Unravelling Oliver(32)

Oliver answered the door and whistled admiringly as he took in the view.

‘Darling, how have you been? I’ve been waiting for the opportunity to call.’

‘Shelley?’ I spat, unable to control my anger. ‘You were fucking Shelley?’

Oliver flinched. He hated bad language, but he also looked puzzled.

‘Shelley …’ he said, as if trying to recall who she was. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Don’t lie to me, Oliver! I saw you with her coming out the stage door.’

‘Oh, that? Don’t you see? I was just trying to make sure Con wouldn’t suspect you and me!’

I was confused for a moment.

‘Con told me he was coming to New York to surprise you. I tried to put him off but he insisted, and I was worried he suspected something was going on between us, so I thought it would be better if he thought that I was seeing someone else. It was all such a mess. I didn’t get a chance to tell him you’d been fired because he was in the middle of the Atlantic at the time. I knew he was going to be waiting for you at the stage door after the show, so I made sure to come out with some dolly bird on my arm and Shelley was closest.’

I was not entirely sure whether to believe him or not – after all, he lied with such ease to Alice – but he took my hand and raised it to his lips and kissed the tips of my fingers. I realized that it didn’t entirely matter whether it was true or not. I was not going to give him up. A wave of tension washed out of my head.

‘Oh, Oliver,’ I said. He kissed me then and led me upstairs, and I thought that maybe everything was going to be all right.

Our affair picked up where it had left off. In fact, it improved to the extent that I was emboldened after a few months to suggest that we might one day leave our respective spouses and set up home together.

‘Don’t be an idiot,’ he said.

He made it clear that he would never leave Alice. He said that it wouldn’t be fair to her. In the beginning I tried to make him see that he would be happier with me, that I would be good for him, that I would be a more suitable partner for somebody of his stature, but these pleas were met by silences that could last months and eventually I learned that if I wanted any part of him, I would have to do things his way.

My career picked up too, after a while. I was selected to be a team leader on a TV game show and I picked up a lot of voice-over work for commercials and radio dramas.

I know I said earlier that I was supposed to be a friend of Alice’s. The truth is that I couldn’t stand her. Not because of anything she did to me, but because she was in my way. I just wished she would disappear.

And now, in a sense, she has. I’m not proud of the way I felt towards her.

I don’t think I have betrayed Alice. I would have in the past if Oliver had agreed to leave her. I would have betrayed her and not given it a thought.

She was useful though. I don’t mind admitting that she was extremely helpful with my two children. When I was working long days in studio or in theatre rehearsals and Con was stuck in the clinic, Alice would often come over to be there when they got home from school. She said that Oliver needed absolute concentration to write his wonderful books; there was no question of the kids going over there, children were too much of a distraction. Alice was like an unofficial nanny for Gerry and Kate, actually. Sometimes when I got home she’d have a three-course meal prepared. It seems she got very interested in food after she was first married. Oliver told me that she grew up with a retarded brother who could only eat rice pudding and potatoes, and apparently she hardly knew what food was supposed to taste like until Oliver packed her off to a cookery school the week after they married. I confess that this stimulated my own interest in cooking. I can hardly believe that I felt forced to compete with bloody Alice. On the rare occasions when Con was away and I could entertain Oliver at home, I liked to be able to feed him in the manner to which he was accustomed.

You would think that Alice and I might have had more in common. After all, we were both in love with the same man. We were thrown together in all sorts of ways. I initiated the ‘friendship’, actually; it seemed the easiest way to get close to Oliver. But, my God, she drove me mad with her slow, dreamy ways and her nonsensical conversation. I dreaded the occasional afternoons that I would have to spend in her company. I always tried to come up with an activity that would keep her busy, would negate the need for much conversation: cinema, shopping, theatre.

Of course, I feel bad about it all now. The last time I saw Alice was in Bordeaux airport last November, just a few days before Oliver lost it with her. She was really upset. At the time, I thought she was upset about Javier and me. No doubt we’ll find out the whole truth during the trial.

Maybe I should have been nicer to Alice and maybe I shouldn’t have slept with her husband for nearly twenty years, but a small part of me wishes that the fight was about me. I wonder if he ever truly cared about me. Or her.





14. Oliver


When I was young, very young, before that summer in France, I tried hard to be a good person. I spent most of my life trying to impress a man who more or less refused to acknowledge my existence. My birth certificate names my mother as ‘Mary Murphy (maiden surname)’, probably one of the most ubiquitous names for a Dublin female at the time. It states that my parents were unmarried. Over the years, private research has yielded absolutely nothing about her, and I could only speculate that this was not her real name. My father is listed as ‘Francis Ryan’. Under ‘Rank or Profession of Father’, it says ‘priest’. I realize that it must have been a scandal in 1953, or would have been, if it hadn’t been hushed up in some way.