by Cathy Kelly
‘I shouldn’t have come here,’ Caroline said, getting to her feet. ‘But I’m glad I did. You’re not a bitch, I see that. But for their family’s sake, leave him alone.’
‘I have,’ said Izzie angrily. She thought she’d explained all that.
‘Seriously, they love those boys. They love each other, they really do.’
Izzie nodded. She wanted Caroline to go. She felt so tired. Being with Joe was like some huge quest, full of pain and heartache, and she wasn’t able for it any more.
‘No, they really do,’ Caroline insisted. ‘Why, just last month Elizabeth had a pregnancy scare. She thought she might be pregnant with their fourth child. “At my age!” she said to me. She’s forty-two, by the way. Lots of women have babies at her age, but it happens she’s not pregnant after all. Still, it made them think, you know, about another child. Could that happen if they didn’t love each other?’
Izzie didn’t answer the question: she felt too much pain inside her. She’d never asked Joe whether he still slept with his wife or not. Such a thing was beneath both of them. In the beginning, she’d assumed not, since he and Elizabeth lived separate lives. Then, as time went on, she’d hoped that it wasn’t the case. She’d thought about it, how two people living in the same house could come together over wine and shared experiences.
But that wasn’t what hurt most. The baby did that.
Still, it made them think, you know, about another child, Caroline had said.
And another child would be an option. They had three beloved sons. They shared so much: another child wouldn’t be the disaster it would be if Izzie was its mother.
In this situation, another child could be the glue that put the Hansens’ marriage back together.
‘Caroline, I have to go now,’ Izzie said formally.
‘Of course.’ Caroline nodded.
They stood awkwardly for a moment. It wasn’t the time or the place for handshakes.
‘You’re a good sister,’ Izzie blurted out suddenly. ‘Goodbye.’
Whirling around, she walked in the direction of the big fashion tent, her head flooded with images of Joe and Elizabeth having a baby. She kept seeing a baby in her mind, except it wasn’t Elizabeth’s, it was hers, Izzie’s.
‘Hiya,’ yelled a voice.
She looked around. It was someone from another agency who’d clearly also sneaked down to watch the shows.
‘Yeah, hi,’ she said, trying to look as if she was madly busy, not wanting to talk to anybody. There was no need for her to go back into the tent for the next show, but she just needed to be alone with her thoughts, and this was the only safe place right now.
In the tent, chaos still reigned, but somehow Izzie tuned out all the noise.
A baby. She’d never have a baby, not with him, not with anyone.
Izzie slipped out through an emergency exit and found a quiet corner behind the tent, where she sat down and began to write an email on her BlackBerry. It took her an hour to compose the email, a ridiculous amount of time given how short it was.
She’d put private on the subject line because even though Joe had told her the address he’d given her was his private email address, she’d never sent anything to it before and she wasn’t sure if his secretary went through all his emails, private or not.
Hello Joe,
I got a phone call from a Caroline Montgomery. I didn’t know who she was until she met me down in the middle of Fashion Week. I was here for my agency and then along came your sister-in-law to tell me that you and Elizabeth have a strong marriage, and that just a month ago, Elizabeth thought she was expecting another baby.
I’m taking the coward’s way out because I can’t talk to you again. I’m sorry.
Go back to them all. Leave me alone. It would never have worked. It’s better this way.
I
She didn’t want to sign herself Izzie. That was too personal. She reread it all, adding a comma here, tweaking there – oh fuck it, she said out loud. Why was she bothering with grammar? All she needed to convey was a simple message and, when he read this, he’d get it. She pressed ‘Send’. It was gone, like Joe, out of her life.
She left Bryant Street and walked aimlessly along the sidewalk, stopping in a coffee shop for a latte that she barely tasted. It was nearly six when she made it back to the office. Their assistant, Sasha, was out on the last coffee run of the day – the espresso machine was still broken. Lola was on the phone and so was Carla.
Carla held up a hand in greeting but then registered the look on Izzie’s face. As much as she’d tried to disguise it, Izzie could tell that her pain was evident.
