Better Together (50 page)

‘Holy shit!’ He touched it with his fingers and wiped away blood. ‘Get hold of yourself, you crazy bitch!’

‘How dare you call me names. You – you who’re treating me like a whore!’

She was yelling now, and he looked around anxiously, as though someone might hear.

‘Please, Elva.’

‘Don’t please Elva me,’ she cried. ‘It’s please Sean, isn’t it? Always please Sean. You come to me when you want and you leave me when you want and you don’t care. You never cared. You didn’t care the first time you dumped me and if I’d died you still wouldn’t have cared.’

He said nothing.

‘I didn’t eat for weeks and I threw myself into the Bawnee and did you ask about me? No you bloody didn’t.’

‘Elva, for God’s sake . . .’

‘You waited, didn’t you? Until I was married. And then you came after me again.’

He was getting seriously worried now. He had never seen her so hysterical.

‘Well you’ll get your comeuppance when Paudie comes home. Yes you will. Because he knows everything. But not yet the fact that his precious, darling youngest daughter is yours. When he finds out, that’ll be the end of your picture-perfect marriage with your cow-eyed stupid wife.’

‘That’s not true,’ he said. ‘You’re upset, I can see that. But you don’t want to do this.’

‘You don’t know what I want to do.’

‘Ah, Elva. You’ll be better off without me.’

‘But will you be better off without me?’ she asked. ‘Will you?’

‘Yes,’ he said as she sank to her knees and started to cry. ‘Yes, I will.’

He waited for a moment but she didn’t look up. So he left the house, jumped into the car and drove away.

He’d worried, at least fleetingly when he first heard the news, that she’d told Paudie about Cushla and that he’d killed her in a rage. He knew that he was being melodramatic and overemotional about it, but these things happened no matter how much you thought they never happened to people you knew. So he wondered and worried and fretted, too, that somehow he’d be dragged into it all. Then the stories had started to leak out. That perhaps she’d been drinking. That she may have leaned out of the window and lost her footing. That it was all a terrible accident.

He was still concerned that the police would want to
interview him. If they found out he’d been at the house and was probably the last person to see her alive, he’d be a suspect straight away. Sean liked watching detective series on TV. He knew how it worked. If they learned about the affair and his desire to end it, the police could decide he had a motive for killing her, and God only knew what would happen next. Just because you were innocent didn’t mean mistakes couldn’t be made. Or that your life couldn’t be destroyed.

His relief when he heard that she’d been seen in Ardbawn early in the afternoon, and that subsequently she’d dropped the children off at a birthday party, was beyond words. Whatever had happened, however it had happened, it had been nothing to do with him.

Then the note arrived in the post, along with the paintings and the ring.

It wasn’t addressed to him. Just to the guesthouse. And Nina opened it.

‘. . . That’s how I found out. After that, he told me everything.’

Nina handed the note to Joe as she finished telling the story. The two of them had sat silently as she spoke, not interrupting her, allowing her words to flow.

‘So what did you do then?’ asked Sheridan while he read it.

‘The way Sean tells it, Elva practically stalked him. I could believe that, you know, because she was a very intense sort of woman.’

Joe’s body tensed.

‘She was lovely, Joe, I know she was, but she was also . . . difficult. Sean said that he’d loved her when they were younger but that her neediness and her intensity scared him off. He always felt guilty about the whole Bawnee River thing and not going to see her afterwards. He thought that maybe if he’d done that, things might have been different. He thought she obsessed about him.’

‘He thought an awful lot of himself,’ Joe said, and his tone was harsh.

‘Yes,’ agreed Nina. ‘He still does.’

‘Poor Elva was clearly very disturbed,’ said Sheridan, who immediately wished she’d kept her mouth shut because she saw the dart of pain in Joe’s eyes.

‘You’re blaming her,’ said Joe. ‘Both of you. For the fact that she had an affair. For the fact that he kept coming back. And my sister . . . Cushla
is
my full sister. I know she is.’

‘I think she is too,’ said Nina, although the truth was she’d never been certain. Any time she saw Cushla O’Malley in Ardbawn she searched her features for similarities to Sean. She’d never found any. But nor had she found any real likeness to Paudie. Cushla was the image of Elva.

