Forgotten Waltz, The

by Enright, Anne

  ‘I’m just saying,’ says Fiachra. ‘He’s small, good-looking, witty.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘He’s your type.’

  ‘I don’t have a type.’

  ‘I’m just saying.’

  So all right, they are both on the smallish side. They are both good company; both hard to know well. But underneath the charm Conor is an absent-minded sort. And Seán? When the party stops, when the door closes, when the guests go home …

  They are completely different people. People love Conor, but they do not love Seán. They are attracted to Seán, which is not the same thing. Because Seán has a permanent joke in his eye, and it is usually you – the joke I mean – he is such a tease. And he likes to boast a little. And he likes to do you down.

  My grey-haired boy.

  He always compliments the thing you don’t expect. It is never the thing you made an effort with: the dress, or the jewellery, or the hair. He compliments the thing that is wrong, so it gets more wrong all night.

  ‘What do you think?’

  Coming down the stairs, ready to go out: there is something about my expectant look that annoys him.

  ‘I like the lipstick.’

  These days, it is always my mouth. I should not have told him about my father in the hospice. I know that now. I tell him less and less.

  My poor, raggedy mouth.

  Seán Peter Vallely, born 1957, educated to be obnoxious by the Holy Ghost Fathers, reared to be obnoxious by his mother, Margot Vallely, who loved him very much, of course, but was so disappointed he did not grow up tall.

  You could be worn out by it, that’s all. By this man’s inability to lose.

  I am only thirty-four. That is what I caught myself thinking. There is still time. There is something the fat on his chest does – I mean, he has very little fat on his chest, and anyway I do not care – but there is something this layer does, the effort it makes, that is dispiriting. And I do not mind until his eyes check me over, like the mirror does not see him.

  Then, as though he knows what I am thinking, he says, ‘Look at you. You should be out there. You should be.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Neither of us can say the word ‘baby’.

  ‘I don’t want to be out there,’ I say. Thinking, He will use this as an excuse to get rid of me.

  And, This is one of his tactics too.

  I came in late, one Saturday, after ending up in Reynards talking shite with Fiachra until three in the morning, just like the old days. I stumbled about the bedroom, and there was, I admit, a bit of cavorting as I discarded my clothes, then I jumped into bed and snuggled up.

  Seán, who had been asleep, was having none of it. Recollection is dim, but, between one grope and the next, I must have conked out. Only to wake maybe two hours later in such a state of fright, I suspect he shoved me in my sleep. He was lying in the darkness with his eyes open, as he had clearly been doing for some time. He said something – something horrible, I can’t remember what it was – and we were in the middle of breaking up; shouting, grabbing dressing gowns, slamming doors. It went from Fiachra to everything, with nothing in-between.

  You always.

  You never.

  The thing about you is.

  It was, in a spooky way, just like being married. Though there were, crucially, differences of style. Conor used to take the moral high ground, for example, and Seán doesn’t bother – the air up there doesn’t suit him, he says. No, Seán doesn’t get aggrieved, he gets mean and he gets cold, so I always end up weeping in a different room, or trying to placate him. Sitting in the silence. Lifting my hand to touch him. Putting the work in. I coax him back to me.

  Then he gets aggrieved.

  Anyway.

  Making up is always sweet.

  And though I miss the future I might have had, and each and all of Conor Sheils’ fat babies, I do not think that we are selfish to want to keep the thing unbroken and beautiful; to hold on to the knowledge that comes when we look into each other’s eyes.

  I just don’t know how to explain it.

  I thought it would be a different life, but sometimes it is like the same life in a dream: a different man coming in the door, a different man hanging his coat on the hook. He comes home late, he goes out to the gym, he gets stuck on the internet: we don’t spend our evenings in restaurants, or dine by candlelight anymore, we don’t even eat together, most of the time. I don’t know what I expected. That receipts would not have to be filed, or there would be no such thing as bad kitchen cabinets, or that Seán would switch on a little sidelamp instead of flicking the main switch when he enters a room. Seán exists. He arrives, he leaves. He forgets to ring me when he is delayed, and so the dinner is mistimed: the Butler’s Pantry lamb with puy lentils that I heat up in the microwave. He reads the newspaper – quite a lot, actually – and there is nothing so wrong with any of this, but sometimes the intractability of him, perhaps of all men, drives me up the wall.

  It’s like they don’t know you exist unless you are standing there in front of them. I think about Seán all the time when he is gone, about who he is, and where he is, and how I can make things right for him. I hold him in my care. All the time.

  And then he walks in the door.

  Seán in my sister’s garden in Enniskerry, with his back to me and his face to the view, and the rowan tree at his side has a skipping rope tangled in its branches that are still just twigs.

  The day has been warm and I have had a lot of Chardonnay. I am recently back from Australia. I am in love and I am working really hard at the whole Enniskerry thing with the neighbours and the kids. So the man who is standing at the bottom of the garden is just a little rip in the fabric of my life. I can stitch it all up again, if he does not turn around.

  Seán stands at the window in his pyjamas, with the frost flowering across the window. Or he stands at the window in the summer light and his naked back is a puzzle of muscle and bone – he still looks like a young man, from behind – and I want to whisper, Turn around.

