Be Careful What You Wish For, page 3
‘A half-bottle wasn’t enough. I should have gone for the full monty,’ she ruminated, waiting for Helen to morph into a seductress. She brightened. ‘Perhaps I should nip back and buy another half, see if Hercules is pining without me.’
‘No time, the taxi’s due any minute. Pass me those suede slingbacks. I know you haven’t seen them before, they’re part of the emergency package too. God knows if I’ll be able to totter in them. I’m only going to places that have waiter service because I intend to do absolutely no walking in these. In the interests of avoiding a visit to casualty.’
Helen struck a catwalk pose. The dress floated flimsily as a cobweb across her slim body and plummeted at the back.
‘Talk about capitulation. You certainly know how to do slut when you put your mind to it,’ breathed Molly. ‘Even in a navy dress.’
‘It’s not navy, it’s midnight blue.’
The doorbell punctured their quibbling.
‘That’ll be the cab,’ said Helen. ‘Let’s go to a hotel bar instead of the Lifer. The champagne has given me a taste for more of the good life.’
‘We’ll start in The Clarence where we’ll trifle with the affections of U2 fans and tourists. Then we’ll check the immediate vicinity for any pop stars who might be loitering, waiting for their limousines to pick them up. Obviously we won’t waste time toying with them – rock gods can have anything they want from us. Afterwards we’ll plunge into the night and cause all-purpose mayhem on the streets of Dublin.’
‘Promise me this.’ Helen clung to the banister as she negotiated the stairs. ‘We’ll do it sitting down.’
Helen reeled back indoors in the early hours, giddy from laughter and wine. She dangled her shoes by the straps and plotted a route towards bed, dimly aware that every stitch she was wearing reeked of smoke but beyond caring. She was about to nosedive and only her mattress could cushion the landing.
She giggled before oblivion claimed her. A mental image of Molly on her way to the ladies in the restaurant distracted her from sleep: urbane, sophisticated and with a ladder as wide as the Liffey snaking up the back of her tights. Helen chased in after her with the replacement pair she always carried in her bag, a Good Samaritan’s deed that had Molly calling her the battery-powered Little Miss Ever Ready.
But Molly admitted she was glad of Helen’s taste in sheer denier when they returned to their table and found the couple next to them had bailed out, to be replaced by four South African rugby fans weekending in Dublin for a Lansdowne Road match. What a result – the craic ratio was about to skyrocket up the Richter scale, although the friends had derived a certain entertainment value from spying on the first-daters preceding the foursome. Their body language had been fascinating. They could tell from the girl’s this was going to be another case of sudden-death dating; the end was as visible as if the fellow had a dagger protruding from between his shoulder blades. It was pitiful watching the polite indifference with which she treated him. Molly was prepared to gamble a month’s salary there’d be no good-night kiss; that girl would be ducking for cover before the car’s handbrake was on. The Boers were a distinct improvement, she mouthed to Helen, just before turning towards them, radiating a glow of invitation so brazen even the Statue of Liberty couldn’t have held her torch any higher.
The friends’ return from the ladies precipitated copious eyeball slewing while the fellows tried to think of an opening gambit. Easier said than done in view of the regularity with which they’d been raising and lowering their elbows since late afternoon. Despite Molly’s signals, which spelled out ‘Ready when you are, boys. Form an orderly queue and I’ll attend to each of you in turn’, the visitors had a few false starts before they were up and running. The whole point about picking up men was the fellows had to imagine they were the hunters. So Molly and Helen ignored ‘Do you always wear so much perfume?’ and a burst of ‘Molly Malone’ when they heard her name. ‘Must try harder’ was the subliminal message. Finally they decided to put the lads out of their misery and asked if they could recommend any of the South African wines on the menu, offering them a shatter-proof excuse to buy a couple of bottles and push their tables together. Mingling hands and mingling glances, step one of the courtship dance.
Molly automatically chatted up a massive specimen – Hercules truly was an aberration on her usual type, best categorised as the larger the better. Obviously, she’d once rationalised, she was in the grip of some primeval instinct to select the biggest troglodyte in the tribe – what could she do? It was genetic programming.
