Stone Heart

by Des Ekin

  For a second her eyes, behind the dark Ray-Bans, flickered with reawakened pain. Then, suddenly, she stood up.

  ‘I can’t let you do this to yourselves,’ she said. ‘I won’t let you do it. Here.’

  She thrust a hand into her briefcase, lifted out a small notepad, and scribbled out a number. ‘This is the phone number of the house he’s been staying in, in London. If you’re lucky, you’ll get him before he catches his flight for Johannesburg.’

  She put the unsigned contract back into her briefcase, and shut it with a loud snap. ‘You’re in no condition to sign anything,’ she said decisively. ‘We’ll talk about it another day. No, don’t bother to see me out. You’d just be wasting valuable time. Go and phone.’

  Ignoring the imperious command, Tara escorted Wendy through the arch of fragrant honeysuckle towards the front of the house. The gleaming Merc flashed four orange lights and beeped dutifully as its mistress approached.

  ‘Look after him,’ pleaded Wendy with deeply-felt concern. ‘He can come across as a bit arrogant, but it’s all just a front. He’s one of the few genuinely kind, compassionate and unselfish men I’ve ever met – and, Lord knows, I’ve met a lot.’

  Tara stared at her. ‘My God,’ she said as the penny dropped. ‘You’re crazy about him, too.’

  ‘As a loon, darling. As a coot.’ Wendy smiled brightly as she got into the car, closed the door, and pressed a button that made the driver’s window sigh downwards. She turned the ignition key and the engine murmured an obedient response.

  ‘When I said you had something I wanted,’ she said, with forced breeziness, ‘I wasn’t just talking about a sculpture, you know.’

  Tara watched the grey Merc disappear down the dusty road. She returned to the house, poured a glass of ice-cold Perrier and forced herself to take long, slow, deliberate breaths to steady her nerves.

  Then she phoned the London number.

  ‘Hello?’

  A woman’s voice.

  ‘Hello. Could I speak to Andres Talimann, please?’ Tara tried to keep her voice calm and businesslike.

  ‘He not here. He gone.’

  The woman’s voice was high-pitched, Oriental. And with that poor command of English, she obviously wasn’t a receptionist or secretary. Tara had a ludicrous vision of a Filipino beauty stretched naked on Andres’s bed filing her nails.

  ‘I’m the housekeeper. I take a message?’

  Tara felt like kicking herself. ‘Did he say when he’d be back?’ she asked, biting her cheek apprehensively as she waited for the reply.

  ‘He not coming back. Mr Talimann gone for good.’

  ‘Oh, my God. Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. He pack bags, leave for airport, catch plane at three-fifteen.’

  ‘Which flight? Which airline?’

  ‘I dunno. Sorry.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Tara hung up. She rapidly flicked through a phone book, and dialled the number of the Springbok Airways desk at London Heathrow.

  ‘Hello. Do you have a flight leaving Heathrow for Johannesburg this afternoon?’

  ‘Yes, we have, ma’am,’ said a voice with a heavy South African accent. ‘There’s one at three-fifteen.’

  ‘Is there a ticket reserved for a Mr Andres Talimann?’

  ‘I’m sorry, ma’am. We can’t divulge information about our passengers.’

  Tara tutted impatiently. ‘This is Mr Talimann’s secretary,’ she said, summoning up the appropriate tone of indignation. ‘We need to confirm our reservation. Is that a problem?’

  ‘Hold on, please.’ She was treated to two minutes of a song by Ladysmith Black Mombazo before the woman returned. ‘Yes, we can confirm that Mr Talimann is booked first-class for the three-fifteen flight,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Slowly, Tara hung up the phone. Damn, damn, damn. What could he be thinking of? Why was he running out on her like this, just when she’d realised how important he was to her? She felt anger and self-pity flare up inside her, but it was rapidly doused by cold reason. How could she blame him? She’d never given him the least encouragement. She’d practically sleepwalked through their time together, her eyes blind to his kindness towards her, his courage, the extreme lengths to which he’d gone in a bid to save her from herself. If anyone was to blame, it was…

  Her thoughts were interrupted by the clatter of the letterbox. Zombie-like, she walked into the hallway to collect the mail. Her stomach performed a sickening somersault as she saw the white envelope lying on her mat, with her name and address scrawled across it in a hurried, masculine script.

