Only We Know (7 page)

Her eyes meet mine. ‘No,’ she
says.

‘Is he happy?’ I ask her
then.

Briefly, confusion crosses her face.
‘Yes. For the most part. Although this past year has been difficult. Since his
mother died, it’s been hard for him. He would have done anything for her. Even
though their relationship was complicated.’

‘Complicated?’

She frowns, leaning forward, trying to
formulate the words to express her meaning.

‘Yes. You see Luke is so different
from his mother, in looks and in personality. Not like Nick, who never had to try very
hard with Sally because he’s so like her in almost every way. There was a natural
bond between them. Luke and Sally … well, it was different. He loved his mother, of
course, and she loved him. But it always seemed to me that
he was forever striving to please her and yet, no matter what
he did, she held him at a distance. Not in any overt way, just this very subtle coldness
despite her love for him.’

As she talks, a scrap of memory surfaces
from nowhere. I was nineteen years old and sitting in the kitchen of the Yates’
house up in the Wicklow hills. It was some time in the first weeks when Nick and I were
reviving our friendship. Ireland can be funny like that – you lose touch with someone,
assume you’re never going to see them again, until one night you’re in a
student bar with your friends and across the room you see a face through the smoke and
gloom, a face from childhood, a face that brings with it a jolt of recognition so strong
that you just stand there, transfixed. That was how it was with me and Nick. That first
reunion, so awkward and clumsy, Nick with his habitual shyness, barely able to look up
at me while I jabbered away, simulating casual confidence, and all the while a great
hole of uncertainty was opening inside me. And then it was like we couldn’t stop
running into each other – parties, discos, on campus at UCD.

Now, in retrospect, I wonder how much of it
was coincidental, or whether we had sought each other out. But the day I’m
remembering, a group of us from college were out hiking in the hills, when a sudden
downpour sent us all running for cover and Nick suggested we go to his parents’
house. I can still recall the sickness I felt as the nerves gathered in my stomach,
reluctance holding me back. The house was not far and we could dry off there and get
something to eat. Everyone else was going along with the idea so I couldn’t object
– it would seem odd, and I would draw too much attention to myself. So I had sat
with the others in that house, trying to
relax, trying to pretend that it was not strange to be there, Nick making sandwiches
while the others lounged around the kitchen table, chatting and smoking, and all of a
sudden Sally Yates walked in. Hair shoulder-length and still dark but with a glamorous
streak of grey at the temple, her body thickened now in middle age yet still curvy and
louche, the same easy sway of the hips. Her clothes had the chic I remembered from
childhood, a cardigan thrown over her shoulders, shoes that were strappy and heeled. And
she greeted us with a smile so hazy it seemed almost medicated.

‘Oh, how lovely!’ she had said.
‘To meet my Nicky’s charming new friends.’

Nick blushing furiously while his
mother’s gaze drifted over us.

And then she saw me. Her smile tightened and
she said, her voice cool with astonishment: ‘Katie Walsh. I don’t believe
it.’

The last time I had seen her was at the
airport in Nairobi with my mother, a witness to their stiff farewell.

‘Hello, Mrs Yates.’

‘Well, now. This is a
surprise.’

I could see the struggle going on inside
her, and I knew the others saw it too. A silence had fallen over the table.

‘And how is your father,
Katie?’

‘He’s fine.’

‘Good. Good. Please remember me to
him, won’t you?’

‘Sure.’

Not a word about my mother. But, then, Sally
had said everything she had wanted to say about her. I remember the card that had come
after Mam died, icy in its formality,
not a
trace of tenderness in the neat hand, the carefully chosen words of condolence.

And there was Sally Yates, smiling tightly
at me in the kitchen of her home, turning on her charm and departing gaily with a warm
word for everyone – but just before she left the room, I caught her glancing back at
Nick, caught the anxiety in her eyes, the flash of warning, and I had the sense that
later she would pull him aside, question him about me, and then, in that silky way of
hers, advise him to stay away from me – that it was for the best.

‘She was a complex woman,’ I say
to Julia now, hearing a little ice in my own voice.

‘She was. I keep forgetting you knew
her.’

