Lies of Silence Read online

  “But it was the Germans who destroyed Belfast,” his father used to say. “It wasn’t these Troubles, it was the bombing during the last war. After the war they cleared the bombsites, but they never rebuilt.” It was true, he supposed, for he had seen photographs of the prewar city, orderly, ugly, Victorian. But what the war had begun, a quarter of a century of civil strife had worsened, so that now, beneath the new motorways which crossed the city like slash marks on a map, the old heart of Belfast, those thousands of small dwellings which housed people whose highest ambition was a job in a shipyard or a mill, lay in a continuing plague of poverty, decaying, without hope.

  His house was in the north end of Belfast, part of that much larger city which surrounded the central ghettos, a quiet, unpublicized, middle-class Belfast where Protestants and Catholics lived side by side, joined by class, by economic ties, even by intermarriage, in a way the poor could never be. The house, unlike the others in their avenue, was rented, for Moira had said, “What I really want is to buy a nice place on the other side of town, near your work.” When he told her that he had no intention of staying on in Belfast she ignored it.

  The first time he met her—it was at a party given by mutual friends in London—she said, “Do you like it here? I hate it. You could live six months anywhere in London and you’ll be lucky if you know the name of the people next door. I can’t wait to go home.”

  “So you’re going home?” he asked. Although he had known her less than five minutes he felt an ebb of disappointment. She was tall, beautiful and very flirtatious. Already, he had thought of asking her for a date.

  “I wish I could,” she said. “I came here because I couldn’t find a job at home. This girl, Clodagh Burke, she’s a friend of mine, we were at UCD together—”

  “You were at UCD?”

  She laughed. “You sound surprised. Well, as I was saying, Clodagh’s started a little nursery school here in Hampstead and she asked me to come over and help her run it. If she makes a go of it, she wants to open a second school in Belfast. And I’ll run it.”

  “So you’ll be going back eventually?”

  “Maybe. Between ourselves, I’m fed up with teaching kids. I don’t know what I want to do now. I’d love to go home but, for the time being, I’m stuck here.”

  “It’s ironic,” he said. “I’m the opposite.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “This American hotel group I’m working for has just bought the Clarence Hotel. They want me to manage it for them. And it’s the last thing I want.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “I’m going. If I go to Belfast now and make a go of it, they’ve promised they’ll bring me back to London and put me in charge of one of their hotels here. Which is what I do want.”

  “So when are you leaving?”

  “October.”

  “I envy you,” she said.

  Was that why, when two months later he asked her to marry him, she said yes? A few weeks ago in a drawer he found an old, discarded wallet. Inside was a color photograph of a girl, tall, slender, smiling, wearing a low-necked dress, hair tumbled about her shoulders, a photograph a man might keep in his wallet to show to other men for the pleasure of knowing they envied him.

  And, of course, they envied him. Was it only last year that her habit of flirting with strangers still filled him with jealous rage? Beginning with his father who, tipsy at the end of the wedding reception, clasped Moira to him in a far from fatherly embrace, giving her a large, wet, lascivious kiss.

  Now, as he drove up the Antrim Road, he thought of his father. Moira would, of course, telephone his parents at once. He could imagine his father listening to the news in his office in the back hall of Kinsallagh House Hotel, putting down the phone, rising to go and close the green baize door so that the kitchen staff would not overhear, then ringing him up.

  “Michael, what’s this I hear? I’ve just been talking to Moira. Have you thought of what this will do to your mother, have you? Never mind the damage to your career. Do you think you can walk off the job of running an important hotel and expect anyone in this business ever to take you seriously again? I might remind you this reflects on me. I recommended you to those people. I trained you—well, all right, early training here at Kinsallagh. And the Yanks, how do you think they’re going to react? I can see Mr. Keogh’s face when you tell him you’ve walked off an important post just because you’ve met some little tart. Damn it, Michael, there are more important things in life than a piece of crumpet.”

