The Better Half

by Sarah Harte

  I handed Maureen the box of crackers for her cheese. Her eyes widened a fraction. She did everything by the book, consciously genteel to the last, cutting crusts off sandwiches, covering trays with cloths, adhering to all the little rules and constructs. She didn’t do boxes. She would get over it, though. She had Tracey.

  ‘Brideshead is very zeitgeisty when you think about it,’ I ventured. ‘It heralds the end of an era, the end of an economic class.’

  Maeve shot me a sarky look but otherwise there seemed no great enthusiasm for the discussion. Tracey looked stupefied. In our own ways we were all contending with things. Only Maureen was undented. ‘I like to be transported by a book,’ she said, with a small frown. ‘This didn’t do that for me.’

  She was working up to something.

  ‘I have to say,’ she said, making a little fist, ‘that I couldn’t get the “homosexual” relationship between Sebastian and Charles that you were referring to, Maeve.’

  ‘What a surprise,’ Maeve responded, with a roll of her eyes. She was wearing scarlet shoes. There had been menace in her voice.

  Maureen sank back in the armchair. ‘I understand that Sebastian was a homosexual.’ She tented her fingers. ‘And that Charles and he had a wonderful heart-warming relationship. But it was platonic.’

  ‘Oh, come off it,’ Maeve said, making a sort of snuffle. She tapped her fork against her plate. She was in a filthy mood. She had complained that the bank was spying on them and that Ultan had put a moratorium on shopping. Now that there were huge loans to be paid back, any excessive expenditure would not be tolerated by the bank and could be traced on credit cards. ‘Which means that I have lost the will to live.’ Continuing now, Maeve said, ‘All that eating peaches and talking of gazelles and unicorns and gambolling about with no clothes on – it doesn’t take Miss Marple.’ Then she said, ‘Sebastian and Charles were bum chums.’

  A crumb appeared to lodge in Maureen’s throat. She coughed and spluttered, her chest heaving. ‘Frog in my … throat,’ she managed, her face crimson.

  ‘Pat Maureen on the back, Anita,’ Maeve instructed, looking bored as the coughing fit crescendoed. She began to pick at a mince pie morosely. Then she decided to chip in again. She spoke in an impatient staccato voice: ‘I found the end mawkish and unconvincing. When Lord Marchmain recants. He was a lifelong atheist – I mean, that’s why he ran away from his wife because he was sick of her pious bullshit.’

  ‘Faith is a wonderful thing,’ piped Maureen, who had recovered.

  Maeve oozed sweetened bile. ‘We’ll all have to find faith now that the boom is over and we’re all in deep doo-doo. It won’t be just our Polish cleaning ladies and Filipina nannies going to Mass any longer.’

  Apart from Maureen, Shannon was the only one of us who went to Mass. That was another thing that had surprised her when she’d first moved to Ireland. ‘I thought you guys had such a strong belief.’

  ‘You also thought we listened to traditional Irish music, and were disappointed we didn’t dye the Liffey green for St Patrick’s Day and wore clumps of shamrock and sang rebel songs,’ Maeve had told her acerbically.

  ‘It’s an awful thing to lose your faith,’ Maureen said.

  I held my breath, waiting for Maeve to unleash a shit storm.

  ‘I can’t be sure but I think it was the systematic abuse of small children by those beacons of priestly moral rectitude that led to me losing mine,’ Maeve shot back, with an airy smile, her bright red talons waving, ‘and the repeated cover-ups by the Church and total lack of remorse,’ she added, flicking her luxuriant dark hair.

  Maureen’s mouth formed a thin line.

  It was then that Tracey piped up. ‘I can see that faith could get you through things.’

  She sounded almost sleepy, I thought.

  Maureen was solemn. ‘Sadly, there have been lots of mistakes made by the Church. But,’ she said, cocking her head at a jaunty angle, ‘there are lots of wonderful things about Catholicism. Like the notions of redemption and forgiveness. Everyone deserves a second chance.’

  Tracey mustered a feeble smile, her narrow shoulders seeming even slighter and more fragile.

  ‘Everyone deserves a second chance,’ Maureen repeated, as if we hadn’t heard her the first time.

