The Blue Pool Read online

  “I don’t expect so. At least I hope not.” Ruth sounded not so sure this time.

  A pause.

  “I’m going to have to listen to the news again.” Kathy drummed her fingers on the desk. She’d found that shielding herself from the diet of wars, violence, and general misery dished up in the media made her less agitated. As if by switching everything off she could hide from what she’d done. Her life was small these days. Exactly how she liked it.

  “Do the Nugents know?” she asked with dread.

  “Ava and Penny?”

  Ava and Penny Nugent were Sarah’s sisters.

  “And her mum and dad.”

  “Oh, didn’t you hear?” Ruth sounded surprised.

  “Hear what?”

  “They passed away.”

  It took a few moments to sink in. “Sarah’s parents are dead?”

  “Yes, Kath. They’re dead.”

  “Jesus. How tragic… how unutterably tragic.” She was shocked.

  “Sure is,” said Ruth.

  “Maybe it’s better like this,” Kathy said quietly.

  “Better?”

  “Well, I never liked Sarah’s mother, but I wouldn’t wish this on her. Now she’ll never have to know exactly what this guy did.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  “Ruth?”

  “Yes?”

  “What exactly did this guy do?”

  “I don’t know. And that’s the truth.”

  A pause.

  “Is he local?” Kathy then asked.

  “I’m not sure about that. He’s like a caretaker or something – a carpenter or an electrician, maybe. That’s what Charlotte said. He’s in his sixties. And now you know as much as I do.”

  How could Ruth sound so detached, so composed, and cool? Kathy’s head was buzzing.

  Sometime later she turned on the radio for the first time in months. She looked into the small garden at Emma’s swing swaying in the breeze. For the first time ever, she was glad her daughter was at her father’s.

  It was going to be a rough few days. She cancelled Mrs Wallis’s reflexology appointment. Going to the drawer next to her secret place in the garage, she took out two blister packs. Valium or Xanax?

  She chose the Xanax.

  Charlotte

  Galway, Ireland

  Present Day

  Charlotte felt a buzz in her sporty compact car. Although sleek, it felt extravagant and cost more than she’d intended to spend. The parsimony of her student days had never left her. That fear of being caught short, never quite going away.

  Trading in the practical vehicle she’d ferried the kids in for the last ten years had been a wrench and a release. She resented the passage of time. “Tempus fugit,” she muttered checking her wing mirror. She felt conflicted. Should she feel bittersweet sentiment that the best of life was over, or was the best to come?

  The kids were growing up, and she’d intended to paint over the crayon scribbles on the stairwell many times this year. Yet she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Of course it was unsightly. The girls had been bold to do it, but painting it over with a bland magnolia emulsion would erase those years forever.

  However, there was plenty Charlotte wouldn’t miss. She wouldn’t miss her old car. Or the perennial ‘wash me’ scrawls the neighboring kids annoyingly drew on the back. Or the persistent smell of puke that she couldn’t expunge from the back seat. On the other hand, the car had been plastered in stickers from every happy ferry journey they’d made to France. All of that was coming to an end.

  “I’m way beyond a family holiday. Count me out this year, right?” seventeen-year-old Tom had drawled as he examined himself in the hall mirror. “I’m thinking I’ll like stay here with the guys and catch some festivals instead.”

  “Like hell you will!” Mark had exploded. “And trash my house with parties?”

  It was a battle in progress. The old bull and the young bull. Try as she might, Charlotte couldn’t stop the clock. Everything had a shelf-life. The kids were moving on and it was time for her to think about herself.

  “Not bad for forty-six.” She puckered her glossy lips looking in the rear-view mirror. Some women cut their hair short as they advanced through their forties. Charlotte wondered if she might in fact do the opposite. Her hair was as short and spiky now as it had been in her teens.

  “Bloody woman driver!”

  She flinched and jerked the steering wheel. She’d strayed into the fast lane.

  “Go to fucking Specsavers!” the truck driver bawled through his open window.

  “Get lost!” she shouted back.

  Picking up speed and whizzing past the truck, she gave the driver a smile that was accompanied by a clear view of her middle finger.

