At a Time Like This (25 page)

Paola asked me yesterday over lunch, almost shyly, how long ‘
il signore’
intended to stay this time. I looked at her in surprise. I’d forgotten that she didn’t
know. ‘For ever,’ I said lightly, with a smile.
‘Per sempre.’
I think she was satisfied with that. She never pries, never shows inappropriate curiosity. Nevertheless,
I have told her that when
‘il signore’
does arrive, we shall fend for ourselves for the first week or so. I suspect that she might have gathered that already.

I wondered this morning what her private thoughts must be. I received at least half a dozen text messages while we were shopping together, and each of them delighted me. I feel free enough here
not to pretend; there is no need to control my responses. Nevertheless, Paola smiled at each insistent beep. I answered a clutch of messages when we stopped for lunch, not able to hold off any
longer. I excused my lack of politeness: I assume the etiquette of texting is similar in Italy to what exists in Ireland. In other words, when you are at lunch in somebody else’s company:
don’t.

But she waved her hand in the air. It was a gesture that was both conspiratorial and dismissive of my worries. I’ve managed to tell her in my halting Italian that, once next week is over,
I shall contact her to establish whatever new arrangements will suit us best. In the meantime, naturally, I have reassured her that her wages will continue to be paid. Her gratitude when I told her
that was touching.

For ever.
Per sempre.
That is what I was mulling over two nights ago as I made dinner for the last time in my suburban Dublin home: the meaning of ‘for ever’ and the fragility
of all the promises that we make. I used to think in absolutes: this is good, this is bad, this is true, this false. Years ago, while I still clung to the belief that things could work out
differently, I used to yearn for enough faith to believe that now might be bad, but tomorrow would be better. Part of me would long to have the solidity of black and white certainties back again,
the comfort of the things that hold fast. But the fact was that my life was already being lived amid the murkiness of shades of grey. I just didn’t realize it. It felt as though my only
constant was friendship. It, after a fashion, lasts, although its contours shift and change. All the rest is smoke and mirrors. Nothing is for ever.

‘What’s for dinner, hon? I’m starving.’ Pete’s question the other evening startled me back from questions of faith and friendship to the fact that I had been
pushing a lumpy white sauce around the pan for some time without noticing. I loathe cooking, always have done. The tyranny of the evening meal is something I have always resented.

I stopped stirring and turned to look at him. Tall, still slim despite the tendency towards a beer belly, which he works very hard at keeping in check, and grey-haired in a distinguished,
academic sort of way.
Thou art Peter and upon this rock.
The thought came unbidden and startled me. He began to chop parsley for the sauce, taking over as he so often did. Solid, decent,
dependable Peter. Rocklike in his husbandly devotion and his delighted fatherhood. I had the grace to feel sad just then. Not guilty any more, just sad.

‘We’re having some salmon and the roasted vegetables left over from yesterday’ I said. The girls love roasted vegetables. Lillian does all the preparation and chopping and is
delighted to take over the kitchen from her mother. Her mother never demurs. ‘Will you mash the potatoes?’ I continued poking at the lumps in the sauce, but to no effect. They refused
to soften.

Pete put both hands on my shoulders and his thumbs worked their way into the bones at the back of my neck. I stopped resisting almost at once and he took the whisk from me. He began folding the
parsley into the bubbling whiteness. I watched as he worked his magic. He rescued the sauce, smoothed and refined it, just as he had been able to rescue so many other things in the early years.

‘Get Carla or Lillian to set the table,’ he said. ‘I’ll mash the spuds in a minute.’ He gestured towards one of the kitchen chairs. ‘Why don’t you sit
down? There’s a glass or two of that nice Chilean left over from yesterday. It’s in the fridge.’

I retired from the fray. Lillian agreed to set the table and provide dessert, if Carla loaded and unloaded the dishwasher. A born negotiator, I’ve always thought. And a young woman who
loved cooking. I’ve never got that, as the young people say. Never understood it. Nora was the only other domestically obsessed woman I’ve ever known – and I have no idea how the
gene of cooking and kitchen competence ended up in Lillian’s DNA. It didn’t come from me.

I watched the twins last night. I stored up pictures, multicoloured memories for later.

‘You okay, Mum?’ asked Carla. Pete and Lillian were clearing the table after we’d finished our main course. I looked at her soft, open face, dark eyes, long hair caught up into
an untidy, fetching bun. I’ve always felt that bit closer to Carla than to her sister – maybe that’s because she was born first. The twenty minutes that elapsed between her and
Lillian’s more difficult birth forged something different between us, something strong and clear, bright as precious metal.

