At a Time Like This (21 page)

Then, one evening, Georgie manoeuvred the two of us together – Maggie and me, that is. I’ll always be grateful to her for that. I’m sure she did it more for Maggie’s sake
than for mine, but that doesn’t matter. Either way, it was a kind and loyal thing to do and it remains one of the times that Georgie has surprised me the most. But, however grateful I might
be to Georgie and the part she played, I still can’t get over Maggie’s generosity. Her tearful forgiveness was more than I deserved. Not only did she not judge me, she somehow found the
will to be understanding. And afterwards, although I am still not quite sure how this happened, the four of us found a way back to our evenings again, and our friendships. I’m not saying that
things were easy, or even as they had been before, but still, we were able to forge something out of the wreckage.

That night with Ray I was seduced by something so simple, so unexpected that I’m amazed more men don’t know about it. It was kindness. No more and no less. Some time towards the end
of the first bottle of champagne, I began to cry. I couldn’t help myself. I’ve never been any good at drinking. It either makes me paranoid or it makes me weep. Sometimes the two happen
together, and that is not a pretty sight. But these were tears that should have waited, as usual, until I was in my bath, surrounded by the comforts of warm water, the scent of bath-oil and the
privacy of my own home. Ray seemed unsurprised and unmoved by my tears. I wondered afterwards if he was used to seeing women cry, but such an uneasy thought seemed to be at odds with his behaviour.
He patted my hand and hunched towards me so that the people standing behind him couldn’t see my distress. And no, I wasn’t crying over another man, at least not directly, not in the way
that that implies.

‘What is it, Claire?’ His voice was quiet. It seemed full of concern. I know that Ray has been unfaithful to Maggie several times over the years. I even knew it then. But all I saw
on that evening, at least up to that point, was friendship. And so I told him. About my treatments. My failures. My longings.

‘I’ve given up on men,’ I said, sobbing into the handkerchief he handed me. ‘Really’ It was true. I’d been with John for just over a year, but we were never
going to be long-term together and we both knew it. I hadn’t even told him about the hospital treatments. I was terrified that he might take fright and bolt when I needed him most. Dishonest?
That’s for sure. Make a man a father and then abandon him? I admit it. It was not my finest hour.

For just that moment, it was a relief to talk to Ray, to talk to anyone who would listen without having to pretend any more. ‘I don’t expect a relationship. I’m not even
looking for one. All I want is a baby. And after today, I can’t even have that.’

Ray said nothing. He just looked at me and waited for me to stop crying. Finally, he said: ‘What happened today?’ But so quietly I could hardly hear him over the noise in the
bar.

I wiped my eyes, blew my nose and tried to get control of myself. ‘Six months ago,’ I told him, ‘I managed to persuade a doctor to give me fertility treatment. I’ve been
trying to have a baby for three years and nothing’s happened. I was desperate.’

Desperate? There isn’t a word in the English language that can approach how I felt. The initial excitement, the anticipation behind the popping of every Clomid, the taking of my
temperature, the mechanics of sex on the right day, at the right hour. I kept myself alive with the oxygen of promise: the promise of a baby, of
babies
even, if the treatment was successful.
And they kept on telling me just how successful it could be. Statistics swam behind the rosy spectacles of this hopeful mother, of the many hopeful mothers that shared all those afternoons in
plush, carpeted rooms as we sat waiting for consultants to tell us our fate. We’d leaf through magazines, making polite conversation, pretending that we felt normal. As though we
weren’t fuelled by an all-consuming rage that Mother Nature had abandoned us, had singled us out for a litany of losses before we had even begun. There was always the cruelty of hope to lure
us on to the next stage. Beyond this medication, that medication and the other medication, there was always the tantalizing promise of IVF. We patients endured the constant drip-feed of optimism
and expectation, the certainty of a take-home baby at the end of it all. Well, it hadn’t happened. At least not to me.

Ray refilled my glass and I remember that I downed it in one gulp. ‘I pretended to be married, but the doctor knew. Anyhow, we went ahead with the treatment but this is the last cycle
she’s prepared to prescribe. She told me so this afternoon.’ I shrugged. ‘So that’s that.’

