Deceptions

by Laura Elliot

  “Why do you hate me, Michael? You hardly know me. How dare you hate me.”

  The silence that followed expanded like elastic. She allowed it to stretch, her shoulders raised as if she expected it to snap and snarl back against her face.

  “I don’t hate you, Lorraine,” Finally he spoke. “Believe me, what I feel for you is anything but hatred.” His denial sounded genuine yet she heard the skipped beat in his voice, as if his words had to be carefully weighed and considered before being uttered.

  “Then what? What do you want from me?”

  “Peace of mind. I need to understand –”

  “Understand? What’s there to understand? Right now, all I know is that you don’t make me feel good about myself. I can’t cope with ambiguity – or lies. They destroyed me once. I won’t allow it to happen a second time.”

  She hung up before he could reply. Her shoulders slumped as if strings had broken. Distracted, all traces of sleep gone, she tried to silence her fevered thoughts. But the heat of his desire was in her veins and there was nothing she could do to still its course. So long – so long. Her hand glided over the curves of her body, hesitantly, as if she was exploring an unfamiliar terrain. His face was above her and she, drowning in his eyes, sank deeply into the pleasure that forced its way through her numbed fingers.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Brahms Ward

  Midnight

  I lost you once on Dollymount Strand. You must remember the time? We were building a sandcastle. I dug deeper into the trench and you wandered off in search of shells to decorate the ramparts. I didn’t realise you’d gone. One minute you were by my side and then you were swallowed in the crowd. I ran among the families, filled with terror, horrifying visions. I looked towards the sea. Far out, a cormorant crested the tide and changed before my eyes into your small lost body. I saw you sliding under the waves, swiftly, silently drawn out to sea.

  Minutes later, I found you. Your bucket was full of shells, tears still on your cheeks. I carried you back to our castle but children had been there before us. They had jumped on our creation, trampled it into indistinguishable grains of sand. There was nothing to prove that, only a short while before, a magnificent fortress had stood solidly on the spot.

  I haven’t the words to accuse her. They are grains slipping through my fingers. Have you the slightest idea what I’m talking about, Killian? You lie there oblivious, your chest rising falling, your eyelids blinking. I can’t stand it … do you hear me? I can’t stand it.

  She thinks I hate her. What could I say? I hate what I believe, or once believed, still believe, don’t know, going crazy out of my head, don’t know. How could I hold her close and believe she has a heart of stone? It has to stop … stop. Love and hate, Killian. How can two sides of a damaged coin have so much power?

  One two three coins in a fountain … clinking coins, pennies from heaven … clinkity-clink … jingle-jangle … one two three … clink-clink … stole from wallet … purse … bracelet … Lorcan wait …

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Lorcan had made his entry into Sheraton & Strong Advertising dressed in jeans and a skin-tight top with I’m It printed across the front. After a heated discussion with Adrian on the dress code of the company, he started wearing a suit but his attitude remained as insolent as ever. Adrian’s name was condensed to “Ado” and he continually referred to Virginia as “Virgin”, a form of address usually accompanied by a leer.

  “He’s an insufferable little cockroach.” Adrian complained constantly about him. “With a bit of luck he’ll get bored and crawl back under a stone again.”

  But Lorcan had no intention of crawling anywhere. He shoved his ideas under Adrian’s nose, demanding his attention, and sulked when told to perform the most basic office functions. One afternoon, Virginia discovered him sitting on Adrian’s chair, swivelling aimlessly from side to side as he chatted on the phone to Marianne Caulfield. At least she assumed “Cauliflower” was the young film-maker who had attended the charity auction. Lorcan was making a date with her. Clubs and pubs, thought Virginia, until the words “prayer meeting” were mentioned. Lorcan, a born-again Christian! The reformed addict’s final refuge. With an effort she kept a straight face. Becoming aware of her presence, he abruptly ended his conversation but made no apology or excuse for invading his employer’s office.

  When asked if Adrian was at a meeting, he replied, “If you say so, Virgin, then I guess that’s where he is.”

