At a Time Like This

by Catherine Dunne

  ‘You’ll find a contract to that effect in the folder. I suggest you have a solicitor of your own choosing look over it.’ He crushed out his cigarette in the cut-glass ashtray. ‘Always pays to be careful,’ he intoned. ‘Even with family’

  I looked at him, wondering what that had ever meant to him.

  ‘Especially with family’ he added weakly, attempting a grin.

  I didn’t respond to that, either.

  ‘Get back to me early next week and let me know how you want to handle the renovations. Get your pal Claire to give you a hand.’

  I wasn’t going to tell him that Claire had recently landed a job as fashion correspondent for Irish-Style, Ireland’s newest and trendiest glossy, already taking the market by storm. Even the hyphenated title gave a knowing, ironic nod towards the old Ireland, harking back to things like ‘divorce, Irish-style’, and ‘abortion, Irish-style’, while heralding the new and more fashionable, more right-on order. The last thing that Claire would have time for was overseeing renovations in a soon-to-be-boutique in the suburbs of Dalkey I don’t think that she even got to finish her first interview at the magazine: she was offered the job on the spot. I was very glad for her. Claire was in the right place at the right time, just where she ought to have been. She became a satellite of style as Dublin began to be the new party city of Europe.

  Two years after I got Dalkey up and running – I’d called the boutique ‘Oui Two’ in the expectation of Maggie’s future involvement – I decided that I needed to refine my stock even more. I wasn’t exploiting my client-base cleverly enough. I wanted to import high-quality leather goods, shoes, silk handbags. Not the sort that every globalized street market now has to offer, but one-offs, quirky designs, originals by unknowns whose work I could promote – as long as they came cheaply enough.

  I found just the man to help me. I met him at a trade fair in London about a year after I went into business. We had a fling that lasted for a whole, glorious weekend – but it was nothing that either of us wanted to make permanent. Besides, he was forty-something, already married, and I was a woman in a hurry. But Luis recognized a kindred spirit when he met one.

  ‘We can do business, you and I,’ he said, as he poured the champagne that room service had delivered. ‘You are able to separate love and sex and work. That is an unusual characteristic in a woman, but an excellent one.’

  I remember I looked at him as coolly as I could manage, given that we were still lying in his hotel bed, still tangled in sweaty sheets, the floor littered with our discarded clothes. ‘If I didn’t know better, Luis, I’d say that you had just managed to insult me.’

  He roared with laughter. After he took me to bed for the third time that weekend, he told me of his Turkish contacts. I never inquired how hides of the finest leather made their way to his warehouses – and then to me – without attracting the attention of Customs. I never asked how shoes of such exquisite design arrived on my doorstep with a price tag that would make chain stores everywhere gag with envy. I never wanted to know how such intricately beaded silks turned up in otherwise innocent consignments of cheap handbags and unremarkable leather jackets – items I then sold on to the lower-end boutiques for their January sales.

  Luis had already told me – pillow talk – that if I saw his bank statement I’d die of laughter. Mortgage, gas, electricity, life insurance: enough to keep the tax authorities off his back. Everything else was, he said ‘dinero negro – all hidden, under-the-counter income. I didn’t care. I stocked everything he sent me and sold them to the wealthy women of Dublin who made their way to ‘Oui Two’ in droves. I met Luis maybe half a dozen times during the following year. And at least twice a year since; every year for the next decade. It was no grand passion. But as I’ve said, we were kindred spirits. We stayed together in Paris, Milan, Madrid and Rome. He liked to claim that he was my mentor.

  And then I met Pete. I was twenty-four, almost twenty-five. My approaching birthday was something of a milestone. I had decided that twenty-five or so was a good age at which to settle down, to acquire the trappings of marriage and possibly children. Pete was an investment banker, one of the many people Claire introduced me to. I liked his solidity. After Danny’s flakiness and Luis’s flamboyance, Pete seemed to me to be the perfect antidote. He listened gravely to my plans for expansion and made some perceptive comments. I told him about Maggie, what we could each bring to the other as partners, at some stage in the near future. I could see that he was impressed. Naturally, I was economical with the truth about my Spanish contact.

