After dropping Luke off at the Ferriters’ cabin, Nessa drove home to Sunday’s Well. She showered and changed and went with Philip to a dinner party hosted by a banking lawyer called Dennis Fogarty and his wife, Olga. The Fogartys lived in Elgin Woods, a gated development of detached five-bedroom houses on the city side of Blackrock. The “wood” comprised four oak trees that had grown for several hundred years in the grounds of an adjoining manor house recently converted into apartments. There were twenty houses in Elgin Woods, each with large yards in the back and smaller yards with circular driveways out front. They all had the same miscellany of shrubbery, tended to, Nessa suspected, by the same gardener. All the topiary was shorn that little bit too tight, and the roots of all the black bamboos were causing tiny undulations in the otherwise neat lawns.
Olga was from Carlow, her father a beef farmer, her mother a primary school teacher who had encountered the name Olga in a romance novel. Olga talked a good deal, almost exclusively about books. She’d had some short stories published and occasionally wrote reviews for newspapers. That night in the Fogartys’ dining room, Nessa was seated beside her. There were three Louis le Brocquy prints and an original Gottfried Helnwein on the dining room walls. The Fogartys had caterers looking after everything, so there was no respite, no lull when Olga might otherwise have got up to check on vegetables. Nessa listened politely, a smile fixed to her face. Halfway through the starter, Nessa thought that she’d rather chew off both her own arms than listen to Olga for another minute. The particular book she was talking about that night involved a man attempting to generate a new life-form in the hull of a beached schooner in Patagonia. Olga had been speaking about it for a while and all that had happened, as far as Nessa could make out, was that the man had broken a cup. It was all about the very particular way in which he’d broken it—Olga was careful to explain this—and how the broken cup was a metaphor for a fractured world.
After a while Nessa allowed her gaze to wander and caught a man directly across the table staring. Immediately he looked away. He wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination an attractive man, but all the same Nessa felt flattered. She turned her attention back to Olga, who’d moved on from the cup to some new occurrence. When a moment later she glanced back at the man, he was staring again, this time in a more intense manner that made her uncomfortable. “Excuse me,” she said, interrupting Olga mid-sentence, “I’ll be right back.”
She wove through the bustle of catering staff in the Fogartys’ kitchen and let herself out into their backyard. In a different age, the Fogartys’ butler might have come after her and escorted her back inside, or perhaps fetched a warm wrap. But the caterers couldn’t have cared less, and she pulled the door shut, walked a little distance down the path. The city glittered like a circuit board, the grids and boxes of lights, the rows of streetlamps. How magnificent, by night and from a distance, the homes of Cork. She stood there, breathing deeply, and tried not to think of anything at all. Behind her, she heard the kitchen door opening. When she turned, she saw the man from across the table, and she realized she wasn’t surprised. He was approaching through the grass, in long strides. When he was within a few feet of her, he stopped. She wondered if he’d said something very quietly and she hadn’t heard. He had his hands in his pockets, and was rocking back and forth on the heels of his shoes.
She said, “It’s a nice house, isn’t it?”
“Only the best for Dennis and Olga.”
He was very drunk, she realized. He must have been getting quietly and inconspicuously drunk indoors, and now the cold air had hit him.
“If my wife could see me now,” he said, “out here with you.” He took a step closer. “What would your husband make of it, I wonder?”
“He’d make nothing whatsoever of it,” she said lightly. What was it about men, that they always presumed a woman was about to jump on them?
“Trust each other, do you?”
“As a matter of fact, yes.”
He laughed. “Oh dear,” he said. “Oh dear.” He shook his head. “You don’t know who I am, do you?” He held out a hand. “Richard Wilson.”
It took a second to register. Richard Wilson. Cora’s husband. She had never seen him before. He wasn’t one of the small number of fathers who graced the school gates. She didn’t take his hand and after a moment he withdrew it. “He’s some man, your husband,” he said. “He fucks my wife; he, presumably, fucks his own wife. Maybe he’s got a harem going up there in Sunday’s Well?” The Wilsons lived in Hollyhill, though not in one of the estates. Nessa went to step around him to go back to the house, but he caught her by the elbow.
“Let me go,” she said. She glanced up at the Fogartys’ kitchen and was relieved to see the outlines of the catering staff. She could shout, if it came to that.
He brought his face close to hers. “What do you think?” he said. “Maybe you and I should give it a go. That’d show them.”
She shrugged off his hand and walked to the house, trying not to show how panicked she was. The caterers paid her no notice; they were in the middle of a different sort of crisis—a sinkhole of soufflé sat on the countertop. In the dining room, Philip was in conversation with a woman she knew to be a project engineer. Nessa went up, tapped him on the shoulder. “A word,” she said.
