After collecting the booklets, Otto looked Shane in the eye. He’d always struck Otto as a happy young man. It wasn’t too improbable. Happy people existed, too. ‘I have no choice, Shane,’ he whispered, like they were having a conversation in a church.

  Shane sighed as if having just seen his future. ‘I know.’

  Sitting on the side of his super-king mahogany sleigh bed, he wondered how Shane had become a writer of repute. Otto did have doubts about how good the books were. True crime – surely that’s just turning newspaper articles into a compendium of adjectives? Earlier, when he’d called into Clareville, Otto had noticed the shelving behind Shane’s desk. Between antique bookends were copies of his books, each one in a different language – Chinese, French, German and so on. Languages that no one in his house spoke and the English versions Shane had presumably read as he had written them. The vainglorious prick.

  People who were expelled from university were not supposed to turn out like Shane – especially if they’d also failed to come from a significant family. It was not so much that Shane thought that the rules of life didn’t apply to him. It was more that he’d identified that one of his life’s great pleasures was bending them. He was the guy who had decided to go to university, not because of any passion to learn, but to avoid the ongoing humiliation of factory-line and shelf-stacking gigs. Shane, the young man who cheated and was expelled, came from a shithole where growing up was like living in a vast open prison; where becoming a manager in Spar was seen as the top of the totem pole; where young men who made it to twenty without doing a spell inside were seen as good catches. His parents were of a particular Irish generation that believed God had sent JFK to restore Catholicism and would’ve been over the moon if he’d become a civil servant.

  Otto also knew that there was a shadowy tone to Shane that made him attractive to a certain type of woman – the type of woman that Jenny was. Shane certainly preferred to take the dark view of life, and he was often right. He had no illusions as to what people were capable of. Otto supposed that Shane’s habit of suspicion came from an insight into his own character. After all, there’s a reason why Christ was a humanitarian and not a creative.

  Otto did not like how close Jenny and Shane were, but he did admire it. What he’d told Shane earlier, about how happy they were, he’d meant it. True, Shane and Jenny never acted like each was a half of a whole. She didn’t sit on his knees. He didn’t fawn over her. They didn’t hold hands all day long. But Shane would occasionally touch her shoulder. It was an affectionate gesture – not intimate – just enough to remind Otto that he was an outsider. Then there would always come a point where he would have no idea what they were talking about. Even though they wouldn’t be speaking in code or whispering, it would sound private and therefore like something he would be very interested in. But he wouldn’t get their jokes and he couldn’t share their history. In the dense compact of their marriage, they were each other’s alibi.

  *

  5.28 pm: Something moved outside the window. Otto stood from the side of the bed and winced as his knees crunched like tyres on gravel. It was a crow, crossing the ledge. Then, something below caused it to glance downwards. Cawing with alarm, it jumped off the sill and fluttered off to the trees.

  Taking out his phone, Otto opened the app that hooked up to the security cameras. His home and the gardens surrounding it were fitted with a state-of-the-art alarm system, comprising laser-activated lights, cameras and microphones. He opened the feed of the front gate, but it was blank. He tried the one scanning the driveway. That too was blank. Finally, he tried the front door and was not surprised to be also greeted by a vacant screen.

  What if somebody is out there? He tapped a reminder into his phone to call the security firm in the morning and have it fixed. Don’t be stupid, Otto – you’re in a great house, in a great area, in a great city. However, high finance had shown him, time and time again, that civilisation was just a thin veneer. Underneath it, was humans’ default mode – savagery, greed, lust.

  26

  5.29 pm: The door opened.

  ‘Ah, Jennifer,’ Vera said, and smiled as if she always smiled at the mere mention of her daughter’s name. She was looking good – vital and happy. Jenny’s mother was one of those old ladies who went out power walking at 10.00 am in an elegant tracksuit and white runners, as if the main street was a racetrack, as if life was so good that she wanted it to last forever.

  ‘Hi, Mum,’ Jenny said, and held out the packet of mints.

  ‘Oh lovely, my favourites. Yum!’