  At which point he would probably hang up on his father. But that would not be the end of it. His father, sole proprietor of Kinsallagh House Hotel, County Antrim, “a fine old Irish country house, a listed building set in five acres of landscaped gardens, with magnificent fishing in the nearby Kinsallagh River,” his father who had managed to live his life in a fantasy world, believing that his guests saw him as a landed gentleman who ran Kinsallagh House not as a hotel, but as a hobby, his father who could conveniently ignore the fact that to make ends meet he, the landed gent, must act as headwaiter in the dining room, and take orders for wine and drinks each evening, before dinner was served, his father who had introduced him to the hotel business, who had been so impressed by his appointment to run the Clarence, “A plum, Michael, once the finest hotel in the city. And it will be again, thanks to you.” To his father this would seem a personal insult, a family betrayal.

  Ahead, as he drove into Winchester Avenue, the sky turned dark. He turned up the narrow driveway behind his house and parked the car in its usual place outside the gate of his back garden. There was no wind tonight. The garden seemed oddly still. He looked up at the house, half hidden by untended shrubs and hedgerows. There were no lights on upstairs. So, she was not yet in bed. He opened the gate and stood in the garden, waiting for the cat. But the cat did not come. Where was it? No matter how late he came home the cat would glide up swiftly, rub against his trouser leg, and mew for its food. It was an outside cat. Moira would not allow it in the house.

  “Teddy?” he called softly. “Teddy?” He waited, then shut the gate behind him and went up the garden path to the back door. Who would feed it when he was gone? He opened the back door, which was unlocked, and saw the false colors of television spill into the shadows of the back hall.

  “Michael, is that you?”

  He went into the sitting room. She was not alone. “We were just watching the end of ‘The Twilight Zone,’” she said, rising to switch the set off.

  He turned to Peg Wilton. “Hello, there.”

  “Hello, Michael. Goodness, it’s half ten. I had no idea it was so late. It was light until a minute ago.”

  “The twilight zone,” he said.

  Peg Wilton laughed, heaving herself up from the sofa, presented her large rump to him as she bent down to scoop several small objects off the coffee table. “I’ll leave these two pieces of jet, will I?” she said to Moira. “And the tortoiseshell combs, is that right?”

  “I’m not sure about the jet—oh, leave them, anyway,” Moira said. “But I definitely have a customer for the combs. And, listen, Michael will run you home.”

  “No, no.”

  “It’s no bother,” he said.

  Peg Wilton smiled at Moira. “As always, the gentleman.”

  Was she being sarcastic? He knew she did not like him and, normally, would have been irritated at having to chauffeur her half a mile down the road. But tonight, in the same room with Moira, knowing that tomorrow she would have to be told, he wanted to escape. “Listen, don’t bother to wait up for me,” he said. “Why don’t you go on up to bed? I have some things to do.”

  Moira ignored this. “Come on, Peg, we’ll go out the back. The car’s in the entry.”

  When they all three stepped into the garden he peered around in the darkness. “Have you seen the cat tonight?”

  Moira was not interested in the cat. She embraced Peg Wilton. “All right, Peg, I’ll give you a ring tomorrow. Around
ten, OK?”

  He went ahead of Peg and, opening the car door, pushed the front passenger seat back as far as it would go. Peg was a large lump of a woman. When he switched on the headlights, suddenly, ahead, he saw the yellow gleam of a cat’s eyes. But this cat was a Persian. It ran in front of the car and jumped into a bush.

  They drove out into Winchester Avenue. Peg said, “I suppose these are busy days for you at the hotel?”

  “Yes, it’s graduation week.”

  “Of course. And everybody goes to the Clarence afterward. Especially now. It’s marvelous, the change in that place since you’ve had the running of it.”

  He stared at the road ahead. Who will take over the running of it now? They’ll have to send someone from London. Again he felt a rush of happiness so strong that, unconsciously, he put his foot down hard on the accelerator, sending the car surging forward.

  “Hold on, hold on,” Peg said. “We’re nearly here. The fourth door, the red one. There.”

  He pulled in where she indicated and shut off the ignition. As he did, she leaned toward him and put her plump, ringed hand on his sleeve. “Could I ask you something?”

  “Yes, what?”

  “You won’t be annoyed with me, will you?”

  “Why would I be annoyed?”

