The Better Half Read online

  Past the large curved bay windows, beyond the marble fireplace, back towards the centre of the floor, Frank moved boldly, confidently, powering his stocky frame around the room with surprising elegance, verging on grace. He had taken ballroom-dancing lessons for the party, so he could show off. They had been a deathly secret. It was pure Frank, one-in-the-eye stuff – I’ll show them. He hadn’t asked me to come with him. I hadn’t thought it strange. Maybe he had brought his Irish-dancing colleen with her shiny red curls.

  A sea of faces. They were here for Frank, of course. He was the draw. For many I wasn’t even the side salad to his main course. I was just the garnish. If I’d collapsed in a heap on the floor, there were people who would have stepped over my crumpled form to get to Frank.

  Frank’s eyes gleamed.

  ‘Do you love me, Frank?’ I asked, with a sort of tugging in my chest.

  He looked at me in a stunned-mullet sort of way, tipping back his head. ‘Of course,’ he said, yanking me around in another wide arc. It was significant, I thought, that he twirled me faster and faster – so that we couldn’t talk any more.

  The storm had passed. The guests had gone. All the Aston Martins, Jaguars, Bentleys and top-of-the-range Mercedes had purred away, ferrying our guests back to their plush homes. Ella and Frank had gone to bed. Dylan was still out.

  I’d succumbed to the demon drink – the clear golden liquid that made everything that bit better. The morning light burst into the drawing room and edged up the walls, illuminating the ornate plasterwork, the cornices and the giant rose in the centre of the ceiling. We’d been told by the estate agent that it was very large by the standards of the time when the house was built, which meant that the original owners had been flash bastards like us. Frank hadn’t liked it when I’d made that connection. And he’d gone mental when he’d heard me saying it to some friends. ‘Stop talking through your arse, Anita.’

  Right. Like they might have thought the pair of us were born with a silver spoon.

  I sat on the floor in the middle of Frank’s presents – his booty, his swag – a vat-sized glass of wine next to me. Bottles of vintage champagne, golf clubs, bulging envelopes containing God knew what. My legs were tucked under me. The too-small shoes were kicked off, the red feathered dress lying on the floor in a heap. I was in my bra and knickers.

  Frank had neither thanked nor praised me for organizing the party. Nothing. He’d gone to bed humming to himself, a little unsteady on his feet, a half-drunk bottle of champagne in his hand, his bow-tie undone. ‘That was some party – that’ll show those cunts,’ he’d called back over his shoulder. ‘Frank Lawlor is going nowhere. That’s what you’ve gotta do,’ he went on. ‘When the going gets rough, you mow the front lawn, paint the front door and put on a new suit.’

  I liked that about Frank. He was a fighter. I respected his instinct to fight like hell for what he’d got. Like I was going to fight for my marriage. My life. I had put all my eggs in one basket. Little Miss Big Knockers couldn’t just take everything away from me. She had said that Frank and I had nothing in common. Was that true, I wondered, taking a long slow slug of wine. It was hard now to remember what we had talked about on our last holiday. I scrunched up my nose, trying to fight my way through the fog in my head.

  The hot sun in Miami had beaten down. We had stayed in the Delano. It was an Ian Schrager-designed hotel. Schrager was part of the Studio 54 posse who had hung out with Andy Warhol. Vogue had once described the Delano as America’s coolest hotel. A slew of celebrities had stayed there, including maybe Madonna. Of course, even though I practically stopped the milkman to tell him all this, I’d never heard of Schrager or the hotel until somebody had filled me in. Competitive holidaying was very big: Irish people who used to think that a week in Brittas by the beach in a caravan, or a weekend in some damp bungalow with slug trails in the rain in Kerry, was a brilliant getaway had got into the habit of parroting things like: ‘I preferred Umbria to Tuscany. We stayed in a wonderful converted monastery at the top of a hill and the views were to die for.’ Or: ‘Lamu was divine. You don’t know Lamu? It’s a small Muslim island off Kenya. You fly Amsterdam, Nairobi, Lamu and then you take a boat to get to the island. It was so worth it, though.’ Cue smug laughter, so you’d want to beat the head off them while you made a mental note to Google it.

