Ninemile House Page 19

  Once or twice she almost worked up the courage to ask him straight out, “James, are you having an affair?” But, no matter how much she steeled herself, no matter how often the words formed in her mind so vivid she could almost hear herself actually saying them, the right time and opportunity never seemed to present itself. And then James suddenly took the matter right out of her hands. Arriving home later than usual one evening, he played with the dinner Derry had keep warming in the oven, pushing the vegetables around on his plate and re-arranging the meat. The only real inroads he made was into the glass of red wine he had treated himself to.

  “Derry?”

  “Um?” Derry turned round from where she’d been drying the dishes by the sink.

  “Derry, come and sit down for a moment. There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

  So serious was the tone of his voice that Derry experienced one of those profound moments where the world suddenly seems to slow right down, yet conversely where consciousness is heightened to such a pitch that every sense is on red alert, every nerve jangling, every beat of the heart loud as a Lambeth drum. Filtering through the ceiling, she could hear the light childish voices of the twins upstairs bickering over something or other and from down the corridor the muted music from some TV show to which Gabby was glued. From outside came the short staccato bark of next door’s terrier bursting like gunfire into the atmosphere, itself charged with tensions that hadn’t been there a moment before. The scents of Basil and parsley rose up from the earthenware pots on the kitchen window, choking her with their pungency and looking down to discover the source, she caught sight of her own hands which somehow seemed no longer to be a part of her, but independent white robots that carefully dried the plate in their possession before laying it down ultra carefully on the work top. For a moment, she swayed towards the sink, feeling the cold ceramic rim almost push her away and then James’s voice came again.

  “Derry? I said can you sit down for a moment please.”

  Dying a little every moment, Derry carefully folded the tea towel and holding it like some sort of a shield in front of her covered the short distance between them, each step feeling as though she was wearing weighted diving boots.

  Bleak, she took the seat opposite, wondering if the dread she was feeling inside was as obvious on her face. His own face was noticeably pale beneath his tan and there were dark circles beneath his blue eyes and two deep crevices marching down either side of his nose, she’d never noticed before.

  Reaching across the table he took her hand, imprisoning it between his own. For a crazy moment, Derry wondered if she shouldn’t stop him right now, cut him off at the pass before, in the salving of his own conscience he wrecked both their lives.

  “Whatever it is, it’s past, over and done with. We can work through it. It’ll take time, I know, and it won’t be easy, but we’ll take it day by day. One step at a time. Honestly, this doesn’t have to be the end. We can be stronger than ever.” Like the score of some old music hall song, all the trite, pat phrases she had ever heard or read in books or sang along with in songs, drifted across her mind in a sort of mental autocue, none of which made it past her lips.

  James did that clearing of the throat thing. “Derry, there’s no easy way to say this and I’d give anything if I could turn back time so I didn’t have to say it.” He paused, held his hands out, supplicant. “It’s Sinead.”

  Derry wrenched back her hand as though it had been burned. Sinead! So it was the old clichéd boss/secretary thing after all. Seeing the emotions flit across her face, James held a hand up as though to ward them off.

  “No! No! I wasn’t having an affair with her.” His voice faltered and his gaze fell away. “It was . . . it was just an indiscretion.”

  “An indiscretion?” Derry felt hysterical laughter bubble up inside of her “Is that what they’re calling it now? Have the PC brigade ruled on that case too. Adultery. Cheating. Screwing around. Offensive to minority groups, perhaps?”

  “No, Derry, I’m serious. It really was just the one time, I promise you and straight after, I regretted it more than anything I’ve ever done before or since.”

  Derry felt sick as she looked at him, at this man she loved with all her heart and who had just ripped the same heart out and trampled it all over the floor. She didn’t recognize him. It was as though a huge invisible barrier had come down between them and nothing would ever raise it again.

  “I thought better of you, James.” The words struggled past her hurt. “Even when common sense was telling me otherwise, when all the little signs were there, arrows pointing blatantly to the fact that you were a lying, cheating bastard, I managed to hold their heads beneath the water and drown out the voices. “Why?” The last came out as though it had been ripped from her.

  James put his head between his hands. “Why?” I have no answer to that, because I honestly don’t know. Oh, I suppose I could trot out the old tried and tested excuses. You were neglecting me. I was feeling unappreciated, overworked, stressed. It was at the time you first brought Gabby home. The thing is none of it would be true.” Wearily, he raked a hand through his blond locks. “The truth is far more simple and far more sordid. You sure you want to know the gory details?”

  Derry nodded, her eyes lancing into him like steel-tipped bayonets. You bet she wanted to hear it, in full glorious, Technicolor pornographic detail. There was no way she was going to be palmed off with the abbreviated, sanitized version, just to make him feel better.

