The Truth Club (4 page)

‘He said he’ll be in town on Thursday.’

‘He wants to meet you?’

‘Yes,’ she sighs. ‘Yes, I suppose he does.’

‘And are you going to meet him?’

‘I don’t know. I want to. I feel like… like maybe the whole thing
can teach me something.’

Erika is forever thinking that things can teach her something.
She thinks that life is one great big university, and that when she
understands love better none of this stuff will bother her any more. But Alex has done relationship courses and he’s got relationship certificates, and it hasn’t made any difference.

After Erika hangs up, I get back to the article. I tell people to
decorate their tiles with enamel paint, and I virtually order them
to collect shells and make collages. I add that their shower
curtains must be ‘boisterous’ and their bath mats ‘sensuous’. As
for flooring, I mention exotic stone slates that need to be
imported from Hyderabad. So many people go on, these days,
about how to make your house nicer. But it seems to me that they
– and I include myself in the bunch – don’t talk much about how
to make a
home.

Somehow the word ‘home’ always reminds me of the house
we had when I was little – the old, shabby one where the
cushions were faded and the carpets were frayed, and dust motes
danced in the light. There was a curved drive and tall trees and
a big lazy lawn that never got mowed enough. That was how we
lived. We all sort of pottered around, and Dad practised his cello
and went off and gave concerts every so often. Sometimes pets
died, and I was inconsolable – the world was virtually torn from
me when I laid guinea pigs and dogs and hamsters in their final resting-places; but most of the time I was happy, and I didn’t even know it.

The doorbell rings. I consider ignoring it. Somehow I have to
make time to finish this article
and
visit my great-aunt Aggie, who is old and frail and weird these days, living in a nursing home and
convinced that her room is full of sheep.

I decide to ignore the doorbell. I just don’t have time to answer i
t. But I do creep over to the window and peep out between the curtains.

It’s Diarmuid – and he’s seen me. He’s waving and smiling and
looking rather pleased with himself. I assume this is because he’s
carrying a large bunch of flowers, and they clearly weren’t bought
in a garage. They are beautiful, and they are swathed in soft pink
paper, with a ribbon round them.

I open the door and let him in.

Chapter
Two

I’ve put Diarmuid’s flowers
in a large glass vase, and they’re on t
he mantelpiece. They are clearly expensive, because they
include blossoms that look as though they belong in Hawaii.

‘Thank you so much, Diarmuid,’ I say again, as I hand him a blue mug of Earl Grey and put a plate of almond biscuits on the coffee table.

‘You’re welcome,’ he says. His ‘welcome’ has a slight American
twang to it, because he spent five years working as a builder in Brooklyn. That’s one of the things we have in common: we’ve
both lived in America. My family moved to California when I was
nine and returned to Dublin when I was twelve. Diarmuid went to New York when he was twenty-one; he has loads of cousins out there. Sometimes he talks as though the Bronx is just down the road.

‘They really are lovely.’ I have already thanked him five times.

Diarmuid smiles at me with obvious pleasure. One of the advantages of separating from Diarmuid is that he is being kind and attentive again – only I wonder how long it would last if I went back to him. Because it wasn’t just the mice that made me
storm out of the house with my cream suitcase. I was also furious
because he had forgotten our first wedding anniversary. There wasn’t even a card. He had also taken to going out with friends to the pub, after his biology lectures, and returning home late without so much as a phone call. He just didn’t seem like the
Diarmuid I had married. When I asked him if he still loved me, he
said, ‘Well, I’m here, aren’t I?’ which to be frank didn’t offer me m
uch reassurance. Then he held me close and said that the
romantic part of love was just the icing. The cake, the nutritious
part, was working as a team and building a home together. A
family. He explained that he was doing the biology course for us, because he wanted to earn more money, so that we wouldn’t have to delay having children for too long and I could, if I wanted, give
up journalism for a while and be a stay-at-home parent. And
what I wanted to say, but didn’t say, was that I wanted more of
the icing. I felt I was entitled to it. This cake he was talking about
didn’t sound all that appetising.

‘You’ll feel differently when we have kids,’ he kept saying, but
I’m not the sort of person who wants to use kids to keep me with
someone. Diarmuid is very keen to be a parent – in fact, I
sometimes wonder if that’s the main reason he married me – and
he still thinks that a ‘kid’ would be the answer. That is why,
despite our differences, he sometimes tries to get me into bed. He
tries to get me to sit beside him on the orange sofa so that he’ll
have easy access to the ultra-sensitive blissful spots just behind my
ears. He knows that, once he really got into gear, he could make
me forget little details like condoms. I think he must have a
diagram of all my erogenous areas. I have never met a man who
could press the right buttons quite so fast.

The argument that made me bolt was about spermicidal cream.
One of the many dismaying aspects of my marriage is that some
of the crucial details sound almost farcical. Diarmuid found some
spermicidal cream in a drawer and asked me why I had it, and I sort of mumbled and stuttered and said, ‘Oh… goodness… do I still have that?’ And then I blushed, and he said, ‘You’ve been using this, haven’t you?’ And I said, ‘Well, maybe just… just
occasionally,’
and he hit the roof. Because, although we had never
discussed it in detail, Diarmuid had formed the impression that we were ‘trying to start a family’. And I felt we should get to
know each other better before we went straight into teething and n
appies and leaky breasts. I wanted more of that icing.

