Forgotten Waltz, The

by Enright, Anne

  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.

  II

  Crying in the Chapel

  WE HAVE BEEN waiting, all week, for the snow. The cold came first. The air thrilled to it. Even indoors, the rooms felt bigger, their edges seemed more clear. The whole country was in a tizz. There were thirteen accidents on the back roads of Leitrim, there was black ice in Donegal. On Tuesday we watched the snow closing London down, covering the Cotswolds, building on the rails of the bridge into Anglesey, and melting, as if to prove its stealth, in the grey Irish Sea. It was snowing in Britain; it would snow here too.

  Yesterday morning, the light was softer, the walls seemed to have moved closer in. Seán got out of bed and opened the curtains on the back garden, as though he was looking for something and I caught it, then – unbearably faint – the high, sweet smell of approaching snow.

  Seán said he didn’t know you could smell snow. He gave me a ‘crazy girl’ look as he went out on to the landing and snapped the string on the bathroom light. I heard it bounce against the mirror, once, twice. Then a silence so complete he might have ceased to exist. I looked at the place where he had stood at the window, and noticed the frost flowering along the edges of the pane.

  The place is freezing.

  The duvet, at least, is light and thick. It is easy to slide my legs into the warmth he has left, to take his pillow and turn it over to the cool side, and add it to my own.

  I lie there watching the familiar square of day, with its new edge of lace: our breath, the sweat of our bodies, gathered in a crystal fog, that grew overnight into fronds and florets of ice.

  The room faces east. I know, as well as anything, the sparse dawn light, but the trees this morning are a denser green, the clouds are low and bruised with the colours of unshed snow.

  I am back, through no fault of my own, in the house where I grew up. It is the fifth of February – twenty-one months, to the day, since my mother sat down on the path with her coat fanned out around her. And still there are rooms I can barely bring myself to open. Not that we are living here. We are just sorting things out. Seán, especially, is not living here, though it is nearly a year, now, since he washed up at the door. We are in between things. We are living on stolen time. We are in love.

  Next door in the bathroom, Seán sighs and, after a waiting pause, starts to pee. There is another pause when he is finished, or seems finished. Then a last little rush; an afterthought. It worries me, this sense of difficulty, surely there should be nothing simpler than taking a leak? And I remember my own father leaning like a plank over the toilet bowl, his hand braced against that bathroom wall, the side of his face nuzzled into his arm. Waiting.

  ‘God this place is cold,’ says Seán’s voice.

  He flushes the toilet and then appears back in the room to lift a dressing gown from the hook on the door. The dressing gown is a plaid design in thick grey towelling, that smells like it needs to be washed. I mean, when it is cold, it smells like this. When it is warm, it smells of Seán.

  He puts it on over his pyjamas of striped jersey cotton.

  Even when it is not about to snow, Seán wears pyjamas in bed. It is a habit he got into, he says, after Evie was born – not that she is around to see, except at the weekends. Even so, he walks around decent, and the world rests uncorrupted, thank goodness, by his nakedness.

  The slippers are brown leather mules that slap as he walks about the room. He roots through his gym bag and shakes his dirty gear into the laundry basket. He goes back to the bathroom to get his shower gel and a fresh towel and when the bag is zipped and done, he drapes a jacket over it. I have weaned him off the suits, but there is still something too perfect about his shirts. He sends them out, now, at enormous expense, after the morning when he took one out of the wardrobe and said, in a puzzled voice, ‘Is there something wrong with the iron?’

  So the shirts come out of the chest of drawers now, and the cardboard ends up in a heap on top of it, and the little pins end up on the floor.

  ‘I’ll get the man again,’ I say.

  ‘God it’s fucking freezing,’ he says, shuffling out of one leather slipper and then the other, as he drops the pyjama bottoms and, with a staggered hop, gets into his underpants.

  ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,’ he says, while the radiator gives an intestinal groan and something judders, downstairs.

  I don’t mind if he wears pyjamas at the weekend. I don’t mind if he wears pyjamas every night of the week. We are in love. He can wear what he likes. Even so, I wonder if there was a time when he walked this room naked; was there a day last summer, when I saw him silhouetted against the window light? Because the most foolish thing about Seán’s bare flesh is its purity. And though I have lusted after him mightily, in my time, it was always about getting him to the point where his body is as simple as it wants to be; as cruel, or as easy. There is very little about it, I would have thought, to frighten a child.

  ‘What am I thinking?’ he says. ‘I’m in Budapest.’

  ‘Today?’

  ‘Just tonight. Just to sort it out.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ I said.

  He takes his trolley bag down from the top of the wardrobe, then changes his mind and puts an extra shirt into his gym bag, which he then takes out again.

