At the reception desk Hanna registered as Mrs. M. Turner, took her key, and went to her room. Then, resolutely ignoring the fact that each item on the menu cost more than a week’s worth of packed lunches at the library, she called room service and ordered a sandwich and a large pot of tea.
“Darjeeling or China, Madam?”
“Earl Grey,” Hanna said firmly. If she was going to meet Malcolm at three fifteen she had better practice being assertive. He could stonewall her in a letter, but surely if they sat in a room and talked they could work something out.
He had always been controlling. Looking back now, Hanna could see that. Louisa and George Turner had doted on their clever, good-looking son and raised him to be an achiever. In contrast, Hanna’s own parents, Tom and Mary, had been baffled by their only child’s ambition. But Tom had willingly paid for her training in Carrick and tucked a roll of five-pound notes into her pocket as she set off for her first job as a local librarian in Dublin. And when she phoned to say she was moving to London, he had wished her well. Mary had snatched the receiver from his hand and told her that she was killing her poor father. Hanna had been about to hang up when she heard Tom’s gentle voice again.
“Don’t be listening to your mam, pet, we’re made up for you. It’s just that London’s a long way away.”
“It isn’t really, Dad, and it’s a big thing to have got a place in this college. It could lead to a job in a gallery. And that’s what I’ve always wanted.”
It always had been. It was pictures that had mattered to her first. Words had come later. She had had no interest in reading when she was young. Indeed, all they’d had at home in her childhood was a battered Victorian Bible and a paperback biography of John F. Kennedy. What had seized her imagination in the first place was a painting of a house.
It was a square eighteenth-century manor, painted in oils. In front of it a young man in a tricorn hat, a yellow coat, knee britches, and a gorgeously embroidered waistcoat, stood at a horse’s head. The horse was harnessed to a high-wheeled open carriage in which a pink-cheeked young woman in powdered curls and a quilted petticoat sat with a toddler on her knee. Even as a teenager Hanna had been aware of the sense of achievement that radiated from the painting. There was a groom somewhere in the background, but the hand on the horse’s bridle was the master’s and the swagger with which he presented his good fortune to the viewer was far too touching to be arrogant. Looking back now, Hanna realized that what had attracted her as a child was that naïve blend of materialism and romance. Here was a world in which people hardly older than herself lived in enviable surroundings, wrapped in domestic harmony. Obviously, the couple were in love. Clearly, they owned all that they surveyed. For Hanna, raised in the rooms over Crossarra’s post office, the painting offered heart-stopping possibilities.
She had discovered it on a flier for an art exhibition, tucked into James Stephens’s novel The Charwoman’s Daughter, which some teacher had told her to read. The exhibition was long over by the time the fourteen-year-old Hanna had found the flier, but the reproduction of the painting had captivated her. That year, during the summer holidays, she had cajoled her father into taking her to Dublin to visit the National Gallery. They walked around for an hour without finding her painting but by the time they emerged Hanna was hooked on art. She already knew that she was useless with a paintbrush or pencil, but there were people who looked after all this stuff, and wrote the signs under the pictures and statues, and created lists and catalogues. Maybe you could get a job doing something like that. Later on, when she discovered that big art galleries had libraries, everything fell into place. She would train to be a librarian and find herself a job in a gallery. And the rest of her life would be spent among paintings that made your eyes fizz and your brain dance, and beautiful books that told you all about them.
Back then it wasn’t only the fact that she’d found a career to aspire to that excited her; it was the thought that one day, somewhere beyond the confines of the Finfarran Peninsula, she might find her own version of the lifestyle portrayed in the painting, complete with the perfect home, the perfect lover, and the perfect family. But now, looking back at that eighteenth-century couple, as smug as any pair of twenty-first-century lovers posting photos on Facebook, all she could see was fragility. The merchant ship lost at sea. The failed bank. The germs that threatened the nursery, and the dangers attendant on childbirth. The fortune lost at play or spent on a mistress. The loneliness of a wife stuck out in the country while her husband was gadding in town.