One of the South Africans pressed dessert menus on the women and tried to cajole them into choosing the restaurant’s cheesecake speciality. Molly was willing – she prided herself on being available to temptation at all times of the day or night – but Helen frowned.
‘You mean voluntarily order a dessert? A high-calorific, sugar-drenched, artery-clogging pudding? Ask for it and then eat it? I think not.’ Her look was withering. ‘And attempting to induce someone else to do it is even more reprehensible. I call that corrupt. It’s the sort of behaviour that might be acceptable in the Transvaal but it simply won’t pass muster in Temple Bar.’
A study in primness, Helen signalled to the waiter and asked for a chocolate fudge ensemble that made the cheesecake seem positively spartan. Meanwhile, Molly, not fully convinced she was witnessing a wind-up, heaved a sigh of relief and added banoffi pie – ‘with ice cream as well as cream’ – to the order.
The men had Irish coffees with whiskey chasers in case there was too much coffee in the coffees. Molly and Helen exchanged pitying glances at their ignorance – by the dregs of the weekend these visitors would have more faith in Irish coffees. Then Molly became engrossed in experimenting whether Hercules’ place in her affections could be usurped by a Goliath of a South African with blond hair and – a million points deducted for this – a moustache that settled on his upper lip like a third eyebrow. She was inclined towards giving him a chance, when she became aware that the foot tapping against hers under the table didn’t belong to … what was his name anyway – Pieter? … but to Helen. Who seemed to be suggesting, make that insisting, they adjourn to the ladies.
‘How are we going to rid ourselves of the away team?’ hissed Helen, surrounded by mirrors and wash-hand basins.
‘I didn’t know we wanted shot of them.’
‘Eejit, of course we do. We don’t want to go clubbing with that crew playing albatross.’
Molly brightened. So Helen was up for a stint in clubland. Usually she ended their evenings out when the restaurant staff stacked chairs around them. Molly flicked one of her corkscrew curls and waited for an escape plan to inspire her. Nothing happened.
‘It’s a long shot, angel face, but there’s just one course of action open to us,’ she said eventually.
‘Name it.’
‘We tell them we’re tired and we’re going home.’
Helen considered. ‘They’ll suggest accompanying us,’ she pointed out. ‘Should we mention our boyfriends will be waiting up?’
‘Shame on you, Sharkey, depending on a man – or the shadowy outline of one – to spring the trap. So much for your feminist principles.’
Helen pulled a face. ‘Fair’s fair, we’ve been leading them on. Behaviour like that isn’t in the feminist handbook. And backless dresses don’t leave much room for principles. So here’s what we’ll do: you ring for a taxi on the mobile from in here and when it arrives we’ll have our handbags and coats at the ready, leap to our feet and exit in a flurry of “wonderful to meet you and enjoy your stay” civilities, blowing air kisses two yards west of their cheeks. Deal?’
‘Deal. And the taxi will convey us straight to a club, not back to Sandycove via Blackrock.’
‘Certainly. You can choose whichever club you like, as long as it’s not too noisy, too dark, too funky, too happening, too crowded or too hot.’
‘Wonder which club is most popular with Dublin’s Greek community,’ puzzled Molly.
‘Dublin doesn’t have a Greek community. Now I’ll wend my way back to the table while you set our fiendish plan in motion.’
The nightclub was predictably grim – ‘face it, Moll, we’re too ancient for clubbing’; ‘speak for yourself, Sharkey’ – but Helen enjoyed the sense of connection with the wider world that she experienced simply by being immersed in a communal mass of bodies. Sometimes she had the feeling she was too self-contained and an evening like this reminded her she wasn’t an island. An isthmus existed, even if it tended to flood over.
Molly was right, there was nothing like a night on the tear. But in the aftermath Helen was jaded, spent both financially and physically. Her head was pounding – she couldn’t consume alcohol at the rate Molly packed it away – and her system by the following lunchtime hankered for caffeine slightly more than it craved licence to lie on the sofa. Although both were imperatives. So Helen wandered out to the kitchen. As she pressed the button on the kettle, realisation slammed her with the jolt of a cattle prod. She hadn’t thought of him once since 6.10 the previous evening. That totted up to eighteen hours in succession. Could this mean she was cured? Maybe the attraction was something she’d magnified out of proportion. Impossible to resist checking the answerphone, however.
