Past Secrets (19 page)

‘Oh, Grey, stop it,’ she said. ‘That’s crap. You were in bed with her. Nothing you can say can change that.’

‘I know.’

‘Let’s talk about the apartment and what we’re going to do with it,’ she added. That was good, she was firm, in control. She would not turn into the old Maggie, desperate for approval.

‘I’m not here to talk about the apartment. I’m here to make you come home.’

‘I left two weeks ago, so it’s taken you quite a long time to get here,’ she said sharply.

‘I was giving you time to think, time to get over being mad at me,’ he said with such simple sincerity that she felt herself being pulled back in.

‘I’m not mad, I’m hurt. Betrayed. Devastated,’

she emphasised. ‘Mad is what you get when you stub your toe. I loved you with all my heart for five years and you threw it back at me by taking another woman to bed in our apartment, so no, mad doesn’t quite do that justice.’

‘It was just a figure of speech,’ he said, giving her that wry grin she adored.

Maggie felt herself being reeled in again, despite her plans to tell him it was all over. Because that’s what she’d told herself she’d do, wasn’t it?

Henry put the coffee down a second time. ‘Is that all right for you, Maggie?’ he asked. ‘Yes, thank you, perfect,’ she said.

Henry looked shrewdly from one to the other, smiled and walked back into the kitchen.

‘You’ve every right to be angry with me,’ Grey went on, as if they hadn’t been interrupted. ‘I didn’t know what to do to make it better, that’s the truth.

I …’ He hesitated. ‘I know what you think, but nothing like this has ever happened before, I want you to believe that, Maggie. It was a stupid oneoff thing and I can’t forgive myself - that’s why I haven’t been in touch. I didn’t think you’d even want to see me. I can understand how hard it is for you to forgive me but please, we’ve got so much going for us. We can’t throw it all away.’

‘I didn’t throw it all away - you did!’ she breathed. ‘You did.’

They both sat back in their chairs, a pair of gladiators wondering how to attack next.

Again, the moment on the terrace at Shona and Paul’s wedding flashed through Maggie’s mind. She hadn’t been a strong modern woman and asked her boyfriend if he thought they should get married.

She’d wittered on about how romantic the wedding was, waiting for him to say something, and then when he’d dodged the subject, she’d never mentioned it again. What a wimp.

‘Why did you never want to get married?’ she demanded suddenly. ‘You knew I did. I hinted that I did. But you avoided the subject.’

‘Well … I …’ For once, Dr Grey Stanley was nonplussed.

Maggie watched him think. She could read his face like a book, or so she’d once believed - now she realised she was wrong. She hadn’t read signs of his infidelity. Another certainty crumbled.

‘You didn’t want to get married, did you?’ she said, looking down at her coffee.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Truthfully, no. I thought we had everything already and that marriage would spoil it. Why fix what’s not broken, right?’

‘You’re the one who broke it.’

He bowed his head, as if the weight of the pain was too much to bear. ‘I can’t tell you how sorry I am, Maggie. I miss you so much, I want you back, I should never have let you leave that morning. Everyone says I must be mad to have let you go, you’re so stunning, beautiful, too good for me, they tell me.’ And he laughed, but it was clear that somebody had indeed said that to him.

And Maggie felt a surge of pleasure that at least someone on campus had thought good of her.

‘Is that why you’re here? Because your colleagues think you should be with me instead of some beautiful little blonde?’

Grey looked up and stared at her with mystification. ‘Beautiful? She’s nothing compared to you.

You’ve never had a clue how beautiful you are, Maggie. It’s one of the most beguiling things about you. Most beautiful women are like stockbrokers, always bartering. Their presence costs. Presents, dinner, compliments. But not you. Even when you’re sitting on the couch in your old jeans and that horrible cardigan you love, with your knees scrunched up, biting your cuticles watching a movie, you look like someone should be photographing you,’ he added. ‘I suppose I’m more used to the stockbroker beauties, they’ve got hard shells.

They know their worth. But you don’t.’

He reached out and took her hand now. ‘Please come back to me. I do love you. Don’t you believe me?’

‘I believe you,’ she said in a small voice, loving the feeling of his hand on hers. Her resolve to tell him it was over between them crumbled some more.

