Things We Never Say (7 page)

‘Tomorrow is fine,’ she said, not wanting to argue with him about the grass even though he’d been promising to cut it for the past week, and a week of dry, sunny weather practically constituted a heatwave in Ireland. ‘Your dad was doing another will.’

‘Not again.’ Gareth turned from the computer, an irritated expression on his face. ‘What’s in it this time?’

‘I’ve no idea. I saw it sticking out from under a folder. I thought that maybe he’d put it there simply so that I’d come back and mention it to you and you’d go hurtling up there to find out what he was at.’

‘No point,’ said Gareth. ‘You know what he’s like.’

‘We all do.’

‘It’s so childish.’ Gareth shook his head. ‘He thinks he can keep us in line by holding the damn will over us like some kind of big bribe.’

‘It works,’ said Lisette. ‘At least as far as you and Donald are concerned.’

‘That’s unfair!’ exclaimed Gareth. ‘We look after him because he’s our dad, not because we’re hoping for something.’

‘I know, I know,’ said Lisette quickly. ‘I wasn’t trying to imply that you didn’t do enough – we all do.’

‘But we’re entitled to be remembered by him. We’ve put up with enough over the years, haven’t we? All of us.’

‘Of course,’ she agreed. ‘Anyway, today he was going on about abused women and Magdalene laundries.’

‘What?’ Gareth stared at her.

‘He said the state didn’t do enough for them and that they deserved better. I thought that maybe he was implying he was going to leave money to some kind of women’s charity.’

‘You’ve got that all wrong,’ said Gareth. ‘Dad might leave money to a vintage car club or something like that, but he’d never leave any to a women’s charity.’

‘That’s what I would’ve thought,’ agreed Lisette. ‘All the same …’

‘He’d even leave it to Suzanne before a women’s charity.’ Gareth suddenly looked doubtful. ‘Well … maybe he would.’

‘I know he should probably divide everything equally between you all, but she’s never here and she’s never offered to help.’

‘True,’ said Gareth.

‘Though even with the dodgy wrist and that shocking cough and the whole bypass thing, I can’t help feeling he’ll go on for ever. And … it’s not like I want him to die on us, but … well, we could do with the money, couldn’t we?’

‘Maybe I’ll hit him over the head,’ muttered Gareth. ‘Finish him off.’

‘Gar! Not even as a joke.’ Lisette looked shocked.

‘Who said I was joking.’ Gareth glanced at his computer screen.

Lisette said nothing. She looked at the computer screen too.

‘So what are you working on?’ she asked.

‘Huh?’

‘On a beautiful day like today. When you should be out in the garden – even if you’re not cutting the grass – you are in here hunched over the computer. What were you looking at before I came in?’

‘Nothing.’ Gareth tried to keep his expression guilt-free.

She leaned across him and maximised the screen again.

‘An estate agent? In France?’ Her words were sharp.

‘Research.’ His tone was dismissive.

‘On what?’

‘Prices. You know.’

‘But why would we want to know about prices in France?’ she asked, her eyes scanning the page. ‘Near La Rochelle?’

‘I wondered how much Papillon was worth,’ he confessed finally.

‘Why?’

‘We need to know how valuable our assets are.’

‘You’re not thinking of selling it, are you?’ She sounded suddenly horrified. ‘Not Papillon.’

‘Look, Lisette, I wanted to know, that’s all. Just in case.’

‘We are
not
selling Papillon.’ Her voice was firm and ice-cool. ‘No matter what. It is our home.’

‘This is our home.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘This is where we live. It’s an entirely different thing.’

She walked out of the room and banged the door behind her. She knew that if she stayed, she’d only say something she’d regret.

Zoey Fitzpatrick liked the Dundrum Town Centre mall. Being on the opposite side of the city to her home, it wasn’t her closest or even most convenient shopping centre, but it had the biggest range of shops of any in Dublin. Zoey was hoping to find the right dress for her upcoming thirtieth birthday party. She’d trawled the entire length of Grafton Street without success, not even finding anything she liked in the exclusive designer rooms of the Brown Thomas department store. She was beginning to panic ever so slightly about the dress. She wanted it to be absolutely perfect.

