Lessons in Heartbreak (17 page)

‘Izzie!’ a voice rang out from inside. ‘Urgent call for you from Ireland. Some emergency…’

Izzie gratefully took the cup of coffee that Carla offered her and wrapped her hands around it. Their cube farm in the Perfect-NY offices wasn’t cold, but she was icy inside at the news. Darling Gran, one constant in an always messed-up world, was in hospital back home in Tamarin and she might die.

The news had shocked all thought of Joe out of her mind.

Instead, she thought of Lily, frail now more than slender, with those faded blue eyes staring out wisely at the world. Kindness shone out of her: kindness and wisdom.

Izzie couldn’t bear to think that her grandmother’s wisdom would be gone for ever when she needed it so much.

There were so many things she still needed to know, so many things she wanted to tell Gran – now, she might never be able to.

And the one thing she desperately wanted to share, how she felt about Joe, she’d never be able to tell. To a woman of her grandmother’s generation, there could be nothing worse than infidelity, and Izzie simply couldn’t bear to see Gran’s eyes cloud over with the knowledge that Izzie was having an affair with a man who was still married. If Carla, who was as liberal as it was possible to be without being a radical lesbian feminist, had been shocked by the news, imagine how devastated Gran would be. Granted, Carla’s anger was only because she felt Izzie had been conned, but still.

‘Oh, Gran,’ Izzie prayed, willing magic into the air as if that might breathe health into her grandmother thousands of miles away, ‘please, please don’t go.’

‘It was a massive stroke,’ Dad had said on the phone. ‘They found her in the courtyard outside the church. Luckily she’d fallen against the back of the seat or else she’d have cracked her head on the slabs and then, well…’ His voice had trailed off.

Her father couldn’t say ‘she would certainly have died’. Not dealing with the hard stuff was Brendan’s forte. Izzie knew it was not by accident that she’d fallen for an alpha male with vigour, courage and the ability to face life.

The noticeable differences between the man she loved and her father was the stuff undoubtedly covered on the first day of the Psychology Made Simple class.

‘When did it happen?’

‘This morning after Mass.’

‘What do the doctors say?’ Izzie steeled herself.

‘Not much…she’s in intensive care and they’ve got all these tests to do, but nobody will really say anything to me…’

Izzie could imagine her father, taller than she was, but without a shred of her fierce energy, looking round the ICU for a doctor, but not able to find anyone to ask because they were all rushing and he didn’t like to bother anyone.

Sweet and gentle was a lovely way to live, but it didn’t work in the high-speed, intensely pressured atmosphere of an emergency room.

‘Is anyone with you? Like Anneliese or Edward?’

Uncle Edward was a more forceful individual than her father and would certainly get things done. Darling Anneliese was even better: she was calm in any crisis and she’d certainly needed to be, Izzie knew.

Her cousin, Beth, would have gone under if her mother hadn’t been made of such stern stuff.

‘No.’ Her father made the word into two syllables.

Izzie waited.

‘Anneliese is on her way. I phoned Edward, you see, and told him and said to tell Anneliese, and he went all quiet and said since it was an emergency he would, which sounds strange, but I didn’t have time to ask him…’

‘But Anneliese is on her way?’ Izzie was impatient with these details. She needed to know that her aunt would be there, looking after things, looking after Lily.

‘Well, yes. I suppose. You know how Anneliese loves your gran.’

‘
I
should be there,’ Izzie said.

‘I wouldn’t dream of asking you to come home. You’re so busy with work,’ her father said quickly, which made Izzie feel bleak at this perceived notion that her job, only a bloody job, was more important than her beloved grandmother. Had she made them all think that? That Perfect-NY was higher on her list of priorities than her family?

‘I’m coming,’ she said fiercely. Damn the bloody job. If she had to swim across the bloody Atlantic to reach her grandmother’s hospital bedside, she’d do it. ‘Gran needs me.’

What she didn’t say was:
And I need her because my heart is broken
.

‘Go home,’ advised Carla. ‘You look wrecked. Lie on the couch and chill, and call me if you need me, right?’

Izzie nodded. ‘I will, thanks – for everything.’ Thanks for not mentioning Joe again, she meant.