  ‘What am I doing? What am I doing here?’

  ‘Where are you staying, the Gellert?’

  ‘I can’t face the Gellert,’ he says.

  I don’t know if this is a compliment to me or not. We had a weekend there, sometime last year, before the arse fell out of the Hungarian forint. It seems a long time ago now. You could actually see Seán’s apartment up the river, a row of three beautiful nineteenth-century windows on the far bank. He had rented the place out to a guy who claimed to be an importe
r of mobile phones – and maybe he was. He is, in any case, gone now, along with four months’ unpaid rent. That long-ago weekend – just last year, as I say: August 2008, when everything was still to play for – Seán finished the paperwork and slapped the phone importer’s back, and we went off to spend the afternoon down in the Gellert’s hot springs. We paddled about the beautiful old pool, then went our separate ways: him to the naked men and me to the naked, mostly old, women, every shape and size of them, who groaned as they eased themselves into the gentle waters, or slapped it towards them in small waves, gathering solace. I don’t think we made love in Budapest. We made money, of course, or Seán made money, but there was too much history downstairs, soaking in the hot pools and plunging into the cold. Too many sagging thighs and bald pubic mounds and yellow stomachs, with their stretch marks of ancient silver. In the middle of it all were two California Girls, with water up over the tips of their beautiful fake breasts, who looked about them appalled; like this is all so wrong, there must be someone they could sue.

  Or we thought Seán was making money. It turns out he was actually losing money. But you know, it still felt good.

  I don’t think he liked the baths, though. ‘Talk about Midnight Express,’ he said – meaning that Turkish prison movie from the seventies. We talked all evening, and we stayed too late in the hotel bar, and he fell asleep still holding the remote control.

  ‘There’s an Ibis out by the airport.’

  He has a third bag now, hauled out from the bottom of the wardrobe, a knock-off Bally he got in Shanghai. The bed is covered with luggage.

  ‘No, don’t do that,’ I say. ‘Stay in town.’

  And he stands there, looking at it all.

  ‘Jesus, it’s cold.’

  He slaps over to the wardrobe and comes back to the bed empty-handed. Then he grabs his clean gear out of the gym bag and says, ‘Fuck it, I’ll just come back.’ And he starts to put the tracksuit on.

  Seán’s legs are white. The hair has rubbed away from his shins and calves – not a thing I would have noticed, until I saw him one day in front of the mirror, craning around to check, like a woman with crooked seams.

  ‘I’ll do a quick gym.’

  ‘Good luck.’

  ‘I’ll be back in a bit.’

  ‘I’m gone too,’ I say. ‘Dundalk.’

  ‘Don’t make me jealous.’

  He kisses me, quickly, as I lie there in the bed.

  ‘If we make it, either of us, through the snow,’ I say.

  And he goes. No breakfast. The scrape of the garage door, with his bicycle being pushed through it.

  An empty space in front of a window. A wilderness on the glass, of encroaching ice. The smell of snow.

  I am late, myself, now. I lie there for a second, then another second, and am out from under the duvet and into the bathroom before he has joined the flow of traffic on Templeogue Road.

  I twist the knob on the shower and go to brush my teeth while the water warms, turning the light on over the mirror.

  Rrr-chink.

  That string – the little plastic doo-dah at the end of it is chipped, and the string is knotted underneath to hold it on – it is eating itself with knots, crawling higher up the wall, and the twine itself is dense with whatever is left by twenty, thirty years of human fingers, as we approach that mirror, and pull it down. Rrr-chink! I am so intimate with the sound of it, and the silence that follows as we acknowledge the image that meets us in the glass, and allow it, a little grudgingly, to be ourselves.

  Remember me?

  No.

  The cleanest place in the house, that mirror; the way it refuses to hold the past. I leave it to the blank contemplation of the far wall, step into the shower-stall, and drag the door closed: the same metal pipe squirting water at its base, the same shower head. New water though; nice and hot.

  The towel, with a pattern of pink roses and mint-green leaves, is nearly as old as I am, and still soft. But most of the family stuff is gone, and I rarely use what is left of it. We sleep in Fiona’s old room, which seems a little odd – but less odd, somehow, than my childhood bed, which is next door to my mother’s old bed, which was once my father’s bed too. The spare room is for Evie. So we make love in this one place, the rest of the house remains inviolate. I take up only two drawers in the chest of drawers, and Seán takes the other two. We live on the sound of my mother’s old radio, our laptops, one clapped-out TV. We leave very little trace.

  This is, surprisingly, easier for Seán who would rather have nothing than the wrong thing – and this is part of his snobbery too.

  ‘Don’t be such a snob,’ I say.

