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Chapter Three

From: ed@sundayinsignia.ie

To: Keeley Considine

Subject: Re: Extended break

Hi, Keeley.

So you’ve got yourself a cottage in Lissamore?

Nice. Pity about the tax on second homes though, ain’t it ;b

Enjoy your ‘extended break’, but please note that I’m holding you to your contract, which has a further three weeks to run. (Not having broadband is no excuse. I Googled the joint: there’s an internet café in the village.)

Yours (I mean it),

Leo

PS: Click here. You interviewed him once, years

ago, didn’t you? How about nailing her?

Keeley allowed herself a reflective moment, then refilled her coffee mug and clicked on the next email in her inbox. It was from her grandmother’s solicitor, to tell her that the keys to the cottage were ready to be picked up from his office, and reminding her that – as well as inheritance tax – she would now be eligible for the new tax on second homes. On the radio, some pundit was talking about property prices. ‘The reality is that prices have plummeted by fifty per cent in the Galway region. This includes holiday residences, which have been flying on to the market since the introduction of the tax on second homes . . .’ Keeley pressed the ‘off’ switch. She didn’t want to be reminded for the third time that morning about the new tax on second homes. The third email she clicked on was from her accountant, alerting her to the fact that she would now be eligible to pay . . .

Click! The email went shooting off back into her mailbox.

There would be more unpalatable stuff, she knew, waiting for her at her work address. She steeled herself before setting sail for mail2web. In keeley.c@sundayinsignia.ie there was the usual assortment of mail to do with the previous Sunday’s interviewee. The subject had been an up-and-coming young model who also happened to be the daughter of a major theatrical agent, and among the acidic responses provoked were: ‘She only got where she is because of who she is.’ ‘My daughter could do a million times better! See attached pic.’ ‘Who did she blow to get her face on the cover?’ Delete, delete, delete. Keeley found the rancour of some of the email feedback she was subjected to truly dispiriting. Since she’d returned to Ireland from the States, she had come to realise that there might be some truth in the old adage about the Irish being a nation of begrudgers.

Keeley Considine’s brief each week was to conduct an in-depth interview with an Irish celebrity-du-jour. So far, she’d included among her interviewees a singer/songwriter suffering from early onset Alzheimer’s; a fashion designer who had been abused as a child; an ex-priest who was now living as a woman; and a gay government minister who had walked out on her husband and children (she was now an ex-government minister). What connected all Keeley’s subjects was a moment of life-changing insight – an epiphany – which was why her Sunday column was called (ta-ra!) ‘Epiphanies’. Since being approached by the Insignia the previous year, she’d conducted fifty-one interviews. Fifty-one weeks as confidante to strangers, and forty-one weeks as mistress to the newspaper’s editor had left Keeley feeling burned out.

She could, she thought ruefully, have been a candidate for one of her own interviews. Attractive Ex-pat Journalist (AEJ) returns to Ireland seeking employment after a decade in New York, during which period she’d served time on a major Sunday newspaper, both as rising star features writer, and as mistress to the editor. Until his wife found out. And whaddayouknow – within three months of arriving back on her home turf, AEJ makes the very same mistake. Except this time, AEJ was in grave danger of falling in love.

Keeley’s epiphany had occurred when she got the news that her grandmother had left her a cottage in the village of Lissamore in the west of Ireland. Her initial reaction had been one of bemusement. What to do with the joint? Her grandmother had moved out years ago (Keeley had childhood memories of pootling around waterlogged beaches in the so-called summer months), and since then the cottage had languished as a holiday rental on the books of a letting agency called Coolnamara Hideaways. Keeley’s dad was always moaning about the fact that it cost more to maintain than it ever brought in, but he had never managed to persuade his mother to sell. She was, for some reason, adamant that the cottage should go to her only granddaughter on her death. And now Gran had died, and Keeley had come into her inheritance, and was liable for the property tax on second homes.

Thanks, Gran, she had thought the day after the funeral, staring morosely at the images of her bequest on the Coolnamara Hideaways website. Curlew Cottage was all whitewashed charm outside, all bog-standard pine inside, and – altogether – most un-Keeley Considine. But then she had looked around at her Ikea-furnished apartment with its Bang & Olufsen HD TV and its Bose sound system and the Nespresso machine she rarely used because she usually bought her coffee from Starbucks, and she’d had the most surprisingly unoriginal thought she’d had in a very long time. She, Keeley Considine, with her BA in creative writing and her diploma in journalism and her award for excellence in celebrity profiles – had thought ‘A change is as good as a rest’. And then she had taken Curlew Cottage off Coolnamara Hideaways’ books and composed the email to Leo, telling him that she wanted a break.

