Woman to Woman (3 page)

“Flowers! They’re lovely,” she said, not even vaguely surprised that her husband had only remembered it was their anniversary when he was filling the car with petrol on the way home from work. He’d never been

much of a man for carefully thought-out presents. So how had he overcome this particular blind spot so spectacularly in Dublin’s most expensive underwear shop?

It was unbelievable. Aisling shook her head as she thought of Michael with another woman, his naked body in someone else’s arms, his mouth kissing another woman’s lips, his eyes dark with desire. Did he murmur her name in the same husky voice he used when it was Aisling in his arms?

Who was this other woman? What did she look like?

Questions bubbled in her mind as she tried to picture her rival. She was probably slim, beautiful and clever, with a highprofile job and conversational abilities beyond the special offers on bananas in Crazy Prices that week.

How did this happen to them? Never in a million years would she have dreamed that Michael could sleep with another woman, could betray their marriage.

Passionate affairs happened to people in Fiona and Pat Finucane’s world where getting divorced and finding another partner was as easy as ordering a bottle of champagne at the most expensive restaurant in town.

But she didn’t want to look for another man, a younger version of Michael. She had fallen in love with him thirteen years before and didn’t want to replace him. But what if he wanted to replace her?

She squirted washing-up liquid into the sink and let a jet of hot water create a froth of soft bubbles. Plunging her gloveless hands into the sudsy warmth, she rinsed cups, plates and bowls from the boys’ breakfast. It was the same routine every weekday; she listened to the Gerry Ryan radio show as she dried the dishes and stacked them away. But today it made her heart sink to the pit of her stomach.

Every part of her life, every mundane task in the family home, was suddenly threatened by the existence of some other woman, someone Michael had gone to bed with.

Aisling stopped clearing up and tried to focus her muddled thoughts. No, this could not be happening. He loved her. They were married! He

couldn’t go off with someone else, wouldn’t go off with someone else. For God’s sake, he roared with laughter when she told him Fiona’s latest gossip about her cheating acquaintances.

Michael wouldn’t betray her. She was jumping to conclusions.

That was it. There was probably some perfectly reasonable explanation. Suddenly hopeful again, Aisling realised that there was one way to find out what was going on. If Michael bought anything with his credit card, he filed away the statement. He kept several accordion folders in his wardrobe where he kept bills, bank statements, birth certs and, of course, credit card statements.

Aisling untied the ribbons at the top of the first folder with trembling hands and rifled through the alphabetical sections looking for credit card receipts. At first she found nothing but bank statements and paid gas and electricity bills, neatly filed with a red pen marking “Paid’ on every one.

She tackled the second file, searched quickly through the Cs for credit cards and then onto V for Visa. And there they were, wedged in between a sheaf of medical insurance forms.

Aisling carefully removed the familiar credit card statements and spread them onto the soft beige bedroom carpet.

The bloody cat was shedding hair again, she thought absently.

It didn’t take long to find the debit for Lingerie de Paris.

Unfortunately, it was nestled in between other, equally damning expenses which brought a lump to Aisling’s throat.

Silk knickers followed numerous debits for costly meals in?

Dublin’s trendiest restaurants, places she’d never been to. And!

then she found a debit to Jurys Inns, the plush hotel built near!

Christ Church Cathedral. The date, two days before their!

anniversary.

She stared at it blankly. Michael was never any good at remembering dates, but the tenth of June stood out in Aisling’s mind. Phillip had picked up some sort of stomach bug and came home from school with a temperature. She had spent most of the afternoon bringing him to the bathroom where he tried to be sick sitting on his mother’s lap like a

fractious four-year-old. Typically, Michael had been in London. He was meeting bosses of the newspaper group’s sister paper for discussions on the supplement. He wasn’t due home until the next evening.

By the time the doctor had arrived at the house, Paul had started being sick and Aisling wasn’t feeling too good herself.

Three Maxalon injections later, the boys were sleeping soundly under their matching Manchester United duvet covers. She was curled up on the settee feeling washed out, miserable and with a sore arm, courtesy of Dr. Lynch and his syringe.

