The Forgotten Waltz

There Will Be Peace in the Valley

I MET HIM in my sister’s garden in Enniskerry. That is where I saw him first. There was nothing fated about it, though I add in the late summer light and the view. I put him at the bottom of my sister’s garden, in the afternoon, at the moment the day begins to turn. Half five maybe. It is half past five on a Wicklow summer Sunday when I see Seán for the first time. There he is, where the end of my sister’s garden becomes uncertain. He is about to turn around – but he doesn’t know this yet. He is looking at the view and I am looking at him. The sun is low and lovely. He is standing where the hillside begins its slow run down to the coast, and the light is at his back, and it is just that time of day when all the colours come into their own.

It is some years ago now. The house is new and this is my sister’s housewarming party, or first party, a few months after they moved in. The first thing they did was take down the wooden fence, to get their glimpse of the sea, so the back of the house sits like a missing tooth in the row of new homes, exposed to the easterly winds and to curious cows; a little stage set, for this afternoon, of happiness.

They have new neighbours in, and old pals, and me, with a few cases of wine and the barbecue they put on their wedding list but ended up buying themselves. It sits on the patio, a green thing with a swivelling bucket of a lid, and my brother-in-law Shay – I think he even wore the apron – waves wooden tongs over lamb steaks and chicken drumsticks, while cracking cans of beer, high in the air, with his free hand.

Fiona keeps expecting me to help because I am her sister. She passes with an armful of plates and shoots me a dark look. Then she remembers that I am a guest and offers me some Chardonnay.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Yes, I’d love some, thanks,’ and we chat like grown-ups. The glass she fills me is the size of a swimming pool.

It makes me want to cry to think of it. It must have been 2002. There I was, just back from three weeks in Australia and mad – just mad – into Chardonnay. My niece Megan must have been four, my nephew nearly two: fantastic, messy little items, who look at me like they are waiting for the joke. They have friends in, too. It’s hard to tell how many kids there are, running around the place – I think they are being cloned in the downstairs bathroom. A woman goes in there with one toddler and she always comes out fussing over two.

I sit beside the glass wall between the kitchen and garden – it really is a lovely house – and I watch my sister’s life. The mothers hover round the table where the kids’ food is set, while, out in the open air, the men sip their drinks and glance skywards, as though for rain. I end up talking to a woman who is sitting beside a plate of chocolate Rice Krispie cakes and working her way through them in a forgetful sort of way. They have mini-marshmallows on top. She goes to pop one in her mouth, then she pulls back in surprise.

‘Ooh, pink!’ she says.

I don’t know what I was waiting for. My boyfriend, Conor, must have been dropping someone off or picking them up – I can’t remember why he wasn’t back. He would have been driving. He usually drove, so I could have a few drinks. Which was one of the good things about Conor, I have to say. These days, it’s me who drives. Though that is an improvement, too.

And I don’t know why I remember the chocolate Rice Krispies, except that ‘Ooh, pink!’ seemed like the funniest thing I had ever heard, and we ended up weak with laughter, myself and this nameless neighbour of my sister’s – she, in particular, so crippled by mirth you couldn’t tell if it was appendicitis or hilarity had her bent over. In the middle of which, she seemed to keel off her chair a little. She rolled to the side, while I just kept looking at her and laughing. Then she hit the ground running and began a low charge, out through the glass door and towards my brother-in-law.

The jet lag hit.

I remember the strangeness of it. This woman lumbering straight at Shay, while he cooked on; the hissing meat, the flames; me thinking, ‘Is this night-time? What time is it, anyway?’ while the chocolate Rice Krispie cake died on my lips. The woman stooped, as if to tackle Shay by the shins, but when she rose, it was with a small, suddenly buoyant child in her arms, and she was saying, ‘Out of there, all right? Out of there!’

The child looked around him, indifferent, more or less, to this abrupt change of scene. Three, maybe four years old: she set him down on the grass and went to hit him. At least, I thought so. She raised a hand to him and then suddenly back at herself, as though to clear a wasp from in front of her face.

‘How many times do I have to tell you?’

Shay lifted an arm to crack a beer, and the child ran off, and the woman just stood there, running her wayward hand through her hair.

That was one thing. There were others. There was Fiona, her cheeks a hectic pink, her eyes suddenly wet from the sheer la-la-lah of pouring wine and laughing gaily and being a beautiful mother forward slash hostess in her beautiful new house.

And there was Conor. My love. Who was late.

It is 2002, and already, none of these people smoke. I sit on my own at the kitchen table and look for someone to talk to. The men in the garden seem no more interesting than they did when I arrived – in their short-sleeved shirts and something about their casual trousers that still screams ‘slacks’. I am just back from Australia. I remember the guys you see along Sydney Harbour-front at lunchtime, an endless line of them; running men, tanned and fit; men you could turn around and follow without knowing that you were following them, the same way you might pick up a goddamn Rice Krispie cake and not know that you were eating it, until you spotted the marshmallow on the top.

‘Ooh, pink!’

I really want a cigarette now. Fiona’s children have never seen one, she told me – Megan burst into tears when an electrician lit up in the house. I pull my bag from the back of the chair and idle my way across the threshold, past Shay, who waves a piece of meat at me, through rain-bleached tricycles and cheerful suburbanites, down to where Fiona’s little rowan tree stands tethered to its square stake and the garden turns to mountainside. There is a little log house here for the kids, made out of brown plastic: a bit disgusting actually – the logs look so fake, they might as well be moulded out of chocolate, or some kind of rubberised shit. I lurk behind this yoke – and I am so busy making this seem a respectable thing to do; leaning into the fence, smoothing my skirt, furtively rooting in my bag for smokes, that I do not see him until I light up, so my first sight of Seán (in this, the story I tell myself about Seán) takes place at the beginning of my first exhalation: his body; the figure he makes against the view, made hazy by the smoke of a long-delayed Marlboro Light.

