Woman to Woman (4 page)

“I’m sorry, so sorry,” repeated Fiona.

“I just didn’t know how to tell you, how to find the words. I hoped it would blow over before you found out. That’s the best way, he gets it out of his system and you never find out,” she added prosaically.

“I

thought it was better not to say anything. But I kept wishing I’d never seen them, because I felt so disloyal to you.”

“Just tell me who it is,” Aisling interjected, her tone pleading.

“Just tell me …”

Fiona paused and then spoke again, her voice strong and calm, as though reassuring a small child.

“It doesn’t mean anything, Ash, honestly. They all do it, and then they get over it. Remember that, OK?”

“They all do it,” repeated Aisling hysterically.

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“No. It’s just supposed to make you feel less alone,” Fiona

“You don’t know her she continued in the same calm vein.

“Her name is Jennifer Carroll and she works in an advertising agency. I only recognised her because she’s at every bloody party we go to. You know the type, goes to the opening of an envelope if she thinks she’ll get her picture in the social columns. Are you all right, Ash?”

“Yes. Go on.”

“I went out to dinner with the girls from the tennis club when Pat was away last autumn.”

Fiona hesitated for a moment before continuing.

“Michael was in Le Caprice with this darkhaired woman. I thought it was something to do with the paper. Well, he meets so many different people. I didn’t think anything of it at first, really.”

“What happened?” Aisling’s voice was remarkably steady as she spoke. Fiona couldn’t see her digging her nails into the palm of her right hand, clenching her fist as though her life depended on it.

They were sitting at an out-of-the-way table, but I could still see them,” explained Fiona.

“He kissed her and it just wasn’t a platonic type of kiss, you know? When I thought about what she was wearing, I put two and two together. You don’t go out for a business dinner wearing a dress with slits practically up to your navel. God, men are all the same, aren’t they?”

She paused and Aisling knew she was lighting a cigarette, those long, dark menthol cigarettes that looked faintly ridiculous and smelled like

burning Polos. Michael always laughe dat them, calling them poseurs’ cigarettes and asked why she didn’t smoke real ones, like the Marlboros he was trying to give up.

“Fiona, why didn’t you say something?” Aisling asked.

“I didn’t know how to tell you. What could I say?” her friend answered quietly.

“That your bastard of a husband was cheating on you as publicly as he could? That he didn’t seem to care who saw him and his bloody girlfriend because he knew that you’d never find out, stuck in your little wifey world?”

Aisling sat with the receiver in one hand as she stared blankly outside.

“I’m coming over,” Fiona said quickly.

“We need a huge cup of tea and a good talk.”

The phone clicked in Aisling’s ear and she put it down slowly before turning automatically towards the dressing table to put some lipstick on. As she twisted up the tube of pink lipstick she stopped and looked at herself in the mirror. A pale face with serious eyes stared back, the startling blue irises diminished by pupils enlarged with misery. Her eyes had always been her best feature, but lately she hadn’t bothered with make-up. Without mascara to darken her fair lashes, her eyes were undefined and pale in her bare face.

As always nowadays, her unruly light brown, long hair was tied back with a red scrunchie. The combination of no make-up, starkly tied-back hair and a loose sweatshirt, which did nothing to flatter her generous curves, made her look tired and worn. She stared long and hard at herself in the mirror.

She remembered the summer she had first met Michael, when her hair was long and bleached with strands of gold from ten days on an idyllic Greek island and her skin glowed thanks to hours basking in the glorious Mediterranean sun.

He had called her beautiful then and never stopped wanting to touch her skin and kiss her lips, putting his arms possessively around her golden shoulders when they walked through the streets of Corfu town.

As she held her lank hair away from her face, Aisling wished she could recapture that distant Greek summer and feel young and pretty again. Wouldn’t it be wonderful not to feel thirty-five and boring, another frumpy housewife with no prospects, no waistline and a preoccupied husband. God knows, there were plenty of women like her out there. She saw them all the time in the supermarket, listlessly pushing trolleys full of fuel for teenagers and husbands who were never home.

