‘My wife Mary was showing me that interview you did with Robert De Niro last month,’ Owen went on. ‘Very impressive!’
‘Oh, that.’ Cate said. ‘You know how it is, these things always sound much more exciting than they actually are. De Niro’s notoriously difficult to interview.’
‘Ah, go on out of that, don’t try to tell me that meeting film stars is less glamorous than this,’ and Cate, glancing around at the worn carpet, the dingy filing cabinets and the buff folders, took his point, and made no such denial. Owen followed her glance, and picked up a folder from the desk. ‘Helen was reading a thing out to me the other day about what they call the paperless office, and saying “Why can’t we have one of those?” We had a good laugh about it.’
Cate forced a smile. ‘Be sure and thank Helen for me,’ she said, ‘and tell her I’ll see her this evening. I won’t take up any more of your time; I know you have people waiting.’
‘They’re well used to it,’ Owen said, as he crossed to the door. ‘If you’re around later in the week, give us a ring. Mary would love to have you over for an evening.’ Cate gave him one of her marvellous smiles, and fled. When she got into the car she realised that she felt miserable again. Everything around her looked bleak, and she couldn’t find it in herself to rise above it. She wasn’t usually like this, she thought, as she turned on the ignition.
Her spirits didn’t lift when she pulled up outside Helen’s house a short while later, with it’s stark garden adorned by a lone tree in a tub. It depressed her to think of her sister driving over every evening from that office, that horrible office, to this place, which was so wrong for her. Even Helen hadn’t been able to stand up to social pressure, even she conformed. She wasn’t like Owen who threw himself blindly and shamelessly into the quest for social approval like an otter leaping into a river; nor like Cate herself, whose very career and standing with her colleagues depended upon her ability to read the signs of the times more quickly and fluently than most, and to endorse them with enthusiasm. Helen should have stayed in Andersonstown, where she’d been living when she first started to work with Owen, Cate thought. She’d liked it there, but the pressure to conform had been too much, even for an idealist like Helen. Cate let herself into the house and found no comfort in the bare hall and the chilly sitting room. She stood for a few moments trying to decide what changes were needed: a stronger, warmer colour for the walls, to begin with. The room was big, it could take it. Maybe some sort of urn over in that corner, or there needed to be more focus on the fireplace … This was a habit of Cate’s, she couldn’t help doing it, even in houses more successfully furnished than this. She did it to other women too, assessing their clothes, their hair, their make-up, professionally, but not unkindly, she liked to think.
As it was now, the most striking feature of the room was a large framed photograph of Helen and her father on the lawn at Queen’s, Helen in her academic gown with her scroll in her hands. She and her father were smiling at each other in such a way that the picture would have appealed even to someone who had met neither of the people in it: the affection between them lifted it above the usual run of graduation photographs. Staring hard at Helen’s image, Cate remembered the words her cousin Una had used when she collected Cate at the airport that night two years ago. ‘Helen’s just gone to pieces,’ was how she’d put it, when Cate asked after her mother and sisters, and when Cate saw Helen, later that night and in the following days, the phrase had come back to her as being horrifyingly accurate.
Beside the graduation photograph, which sat on top of a bookcase, there was another, much smaller picture: a framed black-and-white snapshot showing the three sisters when they were children, sitting on the back step of the house, eating sliders. Cate, smiling, took it in her hands and sat down on the sofa to study it in detail. Charlie Quinn’s daughters. Anyone could easily have recognised each of them from their adult selves, the similarity was almost comic.
The first year Cate had been in London, a colleague had remarked to her in mid December that she would be spending Christmas with her parents, and that her sister would be there too.
‘Not that it matters much to me,’ the woman added, ‘we’re not very close to each other.’
‘When did you last hear from her?’ Cate had asked, and the woman had frowned and thought for a moment.
