Deceptions (35 page)

It had been raining the night she betrayed him, falling like needles under the street lamps, trickling coldly down the back of her neck. She opened the front door and silently entered the house. The hope that her parents were sleeping, oblivious to the fact that she had spent the small hours on a tumbled blanket with a man called Razor Blade, was quickly dashed when her father summoned her into the living-room. They were waiting up for her, sitting on opposite armchairs, as inflexible as judges and united for once in common purpose.

“Slut!” he roared and grabbed her hair, pulled it so hard her eyes stung with shock. “Where were you until this hour?”

Virginia laughed, holding her cheek, remembering the heat of Razor’s hands on her hips, his lanky frame stretched beneath her, and she above him, controlling him, her hot-blooded, angry punk.

“It’s none of your business,” she retorted and tried to push past him.

“Answer me, slut.” He shoved her back against the wall.

“Don’t bully me,” she shouted. “I’m not a kid any more.”

He lifted his hand again and struck her cheek. She turned on him, her anger as strong as his own, and answered him. “We were fucking in Razor’s flat. It took longer than expected because we did it twice.”

Horror-struck, Josephine lifted her hand to her mouth.

“You foul-mouthed tramp,” he roared. “How dare you use such language in front of your mother. I’ll make you give up that punk bastard if it’s the last thing I do.” He struck her again and again, his face flushed so deeply she thought he would have a stroke. “There’s plenty more where that came from if you don’t stop behaving like a little whore.”

There was always more where that came from. When she was young she believed there was a magic spell in Sonya’s house that took all the angry lines from her father’s face. But the spell only lasted until they reached the end of her road. She had grown up with the sting of his hands on her legs, her arms and her face, his bullying voice loud in her ears. She had loved and hated him in equal measure. It was her love that kept Sonya a secret and her hatred that released it that night, when she screamed, “What about your slut, Sonya? When are you going to give her up? How many years now … how many years have you forced me to lie?”

The sound her mother made reminded Virginia of pups. The same helpless, whimpering cry she used to hear from the room where she could not go. Only now it held anguish and the acknowledgement of a truth long denied. A truth that longed to be denied. It was the loneliest cry in the world.

Her father moved out the following day. Shortly afterwards she also left home and moved in with Razor. Her mother joined a bowling team.

At last his body was flown to Dublin. The atmosphere in the funeral parlour was restrained, polite greetings, whispered condolences. No tears were shed as the mourners filed before the open coffin and Virginia, shaking hands, smiling, accepting sympathy from her father’s Irish relatives, wondered how soon the charade would end. Josephine, arrayed in widow’s weeds that looked as if they had rested in mothballs since the reign of Queen Victoria, was the only person who wept, and this she did with relentless force. Edward’s plump arm comforted her. His children, two boys and a girl, all endowed with his earnest, round face and their mother’s pale complexion, gazed longingly towards the door when Josephine ordered them to kiss their grandfather’s forehead in farewell.

Brian Cheevers bowed his head in prayer then stepped back from the coffin. Donna took his hand and they stood together, offering condolences to Josephine, refusing to make eye contact with Virginia. The ingrained veneer of civility working against the odds, she thought. Still no sign of Lorraine or Ralph.

They followed the coffin into the church and sat in the front row. Behind them, the whispering, fidgeting and coughing gave way to an anticipatory silence. Virginia did not need to turn around to see whose footsteps clicked sharply up the aisle. The friction of separate particles rubbing together and igniting. Adrian shifted in his seat, as if he too could feel the electricity in the air, and moved slightly away from her.

The funeral mass was swift. The priest had never heard of Des Cheevers and had no inclination to eulogise a stranger. Wafted with incense, doused with holy water, the coffin was wheeled briskly back down the aisle. Statues and stations of the cross wavered before Virginia’s eyes. Burning hearts offering everlasting forgiveness – but there was no forgiveness in the cold gaze of Lorraine Cheevers, who stared unflinchingly as the small family procession approached. The brash red jacket she wore should have clashed with her hair but it added luminance to her appearance, a vibrant statement. Virginia knew it had been chosen with care.

More handshaking outside the church. Virginia smiled at the elderly men who came forward and told her what a card her father had been. A great man when it came to the wine and the women. As if the latter fact needed verification, a woman in a Zimmer frame twinkled up at her and confessed that she and Des had quite a thing going in the olden days, not a twinge of arthritis between them, the pair of them as frisky as young goats. She guffawed loudly and shuffled back into the crowd. Ralph had also arrived during the funeral mass. He shook hands with Edward and kissed Lorraine for longer than was appropriate at a funeral ceremony. Virginia signalled the undertaker to depart for the cemetery. The day was gathering its own momentum, sweeping them haplessly on its back.

At the graveside they stood opposite each other, Lorraine flanked grimly by her parents. The hole into which Des Cheevers was being lowered was only a fissure in the distance separating them. After the burial people hung around the graveside. Virginia wanted to clap her hands and scatter them. The Irish had no sense of decorum. They turned every gathering, even a funeral, into a party. Her jaw locked painfully when her mother again related the boiled-egg story, this time to Ralph, who listened, his head tilted to one side, and asked if it had been hard or soft boiled.

Firmly, Virginia escorted her mother back to the mourning car. She slammed the door on her protests and walked back to Ralph. “Thank you for coming.” Her tone was as formal as her handshake. “Don’t let me detain you any longer.”

“Des was a fine man. He’ll be sadly missed.”

Her smile glittered. “He was a bad-tempered bully who never cared where he landed his fists. I remember he planted them in your teeth once. It’s a memory I’ll always cherish.”