Seán.

He is, for a moment, completely himself. He is about to turn around, but he does not know this yet. He will look around and see me as I see him and, after this, nothing will happen for many years. There is no reason why it should.

It really feels like night-time. The light is wonderful and wrong – it’s like I have to pull the whole planet around in my head to get to this garden, and this part of the afternoon and to this man, who is the stranger I sleep beside now.

A woman comes up and speaks to him in a low voice. He listens to her over his shoulder, then he twists further to look at a small girl who hangs back from them both.

‘Oh for God’s sake, Evie,’ he says. And he sighs – because it is not the child herself who is annoying him but something else; something larger and more sad.

The woman goes back to scrub at the gunk on Evie’s face with a paper napkin that shreds itself on her sticky skin. Seán watches this for a few seconds. And then he looks over to me.

These things happen all the time. You catch a stranger’s eye, for a moment too long, and then you look away.

I was just back from holidays – a week with Conor’s sister in Sydney, then north to this amazing place where we learned how to scuba dive. Where we also learned, as I recall, how to have sex while sober; a simple trick, but a good one, it was like taking off an extra skin. Maybe this was why I could meet Seán’s eye. I had just been to the other side of the world. I was looking, by my own standards, pretty good. I was in love – properly in love – with a man I would soon decide to marry, so when he looked at me, I did not feel afraid.

Perhaps I should have done.

And I can’t, for the life of me, recall what Evie looked like that day. She would have been four, but I can’t think how that would play on the girl I know now. All I saw that afternoon was a child with a dirty face. So Evie is just a kind of smudge in the picture, which is otherwise so clear.

Because the amazing thing is how much I got in that first glance: how much, in retrospect, I should have known. It is all there: the twitch of interest I had in Seán, the whole business with Evie; I remember this very clearly, as I remember the neat and indomitable politeness of his wife. I got her straight off, and nothing she subsequently did surprised me or proved me wrong. Aileen, who never changed her hair, who was then and will always remain a size 10. I could wave to Aileen now, across the bridge of years, and she would give me the same look she gave me then, pretty much. Because she knew me too. On sight. And even though she was so smiling and correct, I did not fail to see her intensity.

Aileen, I think it would be fair to say, has not moved on.

I am not sure I have, myself. Somewhere up by the house, Marshmallow Woman is laughing too hard, Conor is elsewhere, Aileen’s paper napkin, in a tasteful shade of lime-green, will soon leave shreds of itself on Evie’s sticky skin, and Seán will glance my way. But not yet. For the moment, I am just breathing out.

Love is Like a Cigarette

LET’S START WITH Conor. Conor is easy. Let’s say he has already arrived, that afternoon in Enniskerry. When I go back into the kitchen he is there, lingering and listening, having a good time. Conor is low and burly and, in the summer of 2002, he is my idea of fun.

Conor never takes his jacket off. Under the jacket is a cardigan, then a shirt, then a T-shirt and under that, a tattoo. The wide strap of his bag is slung across his chest, keeping everything tamped down. He is on the mooch. This man never stops checking around him, as though for food. In fact, if he is near food he will be eating it – but neatly, in an intelligent, listening sort of way. His eyes keep travelling the floor and if he looks up it is with great charm: he is caught by something you have said, he thinks you are funny. He might seem preoccupied, but this guy is always ready for a good time.

I loved Conor, so I know what I am talking about here. He comes from a line of shopkeepers and pub owners in Youghal, so he likes to watch people and smile. I used to like this about him. And I liked the bag, it was trendy, and his glasses were trendy too, thick-rimmed and sort of fifties, and he shaved his head, which usually annoyed me but it suited him because his skin was so brown and his skull so sizeable. And his neck was large, and his back bulged and sprouted hair from the shoulders down. What can I say? Sometimes it surprised me that the person I loved was so fantastically male, that the slabs of muscle were covered in slabs of solid fat and the whole of him – all five foot nine, God help us – was fizzed up with hair, so that he became blurred at the edges, when he undressed. No one had told me you could like that sort of thing. But I did.

Conor had just finished a Masters in multimedia, he was a happening geek. I was also in IT, sort of, I work with European companies mainly, on the web. Languages are my thing. Not the romance languages, unfortunately, I do the beer countries, not the wine. Though I still think the umlaut is a really sexy distortion, the way it makes you purse your mouth for it, and all those Scandinavian ‘o’ and ‘u’ sounds give me the goose bumps. I went out with a Norwegian guy called Axel once, just to hear him say ‘snøord’.

But I went out with Conor for the laugh and I fell in love with him because it was the right thing to do. How could this be possible? That, in all the time I knew him, he never did a cruel thing.

There was no big decision to buy a house, it just made sense. Australia was our last fling, after that everything was salted away for deposits and mortgage insurance and stamp duty and solicitors’ fees – Jesus, they wrung us till we squeaked. I can’t remember what this did to the love we were supposed to be in. I can’t recall the nights. Ours was, anyway, a daytime kind of love; Conor took up windsurfing out at Seapoint, and came back smelling of chips and the sea. On Saturday afternoons we tramped around other people’s houses – three-bed semi, Victorian terrace, penthouse flat. We looked at each other standing beside thirties’ mantelpieces, and sort of squinted. Or we wandered into separate rooms where we could imagine ourselves in the space more easily, with a wall knocked, or a smell gone, or the place less uninhabited.

