Better Together (49 page)

Even after Alan was born, Nina continued to find ways to improve the guesthouse. She was the one to decide that Sunday lunches and afternoon teas would be a draw, and Sean agreed that they could be good money-spinners. She was right. Bawnee River Sundays attracted not only the residents of Ardbawn but people from outside the town too.

They had two Sunday-lunch specials under their belts when Paudie made the booking. It was Elva’s birthday, he told Nina, who took the call. Did she think she could provide a small cake too? They’d be coming with their children, so there’d be six of them.

Nina was excited when she told Sean about the booking. Paudie had become the town’s most prominent businessman. He employed a lot of local people in his two printing companies and he’d recently been interviewed by RTÉ radio for a business programme, discussing opportunities for development
outside of major cities. He’d been articulate and passionate, although a little brusque and impatient with the reporter, who wasn’t as quick as Paudie himself. But think, she said to Sean, he could give us a mention next time. We’re a successful business after all!

Sean realised that he was apprehensive about having Elva in his home, although he told himself that nerves were ridiculous. He was a bit anxious about seeing Paudie, too. After all, he’d had sex with the other man’s wife. It could certainly make the occasion a little awkward.

They were an attractive family, he thought, as they walked through the door. Paudie was tall and broad and strong. Elva was pale and slender and ethereal. The three oldest children had inherited Paudie’s dark good looks, but Cushla, the latest addition, was far more like Elva in appearance. Her hair was fair and curly and she had the same aquamarine eyes as her mother.

Sean welcomed them and showed them to their table. He didn’t know if the brush of Elva’s hand against his was deliberate or not. He felt a quiver of desire run through his body and he stepped away from her. She looked at him with the faintest hint of amusement and pushed her fingers through her still flaxen hair. The sun glinted off the warm amber of the ring she wore on her right hand, while the diamond on her left glittered hotly.

He’d given her the amber ring for her birthday when they’d first gone out together years before. He was both flattered and amused that she still had it and had worn it today.

The birthday lunch was a success. The cake that Nina had baked was devoured after Elva had blown out the single candle. The O’Malleys stayed long after the other guests had
left, and Paudie chatted to Nina about how well the guesthouse was doing and how proud her mother would be of her. He told Sean to come to him if there was any help he could give, and offered a discount on any printing they might need. No job too big or too small for a fellow Ardbawn man, he said warmly. We’ve got to help each other out whenever we can.

The O’Malleys came again the following Sunday. But the Sunday after that Elva came alone. Paudie had taken the children to see their great-uncle in hospital in Dublin, she said. They were going to stay overnight. She’d had a terrible headache that morning and had decided not to go with them. But it had lifted now. She felt a lot better.

She ate her lunch at a corner table, reading the newspaper and ignoring everyone else in the dining room. Afterwards she sat in the garden, smoking a cigarette and drinking a glass of white wine, her soft white cardigan wrapped around her shoulders against the chill of the breeze.

‘She’s a strange woman,’ Nina observed as Sean loaded the dishwasher. ‘She looks so fragile and yet I bet she’s a tough cookie.’

‘She’s different,’ agreed Sean.

Elva drank another two glasses of wine before deciding it was time to go. She stood up and wobbled on her high heels.

‘I don’t think you should drive home,’ said Sean, who’d been watching her from the kitchen.

‘I need my car at the house,’ said Elva. ‘I have to go out early in the morning.’

‘It’s still not safe for you to drive. Wait there.’

He called to Nina and told her that he was going to drive Elva home in her own car.

‘Best thing,’ agreed Nina. ‘You don’t want her wrapping herself around a tree. We shouldn’t have allowed her to drink the guts of a bottle of wine. I didn’t realise she was having so much.’

Sean brought Elva to the car, a bright red Honda Civic, and helped her into the passenger seat. It didn’t take long to reach March Manor.

‘Come in,’ she said, her words more slurred than they’d been back at the guesthouse. ‘Come in for a drink with me.’

‘I can’t,’ said Sean.

‘You’re walking home,’ she pointed out. ‘It won’t matter.’

‘I can’t,’ said Sean again.

She walked over to him and rested her head on his shoulder.

‘Please?’ she said.

