This Charming Man (62 page)

Poor Ma and Dad were showing the strain and it was sad to see because Christmas usually energized Dad. He had a conspiracy theory which got a great airing every year, kicking off in early December. He would rant and rage at anyone who would listen that the Christian churches were in cahoots with big business, compelling people to spend shedloads of money on novelty socks and cranberry sauce and bottles of Advocaat.

In other homes, you know it’s Christmas when the decorations come down from the attic. In ours, Dad’s first conspiracy-theory rant declared the season open.

But this year, apart from a half-hearted tirade on the uselessness of pot pourri, he barely bothered.

Marnie came to Ireland – without the kids, of course – and passed through the ‘celebrations’ like a whey-faced sleepwalker. Up to that point I’d been able to prevent Ma and Dad from knowing about the drinking but if Marnie decided to go on a bout, there would be no way of keeping it from them. The carry-on of her was so bad, she could end up on the six o’clock news.

Perplexingly, though, she didn’t drink. Mind you, she didn’t eat or sleep or speak either.

But I was tentatively hopeful. Perhaps she had finally come to the end. Perhaps the shock of Nick leaving her had finally done it.

It was Damien who suggested that I ring Nick to apprise him of the progress – but Nick was nothing like as pleased as I was. ‘Ten days without a drink? Not good enough. Needs to be a lot longer than that.’

‘But Nick, if she had your support –’

‘No, Grace, I can’t do it to the girls.’

‘But –’

‘No.’

I didn’t like it but I sort of understood it.

I decided that when Marnie returned to London on 30 December, I would go with her to get her over the hump of New Year’s Eve. ‘In fairness,’ I said, ‘New Year’s Eve is enough to turn even the Dalai Lama into a pisshead.’

Damien offered to come with us and I was tempted. I wanted to be with him – it felt as though I’d barely seen him in weeks, even though I had; after all I lived with him – but having forced him to give up cigarettes because of one member of my family, I thought it was pushing my luck to ask him to babysit another of them. And on New Year’s Eve.

‘Go out,’ I urged. ‘Have fun. I’ll be back in two days.’

‘I’ve had enough so-called fun to last me the rest of my life,’ he said gloomily. ‘Certainly enough seasonal cheer.’

His siblings were great ones for Christmas and threw a variety of bashes. Mid-December, Christine and Richard had a glamorous White Russian ball where the invitation ordered you to wear white. ‘Or what?’ Damien had asked the little rectangle of stiff cardboard. ‘Or we’ll be sent to Siberia?’

Two days before Christmas itself, there was a three-line whip from Deirdre. ‘A family dinner,’ she’d said. ‘As we’ll all be with our own families on the day itself.’ She’d created a Christmas grotto in her dining room, the floor strewn with pine needles, sconces flickering, and she served a full-on traditional dinner to twelve adults and ten children, without her smile ever once faltering.

On Christmas Eve, the cousins who were aged around nine to eleven put on a ‘Christmas revue’ with puppets they’d made themselves. In a way this wasn’t the worst of the gatherings because conversation had to be minimal
in order to hear the puppets’ dialogue. But in another way it was strangely depressing. These weird children. Shouldn’t they be out nicking lipglosses from Boots?

There were also any number of ‘impromptu’ ‘get-togethers’, from ‘potluck suppers’ to ‘We’ll be in the Dropping Well from 9.30. Do come.’

Damien and I had to show our faces at a couple of the events because if we didn’t – we’d learnt this from previous years – his mum rang us and said everyone was worried about us.

‘Christmas is the pits,’ Damien mused. ‘I know we say it every year, but let’s go away next year, Grace. To Syria or someplace Muslim where they don’t have it.’

‘Grand.’ I’d have gone this year if it hadn’t been for Bid. And Marnie.

‘But bad as Christmas is,’ he said, ‘New Year’s Eve is worse. I
hate
it.’

‘Who doesn’t? But whatever you get up to, it’s got to be better than sitting in Marnie’s mausoleum drinking Appletise.’

‘Juno’s having a party,’ he said.

My heart was suddenly heavy. It felt like Juno had us bombarded with invitations. Since the night Damien and I had had dinner with her, she’d tried to lure us along to hundreds of different affairs. (In fact, once I focused on the exact number, it turned out to be only three, which I found amazing, it felt like so many more.)

