by Cathy Kelly
‘And you posed for him, naked,’ James spat out, looking back at the picture. ‘This is you. I looked it up on the internet just now. He’s famous for these mysterious Dark Lady paintings. You knew I wouldn’t know about them. Art doesn’t interest me, so you were pretty safe with your secret. You knew I was never going to notice a painting by this man and realise, that’s my wife lying there naked, because I would have recognised you anywhere.’
‘I know,’ she said soberly, ‘it made it easier that you weren’t interested in art. It must mean something to you now that I am telling you, that I trust you enough to say all these things to you.’
‘Trust?’ he said. ‘What’s trust, Christie? I thought we had trust, but I was wrong. What was wrong with me? Was I too safe, too boring, too dependable, with my government job? Did you really want another life with someone else? Have you been waiting for bloody Wolensky to come and claim you all these years? Were there secret phone calls and trysts? Tell me!’
‘No,’ she shouted. ‘I haven’t seen or heard from him in twenty-five years. I wasn’t waiting for him. If I’d wanted a life with someone else, I would have left to be with him when he asked me, but I didn’t.’
‘Oh, so you gave up the chance to run away with the great artist, for me and our dull life?’ said James coldly. He got up abruptly, stared at her, as if she was a stranger. ‘I don’t know what to say to you, Christie. I’ve been looking at that book for what seems like hours, looking at pictures of you from every conceivable angle. Drawings by a man who looked at you in the way only I was supposed to look at you. Maybe at our age you’re not supposed to care, maybe you’re supposed to be beyond all that jealousy. But you know what, I do care. I care so much it hurts here.’ He struck his chest fiercely. ‘I don’t know if I can forgive you or him. Where is he anyway?’
‘No, don’t go near him,’ Christie said. ‘That’s how I have the sketchbook and the picture. He wanted to give them to me, he’s dying.’ She said it quickly, in case James rushed out into the city, searching for Carey Wolensky with a view to killing him.
‘He’s terminally ill, James. He wanted to find me and say goodbye, that’s all. I knew he was coming, that’s why I’ve been so anxious lately. Anxious that he’d come and ruin our lives. That’s when I realised I had to tell you myself because I couldn’t live with the fear, the fear of losing you.’
‘Well, there’s a pity,’ said James with uncharacteristic harshness, ‘because you’ve lost me anyway. I’ll leave you with your lover’s grubby little pictures. Wolensky can come here any time he wants now, because I won’t be here. Isn’t that what you want? Oh yes, you can talk to our sons and tell them what happened.’
‘James, we don’t need to bring Ethan and Shane into this,’ Christie begged. ‘This is not about them, this is about us. Please don’t let’s involve them.’
She couldn’t bear it if her two sons learned of this. She couldn’t bear them to look at her with disgust and anger, to think of what she’d done to their beloved father. She thought of Faye: how she’d been terrified of letting Amber know the truth about her past life, and Christie understood it completely. Could there be anything worse than having your darling children stare at you with disgust, where once they had looked at you with pride?
‘Please don’t say anything to them,’ she begged.
‘I’m not saying anything to anyone,’ James snapped. ‘I need some time to myself. I’ll be on my mobile phone. I might go fishing.’
He hadn’t gone fishing for years. She couldn’t imagine where his fishing boxes and tackle were. Suddenly, she realised that that was hardly a problem and that James probably wasn’t going fishing anyway. He just needed to get away, to be anywhere, except near her.
‘I understand,’ she said humbly, ‘and I’m sorry. That’s all I wanted to say, I’m sorry. It was a huge mistake and there is nothing else I can say except I love you. It was a mistake. He was a mistake. But I didn’t go with him when he asked me to, I stayed here with you.’
‘And I’m supposed to be grateful for that fact?’ James said. ‘Because right now, I don’t feel very grateful. I just feel very angry.’
‘Will you phone me tonight so that I know wherever you’re going, you got there safely?’ Christie asked, not wanting to think of him driving recklessly.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to talk to you, Christie. I can’t, I have to think.’
