Semi-Sweet Page 22

  They hadn’t met since Nora had begun working for Patrick, well over a month ago now. The occasional text had been exchanged, each mentioning vaguely a future lunch date, but until the previous evening nothing had been arranged. And then, out of the blue, a text from Leah: LUNCH 2MORO? MY TREAT. And here they were.

  “The job is fine,” Nora said. She hadn’t missed Leah’s look when she’d walked in, the envious glance her lilac wool top, silver-gray pencil skirt, and black stilettos had earned. “Nothing I can’t handle.”

  She wouldn’t mention Patrick directly. She was still feeling her way toward the reason for today’s lunch. “The people are nice. A few of us went out for drinks the other night.”

  She’d spent the first twenty minutes trying to escape from Evan in Accounts, who clearly fancied his chances. In the end she’d gone to the toilet and joined another group when she got back, where the talk was of babies and teething and weaning. She’d excused herself after ten minutes, pleading stomach cramps. Back at the flat, she’d watched an episode of Law & Order she’d seen six months ago in the States.

  “It’s interesting, working for a newspaper. I haven’t done it before.”

  “And you’ll stay in Clongarvin?” The waiter appeared, and Leah regarded her plain pasta without appetite.

  “For the moment,” Nora replied, plucking a cube of feta from her Greek salad as it was placed before her. “I’ll have another of these,” she told the waiter, holding up her martini glass. “I’ll do the drinks bill,” she added to Leah, “since you’re not having any.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Leah said. “You can pay next time. We mustn’t let it go so long before we do it again.”

  “Absolutely not,” Nora replied.

  Leah envied her, that much was obvious. She probably wasn’t entirely happy still about Patrick’s being in close proximity with Nora, whose looks and figure were so much more attractive than her own right now. But as far as Nora could see, Leah’s only motive for inviting her out to lunch today was that she needed someone to talk to—or possibly, Leah being Leah, she might have decided that by keeping Nora close it would make it more difficult for anything to happen between her and Patrick.

  She had no idea, none at all, that she was too late. Shame, really.

  Why don’t you lock the door? he’d said as soon as she’d walked in.

  Why don’t I leave it open? Nora had replied.

  Not surprised, not in the least, by his suggestion. It was what she’d known would happen, very soon after she’d started to work for him. Sooner even, his eyes lingering on her crossed thighs, on the V of her top, at the interview. His hand holding hers a second too long as he’d thanked her for coming, as he’d promised to be in touch. She’d thought, You’re up for it. They were always so obvious.

  Leave it open, then, he’d said. Watching her as she’d crossed the room that smelled of the drinks he’d had at his three-hour lunch. Better sober up before he went home to Leah. Nora hadn’t minded that he was fairly well on—it usually added to the fun. Got rid of the inhibitions.

  Come in for a minute, he’d said as he’d passed her desk on his way back. She’d smelled the alcohol, and she’d known.

  She’d made her way unhurriedly around the desk to where he was slouched in his big leather chair. She’d swiveled the chair around to face her.

  Are you ready for this? she’d asked softly.

  Take your panties off, he’d replied thickly.

  She’d stood in front of him and opened the buttons of her blouse one by one, taking her time. She’d reached behind and unhooked her bra and lifted the cups off her breasts, all the time looking at his face. She’d hiked up her skirt and slid her underpants slowly over her hips, letting them drop to the floor and stepping out of them.

  Now me, he’d said, and she’d undone the button of his trousers and slid down the zip and reached inside before straddling him in her lace-topped stockings, in her black stilettos, in her bunched-up skirt and open blouse.

  No need to talk, both of them knowing the rules. His mouth had found her nipple, she’d guided him into her with his office door unlocked, anyone liable to knock and walk in without waiting for a response, as she’d seen people do plenty of times, as she did herself all the time. His huge hands on her bare buttocks, her hands in his hair, watching people passing in the street below.

  Moving against each other, the leather chair creaking in rhythm, anyone liable to walk in, her excitement mounting as he gripped her buttocks, as she bent her head and found his mouth and took his tongue between her teeth, as he moaned, as she lifted her head again, drawing breath sharply, and arched against him—

  Yes, she thought regretfully, much too late for Leah to be taking me out to lunch, to be buying me a Greek salad and two martinis.

