Forgive and Forget

by Patricia Scanlan

  What was wrong with him lately? he wondered. He felt so dissatisfied. It was this bloody wedding. Up until this, life was flowing placidly along and he was going with the flow of it. It was only since he’d started spending more time with Connie that he’d become unsettled.

  Why could he not stop thinking about her? Why had he started comparing her to Aimee? It made him feel extremely uncomfortable and disloyal. They were completely different women and, the older he got and the more time he spent in her company, the more he realized that his ex-wife had some sterling qualities which he’d never really appreciated when he’d been married to her.

  She was very, very understanding, especially when dealing with Melissa. Aimee should not have made such a song and dance at the table today the way she had. Lissy had been humiliated and upset and Connie had seen it and gone out of her way to be kind. Not that Aimee had appreciated it; she’d been very sharp in her response to Connie and, to his shock, that had rankled. He’d felt like telling his wife to be quiet. He’d immediately wanted to take his ex-wife’s side.

  He’d felt like telling Debbie to be more than quiet. She was being totally insufferable. He’d never felt the vibes so toxic between them. No matter what he said or did, she wasn’t happy. She loved trying to make him feel guilty. How could she keep it up after all this time? He’d done his best, he’d always looked after her financially and been more than generous but she’d kept those barriers up so high, no matter what he did to try and repair the damage between them. But what was even worse was the cold way she treated her half-sister. Only that Connie sometimes warned him to go easy on her due to wedding nerves, he’d let her have it. When the wedding was over he was going to confront Debbie and have it out with her once and for all. It wasn’t all about her. He was a damn good father despite what she might think and it was time she grew up and copped on to herself.

  He put the book back on the shelf and ambled over to the café, ordered a latte and started the Irish Times crossword. There was no point in going home – Aimee would be in a snit with him, and if they started a row things might be said that could cause real trouble.

  He might as well sit here and relax with the paper for another hour or so and let things calm down.

  ‘My mom was like, so mean, she just kept on and on about it being rude to text at the table, in front of them, and I was like, nearly crying inside I was so embarrassed. How could she do it in front of them? She was just showing off and I hate her. She had her snooty show-off voice on that she uses when she wants to impress people.’ Melissa sipped a diet Coke as she sat on a seat on the promenade and poured her heart out to Sarah, who was tucking into a Big Mac and a milkshake.

  ‘Parents are just so annoying sometimes, that wasn’t very nice. What did Debbie say?’ Sarah oozed sympathy.

  ‘Nuttin.’ Melissa sighed. ‘She never says anything. She’s so unfriendly. I think she hates me.’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ her friend protested.

  ‘She does. And I know why. It’s ’cos I live with our dad and she’s jealous of us. I heard my mom and dad talking about it once. They didn’t know I could hear them. My dad was saying how he’d really like us to be friends and my mom told him he was wasting his time. Debbie doesn’t want to be friends – she’s too angry with him for splitting up with Connie when she was small.’

  ‘I suppose it makes sense – I wouldn’t like my dad to live somewhere else with another daughter,’ Sarah said matter-of-factly, licking the sauce off her fingers.

  ‘I don’t care, it’s not my fault. Once this wedding is over I won’t be seeing much of her,’ Melissa said sulkily.

  ‘It’s a pity though, in a way. She’s your only sister. You could have fun with her. You could go and stay with her at weekends and meet all Bryan’s cool friends,’ the other girl pointed out.

  ‘Yeah, well, that’s never going to happen so we better make the most of the wedding. She’ll be so busy she won’t bother us on the day.’

  ‘It was very kind of them to ask me to it.’ Sarah’s eyes lit up.

  ‘Connie’s pretty OK, actually. I’m starting to like her the more I get to know her,’ Melissa admitted. ‘We had a good time in her house last night, even though I didn’t think I was going to enjoy it. I played with her little black cat for ages. She’s a good cook too. Those new potatoes we had were scrumptious. They were straight out of the ground and she cooked them lovely. She stood up for me, too, at the lunch today. She told my mom that the text might be important, but my mom wasn’t having any of it. Then, later, Connie came into the loo and asked me if I was OK. And when I came out Mom had gone home in a huff so my dad and I ate our lunch on our own, and he’s gone to Hughes & Hughes, even though we were in it this morning. Thank God you were able to meet me. It won’t be much fun at home for the rest of the weekend.’ She chewed the inside of her lip.

