Past Secrets

Just not faithful.

‘I love you, Grey, I don’t look at other men,’ she said. ‘I don’t think about anyone else but you, I almost don’t see anyone else but you. If there was anyone else there, if Brad Pitt and George Clooney and Wesley Snipes and anyone else you can think of were there for the taking, you know what?’ She paused. ‘I’d still say no.’

‘I know, I’m sorry, so sorry.’ The long piano-player’s fingers ran through his hair again and for a flicker of an instant, Maggie thought of his hands running through the girl’s hair in the throes of passion, twisting it and pulling gently like he did with Maggie.

‘I love your hair,’ he’d mutter when they were naked together. Maggie almost never cut it now. Grey loved its length lying tangled on the pillow as he hung over her, cradling her face before he kissed her. He thought she was feminine and sexy, things Maggie had never felt in her life until he’d come along and made her feel them. Now he’d taken all that away.

When her mother or Shona or other people said she was beautiful, she didn’t believe them. They loved her, they were being kind to her. But when Grey said it, she had believed him. He made her beautiful because she glowed from being with him.

That he had so much power over her made her feel helpless now. Going back to the sort of woman he’d had before her made it a double betrayal – a blonde with curves that Maggie would never have. She felt so hurt that she wanted to hurt him too.

‘You’re lying. You’re not sorry, only sorry I got home early and ruined it all. You screwed her. In. Our. Bed,’ she said slowly. ‘That’s not love and respect.’ She paused. ‘Were there others?’

A strange look touched his face briefly, a look of sheer guilt, and it was gone so quickly that only someone who loved his face and knew it in every mood would have noticed. But Maggie was that person. She noticed.

‘No,’ he said. She didn’t believe him.

The armchair seemed to rise up to greet her. Collapsing into it, she hugged her knees to her chest, a gesture that said ‘keep out’.

There had been others, of that she was sure and she wasn’t strong enough to hear about them. Her mother was ill, crying and not coping. Her father was asking for her help. Maggie’s world was topsy-turvy.

‘Just tell me, what’s so hard about fidelity?’ she whispered, afraid she knew the answer.

It had to be her fault. This confirmed what she’d known all along. She’d always felt lucky to have Grey, astonished that he was with her.

Someone like Grey could manage faithfulness with other people, with one of those icy blondes, but not with her. For one of those women, the right sort of wife for a man with a political future in front of him, he’d have got married. But Maggie obviously wasn’t the right sort of wife for him. She was an experiment between the Carolyn Bessette Kennedy types, the trophy women. She wasn’t worth giving up other women for. That was what this was all about.

The demons of anxiety and the self-doubt she’d grown up with rushed back howling into her mind and it was as if they’d never been away.

‘I’m sorry, Maggie, I swear this will never happen again, never.’ He looked up at her but Maggie was away in her head, remembering the years when she’d lived with a permanent clench of anxiety in her gut.

Sunday nights were the worst, when the weekend was careening to an end and Monday loomed, Monday with Sandra Brody and her taunting crew who’d made it their mission in life to destroy Maggie Maguire. Maggie had never done anything to them but that didn’t appear to matter. Maggie was the chosen scapegoat. Daily verbal torture and cruel tricks were her punishment. The self-loathing – because it had to be her fault, hadn’t it? – felt just like it did now.

‘I’m sorry, Maggie,’ Grey repeated. ‘I don’t know why I did it. I wouldn’t hurt you for the world.’

‘Really?’ she asked with a bitter laugh. Why was he bothering to pretend? She’d prefer it if he told her the truth: that he loved her but just not enough. She wasn’t quite good enough.

‘You’re different, Maggie,’ Grey began and sat at her feet, pulling both her hands from around her knees, trying to make her hold him. ‘I love you, I never meant to hurt you. I am so, so sorry. Can’t you forgive me?’

She whisked her hands away, but he laid his dark head on her chair, pleading, imploring. It would be so easy to reach out and touch him, make it all go away and start again. Go on holiday, sell the apartment, move somewhere else, anything to paper over the crack. Maggie felt her fingers reach out, an inch away from brushing the softness of his hair.