‘I don’t think we’ve been in touch at all since a New Year’s Eve party last year, now I come to think of it.’ Cate was so amazed by this she hadn’t known what to say. It was just around this time that she’d changed the spelling of her name, and the family didn’t like it: Helen was being particularly prickly and difficult, but no matter how awkward it was between them the idea of their not being in touch for a whole year, and it being such a matter-of-fact thing, struck her as impossible. She could see that the other woman had noticed her reaction, even though Cate still made no comment.
‘It’s no big deal, you know,’ her colleague said. ‘We have nothing in common with each other.’
But this only mystified Cate further. What did she have ‘in common’ with Sally and Helen, except that they were sisters? Surely that was the whole point of family. It was to change strangers into friends that you needed some kind of shared interests, beliefs or aspirations, but with your sisters, what you had ‘in common’ was each other. Looking back on this now, years later, she was even a bit ashamed to realise how much she’d taken her own family for granted, how unremarkable she’d found the tremendous warmth and love in which she had grown up. She’d always known that childhood was important, and to catch a glimpse into the unhappiness of other people’s lives had shocked and unsettled her.
She replaced the photograph on top of the bookcase and went into the kitchen, little knowing that Helen had cleaned it since the weekend, and that what she found so untidy was a significant improvement on what had gone before. Out of the few things available there, she prepared something for herself to eat. There was some bread and cream crackers, but the bread was hard, and the crackers were soft; so she had a cup of instant soup and an apple. She washed up her cup and spoon afterwards, and cleaned around the stove and sink too, thinking vaguely that this might make Helen even a little bit more kindly disposed to her: Cate knew that she needed all the help she could muster.
When she had finished in the kitchen, she made herself a pot of tea and took it back into the other room, where she settled down on the sofa to read. An hour or so later, having tired of her book, she rummaged through Helen’s video collection, and decided to watch The Third Man. When it was over, she had something more to eat. Had it not been for the rain which was now steadily falling, she would have gone for a walk; but instead she sat down on the sofa again, and picked up her book. Immediately, an irresistible sleepiness came over her. She took off her shoes, put a cushion under her head, and within moments she was in a deep sleep, from which she was awoken some hours later by the sound of the phone ringing.
‘It’s me.’ When Cate’s family called each other up on the phone, they never identified themselves by any other means than this phrase, and the recipient of the call was never confused or baffled, for even a moment, as to which member of the family was speaking to them. ‘Oh, hello, Helen.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes, fine, great,’ Cate lied, for she had been hauled out of a dream about the man whose child she was expecting, and felt disoriented now to be listening all of a sudden to Helen talking about what time she expected to be home. She would stop off and get pizzas to save them having to cook and would that be all right, and did she want a Four Seasons or a Pepperoni, and Cate was saying yes, yes, whatever you want, whatever you think best. And then suddenly the conversation was over, and she was sitting there holding a buzzing receiver, and trying not to cry.
The dream had been horrible. She had never dreamt about him before, she even thought about him far less often than she would ever have believed likely in such circumstances. She had, however, dreamt frequently
about the child, and that wasn’t pleasant either: always the same, of going into a nursery and seeing a cot at the far side of the room, with the child sitting in it, in a straight-backed, rather adult posture. When Cate approached it, the child would turn and look at her in a somewhat sceptical way, which always made Cate feel glad that it was too small to be able to talk, because it looked as if it would have plenty to say if it could.
In this new dream, the child’s father had looked pretty sceptical too. They were sitting together in a restaurant to which they had often gone, but which she would never have considered for a moment as a suitable venue for breaking the news to him. But it appeared that that was what she had just done, and he was reacting as she had feared he might, without ever really thinking that he would. In her dream he was surpassing her worst imaginings, denouncing her loudly, so that everyone could hear. The whole place fell silent, the sound of conversation and the clatter of cutlery dying away, and although people pretended not to listen she knew that everyone was agog. How could they fail to hear his loud accusations of selfishness and deceit, and what would they make of her own failure to argue against this? She couldn’t find a word to say in her own defence, although as soon as she awoke, it was all she could do not to start blurting out excuses and explanations to her sister.
