The Better Half

  The Better Half

  Sarah Harte studied law and French at University College Cork. She worked as a corporate lawyer before she switched to writing. From Cork she moved to Dublin, where she now lives with her husband Jay, their son Conn and Lucy the dog. The Better Half is her first novel.

  The Better Half

  SARAH HARTE

  PENGUIN IRELAND

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published 2011

  Copyright © Sarah Harte, 2011

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-1-844-88266-3

  To Niall and Kay Harte, to whom no

  thanks could ever be enough, and to Jay Bourke,

  for his steadfast encouragement

  Seize the day, for the world is fleeting,

  In the eyes of the wise the moment is better than the whole world,

  Alexander, who ruled a whole world,

  At the very moment when he died left the world.

  Qazvin or Isfahan, about 1600

  Table of Contents

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part II

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Part I

  1

  Days that change your life start out like any other. There is no big sign written across the sky saying, ‘Hello, your world is about to be ripped apart.’

  This day was windy. A great gale was blowing down our road. Shrewsbury Road was the dog’s in terms of addresses. The imposing, detached Edwardian houses were set well behind wrought-iron railings and mature greenery, with wide lawns and gravelled drives – you couldn’t beat it for snob value, which was why we lived there.

  The door of my SUV swung open and I climbed into its cream leather interior, my hair whipping round my cheeks. The angry clouds were so low they were practically touching the Rangy’s roof. The branches of the trees swayed violently. The shrubs lining our drive had been flattened by the wind. I’d prayed to St Francis for good weather – even though, come to think of it, he might not be the patron saint of meteorology. I had an inkling that he was lost causes or maybe animals. I was never that well up on that stuff.

  I checked myself in the mirror. I’d spent the morning being plucked and polished and buffed. I had a new facialist who was keen as mustard. She’d spent two hours with me, discussing my diet, lifestyle and mental health. ‘It’s all part of teaching customers,’ she’d said, ‘to care for their skin in a holistic way.’

  I didn’t like to rain on her parade by telling her about the amount of stuff I had shipped into my face. Like, I was all about eating organic food and that, but when it came to cosmetic interventions, it was bombs away.

  The facial injections had been done in good time so the bruising and bumps had died down. I thought they’d made a positive difference. Frank didn’t agree. ‘Anita,’ he’d said, the other day, ‘if you don’t stop filling your face with that crap you’re going to look like a fucking stroke victim.’

  True, I had a little trouble eating soup – but only straight after the procedures. All my friends had had work done, even those who didn’t admit it. It was the norm now and you had to keep up. Nobody wanted a forehead like a ploughed field when her friends were line free. And, in fact, you had to make your face swell like a puffer fish with fillers because being stick thin gave you lines. Bigger girls with generous bottoms had lovely smooth skin and plump cheeks.

  It was like social death in the world I moved in to look your age or to be fat. It wasn’t allowed. There were rules. To be fat was like having some incurable disease. It was fine to pump yourself with poison, cut yourself open, starve and stretch yourself. You were expected to do what it took to battle time and the evil forces of gravity.

  I’d got some more movement back since the injections, anyway. Maybe a little too much, I thought, fingering my forehead. Despite all the time and cash I’d spent, the mirror wasn’t lying. I had won some minor battles, courtesy of my dermatologist, facialist, colourist and personal trainer, but there was no doubt that time was winning the war. I could fight all I liked but in the end, like the little Dutch boy with his finger stuck in the dike, I would lose.

  I hated my ageing body and face. I had a boyish bum that had gone all flat like an old person’s. My stomach was thin but slightly wrinkled, like fruit. There was no escaping the pouches under the eyes or the crêpy skin on my boobs. There were rings on my neck and my hands were going the way of gnarled tree roots. I was turning into a tree.

  In my bleaker moments I thought my face looked like a balloon that the air had been let out of. I could give you an exhaustive list of my flaws at the drop of a hat. And I could give you a fairly comprehensive list of my pals’ defects too. Carrying those around in your head was the adult equivalent of a comfort blanket. I might have a flat, droopy bum but Shannon’s boobs were like punctured tennis balls on the end of long, droopy socks.

  It was hard not to mind the way men had stopped noticing me. Once heads had twisted and hungry horny looks had come at me when I walked down the road, or I’d heard piercing whistles when I sashayed past a construction site, hips swinging. Now there was just a loud silence. I was almost past my sell-by date. I went to dinner parties and men looked at me vaguely. Once they’d have been falling over to listen to me – if I’d recited the alphabet backwards in Urdu they would have been spellbound. When my boobs had started to sag and my arse began to go flat, they’d started to look over my head. I felt as if I had once been in colour and now was only black-and-white. I had become the invisible woman.

