by Claire Allan
Realising the futility of my actions, I shrugged my shoulders thentold her to go ahead. The shop was a mere two minutes away. Even if hestopped to talk to someone, or spent a while choosing his treat ofchoice, he should be back within five minutes. Or we could always heatup his dinner in the microwave.
So three plates filled, and his left sitting on the worktop, we wentinto the living room, sat on the floor and tucked in.
My plate was empty and my wineglass half done when I looked at theclock and realised ten minutes had passed and he still wasn’t back. Ofcourse, Jules being Jules, she assured me he was a big boy and was justfine and that I needed to calm down.
And I did calm down, for all of about another ten minutes and then,when he still wasn’t home, I started to feel a little twitchy. It’snot that I needed to know his whereabouts every second of every day,or that it bothered me that he might be out somewhere – it was justunusual for him not to tell me if he was going out for anything morethan five minutes. Unlike a lot of men, Paddy was a text addict – andmessaged me frequently throughout the day. I was used to getting a running commentary of what he was doing. I tried to think back to the last time I had heard from him that day. I had texted him when we left The Dressing Room to tell him we were going to the pub and had invited him to join us if he had felt up to it. He had texted back to say he was feeling a bit tired and was just going to take it easy. That had been maybe three hours before and I hadn’t heard anything since.
“This really isn’t like him,” I said to Jules.
“Ooooh,” she giggled drunkenly. “Maybe he has cold feet and has run off!”
Which was precisely the very worst thing she could say to a woman who had previous experience of a man getting cold feet and running off. She realised almost as soon as the words were out of her mouth that she had said the wrong thing. It was probably the expression of sheer horror on my face which gave it away.
“Oh Jesus, Erin.I didn’t mean that. I was joking. I wasn’t even thinking. It was stupid of me to say . . .”
But while she talked my mind ran through the scenario that after all my worrying, all we had been through, Paddy could and might still walk away. That cancer was not the only thing I had no real control over. My mind raced – with thoughts of calling off the wedding, of people laughing. To lose a husband once was unlucky, to lose one a second time – well, that was nothing short of humiliating. And, Jesus, the article would be in the magazine about the great big jilting and how this time was different.
“You’re not a bit funny,” I said to Jules which was pretty calm considering inside my head was screaming. “He wouldn’t do that,” I said, my brain internally finishing that sentence with a ‘would he?’
“No. No, he wouldn’t,” Jules said as I rifled in my bag for my mobile just in case there was a message I had missed. No, there was nothing. So I hit the call button to dial his number, hoping that this was just one of those things and the drink and wedding paranoia was sending me over the edge.
For a moment I breathed a weird, stilted, sigh of relief when I heard his phone ring in the house. He never went anywhere without his phone. He certainly wouldn’t run off without his phone. Phew! But the phew was replaced with a strange uneasy feeling – if he wasn’t here but his phone was and he was gone too long to only have nipped out to the shop, then where on earth was he?
I followed the sound of his ringing phone upstairs. It was coming from our bedroom. Maybe Paddy was here after all. He was probably asleep and just hadn’t heard us when we came in. That man could sleep through anything. Well, almost anything. The persistent ringing of his phone would normally wake him. He hated to think he would miss out on any craic at all.
I walked into the room and sure enough he was in bed. “Paddy!” I called. “Wake up! You’ve missed your dinner!” My entire being was flooded with relief that he was here and hadn’t run off – so flooded with relief that I climbed into bed and cuddled up beside him. “C’mon, sleepy head! Wake up.”
But Paddy didn’t wake up.
Jules called the ambulance. I stayed with Paddy, trying to rouse him. He looked so pale – sheet-white like a mannequin of himself. But he was breathing. It was shallow and rasping in places but it was breathing and I sat beside him, rubbing his hand, asking him to wake up – pleading with him to jump awake and shout ‘surprise’ and all the while pleading with every deity I could think of to make sure he kept breathing. Just keep breathing – just one more. Just stay with me.
“You’re not getting away that easy,” I said. “You’re not leaving me.” I wept, my head on his chest, feeling for that gentle rise and fall, listening to the thudding of his heart, pleading with it to keep going. This was not in the plan. He was getting better. Chemo was nearly done. He’d had the damn cancer cut out. This was not what we had bargained for.
Jules walked into the room, her face almost as sheet-white as Paddy’s.
“Is he . . . ?”
“No,” I said, not lifting my head from his chest. “No. He’s here. You’re here, aren’t you?” I stroked his arm, feeling his warm skin against mine and praying with every fibre of my body that this would not be the last time I felt his warm skin against mine.
“They’ll be here soon. What’s wrong with him, Erin?”
I didn’t shake my head. I didn’t shrug my shoulders. I was afraid to move, even for a moment. “I don’t know,” I said, “I just don’t know.”
Chapter twenty-three
Kitty
When I left work I had a smile on my face. That’s not to say my life had become any less complicated. My mother was still looming large, having left a message on my phone to say she would call in to the shop for a look around at the start of the following week. The manner in which she spoke was as if she was making an appointment with the dentist – not trying to build any bridges of any sort. Mark had been texting, infrequently. His message was less staid – he wanted to meet. We needed to talk, he said, but I didn’t know what to say. And I wasn’t ready to have him trample all over my heart again – not face to face anyway.
