The Velvet Ribbon Page 2

  ‘Nicholas, I cannot take you to Tarabeg. I’ve already explained a million times – it just wouldn’t be right. We aren’t married. The shock would kill Granny Nola and Granda Seamus, I’ve no doubt about it. I cannot even begin to imagine. They think I work here, that Lavinia and the boys still live here. Even if you were a single man, the fact that you aren’t a Catholic, that would be enough. Father Jerry would be apoplectic with the shock.’

  ‘That’s the Irish in you,’ said Nicholas with a grin. ‘You’re just exaggerating. None of that matters a jot to anyone. They will be happy for us both, because I love you as much as they do and more still, and isn’t that all that matters to them, that you are happy?’

  Mary Kate sighed, exasperated, but then grinned, unable to stop herself. ‘I do not exaggerate, Nicholas.’ She jabbed the hairbrush at him as she spoke. ‘There is no divorce in the Catholic faith, it doesn’t exist in Ireland. I’ve never met a divorced person in my life. Even if Lavinia does one day agree, it would never be accepted back home. Divorce is one unholy scandal, a terrible sin. Do you not understand? They’ve always known I’m strong-willed, but this… Not one of them would ever have imagined this. This me would be a stranger to them.’

  She looked down and turned another woman’s hairbrush over and over in her hands, felt the gold band on her wedding hand slide between her forefinger and thumb. They had bought the ring for appearances, for when they were out together. None of the other women who lived on the avenue were fooled, but thank God that Nicholas’s surgery was down by the docks, away from the stuffiness of their Fullmore Park neighbourhood. And down in Surrey, at the Box Hill teashop they went to on the rare weekends they were allowed to visit Nicholas’s boys at their boarding school, she passed as the proud wife of Dr Marcus. On those days, Mary Kate forgot the truth, became the real Mrs Marcus and revelled in the fantasy of being his legitimate wife.

  Nicholas lived for those infrequent, intense weekends. There was so much to say to the boys, but when the time came there were often awkward silences and sadness in between the bursts of fun and chatter, especially for little Jack. As they drove the car down the drive of the school to return the boys to the housemaster, Jack always began to cry – ‘Don’t leave me, Daddy. Don’t leave me here’ – and Mary Kate could almost hear Nicholas’s heart breaking beside her. Lavinia was in the driving seat down that long and winding driveway, not Nicholas. She was the boys’ mother. The boarding school was at her insistence. Cold rooms and corridors. Stern hearts, scant love.

  As Mary Kate looked up at the man who made her heart lift, the words of Mrs O’Keefe, her friend and neighbour, rang in her ears. ‘If anyone ever reports him to the General Medical Council, he could be struck off for adultery. It’s happened before. Be discreet, my dear. True love knows no bounds, but it can encounter many obstacles along the way.’

  Mrs O’Keefe lived further up the avenue and Mary Kate had met her on the boat from Ireland. Her arrival in Liverpool had been disastrous and if it hadn’t been for the kindly Mrs O’Keefe, and Cat, her great-aunt’s neighbour, she might well have ended up back in Tarabeg within a week. Now those two women were her closest friends; their unquestioning support felt like a warm blanket draped across her shoulders.

  The words echoed through Mary Kate’s mind as she stared at Nicholas’s reflection in the mirror. She would never mention that possibility to him. He was obviously blissfully unaware and had enough to deal with. His first thoughts were always for his patients, and as Bella often told her, ‘He’s the hardest-working doctor in all of Liverpool and his patients love him more than any doctor I’ve ever worked for – and I’ve worked for some very important doctors in my time. I saved the best till last.’ Bella, who threatened to retire at least once a day, would place a soft hand on top of Mary Kate’s and give it a little squeeze. ‘Don’t worry. I won’t leave him,’ she always said, ‘if you don’t either.’

