‘Everything in place?’ asked Leo, as she resumed her seat at the table.
‘You betcha,’ said Keeley, cool as you like. ‘Perhaps you should think about settling up.’
Leo raised a hand to summon the waiter, and Keeley broke a crust of the remains of the baguette on her side plate, just for something to toy with while waiting for the bill to be sorted. And as she did so, a woman whom she recognised as Leo’s wife came into the restaurant, and made straight for the maître d’.
‘I thought you said Rachel was in Cork?’ she said.
‘She is.’
‘No she’s not. She’s behind you, Leo, and she’s headed our way. Oh, fuck, oh, fuck – this is just . . . Oh fuck.’
It was like watching a car crash in slow motion. The maître d’ had indicated their whereabouts, and Rachel was moving towards them now, dazzling Colgate smile fixed in place.
‘Good evening!’ she fluted, as she slid next to Leo on the banquette opposite Keeley. ‘Don’t worry about another place setting. I’ve already asked the maître d’ to sort that out. I know I’m a little late, but I’m sure you won’t mind if I have something? An hors d’oeuvre is all I require, since I had a late lunch. Oh, good. I see they’re still doing Baba Ganoush – I haven’t eaten here in ages, and I thought the menu might have changed. And I’m so sorry, I haven’t introduced myself. We met at an Insignia event some time ago, but you may not remember me, Keeley. I’m Rachel, Leo’s wife. How nice to see you again. You haven’t changed a bit. That’s the same dress you were wearing last time I met you. Zara, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘How brave!’
It went on, and it went on. Rachel was relentless. She ordered her Baba Ganoush and another bottle of wine, and she sat and chatted about the Insignia and her husband and her children and the fact that she had been obliged to give up her very successful career as a pharmacist in order to rear Leo’s family but she didn’t resent a single minute of the time spent with the children since they were all prodigies just like her mother-in-law told her Leo had been, and wasn’t the weather stunning, and wasn’t it simply wonderful that Keeley had inherited a little cottage in the west of Ireland that she could visit when the stresses and strains of urban living became too hard for her to handle. And good heavens! Was that the time? They really ought to be making tracks – Leo had the school run to contend with in the morning, and Rachel had a parent-teacher meeting and thanks so much, Keeley, for taking care of the bill.
And all the time Keeley had sat there with the jade and obsidian eggs inside her, not feeling loved up at all, but rather like a constipated hen. And after Leo and Rachel had left the restaurant, she had ordered a large brandy and sat nursing it on her own, pretending to do important stuff on her iPhone and all the time flexing her pelvic muscles – two, three, four! – because she was fearful that when she stood up the jade and obsidian eggs might fall to the floor and be pounced upon by the punctilious maître d’ . . .
Yours (I mean it) . . .
Keeley returned to Leo’s email, re-read it, then clicked on the link he had sent. It took her to the website of a publishing trade magazine, and a headline that read ‘Gallagher Muse to Pen Children’s Book’.
Top literary agent Tony Baines has negotiated a high six-figure deal for a first-time author with children’s publishing giant Pandora. ‘Pussy Willow and the Pleasure Palace of Peachy Stuff’, written by Ophelia Gallagher, is aimed at seven- to ten-year-olds. A former actress, Ophelia Gallagher is wife and muse of the internationally renowned Irish painter Hugo Gallagher. Ms Gallagher was inspired to write the book after visiting Sans Souci, the summer palace in Potsdam built by Frederick the Great of Prussia.
Hugo Gallagher. She didn’t know he’d married again. Keeley had conducted one of her very first interviews with Gallagher about ten years earlier, when she was fresh out of college. It had been at the opening of an exhibition of his paintings in the Demeter Gallery in Dublin – his breakthrough exhibition, as it had turned out. At that time Hugo Gallagher’s star had been in the ascendant. After years as a struggling artist, he had emerged from obscurity to take his place centre stage in the Irish art world with a series of astonishing abstracts. She remembered being introduced to a saturnine man, loose-limbed and sexy – a man who exuded a lethal charm. She remembered his then-wife, a woman called . . . Paloma, and a child: a tousle-haired gypsy with angular limbs and intense dark eyes. She remembered how the mother had exuded an anxious air, and how her anxiety had escalated in proportion to the copious amounts of wine consumed by her husband. The child, she recalled, had hunkered on the floor in a corner of the gallery, oblivious to the brouhaha around her, drawing with a leaky biro on the back of a price list.
Keeley wished she could remember the price a Gallagher painting would have fetched back then. Ha’penny place in comparison to today’s reckoning, she suspected, because by the end of that evening’s feeding frenzy, every single canvas on the pristine gallery walls had been sold. Thereafter Hugo Gallagher had been able to double, treble, quadruple and, finally, simply name his price. Was he still coining it in? Keeley was curious as to how the artist’s career had fared in the intervening decade. She’d read somewhere that Paloma had left him several years ago, making way for the current Mrs Gallagher.
Returning her attention to the screen, Keeley studied the photograph that accompanied the blurb. Ophelia was a beautiful woman – petite and peachy-skinned, with huge, limpid, indigo blue eyes and an irresistible smile. She was dressed down in dungarees and bare feet, lustrous hair tumbling artlessly around her shoulders; she had a tiny tattoo of a daisy in the hollow of her collarbone and a fetching gap between her front teeth. She came across as fun, youthful, and with a sense of mischief – yet there was something of the earth mother about her too. Had she used the little Gallagher girl – her stepdaughter – as a sounding board for her book, Keeley wondered. But rudimentary arithmetic told her that Caitlín would have been way too old for children’s stories by the time Ophelia and Hugo finally got married.
Google beckoned.
Wikipedia told her nothing she didn’t already know about Hugo Gallagher’s early life. The poverty, the drinking, the acquisition of the famous Crooked House (which he claimed to have won in an all-night poker game), the failed marriages to his first wife and subsequently to Paloma. Also listed were the offspring of those marriages: the son Raoul, an architect; the daughter Caitlín. Documented, too, was the meteoric rise to fame that followed that sell-out exhibition in the Demeter Gallery, and the stupendous prices his work had fetched in the rampant Celtic Tiger era. Lately, however, information pertaining to the Great Artist seemed a little more hazy. There had been no output for the past couple of years, although he was rumoured to be working on an import ant new series. Reading between the lines, it wasn’t difficult to deduce that drink was to blame. Hugo Gallagher was following in the footsteps of those legendary wild men of art – Pollock, Rothko, Basquiat – destined to burn out and leave a priceless legacy behind him. The problem was that once he died, although his paintings would soar in value, it would be of no benefit to his family because – unless he really was working on a new series – all his paintings had already been sold and were now hanging in public and private collections all over the world.
The Wikipedia link to Gallagher’s current wife – former actress Ophelia Spence – told Keeley that she had appeared in major theatre venues all over the world. Roles undertaken included the maid in Chekhov’s Three Sisters, the maid in Phaedra and the maid in Private Lives. Three little maids in a row hardly constituted an illustrious stage career, concluded Keeley. Ophelia,