by Anne Enright
Our reflections rolled and flickered over the flawed old glass of the four long windows, with all the loveliness of Christmas past and for a moment it was as though everything had already happened. We had loved and died and left no trace. And what it wanted, what the whole world wanted, was to be made real.
The minute Fiona left, I made my way to the kitchen, with a blagged cigarette in my hand. Seán was there, opening a bottle of red.
‘What’s that?’ he said.
‘Is this the way out?’
‘Don’t,’ he said.
I looked down at the cigarette and said, ‘Oh for God’s sake.’
I made my way to the sink, turned on the tap and drowned the thing, then opened the cupboards under the sink, one door after another, and threw it in Seán Vallely’s own, personal, domestic bin. After which, I straightened up and looked at him.
‘Wow,’ I said. ‘I love your units. What are they, oak?’
‘Something like that,’ he said.
And I wandered back into the fray.
It was getting to that time when everyone is unspooled and sad to be leaving, though they never actually do leave; the hour when bags are lost and taxis fail to arrive. It was the lost hour, the hour of unravelling intentions, and it was in this extra time, while Aileen hunted in the living room for Dahlia’s abandoned shoes, that I kissed Seán, or he kissed me, upstairs.
It was Fiachra’s fault. I have never been at an event with Fiachra which he has left voluntarily. Drunk or sober, he is the kind of guy who has to be dragged backwards through life. I offered to get the coats, just to move things along, and was halfway there when I heard Seán take the stairs behind me, saying, ‘I’m on to it.’ He followed me across the landing, and I made it into the au pair’s room before turning around.
I had expected – I don’t know what I had expected – some kind of collision. I had expected lust. What I got was a man who looked at me through pupils so open and black, you could not see the iris. What I saw, when I turned, was Seán.
I kissed his mouth.
I kissed him. And as kisses go it was almost innocent; a second too long, perhaps. Maybe two. And at the beginning of that extra second I heard Evie squeaking at the sight of us; towards the end of it, her mother’s voice downstairs.
‘Evie! What are you doing up there?’ making the child glance back over her shoulder, as my eyes rolled, a little comically, towards the door.
Seán pulled away. He took a breath. He held me at the hips. He said: ‘Happy New Year!’
I said, ‘Happy New Year to you, too!’ and Evie’s hands began to flap as she lifted her arms from her sides.
‘Happy New Year!’ she said, and she barrelled into her father. ‘Happy New Year, Daddy!’
He bent to kiss her too; a peck on the lips, and she encircled him with her arms and squeezed tight, and tight again.
‘Hoofa! Ooofa!’ said her father.
Then she turned to me.
‘Happy New Year, Gina!’ she said.
And she tilted her face up, so I could kiss her too.
The coats were gathered and Evie preceded us down the stairs. She put a soft white hand on the banister and walked carefully in front of us, one sock drifting towards her ankle, a row of corrugations around her calf where the elastic left its red reminder, her hair a little dishevelled, her cheek, as I knew from kissing it, sticky with stolen sugar. She had sneaked a go of the White Linen, but, from under her clothes, came the tired smell of a body that is not yet sure of itself. She seemed so proud; like a little herald, full of news beyond her understanding.
The front door was open and Dahlia stood on the doorstep facing the night, while Fiachra lingered inside the living room, draining a final glass. As we came down the stairs, the pregnant woman stretched her arms above her head. She looked a little fat, from behind; her spine curved back on itself, beautiful and sturdy, while her hidden belly lifted to the sky.
She dropped her hands.
‘Home’ she said, and turned around to me. ‘Are you right, so?’
Aileen obliged Fiachra into the hall, then she put coats on the parents-to-be and she kissed them both. Then Seán kissed them. Then Seán kissed me on the cheek, his hands pushing simultaneously at my shoulders, so it wasn’t so much a kiss as a kind of bounce back from each other. Then Aileen gave me a hug, and stood back to look at me. She put an admiring hand on my hair, just over my ear, and she said, ‘You must come again soon,’ and I said, ‘Yes.’
‘And Donal too.’
‘Conor.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Goodnight. Goodnight!’ and she watched, silhouetted in the doorframe with her lovely husband and her lovely daughter, as we got into the car and drove away.
‘God,’ said Fiachra, slipping down in the passenger seat in front of me, while his wife grunted at the gearshift.
‘God almighty. Out of there I thought we Would Not Get.’
I have thought about it a lot, since – how much Aileen did or did not know. When it all blew up in our faces, Seán said that she had been ‘in denial’. He said ‘you have no idea’ (the things I have to put up with). They must realise, these women. They must, on some level, know what is going on. I know it sounds like a harsh thing to say, but I think we should own up to what we know. We should know why we do the things that we do. Otherwise it’s just a mess. Otherwise we are all just flailing around.
When Conor came in the door the next day, sometime after noon, he looked at me, lying on the sofa with a sleeping bag thrown over me, watching ‘The Simpsons’ with the remote in my hand. He said, ‘Where’s the car?’