We did this for months. We got quite good at it. I could walk into some kip and slap a tobacco-brown leather sofa up against the longest wall, on sight. I could dangle a retro lampshade as soon as you said ‘fifties semi’, and stick an Eames chair under it, and switch on the light. But I didn’t know what my life would be like in that chair, or how I would feel about it. Better, no doubt. I was sure I would feel serious-yet-playful, grown-up and happy, I would be somehow fulfilled. But then again, as I said to Conor.

‘Then again.’

There was, when we made love at the end of these long Saturdays, a sense in which we were reclaiming ourselves for ourselves, after some brief theft.

You walk into a stranger’s house and it is exciting, that’s all, and you are slightly soiled by it. I could feel it, in the second-hand, abandoned kitchens, and in my Sunday-supplement dreams. I could feel it drain away in the moments after waking, when I realised that we hadn’t bought, we probably never would buy, a house with a sea view. It didn’t seem a lot to ask – a house that would clean your life every time you looked out of it – but it was, apparently. It was far too much to ask. I did the figures up down and sideways and I never could believe the bottom line.

The bottom line was the place we had started out from, before we lost the plot. The bottom line wasn’t so much a house as an investment; somewhere to swing our cat, that was not too far out of town.

So we found exactly that; a townhouse in Clonskeagh for three hundred grand. We were the last in, bought off the plans, drank a bottle of Krug to celebrate – all one-hundred-and-twenty euros’ worth.

Krug, no less.

It was nice.

I loved Conor then. I really did love him, and all the versions of him I had invented, in those houses, in my head, I loved them all. And I loved some essential thing too; the sense of him I carried around with me, which was confirmed each time I saw him, or a few strange seconds later. We knew each other. Our real life was in some shared head space; our bodies were just the places we used to play. Maybe that’s the way lovers should be – not these besotted, fuck-witted strangers that are myself and Seán, these actors in a bare room.

Anyway. Before our lives became a desolation of boredom, rage and betrayal, I loved Seán. I mean, Conor.

Before our lives became a desolation of boredom, rage and all the rest of it, I loved Conor Shiels, whose heart was steady, and whose body was so solid and warm.

The weekend after contracts were exchanged, we went into the unfinished house and looked around. Then we sat on the concrete floor and held hands.

‘Listen,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Listen to the money.’

The place was going up by seventy-five euro a day, he said, which was – he did the calculations under flickering eyelids – about five cents a minute. Which didn’t seem like much, I thought. Which seemed almost piffling, after all we had been through. Still, you could almost feel it, a pushing in the walls; the toaster would pop out fivers, the wood of the new-laid floors would squeeze out paper money and start to flower.

And, for some reason, we were terrified.

Don’t tell me otherwise.

The house fitted Lego-like with its neighbour, which had the basement and split the middle floor, and this threw me a bit, the fact that it was only half a house until you went upstairs. It was like the place had suffered a stroke.

Not that this was a problem, or at least not a problem you could identify. I just hadn’t expected it. And I still dream about this house, about walking up those steps and opening the front door.

The day we moved in, Conor was inside in among the boxes, sitting at his laptop like a demented organist, cursing the internet connection. I didn’t complain. We needed the money. The next few months were all about work and there was something frantic and lonely about our love in that little house (don’t get sentimental, I tell myself, the sockets moved in the wall every time you stuck in a plug). We clung to each other. Six months, nine – I don’t know how long that phase lasted. Mortgage love. Shagging at 5.3 per cent. Until one day we decided to take out a couple of car loans and get married on the money instead.

Vroom vroom.

It was the silliest thing we had ever done – either of us – and it was surprisingly good fun. It happened, after much fuss and diplomatic incident, on a lovely day in April; church, hotel, bouquet, the lot.

About seven hundred of Conor’s cousins came up from Youghal. I’d never seen anything like it: the way they stood their rounds of drink, fixed their little hats in the mirrors, and checked the weight of the hotel cutlery when they picked it up to eat. They treated the day like a professional engagement, and danced until three. Conor said it might as well be your funeral; he said they hunt in packs. And my mother – who had, it turned out, ‘always been saving for this day’ – led a seasoned troupe of the Dublin middle classes, many of them old, all of them entirely happy, as they chatted and sat and sipped their peculiar drinks: Campari, whiskey and red, Harvey’s Bristol Cream. We were just the excuse. We knew it, as we went upstairs to change out of our duds and ride each other rotten against the back of the bedroom door. We were beside the point. Free.

My mother is there in the photograph album (five hundred euro, bound in cream leather, now mouldering under the kitchen counter in Clonskeagh). She wore a lilac-grey suit and a fascinator, no less, in grey and mauve, complete with face net, and those funny black feathers that arc out, stripped to bobbing dots of black. She is there beside me. Tiny. Her hair a kind of mystery; she had it caught up some way at the back. My mother’s favourite film was Brief Encounter, she knew how to cry under a veil. And she always spent money on her hair. Even when she was skint, she had a way of convincing people to make her look beautiful, that it would be possible, and they did their best by her. When it comes to the hairdresser’s, she used to say, it pays to leave your moods at home.

She wouldn’t give me away, refused point blank, fixed me up instead with my father’s brother; a man I had not seen since I was thirteen years old. I thought we might meet the day before, at least, but he turned up on the morning, fresh from the airport, and when everyone went off in the first car, we were left in the front room looking at each other, while the driver idled outside.

