The Better Half Read online

  ‘Maybe it’s a sign,’ the young one said, shaking her head, ‘that I’m pregnant.’

  I smiled at her. ‘Is it your first?’

  She nodded, giving a small bashful smile. It brought me back to when I was having Dylan. I was even younger than her. I’d been twenty-three. Young and thrilled and scared out of my mind. Frank had been over the moon, his chest stuck out like a bantam cock, that I’d got knocked up on our honeymoon.

  ‘I’m a bit nervous,’ she said. ‘I’m just getting a check to make sure. I mean, I’ve done a test and I think I am. I just want to be sure. Is it as bad as they say?’ she asked. ‘I mean the labour.’

  I lied: ‘Not a bit of it. It’s grand.’ All women had a duty to lie about that and not to describe the bowel-wrenching pain. Anyway, it was worth it. Every bit of it. Including the piles and varicose veins and stitches.

  She puffed her cheeks out.

  ‘Honestly,’ I said, ‘the day you have your baby is the best day of your life.’ I felt a pang then, thinking of the day I’d had Dylan, and my eyes misted. They had slapped him up on my tummy and Frank had shouted out something like ‘Is he okay?’ And then Dylan had looked right at me. I would never forget that as long as I lived. In a sort of a way – and this was no disrespect to Ella because that was a very special day too – it was the most perfect moment of my life.

  ‘That’s good,’ she said, reaching towards her bag and plucking out a lip salve. She had lovely lips. Pink and full and pillowy. The type a couple of my cronies had tried to buy with their credit cards. She went silent for a second. Then she said, ‘I hope my boyfriend’s into the whole kids thing.’

  ‘I bet you he’ll be thrilled,’ I said, touching her arm. I had no basis for coming to that conclusion. The guy, whoever he was, might not want children at all.

  ‘He’s in London today on business,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t even know I’m here. The pregnancy wasn’t exactly planned,’ she confided.

  ‘Lots of the best things in life aren’t planned,’ I said, thinking she was lucky to be starting out. People were interested in you when you were pregnant. You became public property, but in a nice way, with people touching your stomach and asking when you were due. You were the centre of attention. When you were pregnant you had a sense of purpose.

  ‘He’s married,’ she said, ‘separated – or almost.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, a bit taken aback. In my day you’d no more have admitted that than said you were a child molester. Things had got a lot more tolerant.

  ‘I hope you don’t think I’m some sort of home-wrecker,’ she said, swivelling to look me in the eye.

  I did, actually. ‘No,’ I lied, ‘not at all.’ And it wasn’t for me to judge. He who is without sin shall cast the first stone and all that.

  ‘He and his wife have been finished for years,’ she said. ‘They got married when they were super-young and they’ve nothing left in common.’

  ‘It happens, I guess.’ I wondered if you could say that about Frank and me. We had the kids in common for one thing.

  ‘It’s their kids that have kept them together,’ she said then, ‘but they’re grown-up now so there’s no other reason for him to stay.’

  My heart hurt a little for the other faceless woman. Going about her life, not knowing that her husband was on the brink of trading her in for Little Miss Big Knockers, that she was about to be discarded like an old shoe. Hopefully, she wouldn’t mind. Maybe she was dying to be shot of him. Maybe it would be a whole new lease of life.

  ‘My boyfriend’s a lot older than me, so I think he’s more conservative about stuff like divorce,’ she said, shrugging her shoulders. ‘It’s a generational thing, I guess.’

  The way she was talking sort of implied she and I were on a wavelength. Maybe she thought I was younger than I was, I thought, feeling pleased.

  ‘Not that I’m saying anything against your generation.’

  Right.

  ‘I hope he wants the baby.’

  She looked about ten suddenly and I thought of my Ella. I reached out and touched the young one on the arm again. Frank always complained that I was too tactile and over-familiar. ‘I’m sure he will,’ I said, not knowing what else to say.

  She frowned, making an impatient sound. ‘It drives me mad that he won’t tell me anything about her. It sort of makes you obsessed, wondering what she’s like. I haven’t even seen a photo.’

  I could imagine how something like that might get under your skin.

