by Sarah Harte
‘It’s all right,’ Frank said wearily, when I finally got him. ‘I didn’t invest with him. He did my accounts, but I never gave the stupid bollocks any money to invest.’
‘How come you didn’t?’ I asked.
‘I never trusted him,’ Frank said. I thought of all the dinners we’d eaten with Dermot and Tracey, all the laughter and bonhomie and back-slapping and social interaction, clearly founded on mistrust and falsity. ‘But he was good with the banks and I couldn’t get rid of him because he knew where all the bodies were buried.’
And I had no doubt that, over the years, Frank had buried a lot of bodies in his business.
I thought then of the Thornleys’ lavish lifestyle, of the Bentleys and the Aston Martins and the helicopters ferrying guests to glitzy parties in marquees and the bands flown in to play at them and Tracey and her python handbag. ‘What will happen to them, Frank?’
‘I don’t know. But if half of what’s being said is true, he’s not going to be a very popular man around town. They’ll skin him alive.’
If Dermot had stolen money, people would understandably want to see justice done. But others would enjoy seeing him go down in flames. Irish people did not appreciate boasting. It didn’t matter what a big, swinging dick you were, you had to be publicly humble or they would wait in the long grass for you. You had to hide your light under a bushel. Tracey and Dermot had flaunted their success: they had dangled their good looks and good fortune under people’s noses and they would receive little sympathy.
‘There’s no difference between what your mate did and some fella from our flats smashing through a window and grabbing some ciggies except your man did it on a bigger scale and probably to some of his friends and family, which is just lovely,’ Karen spat, ‘so don’t even try to excuse him. Just that your mate Dermot has a white collar and the right accent and went to the right school.’
‘Innocent until proven guilty,’ I said, parroting Shannon.
‘Right, yeah,’ she said, and rang off.
12
Ciara was baking Christmas cakes. I had called in to see her on the way home from school. There had been a number of vans parked in her drive. The work on her house and gardens never stopped: there was always a small army of people renovating, painting, decorating.
I had only been there about twenty minutes and already I wanted to beat a retreat.
‘I got rid of the Mercedes,’ she had confided, as she ushered me in past the new shining Toyota Prius parked proudly on the gravel. ‘I know I only had it a couple of months but four-by-fours have had their day. I was back in London recently, doing some last-minute Christmas shopping.’ Ciara’s Christmas shopping had been done for months. Her presents, every year, were chosen and wrapped, ready to go. She did Santa at the start of September. ‘Nobody drives them in Chelsea any more.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘They practically spit on you. It’s the new zeitgeist,’ she said, ‘with the environment and the recession and all that.’
And all that. I watched her stir the cake mixture.
‘I’m sort of mixing a Nigella recipe with a Rachel Allen one,’ she said, giving me a brilliant, purposeful smile. The rock star’s wife had given her a tip about Christmas cakes. ‘She said to soak the fruit in Marsala instead of in brandy,’ Ciara said.
Of course the rock star’s wife was very public about her support for the environment, I recalled. An image of the gleaming Prius popped into my mind.
‘She’s very sophisticated, actually,’ Ciara confided, ‘but then she’s bound to be with all the travel and exposure to different people.’
Ciara dried her hands on a tea-towel. I could feel her scrutinizing me. She was trying to figure out my look, I decided. And there wasn’t one. I had put away my elaborate frocks and skyscraper heels. They had been consigned to the past. Now I wore jeans and casual tops. I no longer went to charity dos. Such occasions were thin on the ground anyway.
‘What will you do with yourself,’ Karen had asked, ‘now that you’re no longer eating full time for Africa?’
Ciara was dressed in a number of different shades of grey, which made her look more willowy than ever. A pretty flowery apron in the fifties style accentuated her slim middle. There was a strand of hair plastered across her forehead but she looked radiant, like an ad for domesticity. She was so perfect. If she had glided forward on castors I wouldn’t have been surprised.
She sifted flour into the bowl, careful not to spill any around the sides. ‘How are things with you?’ she asked.