‘I don’t want our marriage to be over,’ she pleaded.
‘I can’t tell you that either,’ James said.
He stormed out of the room, but for once the dogs didn’t get up to follow him halfway up the stairs, torn between the humans they loved most. Instead, they lay on the floor, noses on their paws, big dark eyes looking soulfully and worriedly up at Christie.
‘I know, babies,’ she said. ‘Daddy’s upset. But it’ll be OK.’ She talked to them like she’d talked to her children when they were small. You always told children that things would be OK even if they weren’t going to be. Christie didn’t know how this would all pan out. Her gift of vision was blank. She wished she could look into a crystal ball and see James coming home, forgiving her, throwing his arms around her, saying it was all in the past and they could forget it. But that might never happen. She’d done what she thought was the right thing, because she couldn’t live under the fear for ever. But now the fear that James would one day find out about her infidelity had been replaced with an entirely different type of fear. The fear that James would leave her for ever. Had she done the wrong thing after all?
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Faye, too, felt lost and alone, waiting in New York for news of Amber. She’d meant to go home sooner: she’d been there nearly a month and it was costing her a fortune. But leaving would be like giving up on Amber and she just couldn’t do it.
She rang Ella each evening, hoping that Amber might have rung her friend with details of where she was, but no such luck. It was as if Amber had fallen off the face of the earth. Now that she’d made her choice, she was going to stick with it, not talking to friends, family, anyone, she’d cut them all off. Like mother, like daughter, Faye thought endlessly, remembering how single-minded she’d been all those years ago, before she’d become pregnant with Amber. Then, she wouldn’t listen to anyone. She should have known that Amber would have inherited that trait too.
Alone in New York, she had plenty of time to think. She wasn’t a shopper, so she bypassed the stores that would have left Grace in paroxysms of delight. Instead, she forced herself around the sights.
She visited Ground Zero one day, and stood there silently and felt ashamed of herself. She might not know where Amber was, but she was pretty sure she was alive. She’d simply chosen not to have contact with her mother any more. Whereas the people who had died here were gone for ever. She could and would see Amber again. The Ground Zero families were not so lucky.
Faye left with a new sense of determination. There had to be something else she could do to find Amber: that was the first thing on her list. And the second was to move on. She hadn’t had so much time on her own in years, time to look at herself. She found she didn’t like what she saw.
Getting back to her comfortably familiar hotel room, she phoned Grace’s office answering machine and left a message.
‘Grace, this is Faye, I need your help. When you get this, will you ring me at the hotel? We can talk and I’ll give you all the details.’
Grace phoned at eight p.m. Irish time.
‘You’re in late,’ said Faye.
‘Well, my fabulous partner and second-in-command is on leave,’ retorted Grace, ‘so somebody has to keep the home fires burning. But you don’t want to hear my problems. How’s the search going?’
‘Not well,’ Faye replied. ‘Whatever deal the band had going is off, so God knows where they are. I imagine they’ll be looking for another production company. Amber’s friend, Ella, says that Karl Evans—he’s the guy Amber’s fallen for—is very determined
to succeed, so it’s unlikely they’d just give up…But it’s a whole other world here and I can’t get much information. I thought maybe you could ask around at home, see who knows of the band or their manager?’
Grace knew everybody, senior policemen, politicians, business movers and shakers. If anybody could track down Ceres and Karl, it was Grace.
‘Give me all the details,’ Grace insisted, businesslike. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
Faye felt a weight lift off her shoulders; she wished she’d asked for Grace’s help ages ago.
Three hours later she rang again. ‘I think I’ve found them,’ she said.
‘Do you know what day it is?’ Amber asked Karl.
They were sitting by the pool at a small table enjoying breakfast. The rest of the band were around them, all looking bright and energetic even though it was half past eight in the morning. There was no drinking or carousing now. Life had turned serious. They were working on their album, had been for the last three days. Amber had never doubted Karl’s ability but she had never seen him so focused, so dedicated. And so happy. But she was finding it hard to see the person she loved filled with a joy that had absolutely nothing to do with her. It made her feel lost and alone.
