I never want to see any of them again. That’s what she wrote.
I must respect that. It was silly of me to ring International Directory Enquiries in the middle of last night to ask if they had a number for a DeeDee Aldridge in Rio. They didn’t, of course. She will have changed her name. She wouldn’t have wanted to keep any reminder of the family that spurned her. She’s probably married. I hope life brought her lots of hats and marble cake – and, most of all, I hope it has brought her love.
I check my bag to make sure the diamond brooch is still in there. I wish April hadn’t made me promise not to tell Mum I know who her father is – her biological father. Dad is her father too; of course he is. When he hears April is on the phone, his eyes light up. I admire him even more than I used to. He must have a big, forgiving heart.
I’m about to close my bag when I see the notebook. I take it out and reach for the small, faded photo of DeeDee. That’s all we have of her now. I wonder what she would have made of our big, friendly house in the golden hills outside San Francisco. Maybe April was conceived there. Dad was often away giving concerts, and I came back from school late in the afternoons. I used to feel it was a truthful house; it had huge windows, and in a weird, childish way I thought that meant we were open, too – transparent. But, of course, we weren’t. That’s where Mum learned how to lie and I learned about love. I felt its presence, the contours, the textures; the shy, wispy shapes of its absence. It seemed to disappear and return like the tide, and I knew I would never understand it. I wanted love to be ‘one dear perpetual place’, like Yeats wrote in a poem. Only it wasn’t.
‘Sorry I’m late, there was a big queue in the supermarket… No, it can’t have been my car. I was with Veronica. She’s just bought a hammock… Don’t worry about those strange calls. Our number is almost the same as that Indonesian takeaway’s…’ So many lies. And Mum was really good at it, too.
Like Diarmuid. ‘I was studying at home all evening… Charlene and I are just friends… My mother really likes you, Sally.’
Like me. ‘I love you, Diarmuid. Yes, I want to marry you.’
How do people learn how to lie so expertly? Sometimes they don’t even know they’re lying, because they are lying to themselves too. I’m good at that. That’s my speciality.
I stare at DeeDee’s eyes. They look truthful. I’d say she would have liked our California home, but only for a visit. She seems more of a city girl. I can’t see her growing flowers, but I can see her getting them in big, extravagant bunches from a florist. I’d say she often didn’t even know who they were from, and that made her smile. She has that look about her – the look of a wounded child and a thief, a spy and a black-and-white film star, all mixed together. She has a sturdy glamour. Men would have liked to have her beside them, arms linked, in the street. It’s not easy to be that kind of woman, to be wanted for things other than yourself. But DeeDee wouldn’t have known that, because she was restless; she felt her answer was somewhere else, somewhere exotic, so she wouldn’t have noticed the little aches and sorrows. The little nudges. The habits and ordinary yearnings of her heart.
The evening sun is streaming through the window. I stare out the window at the people striding by on the sidewalk. They want to get to the next place – the next meeting, the next meal, the next love affair, the next shop. Sometimes I wish I had been born in a quieter century, but maybe there never was a quieter century. Maybe people have always been like this. Maybe even cavemen went haring out each morning with their clubs.
The waiter asks if I want another cappuccino – waiters are so attentive here. I say yes, and I add that I want a chocolate brownie. This is not a day to go without chocolate, or crisps. I must buy a stack of them to eat on the plane.
I glance at the headline of a newspaper someone has left on a nearby table: ‘Fake Fur – How to Make Your Dog Feel like a Millionaire!’ I catch my reflection in the window. I appear to be sipping cappuccino calmly. I even look quite smart: I’m wearing a flatteringly tailored navy jacket and a thick turquoise shirt, and there’s a chunky pop-art brooch shaped like a terrier on my lapel. My sunglasses make me look mysterious.
I don’t have to go home – that’s what I find myself thinking. I could fly out to April in California. What’s there to go back to, really? I don’t even feel the same way about Aggie, after what she did. And, anyway, she has Fabrice now. Fabrice is going to visit as often as she can. Aggie talks about her as if she’s known her all her life. She says the angels brought them together.