There was a note of false, almost aggressive brightness in her voice. She was speaking in exclamation marks, her smile too wide. There was tension in the kitchen among the tea-towels, Christmas cakes and the cup cakes Ciara had baked earlier and decorated with coloured sprinkles. Female friendships were complicated, predicated on all sorts of rules. There were hierarchies, leaders and underdogs. It wasn’t all Hobnobs and kind words.
I had broken the contract between Ciara and me by quietly revolting. I had been the underdog, the compliant sidekick, while Ciara was Top Dog. That was the basis for our relationship. When she looked at me, things about me, deficiencies, made her feel good. She shared tips with me in the knowledge that I’d never really nail the look properly. She was always ten steps ahead.
I gave her unquestioning admiration – punctuated by the occasional stabs of envy – and tried to copy her. She saw her wonderful self reflected back in my adoring eyes. Now I was going my own way and she had picked up on it. Outwardly it was all business as usual but we both knew that the ground had shifted.
‘I’m good,’ I said. And in a way I was. At night I went to bed and slept. I was less jittery. And I did not wake up with wet cheeks. It was a start. And I could sense that I was gaining in confidence.
We were back to the subject of the rock star’s wife. Ciara was now upending dried fruit into the bowl. ‘Remember I mentioned about her son, little Kitson …’
She had snared the rock star’s wife’s son. I had done it myself, actually, used my children as social passports, as a way to net certain people and make them part of my social circle, however tangentially.
‘He’s coming to Jack’s party.’ Ciara tried to play it cool but she couldn’t keep the big grin off her face. ‘Kitson and Jack get on so well. He’s such a sweet little boy. He’s very sensitive, like Jack.’
Jack was a pleasant little blond-haired boy with a blank face who hid his light behind a bushel, if his cerebral talents and artistic bent were as marked as his mother said they were.
‘But then she’s such a lovely person. We agree, I think, on the importance of a down-to-earth approach when you’re raising children.’
Ciara was so grounded – with her blow-dries and her colonic irrigation and her maternity nurses and her yoga and her diets.
‘Speaking of not being grounded,’ she said, puckering her lips, ‘can you believe the facts that are coming out about Dermot Thornley?’ She tutted.
‘It’s not great,’ I said.
‘It was on the news this morning that the Fraud Squad are involved.’
She’d said it in a supercilious way that made me want to needle her. ‘What does your father think of it all?’ I asked her. She stopped stirring the fruit into the cake mixture. ‘He must have an interesting perspective as a garda.’
There was the fraction of a pause as her eyes slid away. The smile had congealed on her face. ‘I didn’t really discuss it with him,’ she said, and resumed stirring.
The silence bristled with things unsaid.
When she looked up again she said, ‘I know he was Frank’s accountant.’
‘Yes,’ I said. She was getting no information from me.
Another silence grew.
Then Ciara said, ‘The whole thing is so ugly. I wonder if Tracey was in on it.’ She spooned the batter into foil-lined tins and surveyed her handiwork.
‘She wasn’t,’ I said tersely.
‘Oh?’ she said, her neat head cocked.
‘Shannon says Tracey’s completely floored by what’s happened.’
Ciara looked unconvinced.
‘She also said that Tracey’s doped up to the gills just to help her cope. That it’s like she’s woken up in the middle of a nightmare.’
Ciara raised her eyebrows sceptically and I felt like smacking her.
She sighed. ‘It’s all such a mess at the moment,’ she said. ‘Will had a very funny joke the other day, a little bit naughty.’
‘Naughty’. She hadn’t used that word when she was growing up. Like me, she had adopted a new accent and a new vocabulary to go with it.
‘What’s the difference between Ireland and Iceland?’ She paused briefly. ‘About six months and one letter,’ she said, putting her fingertips over her lips in a faux-penitential pose and giving a merry laugh. Was she totally oblivious to other people’s feelings?