‘Well, I didn’t, really. At
least, not in recent years. But when I was a child – ’

‘You spent that summer with them. In
Kenya.’

She says this suddenly, and I’m
momentarily taken aback. I hadn’t realized she knew this. Instantly, the question
pops into my head:
Does she know what we did?

‘Yes. That’s right.’

She sits still, the breeze blowing strands
of hair across her face, her eyes never leaving mine. There is a challenge in them;
she’s waiting for me to tell her something about that time, about what happened,
and I have no idea how much she knows of it, how much Luke has shared with her, but
either way I don’t want to get into it. In my head, the iron doors come sliding
down, cutting off the route to that memory.

‘Come up to the house,’ she
says, after a minute, getting to her feet. ‘There’s something I want to show
you.’

I follow her up the path, and in through a
side door. A
narrow passageway opens suddenly
onto the living room where the seaward wall is made of glass. Through it I can see the
trees in the garden dripping from the recent downpour, and beyond them the green swathe
of a briny sea, the sky a dim metallic grey bearing down heavily. The décor is all
angles and hard surfaces. An echoey silence hangs heavily in the vaulted space. I follow
Julia, wondering what’s happened to the heavy who was guarding the gates. Marble
floors, high ceilings, a great deal of wrought iron curving around the staircase.

Just before we reach the vestibule and the
two massive old doors, she stops and turns to a mirrored cabinet against the wall, and
from it she takes something. When she turns to me, there is a photograph in her hand.
‘When I went into the study yesterday morning and found that – that mess, I also
found this.’ She turns the picture over in her hands. ‘It was on his desk,
propped up against the computer monitor.’

She takes one last look at it, then hands it
to me.

As soon as my gaze falls upon it, I feel the
belt around my neck.

The colours are faded, and there is a crease
down the middle as if the photograph has been folded for some time. Three youthful faces
captured in the golden light of a summer’s day from the distant time of my
childhood. Luke, Nick and I are sitting on a wall, the yellow-green of high grass in the
background, a blue sky flecked with clouds above. Luke wears a black U2 T-shirt and he
is the only one of us staring at the camera. Smirking. Nick wore his hair long that
summer, and he is looking at the ground, his face almost hidden. He is smiling but,
unlike his brother,
seems bashful, secretive
even. I am sitting next to him, face turned to my right, my attention caught by
something off camera. My hair is long and raggedy, bleached golden by the sun, and my
bare arms are brown, my face a riot of freckles. I am the only one who isn’t
smiling.

‘How old were you when that was
taken?’ she asks.

I answer straight away:
‘Eight.’

I know instantly. It was the summer when
everything changed. ‘This was on his desk, you say?’

‘Yes.’

‘But why?’ The air in the hall
feels suddenly chilly.

‘I really couldn’t say,’
she answers, her eyes level and examining. ‘All I can tell you is that until
yesterday I had never set eyes on that picture.’

I examine the photograph again and see that
my hands are shaking.

‘You know, until recently, I was
barely aware of you,’ she goes on. ‘And yet, in the last few days, you keep
cropping up. What exactly is your relationship with my husband?’

‘Not that,’ I say quietly.
‘It’s not what you’re thinking.’

I can’t bring myself to return her
gaze, but I can feel her eyes on me, the air between us pulled taut.

‘And the photograph?’

‘I’ve no idea why it was
there,’ I say briskly, thrusting it back at her but she holds up her hand.

‘Keep it. Please.’

I pull my notebook out of my bag, then stuff
the picture into it, trying to cover up how shaken I am.

She holds the door open for me and watches
as I walk out.

On the step, I turn to her. ‘That
phone call Luke made – who was it to?’

She shrugs in
reply.

‘Nick is coming,’ she says
then.

I pause on the step. ‘Nick?
Nick’s coming here?’

‘You seem surprised.’

My heart is hammering.
‘When?’

‘Tomorrow.’

