Hush Hush (32 page)

‘Is it all off with Conor?’
asked Rachel politely. ‘I promise you, I only sold that dress
to him because he took a shine to it. And he was completely
impervious to my standard flirtation. He saw the real me all right,
and backed off. I think he heard me hissing with a forked tongue when
I spoke.’

‘I don’t know the
state of play between him and Angela,’ said Sadie briskly.
‘Angela’s wary of him because he’s a complicated
package of a man. Whereas with Robert, they both knew she could’ve
done better, so she felt secure in his gratitude. Which makes his
betrayal all the more shattering.’

Sadie shut her trap belatedly and
made for the door. She must get out of the habit of treating Rachel
as a confidant. It wouldn’t be easy after all these years, and
Angela would carry on doing it. Unless and until Sadie put a stop to
it. God help her, it was a poisoned chalice all right. Angela had
lost her husband. She probably wouldn’t thank a righteously
angry mother for taking away her best friend as well, never mind
exposing her dirty secret.

‘For what it’s worth,
I’m sorry,’ said Rachel on the doorstep. ‘I’m
sorry Angela has to cope with guilt over Robert’s death. That’s
why I’ve been dying for her to find happiness with someone
new.’

‘Well now,’ said
Sadie. ‘When all’s said and done, your concern is
touching and duly noted.’ It was an uncharacteristic flourish
of targeted sarcasm. She felt pleased with it as she walked away.

‘Who is it?’ yelled Angela, sloshing
tea dregs into the sink. She’d just completed her first day
back at work and was too bone-tired to walk to the door and find out
for herself. If it was Jehovah’s Witnesses, they’d soon
tire of trying to offer salvation through the letterbox.

‘It’s me, Ange,’
a strangely listless-sounding Rachel called instead. She made no
comment about the fact that the doorbell still wasn’t fixed.

Angela tugged open the door,
sighing. ‘Evening, Rache. Look if this is another pep-talk
about my love life, can it wait till I’m up to dealing with it?
You can imagine what Mum’s been like.’

‘It can’t wait, no,’
said Rachel, with unusual crispness. She moved past Angela into the
hallway, unwinding her soft woollen scarf with fumbling fingers. They
weren’t just fumbling, Angela noticed. They were shaking. And
her hair, usually immaculate, had a slightly greasy sheen. It had to
be Marshall.

Angela’s mind raced with
possibilities. The likeliest was that he’d called time on the
relationship
‒
perhaps
the first man to do so in a long while
‒
and Rachel had reached that age and stage where it was no longer
water off a perfectly exfoliated back. At once, Angela was all
concern. Rachel was owed a long, girly listen-to about her life.
’Plonk yourself down, Rache. Tea or something stronger?’

‘Whiskey, and pour one for
yourself,’ advised Rachel, following her into the kitchen. ‘I
don’t want to sit. I want to get this over with.’

Angela paused. ‘I sort of
guessed Marshall was married. Has his wife found out?’

‘No. Sadie found out.’
Rachel looked down at her shapely nails. ‘So I thought you’d
better find out before she decides to spread the word on my behalf.
It’s about me and another married man, actually.’

‘But what’s Ma got to
do with it?’ Angela had forgotten all about the whiskey.

Rachel looked up at her, blue
eyes couched in shadows. ‘I’d prefer it if you guessed.’

‘Guess what? Come off it,
Rachel. I never was a code-cracker.’

‘Fuck it, anyway,’
said Rachel with feeling and took a deep breath. ‘I had a
one-night stand with Robert. I was the one who had dinner with him.
If I had any idea that you suspected him all along, I’d have
come clean before now and spared you the guilt of an unproven
accusation and a pointless grudge match against that woman in the
travel agent’s. May I sit down?’ Suddenly, Rachel was
standing on ceremony, stressing the formality of her announcement and
the chasm she’d just opened up between them.

Angela sat down instead. She
simply gaped at her best friend, whose beauty was now distorted by
the ugliness of deception, her scalloped nails the claws of a
mistress hooking spoken-for men. ‘You utter fucking bitch,’
she managed at last in a tone of wonder. ‘How many other
women’s lives have you wrecked?’

‘Oh, so you’re
suddenly sorry for Marshall’s wife, I take it? But if I’d
just confessed to a split-up with him, you’d have been all
sympathy, without a thought for the relieved wifey who’d got
him back.’