‘It’s not like I won’t pay for the ideal one,’ she told her mother, Lesley, as she drummed her fingers on the tabletop in the café where they were having coffee before beginning their search. ‘But so far none of them have been exactly right. It’s my big night. I can’t have people outshining me.’

‘You’d outshine anyone, babes, even in a sack,’ said Lesley. She pushed the sunglasses she’d been wearing on to the top of her head. Lesley often wore sunglasses indoors to hide her occasionally puffy eyes, but this time it had been the sun coming through the glass roof that had made her keep them on while having coffee. Now it had disappeared behind a cloud and she couldn’t see her daughter properly.

‘I hope so,’ said Zoey. ‘I want to look fabulous.’

‘You always look fabulous.’ Anthea, her best friend, who’d also joined them for the shopping expedition, spoke with conviction.

‘Ah, thanks, hon.’

Zoey knew her friend was telling the truth, so there was no point in false modesty on her part. Always dressing for the occasion and looking her best was very important to her. Today’s outfit was perfect for Saturday shopping. She was wearing her favourite Armani jeans and a baby-pink Juicy Couture tracksuit top over a simple white T-shirt. Her face was flawlessly made up, highlighting her dewy complexion, her exceptional cheekbones and her brilliant blue eyes. (The only let-down, Zoey always felt, was her lips, which were thinner than she would have liked, despite her regular use of plumping balms and lippy.) Her perfectly coloured brunette hair (with its highlighted extensions) fell around her shoulders in a cascade of GHD curls, and, like her mother, she had pushed the big sunglasses she habitually wore on to the top of her head.

‘So let’s stop drinking coffee and nattering and get shopping,’ said Anthea.

Zoey was glad she’d asked both her mother and her friend to help her in her search for the party dress. There wasn’t the same buzz in trying on loads of different outfits if nobody was with her to give an opinion (she didn’t trust the salespeople in shops, ever since the day one sales assistant had told her she looked great in a totally unforgiving style that had, without doubt, made her bum look enormous). But she trusted Lesley and Anthea implicitly and she enjoyed having girlie shopping days with them.

They left the coffee shop and walked out on to the concourse. Zoey felt the surge of adrenalin rush through her, as it always did before she went shopping. It was one of her favourite occupations and she knew she was good at it. Since marrying Donald, it had been something she’d been able to indulge in to a much greater extent than ever before, although in recent months he’d been looking at her credit card bills with a certain amount of shock and making comments about having to cut back a little.

‘Cut back?’ she’d said on the morning he’d (literally) gasped when he’d opened the bill. ‘Why?’

‘Because you’re spending the equivalent of a medium-sized mortgage on clothes and shoes every month!’ he exclaimed. ‘How could you possibly need all this stuff?’

‘To look gorgeous,’ she told him as she got up from the breakfast table and put her arms around him, engulfing him in a scented cloud of J’Adore.

‘You always look gorgeous,’ he said.

‘Because I make an effort.’

‘You look gorgeous now,’ he said, ‘and you’re only wearing pyjamas.’

Zoey decided not to tell him that the pyjamas were La Perla and had cost nearly as much as his last suit.

‘You don’t begrudge me clothes, do you?’ she asked, allowing her gleaming hair to brush against his face and swinging her legs over him so that she was sitting on his lap.

‘Of course not.’ For the first time in their married life he didn’t respond to her move. ‘It’s just that – well, you hardly need any more, do you?’

‘It’s not a question of needing.’ She kissed him on the nose. ‘It’s a question of having.’

‘Having?’

‘Being prepared,’ she amended. ‘For every eventuality.’

‘We don’t have that many eventualities you need to be prepared for,’ said Donald.

‘No?’ She put her arms behind his neck and kissed him on the lips this time. ‘What about the night you brought your managing director to the house for a drink? That’s cocktail glam. Or the day we met your friends for lunch at the yacht club? Smart casual but not too casual. Or the night we went to dinner in the flashy restaurant? Sophisticated. Or the day we did the charity walk? Sports casual.’

‘I know you need different things for those events,’ conceded Donald. ‘But there’s not that many of them.’

‘What about when I go out with my friends?’ she asked. ‘I have to look good. I have to let them know that in marrying Donald Fitzpatrick I made the right choice.’

‘Of course you made the right choice,’ he said. ‘I love you.’

