Semi-Sweet

by Roisin Meaney

  Hannah told him about her grandfather. “He was the one who got me interested in baking. He taught me how to make rock buns and almond cookies when I was seven or eight. He got me my first apron and electric mixer. His father was a baker, but I never knew him.”

  “Was it frightening,” he asked, “opening your own shop, all by yourself?”

  “Terrifying—and in the middle of a recession too. I’m sure people thought I needed my head examined.” She smoothed a small crease in the tablecloth. “Even with Granddad’s legacy, which helped a lot, there was still a fair bit of expense involved, and I also have a mortgage to pay, and all the other bills that go along with a house. My parents didn’t say it, but I know they were worried I’d go belly-up in a week.”

  “It’s their job”—he smiled—“to worry about you.”

  “I suppose so. Luckily, I’ve proved them wrong so far and I’m still here—if not exactly raking it in.” Their waiter brought pappadams, and she reached for one. “And I haven’t collapsed from exhaustion—yet.”

  When the wine arrived, John filled their glasses and lifted his. “I have every faith in you. This time next year, you’ll be counting the profits, mark my words.”

  Hannah touched her glass against his. “I’ll drink to that.”

  Her mother’s perfume these days smelled terribly cloying to Leah. In the past few weeks, she’d completely lost her taste for anything sweet—developing instead a craving for salted crackers topped with cheese and sprinkled with soy sauce—so it was hardly surprising that Fiona’s heady, almondy scent made her want very much to gag.

  “Thank you,” she said when her mother handed her a jar of verbena hand cream, knowing that it was the nearest Fiona would come to an apology.

  They hadn’t spoken since the disastrous lunch on Easter Sunday, when Fiona had practically called Patrick a gigolo, not until Fiona had rung the other night and suggested she call in for a short visit on her way home from bridge, using exactly the same tone of voice she always did, as if they hadn’t parted in anger almost three weeks earlier. And Leah, caught unawares, had found herself agreeing.

  Patrick wasn’t there. Leah had suggested he make himself scarce, and he’d been happy to oblige. When the baby came, he and Fiona could put their differences aside. Once Fiona realized that Patrick was as committed to parenthood as Leah was, she couldn’t object to him anymore, and a silent truce would come into force. It had to.

  In the meantime Leah would have to be the buffer. “Coffee?” she asked her mother. “Or tea? Earl Grey?” She was determined to keep this meeting neutral, had resolved to be polite and hospitable and no more.

  Patrick hadn’t once referred to Fiona’s implied accusations; no mention had been made of the Easter Sunday encounter. After lunch had ended so abruptly he’d left the apartment without coming into the bedroom where Leah lay. She’d heard the front door closing softly, and she’d turned her face to the wall. She hadn’t heard him return, but had woken some time later to the sound of the television, and walked out to find him asleep on the couch, his jacket still on, the remains of a pizza in a box on the floor beside him.

  “Your baby cot is still in the attic,” Fiona was saying, “and I think a playpen. Of course, you may prefer to buy new ones.”

  She was trying, as much as Fiona could try. Leah should meet her halfway; she’d probably need her mother around when the baby arrived. Need, not want.

  “Thank you,” she replied, in the same neutral tone. “I’ll think about it. Did you say tea or coffee?”

  She and Patrick had made love twice in the past fortnight, both times at her instigation. Patrick hadn’t looked for it. He hadn’t once turned to her in bed, hadn’t woken her up in the middle of the night the way he used to.

  It was the baby, of course. He was wary of doing anything so late in the pregnancy, that was all. Once the baby arrived, things would sort themselves out.

  “Have you seen much of Nora O’Connor?” Fiona asked as Leah began to lay out cups and saucers.

  “A little.”

  Nora had dropped by the salon out of the blue a few days earlier. She’d brought a toy white rabbit and a bottle of jasmine-scented bath salts. How’re you feeling? she’d asked, leaning against the doorjamb in her cream linen cardigan and blue linen trousers. We must do lunch again, she’d said. My treat this time. When you get a chance.

