‘Well now, you take care. I’m off to my bed. Don’t let Deidra sing when she gets home, and for God’s sake don’t let her come up the road swinging around the lampposts with her imaginary Fred Astaire. Ginger Rogers she is not.’
*
Mary Kate slipped out of the house, instructions still ringing in her ears.
‘And don’t forget to lock the back door either.’
The night air was refreshingly cool and she tilted her face to catch the gentle breeze.
She had to pass the Marcus house on the opposite side of the road to reach the bus stop. As she approached their gate, her heart began to pound at the thought of Dr Marcus. The words he’d spoken, the look in his eyes. The instant bond she had felt between them, as though they were equals. It was as if they’d been fated to meet, meant to be; she’d been sent there, propelled to Liverpool, for a reason and maybe he was it. Maybe she was meant to be there in his hour of need, to help him.
She could see the master bedroom light was on, so they were obviously home. She crossed the wide road, her footsteps light, and leant against one of the tall laurel bushes that marked the perimeter of the Marcus property. As she gazed down the drive towards the house, about to move away and continue towards the bus stop, she noticed the red glow of a cigarette end and she realised it was Dr Marcus sitting on the bonnet of his car, smoking.
He pushed himself up off the car and whispered, ‘Is that you?’
Mary Kate stepped out of the shadows and stood at the entrance to the drive. ‘If you meant me, then yes.’ She smiled, filled with a confidence she had been unaware she possessed.
He did not smile back. His face was set and serious-looking.
‘How was your evening?’ she asked.
He put his cigarette in his mouth and took a long pull before turning his head sideways and exhaling in the direction of the breeze. ‘I’ve had better.’ He threw his cigarette to the ground and stubbed it out with the toe of his shoe.
There was a frisson between them and she knew she wasn’t imagining it. They were standing only a few feet apart and her eyes fixed on his white shirt, open at the neck, dark hair curling over the edges. In the dim, silvery moonlight she could see the pulse throbbing in the side of his neck as he glanced up towards the bedroom window. He turned back to her, his hands thrust deep into his pockets.
‘Did you…? Did you…?’ She couldn’t form the words, couldn’t frame the question, but she wanted to know. She realised that this was the question that had been burning into her brain all evening. Had he…? Would he…? When would he let his wife know what he had read?
He finished the question for her. ‘Did I tell my partner at the practice what a cheating cad he is? No, I didn’t. Did I tell my wife that if she doesn’t behave like a good mother to our children, I will leave her? No. Did I even tell her that there is a young woman I have been inexplicably drawn to since the second I looked into her eyes and that ever since that moment I haven’t been able to get either her or those eyes out of my mind? No, Mary Kate, I did not, because that makes me as guilty as my wife. Or do you believe there is a difference between thought and deed? Because, truly, I don’t. What my wife has done in deed has been no worse than what I have done in thought.’
Mary Kate gasped as she struggled to comprehend who and what he was talking about. Surely he couldn’t mean her? Not Mary Kate. Her mouth dropped open and her hand flew to her throat.
‘You do know who and what I am talking about, don’t you?’
Mary Kate shook her head, dumbfounded. But, like waves encroaching the shore, the truth gradually washed over her.
He continued regardless. ‘The moment I saw you in my house, before you started to work for us, I thought it must be fate. What else could it be? You arrive in Liverpool and within seconds, just seconds, I happen to be driving past and I put you back together, and then the next evening you are here, in my home, and I am more drawn to you than I have been to anyone in my life. I want to see you, know you. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you all evening.’
He tapped his finger on the side of his head. ‘You may have left my sight, but you have taken root in here. I’m talking about you, Mary Kate. It’s you. I should be enraged, as the wronged husband, and yet the weight of my guilt, my feelings for you, the thoughts in my head, they are stronger than the anger I feel towards my wife.’
Mary Kate swallowed hard and thought she must be dreaming. This could not be happening. She tried again to speak, but there was no need for words as in a stride he was in front of her and holding both of her elbows. For this she was grateful because if he hadn’t done that there was a strong possibility she’d have fallen over. She looked up, met his gaze and smiled. And then she began to giggle, and she couldn’t stop.
