The Kiss (7 page)

He limps up the stairs, registering the pain in his left foot where it was crushed under the bike and pushes
open the door of Davy’s room where Sophie is to sleep for the night. Should even now be sleeping. His premonition was right; the bed is flat and the room has that air of stillness when no one has disturbed it for some time. Swearing, he retraces his steps back down the stairs, placing his injured foot carefully. As he goes to lift the receiver he sees a note lying on the table.

‘Gone to a party with Tilda at Mandy’s, staying the night. Thought you wouldn’t want me to walk home on my own late. See you tomorrow. Sophie x.’

Who the hell is Mandy and where does she live? The name doesn’t ring a bell. Rachel would know, would probably have Mandy’s phone number in her little book. She has always insisted on having the phone numbers of Sophie’s friends when she goes to stay with them overnight. What time is it? Getting on for two. Too late to phone Rachel. He chats to Sal for another few minutes but when he goes to bed he’s restless and keeps waking up and looking at his watch. He imagines his daughter at a rave in some dark cavern, popping Ecstasy tablets, collapsing unconscious on the floor. In the next sequence she is walking down a dark, empty street, and a man is waiting in the shadows, poised on the balls of his feet, ready to pounce. Now she is crossing the road, and a crazy drunken driver is swerving, coming straight at
her. This is ridiculous! More than that, it is ludicrous, and in the morning, in its sober light, he will know and acknowledge that. He is working himself up into a lather when she is probably fast asleep in a bed at Mandy’s house with Mandy’s mother and father in the next room. He cannot quite talk himself into believing that! So what
would
she be doing at this time of night? He knows she is most likely to be in the arms of a member of the opposite sex.

He goes out early in the morning to buy a paper, hoping he might catch sight of his daughter legging it homeward. There aren’t many people about and they are mostly people like himself carrying newspapers. There is no sign of a girl in a long woollen coat with a twirl of coloured scarves thrown across her throat.

‘Sophie, I could murder you,’ he mutters and a woman, dressed in a churchy hat, looks round at him.

He goes into a café and orders coffee and a croissant.

In a café on the Boulevard St Germain, they ordered coffee and croissants. They needed a rest; their feet were weary after so much pavement-pounding. Cormac was making them walk everywhere rather than resort to travelling underground on the Métro. It was the only way to see the city, he insisted. Never mind a few blisters. Keep your eyes open.

They seemed to have mislaid the others, on the way back from the Musée D’Orsay. They had been talking and not noticed that they had gone so far out in front.

‘I like the Impressionists,’ said Clarinda defiantly. Some of the group predictably had been calling them old hat. Cormac despaired at times of their reactions; they were so predictable. ‘Surprise me!’ he often told them.

‘Most eras in art have something worth looking at. It’s a mistake to be too dismissive. You miss too much. The main thing is that it should give you pleasure.’

‘Oh, it does!’ said Clarinda with ardour.

In the morning, they had gone to the Orangerie to see Monet’s water lilies. They’d gone early so that they were there when the museum opened and they’d had the place to themselves for the first quarter of an hour and been able to see the walls unimpeded. The water lilies had scored a hundred per cent with the pupils. Tomorrow they would go to Giverny to see Monet’s garden.

‘I’m dying to see it!’ said Clarinda.

It was so agreeable to sit at a Parisian pavement café, with all the echoes that that evoked, and talk about painting. The vision it conjured up seemed almost to be a cliché, he observed to Clarinda, but she did not
comprehend. Clichés came from over-use. She had not lived long enough yet. She enjoyed each thing for what it was, which was one of the things that he had learnt about her on this trip and, of course, liked. Her reactions were fresh.

‘I love pavement cafés,’ she cried gaily. ‘I love Paris!’

‘It’s easy to love it,’ he agreed. Their table was sitting in a pool of sunlight.

‘I can understand Gwen John wanting to live and work here, even though she did have a difficult time with money and had to pose for other artists. She didn’t mind posing for Rodin though, she said she loved that. He must have been a very charismatic man.’

‘What did you make of her letters?’

Clarinda was not ready to answer straight away; she needed to take time to consider.

‘Do you think Rodin made her happy?’ prompted Cormac.

