This Charming Man

  ‘We are!’

  ‘We’re not.’

  ‘We are!’

  ‘We’re not!’

  Juno flashed us her pack of Marlboro, like it was an FBI badge. ‘I hate to interrupt,’ she twinkled, ‘but I’ll be out the front, while you two get your story straight.’

  ‘Why did you say she was like me?’ I raged in the taxi home.

  ‘Because she’s her own woman. She gives as good as she gets. Like you.’

  ‘Like me! We’ve nothing in common. She doesn’t have a job.’

  ‘She has two kids.’

  ‘She has a nanny! She plays hockey. She goes horse-riding. She says, “Everyone, let’s get naked!” ’ (The punchline to some pointless anecdote involving an all-day drinking orgy and a swimming pool.) ‘She’s a female jock.’

  ‘She’s fun.’

  She wasn’t.

  ‘If you don’t like her,’ he said, ‘you don’t have to meet her again.’

  ‘But you will, won’t you?’

  ‘I might…’

  ‘Ah Damien, she’s your ex-wife.’

  ‘But sure, that’s immaterial. That was a thousand years ago.’

  ‘Don’t starting hanging around with her.’ Drunkenly and childishly I said, ‘Don’t be so mean.’

  ‘What’s the big deal? I love you. I’m with you.’

  ‘Just bloody stubborn,’ I muttered into my chest. ‘Only doing it to be contrary.’

  ‘No, no.’ He was being irritatingly reasonable. ‘Juno’s a part of my past and I’m glad we’re back in touch with each other.’

  ‘But –’

  Then I was suddenly reminded of another conversation we’d had, not so long ago, and with the fighting spirit of the drunk person who knows she’s beaten but can’t bear to lose face, I said, ‘Fuck it, then, fine, fine, have it your way. Lez all be friends with lovely Juno.’

  It was 6.58 a.m. when the phone rang.

  I was already awake. All the same, it must be something big. Another tsunami? When something of that magnitude happened we were all called in to work immediately.

  ‘I’m on my way to the hospital!’ It was Jacinta. ‘Oscar’s burst his appendix!’

  ‘… Right.’

  ‘Natural disaster?’ Damien asked sleepily.

  ‘Take it easy, Jacinta,’ I said.

  ‘Jacinta,’ he muttered. ‘I might have known.’

  ‘No one dies from a burst appendix nowadays,’ I said. ‘He’ll be fine.’

  ‘No, you don’t understand! Today’s my day for interviewing Rosalind Croft and I’ll be stuck at Oscar’s bloody bedside. Of all the fucking days he has to pick! Never have children, Grace, they’re the most profoundly selfish –’

  ‘We’re not running the piece until Friday. Change the interview to tomorrow or Thursday.’

  ‘No, no! Rosalind’s schedule is so full, it has to be today. Today! You’ll have to go instead of me.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Okay? Is that all you have to say? Aren’t you glad?’

  ‘… Ah…’

  ‘If she gives you anything, like a scarf or… or anything, you give it straight to me.’

  They valet-parked me. A house with valet-parking.

  A suited PA-type person escorted me to a dressing room that was bigger than my entire house, where Mrs Croft was getting her hair blow-dried. She was already fully made-up. It was hard to put an exact age on her – maybe forty-five?

  I’d expected to dislike her. I was more than slightly judgemental about society women who did charity work; I suspected it was just an excuse to buy lots of frocks. But she squeezed my hand and smiled with a warmth that seemed genuine.

  ‘You’re going to shadow me today, Grace? I hope you won’t be bored to death.’

  I sincerely doubted it. Much as I might disapprove of the super-rich, I was shamefully fascinated by their lifestyles.

  People were constantly in and out of her room, bringing her phone messages, menus to approve, documents to sign. Being rich was a demanding job. Mrs Croft was chatty and pleasant to everyone. But maybe only because I was there.

  A stunningly good-looking Nigerian girl called Nkechi was flitting around, laying out clothes, flicking through hangers and shouting dog’s abuse at another Nigerian girl called Abibi. ‘MaxMara, MaxMara, I said MaxMara. Why do you give me Ralph Lauren?’

  ‘You said cream trousers.’

  ‘I said cream MaxMara trousers, you moron. There is a world of difference.’

