The Forgotten Waltz Part 5

It was nice to be with my own family for once. Even though I had no family to speak of, and it was just the two of us, sitting in front of the real flames of my mother's artificial gas fire, flicking channels through the midnight bells and drinking Sea Breezes.

Joan poked the ash of her cigarette vaguely at the fireplace, even though it wasn't a real fireplace, and she loosed her stockings through the cloth of her skirt, to let them settle around her ankles, in two gossamer nests. My mother was strangely slovenly, for someone who looked so pristine. Or more than pristine; for someone who seemed to gather the available light about her. It used to embarra.s.s me, the way she sat in the kitchen with our friends after school, getting all their chat and letting the ash topple on the tiled floor. It wasn't as though she didn't have an ashtray. I found one in the fridge once which wasn't a surprise; the contents of the fridge were often a little arbitrary. 'What do you do all day?!' I remember shouting at her, when I got in hungry one afternoon. To which she said nothing. There was nothing for her to say.

I suppose, in the early years of her widowhood, she let things slide and we did not forgive her for it. Children want things to be ordinary. Maybe that's all they want.

Ordinary was, in any case, exactly what I got that New Year's Eve: a cheese-and-tomato sandwich, a cup of tea; my mother rattling through the bottles to see if there was anything worthwhile, shaking the carton of cranberry juice, saying, 'Good for the bladder,' the pair of us going into the sitting room to talk about it is hard to remember what we talked about, I can't quite fix it in my mind. I remember she said, 'How are the in-laws?' and I said, 'You don't want to know.'

Diets, obviously; the fact that when you get older the weight all s.h.i.+fts around to the front. I think we also talked about separates versus dresses, old boyfriends and what happened to them, both hers and mine. My stubborn aversion to pastels. The usual.

Then, at five past twelve she stood up and made for bed, and I did not know what to do, or where to go. Maybe she was so used to her routine, it didn't occur to her to see me to the door.

I sniffed the last of my drink and swallowed it down.

'Am I over the limit?' I said, and triggered much fuss. Joan, for whom public transport was a deep mystery, wouldn't hear of my trying for a taxi, 'On this night of all nights,' she said.

'Oh darling. Go on up to your own room.'

She was out in the hall by then, holding the post at the foot of the stairs and her eyes, over the drag and sough of her breathing, were large with concern.

'Well, let me help you up at least,' I said, but she batted me vaguely away, and started up by herself, holding on to the banister.

'Just tonight, mind!'

In case I thought the burden of care was about to s.h.i.+ft my way.

I followed her up and went into my old bedroom, climbed into bed and undressed piecemeal between sheets slick with the cold. In the morning, I woke like a child and came down to a breakfast of eggs and sausage, toast, b.u.t.ter, tea. My mother was already dressed in a raspberry cashmere twinset and tweed skirt, her make-up done just a few crow's feet, she really had remarkable skin. She gave out to me for my cheap tights, and sent me upstairs for a new packet of stockings from her drawer: 'Mother, I am thirty-two years old.'

I refused the stockings, but found a huge costume ring she had from her dancing days and borrowed that instead. I nearly took a scarf, too, but some sadness made me put it back at the last minute, saying, 'I don't know when I'll get it back to you.'

Then we got into her Renault and drove out to Bray where my brother-in-law was doing the New Year swim.

We made our way through the deserted town and parked along the seafront. It took us a while to find him among the crowd on the beach; my sister's pantomime husband, dressed in a fright wig and a yellow T-s.h.i.+rt with 'Aware' written on the front. He was collecting 'for depression' he said, while his children pushed back against Fiona's legs and gazed up at him, frozen and bemused. He looked fat. Or worse than fat, I thought what with the belly and the legs made spindly by black lycra he looked middle-aged. His feet, especially, were horrible; waxy and white on the stones of the beach, as he struggled his way down to the deep, churning water and the shrieking masochism of the crowd. They splashed about, and turned to wave at the sh.o.r.e, and it made me uneasy, seeing people swim in Halloween masks or bobbly hats, the way the guy beside you took off his coat and turned into a madman, who didn't know the difference between wet and dry.

Afterwards, we went back to Enniskerry for soup and a cup of tea, and our mother stayed to babysit, while we walked up to Sean and Aileen's for the Bull Shot cure.

So it was all natural and ordained and as it should be that, at 2 p.m., I was walking in a righteous way across the New Year's gravel to the matt grey door belonging to my colleague and acquaintance Sean Vallely, with the hand-shaped knocker on it, that his wife had brought back from Spain.

