The Better Half Read online

  A nurse would do the test, which was just as well. I mean, there was no way around it. I’d had thoughts concerning Will that I wasn’t proud of. It was just sometimes when I hadn’t had sex with Frank for a while that I got to thinking about Will. Images of him and his firm behind crept into my mind. I was always the main protagonist, which struck me as kind of interesting. Will was really only a bit player. It was all about me being seized and wanted and desired. When I had guilty fantasies about Will and his stethoscope, they were always silent movies. They didn’t involve him opening his mouth – for talking purposes at least.

  I always felt disloyal afterwards, not just to Frank but to Ciara. You didn’t have dreams like that about a friend’s husband. It just wasn’t cricket, as Will himself might have said. That was a ‘Willish’ thing to say: while he was easy on the eye he was definitely on the boring side. With Will, roses were red and violets were blue.

  I swung my jeep into a space, got out and ran towards the space-age-style glass building with a jacket over my head. I was forced to narrow my eyes against the wind and now the rain: the skies had torn open like a soggy paper bag. It was freezing too. I had ordered heaters for the marquee. They would be up and running, I had been told, by tea-time. The party planner had smiled her lipsticked smile, drawn on like a perfect bow, and guaranteed that my guests would not freeze. They would not be wiping their noses with their napkins, their extremities gone blue.

  Frank was coming home from London. His flight was delayed. He would make it in plenty of time but he was stuck in Heathrow due to some security alert. He was like a bull. He had rung me again and again to fire questions about the party. Would the band be good enough? Was I absolutely sure? He hadn’t wanted the one that most of our friends used. Was I sure about the marquee? We had hired a vast speciality tent from England, complete with sofas, armchairs and a dance area. He was worried it might look like a circus Big Top. Were we having a girl swinging from a trapeze?

  The answer to that was no. It wouldn’t be in keeping with the Great Gatsby theme the party planner had persuaded me to go for.

  Weather aside, most things were under control, I thought. But then I remembered my dress. Jesus. In the boutique, with the nice lighting and flattering mirrors that stretched you out a bit, I had thought it sexy and daring. ‘You look amazing, you’ll really stand out,’ the youngest, most beautiful assistant had said, so that my aged, gullible, an-eejit-born-every-day face had pinked with pleasure. That morning in the privacy of my room I’d held it up to me and thought I looked like something that had been let out on day release. Frank hadn’t thought to ask about the weather. Surely he couldn’t blame me for that, I thought, as I took the lift to the third floor. The doors opened onto a long corridor. There was a sign on the door of Will’s suite: Please wipe your feet on the mat before entering. That was classic Ciara. She had overseen the redecoration – remodelling, she called it – of Will’s suite and she was a total control freak. It was something she tried to hide with a modicum of success. ‘Oh, this old thing? I just threw it on,’ she’d say, of a dress she’d sourced from some young designer nobody had ever heard about up a back alley in Milan. And after serving up a gourmet meal she’d been preparing for a week, she would bat away your compliment saying it was just something she’d flung in the oven.

  ‘You’re so slim,’ I heard a woman with a bum the size of a small African country say to her at a party. ‘How do you do it?’

  Ciara had shrugged. ‘I don’t know, a high metabolism maybe,’ she had said, even though I knew full well that she did yoga, ran, lifted weights, starved herself and got pipes stuck up her arse for colonic irrigation. Fair enough, I was competitive, but Ciara was chronically competitive. She had a syndrome rather than a tendency.

  A lot of the women we knew had it. If you ‘worked in the home’ – and, let’s face it, in our circle you weren’t exactly worn out with domestic duties, what with the army of foreign nationals ready to pick up the slack – you had to find something else to go head to head on. That left a couple of possibilities. Kids provided a rich vein of material whereby fascinating information was traded: ‘Adam eats broccoli, carrots, all his vegetables and hates sweets’ – which usually meant that if Adam came round to your place he was to be found face-down in your biscuit tin. Or ‘Amanda is particularly gifted at gymnastics’ when Amanda, a sweet little duckling with the co-ordination of a drunken sailor, was busy hurling her blocky form around the hall next to your graceful swan.

