Be Careful What You Wish For, page 9
‘Ringlets,’ he said.
‘I wasn’t consulted.’ She flattened her bob with tremulous fingers; she could control her voice and expression but not her hands.
Helen hovered by the mantelpiece, irresolute where to sit. It struck her as singularly unsafe to join Patrick on the sofa, where she’d be close enough to detect the fabric conditioner smell from his clothes, to trace the indentations of a chicken pox scar on his forehead. Staying on her feet was the most sensible recourse.
‘Come and sit next to me,’ he invited. ‘You’re too far away.’
Helen threw caution to the winds and perched alongside him, simultaneously poised for flight and prepared to nestle against him.
Just as she remembered the obligations of hospitality and realised she should offer him something to eat or drink, he confessed: ‘I’m not here to apologise at all.’
‘I suspected as much, Patrick.’
‘I’m here because I couldn’t remember what your voice sounded like and that seemed quite literally sinful. I wished and wished that I could conjure it up but I couldn’t. So I decided to do something about it.’ Patrick folded his arms mock-aggressively across his chest and added: ‘And before you tell me that I could have had a more straightforward reminder by lifting the telephone, you’re absolutely right. But straightforward didn’t appeal to me. Why be guileless when you can be circuitous?’
Helen chuckled but when the merriment died away she was equivocal about how to respond. Her head was telling her to tread carefully; her heart was waltzing. Finally, because she could not hold the words back, she murmured, ‘Your face gladdens me, Patrick.’
They sat looking at one another for a few moments, both flooded with emotion. Then a gust of wind that sent a tree branch scratching against the patio doors fragmented the spell. She roused herself and bent to sniff the snowdrops.
‘They’re sublime. Did you have trouble finding them?’
‘None at all. I knew exactly where to go. I prowled around the park with my trowel and as soon as the light dimmed I was in like Flynn.’
‘You didn’t!’
‘I didn’t. The concierge at the hotel recommended a couple of flower shops. None of them had any snowdrops in pots for sale but I persuaded one enterprising member of staff to rustle up something for me. I can be very persuasive when I put my mind to it, Helen. In fact –’ he leaned conspiratorially towards her – ‘I’m a bit of an operator.’
‘Don’t I know it.’ She lowered her nose to the miniature blooms again, floating above the foliage like froth on the sea. ‘I’ve never seen anything so flawless in my life.’
‘I have,’ said Patrick.
The silence between them was charged with a thousand volts of electricity.
Finally he said: ‘We have to talk.’
‘That’s what we did last time and look how we ended up. Canoodling on a park bench like a couple of youngsters, without even the sense to wait until the weather was fine.’
‘True, but forewarned is forearmed. I’m prepared for the gravitational pull I feel when you’re in my vicinity. I’m wearing my Superman vest under my shirt. So your wiles are useless against me unless you’ve Kryptonite secreted about the house.’
‘I had a springclean and threw it all out,’ she said. ‘You’ve no idea what a dust collector that Kryptonite is. Will we do the talking now or would you like some coffee first?’
‘Better make it now,’ said Patrick. ‘We have to knock this on the head as quickly as possible. We’re in limbo at the minute.’
The day which had started so bleakly, with Helen spooning coffee granules into a mug and wondering how she was going to decimate time on her own, seemed rainbow-hued. Even if what they had to discuss was tinged with sepia.
‘Limbo,’ she reflected. ‘I suppose that’s about the height of it. Although technically it’s been wiped from the theological map.’
‘Since when?’ asked Patrick.
‘Years ago, the Church quietly dropped it. Limbo was never doctrine anyway, although that wasn’t much consolation to all those generations of bereaved parents who were told their unbaptised babies would never go to heaven.’
