by Anne Enright
It doesn’t make sense.
My mother had that old-fashioned thing, an easy death. But not yet.
And I was in love with Seán, but not as far as I knew. Not yet.
I was leaving my husband, though I might have already left him. We might have never been together – all those times, when we thought we were. When he turned and smiled at me, at the top of the aisle in Terenure church. When he dived below me, so deep you could see the water between us thickening to green.
There are dates I can be sure of, certainly, but they are not the important ones. I can’t remember the day – the hour – when Joan’s ‘poor form’ became ‘depression’, for example, or when the depression turned into something physical and harder to name. There must have been a moment, or an accumulation of moments, when we stopped listening to the words she said, and started listening to the way she said them. There must have been a day when we stopped listening to her at all – one single split second, when she changed from being our mother, Oh Joan, would you ever … and turned into the harmless object of our concern.
‘How are you, darling? All right?’
I was busy of course – I mean, we were all busy – but if I had recognised that moment then things might have been different. If I had been able to see her, instead of being surrounded by her, my beautiful mother, then she might still be alive.
There are some things I am sure of.
What happened, I mean the verifiable truth, reconstructible through emails here on my computer, calendar entries, phone calls made and received, was that, yes, undoubtedly, a few weeks after Megan’s party, I recommended Seán, and Seán’s consultancy, when we wanted to restructure in Dublin before setting up in Poland. I did it without hesitation; he was, undoubtedly the best person for the job.
All that is certain.
Slightly less certain is the fact that Conor and I had, for a while, perhaps around this time, excessive and unfriendly sex, in our sanctioned – blessed even – marriage bed.
But when it comes to Conor, I really can’t go into it. I mean I can’t even be bothered to remember what happened when; I am not going to map our decline. There is nothing more sordid, if you ask me, than the details.
Was the sex bad then, or was it just bad after I had started sleeping with Seán?
Bad is not the word for it.
The sex was, around this time, a little too interesting, even for me. But it was also beside the point – and maybe this is the interesting thing, that, in a story that is supposed to be about sleeping with one man or another, our bodies did not always play the game in the expected way.
But it is probably true that, around this time, we were actively thinking, or pretending to think, about starting a baby. One night, after a friend’s wedding in Galway and much dancing, when I had forgotten to pack the pill and Conor said, ‘What the hell.’
I can’t remember what it was like exactly, but I do remember that I did not like it. Apart from anything else, the sex was terrible, it was not like sex at all.
‘He’s fucking my life,’ I kept thinking. ‘He’s fucking my entire life.’
In These Shoes?
RATHLIN COMMUNICATIONS PUTS European companies on the English-language web. That’s what we do. But we make it look like fun.
Our office is all stripped brickwork with industrial skylights, and there is a discreet feel to the way the space is managed, an illusion of privacy which, as anyone who works in open-plan will know, just makes it worse – the paranoia, I mean. The best thing about the place is the plants contract, which is held by the boss’s otherwise challenged daughter. She comes in each morning to do the foliage, which is everywhere and fabulous, from the bougainvillaea going up the ironwork to the ivy cladding the bathroom walls. The Danes who did the refurbishment put in irrigation the way you might do the wiring so the place is a thicket, and though I am cynical about these things (the idea that a few plants make us more ‘green’) I even voted for canaries, at some meeting, only to be outvoted on the grounds of canary shit.
It is the kind of place where the lift is big enough to bring your bike upstairs, and the coffee is all fair trade. There is an amount of sex in the air, I suppose, but we’re not that pushed. We’re all pretty young. We are big on ideas: the guys who have a bed in their office are sad techie bastards who really do fold them out for a sleep.
