Desperately Seeking - By Evelyn Cosgrave Page 0,18

but Daniel made a special effort to get over to me the following evening. He said he had been incredibly proud of me. He said I was the most stunning woman in the room and it was killing him that he couldn’t run home with me there and then. He said he couldn’t believe what we were doing but he wanted it never to end. He said he cared for me so much it hurt. We made love on the floor of my living room and hours later I had to prise him away from me and send him home.

There were other occasions. It was one of those instances in which as soon as you become aware of a person you see them everywhere. She was at an art-exhibition opening; she was three people ahead of me at the checkout in Dunnes; she was coming out of the beautician’s as I was going in. Limerick isn’t London, or even Dublin, but it’s not that small. I have good friends I don’t see as often. And every time I’d see her I’d feel less and less comfortable. It was one thing to parade in front of her in my best party frock buffeted by cheap company champagne, and quite another to come up against the wife of the man I was sleeping with in a multi-storey car park as she piled her kids and her shopping into the family car.

Now here I was, trapped in a space so small I couldn’t even stretch my legs to relieve the tremors in my body. There was absolutely no way I was going to face her. Because now she knew who I was.

So, I decided to make myself even more ridiculous by remaining in a department-store changing cubicle for as long as it took the two women to go away. Nothing that they or anybody else thought could be worse than dragging my clothes back on and walking out in front of her, party dresses in tow. So I waited. I heard them wonder to each other if there was anybody in there; I felt them tug at the flimsy curtain that divided me from them; I could smell her perfume as she leaned in to try to see what the hell was going on. Still I didn’t move.

I was hoping they’d find the whole thing too weird and go away without alerting a sales assistant. For a moment I contemplated putting a scarf over my head and making a run for it, but I couldn’t get my limbs to respond. So I continued to wait. I was aware of how utterly ridiculous the situation was but there was nothing I could do. I wasn’t equal to a meeting with this woman.

Suddenly I felt the curtains being tugged a little more roughly and then the other woman spoke, in a voice quite unlike the one I had heard when she was worrying about her weight: ‘Look,’ she said, ‘we don’t know what you think you’re playing at but we’re about to call a manager and Security.’

I was petrified. I didn’t even have the wit to pull on my clothes. Was I really about to be discovered in all my shame?

‘Oh, leave it, Trish,’ I heard Daniel’s wife say. ‘It’s not worth it. I need to sit down anyway.’

‘No way! We have a right to use this changing room. I’m not leaving here until she comes out.’

She kept tugging at the curtain; it was only now I realized my knuckles were white with the effort of clinging to it.

‘Just leave it. Obviously something’s not right.’

‘I’m not leaving it!’

‘Fine!’ And that was when Daniel’s wife shoved her bulk past her friend and forced her way in. I didn’t even feel the curtain leave my hands. Suddenly she was towering over me, heavily pregnant with her husband’s baby, her expression moving rapidly from surprise to recognition to disdain and, finally, to disgust.

‘Come on, Trish, let’s go,’ she said, turning round. ‘I told you something wasn’t quite right. There’s a foul stench in here.’

Then the friend was in the cubicle, looking down on me with a sneer that told me she, too, knew everything.

‘Oh, my God,’ she said. ‘Is this… is this… her?’

‘That’s right. This is the little bitch who screwed my husband.’

I was still unable to speak. There was a tightness in my throat that felt like stones rubbing off each other and my mouth was so dry my cheeks seemed pasted together. The lights seemed to