Hush Hush (27 page)

The room wasn’t as brightly
lit as Angela had first thought. The main light switch was off, a
supplementary light issuing pinkly from a lopsided lampshade in one
corner. In the grate of the small, neat fireplace, lily-shaped
candles floated in cut-glass trifle bowls full of water. Leonard
Cohen leaked mournfully from speakers either side of a bookcase.
There were plants, framed posters of famous paintings, and a lot of
wimmin. Though, as far as Angela could tell, they were really just
women. They squatted on cushions, leant on projecting shelves, talked
and gesticulated in the manner of all mingling partygoers. And
scattered here and there among them, like exotic starfruits in a
plain old fruit salad, were men. Pauline returned to her side with a
glass of red wine.

‘I thought you said there’d
be no men,’ Angela hissed, though not accusingly.

‘They’re not men in
the real, shitty sense of the word,’ explained Pauline.

‘You mean gay men? Honorary
women.’

Pauline poked the nearest man
with her foot. He looked up from an animated conversation on the
floor, good-looking in a hollow-eyed, cadaverous way. ‘You gay,
Alan?’

He bridled. ‘Not so you’d
notice.’

Pauline buried her elbow in
Angela’s ribs. ‘Alan lives upstairs and came down to
complain about the crappy choice of music on the stereo. Decided to
stay when he saw it was wall-to-wall totty and every man for himself.
We’d better move away, we’re cramping his style.’

Pauline found Angela a half-inch
of unoccupied scatter cushion by the fireplace. ‘You’ll
roast in that jacket, Ange. Aren’t you going to take it off?’

Angela clutched her black linen
jacket
‒
a size too
large
‒
around the
pink and black dress. Its pockets contained her essentials of keys,
purse and contact lens bottle. ‘Fact is, I’ve come
overdressed for the occasion, Pauline. When you said party, I
automatically thought party dress, as in girly frills and too much
pink. I’m afraid I’m out of practice gracing the party
scene.’

‘Have some more wine,’
urged Pauline, sensibly comfortable in her floaty ethnic skirt and
long white blouse, and topped up the unwanted red plonk that Angela
had barely sipped. ‘I’ll point out a few wounded souls to
you. That’s Sheila. Husband ran off with the au pair, but
neglected to do her the favour of taking the kids with him. Monica
nursed a live-in lover through a long illness. So when he recovered,
naturally, he ran off with the next sentient woman who crossed his
path.’ She frowned around the room. ‘A few others I don’t
recognise. Friends of friends.’

‘And what about you?’
asked Angela hastily, wondering how she’d been prefaced before
her arrival. ‘You said you’d give me the lowdown on your
latest
‒
um
‒
male shit.’

Pauline slumped forward, playing
with the ends of her hair. ‘A bastard from yesteryear, name of
Dominic. You know the press pass I got to the preview of the Monet
exhibition at the National?’

‘Er
‒
no.’ As the new girl, Angela was bottom of the pecking order
for office freebies. She took a deep slug of vinegary wine.

‘Well, Dom was there,
giving me the come-on. Said his etchings were better than Monet’s
daubings any day of the week. We had lunch, then each other. Twice at
my place, once back at his the following week. I was in seventh
heaven.’ She stared down at a floating candle, reminiscing.

‘So, did he
‒
um
‒
dump you?’
Angela risked eventually.

‘Of course! That’s
twice I’ve let him do it to me. Why do I never see it coming?
Why?’

Because you don’t want to,
sighed Angela inwardly, and carried on drinking. It gave her
something to do with her hands.

Pauline’s fawn and white
cat appeared from nowhere to jump onto Angela’s lap, sinking
its claws into pink silk folds. Pauline nodded approvingly. ‘You
must be giving off good vibes for Casper to favour you. Are you fussy
about cat hairs?’

‘No,’ sighed Angela
truthfully. She was quite happy for Casper to rip the dress to
shreds. She’d worn it consciously, to banish nostalgic
associations. She hadn’t wanted to come across it in her
wardrobe in six months’ time and stare at it, rub her face
against it, recall it as the dress of her night of passion. It was
just a Rachel cast-off. She drank more wine.

Pauline vanished to circulate
with a tray of nibbles and her sob story about Dominic.

Someone else plonked down beside
Angela with a sigh of weariness. ‘Jesus, my feet are killing
me. Been on them all day. That’s shop work for you.’

