Past Secrets

In the back seat of the taxi, her thoughts miles away, Maggie realised they’d passed the third of Summer Street’s maple trees and suddenly they were slowing down outside her house.

‘Number forty-eight you said?’ the driver asked.

‘Yes, thanks,’ she replied.

She scrabbled in her bag to pay him.

‘Cheer up, gorgeous,’ he said, beaming up at her from the window, ‘it might never happen.’

True to form, Maggie managed a smile.

‘See ya,’ she said. There was no way she was going to tell him it had already happened.

She turned and stared at number 48. Home. It was one of the 1930s houses, white with dark beams painted on the front gable and diamond-paned windows. Part of the house was covered by the bronzed leaves of a Virginia creeper that had science fiction film capabilities to regrow no matter how often it was pruned back to the roots.

Maggie felt the years shrink away. Home made her feel not entirely like a child again but as if still under the influence of all the old childhood problems.

Her father met her at the gate, dressed up in his going-into-the-hospital outfit of navy blazer and tie, but still comfortingly familiar. When he put his arms around her, Maggie snuggled against him like the child she once was, even though he was shorter than her and as skinny as ever.

‘It’s so lovely to have you home,’ he said. ‘Thank you for coming. I know it’s a lot to ask, but thank you.’

‘How could I not come?’ admonished Maggie, pulling away briskly. If she let her reserve drop, she’d sob her heart out. Better to be brusque and not give them a chance to ask after Grey. She’d tell them later, when she – and they – felt stronger.

‘How’s Mum?’

‘Much better today.’ Her father’s face brightened. ‘She got an awful shock, you know. It was all so quick. One minute we were here, the next, she’d passed out with the pain. I thought she was dead, Maggie,’ he added, and he looked so forlorn that Maggie had to take a deep breath to steady herself.

‘Where is she?’

‘Where do you think?’

The kitchen at the back of the house was certainly the heart of the Maguire home. A cosy room which had been decorated at a time when there was no such concept in interior design as using too much pine, it was the room Maggie felt she’d grown up in.

Sitting in an armchair at the table (pine) with her plastered leg up on a kitchen chair (pine), watching the portable television that was perched on the Little House on the Prairie dresser (distressed pine), was Maggie’s mother, Una.

As tall a woman as her daughter, she was just as slender but with faded red hair instead of Maggie’s fiery curls. Their faces were very similar: perfect ovals with other-worldly cobalt-blue eyes and wide mouths that were always on the verge of a smile. But whereas Maggie’s smile was tremulous, anxious, Una’s was the all-encompassing beam of a woman who embraced life. Now Una sat listlessly in the chair, as if breaking her leg had taken the strength out of all her bones. Beside her was the crossword, nearly finished.

‘I’ve left the hard ones for your father,’ Una said, which was the standard and affectionate lie in the Maguire household.

Dennis was no good at crosswords. A champion at the Rubik’s Cube, and deeply sorry when that had gone out of fashion, he was marvellous with gadgets, figures and magazine quizzes where you had to work out which tetrahedron was the odd one out.

But words defied him.

‘What’ll I say?’ he used to beg Maggie when he had to write the only birthday card his wife didn’t write for him.

‘To Una, happy birthday, I love you so much, Dennis,’ was Maggie’s usual suggestion.

It was what she’d have liked written on a card to her. Grey, for all his eloquence, hadn’t been much good at cards either, although Maggie had kept every single one he’d given her.

Mum hugged Maggie tightly, then somehow managed a final squeeze and whispered in her ear: ‘We’re so glad you’re here, Bean.’

Bean or Beanpole was her nickname, so given because she’d been long and skinny as a child.

‘Like a beanpole!’ her cousin Elisabeth used to say joyfully.

Elisabeth, also tall but with Victoria’s Secret model curves instead of Maggie’s racehorse slenderness, was never called anything but Elisabeth.

While Dennis bustled off with Maggie’s suitcases, Una told her daughter that the osteoporosis was advanced.

‘They can’t believe I haven’t broken anything before,’ she said finally. ‘It’s a bit of a miracle, and at my stage, I could end up breaking bones with just a knock against a bookcase.’

Maggie was shocked. ‘Oh, Mum,’ she said. ‘That’s terrible. Dad said it was osteoporosis but he never said it was that bad.’

