The Kiss (10 page)

‘I’ve been having an affair,’ said Rachel. ‘It didn’t last long, and it’s over now. We were only together two or three times. I’m sorry.’

He was stunned. It had never occurred to him that Rachel –
Rachel
, of all people … He couldn’t believe that she had been as intimate with another man as she had been with him.

‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated. ‘Especially having to tell you this today. But somehow I had to, I don’t know
why. Or perhaps it’s because of what happened today. I want to be open with you. We’ve got to be open with each other. And I didn’t want you to hear any rumours from anywhere else – just in case.’

In case they had been seen together? Though Rachel would have been very careful, he was sure, very discreet, whatever she had been doing. But no one could afford to discount chance. Had someone seen them, this man, whoever he might be, and her, when they had least expected it? Was that the reason for her confession?
By the way, Cormac, I saw your wife with
… With
whom
? His brain felt befuddled and incapable of taking anything more in.

She was lying on her back, eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling. Was she waiting for him to make a similar confession? He did have a sin, a minor one, he rated it, but still a transgression that surfaced every now and then to cause him unease. He had been unfaithful to Rachel following the birth of Sophie. He’d gone out with some mates to celebrate and had drunk a skinful and they’d picked up or been picked up by some women out on a hen night. Somehow or other he had ended up with one of them in her bed. Afterwards, it had all seemed rather foolish, but he hadn’t dared tell Rachel in case she would leave him and take their beautiful new baby with her. Could he face telling her now? His brief
fling would seem tawdry beside her serious affair. For he did not doubt that hers would have been serious; Rachel would not embark on such a thing lightly. That was what bothered him more than anything: he feared she might have fallen in love with someone else.

He felt as if his marriage was coming apart, unravelling between his hands, like a piece of worn-out cloth. One false move, or word, and it would be rent asunder.

He ran his tongue over his parched lips and told her. She was very quiet, she hardly seemed to be breathing. Did she feel that his transgression evened the score? He thought not.

‘Things haven’t been very good between us for a while, have they?’ she said eventually.

‘Haven’t they?’ he responded stubbornly, though he knew that what she was saying was true. They had been drifting away from each other a little, but perhaps that was understandable after so many years. It didn’t mean that he didn’t still love her.

‘You’re upstairs every night, night after night, in your studio. Wrapped up in your sculpture. I know that when you start working on something you can’t think of anything else. But I hardly ever see you, except at mealtimes and even then you’re only half there.’

So she resented his work, did she? But he couldn’t live without it, he’d wither away. He had always thought
she supported him, was proud of him even; she’d said so when he had his recent exhibition.

‘I suppose I am a bit caught up in it,’ he muttered.

‘Obsessed, I’d say. But then maybe you have to be to achieve anything.’

‘But you’re often out yourself in the evening. At your meetings and classes.’ She was a school governor and she went to conversation classes at the French Institute and to aerobic classes and sometimes she had a night out with her women friends. They had always agreed it was good to have separate interests, not to live in each other’s pockets.

‘But I’m not out till one or two a.m. I don’t come to bed in the middle of the night and get up in the morning growling like a bear with a sore head. You know you’re often grumpy in the morning because you haven’t slept enough.’

‘So it’s my fault, is it? That you’ve been having an affair?’ He still couldn’t make sense of it. That Rachel, whom he thought he knew almost as well as he knew himself, and who was usually honest and rational and reasonable, should do something that seemed so out of character. But what did it mean, ‘out of character’? Only that someone was taking you by surprise.

‘Of course it’s not your fault!’ she said almost sharply. ‘I’m not trying to put the blame on you. I’m just trying to understand where we are.’

They are silent, each locked once more inside their own thoughts.

He swallowed and asked, ‘Who is he, anyway?’

‘That’s of no importance.’

‘No importance!’ He sat up. ‘For Christ’s sake, how can you say that?’

‘It’s over,’ she said again. But could he believe her?

