Girl Unknown(18)

‘And boots,’ he said then.

‘Boots?’

‘She wears these boots – military-looking. Doc Martens, I suppose. Oxblood in colour. They look enormous at the end of her skinny legs. She’s such a little slip of a thing. Shy.’

The way he said it, I couldn’t help thinking he felt affection towards her.

He lay there for a moment, staring into the dark. Outside, the car alarm had stopped, and silence came into the room, like a sudden intrusion. He turned over, flattening himself in preparation for sleep.

But I didn’t sleep. It was as though each of us – in separate and distinct ways – had been plunged back into the past. Fragments of old memories were coming back at unexpected moments. I wondered, as David’s breathing slowed, if his last waking thoughts that night were of Linda. As for me, I found myself going back further to another time, another meeting. A decision made. The weight of its seriousness pressing on my young shoulders. You don’t have to come with me, I had told him. I can go on my own. Trying to sound brave while inside I was dying. Did he remember that conversation, my sleeping husband? Was any of this coming back to him, too? Old ghosts awoken, stirred angrily into life by this new girl, like a wasp’s nest struck with a stick.

It was a flare in my brain – her golden hair. Everywhere I looked there were girls with blonde hair, hanging loose down backs and over shoulders, swinging in ponytails, with flicked fringes. I found myself staring at teenage girls, calculating their age, anxiously assessing their likeness to David, to Holly. She could have been any one of them.

I didn’t intend to seek her out. But one morning when I was driving along Morehampton Road, running an errand for Peter, it occurred to me that if I kept on driving I would reach the UCD campus.

I rang the History Department office while driving, saying my niece was a first-year student of history; she had been visiting me last night but had left her phone in my house. I had no way of getting in touch with her, I said, and wanted to drop it into the university.

All I wanted was to get a look at her. I had no intention of approaching her. First-years had American History in Theatre J that morning, I was told. All I needed was to see her. Once I had done so, my fear would subside, or if not my fear, at least my curiosity.

The possibility of bumping into David, going from his office to a lecture, had crossed my mind. If I saw him, I would make something up. Part of me wondered what his reaction would be. Students were already streaming out of lecture theatres as I ran up the steps and into the Arts building, the corridors and foyers becoming momentarily clotted with them. When I got to Theatre J and looked around at the empty seats, the vacant space awaiting the next influx, I felt a small stab of disappointment.

What are you doing? I asked myself. Foolish woman.

Outside the lecture hall, students were drifting sluggishly along, like hung-over cows. I felt conspicuous among them, dressed in a black trouser suit and kitten heels, my shoulder-length brown hair flicked out at the ends. I didn’t look like a lecturer, let alone a student. To them, I probably looked like an accountant or a management consultant on campus to give a presentation. I would call on David. Surprise him. Make a serious attempt to bridge the gap we both knew had opened between us since his revelation. Pushing myself away from the wall, I looked towards the stairwell, and it was in the act of turning that I saw her.

Blonde hair, just as he had said, luminous under the fluorescent strip-lighting. Her face small and pale. A skinny girl, and not very tall, but she held herself well, shoulders thrown back, a long, straight neck, her bag slung over one shoulder – a casual, relaxed pose. And the boots he had mentioned lent something firm and inflexible to her otherwise waif-like appearance.

She was standing by a marble and limestone sculpture known to generations of students as the Blob. I had wanted to catch a glimpse of her, nothing more. Well, I had done that, yet still I lingered. She didn’t look remotely like either of my children. The lightness of her hair, the milky-whiteness of her skin were at odds with the darker colouring that unified the four of us. I looked her over and felt doubt trickling in.

She broke away from her friend and walked through the thinning crowd of students towards the exit. I watched her narrow back, her skinny legs, the careful manner of her walk – no slouching or dragging feet with this one. Reason told me to let her go, but impulse led me to follow her, and soon enough I was outside again, feeling the chill of the air, following her up the paved walkway towards the pond by the Engineering building. All the time, I was trying to keep my distance, trying to walk as if I had a purpose other than stalking her.

She took a seat on an empty bench on the deck around the pond. As I neared, the sound of my heels rang out and I slowed my step. She was sitting with her eyes closed, her head tilted to the sky, soaking up what little heat there was. Her pose was perfectly still, like a cat basking in the sun. I stopped, looked down at her, and slowly she opened her eyes. Green eyes, a little widely spaced, short dense lashes. They looked up at me in an assessing way, but she didn’t say anything.

‘You’re Zo?,’ I said.

‘Do I know you?’

Still so composed, so unfazed. A Northern flavour to her voice.

‘I’m Caroline,’ I said. ‘David’s wife.’

Her face cleared in recognition, eyes narrowing a fraction, then a slight flicker as she took me in, her interest piqued. She smiled, a slow, lazy smile and, it seemed to me, a little sly. ‘So he told you.’