OUT OF THE BLUE a gripping novel of love lost and found (24 page)

At the hour of twelve at night

Who should I see but the Spanish lady

Combing her hair in the pale moonlight

First she washed it, then she dried it

Over a fire of amber coal

In all my life I ne’er did see

A maid so sweet about the soul.

My mother claims that one of those Spanish sailors from the Armada got friendly with my Connemara ancestors, hence the hair and brown eyes.’

‘Eyes like wood smoke,’ he said, ‘that misty smoke that turf produces.’ He picked up a soapstone figure of an elephant, ran his fingers across its smooth back. ‘I’m eight years older than you; my job takes me away regularly. I smoke marijuana when I’m not working, probably too much, my only excuse being that it helps me sleep and it got me through the last couple of years and my divorce; living with Matt is like having a guerrilla fighter around. I’m not looking for a substitute mother for Matt, it’s important that you understand that. That’s it, that’s all.’

I kissed his hands and the hollow of his throat and drew him down beside me. We lay, reading each other’s faces and when we made love, he looked into my eyes, held my gaze and I thought that he was the first man who had ever done that, the first man who hadn’t found passion somehow embarrassing.

In the early hours he caught my hand, opened his eyes and sat up to light a joint, plumping his pillows. I took a pull when he passed it to me, although I didn’t much care for the bitter taste.

He told me then about his ex-wife, Veronica, his voice cracked and tired in the dark. She was a flight attendant; they’d met on a trip to Sydney. She’d handed him his Pernod, they’d chatted briefly, then during the night at length, whispered while the other passengers slept. A year later they married. Two years later, Veronica had propped a note by the kettle to say that she was leaving him for Michel, a French pilot she’d fallen for in Dubai. She’d doubled back after heading for Heathrow one morning, packed her things and vanished. He collected Matt from nursery and came home to a ransacked flat; at first he thought there had been a burglary. There had, in a way: a burglary of his trust, his life. His bed was wide and deep with a beech headboard, a relic from his marriage and we lay close in the middle of it. Veronica was in Paris now, with Michel. Matt stayed with Nathan, and Veronica didn’t object. Once a month she flew to London and took Matt back for a week. She never explained to Nathan how she could leave her son. He said that he believed that she let him keep Matt through guilt. For months, he agonized over what it was that he did or failed to do that caused her to leave him.

‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘there was nothing you could have done. Maybe it was just chance, just bad luck that she met someone else at that time. Events sometimes overtake people.’

He took a deep draw on his joint. ‘I don’t know. My aunt used to say, “If I
didn’t have bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.”
Mind you, she was one of life’s pessimists; every cloud had a lead lining. When I got accepted for university she sent me a card saying, “if it was raining soup, you’d have a spoon
”.’

‘The opposite of that is, “If it was raining soup, you’d have a fork.”
Or, as Cormac says, “If there was only a rasher of bacon to eat, I’d be Jewish”.
’

He pulled me close, holding my head between his hands. The skin on his palms was curiously rough and wrinkled. ‘Tell me what you know,’ he said, teasingly.

I stretched my fingers against his chest. ‘I know that the world’s my oyster and that an elephant never forgets and . . . I know that there’s a man in the moon who eats the green cheese.’

As dawn broke in a lemon haze, revealing his face on the pillow, he said, ‘I have to tell you, I’m afraid, that an elephant has no memory at all.’ He stroked my hair back. ‘You’ll be my girl, then, you’ll be my love.’

I agreed.

* * *

Matt was a generous boy with a trusting nature. He accepted my arrival in his life with equanimity. He was robust, with sturdy limbs, fair hair and Nathan’s tender, washed-blue eyes. His energy was boundless. He was picking up French on his stays in Paris and would lapse into a form of Franglais when he was cross:
‘Du pain,
Daddy, I want
du pain!’

‘May’s a funny name,’ he said the day Nathan introduced me.

‘I’m called May because I was born in May,’ I told him.

‘Then There’s May blossom, Our Lady of the May, Maypole, Mayfair, May queen, nuts in May and may I have this dance,’ Nathan said, picking Matt up and whirling him through the air.

‘Maymaymaymaymaymay,’ Matt chanted, delirious with pleasure, hiccupping.

We picked him up from nursery on that first day. When he saw Nathan he raced to the gate, his legs pumping. He sat on his father’s shoulders, pulling his ears, demanding samosas for tea. He had learned to count to twenty in both English and French and repeated the numbers over and over, until Nathan told him to put a sock in it, which caused him great amusement. We stopped at an Indian take-away for the samosas. While we waited for them we tried morsels of the sweets set out for tasting on the counter. I preferred the coconut wedge, Nathan the milky slice flavoured with cardamom. Unusually for a child, Matt didn’t ask for sweets. Nathan told me that this might be because Veronica never allowed him to have them and I thought how odd it must be to have a part-time parent who pulled strings from afar.

We ate the samosas with chutney and yoghurt in front of the television while Matt watched cartoons. My tongue still held a trace of coconut and this added to the strangeness of sitting at five o’clock in the day with the curtains half drawn against the sun, watching Spiderman and crunching spices. It was like an afternoon visit to the cinema, which always seemed an illicit pleasure. I licked my fingers and drew air into my mouth to cool me down.

Matt turned time around and there were traces of him everywhere, like a remorseless tide: toys, vests and Tshirts, battered books, pictures of blobs executed in watercolours, bits of crisps, half-eaten apples. He smelled of cinnamon, his favourite topping on toast. When he was tired, he became pale and irritable. He tolerated me then, but it was Nathan he wanted, Nathan he cried for.

