by Karen Perry
‘I’m not saying Zoë should stay here indefinitely,’ he said, putting the plate and knife down, ‘but it’s only a few weeks since she tried to kill herself. I’m not comfortable at the thought of her taking care of herself yet.’
‘Have you talked to Zoë about it? About how she’s feeling now, within herself?’
‘A little. I mean, she’s doing better but she’s still vulnerable. I think she needs our support.’
‘Shouldn’t she be getting professional help?’
‘How is she supposed to afford that?’
‘What about the university? Haven’t they got counsellors?’
‘I don’t think that’s the answer, Caroline.’
I could see I wasn’t going to get anywhere. Turning back to the worktop I began scraping leftovers into a Tupperware box.
‘I’ll do something with Holly,’ he said, to appease me. ‘Something to make her feel special.’
‘Fine.’ I put the box into the fridge. Still I could feel him watching me. When I glanced at him, it was obvious there was something else on his mind. ‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘I’ve been giving some thought to Zoë’s college fees,’ he began. Instantly my defences rose. ‘She hasn’t said it outright, but it’s clear that she hasn’t got much money. Gary isn’t exactly supportive and the part-time jobs barely pay her rent. I have the impression it might have been a contributing factor to what she did on Christmas Day.’
‘Where are you going with this?’ I asked, unable to keep the coldness from my voice.
He was standing opposite me, looking at me squarely. ‘I want to pay her college fees.’
A laugh escaped me, and I could see it startled him. ‘With what?’ I asked. ‘A big chunk of your salary goes to pay the mortgage. Have you forgotten the loan we took out to do all this?’ I gestured with one hand to take in the new kitchen, the extension, with its wall of windows, revealing the garden beyond. Despite the bequest from my parents, our house renovation – the renovation of our marriage – had put pressure on our finances.
‘We’ll manage,’ he said, standing his ground.
‘What about all the other outgoings? Car payments, school fees, health insurance, not to mention cello lessons, piano lessons and the other after-school activities? It all adds up, David. How are you going to make your salary cover all that as well as college fees?’
He began to look shifty.
‘Can’t you pay for some of that stuff?’
I didn’t say anything, just stared.
‘Now that you’re working, you could cover the kids’ activities and the school fees. Maybe the health insurance, too.’
I could hardly believe what he was suggesting. ‘You want me to pay for Zoë’s college fees?’
‘I didn’t say –’
‘That’s what it amounts to, though.’
‘For God’s sake, Caroline. Is it so much to ask that you contribute a little? All these years, I’ve been shouldering the entire financial burden. Is it unreasonable to ask you to share the load now?’
Anger shot through every muscle and fibre. It was outrageous. All those years I had worked in our home, raising our children, keeping things running smoothly on the domestic front, leaving him free to pursue his career, all that time it had felt like there had been a pact between us, a mutual appreciation of the other’s endeavours. Now, with the sweep of his words, he was devaluing all the years I had put into our family, our home, as if there were some kind of debt I needed to repay him. His suggestion that I should pay for Zoë’s education – and that was what it was, no matter how he tried to dress it up – was like a slap in the face.
‘I am not paying for that girl’s education,’ I said emphatically.
‘Hang on –’
‘No, David.’
I stepped past him quickly, unwilling to spend another second discussing it, and as I went into the hall, I felt it. The slightest movement of air coming from the top of the stairs, the faintest creak of a floorboard overhead. I moved into the middle and looked up, hoping to catch a glimpse of whoever had been listening.
Perhaps I had imagined it. All the bedroom doors were closed. Robbie’s cello was silent. I thought I heard laughter drifting down from his room. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone else had overheard our entire conversation in the kitchen.
A little later in the week, I was in the office when out of the blue I got a call from Robbie’s school asking me to come at once. There had been an incident.
‘What happened? Is Robbie all right?’
‘He’s fine,’ the school secretary told me. ‘He’s in Mrs Campbell’s office at the moment.’
