Читать книгу Be Careful What You Wish For - Martina Devlin - Страница 7

Patrick was standing on the steps of the Fitzwilliam Hotel scanning the traffic.

‘You’re late but I forgive you.’ He jumped into the front passenger seat and skim-kissed her cheek.

She flinched, then tried to mask it by flicking her hair behind her ears.

‘Will I find a parking space so we can go into the Green?’ She gestured across the road towards St Stephen’s Green, the city’s oxygen lung.

‘If you like. Or somewhere more private might be appropriate.’ He took stock of her profile as she searched for a gap in the stream of cars sailing around the park

‘Merrion then,’ she agreed, and headed back the way she’d come.

He started speaking as soon as she’d parked her Golf. As she locked the car, still bending over it, words poured from him in a rehearsed cascade.

Helen touched his elbow. ‘Wait until we’re sitting down.’

But they didn’t gravitate towards a bench; instead they paced the park’s outer perimeter, past the gaudily painted statue of Oscar Wilde facing his home, looking as louche as any devotee of his work could hope for; past flowerbeds waiting for spring to resuscitate them; past the canvas backs of paintings attached to railings, artwork which tourists examined and sometimes bought. But only if it were sentimental or scenic and preferably both.

They returned to Wild Oscar’s statue – another of Molly’s nicknames – and paused to read some of his epigrams.

‘I love his children’s stories although I didn’t discover them until childhood was a dim and distant memory,’ said Helen. ‘Especially “The Happy Prince”; I wept for days about the dead swallow.’

‘How can a story called “The Happy Prince” leave readers sobbing? It’s irrational,’ Patrick objected.

‘You’ve obviously never read it.’

‘I’m more of a P. D. James man myself. That’s when I find the time to read at all. It takes me weeks to plough through a paperback.’ Patrick bent for a closer look at one of Wilde’s witticisms on the plinth, immune to Helen’s scandalised glance. ‘How about this one, “We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars.”’

‘I keep hunting for my favourite one – his spin on the love–hate relationship between parents and children.’ Helen followed the plinth around its four sides but couldn’t locate it. ‘I can never remember the exact wording but it’s to do with children beginning by loving their parents, then judging them and rarely, if ever, forgiving them.’

Patrick zipped his flying jacket against the chill. ‘Obviously too depressing for the tourists, that gem. Safer to stick with the ones that lend themselves to posters and T-shirts’ He laid an arm casually across her shoulder; she sidestepped just as casually to widen the gap between them, and it dropped away.

Two Americans nearby were studying Oscar’s statue.

‘He made perfume, right?’ The woman’s voice was so penetrating it was impossible to ignore.

‘No, honey, he was a writer.’ Her male companion corrected her to Patrick’s and Helen’s relief. Otherwise they’d have felt obliged to set her right. National honour demanded it.

‘One of his books was turned into a movie,’ continued the knowledgeable American. ‘It was called A Picture of Dorian Black.’

Patrick and Helen cringed in unison and turned their steps towards the centre of the park where there were no statues to attract sightseers. As they walked – it was too wintry for strolling – they spoke of his life in London, hers in Dublin, their shared experience growing up in Kilkenny, of jobs and homes and even the lighthouse tattoo he aspired to as a boy. It emerged that he’d actually visited a tattoo parlour, clutching the readies, during his first summer in England but reconsidered when he encountered the needles. Helen laughed aloud while he described his flight, still clinging to the patterns book, and again he spontaneously rested an arm on her shoulder. This time she allowed it to stay.

By and by she sighed. ‘We should talk.’

‘I thought that’s what we were doing.’

‘Chewing gum chatter.’

They ensconsed themselves side by side on a park bench, isolated against the grumble of traffic a few yards away, not touching but acutely aware of each other, and he asked her to tell him what to do. She told him. He asked her again. Her answer didn’t vary. Then he nodded in acknowledgement of her prudence and said he’d return to his hotel now. He was staying overnight, catching the Monday morning red-eye flight back to London.

Helen knew she should feel as though the iron bars encircling her chest had been yanked off; instead it was as if their diameter contracted and they tightened, a tourniquet on her diaphragm. But she realised it was impossible even to contemplate love with this man.

And so she prepared to walk away. Until a minuscule movement changed everything.

