Hush Hush Read online

  ‘Your parents live?’

  ‘Only Mum. She’s a widow too, but it’s not such a big social gaffe at her age. People react as if I must’ve killed off Robert by nagging or working him to death.’

  ‘And now you live with your mother?’

  Angela’s cup trembled its way onto her saucer. She hadn’t anticipated the question. ‘Not bloody likely! Anyway, she wouldn’t live with me. We’d be at each other’s throats inside three days. She does her own thing, still works part-time, and she’d never leave her house to move in with me. She’s lived there forty-three years and knows every ruck in the lino. My brother and I were even born at home.’

  ‘What does your brother do?’

  Relieved at the change of subject, Angela flopped back in her canvas chair. ‘He’s a bit of a case, to be honest. He emigrated to Canada when he was twenty-one, married a Canadian, and took her name, if you don’t mind. Dad said nothing, so we knew he was hurt. Owen asked Mum if she minded, but she said, “Do what you like, I only borrowed the name by marriage. I still regard myself as Sadie Dignan.” We don’t know the ins and outs because we’re not there in Canada, but it seems his wife got him to ditch his Irish surname. It’s Feeney, you see. Doesn’t go with black tie dos and charity lunches at the yacht club, where his wife’s a member.’

  She sneaked a look to see if Habib had nodded off.

  His big smile was back in place, as wide and gleaming as the vista before them. He’d probably only half-followed her ramblings, but he was her favourite kind of therapist. A stranger whose approximate grasp of English shortened his attention span, filtering out juicier indiscretions. ‘I drive a different way back to show you sunset,’ he said.

  ‘OK,’ smiled Angela, feeling shriven and reckless. He could now hurtle off a hairpin bend into the blue oblivion if he wanted. She felt like she’d just made her last confession, and if he did sheer off a precipice, there’d surely be time for a gabbled act of contrition before the airborne Land Rover bit the dust.

  Habib delivered her safely back to the hotel, though later that evening, as she eased her aching bottom into a restaurant chair, she drew disapproving looks from the Zimmer frame brigade. Some of them had probably seen her take off with Habib for the afternoon and speculated, when the canasta and gin-rummy palled, that she’d hired him for a private rogering session. Let them think what they liked. Truth was, big men had big private parts (allegedly), and Angela was scared of big privates. Too much like squeezing the Titanic through the Panama Canal for her liking.

  That night, as the sun set over her balcony, she wrote her postcards.

  ‘You were right about me being a recluse,’ she conceded on Sadie’s, a picture of a donkey. ‘I hope to return a new woman.’

  Rachel got a fat, moustached water-seller in national costume. ‘Don’t fancy yours much, Rache. Nobody’s pinched my bum yet, but can’t decide if that’s good news or bad.’

  That Saturday, she bagged a window seat on the flight home. She kept her head down, reading about snowboarding in Aspen in the in-flight mag. She had an absolute belter of a headache malleting the side of her nose. She shut her eyes and turned in to the window, wedging her poor, sore nose against the glass. Someone came and sat next to her. She cared not. The stewardess asked for her attention during the safety demo. Angela withheld it.

  When the in-flight meal arrived, steamed up redly under its plastic cover, Angela discovered that she could be hungry if she put her mind to it. She peeled back the cover, prodded and sniffed.

  ‘Breast of chicken in tarragon sauce with pasta underneath,’ said the man next to her, reporting expertly on his first mouthful. ’Not bad, if you’ve had nothing to eat in the last ten hours but a Rich Tea biscuit.’

  ‘Would you like mine then?’ asked Angela timidly. ‘I don’t care for meat much.’

  ‘You could eat the pasta underneath,’ said the man, his soft burr obscured by chicken. Was he Cornish? Scottish?

  ‘The pasta will taste of chicken,’ sniffed Angela.

  ‘My, my, aren’t we fussy?’ snorted her companion. ‘Don’t mind if I do.’ He pounced on her meal.

  Angela turned to glare at him. What a Neanderthal! He was a scruffy brute of a man, unshaven, and shovelling in pasta like a mechanical digger. He also whiffed of something indefinable, but definitely not aftershave.

  He saw her wrinkling nose. ‘My jumper smells of fish,’ he said with his mouth full. ‘Spent the last twelve hours on a smack so I could get to Agadir airport in time for this flight. It won’t be putting you off, as you’re not eating.’

