The Truth Club (14 page)

I stir my cappuccino and watch the thick whorls covered in chocolate powder. Becky is probably back in New Zealand by
n
ow, anyway. She was only over for a visit. I must cook Diarmuid
a lovely meal – big fat steaks and broccoli and chips, his favourite
– and get in a big box of Turkish Delight. I can’t believe how
patient and understanding he’s been. It’s high time I appreciated
him more. I was so
relieved
to marry him. I don’t know why I’ve
allowed myself to have these doubts. Being single was so lonely.

Out of nowhere I think of Nathaniel, the beautiful blue-eyed
stranger, but this time I don’t feel a pang of regret. He’s just a nice
memory that floats back into my head every so often.

My mobile rings just as I’m lifting the cup to my lips. Feck it,
anyway. Sometimes I wonder if it really is an advantage to be quite so accessible. I consider leaving it in my bag, but I realise it could be Diarmuid. I really want to speak to Diarmuid. He
hasn’t phoned for days because he’s studying for exams. I hope he
does well.

‘Sally, you have to stop asking Marie about DeeDee.’ It isn’t Diarmuid; it’s April. She feels no need to build up to a subject gradually.

‘How do you know I’ve been asking her about DeeDee?’ I frown. I also sit up straight and clench an armrest.

‘She told me when she rang yesterday. She was wondering whether she should change the date of the party so I could be there, but I told her I was fully booked up for the whole of  
September. I told her there were weddings and very important meetings and, of course, the conference.’

‘I see.’ April is a very good liar. She does it with real conviction.

‘Anyway, I got into her good books by saying I’d tell you to stop asking her about DeeDee. She brought it up because she knows I agree with her about things like that. There’s no point poking around in the past.’

‘But this is the present,’ I say, trying to keep the irritation from
my voice. ‘If DeeDee’s alive, we could meet her
now.
’

‘Why should we want to?’ April asks, and for a moment I almost agree with her. Her minimalist view of life sometimes seems like a restful contrast to my own.

‘Aggie wants to meet her before she…’ I can’t bear to say ‘dies’,
so I say, ‘It’s understandable, isn’t it – wanting to see your sister
again?’

April doesn’t answer that. There are times when we talk when
I could burst into tears. Instead she says, ‘So how are you,
anyway? Are you dating again?’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ I splutter. ‘Of course I’m not dating again. I’m
married.’

‘I think you should date again. It would get you out of
yourself.’ April has clearly formed the opinion that I am an
introspective, miserable person who spends her spare time
hunting for music boxes in attics.

‘Look, I don’t want to date anyone, OK?’ I say fiercely. ‘I’ll probably go back to Diarmuid, but if I stay single, I… I want to keep loads of cats and… spend the weekends haring around the countryside on my mountain bike.’ I hope this extravagant declaration will silence her.

It doesn’t. She just laughs and says, ‘Oh, you are funny sometimes.’

‘I mean it!’ I spit.

‘Oh, come on. You’re not a mountain-bike type of person,’ she g
iggles. ‘Anyway, I’d better go; I’ve got a meeting. Talk to you soon.’ The line goes dead.

I sit there for a while in a sort of trance. Sometimes April’s
phone calls feel like ambushes. They make me say strange things.
No wonder she thinks I’m not a mountain-bike kind of person; she was too small to remember that there was a time when I wanted a mountain bike with all my soul. My best friend Astrid had one. It was about freedom and adventure. A mountain bike seemed like a window to a whole new world. The Wild West is
still wild, despite its veneer of civility, and I was wild too – wild
in my heart.

But Mum and Dad just didn’t like the idea of the mountain bike. They didn’t want their well-behaved, pigtailed daughter taking off for dry brown hills and lumbering over tough, dusty terrain. What if I got stranded someplace with a flat tyre or something else that had to be fixed? Bikes could be quite
temperamental. And a young girl shouldn’t be out in the wilds on
her own, anyway; an adult should be present. I pleaded and
pleaded, but they wouldn’t budge. It did make them think I
should have a hobby, so they decided I should take piano lessons,
which I hated.

But years later, when April said she wanted a mountain bike, things were different. We were back in Ireland, my parents had managed not to divorce and April appeared to be a full genetic member of the family; so, in the grand scheme of things, a mountain bike didn’t seem such a big deal. She got one. It was hardly even discussed. She took off on her bike and then came
back on it, and we began to see her as a rugged, outdoorsy person
who took risks and had adventures. And maybe people would have seen me that way, too, if I’d got my mountain bike; but I didn’t.

And now I’m lost. I’ve left the café immersed in these
memories, and I must have walked straight past the building
w
here the reception is being held. The street numbers don’t seem
to follow any logical pattern; even the landmarks Greta men
tioned don’t seem to exist. Time has fast-forwarded to five-twenty
in what seems like three minutes. Greta will be angry, because all
her favours come at a price: I am virtually under orders to attend
this reception and walk around looking fascinated and making careful notes while interviewing ‘top young designers’.

