Desperately Seeking - By Evelyn Cosgrave Page 0,64
and Mum had been planning the party. She was going out on an optimistic limb, she said, and had decided to have it outside. She was hiring a marquee and borrowing a barbecue from Marion and Nick. She already had outside lights from last Christmas (Mike had set them up) and she was going to invest in a couple of those patio gas heaters that everybody was talking about. She was as animated as I’d seen her in a long time.
When Dad and Keith joined us, after an extensive tour of the garden, I could see that Dad was tired. It reminded me to ask them, tentatively (they both hate getting bulldozed into anything), if they’d thought about a holiday this year. They spoke together, almost as if they’d prepared speeches. Mum’s excuse was Anna coming home and the planning that needed to be done for her visit, and Dad went on about holidays being more stressful than staying at home. I gave up and suggested they think about it again in September when everything would have quietened down. We went inside, where an elaborate table was laid with salad for three and steak for one.
That evening we were silent on the way home; perhaps I should have been more concerned that Keith wasn’t as enthusiastic as I’d expected, but I was preoccupied. I’d convinced myself that I was over Daniel’s reappearance, but I couldn’t stop thinking about him. About him and us and Keith and me and what it all meant. I was over Daniel, of that much I was sure. I regretted ever having got involved with him. I regretted the pain it had caused his family but mainly I regretted the pain it had caused me. Then, for the first time, I wondered if my relationship with Keith was built on running away from Daniel. After all, they were the polar opposites of each other. Daniel was exciting, dangerous, callous and possibly amoral, while Keith was safe, solid, loving and profoundly moral. Having played the femme fatale with one man, was I now merely playing a different game with the other? It had been so easy to run from Daniel, and the memory of all I was (and was not) with him, to the security of a man who would make me a better person if I just breathed the same air he did. And, yes, I did love him – I couldn’t be planning to marry him if I didn’t love him. But did I love him more for what he could be for me than for what he was himself?
And why, after all I had told myself, was I still unable to shake certain thoughts (terrible, terrifying, irresistible thoughts) from my mind?
12
The following Saturday I had a lunch date with Colette. We hadn’t seen each other in ages but we could go for years without and then, as they say, pick up where we left off. Y et meeting her now, after only a couple of months, I couldn’t remember where we had left off. I couldn’t remember what I had told her and what I was keeping to myself. It felt odd and not very pleasant because I was used to being open with her.
We met in Poons, the new rooftop restaurant on top of Limerick’s oldest department store. It was large, white and airy and made me think of places like Harvey Nichols and Harrods (especially when I looked at the prices). She still looked wonderful. If that was what having kids and running a household did for you, I might just sign up some day. In fact, part of our lunch date was to include a trip to the beauty parlour, which Colette does regularly, for a facial and a massage.
‘Utterly inessential,’ she says, ‘but absolutely necessary.’
Whenever she has a day out, she reverts right back to the Colette I knew as a teenager. I don’t know if it’s an unconscious loosening of her present life as soon as she’s away from it, or something she does especially for me so I won’t be bored by the things I don’t have. Either way, it means I love being in her company.
‘So,’ she began, as we took our seats by a breathtaking view of the Shannon, ‘what’s all this I’ve been hearing about your wayward sisters leaving their husbands and becoming lesbians?’ In fairness, the texts I’d been sending her in an attempt to maintain contact must have been tantalizing.