The Forgotten Waltz (11 page)

‘All this. Have you done it before?’

‘Well, you know,’ he said.

When we met the next week, I wore my black suede boots with the fringe down the back seam, and I sat in the chair and crossed my legs and told him it was time to make an end. And after he agreed, and seduced me, and I resisted and then cried (just a little), he told me about the other girl, the first one. She was someone at work, he said. She was someone he had actually hired, at work, so go figure, but unbelievably it did not occur to him, except in a ‘wouldn’t mind’ sort of way, and anyway he wasn’t …

‘What?’ I said.

He just wasn’t free. That was the bottom line. But something about her, slowly, something about her just broke him, the way she was, she had a thing for nail varnish, these tiny hands and her nails were done in all these bubblegum colours, they looked like sweets.

‘And?’ I said.

Well she was twenty-two, which, you know, looks great, but it was the emotion that sideswiped him, it came from nowhere. And she was twenty-two. So he was in love – he thought he was in love – and he had forgotten how it is at that age but she was really hard work. She wasn’t thick, exactly – she still, God knows, went on about her B in Honours Maths – but she gave a very good impression of thick, talking about herself all the time, obsessing about her thighs, throwing things at him if he said the wrong, nice thing about her thighs.

And she couldn’t take her drink, so it was always a mess, she was always maundering on about her mother or her horrible father, who turned out to be a guy Seán knew, actually, and she was fighting with taxi men and roaring in the street, so she had him by the balls, this crazy woman, he couldn’t even sack her, he couldn’t take the risk. And when it was finally over, he thought: so that’s it. That was his chance, his fling. That was his big romance.

I waited for the next line.

‘Until I met you.’

And we made love for a second time. I was very upset, although I did not show it. I was upset because I felt so lonely, all the way through.

I had taken to ringing his home number at night, and this was a disastrous thing to do. Disastrous to want it so badly; the sound of his voice in the middle of a long fortnight, although it might not have been his voice exactly I was looking for. This was me ringing the landline to Enniskerry, the one I had seen nesting on the console table in the hall, and on the kitchen wall, and by the marriage bed. It was answered somewhere in the ordinary life of the house: Aileen with bleach foaming on her upper lip, Evie at the kitchen table, doing her homework, Seán, apparently, elsewhere. The second or third time, Aileen did not cut the connection. She waited, and the silences of her life filled the earpiece, as I heard the nearness of her breath, and she felt the nearness of mine.

I zipped my calves back into the boots, holding my legs high, one after the other, to avoid the fringe. Seán sat on the edge of the bed putting in his cufflinks. He was wearing a pink shirt, impossibly pale. His jacket was hung over the back of the chair. He did not mention the phone calls. He bent down to lace up his plain, black shoes.

He said, ‘You should never do this with someone – you should never expose yourself to someone like this – unless they have a lot to lose.’

I ran home to him that day. I ran home to my husband, to his wise brown eyes that were not, in fact, wise, and to his big, warm body that had not kept me from the cold.

On Saturday night I cracked open a bottle of wine and we watched ‘The Wire’ on box set, and after that we drank another bottle, despite which I was numb, in his arms, with the thought of all I had lost: the movement of his hand was just a movement, his tongue was an actual tongue. I had killed it; my best thing. The guilt, when it finally hit, was astonishing.

Dance Me to the End of Love

IN THE MIDDLE
of April Seán was guest speaker at some motivational golfing weekend in Sligo and we had two days together – I can’t remember what lie I told before I got on the train – two days, and one whole night, to end the affair; to strangle it and beat it about the head, to throw it in a shallow grave and go home.

Seán picked me up at the station (Evie’s fluffy earmuffs abandoned on the back seat), and brought me out to a hotel, far from the golfers, on the outskirts of town.

The hotel was actually a converted asylum, massive, and grey. There were two Gothic chapels on either end of the car park, one smaller than the other.

‘Protestant and Catholic maybe,’ said Seán. Or staff and patients. But I said it was men one side and women the other. We looked at them when we got out of the car and thought about it: stolen glances across the forecourt. It was all there: the sackcloth, the raving, thwarted love.

‘Jesus,’ said Seán. ‘It’s the County Home.’

