Lessons in Heartbreak (14 page)

That had been two months ago. Since then, no one could have said that Izzie Silver and Joe Hansen were having half an affair – it was one hundred per cent, for sure. They talked every day, met as often as Joe could manage, and Izzie tried very hard to cope with both the insecurity of her own position and the fact that making love to another woman’s husband went completely against her moral code.

Oh, Izzie, you pathetic idiot
, she said aloud. She was staying in a cooling bath in case the man in her life phoned. What was modern, grown-up and independent about that?

If he phones, he phones. She drained her spritzer and then stood up, letting the rose-scented water flow over her body. She’d just wrapped a towel around herself when the apartment phone rang.

‘Hi, it’s me.’

Izzie felt the relief sweep from her head to her toes.

‘Hello,’ she said softly, as if she were the one whispering as she made an illicit call.

‘How are you, Joe? I missed you.’

Probably not the right thing to say, she knew, but she refused to play games.

‘I missed you too.’

He didn’t play them either.

‘Why didn’t you call?’ OK, so that
was
a bit of game-playing. But she couldn’t help it. Why
hadn’t
he called?

‘I’m sorry,’ he said softly.

‘That’s not an answer,’ Izzie replied, feeling the familiar anxiety claw its way up her throat. She’d never been this way in a relationship before. But then, she’d never had a relationship like this before: a hidden one.

‘It’s complicated.’

‘O-kay.’

‘Really. I can’t talk now. I’m at home.’

Why did that word hurt so much?
Home
. He had a home that was where she wasn’t. How could that be right? When she felt as if nowhere was home except when she was with him? When had this all become so one-sided?

‘Well, if you can’t talk…’ she said sharply, knowing she was cutting off her nose to spite her face. She’d
longed
for this call, blast it.

‘I can’t, I’m sorry,’ he said evenly.

‘Why did you phone, then?’ The words just snapped out of her.

‘Right now, I’m asking myself precisely that question,’ Joe said, a slight edge to his voice. ‘We should talk when you want to talk to me.’

‘I do want to talk to you – but not with you whispering in case somebody hears,’ hissed Izzie. And that was the crux of it: the great love of her life was talking quietly on the phone to her, when she wanted him yelling his love from the rooftops. How bloody hard could it be for him to tell his wife that he was formalising what they’d talked about for years?

‘I’m sorry you feel that way,’ he said, still calm. His calmness infuriated her. He was in control, in every way. Whereas she felt wildly out of control over the depth of her feelings for him. And she had no control over their relationship because he called the shots. It was like walking a tightrope with no harness and no safety net.

‘I have to go,’ she said suddenly, wanting to goad him into begging her not to go. ‘I just got out of the bath and I’m dripping bathwater on to the floor.’

He didn’t take the bait.

‘Fine,’ he said.

‘No it’s not fine. Nothing’s bloody fine!’ she snapped back and hung up. Then, because she so desperately wanted to phone him back and say she loved him but couldn’t because of how awful she’d just been, she burst into tears. If she wasn’t so fiercely in love with Joe, she’d wish she’d never met him. Because surely there wasn’t much more pain than this, was there?

The next morning, her eyes looked red as a coal miner’s and her face was puffy with tiredness. She’d barely slept all night and during the hours she’d lain in bed, awake, tears had
kept welling up in her eyes. It was like having a geyser in her head.

‘Ugh,’ she said, grimacing at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. Emergency measures were required. As the most up-to-date beauty fixing products were spilling out of her bathroom cabinet, Izzie had no trouble finding balms, soothing eye creams and drops, and anti-puffiness masks.

Half an hour later, she looked marginally better.

‘Like someone with a migraine,’ she decided grimly, peering at herself. Her eyes weren’t red any more – those eye drops made her cry, but wow, they worked – but the rest of her still looked rough.

Rough, tough and dangerous to know, she decided, pulling on a masculine trouser suit. She’d never wear this for Joe; for him, she let her feminine side out, revelling in silks and lace, spike heels and figure-hugging styles.

