by Cathy Kelly
‘I know, it’s annoying, isn’t it,’ said Anneliese automatically.
She had been responding to a lot of her daughter’s statements like that. Since Beth had picked her up from the train station there had been a constant monologue about all the difficulties involved in the new baby. The house was wrong, for a start. There were only two bedrooms and they really needed three, for people like Anneliese who would be coming to stay with them when the baby was born. Every time her daughter mentioned this in such a blasé way, Anneliese prayed that by the time her grandchild was born, she’d have recovered some of her energy and enthusiasm for life. As it stood, she couldn’t imagine taking care of a baby. Babies needed kindness and love, and Anneliese felt like a big slab of ice.
Beth’s car would have to go: three doors were no good for getting a baby in and out of the back. Work was a problem too. Beth was a chartered accountant and it wasn’t the sort of job you could do on a part-time basis, not in her company anyway.
Try as she might, Anneliese couldn’t summon up any enthusiasm for Beth’s worries. It was odd. All Beth’s life, Anneliese had been consumed with interest in her, no detail was too small. From her anxiety as a small child over having a book to read for Book Day, to various worries over how she had done in her accountancy exams. But now, all of a sudden, Anneliese felt so distant from her daughter.
It wasn’t Beth’s fault: it was her. Edward leaving had suddenly sheared their family into three different compartments. It was as if, in making Anneliese redundant as a wife, he had somehow made her redundant as a mother as well.
The depression added to it all too. Anneliese hated this feeling of distance from her beloved Beth and damn it, she hated Edward for having done this to her.
‘Are you OK, Mum?’ said Beth, as they got inside the house.
She hadn’t asked this question yet, although Anneliese knew it was coming. She knew it as soon as she set eyes on Beth and realised her daughter had noticed how tired and drawn she looked, and how she hadn’t dressed up the way she might normally, if she was going to visit her daughter in Dublin.
For a moment, she was about to launch into her standard: No, I’m fine, really, speech – the way the old Anneliese would have done. And then, she changed her mind.
‘No, Beth,’ she said. ‘I’m not fine, I’m not OK. I’m heartbroken.’
‘I wish I could do something,’ Beth said sadly. ‘I don’t think I’m much help to you, Mum, I’m sorry.’
‘You’re a great help,’ Anneliese said passionately. ‘But there is nothing you can do. There’s nothing anyone can do. I just have to get through it.’
‘But if Dad came to his senses and came home, it would all be OK again, wouldn’t it?’
She was like a child, Anneliese thought wistfully. A child hoping that Mummy and Daddy could get back together and everything would be the same as it ever had been.
‘It’s not that easy,’ she said. ‘Even if he turned around and came home now, I couldn’t have him back. It wouldn’t be the same. He’s broken my trust and it’s a very fragile thing, you know.’
‘He’s sorry, though. I know he is,’ Beth insisted.
‘Did he say that to you?’ Anneliese asked.
‘Well, not in so many words.’
‘Not in any words, you mean,’ said Anneliese. ‘This isn’t something that can be easily fixed, Beth. It’s over. We’ll just have to put up with it. I’m finding it hard to deal with it, but that’s my battle, not yours. Now, can we talk about something else?’
‘Sure.’ Beth looked mildly shocked, but said nothing more on the subject as she showed Anneliese to the spare bedroom and began to outline the plans she’d made for the two days that Anneliese was going to stay in Dublin.
Sitting at Lily’s bedside, watching her disappear, the idea of going to Beth’s had seemed like a good one.
Now that she was here, with lots of outings arranged to cheer her up, she felt even more miserable than ever. At least in her own home she could be miserable if she felt like it. Here she’d be forced to smile and put a brave face on things.
She’d endured the trip, and on her return home, she’d slipped back into her quiet life, working at the Lifeboat Shop twice a week and working with Stephen in the garden centre on Saturdays and Sundays.