  Or, Don’t turn around.

  The weeks I spent waiting for his call, the months I spent waiting for him to leave Aileen. The loneliness of it was, in its own way, fantastic. I lived with it, and danced with it. I brought it to a kind of perfection the Christmas before last, just a few months before he went clear.

  The house in Terenure had been on the market four months already, and a flood of people had been through the place, opening cupboards, pulling up the corners of carpets, sniffing the air. My living room, the sofa where I sat, my mother’s bed, were all – they still are – on the internet for anyone to click on and dismiss: the stairs we slid down on our bellies, the dark bedroom over the garage, the stain around the light switch. I found a discussion board online where they were laughing at the price – but other than that, it was hard to know what people thought. A single bidder who might have been an investor made a lot of fuss but didn’t come through. A married couple with kids offered low, and then faded. And so it was Christmas. My father was not there to ruin the day. My mother was not there to make it all better. My sister was not speaking to me. My lover was in the cold bosom of his family, wearing a paper hat.

  I thought about him all day: his daughter sitting at his feet, writing her first ever email, Hello Daddy! His wife in the kitchen, her hair drooping in the steam from the brussels sprouts. His wretched mother looking about her with a glittering eye.

  I had a pathetic little tree in the corner of the living room, a plastic thing you plug in, with light running to the tips of its fibre-optic needles. I made myself a sandwich for lunch and drank a cup of tea. I thought about leaving the house but I just couldn’t. There was traffic on the road outside, but they were all travelling to each other: even the taxi men had their wives beside them and their children in the back seat.

  There were times, in the last years of my mother’s life, when she could not walk out the front door, and on that day
, moving from room to room, I think I understood why. Inside was unbearable, and outside beyond my imagining.

  I finally drove into town around two o’clock; where I abandoned the car on a set of double yellow lines. In the windows of the Shelbourne, you could see the respectable flotsam tucking into their hotel turkey, or lifting their heads to look out on deserted streets. I walked past the locked gates of Stephen’s Green, down the empty maw of Grafton Street, the mannequins in the shop windows frozen as if to say: this is it! this is the day! I thought, if I fell down in the road, there would be no one to find me until morning. By the wall of Trinity, I passed a tall couple who looked like tourists. They turned their faces as I walked by, chiming, Happy Christmas, Happy Christmas, and I felt it keenly; the pure shame of it. I did not exist. I would end up breaking windows, just to show that I was real. I would shout his name: my lover who could not risk – he could not risk it! – a text or a call.

  I didn’t break any windows, of course. I made my way back to the car and drove home. When I checked my phone, I found a message from Fiona. It read, ‘Happy Christmas, xxxxxx yr sis’ and it made me cry.

  In fact something did come through from Seán about seven o’clock. It said, ‘Check the shed’ where I found a bunch of roses and a slender half-bottle of Canadian ice-wine. And despite the fact that I do not really drink anymore, I ended up drinking the lot of it, following the last sweet drops with a skull-splitting dose of whiskey. None of it was right – the perfect drink does exist, but it is never, somehow, the one you have in your hand. I worked on, nonetheless, until I was steady and empty and clean. The next day I was worried I had made a noise sitting there; some keening, lowing, honk of pain, but I am pretty sure I kept silent, and that when the day was over, the season slaughtered, I managed, with some dignity, to rise and turn and walk upstairs to bed.

  I woke up late on Stephen’s Day with the headache I so richly deserved and, after a breakfast of tea and Christmas pudding, I got in the car and crawled out to Fiona’s house in Enniskerry. I wept a bit as I drove, and put on the windscreen wipers by accident. I did not call beforehand. I did not know what to say.

  It was three o’clock when I arrived and darkness was already in the air. I parked for a moment and saw no sign of life, but my nephew Jack was in the front room and he opened the door before I had the chance to knock. He stared me up and down, wondering how to respond to the amazing fact that I was real. Then he decided on indifference.

  ‘Hi,’ he said.

  ‘Hi Jack.’ He hung on to the side of the door, staring at me through the gap.

  ‘Where’s your Mum?’

  ‘She’s upstairs having a cuddle.’

  ‘Right.’

  There seemed very little I could say to this, but he had already turned and run back into the front room. The door was still open, so I pushed through into the hall and closed it quietly behind me.

  ‘And where’s your sister?’ I said, carefully.

  ‘Out.’

  ‘And what are you doing?’

  ‘I’m writing a book,’ he said.

  He was on his knees in the living room. I thought he might tell me more about it, but he just flopped back down on to the floor and pulled the pages of his copy book into the crook of his arm. He stuck his tongue out of the corner of his mouth and wrote: bum in the air, cheek on the page, eyes inches away from the pen’s moving tip.

  I sat and watched him for what seemed like a long time. The house was entirely silent. I was about to ask him more questions, when I heard someone come downstairs and go into the back of the house. It was Fiona, I saw her through the connecting doors. She was wearing her dressing gown and she looked, I thought, distinctly rested, you might almost say ‘refreshed’. She put the kettle on, then saw me and took fright.

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘I just arrived,’ I said.

