The Kiss (17 page)

‘Oh yes, of course,’ says Rachel, ‘hang on a minute.’ She is confused at the other end of the line, is rustling through pages and can’t seem to put her finger on it. ‘It’s in an awful mess, this book, with things written in and others scored out, I’ve been meaning to get a new one and throw this out but it’s such a bother transferring all the numbers.’

He waits until she has no option but to give him the number he wants. ‘Sheila’s out a lot,’ she warns him. He can always leave a message, he says.

Sheila happens to be in and gives him Archie’s number though he has to listen to a long story before she does. She does not mention Rachel. ‘He was having it off with someone while we were still together, oh yes! He thought I didn’t know – men are such fools, sorry about that, Cormac – but how could I not know? A woman always knows. He started shaving twice a day and he bought himself a whole load of new boxer shorts. He usually hung on to his underwear until it reached the disgusting stage and I would have to throw it out myself when it came through in the wash.’ Cormac does not want to know any more of these details but Sheila is a difficult woman to stop. He half listens, then when she pauses he asks, ‘Did you ever find out who he was having the affair with?’

‘Oh, no, he was far too clever for that. He is clever, is
Archie. And he had to keep up his image as the virtuous, unsullied headmaster, didn’t he?’

When Cormac has extricated himself he makes his final call of the evening. While he’s dialling and waiting he reflects what a big thing the telephone has become in his life, one of his chief lines of communication, whereas, before, he seldom answered it, if he could avoid it.

‘Archie Gibson speaking.’

‘Hi, Archie. It’s me, Cormac.’

‘Oh, hello, Cormac.’ Archie is not surprised, nor does he ask how he got hold of his number. So Rachel has phoned to warn him; she had time to do that while he was talking to Sheila. ‘Nice to hear from you,’ says Archie. ‘How’re you doing?’

‘Fantastic! Sandwiches are big these days. I’ll soon be floating the business on the stock market. I’ll cut you in on the early shares if you like.’

Archie gives a relieved laugh.

Cormac suggests meeting for that drink they talked about.

‘Can you get out in the evenings? I mean, I thought you had Davy living with you?’

‘I do but I can’t sit in every evening. Rachel babysits when I want to go out. I’m sure she’d do it for us. I told her I was going to give you a call.’

‘Oh, you did?’

‘So how about it?’

Archie says he’d like to go for a drink but not right now, he’s afraid, he’s up to his eyes, working at home every evening, trying to catch up, Cormac knows what a load of paperwork he has these days, all this bloody bureaucracy, and he’s in the middle of some special reports that have to be in by next week.

‘I get the picture,’ says Cormac.

Archie promises to give him a ring once he’s managed to clear his feet a bit. ‘I don’t suppose I’ll ever get them totally clear,’ he remarks.

‘It’d be a lot to ask for,’ says Cormac, and puts the phone down.

Rachel and Archie Gibson
.

‘Bain,’ he read on the bell at the top of the row. He paused to take a deep breath before putting his finger to it. He would need all the wind he could muster. A prayer wouldn’t go amiss either but he couldn’t think of a suitable one. The time had come to try to take control of the situation, instead of waiting passively for the storm to pass overhead. Clarinda, he knew, would be at school, rehearsing for A
Midsummer Night’s Dream
, the school play, in which she was to play Titania. The drama teacher said she was going to be brilliant in the role, just as she had been as Ophelia last year. She had great range. A very talented girl. He thought she could go on the stage.

After what seemed a long moment the voice of
Mrs Bain floated out through the grille at the side of the door.

‘Yes? Who is it, please?’

‘It’s Cormac Aherne,’ he said gruffly.

‘Sorry, I didn’t quite catch that.’ Was she trying to torment him? Her voice was clear enough to him and he thought it had sounded amused.

‘Cormac Aherne,’ he bellowed. ‘Clarinda’s art teacher.’

‘Ah, Mr Aherne! You may come up.’

‘Thank you,’ he muttered and on hearing the door buzz gave it a hard shove and he was in.

He stubbed his shins on a bicycle as he went up the ill-lit passage; he then had to skirt round a couple of pushchairs badly parked at the foot of the stairs. A pungent smell of cat made his nose wrinkle. He did not blame the Bains for wanting to move to a garden. He began his climb of the steep grey stairs. When he reached the second landing he had to pause for a second to draw a longer breath, although he had hoped not to. It would seem to put him at a disadvantage if he were to arrive short of wind and stiff-limbed.

He started on the next flight before he was fully recovered. Halfway there, he could not resist glancing up. She was waiting for him outside her door, clad in a purple and orange kimono that made a brilliant show of colour against her drab surroundings. She was looking
down on him and he, unfortunately, was stuck with looking up at her. He was definitely at a disadvantage now. Making a supreme effort he went briskly up the last few steps.

‘Quite a climb, isn’t it?’ she said gaily.

‘Quite.’

‘But, Mr Aherne, this is a real surprise!’ He had the feeling that it was not an overwhelming one. She reminded him of a spider who has been awaiting her prey, confident that it would be drawn in, all in good time. The hand holding the door was barnacled with large heavy rings. Knuckledusters. She might well want to sock him in the jaw once he’d said his piece.