With that she closes the door softly, and I
am left standing on the limestone step where the sun finds my feet and travels up to my
face. Beyond the walls there is silence from the street, and someone in the house must
have pressed a button because the gates slowly open of their own accord. The scrum of
journalists has gone, dispersed as quickly as the rain. The warm air holds the sweet,
heavy scent of some flower I don’t recognize, and standing there by the closed
door, a strange vertiginous feeling comes over me. For Nick to return brings home to me,
with crushing certainty, just how serious this is. Then I cross the cobblelock driveway,
walk out into the street and hurry away.

I’d intended never to go back. Ever.
When I sat on the plane after my mum’s funeral and felt it making its steep
ascent, I closed my eyes and released my breath – I felt as if I’d held it the
whole time I was home. Never again, I told myself.

Now here I am, barely a year later, another
flight, another intake of breath, only this time I’m not alone.

Lauren sits beside me, quietly absorbing the
great expanse of sky. It seems like the first time we have been alone since our wedding.
The past couple of days have been a blur of anxiety and activity – booking flights and
hotels. In a way, I’m glad to be on this flight. I can be still and quiet for a
few hours and I know I can do nothing until the plane lands and the whole thing cranks
up again.

The plane dips a little as it hits a pocket
of air and I give Lauren’s hand an involuntary squeeze, shoot her a smile of
reassurance, which she returns before settling back in her seat, eyes closed. The truth
is, I’m nervous as hell. I’ve barely slept since I heard the news. My body
is swamped in fatigue and I’m too hyped up to rest, nerves jangling, anticipation
dancing through every fibre.

‘You’ll let me know,’
Murphy had said hoarsely, ‘as soon as you hear anything?’

His face was lined and swollen when he saw
us off at the gate, passing his cap from one hand to the other.

‘Of
course.’

‘Come here.’ He’d pulled
me into his embrace and I’d briefly dropped my head to his shoulder, felt the
coarse weave of his cotton shirt against my face. ‘He’ll be all right, Nick.
You’ll see. Chances are he’ll be waiting for you at Arrivals.’

‘Yeah. I’ll bet you’re
right,’ I’d said, but we both knew that was a lie.

As the plane bumps from one pocket of air to
another, the captain announcing that the turbulence will soon pass, all I can think of
is the blood. It was the one detail that had jumped out at me when I’d finally got
to talk to Julia.

There was blood on the floor,
Nick
.

Around me, the other passengers are bracing
themselves. I’m not the only one to grip the arm rests. I take a deep breath and
wait for the next side-swipe from the elements. My stomach quivers. I close my eyes,
press my head back against the seat and wait it out.

The whole time I was back, I seemed cloaked
in a sense of disbelief – numb to the reality of the situation. Nothing about it felt
right, from the suit I was wearing to the press of people’s hands against my own:
the words spoken, condolences offered, a box with a body in it – my mother’s – her
withered limbs, her shrunken frame. A brief moment alone with her, masking my shock at
her papery skin, the groove worn into the tissues of her nose where the tube had entered
her nostril, her ribcage protruding like that of a malnourished child, her flesh having
wasted away. One last kiss before they closed the coffin – and, Jesus, how I
didn’t cry out in fright at the stone coldness of her forehead as I pressed my
lips to it …

Murphy said the Mass.
He spoke fondly of Sally, of how she had touched the lives of many, but the words seemed
to string together and buzz in my ears, as if something were wrong with their rhythm,
something that made me shift in my seat. I remember Luke walking to the edge of the
grave after Mum was lowered. He bent down, picked up a handful of earth and threw it
onto her coffin. I can still hear the echo of the stony soil, like a melancholy snare
drum.

I push away the memory and, gradually, the
plane levels off as we find a smooth line. People sigh with relief. The nervous energy
is still there, but it’s venting itself now in movement and chatter.

‘You okay?’ I ask Lauren.

‘Fine,’ she says, but I know
that this whole episode is not what she’d expected. She’s still jittery and
nervous.

‘Hey, I’m so sorry about this –
all of it. I’ll make it up to you. I promise.’

‘I know you will,’ she says.

‘This is supposed to be your
honeymoon.’

‘
Our
honeymoon,’ she
corrects me.

‘We’ll still do it – Madagascar,
the whale-watching, the whole thing – I promise.’