Hush Hush (14 page)

‘Is it worth it?’

Shane looked askance at his
father.
‘
How should
I know? You’re the one who fancies her.’

‘I mean ‒ is it worth
it, if you’re going to chuck a giant spanner in the works every
opportunity you get? What is it with you, anyway ‒ lack of love
and attention? Are you punishing me for screwing up your childhood by
screwing up my marriage?’

‘I can’t follow that
logic, Dad.’

Conor’s green eyes snapped.
‘
Look. I’ll
make a deal with you. When you get to thirty-five, you can turn round
and say,
“
It’s
all your fault,
”
like most kids do when they hit early middle-age and need a scapegoat
for their ordinary lives and ordinary failures. But lay off me for
the intervening years. Let me get a life, however pathetic and wrong
you think it is. I won’t stop putting you first. Haven’t
I always put you first?’

Shane scuffed a trainer on the
cork tiles.
‘
Yeah,
suppose so. Enough already with the Waltons crap. She was quite
human, as it happens. Compared to ‒ ’ He clamped his lips
shut.

‘Rosie?’ asked Conor
quickly.

‘Compared to what I was
expecting,’ shrugged Shane.
‘
And
she left a
tenner
sticking out of my school bag.’

Conor grunted.
‘
In
your book, I suppose that’s currying favour.’

‘I’ve no objections,’
said Shane smoothly.
‘
Think
of all the stuff you and Mum have bought me off with over the last
two years.’

Conor lowered his gaze to the
papers on the table. He was mortified by a sudden desire to cuff
Shane. Usually, he had to suppress an equally misplaced desire (from
Shane’s viewpoint) to ruffle the gleaming quills of hair as
they bent over homework or poked above the duvet.

With an effort, Conor said
reasonably,
‘
It’ll
be a long time before I treat you to a pair of new trainers or a meal
at the Fire Station again, so think on.’

At such empty threats, Shane’s
heart bled a little for his innocent fool of a father.

‘All I’m saying is, how well do you
know him?’ repeated Val, breathing wine fumes over Angela.
‘
Plausible bloke
with good looks, distant ex-wife and apparently no decomposing bodies
under the floorboards. Ah ‒ but is that the whole story?’

Marla
and Pauline looked expectantly at Angela, who was busy kicking
herself and resolving never again to drink alcohol on a lunch date
with her colleagues. The occasion was Marla’s birthday. They’d
only had a glass each, but even that amount had been enough to loosen
Angela’s tongue and bring out the inner philosophers in her
workmates, with their, ‘ah, grasshopper, you have much learn’
take on the battle of the sexes. ‘Us women never wise up,’
brooded Val. ‘We trust too early, commit too soon, practically
inviting our hearts to get broken.’

‘Jean-Paul Sartre, eat your
heart out,’ muttered Angela.

‘Sorry, Ange?’

‘I was just saying, I’ve
only committed to attending his son’s sports day next Saturday.
He’s pretending it’s the son’s idea to invite me,
which is quite sweet.’

‘This is your red-haired
Irishman, right?’ hiccuped Marla. She kept losing the plot.

‘Of course it’s her
red-haired Irishman,’
declared
Val.
‘
Go on, Ange,
tell us, what’s the sex like?’

‘Val-er-ie!’ shrieked
Marla.

‘We ‒ haven’t ‒
um, I mean, I haven’t.’

‘Blimey, what’s
stopping you?’ snorted Val.

‘Sssh!’ Marla swayed
and waved an abjuring finger at Val.
‘
Don’t
be tasteless, Val. Angela lost her husband within the last eighteen
months.’

Val tried to access her good
taste persona, but failed.

‘All the more reason to get
back in the swing!’ she squawked.
‘I
t’s
like falling off a horse or
…
’

‘Riding a bike. Yes, yes, I
know,’ hissed Angela through pursed lips.
‘
Why
does everyone make sex sound like a skill you learn at an activity
centre, with an accredited course and a certificate at the end?’

‘Well, it is an activity,’
pointed out Val.
‘
Preferably
an outdoors one taught by a hunky instructor. Maybe your bike still
has stabilisers, Ange.’

‘Val-er-ie!’

‘Of course, there’s
the other possible explanation for his sexual inhibitions,’
posited Val, with the inebriate’s crafty insight.
‘
He’s
Irish, you’re more or less Irish. Don’t paddies think
women have ground-up glass between their legs?’