‘Are you laughing at me?’ he asked, taking a step back. ‘Have I got this all wrong? Is it not the same for you?’ He sounded incredulous.
Mary Kate stopped laughing. ‘No, no. I was laughing because I’m happy, because I cannot believe how this is all happening. It’s like I’m at a film or something, watching someone else’s story. I can hardly keep up with my own life, it’s all moving so fast. Last week, I had never heard of you or you of me, and I’d never set foot in Liverpool even, and now… now this?’
She lifted her arms in a gesture of bemusement and he caught her hands and pulled her into him. His hands cradled her face and he looked deep into her eyes. ‘This is real,’ he whispered, his voice thick with emotion. ‘This is what I’ve been missing for all of my life… You.’
She placed the tips of her fingers onto his lips and traced them, as though the words were written in an emotional braille and she had to feel them to understand them. Her brow furrowed. ‘What do we do?’ she asked and then answered her own question. ‘There isn’t anything we can do, is there?’ Her eyes scanned his face, her knees weak.
‘Yes, there is.’ His hungry mouth found hers and he pulled her back into the shadow of the hedge.
She responded, equally desperate to feel his body close to hers, to taste his lips. She gasped as his hands slipped down her back and their bodies fused; he pulled her deep into him, his urgency and passion burning into her. She was drowning in the moment, her body reacting without reason or control. His hands slid through her hair and around her waist and as he moved from her lips to her neck, she tilted her head and groaned, surprising herself at the sound that had escaped from her.
Abruptly, he pushed her away. ‘No, no, I must stop,’ he said as he took both of her hands into his and pressed them together. ‘This isn’t right, I can’t do this to you. We have to stop.’
Mary Kate dragged herself back into the present and was about to protest, but she never got that far. She wished the earth would open up and swallow her as the voice of Lavinia Marcus spoke out.
‘Well, well, well. Back so soon, Mary Kate.’
23
Cat was hanging Michael’s clothes out on the line when Linda popped her head over the wall.
‘How is Michael now?’
Cat pegged his trousers by the bottoms. ‘He’s in a right state – he’s never had his stomach pumped before, or been in a hospital or an ambulance. I think it’s his pride that’s hurt the most though, that the kids could swim and he couldn’t.’
‘No shame in that,’ said Linda. ‘I can’t and neither can you. Our kids are lucky, being taken to the new baths by the school every week.’
‘But these clothes, honest to God, I can’t get the smell of the lake water out of them.’
‘Send your kids round to me,’ said Linda. ‘They can sleep at ours. He’ll need to go in the kids’ bed – he’s so tall. And mind, I said the kids’ bed, not yours.’
Cat grinned. ‘Go and wash your mouth out, Lin. The poor man has had a nasty shock. He’s never worn a hospital gown before either and that’s all he has until this lot are dry. They sent him back in the ambulance wearing that and an army blanket.’
Linda’s head disappeared be
hind the wall only to reappear with her own basket of wet clothes to hang up. ‘Well, one thing’s for sure, Cat, no one’s going to trust us to take the kids to the park ever again. And by the morning, if Michael spends the night at your house, you’ll be the talk of the streets, and every woman around here will be as jealous as hell.’
Cat winked and grinned, enjoying the fact that a good-looking if slightly poorly man was spending the night in her house.
‘Especially when you’re walking like a cowboy in the morning, eh?’
Both women laughed.
Linda took a cigarette from behind her ear and then the matches from her apron pocket to light it. She’d already put her curlers back in and as she bent to take the flame, Cat saw the redness on her scalp where the hair was stretched.
As she puffed out, Linda said, ‘Tell you what, I’m thinking of writing to Bee to ask her who she’s sending over next and if I can have him. For God’s sake, Captain Bob was a bit of a dish, in a homely way. She was bloody lucky. And you have the hunk lying on your sofa. Mary Kate is lovely too. I’ll tell her, I don’t mind if the fella she sends for me has a bit of a belly, as long as he’s discreet.’ Linda cackled as she picked up her washing basket.