‘Helen,’ said Patrick, with the determination of a man resolved to return the conversation to relevant matters, ‘I’m in love with you. I don’t want to marry Miriam – attractive, groomed, suitable, organised Miriam waiting for me in Camden Town. Waiting for me to set a wedding date with the same graceful patience she waited for me to propose. It took months to do it. I could trace the outline of her disappointment like you’d skim your hands around the contours of a bowl when another day passed and I couldn’t eject the words. But ultimately I did it. I should never have asked her to be my wife. I thought it would exorcise my feelings for you, Helen, except it didn’t. I can’t ignore how moved I am by you, however inconvenient that might be. If I could press a button and eradicate it I would, believe me, but that’s not an option.’
Dejection oozed from him and Helen had to suppress her instinct to reach out and stroke his hair. Instead she contented herself with watching the way it waved as it grew back from his forehead and in imagining herself running her fingertips along the sharply delineated outline of his widow’s peak.
Patrick scattered her meandering thoughts with his next words, dropped pebbles into a still pool spreading ripples with each sentence.
‘I know I can’t marry you, Helen, but I would like us to be together – somewhere people don’t know us and can’t be judgemental. Which rules out Ireland. But the world is a vast place. We could find a corner and claim it as our own.’
Her head reeled. He was articulating desires she’d suppressed for years – urges she thought were buried so deep they’d never surface. Wishes she could scarcely bring herself to formulate. But a few minutes in his company and they were basking in the open, clamouring for recognition. She allowed herself to luxuriate in the possibility of a lifetime with Patrick, tantalising her imagination as she rolled the scenario around in her mind’s eye, then reality intervened and she clashed down the blinds.
‘Is the world immense enough?’ she asked. ‘Truth will out whether you’re in Ballydoyle or Borneo.’
He stroked the faint blue veins threading her wrist. ‘I believe there’s a crevice we could slide into, Helen.’
She reared back from the duplicity conveyed by his words. From the reptilian slant cast on their future behaviour if she decided they had a hereafter together. But the whispering touch continued against her inner wrist and its hypnotic repetition soothed her. She closed her eyes, excluding everything but the sensation. Until Miriam intruded.
‘What about the woman you’ve promised to marry?’
Patrick’s pupils expanded, black obscuring grey-green. ‘I’ll break it off. I’d never have become involved with her if I weren’t homesick and lonely in England. Work kept me occupied most of the time but there was a chafing, inside and out, that begged for salve, and Miriam offered it. She appeared when I was at my lowest ebb and made it apparent she wanted to be with me on any terms I chose. At the time that was enough for me.’ Patrick shrugged and reached for Helen but she moved and his hand fell in the gap between cushions. It flapped, a stranded fish dangling from his shirt sleeve. ‘Before I knew where I was we were living together and she was making plans that involved the two of us. I went along with them, more from inertia than anything else. I hadn’t the heart to scupper her dreams. Until now.’
He looked appealingly at Helen but she didn’t respond because she could find no words within her. Patrick took up his story again.
‘The last time we were together, three years ago –’ he raised his voice to be heard above a flurry of agitated protest from Helen – ‘I know that’s the time you keep insisting we’re never to talk about but I can’t block out what happened between us, even if you can. It was a validation. But afterwards you were so insistent we must part for ever that I couldn’t allow myself to hope there’d be a reprieve. You convinced me the feelings we had for each other would eventually subside, so I waited for that. And waited. Life without you was an amputation …’ Patrick’s voice trailed off as he struggled with reconvened misery. ‘Then Miriam materialised and distracted me from the pain. She didn’t seem to mind that I was only there in silhouette for her.’
Helen shifted position so she was looking ahead, scrutinising her china cabinet as though it had materialised overnight in her living room. Each piece of ware behind the glass doors needed cataloguing in her mental inventory. Count jugs and sideplates and don’t think about three years ago. What took place had been a mistake, and if they buried it deep enough they could pretend the error had never seen the light of day. It was between the two of them alone – they made it happen and they could unhappen it. They’d agreed it was an aberration. So why was Patrick trying to exhume it? A porcelain teapot blurred as Helen’s eyes moistened; unexpectedly she felt choked with a sense of betrayal at his engagement to another woman.