Damien had persuaded me to go to one of them, on the Friday before Christmas, an afternoon, mulled-wine thing. I’d only gone because I was carrying around a suspicion that Juno and her husband must have split up. Why else would Juno have got in touch with Damien so unexpectedly?

But as we arrived, standing on the front steps, smoking a cigarette, was a stout, red-faced man who squashed my hand with drunken bonhomie and introduced himself as, ‘Warner Buchanan. Juno’s husband, the bloody husband, for my sins!’

Then he recognized Damien and, I swear to God – I wasn’t being paranoid

– his expression became wary. ‘You’re the first one! First husband.’

Damien politely admitted that he was indeed and Warner’s face fell – it really did, I wasn’t just imagining it. It sank down into jowly discontent, and beside Damien’s handsome good looks, Warner looked dishevelled and, actually, a little pitiful – and it occurred to me that if I was comparing Damien and Warner and finding Warner a bit lacking, what was to say that Juno wouldn’t also?

Warner slapped an arm around Damien’s shoulders and led him into the house. ‘You and I should swap war stories,’ he roared, but I wasn’t convinced by his display of camaraderie. Too little, too late, is what I would have said had anyone asked me. But they didn’t – no one was interested in me. Juno – as if alerted by a sixth sense to our arrival – swooped out into the hall and yelled at Warner, ‘Get your fat hands off my lovely Damien!’

She kissed Damien – again, on the lips – then me, but not on the lips.

‘Grace!’ she said. ‘Aren’t you at work?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But I’ve mastered the cunning art of bilocation.’

No one laughed. Because no one was listening.

‘There’re loads of people here that you know from school,’ Juno said to Damien. ‘Let’s get you a drink.’

It was the kind of party where they absolutely pour drink into you, where people end up falling into walls and passing out spreadeagled on the bathroom floor and having to be put to bed in the spare room. Much as I wanted to join in the seasonalgood cheer and imbibe enough to end up comatose, I was driving.

I found a seat and nursed a hot Ribena as Juno squired a flush-faced, fluthered Damien around the room. ‘My first husband,’ I kept hearing her say. ‘Isn’t he gorgeous? Look at the cut of Warner next to him. Isn’t he an absolute bloody fright?’

She must be really drunk to talk about her husband that way, I decided. But she didn’t look drunk. In a slinky, beaded, champagne-coloured dress – no foul rugby jersey with the collar turned up today – and her blonde hair twinkling in the light from the chandelier, she was radiant and pretty.

Actually I’ll tell you what she was. She was dazzling.

As I drove him home, Damien declared himself delighted that he’d attended and expressed his drunken appreciation that I’d accompanied him. (The next morning, however, was a different story. We were meant to be braving the scrum, shopping for Christmas presents for his enormous bloody family, but he felt so queasy that he refused to get out of bed.)

‘So Juno’s having a New Year’s Eve party,’ I said. ‘Now why doesn’t that surprise me? Does she do anything
other
than throw parties?’

‘I won’t go if you don’t want,’ Damien said. ‘I hate New Year’s Eve. And I hate parties!’

I had to laugh – in order to pretend I wasn’t a possessive bunny-boiler.

But I couldn’t sustain it. I burst out, ‘What’s Juno up to? Why has she suddenly emerged from nowhere with her fecking DVD? Why is she so mad keen to be friends with you? What’s her game?’

‘There’s no game.’

It was a short, simple sentence, three to four words. So how had Damien infused it with such defiance? Or perhaps he hadn’t.

‘Well, why do
you
want to see
her
?’ I just couldn’t see the appeal.

‘I’m not that bothered,’ Damien said.

‘Aren’t you?’

‘No. Really.’

‘In that case, go with my blessing.’

So Marnie and I flew to London and the first thing I did was a trawlof the house, where I found bottles of vodka in all kinds of hidey-holes. ‘Pour them away,’ Marnie said. ‘Get rid of them.’

Like I was going to suggest we drank them.

On New Year’s Eve we spent the afternoon with Daisy and Verity. We tried our best, but Christ… Daisy’s glow had disappeared; from day one she’d been a charming, beautiful child and now she was flat and plain and sullen. As for poor Verity, she was a ball of twitches and tics. They kept asking –
kept
asking – why they didn’t live with Marnie any longer and when they’d be coming home. ‘Soon,’ Marnie kept promising. ‘Soon.’

When Nick came for them, they both cried violently and I thought my head would explode.

But their tears were like nothing compared to Marnie’s. She convulsed so long and hard that I actually wondered if I should try to get medical help.

