‘Ah, but I can’t make excuses about civil bills and statements of claim,’ she said. ‘You can invent all the tomatoes and razor blades in the world.’
‘So we’ll have to meet on neutral ground,’ he suggested.
They met two days later at the church when they both attended the funeral of Mrs Miriam Murphy.
It was pneumonia, Dr Jims Blake had said. Brought on by exposure, someone else had said, Mrs Murphy had taken to sleeping out on the rockery of their garden. It was a sure fact that money and position didn’t bring you happiness.
Richard Hayes looked at the small wiry Leo as she walked down the church supporting her father. Two strange men, the brothers from abroad, had come for the funeral. They looked military, they knew hardly anyone.
There was a gathering in Ryan’s Hotel. Young Nessa had done up one of the downstairs rooms as a special function room. It was exactly what was needed for this occasion. Coffee and sandwiches and some drinks. Those who wished to adjourn to the bar could do so. It had never been done before in Shancarrig; you either went back to someone’s house or you went to the pub. This was a new respectability.
‘Very clever of you to have thought this up, Nessa,’ he said admiringly. Genuinely so.
‘Leo is my friend. It’s not easy for her to have people at the house.’ Nessa hadn’t time to talk to him – these days she was great with young Niall, and already the boy was beginning to look the better for it. His hair was smarter, he had got a new jacket. Somehow he even seemed to walk taller.
Gloria and Mike Darcy were in the gathering though somehow Richard wondered had they been invited in the strict sense of the word.
As people moved around offering sympathy and trying to place Harry and James who had long left Shancarrig, Gloria found herself next to Richard.
‘So now we’re on neutral ground,’ she said.
‘Yes, but very crowded neutral ground,’ he said, shaking his head in exaggerated sorrow.
‘Have you any suggestions for somewhere that’s not crowded?’ She couldn’t have been more direct. Had she asked him to make love to her she could not have said it more clearly.
‘Well, since your place, my place and this hotel are out of the question, let’s think of somewhere that might be deserted at this moment.’ He wasn’t serious. There was nowhere they could go in Shancarrig, literally nowhere.
‘There’s The Glen,’ she said. She saw the look of revulsion on his face. They were sympathising over the death of the woman who had lived all her life in The Glen; Gloria could not possibly be considering going there to use the empty house. ‘Not the house, the gate lodge,’ she said.
‘How would we get in?’ Already he had bypassed any moral objections to a place in the grounds. That was different.
‘The back window is open, I checked.’
‘Twenty minutes?’ he asked. It would take him ten to say his goodbyes, two to go back to his room for condoms.
‘Fifteen,’ she said, and again she ran her tongue along her lower lip. His goodbyes were courteous and very swift.
There was a crotchety old farmer who lived out that direction. If he was asked he could say he got a message to visit him but then he had turned out not to be there. But why was he taking these kind of precautions? No one would ask him. Nobody would dream he was about to do what he was about to do.
She was there before him, lying on a divan covered with a rug. The place smelled musty but not of damp.
‘Did you bring anything?’
‘Yes, that’s what delayed me. I had to go back to my room for them. I don’t carry them always just in case,’ he laughed, patting his pocket.
‘Now don’t be so unromantic. I meant champagne, something like that.’
‘No, I’m afraid not.’ He looked crestfallen.
‘Never mind, I did.’ Her white teeth flashed as she bit the foil from the top of the bottle, there were cups on the dresser. They laughed as they drank it too quickly so that the fizzy liquid went up their noses. And they kissed.
‘Did you go back to the shop for this?’ He marvelled at her speed.
‘No. I had it with me in my big shoulder bag.’ She laughed at her own wickedness and the confidence that it would have needed.
‘Let me take off these dark respectable clothes. They don’t suit you,’ he said.
‘Well, it was a funeral. I couldn’t wear my red skirt but …’ She was wearing a red petticoat, trimmed with white lace, she wore no brassiere, just a gold chain around her throat. She looked so abandoned and wild as she lay there laughing up at him he could scarcely bear the moments of waiting.
‘I’ve longed for you, Richard Hayes,’ she said. And he sank into her as if he had known her all his life.
After that it was always urgent and never easy. If only the Murphys lived a more regular life, Richard groaned to himself. If he could know they would stay in the big house, or stay out of it, then the gate lodge would have been the ideal place for his meetings with Gloria. But they could never be sure; they would have no excuse if they were seen going in and out of the window.
It took them weeks to work out some kind of a pattern to the curious ways of Leo and her father.
Leo eventually started a secretarial course which involved going to the town on the bus. This gave her day a shape. The Major, who walked the long avenue with his old dogs, that he kept calling Lance and Jessie, was less predictable. Richard tried to find out more of his movements by asking his uncle, but it seemed that a friendship of twenty-five years was based on Bill Hayes knowing nothing whatsoever about Frank Murphy. It was hard to believe, but that was the way it was.
And there was the time that Hayes and Son, Solicitors, were asked to see to a property. Richard and Gloria had many happy meetings there in the guise of showing it to clients.
Gloria could get away so easily it was almost frightening.
‘Does Mike never ask where you’re going?’
‘Lord no. Why should he?’