Not that she’d needed to explain herself, up until yesterday, for in reality he had been kind to her, and had offered her all the help and support she wanted, which was none; she only intended to go on with her life without him, and she wondered afterwards why she had told him at all, why she had risked trouble. The only reason that she could dredge up was that it wouldn’t have been either fair or decent to keep him ignorant of the situation, and that had been of enormous importance to her, to be able to tell herself that she was acting with fairness, and decency. But now, in the aftermath of her dream, she was no longer so sure about this.
There were two clear points which Cate could not reconcile. One was that she would never admit she had deliberately set out to get pregnant; she’d have sworn that by all she held dear. The other was that when she received the results of her pregnancy test, she’d felt a rush of pure delight. And she’d never have admitted that to anyone, either.
What had happened? Was it just because of the age she had reached? She didn’t think so; nor did she like to. She didn’t like to make a connection between this and her father’s death, but everything was different now because of that. Even while her life had appeared to go on much as before, to her it was utterly changed, in ways she would never have expected. Her initial reactions had surprised her. The grief and anger she felt she could understand, but she couldn’t explain why, on returning to London, she’d flung herself back into life there as if her own life depended on it. One of the first things she did after the funeral was to arrange to have her apartment redecorated in pale colours which gave a greater sense of light and space. She sometimes bought more flowers than she had vases for; she became seriously interested in food and invited people round to dinner more often than ever before. She bought herself some new clothes which, even by her own extravagant standards, were outrageously expensive. But when she was with her friends she could sometimes see that they weren’t at ease with her the way she was, that there was something about all this which didn’t add up. So sometimes she went alone at nights amongst strangers, and she watched the crowds surge in the West End, she craved noise and brightness and colour.
And yet, for all of that, her life had gone sour. The grief was always there. It was as if for years she’d been walking on a tightrope, but had been so skilled and gifted that she hadn’t even known she was doing it. Now she had suddenly swayed, had looked down and seen that she might well fall, and fall a long, long way. Worse, people wouldn’t care, it would be little more than a curious spectacle to them; and some people would be quite happy even to shake the rope.
There’d been a coolness and reserve with some of her colleagues after the funeral, and it was something more than the English being less comfortable with the bereaved than the Irish were. What they were thinking only dawned on her slowly, and it was so horrible that she shrank away, afraid of having to confront it until she was forced to do so; and of course it wasn’t long before that happened.
One day, about three weeks after she returned to work, a journalist who had often done freelance work for the magazine in the past had called in to discuss a supplement which had been commissioned in Cate’s absence. As she looked through the initial work he’d brought along she remarked, ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t in on this from the start, but I was in Ireland,’ and she didn’t know why she added, ‘My father died.’
‘Yes, I know,’ the man replied. ‘I read about it in the papers.’
Cate lifted her head from the material she had been glancing through and stared hard at the man, but he stared back coldly at her, and did not speak. ‘He thinks my father was a terrorist,’ she said to herself. ‘He thinks that he brought his fate upon himself; that he deserves the death he got.’
Afterwards, she couldn’t remember how she’d brought the exchange between them to a close. She remembered sitting at her desk leafing through the pages he’d left with her, not seeing them, and wondering if your heart could literally turn to iron in your chest, for she felt like that was what was happening to her. She didn’t think she could contain her anger, she surprised herself at how calmly she was able to say to a colleague who came into the room, ‘We’ll go through with this project because it was commissioned when I was away, but I don’t want to use him again in future. The quality of his work has gone down; we need fresh talent for the magazine.’ But when her colleague protested (as well she might have done, Cate knew, for there was absolutely nothing wrong with the man’s work), it was then that her temper broke.
‘Did you hear me?’ she said, banging the desk with her fist. ‘I’m in charge of this department. What I say goes, and I say that he won’t work for us again. Is that clear? Is it?’