‘What day it is?’ he echoed genially. He had a Californian tan now. His skin was naturally dark and even though the band had spent a lot of time in the studio, he had a fabulous glow about him. He looked different. It was as though he was moving away from her, thought Amber, with growing despondency.
‘Yeah, do you know what day it is?’ she repeated.
‘No.’ He shrugged. ‘The fourth day of the rest of our lives?’ Karl had said recording an album was like starting a new life, the one he’d been dreaming about since he could dream. ‘I don’t know, what day is it?’
‘It’s the day the exams end,’ Amber said.
Right now, she knew Ella was probably still asleep. Back home it was late afternoon and the gang at St Ursula’s would already be planning to go out partying to celebrate the end of school and the end of exams. How many times had she and Ella thought about that moment, imagining what it would be like, especially in the dark days of winter when they trudged home, school bags heavy with books, their hearts weighed down with the thought of all the study.
‘I know what I’m going to do when it’s all over,’ Ella would say dreamily, ‘I’m going to go home, get into bed and lie there and turn my TV on and read magazines. And paint my nails and have a bath, oh, and do my hair and put on my make-up and dance around and go out!’
‘Sounds perfect to me,’ sighed Amber, although she didn’t have a TV in her bedroom. Her mum disapproved of televisions in bedrooms. But she’d put on her CD player and dance around and do nothing, have absolutely nothing hanging over her.
And now, here she was thousands of miles away in beautiful sunshine surrounded by arguably some of the most beautiful people on the planet, doing nothing and it should have been wonderful. Except that it wasn’t. The boys were going off into the studio soon and she’d be alone again.
She’d never been so much on her own in her whole life. She’d always been with people: Ella, girls from school, Mum, yet now here she had vast tracts of time to herself and not really anywhere to be or anything to do. It was odd. Doing nothing wasn’t as much fun when there was nothing else you should be doing. The fact that she felt so out of place here added to her sense of sadness.
‘Bet you’re glad you missed all that exam crap,’ Karl said, taking another bran and cranberry muffin from the pile. ‘What’s the point of all that kind of bourgeois garbage? Exams didn’t get us where we are today, did they?’ he said, with a touch of the smugness that was creeping into everything he said these days. The band were going to make it, they were going to be on the cover of Billboard. He didn’t say these things quietly to Amber in the privacy of their own suite as they lay in each other’s arms and shared dreams. She wouldn’t have minded that. But no, this unshakeable self-belief was said publicly and without a shred of embarrassment. Even Syd, who was the voice of reason, was affected by it and grinned when Karl went on about how big the band were going to be.
‘I keep thinking,’ Amber blurted out suddenly, ‘I should have stayed at home to do the exams after all. I feel guilty now. I mean, it wouldn’t have made any difference if I’d come late. I could have got on a plane tonight and been here tomorrow.’
‘But you’d have missed all the fun,’ said Kenny T.
‘Exactly,’ said Lew, who was stuffing his face with an omelette, a full egg one, a fact which had astonished the waitress.
‘Not an egg white one?’ she’d said, because nobody here ever ate full egg omelettes. Think of the cholesterol, the fat?
‘No, the whole egg, the yellow bit and all,’ said Lew happily. Lew planned on never learning how to spell cholesterol. If he couldn’t spell it, it couldn’t get him.
‘I mean, think of the fun we had on the road, the adventures,’ he said now.
Amber looked at Lew. He’d rewritten the road trip in his mind. She remembered it exactly as it had been: miserable, scary, cockroach-ridden. Being totally broke was not a nice way to travel through a foreign country where you knew nobody.
‘You’d have missed being part of the adventure,’ Kenny T added. ‘You wouldn’t have been part of our history, the history of the band.’
‘You see, when they write about us in Rolling Stone,’ Syd said, with a sly grin in Karl’s direction, ‘we’ll be able to talk about how the five of us trekked across America with only a dream in our hearts and you’ll have been a part of that.’
