Past Secrets

‘Haven’t-a-Clue Barbie.’

‘Slapper.’

‘Oh, thank you,’ Shona said, pretending to preen. She was impossible to shock. ‘Shona O’Slapper, I like that. Now, can you swap shifts with me? I know you’re on till six tonight, but I’ll do it and you can go early if you’ll do tomorrow afternoon for me? You could spend another hour honing your body in Extreme Fatness,’ she wheedled. Shona had accompanied Maggie to the gym once and hated it, hence the new name.

‘Are you and Paul going out?’ inquired Maggie.

‘I’m providing a shoulder to cry on,’ Shona informed her. ‘Ross has broken up with Johann.’ Ross was a hairdresser who lived in the apartment below Shona and Paul, providing the perfect opportunity for Shona’s fag-haggery and giving Paul a chance to watch football on the television while she and Ross sat in the apartment below, rewatching old Will & Grace episodes and bitching happily.

‘He’s inconsolable, even though he whined all the time they were going out about how insensitive Johann was and how he didn’t like Nureyev.’ Nureyev was Ross’s beloved pet, a lop-eared rabbit, who was spoiled beyond belief and had his own Vuitton bunny carrier as well as a purple velvet collar with his name spelled out in diamanté. He lived in luxury in Ross’s Philippe Starck-style kitchen and was house-trained to use a cat litter box. ‘Nobody’s ever truly gorgeous until they dump you, right? We’re partying to get him over it.’

‘On a Wednesday?’

‘Woe’s day, sweetie, as the ancient Danes would say. It’s apt.’

‘Who’s looking after Nureyev?’

‘We’re going to leave the Discovery channel on for him. He loves all those shows about meerkats.’

Maggie was still laughing at the idea of the rabbit sulkily glued to the television when she got to her own front door and pulled out her keys.

The mortice lock was undone. Grey must have got home early, she thought with a smile. That was good, they could have a blissfully long evening together. Good call, Maguire, she thought as she let herself in. Sometimes a girl’s gotta know when to miss stretching on a mat so she can stretch on a bed. And for all of his intellectual cool, Grey knew some pelvic contortions the Pilates teacher had never taught. It was funny though, Grey was supposed to be at a meeting – perhaps it had been cancelled?

‘Shouldn’t be too late, honey,’ Grey had said on the phone earlier. ‘You’ve got your class tonight so I’ll pick up Thai food on the way home.’ Grey believed in sharing cooking duties, although he preferred takeout to actual slaving and stirring with wooden spoons.

Inside the apartment, Maggie heard muted noises coming from the apartment’s lone bedroom. Grey must be watching the TV, she thought, and, shedding her possessions as she went, handbag on to the floor, jacket on the couch, she crossed the small living room, went down the hall and pushed their bedroom door open.

The door was still swinging open when Maggie stopped on the threshold, frozen.

Grey was on the bed, naked and lying underneath a woman, also naked.

The woman’s hair hung like a silken curtain, erotically half covering a lingerie-model body with a hand-span waist and high, perfect C-cup breasts.

Three mouths opened in surprise. Maggie twisted her head sideways to try to get the scene to make sense. It was like a clever illustration in a psychoanalyst’s office, a bizarre, mind-bending scene designed to make you question everything you knew: what’s wrong with this picture?

Well, Doctor, that’s our bed with our duvet tangled up on the floor, and my side table pretty much the way I left it this morning with a book open on it. And there’s the photo of me and Grey outside the cathedral in Barcelona, but in the bed, there’s this strange blonde girl with an unbelievable body arched over my boyfriend who has – well, had – an erection. And there really is no other explanation for this apart from the obvious.

‘Maggie, I’m so sorry, I never meant you to see, I wouldn’t hurt you for anything,’ Grey said urgently, wriggling out from under the blonde girl so fast that she squealed.

Maggie didn’t answer him. She couldn’t. She just stared in disbelief.

Politicians were supposed to be excellent at wriggling out of embarrassing situations. Perhaps Grey taught that, too, along with analysis of world power structures and globalisation.

Bile rose in Maggie’s throat and she turned without a word and ran to the tiny cloakroom she’d decorated with such pride. Student. That girl had to be one of Grey’s students. Someone who’d possibly stood in the college library and looked calculatingly at Maggie sitting at the research desk, pleased to realise that her rival was older. Perhaps wondering what Grey saw in thirty-year-old Maggie with her tangle of wild hair when he could have a twenty-one-year-old with a silken mane like a hair commercial, and a va-va-voom figure with the peach-bloom skin of youth.

Students were always getting crushes on Grey. The two of them joked about it, because it seemed so funny, despite Shona’s stories. Grey was miles away from the image of a fusty academic with woolly hair, badly fitting jackets and mismatched socks. When they had first met, five years previously, when she was finding her feet in the city, Maggie herself had found it hard to believe he held a doctorate in political science. At a start-of-term college party, he’d stood out among the soberly dressed professorial types. He wore jeans, and, around his neck, a couple of narrow leather coils from which hung a piece of obsidian that glittered like his cloudy grey eyes. Maggie had heard of Dr Grey Stanley, a brilliant thinker who’d resisted attempts by various political leaders to advise their parties and who was the author of several widely read articles on the state of the country. Nobody had mentioned how jaw-droppingly handsome he was.

‘Hey, Red,’ he’d said, tangling long fingers in the tendrils of her auburn hair. ‘Can I get you a glass of the vinegar that passes for wine round here?’