Ciara was so competitive that even now, when many of the people we knew well were in meltdown, she was enjoying a moment of Schadenfreude. ‘Messud’s has shut down,’ she said suddenly. Messud’s was a Michelin-starred restaurant that Will and she loved. ‘It’s very sad.’ She widened her blue eyes. ‘It makes you thankful for what you’ve got.’ She positioned a rogue strand of hair behind her ear. ‘We’ve been fortunate in that Will was very cautious about his investments.’
Frank would be sorry to hear that. I also thought that Ciara was beginning to sound more and more like her husband.
‘He invested a certain amount in MM but nothing significant. Ultan Mohally was pretty persuasive, I gather, but Will had the good sense to resist when he came back looking for us to invest more money.’
Frank had said that Ultan Mohally was a deal-maker rather than somebody who used his own money. ‘That’s the way it was until a couple of years ago,’ Maeve had later told me, groaning. She said Ultan was leveraged up to his eyeballs. ‘I think it just got to the point where he couldn’t resist. They were buying properties so fast and flipping them and making so much goddam money he wanted a piece of the action.’ Now Ultan was making cuts in the firm. ‘His partners are in a rage with him because they’re saying it was he who drove most of the big deals that resulted in them being so highly leveraged. Not that those snivelling turncoats weren’t delighted with him when times were good. They thought he could walk on water.’
Ultan was into Paul Hogan’s bank for a billion.
Ciara’s daughter Camilla had been doing some homework in the corner at the circular Saarinen table. She got up and announced that she’d finished. ‘Good girl. Go and do your piano practice,’ Ciara instructed her. ‘Forty-five minutes – put the egg-timer.’
Ciara piped classical music through the rooms her children played in. She fired mental maths at them. She played French tapes in the car. ‘They’re like sponges,’ she had said once. ‘It’s a shame not to take advantage of that.’
Camilla heaved her shoulders and let out a dramatic sigh. ‘I did thirty minutes this morning, Mum. And I had theory today. Pleeeease, Mum,’ she begged, jigging up and down.
Ciara put on a disappointed face. ‘Camilla, when you’re on grade five that’s what’s expected. You know that. I’m not willing to discuss it.’
Camilla slouched off. A minute later strains of music were wafting in our direction.
‘She’s very annoyed,’ Ciara confided, ‘that she didn’t get a main role in the Christmas play.’ She gave a tight smile. ‘She’s got a part but with no singing. It’s very galling. I mean, I know you shouldn’t say it about your own but she’s very musical. I hate it when things are unfair. It’s the unfairness that kills you. I wouldn’t mind but I just think it’s very hard on her. I’ve had some issues with the teacher in question.’ She rolled her eyes as if it was no big deal but I knew full well she’d probably considered taking a contract out on the music teacher’s life.
‘We’re going skiing in January,’ she said brightly. ‘I’m really looking forward to it. We’ve just finalized the details.’ She said they were hoping to meet up with the rock star and his wife – they would be in Zermatt at the same time. But I felt sure there wasn’t a chance of that happening. Ciara opened the oven door, popped the cake tins in and turned to smile at me triumphantly. ‘We’re also going to drive over the border to France and have a look around. It’s a great time to snap up something,’ she said. ‘Lots of Brits and Irish are being forced to sell.’
I’d go home soon, I thought. I had nothing to say to Ciara. Our friendship had run its course. We’d never been what you could have called intimate. Or it had been a false sort of intimacy. I could see that now. You could never get beyond a certain point with her. It was like trying to penetrate a fortress. I had no knowledge of her interior life. She was beautiful and stylish. She had flair and panache. She knew how to dress and how to make her life look like something out of a magazine. But she was all style and no substance. She was restless with new enthusiasms, constantly shifting her paintings around her house, mastering new hobbies, then moving on. She mastered people too, made them hers, before her vaulting social ambition propelled her to set her sights higher.
I knew deep down that at the core of her perfectionism lay a lack of confidence. She was searching for social validation. And I wasn’t interested any more. I no longer needed her approval. I did not want to copy her. And at that moment I realized, with a mixture of sadness and surprise, I didn’t even want to listen to her.
