The Betrayal (10 page)

She pulled my arm, drawing me down to her level.
‘I have to phone the guards,’ she shouted in my ear.
‘It’s too noisy here.
I’ll ring them from the harbour phone.
Get Karin down.
We’ve got to get back to the cottage.’

The exultant glow in Karin’s eyes darkened when she saw me.
She blinked, as if the effort of looking at me required too much effort.
She ignored me when I gestured at her to come down.
The band was about to start a new number.
I stepped onto the stage and grabbed her arm.
Jake had signed his name on her skin.
She jerked away from me and smacked the tambourine against my face.
The crowd howled, their laughter thick with anticipation.

‘Fight… fight,’ someone roared and the cry was taken up.

Jake came between us.
My lip was bleeding where one of the metal zils had cut the skin.
I wiped the blood with the back of my hand, hardly aware of what I was doing.

‘Whatever’s going on, take it elsewhere,’ Jake shouted.
‘This is our night.
Don’t fuck it up.’

‘Where’s your father?’
I yelled at Karin when she followed me from the stage.
‘I thought he was here with you.
Your mother’s ringing the guards.’

‘What’s she doing that for?’
She took a packet of cigarettes from her pocket and lit one.
It was the first time I’d ever seen her smoking.

‘He’s been gone over two hours.’
I had to make her understand.
‘If he’s on the cliff he could have had an accident.’

‘Don’t be so stupid,’ she shouted.
‘He’ll be back soon.
He always is.’
The crowd pressed against us as Jake began to sing.
She held the cigarette upright between her fingers and blew smoke into my eyes.
‘Go back to the cottage with her.
I’m staying with Jake.
I showed your letters to my mother and I’ll show them to him.
Then he’ll know what you’re really like… you lying
cunt.
’ She pressed her knuckles to her mouth, as if she was as shocked by the word as I was.

‘I’ve been searching for him – ’

‘Filthy prostitute… that’s what you are.’

Her words glanced off me.
A terrible certainty had taken over and I was beyond being offended.

‘What if he doesn’t come back?
Don’t you care?
He’s
missing
.
I went down to the beach searching for him but the tide’s in over the sand.
What if he’s fallen from the cliff?’

For the first time she seemed to hear me.
She shoved through the crowd, beating at them with her fists when they refused to move.
It was still raining as we ran towards the harbour.
Joan was talking to a man outside the phone kiosk.
I recognised Charlie, the old fisherman who had danced with her all those week ago.
She handed her car keys to him and he drove us back to the cottage.

‘He’ll be waiting for us,’ Karin said.
‘He’ll be mad at us for going without him.’
She shivered, drenched, as I was, from our run to the car.

‘Of course he’ll be there,’ said Charlie.
‘He’s a man who knows his way around there parts, right enough.’

The cottage was as we’d left it.
The sodden towel lay on the path and the front door banged open and closed.
A squad car arrived shortly afterwards.
The night was long and loaded with dread.
Guards came and went.
Searchlights illuminated the cliff.
The coast guard and a mountain rescue team joined in the search.
We sat up all night and convinced ourselves he’d run away.
Karin said he’d come back for her.
She repeated this like a mantra.
I longed to cover my ears but I listened and agreed.

His body was found the next day, washed in on the tide.
We knew he was gone by then.
We’d seen where he’d fallen.
The scrub broken and uprooted had been unable to stop his fall as he pitched forward into the night.
He would have died as soon as he hit the rocks, dead before he was washed out to sea.
Karin and her mother were assured of this fact many times, as if, somehow, this was a balm to be applied over their grief.

We both knew our friendship could never be rekindled.
How could it?
We only had to glance across at each other to remember the waiting hours and the dread of what the morning would bring.
I wrote to her after her father’s funeral and asked if we could meet and talk.
The envelope came back to me by return of post.
My note was inside, shredded.