September was always an interesting time in the garden centre. The crazy summer rush of people realising that their back gardens were neglected was over. Everyone had bought the sand pits and paddling pools and potted shrubs to brighten up the gardens. September was a new beginning, school time.
It was time for battening down the hatches and tidying up after the summer. It was also the time to plant bulbs for Christmas. For years, Anneliese had planted vast quantities for the Christmas market, and then last year she hadn’t done it at all. She’d spent all yesterday sitting out behind the big greenhouse with bags of compost and peat beside her, along with giant bags of hyacinths arranged by colour. There was something comfortingly familiar and monotonous about lining the pretty pots with crocks and then filling up with peat and soil and compost and planting the bulbs carefully. White hyacinths were her favourite. There was something about the combination of the pale subtle green and those strongly scented tiny white flowers that she loved. At home, she used to pot up two blue china bowls with bulbs and they’d always bloomed in time for Christmas. They were part of her Christmas decorations. She hadn’t bothered doing any this year.
Her bones ached and she moved off the scrub grass, getting to her feet to walk the stiffness out.
Walking on sand was supposed to be springy, but she’d never felt that. Perhaps she’d seen too many bad films when she was young where quicksand lured people in so that they sank into it, drowning in sand instead of water. To her, sand was not as benign as everyone thought.
Gazing out at the harbour from the dune, she thought of the poor whale. The marine-expert guy who’d tried to save her was still in Dolphin Cottage. Anneliese avoided him whenever she saw him walking that bedraggled big black dog of his. He’d done his best for the whale, though.
It was sad to see such a beautiful sea creature die simply because her sonar had become messed up and she couldn’t find her way out to sea again. Like me, Anneliese reflected. My sonar was Edward and Beth and now they’ve gone and I have nothing. No safety, no security, no reason to be.
Did the whale drown? she wondered. Drowning was supposed to be quite comforting once you let yourself go – but how did anyone know that? Surely, if you’d actually drowned, you couldn’t tell anyone.
Anneliese felt the texture of the sand beneath her feet change. She looked down and realised she’d moved further down the beach and was now walking in sand drenched in seawater. The waves were out but suddenly a large wave swept in. She didn’t move, just let the seawater surge over her shoes. It felt interesting not to step back, the way she would normally. The salt water slowly drenched her feet in their light runners.
It was a cold, grey day after a week of glorious September sun, yet weirdly the cold wasn’t shocking. Instead, it was almost soothing, the soothing of nature’s logic. You stood in seawater and it was cold, like a mathematical equation, x + y = z and always would. Nothing else in life worked out so logically or mathematically.
Just to see how it felt, Anneliese walked a little further out. The seawater lapped around her ankles now, on the bare skin under her jeans. She could feel goose pimples on her legs, and it still felt strangely all right.
The sea was the same as it had always been: vast and somehow not frightening any more. It was the rest of the world that was frightening. With the natural world, you got what you expected. It was so-called civilisation that threw curve balls at you.
Anneliese stopped and let her mind flow around her the way the water was flowing around her ankles.
Would the sea embrace her? Would the cold numb her, so that she no longer felt anything, and just begin to float? Yes, that’s what it would do, what she’d do. People were anim
als, just organic matter, after all, so what could be more normal than going slowly into something else organic, being consumed by the planet? It would be like the whale dying slowly in the harbour. It made perfect sense.
People would be sad when they heard. Death was sad. But they’d get over it. They had other things in their lives, other people.
Beth had the baby. Anneliese tried to stop herself thinking about the baby, her grandchild. The baby was part of a future life and she didn’t want to think about it. There was no place for her in that future, no place at all. She’d given everything she had to everyone else and now she was done, finished.
This was her choice.
She walked further into the sea until the seawater came up around her torso, waves creeping up, wetting her clothes so that the water moved up over her breasts, reaching up towards her shoulders. It was cold. Walking in this way was different from running in when you wanted to swim or creeping in gently, screaming with the cold and laughing with people teasing you and urging you on. That’s what she used to do at the seaside as a child.