  Maureen was a good person in spite of it all – the medical revelations, the ceaseless Donal stories and the absence of tact. ‘I couldn’t agree more,’ I said.

  ‘Hear, hear,’ said Maeve. She looked surprisingly chastened.

  16

  I walked to Maeve’s house. The weather was unseasonably mild. White skittish clouds scudded across the sky, propelled by a strong fresh breeze, and I had to pluck strands of hair out of my mouth. It was energizing. I felt peppy. More than peppy. I felt happy. All around me there was carnage, failing banks, higher taxes, businesses going bust, people losing their jobs, friends struggling – and I was as happy as Larry. Mrs Cavalier. My timing stank.

  Maeve lived on Raglan Road, the historic street immortalized in Patrick Kavanagh’s poem. She and Ultan had a beautiful period house located off the street up a flight of sweeping granite steps. Ultan had lobbed on an enormous extension the size of the original house. It was a series of lofty interconnecting rooms full of objets d’art and antique furniture that Maeve had paid an arm and a leg for, no expense spared. She had got rid of some of the heavier masculine furniture that had come with the house and replaced the traditional gilt wallpaper with a pale blue silk.

  In the past Maeve had employed armies of people to help her do it up. She had perpetually been in the process of extending and renovating, decorating and adding new touches. This was all on hold now, thanks to the financial tsunami that had hit most of us and the bank’s new attitude.

  Maeve had the taste of a footballer’s wife. Today she was wearing black leather leggings tucked into knee-high boots and a floaty leopard-print kaftan. If she had had to walk to a clothes line – about as likely as her landing on the moon – she’d have done it in full makeup, diamonds and a co-ordinating high-octane sexy outfit. When it came to the house, though, she had shipped the taste in, consulting a team of designers every step of the way.

  She had summoned me. She had been like a virago all week. The sheriff had come to their door. ‘He said that he was seizing goods on foot of a warrant to satisfy some judgment against Ultan. I rang our solicitor and he said to say that the property was the subject of dispute and that the sheriff would be held personally liable if he seized goods belonging to someone else, so I followed him around shrieking like a banshee, telling him that half the stuff belonged to my parents, which is bull. Of course it’ll be all over the blasted papers.’

  And it had been.

  Maeve had sensed my hesitancy when we were on the phone. ‘It’s okay,’ she had said, her tone sardonic. ‘You can relax, Father Matthew. I don’t want to drink with you. I can’t drink anyway,’ she’d said, and I presumed she was sick. ‘It’ll be paper hats and Club Orange all the way. I just need the lend of your ears.’

  Maeve stood on the top step, pressing the button for the electric gates. Everything was big, I thought, looking up at her. Her high heels were big. Her hair was big – it was backcombed off her face. The house was big obviously. The Mercedes parked outside on the gravel was big. The wreath on the hall door was disproportionately big. The tree inside the gates was big. And the perfectly decorated Christmas tree nudging up against the drawing-room window was big. The window itself was big. It was the House of Big.

  ‘The kids are at the panto with their nanny,’ she announced, beckoning me in. She looked a little ragged. ‘And Ultan’s in New York.’

  Maeve led me through the mosaic-tiled hall past an outsize tree – not the one pressed up against the drawing-room window. It was perfectly decorated in black and white. We crossed under a glittering chandelier to the ‘library’. It was a walnut-panelled room with a marble fireplace, Oriental
rugs and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined with antique classic books that had been bought in a job lot by a dealer in antiquarian books for their gravitas, according to Maeve. Maeve didn’t read all that much any more. And Ultan never read anything that wasn’t on a balance sheet.

  The room was beautiful in an ostentatious way. Prominent in it was a giant photo of Ultan and Maeve, Madison and Max, their eyes gleaming as they stared at the camera, their mouths apparently stretched into expressions of bliss. Ultan looked embalmed. He was wearing a violent purple short-sleeved shirt, his stab at casual. I don’t think I’d ever seen him in anything but a suit before. Maeve said he never did dress-down Friday at work.

