Forty-eight years earlier…
It was strange, this new imbalance in her relationship with Douglas. She still loved him, perhaps she always would. Now they bumped into each other and it seemed as if they were stepping into a new dance with each other. The Christmas holidays were coming up and Tess had a feeling that the break might do them both good. Secretly, she hoped that if Douglas didn’t see her for a few weeks he’d be overcome with loneliness and realise that he loved her as much as she loved him. It seemed like her only chance at this stage.
At least Nancy was happier in herself. She left each day for her secretarial course with a real bounce in her step and arrived home later each evening. When Tess quizzed her about her new friends, she fobbed her off with ‘Oh, just a bunch of girls from the course.’ Tess was happy for her because Nancy had never been one to make a big circle of friends. She wondered, too, if maybe she’d met a boy. There was something about her, a new-found lightness and Tess recognised it as that same feeling she had in those first few days when she would run into Douglas in the university corridors. Sometimes she thought about those days, the world was a different place then, before they’d kissed, before they’d gone to the ball. It saddened her to think that life would never go back to those carefree days. As far as Douglas was concerned, it was as though, she’d completely lost her value.
*
The Sunset club had grown smaller, warmer, duskier without Douglas. Tess felt something snake along her spine, a feeling that something had flipped within her since she last sang here. Stephen must have noticed it too. He handed her a tall glass of gin that burned her lips but imbued her with a sense of warmth that had nothing to do with the clamminess of the place. She drank the first half before she was due to sing.
When it was her turn, she walked to the stage with a lazy, sensual languor that fitted well with the cocktail dress that clung to her but sat at odds with the girl who came from Ballycove and wanted only the boy who once sat silently with her sister, disapproving, if only she’d known it.
She tried to put aside the fact that she felt more out of place in college with every passing day. Somehow, in that fuggy sultry music, the loneliness that had started to creep into her soul seemed to fizzle into a discontented energy that numbed the cloaking ache about her heart.
She heard the band behind her begin to rumble into the opening bars; it was time for her to sing, but nothing came. She stood back a little from the spotlight; searched out the eyes she hoped would push her on.
There was nothing. She was empty, there was no music – somehow it had deserted her. She waited until they rallied through a sequence that might have been a drawn-out introduction, but when it was time for her to sing, again she froze. It seemed she stood for an eternity, looking out into the anonymous darkness. There’s no counting minutes when time stands still and a life is turned on the loss of something irreplaceable. In those moments, the tight-lipped conclusion of an unremarkable club choked the harmony from her. It was enough to let her know that she didn’t want to be here anymore. She mumbled ‘sorry’ into the microphone and made her way into the wintry night outside.
Without her, they were just background music – she knew that. They needed her, but she couldn’t do this anymore. It cost too much. She was failing every written exam she sat – the only one she knew she’d pass was when she had to stand before the class and perform. And now? She wasn’t so sure of even that.
The fresh air served the gin more than it cleared her head. Each breath seemed to bring a new wave of unsteadiness to her. She leant against a railing, for a minute, tucked her collar up, buttoned herself in as much against the night-time roving crawlers as against the winter chills. She wasn’t sure how long she stood. She thought of Douglas and how her life seemed to be suddenly changing. The knowledge that Nancy would move back to Ballycove only cemented the notion that she was, by comparison, adrift in some unfamiliar way. At this moment, she missed Aunt Beatrice and that common sense she could be relied upon to dispense in even the darkest moments.
‘Hey, Tess.’ Stephen was beside her. ‘You all right? What are you doing here? You know all kinds are about this area, it’s no place for a girl on her own, to be…’ He looked at her now, ‘Come on. I’ll bring you home.’ He placed an arm at her back; half held her up and pushed her along, all at once.
They walked in silence; he wasn’t exactly full of sparkling conversation.
At the door, he stopped, just long enough for her to catch his eyes. ‘You’ll be fine, it mightn’t seem like it now, but you know where we are if you want to come back to the club.’ He put his hand up to her face and placed it gently on her cheek and then he was gone and Tess had a feeling that it would be a very long time before she saw Stephen again.