Sean thought about Nina and the various chores that awaited him back at the guesthouse.

‘Oh, all right,’ he said. ‘But I won’t stay long.’

He hadn’t intended it to be the start of an affair, but it was. There was something about Elva that drew him to her as it had before. She was so different to Nina, cool and edgy, and able to do things with her body that his wife had long forgotten. She’d lost the neediness, too. She never asked him if he loved her.

He told himself that he deserved a short fling; he’d been working really hard lately. Maybe Elva deserved one too, married to someone like Paudie and with her brood of kids. He’d end it before it went too far and before anyone got hurt. In any event he knew it would have to finish before someone saw his car at March Manor when he was supposed to be somewhere else, or before Nina began to realise that
he spent a lot of time nipping out to do some trivial chore that took far too long. Besides, this was Ardbawn. It was practically impossible to keep a secret. Sean couldn’t decide whether it would be worse to have it discovered by Paudie, who would destroy him, or Nina, who would be devastated by his betrayal. He didn’t want to be destroyed by Paudie and he didn’t want to hurt Nina, but he couldn’t yet give up the thrill he got from being with Elva. Besides, Nina was pregnant again, and embracing the kind of earth-mother persona she’d adopted when she was expecting Alan. Elva never made him think that she was a mother at all. She was still unbelievably, thrillingly sensual. Nevertheless, it was a dangerous road to travel. And he knew that he had to pick the right time to stop.

But he was still waiting for that time to come.

During the affair between Sean and Elva, the O’Malleys continued to be regular visitors for the Sunday lunches at the guesthouse. Sean thought these visits were entirely due to Elva, who would always behave so demurely in front of her husband that Sean himself sometimes found it hard to believe that he had slept with this woman and that she would cry out with the excitement of making love to him.

Elva never seemed to mind the fact that their meetings were sporadic, sometimes at short notice and always now away from Ardbawn, no longer at the riverbank spot that she called their own and where she’d started to paint pictures of him. ‘Good cover,’ she’d told him one day as she’d set up her easel. ‘Paudie thinks it’s important for me to have an interest of my own. I show him ones without you in them.’ Sean thought that she rather liked the cloak-and-dagger nature of their affair. As he did too, even though, after Chrissie
was born, he found it more difficult to justify leaving Nina at irregular intervals to look after things on her own. Anyway, it was getting too dangerous. They’d nearly been spotted in Kilkenny the previous week by TJ Meagher. There was no way they could keep it secret for much longer.

When he told Elva that it was over, she looked at him and laughed.

‘You can’t leave me,’ she said. ‘We’re tied to each other. We always will be.’

He didn’t want to have a row with her that night, but he knew that she was wrong. The only woman he was tied to was Nina. He could and he would break up with Elva. He didn’t love her, no matter how much he desired her. Yet making a clean break was more difficult than he’d imagined. There was always some reason to see her again, some reason not to finish it straight away. But the day was drawing closer. He had his own family to think about, and he hated the idea of his children one day finding out that he’d been seeing someone else. It seemed wrong to him.

He said this one night to Elva, who nodded.

‘I’ve been thinking about that too,’ she said. ‘I hate being dishonest with my children.’

Sean was surprised at how relieved he felt at her words.

‘It’s not right for them to think that I love their father,’ she continued. ‘It’s not right for them to be totally unaware of the fact that the only man I’ve ever loved is you.’

He hadn’t expected that. He didn’t know what to say.

‘I was stupid to marry him,’ said Elva.

‘Why did you?’

‘Why d’you think?’ She looked at Sean as though he was crazy. ‘You’d dumped me. You didn’t care about me. I nearly
died and you didn’t care. I needed to find someone who did. Paudie is crazy about me, the old fool.’

‘Of course I cared,’ said Sean. ‘I just didn’t see . . . Well, it was over. There was no point in pretending . . .’

‘But it wasn’t over,’ said Elva. ‘You came back to me. You’ve been with me ever since.’

Sean didn’t quite see it that way.

‘We’ve known each other for years, Sean Fallon,’ Elva continued. ‘We were meant to be together.’

‘Oh well.’ He tried to joke about it. ‘Life had other plans.’

‘No,’ said Elva. ‘We have to do something about our situation. We have to make our own plans.’