But he didn’t want her, so she’d go for tough instead.

‘You sick?’ asked Louisa, Perfect-NY’s receptionist, when Izzie stalked in, menacing in her charcoal boy’s suit.

‘Yes. And tired.’

‘Eight messages for you on your desk. The Zest catalogue people want you to phone, like, yesterday, and Carla’s got a virus, so she won’t be in.’

Izzie breathed a sigh of relief. Carla had X-ray vision which could detect bullshit anywhere. With her out sick, poor love, at least Izzie had some hope of telling people she simply hadn’t slept well. Keeping her relationship with Joe secret was turning her into a liar and she hated that.

Joe phoned at ten: ‘I need to talk to you.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘That’s nice,’ he said mildly.

‘I don’t mean to be nice,’ she retorted.

‘I’ll hang up and phone again when you’re less pissed off with me?’

‘You do that.’

Izzie hung up first, which gave her a certain childish satisfaction that lasted for a second, whereupon she moaned softly at the thought of having hung up on him. She loved him, blast it. Needed him. Didn’t he know that she was just
saying
those things? That she wanted him to need her so bad that, in spite of her anger, he’d rush downtown to Perfect-NY’s office, throw himself on his knees in front of everyone, and tell her he loved her? That Elizabeth would have to deal with it. That his kids – and Lord knew, she admired how he did things for his kids, but it could still hurt – would get over their parents splitting up. Kids weren’t stupid. They knew when people weren’t getting on, didn’t they? Surely she’d read that in a psychology magazine. It was better for children to see their parents facing up to the problems than hiding them, pretending it was all fine. But she couldn’t say any of that to Joe because she wasn’t supposed to be the kid expert, after all. He had to work it out for himself.

Her cell phone rang again.

‘Yes?’ she’d hit the button before it could attempt a second ring.

‘Izzie, this is Amanda from Zest…’

Get off the fucking phone in case my lover is trying to contact me!!!
was what Izzie wanted to say. Instead, she went into professional mode.

‘Hi, Amanda. Recovered from New Mexico yet? And has Ivan sent over the photos from the shoot?’ she asked calmly.

At lunchtime, Izzie deliberately went out and had a sandwich in the diner she’d told Joe she loved most, in case he was waiting for her and wanted to see her. She sat in one of the front booths, forced to share with three suited guys because the place was so busy, and pretended to read a magazine, all
the time aching for Joe to come in and drag her out on to the street.

I love you, I don’t care about anything else. I want to be with you
, he’d say, and everyone would smile at this proof of true love on the streets of Noo Yawk, and it would all be perfect because he’d chosen her.

Wait
, he’d beg.
Please wait for me, Izzie. It will work out, I promise
.

He didn’t turn up.

Izzie went back to work but couldn’t concentrate on anything, until she flicked through the
Post
and found an article about a benefit in the Museum of Natural History the following night.

The great and the good would be at it, the
Post
told her breathlessly, including Elizabeth Hansen, who was on the charity committee, and her husband, Joe, who was a major benefactor. Izzie could feel the blood draining from her head. She’d never fainted in her life but she might just faint now. Joe was going to this charity thing with Elizabeth after he’d sworn that he’d told Elizabeth they’d have to stop doing that. She’d been so hurt when he’d gone to the AIDS benefit the night after they made love.

‘I had to,’ he’d said.

‘If you live separate lives, you don’t have to!’ she’d yelled back.

‘I know, I’m sorry. I’ll tell her we can’t do that again. It’s just – she’s on lots of committees and there are lots of functions

‘Joe, if you and Elizabeth are over, then that’s fine,’ Izzie had said coldly. ‘If you’re not, get the hell out of my life.’

‘We’re over,’ he’d said. ‘Over. Promise. It will work out, Izzie, soon, I promise.’

‘I think I’ve got Carla’s flu,’ Izzie announced blindly, closing the
Post
. She just had to get out of the office where she jumped every time a phone rang.