The woman rubbed plump ankles.
Her shoes were high-heeled, backless and toeless, the front of each a
mere strip of plum-coloured suede. They were the more obvious source
of her tortured feet. ‘You one of Pauline’s walking
wounded too?’ she asked Angela.

‘Definitely not,’
replied Angela, affronted. ‘Anyway, Pauline does talk about
other things beside the iniquity of the male species. She’s a
good laugh.’

‘Yeah, but look around
you.’ The woman’s plump arm jangled with bracelets as her
hand swept the room. ‘Sooner or later, we all end up here from
one of Pauline’s therapy groups.’

Angela started. ‘Pauline’s
a therapist?’

‘Alternative therapist,
love. Get the jargon right. She runs a workshop in the adult
education centre every so often, numbers permitting.’ The woman
glanced at Angela curiously and with new respect. ‘So you know
her from the real world, then? You must have a few more screws in
place than the rest of us.’

‘I work with her,’
said Angela uneasily. As far as Pauline was concerned, she was one of
her walking wounded, as yet unrecruited into a beans-spilling,
anger-letting therapy session.

The woman stood up, swaying
uneasily in a crushed purple skirt that reached to her painfully
arched ankles. ‘Well, I’m off to get more wine. Drinking
to forget is the best reason I know. Trouble is, when I wake up
tomorrow with a screaming hangover, I’ll still remember a
certain red-haired mick with an unholy brat of a son. Nice meeting
you.’

The woman tottered off. Angela
gazed after her in consternation, looking at her properly for the
first time. That long red hair, coiled loosely on the back of her
head, snaky tendrils escaping over her ears. Jesus, it was Kate!
Somehow, she’d done a bunk from New York, materialised at
Pauline’s, crept up on Angela, hoping to catch her unawares.

Angela clutched Pauline as she
passed with a tray of cheese-laden crackers. ‘Pauline, who’s
the woman in purple with the red hair?’

Pauline squinted down the room.
‘Never saw her before in my life.’

‘But she said she was from
‒
never mind!’
On second thoughts, better not let slip that she’d heard about
the therapy group. Pauline might take it as an active recruitment
signal.

Angela spent the next half-hour
trying to manoeuvre herself within conversational range of the Kate
apparition. She had a drinker’s complexion, all right. In fact,
she was a bit
‒
well
‒
fishmonger’s
wife to be the love (officially ex-love) of Conor’s life. Her
face was plump to the point of gaining a second chin, her blue eyes
alive but watery under mascara-encrusted lashes. She worked the room,
sharing hearty jokes with several women she obviously knew, but
stayed close to Pauline’s dining table, where the sandwiches,
nibbles and wine bottles beckoned.

Angela shadowed her back to the
table. The woman whirled round, thrust a plate under Angela’s
chin. ‘Prawn sarnie?’

‘Thanks.’ Angela took
one without thinking. Anyway, she had to line her stomach with
something substantial after three glasses of wine.

‘You following me or
something?’ demanded the Kate lookalike.

‘No! Look, the thing is,’
Angela swallowed a mayonnaise-jacketed prawn, ‘I was just
wondering if you knew
‒
a bloke called Conor McGinlay.’

The woman’s eyes snapped
open wide, then narrowed. ‘Don’t tell me he’s had
you as well? In both senses of the word?’

Angela’s slack-jawed shock
confirmed it. The woman shook her head delightedly. ‘Oh dearie,
dearie me! Pauline’s right about one thing. Us women live but
we never learn. Were you dismissed for upsetting the unholy brat? Or
did you stumble on the shrine to St Kate?’

‘The shrine?’
Angela’s confusion conceded the upper hand. Whoever this was,
she clearly wasn’t Kate. That meant she had to be the other one
‒
what was her name?

The woman laid a plump hand on
Angela’s arm, steered her into a corner. ‘I can see I’m
going to have to fill in the blanks. Upstairs in the dream house, in
the one-time boudoir of Conor and Kate McGinlay, he keeps everything
on her dressing table exactly as it was on the day she departed. He
replaces fresh flowers next to the bed every few days, just as she
did. The drawers are full of her lace-lined undies that I bet not
even Mrs Turner is allowed to touch. He sleeps with a lock of her
hair under his pillow. I’m Rosalind Jennings, by the way.’

‘Angela Carbery,’
said Angela automatically. ‘But he told me they didn’t
even share a bedroom after Shane!’ It leapt out bitterly before
she could bite it back.