They heard Dennis coming back.

‘I don’t want him to know everything,’ her mother went on. ‘It’d only worry him and what’s the point of that?’

‘He ought to know, Mum.’

‘Ah, why? It won’t be good for his heart if he’s watching me every moment worrying about me. I’ll be fine.’

Maggie’s father came back into the kitchen.

‘What’ll we have for dinner?’ said Una breezily. ‘I can’t wait for a decent meal. Your poor dad is doing his best but he can only do soup and rolls. How about a roast? I fancy beef.’

‘Roast beef? Is there beef in the fridge?’ Maggie asked.

Her mother looked blank. ‘I don’t know, love. I can’t get near the fridge. But look. Or you could go to the shops. The car’s there.’

At that instant, Maggie began to feel panicky. Everything was more serious than she’d thought.

Her father wasn’t exactly one of life’s copers. He’d never been able to cook, and viewed both the iron and washing machine as arcane specimens, beyond his ability. Her mother had done everything in the Maguire household.

And yet here she was, expecting Maggie, who had just arrived, to know what was in the fridge, not to mention to feel confident hopping into a car she had never driven before and going to the supermarket. Maggie had passed her driving test when she was a teenager but she’d never owned a car and could barely remember the difference between all the pedals.

Had breaking her leg broken something else in her mother too?

‘Mum,’ Maggie said, feeling horrendously guilty at not being able to do this simple thing in a family crisis, ‘I can’t drive. You know I can’t.’

She looked into the fridge. There were several big chill-cabinet cartons of soup, half a pack of butter and eggs. Nothing else. ‘We shop from day to day,’ her father added helpfully. ‘I’ll stay with your mother.’

Maggie shut the fridge. She was in charge. She wondered how this had happened. She was not qualified for this. Her mother was the one who was in charge.

‘You’ll be able to go, won’t you?’ Una’s voice quavered slightly.

With frightening clarity, Maggie saw that their roles had swapped. One cracked femur and she was the parent.

She had no option.

‘I’ll do a shop right now,’ she said firmly. ‘The mini supermarket will have everything we need. I’ll walk.’

Speedi Shop on Jasmine Row had been open from dawn to dusk since Maggie had been in infant school. More expensive than the proper supermarket a mile away, it was always busy but there were never any long queues at the checkouts, mainly because Gretchen, the owner, didn’t encourage chitchat. She was, however, an interrogator of Lubyanka standards and Maggie had always felt that Gretchen was terrifying. She didn’t smile much and when she did, her forehead and face remained static, as if filled with Botox, although it was hard to imagine Gretchen spending the money on such a thing. Beauty, a bit like politeness, was a waste of time in Gretchen’s book.

She was there behind the counter when Maggie arrived at the checkout, her basket spilling over with the makings of a roast dinner, shop-bought apple pie and ice cream for pudding.

‘Maggie Maguire, a sight for sore eyes. Long time no see. I thought you were living in married bliss in Galway.’

Maggie translated this bit of faux politeness in her head: fancy seeing you here, and is it true you’re not married at all but still shacking up with some fellow who clearly won’t marry you?

‘Home for a few days,’ said Maggie, aiming for the happily unconcerned approach. Had Gretchen X-ray vision? Could she see that Maggie’s man had cheated on her? It wouldn’t surprise her if the answer was yes. ‘And I’m not married, actually, I’ve a long-term partner.’

Translation: I am a fulfilled woman who has made interesting life choices and wouldn’t be bothered getting married when I could live the free life of a modern feminist unshackled by silly old wedding vows.

‘Right.’ Gretchen nodded appraisingly and began to scan Maggie’s groceries. ‘You remember my Lorraine, don’t you? You were in the same year in school. Lorraine’s living in Nice, married to this gorgeous French pilot, Jacques, with three kids and a live-in nanny. You should see their house: Jacuzzi, pool, bidet in every en suite, the lot.’ I don’t buy your story, said her eyes. Long-term partner, my backside. Now Lorraine, she’s a success story. She has it all: fabulous husband, children, everything money can buy. She’s not home with her tail between her legs at the age of thirty with no ring and no kids either.

