Claire Kilroy - The Devil I Know

Yes. First we signed the contracts, then we went to see what we had bought.

Hickey dropped me home to get some rest before setting back out again. I slept until the afternoon then stumbled outside into blazing sunshine, unsteady on my legs, as if I had been bedridden for many years, for all of my life in fact, but was now for the first time bearing my own weight, a man on whom a miracle had been performed. Bona fortuna, Tristram. My luck had turned. M. Deauville hadn’t called since the deal, but then, he didn’t need to. For once, I wasn’t dying for a drink. I raised my face to the sun and my eyelids glowed pink. Maybe the dark days were over.

I wandered up the avenue past Father’s ski lodge of an hotel to the wild rhododendron gardens. May is their month. I have missed their famous display on more occasions than I have caught it because that is the kind of man I am, or was; the kind who let himself lose out on the best part of things.

I found her there, or she found me. Edel. Hickey’s wife.

‘Oh,’ she said, because that’s how all our early conversations began — with an expression of surprise. ‘I came down to see the rhododendrons. They’re at their best at this time of the year.’

‘Is that a fact?’ I said in mock amazement, for I was feeling playful and capricious and expansive all of a sudden, traits I had never experienced while sober. I felt drunk, in fact, now that I think of it. Drunk as a lord.

She lowered her head. ‘You already knew that.’

‘Yes, I already knew that.’

We were walking then, deeper into the gardens. She was leading and I was following. I don’t know how we arrived at this arrangement, just that we did and that I was very happy. Edel was wearing a white sundress. Her blonde hair was tied in a high ponytail and her bare shoulders—

Forgive me. One moment.

*

Thank you, Fergus. You will appreciate that I find the subject difficult. I was the king of the castle and she was my difficult subject. The heat was almost tropical at the base of the bluff; we might have been wandering through a jungle in Borneo. The blossoms were staggered up the jagged incline in hues of red, pink, purple, peach and white until the bank gave way to sheer rock face, and the rock face to blue sky.

The path grew lush and overgrown. Edel kept her head down as she picked her way along it, and those shoulders looked so delicate that I ached to protect them from all the badness in this world, though she seemed untroubled by it. ‘I’ll have to get these paths cut back,’ I blustered in an effort to assert my authority, and she threw me this look over those shoulders before disappearing behind a screen of leaves, leaving me wondering whether it could possibly have meant what I hoped it did. Such a difficult, difficult subject.

A halter-neck. That is the type of dress she wore. A white cotton bow was knotted at the nape, but that is by the by. Or maybe it isn’t. I suspect that various undocumented forces were at work upon me during that period — of which the white cotton bow knotted at the nape of Edel’s neck was one — but that I’ll spend the rest of my life trying and failing to get to the bottom of the other agencies that invisibly and inexorably exerted their pull, and that, furthermore, the rest of my life should be spent this way, that all of us who were implicated should spend the rest of our lives this way, examining the aftermath for clues, sifting through the rubble, though I appear to be alone in this endeavour.

We almost collided when I pushed through the leaves to find her waiting on the other side in a drift of wild garlic. It felt natural to place my hands on her waist. Her waist seemed their natural resting place. She reached up and plucked a leaf from my hair before initiating the kiss that initiated everything, but that is beside the point. I had never touched another man’s wife before, but that is also beside the point. I no longer understand the point. I no longer know why I’m here. Just that I am here but she is not and that is the end of that.

*

The forest looked more than ever like a jungle when we emerged some time later from our dell. Edel took the path that forked up the hill and I took the one winding down, but instead of going home I stood watching her ascend through the rhododendrons, the little bow knotted at her nape, a butterfly that had alighted on her neck. I had tied that bow myself. No trail of footprints betrayed our bower. There was no sign that we had been there at all. I was not sure whether I could even find my way back to that place again, and at the same time, by the same token, I’m not sure I ever found my way out of it. I’m still there, or part of me is, my choked morsel of a heart.

She reached the point where the castle lands ended and the real world began. As I turned to leave something caught my eye. A familiar shape was crouched beneath the gunnera. I pounded over and pushed back the giant leaves to expose Larney squirming on the forest floor, the serpent in paradise. I cursed him, I cursed the filthy little goblin. ‘I didn’t see her!’ he whimpered up at me. ‘I didn’t see her diddies!’

*

Down at the castle, a shiny new monster truck was parked in the courtyard. Hickey jumped out. ‘Where the fuck were you?’

‘What business is it of yours?’

‘Have you seen the shagging time?’

I nodded at the truck. ‘What the hell is that?’

‘Why aren’t you answering your phone?’

We were both full of questions that neither party was prepared to answer. Hickey jerked a thumb at the passenger door. ‘Go on, get in. Better late than never.’

This wasn’t about Edel. Were it about Edel, I would already have been burst. ‘Late for what?’

‘Are you for the birds? Late for viewing the farm, a course.’ He hauled his weight into the cabin and the contraption bobbed like a raft on its tractor tyres. Those tyres were as disproportionate as football-sized breast implants. ‘What are you waiting for?’ he shouted out the sunroof.

I opened the passenger door. A cream leather interior in a utility vehicle struck me as a poor call. ‘Does Edel approve of this monstrosity?’ I was desperate to talk about her.

‘The wife?’ Hickey pulled a face without looking at me. He was punching letters into the keypad of the satellite navigation system and it all looked a bit implausible, his hairy hand trying to operate technology. ‘What’s it to her? Ah, for fuck’s sake. It says it doesn’t recognise the place.’

‘That’s because it isn’t a place.’

‘It will be soon.’ Hickey started the ignition and did his post-pint sigh. ‘ Ahhhhh , listen to her.’

He barely gave the Claremont site a second glance as we passed, which was most out of character, considering he’d been pretty much living down there according to Edel, though I reckoned he’d been spending his nights behind the Viking’s Staff Only door. He pressed a button in the console and my seat tilted back. He pressed another and the sunroof sealed shut. A third and the leather steering wheel rose in his hands. ‘Height adjustment,’ he noted with satisfaction, then produced a folded page from his shirt pocket. ‘Here. McGee’s office emailed that.’ It was the site map.

Hickey had already lobbied the Minister for Bribes. Ray had concluded that diverting the Metro would be an expensive and time-consuming business but he saw no reason why it couldn’t be rolled out were enough money invested at the pre-planning stage.

‘How much?’ I asked.

‘A quarter of a million.’

‘Jesus.’ Greedy X.

The architect had similarly agreed that Hickey’s proposal to build a new urban quarter on the site to accommodate Dublin’s burgeoning workforce was achievable, but then, Morgan was paid to design whatever he was told to design. Hickey was so fired up with his plans for the farm that I wondered whether he had even partially grasped the magnitude of the international property portfolio that we had acquired overnight.