Callie Reynolds sat in the cosmetic surgeon’s chair and winced.
This was going to hurt, no doubt about it.
‘I think you need a little more filler . . .’ Frederica, the cosmetic surgeon pointed, ‘. . . just there. A little lift.’
Callie held the small mirror up to her face and knew why she never had enlarging mirrors in her bathroom. Up this close in the heavily magnified dermatologist’s mirror, she looked about seventy and her skin was as pitted as Pompeii on Day Two of the disaster. And as for the increasing growth of fine facial hairs . . .
If it kept up this way, she’d look like a baby chicken by the time she was sixty.
Once, sixty had seemed old, but not now. She would be fifty in a month.
Fifty. She’d never thought she’d care and yet, now that it was around the corner, she found that she did. Worse, she kept thinking of her family and all the bridges she’d burned.
Was that why people hated the big birthdays? Not the age but the retrospection?
‘I don’t want to look done,’ she said again to Frederica, who was the best in Dublin.
‘Nobody who comes to me looks done,’ said Frederica indignantly and then they both grinned. They’d often had this conversation. Just across the hall was a dermatologist who specialised in turning out people who looked expensively retouched from a distance of fifty yards when viewed even by people who were legally blind. They came out of her office with big lips, puffy cheeks and glassily smooth foreheads that couldn’t move a muscle even at the onset of an earthquake.
‘Sorry,’ apologised Callie. ‘I’m just anxious, Frederica. I feel old, irritable and anxious.’
‘Hormones,’ said Frederica firmly. ‘Have you seen anyone for HRT yet?’
‘No. It’s like admitting I need it. Being on the verge of menopause makes me feel so . . .’ She searched for the word. ‘Ancient. Dried up. Unfeminine.’ There, she’d said it.
‘We all fight ageing the best we can, Callie. You could be mourning the lack of fertility. And for the moods with perimenopause, you need help. If you needed insulin, you’d take it. I’ve given you the name of the best gynaecologist I know, please see her.’
‘I know,’ muttered Callie. ‘I didn’t know it was going to be like this. I thought I’d sink into elegant fiftyhood and, instead, I just feel like a dried-out prune on the inside, with no sex drive. I’ve no energy and zero interest in the party my poor husband is planning.’
‘That’s sweet of him.’ Frederica went to the fridge where she kept her magical ampoules and filled up a syringe.
‘Yes, he’s very good,’ agreed Callie, even though she knew that Jason was driven to have the party for them, the fabulous Reynolds family, rather than as a love letter to her.
Jason, bless him, loved to show off.
She got ready for the pain as the doctor flicked on her special light, put on her glasses and looked closely at her.
‘So, where are you having this fabulous fiftieth birthday party?’
‘At home.’
It would all look amazing, though, she thought, almost tearfully. Jason would stop at nothing to make sure it would be sensational. He loved her. He wanted to show off both her and their fabulous house.
So why didn’t she feel more excited about it all? What the heck was wrong with her?
Afterwards, Callie snuck out the back entrance to the surgeon’s rooms wearing her sunglasses. She walked coolly and elegantly to her car, like the former model she was. Not that she’d been a Chanel favourite or anything like it. No, she’d modelled in Ireland in the eighties when she’d been the muse for an Irish designer who’d never made it on the international stage but had been an utter genius. Simon had been kind, clever, gay and the AIDs plague had taken him from the world too soon.
Simon had made her name and he’d understood her, intuitively recognised her anxieties and that just because she looked like Grace Kelly didn’t mean she came from the same social strata.
‘Beauty, darling, is your ticket out of here,’ he used to say when he was draping fabric on her in his small fourth-floor studio from which the spires of Dublin could be seen. ‘Ignore the bitches with the money who might mock your accent – I was hardly born with a silver spoon in my mouth.’
Callie had jerked in astonishment and got a pin stuck into her by mistake for her trouble.
‘Sorry, just don’t move. Elocution lessons. Changes the grubby tin spoon into a silver one.’
Simon had been the one to get her to change her name, from Claire to Callie.
‘Sounds better, different,’ he’d said. ‘You’ve got to stand out. Callie’s the shortened version of Calliope, tell people that.’
‘Callie-what? They’ll know I’m lying.’
Simon had fixed her with a knowing look: ‘Everybody lies, sweetpea. Didn’t you know?’
She’d had the elocution lessons. Had read books, had gone to galleries and museums, read the papers earnestly.