‘But you proposed marriage to her,’ she accused. ‘Nobody forced you to say those words.’
Patrick cupped her chin, guiding it towards him. The cautious sun leaking through the French windows had taken shelter behind a cloud and his face was in shadow, although she could guess at its unflinching expression because his tones were harsh. ‘It’s true I asked her to marry me and she agreed. But I wanted to be normal, to have a home. I thought Miriam and I could cobble together a reasonable facsimile of a life, I truly did. You made me believe our love had to be aborted, that it was warped and grotesque and ultimately it would poison our lives.’ The thumb holding her chin, its pressure forcing her to meet his gaze, stroked her skin. His voice melted. ‘And then, Helen, we met again a few weeks ago – not by design but because we were meant to be together. What’s unnatural is not how we feel about one another but for the two of us to be apart, denying our love. I recognised that the instant I looked into your eyes again and something fundamental leaped within me; it was as if there had been no parting, that we’d been separated in body but not in spirit. I knew you felt the same way. I know you do now, however much you deny it.’
‘I’m not going to repudiate it.’ Helen’s delivery was sombre; she closed her eyes and fumbled for a path out of the maze. Her brain was malfunctioning; Patrick had that distracting effect on her. Love turned her critical processes to slush.
Miriam’s name – she couldn’t even put a face to her – sliced through the silt. Helen had never met her but she felt a sense of responsibility towards the woman. After all, they were in love with the same man.
‘Patrick, I long to believe in happily ever afters. I wish on every full moon and rainbow, on each coin I toss into a fountain, every black cat that crosses my path, and every candle I light there’s one out there for you and me. But I can’t convince myself. What’s between us is intrinsically wrong. Nature, precedent, the force of history flows against it – we’d have no luck. And whatever else we renounce voluntarily, luck we can’t forsake.’
She focused on his eyes, willing him towards comprehension, glimpsing a pair of tiny Helens in his pupils. They seemed to belong there. Oh God, to have this over with, to crawl back into bed and cancel out the world with its oppressive desires. Or to crawl back into bed and bring Patrick with her, to obliterate the world with him beside her, on top of her, inside her … Helen shuddered and, gathering together the tattered remnants of her self-control, she stood to distance herself from him.
‘And as for yourself and Miriam, Patrick, it strikes me you’re selling yourself short by planning to marry someone you don’t love wholeheartedly, and you’re selling her short too. She deserves better than a putative lover who’s using her as emotional blotting paper.’
‘But you urged me to go ahead and marry Miriam.’ His black eyebrows were mutual rods of indignation. ‘When we spoke in the park you insisted I was duty-bound to honour our engagement.’
‘That was before I was aware of the circumstances. For all I knew you could have been in love with her and I was a spanner in the works. But if you’re not utterly, unreservedly, passionately in love with someone you have no right to marry them.’
Her mental commotion had Helen pacing but she paused now and chewed a knuckle.
‘I was being selfish too, telling you to forge ahead with the wedding. I thought if I knew you were married and completely beyond my reach, I might come to terms with the realisation we could never be together. Knowing you’re out there somewhere thinking of me, just as I’m here longing for you, makes me feel plugged into the world in one sense – but in another it hinders me from moving on because I keep hoping, completely irrationally, there’ll come a time for us. So if you and Miriam had a life together I’d know conclusively that you were going your way and I should plod mine.’ She exhaled lingeringly. ‘Does any of that add up? I know it’s convoluted; I can hardly make sense of it myself.’
Patrick nodded slowly. ‘If I take myself so irrevocably out of your life that there’s no possibility of second thoughts, you believe you might be happy. You’d have a chance to meet someone yourself and have children, a normal life, everything you can’t expect with me.’
Helen sat beside him and leaned her head against his upper arm – a gesture less of affection than of resignation.