She’d never wanted to become one of them, one of the women who sat on the edge of the sofa at parties trying hard to listen and blend in, trying to think of something funny to say while their more confident sisters fitted in perfectly.

“Hit me if I ever turn out like that, won’t you?” she’d told Michael after their engagement party. His matronly cousin had bored her to tears with advice about the right washing machine.

“Don’t worry, darling,” he’d laughed, ‘you’re never going to turn into an Elsie, I promise.”

But she had. Well, sort of. Maybe she didn’t discuss the advantages of a Zanussi as opposed to a Whirlpool when they went out, but she certainly didn’t fit in the way she used to.

And Michael knew it.

That was the hardest thing about going out to parties or dinners these days; being aware of Michael looking at her distantly across the room as if she had failed some secret test.

She hated sitting around a dinner table with two or three glamorous career women sparkling around Michael and vying for his attention, while she sat in isolation, too selfconscious to chat to the men placed beside her. No wonder he’d wanted another woman.

She wasn’t beautiful, particularly clever or even good at some high-powered job. She was a housewife and, even though that’s what he’d wanted her to be a few years ago, that’s not what he wanted now.

Maybe if she’d stayed the woman he married, that enthusiastic girl who’d walked blindly through life, hoping for the best instead of

settling into domestic bliss like Ma in Little House on the Prairie, maybe then he would have still loved

She looked at least ten years older than she really was with her pale, slightly plump face and the beginnings of a double chin. But she had finally decided to do something about it.

Without breathing a word to Michael, she had started a diet.

Not one of her diet on Monday, stuff your face on Tuesday diets, but a proper diet. She had decided that this was the real diet, the one which would change her life. That, however, was last week.

Sadly, she dropped the lipstick onto the lace-covered dressing table. What was the point, she asked herself? Why bother trying to look better now? He had gone and found someone else anyway.

“Ash, let me in,” Fiona roared up at the open bedroom window.

“I’ve brought the Hobnobs, darling. What more does a woman need.”

An hour later, Aisling was sitting in the passenger seat of Fiona’s sleek black Nissan NX as her friend expertly manoeuvred the car into a parking space in the Frascati Centre.

“Don’t back out on me now,” warned Fiona, climbing out of the car and slamming the door with a careless bang.

“You’re going to look stunning tonight if it kills both of us.”

It just might do that, thought Aisling to herself as her friend frog marched her towards the expensive boutique she’d always avoided in the chic Blackrock shopping centre. She had been looking forward to the launch party for months now, eager to meet the team of journalists she had heard so much about from Michael in the past year but had never met.

Michael had been working late more and more. The odd newsroom parties seemed to have dried up along with any chitchat at the Morans’ kitchen table. Working late my ass, Aisling growled to herself as she followed her friend into the shop.

“Shopping is the only cure for a broken heart,” Fiona continued gaily, slim brown arms outstretched to rifle through racks of expensive little

black numbers. In a daze thanks to a five-milligram Valium, Aisling moved sedately towards the party dresses, separating the hangers with totally steady fingers. She was beginning to feel quite “good, happy almost. Something sexy, she smiled inwardly, fingering the rich brocade and crepe outfits, looking for a dress to knock the spots off Michael’s bloody fancy woman. Aisling knew that the Valium was giving her an unrealistic high, but she simply didn’t care and sank into the numb happiness she felt flooding her head.

For a day that had started out in the worst possible way, it was certainly improving, Aisling thought with a giggle as she picked out a totally unsuitable black velvet sheath and waved it at Fiona.

“You should be on Valium more often Fiona remarked, putting the black velvet back on the rack and steering Aisling towards the back of the shop.

The larger sizes, Madam,” Fiona said with a flourish, plucking a subtle grape-coloured jacket off the rack and holding it up against the other woman.

Generously cut on the hanger, the jacket and its matching flowing skirt seemed to have shrunk on Aisling. She peered out of the changing cubicle selfconsciously, not wanting anyone but Fiona to see her.

“Maybe something with a better cut…” muttered Fiona, eyes narrowed as she stood back examining the outfit.

“Not better cut. Just bigger,” said Aisling flatly, the Valium giggle gone out of her voice.

