Tender (24 page)

“Sorry,” Catherine said again.

“Well?” Zoe said, her mouth full. “I mean, you say you’re not going out with him, but to me it looked like the two of you were in the process of breaking up.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it looked very serious. Did Emmet get his mid-twentieth-century poets mixed up or something?”

“Emmet Doyle doesn’t know mid-any-century poets,” Catherine snorted, feeling immediately guilty, remembering how Emmet had looked so closely at the Hughes poems.

“I was talking to Conor earlier, by the way.” Zoe fixed her with a look. “And he was telling me that you two aren’t talking at the moment. He told me you had an argument in the Buttery a couple of weeks ago. Over James. I thought I was hearing things.”

“Did he tell you what he
said
about James? Did he tell you what he called him?”

“Camp, I think.”

“Yeah,” Catherine said hotly.

“Which,” Zoe said, raising her eyebrows, “James kind of is. I mean, I think
James
would admit that.”

“Oh, fuck, don’t you start.”

“Start what?” Zoe said. “You’re the one who took it upon yourself to tell Conor and me about James. And others, for all I know.”

“I
didn’t
tell others,” Catherine lied.

“Well, fine. But my point still stands.”

“What point?” Catherine almost spat.

Zoe did not flinch. She rarely did. She regarded Catherine steadily, and sipped from her coffee, and put the cup down. “You can’t protect him, Catherine.”

“Protect
who?
”

Zoe actually laughed, though it was not really a laugh. “Oh, please. You know who I’m talking about. You’re too involved, Cath. Aidan and I have been meaning to bring this up with you for a while now.”

“Aidan and you?” Catherine spluttered. “What are you, a crack team of fucking meddlers now, or something? Or, wait, are you sleeping together?”

“No, Catherine,” Zoe said in a warning tone. “Look, I don’t want to have a fight with you. I’m just saying. You need to give James some credit. You need to stop trying to protect him all the time.”

“I’m not trying to protect him! How could I protect him?”

“Well, that’s kind of my point.”

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” Catherine said, and she began to gather up her lunch things.

“I know you’re his friend,” Zoe said quickly. “His closest friend, I know that. But you have to let him fight his own battles. You know?”

“Oh, yeah,” Catherine said bitterly. “Because that’s really worked out so well. For so long. Leaving people like James to fight their own battles.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about,” Zoe said, pointing at her. “Don’t paint me as some—”

“Saying nothing, instead of standing up and taking a stand?” Catherine said, hearing immediately how ridiculous the sentence sounded. “Instead of doing something to make things easier?” she said.

Zoe stared. “What are you
talking
about, Cits? Nobody is trying to make things difficult for James. If anyone is making things difficult for James, it’s himself. And you, I might as well tell you, are not at all helping by hanging around him like an overprotective mother. Or like his girlfriend. Or like his fucking
wife,
actually. You do realize that people are assuming that you two are a couple?”

“I don’t give a fuck what people assume,” Catherine said. “What the hell am I supposed to do about the things that people assume? What can I do about it?”

“You could stop holding hands with James in public, for one thing.”

“We don’t hold hands,” Catherine said. “We link arms.”

“You look like you’re holding hands,” Zoe said, shaking her head. “It’s the closeness. The physical proximity. It has the same effect.”

“Oh my God. Are you serious? Are you seriously talking to me like this? Fuck
off,
” she said, and she jerked her hand to the side, and this was how she spilled Zoe’s coffee, which went all over the table. “Oh,
shit,
” she said, moving to get things out of the way of the spreading brown liquid.

“Here, here,” Zoe said, already soaking up the spilled coffee with a wad of napkins she had produced from somewhere. “It’s all right,” she said, and she glanced up at Catherine. “Is your book OK?”

Catherine just nodded; she had knocked
Birthday Letters
down onto her lap as soon as she could, but she was pretty sure some of the coffee would have got at it.

Zoe sighed. She reached across and took Catherine’s hand, patted it briefly.

“Emmet touched my hand in the library,” Catherine said.

“Oooh,” said Zoe, and she raised her eyebrows. Then her face changed; something seemed to occur to her. “Does Emmet know about James?” she said.

Catherine said nothing for a moment, weighing up her options, or trying to. Then she nodded, a short, sharp nod.

“Well, thank goodness for that at least.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I mean, at least you’re not pretending to
him
.”

“I am not pretending to anyone!” Catherine exploded. “I told you! What am I meant to do about what people assume? James is my friend. And I’m worried about him. I’m being as good a friend as I can to him so that he doesn’t feel—”

“So that he doesn’t feel gay?” Zoe cut in.