The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s in His Kiss)
AFTER THE PARTY, things went quiet for a while. There was something too intimate there, that did not suit us – or did not suit me. I had flashbacks to the top of the stairs and, in the whiteness, I seemed to grow and shrink as I reached out my hand to open Seán’s bedroom door. I’d startle back to myself to find the taxi man still complaining, or some meeting called to an unsatisfactory conclusion while I sat on, my files scattered in front of me.
‘See you Tuesday.’
‘Yes. Yeah sure.’
It wasn’t just me. There was a lull in the beginning of that year; a sense of in-taken breath. The boss was in Belize, of all places, looking at a villa. Fiachra’s baby refused to arrive. Seán’s report was not due until the first of February, but nobody seemed wild about Poland anymore. I don’t know how it translated into euros and cents, I just remember it as a mood; how Warsaw, whose streets I had so recently walked, became as foreign to me as it had been when I did not know their word for Thursday and never knew I might want to. Who would have thought, growing up as a nice Irish girl, that this language would give me such pleasure? And those Polish men, my goodness, so proud and sexy as they bowed – some of them actually did do this – to kiss my outstretched hand. I mean, I nearly bought a flat there. But even then, in January 2007, it had started to go a bit cabbage-shaped. Outside the window, the day refused to stretch. Even the planet was taking its time.
One day towards the middle of the month, I answered my mobile to a withheld number and Seán was on the other end, as I knew he would be; everything to play for in the silence after he said, ‘Hi.’ And also nothing. I was ready – I have always been ready – just to walk away.
‘Hello,’ I said.
‘When can I see you?’ he said.
The pain I felt was so sudden and unexpected, it was like being shot. I looked down the length of myself, as if to share the news with my body, or to check that it was all still there.
We went to the Gresham again. Seán paced the room, he said, ‘We need somewhere. Jesus.’
I caught him from behind and put my face against his back. I reached for his hands and crossed them over his stomach, as if to reassure him that the party was over, as Christmas was over, that whatever happened – if anything had actually happened – was something out of time.
But he was fierce and preoccupie
d and lay afterwards staring at the ceiling. He put his hands over his face, and pushed them up and over his eyes, which opened again as soon as he was done.
If I had a picture of that time of our lives it would be this: Seán’s face disappeared under his hands, his neck red to the collarbone, and the rest of his body strangely white. There is more if I want to think about it: the sepia blush of his private parts, the condom slack and yellow, his chest hair turning white. Or I can see his hands, which I loved, square tipped and intelligent, his eyes beneath them grey as a January sea.
He shifted over on to his side and stroked my face. He said, ‘You’re lovely, you know that?’
I said, ‘You’re not so bad yourself.’
Seán filed his report and the boss took it off home with him and nothing more happened; it might as well not have been written.
And so it went. Winter refused to shift into spring, and for a while it seemed as though we knew what we were doing. We met every second Friday and sometimes, if he could manage it, the Friday in-between.
At first, I chose my clothes with great care. But we were so seldom dressed; after a while I just wore things that would not get too creased when they ended up on the floor.
There is something so open about a hotel bed, the duvet kicked away; it was like a plinth, or a padded stage, and the shapes we made there were more sweet and anguished for seeming abstract, as we fitted together our jigsaw love, one way, or another, ending up one evening at dusk, with me spooned around the curl of his body on the bare sheet; his eyes, when I lifted my head to check, burning with the impossibility of it all.
When I think of those hotel rooms, I think of them after we left, and only the air knew what we had done. The door closed so simply behind us; the shape of our love in the room like some forgotten music, beautiful and gone.
After we made love – which we always did first, for fear, almost, of becoming friends – afterwards, when it was safe, Seán would talk to me about his life and I would be interested, looking at him beside me, dazed by the details. The corner of his mouth, for example, which was the precise location of his charm. This was where it happened; at the point where his lower lip doubled back from the upper, the angle – I had kissed it – where they divided and met. In its slow lift, the charm of a smile you do not trust, and like all the more for that.
Seán did not talk about Evie, or about his wife. He did not mention the house in Enniskerry, or the house overlooking the beach in Ballymoney, though he was happy to talk about anything else. More than happy. Seán loves to chat and I love to chat, and there were times when we caught hold of ourselves for getting on too well. It was in no one’s interests (we both knew this) to have that kind of a good time.
We stayed until dark and each time the dark came later.
When Seán was young, he told me, he had a red setter that would feck eggs from a local hen-house and his mouth was so soft, he could run back home without cracking the shell.
He talked about Boston where he did his MBA. Two years in America makes you an outsider for the rest of your life, he said: coming home was so strange, it was like arriving in from a long walk on a beautiful autumn day to find everyone still huddled around the fire.
He told me about his family: an older brother who annoyed him for no exact reason – he had blown this brother out of the water, anyway, and this made him a bit sad. Winning was a lonely occupation for Seán – though that never seemed to stop him. The brother was a secondary-school teacher who thought Seán was a snob. Seán said he was anything but – he thought snobbery bad for business – but still the brother used to say, So how’re the ghastly middle classes, and borrow things that he never returned; box sets, a cast-iron cooking pot, a buoyancy aid from the kayak down in Ballymoney. The brother was also, I discovered when I finally met him, six foot two, with a smile that curled up, not just on one side, but on the other too; he was Seán on steroids, and gentle with it. I thought, when he looked at me in his lovely, disappointed way, that now would be a good moment to go to the nearest convent, if such a thing still existed, and take the veil – I mean, on my knees – that man was so sexy, he was the point of no return.