‘What’s up?’ mouthed Carla across the room at her.
Izzie shook her head, afraid to speak in case she cried. She would not cry: she had wasted enough tears on Joe. She would never cry over him again. If she had to go down to the voodoo end of town and get some Haitian queen to come up with a spell involving chicken innards and rabbit’s feet to get him out of her mind, she would. She was never going to talk to or see him again.
‘Hey, what’s happening?’ said Carla, hanging up.
‘I…’ Izzie knew she was going to sob now. She turned and rushed towards the women’s room with Carla hot on her heels.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘What do you think?’ said Izzie brokenly. ‘Joe Hansen, that’s what’s wrong.’
‘What now?’ said Carla.
‘His sister-in-law was the woman trying to phone me – Caroline-Bloody-Montgomery. She turned up at the Bryant Park Grill’.
She had to stop and find a tissue to blow her nose.
‘And…?’ asked Carla ominously.
‘She told me Joe and her sister had a brilliant marriage and that –’ Izzie could barely bring herself to say it’ – that Elizabeth thought she was pregnant a month ago.’
‘Oh.’ Carla hitched herself up so she could sit on the vanity unit and lean her back against the mirror. ‘Honey, I knew that guy was up to no good the first moment I heard about him.’
‘You’re wrong,’ Izzie said, startling her friend. ‘He’s a good guy; too good. I wasn’t up against his wife, I can see that now. I was up against his family, his kids. And that’s not what I want or wanted: to compete with them for his love. He wouldn’t be the man I loved if he didn’t adore them. And he does.’
She blew her nose again.
‘There’s no future for us and it’s not because he slept with his wife. He’s not ready to leave his family, no matter what he thinks. If he did, it would hang over us for the rest of our lives.’
‘The spectre of the first family?’ Carla said.
‘Yeah, the three people he loves most in the whole world thinking he’d left them. He couldn’t take that, and neither could I.’
‘So it’s over? You told him?’
‘Email.’
Carla winced. ‘Probably the best way. You’d bleed to death if you had to see him.’
Izzie managed a smile.
‘Age does matter, doesn’t it?’ Izzie said to Carla that evening as they shared a cab home. Somehow, Izzie had sleepwalked through the rest of the day, barely functioning and refusing to answer her phone in case Joe rang.
‘No, of course it doesn’t,’ Carla said, the way she always did. But Izzie interrupted her.
‘You’re wrong, it does. It matters for women, it matters because you can’t have children.’
‘What about Madonna?’ said Carla. ‘What age was she when she had her last baby? There’s loads of other movie stars who’ve had kids late.’
‘Oh yeah,’ said Izzie, ‘and for every movie star who manages to have a baby, there’s four hundred other women who didn’t. You only hear about the successes, Carla, not the failures. Most of those people have guys in their lives: husbands, lovers, whatever. What do I have? Nothing. At least if you go down that whole trying-to-have-a-baby-chemically route, you should have somebody with you, somebody to moan about it and cry about it with. I wouldn’t
have that. I’d have nothing.’
‘Don’t call your friends nothing,’ said Carla, pretending to be insulted to jerk Izzie out of her misery.
‘I don’t mean it like that,’ Izzie said quickly. ‘But if you’re going to go on the baby quest, you do need to have somebody doing it with you. At least somebody to provide the sperm, otherwise what do you do, get donor sperm?’
‘Plenty of people do that too,’ Carla said.
‘Yeah, and that’s a valid way of doing things. I’m not disrespecting it. But it’s not an easy option, either. What do you tell the child? By the way, your daddy is Test Tube 453? I’m sorry, but it does make it more difficult. If that’s the only option, fine, that’s the only option, but wouldn’t it be easier to have a guy you made love with and got pregnant? Wouldn’t that be nicer than all these moral dilemmas of what you tell the children in the future? “The test tube and I really loved each other, kids.”’
‘You sound so defeatist,’ Carla said. ‘I never thought you were going to turn into one of those crazy baby ladies, who had nothing in her life except misery and wishing she’d had a child. You can still do it, if you want to.’