  She’d seen the same handwriting before. In the note Andres had left for her in his apartment, just after their trip to Paris.

  Tara’s hands shook as she ripped open the envelope. It had been posted the previous day, she noted – just one hour after they’d said their casual goodbyes at Dublin Airport.

  She leaned her back against the wall for support and forced herself to read the letter. As she worked her way through Andres’s hasty scrawl, her whole body slumped downwards until she was seated, knees raised, foetus-like, on the wooden floorboards of the hall.

  Dear Tara,

  I am sorry to say goodbye to you in a letter. I wish I had the strength to talk to you face-on-face, but I know that if I see you one more time I will never be able to leave you.

  I cannot get you out of my head, Tara. You are on my mind night and day. Your face is the last thing I see when I fall asleep and the first thing I see in the morning. Whether we are in Ireland or Estonia, there is only one diagnosis for this strange disorder, is there not? I have fallen deeply on love to you, Tara, and for me there can only be one cure.

  I have decided to leave Europe, to take up a job in faraway South Africa.

  I do not know how you feel about me, Tara. Perhaps it is better that I never know, for it is best that we forget one another.

  This is the cure for my complaint. Like many drastic remedies, it will hurt for a little while, but, in the end, it is better than running the risk of long-term unhappiness.

  Be strong,

  Andres

  For a long time Tara sat motionless, watching the words swim before her eyes. Andres was doing it again: exactly as Melanie’s friend Carla had predicted, exactly as Wendy had warned. He was running away before he became too involved. He’d done it so many times before…

  Well, perhaps no one had ever tried to stop him before.

  Tara shook herself out of her despondency and rose resolutely to her feet. There must be something she could do, she told herself. If only she had more time, she could even fly to Heathrow and try to talk to him before he left…

  But there wasn’t time. That was the point. And anyway, the very notion – flying all the way from County Clare to London just to head off a flight to South Africa – was patently ridiculous.

  She phoned Aer Lingus.

  ‘Let me see,’ said the woman who answered the phone. ‘Yes, there’s a direct flight from Shannon to London Heathrow at five past one.’

  ‘Hold on, please,’ Tara told her. She glanced up at the big schoolhouse clock on the kitchen wall. Eleven-twenty. My God, it would be close. Scarily close. But if she left right now, without delaying to change clothes or pack a bag, she could make it to Shannon Airport by twelve-thirty. Catch the flight. Arrive at Heathrow at two twenty-five. Say twenty minutes to change terminals. She could be at the Springbok Airways desk a good half-hour before the flight. With a bit of luck, she might even catch him before he checked in.

  If she could get just five minutes with him, face to face, she just might be able to persuade him to change his mind.

  ‘Book me a seat,’ she said.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  THE JOURNEY to Shannon Airport was a nightmare. Juggernauts, tractors, hydraulic diggers…they seemed to be working on a rota basis for the sole purpose of holding her up. It seemed that, as soon as one crawling, smoke-belching truck left the road, another would
appear in the distance to take its place. She’d never seen so many steamrollers, white-line sprayers, and hedge-cutters on one single road in her entire life. And why did every learner driver in the county have to pick this particular morning to practise driving at fifteen mph?

  At one stage, immobilised behind a beer-keg delivery truck in Ennis, she took out her cellphone and dialled Melanie’s number.

  ‘Hi,’ said Melanie. ‘Still okay to meet for drinks tonight?’

  ‘No, that’s why I’m phoning,’ she explained. ‘I have to go to London. Would Saturday night do instead?’

  ‘Fine by me,’ said Melanie. ‘But why London?’

  ‘I’ve just been told that Andres is leaving for South Africa. I’m going to try to catch him before he gets on the three-fifteen flight to Jo’burg.’

  ‘You’re what?’

