Past Secrets

But her head had to do the talking. Leaving this way was easier, because if she stopped and thought about actually losing him, about not sharing her life with him, Maggie was afraid she’d relent. And her head told her that staying would destroy her, in the end.

Gulping back a fresh batch of tears, she grabbed Cursed Candy Pink and shoved it on to the luggage trolley behind Wardrobe, ignoring the interested gaze of the man who’d tried to help her. She wished he’d stop looking at her. Honestly, what was wrong with people? Couldn’t a person cry in public?

On top of the trolley, she dumped her handbag, a banana-shaped black leather thing that held everything, and cleverly deposited the most vital bits right at the bottom, thus deterring both purse-snatchers and Maggie from locating her money in shops.

She wheeled her trolley hopefully past the special mirrored section, holding her breath.

On those girls-only holidays to Greece, in the pre-Grey days, the others had always trooped through customs happily clinking contraband bottles of ouzo and Metaxa brandy, while she (the only one who’d actually read the customs bit of paper about only importing 200 fags and giving notice if they’d been loitering near goats) was the one to have to unpack her case in public.

Today, fortunately, the customs people behind their two-way mirrors resisted the impulse to go through Maggie’s blameless luggage.

Then she was out into arrivals, into the spotlight, where hundreds of eager people scrutinised and rejected her as they searched for whichever special person they’d come to meet so they could wave their welcome home placards, wobble their helium balloons and scream ‘hello!!!’

It brought home to Maggie that she had no special person any more. The person for whom she used to be special had cheated on her. God, it hurt.

Trying to look cool, as though she didn’t care, she was thankful when her mobile rang and she could busy herself answering it.

‘We’re home from the hospital,’ said her father happily. ‘Where are you, love? Are you nearly here yet? Will I boil the kettle? Your mother can’t wait to see you.’

Maggie felt the usual dual burst of affection and irritation reserved for conversations with her parents. The plane had only just landed, for heaven’s sake. She’d already given Dad the details and told him to add another fifteen minutes for normal plane delays. Unless Clark Kent was bursting out of his Y-fronts in a telephone box nearby in order to whisk her off home at supersonic speed, she wouldn’t reach Summer Street for another three quarters of an hour at least.

‘Not quite, Dad,’ she said, keeping her tone cheery. It was only because he cared. ‘I’ve just come through arrivals.’

‘Oh, right then. You’ll be here in…’

‘Less than an hour,’ she said. ‘See you then. Bye!’

She stuck the phone back in her jeans pocket and tried to ignore the feeling that the walls were closing in. She was back home. Back with nothing to show for five years away in Galway and the Maguire family clock – always at ‘Where were you? Why didn’t you phone? We were worried!’ – was ticking once again.

Maggie manhandled all her worldly goods towards the door and the taxis. It was too late for the if-onlys but she went through them all the same – if only Grey hadn’t screwed someone else, if only she hadn’t witnessed it, if only he’d realised how much he loved her and pledged undying faithfulness instead of saying he couldn’t help himself. If only she wasn’t so stupid to fall for someone like him in the first place.

That’s what it all came back to: her stupidity. An intelligent woman would have known that Grey, who could have had any woman, would one day stray. An intelligent woman would have got out before this happened. An intelligent woman would have made it calmly clear long beforehand that straying wasn’t an option and that if he did, their relationship was over. For such a woman, Grey would have agreed.

But not for Maggie. For all that he’d said she was special, that he didn’t want a pert blonde, he’d lied to her.

Now all she had to do was work out what to tell her parents. With luck, she’d have some peace on the ride home to adjust and get her story straight. They didn’t need her in tears right now, with her mother in such distress.

‘…So you see, what the politicians don’t realise is that if you have a system with toll roads, it’s the people like myself who are paying for it…’

‘Right, I see.’

The taxi driver’s monologue was only stemmed by having to negotiate the tricky box junction just before St Kevin’s Road. Since picking her up at the airport, he’d been talking at high speed about the price of property, chewing gum on car seats and now toll roads. Maggie hadn’t felt able to interrupt. It would have been rude and in the grand scheme of things, there was no excuse to be rude, was there? Her mother’s training had kicked in as usual.

Maggie was the one who got stuck with bores at parties, charity muggers in the street, and sweet bewildered people who wandered into the library for warmth and who ought to have been thrown out. She was too kind and too polite to say no or ignore people.

‘That’s what I said to that woman politician. I said: that’s my opinion, Missus, and if you don’t like it, don’t get in my cab,’ the taxi driver went on. ‘Was I right to say it?’ As with all the other questions he’d posed on the forty-minute trip, he didn’t pause for a reply. ‘I was right, you see. Nobody stands up to these people. Nobody.’

