Scarlet Feather (48 page)

Walter disappeared. The twins were running out, excited but anxious at the same time. It was so cruel and unfair to treat children like this. When he and Marcella had children, they would be loved and praised. He remembered that Marcella had not come home last night. And suddenly there was a taste of bile in his mouth.

‘Can I get anything for you, Tom? Tea, coffee, a drink, you’re so good to get the children for us.’

‘No, I’m just fine thanks, Lizzie, just wanted to do something to take my mind off things.’

‘That work is just killing the pair of you, Cathy’s pale as a ghost.’ ‘No, it’s not that at all, we both love the work… it’s just…’ He paused. There were so many things he couldn’t say. Like why

Cathy was so pale. Like why they had to work so hard because the premises had been done over. Like his own life being in tatters. ‘It’s just one thing, Lizzie, what time do they leave to go back to that place?’

‘Muttie’ll take them, it’s only a couple of buses, they have to be back before eight.’

‘I’ll come and pick them up at a quarter to.’

‘We can’t have you traipsing all over the city with—’

‘No, please, it suits me,’ and he was gone.

‘She stood at the window and watched him leave.

‘He’s had a row with your one, you know, the beautician,’ Lizzie said.

‘How on earth do you make that out?’Muttie asked.

‘Phyllis down the road, she was at the fashion show in Haywards, she said you wouldn’t see it in an X-rated movie and that your one, Tom’s girlfriend, had hardly a stitch on her.’

I’m very sorry we didn’t go, now that you come to think of it,’ said Muttie reflectively.

‘ I asked Geraldine about it and she said to keep you under lock and chain and not let you near it, so I didn’t,’ said Lizzie with some pride.

Cathy thought that when Neil came home she would drive him straight down to Holly’s hotel in Wicklow, and that they wouldn’t stop at Waterview. She took down all Neil’s messages for him on the answering machine, she packed him an overnight bag. Now he would have no excuse to pause at home and be distracted. She drove the Volvo to the airport and waited as the arriving passengers came though the gate. There he was: slightly tanned, so there must have been
some
free time. His handsome, animated face was full of the conversation he was having with one of his colleagues. He barely paused when he saw her.

She knew one of his companions, a very earnest man with no sense of humour but an ability to wear the other side down. She recognised another as a politician with an eye to self-advancement; the fourth was a tall, grey-haired man whom she didn’t know.

‘Good heavens, you’re Scarlet Feather!’ he said. ‘We were at a do you did for Freddie Flynn, simply superb affair, we kept your card. Now this is just the prompting we need… Neil, why didn’t you tell us you were married to this genius?’

‘Because then you’d have taken your eye off the ball out there and talked about Cathy’s food all the time,’ he said. But he put his arm around her shoulder. He was proud of her, she could see. It would all be fine, she must not be so nervous about telling him. They walked hand in hand to the car park.

‘I’m dying for a shower,’ he said. ‘We won’t spend long at home, though we’ll head straight down to Wicklow, a promise is a promise.’

Tom came out of one cinema in the big complex, went to the desk and bought a ticket for another. The blonde girl in the ticket office smiled at him.

‘Glutton for the movies, aren’t you?’ she said.

‘What?’ Tom said, startled.

‘That’s the third you’ve got today. Are you catching up or something?’

He was so handsome, big shoulders, fair hair, a gorgeous smile. The kind of fellow you hardly ever met these days.

‘Yeah, that’s what I’m doing. Catching up,’ he said.

She got the feeling he wasn’t talking to her properly, that he couldn’t really see her. She shrugged to herself. Maybe he was on drugs or something. When the cinema finally closed on Sunday there was still light in the sky. It must be the lights of the city causing a glow. Tom drove back to the premises and let himself in again. He wondered was the spy from the insurance company lurking somewhere, waiting for Tom to trash the place a second time. He wondered would he have anything to eat. After all, it was like a child in a sweetshop to be here. The rented freezers were stacked with food, or he could make a simple omelette. But food would taste like sawdust in his mouth. He sat down with his head in his hands. He lay down again on the sofa in the front office. He had slept here once before, in the run-up to the launch party last January. It had been cold then, and he had laid every coat he could find over him. Tonight was warm, and he needed nothing to cover him. He lay in the dark and looked at the ceiling. Soon he would sleep, and the awful, shocking hurt and jealousy would go away. But that hadn’t worked at the cinema. The plots of all those movies had meant nothing to him. All he could see was Marcella. Talk to her, talk to her, he told himself. She might well be sitting up in Stoneyfield, anguished, waiting for him to come back. But what would be the use if they were not able to talk? What could he say, or she say that made any difference now? With horror Tom realised that there was nothing to talk about any more. They were way beyond that now.

