by Anne Enright
I had been hoping for clues, of course, but I was surprised to get them hurled at me as soon as I walked in the door. It was not that Aileen wanted me to know about her second house – everyone over forty wants you to know about their second house – she was actually telling me her schedule. She was spelling it out for me: my husband is free every second (or third) Friday, but on Saturday he gets in the car and follows me down to the country where we light a fire, and drink a bottle of good red, and look, from on high, at the lovely, ever-changing sea.
And all this before I had a drink in my hand.
‘Oh how nice,’ I said, for distraction, looking at the series of photographs on the wall. There was a line of them in square, dark frames; the images in flaring, overexposed, black and white. It took me a moment to recognise Evie in one, then another – these were studio pictures, taken when she was a toddler. Very arty and beautiful. Aileen in a white shirt, leaning against a white wall. A tousle-headed Seán.
I thought I heard his voice from the kitchen and took a quick left into the long living room, which was comfortably full of people. Four beautiful casement windows. Food one end, drinks by the door, a Filipino circling for the refill with a bottle in either hand.
Frank was there, a little to my surprise – blathery old Frank – he gave me a slippery look across the room, as though there was something I did not know about. For a second I thought it was to do with me and Seán, but Frank doesn’t do sex, he does other kinds of hidden currents and agreements; the kinds that happen between men and are not about anything you could put a finger on – it’s not the cars, it’s not the football, it’s about who is going to win (though win what is sometimes also a question). I say this with some bitterness, because Frank was promoted over my head three months later, so now I know. A man with no discernible talent except for being on side.
I gave him a nod through the various bodies and gesturing hands between us and he came over to give me a clumsy kiss, before heading home.
‘Next year in Warsaw,’ he said.
Poor old Frank.
I heard Seán seeing him off at the front door and I went up to the drinks table, where he might look in and spot me without having to say hello. The silence when he clocked me was very slight, and very interesting. I didn’t look over at him. I smiled, as though to myself, and moved away.
I recognised a few of the faces from Fiona’s parties, except there were no children here and the mothers, dolled up in the middle of the day, looked catastrophic, some of them, or else surprisingly attractive and well got.
Fiachra was also there, with his pregnant wife called – I must have got this wrong – ‘Dahlia’. It was strange to meet her in the flesh – indeed in all that extra flesh; she was huge. She waved a large glass of wine at me and said, ‘Do you think this will bring it on?’ Then she took a sip and winced. There was a woman, she told me, who went on the lash at the Galway Film Fleadh and woke up the next morning in hospital, with the world’s worst hangover and a baby in the cot beside her.
‘Like, what happened last night? Where am I?’
‘Respect,’ I said.
‘Drunk. Can you imagine? The midwives must have loved her.’
‘How could they tell?’ said Fiachra, bone dry, as ever, and he turned to a woman who had come up to him, with a squeal.
I don’t know what she was like most of the time – Dahlia, or Delia, or Delilah – but at thirty-eight weeks’ pregnant, she was as slow and hysterical as a turnip in a nervous breakdown. She pulled me in over her belly – literally pulled me by the cloth of my top – and said, in a low voice:
‘Why is my husband talking to that girl?’
‘What?’ I said. ‘Would you give over.’
‘No really,’ she said. ‘Does he know her?’
She was crying. When did that start?
I said, ‘Would you like something to eat, maybe?’ and she said, ‘Oh. Food.’
Like she had never thought of doing that before.
I sat her on a sofa and brought her a plate filled with everything: quiche, poached salmon, green salad, potato salad with roasted hazelnuts, a grated celeriac thing; also a few cuts of some bird, with sausage stuffing and some clovey, Christmassy, red cabbage. It wasn’t catered, I noticed. They had done it themselves.
‘It’s a bit mixed up,’ I said.
‘Oh well,’ she said. ‘Never mind, eh?’
I wanted to get away from her, but it didn’t seem possible. There was an equal temptation to sit beside her – for warmth almost – and I gave in to that instead, checking around me that Seán was once again out of the room. Or perhaps it was Conor I was worried about, even though I knew he was so far away.
