DUBLIN, LEACHLARA AND AUGHASALLAGH 1994
Con refused to be carried away by rumours or tip-offs. He knew his colleagues lied all the time, layering untruths around a fragment of news in order to advance their own cause. However, the inkling of a cabinet reshuffle had come from so many sources that he allowed himself to believe in it a little. He would usually have told Columbo to keep his ambitions reined in but this time he couldn’t help thinking that he might well be in the running for a top job. Even a junior ministry would be a start, although being a junior anything when he was sixty years of age seemed a touch ridiculous. Still, he would not of course knock it back if the offer came. Better to make his mark while he still had a chance, even if Columbo had sworn not to down tools until he had placed his man in the top slot. The Taoiseach was not a man Con could claim to know well: he had of course, as a long-serving deputy, been in his company countless times, but there was no way he was within a sniff of the inner circle. A certain crew had that sewn up. Even at parliamentary party meetings it was a small number of senior party figures that controlled the agenda, and backbenchers were expected to toe the appropriate line. You obeyed the whip if you knew what was good for you. Never was a phrase so apt in politics, and it seemed to Con that democracy was an ideal only barely tolerated within the parliamentary party. Mavericks didn’t get very far in the long run. Con Abernethy had shown himself willing to champion the party on local radio and in the newspapers and had proven to be a top-class vote-getter. He had topped the poll for the first time in the last election and he knew it was because he had never been hungrier for the contest, chasing every vote down to the last minute of the eve of polling day. He had to admit that his constituency team had worked for him harder than ever before and he liked to think that his spectacular personal-vote tally had elevated him somewhat in the eyes of the top people.
Mary’s illness had played a part too, though he knew that fact probably galled her more than the discovery of the cancer itself. He had gone on Tipptalk FM to champion the cause of breast-cancer treatment and the need for Breast Check to roll out to the regions, tearfully, if not wholly sincerely, detailing how the tragedy of his wife’s illness had rocked his family to its foundations. In reality breast cancer was little more than a footnote in the disaster of their marriage. Mary had been incandescent with rage, but the short radio piece had brought him requests for further interviews from two national newspapers and this had heightened his profile more than any of his hitherto, admittedly local, political achievements. Someone from Marian Finucane’s morning radio programme had been on to his office, but it hadn’t come to anything and Con didn’t want to be seen pursuing it. He could not appear to be crassly capitalizing on his wife’s illness even if that was his true intent. He had been coping with Mary’s rage for most of his life and now he shouldered the burden of its redoubling without noticing the extra weight. After a nurse in the Mater had shown the heart-rending interview in the Independent to her, Mary had rung to tell him, again, in no uncertain terms, what she thought of him. He held the receiver away from his ear while she told him he was a worthless piece of shit and waited for her anger to deplete its oxygen supply.
‘I spoke to your consultant. He says you are responding very well to your chemo. Certainly hasn’t exhausted you any, that’s for sure.’
‘You have no business talking to my consultant. He is my doctor and—’
Con cut her off because this was one line of attack he would not let her get away with. ‘You are in Dublin, Mary, because everyone told me that the best oncology services are there. For the considerable amount of money I am paying out I will ring your consultant to check the answer to nine across in the Irish Times crossword if I want to.’
‘You are despicable,’ was all she could manage, rendered inarticulate by her own fury.
The words rang in his ears. If he had any residual feelings to be hurt by his wife the words would have been like sandpaper rubbed on open wounds but Con had long since gated that avenue of pain. Nobody – except Dan – knew him better and nobody hated him more, but as long as he had his son he knew he could face anything. So every evening he pulled his car into an empty bay in the visitors’ car park. He took a ticket from the attendant in the shelter cabin and listened as the closing time of the car park was recited again. He bought flowers when he judged that the last lot had been disposed of and he always brought magazines and chocolate. He sat beside Mary’s bed every night alongside Dan, and sometimes Alison, who had become a permanent fixture in his son’s life, saying what spouses say and doing what they do when they know their children are watching. Mary concealed her distaste for him as best she could, remaining mostly impassive when he spoke, and although his presence irritated her he knew that she would be infinitely more irritated if he were true to them both and never came at all.
After a double mastectomy and more than four months’ worth of chemotherapy Mary was declared to be in remission. She resumed her life in the shadow of the three-monthly appointments that punctuate the cancer patient’s calendar. Each day survived was an achievement in itself but also brought the next hospital appointment and its attendant dangers even closer. If anything, Con would think to himself afterwards, cancer had mellowed his wife, blunting the rough corners of her anger. The truth was that Mary Abernethy was thinking of other things: an unsatisfactory life half lived and the stack of its remaining days possibly numbered and steadily petering out.
She took a call from the Taoiseach’s wife in the hall of their house in Leachlara and Con listened, panicked at first and then stunned at how easily she detailed how supportive he had been at her time of greatest need, how he had done everything to make her time in hospital bearable, how she would certainly be lost without him. Her facility for deceit impressed him and when she put down the phone crisply he smiled in gratitude for a performance well delivered. In that moment he recognized that a mutual pragmatism had bound them together in a way that love and respect had never done. Con’s future success would keep him out of her house and out of her life and this marriage that they had long ago decided to cling to, not for better but definitely for worse, would remain a testament to endurance and proof that love need not mean a thing.
