This Charming Man

  ‘Oh God, that’s fantastic,’ Marnie said. ‘I needed that.’

  My heart clenched. I’d always worried about her and recently more than ever.

  More than anything I wanted her to be happy and she never seemed it. Not fully. Even on the most joyous days of her life – the births of Daisy and Verity – she seemed to be holding on to a little pocket of melancholia.

  ‘What’s up?’ I asked.

  ‘I can’t stop thinking about Bid,’ she said. ‘I was talking to her yesterday, she sounded okay, but how do you think she’s doing?’

  ‘Hard to say. We won’t know untilshe’s done the six goes of chemo.’

  ‘Well, I can see for myself in three days’ time.’ As soon as Bid had got her diagnosis, Marnie booked time off from work. She was coming from London on Thursday with the girls and her husband, Nick.

  ‘I’ll be straight out to Ma’s as soon as I finish work,’ I said.

  ‘How is work?’ I’d kept her abreast of my insecurities about Kaplan. She was the only person, apart from Damien, in whom I felt I could confide.

  Of the two of us, Marnie was far more clever, but somehow she had ended up punching in the hours in some mind-numbing mortgage brokers’ office, while I sometimes got to profile celebrities.

  But she never made me feel like I’d got her share of the luck.

  ‘Let me guess,’ she said. ‘You got sent to cover the ploughing championships while your man Casey Kaplan interviewed the Pope, Johnny Depp… say one more.’

  ‘JD Salinger, he hasn’t done an interview in a hundred years.’

  ‘I thought he was dead.’

  ‘God, maybe he is.’

  ‘Well, if he is, that’d be a great coup. Wait, I’ve got a better one. Marilyn Monroe’s made contact from the other side and she’s only doing one interview and she insists it’s with Kaplan.’

  I was about to go to bed with my Michael Connolly when the phone rang again.

  ‘Hello, Grace, this is Manus Gildee, your father, calling.’

  ‘Hello, Dad.’ He was about to apologize – a formal introduction always preceded his eating humble pie, as if to distance himself from the shame of it.

  ‘I believe I owe you an apology. Ma said I was hard on you earlier, about Bingo. It’s the cigarettes, Grace. I’m finding it next to impossible to do without them. Am I forgiven?’

  ‘You’re forgiven.’

  ‘Also, Ma wants to know what time you’re fetching Marnie and co. from the airport on Thursday?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘Ahhh… you?’

  ‘I don’t want to fetch them,’ he stuttered. ‘Verity puked in the car the last time. The floor mat is still smelly. It upsets Bingo.’

  ‘Dad, I don’t even have a car at the moment.’

  Mutterings of ‘What fresh hell’ reached me. ‘Still burnt out, is it?’

  ‘Yes, Dad, still burnt out.’

  ‘Let me tell you what my life is like at the moment. People say to me, Any plans for this evening, Manus? Theatre, perhaps? A concert? A meal with friends? And I reply, Not smoking. Yes, all evening, from the moment I finish dinner to when I retire, I’ll be Not Smoking. It’s an activity in itself.’

  Christ, it had only been a day. What would he be like after a week of nicotine-deprivation?

  ‘So you’ll do the airport run, Dad?’

  ‘Without cigarettes, I feel, how can I put it… unfinished?’

  ‘You’ll fetch them from the airport?’

  ‘What’s the line from that asinine film that Marnie made me watch?’ I heard him click his fingers. ‘Yes, I believe I have it. “They complete me.” ’

  ‘Am I to understand – ’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he interrupted irritably, ‘I’ll go to the feck-bollocky airport.’

  I was just drifting off to sleep when I heard the front door open, followed by the sound of a briefcase being kicked under the hall table. Damien was home from his me-time.

  ‘Grace – ’ he came up the stairs – ‘are you awake?’

  ‘I am now. What’s up? And make it quick, I’ve got to get up in about four hours to fly to London.’

  ‘Okay. Should we have a baby?’

  ‘Right now?’ I eyed him speculatively.