Patrick was waiting for Helen as she tugged at a glove lying in her lap, attempting to pull it back on, but her fingers couldn’t find the openings. Her head bent forward, her hair shielding her face, a flimsy carapace against this world breeding bleakness now they were on the brink of taking their leave of one another. She struggled against a sense of loss, an emotion as bewildering as it was overwhelming, for how can you mourn the absence of something you’ve never had?

And yet she did keenly feel a void. She knew he couldn’t be the one to fill it, although meeting him after three years had wrenched open the vacuum. So she heaved a rustling breath of resignation and nodded towards Patrick, signalling she was ready. Time to walk away from this windy park, where they huddled in scarves and coats, their bodies trembling in the winter chill but their minds impervious to it. Time to walk away from each other.

But the glove impeded her efforts at composure. Tears sprang in her eyes as she channelled her frustration at her and Patrick’s self-imposed separation towards the glove. In a passion, she hurled it to the ground – an insignificant movement charged with import. The butterfly’s wings that flapped up a hurricane. For he bent to pick it up and as he reached the leather to her, their eyes connected; it was as if her misery flowed and melded with his and he could not bear to acknowledge their imperative to separate. Patrick stretched his hand out and guided her head onto his shoulder and she nestled against it. They sat without speaking or moving, his hand splayed around her skull … there was such comfort in his touch.

In the aftermath, attempting to make sense of what followed, Helen thought there was an inevitability about their caress and the rollercoaster experience it precipitated. Did they really think they could put the brakes on something so powerful? Yet the human capacity for self-delusion is infinite. So she lay against Patrick with her head on his shoulder, his stubble bristling her forehead, and was suffused by exaltation. Nothing mattered beyond this moment ringfenced in time.

She had no way of knowing if they rested together for minutes or hours, leaching solace from their togetherness and content in the chrysalis of one another’s embrace. After a while she became aware of children’s voices as they ran along the path near the bench, arguing about the ownership of a comic. A woman’s voice interjected, refereeing the dispute. Helen lifted her head in the direction of the sounds, hesitant about her and Patrick’s public intimacy. Cities weren’t truly anonymous, particularly not ones as village-proportioned as Dublin – above all when there was something to hide. The voices seemed to be receding. His hand on her hair urged Helen’s head back to its perch. She needed no second bidding; it belonged there.

This time Patrick stroked her hair, winding its skeins around his hand and threading them through his fingers. Once she felt him incline and inhale their scent. Then his hand dropped to the area of her back between her shoulder blades and rhythmically he stroked in circles, easing away a misery she’d scarcely acknowledged existed. And still she kept her face turned from his, for she was loath to meet his eye. Reluctant and paradoxically drawn to it.

She felt Patrick’s lips brush the top of her hair. It wasn’t a kiss, more an unconscious gesture as he moved his head to incline it cheek down on top of her. She waited, accepting the weight of him, and then raised her face to his and they looked at one another. There was turmoil, a churning such as she’d known only with him. And without him. They gazed, grey eyes swimming into grey-green, then she found herself smiling and she could never recall whether he smiled first and she responded or if it was the other way around. But smiling they were, into one another’s face, with an unfettered joy.

They had nothing to smile about. Even as he held her a recess of her subconscious warned she should drop this encounter into amber – store it up against future barrenness – and yet when she looked into the face of the man she loved she could not but register pleasure A memory of reading about Richard Burton gatecrashed her mind. He’d told once in an interview how he’d laughed aloud when he first met Elizabeth Taylor because she was so exquisite. Helen felt like laughing too, even as she studied the path Patrick’s eyebrows cut across his face and the curve of his mouth – a mouth she knew already as well as if it grew on her own face.

A splattering of rain tiptoed across them, an apologetic reminder of a world beyond their cocoon, and Patrick stood, holding his hand out to her.

‘Come on. I’ve already seen to it you’re half frozen, I’m not going to have you drenched as well.’

His hand gripped hers, lacing fingers, and he pulled her to her feet. She’d gladly have sat on that bench until they seeped into the structure, matter fusing with matter, but she allowed herself to be drawn upwards, and walked towards the exit. Towards real life.

Near the gate a clump of snowdrops bowed their heads against the wind; Helen marvelled that no sound emanated from their bell-like heads – she always expected them to chime.

‘There are snowdrops in the front garden of a house in the street behind mine,’ she told him. ‘I haven’t been in my own house long enough to plant any. But whenever I’m melancholic I look at their snowdrops and my heart is lifted. I sometimes feel like knocking on the door and thanking the owners for planting them. I’d like them to know how much joy their froth of tiny blossoms have given me this winter.’