“Honestly? I don’t think you are strong enough,” James had said softly as we talked about it the night before. He had taken to calling over every evening and he had listened to me try and make sense of it all. I knew he was right. I wasn’t ready to hear the gory details. I didn’t want to hear how some other woman made him happy – how he was bored with me and us and what we stood for and had to look elsewhere.
I hadn’t told Rose about James’ visits. Nor had I told Ivy. I imagined neither of them would take the news well. And I didn’t know how I felt about it, if I was honest with myself. He was a good shoulder to cry on – a nice solid set of shoulders and it was nice to have him hug me – for him to tell me that Iwas special, that Mark didn’t know what he was missing. I suppose that small part of my self-confidence which had not been left bruised and batteredsuspected he might have had feelings for me. As the nights had gone on, I could see a certain look in his eye. But I was so confused and until I wasn’t confused any more I didn’t want to talk to anyone about it. Did I have feelings for James? It was a hard one to answer. I had known him for so long. I had been in love with Mark for so long. There was a chance I was still in love with Mark – more than a chance really – you don’t just switch that off. You can’t just switch that off – no matter how much you may want to.
But I had started to look forward to his visits. He listened to me talk about whatever I wished and smiled and nodded in all the right places. He had even cooked me dinner the previous night, while I sat on the sofa chatting to him over the kitchen island. I made a mental note to tell him about Erin – how she had asked me to be a part of her feature for Northern People – and I would tell him how she and Paddy had overcome so much to get where they were.
If it was me, I would have fallen apart. Sure hadn’t I fallen to pieces over the last few weeks and wasn’t I just about starting to pull myself together, slowly and not so steadily now? But Erin and Paddy, they
had grabbed the world by the balls (excuse the pun) and were just getting on with things.
That in itself made me just as determined to get on with things – to put a smile on my face despite what the world was throwing at me – returning mothers, errant husbands and all.
I had never noticed James’ smile before. That’s not to say I hadn’t seen him smile, but I’d never had much cause to pay attention to the gentle way in which it transformed his face. I noticed it that night, sat on the decking, sipping wine. He was smiling as I told him about Erin and her sister and their infectious laughter. I had told him how Erin’s love for Paddy showed through brightly and he had grinned.
“That’s what I dream of,” he said.
“What?”
“You know, that happy-ever-after where you know that the person you are with will always be there and really will be that for-better-for-worse person you always wanted to be with.”
I knew exactly what he meant. It was exactly the kind of relationship I had thought I’d had with my husband – you know, the man who had actually promised to love me for better for worse.
Before we had married we had actually had that discussion one day while painting the living room of this very house.
“If all my teeth fell out and I could only eat soup and kissed like an old man?” he had asked.
“I’ll still love you,” I said, slapping magnolia paint onto the walls.
“Your turn,” he said.
“Okay . . . what about if I put on seven stone and my boobs touched my knees when I sat down?”
“Oh baby!” he laughed. “I’d still love you. Now, how about if I was one of those people who had a horrible accident, fell into a coma and when I woke up spoke with a funny accent, like Jamaican or something?”
“I’d still love you, man,” I said in the worst Jamaican accent possible. “What about if I went on the XFactor and made a total eejit of myself, you know, like one of those eejits that only goes on it for the craic – like Wagner or Jedward – and the whole world was laughing at me?”
“I’d still love you. If I developed terrible flatulence and it always smelled like cabbage?”
Laughing, I stopped what I was doing. “Mark, my darling, you already have that condition and, yes, I still love you. I’ll always love you.”
“For better for worse?”
“Yep.”
“For richer for poorer?”
“Well, I’d prefer the richer part,” I said, “but if we have to do poorer we’ll manage.”
“In sickness and in health?”
“Again, let’s hope for the health bit more, but you betcha.”
“And all that other stuff that I’ve not learned yet but will absolutely learn in time for the big ceremony so that you don’t divorce me before we are even married?”
“Absolutely,” I said and we abandoned the painting for about twenty-four minutes while we were otherwise engaged.
Looking at James now, how he wanted that, I veered between wanting to tell him that I wanted it too, that I still believed in it, and wanting to tell him that it was all bullshit and no one – not even Paddy and Erin – could make those promises to each other knowing that those feelings wouldn’t ever change. Things do change.
I took a long drink from my wineglass. “We all want a happy ending,” I said sadly. “It just doesn’t always work out that way.”
“It’s not over till it’s over,” he said. “Everything happens for a reason.”
“You sound like Rose. Ever the optimist.”
“I do feel bright about the future,” he said, drinking from his bottle of beer. “And I feel bright about yours too.”
James and I didn’t really talk about Mark. They hadn’t been in touch, he said. He said he didn’t really know Mark anymore.
That did shock me, when I thought about it. Those two had been thick as thieves for as long as I had known them. I had always, always assumed that should things go tits up between Mark and me, James would no longer be a fixture in my life. It wouldn’t have bothered me. It’s not like we were particularly close. We were polite to each other. We had a great laugh every now and again – usually under the influence of a few drinks.