  “Well, the thing is, Michael, I’ve decided to open up a place in Dublin. I’ve found a marvelous set of premises just off Grafton Street. The thing is, you see, I’ll have to go up there to get it going. And that means I need someone to run my place here, someone with flair. And, to be frank, the person who would be ideal is Moira.”

  Had Moira put her up to this latest lunacy? Running a bloody shop. But now, what did it matter? It might even help. “What does Moira feel about it?” he asked.

  “Well, that’s the thing, you see. She thinks you’ve got some sort of prejudice about her working in a shop.” She smiled at him, the smile of an enemy. “Is that true?”

  “It’s true,” he said. “With her education, I think it’s a waste.”

  “But the thing is, as you know yourself, Moira isn’t interested in teaching. I think this would be great for her. It would get her out. Meeting people. I think she’d love it.”

  “Well, it’s up to her,” he said, and at once felt Peg’s fingers tighten on his arm.

  “Do you mean it?” she said, and this time her smile was real.

  “Of course.”

  “Oh, good. Oh, I am pleased. Can I tell her it’s all right, then? Or do you want to speak to her first?”

  “No, you tell her,” he said. “Tell her tomorrow.” For by this time tomorrow Moira would not be asking his permission about anything.

  “But it will be all right, will it?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Well, then, I’ll run on in.” She pushed open the door of the little car. “Thanks awfully, Michael. And thanks for the lift.”

  “I’ll see you to the door.”

  “No, no, I’ll be all right.”

  As he watched Peg Wilton go to her door and open it, he remembered Andrea running up to her front door, turning, waving to him. Tonight my life has changed. Everything has changed. Everything.

  He drove back down the Antrim Road and reparked in the driveway. The light was now on in their bedroom window. Perhaps he could stay downstairs until she went to sleep? These last months he had found it easy to deceive her. She was the enemy of his freedom. But now he was sure he could not conceal his new happiness from her even for one night. Now she was no longer his enemy. She was his victim.

  As he went up the garden path he heard a clattering sound behind him. The gate, which he had not closed properly, was swinging to and fro, hitting against the gatepost. He went back and in the light shining down from the upper window noticed something sticking out of the hedge behind the gatepost. A woman’s handbag? But as he bent to retrieve it he saw that it was not a handbag. Teddy. He touched the body, hard and cold beneath its fur. The left side of Teddy’s head was matted with blood, the jaw crushed as though it had been hit by a car.

  Had someone, coming up the driveway, hit Teddy then thrown him over the hedge? Anyone using the driveway would most likely be a resident, might even know that Teddy was his cat. Sick, he lifted the small body and hid it carefully under a fuchsia bush. Better not to tell her tonight. He would bury it in the morning. Not that she cared about Teddy but a thing like this could set her off, making her ring up the police, accusing the neighbors, God knows what.

  The back door was unlocked. He locked it now when he went in. The phone began to ring and he hurried up the back hall to the hallstand where the receiver sat beneath a pile of coats. But, as he reached it on the third ring, the ringing stopped. She had picked up in the bedroom. Usually a call at this time of night meant an emergency at the hotel.

  So he lifted the receiver and heard Peg say, “Remember, don’t say anything. Be surprised.”

  Then Moira, hurriedly. “All right. I think he just came in. ’Bye.”

  As he started up the stairs her voice called down. “Is that you?” He did not answer. At the head of the stairs he saw her figure, a black daguerreotype silhouetted against the light from the bedroom behind her. “Did you pick up the phone?” her voice asked.

  “Yes. What did Peg want?”

  “Oh, it was just something she forgot to tell me about a piece of marquetry she bought.”

  She turned and went back into the bedroom, sitting at her triptych mirror to begin the nightly brushing of her hair. As she picked up the brush she leaned forward and angrily plucked out a long strand, bright as a silver wire, examining it as though it were infected. Her blue cotton nightgown was cut in a deep V, exposing her long white back, the vertebrae like knuckles down her spine. She took up the brush again and began to comb her hair forward over her face with a jerking movement which brought back to him the sight of her kneeling at the toilet bowl, her finger in her mouth, retching as she vomited up half a box of chocolates or part of a cream cake, eaten less than an hour before.