  At the end of that evening in Claire’s, he handed me his card. ‘I think I may be able to help you,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you give me a call?’ I knew by the way he said it that it was an invitation to meet him again, not merely a request to do business.

  So. I did call him. I hadn’t known that I would, but Claire insisted. ‘He’s a good guy’ she said, ‘and he’s been brilliant for the magazine, when nobody else would touch us. He’s not afraid of the stuff that comes out of left field, trust me. Besides, he likes you.’

  I was intrigued. By then, as well as having my logical, intellectual decision in place about what I wanted to do next with my life, I had begun to realize that I was restless. I found all the old clichés coming home to roost. I wanted someone who was mine, in all the ways that Danny hadn’t been and Luis couldn’t be.

  I was hooked. I was in love with love – or the idea of it. A dangerous, dangerous place to be. I could also hear the predictable ticking of the biological clock, stronger at that stage of my life than at any other time before or since. Six months after we met, Pete asked me to marry him. We’d had dinner in Patrick Guilbaud’s – a performance rather than a meal – and I was feeling mellow, my natural spikiness soothed by the annual returns verified by my accountant that afternoon. Pete celebrated my success; it was a success that also reflected well on his judgement as an investor. We were both feeling very pleased with ourselves.

  When he finally mapped out his life for me over tiny cups of espresso, I thought, ‘Why the hell not?’ And so I said yes, I would marry him. At that stage, we hadn’t even slept together. It had been a curiously old-fashioned courtship, Pete a curiously old-fashioned man. I went home with him that night, and while he was a long way from Danny or Luis, I fell for his tenderness. Back then, it was something that I needed. And I must have been something that he needed, too.

  And now? Well, now is now and now is different.

  ‘Talk to me,’ he has said on a few occasions over the past couple of years. And I am at a loss. About what? Why can’t he talk to me? He is obviously the one with things to say, things on his mind that he would like me to listen to. I, on the other hand, am not: I have grown accustomed to the silences between us. There is nothing I now wish to share. The last few years have made me want to retreat from my life – or the private aspects of it at least – and be a completely other person. I was thinking recently about the fairy tale ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ and I no longer know whether I am the little boy on the sidelines shouting about the emperor’s nakedness, or whether I am the emperor himself. Either way, it seems that I have been parading bare through my surroundings, trying to gather enough cover to be invisible. And it hasn’t worked. I have been exposed for what I am. So. I need a whole new wardrobe.

  And yet, and yet and yet. I have been a good wife. A good enough wife. I have given birth to and mothered two daughters. I have been faithful, after my fashion. If I have strayed – and I am not claiming that I have not – I have done so discreetly, quietly, making sure that neither Pete nor my children have suffered. Until now.

  And that’s because this is different. If Pete is what I needed for the middle part of my life – the parenting, consolidating, conventional part – then this man, whose arrival I await with baths and perfume and eagerness, he is for the latter part. Or so I feel. Age makes sure that I qualify all of these assertions. I have learned that there are no certainties and no absolutes. Bl
ack and white continue to bleed into one another, muddying all the channels in which we live.

  But these are the choices that I have made. At forty-four years of age, I know that all choices have consequences – something that at twenty-four, for example, I did not know, or did not fully understand. But I am prepared for that, for all that may come. And so I wait, surrounded by olive trees and vineyards and the hot gritty dust of Tuscany. Toscana, Luis used to call it, promising that we would go there some day. I liked its lilting cadence in Spanish, but knew that I could not wait for his promise to be fulfilled.

  And so, I look out over my balcony and count the hours. Not since Danny have I felt such a feeling of anticipation, of danger. The unknown has me on edge, reminds me how alive I feel now after all the years of sleep-walking through my future. I have taken control again and I have to wait only three more days. That is all the time that remains. And I shall wait, patiently or impatiently.