‘I’m fine, just fine.’ I stroked a strand of escaping hair and tucked it behind her ear. ‘All okay with you?’

She nodded. ‘Yeah. We looked at some more flats today. There was one that Lillian really liked. I’m not so sure. But she said I could have the bigger bedroom with the en-suite, so
I’m tempted.’

I smiled at her. ‘Why her sudden generosity?’

‘’Cos it’s cheaper than the one I like, and on a direct bus route to UCD. But I’m holding out for a while. She’s not the only good negotiator in this family’
And she winked.

I looked at her in surprise. Carla has always had that ability – to say or do something that takes me aback, that shows how she learns and absorbs things all the time. But she does it
quietly, without any of Lillian’s showiness. I had to laugh at her expression and said something like ‘That’s my girl!’ but I was thinking, again, how superfluous I now was
to her life, to all their lives. Or maybe that was just my own rationalization, something I wanted to believe. Who knows? Who cares? I am past agonizing. All I know is that somehow, almost without
my noticing, my fractious twins have become eighteen-year-old women, feisty, self-assured and full – as Maggie used to say – of piss and vinegar.

‘Ta da!’ Lillian emerged from the kitchen with her customary fanfare. She balanced a tray above her right shoulder with four dessert bowls and an enormous pavlova. The cake had
sparklers positioned at each corner, spitting tongues of tiny fire. She laid it all on the table in front of me. ‘Just to wish you bon voyage, Mama,’ she said, pronouncing it as
‘Ma-maw,
‘and to say how terribly we’ll all miss you, yet again.’ Her tone was artificial, waspish.

That startled me. I thought I caught something fleeting in her expression, but it was gone, whatever it was, just as soon as I saw it.

‘Now, Lillian,’ drawled Pete, ‘you know that sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.’

She looked at her father, all wide-eyed and innocent. ‘But Pa-
paw,
you know that we can’t manage without her.’

‘Horseshit,’ he said. His amiable expression never altered. ‘You’ve been managing without both of us for years. You guys have now reached the stage of being able to buy
and sell both of your parents.’

Carla and Lillian grinned across the table at each other. Once again, I saw that twin-style complicity, that steel-like closeness that, as children, had even manifested itself in the creation of
their own obscure, private language.

‘And have been wrapping us around their little fingers for eighteen years,’ I said. ‘You’d better be able to manage, come to think of it – now that you’ve
decided to leave the bosom of your family’

Lillian spooned dessert into bowls, making sure the portions were scrupulously equal. It was a hangover from childhood, this insistence on fairness. As toddlers, the twins used to squabble over
cake and dessert, each sharp-eyed as they regarded the portion destined for the other. Nothing would convince them that one had not been short-changed, the other favoured. So I devised a simple
system: one cut, the other chose. Thus a talent for precision was born, and in the event that mistakes were made in the cutting, the other twin had the advantage of choosing the larger portion. End
of problem.

Carla popped a large strawberry into her mouth. ‘Time to move on, Mother. You always said the day would come.’ Her words were muffled and made her pronouncement sound distorted.

‘Don’t speak with your mouth full,’ Pete said.

Carla stuck her tongue out at him, a gesture from childhood that had always got her into trouble. But this time, neither of us rose to the bait.

Lillian turned to her sister. ‘You can speak any way you like, once we move to Donnybrook.’

Carla inclined her head, the gesture a noncommittal one. I felt a surge of admiration for her silent assertiveness, her unwillingness to give way under pressure.

‘I thought moving out of home meant putting away the things of childhood – not continuing to blow raspberries, or in this case strawberries,’ Pete observed.

Carla hooted. ‘No way, Dad, no way. Moving out means paying for our own right to be permanently silly’

Lillian’s mobile rang then and she left the table with an apologetic wave. Carla looked at her watch. ‘Oops,’ she said, and gathered the bowls off the table. ‘I’ll
just finish with the dishwasher and then I’m off to the cinema. Mike’ll be here at seven.’

We sat, Pete and I, in the silent aftermath of their departure.

‘They’re wonderful,’ he said. ‘At least we did a good job there.’

I stood up. We had had this sort of conversation before and I didn’t want another one, not tonight. ‘Not now, Pete, please,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to go and
pack.’

‘Then when,’ he said. But it was no longer a question. He got up and left the table.