I frown and bite into my brownie. I used to believe in angels. Our house in California was crammed full of them. There came a point when I really thought some of them should move into the attic; there were at least twenty of them in my bedroom, and it wasn’t all that big. At night, when Mum and Dad were arguing, I knew the angels were watching over me. If I stared hard enough, I saw a sort of golden glow above the curtain rail. Sometimes I thought I heard their wings banging off the ceiling, and I said, ‘Ouch!’ in sympathy. One of the great things about the angels was that you could pour them a great big glass of Coke and they could drink it all and leave the glass completely full. They were really low-maintenance.
And then, one night, I stared really hard at the golden glow over the curtain rail and realised it wasn’t there. That’s when I knew I’d just made the angels up because my friend Astrid kept going on about them and because I was scared Mum would leave us. It was only the moonlight dancing through the gaps between the curtains. I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed that before; probably because I just didn’t want to. That’s the thing about the truth. Sometimes the lie is infinitely preferable.
I must ring Diarmuid, I decide suddenly. I must tell him we can’t go on pretending any longer. Our marriage is no longer even semi-detached; it appears to be over.
I pick up my mobile phone and am about to dial when it rings.
‘Hi, there!’ I’d recognise that voice anywhere. It’s Nathaniel. ‘Greta told me she sent you off to New York. How are things in the Big Apple?’
I make circles in the air with my foot. ‘Oh, you know – very calm and quiet. It’s a great place to get away from it all. And I bought a really nice pair of socks.’
He laughs. He has a great laugh. ‘I’m almost tempted to ask you to get my shirts back, but I don’t think you’d want to.’
‘You’re right about that.’
‘You sound weird.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Yes, you do. What’s happened?’
I don’t know how he does this. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I protest. ‘I’m having a cappuccino and a brownie in a lovely café. I’m sitting on a sofa –’
‘Couch, Sally – you’re in New York.’
‘OK, I’m sitting on a couch, and the sun is shining. I’m wearing sunglasses – I mean shades.’
‘Wow… a woman of mystery.’
‘I’m also learning how to make a dog feel like a millionaire.’
‘What?’
‘It’s the headline on a newspaper.’
‘That figures.’
‘Look, Nathaniel, I’d better go,’ I say firmly. ‘I’ve got to buy some crisps and catch a plane.’
‘Get some for me too.’
I hesitate and look wistfully out the window. I don’t think Nathaniel even guesses how much he means to me. He’s so chatty and sociable; he’s probably like this with everyone.
‘I need to see you, Sally.’
I clutch the phone more tightly. Maybe he feels more for me than I thought.
‘Why?’ I ask quietly.
‘I need to talk to you about something.’
‘What?’
‘I need to talk to you about DeeDee.’ His voice sounds urgent, excited. Like he knows a secret he wants to share.
Chapter Thirty
It’s 3 p.m. and I am curled under my duvet. I got back from New York a week ago, and I’m allowing myself a siesta because of the general weirdness of my
life. I’m thinking about the conversation I had with Nathaniel just before I left the Big Apple.
‘I’ve met someone who used to know DeeDee!’ he said excitedly. ‘Her name is Fabrice. She was with Aggie when I visited today.’
‘Actually…’ I frowned. I didn’t want to disappoint him, but I felt I might as well tell the truth; there seemed to be a lot of it about lately. ‘Actually, I’ve heard about Fabrice already. Aggie told me.’
‘Oh, dear, I wanted to tell you first,’ he sighed. ‘This great-aunt of yours has me kind of intrigued, Sally. I love mysteries.’ It’s funny, but I found myself thinking that he was leaving something out – that he had more information about DeeDee than he was sharing with me. But I knew I must be imagining things. I’ve got so used to people having secrets that I’m even suspicious of Nathaniel, the most honest, guileless man I’ve ever met.