“I seem to be getting bigger all the time. No wonder Michael went for, what did you say her!

name was.”

?”

“Don’t torture yourself thinking about her, Aisling,” Fiona answered impatiently.

“I can’t help it. I can’t stop thinking about her, whatever her name is. But I bet she’s slim and glamorous. Am I right?”

“OK, she has a good figure and I suppose you’d call her glamorous. To my mind, she’s a bit over the top. You know, all red talons, more make-up than Joan Collins and lots of expensive outfits with too much

embroidery and huge gold buttons Like this sort of thing, actually.” Fiona swiped a short denim jacket out from the rails and held it up against her torso with a grimace.

“I wouldn’t be seen dead in this,” she announced.

“Denim and sequins, how passe.”

And I wouldn’t fit into it even if I wanted to, thought Aisling despondently. She gazed around at the racks of clothes and wondered if they had a generous size sixteen in anything glamorous.

She hated shopping nowadays. But tonight was going to be different. Tonight she had planned to splash out on something which would make her feel good, make her feel a little like the confident woman Michael married.

She had actually managed to lose three pounds in the last week. One main meal a day, as much black tea or coffee as you liked, brown bread or scones for light meals and lots of fruit and vegetables.

“You won’t be hungry on our four-week summer diet!” promised the magazine she’d ripped the diet out of. And she hadn’t been hungry at all, apart from the sheer longing for a chocolate digestive with her lunchtime coffee.

Now she wondered if there was any point in trying to lose weight. She had planned to look her best tonight, to make Michael proud of her in front of all the new newspaper staff.

The supplement was finally being produced after a year of talking about it. Aisling had decided to jump-start her own life to celebrate Michael’s hard work.

She’d wasted far too much time while she wallowed in domestic misery, hidden under masses of laundry and dirty dishes.

Plenty of women worked and looked after a family, she knew that. There was no reason why she shouldn’t. It could be just what she needed, Fiona had said encouragingly. Now that the boys were older and were walking to school on their own, there was no excuse for Aisling to stay at home. Surely it couldn’t be too hard to get a job and climb out of

the rut she’d fallen into? Sometimes she felt a pang of nostalgia for her old life.

Those carefree days living with Jo in Rathmines, when the two single girls had spent every penny of their wages on clothes, make-up and cheap bottles of wine for parties, seemed idyllic. They worked hard all week and played hard at the weekends, always on the move and ready for the next party. Jo never wanted to climb out of her warm bed on Monday morning, but Aisling was up bright and early, raring to go. Plenty of people complained about working in the cramped insurance office in the city centre, but she had loved it. I Every night of the weekend was party night. During the week, they often went to the pictures if they fancied what I was showing in the Stella cinema. Afterwards, they’d buy!

chips and onion rings to eat in the flat’s tiny sitting room!

while discussing the merits of Robert Redford as opposed to hunky young Richard Gere.

Now Aisling went” out only to shop or to bring the kids to school or to have a quick cup of coffee in Fiona’s before her friend raced off for a game of tennis or an aerobics class. She often spent the entire day on her own, cooking, polishing and waiting for the twins and Michael to come home and liven up her life.

It was a lonely existence, she realised. Was that all she could expect from the rest of her life? She’d planned to hang up her apron and get a job. But what was the point now?

If she couldn’t keep her husband, how could she ever keep a job? Who wanted thirty-five-year-old housewives in their office, anyway? And let’s face it, her typing skills weren’t amazing ten years ago, so how would she cope with a computer?

All she knew about the world of technology was limited to what she’d learned on a speedy tour of the News three years previously when they had finally upgraded their system.

Fifteen minutes watching somebody playing hangman on a computer was hardly what you’d call experience.

Thinking of the paper wrenched her mind back to Michael. Maybe everyone in the bloody office knew. How could she face Michael’s colleagues at the supplement launch party tonight knowing what she did, wondering if everyone there was in on the secret? She wouldn’t even have the chance to confront Michael before the party either. He’d told her he wasn’t coming home beforehand, adding that Aisling should make her own way there.