She could now move in the higher echelons of the rich with ease, but the thing that had transformed her from being a working-class girl with notions had been her relationship with Ricky.
Wild, beautiful and often emotionally lost, he was a posh boy from her home town who had a guitar, big dreams and sat writing songs all day. At night, he prowled the pubs and clubs, hating himself for not being successful yet, worrying that his parents had been right and he should have gone into medicine, like his father. Poor Ricky, he’d always been searching for something and he found it in Callie, with her wise eyes and her tender soul.
They fell into each other’s arms and in love. Somewhere along the way, Ricky had found fame. Then, almost inevitably, he’d found drugs, and Callie had been left behind.
One of his band’s most famous songs was ‘Calliope’, an ode to her, and she never listened to it when it came on the radio. She’d switch channels, pushing down all the emotions the music conjured up. Of another time, another her. When she still saw her family, her darling Ma and Aunt Phil, and even poor Freddie, who’d tried rehab twice but still couldn’t escape the power of drugs.
At home, Callie drove the Range Rover into the underground garage and made her way round Jason’s Ferrari. Bright red.
‘The ultimate mid-life crisis,’ he’d joked as it had been delivered, and Callie had thought ‘yes, indeedy’ but said nothing.
As long as buying a penis-shaped car was the worst of Jason’s crises, then she didn’t mind. Big boy toys she could handle.
In the house, she heard the hum of the vacuum.
Brenda was there. Great. With Brenda, she didn’t have to pretend.
Without worrying if she was red-faced, Callie walked through the basement, past the wine cave, then up to the kitchen, which was the cosiest part of the house. It was all rich creams, wooden countertops and scarlet gingham cushions, like the American fantasy kitchens in magazines she used to read when they had no money.
‘You look like a pincushion,’ teased Brenda, when she turned off the vacuum.
‘It keeps your eyes off the rest of the wrinkles and my furry face,’ deadpanned Callie.
‘If you have wrinkles and fur, I’m turning into an ancient kiwi fruit,’ said Brenda, reaching into her pocket for her cigarettes.
Brenda was half-Irish, half-Brazilian, and five years older than Callie. To her disgust, she had fair Irish skin instead of the honeyed Brazilian variety like her dad, but she still loved to sit in the sun and smoked forty a day, neither of which were skin or healthcare tips recommended by Dr Frederica.
‘Give up the fags, then,’ teased Callie.
‘That is an old, old song, baby,’ was Brenda’s reply and she went to the back door, opened it, pulled out her cigarettes with the ease of practice, and lit up. ‘If Himself comes in and complains, tell him to eff off,’ she added.
Jason, an ex-smoker, was notoriously anti-smoking in anyone else.
‘But Jason’s in work,’ said Callie, putting a cup under the boiling water tap to make herself some tea.
He was gone every morning at half six and only the direst emergencies got him back before six p.m.
‘No.’ Brenda sucked on her cigarette like her life depended on it. ‘He’s here. Came back half an hour ago and is in the study roaring into the phone.’
‘What?’
‘Yeah, must be some big crisis. I made him coffee. Don’t think he even noticed me.’
Callie took her tea and wandered towards the study. From outside the door, she could indeed hear her husband shouting into the phone. Not his posh voice, the rounded vowels were gone: he was husky-voiced, enraged and spoke like the man from Ballyglen who’d been brought up the hard way.
‘Just make it fucking work! What do you think I pay you for, you little shit!’
Callie shivered, the anxiety rushing through her again. The rage in his voice wasn’t good.
There was obviously something wrong.
She’d love to ask, but Jason never talked about work.
Annoyingly, when she said anything, he’d snap, ‘just business stuff’, and stalk off into the study, dismissing her, which she hated.
But this shouting – this was new. Something was up? Was it Jason himself?
It was a niggle in the back of her mind, a shiver of awareness that something in their relationship had shifted. If his irritation was just business, fine. Yet in some deep part of herself that Callie didn’t want to look too closely into, she wondered could her husband – faithful always – be straying?
Brenda, who was so cynical she should have run for election, would probably say she wasn’t in the least surprised.
And Evelyn . . . Telling Evelyn would mean admitting that, after years of watching Evelyn get over Rob, finally Callie was in the same boat.
The next day, she and Evelyn went to Pilates, and afterwards, Callie was ready: ‘Coffee?’
‘Definitely,’ said Evelyn.
