The Forgotten Waltz Part 15

Bubblegum girl, as I like to think of her, the one with the nail varnish and the B in Honours Maths, was drinking like a twenty-two-year-old and hanging out of railings around the time I met him in Brittas Bay. I think about his body on the beach, and it seems different to me now. His strong legs and neat back standing at the edge of the sea, while his wife disentangled herself from Evie on the strand: the tufty nipples he covered up with a black T-s.h.i.+rt, while we sat and talked, it all seems, now, differently naked; shadowed by another girl's touch, wrapped in her secret arms. c.o.c.ky little b.a.s.t.a.r.d. No wonder he leaned back on his elbows like that and lifted his face to the sky.

I don't know why I should worry about his infidelities to Aileen especially considering that I was one of them. I should take it as proof that he never loved her, though I think he really did love her once. Did he love my sister that day in Brittas? Or all of these women, all of the time? I don't care.

He loves me now. Or he loves me too.

Or.

I love him. And that is as much as any of us can know The Things We Do for Love THE FIRST THING I hear in the morning is the phone.

'Are you going into work?' It is Sean.

'I think so.'

'Right,' he says. 'Thanks.'

'Where are you?' I say, but he is gone.

Neither is he, as I discover when I let the phone fall back on the duvet, in the bed beside me. It is half past eight. There is something too blank about the light outside. I get up into the murk of the room, and pull the curtains of grey linen, and find the world flattened by monochrome.

I do the winter sprint around the freezing room, shower and dress, pick the phone up to find a text: 'Can you pick Ev up from Foxrock?'

To which I reply, 'Hve meeting. Walking into town.'

I can't imagine how Evie is supposed to get out of Enniskerry, which must be snowed in. The schools are closed. I don't see any cars on the road, and the television, when I turn it on, has pictures of frozen confusion, quiet chaos. Nothing is moving, except makes.h.i.+ft toboggans and s...o...b..a.l.l.s.

You would think that on this day of all days, she would just stay at home. But I know nothing about these things the reason Evie stays, or the reasons she goes there are deep forces at work, great imperatives. We must inch forward ma.s.sively, like rock along a fault line, for fear of the quake.

At ten thirty, another, somewhat redundant, text from Sean, 'Hang on ...'

'Bated breath,' I write and then delete.

Since his daughter came into my house, life is one long wrangle about arrangements: times, places, pick-ups, drop-offs, handovers. And everything has to be done in person. For some reason, you can't just ask someone friend's mother, drama teacher or whoever to put the child in a taxi. I mean, how much is my time worth? How much is Sean's time worth? Surely more than the tenner for the fare. But you can't put daughters in taxis. Putting a daughter in a taxi is like asking a foreigner to molest her, on the meter.

'Meet Ev 3.30ish Dawson St??'

'ok. When home?'

'145 bus stop.'

'whn home?'

'trying!!!!'

'How Buda?'

He does not reply.

I have saved this man's life, but there are things I am not allowed to that I do not need to know. The money thing, for example. I don't know whether he can break even in Budapest, or what is happening to his house by the beach, which is now up for sale too. I think, to be fair, he doesn't know either. I mean, it's fine. Everything is fine, just so long as no one blinks, no one moves. Meanwhile, it is there on the web for everyone to click over and ignore the sh.e.l.ls on the windowsills in Ballymoney, and whether Clonskeagh has gone Sale Agreed. Myself and Sean have loved a whole litter of For Sale signs into being. And no one is about to buy anything. Not in this snow.

At eleven my meeting calls to cancel, as I knew she would. I hold my phone and look at it, wondering who to text about what. Then I just put it away.

The craziest thing, I think, is the way I can't speak to them in person, to Aileen or to Evie. I am a grown woman with a job and a salary, and I am not allowed talk to the people who, at a whim, make or ruin my Sat.u.r.days. I can not even lift the phone.

As I say to Fiachra, it's like I get all the stupid stuff and none of the cuddles. Not that I want the cuddles: Evie (am I the only one who notices this?) is no longer a child.

