‘Hadn’t you? I’m sure you did, Frank. After all you haven’t been able to get any joy out of the adoption societies, Carlo tells me.’
‘My father has no right to speak of such things,’ Renata said, her face a dark red.
‘No, perhaps not. But he does of course. Anyway, it was to make these matters clear that I asked you here, and to tell you that I will be going North, soon, much sooner than anyone expected. I’ve sold my house here, and bought a really lovely old Georgian farmhouse in need of repair, but magnificently proportioned, small and beautiful, and a perfect place for a child to grow up. If he or she is only going to have me around, then the poor love had better have a pony and somewhere to play as well!’ Her smile was all-embracing.
Renata took a deep breath. ‘And will the child’s father be involved at all?’
‘Not at all. The father is someone I met casually on a packaging conference, a ship that passed in the night.’
Renata’s hand flew to her mouth in an involuntary gesture.
‘Is that so shocking?’ Joy asked. ‘I wanted to have a child, he was as good a person as anyone else.’
‘I know, I mean it was just that I thought …’ Her voice trailed away and she looked at Frank, whose face was stony.
‘What did you just think, Renata?’ Joy was like honey now.
‘I know this is silly.’ Renata looked from one to the other. ‘I suppose I was afraid that the child might have been … Frank’s child. And that this is why you even contemplated offering it to us … please, I don’t know what I am doing talking like this … please.’ There were tears in her eyes.
Frank was frozen, he still didn’t know which way Joy would jump. He couldn’t put out his hand to comfort his wife.
Joy spoke deliberately and slowly: ‘Oh, Renata, surely you couldn’t have thought that. Frank and I? We’re too alike to be a number, to be the Grand Affair of the century. Oh no. And anyway. Frank a father, that’s not very likely, that wouldn’t have been on the cards, would it?’
‘What … what do you mean …?’
‘Oh, Carlo told me about his problems … I’m afraid your father is very indiscreet sometimes, but only when he knows it won’t go further … Please don’t say back to him that I ever mentioned it. But he was always so sad that Frank did not give him the grandson …’
Frank spoke for the first time for a long while. He thought he had managed to take the shake out of his voice.
‘And your child? Shall you tell him it was a one-night stand in a hotel room?’
‘No, no, of course not, something much more romantic and sad. An untraceable wonderful person, long dead. A poet maybe. Something sad and beautiful.’
Somehow they finished the meal, somehow they found other things to talk about. The hurt went a little from Renata’s eyes, and the lines of tension from Frank’s face. And the serenity and bloom of pregnancy settled ever more on Joy East. She paid the bill confidently with her credit card and when Renata went to the Ladies’ she sat and looked calmly across the table at Frank.
‘Well, you won,’ he said.
‘No, you won.’
‘How did I win, tell me? You frightened me to death and now you’re denying me any part in the child’s life. How is that winning?’
‘You got what you wanted. You got me out.’
‘You’re not starting that again?’
‘I don’t need to. I investigated the market-research bureau. They told me you hired them, they even had the date, it was just after we had lunch in this restaurant. As usual it turned out the way you wanted it to. I’m out of your hair. The coast is clear for the next project. I do wonder who she’ll be. But I’ll never know. Any more than you’ll know what it’s like to play with a two-year-old, your two-year-old. Because you’re not capable of fathering one. That’s both your alibi and my excuse for cutting you out.’
‘You never told me why. Why all this hate?’
‘It’s not hate, it’s determination. And why? I suppose because you have cold, cold eyes, Frank. I didn’t see that until lately.’
Renata was coming back across the room. They stood up, it was time to go.
‘You’ll be back for the meetings … and everything?’ Frank said.
‘Not all of them, I think if this operation is to be a success, we mustn’t let anyone involved think that we keep running to London all the time. Major decisions should be made in the place itself. Otherwise they’ll just think they’re a little outpost instead of important in their own terms.’
She was right of course, as she had been so often.
He held the door of the taxi open for her. She said she was too big to fit into her little sports car any more.
For a brief moment their eyes met.
‘We both won,’ she said softly. ‘You could put it like that.’
‘Or neither of us won,’ he said sadly. ‘That’s another way of putting it.’
And he put his arm around his wife’s shoulder as they went to where the Rover was parked.
Nothing would ever be the same between them after tonight. But the world had only cracked a little for them, it hadn’t blown apart as it might have. And in a way that was winning.
8
DEIRDRE
THE ARTICLE SAID that anyone could be truly beautiful if they would give twenty minutes a day. Deirdre settled herself with a happy little wriggle into her chair and pulled the packet of biscuits towards her. Of course she could give twenty minutes a day. Who couldn’t? Lord, weren’t we all up and awake for sixteen hours for heaven’s sake? Twenty minutes was nothing.
She repeated the words Truly Beautiful. She could hear them being said about her when the day came. Doesn’t Deirdre look truly beautiful? Who would think she was married for twenty-five years? Imagine that she’s the mother of three grown children.
She sighed with pleasure and began to read. Let’s see, what would she have to do? It would be her own little secret, investing this amount of time. The reward would be sensational.
