Faithful Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #3)(80)
“Frank, shhh. Why on earth should this have been bad for her? The only thing you’ve ever said about your family was that you didn’t want to get back in touch. It’s not as if you’d told me they were a shower of ax murderers. Jackie is lovely, she’s never been anything but good to Holly, and she said the rest of them were perfectly nice people—”
“And you took her word for it? Jackie lives in her happy place, Liv. She thinks Jeffrey Dahmer just needed to meet a nice girl. Since when does she make our child-rearing decisions?”
Liv started to say something, but I punched the words in harder till she gave up and shut her face. “I feel sick here, Liv, physically sick. This is the one place where I thought I could rely on you to back me up. You always thought my family wasn’t good enough for you. What the hell makes them good enough for Holly?”
Olivia finally lost the rag. “When did I ever say that, Frank? When?”
I stared. She was white with anger, hands pressed back against the door, breathing hard. “If you think your family isn’t good enough, if you’re ashamed of them, then that’s your problem, not mine. Don’t you put it on me. I never once said that. I never thought it. Never.”
She whipped around and grabbed the door open. It shut behind her with a click that, if it hadn’t been for Holly, would have been a house-shaking slam.
I sat there for a while, gawping at the door like a cretin and feeling my brain cells whiz-bang like dodgem cars. Then I picked up the wine bottle, found another glass and went after Olivia.
She was in the conservatory, on the wicker sofa, with her legs curled under her and her hands tucked deep into her sleeves. She didn’t look up, but when I held out a glass to her she disentangled a hand and took it. I poured us each a quantity of wine that could have drowned a small animal and sat down next to her.
It was still raining, patient relentless drops pattering off the glass, and a cold draft was filtering in at some crack and spreading like smoke through the room—I caught myself making a mental note, even after all this time, to find the crack and caulk it over. Olivia sipped her wine and I watched her reflection in the glass, shadowed eyes concentrating on something only she could see. After a while I asked, “Why didn’t you ever say anything?”
Her head didn’t turn. “About what?”
“All of it. But let’s start with why you never told me my family didn’t bother you.”
She shrugged. “You never seemed particularly anxious to discuss them. And I didn’t think it needed saying. Why would I have a problem with people I’ve never met?”
“Liv,” I said. “Do me a favor: don’t play dumb. I’m too tired for that. We’re in Desperate Housewives country, here—in a conservatory, for f*ck’s sake. It’s far from conservatories I was reared. My family is more along the Angela’s Ashes lines. While your lot sit in the conservatory sipping Chianti, my lot are off in their tenement deciding which greyhound to blow the dole money on.”
That got the faintest twitch of her lips. “Frank, I knew you were working-class the first time you opened your mouth. You never made a secret of that. I still went out with you.”
“Yeah. Lady Chatterley likes her bit of rough.”
The bitter edge took us both by surprise. Olivia turned to look at me; in the faint light trickling through from the kitchen her face was long and sad and lovely, like something off a holy card. She said, “You never thought that.”
“No,” I acknowledged, after a moment. “Maybe not.”
“I wanted you. It was as simple as that.”
“It was simple as long as my family was out of the picture. You may have wanted me, but you never wanted my uncle Bertie who starts fart-volume competitions, or my great-aunt Concepta who will explain to you how she was sitting behind a black on the bus and you should have seen the lips on him, or my cousin Natalie who put her seven-year-old on the sun beds for First Communion. I can see how I, personally, wouldn’t give the neighbors full-on heart attacks, maybe just a few mild palpitations, but we both know how the rest of the clan would go down with Daddy’s golf cronies or Mummy’s brunch club. Instant YouTube classic.”
Olivia said, “I’m not going to pretend that’s not true. Or that it never occurred to me.” She was quiet for a while, turning her glass in her hands. “At first, yes, I thought the fact that you weren’t in touch with them probably made things easier. Not that they weren’t good enough; just . . . easier. But once Holly came along . . . She changed the way I thought about everything, Frank, everything. I wanted her to have them. They’re her family. That takes priority over their sun-bed habits.”
I sat back on the sofa, got more wine into me and tried to rearrange my head to make room for this information. It shouldn’t have stunned the bejasus out of me, at least not to this extent. Olivia has always been a vast mystery to me, at every moment of our relationship and especially in the moments when I thought I understood her best.
When we met, she was a lawyer in the Office of Public Prosecutions. She wanted to prosecute a D-list smack dealer called Pippy who had been picked up in a Drug Squad sweep, while I wanted to let him skip along his merry way, on the grounds that I had spent the last six weeks becoming Pippy’s new BFF and I didn’t feel we had exhausted his many interesting possibilities. I called round to Olivia’s office, to convince her in person. We argued for an hour, I sat on her desk and wasted her time and made her laugh, and then when it got late I took her to dinner so we could keep arguing in comfort. Pippy got a few extra months of freedom, and I got a second date.