‘You absolute bitch,’
repeated Angela in a daze. ‘All those months of fucking guilt.
I was hardly able to think straight. Every memory of him was poisoned
by suspicion. And you
…
hang on! Jesus, Mary and Joseph and a cast of thousands, how did Ma
find out?’

Rachel told her, grateful for a
chance to side-step the issue of her utter fucking bitchiness. Angela
wanted to flay her best friend’s perfect features. But she was
stopped by the realisation that Rachel would let her. Rachel would
take her punishment on the chin and not fight back. She had no heart
for self-justification because she had no sense of guilt, only a
disinterested awareness of upsetting less dispassionate people with
her behaviour. She had no heart at all.

‘You,’ said Angela,
trembling, ‘are a vapid, empty excuse for a human being. At
least poor Robert would’ve felt guilt afterwards. Oh my God.
Oh, dear God!’

The tears spilt out of Angela’s
eyes in a purgative torrent. She put her hands over her face,
perversely ashamed of her loss of control in front of Rachel.

Rachel flapped a clean paper
hanky, glimpsed by Angela through wet fingers as she sobbed. She
ignored the hanky, so Rachel put a hand on her heaving shoulder and
left it there, a light, consoling touch, almost coolly impersonal and
awaiting its next instruction from Angela’s body language.

Angela’s shoulder pitched
and tossed under the hand’s dry-leaf weight. To think that she
was weak enough to let Rachel comfort her, to let Rachel slip back
into the role of patiently abiding counsellor when she herself had
triggered the breakdown!

‘Fuck off out of it,
Rachel!’

‘I can’t just leave
you like this, Ange.’

‘It’s a bit late for
your touching concern.’

‘Look, Robert was in bits
over it. I invited him to dinner, got him very drunk and came on to
him like the Tasmanian she-devil. I practically trussed and bound and
raped the bloke, to be honest. My date had blown me out and I was
feeling vengeful towards men in general, while needing a bit of
sexual reassurance.’

Angela wiped her face with the
back of her hand. ‘Then why,’ she snivelled, ‘didn’t
you hitch your skirt for passing lorry drivers, like every other
local tart? Or try a dildo?’

‘I don’t know, I
really don’t. Except, I didn’t plan it. And Robert
certainly never had it in mind.’

Angela grabbed the hanky off the
kitchen table and blew her nose. ‘The bloody swine! Telling me
I was paranoid, going off on a tangent about Mum. He needn’t
think he’ll get away with this, just because he’s snuffed
it! I’ll dig him up and have him cremated! He was always scared
of naked flames. Wouldn’t go near a barbecue or a bonfire in
case a sausage exploded.’ She choked on a harsh laugh that
turned into a sob.

‘I’ll make you a
sandwich,’ offered Rachel. ‘I’d be grateful for
something to do, and if I know you, you won’t bother to eat
tonight otherwise.’

‘Oh you do know me, that’s
the problem. You and him both. You risked jumping into the sack
together because thick old Ange was so easy to fool.’

‘It was never like that.’

Angela stood up, suddenly bereft
of fight. She stumbled out of the kitchen and up the stairs to the
womb-like sanctuary of her duvet, wrapping it round her and fattening
its fourteen-tog cotton with her tears. If there was ever a time when
she needed Conor McGinlay, this was it. Not so much to comfort her
(after all, the whole fiasco didn’t show either her marriage or
her husband in a light that flattered her wifely qualities), as to
remind her that she’d moved on, regained control of her life.

But as Rachel’s confession
had made clear, her comeback from Robert’s death had been as
brittle as the icing on Miss Havisham’s wedding cake, nibbled
away by the sharp teeth of self-deception until it finally crumbled
to dust when the shutters were flung open on the truth. She’d
never forgiven Robert for hiding something or herself for doubting
him. How did you come back from that contradiction?

Still crying, she drifted off to
sleep.

When she awoke, a cold toasted
cheese sandwich sat on the bedside table, next to a cup of scummy
tea. Her stomach rumbled its protest over her emotional objection to
sustenance. A healthy appetite was hardly part of the pining process.
After a moment’s hesitation, she wolfed down the cold, greasy
sandwich and lukewarm tea, perfectly spiked with just the right
amount of sugar. Well, Rachel wouldn’t neglect an intimate
kindness like that, would she? The tears came again but this time,
her mind worked in tandem with her swirling emotions.

Hobbling downstairs in the duvet
with the dirty crockery, she switched on the kitchen light. Rachel,
sitting at the kitchen table, lifted her hands against the blinding
light.

