Barefoot Over Stones

by Liz Lyons

  ‘Ah, politics doesn’t really interest my mam, to be honest. She lets that side of things to my dad. It’s his strong point.’ Dan got up to make coffee, struggling with the awkward turn the conversation had taken. He wished he didn’t clam up every time he had to talk about his mother or his parents’ marriage, but worse was still to come. Ciara cleared her throat.

  ‘The pressure of politics is pretty terrible on families, isn’t it, Dan? I was reading an article in the Independent last week that said there was worldwide research to prove that politicians had the unhappiest marriages of any profession and that they were ten times more likely to have affairs than, say, doctors, solicitors or teachers. All that time away from home would I guess take its toll and give them plenty of opportunity.’ She took another satisfied gulp of her red wine and looked around to see the effect that she was having.

  Richard sat staring at her. He was stunned that she would raise a topic that was so unsuitable. Too much alcohol did terrible things to people. Alison thought she might choke. What in the name of God did Ciara think she was doing? Her mother seemed embarrassed that Ciara was talking about affairs and was anxious to say something that would assuage the discomfort that she thought Dan must feel.

  ‘Well, that’s very interesting, Ciara, but I’m sure they were talking about foreign politicians and not about Irish ones. Ireland is too small for people in the public eye to get away with that sort of thing.’ Dan smiled at her to show his gratitude for her interjection, but it was premature, because Ciara had just climbed to the top of the roller coaster where, it turned out, she was totally comfortable.

  ‘Well, that is what you would think, Mrs Shepherd, but the article made specific reference to one rural Irish politician. They couldn’t give his name, obviously, as politicians are notoriously litigious. He is screwing around on his wife with a schoolgirl, by all accounts.’

  She paused to take satisfactory note of Richard Shepherd’s slack jaw, his mouth gaping in disbelief. Either he had scalded himself with the hot apple tart or the word ‘screwing’ was not common currency in the salubrious streets of Caharoe or the genteel rooms of the Shepherd household.

  ‘Picked her up in the local pub where she is a lounge girl and now he has moved her up to Dublin to one of his flats so he can carry on with her on the quiet. I was stunned, I have to say. You just wouldn’t think things like that would be happening in the places we come from, would you?’

  Alison’s father cut in before she had a chance to muddy the evening any further with her indelicate talk. ‘No, indeed you would not. You know, Ciara, some of these newspapers thrive on the salacious and when it’s not there they make it up. I’m sure you have been told by someone before now not to believe everything you read.’ Richard had adopted a teacher-like tone. He would not tolerate Ciara’s sort of talk in front of his daughter or his wife and he wouldn’t have Dan embarrassed either, because he had to admit that Dan seemed like a fine sort of a man indeed. To break up the conversation he asked a pale-faced Dan to help him bring in from his car a desk that he had picked up at an auction for Alison. She had told him that she did her work at the kitchen worktop because it was the only flat surface, other than her bed, where she could lay out her books, so he felt she needed a desk, especially for the upcoming exams. Cathy told her husband to mind his back lifting the desk and excused herself to go to the dismal bathroom on the landing, leaving Alison and Ciara to face each other in the living room.

  ‘What the hell do you think you are doing, Ciara, bringing all that shit up? I could have swung for you, honestly. You had no right embarrassing Dan like that.’

  ‘What I was doing was injecting a slight dose of reality into the Walton-family glucose that you are all peddling. How many times do I have to explain to you that Con Abernethy is a shit, an absolute bastard? You still won’t take it seriously because of Dan. Do you realize how sickening it is for me to listen to all that talk of your father’s about the wonderful public servant that he is and how lucky rural Ireland is to have people like him? And to see Dan agreeing, even though he knows he is shagging my little sister and you sitting there like you have lost your tongue? That’s if you ever had one to speak of.’

  Alison heard her mother flush the toilet and knew they had only a moment or two before she would be back in the room. She was hardly likely to linger there, as mould clung stubbornly to every surface. ‘We will talk about it again when they have gone.’

  ‘Oh, spare me that fucking fob-off. I cannot stick this hypocritical balderdash for one more minute.’ Hurtling down the stairwell, she squeezed past Alison’s father and Dan struggling with the awkward desk.