‘And I love you too,’ she said as she nuzzled his ear. ‘I want you to think you made the right choice too. I want you to be proud of me when you see me beside all those other women.’

‘Oh, I’m proud of you all right.’ Donald gave in to the allure of her body. ‘How could I not be?’

‘How could you not,’ she agreed as she set to work to help him forget about the credit card bill and remember why it was that he’d fallen for her in the first place.

Zoey had met Donald at a low ebb in his life. He was going through a bad time personally and professionally, and (as he said at the time) the sharp pain in his tooth was the final straw. She was the receptionist in the dental surgery but she’d never seen him before. He confessed, as he cradled his jaw in his hand, that he hadn’t been for his yearly check-up in, well, three years, so it was probably his own fault. Zoey, however, gave him a sympathetic look and told him that nobody ever did what they were meant to when it came to their teeth but she’d find out if Mr Johnson could see him straight away.

‘I reckon you have an abscess,’ she said.

Afterwards, Donald told her that she’d been like an angel, fussing over him, comforting him, calming him. He hated the dentist, always had, hated the noise of the drill and the helpless feeling as he lay back in the chair; hated too the way the dental nurses and receptionists always made him feel like a naughty schoolboy for not looking after his teeth properly.

‘In fact you hate everything about it,’ she said as she keyed in the details of his follow-up appointment. (She’d been right, it was an abscess.)

‘Except you,’ he said.

A week after he’d had his check-up, he’d phoned her and asked her on a date. She’d been surprised and then doubtful because he was way older than her, but she wasn’t seeing anyone herself at the time (having dumped her most recent boyfriend for being a total bore) and she reckoned that it might be a nice night out.

Donald had taken her for a meal at a top city restaurant, followed by a drink in a quiet bar – although she’d nearly bailed out before the drink because he’d mentioned his ex-wife, Deirdre (afterwards often referred to by Zoey as Disgruntled Deirdre), and his two daughters, both in their late teens, who were placing enormous demands on him. The demands were for money, in the case of all three, who seemed to regard the bank of Donald as pretty limitless; and for his time, at least as far as Deirdre was concerned. Donald’s soon-to-be-ex-wife hadn’t seemed to grasp the concept that their impending divorce meant getting out of each other’s lives, and would ring him up whenever she had a minor problem, which she expected him to solve for her immediately.

Zoey wasn’t keen on going out with a man with a money-grabbing ex and teenage daughters, but Donald was good company and far more mature than the guys she normally dated – well, he
was
more mature, she reminded herself; he was in his forties after all! Nevertheless, she enjoyed being with someone who was confident, who wore nice clothes (she was fed up with guys who thought ripped jeans and a rugby shirt was actually dressed up) and, above all, who treated her well. If Donald said he’d call, he called, and if he said he’d meet her somewhere at seven, he was there at seven. Zoey liked that. It made her feel special.

By their third date, she’d decided that his age and his previous marriage didn’t matter. They got on well together and he was fun to be with. Besides, all of his credit cards were platinum, he drove a top-of-the-range BMW and he was living in a penthouse apartment in the city centre while his divorce from Deirdre was being negotiated. Zoey couldn’t help thinking that she could do a lot worse than Donald Fitzpatrick; that she’d done a lot worse than him in the past, and that she deserved the good times he was giving her now.

They’d married shortly after his divorce came through. Zoey had suffered doubts before their wedding, thinking that Disgruntled Deirdre had somehow managed to get far more out of the deal than Donald had expected or wanted, and worrying that his first wife and children would be a constant drain on their resources; but, as her mother pointed out, the Fitzpatrick family seemed to be very well off and Donald’s father lived in a gorgeous house on Howth Hill, so one way or another Donald was probably a good bet. Besides, Lesley had added, he’s a nice enough guy and not at all bad for someone pushing fifty. She’d chortled at her own comment, which made Zoey poke her in the ribs and tell her not to be a cougar, and to keep her hands off her fiancé.

Zoey had smothered her doubts because she loved Donald, although she had to admit that it wasn’t exactly the sort of hot passion she’d had for some of her previous boyfriends. But those experiences had only made her realise that hot passion eventually faded, and she was satisfied that even if Donald wasn’t the most inventive man between the sheets, he was thoughtful and considerate. Most importantly, he loved her, and she knew that she loved being loved by him too.