By then, I was feeling light-headed. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling. It was like the night of my first party with Maggie and Georgie in our flat in Rathmines when the dope had made me sick.
The memory of that, of my friends and how they had looked after me, on that occasion and on others, propelled me all at once into standing. I looked at Ray and I remember feeling amazed, confused,
just for an instant. It was as though I was seeing him for the first time. He was unfamiliar and distant. What on earth was I doing? Telling this man things I hadn’t even told my closest
friends? What was I thinking? I finally began to feel the return of some sort of sanity, even though it was through a haze of champagne.

‘I have to go,’ I said. I remember that I stumbled, almost falling back into the chair again. I knew that my departure was abrupt, that my behaviour must appear to be very strange.
But I couldn’t wait. All I knew was that I needed to be gone. I needed to be home.

‘Wait,’ he said, flinging out one arm to catch me. ‘You can’t go home alone, not like this. Let me take you.’

‘No,’ I protested. ‘I’ll be all right. I’m going to get a taxi.’

‘I’m coming with you,’ he said. ‘It’s the party season. Taxis’ll be thin on the ground at this hour. And you’re a little . . . the worse for
wear.’

The worse for wear. That brought me back – back to Paul, to the night we met. I didn’t want to remember how I had lost him, how I had driven away the one man I did love and still do,
for better and for worse.

Ray steadied me then and helped me into my coat. He put one arm around my shoulders and opened the door of the pub. Unfortunately, we got a taxi immediately. I say ‘unfortunately’
because maybe if I had had to stand and queue for longer in the freezing December air of Dublin, I might have sobered up more than I did. I’m not trying to make excuses. I did what I did and
I am responsible for it and no one else is to blame. But it might have meant that I’d have resisted with more conviction when Ray pulled me towards him and kissed me. It might have meant that
I’d have sent him packing instead of handing him my key when the taxi pulled up outside my house. It might have meant that I would not have allowed him to open my front door and bundle me
inside.

What is there left to tell? How can I bear to remember the ordinary, sordid tale of betrayal that played itself out on my living-room sofa that night. How can I ever forget. Did I think of
Maggie? No, I did not. I thought only of sperm and egg. I was driven by all the longings of thwarted motherhood. It was a madness, I no longer have any doubt about that. It was a compulsion, a
yearning that refused to be denied. It has made me understand the force of addiction, that lunacy of desire that demands to be fulfilled or else it will kill you in the attempt. The end result, the
possibility of a baby, was all I thought about, both that time and the next.

And that’s what Maggie understood on that evening when Georgie finally brought us together after more than two years of silence. Years that had been filled by the yawning absences that
betrayal brings in its wake. I think Maggie found all that grief easier to accept, finally, than love or lust. Maybe it didn’t seem to be quite as big a betrayal in her eyes. At least, not on
my part, anyhow. She never discussed what she felt about Ray, not with me. That night in Georgie’s after we had spoken, she took my hand in hers. The gesture moved me so much that I broke
down. So did she.

‘I’m so sorry, Claire, so very sorry about everything. God, life is a real mess, sometimes. And yes, of course I want to forgive you.’ She rummaged for tissues in her sleeve
and handed me one. ‘I knew nothing . . . I didn’t realize . . . you’d been trying for so long. It never occurred to me. It’s terrible, the whole thing is just
terrible.’

I couldn’t speak. I continued to sob as she stroked my hand. She never once mentioned the awful outcome that that evening might have had, never once alluded to how there might have been a
child, her husband’s child. I will never forget the depths of my own shame as she held both of my hands in hers.

‘We’ll talk about it again,’ she sighed. ‘Don’t break your heart over it. We’ll work our way through it somehow, you and I.’

And then Georgie came back into the room and we stopped our conversation. But we did meet again. I was glad to meet her on my own, happy that she had wanted to ask it of me. I felt that I owed
her many things, among them the courtesy of a full explanation, long overdue.