‘Any sign of Tom these days?’ Joe asked his parents.

‘Didn’t you see him on Friday night at this trade fashion show?’ Maura Feather sniffed. She still suspected that she had somehow been misled about the nature of that evening, and that neither of her sons had wanted her to attend.

‘Yes, of course I did.’

‘And isn’t that only the day before yesterday?’ his mother said.

‘Is that all it is? How extraordinary.’

It seemed like a lifetime since the night his brother’s great love Marcella had come back so unexpectedly to the hotel with Paul Newton to the party, instead of going to Tom’s little dinner in the Italian restaurant. Joe didn’t dare to think what Tom had made of it all.

Marcella telephoned four times on Saturday and was puzzled to find the answering machine on on each occasion. He had
known
she wasn’t coming back on Friday night. She had
told
him, for heaven’s sake. Why the sudden attitude? Maybe he was sitting waiting in Stoneyfield, brooding, sulking, looking like a little boy and needing to be cajoled and patted down.

‘Tom,’ she called as she went into the flat, but there was no reply.

The place was quiet, too quiet. Also tidy, too tidy. She realised at once that he wasn’t at home. She looked around for a note, but there wasn’t one. Marcella sat down and took out a cigarette. For a woman who claimed and believed that she didn’t smoke, she was getting through rather a lot of cigarettes these days.

‘I’m sorry if our dancing made you feel badly, Mother,’ Maud said on Sunday.

‘Dancing?’ Kay Mitchell asked, confused.

‘Father said the sound gave you a bad head and made you sick.’

‘I don’t remember,’ she said.

‘Could we get you a cup of tea or anything?’ Maud wondered.

‘That’s very nice of you, dear, but why, exactly?’

‘Well, you didn’t come down for breakfast or lunch or anything, and we thought you might be hungry,’ Simon explained.

‘No, you are kind, but not at all,’ she said.

Simon and Maud went downstairs. Their father was at the kitchen table in a very black humour altogether. Most of his rage was directed against old Barty, who had disappeared without trace, apparently. They knew from the past that it was unwise to ask about food when anyone was upset. So they took a tin of peaches and some bread out to the garden.

‘Do you think they’re sort of, you know… ?’ Simon asked Maud.

‘You mean, Mother’s nerves getting bad and Father about to wander?’ Maud spelled it out.

‘Something like that,’ Simon was upset.

‘Don’t let him see you crying. Let’s go into the shed.’

‘It’s locked, isn’t it?’

‘No, Walter went out earlier and left it open. I went in to see was there a skipping rope.’

Simon scooped up the peach tin and scurried into the shed. His father’s lectures on behaving like a man and to stop this very poofy dancing were becoming increasingly hard to take.

Tom went for a long run. It was a warm evening, and if he had been able to take in some of the things he saw he might have enjoyed himself. But he didn’t see very much. He let himself into the premises. At first he thought he saw someone watching near the courtyard, but decided he must be imagining things. He went in and slept on the big chintz sofa. He slept badly, but had he gone back to Stoneyfield he would not have slept at all.

The phone rang harshly beside her. This would be Freddie now. She would be very cool. It wasn’t Freddie Flynn, it was her niece Marian, ringing in floods of tears from Chicago. Through all the sobs she could only understand one word, repeated over and over, and it seemed to be the word ‘men’, then she heard how useless and unreliable and hopeless they were. Geraldine sighed a deep sigh. Harry was obviously as bad as every other man. They didn’t breed them better in Chicago than anywhere else. But gradually it became clear, Harry had
not
run off with someone else and cancelled the wedding. The wedding was still very much on, it was just that Harry and his family hadn’t booked the hotels for the rehearsal party and the recovery party, and they were now absolutely at their wits’ end about what to do. Geraldine made soothing noises.