“Look on the bright side,” Fiona said encouragingly when she phoned after spotting the doctor’s car parked outside the Morans’. “A twenty-four-hour bug is better than a weekend in a health farm, you’re bound to lose a few pounds.”

“Fiona, you’re mad, do you know that?” laughed Aisling. “Only you would think about losing weight when you’re staring at the inside of the toilet bowl.”

“But I made you laugh, didn’t I?” her friend demanded.

“Laughing is essential for helping people recover from all sorts of illnesses. That’s why I always phone up Pat’s bitch of a sister when I’m sick. She’s a complete hypochondriac. Ten minutes of listening to her blather on about colonic irrigation or the latest disorder she thinks she has after reading one of those health magazines has me in stitches.

“It’s a psychological thing, it’s the thought of sounding like a hypochondriac that does it. I think, “Do I sound like that?” and I feel better immediately!”

“Maybe I should give her a ring,” Aisling remarked.

“The twins aren’t terribly talkative tonight and even the cat has gone out scouting for boyfriends.” “Where’s Michael?”

“In London with the editor and the managing director.

They’re discussing the supplement with the UK paper’s and in between eating in the sort of restaurants that sends Egon Ronay into spasms of delight. He rang me earlier to say he’d just stopped off in the hotel to change his clothes before they went out to eat.

“He said they were going to that really plus restaurant, Sans Lorenzo’s,” she added. “Lucky old Michael,” remarked Fiona. They’re always A.W.O.L. for the messy bits of child-rearing, aren’t they? Pat practically vanished when Nicole had that awful gastroenteritis a few years ago, in case he might be called upon to do something involving nappies.”

“I know,” Aisling muttered, her mind on Michael’s brusque phone call.

“I just wish he’d sounded a bit more sympathetic, though. Here I am stuck at home with the kids sick and he’s off having a whale of a time. He couldn’t talk to me for more than two minutes on the phone.” She broke off abruptly, suddenly feeling that she was being childish.

“You poor old thing,” Fiona answered, in the soft tone she reserved for her adored six-year-old daughter, Nicole. “I’m going to pop down to the video shop and get you a nice, slushy, romantic film so you can sit in comfortable misery, all right? And when you’re talking to Michael later, tell him you expect a bit of pampering and a huge bottle of perfume from the duty-free to cheer you up.”

“Well, I don’t think he’ll be ringing because he said I should go to bed early and that he mightn’t be in ‘til late,” Aisling answered.

“Leave a message for him, Ash. Most of those business hotels have an answering machine for each room. You can tell him you’re miserable, make him feel guilty, he’ll ring you back.”

“I don’t know where he’s staying,” Aisling realised.

“I forgot to ask.” Immediately she regretted saying it. She didn’t want Fiona to know that Michael could go away without telling her where he was staying. It made it sound as if she and Michael didn’t talk. And of course they did.

“Never mind,” Fiona said a little too briskly.

“He’ll probably be in so late that he’d just wake you up if he rang. I’ll get that video for you. I won’t be long.”

An hour later, Aisling was watching Sleepless in Seattle.

Flossie sat Buddha-like on her lap and a hot whiskey, courtesy of Pat’s twelve-year-old Scotch, was in her hand. She didn’t sleep much that night, lonely in the big double bed.

She spent a feverish night, tossing and turning, dreaming of mad surgeons racing after her waving syringes the size of hockey sticks. She woke up with the feeling of unease her nightmares always brought. She lay exhausted in bed watching the red digits on the bedside clock-radio tick inexorably towards seven. Why hadn’t Michael phoned her from London?

But he didn’t phone and, when he returned home that evening, he was so moody and quiet that she simply assumed some calamity had befallen the supplement.

“Everything’s fine,” he answered testily when she dared to ask.

“I’m just tired after a day of meetings and a long business dinner.”

The effortless way he had lied hit her now like a punch in the stomach. No stuttering or stumbling. He’d lied with the calm of an accomplished liar. He hadn’t even told her what hotel he was staying in and she’d never even thought to ask.

Of course, if she had asked, he would, no doubt, have pointed!

out that she shouldn’t bother trying to ring him because he was out at a business dinner.