It was the strangest moment of a very strange day. I stood trembling at the window, in my pewter silk Alberta Ferretti with a mad Philip Treacy yoke (you might even call it a fascinator) stuck to the side of my head, and every time I made to move, this guy checked his fat watch and said:

‘Make them wait. You’re the bride.’

Finally, at some mysteriously ordained moment, he crossed the living room carpet, took me by the shoulders, and said, ‘You know who it is you remind me of? My own mother. You have her lovely eyes.’

Then he offered me an old-fashioned arm and conducted me out to the car.

Was that the creepiest bit? Taking the slow march down the aisle on the arm of this old geezer, who hadn’t expressed an emotion, by the look of him, since 1965? I don’t know. The local church, which does a good line in cherry blossom, also has a very peculiar crucifix suspended over the altar. A huge thing, made of wood. The figure of Christ, which isn’t especially gory, hangs not just on the front, but also on the back of it – this for the people who end up on the other side of the altar. And it distracted me throughout the ceremony, the way it used to distract me as a child, this double Jesus, back to back with His own reflection. Standing there, in two-hundred-and-twenty euros’ worth of underwear, never mind the dress, I wanted to say, ‘What were they thinking?’ This just a milder version of the things that used to flash through my head in this church – the shapeless obscenities that plagued my school years, and which started, at a guess, at my father’s funeral when I was thirteen. All grown-up, I stood where his coffin once lay (his ghost drifted, head first, through the small of my back), and I regretted my choice of basque over Spanx, while the priest said:

Do you take?

And I said:

Yes. Yes, I do.

And Conor smiled.

Outside, the sun shone and the photographer waved, while the shiny black cars nudged each other in the yard.

We had a great time. The seven hundred cousins from Youghal, and my uncle in from Brussels. We had, Conor and myself, enormous amounts of sex on the strength of it, and a holiday in Croatia (cheap after all that excess), and we woke up back in Clonskeagh one morning; hungover, giddy and unafraid.

The next year, the next two years, I was as happy as I have ever been.

I know this. Despite the bitterness that was to follow, I know that I was happy. We worked like crazy and partied when we could. We fell into bed, most nights, after a hard day and a quick knock-back of whatever: I was beyond Chardonnay by then – let’s call them the Sauvignon Blanc years.

Conor had a sudden jump of money when he hooked a travel company who wanted to get online. He was working with other people by then, you might even say he was working for other people, but I don’t know if he cared. The internet was made for Conor: the way he was always interested but could never settle on any one thing. He spent hours – days – at the screen, then he was up and out of the chair; walking into town; cycling over to the Forty Foot where he swam, in cold seas and warm, with much splashing and whooshing. Everything was slightly too much, with Conor. He wore too many clothes, and when he was naked he heaved large sighs and rubbed his chest, and farted hugely as he stood in the bathroom to pee. And I ended up not believing it, somehow. I ended up – this seems a peculiar thing to say – not believing a single thing he did; thinking it was all gesture and expostulation, it was all air.

Sunny Afternoon

BUT THIS WAS later. Or perhaps it had happened already, perhaps it was happening all along. We might have run along these parallel tracks, of believing and not believing, for the rest of our lives. I don’t know.

Because we were also flying along, myself and Conor, we were happily, sensibly, married married married. The next time I saw Seán, I had forgotten all about him. It was 2005. We were stuck at home for another summer, clearing the costs of buying the house, so we went down to Brittas Bay one bank holiday Monday, to see Fiona.

She was there for four or five weeks with the kids while Shay came down when he could – which was to say, when it suited him. You have to understand that Shay was coining it at the time, so not only did they have a house practically in the country, which is to say in Enniskerry, but a few miles away, thirty minutes in the car, they had a site in a posh mobile home park by the sea. This was – I don’t know – a hundred, two hundred grand’s worth of tat on a caravan site by the beach. It is not something I would normally be jealous of, except that I didn’t have two hundred grand to throw around like that, and nothing makes you jealous like something you didn’t actually want in the first place.

We got up early and drove down the N11, Conor with his windsurfing gear, and me with a couple of bottles of red and a load of steaks I grabbed for the barbecue. I offered the meat to Fiona when we arrived; a bulging white plastic bag that was stained on the inside with blood turning brown.

‘Ooh!’ she said.

‘It seemed like a good idea, in the shop.’

‘It was a good idea,’ she said. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s an arse in a bag,’ said Conor. Which was exactly what it looked like, dangling there.

‘Leg of lamb steaks,’ I said.

My niece, Megan, started to laugh. She must have been nearly eight, and Jack, her little brother who was five, ran in shouting circles. Conor went after him, hunched over with hands waggling, until he caught the child, and threw him on the ground screaming, while Conor went (something like), ‘Har har, I am the arse, har har.’

I thought Jack was going to vomit, that this would be the end of us as a Happy Bank Holiday Family, but Fiona just gave the pair of them a steady look, then said, ‘I hope I have room,’ before clumping up the little wooden steps and going into the caravan.

When I followed, she was on her knees, pushing the meat like a pillow into the bottom drawer of the fridge. There was a pile of salad and vegetables beside her on the floor.

‘God, this place.’

‘It’s lovely,’ I said.

‘Bedsit sur mer.’

‘Well,’ I said – because it was hard to know what to do with it. I looked around. The plastic partitions had a sort of inbuilt wallpaper pattern, and everything shook a bit when you walked. But it was nice, too. A toy house.

‘The woman three down has wooden blinds.’

‘It’s not supposed to be real,’ I said.

‘Oh, you have No Idea,’ she said.