The house was not as large as I remembered it from the night I sat and watched the lights go out. Somehow, in the days after my little stalking incident, it had grown in my mind to be a square Georgian farmhouse, with an unspecified acreage in front and behind. But in fact, it was only semi-detached, and the windows one on either side of the door, and three in a row upstairs were not that large. Still, it had that thing. It had lollipop bay trees with red Christmas bows, it had tasteful white lights dripping from the eaves, it had that Cotswold gravel and box hedge thing that I hated and wanted in exactly equal measure, and I walked up to the threshold with badness on my mind.

'Nice knocker,' I said, picking up the slender bra.s.s fingers and letting them fall. Then I fixed my gaze on the painted wood, and waited for it to swing away.

And when the door opened, there was no one there.

Of course, it was Evie on the other side, and this threw me. I had to look down from the piece of air where I expected an adult face, and my expression, when I found her, may have slipped from my control. She looked at me with that curious, caught gaze of hers and Fiona said, 'You remember Megan's Auntie?'

'Yes,' though there was nothing in her voice that would make you believe it.

Then she said, 'Hi, Gina.'

And I said, 'h.e.l.lo, sweetheart,' because that was exactly what she was, gathering coats in her stunned, delighted way and bringing them up the narrow stairs to be left on some unspecified bed above.

I had not thought about Evie, all this time. I don't know why. The fact of the wife was always there, she was like a wall running along the side of my mind, but when you are in the throes of l.u.s.t for a man you do not maybe you just can't think about his daughter. As far as I was concerned, Evie was irrelevant to the whole business of sleeping with Sean, her shadow did not, could not, fall across our hotel bed. It would be wrong for her to exist at such a moment: it would be slightly obscene. Or less than obscene it just wouldn't make sense.

And now, there she was. The fact of her amazed me. I had intimations of some dark future, as I watched her walk up the stairs with my coat laid across her two forearms. Or, worse than that: there was a word I wanted to shout at her ascending back, something blurted and bizarre, like: 'Little cow!'

But I did not know what word it was, or what kind of drama it came from. 'a.s.sa.s.sin!' Was that Miss Brodie, or Baby Jane? When I was at school, we went to see Hamlet and, during Ophelia's mad scene, a girl from some innercity school, a little barrel-chested one with unwashed hair, stood up in front of me and roared, 'Ah, show us your c.u.n.t!' at the actress onstage.

That was what it was like. A bit.

Of course I did not want to shout this, or anything like it, at the child. I had no words for the shout in my head, and no intention of looking for them, but it was, whatever way it took me, a giddy moment. Standing for the first time in the smell of Sean Vallely's domestic life all Christmas orange and clove watching the neat and lovely back of his daughter ascending the stairs, her arms held carefully out in front of her; her white socks, the fresh and secret skin at the backs of her knees, like a child from the fifties I don't think you could even get Megan into a skirt by that age, unless there were leggings involved but there she was, in a perfect little kilt and, my goodness, black patent leather shoes.

Then Aileen was in the hall, all mock bustle and precision.

'Come in, come in!' she said, kissed us one by one, 'Happy New Year!' first Fiona, then Shay and then me.

I am trying to remember the smell or texture of her skin, or lips; the sense of her proximity, but a sort of blank thing happened when she came in for the kiss. She stood back quickly. And smiled again.

'So glad you could make it. Some of the others are inside.'

Other what?

She wasn't as old as I remembered, though she sported some very middle-aged lipstick, pinkish and pearlised, on her unprepossessing, useful face. She was wearing a black Issey Miyake pleats dress edged with turquoise, and the collar stood up around her neck in a sharp frill. It made her look like some soft creature, poking out of its beautiful, hard sh.e.l.l.

The house unlike her outfit was surprisingly unpretentious. There was a study on the right of the door we had come in, and a kitchen down at the end of the hall. On the other side, they had knocked through from front to back to make one long reception room.

'Isn't this lovely?' I said to her, taking it all in.

'Oh, it's neither fish nor fowl,' she said. 'I wanted to take out the back of it, but Sean says it's time to sell up again, move back into town.'

'How's the new house?' said Fiona.

'Well that's the thing. We love it.'

'Isn't that great?' said Fiona.

She turned to me, 'We found this wonderful old place overlooking the beach at Ballymoney. Up high,' then back to Fiona, 'When will you let Megan come down? I go straight from the school pick-up, you know, let Sean follow whenever, every second or third weekend.'

I had been hoping for clues, of course, but I was surprised to get them hurled at me as soon as I walked in the door. It was not that Aileen wanted me to know about her second house everyone over forty wants you to know about their second house she was actually telling me her schedule. She was spelling it out for me: my husband is free every second (or third) Friday, but on Sat.u.r.day he gets in the car and follows me down to the country where we light a fire, and drink a bottle of good red, and look, from on high, at the lovely, ever-changing sea.