  The temptation to wrench him bodily from the chair and shake the cheeky grin from his face was resisted with an effort. No employee would have dared behave with such insolence towards Ralph, whose new company was making an impact. Lots of media attention; he had even featured on a television debate about ethics in advertising, sincerely flashing his white teeth and phoning Virginia afterwards to ask if she had noticed the wink he gave her. The familiar wink from his Sulphuric Acid days when she was dancing before the stage, knowing that he meant, “You think this is music, bitch. Wait till I get you into my bed – then we’ll really dance.”

  He had acquired the Ormond Pharmaceuticals account, as Virginia had feared, blatantly poaching Sheraton & Strong’s most lucrative client. Adrian had stormed into her office waving a newspaper that carried a report on the deal in the business section and flung it on her desk. “Let’s see what happens when Brian Ormond discovers there isn’t a creative bone in his body.”

  “Ralph nurtured your talent for long enough,” she retorted, furious that her suspicions were being realised. This was not the first account that had transferred from Adrian to Ralph.

  “Nurtured my talent?” His head shot back, his shoulders squared up to her. “Jesus Christ, Virginia, you make me sound like his fucking protégé. We were partners, remember? I gave one hundred per cent to that company.”

  “Then why aren’t you doing the same now?” She was dismayed at how quickly their conversation had degenerated into an argument. Such thin ice. How easily it cracked under the slightest provocation. “You’re all over the place since Ralph pulled out. I don’t blame Bill Sheraton for being anxious. He thinks –”

  “Have you been discussing my business with him again?”

  “Of course not.” Virginia placed the newspaper in a shredder and watched the insufferably smug head and shoulders shot of her husband reduced to slivers.

  “So what are you saying?”

  “The last time we spoke he mentioned Lorcan. He thinks you should pay more attention to him and you’d be wise to keep Bill on-side. As long as he believes his son is settling into the agency and taking on responsibilities, he won’t ask too many questions about poached accounts.”

  A frown settled between his eyes. “I’ve enough on my mind without listening to lectures on how to run my own company.”

  “Why are we arguing, Adrian? I’m only trying to help.”

  “You’re smothering me, Virginia. Every time I turn around you’re behind me, complaining about something or other. I never asked you to approach Bill Sheraton. I had my own plans but you overrode them. And now you’re meeting him behind my back, discussing my personal business affairs. How do you think that makes me feel?”

  “Smothering you? How exactly am I doing that?”

  “Every time I try and talk about it … the accident … you shut me up.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything? I was under the impression we were discussing a company that’s in danger of going to the wall if you don’t pull yourself together.”

  “I can’t … don’t you understand? You won’t allow me to feel anything. He was so young. Someone’s son. He could have been Emily.”

  “But he isn’t Emily. And if his parents cared that much about him, why was he down on the pier breaking into cars and robbing whatever he could lay his hands on? How many other cars had he damaged that night before he came to us?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything? We’re the ones who drove away and left him to die.” He p
ut up his hand to silence her protests and repeated, “We left him to die.”

  “We thought he was dead. You felt his pulse. You believed it too.”

  “How the hell was I to know? Jesus Christ!” He placed his hands over his face. “If we hadn’t been together –”

  “If you’re blaming me for this, you’d better state it loud and clear so that we can deal with it. Do you hear me?” Her voice gained strength. “I refuse to hide like some guilty accusation at the back of your mind.”

  “Don’t you feel any sense of guilt?”

  “I’m not like you, Adrian. I don’t carry guilt like a knife in my side. It was an accident, a tragedy that should never have happened. But it did and we can’t keep beating each other up over it.”

  “He’s on my shoulders, Virginia. I can’t shake him loose.” He left her office, trailing his fears across her floor. Where had it gone, the delicious anticipation that had sustained them for so many years? She had given up everything for him. In return he had laid his conscience like a rock around her neck.