I looked around the dining room, at the surroundings that had been familiar to me for so many years. We’d moved into this house when the twins were three, anxious to send them to the
highly regarded local primary school. Our rise had been dramatic, Pete’s and mine: from obscure but hard-working young couple in the suburbs to the sudden wealth and cachet of Rathgar.
Detached house, large gardens, domestic staff. Granted, my father – my parents – had played a not insignificant role in our advancement, but our arrival had every bit as much to do with
us as with them. Pete’s success as an investment banker was ‘stellar’, according to his associates, and the blossoming of my couture business with Maggie was no less spectacular.
When I look back, I see an eternal triangle of influences and I wonder whether age has distorted the balance. What makes a life, anyway? How do you establish who gives what, who takes what? The
other evening, as I looked around what had once been my home, everything had acquired an eerie strangeness, as though all that comfortable familiarity had mutated into something else. Now the
table, the chairs, the curtains, even, had become arid and shadowy and looked as though they were about to crumble into cobwebby dust, just like Miss Havisham’s gown.

I made my way upstairs and pulled my suitcase out of the wardrobe. I had already sent some boxes on ahead by post, so all I needed to pack were the usual essentials that accompanied any normal,
four-day business trip. Nothing to arouse question or suspicion. But I’d have to say that Pete is not a suspicious man, never was.

I stayed up late, finishing emails and tidying up the ordinary business bits and pieces that hectic days leave no time for. The house was in darkness by the time I was ready to go to bed.

Then, I did something I haven’t done in years. I went into Carla and Lillian’s room. Despite our four large en-suite bedrooms, the twins have always chosen to share. Neither one
could bear to be without the other. I found that a great comfort, last night. I knew that each would fill any temporary gap that might arise in the life of the other. They were both fast asleep in
their single beds, each with one hand under her cheek and as always, facing towards her sister. I bent down and kissed Lillian and then Carla, very gently on the forehead, just on that spot near
the temple where they had loved to be stroked as babies. I could feel emotion begin to gather at the base of my throat and had to pull myself away. Not for the first time, I gazed in wonder at
these two adults who seemed to be my children but who were, in fact, separate individuals, perhaps even two strangers who had – or hadn’t any longer – something to do with me. The
point was that they now had a choice. Their welfare, their existence, their safety, even, no longer depended on me, or on anyone else. My job was done.

The last time I looked at the clock it was after one. I climbed into bed beside Pete, whose breathing was easy and regular. It occurred to me that he might have been feigning oblivion, but that
is something else I shall never know. I settled down – or at least tried to – falling into that kind of uneasy, thinnish sleep that you get when you know you’ve only got three or
four hours.

And now here I am, with the events of the last few days behind me. Few days, few hours, few decades. What does it matter? The past fades very quickly and the future is uncertain.

What matters for now is now.

Paola is sweeping the balcony by the time I get back from my walk. It rained last night, and the soil now has a pleasant smell, sweet and heavy like fruit just about to turn. I
need these solitary walks, find that they help to clear my head, fire me up for whatever demands the day will bring. I felt on edge earlier this morning and I knew that I would not be able to
settle until I had done some normal things, routine things, something that involved physical movement. As a result, I pushed myself hard along the hilly roads, quickening my pace, lengthening my
stride so that my muscles are now aching, my knees protesting.

I have been consumed with curiosity all morning, wondering how things ended up the other night at Claire’s. Pete is predictable, of course: he’ll have called her and Maggie and Nora
once he gets my email. They’ll all have agonized together about my absence. They’ll have tried my mobile, too, not once but several times, each of them needing to be convinced
individually that the number was already disconnected. And they’ll also discover that my email address is no longer extant. Their messages will bounce off a satellite and land back in their
inboxes, the technological equivalent of Elvis’s ‘Return to Sender’. It’s a curious feeling, to be cut loose like this, particularly when so much of my recent life has
depended completely upon communications. I had toyed with the idea of keeping on the old mobile phoneline and checking messages from time to time, but I decided that that might have the potential
to suck me back in again to all the things that I need to leave behind. I am not stupid. I am aware that anyone who tries hard enough will be able to discover where I am. I have left things in
place for Pete, no loose ends. My email will help him find them sooner rather than later. And once his anger subsides, he’ll realize that he no longer wants me back. I know this already. It
will take
him
some time to realize that he knows it, too. My friends will each deal with my absence in their own way. And I have plans for my daughters. My letters await them. I know them
well enough to know that, in time, they will forgive me.