‘Oh, fuck off, Val, he’s
a father,’ said Marla uneasily. But Angela had already thwacked
down her wine glass, ready to do battle.

‘What the hell are you on
about, Val? You’re the one stewing your brains with booze. Look
at me, more or less Irish, and not even half-addled. Isn’t that
bucking the national stereotype?’

‘Eshnick minorities,’
slurred Val.
‘
Bloody
great chips on their shoulders, the whole lot of ’em. You can’t
even tell Irish jokes now, when everyone knowsh the Irish make jokes
about Kerrymen. Whassa difference?’

Angela gritted her teeth, her
heart thumping. She found it tricky defending an identity she felt
ambiguous about at the best of times.
‘
The
difference is, you gormless bint, that you Brits have a collective
responsibility to be nice to the people you treated like dirt in the
name of colonial expansion. Look, there’s a black bloke in the
corner, having a quiet meal. Go over and make monkey noises and see
if he’s into self-parody.’

An embarrassed hush fell around
the table. Angela cringed. Things had got out of hand. Like all the
righteously defensive, she felt as if she’d taken herself too
seriously, mounted a soap-box and roused her audience to nothing more
fruitful than a suspicion that she was a humourless paranoiac.

A siren rose and died in the
street outside the wine bar, sawing through lunchtime traffic and the
silence at the table.
‘
Oops,
they’re coming for you Ange,’ giggled Val.
‘
Someone’s
tipped them off about the Semtex shtashed under your keyboard. In the
interest of community relations, I’d just like to say it wasn’t
me.’

The extent of Val’s
loose-tongued drunkenness finally reminded Marla who was boss.
‘
I
think we’ve had quite enough partying for one lunchtime. If
you’d all care to stagger back to the office, and pretend to
put in an afternoon’s work
…
’

Pauline fell into step beside
Angela on the walk back, Marla and Val stumbling ahead with linked
arms.

Angela grimaced.
‘
I
suppose I shouldn’t have risen to the bait. Us plastics are a
sensitive species.’

‘What’s a plastic?’
asked Pauline, intrigued.

Angela sighed. ‘A plastic
paddy. That’s what the home-grown Irish call the second
generation ‒well, the second generation who apply for Irish
passports and still think about mailing dog-poo to the West Midlands
crime squad, even though we’re all shaking hands across the sea
now, not flicking each other the finger. Thank God for
Riverdance
!
And Terry Wogan.’

For all her dry humour, Angela’s
skin was as thin as rice paper stretched across the surface of a
drum. Drunken outbursts were always a conundrum. Were they a
revelation of the speaker’s true opinion or just a stage on the
way to the other, possibly unrepresentative stages of maudlin
depression and declarations of love for the embarrassed drinking
pals?

Pauline insisted at her side:
‘
I’m still
intrigued. How does your Conor see you?’

Angela considered.
‘
As
me, I hope. He knows I’ve a quixotic attitude to the auld sod,
but that’s my mother’s fault. She’s spent half her
life slagging off the place to the likes of me, and the other half
defending it to the likes of Val. She has a refugee’s
schizophrenia, a foot in both camps without feeling comfortable about
calling either home. When I visited Ireland as a kid on holiday, the
neighbours’ kids pelted me with cow-pats for having an English
accent. Back here, the likes of Val take great pleasure in reminding
me where I come from. Yet if I won a Nobel prize tomorrow, I’d
be fêted as a true Brit. It’s enough to make you dizzy.’

Pauline pondered.
‘
It
must be the same for black kids going to Jamaica on holiday.’

‘They get sunshine to make
up for it.’

‘Look, just forget about
Val,’ frowned Pauline, returning to the insult at hand.
‘
There’s no
real malice in her because there’s no imagination there,
either. For a start, she can’t imagine what it’s like to
lose a husband.’

Angela studied the pavement,
blushing. She longed to say something equally wise and comforting to
Pauline. But she had only ever sensed Pauline’s unhappiness,
never been privy to an expos
é
of its origins. She did know that Pauline had never been married.

‘I haven’t been
dicing with death on any more Tube platforms,’ said Pauline
presently.

Angela took the opening.
‘
Why
were you ‒ you know ‒ so down on men that time, calling
them shits?’