  She dreamed of wolves. They prowled above her in the dark attic and flung their bodies against the trapdoor. She listened to her father. He shouted, demanded that the wolves be released. Her mother’s voice pleaded but he refused to listen. None of God’s creatures should be imprisoned. He mounted the ladder to the attic and the wolves sprang free above Virginia’s head. Such beautiful, sleek creatures, not like the hungry wolves she saw in pictures. Their thick fur shimmered. Their tongues hung loose. Saliva trailed from their mouths as they leapt down the stairs, leapt joyously out through the open window towards freedom.

  The dream forced her awake and into the hot airless atmosphere of the apartment. She was used to space, a house with a driveway and tall chimneys, a garden that smelled of lilac and lavender, not chemicals from some polluted and noxious factory that wafted unpleasantly across the bay. No matter what she used, aromatic oil burners, perfume, scented candles, fresh flowers, nothing seemed to eradicate the fumes. She had complained to the interior designer, to the painters and to the agent who sold them the apartment – but no one seemed capable of solving the problem, or even admitting there was a problem.

  She switched on the bedside lamp, angled the glow so that it did not disturb Adrian. The dream clung to her like a cold sweat. She entered a small room that they had designated as a home office. The computer was still on. Tropical fish swam across the screen, trailing bubbles, weaving between fronds of seaweed.

  Josephine had rung in the afternoon and said, “Truth is stranger than friction.” Sometimes, Virginia imagined her mother lying awake at night constructing proverbial distortions to inflict upon her family. On this occasion, she had sounded quite elated. “Guess who came to dinner last night?”

  “Edward and his adorable mob?”

  “Much and all as I adore Edward’s family, I do not suffer little children when I have a table set for two. Guess again.”

  “Mother, I’m preparing for an important meeting. I’ve no time for guessing games.”

  “Your father.”

  “You can’t be serious?” Virginia almost dropped the phone. “Dinner? After all this time?”

  “Time is a great sealer, young lady. I’m lonely. So is he, as it happens. We have a lot of catching up to do.”

  Last year she had rung and announced, “All good things come to those who hate. Guess who’s dead?”

  Sonya’s body had been cremated and her ashes scattered. Ashes to ashes – dust to dust. Virginia had sent apologies for her non-attendance at the funeral. Pressures of work. Her father sent her a memorial card. Sonya and her rabbit teeth smiling from a stamp-sized photograph. Resting safely in the arms of the Lord. And now, it seemed, the old enemies were reunited. Time – the great sealer.

  Virginia opened the balcony doors and stepped outside. Faintly in the distance, she heard a siren, an ambulance on an emergency run or a police car chasing joy riders. The night sounds of a city had become familiar to her. What had brought her to this stage, sleepless, haunted by dreams and imaginary fumes that attacked her throat at the most unexpected moments? Her beautiful house was razed to the ground. She could see it so clearly in her mind, the view from her bedroom window, the perfectly restored cornicing in the hallway, the leisurely dinner parties in the long dining room, all gone, destroyed by a property developer who was building luxury apartments on the site. She had driven to Howth for a last look. The garden was overrun with machinery. Ugly purple hoardings surrounded the site.

  “Can I do something for you, Missus?” One of the builders had stepped down from a digger and advanced towards her on mud-caked boots. Suddenly, seeing a gaping hole where a silver birch once grew, she was filled with fury. Not with Ralph. They had divided their assets between them and he had been free to sell or not. The anger that spilled from her as she watched a digger claw into the foundations had been directed towards Adrian. He should never have allowed Lorraine room for suspicion. Her evidence was slight, her fears begging to be eased, denied, soothed. But he had fallen apart, the secret on the pier bearing down on him, making him incapable of denying his wife’s furious accusations.

  Ralph would have withstood the pressure, protected her as she would have protected him.

