The Better Half Read online

  Sometimes parents envisaged their kids busting down the doors of worlds they’d never gained access to, like me with Ella studying law in Trinity. In other cases, the parent, like Frank, hoped that the child would be a chip off the old block and carry on their work. But there was a tipping point when your dreams became a burden to your children.

  ‘It’s just an internship, Mum,’ Ella called over to me, in support of her brother.

  ‘If Nana May could see you …’ I said dreamily. ‘Or Nana Kathleen,’ I added hurriedly, before Frank could think I was casting aspersions.

  Frank’s mam would have listened to the news with her lips disappearing off her face. Then she would have dredged up some story about another young person she knew who had had the chance to ride shotgun with the President of the United States for the summer.

  My ma would have been gob-smacked at the idea of her granddaughter studying law in Trinity College, never mind going to the States on an internship. Ma had cleaned houses, including for a big-shot judge who lived on Merrion Square. I had gone there once with her to collect her pay. It had been Christmas. We’d stood outside on the step waiting for the woman of the house to come out. It had been a big black door with a brass knocker and a Georgian fanlight.

  The judge’s wife was very posh with a cashmere sweater and pearls, but she’d been nice. She’d given me sweets and asked Ma in for a glass of sherry on account of it being Christmas Eve. Ma had gone pink and said no. She’d been thrilled to be asked but she was way too shy. Ma knew her place. There was no social mobility back then.

  ‘Do you ever think you might become a judge?’ I’d asked Ella one day, just after she’d started law and I’d got a bit carried away imagining her in a wig and gown, saying in a stern Ella voice, ‘Take him down,’ which she would be very good at in my opinion.

  She’d considered the question briefly before flicking her hair airily and saying, ‘Maybe.’ She had said it like it was no big deal that May Butler’s granddaughter might be a judge.

  Ella and Dylan’s generation was so confident. They were praised all the time. They were winners. They had American-style confidence. They were all told they were great. Even if they came last in a race they got a medal. They were encouraged to talk about themselves and give their views. It was a different approach from when we were growing up. We had been afraid of our shadows. We had been told it was a sin to focus on ourselves. Ella and Dylan asked questions all the time – whatever came into their heads – while we had been told that asking questions was rude.

  ‘So … New York,’ I said to Ella, sipping my Buck’s Fizz. I felt very emotional at the thought of letting her go, but I wasn’t going to show it. I started humming ‘New York, New York’ Liza Minnelli-style, and clicking my fingers. Da da da da da.

  Ella gave me a polite smile. She looked strained. Her guarded look had returned. When she was small she couldn’t get enough of me. She copied the way I dressed, sitting up at my dressing-table, smearing makeup on her face, walking around after me in my high heels. When Frank and I were going out she would lie on my bed and watch me. ‘You’re very pretty, Mummy,’ she would say. ‘I want to be like you when I grow up.’

  She’d got over that.

  ‘God, Mum, isn’t that dress a bit young for you?’ she’d said earlier, casting her eye over me, her mouth pursed. I tried not to let it get to me. It was a teenage thing to think that you had invented the wheel, to be savage and conservative while thinking yourself radical.

  But it rankled that there was no criticism for Frank about how he looked. Frank who had taken to wearing aviators and drove a red, phallic, mid-life-crisis car. Jesus, was I slow or what? How had I not seen the signs that something was up? Frank, who would have driven his car up the stairs to bed if he could have got away with it, had taken up jogging. I had watched him sweat his way down Shrewsbury Road – his softened body encased in nylon so that it looked like a German sausage – and not suspected a thing. I’d seen him do push-ups in the bedroom, gazing at his side profile in the mirror, tilting his head back and sucking in his belly, making a yeah-I’ve-still-got-it snuffling noise through his nostrils. And I’d never suspected a thing.

  I watched Ella help herself to mixed berries. She was on the brink of having sex. I knew that lots of girls were sexually active much younger now. I’d been expecting it for years. But it hadn’t happened. I just knew Ella hadn’t. She was so knowing and worldly-wise sometimes that it shocked me. And in other ways she was innocent and unsullied. She was beautiful and serious and thoughtful. Christopher was her first real boyfriend.

