The Better Half Read online

  He had been invited on because people had an interest in him – the size of the development he was doing, the sky-high price he’d paid for the land and the fact he’d bought it without having got his planning permission. And because, of course, he’d put himself about as a poster boy of the Celtic Tiger. He’d had his architect on the show with him – his ‘starchitect’. He was an emaciated little English fella called Russell Bernard Owen who wore a uniform of distressed denims that had no doubt cost a fortune, with skinny-rib black polo-necks and the heavy rectangular glasses that seemed to be the face furniture of choice for big-shot architects like him. When they were together, he and Frank looked like a cartoon. Frank robust, red-faced and thick-necked, Russell Bernard Owen pale and reedy.

  Russell Bernard Owen spoke in halting sentences, often leaving large gaps in the middle so that you expected him to come out with something great. This never materialized. He talked a lot about the ‘autonomy’ of buildings and about ‘the feel’ and ‘touch’ and ‘soul’ of things in a flat low monotone that forced you to lean in to hear him. Half the time I had no idea what he was jawing on about. Frank thought he was the man, though.

  I had tried to persuade Frank to use an Irish architect. But he was having none of it. ‘I want some international fella, some major big shit who’s going to blow people’s socks off. This will be my legacy, Anita.’

  Frank was all about his legacy now. In the early years of our marriage he’d thrown up God-awful egg-box houses all round the outskirts of Dublin in which you could hear people breathing in the next room. Now he was all Le Corbusier this and Daniel Libeskind that and my legacy.

  Russell Bernard Owen for his part talked about the need for ‘private architectural patrons’ like Frank. He said that for great iconic buildings to be built – and here he generally mentioned the Parthenon – men like Frank, ‘forward-thinking visionary leaders’, were required to take a risk on behalf of future generations. This, of course, had Frank’s arse levitating off the seat with pride and his cheque book – or the bank’s, depending on how you looked on it – wide open. It showed, I thought, that despite his vague, theoretical, artistic language there were no flies on old Russell.

  When it came to artists – and Russell Bernard Owen was a very great artist, according to Frank – Frank seemed to lose his inbuilt bullshit detector. A sort of innocence seemed to take over this hard-nosed man from the bogs of Offaly. He thought artists were dreamy and from another realm. I thought Russell Bernard Owen was a ruthless little so-and-so who could have floated over from England on the hot air of his monumental ego – but there was no telling Frank.

  So Russell Bernard Owen had puffed up Frank on the radio and talked about ‘the philanthropy of building soaring towers and memorials’, and Frank had been more than happy to run with the ball: ‘We want to construct a landmark development that is iconic and global but retains local distinctiveness, a development for the citizens of Wexford and for their future descendants and for all of Ireland.’ There was no doubt that those boys were all hopped on pride and testosterone and, of course, no small amount of bullshit.

  I’d rung Frank after the interview. ‘You did well, love.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  I knew that voice. It meant he was busy and to stop bothering him. I bit my lip. I had been working up to asking him a particular question for some time. ‘Will the bank pull the plug on you, Frank?’ This was a question the presenter had asked him. There had been a fraction of a hesitation, which had made my heart turn over, before he had peddled her some upbeat keep-the-flag-flying schtick.

  On the phone to me he had sounded weary. ‘No,’ he had said. ‘How many times do I have to tell you? They can’t. It’s like this, Anita. If you owe the bank a mid-sized amount it’s your problem. If you owe them the amount I owe, it’s their problem. The bank has put in capital. Appointing a receiver is expensive and a pain in the hole. They’ll play along with me but they won’t be wiping my arse for me any more, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Come home, Frank, you sound tired. We’re having breakfast for Ella.’

  So, as the good, forgiving little wife I was, I’d dickied myself up, despite the early hour, put my hair into soft waves, worn a slinky jersey camel dress, doused myself in perfume and teetered around the kitchen in my toweringly high shoes – Maeve called them ‘knock me over fuck mes’ – with an apron tied around my waist.

