The Better Half

by Sarah Harte

  Frank paused. He shook his head. ‘It was only money.’

  Epilogue

  Frank and Ella waved me off, Frank in his dressing-gown, Ella with Crouton in her arms. They were standing on the front step in a patch of sunlight. The sun was high in the sky and it was a breezy, bright day.

  Frank went to shout something but seemed to change his mind, clamping his mouth shut.

  ‘Good luck, Mum,’ Ella yelled after me. I waved at them. I was anxious to be gone, away from their chatter. Ella had blindsided me with destabilizing talk of what she was going to do after she finished her degree. She had sat down to the table, a slice of toast in one hand, saying, as if it was no big deal: ‘People are being told by the Law Society to plan careers outside law. The bottom has fallen out of the profession. A lot of people are freaking about it but I’m chilled. A law degree is a good training and I can always work with Dad.’

  The way her eyes had darted away and not met mine told me that in fact she was trying to raise the notion at a time when I might be too distracted to bat it back to where it belonged – outer space.

  ‘We’d make a good team,’ Frank had said, looking chuffed.

  I’d wanted to leap forward, like a Springer Spaniel, and wedge myself between the two of them shouting, ‘Noooooooooo!’ Instead I had swallowed a mouthful of coffee and said nothing.

  I did not want my daughter to get sucked into the Frank Lawlor vortex, to apply all that keen intelligence to helping him sort through his mess. Frank was plotting and planning, back hustling. He was making fairly frequent trips to India. ‘There’s opportunities there, Anita girl, for the taking – if all the ducks fall into a row. And a fella could get a fresh start in a place like that.’ He was also working for the bank, to develop and sell off the sites he had formerly owned. Who better to do it? It wasn’t the bank’s main business. ‘I work for the banks. I’m a bank worker,’ was his big joke.

  He was not a hundred per cent on the up yet. Sometimes he still mooched around the place gloomily. It was only a matter of time, though, before he cooked up some grandiose new scheme.

  I had swallowed my objections. I would not allow my family and their concerns to intrude until later when I might have to go into battle. For now the day was about me.

  Dylan was long gone. He had a job at Eden in Temple Bar as a chef. He was learning to make some beautiful things. Things I could eat more securely without my female fear of excess flesh. No woman, however confident, ever wanted a fat arse. The rest of the time Dylan worked on his portfolio. He wanted to get into NCAD. That was his goal. NCAD was the Harvard of art colleges so Ella and I were trying to nudge him towards a portfolio course in case his hopes were dashed. Frank had – outwardly, at least – been very positive about the move. He tried to talk to Dylan about art although this often ended in Frank cursing the dealers who had sold him ‘fucking crap’, which was now ‘worth feck all’. Dylan was polite if noncommittal about these overtures.

  Dylan was doing well, though, tumbling up the path in the morning to go to work. He no longer shrugged himself back into the bed when you went into the coach house in the mornings. Not even at the weekends when he was up early working on his art. I liked to think that the sense of entitlement we’d bred into him was receding a little.

  Maureen’s Donal had recently made an offer to buy the Wexford site that had heralded the end of Frank for thirty per cent of what Frank had paid for it. The bank, Frank said, were seriously considering it. Maureen would have plenty to crow about.

  Frank had a bit of money salted away. I wasn’t sure where. It made me feel uneasy. He had borrowed all that money and not paid it back; although he had lost a lot too, he had essentially walked away.

  ‘Lookit, Anita,’ he’d said, with some force, when I’d tried to winkle it out of him. ‘I might not be a feckin’ saint but I conducted my business along ethical lines. I kept a lot of lads in jobs for as long as I could and I paid all my subcontractors more or less. Yes, hands up, one of the development companies I used went into liquidation but I paid the bulk of what I owed to the suppliers in so far as I could.’

  I wasn’t sure whether to believe him, but he was certainly soldiering on. He did, I had to admit, have spirit. The heart attack and near bankruptcy hadn’t taken him down. Yes, I saw doubt in those eyes sometimes – the brass neck was not so brassy – but he was still bold Frank Lawlor.

