At a Time Like This

by Catherine Dunne

  ‘Claire? Are you okay? Did I say something wrong?’

  I shook my head. I felt dizzy, my legs went weak, my throat filled with nausea. Time had not healed this sense of loss. Hadn’t even begun to. ‘No, no – of course not. I haven’t been feeling well, that’s all. Must be some sort of bug.’

  She insisted on bringing me into the café, sitting me down, getting me a glass of water. I just wished that she would leave. I wanted to be on my own. It was a cruel reversal of the night that Paul and I had met. Then, my feeling unwell had been the means of bringing us together. Now, it was the sign that all the things I had done had driven us apart. His choice of obstetrics opened up all of those wounds, all over again. I still think about him. And that night with Maggie in the restaurant, I felt tortured by guilt, old and new. Her husband and her brother, I kept thinking. Her brother and her husband.

  We ordered food and the waiter poured our wine. Maggie looked at me across the candlelit table. I could see that her expression was still guarded.

  ‘I’m glad we can try and put it behind us, Claire. It hurt, I won’t deny it, and some days it still hurts. But Ray was responsible too, it wasn’t all you. And that’s been part of the problem, having to admit that to myself. But I’ve missed you and the group. Life’s too tough to spend it without your friends.’ She raised her glass. ‘Here’s to Georgie. For once, being a bossy-boots brought about the right result.’

  I smiled and repeated her toast, grateful all over again for friendship, particularly at a time like this. ‘To Georgie.’ We sipped in silence for a few moments.

  ‘You wanted to tell me something else, didn’t you?’

  I was grateful for her directness. Maggie has always had that ability – to get right to the heart of the matter.

  I drew breath and prepared myself. ‘Yes. About Paul and me.’

  She looked surprised. ‘Paul?’

  ‘Yes. Why we split up.’

  She frowned. I thought she looked uncomfortable and wondered why. I had a moment of panic. Perhaps this wasn’t a good idea. Perhaps this was me being selfish again. Maybe I wanted to have her hear my confession to make me feel better. Never mind about her.

  ‘You don’t have to tell me anything about that, Claire. It’s all a very long time ago. What? Fifteen, sixteen years?’

  I looked at her. ‘Yes. I want to tell you what happened. I know you didn’t understand and I wouldn’t talk to you at the time. I’d like to now. If that’s okay’

  She poured herself a glass of water. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘If it helps.’

  ‘I need you to know because it’s all connected. Back then, and now.’ She looked wary again. Maybe she was afraid I was going to talk about Ray.

  ‘I loved Paul. I’ve never stopped loving him. He wasn’t the one who broke us up. It was me.’ I could feel my eyes begin to fill. Whoever talked about time being a great healer was full of crap. Old hurts still hurt if their cause lives on.

  The waiter placed our starters in front of us. He moved swiftly, quietly, around the table. Perhaps he sensed something.

  ‘You remember Nora’s wedding? Stupid question. But you know what I mean.’

  ‘Of course I do. I knew something had happened between the two of you that night.’

  I could feel my hands begin to tremble. I put down my cutlery. I wasn’t able to hold my knife and fork any more.

  ‘I had an abortion, Maggie. I didn’t tell Paul until afterwards. He couldn’t forgive me.’

  ‘Ah.’ Her eyes were filled with sadness. For me. And for her brother, too, I’d imagine. Perhaps even for herself. ‘I’m sorry, Claire, I really am. That must have been awful for you.’ She paused for a moment and something seemed to strike her. Maggie was always good at stitching things together, at reaching conclusions without needing to have everything spelt out. Are you telling me that you believe that’s why you’ve never been able to become pregnant? Since, I mean.’

  I nodded and bit the inside of my lip. It was a trick I had learned, one that stopped me crying. It gave me a different sort of pain to think about. ‘Yes, but that’s not . . . that’s only part of it. I need you to understand.’

  Poor Maggie. I knew that our split, Paul’s and mine, had upset her deeply. She used to joke back then about us being sisters-in-law. She had been thrilled that Paul was finally with someone she could like. They’d always been close and I’d felt badly that she blamed him for our not being together, and not me. But I can’t have felt badly enough to summon up the courage to tell her when it might have made a difference, can I? I regretted that and even as I was speaking, I was regretting being the source of yet more upset. But it was too late now to turn back. Too late in too many ways.