  Women also competed about their husbands’ jobs and how busy the men were, meaning how much dosh they were pulling in. I’d even heard people compete over their dogs. My friend Ciara liked to claim that her mutt Cleo was extremely clever: ‘The dog psychologist said Cleo had anxiety issues. Once we got those resolved, there was no stopping her. Say what you like but Cleo is seriously intelligent.’

  Cleo, a fat ball of fluff that liked to chew her paws, didn’t seem particularly gifted to me, but that wasn’t the point. The point, I think, was that the ball had officially gone out of court when you found yourself in competition over your dog.

  But by far the most fertile ground for competition was weight and looks. Peers were scrutinized to see how well they were holding up as the years rolled by. You couldn’t win. If you were fat you were looked down on – although everyone was thrilled to bits by your extra poundage and encouraged you to stay well padded so they could feel better about themselves – ‘It suits you!’ If you were super-thin people wanted to claw your eyes out and got their revenge by saying, ‘She’s gone very thin, God love her.’ Translation: ‘She looks as old as the prehistoric man hauled from the bog.’

  Anyway, Will was obviously cleaning up: the waiting room was rammed with women flicking through magazines. No downturn in the economy biting at his bum, I thought, as my feet sank into the new cream carpet. Frank would be thrilled. Not.

  ‘Fannies are recession proof,’ Frank had said the other day, with a real envious look on his face when we saw Will roar past us in his new Porsche. ‘Women need their bits seen to no matter what.’ It was fair to say that Frank suffered from fairly severe attacks of the green-eyed monster.

  The receptionist took my details. A small blondey one with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. Her voice was polite but detached. That was a skill: to be able to talk to people without getting involved. Frank was always giving out that I drew people down on us. ‘Just don’t give your life story every time you open your gob,’ he’d said to me, a few weeks previously, on holiday in Miami when I’d got talking to a nice woman by the pool. ‘Now we’re going to have to nod at them and talk to them for the rest of the fucking holiday.’

  He had a point, I suppose. But there was another way of looking at it.

  ‘Do you not think, Frank,’ I’d said, slathering oil on his broad, freckly back – Frank still had the Irish thing of being up for a tan even if it meant dying of skin cancer, ‘that life would be a lot less enjoyable if you were always guarding what you said and you didn’t take time to talk to your fellow man or woman?’

  He’d grunted at me, his trademark sarcastic grunt. ‘It’s called having fucking verbal diarrhoea, Anita.’

  ‘One moment – I’ll just put you on hold.’ The receptionist lifted her eyes from the computer screen so that they landed on the golf ball of a diamond I had on my finger. I won’t lie. I loved that ring. Frank had carted it home after he closed his first big property deal. We had been like two complete eejits, drinking champagne, me waving my finger around and thinking we were the dog’s. That was the start, really, of the boom in Ireland.

  ‘You’re here for a smear with Dr White’s nurse.’

  She said ‘Dr White’ possessively, as if she owned him. Ciara suspected Will’s receptionist of having the hots for him. Big surprise there.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Just take a seat,’ she said, her eyes once more on her screen.

  Bet you didn’t d
ance with Will last week at a ball fronted by a rock star’s wife and your woman who ran the orphanage out in Calcutta, I thought, as I sat down. The ball of the year. Le tout Dublin. The glitterati and clitorati in the Round Room of the Mansion House. A Who’s Who of fake-tanned, big-titted Dublin – but one of the shindigs you didn’t want to be left out of. And Will had swept me around the pink ballroom in full view of everyone. I won’t lie: I was chuffed.

  Half the women in the waiting room had rounded stomachs belling out in front of them. I chose to sit beside one who wasn’t visibly pregnant. It was funny but it made me sad to think I wouldn’t be going again. Like, don’t get me wrong: I don’t miss the sleepless nights as you stagger out of bed to heat a bottle, bitterly eyeing your spouse who is pretending to be sound asleep. Or the desperation of being stuck for hours on end in the playground, pushing the kids on swings, twirling them on the roundy thing that makes you both dizzy, wondering if you’ll ever get out from that behind those railings.