  ‘And I can’t ask you to mine because my granddad’s going to be staying while my grandma’s in hospital and my mam’s in a tizzy and not in very good humour either. And she’s got PMT! Our house is no fun. Let’s go up to the market and have a look around, will we?’ Sarah suggested.

  ‘OK. I want to have a look at the jewellery, I got a cool bracelet there a few weeks ago – remember the one I showed you?’

  ‘Yeah, it was beautiful. You should wear it to the wedding.’

  ‘Mom wants me to wear a dress. I told her no way.’ Melissa finished her Coke and threw the can in a bin as they began to stroll towards the People’s Park.

  ‘Look, we have to look grown-up – maybe she’s right? A dress with very high heels and black tights can look great. Look at Kate Moss; she looks dead cool in dresses,’ Sarah advised. ‘Don’t forget we want those hot guys to dance with us so we can take loads of photos of them.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re right,’ Melissa agreed eagerly, seeing the sense of her friend’s words. ‘We’ll show them around the class when we go back to school after the summer. We can pretend we’re dating and that might shut that minger Terry Corcoran up. She’s always asking me have I ever had a boyfriend and have I ever done it and she knows very well I haven’t. Do you think she’s done it or is she spoofing?’

  ‘Don’t know, she’s a tart, though, so she could have. Lenny Dunlop said he’s done it with her after they’d smoked a joint at Lena Conway’s party.’ Sarah shrugged. ‘I don’t know how they could keep smoking it, do you remember the way it made us puke after a couple of goes? I was scared. I wouldn’t try it again.’

  ‘Me neither,’ Melissa said in heartfelt agreement, remembering how violently ill she’d been in Lena’s garden after attempting to smoke her first joint. She’d felt so woozy and out of it. Sarah said she’d actually turned green. She’d felt green, she thought guiltily. She definitely wouldn’t be experimenting again. ‘Do you think it was because she was out of it that she did it?’

  ‘Maybe, I don’t know. She’s always messing with boys, she’s a slapper,’ Sarah said dismissively.

  ‘I’d be afraid to do it. I bet it would hurt; it hurts putting in a tampon.’ Melissa grimaced.

  ‘A tampon’s tiny compared to a mickey,’ Sarah scoffed.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Pretend your tampon is Johnny Depp,’ giggled Sarah as they strolled along, laughing, all their worries temporarily forgotten.

  ‘And then she had the nerve to ask me was I not worried about putting on weight because I was eating the cod and chips. How rude is that, Bryan? I felt like smacking her. But I gave her her answer, I can—’

  ‘Stop! Enough! I don’t want to hear any more. You know what I think, Debbs? I think we should call the whole thing off, it’s causing nothing but trouble. They’re not happy. You’re not happy. You’re stressed out. We don’t seem to be having any fun lately. It’s just not worth it.’ Bryan took a slug of beer and studied his fiancée to see her reaction.

  ‘What! You want to call it off?’ Debbie stared at him in horror.

  ‘Yeah, I do. It’s no fun any more. You’
re totally stressed out and that’s stressing me out. Everything’s a big deal. That’s not the way it should be.’ Bryan ran his fingers through his hair and shrugged.

  ‘Don’t you want to marry me?’ She could hardly speak. She felt as though he’d punched her in the solar plexus.

  ‘Yes I do, of course I do.’ He leaned across the table and took her hand. ‘But not this way. Not with all this fighting and arguing, not if every single minute is going to be consumed so much by this frigging event that we don’t have a life any more.’

  ‘But, Bryan, these things happen in life. I need to know you’re supporting me. I need to know I can depend on you when things are tough for me, the way you know I’m there for you when things are tough for you.’

