Girl Unknown (8 page)

‘And boots,’ he said then.

‘Boots?’

‘She wears these boots – military-looking. Doc Martens, I suppose. Oxblood in colour. They look enormous at the end of her skinny legs. She’s such a little slip of a thing. Shy.’

The way he said it, I couldn’t help thinking he felt affection towards her.

He lay there for a moment, staring into the dark. Outside, the car alarm had stopped, and silence came into the room, like a sudden intrusion. He turned over, flattening himself in preparation for sleep.

But I didn’t sleep. It was as though each of us – in separate and distinct ways – had been plunged back into the past. Fragments of old memories were coming back at
unexpected moments. I wondered, as David’s breathing slowed, if his last waking thoughts that night were of Linda. As for me, I found myself going back further to another time, another meeting. A decision made. The weight of its seriousness pressing on my young shoulders.
You don’t have to come with me
, I had told him.
I can go on my own.
Trying to sound brave while inside I was dying. Did he remember that conversation, my sleeping husband? Was any of this coming back to him, too? Old ghosts awoken, stirred angrily into life by this new girl, like a wasp’s nest struck with a stick.

It was a flare in my brain – her golden hair. Everywhere I looked there were girls with blonde hair, hanging loose down backs and over shoulders, swinging in ponytails, with flicked fringes. I found myself staring at teenage girls, calculating their age, anxiously assessing their likeness to David, to Holly. She could have been any one of them.

I didn’t intend to seek her out. But one morning when I was driving along Morehampton Road, running an errand for Peter, it occurred to me that if I kept on driving I would reach the UCD campus.

I rang the History Department office while driving, saying my niece was a first-year student of history; she had been visiting me last night but had left her phone in my house. I had no way of getting in touch with her, I said, and wanted to drop it into the university.

All I wanted was to get a look at her. I had no intention of approaching her. First-years had American History in Theatre J that morning, I was told. All I needed was to
see her. Once I had done so, my fear would subside, or if not my fear, at least my curiosity.

The possibility of bumping into David, going from his office to a lecture, had crossed my mind. If I saw him, I would make something up. Part of me wondered what his reaction would be. Students were already streaming out of lecture theatres as I ran up the steps and into the Arts building, the corridors and foyers becoming momentarily clotted with them. When I got to Theatre J and looked around at the empty seats, the vacant space awaiting the next influx, I felt a small stab of disappointment.

What are you doing?
I asked myself.
Foolish woman.

Outside the lecture hall, students were drifting sluggishly along, like hung-over cows. I felt conspicuous among them, dressed in a black trouser suit and kitten heels, my shoulder-length brown hair flicked out at the ends. I didn’t look like a lecturer, let alone a student. To them, I probably looked like an accountant or a management consultant on campus to give a presentation. I would call on David. Surprise him. Make a serious attempt to bridge the gap we both knew had opened between us since his revelation. Pushing myself away from the wall, I looked towards the stairwell, and it was in the act of turning that I saw her.

Blonde hair, just as he had said, luminous under the fluorescent strip-lighting. Her face small and pale. A skinny girl, and not very tall, but she held herself well, shoulders thrown back, a long, straight neck, her bag slung over one shoulder – a casual, relaxed pose. And the boots he had mentioned lent something firm and inflexible to her otherwise waif-like appearance.

She was standing by a marble and limestone sculpture known to generations of students as the Blob. I had wanted to catch a glimpse of her, nothing more. Well, I had done that, yet still I lingered. She didn’t look remotely like either of my children. The lightness of her hair, the milky-whiteness of her skin were at odds with the darker colouring that unified the four of us. I looked her over and felt doubt trickling in.

She broke away from her friend and walked through the thinning crowd of students towards the exit. I watched her narrow back, her skinny legs, the careful manner of her walk – no slouching or dragging feet with this one. Reason told me to let her go, but impulse led me to follow her, and soon enough I was outside again, feeling the chill of the air, following her up the paved walkway towards the pond by the Engineering building. All the time, I was trying to keep my distance, trying to walk as if I had a purpose other than stalking her.