He was sitting in the meeting room, that first morning. I saw him through the glass wall before he saw me and I couldn’t think what was wrong with him. He was using a fountain pen – but that was all right, wasn’t it? – his BlackBerry was neatly displayed on the table beside him. The suit was maybe a bit sharp, his tie a bit restrained – but I mean, he’s a consultant, he is supposed to wear a suit. Maybe it was his hair, which seemed straighter than before, and flopped forward. Had he dyed it? There was, at least, an amount of gel involved. He looked up from under this youthful mop as I walked in and he said, ‘Hello, you.’
‘Hi.’
He had a pair of Ray-Bans hooked on to the idle forefinger of his left hand.
‘You got here,’ I said.
He let the glasses swing.
‘So it would appear.’
He seemed so sure we would sleep together that I decided against it on the spot, or wished, at least, for darkness to take it away, this unexpected weakness he had for props.
I sat down, smiled neatly, and said, ‘So, how would you like to be introduced?’
The room filled and the meeting went ahead and it was all very much as you might expect. There was the usual blather from Frank, who was being edged out to blather elsewhere. This was followed by a little posturing from my young colleagues, David and Fiachra, who were maddened by the potential gap. The boss was excited; you could tell he was excited because he seemed so bored. And I – well, I, as ever, smiled, facilitated, and kept clear, because I was the girl who would win in the end, despite the fact that girls so rarely do.
Seán looked from one speaker to the next, asked some questions, and kept his opinions to himself. This surprised me a little. I had expected more of the flamboyance we saw at the whiteboard in Montreux, but Seán at work – I have always loved Seán at work – used no more energy than was needful. It reminded me a little of Evie, this ability he had to be simple, in the middle of much fuss. So I managed to forget the hair gel and the horrible architect’s watch, and I just looked at him thinking, for a while; his grey eyes moving from one person to the next. And – it might have been a work thing, this sensible, almost offhand way we had of speaking about, let’s face it, a lot of money; it might have been the fact that he was sitting in the place where I spend most of my waking hours; but it was very intimate and slightly dreamlike to see him there – like having a movie star in your kitchen, drinking tea – and I really wanted to fuck him, then. There was, for the first time, no other word for it. I wanted to make him real. A man I would cross the street to avoid at nine o’clock – by nine twenty-five I wanted to fuck him until he wept. My legs trembled with it. My voice floated out of my mouth when I opened it to speak.
The glass wall of the meeting room was huge and suddenly too transparent, I felt so exposed.
Not that things always go the way you might expect. Six months later Frank – who still does nothing but blather – was, for reasons I can’t quite fathom, running much of the show; it was David who had been edged out, to do his posturing elsewhere. Fiachra, meanwhile, had got himself a new baby, an ecstatic look in his eye and a tendency to fall asleep while sitting on the toilet, much to the delight of the entire company who tiptoed in, girls included, to listen to the sound of his snoring on the other side of the cubicle door. I was still cheerful and useful and altogether indispensable, and still going nowhere in Rathlin Communications, despite the fact I had slept with the management consultant – something neither of us found particularly relevant: I mean, no one would ever accuse Seán of securing the contract with his dick. Six months later, I was talking to the bank about going out on m
y own and the bank was licking me slowly all over – as were, now that I pause to think of it, both Seán Vallely and Conor Shiels. I am not an extraordinary woman but this was my life that year, and yes, it felt astonishing. It also felt like a mess. The opposite of a nervous breakdown, whatever you might call that.
But I am getting ahead of myself here.
The office game was another game for us to play, after the suburban couples game, and before the game of hotel assignations and fabulous, illicit lust, and neither of us thought there might come a moment when all the games would stop.
It was a lot of fun.
They say consultants always recommend that you lose thirty per cent – that this is what they are actually hired to say – so when Seán was finished his report, we might be moved up, or out. People found it exciting when he walked out of the lift. You knew he was there. I followed his presence through the glades of rubber plant and bamboo, listened to the click of his briefcase opening two desks down and waited for his soft voice on the phone. He might have just put his head around my partition of fern, but his courtship was close and elaborate. Every time we spoke, it was as though we were rehearsing the lie.