This was different, and yet she wasn’t afraid. The sensation of doing this was stopping her from thinking, and stopping thinking was what she wanted to do so much. Her mind was so full all the time: it never stopped.
At night it woke her up, tormenting her with the same questions and the same sense of hopelessness and she wanted it to stop. No tablets could do that. Nothing could, not unless she was so drugged that she couldn’t keep her eyes open, and what was the point of living like that? This was safer.
This would support her; the sea would take care of her. Suddenly, she couldn’t feel the sand any more. She was treading water and she’d have to stop that, wouldn’t she? Because you couldn’t drown if you were treading water. Or maybe you could and you just waited until you got tired, like the whale. She wasn’t sure. It was so cold that she tried to stop and closed her eyes. The weight of her clothes and her shoes pulled her down and her head went under the surface.
Cold shocked her face. She could feel her hair rippling around her, like fronds of seaweed. What did she have to do next? She had a mission, a plan, didn’t she? Every thought was slow, as if she was in an alternate universe, where real time took much longer.
She would close her eyes and keep them tightly shut and just be. That’s all she wanted to do: just be. Not have to think, not have to move, not have to tread water. Just be and let the sea decide what was going to happen to her, because she was fed up of deciding.
‘It’s OK, I’ve got you,’ said a deep, frantic voice.
She was grabbed and the shock made Anneliese gasp, taking in a huge gulp of seawater. She coughed and began to choke and suddenly fear grabbed her. She was in the sea, up to her neck in the sea, Jesus. Then she was being grabbed forcibly by somebody very strong. She was coughing so much and felt weak, but they were hauling her out of the water on to the beach where cold, icy cold claimed her.
EIGHTEEN
She knew she shouldn’t be making such an effort for a lunch with her ex-lover, but Izzie couldn’t help herself.
When Joe had phoned and asked her to lunch, for one final goodbye, she’d agreed and had shocked herself by instantly wondering what she could wear so he would think how well she looked.
‘I hope you’re not going,’ Carla had said. She’d overheard the conversation because Izzie had taken the call at her desk. In SilverWebb, lack of space made privacy nothing more than an amusing concept.
‘Think of it as closure,’ Izzie replied.
Beautifully dressed closure, she decided, as she picked out a clinging wrap dress very like the one she’d been wearing the first day they’d met. It was over, she knew it was over, but that didn’t mean she didn’t want to look good, did it?
Besides, he’d chosen to meet her in the Amber Room restaurant, a sign if ever there was one, that their relationship was over. The Amber Room was in the financial district and would be full of people he knew. Only an idiot would bring someone he was having an affair with there for lunch, and Joe Hansen was no idiot. This was final proof that Izzie and Joe were no more.
In the cab on the way there, she put on a coat of the richest red lipstick and layered gloss over it: war paint as modern armour. ‘I’m ready for you,’ it said.
And then she applied an extra-thick coat of mascara, because no woman could possibly cry when she was wearing mascara, otherwise she’d be left with spidery trails down her cheeks. Izzie Silver was not going to cry today. She mentally cloaked herself in self-possession as she walked into the restaurant, walking tall in her high shoes. The maître d’ brought her to Joe’s table. He was already waiting for her and, at first glance, she realised he must have caught some sun recently, because his skin was tanned and it stood out against the crisp icy white of his shirt. As usual, he was impeccably dressed, but there was that hint of a street fighter under the cashmere elegance.
‘Izzie,’ he said, formally, and got to his feet, placing a sedate New York kiss on each cheek, the way he’d greet a friend.
‘Joe, sorry I’m late,’ she said, even though she wasn’t sorry at all. She’d been late on purpose.
They exchanged idle chit-chat while a waiter hovered, took their drinks order and carefully laid Izzie’s napkin on her lap.
‘You look well,’ she said to Joe. ‘Have you been down to the Cape?’
‘Yes, I was down for a few days sailing,’ he said easily. ‘The weather was fantastic.’
