The Truth Club (12 page)

Fiona clutches her stomach and rocks back and forth in her s
eat.
Oh dear God, maybe she’s about to give birth.
I imagine m
yself shouting, ‘Push!’ in the middle of Dun Laoghaire pier and
ordering people to go off and boil water and fetch blankets.

‘What is it?’ I ask warily. ‘Is it… the baby?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh.’ I gulp. ‘Well… try to breathe deeply. And –’

‘Oh, no, I don’t mean in that way.’ She smiles wanly. ‘I mean
in… another way.’

‘OK…’ I say slowly. ‘What other way?’

She looks at me. Her eyes are wide and stricken, terrified. ‘I have to tell someone. I just have to tell someone.’

‘Tell me, then!’ I am almost airborne with consternation.

‘Oh, Sally, this… this isn’t Zak’s baby.’

Tears are coursing down her cheeks.

Chapter
Seven

‘
This pavlova is absolutely
delicious.’ This is the first thing I
say to Zak as he comes into his own plush sitting-room. ‘I
love sweet things. Diarmuid prefers savouries.’ As I say this, I realise it pretty well sums up my marriage.

Fiona is studying me anxiously, from a large, round cane chair.
It has a huge plump cushion and many people, including myself,
have been known to fall asleep on it after over-indulging at dinner
parties, but Fiona is almost too alert. Her whole face is tense, and
her smile is far too wide and rigid. We have just returned from our walk, though the last half-hour of it was spent with me comforting Fiona while she howled on a bench on the pier.

I feel the secret is crawling over us all like bees. I fear that at
any minute I’ll shout, ‘Ouch!’ and Zak will ask me what’s wrong, and I will blurt out that Fiona became pregnant in a fertility clinic
in the United States when she was at that conference about databases. I’ll say that I realise Fiona should have told him this, and that she would have, only she didn’t want to upset him by
telling him he had slow sperm – not the type that can suddenly get
a move on and stop dawdling, like he thinks, but
really
slow
sperm. And then I will say that I know she was wrong and beg
him to forgive her. ‘Because it’s amazing the things people don’t
tell each other, Zak,’ I will add. ‘We’re a very strange species. I
have a great-aunt who seems to have disappeared entirely, and no
one even wants to discuss her.’

I don’t say this, however. What I say is, ‘Do you know what I
learned the other day? I learned that mice share ninety-nine per cent of their genetic sequence with humans. Can you believe that?’

Zak smiles at me. ‘Yes, I heard that too. That’s why they’re so
useful in research.’

I must get off the subject of genes. I can’t believe how Freudian
that remark was. I hardly ever discuss mice. Why am I talking about them now?

‘I let them loose in the tool shed.’ What on earth has got into me? I’m still gabbling on about them.

‘What?’ Zak enquires, reaching out to pat Fiona tenderly on the shoulder.

‘Diarmuid’s mice.’ I take a gulp of wine. ‘He spent so much
time with them. He was helping one of his lecturers with research
that wasn’t even on his course. I don’t know exactly what the research was, but he gave different ones different food, and he had to look at them regularly and make notes. I think it was something about nutrition and ageing…’

Zak and Fiona are both looking at me slightly warily.

‘Some of them certainly seemed more springy than others,’ I gabble. Since when do I use words like ‘springy’?

‘That’s interesting,’ Zak says. ‘The whole area of nutrition and
health really needs more research.’

‘But all these food scares are really infuriating,’ Fiona says. ‘I
mean, we end up guzzling stuff that we’re told is good for us –
and then, more often than not, someone comes along and says we shouldn’t eat too much of it because it’s loaded with pesticides or
metals or drugs.’

‘That’s why most of the stuff we buy is organic,’ Zak says. ‘Especially now.’ He gazes lovingly at Fiona’s stomach.

I feel a surge of panic. If he starts talking about the baby, I
might just burst into tears. ‘He lured them back,’ I gabble. ‘All he
had to do was leave some cheese in the cage and they all
wandered back into it. They put up no fight whatsoever.’

‘Well, I suppose they’d got used to the comfort,’ Zak
comments. ‘It can’t be easy being a mouse, especially a wild
mouse. I don’t even know what they eat. I suppose they get seeds
and things, and leftovers.’

There is a long pause. Then he says, ‘I’m going to make hot chocolate. Would you like some more pavlova, Sally?’

‘No. I’d better go,’ I say. ‘I think I’m a bit drunk, actually. This
wine seems to have gone straight to my head.’

‘It always does that.’ Fiona smiles.

‘Yes… yes, I know,’ I sigh. ‘I’m the cheapest drunk in Ireland.’

But, as Fiona and Zak head into the kitchen to make hot chocolate, I don’t attempt to prise myself from the embrace of
their deep, seductive sofa. Because I am suddenly realising that, if
I weren’t the cheapest drunk in Ireland, I would probably never have married Diarmuid.

I encountered Diarmuid at a party given by a woman called
Gladys, whom I’d met at an evening class about restoring
antiques. Gladys and I both joined the class hoping it would be full of hunky men with tool-belts, but it wasn’t; it was full of
women hoping to meet hunky men with tool-belts. I don’t know
why we were so surprised. At the end of the term Gladys decided
to have a party, and I went along to it – rather reluctantly, because
there was a good film on the telly. I had reached the point of singledom where I never expected to meet a half-decent single man again.