I stayed for weekends and during half-terms. We established a haphazard routine, punctuated by my returns to Dublin and Nathan’s work schedules, which involved several weeks away followed by a period at home. Occasionally, I found something of Veronica’s still in the flat: a pair of tights stuffed at the back of the airing cupboard; a silk scarf in a kitchen drawer; a frayed swimming costume at the bottom of the laundry basket,
long body, high leg.
I held them in my hands, absorbing their texture. The scarf smelled of a musky scent. I had a sudden feeling of vulnerability, as if I was an intruder, then I threw them away without mentioning them.

Matt had two photographs of his mother by his bed; she was tall, with short blonde hair and a direct gaze. In one, she held him on her jutting hip, laughing at the camera. In the other, she was in smart uniform, standing in the doorway of a plane and holding a tray. It struck me that Veronica and I were physical opposites. Matt had her wide mouth and hair and referred to her as
ma belle maman.

* * *

We agreed to marry in early April. I resigned from my job and packed my possessions. Cormac took me for a drink on the night before I left Dublin. He looked at my trunk and suitcases stacked in the living-room of my flat and nodded.

‘Time to move on,’ he said. In the bar, he toasted my future. For once, his gaze wasn’t constantly flitting, taking in any promising talent. ‘I think you’re brave, by the way,’ he told me.

‘Brave? Why?’

‘Taking on a man with a kid. Taking on Veronica.’

I didn’t understand, of course. Then, I thought that marriages ended with divorce. I knew no better, didn’t have any friends who were divorced, wasn’t aware of the tightly knotted skeins that can still bind.

‘I’m not “taking on” Veronica,’ I said lightly, sipping my wine, ‘I think Michel’s done that.’

Cormac looked shrewd. ‘It’s a jigsaw and you’re another piece fitting in, let’s say. She might not like you, might have a different picture of Nathan and Matt in her mind’s eye. You can still be possessive about what you’ve thrown away.’

This hadn’t struck me. I’d envisaged a civilized exchange of courtesies between two sets of lives.

‘I suppose that’s possible, but it’s not as if we’re going to have to see much of each other, I’m sure we can manage the situation. Nathan often takes Matt to the airport to meet her when she’s having him for the week and once he’s old enough to fly unaccompanied, she won’t even have to travel over.’

Cormac smiled. ‘I meant more that she might not like the
fact
of you: a usurper. Another woman tucking her child in at night.’

I frowned at him. It wasn’t the farewell I’d been anticipating; evenings with Cormac were occasions of laughter and gossip, details of his multi-faceted love-life. The bar suddenly seemed too noisy.

‘She left Nathan, after all,’ I said. ‘She must have realized he’d meet someone else. I don’t see that she has any reason to resent his new partner.’ She’s happy, I was thinking, why wouldn’t she want Nathan to be?

‘Ah, logical May, rational May. If only people were always rational. If only I knew why I don’t fancy the guy over there who’s giving me the eye.’ He lit a cigarette. The smoke mingled with his aromatic aftershave.

‘Stop being such a Cassandra,’ I said, annoyed. ‘I thought you brought me for a drink to wish me well.’

He apologized, said he was just an old moany queen and I should ignore him.

‘You know some of us gay men, always looking for the drama in a situation,’ he added, ordering us another carafe of wine, launching into a story about a Brazilian he’d met at the theatre.

FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENS NEXT!

http://www.amazon.co.uk/CHILD-compelling-novel-heartbreak-family-ebook/dp/B01CEWISEQ/

http://www.amazon.com/CHILD-compelling-novel-heartbreak-family-ebook/dp/B01CEWISEQ/

UK/US GLOSSARY (scroll down for Irish words)

A & E:
accident and emergency department of hospital

Blighty
: means England

Bookie’s:
Bookmaker

Boxing Day:
26 December

Carer:
person who looks after old or ill people

Chaps:
men

Chip:
fat French fry

Chipper:
feeling positive

Civil servant:
someone who works for the Civil Service

Civil Service:
government departments which put central government plans into action

Council flat:
public or project housing

Cross:
upset or angry

Deputy head:
deputy principal

Fella:
man

Flat:
apartment

Geordie:
someone from Newcastle

GP:
local doctor

Hack
: newspaper journalist

Magistrate:
a civil officer who administers the law

Mobile phone:
cell phone

Mobile:
cell phone

MP:
member of British parliament

Overall:
a one-piece garment worn to protect clothes

Oxbridge
: refers to Oxford and Cambridge universities

Plaster:
Band-Aid

Post:
mail

Puds:
puddings/desserts

RC:
Roman Catholic

Red Brick University
: university founded in 19th and 20th centuries

Register office:
a government building where you get married or register births

Ring:
to phone

Rubbish:
trash

Solicitor:
lawyer

Sun cream:
sun lotion

Takeaway:
takeout food

The tube or underground:
subway

To-do:
a commotion

Torch:
flashlight

Tweedledum and Tweedledee:
characters in an English nursery rhyme

UHT:
ultra heat treated milk for long life

Wee:
little (Scottish)

IRISH WORDS

Alannah:
darling

Bad cess:
bad luck

Barm Brack:
fruit loaf

Boreen:
a path

Hooley
: party

Palaver
: nonsense

Seannachtai:
story teller