The Tea House on Mulberry Street (11 page)

Stop this at once, she told herself. Everything will be okay when I go back to America. It’s just this stupid town that makes me feel this way. I am flying home to New York first thing in the morning, and then I’ll be fine.

The hopeful businessman sent the barman over with a bottle of the most expensive wine in the hotel, and she nodded her thanks politely. Her time in the publishing business had taught her never to be rude to anyone until she found out who they were. She poured some and took a tiny sip. It was a superb vintage. For a second, she considered asking him to join her. There was no harm in having a conversation with the man. He did seem rather charming. Maybe they could enjoy dinner together?

But, it was no good. Her mood was too bleak. He would want to know all about her job, and about New York, and then she would have the delicate task of letting him know she didn’t want to spend the night with him. It would be like a military operation getting through the meal without offending him. She looked over in his direction. He was still watching, waiting for a signal from her. She would have to return the bottle to him, and thank him, and say she was suffering from a headache, or something like that. But even that seemed too much trouble, the way she was feeling.

Suddenly, she stood up and collected her things, left the bar and went quickly into the lobby. The expensive wine was left behind on the table, as forlorn as the face of the rejected male in the bar. She pressed the button to call the lift. She would just have to order some food to be sent to her room. She didn’t want the man to follow her into the dining-room. She could see the disappointment on his face as the lift-doors closed. Sometimes it was a nuisance being so attractive.

She was beautiful, she knew. There was no point in denying it. She had huge grey eyes and a tiny little mouth. Even without make-up, men stared after her in the street. But when she covered her eyelids with sparkly, silver eye-shadow, and painted her lips with deep-red lip-gloss, she was so beautiful it was impossible for men not to desire her. She was a 1925 Tamara de Lempicka self-portrait,
Tamara In The Green Bugatti
, come to life. With her perfectly cut bob and her vintage velvet clothes, she was the envy of every woman she had ever known. Another woman could wear the same clothes and the same make-up, but they never managed to achieve the same effect. It was not easy to be friends with someone so beautiful. In fact, no woman was ever friends with Clare Fitzgerald for long. They just couldn’t bear it when men looked only at her. It was Clare they wanted. Always Clare.

Clare tried dressing down, but that wasn’t her style. She hated jeans and tracksuits and scruffy trainers. She loved her embroidered scarves, her long fringed coats, and her expensive creams and perfumes. She had crates full of silver bangles and glass rings and amber necklaces in her light-filled apartment in New York. Reluctantly, guiltily, she kept those frivolous things and said goodbye to female companionship.

Her detached, otherworldly air earned her huge credibility in the New York publishing community. In a city where every other person had talent to spare, personality counted for a lot. After only five years in the business, she was the editor-in-chief of a high-quality magazine dedicated to upmarket and artistic interiors. Antique four-posters in New England mansions, collections of valuable paintings in million-pound apartments in London. Paris lofts full of movie memorabilia and artists’ easels, and unmade beds with white sheets in fishing villages in Cornwall – with headboards made out of driftwood. That’s what got Clare Fitzgerald interested.

Celebrities and millionaires were falling over themselves to get their lavish homes featured in her magazine, but if Clare didn’t think they were special enough, they didn’t get in. The vulgar mansions favoured by pop stars and glamour models were not even considered. Clare Fitzgerald had the kind of taste that money alone just couldn’t buy.

She sat in her cosy office in New York selecting the locations for shoots, and sending her assistants out for deli and wine and cappuccinos, and sometimes dreaming of her lost love, Peter. Peter was the only man she had ever loved. They had spent one night together, in a tiny flat on Mulberry Street in Belfast. She had only known him for nineteen hours altogether.

She was a student then and the flat was the first home she had created for herself. A tiny little cupboard of a place, barely twenty feet square, but it was better than having to share a house with other students and the legendary squalor they lived in. Even as a teenager, Clare wanted to live in a nice place. The day she moved in, she cleaned the flat from top to bottom, and decorated it with colourful throws and cushions, free postcards from an art gallery, three houseplants, two lamps donated by her mother, a small bunch of flowers and two cheap rugs. She bought a new mattress for the bed and threw the old one in a skip. She hung Indian scarves and strings of glass beads on the Victorian headboard. She felt very grown up, buying her groceries at the supermarket, remembering to buy carpet cleaner and bleach, as well as soap and shampoo and toothpaste. She wasn’t a typical student.