First it said you must assess yourself and list your good points and weak areas. Deirdre took the little silver pen with a tassel on it from her handbag. This was fun, great fun. What a pity she had to do it on her own. Her eldest daughter Anna would say that she was fine as she was, no need to list figure flaws and dry patches in her skin. Her second daughter Helen would say it was ludicrous to be a victim and to think that looks were important, with all the suffering in the world women couldn’t afford to take time analysing their blemishes and deciding whether their eyes were deep-set or too close together.
Her son Brendan, far away from her now, living in Ireland on a remote hillside in his father’s part of the country … What would Brendan say? She found it almost impossible to imagine how Brendan would react any more. She had wept night after night when he had first left home with few explanations and less apologies. Only when he had asked her straight out on the telephone … When he had cut across her tears to ask, ‘If you had your choice, if you had the power to choose my life what would you have me do that would be so good and so important for us all?’ she hadn’t been able to answer him. Because to say that she wished things were different was no answer. You couldn’t wish a circle to be square or black to be white.
But according to this beauty article there were things you could wish to be different and make them different. Like the shape of your face, a little judicious use of the blusher and the lightener could do wonders. Deirdre looked at the diagrams happily, she would learn to do it right. There was nothing worse than people who attempted it and got it wrong, they looked like Coco the Clown.
That was something that she could imagine Maureen Barry saying in the old days. She and Maureen used to have so much fun at one time. Deirdre’s mother had been bosom pals with Mrs Barry and so the girls had carte blanche to do anything they liked as long as they were with each other. Deirdre thought back on those holidays in Salthill years ago. She had called the house in Rosemary Drive ‘Salthill’ as a
reminder, but she saw the name on the gate so often that it didn’t really suggest the sea and sunshine and total freedom of their teens.
Maureen had been so entertaining those times, there was nothing that they felt they couldn’t tell each other. Not until the summer they came to London, the summer that everything changed for both of them.
Deirdre wondered about the girls they had been to university with in Dublin. Did they often wonder what had happened to blonde Deirdre O’Hagan? They would all know of course that she married young, maybe she would even put an announcement of her silver wedding in the Irish Times. Rub their noses in it, the uppity ones who had gone on to be barristers or to marry barristers. The types who thought that Dublin was the centre of the universe and had only heard of Harrod’s as a place to shop and Chelsea as a place to live. Pinner? They used to say Pinner? as if it was Kiltimagh or somewhere like that. Oh, in north London. I see. It was their ignorance that they weren’t travelled. But still she would put in an announcement. Or maybe it was something that the children should do … a little message wishing them well on the twenty-fifth anniversary. She would check the papers and see how people did things these days.
What a pity there wasn’t still that closeness with Maureen Barry. If only the years could be rolled back, she could pick up the phone and ask her. Straight out. And talk to her too about face shaping, and how to shadow the jawline. But she would never ask Maureen anything like that these days. Things had changed completely as the years went by.
There were no friends around here who could share the fun of all this self-improvement. No indeed, her neighbours would think it frivolous and silly. A lot of the women went out to work, they either knew such things anyway or else they hadn’t time for it. Anyway Deirdre would never dream of letting them into her business, letting them know that this was a big thing in her life, that it was her one chance to prove that a quarter of a century had added up to something. Deirdre intended to impress her neighbours rather than let them share in the fun. They weren’t really important, not like people back in Dublin, but still it was good to let them see that the Doyles were people of importance, of worth.
What would Desmond say if he saw her studying this article so intently? Would he say something flowery like that she was Truly Beautiful already? Or might he just say that’s nice in the curious flat way he often said things were nice without engaging in them at all? Or might he sit down and say to her that there was really no need for all this fuss and preparation. Desmond often told her not to fuss. She hated that, she didn’t fuss, she just saw to it that things were done right. If somebody hadn’t lit a fire under Desmond all these years where would they be now she would like to know?
Deirdre would not share her beauty secrets with her husband. Long long ago in that strange summer when it all began, Desmond would lie on a narrow bed and admire her as she brushed her long fair curls, he would say that he never knew that peaches and cream was anything except a line in a song until he saw Deirdre’s lovely face. He would reach over for her and ask if he could help her rub more of that nice cold cream in, maybe down her throat a little, maybe around her neck and arms. Maybe … maybe. It was so hard to remember Desmond being like that. But the article in the magazine said that she could recapture all that fresh glow, it was only a matter of proper skin care.
Deirdre would follow every single step, all those upward and circular movements when massaging in the throat cream, all that avoiding the delicate tissue around the eyes. She was going to look right on this day if it killed her. She was going to show them that they had been wrong to pity her twenty-five years ago when she had married Desmond Doyle, a counter hand in a grocery shop, a boy from a poor family in the back of beyond in Mayo. A family that nobody had ever heard of.
This day would be her silvery revenge.
They had all said yes, every single person who had been expected to come. There were some of course who had been asked but knew that they were not meant to come. Like Desmond’s odd brother Vincent, the man who never left his mountains and his sheep in that lonely place where Brendan had chosen to spend his life. There had been a message from her son that his uncle very much regretted but it was a bad time to get away. That was the way it should have been done. Deirdre had nodded, pleased at the correct response.
