by Anne Enright
At the time, I thought it was the drink that slowed him down. But Seán only ever pretends to drink. Now I know him better; that inward look as he tries to catch his pleasure, the thing that puts him off his stroke, I realise, is age. Or the fear of age.
As if I cared about his age.
Or perhaps this is not how it was in Montreux. I might be imposing the lover I know now on the memory of the man I slept with then. He might have been, that first time, thrilling and keen, pitch perfect; the impulse inseparable from the action. Maybe that is what first times are for.
All I know is that one night, on the shores of Lake Geneva, in a small room among other small rooms, in the middle of Seán’s long effort, I turned my head to see his keys and loose change on the bedside locker; beyond them the open door of the bathroom where the fan still droned, and I remembered who I was.
I don’t know if Seán was surprised how quickly I left afterwards, but he was practically asleep and did not detain me. The last thing I remember was the door at my back and the long corridor stretching out on either side of me. I think I got lost. I have some idea that I tried – quite hard – to get into my room, but it was on the wrong floor: the numbers had confused me. I lurched through the carpeted corridors and got into lifts and out again, and I met no one, or maybe just one couple, who said nothing but stood in by the wall as I passed. But even this is not clear. Some shutter came down, and it did not rise until I woke the next day, safe in my own bed, half-undressed, with all the lights ablaze.
It maddened me. I did not feel guilty, exactly, but I did feel a little mad, I think. I couldn’t face the breakfast room, for a start. I put my sunglasses on and headed to a local patisserie, then I took my hangover to the railway station, and I got the first train out of there, a neat, old-fashioned little thing, with bench seats, which went a surprising distance up into the mountains, through tunnels and hidden passes, until it emerged into high meadow lands strewn with Alpine flowers and grazed by chocolate-bar cows with bells around their beautiful, pendulous, mauve necks. The few scattered houses had heart-shapes cut out of their wooden balconies, and white quilts thrown over the rails to air in the sun. And it was all so wonderful and silly, I decided to get out at Gstaad, which turned out to be a village of a few streets, with twee little shops, all with names like Rolex or Cartier. There was a Gucci shop and a Benetton shop and a delicatessen full of astonishing cheese. I walked the entire village, and there wasn’t a single place where you could buy cornflakes, or muesli, or even toilet paper and I wondered, did the rich people get these things flown in? Perhaps they did not need them: they had moved beyond.
My adultery – I didn’t know what else to call it – lingered in my bones; a slight ache as I walked, the occasional, disturbing trace of must. I had showered that morning, but I realised I would have to go back and clean up again, and the thought made me laugh out loud. It was a vaguely horrified laugh, but still. I did not feel guilty, that afternoon in Gstaad, I felt suicidal. Or the flip side of suicidal: I felt like I had killed my life, and no one was dead. On the contrary, we were all twice as alive.
I also felt, as I went to pack and face the dreaded Seán,that the whole business was a little disappointing, let’s face it – as seismic moral shifts go. In the foyer, and on the minibus to the airport, he ignored me so strenuously I felt like writing him a note. ‘What makes you think I might care?’ It was hardly worth mentioning; not to Seán and certainly not to Conor. And though this seems hard to believe, I returned to my Dublin life as though nothing had happened; as though the lake, the mountains, the whole of Switzerland, was a lie someone had told, to keep the rest of the world amused.
Toora Loora Loora
HINDSIGHT IS A wonderful thing. With hindsight it was clear there was something wrong with Joan long before my hotel encounter, that she hadn’t been entirely right for some time. But there were so many reasons we could not see it, not least of which was that she did not want us to.
Our mother was a great beauty, in her day. Appearances were important to her. And because she was, in a way, too beautiful, she worked hard to keep the show on the road. She loved to be normal; to chat and to charm. When she was ‘on’, she lit up the room.