It would come as no surprise to him. Their relationship had taken a hiding since his wife had happened upon them having dinner à deux in the Trocadero. Keeley was convinced she’d been set up. The memory of that evening had the power to make her break into a cold sweat every time she thought about it . . .

‘What are you wearing under that plain – but clearly very chic – little black dress?’ Leo had asked conversationally, as he refilled her wineglass. ‘Anything interesting?’

‘Yes, actually,’ replied Keeley, taking a sip of wine. ‘I’m wearing that very pretty Stella McCartney bra and panties set you bought for me in Agent Provocateur.’

‘The black lace ones?’

‘Yes.’

‘Suspenders or hold-ups?’

‘Hold-ups.’

‘Lace topped?’

‘But of course.’

Leo gave her a debonair smile. ‘I have another present for you, Ms Considine.’

‘How kind! It’s not even my birthday!’

‘It’s your un-birthday, as per Lewis Carroll’s neologism. Many happy returns.’

Leaning down, Leo had produced a small giftwrapped box from his attaché case. Keeley recognised the wrapping paper immediately. The gift was from Coco de Mer in Covent Garden, the sexiest shop in the world.

She looked down at it as he placed it on the table, then looked back at him and raised an eyebrow. ‘Dare I open it in a public place?’ she asked.

‘You may. The box is very discreet.’

Unloosening the ribbon, Keeley peeled away the giftwrap and folded it carefully: Coco de Mer giftwrap was far too pretty to waste. Beneath was an elegant black box, that was – as Keeley saw when she raised the lid – lined with silk. Nestling in the silk were two perfectly smooth egg-shaped stones, one of jade, one of obsidian.

‘Love eggs?’ she said.

‘Well deduced. Concubines used them in ancient China.’

‘What a very, very thoughtful present,’ said Keeley, slanting Leo a smile. ‘My pelvic floor muscles could do with a thorough workout.’

‘Why not give them a go?’

‘Now?’

‘Yes. Isn’t it time you powdered your nose?’

‘You’re absolutely right. I’m all aglow.’

Sending Leo another oblique smile, Keeley unfurled herself from the banquette and slid the box into her handbag.

‘One moment, sweetheart.’ The skin on her forearm where he touched her sang.

‘Yes?’

His voice was so low, she had to stoop a little to hear him.

‘Leave your panties off.’

‘That goes without saying, chéri.’

And Keeley turned and sashayed in the direction of the loo, knowing that Leo’s eyes were following her every step of the way. In the cubicle, she stripped off her panties, slipped them into her handbag, took the love eggs from their satin-lined box, and inserted them. One. Oh! Two. Oh! The jade and obsidian felt delicious, cool and smooth against her warm flesh, and Keeley felt anticipation surge through her when she thought of the treat in store for her later. And for Leo, too. She’d bought him a silver cock ring last time she was in London.

In the boudoir of the ladies room, she reapplied her lipstick and spritzed herself with a little scent. Her reflection regarded her from the mirror, a half smile playing around her lips, the pupils of her eyes dilated, a flush high on her cheeks that was not courtesy of Clinique. Dear God, she was horny! There would be no dessert this evening, that was for sure. Not in the restaurant, anyway. She had Häagen Dazs Dulce de Leche at home, and fresh Egyptian cotton sheets just begging to be laundered again tomorrow. Keeley squirted Neal’s Yard Lime and Lemongrass onto her tongue, tousled her hair a little, and left the ladies room, Chanel No. 5 wafting in her wake, walking tall and working her hips; the way the promise of excellent sex makes a real lady walk.

‘Everything in place?’ asked Leo, as she resumed her seat at the table.

‘You betcha,’ said Keeley, cool as you like. ‘Perhaps you should think about settling up.’

Leo raised a hand to summon the waiter, and Keeley broke a crust of the remains of the baguette on her side plate, just for something to toy with while waiting for the bill to be sorted. And as she did so, a woman whom she recognised as Leo’s wife came into the restaurant, and made straight for the maître d’.

