Girl Unknown(28)

‘Zo?, hello,’ Caroline said brightly, coming out of the kitchen and wiping her hands on a tea-towel.

They shook hands, exchanging some pleasantries I didn’t quite catch. I was still a little shaken from the déjà vu. I felt as if I had asked not just Zo? into our lives, but the shadowy aura of Linda, too.

‘I hope you’re hungry,’ Caroline said, hanging Zo?’s jacket in the hall, then ushering her into the kitchen. ‘David’s been toiling over a hot stove all day.’

‘She’s joking, by the way,’ I said, but the truth was I had gone to some lengths in preparing the dish, making extra effort. Earlier that morning, Holly had made a passing comment about how I was fussing. ‘It’s goulash.’

‘Something the soldiers ate in the trenches of one or other war, isn’t that right?’ Caroline jibed. She gestured for Zo? to sit on one of the barstools and started cutting the foil from the neck of a wine bottle. ‘Red or white?’ she asked Zo?.

‘I’d prefer white, please.’

If Caroline was feeling the strain, she hid it well. I noticed she had taken care with her appearance – she was wearing a smart fitted dress, high heels, and diamond earrings winked beneath her neatly curled hair. While there was no doubting her attractiveness, next to Zo?’s casual beauty there seemed something over-formal and made-up about her. She poured the wine into three glasses.

Jazz was playing on the stereo – easy listening, nothing to distract us from getting to know each other, but if everything did break down and go quiet we wouldn’t have to cringe in our own silence. Above the low melody, I could hear the rumble of feet on the stairs. Robbie came in.

‘Zo?, this is Robbie,’ I said. He held up his hand in a gesture only teenagers can pull off – a kind of salute.

All morning, the notes from his cello had filled the house. Not the beautiful sonorous sounds of performance, but the harsher false starts of practice. Still, there had been something familiar and reassuring about them.

‘Hi,’ Zo? said, a little apprehensively. She smiled and took a timid step back as if to fully observe her half-brother.

Holly followed, but positioned herself behind one of the kitchen chairs before saying hello. She had been unusually withdrawn in the days since I had broken the news about her half-sister, not her usual ebullient and confident self. I felt a jab of uncertainty. All of us seemed unsure how to negotiate the terms of these newly discovered relationships. In some respects, we reverted to the buttoned-up awkwardness of polite exchange that had marked the time after Caroline and I had patched things up post-affair, when we talked to each other in front of the kids with a forced civility, maintaining the pretence for their sakes that our marriage was solid. I imagined it to be how distant relations talked after having being introduced for the first time – awkward, circumspect and full of artifice.

That being said, Caroline remained resolute. She took command of the situation, enlisting Holly’s help with putting out the food, instructing us all on where to sit.

‘You have a beautiful home,’ Zo? offered politely, albeit with a wavering voice. Her eyes were casting around the kitchen and family room. Light flooded in through the glass doors and the skylight. The weather was unusually fine for October.

Robbie asked Zo? where she lived, and blushed a little when she answered.

‘I rent a small flat in Rathmines. Just a bedsit, really.’

‘What made you want to come to Dublin?’ he asked.

She shrugged, ‘I’ve always liked it, since I was a child.’

‘Did you come down much?’

‘I have cousins in Greystones, so sometimes we’d stop off in Dublin on the way to visiting them. Mam and I used to go shopping on Grafton Street.’

I tried to picture it: Linda holding the hand of a little girl, gazing in the windows of Brown Thomas or Marks & Spencer. Dublin is a small city. Would it have been so far outside the bounds of possibility that I might have bumped into her? Would she have introduced me to her daughter if I had? Told me the truth, or tried to pretend Zo? wasn’t mine? Would she have said anything at all?

‘How are you finding UCD?’ Caroline asked, once we had started eating. I was afraid all the questions would make Zo? feel she was being interrogated. She was nervous enough as it was.

‘It’s good. I’m still finding my way a little,’ she said, smiling shyly. ‘But I’m enjoying it.’

There were further questions about her lectures, what clubs she had joined, the part-time job she had picked up in the students’ union shop. She answered them all patiently, and politely, even if there was a note of hesitancy in her voice, as if she did not trust herself completely to say what she thought was expected of her. We were distracted by the food, passing bread and dipping into the salad. To all appearances everything was going well, but beneath the small-talk there was something else, an unspoken tension – a kind of undercurrent of suspicion so that, no matter what Zo? was asked, I heard the sub-textual rip-tide, the undercurrent of what was really meant: Why are you here? What do you want?

It was a relief to hear her ask a question of her own and deflect some of the intense scrutiny she must have felt: ‘Who plays the cello?’ she asked.

She had finished eating, making a neat cross of her cutlery on the plate. The cello was leaning against the wall to the side of the sofa.