The Truth Club (44 page)

‘Call round soon,’ he said before he hung up. I suppose I
should, because I need to hunt for my wedding ring. I should also
attend a time-management course, because I don’t seem to be able
to find time to think about my marriage, let alone coax Diarmuid
into talking about what the feck is going on between him and
Charlene. Instead I’ve been sweating over my articles about Top
Young Irish Designers. I have also written an ebullient column about how to make your home look like a Provençal cottage. I tossed in references to lavender and candles and whitewashed walls, thick glass vases full of sunflowers, espadrilles and wide-
brimmed straw hats. I am basically being paid to be an
opinionated bossy-boots. The headline on last week’s column
said, ‘Ultimate Vases: Sally Adams Falls in Love with the Latest
Floral Chic’. My life is all style and no substance.

At least I’ve given Mum the diamond brooch. She burst into
tears when she saw it, and I didn’t ask why. I just said it was ‘lovely’
and avoided any significant emotional interchange. I had quite enough of that in New York. I think she was crying with joy – I
hope she was, anyway. My own birthday present to her was rather
meagre by comparison – a collection of creams and bath oils and
soaps – but she seemed pleased enough with it. The card I bought on April’s behalf had tulips on it, and mine had a rural landscape.
There wasn’t a teddy bear in sight. Once I’d made my delivery and
shared a glass of wine with Mum in the sitting room, I trotted off
to see Aggie, but Fabrice was with her and I didn’t stay that long.

Fabrice is an odd woman. If I was to be charitable I might call
her a ‘character’, but I’m tired of calling people ‘characters’ to
excuse all sorts of silliness. She appears to be in her late seventies
and was once probably quite pretty, but now she is, frankly,
mutton dressed as lamb. She was wearing so much make-up that
I have no idea what she might look like first thing in the morning.
Her dyed blonde hair was piled on top of her head, and she was
strewn with silver jewellery and semi-precious stones – she was
even wearing extraordinary glasses with small fake diamonds around the rim. She had a long indigo scarf tossed around her shoulders, and her pink blouse was low-cut and revealed rather too much cleavage. She told us that she had been a nightclub singer in Belgium and a model in Paris, and that she’d never married but had been in love ‘many times’ and in most of the
major time zones. Aggie was entranced by it all. She was gulping
up each word as if it were caviar.

‘And what about you, Sally?’ Fabrice suddenly fixed me with
an intense stare, and that was when I began to get suspicious of
her. Because her eyes are unlike the rest of her showy appearance. They are serious, almost solemn, the eyes of a woman who knows
what she wants and has thought long and hard about it. And they
made me wonder why she wants to visit Aggie so often. There are
people who prey on the elderly and try to extract money from
them, and I began to wonder if this was what Fabrice was up to.
But Aggie looked so happy that I decided not to interfere. Maybe Fabrice is just lonely, like Aggie. Maybe she just needs someone to listen to her stories, which I suspect are mostly dreams of what
might have been. It would be easy enough to become like her.

When I left, Aggie called out, ‘Bye, Sally, dear,’ rather vaguely.
I’m probably jealous, that’s the truth of it. And I’m also angry with Aggie for behaving so badly towards DeeDee,
I’ve scoured DeeDee’s
notebook for more revelations, but the rest of it is just recipes and
doodles.

Though I adore my duvet, it seems to me I should perhaps emerge from it and face the strange, and sometimes downright daft, outside world. I really should go round to Nathaniel’s and
look for my wedding ring – its loss seems far too symbolic – but there are so many other things I should also be doing that I can’t
decide which to attend to first. This is clearly some sort of
reaction to all the truth that has tumbled upon me so suddenly. I
always regarded the truth as important, but right now I find
myself thinking that
ignorance, in certain cases, does indeed contain some
bliss.

I also find myself thinking that Diarmuid is
my
partial
husband, so if Charlene has suddenly decided to make a grab for
him there should at least have been some sort of discussion.
I
was t
he one who was supposed to be having doubts about my
marriage, but now Diarmuid has raced ahead of me
. He even has an alternative partner lined up for
himself, if he wants her. That’s just like Diarmuid, of course. He
doesn’t drift. He has plans and goals and a surfboard stomach. He isn’t a confused and dawdling biscuit-eater.

I manage to push myself out of the house, and blink in the
sudden sunlight. Part of me is still in New York. I almost expect
to see skyscrapers and yellow cabs and bagel-sellers. It’s one of
those days when summer appears for a while and then turns into autumn; there are billowy white clouds and patches of blue, and
a breeze that is bordering on chilly. I cross the road and walk down the steps to the beach. The leaves on the sturdy Dublin
palm trees are being tossed about in the breeze, and a crisp packet
is dancing in the air.

I want to be totally in the present moment. I want to just walk
and smell the sea air, hear the gulls, feel the crunch of sand under
my feet. I manage to do this for thirty seconds, and then I start thinking about the conversation I had with Diarmuid when he collected me from the airport. It was the perfect opportunity to talk about our marriage and what we wanted to do with it, but
instead we ended up discussing horse-riding. It reminded me of a
dinner party I once attended, at which the guests discussed fish-farming for an entire hour.