J
ake took
the Gibson from its stand and sat down on the straight-backed chair he always used when playing his guitar.
He turned the tuning peg and checked the B string.
Still too sharp.
When the guitar was in tune he began to strum ‘The Long Goodbye’.
He needed to calm down.
Music usually provided the perfect antidote but not tonight.
He had needed a slap back to reality and that was what he received when the Kingfisher Graphics business card fell from his wallet.
The shock on Nadine’s face.
Such unguarded hurt in her eyes.
What had she been remembering when she picked it up?
She had been silent of the journey home and had gone straight into her office.
Had she believed him?
He needed to delete those texts and photographs, stop behaving like a lovesick schoolboy and bid goodbye to a fantasy that was never going to become a reality.

She crossed the hall and entered his music room without knocking.
They had an unwritten rule to respect each other’s privacy and his uneasiness grew when she sat down on the edge of the tatty, old sofa, the only piece of furniture they had brought with them from Oakdale Terrace.
His fingers pressed nervously on the fret as he strummed lightly, nervously.

‘I want to talk about our marriage.’
Her back was ramrod straight, her cheeks flushed.

‘What about our marriage?’

‘We both know it isn’t working anymore.’
She twirled a hank of hair around her middle finger, a habit she had never outgrown when she was upset.
‘I’m sorry for blurting it out like this.
I’ve been trying to think of a right way to say this… but the right way doesn’t exist.’

‘Not working?
Since when has our marriage stopped working?’
He automatically tightened the D string then twanged it so violently it snapped and cut his finger.

She flinched at the discordant sound.
‘You’re bleeding.
I’ll get a bandage.’

‘It’s okay… okay.’
He pulled tissues from a box and wrapped them around the cut.
‘I’m confused.
Are you saying you want to leave me?’

Her eyes filled with tears.
‘No, Jake.
I want us to leave each other.
I want us to be free to do the things we’ve always wanted to do.’
Her stance, the rigid set of her shoulders added to the tension in the room.

He stood up and rummaged in the media unit where he kept the spare sets of strings.
‘Let me get this straight.
First of all you want to sell Tõnality.
Then the house.
Now you want to end our marriage.
Am I leaving anything out?
Would you like to disown our children, perhaps?
Pretend
they never existed?’

‘Are
you
going to pretend you still love me?’

‘Of course I love you.’
His hands shook as he tried to restring his guitar.
He gave up and replaced it carefully on its stand.

‘Like a brother loves a sister,’ she said.
‘Like friends.
That’s us, Jake.
How often do we make love?
We’re too tired, that’s what we say.
We both know that’s not true.
We never wanted this marriage but we knuckled down and made the best of it.’

‘We did more than that, Nadine.
We worked at it.’

‘We’ve worked it to the bone.
It’s made us old before our time.
I won’t be forty for another six months but I feel as if we’ve lived the full circle of life when, really, there’s still so much more we can experience.
I need more from my life and so do you.’

‘Stop telling me what
I
need,’ he shouted.
‘You’re willing to risk our marriage, our family, our home, our company on some harebrained notion that life should offer you more.
I
can’t
believe what I’m hearing.’

‘You know I’m right.
It’s time we stopped pretending.’

‘I’m not pretending.’
He sat beside her on the sofa, the space of a cushion between them.
He grasped her shoulders, pulled her close to him.
‘What are you trying to do to us?’

‘I’m giving you back your freedom.’

The word throbbed into the open and a new energy, apprehension, tumultuous fear – Jake was unable to define it – vibrated between them.

‘I can’t talk about this anymore tonight,’ he said.
‘I don’t know what to think… what to say….’

She swayed suddenly and moved closer to him, flushed, eager, her hands held outwards, pleading with him to embrace a vision only she could see.
‘We can make this work, Jake.
You’ll thank me in the end.
Once the children understand that nothing fundamental is going to change in their lives, they’ll accept our decision.
It’s our time now.’

He felt her heat, the tremor of her breath when they kissed.
Her lips opened under the pressure of his tongue.
To his surprise, and, probably Nadine’s, they made love on the old sofa, as they used to do when the children were in bed and they lived in a small house where even a hiccup could be heard through the walls.
No wonder the sofa sagged in the middle.

