by Anne Enright
‘Right,’ I said.
It was hard, after that first occasion, to find a suitable time. Between Megan’s maths homework and Jack’s eczema, Fiona just could not get away. I was busy at work, catching up. So the house sat on, unburgled, while the smell in Joan’s wardrobe turned sour.
There was no one to look after us. We needed someone to help us go through her things: her navy Jean Muir and the Agnès B cardigans; the Biba and early Jaeger; all the stuff she bought that famous year she spent in London before my father met her and courted her and brought her back home.
Isn’t that what men are for? To tell you it’s only a skirt, for God’s sake, it’s only an old blouse. But the men left us to it, and even if they hadn’t, the fact was that neither Shay nor Conor were up to the job. They didn’t matter enough. They could not keep us safe from each other, as we took out her Sybil Connolly evening stole, or the little ostrich-feather shrug, and said, ‘No you have it,’ ‘No you.’
It was more than a question of timing, is what I am saying, though timing is what we think about now.
Outside in the garden, tethered to the gate with some vicious, strong wire, the For Sale sign stands; bright and square and always new. It was hammered in there seventeen months ago, give or take. There is no point arguing about it. Anyone can do the dates. Anyone can do the sums. It is what it is – that’s what I say. It is what it is. Our mother died in May 2007. She was dead all day. She would be dead for the rest of that week. And the week after that, she would be dead too. It was no longer, for Joan, a question of timing.
And anyway, we thought – we were in the habit of thinking – that the longer you left it, the better. Just that February, Mrs Cullen’s down the road went Sale Agreed at ‘nearly two’. That is how you spoke about these things that spring, during the last furious buying before all the buying stopped, when the word ‘million’ was too real and dirty to say out loud. Way back in the good old days, when my mother was alive, and everyone drank in the streets and, if you wanted your kitchen tiled (and we wanted little else), you had to fly the workman in from England, and put him up in a hotel.
Shay brought us to the solicitor’s, sometime in early June. We sat in his office in town and let this stranger with his fine, clean hands go through a file marked ‘Miles Moynihan’ and opine, in the casual after-chat, that once probate was cleared we would probably ask for ‘two and a bit’.
Then we paid him. A big whack of money. We paid the estate agent too. Nearly two years on, I don’t like any of these people.
But at the time, I was almost grateful. If you’re going to spin your grief into cash – what the hell – maybe it helps if the cash is crazy. We left his office and walked in silence down the granite steps. Fiona said, ‘Nice hands.’
‘He was wearing Alexander McQueen shoes,’ I said. ‘Did you see? Tiny little skulls in the leather.’
‘What does that mean?’ she said. ‘What does that mean?’
‘It means he’s a filthy rich, post-punk solicitor.’
‘Well that’s all right then. That makes me feel a lot better.’
When I think about it now, I suspect he knew something we did not. I suspect they all did, that they just couldn’t say it, not even to themselves. We spoke to an estate agent in July and there was some talk of probate, but the timing was good, he said, for the autumn market, so we put the house up for sale in the first week in September, whether we owned it or not. It went on the websites on Wednesday, it was in the property supplement on Thursday. We sat back and felt that we had managed something hugely difficult and significant. We did not want to let the place go.
We do now.
I catch my mother’s trail around the kitchen, this morning of snow, and I am grateful for it. Some days, it doesn’t feel like the house I grew up in, anymore. I don’t remember that I own it, or even half of it. That is what I should have said to my sister when we were still shouting at each other. I will only live in half. Although I am not living there, as we know. I am only keeping the place in a condition to view.
Most of the small stuff is sorted now, gone to the dump or the charity shop, to Fiona’s house or over to Clonskeagh. We divided it with great tenderness. No you take it, No you. These foolish, small pieces of cloth, that no one will ever wear again, a useful triple steamer, a few abstract oils that scream ‘1973’.