‘You don’t feel that way about kids, do you?’ Izzie asked.
Carla shook her head. ‘No, and I’m really grateful, because I’ve seen it eat people up. I never thought you had that hunger, Izzie.’
‘I never did,’ Izzie said sorrowfully. ‘I always thought there was time for everything. Time for me to fall in love, time maybe for the baby to happen, I thought I was young and, look, now I’m not.’
‘Thirty-nine isn’t old.’
‘Forty in two months,’ Izzie corrected her. ‘It’s the whole Joe thing. I’m in mourning, I guess. Him and me, and me reaching forty and still not having had a child – all that is the end of something, and when you reach the end of something, you have to mourn. It’s the end of my romance and baby chances, I know it is. That’s hard to take.’
The cab pulled up outside Carla’s building.
‘Forget about him,’ she urged. ‘You’re better than him, you’ve so much going on. Look, we’ve got the company, we’ve so many plans, it’s an exciting time in our lives.’
Izzie nodded. Carla was right, everything she said was the truth. SilverWebb was going from strength to strength. On a professional level, everything was right in Izzie Silver’s world. But on a personal level, the ground had just fallen away from her feet.
All the certainties in life – her grandmother being there and the notion that one day she’d find love and perhaps a family – had vanished.
‘Yeah, you’re right,’ she said, trying to sound cheerful for Carla’s benefit. ‘Everything is going to be fine,’ she said. ‘Fake it till you make it.’
‘Way to go,’ said Carla. ‘Fake it till you make it: words to live by.’
Izzie didn’t notice Joe sitting on the step outside her building until the cab had driven away.
Oh God, he was here. She couldn’t cope with this, not with seeing him. She’d cry and then she’d never stop…
‘Izzie?’
He sounded so forlorn, not Mogul Man any more.
‘I can’t talk to you, Joe,’ she said. ‘Please leave me alone.’
‘I don’t want to leave you alone,’ he insisted. ‘I’m sorry, sorry about Caroline and the baby and what I said to you –’
Izzie stopped him. She knew what she had to do and nothing he could say would change her mind. It was over. All she had to do now was let him go, make him go.
‘Joe,’ she said, fighting back the tears, ‘I’m telling you to go, right? We could never make each other happy. You’d be swallowed up with guilt about your kids, and I’d be swallowed up with resentment about my lack of kids. Don’t you see? It could never work. We’d hurt each other and them too. You’d never forgive me for that. So leave me alone. Go back to them. It’s what you want, really.’
‘It’s not,’ he said frantically.
‘It is,’ she said, feeling pity for him because he was still fighting it. Not like her: she’d stopped fighting. He wanted his family more than he wanted her. His mistake had been thinking he could have both. ‘I’m letting you go, Joe, for both our sakes. Won’t you just go?’ she pleaded.
He faltered, and at that moment, Izzie knew she’d both lost and won.
‘But –’
‘No buts,’ she said.
He stood aside as she walked up the steps to her building. With shaking fingers, she found her keys and stuck them in the lock.
‘Goodbye, Joe,’ she said, and pushed the door open without turning back.
Inside, she waited for the tears to come but they didn’t. Maybe later. She had all the time in the world, after all. All the time in the world to cry on her own.
TWENTY-THREE
Yvonne chatted nineteen to the dozen on the trip home, as if, Anneliese thought, constant conversation would block out them having to discuss the elephant in the room, that Anneliese had tried to commit suicide. Anneliese felt that it must be the same as when somebody had cancer; everyone tried so desperately hard not to talk about ‘it’, when the person with the disease didn’t mind talking about it; they accepted that it was a huge part of their life and there was no getting away from it. They didn’t have the choice of ignoring it.
There had been huge excitement in the Lifeboat Shop, Yvonne said, when someone had handed in a genuine Hermès Kelly handbag.
‘I wouldn’t recognise a Hermès handbag if it bit me on the bottom,’ Yvonne went on, ‘but this was it, the real deal. We put it in the window.’