They went down the hall and outside to the front steps. “Did you even notice I was missing?” she said, when she’d pulled the door shut behind them.
“I presumed you’d gone to the bathroom.”
“I went outside, because I was stuck with Olga, who has the social skills of a small slug.”
“I thought you liked Olga.”
“I hate Olga. I can’t stand her. Olga and her books. Do you know who I met just now?”
He shook his head.
“Take a guess.”
He looked away.
“Richard Wilson,” she said. “He followed me out to the backyard. I thought he was going to make a pass at me.”
“But he didn’t.”
“He suggested he and I should get together.”
“He’s drunk.”
“I was frightened, Philip. And I should not have to put up with being at the same party as Richard Wilson. I have been humiliated enough.”
“I don’t see where the humiliation is.” An edge had entered his voice. “Richard was the junior barrister on a big case that just concluded. That’s why he’s here. Dennis sends a bit of work his way. So what? It’s not up to us to tell Dennis and Olga who they can have to their home. And he’s here on his own. It’s not like…” He trailed off.
“Go on,” she said. “Say it.”
When he looked at the ground, she said, “It’s not like Cora’s here. Is that what you were going to say? What if she had come? What a sideshow that would’ve been. Your wife and your mistress at the same dinner table. They could’ve sold tickets.”
“Can you stop shouting, please?” he said.
She wasn’t aware that she’d become loud. She looked to see if there was anyone who might have heard, but there wasn’t a soul out in Elgin Woods, apart from Richard Wilson, who might still be in the backyard. The curtains of the house across the way remained closed. If this were happening at their house in Sunday’s Well, Mrs. Moriarty would be at her window by now. “But what if Cora had come?” she repeated. “You must have known they’d be invited, and you didn’t warn me. You were prepared to let me be shamed.”
“Stop it, Nessa,” he said. He ran a hand through his hair, and swore. She had a flashback to a night outside Supermacs in Eyre Square when they were in their twenties, screaming at each other, and Philip making the exact same facial expression he was making now. They were back in that place again, but this time without the optimism of youth to carry them forward. “I knew Cora wasn’t going to turn up,” he said. “I wouldn’t have done that to you.”
“How did you know?”
He looked away. “Let’s not do this here,” he said, “let’s not spoil the night for Dennis. Come back in and have dessert.”
“You’re still in contact with her, aren’t you?”
“She texted to ask if I thought she should come. I texted her back to say that I thought it might be better if she didn’t. That was all.”
“You promised me,” Nessa said. “You promised you’d have nothing more to do with her.”
“I told her to stay away. That’s hardly having something to do with her.”
At some point she’d begun to cry. She wiped a finger underneath her eyes, hoping to stop her mascara from running. “She still does your bidding,” she sobbed. “Cooperative Cora.”
“I really don’t want to have to leave,” he said. “I don’t want to upset the Fogartys.”
“God forbid. Whatever else happens, let’s keep the Fogartys happy.”
He reached out and pulled her close, held her so tightly that it felt more like restraint than love. “You’re here,” he said, “Cora isn’t. Isn’t that enough?”
She allowed herself to relax into his chest. She thought that she should stop speaking about Cora. “Richard Wilson hates you,” she said.
“I wasn’t expecting him to give me a medal.”
“You need to keep an eye on him,” she said. “He’s a nasty human. He’ll sell you down the river first chance he gets.”
“Richard Wilson couldn’t sell water in the desert. Dennis only briefs him on account of Cora and Olga being cousins.”
Cora and Olga were related? That was news to her. And still Cora had had to stay home. A game had been played tonight, the rules of which were hazy to her, but it seemed that she had won and Cora had lost.
Philip stroked her hair as she rested her head against his shoulder. “Come back inside,” he said.
“You go on,” she said, “and I’ll follow.”
After he’d gone in, she sat awhile on the steps. If anyone asked what she was doing, she would say that she was looking at the stars. But there were no stars, not with all the lights, or the light pollution, as Jennifer might say.
Was she this angry about everything when she was her daughter’s age? She remembered her own teenage anger as being more domestic in nature, more circumscribed.
She wondered if Richard Wilson had gone back to sit at the table, if he was right now staring across at her empty chair. Her life—their life—had been recalibrated in the aftermath of Philip’s affair; deals had been struck, and tonight was one of them. Dennis, Richard, Philip. Rock Paper Scissors. Cora Wilson had been removed from the board, but her absence impacted the relationship of all the pieces remaining. It occurred to her then that perhaps Olga, being Cora’s cousin, had known before she did about the affair. Perhaps that was why she’d always spoken to her so urgently about books, to guard against accidentally speaking about anything else.