Chris had released her hands suddenly and she’d lain there, breathing heavily. Her breasts, her ribs, rising and falling. Eighteen years of age. Chris was twenty. His back arched slightly, his right hand descending almost against his will. The expression in his eyes, flickering between her breasts and face. Five seconds, ten. Was time in a car crash this slow? His hand had hovered in temptation, fingers outstretched. What would she have done? Slapped his face and screamed for the driver? Or let him kiss her and touch her breast? Perhaps kissed him back greedily, in the glory of that moment when they were young and life stretched away to infinity. A different life might have opened, away from the complexity of Peadar, with no pregnancy, no miscarriage, no abrupt death of her youth. Old before her time, that’s what the other nurses sometimes said about her. Maybe he wasn’t half the man Peadar was, but she would not have lived her life perpetually trying to keep up, mentally apologising for her lack of ambition. The touch you never stop aching for is the one you’ve never known. God damn Chris Conway, anyway.
Alison wanted to pick her hairbrush up and throw it at the door. How dare he stand in that corridor, his hand inches from the handle? He wasn’t some adolescent now and neither was she. She grabbed her blouse, doing up the buttons with trembling fingers as she reached the door and pulled it open. She was going to tell him what she thought of his indecision, ask how dare he torment her, order him to leave her alone. But the corridor was empty. Chris had walked quietly past long ago, leaving her waiting like a fool, a middle–aged woman imagining herself to be a teenager again.
This time she got into bed and tried to sleep. There were sleeping tablets in her shower bag, but she was afraid to take one in case she wouldn’t hear if the children called her. She reached for Peadar’s pillow and wrapped her legs guiltily around it, as if his scent still lingered there. She blamed the four drinks, but how could she have half hoped, even if only for a second, that Chris would be tempted to try her door? Fantasy and memory spilling dangerously over.
Peadar was the only man she’d ever loved. Her adventure with Stephen was already over in her mind before she found the letters to confirm her suspicion that he was separated with two children and a wife in a mobile home. Stephen had been important only for making her appreciate Peadar again – even though there was pain involved in getting back together. But she never regretted picking up the phone the evening Peadar called her flat out of the blue, and she had tried to calm her voice while her legs refused to stop trembling.
Peadar’s very absence made her think of Chris again. What must he be feeling, alone in his room? Two single beds beside the double one, empty shelves which should be spilling over with holiday clothes. How could he cope with those absences? Then she cursed him for intruding into her loneliness with his all–consuming grief.
Shane was twisting slightly. She knew he wouldn’t wet the bed, but he was a pliable child, calm when woken. She carried him out to the bathroom, encouraging him softly to do his wee. He piddled away, eyes closed, face absolutely beautiful. He stood up, waiting to be lifted and cradled into her shoulder as she carried him back to bed. She cuddled into him for a moment as he reached for his Paddington Bear and smiled, half asleep, when he found it. Then he was gone, back into dreams that were never bad.
Alison was more awake than ever. She knew what she was straining her ears for. It was twenty past one when she heard the soft pad of feet on the gravel outside. They didn’t pause. She could almost imagine the route Chris was taking. Slipping through the tennis courts, climbing the wooden steps, wandering across the grass criss–crossed by streamlets and the slopes of the crazy golf course. She lost him in her mind after that. What the hell was he doing out there? Lives overlap, events recur but differently. Chris had said it so deliberately, like a clue for her to grasp. But not just yet, to be revealed at a later time. Why did she sense it would be too late then?
She had to phone Peadar. He would calm her down, tell her to be rational, this was no concern of hers. In the half light from the bathroom, she knelt to examine the bedside phone. Just two clips attached the receiver to the wall. She lifted the carpet and saw a length of loose flex bundled up there. Nail pliers would undo the clips. She unfurled the flex until the receiver just about reached the bathroom. She was able to shut the door and hunch down by the sink to dial the number. Peadar wouldn’t mind being woken. He’d know from her voice she was starting to panic on her own. In fact he’d enjoy being needed, the sense of taking control. But the phone just rang and rang. She dialled again in case she’d been mistaken. He had the answering machine off, so why the hell wouldn’t he wake up and answer it? Was he okay? Was he even there?