  I had highlights done, a creamier blonde than usual. Would Frank notice
? I darted a look into the mirror. He probably wouldn’t notice if I got a Mohawk. I zapped the electric gates and pulled out of our drive. Sometimes, looking at Frank, I wondered what he thought about, what he dreamt about at night. Did I ever pop into his mind or was his head full of planning permissions, cranes and cement?

  Whoosh, down our road I went. I looked in the mirror again. My hair was a bit bouffant but it would fall, hopefully. All in all, I didn’t look that bad. I’d stayed away from the vino collapso the night before in preparation for the party. Not including five – or six, maybe – small glasses of wine that you’d barely count. It wasn’t civilized to refuse wine with your food.

  Of course, the truth was that the party planner had done the work. I’d have liked to plan it myself, to be able to say it was all me, but I just didn’t have the nerve. Like, I might have made some awful mistake and not even known it until I saw it bounced back at me in somebody’s eyes or bitchy remark. I hated entertaining. I hadn’t grown up around it, which made it that much harder.

  The idea of my ma and da throwing a dinner party in our small kitchen was about as likely as the Queen of England rocking up for tea. All those things you had to know – like which cheese to serve, which wine to offer, which bread went with what. In our house, posh would have been Laughing Cow, Blue Nun and Pat the Baker bread.

  As days went, I was busy. Normally I had bags of time looming ahead of me, just waiting to be filled – there was an irony there: when you had little enough to do, time expanded. That day I was a woman on a mission – a woman on the trail of a perfect party. That makes me sound like an empty-headed bimbo with screwed-up priorities. The sort of spoilt silly cow who people said was a complete waste of space. And, look it, I knew I wasn’t organizing world peace. But I wanted to impress my husband. To have him say to me, ‘Anita, you did a good job.’ I wanted him to notice me.

  I turned onto the Merrion Road, indicating too late so that the taxi man overtaking me shook his fist at me, his mouth open in a big angry cave shape. My heart nearly stopped – for a second I thought it was Darren, my sister Karen’s hubby. Guilt shot through me and I felt my face burn. I would roast in hell. I hadn’t invited my sister to the party. ‘No way, Anita,’ Frank had said, waving his hands. ‘She’s not coming here in her fake Juicy Couture tracksuit, like feckin’ Pocahontas, with her belly hanging out, chewing gum, a fag pokin’ out of the corner of her mouth.’

  Calling her Pocahontas was low. I’ll admit Karen was a bit heavy on the old spray tan but she scrubbed up well. She’d be chewing gum, all right, but she’d make the effort. She was a bit revealing in her style of dress for a woman of her age – she had a thing about getting her chest out – but she was my sister.

  ‘She’ll let the side down and that’s it. End of story.’ Then Frank had played his trump card. ‘I mean none of my crowd are coming, not even Mam.’

  Not even his beloved mam – second only to the Virgin Mary in importance. But that was because ‘Mam’ was sick with a chest infection and the rest of his family were too scared to come to Dublin and leave her in case she cut them out of her will. Not that there was that much to leave but she had an iron grip over her kids like nobody I’d ever met. Not that I could say so – say anything about Frank’s family and you’d live to regret it. But it was open season on mine.

  Anyway, there was a difference. Karen lived twenty minutes down the road and would have loved to come in her yer-all-a-load-of-stuck-up-shites-but-I-did-yez-a-favour-and-came kind of way. And Karen, who could be a scary bitch, might find out about the party, I thought, my heart rate ratcheting up.

  I’d say to her that, with the growing uncertainty with the economy, we were keeping things low key – ‘Just a quiet dinner for the two of us.’ That, of course, was the exact opposite of what we were doing. Frank had his arse hanging out the window on the biggest property deal of his career and we were throwing the party to show people that, contrary to the talk going around – and there was plenty of that in a town like Dublin – we weren’t about to go bust.

  My breathing slowed and I began to enjoy cruising through the early-afternoon traffic. I loved driving. That nice safe feeling it gave you. The sense of purpose you got when you knew you were going from A to B. Coasting around, head cocked up behind the wheel of my Range Rover, the radio on, driving around the leafy streets of Dublin 4, a woman in control of her own destiny. Destiny’s Child, minus the big arse. Sometimes I didn’t want to stop. I just wanted to keep on driving to the soothing thrum of the traffic. I didn’t want to be confronted by the present, never mind the future.