Izzie thought how that would have hurt so much before, the reference to the family’s place in Cape Cod. It still twinged, except now it was different; now she wasn’t allowing herself to be hurt. He had a wife and children, and no matter what the state of his marriage, she was no longer a part of his life. He could go wherever he wanted: sail, get a tan, go to Acapulco and dance on the beach if he wanted to. It was nothing to do with her.
There, she could do it: she was over him.
‘It was a lovely weekend,’ she agreed. ‘I flew to Washington to see a friend of mine, lovely girl, works on the Hill as a journalist. We came over from Ireland at the same time.’
When Sorcha had phoned, Izzie had felt so guilty because it had been months since they’d met. The plans she’d made in Tamarin, to see Sorcha, had come to nothing because of the buzz of setting up SilverWebb. Luckily, Sorcha wasn’t the sort to sulk or hold grudges.
‘Good to hear from you finally, you mad thing, and that’s great news about the business. I had this idea there was a guy involved somewhere and that’s why I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of you for ages,’ Sorcha had said on the phone when Izzie rang to apologise and explain how busy she’d been with Silver-Webb.
‘Well,’ Izzie deliberated, ‘before I started the business, there was a guy…’
‘If you want to come down here and cry your eyes out with me, you’re welcome. You do realise that for every eighty-nine men in Washington, there are a hundred women. Those are terrible odds. I’ll be crying too.’
‘I won’t be crying,’ Izzie had said confidently. ‘I’m over him.’
Sorcha had said nothing, a very loud nothing.
‘Good for you, Izzie,’ she said finally. ‘I don’t believe you, but you sound like you mean it. Fake it till you make it, right?’
‘Washington, what a great city,’ said Joe, appreciatively. ‘I do business there sometimes.’
She imagined him having meetings in elegant Washington hotels, power-broking with other moguls, which was the rich man’s equivalent of paint-balling.
The maître d’ finally left after much table-tweaking.
‘You look beautiful,’ Joe said. His voice was different now.
Izzie glared at him.
‘So, again, tell me about this new business of yours,’ he said, as if forcing himself to lay off the compliments.
Izzie grinned, she knew not many people slapped Joe Hansen down.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘we’ve got a beautiful office space; there are three of us: C
arla, whom you’ve met’ – she was sure he would never forget Carla and the day she’d snapped at him for breaking Izzie’s heart. ‘There’s Lola Monterey, whom you probably don’t know. She was a co-worker at Perfect-NY. And then there’s me. We had our first castings, which were brilliant, and we’re pitching for lots of work. New York Fashion Week gets underway on Friday and we’re involved in two shows, which is quite amazing for a plus-size agency. But the tide’s turning in terms of model sizes. It’s exciting times for us. Also, I was working on this big contract with the SupaGirl! cosmetics people before I left for Ireland, and we’ve got some meetings lined up later in the fall to talk about the possibility of casting SilverWebb models for some of their products. It would be a big step for them, but if it works, fabulous.’
‘Could it work?’ he asked.
‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘A couple of companies are using normal women to advertise their cosmetics. Mainly skin-care lines rather than the more lucrative make-up, it’s true, but all it needs is somebody to take the plunge. A lot of people don’t agree with using ultra-thin models any more, but skinny, beautiful girls have been selling products for years and most companies don’t want to upset the status quo. We’re offering something different and, while people might agree with us intellectually, the bottom line comes first.’
‘I think that’s changing to an extent,’ Joe said thoughtfully, steepling his fingers. ‘There’s a lot more ethical business going on, companies who have made enough money to be able to think ethically.’
‘Isn’t it sad, though, that the idea of using normal-sized models should be seen as some affirmative action or an ethical move?’ she said.
‘Just don’t forget about your bottom line,’ he warned. ‘If your business fails, you’re not doing anything for anybody.’ He switched subjects. ‘Have you found any fabulous new signings, the supermodels of the future?’ he asked.