The Forgotten Waltz Part 8

It reminded me of his daughter sitting on her bedroom floor and saying just that. 'You have no idea.' The things I have to put up with.

But we did not talk about his daughter, and when I offered to talk about Conor, that felt wrong, too.

We talked about Aileen. Of course. We talked about his wife because that is the thing about stolen love, it is important to know who it is you are stealing from.

'You don't understand,' said Sean. But I did understand; the wrongness of his wife, whatever it was, and her inescapability. And to be honest, I was a bit fed up with his wife, who was always somehow there. A part of me was beginning to think she was probably quite a nice woman, that there was nothing appalling about her.

'She just. You know ...'

'I know.'

We brought it to a close. We played at being in love or not being in love, and even the s.e.x, when it finally happened, wasn't great, and in the morning, we packed up our things and went home.

At the train station, I sat in the car and said to him, 'No more.'

He closed his eyes briefly and said, 'No more.' And we didn't know whether to kiss or not, so I just got out, and he popped the boot and came round to get my bag like a taxi man. He said, 'Have a good journey,' and I said, 'Thanks.'

I had a window seat, I looked out over the countryside, the stone walls of Sligo giving way to Leitrim bog. When we crossed the Shannon I was in love with him. By Mullingar I thought, if I did not see him soon again, that I would surely die.

Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye THREE WEEKS LATER, on the fifth of May, my mother collapsed, in the middle of the afternoon, and was taken by ambulance to Tallaght Hospital. Luckily if you could call it luck it happened when she was out of the house. She was near Bushy Park at the time, though what she was doing there was a bit of a mystery. Joan never went down to the park. She used to say it was too close by to bother with and that, after the first twenty years or so, she gave up feeling guilty about all that fresh air. But it was outside the park gates that she held on to the bonnet of a car and then sat down on the ground. We did not know whether she was going there or coming back, we heard about the car from a woman in one of the houses opposite, who told us the story after the removal to Terenure church. As well she might: it was a good story.

'I did not see her hit the ground,' she said. 'She was the other side of the car from me, and she just sank down. When I came out she was sitting there, with her legs straight out, for all the world like a toddler or a little child, and her lovely camel coat fanned out on the path behind her.'

This woman, who seemed to know who we were, and who my mother was, and all her different coats, wanted to hand me a phone.

I did not want to take it. I did not see why I should.

'I found it later, after the car was gone.'

We were pretty sure it was our mother's phone, though the battery was now flat and neither Fiona nor I had the heart to recharge it. It made us wonder how much Joan knew, or guessed the strange trip she made towards the park and, just before she fell, the attempt at making a call. It made us wonder how scared she was; not just the moment she reached for the bonnet of a stranger's car, but in the hour before that, or the day. And if a day then what? The same thought was in both our minds: our mother had been frightened for a long time months, a year perhaps she had been frightened, and we had not seen it, and now she was beyond our soothing.

It was the loss of her mobile that delayed everything, I think. The first I heard was a phone call from the duty nurse at ten o'clock that night, explaining that our mother had been taken to the hospital, and perhaps I would like to come in. I mean, the woman was dead, she was effectively dead, but this must be what they say to relatives in such circ.u.mstances. And I knew this and did not know it, at the same time.

So this might be why I did not ask what had happened, or how Joan was now. It was because I knew this nurse, with her competent, lovely-Irish-girl voice, would not tell me, and that would make me hate her.

'Certainly,' I said. 'I'll be there as soon as I can.'

And she told me the name of the ward.

Fiona rang as soon as I put down the phone.

That day was a Sat.u.r.day, and though I might easily have had a few gla.s.ses of wine, I was, in fact, sober I must have been on a diet and for this I was grateful. For the fact that I knew exactly what was happening, felt every step I took along the fluorescent corridors of the hospital night, and into the room where she was all wired up and ready to go. Fiona arrived with Shay. He and Conor talked to a doctor outside the door. They got us coffee from a vending machine. People pa.s.sed, now and then. There was the flabby ker-clack of a distant zimmer frame, a horrible, wet fit of coughing. We sat with her into the early hours.

I don't know if I hated my sister as she sat in the room a few feet away from me or loved her. Whenever I looked over at her she seemed bizarrely separate from me, and the wrong age.