  I won’t lie. I’d already had a glass of orange and champagne to get me in the forgiving mood. I’d stopped at that because Ella was going to the States and I was driving her to the airport. Then I’d baked some scones, which was a major stretch for me. I didn’t cook much, which was ironic, given my kitchen with its glittering stainless-steel German appliances and giant silent fridge the size of a morgue. Plus it was the last thing I needed, given that I was committed to a bloody charity lunch later in the day that Ciara had roped me into. There was no way I was getting out of it because I was bringing the auction prizes. I’d pushed the boat out because my baby girl was leaving me and I wanted to make sure her send-off was a good one.

  The scones hadn’t turned out too badly, which was a surprise. I had been a complete dunce at home economics. The teacher had told me to sling my hook after the first year when the topic of subject options came up. And I wasn’t sorry. My piece of material for sewing always got sweaty and grubby between my clumsy fingers. My buns never rose, only slumped to one side like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. She was always very sarcastic with me. Then one day in class she’d gone too far.

  ‘You’d know a good family by the state of their tea-towels,’ she’d said, looking directly at me, her long, skinny face flushed. She’d been holding up my tea-towel. It was dirty because I’d spilt something on it in class. It had been spotless when Ma, the cleanest woman in the world, had given it to me.

  I wasn’t having her casting aspersions on the Butlers and certainly not on Ma. So I’d challenged her – spunky little bitch that I was back then – asking her if she was referring to me. She’d gone mental, shouting and screaming. She suffered from her nerves and started quivering like the strings on a violin whenever she got her knickers in a knot. Not long after that we’d agreed to part company, and I’d done art instead, even though I was lousy at drawing.

  Not that I was overly exercised. Back then I was Miss Outstanding Performance in Mathematics. One of my reports had actually said something like ‘She consistently produces outstanding performances in mathematics.’ I had skipped around the place chanting it in my head like a mantra. Outstanding. Outstanding. Outstanding.

  Anyway, that was far back in the mists of time. Now I was just happy that my husband hadn’t run off with a girl young enough to be his daughter.

  ‘Another scone, Dylan?’ I asked, catching him mouthing something at Ella. I wondered how many times I’d used the word ‘scone’. I was bandying it about like nobody’s business, the subtext being, ‘Do you see, Frank, what a wonderful homemaker your wife is? What a great little scone-baking treasure you have on your hands?’

  ‘Nah,’ Dylan said, waving a hand. ‘I’ve got to rock ’n’ roll soon. I’m meeting Biba.’

  I should have known. He was dressed up to the nines, the hair gelled. Frank went mental when he saw Dylan’s products in his bathroom. ‘Is he a fairy or what?’

  Frank came from a different time when real men didn’t use moisturizer and they certainly weren’t tanned and smooth like Dylan. But Dylan had always been into clothes. There had been the sporty stage when he wouldn’t wear anything unless it was nylon with a big sports logo. He hadn’t been into playing sports, which had incensed Frank. It had been more about the look.

  Then had come his ‘homie’ stage when he wore outsized rapper jeans down around his arse so that you could see his underpants. This had been a bad look for Dylan given that he was short. He had looked like he was swaddled, and like his clothes were wearing him. After that had come his I’m-in-the
-band/with-the-band interlude when he wore T-shirts with the names of obscure musicians on them and his room perpetually smelt of dope and stale cigarettes. Which was why I didn’t mind the latest incarnation, which involved expensive designer trainers and ultra-tight T-shirts, chosen specifically to showcase the muscles he’d spent long hours acquiring in the gym. Anything to kiss the bong and weed stage goodbye. I couldn’t stand seeing him sitting around like a vegetable wolfing pizzas and anything else he could shove down his throat because he had ‘the munchies’.

  Dylan spent any free time he had with Biba. He stayed most nights in her flat in Castleknock on the north side of the city. Or else I’d get a flash of her blonde head darting down the black granite path to the coach house. They seemed to go out all the time if the media coverage they got was anything to go by. A picture of them at this opening, at that party, in a nightclub owned by Dylan’s friend Jamie Deegan. How Dylan managed to get up for work in the morning I didn’t know.

  I looked at him and tried to suppress my annoyance. ‘Your sister is going away for the summer, Dylan, so we’re having a family meal. Can you not hang on for another hour?’