  Now Maeve looked pale and drawn despite her fussy makeup. Her sexy smile had lost some of its wattage. She was hovering by the fireplace. ‘I’ve something to tell you.’

  The luxury in the room was stultifying. The sofas were overstuffed, the cushions a little too plumped, the paint job too perfect, your feet sank into the carpet, and there was something strangely deadening about the atmosphere.

  She squared her shoulders. ‘I’m late,’ she announced, with a flat smile that had none of her usual edgy fizz. I was uncertain of her meaning until she followed up: ‘I’ve been puking in the loo. All the usual signs.’

  Okay.

  She strode over to the mantelpiece and picked up a large vase of calla lilies. Her boobs possibly looked a little plumper. Other than that the tensile leanness of her body had not yet been blunted by this new life.

  ‘I can’t stand their smell,’ she said, spinning around and putting her hand over her mouth. She stalked to the door, the heavily perfumed smell trailing her, opened it and shoved the vase out into the hall. She closed the door resolutely behind her, and jammed a thumbnail between her top and bottom teeth. The scent lingered on the air and she fanned her face with a hand. She smiled grimly. ‘As I haven’t had all that much sex with my husband – once, in fact, over the last six months – there’s every chance I’m having a little French baby.’

  My eyebrows shot towards my hairline. ‘What are you going to do?’

  She mustered a shrug. ‘I haven’t a clue. Glass of wine?’ she asked, pointing to a bottle standing on the walnut sideboard.

  I shook my head as the familiar longing hit the back of my throat.

  ‘Christ,’ she said. ‘Have a bloody drink, won’t you?’

  ‘No. Thanks.’

  ‘Well, you won’t mind if I do.’ She tacked on, ‘Although your shitty disapproving look says otherwise.’

  I raised my hands in mock surrender.

  ‘I’ve cut down big-time,’ she said defensively.

  I wanted to believe her.

  ‘Tea, coffee?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘A glass or two won’t kill it,’ Maeve said, as if she were trying to convince herself, ‘worse luck.’ She poured some wine, then flopped down into a silk-covered armchair. Tilting her chin at a defiant angle, she gave a half-hearted smile. She had small pouches under her eyes. ‘What a mess.’

  ‘How far gone are you?’

  ‘Two months,’ came the gloomy reply. She gave me a withering look. ‘And I’m sure. There isn’t a pregnancy test left on the shelves in Dublin 4.’ She stared moodily into her wine, twiddling the stem of her glass. The sleeves of the kaftan fell back to reveal her sculpted naked forearms.

  ‘Are you going to leave Ultan?’ I asked hesitantly.

  She gave me a savage look. ‘Are you joking? Ultan would eviscerate me,’ she said.

  I thought of his shark’s eyes.

  ‘He leaves me to my own devices, but if I publicly humiliated him his fury would have no bounds. And he would never let me leave with his child, particularly not if it’s a boy. Ultan didn’t get where he got without being hard core. You do not fuck with Ultan Mohally,’ she said. I could see the anger rising in her. ‘I’m just not prepared to be poor – do you see?’

  That was the thing when your life became bandaged by wealth: when beautiful things and baubles were bestowed on you, it became increasingly hard to visualize any other way of being.

  She was staring resentfully into space, her mouth pursed. ‘There are paternity tests you can carry out on unborn children in the womb. I’d have to go to Britain. They don’t do prenatal paternity tests here because it’s a service for women like me who’ve played away and are likely to abort if the baby isn’t their husband’s.’

  ‘Are you thinking of having an abortion if it’s not Ultan’s?’ I said, my tone neutral.

  ‘No, as a matter of fact,’ she said, with asperity. ‘I wish I could but I don’t think I could go through with it.’

  I didn’t think I could either. My feelings were ambivalent, though. I’d had Ella primed from when she was about fourteen about what to do if she had an accidental pregnancy. This was when she barely knew what sex was. I’d had a lecture that I delivered over and over as if on a loop.

  You shouldn’t be sexually active until such time as you are emotion ally mature enough to deal with the consequences, but if anything happens, don’t tell anybody, not the boy, not your best friend, and not your father.