There was more, much more that I still needed to tell her. It’s almost impossible to believe that the four of us have spent so many years orbiting each other’s lives. Sometimes the
gravitational forces pull us together, other times they force us apart. I suppose we’ve never been as close as the time when we were all students together. But in reality, that time lasted
only a year. It’s strange, it now seems to be much longer than that. Perhaps because we all lived that year with such intensity. Once the weddings started, though, the friendships all started
to shift and change. At least, that’s how I remember it.

Nora and Frank were the first of our group to get married. Pete and Georgie followed after a gap of some six years, after what I once described as a whirlwind romance, but Georgie disagreed with
my characterization. In fact, she got very cross.

‘It may be sudden, Claire, but this is nothing as trivial as romance. This is a
relationship.
It’s time for me to settle down.’

I didn’t comment. After all, how could I? I was the last person qualified to judge the love affairs of others, particularly those belonging to my friends. But I do remember wondering how
she could be so calculating about it.

After the dizzy heights of Pete and Georgie, next came Maggie and Ray, just six months later. I’ve often felt sorry for Maggie on that score. But not as sorry as I used to feel for myself.
All of these weddings in their different ways reinforced my singleness. I had to learn to be detached from them, to treat them almost as professional occasions. Nora and Frank’s nuptials had
already put paid to any future that Paul and I might have had – not that they were to blame, of course they weren’t. The deed just happened to be done and dusted on their particular
day. The weddings that came next simply repeated the point in case I hadn’t got it the first time around.

If Nora and Frank were the very hallmarks of stability, then Pete and Georgie were the symbols of dynamism. Ireland was just beginning to emerge from the economic black hole of the eighties. It
was starting to be full of movers and shakers. Their reception in the Burlington Hotel was like a
Who’s Who
of the famous and influential. I should know: I helped to organize it. I
used to do things like that, occasionally, back in those days. I was the original Wedding Planner. I found that it went very nicely hand-in-hand with the business of my then magazine,
Irish-Style.

Georgie and I worked well together, making sure that hers would be the society wedding of the year. And our success was recorded for all to see. I still have the four-page magazine spread to
prove it. I made her a gift of a framed collage of the best photographs of the day and she still has it on her office wall. Or at least she did, the last time I looked.

On the day, it was fun to see how the newly rich and influential each kept an anxious eye on the other and on their own place in the pecking order. The seating plan was a complete nightmare, but
we did it, Georgie and I. I developed a healthy respect for her ability to schmooze. There is no other way to describe the endless tact she showed where business connections were concerned. Bankers
and builders – sorry, developers: our standing joke – rubbed shoulders with models and journalists and politicians and what Georgie called the ‘fashionistas’ of every
possible shade.

On the day, the bride was magnificent. There is no other word for it. Her looks were never conventional and she knew she was not beautiful. So she went all out for regal. For a start, she wore
no veil. She had her hair up, showing that lovely neck that I’d admired on the first day I saw her. Her only ornaments were an antique tiara, some long earrings and a string of pearls. She
and Maggie designed and made her wedding dress, of course, which was in off-white and low-cut. It was tailored to the straight, strong lines that suited Georgie best and studded with seed pearls
that caught the light from every possible angle. She didn’t so much walk down the aisle as glide.

Ray was standing beside me in the church the day that Georgie and Pete got married. I had decided not to bring a companion. I had got tired of the endless speculation around Claire and her
unsuitable men. He turned to me as soon as the bride passed by our pew, with Maggie’s small figure close behind.

‘Isn’t she a picture?’ he grinned.

I hoped he meant Maggie.

Georgie’s going-away outfit caused a bit of a stir among the women guests too, I was pleased to notice. It was a coat and dress, a subtle mix of ecru silk and linen, and it was infinitely
more stylish than any of that season’s offerings from Chanel. I could tell that that one outfit alone had just snared maybe another half-dozen potential customers. I rejoiced for both of
them, for her and for Maggie. And her suitcase was filled with lots of other pieces besides. I know because Maggie and I had helped her pack. We had decided a long time back that the wedding might
as well be a showcase for all of our different businesses.