She approached the phone, lifted it and the automated voice said: ‘You have three new messages.’ When she played them there was only static on the line – none of the callers had left a name. Except Helen knew there was only one caller and his identity was no mystery to her. A worm of unquiet niggled as she spooned granules into a mug patterned with an inverted comma – all right, it was a Celtic spiral although she tended to shy away from ostentatiously Irish objects. She made an exception in this case because it amused her to have a symbol representing infinity on an object with a lifespan as limited as a mug.
The phone rang: once, twice, three, four times. On the fifth peal she answered it.
‘Helen, I’ve caught you in at last. Where were you last night? Never mind, you can tell me when we meet. I’m in Dublin, staying at the Fitzwilliam and I’m coming to see you. We need to talk. You must give me your answer. I’ll order a taxi and be with you in half an hour or less.’
‘No, wait. I’ll meet you somewhere.’
‘Where?’ The man’s accent was similar to hers, but with an English intonation overlaying the Kilkenny pronunciation.
‘I’ll collect you from your hotel; we can find a park to walk in.’
‘See you in half an hour then. I’ll be waiting in the foyer.’
‘Patrick, I’m not even dressed yet. Make it an hour.’
Why oh why had she agreed? Why oh why had she stayed out so late last night? The hollows under her eyes would be sagging to her jawline. Why oh why hadn’t she sprung up and taken a shower as she intended, instead of diving below the duvet for an extra snooze? Why oh why was she thinking in cliché-ridden why-oh-whys? But a final one – why oh why was she developing a spot slap-bang between her eyebrows? Still, she could take care of that in seconds; concealer was up there with the polio vaccination in terms of service to humankind as far as Helen was concerned.
She washed and dressed at warp speed, cramming herself into last night’s moleskin rejects and adding a heavy woollen coat and velvet scarf. Her car keys went AWOL and she spent a frantic ten minutes turning her bag upside down and combing the pockets of all her jackets, until she found them in their usual place in the letter rack.
‘Catch a grip, Sharkey,’ she instructed the pallid face in the hall mirror. ‘It’s daylight, he’s not going to pounce. And, above all, remember you have willpower. Use it.’
But as she jammed the gearstick into reverse instead of first she had a premonition it would take more than self-control to bring her home unscathed from this encounter. For he had a knack of dissolving any resolve she managed to muster.
CHAPTER 3
Patrick was standing on the steps of the Fitzwilliam Hotel scanning the traffic.
‘You’re late but I forgive you.’ He jumped into the front passenger seat and skim-kissed her cheek.
She flinched, then tried to mask it by flicking her hair behind her ears.
‘Will I find a parking space so we can go into the Green?’ She gestured across the road towards St Stephen’s Green, the city’s oxygen lung.
‘If you like. Or somewhere more private might be appropriate.’ He took stock of her profile as she searched for a gap in the stream of cars sailing around the park
‘Merrion then,’ she agreed, and headed back the way she’d come.
He started speaking as soon as she’d parked her Golf. As she locked the car, still bending over it, words poured from him in a rehearsed cascade.
Helen touched his elbow. ‘Wait until we’re sitting down.’
But they didn’t gravitate towards a bench; instead they paced the park’s outer perimeter, past the gaudily painted statue of Oscar Wilde facing his home, looking as louche as any devotee of his work could hope for; past flowerbeds waiting for spring to resuscitate them; past the canvas backs of paintings attached to railings, artwork which tourists examined and sometimes bought. But only if it were sentimental or scenic and preferably both.
They returned to Wild Oscar’s statue – another of Molly’s nicknames – and paused to read some of his epigrams.
‘I love his children’s stories although I didn’t discover them until childhood was a dim and distant memory,’ said Helen. ‘Especially “The Happy Prince”; I wept for days about the dead swallow.’