  Fiona Bradshaw took particular care with her preparations. She stroked on liquid eyeliner, resting her elbow on the dressing table to keep her hand steady. She blended cream shadow carefully and dotted concealer under her eyes. She brushed on powder and blotted two coats of lipstick with a tissue.

  She dressed in linen, a suit of duck-egg blue that Leah said brought out the color of her eyes. She added pearls at her throat and in her ears. She replaced her everyday gold watch with the white-gold one that had a diamond in place of the number twelve. She slipped her feet into new dove-gray suede shoes, sprayed scent at her wrists, neck, and cleavage.

  Imagine her disappointment then, when she walked into Frances Mitchell’s sitting room looking as good as she could possibly look and saw Frances’s daughter Cathy sitting with Geraldine Robinson’s usual partner.

  A wasted effort. Geraldine was too embarrassed, probably, to face her after the showdown two weeks before. No bridge game last week because of Easter, plenty of time for Fiona to plan her outfit—and all for nothing.

  No mention was made, during the game or over the coffee and cakes afterward, of Leah’s pregnancy. Nobody asked Fiona how her daughter was doing; nobody wanted to know what baby names were being considered. Nobody at all, thanks to Geraldine Robinson, seemed the slightest bit interested in how Fiona felt about becoming a grandmother for the first time.

  She helped herself to a sliver of Frances’s chocolate rum cake, smiling at Aoife’s account of her niece’s honeymoon in Mauritius, admiring the bracelet Maureen’s husband had given her for her birthday. Accepting graciously the compliments on her own appearance. Showing no sign at all of her resentment, giving no indication that she’d even noticed their lack of curiosity.

  Keeping up appearances. Which, of course, was what it was all about.

  “She hasn’t gone back to work yet,” Una said. “Dave is doing a few bits and pieces, but Claire’s still not ready. And with Jason’s memorial Mass coming up next week, that’ll bring her right back down again.”

  Hannah slipped off her plastic gloves. Hard to believe it was time for the memorial Mass, that a month had gone by since the little boy’s death. “They’re keeping Claire’s job open?”

  “For the moment, yeah, but for how long? You couldn’t blame them if they gave it away—they can’t wait forever.”

  Hannah took her phone from the shelf behind the counter and slotted it into its pocket in her bag. “Maybe when the memorial Mass is behind her…”

  “Maybe.” Una watched as Hannah slung the bag onto her shoulder. “So where are you off to this morning?”

  “I’m meeting someone for coffee,” Hannah said—feeling, to her great surprise, a rising warmth in her face. Making a great show of rummaging in her bag as she made for the door. “See you at twelve.”

  The café was dotted with people. John sat at a table by the far wall reading the Irish Times, a blue mug in front of him.

  “Hello,” she said. Her stomach was fluttering ridiculously. “I hope I’m not late.”

  For her first date with Patrick, they’d had an early supper and gone to the theater to see The Faith Healer. He’d taken her hand and tucked it around his arm as they reclaimed
their seats after the interval, and the tips of her fingers had tingled with pins and needles for the last twenty minutes. She’d rested her calf against his and hoped to God her breath wouldn’t be stale by the end of the night. The following morning, kneading dough in Finnegan’s Bakery, she couldn’t remember how the play had ended, but the memory of his good-night kiss, the lick of desire it had caused in her, had been vivid.

  She ordered cappuccino, and John got a top-up for his tea. He wore a faded blue sweatshirt that looked very soft. His nails were bitten, his fingers slender for a man. Musician’s fingers, Hannah thought, picturing him sitting with the other band members, playing his saxophone.

  He told her he’d come to Ireland after walking away from his marriage. He spoke of his wife without bitterness, mentioned a divorce pending. He told her about a daughter studying law at Edinburgh University.

  He asked her about the cupcake shop, how it had started, if she’d always been interested in baking. He moved his hands as he talked. He smiled a lot. His teeth were even and cream-colored.

