Hush Hush (25 page)

Sadie was horrified. She tried to
heave herself off her chair, but flailed back into it. ‘You
were never ordinary, Angela! How could you see yourself in that
light? My God, the frozen food saga! When you came home and told me
you’d packed in the job, you were going to Rachel’s for
the weekend, and I could lump it. What a rebel! If I seemed to take
Owen’s side when you two rowed
‒
and God forgive me, maybe I did
‒
it was because you always stamped your foot and stood up for
yourself. God forgive me, I thought I was playing fair. I thought I
had to put Owen’s case because he wouldn’t put it
himself. He was the type to let you walk all over him.’

‘He was too clever to be
walked all over!’ hissed Angela. ‘He was a sneaky
pincher, a behind-the-back toy breaker. You just assumed that
quietness equalled goodness.’

There was a long silence. Angela
turned back to the sink and fished a packet of paper hankies out of
the cutlery drawer. She unfolded a hanky with deliberate care and
honked into it. Whatever came next had to come from Sadie. She’d
said too much already.

‘You’ve been nursing
these petty grudges all these years,’ observed Sadie sadly.
‘Thinking I loved Owen more than you. Oh Angela, lovey, how
could you?’

Guilt flared briefly in Angela at
Sadie’s stricken tone but, just in time, she recognised another
favourite ploy of her mother’s. The emotional blackmail ploy.
She wanted Sadie to feel guilty for a change. She wanted to lash out
and give her mother’s self-assurance the battering it deserved.

‘Is this about Robert in
some way?’ asked Sadie, wisely, gently and infuriatingly
maternally. ‘Do you feel life kicked you in the teeth yet again
by taking Robert, while Owen gets away scot-free? Let me tell you,
Ange, there’s no such thing as scot-free in this life. Everyone
has their woes, sooner or later.’

‘Jesus Christ, Ma, spare me
the Sermon on the sodding Mount! You want to know about me and
Robert? Well, brace yourself, hang onto your support stockings, it’s
going to be a bumpy ride of unpleasant truths.’

She took a deep breath
‒
and said nothing.

‘Go on,’ urged Sadie,
with a vague presentiment of doom. ‘Go on, Ange.’

‘All right, all right!’
snapped Angela. ‘Here it is. Robert had that heart attack
because we rowed about you the night before! About whether you should
come and live with us. I said let’s go for it, and Robert said,
very prophetically, over his dead body. I’d never seen him so
worked up. Must have sent his blood pressure through the roof. Oh,
don’t worry, I played my part in bringing on his coronary and
I’ve felt suitably guilty ever since. But the reason he
couldn’t hack the idea was because he sussed long ago that you
never really liked him.’

‘I
‒
well
‒
that’s
just not true!’ gasped Sadie.

‘Isn’t it?’
demanded Angela. ‘Come on, Mum, cards-on-the-table time. You
tolerated Robert, but you never saw him as my equal, let alone yours.
He was yet another poor choice by me, along with passing up college,
not having kids
‒
the whole gamut of second-bests. I’d learnt to live with
disappointing you, of course. I’d had years of practice. But
you’ve no idea how sensitive Robert was to your low opinion of
him.’

‘So, you’re saying
‒
his heart attack was my fault?’ gulped Sadie.

‘No, no, don’t be
stupid!’ snapped Angela, tugging helplessly at her hair. ‘Don’t
you understand, it was my fault. Mine, mine, mine! But you were often
a crap mother, and a crap mother-in-law. I don’t see why you
should get away with pretending you liked Robert, any more than you
should get away with imagining how nice you were to me growing up.’

‘I
‒
well, I
‒
’
Sadie was floundering, a fish on a hot pavement. Her mouth even
opened and shut in convulsive little Os. Her face had lost its colour
and dignity.

Angela suddenly felt like
vomiting. Almond pastry disagreed with her.

‘Wait there!’ she
croaked and dashed upstairs to the loo. She heaved without hurling.
She spent as much time up there as she could, washing her face,
gathering her thoughts, casting about for a mental lasso to rein in
the bolted horse. Eventually, she crept back down, feeling sick for a
different reason. What sort of mood would Sadie be in? The birthday
girl. Jesus! Why did she have to pick today, of all days, to row
big-time with her mother?

Sadie was washing up. She raised
crabbed hands from the sink, webbed with suds, and reached for a tea
towel. Her voice was quieter than a stealth bomber.