The flat was next door to a cafe called Muldoon’s Tea Rooms. That was the best thing about the flat. If she had a lot of work to do, she could buy coffee and a salad roll on the way home from college, and be sitting at her desk a minute later, enjoying her supper. She could smell the aroma of coffee coming through the walls as she lay in bed in the early morning, listening to the rain hammering down on the skylight above her.

Peter was pale and quietly-spoken, but very intense. She liked that. He had a fringe of black hair hanging in his eyes and he had to flick it to one side to see her. He wore a T-shirt with the name of a pop group on it: The Human League. She liked the group too. That’s how they met. Through music. At a nightclub near the docks. Clare saw him looking at her, and she smiled at him, and after a while he came over to talk to her. That’s how it began. That’s how easy it was.

She asked him if he liked the band and they both laughed because he was wearing the T-shirt, and two badges as well.

One song in particular, she loved: “Don’t You Want Me?” She blushed sometimes because she could still remember the name of the song. Even now. (It was just a simple pop tune but at the time she thought it was fabulous.) He said he knew it well, and it was very good.

They danced together when the floor began to fill up, and when the night was over, he offered to walk her home. Twenty minutes could be a long walk when you were on your own, in the dark, Clare thought. She said yes. It was cold and windy. He held her hand.

She was only nineteen. He was older than Clare at twenty-two, just coming to the end of his own student days. She asked him what he was studying. He told her, English. Did he think he would go into teaching, she wanted to know? Or journalism? He said he hadn’t a clue – he’d only come from Fermanagh to Belfast to study because there were no jobs at home. Likely, he would end up going slowly insane in the Civil Service, like many other Arts graduates before him.

She asked him if he had ever been beaten up because of his effeminate hairstyle, and black eyeliner. He admitted he had been chased, three times, by football fans. It didn’t seem to bother him. He could run a lot faster than they could, he explained. That was the great advantage of being thin: he didn’t have a lot of weight to carry.

By the time they reached Mulberry Street, she knew quite a lot about him. He was the eldest child in the family. He had six sisters. His mother was a nurse who went to Mass every day. His father was a mechanic who liked to restore vintage cars in his spare time. They were a close, happy family. He had a guitar, but couldn’t play it very well. He liked chocolate biscuits.

She had the key to her flat in her pocket. She turned it over and over in her hand. Her other hand was tingling, where he was touching it. She decided to invite him in.

She didn’t know what was going to happen when they went up the little stairs and switched on the light. Would he kiss her? Those were the days when men didn’t automatically assume they would be invited into the bedroom on the first date. (The good old days, she thought. Would they ever come back?) She offered to make coffee. They stood in the middle of the sitting-room. The air around them was charged with anticipation. She could hardly breathe with nervous energy. He commented on the decor, and said that it was very artistic, and that he would very much like a cup of tea.

They talked for a while, about pop music mostly, and about other harmless things. When Clare got up from the little sofa to make toast on the 1950s grill, he followed her into the kitchen. She’d thought that with all those sisters, he would be spoilt in the house, but he told her he was very domesticated. He kept an eye on the bread while she hunted through the cupboards for some powdered milk. When the toast was buttered, she noticed he had grilled it on one side only, so that the bread was soft underneath. She hadn’t made toast that way before, so she tried it, and it was very nice, and she grilled her toast on one side forever afterwards.

He looked at her lips as if he wanted to kiss her, but he didn’t. His restraint made Clare weak with desire. She told herself, he must feel something for her or he wouldn’t have walked her home. But the moment was too precious to spoil it with an awkward attempt to embrace him. They listened to music for a while, sitting on the little sofa, eating toast. Neither of them spoke. Clare willed herself to touch his face and kiss him, but she couldn’t move. At four o’clock in the morning, she knew it was time for him to leave, but she didn’t want him going out alone into the empty streets. He looked very vulnerable with his thin coat and his even thinner face.

