The Woman Who Stole My Life (35 page)

In the flurry of preparing for Ireland, the weirdness with Gilda got washed away. There was just one moment, the day following our exchange, when I opened the door to her for our Pilates class and we eyed each other warily.

‘Hey, about yesterday –’ she said.

‘Please, Gilda, I overreacted –’

‘No, I’m an idiot. I should’ve thought things through.’

‘I’m too sensitive about Mannix. Come in. I’m sorry.’

‘I’m sorry too.’ She stepped into the hall.

‘I’m sorrier.’

‘I’m the sorriest.’

‘No, I am.’

We both had a little laugh and, all of a sudden, things were okay again. As Mannix had said, the world was full of young and beautiful women. If I regarded them all as threats I’d be utterly destroyed.

‘Just know,’ she said. ‘I’m devoted to you.’

I realized I truly believed her. Even though I paid her, Gilda was my friend and more. She gave me her optimism and enthusiasm and she provided solutions to problems that were way beyond her remit. She demonstrated over and over again how much she cared about me.

‘Everything is fine,’ I said. ‘We’re good.’

‘Phew. So what about your trip to Ireland? How great is that? I can style your clothes for it.’

‘Well, I’m only going for a week and I’m just visiting Dublin and the weather will be consistent, as in consistently awful, but … Oh sorry, Gilda, that sounded ungrateful. Thanks, it would be great if you did my clothes.’

‘So!’ Ned Mount twinkled at me. ‘Did you pray a lot when you were in the bed in the hospital?’

‘Of course I did.’ I stared into his shrewd, intelligent eyes. ‘The way I pray before I look at my credit card bill!’

Ned Mount laughed, I laughed, the production staff laughed and the twenty or so men who had insisted on accompanying me to the radio interview, and who were watching avidly through the soundproofed glass, they too laughed.

‘You were very brave,’ Ned Mount said.

‘Ah, I wasn’t,’ I said. ‘Shur, you just get on with things.’

‘We’ve been flooded with positive tweets and emails,’ he said. ‘I’ll just read a few out. “Stella Sweeney is a very brave woman.” “I had a stroke last year and Stella’s story gives me hope that I’ll get better.” “I’m loving Stella’s humble, no-nonsense attitude. We could do with a few more like her in this country of whingers and bellyachers.” There are literally hundreds more like that,’ Ned Mount said. ‘And I have to say I echo the sentiments.’

‘Thank you,’ I murmured, mortified. ‘Thank you.’

‘So that’s Stella Sweeney, listeners. Her book, which I’m sure you already know about, is called
One Blink at a Time
and she’ll be signing copies at three o’clock on Saturday in Eason’s, O’Connell Street. I’ll be back after this break.’

He took off his headphones and said, ‘Thanks, that was great.’

‘Thank
you.
And thanks –’ I flicked a glance at Mannix,
Ryan, Enda, even Roland and Uncle Peter, who were all pressing up against the glass wearing clamouring, beseeching looks – ‘for coming out and saying hello to my friends.’

‘No bother.’ Ned Mount stood up. ‘And well done again. I don’t know how you endured that time in the hospital. You must be very special.’

‘I’m not. I’m off-the-scale ordinary.’ My face blazed with heat.

‘Now, brace yourself,’ I said, as he opened the door and the mob of men descended on him. I couldn’t stop smiling as I watched Enda Mulreid earnestly trying to convey to Ned Mount what the Big Event had meant to him – apparently he had lost his virginity to ‘Jump Off a Cliff’. That was something I
didn’t
need to know.

Other than hearing unwanted details about Enda Mulreid’s sex life, this trip had been wonderful. Everywhere I went, people turned up in droves and I was celebrated for surviving. One of the reviews called me ‘the Accidental Guru’. ‘You give us hope,’ I kept being told. ‘Your story gives us hope.’

I went on
Saturday Night In
, where Maurice McNice described me as ‘the woman who’s been taking America by storm’, which was far from the truth, but for a while I joined in with the fiction and agreed that yes, it felt lovely to be a success.

Mannix and I stayed in the Merrion, where I ate and drank what I wanted and the only exercise I did was clinking wine glasses with Mannix. For a week I pretended Gilda didn’t exist.

Of course it wasn’t all positive. One newspaper ran a scathing review, headlined: ‘The poor man’s Paulo Coelho? More like, the bankrupt woman’s.’ And one of the more vicious lines said, ‘It took me longer to read this book than it took the author to write it.’

Then my appearance on Maurice McNice was savaged by a TV journalist called William Fairey, who said, ‘Yet another self-pitying woman uses her “sad” story to try to flog a couple of her rubbish books to other self-pitying women.’