I used to be jealous of those strangers, who looked at my mother and loved her for half an hour at a time. Sometimes, it seemed as though we only got the downside: the despair in front of the open wardrobe door, the loneliness when there was no one there to admire. There were times, on the phone, when you could hear the drag in her voice; a loss of belief, as though there might be no one listening on the other end of the line.
I didn’t get my mother’s looks, but I got some of that thing she had, the lift as you walk into a crowded room. I got some of her chat too, her addiction to the phone. And her avoidance of the phone. There were days she let it ring out, for reasons too painful and absurd to explain. It always worked both ways for Joan. Her pleasures were too deep; she had to manage them constantly. So she always looked ‘a fright’ or ‘fine’, which is to say, perfect. And she was tough as hell on the rest of the world. Ruthless. What worked, what didn’t – hundreds of rules about foundation, lipstick, about whether to conceal or reveal: arms over forty, shoulders over fifty, the lines on your neck. Illness was not something she allowed herself. It was so unattractive. And terribly hard on the skin.
My mother lived forever, every time you looked at her, and she smoked like Hedy Lamarr. She was the last smoker in Dublin. She snuck out into the garden to do it, so her grandchildren would not cry.
She was at it again, at Megan’s next birthday in Enniskerry. You would look around and find her gone, then just as mysteriously back again. Megan was nine, so this party was a much more civilised affair, with friends from school and parents who dropped them at the kerb. It was amazing how much had changed. Out the back, the rowan tree was a sturdy, tall thing, and the fence had been rebuilt, to hide the new houses that now blocked their little slice of view. Shay threatened to arrive home and then did not, so it was just myself and Fiona and our mother, and it seemed a long time since we had played at being couples around Fiona’s witty formica table, with the men outside, checking the sky for rain. There was no wine. We wandered about, cooking ready-made lasagne and drinking tea, while a tight little herd of nine-year-old girls thundered about the house, trailed by one forlorn little brother.
Joan complained of being tired, took off her too-tight shoes, and fell asleep in an armchair. When she woke, she was agitated by the fact she had nodded off.
‘Did I say anything?’ then laughed at herself for her consternation.
She was right not to trust us. I had taken a photo of her, a secret one, ‘My mother, asleep’. I could not help myself.
I was worried sometimes by the fact that she was on her own in Terenure, we all were – her battalions of friends and lost causes notwithstanding – but our mother did not look lonely in her sleep, even though she was, in a way, ‘alone’. She looked like someone who is loved.
I might be biased. The picture looms on my screensaver and then cross fades but it is never as lovely as I remember her, that day. The older you get the less you dream they say but, absent as she was and utterly still, my mother looked, by some indistinguishable sweetness, very much alive.
And young. She was fifty-nine years old.
When she woke up, all fussed, we laughed and told her she had snored. Then Jack was sent upstairs for saying, ‘Granny farted in her sleep. Granny farted.’
‘You always have to push it,’ shouted Fiona at his busy little legs as they disappeared above her, while Joan, who was genuinely shocked as well as amused, said, ‘It’s only harmless. Would you leave the child.’
I had a mild interest in Evie that day – seeing as I had slept with her father, don’t you know – but I couldn’t figure out which one she was. The girls Megan had invited were ridiculously large and hard to fathom. They wore oversized party dresses, or funky tops; two at least were in tracksuit bottoms – you co
uldn’t even tell who they thought they were. These people had, besides, no interest in us, they had each other to love; the way they looked at each other was so passionate and shy.
I set out the plates with the real linen napkins that Fiona handed me, and the real glasses and metal cutlery. I put a jug of sparkling water on the table and another of orange juice; all of which I thought silly. These were big, uncomfortable children, not grown-ups – throw a bag of tortilla chips at them, I thought, and retire.
‘Who wants lasagne?’
One girl, a tall, soft creature called Saoirse, raised her hand. She was stuffed into a pink satin dress that a five-year-old might choose, and under her arm was a haze of golden-red hair.
I glanced at Fiona. She rolled her eyes in dread.
These children weren’t growing, so much as being replaced.