  “Right, then.” James joined his hands together, almost in prayer, and leaning over examined the steepled tips of his fingers. “I never fancied, Sinead. That’s the truth. I won’t deny she’s a good looking girl, but in a glossy, brittle sort of way. And, of course, she’s good at her job too – ruthless.” He looked rueful. “She would have made a good member of the Gestapo. I’ve seen more than one person make the Hitler salute behind her back.”

  Refusing to be sidetracked, Derry gritted her teeth. “Get to the point.”

  “Almost from the off, she made it plain that she fancied me and, yes, I was flattered. What man wouldn’t be? I suppose what made it even more gratifying to my ego was the fact that all my colleagues fancied her and yet I, who could have had her at the drop of a hat, wasn’t in the least bit interested. I had you and the twins and that was more than enough for me.”

  Tears had turned the tips of Derry’s eyelashes to diamonds. Furious, she blinked them away. “So, what happened to change all that?”

  “I know this sounds awful, but I really don’t know. It just seemed to happen one night when we had all been working really late on the election campaign. As a kind of thank-you, I took them all out for a meal and a few drinks and somehow, Sinead engineered it so that she sat next to me all night. Oh, yes she did!” he insisted, seeing Derry’s eyebrows climb towards her hairline. “And she was somehow transformed that evening. Somehow she seemed softer, nicer that night than I had ever seen her before, and she was good company too, laughing and showing what I suppose can only be described as a more human side. To make a long story short, we ended up being the only two people left in the bar and then I felt responsible for taking her home.”

  “And when you got to her place, one thing led to another. You forgot yourself. You forgot you were a married man with a wife and children waiting back home for you.”

  “I’m not proud of it,” James admitted, the extent of his betrayal stabbing through Derry like the sharpest knife. “And when I eventually woke up to myself , it was too late and the damage had already been done. I told her straight away that it was a mistake and that she shouldn’t read anything into it.”

  Derry gave a mirthless laugh. “I’ll bet that went down like a lead balloon. Talk about eating and running!”

  “I know it was both unkind and tactless, but by that stage I suppose I was desperate to get away, to put as much distance between me and the scene of my crime, as it were. All I could think of was you and how I had jeop
ardised our marriage for nothing.”

  “For the sake of a shag, you mean,” Derry said crudely, feeling herself begin to shake with the stress of it all, the tremors starting at her feet, then transmitting themselves to every part of her body till soon she was jerking all over the place like an out-of-control marionette.

  “Derry?” Concerned, James leaned across the table, placed both his hands on her shoulders. “Stop that.”

  “I-I can’t”. Her teeth chattering, Derry gazed back at him, scrutinising every feature in turn as if he were some new and hitherto undiscovered species. Inside she felt all her bones dissolve, felt the blood drain away, the muscles and tissues melt to a soggy mess with no substance to hold them together any more, and then there was nothing left of her, just an empty shell, an automaton running on empty. With James’s confession her whole world, her safe world, the world she had worked hard to achieve, had turned completely on end and was spinning so fast, even her thoughts were ripped from her grasp and hurled away into a vortex. In one corner of her soul, trust lay shattered, alongside the bent and twisted remains of Cupid’s broken arrow.

  James’s voice suddenly sounded like it was coming from a very, very long way away, tolling dismally in the empty space where her heart used to be.

  “Derry, the thing is, Sinead is unhinged. The archetypal woman scorned, the Hollywood bunny boiler, she’s sworn she’ll get her revenge. She’s out to do mischief, Derry, both to me and to you.”

  “The phone calls,” Derry said dully. “Sinead?”

  “Yes, but that’s the least of it. I found her going through some personal papers and making photocopies of them. That’s why I sacked her.”

  Her inner journalist coming to the fore, Derry, just for a moment, managed to set aside her own hurt and pain. “And these papers, what were they exactly?” The vision of Sinead in cahoots with Peter O’Donnell rose up in front of her eyes.

  “Nothing of any great importance, just some documentation to do with the development of the Dublin Docklands, tenders from developers, that kind of thing. I suppose, if I’m being a hundred percent honest here, I wasn’t averse to her giving me the opportunity to sack her. I don’t expect you to feel sorry for me, but it’s absolute torture working side-by-side with your guilty conscience day after day.” His eyes slid around the room. “And boy, did she pile on the guilt. At first she tried the hurt-puppy look, though Sinead could never in a million years be mistaken for a cute little puppy, more your Rottweiler type.” The recollection made him bitter. “Then she tried going down the “reasoning” route with me.” He bracketed the word. “She knew how difficult it was for me to turn my back on children, but nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of true love and, besides, when you came to your senses, some sort of formal contact arrangements could be put in place. And, of course, we would have our own children. A boy first and then a girl.”

  Listening to him, Derry began to feel almost sorry for the other woman. Seemingly she had built up a whole imaginary world around James, only for the object of her desire to cast her aside like a used condom and with as little respect.

