‘Sorry?’
‘Lawyer?’
‘God, no, much worse. Auctioneer. Estate Agent.’ He laughed bitterly.
‘A realtor.’
‘American?’ he said.
‘Bingo. How did you guess?’ He was not a theatre-goer, then. He showed no sign of recognizing me.
He moved down the bar and, as he did so, he knocked his pint glass across the bar. A spray of dark liquid splashed on to my dress before I could get out of the way. The bartender swung into action, cleaned up the mess on the bar and handed me some clean napkins while the man rambled his apology.
‘Shit. Sorry. I guess I’m having a bad day and it’s getting worse. I’m sorry. Your beautiful dress.’ I was busily sponging off the worst of the stain with tissue. Luckily, it was around the knee-length hem. The man was still jabbering away. ‘I blew the sale of a multi-million-euro office building to a Chinese investor. My car wouldn’t start and then the taxi ran out of petrol. You couldn’t make it up. Turns out that Chinese people are sticklers for punctuality. I was only twenty minutes late. He left before I got there. And then my day gets that bit worse when I throw Guinness on to the dress of a beautiful tourist.’
‘It’s okay.’ I was flattered. I’d had the usual Botox and fillers, but only Jack called me beautiful. I felt sorry for him.
He smiled at me forlornly with even white teeth and for a moment I was reminded of Erin’s bright grin.
My sister Erin had married some much older guy nine years previously. Vince was sixty years old and Erin was forty-four now. She invited me to the wedding, but that would have meant going to Boston. Mom had hassled me about going: ‘She wants you to be her bridesmaid.’ I told her I couldn’t go because I had to look after Jack’s drama school. The timing was wrong, I told her.
‘Let Jack find someone else. You don’t owe him anything. Besides, the timing will never be right for you to go to Boston,’ she said, narrowing her eyes at me. She was right and she knew exactly why.
When she returned, she showed me a lot of photos. Vince had two adult sons and was a widower. Erin should have married one of the sons, they were cute. We didn’t speak much after that. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard from Erin. Maybe it was the time she told me I was entitled for expecting Dad to leave me proper money in his will. That was 2018. Seven years ago.
‘Please let me pay for the dry-cleaning?’
I shook the thought of Erin out of my head and turned my attention to this poor man and his bad day. Maybe I could turn it into his lucky day. He hadn’t even tried to hide his wedding ring yet. Mine was in my handbag.
He was still ranting on, feeling sorry for himself. ‘Accountability, my father always said, was what mattered. It’s my own stupid fault.’ Eventually, he stopped, noticing I had folded my dress up on to my thigh and that my glass was empty. ‘Please let me get you another drink?’ he said.
‘Sure.’
Within an hour, my hand was on his thigh, and he was considerably more cheerful.
I remember telling him I was in Ireland on holiday to visit a cousin who lived in Donegal. I was staying one night in Dublin, I lied. I vaguely remember we left the hotel and went across the river to the Clarence Hotel. The same river I had been rescued from a lifetime ago. After that, it was hazy. Flashes of conversation. Kissing up against the wall in the corridor of the Clarence under the stairs, like drunken teenagers. I don’t remember any mention of a wife, but then I never mentioned Jack either. I remember a taxi journey, but after that, it’s all a blank.
64
I woke in this stranger’s house. The second man in six weeks. On the bedside table (obviously his wife’s side) there was an old photo of them kissing under a garlanded arch when his hair was dark as opposed to absent, and another more recent one of them with their hands on the shoulders of a young girl who was wearing the cloak and mortar board of a new graduate, taken in what I recognized to be the main quad of Trinity College. I thought about Lucy, also a Trinity graduate. I wondered what Lucy would think if she knew where I was, if she knew what I had done. What I had done now and what I had done then. This mother and daughter in the picture frame were redheads, though the daughter’s was natural. The wife whose bed I was in was older than me. She squinted in the sunlight at the camera and her furrowed brow was Botox-free. Also on the table, an old-fashioned alarm clock and a transistor radio, both of which told me that the time was 6.14 a.m. There were five different types of medication, none of which I could identify except for a blister pack of anti-inflammatories.
My head pounded and I felt a surge of nausea rising. I took deep breaths to contain it. In for four and out for six. I raised my head from the pillow to further take in my surroundings. It hurt. I quietly took three pills out of their blister pack. I knew the recommended dose was two, but my brain felt inflamed this morning. I felt sick, emotionally and physically.
The corniced ceiling, the luxuriant drapes, the soft bedlinenand plush carpet in tones of cream, beige and gold, told me he was a man of means. Fitted mirrored wardrobes lined one end of the room, and against the interior wall, a walnut dressing table on spindly legs was strewn with cosmetics and jars of lotions and potions, the expensive brands. I could see my handbag on the cushioned seat beside it, an imposter, it’s royal blue clashing with everything else in this room, apart from my matching shoes lying at opposing angles as if they didn’t want to be a pair. My dress was crumpled into a ball in a corner. I could see the strap of my bra sticking out underneath it and flashed back to vigorous kissing in that corner as we had torn at each other’s clothes. This stranger and me.
‘You’d better go,’ he said, startling me. He was awake. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t … this isn’t …’ he mumbled, his voice clouded by a hangover I shared. I sat up and turned to face him, grabbing the duvet to cover my breasts, noting now the hair on his chest, more plentiful than that on his head. Was he an addict too?
‘Me neither,’ I lied. ‘I had too much to drink.’ And that was true.
‘I was upset,’ he said, clearly desperate to make excuses for cheating on his wife. ‘It’s Rebecca, you see, she’s been having immunotherapy in Germany, it’s experimental. It’s a stressful time.’
‘I’m sorry, I’ll go. Rebecca is your daughter?’ I nodded towards the photo of the graduate with her mother as I scurried to the corner, and he turned away, giving me privacy while I scrambled to get my underwear on and shrug the dress over my head.
‘She’s my wife. I know. I’m a terrible person.’
‘What’s your name?’ I wanted to know more about this terrible person. Was he worse than me?
He seemed surprised. ‘Christopher –’ He was about to give his surname but stopped himself. ‘You’re Ruby, right?’
