Skin Deep

by Liz Nugent

  It was a shock to me that I had always had this power in my body, that this knowledge was always within me, that I could float on top of the water or I could plough my way through it, like the tiller of any boat, turning my head from side to side.

  The next day, I learned to swim underwater and opened my eyes to a world below where voices and things and people were irrelevant. I had always loved the sea, the shift and the surge and the swell of it, but this experience of immersion, of being part of it, was extraordinary. The fact that Peter had showed it to me made me feel genuine warmth towards him. Those few days were the happiest of our short marriage. I hoped it was the same for Peter, and though he was distracted by business phone calls from London, we drank wine, made love every night and spent as much time as possible in the water. The frequent latherings of suntan lotion we applied to each other became a sexy ritual, and I told him I loved him, and I may even have meant it. ‘I think you might be a mermaid,’ whispered Peter one night, and I kissed the words right out of his mouth. If only we could have stayed there in that perfect bubble for ever. I was happy. We talked a lot. He admitted that he was stressed about work because he was waiting for the outcome of a deal. He was under a lot of pressure, he said. He tried to talk to me about James again, but I changed the subject every time so he gave up.

  On our last evening in the local cheap restaurant where we’d been most days, he eyed the hovering manager and said, ‘Doesn’t it bother you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The way men look at you. I’m not being jealous, it’s that it’s creepy sometimes. That guy doesn’t even care that you’re clearly with your husband.’

  The restaurant manager he was talking about made no secret of what he thought of me. When I’d emerged from the sea on the first day, I’d heard a long slow whistle and I’d looked up and seen the glint of this man’s gold tooth as he watched me, eyes ablaze with lust. When he turned out to be the same man that later welcomed me into the restaurant, he did not let an opportunity go by to touch me, shaking my hand – ‘Cette belle fille!’ – taking my elbow, unnecessarily placing the napkin on my knee. It didn’t bother me in the slightest.

  ‘It happens in London too, all the time. I’m used to it. They’re harmless.’

  ‘I suppose I can’t blame them. I remember the first time I saw you, at my parents’ dining table …’

  We hadn’t ever talked much about Westport.

  ‘When I was with Harry.’

  He looked mildly irritated, as if he were imagining an errant fly buzzing beside him.

  ‘Yes, but I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the first time I saw you. I spent the whole of dinner trying not to look at you.’

  ‘You stared at me!’

  ‘Did I? I thought I was doing a good job of hiding my feelings.’

  ‘You stared at me as if I wasn’t good enough to be at your table!’

  ‘That’s what my “falling in love” face looks like.’

  We laughed, and although we did not talk about Harry, some element of awkwardness that had always been between us vanished that night.

  When Peter paid the bill, the gold-toothed manager took my hand and kissed it. ‘Enchanté, mademoiselle,’ he said.

  Peter, loosened by wine, corrected him – ‘It’s Madame, actually’ – and offered his own hand to be kissed.

  Raoul, according to his name badge, was offended and scurried back towards the kitchen. We giggled all the way up the steps to our villa, stopping for long kisses on the way. I had not had a single headache for the whole duration of our holiday. I knew all along that James had some secret way of causing me pain.

  When Daddy’s great-grand-uncle, Malachy O’Flaherty, was seven years old, he went out with his uncle on a fishing boat and a hook got caught in his thumb, piercing the nail. It was the days before proper doctors came to the island, so the butcher was called from the mainland to remove the top of Malachy’s thumb. But Malachy, as terrified as a small boy had every right to be, went into hiding before the butcher arrived, and refused to come out. The butcher stayed two nights on the island before sailing back, never having amputated the thumb. When Malachy eventually reappeared, he swore blind that the hook digging into the flesh of his thumb did not pain him in the slightest and that he would happily live with it. He was dosed with whiskey, and pliers were used to remove the part of the hook that was visible, but as he grew it broke through the skin again.