‘I thought you said Rachel was in Cork?’ she said.

‘She is.’

‘No she’s not. She’s behind you, Leo, and she’s headed our way. Oh, fuck, oh, fuck – this is just . . . Oh fuck.’

It was like watching a car crash in slow motion. The maître d’ had indicated their whereabouts, and Rachel was moving towards them now, dazzling Colgate smile fixed in place.

‘Good evening!’ she fluted, as she slid next to Leo on the banquette opposite Keeley. ‘Don’t worry about another place setting. I’ve already asked the maître d’ to sort that out. I know I’m a little late, but I’m sure you won’t mind if I have something? An hors d’oeuvre is all I require, since I had a late lunch. Oh, good. I see they’re still doing Baba Ganoush – I haven’t eaten here in ages, and I thought the menu might have changed. And I’m so sorry, I haven’t introduced myself. We met at an Insignia event some time ago, but you may not remember me, Keeley. I’m Rachel, Leo’s wife. How nice to see you again. You haven’t changed a bit. That’s the same dress you were wearing last time I met you. Zara, yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘How brave!’

It went on, and it went on. Rachel was relentless. She ordered her Baba Ganoush and another bottle of wine, and she sat and chatted about the Insignia and her husband and her children and the fact that she had been obliged to give up her very successful career as a pharmacist in order to rear Leo’s family but she didn’t resent a single minute of the time spent with the children since they were all prodigies just like her mother-in-law told her Leo had been, and wasn’t the weather stunning, and wasn’t it simply wonderful that Keeley had inherited a little cottage in the west of Ireland that she could visit when the stresses and strains of urban living became too hard for her to handle. And good heavens! Was that the time? They really ought to be making tracks – Leo had the school run to contend with in the morning, and Rachel had a parent-teacher meeting and thanks so much, Keeley, for taking care of the bill.

And all the time Keeley had sat there with the jade and obsidian eggs inside her, not feeling loved up at all, but rather like a constipated hen. And after Leo and Rachel had left the restaurant, she had ordered a large brandy and sat nursing it on her own, pretending to do important stuff on her iPhone and all the time flexing her pelvic muscles – two, three, four! – because she was fearful that when she stood up the jade and obsidian eggs might fall to the floor and be pounced upon by the punctilious maître d’ . . .

Yours (I mean it) . . .

Keeley returned to Leo’s email, re-read it, then clicked on the link he had sent. It took her to the website of a publishing trade magazine, and a headline that read ‘Gallagher Muse to Pen Children’s Book’.

Top literary agent Tony Baines has negotiated a high six-figure deal for a first-time author with children’s publishing giant Pandora. ‘Pussy Willow and the Pleasure Palace of Peachy Stuff’, written by Ophelia Gallagher, is aimed at seven- to ten-year-olds. A former actress, Ophelia Gallagher is wife and muse of the internationally renowned Irish painter Hugo Gallagher. Ms Gallagher was inspired to write the book after visiting Sans Souci, the summer palace in Potsdam built by Frederick the Great of Prussia.

Hugo Gallagher. She didn’t know he’d married again. Keeley had conducted one of her very first interviews with Gallagher about ten years earlier, when she was fresh out of college. It had been at the opening of an exhibition of his paintings in the Demeter Gallery in Dublin – his breakthrough exhibition, as it had turned out. At that time Hugo Gallagher’s star had been in the ascendant. After years as a struggling artist, he had emerged from obscurity to take his place centre stage in the Irish art world with a series of astonishing abstracts. She remembered being introduced to a saturnine man, loose-limbed and sexy – a man who exuded a lethal charm. She remembered his then-wife, a woman called . . . Paloma, and a child: a tousle-haired gypsy with angular limbs and intense dark eyes. She remembered how the mother had exuded an anxious air, and how her anxiety had escalated in proportion to the copious amounts of wine consumed by her husband. The child, she recalled, had hunkered on the floor in a corner of the gallery, oblivious to the brouhaha around her, drawing with a leaky biro on the back of a price list.

Keeley wished she could remember the price a Gallagher painting would have fetched back then. Ha’penny place in comparison to today’s reckoning, she suspected, because by the end of that evening’s feeding frenzy, every single canvas on the pristine gallery walls had been sold. Thereafter Hugo Gallagher had been able to double, treble, quadruple and, finally, simply name his price. Was he still coining it in? Keeley was curious as to how the artist’s career had fared in the intervening decade. She’d read somewhere that Paloma had left him several years ago, making way for the current Mrs Gallagher.