And all this before I had a drink in my hand.

'Oh how nice,' I said, for distraction, looking at the series of photographs on the wall. There was a line of them in square, dark frames; the images in flaring, overexposed, black and white. It took me a moment to recognise Evie in one, then another these were studio pictures, taken when she was a toddler. Very arty and beautiful. Aileen in a white s.h.i.+rt, leaning against a white wall. A tousle-headed Sean.

I thought I heard his voice from the kitchen and took a quick left into the long living room, which was comfortably full of people. Four beautiful cas.e.m.e.nt windows. Food one end, drinks by the door, a Filipino circling for the refill with a bottle in either hand.

Frank was there, a little to my surprise blathery old Frank he gave me a slippery look across the room, as though there was something I did not know about. For a second I thought it was to do with me and Sean, but Frank doesn't do s.e.x, he does other kinds of hidden currents and agreements; the kinds that happen between men and are not about anything you could put a finger on it's not the cars, it's not the football, it's about who is going to win (though win what is sometimes also a question). I say this with some bitterness, because Frank was promoted over my head three months later, so now I know. A man with no discernible talent except for being on side.

I gave him a nod through the various bodies and gesturing hands between us and he came over to give me a clumsy kiss, before heading home.

'Next year in Warsaw,' he said.

Poor old Frank.

I heard Sean seeing him off at the front door and I went up to the drinks table, where he might look in and spot me without having to say h.e.l.lo. The silence when he clocked me was very slight, and very interesting. I didn't look over at him. I smiled, as though to myself, and moved away.

I recognised a few of the faces from Fiona's parties, except there were no children here and the mothers, dolled up in the middle of the day, looked catastrophic, some of them, or else surprisingly attractive and well got.

Fiachra was also there, with his pregnant wife called I must have got this wrong 'Dahlia'. It was strange to meet her in the flesh indeed in all that extra flesh; she was huge. She waved a large gla.s.s of wine at me and said, 'Do you think this will bring it on?' Then she took a sip and winced. There was a woman, she told me, who went on the lash at the Galway Film Fleadh and woke up the next morning in hospital, with the world's worst hangover and a baby in the cot beside her.

'Like, what happened last night? Where am I?'

'Respect,' I said.

'Drunk. Can you imagine? The midwives must have loved her.'

'How could they tell?' said Fiachra, bone dry, as ever, and he turned to a woman who had come up to him, with a squeal.

I don't know what she was like most of the time Dahlia, or Delia, or Delilah but at thirty-eight weeks' pregnant, she was as slow and hysterical as a turnip in a nervous breakdown. She pulled me in over her belly literally pulled me by the cloth of my top and said, in a low voice: 'Why is my husband talking to that girl?'

'What?' I said. 'Would you give over.'

'No really,' she said. 'Does he know her?'

She was crying. When did that start?

I said, 'Would you like something to eat, maybe?' and she said, 'Oh. Food.'

Like she had never thought of doing that before.

I sat her on a sofa and brought her a plate filled with everything: quiche, poached salmon, green salad, potato salad with roasted hazelnuts, a grated celeriac thing; also a few cuts of some bird, with sausage stuffing and some clovey, Christma.s.sy, red cabbage. It wasn't catered, I noticed. They had done it themselves.

'It's a bit mixed up,' I said.

'Oh well,' she said. 'Never mind, eh?'

I wanted to get away from her, but it didn't seem possible. There was an equal temptation to sit beside her for warmth almost and I gave in to that instead, checking around me that Sean was once again out of the room. Or perhaps it was Conor I was worried about, even though I knew he was so far away.

She was wearing a red T-s.h.i.+rt over maternity jeans, with a little sequinned bolero that looked, against the scale of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, like it had come off a Christmas toy. She balanced the plate of food on her b.u.mp, then hoisted herself more upright to place it on her knee. Finally she put the plate on the arm of the sofa, and twisted the less pregnant part of herself around to it, leaving the more pregnant part behind.

'Oh Christ.'

I thought I heard her whimper, as she started to eat; actually whimper. I turned to watch the room and the balloon of her stomach continued to swell in the corner of my eye.

'Oh Christ.'

Something moved across her belly, a ripple, or a shadow, and I startled the way you would for a spider or a mouse. I turned to stare and it happened again what looked like a shoulder bone cresting and subsiding, like something pus.h.i.+ng its way through latex, except it wasn't latex under there, it was skin.

Maybe it was an elbow.

'Dessert?' I said.

'G.o.d yes,' she said, without turning around. And I got up and left her, and failed to find her a dessert, or to feed her again.

