Toni gazed glumly at her phone. There were many missed calls. One from Ned.
Having heard Lou on the phone to him the night before, Toni wasn’t surprised he was ringing her.
‘No, I don’t want to talk about it, Ned,’ Lou had said. ‘There’s nothing to talk about.’
There had been a pause while Ned tried to put his side of the story.
Clearly, Lou wasn’t buying the whole the-dog-ate-my-homework vibe coming from Whitehaven.
‘Ned, I always buy all the gifts we give to people, yes I do know that. But for my fiftieth birthday, all you had to do was walk into a shop and purchase something. That was all you had to do. The problem is that you didn’t think you needed to. You’re right, Ned,’ she went on, as if interrupting him, ‘I’ve never said anything like this before. I’m saying it now, OK? It’s not about the price of a gift, it’s about you making the effort to get one. I have to go—’ and she’d hung up abruptly.
‘You are changing,’ Toni had said in admiration.
Lou had nodded.
‘Ned seems to think I’m having a mad hormonal surge and that if he says sorry enough, it’ll all be fine, but it won’t. If he can’t grasp that he hurt me deeply, then I’m going to avoid talking to him.’
‘I don’t know if avoiding people helps,’ Toni had replied, and then realised that this was a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
Her phone showed several missed calls. Two from Cormac, one from Liam and a startling twelve missed calls from Oliver. She hadn’t spoken to him since that Thursday night. What more was there to say? She hadn’t been able to look at him by the end.
‘I can get help, Toni,’ he’d said, after his confession, coming to kneel on the floor in front of her. ‘There’s rehab for gambling. I can book myself in and I’ll get better. I know I can. It’s just the money is the problem and all I owe, but you love me, don’t you?’
Toni had sat in her chair, cold green tea in front of her, and stared at her kneeling husband. At that moment, he disgusted her. He had ruined them. He’d betrayed her, he’d lost everything, and she had never even seen what was happening.
‘Get off the floor,’ she’d said furiously. ‘It’s too late to crawl now, Oliver. Why did you wait so long before telling me? I could have helped a long time ago, if only you’d trusted me. You’ve destroyed us.’
‘No, please,’ he begged. It was the first time she had seen Oliver beg in real life. It was different from his onstage begging in theatre or his film begging in movies. They were begging-with-dignity. This was begging without dignity, true pleading.
‘Oliver, I don’t know where you’re going to stay tonight but get out of here right now because I can’t bear to look at you. Don’t touch another penny of our money while I figure this out.’
‘I promise,’ he’d said. And yet within forty-eight hours he’d removed nine thousand euros from her credit card.
Toni poured espresso from the Moka into a small cup and, coffee in hand, went into the airy living room and sat in the bubble chair that had so enchanted Trinity. She could understand how Lou felt hijacked by the news that their father wasn’t Lou’s biological father. It had shifted Lou’s view of the past. Toni felt precisely the same about her marriage to Oliver. She’d thought she’d known and understood him. The Oliver she’d thought she was married to was a very determined man: determined in his pursuit of her and his pursuit of roles. Oh yes, and in the pursuit of the right things. She thought of their beautiful home and its Japanese art, the handmade rug, the correct couch, the many original paintings.
There were paintings he’d bought because he thought they were impressive by their very strangeness. If it looked like someone out of their head on ayahuasca with access to a full set of acrylic paints might have done it, Oliver would buy it. He liked to pretend that he liked art and bought as a connoisseur. It was not a side of him that Toni had liked, but then people’s insecurities often made them do strange things. There had been no money for art in his home as a child. As an adult, he’d made much of his love for paintings.
‘I buy what moves me,’ he would say when they held parties, and they held a lot of parties in the house. It was the perfect house for entertaining. All that open space for people to walk around clutching beautiful Riedel glasses of wine or a selection of the exquisite cocktails made by the Cocktail Cocteaus, a couple of mixologists Toni had found who brought their cocktail bar from house to expensive house. She closed her eyes at the thought of just how costly these parties had been.
People had wandered around happily, dressed in their finery and admiring the ayahuasca pictures and the obligatory sculpture by her mother. She’d paid her mother for one of her pieces. Trust Lillian to insist that there were no discounts for family.
Toni finished her coffee, then went back into the kitchen to make another, this time with sugar, even though she’d given it up years ago – sugar was good for shock, she’d heard – and took the cup upstairs to the wooden-floored balcony with the jungle of plants leaning over the array of sunbeds and the turquoise and indigo mosaic table.
She lay down on a lounger, not wearing sun cream, sunglasses or a sun hat. She didn’t care if she got lines. All these years she’d been taking care of her face, using Factor 50 SPF, getting Botox, having IPL to remove sun blemishes – and what had been the point? Her career was now over as well as her marriage. All the beautifying in the world could not save you when you were both cancelled and broke. She’d end up like one of Oliver’s paintings, one she hated: a particularly ugly nude that hung in the cloakroom in their hall. The room itself was where Oliver kept the most precious of his awards. They were high up on shelves in the most clichéd room in the house, displayed carelessly between books and copies of theNew Yorker. As if to say, ‘I am so cool that I can keep these in a tiny loo because I don’t need them to prove I’m brilliantly talented.’
But of course he needed to see his awards. He needed them like he needed the house, the money and the adulation. And he needed other people to see them and think he was clever, worldly, artistic, all the things he’d actually felt he wasn’t.
She hated the ugly nude he’d hung in the loo. It was definitely painted by somebody who didn’t like women. The curves of the nude’s shape were dimpled and shaded with bruised, lumpen purples as if the artist had secretly loathed his model and wanted to highlight all the frailties of ageing womanhood. The artist had highlighted every curve of the full breasts that had drooped with age, every dimpled bit of skin in the belly that had grown slack. In someone else’s hands, the model would have been a beautiful older woman, but for this artist, she was ugly.
Toni had never understood why Oliver thought she’d approve of the picture. In his business, he could grow older and get roles, but women actors could not. Nor could women in her business, yet he seemed to think that this painting was perfectly fine in its cruel portrayal of the effect of age on the sex who were most expected not to age.
He hadn’t understood, but then, she hadn’t understood either. Not when it came to the gambling.
Her husband was an addict.
Sitting in the sun with her coffee, Toni found her phone, angled the sun lounger so she could see the screen without glare from the sun and looked up gambling addiction websites. It all made horrific reading. The signs included increased gambling when money was lost; obsession with going back to the gambling location or site; depression; irritability and secretiveness over losing money. He’d certainly nailed the secretiveness so well that she hadn’t even known he was a gambler. The things to watch out for were of no use to a woman who hadn’t noticed any of this stuff. None of it. If only she had ... If only she hadn’t been so concerned with her own career, then she might have noticed and they wouldn’t be in this mess.
The phone rang and Toni almost dropped it in surprise. Before she knew what she was doing, she answered it.