Every once in a while, I come across something we missed. After Seán moved in (though he never actually ‘moved in’) I found a photograph fallen down the back of a chest of drawers; a large glossy black-and-white picture of our parents standing in front of the control tower in Dublin airport. Going where – Nice? Cannes? Going to Lourdes, probably, with rosary beads in her patent handbag – though they managed, with her crocheted hat and his flapping trench, to make this look like a dashing thing to do.
Another time – just a couple of months ago – I spotted a brown cloth bag on top of her wardrobe. I got on a chair and took it down. There were bottles inside: I could tell by the way the glass clacked and squeaked against itself under the cotton.
When I prised open the drawstring I found an empty bottle of Tweed, a perfume I gave her myself when I was in primary school. There was also an empty bottle of Givenchy III – the original blend – and a maverick, half-full bottle of Je Reviens. I opened the Tweed and put the cold glass under my nose, trying to conjure her out of there. Joan was old-fashioned about these things; it was the last thing she put on, after her jewellery and before her coat, so the scent of perfume will always be the smell of my mother leaving; the mystery of her bending to kiss me, or straightening back up. These were the nights when Daddy was still alive, and he would squeeze himself into a tux for some ‘do’ in the Burlo or the Mansion House. They would go for drinks in the Shelbourne first, and dance after dinner, in the wooden centre of the carpeted floor, to Elvis covers and ‘The Tennessee Waltz’.
Then they’d come home in the middle of the night, completely lashed.
My father’s dress shoes were very shiny and black. Even now, I think of them as ‘drinking shoes’. I saw someone on the street, once, who was so like him. Very far gone, but immaculate with it. The kind of drinker who stays upright – also decent, and frank. The kind that likes to say ‘knacker’ and ‘culchie’, who looks like he might have more, and more cogent things to say, even when he is so steaming, the power of speech has deserted him.
I had too much wine, myself, the night after she died. After the undertaker, the phone calls and arrangements, I cracked open a Loire white, and drank it at speed, and I felt two things. The first thing I felt was nothing at all. The other thing I felt was an emotion so fake and slick I wanted rid of it. It was such a lie. There he was – my father. Not in a stranger, but in me, as I sat on my own in a straight-backed chair at the kitchen table, pausing to apologise to the wine when it slopped out of the glass.
I threw the perfume bottles away; these woody, elegant scents my mother chose to complement the smell of her cigarette smoke and her occasional night on the vodka. You might think I would want to hold on to these last moving molecules, but I did not. I wanted to open the windows, bash the upholstery, and chase the smell of her death away; the butts I found in the garden ashtray floating in rainwater, the yellow tinge on the ceilings, the cloying old glamour of Je Reviens.
Seán came to the funeral. I didn’t mind. It should have been a tactless thing to do, but it wasn’t. It seemed to come from some hidden rhythm in our lives; a better place. He came up in the church porch and gave me a hug. Seán looks like someone too busy to care, but then something happens and he does it all perfectly. The country manners coming out in him, maybe, or the bank manager father, who knew the line between doing something sincerely and doing it well. Seán did it well. The only public gesture between us. The only ritual act of touching: hand on my shoulder, hand to the centre of my back, a one-armed hug, his face in my hair, ‘Poor you,’ he said. ‘Poor Gina.’ And did not pause to look into my wrecked eyes, or to feed on the s
orrow in my face, but went over to hug Fiona, and then walked away. The whole sequence perfectly timed and true to what we had become; old comrades in the war of love.
My eyes were fine, as it happened. My sister’s also. We are, neither of us, the crying type. We are the sunglasses type. We are the kind of woman who walks out of a funeral service talking about their foundation.
‘Is there a line?’ I said to Fiona, indicating the underside of my chin. Said it, and meant it. And Fiona, who understood completely, said, ‘Tiny bit. Just there. You’re fine.’
So my make-up was, at least, properly blended, as they loaded my mother’s coffin into the hearse and Seán paid his respects in the May sunshine. I looked after him as he walked away – you might even say he trotted – a busy little shortarse in a pale summer suit, his arm up for a taxi as soon as he hit the side of the road.