  Jenny did like to see Vera’s face happy: her big brown eyes, the laughter lines, the elegant perm, the bold pout of her lips, the sharpness of her thoughts visibly conducting the rise and fall of her deeply furrowed brow.

  ‘Is Joan here?’ Joan lived a quick drive from Vera.

  ‘She’s at the church. She helps clean it every Monday.’ Vera then continued as if Jenny and Joan were close. ‘Joan has so much going on in her life with the separation, the children finishing college and… well, she’s got such a big heart. Always looking after others. Joan is too kind for her own good. She’s always had an over-developed conscience. Now, look at this.’

  Vera held out her mobile with a photograph on it, taken from some website. Joan continually sent her pictures of funny things during the day, as if she was a dog bringing back sticks to its master. ‘I don’t understand it.’

  Vera wasn’t good with any humour that was more complicated than someone tripping over or unknowingly walking into clear glass. There was something lacking in her brain that made her imagination almost totally void. Even though she watched a lot of TV, it was a strict diet of current affairs, chat and reality shows. Anything with actors was avoided.

  Jenny glanced at the screen. It was a visual pun of a street weirdo standing beneath a funny street sign. Instead of wasting time trying to explain it, she said, ‘Me neither.’

  Vera ushered her daughter deeper into the hallway. On the side table was a tall vase supporting a huge bunch of sunflowers, their stems stiff and muscular, the soft petals stretching and strong. Jenny listened to the silence. Even though only her mother remained, the house had always been big enough for so many people to reside there and yet simultaneously live separate lives. On one of Shane’s first visits, he’d told her that while he knew lots of separated parents, Jenny’s were the first he’d come across that lived in separate bedrooms. He’d said, ‘It’s a good job you have so many of them.’

  Jenny looked up the staircase to where her bedroom was, in the back wing. She pictured her Polaroids on the wall, the long mirror, the pile of cute teddies, her favourite books on her dressing table. Then she thought of the bedroom next to hers – Hugh’s.

  ‘So, tell me pet, is everything all right?’

  Calmly Jenny told her usual lie. ‘Everything’s fine.’

  ‘Good. I’m glad to hear it. We’ve been worried.’

  The visage of her sister drifted across her brain. The only thing Joan had ever been worried about, concerning Jenny, was that she just might not fail.

  Vera said, ‘It’s so good to see that you’re not shook up. Many people who have gone through what you did… well, it leaves them marked, you know?’

  Jenny felt a splash of gratitude soak her very being. ‘So, Mum, you sent me a weird text this morning and then sent Joan around—’

  ‘Go on into the living room. I’ll just get my tea from the kitchen.’ Vera would never answer questions that she didn’t want to answer – there was always something to put in the oven, a call she had to make or a kettle to click on.

  Hands in pockets, Jenny entered the sprawling living room. The huge window framed a spread of the outside road, as if it were a work of art; giving the impression that Vera owned what could not be possessed, making private that which was, in fact, very public. In the distance a man was walking the pavement and Jenny couldn’t help from squinting to see if he had a beard and a shaved head.

  Her father’s armchair was still in the corner. Vera obviously wanted it to stay there, otherwise Joan would have it by now. Jenny pictured Lorcan on it, reading the paper or taking a call. In his hand would be a tumbler of the finest gold whiskey, swilling about. Lorcan’s gait had always said, ‘Average stuff? Why bother with it? Shouldn’t you go through life experiencing only the supreme prose, the finest food, the best whiskey?’

  Jenny had been too young to understand her parents’ marriage. She’d just thought that they never much liked each other. After all, they rarely fought in her presence. Instead, crucial conversations were routed through Hugh and her sister. Vera might say to one of them in the kitchen, ‘Go and ask your father if he’s away next weekend.’

  It wasn’t until her adolescence that she gained an insight, absorbed from her friends, that the stiff formality shrouding her parents’ relationship was unusual. Other people’s parents laughed and joked with each other; sometimes they even kissed, on the mouth. It had been strange just to see someone’s mother arc her body affectionately towards her husband.