  “Prick!” she shouted. She’d been at fault, but to hell with it, the red-neck could have let it go. No doubt jealous of her car.

  Throughout the bedlam years, Charlotte had managed to hold down her job. She’d managed to hone a precious few chords of intellect in the clutter of nappies, tantrums, and endless meal-making. The kids were more or less self-sufficient now. They no longer made unreasonable demands on her time.

  She was contemplating leaving the lab in the private hospital. It felt like she’d worked there forever. People didn’t notice her any more. She was like the fixtures and fittings.

  What Charlotte really fancied was another degree. Biomedical engineering perhaps. However, she wasn’t quite sure if the notion was more appealing than the reality. Mark didn’t care what she did as long as she was happy. And generally speaking she was. Or she had been up until Richard’s phone-call.

  The bluster of the Galway wind gave way to a steady drizzle as she drove south to Adare. She fiddled, searching for a wiper setting that would clear the screen but wouldn’t squeak as it scraped it dry. She’d been driving for years, since she was twenty and back in university.

  She remembered how excited she’d been when her brothers in the States had sent her money for the car. Richard – her only brother to remain in Ireland – had paid the insurance. She remembered that car. She’d only driven it when she’d had summer jobs to pay for petrol. It had been ancient even way back then – a red Ford Fiesta, so faded in parts it looked pink.

  Today, the drizzle looked set to stay, and this time, as Charlotte pulled out to overtake, she checked the rear-view mirror carefully. Nostalgia pulled at her heart-strings. She cast her mind back to what seemed a lifetime ago. To a particular summer when they were students, to a time spent driving the four of them around the west of Ireland.

  As Charlotte cruised in the outside lane, she called to mind the people they’d been back then. Irresponsible and impulsive. Ignorant of the many pitfalls and perils that lay ahead. Yeats’s words came to her.

  Dance there upon the shore;

  What need have you to care

  For wind or water’s roar?

  They made her think of Sarah. Impulsive, carefree, reckless.

  Her heart began to flutter. Oh no. Not this again. There was no need to fret, she was only going to Adare. She’d be home later that day.

  Her mobile rang. She jolted. It was in her bag on the passenger seat. She’d been on edge ever since the phone-call. Spilling the contents onto the seat she fumbled unseeing amongst the contents. Keys, antacid tablets, old lottery tickets, mascara, a nearly empty cigarette box, and finally she felt the mobile. She’d been offered the option of a hands-free mobile model but the smarmy sales guy had been so sure of his pitch that she’d turned him down just to see the look on his face. Something she now regretted.

  “Hello?” She pressed the phone to her ear and tried to sound calm.

  “It’s me, Charlie, just checking to see you got off okay.”

  Only Mark. Relief coursed through her. She’d hoped he wouldn’t notice her mood over the past twenty-four hours.

  “Why wouldn’t I? Listen, about the kids, just in case –”

  “The kids are fine.�
�� Mark didn’t even let her finish. “Hell, they’s all growed up now,” he joked.

  “I know.” She managed a laugh. “It’s just that… that… well, you know… I worry. What if—”

  “What if nothing! What if my aunt was my uncle? All this ‘what if’ is horse-bollocks and you know it. You should do this more often. It’s good to see you take a day off work, away from the kids.”

  Mark was a straight-up guy. He could always calm her down. He helped her see things clearly. He was right of course. She didn’t need to worry. Nothing was going to happen. She was being irrational. Yet, all the old anxieties were starting to resurface. Things could have turned out so much differently if it hadn’t been for Sarah.

  “Horse-bollocks, Mark? Do your colleagues speak to their wives like that?” She feigned indignation. The irony was most of the other marine biologists were either separated or divorced. She and Mark were neither. She worked hard at her marriage.

  “Aw, you know what I mean, Charlie,” said Mark. “The kids will survive on pot noodles for once. And there’s the home-made apple pie that Brenda dropped in.”