‘At times. But not all the time. My mother says you can’t expect someone to make you happy
all
the time but if they make you happy some of the time then that’s a bonus. Gwen wasn’t happy when she’d swept and cleaned her room and was waiting for Rodin to come and he didn’t come. And of course she wrote the letters when she was alone so often they wouldn’t have been her best times.’

‘She did a lot of waiting, I think?’

‘Yes, but sometimes waiting is not all that bad. Not if you’re waiting
for
someone.’

‘Only if you are sure they will come.’

She nodded. She opened her bag and took out her notebook. ‘She refers to him as
Mon Maître
always. Here she says nothing else matters after an embrace from her …
amant
.’ Clarinda’s cheeks looked hot. Her head was inclined over the book. ‘All her previous disappointments were then effaced. She speaks quite openly about … things. His hands. Her body. How she felt when they made love. It must have been a grand passion.’

‘Or a fantasy?’

‘A fantasy?’ Clarinda looked up. ‘Oh, no, I don’t think so. If you read these letters you wouldn’t say that. She pours out her heart to him, without shame. And there are so many of them and they went on for a long time. For years.’

‘Perhaps it’s not possible to know.’ He smiled. ‘So, do you fancy coming to live in Paris and being an artist?’

‘Yes, I do, after I’ve been to college. I’ll rent a room and paint.’

‘And starve.’

‘Don’t be cynical! Don’t you have any faith in me? Don’t you think I’ll be any good?’ She removed her
dark glasses and he saw that there were sparks in her eyes. She really cared about her work. That was not so very extraordinary. He had cared, too, when he was her age. He had been single-minded.

‘I think you could be good,’ he answered cautiously. She did have talent though she would need to work at it, like all of them on the trip.

‘Didn’t you ever dream of coming here to live?’

She had touched a nerve that still had the power to jangle. Of course he’d had his dreams, like every other young person.

‘I got married and had children. I had to make a living.’

‘That was your choice, then.’

It was easy to see things simply, at her age, he wanted to tell her, but did not, for it would only sound patronising. But her passion made him feel wistful.

‘I like your work,’ she said. ‘I liked your wire sculptures in particular. I liked the humour in them.’ He was pleased at her perception. He had had an exhibition in the summer and some of his fifth-and sixth-year students had visited it. They had been surprised that his work didn’t look much like Rodin’s.

‘Why did you think it would?’ he’d asked them.

‘You always said he influenced you.’

‘That doesn’t mean I aped his work. Influences are more subtle than that.’

‘I couldn’t agree more, Mr Aherne,’ Mrs Bain had said. She had come with her daughter. ‘I know that myself. I am a great admirer of Burns but I would not presume to think that my poetry in any way resembles his.’ Clarinda had half turned her back to hide her discomfiture and was closely examining an exhibit. Her mother had adored everything as soon as she had put a foot over the gallery threshold and wished that she had enough money to buy the lot! ‘I would fill my house with your treasures, Mr Aherne, if I could,’ she had told him.

He had seldom met a more invasive woman, he reflected, as he sat on a café terrace on the Boulevard St Germain remembering Mrs Bain at his exhibition. It was a wonder she had not found a way to accompany them to Paris. He found her quite alarming when she presented herself at his door on parents’ evenings, dressed in lurid, floating garments which concealed her size and shape, with jangling bangles encircling her plump wrists and various assorted chains hung about her person, and smelling so strongly of some musty scent that he had to move his head back to avoid suffocation. She talked too close to his face for comfort and he was
too conscious of her plummy lips and the traces of lipstick on her teeth. She painted a little herself, she had confided on one visit, dropping her voice to a confidential manner. Watercolours. Oh, she was sure he would think nothing of them. She went to classes, though, and her teacher had been kind enough to say that she could be good enough to be a professional painter with a little more experience. She thought Clarinda must take after her. Apart from Clarinda’s own tendency to wear floating Indian cotton dresses he could see nothing of the mother in the daughter. Perhaps she took after the father who had ducked out of their lives many moons ago, possibly driven out of the house by the stench of perfume and the sound of rattling bangles.

‘I know he was thirty-five years older than her but it didn’t seem to matter,’ said Clarinda. For a moment Cormac was not following. ‘Gwen and Rodin,’ she went on. ‘My mother says age is irrelevant. She says she feels no different from what she did at eighteen.’