  The problem for Lorcan was that he would be made to suffer for not pulling his children into his marital strife, preferring to disappear into his work instead. Conversely, Vera told Hugh and Joan everything, and they sympathised deeply with the one-sided narrative they were continually exposed to. With their father away so much, and Vera more a close friend and leader than a mother, they never doubted who the flawed partner in their parents’ marriage was.

  When Jenny had lived here, the atmosphere was entirely determined by her mother. If Vera had been out drinking lunch with a friend, it would be convivial and gossipy. If Vera had opened a bottle in the kitchen, it would be bitchy and scandalous. But if Jenny’s father was present, Vera would be sober and a frosty atmosphere would be endured until Lorcan retired to his wing of the house, alone.

  Jenny looked to the door, but there was still no sign of Vera. The clock on the wall read 5.35 pm. It was getting on. The day was disappearing.

  By just standing in this room, the past was swamping her. Jenny smiled at the old sofa. She was glad it was still there. It was the same one on which she’d made out with Shane countless times in her eighteenth year. Afterwards, he’d liked to pull the cushions off to prospect for coins. People didn’t lose money in his house.

  There were new paintings on the walls. All of her father’s Connemara landscapes were gone – no doubt hanging in Joan’s penthouse. They had been replaced over the years by religious works – ‘The Last Supper’, ‘Christ Taken in the Garden’, ‘Christ Revealing His Wounds’ and a selection of colourful renderings of The Cross minus the suffering Christ, to add vibrancy to the room. Vera had always espoused the power of prayer; even intimating that by kneeling before sleep, she may have saved lives. But while these paintings removed any doubt as to Vera’s religious certitude; what they really said was that this lady had wealth. Her mother may have believed that every day she metaphorically bathed in the colour of the Holy Lamb’s blood, but Jenny suspected that even Vera would admit that the real cleanser of souls was money.

  While Jenny lived here, she’d pretended to go to a Mass once a week, but had really only attended those where she’d be expected to sit with the rest of the family. Her father, too, had only attended the major ceremonies – Christmas, Easter, funerals and weddings. One afternoon, Lorcan, well-oiled from a business lunch, had muttered, ‘Who knows anything, Jen? If Jesus was the intellectual they say he was, then if he’d lived to be fifty, he’d probably have seen religion as just a youthful folly.’

  At that moment, the ends of religion seeped out of her. It was like forgetting a language she’d only spoken as a child.

  Finally, Vera appeared at the door holding two cups of tea. ‘It was a girl? I saw her picture. The papers didn’t show it, but Joan found it online in one of those internet news things. She was very pretty. Everyone thinks so.’

  ‘Everyone’ was Joan.

  Vera continued. ‘She must have had a terrible time of it in life to do that. I mean, obviously she wasn’t evil like the men you see on the news who do things like that – they’d scare the pips out of an apple by just looking at it.’

  ‘Evil,’ Jenny repeated; that most overused and weakened word in the twenty-first century. Like ‘awesome’, ‘evil’ had lost its meaning. ‘Just because she was pretty doesn’t mean that—’

  ‘I don’t want to know the ins and outs of her. It’s enough to know that you’re fine.’

  ‘It wasn’t me who was smashed up in the car. It was Shane.’ She waited to see how Vera would manage to, once again, avoid direct mention of her husband. For Jenny, it was like being a spinster when talking to her mother. When she and Shane had returned from the Caribbean it was, ‘How was your trip?’, ‘Did you enjoy the weather?’, ‘Are you jet-lagged?’

  Vera said, ‘Yes, well, as I said – it’s all fine now. Which is a relief.’

  ‘Mum, you do know that my husband almost died, right?’

  ‘Almost.’

  Jenny stared at this elegant old lady with cheekbones one could cut your thumb on.

  Vera said, ‘But he didn’t, Jennifer. He’s fine. You’ve always had your marriage on a pedestal. I mean of course I would never encourage either of my daughters to be a bad wife. But with you and Sh— … well, Jennifer, you’re now one of those women who has to ponder which of your friends you can impose yourself upon at Christmas. See, a marriage without children is surely just another type of ordinary, not very special, relationship. Isn’t that so?’ She raised threaded brows above big brown eyes. ‘That’s what makes a marriage special – children.’