“Indeed … memories. Where would we be without them. Fancy your father dying in Josephine’s bed. Who knows? There’s hope for us yet, my darling.”

The mourners filed from the graveside and were joined by a man who had been standing slightly apart from the main gathering. Virginia had no recollection of seeing him in the funeral home or the church. When Lorraine approached with her parents he stepped forward and spoke to her. She drew back, surprised by his appearance, then shook his hand.

Virginia was sure she had met him before. His face was familiar, the angular boniness and narrow chin, an expressive face, but arrogant too, and it was this arrogance that clicked the memory into place. He had come to Blaide House demanding Lorraine’s address and been unnecessarily rude when she refused to give it to him.

Lorraine stood talking to him. She allowed her parents to walk on ahead and laughed at something he said. So long since Virginia had heard her laughter. The sound shocked her. When she allowed herself to think about Lorraine, she thought only of tears and ranting grief.

C
HAPTER
F
ORTY
-S
IX

They had lunch in a restaurant close to his apartment. Lorraine pointed to the first item on the menu.

“Same for me.” He placed his order without once taking his eyes from her face.

“What did we order?” he asked after the waiter departed.

“I’ve absolutely no idea.”

Her answer made him smile and reach across the table to take her hand. She had been shocked at his appearance in the cemetery and now, sitting opposite him, she was able to observe the difference in him. He looked carefree, happy to be with her, his body relaxed as he described how he had read her uncle’s death notice in
The Irish Times
and had arrived at the cemetery on the off-chance that he would find her among the mourners.

“You’ve no idea how much I wanted to contact you but I was afraid you’d hang up on me. Not that I would have blamed you. I should never have let you leave my apartment.”

“Why did you tell me to go?”

“I was caught up in something, Lorraine. It’s very personal and has nothing to do with you. But, at the time, I wasn’t able to make that separation.”

“If you’re involved with someone else –”

“
No
.” His denial was instant, emphatic. “It has to do with my son. I’d like to talk about it soon … but not now. I want the day to belong to us.” His gaze warmed her face, nothing hidden, none of the confused signals she had picked up every other time they were together.

“I accused you of hating me when you phoned that night,” she said.

“I remember our conversation.”

“I still can’t understand why you made me feel that way.”

“It was unforgivable of me. I love you, Lorraine. I’ve wanted to say that to you for a long time.”

His energy came towards her in waves, giddy, intoxicating, and his expression, free from ambiguity, seemed lit from within. Their time together had been so fraught with contradictions and confusion. Now, suddenly, everything seemed different but she was unwilling to trust the fusion taking place so effortlessly between them.

“I’m not ready to fall in love, Michael. It’s too soon.”

“As long as there’s a possibility that some day you’ll love me, I’ll wait forever.”

Their food was placed before them. Beef burgers, heaped with onions, luminous carrots on the side, a trickle of congealed gravy over mashed potatoes.

They stared at their plates and then at each other. Their laughter was spontaneous, so hearty that people dining nearby looked curiously across. He pushed his plate to one side and said, “I’ll make something to eat in the apartment, if you’d like to come back with me?”

She could leave him now and return to her refuge. The walls were strong, reinforced. There was wine in the fridge and a glass ready to be filled. But an afternoon stretched before them and the promise it contained shimmered like an oasis on parched sand. It was so easy, effortless really, to decide. He paid the bill. They walked together from the restaurant.

He drew the curtains to close out the day. The sun filtered through a chink and filled the room with shadowy light. Somewhere behind her a clock ticked, measuring time that no longer had relevance. Only a few hours ago she had stood in a cemetery between her parents, fragile as an invalid exposed to sunshine after a long illness. Her body shaking with the knowledge that there would be other family occasions when she would have to endure the sight of them together. Now she lay in another man’s arms, her lips racked with his kisses, feeling him hard against her, shockingly erect, no awkwardness between them as they undressed each other and stretched across his bed, soaking up each other’s nakedness. He could have spent a lifetime knowing my body, she thought, knowing the pitch of my pleasure, the depths of my passion. His hands traced across her thighs and she opened to him, her limbs receiving him, holding him captive. She was above him, beyond him, and he, within her, filling her, his eyes devouring her, drove deeper until there was nothing left except the sundering of body and mind. She wanted to hold the sensation yet she compelled him onwards until she felt the shuddering spill of his passion inside her and he, hearing her cry out, hearing her abandonment, buried his face in her hair, engulfed.

Afterwards, there was time to lie in each other’s arms. They talked until the room grew dark and the sounds in the apartment block began to change. Balcony doors slammed, a radio played next door and there were voices outside, a brief staccato of sound that quickly faded. They drew life histories from each other, exploring their contrasting childhoods; the leafy suburbs of Drumcondra and the commune where he had spent the first four years of his life.

His mother’s parents had died when she was young and, after the death of her father, which occurred just before her sixteenth birthday, Shady Carmody emigrated to America with her older sister. At first they lived in New York, then moved to California and on to Arizona, where they settled in Sedona, attracted by the boulders and rugged canyons they had seen so often in cowboy films. They were told stories about Native American tribes practising ancient religious ceremonies in secret caverns and, having been reared under the shadow of Croagh Patrick, where pilgrims stumbled bare-foot over stones, they were at ease with mystery and rite. They moved into a hippy commune and learned to meditate and weave lengths of fabric which they sold to tourists. But the older sister grew tired of sunshine and chanting in the shade of red-faced crags. She felt it was time to explore Alaska.