Shay, it turned out, was thinking about a proper summer house near Gorey, or they might look on the Continent, probably France. This Fiona said later, after too much sun and wine, when there were more people to hear. But in the morning, kneeling in front of the little fridge on a floor made slithery with sand, I felt sorry for her, my so-pretty sister, who would always be outdone by the woman three caravans down.

The weather improved through the day. The clouds headed out to sea and their shadows moved, sombre and precise, over the water. It was better than the telly. We sat outside in our big sunglasses, and waggled our painted toes, turquoise and navy blue. Fantastic. I should have brought our mother along, she would have liked it, but it hadn’t occurred to me. I don’t know why.

Conor was out on the central green, throwing frisbee for the kids, treating them like dogs.

‘Fetch!’ he shouted. ‘Fetch!’

‘They’re not dogs, Conor,’ I said, as the children stuck their faces in the grass and tried to lift the frisbee with their teeth.

‘Sit!’ shouted Conor. ‘Paw!’

It wasn’t the children I was worried about, it was their mother. But she gave another of her measured looks and said, ‘Good ploy.’

There was some code of practice here, and I never quite knew what it was.

Another child arrived. She and Megan jigged briefly in front of each other, then she too ran after the frisbee, over and back, jumping up in a doomed sort of way.

‘No, here. No here. No give it to me.’

And she tripped on her flowery flip-flops and cried. Or yowled, actually. It was an interesting noise, even in the open air. It cut out as she stopped to inhale (or choke, perhaps), then it started again, even shriller than before.

Conor, to be fair to him, did not run over to tickle her while har-harring about arse. This was a substantial child, both round and tall, and it was hard to put an age on her. It was hard to know if those were small breasts or largish amounts of fat under the cross-over cardigan – the very pinkness of which insisted she was still a child.

A woman walked across the grass and spoke to her quietly, then waited and spoke again. Which only made things worse, as far as I could tell. Megan and Jack looked on, in a state of uneasy, furtive delight. They loved a crisis, that pair. Made them shiver. Which, in turn, made me wonder how much shouting and mayhem they saw at home.

Fiona was half-out of her chair, but she seemed unsure. Even the child’s father hung back. They had been on their way from the car park when she ran ahead and he stood apart, waiting for the fit to subside. I remember feeling that someone should be grown-up about this; effect introductions, offer drinks. So I waved. And he shrugged and came over, and for a moment, it seemed as though the rest of the world had gone into slow motion, leaving us outside and free.

It was Seán. Of course. More handsome than I remembered, with a tan and longer, curly hair. A bit cheeky, actually, from the front; a bit too ironical. As though he knew me, which, I was keen to tell him, he did not. Or not yet. So we had got to, ‘Your point being?’ before the seat of his trousers had touched the stripy cotton of the fold-up chair.

I am surprised, as I remember all this – the immediacy of it, the copulatory crackle in the air – that it took almost another year before we did the bold thing; before we pulled the houses down around us; the townhouse and the cottage and the semi-d. All those mortgages. Pulled the sky down too, to settle over us like a cloth.

Blackout.

Or maybe he was like that with all the girls.

I have to backtrack a little, and say that there were other things that could have happened with our lives. We might have done it all in secret, either. I mean, no one had to know.

But, back in the daylight of the caravan park, Evie was still baying, Aileen was murmuring in a firm and even tone, while Fiona turned to Seán, like a fool, and said, ‘Would she like an ice-pop, d’you think?’

Seán winced. Our children, whose selective hearing could beat bats’, came running across the grass, and Evie limped after, whinging in a half-hearted and hopeful sort of way.

‘I’m afraid Evie doesn’t eat ice-pops,’ said Seán. ‘Do you, Evie?’ She stopped, her flip-flops clutched to her chest, and after a long and horrible pause said, ‘No.’

He sat with her in his arms during the wrangle that followed, which ended with Megan and Jack banished to the other side of the mobile home to eat their half-promised ice-pops, out of sight. He is a small enough man, Seán. He rocked her, this large child, through distant and imagined slurps and suckings – I wanted a damn ice-pop myself by this stage – while Fiona talked to Aileen about minders and crèche fees, and I thought, Wouldn’t it be better just to hit the child? Wouldn’t it be quicker and more humane?

I exaggerate. Of course.

Evie was a normal enough eight-year-old girl, Aileen was not a monster of calm, Seán was a businessman with too sharp a crease in his summer pants. It was a boring, nice day. After lunch, Conor pulled his hat down over his face and pulled his T-shirt up to warm his brown and hairy belly in the sun. I folded a sheet of paper, the way we used to at school, so you could open and shut it like a little bird’s beak with fingers and thumbs, first forward, then out to the side, and myself and Megan played fortunes: Go Figure, You Smell, Easy Peasy, with True Love hidden under the last flap. After lengthy negotiations, Evie and Jack went inside to watch a DVD. They did not have the resources, it seemed, to do anything else.

In the middle of the afternoon, my brother-in-law Shay turned up. He stopped on the grass, held his phone up high and, with a cartoonish finger, turned it off. Then he came on to the deck, kissed Fiona and said hello all round. Then he walked inside and switched off the television, and told everyone to get down to the beach, with much shouting for togs and towels and inflatable toys while Fiona found – or couldn’t find – missing sandals and keys to the front door and the hundred mysterious objects her children need: water, suncream, a green golfing visor that Megan liked, Jack’s yellow plastic rake; because, as far as I can see, kids will do anything to stay in a place where they are happy enough, up to and including making their mother weep.