When she’d finished, she said, ‘Be careful, Cat. Don’t go doing anything I wouldn’t. The last thing you need is another mouth to feed, or a broken heart either, for that matter.’
‘Oh, don’t you worry about me.’ Cat clipped the peg bag onto her apron waist tie. ‘I’m fine. There’s nothing life can throw at me that’s worse than what I’ve already been through.’
Michael opened his eyes as Cat entered the room and untied her apron.
‘How are you feeling now, love?’ she asked as she threw it over the back of the kitchen chair.
The boys had fallen in, surfaced and swum to the island. Michael had failed to surface and it was only the quick action of the boys and the park keeper that had saved his life. He’d swallowed a great deal of water and a couple of fish by the feel of his stomach, which the doctor at the hospital told him had to be pumped out.
‘It’s my pride that’s taken a beating,’ he said. ‘Those kids were smashing little swimmers, and me, I sank like a stone. Did me wallet survive the dunking?’
‘It did.’ Cat had laid out the wallet and its contents on the mantelpiece to dry. She was surprised at the number of twenty-pound notes. ‘I thought everyone in Ireland was supposed to be poor,’ she said.
Michael didn’t answer. ‘Take one of those notes and go and fetch us a bottle of porter and some food,’ he said. ‘Now they’ve pumped my stomach out, I could eat a horse.’
‘Pie and chips?’ asked Cat, smiling.
‘Aye, and for all the kids too.’
‘Well, this is becoming a habit,’ said Cat. ‘I’m going to send you back to Ireland with my address to hand out. If everyone who comes here gets hurt, needs help and buys chips for tea, I want them all to stop here first.’
Michael reached out and grabbed Cat’s hand. ‘I know now what good company our Mary Kate was in and I’m grateful for it. I want you to know that.’
‘Oh, get away. You’re Bee’s family – she was my mate for years and that’s what mates do.’
Half an hour later, Michael heard whoops of delight coming through the walls from next door. He assumed that meant Cat had just walked into Linda’s with a cardboard box full of chips and pies. A moment later, she was back in her own house with him.
‘I was cold to the bone, so I hope you don’t mind me lighting the fire,’ he said.
‘Don’t be daft.’ Cat plated up the pies and chips and poured two glasses of porter. ‘A hot meal, a drink and a fire, that’s what you need to put you right. Bottoms up.’ She clinked her glass against his and flopped down next to him on the springy and very lumpy sofa.
As she put the glass to her lips, their eyes met and she knew absolutely what the night would hold. For the first time since Ben died, she was ready.
They were halfway down the bottle, empty plates discarded on the hearth, and she couldn’t even remember what it was they were talking about when he set his glass down on the floor, leant back up, removed her glass from her fingers, placed it on the floor, took her face in both his hands and kissed her.
In the seconds it took him to place her glass down, her heart beat wildly, her breath shortened and the air in the room stood still. She kissed him back as passionately as he kissed her, and when he stood and reached down his hands, she took them and willingly allowed him to lead her.
They got as far as the stone floor by the kitchen door, and there, in the grip of a passion she’d never known – he in just the gown he’d been lent by the hospital, and she undressing in a flash – they made love.
‘Oh God,’ gasped Cat, ‘that wasn’t supposed to happen.’
‘Wasn’t it?’ Michael grinned, and to her surprise, Cat found herself laughing long and hard, in a way she couldn’t remember doing for many years.
‘Come here,’ he said as he helped her up off the floor, and immediately began kissing her neck. ‘Let’s try somewhere comfortable next time.’
Cat hesitated for a moment before she led him up the stairs. She really wasn’t sure that her legs would hold her up all the way.
She lost count of how many times they made love during the night. She was intoxicated, high on her own sensuality; for the first time in three years, she felt like a woman, like Cat the person and not Cat the widow, the mother, the one who had to hold everything together. This special night was just for her.
It was as dawn broke and Michael snored gently, his naked limbs splayed out half on and half off her, that the sadness crept in. The first weak grey shafts of light fell onto the bed through the gap in the curtains and she turned her head to watch his sleeping face. The pain in her heart felt like a tightening band.
