Forgive and Forget

by Patricia Scanlan

  She dragged on the tight-fitting black T-shirt that read ‘Cool for Cats’ which her mother had bought her in Paris.

  ‘Ready?’ Sarah came up to her.

  ‘Yep, just got to go to the loo. Got my P’s I think.’

  ‘Tsk,’ Sarah said sympathetically. ‘Hope it doesn’t ruin your night with your mom.’

  ‘It won’t. It’s all off, she’s delayed in London and I have to go out to my wicked stepmother.’

  ‘Oh! Poor you. We’re going to visit my gran in hospital tonight, otherwise you could have stayed with me.’

  ‘Thanks, Sarah, I know. Just my tough luck. I could stay on my own in the house no probs, but they won’t allow me.’

  ‘Bums!’

  ‘Yeah, bums!’ echoed Melissa as she made her way through the throng at the door and headed for the loo.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Barry Adams drummed his fingers against the steering wheel as the traffic crawled bumper to bumper along the Booterstown Road. The roadworks were a blood-pressure-raising nightmare, and it was starting to drizzle rain. The fine sunny weather of earlier had disappeared and dark clouds massed out to sea. He was on his way to pick up Melissa and his humour was not good. The phone buzzed in the hands-free set and he saw he had a message from Debbie. Perhaps she was running late too. Maybe he should have suggested a rendezvous with her to give her a lift, but she’d been so touchy with him lately he wasn’t sure if the offer would have been appreciated.

  Barry scowled as a Merc cut in in front of him and broke the red light. ‘Idiot,’ he snarled, jamming on. Why was there never a cop around when irresponsible bastards like that broke the law? He flicked on Lyric FM and Debussy’s ‘Nocturne’ filled the air. As he waited for the lights to change he scanned the message and his mouth tightened. Debbie wasn’t coming to arrange the seating at her own wedding. That was more than a bit rich, he fumed. Madam Debbie’s manners left a lot to be desired. She was an ungrateful, churlish brat who ought to know better. He dialled her number and got her voicemail. She’d probably turned off her phone immediately so she wouldn’t have to speak to him.

  ‘Debbie, my time is as precious as yours. I do not appreciate being stood up at the last minute. And you might have had the decency to ring earlier and speak to me rather than sending a text,’ he rebuked curtly and hung up.

  Would they ever get on an even keel? Was she going to punish him for the rest of his life? Life really was too short, and he was going to have it out with her one of these days. But not right now, unfortunately. Connie would freak if he caused a row before the wedding. Still, it meant Melissa wouldn’t have to come to Greystones tonight, so that should put her in a good humour. Would sons have been easier to deal with, he wondered ruefully.

  He dialled Connie’s number. ‘Hi, Barry,’ she said cheerfully, and he smiled. One thing about Connie, she was generally good-humoured most of the time. It had been one of the things that had drawn him to her all those years ago.

  ‘Just had a text from Debbie, cancelling. So I suppose we better set up another date, although I’m a bit tied up for the rest of the week.’

  ‘It’s leaving things tight, Barry. Look, why don’t you come anyway? We can do a rough plan and, if they want to change it, they can,’ Connie suggested pragmatically. ‘It’s not that it’s going to be really formal anyway. Barbecues are supposed to be laid-back. It was more to sort out the grandparents and um . . . Aimee and Melissa.’

  ‘Oh . . . Oh. I suppose so.’ Barry frowned. He’d insisted on Aimee and Melissa coming to the wedding. Maybe, on reflection, it would have been easier all round if he’d just gone himself.

  ‘Er . . . it’s just I’ve another complication in that regard. Aimee’s flight has been delayed and I’ve to pick up Melissa. Could I bring her with me?’ he asked hesitantly.

  ‘Sure. No problem. Will you have eaten?’

  ‘I don’t think we’ll have time. The traffic is crap. I’m crawling along. We’ll grab a sandwich in a garage or something.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Barry, you can’t give the poor child a sandwich after a long day at school. I’ll stick your names in the pot. Melissa’s not a fussy eater, sure she’s not?’

