Jennifer Hayward - Deal With The Devil

Leo shrugged and sipped his coffee.

‘Not yet fifty,’ Bridget said quietly. ‘Although I know I look much, much older.’ She glanced away to stare through the window and he could see the shine of unshed tears filming her eyes.

In his head, he was doing the maths.

‘But we weren’t talking about me,’ she said softly.

Leo felt a surge of healthy cynicism and thought that if she figured she could disappear behind a veil of anonymity then she was in for a surprise. There were things he wanted to find out, things he needed to find out, and he knew himself well—what he wanted, he got, be it money, women or, in this case, answers. The unsettling hesitancy that had afflicted him off and on, the hesitancy he hated because he just wasn’t a hesitant person, thankfully disappeared beneath the weight of this new resolve.

‘Indulge me,’ he said smoothly. ‘I hate one-sided conversations. I especially hate long chats about myself... I’m a man, after all. Self-expression is a luxury I don’t tend to indulge very often. So, let’s talk about you for a minute. I’m curious. You’re not yet fifty, you tell me? Seems very young to have abandoned the lure of city lights for a quiet place like this.’ He still could not quite believe that she was as young as she said. She looked like a woman in her sixties.

‘What you may call “quiet”, by which I take it you mean “dull”, is what I see as peace.’

‘Brianna said that you’ve been here a while—quite a few years; you must have been even younger when you decided that you wanted “peace”.’ He couldn’t help thinking that, although their colouring was different, he had her eyes, the shape of them. He looked away with a frown.

She blushed and for the first time he could see her relative youth peep out from behind the care-worn features.

‘My life’s been...complicated. Not quite the life I ever expected, matter of fact.’

Curiosity was gnawing at him but he kept his features perfectly schooled, the disinterested bystander in whom he hoped she would confide. He could feel in his bones that the questions he wanted answering were about to be answered.

‘Why don’t you talk about it?’ he murmured, resting the cup on the table and leaning towards her, his forearms resting on his thighs. ‘You probably feel constrained talking to Brianna. In such a small, close-knit community perhaps you didn’t want your private life to be thrown into the public arena?’ He could see her hesitate. Secrets were always burdensome. ‘Not that Brianna would ever be one to reveal a confidence, but one can never be too sure, I suppose.’

‘And who knows how long I have left?’ Bridget said quietly. She plucked distractedly at the loose gown she was wearing and stared off through the window as though it might offer up some inspiration. ‘My health isn’t good: stress, built up over the years. The doctor says I could have another heart attack at any time. They can’t promise that the next time round won’t be fatal.’ She looked at him pensively. ‘And I suppose I wouldn’t want to burden Brianna with my life story. She’s a sweet girl but I would never want to put her in a position of having to express a sympathy she couldn’t feel.’

Or pass judgement which would certainly mean the end of your happy times with her, Leo thought with another spurt of that healthy cynicism, cynicism he knew he had to work at.

‘But I don’t come from here...’ he encouraged in a low voice.

‘I grew up in a place not dissimilar to this,’ she murmured. ‘Well, bigger, but not by a lot. Everybody knew everybody else. All the girls knew the boys they would end up marrying. I was destined for Jimmy O’Connor; lived two doors away. His parents were my parents’ best friends. In fact, we were practically born on the same day, but that all went up the spout when I met Robbie Cabrera. Roberto Cabrera.’

Leo stilled. ‘He was Spanish?’

‘Yes. His father had come over for a temporary job on a building site ten miles out of town. Six months. He was put into our school and all the girls went mad for him. I used to be pretty once, when I was a young girl of fifteen...you might not guess it now.’ She sighed and looked at him with a girlish smile which, like that blush, brought her buried youth back up to the surface.

‘And what happened?’ Leo was surprised he could talk so naturally, as though he was listening to someone else’s story rather than his own.

‘We fell madly in love. In the way that you do when you’re young and innocent.’ She shot him a concerned looked and he hastened to assure her that whatever she told him would stay with him. Adrenaline was pumping through him. He hadn’t experienced this edge-of-the-precipice feeling in a very long time. If ever. This was why he was here. The only reason he was here.

From nowhere, he had a vision of Brianna laughing and telling him that there was nothing more satisfying than growing your own tomatoes in summer, and teasing him that he probably wouldn’t understand because he probably lived in one of those horrible apartment blocks where you wouldn’t be able to grow a tomato if your life depended on it.

He thought of himself, picking her up then and hauling her off to his bedroom at a ridiculous hour after the pub had finally been closed. Thought of her curving, feline smile as she lay on his bed, half-naked, her small, perfect breasts turning him on until his erection felt painful and he couldn’t get his clothes off fast enough.

‘Sorry?’ He leaned in closer. ‘You were saying...?’

‘I know. You’re shocked. And I don’t mean to shock you but it’s a relief to talk about this; I haven’t with anyone. I fell pregnant. At fifteen. My family were distraught, and of course there was no question of abortion, not that we would have got rid of it. No, Robbie and I were committed to one another.’

‘Pregnant...’

‘I was still a child myself. We both were. We wanted to keep it but my parents wouldn’t allow it. I was shipped off to a convent to give birth.’

‘You wanted to keep it?’

‘I never even held it. Never knew if it was a boy or a girl. I returned to Ireland, went back to school, but from that moment on my parents were lost to me. I had three younger siblings and they never knew what had happened. Still don’t. Family life was never the same again.’

‘And the father of the child?’

Bridget smiled. ‘We ran away. His father ended up on a two-year contract. We skipped town when we were sixteen and headed south. I kept my parents informed of my whereabouts but I couldn’t see them and they never lived down the shame of what I’d done. I don’t think they cared one way or the other. Robbie always kept in touch with his parents and in fact, when they moved to London, we stayed with them for several months before they returned to Spain.’

‘You...ran away...’ For some reason, his normally agile mind seemed to be lagging behind.

‘We were very happy, Robbie and me, for over twenty years until he died in a hit-and-run accident and then I went back to Ireland. Not back to where I grew up, but to another little town, and then eventually I came here.’

‘Hit and run...’ The tidal rush of emotions was so intense that he stood up and paced like a wounded bear, before dropping back into the chair.

‘We never had any more children. Out of respect for the one I was forced to give up for adoption.’

Suddenly the room felt too small. He felt himself break out in a fine perspiration. Restless energy poured through him, driving him back onto his feet. His cool, logical mind willed him to stay put and utter one or two platitudes to bring the conversation to a satisfactory conclusion. But the chaotic jumble of thoughts filling every corner of his brain was forcing him to pace the room, his movements uncoordinated and strangely jerky.