A knock at the hotel bedroom door startled Hanna out of her reverie. It was a waiter with her sandwich. As he placed it on a table by the window, Hanna looked at her surroundings. Here she was in a quietly decorated room in a discreet London side street while Mary Casey was probably rattling along in a country bus, off to do her weekly shopping in Carrick. The door closed behind the waiter. Hanna looked down at her plate. There was a little salad of beetroot leaves, spinach, and walnuts in a bowl beside it. The china was porcelain and a heavy silver knife and fork were rolled up in a damask napkin. This was the kind of service she had got used to while she was married to Malcolm but, as her mother frequently told her, it was far from that she was reared; and it was very different to the life she had when she first moved to London to study. When she’d arrived in London, she’d found a flat in Paddington, where she lived with three other girls in their early twenties. Together they visited galleries and museums, window-shopped in the King’s Road, drank beer in pubs by the river, and ate spaghetti in little Italian restaurants in SoHo. Lucy, the oldest, worked as a sous-chef and cheerfully cooked for the others, who were still students like Hanna. Their flat, on the fourth floor of a grubby Victorian building, had a brick balcony outside the kitchen window. In summer they sat out there drinking wine at a rickety table with their bare legs stretched out in the sun, while Diana Ross sang “Endless Love” on the radio and the smells of the city reached them mixed with the scent of Ambre Solaire.
Hanna and Malcolm first met in the restaurant where Lucy worked. The other girls from the flat had taken her there for a birthday treat and Lucy had finagled a free platter of gelati topped with colored sparklers for dessert. Everyone in the restaurant had clapped when it was carried in by waiters singing “Happy Birthday,” and a group of guys at a nearby table sent over a bottle of champagne. So, inevitably, the two tables had joined up. And that was the beginning. Within weeks Hanna and Malcolm were an item and a month later she had met his parents who lived in a big house in Kent, with sloping lawns and a tennis court. They drove up from London on a Saturday and Louisa, his mother, met them in a hallway where there was a fireplace with a carved overmantel and a bowl of lilies on the hearth. While Malcolm parked the car, Louisa led Hanna through to the living room and they sat in chintz-covered armchairs by an open French window. Louisa had been charming and Hanna had liked her at once. They were chatting about how Hanna and Malcolm had met in the restaurant when Malcolm himself strolled into the room, interrupting their conversation.
“Fate? It was nothing of the sort. I saw her the moment she walked through the door and I knew at once that I wanted her!”
Everyone laughed, including Hanna. Back then Malcolm’s assurance and assertiveness had seemed warm and affectionate, not overbearing. And although it was his manner and good looks that had swept her off her feet, she was still Tom Casey’s daughter from Crossarra who had grown up behind a shop counter among people who were no fools. She knew there was more to Malcolm than macho charm. He was intelligent and courageous, hardworking and interesting, and very good to his parents.
And he really loved her. Three months later when she found that she was pregnant she had had no thought of marriage. She’d been thinking of having an abortion and had only told him about the baby because she believed he had a right to know. It was he who was delighted, grabbing her in a bear hug and wanting to call people with the news. Sitting on the double bed in his parents’ guest room, Hanna had looke
d at him in amazement.
“How come they’re not furious?”
“Because when I’m happy they’re happy, too.”
He had knelt down in front of her and taken her hands. “Does that mean you’ve decided to accept my proposal?”
“I don’t know.”
“Please, Hanna. Let’s just do it. I love you. I want to look after you. I want us to raise our child together and be happy.”
“Are you sure?”
“That I want to be happy?”
“No, idiot, are you sure that we’re right for each other? We never talked about marriage. None of this was planned.”
“You speak for yourself, Miss Casey, I heard wedding bells the first moment I saw you.”
“And what? You sabotaged a condom to make it happen?”
He grinned at her. “No, that bit really was Fate. I should have thought of it, though. You’d never have found out.”