The taxi turned the corner, driving slowly past the Summer Street Café where people sat outside at the small tables, looking as if they hadn’t a care in the world. Mum and Dad loved the café, loved the buzz of meeting people there. Mum would listen to all the gossip and pass it eagerly on to Maggie, forgetting that she’d lived away for five years and didn’t know all the people they met.

Maggie, who didn’t know all of the people in her Galway apartment block and clearly didn’t know her boyfriend at all, had learned that the wild-eyed Mrs Johnson was off the sauce after failing the breathalyser test one night and losing her licence, that Amber Reid, the teenage girl who lived alone with her mother – lovely woman with a big job but never too busy to bake cakes for the Vincent de Paul fundraisers – was going to art college and would be a big star one day. Christie Devlin said she was a marvellous artist, and Christie would know, wouldn’t she? Look at those lovely paintings Christie had done for Una’s sixtieth. Maggie knew that the carrot cake muffins in the café were now sugar-free; oh, and she knew that Jane and Henry in the café had hired this lovely Chinese waitress.

‘Xu her name is, although we call her Sue, because it’s almost the same. Came all the way from China by herself, brave little thing, and not knowing anybody here. She’d put us to shame,’ Mum had said. ‘Learning English and working at the same time, and not knowing a sinner here. It must be terrible hard to leave your country and start again.’

Maggie loved the way her mother was so interested in people. Maggie used to be like that too, she realised, before she met Grey and became so wrapped up in him that she had no space or time left for anyone else. Yet how could she be totally involved with him and still not see the obvious? Love wasn’t just blind, it was lobotomised.

In the back seat of the taxi, her thoughts miles away, Maggie realised they’d passed the third of Summer Street’s maple trees and suddenly they were slowing down outside her house.

‘Number forty-eight you said?’ the driver asked.

‘Yes, thanks,’ she replied.

She scrabbled in her bag to pay him.

‘Cheer up, gorgeous,’ he said, beaming up at her from the window, ‘it might never happen.’

True to form, Maggie managed a smile.

‘See ya,’ she said. There was no way she was going to tell him it had already happened.

She turned and stared at number 48. Home. It was one of the 1930s houses, white with dark beams painted on the front gable and diamond-paned windows. Part of the house was covered by the bronzed leaves of a Virginia creeper that had science fiction film capabilities to regrow no matter how often it was pruned back to the roots.

Maggie felt the years shrink away. Home made her feel not entirely like a child again but as if still under the influence of all the old childhood problems.

Her father met her at the gate, dressed up in his going-into-the-hospital outfit of navy blazer and tie, but still comfortingly familiar. When he put his arms around her, Maggie snuggled against him like the child she once was, even though he was shorter than her and as skinny as ever.

‘It’s so lovely to have you home,’ he said. ‘Thank you for coming. I know it’s a lot to ask, but thank you.’

‘How could I not come?’ admonished Maggie, pulling away briskly. If she let her reserve drop, she’d sob her heart out. Better to be brusque and not give them a chance to ask after Grey. She’d tell them later, when she – and they – felt stronger.

‘How’s Mum?’

‘Much better today.’ Her father’s face brightened. ‘She got an awful shock, you know. It was all so quick. One minute we were here, the next, she’d passed out with the pain. I thought she was dead, Maggie,’ he added, and he looked so forlorn that Maggie had to take a deep breath to steady herself.

‘Where is she?’

‘Where do you think?’

The kitchen at the back of the house was certainly the heart of the Maguire home. A cosy room which had been decorated at a time when there was no such concept in interior design as using too much pine, it was the room Maggie felt she’d grown up in.

Sitting in an armchair at the table (pine) with her plastered leg up on a kitchen chair (pine), watching the portable television that was perched on the Little House on the Prairie dresser (distressed pine), was Maggie’s mother, Una.

As tall a woman as her daughter, she was just as slender but with faded red hair instead of Maggie’s fiery curls. Their faces were very similar: perfect ovals with other-worldly cobalt-blue eyes and wide mouths that were always on the verge of a smile. But whereas Maggie’s smile was tremulous, anxious, Una’s was the all-encompassing beam of a woman who embraced life. Now Una sat listlessly in the chair, as if breaking her leg had taken the strength out of all her bones. Beside her was the crossword, nearly finished.

‘I’ve left the hard ones for your father,’ Una said, which was the standard and affectionate lie in the Maguire household.

Dennis was no good at crosswords. A champion at the Rubik’s Cube, and deeply sorry when that had gone out of fashion, he was marvellous with gadgets, figures and magazine quizzes where you had to work out which tetrahedron was the odd one out.

But words defied him.