‘How wonderful for her,’ Maggie said, adding a large bar of chocolate to the basket to comfort herself. ‘Lorraine always knew what she wanted, didn’t she?’ She snatched back her shopping and shoved it into a bag. Lorraine was a hard-nosed little madam and she was always keen on self-improvement without doing any actual work. Like stealing other people’s homework or hanging round with the class bullies.

‘Bye, Gretchen, have to rush.’

On her way home with the grocery bags weighing her down, Maggie passed the time by trying to remember who lived in the various houses on Summer Street. Many of them were still owned by the people who’d lived there when she was a child, like the Ryans, who bred Burmese cats and never minded the neighbourhood children coming in to coo over the latest batch of apricot-coloured kittens. Or sweet Mrs Sirhan, who’d looked eighty when Maggie had been small, and now must be unbelievably old, but still went for her constitutional every day, up the street into the café for a cup of Earl Grey with lemon.

There was a sign on the park gate: ‘Save Our Park’, written in shaky capitals on a bit of cardboard, and Maggie idly wondered what the park had to be saved from. But the sign-writer hadn’t thought to add that bit of information. Rampaging aliens, perhaps? Or people who didn’t scoop the dog poop?

The old railway pavilion was her favourite part of the park: she’d played in it many times during her childhood and it was easy to imagine it as a train station, with ladies in long dresses sobbing into their reticules as handsome men left them behind, sad stories behind every parting. There hadn’t been a train that way for many years.

The train tracks were long gone, too. Maybe that was the lesson she needed to learn: nobody cared about the past. Her misery over Grey would mean nothing in a hundred years.

It was ten before Maggie managed to escape to bed and to her private misery. She’d left her mobile phone unanswered all day and when she finally checked there were seven where are you? texts from Shona, along with two missed calls and one I am so sorry, please answer your phone text from Grey.

Yeah, right, Maggie thought furiously, erasing it. One lousy text and a couple of phone calls. What an effort that must have been. Feeling angry with Grey was easier than giving in to feeling hopeless and alone. If she let go of the anger, she’d collapse under the weight of the loneliness.

She unwrapped the giant bar of milk chocolate she’d bought and dialled the only person in the world, apart from Shona, who might possibly understand: her cousin Elisabeth. Despite coming up with the nickname Bean, Elisabeth was one of Maggie’s favourite people.

Elisabeth was tall, athletic, had been captain of the netball team and was wildly popular at her school, a fact that had often made Maggie wish they’d gone to the same one. She might have protected Maggie. She was now a booker in one of Seattle’s top model agencies and incredibly, despite all these comparative riches, she was a nice person.

It was eight hours earlier in Seattle and Elisabeth was on her lunch break, sitting at her desk with her mouth full of nuts because she was still doing the low-carb thing.

‘How are you doing?’ asked Elisabeth in muffled tones.

‘Oh, you know, fine. You heard about Mum’s accident?’

‘Yes, Dad told me.’ Her father and Maggie’s were brothers. ‘You don’t sound OK,’ she added suspiciously.

Elisabeth picked up tones of voice like nobody else. Certainly nobody else in the Maguire family, who all had the intuition of celery. ‘What’s up?’

‘I told you.’

‘I mean what else?’

‘You can hear something else in my voice?’

‘I spend all my life on the phone to young models in foreign countries asking them how they are, did anybody hit on them and are they eating enough/drinking too much/taking coke/ screwing the wrong people/screwing anybody. So yes, I can hear it in your voice,’ insisted Elisabeth.

‘I caught Grey in bed with another woman.’

Silence.

‘Fuck.’

‘I didn’t know you were allowed to say that outside Ireland any more,’ Maggie remarked, in an attempt at levity. ‘Everyone on your side of the Atlantic nearly passes out when they hear it, when here, it’s a cross between an adjective and an adverb, the sort of word we can’t do without.’

‘Desperate situations need desperate words,’ said Elisabeth, then said ‘fuck’ again followed by, ‘Fucking bastard.’

‘My sentiments exactly.’

‘Is he still alive?’

‘He has all his teeth, yes,’ Maggie said.

‘And they’re not on a chain around his neck?’

Maggie laughed and it was a proper laugh for the first time all day. Elisabeth was one of those people with the knack of making the unbearable slightly more bearable. With her listening, Maggie didn’t feel like the only person on the planet to have been hurt like this before.

