When we did eventually make love, it was entirely different from anything I had experienced before. It was an early March afternoon in her parents’ house and a wintry sun cast shadows across the tiled kitchen floor as we drank tea from china cups, leaning back, side by side, against the Aga oven. We were talking about our plans for the summer and Laura suggested that we needed to get out of Dublin, ‘to get some privacy’, she said, and looked quickly at me, fiercely, and then looked away again. I knew what she meant, but I teased her – ‘Privacy? For what?’ – and I brushed a strand of her dark hair out of her eyes and kissed her mouth gently. She responded softly at first and then twirled and stood in front of me so that we were nose to nose. ‘They won’t be back until after four,’ she said, and led me by the hand up the back stairs to her bedroom. Once there, we quickly stripped and dived under the covers, both of us shy and tentative, and there we stayed for the next two hours, tenderly touching and tasting, and as I moved inside her I thought, idiotically, that life was good and that all would be well.
Maybe I fooled myself. I thought I loved her and was loved by her and we were real, proper, grown-up people with genuine emotions and feelings for each other, and while in the past it may have given me satisfaction that others were jealous of us, now I simply wished that everyone could have what we had. Laura made me good, and I could never imagine a time when my love for her could be displaced by anybody. I was terribly immature.
If only we hadn’t gone to France that summer of 1973.
Nine years later, I met Alice. She was no Laura, but by then I knew that I never deserved a girl like Laura. Alice was simple, loyal, discreet and kind. Alice was a haven from my nightmares. I have never felt the same passion for Alice that I had for Laura, but until three months ago we made a very good life together. Alice and I complemented each other.
It was no challenge to take Alice from Barney Dwyer. He was clearly one of life’s losers, punching outrageously above his weight by dating Alice. I am still mystified as to what she saw in him. Do I feel bad about usurping him? Not really. All is fair in love and war, isn’t it? Of course not. That is the biggest and most pernicious lie ever. How ridiculous. Nothing is fair in love and life, and I have wasted far too much of my time wishing it were not so.
I imagine Alice’s expectations were low, so it was remarkably easy to overwhelm her, seduce her, marry her. She yielded easily. Barney never stood a chance. I was better than him. He knew it.
Naturally, everyone expected me to have a wife who was more gregarious, more ‘showbiz’, somebody like Laura perhaps, but they do not know me. Nobody knows me. I chose Alice.
5. Barney
We’d been going out together for about ten months and Alice was doing some flora and fauna illustrations for some nature books. They were very nice, very detailed. She took so much care with her work, examining every tiny vein in every leaf under a microscope in her back room. She was very dedicated indeed. Then her publisher gave her a bound rough copy of a children’s book to read and that was it.
I was there the first time she read it to Eugene. There was a bit about a flying chair in it, and because I had started that game with Eugene, he straight away was hooked on it. He wanted her to read it again immediately afterwards. And again. She thought it was wonderful, and it certainly meant a huge amount to her that it appealed to Eugene.
If you ask me, it was just all right. Even now that the books have sold all over the world, I still think they are just all right. The author’s name was on the cover, Vincent Dax. But when we were introduced to him, he told us his real name was Oliver Ryan. I didn’t get that. If it were me, I’d have wanted everyone to know that it was me who’d written them.
I was there the night they met in March 1982; I’ll never forget it. We were at the launch of the nature book that Alice had illustrated. I always hated those nights because we’d have to dress up and I’d be wearing my suit which was a bit tight and a tie which nearly choked me. Oliver was one of those confident types of guys, in a proper posh linen suit, smoking a French cigarette, tanned and good-looking. He looked like a film star with his dark eyes and his suit. I was standing beside Alice when we were introduced, and I swear I don’t think he even saw that I was there. He was looking at her, I mean really looking at her, and she was doing that cute blushing thing she does. So I pretended to cough but I accidentally made a kind of vomit sound instead, and then I got his attention and he turned towards me, so I put my arm around her shoulder, to give him the hint that she was mine and that he shouldn’t be chatting her up. It was a foolish move. I’d never done it before, we weren’t that type of couple, so my hand just dangled embarrassingly over her left breast and she sort of squirmed. She introduced me as her boyfriend, Barney. I was beginning to feel a bit better, but then he said he had a friend who had a dog called Barney and she laughed, a sort of light, tinkly laugh that I hadn’t heard before, and then he laughed. They were laughing together. So I laughed too, or pretended to, but it sounded fake. If the scene had been in a comic book, the speech bubble coming from my head would have said, ‘Guffaw guffaw.’
I took up smoking. It took me a while to get used to it. I tried to get a tan that summer, but the tops of my ears just burned and I looked stupid. Oliver was really good for Alice’s career though. She did the illustrations for his first book, and it seemed like there could be a few sequels. He took us out to dinner a few times, usually with a few other couples, old college friends of his, I suppose. They were very nice, but I didn’t feel that I had much in common with them. For some reason, they seemed a lot younger than me, and at the same time more grown-up, like. They’d be talking about books I hadn’t read and films I hadn’t seen or politics I’d no interest in. Some of them had been away together on the Continent years earlier. Like Cliff Richard in that film, only not in a bus.
At the end of that May, there was talk of another trip abroad to a Greek island. Apart from the fact that I didn’t own a passport, it was out of the question for me. Uncle Harry had had a mild stroke earlier in the year and was leaving a lot of the workload on my shoulders. Not that I minded. He had been very good to me and my mam. But to be honest, travel wasn’t really my cup of tea. I don’t take the sun that well, and I was nervous around foreigners. To be truthful, imaginary flying is as far as it goes for me. I could tell that Alice really wanted to go, but it seemed just as impossible for her. Her mother was a bit frail and would definitely not be in favour of such an escapade, and there was also Eugene to consider. She couldn’t have managed on her own.
It was my idea. I went to Alice’s mother myself and suggested it. I would come by every day before work and help Eugene get washed and dressed and bring him to the remedial centre where he spent his days. Mrs O’Reilly would collect him herself and then I’d come over after dinner and help get him settled, take him on a quick imaginary flight in the chair, read him a story and get him into bed. She wasn’t too pleased by the idea initially, but I eventually managed to persuade her that Alice deserved a break after all her years of minding the mad fella. We broke the news to Alice together. I was very proud of myself. I don’t go out of my way to do a lot of things that aren’t in some way for me, but I was doing this for Alice and, I suppose, so that she knew how much I loved her, without me having to say it. I’m useless at that soppy stuff.
Those three weeks were the longest of my entire life. Eugene was no problem. He whimpered a bit at bedtime because I didn’t read the stories like Alice did, but he really was very good. I missed Alice myself, more than I thought I would. So much so that two days before she was due back, I shut up the garage early and took myself into the Happy Ring House on O’Connell Street and bought a diamond engagement ring. I’d been saving up a long time, without really knowing it myself, and the fella in the shop was very helpful. It wasn’t a massive diamond, just a small flat one on a thin gold band. The fella in the shop said it was discreet. I think that’s probably polite for small.
I was expecting her back on the Saturday night. I was all prepared to go and collect her, but her mother said one of the gang was giving her a lift home from the airport. By Sunday evening she still hadn’t rung. The engagement ring in its velvet box was burning a hole in my pocket. I decided to go round.