‘All I ever wanted was to be a mother.’ The words were wrenched from her. ‘How did I let this happen? My children have been taken away from me and it’s all my fault.’

‘You just have to stop drinking,’ I said. ‘Then you’ll get them back.’

‘I know, I know, Grace, oh God, I know and I just can’t understand why I keep… I’ll tell you the most awful thing, Grace. All I want right now is a drink.’

‘Well, you’re not getting one,’ I said grimly. ‘Have a sausage roll and get through it.’

As the clock hit midnight on New Year’s Eve, Marnie had finally stopped crying and was two weeks sober.

‘New year, new start,’ I said, as we clinked our glasses of Appletise. ‘Everything’s going to be okay.’

‘I know.’

The following day as I climbed into the taxi taking me to the airport, she said quietly, ‘It really is going to be okay.’ She gave me a smile of such sweetness that it shifted me back into a mindset where I wasn’t climbing the walls with worry the whole time. I’d forgotten what it felt like to be normal. It was
lovely
. All I had to worry about now was my aunt dying of lung cancer. And someone with a big enough grudge against me to burn out my car. And my boyfriend’s ex-wife sniffing around. Glorious!

But an hour later, after I’d checked in, I decided to give Marnie a quick call and she didn’t pick up; and I knew, standing in Terminal 1, with crowds of post-festive people pushing and shoving all around me, that she had started drinking again.

I turned around – yes, dramatic as it sounds – and went right back to her.

I was so angry I could hardly see. ‘What the fuck are you at? You’ve thrown it all away!’

‘I’m sorry, Grace.’ Tears poured down her face in a torrent. ‘Being away from the girls… the pain is awful…’

‘Whose fault is that? You’re just a selfish bitch and you could stop if you tried hard enough.’

My jaw clenched with purpose, I hit the phones and rang sixteen treatment centres – who would have thought it was such a growth industry? – and to my amazement many of them were booked out. ‘Busy time of year,’ one bloke laughed ruefully. ‘Peak season.’ Like we were talking about a holiday in the Maldives.

Maybe it should have been a comfort to know that I wasn’t alone, but actually it was a shock to discover there were so many other selfish bitches in the world. Even if there had been availability in any of the rehab places, not one of them would take Marnie unless she admitted she was an alcoholic – and she wouldn’t. For someone so seemingly fragile, she could be as adamant as bejaysus.

‘Grace, I’m going through a bad patch. I can’t stop right now. I need it to get me through this but this will pass –’

‘How
will it pass?’

‘Nick and the girls will come back, everything will be okay and then I won’t need to drink so much.’

‘But Nick and the girls
won’t
come back.’ I was almost in tears with frustration. ‘They left because of your drinking. Why would they come back when you’re still drinking?’

‘I’ll get stronger, and when I’m stronger, I’ll stop. The pain won’t be so bad. And I’ll drink less.’

But I’d learnt a thing or two from my conversations with the treatment centres. ‘Things will only get worse. You’re an alcoholic, that’s what happens.’

She shook her head. ‘I’m just unhappy.’

My yawning terror was that she had nothing left to lose; everything was gone; why would she stop?

I got a flight home later that evening. I had to, I was rostered to work the following day.

‘But I’ll be back at the weekend,’ I warned Marnie.

‘It’s Thursday already.’

So it was. I’d sort of lost track of the days because of the Christmas break. ‘Okay,’ I said with grim cheeriness, ‘in that case I’ll be back tomorrow night. And,’ I continued, surprising myself because I hadn’t planned this, ‘I’ll be here every weekend for the foreseeable future.’

‘Why?’ she asked.

‘To keep you off the fucking sauce. Why else?’

But the following night – last Friday – when I’d arrived to find her passed out in the kitchen, stinking of urine and as slight as a child in my arms as I moved her upstairs to bed, for the first time – Christ, the
fear
– I understood the realreason I’d decided to visit every weekend: I didn’t want to leave her alone for too long because I was afraid that she might die. Anything could happen: she might tumble down the stairs and break her neck; her body might just give up from so much alcohol and so little nourishment – and she’d always been a candidate for suicide.

I tried talking sense to her, but all weekend she held tight to her mantra: she would stop when things were better. It sent me wild with frustration. But as I left her on Monday morning, I saw something different in her: fear. What did she have to be afraid of, I wondered. She was grand, she was the one drinking her head off, having a great time.