Be Careful What You Wish For. Martina Devlin

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СКАЧАТЬ his children’s stories although I didn’t discover them until childhood was a dim and distant memory,’ said Helen. ‘Especially “The Happy Prince”; I wept for days about the dead swallow.’

      ‘How can a story called “The Happy Prince” leave readers sobbing? It’s irrational,’ Patrick objected.

      ‘You’ve obviously never read it.’

      ‘I’m more of a P. D. James man myself. That’s when I find the time to read at all. It takes me weeks to plough through a paperback.’ Patrick bent for a closer look at one of Wilde’s witticisms on the plinth, immune to Helen’s scandalised glance. ‘How about this one, “We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars.”’

      ‘I keep hunting for my favourite one – his spin on the love–hate relationship between parents and children.’ Helen followed the plinth around its four sides but couldn’t locate it. ‘I can never remember the exact wording but it’s to do with children beginning by loving their parents, then judging them and rarely, if ever, forgiving them.’

      Patrick zipped his flying jacket against the chill. ‘Obviously too depressing for the tourists, that gem. Safer to stick with the ones that lend themselves to posters and T-shirts’ He laid an arm casually across her shoulder; she sidestepped just as casually to widen the gap between them, and it dropped away.

      Two Americans nearby were studying Oscar’s statue.

      ‘He made perfume, right?’ The woman’s voice was so penetrating it was impossible to ignore.

      ‘No, honey, he was a writer.’ Her male companion corrected her to Patrick’s and Helen’s relief. Otherwise they’d have felt obliged to set her right. National honour demanded it.

      ‘One of his books was turned into a movie,’ continued the knowledgeable American. ‘It was called A Picture of Dorian Black.’

      Patrick and Helen cringed in unison and turned their steps towards the centre of the park where there were no statues to attract sightseers. As they walked – it was too wintry for strolling – they spoke of his life in London, hers in Dublin, their shared experience growing up in Kilkenny, of jobs and homes and even the lighthouse tattoo he aspired to as a boy. It emerged that he’d actually visited a tattoo parlour, clutching the readies, during his first summer in England but reconsidered when he encountered the needles. Helen laughed aloud while he described his flight, still clinging to the patterns book, and again he spontaneously rested an arm on her shoulder. This time she allowed it to stay.

      By and by she sighed. ‘We should talk.’

      ‘I thought that’s what we were doing.’

      ‘Chewing gum chatter.’

      They ensconsed themselves side by side on a park bench, isolated against the grumble of traffic a few yards away, not touching but acutely aware of each other, and he asked her to tell him what to do. She told him. He asked her again. Her answer didn’t vary. Then he nodded in acknowledgement of her prudence and said he’d return to his hotel now. He was staying overnight, catching the Monday morning red-eye flight back to London.

      Helen knew she should feel as though the iron bars encircling her chest had been yanked off; instead it was as if their diameter contracted and they tightened, a tourniquet on her diaphragm. But she realised it was impossible even to contemplate love with this man.

      And so she prepared to walk away. Until a minuscule movement changed everything.

      Patrick was waiting for Helen as she tugged at a glove lying in her lap, attempting to pull it back on, but her fingers couldn’t find the openings. Her head bent forward, her hair shielding her face, a flimsy carapace against this world breeding bleakness now they were on the brink of taking their leave of one another. She struggled against a sense of loss, an emotion as bewildering as it was overwhelming, for how can you mourn the absence of something you’ve never had?

      And yet she did keenly feel a void. She knew he couldn’t be the one to fill it, although meeting him after three years had wrenched open the vacuum. So she heaved a rustling breath of resignation and nodded towards Patrick, signalling she was ready. Time to walk away from this windy park, where they huddled in scarves and coats, their bodies trembling in the winter chill but their minds impervious to it. Time to walk away from each other.

      But the glove impeded her efforts at composure. Tears sprang in her eyes as she channelled her frustration at her and Patrick’s self-imposed separation towards the glove. In a passion, she hurled it to the ground – an insignificant movement charged with import. The butterfly’s wings that flapped up a hurricane. For he bent to pick it up and as he reached the leather to her, their eyes connected; it was as if her misery flowed and melded with his and he could not bear to acknowledge their imperative to separate. Patrick stretched his hand out and guided her head onto his shoulder and she nestled against it. They sat without speaking or moving, his hand splayed around her skull … there was such comfort in his touch.

      In the aftermath, attempting to make sense of what followed, Helen thought there was an inevitability about their caress and the rollercoaster experience it precipitated. Did they really think they could put the brakes on something so powerful? Yet the human capacity for self-delusion is infinite. So she lay against Patrick with her head on his shoulder, his stubble bristling her forehead, and was suffused by exaltation. Nothing mattered beyond this moment ringfenced in time.

      She had no way of knowing if they rested together for minutes or hours, leaching solace from their togetherness and content in the chrysalis of one another’s embrace. After a while she became aware of children’s voices as they ran along the path near the bench, arguing about the ownership of a comic. A woman’s voice interjected, refereeing the dispute. Helen lifted her head in the direction of the sounds, hesitant about her and Patrick’s public intimacy. Cities weren’t truly anonymous, particularly not ones as village-proportioned as Dublin – above all when there was something to hide. The voices seemed to be receding. His hand on her hair urged Helen’s head back to its perch. She needed no second bidding; it belonged there.

      This time Patrick stroked her hair, winding its skeins around his hand and threading them through his fingers. Once she felt him incline and inhale their scent. Then his hand dropped to the area of her back between her shoulder blades and rhythmically he stroked in circles, easing away a misery she’d scarcely acknowledged existed. And still she kept her face turned from his, for she was loath to meet his eye. Reluctant and paradoxically drawn to it.

      She felt Patrick’s lips brush the top of her hair. It wasn’t a kiss, more an unconscious gesture as he moved his head to incline it cheek down on top of her. She waited, accepting the weight of him, and then raised her face to his and they looked at one another. There was turmoil, a churning such as she’d known only with him. And without him. They gazed, grey eyes swimming into grey-green, then she found herself smiling and she could never recall whether he smiled first and she responded or if it was the other way around. But smiling they were, into one another’s face, with an unfettered joy.

      They had nothing to smile about. Even as he held her a recess of her subconscious warned she should drop this encounter into amber – store it up against future barrenness – and yet when she looked into the face of the man she loved she could not but register pleasure A memory of reading about Richard Burton gatecrashed her mind. He’d told once in an interview how he’d laughed aloud when he first met Elizabeth Taylor because she was so exquisite. Helen felt like laughing too, even as she studied the path Patrick’s eyebrows cut across his face and the curve of his mouth – a mouth she knew already as well as if it grew on her own face.

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