All That I Leave Behind (36 page)

‘You know, you don’t have to put up with it, Michelle.’

His interruption is so sudden, I look up. He’s standing beside me, too close, leaning against the range, hands in his pockets. A muscle is working in his jaw and his eyes are bright with emotion. ‘I can help you, you know,’ he says more softly.

I put the ledger down, and I go to the pram and I pick Rosie up. Her bottom is heavy and damp and I need to change her nappy. I coo into her ear and she giggles to herself, little feet thrust outwards with excitement.

‘I don’t need anything, Sean,’ I say, my mouth to the top of Rosie’s head.

He tuts impatiently. ‘For God’s sake, Michelle, how can you say that? He’s left you with a child that isn’t yours, humiliated you in front of the whole of Monasterard. I mean, how much longer are you going to put up with it? What kind of a woman allows her husband to do that to her?’

The kind of woman who’s too proud to admit defeat, I think to myself. The kind of woman who is hanging on by her fingernails to everything she’s worked so hard to achieve. The kind of woman who loves her husband, in spite of everything. Because I do love him. I love and hate him at the same time.

‘Please don’t judge me, Sean,’ I say. ‘It’s complicated –’ I begin, but to my horror, he comes over to where I’m sitting and he kneels down beside me, and he puts a hand on my knee. It’s heavy and warm. And I look at it and I think that there might once have been a time when I’d have liked him to put his hand on my knee, to stroke my hair, to kiss me softly on the lips. But not any more. The idea of any man ever holding me again feels revolting to me.

‘Why don’t you kick him out, Michelle? God knows, you run the place yourself anyway. I’ll help you – you can come and live here with me. I’ll look after you. I’ll show you that men aren’t all like him.’ He’s squeezing my hand now and I want him to stop. ‘Please, Michelle, you know how I feel about you. You’ve always known.’ He begins to rub my knee in circles, and it’s making me feel ill, and his other hand is on my shoulder and he’s whispering, ‘Please,’ in my ear.

I jump up so suddenly I have to grab Rosie to stop her from falling off my knee. She gives a wail of surprise. ‘Stop it,’ I say, my voice sharp. ‘Stop it now.’ I lift Rosie into my arms and bundle her into the pram, then turn to manoeuvre it out the door. He tries to stop me then, his hand on my arm. ‘Michelle, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It was a mistake.’

I turn and I look at the kitchen, with its ticking grandfather clock and lovely delft, the kitchen that’s been my haven so often over the years, my refuge, and I see it then, that this, too, was an illusion. I wouldn’t have wanted this life, not one little bit. It would have stifled me, crushed my spirit. I could no more play the farmer’s wife than fly to the moon. The only life I ever wanted, I had, the one I worked so hard for, and I was prepared to pay any price to hang onto it. Even losing the man I loved.

‘You were wrong, you know,’ I say.

‘Wrong about what?’ He looks mystified for a second.

‘That all men aren’t like him. They are. Goodbye, Sean.’

I feel that I’ve used up every ounce of energy and can barely walk out the door and trudge across the yard with the pram. I know he won’t follow me. The exhaustion which now overwhelms me is so powerful, I feel I can barely walk, but instead of turning left to the house, I turn right and push the pram down the towpath a bit, my breath slowing as I walk, the whispering of the rushes and the pip-pip of the wagtail soothing me. Rosie sits high up in her perch and she looks around her, pointing at the hens, at the water, at the rushes, and then she gives a little laugh, her pudgy hands clutching her little pink blanket. It’s then that I understand, that I can see clearly. It’s worthless. All the years of sacrifice, pulling everyone along behind me as I marched on grimly, enduring year after year of it, of the cold, the damp, the discomfort, the sense that my life was just a huge mountain that I would never be finished climbing. For what? To stand here and to feel that the whole thing has been a waste, a sham. I know now that my life here is over.

Rosie looks at me then with those lovely eyes, which are so bright and trusting, and she breaks into a gummy grin. It’s as if she’s talking to me, as if she wants me to save her.

And I know now that that’s what I have to do.

I
t
seemed ironic, June thought, that when she’d spent her entire life trying to escape who she was, she only realised too late what it meant to her. Only when she’d wrecked what she valued most did she even see how little care she’d given it. There was nothing to do now, she knew, but to try to start again.

Gerry had moved out that night, when she’d come back from Monasterard. She hadn’t asked him to leave – if anything, it should have been the other way around, but that was Gerry. He was a good man: she’d known that from the moment she’d set eyes on him, that afternoon in the Shelbourne. She’d been able to see beyond the bluster, the snobbery, the tendency to be a windbag, to the man with the good heart who would do anything for his family. Which is why it wasn’t fair to blame him – the fault was all hers. There was something wrong with
her
, not with Gerry.