‘Well, if I had a beautiful wife like you I wouldn’t let her wander off … to do the devil knows what …’ He squeezed her and held her to him again.
‘Then you wouldn’t be a husband, you’d be a gaoler,’ she laughed. He thought about it.
There was some truth in what she said. If you married someone just to guard her like a possession it was like an imprisonment. But look at it the other way, if Mike was more careful and caring about his wife then surely Gloria wouldn’t wander free as she was.
Sometimes he spoke about her children, her little boys, Kevin and Sean.
‘What is there to say?’
‘Aren’t you afraid they’ll find out, that they’d hate you for this?’
‘Darling Richard, you are riddled with guilt. I think we should make a regular thing of visiting Father Gunn together after we meet.’
‘Don’t tease me. I only say these things because I love you.’
‘No, you don’t.’
‘I do. I never said it to anyone before.’
‘We say it at the moment we make love, because at that moment everyone loves. But you don’t love me in an everyday sort of way.’
‘I could.’
‘No, Richard.’ She put her fingers on his lips and then into his mouth, and then she kissed him and soon the words were forgotten.
She was the ideal lover. He could never have dreamed of anyone so passionate and responsive, a beautiful woman who found him desirable and wasn’t afraid to say so. A witty, flowing, secret love whose dark eyes flashed at him when they met in Ryan’s Hotel, in the shops or at the church.
After years of girls wanting more from Richard here was someone who wanted no more at all. Not public recognition, not a commitment, and obviously because of the heavy band she already wore on her finger, not an engagement ring. For quite a time it was the perfect romance.
And then he began to notice small changes in his own attitude. He couldn’t say that Gloria had changed, she had always been light-hearted in their da
ring and the fear of discovery … and enthusiastic about the pleasure they gave each other.
No. It was Richard who changed.
He couldn’t bear to see her holding her little boys by the hand. He thought back to his own mother and father, the respectable Dublin doctor and his busy bridge-playing wife. Theirs had been a house of stability as he grew up in Waterloo Road. His mother had always been there for them. Suppose she had been someone who sneaked out to the arms of a lover while his father worked? He dismissed the thought as some kind of guilty fantasy.
There had been no way in which he had compared his life with that of his parents before, why was he holding up their staid and plodding existence as some kind of example now? Gloria was a wonderful mother to Kevin and Sean. What she had with Richard was something totally different, something separate entirely.
Then Richard found himself uneasy about Mike, big handsome Mike Darcy with his teeth as white and even as his wife’s, who stood long hours in the grocery shop they were so busy building up together. Mike, who would go to endless trouble to find something Richard ordered, furrowing his brow to think where they might get that particular chamois leather Richard wanted. He didn’t like the man being so generous with his time and help for him. Mike’s innocent face was a reproach to Richard Hayes.
Gloria only laughed when he mentioned it. ‘What Mike and I have is different to what you and I have … Let’s keep them separate,’ she said.
‘But I know about him, he doesn’t know about me.’
‘Why do men have to think everything’s a game, with rules?’ she laughed.
And then there were times when he wondered if he did know about Mike and Gloria and what they had together. He would see the way they leant towards each other in the shop when they thought no one was looking. He saw the way Mike Darcy sometimes stroked his wife’s body.
A very unfamiliar feeling of raging jealousy came over him when he saw them touch.
‘You don’t do this with Mike, do you?’ he begged her one afternoon in their gate lodge.
‘Nobody could do what you and I do. This is ours.’
‘But does he want to …? I mean do you and he …?’
‘You’re so handsome when you look worried, Richard,’ she said.
‘I must know.’
Suddenly she sat up, eyes flashing. ‘No, you must not know. There is no must about it. We are not master and slave … you have no right to know anything that I do not wish to tell you. Do I ask you any such questions …?’
‘But there’s nothing to know about me.’ He was wretched.
‘That’s because this is the way I choose to see things. I am not curious, suspicious, asking where I should ask nothing.’ Her voice held an ultimatum.
Accept things as they were or there would be no more to accept. He longed to know if she had known other men since her marriage to Mike, if they failed at this test and had been sent away.
He would have killed any man, any traveller who walked into Ryan’s Hotel, if he had said he shared a bed with Gloria Darcy. Yes, he would have taken this man by the throat and shaken him to squeeze out his life, uncaring about what onlookers or the law would say or do. Why then was Mike able to stand and fill bags with sugar and other bags with potatoes and not wonder where his beautiful wife went to in the afternoons?
It was becoming more difficult too for Richard to be free in the afternoons since young Niall had joined the firm. The boy had definitely gained a new confidence, which Richard suspected was due to the blossoming of a friendship and even courtship with the glossy young Nessa Ryan from the hotel.
Gone were the days when Niall Hayes was happy with the menial jobs, the work of a glorified clerk. Now he wanted to learn, to share, to study Richard’s ways with clients. ‘Can I come with you to the place that there’s all the fuss about the title?’ he would ask.
This was one of Richard’s mythical excuses for being out of the office. He had described a difficult old farmer set in his ways who had to be cajoled and flattered into revealing his documents.