  ‘Which is kind of weird because he’s very high-profile,’ she said, obviously proud but at the same time a bit slow to spill the beans, which I thought was a good sign. It was a shame, though, because I was itching to know.

  She crossed her legs and sat back further in the chair, a small smile dancing around her mouth.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, wondering if I could flat out ask who he was. Her brow was furrowed. It was obvious that she was fairly itching to tell me.

  ‘I won’t say his name but he’s a property developer.’

  My snout began to twitch and I started to run through a list of possible suspects. Some of those property developers were out-and-out boyos.

  ‘The wife sort of seems to keep below the radar.’

  Like me, I thought. I did that too. Like, I was involved with a couple of charities and I went to a fair amount of balls and lunches but I rarely got my picture taken. Mostly because I hated the way I looked in photos. And because there had always been a small part of me that thought if you allowed the media to build you up, it would come back at some point to bite you in the backside. Say what you like about the Irish but we’re especially talented at tearing each other down. We don’t go in for people making out that they’re the dog’s. It’s in our DNA.

  Frank loved having his mug in the paper. It drove him spare that I wouldn’t go along with it. ‘For fuck’s sake, Anita, it’s only a feckin’ picture.’

  I wondered why the wife didn’t get her photo taken. Maybe she and I would get on.

  ‘She’s blonde, I think.’

  The young one had curly red hair, very shiny, a bit like an Irish dancer’s.

  ‘I got that much out of him. They have two kids. A boy and a girl. The boy is doing law and the girl is a stockbroker. No, it’s the other way around. I shouldn’t say any more – he’d kill me if he heard me.’

  She waved her arm so that I was faced with the bracelet. The bottom of my stomach fell away. Her mouth was moving and words were coming at me, assaulting me. I stared at the bracelet.

  ‘He’s so proud of them, always banging on about them. I hope he’ll be as proud of this baby,’ she said, touching her stomach. ‘He’ll be an old father. He’s fifty.’

  Her face took on a set look. ‘The wife is throwing him a big party tonight.’

  There was a roaring in my ears, as if I was hearing from under water.

  She wrinkled her nose. ‘I’d say she’s desperate to hang on to him. Of course, I can’t go …’

  Will White came to the door with a chart. ‘Fiona Keane,’ he called out, ducking his head into the waiting room and smiling. He raised his hand in a little wave.

  I blinked at him.

  The young one gathered her stuff and got up. ‘Great to talk to you,’ she said, giving me a perky little wave.

  I stayed mute. As her back retreated, a wave of her perfume engulfed me. I might vomit, I thought. My muscles were frozen. Maybe I was paralysed.

  ‘Are you all right?’ somebody asked. Was it the receptionist, another woman? I didn’t know. I had moaned, I think, the low, hurt moan of an animal.

  Then I found myself outside. The wind jabbed at my cheeks and nipped at my fingers. The black sky spewed great thick raindrops onto my face, so that my makeup ran, and went down my back and front so that my top and bra were stuck to me. My blow-dried hair collapsed like a fallen soufflé and stuck to my face, strands pokin
g into my eyes. Somebody ran past me with a coat over their head. I stood there like a statue, the sound of the traffic rumbling in the distance. I could hear my rasping, shallow breaths. I stared down at my dirty toes, at the water running through my jewelled flip-flops. I wanted to die.

  2

  I drove around in circles for I don’t know how long. The Range Rover slid in and out of lanes, weaving through the caravan of cars crawling home in what was ironically called the ‘evening rush’. I was barely aware of the cacophony of beeps and raised fingers that punctuated my dead-eyed, sloppy manoeuvres.

  The man on the radio babbled in the background about the weather, saying something about ‘record precipitation’. I had nowhere to go, I thought, clutching the wheel. The phone rang and rang. The party planner’s number flashed up again and again. I could picture her mega-watt smile sliding from her face when the hostess never showed up. When the hostess was found floating in a canal her blonde bouffant floating around her head in knotty tangles.

  In the end it was my need for drink and Valium that took me home.

  ‘Where the hell were you?’ Frank asked, bursting into our bedroom swaddled in a towel, trailing a cloud of aftershave behind him that would have felled a horse. Frank was a bit heavy on the old aftershave sometimes. His short springy hair was wet from the shower and plastered back on his skull. He didn’t wait for an answer, just motored on. I wanted to scream at him but no sound came out of my throat.