She is tiny, Fiona. I outgrew her when I was eleven. I don't know how she got pregnant, with that child's pelvis, it seemed so wrong. Now there she was, her knee beside her white face, the heel of her boot hooked on to the edge of the chair. How are you supposed to sit, when your mother is dying; when your mother is, effectively, already dead? I sat the way Joan taught me to: shoulders straight, hands loosely laced in my lap, legs crossed and angled slightly, to maximise the length of thigh. Like an air hostess. That is the way I sat, as my mother died.

My mother was a great beauty, in her day; more beautiful than either of her daughters, and all her bones were slender and long.

Conor told us that the doctor would let her go whenever we were ready. He said this without looking at anyone. He said it after leaning forward in his chair and taking up Joan's hand, and laying the palm of it along his cheek, and then setting it back on the counterpane. I did not want him to touch her, actually, I did not want anything to happen. And I can't remember any further discussion about this matter, but at perhaps one o'clock in the morning, the doctor, or whatever he was, came in and touched my arm. He had beautiful, compa.s.sionate eyes. He told me his name, which was Fawad. Then he flicked a couple of switches they didn't look like much while a nurse took the tubes away. He touched my arm again before he left the room, and I was glad I had met him. I thought, perhaps absurdly, that he had a great soul.

That was 1 a.m. Joan lay there for another twenty minutes, breathing. Her beautiful face was a dark shade of blue, her lips purple with a rim of black, and her chin was all wrong, like the jaw had been dislocated. She wasn't happy.

At a twenty past one, a nurse asked us to leave, just for a few minutes. She suggested we go for a cup of tea and shut the door after us. I don't know what she did in there. There was a sound of suction, I thought, like that thing at the dentists, but no one mentioned this at the time, or afterwards, and when we went back in, Joan was herself again, pale for all the world asleep her breath coming in wisps, and her face wiser than I had seen it before. She looked very beautiful. Her face was turning into the idea of a face. Not quite the one I recognised. Not quite her own. It looked like a face that might become hers, if she ever woke up to claim it.

I think I was the last to realise that she was gone.

It was like waking up the realisation, I mean it happened slowly at first and then, somehow, all in retrospect. We were in a room together; we were all sitting in this room. I had an impulse to giggle. We didn't know what to do, or whether we should stay.

Conor got up and went out into the corridor and I thought he might be running away. In fact he was just looking after business. The nurse came back and, though she didn't ask us to leave, we knew we had lost possession of our mother, and of the room. We were not wanted here. The nurse said, 'Take your time. Take your time.'

I stepped up to the bed and said, quite loudly I mean, I said it in a normal, conversational voice 'I won't kiss you, my darling,' and I touched her warm hand and turned to leave.

Behind me, Fiona said, 'Oh the kids! The kids!' as though they had died too, despite the fact that they clearly had not died. And everything became ordinary again. It was a hospital corridor at night; flowers on the windowsills, somebody coughing, my sister, these two men pus.h.i.+ng us through the gloom.

'Who's minding them?' I said.

'A woman down the road, Aileen Vallely. You know her; Missus Issey Miyake.'

And the men led us down the corridor to the nurse's station, where we stopped at the high desk, and wondered was there anyone who might tell us what was supposed to happen next.

II.

Crying in the Chapel.

WE HAVE BEEN waiting, all week, for the snow. The cold came first. The air thrilled to it. Even indoors, the rooms felt bigger, their edges seemed more clear. The whole country was in a tizz. There were thirteen accidents on the back roads of Leitrim, there was black ice in Donegal. On Tuesday we watched the snow closing London down, covering the Cotswolds, building on the rails of the bridge into Anglesey, and melting, as if to prove its stealth, in the grey Irish Sea. It was snowing in Britain; it would snow here too.

Yesterday morning, the light was softer, the walls seemed to have moved closer in. Sean got out of bed and opened the curtains on the back garden, as though he was looking for something and I caught it, then unbearably faint the high, sweet smell of approaching snow.

Sean said he didn't know you could smell snow. He gave me a 'crazy girl' look as he went out on to the landing and snapped the string on the bathroom light. I heard it bounce against the mirror, once, twice. Then a silence so complete he might have ceased to exist. I looked at the place where he had stood at the window, and noticed the frost flowering along the edges of the pane.

The place is freezing.