She could see how the other woman was shaking with fright as she left the room after this unexpected outburst and Cate’s own hands were trembling as, sitting alone now, she covered her eyes. She knew that she was in the wrong. Later, she might apologise to the other woman, but she wouldn’t go back on her word about the journalist. So she was being unfair: well, life was unfair and if he didn’t know that, it was time he found out. Yet even as she recognised and nursed her own meanness of spirit, she was appalled by it. Her anger this afternoon came from the same source that had caused Sally, gentle, good-hearted Sally, to say words Cate could never have imagined coming from her: ‘I hate those people, and I hope somebody kills them.’
When she left the office at the end of that day, she felt inexplicably weary. Usually, she would unthinkingly join the rushing river of commuters which had shocked and disturbed her when she had first arrived in London, but which was so much a part of the city that it now seemed barely worthy of mention. Having become a part of that phenomenon herself, she had been mildly surprised at the strength of Sally’s reaction when she visited her: ‘When they say “rush hour” here, they really do mean it, don’t they?’
But on this particular evening, Cate felt as though she had just arrived in the city, and was unable to cope with it. On Hungerford Bridge, people jostled her and impatiently pushed her out of the way. The tracks sparked blue as a packed train pulled slowly out of Charing Cross. She could see the faces and bodies of people pressed up against the glass of the windows, like bottled fruit. The rumbling weight and proximity of the passing train unnerved her. Abruptly, Cate pulled herself out of the flood of people, into one of the recessed areas of the bridge, where she leaned against the railings and looked down at the green water sliding past. Then she raised her eyes to take in the huge, glittering city: the festoons of white lights swaying along the South Bank, the dark winter sky, the dome of St Paul’s and the lit, clustered buildings all around it: the whole unstoppable engine of the city itself.
In her
apartment, there was a vase of stiff, thornless yellow roses. Before leaving for work that morning she had gently inclined one of the flowers towards her, and stared into the heart of it, into the dense arcs of pure colour. Had there ever been another such rose? Yes indeed: she remembered the fat, soft yellow roses her grandmother had grown, and which still grew: Brian would bring them to Cate’s mother in slack bouquets, the stems sheathed in tinfoil. The roses would grow and fade and grow again; the tree would force out leaves and then buds and then roses, no matter who lived or died, no matter who saw the blossom, or cared for it’s existence. And the city before her, she now realised, was as fragile as the roses, constantly renewing itself, but a finite thing, an illusion. And although she could not remember making any conscious decision there, later, when she thought about why she wanted to have children she would always remember that evening when she stood upon the bridge; and how, on returning to her apartment she found upon the table scattered yellow petals. The only explanation she would ever be able to give was this: ‘I wanted something real.’
She turned and looked at the clock. In no time at all now, Helen would be back.
Chapter Eight
Now all the newspapers from London and Dublin, as well as those from Belfast, were full of articles about what was happening in Northern Ireland. On television, there were reports of marches which ended in violence; of bomb attacks on water and power installations; and endless political wrangling. The children knew all this was important because of the attention given to it not just by their parents, but by almost all the adults they knew; who spent hours talking about what was happening, what might happen, and what ought to happen. The sisters quickly learnt not to interrupt any of these discussions, nor to make a noise while the news was on the radio or television; but they were still too young to understand fully what was happening. There was tremendous delight and excitement at home when Bernadette Devlin was elected to Westminster; but Helen’s, Kate’s and Sally’s lives were still more completely focused on such matters as a spelling test at school, or a trip to the dentist’s, or the prospect of an outing to the cinema in Magherafelt or Ballymena. They discovered in April that year that their cat Tigger was going to have kittens, and they happily watched her swell over the weeks until she was like a furry torpedo waddling around the back yard. They petted her and prepared a new bed for her; pleaded with their mother for the cat to be given extra food and milk; speculated on how many kittens she might have, and what names they would give to them.
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