by Anne Enright
Conor’s mother wore cream trousers to match her ash-blonde hair, and fine gold jewellery on a permanent, light tan. His father was a big, physical man who liked to get a decent handful when he said hello; who thought a handful of daughter-in-law was, at his age, only fair. His wife might rebuke him, she might rap out a ‘Thank you, Francis!’ and everyone would laugh – I am not imagining this – at my discomfort, and the wonderful, horny badness of their old man.
They were a good couple, for all that. They had fun. The place was always busy with cousins and friends and various ‘associates’ who dropped in clutching bottles of Heidsieck or Rémy Martin and laughing about ‘coals to Newcastle’ as they were invited into the front room. It reminded me of my own father, the mock seriousness, ‘Oh take no notice of that fella!’, with its under-swell of self-importance and things unsaid; the way they were all in the know.
I am not sure what there was to know – my father either – I am not sure what they actually got, for all their air of being canny: the pub licence, maybe; planning permission for some bungalow. It hardly seemed worth all the nods and winks, and though it made me nostalgic for the men who tickled the back of my neck to produce fifty-pence pieces in the hall, Conor hated it – it made him literally itch in his clothes and try to shrug free.
What Conor liked about being home was the chance it gave him to be a boy again. He liked wrestling with his brothers and being a slob and leaving the kitchen work to the women, and it never ceased to astonish me. If this was regression then he was going back to some smaller self, one long ago discarded. So my rage at the sink was only partly to do with the drudgery of being a guest in that house, it was more to do with the loss of the man I knew to this loutish teenager who was a stranger, possibly, even to himself.
In bed, at night, I tried to claim him back – I was sleeping with Seán at the time, I know that, but these things don’t always work the way you think they should – and some night, before the drinking got too humourless and steady, I knocked on his shaved brown head to see if he was still in there. And he was. He opened his eyes in the darkness. Then he loved me up, down and crossways, as though I was a dream of his future come impossibly true, there among his old football posters and scattered CDs, as though the truth was better than he ever could have imagined.
We did not fight until New Year’s Eve. I can’t remember what triggered it. Money probably. We used to fight about money. His mother. I mean, tick the list. The way the washing machine was left to flood after he ‘installed’ it and pushed the button and went back to play Shattered Galaxy. The whole internet thing maddened me, by then – I can’t remember when it happened, when Conor at the cutting edge turned into Conor hanging out with a load of wasters online. I went so far as to check his browsing history once, but it was completely unremarkable – which just made it worse, somehow: at that stage I would have been happy to find porn.
But this could not have been the fight we had in Youghal because we were outside, far away, for once, from any screen. We were walking on the beach and the pain of the cold air on my lungs was like the pain of the view on my eyeballs, after four days of kitchen living and bad Christmas TV. It was being in the open that let it loose, I think. Even when I shouted, my voice seemed to happen in its distant echo, out where the sky grew low over the sea.
The beach was not completely empty – there was a woman walking down near the water and a man taking photographs, with a very ordinary camera, from the giant concrete steps that held the land safe from the waves. Lines of black posts marched down to the shoreline, small and smaller, overtaken, each in their turn, by the shifting sand. The new summer houses, a little toy village, tucked themselves under a distant headland. Conor said his father owned four of them, Did you ever see the like? But they weren’t too bad. They looked almost pretty under the blue winter sky, through air so still you thought it might crack. Even the waves – or is this just the way I remember it? – even the waves made no noise.
The fight was not, in fact, about money; nor was it about the internet, or the flooded kitchen, it wasn’t about the box – I remember saying this – of our lives, the colour of the box, or the smell of it, whether things worked in the box or not, but just the fact that we were in a damn box, when we might be free.
It was the last day of the year. I had decided to give up cigarettes in the morning. Maybe that was what it was all about: the yelp of the addict before it is all taken away. Or maybe it was because I was giving up for Seán, who found the smell of stale cigarettes so disgusting. So he too was looming as the day ticked on – this need I had to be right for Seán. And the anger that came with this was terrible; the pure annoyance of smashing my way out of one box, only to find myself in another one.
There is nothing like a bit of drama on an empty coastline, the shrill little screams and foot stampings entertainment for the gulls, tinnitus for the fishes. There is nothing so pointless and refreshing: a sad backside hitting a million affronted grains of sand, the faint ticking, in the rocks, of footsteps walking away.
Conor went back to the car and left me to it, to the skyline and the line where the sea lapped the shore, and I watched as the water sank into, or pulled away from the sand.
I was quite happy, then. I lit a cigarette and was happy for the length of it. Nothing moved, except the water, which was always moving. I thought the world might have stopped, except for the progress of ash down the cigarette’s white shaft.
It was New Year’s Eve – my least favourite day of any year – and I just didn’t think I could do it, this time. I thought midnight would kill me, every strike of the damn clock. I wanted to sit where I was, and let time pass elsewhere. How do you do that? You could rise up and let the earth roll beneath you. You could float on that still, cold sea. You could love one man and never stop kissing another.
Never stop.
When I climbed back into the car, I said to Conor I was going home, that I really wanted to see my mother tonight, and he could come too if he liked but I would prefer he didn’t.
‘No, really prefer,’ I said.
And that I just … wanted … some time … all right?
Conor, out of pity for this and for all sad human cliché, sighed and leaned forward to the ignition.
‘I’ll drive you up,’ he said.
‘No.’
‘Well you take the car then,’ he said. ‘I’ll catch a lift.’
And I didn’t say ‘Thanks,’ or ‘Sorry,’ or ‘It’s not you, it’s the damn cigarettes.’ I neither lied to him nor told the truth – that all this had nothing to do with him, nor even, in a way, with Seán Vallely.
I headed for Waterford along the N25, slipping down the high curving road into Dungarvan just as the streetlights came on. I thought about my mother-in-law’s face as I said my unexpected, hurried goodbye.
‘Don’t worry,’ I might have said. ‘I will not break your son’s heart.’
Or something of that nature. Even if it was a lie. Even if we were to speak, which we did not, of course. The power had shifted between Conor’s women, that was all, though I did not enjoy it as much as you might expect.
Conor brought the car around to the front door and I put my case in the boot. I kissed them all goodbye outside their big white bungalow, and my wretched father-in-law kept his hands to himself, for once. But you know, I never really minded flirting with my father-in-law. I probably liked it as much as anything. I am a terrible flirt.
I passed the turn off to Brittas and the one for Enniskerry at the beginning of the motorway lights. I drifted all the way to the Tallaght exit, worked my way through the suburban streets and pulled up the handbrake outside my mother’s front door. I switched off the engine and stood out of the car in the winter silence, the blood in my veins still hurtling on.
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 embarrass 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 shifts 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 shift 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, butter, 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-shirt 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 shore, 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 Seán 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 Seán 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 brass 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, ‘Hello, 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 lust 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 Seán, 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. ‘Assassin!’ 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 cunt!’ 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 Seán 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 shell.
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 Seán 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 Seán follow whenever, every second or third weekend.’
