Hush Hush (21 page)

She marvelled all through the journey that he’d
been not angry but scared that she’d stood him up. He drove the
hire car skilfully through plangent, steady rainfall, to their hotel
in Curracloe, a good two hours’ by car from Dublin airport. Or
so it felt. Angela could see nothing and felt disoriented. Beyond
town centres, there were no lampposts or fairy-lit urban sprawl to
illuminate the dark contours of night.

‘How come you never learnt
to drive?’ asked Conor.

‘Oh, Robert gave me a
couple of lessons and didn’t rate my chances.’

‘Spouses don’t make
the best instructors.’

‘I hit a bus shelter. He
lost his no-claims bonus.’

‘Ah,’ said Conor.
Angela studied the map with a travel torch. Might as well try and
look useful after confessing to such inadequacy. She hoped he
wouldn’t ask about her last visit to Ireland, which was
shrouded in the mists of enforced forgetfulness.

She and Robert had stayed in
Kinsale, but en route to the gastronomical capital of Ireland, Robert
had run over a chicken, mistaking the jolting thud for a hidden
pothole, it had ‘pissed down’ as the guidebook hadn’t
put it (preferring the euphemistic ‘soft weather’) and,
to top it all, Angela had eaten a dodgy shellfish and vomited over
the rocks in Kinsale harbour, in full view of camcording American
tourists. The row developed when she realised that Robert was
snapping her, too.

‘Conor,’ she asked
suddenly, ‘do you see me as a plastic?’

‘Tag? Gnome? A plastic
what, Ange?’

‘Paddy, of course. Surely
Shane’s been lumbered with the name by some of your family in
Dublin?’

‘If he had been, he
wouldn’t tell me. Let’s see.’ He drummed his
fingers on the steering-wheel. ‘Have you got an Irish
passport?’

‘No, couldn’t be
bothered. I needed to go on a school trip at short notice when I was
sixteen, so I nipped down the post office in Wilmesbury and filled
out a form for a twelve-month thing, complete with lions and shields
and rampant loyalty to queen and country. Are you disappointed in
me?’

‘As disappointed as a man
could be in a plastic who’s sold out.’

He laughed when she slumped down
in her seat.

‘Look, I’ve lived in
England for donkeys’ years, so my pure-alloy Irishness must be
degrading to a baser metal. Maybe iron rather than plastic.’

‘Pig-iron, if you’re
a paddy,’ corrected Angela. She felt reassured enough to try
her hand and struggling eyesight at map-reading again.

‘Fraid we won’t see
the lie of the land before morning,’ said Conor, swinging
between a pair of gothic stone pillars. ‘But the forecast
wasn’t too bad. This is supposed to be a half-decent joint, so
they should still run to dinner, even though it’s gone nine.’

Half-decent! It was palatial
compared to the B&B in Kinsale. Once the seat of a C of I bishop,
Clariton House was a grey Georgian mansion where rotting wall
tapestries hung on repanelled walls and modern plumbing rumbled
soothingly behind antique porcelain cisterns. The sort of place she
and Robert had often passed out driving, musing, ‘I wonder who
stays in a pile like that?’ and decided complacently, ‘Golf-mad
Yanks who think any house over fifty years old is heaving with
ghosts!’

Looking back, Angela saw their
dismissiveness for what it was. A bit of harmless jealousy that their
budget couldn’t run to four-star Georgian piles.

‘What are you thinking?’
asked Conor suddenly, turning from the reception desk with a smile.
Angela looked away hurriedly at a tapestry. She couldn’t very
well say, ‘my honeymoon,’ or even, ‘how moreish you
look in that well-cut overcoat, with your dampened-down curls and
your fisherman’s jumper, how very much at home you look in this
imposing old house,’ an odious comparison with poor, dead
Robert. Upstairs, Angela hurried into their en suite room and
pulled
out her mobile
to hide her shyness. ‘Mind if I ring Mum
to check she’s OK?’

‘Go for it. I’ll ring
Shane at Matty’s.’

Angela only half-listened to
Sadie’s complaints about the mobile and Maud Ambrose’s
‘nosiness’. She was looking down at the blue-and-white
bedspread under her knees, silky and raised, its downy thickness
reassuring evidence of its cost. Tonight, she’d lie under it
with Conor, between fringed blue lampshades and under a ceiling
studded with plaster cabbage roses. Soon, this room would resonate in
memory with an outcome still unknown.

