‘Of course I don’t hate you.’
‘I hate me.’
‘Well, I don’t see how that’s going to help.’ She twists a hank of her hair round and round her index finger. ‘If you look at it one way, you could say it was all the frog’s fault.’
‘That’s not funny.’
‘OK.’
‘It wasn’t the bloody frog’s fault.’
‘All right. Sorry. Bad joke.’
‘Very bad joke. It was my fault. Mine and mine alone.’
‘Well, whatsherface – Gina – was there as well, wasn’t she?’
‘Yes . . . but . . .’
‘But what?’
‘It was all my fault.’
His sister rolls her eyes. ‘I don’t think you can appropriate all the . . .’ She shakes her head, as if trying to order her thoughts. ‘So how long did it go on?’
‘Well, she joined the school at the start of the year, in September, and I spoke to her for the first time in, well, probably October, or was it November? And then I remember at the Christmas concert, which would have been December. Mid to late December—’
Aoife cuts across him with a sigh. ‘How long was the actual affair?’
‘I was trying to tell you. She joined the school in September and at Christmas there was a concert at which all the teachers had to—’
‘Are you being deliberately annoying?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Why are you droning on about Christmas concerts? Just tell me how long you and she were fucking.’
He sits up, outraged. ‘I really don’t think you need to use that—’
‘What?’
He lies down again. ‘It was just the once.’
‘Just the once?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you got caught?’
‘Yes.’
‘That was bad luck.’
‘That’s not the point, Aoife. The point is I did a terrible thing. If you’re married you don’t just go around sleeping with colleagues. You’re supposed to—’
‘Do you still see her?’
He sighs. He covers his face with his hands. ‘She left. The following week. Went back to Australia.’
‘Hmm.’ She grinds out her cigarette and flicks the butt out of the window. ‘You want to know what I think? I think it’s not as bad as you think it is. Of all the shitty things people do to each other, all the awful, dire, cruel things that happen in a marriage, this isn’t one of them. You shouldn’t have slept with her, sure, but it was only the once. You didn’t repeat your mistake. And you didn’t leave. You didn’t abandon your kids. Claire should be glad that she’s got a good one, she should realise—’
‘Well, she’s not. And she’s right. You shouldn’t go around sleeping with other people when you’re—’
‘Jesus, Michael Francis, you’re only human. It happens. People fall for other people. So you got a crush on someone. You had a one-night stand. We’ve all been there. But you realised you’d made a huge mistake. You put Claire first, you put the kids first.’
‘No, I didn’t,’ he moans, his face in his hands, ‘not at all.’
‘Oh, spare us the drama and the guilt. You did. You had a crush, you slipped up, you dealt with it, you got out. End of story.’
‘It wasn’t a crush,’ he mutters.
‘Whatever you want to call it.’
‘I loved her.’
‘No, you didn’t.’
‘I did.’
‘You didn’t.’
‘I did.’
‘Didn’t.’
‘Did.’
‘You can’t tell until you’ve slept with someone at least three times.’
He pulls his hands away from his face. ‘Who says?’
‘Me.’
‘That’s shite.’
She leans forward on the bed. ‘Michael Francis, how many people have you slept with?’
‘None of your business.’
‘Two. Right? Maybe three, at a push?’
‘I’m not telling,’ he says, but starts to laugh.
‘Well, then. You’re going to have to take my word for it. Sex is the great decider. The only decider. And you can never tell on the first time – that’s just the equivalent of a throat-clearing.’
‘How many people have you slept with?’
‘I’m not telling you.’
‘Go on.’
‘No.’
‘Please?’
‘No. You’d be shocked. You’re a different generation from me, remember.’
‘Give us a hint. Is it more than five?’
‘Oh, God.’
‘More? More than ten?’
‘Enough. I’m not playing this game. Tell me about Claire’s new friends.’
‘More than twenty?’
Monica hovers on the landing; she turns her foot one way then the other, observing how the instep of her shoe has acquired a scuff. She’ll have to deal with that today; always better to treat scuffs as soon as they happen. But will her mother have burgundy polish? She doubts it very much.