  Mrs O’Keefe regularly counselled Mary Kate to share her concerns over their morning coffee together and not to worry Nicholas. ‘Don’t burden him. His patients do enough of that, with all their problems. God knows how much he does for them. There are only so many problems one man can shoulder in a day. That Lavinia, she was a truly wicked woman, and thank God there aren’t many like her. But, despite her wickedness, he has all the guilt and the shame to shoulder in this because he would wish it any other way for your sake and for his boys too. He would stop the tide for you, that man, if he thought it would make you happy, because you make his boys happy.’ Wise and true words from the woman who had become the closest to a mother any girl away from her own home and family could have wished for.

  Nicholas sat on the bed and pulled on his socks, his heart heavy with the words Lavinia had spoken to him the previous day. She had threatened to report him. He would never let Mary Kate know that she hounded him on a daily basis, and he had secured a promise from Bella that she wouldn’t breathe a word about the intimidation or the telephone tantrums to a living soul. Even though Nicholas held a letter that proved Lavinia’s adultery, she vowed to ruin him should he ever use it to sue for divorce. And because he and Mary Kate were living together, in sin, as man and wife, he knew he would be struck off the register and forbidden from practising again if she did report him. That nightmare possibility haunted him, along with the sound of Jack’s pitiful tears; he was all too aware that he and Mary Kate were teetering on the edge of an abyss, their situation so precarious that it couldn’t possibly last.

  ‘Show that letter to a single person and I have nothing to lose,’ Lavinia had hissed down the phone the previous day. She never called the house, always the practice. ‘I will make sure every woman in the avenue knows that girl for what she is, do you hear me? It will take me one call to the golf club captain and another to the medical council. The captain always rather liked me, not that you’d have noticed. And don’t you ever forget, the medical council will have to listen to me because she was a patient registered on your list. We all know the price a doctor has to pay for sleeping with one of his own patients, don’t we? Never mind living over the brush with the little whore.’

  She gave a shrill laugh that sounded like breaking glass and had the desired effect of sending a shiver down his spine. She was of course quite right. Mary Kate had been his patient.

  ‘Had even you forgotten that little fact? She was registered on your list at the practice, not Robin’s – at your absolute insistence, he told me. Your patient, not his, and he will testify to that now that his poor wife knows what happened. Ruined everything, you did, Nicholas, because you couldn’t keep your trousers up.’

  The phone in his hand shook violently. His throat tightened and his mouth was dry. Fear made it impossible for him to speak, but at that particular jibe he almost laughed out loud. His wife had been having an affair with his partner for months. There had been others, for which he had always forgiven her, but not this time, even though Lavinia now had the power to ruin him and it was all in her hands.

  ‘You will lose your job, the house, your reputation, your precious patients… And as for that harlot that you insultingly refer to in my presence, the mother of your sons, as the love of your life – you won’t see her for dust. It’ll be all over the newspapers and Mary Kate will be known forever as nothing better than a scarlet woman.’

  The first time she’d called and made her threats, he’d driven twice around the park before returning home after work, asking himself over and over, should he tell Mary Kate? He had decided against it. She didn’t need to deal with that, and besides, how could she? She was far too young and trusting, the opposite to Lavinia in so many ways. He would handle Lavinia in secret and shield Mary Kate from her intimidations.

  ‘Use the letter that Robin wrote to me, that your little harlot stole, and I can tell you this: you will unleash the dogs of war. Neither of you will survive. You have committed the ultimate crime for a doctor, my darling, broken the absolute taboo, brought the Hippocratic oath into disrepute. Not fit to practise on ethical grounds – that’s what they’ll say when it’s reported to the General Medical Council, so Daddy tells me. The only thing you have in your possession, Nicholas, is the ability to prevent me from doing much worse. Try me and I will destroy you both.’

  Lavinia had been referring to the letter Mary Kate had inadvertently found; it was from Nicholas’s former partner, Robin, with whom it had transpired Lavinia was having an affair. They still had the letter. It was all that stood between him and ruin and he thanked God that Mary Kate had found it because if she hadn’t, he couldn’t bear to imagine what Lavinia might have done to both himself and Mary Kate by now.

