This Charming Man (83 page)

He’d instigated date night in an effort to rekindle a connection between us.

He’d given up cigarettes to keep my aunt alive.

I wanted to vomit.

‘But why weren’t you angry with me?’

He looked at me. He seemed surprised – then almost contemptuous.

‘I have been angry. I am angry.’ He bit the words out and suddenly I knew the full extent of his rage. He wasn’t trying to hide it any more and it was a cruel and terrifying thing.

‘Don’t blame yourself for not being able to hide your fondness for de Courcy,’ he said coldly. ‘Even ifI hadn’t guessed, de Courcy took the precaution of telling me.’

I was shocked into open-jawed silence.

‘The night with Zara and Selma?’ he said. ‘As soon as you’d left, he phoned me.’

So that was why Damien hadn’t answered my calls that night.

‘Damien…’ Tears began to pour down my face.

I wanted to tell him that I’d been temporarily mad and that I was better now. I wanted to beg for his forgiveness, but I knew he wouldn’t – couldn’t

– grant it.

The worst thing, the most unbearable part, was that Damien had warned me this would happen. Last summer, when I’d been in the thick of my de-Courcy-itis, he’d said that ifeither of us cheated, we might get over it but that things would never be the same again. The innocence and trust would be gone.

‘I’ve ruined it, haven’t I?’

He wasn’t being gratuitously harsh – but there was only one answer he could give. ‘Yes.’

Ma opened her front door. ‘Grace? What are you doing here?’

‘I need sixteen euro to pay the taxi.’ I nodded at the car idling by the kerb.

‘Why have you come in a taxi? And why can’t you pay for it?’

‘I can’t find my car key. Or my wallet.’

‘Where are we going to find sixteen euro? We’ll have to go through your father’s glass things.’ Dad collected one-cent coins in old jam jars.

‘I’ll go and tell your man we’ll be a while.’ I dropped my rucksack by the door and started back down the steps.

‘Grace, are you all right? You look a bit –’

‘You know the way you said there was always a bed for me here?’

Ma gazed at me, her face changing and becoming luminous with shock, as understanding dawned.

‘I’ve come to take you up on it,’ I said.

‘What happened?’ she whispered.

‘Paddy de Courcy.’

‘Paddy de Courcy?’

He’d won.

The Horseshow House
Bridie, Barry, Treese and I awaiting the unveiling of Gwen, Jem’s new girlfriend.

‘Why we in this bloody pub?’ Bridie asked. ‘Is miles out of the way and full of rugby-type oddballs.’

‘Jem wanted neutral venue for “the meet”,’ Treese explained. ‘No reminders of Claudia.’

‘He actually call it “the meet”?’ I asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Cripes… What you think she’ll be like?’ I asked. ‘This so-called Gwen.’

‘Well, she needn’t think she can take Jem for a ride, the way Claudia did,’ Bridie said grimly.

‘Yeah!’ Barry agreed. ‘Too right. We’ll be watching her.’

‘Shush! Here they are.’

Jem approached, grinning, grinning, grinning. Also sweating. Also rubbing his hands around and around each other, as if washing them.

Clearly under considerable stress.

He ushered forward tall, dark-haired girl. ‘This is Gwen.’

At first glance, her knockers not fake.

‘Yes, hello, Gwen,’ we all cried. ‘Lovely to meet you, yes, lovely.’ We were smiling, smiling, smiling with our mouths but our eyes like flint.

‘Lovely to meet you too.’ Gwen was sweating around her hairline. ‘Yes, gin and tonic,’ she said to Jem. In quieter tone, she added, ‘Make it large one.’

Stab of pity for this so-called Gwen. Few experiences in life more daunting than ‘beauty contest’ with new boyfriend’s old friends. Wondering if you’ll be accepted into gang or cast into outer darkness.

However, could not permit heart to soften too much. She could be
fake-knockered hustler, like Claudia. Mind you, she didn’t seem like hustler. She seemed nice.

Drinks, chat, anecdotes. Under guise of fake friendliness, Bridie, Barry, Treese and I assessed this so-called Gwen’s every move. Much shrill anxious laughter on Gwen’s part. Perched on edge of banquette, her legs crossed three times around themselves.

Jem watching us, his eyes pleading, Please like her, please like her.

Jem went to the bar – again – to pour more alcohol into us and while he was gone, Gwen slumped.