  Leah hadn’t asked Nora about her job. She’d shifted her weight and told Nora she had a customer waiting. I’ll give you a call, she’d said. Thanks for these.

  She’d phone Nora at some stage, and they’d go to lunch, and Leah would hope, as she’d been hoping now for weeks, that Nora would look past Patrick for a diversion. That Patrick wouldn’t consider being unfaithful, even if Nora did set her sights on him.

  “You look tired,” Fiona said. “Are you getting enough sleep?”

  Three weeks, give or take, and Leah and Patrick would be parents. He hadn’t once asked about names, even though she’d left the book where he couldn’t miss it. He never wondered aloud if they’d have a boy or a girl, hadn’t asked her which she’d prefer. He’d gone along to the classes when she’d asked him and taken part like all the other expectant fathers, but he didn’t mention the baby the rest of the time, ever.

  Surely when it arrived, he’d change. Surely he’d take one look at his son or daughter and fall in love.

  “I think I’m having a girl,” Leah said suddenly, wanting someone to share it with. “I’ve just got this feeling.”

  Fiona regarded her above the rim of her cup. “A girl,” she said, without expression. “You could be right—although I was convinced you were going to be a boy.”

  Leah squeezed lemon into her tea. “How did you feel,” she asked then, “when you saw me? How did you and Dad feel?”

  Fiona lowered her cup. “We were happy to have a healthy baby, of course,” she answered placidly. “Just as you will be.”

  Just as you will be. As if Leah had made this baby all on her own. She hoisted herself from the chair. “I need the toilet,” she told her mother, and walked heavily from the room.

  “Hi there.”

  Hannah smiled. “Hello. This is a surprise.” His accent was even more pronounced on the phone.

  “Can you talk? Are you busy?” he asked.

  “Yes I can, and no I’m not.”

  “I have something to confess,” he said then, and her smile faded. She waited, looking at the cupcake tree. Reaching out to straighten the coconut-lime sample.

  “I’m not sure how to say this,” he went on. “I haven’t been completely honest with you.”

  He was still with his wife, they hadn’t separated. His conscience was at him now, and he’d decided to come clean.

  “Are you still there?” he asked.

  “Still here,” Hannah answered lightly. “Just wondering what’s coming.” Say it, she thought. Say it and get it over with.

  “The truth is…” She heard his indrawn breath and closed her eyes. “…I don’t really like cupcakes.”

  Her eyes snapped open. “You what?”

  “I haven’t really got a sweet tooth, you see,” he said. “It’s not just cupcakes, it’s chocolate and biscuits and…well, anything sweet really.”

  Hannah let out the breath she didn’t know she’d been holding.

  “Are you mad at me?” he asked.

  “I am,” she said, her smile returning. “I’m shocked at your deceit. I’m not sure that I’ll be able to forgive you, really.”

  “I was afraid you’d say that,” he answered, “so I thought I’d make it up to you.”

  “How?”

  The shop door opened and there he was, holding a bag of Kettle Chips. Slipping his phone back into his shirt pocket.

  “Aged White Cheddar, right?” he asked, approaching the counter. “See? I’m not the only one who likes savory things.”

  Hannah laughed. She’d mentioned Kettle Chips in passing, weeks ago, and he’d remembered. She h
ung up and took the dark blue bag from him.

  “You’re forgiven,” she said. “Let’s open them right now.”

  She was being wooed, and it was wonderful.

  He’d mastered “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and “Sur le Pont d’Avignon.” He’d eaten the Jammie Dodgers when they’d appeared for a second time and drunk the milk—and suffered the consequences the following day. He’d attempted small talk with Vivienne’s mother when she’d appeared—he’d admired the garden, remarked on the fine weather they’d been enjoying—even though the older woman was clearly suspicious of him. (And who could blame her? If ever someone’s motives were suspect, Adam’s were.)

  He’d even reached out to pat the giant marmalade cat, which seemed to live on the piano—but to his relief it had shrunk away from him, and Vivienne had murmured that he was shy around strangers.