  I could hear the excitement in his voice. Frank loved the social swim. He loved razzmatazz. He liked nothing better than to think of himself as a player, not just in business but socially. Frank was never really off the stage.

  I had always found hosting parties nerve-racking. Frank rose to the occasion, visibly inflating, sprinkling bons mots here and there. If there were ribbons to cut or babies to kiss he’d do it gladly.

  Maybe he was excited at the prospect of becoming a father again. I flinched at the idea. He had spent most of Dylan and Ella’s childhood out busting his balls. There was always some project ‘kicking off’, which meant he couldn’t be with us. Maybe this was a second crack of the whip for him.

  ‘We’ve had to abandon the marquee – the fucking thing practically blew down. We should sue those bastards.’

  That was always Frank’s first line of thought. Who to sue? Frank was macho: he spent his life suing people. He was one of the reasons the Four Courts – or Four Goldmines, as they’re known – were so fecking busy. If he wasn’t suing neighbours over boundary disputes, he was suing ex-business partners and other developers. Plenty of the actions he initiated ended up being settled once he started giving evidence – often not in his favour because Frank had bullied his lawyers into taking the case when he hadn’t a leg to stand on.

  Frank looked in the mirror, sucking in his flabby stomach. Then he trained his gaze on me and whistled. ‘I like your dress, missus.’ He came over then and cupped my bottom with his hand. ‘You’re looking very well.’

  That showed exactly how much attention he was paying me. I looked terrible.

  ‘Fancy slipping into something more comfortable later?’ he continued, kissing the side of my head and kneading my buttocks.

  I wanted to howl at him. He had given her my bracelet. My perfume. My smell. He had stolen some of my identity, parcelled it up and given it to her.

  ‘People are starting to arrive,’ he said.

  I looked as if somebody had told me I’d five minutes to live. He hadn’t noticed.

  ‘Shake a leg. It’s showtime!’ he said, and waltzed out of the room, leaving me on my own. After a while I picked up a lipstick and began to fill in my ever-thinning lips. He was discarding them for plump pillowy ones.

  Eventually I made it to the top of the stairs. I could hear chatting and raucous laughter. Dazed, I sank to the floor. Frank hadn’t even wanted to know why I’d been late. I leant my forehead against the banister. I’d driven the Jeep around the city for hours, catatonic, unsure what to do, where to go. Now an army of uniformed waiters, the women sporting little frilly hats on account of the Great Gatsby theme, charged back and forth ferrying trays of glasses. Through the banisters my eyes bored into Frank’s treacherous back. He was holding court, surrounded by a constellation of associates. A woman with a red slash for a mouth shrieked with laughter at something he had said.

  Frank’s affair was pure cliché: he was a middle-aged man grappling with his mortality and the advancing years. ‘You’re only as young as the woman you squeeze,’ Frank used to joke, because I’m five years younger than him. Well, the man was as good as his word. He’d found a girl young enough to be his daughter. When I thought of it I felt crazy. The two big achievements in my life, its twin pillars, were marriage and motherhood. Frank might be proposing to take the first away, and the second was crumbling because my children had grown up. That was a gut-wrenching thought.

  I visualized myself moving to the top of the stairs and bellowing down at the red-faced husband I loved in spite of everything, ‘Don’t do this to me, Frank, you unfaithful pig. DO NOT DO THIS TO MEEEEE!’

  In the run-up to the party – like a sad, deluded, carried-away sap – I had harboured fantasies of a grand entrance. I would sweep down the stairs Gone With the Wind-style – since I was little I’d had a thing for Scarlett O’Hara – so that my guests’ eyes would be drawn to the red fabric of my dress, which would contrast with my blonde hair. I had always had a taste for melodrama. Oh, the woeful irony of that delusion. Instead I slunk down to the party, sedated – and there was every chance some of my guests were feeling dead sorry for me. Some of them might have seen Frank with Little Miss Big Knockers and admired her round, shapely bottom and boobs. Some of them may have seen the affair as evidence of Frank’s legendary charisma.