‘Have you ever heard of a Loon A Tic asylum?’ I said to Megan, who regarded me with wise, monkey eyes. Meanwhile Seán’s wife, Aileen, just read the paper until everyone was ready, then she walked back to their car and lifted a single bag from the boot.

‘Right!’ she said. ‘Onward!’

Conor laughed all the way home.

‘The ice-pop!’ he said. ‘The fucking ice-pop!’

And I intoned, ‘Evie doesn’t eat ice-pops, do you Evie?’

‘Jesus Christ.’

‘Apparently she has some kind of thing. The child,’ I said, because that was what Fiona muttered to me by the sink, as we washed up.

‘Like what?’

‘You know, something wrong. Fiona didn’t say.’

Evie was a funny, disturbed little article, there was no doubt about it. She didn’t seem the same age or stage as Megan, though they were both around eight years old – or maybe I was biased, my niece being such a little sprite. If I had known more about these things I might have put her on a spectrum, or tried to. Except that Evie was all there – alert, trembling with it – she just found things very difficult. And whether this was, as I suspected, her mother’s fault, I couldn’t say for sure. I did find her slightly unbearable, though. It might have been something to do with the fat; those plump, kissable baby wrists; but with the wrong sort of face above them, the wrong kind of eyes. I didn’t say this to Conor, of course. I mean, I might have said, ‘She is quite an object,’ but I am pretty sure I didn’t say the fat made her unpleasant to me; I did not share my ‘failure to love’, as Megan’s teacher calls a sin these days. Besides, whatever slight annoyance ran through me when I looked at Evie left, as a residue, something both calm and keen.

Pity.

‘Poor child,’ I said. ‘It’s all her, you know,’ meaning the mother. And Conor said, ‘They should both be shot.’

He seemed to like them well enough at the time. He chatted to Seán as we all trekked over to the cold Irish Sea and Fiona chased and cajoled her children into their togs and creams, while Shay opened a bottle of red, sat on the rug and shut down, massively and at speed – it was frightening to watch – like a power cut running through Manhattan.

‘I thought he looked terrible,’ I said to Conor in the car.

‘Who?’

‘My brother-in-law,’ I said. ‘I thought he looked like shite.’

‘Shay’s all right,’ he said. ‘Don’t you worry about Shay.’

Conor was being a bit obtuse, these days. He was recently finding the whole contraception thing a bit ‘unconducive’, for example. To what? He did not say.

We did not talk about Seán, as far as I recall. Perhaps there was no need to. It is possible that we held an uncomplicated silence, the rest of the way home.

Certainly, in his togs, Seán – my downfall, my destiny – cut a less than imposing figure. I suppose you could say that of us all. In the bare sunshine we looked a bit peeled. Fiona, being, in her day, the most beautiful girl in Terenure, didn’t bare an inch, of course. She had some way with sarong and towel that made Brittas look like Cannes, and when we toyed with the idea of a swim, said, ‘Oh, I was in this morning,’ because whatever effort she puts into it all (and I suspect it is considerable) she never lets on.

So it was just the four of us, Conor and me, Seán and Aileen, playing Houdini with bra straps and towels, then pretending not to look at each other’s bodies on the beach. Truth be told, I didn’t really bother with Seán that day, I was too busy checking out his wife; so dull when dressed, so elegant and boyish in the nip, never mind her age. Her odd little breasts screamed ‘breasts’ at you, though – they looked so tender on her little bony ribs, like they had been grown there specially.

Seán gave me the full flat of his face, as if to ask if I had some problem with the body of his wife. But I had no problem with it, why should I? I had problems enough of my own. I had to keep Conor in front of me, for a start, until the other pair were safely wet, or, at least, looking the other way.

‘What is it?’ said Conor. ‘What do you want?’

While I hung on to him, bickering and talking rubbish, managing the towel.

Seán headed down to the surf, hugging himself, with high shoulders and picking, bouncy feet. Aileen gave the sea a cold look, snapped her suit down under her bum and started to walk. Then, at the last moment, Evie flung herself in the sand and caught her mother’s leg, hugging her thigh in terrible supplication.

‘Evie, please stop that.’

While my sister checked round her with vague eyes and loudly said, ‘Megan, what did you do to Evie?’

And I walked away from them in silence, and kept walking until the water covered my thighs.

Then I screamed.

‘Whuu! Freezing!’

But it pulled all the uncertainty out of my bones – the surprise of lifting your feet and finding there was no need for sand. I made my way through the wave’s sharp swell, towards the flat line of the horizon. By the time I turned back to the shore, pushed and loved by all that weight of water, I was happy.

I watched from the sea as Aileen straggled up the beach to tend to Evie, and I realised that her thin body wasn’t fit, it was just busy. You could see it in the hunch of her shoulders; how she might walk at speed, but she took no pleasure in it.

Conor would stay in the water for another twenty minutes, his windsurf board forgotten on the roof of the car. Shay, meanwhile, had fallen backwards on the lime-green, polka-dot rug, belly to the sky. Which left Seán, and Seán’s lacklustre desiring – because we all wanted him to want us. At least I think we did, disporting ourselves (isn’t that the word?) about the place where he sat, our bodies shocked into delight by the cold sea. There we were: Fiona, who was a sort of dream, and his wife who did not matter, and me, who was – for these few moments at least – the bouncing girl. As I came up the short slope of the beach, and bent for my towel, and flung my hair back and said, ‘Hooo-eeee!’ I was the girl who liked it. The fat one.

I was the nightmare.

Or I felt like the nightmare. It must have been the way he looked at me.