And of course the Palazzos who ran the huge company where Desmond had worked for so long. Unfortunately they couldn’t come, a sweet letter from Carlo and Maria, signed personally, wishing them all kinds of happiness and full of regrets that it would coincide with their annual visit to Italy. There would be a gift and flowers. But it was right that they didn’t come. They were too high up, they would cramp everyone else’s style. And Deirdre’s mother who felt able to talk to everyone might discuss with them too closely Desmond’s career in the company. She might discover that Desmond had never risen high and had at one stage been let go. This would be at odds with the glowing picture Deirdre always painted.
Frank Quigley and his wife Renata Palazzo said they would love to come. Deirdre thought grimly that Frank, for all his vast success and his unfair advancement up the ladder even before he married the heiress to the Palazzo fortunes, was still a good man to have at a function. He always seemed to know the right thing to say, and said it. She remembered back to their wedding day, Frank had been the best man then, he had been well able to handle anything that had turned up. Including Deirdre’s mother and father, with their faces like early Christian martyrs throughout the ceremony and the so-called festivities.
And Father Hurley was coming, he said it would be a marvellous chance to visit a couple whose marriage has worked out so well. Deirdre knew she could rely on kind Father Hurley to say the right thing all evening.
And of course the Irish contingent would arrive. The date had been long fixed in their minds. There had been a possibility that her brother Gerard might not be able to make it but Deirdre had telephoned with such surprise and hurt and bewilderment that somehow his plans had changed. She had told him straight out on the telephone that there was no point in having a silver wedding if the family couldn’t be there.
‘Will Desmond’s family be there?’ Gerard had asked.
‘That’s not the point,’ Deirdre had said.
Mother was coming of course, and Barbara, they were going to make a long weekend out of it all, come on the Thursday, do a few shows, take in a lot of shopping. Barbara’s husband Jack would combine it with a business trip of course. That’s what he was always able to do.
And when they arrived they would have drinks on the lawn in Rosemary Drive in the late afternoon. Then they would all go to a special Mass where the priest would refer to blessings of the sacrament of matrimony in general and specific reference to Desmond and Deirdre in particular. Father Hurley would be called on as the priest who married them to say a few words … Then after photographs outside the church and everything they would gather back at Rosemary Drive, and champagne would be opened.
There had been no champagne back in 1960 but Deirdre would not let her brow furrow about that. If she were to be truly beautiful she must keep worry lines away from her face.
She told herself that there really was no need to have worry lines. Everything would go perfectly.
And even if … no, no, smooth out the temples, don’t screw up the eyes.
The beauty plan had suggested you do a Countdown and a Chart. Nothing pleased Deirdre more, she loved making out plans and schedules like this. Anyway she already had her own Countdown to the silver wedding in terms of things to be organized.
Desmond had shaken his head sadly, but men didn’t understand the way things were done. Or maybe, Deirdre thought crossly, some men did, and those were the ones who got on. Men like Desmond who had never risen in Palazzo, who were leaving and going into partnership in a corner shop. Those men didn’t understand.
And because Deirdre was so plugged into her countdown, she knew she had exactly 110 days to go when the telephone rang and it was her mother at
the other end of the line.
Mother rang only every second weekend, on Sunday evenings. Deirdre had instituted that practice years ago, they rang each other on alternate Sundays. Sometimes she felt that Mother had little to say, but that couldn’t be possible. Mother wasn’t good at writing letters so these conversations were Deirdre’s lifeline. She remembered everything that was said, and even kept a little spiral notebook by the phone to jot down names of Mother’s bridge friends, or of the party that Barbara and Jack had been to, or the concert that Gerard had taken Mother to. Sometimes Mrs O’Hagan would exclaim that Deirdre had the most extraordinary memory for little things. But Deirdre thought it was only natural that you should want to recall matters of moment in your family’s life. She was always mildly put out that Mother hardly ever remembered any of her friends, and never inquired about Palazzo or about any of the outings that Deirdre had described.
It was unexpected to hear from Mother in the middle of the week, in the middle of the day.
‘Is anything wrong?’ Deirdre said at once.
‘No, Deirdre, Lord above you sound just like your grandmother.’ Kevin’s mother always began every greeting by asking was anything wrong.
‘I meant it’s not your usual time to ring.’
Mother softened: ‘No, I know, I know. But I’m in London and I thought I’d try and see could I catch you at home.’
‘You’re in London!’ Deirdre cried, her hand flying to her throat. She looked around the living room, untidy and covered with Desmond’s papers, plans and projections, notes that he had been discussing with the Patels, the family who ran the shop that he insisted was far more his life’s dream than the great Palazzo company. Deirdre herself was dressed in a faded pinny, the place was a mess. She looked out the window fearfully as if her mother were about to come straight in the door.
‘Yes, I just got in from the airport. The Underground is marvellous isn’t it? Just whizzes you in, door to door almost.’
‘What are you doing in London?’ Deirdre’s voice was almost a whisper. Had Mother come three months too early for the silver wedding, was there a crisis?