  ‘Where are you off to, young lady?’ Richard looked at his watch and was surprised that she would think of going out walking alone at such an hour.

  ‘I’m going for fresh air. It’s in short supply up there.’ She slammed the gate after her and was quickly hidden by the pavement-side hedges of the neighbouring houses. Dan looked at Richard, searching for something intelligent to say, but all words failed him.

  ‘I think that young girl has a tiny bit of a problem with the drink and with her temper. Drink makes her sour and her talk random. She drank a whole bottle of red bar the one glass that Cathy had.’

  ‘She’s worried about her exams coming up, I think,’ Dan said, ridiculously grateful that Richard had not made the connection between Ciara’s rant and his father.

  When they finally managed to negotiate the route into Alison’s room, Dan moved her books from the bed and put them in a neat pile on the new desk. ‘She will be delighted with this, Dr Shepherd.’

  ‘Call me Richard, please. The doctor title is pleasing for about a week after you qualify but you get sick of it, as you will find out for yourself.’

  ‘OK, Richard it is then.’

  In the living room Cathy Shepherd was listening to her daughter explaining that Ciara was very stressed about the exams because she had not done enough during the year and that she would never have meant to offend anyone. Her daughter’s upper lip was twitching, as it always did when she was nervous. Cathy nodded as if she bought the story, but in her mind she resolved to find out a little more about Con Abernethy. It did seem that Ciara was making very personal digs and she was, after all, from Leachlara so maybe she knew something that Alison didn’t. Cathy decided to talk to Rena Lalor. Between them, Rena and Hugh knew everyone in Munster. Con Abernethy was doubtless not beyond their radar. Meanwhile, she would comfort herself with the fact that whatever the truth was about his father, Dan Abernethy was a very attractive and personable young man who seemed to really care for Alison.

  After her parents had gone Dan helped Alison to wash up and put the stuff back in the cupboards. He washed the plates silently, scrubbing off every remnant of food with the dishcloth.

  ‘Ciara really does know how to put the cat among the pigeons, but I think the dinner went off really well, don’t you?’ Alison offered as cheerfully as she could. Dan smiled at her gratefully but he was utterly crestfallen. He had put thoughts of his father and Leda Clancy as far out of his head as possible, because it was such a disgusting prospect, but Ciara was so adamant that they were having sex that it was no longer feasible to deny it to himself. His father had lied to him and treated him like a fool and Dan felt it like a kick in the stomach.

  ‘I really didn’t think it was true, Ali. I believed him when he said it was all made up. He must think I am a right dunce. As for this stuff about moving her up to Dublin, what’s that all about? Leda is still in school in Leachlara. She must have just thrown that in for effect.’

  Alison ventured information that she had deliberately withheld until now. ‘Well actually, I don’t think she is making it up. Ciara told me a few weeks ago that Leda had packed in school in Leachlara and taken a job up here in a solicitor’s firm, a job arranged by your dad. I didn’t say anything because you get so upset every time her name is mentioned. I am sorry, Dan. I should have said something.’

 
He pulled her to him, needing her touch, needing to feel her in his arms. ‘Well, it looks like Mam was right about him all along. I really thought I could trust him. Why hasn’t Ciara gone for me about the whole thing?’

  ‘She likes you, Dan, realizes that you can’t control what he does, any more than she can get Leda to do a single thing she says. She went to her flat and tried to tell her to go home and that she was making a fool of herself but Leda wouldn’t even let her in. She told her she was perfectly happy and that Ciara would not understand.’

  ‘Let me guess. She lives in one of my dad’s houses on Leeson Street?’

  Alison nodded.

  ‘Oh, excellent. I have a teenage neighbour that my father is sleeping with. Yes, my life is practically complete. All I need now is for my mam to shack up with one of the lads from school.’ He bowed his head.

  Alison hated to see him so distressed. She squeezed his hand. ‘Will you stay with me tonight, Dan, please?’

  ‘You mean stay here in the flat?’

  ‘Will you stay in my bed with me?’