Izzie had never attended a function at the museum, although she’d seen pictures in the papers and magazines and knew the form. The vast Romanesque steps spread majestically down to where the cars lined up, with fat red carpet laid for the rich to step on.

She stood with all the onlookers and waited, feeling crazier by the minute. It was just like being a celebrity-obsessed person waiting for their favourite movie star, standing in line in the rain and cold for just a glimpse of a person adored onscreen. Why would anyone do that? It was sad, such a sign of not having a life.

And then she thought of how sad she was: standing waiting for a glimpse of her lover and his wife, to see if she could detect the truth. She was pathetic.

Hating herself at that moment, Izzie turned, leaving the small crowd of onlookers, not thinking where she was going in her misery, and found herself close to a dark limo that was disgorging four passengers going to the gala.

Two men and two women, all with the waft of privilege and dollars around them. On one side of the limo were Joe and a blonde woman who could only be his wife. She looked better than she had in the Google pictures: thin, tall, with the racehorse legs these East Coast society women inherited from their mothers, and high, high shoes with the telltale red soles that marked them out as Christian Louboutins. Izzie had only one pair. They were things of beauty but too expensive for someone on her salary. She felt envy at a woman who wore them carelessly in the rain. And her clothes – Izzie gazed enviously at her clothes. Elizabeth wore a beautiful evening coat – tailored plum silk, definitely Lanvin, beyond fashionable. Of course, she wouldn’t be a bling bling taste-free person. As if anybody in Joe’s life could be that.

Izzie thought of the high-street copy of that same coat that hung in her own wardrobe: a knock-off she’d worn once with
him and he’d said it was sexy but he preferred what was underneath, and he’d untied the big bow belt and they’d made love on the rug in her living room.

Hers had been cheap. Like her. She’d got a fake Lanvin, lots of pairs of pretend-Louboutins and a fake boyfriend. Which was just right for someone who was cheap.

Exactly then, Joe turned his face away from the rain and she knew without a doubt that he’d spotted her in the crowd. For a flicker of a second, their eyes met before he turned away. His face didn’t really alter, but she knew he’d seen her. Standing in the crowd like a dirty-faced urchin with her nose pressed up against the sweetshop window: looking at forbidden treasures.

His face was expressionless, and Izzie felt as if she was the cheapest whore on the planet.

So cheap, she’d been free. She should print cards and leave them in phone booths.
For a good time, no fee, call Izzie Silver
…Even joking couldn’t make it better.

His wife said something to him, and clutched his raincoated arm with her hand, a sparkly hand that glittered with a fat diamond the size of a robin’s egg. Tiffany, Izzie thought. Engagement ring or just cocktail ring? She wasn’t sure which finger it was on.

Joe instantly turned to Elizabeth, his head bent the way it bent when he talked to Izzie.

How could she have been so stupid?

He’d said he loved Elizabeth, that after twenty-four years, he still did, but that their relationship was over and that he wanted out. He’d said he needed and wanted Izzie.

Izzie had imagined that no man could love two people at the same time, simply because she wouldn’t have been able to. She’d assumed it was the same for him.

She was obviously wrong.

Joe could love his wife and simultaneously lie to and fuck Izzie. Simple as that.

Izzie turned away, furiously blinking back tears. This time, she wouldn’t cry. She was done crying over Joe. Falling for him had made her abandon all her principles. She’d known it was complicated, messy, but she’d gone out with him anyway.

She was as bad as those predatory women who hunted men, using anything to get a ring on their fingers. Izzie had thought she was above all that. It had turned out she was just as bad. At least they knew what they were doing, and she hadn’t. She was dumb as well as a stupid whore.

Lily Shanahan sat on a wooden bench in the tiny courtyard beside St Canice’s in Tamarin and let the April sunlight wash over her. It was nearly half ten and the courtyard was empty, apart from a couple of pigeons poking around the grey slab paving stones looking for crumbs. Everyone else was inside the church, listening to the gentle tones of Father Sean. Lily could hear the drone of the small Thursday-morning congregation murmuring along to the service.