Cormac leaves Davy and runs back down the stairs. He lifts the receiver. He seems to spend half his evenings on the telephone these days, which he didn’t do when he was with Rachel; she took charge of it then, calling him only if it was his mother or one of the aunts. But they call more often, these female relatives of his, now that they do not have to go through Rachel, not that she would be unfriendly to them, she’d always have a little chat, ask after their health, before running up the two flights of stairs to bang on his studio door. From his high retreat he had been blessed by only being able to hear the phone ringing distantly. In this small house it penetrates every corner.

He dials Rachel’s number and waits. He is going to
have to give her the satisfaction of telling her that Davy wants her. The boy’s welfare takes priority over his petty pride. Davy can go and spend the night with her if he wishes, and he does. ‘It’s not a problem,’ he told him before coming downstairs. ‘You can go round any time you want to.’ As long as he comes back to him: that he leaves unspoken. It is not a clause he can insist on.

The answering machine is coming on, drat the bloody thing!
This is the answering machine for Sophie and Rachel Aherne. We’re sorry
… Ta, ra, ta, ra. He clamps the receiver back onto its rest, cutting off her well-modulated voice. Oh, yes, he bets she’s sorry. Where the hell is she when her son is crying for her upstairs? Out with her lover? He knows he’s being unreasonable and would acknowledge that he often is, but ever since Rachel told him about her affair he has been obsessed by the identity of this man who lured her into his arms. Or perhaps she lured him into hers? Now he’s being ridiculous. He can imagine her voice telling him so. But is he?

She might be on call, he tells himself, at the bedside of a sick child. She might be at the French Institute making conversation about holidays spent in converted farmhouses in the valleys of the Lot and the Dordogne. She might be at the cinema watching a French film. But Sophie is not at home either and she should be, doing
her homework. Her Standard Grade exams are coming up. Is she doing any work for them? He asked Rachel the last time they talked – there was no point in asking Sophie – and she confessed, not an awful lot. But how do you make someone who doesn’t want to work work? How do you keep a fifteen-year-old in the house unless you tie her up or lock her in her room and if you were to do that she would probably climb down the drainpipe. And then she might run away from home. She might go on the streets, fall in with a crowd of druggies. His imagination is running away with itself, as his mother used to tell him when he exaggerated. Just like your da, she’d tell him. Pat Aherne was known for his stories. A little embroidery here and there doesn’t do a pick of harm, he’d say; it adds a bit of spice. Cormac is sorry Sophie hasn’t had the chance to know her grandfather; he thinks she would have enjoyed his crack.

Rachel thinks Sophie might need to learn a lesson. If she fails her exams, so be it. Sophie doesn’t like to fail; she has always been competitive, so that might bring her to her senses. On the other hand, her father thinks that if she does miserably badly at her Standards she might leave school and get work chopping vegetables in Henderson’s kitchen and describe it as honest toil, which it may be, but he wants his daughter to live up to herself, to realise her potential, though he knows he
would be on rocky ground, given his own situation, if he were to make much of that.

It would help if her mother was in the house, encouraging her, listening to her French verbs. What
is
Rachel up to? She has absolutely refused to tell him with whom she was having an affair. Was? Is she still? She finds it easy to keep secrets, whereas he does not. He suspects an old boyfriend of hers who reappeared in Edinburgh after years spent in the steamy jungles of Guatemala; one of the doctors in the practice who is a bachelor; the man who used to live next door to them and who always referred to her as ‘your charming wife’ whenever Cormac talked to him. No, he thinks he can rule the last one out; she can’t be that gormless. And maybe the unmarried doctor might not be interested in women at all. There don’t seem to be too many choices left and the one from the jungle went back there, he seems to recall. He wishes he had paid more attention when Rachel talked about him.