  ‘It wasn’t that Paul couldn’t forgive me for the abortion. What he couldn’t forgive was that I didn’t trust him enough to tell him. That I went and did it on my own, without him. I broke him, Maggie. Not the other way around.’

  Maggie lifted her napkin to her mouth. ‘I’m so sorry, Claire. About all of it. I really am. I can’t imagine how it was for you.’

  I saw Maggie stuck for words for perhaps the first time ever. But I was driven to keep talking, to reveal my other, awful secret. That particular newsreel plays frequently in my internal cinema. A bit jerky in places, but it still tells its story with far too much clarity. Sometimes black and white, sometimes Technicolor, but always from start to finish. I have discovered that there is no detail too painful to omit. First, there was the panic of pregnancy after the only serious row Paul and I had ever had. It was about us going to London for the summer, or not going, in his case. I accused him of not loving me enough, not wanting to be with me enough.

  ‘Claire.’ I can still hear him groan. ‘I failed two fuckin’ exams. I have to repeat. I have to study. I can’t go to London. I need to be here.’

  I don’t know why I kept pushing it. Did I think he was getting tired of me, of us? That he might leave me? I don’t know. Maybe. Was I trying to test him, to see if he really loved me? Maybe that, too. One way or the other, though, I had my finger on the self-destruct button.

  ‘You can study in London every bit as well as you can study here. Three months apart is just too long.’

  All I wanted was for him to ask me to stay. But he wouldn’t. He always said he’d never try to stop me doing the things I wanted to do. He said that I had a life of my own and he respected my independence. Right then, I didn’t want my independence respected. I wanted him to need me, to put his arms around me and want to keep me with him. But then, of course, I was the needy one.

  ‘That’s not true and you know it.’ I remembered how he ran his hands through his hair, a familiar gesture that immediately caused my heart to contract. ‘I’d have to get a full-time job. Living in London costs a shitload of money. Don’t you realize that?’

  ‘You’re working here,’ I pointed out. Digging, always digging.

  ‘Part-time,’ he shouted, losing his temper.

  There was more. Much more. Things were said that couldn’t be taken back. He shouted at me over my ‘abandonment routine’. About my driving a wedge between us. About my not trusting his love. And he was right. About all of it. I slammed out of his flat, shaking. I didn’t want him to see me cry. Two days later, I discovered I was pregnant. Blame hormones, blame my mother for leaving me, blame blind, stupid panic: I booked a clinic, spun my father a yarn about needing extra money for rent, and did what thousands of Irish women had done before me and are still doing. I took the boat.

  Here’s where the images judder a bit. The coldness of the clinic. The kindness of the counsellor at my ‘it’s not too late to change your mind’ interview. Standard procedure beforehand, I believe. Not just because I was Irish and Catholic and terrified out of my mind. And where were my friends in all of this? In ignorance, which was exactly where I wanted them to be.

  How could I trust that none of my three friends would let something slip by accident? My reasons for keeping Paul in the same ignoran
ce were more complex. Perhaps a mix of I’m leaving you before you decide to leave me; a potent memory of a woman trapped with children in a life she didn’t want, humming ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ as she scrubbed the kitchen tiles.

  And so I signed the clinic’s form, got into bed and waited. I was determined not to see myself there, not to take in any of my surroundings, not the pale green of the room, not the starch in the sheets, not the Irish accents of the nurses. None of it. I decided not to speak to any of the other women. Most of us avoided eye-contact, anyhow. I don’t know which was greater: the sense of fear or the sense of loss. I didn’t want to share anybody else’s grief because I already had enough of my own. And of course it was safer that way because somebody would be sure to know me. Somebody would know my home place. And then somebody would tell.

  When it was over, I made the journey home, bleeding my way through seventeen underground stops, three changes of line and all the chaos of Euston station.