‘Loo flush is
temperamental,’ reported Conor, returning from a gurgling
bathroom. ‘You have to open the cistern lid and hold the
ball-cock above the waterline to let it refill. Shall I complain?’

‘Well,’ blushed
Angela. After all, he was paying. She had offered, forcefully, to go
Dutch, but he’d insisted that the whole weekend was on him. ‘A
wonky loo’s all part of the old-world charm, I suppose. The bed
dips in the middle too, but I don’t mind that, either.’

He seemed relieved that she’d
mentioned the bed. ‘I usually sleep facing the window,’
he revealed.

‘Fine,’ she said, and
scattered her cosmetic essentials (carefully vetted) on the
alternative bedside table. In its top drawer, she found a Gideon
bible and a leaflet about the house, smelling of camphor. On the
front was a sepia photo of the bishop and his family on the front
lawn, a dour man flanked by corseted women in plume-heaped hats,
parasols struck into the ground like at-ease rifles.

Their eyes squinted in a golden
evening of long ago. ‘His wife and three daughters,’ read
Angela aloud. ‘Look at that view!’

Sepia hills sloped away behind
the colonnaded porch, intersecting pleats of burnt sienna. The sea
and Curracloe beach lay in the opposite direction. ‘It’s
much like that now,’ claimed Conor. ‘Wait until morning.’

It was too late for dinner, so
they ordered sandwiches and tea up to the room. Cheese and chutney
doorsteps arrived for Angela, cold bacon for Conor, with a steaming
brown pot of tea and turf-dark stacks of moist brack, the shiny
raisins reminding Angela of turf beetles. When she and Owen were
kids, they’d spent summers scrambling over their grandfather’s
turf stacks and down his haystacks on his County Clare homestead.
Angela, in truth, had spent a lot of time running away from Owen, or
extracting his palpable hits
‒
beetles rendered legless and sharp haystalks ‒ from the back of
her dress.

‘What are you thinking?’
asked Conor for the second time that evening.

She looked up in confusion.

His eyes were fixed on her with
the green intensity of a cat’s. But his smile was nervous.
‘Sorry ‒ I’m clumping my hobnails all over your
innermost thoughts.’

‘No, you’re not ‒
I was just thinking about when I was a kid, on my grandad’s
farm in the summer holidays, down in Clare.’ She picked the
plumpest raisin out of her brack and laid it on the plate-edge. ‘He
was a miserable bastard, my grandad, a tyrant. I don’t know why
Mum went back there, summer after summer, to blacken his range, clean
his house, soak his callused feet, put up with insults by way of
gratitude. Do you know, the only summer we didn’t go over, my
aunt came over from the States to visit him instead, and he wouldn’t
open the front door because she was wearing trousers! Honest to God.
She had to walk to the next farm and call a taxi back to Ennis.’

‘Don’t tell me ‒
like a good, martyred Irish daughter, she returned the next day in a
tweed skirt, bringing a nice bit of black pudding for his brekky and
a king-size humble pie for herself,’ smiled Conor.

Angela grinned. ‘How did
you guess? He let me and Owen run amok over his crops, to be fair.
Gave it in the neck to Mum, I suppose, when we were out of earshot.’

Angela sat back, thinking.
‘That’s not me, you see, turning the other cheek. I’d
have told him where to stick his attitude. What about Shane? He must
have grandparents over here.’

Conor straightened. ‘My ma
in Dublin is all that’s left. Kate’s parents in England ‒
they don’t want to see Shane.’

Angela started. ‘Why not?’

Conor’s brows knitted.
‘It’s complicated
…
her dad didn’t approve of me, remember? When he got wind of
Kate’s relationship with me, he gave her the
“
never
darken our door again
”
speech if she went ahead and married me.’ He swallowed a gulp
of cooling tea. ‘That was the green light, as far as Kate was
concerned. Not that I knew her dad’s essential gitness made her
mad keen to hang onto me. Not at first, anyway. I’ve no idea if
her mum’s just as reactionary. Her dad rules the roost and what
he says goes. He’s cast Kate into the outer darkness, so her
child doesn’t exist either. Bringing Shane up Catholic (Kate
was very keen on the idea) was probably the last in a long line of
straws for her old man.’ He shrugged. ‘We even drove up
to Northumberland to announce our engagement. Old git wouldn’t
let us in the house.’ He grinned balefully at Angela. ‘And
Kate wasn’t wearing trousers.’

‘Whew!’ breathed
Angela. ‘So Shane’s never met them?’