  ‘She’d eat yourself,’ laughed Barry, feeling more relaxed. ‘Look, I can’t tell you what time I’ll get there, I don’t know what the traffic is like on the N11, I haven’t heard a traffic update. But if it’s anything like here, it’s pretty slow.’

  ‘There’re plenty of roadworks; I got stuck last Monday just after Loughlinstown. Why don’t you get the Dart from Sandycove and give me a buzz and I’ll drive down and collect you? It would save you an hour at least.’

  ‘Are you sure? That’s putting you out a bit.’ Barry felt a tad guilty to have his ex-wife running around after him.

  ‘Don’t worry about it. Otherwise it will take you all night and I want to go to bed early, I’ve an early shift tomorrow,’ Connie said briskly.

  ‘Oh . . . OK, I’ll buzz you when we’re leaving Bray.’

  ‘See you then.’

  ‘Thanks, Connie,’ Barry said gratefully and hung up.

  He gave a sigh of relief. Getting the Dart and having Connie collect him, not to mention feeding him and Melissa, would make life so much easier. It would take all the hassle out of the evening.

  He was so lucky with his ex-wife, he reflected as the lights turned green and he crawled forward another few metres. Connie was a sound woman. He heard such dreadful tales from blokes he knew who were crucified by their ex’s demands. Bill Wallis in the golf club had been driven to a heart attack by his ex’s selfishness. Sheena Wallis had always been bone idle anyway, Barry remembered. Sheena had given up work the minute she’d got a ring on her finger. She’d had two children and moaned her way through her pregnancies and made Bill feel like a heel. The chap had never had a proper dinner handed up to him when he came home from work; she bought processed meals and pizzas and stuck anything she could in the microwave. If it was sunny she sat out sunbathing all day. She demanded an au pair so she could play golf and ‘lunch with the “girls” ’. She was always taking off to those spa places for beauty treatments and Bill had endured twenty-five years of hard labour before he met a gorgeous woman who cherished and loved him and had fun with him. When he’d told Sheena he was leaving her there had been ructions. She’d got a hotshot lawyer who’d seen to it that she’d kept the big house in Sandycove they’d lived in and he was paying a whacking big dollop of spousal maintenance, even though the two sons were grown up and living abroad.

  Sheena still golfed and sunbathed and went to spas and had no intention of ever doing a day’s work. Bill and his second wife were living in a small apartment in Cabinteely, but he told the guys at the club that it was worth all the hassle to be with a woman who really loved him.

  Bill wasn’t the only one who had to put up with mega hassle from an ex-wife and Barry knew that he’d been really lucky with Connie. When they’d made the decision to split he’d told her that she could have the house and that he’d continue paying the mortgage but she told him that that wasn’t fair and she’d take over the mortgage herself, as long as he paid maintenance for Debbie.

  ‘I’ve never been a sponger and I’m not going to start now,’ he remembered her saying firmly. He’d really admired her for that. She’d gone back to agency nursing five mornings a week rather than the part-time hours she’d worked when Debbie was young. Once their daughter had gone into secondary school she’d worked full-time, starting early so that she could be off at four-thirty to be there when Debbie got home from school.

  He still sometimes felt guilty about their break-up. When, after months of him withdrawing and distancing himself from her because he felt trapped and unhappy, she’d asked him if he wanted to separate, he’d grasped the chance eagerly. He’d rejected her offer to go to couples counselling, he’d just wanted out. He’d been a selfish bastard really, he acknowledged as he slowed to a halt at the Blackrock Clinic. He’d made no effor
t to try to save their marriage. They could have struggled through the bad times if he’d been prepared to try and work at it. He’d let it go too easy.

  He sighed. If she hadn’t got pregnant with Debbie before they got married, things might have been different. He wouldn’t have felt obliged to propose. They could have travelled, worked abroad, had fun, before settling down.

  He remembered the sense of dread and despair that had enveloped him as they’d signed the papers for their first mortgage. He’d felt utterly hemmed in and resentful, but he’d put on a brave face and accepted the congratulations of his friends when he and Connie had thrown their housewarming party.

  He had tried. And their first years together were happy enough. He’d been very much a hands-on dad and had always mucked in with the housework. When Connie had had a miscarriage when Debbie was three she had been gutted and he’d grieved with her, but a part of him – and he still felt ashamed, when he looked back – had felt relief. Two children would have anchored him very, very firmly.