‘You’d better go,
Angela. I don’t want to see you or talk to you for a while. I
want to think things over.’

‘Look, Ma, about what I
said
…
’

‘Don’t make me ask
you to leave.’

Angela capitulated. This was the
tenor of exchanges of old. Sadie’s deadly tone, gathering her
strength for the storm, Angela’s huddled truculence before she
fled and waited for her mother to calm down. But this time, Sadie was
eerily calm. This time, Angela had gone too far.

‘I’ll get me coat,’
she tried half-jokily, but Sadie wasn’t familiar with the
catchphrases of popular culture. Angela got her coat, stepped onto
the porch, closed the front door slowly. ‘Well, bye then. I’ll
ring tomorrow. You can break out the sackcloth and ashes for my next
visit.’

She
wanted to say more, but what? ‘Hang on, Ma, before you go
volunteering for martyr of the month, remember you’re the one
who snooped in my bag and went off half-cocked ringing Conor in
America’? The cutlery clanged onto the draining board. Binky
stalked past the front door and towards the kitchen, pausing to
reproach Angela with all-knowing green eyes. Bloody cat! It was true
what Sadie claimed. He had a face to fit every occasion. This face
said, how could you? OK, so she could snoop for MI5. Maybe M16, if I
knew what the difference is. Which I don’t, being a cat. Point
is, she’s your mother! And she’s got arthritis!

Conor found the postcard in the bottom of his bag,
while looking for a clean shirt. It was a big night in Kate’s
recuperation programme. She’d survived a week of intensive
therapy and her stomach was starting to lose its tender resistance to
solid food. They were all going to a bistro in Greenwich Village to
celebrate.

The bathroom door opened. Conor
shoved the postcard back in the bag.

‘Shane!’ His tone was
exasperated. ‘Can’t you ever knock before storming
through a bathroom or bedroom door?’

‘Ye wot? There’s no
privacy here, anyway. I have to share a room with you, listening to
you grunt and slobber all night. I dunno why they call it snoring.’

Conor sighed. ‘Who was that
on the phone?’

Shane shut the door carefully
behind him. ‘Old Mrs Wotserface, Angela’s mother. Ringing
to ask how Mum is.’ Shane paused, conveying added meaning with
a look. The word ‘ostensibly’ was outside his vocabulary.

‘That was nice of her. Did
she want to talk to me?’

‘I said we were halfway out
the door. I told Mum it was work ringing for you. It’s going to
be awkward if Angela and her fan club make a habit of phoning here.’

‘Angela won’t phone
again,’ said Conor gloomily. ‘And if she was going to,
she’d use my mobile, for obvious reasons. Now bog off and let
me get changed.’

‘What reasons? Wouldn’t
it be well cheaper ringing the landline here? Oh …’ The
penny suddenly dropped with Shane. ‘She doesn’t want to
risk talking to Mum. Well, then she’ll text or email you.
D’uh.’

‘Thanks for the technology
update. Now get out. Please.’

With a final eye-roll, Shane
finally scuttled off, leaving Conor alone in the bathroom. He looked
around. The dinky little bathroom had no shelves or rails to drape
clothing. Even the hand towel was spread over the top of a
chest-shaped linen basket.

Everything was pink and edged in
fake gilt. ‘A bleedin’ Barbie boudoir,’ in Shane’s
spot-on opinion.

He’d no sooner got rid of
Shane than Kate’s marmalade tresses snaked round the door. ‘Are
you decent yet? Only the cab’s due in a minute and I wasn’t
sure if you’d shaved yet.’

‘Don’t worry, I
tackled that first.’ How easily they’d settled into old
spousal routines and returned to old pet hates. She’d never
liked his hirsute whiskeriness. Kate’s preferred male ‘type’,
by her own admission, was the clean-shaven dealer in off-shore
portfolios who inhaled wine through a patrician nose and knew a fish
fork wasn’t for picking his teeth. Conor had often wondered if
she’d chosen him to spite herself as much as her father; if her
self-destruct sequence was always on the verge of countdown.

When he emerged from the
bathroom, she was doing a twirl for Shane. The little black dress was
velvet. He thought, with a pang, of peeling Angela’s black
velvet straps off her bony, supple shoulders. The hilarious thong.
His rudeness. Angela’s hurt pride and readiness to see the
joke. ‘You look lovely,’ he told Kate honestly.