  But when you know that the door is closing on all that because your body’s past it, when you know you’ll never get a whiff of that velvety smell at the back of their necks, or watch their chubby little legs kick up in the air when you take their nappy off, or hear the gurgling sound they make when you first jam a bottle into their mouth, it makes you feel a bit empty.

  A woman I knew click-clacked across the waiting room, her hair cut in a razor-sharp super-shiny bob. Her son had been in Dylan’s class. I automatically ducked my head. She was one of those who always left you feeling a bit crap about yourself after you talked to her. Super-Mum. She had some kick-arse job in a law firm, merging this with that or something. ‘Clever you,’ she’d said to me once, at the kids’ sports day, when I was handing out medals, as though she thought I was a bit slow.

  Dylan wasn’t the best at school. Not compared to her lad. Dylan had arsed around for a couple of years after he’d left. His gap year had turned into a couple of gap years.

  ‘If he’d get a feckin’ job he’d get all the life experience he needed,’ Frank had said.

  He had just started being a stockbroker a couple of months back. I wondered if I could walk over to your one and drop into conversation how Dylan was doing. Update her a little. Enjoy a bit of parental conceit. The last time we’d spoken, her son had been going great guns studying medicine. Dylan had been working in a bar in Sydney, drinking more than he sold, I suspected, with corn-rows in his hair, which did nothing for his round face. Maybe I could ask how her son was keeping and then just sort of slide in that my son was a stockbroker now. That would be pathetic. I wondered if she’d had a bit of work done – she looked a lot perkier around the gills than I remembered.

  Anyway, I had Ella, who was brilliant. Her English teacher had said to me around the time she was leaving school that my daughter was ‘intellectually brilliant’. Words like ‘exceptional’ were regularly bandied about when Ella’s teachers discussed her. Sometimes she lapsed into the American TV ‘OMG’ way of talking – when you ditch proper sentences in favour of teenage argot – but her conversation was peppered with big words like ‘rhapsodizes’ and ‘Valhalla’. She learnt a new word a day and had done since she was tiny. I’d ask her what today’s word was and try to memorize it. I didn’t use them much out loud because I was afraid of using them in the wrong context or mispronouncing them, like a woman I heard at a dinner party going on about ‘connojures’ of wine. I hadn’t a clue what she was talking about and felt a bit bad about myself until I got home and realized the poor dozy cow meant ‘connoisseurs’.

  Ella’s first word was ‘helicopter’. I was dead proud of that and told everybody I knew at the time. Half of them didn’t believe me. Whatever. Frank and I knew the truth. Our girl was practically a genius. She had been able to read the paper at the age of three. Frank and I had treated her like a performing seal, getting her to read out loud for our families. It made a nice change from watching Dylan run around the place head-butting things.

  Ella got one of the best Leaving Certificates in the country – straight As – and her gorgeous beaming face had been splashed all over the papers as she held up her results. Most people would have seen it, but there had been loads of mothers who’d schlepped past me, saying something general like ‘It’s great it’s all over’ so I knew they were jealous as hell. Ella had it all going for her. Brains and looks. Sometimes I thought it was the very fact of Ella that kept me sane. Not to be knocking Dylan, because in a way he’s my pet, but Ella was what I had achieved in life.

  I know it’s sad but I loved to imagine her pushing her bike across the Trinity campus, like in a movie, with her knapsack on her back, the light fading and her Trinity scarf – I couldn’t say that word ‘Trinity’ enough – wrapped round her beautiful swan-like neck. My daughter the law student and nobody, not even Ms Big Job in the Law Firm sitting a couple of seats away tapping at her phone, or anybody else could take that away from me.

  The young one next to me had gorgeous skin. Plump and unlined and peachy. She was slightly on the heavy side although the weight kind of suited her – and for once I meant that sincerely. Anyway, the skin more than made up for it. Do not covet your neighbour’s skin – that should have been in the Ten Commandments. Actually it was her bracelet I noticed first. A white-gold Bvlgari number with diamonds similar to the one Frank gave me for my last birthday.