The duvet, at least, is light and thick. It is easy to slide my legs into the warmth he has left, to take his pillow and turn it over to the cool side, and add it to my own.

I lie there watching the familiar square of day, with its new edge of lace: our breath, the sweat of our bodies, gathered in a crystal fog, that grew overnight into fronds and florets of ice.

The room faces east. I know, as well as anything, the spa.r.s.e dawn light, but the trees this morning are a denser green, the clouds are low and bruised with the colours of unshed snow.

I am back, through no fault of my own, in the house where I grew up. It is the fifth of February twenty-one months, to the day, since my mother sat down on the path with her coat fanned out around her. And still there are rooms I can barely bring myself to open. Not that we are living here. We are just sorting things out. Sean, especially, is not living here, though it is nearly a year, now, since he washed up at the door. We are in between things. We are living on stolen time. We are in love.

Next door in the bathroom, Sean sighs and, after a waiting pause, starts to pee. There is another pause when he is finished, or seems finished. Then a last little rush; an afterthought. It worries me, this sense of difficulty, surely there should be nothing simpler than taking a leak? And I remember my own father leaning like a plank over the toilet bowl, his hand braced against that bathroom wall, the side of his face nuzzled into his arm. Waiting.

'G.o.d this place is cold,' says Sean's voice.

He flushes the toilet and then appears back in the room to lift a dressing gown from the hook on the door. The dressing gown is a plaid design in thick grey towelling, that smells like it needs to be washed. I mean, when it is cold, it smells like this. When it is warm, it smells of Sean.

He puts it on over his pyjamas of striped jersey cotton.

Even when it is not about to snow, Sean wears pyjamas in bed. It is a habit he got into, he says, after Evie was born not that she is around to see, except at the weekends. Even so, he walks around decent, and the world rests uncorrupted, thank goodness, by his nakedness.

The slippers are brown leather mules that slap as he walks about the room. He roots through his gym bag and shakes his dirty gear into the laundry basket. He goes back to the bathroom to get his shower gel and a fresh towel and when the bag is zipped and done, he drapes a jacket over it. I have weaned him off the suits, but there is still something too perfect about his s.h.i.+rts. He sends them out, now, at enormous expense, after the morning when he took one out of the wardrobe and said, in a puzzled voice, 'Is there something wrong with the iron?'

So the s.h.i.+rts come out of the chest of drawers now, and the cardboard ends up in a heap on top of it, and the little pins end up on the floor.

'I'll get the man again,' I say.

'G.o.d it's f.u.c.king freezing,' he says, shuffling out of one leather slipper and then the other, as he drops the pyjama bottoms and, with a staggered hop, gets into his underpants.

'Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,' he says, while the radiator gives an intestinal groan and something judders, downstairs.

I don't mind if he wears pyjamas at the weekend. I don't mind if he wears pyjamas every night of the week. We are in love. He can wear what he likes. Even so, I wonder if there was a time when he walked this room naked; was there a day last summer, when I saw him silhouetted against the window light? Because the most foolish thing about Sean's bare flesh is its purity. And though I have l.u.s.ted after him mightily, in my time, it was always about getting him to the point where his body is as simple as it wants to be; as cruel, or as easy. There is very little about it, I would have thought, to frighten a child.

'What am I thinking?' he says. 'I'm in Budapest.'

'Today?'

'Just tonight. Just to sort it out.'

'I don't mind,' I said.

He takes his trolley bag down from the top of the wardrobe, then changes his mind and puts an extra s.h.i.+rt into his gym bag, which he then takes out again.

'What am I doing? What am I doing here?'

'Where are you staying, the Gellert?'

'I can't face the Gellert,' he says.

I don't know if this is a compliment to me or not. We had a weekend there, sometime last year, before the a.r.s.e fell out of the Hungarian forint. It seems a long time ago now. You could actually see Sean's apartment up the river, a row of three beautiful nineteenth-century windows on the far bank. He had rented the place out to a guy who claimed to be an importer of mobile phones and maybe he was. He is, in any case, gone now, along with four months' unpaid rent. That long-ago weekend just last year, as I say: August 2008, when everything was still to play for Sean finished the paperwork and slapped the phone importer's back, and we went off to spend the afternoon down in the Gellert's hot springs. We paddled about the beautiful old pool, then went our separate ways: him to the naked men and me to the naked, mostly old, women, every shape and size of them, who groaned as they eased themselves into the gentle waters, or slapped it towards them in small waves, gathering solace. I don't think we made love in Budapest. We made money, of course, or Sean made money, but there was too much history downstairs, soaking in the hot pools and plunging into the cold. Too many sagging thighs and bald pubic mounds and yellow stomachs, with their stretch marks of ancient silver. In the middle of it all were two California Girls, with water up over the tips of their beautiful fake b.r.e.a.s.t.s, who looked about them appalled; like this is all so wrong, there must be someone they could sue.