  I had said things like that myself at the beginning when people first started to make a few bob. I used to hear myself going on like that about a holiday and couldn’t believe the bull I was coming out with. Not that I had much choice, because even if we were tragically bored on holiday and the weather was dire and we’d fought like two Jack Russells the whole way there and the whole way back, Frank would insist on talking it up. ‘Oh, it was a-mazing,’ he’d say, with a grin on his face.

  Anyway, after a couple of years of trotting out that kind of thing, bragging became second nature. You felt compelled to outdo your friends – which was lovely behaviour when you thought about it.

  In fairness, the Delano Hotel had been nice: an art-deco building on Collins Avenue in South Beach all tricked out in pastel colours. The sand had been white, the sea azure, the beach huts striped in peach and pistachio, the umbrellas cream, with white-clad staff offering guests free smoothies and popsicles. The bodies on the beach were buffed and flawless. Perfectly toned bottoms wore barely there thongs and string bikinis struggled to contain massive fake but pert boobs on stick-thin women, their faces shaded by massive designer sunglasses. There was not a spot of cellulite in sight.

  A beautiful man with a huge Afro had cartwheeled along the beach in the latest designer gear before stooping to do press-ups. There were biplanes flying overhead, powerboats and jet-skis out at sea, palm trees. The loungers around the pool turned into flat beds at night so that the Delano guests could lean back and look at the stars as a DJ played by the pool.

  Frank had paced up and down with his phone, muttering, issuing orders, raving. He didn’t actually like holidays. He liked to be busy all the time. He loved working. He couldn’t see the point of holidays. He took them so that he could boast about them afterwards.

  We’d had dinner together, me dressed up to the nines in white to highlight my tan, my makeup looking a little hard, and Frank, in his freshly laundered short-sleeved shirt, the colour of a boiled lobster, rogue sweat stains spreading down his back although he had only just stepped from the shower. I had picked at some seafood ceviche and yucca chips, which was a way of eating but not taking in any calories. Oh, and I had drunk a lot of cocktails. Peach Blossom, the house special, was my favourite, an explosive mix of Absolut peach vodka, pineapple juice and a dash of peach schnapps. Frank had talked about business and the banks, and the planning system being run by muppets, and political parties he had no sway over otherwise he would have got his planning in a second. I stared at him, anaesthetized by alcohol, my buddies the Peach Blossoms.

  We’d had a silent communion, I told myself now, drinking half my glass of wine in one swallow. Frank and I had history. There was lots of water under the bridge. She couldn’t just write me out of the picture. I started to feel more confident. I will take you down to Chinatown, bitch.

  There was the sound of someone stirring upstairs. The rattle of a door. I cut my eyes towards the stairs. I drained my glass as I watched Frank’s short powerful bare legs come into view. He wanted me to come to bed, I thought, my leaden heart doing a little jig at the idea that my husband might actually want me.

  He stopped and leant over the banisters, his hand gripping the rail.

  I stared at him. His eyes were moist. I had never seen Frank cry. Not even when the kids were born.

  ‘Anita,’ he said, running his hand over his face. ‘Mam …’ He broke off and tried again, the tears running down his face unchecked. The colour was bleached from his face.

  My heart did a back flip.

  ‘Mam,’ he said. He sat down heavily on the stairs. In a voice that
was low, hoarse and beaten, he finally managed, ‘Mam is after dying.’

  3

  My eyes were swollen and red. I had cried buckets in the church with the snot and tears running down my face so that even Frank had turned to look at me. I felt dead embarrassed to be hogging the whole scene but I just couldn’t help myself. Frank’s sister-in-law Mary had looked a bit put out by my performance. She’d been going great guns as chief mourner cocked up beside DJ, Frank’s older brother – like a pet fox with her ferrety face – until I’d stolen her thunder. All she was missing was the Jackie Onassis mantilla. Why, I don’t know, because Mam had been a total cow to her. But then maybe that’s what people did at funerals – cried for their own reasons. Or maybe, God forgive me, poor Mary was so relieved at not having to live with Mam any more that she was crying from sheer gratitude.

  ‘Jaysus, I never knew you and that old wagon were so close,’ my sister Karen hissed in my ear afterwards.