  He laughed and sat on the bed to pull off his boots.

  ‘What’s brought this on?’ I asked. He usually raised this subject when he was dissatisfied with his life. And when it wasn’t babies, it was that we give up our jobs and rent out our house and go travelling. ‘Someone at the poker game’s just had a baby?’

  ‘Yeah, Sean. And everyone at work’s got one.’

  ‘… Christ, Damien… a baby’s not like a company car.’

  ‘Ah I know, I know… but you should hear them – all men – boasting about having to get up three times in the night to feed the baby.’

  ‘Really?’ I yawned. Just the thought of middle-of-the-night feeds was enough to set me off.

  ‘Four of them have new babies and every morning they come in with stories, Grace. Competitive sleeplessness. Angus Sprott hasn’t been to bed since July – now Fm yawning – they make me feel… left out, like I’ve got no balls… for getting my full seven hours.’

  ‘The grass is always greener.’

  ‘Say something else.’

  ‘You’d be a terrible father, you’re too moody.’

  He seemed to brighten at that. ‘I would, wouldn’t I?’

  ‘Christ, yes. And if we had a baby we’d have to sell this house. It’s too small. We’d have to move very far away and buy a starter home in an estate with twenty thousand identicalones.’

  ‘Maybe we shouldn’t have a baby,’ Damien said. ‘Moment of madness there. I’m over it now.’

  ‘Maybe we shouldn’t.’

  I didn’t want children. And of all the shameful things a woman could admit to – breast enhancement, sex with her boyfriend’s father – this was the most taboo.

  I’d read enough magazines to expect that in my late twenties my hormones would seize the controls and I’d find myself in the grip of a powerful baby-hunger. I was quite excited about it – but it simply never happened. Marnie, on the other hand, had always adored children and couldn’t wait to have her own. Sometimes I wondered if there had been a mix-up in the womb and she’d got my share of baby-longing as well as her own.

  Oddly – or maybe not, I didn’t know – I had heartfelt sympathy for women who couldn’t get pregnant, because I knew what it was like to be unable to control my own body. I wanted to want to get pregnant and never got it.

  Damien was more vague than I was. If pressed, he’d mumble something about there already being far too many people in the world and it would be wrong to bring yet another one into it. But I suspected that the realissue was Damien’s family. This is hard to understand if you haven’t spent time with them, because they’re lovely people. They really are, I’m not just being polite. They’re warm, fun, kind, clever. Clever. Especially clever. And that’s really where the trouble lies. Damien has two brothers and two sisters: a brother and sister older than him; a brother and sister younger. He’s the middle child. And of his four siblings, three of them – Brian, Hugh and Christine – are surgeons. In fact, Damien’s dad, Brian Senior, was also a surgeon. (Further information that you might find interesting: Damien’s mother is called Christine. In other words, Mr and Mrs Stapleton called their two eldest children after themselves, which says plenty, really, if you think about it.)

  The only Stapleton sibling to not be a surgeon – other than Damien – was Deirdre. And that was because she successfully ran her own business, ‘creating’ children’s bedrooms. It had started as a hobby with her own kids, but she’d conjured up such magical, thrilling kingdoms that everyone started asking her to do it for their children, and before she knew it she had a wildly successful enterprise on her hands. Not that she would ever boast about it. None of them ever boasts. (Further information: despite their graciousness
, Bid hates the Stapletons. She says, ‘They’d sicken you.’)

  Anyway, in any other family, Damien would be regarded as the Mensa candidate. But not in the Stapletons’. Damien once told me that he feels like he’s only an associate member of his family, not a full member with all the accruing rights and privileges, and I think that the real reason he doesn’t want to have children is nothing to do with the overcrowded planet but is because he doesn’t want anyone else to feel left out, the way he does.

  (Further information: I would never say any of this to Damien. He doesn’t believe in pop psychology analysis stuff. In fact, neither do I…)

  Occasionally I tried to write columns crusading for women like me, but judgement always rained down like bricks and I got tons of letters telling me I was ‘unnatural’, I was ‘a freak’, I was ‘feminism gone mad.’