Beyond the door, in the room that was once hers, then hers and Aoife’s, then just Aoife’s, she can hear her brother and sister talking. More than ten, Michael Francis is demanding, more than twenty, and there is the sound of Aoife laughing, and she wants to say: how can you be laughing at a time like this? And also: more than twenty what, tell me the joke.
Monica feels herself to be once more on the verge of tears. She tips her head back to stop them coming and finds herself looking up at the light fitting. An inverted bowl of swirled glass. Venetian, her mother said it was, but Monica found this hard to believe. It dates from the time their mother had a thing for the junk shops of Holloway Road. One of Gretta’s longer obsessions. Every week she’d come back with something – a picture made entirely of shells, an ashtray in the shape of the Isle of Man, an elephant’s-foot umbrella stand. Gorgeous, she’d call her purchases, an absolute bargain. How those shopkeepers must have rubbed their hands when they saw her coming. Her mother believed anything they told her, caught in the grip of an urge to buy, thinking she could transform her life, her home, with just one more purchase, just one more thing.
She has had just about enough of this day, Monica decides. It’s been a horrible day, the worst day, and its events turn and twist inside her, like a meal she can’t digest: the burying of the cat, the journey here on, first, a bus then a sweltering train, seeing Joe of all people and the baby, and the phone call to Gloucestershire and the search of her father’s desk, and then there was Aoife saying, it wasn’t me, I didn’t tell him. She wishes it were over. She wishes it had never happened. She wishes she could walk out of this house and never come back.
It can’t be more than thirty, Michael Francis is saying, beyond the door, you’re joking me, and Aoife is still laughing and saying, I’m not discussing this.
Monica steps up to the door and pushes it open. The laughter and talk stop, swallowed by silence, just as she had known they would. It is, she reflects, as she surveys her siblings, the downside of being the favourite. You are regarded as one of them, a spy from the parents’ camp; when they are together, you are tolerated but never included.
How to play it? Monica considers her options as she stands there. Michael Francis is sitting up, combing back his hair with his fingers, a chastened look on his face. He knows he shouldn’t have been chatting and laughing on a day like this. Aoife, however, shoots her a baleful look, extracts a cigarette from a pack at her side and places a book on her lap. The stolen library book, Monica sees.
Should she attempt to join in, to ask them, more than thirty what? Or should she produce the cheque stubs, shame them into focusing on the problem in hand?
The latter comes to the fore, without her even having decided upon it.
‘What,’ she demands grandly, ‘are you two doing up here? I’ve been working away downstairs, going through Dad’s things. You might think about helping, rather than just si
tting about chatting, rather than just leaving it all to me, as usual.’
She continues to talk. Michael Francis stands, as if ready to help in whatever way she suggests; it’s always been the easiest thing in the world to make him feel guilty. Fish in a barrel. Aoife, though, rolls her eyes and slumps back against the wall. How can it be, Monica finds herself thinking, that she didn’t tell Joe? The fact of Aoife telling him has sat for so long inside her head, has eaten away at her thoughts for years now. Her sister destroyed her marriage: this has been Monica’s internal drama, her defining injury. How can it be that she didn’t? And if she didn’t, then how did he find out? Did a nurse tell him, at the hospital? Or did he just work it out for himself?
Then there was that time in Michael Francis’s kitchen. She doesn’t like to think about that, can’t think about it, can’t even recall it clearly. It came in the midst of such a confusing, ruptured time. Did she really say those things to her sister? Did she really let them out into the space between them? She can’t have done. And yet she has the distinct feeling that she did. She had told Aoife about what had happened to Gretta after she was born. How can that be?
The sensation of wanting to speak to Aoife surges up in Monica – what exactly she might say is unclear – but there it is, the urge, unfamiliar, unaccountable, to express something, to communicate something to her sister.
Instead, she finds she is saying, ‘Have you seen these?’ to Michael Francis and pressing the cheque stubs into his hands.