Dan had taken his mother’s illness badly. Of course he didn’t want his mother to be sick but neither did he want to partake in the charade of family unity that had ensued since she had been diagnosed. He was ashamed when he admitted to Alison that the nightly visiting sessions at the hospital drained him so much that he often pretended that his work had delayed him and managed only ten minutes at the end of visiting time to sit and witness his parents enact their elaborate masquerade. He could tell Alison anything and consequently told her everything, depending on her warmth and normality to curb how awkward his own flesh and blood made him feel.
‘If anything, Ali, you would think that my mam’s cancer would bring either or both of them to their senses, but the tension in the room is unbearable. I love it when you come because they pull out all the stops when you are there.’
Alison hugged him tightly to her. She had spent almost four years with Dan Abernethy and every day made her look forward to another. Two peas in a pod, Rose had said to her the day she shut up the Daisy May for the last time, its lease too expensive for her modest operation. ‘Don’t ever forget that you and Dan are meant to be together. Whatever comes your way, stick it out. Romance isn’t worth a flake unless it steels you for the tough times.’ Then, weary of doling out sound advice, she had added, ‘By the way, if I find out that you got married and you didn’t invite me I will come from whatever point on the planet I am on and will haunt you for the rest of your days.’ Alison guaranteed Rose an invitation to the big day when and if it happened and she took heed of her friend’s advice. In years of working shifts at the Daisy May she had never tired of listening to Rose’s take on life. By any measure she had had a fairly dismal run in life but here she was in her late fifties thinking of heading off on a trip to some far-flung corner of the world to see if she could wring something worthwhile from the second half. Beneath her sarcasm, and there was much of it to wade through, she retained her sense of humour and she was convinced that Dan and Alison were meant for each other. It was a sentiment that Alison never tired of agreeing with, daring to hope it was true. She loved having Dan in her life and could not imagine a single thing that their love could not overcome. They fought, of course, but their arguments flared and died out almost in the same breath. They squabbled about who would pay for things, and they argued about Ciara who had remained Alison’s flatmate throughout their time at college, but neither was afraid to tell the other what they thought.
Ciara’s disapproval of Dan ebbed and flowed but Alison demanded respect for the other from both of them. It would be totally unfair if they made her choose between them, she chided, and mostly they complied and tolerated one another. Tensions flared when Ciara had time on her hands in between a steady procession of boyfriends and her conscience about Leda would lead her to throw a few daggers in Dan’s direction. Yet even Ciara had to admit that Leda seemed to have settled for her limited role in Con’s life, amounting to little more than convenient sex. She was willing to tolerate the bad treatment in between as long as she could live rent free, in a flashier apartment now than in the beginning, and with money in her pocket. She returned home to Leachlara at Christmastime only and she kept her mouth shut about Con when she was there, as he had instructed her to do, while flaunting what his money had bought her. Ciara finally understood that it was all about the pay-off for Leda and had never really been about Con at all. He was merely a means to her chosen end. Leda was no longer a teenager and if Con’s twenty-one-year-old lover had agreed to abide by his dodgy morals then Ciara had grudgingly decided to let her, and consequently Dan, be.
Con Abernethy’s hand shook now as he put the phone down in his Leinster House office. It was a cramped room that he shared with a backbench colleague from Kerry. Two desks, two phones and some random constituency and party promotion leaflets and little more filled the limited space. Anything personal or of value he kept in the house at Leachlara. The rumours, it seemed, had been spot on. He had received a call from the party secretary to attend the Taoiseach’s office at 7 p.m. sharp. It could only mean one thing. He straightened his already straight tie and smoothed down the lapels of his immaculate Louis Copeland suit, congratulating himself for deciding to wear it this very day, then made a call to Dan at the hospital staffroom. Would he and Alison meet him outside Leinster House around nine? He had some good news that he would share with them over dinner. If his gut feelings about his impending promotion were correct then Dan and Alison would be there to flank him as he talked to the political correspondent on the nine o’clock news. He could have told Columbo about the summons to the Taoiseach’s office and no doubt Columbo would have broken every speed limit from Leachlara to Kildare Street in an effort to be there to witness the proud moment, but Con decided against it. He had waited much too long for this moment, and he wanted to savour it as a personal achievement before it was swallowed up by the party workers as a group success or analysed by the media as merely a strategic stroke by a political leader responding to trouble in the polls. He would tell Mary too of course when it had been confirmed. She would not be interested in hearing from him now when he was merely anticipating the good news. She would dismiss him for ill-advised presumption before the fact. Mary only dealt in cold facts, so he would make that call on his return from his seven o’clock appointment. Bereft of congratulation, as he knew it would be, it should take no more than thirty seconds. Leda might hear it on the news, although admittedly that was unlikely, as he had never once heard a voice on that radio of hers, just thumping dance music that she thankfully knew to turn off when he came in. He would see how things went with Dan and Alison, how long they would spend with him and maybe he would call over to Leda afterwards.
He kept a bottle of Jameson whiskey in the top drawer of his desk and he found himself thinking more and more of it as the clock seemed to crawl from six-thirty. Every minute seemed to drag, wilfully torturing him. With ten minutes to go he gulped greedily from the bottle and chewed a mint on his way down the corridors to meet with the future. It had taken longer than he had planned, but it was welcome all the same.