‘I won’t ever marry and have children.’ Her voice rustled so faintly he had to strain to catch the words.
‘Yet you’re telling me to do exactly that.’
‘You’re capable of it, Patrick. You showed that when you allowed yourself to imagine a life with Miriam. You may even have married her without discussing it with me if we hadn’t met at the funeral the other week. But lives overlap for a reason. Auntie Maureen brought you back to me, on temporary loan, and I’m grateful to her – she always was a romantic.’ Helen’s smile was subdued.
After a while she raised her head from his arm. ‘Patrick, I’ve no expectations of finding a doppelgänger for you, possibly not even the pale imitation I realise is the best I can hope for. I’m not saying I’ll never let another man touch me – distasteful though it seems now, I imagine one day I’ll be lonely enough to agree to the usual trade-off. But I’ll never exchange vows with someone because I’ve already pledged myself, in my heart, to you and there’s no reneging on that. Apart or not, it makes no difference.’
His eyes had the sheen of unshed tears as he contemplated her.
‘You’re being unfair to me, Helen, the same offence you accused me of practising on Miriam. I’m supposed to vanish from your life and dismiss you from mine – but while I’m under instructions to go forth and multiply you’re intent on living a sterile existence.’
Helen recognised they were both overwrought and needed some respite from the angst.
‘I’m making tea.’ Her tone was peremptory as she retreated to the kitchen. Patrick followed, unable to countenance losing her from sight.
‘Would you bring these in?’ She thrust mugs and a packet of Viennese whirls at him to keep him occupied. She could have found room for all of them on the tray but she was uncomfortable with the way he tailed her back and forth from sink to worktop.
As she poured, curiosity overcame Helen. ‘What does Miriam look like?’
‘Light brown hair, the sort that would have been fair when she was a child; slim; tans easily, unlike us; dark blue eyes. She’s pretty. She has a way of cocking her head to the side when she’s listening to someone speak that’s endearing.’
‘Is she at all like me?’
‘No. She’s very English. Miriam’s a nurse; she has that aura of briskly compassionate competence that nurses perpetually convey. I always imagine you could hand her a screwdriver and tell her to rewire the house and she’d manage it. Whereas you, my love,’ amused indulgence radiated from him, ‘are a Luddite. I notice your microwave is still in its original wrapping.’
Helen reddened. She thought about lying and telling him she’d only just bought it, but stifled the notion stillborn. It was astonishing, she reflected, how one minute they could be threshing in an emotional whirlpool and the next they were placidly drinking tea.
‘Even when she’s off duty you can tell Miriam is a nurse,’ continued Patrick, biting Viennese whirls into extinction. Helen had forgotten how rapidly he could decimate a plate of biscuits. ‘You know how nuns have that convent air about them, even when they’re in civvies? It’s the same with nurses.’
Helen slid off her seat to fetch more biscuits; if she were truly performing her hostess duties she’d offer to cut him a sandwich but she lacked the energy. Emotional trauma was draining. This was like excavating a scab but she felt she needed to know more about Miriam.
‘Does she realise you’re back in Dublin so soon?’
‘No, I told her I was going to Durham on business.’
She registered the lie, layering custard creams into a fan. Even to spare someone’s feelings an untruth seemed shabby. Of course he could justify it as a kindness but she twitched uneasily until the need to interrogate goaded her to speak again.
‘How did you meet?’
‘We were introduced over pints of lager.’ He was matter-of-fact. ‘She’s the sister of a colleague at work who was offered a new job and organised the usual leaving do in the pub on the corner. Miriam came along and Peter, that’s her brother, asked me to keep an eye on her because she didn’t know anybody.’
‘From tiny acorns,’ remarked Helen. Only a shade sourly.
She drank more tea, cogitating on how incurious men were. She could have had a string of lovers for all Patrick knew or cared. But it was of consequence to her to be able to imagine him in situ in London – which floor his flat was on, the way his furniture was arranged, how he travelled to work.