  ‘Jack, you should always tell me if there’s someone at the door. Always, all right?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said trying to protect him from her.

  ‘Do you hear me, Jack?’

  ‘All right.’

  She looked at me and gave a crooked smile.

  ‘You want some tea?’

  ‘We need to talk about the house,’ I said later when the relief hit.

  ‘Yeah. The house,’ she said, and waved a depressed hand in the air. And to be fair to Fiona, she has never been greedy in that way.

  ‘Did I tell you, we sold the place in Brittas?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well we did. I’m telling you, nothing is shifting over a million. Nothing. Shay says.’

  ‘Really?’ I said.

  ‘Nothing being built. Not one brick, he says, on another brick, this year. Not one.’

  ‘Well it was too mad,’ I said. ‘Wasn’t it?’

  ‘You think?’

  And we listen to it for a moment; the rumour of money withering out of the walls and floors and out of the granite kitchen countertops, turning them back to bricks and rubble and stone.

  Shay came downstairs, freshly showered and full of himself, in his polo shirt and jeans.

  ‘Gina!’ he said, like we were old golfing buddies too long away from the tees. Then he left, at speed, in order to pick up Megan. Fiona started putting a salad together on the kitchen island and I said it was over between myself and Seán. Just in case she wanted to know. Just in case she was interested.

  ‘Finished,’ I said. I did not want to see him again. He could go back to his wife.

  ‘What do you mean “go back”?’ said Fiona. ‘He never left.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘I don’t think he even told her, you know?’

  ‘No?’

  So I really did mean it, when I said I did not want to see him again – not ever. Seán was three hundred yards down the road, playing the family man, my sister was in her kitchen, playing the perfect wife and I was the perfect fool. There would be penalties, I knew that. Because I really felt, just then, that I had lost the game.

  ‘I don’t know what you saw in him,’ said Fiona.

  ‘Little fucker,’ I said.

  ‘It’s just something he does, you know. You’re not supposed to take it seriously.’

  ‘Well I did.’

  ‘He sat there,’ she said, and she was angry now – whether she was angry with me, or on my behalf, it was hard to tell.

  ‘He sat there,’ pointing at a leather tub chair. ‘And he told me how lonely he was. No. He told me how lonely his wife was. How worried he was about his wife.’

  ‘When was that?’ I said.

  Fiona looked at the sheet of glass between the kitchen and the garden, where her reflection was emerging from the dusk. She checked her face, its degree of sadness, and the state of her hair.

  ‘Little fucker,’ she said. ‘I was fond of him.’

  And she leaned over the black granite of her kitchen island, making claws of her upturned hands, the way Seán does, when he is in persuasive mode.

  But you know, everyone makes a pass at Fiona, it is the burden she carries through life. Even the postman fancies my sister, she is a martyr to it, she can’t even open her own front door.

  ‘When was that?’ I said again.

  ‘Oh I don’t know,’ she said.

  And then I remembered something else about my sister. It’s not that everyone fancies her, that is not her problem. Her problem is the way they love her. Men. They don’t want to shag her so much as pine for her. That is the thing that makes her sad.

  ‘Years ago,’ she said. ‘I was about two minutes’ pregnant with Jack. I remember, I was really stupid with it. I couldn’t figure out what he was saying to me.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Oh I don’t know.’ She moves to the double-door fridge that seems to occupy half her kitchen wall. ‘What do they ever say?’

  She opens it and the plastic seal gives way with a slight sucking sound. She says, ‘Gina. You know there’s no work for Sh
ay. You know he hasn’t worked since October last.’

  III

  Knocking on Heaven’s Door

  WHEN EVIE WAS four years old, she fell off the swing and Aileen slapped the au pair, and Seán, when he arrived home, put his little finger into his daughter’s mouth to find where she had bitten the inside of her cheek. He checked her pupils.

  ‘Look at me, Evie. Now look up at the light.’

  ‘I lost my shoe,’ she said.

  So he went out into the dusk and found the little glittering ballet flat beside the swing. The back of it was smeared with clay, and there was a little divot of turf still attached to the heel.

  There was a time, after Fiona’s ruthless little anecdote in her kitchen, that I questioned everything that had happened between myself and Seán, down to our choice of bed. I had missed key details, I thought: I had misread the signs. If love is a story we tell ourselves then I had the story wrong. Or maybe passion is just, and always, a wrong-headed thing.

  Now, I feel if I can figure out what happened to Evie, I can tell the story properly. If I can think about it and understand it, then I will be able to understand Seán, and ease his pain.

  The evening she fell off the swing, they sat with the drained and smiling child in the GP’s waiting room, and she turned to her father and said, ‘Did I die?’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ he said. ‘Look at you, you’re all alive!’

  The doctor, who had a marked English accent, introduced himself as ‘Malachy O’Boyle’ – a name so makey-uppey and Irish that, Aileen said later, ‘it was definitely fake’. He sat Evie up on his examining couch and laid her down. He felt the back of her head, checked her pupils and all her signs, while listening to, and ignoring, Aileen’s clear and agitated description of events that afternoon.

  ‘Did she have a temperature?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ At which Aileen fell silent, because of course, she had not been there.