  I wonder where he gets it from, Adam had thought.

  Any attempt at personal conversation on his part brought a fresh flood of color to her face—if she could have shrunk away from him as the cat had, Adam suspected she would. So he stuck to questions that related to the pieces they were looking at, and he did his best to be patient and bide his time.

  But all the same, he was inching toward her, absorbing a fraction more about her with each visit. She had a habit of rubbing her middle finger as she listened to his efforts and closing her eyes briefly now and again. Her teeth weren’t quite straight and not perfectly white. She wore no jewelry, not even a watch. Her ears, surprisingly small, had never been pierced.

  She dressed only in dark colors—black and gray and navy, mostly. Her clothes were modest and unremarkable. Her hair was always pinned up, never loose. Her breath smelled minty. She used no makeup, as far as his untutored male eye could tell.

  Her feet were long, her calves—what he could see of them—slender. He was reminded of a scene from The Piano when Harvey Keitel had lain on the floor and poked a finger through a hole in Holly Hunter’s stocking as she played. Vivienne’s eyes were fringed with surprisingly long, pale lashes.

  And thanks to Hannah, he now knew for sure that she was single.

  He decided, during his third lesson, that the time had come to risk tiptoeing a little further toward her. He waited until her mother had delivered the usual tray—tiny Iced Gem biscuits tonight, which he’d last eaten more than twenty years ago—and left them alone again.

  “How did you get involved with the band?” he asked. A musical question: She could hardly object.

  She blinked rapidly twice, a nervous gesture he was becoming accustomed to. He wanted to reach out and touch her arm and tell her that she had nothing to fear.

  “My brother,” she said quickly, bending to riffle through the pages of sheet music for a new piece for him.

  Adam bit the pastel pink swirl off an Iced Gem. “He’s a member?”

  She nodded. “Keyboards.”

  “I see.” Adam crunched his biscuit. Imagine admitting that he knew all this already, that his friend had pumped the saxophonist to discover her marital status. Imagine her reaction if he said that.

  “And your brother only plays one instrument? That’s a bit lazy, isn’t it?”

  She looked up, the tiniest of smiles flashing across her features. “He can play the guitar, too. And the flute.”

  “Right,” he said. “So you’re a musical family.”

  A short nod as she pulled a sheet from the bundle and placed it on the stand. Beethoven, Adam read. Bit of a step up from “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Hannah would be impressed.

  “What’s the name of the band?” Another question he knew the answer to.

  “Small Change.”

  “And how long—”

  “We’ll try Beethoven next, a lullaby,” she said. “When you’ve finished.”

  Adam downed the rest of his milk and returned the glass to the tray. “What’s your brother’s name?”

  Vivienne shifted on her bench, her smile gone. For a second, Adam thought she wasn’t going to reply, and then she said, “Walter. Wally.”

  “And he’s a full-time musician?” Aware that he was pushing but reluctant to return to the formality of the lesson just yet.

  “No—he drives a taxi.” She looked pointedly at his clarinet, lying on the floor by his chair, and Adam picked it up. “Beethoven,” she said again, turning toward the stand, and Adam put the mouthpiece to his lips and awaited further instruction.

  And then she said, keeping her eyes fixed on the sheet music, “You’re improving a bit.” The familiar flush reappearing, drifting slowly up her cheeks. “With the clarinet.”

  It wasn’t much. It was hardly anything. She probably said that to all her pupils to keep them trying. Silly, really, the effect it had on him.

  When the woman came out of the house, Alice nearly missed her, scraping with her nail at a stain on her skirt. As she raised her head, a movement caught her eye on the other side of the road. The woman walked rapidly, head lowered, shoulders hunched, hands thrust into the pockets of a green jacket.

  Alice grabbed her bag and got out, no thought in her head but to follow. She locked the car and walked after the woman, suddenly aware of her quickening heartbeat, her dry mouth, her grotesquely loud footsteps on the quiet afternoon street.