Then we walked into reception and found ourselves in the middle of two different hen parties, one in black T-shirts with magenta-coloured feather boas, another in white T-shirts with a pink slogan on the front. The slogan said: ‘Aunt Maggie is on the Farm’.

I turned to pull a face at Seán but he was gone. Disappeared. I couldn’t see him anywhere. In my foolishness I spun around in the hotel foyer, and then back again while the hen parties milled around in front of the desk. I finally pulled out my phone, to find a text that said, ‘Sign in. Send no, will fllw’.

Something, or someone, had spooked him. And so I queued, the only woman in the place who wasn’t wearing pink, and I panicked about my credit card, which had my name on it, which would, one day, turn into a credit-card bill, and I thought how resentment is the one true opposite of desire.

The room was impossible to find. I had to walk miles of corridor, go up in one lift, and down in a different one. The walls were hung with paintings done to match the carpet; an increasingly sickening series of abstracts in cream and maroon that looked like they came out of the same two pots of paint; the inmates’ revenge. The room was in fact in the old nurses’ quarters: a separate, modern building connected by a walkway to the main hotel, with the feeling along the length of it of going from madness to your dinner, and back again. I didn’t know if these ghosts were any easier to handle, as they crept with naggins of vodka in their white pockets to trysts with doctors or orderlies, or with patients who were handsome and sad. A swirl of magenta feathers danced over the carpet as I passed, while at the end of the corridor some ancient echo asked me what I thought I was doing out of bounds at that hour, and in those high heels.

When I got up to the room, Seán was already lurking by the door.

‘How did you manage that?’ I said.

‘Manage what?’ Apparently it was all easy to find, from the outside.

We made love as soon as we saw the bed and then wandered the rooms – it was actually a family suite with a living room and kitchenette: dark wood, stripy cushions. Seán looked different there, more domestic, and used.

It was the end, I knew that. I think we both knew.

That afternoon, we drove to Rosses Point and kissed on the beach. The tiny flesh of his lips in front of that great ocean and, when he opened his mouth, it was like diving in.

Driving back along the coast road, Seán swung in through the gates of a house with a For Sale sign outside.

‘Just curious,’ he said, as he went up the driveway, and we parked right in front of their lives, whoever these people were, in their eighties dormer with its lawn running down to the sea.

They had a trampoline in the garden, and a separate garage – it looked nicer than the house actually – with room for two cars.

A silhouette paused in front of the window: a woman, checking us out.

‘Do you want to buy it?’ I said.

‘Do I want to buy it?’ Which was another thing that annoyed me about him, the way he liked to deadpan what I just said. ‘Giving it the cold read’ as he called it.

‘Are you interested in buying the house?’

‘Always, my love,’ he said. ‘Always.’

My love
.

We stayed for five long minutes, maybe more. At one stage he got out of the car and walked to the gap between the house and the garage, assessing the view down to the sea. Then he walked towards the car, backwards, checking the gutters as he came.

‘OK,’ he said.

And we left the woman with her trampoline and her swing set, that did not have the grass rubbed away beneath it, and to her life by the sea.

I kept checking my phone. No one knew where I was, and I felt cut loose – abandoned almost. I spent the entire time I was there, fantasising the call; the one I might get from Conor; the one from my mother’s mobile that I answer, only to hear a stranger’s voice at the other end. In fact, no one missed me, or wanted me; the phone stayed dead. It was just Sligo working its voodoo as we slid along the lost lanes, in the flat plain between Ben Bulben and the sea.

At Glencar Lake, he recited Yeats to me, ‘Come away oh human child, to the waters and the wild.’ Then we parked beyond the waterfall, and he pushed his seat back, and there was something about him, the expansive way he sat, I knew he wanted me to get up to some badness, that this would be a treat, what with the scenery and the poetry and the fact that we were in his very own, very nice car. And I thought, this can not be true. This man can not want me to blow him, in daylight, in a public car park. This man
whoever he is
.

I opened the glove compartment and looked at the CDs.

‘Guillemots! Is this yours?’

‘Yeah,’ he said.

And he drove back to the hotel too fast, where I failed to seduce him on my way to the shower and he failed to seduce me on my way out of it. And on it went. We risked a meal in town, and hated it. Then we came back and fought. I sat on the bed and cried. I said, ‘Why are you so horrible to me?’