That’s why I frequently used a diaphragm. I’d dart into the
bathroom and attempt to insert the thing without it springing
from my hands and bouncing against the wall.

‘What are you doing in there?’ he’d call out as he lay in our double bed, erect and waiting.

‘Oh… just washing,’ I’d shout back.

That’s how he formed the impression that I was, perhaps, over-
fastidious about hygiene – though he’s pretty fastidious too. He is not the sort of man who says, ‘Let’s just do it now, on the kitchen
table.’ He has a little wash too, and gargles with mouthwash;
then he sprays himself with an aftershave called Ocean.
Sometimes I wanted to say that it would be nice just to smell him
– that it was all becoming a little too sanitised.

‘You lied to me!’ That’s what Diarmuid shouted when he found
the cream – and then the diaphragm – at the back of the drawer.

‘No, I didn’t! We never discussed it!’ I screamed back.

This did not mollify him. As far as he was concerned, we had
come to an agreement. He was so enraged that he turned on his heel and left the bedroom. That’s another thing I’ve discovered
about Diarmuid: when he is bulging with anger, he doesn’t want to
talk about it. And I desperately needed to talk about it. I needed to
talk about all sorts of things. I felt I might burst with frustration.

‘You lied to me too!’ I yelled down to the sitting room. And,
because he didn’t ask me what I meant – he had just turned on the
television – I added, ‘You’re not the person I married. I don’t know you. I don’t know what we’re doing together.’

Silence. There was just the sound of an English voice discussing
some team’s chances in the Premiership. That’s when I started packing. I have never packed so fast in my life.

I rang Fiona on my mobile and asked her to come and collect me; despite my fury, I could hardly drive off in Diarmuid’s car. When the doorbell rang I almost ran down the stairs, despite the h
eavy suitcase. And that’s how I ended up staying at Erika’s flat
until the tenants had left my cottage.

But Diarmuid and I are, naturally, not going to talk about any
of that now. At this moment, Diarmuid is telling me that he’s just been giving Charlene a driving lesson. Charlene is a colleague of
his – she teaches remedial English at the same school where he teaches woodwork – and any time he mentions her, he adds
carefully that she is ‘just a friend’ and that her boyfriend tried to teach her to drive but got too impatient; and she needs to be able
to drive, because she is divorced and has a son who’s got
interested in swimming, karate and football. I believe him.
Diarmuid is the kind of man who does that sort of thing. He
thinks people should help each other out.

What we are doing is ‘keeping the lines of communication
open’. That’s what the marriage counsellor told us to do. We only
visited her once, and I wish she had added something about
Diarmuid phoning before he turned up, but she didn’t. Diarmuid
visits at least once a week, and he always tells me he is only dropping by for a moment and he hopes he hasn’t called at an
inconvenient time. In fact, he has just said this, and I’m wondering
if I should mention the article on bathroom accessories and my
visit to Aunt Aggie. It’s 5.30 p.m. and I said I’d e-mail the article
by the end of the day; this could be construed as meaning 11.55 p.m., but I think that would be stretching the point a little.

‘So, Sally, how are you?’ Diarmuid asks. I feel like replying that
not much has changed since we spoke on the phone last night; I haven’t, for instance, suddenly decided to be an airline pilot.

I look him straight in the eye. ‘Diarmuid, it’s lovely to see you,’
I say, which of course doesn’t really answer his question. I take a
deep breath. ‘It’s just that… I’m a bit late with an article. I was just
trying to finish it.’

Diarmuid looks at me long and hard.

‘They’re real sticklers for deadlines at
The Sunday Lunch,’
I c
ontinue, apologetically, because I have begun to feel extremely
guilty. I am very good at guilt. It’s been my devoted companion since I left my marriage.

‘That’s a pity,’ Diarmuid replies. ‘I wanted to take you out for
dinner.’

This, of course, is the ideal time to mention that if you want to
take someone out to dinner it would be wise to give her advance
notice. But I don’t say this. What I say is, ‘Oh, that would have been lovely.’

‘It could still be lovely.’ Diarmuid smiles. ‘I can wait here until
you’ve finished the article, and then we can head off. There’s a new
Thai place in Donnybrook I think you’d like.’

‘That’s very kind of you, Diarmuid,’ I say. I have been
repeating this sentence at regular intervals for months now, because Diarmuid
is
being kind – almost unreasonably kind. It
frequently occurs to me that he should be far more pissed-off. ‘It’s
just that I’ve promised to visit Aunt Aggie.’

Diarmuid clenches his jaw. ‘Couldn’t you visit her tomorrow?’

‘
Yes, I suppose I could,’ I agree. ‘But I’d have to phone her, and
she’d be disappointed.’

There is a silence, in which I am sure Diarmuid is thinking that
I’ve just admitted something crucial and unflattering: I have just
admitted that a woman who thinks her room is full of sheep is
more important to me than my own husband, the man I promised
to love for ever.