‘Come and eat!’
It troubled me quite a bit, actually – the hair. It looked beautiful, when it should have been disgusting. And it was twice as disgusting as it should have been, when you looked up from it to the big pudding-face of the child. I should get out more, I thought – this can not be as strange as I think it is. And I also thought, Something has gone wrong.
Then I saw Evie. She revealed herself with a flash of her father’s too-beautiful eyes. It happened when she looked straight at me, like the opening of a hidden door. She was still a bit puppyish around the chest, but the fat was mostly gone. And something else had changed – I mean, apart from everything, because everything had changed – but something essential had shifted. She looked happy. Or not happy so much as connected, for once. Not so scared.
It made me uneasy, the idea that she used to be afraid. I wondered what kind of man I had slept with – how many months ago now? – and would he arrive in through the door. Three months. It was three months since Montreux and I never wanted to lay eyes on Seán Vallely again. I wasn’t just mortified, I was actually averse; the thought of speaking to him was slightly soiling, like putting on used clothes after you’ve had a shower.
Even so, I was caught by his daughter. I watched her, as though she might hold some key to this man, whose eyes seemed to make more sense on her face than they did on his own; the long black lashes just the same, the same sea-grey with a pale sunburst around the pupil, of white or gold.
I had nothing to say to her.
‘Would you like some juice?’ I asked, as the girls gathered round the table for lasagne and coleslaw – not a pink marshmallow in sight.
‘Yes please.’
‘Oh look at that great hair,’ I touched her black curls, which pleased her. ‘Do you dry it yourself?’
She was moist with sweat. They all were.
‘Sometimes,’ she said.
‘Or your Mum?’
‘If I got straightener, it would be all the way down my back.’
‘Well,’ I said. By which I meant, ‘Time enough.’
‘Sometimes my Dad does it,’ she said. But this was too intimate for me, and I had to move away.
After the cake and candles, I took out my iPod and found myself in the middle of a sudden clamour of tweenies, demanding Justin Timberlake.
‘Hang on,’ I said, and obliged the white bud of the earpiece into Evie’s ear. As soon as the music came through, they ran off, grabbing for the other earpiece, switching tracks, turning the dial.
‘Hey hey hey!’ said Fiona, before being diverted by the sound of the doorbell.
The party was over. I hung back while the parents came and, one after another, the children were called away. In the middle of the confusion, the sound of his voice in the hall brought an unexpected pang, and I turned to pick up wrapping paper at the far end of the room.
‘Evie!’
He had arrived in the doorway. I was starting to run out of things to clear off the floor when I sensed Evie standing beside me – a little too close, the way children do.
‘Just give it back,’ said Seán’s voice, though this was what she was already doing; wrapping the wires around the iPod, as she held it out towards me.
‘Thank you, Gina,’ she said.
Gina, no less.
‘You’re welcome,’ I said.
‘Good girl.’
Seán’s voice was so cold, it was clear what he really wanted to say. He wanted to say, ‘Please step away from my child,’ and this was very unfair. It was so unfair, that I turned and looked straight at him.
‘Oh, hello,’ I said.
He looked just like himself.
‘Come on,’ he said, ushering Evie through the doorway. The rudeness was astonishing. But he faltered and turned back for a moment, and the look he gave me then was so mute, so full of things I could not understand, that I almost forgave him.
I tried to keep it at bay, and failed. When the last small guest was gone and the rubbish bag full of packaging and uneaten lasagne the thought of him – the fact of him – happened in my chest, like a distant disaster. Something snapped or was broken. And I did not know how bad the damage was.
My hands, as they picked up the heavy jug Fiona used for juice, remembered the solid span of his waist under them that night in Montreux. What was it he had said again? ‘You have lovely skin.’ It seemed a bit all-purpose, at the time. ‘So soft.’ Why did men need to persuade themselves? Why did they have to have you, and make you up at the same time?