‘I’d just been loved
and left by one, of course.’ She smiled sadly.
‘
Thing
is, Val’s quite right. Women rush in where any half-sober man
would fear to tread. I trusted too soon and put all my eggs in one
basket. I thought he loved my winsome chatter and close attentions.
Turns out he thought I was a clingy old gasbag.’

A small gasp escaped Angela.
‘
Is
that what he called you?’

‘Oh no. Phil was the latest
in a long line of civilised, well-behaved shits. He wrote me a
letter, would you believe? A dear Joan letter. Signed his name with a
curly flourish. I don’t think he was sobbing with grief as he
held the pen.’

‘I’m sorry,’
murmured Angela.

‘The sex was good, I’ll
say that for him.’

Angela sighed inwardly. She was
out of her depth again.

‘At least yours can’t
just be in it for the sex if you haven’t had any yet,’
opined Pauline.

‘I think we’re both
as nervous as each other,’ confided Angela. She hesitated, then
came out with the lot.
‘
You
see, I’ve only had one lover ‒ Robert. Conor has had two.
His ex-wife and a fling he had after she left. His son Shane didn’t
hit it off with the woman, Rosie. We’re a right pair of
greenhorns by the permissive society’s standards, which isn’t
as hunky-dory as it sounds. Neither of us are skilled at making the
first move.’

‘Forgive my cynicism,’
said Pauline cynically.
‘
But
do you believe him? Two women in a lifetime? Eunuchs have put it
about more.’

‘He sounded convincing
enough,’ winced Angela, remembering the previous week’s
mortifying walk round the boating lake in Wilmesbury park.

Conor had wanted to put things
straight after the lunch fiasco. Angela had assumed he meant about
Shane. But putting things straight had also involved a confessional
blabbing. Throwing unshredded chunks of bread at alarmed ducks, Conor
had revealed the bare bones of his love life, summing it up as
inglorious but not too tawdry. Just as Angela had been about to seize
the moment and ask him more about Kate, they’d been buttonholed
by a furious woman who’d accused Conor of trying to stone the
ducks with stale wholemeal.

Angela, scuffing her toes in
gravel, had felt duty-bound to offer a reciprocal account on the walk
back ‒ starting and ending with Robert. Conor hadn’t been
amazed, delighted or dismissive. He’d simply nodded and changed
the subject to how springlike it was for the time of year.

‘What do you think he was
really getting at?’ Angela grumbled.
‘
Trying
to excuse or boast about his lack of forwardness? Preparing me for
gauche fumblings when he does make his big move? Thing is, you’d
never suspect sexual shyness to look at him. He has a tendency to
verbally bulldoze his way out of awkward moments.’

‘Classic defence
mechanism,’ said Pauline crisply.
‘
Anyway,
while I hate to give cheesy love songs any credit, as the song says,
it’s in his kiss. If he was impotent or scared of women or a
serial seducer, that’s where you’d pick up the vibes.’

Angela walked on, considering.
She hadn’t kissed Conor McGinlay since their brief tussle on
the sofa, cut short by Shane. Cushionus interruptus.

Frankly, she’d just made
her relationship with Conor sound like a mutual crush between
sixth-formers ‒ sweaty hand-holding, noses colliding with ears
in the cinema’s back row ‒ while Pauline, habitually
risking all for love, knew the real world of crumpled sheets and
cruel letdowns.

She felt Pauline staring at her,
and looked up to catch her smile.
‘
Funnily
enough, a lot of Val’s ramblings made sense,’ said
Pauline.
‘
Go more
carefully than I’ve ever done. Because, alas, it’s true ‒
how well do you really know him?’

Val cornered Angela in the
ladies’ loo just before knocking-off time.
‘
Listen,’
she croaked, gazing in the mirror to avoid looking at Angela.
‘
I
was out of order with the Semtex thing.’

‘And
the rest,’ said Angela grandly. She was going to milk this on
behalf of every plastic slighted by thoughtless English folk, with
their phoney sense of
‘
fair
play’ that was just an excuse to ignore the bloody partiality
of their imperial past. Some days (days like this), Angela surprised
herself with her dislike of the very Englishness that had shaped her
own character. Maybe she was Irish, all along. Scratch a plastic, and
find the real McCoy.