Maybe I should just go somewhere else. Sit by the pond in St Stephen’s Green and dream…

But of course I can’t. What am I thinking? I go into a
newsagent’s and ask them where the store is; it’s just down the
road, apparently, on the left. How can I have missed it? I race out.
Beads of perspiration are gathering on my forehead. There it is –
of course it is. I dart through the huge glass door.

I scan the room. I don’t see
The Sunday Lunch
’s
photographer. That will disappoint Greta. She seems to think I can boss the pictures editor around and demand that he include certain photographs in the paper, but I simply don’t have that kind of
clout. I grab a glass of sparkling water. I mustn’t have any wine.
I must stay sober and focused. I must dart around the room like a blue-arsed fly, looking fascinated.

I take a deep breath and am about to launch myself into the
throng when I see him. He is standing by the big rosewood drinks
table – the man I somehow know, although I have never even spoken to him. Nathaniel, the beautiful blue-eyed stranger.

Chapter
Nine

I stare at the
Beautiful Stranger as though he were a famous
sculpture in a Florence art gallery. I gawp like an American
tourist who has never been to Europe before and finds it all
fascinating. I want to reach out and touch him, trace the beautiful
dark curve of his eyelashes. I’ve never seen eyelashes like that before, so long and thick, above such clear blue eyes.

‘Sally, you made it!’ Greta swoops down on me. ‘What
happened to you? There are so many people I want you to meet.’
She looks more tall and muscular than ever, and her long black
hair is tied up in a chignon. She’s wearing a bat-winged silk thing
that she probably painted herself.

Greta grabs my arm and hauls me over to a small, wiry man
who appears to be wearing white cotton pyjamas. ‘This is Tobias
Armitage.’ She beams at us both. ‘Sally just loves your sofas,
Tobias. She’s from
The Sunday Lunch.
’
In Greta’s world, people
don’t just like sofas, they
love
them. It’s her way of bolstering the
artistic temperaments of her clients.

Tobias looks at me and I look at Tobias. I’ve never heard of his
sofas, but this is a mere technical detail. Tobias clearly sees this as
a chance for sofa fame and grabs it with his unusually hairy
hands. The hairs are dark and long, and I find myself looking at them for far longer than is polite. I can’t seem to focus on what he’s saying.

I keep glancing over at Nathaniel to see if he’s still there; I almost expect him to disappear like a mirage.
What’s he doing here?
I think.
I thought he’d gone to live in New York.

According to Tobias, one of the high points of anybody’s life is
choosing a sofa – preferably one of
his
sofas. ‘These days, people
want more from a sofa than just a place to sit,’ he tells me in his
nasal voice. He also has nose hair. ‘In many ways, a sofa is a new
member of the family.’

Nathaniel is leaning languidly against a large and very minimal
wardrobe, eating a sausage roll. He looks relaxed and laconic. I
notice this even though I am scribbling furiously in my notebook,
noting that Tobias likes the colours anthracite, ‘donkey’, burgundy
and oatmeal. He believes it is worth paying that bit extra for built-
in stain-resistant fabric protection. Sofas are his life.

I must ring Diarmuid. I must ring him right now and tell him
to take me away from here. I need counselling. I need someone to
hypnotise me out of these ridiculous feelings I have for this man. Nathaniel is all icing and no cake, I’m sure of it. I am not the sort
of person this happens to. It doesn’t happen to anyone.

And then I remember I am wrong. It does happen to some people. It happened to my parents. My father saw my mother
across a crowded room after a concert, and that was it. He loved
her high, gleeful laugh, her irreverence. He said there was a
golden buzz in the air around her; even across the room, he could
feel it. He used to talk about that night a lot when I was little. I knew the story as well as ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’. I loved that story; and then he stopped telling it. You can’t tell that kind of story with a broken heart.

I want to run away. I can’t stay in this room with Nathaniel.
He may look over at any moment, and I may swoon with longing
into Tobias’s big hairy arms. Tobias also has tufts of hair growing
out of his ears.

‘Try to obtain a fabric swatch before making a decision,’ Tobias is saying. ‘Especially if you’re matching your sofa to an existing colour scheme.’

Tobias’s sofas are driving me crazy. I feel antsy and itchy, like
when I was a kid and wanted to hare off into the hills on my
mountain bike.

‘Thank you so much, Tobias; that was really… interesting. I’d
better go off now and…’

‘I understand, Sally. Places to go, people to see.’ He smiles jauntily. There are even long dark hairs peeping over the top of his open shirt. He must look like a gorilla in bed.

I really want a huge glass of wine. And a cigarette. I used to smoke with Erika, when we were sitting around at social events
realising that we would never meet anything close to a soulmate. As we were smoking our cigarettes, we often said we wished we
were lesbians, because Dublin seemed so full of interesting, warm-hearted women who kept meeting each other when they were supposed to be meeting interesting, warm-hearted men. Deep down, we began to prefer women in many ways (though
not in bed); women just seemed
nicer.
I even felt that way when I
married Diarmuid.

But I don’t feel like that when I look at Nathaniel. He’s
reminding me of all the stupid longings I thought I’d ditched. My
poor father must have felt just like this when he saw my mother,
and look what happened to him. Maybe I should just go over to
Nathaniel and say something incredibly rude. That would put an
end to it.