She took a seat on an empty bench on the deck around the pond. As I neared, the sound of my heels rang out and I slowed my step. She was sitting with her eyes closed, her head tilted to the sky, soaking up what little heat there was. Her pose was perfectly still, like a cat basking in the sun. I stopped, looked down at her, and slowly she opened her eyes. Green eyes, a little widely spaced, short dense lashes. They looked up at me in an assessing way, but she didn’t say anything.

‘You’re Zoë,’ I said.

‘Do I know you?’

Still so composed, so unfazed. A Northern flavour to her voice.

‘I’m Caroline,’ I said. ‘David’s wife.’

Her face cleared in recognition, eyes narrowing a fraction, then a slight flicker as she took me in, her interest piqued. She smiled, a slow, lazy smile and, it seemed to me, a little sly. ‘So he told you.’

A bristle of anger went through me. Of course he told me, I wanted to say. I’m his bloody wife. ‘Do you mind if I sit?’

‘Sure.’

The bench felt cold against the backs of my legs. My gaze followed the curling path of a moorhen, gliding through the reeds. That pond hadn’t been there when I was a student. I could feel Zoë looking at me with that little smirk.

‘You thought you’d come here and give me the once-over for yourself,’ she said.

A statement, not a question, and I could see how it was going to be between us. She had no notion of treading softly with me. Whatever charm she had reserved for David, it was clearly not going to be employed here.

‘You can’t blame me for being curious,’ I replied.

‘True.’

She turned her face to the sun, her shoulders thrown back, and closed her eyes again. I examined the planes of her face, looking for some trace of David, but there was nothing. She was completely unfamiliar to me. David’s words ran through my head:
A little slip of a thing. Shy.
Was that really how he saw her? Some vulnerable waif? The unfazed stillness of her pose made her seem so sure of herself, so self-contained, nerveless, where I was rigid and tense.

‘What made you decide to seek him out now?’

‘I don’t know. I was always going to get in touch, wasn’t I?’

‘Why now, though? Why not before?’

‘Now, before, later – what difference does it make?’ She shrugged, then added: ‘I’m here in the college, after all. It seemed stupid to avoid it any longer.’

‘It’s come as a shock,’ I said, ‘for David and for me.’

‘Hmm.’

She said this in a ruminative, matter-of-fact way that infuriated me. There was no hint of her taking this seriously – it was all a game to her.

‘I suppose I wanted to meet you so I could find out what your position is.’

‘My position!’ She laughed thinly, sounding insubstantial, lacking in conviction, although when she spoke, the words were sharp and precise.

‘Yes, your position. I wanted to see where you stood on this.’

‘You make me sound like a politician.’

‘Well …’ My voice faded. The truth was I didn’t know what I wanted from her. Except, perhaps, for her to turn around and say it had all been a stupid joke: none of it was true. When I had made the decision to sit down next to her, I still thought if I just spoke to her – confronted her, I suppose – she would crumble, break down. There would be tears and an admission to a foolish spoof, some desperate grab for attention. But looking at this cat preening herself under the sun, I was the one close to breakdown.

‘Does David know you’re here with me?’

I looked at her sharply. ‘Yes,’ I said, the lie coming quickly to my mouth.

It was instinctive, the need to align myself with my husband in the girl’s eyes. Something told me that if she knew the truth she could use it as ammunition.

‘I see.’

‘He’s my husband,’ I said. ‘I don’t want him to get hurt.’

She flicked back her hair, opened her eyes, leaned forward to pick up her bag and got to her feet. Standing in front of me, she blocked the low-lying sun, her face in shadow, but I could see her gazing down on me with those cold eyes. Without a word, she swung her bag over her shoulder, and turned away.

‘My position,’ I heard her say again, amusement in her voice.

Her laughter rang out as she walked back towards the Arts building, and it stayed with me – the mocking ring of it. Sitting on the bench, I felt a shiver of nerves cross my shoulders. All those years I’d spent thinking about Linda, wondering what she might have been like, trying to imagine her, now I felt as if I had finally met her. And I didn’t like her. She unnerved me.