‘No, they’re still in his mouth. I did think about hitting him but he was attached to this blonde fourteen-year-old at the time…’

‘A fourteen-year-old!’ shrieked Elisabeth.

‘Metaphorically speaking,’ Maggie interrupted. ‘She’s probably twenty or twenty-one, actually. Gorgeous, from the angle I was looking from. Which was really a bummer. I mean, if she was ugly and wrinkly, I might manage to cope, but being cheated on with a possible centrefold doesn’t do much for your self-confidence.’

‘Oh, Maggie,’ said Elisabeth and there was love and pity in her voice. She’d long since given up trying to boost Maggie’s self-esteem, although having a beautiful cousin with a skewed vision of her gorgeousness was perfect training for working with stunning size six models who thought they were too fat and faced rejection every day. ‘I wish I was there to give you a hug. What did you do?’

‘Dad phoned about Mum, so I left to come here. Ran away, in other words, which is what I’m good at.’

‘You haven’t told them.’

‘No. Couldn’t face it.’

Maggie heard muffled noises at Elisabeth’s end.

‘Sorry, I’ve got to go. Call me tomorrow?’

‘Sure.’

Maggie looked at her suitcases waiting patiently to be unpacked. It was hard to feel enthusiastic about moving back into her childhood bedroom. All she needed now was one of those big doll’s heads that you put eye make-up on, her old Silver Brumby books, and she’d be eleven again.

She’d read so much as a child, losing herself in the world of books because the outside world was so cruel. And yet she hadn’t learned as much as she’d thought she had: books taught you that it would work out right in the end. They never envisaged the possibility that the prince would betray you. They never pointed out that if you gave a man such ferocious power over your heart, he could destroy you in an instant.

She finished her bar of chocolate slowly.

If everything had been different, she’d have been at home now in her own flat with Grey.

Without closing her eyes, she could imagine herself there: sitting on their bed, talking about their day, all the little things that seemed mundane at the time and became painfully intimate and important when you could no longer share them. Like waking up in the night and feeling Grey’s body, warm and strong beside her in the bed. Like leaning past him at the bathroom sink to get to the toothpaste.

Like hanging his T-shirts on the radiators to dry. These things made up their life together. Now it was all gone. She felt betrayed, broken and utterly hollow inside.

She was back in her childhood bed with nothing to show for it.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Mrs Devlin’s art classes were different from any other lesson in the school, agreed all the girls in the sixth year. For a start, Mrs Devlin herself was not exactly your average teacher, although she was older than many of the others. Even her clothes bypassed normal teacher gear, whether she wore one of her long honey suede skirts and boots with a low-slung belt around her hips, or dressed down in Gap jeans and a man’s shirt tied in a knot around the waist. Compared to Mrs Hipson, headmistress and lover of greige twinsets and pearlised lipstick, Mrs Devlin was at the cutting edge of bohemian chic.

Most of all, the girls agreed, it was her attitude that made her different. The other teachers seemed united in their plan to improve the students whether they wanted to be improved or not. But Mrs Devlin, without ever exactly saying so, seemed to believe that people improved themselves at their own rate.

So on May the 1st, with just weeks to go to the state exams and with the whole teaching body in a state of panic, Mrs Devlin’s assignment to her sixth-year class was to ‘forget about the exams for a moment and paint your vision of Maia, the ancient pagan goddess who gave her name to May and who was a goddess of both spring and fertility’.

‘As today’s the first of May, it’s the perfect day for it.’

She stopped short of pointing out that the exam results probably wouldn’t matter in a millennium. Not the way to win friends and influence people in a school. ‘You’ve all been working so hard with your history of art,’ Christie added as she perched on the corner of the desk at the top of the class. She rarely sat down at the desk during art practicals, preferring to walk around and talk to her students: a murmured bit of praise here, a smile there. ‘I thought it might be nice to spend one hour of the day enjoying yourselves, reminding yourselves that art is about creativity and forgetting about studying.’

The class, who’d come from double English where they were re-butchering The Catcher in the Rye for exam revision, nodded wearily.

The most art they got to do these days involved colouring in their exam revision timetables with highlighter pens – generally a lot more fun than the revision itself.