He wasn’t looking for revenge because of what she’d done; he wasn’t even angry, although he should have been. He was hurt, and that was far worse. When he’d intercepted her at the top of the stairs, he’d just held her mobile phone out to her, bottom lip trembling, like a lost little boy.

‘Oh.’ That was all she could think to say. ‘Oh.’ She had no idea she’d left the phone behind. She didn’t have to look at the texts, with their silly emoticons, their misspellings. She knew what they said, and now so did Gerry.

‘I won’t read them out,’ he’d said gently. ‘They don’t really bear being read out loud.’

If he’d ranted and raved, it would have been easier – if he’d yelled about the vows they’d taken and did they mean nothing to her, or banished her to the holiday home like Susie’s husband Frank had done when he’d found out about Jao, the instructor, and they’d all had to go rushing down to Rosslare to drink wine and listen to her sob her heart out and feel smug that it wasn’t them. Instead, he’d just looked at her sadly. ‘I blame myself,’ he’d said. ‘If I’d been around more … been less caught up with my job, with this stupid board meeting …’

She’d grown angry then. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Gerry, why on earth are you trying to blame yourself? I’m the one who –’ She hadn’t finished her sentence. The phone lay between them, all the little emoticons that Dave liked to use – the devil’s horns, the endless smiley faces. She didn’t even think to ask herself why she hadn’t deleted them. Maybe she’d wanted Gerry to find them, or was that just too obvious?

‘Is it serious?’ he’d asked.

‘Yes,’ she’d answered.

She hadn’t meant it like that, she thought now as she drove through town. She’d meant ‘serious’ in the sense that wrecking your whole life was serious, managing to lose your husband and family in one week was serious. She was driving him to his mother’s now, a week after the family conference, the two of them wordless as they drove through the grey streets, the people huddled in the early winter wind, darting along the pavement, muffled in scarves and jackets. She pulled up in front of the smart flat on Mespil Road, with its view of the posh bit of the canal, full of barges and pristine swans, suppressing the shiver of revulsion which always gripped her whenever she slipped into her mother-in-law’s orbit. She’d be only too delighted to have her only son back in her lair.

She turned to him then, wondering why he wasn’t getting out of the car, to see tears streaming down his face. ‘Junie, let’s not do this, please. I can’t manage without you, you know that.’ After everything she’d done, she could hardly bear it, but she knew that they had to be strong now – that they – she – couldn’t just go home and pretend that nothing had happened.

‘Is it because we haven’t taken Charlie out for a walk for a while?’ He looked at her hopefully, as if a slight lull in the bedroom department might have set her on a course of complete self-destruction.

‘Oh, God, no.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s not that, believe it or not.’

‘Look, it’s the stress … this new guy at the station – Aidan keeps going on about what a find he is and I’m fighting for my life here, Junie.’ Gerry sniffed. ‘They don’t want old farts like me.’

‘Oh, Gerry.’ June leaned over and dabbed at his tears with a tissue. ‘I had no idea it had got this bad. Why on earth didn’t you tell me? We’ve always been able to tell each other things.’

‘Not recently,’ Gerry said dryly.

‘No, you’re right,’ June agreed, blushing beet red. ‘Gerry, I—’

He held up a hand. ‘No, please, Junie. It makes it worse if you explain. I keep telling myself that it was completely meaningless. Just … bodies and stuff. Please don’t tell me otherwise.’

June shook her head and felt tears springing to her eyes. Tears that she didn’t need to stem, to wipe away and pretend that they’d never happened. She cried for herself and Gerry and for the awful things she’d said to her siblings and for lying and keeping secrets and being a bad mother – everything. And when she finished, she gave her nose a good, loud blow, a honk, and herself and Gerry managed to giggle, like schoolchildren.

‘I’m sorry, Gerry.’

‘I know you are, love. But I’m hurt, and my ego has taken a battering.’

‘And you don’t trust me any more,’ June said.

He didn’t say anything in reply, just shook his head. He didn’t need to say anything.

‘I’m going now, love. Mummy will be wondering what I’m doing out here.’ He nodded in the direction of his mother’s place and they both looked up to her third-floor flat to see her looking out the window. Oh, Christ, June thought – what would that cow make of it? She’d be jubilant. She’d always thought June had no class.

‘Gerry, before you go, can I tell you something?’

He turned around. ‘Of course, Junie, anything.’