She’d been on her way into the church when she’d felt a little light-headed and had a strange compulsion to sit outside in the sun instead, and worship another way.

You didn’t have to talk to God in a church. If He’d made the sun and the sky, it was only right to enjoy them. So she’d walked slowly to the wooden bench and decided she was taking a different sort of pew today.

God would understand. The church would be warm and the stuffiness might make her light-headedness worse. St Canice’s was architecturally very beautiful but flawed when it came to heat and cold. In the winter, it was freezer-like, elderly radiators notwithstanding. In the warmer months, it became a hothouse and many a bride had found that it was fatal to dress
the church with wedding flowers the night before the wedding, as even the buds that liked heat wilted in the fierce warmth of the church and slumped in their arrangements on the day itself.

Once she’d settled herself on the bench, Lily took off her beige cotton hat and closed her eyes, turning her face to the sun. Before she’d left the house, she’d meant to use some of that expensive cream that Izzie had given her the last time she was home; marvellous stuff, Izzie had said.

‘
Skin Replenish
. Keeps wrinkles at bay. You should mind your skin, Gran.’

Eyelids still shut tight, Lily smiled at the memory. Izzie didn’t come home often enough these days. She was busy with her life in New York and, while Lily missed her, she was able to accept it. Lily’s job as a grandmother standing in for Alice, Izzie’s dead mother, had been to give her darling granddaughter roots and wings.

She used to say it to Izzie when Izzie got a fit of guilt over missing some big event in the Tamarin world:

‘Roots and wings, darling: that’s what love is,’ she’d murmur, and feel grateful that she had the strength to mean it and that the words comforted Izzie.

Besides, there was no point saying that type of thing if you whined when the wings part meant the person built their own life away from you. Lily had no time for people who liked spouting such truths but didn’t like living them. It was the hypocrisy she disliked; like telling Izzie to get on with her life and then being discontented because she did.

No, Lily wasn’t a woman for hypocrisy. Probably not a woman for expensive moisturiser either, she thought with a little chuckle.

Izzie’s precious cream felt beautiful on Lily’s skin when she actually used it, but she’d generally left the house before she remembered and she could never be bothered going back to apply it. At her age, time, gravity and life had done damage
that no expensive cream could fix – unless there was alchemy at work in the pretty glass jar.

What was nice was that her granddaughter still thought her skin worth saving. Izzie, who worked with beautiful women with skin as velvety as newborn babies’, hadn’t written her off as an old woman.

Some people did – as if wrinkled skin was an invisibility cloak. Like the maids’ uniforms of so long ago, Lily thought wryly. She’d learned that early on. Once a person slipped on a servant’s garb, they faded into the background.

The maids’ uniforms in Rathnaree had been plain navy gabardine dresses with buttons up the back and a white collar that had to be laundered and starched to within an inch of its life. Lily’s mother, Mary, didn’t have to wear the same uniform because of her valued position as housekeeper and Lady Irene had provided her with two navy serge skirts – ‘From
Harrods
,’ Mary would say in awe at the very thought of owning a garment from a shop where the gentry themselves shopped.

Mary wore the skirts with pristine white blouses and a grey woollen cardigan.

The memory of her mother in that outfit, keys dangling from her belt, glasses on a ribbon round her neck, used to make Lily wince at the subservience of it all.

The Rathnaree housemaids liked their uniforms and the fact that it saved their own clothes.

Even Vivi, Lily’s best friend, liked hers.

‘Keeps my things nice, Lily,’ she said cheerfully, squashing her curls under the starched maid’s cap. ‘Will you ever tell me why you have such a bee in your bonnet about the uniform?’

‘I don’t,’ Lily would say, which wasn’t the truth at all.

Vivi was such an uncomplicated soul and Lily knew it would be impossible to explain that she hated the way putting on a
uniform turned her into a piece of the furniture, which was what Lady Irene wanted: lots of blank-faced servants rushing around doing her bidding. Lily might have been born into the servant class, but she didn’t have to like it.