  I was warned (often by men, like how the hell would they know?) that the day I started the menopause, I’d be crippled by loss and it would be too late to undo my ‘selfish’ choice.

  Which was unfair because I didn’t judge those who’d had babies, even though they became – on behalf of their child – the most selfish creatures on earth.

  Did I care that their baby liked puréed aubergine but not puréed parsnip? No. But I’ve stuck on my interested face and moved the conversation beyond the point of no return with leading questions about puréed carrots, puréed potatoes and – a controversialone, this – puréed chicken.

  Did I mind if they opened the window so that ‘the baby’ (warm as Thailand beneath a pile of technologically adapted blankets) got some air, even though the room was already freezing?

  Did I mind that even though a plan had been fashioned to go to the park and we were all standing by the front door with our coats and hats on, ‘the baby’ suddenly fell asleep and all activity was suspended for an unquantifiable length of time?

  The strange thing was that I was ‘good’ with babies. I loved their milky, powdery smell and their warm, soft weight in my arms. I’d never objected to changing a nappy and I didn’t care if they puked their bottle back up on me. And, for some reason that really pissed off those who disapproved of my childless-by-choice state, I could always stop them crying.

  I loved babies. I just didn’t want one of my own.

  Dazzler. Dazzler! Even now I can remember the exact mix of giddy joy and hope when Damien told me at Lucinda Breen’s thirtieth-birthday party that he had a name for me – and such a brilliant name! I was so tingly that for a short while I lost the feeling in my feet and it took weeks to come down from the high. (I’ve always had a soft spot for Lucinda Breen since that night.)

  However, as soon as the first loved-up flush had passed, I needed to get to the bottom of this ex-wife business. All men have ex-girlfriends, but Damien had married this woman.

  ‘Go easy,’ Marnie had counselled anxiously. ‘This is one sure way to make him scarper.’

  ‘But I have to find out!’

  ‘If you must do it, do it subtly!’

  But when had I ever been subtle?

  I waited until after a bout of particularly passionate sex, and when our breathing had finally returned to normal, I said, ‘Damien, you’re a man and you’re not going to want to answer these questions, but tell me about your ex-wife. Juno, that’s her name?’

  He lay back on the pillow and whispered, ‘Oh no.’

  ‘I need to know,’ I said. ‘What if you’re still hung up on her – ’

  ‘ – I’m not. She’s my ex-wife. Ex.’

  ‘Yes, but what happened? You got married? Why? And why didn’t you stay together? And why – ’

  Eventually, after he simply couldn’t continue deflecting me, he broke down and burst out, ‘There were three reasons it didn’t work out.’ He listed them on his fingers. ‘One. We got married too young. Two. I was working long hours so we never saw each other. And three. She started shagging her boss.’

  He thought the discussion was over – whereas I thought his three-point breakdown was simply an interesting opening gambit.

  I rolled over on top of him and stared into his eyes. ‘Just tell me everything,’ I said. ‘Make it easy on yourself.’

  ‘No.’

  I continued to hold eye contact. ‘You are strong-willed,’ I said. ‘But I am stronger.’

  We stared and stared and stared, the muscles around our eyes rigid – then he blinked.

  ‘You blinked! I win.’

  He closed his eyes, opened them again and said, almost laughing, ‘Okay. What do you want to know?’

  ‘Where did you meet?’

  ‘At school. Marfleet’s.’

  Marfleet’s was a fee-paying establishment for privileged children, which offered an ‘all-round’ education. What this meant in practice was that even if pupils were as thick as a plank, their potato cut-out shapes would be so celebrated that the fact that they were almost unable to write their own name would pass them by entirely. Having said that, Marfleet’s turned out a higher than average quota of diplomats, triathlon winners, surgeons and hedge-fund managers.

  Although Juno and Damien had been in the same class, it wasn’t until they’d left school and were both doing degrees in Trinity that they fell in love.