  By the time Debbie was five he felt well and truly in a rut, working nine to five as a copywriter in an advertising company. A couple of bottles of wine on Friday night with friends, sex on Saturday morning, then the fry-up, supermarket shopping or a trip to the DIY, a meal out that night if they could get a babysitter. A walk by the sea on Sunday morning and then lunch at either of their parents’. Roast beef, roast lamb or stuffed chicken – it rarely varied. A game of golf Sunday afternoon. Then home to flick through the papers and, before he knew it, it was Monday and the whole boring routine started again. It did his head in and he’d taken it out on Connie and punished her by withdrawing from her. There weren’t ugly rows or slamming doors and walk-outs, just coldness and silence.

  It had been a relief when she’d suggested a separation, but then she’d always been the brave one. He hadn’t had the guts to suggest it first. He’d been a bloody coward, he thought, as he finally took the left turn for Dun Laoghaire, glad that he didn’t have to face the mayhem of the N11.

  He’d moved out and got a small flat before moving to the States. He’d got a job in Boston in an advertising agency, through a friend who’d moved over there a few years previously. He’d spent two years there, sorting his head out, dating women and sowing the oats he’d never had a chance to sow before he’d married and become a father. On a trip home, he’d hooked up with an old college buddy, Frank, who was the publisher of a string of successful trade magazines. He’d dragged Barry to a launch of a sport and leisure company in a posh marquee in Killiney, and there he’d met Aimee Davenport, who’d overseen the catering end of things. She was tall, raven-haired, supremely confident and utterly driven to succeed. She fascinated him. Her career meant everything to her, and he was challenged.

  She was the one who rang up cancelling at the last moment because something had come up at work. She was the one who insisted on driving her car on dates because she liked being in control and hated being driven around by other people. She was the one who couldn’t understand how women would want to give up work after having a baby. ‘What a waste of a brain,’ she’d scoffed when telling him about her boss, who was resigning to stay at home to look after her children after her third pregnancy.

  He’d fallen hard. She was so different to most women he met. And marriage was not on her agenda, even though she was in her late twenties.

  ‘Marriage is on every woman’s agenda,’ he’d assured her when he’d asked her why she was still unwed.

  ‘Well, it’s not on mine . . . and never has been. I want to be with someone because I want to, not because I have to. And I want them to feel the same. I can look after myself, I can provide for myself. I am every man’s equal. Marriage changes all that.’ He could still remember the sparkle in her green eyes as she eyeballed him.

  He had found her attitude very refreshing, especially after his experiences in the US, where most of the women he’d dated seemed frantic for ‘exclusivity’ and marriage. She’d been equally refreshing about sex.

  ‘You want it, I want it . . . what’s the big deal?’ she’d said casually, and then proceeded to lead him into her cool, minimalist, mint-green bedroom, where she’d stripped unselfconsciously and laughed at his reserve. He’d felt happy, free, unfettered, being with her.

  Connie had been cool when he’d told her he was seeing a woman at home. Somehow, seeing a woman in Dublin was harder for her to take than knowing he was with someone in Boston. Debbie, as usual, ignored him. Angry and hurt at what she saw as his desertion of her, she wanted nothing to do with him at first. He was always shocked by the changes in her when he came back to Ireland to visit. How tall she got, the smattering of freckles across her nose, the gap in her front teeth just before her Holy Communion that made her look like an endearing little urchin. Each time he came home he had to get to know her all over again, and it was difficult for all of them.

  In fairness to Connie, she tried her best to foster good relations between father and daughter but, always, just as he’d begun to make a little headway, it was time to go back Stateside. When Debbie had realized, the last time he’d come home, that he wasn’t staying, as she’d fantasized he would, she had, with all the rage and anguish of a devastated child, screamed that she hated him and wished he were dead.

  He’d gone back to Boston with his head in a spin. When he phoned Connie, as he did every week, Debbie refused point blank to speak to him, in spite of her mother’s entreaties. That was painful – much more than he’d expected – and life in Boston began to pall. He missed her breathless ‘Hello, Daddy’ and all the childish little tales she had for him.

