by Sarah Harte
I watched Jamie push a pair of sunglasses back into his hair. He had chiselled cheekbones, a deep tan and a vivid purple shirt. He was a golden boy and it seemed he always had been. He’d been brilliant at rugby, captaining the Senior Cup team in his rugby-obsessed school, which in certain circles guaranteed him a free pass for life. When his team had won the Holy Grail that was the Senior Cup his mother had hired a suite in the Four Seasons where the team, high on their victory, had got higher on champagne.
I had met Jamie the other day. He slowed down his antique sports car – a beautiful old Aston Martin that I presumed had been supplied by his old man. Ted Deegan collected cars. Jamie had told me about meeting Ella in New York. They’d gone for a drink in some bar in TriBeCa where, according to Dylan, Jamie – or his family – had a big one-storey loft apartment. It had been ‘cool’ to see her, he’d said, running his hand through his hair. No, Christopher hadn’t been with her. She’d seemed in good form. He hadn’t said anything about Frank and me splitting, I knew. Dylan had told me he had warned him to say nothing.
He was, he’d said, dividing his time between Dublin and New York where he was trying to get another nightclub established. His patter was steady and he was charming, full of beguiling bonhomie, but if you tuned into what he was saying it didn’t add up to much.
Regardless, people orbited around Jamie like planets around the sun. Dylan was one of those planets. I could see why Jamie was keen on the relationship: he got both Dylan’s unqualified admiration and his cash as Dylan seemed to be at Jamie’s nightclub on an almost constant basis. What Dylan got out of the relationship I wasn’t sure. He had always been biddable, even as a child. If somebody he admired had told him to jump off a cliff, he would have done it with a good-natured dopey smile.
Jamie sat down at a low table at the far end of the VIP section on which there were buckets of champagne. Dylan had followed him and was now telling him a story. Jamie rewarded him with the slow, lazy smile that almost certainly drove girls wild. I had a pang then for the lolloping, cheerful, affectionate puppy that was my son.
Dylan was now accepting delivery of two more champagne buckets. The knot of people swarming around him held out their glasses. Drinks had arrived all night, seemingly unordered, ferried to their table by a beautiful Slavic girl with a wide mouth and a hanky for a dress.
‘Who’s paying for all of this?’ I asked my sister.
‘You are,’ retorted Karen. ‘He likes to live in the fast lane like his mammy and daddy.’
Frank was almost certainly bankrolling some of it. He would have given Dylan money for his birthday. Dylan had good prospects but he was very junior in the stockbroking firm, no more than a bag carrier so far. Biba and he had gone to visit Jamie in New York for a weekend and stayed in a trendy hotel in the Meat Packing District. There had been a holiday to Ibiza. And there seemed to be endless socializing, much of it involving driving around in fast cars swigging champagne. Or hanging around in Jamie’s penthouse in the Docklands doing God knew what.
‘You should see Jamie’s pad, Mum,’ Dylan had told me one day. ‘It rocks. It’s all glass and has this totally amazing view of the docks. His mum got a top interior architect from London to do it. The roof slides back so that you can see the sky. Plus he copied the fire out of a James Bond movie.’
Now Dylan caught me looking at him and gave me the thumbs-up. These kids were boomtime children, with their perfectly straight and whitened teeth. They were confident in restaurants and five-star hotels in a way that we, their parents, had never been. You could argue that nothing really changed, that drugs might come in and out of fashion but the mating rituals were basically the same as they had been in our day, that hair and clothes were better, but only through better nutrition and access to global influences. From birth these young people had known nothing but good times and a world of full employment. They had a sense of entitlement and the expectation that everything would go their way. But times were changing. The financial stormclouds that were gathering showed no sign of blowing away.
I was worried about how my son would fare. Underneath the quick smile, the easy patter, I knew he was drifting. Dylan was no more suited to being a stockbroker than Frank was to being a ballet dancer. I should have been more vocal. I should have helped my son to express the artistic talent his teachers had talked about. And to find real confidence, I thought, watching him being air-kissed by a pretty raven-haired girl with a wild-eyed expression that signalled she had taken something stronger than booze.
