachel, sitting at the kitchen table, lifted her hands against the blinding light.

  ‘Why the fuck are you still here?’

  ‘Don’t laugh if I tell you,’ replied Rachel in a furry voice.

  Angela glared. ‘It wasn’t top of my agenda.’

  Rachel shoved the whiskey bottle into the centre of the table. ‘I was hoping, if I drank enough of this stuff, I could make myself cry.’

  ‘So I’d feel sorry for you instead of wishing you dead?’

  ‘No,’ hiccuped Rachel regretfully. ‘So I could feel as bad as I’m supposed to about betraying my best friend. But I can’t. See, the mascara’s still perfectly dry. You’re right, I am a vapid human being. I couldn’t even cry on cue if a funeral demanded it.’

  ‘And that,’ growled Angela, ‘is supposed to excuse your total lack of morals? The old argument that predators can’t help their characters?’

  ‘Not at all,’ sighed Rachel, her puffy face testament to her whiskey consumption. ‘It’s supposed to make you realise how lucky you are, Ange. Better to have loved and lost than never to have felt more than a collection of nerve-ends stimulated in the groin area, my only approximation to love.’

  ‘Oh, get out!’ roared Angela. ‘I’m sick to death of your rational analysis of your alley-cat behaviour. And I don’t care if you’re so drunk, you crash the car on the way home, though you’d better hope I don’t ring the plods and tip them off.’

  ‘Consider me gone,’ said Rachel with grave dignity and only swayed a little bit as she walked to the front door.

  Chapter Twelve

  Angela lay face down on her beach towel, heat buzzing in her ears. Above the rim of her sunglasses, balanced painfully on her blistered nose, she had an uninterr
upted view of the beach. The pale yellow sand was mostly unpopulated and as flat as plaited rope, a heat haze thickening its surface and vapourising under orange and blue beach umbrellas. Angela squinted up at their own umbrella. The sun had edged round it, pouncing eagerly on her exposed back. She stood up to reposition her towel. ‘The beach is the same colour as Rachel’s hair,’ she said, deliberately invoking The Name to gauge Sadie’s reaction.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Sadie non-committally, reading Woman’s Weekly from her deck-chair, huddled against the umbrella pole. ‘You want to be careful, Ange, or your shoulders will go the same way as your nose. Need more lotion?’

  ‘So we can’t mention her name? I was thinking, at least she had the guts to tell me face to face.’

  ‘Only to get in her version before I dished the dirt,’ snorted Sadie. ‘The sun’s softening your brain, lovey.’

  ‘To err is human, to forgive divine, as you die-hard Christians never seem to say when put to the test,’ sniped Angela controversially. Seeing her mother’s face sag, she backtracked quickly. ‘You’re right of course, Ma, there are no extenuating circumstances. This is my second trip away in a matter of months. Marla’s none too impressed. I’ll probably have to do unpaid overtime for the next decade.’

  ‘You’re on a mission of mercy, taking your creaky-jointed mother to warmer climes,’ flapped Sadie with her magazine. ‘You know, like them artists who thought a nice, sunny holiday would cure their TB.’ Best not to point out that it was in fact Angela’s third holiday in five months, if she included the weekend in Curracloe.

  Angela eyed her mother with new respect. It was Sadie who’d picked out the holiday in a brochure and avoided booking it at Hartley’s.

  The tourist trade in this corner of Rhodes was largely restricted to day-trippers who poured off a steamer and bought sponges in the quayside shops before grabbing a quick lunch in a waterfront café and reboarding the steamer. The action centred round the jetty, where smacks with painted prows bobbed on their moorings. Behind the vine-clad tavernas lay steep streets winding upwards between white, cubed houses towards a clifftop monastery.

  Sadie and Angela had an apartment ‒ three cool, whitewashed rooms ‒ over one of the quieter harbourside tavernas.

  Since their arrival two days earlier, they’d developed a routine. Mornings on the beach, lunch at the same taverna (Yanni gave them big helpings and a discount), then up to their rooms for a two-hour siesta, and down in the cool of the evening to take a leisurely stroll and eat dinner. Sadie was lapping it up. She’d been abroad before, on family holidays to the Costa del Sol when Angela and Owen were small. But here, she was in her element. For one who feared enforced inactivity, the luxury of unplanned hours filled her with a rich drowsiness, much as the sunshine leaked into her joints, softening spiked ridges of pain.

  Angela, watching her mother blossom, felt the familiar onset of guilt. She should’ve taken her away long before now. Sadie, watching Angela prone in the shade, rejoiced in her brainwave of this holiday. Now, if only everything else went to plan!

  Angela peered down the beach again. At its southern tip, the white early afternoon steamer scraped between the rocks towards its berth and began unloading its twice-daily cache of crumpled visitors. A few, like Angela and Sadie, had come to stay. The others were content to snap photos of basking cats before fleeing to air-conditioned hotels back in the larger resorts.

  The dedicated sun-worshippers turned at once to the stone steps leading down to the beach. Angela peered past them, searching for the flaking green railing of their apartment balcony. She could just make it out if she narrowed her eyes, and even discern the damp towels and hand-washed shorts hung out to dry.

  A couple advanced down the beach. The woman wore a white halter-neck top, showing a bronzed midriff. Her sun-whitened hair was whipped up like candyfloss. The man wavered in the heat beside her, dressed too sensibly in long trousers and a dark shirt that was bound to be a sun-trap. He had reddish hair.

  Angela smiled sadly and shut her eyes. She thought about the moment she’d realised that she probably loved Conor McGinlay right back.

