Hush Hush (11 page)

When she came to, she was on the
seat gallantly vacated by the plum exhibitor. She could see his denim
legs in front of her, but little else. Her head was wedged firmly
between her own legs. She tried to sit up, but a hand shoved her back
down.
‘
It’s
too soon. Wait a bit longer!’

‘Poor old gel, she’s
still green,’ said plum exhibitor and Angela decided nothing
worse could befall her.

The train was moving and could’ve
been for some time. She jerked her head up in panic. Had she missed
her stop?
‘
Haven’t
reached the next station yet,’ said the woman who’d
shoved her down.
‘
There
was no point pulling the emergency cord when you blacked out cos we
were stuck anyway. You OK now? Claustrophobia, is it?’

‘How wouldn’t it be
on these trains?’ snorted a man nearby.
‘
Those
people who picket veal lorries should take a look at our travelling
conditions.’

‘And no proper explanations
when you’re stuck,’ nodded plum exhibitor.
‘
Never
mind there could be someone in your carriage having a baby or an
epileptic fit.’

Angela understood from this that
she’d constituted an unreasonable burden to her fellow veal
calves. She sat up, stricken with embarrassment and irrational rage
at Conor McGinlay.

She staggered off the Tube at
Oxford Circus, and clung to the pissy tiles of the platform wall
until the surge of humanity had eased off.

As she found the platform for
Victoria, a Tube train was pulling in.

Angela prepared to hop on,
relieved to see that both platform and arriving train were relatively
empty. Her lungs swelled briefly with elation, just as giddy as her
recent panic. She was going to make it! A whole Tube journey by
herself, without hysterics or throwing up!

Then she glanced down the
platform and saw Pauline standing at the far end. Something in
Pauline’s stance sent icicles up Angela’s spine.

Pauline’s toes hugged the
edge of the platform. Her arms were rising slowly, her calves
bunching purposefully through the clingy cotton of a long ethnic
skirt. She was aping the graceful trajectory of a pearl-diver, poised
to take flight with an angelic leap of blind faith. And she was
waiting
‒
waiting
for the onrushing train to come her way.

‘Pauline, no!’ Angela
had thought her cry would emerge as a bat-squeak. Instead, she heard
her desperate roar bounce off the echoing roar of the Tube train.

Pauline looked up in
astonishment. Just for a second, she teetered dangerously, arms
flapping. Oh my God, thought Angela. She is going to fall in front of
the train. And all because I yelled at her.

Pauline stepped back from the
edge. She waited calmly as the Tube doors slid open, then boarded.

Further down the platform, Angela
boarded, heart hammering. She had made a spur-of-the-moment incursion
into Pauline’s life, prompted by instinct. But what of the
consequences? Pauline, who’d probably been daydreaming, would
think she was mad, hate her, make work a misery.

At Victoria, Angela hung back in
the exodus from the station, keeping Pauline within her sights.
Pauline strode ahead, not a chestnut hair out of place beneath her
velvet Alice band.

Angela scampered towards the
sanctuary of Marchbank Publishing. Eyes down, she almost tripped over
Pauline, who’d stopped to look at a display of pipes and
pipe-racks in a shop window.

‘H-hello,’ nodded
Angela, continuing to walk.

Pauline left her vantage point
and fell into step beside her. Her silence drove Angela to gabble.
‘
Sorry about that
‒
shouting at you on the platform.’

‘You thought I was going to
chuck myself under the train,’ said Pauline as a cool statement
of fact.

‘Course not!’

‘I sometimes think about
playing chicken on Tube platforms,’ confessed Pauline dreamily.
‘
I enjoy facing my
fear and inciting other people’s. I like to stand too close to
the edge, and look up to see terror on the Tube driver’s face.
Isn’t that wicked?’

‘Dunno.’ Angela felt
Pauline’s habitual stare and shrank deeper within herself.

‘Was that your boyfriend,
the bloke who came in with the flowers?’ asked Pauline.

‘No. Yes. Sort of. We only
met the other day.’

‘He’s a looker.’

Angela said nothing. Agreeing
would sound big-headed and demurring like false modesty.

‘They’re all shits,’
said Pauline suddenly.
‘
I
can’t stand women who’d rather tolerate a shit than be on
their own.’