‘Maybe Cathy will come up with something, she’s there on the ground… She won’t have an awful lot else to do, will she?’ Marian snuffled and wept.

‘Stop crying, Marian, it will all be all right.’

‘Geraldine, you’re so good at calming people down, how did you get to be a member of our family, answer me that.’

Geraldine stared dumbly across her expensive apartment and wondered about this also.

He reset the machine and left the apartment. He would not come back tonight, he had packed gear that would take him through the weekend. He would not be here to listen to her explanations. He did not want to listen to the fact that it didn’t matter that the party meant nothing, and that she was being so good and honest about having told him that she should begetting a pat on the back for it all.

It had taken Shona Burke twenty-four hours to know whether she would accept the invitation or not. She didn’t want to go, but the wording was very hard to refuse. She wondered how long it had taken to write. Days, possibly. She could not be expected to respond instantly. She would write her letter carefully too. When other people were out enjoying a summer Sunday, Shona Burke would spend the hours composing her reply.

Geraldine was also in her apartment in the Glenstar building. She could not believe that Freddie had done this to her. Called her in front of his wife and told her that plans had changed. Pretend he was talking to the dry-cleaner’s. She would not accept that. Not from anyone. No matter how tense the situation might be at home, no matter how great the pressure from his wife, and possible suspicion, Geraldine was owed more than a travesty of a phone call like that. When Freddie apologised, as he would, when he tried to explain how it seemed the only option open to him, she would listen to him coldly. As Geraldine had told him, she always behaved perfectly, she was the ideal mistress, she wished only the same consideration in return. She turned her wrist so that the jewels on her watch caught the light. Yes, of course he had been considerate to give her this and other gifIs, but that wasn’t the point. She needed respect as well.

‘Ah yes, but a hijack is a hijack. They have showers in Wicklow too. My only hope to get you to myself is if we go straight there…’

‘But hon, my messages…’ he wailed.

‘They’re in the glove compartment, all of them, and you can’t call anyone on a Sunday anyway,’ she said.

And in the afternoon sunshine they drove down to Wicklow, and he told her tales of the conference and the people they met and what had gone well and what had been stymied as usual.

Tom tidied up the apartment at Stoneyfield meticulously. He packed an overnight bag for himself and put it in the back of the van. The phone rang just as he was leaving. He listened to hear who it was. It might just be Marcella. Or it might not. But he would not pick it up. After the click there was a hesitant intake of breath, and then whoever it was hung up. He played it four times to see what he could decipher. It was definitely Marcella.

She was shocked that he had left the phone on the machine. After what she had done, she had expected him to be waiting and ready.

He wondered where she was calling from. He wondered why he had never got that call identify gadget that Cathy had… What would it have told him? It would have identified which hotel his brother had booked for this thug who had bought Marcella. Would it make it better if he could exonerate all the other hotels in Dublin and just blame one?

Holly’s hotel did a big Sunday-lunch trade, it was just the right distance from Dublin. People brought grannies and mothers-in-law there. It always reminded them of their youth, some kind of continuity in a changing world. It had an old-world charm, a lot of chintz and the same waitresses year after year. They checked in at the big, old-fashioned desk with all the keys to the rooms hanging there with their coloured tassels. People were moving to and fro in the hall behind them. Among them, Molly and Shay Hayes. There was a lot of shouting about what a small world it was.

‘Having a little anniversary, are you?’ Molly wanted to know.

‘No, Neil has just come back from Africa, he was at a forum on refugees,’ Cathy explained.

‘Hope you sorted them out,’ Shay said glumly.

‘Well, we did our best, Mr Hayes, but you know, there was so much red tape, and these things go so slowly.’

‘Still, as long as you put the boot in, we’ve quite enough of our own in need here, without letting in a lot of people who don’t know our ways…’

Neil’s mouth was open in astonishment.

‘We’ve got the room key, Neil, don’t you think we should go on up?’ Cathy said hastily.

‘I don’t exactly understand…’