  Not that she had bothered to conceal her illness from him, once he discovered it. “It’s something that happens to me,” she said. “It’s called bulimia and there’s nothing I can do about it. I suppose I should have told you before we got married. Yes, of course I should. Anyway, I don’t want you telling people, now. Do you hear me, Michael? I mean it.”

  But, of course, he had not heeded her. “It’s a form of anorexia,” Sean Mullen, a gynecologist, told him. “They’re women who want perfect figures and have a morbid fear of getting fat. They go on eating binges, sweets mostly, and vomit the stuff up. The theory is they want to become a stereotype of helpless, dependent, female beauty. Is it someone you know?”

  “Yes. But that stuff about wanting to be helpless and dependent doesn’t sound right.”

  “Are you sure?” Mullen said. “These things don’t always show on the surface. Whoever it is, she should think about treatment. Bulimics can be suicidal.”

  Now, she tossed her head back, her hair swirling around like a ponytail as she caught sight of him standing behind her. “What’s the matter with you?” she asked crossly.

  “Nothing.”

  “Are you coming to bed?”

  “In a minute. I have some bills to pay. Don’t wait up for me.”

  She turned again to her mirror, examining her face in a nervous, questioning way, touching her cheeks, pulling the skin tight about her eyes, smoothing away imagined wrinkles. At thirty-three, she was as beautiful as ever, but in the past year she had begun to believe she was losing her looks. It was true that in her present anxious, depressed state she no longer employed the flirtatious manner which men warmed to, but she was, indisputably, someone they turned to stare at in the street. Guiltily, he told himself that she would have no trouble finding a second husband. Whether she would want one was another matter.

  “Good night, then,” he said. She glanced at him through the mirror, but did not answer. He went out on the landing an
d into the small front bedroom which he had converted into a study. Here, arranged floor to ceiling in homemade bookshelves of bricks and plywood, were his books, most dating from his student days, some going back to his boyhood in Kinsallagh House Hotel—his books, Chekov, Joyce, Eliot, Stevens, Yeats, Flann O’Brien, Lowell, Proust, Laforgue, Auden, Waugh, Greene, Sartre, Tolstoy, a mix of novels, poetry, biographies—books he had jealously kept apart from those in the “library” at Kinsallagh, those detective stories, spy novels and romances left behind by departing guests and used by his father to fill the bookshelves. His books: his passport to that other world he had once dreamed of joining. But tonight, looking at them, for the first time he thought of leaving them behind. Still, if he did not take them Moira might think that he had not really left home.

  Outside, in the night silence, he heard the noise of a car coming up the avenue. It seemed to stop outside his house. He went to the study window and looked down. A white Ford Escort had parked across the street. The driver turned the headlights off and Dillon saw that there was a girl sitting beside him. The driver turned and put his arm around the girl as if to kiss her, but did not. They sat frozen in that position for a long moment and then, as though aware she was being watched, the girl turned her head around and looked up at the house. At once, embarrassed, Dillon stepped back from the window. Behind him the light went off in their bedroom.

  He sat down at his desk. He opened drawers, searching for the things he must take with him tomorrow. He collected his passport, his diploma from the École National d’Administration des Hôtels in Lausanne, and his checkbook. In a second drawer he found copies of poems he had published in little magazines in his student days and some articles he had written for Omega, the student magazine he had helped to found. In the bottom left-hand drawer was a photograph album. He opened it. Pictures of his wedding day. The reception had been held in Kinsallagh House and there, on the front lawn, looking pleased with himself in rented morning clothes, was his father, armlinked with his mother who wore a large garden-party hat. The second photograph was of Moira’s parents, Joe, the butcher, ill at ease in a badly fitting blue suit and Maeve, her mother, enormous in flowered chiffon. On the next page of the album was a photograph of Moira, alone in white satin, holding a bouquet of yellow roses, radiant, smiling, and somehow infinitely touching, like a tall twelve-year-old dressed up as a bride. The next page was blank. He shut the wedding portfolio and in that moment heard her call to him from the bedroom. “Will you be long?”