Was that a challenge or an
accusation?
‘
Yeah,
well,’ said Angela nervously.
‘
I’m
wary myself. There’s a lot in that old saying, never trust a
man with testicles.’

Pauline laughed. A great snorting
laugh of vented agitation. Beneath its sharp edge lay the faint
belltone of unhappiness. Some man had treated Pauline like a shit.
Recently. Angela toyed with the idea of confiding the Tufnell Park
incident.

But then the revolving doors of
work loomed before them, and Pauline disappeared inside. She didn’t
hold the lift for Angela.

Back at her desk, Val was
waiting.
‘
Angela!
You kept quiet about him. Red-haired, Irish, bringer of flowers and
springer of surprise lunch dates. He’s gorgeous.’

‘Is he?’ Angela
curdled with embarrassment as Marla looked up as well.
‘
I
haven’t known him long. You don’t think he’s a bit
‒
rugged?’

‘If you can’t see
he’s gorgeous, you need bifocals,’ sniffed Val.

Pauline said nothing. Now and
then, throughout the afternoon, Angela felt the heat of Pauline’s
stare on the side of her neck. But this time, it had a different
intensity, a subtler pitch. It was a thoughtful, not a hostile stare.

She walked to the station that
night with a light tread. She had picnicked with a man who was
interesting and interested in her. She had made a Tube journey. And
she had forged an unspoken alliance with Pauline; without trying to,
and without knowing why.
‘
You’re
no longer scared of her,’ she could hear Sadie murmuring.
‘
You’ve
glimpsed her vulnerability. If fear is the beginning of wisdom,
understanding is the beginning of friendship.’ As usual, Sadie
was getting carried away. She read too many self-help books.

‘Tell me again why I have to be here when
she comes,’ demanded Shane.

Conor drew out the grill pan and
sniffed the fish fingers.

‘Try poking them with a
fork,’ advised Shane.
‘
If
it goes through, they’re done.’

‘Right pair of
master-chefs, aren’t we? Anyway, you don’t have to be
here. You happen to live here, and if I invite someone to Saturday
lunch, why shouldn’t you be eating your lunch here at the same
time?’

‘Because it’s not
someone, it’s a woman. And most blokes in your size twelves pay
the kid the going rate to sod off for the afternoon.’

‘Nice try, but that’s
not me.’ Conor rammed the pan back under the grill.
‘
And
will you kindly moderate the
“
sod
offs
”
and
“
friggin’
hells
”
when Angela
is here?’

‘Friggin’ hell! What
am I, Little Lord Fauntleroy?’

‘You will be if you don’t
behave. I’ll make you wear velvet pantaloons, talk with a lisp
and answer to the name of Crispin for the afternoon.’

Shane gurgled with adolescent
laughter. He was exceedingly fond of Conor’s empty,
unenforceable threats.
‘B
ut
seriously, Dad, won’t you scare this woman off if you introduce
the offspring, like, too soon? Or are you letting her see the worst
from day one, so she can’t accuse you of springing a nasty
surprise six months down the line?’

‘I’ve told you,
Shane. If I invite a ‒ woman to lunch, I want to behave
naturally. That means, neither hiding you under the floorboards nor
parading you as the only begotten, OK? It’s no big deal.’

He turned away to fuss with the
dinner plates, so their eyes wouldn’t meet.

Shane was left to snort in silent
contempt. No big deal! This was a blatant attempt to reverse the
Rosie fiasco.

Shane still had vividly
unpleasant memories of Rosie. Conor had kept her under wraps until it
was too late for civilised introductions, allegedly out of deference
to Shane’s allegiance to Kate.

So, instead of being forewarned
and forearmed, Shane had stumbled upon Rosie in the bathroom one
morning. God, what a sight! Brassy red hair in shoddy imitation of
his mum’s
au naturel
tresses. Big bosoms slung inside
Conor’s dressing gown, fat arms and legs. Dad was slumming it
and then some! She’d been a cheapie, pay-by-the-hour lookalike
of Kate Stanton McGinlay. Their eyes had met in the bathroom mirror
with mutual antipathy.

Rosie had played a stormer in the
following weeks though, pretending to be an earth-mother in front of
Conor, ruffling Shane’s hair, squeezing his kneecaps, buying
him presents and looking downcast and wounded when she didn’t
get a kissy-huggy response.