  It was on the drive back from Simonetti’s in Curracloe. She was watching him covertly from sleepy eyes, admiring him like a sculpture, the way his arm muscles bunched changing gear, and his hair curled so delicately around the outer shell of his ear. Suddenly, he’d turned and smiled, catching her in the act of covert admiration. It was the smile he’d tried to dazzle the traffic warden with, outside the offices of Goss! But this time, its sweetness was instinctive, not manufactured. Her insides had contracted, her heart pounded in her ears. It was the feeling ‒ part chemical, part physical and wholly indefinable ‒ that she’d felt within minutes of meeting Robert. It was love. Probably.

  She opened her eyes and saw that the couple weren’t walking together, as she’d thought. Perspective had lent a false impression. The man was some way ahead of the woman, unconnected with her. He was Conor. Angela shot upright on her towel, hauled up her costume straps and reached for the long T-shirt dress crumpled on the sand next to her. ‘You!’ she said furiously, scattering sand as she pulled it over her head. ‘You set this up, Ma!’

  ‘Did I?’ Limp with relief that he’d come after all, Sadie turned a page.

  ‘I told you not to ring him!’

  ‘But you didn’t tell him not to ring me.’ Sadie was enjoying her upper hand. ‘Now he’s here, you’d better deal with it, don’t you think?’

  Conor ducked under the umbrella, scowling mightily with fear of rejection. ‘Hello all. Come here often?’

  Angela drank him in. She was getting used to interpreting his repertoire of defensive facial expressions, even after an absence of weeks. His presence was deliciously undeniable against a backdrop of sea, sea breeze and vibrant blueness. He was much browner than she was. His skin knew how to tan. ‘What happened to your nose?’ he asked abruptly, clearly thinking along the same lines.

  Angela touched her pulsating beakiness, mortified. ‘Tactful as ever. You can’t have come all the way from New York to trade insults.’

  ‘Haven’t come from New York at all, you presumptuous gobbeloon of a woman. I’m back in Loxton, as I planned to be all along, and as I explained I would be in the note with my flowers. Didn’t you get them?’

  ‘Back to sell your house and collect the loot!’ huffed Angela, stuffing things into her tap-dancing frogs bag. She was too excited to think positively. It was best to assume he’d come in person to deliver a shattering, final blow to her last vestige of hope. She felt Sadie’s beady eye upon her and looked up, frowning.

  ‘Yeah, Sadie told me you’d somehow found out about the house sale from a workmate who lives nearby,’ growled Conor. ‘Look, let’s all go and eat.’ He kicked the umbrella pole gently.

  ‘You two go off and eat,’ corrected Sadie in exasperation. ‘Let’s not pretend you don’t have things to thrash out. I’ll stay here with my fruit and bottled water. Where’s Shane?’

  ‘Taken a donkey ride up to the monastery,’ grunted Conor, catlike eyes fixed on Angela.

  She started. She hadn’t taken Shane into the equation. ‘It’s Whitsun half-term,’ shrugged Conor. ‘I’ve done enough leaving him with Mrs Turner. Well?’ His direct look challenged her. ‘Shall we go?’

  ‘Yes, yes, might as well hear what you’ve got to say this time.’ She heaved a martyred sigh and shoved her feet into canvas flatties. ‘If you need me, Ma, I’ll be at the Fig-Leaf, two up from Yanni’s place.’

  Sadie waved her away, fearful and exhilarated. Oh please God, let her not blow it this time! Angela had gone out of her way to ignore him, and he’d still followed her here, taken the risk of looking a fool for love. The least she could do was listen to him. Sadie had listened when he’d phoned her from New York, and she’d believed every word.

  Angela found a table in the shade. All of her felt red and raw next to Conor’s brown smoothness. Prickly heat was already swelling on her collarbone. Under the tabl
e, cats twined round their ankles in the hope of scraps. She plunged her gibbon-like proboscis into a menu.

  ‘Now then, Angela.’ Gently and firmly, he plucked the menu from her hand. ‘This isn’t going to be like Simonetti’s all over again, is it, with you being all aggressive and interrogating me?’

  ‘I don’t know, Conor, because you had things to confess that night. And it seems you’ve high-tailed it over here with a new batch of confessions.’

  ‘You left me no choice, except to make the grand gesture. S’pose I could’ve waited till nightfall and shinned up your balcony with a rose between my teeth.’

  ‘Oh great. That means Mum’s told you where we’re staying.’

  Conor eyed her balefully. ‘How long are you going to maintain this sniffy attitude? I’m supposed to believe that not one bone in your sexy body is secretly pleased to see me come running, cap in hand?’

  ‘More like all guns blazing! I’m portrayed as the baddy in all this because I elected to get on with my life when you swanned off to New York, seeing fit to phone me a handful of times and then not at all.’

  The waiter arrived. Angela asked for a Greek salad, unable to face grappling with a hearty meal. Conor messed around, asking in measured tones if the souvlaki was well done and the olives pitted, as if the preparation of his lunch was the only thing on his emptied, vacationing mind. This was a ploy, Angela knew, to seize the initiative by playing on her nerves.

  ‘Look,’ he said as the waiter left, ‘it got nigh impossible to ring you from Kate’s and hold a private conversation, and as I ended up virtually working from her place …’

  ‘You could have sent me texts explaining all that, instead of leaving me thinking the worst!’

  ‘Well – so could you.’

  She shrugged. He had a point.

  ‘Though that’s not the point,’ he frowned. ‘Texts might’ve muddied the waters. You can’t say what we needed to say to each other in 140 characters or less.’