  Although now I knew about Frank’s cynical pragmatism on the subject I needn’t have issued that last directive.

  Ella used to put her hands over her ears.

  Come home to me and we’ll be on the first plane to London. Thousands of Irish women do it every year, but you’d have to keep it a deathly secret. Certainly it’s a major decision but it’s not the big deal everyone makes it out to be. If you do it in time it’s just like bringing on a period. But you mustn’t tell any of your friends I said this. This is just between you and me.

  I couldn’t stomach the idea of my daughter ‘getting caught’.

  Maeve gave me a pained look. ‘I meant what I said to that holy roller Maureen about morality being relative. And I’m pro-choice. But it’s the early training. You never really get over that sort of Catholic indoctrination – abortion is murder and all that. I mean, intellectually I know that, at this point, it’s only a ball of cells, but if I was to go to England I’d chicken out.’

  She set down her wine glass on a coffee-table and sighed. ‘The nuns would be delighted to know they got to me about something.’

  Irish people were funny about abortion: uptight as hell and sometimes downright wacko. It was the sort of thing that started mini wars between people and unseemly name-calling and slanging matches even between our public representatives, who were not beneath shouting, ‘Murderers,’ at pro-choice politicians.

  Officially, there was no abortion in Ireland. It was a criminal offence for a doctor to perform one on Irish soil, although I’d heard it said that if you knew the right doctor you could easily get a D and C and, bingo, the contents of your uterus would be scraped out and nobody would be any the wiser. Otherwise you skulked off to England or the Continent, another member of a guilty, faceless band of women – or you clamped your teeth together and got on with it.

  I’d seen a female senior counsel loudly gnashing her teeth over the subject at a party of Ciara’s and attracting wrathful looks from Will and other guests. ‘The Irish monomania with female reproduction is wearing,’ she’d said. ‘It’s all about controlling women. My God, giving a foetus a right to life in the Constitution equal to that of a grown woman is an outrage. I’ll tell you something for nothing. You wouldn’t find that happening if men had babies.’

  ‘Are you going to tell the Frenchman?’

  Maeve shifted in her chair. ‘I don’t know. I’d have to have Pierre’s written permission for the paternity test. And then if the baby was his I’d be afraid he might want it. I mean, could I trust that he wouldn’t make a fuss?’

  He was a gigolo. I wouldn’t say that, though. This was a time for silence.

  ‘He’s French, but he’s Catholic,’ she went on, ‘which I know means very little over there
but he might get funny ideas. You just can’t be sure. The whole thing is a total cock-up,’ she said, rubbing her temples with beringed fingers.

  ‘You could go back to work, Maeve,’ I said. ‘You’re so well qualified. If you wanted to leave Ultan.’

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘You think I’d get taken on in this climate while pregnant? Anyway, do you think I want to go back and be patronized by some jumped-up little peon in a suit who’s younger than me but has passed me out because I’ve been off having babies and who thinks he’s God’s gift?’ She shuddered. ‘Not a chance.’

  ‘Could you work with Ultan?’

  ‘What – and leave him?’ Maeve said, sounding exasperated. ‘Oh, hey, there, Ultan, I know I’ve cuckolded you and humiliated you and left with your children but could you giz a job?’

  ‘I didn’t think,’ I said. ‘You’re right.’

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘Ultan isn’t in a position to give anyone a job. I presume you know they’re trying to refinance certain projects. It’s a complete nightmare – they have to make cash calls on syndicate members and you can imagine how well that’s going down.’

  My stomach tensed. Frank was a member of certain syndicates with Ultan’s firm. I immediately thought of the soothing, magical powers of a drink.

  ‘People aren’t taking the calls. They’re basically telling MM to whistle for it.’

  ‘If they don’t have it, I guess,’ I said, feeling awkward, and then I forced myself to ask, ‘Do you mean Frank?’

  ‘It’s between them,’ she said shortly. ‘Nothing to do with us, Anita.’

  In her screwed-up way, Maeve was loyal.

  ‘The yacht and the jet have gone. And the helicopter. Everything is up for sale except the house in Portofino, because the latest is that we may have to go and bloody well live there and ride this thing out.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Maeve.’