She got a cab home instead of battling it out on the subway, and all the way home she wondered if God was so vengeful that her grandmother’s stroke was His way of getting at her for being involved with Joe.

No, don’t be crazy, she told herself. That’s like saying
only you
are important, so that God punishes other people to get at you. But still the thought hammered away in her head with the intensity of a horror movie watched late at night. She’d always jokingly described herself as a submarine Catholic – one who only comes up when there’s trouble. Now she realised it was true, and then some. Trouble made her Catholicism seep out of her pores and make her question everything.

At home, she checked the airlines and found that she’d never make that evening’s flight to Dublin, but that there were seats on the next evening’s.

She booked, feeling a strange sense of relief that she couldn’t leave New York just yet. She felt too unravelled to go, so much of her life still hung out there, threads flying in the wind.

She began to pack for the trip and found that she couldn’t concentrate. What would the weather be like was normally an important packing question, but the major one – how long would she be gone – was unanswerable. It depended on her grandmother’s survival.

Oh, Gran
.

The silence of the apartment was closing in on her. Izzie was rarely at home on a weekday afternoon; she was always out there, being New York City Girl, rushing and racing. For what? she thought bitterly. To be alone, dealing with this horrible news, preparing to make a journey home alone too.

Where was her lover now that she needed him? With his wife, that’s where.

Izzie sat down on her small couch and cried. All the romance and the excitement counted for absolutely nothing at that moment. She could tell herself it didn’t matter that she didn’t have a husband, 2.5 children and a crippling mortgage, but at moments like this, it did matter.

She knew she wasn’t the only woman to fall for a married man, but it felt like it – she was in a club with only one member, a spectacularly stupid member.

Still, when her cell phone rang, she leapt to it, hoping that it might be him, eyes too blurry to focus on the number.

‘Hello?’

‘Hey, girl, how are you doing?’ Carla’s smoky Marlboro Lights voice was warm with concern.

Izzie slumped against the wall beside the phone. ‘OK,’ she mumbled.

‘I’m sorry I told you to go home. I got to thinking that you’d be climbing the walls by now.’

Izzie laughed. ‘How’d you know that?’

‘Instinct.’

‘Whatever it is, it’s spot on,’ Izzie replied. ‘I can see the lure of the barstool now. All those people I used to think were losers for sitting in bars in the afternoon – they have a point.’

‘You could join me on a barstool tonight? First, we eat, then we hit a club or two. Might take your mind off things.’

‘Count me in,’ Izzie said. If she stayed at home, she would cry herself to sleep, she knew.

They arranged to meet in SoHo at eight and when her phone rang moments later, Izzie answered it without looking, thinking it was Carla ringing back.

‘Hi,’ she said warmly.

‘Hello.’

It was him. Colder than he’d ever sounded before, but still him.

The driving rain hitting her face outside the museum benefit came starkly back into her mind. She thought of his arm on his wife, the stunning WASP blonde with racehorse legs, and the blank look on his face as he stared at Izzie.

Then, she remembered her father’s voice on the phone, along with the vision of Gran lying in a coma, and all the vicious things she’d planned to say to Joe vanished. She needed him like she’d never needed him before.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, starting to sob. ‘I’m sorry, Joe. It’s awful, my grandmother back home in Ireland is sick: she’s had a stroke and they don’t know if she’s going to be all right, and it’s awful…’

‘Oh my love,’ he murmured, frost gone. ‘I’ll be right over.’

He was there in ten minutes.

At the door, he said nothing, just held out his arms and let her come to him where he drew her into the tightest bear hug she’d ever experienced.

‘Baby,’ he kept saying over and over again, his hands tenderly stroking her as if she were a child.

Finally safe, she cried until her face was raw and she felt too tired even to stand.

He brought her over to the couch and they sat, Izzie curled up on his lap. The comfort from feeling small and loved was immense.

‘Thank you,’ she sighed, her head bent against the wall of his chest.

Curled up against him, she talked about Gran: about how she’d practically lived in Lily’s house after her mother died, and how Gran had been the only person who didn’t shy away from talking about her mum.