  Tara swallowed. ‘I know this sounds ridiculous, Mel, but I’ve only just realised how important he is to me. I’ve realised I’m crazy about him.’

  Melanie laughed. ‘Sure I know that already,’ she said, as though it were patently obvious.

  ‘You do?’ Tara was slightly miffed by Melanie’s casual dismissal of her earth-shattering news.

  ‘Of course I do,’ said Melanie, highly amused. ‘You’re the only one who didn’t realise it.’

  Before Tara could respond, the line fizzed, crackled and went dead. She’d hit another twilight zone of reception.

  She continued her nightmare journey, and made it to the last traffic lights before the airport with a mere twenty-five minutes to go before take-off. The lights were green as she approached. She was nearly there.

  Then…

  Damn it! Damn it to hell, she thought. This can not be happening…

  A garda motorcyclist had just pulled up, siren blaring, and had raised a hand to stop all the traffic. He sat there motionless, as the lights turned from green to red, then back to green, then red again. Nothing happened. Tara banged the steering wheel with the heel of her hand in sheer frustration.

  Then, at last, a black limousine with motorcycle outriders flew past on its way to the airport. Oh, well, thought Tara cynically. Everyone else may have missed the flight, but at least the Minister’s girlfriend won’t have any problems.

  The garda roared off, leaving the honking, swearing drivers to sort themselves out. The light was green. Please let it hold at green until she got through. Please…

  It held.

  She put her foot down firmly on the accelerator, ignoring the airport speed limit, and abandoned her Fiat in a semi-legal space between two larger vehicles.

  At the check-in desk, the Aer Lingus official had just one word to say to her: ‘Run.’

  She made the London flight with only seconds to spare before it closed.

  Flopping into her seat, she tried to relax, but couldn’t. Even though it was a perfect flight, her stomach swirled and churned as though affected by serious turbulence. And despite the textbook landing, her pulse still raced and her head pounded with tension.

  Her hurried footsteps, clattering on the airport floor, echoed her heartbeat as she changed terminals. She passed through seemingly endless corridors, through a maze of escalators and people-movers, checking her watch every few minutes. Two-forty. Two forty-five.

  Two-fifty. This was impossible. She’d never make it. Two fifty-five. At last, there it was in the distance. Springbok Airways flight desk. There was only a handful of flustered passengers in the queue. And Andres wasn’t among them.

  ‘Boarding. Boarding,’ flashed the monitor overhead.

  Tara ran up to the desk. ‘Excuse me. I have to get an urgent message to a passenger…’

  ‘Hey,’ snarled a hatchet-faced American woman. ‘Get in line.’

  ‘But it’s urgent.’

  ‘So’s catching my flight, honey.’

  The airline official took the safe way out. He kept tearing tickets and tapping his keyboard, eyes downcast.

  ‘Boarding,’ echoed the tannoy system.

  Helplessly, Tara took her place in the queue and waited for five agonisingly-long minutes until it was her turn.

  ‘I need to talk to one of your passengers,’ she said to the man behind the desk. ‘A Mr Andres Talimann. Can you tell me if he’s gone on board yet?’

  ‘I’m sorry, ma’am. We cannot disclose the identities of any of our passengers without due authorisation. If you contact our public-liaison officer at this number, she’ll be only too pleased to help you with your query.’

  It was almost like listening to a robot.

  ‘I haven’t time to do that,’ Tara pleaded. She glanced at the monitor. Five past three. ‘It’s really important. Couldn’t you just…get a message to him?’

  ‘Is it an emergency, ma’am?’

  Tara hesitated. It was…to her. But there were probably all sorts of dire penalties for delaying an international flight without due cause, and she doubted if the regulatory authorities would agree with her definition of an emergency in this case.

  ‘It’s really important,’ she repeated.

  The official studied her face and seemed to relent slightly. Then he frowned as a message appeared on his computer monitor.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ he said, the sympathy in his voice failing to disguise his obvious relief. ‘But that flight has just closed. It’s already received clearance for take-off.’

  Tara nodded dully. She felt the tears of frustration well up in her eyes until the official’s face became blurred and indistinct. She tried to blink them away and found she couldn’t.

