Page 24 of The Bookshop Ladies

Fern sat back in the chair, unsure what to do next. Her hands were shaking, so she held them awkwardly as if they’d just been burned. Maybe the espresso was a terrible idea. If the coffee cups were anything to go by, the espresso cups would be thimble-sized. She picked up the phone, scanned down through her most often used contacts, her finger hovering over her husband’s name.

She couldn’t do it. Not here. Not in such a public place. She was not going to be that sort of woman. Middle aged. Pitiful. Cast aside. Rejected. Sad. Or at least, she was not going to be that woman in a public place, having THE conversation that would certainly end in tears and shouting and (God help her) begging.

No. Absolutely not. She picked up the cup which the waiter had brought, deliberately. Drank the full contents in one go. It was hot. Much hotter than she expected, burning her mouth and her throat. She shuddered, but at least it felt fortifying on some strange level.

She put away her phone. Her mind still raced in a thousand different directions. What should she do? If Margot was here, she would tell her exactly what to do.Oh, God, Margot, why did you have to bloody die and leave me here?She still missed her friend so much that sometimes it was a physical ache.

Fern knew exactly what she wanted to do, she wanted to go round to Luc’s office and have it out with him and Patrice – the secretary. The lover, she corrected herself only to feel tears pricking. She wiped her eyes and left change on the table for the coffee and a tip. Not that the waiter deserved it, but she hadn’t it in her to hang about and use her debit card.

It was raining. Of course it was raining, it was Dublin and her life had just imploded. More than twenty years of marriage came tumbling down in one awful image. Fern had never imagined Luc would be the sort of man to desirethat sort of thing.

‘We’re happy, aren’t we?’ she had said to him only a few weeks earlier after another of their friends filed for divorce. It seemed they hardly ever spoke any more and sometimes she wondered about it.

‘Of course we’re happy.’ He barely looked up from his newspaper.

Of course they were happy, they were just at that stage, she thought, settled into middle age. Luc seemed to be clocking in the days until he took early retirement. Or at least, that was what she had believed then.

‘Ralph and Pauline, they asked too much of each other,’ he said, picking up a slice of toast. ‘All this therapy and wellness lark, far better to let each other breathe.’

And she had murmured agreement, although she occasionally envied Pauline the fact that her husband wanted to go on weekends away to spas and health clubs. It was only in hindsight that she realised those ‘health clubs’ had been swinging parties and, unfortunately, Ralph had swung a bit more permanently than Pauline. So much for being open-minded.

Now who was happy? Evidently, behind the newspaper, Luc had been keeping his own secrets. She found herself filled to bursting with questions. How long had it been going on? How had it started? Who started it? Well, maybe she knew the answer to that. After all, what twenty-year-old girl yearns after a fifty-something man, even if he is in moderately good shape?

Fern stopped walking. Eventually. She must have walked for miles. Now, she looked around her, she was surrounded by grey houses, small gardens and private car parking spaces. She had tramped across at least four postcodes and here, in the middle of nowhere, there wasn’t a taxi to be found. She wanted to dump her huge handbag on the path, throw herself on top of it, beat the concrete with balled-up fists and cry at the injustice of it all. Her heart felt as if it might be breaking. Actually breaking in two; she was too bloody old for this. She needed to pull herself together, marriages ended up in trouble every day of the week. It wasn’t necessarily the end, unless she called time on things, but the way she felt now, she couldn’t imagine being in the same room as Luc, never mind the same marriage.

She pulled out her phone again.

Margot would know what to do. Fern scrolled down through her phone numbers, pressed her best friend’s name and waited for the dial tone and then stopped, because of course Margot wasn’t there any more. She would never be answering the phone again. Margot had no time for husbands and even less time for cheating spouses or simpering wives. Fern looked down at her friend’s achingly familiar face, smiling up at her from one Christmas they’d spent in Ballycove years earlier. Suddenly, weirdly, she felt a little relieved; at least she didn’t have to face telling Margot.

There was no Margot to run to now. So, what to do? Fern needed time to think. She couldn’t face it, much less Luc. She actually thought she might be physically ill if she had to share the same space with him at this moment.

How could she feel all these things and yet, feel absolutely nothing?

She pulled her jacket up around her. She was soaked through. Her hair was plastered to her head, her make-up long washed away.

She had come to a bridge, beneath which was a canal, murky but home to a few dilapidated longboats. Fern made her way down the side of the bridge, towards the towpath. She was thinking no further than taking herself away from people, away from oncoming traffic and women walking home after a day in the office, with no worries beyond heating shepherd’s pie or making sure there was a clean blouse to wear the following day. Was this all her own doing – payback for having hurt some other poor innocent woman years earlier? She had felt guilt for a long time. For over twenty years in fact, since that one night with Yves Bachand. Not that she regretted it, because she wouldn’t swap Robyn for all the peace of mind in the world. But it had repressed her. She could see it in her paintings. Other people were too kind or blind to mention it, but it was there, a sort of blandness, as if by taking what was not hers she had traded a little of her soul.

She flopped onto a bench. It was wet, but what did she care? It was only rain.

That was the thing with guilt. You had to pay it back with interest at some point. But not now; surely not like this? This was too simple; surely there was more to the laws of karma than this. It was downright unimaginative. She always assumed the price would be something like cancer or bankruptcy. When she lost Margot she almost convinced herself the score was in some awful way settled.

Fern sat there in the pouring rain and began to laugh. It was a strange hysterical sound coming from somewhere that she took to be her solar plexus, or maybe somewhere even deeper. It felt as if the manic sound was forming in her very DNA. Here she was, sitting on a bench in the middle of some unknown, forgettable Dublin suburb, going completely mad.

And then it stopped.

The rain. The laughter. The tears. The pain. As if she had been cut off from everything vital around her and within her, even the traffic on the bridge seemed to quieten. But of course, she knew in the higher part of her brain, it couldn’t all just stop. She looked at the water. Not even deep enough to drown herself in – so typical. There was only one thing for it. She would have to go home and face the music.

She walked up towards the busy road again, attempted unsuccessfully to flag down two different taxis. She couldn’t blame them. She wasn’t sure she’d let someone who looked completely bonkers into her taxi. She walked for another five minutes and then, because someone, somewhere, if there was a heaven, must have been looking down on her, she saw a Dart station – it would be dry on the platform and even if she had to wait a while, she could at least get the train home.

16

It was amazing and Robyn had no idea how she had managed it, but, within a few days, Joy had got to know most of the locals. Uncle Leo had returned again after that first day and Robyn tried to smooth the ground between them, telling Joy that he was probably one of the most eligible fifty-something-year-olds in the local village council.Believe it or not, he has quite a few admirers around the village.At which Joy snorted with laughter,there’s no accounting for taste.Though she did concede,at least he can bake.

So far this week, Leo had bought theIndependent, theExaminerand theDaily Starand on one occasion Margot’s last poetry collection. Robyn knew for a fact, he already had a signed copy in his bookshelves, he kept it next to a framed photograph of Albie and Peggy. Margot had organised for her publisher to send them on a copy each; by a cruel twist of fate, they arrived signed and with a personal note just a few days after she died.

‘I lent my copy to a friend and it doesn’t look as if I’m getting it back.’ They both knew he’d done no such thing. Joy always disappeared to the furthest corner of the shop to get away from him, but Robyn suspected he came in just to see her. Irishmen are strange animals. Robyn had seen one of the most elegant middle-aged businesswomen in the village flirt outrageously with him at the council drinks party, but perhaps he preferred a woman who was not quite so obvious.

‘I didn’t know your friends liked poetry that much?’ Robyn said.

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