Catherine stared at her. “I can’t believe you said that.”

“Well, I did say it, Catherine. And I’m not sorry I said it. I mean, if you don’t care about yourself, and what people think about your availability…”

“Availability! What is this, a fucking matchmaking festival?”

Zoe shrugged. “At this stage of life, yes. That’s what it’s meant to be.”

“Maybe for you,” Catherine said contemptuously.

“Maybe for James, too, if you’d let him.”

“You don’t know
anything
about him. You met him a month ago, for fuck’s sake!”

“I know that, and if I’d met him three hours ago, it would still be crystal clear to me how much you’re potentially fucking things up for him. What do you think this is doing to James, Catherine? Parading around with a girl on his arm virtually every time he’s out in public? What kinds of opportunities must this, this
illusion
of yours be wrecking for him?”

Catherine scoffed. “There are no opportunities,” she said.

Zoe regarded her for a long moment. “And why do you think that is?”

“Because he’s not ready,” Catherine said, slamming her hand down on the table. “Because he doesn’t feel ready for someone. When he’s ready for someone, someone will come along. Until then, I’m his friend, and it’s my job to look after him.”

“To look
after
him?” Zoe said disbelievingly.

“To look out for him, then,” Catherine said. “I don’t care about the semantics. Put it however the fuck you want to put it.”

“Jesus Christ, Catherine,” Zoe said, shaking her head. “On second thoughts, you should stay well clear of Emmet. He doesn’t deserve this bullshit. He doesn’t deserve to find himself involved with someone like you.”

“Going to go after him yourself?” Catherine sneered. “Another notch?”

“I don’t know what’s happening to you, Catherine,” Zoe said, and she got up and walked away.

E
d Dunne’s opening was on the Thursday before Easter, as it turned out, so few people were still around to come to it with Catherine and James; Amy and Lorraine had already gone home for the weekend, as had Aidan and Liam, and Zoe and Lisa, who both had part-time waitressing jobs, were working that night. James himself had found it difficult to get the night off from O’Brien’s; with every pub in the country about to close for twenty-four hours, the place would be teeming with drinkers, but he had managed to get someone to cover for him. Catherine, meanwhile, was meant to be in Longford already, helping to prepare for her grandfather’s eightieth birthday party, which was taking place that weekend; she had managed to fob her mother off by pretending that her essay was due much earlier than was actually the case.

In Stormont, the peace talks were rapidly approaching their final deadline, which was, as a piece in the
Irish Times
had put it that week, “the best possible publicity” for Dunne’s show. His work had always reflected obliquely on the Troubles, even though he had been gone from Northern Ireland since the 1970s, living first in London and now in New York; over a period of many years, he had kept up with the news from there by making weekly phone calls to friends in Belfast. When news of a particular event struck him, he would go out and make a piece by photographing whatever happened to be in front of him. He had a home upstate as well as in Manhattan, so just as many of the images had a rural setting—a setting that looked almost Irish—as an urban one, and each one bore the date on which it had been taken. The new show would bring together works in this series from the past decade.

She and James had a drink in the Stag’s before going to the gallery. James was disappointed that none of the others had been able to join them.

“It would have been a bit of craic with a few of us,” he said sadly.

“It’ll
still
be craic,” said Catherine.

“Oh, of course, of course it will. I just meant, the more the merrier. You know?”

“Yeah,” she said quietly. “You ready? It’s almost seven.”

When they reached the gallery, James walked upstairs to the exhibition space ahead of Catherine, stopping short as soon as he got to the landing.

“Balls,” he said under his breath.

“What?”

“We’re nearly the first ones here,” he said, sounding mortified. “We should leave and come back again. What was I thinking? Nobody turns up at the time on the invite.”

And it was true, they were among the first people there; four or five people stood chatting in the center of the gallery floor, among them Dunne himself, recognizable from the photograph which had run beside the
Irish Times
piece. He would turn sixty later that year, the piece had said, and the journalist had described him as looking younger, but to Catherine he looked about that; he was bald, and wrinkled, and as tanned as if he lived in the Caribbean, and he wore a dark suit, the jacket of which had a closed collar coming right up to his neck, and bright blue glasses, the frames very round. In his hand he held a glass of champagne, as did the other people standing around him: a couple of gray-haired men, a woman in a tight red dress, a younger, dark-haired man in a more traditional suit and tie. As James and Catherine stood, frozen, at the entrance to the space, Dunne noticed them and beckoned them in.

“Oh, fuck,
fuck,
” James hissed out of the side of his mouth.

“What should we do?”

