The Truth Club (69 page)

Then Marie marches up behind me and grabs my hand and
drags me into the conservatory. ‘I can’t believe you didn’t tell me
this!’ she splutters in outrage.

‘What?’ I reply, wondering if she has somehow discovered that
I visited DeeDee in London.

‘About April, of course!’ Marie snaps. ‘That your father isn’t
her real father. Your mother came up to me and just announced it in the kitchen. I’m sure Cedric overheard her.’

‘Oh.’ I try, but I just can’t hide my smile.

Chapter
Forty-Five

It is nearly spring,
and the first snowdrops are nudging their
way through the earth in my small garden. During the winter
we almost lost Aggie a number of times, but she’s still with us and
as curious about my love life as ever.

I don’t tell her I have no love life to speak of, though Erika,
Fiona and I often rent passionate DVDs and develop major
crushes on the leading actors. We watch these DVDs in my
cottage so that Lionel and Zak are spared the sight of their
beloveds drooling over some hot young Hollywood heart-throb.
Love hasn’t dented Erika’s and Fiona’s admiration for a nice bum
or a pair of well-toned biceps. I, of course, am free to ogle any hunk I want to. Being single really does have many advantages, including a complete absence of mice.

Nathaniel has gone to London instead of to New York. He has
some social-work job there and occasionally sends me cheerful
postcards. I haven’t asked him, but I suspect he may have finally
chosen someone from his horde of female admirers; he hasn’t actually said as much, but on the one occasion when he phoned
me, he said ‘we’ when he mentioned a walk in Hyde Park. ‘We’,
of course, is a word that couples get used to. They say it almost without thinking.

Eloise is a ‘we’ too. She got married last month, to a fabulously
rich and handsome man; it must have been a very short and
passionate engagement. Glamorous photos of their wedding were
splashed all over the papers.

In the circumstances, it’s probably best that Nathaniel is out of m
y vicinity. I probably wouldn’t be able to fit him into my
schedule anyway, because of my new interests in gospel singing and cookery and my torrid affair with the well-known actor Mel
Sinclair. This relationship is wonderfully undemanding, since Mel
doesn’t know I exist. I rent him when I need him.

During Nathaniel’s one and only phone call, I managed to unearth the truth about his unlikely friendship with ‘Fabrice’. It
turns out he found out Fabrice was DeeDee on the day they first
met in Aggie’s bedroom. After their visit, he offered her a lift into
town and she accepted; and as she was sliding herself cumber
somely towards the passenger seat, Fred grabbed playfully at one
of her dangling earrings and pulled off her wig. When the wig was
reclaimed, Nathaniel was going to ask Fabrice why she was wearing a wig in the first place – she did, after all, seem to have
nicer hair underneath it, and the wig hid large parts of her face –
but then he studied her more closely and found himself saying, without thinking, ‘DeeDee?’

‘Yes?’ she said; then she suddenly realised her mistake and
frowned. ‘Why are you calling me that name?’ she added
brusquely. ‘My name is
Fabrice
,
dear.’

‘Oh, DeeDee!’ Nathaniel flung his arms around her, and that was that, really. He disarmed her, like he seems to disarm all of
us. She ended up telling him her story, though of course she swore
him to secrecy. He said he had almost told me many times.

‘That’s why I kept wanting you to know her better,’ he
explained.

‘Where did you go, that time you both flew off someplace?’ I
asked, feeling as though I was, at long last, finding the missing pieces of an extremely large and unlikely jigsaw.

‘London. She was travelling back there anyway, and she
wanted me to see Extravaganza and meet Craig. I kept telling her
she should be sharing these intimacies with you and the rest of her
family, but she seemed more comfortable with a total stranger.’

A Beautiful Stranger,
I thought.
You do make a very Beautiful
Stranger.

‘When exactly did you first meet DeeDee?’ I found myself
asking.
‘DeeDee told me you’d been into Extravaganza with a friend and met her quite a while ago,’ I commented. ‘She said you phoned her when you heard me mention my lost great-aunt.’

‘Actually, that was a fib.’ Nathaniel sighed. ‘We had to make
you believe I knew about DeeDee without implicating Fabrice.
She was still very undecided about whether she could face Aggie
as her real self; and she thought that, if you knew about her visits,
you’d be even more frustrated about her doubts. I’m sorry.’

‘Oh, well. I eventually found out the truth.’ I smiled. ‘I suppose
one sometimes has to build up to it gradually.’

‘I knew you’d understand.’

‘Do you ever see her now?’

‘Yes.’ Nathaniel laughed. ‘In fact, I think I’m addicted to her
marble cake. They may have to start a twelve-step programme for
it. You should pop over; she’d love to see you again.’

But what about you, Nathaniel?
I wanted to ask.
How would you feel about seeing me again?

‘Tell Fred I miss him far more than I should, given that he’s a
disrespectful, jewel-thieving mongrel,’ he added cheerfully. Then
he was gone, and I sat down on the sofa and cried for a bit
because I missed him. But I quickly dried my eyes and told myself
not to be so stupid. How could I have forgotten that I was
actually
enjoying
being single? My social life had expanded, and
I was eating far fewer biscuits.

