Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series) (64 page)

“I want te know my Daddy, all of him an’ Terry always leaves out the bits about ye. I want to know my father through yer eyes.”

There was a long silence then, during which Peg studied Brian’s hands, long and broad and blunted at the ends with a strength that was formidable. His father’s hands, his father’s gentleness and his own quiet need to rebuild the past brick by brick until the wall gave him the protection he sought.

“Are ye certain that ye want to know it all,” she asked in a much softer tone of voice, “d’ye know what it is ye’re askin’?”

“Aye, I know,” he replied simply.

He left shortly after that but he’d come back, seeming to know instinctually when Arthur was home, when Siddy was likely to drift in and out. Though Arthur, to be certain, wasn’t hard to pin down. Arthur was as constant and as regular as the sun, up in the morning, down in the evening, wore a tie Monday to Friday and short sleeves on the weekend. You could set your clock by him or your life and never be late or off balance. It was what she loved and hated about him. Arthur was the quintessential English country barrister. Whitfield, Grey and Whitfield, Arthur being the Grey in the middle. Arthur who had loved her with the devotion of an old and blind dog and she supposed she had treated him as such for years, like a beloved pet, faithful and dependable. Banishing him to other rooms, houses and women when his need became too distinct. She hadn’t understood, even in the beginning, what it was that so attracted him to her. She’d been half dead with grief and certainly not in the market for an eligible, if somewhat stodgy, young British lawyer. But Arthur, like the proverbial dog with a bone, had not let go and eventually his persistence had worn her down. His proposal had been like the rest of their life, not quite what it should have been.

“I’ll never love ye the way a wife should,” she’d said bluntly, “and I’ll never be the sort of wife a man like you should have.”

“I can love enough for two, Margaret,” he’d replied in that soft, yet solid way he had, “and as for the rest, we’ll manage.”

But they hadn’t, not really. Certainly Arthur had made partner in the firm at a very young age, but even at fifty it seemed that he had never ceased to be the junior partner. She hadn’t wanted children, but had found herself quite miserably pregnant in the second year of their relationship. Arthur, strangely triumphant, had declared marriage unavoidable then. Tired, heartsick and uncaring, she’d agreed. Siddy had been a carbon copy of his father, it was as if he’d known her rejection of him and refused her genes, had not wanted any part of his mother. His wild Irish mammy, as Arthur used to call her with affection and a certain unquenched longing in his eyes that turned her cold. Siddy had been bothered by her wildness and particularly her Irishness from a very young age. In Siddy’s little, gray soul the only longing that persisted was to be a proper British gentleman and an Irish mother who said and did outrageous things didn’t have a place in that picture. He’d retained a solemn tolerant fondness for her though until the spring that Brian came into her life, then she had committed an outrageousness that no one could forgive.

Brian had been her secret for months, a sweet half-boy, half-man who made the past a little more livable and brought back the joy of it instead of the horror and pain. They met quite often in the mornings and he’d help her with the marketing, doing various chores and bringing small delights that he thought she might enjoy. It was for the first time in many years truly spring for her, spring in her own soul, where she’d thought nothing would ever grow again. And on their various journeys, she would tell him about his father, a bit here, a story there, an adventure they’d had, a conversation shared and remembered like diamonds mined.

She changed her hair, bought new clothes, listened again to music that had been too painful to even contemplate before, when nothing could be allowed to thaw or even chip at the ice she’d hidden behind in her heart. She drank wine and laughed and one evening as dusk fell and she felt an utterly terrifying restlessness seize her, Arthur said, “I like the way you are wearing your hair these days, it suits you.” It had been that simple. But with Arthur, you learned to hear the words behind those actually uttered. It meant he had noticed, he had noticed and knew that the balance of their lives, always precarious and dependent on her grief, had shifted and would not be regained.

“I needed a change,” she said but shook with the enormous lie of the words. Brian was the change.