I had not seen Mrs Campbell, the headmistress, since the business with Aidan, and even hearing her name now brought a prickling to my skin, like thousands of nerve-endings sitting up in fright.
‘I’m at work,’ I said, flustered. ‘I mean, is he hurt?’
‘Oh, no. He’s not hurt,’ she said, and my heart sank as she went on: ‘If it’s difficult for you, perhaps Robbie’s father could come. Either way, Mrs Campbell wants this sorted out immediately.’
There was no way I could ask David. He’d made it clear after the parent-teacher meeting in September that I needed to get over my humiliation.
‘I’ll be there in half an hour,’ I told her.
A short time later, when I parked my car outside the school and climbed the granite steps, I was filled with dread at going back there. Dread mingled with a niggling sense of annoyance. Why hadn’t I stood my ground at the time, insisted on moving Robbie to a different school? The whole staff knew what I had done. Did David get some kind of satisfaction from that? His petty revenge meted out piecemeal with every parent-teacher meeting for the next three years? Every school play, every sports day, every end-of-year Mass: did he quietly enjoy my humiliation at every occasion?
‘I’ll be brief,’ Mrs Campbell told me.
Ever the professional, she sat behind her desk and filled me in on the campaign of aggression that my son had been waging against his French teacher, Miss Murphy. It had been going on for some time, apparently, but Miss Murphy – in her twenties, this her first teaching job – had kept quiet on the matter, hoping it would resolve itself without her having to involve anyone else.
At first it was small, silly stuff: using the face of his watch, he would reflect sunlight from the window into Miss Murphy’s eyes as she faced the class; he made a popping noise every time she finished a sentence; he would hum constantly, then deny it was him. Stupid stuff, the kind of petty misdemeanours that drive every teacher mad but not enough to warrant serious disciplinary steps. Lately, however, things had escalated. He had started throwing pens at her whenever her back was turned. When she came into the classroom, someone had drawn her likeness, breasts bared, on the whiteboard, with the caption ‘Come get it, boys!’ in a speech bubble from her mouth. She couldn’t prove it had been Robbie, but her suspicions leaned in his direction.
The incident finally prompting her to tell Mrs Campbell had happened that morning. Having grown exasperated with his constant baiting, she had ordered Robbie to stand up by the whiteboard for the duration of the class but as she proceeded to give the lesson, he began slowly inching towards her. At first, she didn’t notice, until some of the other boys began sniggering and she turned to find him almost upon her. Shouting at him to get back against the wall, she had put a hand to his shoulder to propel him. Instantly Robbie had swiped away her arm and putting both hands to her chest he had shoved her roughly back. Miss Murphy, stumbling over the leg of a table, had fallen awkwardly and banged her head against the seat of a chair. She was still in the sick bay, apparently, shaken.
‘It goes without saying,’ Mrs Campbell went on, ‘that a violent assault on a member of staff is absolutely insupportable and must be treated with the utmost seriousness.’
‘Of course,’ I said, reeling from all she had told me.
‘The most worrying part in this s
orry affair is how targeted the attack was,’ she said. ‘In every other class, Robbie is well behaved. None of the other teachers have any complaints about his behaviour.’
‘I don’t understand it,’ I said. ‘I have no idea why this has happened, or what he has against this teacher. He’s usually such a gentle boy.’
Her eyes narrowed, and her voice softened. ‘Is everything all right at home? When a student is disruptive in school, it’s often because of some difficulty he’s experiencing at home.’
Neither of us mentioned my year-long absence from the school, my previous indiscretion. I’m sure it must have been on her mind, though.
‘Everything’s fine,’ I said quickly.
Robbie was suspended for a week.
How strange it had been, going back to the school. Just standing within those stone walls again had touched old memories alive, and I found myself thinking back to that time as I drove in silence, my son staring sullenly out the window.