Another good thing about Nathaniel’s absence is that I get to
borrow his dog. Fred needs plenty of entertainment and exercise
if he is to be prevented from stealing jewellery (Greta’s gold bracelet was eventually located under the hydrangeas when Nathaniel hired a metal detector), so he and I regularly stroll
a
long the shoreline together. Fred is a wonderful aid to slimming,
though of course walking makes me hungry and I have to sternly
avert my gaze any time I pass an ice-cream pusher, in his van, virtually trying to force a large cone into my mouth.

Greta is immensely grateful to me for helping her to look after
‘that mongrel’. She also sometimes insists I sit in her Provençal-
style kitchen and says things like, ‘So, Sally, have you found someone else?’ She’s beginning to sound just like April, but for
some reason she also looks a bit worried. The other day, to cheer
her up, I mentioned that I’d been dating a guy called Brian Mulligan. I made it sound like Brian was a real find. In fact he
makes me want to stick my head into a hot towel with boredom, which is why I don’t plan to see him any more, but I felt I could
spare Greta these unimportant details.

I thought she’d be pleased to hear about Brian, but she actually
looked a bit jumpy. ‘Take care not to marry on the rebound, dear,’
she said sombrely.

I never expected her to take such interest in my personal life.
‘Oh, Brian and I would discuss things in great detail before we did
anything like that,’ I reassured her.

‘So you’ve discussed
marriage?’
She leaned forward and almost
spilt her tea.

I began to wonder whether Greta secretly fancied me. What
else could account for her unnatural interest in the men in my life,
or the lack of them?

The truth about Brian Mulligan is that I met him at a gallery
opening and we got talking and I let him fetch me a glass of wine.
He was tall and well built and had a broad, handsome face that I
didn’t find particularly attractive, but he seemed pleasant enough,
so we went out for a pizza afterwards. I don’t really remember what we talked about. A few days later we went to a film and I let him kiss me outside the door of my cottage; it was a soft, passionless kiss that slid off me as soon as I got indoors. After that we went on a Sunday-afternoon drive and had tea in a nice café and walked a bit in the countryside. Then, some days later, we went out for a slap-up Italian dinner and Brian brought me back to his flat – a very tidy, high-tech place – and we slept together. Brian seemed to enjoy it, but I was distracted by the tightly patterned wallpaper.

A few days later Brian ‘popped by’, just like Diarmuid used to,
and I told him I didn’t think we should date any more because I
was trying to get over the ending of my marriage. He was
naturally surprised that I hadn’t mentioned this marriage earlier, but he didn’t seem particularly disappointed, though I sensed he
regarded the announcement as mildly inconvenient: he would now have to find someone else, which he seemed to regard as a chore. I watched his departing car with considerable relief and luxuriated in a wonderfully single evening – a long bath, a high-quality convenience dinner, and rubbish telly watched in bed in wonderfully cosy, unflattering clothes. I didn’t eat one biscuit.

April calls more often these days. The whole family knows
about Al now; apparently the rumour spread discreetly but
rapidly at Marie’s party, just like Mum must have known it
would. April returned to San Francisco with a broad smile on her
face and a large Waterford crystal bowl in her hand luggage.

‘So have you found someone else yet?’ she often asks, in her perky Californian way.

‘Yes, Mel Sinclair will be moving in any day now,’ I reply. ‘I
may need to construct a secret entrance for him because of the paparazzi.’

‘Aw, come on, Sally,’ she protests.

‘Look, I
like
being single,’ I tell her. And in many ways that’s true. My days are full and I’m not unhappy, and at long last I
have sufficient storage space in my kitchen. I gave in to Diarmuid
about the cabinet eventually. He kept ringing and asking me if I was really sure I didn’t want it, and one day I said I did, just to shut him up. I told him to come on a day when I knew I would
be out, learning about curries and spices from some of the people
Erika and I teach English to.

I can no longer lump them all together and call them ‘Erika’s
refugees’. They have names now, and stories, and I like some of
them more than others. They make me forget the things I feel I
should feel sad about; they make me remember that, in the grand
scheme of things, I have a great deal to be grateful for. And some
of them are excellent cooks. Every so often
The Sunday Lunch
allows me to write articles about ethnic cuisine, and my students
have been providing the recipes. We try them out in a small
kitchen down the corridor from the hall where we hold the
English classes. I have eaten fruits and vegetables I didn’t know
existed, and types of meat and grains I would never have
considered. When we try out a recipe we cook enough for the
whole class, so sometimes our English classes are, basically, large
and somewhat boisterous dinner parties. Erika brings along some
wine and fruit juice, and people end up talking loudly and opinionatedly about all sorts of matters, with varying levels of
expertise. Occasionally there are tears, but there is also plenty of laughter. In the past, the mixed nature of these gatherings would have distressed me – though I claimed to value honesty, I would have felt disappointed by the sobs amidst the smiles – but now it
seems to me that this is entirely normal, given the circumstances.
And it is also entirely normal that we often stray onto less serious
topics.