Lady Irene wouldn’t have forgotten to put expensive wrinkle cream on, Lily smiled to herself from her seat outside St Canice’s.

If ever there was a woman keen to keep the ravages of time at bay, it had been Lady Irene. In those long ago days when Lily worked in Rathnaree, creams like Izzie’s gorgeous Skin Replenish were definitely the preserve of the upper classes. An ordinary woman from the town would never wear any cosmetics, never mind expensive face cream. Lily’s mother washed her face in water and soap, and that was it. She tidied up Lady Irene’s walnut dressing table with its many potions and silver-topped bottles, but never expected to use such things herself.

Lily could remember herself at twenty, defiantly buying Max Factor cosmetics and arranging them on the windowsill beside her bed. She’d have loved Lady Irene to see them and understand that the girl from the cottage was as entitled to beauty as she was.

‘See, they’re not just for the likes of you, Lady Irene,’ she’d have said, holding up the Chinese Red lipstick she loved and painted on in the same way Joan Crawford wore hers, with that elongated, sultry bow. The Crawford Smear, they called it, and it was the devil to clean it off your mouth, leaving a dark red stain that made you look as if you’d been pigging out on raspberries.

Had she ever been that young and fierce? That angry? She’d hated the Lochravens and all they stood for then: wealth, privilege and a blithe, careless approach to life. Lady Irene was the worst. From the moment she got out of bed, leaving her teacup teetering on the edge of a dresser, casting
off silken bedclothes on to the floor, the lady of the house went about her business with the unassailable knowledge that someone would be following behind, tidying up. Lily hadn’t cared so much when
she
was the lady’s maid following in her employer’s wake. She was young, energetic and with supple limbs: she could button her lip if need be. But how she’d hated it when her mother, Lady Irene’s housekeeper, was the one stooping and tidying up.

‘You’d think she’d pick up her things the odd time,’ Lily would say, scowling, when her mother came down to the big Rathnaree kitchen late at night, worn out with tiredness after her day but not ready to go home yet.

‘Hush,’ Mam would say, anxious lest anyone heard, although there were plenty of other people in the house who agreed with Lily and said nothing, but just took their wages. ‘Her ladyship wasn’t reared to tidy up after herself.’

‘More’s the pity,’ Lily snapped. She was fed up hearing how Lady Irene, a lady in her own right and not by marriage, had been raised in a palatial home in Kildare with three times the number of servants she had in Rathnaree. In the run-up to hunting house parties, her ladyship could be heard moaning about life at CastleEdward, where her mother, Lady Constance, had so much time to herself because the vast household almost ran itself.

‘Why doesn’t the stupid cow go back there, then?’ Lily would snap at Vivi.

From the vantage point of age, Lily was able to smile at the memory of her angry, younger self. At the time, she thought she knew it all, but she didn’t. She hadn’t understood that money and privilege didn’t buy escape from the pain of life. There were some things a person had to live through and nothing could ease the agony, be they lady’s maid or ladyship. They were all sisters under the skin.

The murmuring was louder in the church.

The congregation were reciting the Creed, Lily realised. In another ten minutes, the Mass-goers would be out and they’d fuss over Lily, worrying about whether they should call the doctor or not.

Lily’s friend Mary-Anne would twitter with anxiety at Lily’s mention of feeling light-headed, and would probably get faint with the shock of it all, and need to sit down herself. Everyone had to have a hobby and Mary-Anne’s was hypochondria. At eighty-six, she was a slave to her pills and a torment to her GP.

Lily was the opposite. She didn’t want a fuss. She’d move before everyone emerged, perhaps walk slowly out down the lower left side of the courtyard and on to Patrick Street. A cup of strong tea in Dorota’s might revive her.

She could sit and look out at the harbour and watch the fishing boats come in. Thursday was the day Red Vinnie – so called because of the bright red slicker he wore – brought in his lobster pots. Vinnie always had time for a chat and he’d talk of the seals he’d seen basking out beyond Lorcan’s Point, or the gulls with the strange yellow stripe on their wings the like of which he’d never seen before in his thirty-five years as a fisherman.