‘Maia is the oldest and most beautiful of the seven stars called the Seven Sisters, or the Pleiades,’ Christie continued. ‘The Pleiades are part of the constellation of Taurus, which is ruled over by Venus, for those of you interested in astrology. Maia is around five times larger than our sun.’

It was such a sunny morning that flecks of dust could be seen floating on shafts of light filtering in from the second-floor windows. St Ursula’s was an old building, with decrepit sash windows and huge sills perfect for sitting on between classes and blowing forbidden cigarette smoke out into the netball court below.

‘In art, spring is represented, as you know, by the sense of sensuality and passion,’ Christie went on. ‘Can anyone remember any artists who painted spring in such a way?’

‘Botticelli,’ said Amber Reid.

Christie nodded and wondered again what Amber had been getting up to on Wednesday. The way she’d been dressed and the joy in her step made Christie damn sure that Amber had been on her way to some illicit activity.

‘Yes, Amber, Botticelli is a good example. Remember, girls, artists didn’t have television to give them ideas, or films. They looked at their world for inspiration and got it from nature. Keep that in mind during the exam, they were influenced by their times. By war, poverty, nature, religion. As we discussed in art history last week, religion is important as an influence on artists. Remember the puritanical Dutch schools with their hidden messages.

‘Today’s the pagan festival of Beltane, which is why May is called Bealtaine in Irish, and it’s a celebration of spring, warmer days, blossoming nature and blossoming of people too. Of course, the Church wasn’t too keen on pagan festivals, but they’re part of our history too, so it’s interesting to know about them. You paint, I’m here if you need me.’

The class were silent as they considered painting a fertility goddess. At St Ursula’s in general, sexuality was given a wide berth by the teaching staff. Even in sex education classes, the concept of passion was diluted, with scientific words like ‘zygote’ giving students the impression that it was a miracle the human race had gone on for so long considering how boring procreation sounded.

‘Is it true that Titian only painted women he’d gone to bed with?’ asked Amber suddenly, her eyes glittering.

Christie had a sudden flash of knowledge: a picture of Amber and a dark, moodily dangerous young man came into her mind, entwined on a childhood bed doing grown-up things. Christie knew exactly what Amber had been up to the day before. She blazed with burgeoning sexuality. To embody Maia, Amber just needed to paint a self-portrait.

Christie felt a rush of pity for poor old Faye who probably hadn’t a clue that her teenage daughter had just taken one of the giant steps into womanhood. Having sons was definitely easier than daughters, she thought gladly. Sons were rarely left holding the baby.

‘So I believe,’ said Christie carefully. ‘Paint, Amber,’ she whispered, ‘don’t talk.’

‘I swear Mrs Devlin’d bring in nude life models if she was let,’ groaned Niamh to Amber. Niamh was struggling with art in general and was sorry she hadn’t done home economics instead. How was she going to embody a fertility goddess? Couldn’t they please do a still life instead – a couple of bananas or a nice simple apple?

‘I wish she did bring in nude models,’ said Amber, glaring at Niamh. ‘It’s impossible to learn to draw people properly with their clothes on.’ At least in art college, she’d be able to study line drawing properly with nude models…

But she wasn’t going, was she? She was going to New York with Karl, before the exams, and she had to tell her mother all this, and soon.

‘It’s not as if you haven’t seen a man with no clothes on, Niamh,’ added the girl on the other side of Amber with a wicked grin. ‘You’ve been going out with Jonnie for a year now, don’t tell me he’s kept his boxers on all this time.’

It was Niamh’s turn to grin. ‘He’s worth drawing, all right. And he’s got a bigger you-know-what than all those Michelangelo statues!’

The back of the class dissolved into filthy giggles, but were sure Christie, who was walking sedately around the art room, couldn’t have heard the remark.

Silvery-white hair was a fabulous disguise, Christie thought as she managed not to smile. Schoolgirls appeared to think that white-haired equalled deaf, which meant she overheard all manner of things she mightn’t have heard otherwise. These girls probably would have been stunned to think that their esteemed art teacher had made the same jokes once, a lifetime ago, when she was as young and when men’s heads turned to look at her.

Young people always imagined that sex and passion had been invented by them. Christie fingered the gold and jasper scarab necklace that James had once bought for her in a market in Cairo, and smiled.