  ‘I’m chairing a committee meeting this morning,’ Mrs Croft said, as Nkechi helped her into a strokeably soft cream cardigan. I didn’t know much about wool but whatever this garment was made of, it was clearly very, very expensive. I was saving up phrases to tell Damien later. I decided on, ‘A cardigan knitted from the hair of newborn babies.’

  ‘What sort of committee meeting? Charity?’

  ‘Are there any other kinds of committee meeting?’ Her eyes twinkled. ‘Thank you, Nkechi.’ Nkechi zipped up the cream MaxMara pants that had caused all the shouting. ‘Sugar Babies. For babies with diabetes. Then a lunch.’

  ‘And what sort of lunch?’

  ‘Take a guess. Charity again.’ Leaning on Nkechi, she stepped into a pair of cream and brown patent, low-heeled pumps. ‘Thank you, Nkechi.’

  ‘Same charity?’

  ‘No, no, different. The Sweetheart Foundation. For children with heart defects. Thank you, Nkechi.’

  Nkechi was fussing at Mrs Croft’s neck with a cream scarf decorated with horseshoes and stirrups. ‘Okay, it appears we’re ready to go.’

  It was a right cavalcade. There was me, Mrs Croft, the PA, the hairdresser, Nkechi, Abibi, two cars, two drivers and a large number of Louis Vuitton suitcases.

  Mrs Croft, the PA and I were helped into a Maybach (‘the dearest car in Ireland’), while Nkechi, Abibi, the hairdresser and the suitcases ‘had to suffer the ignominy’ of travelling behind us in an S-class Merc.

  The other committee ladies were exactly what I’d expected: freshly blow-dried hair, impractically light-coloured clothing and accents like angle-grinders. It seemed that everyone served on everyone else’s committees and they all attended each other’s shindigs. (‘Every lunch and dinner must be like Groundhog Day with tit tape.’)

  There was lively discussion over the theme for the Sugar Babies ball, or at least to find a theme that hadn’t been used in the previous six months at another ball. Suggestions were bigged up and shot down, according to whatever personal animosities were in play. Mrs Croft kept it all under control without having to raise her voice and they finally settled on a Marie Antoinette theme. (‘Super!’)

  Then the agenda moved to the menu.

  ‘Like it matters.’ Mrs Croft sighed.

  ‘Excuse me?’ one of the angle-grinders said.

  ‘Like anyone eats the food at these things.’

  The angle-grinder stared. ‘That’s hardly the point, Rosalind. We still have to have an innovative menu.’

  ‘Of course, Arlene, you’re absolutely right. How about partridge?’

  ‘Done. Only last week.’

  ‘Poussin?’

  ‘Done.’

  ‘Woodcock?’

  ‘Done.’

  ‘Duck?’

  ‘Done.’

  ‘Pheasant?’

  ‘Done.’

  ‘Chicken?’

  ‘Done.’

  ‘Grouse?’

  ‘Done.’

  ‘Why hasn’t someone invented a new bird?’ one of the angle-grinders whined. ‘This bloody country, I tell you.’

  In a suite in the hotel, Nkechi helped Rosalind out of her committee clothes and into her luncheon outfit. The hairdresser did a quick change of style, then it was down to the ballroom for the lunch.

  Hellish. A hundred and fifty clones of the women who’d been at the committee meeting. It was like a nature programme about a colony of breeding seagulls. The noise.

  Once the women on either side of me dis
covered that I was unable to discuss the terrible traffic in Marbella or the drop in standards in private schools, they turned their respective backs on me. I didn’t care; I zoned out and fantasized about a warehouse full of uncountable numbers of cigarettes. Shelf after shelf, so many you had to drive along on a mechanical platform thing to view them. A cigarette universe. Cigarettes by the million. Although I’d have been happy with just one.

  At 2.30 on the dot, the PA poked Rosalind and Rosalind got to her feet like an automaton and the cavalcade was off again. To be honest, I was shattered and I couldn’t understand why. I’d done nothing all morning, except make snide remarks in my head.

  Our next stop was a yoga lesson with a man who was often on telly. Another change of clothes, then on to dress fittings in Brown Thomas. Then back out to the house in Killiney for her amatsu practitioner, followed by a quick break for tea and victuals – ricecakes for her and handmade biscuits, spookily similar to the ones you find in posh hotels, for me.