  Dan let her lead him to her cramped bedroom. They undressed in between feverish kissing and fondling. Dan flung his shirt and trousers on top of the desk, not stopping to think what Richard Shepherd would do to him if he caught him now. They climbed underneath the covers shivering and grasping each other for warmth and closeness. ‘Are you sure?’ Dan asked as he ran his hands along her slender limbs and cupped the rounded softness of her breasts and bottom. She kissed him firmly on the lips before she answered.

  ‘I am certain. I want this. I want you.’

  As he rolled around the heat of her body and moved within, exploring her soft wetness, he felt consumed by utter desire and happiness. He had never wanted anyone so badly, never wanted anyone to need him more.

  Afterwards they fell into a deep contented sleep, clinging together in the comically narrow bed. Not even the after-midnight thuds of Jean McDermott as she ransacked her house looking for an emergency bottle of gin or Ciara as she slammed the front door in the early hours could wake them from where they were.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  DUBLIN, LEACHLARA AND AUGHASALLAGH 1994

  Con refused to be carried away by rumours or tip-offs. He knew his colleagues lied all the time, layering untruths around a fragment of news in order to advance their own cause. However, the inkling of a cabinet reshuffle had come from so many sources that he allowed himself to believe in it a little. He would usually have told Columbo to keep his ambitions reined in but this time he couldn’t help thinking that he might well be in the running for a top job. Even a junior ministry would be a start, although being a junior anything when he was sixty years of age seemed a touch ridiculous. Still, he would not of course knock it back if the offer came. Better to make his mark while he still had a chance, even if Columbo had sworn not to down tools until he had placed his man in the top slot. The Taoiseach was not a man Con could claim to know well: he had of course, as a long-serving deputy, been in his company countless times, but there was no way he was within a sniff of the inner circle. A certain crew had that sewn up. Even at parliamentary party meetings it was a small number of senior party figures that controlled the agenda, and backbenchers were expected to toe the appropriate line. You obeyed the whip if you knew what was good for you. Never was a phrase so apt in politics, and it seemed to Con that democracy was an ideal only barely tolerated within the parliamentary party. Mavericks didn’t get very far in the long run. Con Abernethy had shown himself willing to champion the party on local radio and in the newspapers and had proven to be a top-class vote-getter. He had topped the poll for the first time in the last election and he knew it was because he had never been hungrier for the contest, chasing every vote down to the last minute of the eve of polling day. He had to admit that his constituency team had worked for him harder than ever before and he liked to think that his spectacular personal-vote tally had elevated him somewhat in the eyes of the top people.

  Mary’s illness had played a part too, though he knew that fact probably galled her more than the discovery of the cancer itself. He had gone on Tipptalk FM to champion the cause of breast-cancer treatment and the need for Breast Check to roll out to the regions, tearfully, if not wholly sincerely, detailing how the tragedy of his wife’s illness had rocked his family to its foundations. In reality breast cancer was little more than a footnote in the disaster of their marriage. Mary had been incandescent with rage, but the short radio piece had brought him requests for further interviews from two national newspapers and this had heightened his profile more than any of his hitherto, admittedly local, political achievements. Someone from Marian Finucane’s morning radio programme had been on to his office, but it hadn’t come to anything and Con didn’t want to be seen pursuing it. He could not appear to be crassly capitalizing on his wife’s illness even if that was his true intent. He had been coping with Mary’s rage for most of his life and now he shouldered the burden of its redoubling without noticing the extra weight. After a nurse in the Mater had shown the heart-rending interview in the Independent to her, Mary had rung to tell him, again, in no uncertain terms, what she thought of him. He held the receiver away from his ear while she told him he was a worthless piece of shit and waited for her anger to deplete its oxygen supply.

  ‘I spoke to your consultant. He says you are responding very well to your chemo. Certainly hasn’t exhausted you any, that’s for sure.’

  ‘You have no business talking to my consultant. He is my doctor and—’

  Con cut her off because this was one line of attack he would not let her get away with. ‘You are in Dublin, Mary, because everyone told me that the best oncology services are there. For the considerable amount of money I am paying out I will ring your consultant to check the answer to nine across in the Irish Times crossword if I want to.’

  ‘You are despicable,’ was all she could manage, rendered inarticulate by her own fury.