She was wearing a red T-shirt over maternity jeans, with a little sequinned bolero that looked, against the scale of her breasts, like it had come off a Christmas toy. She balanced the plate of food on her bump, then hoisted herself more upright to place it on her knee. Finally she put the plate on the arm of the sofa, and twisted the less pregnant part of herself around to it, leaving the more pregnant part behind.
‘Oh Christ.’
I thought I heard her whimper, as she started to eat; actually whimper. I turned to watch the room and the balloon of her stomach continued to swell in the corner of my eye.
‘Oh Christ.’
Something moved across her belly, a ripple, or a shadow, and I startled the way you would for a spider or a mouse. I turned to stare and it happened again – what looked like a shoulder bone cresting and subsiding, like something pushing its way through latex, except it wasn’t latex under there, it was skin.
Maybe it was an elbow.
‘Dessert?’ I said.
‘God yes,’ she said, without turning around. And I got up and left her, and failed to find her a dessert, or to feed her again.
It was the kind of party where no one ate the chicken skin. Glazed in honey as it was, with a hint of chilli, the chicken skin was left at the side of every plate. I discovered this later when I cleared some dishes out to the kitchen, slaloming between the guests, and humming as I went. I left them on the kitchen counter beside Seán, who tended his pot of hooch, and really, possibly, wished that I would go.
Or wished that everyone else would go. I couldn’t quite tell.
‘Good Christmas?’ I said.
‘Yes thanks,’ he said. ‘You?’
‘Lovely.’
I had, besides, no intention of going. I was having too good a time.
Back at the buffet, Fiona and the Mummies were giving it all they had. They leaned in for scurrility, then reeled back with laughter, hands going to mouths, Oh no! People dodging sideways to scoop up a glass, or snaffle an extra piece of this or that. There were little bowls of glazed nuts, and dried mango slices that had been dipped in dark chocolate. Really dark. At least 80 per cent.
‘Am I dead? Is this heaven?’ a woman said across to me, before lifting her head with a loud,
‘Fuck it, I knew her at school.’
They were talking about plastic surgery. Indeed, a couple of women in the room had the confused look that Botox gives you, like you might be having an emotion, but you couldn’t remember which one. One had a mouth that was so puffy, she couldn’t fit it over the rim of her wine glass.
‘Someone get the woman a straw,’ said the schoolfriend, and she turned to consider the sherry trifle, her hand lifting to the skin of her neck.
I recognised someone from the telly over by the far wall, and an awful eejit from the Irish Times. And of course Aileen had a job, I remembered now, she was some kind of college administrator – which explained the academic types in their alarming clothes, who hogged all the chairs and watched the room with stolid eyes. The Enniskerry husbands stood about and talked property: a three-pool complex in Bulgaria, a whole Irish block in Berlin. Seán wasn’t working the room, so much as playing it. He went about seeding slow jokes, glancing back for the bellow of laughter.
‘Don’t worry,’ he threw over h
is shoulder. ‘I’ll invoice you for that in the morning!’
Aileen, too, was on her mettle. She caught me in the kitchen doorway, and asked me lots of interesting questions about myself. Slightly lit up, as she was, a champagne flute in her hand, she quizzed me about my life. ‘Where are you living now?’ And she was so cheery and bright, she had everything so much under control, it was – I am not wrong about this – like a fucking interview. For what job? Who knows.
I didn’t care.
I had a few too many glasses of white under my belt, and a ring on my finger; a big plastic fake rock from my mother’s dancing days, that might have been made of Kryptonite. I could go upstairs and leave a kiss on his pillow, or a lychee – they had some, I noticed, in the turned-wood fruit bowl. I could stay too long in the upstairs bathroom and have a good snoop: olive-green walls, smelly candle, weather-beaten wooden buddha to watch, and bless perhaps, all the excretions of the house. There was a white lattice cupboard under the sink, where various products lurked: I could steal a squirt of his wife’s perfume, or just take the name for later (ew, though, White Linen?). What words should I write on the mirror, to show up later in the steam of the shower? In what corner might I dribble my spit? The cupboards were flush, the floorboards tight, but there might be a gap or crack somewhere, where a hex of mine might rot, or grow:
Seán, where did this thong come from? The one under the bed?