‘No, Niall. It wouldn’t work out … this fellow is as mad as a wasps’ nest. You wouldn’t know what he’d do if I brought anyone else. I’ve only got as far as I have because I go on my own and put in endless bloody hours with him.’
‘Well, can I see the file on him?’ Niall asked.
‘Why? What do you want to bother yourself with that old fart for, there’s plenty of other work to do …’
‘But won’t we need to know when …?’
The words remained unfinished, the sentence hung in the air – when … Richard went back to Dublin – something they all knew would happen. There wasn’t room for two partnerships in the firm. The business simply wasn’t there; even two salaries was beginning to strain Bill Hayes. Niall was the son of the family.
Surely Richard would be going back any day now.
Only Richard knew that he could never leave Shancarrig and the woman he loved.
‘I do love you,’ he said defensively to Gloria, as they sat smoking a cigarette by their little oil stove one cold evening in the gate lodge.
‘I know.’ She sat hugging her knees.
‘No, you don’t know. You said we shouldn’t talk of love, that I only felt it at the moment of taking you. That’s what you said.’
‘Stop sounding like a schoolboy, Richard.’ She looked beautiful as she sat there in the flickering light.
‘What are you thinking about?’ he asked.
‘About you and how good you make me feel.’
‘What are we going to do, Gloria?’
‘Well, get dressed and go home, I imagine.’
‘About everything?’
‘We can’t solve everything, we can only solve things like not letting the light be seen through the windows and not getting our death of cold in all the rain.’
‘What will you say … about where you’ve been?’
‘That’s not your concern.’
‘But it is, you are my concern.’
‘Then let me handle it.’ Again he saw the warning in her eyes, and he felt frightened.
They had met in late summer and continued through autumn and a cold wet winter; soon it would be spring. Surely some solution would have to be found.
But for Gloria spring meant that she could wear fresh yellow and white flowery dresses, and white sandals and take her lover to hidden parts of Barna Woods, to dells with bluebells and soft springy grass. Again an ache came over him. How did she know where to find such places? She hadn’t grown up in this place – had other men taken her here? Not only could he never ask, he must never think about it. He hated that the shop was doing so well, he wanted to be her provider and give her things but she would never take them.
‘What would I say, Richard? I mean I could hardly say that the handsome young solicitor who drops in to buy an inordinate amount of razor blades bought me a silver bracelet, now could I?’
But with increased prosperity Mike Darcy bought his wife jewellery. There was an emerald pendant, there were diamonds. Nobody in Shancarrig had ever known such extravagance. Quite unsuitable, Richard’s Aunt Ethel had said, shaking her head about it.
Richard agreed from the bottom of his heart but was careful not to express this.
To his surprise young Niall had the opposite view.
‘What do people work for if it isn’t to get themselves what they want?’ he asked.
‘I hope you wouldn’t throw your money away on emeralds for Gloria Darcy and her like,’ his father said in ritual dismissive vein to his son.
These days Niall Hayes answered back. ‘I’m not sure what you mean “her like”, but if I loved someone and I earned my money lawfully I would feel very justified in spending it on presents for her,’ he said.
Suddenly the room was silent and drab. Aunt Ethel looked at her son in some surprise. On her cardigan there was no jewellery; there never had been any except the engagement ring, wedding ring and good watch. Perhaps life might have
been better if Bill Hayes had visited a shop and looked at jewels.
‘Let’s celebrate our anniversary,’ Richard said to Gloria.
‘Like what? Dinner for two in Ryan’s Shancarrig Hotel, a bottle of wine?’
‘No, but let’s do something festive.’
‘I find what we do is fairly festive already.’ She laughed at him.
‘You must want more, you must want more than creeping around.’
She sighed. It was the weary sigh of a mother who can’t explain to a toddler how to tie his shoe laces. ‘No, I don’t want any more,’ she said resignedly. ‘But you do, so we’ll do whatever you like for the anniversary.’
It was hard to think what they could do. The mystery was that they had spent a year as lovers without being discovered. In a place of this size and curiosity it was a miracle.
Perhaps they could go to Dublin. He would find an excuse and she would surely be able to think of some reason to go away as well.
Before he suggested it he would plan what they would do, otherwise she would shrug and say that they might as well stay here. He wanted to take her into Dublin bars, restaurants, he wanted people to admire her and be attracted by her beautiful face and sparkling laugh. He wanted to see her against some other background, not just the grey shapeless forms of Shancarrig. In all his years there Richard had never been able to like the place, it was lit up only by Gloria and he wanted to take her away from it.
He planned the visit to Dublin, how he would meet her off the train in Kingsbridge in his car – he would have gone up the day before so that there would be even less suspicion – how he would show her the sights – she didn’t know Dublin well, she had told him. He would be her guide.
They would check into one of the better hotels. He would check out the room first, make sure it was perfect … they would walk arm in arm down Grafton Street. If they met anyone from Shancarrig they would all laugh excitedly and say wasn’t it great coming to Dublin how you ran into everyone from home.
The more he thought about it the more Richard realised that he did not want Gloria in Dublin just for one night, he wanted her there always. He didn’t want them in a furtive hotel room, he wanted them in a home of their own. Together always.