Marriage – that would be the ultimate Band-Aid. A sign that they were together despite it all. Her mum would love it if she got married. Poor Mum, always hoping for the fairytale ending for her daughter. But Grey had never discussed marriage with her. Perhaps she wasn’t worth that, either.

Maggie’s hand stilled on its way to his hair. She could forgive Grey, she could forgive him almost anything. But then it would happen again. Other women, who’d work at the university and pity her, understanding that a prince like Grey wouldn’t be satisfied with just one woman. That was the price a woman like Maggie had to pay to be with a man like Grey. Why hadn’t she realised that there was a trade-off, a price?

She pulled her hand away. She couldn’t pay that price.

Suddenly, her running shoes seemed very inviting. Even home, the confines of Summer Street where her life had never been storybook perfect, was better than this.

It was familiar, somewhere she could lick her wounds. Shona and Dr Phil were probably wrong about running away. Now, staying was the hard option and running was easy.

Christie had cooked a beautiful goulash by the time she heard James’s key in the lock.

Goulash in honour of her dear Hungarian friend, Lenkya, who’d once said, ‘You can kill a man or cure him in the kitchen.’ This had been nearly forty years before, when Christie’s culinary expertise extended to making porridge or boiling eggs.

‘Cooking is the heart of the home and is the place where the woman is queen,’ Lenkya pointed out in the husky Hungarian accent that would have made the phone book sound fascinating, should she ever want to recite it.

Lenkya had lived below Christie in a house on Dunville Avenue that contained a veritable warren of bedsits.

‘If you can kill in the kitchen, I’ll end up in the dock for murder,’ Christie had said merrily.

She was dark-haired then and when she and Lenkya walked the half-mile to Ranelagh to buy groceries, people often mistook the two women with their flashing dark eyes, hand-span waists and lustrous curls for sisters.

‘You should learn to cook,’ said Lenkya, who could rustle up the tenderest stew from a handful of root vegetables, a scattering of herbs and a scraggy piece of meat. ‘How have you never learned before this? In my country, women learn to look after themselves. I can grow vegetables, raise chickens, kill chickens, pouf –’ She twisted both hands round an imaginary chicken’s neck. ‘Like that. If you are hungry, you soon learn.’

‘My mother cooked for all of us, my father, my brothers and sister,’ Christie told her. It was harder to explain the family dynamics which meant cooking was the only power her mother had ever had. Under Christie’s father’s thumb all the time, it was only when Maura was in front of her stove that she was in charge. If it was possible to kill or cure a man in the kitchen, Christie wondered how her mother had resisted the impulse to kill her overbearing husband.

James hadn’t known Lenkya well, but he’d been benefiting from her cooking expertise ever since. Food was all about love, Christie knew now. Feeding your family, giving them chicken soup when they were sick, and apple cake to take away the bitterness in their mouth when they were lovelorn: that was how you could cure them. Love and healing flew out of her kitchen into her home. Her life was nothing like her poor mother’s and she had no need of killing.

‘Hello, Christie.’ James put his arms round her and held her tightly. He smelled of the train, of dusty streets and other people’s cigarette smoke. He looked, as he so often did these days, tired and in need of a long, long sleep.

‘Hard day?’ Christie took his briefcase and jacket, resisting the impulse to push him up to their room, tuck him into bed and make him stay there until the exhausted look had gone from his face.

‘Ah no, fine,’ he said, removing his shoes and pulling on the old leather slippers he kept on the second step of the stairs. ‘The trip takes it out of me, I don’t know why. I’m sitting on the train half the day, not driving, so I should be in fine fettle.’

‘Travelling is exhausting,’ Christie insisted. ‘There’s a difference between sitting in your own armchair at home and sitting on a train at the mercy of leaves on the track, worrying about missing your meeting.’

‘I’m hardly Donald Trump,’ he joked.

‘He has a limo, I’d say, so he’s not at the mercy of the leaves.’ Christie handed her husband a glass of iced tea. ‘And someone else to drag his briefcase around after him. How did the meeting about the emissions go?’

‘We’re getting there. But one of the people was sick today, so there’s a chance we’ll have to go through it all again.’

‘For heaven’s sake,’ exclaimed Christie. ‘Surely if they’re sick, they have to catch up with the rest of you, not the other way round.’