  Brenda was their next-door neighbor who’d been recently widowed. In the last few weeks, she’d taken to calling on Mark to fix any little thing for her. The latest was a dripping tap that she complained was keeping her awake at night. Hardly a crisis. But Mark had patiently gone next door again, remarking how lonely Brenda must be. Charlotte had made a mental note to drop her in a list of odd-job guys in the area. She couldn’t have Brenda becoming too reliant.

  “Make sure to pass on my regards to Sherlock,” Mark said hanging up.

  Charlotte smiled. Richard was about as far from Sherlock Holmes as you could get. However, the smile soon faded. She felt uneasy. Mark didn’t know the real purpose of her visit to Adare. He thought she wanted to see Richard and his new house. Sadly, it was nothing so innocuous. There was a more compelling reason.

  As she drove through Clarinbridge and on to Claregalway, Charlotte tried to ignore the craving. It wasn’t any use. She’d have to pull in. She looked for somewhere overlooking the bay. Mark had no idea she still smoked. Even now, there were things about her that Mark didn’t know. The one time she’d nearly been caught smoking, she’d blamed Tom – their eldest. Afterwards, she wished she hadn’t. It had provoked a fierce argument. “I can smell it, I’m not stupid.” Mark was mad. “Well, if it wasn’t you, it was that daft friend of yours – Joey four-fingers or whatever his bloody name is. Why can’t any of your friends have proper names?” Tom had looked at his father, bewildered.

  Mark fell into the ‘AS’ chapter of Charlotte’s life – After Sarah. Charlotte had this in common with Ruth and Kathy. She knew that they too divided their lives into ‘BS – Before Sarah’ and ‘AS – After Sarah’.

  Mark knew about Sarah. It had been one of the first confidences she’d shared with him. It had been a confidence that had bonded them early in their relationship. Mark hadn’t judged or criticised like everybody else. “Bad stuff happens,” he’d said. “Let it go, Charlie. Accept it and move on.”

  She’d been grateful. Grateful that he didn’t want to upset her, or make her revisit it or dwell on the details. He accepted what she told him. Thankfully, Mark was an uncomplicated man.

  Leaning against the wall, Charlotte inhaled, sucking every last carcinogenic atom into her lungs. The stone-wall was cold and wet. She should grab a newspaper from underneath the passenger seat to sit on. Every weekend she saved the travel supplements for her lunch-time break. She’d puff through an open car window in the car-park at work and wonder what it might be like to hike through Belize, or stay in a yurt in Kazakhstan.

  At one time, she thought she’d cover the world. Now, she knew it was unlikely she’d get further afield than a mobile home in France. She couldn’t help feeling that she’d missed out along the way. It was a feeling that was becoming more and more acute as the years went by.

  Cigarette in one hand, and holding a broken umbrella in the other, she examined the cigarette packet. It warned of all manner of hideous diseases. She should really give them up. Still, she didn’t have many things that gave her pleasure nowadays. She inhaled, devouring the smoke and welcoming the dizziness in her head.

  She’d smoked her first cigarette during Rag Week in university. All her friends had smoked at school but she hadn’t bothered. But in that first year at college she made up for lost time. She drank. A lot. She smoked. A lot. She partied. A lot. And of course she’d met the girls – Ruth, Kathy, and Sarah.

  * * *

  Stubbing the smouldering cigarette butt on the drizzle-damp wall, Charlotte thought she could hear the phone ringing again from inside the car.

  It was Rachel – middle child. Something was wrong.

  “Rachel, honey, what’s up? What’s wrong? Did you forget your inhaler?” Rachel hadn’t had an attack for three whole months and Charlotte knew just how serious an asthma attack could be. The Atlantic damp was unforgiving.

  “Jeez, Mom, don’t panic. I just wanted to tell you that I’m on my way to the orthodontist but I forgot the appointment card. Will that matter?”

  “Less attitude, Rachel,” Charlotte replied settling herself into her seat, relieved again it was nothing serious. “It shouldn’t matter. They’ll have a record of it.” Cradling the mobile between her ear and shoulder, she started the ignition, keen to get moving again.

  “Mom…?”

  A lengthy silence.

  “What?” Charlotte sensed a tension.

  “Mom, you’re not… you’re not outside the school again, are you?”