I said Erika wanted us to go horse-riding and Diarmuid said it
was a good idea. Then he said that he used to go horse-riding when he was a teenager, and I said he’d never told me that, and
he said he was telling me now. The conversation got very prickly
for a bit, because his dinner with Charlene was hovering around
in my thoughts and I felt furious with him for sleeping with her
and giving her driving lessons – and, most of all, for
talking
to
her. I suddenly felt sure he had said all the things to her that he hadn’t said to me. What’s more, I felt he had actually
saved up
t
his conversation for just such an occasion. At one point I thought
I couldn’t stay in the car with him a moment longer. I almost leapt
out at a traffic light when I saw a taxi rank, but then I realised my
purse was full of dollars. So I just closed my eyes, and Diarmuid
started to talk about this horse he’d got very fond of and how he
loved the smell of her sweat on his hands after grooming. He said
there was nothing like a good gallop across an open field. I said, rather frostily, that I didn’t want to gallop across an open field; I
wanted to be on a smallish horse that was happy to walk and didn’t run off with me. I wanted a horse I could
trust.

We sat in silence for a while after that, and I thought of Fiona,
who gets on big gleaming thoroughbreds and gallops off across
fields. She even has her own jodhpurs and riding boots and a hard
hat. Erika and I went to some posh equestrian place with her
once, and we were, as usual, left completely in awe of her
streamlined, gutsy beauty. We ended up having scones and tea in
the little café by the stables.

As Diarmuid drove on sombrely, I found myself thinking that
knowing someone like Fiona really rubs one’s nose in it. That’s
why this situation with Milly doesn’t seem right, somehow. It just
isn’t the sort of thing that happens to Fiona. I suppose I could almost feel relieved to discover she isn’t perfect after all, but
instead I’m heartbroken for her. I love her. I want her to be happy.
I want her to be the Fiona who made us all feel a bit inferior.

‘How was New York?’ Diarmuid asked, when we were nearly
at my cottage.

‘It was fine. It was very nice.’ I told him a bit about the interviews and the swanky hotel.

‘Good. I’m glad you enjoyed it.’ He leaned forward and kissed
me on the cheek. ‘You must be tired. I’ll call around soon.’ He helped me carry my bags into the living room and asked me if I
needed a lift to the shops to get some milk. I felt a brief return of affection. It was so typical of Diarmuid to remember a detail like t
hat. I probably married him for just that sort of question.

I said I would get the milk tomorrow, so he gave me a quick
hug and drove off. I suddenly felt terribly lonely – but I also found
I was almost relieved that we had managed to avoid all the crucial
emotional topics. Life and love are sometimes so strange that I really don’t know what I think about them.

As I watch a young girl run along beside the waves with her
dog, my mobile phone rings. It’s Fiona, and she’s in tears. ‘Should
I tell him, Sally? I really want to tell him,’ she asks, through sobs
and sniffs. Then she blows her nose. It sounds like an off-key trumpet. For such a pretty, streamlined person Fiona is a very noisy nose-blower.

‘Not yet,’ I say with as much authority as I can muster. What
Fiona needs at the moment is someone who has an opinion – any
opinion, as long as it sounds calm and considered. She keeps ringing me in tears and asking if she should tell Zak he isn’t Milly’s father, and I always tell her to wait for a while, mainly
because I don’t think she could deal with Zak storming out of the
house and leaving her on her own with Milly and the nanny. Of
course, he mightn’t do this; but he has such lofty opinions about
telling the truth that I think she should wait a bit, at least until Milly settles down and stops bawling at all hours of the night.

Then Fiona says she wonders if she should postpone the
christening, because Zak will probably have the results of Milly’s blood tests by then. I tell her that Milly will have to get christened
sooner or later, and even if Zak knows he isn’t her father, he may
feel obliged to put on a good show for the relatives. I say this
might in fact be very useful, because it would delay his departure
– even though he probably won’t leave anyway – and give them
more time to discuss the situation.

‘He’s getting suspicious. I’ve heard him whispering on the phone to his relatives.’

Frankly I’m not surprised. Every time I look at Milly, I can’t help wondering if her father is Chinese or Japanese or perhaps even Tibetan. The fertility clinic really should have a look into their filing system.

‘Maybe I should have brought Milly to New York with me and
just stayed there,’ Fiona says.

I try to calm her down. I say that Zak may understand; he’s a
very understanding man. And he loves Milly. He is also besotted
with Fiona.

‘Maybe you don’t know him quite as well as you think,’ I add.
In normal circumstances this might not be comforting, but in this
case it seems to offer a mild reassurance. ‘There could be a part of him that can come to terms with this. Look how my father loves April.’

‘Zak’s not like that,’ Fiona says, and I know she’s wrong to be so sure about what he is and isn’t. At least that’s something the last few months have taught me. Then her voice suddenly
brightens, and I know Zak must have appeared. ‘Yes, I just loved
that film too. We must go to the cinema soon, Sally. Lovely to talk
with you. Bye.’ She hangs up.