Though this dark magic, surely, could work against you too.
The room where they slept was white. Or near white. The ceiling was cut by the slope of the eaves and it was done in horribly similar, crucially different shades of fucking white. I mean I didn’t have the colour chart in my hand, but it was an old house, so let’s give Aileen the benefit of posh here; let’s call it bone white on the floorboards, the walls strong white, the wardrobe French white – that horrible furniture you get with the garlands and curlicues – and all surrounding the crisp white sheets, on the froth of a duvet, that fluffed itself up off their five-foot wide bed.
They had very few things.
In a way, that was what I envied most. No dressing gown on a hook, no shoes under the bed.
I tipped a door in the wall and it opened on the en-suite: many fitted cupboards, pin lights, a large shower-stall with a flat rose like the bottom of a bucket and, for extra clean, a second, smaller shower head at hip height.
Who could leave all that?
I went back on to the landing and listened.
The noise downstairs continued, indifferent to the silence where I stood, in the dead centre of the house. In the spare room, the bed was dark with heaped and waiting coats. Across the landing was the lavender glow of Evie’s room, that hummed, in the dusk, almost ultraviolet. It too, was perfect. A dreamcatcher by the window, a little white bed. The door was open, I did not have to pry. I was looking for the distinctive thing, tacky or sweet, as a sign of the girl herself; something scabbed or plastic, like the dinosaur stickers my niece had put on her bedroom door that no one had the energy to remove. But there was nothing. I mean, there was nothing there that I could identify. It was only a glance.
I heard something though, as I turned to leave; a terrible, soft noise, guttural and broken – and definitely human, though it sounded like a cat was dying, very quietly, behind the door. I was about to back away when I remembered the child had fits, and so I found myself stuck there, trying to do the right thing, while the little, broken mewlings continued. Up and then down. And then up again. And down.
She was singing. It wasn’t a fit, it was a song. I put my head around the door in pure relief and there she was, sitting on the floor, with a big set of Bose headphones over her ears, crooning along.
She dragged the headphones off as soon as she saw me. She even tried to hide them, behind her back.
‘You’re all right,’ I said. God, what a house.
‘My Mum doesn’t like it,’ she said.
‘Right.’
‘She says it makes me look stupid.’
‘Really?’ I said, keeping things cheerful.
‘You have no idea,’ she said, complicit, almost camp. The things I have to put up with.
I laughed.
‘Did you hear about the magic tractor?’ I said.
‘No, what?’
‘It went down the lane and turned into a field.’
She rolled her eyes.
‘What age are you, anyway?’
‘Like – nearly ten?’
‘Ah well,’ I said. ‘That’s soon cured.’
‘Are you looking for your coat?’
‘Not yet,’ I said.
‘It’s in the au pair’s room,’ she said, hopping up to show me anyway. Fortunately, there were other people coming to get their things: three men, the bulk of them filling the staircase from banister to wall. I had to wait until they were past before I could make my way downstairs.
In my absence, the party had shifted up a gear. You can never catch the moment when it happens, but it always does: that split second when awkwardness flowers into intimacy. This is my favourite time. Those who were drinking had drunk too much, and the ones who were driving had ceased to matter. I got another white wine and floated through the room on a beautiful sea of noise; ended up slap bang against my brother-in-law, who bellowed at me that he had spent three years on the old-fashioned anti-depressants before he met my sister.
‘Just to take the edge off, you know?’
Well I didn’t know. My brother-in-law is an engineer. He gets really uptight about health and safety on his construction sites, and this is as much insight into his emotional life as I need, thank you.
