The Truth Club (9 page)

He’s trying to lure me back with food, just like he did with the
mice,
I thought. But I was suddenly very hungry.

When the car was parked, Diarmuid came around and opened
my door for me. Then he held out his hand and virtually pulled me from the car.

Diarmuid held my hand as he unlocked the front door, and he
held my hand as he led me upstairs to ‘our’ bedroom with its view
of the Dublin mountains. He held my hand as we sat down on the
bed. Then he kissed that ultra-sensitive spot behind my ear and
started to undress me. And, just as I was thinking that I must call
a taxi immediately, he poured me a large glass of red wine – he had an open bottle and glasses on the bedside table. He handed
the glass to me and I gulped it down like lemonade. ‘Just hold me,
Diarmuid,’ I said. ‘I just want you to hold me.’ The wine was
already going to my head. I must be the cheapest drunk in
Ireland. I wanted, needed, someone to comfort me; and that
person was Diarmuid, even though he was the reason I needed comfort in the first place.

But of course we didn’t just lie together chastely. After a few
minutes, he had somehow managed to remove all my clothes and his own. He got on top of me and kissed my lips, my breasts, my
hair; his breath was ragged with emotion. And then he was
suddenly inside me. Sex with Diarmuid is usually tender at first,
but this time it was hard and urgent, raw with intensity; the bed bounced so much I thought we might take off into the air. He didn’t bother to press the right buttons this time. This wasn’t about reaching out to me; it was about something else. I looked into his eyes, and then I looked away. There was more anger in them than love.

Something in me pulled back and just watched us, pounding against each other on the bed we had chosen together. Why
s
houldn’t he be angry, and why shouldn’t he use sex to prove that
I was still his wife? Sex can be so many things. It doesn’t have to
be tender.

But I needed it to be tender. I closed my eyes as the thrusting
became more intense and he groaned and shuddered and just lay
there for a moment. I couldn’t look at him. I just wanted him to be off me. I had never felt so lonely in my life.

That’s why small tears gathered in the corners of my eyes. I tried to blink them away, but Diarmuid must have seen them.

‘Oh, Sally, what is it now?’ he asked. He sounded frustrated. Weary.

‘It’s nothing.’ I managed a smile. ‘It’s just that all this has been
a bit… you know… unexpected.’

He touched my cheek tenderly. ‘Do you want me to go down and heat up dinner in the microwave?’

‘No. Let’s wait.’ I couldn’t tell him I was no longer hungry. And
then he said those things about how much he had missed me, and
fell asleep.

I get up carefully from the bed. I start to gather my clothes, which are strewn on the floor. I want to leave, but I don’t want
Diarmuid to wake up and find me gone. I want to explain to him
that, if I come back to live in this house, it needs to be my decision.

I start to snoop around the room, like Diarmuid snoops
around mine. I expect to find biology textbooks and magazines
about cars, and I do. I also find an empty box of Turkish Delight, which makes me smile: Turkish Delight is one of Diarmuid’s few
guilty passions. I am about to go downstairs and make myself a
cup of tea when I see what looks like a handwritten letter poking
out from his brown leather Filofax, which is on a chair next to his
navy-blue boxer shorts. I shouldn’t look at the letter. Of course I
shouldn’t look at it. It’s a woman’s writing. It must be.

Diarmuid stirs. I think he’s about to wake up, but instead he
turns over, his back to me. I reach for the letter. It’s probably from
Charlene, thanking him for the driving lessons. I almost put the
letter down; but there is something about the round, enthusiastic
handwriting that makes me read it.

‘Dear Diarmuid, it was so lovely to see you after all these years.
You haven’t changed. I know I must have, even though you say I
haven’t.’

Diarmuid moves again and makes those queer sucking sounds
he sometimes makes when he’s waking up. I turn the letter over. I
haven’t time to read it all; I just want to know who it’s from. Probably one of his cousins in New York.

Only it isn’t.

‘Do let’s try to keep in touch. Now that I’m back in Dublin, maybe we could meet for lunch again sometime.’ I look at the bottom of the page. The letter is signed, ‘Love, Becky.’

Chapter
Five

‘He’s seeing Becky.
’

‘Who’s Becky?’

‘I’ve told you about her, Erika,’ I say into my mobile, somewhat impatiently. I’m striding along a road towards my parents’ house, panting slightly. ‘She’s the girl… the woman he dated for five years. The one who left for New Zealand.’

‘Oh, yes… just a moment. There’s a call.’ Erika is working as a
temporary receptionist. At this minute she’s saying, ‘International
Holdings,’ to someone, though she doesn’t know why the holdings
are international or what the company actually does with them.

‘Sorry about that.’ She comes back on the line. ‘The calls come
in here in bunches.’

‘He says he only met her once for lunch and she’s planning to g
o back to New Zealand soon. He says they’re just friends now.’

‘Well…’ Erika hesitates. ‘Well, that’s not too bad, is it? Maybe h
e’s telling the truth.’

‘I don’t know… there was a funny look on his face when he said it.’

‘Sorry. Just a moment.’ She takes another call.

‘I slept with him,’ I say, as soon as Erika is back on the line.
Knowing that she may disappear at any moment means I have to
get to the headlines fast.