‘Mother of fuck.’ She wiped her forehead. ‘This is worse than job interview.’

Chestburst of compassion for her.

‘You were friends with Jem’s previous girlfriend for long time,’ she said. ‘It’ll be hard to accept me. But give me time.’

Bridie, Barry and Treese also riddled with compassion.

‘Actually we hated her,’ Bridie confided.

‘Hated her,’ Treese confirmed.

‘Hated her,’ I said.

Suddenly all of us roaring laughing and firm friends. Yes, Gwen the right one for Jem. In a way, their names almost rhymed.

Everyone truly settled now. Except me, of course. Not bitter. No. Simply observing.

She rose inexorably towards the surface.

…
I’m still here
…
I’m still alive
…

Desperate for oblivion, she tried to push herself back down into the nothingness, but she resurfaced again, popping up like a plastic bottle on the waves. It was over, she had returned, she was conscious, she was – dispiritingly – still alive. What would it take?

Automatically she looked around for a bottle. The one beside her bed had toppled over and emptied itselfonto the carpet, she’d have to go on a search.

She stood up. Her legs felt as ifthey were being operated by someone else, there was a loud humming in her ears and her tongue tasted thick and numb, as if it was coated in paraffin wax.

Down the stairs, someone else’s legs carrying her, and into the hall, where a light flashed on the answering machine. She didn’t know when she’d developed a fear of hearing messages, but she had. (The same with the post: she could barely look at it, much less open it and make neat piles.)

She had better listen to the messages, she’d been out of it for nearly four days, something might have happened. When she heard Ma’s voice, she bit her thumb to tamp down her dread. But it was good news: Bid was better.

She was too numb, still too stunned from her hangover, to feel glad. But she knew she was relieved, she was simply too anaesthetized to feel it.

There was a second message. Again from Ma. Damien and Grace had split up. Grace had moved out of their house and was back living in her old bedroom.

‘Something to do with Paddy de Courcy,’ Ma said. ‘She’s not so good.’

This was such astonishing news that Marnie sank to the cold parquet
floor and listened to the message again just to make sure that she’d got it right.

It was hard to believe. Grace and Damien had seemed so… together. So unbreakable.

Clearly Paddy de Courcy was even more powerful, more destructive, than she’d realized.

She should be glad. Glad that Grace had paid the price for messing with someone she shouldn’t have. And glad that she herself wasn’t the only one Paddy de Courcy had ruined – after all, if it could happen to strong, scary Grace, then it could happen to anyone.

But she was surprised to feel something winkle its way through the numb, buzzing force field that surrounded her feelings. Poor Grace, she thought, a shard of compassion warming her deadened heart. Poor, poor Grace.

I opened my bedroom door and met Bid on the landing.

‘You look like shit,’ she said.

‘Good morning to you too,’ I said wearily.

‘Would you not wear a bit of make-up?’ she asked. ‘You’ll scare the public, going out like that. It’s not fair on people.’

I didn’t look like myself, she was right about that. Three nights ago, the night Damien and I had split up, I’d undergone some sort of transformation while I’d been asleep. I’d looked thirty-five when I went to bed but when I woke up the following morning the hollows around my eyes had sunk down into my skull and suddenly I looked like I’d been roaming the earth for four thousand years.

‘Even some concealer for those black circles?’ Bid suggested.

‘I haven’t got any with me.’ Most of my stuff was still in the house. ‘You could go back and get some.’

‘Not today.’

‘You could ask Damien to pack up some of your stuff.’

‘Not today.’

I couldn’t cope with any of that organizey-type stuff. All I could manage was the bare minimum required to get through the day.

I’d left our house – my
home
– on Tuesday night and when I woke up on Wednesday morning, shivering in Ma’s spare room, I thought, I have to survive today. The same thing happened on Thursday. Now it was Friday and, like a mantra, going through my head, were the words, Just get through today.

There was an awful tightness in my chest and I still couldn’t feel my feet, and my face and head felt like they were going to burst apart and splinters of my skull were going to go flying everywhere, like in a video nasty.

Down in the kitchen, Ma and Dad leapt up, all concern, when they saw me. ‘Are you going to work, Grace?’

What else would I do?

‘You know you’re free to smoke again?’ Ma said.