“Come
in,
for Chrissakes!” the younger man exclaimed. He was American; he looked, Catherine thought, like a Kennedy. He came towards them now as they walked—shuffled—into the space, both blushing—how Catherine hated to see this in James; how she wished he, at least, had managed to look unflustered—and the American smiled, showing his white, straight teeth. He was, Catherine thought, thirty or thirty-five or something, with a high, clean forehead under his tight dark curls.

“Sorry we’re early,” Catherine said as they reached him.

He frowned. “You’re not early.”

“Sorry, sorry,” she blurted again.

He smirked. “Oh, I forgot that about you people. The apologizing.” He extended a hand. “I’m Nate,” he said. “I’m here with Ed. And you two?”

“We’re not,” Catherine said, ridiculously, immediately closing her eyes with the shame of it, so that she could not see the expression on Nate’s face as he reacted to this.

“We’re…” James said, seeming to cast about for a description. “We’re students. Art students. We heard about the exhibition through a contact.”

“Through a
contact?
” Nate said, visibly smothering a laugh.

“Well, a friend, really,” James said hurriedly. “Another, you know, artist.”

“Hmm,” Nate said, nodding slowly. “You still haven’t told me your names.”

Seeming to have decided now to take charge, James stepped forward, his hand outstretched. “James Flynn,” he said briskly. “And this is Catherine Reilly.”

“Very formal,” Nate said; his handshake was firm. “So have you met Ed before?”

“Oh, no,” they said in unison. Catherine blinked rapidly.

“We’re just here to see the art, really,” she said, and she swept her gaze wildly around the gallery walls. “Looks great,” she said, and then, as though propelled, she lurched away from Nate and James and practically ran to the piece which was furthest away, right across the room, a huge photo of a red-bricked block of flats, clothing hanging from many of the balconies, the reflection of a sunset glinting in a swath of the windowpanes. She stood in front of it as though it was an actual building, and one to which she desperately needed to gain admittance; she stood there, clutching the strap of her new Oxfam evening bag, as though she was prepared to queue outside this building all night. Behind her, she could hear the sounds of Nate introducing James to Ed Dunne and the others: James’s
Love your work,
Dunne’s rote, bluffing professions of modesty, Nate’s loud, confident interrogations, and the polite laughter of the people around them, the people who had turned up first to this exhibition and yet seemed not to have any desire to look at the work.

Gradually, more people began to arrive, filling the gallery space, standing in front of the photographs. Whenever Catherine glanced around, James was still deep in conversation with Dunne and his group. In the pub he had expressed a determination to network at the opening, and she had encouraged him, telling him to make sure that people knew that he had a show coming up himself, but now she could not help but feel the sting of being abandoned by him like this. It was her own fault, she knew; if she had not fled the exchange with Nate like she had, she would presumably also be a part of that chatting, smiling cluster of people now. She was comforted by the thought that James could not talk to them all evening, but in the next moment it occurred to her that he was very capable of doing just that; of getting so caught up in the excitement and the stimulation of being in the middle of things that he could completely forget that she was waiting for him elsewhere in the room. She pushed the thought away, because it threatened to make her miserable, and because she had resolved not to be miserable tonight; she had resolved to be normal, and easygoing, and a friend. She fixed her attention on the photograph in front of which she was now standing: it was a scene shot by torchlight in what looked like a field; blades of grass were visible, yellow and bright in the beam against the darkness. In the
Times
article, Dunne had talked about these photos as “guilt-pieces,” works saturated with the consciousness of the place he had left behind thirty years previously.

Bovinia, NY, 19 June 1994,
the piece was titled. Each piece corresponded to an atrocity which had happened in the North, to an event which had claimed a life or lives. 19 June 1994; Catherine tried to think, now, what had happened on that day. She would have been in school, third year; it had been the month, she realized, of her Junior Cert, which had happened at the same time as the World Cup about which the entire country had gone insane. There had been a mass shooting in a pub up there the evening of the first Ireland match, she remembered now; the IRA, or the UVF, or whichever of the bastards it was, had walked into a bar and murdered several men who had been just sitting there, watching the football. Had that been the date? It seemed likely, but then there had been so many dates. Any one month could have had twenty of them. It was incredible to think now that all of that might really be over, that in a room up there, right now, people were possibly finding a way to make it end. It had been around as long as she could remember—her grandmother and her mother gasping and clicking their tongues in sorrow and disbelief at the news on the radio; her father’s angry, downcast eyes. It had been always the choked, frightened air of the country, so Christ knew what it had been like actually to live up there, over the border; Catherine could not imagine. Her family had never even traveled there; it had simply always been a place to which you did not go. She thought of Liam; his father had a pub up there, she remembered him saying, though she could not remember in which town—Enniskillen or Armagh or Derry or one of those places; they were all the same, in honesty, to Catherine; they were all scary, forbidden places, the inhabitants of which she felt somehow in awe of. To live with that, and yet to get on with things—she simply could not imagine.
Daddy, I love you very much,
a dying girl at the scene of the Enniskillen bombing had said to her father, and Catherine, aged nine or ten then, had been unnerved and shaken by it, by the thought of a girl, her life about to be taken from her, having that much courage, that much thought for those who would mourn for her, to be able to say that to her father, to be able to speak those words.