  The noise of the radio in the kitchen broke into his thoughts and brought him back to the present. Joan was moving noisily about downstairs and the kettle was whistling. The pipes clanked as the water ran into the sink and Joan sang along to the radio, slightly too loudly, one of the many liberties she now took as payment for working in a house of ‘the most unspeakable of all sins’. ‘When my little girl is smiling…’ her voice bellowed up the stairs.

  ‘Look how hard it was to keep Joan,’ Mary Kate said, gesticulating towards the open bedroom door with the hairbrush. She frowned. ‘She still threatens to leave almost every day. If it wasn’t for Mrs O’Keefe, we probably would have been run out of the avenue with all the wild gossip. As it is, no one here speaks to me.’

  He covered the distance between them, threw his arms about her and hugged her into him, causing the stool to squeak and shift across the carpet. ‘But it will be different once your family meet me and I explain everything to them…’

  Mary Kate pulled away and shook her head. ‘Do you know, one of the women in the avenue actually crossed to the other side of the road yesterday when Joan and I t
ook the bus into town. Liverpool is a Catholic city, Nicholas. Can you imagine? This is just a small taste of how bad it would be at home.’

  Anger flashed across his face as he turned over the first cuff. ‘Who was it?’ His tone was controlled, but his smile and happy demeanour had evaporated and his eyes were focused on her reflection.

  ‘I’m not telling you because I don’t trust you not to knock at her door and give out to her on your way to work. I’m not going to have them calling you a bad-mannered brute and damaging your reputation on my account – not likely.’ She brushed her hair as her eyes still held him in her view. Then she smiled.

  His face relaxed and he smiled back at her, although this time it didn’t quite reach his eyes. She was right. He couldn’t help himself. All he wanted to do was protect her and when he heard stories of how she was ostracised, he was filled with an anger he was wholly unused to.

  ‘Are you seeing Cat today?’

  Mary Kate laid down the brush and gathered her hair into a large tortoiseshell clip. This was far safer ground. ‘I am. I’m going with her to take Debbie for her hospital appointment and then I’ve promised Debbie that as it’s her fourth birthday tomorrow we will call into a café for cake on the way home.’

  ‘What time is Debbie’s appointment?’

  ‘Eleven o’clock. Why? Are you at the hospital today?’

  He struggled with the right cufflink, using his left hand. ‘I am, but I’ll be gone by then.’

  ‘Come here,’ she said. ‘Let me help you.’ She reached out and took the cuff with one hand and the link with the other. ‘Think of it as a lucky escape then. Mrs O’Keefe is coming with me. She’s knitted Debbie a cardigan for her birthday. You would have been surrounded by women and bored with us all.’

  The arrival of the young widow Cat and her brood of children into Mrs O’Keefe’s life had given the kindly woman a renewed sense of purpose. She had barely stopped knitting since.

  ‘You are good to Cat and those children,’ Nicholas said, secretly relieved that Mary Kate had them in her life to be good to. He often asked himself how unbearable life would have been for her if there had been no Cat, or whether she would have tolerated all that she had since Lavinia had threatened to destroy her reputation, and thereby her life, even though Mary Kate had done nothing other than fall in love with a man whose wife had slept with his partner and walked out on him. Nicholas wasn’t sure that Mary Kate could have borne the loneliness if Cat and Mrs O’Keefe hadn’t been there for her. They were all the friends she had in Liverpool.

  Cuffs fastened, Nicholas picked his tie up from where he’d thrown it on the bed.

  ‘Here, let me.’ Mary Kate moved towards him and stood at the edge of the bed. Her dressing him during his morning routine was as intimate as him undressing her at bedtime. The pink quilted satin eiderdown had fallen from the blankets and was now almost fully on the floor. The pillows were tumbled, the sheets a tangled knot. Her nightdress was carelessly thrown across the bedstead, where it had been since the night before, when he’d removed it not long after she’d switched off the lamp. While she looped his tie, he slipped his hands inside her robe and around her soft, naked waist, as he always did, and began kissing the tip of her nose. Then, lifting stray tendrils of hair out of his way, he moved down to her neck.