She knew suddenly that he wasn’t. Stephen’s voice came back, though it was years since she’d thought about him before tonight. ‘If that bleeding ex–boyfriend of yours said he didn’t want it then he was a bleeding liar. There isn’t a man born alive not dying to come on the tip of your tongue.’ What did Peadar really want from sex? There was always more happening inside people than you expected. You needed to spend years with someone before realising you knew nothing about what went on in their heads. Or inside your own for that matter, the memories surfacing, rekindled desires you never even knew you had.
But, on reflection, she knew that Peadar wasn’t having a proper affair – he simply hadn’t the time if nothing else. None of this had been planned. The builder had genuinely gone bankrupt, but once the chance arose Peadar hadn’t been slow in abandoning them. What could be better for his conscience than to leave them all in a luxury hotel?
He must have brought a prostitute back to their house last night. It was pure and simple. The girl wasn’t even gone by eight–thirty this morning. Every unanswered ring of the phone seemed to confirm her suspicions that he was at it again tonight, cruising the canal or Fitzwilliam Square or, worse still, those bleak lanes off Benburb Street. It wouldn’t be in Peadar’s nature to visit a nightclub and pretend to be single. His pride mattered too much for the lies of a one–night stand. And he’d never trust those massage parlours in cellars, where he wouldn’t feel in control.
It would have to be a pick–up on the canal, a teenage heroin junkie, with a knife in her bag or a pimp following the car. What the hell did he need to go to a prostitute for, but maybe it was for nothing special? Was it just to be with someone different, someone younger? Maybe he would produce a torch from the glove compartment and show her the blueprints for his bloody extension? Maybe Alison was wrong and he was simply out for a walk or holding a crisis meeting in McCann’s house? He could even be driving down through the dark to sleep in the car park and surprise them first thing in the morning. Alison didn’t know and the ringing phone tormented her, making her invent things she had never considered before.
Had Peadar ever been unfaithful, maybe during those teacher conferences? Who could anticipate when temptation might suddenly occur, especially if you found yourself alone, out of your routine in a strange place, with time for gnawing doubts? The disappointments, which you always expected life to eventually make up for, except that you suddenly found time was slipping you by.
Alison carried the phone back to the bedside locker, carefully replacing the flex in case Sheila tripped over it. She should have returned to bed but found she couldn’t. Instead she stood at the French doors, gazing out at the unlit gardens.
Was Chris out there, watching her like a voyeur? Twenty years ago, when he spent whole nights on that bench on Drumcondra Road, staring across at her flat, she should have been frightened but had known that he simply wanted to feel close to her.
Where was he hiding now? She pressed one hand clumsily against the glass. Was this a penance, a vigil? She tried to ignore the impulse but it took hold. If Danny was going to wake he would have done so already. Once Shane was lifted he never stirred again and the antibiotic made Sheila sleep soundly. Still it was crazy to leave them alone, even for a moment. What sort of mother stepped out into an unlit hotel garden, leaving her door unl
ocked? She didn’t even know what she wanted to say or do if she found him.
Chris had nothing left to lose, nothing to even stop him raping her. How could she explain to Jack Fitzgerald, and then Peadar and the police, why she had followed him out into the dark? Lives overlap, events recur but differently. She was no child now, she was a woman frightened for his sake. She pulled her dressing gown tight, found her sneakers and unlocked the door. She looked back: her children slept peaceably. The door closed with the faintest click. She panicked and tried it to make sure she could get back in. Then she carefully crossed the gravel to the entrance to the tennis courts.
She brushed against the net and knew that the wooden steps up onto the lawn were ahead of her. Surely it made sense to call his name, but she climbed them in silence. The blackness frightened her. You could break a leg falling over hidden rocks and water. She imagined herself lying here until dawn with her children crying for her. She pushed on, navigating from memory, searching for any sign of him.