A part of the trip, thought Amber. But not a part of what had happened afterwards. Having survived the travails of the road didn’t make her a member of the band. Instead, she was a hanger-on, the girl with the band.
Thinking of this, she glanced at Karl, hoping he’d say the right thing and make her feel that her presence was still important to him. She wanted to hear him say that it wouldn’t have been the same without her, that her presence—as his muse—had made it all work.
But he wasn’t even listening and was flicking through the papers again.
A helicopter buzzed overhead, breaking up the perfect sky for an instant before disappearing. Amber looked up to see the glint of the chopper between the fronds of the palm tree shading their table. This really was a slice of paradise. Except it wasn’t her paradise. She wasn’t here on her dime: she was here on someone else’s. Karl didn’t really care whether she was here or not.
She’d been stupid to think he had. It had been fun while it lasted, but she’d given up so much for him and he neither understood nor appreciated her sacrifice. That realisation was crystal clear.
The boys sat there eating, and talking, all openly admiring an extremely attractive, very skinny blonde who sashayed past in a sliver of a dress hardly covering the most phenomenal breasts Amber had ever seen. They were clearly not real, but the boys didn’t seem to realise that, or they didn’t care. They just stared anyway, watching her skinny flanks appreciatively, even Karl.
Amber found that she didn’t mind very much, whereas, once, she’d have been outraged at Karl ogling another woman so openly. Was this her Damascene conversion, she wondered, and then grinned, thinking that at least Sister Patricia would be pleased that Amber had been paying attention at some point in religious education at St Ursula’s.
She got up from the table. ‘I’ll see you guys later, right?’
‘Yeah, sure, right,’ they all said.
‘Bye, babe.’
‘Yeah, see ya,’ said Karl absently.
Amber walked back to their suite. She shouldn’t have given up her life for Karl and the realisation didn’t make her feel stupid, it just made her feel sad.
She’d burned a lot of bridges for him. Even her eighteenth birthday had turned into pretty much another day with Karl.
Instead of Ella and her friends organising a night out after the exams, Amber’s birthday had been celebr
ated in a pub in Dublin just before they left when Karl had given her a silver bangle which was now tarnished, proof of how cheap it had been. She thought of the lovely portfolio her mother had bought for her and wanted to cry.
She’d been so blind to his faults, she realised. At least she was wiser now.
That night, while she was still working out what she was going to do, Michael took them to another party. There were parties every night but nobody stayed out late. Nobody got drunk either. LA was, as Michael reminded the band, a working town. Going to parties was a public relations exercise, not an excuse for wild behaviour.
Tonight’s party was in the Hollywood hills and Amber, who’d worked out in the hotel’s gym and then swum lengths in the pool, felt physically tired as she got ready in her bathroom. She was wearing her green thrift shop dress and pendant again. It looked lovely and she did have a faint tan too, not Hollywood gold but certainly something she’d have considered mahogany in Dublin.
The house they were driven to in the requisite convoy of Jeep Grand Cherokees was hotel-sized, appeared to be mainly made of glass and sat perched on a hillside with an intricate terrace and a gently curving pool filled with Japanese carp. Walking in the door was like walking into an interiors magazine.
Not that it was ostentatious—quite the opposite. Painted a warm vanilla, with dark floors, creamy upholstery, and carefully placed modern lighting, the effect was of simple elegance, like the guests. The music was muted jazz, the drinks were clear cocktails, champagne and plenty of juice, and the band loved it.
Within half an hour of arriving, Karl had left Amber’s side and when she saw him a few minutes later, he was talking to Venetia, who looked as exquisite as the first time Amber had seen her, white linen pants and a white silk halter top emphasising both her figure and the rich colour of her skin.
Amber didn’t feel threatened by Venetia tonight, although she couldn’t have explained why, if anyone had asked her. Venetia was so beautiful, she was in another dimension of beauty. Normal people like Amber could never compete with Venetia’s exquisite ebony limbs, those dark, flashing eyes and lips that were full of promise.