  Aimee had kept in touch sporadically and he found himself wanting to be with her and wishing that she wanted to be with him. His father had become ill with heart trouble and he’d flown home several times that year. Debbie refused to see him and Connie had eventually asked him to stop forcing the issue. It was too upsetting for their daughter and very stressful for her. He’d felt completely miserable, frustrated and angry and hadn’t tried to see either of them on his last visit.

  He’d always linked up with Aimee on his trips home, and his time with her made him briefly forget the other dramas in his life. Frank, the friend who’d introduced them, had bumped into them in the Horseshoe Bar in the Shelbourne one Friday night.

  ‘Just the man I need. That little turd Gavin Clooney has taken a job with a rival publisher and left me in the lurch. I need someone good. I need someone who knows their stuff. I need a new managing editor who can write copy if needs be, and no one can write better copy than you. What do you think, Barry? Do you want to come home and give it a go and sicken that little bastard at the same time?’ Frank grinned at him.

  Barry laughed. No one in the business had liked Gavin Clooney; he was a self-opinionated, pushy know-all, but he was good at the job.

  ‘I suppose it’s something to think about,’ he said slowly.

  ‘Come on, it will be fun, just like old times. We’d make a great team,’ Frank urged. ‘Persuade him, Aimee.’

  ‘My phone bill would be a hell of a lot cheaper.’ Aimee slanted him a teasing glance.

  ‘And you could keep an eye on your dad, and spend a lot more time with your little girl,’ Frank observed shrewdly, knowing he was pressing all the right buttons.

  ‘Stop! Stop!’ Barry held up his hand. ‘Overkill!’

  ‘OK.’ Frank backed off, laughing. ‘Let me email you a proposal, salary, perks, etc. Have a think and let me know by midweek.’

  ‘What do you think about Frank’s proposal?’ Barry asked Aimee several hours later as they lay spooned together after a lusty session of love-making.

  ‘Entirely up to you,’ she murmured drowsily.

  ‘I know that,’ he retorted. ‘I’m asking you, what do you think?’

  ‘Are you asking about the job or about us?’ Aimee turned to face him, her eyes glinting at him.

  Barry laughed. ‘Direct, aren’t you?’

  ‘That’s m
e.’ She leaned up on her elbow, her hair tumbling down over her face and shoulders, and smiled at him. ‘As I said, my phone bill would be a lot cheaper.’

  ‘And that’s it?’ he demanded.

  ‘Don’t push, Barry. I like what we have. You’re a sexy man, you turn me on, we have fun together and it would be nice to see more of you, but. And it’s a big but . . . don’t make me the reason for deciding to come back to Ireland.’

  ‘Well, that’s honest,’ he muttered.

  ‘Oh, don’t get huffy,’ she teased, sliding her hand down his thigh. ‘You guys, you’re all the same. All needing your egos stroked.’

  ‘You should have been a man,’ he growled, kissing her hard.

  ‘I’m glad I’m not,’ she laughed, when he lifted his head to look down at her. ‘I’m not a girly girl and I never will be. I’m my own woman and don’t forget it.’

  Barry smiled at the memory. Aimee was still very much her own woman and he knew that she might never have married him, only that Melissa had begged them to get married for years, before they finally tied the knot in a registry office three years ago.

  Would he have come back home if Aimee hadn’t been on the scene? It was still hard to tell, but he’d taken the job and made a go of it, and become a director and shareholder of the firm to boot. So, careerwise, it had worked out. He and Aimee hadn’t moved in together for a year after he returned, until she was ‘sure’ she wanted to be in a long-term relationship. When she had decided that she should ‘do’ motherhood, he’d looked on Melissa’s birth as a chance to be a proper father, second time around. And this time he really had been hands on. He’d had no choice. Aimee had climbed the career ladder with single-minded determination. She’d been back at work full-time two months after giving birth. Maternity leave had sent her climbing the walls.

  Connie and Aimee were chalk and cheese, that was for sure, he reflected as he drove past the yacht club. And, lately, because of the time he’d spent with his ex discussing the forthcoming wedding, he was beginning to appreciate Connie a lot more than he had when he was married to her.