‘Feng Shui in the bedroom’: never sleep opposite a mirror – the reflections suggest the presence of a third party. How ironic. Ronan and I sleep opposite a mirror.
‘The turtle exercise’: sit down and close your eyes, let your chin drop to your chest. Inhale – slowly raising your head again – then exhale while tilting your head back.
Right now, I’m sitting in the middle of Bewley’s crowded Oriental café, doing the turtle exercise with my eyes closed.
“Julianne, what are you doing?”
The cheerful voice makes my heart somersault.
It’s Nicole.
She’s in her red dress, out of breath, all smiles. Hurriedly I drop the Feng Shui booklet between my legs, close it and slide it surreptitiously into my bag beneath the table.
“I was just reading the Bible,” I reply, pushing the coffee eclair towards her. “What on earth are you doing here, Nicole?”
“I’m meeting Ronan at four in Temple Bar. Isn’t this an amazing coincidence? Julianne, I love the leather jacket.”
“I’ve just charged it to my husband’s credit card, along with all these shoes and suits and things, and I also bought a lemon-yellow Wonderbra with matching knickers, just for the hell of it.”
Not a flicker from her. “I’ve just bought a dress myself. Will I show it to you?”
“It’s okay.”
“It’s peach,” she insists hopefully.
“Charming. Enjoy your coffee eclair, Nicole.”
She sits down opposite me and starts picking at the eclair (Mother will be furious). After ordering a coffee from one of the waiters she turns to me all earnest, grave.
She says she realizes I just put myself on the line for her back there in front of Harry. She says she is extremely grateful to me for saving her life, and that owing to me, she no longer lives in danger of being thumped. Thank you so much, Julianne.
“You’re welcome, by the way, Nicole…” I’m playing with my lower lip. “I’d love to meet Ronan.”
“You would?”
“Yes. I was thinking: what about an introduction?”
“You mean, this afternoon?”
“It can’t hurt.”
“I’d like that.” She smiles.
“I’m just curious to see what a jerk he is. Only joking.”
She tells me, in effect, that, at four o’clock she’ll introduce me to my husband of two years’ standing.
“Hands off, though.” She laughs. “He’s mine, okay?”
This is her concept of a joke, like.
“You have no idea, do you?”
“How do you mean?”
“Forget it.”
She flicks her hair back and takes another forkful of cake. She’s beginning to look tired. She’s lost the happy glow she had when I called up to her place earlier. That thing with Harry must have traumatized her, poor thing.
I take a bite from my own cream-orientated gunge, take several sips of my coffee and turn to her. “Nicole, can I say something?”
She nods earnestly at me.
“You probably won’t like this, but do you have any idea what you constitute in Ronan’s eyes?”
“How do you mean?”
“To him you are just a sexual plaything.”
“I don’t…”
“To Ronan you are merely an inflatable doll with a smile. A vibrator with a human face. He is just using you as his virility barometer.”
“Why are you saying all that, Jul – ”
“You’re just a conquest, Nicole.”
She quietly nibbles some titbits from her fork. I’m actually beginning to enjoy this.
“This isn’t about sexual conquest.” She sulks.
“Face it, Nicole, you’re no more than a mini-Everest.”
She flushes, sipping her just arrived coffee.
And most infuriatingly I add: “Sad but true.”
“Ronan is not like other men,” she tries to explain.
“They never are.”
Again, I have to listen to a load of hogwash about how my wonderful husband is so different. She tells me that he’s kind and gentle, and appreciative of her work as an artist, which of course makes me want to vomit recipe books wholesale.
“You’ll see what I mean when you meet him at four.”
She goes quiet now.
“Look, Nicole, I don’t see how you can continue to ignore certain blatant facts: once upon a time he and his present wife actually went to the trouble of getting married in a church. In front of a priest and a congregation. In front of God, for chrissake! Think of this: he put a wedding ring on her finger and walked back down the aisle with her and took her on a honeymooon to…wherever, and he lived with her for a few years and is still living with her, no thanks to you, Nicole.”
“Have you any idea how all this is making me feel?”
“In the end he’s only going to let you down. Like he did his own wife. Wait and see.”
She slams down her fork, leaving one small piece of eclair on the plate, and takes a sip of coffee. She waits a beat, then proceeds, as nicely as she can: “Look, I know you’re going through your own problems.”
“Stop right there, Nicole.”
“You were really kind,” she insists, “taking me to hospital yesterday…”
“I didn’t plan it like that.”
And I didn’t. In actual fact I had planned to beat the crap clean out of her, but fate in its characteristically arrogant and unpredictable manner decided to jerk people around yet again and give the job to Harry instead.
“…and protecting me from Harry just now. You didn’t have to do all that. You’ve been fantastic.”
“Dump him, Nicole.”
“But I’m in love with him, don’t you see?”
“He’s using you. For a bit of sex.”
“Is that what you think this is?” she pleads. “A bit of sex?”
“Exactly.”
“If it’s just a bit of sex, then why did he tell me this morning that his marriage was dead?”