‘Why the fuck are you still
here?’

‘Don’t laugh if I
tell you,’ replied Rachel in a furry voice.

Angela glared. ‘It wasn’t
top of my agenda.’

Rachel shoved the whiskey bottle
into the centre of the table. ‘I was hoping, if I drank enough
of this stuff, I could make myself cry.’

‘So I’d feel sorry
for you instead of wishing you dead?’

‘No,’ hiccuped Rachel
regretfully. ‘So I could feel as bad as I’m supposed to
about betraying my best friend. But I can’t. See, the mascara’s
still perfectly dry. You’re right, I am a vapid human being. I
couldn’t even cry on cue if a funeral demanded it.’

‘And that,’ growled
Angela, ‘is supposed to excuse your total lack of morals? The
old argument that predators can’t help their characters?’

‘Not at all,’ sighed
Rachel, her puffy face testament to her whiskey consumption. ‘It’s
supposed to make you realise how lucky you are, Ange. Better to have
loved and lost than never to have felt more than a collection of
nerve-ends stimulated in the groin area, my only approximation to
love.’

‘Oh, get out!’ roared
Angela. ‘I’m sick to death of your rational analysis of
your alley-cat behaviour. And I don’t care if you’re so
drunk, you crash the car on the way home, though you’d better
hope I don’t ring the plods and tip them off.’

‘Consider me gone,’
said Rachel with grave dignity and only swayed a little bit as she
walked to the front door.

Angela lay face down on her beach towel, heat
buzzing in her ears. Above the rim of her sunglasses, balanced
painfully on her blistered nose, she had an uninterrupted view of the
beach. The pale yellow sand was mostly unpopulated and as flat as
plaited rope, a heat haze thickening its surface and vapourising
under orange and blue beach umbrellas. Angela squinted up at their
own umbrella. The sun had edged round it, pouncing eagerly on her
exposed back. She stood up to reposition her towel.
‘
The
beach is the same colour as Rachel’s hair,’ she said,
deliberately invoking The Name to gauge Sadie’s reaction.

‘Hmm,’ said Sadie
non-committally, reading
Woman’s Weekly
from her
deck-chair, huddled against the umbrella pole. ‘You want to be
careful, Ange, or your shoulders will go the same way as your nose.
Need more lotion?’

‘So we can’t mention
her name? I was thinking, at least she had the guts to tell me face
to face.’

‘Only to get in her version
before I dished the dirt,’ snorted Sadie. ‘The sun’s
softening your brain, lovey.’

‘To err is human, to
forgive divine, as you die-hard Christians never seem to say when put
to the test,’ sniped Angela controversially. Seeing her
mother’s face sag, she backtracked quickly. ‘You’re
right of course, Ma, there are no extenuating circumstances.
This is my second trip away in a matter of months. Marla’s none
too impressed. I’ll probably have to do unpaid overtime for the
next decade.’

‘You’re on a mission
of mercy, taking your creaky-jointed mother to warmer climes,’
flapped Sadie with her magazine. ‘You know, like them artists
who thought a nice, sunny holiday would cure their TB.’ Best
not to point out that it was in fact Angela’s third holiday in
five months, if she included the weekend in Curracloe.

Angela eyed her mother with new
respect. It was Sadie who’d picked out the holiday in a
brochure and avoided booking it at Hartley’s.

The tourist trade in this corner
of Rhodes was largely restricted to day-trippers who poured off a
steamer and bought sponges in the quayside shops before grabbing a
quick lunch in a waterfront café and reboarding the steamer.
The action centred round the jetty, where smacks with painted prows
bobbed on their moorings. Behind the vine-clad tavernas lay steep
streets winding upwards between white, cubed houses towards a
clifftop monastery.

Sadie and Angela had an apartment
‒
three cool,
whitewashed rooms
‒
over one of the quieter harbourside tavernas.

Since their arrival two days
earlier, they’d developed a routine. Mornings on the beach,
lunch at the same taverna (Yanni gave them big helpings and a
discount), then up to their rooms for a two-hour siesta, and down in
the cool of the evening to take a leisurely stroll and eat dinner.
Sadie was lapping it up. She’d been abroad before, on family
holidays to the Costa del Sol when Angela and Owen were small. But
here, she was in her element. For one who feared enforced inactivity,
the luxury of unplanned hours filled her with a rich drowsiness, much
as the sunshine leaked into her joints, softening spiked ridges of
pain.