Where the Rain Gets In (21 page)

T
hey chose another table, in the bar and
away from the open foyer.

“I’m going to have to eat something,”
said Mike.

“I’ll have a pot of tea,” said Katie.
“If you order some sandwiches then I’ll share them with you.”

Katie left Mike alone while she went to
freshen up and to recover some of her lost composure. She studied herself in
the mirror. Her clothes and her look said successful businesswoman. She
wondered if anyone in the foyer had recognised her – had she become the stuff
of gossip columns out there? She realised she’d been crying. She cursed Mike
again for doing this to her. But there was nothing here Katie didn’t already
know – the front she put on to the world could collapse at any moment; it was
hardly surprising if it had almost happened today. She splashed her face with
cold water, dried her hands, and walked back out to the bar.

“I need to tell you about my home and
family,” said Mike, “and then I think you’ll see why I’m here.”

“No bullshit, then,” said Katie.

“No bullshit, I promise.”

“Because I can tell when you’re lying.”

“No lying, and no bullshit – I promise,”
said Mike again.

Their food and drinks arrived; Mike had
a Guinness this time, as though it was he now that needed the drink to help
calm him down. Katie was happy with her tea and helped herself to a sandwich.

Mike looked up at Katie. It was an
unguarded moment, and Katie saw something. His still young face reminded her of
the summer days when they used to drive out to the hills above Manchester; when
Mike would be trying but failing to figure Katie out. He’d looked lost then, and
he looked lost now.

“What is it?” she asked.

But then the look was gone, and Nice Guy
Mike was back.

“You were right about my wife,” he said.
“I knew her all the time you and I were together at college – though, of
course, I wasn’t married to her at the time. We weren’t even seeing each other
– not in that way, anyway – so it wasn’t as though I was cheating on her. And
you and I weren’t exactly what you’d call going out together, were we?”

“When did you meet your – how long had
you known Margaret?”

“We used to meet in the library after
school,” said Mike. “That was where we first saw each other, and I can’t
imagine we’d ever have met otherwise.”

“It’s a good place to meet girls – a
library,” said Katie. “You can fool them into thinking you’re intelligent, and
they like that.”

“Well, the similarity did occur to me a
year or so later when you came over to talk to me in the Law Library that time.
But anyway, getting back to Margaret . . . it took a couple of months of
staring across the tops of desks and then looking quickly away before either
one of us had the nerve to speak to each other. And when it did happen, it was
only because her friends egged Margaret on; I would never have had the courage
to say hello. I used the library because to get to school I had to travel the
whole way across town, so it was easier to stop off on the way home and get my
work done there. I’d be knackered by the time I got home otherwise, and this
way I was still in a studying frame of mind – in my uniform and everything.”

Katie smiled.

“What?” asked Mike.

“The thought of you in your school
uniform – did you have a little cap on you head?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“What age were you?”

“I was just seventeen; Margaret was
almost sixteen and studying for her O’ levels. I was about to take my A’s. And
the uniform is relevant, because it told Margaret where I went to school. There
were always two or three of her friends with her, giggling at Margaret for
daring to talk to me. She used the library because there was no space to work
at home, she said.”

“Now that I can understand,” said Katie.

“Well, yeah, I guess nobody loved their
library as much as you did.”

“It was private,” said Katie, “your own
space even though you’re in a very public place. I could never have studied for
my exams otherwise – certainly not at Margaret’s age – so I know what she was
doing.”

“She said if I couldn’t handle a couple
of girls giggling,” said Mike, “there wasn’t much hope for me. What she meant
was, I was going to come up against greater resistance than that if I wanted to
carry on seeing her. Because it was Belfast, the easy way of looking at it was
that she was a Catholic and I was a Protestant and sure, that was there – I’m
not denying it. But when you got right down to it – when it was just the two of
us – it was the fact that I had money and she didn’t. Or rather, that my family
had money and her family didn’t.”

“There’s nothing like a rich person for
not knowing the value of money,” said Katie.

“But it’s not as though we were rich,”
said Mike. “We weren’t poor, but we weren’t so well off either. I was just a
middle-class school kid, and even that wasn’t the real me; it was my family
that weren’t poor, my family that were middle class. I was just a schoolboy and
this was the first time I’d come across how money can affect how one person
might look at another.”

“I’m with Margaret on this one,” said
Katie. “I can imagine you were unbearable.”

“But that’s just it,” said Mike, “If I’d
ever thought about it at all, I was just some kid who was studying to go to
college. And then suddenly I was being looked at like I was some freak from
landed gentry or something.”

“You’d have to be where Margaret was
from to understand.”

“I know, I know,” said Mike, “but this was
a real lesson to me, the difference money makes to people’s attitudes. And I
don’t mean the difference money makes to your life – I’m not that stupid, and I
wasn’t even that stupid back then. But Margaret looked at me differently
because I wasn’t poor. Not necessarily that I was any better or any worse than
her – just different.”

“Again, I’m with Margaret here.”

“But it was just me,” insisted Mike.

“Just you, about to take your exams a
year before anyone else, hoping to go to college to study law and definitely
not hanging around Belfast for the rest of your life. What was Margaret hoping
to do?”

“She’s a nurse; she always knew she was
going to be a nurse and that’s what she did.”

“That’s good, then,” said Katie.

“Yes, but the way she went about it
shows what I mean. She was as desperate to leave Belfast as I was – or, at
least, she claimed to be – and she could quite easily have gone away to
college, even to Manchester, to study nursing and qualify over there.”