  Hannah spoke briefly of Patrick but didn’t explain how they’d broken up, made no mention of Leah. She talked about Adam’s moving in with her to help with the bills after Patrick had left, about his twin sister, Nora, home from America after her second divorce. “She works for the local paper now.”

  She told him about Kirby the black Labrador who shed hairs everywhere. She talked about the awful brown tweed armchair Adam had brought home from the charity shop to protect Hannah’s red couch from the black hairs. “It’s like Frasier’s dad’s chair, only a whole lot tackier.”

  She spoke of her dentist father and her mother who worked in Glass Slipper, one of Clongarvin’s three shoe shops. She drank a second cappuccino. He ordered a black coffee. And by the time she thought to check her watch, her two hours had ended twelve minutes earlier.

  Number 10 Fortfield Avenue wasn’t in the least what Adam had been expecting. Instead of a cozy cottage for one, he found a two-story redbrick semi, attached to its identical opposite number in an area of Clongarvin he knew only slightly, never having had occasion to visit it in the past.

  Fortfield Avenue was one of several similar roads in the neighborhood—Fortfield Park, Fortfield Drive—all lined with redbrick houses, most of them semidetached, all two-story.

  Vivienne’s house looked big for a woman on her own. Adam locked his car and slipped the keys into his pocket, gripping the clarinet case firmly. Here we go, he told himself. Time to find out, once and for all, if there was a man in her life. He walked up the short paved path, noting the dark green six-year-old Corolla parked on the gravel beside it, and pressed the white button on the doorframe.

  A loud, harsh buzz sounded from within, causing a little brown bird perched on a nearby cable to flutter away. When nothing further happened for almost a minute, Adam began to wonder if he had the right house. She had said number ten, hadn’t she? He lifted his hand to press the bell again but lowered it when he heard someone approaching.

  The door was opened, not by a man.

  “Yes?”

  Adam offered his most charming smile. “Good evening,” he said. “I’ve come for a music lesson.”

  “Yes,” the woman repeated. Unmoving. Unsmiling. A pair of what looked like gardening gloves in the hand that hung by her side.

  “With Vivienne,” Adam added. Maybe the house was full of music teachers. Maybe he’d come to the smallest music school in Ireland.

  “You know she only takes children,” the woman said. “Up to twelve. No adults.”

  “Right.” Adam shifted his clarinet. “She did mention that, yes, but after some discussion she agreed to try me out—to give me a few lessons,” he amended hastily.

  “Yes.” Mouth set in a thin, disapproving line. Clearly not impressed with Vivienne’s first grown-up pupil.

  Adam put her somewhere in her late fifties or early sixties, her short, silvering hair pulled off her face with what looked like a child’s hair band. Large, fading freckles were scattered across her face. “You’d better come in then.”

  She stood back not quite far enough, forcing Adam to squeeze past her, holding the clarinet case awkwardly above his head to avoid a collision. The hallway was narrow and dimly lit and smelled of turnip.

  “Wait in there,” the woman ordered, and Adam stepped into a room that contained a green tweed couch covered with clear plastic and two matching armchairs similarly protected. A portable television was perched on a high stool in the corner, to the left of a small fireplace, in front of which dried plants were arranged in a tall glass vase.

  As the woman disappeared, Adam became conscious of piano music coming from somewhere in the house, a complicated piece that meant nothing to him. He wondered again if the house contained more than one music teacher.

  He sat in one of the green tweed armchairs, plastic crackling loudly as it accepted his weight, and let the distant notes wash over him as he checked out his surroundings. The carpet was biscuit-colored with maroon swivels, the walls were papered with embossed cream. A painting of men pulling a low black boat up onto a beach hung over the fireplace. Adam spotted photos in frames on the mantelpiece. He crackled to his feet and walked across to study them.

  There was Vivienne, maybe ten years old, standing solemnly by a five-bar gate, hair twisted into two thick plaits that hung at either side of her bespeckled face. Gray pullover, plaid skirt that stopped above her skinny knees, long white socks, black-laced shoes. A book tucked under one arm. A boy of about the same age was sitting on top of the gate, grinning at the camera in his gray trousers and gray pullover, feet tucked behind the third bar.