Returning her attention to the screen, Keeley studied the photograph that accompanied the blurb. Ophelia was a beautiful woman – petite and peachy-skinned, with huge, limpid, indigo blue eyes and an irresistible smile. She was dressed down in dungarees and bare feet, lustrous hair tumbling artlessly around her shoulders; she had a tiny tattoo of a daisy in the hollow of her collarbone and a fetching gap between her front teeth. She came across as fun, youthful, and with a sense of mischief – yet there was something of the earth mother about her too. Had she used the little Gallagher girl – her stepdaughter – as a sounding board for her book, Keeley wondered. But rudimentary arithmetic told her that Caitlín would have been way too old for children’s stories by the time Ophelia and Hugo finally got married.

Google beckoned.

Wikipedia told her nothing she didn’t already know about Hugo Gallagher’s early life. The poverty, the drinking, the acquisition of the famous Crooked House (which he claimed to have won in an all-night poker game), the failed marriages to his first wife and subsequently to Paloma. Also listed were the offspring of those marriages: the son Raoul, an architect; the daughter Caitlín. Documented, too, was the meteoric rise to fame that followed that sell-out exhibition in the Demeter Gallery, and the stupendous prices his work had fetched in the rampant Celtic Tiger era. Lately, however, information pertaining to the Great Artist seemed a little more hazy. There had been no output for the past couple of years, although he was rumoured to be working on an import ant new series. Reading between the lines, it wasn’t difficult to deduce that drink was to blame. Hugo Gallagher was following in the footsteps of those legendary wild men of art – Pollock, Rothko, Basquiat – destined to burn out and leave a priceless legacy behind him. The problem was that once he died, although his paintings would soar in value, it would be of no benefit to his family because – unless he really was working on a new series – all his paintings had already been sold and were now hanging in public and private collections all over the world.

The Wikipedia link to Gallagher’s current wife – former actress Ophelia Spence – told Keeley that she had appeared in major theatre venues all over the world. Roles undertaken included the maid in Chekhov’s Three Sisters, the maid in Phaedra and the maid in Private Lives. Three little maids in a row hardly constituted an illustrious stage career, concluded Keeley. Ophelia, she learned, had met Hugo Gallagher at a charity fundraiser in Dublin at the height of his fame, and assumed the mantle of his muse and mistress within a month. They had no children. Pussy Willow and the Pleasure Palace of Peachy Stuff was her first book.

Oh, yawn! Keeley had heard, seen and read it all before. The shelves of her local charity shop were groaning with unread copies (many of them hardbacks intended for review and donated by Keeley) of novels, cookbooks and memoirs by former actresses, models, columnists and TV personalities, all desperate to take advantage of their waning celebrity status and make a few bucks before they sank without trace beneath the public radar. Once they dipped below number ten in the search engine’s ranking, they were bollixed. Something told Keeley that, since Ophelia Gallagher’s main claim to fame was her illustrious surname, the former actress’s season in the Google sun was a particularly limited one. Why bother extending the poor creature’s shelf life by wasting a precious ‘Epiphany’ on her and her children’s book, when there were hundreds of more worthy wannabes queuing up to be interviewed?

And yet, and yet . . . something about Ophelia Gallagher intrigued Keeley. Why had she written a children’s book when she had no children? Why hadn’t she written a novel or a cookbook or an autobiography? Why hadn’t she divorced the drunken husband and penned a kiss-and-tell, warts-and-all memoir? Why hadn’t she designed a clothing line, or launched a signature scent?

Keeley picked up her phone and dialled the publishing house. Within minutes she had been put through to the publicity department, and secured an ‘at home’ interview with Ms Gallagher, which she arranged to dovetail neatly into her westward itinerary. The Crooked House was just off the N6, on the way to Lissamore.

‘Wouldn’t it be more convenient for you to meet in a hotel?’ the publicist had asked. ‘No,’ said Keeley. ‘It’s always more interesting to talk to someone on their home ground.’

It was true. Interviewees were always more relaxed in their home surroundings. A relaxed Ophelia would be an Ophelia with her defences down. And that was just how Keeley wanted her.