This tiny drama happened and then disappeared immediately, as if by arrangement, and we sat around on a spoiled patchwork of towels, as though used to pretending that everyone was fully dressed. We talked about the year we realised you could have more than one bathing suit – which, in my case, was the year in question, when I had to go up a size, due to too much wedded bliss, and went mad in the shop and bought two. ‘One on, one drying on the line.’

Seán talked about wearing his father’s navy underpants on the beach in Courtown, and never forgiving his mother for it, the way she stitched up the flies and said they were just like the real thing. The story made us realise how much older he was than us – which also explained the stone house down the road from Fiona and Shay’s in Enniskerry. Myself and Conor still got age-rage when people waggled their bricks and mortar at us. ‘You have a nice house? That’s because you’re old, you bastard,’ though Seán – so wiry and compact – seemed hardly grown-up at all. The pair of them, husband and wife, were like mantelpiece ornaments, each so particular in the way they moved, and I felt myself inflate slowly on the beach beside them. I was huge! I was horny! I was… careful. When I looked at Seán, and he at me, it was always eye to eye.

In fact, as I discovered later, Seán wasn’t judging my body one way or another. He just waited for my own judgement to rise and then smiled it back at me. It was one of his tricks. I should have known about his tricks.

Two passing teenagers, for example, fabulous and tall; he stared at them for a second too long – stared hard, like he might have to go over there and fuck them, right now. Then he turned back to look at disappointing you.

I was sort of scorched by it, I have to say.

This is why Fiona started burbling on about buying a house in France. It was because she wanted to impress Seán – a man who, in his Speedos, was not exactly a siren song. He stirred us up. Everything he said was funny, and everything seemed to do you down. Or buoy you up. He could do that too. He sat about; a black T-shirt covering his little mound of stomach, and he pushed into the sand with his tough, white toes.

Even in the strong sun, I was caught by the beauty of his eyes, which were larger than a man’s eyes should be and more easily hurt. I saw the child in him that afternoon, it was easy to see: an eight-year-old charmer, full of mischief and swagger. But I don’t know if I saw how tactical it all was. I don’t think I saw the way he was threatened by his own desires, or how jealousy and desire ran so close in him he had to demean a little the thing he wanted. For example, me.

Or not me. It was hard to tell.

One way or another, we all ended up boasting. Practically naked as we were, in our very ordinary, Irish bodies (except Fiona’s, which wasn’t on show), we sat and bragged for a while, while the children dug in the sand and ran about, and the beach and the sky continued, beautiful, without us.

‘What was all that about?’ said Conor, in the car on the way home. ‘Jesus.’

Will You Love Me Tomorrow

THAT WINTER, JOAN complained of swelling in her feet, which, for our mother, was a terrible comedown, the row of shoes she had, going back thirty years, all forsworn for Granny boots: she just hated it. She got supplements in the health food shop and complained of depression – she was, actually, depressed, I thought – and it never occurred to her, or to any of us, to do anything about it except mope and talk on the phone about kitten heels and peppermint lotion and the various shades in which you might get support tights.

And I had gone back on the pill, which isn’t exactly important, except that the pill always makes me depressed: foggy and guilty and permanently just that tiny bit swollen, so the surface of me is too needy and stupid, somehow. I am not explaining it very well. I just think that if I hadn’t been on the pill things would have gone differently; I might have been able to listen better to my mother on the phone, or think better, but it was like I had gone to the edges of myself, and what was in the centre was anyone’s guess. Nothing, that is one answer. Or nothing much.

And I was busy, it seemed like I was always on a plane. There were times my toiletries never made it out of their see-through plastic bag.

Conor’s mother arrived for the weekend; she sat there eating breakfast and floated the opinion that two pillowcases were more hygienic, she always thought, than just one.

‘Sleep,’ she said. ‘It’s a third of your life.’ And I didn’t throw her out or shout at her that the son she reared didn’t know you could change sheets, he thought they came with the bed.

‘You know,’ I said. ‘That makes a lot of sense.’

Mrs Shiels had five children: two in Youghal, and two breeding mightily in Dundrum and Bondi. A capable, glamorous woman, she was all set to use us for her Dublin shopping base – she knew it and I knew it. For Christmas, I got her some vouchers for a posh hotel.

‘The Merrion!’ she said. ‘Lovely.’

This was a Christmas I could have been with my own mother, but which I spent instead in the middle of a scrummage down in Youghal, with forty people whose names I did not know, each and every one of whom hated Dubliners (don’t tell me otherwise) for the fact that they weren’t from fucking Youghal.

Christ.

I can’t believe I am free of all that. I just can’t believe it. That all you have to do is sleep with somebody and get caught and you never have to see your in-laws again. Ever. Pfffft! Gone. It’s the nearest thing to magic I have yet found.

But the pill is important for another reason too, I suppose, because if it hadn’t been for the pill, I might not have slept with Seán that time in Montreux. Which was – and this is a peculiar thing to say – the only time it did not matter. Apart from anything else, there was a lot of, I think, Alsace Riesling involved.

It happened at a conference. Of course. A week of management-speak on a Swiss lake with flow charts and fondue, and a little trip on a wooden boat, with a mixed gang of semi-state and private sector, a few from Galway, most Dublin-based, and drinking on the last couple of nights, until 4 a.m. Most of them, I might also mention, were men.

The title of the week was ‘Beyond the EU’. I was there to talk ‘International Internet Strategy’ – delighted to get the invite, which was a step up for me. The hotel was a confection in cream and red velvet, with gilt everywhere and stains on the carpets that might have been a hundred years old. And there on the first morning, under the heading ‘The Culture of Money’ was the name ‘Seán Vallely’.