Then I hugged the next person.
I can’t talk about Conor at the funeral. He was great. Conor is great, anyone could tell you that. He did everything right. Except, I suppose, for the way he checked his damn phone every five minutes.
‘Don’t tell me that thing is online,’ I said.
‘Duh!’ he said. Then he looked up at me and stalled, realising where he was.
He was wearing his black suit – too tight on him, now – his only suit, the one he had been married in. Same church, same porch, a little later in the year; the fallen cherry blossom now drifted against the steps and turning brown.
How Can I be Sure
SEÁN RANG, SOME weeks later, to ‘check that I was OK’, I said I was really not OK, and I laughed. He said he knew a good guy if we wanted help selling the house.
‘If you are selling the house.’
‘Well, you know,’ I said. I did not tell him that I was sleeping in the place, or sleeping there some days, during the afternoon. As I said, you would think the rooms might have faded, but all her things were just as she liked them. And when I came back, one day – another day, that Fiona could not manage – I put my feet up on the sofa for a moment, and woke just as dark was starting to fall.
‘What’s up with you?’ I said.
‘Nothing’s up.’
‘Are you in the dogbox?’ I said, because that’s how he used to talk about his marriage, he always used to say, ‘I’m in the dogbox at home.’
‘No, it’s not that,’ he said. But it was something.
In the old days – the good old days, when we seldom saw each other dressed – Seán did not discuss his daughter. She might crop up towards the end of the afternoon, just as he was getting ready to go. One day he said, ‘Evie wants a ferret. Can you believe it?’ Another time, going through his pockets for keys, he said, ‘A lump of Evie’s hair fell out, have you ever seen that? About the size of an old two-pence, about this wide.’
He said this sometime in the spring. I know when it was because I remember thinking, quite casually, ‘We did that.’ It was our kiss on New Year’s Eve that did this thing to Evie’s hair.
The calls he made after Joan died were different. He rang as a friend, and he talked about his daughter, the way you do.
Evie was fighting with her mother. Evie threw a pair of shoes under the wheels of a lorry because she wanted to wear high heels. Evie was so spacey, she was always late. Her schoolwork was going to pot, she couldn’t concentrate for two minutes at a time. I tried to figure out if my niece, Megan, had started her periods yet. I said, ‘Is she eating?’
‘Eating?’ he said.
‘Like, food.’
‘She eats,’ he said, though he seemed to disapprove of the question.
‘What age is she again?’
‘Ten.’
‘That’s a bit early all right.’
I told him we thought Fiona had anorexia when she was sixteen and this interested him a lot.
‘We brought her to a doctor. Have you brought Evie to a doctor?’
‘For what, though?’ he said. ‘I mean, what would you say?’
It was a thing we started to do, whenever I was over in Terenure – twice, maybe three times in the next couple of months – I sent him a text, and he would call. I slept on the sofa another time, and we talked when I woke. The third time (it was a bit like going back on the cigarettes, actually) I rang as soon as I got in the door, and we had these dreamy, walking chats, where he led me, through this and that, to his troublesome daughter, and I moved through my mother’s rooms, and touched the objects she had left behind. And I don’t know if Evie was the reason or the excuse, the day he said – maybe that day, the day of the third call:
‘Where are you? Are you there now? I’m just down the road.’
Which is how we ended up making love, not in my old room, but in the bedroom beside it. I opened the front door and he was there, all clear grey eyes in front of a troubled grey sky. I showed him into the house.
‘Funny,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘I thought it would be bigger.’
‘It is quite big,’ I said.
We went upstairs.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I mean this is a very desirable sort of house.’
He glanced inside the bedrooms, checked out the en-suite, the spare room, the upstairs bathroom.
‘Two and a bit?’ he said.
And then he hugged me, because I was trembling. I fended him off at the door to my parents’ room and at the one that led to my own childhood bed. We went to the place of least resistance. At least I think so. I think we fell through the door that felt right.
And were, of course, found out.