‘What plans?’ he asked cautiously.

‘It’s time for us to leave Paudie and Nina,’ she said. ‘I’ve been thinking about it a lot. They don’t deserve us. We deserve each other. We deserve happiness.’

‘It’s not that simple.’ Sean felt a chill at her words.

‘It is,’ said Elva. ‘The time is right.’

‘You can’t leave Paudie,’ he told her. ‘It would be a terrible scandal.’

‘You think I care about scandal?’ She looked incredulous.

‘Your children will care,’ he said.

‘And what about
our
child?’ she asked.

He looked at her in bewilderment.

‘You think Cushla is Paudie’s?’ She snorted. ‘Oh Sean, you’re so naive. Can’t you see that she’s yours?’

She had to be wrong about that. For Cushla to be his daughter, Elva would’ve had to get pregnant when they’d made love the one time six years previously, when he’d seen her in Dublin. He didn’t think so. They’d used protection. Elva was deliberately winding him up. But if she started saying
things, dropping hints . . . He wouldn’t put it past her. And that could make things very messy indeed.

So for Sean Fallon, the overwhelming emotion the day Elva died was relief. But he was shocked too. Shocked that it had happened and shocked that she had gone for ever. And worried, because he knew he’d been one of the last people to see her alive.

When he’d driven to March Manor that morning, using the excuse that he needed to see Paudie, he hadn’t known what to expect. His priority was to talk to Elva, because she’d phoned the guesthouse. She’d never done that before. They usually got in touch with each other by mobile phone, a service that was relatively new at the time, though from their point of view brilliantly convenient. It had been lucky that he was the one who’d answered the home phone, because Elva was brittle and nervous, saying that Paudie was angry with her and that they had to talk. Sean didn’t want to go anywhere near March Manor, but after Elva insisted that Paudie would be out all morning, he’d relented.

She was alone in the house when he arrived.

She was wearing a gingham blouse tied under her breasts, and a short denim skirt. Her hair fell carelessly around her shoulders. She looked about twenty.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I wondered if you’d come. I wonder will you come later too.’ She smiled.

‘I’m not here to—’

‘Oh, don’t be boring.’ She walked into the house and he followed her.

She closed the front door and untied her blouse. She moved closer to him, and he could smell the floral scent of her perfume.

‘Elva, please.’

‘What?’ There was a sharpness in her voice that he’d never heard before. ‘What is it now?’

‘I thought you wanted to end it. I thought you were worried about Paudie. What does he know?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t want to end anything. I want to make love to you.’

‘Come on, Ellie. This is serious.’

‘I
am
serious.’ She removed the blouse to reveal a lacy figure-enhancing bra underneath.

‘I can’t do this.’ He picked up the blouse and handed it to her.

‘Of course you can.
We
can. We always can.’

‘Not this time.’

‘Fuck you.’ She’d never sworn at him before, and the words sounded harsh from her lips. ‘You think you’re some great man, don’t you? Happy to screw me and then go home to your dumpling wife.’

‘I never felt that way or thought that way, Elva. We’ve been having an affair. But now it’s over.’

She stared at him.

‘I’m sorry. I love my children and I can’t keep lying to Nina. We’ve had a good time, haven’t we, but it always had to end sooner or later.’

‘No,’ she said.

‘We can’t have an affair all of our lives.’

‘That’s why we have to run away.’ She smiled at him. ‘Today. Now.’

‘You’re crazy.’ He stared at her. ‘Are you drunk?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Though champagne would be nice, don’t you think? To celebrate our love for each other.’

‘Elva!’ He caught her by the wrist. ‘We don’t love each other. We . . . It’s something else, you and me.’

‘I love you,’ she said, and her voice was pettish. ‘I always have.’

‘I care about you,’ he said. ‘But it’s over. We both have families. People who could get hurt.’

‘You don’t usually think of them when we’re in the bedroom together.’

‘No. I don’t. But I should.’

‘You’re such a bastard, Sean Fallon. You’ve broken my heart. Again.’

‘Elva . . .’

She twisted her wrist from his hold, raised her hand and hit him across the face. He felt the sting as the amber ring he’d once given her caught his cheek.