They did not bother removing their clothes.
No foreplay to delay the inevitable clash of pleasure.
No awkwardness as they unzipped, unhooked, unbuttoned, undid each other’s resolve to pretend that this was anything other than a familiar ritual.
She was moist and ready, sweet and juicy as the apple she had so temptingly held before him.
Her desire matched his own, their cries buried in each other’s shoulders as they shuddered into relief.
When she moaned he was unsure if the muffled sound was carried on pleasure or pain.

The sofa was uncomfortable, broken springs pressing into their hips, legs cramping as they untangled themselves, the aftertaste of sex on their lips.
A slight embarrassment as she fastened her bra, her face averted from him.

In bed, she fell into an exhausted sleep.
He tried to imagine waking up beside a different face, a different form — Karin Moylan sauntered into view – but the leap was too great for his imagination.
Nadine turned, still sleeping, and slid her arm across his hip.
A practiced gesture, as established as his regular breathing when he finally drifted asleep.
Her words were out there now, asteroids in space, already spinning off in directions neither of them could foresee.

T
hree weeks had passed
since that night.
Sometimes, in the throes of work, Jake wondered if he had imagined their entire conversation.
Freedom.
The word had dangerous connotations and Nadine had teased them out in front of him.
Was she crazy?
Was he crazy not to listen to her?
She had not mentioned their discussion since, nor had he, but ignoring something did not mean it would go away.
She was waiting for him to make up his mind.
When they were together he was aware of her every movement, each change of expression, the undercurrent of tension behind her words.
Had he ever known what went on beneath that storm of red hair?

Small but significant changes were taking place between them.
They had not made love since that night.
The desire that flamed so swiftly had burned itself out and, now, they lay chastely apart, apologising, almost embarrassed, if they made contact.
They avoided intimate actions like walking naked from the shower or dressing in front of each other.
They tapped on their office doors before entering and no longer checked each other’s work diaries, something they used to do without a second thought.
And the texts he had intended on deleting remained on his phone.
New ones arrived from Karin but they no longer lifted his spirits or sank him into a reverie.
He was focused on only one thing.
The decision he must make.
He had the unsettling sensation that a tamed animal might feel when faced with the challenge of an open cage door.

Then Darina Moylan died.
Five years in the grip of Alzheimer’s, Darina passed gently away and Karin flew home from for her grandmother’s funeral.
It was literally a ‘flying’ visit, she emphasised to Jake in her text.
She would spend two days in Dublin where she would attend her grandmother’s funeral and view the apartment she hoped to buy.

They met in the Clarion Hotel beside Dublin Airport for an hour before she flew back to New York.
She was waiting for him when he arrived, still dressed in funeral black, the brim of a hat low over her eyes.
Darina had outlived her contemporaries and her funeral had been a quiet ceremony, Karin told him when he expressed his condolences.
She was pleased with the apartment and had decided to buy it.
He knew the location.
One of the flashy Celtic Tiger developments built on the once derelict docklands overlooking the Liffey.

‘How’s the Shard reunion coming along?’
she asked after he had viewed photos of the apartment on her mobile.

‘We’ve had to postpone,’ he admitted.

Her eyes narrowed with disappointment when he explained that Reedy had been offered a contract with a band whose guitarist went into rehab just as they were about to tour the States.

‘We’ve still four months to go before we’re officially over the twenty-five year mark,’ he said.
‘So, it will happen before March.’

‘I’ll be living back here by then,’ she said.
‘Will you invite me?’

‘It’s an open concert.
Anyone can come.’

‘I’ll look forward to it.’
She stirred her cappuccino and licked the froth from the curve of the spoon.
‘How’s Nadine?’

‘Busy.’

‘That’s all you ever say.’

‘What do you want me to say?’

‘The truth.
Is she happy with you?
Are you happy with her?
And, if so, why are you here with me?’

‘That’s a lot of questions, Karin.’

‘Are you going to answer them?’

‘It’s complicated.’

‘That’s not an answer.’
She was challenging him, her head tilted at that now familiar angle.

‘I’ll tackle the last one first,’ he said.
‘I’m here with you because I can’t get you out of my head.
You’re a torment and a pleasure.
I keep thinking about New York.
About what could have happened if you’d invited me into your apartment.’

