22

Sam is disappointed when she steps on to the bathroom scales of her Kensington hotel. After all her efforts, including denying herself chocolate, she has put on nearly a pound in a week. So exercise has been on her mind all day, and as soon as she finishes work at the shoot, she returns to her hotel and plans her route.

After a light dinner, she will power-walk, down as far as Victoria Station, then along by the Thames, turn at Battersea Bridge and back to sweat it off in the sauna, then as many lengths of the pool as she can manage.

Kensington has settled down after the growl of evening traffic. Although she is used to the district by now, and feels safe among the rows of Regency houses, with their cream-columned porches – the legacy of empire and old money – she is always wary. A woman on her own, one never knows. The community of cyclists, however, and power-walking women like herself who take over the streets after close of business set her mind at rest.

The mild evening has brought out more walkers and joggers than usual, and couples too on bicycles, some with a child in the carrier. They are availing of the last few days before the schoolchildren go back after the summer holidays. When a pub door opens, the din of conversations and the whiff of beer flow out to the cobbled street. Working up to a brisk pace, she passes a man and a woman in well-cut suits, whose row is so intense, they are heedless of their surroundings. The woman is giving him a piece of her mind. ‘Yes, that’s you – the centre of the bloody … ah, what’s the use?’

In their wake, they leave behind the echo of their cut-glass accents.

After twenty lengths of the pool – the last few a self-punishment for the midday chocolate – another setback – she takes her laptop to the dining-room to check over her presentation for the following day’s meeting.

She has a system worked out for these business trips abroad, when she is on her own without a copywriter or an art director: time to work out her meetings and time to exercise. For the most part she manages to silence the mischievous whispering from the wings and to shut out Peggy Lee’s world-weary song.

She is determined, however, to keep the prize in her sight, her place at the table, and never to become her mother, looking in shop windows for another pair of dancing shoes.

After returning from the dining room, Sam lights the sandalwood and lavender candles she had bought as she was jogging back to the hotel, pours a glass of wine and places it on her bedside locker, then takes her well-thumbed copy of Unleash the Power Within from her briefcase. At the gym in Raheny, everyone was praising the book to high heaven. She has a whole shelf of books like it at home; each, more or less, promising to transform the reader’s life in ten weeks. About to settle the pillows in a comfortable position, she notices a concert ticket falling from the book – their first symphony concert when Philip returned from London.

‘Toner’s,’ he had announced to her over the phone, when he told her of Sharkey’s offer to him and Egan. ‘Saturday night. Big homecoming.’

Some of the gang from ucd – those who had got jobs – turned up. They had the latest news: Emer and Don have parted company; he’s gone to Zambia to work on a hydroelectric power plant. Ann-Marie is in line for a consultancy at Tallaght Hospital. The International Financial Services Centre is up and running: ‘Here’s to Haughey.’ They raised their glasses.

To Haughey.

And Desmond.

Here’s to Desmond.

Dawn was breaking over Ireland: there was talk of computer companies setting up, house prices were showing a slight improvement and the country kept winning the Eurovision Song Contest. Sam and Philip had a lot of catching up to do with others now back from Sydney and New York. They laughed at their student campaign to change the world, their protest rallies and their decision to join the Labour Party.

By the way, has anyone seen Father Tom?

Gone to Africa, I believe. Couldn’t hack a bossy bishop.

Oh well. Same old, same old. What are you having there?

A pint.

Yeah. Tom’s a great guy.

Wasted in the priesthood.

Agreed.

Like actors following a script, the circle broke for the next scene, and, as in the past, Philip and Sam found themselves together: she perched on a high stool, her wine glass on the counter, he standing beside her with a pint of Guinness. The others keep their distance. But Egan, jubilant after his engagement to Gillian, said what they were all thinking: ‘Thank goodness, some things never change, like pints of Guinness, or Philip and Sam.’ He raised his glass; the whoop of the gang becomes a Greek chorus: ‘Yeah, made for each other you are.’

‘Not the marrying kind,’ Sam calls out, ‘too much on my plate right now.’

Less than a year later, on the same high stool, Sam announced their engagement. ‘We can have it all, girls. Why not? Career and two kids. Right?’

‘Career, the house on the hill – let’s drink to that,’ said one of the girls.