  ‘Nicholas, will you stop.’ She laughed as she tilted her head back.

  ‘Okay, if you insist, I suppose I must – I can’t be late today,’ he said with reluctance as instead he began devouring every feature of her face with his hungry eyes.

  Her sparkling blue eyes; the thickness of her red hair that all too frequently refused to be tamed; the bridge of half a dozen freckles across the top of her nose and along the line of her jaw; her lips, oh her lips. If there were any other way, he would give up his medical career and remain at home with his Mary Kate all day and every day, just kissing those lips.

  ‘Nicholas, stop doing that too.’ She could see him out of the corner of her eye and she was grinning.

  ‘I can’t help it. I love you,’ he said and suddenly tugged on her waist and hugged her into him, tight, too tight, as he tried to cover every inch of her with his body.

  ‘I love you too,’ she whispered into his chest and for a brief moment time stood still and all they could hear was the beating of each other’s hearts.

  ‘How about I invite my new partner, William, and his wife over to us for lunch on Sunday then,’ he said as they broke away and she threaded through the final loop of his tie. ‘I imagine his wife would appreciate the change of scene, as she’s got two little ones to look after.’ He chuckled. ‘You know, Bella and all the patients call him Dr William – they don’t realise it’s his first name.’

  Her eyes met his. ‘Do they know about us?’

  ‘Well, not exactly, but he’s a doctor – we don’t judge like some others do. I’ll explain beforehand and it will be fine.’

  ‘Are you sure? Where are they from?’ She wasn’t nearly as confident in the charity of others as Nicholas apparently was.

  ‘Here, in Liverpool. He trained at St Angelus, obviously – a few years below me – which was where I first met him. I call you my wife at the practice, you know that, and so does Bella, who loves you.’ They may not have had family, but they had crumbs of affection from a limited number of people to sustain and carry them through. ‘Here, I have something for you. I meant to give it to you last night. Wait there.’

  He dashed out of the bedroom and across the landing to his study. She heard the click of the lock on his Gladstone bag opening and closing, and before she had finished brushing her hair he was back at her side.

  ‘You know that emerald heart of your mother’s in the dressing-table drawer? Well, look, I took it without you knowing, and I did this.’

  His smile was boyish, happy, and she stretched out her hand to take the box he held out to her. Her father had brought the heart over on his one visit to Liverpool, shortly after she’d got there. It had been a gift to Sarah from Mary Kate’s great-grandfather, Daedio. All Mary Kate knew about it was that it had come from America.

  She opened the long box he held out to her and gasped. There was her emerald, and she had never seen it look so beautiful. It hung by a gold thread from a deep-green velvet ribbon.

  ‘It’s a choker – all the rage, so the jeweller told me. What do you think?’

  Mary Kate turned back to the mirror and drew the ribbon around her neck. ‘Can you fasten it?’ she asked as her eyes met his in the mirror.

  He stood over her, looking at her reflection as he did as she’d asked, and was overcome by a strange sense of melancholy. ‘Mary Kate, will you do something for me?’

  She wasn’t really concentrating, she was so taken by her own image. Sometimes she was shocked at how much like her mother she looked, and at this moment, as the green velvet ribbon settled into the dip in her throat and the emerald caught the light and winked back at her, she felt as though Sarah was sitting next to her, smiling. Sarah had worn the emerald every day of Mary Kate’s life. She shook her head; it was the familiarity of the stone that had made the hairs on her arms rise. Her fingers flew to her neck as she caressed the soft loveliness of the green velvet ribbon.

  ‘Nicholas, it’s so beautiful. I don’t know how you thought to do this.’

  ‘I saw it in Lewis’s, when you sent me to buy the ribbons for Debbie’s hair.’ He laughed. ‘And the idea just came to me. Will you wear it every day? Promise me?’

  She nodded, her eyes full of tears. She stood and turned; her lips found his and her hands cupped the back of his neck. ‘I love you so much,’ she whispered as they parted.