  ‘Christopher’s mother makes her own granola,’ Ella chipped in.

  We heard a lot about Christopher and his family, their likes and dislikes, the way they went to the theatre, the opera in Wexford, subscribed to the New York Review of Books, Christopher’s taste for South American writers and vegetarian food, the fact Christopher’s mother was ‘a voracious reader’ … ‘For fuck’s sake, I haven’t even met them and I know what Jesus brand of bog-roll they use,’ Frank had hissed at me one night. It was called ‘mentionitis’. Hard and all as it was to believe now, I’d once had a bad dose of it where Frank was concerned.

  Actually, I was pretty fed up of hearing about them myself.

  ‘Christopher said it’s common to have your house too clean,’ Ella remarked one day.

  I had heard myself say sourly, ‘You should be well in there so, given the state of your room.’

  Ella’s room was like a cess pit, heaps of clothes on the floor, half-eaten bowls of cereal, abandoned cups of tea, cotton buds dipped in cleanser and makeup on her dressing table. If Ma could have seen her granddaughter’s room she would have had a stroke.

  Now Dylan was using a finger to push up the end of his nose. ‘That sounds spiffing.’

  ‘Get lost,’ Ella said, but her face creased with laughter. Ella and Dylan still got on great.

  Then Dylan fixed eyes with me. ‘Ella doesn’t care if I split,’ he said. ‘She’s only going for the summer. It’s not like she’s emigrating or anything.’

  Ella was going to New York to intern with an organization that worked for prisoners’ rights. It was part of an Irish-American programme. She was one of ten gifted students chosen on account of the high marks she’d been awarded in her exams. ‘I hope this doesn’t mean she ends up defending a bunch of no-hopers for fuck-all money,’ Frank had said to me privately. ‘Corporate law is where the real dough is – the dogs on the street know that.’ Secretly he was proud as Punch.

  Christopher was going too. He was going to work in a judge’s office. His father had arranged it. He hadn’t been picked for the programme. And for all his supposed cleverness he hadn’t done as well as Ella in the exams.

  ‘He’s really super-bright, Mum,’ Ella had insisted, when I’d asked. She got this defensive look when she spoke about him, as if she sensed I was trying to undermine him, which I probably was. ‘He just sort of bombed in company law. He didn’t get the mark he deserved. It was because he didn’t see eye to eye with the lecturer. It was so unfair. He was penalized for having strong views.’

  Oh, yeah, right, I’d thought. It was the lecturer’s fault. I tried not to think mean things about Christopher, but there was something kind of controlling and cold about him. Ella had told me he’d put a fatwah on them texting each other too much because he felt it ‘interfered’ with his studies. Fat lot of good that seemed to have done him, I’d thought, enjoying feeling mean-spirited. But it was when I saw her looking into his eyes as if he was God handing down the Ten Commandments that I wanted to scream. I wanted to say to her that men were great but they had a way of sidetracking you, of swallowing you. I wanted to say to her that in my darker moments I felt marriage and love meant the death of female ambition. I wanted to tell her that I and the whole world had drip-fed her romance since she was a small girl. I had read her stories about Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, all nice, passive girls who were rescued for being pretty and not much else. I wanted to say that, yes, I had watched Pride and Prejudice with her and gone all gooey-eyed over Mr Darcy coming out of the lake looking wet and masterful – but that at some point Mr Darcy would get sick of Elizabeth’s ‘fine eyes’ and want his dinner on the table and his clothes washed.

  ‘I don’t mind if Dylan has to go, Mum,’ Ella was saying, with one of her little shrugs.

  ‘I mind,’ I said, trying to catch Frank’s eye but he was staring into the middle distance.

  Dylan propped his head in his palm and sighed.

  ‘Glass of Buck’s Fizz, Frank?’ I asked.

  ‘No, thanks,’ Frank said.

  ‘Our daughter is going to America.’

  ‘I’ve got to do some work,’ came the flat response.