  ‘But why did you get married?’ I asked. Couldn’t they just have been in love like normal people?

  ‘It sort of started as a joke,’ Damien said, as if he could hardly believe it himself.

  Reading between the lines, I guessed that Juno was bored and thought getting married would be a great excuse for a party. But what really gave the thing impetus was that both sets of parents opposed the idea. The pair of them were far too young, they said.

  Now, the thing about Damien, which I was learning fast, is that he’s stubborn. You can’t tell him not to do something. The more he was told he was too young to get married, the more determined he became that the wedding would go ahead.

  ‘You know yourself, the more they said we were too immature, the more we decided that we were far more clued-in than them.’

  ‘ “They say we’re young and we don’t know, we won’t find out untilwe grow,” ’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘ “I Got You Babe”. Sonny and Cher.’

  ‘Right, yes, exactly.’

  Eventually he and Juno got their way. So the summer they graduated, they got married.

  ‘So there you were, twenty-two and married,’ I prompted.

  ‘Utter lunacy.’ He shook his head. ‘Working sixty hours a week as a cub reporter for the Times and studying at night for an MA in Political Science. And we were skint.’

  Sympathetically I said, ‘ “They say our love won’t pay the rent, before it’s earned our money’s all been spent.” ’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And Juno?’ I asked. ‘Hanging around the house making cupcakes?’

  ‘No, she had a job too. In PR.’

  ‘Which firm?’

  ‘Browning and Eagle.’

  This told me everything I needed to know about Juno. Contrary to popular opinion, not all PR girls are despicable leeches – I came across an above-average number of them in my job, so I knew what I was talking about.

  But there are a certain breed who combine pushiness with a soul-destroying absence of belief in their product. They couldn’t sell a can of 12 per cent cider to an alcoholic, and you get the feeling that they’re only in the job so they can get their hair blow-dried and stand in a function room in the Four Seasons, patronizing people.

  Juno was one of these.

  Of course I knew all of this without ever having met her.

  ‘And what happened next?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh God.’ He ran his hands through his hair. ‘I was working all the time. You know what it’s like when you’re starting out.’

  I certainly did. You’re at the mercy of your editor. You could be sent to Antwerp at a moment’s notice and you have to suck it up because you’re getting experience and earning your stripes.
br />   ‘And when I wasn’t working, I was studying. But her job was very sociable. And she was very sociable. There were always launches and parties and weekends away and I couldn’t keep up. I needed the MA to get a decent job. So we sort of got into a routine – she did her stuff and I did mine, and maybe she wasn’t that bored for the first couple of years. But by the third year…’

  He trailed into silence and I waited.

  ‘There was this Saturday night,’ he said. ‘She was gone to Ballynahinch Castle for a weekend, for some launch of something or other. I’d worked an eighty-hour week and the only time I’d seen her was for fifteen minutes while she packed. Then off she went and I started writing a five-thousand-word paper on Marxism and globalism. I worked on it all Friday night, then all day Saturday, and I finished it around ten o‘clock on Saturday night…’

  ‘Yes…’

  ‘And suddenly I had nothing to do. It was a hot night. There must have been a match on, because every now and then I’d hear this big roar. I suppose someone must have scored or nearly scored. The whole world was out having a good time. I felt like the loneliest man in Ireland. And then… then I remembered Juno packing. I just had this picture of her getting this black shiny thing out of a drawer.’

  ‘A black shiny thing?’

  ‘Yeah. A basque thing. And I wondered, Why’s she bringing a basque away on a working weekend?’ He looked at me. ‘Then I remembered the number of times she’d been mentioning Oliver Browning. Her boss.’

  I knew him. He was a creepy creep who dyed his hair; it was meant to be brown but it had a terrible orangey hue.

  ‘It felt like every conversation I’d had with her over the past God knows how many months had been about him and how great he was.’ He shrugged. ‘Suddenly it was just obvious. And there you have it, Grace.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. What a sad story. ‘And did you have a showdown with her?’