  I felt a sort of jangly hysterical laughter bubbling up inside me. My sister had come the whole way down to Offaly on the bus for Frank’s mam. Darren, her hubby, was working and Karen didn’t drive. I felt like a pure louse for not inviting her to the fiftieth. ‘You’re awful good to come, Karen,’ I said, hugging her tightly. Sometimes around Karen I found my language reverting back to that of my youth, before I’d reinvented myself from top to bottom.

  ‘Ah, it’s nothing,’ she said, loosening my grip and giving me that slanted ironic smile of hers. Then she shot back, ‘You must be wrecked, what with this coming hot on the heels of the party and all.’

  That was classic Karen. She never let you away with anything.

  Frank seemed touched that Karen had made the effort. ‘At least Pocahontas didn’t come in a black tracksuit,’ he’d said to me, before the Mass began, with a soft look in his eyes. That had been when I’d felt my eyes spring leaks.

  The church was small and cute, set in the middle of grassy fields, near the village of Enniskane. The graveyard was behind it. Crows and jackdaws cawed and chattered in the high, rustling trees. There was a smell of wild garlic and flowers. The place looked like an illustration on the front of a chocolate box. The country did my head in. Once a Dub always a Dub. I missed the soothing sound of traffic, the Dublin buses trundling along. Nice clean gleaming footpaths. There were no decent shops either.

  Along with a couple of castles and monasteries, the Grand Canal and the Bog of Allen were the two main attractions in Offaly. Big deal. We had the Grand Canal in Dublin too. Frank’s family went on about the Bog of Allen as if it was the ninth wonder of the world. ‘Being from a bog, Frank, isn’t something to shout home about,’ Karen had said once. Frank had reared up in the seat and looked like he wanted to give her a dig.

  I let on that I thought the place was great. Frank’s family got very thick with you if you didn’t praise everything to the skies.

  Ella had said a poem in the church. She had walked up to the pulpit and my heart had soared into the rafters. I’d felt so proud, the dark brown eyes looking into the middle of the congregation, the steady, clear voice. She had looked so sure of herself beneath the stained-glass window, the embodiment of confidence, this person Frank and I had created together. Our daughter. I’d felt like howling.

  Afterwards Dylan carried the coffin out of the church with Frank, looking as manly and neckless as his father. The Lawlors had no necks. Frank and Dylan and Frank’s brothers had heads like bowling balls plonked on their broad shoulders. It was nice to see them together under the coffin. It was hard for Dylan sometimes: his relationship with Frank was rocky, and Ella overshadowed him.

  Things came easier to her. She had walked first, talked first. Dylan had been more halting, requiring more coaching and care. Even in her high chair she had been self-possessed and in control, whereas Dylan had squirmed and waved his arms like windmills, throwing his food everywhere. On the rare trips down to see Mam, Ella had scaled the ancient barn wall, without a backward glance, just like Frank had done. Dylan had stood doubtfully at its base wanting to climb up and please Frank but unable to pluck up the courage to do so. Frank’s attempts to coax him had turned into frustrated shouting: ‘For fuck’s sake, Dylan, what kind of a girl’s blouse are ya?’

  But Dylan had never been envious of his sister. He had been three when Ella was born and we had thought he might be jealous, but he had hung over her carrycot adoringly from the first day we’d brought her home from the hospital. He’d had to be stopped from smothering her with love.

  We were at the graveside now, having walked the short distance from the church behind the hearse. Irish funerals were a big deal – not like in some other countries where they shoved you in the ground when you were still warm or drove up in a car to view your dead body through a window. Irish culchies, though, really threw the book at it. There had been the wake when Mam had been laid out in her own bedroom surrounded by candles, people coming to see her. She’d never been left alone. There’d always been a core contingent up with her, praying, right through the night. And there had been constant pots of tea on the go, and booze, and women moving tactfully about, speaking in hushed whispers, making sandwiches and bringing cakes, and people waiting outside, chatting. Then she’d been removed to the church, where mourners lined up to shake hands with the whole family, saying things like ‘I’m sorry for your troubles.’