Pause.
“He said that?”
“He phoned me after breakfast. His silly wife had been tormenting him again.”
“His marriage is dead.”
I mean, it seemed relatively alive to me this morning.
“That’s what he said.”
“How dead is dead? ”
She stands up, excusing herself and saying that it’s nearly four o’clock, and she’d better ‘pop’ into the ladies with her plastic Brown Thomas bag to change into her new peach dress.
Oh, the joys!
Nicole is leading me up Dame Street to the Temple Bar area of town, a revamped cobblestone development housing the worst and the best excesses of humanity, from sculpture exhibition halls to institutions for getting pissed.
She’s walking tall beside me in her vile new peach dress. She says Ronan has never kept her waiting. That he’s a fantastic timekeeper.
“Has he considered working in aviation control?”
“He’s great that way.”
I can’t wait to see his face when we both walk in.
She tells me a little about him. Most of it a whole load of codswallop, like the bit about Ronan being a ‘creative genius with words and images’. What can you say?
As we branch through a narrow side street to Temple Bar, she starts telling me that Ronan has offered to rent some studio space for her in the vicinity, which is full of artists’ studios. She tells me that Ronan is loaded and he can well afford it, but that she hopes to be able to pay him back some time in the future if she makes a success of her painting.
“If,” says I, all sarky.
“There’s something I haven’t told you,” she replies.
“Go on.”
“I’ve had some good luck.”
“Pray tell.”
“Ronan received fantastic news about my main painting from Lucien Morel – he’s an artists’ agent Ronan knows from his time in Paris. They’re
going to exhibit it in the first week of September!”
“September?”
“Yes! And they want to see some more of my paintings. And apparently the art critic of Le Monde wants to meet me. Isn’t that incredible!”
“What’s the painting about?”
“It’s called Chi.”
“Of course it is.”
I’m humming away to myself, wondering how Ronan will cope with his cardiac arrest when he sees me walking into the pub beside his nubile jerk-off.
“It’s my best work,” she says. “Ronan agreed to mind it for me in his surgery, in case Harry decided to fly into a rage and tear it up or something.”
I stop dead on the pavement and glare at her. “Describe it to me.”
Surprised, she explains that it’s a work in oils and features eight goldfish in different colours in a big bowl.
“I see.”
It’s the picture hanging up in the surgery.
“The number eight symbolizes the Bagua. I painted each fish in different colours, to show that each is a source of chi but at the same time stands for something unique. The idea was based on the trigrams found on the Bagua. Trigrams are a kind of script using parallel lines. Each trigram stands for…”
“So this Chi, as you call it, is some sort of masterpiece?”
“I wouldn’t call it that.” She laughs.
“So it’s the best of a bad lot?”
She doesn’t want to agree with this formulation either. “I suppose it’s my one really good painting.”
“The one on which your reputation depends.”
She nods. “Ronan says it’s got great possibilities, he says it’s my real selling point.”
Can that cad ever keep his mouth shut?
“Anyway, as I was saying, each trigram stands for a thing. Zhen, for instance, stands for thunder, Li means fire and…”
I just switch off and let her drone on. We’re approaching Temple Bar Square anyway, so my mind is on other things. The pub is located on the corner beside the barber’s and the secondhand music store, near the narrow arched passageway that leads down to the quays. We’ve only about fifty metres to go.
“Also, he’s taking me to Paris next week,” she says gaily.
I stop suddenly, alongside a bronze petalled lotus seat, presently being subjected to rigorous and loud intellectual scrutiny by a group of US tourists. “What did you just say, Nicole?”
She’s beginning to look apprehensive. “Nothing.”
“Did you just say he’s taking you to Paris?”
“It’s for my art.”
I am completely flattened. “When?”
“Next Tuesday. There’s a late-afternoon flight. Look, I know you don’t approve of the situation I’m in with Ronan…”
“Holy Christ.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to meet him some other time?”
“I don’t believe this.”
“But it’s a fantastic opportunity, Julianne. I have to go.”
This is serious. This is critical. They are closer than I thought. She could become a famous artist. And where will that leave me? A mere barrister? She could be rich. And me? On impoverishment rations of fifty grand a year.
This is catastrophic.
I know that Ronan is at worst just a transient prick pedlar who leeches on to female soft tissue until spray time. But with art and glamour and wealth thrown in? Why, I haven’t a stinking hope in hell.
If I go in there now I could force him to a spontaneous decision. I could risk everything.
I grab her by the arm and pull her to the right into the arched passageway leading to the river. We stop and I lay into her, my voice reverberating against the enclosing walls. I’m spewing out a torrent of exhortation, pleading with her generally to see sense and to devote her life to independence and autonomy, and responsible adulthood.
And what does she do?
She turns all soft and sympathetic on me. “Julianne, you’ve been wonderful, you really have. It was wrong of me to burden you with Ronan. I wasn’t considering your feelings, especially since this isn’t an easy time for you, with your own husband.”