‘Their loss,’ grunted
Conor, his mobile features working overtime. ‘They wouldn’t
come to the wedding, so I had to give my parents a cover story that
they saw through in ten seconds flat. Kate’s charm made up for
her parents’ snub, but the past is always there, the uninvited
guest, the bad fairy at the christening, waiting its moment to
scupper the future.’ He stared broodingly at the teapot and
then reached for it. ‘Another cuppa?’

‘No, thanks.’ Was he
right? Was the past the final arbiter of hopes and dreams? Or was it
really another country, peppered with minefields and watchtowers to
stop you escaping over the border to freedom?

She used the bathroom first,
brushing her teeth rigorously and scrambling into a
middle-of-the-road nightie that was sprigged with rosebuds
à
la
Little House on the Prairie
, but laid claim to
non-salacious modernity with spaghetti straps and a short hemline.
She slipped into her whitest pants, hoped chin-whiskers wouldn’t
sprout overnight and opened the bathroom door.

Conor lay fully dressed on top of
the crumpled duvet, eyes shut, breathing down his nose. His socks
were different shades of blue, and one was balding at the heel. She
smiled. Conor opened his eyes.

‘My God, the state of me
compared to you,’ he grunted, heaving himself off the bed.
Angela claimed it instead, clambering under the sheet and catching
her toes in the top seam. She wondered when she’d last cut her
toenails, then pulled the sheets up to her chin, as Conor grabbed his
bag off a chair and disappeared into the bathroom. She took his
comparison of their relative states of readiness for bed as the
closest she’d get to a compliment on her night attire. Would he
wear pyjamas?

He didn’t look like a
pyjamas man, but he didn’t look the
au naturel
type
either. She heard him fill the sink, followed by a long silence. She
turned over and covered her ears with the pillow-corners. It wasn’t
right or fair, or a good augury for the night ahead, to tune in to a
man’s ablutions.

Next thing she knew, the bed was
dipping next to her as he climbed in beside her. She removed her
pillow-muff. By the time she turned round, he had the sheets drawn up
to his own chin, which gleamed with freshly mown stubble. ‘I
have to shave sometimes before I go to bed,’ he explained,
embarrassed.

‘Oh right.’ She
hesitated. ‘Just when you go to bed with women, you mean?’

‘You make it sound like
I’ve had a haremful.’

‘Sorry, didn’t mean
to.’ Oh God, what now? They’d lost the lazy conviviality
they’d shared over sandwiches and a pot of tea.

‘Is that a squashed insect
on the ceiling?’ asked Conor suddenly.

‘Where?’ She squinted
upwards. The bedside lamp on his side, still on, threw long shadows
across the bumpy plaster surface.

‘Oh my God!’ she
gasped. ‘It moved! It’s not squashed at all.’

Conor threw back the sheets and
jumped on to his pillow, so that he was just tall enough to stroke
the ceiling with his fingertips. Angela inched away from his legs,
curving hairily out of a pair of boxer shirts. His bare back was
covered in much finer hairs, thank God.

‘It’s an earwig out
on the razzle,’ he reported. ‘I think it’s supposed
to be tucked up at home under that loose bit of cornicing over
there.’

‘Kill it, Conor, I hate
them!’

He jumped higher, slapping his
hand against the ceiling. ‘Damn, missed the bugger. I think
it’s fallen on your head, Ange.’

‘Argh!’ She dived
under the sheets, shuddering. She screamed again when something
tickled her neck in the darkness.

‘Hah, got you!’
laughed Conor, and she came up for air to find his fingers stroking
the back of her neck. ‘Don’t worry, I whipped his ass
good.’

‘Really?’ she
trembled.

‘OK. God’s honest
truth. It was just a trick of the light on a ceiling stain. There was
no earwig. Though what the poor things ever did to you
…
’

‘His ‒ ancestors used
to get into my pants when they were out on the line.’

‘Well, can’t say I
blame them.’

Angela laughed. ‘I walked
into that one.’

His fingers moved off her neck
and explored her shoulder, their progress invited by the flirtatious
dip of her flesh under the concealing sheet.

‘Mm,’ she said,
because it felt nice and she thought he should know.

He hesitated, then rolled over
quickly to switch off the light. Angela sighed with satisfaction.
That was much better, the hypnotic touch of flesh on flesh made
mysterious by darkness. She’d never been one for doing it with
the lights on, which struck her as a form of sensory deprivation.
Thank goodness that Conor, complete with clean-shaven jaw and subtle
hint of aftershave, felt the same way.