‘Mrs Bain,’ he said, ‘I have to talk to you. Clarinda has some ridiculous notions in her head.’

‘Ridiculous, Mr Aherne? That is not what I’ve been hearing.’

In spite of what would seem to be incriminating evidence, Cormac wonders if his suspicion about Rachel and Archie Gibson is ridiculous. Surely Archie, who was his friend for twenty years and more and whom he saw in school, day in, day out, would not have betrayed him in this way? How could he have managed to look him in the eye over their after-school half-pints and talk normally about normal things? Cormac tries
to think back to that time, to conjure up the pub, the corner where they used to sit round the side of the bar. He can remember nothing of significance, no clue unintentionally dropped on Archie’s part that should have alerted him. They mostly talked shop, as far as he can remember.

He is raking his memory, too, about Rachel. Perhaps she never did go to the French conversation class, or to meet her friend Marcia. Perhaps every time she left the house in the evening she went to meet his headmaster. Whenever she was going out, even if it were to a class, she would always change out of her work clothes. She likes to be well dressed. He can see her with her dark hair brushed and gleaming, poised to leave. ‘Won’t be late,’ she’d call up. He’d come to the top of the stairs to see her. ‘Have a good time,’ he’d call complacently down and return to the piece of work that was absorbing him. There was no doubt he had allowed himself to become too absorbed.

Where did they conduct their secret meetings, Rachel and Archie Gibson? It couldn’t have been easy, with both of them having public as well as private faces, liable to be recognised by any number of people. He remembers now that she had played a lot of tennis that spring and summer; two or three nights a week, in fact. He’d remarked on it at the
time, said, ‘You must be keeping fit!’ She belonged to the same club as Archie! He’d read nothing into that at the time. When she’d come in he’d ask if she’d seen Archie and she’d say casually but quite often, ‘Actually we played a game of mixed doubles together.’ She and Archie would be well matched at tennis; both had fast serves and strong backhand returns. Did it all start in full view of the world, on the open courts, brushing hands as they passed tennis balls one to the other, exchanging covert glances? And then what? Where did they go? They couldn’t have got up to much in the clubhouse. How long
did
the affair actually go on? She said they’d only been together two or three times; she meant sexually, he presumed. Was it serious, this relationship, or a fling to break the boredom of their marriages? Had she been bored with her marriage?

Questions rattle in his skull like hard peas in a drum. He put those questions to Rachel on the night she made her confession but she would not reveal anything but the bare fact. She had had an affair, which was now over, and she was sorry. But was she sorry that she had hurt him or sorry that she had had an affair? He did not ask any further questions for she would not be drawn; she would not cave in eventually as he would have done in a similar situation and said, ‘All right, I’ll
tell you, since you want to know.’ She could contain herself better.

‘Sometimes things come out of the blue and take you by surprise,’ she said. She frowned, as if she were trying to understand why they did. She would not have liked being taken by surprise.

‘True,’ he agreed. ‘There was my father who had an affair with Mrs Blaney at her B&B, and then he upped and left us. That took us by surprise.’

‘It was good, though,’ said Rachel, ‘that you saw your dad again before he died.’

She had been ironing and listening to a Radio 4 programme one evening when she’d heard an announcement that had made her drop the iron.

‘Would Cormac Patrick Aherne, formerly of Belfast, and believed to be living somewhere in the United Kingdom, please get in touch with Manchester Royal Infirmary, where his father, Patrick Seamus Aherne, is dangerously ill.’

He drove through the early hours of the morning down the M6, praying that his father would still be alive when he got there, and he was. A priest was just leaving, having administered the last rites.

Pat Aherne recognised his son – not the forty-four-year-old man seated at his bedside, but the voice of the
boy he’d known as a child. ‘I can hear you there all right, son. I’d have known you anywhere. I’ve often wondered what you were like. I wrote to you, you know, several times, oh yes, ’deed I did, but the letters came back marked “Not known here” in your mother’s hand. Ah well, who could blame her, poor woman? She didn’t get much of a deal from me but there’s nothing I can do about it now. Tell me about yourself, son. I want to know it all. Have you children of your own?’

Cormac held his father’s hand and recounted the story of his life from aged ten to forty-four. As the minutes ticked quietly past he built up a picture of a man contented with his lot, living in a desirable house in a desirable neighbourhood, holding down a decent job, which he was at that time, an important job involving the education of the young, also gradually building a reputation as a sculptor for himself, married to a lovely woman with a good job, with two wonderful children to show for it, a girl and a boy, both blessed with brains and looks. Of course he was selective. When relating a story one had to be, and so he introduced no element into his tale that was not ideal. Pat Aherne could sleep peacefully now, reassured that by abandoning his child he had not blighted his life. His son was a success story. After a while he sank into a coma, though the nurse said to carry on talking for one never knew how much
they took in when they were in an unconscious state. Cormac stayed at the bedside for the rest of the day, with Mrs Blaney. They each held a hand of the dying man and were with him at the end.