She is nearly twelve. Evie had a growth spurt last autumn and, though she measured herself against her father chin! earlobe! forehead! to her preening delight and his seeming pride, it has not yet translated into actual cubic centimetres: this of girl and this of air. She has not yet learned the extent of herself.

So she sits on her father's knee, or rather plonks herself on to his lap, just as she always used to, 'Oh G.o.d. Evie,' while he pulls back to guard the family jewels and ducks to the side to keep her skull from breaking his nose. You can't actually see him behind her large and white and radiant flesh. She is dressed like a girl you see throwing up into a litter bin on a Sat.u.r.day night, in black ripped tights under denim shorts (Aileen looks in the cheap shops to see what she will wear and tries to match it in something a little more expensive), and she really is sitting on him as opposed to perching on his knee, and the two of them are entirely happy and natural with this, until they aren't.

'Off now, Evie.'

'Aw-ww.'

'Off!'

Sometimes he succeeds, and sometimes, he lets her stay. Her face in front of his is rounder, the lips softer, and her eyes, though the same shape and colour, are spookily not the same: there is an entirely different human being in there. She swings a leg and looks airily about, claiming her father against all comers, while I sit and smile.

The first time she stayed over I kept away, walking the streets of Galway in the rain, only driving home when I was sure she would be gone. It was September. The house had been on the market exactly a year. If you listened to the car radio, all the money in the country had just evaporated, you could almost see it, rising off the rooftops like steam. And there she was, this cuckoo, sitting in my kitchen; the price I had to pay for love.

The absurdity of it was lost on Sean, who was who continues to be completely helpless when it comes to Evie. He can see nothing but her.

So I did not ask his permission the next weekend, but walked in at two o'clock to find the two of them sitting down to lunch.

'Hi!' I said, brightly.

Evie ignored me, but it is possible she ignores everyone for the first while.

Her father said, 'Evie,' and she looked up with hurt eyes. 'You remember Gina.'

'Hm,' she said.

And I moved quietly about as she picked through the home-made burger; removing lettuce and cuc.u.mber, complaining there was no ketchup, piling on the mayonnaise.

Since then, she comes quite often. We meet in pa.s.sing. I dodge her rage. I am always brief. I am always nice. I sleep with her father, while she sleeps across the landing. All the doors are open in case she dies in her sleep, even though she is not going to die in her sleep. But I do not think we would make love if they were closed, not even silently.

I come out in the morning, to find her already occupying the bathroom, or she barges past, in some tatty flannelette of infant pink. Every time I see her, she has grown but ma.s.sively. It is like a different stranger to b.u.mp into every week.

At night, I hear them moving about the spare room, the curtains pulled, the quiet chat as she arranges fluffy toys and night lights and who knows what, until her father Evie is nearly twelve, remember lies down beside her and murmurs her to sleep. As often as not he falls asleep too, and I can not tap on the door, or put my head round it to rouse him: I can not risk it. So they lie, coc.o.o.ned and hopeless and completely contented, while I sit and watch c.r.a.p TV.

She started coming in September and they ran out of trips and excursions by the middle of October, so they linger in the house and fail to make decisions; Evie whining, I just want to hang out with my frie-ends.

For a man who is crazy about his daughter, Sean spends a lot of time telling her to go away. Maybe all parents do this.

'Go and do something,' he says, as she peers over his shoulder at his laptop screen, eating an apple beside his ear.

'What are you standing there for?' He sends her down to the shops for sweets, and then tells her she can't have sweets. He sends her down to the shops for a smoothie, instead. He says, 'Go and play,' when there is no one for her to play with. He tells her to go and read a book, though he never reads books, himself; I have never seen him with a book in his hand. So she plays Nintendo, and then he tells her not to play so much Nintendo.

'Stop touching things, Evie.'

There is no stilling her hands, always on the mooch.

