chapter twenty-nine
‘How come we’re not having lamb?’ asked Polly. ‘We always have a lamb roast when Daddy comes home.’ She poked her fork discontentedly at the piece of overcooked fish on her plate.
‘Why did you cook fish for dinner?’ said Isabel to Cecilia. ‘Dad hates fish.’
‘I don’t hate fish,’ said John-Paul.
‘You do so,’ said Esther.
‘Well, okay, it’s not my favourite,’ said John-Paul. ‘But this is actually very nice.’
‘Um, it’s not actually very nice.’ Polly put down her fork and sighed.
‘Polly Fitzpatrick, where are your manners?’ said John-Paul. ‘Your mother went to all the trouble of cooking this –’
‘Don’t,’ Cecilia held up her hand.
There was silence around the table for a moment as everyone waited for her to say something else. She put down her fork and had a large mouthful of her wine.
‘I thought you gave up wine for Lent,’ said Isabel.
‘Changed my mind,’ said Cecilia.
‘You can’t just change your mind!’ Polly was scandalised.
‘Did everybody have a good day today?’ asked John-Paul.
‘This house smells of sesame oil,’ said Esther, sniffing.
‘Yeah, I thought we were having sesame chicken,’ said Isabel.
‘Fish is brain food,’ said John-Paul. ‘It makes us smart.’
‘So why aren’t Eskimos like the smartest people in the world?’ said Esther.
‘Maybe they are,’ said John-Paul.
‘This fish tastes really bad,’ said Polly.
‘Has an Eskimo ever won the Nobel Prize?’ asked Esther.
‘It does taste a bit funny, Mum,’ said Isabel.
Cecilia stood up and began clearing their full plates away. Her daughters looked stunned. ‘You can all have toast.’
‘It’s fine!’ protested John-Paul, holding on to the edge of his plate with his fingertips. ‘I was quite enjoying it.’
Cecilia pulled his plate away. ‘No, you weren’t.’ She avoided his eyes. She hadn’t made eye contact with him since he got home. If she behaved normally, if she let life just continue on, wasn’t she condoning it? Accepting it? Betraying Rachel Crowley’s daughter?
Except wasn’t that exactly what she’d already decided to do? To do nothing? So what difference did it make if she was cold towards John-Paul? Did she really think that made a difference?
Don’t worry, Rachel, I’m being so mean to your daughter’s murderer. No lamb roast for him! No sirree!
Her glass was empty again. Gosh. That went down fast. She took the bottle of wine from the fridge and refilled it to the very brim.
Tess and Connor lay on their backs, breathing raggedly.
‘Well,’ said Connor finally.
‘Well indeed,’ said Tess.
‘We seem to be in the hallway,’ said Connor.
‘We do seem to be.’
‘I was trying to get us to the living room at least,’ said Connor.
‘It seems like a very nice hallway,’ said Tess. ‘Not that I can see all that much.’
They were in Connor’s dark apartment, lying on the hallway floor. She could feel a thin rug beneath her back, and possibly floorboards. The apartment smelled pleasantly of garlic and laundry powder.
She’d followed him home in her mother’s car. He’d kissed her at the security door to the building, then he’d kissed her again in the stairwell, and for quite a long time at the front door, and then once he’d got the key in the door, they were suddenly doing that crazy tear-each-other’s-clothes-off, banging-into-walls thing that you never do once you’re in a long-term relationship, because it seems too theatrical, and not really worth the bother anyway, especially if there’s something good on TV.
‘I’d better get a condom,’ Connor had said in her ear at a crucial point in the proceedings, and Tess had said, ‘I’m on the pill. You seem disease-free, so, just, please, oh, God, please, just go right ahead.’
‘Rightio,’ he’d said and done just that.
Now Tess readjusted her clothes and waited to feel ashamed. She was a married woman. She was not in love with this man. The only reason she was here was because her husband had fallen in love with someone else. Just a few days earlier this scenario would have been laughable, inconceivable. She should be filled with self-loathing. She should feel seedy and slutty and sinful, but actually what she felt right now was . . . cheerful. Really cheerful. Almost absurdly cheerful, in fact. She thought of Will and Felicity and their sad, earnest faces just before she threw cold coffee at them. She recalled that Felicity had been wearing a new white silk blouse. That coffee stain would never come out.
Her eyes adjusted, but Connor was still just a shadowy silhouette lying next to her. She could feel the warmth of his body all along her right side. He was bigger, stronger and in much better shape than Will. She thought of Will’s short, stocky, hairy body – so familiar and dear, the body of a family member, although always sexy to her. She had thought Will was the last bullet point in her sexual history. She had thought she wouldn’t sleep with anyone else for the rest of her life. She remembered the morning after she and Will had got engaged, when that thought had first occurred to her. The glorious sense of relief. No more new, unfamiliar bodies. No more awkward conversations about contraception. Just Will. He was all she needed, all she wanted.
And now here she was lying in an ex-boyfriend’s hallway.
‘Life sure can surprise you,’ her grandmother used to say, mostly about quite unsurprising developments such as a bad cold, the price of bananas and so on.
‘Why did we break up?’ she asked Connor.
‘You and Felicity decided to move to Melbourne,’ said Connor. ‘And you never asked if I wanted to come too. So I thought, Right. Looks like I just got dumped.’
Tess winced. ‘Was I horrible? It sounds like I was horrible.’
‘You broke my heart,’ said Connor pitifully.
‘Really?’
‘Possibly,’ said Connor. ‘Either you did, or this other girl I dated for a while around the same time called Teresa. I always get the two of you mixed up.’
Tess pushed her elbow into his side.
‘You were a good memory,’ said Connor in a more serious voice. ‘I was happy to see you again the other day.’
‘Me too,’ said Tess. ‘I was happy to see you.’
‘Liar. You looked horrified.’
‘I was surprised.’ She changed the subject. ‘Do you still have a waterbed?’
‘Sadly, the waterbed didn’t make it into the new millennium,’ said Connor. ‘I think it made Teresa seasick.’
‘Stop talking about Teresa,’ said Tess.
‘All right. Do you want to move somewhere more comfortable?’
‘I’m okay.’
They lay in companionable silence for a few moments, and then Tess said, ‘Um. What are you doing?’
‘Just seeing if I still know my way around the place.’
‘That’s a bit, I don’t know, rude? Sexist? Oh. Oh, well.’
‘Do you like that, Teresa? Wait, what was your name again?’
‘Stop talking please.’