Читать книгу Cecelia Ahern 2-Book Gift Collection: The Gift, Thanks for the Memories - Cecelia Ahern, Cecelia Ahern - Страница 22

It was ten thirty at night by the time the city spat Lou out and waved him off to the coast road that led him home to his house in Howth, County Dublin. Bordering the sea, a row of houses lined the coast, like an ornate frame to the perfect watercolour. Windswept and eroded from a lifetime of salty air, they got into the great American spirit of housing giant Santas and reindeers on twinkling rooftops. Every window with open curtains twinkled with the lights of Christmas trees, and Lou recalled, as a boy, trying to count as many trees on show as possible to pass the time while travelling. To Lou’s right he could see across the bay to Dalkey and Killiney. The lights of Dublin city twinkled beyond the oily black of the sea, like electric eels flashing beneath the blackness of a well.

Howth had been the dream destination for as long as Lou could remember. Quite literally, his first memory began there, his first feeling of desire, of wanting to belong and then of belonging. The fishing and yachting port in north County Dublin was a popular suburban resort on the north side of Howth Head, fifteen kilometres from Dublin city. It was a village with history; cliff paths that led past Howth village and its ruined abbey, an inland fifteenth-century castle with rhododendron gardens, and many lighthouses that dotted the coastline. It was a busy, popular village filled with pubs, hotels and fine fish restaurants. It had breathtaking views of Dublin Bay and the Wicklow Mountains or Boyne Valley beyond. Howth was a peninsular island with only a sliver of land to attach it to the rest of the country. Only a sliver of land to connect Lou from his daily life to that of his family. A mere shred, so that when the stormy days attacked, Lou would watch the raging Liffey from the window of his office and imagine the grey ferocious waves crashing over that sliver, licking at the land like flames, threatening to cut his family off from the rest of the country. Sometimes in those daydreams he was away from his family, cut off from them forever. In the nicer moments he was with them, wrapping himself around them to shield them from the elements.

Behind their large landscaped garden was land, wild and rugged, of purple heather and waist-high uncultivated grasses and hay that looked out over Dublin Bay. To the front they could see Ireland’s Eye, and on a clear day the view was so stunning it was almost as though a green screen had been hung from the clouds and rolled down to the ocean floor. Stretching out from the harbour was a pier, that Lou loved to take walks along, though he walked alone. He hadn’t always; his love for the pier had begun when he was a child when his parents brought him, Marcia and his elder brother Quentin to Howth every Sunday, come rain or shine, for a walk along the pier. Those days were either made up of a sun so hot he could still taste the ice-cream as soon as he set foot on the pier, or were so stormy that the wind whipped with such strength they would hang on to one another to avoid being whisked off land and lost to the sea.

On those family days, Lou would disappear into his own world. For on those days he was a pirate on the high seas. He was a lifeguard. He was a soldier. He was a whale. He was anything he wanted to be. He was everything he wasn’t. For the first few moments of every walk along the pier, he would begin by walking backwards, looking at their car in the car park until the bright red colour was no longer visible and the people had turned into penguins; dark dots that waddled about the place without any defined movements.

Lou still loved walking that pier; his runway to tranquillity. He loved watching the cars and the houses perched along the cliff edges fade away as he moved further and further from land. He would stand shoulder to shoulder with the lighthouse, both of them looking out. Here, after a long week at work, he could throw all of his concerns and worries out to the water and watch them land with a plop on the waves and float down to the floor below.

But the night Lou drove home after first meeting Gabe, it was too late to walk the pier. The power button on his view was off, all he could see was blackness and the occasional standby light flashing on a lighthouse. Despite the hour and the fact it was midweek, the village wasn’t its usual quiet hideaway. So close to Christmas, every restaurant was throbbing with diners, Christmas parties and annual meetings and celebrations. All the boats would be in for the night, the seals gone from the pier, their bellies full with the mackerel purchased and thrown to them by visitors. The winding road that led uphill to the summit was black and quiet now, and, sensing that home was near and that nobody else was around, he put his foot down on the accelerator of his Porsche 911. He lowered his window and felt the ice-cold air blow through his hair, and he listened to the sound of the engine reverberating through the hills and trees as he made his way to Howth summit. Below him, the city twinkled with a million lights, spying him winding his way up the wooded mountain like a spider among the grass.