He paused. He walked to the window and pulled back the curtain to watch the darkness, or his own reflection in front of the darkness. Then he let the curtain drop.

‘Gina,’ he said slowly, like he was explaining something it had taken him a while to understand. ‘We don’t really know each other.’

Which didn’t stop us acting like we did. We had four whole rooms to do it in, I could slam a cupboard door in the kitchenette, he could clear his throat while sitting on the side of the bed to undo his shoes. I could drink a glass of wine at the table while he shook out the newspaper on the sofa behind me. He could stand at the bedroom window and look out at the car park while I shifted through the stations on the remote control. We could move about like this: as though we had a claim on each other, as though we were intimate. But we were only playing at these things. I knew that too. The way we leaned or sat, or directed our gaze; the gestures and arrangements we made of ourselves: living room, bedroom, bathroom, hall. And then later when we went to bed, the same play with pillow and duvet, turning towards or away from each other, and even our breathing a kind of demonstration.

In the darkness, something gave.

Seán said his marriage was unbearable. Not over but ‘unbearable’.

‘You have no idea,’ he said.

It reminded me of his daughter sitting on her bedroom floor and saying just that. ‘You have no idea.’
The things I have to put up with
.

But we did not talk about his daughter, and when I offered to talk about Conor, that felt wrong, too.

We talked about Aileen. Of course. We talked about his wife – because that is the thing about stolen love, it is important to know who it is you are stealing from.

‘You don’t understand,’ said Seán. But I did understand; the wrongness of his wife, whatever it was, and her inescapability. And to be honest, I was a bit fed up with his wife, who was always somehow
there
. A part of me was beginning to think she was probably quite a nice woman, that there was nothing appalling about her.

‘She just. You know …’

‘I know.’

We brought it to a close. We played at being in love or not being in love, and even the sex, when it finally happened, wasn’t great, and in the morning, we packed up our things and went home.

At the train station, I sat in the car and said to him, ‘No more.’

He closed his eyes briefly and said, ‘No more.’ And we didn’t know whether to kiss or not, so I just got out, and he popped the boot and came round to get my bag like a taxi man. He said, ‘Have a good journey,’ and I said, ‘Thanks.’

I had a window seat, I looked out over the countryside, the stone walls of Sligo giving way to Leitrim bog. When we crossed the Shannon I was in love with him. By Mullingar I thought, if I did not see him soon again, that I would surely die.

Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye

THREE WEEKS LATER
, on the fifth of May, my mother collapsed, in the middle of the afternoon, and was taken by ambulance to Tallaght Hospital. Luckily – if you could call it luck – it happened when she was out of the house. She was near Bushy Park at the time, though what she was doing there was a bit of a mystery. Joan never went down to the park. She used to say it was too close by to bother with and that, after the first twenty years or so, she gave up feeling guilty about all that fresh air. But it was outside the park gates that she held on to the bonnet of a car and then sat down on the ground. We did not know whether she was going there or coming back, we heard about the car from a woman in one of the houses opposite, who told us the story after the removal to Terenure church. As well she might: it was a good story.

‘I did not see her hit the ground,’ she said. ‘She was the other side of the car from me, and she just sank down. When I came out she was sitting there, with her legs straight out, for all the world like a toddler or a little child, and her lovely camel coat fanned out on the path behind her.’

This woman, who seemed to know who we were, and who my mother was, and all her different coats, wanted to hand me a phone.

I did not want to take it. I did not see why I should.

‘I found it later, after the car was gone.’

We were pretty sure it was our mother’s phone, though the battery was now flat and neither Fiona nor I had the heart to recharge it. It made us wonder how much Joan knew, or guessed – the strange trip she made towards the park and, just before she fell, the attempt at making a call. It made us wonder how scared she was; not just the moment she reached for the bonnet of a stranger’s car, but in the hour before that, or the day. And if a day – then what? The same thought was in both our minds: our mother had been frightened for a long time – months, a year perhaps – she had been frightened, and we had not seen it, and now she was beyond our soothing.

It was the loss of her mobile that delayed everything, I think. The first I heard was a phone call from the duty nurse at ten o’clock that night, explaining that our mother had been taken to the hospital, and perhaps I would like to come in. I mean, the woman was dead, she was effectively dead, but this must be what they say to relatives in such circumstances. And I knew this and did not know it, at the same time.