‘Is that you?’ he might say, when I picked up.
‘Yes.’
I had never had an affair before. I did not realise how sexy it was to be clandestine. The secret was everything.
‘Are you at your desk?’
‘What do you think?’
I could hear him move and murmur a few metres away, but his real words were close, almost warm in my ear.
‘Busy?’
‘I am now …’
‘What are you doing?
‘Well, I’m talking to you.’
The intimacy between us was so formal, so completely erotic.
‘I thought we might do that better over lunch.’
‘Lovely.’
Mind you, there was a certain key-jangling element to it, too; the idea that he might be reaching rather ardently into his pocket to check for spare change. The whole thing played surprisingly close to farce. I’m not sure how many people around us knew what was going on – at a guess, they all did, and they were all hugely amused by it. But we were pretty amused too – I mean, the rutting aside, the fierce and fleeting idea of it that ran across our minds (I must confess) from time to time – we also found it slightly hilarious; the thought that we might, for once, just get away with it. And this is how we overcame our doubts – because we both had major doubts. When it came to the point, some weeks later, of taking each other’s clothes off, we didn’t weep, or declare undying love, we didn’t savage each other up against some filing cabinet, we just laughed – well why not? We laughed when we kissed and we laughed at every button and reluctant zip, and it was all hunger and recognition and delight.
Meanwhile, I saw him at the coffee maker and the beauty of his tie did not offend me. I even got to like his fountain pen. I was with him all the time. He knew I was there – I was getting inside his skin. The tap of his hand on the side of his thigh. The way he leaned back in the chair and rubbed his nipple, for comfort or reward; he saw me noticing this, and stopped.
Oh, the game. The game.
The little surges of irritation, of contempt: from him, from me. Is this what you want?
If Seán were less of a tactical person, the thing might have gone sour before we’d even begun, but he knew his pleasures – more than I did, it has to be said. He knew when to put the phone down. When to go home. When to turn away.
It is no wonder I became obsessed.
We had lunch every Friday for five weeks; it was our de-brief. We went to La Stampa – fancy but not too fancy – and talked business. He was good, as I keep saying, at his job. He had no interest in complication. He looked at the company carefully, trying to split the rock with just one tap. And after business, came charm. He told a story, he told another. Really funny stories. He ordered dessert wine. He teased me about the ‘posh’ school I went to, about the height of my heels, he made me fight and flirt. I thought, by week three, that there was something wrong with my blood pressure, that I might actually faint or die.
I took to walking home in the evening – or walking somewhere. I swerved from the entrance of the pub on a Friday, because he was not there. I veered from the pedestrian light that was against me, crossed streets because they were empty of traffic, and turned different corners – not so much avoiding home as averse to any particular destination. One night, I ended up on the rim of Dublin Bay. It was October by then; dark and cold. There was a container ship lodged on the horizon, impossibly large and disproportionate. The endless strand gave way in the darkness to a sea so shallow you would think the thing was stuck to the sea floor. But the lights floated in front of me. The ship was moving, or it must have been moving. I could not tell, in the darkness, which way.
It was also beautiful, this game of not touching: that is the thing I am afraid to say about myself and Seán – how beautiful it was, how exquisite the distance we kept between us. And when I saw him one afternoon standing by the printer, lost in thought, with the light falling over his shoulders, it was as though the same light had jabbed me in the chest. I hadn’t expected to find him there. He was wearing grey and his hair was grey: the plants beside him were dark green and the floor of the corridor beyond was teal blue. These are the details and they sound so foolish: a middle-aged man in an office with a file in his hand – I mean to say. And there was no solace in his absence, either. When he was gone, I thought about nothing else: Seán in my sister’s garden, Seán in Brittas, Seán in Switzerland. I wondered where he was this minute, and what he might be doing. I thought about a future together and wiped the thought, fifty, sixty, a hundred times a day. It was all such an agitation. But somewhere in the gaps – in the certainty of seeing him after the lift doors opened, or in the shock of his voice nearby – a stillness hit, a kind of perfection. It was very beautiful, this desire that opened inside me, and then opened again. And this is what puts me beyond regret: the sweetness of my want for Seán Vallely, the sense of something unutterable at the heart of it. I felt – I still feel – that if we kissed again, we might never stop.