  ‘You’re Irish,’ she realised.

  ‘Guilty as charged. Irish, ugly and smelling of fish.’ He grinned and pasta-smeared white teeth glimmered out of his nut-brown face. ‘Not exactly holiday romance material. Do you want that unidentifiable dessert? I think custard may be a key component.’

  ‘Be my guest.’ He wasn’t ugly, actually. Just blunt and covered in travel-dust. And very hungry.

  Pain lanced through Angela’s head. ‘Jesus,’ she whispered and slumped forward over Fish-Jumper’s second meal.

  ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ he expanded. ‘You OK? You having a turn or something? Shall I call a stewardess?’

  ‘My lens!’ Angela tipped her head back and blinked. She blinked again at Fish-Jumper and shook her head. He was still a complete blur. ‘I’ve lost a contact lens!’ she panicked. ‘I think just now, when I leant over the tray. It’s in your food!’

  Fish-Jumper picked up a plastic fork and began trawling through soggy pasta. ‘Not like that! You’ll shred it!’ wailed Angela.

  ‘Very bloody sorry, missus.’ He put down the fork and glowered.

  ‘Oh my God, I’m not insured and they were one of my new batch for the month. Why did it have to happen to me?’

  ‘The great philosophical question of our times,’ observed Fish-Jumper, folding his arms. ‘Got a pair of glasses to put on?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid!’ snapped Angela. ‘You can’t see through glasses when you’ve still got a contact lens in.’

  ‘I stand corrected. Why bother, anyway? They’re so fiddly. They fall down the U-bend, get hoovered up, slip round the back of the eye and rot there. What’s the point?’

  ‘To look good!’ goggled Angela, looking anything but good (she knew) as her lensless eye wavered and wept. A highly expensive sliver of wafer-thin silicone was currently basting in tarragon sauce that no amount of fizzy build-up tablets would remove. ‘And they can’t go round the back of your eye. Especially not mine, because they’re soft, and when you bung them in, they just float around until they find where they’re meant to be and settle there.’

  ‘And take out a mortgage, I suppose.’

  ‘You’re no help!’ snarled Angela, wincing as she touched her forehead.

  ‘Yeah, you’re right,’ acknowledged Fish-Jumper after a pause. ‘If you need help at the other end, I can put you on a bus or call a taxi for you or whatever.’

  ‘Mind your own business!’

  ‘OK, OK, keep your hair on,’ he retorted, in a much milder tone. ‘I can see you’re tired and emotional. Look, I’ll go through this tray very carefully. I’ve already found a rogue hair.’ He lapsed into a concentrating silence. She was vaguely aware of his index finger excavating the chicken and pasta with patient thoroughness.

  Her heart choked her at the spectacle she’d reduced herself to. ‘There’s no need, really,’ she sighed, flaunting her desperately recovered equilibrium. ‘Look, I’m sorry I was so rude and snappy. The lens is gone for good, and I’m calling off the search. These things happen.’

  ‘Especially to you, right?’

  She bridled. Was he goading her, laughing at her or just sneering at her?

  When the plane landed, he grappled down her luggage from the overhead locker and deposited it on her foot in the aisle. ‘Can you manage?’ he asked ungraciously.

  She just growled, grabbed her suitcase handle and trundled away.

 
; At the carousel, they took up positions at opposite ends. Typically, Angela found herself furthest away from the point of luggage disgorgement.

  She seized her navy holdall off the belt and threw it on to a trolley with a casual toss that nearly dislocated her arm. Then she made her exit towards the pick-up point where Rachel was meeting her. Her dignified exit was spoilt a bit by the trolley’s wonky wheel. She found the only way to reach ‘nothing to declare’ was to point the trolley towards the gents’ toilet. And she still had a headache.

  Chapter Three

  ‘But, the main thing is, you enjoyed yourself,’ said Rachel.

  Angela sighed. ‘I’ve been going on, haven’t I? You must be dying to get home to your own bed.’

  ‘Not yet, Ange. I’m intrigued by this bloke you met on the plane.’

  ‘Oh, Fish-Jumper. What’s so intriguing about him?’

  Rachel had come in after driving Angela home. Now, as they lingered over late-night coffees laced with brandy, Angela still chafed inwardly over her lost contact lens. The lone survivor was safely potted in the bathroom.