Roland – who had come to see Mannix and me in the hotel – took one look at it and laughed. ‘William Fairey is a bitter prick. He’s failed at everything except being bitter. He is so beneath you, Stella. He’s beneath all of us. He’s beyond contempt.’

In May, Georgie breezed through New York for a couple of days, en route to Peru.

‘Why’s she going there?’ Karen asked me, over the phone.

‘To “find herself”.’

‘Feck’s sake,’ Karen said. ‘The rest of us have to “find” ourselves in the borough we were born and brought up in, but posh girls like her can only find themselves by travelling to another continent and doing yoga on hilltops at dawn. Will she be gone for long?’

‘Indefinitely, she says.’

‘So who’s running her boutique?’

‘The woman who’s been managing it.’

‘Well, if Georgie ever needs any help,’ Karen strove to sound like she didn’t really care, ‘ever needs anyone to cast an eye over the figures or anything, I could always do it.’

‘Grand.’

‘How do I look, Mom? Mannix?’ Betsy asked.

She stood in the living-room doorway, wearing a minty-green satin ball gown, with workman’s boots and an XL lumberjack shirt. Her hair was wild and uncombed and she’d drawn wobbly lines of thick black eye-pencil right up to her hairline. But nothing could stop her being beautiful.

‘You look fabulous, sweetheart,’ I said.

‘You absolutely do,’ Mannix echoed. ‘Happy prom.’

The bell rang and Betsy said, ‘The guys are here!’

Academy Manhattan’s prom was as touchy-feely as the rest of its ethos: the pupils were ‘encouraged’ to embrace a simple night, with no limos, no corsages, no coupling-up. A neighbourhood Tyrolean restaurant had been filled with long tables and there was no seating plan, so everyone could pile in and no one would feel left out. Apparently the Prom Queen was a boy.

‘Come down to wave me off,’ Betsy said. ‘Take lots of photos for Dad.’

Idling kerbside in the late May sunset was an orange VW camper van which had been hired for the night. It was filled with teenagers, both boys and girls. The side door rattled open and I clicked off shot after shot. From what I could see, only one person had bothered with a tux – a stout girl, with slicked-back hair and vampiric eyes and lips.

‘Get in, Betsy, get in!’ Arms reached out to grab her and she tumbled in, and, amid squealing and shrieking, the van drove away.

Mannix watched them go, a wistful look on his face.

‘Are you going to cry again?’ I asked him.

Betsy had had her high-school graduation ceremony earlier that day, which Mannix had attended because Ryan said he couldn’t afford the flight. As Betsy stood on the stage and accepted her rolled-up parchment and smiled shyly and with pride, I was sure I saw a little tear in Mannix’s eye.

He denied it, of course, but it was at times like that that I was reminded of how he’d once longed for kids of his own.

‘Shep,’ I said to him, as we watched the VW van shoot off down the street. ‘You, me and Shep, walking on the beach. Focus on Shep.’

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Shep.’

Shep had become our security-blanket word, our comfort word.

We went back upstairs to the apartment and I said, ‘I’m just going to send some photos to Ryan. Then he’s going to Skype me and go mad about Betsy’s non-glammy outfit.’

‘Fuck him,’ Mannix said. ‘She looked great.’

‘I’d say he’ll be on in less than five minutes.’

‘I give it three.’

Mannix won. In two minutes, fifty-eight seconds, Ryan’s furious face appeared on screen. ‘It was her prom!’ he yelled. ‘What the hell was she wearing?’

‘She’s finding her look. Let it happen.’

‘And what did her yearbook say?’

I swallowed. This was going to be tough. ‘She was voted “Pupil most likely to be happy”.’

As expected, Ryan went berserk. ‘This is a disgrace!’ he raged from across the Atlantic. ‘This is practically an insult. Who the hell wants to be happy? What about successful? Rich? Powerful?’

‘Is happy so bad?’

‘Is she still at that nanny lark?’

Betsy had caused massive upset some weeks back when she’d outlined her future plans by saying she wanted to be a nanny.

‘That’s not a career,’ I’d said.

‘Oh really?’ She’d shown an uncharacteristic flash of steel. ‘Whose life is it, exactly?’

‘Betsy, you need to go to third-level education.’

‘Let’s face it, Mom, I’m not the brightest, I mean not academically.’

‘You are bright! You’re fluent in Spanish and Japanese. And you’re extremely gifted at Art and Design, your teacher says so. This is my fault,’ I’d said. ‘We arrived too late in the
USA to start prepping you for an Ivy League school. We should have come a year earlier.’