‘You know how it works, love,’ said James. ‘For some people, the more meetings there are, the better. Then nothing actually gets done, but lots of minutes are typed up and the department’s accounts’ people are kept busy printing out expenses cheques for tea and coffee. Global warming won’t kill the planet: bureaucracy will.’

He followed her into the kitchen and sat down on a low stool to pet the dogs, who’d been clamouring for love since he arrived.

He normally knelt on the floor to pet them, she knew. His hip must be bothering him again. Not that James would ever say so. Christie knew many women with husbands whose flu symptoms were always at least on a par with Ebola, if the patient was to be believed. She was the lone dissenting voice with a husband who never magnified his illness to the power of ten, which worried her because James could be having a heart attack in front of her and he’d probably say he had ‘a bit of an ache’ and that a moment sitting down would cure it. How could you look after a man like that?

‘Now, what was that all about this morning?’ he asked when Tilly’s inner ears had been rubbed to her satisfaction and Rocket had snuffled wetly all over his shoes to establish that no other dogs had been admired that day.

‘What was all what about this morning?’ said Christie, feigning innocence.

‘You know, the phone call when I’d only just left the house.’

‘I was having an anxious day, that’s all,’ she relented. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to worry you but I had this awful feeling that something bad was going to happen to us.’

James pulled her over on to his knee and the dogs whimpered in outrage. This was their time for cuddling, not Christie’s. Tilly stormed off to her bed to sulk.

‘You can’t take my weight on your hip…’ Christie began. She knew it was stiff, she could see from the way he’d been walking that morning.

‘Oh, shut up about my bloody hip, woman,’ James said and held her tight. ‘I love you, you daft creature, d’you know that? I love that you still worry about me.’

‘Yes and I love you too, you daft man,’ she replied. ‘Even if your hip is aching and you won’t mention it.’

‘It’s only a twinge.’

‘I don’t believe you. You’d be in agony, and you’d still say it was only a twinge. You’re not impressing anybody with your stoicism,’ she said crossly.

‘It’s not agony.’

‘If your arthritis is playing up, it’s not good to have me on your lap,’ she said.

James laid his head against her cheek. ‘The day I can’t manage to have you on my lap,’ he said, ‘get them to shoot me.’

‘They couldn’t shoot you,’ Christie murmured, hugging him. ‘You’re an endangered species.’

‘Like the dodo?’

‘The poor dodo’s been and gone, sorry. You’re more of a white tiger: rare and special.’

‘You say the nicest things,’ he replied, his lips close to her cheek.

‘Impossible man,’ sighed Christie, kissing him on the forehead and getting up. ‘I made goulash.’

‘Lenkya’s recipe? Great, I love that.’ James sat down at the table expectantly. ‘Whatever happened to her? She hasn’t been in touch for years, not since Ana was involved with that artist fellow and they were all here for the big exhibition in Dawson Street. Remember that? How many years ago is it?’

Christie opened her mouth but no sound came out. Fortunately the phone blistered into the silence and she leaped to answer it.

It was Jane from the Summer Street Café, with news that poor Una Maguire had been carted off in an ambulance after a fall.

‘I knew you’d want to know,’ said Jane, ‘and that Dennis might not get round to telling people.’ Which was a kind way of saying dear Dennis would be too flustered to brush his teeth and might need some hand-holding. Christie was good at that: calm in a crisis.

‘I’ll pop a note through their door telling him I’ll drop in on Friday and to phone me if he needs anything before then,’ Christie said and Jane hung up, knowing it was all taken care of now that Christie Devlin knew.

‘Looks like your feeling of gloom was right after all,’ James said as they sat down to their goulash. He’d opened a bottle of lusty red wine to go with the stew, even though it was only midweek, and they stuck pretty much to the wine only at weekends rule.

‘Yes,’ said Christie, thinking of the Maguires and how Dennis would cope with being the carer instead of the cared for. ‘That must have been it, after all.’

But she wasn’t telling the truth. Whatever dark cloud had moved over her head was still there, looming, promising bad things to come.