At one stage Mark and I had tried to set him up with Cara – but it simply hadn’t worked. It’s not that they didn’t get along – they did, but simply as friends. Cara had told me James just hadn’t seemed interested in her in that way and that had been the end of that.
Cara had asked me earlier that day if I didn’t find it a little strange? That he was calling round, and that he was supporting me so. I told her that of course it was surprising but that it was nice all the same.
“He makes me feel, I don’t know, like it wasn’t my fault.”
“But you know it wasn’t your fault. You don’t need James to tell you that. We are all telling you that. Me, Ivy, Rose, your dad.”
I shook my head and reminded her that no, actually, people weren’t telling me itwasn’t my fault. In fact, Ivy wasn’t telling me anything at all because she was still so enraged that I hadn’t told our mother to frig off to the back of beyond. My dad had just gone into quiet contemplative mode. I figured once he had told me that he knew what I was going through, he was all out of things to say. So when he saw me, he just gave me sad looks and lots of hugs and then went back to sitting and staring into space. Rose had gone a little quiet too – which was probably piggybacking off the fact that Daddy had gone quiet.
So James and his reassurance thatnone of this big old mess was my fault, not even a little bit – well, I was more than happy to listen to him.And I was more than happy to watch him smile.
It was nice how we talked – and it wasn’t all about Mark, or relationships, or failed relationships. We talked in that way you talk to someone when you are just really getting to know them. He admitted that he had cried watching Forrest Gump and I admitted I’d taken against ever watching that film again as it made me such a crying wreck by the time the wee boy at the end writes the letter. We had laughed as we shared memories of our separate misspent youths – the drunken nights in Waterloo Street, the walks home because it was quicker than waiting for a taxi, the cheap but so very tasty fast-food to line your stomach after a skinful. We talked about the places we had visited and the places we hoped to go. We discussed the merits of Deal or No Deal and Come Dine with Me and planned our menus for the latter. And then, when the grief hit me about what had happened, he would listen and soothe me and hold me in his arms until it felt better.
He didn’t try to kiss me. I didn’t try to kiss him. But there was a part of me that wanted to – a part of me that was confused and lonely and needed to feel better about myself. And I knew he wanted to kiss me too. He told me so. “If it were in any way appropriate I would lean across and kiss you right now,” he had said, which left no room for misinterpretation.
I had blushed, felt flustered, a mixture of flattered and scared, and I had offered to top up his drink. When I returned he had pretended everything was normal and I was happy at that stage to play along. But when he left, and I went to bed and tried to sleep there was a big part of me that just couldn’t stop thinking about exactly what it would feel like to have him kiss me.
Rose arrived at work with an extra-large bouquet of ivory roses, tied together with a purple satin ribbon. She had picked up a box of chocolates and had baked some shortbread to offer alongside the Prosecco which she carried in from the car.
“The Jo Malone candles I ordered arrived. I thought we should light a few around the shop, give it a nice glow and a lovely smell,” she said, taking out the Blue Agava and Cacao candles and dotting them around the room. She was on top form – in a super-organised, mega-efficient way which made me feel a little nervous. She was a great worker, but she didn’t normally get right to it. Normally she put the kettle on, made some toast in the kitchen and listened to a wee bit of Ray Darcy before she got started for the day.
“You okay, Rose?” I asked as she bre
athed in the soft scent of the candles and arranged the flowers.
“Perfectly tickety-boo,” she said. “How are you?” She smiled at me but I wasn’t convinced.
“You want a cup of tea?” I asked, making for the stairs to head to our tiny kitchen.
“You know, I’m grand, love,” she said. “I’d rather get organised down here and have everything looking its very best, if that’s okay.”
“But tea? You always have tea.”
“There will be time for tea later,” she said, turning to smile at me again.
I noticed she was wearing a little more make-up than usual – there was a definite shading across her eyelids and if I wasn’t mistaken a sweep of lip gloss across her lips. Come to mention it, her hair looked a little more teased and she had accessorised her uniform with a little more bling than normal.
It was then the penny dropped.Clearly I had been blocking it out as something which I absolutely was not looking forward to at all – but this was the day my mother was coming to look at wedding gowns. Realising this, I wished I had put on an extra slick of lipgloss and had teased my hair a bit more. At that moment, part of me wanted to hug Rose for being thoughtful enough to make sure the shop was looking and smelling its very best. That was, of course, until I realised that she probably wasn’t doing it for my benefit. Even though Mum had left Dad. Even though it had been a very long time ago indeed, there was a part of her that somehow felt she was in competition with the woman who was about to walk back into our lives.
“Mum’s coming today, isn’t she?” I said.
“Oh, is she?” Rose asked, blushing. “I’d forgotten,” she said slowly and not at all convincingly.
“Rose,I know you, you know. All this effort, for my mother. Ivy would go mad at the very notion but thank you. Thank you because she will be taking in every detail.”
“That’s what I’m worried about,” Rose said, and she sat down and put her head in her hands.