Frank was darting nervous looks in our direction from the other side of the room. I had converged on him and Little Miss Big Knockers as I was going to the loo. They were just arriving. We had stared at each other, speechless for a few seconds.
‘Frank,’ I had managed eventually.
‘Anita,’ he said, as if he’d seen a ghost.
It was a holy miracle. For the first time in his life Frank Lawlor was dumbstruck.
‘That’s me,’ I’d said, nailing a horrible smile to my face, ‘the woman you were married to for all those years.’ A lump had formed in my throat. I was not good at being nasty. I was a born people-pleaser programmed to be nice, to seek approval, to burble sweetly.
So many times I had rehearsed this scene in my head, where I was majestic and menacing and beautiful in an older, slightly windswept way. Where I, Anita Lawlor, née Butler, took control of the scene. I had obsessed over this woman, wondering what she wore, what she ate, if she’d gone to college. I had thought of doorstepping her at work, of confronting her or ringing her parents.
Now I had stood stock still and reddened. I’d forced myself to swivel my gaze to her. ‘Yes, that’s right,’ I said, hearing the tremor in my voice. ‘I’m the woman from the clinic. It was my husband you stole.’
Heat had come into Fiona Keane’s round cheeks but she was not quelled. Feeling damp under the arms I tried to stare her down but she had met my eye. She’d led Frank away like a guilty pet pig. I’d wanted to shout after her, ‘And by the way labour is every bit as bad as they say.’
I had my back to them now. Karen threw poisonous looks at them every now and then. ‘Hark at love’s young dream,’ she said. ‘It was brazen of your woman to come. The little trollop.’
‘Brazen’ was a good word for her. Fiona Keane did not make you feel good about young women. She made you think of a generation of self-absorbed, hard, ambitious girls, who would do anything to get ahead. But it was not good to think like that. Down that route lay Maureen and her bitter-lemon thinking. There were lots of lovely young women like Ella who were not unsisterly and predatory.
That said, I knew that Fiona Keane had insisted on coming. Frank would not have wanted to provoke Dylan by bringing her. Nor would he have wanted to hurt me more. He was a selfish, unfaithful man but he was not unkind.
‘I’d say Frank’s shitting himself that I’ll go over there and throw him a few digs,’ Karen said. ‘He’s been looking at us a lot.’
‘The irony,’ I said, slugging back my drink. ‘He was never so attentive when we were together.’
‘Can you believe Frank is slipping the mickey to a chubby bird?’ Karen remarked.
‘Karen.’
‘Sorry,’ she said, looking at me apologetically, ‘but she’s not the best-looking.’
‘She’s pretty,’ I retorted.
‘Not a patch on you with her big head of Fanta hair.’
Karen was loyal.
‘She’s young enough to be my daughter.’ Fiona Keane was twenty-five. ‘She’s got a career and a womb that will produce babies.’
Karen snorted. ‘She has Frank tricked out like God knows what,’ she said. ‘He looks sinister in that flowery shirt. Like a child abuser or something.’
Frank’s shirt was a mistake. It would have suited somebody of Dylan’s age. His rotund middle-aged body was not designed for that sort of gear – it made him look paunchier and it wa
s pinching his neck. His fitness regime seemed to have slipped.
She cupped her hands to her mouth. ‘Frank! The oldest swinger in town called and he wants his shirt back.’
A striking young couple at the table next to us eyed us doubtfully.
‘Frank! A village has lost its idiot.’
‘Stop it, Karen,’ I said, batting her arm.
‘Well, she’s not showing yet,’ Karen said.
She was like a reporter on the front line of a battle, relaying bits of intelligence back to HQ.
‘She’s only about twelve weeks. They were seeing each other on and off for about six months when she got pregnant.’
‘That’s some going.’
‘Frank said she was on the pill.’
‘She was on her hole.’ Karen jiggled the ice in her glass. ‘No woman ever gets pregnant without meaning to.’
‘Do you really think that?’
‘Not when they’ve only been “going out” for six months.’