Some dinner, she thought, dropping the credit card statement and scanning the next one. Who had he snuggled up with in Jury’s when she was holding their ten-year-old twins’ heads over the downstairs toilet? A few entries further down she came across a bill from Interflora which was for enough flowers to fill a stadium if the price was anything to go by.

Then it hit her. Fiona knew. She had to. Why else would she have asked where Michael was staying that night? Why would she have tried to gloss over the whole incident so quickly?

And why else would she have started that strange conversation about a couple of friends who were splitting up, even though Aisling had never met them? It had been the previous week when they had been grocery shopping together after lunch in the Merrion Inn.

They were wheeling their shopping trolleys past the frozen food department when Fiona started talking about the latest husband she knew who was straying from the marital path.

“I can always tell pronounced Fiona.

“That man never did a day’s exercise in his life and suddenly he was jogging around the track in UCD three times a week. What does that tell you,

She didn’t wait for an answer.

“And the clothes. God, you should have seen him at that party in the Ryans’ place last Christmas. He was wearing jeans at a cocktail party, can you believe it? I asked him had he joined Bon Jovi, but he wasn’t at all amused.”

Fiona had paused long enough to fling a brace of Lean Cuisine’s into her trolley before continuing.

“Wives never notice, you see. All that extra grooming, workouts and new bikini underpants go totally unnoticed at home and, before you can say “affair”, that’s another marriage down the tubes.”

She had given Aisling a long, meaningful look as she spoke, a can’t-you-read-between-the-lines look, Aisling realised

Tat would never dream of playing away Fiona said once in an unguarded moment.

“He knows which side his bread is buttered she added. Fiona knew her husband would never stray in case he risked his partnership in her father’s lucrative law firm.

As she smoothed out another statement and searched for yet more proof of her husband’s lies, Aisling numbly realised that Michael had always buttered his own bread.

Her father had worked for an accountancy firm for twenty years and retired with just enough money to keep himself and her mother. Even if he had been able to help her husband in his meteoric rise to the top, Michael would never have accepted that help. He was a brilliant young journalist with his eyes firmly set on the top of the ladder and he had never needed family links to give him an entree into the corridors of power.

Now, at the age of forty, he was deputy editor of one of the most

successful Sunday newspapers in the country and, if his star continued to rise, he could soon be editor of one of the paper’s sister titles. I But she might not be the woman by his side when he did it!

Who would? She dropped the last of Michael’s statements onto the floor and rose to her feet slowly. She picked up the telephone by his side of the bed, not really seeing the empty orange juice glass he’d brought upstairs that morning and left for her to clear away. Under normal circumstances, she would have made the bed by this time and would probably be busy hoovering out the twins’ room, tidying the books, comics and toys they carelessly abandoned on the floor.

Right now she didn’t care if the whole house fell apart. She simply had to know what was happening, who Michael was seeing. And, maybe,

find out that it was all some horrible mistake.

Fiona answered on the second ring.

“I was just about to phone you she exclaimed, ‘to see if you fancied a trip into Dun Laoghaire to check out the shops.

There’s this lovely John Rocha suit I noticed in a magazine at the weekend and I’ve decided to splash out. We could have our coffee there, couldn’t we? Or are you on bread and water for tonight?”

“I can’t go shopping now, Fiona.” Aisling’s voice quivered.

She’d planned to be stoical, but Fiona’s warm and friendly voice made her want to sit down and sob.

“I don’t know what to do …. It’s about Michael,” she managed to say hoarsely.

“You knew, didn’t you?”

Aisling could hear her friend’s sharp intake of breath down the phone and for a brief moment she held her breath, hoping there was some reasonable explanation for the hotel bill, the flowers and the underwear.

“Knew what?”

“That he’s having an affair.”

“Oh God, Ash. I wish you’d never found out.”

As she looked out the window at Fiona’s perfectly manicured garden across the road, Aisling was amazed to see everything looking exactly the way it had the day before. The grass neatly shorn like a barber’s number one cut, the petunias spreading out greedily in between the tiny fragrant lavender bushes. How could everything look so damn normal when her life had just suffered a cataclysmic upheaval?