Past Secrets

Elisabeth picked up tones of voice like nobody else. Certainly nobody else in the Maguire family, who all had the intuition of celery. ‘What’s up?’

‘I told you.’

‘I mean what else?’

‘You can hear something else in my voice?’

‘I spend all my life on the phone to young models in foreign countries asking them how they are, did anybody hit on them and are they eating enough/drinking too much/taking coke/ screwing the wrong people/screwing anybody. So yes, I can hear it in your voice,’ insisted Elisabeth.

‘I caught Grey in bed with another woman.’

Silence.

‘Fuck.’

‘I didn’t know you were allowed to say that outside Ireland any more,’ Maggie remarked, in an attempt at levity. ‘Everyone on your side of the Atlantic nearly passes out when they hear it, when here, it’s a cross between an adjective and an adverb, the sort of word we can’t do without.’

‘Desperate situations need desperate words,’ said Elisabeth, then said ‘fuck’ again followed by, ‘Fucking bastard.’

‘My sentiments exactly.’

‘Is he still alive?’

‘He has all his teeth, yes,’ Maggie said.

‘And they’re not on a chain around his neck?’

Maggie laughed and it was a proper laugh for the first time all day. Elisabeth was one of those people with the knack of making the unbearable slightly more bearable. With her listening, Maggie didn’t feel like the only person on the planet to have been hurt like this before.

‘No, they’re still in his mouth. I did think about hitting him but he was attached to this blonde fourteen-year-old at the time…’

‘A fourteen-year-old!’ shrieked Elisabeth.

‘Metaphorically speaking,’ Maggie interrupted. ‘She’s probably twenty or twenty-one, actually. Gorgeous, from the angle I was looking from. Which was really a bummer. I mean, if she was ugly and wrinkly, I might manage to cope, but being cheated on with a possible centrefold doesn’t do much for your self-confidence.’

‘Oh, Maggie,’ said Elisabeth and there was love and pity in her voice. She’d long since given up trying to boost Maggie’s self-esteem, although having a beautiful cousin with a skewed vision of her gorgeousness was perfect training for working with stunning size six models who thought they were too fat and faced rejection every day. ‘I wish I was there to give you a hug. What did you do?’

‘Dad phoned about Mum, so I left to come here. Ran away, in other words, which is what I’m good at.’

‘You haven’t told them.’

‘No. Couldn’t face it.’

Maggie heard muffled noises at Elisabeth’s end.

‘Sorry, I’ve got to go. Call me tomorrow?’

‘Sure.’

Maggie looked at her suitcases waiting patiently to be unpacked. It was hard to feel enthusiastic about moving back into her childhood bedroom. All she needed now was one of those big doll’s heads that you put eye make-up on, her old Silver Brumby books, and she’d be eleven again.

She’d read so much as a child, losing herself in the world of books because the outside world was so cruel. And yet she hadn’t learned as much as she’d thought she had: books taught you that it would work out right in the end. They never envisaged the possibility that the prince would betray you. They never pointed out that if you gave a man such ferocious power over your heart, he could destroy you in an instant.

She finished her bar of chocolate slowly.

If everything had been different, she’d have been at home now in her own flat with Grey.

Without closing her eyes, she could imagine herself there: sitting on their bed, talking about their day, all the little things that seemed mundane at the time and became painfully intimate and important when you could no longer share them. Like waking up in the night and feeling Grey’s body, warm and strong beside her in the bed. Like leaning past him at the bathroom sink to get to the toothpaste.

Like hanging his T-shirts on the radiators to dry. These things made up their life together. Now it was all gone. She felt betrayed, broken and utterly hollow inside.

She was back in her childhood bed with nothing to show for it.

CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_aaec0850-3106-524e-944c-75723d27c7be)

Mrs Devlin’s art classes were different from any other lesson in the school, agreed all the girls in the sixth year. For a start, Mrs Devlin herself was not exactly your average teacher, although she was older than many of the others. Even her clothes bypassed normal teacher gear, whether she wore one of her long honey suede skirts and boots with a low-slung belt around her hips, or dressed down in Gap jeans and a man’s shirt tied in a knot around the waist. Compared to Mrs Hipson, headmistress and lover of greige twinsets and pearlised lipstick, Mrs Devlin was at the cutting edge of bohemian chic.

Most of all, the girls agreed, it was her attitude that made her different. The other teachers seemed united in their plan to improve the students whether they wanted to be improved or not. But Mrs Devlin, without ever exactly saying so, seemed to believe that people improved themselves at their own rate.

So on May the 1st, with just weeks to go to the state exams and with the whole teaching body in a state of panic, Mrs Devlin’s assignment to her sixth-year class was to ‘forget about the exams for a moment and paint your vision of Maia, the ancient pagan goddess who gave her name to May and who was a goddess of both spring and fertility’.

‘As today’s the first of May, it’s the perfect day for it.’

She stopped short of pointing out that the exam results probably wouldn’t matter in a millennium. Not the way to win friends and influence people in a school. ‘You’ve all been working so hard with your history of art,’ Christie added as she perched on the corner of the desk at the top of the class. She rarely sat down at the desk during art practicals, preferring to walk around and talk to her students: a murmured bit of praise here, a smile there. ‘I thought it might be nice to spend one hour of the day enjoying yourselves, reminding yourselves that art is about creativity and forgetting about studying.’

The class, who’d come from double English where they were re-butchering The Catcher in the Rye for exam revision, nodded wearily.

The most art they got to do these days involved colouring in their exam revision timetables with highlighter pens – generally a lot more fun than the revision itself.

‘Maia is the oldest and most beautiful of the seven stars called the Seven Sisters, or the Pleiades,’ Christie continued. ‘The Pleiades are part of the constellation of Taurus, which is ruled over by Venus, for those of you interested in astrology. Maia is around five times larger than our sun.’

It was such a sunny morning that flecks of dust could be seen floating on shafts of light filtering in from the second-floor windows. St Ursula’s was an old building, with decrepit sash windows and huge sills perfect for sitting on between classes and blowing forbidden cigarette smoke out into the netball court below.

‘In art, spring is represented, as you know, by the sense of sensuality and passion,’ Christie went on. ‘Can anyone remember any artists who painted spring in such a way?’

‘Botticelli,’ said Amber Reid.

Christie nodded and wondered again what Amber had been getting up to on Wednesday. The way she’d been dressed and the joy in her step made Christie damn sure that Amber had been on her way to some illicit activity.

‘Yes, Amber, Botticelli is a good example. Remember, girls, artists didn’t have television to give them ideas, or films. They looked at their world for inspiration and got it from nature. Keep that in mind during the exam, they were influenced by their times. By war, poverty, nature, religion. As we discussed in art history last week, religion is important as an influence on artists. Remember the puritanical Dutch schools with their hidden messages.

‘Today’s the pagan festival of Beltane, which is why May is called Bealtaine in Irish, and it’s a celebration of spring, warmer days, blossoming nature and blossoming of people too. Of course, the Church wasn’t too keen on pagan festivals, but they’re part of our history too, so it’s interesting to know about them. You paint, I’m here if you need me.’

The class were silent as they considered painting a fertility goddess. At St Ursula’s in general, sexuality was given a wide berth by the teaching staff. Even in sex education classes, the concept of passion was diluted, with scientific words like ‘zygote’ giving students the impression that it was a miracle the human race had gone on for so long considering how boring procreation sounded.

‘Is it true that Titian only painted women he’d gone to bed with?’ asked Amber suddenly, her eyes glittering.

Christie had a sudden flash of knowledge: a picture of Amber and a dark, moodily dangerous young man came into her mind, entwined on a childhood bed doing grown-up things. Christie knew exactly what Amber had been up to the day before. She blazed with burgeoning sexuality. To embody Maia, Amber just needed to paint a self-portrait.