Be Careful What You Wish For. Martina Devlin

outline of his widow’s peak.

      Patrick scattered her meandering thoughts with his next words, dropped pebbles into a still pool spreading ripples with each sentence.

      ‘I know I can’t marry you, Helen, but I would like us to be together – somewhere people don’t know us and can’t be judgemental. Which rules out Ireland. But the world is a vast place. We could find a corner and claim it as our own.’

      Her head reeled. He was articulating desires she’d suppressed for years – urges she thought were buried so deep they’d never surface. Wishes she could scarcely bring herself to formulate. But a few minutes in his company and they were basking in the open, clamouring for recognition. She allowed herself to luxuriate in the possibility of a lifetime with Patrick, tantalising her imagination as she rolled the scenario around in her mind’s eye, then reality intervened and she clashed down the blinds.

      ‘Is the world immense enough?’ she asked. ‘Truth will out whether you’re in Ballydoyle or Borneo.’

      He stroked the faint blue veins threading her wrist. ‘I believe there’s a crevice we could slide into, Helen.’

      She reared back from the duplicity conveyed by his words. From the reptilian slant cast on their future behaviour if she decided they had a hereafter together. But the whispering touch continued against her inner wrist and its hypnotic repetition soothed her. She closed her eyes, excluding everything but the sensation. Until Miriam intruded.

      ‘What about the woman you’ve promised to marry?’

      Patrick’s pupils expanded, black obscuring grey-green. ‘I’ll break it off. I’d never have become involved with her if I weren’t homesick and lonely in England. Work kept me occupied most of the time but there was a chafing, inside and out, that begged for salve, and Miriam offered it. She appeared when I was at my lowest ebb and made it apparent she wanted to be with me on any terms I chose. At the time that was enough for me.’ Patrick shrugged and reached for Helen but she moved and his hand fell in the gap between cushions. It flapped, a stranded fish dangling from his shirt sleeve. ‘Before I knew where I was we were living together and she was making plans that involved the two of us. I went along with them, more from inertia than anything else. I hadn’t the heart to scupper her dreams. Until now.’

      He looked appealingly at Helen but she didn’t respond because she could find no words within her. Patrick took up his story again.

      ‘The last time we were together, three years ago –’ he raised his voice to be heard above a flurry of agitated protest from Helen – ‘I know that’s the time you keep insisting we’re never to talk about but I can’t block out what happened between us, even if you can. It was a validation. But afterwards you were so insistent we must part for ever that I couldn’t allow myself to hope there’d be a reprieve. You convinced me the feelings we had for each other would eventually subside, so I waited for that. And waited. Life without you was an amputation …’ Patrick’s voice trailed off as he struggled with reconvened misery. ‘Then Miriam materialised and distracted me from the pain. She didn’t seem to mind that I was only there in silhouette for her.’

      Helen shifted position so she was looking ahead, scrutinising her china cabinet as though it had materialised overnight in her living room. Each piece of ware behind the glass doors needed cataloguing in her mental inventory. Count jugs and sideplates and don’t think about three years ago. What took place had been a mistake, and if they buried it deep enough they could pretend the error had never seen the light of day. It was between the two of them alone – they made it happen and they could unhappen it. They’d agreed it was an aberration. So why was Patrick trying to exhume it? A porcelain teapot blurred as Helen’s eyes moistened; unexpectedly she felt choked with a sense of betrayal at his engagement to another woman.

      ‘But you proposed marriage to her,’ she accused. ‘Nobody forced you to say those words.’

      Patrick cupped her chin, guiding it towards him. The cautious sun leaking through the French windows had taken shelter behind a cloud and his face was in shadow, although she could guess at its unflinching expression because his tones were harsh. ‘It’s true I asked her to marry me and she agreed. But I wanted to be normal, to have a home. I thought Miriam and I could cobble together a reasonable facsimile of a life, I truly did. You made me believe our love had to be aborted, that it was warped and grotesque and ultimately it would poison our lives.’ The thumb holding her chin, its pressure forcing her to meet his gaze, stroked her skin. His voice melted. ‘And then, Helen, we met again a few weeks ago – not by design but because we were meant to be together. What’s unnatural is not how we feel about one another but for the two of us to be apart, denying our love. I recognised that the instant I looked into your eyes again and something fundamental leaped within me; it was as if there had been no parting, that we’d been separated in body but not in spirit. I knew you felt the same way. I know you do now, however much you deny it.’

      ‘I’m not going to repudiate it.’ Helen’s delivery was sombre; she closed her eyes and fumbled for a path out of the maze. Her brain was malfunctioning; Patrick had that distracting effect on her. Love turned her critical processes to slush.

      Miriam’s name – she couldn’t even put a face to her – sliced through the silt. Helen had never met her but she felt a sense of responsibility towards the woman. After all, they were in love with the same man.

      ‘Patrick, I long to believe in happily ever afters. I wish on every full moon and rainbow, on each coin I toss into a fountain, every black cat that crosses my path, and every candle I light there’s one out there for you and me. But I can’t convince myself. What’s between us is intrinsically wrong. Nature, precedent, the force of history flows against it – we’d have no luck. And whatever else we renounce voluntarily, luck we can’t forsake.’

      She focused on his eyes, willing him towards comprehension, glimpsing a pair of tiny Helens in his pupils. They seemed to belong there. Oh God, to have this over with, to crawl back into bed and cancel out the world with its oppressive desires. Or to crawl back into bed and bring Patrick with her, to obliterate the world with him beside her, on top of her, inside her … Helen shuddered and, gathering together the tattered remnants of her self-control, she stood to distance herself from him.

      ‘And as for yourself and Miriam, Patrick, it strikes me you’re selling yourself short by planning to marry someone you don’t love wholeheartedly, and you’re selling her short too. She deserves better than a putative lover who’s using her as emotional blotting paper.’

      ‘But you urged me to go ahead and marry Miriam.’ His black eyebrows were mutual rods of indignation. ‘When we spoke in the park you insisted I was duty-bound to honour our engagement.’