‘About a charity ball,’ Neeve says.
I’m frozen. I’m right on the edge where unbearable relief falls away into unbearable disappointment: Richie Aldin. Yeah, I’d seen his call come in and, no, I hadn’t answered it because I’ve already declined his wretched effing charity ball about a hundred billion times and his caper is bordering on harassment.
‘He said the three of us should go together!’
Her happy, hopeful face strikes the fear of God into me and this is something that needs to be handled right now. ‘Neevey, I’m not going to the ball thing.’ My tone is gentle. ‘But let me talk to your dad about it.’
I find his number and ring him. He answers too quickly. ‘Amy?’ All eager.
‘Can we meet for a chat?’
‘I can come to yours.’
‘Starbucks in Dundrum.’ I’m not prepared to travel any distance. ‘How soon can you get there?’
‘Oh, you mean right now? But I’m at home in Clontarf. It’ll take a while.’
‘Get driving so. Text me when you arrive.’
‘Wouldn’t it be easier if I just came to you?’
‘Text me from Starbucks.’
My phone beeps.
I’m here. What you like to drink?
Mint tea.
Okay, on it! xx
Richie looks smiley and happy, delighted to see me. ‘Amy.’ He leans in for a kiss and goes for the mouth, something I’d half expected so I turn away in time. This surprises him, but not for long.
‘You look great,’ he declares. ‘Cute coat.’ He makes some signal to the lad behind the counter, who materializes with a pot of boiling water, for my mint tea.
‘Didn’t want your tea getting cold on you,’ Richie explains, with yet another smile. I hadn’t noticed this before but at some stage he’d obviously got veneers: his teeth are unnaturally square and even. Can teeth be described as smug?
‘I got you a muffin.’ He slides a plate across the table to me. ‘Cinnamon okay?’
He pours my tea. ‘So what’s up? Couldn’t wait until Saturday week to see me?’ A flash of the smug veneers.
‘Richie, I’m really not going to that ball with you.’
The expectant expression on his face doesn’t change. ‘You don’t like that sort of thing? I guess you do a lot of them in your job. Well, how about dinner? Anywhere you like! The Greenhouse? Guilbaud’s? Or we –’
‘Richie, I don’t want to go to anything with you.’
‘Why not? You’re on a break.’
‘Hugh’s on a break, but I’m not. And even if I was, I don’t have those sorts of feelings for you.’
‘You just need to try. C’mon, Amy, remember the way we were? I do.’
There must be a name for this, the utter absence of empathy. It’s obviously some sort of personality disorder. Would it be narcissism? I must google the exact symptoms.
‘You deserve to have things made right,’ he says.
‘But it no longer matters.’
‘It does to me. I feel guilty. Amy, I’m … troubled. I wake up at night and I’m thinking about you and Neeve, and you were so young, the age Neeve is now, and on your own and I screwed you on the money and –’
‘I forgive you. You already know that.’
‘But the remorse won’t go away.’
I shrug helplessly. ‘I don’t know what to suggest. Maybe you could walk the Camino.’
‘But it’s more than just guilt,’ he says. ‘I’m still attracted to you.’
Oh, for the love of God.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I mean sexually.’
How can I not laugh? Yes. I mean sexually. This will make a fabulous anecdote. Wait till I tell Hugh – oh, God, Hugh is gone. But other people. Derry. It already has the makings of a great catchphrase. Yes. I mean sexually.
May I have that leg of lamb? Yes. I mean sexually.
I LOVE your hair. Yes. I mean sexually.
He must think my hoot of mirth is an expression of pleasure because he continues, earnestly, ‘It doesn’t matter that you’re in your forties. So am I. When I look at you, seventeen-year-old Amy is the Amy I see.’
‘Stop, Richie.’ He’s making a show of himself. I’m actually embarrassed for him.
But could someone please tell me what’s going on? Is this some sort of cosmic consolation prize? The universe takes away one husband, a great one, and as a salve, re-gifts you the gobshite you’d loved twenty years ago?
How strange that, once upon a time, a Richie pleading for forgiveness would have had me delirious with joy. Suddenly I wonder if Hugh and I will sit together like this one day on opposite sides of a table in a busy Starbucks, when we’re all done and dusted and consigned to The Past? The thought elicits a stab of unbearable grief.
Where does love go when it dies? Into flowers and other beautiful things? Back out into the universe to be recycled? Because Richie was right: he and I had loved each other passionately and now nothing remains, except his self-indulgent, long-overdue guilt.
‘Trust me, Amy,’ Richie says. ‘We can go back to the way we were.’
‘We absolutely can’t.’
‘You’re not trying. Try. You have to because I can’t take feeling this way.’
‘Richie, maybe you should see a doctor. Get yourself checked out, it’d do no harm.’
‘You’re punishing me!’
It’s not my intention. But I can’t give him what he wants, not now, it’s years too late, and with that I see that everything passes. Everything passes in the end, good and bad, love and pain. It’s a bittersweet truth to hold on to. Everything passes in the end. ‘Go into therapy,’ I suggest. ‘Or volunteer in a soup kitchen. One way or another, Richie, just learn to live with the guilt.’
‘Okay.’ Unexpectedly he’s all bluster. ‘If you won’t see me, I won’t see Neeve.’
Now I’m scared. But only for half a second. Because just say I was mad enough to go along with his bullshit request, he’d tire of me super-fast and Neeve would be kicked to the kerb once more. ‘Seriously, Richie, threats? This is how you make things right? Maybe treating your daughter with kindness might help dampen down your guilt. Why don’t you take her to the poor blind children’s ball?’
‘I only wanted –’
‘Richie, you need to hear this. I don’t want to spend time with you. I don’t want to see you.’ I stand up. ‘I don’t want to hear from you unless it’s about Neeve.’
‘Ah, no, Amy –’
The knife rattling on the plate, I slide the muffin back to him. ‘One last thing, I hate cinnamon. I’ve always hated cinnamon. Everyone knows.’
Neeve is hovering by the front door. ‘How’d it go?’
‘Neeve.’ I swallow. ‘Let’s sit down.’
She knows. I can see it in her. She knows what I’m going to say and already her tears are falling, my poor Neevey, who almost never cries.
We sit knee to knee on the sofa, her hands in mine.
‘Neeve, I love Hugh,’ I speak softly, because I’m speaking to a little girl. ‘You’d like your daddy and me to be together, and that’s easy to understand. But it was a long time ago and I love somebody else now.’
‘But Hugh is so mean.’ The tears are gushing. ‘He’s gone away and left you, and Daddy is here and he’s sorry. He told me, Mum, how sorry he is, how he wishes he could change everything. He’ll fix it all, he told me. He’ll fix it for both of us, for the three of us.’
‘But I love Hugh.’
She cries short, hard howls, as if they’re being stabbed out of her.
It is excruciating.
I let her cry because there is nothing – nothing – else I can do.
58
Saturday, 29 October, day forty-seven
Saturday morning, it’s not even ten o’clock, and already I’ve ordered a satin skirt from Asos, done the weekly shop, made a frittata, read the papers and wondered if Steevie will ever talk to me again. There’s a lot to be said for insomnia.
And here’s Kiara.
‘Morning,’ I say. ‘Will we put up the Hallowe’en stuff today?’