  I’d seen a nuzzle mark on her chest. I’d seen it when she’d stepped out of the shower wrapped in a towel. I’d sent her off to get the pill.

  She’d gone scarlet. ‘Oh, my God, Mum,’ she’d said, crinkling her nose in disgust. ‘That is soooo my private business.’ She’d turned away from me. ‘I know all that stuff from school.’

  Frank would have a fit even now if he thought she was having sex. When he looked at her he saw a small girl with pigtails. One time he’d picked up one of her teen mags and started leafing through it until he’d come across tips for giving a great blow-job. He’d nearly had a seizure. Of course he’d blamed me. ‘Jesus almighty, Anita,’ he’d roared, as if I’d personally written the article. ‘There are tips here for going down on a fella.’

  Frank was very unrealistic about these things. He wanted her dancing at the crossroads like de Valera’s maidens. He didn’t know that she was going to America with Christopher. He thought she was heading off with a group of girls. Ella and I had agreed not to enlighten him. ‘Dad has enough pressures at the moment,’ I’d explained to her.

  Like the possibility of having another family. Ella would have gone postal if I’d told her that. Daddy’s girl.

  ‘A chip off the old block,’ Frank liked to say.

  They were alike. She was her father’s daughter with the same drive and determination. Dylan was like me. He needed to fill silences in a conversation. Ella and Frank could stay quiet and only speak when it suited them.

  I should have let Ella loose on Little Miss Big Knockers. That would teach her. I had rung her a few nights before. Frank had been off playing golf with some buddies. I’d had a few. The kids were out. The phone had been clammy in my hand. My heart had been pounding. And I’d drunk-dialled.

  Her voice had been like a punch in the stomach. ‘Hello … Hello. Who’s this? Hello?’

  In the airport, the strip neon lights cast a jaundiced glow on our skins. I had a rictus grin stretched across my face like the Joker. Ella had warned me in the car, ‘Do not make a big deal out of saying goodbye, Mum. I’m only going for the summer.’

  I had gone into her room the night before. Tucking in, we’d called it, when she’d been little. She used to make a big production of it, insisting on all her teddies being kissed goodnight and the room being checked for spiders before she folded away her book. Ella always read until the last minute. Not Dylan. At bedtime Dylan had usually been bouncing on his bed. He would be half naked, zinging up and down, his chubby cheeks pink and shiny, until you had to bawl at him to get under the covers.

  Ella was definitely a little nervous about going away. She had let me straighten the sheets and kiss her goodnight. I had badly wanted to climb in next to her and breathe in the scent of her freshly washed hair. But that would have been pushing my luck.

  There was a knot in my stomach before I’d even abandoned the Range Rover in the short-term car park. A spool of images kept running through my head – a young Ella with a gap between her teeth grinning up at me; Ella in her school uniform at the Young Scientists’ exhibition; Ella going to her first disco with a mouthful of metal; Ella standing on the stage at school being awarded a prize for the best Leaving Cert, with Frank’s flash going off.

  Christopher’s parents were fine. I had talked too much, though, waggling my hands and burbling on at them, over-effusi
ve. Inside I felt like I was crumbling. Ella and Christopher were almost checked in. My throat was tightening. The check-in assistant with the smiley eyes was handing Ella back her travel documents, her long red talons curled around them. Oh, Jesus, an ominous lump was forming in my throat. Ella’s bags were being ferried away on the belt.

  Frank hadn’t come to the airport, much to our relief, given that we were keeping up the Ella-heading-off-with-girlfriends fiction, and he’d been too preoccupied to delve for details. He’d kissed Ella on the top of her head, his eyes misting over as he let her go when his lawyer Eamon had picked him up.

  I had tracked him across the hall out the door. ‘’Bye Frank,’ I had said, in an overly upbeat bright voice.

  ‘Thanks for breakfast,’ he had said, turning briefly. ‘The scones were lovely,’ he added gruffly.

