‘I hope you’re not going to that,’ Mrs Cooper said to Gloria, on the night in question. ‘I know you’re thirty-four, Gloria, but it’s going to be a bit wild. There’re going to be drugs, you know there are. Your father sees enough of it in his work. People think drugs can’t get out to Whitehaven from the cities, but they should see what your father sees. The real world is here too.’
Gloria was desperately torn. She was an adult and if the solstice was happening on a Dublin beach and Angelo had asked her, she’d have been able to go along.
But here in Whitehaven, when her father and mother were so against the idea, when half the town was so against the idea, she felt as if she’d be letting them down if she went.
‘Why not?’ said Angelo, confused. ‘We were pagans long before we were Christians,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to drink and take drugs. I’m not bringing the car so I’ll have a whiskey or two, but that’s all. Reefers give me a headache and stop me working. I don’t like them.’
‘I don’t know, Angelo,’ Gloria had said. ‘It’s tricky. I’m from around here. You’re not.’
He shrugged. ‘I will not tell you what you can do,carissima.’
They separated with her feeling miserable and him quiet.
‘Is Lillian going?’ Gloria asked Bob.
He looked at her uncomfortably. ‘She wants to and I can’t stop her.’
The notion of Lillian going to the party infuriated Gloria for reasons she couldn’t quite express. Lillian was younger and yet she had all this freedom, freedom she liked to wave around like a flag.
She’d taunt Gloria about the solstice party too, Gloria knew. To Lillian, Gloria was a prude. If she knew about Gloria and Angelo’s relationship, she wouldn’t think that, but then Gloria couldn’t tell her. What did Bob see in the bloody girl apart from the obvious?
The evening of the solstice, she and Bob went for a long walk through the town and out the city side, then back. The older people nodded approvingly at them, pleased to see the polite and well-behaved doctor’s offspring at home on such a night.
‘I feel as if life is going to pass me by,’ Gloria said restlessly. ‘You’re getting married, Bob, and what am I doing? I’m running up and down here every weekend from Dublin, like a kid who still lives with her parents and still ruled by their wishes ...’
‘If Angelo cared, he’d understand that you can’t go,’ said Bob, and Gloria had glared at her brother.
‘So it’s different for Lillian?’
Bob had sighed. ‘Lillian does her own thing. We’re going to get married. And I feel as if this is her last big blowout. We’ve talked about it. She’s going to work, get a job, an ordinary teaching job, because if we have children, she can’t live that crazy life then.’
‘Oh Bob,’ Gloria had said, feeling protective on his behalf. She had to say something. ‘Lillian is never going to settle down.’
‘She is,’ he insisted. ‘She is because she loves me.’
The weekend passed slowly with no sign of Angelo. Lillian had turned up at the Coopers’ family home on Sunday afternoon just before Gloria headed to Dublin. Lillian had been bright-eyed, skin glowing. Her dark hair rippled around her shoulders and her eyes had careful kohl at the edges, emphasising their catlike shape. She wore a seersucker dress in simple white with no bra, her tanned shoulders gleaming from sitting on a sun-soaked beach.
‘How was your trip to see your mother?’ Mrs Cooper asked.
Gloria looked around in shock.
Lillian had lied about going to the solstice party and Bob had been complicit in this.
‘It was lovely, Mrs Cooper,’ lied Lillian, ‘Just lovely. We went into Tralee to see my friends but it was a quiet weekend.’
Gloria just stared at her. To lie so blatantly ...
There was no phone call from Angelo during the week in the hall of the Rathmines house where Gloria lived. All the flats used the same coin-operated phone in the hall and when it rang, they took turns in answering and yelling up to the flat in question to say there was someone on the line for them.
Nobody phoned Gloria from Whitehaven. Was it over?
But Angelo appeared at their usual spot on Friday evening to drive her home. He looked different. Paler, tired and when he looked at her his eyes were sad. Instinctively, Gloria didn’t ask what was wrong. She didn’t want to know. But she knew all the same. Something was broken but if she didn’t talk about it for the journey, then she could still exist a little bit longer in the mirage of their love.
They stopped briefly for tea and sandwiches along the way. But it wasn’t the fun picnic they normally had. When they got to Whitehaven. Angelo drove to Mermaid Point instead of to the Cooper family home.
‘I need to talk to you,’ he said.
‘About what happened at solstice?’ asked Gloria.