I noticed this the first time we went outside the house together, and walked down to Bushy Park with Evie's new dog (the dog is another story: let me not begin to discuss the dog). She followed each wall with the tips of her fingers, smooth or rough; let them drift through hedges and drag the leaves off bushes.

It was as though she was testing the edges of her world; finding the point where objects began and s.p.a.ce stopped.

'There is no need to touch the wall, Evie.'

Sean seemed worried she would shred the pads on her fingers and there was something else there too, some idea of contamination; whether she would dirty things or be made dirty by them Sean is, as we know, a clean sort and Evie plays with his disgust in the smallest ways. She doesn't do anything truly taboo, she wouldn't get away with it; she is, besides, at a modest age. Delicate to a fault about her galloping physicality, she never discusses s.e.x and thinks adults are completely gross when they try.

'Oh pull-ease.'

But she scratches her scalp into the fold of a book. She leaves sticky smears on the keyboards and remotes and phones. She twirls her hair, or sucks her hair, she is hugely uncomfortable in her bra for which she has my sympathy, it's a life sentence and her underwear is constantly prised out and readjusted. She also and this gets to me too hoiks the phlegm up her nose instead of using a hanky.

It is all, in its way, fantastic for being so effective. Although she seems to be helpless to it, and maybe she is, it is also the best and quickest way to drive her father around the bend.

'Evie, please!'

'What?'

She also knows, as though by the fruit of long contemplation, the exact and simplest way to his heart. Not just by looking at him with her grey eyes, which should be enough for anyone, which is almost enough for me. Not just by doing well in school and being ostentatiously averse to boys. No, Evie has made friends with the richest girl in the cla.s.s. Which in Evie's cla.s.s, out in County Wicklow, is pretty d.a.m.n rich. In fact, the father of Evie's best friend (blonde, like her mother, with beautiful slim knees) owns houses and hotels, owns whole apartment blocks, from Tralee to Riga.

Her name and you have to admire her parents for this is Paddy.

They are doing a project together on lice in horses. Paddy is supplying the horses. I did not ask if Evie was supplying the lice.

And sometimes, too, they are perfect: sitting on the sofa watching 'Father Ted', or out in the open air, or the way they talk in the car, because talking is what Sean is good at, and with his daughter there is no charm and no blame, there is just Sean. I listen to the ease of his tone with her and I think, He does not speak that way to me.

He does not hold me by the hand. He does not tickle me, quickly, to get me out of his way. He does not tango me down the hall, and arch me over, backwards. He does not wake in the night, thinking of me.

I have saved his life.

From what?

'You have saved my life,' he said.

But if you ask me, it's not one woman or another that is the saving of Sean. It is the woman he loves but can never desire. It is Evie.

'Take those earphones off, Evie.'

Evie absent or dreaming in front of a screen or a book. Evie failing to focus up, to move along, to snap to.

Evie stalled in front of the mirror for hours at a time, sprouting hair and neuroses, moody as all get out. And it seems so unfair, to be jumping with hormones when you're still in h.e.l.lo Kitty pyjamas; it is like no one is telling the truth, or no one knows what truth to tell.

I walked in on her one evening. Evie always leaves the door open when she is in the bath You still alive in there, Evie: you haven't gone down the plughole? Usually, she chats away just the feel of the warm water seems to set her rattling on and her father leaves her to it; listening, or pretending to listen, stretched out on our bed across the landing.

But this one evening, she had fallen silent and, between one sentence and the next, I walked in the door.

Evie pulled the sponge up to cover her little budding chest and looked at me with huge grey eyes.

'Don't mind me!' I said, as I dodged across the room to get the thing I needed, whatever it was, from out of the bathroom cabinet.

In the autumn, Evie seemed to get rounder and rounder, fatter and fatter, after which came the amazing stretch and boi-oi-oinngg of this extra flesh into a waist and hips and b.r.e.a.s.t.s though, as I recall, b.r.e.a.s.t.s don't feel like fat, at that age, they feel like tenderised gristle. But they look, from what I saw in the bath, heartbreaking and simple.