  As I topped up my own glass – another tiny bit wouldn’t put me over the limit – I saw Ella frowning at me. ‘Are you not driving me to the airport?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, my smile not slipping. ‘A wee dram of Buck’s Fizz won’t hurt.’ Silence. I decided to ignore the fact that my children were trading glances. ‘I can’t believe you’re going to America to work with real lawyers, Ella,’ I said, allowing myself to feel a glow of pride.

  ‘You’ve done very well,’ Frank chipped in, ‘thanks to your hard work at your studies.’ He threw Dylan a look in which I recognized the signs of potential strife. Frank persisted in comparing the children.

  ‘He’s different from her, Frank,’ I would say to him. ‘He has other talents.’

  ‘A talent for sitting on his arse,’ Frank would respond, with a sarcastic grunt.

  Ella had always been focused. At four she would snap on her goggles and swim down the pool straight as an arrow. Dylan would weave and bob and chat until the teacher gave out to him. She set herself goals and chased them down. He was more fluid in the way he approached things. That was how I saw it.

  He was brilliant at art. His teacher had wanted him to go to art college. He had been a sensitive-looking man with glasses and a soft voice, which didn’t impress Frank. ‘He has real talent,’ the art teacher had said to us, ‘but he might have to do a portfolio course first. I’m not sure if he’d get straight into NCAD. He could, though, if he focused.’

  Frank, with his enlightened views on masculinity, had been dead set against it. He had sat there with his big thick neck going redder, a vein twitching on the side of his temple, and I’d been petrified he’d let us both down and say something completely insulting. Thankfully, he’d saved his ire for me. ‘Is that fella on drugs or what?’ he’d said, when we’d walked back to our car. ‘Is that what I pay private-school fees for? Art college is for shirt-lifters.’

  Frank had an unreconstructed attitude to sexuality. If a man ordered a latte or wore a hat and gloves he got suspicious as to his orientation. There was also the fact – and he wouldn’t have admitted this under pain of death – that he had been harbouring the hope that Dylan might follow him into the business, but even as a young fella Dylan had hated going out on site. Frank had bought him a little yellow hard hat and a box of pretend tools, but anyone with a pair of eyes could see that he had no interest. He’d far prefer to sit up at the table and draw buildings.

  If that wasn’t a runner, Frank was all in favour of medicine. ‘It’d be perfect for you, Dylan. You’re a people person. You’d have a great bedside manner.’

 
; Dylan would give a lazy roll of the shoulder – the type he specialized in, which made Frank violent. ‘Nah, Dad, I wouldn’t get the points in a fit and I’m not into that whole saving-lives thing. That’s just not how I roll.’

  ‘You think that lot are into saving lives?’ Frank would splutter. ‘My hole. Look at Will – there’s savage money to be made in fannies. If I’m ever reincarnated I want to come back as an obstetrician. Or an orthodontist,’ he’d add, as an afterthought. ‘There’s serious moolah in mouths too. Those bunch of fuckers are daylight Dick Turpin robbers.’

  There had been lots of fruitless conversations like that.

  Dylan had said very little about art college after Frank had rubbished it. Big surprise there. And I hadn’t said enough. I’d let it slide. After he’d left school Dylan had had lots of ideas about what he was going to do, some of them half-arsed business enterprises, fuelled probably by the frenzied sense of can-do that the Celtic Tiger economy created, that seemed to involve maximum glamour and minimum work. He’d been in a band called Dead End for a while. He’d seen no irony in the name, even though Ella had made plenty of attempts to point it out, and Frank had said, ‘That would be about right,’ when he was told. We’d paid a fortune for a drum kit and a guitar, and they’d practised in the coach house, attracting plenty of complaints from the neighbours and their cats. The boy who had been lead singer had sounded like he was being tortured. They’d never actually played a paying gig.

  Then Dylan had decided to go travelling, which had ended in a monumental piss-up in Australia.

  There was this push and shove between Frank and Dylan as they sparred. Dylan often set out to bait his father, yet he wanted his blessing. Deep down he wanted Frank’s attention – look at me, Dad, look at me. That was what the job in stockbroking had been about. Dylan battled so hard for his approval yet Frank was blind to it. Frank wanted him to go to college and do something Frank wanted him to do, or to take over the business.