  Very often, like now, I started to juggle figures in my head. I loved numbers, always had done. And not just the ones on my credit card, as Frank tried to claim. When I was little the teacher would give me extra sums to do because I whizzed through what the rest of the class was doing. When I was eight I was doing what the twelve-year-olds were doing. I even got put up a year at school on account of it. Mental maths was fun. Like multiplying by nine was really multiplying by ten minus one. So, 9 x 9 was 9 x (10 – 1), which was 9 x 10 – 9 which was 90 – 9 or 81. That was a simple one. I was always doing mental maths in my head to amuse myself.

  I was just having a lash at quite a complicated one when the guilt about Karen came lunging at me again. Okay, it wasn’t my fault that Frank and Karen had never seen eye to eye. The first time I’d led Frank home like a prize pig to meet Ma and Da, Karen was in the corner eating a bag of Taytos, her eyes like laser beams taking it all in. I’d been blabbing about him non-stop. Frank the big business man, the Flash Harry who took me out to dinner – even though back then he barely had a seat in the arse of his trousers – with nothing but a van, a lad to help him and a couple of ladders.

  Karen had taken a long, hard look at Frank, who was all trussed up in his good suit – in those days we didn’t have the casual-clothes thing down – with everything but his face polished. ‘So this is Del Boy,’ she’d said.

  Frank had never forgiven her. All the same it was a lousy thing not to invite your own sister to your party. And there was more to my guilt than that. A little voice in my head told me that part of me was relieved Karen wasn’t coming. I wouldn’t have to feel those beady coal-black eyes following me round the room and boring into my back as I schmoozed or ‘talked posh’, as she would put it. Jaysus, as she might have said – or as I might once have said, which Karen would be quick to point out.

  Frank had been most specific about what he wanted for his fiftieth. I was to throw him a ‘surprise party’. He wasn’t joking. ‘Something that’ll make Will and Ciara’s last bash look like a fucking tea party. I’m serious, Anita, I want something that’ll have Will ragin’ with jealousy.’

  That was the other reason we were pumping money into the party: to best everyone we knew. Particularly Will. Frank was ultra-competitive. He hid it well with his I’m-just-a-country-man-of-the-people routine. Inside, though, he was always trying to get one over on someone. He was weighed down not by a chip but more like two concrete blocks, one for each shoulder. A matching set.

  Will and Ciara had been our neighbours before Frank trained his sights on Shrewsbury Road. They were the king and queen of our social circle, a sort of alpha couple. Frank was obsessed by them. He hated Will because – although he hadn’t figured this out – he wanted to be him. And it was obvious to me that he would have loved to marry Ciara and have her long, lithe, silky limbs wrapped around his short powerful ones. Fat chance. Apart from all the other reasons Ciara would never have gone for Frank, Will was very handsome. I loved Frank – he was the father of my children, the man I’d spent my life with since the age of nineteen – but, with his pink face and thick middle, Frank looked like a stuffed tomato beside Will.

  I was pretty sure that it was Will’s flowing Prince Valiant hair that really fried Frank’s mind. (Frank’s looked like a toilet brush.) That and the fact that Will was always talking about the jolly japes he’d got up t
o at college. Frank droned on about having gone to the University of Life but deep down it drove him mad that he hadn’t made it to old Trinners or UCD.

  Will was also my gynaecologist. ‘The fanny doctor’, Frank called him behind his back, if only at home – and Ella, our youngest, went completely mental when he did. Gave him that look of hers which would turn you to salt and of which I was secretly proud. No flies on our Ella. Generally speaking, when Frank was out and about he tried to sound posh and to can the bad language. A tall order, I always thought, when you were a hayseed who came from the arse-end of nowhere in County Offaly.

  Through Donnybrook village, past Donnybrook Fair, where I could be almost certain one or other of my friends would be sitting over a skinny decaf latte. Maeve would be moaning about something – the difficulty in getting a reliable cleaner, a good facial or how her husband didn’t appreciate her – or retailing gossip, which was her favourite sort of conversation. She was really only enlivened by scandal.

  Ciara – of Ciara and Will – might be chewing the ear off someone about the right music school for her children: could the Dublin Institute of Technology conservatoire really be better when it was less expensive than the Leeson Park establishment? Was it better for your child to focus on one foreign language, and become really proficient in it, or study two – or maybe go off piste altogether and learn Mandarin, what with China being an up-and-coming power? And which did ‘a young gentleman’ – her son Jack was six – really need: sailing, golf or both? Ciara really got off on that kind of chat. She was an über-mummy and her energy for such discussions was really something.

  I drove down the Stillorgan dual carriageway past University College Dublin, crossing to the giant, sprawling Sandyford Industrial Estate. It was a slightly out-of-the-way place for a clinic but it was where Will had his medical suite. I was having a smear-test. My ma had died from cancer and, while I wasn’t neurotic about my health, I was good at having myself checked out.