  ‘Fish-Jumper,’ she recalled, ‘hoovered up two in-flight meals like an industrial nozzle, and my lens with them.’

  ‘Yes, but why was he on holiday alone? Why did he need a lift to the airport on a fishing smack?’

  ‘I dunno. Probably smuggling hashish in his turn-ups and reckoned customs at Heathrow would leave him alone if he whiffed of the EU mackerel quota.’

  ‘There’s got to be more to it.’ Rachel’s gaze settled on the middle distance with a matchmaking gleam that Angela knew and dreaded.

  Rachel, currently between admirers, sat with casual elegance on Angela’s unravelling wicker chair, one golden leg folded beneath the other. Her body boasted a pre-Christmas tan from Jamaica. Though it was winter and Rachel went without tights, she never sported plucked chicken legs, and wicker splinters knew better than to sink into that peach-glow skin.

  ‘Look, Rache, I’m just like you,’ pretended Angela desperately. ‘I don’t need a man to look after me. I am coping. I start a new job on Monday, remember.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Ange, but I’m with your ma on this one. You do need a man’s protective custody. You’re not weak or anything, you’re just ‒ a lot more yourself in a couple.’

  ‘I could be very insulted by that.’

  ‘Don’t be. You know something? I wish I wanted a soulmate. I get tired of flitting from flame to flame, getting my wings singed.’

  ‘At least you’re an exotic sort of moth,’ grumbled Angela. ‘Even if I was a butterfly, I’d be a cabbage white.’

  It was Sunday morning. Examining a shaving nick in his bathroom mirror, Conor McGinlay thought about the daffy woman on the plane.

  Daffy or not, he’d been rude and ungracious. He was out of practice, talking to women socially.

  ‘You getting up?’ he yelled into the space behind him. ‘I’m only offering once! If you want a cooked breakfast, speak now or forever hold your peace.’

  He cocked his ear for the usual assenting grunt. He heard nothing.

  The house wasn’t too much of a tip, considering his two-week absence. Mrs Turner had polished his hardwood floors and maple doors with zeal. The house was her pride and joy, too.

  Blood dripped into the sink. He blotted his chin roughly with toilet paper. God, he wasn’t exactly an oil painting before adding lacerations. His best feature, according to Kate, was his expression. A brooding animal expression. Big deal. An expression was hardly likely to see you into old age, the way a mellowing, even sagging collection of half-decent features would.

  Right now, his animal expression was knackered bloodhound. He’d worked nights as well as days on the logistics of the Hotel Paradise Beach. The contractor had a mass market vision of paradise: five hundred and ten rooms, a vast restaurant bisected by an artificial waterfall and a lobby bigger than Agadir airport. The waterfall was the real nightmare. Still, work kept his mind off other things.

  He padded out of his en suite bathroom and down the gleaming staircase, enjoying, as he did every morning, the simple elegance and spacious modernity of his dream home. His hand caressed the banister rail, as cool and silkily curved as the hollow of a woman’s spine. ‘Sausages, fried bread and fried mushrooms coming up!’ he yelled in a town crier voice. ‘This really is your last call, lazybones!’

  At the foot of the stairs, he frowned. His luggage lay piled untidily in the hallway. On the top was a small case he didn’t recognise.

  The phone eventually woke Angela. She opened one eye, panicking. Was it Monday morning already? She squinted at the clock radio, her other eye refusing to open. Her lids were gummed together with weepy stuff. The phone went on ringing.

  Angela half-tumbled down the stairs, cursing her blurred vision and lack of a phone extension. Wearily, she lifted the receiver.

  ‘You’re back then,’ accused Sadie. ‘I thought you’d ring last night when you got in.’

  ‘Wasn’t up to it, Mum.’ She recounted the lens saga. ‘And the eye it fell out of is still giving me gyp like you wouldn’t believe.’

  ‘You’d better see an optician first thing in the morning.’

  ‘I can’t. I’ve got Goss! tomorrow.’ She hardly wanted reminding first thing on Sunday morning. She’d planned to start getting depressed about four in the afternoon.

  ‘I’ll come round and make you lunch,’ decided Sadie. ‘See you at oneish.’

  ‘That’s only an hour from now! There’s no need.’ The line went dead.

  Angela stared at the phone furiously. She’d never got a chance to go to plan B ‒ pretending that she wanted her afternoon free to visit the cemetery, alone.