She had laughed down at him, bending her head to kiss him as he knelt by the bed. Yet in these last few bitter years she’d realized that what they’d been joking about was a central trait in Malcolm’s personality. He had been raised to assume that he had a God-given right to whatever he wanted, and his instinct was to manipulate everyone and everything around him in order to get it.
It had been a different story when she rang her own parents to tell them about her engagement. Mary Casey had a pregnancy radar that functioned regardless of distance.
“Holy God Almighty, Hanna-Mariah, you’ve got yourself into trouble. Didn’t I tell your poor father no good could come of this library nonsense?”
Hanna listened to several minutes of outrage from her mother before her dad came on the line.
“Are you all right, pet? Are you well in yourself?”
So long as she was “well in herself,” Tom would have been content to go along with her half-established fiction that she was happily engaged with no sign of a baby on the horizon. Just as he would have turned the sign on the shop door and taken the boat to England to beat hell out of any man who made her unhappy. His kindness made Hanna choke, just as Mary’s response had enraged her.
“What about your great job prospects now, girl? It’s far from museums and galleries you’ll spend your life, I can tell you, with a child on your hip and a man to look after.”
A week or so after that phone call Hanna had moved in with Malcolm. He lived in a big flat in a mansion block near Sloane Square, belonging to some cousin who let him rent it for peanuts.
“It’s family property. I think our mutual great-great-grandfather bought it when the block was built.”
“But where does your cousin live?”
“Near my parents. You’ll meet him sometime. He has a pied-à-terre here in town as well, but closer to his work.”
To Hanna, the idea that a family would have large bits of real estate scattered about unoccupied was extraordinary. And the flat was lovely. It had two bedrooms, a living room with windows opening onto a wide balcony, and a kitchen where Malcolm’s cleaning lady did the laundry and ironing once a week. The balcony was accessed through a floor-to-ceiling window that opened like a door. In Hanna’s Paddington flat-share the dusty balcony where the girls ate, studied, and chattered had been reached through a sash window via an upturned box.
In the beginning she had tried to keep up with her coursework. But it was high summer and London had shimmered with heat. Twice Hanna felt so dizzy on the Tube that the staff summoned First Aid. The idea of taking taxis to lectures seemed ridiculous, there was no direct bus route, and the walk was too long to be practical. Eventually, having felt so ill, and having failed to complete so many assignments, she decided to give up her course and reenroll the next year. As she left her tutor’s room she saw a skeptical gleam in his eye.
In retrospect Hanna couldn’t remember if it was Malcolm or his mother who’d proposed a wedding in Kent. She was all for avoiding a day dominated by Mary Casey. There was a moment of concern when she realized that the Turners envisaged a service in the idyllic medieval chapel in their local village while her own parents were geared up for nuptial Mass in the nearest Roman Catholic church. But George and Louisa were understanding, cars were arranged to whisk the guests from the house to the church and back again, and, to top it all, Malcolm charmed the socks off the priest whom Louisa invited to tea to discuss the ceremony. The Turners’ impressive home and Louisa’s graciousness over the teacups had combined to make the priest waive the requirement to attend classes explaining his Church’s views on marriage. He’d be delighted to marry them, he said, leaning back in a comfortable chair and accepting a slice of Battenberg, and he’d be honored to attend the reception. By the time he left, carrying a bottle of George’s vintage port, Hanna suspected he’d have been equally delighted to marry her to a tree-worshipper.
The wedding day passed in a blur. Her parents were unsure of what was expected of them at first, but George put himself out to entertain Tom, and Mary linked up with one of Malcolm’s aunts who felt, as she did, that a wedding wasn’t a real wedding without dancing. When they discovered there was no band they decided to have a sing-song and entertained each other in a corner. After everyone had left, when Hanna was sitting on the terrace with her feet up on a table, Malcolm joined her with two glasses of champagne.
“I know you’re not drinking, but just take a sip.” He wrapped her fingers around the stem of her glass. “I want to toast our love and our life together.”
Hanna shook her head. “It’ll make me feel sick. And anyway I shouldn’t.”
“Just a sip. This is our wedding day.” He clinked the champagne flutes against each other. “Here’s to you, me, and the baby.”