  She shook her head from side to side. “You don’t come out of this at all well, James. No matter what way you look at it, you don’t come up smelling of roses.”

  “You’re right.” James bowed his own head, and when he looked back up a moment later, there was such bleak misery in his eyes that, despite herself, Derry felt an intense urge to hold him in her arms like she would the twins and kiss him all better. She didn’t, of course. The victim of warring emotions she sat, still trembling, wishing like millions before her that she could turn back time and knowing without shadow of a doubt that her husband was wishing in vain for the same thing. Maybe one day they could begin to recoup what he had so blithely, no, so blindly, thrown away. Maybe one day they could start to rebuild the trust and love that had made them such a tight little unit – self-satisfied the begrudgers might even have accused. But not yet. First, Derry needed to assimilate the magnitude of what had happened, break it down to its raw state of pain, rage and betrayal. First, she needed to come to terms with the fact that the nightmare had become reality. The bogeywoman, wearing Sinead’s face, had stepped out of the shadows and into the light, and now her presence interposed itself between them at the table, just as surely as if it had flesh to its bones and breath to its body. And when Derry finally rose on shaky legs and groped her way up the stairs to the bedroom, the presence split itself equally between them, part accompanying Derry, a tangible, moving cloud that slowed her movements to those of an old woman and part remaining with James, wreathing itself like bindweed round and round him, till he felt as though he was being strangulated by the ever increasing pressure of his own guilt. Later, when the house was shrouded in darkness, when both Derry and James lay sleepless, keeping themselves carefully separate and apart, yet alert to every movement, every breath the other took, it came and lay down between them. In the morning it was still there.

  CHAPTER 20

  “Mammy, where are you going? Dara, a much scuffed and well-loved teddy bear dangling by the wrist, came and stood in the bedroom doorway as Derry threw some bits and pieces into a weekend bag.

  “Oh, just down to Cork for a day or two.” Derry made an effort to sound breezy, though after the events of the previous day, she felt as though she had been ripped in two. “You’ll hardly have time to miss me.”

  Dara’s mouth twisted. “But I don’t want you to go.”

  Sitting on the side of the bed, Derry beckoned her over and lifted her up onto her knee. “Now don’t be silly. You’ll have a great time with Aunty Gabby and Sheila and Daddy too.” She dropped a kiss on the little girl’s golden hair, filling her nostrils with the reassuringly sweet baby smell of her. The smell of innocence. “And if you’re a very good girl, I might, just might, mind you, bring you back a present.”

  “Will you bring me back one too, Mammy.” As if the word ‘present’ had conjured her up, Dilis, her twin sister, appeared in the doorway and a moment later found her racing over to take possession of Derry’s other knee.

  Derry jiggled the pair of them. “Oh, I suppose I could run to one for you too.” She held up a warning finger. “But, first, you’ve got to be very, very good girls and let me get on with my packing. Upending the pair of them onto the bed, she tickled first one, then the other, sending the pair of them into fits of laughter as they wriggled to get away from her. To anyone watching it would have looked like an ordinary everyday scene, a mother playing with her children, but today was anything but an ordinary day, Derry reflected. Today was the first day of the rest of her life. Whether it included James remained to be seen.

  ***

  “Do you have to go away?” James followed her out to the car, bruised shadows beneath his blue eyes bearing testimony as to how little he’d slept the previous night and making him look somehow older, washed out almost, in the harsh light of morning. “Wouldn’t it be better if you stayed and we talked.”

  Stowing her suitcase in the boot, Derry slammed the lid shut, the sound echoing like a gunshot on the still sleepy air. “Nope! No amount of talking is going to change things, is it? You did what you did. I don’t pretend to understand why, but if I can face up to it, so can you.”

  “But you’re not facing up to it.” James’s voice rose slightly and a muscle twitched madly in the side of his clenched jaw as he struggled to control it. “You’re running away.”

  “I’m not running away.” By contrast, Derry kept her own voice deadpan, though it almost killed her not to lose it altogether, scream, shout and batter at him. “I’m going away on business for a day or two, that’s all. You don’t think I’d leave the girls, do you?”

  “Oh, but you’d leave me, is that it?” Ridiculous for him to take the moral high ground, he knew, but desperation made him foolish, sent him on the attack. “And this business trip, how come you never mentioned it before now? A bit convenient, isn’t it?”

  “I h
ave to go.” Calmly, Derry climbed into the car, though in truth she felt anything but calm. Her fingers shook as she put the key in the ignition, glanced out the side window and raised her free hand to wave at Gabby and the girls who were watching her from the open doorway. Catching her eye, poor Gabby, who clearly knew something was up, but didn’t like to ask what, mouthed reassuringly, “they’ll be fine, don’t worry”.