  ‘Have a biscuit,’ I said, as I watched her tuck into the styrofoam discs. ‘Those things taste of nothing.’

  ‘Thanks, love, but I’m on one thousand two hundred calories a day, have been for the past nine years, since Maxwell made it big – if I can’t fit into size ten ballgowns I’m a goner. But you eat up.’

  She opened a massive desk diary. ‘You’d like to see my calendar for next week? Take a look.’

  It was awe-inspiring: acupuncture, committee meetings, hospice visits, cranio-sacral treatment, photocalls, colonics, Pilates, teeth-whitening, Christmas gift-buying for her army of staff, lunches, teas, business breakfasts…

  ‘… and always, balls, balls, balls,’ she said, her tone suddenly and unexpectedly bitter. ‘Sorry,’ she said quietly.

  ‘That’s okay,’ I said. ‘It can’t always be fun.’

  As far as I was concerned, it would never be fun. If by some bizarre quirk of the universe – like the plots in Quantum Leap – I ended up as a society wife, they’d have to fish me out of the canal.

  Then something happened – I didn’t know what it was but it made her hands clench and her knuckles flash white. ‘Maxwell’s home. My husband.’ She flicked her wrist to see her watch and said, ‘He’s early.’

  I’d heard nothing.

  As if her switch had clicked from medium to extra-fast, she was gathering her sheets of paper and banging them on the desk. ‘We’ll have to finish for today, Grace.’ She was standing up, tugging down her skirt, moving towards the door.

  ‘But…’ My brief had been to shadow her untilbedtime.

  ‘Rosalind, Rosalind!’ a man’s voice yelled in the hall.

  ‘In here!’ She dived to open the door but, before she got there, someone outside thrust it inwards. A narky-looking man. Maxwell Croft.

  ‘What are you doing in here?’ he asked Rosalind.

  ‘I didn’t expect you for another hour –’

  He looked past her and stared, without warmth, at me.

  ‘Grace Gildee,’ Rosalind said. ‘She’s doing a piece for the Spokesman, about the charity balls.’ She spoke quickly, almost hiccuping over her words.

  ‘Maxwell Croft. Nice to see you.’ He gave me a brief glance. ‘Rosalind will have your car brought round.’

  Any protests I’d been about to make died in my mouth. My will was no match for his.

  ‘What did she give you?’

  ‘Nothing. How’s Oscar doing?’

  ‘Fine, fine. She gave you nothing at all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She probably didn’t think there was any point. Why give you an Hermes handbag? It would only make the rest of you look worse.’

  ‘Jacinta, would you mind not being quite so insult –’

  ‘It’s not too late. Maybe when the piece comes out, she’ll send something. Now, I take it you’ve seen the contract?’

  ‘… Yes.’

  Jacinta had promised the Crofts copy approval, which never happens, not even for Tom Cruise. Therefore my profile of Mrs Croft would be an absolute rave.

  Good job I’d liked her.

  I was the one who introduced them: Paddy and Marnie. It was the July I turned seventeen and I’d got a summer job as a lounge girl in the Boatman, where Paddy was working as a barman.

  It was actually the night of my seventeenth birthday – also Marnie’s.

  Marnie dropped by with Leechy when I’d finished work; we were on our way out to celebrate the only way we knew how: drinking heavily.

  ‘Come and meet Paddy,’ I said, with a little pride.

  Paddy was cool. He’d already finished school, had worked in London for a year on a building site and was starting university at the end of September to study law.

  Marnie and Leechy had heard all about him – as had Ma, Dad and Bid – because he was the only barman who was nice to me. From the moment the rest of the staff discovered I lived on Yeoman Road, they had regarded me with hostility. They mistakenly thought I was from a well-off family and set out to torment me, starting on my very first night, when Micko, the manager, said, ‘There’s a phone call for Mike Hunt, ask around and see if anyone has seen him.’ It was only Paddy’s intervention that stopped me wandering around the pub calling plaintively, ‘My cunt? Anyone seen my cunt?’

  ‘They do it to all the new girls,’ he’d said. ‘Don’t take it personally. There’s a bet on to see how long before they make you cry.’

  ‘They won’t make me cry,’ I’d said, filled with resolve – for about five minutes. Then I decided to leave and get a job somewhere else.

  ‘They’re afraid of you,’ Dad explained. ‘You’re educated and different. You’re just passing through, but that’s their career. Have compassion.’