It was the dress that would prove to be her undoing. She wondered, later, if she’d known that as she picked it out. It was the color of first spring lilacs, pale and silken lavender. It was a color that Brendan had loved on her and she had not worn it since his death. She should have known better than to ever wear it again. It hung in her closet for several weeks and each time she saw it there she felt like an old fool. But one evening when she was alone and far more restless than was good for her, she succumbed to the temptation of putting it on. It slid like pure water over her body and its swish as it settled about her hips felt like the caress of a young man’s hands. Giddiness seized her and she had run down to the kitchen to pour herself a glass of pale gold wine. Back in her bedroom, she had surveyed herself in the mirror and seen reflected back a woman who looked and suddenly felt far younger than her years. It was twilight, that hour that is much kinder to women of a certain age and she turned and twirled and flirted with her reflection until she was dizzy and laughing. Then she’d stopped abruptly, her heart pounding and head whirling. In the shadows stood a man, a tall man with such a very sad face, for one brief moment she thought it was Brendan, or rather Brendan’s ghost but it was only Arthur, her middle-aged eyes and the failing light had deceived her into seeing the desired phantom.

“Have you met someone?” he asked, dispelling, like so many smoke-hurled stars, the illusion of youth.

“No,” she replied too quickly, too crossly.

That had been all he said at the time, but he wanted to make love that night and her guilt had stopped her from turning away, she merely closed her eyes and conjured a ghost the way she had a thousand times before, but this time it was not the spectral touch of Brendan she felt, it was his son.

His son, whom she asked to dinner a week later, when Arthur went up to London on overnight business. She understood what his business was and had never objected; she’d never had a right to and hadn’t ever really cared.

Brian was going back to Ireland in a few days and she wanted to take him somewhere nice, telling herself it was a bit like a proud mother wanting to dine with her son. She knew it for a lie even as she spoke it to herself.

She had worn the dress, with pearls in her ears and at her throat, warmed and wrapped with the scent of her favorite perfume, not the English country garden scent that Arthur preferred but the million roses and one jasmine note of ‘Joy’ that she used to comb through her hair even, in the days of abandon and excess that were her youth. Because that was what she had felt with Brendan, pure joy and terror, and fury and love so tender that it seemed a breath might break it in half and yet she’d known not even an ocean could move it.

She took him to a very expensive restaurant with a lush decor, and even there in a roomful of excessively groomed, bored rich women she stood out like a jewel on white velvet. She drank too much wine and laughed too much and told him things about herself that made him smile and even blush a little. She was completely reckless with the awareness of how soon he was to exit her life. Not much else, she was to later think, could explain the scene in the garden.

But before that, at the end of their meal, she’d presented him with a little blue-bound book.

‘Leaves of Grass, it was—’ he began

‘Your father’s favorite, I know, he gave it to me,” she’d finished. “He could recite ‘Song of Myself’ you know, from the first word to the last. I remember once,” she laughed, “after we’d made love, he stood by an open window, naked and—” she flushed scarlet as she realized what she’d said. “Oh Jaysus, Brian I’m sorry, my tongue’s gotten ahead of my brain as usual.”

He looked at her for a long moment, such a strange look that she had found it hard to breathe. Then he’d said—

“Hands I have taken, face I have kiss’d,
mortal I have ever touched, it shall be you.”

“I suppose he would have said that to you at some point, only he didn’t mean it for himself as Whitman did, he meant it for you, didn’t he? Everything in his life he meant for you.”

She shook her head, uncaring that tears were gathering in her eyes with the force of an impending storm. “If that were true Brian, we wouldn’t be here together now, would we? It was all meant for Ireland,” she said and even twenty years after Brendan’s death the bitterness tasted like poison on her tongue, “oh yes all meant for a goddamn country that loved him enough to kill him like a dog in the street. All meant for Ireland and not a drop left over for you and me, Brian. Not a drop, parched and dying from thirst but not a goddamn drop.” Other diners were staring as her voice rose and the maitre’d looked slightly horrified, but Brian merely gave a cool glance around the room and people turned back to their meals shamefaced and without appetite.