And James had mentioned ‘that artist fellow’ of Ana’s, Carey Wolensky, who’d turned out to be one of the most famous painters of his generation. When James had carelessly referred to him, Christie had felt a shiver run right through her. She didn’t believe in coincidence. Everything happened for a reason. There were tiny signs of the future everywhere and only the watchful spotted them. First her anxiousness, now this mention of a man she wanted to forget. Christie was scared to think of what it might all mean: her past coming back to haunt her. Why now?

CHAPTER SIX

The next afternoon, Maggie’s suitcases arrived together on the carousel. They looked shabby among some of the classier travellers’ bags from the Galway to Dublin shuttle.

She hauled them off the belt with some difficulty, having murmured, ‘No thanks, I’m fine,’ to the man who’d leaped to offer to help the tall redhead in the trailing pale suede coat.

Her eyes were raw with crying and she kept her head down as she spoke, embarrassed by how she must look. The man probably felt sorry for her; thought she was one of those care in the community patients who rattled because of all the Xanax bottles in their pockets.

Maggie didn’t need anyone feeling sorry for her today. She felt sorry enough for herself.

The first piece of luggage was the heaviest, a wardrobe-on-wheels affair that was fit to burst, only a bright purple strap preventing its internal organs splurging out over the concourse. An orange ‘heavy item’ sticker hung from the handle. The second was a hard candy-pink case that was a dead weight even when empty.

Grey used to joke that it had been cursed by so many baggage people, it had probably developed magical powers itself.

‘If our plane ever goes down, the pink case will be the only survivor, you wait and see,’ he’d laugh.

Fresh misery assailed her at this thought of Grey and the fabulous holidays they had saved up for and shared before they’d bought the flat.

They’d never go away together again. Not when she’d be watching like a jailer every time he tipped a beautiful waitress or glanced at a woman on the beach. Only a fool would trust him again. Maggie was not going to be that fool. Last night she’d packed and said they’d talk later, trying to delay the inevitable argument in case she gave in.

‘Would you like me to sleep on the couch?’ Grey had asked, and she wanted to whisper: no, lie next to me and hold me. Tell me it’ll be all right, it was a mistake, that you’ll make it better.

‘Yes, sleep on the couch,’ she said, finding the strength from somewhere to say it.

We’ll try again, I know you love me, her heart bleated.

But her head had to do the talking. Leaving this way was easier, because if she stopped and thought about actually losing him, about not sharing her life with him, Maggie was afraid she’d relent. And her head told her that staying would destroy her, in the end.

Gulping back a fresh batch of tears, she grabbed Cursed Candy Pink and shoved it on to the luggage trolley behind Wardrobe, ignoring the interested gaze of the man who’d tried to help her. She wished he’d stop looking at her. Honestly, what was wrong with people? Couldn’t a person cry in public?

On top of the trolley, she dumped her handbag, a banana-shaped black leather thing that held everything, and cleverly deposited the most vital bits right at the bottom, thus deterring both purse-snatchers and Maggie from locating her money in shops.

She wheeled her trolley hopefully past the special mirrored section, holding her breath.

On those girls-only holidays to Greece, in the pre-Grey days, the others had always trooped through customs happily clinking contraband bottles of ouzo and Metaxa brandy, while she (the only one who’d actually read the customs bit of paper about only importing 200 fags and giving notice if they’d been loitering near goats) was the one to have to unpack her case in public.

Today, fortunately, the customs people behind their two-way mirrors resisted the impulse to go through Maggie’s blameless luggage.

Then she was out into arrivals, into the spotlight, where hundreds of eager people scrutinised and rejected her as they searched for whichever special person they’d come to meet so they could wave their welcome home placards, wobble their helium balloons and scream ‘hello!!!’

It brought home to Maggie that she had no special person any more. The person for whom she used to be special had cheated on her. God, it hurt.

Trying to look cool, as though she didn’t care, she was thankful when her mobile rang and she could busy herself answering it.

‘We’re home from the hospital,’ said her father happily. ‘Where are you, love? Are you nearly here yet? Will I boil the kettle? Your mother can’t wait to see you.’

Maggie felt the usual dual burst of affection and irritation reserved for conversations with her parents. The plane had only just landed, for heaven’s sake. She’d already given Dad the details and told him to add another fifteen minutes for normal plane delays. Unless Clark Kent was bursting out of his Y-fronts in a telephone box nearby in order to whisk her off home at supersonic speed, she wouldn’t reach Summer Street for another three quarters of an hour at least.