Frank had claimed he’d broken it off with her. And then one night she’d turned up in the Shelbourne bar. A couple of bottles of Moët later he’d gone back to her place where, ‘in the elegant surroundings’, a sperm had met an egg.
‘Don’t allow yourself to feel sentimental,’ Karen advised. ‘Frank did the dirt on you and got a girl not much older than your son up the pole. Keep that to the forefront of your mind. You’re in the same boat as Jerry Hall. Take a leaf out of her book and get on with things. You didn’t see her moping around the place. She got out there and looked fabulous.’
‘I don’t feel like Jerry Hall,’ I said, feeling exhausted by the thought.
‘Think of Diana sitting in front of the Taj Mahal looking lonely and miserable. Remember how things took off for her when she got shot of His Royal Jug Ears.’
‘Look how it ended for her.’
‘You were stone mad about Di,’ Karen said, not willing to concede the point.
I had been.
‘You got the Di haircut and you even tried to tilt your head down and look up from beneath your lashes in that shy Di way,’ she said.
‘Yeah,’ I said, dredging up a half-smile. ‘You said I looked like somebody who waved at planes.’ God, I was achingly sad. I wondered if Frank was remembering, as I was, the night we had met in the nightclub on Leeson Street where I’d worked as a hostess. I had a mental picture of a much slimmer Frank, his hair still dark, standing by the bar, a bucket of overpriced wine in front of him, illuminated by ultraviolet light. He had asked me straight out. There had been no messing, no fear that he’d get knocked back. His self-belief had shone like a beacon in those dark days when Irish people were used to being poor and accepting second best. His confidence that he was going to go out there and take the world by storm had been attractive. And the fact that he hadn’t been tanked up. Other fellas would sidle up to you at last orders and ask you what you were having, glassy-eyed or trying to be the last one left with you when everyone else was gone. Then they’d sort of fall on you. Frank, in his shiny suit, had asked me out for dinner. We’d gone to a restaurant on Dame Street called Nico’s. It was my first time eating pasta. The waiter had had to come out and show me how to twist it around my fork. I had thought Frank was so sophisticated.
He’d lived in a flat in Rathmines with a couple of fellas from Offaly. Eamon his solicitor had been one of the gang. The sink was full of dishes. There was always the smell of a fry in the place. And the drinking was savage. Some of the lads ended up working for Frank – they hadn’t progressed due to the boozing. I didn’t sleep with him for ages. He’d asked me to marry him after three weeks and I’d accused him of just trying to get the leg over.
I pretended to be casual but I was stone mad about him. And he loved me. So how did you go from burning love and desire to something less intense and then to something so far in the opposite direction so that you could do what Frank had done? Maybe thousands of failings, omissions and unkindnesses carried you away from each other so that other people, like Fiona Keane, got a chance to come between you.
‘He wanted her to have an abortion.’
‘I’m very surprised at that,’ Karen said, her lips thinning with distaste. ‘I thought Frankie boy, being a devoted foot soldier of the Vatican, was against that sort of thing.’
Like me, Karen was an atheist. We got it from Da, I think. He didn’t mind Ma going down to the church and doing her thing but he was a great devotee of James Connolly and Marx and the fella who got offed with the ice pick so he hadn’t been too gone on religion. ‘De opium of de people,’ he’d say, after a few bevvies when he started to get expansive.
‘Well, Frank told her he could arrange an abortion for her,’ I said.
‘Which makes him a fucking hypocrite into the bargain,’ she said, her lip curling. She wagged a finger. ‘I remember him full well lecturing me on how abortion was murder at the time of the X Case.’
I said nothing. I didn’t want to get into a debate – Karen was very militant about a woman’s right to choose. In the X Case a little girl had become pregnant when she was raped by her neighbour; Karen had patrolled the streets campaigning pro-choice. She said that people had thrown things at her on O’Connell Street and shouted, ‘Baby-killer!’ Karen, of course, had given back as good as she got – ‘Say that closer to my face, you inbred cross-eyed fuck’ – and some of her fellow campaigners had felt obliged to ask her to rein it in.