‘What?
Was this after you found out about Becky?’

‘No, before it. I found a letter from her in the bedroom.’

‘I see. Oh, dear.’ Erika no longer sounds quite so reassuring. ‘How did you leave it, then?’

‘I told him he was one to talk.’ I almost spit the words into
the phone.

‘Talk about what?’

‘Talk about not seeing other people. He kept checking up on me, but he was the one who was seeing someone else.’

‘For lunch,’ Erika points out. Even though I don’t think she
particularly likes Diarmuid, she has a fair-minded streak that can,
at times, be extremely annoying.

‘Anything
can happen over lunch.’ My voice rises with
emotion. ‘People can fall in love again over lunch. He’s always loved her – she’s the woman he wanted to marry, only she got engaged to someone in New Zealand, though she didn’t marry the guy in the end. His mother even has a photo of her in the sitting-room. She’s in a canoe.’

‘Calm down, Sally,’ Erika says. ‘He married you, didn’t he? Yes, put it over there. Where do I have to sign for it?’ I assume she is now talking to someone who has delivered something.

‘Erika?’ I say, after about thirty seconds. ‘Are you still there?’

‘Yes,’ she sighs. ‘Sorry about that. As I was saying, you mustn’t
jump to conclusions. Anyway, what if he does still sort of like this
woman? It wouldn’t be all that bad, would it? I mean… to be absolutely honest, Sally, you don’t seem all that thrilled about being married to him.’

‘I need time to think about it!’ I exclaim indignantly. ‘That’s all.
I haven’t been seeing other people. So I told him that maybe,
given the circumstances, he should take the opportunity to have a
little think about things too.’

‘I suppose that’s only fair,’ Erika says. She disappears to take
another call.

As I wait, I wish Erika realised that sometimes I want her to be
unfair. I want her to take my side and call Diarmuid a stupid bollocks – even though he isn’t, of course. It would be so much easier if he were.

‘He said he didn’t need time to think about things,’ I gabble, w
hen Erika gets back on the line. ‘But then he said he would if I i
nsisted, because we need to make a decision about the house.’

‘
The horse?’

‘The
house.
For God’s sake, Erika, why would we be making a
decision about a horse? We don’t own one.’

‘You’re speaking so fast I can hardly keep up with you.’

‘I can’t stand it. He wouldn’t talk about Becky at all, apart from saying they were just friends. He doesn’t talk to me, not
properly. There’s always been this distant look in his eyes – even
on the day we married.’

‘It’s not gone yet.’

‘What… what’s not gone?’ I demand impatiently.

‘The post. Someone just asked me about it.’

‘So now this decision seems to be about whether to sell the house, when what I want to talk about is… is whether or not we love each other.’

‘Men aren’t very good at talking about emotions, are they?’ Erika sighs. ‘That’s why Alex is so special. He doesn’t mind talking about emotions.’

I almost mention my worries about being pregnant, but I
decide not to. I’m expecting my period soon, so I suppose it’s kind of unlikely – but I’d say Diarmuid’s sperm are a pretty determined
bunch. ‘Thanks for talking to me, Erika,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry for interrupting you at work.’

‘I
love
being interrupted at work,’ Erika says. ‘Do you want to
call round this evening?’

‘That would be lovely.’ I sigh. ‘But I’m meeting Fiona. We’re
going for one of her hikes through the hills.’

‘Oh, dear God,’ Erika groans. ‘Is it going to be a ten-miler?’

‘
No. She’s promised we’ll take it gently. She’s going to give birth soon, after all.’

‘Oh, of course,’ Erika says. ‘I hope she doesn’t do it halfway up
a mountain.’

The thought of being an untrained midwife on some craggy
promontory briefly distracts me from my worries about
Diarmuid. ‘Bye, Erika. Talk to you soon.’

‘Byeee, sweetie,’ Erika says. Before she hangs up I hear the
unmistakable sound of her cramming a chocolate biscuit into her
mouth. Sitting at a reception desk, any reception desk, makes
Erika want to eat lots of biscuits. She’s got very good at tucking
them into her cheek, like a hamster, when she has to answer the phone.

I turn into a tree-lined, middle-class suburban street and head towards my parents’ home. It has the tidiest exterior of all the
houses, because my parents have made convenience a priority: the
lawn at the front has been replaced by concrete, and the round flowerbed is liberally scattered with fetching brown, white and
pale-orange stones – there are a few plants as well, but the stones
are the main feature and naturally do not require watering. Near the front door there is a small and rather polite evergreen tree, which will never, apparently, grow too tall or require much pruning or fertiliser.

‘Hi, Sally!’ Mum calls out as I open the door – I still have my own key. She has a phone stuck to her ear, which is not unusual.
‘I’ve just made some coffee.’ She gestures towards the kitchen. My
mother has become a coffee drinker in recent years; she grinds it herself and has a number of special blends in white ceramic jars.
She is a small, trim woman prone to darting, eager movements. When she was younger she was pretty in an unexceptional,
standard sort of way; now she is what Diarmuid calls ‘handsome’
and I call ‘well maintained’. Her hair colour, for example, varies
regularly because she likes to ‘experiment with highlights’, and
she is permanently tanned due to some very expensive cream that
also protects her skin from ultraviolet rays.