‘Mom, are you tripping? Even if that made any sense – Ivy
League
? I’ll never be that person.’

I couldn’t get a read on Betsy. She was so out of step with the rest of her generation and, indeed, the entire Western world – she lacked the desire that everyone burned with, to find a job that paid shedloads.

I’d spent most of my life worrying about her future – hers and Jeffrey’s. Even while I’d been paralysed in hospital I’d devoted a huge amount of time to praying that Ryan was supervising their homework properly. But Betsy herself didn’t seem bothered. It wasn’t that she was lazy, just abnormally laid-back.

I flip-flopped between being worried sick about her and wondering if there was anything wrong with actually being content with one’s life.

‘She’s knocked the nanny thing on the head,’ I told Ryan. ‘She says now she wants to be an art therapist.’

‘Art?’ he barked.

Ryan had the weirdest attitude to either of the kids showing any aptitude for art. I couldn’t decide if he wanted to be the only artist in the family. Or if he despised art because he’d failed at it.

‘Art therapy,’ I said. ‘It’s a different thing.’ I spoke soothingly, because I had another piece of unpleasant news to deliver. ‘She interviewed well at a couple of liberal-arts universities. But first she’s taking a year off.’

‘To do fecking what?’

‘Well …’

‘Oh no. She’s not coming here, is she?’

‘Ryan, you’re her dad. She misses you, she misses home. Anyway, it’ll be just a short visit. Then she’s going to Asia for
three months. Five others from her class are going. It’ll be fine.’

‘Sweet suffering Jesus,’ he muttered. ‘And that other eejit is just as bad.’

That other eejit being poor Jeffrey.

It was true that Jeffrey hadn’t really found his groove, academically speaking. It had been established that he wasn’t ‘mathematically minded’. But he wasn’t exactly excelling in the more artsy subjects either. At Ryan’s insistence, we’d steered him towards what Ryan called the ‘more manly’ subjects, like economics and business; but that hadn’t taken off either. There was a short spell when he had shown an almost uncanny aptitude for Mandarin, but that had proved to be a disappointing blip.

‘I gave them everything,’ Ryan said. ‘Ungrateful little fuckers. This is your fault,’ he said. ‘Just say it for me.’

‘This is my fault. There’s one thing you’ll like,’ I said. ‘Jeffrey’s made a rich friend. He’s been invited to their place in Nantucket for a month.’

‘How rich?’

‘Someone said his dad owns half of Illinois.’

There really wasn’t anything negative Ryan could say about that, no matter what angle he came at it from, so, after a curt farewell, he hung up.

Mannix swished his glass of wine. ‘I’m getting shades of impertinence.’

‘Insolence, I’d call it,’ Roland said, smacking his lips.

I stuck my nose in my glass and said, ‘Could I be getting the tiniest hint of … actual
rudeness
?’

Mannix and I were on holiday with Roland in the wine country in northern California.

In early June, Betsy had departed on her trip to Asia via Ireland, and Jeffrey had gone to Nantucket with his rich new friend. All of a sudden, Mannix and I were alone in New York.

‘It’s weird here without them,’ Mannix said.

‘I know. But it’s a good chance to start the second book.’

‘Why don’t we go on holiday?’ Mannix said. ‘Just for a week?’

‘No way.’ I was adamant. I kept a beady eye on our money. A quarter of a million dollars had sounded huge – it
was
huge – but our rent and taxes and the day-to-day costs of living in New York were crippling. All kinds of unexpected expenses had popped up – like hiring a nanny to take care of the kids while I was on tour – and the advance was eroding much more quickly than I’d anticipated.

‘You’ve had a tough year,’ Mannix said. ‘You’ve worked so hard; you need a rest.’

‘I know, but …’

‘How would you feel about going someplace with Roland?’

‘Roland?’ I practically shrieked. ‘Where’s Roland going to get money for a holiday from?’

‘He’s just brokered the sale of an office block and he’s paid off a big lump of his debts. He says there are a couple of other things in the pipeline. And he’s been behaving so well, going to his Debtors Anonymous meetings …’

I chewed my lip.

‘Just for a week,’ Mannix repeated.

‘I’m agreeing to nothing, but where would we go?’

‘Wherever you like.’ He shrugged. ‘The wine country in California?’

‘Would it be nice?’ I asked, suspiciously.

‘I’d say it would be wonderful.’

And, oh God, I was so tempted.

‘Okay.’ I squeezed my eyes shut. ‘Okay. Do it. Let’s do it!’