  ‘Don’t leave,’ Ma agreed. ‘Being despised is character-forming. Think of Gandhi.’

  ‘Fuck them,’ Bid said. ‘Ignorant knackers. Work in McLibels instead, you can get us a family discount.’

  In the end, because the tips were good and the place was only round the corner, I’d decided to stick it out. What would have happened if I hadn’t?

  ‘Paddy,’ I called. He was loading glasses into a dishwasher. ‘This is my friend Leechy. And this is my sister, Marnie. My twin sister.’

  He said hello to Leechy, then I waited for him to express the obligatory surprise about Marnie – your twin? You’re so different!

  But he said nothing and for a baffled moment I wondered what was wrong. But when I looked at him, he was staring open-mouthed at Marnie and she was gawking back in the same stupefied fashion. Something was happening – you could actually feel it. Shivery, snaky sensations zigzagged over my scalp. Micko turned from doing something clangy with a metal barrel, his face confused, because he didn’t know why he was looking. Even a very drunk man and woman, curled up in a booth, left off their slurred accusatory conversation and stared at us.

  Instantly Paddy and Marnie aligned their lives. Within fourteen hours Marnie had handed in her notice in Piece’a Pizza, where she and Leechy had both had jobs, and started working instead in the Boatman where she charmed Micko into synchronizing her shifts with Paddy’s.

  Despite her living on Yeoman Road, the other barmen treated her with tenderness and affection; that was the effect Marnie had on men. Also she was a protectorate of Paddy’s and despite being educated and ambitious, everyone loved Paddy.

  Marnie couldn’t stop thanking me. ‘You found him for me.’

  I’d never seen her so joyous, and it was a relief because I couldn’t breathe easy if Marnie wasn’t happy.

  But all of a sudden I was the extra wheel. We’d had other boyfriends in the past, but this was different. Not that I was abandoned and alone. Leechy was almost like another sister, she lived only five doors up and was always in our house. Then there was Sheridan, Paddy’s best friend since infant school. It was as if, at the age of four, they’d selected each other because they knew that when they grew up they could go womanizing as a pair: they were about the same height and build (
vital for womanizing pairs, you just can’t take them seriously if one is six inches shorter than the other) and both very good-looking.

  In fairness, though, handsome as Sheridan was, with his clean, Nordic looks, Paddy had something extra. Sheridan was foisted on Leechy and me, accompanied by a little lecture from Paddy that Sheridan was practically his brother and that we were to take good care of him. Together the three of us formed an uncomfortable little gang of leftovers.

  The funny thing was that I had as much contact with Paddy as if he’d been my boyfriend. I saw him all the time at work and I saw him all the time at home. It felt like you couldn’t walk into a room without finding him already in there, crotch-to-crotch with Marnie, his hand up her T-shirt.

  Ma and Dad had always encouraged us to bring our boyfriends home, but their famed tolerance ran out within days.

  ‘I go down to the kitchen to cut myself a slice of cake,’ Dad raged, ‘and there they are… at it.’

  ‘At it?’ Ma asked anxiously. Liberal as she was, this was not welcome news.

  ‘Not that sort of at it. But kissing. Sucking face. Whatever dreadful expression is currently in vogue. He’s always damn well here. And when he does bother going home, she spends half the night on the phone to him. What do they talk about? He gives me the creeps.’

  ‘The creeps! Why?’

  ‘He tries too hard to be liked.’

  ‘No he doesn’t!’ Ma and I were in unison.

  ‘He’s only a boy!’ Ma said. ‘You can’t attribute such cynicism to someone who’s only a boy.’

  ‘He’s nineteen. He’s too old for her.’

  ‘It’s only two years.’

  ‘Two years is a lot at this age. And they’re never apart. It’s not healthy.’

  But Ma couldn’t resist taking Paddy under her wing. She was a sucker for any waifs and strays and Paddy was perfect: his mother was dead; his father was rarely at home; there was never any food in his house. The least she could do was feed the poor creature.

  ‘You think it’s bad now,’ Bid said to Dad.

  ‘Yes, I do actually, thank you very much,’ Dad said.

  ‘You wait till he goes to college in September. That’ll be fun and games in earnest. He’ll have no time then for the likes of our little Marnie,’ Bid predicted.