  Live with it he did, and that thumbnail never grew past a child’s size and the hook remained embedded within it. He became known as the man who wouldn’t shake your hand, unless a deal went sour. Daddy said that Malachy’s bride, his great-grand-aunt Noeleen, often bore the scars of the hooked thumb, because a man and his wife would always be in the way of touching each other and accidents happened between them. It was said that Noeleen had a wandering eye and needed to be kept in check.

  When Malachy was thirty-five years old, he and one of his brothers were lost at sea after being offshore for four days. Parts of the boat were washed up on the western shore of Inishcrann, but the sea never surrendered the bodies of the men and no amount of prayers or lamenting by one of the wives made a difference. In those times, fishermen were often lost and the islanders soon accepted they were gone for ever. Noeleen, however, was still a girl of twenty when her husband drowned. She was not for lamenting, but for remarrying straight away, to a man from the mainland who had rethatched Malachy’s roof the previous spring. Less than nine months after her first husband’s drowning, she had a baby girl and insisted that Malachy was the child’s father. In the beginning, the family of three were shunned and regarded with suspicion, but gradually people forgot about her haste and went back to buying her bread and letting her new husband thatch their cottages.

  It was eighteen years later, on the occasion of Noeleen’s daughter’s wedding, that a feast was organized in the parish hall. During the meal, Noeleen began to choke on her mackerel and no amount of slapping her on the back or reaching into her throat could remove the suspect bone. She died there, splayed over the wedding table, but with her last breath, out of her mouth popped a small blackened fingernail impaled by a hook.

  Daddy always said that the sea had its own justice, and that it had its own way of taking revenge on island traitors. The sea allowed Malachy to set the record straight. The new bride was not his daughter and Noeleen had betrayed him and the island. Daddy said it was a wife’s duty to be ever faithful to her husband.

  19

  It was soon after we got back to London that things began to change. Just when we found each other, everything started to go wrong. Peter was working later and later and seemed permanently exhausted. Sometimes when I would ring the office, his secretary would admit that she didn’t know where he was, that nobody knew. When I later questioned him, he’d react as if I was accusing him of having an affair. That thought had never crossed my mind. Several times he suggested that we could do without Chiara, now that James was older. I insisted that we keep her but he lowered the credit limit on my card and for the first time began to look at the statements that he kept in a filing cabinet.

  ‘What were you doing in Brighton last month?’ ‘How could a dress cost that much?’ ‘You spent how much on wine?’ The questions were relentless and I eventually guessed that he thought I was the one having an affair. I ordered an itemized phone bill and showed him there were no strange phone calls listed except for Chiara’s weekly calls to Italy. But he ripped it up and threw it in the bin.

  ‘I trust you,’ he said, but he was annoyed.

  And then two weeks later, Peter came home late, ashen-faced. I hauled myself up in bed and put down my book. He didn’t come and kiss me straight away like he normally did.

  ‘Is there something wrong?’ I asked.

  Without answering, he disappeared into James’s room and didn’t come out for another ten minutes. I heard him go downstairs to the dining room and I recognized the hinge squeak as he opened the antiqu
e drinks cabinet. ‘Where’s the brandy?’ he called out.

  I got out of bed and threw my robe around me. Chiara came out of her room and looked at me as I passed. I told her everything was fine and flew downstairs.

  ‘I don’t know. We must have drunk it,’ I lied, knowing that Isabelle and I had finished off the bottle two days previously.

  ‘Fuck,’ he said, and he kicked the cabinet door shut. He was mild in his use of language usually; I knew it was something serious.

  ‘What is it? Is it your parents … or Harry?’ I asked, sitting down beside him at the table.

  He put his head down so that I couldn’t see his eyes, but his shoulders began to shake and tears splashed on to the rug at his feet. I felt a flicker of something. Impatience? Annoyance? Was my husband actually crying? A grown man? Harry had never cried, not even when I broke his heart.

  ‘For God’s sake, Peter, what the hell is wrong?’

  He wiped his nose on his napkin. It was disgusting. All those little points of etiquette I had learned, and for what?

  ‘It’s the business. We’re going under.’

  ‘Under what?’