Indeed, thanks to Bid’s cancer-free status, everyone was free to smoke again. However Ma, Dad and Bid had decided to stay nicotine-free – they didn’t want a recurrence of Bid’s cancer. Also I think they liked the extra cash. But they kept encouraging me to start back on the cigs.

I couldn’t. When I’d first given them up last September, a peculiar part of me had been glad I was denying myselfsomething I loved. The order to stop smoking had been handed down about a week after Paddy had hit me; bizarrely it had felt appropriate to do some sort of penance. Now it felt even more so.

‘I don’t want to smoke. Well, I do, but I’m not going to. I have to atone for what I did to Damien.’

Ma flinched. ‘You weren’t even brought up as a Catholic.’

‘Ach!’ Dad said. ‘Ifyou live in Ireland there’s no escaping the guilt. I think they pump it into the water system, like fluoride.’

‘I’m going to work,’ I said wearily.

‘Will you be here tonight?’ Ma asked.

‘I’ll be here for the rest of my life.’

I got through Friday, then I got through the weekend by sleeping for large patches of it. Marnie rang to offer stiff condolences and ifI hadn’t felt so dismal, the fact that she was talking to me would have cheered me. But I was uncheerable.

Then it was Monday morning and as I was promising myselfthat all I had to do was get through today, my bedroom door opened and Bid tossed a small beige tube across the room at me.

‘What’s this?’

‘Foundation. We bought it for you. We clubbed together. Put some on.’

I rubbed a handful of gunk over my face and it warmed up my death pallor. But within moments my greyness had risen once more to the surface, cancelling out the Tawny Beige.

I got through Monday and I got through Tuesday and on Tuesday night, when Ma came to wish me sweet dreams, I said, ‘It’s a week now. It’s a whole week.’

‘You’ve heard nothing from him?’ She knew I hadn’t. I suppose she was just making conversation. ‘No word?’

‘No. And I won’t. There will be no reunion. This is over.’

I knew he wouldn’t forgive me – but I accepted it.

That was the one good thing. I didn’t daydream about him arriving to claim me. I didn’t ring him and call round to the house, pleading with him to forgive me.

I knew Damien. The qualities I’d fallen in love with – his independence, his conviction in his own rightness, his essential unwillingness to trust another human being – had become the stumbling blocks. He’d trusted me, I’d broken the trust. It couldn’t be fixed.

I lay on the bed and thought back to those days last summer and wished fiercely – scrunching up my face and clenching my hands with the force of my longing – that I could go back and change things.

‘What are you doing?’ Ma asked. ‘With your face?’

‘Wishing I could go back and change things. I really miss him,’ I said. ‘I miss talking to him. Right from the start I was pathetically in love with him. Even at parties – on the few occasions I could drag him along to one – he was the only person I really wanted to talk to.’

‘Did you tell him?’

‘Ah no. We’re not like that. But he knows. Knew.’

‘So why the hell did you get involved with de Courcy?’ Ma asked, almost in exasperation.

‘I don’t know.’ I really couldn’t understand it.

Boredom? Curiosity? A sense of entitlement? All shameful reasons.

‘People, human beings,’ I said helplessly, ‘we’re fucked-up. Why do we do the things we do?’ I sounded like Marnie. For the first time I really understood the despair that ran through her like a black seam.

‘“To err is human,”’ Ma quoted.

‘“To forgive divine,” ’ I said. ‘And I couldn’t care less if the divine forgives me or not. I want Damien to forgive me, but he won’t.’

Ma acknowledged that by keeping her mouth shut.

‘I know you all think he’s grumpy –’

She maintained a diplomatic silence.

‘ – but he’s my favourite person.’

Eventually she asked, ‘What are you going to do?’

‘With what? The rest of my life?’

‘… Yes, I suppose. Or until you get over this?’

‘I don’t know. What does anyone do? Live through it.’

Easier said than done, though.

Bridie’s flat
‘Dance, lil’ sister, dance!’ Bridie urged me.

VIP
had done a special ‘de Courcy pre-wedding pull-out.’ Bridie had removed all the pictures of Paddy and spread them across the floor like carpet tiles.

‘C’mon, lil’ sister, dance!’

‘Lil’ sister?’ Treese and I exchanged a glance. Perhaps words from a song? No knowing where Bridie gets her phrases from.

She played Billy Idol – no knowing where Bridie gets her CDs from either – and we all danced, and must admit, I gleaned pleasure from stamping foot on Paddy’s smiling fizzog.