Shane was conducting a phoney war
‒ and losing ‒ until the day he caught Rosie in the act.

He came upon her one morning,
while Conor was downstairs making breakfast, rifling through the
wardrobe in his parents’ master bedroom ‒ still occupied
by his father, but never by his father and Rosie. When she stayed the
night, they did the business (as far as Shane could tell) in the
motel-like anonymity of the spare room.

Rosie had already appropriated a
small pile of Kate’s things on the dressing table ‒ two
negligées, an unopened three-pack of white M&S pants, a
Cellophane-wrapped box of Chanel No 5.

Rosie was busy stuffing the pants
into her handbag when she turned and caught Shane smiling at her.
‘
I
won’t tell if you sod off for good,’ was the deal he
offered.

She’d shoved the stolen
goodies back onto the wardrobe shelf.
‘
Get
stuffed, small-fry! Who’s going to believe you, anyway?’

‘I am,’ said Conor,
surprising them both. He’d come looking for them to announce
breakfast. He stood behind Shane with folded arms, thunder darkening
his face.

Rosie recovered.
‘
Suits
me,’ she’d snorted, pointing a melodramatic finger at
Shane.
‘
There’s
no future in a relationship with a man who has to drag a little shit
like you around wherever he goes.’

Shane had fought the urge to
frisk her on the way out, in case the family silver (two crested
teaspoons, to be precise) nestled in her undergarments. A week later,
there was still no sign of her, but Shane had needed to make sure and
feel safe.

‘Rosie gone for good, Dad?’
he felt driven to ask unsubtly one evening.

Conor had shrugged laconically.
‘
As far as I’m
concerned. Sorry to put you through that, son. There must’ve
been something off-beam about her all along.’

It had been on the tip of Shane’s
vinegar-soaked tongue to replace
‘
off-beam’
with
‘
crazier than a
shit-house rat’, the meaning of which still eluded him but the
tone of which sounded just right. But something in Conor’s
demeanour had stopped him. The sunken chin, the TV remote control
dangling limply from one hand. He might take it personally.

‘Did you ‒ you know ‒
pick her cos she looked like Mum?’

Conor’s chin tightened as
it sat on his chest.
‘
I
never noticed a likeness.’

‘What about the red hair?’

Conor jumped up suddenly.
‘
I’m
going to get a beer. Thousands of women have red hair, including your
Auntie Grainne. That doesn’t mean I grew up fancying my sister,
and latched onto Mum cos she looked like Auntie Grainne.’

‘Thought never crossed my
mind.’

‘Good. And no, you can’t
have a beer with me.’

Ever since, Shane had lived in
mortal dread of Rosie mark two hoving into view. Because, when it
came to women, it had to be said, Conor specialised in women with
problems.

Even Shane’s protective
love of his mother was tempered with this unpalatable truth. Shane
adored Kate but he was often confused by her behaviour and sometimes
downright scared of her outbursts, though he never let on. The last
time he’d been in New York, Kate had tried to tuck him in one
night, then burst into tears and smashed a couple of ornaments when
he pointed out (very gently) that he was way past that stage. He
supposed the drinking didn’t help, though it wasn’t her
fault she’d had a nervous breakdown before she left Loxton. It
wasn’t Conor’s fault, either. It was, according to Granny
Margaret in Dublin, One of Those Things.

And now, this Angela one coming
to lunch. As far as Shane could see, the old man wasn’t up to
it. Even Kate had taken the bloke for a ride, dumping the kid on him
and doing a flit.

Shane had only recently decided
that the old man’s quest for female companionship must have
something to do with his alleged good looks. These had first been
alleged at the school gates by a couple of giggling girls when Conor
had collected Shane after football one night. Secretly flattered on
the old man’s behalf, Shane had taken to comparing their
features in shop windows and car doors when they were out together.
The results were not encouraging.

Conor doled out burnt fish
fingers, spuds and over-steamed peas.

‘You should let me cook,
Dad. I came top in cookery last year. This is a pretty sad effort.’

‘But you’ve got
other, more cerebral homework,’ fretted Conor, shoving the
grill pan in an overflowing sink.
‘
I’ll
do pasta with tuna tomorrow. I can’t burn that.’