The Forgotten Waltz (9 page)

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 can 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.

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.