  Frank could surprise you like that. ‘That was nice,’ was what he usually said after a meal. Okay, he wasn’t inventive with the compliments but he was no wordsmith. And he had seemed to mean it. He wasn’t false. He had always been quick to put Mam in her box if she tried to undermine me, telling her how great I was.

  ‘You’re welcome, Frank,’ I had said.

  ‘I’ll be back late tonight.’

  Right. That comment had ripped the top off the well of neediness, insecurity and loneliness that was threatening to engulf me. ‘Do you love me, Frank?’ I blurted, as he walked towards the waiting car.

  He stopped. Allowing his shoulders to drop, he gave a theatrical sigh before pivoting to face me. ‘I don’t have time for this, Anita,’ he said, as if he were humouring a child.

  My bottom lip quivered a little – although I was angry at his patronizing tone.

  ‘Do you love me, Frank?’ I asked again, the tears backing up behind my eyes.

  Anyone who has to ask this question of their partner should know that the answer will not be good. I hadn’t planned on asking it. This was bad timing. The moment was not about me. It was Ella’s milestone, but it felt like mine too. Ella’s leaving seemed connected to Frank’s betrayal, to the end of an era.

  He blew out his cheeks. Venomously, I decided he looked like a red-faced chipmunk. ‘You may have all the fucking time in the world but I’ve a business to run,’ he had added. Momentarily I hated him. ‘That’s how I pay for this house and the holidays and the clothes …’

  The rest had been lost as I blinked back angry tears. I’d heard it a million times before anyway. It was the Great Provider Speech. The one that meant that you had no right to ask what you were asking, to complain, to make any further demands because of the life he had bestowed on you. ‘You should be grateful, girl,’ was the subtext. Not even the subtext actually: it was when his gratitude for all the dinners, child-minding and general support melted away.

  He strode towards Eamon, who was waving at me. I wanted to hurl abuse after him. We had a deal, arsehole, and I’ve kept my end up.

  There had been a deal. True, it was not written down. But there had been a deal. I would stay at home and rear the kids; Frank would go out and bring home the bacon. Frank had encouraged me to stop doing the books for his company after Dylan was born. He had been resistant to me working, partly because it was a status thing to have the missus at home – it showed the whole world you didn’t need the second salary – and partly because he had wanted the children to ‘have a good start’.

  And I had gone along with it. I’d wanted to be there for the children. I was happy at home when they were small, even when we didn’t have much money. And, yeah, when Frank started to make a few quid I liked being a yummy mummy, gliding along in my fancy car, done up to the nines, unloading my shopping, with my beautiful kids in the back.

  Then it had seemed as if those times would never end. As if I would always be needed to help with a project on Germany or to drive somebody to their football lesson or to put together a costume for the Christmas play. And at the back of my mind I told myself that when the children got that bit bigger I would go to college. But time had gone on and the day had never come, and here I was in the airport waving my baby off to America for the summer with her boyfriend. Her lover – although it was hard to imagine Christopher, with his thin limbs and skinny jeans and protruding Adam’s apple, cast in the role of the great seducer.

  Ella was saying something to Christopher’s mother now. She hadn’t wanted me to bring her to the airport. ‘I can get a lift with Christopher’s parents,’ she had said, faux-casual.

  ‘Of course I’m bringing you.’

  ‘It’s no big deal, Mum,’ she had said.

  There had been a pregnant silence.

  ‘You don’t have to get all dressed up or anything. It’s just going to the airport. And Christopher’s parents aren’t really like that.’

  Like what? I’d wanted to ask, turning away from her so that she wouldn’t see my face. What was the latest way I’d failed to live up to her expectations? And I wouldn’t mind but Christopher’s father, the judge, looked like something you’d mount on the wall. His head was huge. He had bushy eyebrows that nearly met in the middle and a bulbous nose. The mother was a large, outdoorsy woman with widely spaced eyes and a nice expression. Ella had said she was big into her golf. She was a generous size fourteen, maybe a sixteen down below. And, not saying anything, she wasn’t very well put together. She even had a smear of lipstick on her snaggle tooth. It had been hard to see where they’d got Christopher from, a fact I had taken it upon myself to comment on.