As icing on the cake to the day he had just had, he heard a whoop, and then, looking in his rear-view mirror, cursed loudly at the garda car that came up behind him, lights ablazing. He eased his foot off the accelerator, hoping he’d be overtaken, but to no avail, the emergency was indeed him. He indicated and pulled in, sat with his hands on the steering wheel and watched the familiar figure climbing out of the garda car. The man slowly made his way to Lou’s side of the vehicle, looking around at the night as though taking a leisurely stroll, giving Lou enough time to rack his brain for the sergeant’s name. Lou turned off the music he’d been blaring and took a closer look at the man in the wing mirror, hoping it would trigger the memory of his name.

The man parked himself outside Lou’s door and leaned down to look into the open window.

‘Mr Suffern,’ he said, without a note of sarcasm, much to Lou’s relief.

‘Sergeant O’Reilly.’ He remembered the name right on cue and threw the man a smile, showing so many teeth he resembled a tense chimpanzee.

‘We find ourselves in a familiar situation,’ Sergeant O’Reilly said with a grimace. ‘Unfortunately for you, we both head home at the same hour.’

‘Yes, indeed, sir. My apologies, the roads were quiet, I thought it would be okay. There’s not a sinner around.’

‘Just a few innocents. That’s always the problem.’

‘And I’m one of them, your honour,’ Lou laughed, holding his hands up in defence. ‘It’s the last stretch of road before getting home, trust me, I only put the foot down seconds before you pulled me over. Dying to get home to the family. No pun intended.’

‘I could hear your engine from Sutton Cross, way down the road.’

‘It’s a quiet night.’

‘And it’s a noisy engine, I know that, but you just never know, Mr Suffern. You just never know.’

‘Don’t suppose you’d let me off with another warning,’ Lou smiled, trying to work sincerity and apology into his best winning smile. Both at the same time.

‘You know the speed limit, I assume?’

‘Sixty kilometres.’

‘Not one hundred and …’

The sergeant suddenly stopped talking and bolted up to stand upright, causing Lou to lose eye contact with him and instead be faced with his belt buckle. Unsure of what the sergeant was up to, he stayed seated and looked out the window to the stretch of road before him, hoping he wasn’t about to gain more points on his licence. With twelve as the maximum before losing his licence altogether, he was perched dangerously close with eight points already. He peeked at the sergeant and saw him grasping at his left pocket.

‘You looking for a pen?’ Lou called, reaching his hand into his inside pocket.

The sergeant winced and turned his back on Lou.

‘Hey, are you okay?’ Lou asked with concern. He reached for the door handle and then thought better of it.

The sergeant grunted something inaudible, the tone suggesting a warning of some sort. Through the wing mirror, Lou watched him walk slowly back to his car. He had an unusual gait. He seemed to be dragging his left leg slightly as he walked. Was he drunk? Then the sergeant opened his car door, got back inside, started up the engine, did a u-turn and was gone. Lou frowned, his day – even in its twilight hours – becoming increasingly more bizarre by the moment.

Lou pulled up to the driveway feeling the same sense of pride and satisfaction he felt every night when he arrived home. To most average people, size didn’t matter, but Lou didn’t want to be average and he saw the things that he owned as being a measure of the man that he was. He wanted the best of everything and, to him, size and quantity were a measure of that. Despite being in a safe cul-de-sac of only a few houses on Howth summit, he’d arranged for the existing boundary walls to be built up higher and for oversized electronic gates, with cameras, at the entrance.

The lights were out in the children’s bedrooms at the front of the house, and Lou instantly felt an inexplicable relief.

‘I’m home,’ he called to the quiet house.

There was a faint sound of a breathless and rather hysterical woman calling out movements from the television room down the hallway. Ruth’s exercise DVD.

He loosened his tie and opened the top button of his shirt, kicked off his shoes, felt the warmth of the underfloor heating soothe his feet through the marble, and started to sort through the mail on the hall table. His mind slowly began to unwind, the conversations of various meetings and telephone calls all beginning to slow. Though they were still there, the voices seemed a little quieter now. Each time he took off a layer of his clothes – his overcoat flung over the chair, his suit jacket on the table, his shoes kicked across the floor, his tie onto the table but slithering to the floor, his case here, loose change and keys there – he felt the events of the day fall away.