An eerie night–light caused a reflection of the surrounding water to shimmer on the polished wooden roof of the pagoda. But it gave her something to steer by and the knowledge that Chris wasn’t nearby. She looked back at the hotel rising behind her like an ocean liner. An elderly couple moved about their room on the second floor, the woman removing her earrings while the man closed the curtains over.
She should go back to check her children. If Chris had been watching her room she would have found him by now. A series of wooden octagonal shelters lined the boardwalk. She knew he had to be in one of them. But whatever he was doing had nothing to do with her. The man was simply coping with grief his own way, so why couldn’t she leave him alone?
Yet his kiss hadn’t tasted of grief. It was about life and hope, his need almost tangible inside it, like a man trying to cling to something. Alison walked on, down the boardwalk, with waves flashing below her, the lights of the ferry terminal glimmering in the south and Wexford town to her left. The flashes from four distant lighthouses lit the dark sea, each with its coded signals. She paused before every wooden shelter, knowing she should call his name in warning, half expecting a hand to grab her. But Chris Conway was in none of them.
She was bitterly cold, the wind making a mess of her hair. She felt cheated and empty and stupid. Chris hadn’t made a fool of her. Throughout this holiday she had been making a fool of herself. He was back in bed now after getting some air, oblivious to her having followed him without even knowing what she wanted. Adultery just this once before it was too late? Revenge for Peadar’s lack of attention, for the mundaneness of her life? Or was it for someone to stop the rush of time and make her feel special again for one last miraculous moment?
The children could be stirring. What was the safest route back? She couldn’t bear to be discovered if the night porter noticed a movement outside. That ruled out the easy route across the patio.
It was only as she turned to go back that she spied the figure on the beach. His clothes were so dark that except for the splash of waves around his feet she would have missed Chris Conway. The tide was up to his ankles. The waves must be freezing, but then she remembered him allowing his body to drop in silence into the icy plunge pool.
He was going to drown himself on the beach at Fitzgerald’s. This was why he had paid in advance. What better spot was there? Not in the pool where staff might get into trouble for not noticing a lone swimmer in difficulties. At sea his body wouldn’t even be washed up here. It might get carried for miles along the coast, with nobody’s holiday spoiled. Few people would notice his disappearance. Jack Fitzgerald would report him missing and eventually a body might be found and identified, the inquest verdict left open. He would simply be a man who couldn’t swim and had got into difficulties in the water.
Chris Conway was going to die before her eyes if he kept on walking. She was about to scream when he turned around. Had he seen her? Did he know that it was her, for a change, watching over him? But it would be impossible for him to make out her shape. He started walking back, out of the water and across the strand, making for the steps up to the gardens. If she remained there he would discover her and know she’d been spying. What could she say? He was getting closer, passing the rock that guarded the steps. If he looked up now he would definitely spot her.
Alison turned and raced along the patio, knowing she could be seen by any nighthawks still up in the Slaney Room, but no longer caring. She just wanted to reach her room, to close the door and draw her curtains before his wet footsteps passed softly along the gravel again.
THURSDAY
Alison had to get some sleep. The children would start climbing into her bed at seven a.m., then clamber out to quarrel and play before besieging the mattress, urging her to take them down for breakfast. She had to sleep, even if only for a few hours. Twice during the night she considered taking the phone into the bathroom again to phone Peadar. Wherever he had been, surely he was home by now and alone this time. But how could she explain following Chris out into the darkness or that she didn’t even know if he was still alive? He could have cut his wrists in the bath and left a note for the porter along with a large tip for the girls who would have to clean the room.
She should knock on his door and ask to talk to him. Three times she blacked out into sleep to see herself walk naked along the corridor to his room, with doors opening for guests to watch and Peadar appearing in the gloom. Each time she woke with her throat dry, trying to rein in her imagination.