If you saw Aidan, the word ‘handsome’ would not come to mind. A tall, thin man, with a longish face and blue eyes, he was affable and self-effacing. His son was in Robbie’s class and we were both on the Parents’ Committee. It was not love at first sight, but from the start we’d got on. Sometimes, after a committee meeting, a few of us would go for a drink in the pub around the corner. On occasion, it was just the two of us. All we did was talk, but it was such talk! Small things and big things, from school gossip to our own individual parenting concerns. Idle chitchat, that was all, but a constant pleasurable flow of it.
We had been flirting with each other for some time – harmless enough – but on one night, a night where we stayed behind for a third drink after the others had left, it began to grow more serious. He told me his wife was a very neat and organized person – there was never any question of them leaving a trail of clothes along the floor on the way to the bedroom as seen in movies: everything had to be neatly hung up and put away before lovemaking could commence. ‘I bet you’re not like that,’ he said, keeping his eyes on me over the lip of his glass.
Outside, he waited while I unlocked my bike from the railings, and when I turned to say goodnight, he kissed me long and hard on the mouth and I let him. I remember standing in my kitchen a short time later, my hands to my hot cheeks, horrified by what I had done and yet thrilled by it, too.
The next day I felt silly and ashamed. I had let things go too far and resolved to stop before it got out of hand. A text from Aidan in the late afternoon and I, foolishly, responded. We began texting every day and soon we were meeting outside committee nights – for coffee during the day and, when we could swing it, at night. We met in dingy pubs I’d never heard of in rough parts of town. We sat in the back row of art-house movies, necking like teenagers, discreetly fumbling in the dark.
We never actually had sex, although we probably would have, eventually, if we hadn’t been caught. And, yes, I did feel guilty about it, desperately guilty, but something kept driving me on, refused to let me stop. The seed of anger planted inside me – She was the love of his life, not me. Somehow it opened out and grew shoots, tendrils sneaking out to grasp forbidden pleasures. Such a heady time. Between the elation of the illicit romance and the crying fits in the privacy of the bathroom when the children were at school, my husband at work, I would think of what I was doing and grow frightened and depressed.
At the end of the committee meeting one night, while the others were tidying away the coffee cups, Mrs Campbell made a neat stack of her paperwork and said: ‘Caroline, Aidan, a word, please?’
She hid it well – I’ll give her that much. Throughout the meeting she had behaved as if she was entirely without suspicion that two of her committee members might secretly be fucking. It was only when we went into her office and Aidan closed the door behind us that she addressed us in a tone of icy fury, her eyes bright with disgust. ‘I think one of you had better tell me just what is going on.’
At first, we feigned ignorance, even hilarity at the suggestion, followed by indignation when she would not be put off.
‘You were seen!’ she told us, and I felt a twang of fear.
Aidan refused to go gently, challenging her assertions, demanding to know the details behind the allegation – where had we supposedly been seen (Conways on Parnell Street), when (three nights ago), by whom (she refused to say).
‘You have children!’ she said, with exasperation. ‘How could you be so reckless with their happiness? So selfish and stupid?’
I couldn’t look at him afterwards. We both knew it was over.
Still I thought I could keep it secret, hide it from David, from my children.
At the school gates, in the days that followed, I began to notice the nudging and staring, the whispered conversations I was not party to. Then a phone call from another parent on the committee.
‘You’ve heard the news? Aidan’s left. He’s taking his son out of the school.’
It took a moment for it to sink in, my mind spinning off in all directions.
‘What about you?’ she asked then.
‘Me?’
‘Do you still want to be on the committee?’
‘What do you mean, Olivia?’
All that time, she had been speaking in her usual brisk manner. Now her voice dropped, taking on a confidential tone. ‘I think you know what I mean, Caroline.’
Just like that, I knew I would have to tell David.
And when I did tell him, later that night, it was like watching a coldness come over him, like a thin sheet of ice forming over his skin. I had expected anger, indignation, some kind of volatile reaction. Instead he just sat there, his breathing heavier as I gave my sorry account, made my shameful confession. Then, in a quiet voice, he had said, as if addressing his words to the table and not to me: ‘The children must never know.’