She was growing morbid, she realized; she shook her head vigorously, to shake herself out of it, and moved on to the next photo. This one was of a young black girl sitting on what looked like a footpath; it was gray and stained and cracked. She wore denim dungarees, and red sandals, and her knees were scuffed. In her hand she held a bracelet made of brightly colored plastic balls.
Atlantic Avenue, 8 May 1991,
the piece was called. Her eyes were huge. From the top right-hand corner of the image, a hand reached down, its palm pale and deeply scored.

“Spirited-looking child, isn’t she?” a man to Catherine’s left said. She turned, startled, and there was Michael Doonan, looking not at her but at the photograph.

“Oh,” she said, blushing instantly. “Mr.—”

“Mick,” Doonan said curtly, and then he turned slightly to the woman who was, Catherine realized, with him, and he put a hand to the small of the woman’s back, and he nodded towards Catherine.

“This is the young lady who interviewed me for the Trinity paper,” he said. “My wife, Julia,” he said to Catherine.

“Oh! Mrs.—”

“Julia,”
they both said almost chidingly, Julia shaking Catherine’s hand warmly. She was beautiful, Catherine thought. She looked younger than Doonan, but it was hard to tell; it might just have been that she was so glamorous. She had an ash-blond bob, and sharp blue eyes, and skin that was almost unlined. She wore a white shirt with a high, sculptural collar, and slim black trousers, and on her shoulders was a cropped brown wool cape, and three slim gold bracelets glinted on her right arm.

“We
liked
your piece,” she said, the word
liked
climbing steadily in a way that Catherine could not read.

“Oh, God,” Catherine shook her head. “It was chopped to death by the sub-editor.”

“Ah, the eternal refrain of the journalist,” Julia said, laughing. “I’m a publicist,” she added, by way of explanation. “For my husband, not to mention other, more media-friendly clients.”

“I’ve never pretended to like interviews,” Doonan said with a shrug. “I am what I am.”

“Which is bloody awful, most of the time,” Julia said, glancing to Catherine. “Was he awful to you? He came home and told me he’d been awful to you. Which of course means he was actually twice as awful as he’d admit to having been.”

“Oh, no,” Catherine murmured. “I mean, really,
I
was the one—”

“Well, you managed a good write-up in the end,” Doonan said, seeming unbothered by his wife’s teasing, if that was what it was. “Silk purse from a sow’s ear, as my darling wife put it.”

“From a hog’s arse, more like it,” Julia said, rolling her eyes at Catherine, and with one hand she made a playful swipe at Doonan. “Go over there and get us a couple of glasses of champagne, Mick, will you, for heaven’s sake. Make yourself useful.”

“Right so,” Doonan said, running a hand through his hair, and he trotted off.

Julia watched him go, a fond smile playing on her lips. “I like to torment him,” she said, nudging Catherine gently. “The fact is, I know well what a cheeky article he’s capable of being with young women. I first met him when I was assisting with publicity for
Let Her Go
all those years ago. He was incorrigible.” She gave a short laugh, a jump of mirth. “And still I married him.”

“Oh! Right! Well, he was fine,” Catherine said brightly. “Really. Fine.”

“Oh, he’s a brat,” Julia said, laughing again. “Now, he’s not Naipaul, I’ll give you that. You read that interview that the woman from
The Independent
did with Naipaul?”

Catherine shook her head.

“Well,”
Julia said, raising an eyebrow. “Beg, borrow or steal it. Sir Vidia decided that the questions weren’t worthy of him, and he stood up in the middle of the interview and said, ‘I don’t have time for this, it’d suit you better to be doing an interview with my wife.’ And he called her down from the kitchen or wherever the poor woman was, and he walked out on the journalist.”

“Jesus!”

“And I don’t think he meant that his wife was a spokesperson for his fiction.”

“Jesus.”

“Then again, here you are, talking to Mick Doonan’s wife,” she said, shrugging off her cape now, and folding it over her arm. “Anyway, what brings you here this evening, Catherine? Are you writing about Ed’s show?”