Ben filled her thoughts. He’d not been in her mind all that afternoon or through the night – his longest absence since the day of his death – but he’d slipped back in now, and there he was. The nights they’d shared in that bed, making babies, delivering babies, kissing and loving their babies, talking, worrying, planning into the small hours, hoping, dreaming of a better life. And here she was with no Ben, no better life, struggling hand to mouth, day to day, and now with another woman’s husband in her bed.
She was swamped by a self-pity she couldn’t dismiss. Life was so hard, so unbearably hard for every woman in Waterloo Street, but for her, the only woman on her own, it was doubly so. She had no one to send out to fetch in the coal, no one to carry back the bags of shopping, no one to help when a soot-fall came down the chimney, no one to bring home a wage and no one to share the middle of the night with. No physical warmth, no one to whom she could voice her darkest fears or with whom she could share the pleasures of the children. And this, with Michael, had not made it better. It had brought home to her how alone she was. It had made it worse.
She lay on her side and sobbed.
Michael woke. ‘Hey… There, there. What’s going on? I wasn’t that bad, was I?’
In between her sobs, she giggled and wiped at her eyes with the corner of the sheet. ‘God, you make me laugh. No, it’s not you. I was just remembering Ben and feeling a bit sorry for myself. It’s nothing to do with you – really, I’m sorry.’
Michael scooped her pale, frail form into his dark, work-hardened arms, moved her onto her side and hugged her tight into his chest. He kissed first her eyelids, then her cheeks. ‘You don’t have to be saying sorry to me, not ever. I truly know how it is. Jesus, I’ve cried more nights than I can remember since Sarah died.’
‘I never knew it would go on for so long,’ she said in a voice so soft and so full of pain, he felt his own heart break a little in sympathy. ‘They said it would get easier after a year.’
He kissed the side of her face as she spoke, not wanting to interrupt her, propped himself up on one elbow and looked down at her. ‘Listen, I don’t know who’s been telling you all
that fecking shite, but it won’t ever stop. Well, it hasn’t for me anyway. If it was real, if you were truly in love, I don’t think it ever will. Oh aye, you can find distractions and you can learn to cope with it, but when it’s just you and the night, here in your room, when the world is sleeping and no one knows or cares whether you’re also sleeping or not, that’s when it’s the hardest of all. And you should let it out – there’s no shame in a few tears.’
Not wanting to break the moment or move out of his arms, Cat lifted the corner of the sheet and blew her nose into it. ‘But you… you married again, didn’t you.’
‘Aye. I’m a man, and the fact is, men are fecking useless without a woman. I had Mary Kate and Finn, I’d been almost out of my mind and I’d scared everyone half to death I was so wasted by the grief. But Rosie, she loved me. I know now that she always had. She helped look after the kids and she was always, well, just there. It was like coming in from a hard day at work, taking off the boots and putting on a pair of well-worn slippers when I married Rosie. It was all just… I suppose it was right. It just all fitted together.’
He glanced over towards the upended cardboard box that served as a table and the empty ashtray and box of matches next to it. ‘I suppose I soaked my fags in the lake, did I?’
Cat laughed again. ‘Yes, you did, but I bought you a packet from the pub when I got the port.’
‘What a magnificent woman you are altogether,’ Michael exclaimed. ‘Imagine, if I wasn’t a married man, I don’t think I would be leaving here, so I wouldn’t.’
Cat was kneeling on the bed, striking the match for Michael to light his cigarette, and as he exhaled and flopped back onto the pillow, he failed to catch the sadness in her eyes. In the morning he would be gone, and somewhere in the farthest corner of her mind had flickered the hope she hadn’t known was there. That he might stay. That Mary Kate wouldn’t want to leave Liverpool. That they would find a way to get to know one another better. But it had all truly been a fantasy.
As he smoked, they lay there in silence, his free hand slipped beneath her shoulders and stroking her arm. His own thoughts wandered to places that only made sense in his dreams. He imagined living there, in that house on Waterloo Street, and knew it was impossible. It was not his fate. His fate lay in Tarabeg, with his children and Rosie, and he would have to return there soon.
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