After she’d told him about her affair he found it difficult to touch her and when he did he thought of the other, unknown man touching her. And perhaps she thought of him too. He became obsessed by thoughts of that other man, all the more so, he did not doubt, because he had so little else to fill his imagination, apart from
his own predicament. It was the waiting that got to him most of all, wakening each morning to wonder if they would come for him today. He almost welcomed this further obsession, in that it crowded out the other for periods of time. His mind bounced between Clarinda Bain and his wife’s ex-lover. Ex? Whenever the phone rang he would run halfway down the stairs and listen but he never heard anything of significance. Suspicions, though, continued to buzz in his head like an angry posse of flies, and still do. The unspoken suspicions on both sides added to the tension in the house. They were both as taut as piano wire. They snapped at each other over trivialities and then apologised too quickly, like strangers who have collided in the street.

Rachel, though, did her best to see him through this terrible time. A kindly woman, she cared about her patients, and him, too. That was one thing he did not doubt. She said, ‘It will all pass, Cormac, you’ll see, and then everything will settle down again. I’ll always stand by you. And don’t mention Tammy Wynette!’ She smiled, trying to lighten the moment.

He had little faith in the idea of everything settling down. After a cyclone passed there was bound to be debris left behind.

‘I believe in you,’ she said, but could he believe that she did? He was racked by disbelief.

He was taken into the police station again for questioning and then released. But came the day that the Procurator Fiscal decided he had a case to answer. He was summoned back to the police station where he was formally charged with sexual harassment of a minor and warned that anything he might say could be taken down and given in evidence against him. He had no wish to say anything, once he had acknowledged that he was Cormac Patrick Aherne and that he lived at a certain address. He felt no surprise as he stood stiffly there, listening to the wooden police voice. All was going as he had imagined. It was Rachel who had been optimistic, or had purported to be, who had said, ‘They’ll drop it, you’ll see. They haven’t a leg to stand on.’ But they obviously thought that the ground was firm beneath their feet, though they appeared not to regard him as a menace to the community at large for they allowed him bail. Rachel, who had accompanied him to the station, prepared to leave to raise the bail money from her father.

‘Is there no other way?’ he muttered. It seemed that his humiliation would be without limit.

‘None. You know we haven’t anything to speak of in the bank.’ They lived, like most people, up to the limits of their earning power, sometimes running just a little into the red.

‘I won’t be long,’ said Rachel and left.

What if they wouldn’t give it to her? But they would; for her sake, not his.

His lawyer was a pal of her father, reputed to be one of Edinburgh’s best. He said, ‘Don’t worry, Cormac, old chap. We’ll squash Miss Clarinda Bain’s testimony in court. Is there anything you know about her – or could you suggest anyone who might know anything – that would help?’

‘In what way?’

‘Well, to be blunt – and in a situation like this one can only be blunt – something that would cast aspersions on her character. Sexual, preferably.’

‘You mean, throw dirt at her? Make her out to be some sort of trollop?’ That was a word from his mother’s vocabulary! It had slipped out from the recesses of his mind.

‘And what do you think she’s making you out to be? A seducer of young girls! Look, Cormac, it’s either you or her the court is going to believe. If you’re found not guilty all that will happen to her is that she’ll go away with her tail between her legs and think twice before making allegations in future. But if you are found guilty you will go to prison. And what do you think that would do to Rachel and the children? Lovely woman, Rachel. Bright, too. Head girl at her school and all that.
Did brilliantly at university. She could have become a consultant instead of a GP but having children did rather scupper that, didn’t it? You’re a lucky man, Cormac.’ Cormac had always been aware that Rachel’s parents and their friends had thought she could have done better for herself.

Afterwards, Rachel drove him home and they stayed for a few moments in the car before going into the house.

‘I take it that you never touched her?’ she said. ‘Or gave her any encouragement?’

He paused before he answered. ‘Not consciously, at any rate.’ It was the best that he could do.

She pursed her lips then swung open her door and stepped out onto the pavement.

‘Did she say I could come?’ Davy puts his head round the door.

‘She’s not in, I’m afraid.’

‘Not in?’ Davy’s voice begins to waver again.

‘Come on, lad, let’s go out and paint the town pink!’