‘Really?’

‘You don’t agree?’

‘Unfortunately not.’

A waiter had cleared the dirty cups from their table and was hovering, hoping for a fresh order.

‘Another cappuccino?’ Cormac asked Clarinda and
without waiting for an answer he ordered for them both.

‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘I think you could be almost as good as Rodin. I do! If you were to concentrate on your sculpture and give up teaching,’

He laughed. ‘Come now, Clarinda! You’re just buttering me up. Rodin is a giant. I am scarcely knee-high to him.’

‘Why don’t you have more faith in yourself?’ she demanded fiercely. His laughter faded, and their eyes engaged.

At that moment, the rest of the group burst upon them with cries of ‘There you are!’ and ‘Where have you been?’

When he returns home, having eaten his croissant and drunk two cups of black coffee and read his Sunday newspaper while doing so, he finds the flat still echoingly quiet. No further notes have been left on the table saying, ‘Gone to Claire’s or Timbuktu.’ It is now midday. He is wondering whether to call Rachel and ask her if she knows anyone called Mandy when the phone springs into life, startling him. He grabs the receiver, almost knocking the machine off the table.

‘Hi, Dad!’ Sophie is phoning from a call box and
sounds breathless. She begins to gabble and he wants to break in and say, ‘Hey, slow down,’ but she isn’t listening. ‘Listen, Dad,’ she says, which is what he’s doing, ‘I’ll be home in a couple of hours, maybe less. OK? Don’t worry. No, I’m fine, I tell you. No problems. I haven’t got any more change, I’m just about to run out.’ The phone goes dead.

He rattles the receiver rest futilely. So she didn’t have any more coins. What has happened to all those other coins that she had yesterday? Or has she just been lying? And if she has been lying what else is she covering up? In the meantime he might as well go out and have a pint at the pub.

On his return, the phone is ringing again. It is his Aunt Lily.

‘Now listen, son,’ she starts. He is tired of people telling him to listen, and calling him son. Last night he dreamt of his two dead aunts, Deirdre and Eithne. They appeared before him dressed in purple satin and rose pink respectively though in his dream he had not been sure which was which. They shimmied their hips. ‘Son, son’, he heard them keening. He wakened sweating and had to peel off his pyjama jacket. How had he come to be the answerable son to so many women? Seven sisters and only one to bear a child.
What a burden to lay upon a child. But he got the message a long time ago: there is no escape, not while any of them are still alive.

Lily’s voice is slurred, suggesting her hand has been in and out of her sewing basket where she keeps her halfs of Bushmills. She hasn’t sewn a stitch in years; her silken embroidery threads have thinned and dulled. She was disappointed in love, so Sal says. Well, who hasn’t been? Maybe love is bound to disappoint. God, he’s getting cynical in his old age. Old age! How Sal would scoff. You’re only forty odd, she would tell him, young enough to begin afresh. He is too anxious right now to feel either fresh or young. He can think only of his daughter. He is half listening to Lily. Although her speech might not be totally clear she is by no means drunk. She enjoys a dram or two, just enough to take the edge off and relax her. ‘I know it’s none of my business, son,’ she says, as if that would make any difference to what she would or would not say, ‘but your mother’s near up the wall and you know her blood pressure’s not good, don’t you? She tells me you’ve lost your job and your wife.’

He could make a smart remark about that being an achievement in itself, the loss of both together, but it would be wasted on his aunt. ‘There’s nothing I can do about it, Aunt Lily.’

‘You could come over and see your mother.’ And face the Inquisition.

‘Look, I’ll need to go, Aunt Lily, I can hear the door. I think it might be Sophie coming in.’

This time, he has told not a word of a lie, for it is his daughter arriving home. She greets him cheerfully, while avoiding his eye. ‘It’s cold, isn’t it,’ she says, rubbing her mittened hands together. He takes a long look at her while she is divesting herself of some of the scarves and the long woollen coat. She looks rather grimy to him, as if she hasn’t washed that morning or maybe even the night before. And doesn’t she pong a bit? He’d better not say that! But aren’t those lacy threads clinging to the hem of her coat
cobwebs
?