She touches the back of my hand affectionately and smiles at me sincerely, and says she’s really glad we met just now and that we must get together again soon.
I want to cudgel her.
“But I’d really better go or else I’ll be late for Ronan.”
“Go,” says I bitterly, turning away.
She smiles like I’m suffering from some hormone-related deficiency syndrome but since she’s a woman herself she can fully relate to that. She apologizes and thanks me for some reason, and gives a small wave and whispers goodbye in a caring, sing-song way as if nothing has happened.
She retreats back up the alleyway towards Temple Bar Square, leaving me alone in this hellish windswept void.
I drive home by the sea. There’s a thick band of sombre cloud hovering over the now dark bay. Thin speckles of drizzle flock against the windscreen. I let them fall without switching on the wipers. I prefer to view the world right now as a distorted chaos.
So.
My marriage is dead.
And he’s taking her to Paris.
Well, at least I know where I stand.
I am weary. Too weary for anger.
Now thick raindrops are splashing against the glass. I leave off the wipers. The cars that pass me are just vague, ghostly shapes and I know I am putting my life and other people’s lives in danger by the fact that my visibility is no better than a snowed-up television, but bothering takes far too much effort.
So I keep driving on and on in the direction of home, although that’s the last place where I want to go right now, and it’s only after my wing mirror snaps against an oncoming car that I get the fright of my life and flick on the windscreen wipers again. They cut through the opaque windscreen water wall and there opens out a shining wet road in front of me, bleary, miserable and grey.
Still, at least I kept my trap shut.
I have kept the advantage. If you can call it that.
She was right about one thing though: Chi does have great possibilities. Chi is history.
28
Opening the front door, I’ve got the strange sensation that I’ve just walked into someone else’s apartment.
Apart from the vague odour of dead fish, there’s this old, chunky, tinkly, gargley, bolloxed-music-saloon sound coming from our lounge.
It’s the sound of a piano.
Bizet, I think.
A few feet further on, guess who I spy through the lounge door?
Mother is sitting behind this shining black monstrosity – way too big for the room and for her, and as jarringly incongruous as a giant slag heap stuck in the middle of a desert of snow.
She’s perched on a familiar, worn piano stool, her reading glasses crooked on her nose, her head bobbing up and down like a buoy as she reads from the score.
“I don’t believe this.”
The music crashes to a halt. She looks up, surprised. “Oh, it’s you, dear.”
I am speechless. “You didn’t… ”
“I had to pay the delivery men one hundred and fifty pounds. It’s extortion.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Yes, I should have got another quote.”
“Mother, I didn’t think you were serious.”
“I’m not, dear; I am known for my terrifying sense of humour.”
“I can’t believe you actually had this piano delivered.”
“Well, then have a look at the dents by the front door.”
“Ronan will have a fit.”
“And we must give him all the support he needs.”
“Oh, God!”
I’m circling the baby grand like Ronan recently circled his Porsche – but with a great deal more difficulty, considering the thing has taken up nearly half the lounge and has sucked away any available walk space like a giant vacuum cleaner.
The
dining-table and chairs have gone. Mother informs me that the table is being temporarily stored in our bedroom in a folded-up state, and the Victorian dining-chairs are stacked up in her new bedroom, but it’s no problem: they’re ideal as an elongated shoe rack.
“I’ve sold my house,” she explains. “The purchaser didn’t just want the house. He wanted everything. Carpets, curtains, furniture, even the antiquated lawnmower which I’m in two minds about. Everything except the piano. He said his favourite daughter died last year and apparently she used to play piano. He couldn’t bear the sight of this thing in my drawing-room. I had to give him a handkerchief. It’s awfully sad, isn’t it?”
“You’re changing the subject.”
“Also, it’s very valuable.”
“What am I going to tell…?”
“A piano brings a lot of possibilities to a household.”
“None of them good.”
She laughs the way she used to laugh when I was young and sulkful.
But maybe she’s right? Maybe there is a bright side? After all, this will drive Ronan stark, stripping, internally haemorrhaging crazy, will it not? Surely that’s a point to be borne in mind?
I mean, why should I consider Ronan’s feelings here? Has he considered mine? He’s forking a woman behind my back. And me? What great injustice have I committed? Hijacked his precious living-room space via an old grand piano?
Not very grim in the total scale of things.
Besides, look at her.
She’s the picture of total bliss.
I shouldn’t be so harsh.
Five minutes later – at seven on the dot – the front door opens. Mother scurries daintily into the kitchen out of harm’s way, mischievous grin on her face. Ronan is about to discover something significant and she does not want to be around for the celebrations. The front door bangs shut. Shoe steps in the hall. The rustle of plastic. He deposits something large on top of the banana couch. He sees me.
“Did you have an exciting afternoon?” I wonder.
There’s this rumple of coats being hung up.
“What’s that fishy smell?” he says.
“Well, did you get any?”
Pause.
“Any what?”
“Shoes.”
“Yes, I’m wearing them,” he replies. “Were you cooking fish?”
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