‘Hello,’ he called again, louder this second time, realising that nobody – i.e. his wife – had come to greet him. Perhaps she was busy breathing to the count of four, as the hysterical woman in the television room was doing.

‘Sssh,’ he heard, coming from the second level of the house, followed by the creak of floorboards as his wife made her way across the landing.

This bothered him. Not the creaking, for it was an old house and not much could be done about that, but the being silenced was a problem. After a day of non-stop talking, of clever words of jargon, persuasion and intelligent conversation, deal opening, deal development and deal closing, not one person he had met with had at any point told him to Sssh. This was the language of teachers and of librarians. Not of adults in their own homes. He felt like he’d left the real world and entered a crèche. After only one minute of stepping through his front door, he felt irritated. That had been happening a lot lately.

‘I’ve just put Pud down again. He’s not having a good night,’ Ruth explained from the top of the stairs, in a loud whisper. This kind of speech, though Lou understood, he did not like. Like the Sssh language, this adult-whispering was for children in class or teenagers sneaking out of or into their homes. He didn’t like limitations, particularly in his own home. So that irritated him too.

The ‘Pud’ she referred to was their son Ross. A little over a year old now, he still held on to his baby fat, his flesh resembling the uncooked dough of a croissant or that of a pudding. Hence the nickname Pud, which, unfortunately for the already christened Ross, seemed to be sticking around.

‘What’s new?’ he mumbled, referring to Pud’s lack of desire to sleep, while searching through the mail for something that didn’t resemble a bill. He opened a few and discarded them on the hall table. Pieces of ripped paper drifted from the surface and onto the floor.

Ruth made her way downstairs, dressed in a velour tracksuit-cum-pyjamas outfit, he couldn’t quite tell the difference between what she wore these days. Her long brown chocolate hair was tied back in a high ponytail and she shuffled towards him in a pair of slippers – the noise grating on his ears, worse than the sound of a vacuum cleaner, which, until that point, had been his least loved.

‘Hi,’ she smiled, and the tired face disappeared and there was a glimpse, a tiny flicker, of the woman he had married. Then, as quickly as he saw it, it disappeared again, leaving him to wonder if it was he who had imagined it, or if that part of her was there at all. The face of the woman he saw every day stepped up to kiss him on the lips.

‘Good day?’ she asked.

‘Busy.’

‘But good?’

The contents of a particular envelope took his interest. After a long moment he felt the intensity of a stare.

‘Hmm?’ He looked up.

‘I just asked if you had a good day.’

‘Yeah, and I said, “busy”.’

‘Yes, and I said, “but good”? All your days are busy, but all your days aren’t good. I hope it was good,’ she said, in a strained voice.

‘You don’t sound like you hope it was good,’ he replied, eyes down, reading the rest of the letter.

‘Well, I sound like I did the first time I asked.’ She kept an easiness in her voice.

‘Ruth, I’m reading my post!’

‘I can see that,’ she mumbled, bending over to pick up the empty ripped envelopes that lay on the ground and on the hall table.

‘So what happened around here today?’ he asked, opening another envelope. The paper fluttered to the floor.

‘The usual madness. And then I tidied the house just before you got back, for the millionth time,’ she said, making a point as she bent down to pick up another crumpled ball of paper. ‘Marcia called a few times today, looking for you. When I could finally find the phone. Pud hid the handset again, it took me ages to find it. Anyway, she needs help with deciding a venue for your dad’s party. She liked the idea of the marquee here, and Quentin, of course, didn’t. He wants it in the yacht club. I think your dad would like either of them – no, that’s a lie, I think your father would prefer none of them, but seeing as it’s going ahead without his say-so, he’d be happy with either. Your mum is staying out of it. So what did you tell her?’

Silence. She patiently watched him reading the last page of the document and waited for an answer. When he had folded it and dropped it on the hall table, he reached for another.

‘Honey?’

‘Hmmm?’

‘I asked you about Marcia,’ she said, through gritted teeth, and proceeded to pick up the scraps of new paper that had fallen to the ground.

‘Oh yeah.’ He unfolded another document. ‘She was just, eh …’ He became distracted by the contents.

‘Yes?’ she said loudly.

He looked up and gazed at her, as though noticing for the first time that she was there. ‘She was calling about the party.’ He made a face.

‘I know.’