  Paul had been haunting Rathmines Road in my absence, according to Georgie. She was curious about what was going on and made no effort to hide it. I’d hoped to come back to an empty flat, but the gods were not on my side. She’d made coffee and offered to make me a cup.

  ‘Kettle’s boiled,’ she said. ‘I’m heading out in a minute. Danny’s waiting for me. Sure you don’t want one?’

  I shook my head, not trusting to speech just at that moment. The smell of her cigarette smoke was making me feel sick. It reminded me of most of the women at the clinic, dragging madly on last cigarettes before they faced their particular firing squads.

  I was glad that Georgie was on her way out. I didn’t want a conversation just then. ‘Have you and Paul fallen out?’ she demanded. And where did you get to, anyway? Sneaking away like that and not telling. He hasn’t been off the phone for three days.’

  I put my bag down in the corner. There was no point in trying to hide it. ‘I went to Ennistymon. My dad wasn’t well,’ I lied.

  She lost interest. Didn’t even ask if my father had recovered. That’s Georgie for you. Maggie had stayed over at Ray’s for the weekend, so no more explanations were necessary just then. Once Georgie left, I filled the machine with blood-stained underwear, washing away the evidence like the Lady Macbeth of Rathmines. Then I lay down on the sofa and cried. I was home only a couple of hours when the phone rang.

  ‘Claire.’ I could hear the relief in Paul’s voice. ‘I miss you. This is stupid.’

  He came over. We made up. Until he wanted to take me to bed. And then I had to tell him. I watched him fall apart as he put my words together and tried to make sense of them. He reminded me of my father after my mother abandoned us. His face contorted grey with grief, he wept so hoarsely he frightened me.

  ‘How could you?’ he said. ‘How could you not trust me enough to tell me?’

  I’m going to draw a veil over the rest of it, over all that summer when we tried to fix what I had broken. Instead, I ended up fixing flats: painting, decorating, designing tranquil garden spaces that became the polar opposite of the churning emptiness inside me. Georgie’s father was generous with my wages, and I was able to pay my father back in record time. I did not want him to be responsible in any way for how I’d spent his money. Not that I’d ever have told him. But it wasn’t about how he would feel, anyhow. It was about me, and the way I felt. I didn’t want to live with the thought that I had sabotaged his generosity.

  Each time Paul and I met over the next couple of months, the sense of desperation between us grew. Before that, bed had been our playground. I have never again found that intimacy, that fun, that pleasure that Paul and I shared, although I have looked for it ever since, in far too many beds. ‘Wanton’, he used to call me, sinking his hands into my hair, which he loved. He said it with admiration, with no hint of the moral judgement that usually goes with it. He liked the fact that it played with ‘wantin’’. He loved words. He could have been a writer, if he’d chosen, rather than a doctor. He was good at putting things together, making language sing. We used to play word games, too. Once, I gave him a present of a game of Scrabble, and we devised our own private rules for playing. ‘Abandoned’ was another favourite of his. He’d use it as a deliberate joke about my mother, turning the word around, finding joy in it, testing my growing sense of humour. Growing under his hands.

  But after London, bed was no longer a place to play. The last time we made love, he cried. He must have known it was the last time. I didn’t. I still kept hoping. I still believed that if I could manage enough love for both of us, he would find his own way back to me. Finally, on the day of Nora’s wedding, he told me. That he still loved me, but something fundamental had gone for good. It was watching Frank and Nora together that had made him realize. And broken trust, he said, was something that could not be fixed. He would not spend his life looking over his shoulder.

  Old hurt, new hurt. It’s all the same. And in life’s ironic little fashion, I brought it on myself. A self-fulfilling prophecy of loss and abandonment and lovelessness. That’s me.

  Maggie was pale in the candlelight.

  ‘I wanted you to know the whole story’ I said. ‘I started trying to have a baby when I was thirty. I knew by then that marriage wasn’t going to happen for me – and I didn’t want it. If I couldn’t have Paul, then I didn’t want anyone.’

  She spoke softly. And you’ve carried that on your own for five years. Why didn’t you say something to one of us, even if not to me? Sorry, that’s a stupid thing to say. But we might have been able to . . . I don’t know, comfort you.’ Comfort Paul, too. But she didn’t say that.