There is nothing worse than being nearly twelve.

Evie is at that moment. Her body is at that moment when it is wrong to look at her, wrong to think about her nakedness, when it would be criminal to take a photograph. Her body is becoming her own. Her body is becoming lonely. Her father, who used to bathe and dry her, now stretched out staring at the ceiling, across the hall.

'Have you rinsed, Evie? Rinse till you hear it squeak.'

He was off the bed and standing in the doorway when I came out of the bathroom. I lifted my hands in a mock shrug because all this was normal too and he nodded and turned away.

And I am suddenly pa.s.sionate about Evie. I want to take him by the shoulders and explain that my jealousy is a kind of loving, too. Because, when I was her age, my father was sitting up in his hospice bed enjoying the fact that all women were equally nameless to him now.

'h.e.l.lo my darlings, to what do I owe the pleasure?'

I want to tell him that Evie is lucky to have him, that he, Sean, is where all her luck resides. Because after Miles died nothing went right, unless we made it right; all blessings and bounty, all unexpected joys, came from his love pathetic as it sometimes was and sometimes huge. After Miles died, everything was hard work marrying Conor, marrying Shay and nothing came to either of his daughters gratis and undeserved.

I cried that night. I don't know if Evie heard me; the strange woman weeping beside her father in this strange house. I smothered most of it in the pillow; Sean's hand stroking my back. Me saying, 'I'm sorry, I'll be all right. I'm sorry.'

There she was at breakfast, an overgrown child again; her white a.r.s.e hanging out of her pink pyjamas. She picked the nuts out of her muesli, and left them on the table in a little heap beside the bowl.

Sean said, 'Eat your breakfast, Evie.'

I said, 'Would you like some eggs?'

And Evie said, 'I hate eggs.'

And yet, if it had not been for Evie, we would not be here. That's what I think.

I kissed her father, upstairs in his own house, and Evie lifted her flapping hands from her sides and she ran over to us saying, 'Happy New Year, Daddy!' and he bent to kiss her too.

As far as Sean was concerned, nothing happened that day. Keep it simple and you will win, or if you don't win as he liked to say at least it will be simple. But, sometime after that kiss, between one hotel afternoon and the next hotel afternoon, Evie started to disappear.

How such a constantly tended child could do such a thing, is hard to say. For the first long while, they did not even notice; it crept up on them. Evie was just not where she was supposed to be. She seemed to get lost on her way up the stairs. She didn't show up for meals, only to be found in her bedroom, or the au pair's room, or out in the garden with no coat. One day, around the time my mother died, she failed to arrive back from Megan's house. This was a journey of some three hundred yards down a country road that even Evie was allowed to take by herself.

'When did she leave?' said Aileen to Fiona on the phone: two families streaming out of their separate houses, climbing into four different cars, reversing out of their driveways at a clip. They found her almost immediately. She was standing on the side of the road, as though at an imaginary bus stop, with no sense that her journey had been interrupted, or had taken too long.

'What are you doing Evie?'

'I was just looking.'

It was, up to a point, just the way she was. Stop dawdling, Evie. From the time she was three years old, Evie could never get out of a car without pausing endlessly before the jump. Thresholds made her stall. All journeys were difficult, not for her, but for the people around her, who could never quite figure out just how she managed to slow everything down.

Come along, Evie. So this was nothing more than another failure, on her part, to grow up. Then, one day, she wandered from her mother in the Dundrum Shopping Centre and when Aileen, frantic, found her outside by the fountains, she could not say where she had been.

'I was just,' she said. 'I don't know.'

Sean was in no position to believe that there was a problem. His life with me had taken on some importance, by then; he was a man trying to keep his balance. He was, besides, 'Just not going to do it, this time round.' And though he discussed Evie with me over the phone in those long drifting days after Joan died, he didn't he just couldn't listen to Aileen, when the panic machine ground into gear again.