‘Go with God, Pat Aherne,’ said Mrs Blaney, making the sign of the cross over the soft pillow of her breast. ‘You’ve made me a happy woman and may you rest in peace.’

Cormac wondered if anyone would do the same for him when he went. Rachel was no stronger a believer than himself though she was firmer about her disbelief than he and seemed not to have the same feeling of a void within her. She said life itself was enough for her whereas a bit of him kept hoping that there might be something else. He’d always wanted to have his cake and eat it! So his mother would have said.

‘He was a lovely man, your da,’ said Mrs Blaney.

Cormac enfolded her in his arms and they shed their tears together.

‘It was great you made it before he went,’ said Mrs Blaney later when they sat in a pub having a Bushmills together.

Cormac had time now to feel angry with his mother. Mrs Blaney said she’d not been too pleased with her herself.

‘When Pat was brought into the hospital I got her
number from Directory Enquiries and phoned her. I asked her to pass the message on to you. She said she’d never heard of a Patrick Aherne. That was why I asked them to put it on the wireless.’

After he went home Cormac had a furious row on the phone with his mother who wept and asked forgiveness. ‘But think what he did to us, son.’

‘Are you trying to tell me that you have given my daughter no encouragement, Mr Aherne?’ said Mrs Bain, who stood with one hand parked on her orange and purple satin hip.

They were both standing. She had invited him in. She had said, ‘I think you should come in off that draughty landing and we will discuss this in a civilised manner. We don’t want an argy-bargy, do we?’ That had given him hope and encouraged him to think that she would not simply rail against him but would try to see his point of view. As soon as he had stepped over her threshold, however, and entered her boudoir – it was the word that came straight into his mind – he began to feel apprehensive.
Come into my parlour
… The walls were hung with Eastern prayer mats; various tinkling baubles hung from the ceiling; the orange and pink lamps gave the room a warm if rather hectic glow; and there was a smell of joss sticks. The only furniture
was a white piano and several large satin floor cushions spangled with tiny mirrors that flashed and winked and confused the eye. On top of the piano stood Robert Burns gazing steadily out of his frame into this cave of Eastern promise.

‘Do you think, Mrs Bain,’ said Cormac, struggling to stay calm, ‘that I would actively encourage your daughter to look on me as anything other than her teacher? What do you take me for?’

‘A man.’ She seemed pleased with her response.

‘Apart from anything else, I am forty-three.’

‘A dangerous age for a man. Especially an attractive one.’ She smiled now, making him wonder if he did not prefer her anger. ‘You must be aware that you are attractive to women?’ She was saying ‘women’ now, not ‘girls’. Did she fancy him herself? Was she going to offer herself to him in place of her daughter? This was entering the realm of the bizarre. He had obviously made a mistake by coming here and trying to engage in any kind of rational dialogue with this fool of a woman. She was still looking at him with that cat-that-got-the cream-like smile. Their cat had looked like that yesterday after it had devoured a mouse and left its innards on the kitchen floor. But Clarinda’s mother had not eaten him yet; his innards were intact. He rallied himself and took refuge in a little pomposity.

‘I am married, Mrs Bain, and happily so, and I am nearly thirty years older than your daughter. She is only a year older than my own daughter.’

‘That never stopped a man. My husband was twenty-two years older than me
and
he was married to someone else at the time. It didn’t stop him seducing me.’

‘I have not seduced your daughter.’

‘That is not what she tells me.’

‘She is suffering from an over-excited imagination, stimulated, I fear, by you, Mrs Bain.’

‘What
do
you mean, Mr Aherne?’

‘I think perhaps you tend towards the romantic and the dramatic—’ He waved his hand vaguely at the room. He shouldn’t have started on this tack; she could only take umbrage.

‘You use that word “romantic” as a slur, I rather think, to put me down. Oh yes, you do! I know your type. What is wrong with romance, tell me! Why should people not enjoy it? This ugly world could do with more of it. All this harping on the sordid does nothing for the soul. In Scotland we are bombarded with the underbelly of life as if nothing else was relevant. It can’t be true unless we are rubbing our noses in the gutter! Drugs, gang rapes, degradation. How boring it all is. The Russians give proper recognition to the soul; their
great writers acknowledge it, as well as the ordinary people. Why do we not? We don’t want to look at our souls. We don’t want to admit to having such things. We’re afraid to feel too much. We’re afraid to allow tenderness and romance into our lives. But the poetry of our great Bard is romantic, is it not? What about the novels of Jane Austen? Are they not romances, in the best sense of the word? Can you say otherwise?’ He was not being given the chance to say anything even though he had made a couple of attempts to put a word in, but there was no way in which he would be able to staunch her flow, short of smacking his hands together and shouting ‘Enough!’ in her face. Her indignation showed no sign of cooling. ‘I am a keen supporter of the arts, Mr Aherne, let me tell you. I am a Friend of the Edinburgh Festival. I paint. I go to exhibitions. I take Clarinda to the opera and the ballet when I can afford it, which may not be often since prices are high, and I am a single parent. I love literature. I go to the Book Festival and listen to writers talking about themselves and their works. I go to the theatre. Is all of that a crime?’