“Stay with me,” she said, suddenly, before she became too shy. “I mean, just stay with me for a little while longer.”

“I’d like that,” he said, softly.

They went into the bedroom. He sat gently down on the bed.

“I’ll just take my boots off, if that’s okay.” It took him several minutes to get them off because there were twelve buckles on each one. “Come here,” he said. “It’s cold.” He held out his hand and she sat down beside him. When he looked into her eyes, as they lay down on top of the bedclothes, she almost believed that she was obsessed with him already. He had some tapes in his trouser pocket. There was a small stereo on a chair beside the bed. He found one that Clare liked and put it into the stereo, pressed the repeat button, and then pulled one of Clare’s throws over them both. The room was absolutely freezing. Their breath came out in visible gasps of white smoke.

“Can I kiss you?” he asked. His lips were hot and strong. His kisses were long, lingering and gentle. They were perfect kisses. Clare had no sexual experience, and hadn’t a clue what to do. She thought of telling him this, but he seemed to know already. He made no attempt to seduce her.

They curled up under the throw together, kissing for a long time. He held her in his arms and told her that he was in love with her. She didn’t believe him. Later, he made more tea in the tiny kitchen and carried the tray very carefully to the bedroom because he had filled the cups to the brim. They sat up in bed, drinking it, listening to the cassette, and Clare congratulated herself on having powdered milk in the cupboard. It began to rain heavily then, and he switched off the music and they lay in each other’s arms listening to it drumming on the window. The streetlight coming through the glass made a pattern on their faces. He told her he loved her for a second time. They slept for a short while when the rain stopped.

At seven o’clock in the morning he told her he would always love her and, this time, she believed him. They lay in each other’s arms and slept until well after lunch-time.

Nothing she had felt since had even come close to the ecstasy of that night, the feeling of closeness they had shared. They might have been the last two people alive on the planet. Nothing else, and no-one else mattered. Most of the time, she was able to push it to the back of her mind. But, if she wanted to, she could conjure up a photographic image of his face, and everything else that had happened on the night she decided, on a whim, to go to a disco.

When they finally emerged from the flat at four in the afternoon, they went to Muldoon’s for something to eat. Peter wrote his address and telephone number on the cassette-sleeve of the tape they had listened to, and gave it to her, and asked her formally to be his girlfriend. She said yes. She put the cassette in her little beaded handbag. She promised to call him the next day. He kissed her gently at the bus stop and waved to her as she set off for home, to visit her parents for the weekend.

As the blue Ulsterbus wound its way through the city streets, on its way to Saintfield, Clare lay back on the seat and closed her eyes with pleasure. She was so happy she wanted to tell the bus driver that she had met the man she would marry and love for the rest of her life. She should have invited Peter to come home with her and meet her parents, she thought suddenly. She missed him so much already, it was like an ache in her heart. She worried that he would get knocked down by a car, or hurt somehow, if they were apart for any length of time.

The brick came through the side window of the bus like a bomb. The noise it made was fantastic. BOOM! And then the peculiar sound of safety glass shattering into a thousand pieces. The floor of the bus was covered with it. Like giant grains of sugar, they caught the light, and sparkled. Clare thought the glass was very pretty and then she realised she was crying.

Her hair was wet. There was blood on her cheek. She knew then she’d been hit on the side of the head, and she felt dizzy. The driver skidded to a halt, but started up the engine again when he saw a small group of angry young men running towards the vehicle. Everything seemed to be happening very slowly and quietly.

“Keep going, mate,” shouted an elderly passenger. “They’re gonna wreck the bus!”

The other passengers were calm. They were used to small acts of sudden violence. They knew they would be given a chance to get off, before the bus was set on fire and used to block the road. Even in what the police called ‘a riot-situation’, there were set ways of doing things. Clare’s whole body was trembling. Then, she felt the first wave of pain, and she put her hand up to cover the gash above her right ear. Two women came across to her and one of them supported her while the other one held a tissue to her wound.