“He said they were going to that really plus restaurant, Sans Lorenzo’s,” she added. “Lucky old Michael,” remarked Fiona. They’re always A.W.O.L. for the messy bits of child-rearing, aren’t they? Pat practically vanished when Nicole had that awful gastroenteritis a few years ago, in case he might be called upon to do something involving nappies.”
“I know,” Aisling muttered, her mind on Michael’s brusque phone call.
“I just wish he’d sounded a bit more sympathetic, though. Here I am stuck at home with the kids sick and he’s off having a whale of a time. He couldn’t talk to me for more than two minutes on the phone.” She broke off abruptly, suddenly feeling that she was being childish.
“You poor old thing,” Fiona answered, in the soft tone she reserved for her adored six-year-old daughter, Nicole. “I’m going to pop down to the video shop and get you a nice, slushy, romantic film so you can sit in comfortable misery, all right? And when you’re talking to Michael later, tell him you expect a bit of pampering and a huge bottle of perfume from the duty-free to cheer you up.”
“Well, I don’t think he’ll be ringing because he said I should go to bed early and that he mightn’t be in ‘til late,” Aisling answered.
“Leave a message for him, Ash. Most of those business hotels have an answering machine for each room. You can tell him you’re miserable, make him feel guilty, he’ll ring you back.”
“I don’t know where he’s staying,” Aisling realised.
“I forgot to ask.” Immediately she regretted saying it. She didn’t want Fiona to know that Michael could go away without telling her where he was staying. It made it sound as if she and Michael didn’t talk. And of course they did.
“Never mind,” Fiona said a little too briskly.
“He’ll probably be in so late that he’d just wake you up if he rang. I’ll get that video for you. I won’t be long.”
An hour later, Aisling was watching Sleepless in Seattle.
Flossie sat Buddha-like on her lap and a hot whiskey, courtesy of Pat’s twelve-year-old Scotch, was in her hand. She didn’t sleep much that night, lonely in the big double bed.
She spent a feverish night, tossing and turning, dreaming of mad surgeons racing after her waving syringes the size of hockey sticks. She woke up with the feeling of unease her nightmares always brought. She lay exhausted in bed watching the red digits on the bedside clock-radio tick inexorably towards seven. Why hadn’t Michael phoned her from London?
But he didn’t phone and, when he returned home that evening, he was so moody and quiet that she simply assumed some calamity had befallen the supplement.
“Everything’s fine,” he answered testily when she dared to ask.
“I’m just tired after a day of meetings and a long business dinner.”
The effortless way he had lied hit her now like a punch in the stomach. No stuttering or stumbling. He’d lied with the calm of an accomplished liar. He hadn’t even told her what hotel he was staying in and she’d never even thought to ask.
Of course, if she had asked, he would, no doubt, have pointed!
out that she shouldn’t bother trying to ring him because he was out at a business dinner.
Some dinner, she thought, dropping the credit card statement and scanning the next one. Who had he snuggled up with in Jury’s when she was holding their ten-year-old twins’ heads over the downstairs toilet? A few entries further down she came across a bill from Interflora which was for enough flowers to fill a stadium if the price was anything to go by.
Then it hit her. Fiona knew. She had to. Why else would she have asked where Michael was staying that night? Why would she have tried to gloss over the whole incident so quickly?
And why else would she have started that strange conversation about a couple of friends who were splitting up, even though Aisling had never met them? It had been the previous week when they had been grocery shopping together after lunch in the Merrion Inn.
They were wheeling their shopping trolleys past the frozen food department when Fiona started talking about the latest husband she knew who was straying from the marital path.
“I can always tell pronounced Fiona.
“That man never did a day’s exercise in his life and suddenly he was jogging around the track in UCD three times a week. What does that tell you,
She didn’t wait for an answer.
“And the clothes. God, you should have seen him at that party in the Ryans’ place last Christmas. He was wearing jeans at a cocktail party, can you believe it? I asked him had he joined Bon Jovi, but he wasn’t at all amused.”
Fiona had paused long enough to fling a brace of Lean Cuisine’s into her trolley before continuing.
“Wives never notice, you see. All that extra grooming, workouts and new bikini underpants go totally unnoticed at home and, before you can say “affair”, that’s another marriage down the tubes.”
She had given Aisling a long, meaningful look as she spoke, a can’t-you-read-between-the-lines look, Aisling realised
Tat would never dream of playing away Fiona said once in an unguarded moment.
“He knows which side his bread is buttered she added. Fiona knew her husband would never stray in case he risked his partnership in her father’s lucrative law firm.
As she smoothed out another statement and searched for yet more proof of her husband’s lies, Aisling numbly realised that Michael had always buttered his own bread.
Her father had worked for an accountancy firm for twenty years and retired with just enough money to keep himself and her mother. Even if he had been able to help her husband in his meteoric rise to the top, Michael would never have accepted that help. He was a brilliant young journalist with his eyes firmly set on the top of the ladder and he had never needed family links to give him an entree into the corridors of power.
Now, at the age of forty, he was deputy editor of one of the most
successful Sunday newspapers in the country and, if his star continued to rise, he could soon be editor of one of the paper’s sister titles. I But she might not be the woman by his side when he did it!
Who would? She dropped the last of Michael’s statements onto the floor and rose to her feet slowly. She picked up the telephone by his side of the bed, not really seeing the empty orange juice glass he’d brought upstairs that morning and left for her to clear away. Under normal circumstances, she would have made the bed by this time and would probably be busy hoovering out the twins’ room, tidying the books, comics and toys they carelessly abandoned on the floor.
Right now she didn’t care if the whole house fell apart. She simply had to know what was happening, who Michael was seeing. And, maybe,
find out that it was all some horrible mistake.