Anneliese had a hazy memory of hearing that such handbags cost thousands of euros.
‘What are you selling it for?’ she asked.
‘Four hundred euros,’ Yvonne revealed. ‘I don’t think we’ve ever sold anything for four hundred before, well apart from that lawnmower.’
Another topic that Yvonne considered suitable for discussion was the forthcoming autumn market in Harbour Square. It was going to be running for the next two Saturdays. Yvonne’s daughter had been making crystal earrings for weeks now and was all set with her stall. Yvonne was being supportive, although really she felt that Catriona would have been better studying something practical in college instead of spending hours with teeny-weeny beads and jeweller’s wire.
‘What can you do?’ she said. ‘I’m limited to saying, ‘That’s great, Catriona. Fair play to you, love.’ My mother would’ve hit me over the head and told me to go out and get a proper job if she saw me wasting my education like that – Catriona got five As in her Leaving Certificate! – but being a parent is so different these days.’
The final subject was that dear, sweet Jodi was pregnant.
‘How wonderful,’ said Anneliese with pleasure. Jodi had come to see her once, bearing magazines and chocolate, and was one of the few people who hadn’t seemed embarrassed by the locked ward.
Other, older friends had sent cards and notes but seemed to have been scared to come in, as if mental illness was both contagious and so incomprehensible they were afraid to dip their toe in the water.
‘She’s absolutely delighted,’ Yvonne said. ‘Her mum, Karen, is going to stay in Ireland until after the baby’s born. She teaches yoga – imagine that! I know Jodi wanted to tell you the good news when she went to visit you, but I told her she would want to be careful…’ Yvonne’s voice trailed off. ‘We didn’t want to upset you or anything.’
Anneliese was far too fond of dear Yvonne to let her go on torturing herself.
‘Listen, Yvonne,’ she said, ‘life goes on, and I’m happy that it does. All I can say is, I was having a very bad time and I did something I’m sorry for. Telling me about the real world isn’t going to stop me doing it again, if I wanted to – which I don’t,’ she added hurriedly. ‘If someone wants to kill themselves, they will, they’ll find a way. I think maybe what I did was a cry for help and it’s shown me that I do want to be around. So tell me everything, Yvonne, everythi
ng that’s gone on in the town. Don’t be keeping little bits of news from me in case you upset me, because they won’t, really.’
‘Oh, Anneliese,’ wailed Yvonne and swerved wildly on the road. ‘Sorry, sorry,’ she said, hauling the car back on track.
‘Jesus, when I talked about killing myself, I didn’t mean now, in your car,’ Anneliese joked, and suddenly they were both laughing.
‘I never thought we’d be breaking our hearts laughing over this,’ Yvonne said. ‘I was dreading this you know, I thought I’d be tiptoeing around you, not knowing what to say. I said to Frank, “It’s going to be different, because ideally the person who’d be picking you up would be Edward,” but…’ she paused again, as if she’d realised she’d made another big booboo.
‘Edward did offer to pick me up, actually,’ Anneliese said, ‘which was very sweet of him, under the circumstances.’
‘I’m sure that cow, Nell, would be foaming at the mouth if he came to pick you up. Not that she has a leg to stand on, I mean, considering what’s happened…’ Yvonne went on.
‘Really, it’s OK,’ Anneliese said. ‘There’s nothing like a near-death experience for getting you to make your peace with the world, Yvonne, and I have. I told Edward it was really sweet of him but that we had to move on and I didn’t want to fall into the trap of relying on him, as if everything was the same as it was before, because it isn’t. It’s so kind of you to come and get me. I really appreciate it.’
Yvonne’s kindness was evident in the house too. She’d been in with Jodi, given the place a thorough cleaning, and there were other signs of kindness around the cottage: fresh flowers on two of the tables, a bottle of wine on the counter in the kitchen.
‘I didn’t know,’ said Yvonne carefully, ‘whether any drink would be suitable or not. I thought, God, you might be on medicine and wine would send you completely over the edge. But then Frank said I was overthinking and that a little drop wouldn’t kill you.’