Maggie, tomboy extraordinaire whose shoulder-length hair was one of her few concessions to femininity, would normally have given the death glare to any strange guy who dared to touch her. But this man, all heat and masculinity so close to her, made it hard to breathe, never mind shoot murderous glares. She exhaled, suddenly glad she’d worn the black camisole that hung low on her small breasts, the fabric starkly dark against her milky white skin. Her skin was true redhead type, so white it was almost blue, she sometimes joked.

Grey stared at her as if milky white with a smattering of tiny freckles was his favourite colour combination. The party in a draughty hall on the Coolidge College campus was full of fascinating, clever people with IQs that went off the scale, and he’d chosen her. Even now, no matter how many times Shona told her she was beautiful and that Grey Stanley was lucky to have her, Maggie shook her head in denial. It was the other way round, she knew.

‘Maggie…’

As she slammed the cloakroom door shut and slid the lock, she heard Grey’s anxious voice outside. He rarely called her Red any more. Red was the girl he’d fallen in love with, the feisty redhead who was fiercely independent, who needed nobody in her life, thank you very much. She was so different from the Park Avenue Princesses, she must have struck him as a challenge he couldn’t resist. But five years of coupledom had surgically removed her independence and now, she realised, she had become like a tiger in a zoo: lazily captive and unable to survive in the wild.

She leaned over the toilet bowl and the cloudy remains of her lunchtime chicken wrap came up. Again and again, she retched until there was nothing left in her except loss and fear.

She was the old Maggie again, the one who hadn’t yet learned to hide her anxiety under an armour of feistiness. Stupid Maggie who’d never imagined that Grey would cheat on her. Just like Stupid Maggie from years ago. It was a shock to feel like that again. She was so sure she’d left it all behind her. The memory of those years in St Ursula’s, when her life had been one long torment of bullying, came to her. She’d had four years of hell at the hands of the bullies and it had marked her for ever. Now she was right back there – reeling from the shock, sick with fear.

When she could retch no more, she sank on to the floor. From this unusual vantage point, the bathroom had turned out well, she realised. The colours were so pretty and it was so carefully done. Even Grey had said so.

‘You’re wasted in the college library,’ he’d laughed the day she finished it. ‘You should have your own decorating business. The Paint Queen: specialising in no-hope projects. Your dad could consult.’ Grey had seen and admired the planetarium ceiling in her old bedroom in the house on Summer Street.

‘Lovely,’ he’d said and joked that her parents were sweetly eccentric despite their outwardly conservative appearance.

Grey’s parents were both lawyers, now divorced. He’d grown up with money, antiques and housekeepers. She couldn’t imagine his French-cuff-wearing father ever doing something as hands-on as painting stars on the ceiling for his son. Or his mother, she of the perfect blonde bob, professionally blow-dried twice a week, breathlessly explaining about winning €75 in the lottery and planning what she’d do with the money, the way Maggie’s mum had.

‘My parents are not eccentric,’ Maggie had told Grey defensively. ‘They’re just enthusiastic, interested in things…’

‘I know, honey.’ Grey had been contrite. ‘I love your mum and dad. They’re great.’

But it occurred to her that Grey had been right. Her parents weren’t worldly or astute. They were endlessly naïve, innocents abroad, and they’d brought her up to be just like them. Blindly trusting.

She put her head on her knees and tried not to think about anything. Numb the brain. Concentrate on a candle burning. Wasn’t that the trick?

There was noise outside in the hall, muffled speech, the front door slamming. Grey’s voice, low and anxious, saying: ‘Maggie, come out, please. We should talk, honey.’

She didn’t reply. He didn’t try to open the door but she was glad it was locked. She had absolutely no idea of what she’d say to him if she saw him. There was silence for a while.

After half an hour, he returned, sounding harder this time, more lecturer than contrite boyfriend. ‘I’m going out to get us some Thai takeout. You can’t sit in there all night.’

‘I can!’ shrieked Maggie, roused to yell at him with an unaccustomed surge of temper. How dare he tell her what she could and couldn’t do.

‘You can stay in there all night,’ Grey said patiently, in the voice he used to explain difficult concepts to stupid people at parties, ‘if that’s what you want to do, but you ought to come out and eat something. I won’t be long.’ The front door slammed again.

Gone to phone his nubile student, perhaps? To say that Maggie would get over it and then it would be business as usual.

We’ll have to use your place instead of mine.

Grey mightn’t like it so much if he had to bonk his lover in some grotty student digs, though. He liked the smooth crispness of clean sheets, a power shower and wooden floors where you could comfortably walk barefoot without wondering how many other zillions of people had walked barefoot on it before, shedding flakes of dry skin. He’d been brought up in luxury. Before she’d met Grey, Maggie had known nothing of the world of Egyptian cotton sheets with a 400-thread count. To her, sheets came in only two varieties: fitted and flat.

Maggie stuck her ear up against the door and listened. Nothing. She unlocked the door, came out and looked around the apartment, thinking that it no longer looked like the home of her dreams, only an identikit apartment trying hard to be elegant and different, but still looking exactly like its neighbours.

Everything she had achieved had been done on a budget, from the bargain basement African-inspired coffee table to the Moroccan silk cushion covers she’d bought on a street stall and which were now woolly with loose threads. Despite the kudos of being an ultra-clever doctor of studies whose lectures were always packed, Grey wasn’t paid well.

The library paid less. But Maggie was used to not having money. She’d grown up that way. Making do, managing: they were the words she’d lived with as a child. There had been great happiness in her home, for all the lack of hard cash and the shiny new things some of the other girls had. Money wasn’t important to her. Love, security, safety, happiness were. She’d tried so hard to make their home beautiful, the heart of their love. What a waste of time that had been.