  “No, of course not,” she snapped. “If you must know, Rachel, I’m on my way to Adare to catch up with Uncle Richard.”

  “Really? What’s up, did someone die or something? You hardly ever go to see Uncle Richard.”

  Charlotte stiffened. Rachel had no way of knowing how she’d struck the nail on the head. “Your uncle has bought a house in Adare, outside Limerick. I’m on my way there with a gift.”

  “Down for a nose-about, more like!”

  “Cut the cheek, Rachel. And you’re to walk straight home after the orthodontist, right? The long way home as well, not through the alleyway.”

  “Stop freaking out, Mom. Fine. I’ll walk the extra two miles home just ’cos you won’t let me walk through a teeny tiny alleyway.”

  “Promise?”

  “Yeah, Mom. I promise.”

  The child picks up on everything, thought Charlotte. Rachel – middle child. Difficult child. Much more wayward than the other two. She took more nurturing. Mark saw it differently. He and Tom clashed all the time these days. Sometimes Mark had a point but often the rows were over trivial matters.

  Charlotte’s concern lay with this new girl that Tom was seeing. She clenched the wheel. Unlike Tom, Charlotte wasn’t taken in by that saccharine voice and those big doe eyes in the middle of all that hair. Poor Tom was as yet unversed in the art of feminine wiles.

  Without warning, a van swerved ahead. There was something on the road. Remaining steady, she drove straight on, feeling a crunch under her tires. Looking in the rear view mirror, she checked to see what she’d run over. She shuddered. It was ugly – a furry mess, bloody, entrails splattered. How annoying. There’d be gunk all over her new car now. Shit! She’d put it through the carwash and had been looking forward to showing it off to Richard. She was too late to swerve. She couldn’t help feeling it was a bad omen.

  Whizzing down the motorway she tried to control her unease. She was wise enough to know she couldn’t outrun bad luck. It had been there in the background all this time.

  Incredibly, after all these years, someone had come forward. Her knuckles whitened on the wheel. After twenty-five years, was she about to find out exactly what had become of Sarah Nugent? She tried to tell herself there would be nothing to worry about.

  As long as she remained calm.

  Ruth

  Berkshire, England

  Present Day<
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  “Universitas Hiberniae Nationalis Testantur hae literae gradum Baccalaureatus…” Ruth read from the framed certificate in the study. Her Commerce degree. Honours in the end. It was in the shaded part of the room but it looked aged and yellowed next to Michael and Claire’s music certificates. The scarlet wall was covered with awards and photographs charting the course of Ruth and Colin’s life for the last twenty years.

  When they’d moved in together, she’d refused to live in Cricklewood or Kilburn or in any of the traditional Irish communities. Many of Colin’s business interests were in these areas but Colin knew better than to argue. Ruth had left Ireland behind and what she craved was a version of herself that she could live with.

  “Heaven’s sake!” she exclaimed, avoiding a slip on a golf ball. Gone was the song in her Kerry voice. Over the years, her accent became more neutral, its origin hard to discern.

  The sight of the dimpled white ball made her queasy. She’d been careful at the club. Careful not to align herself with any particular group or to form allegiances until she’d figured out the club dynamics. Careful not to make any connections that she couldn’t withdraw from if need be.

  Ruth had been cautiously welcomed, and she made herself as obliging as she could. She regularly conceded putts to her opponents. She’d suggest allowing other players to play through if her four-ball was too slow. And she’d help to organise sponsorship for charity tournaments. As co-director of their firm Colin Kennefick Architects, Ruth provided sponsorship for club events.

  The members were a conservative lot and not inclined to be influenced by new money. And so she regarded it as a huge personal coup to find that they were seriously considering her, Ruth Kennefick, as a contender for incoming Ladies Captain.

  She wasn’t a particularly proficient golfer, more what was disparagingly known as an enthusiastic golfer. But that didn’t cause Ruth too much bother. What concerned her more was being accepted. To be part of a community that didn’t look at her with fear and suspicion. To be part of something wholesome. Being Ladiesy Captain would not be about the honor, but more about what the nomination represented.