Suddenly Hanna felt hormonal and weepy. Her eyes were full of tears as she raised her glass and sipped from it against her better judgment. Smiling over the rim, she repeated Malcolm’s toast. “You, me, and the baby.”
Now, nearly thirty years later, sitting at the table in the window of Parsons Hotel in Mayfair, Hanna remembered that moment. Knowing then how much Malcolm loved her, she had never doubted him afterwards. Might things have been different, and would they still be married now, if she hadn’t lost the baby two months later?
6
By two o’clock Hanna had eaten her sandwich, taken a shower, and redone her hair. Then she called room service and had her tray removed. Ten minutes later she called again and ordered another pot of tea. This time, when asked if she preferred Chinese tea or Indian, she only just managed to stop herself asking for “Builders’,” her father’s name for strong English Breakfast tea served in a mug with several spoons of sugar. In the Casey family, Builders’ Tea had been the staple comfort in times of stress and now she found herself craving its syrupy texture and the hit of tannin that her mother always declared would take a year’s rust off a kettle.
She had packed an unread Wallander novel in case she’d have time to fill. But concentrating on crime in Ystad proved to be a nonstarter so she sat down with a cup of tea and stared out of the window. Half an hour later, on the dot of three fifteen, the phone on the table rang. She picked it up.
“Hanna?”
“Yes.”
“It’s Malcolm.”
“Yes.”
“I’m in the foyer.”
“Oh. Oh, well, look, do come up.”
“You want me to come up?”
“Well, yes, I mean, it’s quiet . . . I mean it’ll just be us.” Did he think she wanted to discuss money in a hotel foyer with everyone listening? There was a pause while she thought how strange it was that she hadn’t heard his familiar voice in years. Then he just said, “Right,” and hung up.
He hadn’t changed a great deal since Hanna had last seen him, at the funeral of his father, who had died suddenly of a heart attack. She had flown over from Ireland with Jazz, who was a mutinous teenager at the time, and still angry and confused about the abrupt move to Crossarra. As soon as they arrived, Malcolm had carried Jazz off on a wave of Turn
er relations. Louisa, who seemed shattered, had smiled distantly at Hanna and clung to Malcolm’s arm throughout the funeral. Hanna sat at the back of the idyllic little chapel in which she and Malcolm hadn’t got married, and stared at the back of Jazz’s head. Jazz sat in the front pew with her cheek pressed against Malcolm’s shoulder. The color of their hair was identical. That was four years ago. Now, opening the door of her hotel room, Hanna saw that Malcolm’s hair was cut shorter than it used to be, presumably to deflect attention from the gray streaks at his temples. But otherwise he looked no older. Just a lot more authoritative.
She had decided to say nothing until he spoke first. She, too, had played poker in her day, and, besides, she wasn’t sure that her voice wouldn’t crack or squeak. He walked into the room, turned to face her, and said nothing. This wasn’t in the plan. For a mad moment Hanna had a vision of them standing there forever: the maid would come in to clean the room and new guests would arrive to occupy it, but she and Malcolm would be frozen there like statues while other lives just carried on around them. The vision was so vivid that she nearly laughed. Malcolm looked startled. Then his face relaxed and he held out his hand.
“It’s nice to see your smile again.”
Hanna felt a knot in her stomach uncoil. She took his outstretched hand and he pulled her towards him to kiss her cheek. It was going to be okay after all.
“Would you like tea? I could order another pot.”
He shook his head and went to sit at the table. “No, I’m fine. Let’s not waste time.” But he was sitting back comfortably, apparently relaxed and unpressured. Hanna felt confused. She had hoped to find him approachable but she hadn’t expected it to be easy. As she was about to speak she realized that he was looking at her with a familiar quizzical look that was half caress and half challenge. He raised his eyebrows at her.
“That color always suited you.”
“What?”
“Like rich, tawny port.” He leaned forward, smiling. “I’m glad you rang, Hanna, I knew you would eventually.”
The Library at the Edge of the World Page 3