  ‘We were on the verge of something, but it went wrong. We staked everything on one deal and it didn’t work. It’s as simple as not putting all your eggs in one basket, but we were sure and eventually it all fell apart. We’re being forced to shut down.’

  ‘Russell Wilkes? What does this mean?’

  What did it mean for me?

  ‘It’s really, really bad. Not just for us. Dad put a load of money into this, their life savings. He had such faith in me. He mortgaged the hotel.’

  ‘But we have the house?’

  ‘We’re going to have to sell, Delia. It’s gone. It’s all gone. I’ve been meeting with banks and lenders, but everyone’s nervous since Black Monday and it’s all happened suddenly. I honestly thought we’d be OK. We both took bonuses last May. That’s how we got James into that prep school with Daniel’s kids. But I think once people started looking at the bigger picture … our project required long-term investment, and they couldn’t hang on.’

  ‘You gambled everything?’

  ‘I guess I got seduced by the lifestyle that we couldn’t afford. I’m not blaming you. I got sucked in too, trying to keep up with the Joneses, but the bills were mounting up. We couldn’t get any more credit. We had to take the risk.’

  ‘Well, what are you going to do?’

  ‘Thanks for the sympathy.’ His self-pity was pathetic.

  ‘Hang on! I’m not the one who lost every—’

  ‘I was hoping for loyalty, for support.’ The chair scraped over our solid oak floor and Peter slammed the door on his way out.

  Later, when I was in bed, Peter crept in and lay behind me, spooning. ‘I’ll figure something out,’ he said quietly, and kissed the back of my head. I pretended to be asleep.

  The next day he went to work.

  ‘Why are you going in?’ I asked.

  ‘We have to clear the building. The bailiffs are coming for the furniture.’

  ‘Already? Isn’t that very quick?’

  He put his hands up to stop me questioning him any further.

  Hannah rang as soon as he’d left the house. ‘What the hell happened at Russell Wilkes, Delia? Daniel has gone on a total bender since last night. Has Peter said anything?’

  ‘I … I don’t know. I think there’s some trouble at work.’ I wondered what Daniel had told her, and if it matched what Peter had told me.

  ‘I’m coming over. I’ll ring Isabelle.’

  Hannah knew less than I did, but she knew that Russell Wilkes was sinking. ‘Oh God, Daniel has lost the run of himself completely. Too much coke. I mean, most of us can take it or leave it. Maybe he was caught doing a line by a client and word has travelled?’

  That did not seem unlikely. Hannah and I were bonding slightly more now, as the wives of failing businessmen. But I felt I had the upper hand. I smugly pointed out that Daniel was rarely ever in the office and that Peter had always done the lion’s share of the work, that it couldn’t be Peter’s fault. I could see that Isabelle was getting ready to referee a row between us, but Hannah was surprisingly calm and didn’t seem to be particularly perturbed.

  ‘It would all be fine if Mummy wasn’t being such a bitch. She has the money to bail Daniel out and save the company, but she is simply refusing to. Daniel actually begged her on the phone yesterday. Really humiliated himself. We haven’t got a pot to piss in now, but I know Mummy. She’s not going to let us starve. She owns half of Aberdeenshire.’

  ‘But what about us? Peter and me?’

  ‘You can hardly expect us to help you, darling. It’s not as if Peter is family. But don’t worry,’ she said, patronizingly, ‘as you say, your Peter is such a clever chap, he’ll think of something. It is a terrible shame, but it can’t be helped, can it?’ She popped the cork on the bottle of wine.

  Isabelle lit her cigarette and said, ‘Well, all good things must come to an end.’

  By the time Chiara collected James from school, I had gone to bed for the afternoon. It was partly the wine, but I was more rattled by the fact that if Peter didn’t have an income, we wouldn’t be able to afford Chiara, and I would be stuck with my son. I had sent off for some prospectuses for boarding schools the previous week. If Peter wasn’t working, he could mind James. I was sure I could get more hours in Debenhams.