‘I’m not blaming your mother,’ said Sheridan. ‘I’m just trying to put things into perspective.’

‘
You
clearly blame her,’ Joe told Nina. ‘Otherwise why would you have forgiven your cheating, philandering husband so damn quickly?’

Nina winced. When she’d been telling the story of Sean and Elva she’d been thinking about that herself. Had forgiving him been the right thing to do? Or had it, in the end, been a long-term mistake?

‘There was a second letter,’ she said awkwardly. ‘I don’t have it,’ she added as Joe held out his hand. ‘I . . . It was . . . long and rambling and incoherent. She said that she loved Sean. That she hated Paudie. And then she said that she loved Paudie and hated Sean. She said she needed to be somewhere else for a while. She needed people to look after her . . .’ Her words faltered as she saw the expression on Joe’s face. ‘She was clearly very distressed,’ said Nina. ‘I’m so sorry, Joe. I don’t think she meant to kill herself, but I do think that somehow she made a terrible mistake.’

Joe was remembering the day she died, the day of the party, which he’d said he wouldn’t bother going to. She’d been edgy and distracted and he hadn’t wanted to leave her alone. But she’d insisted.

‘I need time for myself,’ she’d told him. ‘I have things to do.’

Afterwards, he’d been devastated to think that one of those things had been to fall out of a bedroom window.

‘If she wrote a suicide note, why didn’t you give it to the police?’ he asked Nina as he came back to the present. ‘And why didn’t you give the first one to the police too?’

‘I was in a complete state,’ said Nina. ‘The first note was sort of inconclusive. It could’ve meant anything – that she was running away, or . . .’ She broke off as Joe looked sceptically at her. ‘The second one came a week later. I don’t know why, because it was postmarked the same day as the first. When I read it, I felt . . . I think I wanted to protect everyone. For it all to be a mistake. For her and Sean never to have happened. Because he made her unhappy, you see. I didn’t want to think that he’d made her so unhappy she’d take her own life. If I produced either note there would have been even more questions and gossip, and I didn’t think any of us deserved it.’

‘Sean did,’ said Joe grimly.

‘Sean was beyond shocked,’ Nina told him. ‘He really was. He blamed himself. He knew she was irrational and he said he should have stayed with her until someone came home, no matter what trouble it caused. But then I reminded him that she’d brought you all to the birthday party and had been seen in the town after that, and I said that whatever had happened it couldn’t have been to do with him. I wanted
that to be the case. So I just put everything away and eventually it all died down and things went back to normal and I thought I’d done the right thing.’

‘But things didn’t go back to normal for us,’ said Joe. ‘Because nothing can fill the gap when you lose someone. Nothing.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Nina.

‘Where’s the second note now?’ asked Sheridan, who’d listened to Nina’s story with an increasing sense of wonder about what went on beneath the surface of people’s lives.

‘I didn’t know what to do with it,’ said Nina. ‘I kept it for two years. And then I sent it to Paudie.’

Joe looked at her in astonishment. ‘You sent it to my father?’

‘I felt he should know,’ said Nina.

A few days after she’d sent the letter to Paudie O’Malley (she hadn’t told Sean what she was doing; as far as he knew, she’d destroyed everything that Elva had sent), the businessman called around to the guesthouse. Nina nearly collapsed when she saw him outside and her hands trembled as she opened the door.

‘I got what you sent me,’ Paudie told her after she’d invited him into the kitchen.

‘I thought you should have it,’ she said. ‘I realise I might have made a mistake, but I kept thinking that perhaps you blamed yourself somehow for what happened.’

‘It
was
an accident,’ said Paudie. ‘She might have been distraught, but she wouldn’t have deliberately . . . She loved the children too much.’

‘Perhaps she thought that if she fell from the balcony she’d injure herself and you’d love her again.’

‘I always loved her,’ said Paudie fiercely. ‘Always. Even though I knew . . .’

Nina released her breath slowly. If Paudie had known about Elva’s affair, why hadn’t he done anything about it?

‘I thought it would blow over,’ he said as though she’d spoken out loud. ‘I knew she always had a thing for Sean Fallon. It was a bit of a joke between us. I never thought it would come to this.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Nina.