‘Perhaps they do know.’ His grey-green eyes softened. ‘Perhaps they’ve been watching from the window, noticing how you pause to look. They probably say, “There goes the beautiful girl who likes our snowdrops.”’

She felt bashfully enchanted by the compliment, hardly daring to believe that Patrick might find her beautiful.

They walked on and still his hand was woven through hers. But trepidation coursed through her once the park was behind them and they were on the pavement; other people appeared and she dropped his hand. She had to be sensible, even if he seemed impervious to others noticing them behave like sweethearts. Helen didn’t realise that, whether they touched or not, the lover’s mark was upon them. They were linked by that invisible chain binding those who love, a bond which others sense. And occasionally envy.

By her car she offered him a lift back to his hotel. Patrick demurred; he needed a brisk walk to stamp the refrigeration from his bones. Helen yearned for him to step inside the metal box with her, to breathe the same air, to be physically close again. Perversely, because she craved it so much, she knew she should deny herself.

‘I suppose this is goodbye then.’ She doodled her key fob across the moisture on the passenger window.

‘I suppose.’

Vehemence laced her voice. ‘How I hate that word.’

‘Then let’s not say goodbye yet,’ said Patrick. ‘Come for a coffee with me. Let’s try the art gallery.’

She went. Virtue definitely wasn’t its own reward and she was being pious enough without aspiring to martyrdom. Besides, they’d be safe in a public place. Consenting adults drinking coffee, what could be more innocent. To the onlooker.

‘We have to admire one exhibit at least,’ she stipulated. ‘Maybe the Caravaggio. I’ll show you where he painted Judas Iscariot’s ear in the wrong place and had to blot it out and re-draw it. I like that – it shows genius takes effort as well as inspiration. More credible than being swept along by the muse.’

She was gabbling, Helen realised, but the way his eyes lingered on her mouth unnerved her.

She hurtled on. ‘I can’t be doing with people who only go into art galleries to drink coffee and buy greetings cards. Kevin Boylan, who’s in my pod at work, meets all his pick-ups there. He thinks it portrays him as cultured, but he wouldn’t know a Yeats from an O’Conor. He’s the sort of culture you find inside the teapot after you’ve forgotten to wash out the dregs for a couple of weeks. My friend Molly, the journalist on the Chronicle – you should remember her, everyone does – has just signed on for a course of lectures here. I wanted to, but Thursday nights are impossible because –’

‘Helen, we can look at the Caravaggio.’ Patrick intercepted her torrent. ‘We can look at as many Caravaggios as you like.’

‘There is only the one,’ she said. But she stopped prattling.

He fetched coffee while she pretended to read the gallery’s February brochure. As he placed the cup and saucer in front of her he trailed his fingertips across her face. She started; the gesture was so tender, so instinctive, it sent delight coursing through her veins, but was he completely insane? Anyone could have observed them.

There was silence. When you want to speak of love, any other conversation is too trite to contemplate. Or maybe, she pondered, they were both struck dumb by their coup de foudre. It wasn’t totally unexpected, it seemed to have been there always in her life, and yet … there’s no way to prepare for meltdown.

‘Do you believe in love at first sight?’ she asked.

Patrick slanted a glance at her. ‘How could I not believe?’

But love, she thought later, is supposed to exault you, to energise you. This love was packaged in wave after wave of misery. Being with him rendered her bleakly disconsolate and not being with him glazed her in yet more desolation. The joy was sporadic, the guilt permanent.

Some people, she reflected that night, lying in bed with her brain whirring, were able to make it work. They fell in love with people who reciprocated. They invented lives together – homes, children, pets, sun-and-sand holidays, Sunday lunches with other couples. Why not her? Why couldn’t she fall in love with a man who was available – that would be a flying start. Start as you mean to go on, isn’t that what they say? No wonder she was toppling over hurdles. But it was all a matter of luck, Helen concluded resentfully, and she’d been short-changed.

The theorising and labelling and deconstructing and attempting to make sense of something that defied definition came later, however. For now she was drinking latte, content to feel his shoulder against hers. Body heat – no comfort could match it. He brought her a scone and jam, she knew she’d never be able to eat it tidily and ignored it until he cajoled her to slice and nibble it.