“But she left school at sixteen, went
straight on to the ward, and stayed at home?”

“Exactly,” said Mike. “And then for the
rest of her life she has this hang-up about me having been to college and she
never did and she wants it for our kids and can’t understand when they don’t
want it too and it all goes back to money and how it makes you see yourself and
the rest of the world.”

“You say you were only seventeen,” said
Katie. “Well, cut her some slack. She was only sixteen at the time; maybe it
was very difficult for her then. She moved over to Manchester eventually,
didn’t she?”

“Yes, yes, I guess so. I just hate that
determination in some people to stay who they are, even when it doesn’t do them
any good.”

“You can’t have hated it that much if
you ended up marrying her,” said Katie.

“No,” said Mike, “you’re right. I’m just
trying to give you as full a picture as possible, that’s all.”

“From your point of view, you mean – I
imagine Margaret’s recollection differs slightly to yours.”

“I guess it does, but I can’t speak for
her so you’re going to have to take me on trust. Jesus,” said Mike, “you’re a
hard listener.”

Katie knew that Mike would have
deliberated long and hard over the best approach to take in saying what he’d
come to say – the best approach to get whatever it was he hoped to get out of
Katie. The lost look she’d seen on Mike’s face a few minutes earlier was the
temptation to simply blurt it all out. Katie decided to give Mike the time and
the space to tell it in his own way.

“Go on,” she said.

“After college,” said Mike, “after Vegas
– I went home. And yes, I know that was a luxury some people don’t have; I was
able to take my time to figure out what I wanted to do next. I had my parents –
a family and a home – where I could hang around, and do nothing much. Of
course, I got some grief about giving up on the banking scholarship, and why
had I studied law if I wasn’t going to be a solicitor? But generally, they were
very understanding; I was taking my time before making my big decision.”

“The Graduate?” said Katie.

“Yeah, like that,” agreed Mike, “only
more so because, although both my parents are Irish, they’ve never lost that
American drawl way of speaking. And they picked up that hard-nosed attitude to
the professions while they were over there – hence their joy when I’d gone to
study law.”

“But now you were turning into a
waster?”

“Well, I was still only twenty one, as I
kept reminding them, and they did allow me the space and time – and I know
that’s incredibly privileged, and not many people would have that kind of
family set-up, but that was me and that was how it was, so I can’t help that.”

“I didn’t say a word,” said Katie.

“No,” said Mike, “you don’t need to.”

“So what conclusions did you come to?”

“Well, there were no great startling
revelations,” said Mike, “if that’s what you mean. I thought about what I’d
been up to over the previous four years, and realised that a lot of it was
bordering on illegal – ”

“More than bordering on, I’d say.”

“Yes, yes – whatever; but I wondered
where it had all come from, all this money thing. You know, this obsession with
proving how easy it was to amass money, even if a lot of it was through dodgy
deals and fraud and suchlike? But I had done some remarkable things. That
listings magazine, for example, is still going strong – maybe not in the same
recognisable form, but it started out in life as my magazine, none the less.”

Katie nodded in agreement, and Mike
continued.

“I knew how to read and play the stock
market,” he said, “and I know we didn’t earn a fortune playing cards, but we
did have a lot of fun and probably ended up even over the years, if you take
away the trip to Vegas.”

There it was, thought Katie. Mike was
about to come on to Vegas.

“I thought about that whole Halibro
thing,” said Mike, “and I just thought – what the hell have I been doing? Where
did all this stuff come from? What was I trying to prove or achieve?”

“And did you find out?” asked Katie.

Mike laughed.

“No, not really,” he said, “only that
I’d gradually been building up to it – getting to college at an early age, being
a high achiever, that sort of thing – and I felt now that part of my life was
over.”

“Mike Maguire finally grows up,” said
Katie.

“And you were a part of what I was going
through,” said Mike. “I’d spent four years trying to figure you out, trying to
get close to you – trying to get you to fall in love with me, even – and now
that was over too. And the money thing – I realised it was a poor substitute
for what I really wanted, and that it didn’t really do it for me or for you and
so, what was the point?”

“The point was,” said Katie, “was that I
did appreciate the money, and I still do. I’ll never lose sight of what it
allowed me to do.”

“But I think I was looking to save you,
or something,” said Mike, “and the money wasn’t going to do that. And I still don’t
even know what I was trying to save you from.”

“You saved me from a life of poverty,”
said Katie, “that’s what you saved me from.”

“Not really – you’d already come away
with first class honours in a law degree; I think you’d have worked things out
just fine. You know I don’t mean that.”

“So what do you mean?” asked Katie.

“That I’d got the money, but I hadn’t
got the girl,” said Mike.

“You had Margaret,” Katie pointed out.

“I know, and I know this isn’t doing her
any favours – making it look like she was second best to you, because that’s
not how it was. I loved her all the way through this; I just couldn’t see how
we could both be together. We were realistic about the distance thing – I was
in Manchester and she was back in Belfast – and we knew it might not work out.
There was every possibility that I would meet someone and she said that if I
did, then that was okay.”

“And you believed she meant that?”

“At the time, yes, because I was so
young, but I can see in hindsight that she may just have been saying it. And I
did meet someone, didn’t I? And whatever you may think of yourself, Katie, I
knew how I felt about you and yes, I wanted to save you and be the one to make
your life okay.”