Her brother has to grab at them so as not to drop them. ‘No,’ he says. ‘What are they?’
Monica is glaring at him. ‘Cheque stubs,’ she enunciates.
‘Well, I can see that, but what—’
‘He,’ Monica steps with a flourish towards the window and affects to be looking out at the garden, before turning around again, ‘makes a monthly payment of twenty pounds to someone he marks down as “Assumpta”.’
Her brother and her sister stare at her, eyes wide. She feels triumphant but isn’t sure why.
‘It goes back,’ she seizes a cheque stub at random from Michael Francis’s cupped hands, ‘as far as I can find. Every month, on the first, he makes out a cheque for “Assumpta”. Look,’ she brandishes an entry, first at Michael Francis, then at Aoife, ‘twenty pounds, first of the month.’
‘Christ,’ Michael Francis murmurs. He sits down on the bed opposite Aoife. He places the cheque stubs in a little pile next to him and starts flicking through them.
‘Do we know anyone called Assumpta?’ Monica asks.
‘I don’t think so,’ Michael Francis says. ‘Doesn’t ring any bells with me – although wasn’t there a cousin of Mum’s?’
‘Assumpta,’ Aoife mutters in the background. ‘Sounds like a nun, if you ask me.’
They ignore her.
‘Who?’ Monica demands.
‘You remember. In that farmhouse up a valley somewhere in Galway. Full of dogs and rotting machinery. Dogs everywhere.’
‘I remember,’ Monica says.
‘I don’t,’ Aoife says.
‘Wasn’t she Assumpta?’
‘Assumpta? Assumpta,’ Monica intones to herself. ‘Was she Assumpta?’ She closes her eyes, pictures the kitchen of the cousin, the dogs thrashing about their legs, dogs careening up and down the stairs, in and out of the doorways, on and off the furniture. ‘No, she was Ailish. And, anyway, she was about a hundred then – she can’t even still be alive.’
‘Fucking hell,’ Michael Francis, still flicking through the stubs, says, first quietly, then more loudly: ‘Fucking hell! There are loads of them—’
‘I know.’
‘Every month. Do you think this means—’
From the room below, Gretta can be heard to shout, like the ghost in Hamlet, ‘MICHAEL FRANCIS, I WILL NOT HAVE LANGUAGE IN THIS HOUSE!’
‘Well, what else could it mean?’ Monica says.
‘You think he’s gone off with this Assumpta, whoever she is?’ Aoife says. ‘Would he do that?’
‘DO YOU HEAR ME?’ Gretta booms.
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘But it doesn’t look good, does it? YES, WE HEAR YOU.’
The three of them take a breath, look around at each other.
‘We’re going to have to tell her, aren’t we?’ Aoife says.
‘Not yet,’ Monica says quickly.
‘Let’s wait,’ Michael Francis says, ‘until—’
‘Until we have more evidence.’
‘How are we going to get that?’ Aoife asks.
Monica smooths her skirt over her knees. ‘The same way I got these.’ She points at the stubs. ‘We’re going to search the house,’ she says, in her best bossiest sibling voice. She fishes a piece of paper out of her pocket. ‘I’ve made this list.’
‘What list?’
Monica, as he’d expected, ignores his interjection. ‘Now. I’ve already been through the desk. I was going to do the wardrobe next. Michael Francis, perhaps you could take the attic and Aoife can do the metal shelves in the shed.’
He scratches at his day-old stubble. A treat he always allows himself at the start of the summer holidays: not having to shave. ‘In what sense “take the attic”?’
‘It’ll be tricky,’ Monica continues, ‘without Mum seeing. But I’m sure you’ll manage.’
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘What exactly are we looking for?’
‘Everything. Anything,’ Monica says, walking over to the cupboard and pulling it open. ‘Anything at all.’ She extracts a cardboard box from a shelf and lifts out of it a wooden chicken, then a Christmas bauble and an owl made from a pine cone.