‘It’s not your fault.’ Paudie closed his eyes and then seemed to gather himself together. ‘What’s done is done. I want to make a life for me and for my children. I’ve burned the letter. I don’t want to talk about this ever again.’

‘That’s OK,’ said Nina, who had been going to give him the paintings and the ring but now decided it might be better not to. ‘I want to put it behind me too.’

‘So why didn’t you get rid of them?’ asked Sheridan.

‘I was going to. But it didn’t seem right somehow. I tucked them away again in the same box as I kept all our family stuff. I was the only one who ever went near it. Hidden in plain view, I thought. Because if they were somewhere else, I was afraid I’d keep looking at them. Afraid what it would do to me and Sean.’

‘And so you forgave him and you just got on with your lives,’ said Joe.

‘Yes,’ said Nina. ‘We did.’

Nina didn’t truly know why she’d decided to forgive him. She only knew that at the time she wanted it all to be over and done with, to forget it had ever happened, and for
everything to get back to the way it was before. Except this time without Elva O’Malley. Besides, her husband was utterly penitent. She’d seen a totally different side to him then. A side where he didn’t know what was best, where he wasn’t the one totally in control, where he was asking her advice and grateful to her for being there. It was the first time in her life that she’d felt superior to anyone, but she certainly felt superior to Sean back then. She’d felt that her role in the marriage was the important one. She’d felt suddenly and unexpectedly strong. And she had to be, because she had the business and the children to consider.

They’d rebuilt their marriage afterwards. More equally, she always thought. They’d put the past behind them and so, it seemed, had Paudie O’Malley. Neither she nor Sean had ever spoken more than a couple of words to him since.

Sheridan was totally wrapped up in the story, but she was also busy examining Nina’s narrative and the effect it was having on Joe, who was now turning his mother’s ring over and over in his hands. She was acutely aware that the reason he was hearing all this now was because of her. Because she’d panicked and taken Elva’s paintings and ring from Nina’s house.

‘I guess it was lucky you’re the person you are,’ she said to Nina slowly. ‘Because if you’d given Elva’s letters to the police . . .’

‘I wouldn’t have done that.’

‘I know. But if that second one in particular had become public knowledge—’

‘What?’ interrupted Joe. ‘What are you trying to say?’

‘Nothing.’ Sheridan wished she hadn’t tried to make Nina
feel better by saying it was a good thing she hadn’t given the letters to the police. But as Joe continued to stare at her she said, ‘If the insurance company had seen that letter, maybe they wouldn’t have—’

‘How dare you!’ Joe was suddenly furiously angry. ‘How dare you suggest that my father benefited from information being withheld about my mother’s death.’

‘I didn’t mean . . .’ Sheridan realised how callous she must have sounded. ‘It was just . . .’

‘My father loved my mother and he was devastated by her death and he would’ve given any money to have her back!’ cried Joe. ‘I know that! And for you to think any differently is just plain wrong.’

‘I’m not saying he didn’t love her,’ said Sheridan helplessly. ‘I’m saying—’

‘I know what you’re saying and I can’t believe it.’ His voice was hard and uncompromising.

‘Joe, please.’

‘Stop. Stop now. I don’t want to hear anything you have to say. How do I know Nina isn’t right?’ He looked at Sheridan angrily. ‘How do I know that this isn’t all some insane ploy by you to investigate my family? To try to destroy us because you still blame my father for you losing your job? How do I know you didn’t plan every single detail?’

‘Joe, for heaven’s sake, how could I possibly have known Nina had all this stuff?’ asked Sheridan. ‘And even if I wanted some kind of revenge on your dad – and I admit that I harboured some dark thoughts about him after I was made redundant – I would never have come up with this.’

But she couldn’t help thinking that it was knowledge that Alo Brady would absolutely kill for.

‘I’m not staying here any longer.’ Joe stood up abruptly. He thrust the ring into the pocket of his jeans and held on to the paintings. ‘Give me the note, Nina,’ he said.

She handed it to him.

‘I have to go home, talk to my father.’

‘I’m sorry, Joe,’ said Nina.

‘It’s a bit late for that,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how to feel about all this. About knowing it was kept from me and about knowing that somehow it’s all come to light. And that one of the people who’s brought it to light is a journalist who . . .’ He stopped and looked at Sheridan.

‘Why are you thinking the worst of me?’ she asked.