  The words rang in his ears. If he had any residual feelings to be hurt by his wife the words would have been like sandpaper rubbed on open wounds but Con had long since gated that avenue of pain. Nobody – except Dan – knew him better and nobody hated him more, but as long as he had his son he knew he could face anything. So every evening he pulled his car into an empty bay in the visitors’ car park. He took a ticket from the attendant in the shelter cabin and listened as the closing time of the car park was recited again. He bought flowers when he judged that the last lot had been disposed of and he always brought magazines and chocolate. He sat beside Mary’s bed every night alongside Dan, and sometimes Alison, who had become a permanent fixture in his son’s life, saying what spouses say and doing what they do when they know their children are watching. Mary concealed her distaste for him as best she could, remaining mostly impassive when he spoke, and although his presence irritated her he knew that she would be infinitely more irritated if he were true to them both and never came at all.

  After a double mastectomy and more than four months’ worth of chemotherapy Mary was declared to be in remission. She resumed her life in the shadow of the three-monthly appointments that punctuate the cancer patient’s calendar. Each day survived was an achievement in itself but also brought the next hospital appointment and its attendant dangers even closer. If anything, Con would think to himself afterwards, cancer had mellowed his wife, blunting the rough corners of her anger. The truth was that Mary Abernethy was thinking of other things: an unsatisfactory life half lived and the stack of its remaining days possibly numbered and steadily petering out.

  She took a call from the Taoiseach’s wife in the hall of their house in Leachlara and Con listened, panicked at first and then stunned at how easily she detailed how supportive he had been at her time of greatest need, how he had done everything to make her time in hospital bearable, how she would certainly be lost without him. Her facility for deceit impressed him and when she put down the phone crisply he smiled in gratitude for a performance well deliv
ered. In that moment he recognized that a mutual pragmatism had bound them together in a way that love and respect had never done. Con’s future success would keep him out of her house and out of her life and this marriage that they had long ago decided to cling to, not for better but definitely for worse, would remain a testament to endurance and proof that love need not mean a thing.

  Dan had taken his mother’s illness badly. Of course he didn’t want his mother to be sick but neither did he want to partake in the charade of family unity that had ensued since she had been diagnosed. He was ashamed when he admitted to Alison that the nightly visiting sessions at the hospital drained him so much that he often pretended that his work had delayed him and managed only ten minutes at the end of visiting time to sit and witness his parents enact their elaborate masquerade. He could tell Alison anything and consequently told her everything, depending on her warmth and normality to curb how awkward his own flesh and blood made him feel.

  ‘If anything, Ali, you would think that my mam’s cancer would bring either or both of them to their senses, but the tension in the room is unbearable. I love it when you come because they pull out all the stops when you are there.’

  Alison hugged him tightly to her. She had spent almost four years with Dan Abernethy and every day made her look forward to another. Two peas in a pod, Rose had said to her the day she shut up the Daisy May for the last time, its lease too expensive for her modest operation. ‘Don’t ever forget that you and Dan are meant to be together. Whatever comes your way, stick it out. Romance isn’t worth a flake unless it steels you for the tough times.’ Then, weary of doling out sound advice, she had added, ‘By the way, if I find out that you got married and you didn’t invite me I will come from whatever point on the planet I am on and will haunt you for the rest of your days.’ Alison guaranteed Rose an invitation to the big day when and if it happened and she took heed of her friend’s advice. In years of working shifts at the Daisy May she had never tired of listening to Rose’s take on life. By any measure she had had a fairly dismal run in life but here she was in her late fifties thinking of heading off on a trip to some far-flung corner of the world to see if she could wring something worthwhile from the second half. Beneath her sarcasm, and there was much of it to wade through, she retained her sense of humour and she was convinced that Dan and Alison were meant for each other. It was a sentiment that Alison never tired of agreeing with, daring to hope it was true. She loved having Dan in her life and could not imagine a single thing that their love could not overcome. They fought, of course, but their arguments flared and died out almost in the same breath. They squabbled about who would pay for things, and they argued about Ciara who had remained Alison’s flatmate throughout their time at college, but neither was afraid to tell the other what they thought.