The Wife Before Me(55)
We stopped using the ice house soon afterwards. So many projects to be undertaken and the dreaded Leaving exam hanging over us like the sword of Damocles. Excuses that made sense and prevented us from confronting what we were still unable to understand. In time, I confided in Amelia. Not the full truth – that I loved her and believed my feelings would never change – but a truth that would fork our lives in different directions.
As I grew more confident in my own skin, I told my father what I’d understood that evening in the ice house. He refused to believe me. There’d never been anything like that in his family, he said, as if lesbianism could be laid at the door of genetics. He waited for my ‘confusion’, as he called it, to pass. When I showed no signs of bending to his will, he told me I’d degraded my mother’s memory. She had sacrificed her life for an ‘aberration.’
After that, it was impossible to live with him. I was twenty when I moved to New York and changed my name by deed poll to Annie Ross. I continued my training under an eccentric Italian who had learned his craft in Venice. In time, I became confident enough to establish the Clearwater Stained Glass Design Studio.
I was happy in New York, free in a way I would never be in Kilfarran. Heartache doesn’t warm the other side of the bed and my expectations were not as demanding when I lowered the bar. Then, it was easier to settle for second best, third and fourth. They left me, those wonderful women, some tearful, some angry, all claiming I lacked commitment to our relationships. They were right. I remained unlucky in love, a woman in constant search of happiness. Was that where I went wrong? Should I have remained faithful to an ideal? Yearned for the moon? For her? No, that was not my nature but when my future changed in a way I’d never envisaged, the Big Apple proved too frenzied and challenging for me to continue living there. I needed the peace and isolation of a cottage on a rugged headland where, on a clear day, I could look across the ocean and imagine I could see America.
* * *
That afternoon, when we closed the door of the ice house on our memories, neither of us mentioned the kiss. Had Amelia forgotten it, crushed it under kisses from the lips of others? Men like Nicholas, who had brutalised their love, or Jay, who had loved her so briefly before they were separated by his warring parents?
He’d returned to Kilfarran to visit his father and came with Mark that evening to Woodbine? They arrived with wine and pizzas and it seemed, for a short while, as if time stood still and it was like old times again… almost.
Amelia drank too much and danced with me, laughing as we reminisced about the dance school we had attended in our teens. As we moved together, tuned in to the same internal rhythm, I felt the slow burn of an old desire but I’d learned to hide my longing in the strength of her friendship.
When she danced with Jay I watched the spark between them reignite. Theirs had been such a short-lived passion, yet there was something so familiar about the sight of them together that the years in between seemed inconsequential.
We’d never understood how Jay’s father had persuaded his mother – whom he had met when he was a student working in Californian vineyards for the summer – to marry him and move to Kilfarran. California was sunshine and surfboards. Ireland was dulled by mist and history – but perhaps it was this colonised history that kept her here. Dolores Lee-O’Meara was African-American, a genealogist specialising in tracing the roots of those, like her, who were descended from African slaves. For seventeen years she’d tried to fit into this small village on the slopes of the Wicklow hills but she missed the sun and dreaded the drawn-out Irish winters. When Trevor O’Meara stubbornly refused to leave his sheep-breeding farm to move to California, she left him, taking her son and daughter with her. After their departure I’d comforted Amelia and reassured her that broken hearts mend. Watching them together that night at Woodbine, I wondered if either of them had really recovered from that summer when they exchanged hot-blooded kisses in the shade of Kilfarren Woods.
In the taxi on the way back to the village, I told Jay the truth about Amelia’s marriage. Was I right or wrong? Did my revelation change the direction of their lives or had destiny preordained what was to come? All I can say in my defence is that sometimes right and wrong don’t matter. It is fate that determines the outcome of our decisions.
Jay loved Amelia. Perhaps he could achieve what I’d been unable to do and rescue her from a precarious and ugly future.
Thirty-One
Amelia had already cleared away the wine bottles and the pizza cartons when Nicholas Skyped from London.
‘Are you alone?’ he asked.
‘Yes, of course I’m alone.’ How easy it had become to lie to him – though, strictly speaking, she was being truthful. Mark was on his way back to Dublin and Leanne had left for Kilfarran Village in a taxi with Jay, who was flying back to California in the morning.
‘How are you feeling?’ Nicholas looked concerned, or was it suspicion that crossed his face? She could no longer tell the difference.
‘I’m okay.’
‘You don’t look okay, Amelia. Have you been drinking?’
Yes, suspicion – as always. ‘A glass of wine,’ she replied. ‘No need to stay off alcohol now, is there?’ Her words, instantly regretted, hardened his expression.
‘Are you blaming me again for the accident―?’