So this might be why I did not ask what had happened, or how Joan was now. It was because I knew this nurse, with her competent, lovely-Irish-girl voice, would not tell me, and that would make me hate her.

‘Certainly,’ I said. ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

And she told me the name of the ward.

Fiona rang as soon as I put down the phone.

That day was a Saturday, and though I might easily have had a few glasses of wine, I was, in fact, sober – I must have been on a diet – and for this I was grateful. For the fact that I knew exactly what was happening, felt every step I took along the fluorescent corridors of the hospital night, and into the room where she was all wired up and ready to go. Fiona arrived with Shay. He and Conor talked to a doctor outside the door. They got us coffee from a vending machine. People passed, now and then. There was the flabby ker-clack of a distant zimmer frame, a horrible, wet fit of coughing. We sat with her into the early hours.

I don’t know if I hated my sister as she sat in the room a few feet away from me or loved her. Whenever I looked over at her she seemed bizarrely separate from me, and the wrong age.

She is tiny, Fiona. I outgrew her when I was eleven. I don’t know how she got pregnant, with that child’s pelvis, it seemed so wrong. Now there she was, her knee beside her white face, the heel of her boot hooked on to the edge of the chair. How are you supposed to sit, when your mother is dying; when your mother is, effectively, already dead? I sat the way Joan taught me to: shoulders straight, hands loosely laced in my lap, legs crossed and angled slightly, to maximise the length of thigh. Like an air hostess. That is the way I sat, as my mother died.

My mother was a great beauty, in her day; more beautiful than either of her daughters, and all her bones were slender and long.

Conor told us that the doctor would let her go whenever we were ready. He said this without looking at anyone. He said it after leaning forward in his chair and taking up Joan’s hand, and laying the palm of it along his cheek, and then setting it back on the counterpane. I did not want him to touch her, actually, I did not want anything to happen. And I can’t remember any further discussion about this matter, but at perhaps one o’clock in the morning, the doctor, or whatever he was, came in and touched my arm. He had beautiful, compassionate eyes. He told me his name, which was Fawad. Then he flicked a couple of switches – they didn’t look like much – while a nurse took the tubes away. He touched my arm again before he left the room, and I was glad I had met him. I thought, perhaps absurdly, that he had a great soul.

That was 1 a.m. Joan lay there for another twenty minutes, breathing. Her beautiful face was a dark shade of blue, her lips purple with a rim of black, and her chin was all wrong, like the jaw had been dislocated. She wasn’t happy.

At a twenty past one, a nurse asked us to leave, just for a few minutes. She suggested we go for a cup of tea and shut the door after us. I don’t know what she did in there. There was a sound of suction, I thought, like that thing at the dentists, but no one mentioned this at the time, or afterwards, and when we went back in, Joan was herself again, pale – for all the world asleep – her breath coming in wisps, and her face wiser than I had seen it before. She looked very beautiful. Her face was turning into the idea of a face. Not quite the one I recognised. Not quite her own. It looked like a face that might become hers, if she ever woke up to claim it.

I think I was the last to realise that she was gone.

It was like waking up – the realisation, I mean – it happened slowly at first and then, somehow, all in retrospect. We were in a room together; we were all sitting in this room. I had an impulse to giggle. We didn’t know what to do, or whether we should stay.

Conor got up and went out into the corridor and I thought he might be running away. In fact he was just looking after business. The nurse came back and, though she didn’t ask us to leave, we knew we had lost possession of our mother, and of the room. We were not wanted here. The nurse said, ‘Take your time. Take your time.’

I stepped up to the bed and said, quite loudly – I mean, I said it in a normal, conversational voice – ‘I won’t kiss you, my darling,’ and I touched her warm hand and turned to leave.

Behind me, Fiona said, ‘Oh the kids! The kids!’ as though they had died too, despite the fact that they clearly had not died. And everything became ordinary again. It was a hospital corridor at night; flowers on the windowsills, somebody coughing, my sister, these two men pushing us through the gloom.

‘Who’s minding them?’ I said.

‘A woman down the road, Aileen Vallely. You know her; Missus Issey Miyake.’

And the men led us down the corridor to the nurse’s station, where we stopped at the high desk, and wondered was there anyone who might tell us what was supposed to happen next.