‘How do you know?’ He started reading again.

‘Because she – never mind.’ Start again. ‘She’s so excited about this party, isn’t she? It’s great seeing her really getting her teeth into something after the year she’s had. She’s been talking a mile a minute about food and the music …’ She trailed off.

Silence.

‘Hmm?’

‘Marcia,’ she said, rubbing her tired eyes. ‘We’re talking about Marcia, but you’re busy so …’ She began making her way to the kitchen.

‘Oh, that. I’m taking the party off her hands. Alison’s going to organise it.’

Ruth stopped. ‘Alison?’

‘Yes, my secretary. She’s new. Have you met her?’

‘Not yet.’ She slowly made her way towards him. ‘Honey, Marcia was really excited about organising the party.’

‘And now Alison is,’ he smiled. ‘Not.’ Then he laughed.

She smiled patiently at the in-house joke, wanting to strangle him for taking the party out of Marcia’s hands and putting it into those of a woman who knew nothing of the man who was celebrating seventy years in this life, with the people he loved and who loved him.

She took a deep breath, her shoulders relaxing as she exhaled. Started again. ‘Your dinner’s ready.’ She began to move towards the kitchen again. ‘It’ll just take a minute to heat up. And I bought that apple pie you like.’

‘I’ve eaten,’ he said, folding the letter and ripping it into pieces. A few pieces of paper fluttered to the ground. It was either the sound of the paper hitting the marble or his words that stopped her on her way, but either way she froze.

‘I’ll pick the bloody things up,’ he said with irritation.

She slowly turned around and asked in a quiet voice, ‘Where did you eat?’

‘Shanahans. Rib-eye steak. I’m stuffed.’ He absent-mindedly rubbed his stomach.

‘With who?’

‘Work people.’

‘Who?’

‘What’s this, the Spanish inquisition?’

‘No, just a wife asking a husband who he had dinner with.’

‘A few guys from the office. You don’t know them.’

‘I wish you would have told me.’

‘It wasn’t a social thing. Nobody else’s wives were there.’

‘I didn’t mean – I’d like to have known so I wouldn’t have bothered cooking for you.’

‘Christ, Ruth, I’m sorry you cooked and bought a bloody pie,’ he exploded.

‘Sssh,’ she said closing her eyes and hoping his raised voice wouldn’t wake the baby.

‘No! I won’t sssh!’ he boomed. ‘Okay?’ He made his way into the parlour, leaving his shoes in the middle of the hallway and his papers and envelopes strewn across the hall table.

Ruth took another deep breath, turned away from his mess and made her way to the opposite side of the house.

When Lou rejoined his wife, she was sitting at the kitchen table eating lasagne and salad, the pie next in line to be eaten, watching women in spandex jump around on the large plasma in the attached informal living room.

‘I thought you’d eaten with the kids,’ he remarked, after watching her for a while.

‘I did,’ she said, through a full mouth.

‘So why are you eating again?’ He looked at his watch. ‘It’s almost eleven. A bit late to eat, don’t you think?’

‘You eat at this hour,’ she frowned.

‘Yes, but I’m not the one who complains that I’m fat and then eats two dinners and a pie,’ he laughed.

She swallowed the food, feeling like a rock was going down her throat. He hadn’t noticed his words, hadn’t intended to hurt her. He never intended to hurt her; he just did. After a long silence in which Ruth had lost the anger and built up the appetite to eat again, Lou joined her at the kitchen table, in the conservatory. On the other side of the window the blackness clung to the cold pane, eager to get inside. Beyond it were the millions of lights of the city across the bay, like Christmas lights dangling from the blackness.

‘It’s been a weird day today,’ Lou finally said.

‘How?’

‘I don’t know,’ he sighed. ‘It just felt funny. I felt funny.’

‘I feel like that most days,’ Ruth smiled.

‘I must be coming down with something. I just feel … out of sorts.’

She felt his forehead. ‘You’re not hot.’

‘I’m not?’ He looked at her in surprise and then felt it himself. ‘I feel hot. It’s this guy at work.’ He shook his head. ‘So odd.’

Ruth frowned and studied him, not used to seeing him so inarticulate.

‘It started out well.’ He swirled his wine around his glass. ‘I met a man called Gabe outside the office. A homeless guy – well, I don’t know if he was homeless, he says he has a place to stay, but he was begging on the streets anyway.’