  I smiled. ‘It was easier to pretend. I hadn’t been able to tell you about the abortion at the time, and then, well, months and years went by and it seemed better, easier for everyone not to. And it’s the same with the infertility treatment. Think how difficult it would have been for all of you. You’d have tried to protect me. You might have felt guilty about your own children or felt sorry for me. I didn’t want that.’

  I could see Maggie thinking. Considering it in the generous, careful way she has always had, trying to match the possible with the actual. ‘What about now?’ she asked eventually. ‘You’re only thirty-five. There must be other doctors, other treatments.’ She did not even mention the cruel irony of her brother’s choice. Her brother with four children and a Tasmanian wife. Her nieces, her nephews. My loss, my losses. Our pasta remained uneaten. The waiter, deferential, concerned, approached us.

  ‘Is everything all right, signore?’

  Maggie looked at him as though she had no idea how he got there. ‘What?’ she said, her face blank.

  ‘The food, signora. Is everything to your liking?’

  ‘Yes, yes, thank you. Everything is fine.’

  He nodded gravely, topped up our wine glasses and left. I could almost see him shaking his head to himself.

  ‘Oh, I haven’t given up hope,’ I told her. ‘But right now, I’m on a break – if that’s the right term. I haven’t been with anyone since John and I split up last year. I’m trying to take stock. I don’t know how much more of the hope and despair treadmill I can take.’ I paused. I didn’t want to bring Ray into the conversation again and I didn’t want to make excuses. ‘The time with Ray was just after the first gynaecologist told me “no more treatments”. To say I was devastated would be an understatement. That’s the last bit of the jigsaw, Maggie. The bit I didn’t have time to tell you in Georgie’s last week.’

  How glib that all sounded. It struck me afterwards that each of Ray’s infidelities must have been like a small death for Maggie, too. I had never found, even for myself, words that would contain the violence of hope and the bitterness of failure that I had gone through every month for more than five years. Why should Maggie’s pain not be similar to mine? The only difference was the cause.

  I remember about three years ago reading a short story by Guy de Maupassant called ‘Useless Beauty’ and being shocked by the title in
to recognizing myself. That’s how I felt. That’s what I was. And to hear others comment on how lovely I looked seemed to me to twist the knife all the more. The gods enjoy these jokes. I’m convinced of it.

  Maggie was looking at me as she sipped her wine. Her expression was one I couldn’t read. I thought I saw compassion there, just like the night in Georgie’s, but there was something else, too. I was not proud of myself or my sometimes tawdry tale. I felt that despite her forgiveness, her understanding both of my abortion and my longing for a baby, something in our friendship had shifted. After this, it would either be better or worse. But it could never be the same.

  ‘I don’t know what to say to you, Claire. This is just so difficult. I’m glad that you’ve told me, but sometimes . . .’ She didn’t finish and I didn’t press her. ‘Let’s talk about it again.’ And she squeezed my hand. ‘But for now, let’s eat. I’m hungry’

  She said it with just the ghost of a smile. Maggie’s appetite was legendary. She loved food, loved wine, had no time for stalks of celery or lettuce leaves masquerading as a meal. Oh, she was disciplined most of the time – otherwise her famous curves might have lost the run of themselves. ‘More gone west than Mae West,’ she used to say. But when food was part of the celebration, Maggie indulged. Buy now, pay later, she used to say. I loved her appetite for life. It endured, despite all of the reasons that it might not. And so we ate, and tried to talk about other things. We even delighted the waiter by ordering a tiramisù to share. I think we were astonished that we were able to ride the waves of normality, although we were both conscious of the undertow.

  I wonder if I will ever be able to bring myself to talk about it to the others. Nora would be of the opinion, I am sure, that my barrenness is a judgement from God because of my sexual immorality. I remember the time, just before she got married, when she accused me of having no respect for myself because I was sleeping with Paul. Her words had stung me. And their shadow haunted me, later that summer, made me feel like a sinner, made me believe that the abortion was punishment for my wrongdoing. That’s how I felt anyhow. It’s why I cut my hair off again, although not as dramatically as the first time.