It was the kind of party where no one ate the chicken skin. Glazed in honey as it was, with a hint of chilli, the chicken skin was left at the side of every plate. I discovered this later when I cleared some dishes out to the kitchen, slaloming between the guests, and humming as I went. I left them on the kitchen counter beside Sean, who tended his pot of hooch, and really, possibly, wished that I would go.

Or wished that everyone else would go. I couldn't quite tell.

'Good Christmas?' I said.

'Yes thanks,' he said. 'You?'

'Lovely.'

I had, besides, no intention of going. I was having too good a time.

Back at the buffet, Fiona and the Mummies were giving it all they had. They leaned in for scurrility, then reeled back with laughter, hands going to mouths, Oh no! People dodging sideways to scoop up a gla.s.s, or snaffle an extra piece of this or that. There were little bowls of glazed nuts, and dried mango slices that had been dipped in dark chocolate. Really dark. At least 80 per cent.

'Am I dead? Is this heaven?' a woman said across to me, before lifting her head with a loud, 'f.u.c.k it, I knew her at school.'

They were talking about plastic surgery. Indeed, a couple of women in the room had the confused look that Botox gives you, like you might be having an emotion, but you couldn't remember which one. One had a mouth that was so puffy, she couldn't fit it over the rim of her wine gla.s.s.

'Someone get the woman a straw,' said the schoolfriend, and she turned to consider the sherry trifle, her hand lifting to the skin of her neck.

I recognised someone from the telly over by the far wall, and an awful eejit from the Irish Times. And of course Aileen had a job, I remembered now, she was some kind of college administrator which explained the academic types in their alarming clothes, who hogged all the chairs and watched the room with stolid eyes. The Enniskerry husbands stood about and talked property: a three-pool complex in Bulgaria, a whole Irish block in Berlin. Sean wasn't working the room, so much as playing it. He went about seeding slow jokes, glancing back for the bellow of laughter.

'Don't worry,' he threw over his shoulder. 'I'll invoice you for that in the morning!'

Aileen, too, was on her mettle. She caught me in the kitchen doorway, and asked me lots of interesting questions about myself. Slightly lit up, as she was, a champagne flute in her hand, she quizzed me about my life. 'Where are you living now?' And she was so cheery and bright, she had everything so much under control, it was I am not wrong about this like a f.u.c.king interview. For what job? Who knows.

I didn't care.

I had a few too many gla.s.ses of white under my belt, and a ring on my finger; a big plastic fake rock from my mother's dancing days, that might have been made of Kryptonite. I could go upstairs and leave a kiss on his pillow, or a lychee they had some, I noticed, in the turned-wood fruit bowl. I could stay too long in the upstairs bathroom and have a good snoop: olive-green walls, smelly candle, weather-beaten wooden buddha to watch, and bless perhaps, all the excretions of the house. There was a white lattice cupboard under the sink, where various products lurked: I could steal a squirt of his wife's perfume, or just take the name for later (ew, though, White Linen?). What words should I write on the mirror, to show up later in the steam of the shower? In what corner might I dribble my spit? The cupboards were flush, the floorboards tight, but there might be a gap or crack somewhere, where a hex of mine might rot, or grow: Sean, where did this thong come from? The one under the bed?

Though this dark magic, surely, could work against you too.

The room where they slept was white. Or near white. The ceiling was cut by the slope of the eaves and it was done in horribly similar, crucially different shades of f.u.c.king white. I mean I didn't have the colour chart in my hand, but it was an old house, so let's give Aileen the benefit of posh here; let's call it bone white on the floorboards, the walls strong white, the wardrobe French white that horrible furniture you get with the garlands and curlicues and all surrounding the crisp white sheets, on the froth of a duvet, that fluffed itself up off their five-foot wide bed.

They had very few things.

In a way, that was what I envied most. No dressing gown on a hook, no shoes under the bed.

I tipped a door in the wall and it opened on the en-suite: many fitted cupboards, pin lights, a large shower-stall with a flat rose like the bottom of a bucket and, for extra clean, a second, smaller shower head at hip height.

Who could leave all that?

I went back on to the landing and listened.

The noise downstairs continued, indifferent to the silence where I stood, in the dead centre of the house. In the spare room, the bed was dark with heaped and waiting coats. Across the landing was the lavender glow of Evie's room, that hummed, in the dusk, almost ultraviolet. It too, was perfect. A dreamcatcher by the window, a little white bed. The door was open, I did not have to pry. I was looking for the distinctive thing, tacky or sweet, as a sign of the girl herself; something scabbed or plastic, like the dinosaur stickers my niece had put on her bedroom door that no one had the energy to remove. But there was nothing. I mean, there was nothing there that I could identify. It was only a glance.