‘You don’t eat enough,’ he scolded. ‘There isn’t an ounce of flesh on you. You need someone to look after you.’

‘There’s no one to do that. I must be more trouble than I’m worth,’ she shrugged, but her heart was singing.

‘Do you remember when we all used to go on holidays to a leaky caravan in Tramore?’ asked Patrick.

She rolled her eyes and giggled. Theirs was invariably the wettest fortnight of the summer, the first two weeks in July – decreed by Helen’s mother from habit because her parents had always taken her away then. But her mother grew up in Belfast and Helen’s grandparents had wanted to avoid the North’s tribal tensions during the run-up to the Orange parades on the Twelfth; it was hardly relevant in Ballydoyle, a mote of a village in County Kilkenny.

‘Who could forget Tramore: Aran cardigans over our swimsuits and goosebumps among the freckles- the epitome of the Irish summer?’ said Helen.

‘Do you ever go to Tramore at all now?’ He tapped his spoon against the handle of his cup.

‘Haven’t been for years. The last time I was there we were on our way to the Burren – I know it was a convoluted route – and stopped off for chips. It looked seedy and peeling but it was out of season, and I’ve heard the place is buzzing now.’

‘Shall we go? Will we jump in the car and head off?’

Helen looked at him in wonder. ‘Tramore in late January – have you been so long in London you’ve forgotten what it’s like, Patrick?’

‘Come on, it’s the best time. Think of the Atlantic breakers, the salt air, the strip-the-flesh-from-your-bones freshness of it all. We can go into the amusement arcade and shove coins into the claw machine, win you a cuddly toy instead of all the gobstoppers we ended up with as kids. I’ll buy you an ice-cream cone with everything on top.’

His enthusiasm was infectious.

‘Let’s do it,’ she concurred.

However, with her agreement, his get-up-and-go stood up and left. His excited expression evaporated, he clattered his cup against the sugar bowl. ‘It’s too late in the day.’

Did he mean literally or figuratively? she wondered.

‘We’d never reach there before dark,’ he added. ‘We’ll do it another time.’

‘Sure,’ she agreed, knowing there’d be no other time.

All they had was now. There was no future for them. Certainly not as lovers; she didn’t think as friends – that required a mental somersault she was incapable of executing. And comradeship was unsafe. It offered intimacy and they needed distance.

She was word-perfect on the theory, no bother to her, it was this business of executing it that foxed her. So when they loitered on the pavement after their coffee, and instead of turning his steps in the direction of his hotel Patrick walked towards her car, she didn’t object. Helen should have pointed out he was going the wrong way but she held her tongue.

Only five more minutes, she promised herself. That’s not too much time to steal for ourselves; as remains of the day go, it’s meagre enough.

At the car she paused and turned to him. ‘Goodbye then. It’s for the best. And for what it’s worth, I truly think we’re doing what’s right.’

His bewildered stare implied the decision they’d jointly made in the park was a revelation. Had he blacked out and forgotten? This was ridiculous – they agreed on a course of action. Mutually. She jingled her keys, stuttering something inane like ‘Take it easy’.

‘Can I come home with you? I’d like to see where you live. So I can imagine you there.’

‘No!’ Helen practically screeched the refusal. ‘I mean,’ she amended, ‘the place is a tip. I’ll invite you over sometime. Yourself and Miriam.’ She said the woman’s name deliberately as a reality fix.

He ignored it. ‘Please.’

She compressed her resolve. One of the pair had to be strong and he was caving in like ice under sunshine.

‘Patrick, don’t ask me,’ she supplicated.

‘I am asking.’

He tilted her chin upwards so their eyes met and she felt like submitting because she didn’t want to be firm any more. She didn’t want to be virtuous or to worry about doing what was right. She wanted to love and be loved. And this compulsion was beginning to outweigh any other consideration.

‘Another time.’ Helen willed him to leave her alone, knowing if he pressed her again she’d yield. And a miracle happened – he retreated.

‘I’ll call you,’ said Patrick.

He walked away without a backward glance. She watched him until he disappeared from sight and then she watched the empty space which his frame had filled. His tall, lean, rapidly moving shape.

She knew she should feel relief at averting something they’d both regret when the insanity passed. But she was conscious of desolation and the prescience that unfinished business dangled between them. As this certainty over Helen she leaned against the car door to steady herself, for she suddenly felt unable to support her own weight.

Dear God, what were they letting themselves in for?