‘Call round soon,’ he said before he hung up. I suppose I should, because I need to hunt for my wedding ring. I should also attend a time-management course, because I don’t seem to be able to find time to think about my marriage, let alone coax Diarmuid into talking about what the feck is going on between him and Charlene. Instead I’ve been sweating over my articles about Top Young Irish Designers. I have also written an ebullient column about how to make your home look like a Provençal cottage. I tossed in references to lavender and candles and whitewashed walls, thick glass vases full of sunflowers, espadrilles and wide-brimmed straw hats. I am basically being paid to be an opinionated bossy-boots. The headline on last week’s column said, ‘Ultimate Vases: Sally Adams Falls in Love with the Latest Floral Chic’. My life is all style and no substance.
At least I’ve given Mum the diamond brooch. She burst into tears when she saw it, and I didn’t ask why. I just said it was ‘lovely’ and avoided any significant emotional interchange. I had quite enough of that in New York. I think she was crying with joy – I hope she was, anyway. My own birthday present to her was rather meagre by comparison – a collection of creams and bath oils and soaps – but she seemed pleased enough with it. The card I bought on April’s behalf had tulips on it, and mine had a rural landscape. There wasn’t a teddy bear in sight. Once I’d made my delivery and shared a glass of wine with Mum in the sitting room, I trotted off to see Aggie, but Fabrice was with her and I didn’t stay that long.
Fabrice is an odd woman. If I was to be charitable I might call her a ‘character’, but I’m tired of calling people ‘characters’ to excuse all sorts of silliness. She appears to be in her late seventies and was once probably quite pretty, but now she is, frankly, mutton dressed as lamb. She was wearing so much make-up that I have no idea what she might look like first thing in the morning. Her dyed blonde hair was piled on top of her head, and she was strewn with silver jewellery and semi-precious stones – she was even wearing extraordinary glasses with small fake diamonds around the rim. She had a long indigo scarf tossed around her shoulders, and her pink blouse was low-cut and revealed rather too much cleavage. She told us that she had been a nightclub singer in Belgium and a model in Paris, and that she’d never married but had been in love ‘many times’ and in most of the major time zones. Aggie was entranced by it all. She was gulping up each word as if it were caviar.
‘And what about you, Sally?’ Fabrice suddenly fixed me with an intense stare, and that was when I began to get suspicious of her. Because her eyes are unlike the rest of her showy appearance. They are serious, almost solemn, the eyes of a woman who knows what she wants and has thought long and hard about it. And they made me wonder why she wants to visit Aggie so often. There are people who prey on the elderly and try to extract money from them, and I began to wonder if this was what Fabrice was up to. But Aggie looked so happy that I decided not to interfere. Maybe Fabrice is just lonely, like Aggie. Maybe she just needs someone to listen to her stories, which I suspect are mostly dreams of what might have been. It would be easy enough to become like her.
When I left, Aggie called out, ‘Bye, Sally, dear,’ rather vaguely. I’m probably jealous, that’s the truth of it. And I’m also angry with Aggie for behaving so badly towards DeeDee, I’ve scoured DeeDee’s notebook for more revelations, but the rest of it is just recipes and doodles.
Though I adore my duvet, it seems to me I should perhaps emerge from it and face the strange, and sometimes downright daft, outside world. I really should go round to Nathaniel’s and look for my wedding ring – its loss seems far too symbolic – but there are so many other things I should also be doing that I can’t decide which to attend to first. This is clearly some sort of reaction to all the truth that has tumbled upon me so suddenly. I always regarded the truth as important, but right now I find myself thinking that ignorance, in certain cases, does indeed contain some bliss.
I also find myself thinking that Diarmuid is my partial husband, so if Charlene has suddenly decided to make a grab for him there should at least have been some sort of discussion. I was the one who was supposed to be having doubts about my marriage, but now Diarmuid has raced ahead of me. He even has an alternative partner lined up for himself, if he wants her. That’s just like Diarmuid, of course. He doesn’t drift. He has plans and goals and a surfboard stomach. He isn’t a confused and dawdling biscuit-eater.
I manage to push myself out of the house, and blink in the sudden sunlight. Part of me is still in New York. I almost expect to see skyscrapers and yellow cabs and bagel-sellers. It’s one of those days when summer appears for a while and then turns into autumn; there are billowy white clouds and patches of blue, and a breeze that is bordering on chilly. I cross the road and walk down the steps to the beach. The leaves on the sturdy Dublin palm trees are being tossed about in the breeze, and a crisp packet is dancing in the air.