  One way or the other, it will pass.

  And now to Nora.

  I have been thinking about her, too, over the past couple of days. Not because I want to, God knows, but because it is inevitable. I never planned any of this, but nevertheless, this is how it is, this is how things are going to be.

  I am enjoying the midday sunshine right now. The waters of the pool are glittering behind me. The sun brings warmth at this time of year, rather than heat, but it is the light that I love above all – the Renaissance clarity and purity of it. I have brought the small wooden table out of the shade and I am sitting at it now, with my journal. Before this, I have never been one for introspection. Maggie has called me Action Woman’ on more than one occasion, given that I often speak my mind, she says, before I have even made it up. Perhaps I have operated on gut instinct in the past, or else that impulsiveness that has often brought trouble in its wake. I don’t know, and I am no longer sufficiently satisfied to say ‘Who cares?’ as I have done so often in my previous life. I need to know, I need to understand what makes me tick. I have to find out how I have managed to allow my life to take me so much by surprise.

  And so, shortly after I arrived here, I decided on the acquisition of a journal. It was a joy to buy. Its cobalt covers caught my eye at once in the Fabriano shop in Florence. Inside, the pages were of handmade paper and their quality was exquisite. I bought a pen to match and I sit out here for a few hours each day, writing. I have pinned my hair up, exposing the back of my neck to the sun. I love the way, to quote Maggie, that it makes my bones feel warm.

  I decided – given that I had no fixed idea where to start – that I would begin my journal by trying to recall those events in my life that had caught me off guard the most. What I mean by that is, I would attempt to remember with honesty the occasions over which I was unable to exert any control. And ‘with honesty’ is the key here. I accept that for much of my life I have played games in order to get what I wanted. With my father, with Luis. With Pete. Sometimes, I have realized, I did so without ever having taken the time to find out what it was I really wanted in the first place.

  To my surprise, given that she is so low down on the list of people that I care for, it was Nora who first came to mind. And I remembered, with almost painful clarity, how the woman had once managed to pull the rug from under my feet.

  It was about three years ago and we were all having dinner at Maggie’s one July evening, when Nora simpered her way in my direction. She started to handle the sequined hem of my jacket and I couldn’t stop myself from moving away from her a fraction.

  ‘I haven’t seen this before,’ she said. Aren’t the little sequins a lovely touch?’

  She was dressed in some hideous navy and white dress, with matching shoes that would have looked fine on Doris Day. Even her handbag was navy and white – a cheap and nasty plastic it was too, masquerading as leather, with the metal clasp already showing signs of tarnish. I remember I shivered. I couldn’t help myself. Nora had once asked Maggie to design something for her, but Maggie managed to extricate herself from that nightmare with the combination of a little tact and a lot of kindness. She did not want to insult Nora by telling her that her large and ungainly frame did not suit the subtle numbers that we produced, or at least, that’s how I should have put it.

  Nora in white linen? Please. Or a cashmere and silk mix? It would have put the rest of our clients off for good. But I wasn’t allowed to say anything to Nora in that instance, as in so many others. Maggie told me to leave it to her, so I did, albeit reluctantly. She told me afterwards, Maggie that is, that she had brought Nora shopping instead. She had even spent a whole day in her company, with one of those personal image consultants who help you buy the things that suit you best.

  ‘What did you do that for?’ I asked her. I couldn’t think of anything I was less likely to do than spend that sort of time with Nora.

  I remember that Maggie looked at me impatiently. ‘You will never see anything good in Nora, will you? Sure, she has her faults, but then again, so do you, Georgie. So do we all.’

  I wasn’t sure that I liked her tone. But I wasn’t about to fight with her, either. We’d had one row already over Nora, years back, and I didn’t want to go there again.