‘But what does that mean, Grey? What does your loving me mean? I only want the sort of love that’s not shared. I can’t share you. That would kill me.’

‘Let’s get engaged,’ he said eagerly. ‘We’ll set a date. Soon, let’s get married soon. Please, can’t you see that I’m serious?’

It sounded so seductive the way he put it. How easy it would be to go back to him. Familiarity lured her in. And marriage. Was this a proposal?

If so, she would never have the face to tell people how she’d got engaged. Because her fiance had had an affair …

‘Now’s not the time to talk about getting engaged,’ she said firmly, taking her hand back.

But marriage. It was what she’d wanted ever since that day watching Shona and Paul make their vows.

There was one question she still had to ask. ‘I know what you said, but I need to be certain: were there others?’ She was sure she’d seen it in his eyes that night. A flash of guilt when she’d asked him if he’d slept with other women. Yet now, there was no guilt in his face, no sign that he had ever cheated before.

‘I swear to you,’ he said fervently, ‘there has never been anyone else, Maggie. She came into my office and she was coming on to me and … I don’t know, I felt flattered.’ He hung his head, paused for a moment before looking up at her again, pleading. ‘It’s stupid, isn’t it, stupid to be flattered by a student? She’s just a kid and not even very bright. And I had you and you’re so clever and brilliant and wonderful and a grownup.

Oh, I can’t articulate all the things that you are, all the amazing things you are to me.’

In her head, Maggie computed that he was saying all the right things. But in her heart, she didn’t care whether he was or not. He loved her, wanted her. That was what mattered. She needed him in her life.

‘There was nobody else, ever?’ she asked.

‘No, never,’ he said. ‘I’ll be honest, I was tempted. Sometimes kids get a crush on lecturers.

You know that, we’ve talked about how flattering it is. Come on, I’m nearly thirty-seven, I’m over the hill as far as these kids are concerned and it’s hard to resist their attention. Who wouldn’t be flattered? You know what I mean,’ he pleaded, ‘you’ve had the guys come into the library, smile at you and flirt. It turns you on a little bit and you feel good. But it doesn’t mean anything. None of that takes away from the love that you feel for one person, and that one person is you, Maggie, I love you. I don’t love some kid. She’s nobody.’

‘Which is worse,’ Maggie said, all the hurt of seeing him in bed with that blonde nobody flooding back, crashing into her hopes of them being a couple again, ‘that you think she is a nobody or that you could have sex with someone you think is a nobody?’

He leaned back in his chair and his eyes glittered, the way they did when he was thinking. He was so clever. His mind could work on so many different levels and today Maggie could almost hear the cogs whirring.

‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ he said. ‘I don’t think of women in that way.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ she interrupted, ‘this is

not a party political broadcast. I’m not a feminist voter you have to convince to come over to your side. I’m not worried about being politically correct when it comes to the person you fucked on our bed. I’m making the point that it says a lot about you when you can have sex with someone and then say they’re nothing. I’d prefer it if you told me the truth.’

But she didn’t really want to know the truth. ‘You know what, this is a mistake,’ she said wearily. She couldn’t go back to him, not yet anyway. She needed more time to think about everything that had happened. ‘You coming here.

I was wrong. It’s too soon. Maybe we should just talk on the phone or something. I’m not ready to see you and Mum’s sick and … it’s difficult.’

She had mused that afternoon in the library that two weeks was plenty of time to get over the fierce pain of his betrayal and talk sensibly but two weeks had turned out to be just a heartbeat after all. The agony was just as intense as it had been. She felt angry, hurt, stupid, so many conflicting emotions.

She couldn’t make a decision now.

‘Let’s talk about everything later. I’ll come back to Galway soon and we can talk then.’

‘No,’ Grey said firmly. ‘I want to talk to you now. I want to get it sorted out now. I can’t go on living like this, with this uncertainty, wondering what’s going to happen, wondering if you’re going to come back to me.’

‘Oh, so it’s about you now, is it?’ retorted Maggie furiously. ‘You sleep around, wait two weeks to come to see me, then you have the audacity to say you were waiting for me to phone and you want to get it all sorted out and back to normal. Well, no thank you very much, Dr Stanley.’

