‘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?