Michael looks on. He glances at his watch. Aoife gets off the bed and leaves the room. Outside, on the landing, she listens, while biting at a ragged edge to her fingernail. Stupid idea, she thinks. The stupidest idea she’s ever heard. What the hell good is that going to do? And: Monica needn’t think that everything is just going to be all right now. And: my God, how monumentally tired I am.
She takes a few steps and finds herself in the doorway of her parents’ room. There is a bed, she thinks. How good it would be to be horizontal on it. She lays herself down on it sideways so that her head juts towards the bay windows. Just for a moment. She might sleep. Just for a moment. She inhales the smell of her parents: talcum powder, cough drops, naphthalene, hair oil, shoe leather. She stares at the faded lilac candlewick tufts of their bedspread, enormous, geographic at this proximity, shifting in and out of focus.
Aoife wakes, confused by the lacy curtains, the electric light spilling in from a door in the wrong place. She jerks up, on to her elbows, and is astonished to find herself in her parents’ bedroom, in Gillerton Road.
She feels indescribably terrible. Parched, sickened, light-headed, hot, unbearably so. She kicks her legs, struggling out of whatever she is wrapped in – some kind of itchy covering.
Someone has been in here, while she slept, and tucked a blanket around her. A woollen blanket. Who in their right mind would put a woollen blanket on someone in the middle of a heatwave?
As if in answer to this question, the porcine stutter of her mother’s snoring comes through the wall.
Aoife kicks crossly at the blanket until it lies like a shed skin on the carpet. She finds herself riding waves of nausea, as if the bed is coasting up and down on the sea, up and down, up and down. There is a moment in which she is gripped by the certainty that she is about to throw up, right there, and she is assessing the etiquette of vomiting on your parents’ bed. But the moment passes. She lowers her head to the bed again, to the disturbingly familiar lilac candlewick, which, she finds, summons many Christmas-stocking openings, her disembowelling the lumpy sock on this bed – a net bag of chocolate coins, a yo-yo, a peg doll, an orange in the toe – her father feigning sleep, her mother saying, ooh, and, ah, and, now, look at that.
She has no idea what time it is. From the silvering light beyond the net curtains and the nervy arpeggios of the birds outside, it
must be dawn, but Aoife refuses to believe it. It’s as though she’s only slept for ten minutes. She cannot possibly have slept through the evening and some of the night as well.
The split green hands of her father’s alarm clock tell her it’s twenty past four. Twenty past eleven in New York, where it’s still yesterday. Will Gabe be awake?
Aoife drags herself upright. Another moment of near-vomiting presents itself but, again, it passes. She looks under where she was lying for her shoes. She kicks the blanket aside to see if they are there. She lifts the Christmas-morning bedspread, she crawls around the perimeter of the bed, she looks under both her parents’ bedside tables. Nothing. Aoife sits down on the bed pressing her hands into her skull. Not being able to find her shoes suddenly seems like the worst thing that’s ever happened to her. Where, in God’s name, can they be? They are quite ordinary sandals of red leather but their very absence has imbued them with talismanic value.
She knows, of course, what will have happened. She can see it, as if she’d been awake during its execution. Her mother coming in here with that goddamn blanket will have seen them, picked them up and decided to tidy them away somewhere. It’s a habit of hers that drives Aoife to the very brink of insanity: the over-zealous tidying. Anything left lying around in Gretta’s presence can be tidied away at any moment. Leave your keys out at your peril. Never put down your purse. Don’t for a moment think that the cardigan, left draped over your chair for convenience, will be there when you get back.
Suddenly, magically, she spies them. Pushed almost entirely out of sight under her father’s chest of drawers. Aoife leaps from the bed, grabs at them and straps them on quickly, as if fearing they might be dragged from her grasp at any moment.
She ventures out on to the landing. Her mother’s snores sound from behind Michael Francis’s door. She must have gone to sleep in there. Does that, Aoife wonders, mean that Monica is asleep in their room? She steps nearer the door, presses her ear to its grain. Is she in there? Aoife would like her book, she would like to lay her hands again on Evelyn’s work. But she can’t risk waking her. Monica has never been one who takes kindly to being woken up.