I told myself I was being ridiculous. Zoë was just a girl. A teenager. There had been no ghostly visitation. And yet I felt shaken by the meeting – unsettled.

Within my line of vision there was a bronze statue of two people reaching, leaping upwards with arms outstretched, limbs entwined – a man and a woman – lean, youthful, athletic, their fingers splayed as if trying to catch the sun. I looked across at that piece of art in the wake of Zoë’s departure, and read within it energy,
vitality, joy. It reverberated with optimism and boundless possibility which made me feel a little sad because I couldn’t feel any of those things, not then. That day, staring at the bronzed figures in the coolness of the October sunshine, I felt hollowed out, as if something had just been taken from me. She was a thief, come to steal from me all that I loved. I knew it then: I would have to guard myself against her.

I wished I hadn’t met her. I had taken the measure of her and didn’t like what I’d found. I wanted it undone.

When David got home from work that evening and I heard him in the hall, I stirred the spaghetti in the pot and felt a tightening beneath my ribs. From upstairs came the sounds of Robbie practising his cello, a long drawn-out note, like a plea. David found me in the kitchen and asked: ‘Any news?’

I could have told him then. Instead I lifted my face to receive his kiss, smiling right back at him. ‘No. Not a thing.’

8. David

By my calculations, the results were due to arrive any day, and so it was that I found myself hurrying to campus the next mid-semester morning, my lungs filling with the heavy autumn air, a mixture of dread and excitement running through me.

As I free-wheeled past the water tower, and the sports centre, I saw the stirrings of a student demonstration. I cycled past it, locked my bike, walked up the steps to the Arts building and went to my office. I turned on my computer and scanned my inbox. A slew of emails confronted me, including a number of questions from Administration, Admissions and the student council. After I had responded as efficiently as possible, but before I had tackled my teaching preparation, I went to the common room for coffee. I needed the jolt. Alan was there with another colleague of ours, John McCormack, the two of them sitting in the corner, sipping tea and chatting.

‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ I said. ‘Setting the world to rights?’

‘What else?’ McCormack said.

He was four or five years younger than me: prolific, brilliant, with an international profile to envy. In history circles his books on the belle époque and the poets of the Russian Revolution were considered sexy, if anything in history can be considered such. Rather than
academic publishers, he had commercial publishing deals. He had an agent, and his books were shortlisted for prizes where they competed with other non-historical titles. As a historian, he was a rising star, as another colleague put it.

‘Join us,’ Alan said, and I sat. ‘John was just telling me about the conference at Birkbeck later this month.’

‘Will you make it?’ McCormack asked.

I told them I hadn’t planned on it this year. McCormack mentioned some of the presenters at the conference and how it was going to be a very full, but fulfilling weekend. In many ways, McCormack was everything I was not – we were both ambitious, but in different ways: he blazed trails where I dug ditches. I liked the dirty work, so to speak, and my pedagogic focus was, to the best of my abilities, student-focused; I don’t know how important McCormack considered the students in his overall plan – teaching, to him, was a necessary evil, something he was obliged to do so that he could do what he really wanted, which was to write those critically acclaimed books. I had been asked the previous year to take on some of his teaching so that he had more time to focus on his research. I didn’t mind. Neither did I begrudge McCormack his success – but I will admit to wondering about his professional integrity.

Those were the kind of things I worried about at the time.

We talked more about the conference before Alan stood up. ‘I’m afraid I have a meeting. Duty calls,’ he said, and bade us farewell.

McCormack brought up the dean’s suggestion for a
week-long festival of teaching and learning. ‘For whose benefit?’ he wanted to know.

‘Our students could get a lot out of it,’ I said, but McCormack detailed how he thought it could end up only as more work for us, thereby swamping us in greater administrative duties.

‘By the way,’ he said, in a confidential whisper, ‘I thought you might prefer it to come from someone you know rather than anyone else, but a colleague told me she saw you having a drink with one of the students. She did say it looked like a
compromisingly intimate encounter
.’

‘Who saw me?’