  ‘I am there for you,’ he protested. ‘I just don’t think this is very enjoyable for you and I think we should not go through with it. Or maybe do it differently further down the line. We could go to the Caribbean and get hitched in a ceremony on the beach, just you, me and some of the gang.’

  ‘But Mum would be very upset if she wasn’t at my wedding.’

  ‘Well, she could come then.’

  ‘And what about Karen and my cousins?’

  ‘See, there you go, Debbie, I’m trying to simplify things and you start causing complications straight away,’ he said angrily. She couldn’t see his eyes – they were hidden behind his sunglasses – but she knew they’d be almost black.

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ she whispered, gutted, and then she could contain her tears no longer and she put her hands up over her face and cried.

  ‘Aw, don’t do that, Debbs – people are looking,’ Bryan said uncomfortably.

  ‘Let them look. I don’t care,’ she sobbed, as the couple at the next table looked at them curiously. They were sitting outside a bistro in Temple Bar, and the streets were full of shoppers and tourists wandering around the cobbled square.

  He handed her a serviette. ‘Here, use this,’ he said awkwardly. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’

  ‘Are you mad, Bryan? Of course you’ve upset me,’ she snapped, pulling her hand out of his, suddenly furious at him. ‘One minute we’re getting married and the next we’re not, because you can’t cope with the hassle. Well, life’s full of hassle, whether you like it or not. And if you can’t deal with it, there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m going home. You better give me the keys of the car. You’ve been drinking. You don’t want to get caught drinking and driving, that might be too much for you to cope with,’ she raged tearfully. She grabbed the keys off the metallic silver table, stood up and hurried in the direction of the quays, tears streaming down her face.

  Today was the worst day of her life, and it was all Barry and Aimee’s fault. If they hadn’t gatecrashed her and Connie’s lunch, she and Bryan would never have had this conversation and the wedding would still be on.

  It was typical of Bryan to back off when things weren’t going smoothly. She just couldn’t depend on him sometimes. What was the point of marrying someone you couldn’t depend on? She emerged through Merchant’s Arch and crossed the road to where the car was parked.

  The seats were hot when she got into it but she kept the roof up. A guy in a hoodie had thrown his empty Styrofoam coffee carton into the passenger seat once when she’d been driving and it had put her off driving on her own with the top down when she was in town.

  She drove along the quays in a daze, turning right to cross the Liffey to come back down the other side.

  ‘I think we should call the whole thing off.’ Those shocking words kept twisting around, tormenting her, frightening her. If Bryan wanted to call off the wedding, maybe he was unsure of his love for her. A cold, fearful dread engulfed her. Maybe he wanted to end it completely. When he said he wanted to call the whole thing off, did he mean the engagement as well? She couldn’t imagine her life without Bryan. He was what made it worth living. She had never had as much fun with anyone as she did with her fiancé. He made her laugh; he brought out the giddy, girlish, carefree part of her. Maybe he was right. She was turning their wedding into an angst-filled nightmare and all the joy had gone out of it for them. And she had to shoulder the blame for most of it.

  Her parents were trying their best. Barry wasn’t mean, she had to give him that much. But if she had just taken all that he’d offered and pretended that nothing was wrong and everything was hunky-dory she wouldn’t have been true to herself. She would have felt such a hypocrite.

  She drove in turmoil, trying hard to concentrate in the heavy traffic. She veered from sorrow to anger. How dare Bryan treat her like that? How dare he suddenly announce that he wanted to call the wedding off? Had he no consideration for her feelings? What did he expect, that she was overjoyed at the suggestion? He’d just sat there, coolly and calmly, and hadn’t even reacted when she’d got upset, except to tell her not to cry. Well, she could manage fine without him. She had a good job, she wasn’t dependent on him, he could stick his wedding, she raged, as she passed the riverside restaurant where he’d had brunch with his friends earlier. He was such a self-centred bollix. He wanted everything in life to suit him. He was always taking and she was always giving. Well, she should have given him his ring back while she was at it. If he didn’t want to marry her now, what guarantee was there that he’d want to marry her in the future?