  She was well put together. Her suit was sharp and she had a snazzy leather briefcase on the floor. Half these young ones looked like they could run the nation. I could see that my Ella would turn out like that, just finishing first law so she was, and wouldn’t take rubbish off God nor man.

  Ciara had done a great job on the waiting room, especially considering there was no natural light. It was all subtle down-lights, creams, beiges and fawns to give an illusion of space. A giant painting hung on one wall by an artist I knew Ciara was very keen on. It looked a bit like the ring from a wet glass repeated across the canvas but it had cost a small fortune. Ciara was very up on her art.

  Frank had bought loads of paintings when things were good. ‘I mightn’t know a lot about art but I know what I like,’ he said, whenever the subject came up.

  I knew that when you said that you may as well have plastered a sign saying ‘Oink’ across your head. Certain types of people automatically pegged you as a savage who lived in a tree and filed your teeth when you said it. Frank knew that, too, but he said it, I think, to challenge people to take him on – and because there was nothing else he could say. It was his way of publicly marking it down that he did not intend to change himself for anyone, when in fact he had made huge private strides to do just that. Frank was big on self-betterment, but of the stealthy variety.

  Frank could bullshit with the best of them about wine but the problem with art was that you could put what Frank and I knew about it on the head of a pin. We hadn’t grown up being dragged around art galleries or being talked to about that kind of stuff. It was a language we hadn’t spoken from birth. When I’d met Frank his idea of art was The Boy with a Tear. There were quite a few areas in the cultural arena where we’d had to learn on the hoof, and even though we’d made up a fair bit of ground in some areas, art was one of those where we’d always be playing catch-up. This drove Frank spare.

  Will was definitely minting it, I decided, then went on to wonder if I’d be able to say a few words at the party – you know, welcoming people and talking a bit about Frank. I’d sort of mentioned to the kids that I was thinking of it and they hadn’t been very encouraging. Ella hadn’t said anything, just shot me a doubtful look, and Dylan – born tactful like his father – had laughed and asked me if I was joking. I’d never actually do it anyway. Even thinking about it practically gave me the trots. Which showed you how far I’d travelled the wrong way: when I was in school – and I find this hard to believe – I was on the debating team.

  My stomach rumbled. ‘Excuse me,’ I said, patting it and going a bit pink.


  The young one next to me caught my eye and smiled.

  ‘I must be hungry,’ I lied. It was an understatement. I was completely off carbs. I was so famished I’d have fallen on a plate of buttery spuds and wept for joy. I’d have sold my body for a slab of white sliced pan plastered with butter. I suffered badly to be thin. I spent my life ready to gnaw my hand off. But if it was a crime to be fat in the circles I moved in, it was an even bigger crime to like the kind of foods I craved. The sort of foods I’d grown up eating – fried sausages, chips and frozen potato waffles. So I bought organic this and free-range that, but I dreamt of suet puddings and Angel Delight and packet custard and the thick end slice of shop-bought Battenberg cake.

  ‘Your perfume is lovely,’ I said to the young one, for something to say. I was a bit embarrassed about the rumble. ‘Is it Jo Malone, the orangey one?’

  She smiled. ‘You’ve a good nose.’

  ‘I used to wear it,’ I told her.

  ‘My boyfriend bought it for me,’ she said. ‘He’s mad about it.’

  ‘It’s nice all right,’ I said, thinking I might go back to it.

  She was smiling at me again. ‘Is it very hot in here,’ she asked, fanning her face with her hand, ‘or is it just me?’

  Her accent was one of those rootless transatlantic ones where you hadn’t a clue if the person was from the bogs or Dublin, the United States of America or the Planet Zog. You could tell underneath, though, that she was country originally. ‘I’m okay,’ I said.

  The girl removed her suit jacket and laid it on the seat next to her. She had great boobs, I thought. You needed boobs to wear my party dress. Mine, of course, were like a spaniel’s ears so I’d have to haul them up with a boulder-holder bra. My friend Maeve had had hers done. They were two hard grapefruits now, stuck to her front.