I lost half a stone.
Which was brilliant. I bounced into work and I ran up the stairs, too impatient for the lift. And I very seldom placed my forehead against a convenient wall, and pushed.
It is surprising how close you can get to someone, by staying very still.
There are two things I noticed, and I don’t know if they are different or connected. First of all, in the office, there was this thing he did if I knew something he didn’t, or if I had been somewhere he had yet to go – that scuba-diving holiday in Australia, for example, or my ease with languages, which was in such contrast to his own few bits of French – he managed very quickly to be proud of these achievements, to boast about them on my behalf. And this irritated me: he made it sound like he was responsible for my being so generally clever and gung ho. So it was as if I did the Great Barrier Reef and he got the credit. Or at the very least that we were in the whole Reef business together. And of course we were. I mean, who doesn’t like Australia? By the time he had finished, the whole damn continent seemed to belong to him. And all this because he had never actually been there, and I had.
You had to admire it, as a way of turning all things to the good.
‘Been there, done that,’ he might say. ‘Isn’t she great?’
But it didn’t make me feel great. I wanted to be free of it, this bag he kept putting me in. It got so I wanted to sleep with him – to love him even – just to be myself again, undescribed. But most of all, I wanted him not to be jealous of me in the first place. I mean, it was only a question of getting on a plane. This was before I heard about his childhood, of course, and long before I realised that he didn’t want this particular emotion fixed. He liked being jealous, it was his comfort and company – call it ambition; it was his protection from the night.
The other
thing I noticed was that Seán doesn’t really like eating. I don’t mean he doesn’t like food, I mean he hates all the chewing and swallowing – I suppose there is much to dislike. Despite which, there was always huge restaurant palaver: the choice of table, the crack of the napkin, endless discussion about the wine, and a vague prissiness about pasta that was not home-made. The foreplay, you might say, went on forever. Then the food would arrive and he would wait. He might fold his hands together and finish his point, or make another point. Finally, he would take that ceremonial first bite, go Mmmm mmmm, and praise the dish: the toffee-ness of the cherry tomatoes, or some such. Then, a bit of ordinary eating – chomp chomp – until the moment I realised he had stopped and was looking at the food. He might attempt another forkful but lose heart before it entered his mouth. Then a bit more staring; a kind of altercation. Finally, he would stage some distraction, grab a last morsel, and push away the plate.
Then he would look up at my, still-chewing, mouth.
I was in love with this man – clearly I was in love, or at least obsessed; the rhythms of his appetite were something I took so personally. But God knows, I could eat for Ireland, so I always felt a bit lonely after our lunch dates; not just greedy, but also thwarted or rejected, as if the food was all my fault.
‘Wonderful,’ he would say. ‘Have you ever had it with pesto?’
I wondered what it would be like to live with that across the table from you, breakfast lunch and dinner. Did they all wait with their tongues hanging out, until he gave the nod? Did they stop when he stopped? Aileen, it seemed to me, was the kind of woman who would count the number of peas she put on your plate. All that containment.
I’m afraid Evie doesn’t eat ice-pops, do you, Evie?
Either they were a perfect match, I thought, or they hadn’t had sex in years. Once the idea came to me, it made enormous sense. This was why they were so neat and polite. This was the sadness in the look he gave me, when he turned back in Fiona’s hall.
But, though I lost seven – count ’em – pounds, living on love alone, I did not think about Aileen much in those office weeks. To be honest, I forgot that Aileen, or even Conor, might exist. When I came home, I was sometimes surprised to find him in the house. He seemed so large and so real.