‘Oh, not when Shane the
shithead was a baby. That kid was such a handful, you can’t
blame her for not wanting another brat, even by accident. But when
Shane got older, and started noticing awkward anomalies, like having
a mummy and daddy who didn’t share a bedroom, they shacked up
together in the master bedroom again. Now don’t ask me if they
had sex!’ Rosie heaved a wayward strap back onto her shoulder.
‘I reckon they must have partaken now and then over the years,
for all the problems between them. They’re only flesh and
blood. All I know is, he fell in an absolute heap when she took off
for New York. They might’ve had a lame marriage, but she was
still his first love. For all you and I know, he tried to get her
back. The man’s fixated. He’s no business starting out on
other relationships he can’t follow through.’

Through her hurt and misery, a
shaft of common sense hit Angela. ‘How do you know all this
about Conor and his past?’

‘I went out with him for
four months,’ shrugged Rosie. ‘If I stayed overnight, we
had to do it in the spare bedroom. I accepted that. A bloke’s
allowed to have a sentimental attachment to the ex-marital boudoir.
He told me the lie of the land, putting his own spin on it, of
course. Everything over between him and Kate, never were compatible
for the long haul, she’d had an unhappy past and he felt guilty
that he couldn’t cope, blah di blah. Then I found the bedroom
shrine one morning by accident when I took a wrong turn from the
bathroom. I quizzed him about it and he dropped me like a hot brick.
When it comes right down to it, he’ll never choose anyone over
her, because he’ll never get her out of his system. She’s
a virus and he welcomes the attacks
‒
the night sweats, the shivers, the pain-racked guilt.’

She leant forward to peer at
Angela, wafting wine fumes and an under-scent of chocolate over the
thin, paling woman in black. ‘Look, I’m sorry if I opened
my Mersey tunnel gob prematurely. You still actually involved with
him?’

‘No,’ shuddered
Angela, thinking back to Curracloe, to his kisses and whispers and
lies. To his biggest lie
‒
that he’d never articulated his failed marriage in detail to a
third party. A tear fell soggily onto her prawn sandwich.

‘You were right about Kate.
He’s just gone back to her.’

‘Wait here,’ Rosie told the taxi
driver, and manhandled Angela out of the back seat. ‘Come on,
dearie, you might as well see for yourself, in case you think I’m
bluffing or bad-mouthing him.’

Angela felt confused and ill. Her
insides were protesting at all that red plonk and indiscriminate
consumption of sandwiches. She wasn’t even sure how she’d
ended up in the back of a taxi with Rosalind Jennings, former
inamorata of Conor McGinlay. As was she, now. They were wimmin bonded
by the shattering of trust too easily pledged and love too freely
given. Greenhorns or fully ripened saps, take your pick.

‘God!’ groaned
Angela, stumbling off the pavement and into the dark embrace of
dense, soft shrubbery. ‘I’m not well. Where am I?’

‘This way!’ Rosie
pinched her elbow not too gently and steered her away from the
thrubbing taxi engine and the safety of its headlights. Where is she
taking me? thought Angela in a mild panic. She stumbled again in the
darkness as Rosie’s fingers bit deeply to keep her upright.
They tottered round a corner and into the quietness of a garden, a
driveway.

‘Behold!’ snickered
Rosie and thrust Angela against cold, sharp metal. Angela clutched
unsteadily at curlicued spears rising from railings, paint flaking
onto her hands.

She knew these railings by sight
but not by touch; the
palings
around one side of 23 PaceIli Road. Above her loomed a post, topped
by a board that glimmered whitely in an opalescent night sky. It said
‘For Sale’.

‘I told you!’ cackled
Rosie. ‘He’s cleared off, upped sticks, headed for the
New World with a pocketful of cash from the sale of this place. You
were right. He has gone back to her.’

Angela grabbed the curlicues so
that they hurt her palms. ‘Love many, trust few, always paddle
your own canoe, as my mother says,’ she croaked. ‘Or,
never trust a man with testicles, as someone else once said to me.’

‘Too right!’
Shivering suddenly, Rosie grabbed her arm again. ‘Come on, our
carriage awaits.’

Angela stumbled gratefully
alongside her. They were heading back to Pauline’s, back to her
sleeping bag and the communion of wronged wimmin. She could get her
exploding head down, use that big, soft cat as a pillow.