  It was going to be embarrassing telling everyone that the wedding was postponed. Connie would freak and Barry probably wouldn’t be too pleased either. They’d lose their deposit for sure with the hotel. And some of their friends had already bought them wedding presents. Well, he could tell them it was all off. He wasn’t going to get away with any more crap. If he made decisions, he was going to take responsibility for them and not leave her to do all the dirty work.

  Her heart contracted. How could he do this to her? Didn’t he love her? Was that what all this was about? He was looking for an escape route and he’d found it. Blaming her stormy relationship with her father for backing out. Why didn’t he understand? She wept as she crossed the river at the Point.

  Didn’t anyone understand where she was coming from? Bryan was the one who was supposed to understand most of all, and he just didn’t want to know. Now he’d pulled the rug from under her. Maybe that was what men did, she thought wildly: her father had done it to her and now Bryan was doing it too, pulling the rug from under her just when she needed it most. Well, two could play at that game. All she needed was courage.

  ‘Oh God, help,’ she whispered as she paid her toll for the East Link and drove home.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ‘Well, Miss Hope, my lunch was a disaster, but I know that you’ll enjoy yours.’ Connie smiled as she spooned some tuna, a rare treat, into her little black cat’s dish, and was rewarded with ecstatic meowing and rubbing against her leg. She patted her pet’s furry head as she bent down and placed the dish in front of her. Cats were so easy to please: tuna and cuddles, and they were happy.

  Her left knee gave a twinge of pain as she stood up and she grimaced. She was getting old and decrepit, she thought gloomily. She certainly felt it today. She walked upstairs to her bedroom and began to undress, stepping out of the red and black floral skirt that she’d worn to lunch. She pulled the black shirt she’d teamed with it over her head and caught sight of herself in the mirror and groaned. Toned and supple she certainly was not. Aimee had looked fabulous at lunch today. So slim and fit and tanned. Her boobs pert and firm, her arms with not a hint of wobbly flesh.

  Connie studied herself. She was around five foot seven, and her legs were in reasonable shape due to the walking she did on the beach. Her waist was still there but had thickened – she couldn’t deny it – and a soft little wobble of tummy was unmistakable under her black briefs. Her boobs, tragically, could no longer, under any circumstances, be called firm and pert, she observed wryly. ‘Ripe’ and ‘full’ could describe them, she wouldn’t pass the pencil test like she used to a few years ago, but they were still shapely for a w
oman on the wrong side of forty-five. She turned sideways and felt even more depressed as she studied her bum. Definitely a question-mark ass! Drooping and starting to spread, there was no denying it. A far cry from Aimee’s tight buns.

  She sighed deeply and sat down on the bed. No matter how hard she dieted or exercised, she was never going to have a body like Aimee’s or even a body like she’d had herself, ten years ago. For the first time she actually felt middle-aged. Sometimes, especially when she’d begun to notice that she couldn’t see the small print on packets and was beginning to have to use her glasses more than occasionally, she’d realized that the ageing process was at work, but it wasn’t something that she’d dwelt on. She’d noticed her periods being a bit erratic, and that the hormonal headache that often accompanied them was becoming more intense and sickening, but it wasn’t until her sister-in-law had teased her over lunch and told her that she was peri-menopausal and probably having a hot flush that it really hit home that her youth was gone.

  A wave of grief overwhelmed her. Life certainly hadn’t turned out the way she’d planned. She was middle-aged, with a failed marriage behind her, living on her own with just a little cat for company. Her body, no longer youthful, was now a reminder to her that time was passing and her options were diminishing. She cried for what was never going to be. No partner to start a new family with, the way Barry had done with Aimee. Always at the back of her mind had been the hope that she would meet and fall in love with someone that Debbie would like, and they would have lived together and had children and been very happy.

  Instead, she was alone, with no realistic likelihood of having another child. Having reared a daughter, and given her what she had hoped was as normal a childhood as possible, it was painful and worrying to realize that her daughter was, at the age of twenty-five, still full of rage, anger and bitterness because of the failure of her parents’ marriage. That had to be her fault. She’d failed completely as a wife, a mother and now her feminine womanly bits were falling apart too. All she had to look forward to was a lonely middle-age and God only knew what sort of an old age.