She smiled, sped over to
administer a wifely fiddle to his tie-knot. ‘And so do both my
men.’ She held out another arm to encompass Shane, who crept
under it, pleased and proud of his beautiful, fragile mother.

How does she do it, marvelled
Conor, as Kate’s skin glowed, her hair shone, her eyes and
teeth sparkled. She looks as if she’s spent the last few weeks
being pampered at a top health spa, not lying face down in her own
stomach contents and then hauled off to a detox centre, to tell a
roomful of fellow manic-depressive dipsos, ‘My name’s
Kate, and I’m an alcoholic.’

The cab honked outside, briefly
distinguishable to Conor’s ear from New York’s long night
of lamenting sirens. He thought again of the postcard. Angela had
bought it for Sadie and never written on it or posted it. In the mad
departure scramble, it had ended up in his luggage.

As he held out Kate’s black
serape for her, he recalled their frantic leaving of Curracloe, the
undignified end to what should’ve been a leisurely weekend of
discovering each other. Then the flight back to London, knowing only
that Kate was critical, leaving Angela to find her own way home on
the Tube, while he dashed back to Pacelli Road, gave Shane some
face-saving story about Kate and appendicitis, and packed for another
flight.

As they climbed into the taxi,
and Kate brushed his knee with her elbow, he thought of his last
phone call to Angela, thanking God the bad line had camouflaged his
craven tone of prevarication. And then, some final words from her,
wavering through the crackle, sounding like ‘I love you!’
But all he got was the heat of passion. Could just as easily have
been ‘I hate you!’

‘Do you miss her?’
asked Kate softly in his ear.

He jumped. It was calculated to
sound sympathetic. But all it sounded was calculated, sussing out her
own hold over him.

‘Yes,’ he said,
sliding his cool hand across her own. ‘I can’t switch my
feelings on and off, can I?’

She held his gaze steadily,
allowing it to stray just for a second towards Shane, who was
interrogating the cab driver. ‘Do those feelings apply to me,
as well?’

The bistro was heavy on ambience
and scornful waiters. Shane sat very upright, grappling with a
leather-bound menu and hissed at Conor, ‘Shall I ask if they’ve
a kiddies’ menu?’

‘Be my guest,’
responded Conor mildly, his attention distracted by Kate studying a
different-coloured menu. He plucked it out of her hands. ‘The
wine list,’ he observed, and slammed it shut. ‘Over my
dead body. Or yours, to be exact. The mineral water probably costs
more than the house plonk, but I’m prepared to pay for it by
the bucketload.’

Kate tossed her head, two hectic
spots appearing on her cheeks. ‘I was just looking.’

‘And I’m just looking
at that strawberry sundae on the next table, but I know strawberries
bring me out in a rash, which tends to keep temptation at bay. And I
like strawberries,’ he added in case she’d missed the
point.

Kate looked warningly at Shane,
then dredged up a martyr-like smile. ‘You’re right, of
course. I’d forgotten how much I need you, Conor.’

He scowled. He’d walked
right into that one. Luckily, Shane still seemed engrossed in his
menu.

After that, the bonhomie was
laced with tension. Kate, Conor knew, was just itching for a drink.
When they got back to her place, he had every intention of checking
the usual places for stashed hootch.

As it was a clear, moonlit night,
he suggested they take a taxi halfway back to the flat, and walk the
rest of the way. ‘You serious?’ frowned Kate, climbing
into the taxi. ‘This is New York, not Ballykissangel.’

‘That’s
what comes of watching
The French Connection
and treating it
as a documentary. In the real New York, tourists like us outnumber
the drug dealers and wise guys at least ten to one.’

‘You just made
that up!’ accused Kate.

‘I’ll have
you know, I only make up statistics twenty eight per cent of the
time.’

‘If
you’re talking stats,’ put in Shane helpfully, ‘rats
outnumber New Yorkers four to one.’

Conor
was adamant.
Paying off the driver, he prodded them onto the
sidewalk for the second half of their journey. He had a particular
reason for wanting to walk the latter half of the journey. He had
something to show Kate.

As they drew near to the alleyway
in question, he slowed purposefully and paused near its entrance.
Then he strode down it without warning, leaving the other two
puttering along in his wake.

‘Conor, wait!’ called
Kate.

‘You mad, Dad?’
puffed Shane, tripping over a cardboard box in the dark.