Frank was outside poking around when I got home. It was nearly dark. He was hunched over what appeared to be a drain. He’d stopped coming into the house unannounced. I’d had to lay down some ground rules.
It turned out that he was cleaning the drains. It took a lot not to laugh: Frank – who wouldn’t have changed a light bulb when he was living with me if I’d got down on bended knee, who got workmen in to do everything – was now cleaning the drains. Was it an eagerness to please, a desire to be near his wife and children? The children, who became mutinous and mute when their father was around so that I had usually ended up rescuing the conversation in spite of myself. I didn’t know.
There was a silence now, as if Frank were unsure what to say next.
I broke it. ‘Any word from Dermot Thornley?’
‘Zip,’ Frank said, his face darkening. ‘He’s not taking my calls. The whole thing is a huge pain in the arse. Not what I need right now. The fucking Fraud Squad will have been all over my files. Anyway, at least the stupid bollocks doesn’t have my money.’ He looked gloomy. ‘I’d heard rumours about him, you know. I asked him. And he looked me straight in the eye and told me it was all complete bull.’ He sighed. ‘You never know who to trust, do you?’
I gave him a hard look. ‘No,’ I said shortly, so that he reddened.
There was an awkward pause, which I sort of enjoyed. Then he asked, ‘You touch base with Tracey?’
I shook my head. ‘I didn’t want her to think I was ringing because of you. I also don’t want to be rubbernecking. Shannon’s in contact, I think. I’ll text her in a while when the dust settles a bit.’
‘God love her,’ Frank said. In his own deeply flawed way, he was fundamentally decent. ‘The planning decision is out next week,’ he said. There was doubt in his eyes.
‘There’s nothing you can do now,’ I said. ‘What’s done is done.’
He nodded, but he still seemed uncertain. ‘You’re looking very –’
‘Lined,’ I butted in.
He shook his head. ‘You look well, Anita.’
My expression was pinched, I knew. Frank Lawlor could stick his banter and his charm and his charisma ten feet up his arse, I thought, glaring at him.
He faltered. Then he said, ‘You’ve stopped shooting all that shit into your face.’
I raised a shoulder and let it drop. When I spoke my tone was dismissive, discouraging. ‘For the moment.’ I pursed my lip
s.
‘The more casual look suits you,’ he said, his expression hovering between nervousness and something I couldn’t place. He ploughed on: ‘The jeans and that …’
I bit back a smile. Frank the fashion adviser. He had a cheek to be trying to compliment me but it was funny all the same. And while I felt a pinprick of pleasure at the remark I didn’t puff up as I would have done before. Compliments were no longer my life blood. ‘I’d better go,’ I said, beginning to move towards the house. ‘Dylan broke up with the girlfriend,’ I told him, turning back briefly.
Biba had dumped him. ‘It’s not you, it’s me,’ she had said, according to Dylan. ‘I need some space.’
My son had looked helpless and bewildered. Part of me had done a jig of delight, the other part had wanted to storm over there and rip her head off for hurting my boy.
He had also lost his job. In a manner of speaking. ‘Like, they asked for people to come forward for voluntary redundancy and I decided not to, so they basically pushed me off the cliff.’
It was a classic Dylan performance. He moved out of home and took on the expense of a flat and then, forgoing the chance of voluntary redundancy, ended up getting canned. So the prodigal son had come back. Now he was spending his time in the coach house, his Heartbreak Hotel, strumming his guitar and listening to Tom Waits-style music, between making raids on the fridge and strewing his dirty laundry on the floor.
‘What’s your plan?’ I’d asked him, pushing the button to raise the blinds in his room. I was ankle deep in pizza boxes and Coke cans. My foot actually sank into a sodden bowl of breakfast cereal. There were life forms proliferating in the room, I was sure, whole eco-systems. ‘Jesus, Dylan.’
The smell was fetid – of socks, sweat, and boy things I didn’t want to analyse. It was more of a lair than a room. Dylan was panned out on the bed. He opened his eyes to a slit, managing to make it look like a major feat. I’d toed him on the chest.
‘Mu-uuum.’
I’d torn his quilt off.