My shoulders sagged. ‘It shows in a way that Frank didn’t really want to be with her.’
‘No, he just wanted to bone her without any consequences,’ Karen said, her face hard.
‘He gave her the run-around, which was why she came to the house with the letter. It showed he wasn’t committed to her.’
‘Which is just lovely behaviour,’ Karen said sarcastically. ‘Let’s not give him a clap on the back for that.’
‘It shows,’ I persisted, ‘that he was dragging his feet about the whole thing.’
‘There’s no point in thinking like that now,’ Karen said briskly. ‘That sort of logic is self-defeating.’
‘I almost hope he loves her,’ I said, after a minute or two. ‘Otherwise it all seems so pathetic.’
Karen made one of her scoffing noises. ‘He doesn’t love her. He looks like a trapped animal. I’d say she hunted him down. Zoned in on him in a weak moment and told him he was the fucking devil and all while opening her legs. He doesn’t know what hit him. About to be put on diaper duty at the age of fifty.’
‘Frank didn’t change nappies for Ella and Dylan.’
Karen snorted. ‘This one won’t stand for that. One look at her face would tell you so. He doesn’t know what’s hit him. And serve him right,’ she said, with venom. ‘Don’t you dare go feeling sorry for him or I’ll swing for you.’
The wine had started to work on me and I was feeling maudlin. ‘I was prepared to forgive him, you know,’ I said, suddenly tearful. Equal parts of love and fear had driven the decision.
‘You’d have said you forgave him but you’d have grown to hate him. And what the hell would you have done with your woman and the baby?’
A rogue tear ran down my face.
She biffed my arm. ‘Come on now.’
‘Let’s have another drink,’ I said, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand.
Karen sprang up out of her seat and, extending her crossed hands, went to pull me up. ‘Come on, chicken, we’re outta here.’
I took the Rangy. It had been in a car park on St Stephen’s Green. Karen never said not to drive. I suppose it hadn’t entered her head that I could be so stupid, so reckless. Driving over the limit had become a habit. When I thought of it later I found it hard to believe that I had been so selfish. My thinking was that it would take less than five minutes to get home.
I drove down Lower Baggot Street. It had begun to rain, driving down in sheets, splashing off t
he windscreen. The wipers struggled to meet the challenge, comedic in its intensity. I turned on the radio to hear that earlier in the day people had turned back on the M50, unable to continue driving into the city such was the deluge. The emergency services had been called. It was thought that motorists had checked into hotels.
Frank and Little Miss Big Knockers had left just before us.
‘Slinking off to your lair,’ Karen had said, quite audibly, as Fiona Keane passed us, her shoulders thrown back defiantly. ‘She’s an able dealer,’ Karen said to me. ‘I’ve met a lot of Kerry people in my time, and while I’d grant you they’re very clever, they’re mad for money. Those Kerry people would take the eye out of your head. They’re cute as the bees.’
‘She’s from Limerick,’ I’d said.
‘Those Limerick people would take the eye out of your head,’ she’d shot back, without missing a beat. ‘Give all your relatives down in Stab City my regards,’ she’d shouted after Fiona Keane.
Frank had loitered next to us briefly, as if he was planning to say something. Karen had eyeballed him like an attack dog so he had settled for a limp wave.
‘Even his hand looks guilty,’ Karen had remarked, with a derisive snort. She’d yelled after him, ‘Congratulations, Frank, on having your own grandchildren.’
I started. Jesus. There was a bang. My heart accelerated as I corrected the wheel. The Rangy had migrated to the left. Dammit, I thought, feeling nauseous. I’d clipped a parked Fiesta. I hadn’t seen it. It was fine. I’d nudged its wing mirror. No harm done. Nearly home.
There had been no scenes between Dylan and Frank.
When we were leaving I’d hugged Dylan for longer than was necessary. He had craned his head back and asked me if I was okay. ‘I’m fine, pet,’ I’d said, smiling brightly. I was trying hard not to upset him, jumping out of bed if I heard him coming into the house, trying not to be needy, so that he wouldn’t blame his father more and feel burdened by me. ‘You were brilliant with your dad.’