  And there Vivienne was again—early twenties, he guessed—mortarboard topping her tied-back hair, sitting formally in blouse and skirt, hands resting in her lap, one holding a rolled-up piece of paper. No glasses this time, her blue-gray eyes looking somewhere to the right of the camera, the smallest hint of a smile on her unpainted lips.

  As he moved to the next photo—a black-and-white family group—he heard footsteps in the hall. He turned just in time to see Vivienne passing the doorway, followed by a boy of about twelve. The boy had a booklet of some sort under his arm. The front door opened and closed, and then Vivienne reappeared, two red spots in her cheeks. “This way,” she said, and promptly vanished again.

  Adam grabbed his clarinet case and followed her into the hall, in time to see her stepping through a doorway farther down. He walked along the dim corridor, wondering what the next hour would bring.

  The second room was smaller than the first and held only a piano with a long bench beneath, a small folding table, a wooden kitchen chair, and a music stand. A wooden clock on the wall showed half past eight precisely.

  “There’s a cat on the piano,” Adam said, standing in the doorway.

  An enormous marmalade cat was sprawled along the top, staring fixedly at Adam with its yellow-green eyes, the tip of its tail flicking languidly.

  Vivienne was riffling through a bundle of papers on the table, her back to the door. “He likes music,” she murmured, without turning around. “But if you’d rather I put him out…”

  “No, no,” Adam answered. “It can…I mean, he can stay. I don’t mind.”

  Cats did nothing for him; he felt no affinity with them whatsoever. Give him a dog any day. On the other hand, he had no serious objections, as long as they kept a reasonable distance from him. He hoped fervently that the current one would respect his boundaries.

  That unblinking stare was unnerving though. Adam shifted his attention to the window next to the piano and saw the woman who’d shown him in. She was kneeling on a green pad beside a flower bed, a pale blue basin on the ground next to her, a supermarket plastic bag covering her hair. The gardening gloves were back on her hands.

  “Is that your mother,” Adam asked, “in the garden, with the bag on her head?”

  “Yes,” Vivienne replied shortly. She wore a dark gray cardigan over a black top and bl
ack trousers. Her hair was pinned up tightly.

  She lived with her mother. No sign yet of anyone else. She wasn’t wearing a ring. Adam’s hopes rose a notch.

  “Sit down,” she said softly, still not looking in his direction. She added something under her breath that he didn’t catch.

  “Pardon?”

  “Eighteen,” Vivienne repeated, selecting another sheet and scanning it. “Euro. For the lesson. Per lesson.”

  “Oh.” Adam hadn’t given a thought to the cost. Eighteen euro seemed reasonable to him; he must be getting the child’s rate. “That’s fine. Where do you want me to sit?”

  His voice sounded too loud. The room smelled faintly of mints, with a musty undertone that he guessed was coming from the cat.

  Vivienne lifted her head then and regarded him, her cheeks deeply flushed now. “Chair,” she said, the faintest suggestion of surprise in her voice. “The bench is for the piano.”

  “Oh…right. Of course. Silly me.”

  He stepped across and took his seat, feeling the cat’s stare following him all the way. Outside the window the older woman got awkwardly to her feet, crossed the lawn with her basin, and upended it into a round green container. On the way back to the flower bed, she glared into the room, and Adam hastily shifted his gaze.

  Vivienne placed a sheet of music on the stand. Adam read “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and imagined what Hannah would say.

  “Jacket,” Vivienne murmured, pulling the long bench out from under the piano and sitting on it. She was about three feet diagonally across from Adam, with the music stand between them. “You need to take your jacket off.”

  “Right.” He placed the clarinet case on the floor, shrugged off his leather jacket, and hung it over the back of the chair. “I’ve a lot to learn,” he added, rolling up his shirtsleeves.

  Vivienne made no response.

  “I heard someone playing the piano,” Adam said, just to put something into the silence, “while I was waiting.” He picked up the clarinet case and opened it.