They walked down the road to a chichi little café that served every coffee known to woman as well as a wonderful variety of paleo/gluten-free/dairy-free snacks. God forbid that any woman in her lululemon gear ordered a plain old bun.
‘We are about to undo all the good work we did,’ Evelyn said cheerfully, looking at the menu once they’d found a table and ordered coffees.
‘Yeah,’ said Callie absently.
Ev, who had known her for a very long time, said: ‘What’s up?’
Callie rested her elbows on the table.
‘It’s Jason, isn’t it?’
‘I, oh – I don’t know. I might be imagining it,’ blurted out Callie.
‘Tell me.’
‘You’re the only person I can tell. He’s so distant lately, he’s out a lot and—’
‘You’re wondering what that means,’ Evelyn finished for her.
‘Yes.’ Callie couldn’t help it, she nibbled her thumb, working her way at a tough bit of skin.
‘Go on.’
‘I hoped that maybe it was a hassle with work and things he needed to do at weekends and late-night dinners and—’
The coffee arrived and Callie put off finger-nibbling for the relief of stirring a quarter spoon of sugar into hers.
‘And?’ pushed Evelyn.
‘I feel something’s wrong. I have nothing to go on, Ev, but it feels wrong . . .’
Evelyn fiddled with her coffee spoon for a moment. Displacement activity.
‘You think he’s got a girlfriend, right?’
Callie looked down and hoped she wouldn’t start crying, not now, with half the Pilates class close by.
‘First, I don’t know anything, Callie, and if I did, I’d tell you. I wished I’d trusted my instincts from the start. It was always like that with Rob when he was seeing someone new. He’d become totally involved with her and there would be lots of’ – Evelyn put her fingers in the air to make quote marks – ‘dinners with clients and last-minute meetings.’ When I found out the first time, there had been a weekend trip away because someone they were working with had tickets to the opera in Milan and they needed to cement the relationship. Rob. Opera. As if!’ She rolled her eyes.
Callie drank some of her coffee as she listened but it tasted bitter.
She had consoled Evelyn plenty after she and Rob had broken up, but there was a difference between listening to your dear friend talk about betrayal and facing it yourself.
‘I knew for years that Rob was a serial cheater – not that we ever discussed it, how stupid was that? – but the real Rob would eventually come back to me and the kids. We’d have a glorious few months before it would all start again.’
‘Why didn’t you discuss it?’ said Callie and then thought pot, kettle, black. Why hadn’t she confronted Jason? Because she didn’t want to hear what he had to say. Hearing him say the words and imagining it going on were two very different things to deal with.
Evelyn sighed. ‘I didn’t want to, that’s why. I was stupid and needy. I wanted to be with Rob because I loved him. I told myself that we had kids together and a history . . . Eventually, I ran out of space in my head for all the lies. One Friday afternoon, when we were all supposed to be going to a pizza restaurant that night, he rang to say he’d had to fly to London suddenly and he’d be away till Sunday.’
Evelyn stared into the distance, remembering.
‘I just flipped. I yelled at him that I was sick of his girlfriends and all the lying. He blustered, told me I was wrong and I hung up. Gave him time. Time to choose. Time to get on the plane and come back home. To us.’
Callie reached over and grabbed her friend’s hand. She knew what had happened.
Rob hadn’t come home. He’d stayed away.
‘Rob was an idiot, Evelyn, you know that.’
‘Yes, but I have to pretend it was all mutual to the kids because you can’t punish them,’ Evelyn said with the fluidity of someone who had told herself this often enough. ‘Although I’d say the poor counsellor I saw is now deaf from all my screeching. But I didn’t screech at home with the boys. I went off-site. That’s important – keep your nervous breakdown out of the house.’
Evelyn laughed without humour.
‘Tell me about it,’ she went on. ‘Gut instinct?’
Callie sipped a bit of her coffee.
‘My gut says something’s up and what else can it be? It’s hard to put my finger on it, but Jason has been working late a lot and he’s stressed. His picture is under the words “emotionally absent” in the dictionary.’
She realised she felt relieved to be saying this out loud.
‘He’s been away for a few weekends and he never used to work weekends, never.’
They both considered this.
Callie backtracked a bit.
‘Of course, you know how he loves going out and how he and Rob liked to have a dinner together once a month with us,’ she said, feeling suddenly guilty because once upon a time it had been Evelyn and Rob at those dinners and now it was Rob and the much younger Anka.