  ‘I don’t know who Christopher takes after,’ I had said, looking at him in his T-shirt with its ‘Green is the New Black’ slogan. ‘His colouring is so different.’ When I got nervous I couldn’t stop talking. Manic small-talk flew from my mouth. ‘No, I just can’t see the resemblance,’ I had said, and went on and on, like an out-of-control train, until Ella had guided me away on some pretext. She had hissed at me, her fingers pressing into my arm, ‘Mu-um, Christopher is adopted.’

  I was mortified so I was. I clammed up then. I went from verbal diarrhoea to dumb silence.

  The judge seemed a bit on the bossy side, writing the luggage labels for Christopher and generally telling everyone what to do, which I suppose was to be expected. He was from the class and generation of male that presumed it was in charge of everything. I could see Ella darting sidelong glances at him. She definitely wasn’t used to being told what to do. Frank, for all his talk of birds, wasn’t in practice that sexist. He thought that women could do anything men could do and probably better. ‘They’re harder-working and more focused,’ he often said. ‘You can get a better pound of flesh from them.’

  Nobody could have accused Frank of not being pragmatic.

  ‘A lick-arse of the first order, is what I heard,’ Frank had said about the judge. ‘He brown-nosed the Taoiseach something awful to get that judicial appointment.’

  People in glass houses. Frank had had his lips permanently and surgically attached to the last Taoiseach’s backside. He was devastated when the man was ousted from office.

  Christopher’s mother was holding it together, no problem. She was not a woman to lose her composure. Nor was she a woman who went in for cosmetic procedures. Her forehead had deep grooves in it. She was nice, though, very sympathetic. ‘New York seems so far away,’ she said, seeing my eyes water.

  We were standing at the barrier to Passport Control. Ella and Christopher were saying their last goodbyes. I bit the inside of my cheek, trying to think of happy things. There were none. The tears spilt over.

  The judge was issuing last-minute instructions. ‘You can’t bring water through,’ he said to Ella, so she tilted her bottle to her mouth and started to gulp it back.

  The tears were coursing down my face now. Ella looked away, embarrassed, as I delved in my bag for a tissue. She gave me a quick hug and a peck on the cheek. She raised her hand, her smile tight. ‘’Bye, Mum. I’ll ring you.’

  I nodded, unable to spe
ak. I was starting to make strangled sounds, as I attempted to quell my sobs. Jesus, I thought. Get a grip, Mary of the Sorrows. I was acting like it was an American wake. The judge was looking at me out of the corner of his eye, as if I needed to be committed.

  An older couple moved around me, casting me curious looks. A small girl dressed all in Barbie pink picked her nose and walked backwards staring at me so that her mother, a young woman with a slab of veiny white marbled flesh hanging over the waistband of her jeans, was forced to come back to retrieve her.

  Through my blurred vision I saw Ella walking quickly away, and a terrible incommunicable grief welled up inside me. If she didn’t go, nothing bad would happen. I felt that. And yet I wanted her to live the fabulous life she was going to have, the life I’d been planning for her. It was me who had taught her the alphabet and her numbers. She’d been like a little sponge. It was me who had fantasized about the exciting things she would do when I launched her into the world. The possibilities for her seemed endless. She could go anywhere and be anything on her terms. She would not make my mistakes. She would not end up like me, I thought, as the back of her head disappeared from view.

  The rain was coming down in sheets. The man on the radio talked about low pressures and anticyclones and ‘exception ally heavy falls’. He said it was the wettest summer since records began.

  I cried all the way home, manoeuvring my jeep through the sprawling traffic. Past the long row of small terraced houses in the northside suburbs of Dublin. The small slightly shabby shops, the takeaways and off-licences – Booze to go – and Internet cafés where you could phone home on the other side of the world at knock-down rates, and motorbike shops and tattoo parlours and television shops and furniture shops and foreign-sounding huckster shops, a money shop – Cheques cashed on the spot – and pubs with cheap plywood fronts and shabby paint jobs. Back over the river Liffey and towards home, where the houses became steadily bigger, the shops more upmarket, the restaurants more plentiful. The rain bubbled up through the gutters, running down the road in giant streams.