‘I was pretty stuck with it,’ he said. ‘Three years, you know?’
‘I can imagine.’
Seán swung past with a bottle of white.
‘Are you drunk?’ he said, quietly.
‘Not really.’
‘Well, why the hell not?’ he shouted, and slopped some more into my glass. Then he did the same for Shay.
‘Shay my man, she’s a relative!’
‘Please,’ said Shay, holding up an innocent hand.
‘What? You think you got the better deal?’ said Seán. Then he turned back to me with a wink.
It was an interesting tactic, flirting with someone you had no need to flirt with anymore. I could see the logic of it. Though I thought, also, his eyes were a little wild.
Evie had come downstairs. I saw her shifting from foot to foot, in front of one of the academic types; an old man, who reached out to take the cloth of her blouse between thumb and finger.
‘Come here to me a minute.’
I wanted us all to be sober for her: What age are you now? She wriggled and itched, and looked like she loved it too. Awful as it was to be noticed by these people (they’re nothing much, I wanted to shout over to her, they are no great shakes) she smiled and rolled her eyes to the wall, until her mother came to release her. Aileen set her hands on Evie’s shoulders, letting the child slip away from under them, and she disappeared among the adults, leaving a disturbance of lifted glasses, as she made her way across the room.
Every time I saw her father, meanwhile, he was flirting with someone. It looked harmless, because Seán wasn’t tall. The way he leaned in, it made him look, as he teased one woman or engaged in serious conversation with her husband, merely friendly. But it never stopped. I noticed that, too. The way he put his hand on the small of every woman’s back, so they could feel the warmth of it there.
I couldn’t be jealous. In the circumstances, that would be a bit silly.
Besides, his wife didn’t seem to mind.
I met her again in the hall, when Fiona was trying to head home and there was fuss about arrangements.
‘Oh don’t you go too!’
She touched my arm. She seemed – I am looking for the right word here – fond of me. As though there was something about me that made her nostalgic and hopeful, something that gave her a pang.
‘Seán c
an walk you back, whatever happens. Won’t you Seán?’
‘Sorry?’ He was standing inside the big room, with his back to us.
‘Walk Fiona’s sister down the road.’
‘What?’
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘As I keep telling my sister here, I am getting a lift back into town with Fiachra.’
Because Fiachra and his Fat Flower were at their last party ever – they might as well have brought their pyjamas. She had already taken one little nap on the sofa and had woken up for more.
I waved my sister and her husband away from the door and knew, as they walked into the country darkness, that it was not wise to stay. I watched them as far as the gate; Fiona tiny beside the bulk of her husband, reaching over to take his hand. Then I turned to Aileen and said, ‘Those mango slices are a crime!’
I had joined Seán and Fiachra as they hovered near his sleeping wife.
‘First year – no sex,’ Fiachra was saying into his wine glass. ‘Isn’t that what they say?’
‘Ah, stop it,’ said Seán. ‘You won’t know yourselves.’
Behind us, the woman slept, while the baby – I don’t know – smiled, or sucked its thumb, or listened and knew better, while, on the back of the sofa, the side of Seán’s hand touched the side of mine. I could feel the thick fold in the flesh, at the bend of the knuckles. And it was surprisingly hot, this tiny piece of him. That was all. He did not move, and neither did I.
But once we had begun, how were we supposed to stop? This sounds like a simple question, but I still don’t know the answer to it. I mean that we had started something that could not be ended, except by happening. It could not be stopped, but only finished. I mean the woman with the chocolate-dipped mango who was eyeing up the sherry trifle, and the boys with the Bulgarian complex that had three whole Bulgarian pools, two in the garden and one on the roof, and everyone with a last drink who was thinking about another last drink, and me sitting with my hand touching the side of Seán’s hand in his own house – we were all drunk, of course, but I could no more have left it at that than Fiachra’s baby could have decided to stay where it was for another couple of years. I could no more ignore it than you could ignore the smell of the sea at the road’s end -turn back without checking that the water was there and that it was wide.