‘It’s OK, you can say it,’ said Evelyn. ‘I’m over Rob, it’s fine. I know you guys go out because he’ll phone and mention it, and I go out into the garden and pour salt on the slugs eating my plants. Great for inner rage.’
They both laughed.
‘Callie, I honestly don’t think that Jason has been cheating on you. I think I’d know.’
‘How would you?’ said Callie, desperate for consolation.
‘Rob and I talk all the time, mainly about the kids but he goes on about work and I think there’s something hassling them with the office right now. I honestly think that’s it and trust me, I would tell you if I thought Jason was seeing someone.’
She was quiet for a moment as if considering how to put this. ‘Rob’s a good liar but I’d pick up on it if he was hiding something about Jason. And he’s always admired you. He talks about you, Jason and Poppy like you’re a perfect family.’ Evelyn smiled wryly. ‘I think he fancied you a million years ago. I used to feel jealous of you in the early days.’
‘No,’ said Callie stunned.
‘I did actually,’ said Ev, ‘sorry. It’s really stupid, but you’re so beautiful and had such an exotic background—’
‘What? Ballyglen and a council house?’ said Callie, laughing with relief and disbelief combined.
‘You hid that very well, honey,’ said Evelyn. ‘I felt totally intimidated until I met you and got to know you – obviously.’
‘Got to know what a fake I was behind all that mysterious facade,’ said Callie, smiling genuinely for the first time since they’d left the Pilates class.
‘Rob always tells me about the nights out you four have together.’
‘Ouch.’ Callie grimaced. ‘That is thoughtless in a whole new dimension. Apart from that first time I had to meet Anka and I told you so, I never discuss the dinners in case it hurts you and besides, you know I’d far rather be out with you.’
‘You’re a kind friend who worries about my feelings, but he’s an ex-husband, Callie,’ said Evelyn. ‘Thoughtless is pretty much what he does. He thinks it’s quite reasonable to say to me that he and Anka are going to the Seychelles for a week when I’m worrying about how the windows are rotting and need replacing. Then, he starts telling me about the villa with private butler and I can truly see how women kill their ex-husbands and bury them under the patio.’
‘He left you enough money in the settlement, didn’t he?’ said Callie, astonished at the revelation about rotting windows and the implication that this could be a problem. Rob was rich. How were Evelyn and his children living in a house that needed work they weren’t able to afford? She’d never asked this before. Finances were so personal. But then, Evelyn had never told her that Rob discussed dinners with Anka, Callie and Jason before, either.
‘He gave me more or less enough money,’ Evelyn agreed, ‘although he hid a lot of it.’
Callie was stunned. She’d just assumed Rob had been decent to Evelyn: Jason had implied as much.
‘I felt ashamed. I just couldn’t tell you,’ admitted Evelyn. ‘And I mean, you’re married to Jason, Rob’s friend and partner, how could I possibly say, I think my husband is hiding shedloads of money from me. Funny, right? So my lawyer did a little bit of forensic accountancy work in order to track down the money, but there comes a point when you have to stop. Besides, Rob was all over it and said to my lawyer, ‘Let’s do a deal for a lump sum rather than alimony.’ It’s OK, we’re happy with that, he provides for the kids pretty well. I have locked-in college funds for them. But the house is old and the maintenance is a nightmare.’
Callie inhaled sharply. Evelyn had gone so far as to make sure her sons had their college money sorted – she must really not trust Rob.
‘I’m stunned, Ev,’ she said.
In her mind, she was thinking about Jason and the possibility of him trying to hide money from her in a divorce.
This must have been written all over her face.
‘Jason adores you,’ Evelyn said instantly. ‘I truly believe that. Just don’t do what I did – ignore your fears. If you’re really worried, say something. I let Rob carry on with other women for years and he began to think it was normal: having women flirt with him, sleeping with them.’
‘That’s not what marriage is supposed to be about,’ Callie said quietly. ‘It’s supposed to be forsaking all others.’
Evelyn shrugged. ‘Rob was always a bit of a player, Callie, but I honestly don’t think Jason is. He adores you.’
‘I know,’ said Callie, relief in her heart. It must be just business upsetting her husband. The alternative was horrible. What would she do if the lens of his admiration was turned away from her? How could she cope with that?
And yet, did she want to start a conversation with her husband about the possibility that he was cheating on her? She had nothing to go on, nothing. Perhaps Evelyn was right and it was just work. Rob would know and he appeared to tell Ev everything.
And all marriages went through ups and downs. It couldn’t all be a bed of roses. Even roses had thorns.