  Actually, she had to be in an upbeat mood to go anywhere near the cemetery. If she went along feeling the least bit cynical, all that dripping stone Victoriana and the desolate cries of crows (buzzards?) wheeling overhead plunged her into an ultimately fruitless search for reasons to believe in an afterlife.

  Catholics were buried at the far end of Wilmesbury cemetery, a good half-mile walk through an avenue of sombre yews. And when she reached the Catholic section, she was forced to indulge two griefs for the price as one, as Robert was buried only two rows behind her father.

  She’d stand with head bowed, her bitterness at their comparative ages wrestling the demon guilt. A stranger wouldn’t have read Fenton’s headstone (Fenton Feeney, 1935-2007, ‘Taken from us too soon’) without remarking on his good innings compared to that bloke two rows back (Robert Anthony Carbery, 1974-2012, ‘Dust has its sweetness too,’ whatever the hell that meant. Pressed to supply a headstone soliloquy at short notice, a shell-shocked Angela had simply stuck a pin in the undertaker’s Patience Strong almanac. In retrospect, she’d have preferred, ‘Snuffed out before his time. Thanks a lot, God.’)

  Angela tottered back upstairs, her gummed-up eye as stubborn as a clam.

  She ran cold water into the bathroom basin, and plunged downwards. When she came up for air, gasping, her eye finally popped open. It stared back at her from the mirror above the sink, threaded with veins, but mysteriously well in focus. Then she realised why.

  Beyond the blue rim of her iris shone the silvery rim of her contact lens. It had been there all the time; the cold water had floated it back into position! It had popped off on a detour, despite all she’d said to Fish-Jumper.

  Scrabbling it out and into her lens bottle, she didn’t know whether to feel relief or anxiety that she’d slept a good twelve hours with a foreign body rattling round her orbital socket.

  ‘For God’s sake, try to stop worrying,’ murmured Robert inside her head.

  She sat down on the toilet lid, suddenly weepy with nostalgia. On Sunday mornings, he’d always got up first and made rounds of toasted cheese. Straining her ears, she could even hear the grill pan tinkle downstairs.

  Slowly, she rose and went to get dressed.

  She’d kept him in the living room for the week before the funeral, in a closed ca
sket. She’d asked Sadie to stay for the week, partly for the company and partly to keep Robert’s mother at bay, farming her out to a sympathetic neighbour. Robert’s mother, who’d made the journey from Wales, didn’t approve of bodies in the house and other Catholic mumbo-jumbo.

  On the night of his homecoming, Angela had a vivid dream of Robert climbing out of the casket to come upstairs and sleep in his bed where he belonged. She’d woken suddenly in the wee hours, already damp with sweat, alerted by creaks on the stairs. She’d stared at the door handle a long time, panic clawing with hope, but the creaks fell silent, the door handle stayed unturned. She’d never told Sadie. Sadie had a robust impatience with ghosts.

  Once dressed, Angela wandered downstairs. She stared at the grill pan, then foraged in the cupboard for cereal. Sadie had stocked up in her absence. The cupboards now bulged with siege supplies of rice, tinned vegetables and even powdered milk. No cereal, though. Angela fancied nothing less at this juncture than a Cadbury’s Flake crumbled over a bowl of Rice Krispies.

  She was finishing her second cup of coffee and her third chocolate wafer from a six-pack, when knuckles rapped loudly on her front door. She jumped guiltily, brushing crumbs off her lap. Sadie was here already!

  ‘Coming!’ she called, running a hand through uncombed hair en route to the door.

  She flung it open.

  ‘Your doorbell’s knackered,’ grimaced Conor McGinlay.

  Angela gaped. He looked vaguely familiar. Fish-Jumper! Only he’d smartened himself up, an open-necked shirt visible beneath a cleanish-looking fleece. He was shaven too, a plaster clinging raggedly to the sheer cliff of his chin.

  ‘Well, can I come in?’ he grunted. ‘I’ve come all this way to reunite you with your luggage.’

  ‘What luggage?’

  ‘You mean, you haven’t even missed it?’ He stepped into the hallway, brandishing a small holdall. ‘I haven’t looked inside it, but I assumed you’d be going bonkers, reporting it as lost to the airline.’

  ‘Oh.’ Angela glanced guiltily at her unopened baggage behind the door. The only thing she’d unpacked the previous night was her toilet bag. ‘How did you end up with it?’