‘Not quite, Dad,’ she said, keeping her tone cheery. It was only because he cared. ‘I’ve just come through arrivals.’

‘Oh, right then. You’ll be here in…’

‘Less than an hour,’ she said. ‘See you then. Bye!’

She stuck the phone back in her jeans pocket and tried to ignore the feeling that the walls were closing in. She was back home. Back with nothing to show for five years away in Galway and the Maguire family clock – always at ‘Where were you? Why didn’t you phone? We were worried!’ – was ticking once again.

Maggie manhandled all her worldly goods towards the door and the taxis. It was too late for the if-onlys but she went through them all the same – if only Grey hadn’t screwed someone else, if only she hadn’t witnessed it, if only he’d realised how much he loved her and pledged undying faithfulness instead of saying he couldn’t help himself. If only she wasn’t so stupid to fall for someone like him in the first place.

That’s what it all came back to: her stupidity. An intelligent woman would have known that Grey, who could have had any woman, would one day stray. An intelligent woman would have got out before this happened. An intelligent woman would have made it calmly clear long beforehand that straying wasn’t an option and that if he did, their relationship was over. For such a woman, Grey would have agreed.

But not for Maggie. For all that he’d said she was special, that he didn’t want a pert blonde, he’d lied to her.

Now all she had to do was work out what to tell her parents. With luck, she’d have some peace on the ride home to adjust and get her story straight. They didn’t need her in tears right now, with her mother in such distress.

‘…So you see, what the politicians don’t realise is that if you have a system with toll roads, it’s the people like myself who are paying for it…’

‘Right, I see.’

The taxi driver’s monologue was only stemmed by having to negotiate the tricky box junction just before St Kevin’s Road. Since picking her up at the airport, he’d been talking at high speed about the price of property, chewing gum on car seats and now toll roads. Maggie hadn’t felt able to interrupt. It would have been rude and in the grand scheme of things, there was no excuse to be rude, was there? Her mother’s training had kicked in as usual.

Maggie was the one who got stuck with bores at parties, charity muggers in the street, and sweet bewildered people who wandered into the library for warmth and who ought to have been thrown out. She was too kind and too polite to say no or ignore people.

‘That’s what I said to that woman politician. I said: that’s my opinion, Missus, and if you don’t like it, don’t get in my cab,’ the taxi driver went on. ‘Was I right to say it?’ As with all the other questions he’d posed on the forty-minute trip, he didn’t pause for a reply. ‘I was right, you see. Nobody stands up to these people. Nobody.’

The taxi turned the corner, driving slowly past the Summer Street Café where people sat outside at the small tables, looking as if they hadn’t a care in the world. Mum and Dad loved the café, loved the buzz of meeting people there. Mum would listen to all the gossip and pass it eagerly on to Maggie, forgetting that she’d lived away for five years and didn’t know all the people they met.

Maggie, who didn’t know all of the people in her Galway apartment block and clearly didn’t know her boyfriend at all, had learned that the wild-eyed Mrs Johnson was off the sauce after failing the breathalyser test one night and losing her licence, that Amber Reid, the teenage girl who lived alone with her mother – lovely woman with a big job but never too busy to bake cakes for the Vincent de Paul fundraisers – was going to art college and would be a big star one day. Christie Devlin said she was a marvellous artist, and Christie would know, wouldn’t she? Look at those lovely paintings Christie had done for Una’s sixtieth. Maggie knew that the carrot cake muffins in the café were now sugar-free; oh, and she knew that Jane and Henry in the café had hired this lovely Chinese waitress.

‘Xu her name is, although we call her Sue, because it’s almost the same. Came all the way from China by herself, brave little thing, and not knowing anybody here. She’d put us to shame,’ Mum had said. ‘Learning English and working at the same time, and not knowing a sinner here. It must be terrible hard to leave your country and start again.’

Maggie loved the way her mother was so interested in people. Maggie used to be like that too, she realised, before she met Grey and became so wrapped up in him that she had no space or time left for anyone else. Yet how could she be totally involved with him and still not see the obvious? Love wasn’t just blind, it was lobotomised.