‘Please.’ He grabbed one of her hands between both of his and his touch was electric.

‘You shouldn’t do that,’ she said weakly, but she didn’t mean it.

‘I love you, Maggie,’ he said. ‘I’m going to go in a minute because I think that’s what you want me to do, but I just want you to remember that I love you so, so much. Please remember that. I made a mistake, one mistake, don’t crucify me for it, please. We’re stronger than that. We’re worth more than that.’

He stood up and leaned over the table and kissed her very gently on the lips. Almost against her will, Maggie found her head tilting up to get closer to him.

Then he moved away and stroked her cheek with exquisite gentleness.

‘I love you,’ he said. ‘Please believe that.’ And then he left.

Maggie stared back down into her coffee and stirred it. She added a couple more little packets of sugar and drank slowly, thinking. What on earth should she do?

Part of her desperately wanted to run out on to the street and call him hack, to say that she couldn’t live without him. But part of her was still

too hurt to do that. His betrayal had broken something precious inside her and it could never be fixed.

No matter what, their relationship would never quite be the same. And, inside her, a voice relentlessly whispered: if they got back together, would Grey cheat on her again?

The brass knocker shone, the doorstep was spotless and delicious scents of beeswax polish and home baking wafted from the hallway.

Faye loved the home she’d grown up in but

there was something about walking back through

the door that made her feel she’d failed her mother in some way. From this tiny council house, with

a combination of her widow’s pension and what she earned in her part-time job, her mother had

put Faye and her brother, Miles, through college at a time when there weren’t many kids on their

street in third-level education.

The maze of houses in the vast Linden Estate

had been a tough place to bring up children, riddled

as it was with petty crime and the scourge of drugs.

But Josie Heffernan had managed to keep her

children on the straight and narrow so that Faye could win a place at art college and Miles could achieve the school exam results he needed to study

economics at Trinity.

Now Miles was a high-flyer in corporate banking, making good use of his mother’s hard work. Although Faye regretted that they didn’t make enough time to see each other very often, she knew he was a loving husband and father as well as a hard worker. He’d never gone off the rails in his life. But Faye still felt a twinge of guilt that she had wasted her early promise.

It was late on Sunday morning and the house was full of Josie’s friends from St Michael’s Church.

Josie was what people called ‘a pillar of the community’

in the best sense of the phrase. She got involved with kindness and capability and really made a difference.

Today, as usual, her mother was holding court in the kitchen, with every seat in the place taken, the big stainless-steel teapot on the oilcloth, and the remains of some homemade scones on jammy plates.

‘Hello, Faye,’ said her mother, jumping up lithely. Josie was light on her feet. A small woman, like her daughter and her granddaughter, she didn’t carry an ounce of spare fat because, as Amber accurately put it, ‘Gran never sits down for long.’

Whether it was cleaning St Michael’s, taking care of meals on wheels or working in a local daycare centre for disabled children, Josie gave it her all.

Stan Stack, Faye’s stepfather, was reading the newspapers in the quiet of the tiny living room, although how he could concentrate with the laughs coming from the kitchen, Faye didn’t know.

‘When Father Sean said she could feed the baby in the church and she says “fair enough” and whips out a boob, I swear, I thought I’d laugh up a lung!’

shrieked one woman, church perfect in a navy suit.

‘Ah, Father Sean wouldn’t mind, he’s been on the missions and he’s seen it all,’ grinned Josie. ‘He’d take that in his stride.’ She loved Father Sean and called him the Under Boss, in that he answered to the Man Above.

‘It wasn’t the boob so much as the tattoo,’

insisted the navy-clad woman. ‘Robbie 4Ever in a heart. And the husband’s called Tom. That’s what got me.’

‘Robbie Williams,’ suggested one of the ladies thoughtfully over her scone. ‘I do like him.’ ‘They can get them off with lasers nowadays.’ ‘Robbie Williams?’

‘No, tattoos.’

More howling ensued.

Eventually, the visitors had had enough scones and tea, and took their leave. Mother and daughter were left alone in the kitchen. Without Josie’s chatty, lively crew of friends, it seemed very quiet indeed.