  We’d had the Requiem Mass. The Lawlors had put on a good show, what with Frank putting his hand in his pocket and Father Willy – Mam’s cousin – leading the charge in concelebrating the mass with five other priests. Mam would have been pleased. For all her Irish-mammy ‘Don’t mind me, I’ll just sit here in the dark’ carry-on, she would have expected to be sent off in style.

  Mam had been mega-religious. The Lawlors had been head, neck and tail of the local church. They’d been altar-boys, helped with collections, weeded in the grounds – although that wouldn’t have stopped them burying you at the side of a bog if they thought you were encroaching on their land.

  Mam had a big Technicolor picture of the last pope on her wall. Sacred Heart pictures were dotted in each Lawlor bedroom, complete with gleaming votive lights and creepy red eyes looking down on you. ‘What Mass will you be getting?’ she’d ask, when you went down there for a visit before you even had your coat off. They said the rosary after dinner. After Frank and I had become engaged I’d brought Karen down there. God knew why. She’d been at a loose end or something – between jobs. She’d gone through a phase of telling her bosses what she thought of them, which meant she changed jobs a lot. Things like sexual harassment were more commonplace in those days and ‘girls’ generally put up with it. But not our Karen. She would come bursting into Ma and Da’s, spluttering, ‘The perverted bastard put his hand on my arse so I told him to bleedin’ fuck off.’

  Anyway, we’d ended up in Frank’s just before the bells of the Angelus had begun to toll. Mam had got down on her knees and outstretched her hands, instructing us all to follow suit. I’d closed my eyes and fallen to my knees clasping Karen’s hand, afraid for my life that she’d burst her arse laughing and Mam would fillet us. Afterwards we’d run down the boreen towards the town for a drink, quaking with laughter once we were out of earshot. Karen had bellowed, ‘Oh, Jaysus, I thought I’d die wanting to laugh. Frank’s ma is a bleedin’ holy roller.’

  And when Frank went home he still pretended he went to Mass, hiding down the road in the hotel reading the papers rather than telling her the truth – Frank who’d take shit off nobody, Frank who said it like it was, ‘like it or lump it’. But not with Mam. Dylan and Ella had been told to lie too. When they were small we’d more or less had to buy their silence with sweets, which was morally dubious, but Frank wouldn’t hear of anything else.

  Frank adored her. It was a real case of the Irish mammy and her adoring son. An image of Mam with her short heavy limbs, her Pioneer pin, the small gold cross hanging around her neck and the set lines of her mouth
loomed large in my mind. Frank would never have confronted her with a lover and a child – which was why, of course, I was distraught: my insurance policy had expired. Mam and I might never have been bosom buddies but she’d have been in my corner on this one.

  Now we were on the home straight: the burial. One cloud floated across the sky. The sun was blazing down. DJ was staring down into the grave, his mouth hanging open a little, the hair slicked back as usual, large dark sunglasses covering his eyes. DJ’s personal motto was ‘Bullshit beats brains any day.’

  ‘Your man DJ is a dead ringer for Mr Ed the talking horse in those glasses,’ Karen whispered, and I had to clench my stomach to stop myself laughing.

  Mam always said that DJ was the bright one, which was a fairly major insult to Frank. DJ wasn’t in danger of getting a call from Mensa. In fact, as Frank often said, ‘That fella couldn’t find his own arse with his two hands.’ Anyway, Frank had set him up with a shop and a pub half a mile up the road from their farm, but DJ didn’t exactly break his balls. He seemed to spend a lot of his time driving up and down roads in an SUV with a bull bar going to see a man about a dog. Mam had liked to make out – at least around Frank and me – that DJ was some big-shot tycoon. That was Mam through and through. She’d have wanted to cut Frank down to size.

  Mam had set her kids up against each other. They spent their lives scrambling to impress her and win her love. That was why Frank was as he was. It all came back to Mam. Nothing was ever enough for her, no matter what Frank achieved. If he’d climbed the Matterhorn to bring her back a flower, it would have been the wrong flower. Everything that man did at some level was to impress his ma. All the Lawlors were the same.

  Father Willy had gone on about Mam in his eulogy as if her ascension into heaven was a sure-fire bet.

  ‘Is he talking about the woman we knew?’ Karen had murmured to me. I’d had to stifle a laugh. Crying, laughing, I was all over the place.