This, I asked myself, rather foolishly, while holding the thick glass jug in Fiona’s open-plan kitchen in Enniskerry, standing on her new limestone floor (the old terracotta floor was ‘all wrong’ apparently). I thought about the difference between one man and another when you have your eyes closed. And I said to myself that the difference was enormous. There was no difference greater than the difference between two men when you have your eyes closed. And in my head I dropped the jug and was devastated by its fall. Fiona was loading the dishwasher. Joan was taking the plates out again and rinsing them under the tap. Megan and Jack had disappeared. I could feel it, still there under my hands: thick blown glass with swirls, in the base, of cobalt blue. Such a beautiful jug. And then I let it go.
She had fits, apparently. This is what Fiona told me when she had cleared the last shards of glass, not just with a brush but also with the Hoover, because she didn’t care about the jug so much as the danger to her children’s bare feet. Evie, she said, had fits. Fiona had never actually seen it happen, though for a few years they were all on red alert. The child’s mother was driven frantic; had tried everything, from consultants to – whatever – homeopathic magnets.
‘She looked all right to me,’ I said.
‘No, she’s fine now,’ said Fiona. ‘I think she’s fine.’
‘She’s a funny little person,’ I said.
‘Is she? I don’t know. I mean, everyone was so worried about her. But I don’t know.’
‘God. Poor Seán,’ I said.
She gave me a look, exaggeratedly blank.
‘Up to a point,’ she said.
I wanted to know what she meant by that, but she had already turned away.
I watched Megan later, sprawled on the sofa, so healthy and large. Our mother was freshening up. Jack was stuck into his Nintendo. I was waiting to leave. We were all waiting, perhaps, for Shay to come home. The evening had come adrift.
‘So birthday girl,’ said Fiona, sitting down and hugging her daughter to her. ‘How does it feel to be nine?’
‘Good,’ said Megan.
We sat and pretended to watch the telly. Our mother spends such a long time in the bathroom, it used to make us anxious; wondering what she was up to in there, and when she would emerge. Meanwhile, Megan brushed her own mother’s hair back from her face, admired an earring, gave it a tug.
‘Careful.’
And the wrangle began: Megan stretching her mother’s lips into a painful smile, pulling her eyelids back into slits, while Fiona just looked at her and refused to be annoyed. They had always been like this, locked in something that wasn’t exactly love, and not qui
te war.
‘Leave your mother alone, Megan,’ I said. ‘You’re nine, now.’
And Fiona said, ‘Hah!’
‘Only another twenty years to go,’ said Joan. She was standing behind us in her summer trench coat and silk scarf, her mirror work done – everything the same as before, except that tiny, crucial bit better. The usual miracle.
She looked at me.
‘Will we go?’
I may be getting things in the wrong order here.
I was not yet in love with Seán. Though, at any of those moments, I might have fallen in love with him. Any of them. The first moment in the garden, by the fence that wasn’t there. The time he sat in the fold-up chair on the caravan site in Brittas Bay, or went to sit, and everything slowed to a standstill except us two. I could have fallen in love with him in a hotel corridor in Switzerland, when the lock whirred and he stayed to kiss me instead of obliging me through the door.
But I did not love him. I was slightly repulsed by him, in fact. I mean I had already slept with this man, what else was there to be done with him?
If you asked me now, of course, I would say I was crazy about him from that first glance, I was in love with his hands as I watched them move in Montreux, I was in love with some other thing from the time he ushered Evie away from me and turned back in the hall – his particular sadness, whatever it might be. So don’t ask me when this happened, or that happened. Before or after seems beside the point. As far as I am concerned they were happening all along.
And there are things I have forgotten to mention – the beauty of the children on the beach in Brittas that day seems important now, in a way I did not realise then. Perhaps it is the fact that Evie was not well, and I did not know it, but the beauty of the children matters in some way I do not understand.
Still, I can’t be too bothered here, with chronology. The idea that if you tell it, one thing after another, then everything will make sense.