Seán had come into the house with some papers in his hand and he left them on the shelf in the hall where the post gets left, and a few days later Fiona discovered, among the letters there, several addressed to him, their envelopes ripped open, including one that contained – she could not help but notice – a cheque for four-hundred-and-fifty euro. She put them in her car and drove them home on the front seat beside her, and she was about to pull into his driveway and hand them in at his door when she realised that she could not do this. She thought about pushing them through the letterbox and decided against this also. She dialled my number and said, ‘I can’t believe you did this to me.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I can’t believe you did this. How am I supposed to look at them now? How am I supposed to look at his wife?’
All of this from her parked car, in the lane outside his house; the boxed fury of my sister.
‘How am I supposed to look at her?’
‘Look at who?’ I said.
And we carried on like this for a while – like married people, shouting and lying.
‘I can’t believe you did this to me.’
‘I didn’t do it to you,’ I said. ‘It is nothing to do with you.’
But it turned out I had done it to everybody. The whole world was disgusted with me and worn out by my behaviour. The entire population of Dublin felt compromised, and they felt it keenly.
Fiachra, for example, ‘always knew’. He knew it before I did. ‘I am in love with him,’ I said, sitting in the back room of Ron Blacks after too many gin and tonics. And Fiachra waited a tiny, unforgivable moment, before he said:
‘I am sure you are.’
But it was the first time I had said the words out loud, and it might have been true all along but it became properly true then. True like something you have discovered. I loved him. Through all the shouting that followed, the silences, the gossip (an unbelievable amount of gossip) there was one thing I held on to, the idea, the fact, that I loved Seán Vallely and I held my head high, even as I glowed with shame. Glowed with it.
I love him.
It was something to say in the long gaps between things – because even though it felt like everything was happening, for long stretches, nothing happened. Except for being in love, which happened intensely and all the time.
I love him: dull, like a pain, when no one rang: thrilling and clarion in the arguments I had wi
th my sister, I love him! And then like a punch to the stomach, the day his wife rang to say, ‘Can we talk?’ and I drove up there and saw her standing behind the old glass of the house in Enniskerry, before I put the car back into gear and drove away.
‘Don’t mind her,’ said Seán. ‘I know what she’s doing, here. Don’t mind her. You don’t know what she is like.’
But I just felt sorry for her – this woman who refused the truth. I had to remind myself this was something between me and Seán, not between me and Aileen. I might have liked her or hated her in another life. It was only incidental that she was not my type.
But this was much later – months later. For a week after that first phone call, ‘I can’t believe you did this to me,’ Fiona did nothing. I continued as usual, and Seán continued as usual, and no one spoke to anyone else as we waited for the axe to fall.
Walking around thinking, This will end, and This will end as I stacked the dishes in Clonskeagh, or turned out the bedside light. Kissing Conor, as he slept, and feeling stupid even as I leaned over him, his stone-still, dreamless head. It was all too melodramatic and silly. Maybe the axe would not fall: maybe we would continue just as before. Though I didn’t like Conor so much by then; I did not like the smell of his sleeping breath.
On Saturday morning, Seán got a call from Shay, asking him to drop round to the house. He rang me afterwards, walking back down the lane.
‘What did he say?’
‘Not much.’
My brother-in-law had been his rueful, back-slapping self. He brought Seán into the kitchen and pushed the letters across the table saying, ‘You’ll be wanting that cheque.’
‘Was Fiona there?’
‘No.’
Fiona had taken the kids off somewhere, apparently. Seán sounded a bit shook as he said this and I could imagine the delicate way Shay phrased it: Fiona bundling the kids into the car, as though the sight of the adulterer might scar them for life.
Another fabulous silence descended. For a week, maybe more, I waited for Seán to ring, for Aileen to turn up on my doorstep, for Conor to put his head in his hands at the desk and weep. None of these things happened. One evening after work, I went to the house in Terenure and fell asleep on the sofa. In the middle of the night I got up and went upstairs, to the bed where we last made love, and I have slept there ever since.