  ‘Sure,’ I said instead. But I was careful not to shrug. ‘Rather you than I, that’s all.’ And the inevitable happened, of course it did, after a year or so. I could have told her – I could see it coming. Once Nora had Maggie in tow, and her personal shopper to boot, she dressed well and stylishly. I have to admit, she made the most of herself for at least six months. But then she began to revert to type. And by the time Robbie’s twenty-first rolled around, she had slipped back into all her bad habits again. I don’t know how Maggie felt about that; I’ve never asked. I know how I’d have felt, but that’s an altogether different story.

  So that when Nora started tugging at the cuff of my jacket on that occasion in Maggie’s, I was probably even more touchy than normal. ‘Thanks, Nora,’ I said, smoothing my sleeves. ‘It’s one of a new line Maggie and I are developing. It’s the first time I’ve worn it.’

  ‘Really?’ she asked. Something in her voice made me look at her. Her expression was cunning, her tone full of false surprise. ‘I thought I saw one very like it last weekend. And the woman looked awfully like you, too, from the back.’

  I remember feeling bored already by the conversation. Nora always had that effect on me, ever since I was eighteen. ‘Oh, yes?’ I said, or something like it. ‘Where was that?’

  ‘In Castleknock.’ And she kept looking at me.

  I have to say that I was caught off guard. And particularly coming from Nora, I was unprepared. I put my hand up. After all, this is the time for honesty. Nevertheless, I think I was convincing. Either way, neither Maggie nor Claire picked up on what she was saying, so the situation never developed. It took a moment, but I regained my composure and smiled at Nora, shaking my head.

  ‘Don’t think I’ve ever been to Castleknock in my life,’ I lied. ‘Must have been somebody else.’

  And that was that. But I felt her gaze throughout the meal that night. The irony of it is, it was she who had insisted, months beforehand, that we all foregather at her house for champagne and canapés to celebrate Robbie’s twenty-first. Strictly a ‘six in the evening till eight’ invitation. I felt I could manage that, as long as Maggie and Claire and I arrived together and left together. It was a pre-party party and we did all that was appropriate. We brought flowers for Nora, a bottle of wine for Frank – the same vintage as his firstborn – and a respectable amount of money from the three of us as a gift for Robbie. We all shook hands and kissed him and wished him happy birthday. I was designated to slip the envelope to him, away from Nora’s and Frank’s eager parental eye. Just this once, we felt, he ought to be permitted to be reckless.

  There were all the usual stories to be shared – about how the four of us had, shortly after he was born, made a pact that we would keep on meeting, about how we had watched him grow, about how the years fly. Y
ou know the kind of thing. Nora was in her element and I was on my best behaviour, duly warned by both Maggie and Claire. And then it was photograph time.

  ‘Let’s have one of the four of us with Robbie,’ Nora fussed, shooing us all towards the profusion of plants in the conservatory. ‘Robbie, you stand there, in the middle.’ I didn’t like to tell her that the resulting photo would be sure to show a fig-tree growing out of the top of her eldest son’s head. ‘Claire, you go here, Georgie, you stand there. That’s right, Maggie. Frank! Oh, Frank! Come and take our photo!’ Robbie grinned good-naturedly. He raised one eyebrow slightly as we gathered ourselves for the photograph. I think he shared the joke. I ended up on one side of him, his mother on the other. That was not what Nora had wished – but Frank’s word held sway. The composition of the photo would be far better that way, he kept insisting, much more balanced.

  A little closer,’ Frank called. A little closer still.’

  Robbie pulled his mother towards him. Then, he tightened his grip around my waist. His hand was warm, insistent through the fine silk of my dress. I cursed Frank for fiddling with light meters and lenses and flashes. Why couldn’t he use a digital camera like everyone else, for God’s sake? The pressure of Robbie’s arm was making me uncomfortable. He was too close, intruding into my personal space. I could see the beginnings of his five o’clock shadow, smell the subtle undertone of his aftershave. It wasn’t that his presence was unpleasant: rather that there was far too much of it. Finally, Frank declared the photograph perfect and we were released. I turned to Maggie.