‘How can a story called “The Happy Prince” leave readers sobbing? It’s irrational,’ Patrick objected.
‘You’ve obviously never read it.’
‘I’m more of a P. D. James man myself. That’s when I find the time to read at all. It takes me weeks to plough through a paperback.’ Patrick bent for a closer look at one of Wilde’s witticisms on the plinth, immune to Helen’s scandalised glance. ‘How about this one, “We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars.”’
‘I keep hunting for my favourite one – his spin on the love–hate relationship between parents and children.’ Helen followed the plinth around its four sides but couldn’t locate it. ‘I can never remember the exact wording but it’s to do with children beginning by loving their parents, then judging them and rarely, if ever, forgiving them.’
Patrick zipped his flying jacket against the chill. ‘Obviously too depressing for the tourists, that gem. Safer to stick with the ones that lend themselves to posters and T-shirts’ He laid an arm casually across her shoulder; she sidestepped just as casually to widen the gap between them, and it dropped away.
Two Americans nearby were studying Oscar’s statue.
‘He made perfume, right?’ The woman’s voice was so penetrating it was impossible to ignore.
‘No, honey, he was a writer.’ Her male companion corrected her to Patrick’s and Helen’s relief. Otherwise they’d have felt obliged to set her right. National honour demanded it.
‘One of his books was turned into a movie,’ continued the knowledgeable American. ‘It was called A Picture of Dorian Black.’
Patrick and Helen cringed in unison and turned their steps towards the centre of the park where there were no statues to attract sightseers. As they walked – it was too wintry for strolling – they spoke of his life in London, hers in Dublin, their shared experience growing up in Kilkenny, of jobs and homes and even the lighthouse tattoo he aspired to as a boy. It emerged that he’d actually visited a tattoo parlour, clutching the readies, during his first summer in England but reconsidered when he encountered the needles. Helen laughed aloud while he described his flight, still clinging to the patterns book, and again he spontaneously rested an arm on her shoulder. This time she allowed it to stay.
By and by she sighed. ‘We should talk.’
‘I thought that’s what we were doing.’
‘Chewing gum chatter.’
They ensconsed themselves side by side on a park bench, isolated against the grumble of traffic a few yards away, not touching but acutely aware of each other, and he asked her to tell him what to do. She told him. He asked her again. Her answer didn’t vary. Then he nodded in acknowledgement of her prudence and said he’d return to his hotel now. He was staying overnight, catching the Monday morning red-eye flight back to London.
Helen knew she should feel as though the iron bars encircling her chest had been yanked off; instead it was as if their diameter contracted and they tightened, a tourniquet on her diaphragm. But she realised it was impossible even to contemplate love with this man.
And so she prepared to walk away. Until a minuscule movement changed everything.
Patrick was waiting for Helen as she tugged at a glove lying in her lap, attempting to pull it back on, but her fingers couldn’t find the openings. Her head bent forward, her hair shielding her face, a flimsy carapace against this world breeding bleakness now they were on the brink of taking their leave of one another. She struggled against a sense of loss, an emotion as bewildering as it was overwhelming, for how can you mourn the absence of something you’ve never had?
And yet she did keenly feel a void. She knew he couldn’t be the one to fill it, although meeting him after three years had wrenched open the vacuum. So she heaved a rustling breath of resignation and nodded towards Patrick, signalling she was ready. Time to walk away from this windy park, where they huddled in scarves and coats, their bodies trembling in the winter chill but their minds impervious to it. Time to walk away from each other.
But the glove impeded her efforts at composure. Tears sprang in her eyes as she channelled her frustration at her and Patrick’s self-imposed separation towards the glove. In a passion, she hurled it to the ground – an insignificant movement charged with import. The butterfly’s wings that flapped up a hurricane. For he bent to pick it up and as he reached the leather to her, their eyes connected; it was as if her misery flowed and melded with his and he could not bear to acknowledge their imperative to separate. Patrick stretched his hand out and guided her head onto his shoulder and she nestled against it. They sat without speaking or moving, his hand splayed around her skull … there was such comfort in his touch.