‘Dad didn’t know what to do. He thought that if we talked about Mum, I’d get upset, so it was better if we didn’t. That
was fine for the first year when I couldn’t talk about Mum, but afterwards, when I wanted to, he’d change the subject so fast. Maybe he couldn’t talk for his own sake, either.’

‘What was she like?’ he asked.

‘A lot like my dad: vague and artistic. She painted. She’d walk around with paint smudges all over her clothes and on her face and not even notice. She’d go to the supermarket in her slippers and laugh if you mentioned it to her. Bohemian, I guess. She had quite dark skin, not like me, and she loved the sun. She had a mole on her back that went very dark, and she didn’t think anything of it. By the time they realised it was cancerous, she had only weeks to live.’

Joe said nothing, just carried on gently stroking her hair.

‘Dad went to pieces, like today,’ she sighed. ‘Nothing new there. Gran stepped in and took over. She raised me.’

‘Tell me about her,’ he said, moving so that they were both lying on the couch now, his long legs hanging over the end, Izzie feeling fragile against him, the way she always did because he was such a big man.

So she talked: about Gran blazing a trail in Tamarin by leaving to train as a nurse in London during the war, of the stories she’d told of being a twenty-one-year-old in another country, and how she’d coped.

‘That’s probably why I wanted to travel when I left school,’ Izzie said. ‘I’d grown up hearing Gran talk about another world outside Tamarin, and it felt like what I had to do.’

‘But she went back to Ireland, though, didn’t she?’

Izzie nodded. ‘She went back after the war, married my granddad and has been there ever since.’

‘I know you’re going home, but not for good, right? I don’t want you to leave New York,’ he murmured. ‘Your grandmother needs you now, but not to stay. I need you even more, Izzie.’

He moved his hand from stroking her hair to gently trace the curve of her waist and hip, settling around the firm swelling of her buttocks.

Fear and death made people think of love, Gran had told her once. That thought flickered through Izzie’s consciousness as she felt her body answering Joe’s hunger.

People regularly went home from funerals and made love, she knew, to banish the cold, hard reality of death. Gran wouldn’t die, she just couldn’t. As if the fierce passion of their lovemaking could keep her grandmother’s heart beating through some spiritual intervention, Izzie Silver kissed her lover back with more hunger than ever before.

Life and love couldn’t end, it couldn’t.

They ended up in the bed after all, since the couch was too small for both of them. Joe had lifted Izzie up and carried her to the bed, throwing off the pretty pillows that decorated it so they had more room, pinioning her to the bed with his weight as he adored her body, kissing, sucking, licking. The second time was gentler, more loving and less fierce.

When he was inside her, he cradled her face in his hands and gazed into her eyes with such love that Izzie wanted to cry, but he didn’t say anything, only called her name as he came.

After their exertions, Joe lay beside her, breathing deeply. Izzie was sure he was asleep, and she lay curled against him.

As she lay there, she allowed herself to dream. What if he said that this was the time for him to leave his home and come to her?

You need me now, Izzie. I’m going to be there for you. I’m coming to Tamarin too
.

And Izzie, who knew she’d never, ever have asked him for that because she wasn’t the sort of woman to walk round with a chisel in her purse, trying to prise him off his wife, would say:

Thank you, I’d hoped you’d say that, but I’d never ask
.

If she’d asked, she’d be no better than the sort of woman she hated: the professional girlfriends who picked married men with big bank balances and used skills like safe-crackers to get their hands on the money. That wasn’t Izzie.

But if he came to her now, how wonderful it would be. She’d be able to cope a little better if he were with her, holding her hand, sitting beside her in the hospital with Gran.

‘This is the man I love, Gran,’ she’d whisper, and even,
God forbid
, if Gran never woke up, Izzie would have brought Joe to meet her. She so wanted Gran’s approval of the man she loved. Even though it was all so unconventional and difficult, it would work out, because love found a way, didn’t it?

The love of her life stretched beside her and then moved so that he was propped up on one arm, staring down at her.

She gazed up at him happily, eyes tracing the familiar lines of his face and loving what she saw.

‘Izzie, I need to know why you came to the museum last night,’ he said.

‘
What
?’ she asked, her happy daydream crashing to the ground. ‘Can’t you guess?’