Robbie refused to speak the whole way home. I tried various methods of coaxing information out of him but he wouldn’t answer and after a while I gave up. The journey took longer than usual, traffic from a rugby match clogging the streets. As the wheels of the car crunched over the gravel in our driveway, I felt exhausted and troubled. Every single book or magazine article I had read about the adolescent male had warned of sudden fits of aggression, yet still I hadn’t believed it. Not my Robbie. Not my gentle boy. Had arrogance led me to think like that? The blindness of a mother’s love? He had always been softer than other boys, easily hurt. I had worried that he might be the object of bullying. To learn he was the perpetrator of violence had thrown me completely. I turned off the engine.
‘Robbie,’ I began carefully. ‘I know things have been strange lately. I haven’t been around as much now that I’m working again. If I haven’t been there for you, then I’m sorry. Perhaps you feel that I’ve let you down, but –’
‘I don’t. I think it’s good you have a job.’
‘Then what is it, love?’
He shook his head then pressed it back against the headrest, unhappiness filling his face.
‘What you did to that teacher … It’s so unlike you. What’s the matter? Has something happened?’
He didn’t answer.
A thought crossed my mind. All those evenings, the two of them up in his room, talking, whispering. ‘Does this have something to do with Zoë?’
He put a finger to his mouth, biting at the corner of a nail.
‘I know you two get on well, Robbie. But I think it best if you spend less time with her. She’s older than you are. The long chats you have in your room – I don’t think they’re a good idea.’
He gave a small exasperated sigh and shot me a look of disgust. ‘Miss Murphy was the one who saw you together – you and Jack’s dad. The one who ratted on you.’
Something hard caught in my throat, like a cold stone wedged there. The shock of his admission and all the realizations that flowed from it. He knew what I had done. He knew. I felt it, like a fist around my heart.
‘Oh, Robbie …’ I wanted to expla
in it, to make it better. I knew, though, that nothing would, just as I knew he had lived with the knowledge all this time. David and I had secretly been congratulating ourselves on shielding the children from what I had done, and all the time he’d known.
He opened the car door and clambered out, and I sat there, watching him march to the front door, put his key in the lock and disappear inside. I thought of all the small triumphs of motherhood – teaching him to read before he started school, recognizing his musical ability before anyone else did, finding the instrument that best suited his temperament, remembering the flush of pride when the librarian remarked on how many books he got through each week for such a small boy. I thought of all these things and felt how flimsy they were, how paltry in the face of the pain I had caused.
It was a few moments before I could get out of the car. Then I locked it, straightened myself and followed him slowly into the house.
14. David
It happened that around this time I was invited to speak at a conference hosted by my old stomping ground, Queens University, Belfast. On the morning I was due to leave, I got up early, before Caroline’s alarm went off, and wandered downstairs. It was one of those surprising February mornings when the frost sparkles beneath the hard sunlight, crocuses spearing up through the frozen earth, and you sense the real possibility that spring has arrived. I took my coffee and the notes for my talk and went to sit in the garden on the wooden bench by the back wall.
I read over my notes, but the words kept blurring on the page, my attention pulled elsewhere. It had been years since I had been to Belfast, and while it was nice to receive the invitation, the thought of going back to Queens only served to stir up buried memories, and awaken old ghosts.
Earlier in the week, I had taken it upon myself to track down the contact details for Zoë’s stepfather, Gary. Of course I could have asked Zoë for his number, but she was so closed and defensive – almost frightened – any time he was mentioned that I chose not to. Instead I went through the university registrar. In the end, it was all straightforward enough. A brief phone call suggesting we meet, which he accepted without question, although I noted the surprise in his tone. I told myself that I just wanted to outline for him my plans to become actively involved as Zoë’s parent, paying her tuition fees as well as taking her into my home. I didn’t know whether or not to tell him about her suicide attempt, weighing up his need to know versus her desire for privacy. It was still unclear to me what responsibilities towards her Gary felt still existed in the wake of Linda’s death. I suppose that was why I set up the meeting rather than discussing it over the phone.