‘And in control of our own destiny.’

They were married in the church of Our Lady, Mother of Divine Grace, Raheny. After the ceremony, when Philip and Sam stood at the front door of the church, surrounded by their laughing friends, motorists, waiting on the Howth Road for the lights to change, hooted. Philip’s uncle, Father Anselm, took holidays from his missionary work in Tanzania to officiate at the wedding. Ollie told everyone that he was sparing no expense for the wedding of his one and only precious daughter, so the reception was held at The Shelbourne Hotel. In his after-dinner speech, Father Anselm joked that ‘marriages are supposed to be made in heaven, but this one was made in the Commerce Soc. at ucd.’ Everyone laughed except Una.

We can have it all, girls. Sam tears the concert ticket in two and tosses it in the bin. She gets off the bed and slouches to the desk where she opens her laptop to check her messages: among the twenty or so is a Good luck tomorrow from Philip. She replies to the most urgent, but while working on her laptop, images in her head break her concentration.

The one of Philip, herself and the children at Kelly’s Hotel in Rosslare rises to the surface. Crina had taken their photo in front of the pool. Neither Dylan nor Zara wanted to go unless Crina went too. This was the first telltale sign of how much her career had cost Sam.

Crina had been looking after Dylan since he was five months old when Sam returned to work with a flat stomach after keeping to the drill her coach at the gym had drawn up. And when Crina herself had had a baby, and so had to stay in her rented apartment in Killester, Philip or Sam would drop Dylan off each weekday morning.

‘New baby, Cee-ah new baby, new baby Cee-ah,’ he chirped from the back of the car each evening when they were driving home in the dark. And what wasn’t lost on Sam was the way he clung to Crina when she was tucking him up in his coat and scarf, but she still stuck to her guns: just a natural fondness, and shouldn’t I be glad to have found her?

When Zara came along, she would spend the day in the apartment while Crina washed and ironed, and her daughter played with Zara in the sunny kitchen. And whenever Sam had had a day to herself, she had the weird sense of being an interloper in her children’s lives.

Then one evening coming up to Christmas, Sam was driving home to Raheny, with Dylan beside her and Zara in the back of the car, and Drivetime on the car radio was yakking on about Ireland’s latest success in an economic survey – something about gdp and how it was the highest in Europe apart from Luxembourg.

‘Mummy,’ Zara calls from deep in the back seat, ‘Mummy, Mummy,’ her tone had become urgent.

‘Yes, lovey.’

‘Mummy, can Crina come to our house on Christmas Day?’

‘What?’

Dylan joins in. ‘Oh please, Mummy, ask her, Mummy.’

‘Yes, and we’ll get a second turkey, won’t we, Mummy?’ Zara is clapping her hands in the way of children who are excited by a sudden notion.

At Raheny village, the lights are against them. Both children have an opportunity now to make a joint attack, so, to pacify them, Sam says: ‘Yes, Mummy will ask, but you know, Crina may be going to Bucharest to be with her own mummy.’

Zara becomes peevish and frowns at Sam’s eye in the mirror: ‘No, she won’t be going to Book-a-es. No she won’t.’

‘Lovey,’ Sam says, ‘Daddy and I will make sure Santa Claus gets you whatever you want on Christmas morning. The best present you ever had.’

Zara is working at the door handle, and muttering: ‘I don’t want Santa Claus. I want Crina.’ She starts knocking her feet against the back of Sam’s seat.

‘Right, Miss,’ Sam says, losing her patience, ‘one more word out of you, and I’ll get another nanny for you.’

‘I hate you! I hate you! I want Crina for my mummy!’ Zara shrieks.

Sam raises the volume on the radio. Wide-eyed, Dylan now sinks deeper into his seat as the rain spits against the windscreen.

Sam finishes off replying to the other messages, closes down her laptop and wanders around the room. An ambulance siren gets louder as it tears up the road, past her London hotel.

She fills a glass with wine, goes to her bag for a bar of chocolate, eighty percent cocoa – it helps to lower cholesterol; one or two pieces won’t do her any harm. Later, when the wine has worked its way into her veins, she will call one of the girls to give a glowing account of her trip, and the luxury of the sauna and chablis.