  Ignoring his formulaic apologies and suggestions, she slowly made her way upstairs to a café where she could watch the planes land and take off.

  Yes, there it was, the Springbok Airways jet, taxiing slowly towards the runway. For a moment, she thought she could see Andres’s face at one of the windows, but she knew it was just her imagination. The plane negotiated itself into position, roared its engines, and shot down the smooth black runway. Its nose lifted, and then its entire body gracefully shed weight until its tyres were merely kissing the tarmac. As it finally broke contact with the earth, Tara felt as though she, too, had lost contact with some part of her soul.

  She watched the plane rise until it was just a tiny glint of silver light in a perfectly blue sky. Then she turned her back on it and walked miserably away.

  What would she do now?

  Phone him in South Africa, she supposed. E-mail him. But she was under no illusions about the difficulty of building up a relationship half a world away, with a man who was determined to forget her.

  In the meantime, she had to get back home.

  She’d have to go back to the domestic terminal and book a flight to Shannon. And while she was waiting for the plane, she would have a bite to eat, maybe drink a glass or three of wine, or even four, while she worked out how to clear up this godawful mess she’d made of her life.

  The Aer Lingus desk at Terminal One was crowded. An entire brass band was checking in, all at the same time, loading drum kits and euphoniums on to the luggage scales and passing tickets over their heads to a check-in official who was doing her best to achieve some sort of order out of the chaos.

  Tara didn’t really care. She was at the next check-in desk, and she was in no hurry any more. And after the events of the past month, she was well used to chaos. In fact, chaos seemed to be the natural order of things in her world.

  Handing over her ticket for Shannon, she waited as the official filled out her boarding pass. She felt suddenly tired and hungry. It would be nice to retreat to the restaurant for a long-awaited meal and a much-needed drink…

  ‘Excuse me.’ A tall man, hidden from her view by a forest of bandsmen’s caps, was talking to an official at the far check-in desk. The voice wasn’t particularly loud, but it was strangely familiar.

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘Flight EI 377 to Shannon. What time is take-out, please?’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir?’

  ‘
What time is take-out?’

  ‘Oh. You mean take-off, sir.’ The Aer Lingus woman smiled.

  ‘I apologise. It flies out, but it takes off. I shall remember in future.’

  Tara stood rooted to the spot, hardly daring to breathe.

  ‘Excuse me, ma’am? Ma’am?’ The woman at her own check-in desk was impatiently holding out her boarding pass. ‘Boarding is in forty-five minutes, Gate…’

  ‘Thanks, I know.’ Tara grabbed the pass and dashed towards the sound of the man’s voice. She had to fight her way through the throng of bandsmen who had all, naturally, decided to walk away from the desk at that precise moment.

  ‘Excuse me, excuse me.’ Tara pushed her way through the crowd and burst out in front of the next check-in point.

  But by that time, of course, Andres had gone.

  She was perched on the first-floor balcony, her eyes desperately scanning the crowded terminal building, when she finally caught sight of him.

  There he stood, directly beneath her, at the bottom of the upward escalator. And for some reason, he, too, seemed to be scanning every face in the crowd.

  ‘Andres!’ she yelled, waving her hand. ‘Andres!’

  But her words were swept away in some interminable tannoy announcement. He turned and began to walk away.

  ‘Andres!’

  Tara felt a surge of anxiety. She glanced over her shoulder at the downward escalator, which faced the opposite side of the building. If she took that, she would lose sight of him – and she couldn’t bear to do that. By the time she’d reached the ground floor, he could easily have disappeared.

  Throwing caution aside, she ran downwards on the ascending staircase, dodging irate passengers as she fought her way down against the flow of rising metal.

  ‘Andres!’

  This time he heard her and turned around. His tanned face split into a wide grin that could have signified either relief or amusement, or possibly both. Laughing at her antics on the moving stairway, he quickly returned and hopped on to the bottom step. They met halfway, in a chaotic tangle of outstretched arms. The escalator continued to carry them upwards.