Anyway. According to Seán, there was this useless older brother, with his chain-store jackets and his fat wife. There was also a younger sister, much loved, who was an artist down in Kilkenny. There was a father some years dead, and a mother who was very much alive. I couldn’t tell what the problem with the mother was, except it was clear that the wrong parent had died. The way he talked, you’d think she had actually done it; slipped something into her husband’s tea, or taken a pillow to his sleeping face; the mere fact of her was enough to put the man in an early grave.
And this was interesting, because for the Moynihan girls – and this was our dirty little secret – it was the right parent who had died. Myself and Fiona might fall out over his memory from time to time – we would argue what he was, or was not (violent, for example; Fiona would say, ‘He was never violent’), but there was no doubt that we felt easier about the world, for the fact that our father was no longer in it. We loved him, of course, but we both knew that life was simpler now that he wasn’t just ‘out’, or ‘late’, or even ‘gone on a wander’, but definitely and definitively dead, dead, dead. No coming back. No late-night key scratching for the lock.
I don’t think I told Seán all that much about him, though he was quite interested in the lives we led after Daddy died: the Moynihan women, all dressed in black. He really liked the sisters thing, he wanted – I don’t know – teenage details; snogging at the corner, disasters with underwear. He liked the idea of us growing up; myself and Fiona causing a stir, as he put it, in the pants of every boy in Terenure.
He talked about his mother quite a lot. I mean, it was clear I would never have to meet this woman, he could say whatever he liked. I would not have to listen – the way you do – to tales of tenderness or brutality, and then shake some old woman’s hand, to discover that she was quite ordinary, really: a bit dimmer than you expected, or sharper, but surprisingly faded and human, though not always – as I recall from other women I have heard described by naked men – entirely nice. Anyway, he told me about his mother, the way Conor used to do and before that, Fergus, and before that, Axel from Trondheim, who called his mother ‘Meen Moooor’ and before that various others, though my virgin years were mostly spared. After sex, that is when men talk about their mothers; before sex they are a little affronted by the mention of her. As for daughters; my experience of sleeping with fathers is limited, but I suspect that daughters are only discussed when everyone is fully dressed. Daughters are discussed in the morning light. Or they are not discussed at all. I mean that they are completely irrelevant and completely forbidden, both at the same time.
Don’t go there.
OK. Fine.
But I am becoming distracted from the subject of Margot, Seán’s mother, the bank manager’s wife and Sunday painter, who drank an actual martini every day at half past five, and was not a beauty, though she considered herself to have an Interesting Face.
‘Thin?’ I said.
‘As a rake,’ he said. ‘Hands like,’ and he made the same swirl and grab of the air, that I had seen and loved, that time in Montreux.
‘Of course,’ I said.
Seán’s mother needed space to grow as an artist and a human being, and Seán’s father moved around every few years on his way up the ladder of the Bank of Ireland, so Seán was packed off to boarding school at the age of twelve – and not a posh boarding school, at that, but the kiddy-fiddlers down in Wexford, where they beat the shit out of you, and didn’t even bother to teach you French.
But the school was fine – no one touched him, one way or the other – there was nothing terribly wrong with the school. It was the mother and her daubings, that was the problem; it was Margot and her ‘needs’. The day he got his exam results she decided it was time that she too went to college, and he spent the entire summer dreading UCD whe
re his mother, as he thought, would be holding court in a corner of the student bar. In the event, she decided on art college instead, then changed her mind and wanted to study counselling.
‘And did she?’
‘Did she what?’ said Seán. ‘Did she shite.’
I thought she sounded quite interesting in a way. I was almost sorry I would never look her in the eye. Or that, if I did look her in the eye, she would not know who I was:
‘What wonderful watercolours, Mrs Vallely. Don’t tell me you did them all yourself.’
The affair, as I had learned to call it, progressed in its Friday pace. The sex became less filthy and more fun, the silence filled with talk – laughter even – and this unsettled me. I might have preferred silence. Every normal thing he said reminded me that we were not normal. That we were only normal for the twelve foot by fourteen of a hotel room. Outside, in the open air, we would evaporate.
I bumped into him one evening in March. I was with a client, a plastics guy from Bremen, with a Plattdeutsch accent like someone walking in shoes three sizes too big for him. It was not a glamorous evening. We ended up in Buswells for a nightcap and there was Seán with some suits in the corner, being the thing – the way men can do that, somehow – making money just by being himself.
I took a long route to the ladies in order to pass near him, and we had a funny, offhand little exchange. There he was. Dressed. Polite. He asked about work. I answered him. He turned back to the suits and I went on to the toilets, where I started to shake so badly I could not open my bag to get a brush. I stood for a moment, trying to breathe. Then I washed my hands, and dried them carefully, with the little white towel. I touched the mirror where my face was, I pressed quite hard on the glass, then I went back in to my plastics man.