  After crossing a number of intersections and turning a few corners, they came to a bus stop. The woman stood next to the pole, ignoring the shelter. An elderly man sat on the wooden bench inside, his hands wrapped around the knobby handle of a wooden stick.

  Alice approached, slowing her pace. No plan, no clue what to do.

  She stopped a foot or so from the woman and rummaged in her bag. She never traveled by bus, had no idea how much it cost. She emptied coins from her purse into her palm—roughly two euro. Surely that would be enough.

  She closed her bag and hung it on her shoulder, then turned her head slowly toward the mother, who was staring fixedly at the ground. She looked tightly clenched, standing there. Alice could see the shape her fist made in the near-side pocket. The thin strap of a small brown bag lay across her body. Her blond hair was pulled back into a blue rubber band.

  “Excuse me,” Alice said, and the mother turned toward her and regarded her dully. “I wonder,” Alice went on, struggling with an unexpected lump in her throat, “if you know when the bus is due?”

  Nothing in the woman’s face suggested that she’d even heard the question. As Alice was about to repeat it, she said in a low voice, “Ten past,” and turned away again.

  “Thanks.”

  The man on the bench pulled a hankie from his pocket and blew his nose noisily. A younger man approached the bus stop and sat, rattling change in his pocket, tapping one shoe on the ground, presumably in accompaniment to whatever was coming out of the earphones he wore. A woman arrived from the opposite direction, pulling a smallish suitcase on wheels. A siren sounded faintly in the distance.

  Alice was acutely aware of the mother’s presence, so close she could have reached out and taken her arm and told her how terribly, terribly—

  The bus appeared and slowed to a stop. The two men got to their feet, the older man’s knuckles white around his stick as he hauled himself upward.

  Alice stood unmoving as the others filed on. Her hand tightened around the coins she held as she watched the woman boarding. She waited until everyone was on, and then she turned and retraced her steps to the car.

  She drove slowly out of the estate and through streets full of people, past shops and parks and schools. On the far side of town, she pulled into a small car park attached to a church she’d never been inside. She switched off the engine and sat there, watching the few who came and went from the church. Eventually she started the car again and drove home.

  In the kitchen, as the dinner was cooking, she stood at the window looking out at the lawn spotted with dandelions, the flower beds that were more weeds than flowers, the mint that was running riot in the herb box.

  She opened the cutlery drawer
and took out her daughter’s last letter, and she read again the news of kindergarten graduations and birthday parties, and a camping trip to the mountains. She looked at the photos Ellen had sent, of grandchildren Alice hardly knew jumping into swimming pools, eating pizza, laughing for the camera. Healthy-looking and tanned, with such white teeth. She longed to be there with Ellen, to leave this hellish place behind.

  When the shepherd’s pie was ready, she spooned a serving onto a dinner plate. She put it on a tray with a glass of water, a butter dish, and the smaller of their two saltcellars. She brought the tray upstairs to her husband, who had taken to going to bed in the late afternoon and not rising again till the following morning was almost over.

  “Guess what,” Adam said. “Nora has a man.”

  “Has she?” Hannah closed the door of the washing machine. “What’s he like?”

  Adam draped his jacket over a kitchen chair. “Well, I didn’t actually meet him.”

  She turned a dial, and water started rushing into the drum. “So what did she tell you about him?”

  “Nothing.” Adam hesitated. “The thing is, I think she was hiding him. Just now, when I called over.”

  Hannah frowned. “Hiding him?”

  “I’m pretty sure someone was there.” He filled the kettle. “Nora couldn’t wait to get rid of me. She said I should have phoned before coming over—”

  “I told you—”

  “—and she said she hadn’t time to make coffee because she was getting ready to go out, but she was definitely cagey. Barely let me get the books I wanted before shoving me out the door.”

  Hannah crossed to the fridge and took out a pound of butter. “So you’ve no proof anyone was there?”

  “No, but I’m pretty sure.” He got mugs from the cupboard. “I’d bet anything there was a man there.”

  “But why would she hide him? I mean, it’s not as if she’s forbidden to have men in your flat.”