They go to Henderson’s Salad Bar where a man is tinkling on the piano and no one is listening. How demoralising, thinks Cormac, whose own morale sags when a customer eats but a couple of bites out of one of his sandwiches and trashes the rest in the outside
bin. But perhaps the pianist does not care about approbation; his only need might be to play. Davy eats trifle and Cormac drinks red wine and broods. Rachel is entitled to go out with whom she pleases, he tells himself. He has no rights over her. They have separated. Parted. He feels far apart from her yet he cannot let her go.

‘Hello, Cormac.’

He feels a shadow over him and looks up to see Clarinda Bain looking down at him. Can she be following him? She is with another girl tonight, one that he vaguely recognises, and they are carrying trays of salad aloft.

She rests her tray on the corner of his table. ‘How are you?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘I don’t know.’ She looks at Davy. ‘Is this your son?’

He has to acknowledge Davy to her. Davy gives her a blank stare – he mercifully has never heard of Clarinda Bain – and asks if he can get himself another glass of orange juice. Cormac automatically gives him the money and he goes off to the counter.

‘I’m sorry about everything, you know,’ says Clarinda.

‘You’re spilling your salad.’ Coleslaw is running over from the edge of her plate into the tray.

‘Are you coming, Clarrie?’ her friend calls over.

‘Better go,’ he says.

His hand shakes as he raises his glass to his mouth. He would have liked to have thrown the wine over her but he would not have been able to summon the energy had he tried.

Next day, when he is clearing up in the shop, before going to fetch Davy, she comes in. He goes on washing the floor.

‘Won’t you talk to me, Cormac?’

‘Get lost, Clarinda,
please
!’

‘What does it all matter now?’

‘Now that I’m no longer a teacher and you’re no longer my pupil? And now that I’m no longer married.’

‘I heard you’d left your wife.’

‘I didn’t leave her. We left each other, by mutual consent. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ll get on with my work.’ He rinses the mop in the bucket and squeezes out the water as tightly as he can. The muscles in his upper arm bulge. ‘I’m trying to wash the mayonnaise and mustard off the floor so that my customers won’t slip and fall on their rear ends when they come in the door tomorrow.’

‘It’s terrible that someone like you should be making sandwiches!’

‘I’d rather do it than stand on a corner and sell
The Big Issue
.’ He makes a wide sweep near her feet and she has to jump back.

‘Cormac, why don’t you go back to your sculpting?’

‘Do you think that would feed me and my son? Anyway, it’s finished. It’s gone dead on me. Objects look dead. I’m opting for the living now. That’s why I’m into feeding them, seeing them go out the door and return the next day smacking their lips, satisfied, repeat customers. When you’re an artist you don’t have as many satisfied customers, certainly not on a daily basis. You spend days, weeks, months, soldiering on, alone, wondering if you’re mental to carry on.’

‘It’s not to do with customers,’ she cries and he thinks she might be about to stamp her foot. ‘It’s not a business proposition.’

She has listened well to his lectures, too well, for now she can throw his words back in his face. She was a good student, one of the best he ever had.

‘Look,’ he says, ‘I’m running late. I have to be at my son’s school on time so, for God’s sake, Clarinda, get out of my bloody way!’

On the Saturday of their stay in Paris they went to the Marché aux Puces. Today, art was out, commerce was in. The pupils were excited on the long Métro ride out
to Clignancourt and were counting their money and talking about bargains.

‘Be careful you don’t get taken for a ride,’ warned Cormac. ‘The place is full of chancers, as well as pickpockets.’

He sat beside one of the boys and they talked football. He thought he might have been pushing art too much; now was the time for a little leavening. He knew himself that there was only so much one could look at at a time; after that point was passed nothing much was retained. He had yet to visit the Louvre successfully. But the Rodin Museum now, that was different. He could go back time after time, and on this trip had gone three times. Not all the pupils had come with him. Clarinda Bain was the only one who had come every time.

The flea market was thronged with touts and tourists as well as natives.