All she had to go on was her instincts. Chris could have paid Jack Fitzgerald in advance for a completely innocent reason. He might simply enjoy walking on the sands at night. He could have been drunk, unaware of how close the waves were when they rushed in around his feet. But everything she knew about his past confirmed her suspicions. Events recur but differently. A clue that Chris couldn’t even be sure she would eventually understand. An absolving her of responsibility this second time around. They had never discussed the events of that night after their row in Loughshinny. Chris hadn’t wanted to die, it had been a cry for help, an act of self–pity even. She might never have known about the overdose if Peadar hadn’t told her. That was typical of Chris back then, to run to Peadar as some sort of surrogate.
In the fortnight between that single instinctive kiss in Dalkey and the trip to Loughshinny, emotions between them had been building to a conclusion. Even the cleaners teased her behind his back. Peadar and her were in the midst of a deepening row, their first crisis. She had wanted him to herself, but he seemed to expect her to slot like an appendage into his established social life, to sip orange juice among the scrum of would–be teachers in the Cat and Cage and be happy to bask in his reflected glory as their natural leader. But being Student Union president in the college wasn’t enough for him. His conversation was littered with plans for a position on the National Executive, for reforms and campaigns. There seemed nothing he wasn’t going to shake up, a whirlwind in the making, a true son of the first president of the Teachers Union of Ireland to lead a national strike, someone whose ambition made her feel increasingly inadequate.
Twice that summer Peadar had asked her down to meet his parents in Oughterard. In July, for his mother’s fiftieth birthday, Peadar had bought her a set of driving lessons in Galway. His father had laughed like it was a practical joke and tore the vouchers up before the whole family at dinner. ‘Sure haven’t I a car?’ he’d announced proprietarily. ‘If there’s anywhere she wants to go, then can’t I drive her there?’
Not just this story but everything Peadar said about his parents intimidated her. Alison never went down and Peadar was always different after he returned from seeing them, remote, tense, throwing himself into sport or study like a man desperate to prove something.
Not that there weren’t times when Peadar made her feel special. Some nights after the hangers–on dissipated he had opened up with a surprising vulnerability other people never saw. At those moments she felt like the strong one and Pea
dar become a small boy, near tears, entangled between nets of guilt and expectation that she couldn’t even begin to fathom. She had never met anybody more complex or contradictory, so that she felt unsure whether to be in awe of him or annoyed.
But increasingly, as that July led into August, she had often wished for a boyfriend whose attention she didn’t have to compete for, somebody on her own level who made her the centre of his world. She wasn’t sure if Chris might be that person, because he had never yet shown enough courage to win her respect. But in the days before Loughshinny she found herself tempting him, reading out the names of films that she knew Peadar wouldn’t take her to and leaving pauses where Chris could ask her out to see them. Several times he seemed on the verge of doing so, yet the words were unable to come.
When she saw him switch the rotas so they would be out together on the Tuesday Loughshinny run, she had acquiesced to his plans, knowing that something had to give. But nothing did, except that – after the horseplay which felt like foreplay – she was left lying on the sand, momentarily half naked beneath him, exposed like a fool.
Poor Chris, forever crippled by shyness. But it wasn’t pity she had felt that afternoon in the van, as borrowers came and went. She felt frustration and contempt. Chicken Licken Chris. She had turned on him, suddenly bitter. He was all talk and no action, better off at home playing with himself. He was only a city boy whereas she preferred proper countrymen. She couldn’t remember half the insults she taunted him with, while he grew more morose and silent and the driver cursed them both, claiming he would never go anywhere with them as a team again.
Chris had got off the van at some traffic lights, not even looking back when she called, concerned now, anxious to make up. Previously whatever lay between them had been underplayed, so circumspect it was never visible enough to be broken. But something had frightened her about how he walked away between the moving cars like a beaten dog. The image still upset her that evening when Peadar had called and she deliberately picked an argument to send him away. She hadn’t wanted any man’s touch, she’d simply wanted to know that Chris was all right.
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