“I’ll take you home, Peg,” he said and had sounded so much like his father that she’d wanted to slap him, call him a faithless bastard and take him to bed all in one go. Instead she followed quietly, tears slipping silently down her face, destroying the meticulous maquillage of a forty-five year old woman.

He took her home, but he didn’t leave her the way she had been certain he would. They sat in the garden and he talked to her in such a low and gentle voice that she thought she would go mad if he didn’t touch her. Touch her as a man, not a boy. He told her his story about the man he’d known, the father he’d loved and at times hated for his strength and his death, which Brian had struggled not to see as deliberate on Brendan’s part.

She was later to think how funny it was that gardens often played a part in the downfall of man, or woman as the case may be. How five minutes of madness in a lilac drenched patch could forever alter the constructs of a life.

Before the madness struck, he took her hands in one of his and wiped her face gently with a cloth in his other.

“I must look a dreadful sight,” she said, profoundly and wearily meaning it, not looking for pretty denials as she would have years ago.

“No, no you don’t,” he said and the look on his face had been enough to make her move away from him to stand under the overarching lilac branches, heavy and swollen from a sudden rain. He followed, as she must have known he would.

“I’m not my father,” he said simply and she whispered, “I know Brian, I know too well.” And then of course, he kissed her, softly, achingly, arching her back into it. Her body, so long dormant, leaped like a tightly strung bow to his touch. She felt on fire at once and responded like a woman whose death sentence has just been removed. She never knew later, or perhaps she just didn’t want to know, who removed whose clothing, she would remember only the touch of his hands sure and hard on her breasts and how she breathed in sharply at the sight of his body half-bared to her. It was madness, but an irresistible insanity, that made her laugh as his hands, his fine, young hands slid down over her hips, lifted her, settled her so that her back would have scratches and long bloody scrapes for weeks after from the rough bark of Arthur’s much loved lilac trees. And then just as suddenly she knew Brendan was there, that his hands touched her as they had in so many painful dreams, painful for the waking, not for the dreaming. It was Brendan whose breath came hard upon her neck, Brendan’s hands cupping her hips, Brendan’s teeth and tongue upon her breasts, Brendan inside of her and the knowledge, longed for, hungered and ached and tossed and turned for through endless agonies of nights, the knowledge left her cold. She pushed him away and saw him in the moonlight, stunned and hollow-eyed before she covered her face with her hands and began to weep in a way that had nothing to do with tears.

“I—oh Christ—I—for a minute I thought...” he trailed off as he saw her face and she knew that he had felt it too, had felt his father enter his body, his blood and push him aside to have the woman he’d burned for in life and it would seem, even in death.

She felt sickened and ashamed and leaned down to pick up her dress, crumpled and sodden with dew, a dress that, even if it hadn’t been ruined, she would never have worn again. As she straightened up, she caught a flicker of gray in the corner of her eye and stood to see Arthur standing at the entrance to the garden, his face ashen behind a mist of filmy apricot roses. Brian turned then, sensing a watcher behind him, and gave Arthur the small dignity of looking him in the eyes, before bending to retrieve his own fallen attire and shrugging into its drenched shell.

She didn’t know how long she might have stood there watching Arthur turn to dust, watching him fall and crumple and die though he never moved an inch, perhaps forever if there hadn’t suddenly been a vicious rush across the space that separated them and the whirling eddy of adolescent fists flailing at her naked body and a voice, shrill with betrayal and blood-hate, screaming ‘filthy Irish whore’ at her. Her son, calling her a whore, while his father stood like a statue by the gate and she welcoming the blows that rained down and bruised her in ways that would never show on her skin. It was Brian who stopped him, Brian who pinned his arms at his sides and bodily moved him over to his father and then gently told Arthur that it would be best to take the boy inside and that Peg would be in shortly.

Arthur seemed almost grateful to be instructed what to do. He nodded at Brian and without a backwards glance herded Siddy into the house. Siddy, who followed quietly enough after spitting in Brian’s face.