  ‘Why not?’ he said once and I said, ‘It’s so ageing.’

  I love Seán. I am in love with Seán. I only punish him to keep him by my side. The cufflinks are gone, the Ray-Bans are forgotten in the glove compartment. He cycles into work now, his iPod playlist is a joy to behold. And in the middle of the night I help him kick off the pyjamas. I place my foot between his thighs and push them down.

  The empty bedroom makes me want him again. I go to the wardrobe and pick out something he likes, even though he will not see me wearing it. I take his perfume from the bedside locker – the gift of rain – and grab the laundry basket on my way downstairs.

  Halfway down, I step over some version of myself; a girl of four or six, idling or playing in the place most likely to trip people up. This is where children sit, I know this now; how they love doorways, in-between places, the busiest spot. This is where they go vague and start to dream.

  Oh for God’s sake.

  My mother’s shoes are some posh colour that is hard to name; sable, or taupe. Her arms are full of clean clothes. Downstairs, in the kitchen, I go about on her familiar track and I find it all comforting and sad; the jolt in the neck of the tap as the water hits; the aimless click of the ignition waiting for the gas to light.

  Whomp.

  The washing machine is the new one she bought, after the old one that gave her so much trouble. I know she found it hard to build up a full load. A lot of her stuff was dry clean only; it is possible, in that last year, that the machine was not much used. Or so I thought when I opened the wardrobe in her bedroom and caught the thin, sour smell of abandoned clothes.

  ‘Old age doesn’t smell much,’ she said once, in her arch way. And she was right. But it does smell a little.

  It was some time before we opened the cupboards and the drawers. Shay said nothing could be touched for two weeks – something to do with probate, though I am sure we left it for nearly four. A month at least, to let the place fade a little, before we could begin to dismantle her life; divvy it up and throw it away. Then the surprise to find that it had not actually faded. All her things were just as she had them; bright and clean and particular. It was too hard. She liked all that Scandinavian stuff and I brought it back from my travels: a reindeer holding candles in its antlers, paper stars I bought in Stockholm, a beautiful wooden platter. The place was frayed at the edges, of course, the flooring a little clapped out, the fittings and fixtures, as the estate agents have it, in need of renewal. But she painted the rooms in those floating northern colours between blue and green: aqua, Pale Powder, Borrowed Light. She did it herself, the lines were not quite true. I wonder why she didn’t get the painters in and where the money went: school fees, college, Armani jackets. All fur coat and no knickers, that’s the Moynihans for you, though when you think about it, the home-improvements thing didn’t happen until recently. Fiona, who for weeks at a time sees more of her plumber than her husband – that’s all new.

  We went in together, to clear her things away. We met at the corner and walked down, as we used to do from school. Fiona is, in fact, the same weight she was in sixth year, though motherhood has settled in her gait and her hair colour has brightened over the years from mouse-brown to a more glamorous afghan-hound.

  I don’t know what I looked like. If you asked me my age, in the weeks after Joan died, I w
ould not have been able to say. I seemed to shift from hour to hour around some heavy, unchanging thing. I felt ancient. I felt like a child.

  We looked to each other, at the front door. Fiona deferred and I put my version of the key in the lock, and we walked in to the smell of our childhoods, and the bright, neat hall.

  We didn’t, in fact, sort Joan’s things. We went, as though by agreement, to our old bedrooms at the back of the house, and we sorted our own. I had a roll of bin bags and I filled two of them with fluffy toys, books, belts, beads and shoes. Only a mother could love this tat, I thought, wondering what Joan saw when she looked at this faded plastic – some happiness of her own, some childhood, that was not quite my childhood. I had lost this too.

  I knotted my bags and left them on the landing, ready for the skip. Fiona took hers with her out to the car.

  ‘You’re not going to hang on to all that?’ I said. And she said, No, she would take them home and throw them out there.

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  It was hard, after that first occasion, to find a suitable time. Between Megan’s maths homework and Jack’s eczema, Fiona just could not get away. I was busy at work, catching up. So the house sat on, unburgled, while the smell in Joan’s wardrobe turned sour.

  There was no one to look after us. We needed someone to help us go through her things: her navy Jean Muir and the Agnès B cardigans; the Biba and early Jaeger; all the stuff she bought that famous year she spent in London before my father met her and courted her and brought her back home.

  Isn’t that what men are for? To tell you it’s only a skirt, for God’s sake, it’s only an old blouse. But the men left us to it, and even if they hadn’t, the fact was that neither Shay nor Conor were up to the job. They didn’t matter enough. They could not keep us safe from each other, as we took out her Sybil Connolly evening stole, or the little ostrich-feather shrug, and said, ‘No you have it,’ ‘No you.’