At that stage the baby monitor began crackling as Pud started to cry softly. Just a gentle sleepy moaning at first. Knife and fork down and with the unfinished plate pushed away, Ruth prayed for him to stop.

‘Anyway,’ Lou continued, not even noticing, ‘I bought him a coffee and we got talking.’

‘That was nice of you,’ Ruth said. Her maternal instincts were kicking in and the only voice she could now hear was that of her child, as his sleepy moans turned to full-blown cries.

‘He reminded me of me,’ Lou said, confused now. ‘He was exactly like me and we had the funniest conversation about shoes.’ He laughed, thinking back over it. ‘He could remember every single pair of shoes that walked into the building, so I hired him. Well, I didn’t, I called Harry –’

‘Lou, honey,’ she cut in, ‘do you not hear that?’

He looked at her blankly, irritated at first that she’d butted in, and then cocked his head to listen. Finally, the cries penetrated his thoughts.

‘Fine, go on,’ he sighed, massaging the bridge of his nose. ‘But as long as you remember that I was telling you about my day, because you’re always giving out that I don’t,’ he mumbled.

‘What is that supposed to mean?’ She raised her voice. ‘Your son is crying. Do I have to sit here all night while he wails for help until you’ve finished your story about a homeless man who likes shoes, or would you ever go and check on him of your own accord, do you think?’

‘I’ll do it,’ he said angrily, though not making a move from his chair.

‘No, I’ll do it.’ She stood up from the table. ‘I want you to do it without being reminded. You don’t do it for brownie points, Lou, you’re supposed to want to do it.’

‘You don’t seem too eager to do it yourself now,’ he grumbled, fiddling with his cufflinks.

Halfway from the table to the kitchen door, she stopped. ‘You know you haven’t taken Ross for one single day by yourself?’

‘You must be serious, you’re actually using his real name. Where has all that come from?’

It was all coming out of her now that she was frustrated. ‘You haven’t changed his nappy, you haven’t fed him.’

‘I’ve fed him,’ he protested.

The wails got louder.

‘You haven’t prepared one bottle, made him one meal, dressed him, played with him. You haven’t spent any time with him alone, without me being here to run in every five minutes to take him from you while you send an email or answer a phone call. The child has been living in the world for over a year now, Lou. It’s been over a year.’

‘Hold on.’ He ran his hand through his hair and held it there, clenching a handful of hair with a tight fist, a sign of his anger. ‘How have we gotten from talking about my day, which you always want to know so much about – second for second – to this attack?’

‘You were so busy talking about you that you didn’t hear your child,’ she said tiredly, knowing this conversation was going the same place as every other similar argument they’d had. Nowhere.

Lou looked around the room and held out his hands dramatically, emphasising the house. ‘Do you think I sit at my desk all day twiddling my thumbs? No, I work my hardest trying to juggle everything so that you and the kids can have all this, so that I can feed Ross, so excuse me if I don’t fill his mouth every morning with mashed banana.’

‘You don’t juggle anything, Lou. You choose one thing over another. There’s a difference.’

‘I can’t be in two places at once, Ruth! If you need help around here, I’ve already told you, just say the word and we could have a nanny here any day you want.’

He knew he’d walked himself into a bigger argument, and as Pud’s wails grew louder on the baby monitor, he prepared for the inevitable onslaught. Just to avoid the same dreaded argument, he almost added, ‘And I promise not to sleep with this one.’

But the argument never came. Instead, her shoulders shrank, her entire demeanour altered, as she gave up the fight and instead went to tend to her son.

Lou reached for the remote control and held it towards the TV like a gun. He pressed the trigger angrily and powered off the TV. The sweating spandexed women diminished into a small circle of light in the centre of the screen before disappearing completely.

He reached for the plate of apple pie on the table and began picking at it, wondering how on earth this had all started from the second he walked in the door. It would end as it did so many other nights: he would go to bed and she would be asleep, or at least pretend to be. A few hours later he would wake up, work out, get showered and go to work.

He sighed, then on hearing his exhale only then noticed that the baby monitor had become silent of Pud’s cries, but it still crackled. As he walked towards it to turn it off, he heard other noises that made him reach for the volume dial. Turning it up, his heart broke as the sounds of Ruth’s quiet sobs filled the kitchen.