  Frank might not be classically good-looking but he had always had a certain raw magnetism, even back in the days when he wore black shoes with white socks, like a bogger garda. Sometimes I thought I’d got lost somewhere in the great sea of his personality, a pale, uninteresting person, in 2D compared to the 3D of his muscular persona.

  My eyes panned the room. No sign of my children. Dylan had slipped off by now. He had a new girlfriend, an underwear model trying to break into television. She was called Biba. She hadn’t wanted to come to the party – not her kind of thing, apparently – so Dylan had offered to come on his own. We’d never met her but Dylan was like a fool after her. His heart was too big and he didn’t have his younger sister’s smarts. Bright enough, though, to spot that the ice sculpture looked like a penis. He’d had that clocked in zip time: I got a text – Ice sculpture lks like giant schlong Dx.

  He was right.

  Ella had come with her boyfriend, Christopher. They kept themselves to themselves, lost in the intense bright burst of first love. They were both finishing first law in Trinity College. Christopher looked like Rupert Bear with his skinny body and a scarf thrown back around his neck. He was very polite. A little bit in love with himself, maybe.

  ‘What a geek, Mum,’ had been Dylan’s verdict.

  ‘That fella is missing in action up his own arse,’ Frank had said, after he had overheard Christopher – a poncy name, according to Frank – talking to Ella about the urgent need ‘to de-Catholicize the Irish Constitution’. ‘I don’t know how she sticks listening to that shite.’

  Frank was torn about him, though. Christopher’s father was a judge, which was a big plus, something to be dropped casually into conversation on the golf course. On the other hand, the fact that Ella, his little girl, had a boyfriend at all was a big no-no.

  According to Ella, Christopher was off-the-charts bright.

  ‘Like you so, love,’ I’d said to her, but she’d just shrugged, as if to ask what I would know about stuff like that.

  ‘Just don’t let Dad drink too much,’ she’d said at breakfast, when she’d told me that Christopher would be honouring us with his presence. ‘Ple
ase don’t let him go on about how much the party cost. And, oh, my God,’ she’d said, making a face, ‘does he have to, like, tell everyone that he started his business from nothing?’

  Ella wasn’t overly keen on being reminded of her parents’ origins. Dylan didn’t give a rattling damn. ‘Better nouveau than never,’ was Dylan’s mantra. ‘I’d rather be a Johnny-come-lately than a Johnny-not-come-at-all.’

  I tried to catch Ella’s eye during Frank’s speech when he kicked off with ‘I started my business with a van and a ladder …’ but she’d been looking the other way, her back stiff. Sometimes, I thought, she looked at her family as if she was viewing zoo animals through a glass screen.

  Paul Hogan was encircled by a crowd of admirers. He was a sort of celebrity banker – always in the news pontificating about this, that and the other. He was bankrolling Frank’s big development just like he’d lent money hand over fist to half the developers in town. Several of the male guests licked every nook and cranny of Paul’s posterior. And Frank was no exception. It used to be the other way round but the tide was turning and now the likes of Frank had to kowtow to the bankers and keep them sweet, ‘getting them to keep faith and not pull the plug’, being the deadly subtext. Frank had given Paul a special mention in his speech: ‘And there’s a fella here I’d like to thank … for the way he changed the culture of lending in this country, for his vision … for the vision that the older, snootier, more establishment bankers didn’t have, one of the main reasons behind the kick-starting of the tiger economy … Please give it up for Paul Hogan – the man’s a legend …’

  To thunderous applause, catcalls and roars, Paul had pivoted around with his big flashy smile giving a mock-regal wave. He walked in the swinging-dick way that suggested his balls were so big he had to turn out his legs – and made you wonder if they were in fact the size of marrowfat peas.

  My eyes drifted. Frank’s accountant Dermot was talking to my friend Maeve. Dermot Thornley was a celebrity accountant, often described as ‘a friend to the stars’ and reputed to have the Midas touch with money. He and his wife hung around with a fast, ritzy set and were regularly photographed with its members in the pages of the society magazines. Their presence at the party would help Frank secure column inches in the social diaries. Frank Lawlor, his glittering friends and their glittering lives: that was the sort of bull that Frank wet himself for.