It all came together very quickly. We met Roland in San Francisco and hired a car and drove north, stopping off at vineyards and artisanal food-makers during the days and every evening staying at ‘inns’ which were in actuality five-star hotels but with chintz. They had stables and Michelin-starred restaurants and private wineries.

It was blissful – the sunshine, the daily drives through beautiful countryside and the pleasure at seeing Mannix so happy.

Roland was part of some secretive foodie online collective – each morning he input his GPS coordinates and we were given magical-mystery-tour directions to the location of some remote baker who ground his own flour by hand, or a duo of brothers who used some extraordinary technique for smoking bacon.

I wasn’t a foodie, I didn’t care if bread came from a massive factory or from an ancient water-mill, but each adventure
was great fun. Roland was a delight, always positive, always good company, but not one of those abrasive entertainers who needed constant attention.

Every night, at the chintzy inns, we had elaborate tasting menus, where Mannix and Roland tried to push me out of my comfort zone.

‘I can’t believe you’ve never had oysters!’ they exclaimed on the first night.

‘Or pigeon,’ I said. ‘Or quail’s eggs. And I’m not starting now.’

They tried to tempt me with tiny amounts on their forks but I wouldn’t budge, especially on the pigeon, so instead they decided to educate me in wine.

‘Swirl it.’ Mannix gave me a massive round glass. ‘Take a few moments and see what comes to you.’

‘It smells like wine,’ I said. ‘Red wine, if you want me to be really specific.’

‘Close your eyes,’ Roland said. ‘Swish it around and say what it makes you think of.’

‘Okay.’ I swirled for a few seconds, then inhaled. ‘Missing teeth.’

‘What?’

‘I’m serious. A ruined smile. It could have been beautiful but … it failed …’

I opened my eyes. Both men were still and startled, frozen in a stare. Their postures and expressions were identical – even though Roland was five stone overweight and Mannix as lean as a wolf, you’d know they were brothers.

Mannix reached for his glass and swirled and coughed back the wine. ‘She’s right. There’s a terrible sadness in it.’

‘That’s just you,’ Roland said.

‘It’s not. I’ve never been happier. Try some yourself.’

‘Jesus.’ Roland rinsed a swig around his mouth. ‘You’re
completely right, Stella. I’m getting top notes of loneliness and an aftertaste of dread.’

‘Dashed dreams,’ I said.

‘Faded beauty.’

‘Punctured tyres,’ Mannix said. ‘All four of them. Slashed deliberately.’

Suddenly we were in convulsions, and it seemed like we spent the entire week laughing that way.

Every glass of wine we drank became a competition for the most elaborate and unlikely descriptions.

‘I’m getting shades of shoe leather.’

‘And wobbly table legs.’

‘Graffiti.’

‘Ambition.’

‘A bus driver’s jacket.’

‘Appendicitis.’

‘A soupçon of sulphur.’

‘Flotsam.’

‘And jetsam?’

‘Noooo … Yes! The jetsam is coming through now.’

‘Gilda will kill me,’ I said, after yet another five-course dinner.

‘The diet resumes next week,’ Roland said. ‘Eat up.’

‘Are you still doing the Nordic walking?’ I asked, a little tentatively.

‘No.’ He was solemn. ‘I had to knock it on the head when I broke the machine and they barred me from the gym.’

I snorted with involuntary laughter.

In fairness, he looked like he’d abandoned all exercise. The svelte-ish figure he’d showcased last Christmas was no more. And at the Meadowstone Ranch and Inn, when the stableboys saw Roland waddling towards them, they seemed distinctly anxious.

‘Did you see their expressions?’ Roland asked. ‘Even the horses looked worried.’

Tears of laughter were streaming down my face.

‘I’m starting with a new personal trainer when I get back to Ireland.’ He raised his glass. ‘But for now, we’re here, in this beautiful place, having this wonderful food and wine, and we are going to enjoy it.’

Later on, as we got ready for bed, Mannix said, ‘You’re in love with my brother.’

‘Of course I am,’ I said. ‘How could anyone not be? He’s fabulous.’

It was the best holiday of my life and when we said goodbye to Roland at San Francisco airport, it was hard work to not cry: the holiday was over; I should have started writing my second book and I’d done nothing; and in two weeks I was starting another book tour.

‘It’s okay.’ Mannix squeezed my hand. ‘Think of Shep. You, me and Shep walking the beach. In the meantime, this tour won’t be as bad as the last time.’

And it wasn’t. The starts weren’t so early, the schedules weren’t so packed and I got every sixth day off.