  Jenny muttered, ‘It didn’t make Joan’s very special.’

  Only Vera’s lipsticked mouth revealed her displeasure – lips pulled together like a little red fist. She had never liked her youngest rudely pointing out and parading about things the rest of the family were currently sweeping under the rug.

  Offering a smile that announced the topic was about to be changed, Vera gestured to the cups still in her hands. She said, ‘Oh, your camomile tea is getting cold.’ Back-kicking the door closed, she crossed the living room and handed Jenny the cup. Her own tea was English and black – Vera didn’t waste calories on milk and sugar. ‘Well, Jennifer, as you know, I’ve been trying desperately to get in touch.’ Vera did not at all sound desperate.

  ‘One text, Mum. That’s all I got.’

  ‘I’ve been waiting all day for you to get back but at least I got to clean out the oven.’

  Jenny pictured Vera reaching deep into the dark cavern, scrubbing. ‘I was at the launch.’

  Vera shrugged. ‘Ah yes, the launch. You always loved the idea of big glamorous occasions. From the moment you could shop you were packing your wardrobe with “maybe someday” clothes.’ Her gaze drifted to the window, and she looked out to the distance. As if to herself, Vera muttered, ‘I always appreciated your confidence, but beauty is sometimes ugly when it’s too self-aware.’ Turning back to Jenny, she stated, ‘The problem with looking younger than you are, is that one day you suddenly won’t.’ Vera seemed to enjoy that pinch of sourness, as if she wanted her daughter to realise that soon she would no longer be desirable; that she’d be off-putting to men in some way. ‘I noticed, from the pictures Joan showed me on her phone, that your husband didn’t go to LaLucia’s today.’

  ‘Mum, last night he slept in a hospital. It was even on the news. You know this.’

  ‘I notice he’s never in any pictures of you at work on the internet-a-majig, either.’

  ‘Either?’ Her mother had a knack at keeping Jenny off-balance and constantly questioning herself. ‘It’s my work and my career. I don’t photobomb his author pics.’

  Vera looked amused. ‘Like the rest of the world, he’s just a spectator. Be careful, Jennifer. There’s only room for one star in every relationship.’

  ‘I thought you’d be… at least pleased about the launch.’

  ‘You know, your father said that launches and openings were just a useful invention to justify daytime drinking.’

  ‘It wasn’t “daytime drinking”, Mum. It was, like, the pinnacle of my career so far. It was really important.’

  ‘Pinnacle of your career,’ Vera paraphrased grandly. ‘It’s a job, Jennifer. There are lots of them out there.’

  ‘But this can open up so many doors for me. If certain companies notice—’

  Vera shook her head. The movement was firm, full of adult certainty. She wasn’t communicating that she disagreed with Jenny. It just meant that she didn’t want the conversation to run off in a tangent that she had no interest in. ‘I had to send Joan to you when I heard nothing back.’

  ‘Mum, I really wish you hadn’t. I don’t need any more—’

  ‘Jennifer, your first word was “more”. I remember you saying that on your father’s lap. Right there in his chair. Tickles and food or whatever. More, more, more. Your first word.’

  ‘You’ve told me many times.’

  ‘Lorcan thought it attested to your adorability, but the others adopted it as evidence of your ingrained greediness.’ She paused to let that soak in. ‘Oh look – now you’re in a mood.’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ she replied, cringing at the sulky sound of her own voice.

  ‘But I don’t blame you. We were just saying this morning – Joan and I…’ She paused as if to purposely give Jenny time to conjure up the frankly repulsive image of her older sister sitting in her mother’s kitchen for the first of their twice-daily meet-ups to bitch about neighbours, friends, Jenny. ‘We were just saying,’ she continued, ‘that you’ve had it so tough this year and it’s only June.’

  That sounded like a threat.

  Jenny steeled herself for whatever was coming.

  Vera took out a neatly folded note from the breast pocket of her blouse. Opening it out, she held it up and nodded with satisfaction. ‘Right, there are some things I need to discuss.’