Or we thought Sean was making money. It turns out he was actually losing money. But you know, it still felt good.

I don't think he liked the baths, though. 'Talk about Midnight Express,' he said meaning that Turkish prison movie from the seventies. We talked all evening, and we stayed too late in the hotel bar, and he fell asleep still holding the remote control.

'There's an Ibis out by the airport.'

He has a third bag now, hauled out from the bottom of the wardrobe, a knock-off Bally he got in Shanghai. The bed is covered with luggage.

'No, don't do that,' I say. 'Stay in town.'

And he stands there, looking at it all.

'Jesus, it's cold.'

He slaps over to the wardrobe and comes back to the bed empty-handed. Then he grabs his clean gear out of the gym bag and says, 'f.u.c.k it, I'll just come back.' And he starts to put the tracksuit on.

Sean's legs are white. The hair has rubbed away from his s.h.i.+ns and calves not a thing I would have noticed, until I saw him one day in front of the mirror, craning around to check, like a woman with crooked seams.

'I'll do a quick gym.'

'Good luck.'

'I'll be back in a bit.'

'I'm gone too,' I say. 'Dundalk.'

'Don't make me jealous.'

He kisses me, quickly, as I lie there in the bed.

'If we make it, either of us, through the snow,' I say.

And he goes. No breakfast. The sc.r.a.pe of the garage door, with his bicycle being pushed through it.

An empty s.p.a.ce in front of a window. A wilderness on the gla.s.s, of encroaching ice. The smell of snow.

I am late, myself, now. I lie there for a second, then another second, and am out from under the duvet and into the bathroom before he has joined the flow of traffic on Templeogue Road.

I twist the k.n.o.b on the shower and go to brush my teeth while the water warms, turning the light on over the mirror.

Rrr-c.h.i.n.k.

That string the little plastic doo-dah at the end of it is chipped, and the string is knotted underneath to hold it on it is eating itself with knots, crawling higher up the wall, and the twine itself is dense with whatever is left by twenty, thirty years of human fingers, as we approach that mirror, and pull it down. Rrr-c.h.i.n.k! I am so intimate with the sound of it, and the silence that follows as we acknowledge the image that meets us in the gla.s.s, and allow it, a little grudgingly, to be ourselves.

Remember me?

No.

The cleanest place in the house, that mirror; the way it refuses to hold the past. I leave it to the blank contemplation of the far wall, step into the shower-stall, and drag the door closed: the same metal pipe squirting water at its base, the same shower head. New water though; nice and hot.

The towel, with a pattern of pink roses and mint-green leaves, is nearly as old as I am, and still soft. But most of the family stuff is gone, and I rarely use what is left of it. We sleep in Fiona's old room, which seems a little odd but less odd, somehow, than my childhood bed, which is next door to my mother's old bed, which was once my father's bed too. The spare room is for Evie. So we make love in this one place, the rest of the house remains inviolate. I take up only two drawers in the chest of drawers, and Sean takes the other two. We live on the sound of my mother's old radio, our laptops, one clapped-out TV. We leave very little trace.

This is, surprisingly, easier for Sean who would rather have nothing than the wrong thing and this is part of his sn.o.bbery too.

'Don't be such a sn.o.b,' I say.

'Why not?' he said once and I said, 'It's so ageing.'

I love Sean. I am in love with Sean. I only punish him to keep him by my side. The cufflinks are gone, the Ray-Bans are forgotten in the glove compartment. He cycles into work now, his iPod playlist is a joy to behold. And in the middle of the night I help him kick off the pyjamas. I place my foot between his thighs and push them down.

The empty bedroom makes me want him again. I go to the wardrobe and pick out something he likes, even though he will not see me wearing it. I take his perfume from the bedside locker the gift of rain and grab the laundry basket on my way downstairs.