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‘Saw you kissing?’
He nodded.
‘Oh, sweet Jesus.’ Alison Fucking Rafferty was only the chairwoman of the Parents’ Association, coach of the camogie team, wealthy, glamorous, and de facto gatekeeper of Cork society.
‘You may as well have put a full-page ad in the fuckingExaminer.’
He breathed out shakily. ‘I know.’
Her mind raced through the implications. ‘So, you figured I was going to find out anyway.’
He nodded.
‘And you thought you’d better tell me yourself, before someone else did.’
‘Yes.’ Ronan shook his head, as if to contradict himself. ‘But I would have told you anyway—’
Claire cut him off, raising her voice. ‘And that’s why you booked a weekend in Paris – to tell me you’d been up against a wall with Saoirse Maloney?’
She turned her body away from him, stared straight ahead at the ripples moving through the pond, outwards in ever-widening circles until they hit the wall. Such an extravagant argument, shouting at each other in public was, in itself, a shocking thing. Claire was ashamed of their uncouth behaviour, She felt she had exposed herself as much as if she had ripped off her dress and streaked through the tennis courts. She was embarrassed. But worse, she felt that they had taken an irrevocable step into an unexpected future, when all she wanted was what they once had in the past.
‘I thought it was about us,’ she said, her voice almost a whisper. ‘I thought you were being kind. I thought it was about getting away from all the bad memories in Cork, you know, and finding a way to climb out of this well of grief we were in.’
Ronan stared down at his hands. She wiped tears from her cheeks and went on.
‘And all the time that you were being so nice, cajoling me and touching me, you were just waiting for an opportune moment to tell me that you had your tongue down Saoirse Maloney’s throat.’
‘It wasn’t like that.’
‘It was exactly like that, Ronan. You’d have shagged me last night, if I’d let you. We could have made a’ – a heavy sob blocked her airway – ‘b-baby last night, and what then, would you still have told me this morning about how you got caught with another woman?’
‘Yes, I would,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to listen to me, Claire. Itwasabout us – and the grief and all that.’
‘By “all that”, I take it you mean our daughter dying?’
He closed his eyes for a second, and she knew she’d hurt him. Her heart was pounding, and a solid mass seemed to be expanding in her windpipe. She wanted to get up and walk away from this, from the row and the pain, but she knew that they were locked into it now, this duel, for better or worse.
‘Itwasabout her. It is. It’s all about Mabel.’ His voice rose too loud, as though he was having trouble modulating the volume.
Claire flinched. She said nothing and waited.
‘I felt it, too, you know,’ he said. ‘At first, it was this enormous shock, and I didn’t really think about her. I was so worried aboutyou. And then, you just went back to work, and I thought ifyoucould do that, then of course I could, but I had this physical ache in my chest all day, every day, you know?’
He was weeping now.
She nodded, and he went on.
‘And I knew you were the only other person who could understand the pain of it, but then you got so distant. You disappeared into yourself. I tried everything I could think of to reach you. I needed you, Claire. Ineededyou.’
She couldn’t think of an answer to that. She didn’t want – not now – to say she was sorry. She’d coped the only way she knew how. She’d known he was sad – of course he was – but her pain had filled all the available space inside her. She swallowed the lump in her throat.
‘I think,’ she said, ‘I felt that I was entitled to a bigger grief than you were.’
‘You were. You are. I get that. But I lost her too, and then I lost you.’
She wanted to scream at him then and beat his chest with her fists and tell him that she’d only asked for a little time. Time seemed to have a different meaning to him. To her, the pain had hardly changed. It still came over her, like a cloudburst, when she stood under the shower, when she stopped the car at traffic lights, whenever she allowed any chink of quiet in her day. After nine months, he wanted her to act normally, when she was still fighting for breath.
‘So, you turned to Saoirse Maloney for consolation?’