I want to be totally in the present moment. I want to just walk and smell the sea air, hear the gulls, feel the crunch of sand under my feet. I manage to do this for thirty seconds, and then I start thinking about the conversation I had with Diarmuid when he collected me from the airport. It was the perfect opportunity to talk about our marriage and what we wanted to do with it, but instead we ended up discussing horse-riding. It reminded me of a dinner party I once attended, at which the guests discussed fish-farming for an entire hour.
I said Erika wanted us to go horse-riding and Diarmuid said it was a good idea. Then he said that he used to go horse-riding when he was a teenager, and I said he’d never told me that, and he said he was telling me now. The conversation got very prickly for a bit, because his dinner with Charlene was hovering around in my thoughts and I felt furious with him for sleeping with her and giving her driving lessons – and, most of all, for talking to her. I suddenly felt sure he had said all the things to her that he hadn’t said to me. What’s more, I felt he had actually saved up this conversation for just such an occasion. At one point I thought I couldn’t stay in the car with him a moment longer. I almost leapt out at a traffic light when I saw a taxi rank, but then I realised my purse was full of dollars. So I just closed my eyes, and Diarmuid started to talk about this horse he’d got very fond of and how he loved the smell of her sweat on his hands after grooming. He said there was nothing like a good gallop across an open field. I said, rather frostily, that I didn’t want to gallop across an open field; I wanted to be on a smallish horse that was happy to walk and didn’t run off with me. I wanted a horse I could trust.
We sat in silence for a while after that, and I thought of Fiona, who gets on big gleaming thoroughbreds and gallops off across fields. She even has her own jodhpurs and riding boots and a hard hat. Erika and I went to some posh equestrian place with her once, and we were, as usual, left completely in awe of her streamlined, gutsy beauty. We ended up having scones and tea in the little café by the stables.
As Diarmuid drove on sombrely, I found myself thinking that knowing someone like Fiona really rubs one’s nose in it. That’s why this situation with Milly doesn’t seem right, somehow. It just isn’t the sort of thing that happens to Fiona
. I suppose I could almost feel relieved to discover she isn’t perfect after all, but instead I’m heartbroken for her. I love her. I want her to be happy. I want her to be the Fiona who made us all feel a bit inferior.
‘How was New York?’ Diarmuid asked, when we were nearly at my cottage.
‘It was fine. It was very nice.’ I told him a bit about the interviews and the swanky hotel.
‘Good. I’m glad you enjoyed it.’ He leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek. ‘You must be tired. I’ll call around soon.’ He helped me carry my bags into the living room and asked me if I needed a lift to the shops to get some milk. I felt a brief return of affection. It was so typical of Diarmuid to remember a detail like that. I probably married him for just that sort of question.
I said I would get the milk tomorrow, so he gave me a quick hug and drove off. I suddenly felt terribly lonely – but I also found I was almost relieved that we had managed to avoid all the crucial emotional topics. Life and love are sometimes so strange that I really don’t know what I think about them.
As I watch a young girl run along beside the waves with her dog, my mobile phone rings. It’s Fiona, and she’s in tears. ‘Should I tell him, Sally? I really want to tell him,’ she asks, through sobs and sniffs. Then she blows her nose. It sounds like an off-key trumpet. For such a pretty, streamlined person Fiona is a very noisy nose-blower.
‘Not yet,’ I say with as much authority as I can muster. What Fiona needs at the moment is someone who has an opinion – any opinion, as long as it sounds calm and considered. She keeps ringing me in tears and asking if she should tell Zak he isn’t Milly’s father, and I always tell her to wait for a while, mainly because I don’t think she could deal with Zak storming out of the house and leaving her on her own with Milly and the nanny. Of course, he mightn’t do this; but he has such lofty opinions about telling the truth that I think she should wait a bit, at least until Milly settles down and stops bawling at all hours of the night.
The Truth Club Page 26