He was still young enough to find change shocking, Lily reflected. She’d lived long enough to see that there weren’t as many changes in life as people thought: the world moved on a cycle and everything came round again. Only someone of her age could see that. Wait long enough and the past had its turn again and became the present.

The past – Rathnaree, Lady Irene, dear Vivi – had been taking up space in her mind lately because of that sweet Australian girl who’d been so softly-spoken on the phone, scared of ringing such an ancient old dear as herself.

Jodi Beckett, the girl’s name was and she had a photograph, she said, of Rathnaree in 1936, of Lady Irene’s birthday party.

‘It’s all beautiful and glamorous, like people from a film,’ Jodi had added excitedly. ‘They’re standing in front of a fireplace with a tiger rug at their feet. I don’t like that because it’s a real tiger. It’s so cruel, but the rest is so amazing. The clothes are incredible, glamorous…’

It had been all that, Lily agreed, smiling wryly: very glamorous, although not so much so when you were the person sweeping up the ashes from those once-blazing fires at six on a cool morning, knees hard on the marble hearth, trying to be quiet lest you wake the household who wouldn’t care less about waking you if they needed something.

But that wasn’t the thing to say to the girl. Jodi, pretty name, so confiding too, had told Lily that she’d married an Irishman, who was the new deputy headmaster in the local secondary school. And that her great-great-grandparents had come from County Cork and her family in Brisbane considered themselves Irish and loved all things Celtic.

‘Investigating the past in Ireland is what I’m meant to be doing,’ Jodi had said on the phone. ‘I knew so much about Ireland before I came here. I love it.’

Lily thought of how the past got romanticised into the rich vibrancy of Technicolor and Hollywood, where the servants weren’t seen – except to doff their caps and be meekly happy with their peasant lot – and the rich got to be glamorous and have fun.

There were so many stories she could tell young Jodi about those times, but they might not be the stories Jodi was expecting.

Yes, there were silk gowns that bared pale, pampered backs, and the glitter of family diamonds and emeralds hauled out of jewellery cases for parties and balls. But that was only one side of the story. The less glamorous side was of whole families practically born into service by virtue of being born on the grand estates, families who were expected to
have subservience in their blood. Except that not all of them wanted to wear a uniform, bob endless curtseys, and do the bidding of people who were exactly the same as them, except that the gentry had money behind them.

Lily knew that feeling all too well, because that was how she’d felt about the likes of Lady Irene.

She sighed, thinking of her younger self and all the anger and resentment she’d carried inside then. People now didn’t really understand
class
the way older people did. Money could buy you anything now. But then, money was nothing against the wall of the fierce class divide. When you were born one of the peasant class, you died that way too. Raging against such cast-iron barriers made little difference. Such complex memories weren’t what Jodi was anticipating.

‘I’ve made a start on the history of Rathnaree, but there’s not much about it. No books – isn’t that incredible? I’m sure you’ve so many stories and things. I’d love to hear them but…’ Jodi paused. ‘Only if you’d like to talk to me. I wouldn’t want to tire you out.’

‘Ah pet,’ Lily said kindly, ‘talking doesn’t tire me out. Let me look and we can talk about it all then.’

Jodi would love the box Lily had kept hidden in her spare room: full of letters, photographs and her precious diary, along with programmes from the theatre, menus, a fake gold compact that had once been filled with Tea Rose face powder, dried flowers from her tiny wedding bouquet, her old ration book, bits and pieces that made up a life lived fifty years before. When she’d been speaking to Jodi, Lily’s mind had instantly run to the box.

She’d taken it from its hiding place and put it beside her armchair in the sitting room, planning to open it up and look at its contents again. But somehow, she hadn’t. The box was still there, its dusty flaps closed.

Lily decided she’d meet the young Australian girl, but she wasn’t sure if she wanted the precious contents of her box out there in the world. There were secrets in there – nothing that would threaten the State, she smiled to herself. But secrets, nonetheless. Things she’d never told anyone.