  So we went on together, Frank and I. There was no great rupture between us. I felt reasonably sure that he would not stray again. But I knew that, at the first opportunity, he would be wheeling and dealing. I also knew that, even if he reverted to type, I was a changed woman. I had a goal and even a sense of mission: I was repaying a debt. As ethical checks and balances went, it was far from perfect, but it was the best I could do.

  I was now on College Green and the gates were well within my sight. I felt a little tired. I had tossed and turned throughout the night. I was almost at the railings and I felt a catch in my chest, a fluttering feeling of happiness and nerves.

  I was about to pass through Front Gate, under the arch. I paused so that I was standing stock still under the cloudless blue sky, an island in the middle of a stream of babbling bronzed students. I would join the throng in a minute and be borne forward across the cobblestones, the august buildings on either side, my backpack – with A4 pads and pens – on my back.

  Frank had wanted to come with me, to see me to the gate, but I hadn’t let him. I needed to keep him at bay. Somehow allowing him come would have made today about Frank, rather than me. With his outsize personality he had a way of making things about him.

  I might meet Ella for coffee. I’d promised her it wouldn’t become a habit. But it was my first day and it would be nice to have that back-up. I would be called a ‘crinkly’, she’d said. That was what her friends called the mature students. I was very mature. In some ways I had always been a slow starter.

  Later I would meet Shannon and Maeve. Ciara was away with her daughter, who was, apparently, on her way to becoming a tennis champion. We didn’t really talk that much any more and I didn’t miss her. Shannon was on a day off from her job as a paralegal. She hated it but it brought in some money. She had come to an arrangement with the bank about the house. They had been given a holiday from their mortgage as Jimmy was still out of work. They wouldn’t be able to hang on to it, I thought, unless Jimmy started working again. Shannon had spirit, though. After the initial shock about her changed circumstances had worn off she’d gone out there and started battling. And she’d discovered that the standard of teaching in the national school her boys were attending was better than it had been at the private school. She was studying for the conversion exam that would allow her to work as a lawyer in Ireland.

  Maeve was home from Portofino. She had a new little girl called Sloane, who had been deposited in the arms of a Filipina nanny almost as soon as the umbilical cord had been cut. On account of her dark skin when she was born, she told everyone that Sloane had jaundice. Pierre had gone back to France, not knowing that he left behind a little Irish baby. On her visits to Ireland, Maeve’s drinking appeared to have reached the point where a visit to rehab might become inevitable. That was why we were meeting in a coffee shop, although I knew she might be a little lopsided by the time she arrived. I took the odd drink now, but I remained cautious.

  I was standing at the entrance to Trinity. It had been some journey to get there but before I went in I had to make a call. A call that had been a long time coming. I had to tell Animal that I had finally walked the short distance up the road to Trinity College. I wanted to tell him he was right: it had been a galaxy away. But I – Anita Lawlor, née Butler, from the Coppinger Street flats – had finally got there.

  Acknowledgements

  Many thanks to Patricia Deevy at Penguin, for my first break and for her unfailing good humour. Thanks to Michael McLouglin also, and to all at Penguin Ireland and England, for their help. A
nd to Hazel Orme, for her excellent editing skills. Thank you to my agent, Sheila Crowley, for all her brilliant help and without whom there would be no book, Sarah Lewis, and to all at Curtis Brown. A big thank you to Alison Walsh for her much-needed encouragement. Special thanks to Paula O’Brien, for all her support and for help with some of the historical information on Dublin. Thanks to Denis A. Hickie for his shrewd, if direct, counsel. Thank you to my aunt and godmother Marog O’Brien, for some of the lively turns of phrase she supplied! Thank you to Conn Harte-Bourke, for his stoicism in the face of deadlines, for his good humour and for being Conn. Lastly, thanks to my English teachers, Rosalin Ni Laoire and Marion McCarthy, and to my history teacher, Míchéal Ó Súilleabháin. And in memory of my late headmistress, Eibhlin Ni Drisceoil.