‘I’ve thought about that too,’ she said softly.
‘But I’m not sure what we’re going to do about it.’

He had forgotten the power of her gaze.
The smouldering promise carried on the sweep of eyelashes.

‘When are you moving back here?’
he asked.

‘Why?’

‘You shouldn’t have to ask.’

‘Oh, but I do.
Dublin isn’t New York, Jake.
It’s like a village with its ear to the ground.
What about Nadine?
If we do see each other… what are you offering me?
An affair?
I’ve been down that road before.
It doesn’t lead anywhere.’

He was tempted to throw caution to the wind and tell her everything.
Instinct warned him it was too soon.
He was standing on the edge of a crevice, his toes braced against the fall.

‘I’m not offering you an affair, Karin.’

‘What then?’

‘A relationship… if that’s what you also want.
But…’

She smiled ruefully.
‘Married men always have a ‘but.’
What’s yours?’

‘I’ve some important decisions to make.
I can’t say more than that for now.
Can you trust me to have everything sorted out when I see you again?’

‘Are you a rarity, Jake Saunders?
An honest married man?
Or are you teasing me?
Promising something you can’t possibly deliver?
Where’s Nadine in all of this?’

‘Nadine wants what I want.’

‘Really?’
She checked her watch and stood up.
‘You two seem to share everything, including the desire to end your marriage.
It’s time to catch my flight.’

‘Is something wrong?’
He was startled by her abrupt comment but she had bent to pick up her overnight case.
A slit at the back of her dress opened to reveal a trim of kingfisher blue.
He admired the way she used her signature colour, flamboyantly draping it over her shoulders or discreetly revealing it in the bend of a pleat.
She was smiling again when she straightened.

‘Why should anything be wrong?’
she asked as they walked towards the exit.
‘I want you, Jake.
I always have… ever since that summer.
But I don’t share.
That’s something you have to accept or this relationship you’ve promised won’t work.
Is that a commitment you’re prepared to make?’

‘Yes.’

At the top of the steps she stretched on her toes to kiss him.
No longer eye-to-eye, mouth-to-mouth.
A new configuration, his tall frame against her diminutive figure.
Would their conversation have moved so swiftly from a light flirtation into something more demanding if Nadine had not dangled such alluring possibilities before him?
She had kicked the supports of their marriage from under him and he was adrift on anticipation.
On the newness of discovery.
Addictive, mind-blowing emotions.

‘You were right about everything,’ he told Nadine when they were in bed that night.
‘Thank you for having the courage to take that first step.’

She looked exhausted, dark shadows under her eyes.
Was she regretting her decision already?
Too late now.
His resolve was as fixed as the markings on a new coin.

‘It won’t be easy,’ she said.
‘Eleanor will be furious.’

‘I’ll deal with her.
What we’ve decided to do is none of her business.’

‘We’ll tell the children when they’re all together at Christmas?’

‘We will.’
A claw sharpened with guilt scraped against his chest.

‘Do you think we’ll have phantom pains when we separate?’
she asked.
‘You in your mews.
Me in my cottage.’

‘Phantom pains are possible,’ he replied.
‘For a while, anyway… until we get used to being apart.’

‘I hope we don’t end up hating each other.’

‘Impossible,’ he reassured her.
‘I’ll always love you.’

‘And I’ll love you.’

Declarations of love… what a way to end a marriage.
They loved each other once with passion.
Now they loved with affection.
A world of difference existed between loving someone and
being
in love, overwhelmed, besotted, crazed with yearning, giddy, and delirious.

T
he trees lining
the pavements of Bartizan Downs were bare now and the black branches had the clenched arthritic look of winter.
It was dark when he and Nadine left for Tõnality in the mornings and dark when they returned in the evenings.
Ravens crouched like a menacing army on the rooftops.
Beady eyes and cruel beaks, their feathers sleek as oil as they rose in black, clamorous flight, heading to roost in distant trees in the Malahide Demesne.

Poverty and the downfall of a family, Rosanna used to say.
Harbingers of doom, that’s ravens for you.