She was about to tell him then, to ‘spill’ as India would put it, but instead she shook her head. ‘It’s nothing. I’m sorry.’

‘Junie, are you sure you don’t want to tell me?’ He was gentle. ‘Don’t you think not talking is what got us into this mess in the first place?’

‘Among other things,’ June said grimly. She took a deep breath and let the words come out. ‘I’ve been writing to my mother for years, and I told nobody about it.’

He’d looked puzzled for a few minutes, his forehead creased into a frown. ‘Your
mother
? But she’s dead, or as good as,’ he’d added.

She could have taken offence, but June knew what he meant. As far as Gerry was concerned, Mammy was dead. She’d been gone for years when they’d met and her name had only been mentioned once in all the years they’d been together. Just once. The woman who’d taught her everything, and she’d mentioned her name once. June had felt a wave of shame wash over her. It didn’t matter what Mammy had done. She didn’t deserve that, to be wiped out like that.

June had shaken her head. ‘She’s not dead, Gerry.’

‘Oh.’ He’d shifted slightly in the seat, absorbing the information.

‘That’s right. She’s been living … overseas, and … ehm, she’s written to me now and again over the years.’

‘And you kept it to yourself,’ he said wryly. ‘How well I know you, Junie.’

‘I did,’ she admitted.

‘Why?’

‘I’ve thought about that a lot over the past few weeks and I don’t know. I thought I was protecting the rest of them, or maybe I just wanted Mammy to myself … maybe that was it. Is that really so wrong, Gerry? I mean, it affected me too, her leaving, and no one ever gave me any credit,’ she said.

He reached over and patted her gently on the hand. ‘It’s OK, love, it’ll be OK.’

‘Gerry?’

‘Yes, love?’

‘Why are you being so nice to me?’

Gerry shrugged. ‘Look, I know that I might not have listened much in the past. I suppose that life has been pretty comfortable for me. I’ve just sailed on through without a single obstacle and I forget sometimes that it hasn’t been like that for everyone else. Well, I suppose I’m getting my comeuppance now. I have no idea what to do with myself, do you know that?’ He shook his head. ‘No idea at all.’ He gave a heavy sigh then and blew his nose loudly into a crumpled hankie, which he’d pulled out of his jacket pocket. His eyes were red-rimmed and his face creased with disappointment and June thought she’d never loved him more. But she didn’t deserve him. She just didn’t.

There was a long pause before he said, ‘You know, if it’s any consolation to you, I need to do some thinking too, Junie. I know, it’d be a first,’ he smiled, ‘but there’s a first time for everything, isn’t there?’

‘There is,’ June agreed sadly.

‘And you’ll triumph in the end, I know you will. You’re stronger than you look, you know.’

‘Thanks, Gerry. It’s good of you to say it.’

‘Yes, well … if it’ll bring us back to each other sooner, Junie, I’ll say anything at all, you know that.’ And then he’d leaned towards her and given her a gentle peck on the cheek. ‘I’ll be over to see the girls on Sunday, OK?’

She’d left him on the pavement outside his mother’s, two suitcases beside him, waving, a lost soul. She thought her heart would break.

She texted Dave that night. ‘Meet me at the Shelbourne, 6.30, Friday.’ She didn’t bother asking if that suited him, or if he might be at home with his family on a Friday night. He had a wife and two children – she’d seen photos of them on his desk, and he’d hastily turned them face down. And had she cared? Not really. She’d been so hell bent on getting what she wanted – whatever that was – that she didn’t stop to think about anyone else. How could she have been so selfish – imagine if it were India and Georgia? And then she flushed when the next thought came.

It was the least she could do now to let him go with a bit of style, a bit of dignity.

His reply was typical, full of exclamation marks, and June had tutted as she’d deleted it. She’d need all of her strength to see this through.

She insisted they meet in the tea rooms, and as soon as she walked in, feet squishing over the heavy cream carpet, the drapes framing the windows with their lovely views of St Stephen’s Green, she knew that it was a mistake. Dave was sitting in the corner, in one of those stiff wing-back chairs, in a suit and tie. She’d never once seen him out of overalls and he looked as if he were being strangled by his collar, pulling and tugging at it, eyes flicking nervously to one side. When he saw her, he jumped up, like an excitable schoolboy. June flushed a deep red. Sit down, for God’s sake, she thought as she walked towards him. She’d dressed as if for a business meeting, in a dove grey wool suit. It was Chanel and she’d told Gerry not to buy it for her, that it was too expensive, but he’d insisted. Now, she was glad she had the suit of armour, could pretend that she was just another well-heeled professional chatting to a client.