I’m shy at parties, and not a great talker, so I tend to end up chatting to people I know, or helping with the washing up, or
handing out sausage rolls. But Gladys was determined we would
all have a good time, and she was virtually pouring the red wine
down us forcibly. So by the time I reached Diarmuid, who was
sort of cowering in a corner by a cheese plant – he’s shy at parties too – I stuck a plate of Ritz crackers loaded with egg swirls under
his nose and said, ‘Hi there, beautiful stranger!’

It wasn’t that I thought Diarmuid was stunningly handsome,
though he is attractive. I just liked the idea of saying that
particular sentence to someone. I was feeling skittish and feckless,
and I kept bumping into people and saying, ‘Oops!’ and then giggling. Gladys’s Chilean wine must have been industrial strength.

Diarmuid gulped when I called him ‘beautiful’. Then he took one of the crackers and looked at me dubiously. I could see he thought I was a brazen and completely un-shy sort of woman, and he wasn’t entirely sure what to say.

Because he was saying nothing and everyone in the room now
had a Ritz cracker with egg swirl, I asked him how he had met Gladys, and he said she was a friend of his brother’s. Then he
asked me how I had met Gladys, and I explained about the
evening class. I told him the main thing I’d learned was that life
is too short to attempt to re-upholster your own armchair.

‘I know quite a bit about re-upholstery,’ Diarmuid mumbled bravely. He was knocking back the wine himself and seemed to have formed the impression that I was not about to bite him. ‘Actually, I teach carpentry.’

‘So you own a tool-belt!’ I shrieked with delight. I was now extremely sozzled. ‘Gladys…’ I shouted across the room. ‘I’ve found Tool-Belt Man!’

‘Go for it, honey!’ Gladys yelled back. ‘Ask him where he keeps his drill.’

Gladys and I snorted with mirth, and a number of other female
antique-restorers also giggled and stared at Diarmuid. It is much
to his credit that he didn’t walk off at that point. He just smiled shyly and said, ‘So what do you do?’

‘I’m a journalist,’ I said. ‘I write lots of stupid articles about any old thing at all.’

‘I don’t believe that,’ Diarmuid said. ‘I bet your articles are very
interesting.’

And that’s when Gladys came round with the big plates of
spaghetti bolognese, and I sobered up enough to realise that I was
talking to a single man who really seemed quite
nice.
He took my
phone number; I didn’t think he’d call, but he did, the very next
day. We had a pizza and went to a film that Saturday, and that’s
how it started. And the really stupid thing is that, if Diarmuid had been someone I really fancied like crazy – someone I thought was
sex on legs – I probably wouldn’t even have offered him an egg-
whirled Ritz cracker. Even the wine wouldn’t have got rid of my
embarrassment. But, because I had no particular feelings about him, I waltzed up to him brazenly and behaved as though I had been instantly attracted to him.

He still believes I was, in fact, and I have never denied it.
Actually, I’ve encouraged him to retain this impression. Because
Diarmuid doesn’t have a very high opinion of himself when it comes to women. He told me that he never made the first move because he was scared of being rejected. I did the very thing he
was waiting for. I told him he was beautiful. And, even though it
was a rather odd thing to say to a stranger at a party, it gave him
the courage to ask me out and eventually marry me. Of course, he
must have fancied me too; but I’m sure Diarmuid has fancied piles
of women at parties and never even spoken to them. He was waiting for reassurance that he wasn’t going to make an arse of himself – and I gave it to him with one chance remark.

And the stupidest thing of all is that it’s a sentence I wanted to
say to someone else at a party before, but didn’t. Though
Diarmuid is attractive, I would never call him beautiful. Beautiful
is a big, extravagant word. To call a man beautiful implies that,
in one glance, you have seen a sweetness of spirit – something that
transcends other desirable attributes, such as a nice body or luxuriant hair or a wide, kind smile – something that speaks directly to your heart. And you can’t understand how this has happened, how someone has become so precious to you in an i
nstant; how, in some ridiculous golden way, he seems like part of
the home you’ve been searching for.

I never even talked to the Beautiful Stranger I saw at the other
party, so for all I know he could have been a right bollocks. And this incident seems typical of the way I live my life. I’ve always
gone for the simplest choices – the ones that are most convenient
and don’t make waves or cause controversy.

‘You look deep in thought,’ Zak says, handing me a mug of hot
chocolate – he and Fiona use their cappuccino machine to make a nice thick froth. ‘You didn’t even notice me. What were you thinking about?’

He smiles, that ridiculously wide smile. It should make him ugly, but it doesn’t. There’s a goodness about Zak that radiates
from his smile, and from his small, deep-set eyes. It’s even in his
hands; they are broad, and the fingers are long and sensitive. Sometimes I love him myself, in a sort of detached way; I don’t want him for myself, but I’m glad he’s there to make me and
everyone else feel warmer. Softer. Accepted. He is comfortable in
his own skin; he is trusting and kind and almost obsessive about
telling the truth. ‘How can we really know people if they lie to us?’ I remember he said that once, shortly after he and Fiona married. ‘Even small white lies erode something. They’re disrespectful.’

I decide not to tell Zak I was distracting myself from his slow
sperm by tracing the provenance of my marriage. ‘Actually, I was
wondering about sofas,’ I reply. ‘There are too many designs and
colours to choose from these days.’