  It took a week or two before I gleaned the full story. Far from being a paragon of virtue, Peter had had his hands in the till. It wasn’t Daniel’s coke dealing or lack of interest in the business that had been the ruination of Russell Wilkes. It was Peter’s embezzlement. The financial situation was far worse than he had led me to believe. He had risked clients’ money by investing in deals without their permission. Daniel didn’t even know yet the full extent of the losses. Peter didn’t have the courage to tell him. But he feared that he could be prosecuted.

  ‘But why, Peter, why would you do such a thing?’ I asked.

  He did not blame me directly. He loved me too much for that. But he looked right at me as he said, ‘We wanted a proper house and a good school for our child, but I couldn’t afford it yet, and the bank wouldn’t lend me as much as I needed, so I thought I could temporarily borrow from certain accounts. I was sure I’d be able to pay it back, but then the furnishings were so expensive, and Chiara’s wages, James’s school fees and the credit card bills mounted up, and I got a bit more desperate and risked more money. I’ve been fobbing off clients and shuffling money around for the last four years. And then, before we went on holiday, these aviation leasing company shares came up. I talked to a guy I shouldn’t have talked to.’

  ‘Insider dealing?’

  ‘Yes, but he was so sure that a merger was happening, so I moved everything into that stock. I trusted him.’

  ‘Are the police coming?’ I asked.

  ‘Not yet. I hope Daniel will be able to get the money together to cover the losses.’

  ‘Peter, you stole other people’s money.’

  He was collapsed in anguish on the sofa. ‘I’m so, so sorry.’

  ‘You’ll have to ring your father.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  Within a matter of months, we lost our home, credit cards, furniture and friends. We lost Chiara. She was distraught. But not as much as I was to lose her. She was the one who took James shopping, bought his clothes and noticed when his little shoes were getting too tight. Chiara adored James, and I think she was secretly pleased that he preferred her. Even after years of living in our home, she was intensely private and had no friends or social life that we were aware of. James was her world, and even though she didn’t technically work for us in the evenings or on Sundays, she was always happy and eager to babysit if we were going out.

  ‘Do you think Chiara is too attached to James?’ Peter had asked one evening, as the child sat patiently outside her bedroom door, waiting for her to come out.

  ‘It’s go
od for both of them,’ I said. I could tell Peter wasn’t entirely satisfied with the answer. But I kissed his brow and he leaned into me.

  What would I do without her? I hadn’t given much thought to what might become of her. We had had an alliance of sorts, but we had never become friends. Peter had to give her a month’s notice and she spent most of the month hollow-eyed or weeping. Peter thought Chiara was unstable. ‘It’s as well she’s going,’ he said. ‘She acts as if James is her child. It’s completely inappropriate.’

  As close as she had been to James before, over that last month they clung to each other. It was pitiable. In her final week, Chiara came to me and said, ‘What about James? Who will be his mother?’

  I knew exactly what she meant and I think the question gave me more sleepless nights than it gave Chiara. When she left, she was sobbing, and although we had explained to James that she was going away for a little holiday, he knew that it was more than that. He kicked and screamed and pulled everything off the dining-room table. I sent him up to his room and locked the door and turned up the radio.

  Peter stayed out of jail, as Hannah’s mother was eventually persuaded to cough up to keep Daniel and Peter from being sued or arrested. Daniel had countersigned all of Peter’s transactions, so legally he was equally culpable. Word spread around the City though, and Peter and Daniel’s names were synonymous with dirty dealing and they could never work in finance again. Hannah rang once thereafter and called my husband and me every name under the sun.

  I knew deep down that Hannah and Isabelle had adopted me like children do with a stray dog. They had been friends with each other for years. They would soon tire of me and move on to their next little pet. They were old money, and Peter would always be ‘trade’ to them. Hannah and Daniel came from aristocracy, and Isabelle’s father had owned a stately home somewhere in Norfolk. Her interior-decorating job earned enough money to maintain the old place and keep her in a tiny flat. She had always been generous and welcoming to me, but now she no longer returned my calls and the nightclub invitations stopped.