  “You’re the only one who will ever see into my soul,” he said, soon after Jake died, and handed her the power to penetrate, as delicately as a geologist, each brittle, aggressive strata, chipping away at his tough exterior until he belonged entirely to her. She had seen the estate where he grew up. High-rise council flats, walls covered in graffiti, boarded-up shop windows. The middle child in a brawling working-class family, so different from Edward with his studious glasses and polished accent, and different also from her father, an armchair terrorist, who took the English shilling and muttered vengeance on the Crown. Ralph would have been a real terrorist. Under different circumstances he would have handled a rifle instead of a microphone. He had been the rock upon which she had dashed herself, knowing that his love was strong enough to withstand the demands she would place upon their marriage.

  She shivered. Winter was upon them. Over a year now since it happened. Time did not stand still for anyone.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Large wooden frames were stacked against the walls of the studio and a number of canvases were in varying stages of completion. The road-works painting was a configuration of bent and crouching figures. The plane trees on the pavement outside her parents’ house stood still and black against the sky and the woman in her luminous jacket, her feet in hulking boots and thickly ribbed ankle socks, moved backwards in the spotlight flare, separated from the men yet linked to them by the cable she was unwinding. Lorraine had painted other women. Sophie, her face split in an exhausted grin, a new-born calf between her hands, all slime and glistening life. A canvas titled Dancing at the Crossroads revealed the village hall, where middle-aged women in cardigans and sensible shoes danced the salsa. But the painting which attracted Ralph’s attention was the one she had painted of bats in flight and a woman watching from the window, a spilled glass of wine on the ledge.

  He had arrived in Trabawn with an encyclopaedia on horses for Emily and a bouquet of roses for Lorraine. She had prepared a seafood pasta dish which, after he had toured the studio, they ate in front of the fire. Music thumped from Emily’s room, where she had gone to study after regaling Ralph with horsy stories and the daily antics of Emily the calf.

  He glanced towards the ceiling. “Who would have believed it? Emily a culchie.”

  “She’s more contented, especially since she made peace with Adrian.”

  “And you?”

  “I’m managing fine.”

  “By running backwards instead of forwards. Trabawn is a picture postcard, Lorraine, and you’re hiding in it. You let them run you out of town.”

  To return to a place where so much happy memory was invested must seem like the act of a crazed woman, she thought. Ralph would never appreciate her reasons for
coming here and she was only now beginning to realise why she had made such a decision. Trabawn with its high sand dunes and teenage yearnings was where a cruel triangle began. She was setting her own imprint on the shifting sands of deceit.

  “When the past stinks there’s only one thing to do,” she replied. “Shake it like a rat. Toss it in the air. Conquer it.”

  “Such venom!” Surprised by her outburst, he wagged his fork at her and grinned. “Where’s the sweet Lorraine I used to know?”

  “I’m serious, Ralph. Trabawn belongs to me now, not to the past. It’s where I’ve chosen to begin again.”

  His voice hardened. “Until it’s over, I’ve no intention of beginning again.”

  “But it is over, Ralph.”

  “Not until I say so.”

  He reminded her of a damaged animal, a predator taken off guard, bleeding but still dangerous.

  “I’m going to exhibit in the Spiral Staircase gallery,” she said.

  He turned, surprised, then threw back his head and laughed. “In your old studio?”

  “Yes. When I’m ready.”

  “Will I get an invitation to the opening night?”

  “Of course. They will also.”

  “That should be an interesting occasion. I’ll look forward to it immensely.” Still smiling, he leaned towards her and wrapped a strand of her hair around his finger, watched it unfurl. Apart from the glow from a table lamp, the room was dim, mainly lit by the flames. “I find myself thinking about you at the most unexpected times. Do you know what I feel then?”

  “I’d be afraid to guess.”

  “Regret that you and I never really got to know each other.”

  “I’ve known you for twenty years, Ralph.” She smiled back at him, aware that he was flirting with her for the first time ever. But what he said was true. They had never become close, despite all the years of togetherness. They needed space to understand each other but Virginia’s dominant personality had never allowed them find it. She had remained the centrepiece in both their lives, the one upon whom they focused their attention. Only occasionally, as had happened on the night Jake died, did Lorraine know him in any emotional sense.