‘You made it,’ he said. He looked better than I remembered. Maybe it was the fact that he was dressed.

‘I wondered who it was,’ I said.

‘Ah, wheels within wheels,’ he said.

We shook hands.

His palm felt old, I thought, but most palms do.

I checked him out giving a seminar that first morning: I glanced in through the open door and saw him eating the room. His open jacket flapped behind him, as he turned to one corner and then the other. He worked the air in front of his chest; he cupped the thought, and held it out, and let it go.

‘Why,’ he said, ‘do you dislike rich people?’

It was quite a spiel.

‘You. What’s your name? Billy. OK, Billy. Do you like rich people?’

‘I’m not bothered.’

‘You take it personally, don’t you? The house, the car, the holidays in the sun. You take it personally, because you’re Irish. If you were American, you’d let them have it. Because, you know, these people are not connected to you. They bought their nice house and your name didn’t even come up. They went to the Bahamas and they didn’t even forget to invite you.’

There were two speakers each morning, and people were split into groups for workshops during the afternoons. I thought Seán was sleeping with the ‘Global Tax’ woman, or that he had slept with her. But, I learned later, they just didn’t like each other, or so he said.

Meanwhile there were the chocolate tastings and shopping opportunities and much rubbish to talk. The wilder ones, myself included, formed a kind of gang, with large amounts of drinking to get through. There were two Northern Irish guys ‘from either side of the divide’ whose catchphrase became, ‘just so long as nobody gets shot’. There was a really nice gay guy who played torch songs at the piano in the bar and the Global Tax woman, who drove me up the wall by stopping the conversation, many times, in order to make her point yet more clear. By Wednesday night it was a drinking competition, and I had her knocked out by the fourth round. On Thursday I ended up in one of the Northerners’ rooms, polishing off the mini-bar with the other Northern guy and Seán; the queen of international tax returns passed out on the second bed. On the last night – Friday – Seán met me on my way back from the ladies, and he turned to gather me up, saying, ‘Come here. I have something to show you.’ At least I think that is what he said. I may not remember the words exactly, but I remember his hand on the small of my back, and I remember knowing what we were about to do. It seemed that choice had nothing to do with it, or that I had chosen a long time ago. Not him, necessarily, but this; waiting for the lift in sudden silence with a man who did not even bother to court me. Or had that happened already? Maybe he would court me later. Things, clearly, did not happen in a particular order anymore: first this, and then that. First a kiss, and then bed. Maybe it was the drink, but my sense of time was undone, as idly as a set of shoelaces, that you do not notice until you look down.

In the lift we made small-talk. Don’t ask me what about.

A part of me said that there would be other people in his room, like the previous night’s fun – that we were still a happy bunch of people who were trying to move beyond the EU – another part surely hoped that there wouldn’t be. But there is little point in agonising over something so simple. We went upstairs to have sex. And it seemed like a great idea at the time. I was, besides, so drunk, I only remember it in patches.

We had an amazing session outside the room, I do remember that; as I resisted going in the door and he turned back to persuade me. My memory skips the beginning of it, like a needle in an old record, so I have lost the moment of decision, the leaning in. But I remember how he slayed me with kisses, how, when I struggled to open my eyes, I was surprised to find the hotel corridor still there; the dizzy carpet, the receding line of identical doors, and the wallpaper, in vertical stripes of scarlet flock. As I continued to leave and he continued to keep me, the kiss was a sweet argument and pursuit, so tranced and articulate, his left hand on my arm, the other holding his plastic door key, not yet slipped home.

It was the luxury of the kiss that held me, the pure pointless, greedy delight. Even when the lock whirred and the door clicked open, we carried on, and it was only the sound of people coming out of the lift that sent us scurrying inside, laughing in the darkness.

After the kiss – the five-minute, ten-minute, two-hour kiss – the actual sex was a bit too actual, if you know what I mean. There is another blank when I try to recall how we got from the door to the bed, after which, much enthusiastic bouncing and writhing, despite the fact that I couldn’t really feel much, I don’t think, and Seán (who is now the love of my life – my goodness, how it betrays him to say this), took about half an hour to come.

At the time, I thought it was the drink that slowed him down. But Seán only ever pretends to drink. Now I know him better; that inward look as he tries to catch his pleasure, the thing that puts him off his stroke, I realise, is age. Or the fear of age.

As if I cared about his age.

Or perhaps this is not how it was in Montreux. I might be imposing the lover I know now on the memory of the man I slept with then. He might have been, that first time, thrilling and keen, pitch perfect; the impulse inseparable from the action. Maybe that is what first times are for.

All I know is that one night, on the shores of Lake Geneva, in a small room among other small rooms, in the middle of Seán’s long effort, I turned my head to see his keys and loose change on the bedside locker; beyond them the open door of the bathroom where the fan still droned, and I remembered who I was.

I don’t know if Seán was surprised how quickly I left afterwards, but he was practically asleep and did not detain me. The last thing I remember was the door at my back and the long corridor stretching out on either side of me. I think I got lost. I have some idea that I tried – quite hard – to get into my room, but it was on the wrong floor: the numbers had confused me. I lurched through the carpeted corridors and got into lifts and out again, and I met no one, or maybe just one couple, who said nothing but stood in by the wall as I passed. But even this is not clear. Some shutter came down, and it did not rise until I woke the next day, safe in my own bed, half-undressed, with all the lights ablaze.

It maddened me. I did not feel guilty, exactly, but I did feel a little mad, I think. I couldn’t face the breakfast room, for a start. I put my sunglasses on and headed to a local patisserie, then I took my hangover to the railway station, and I got the first train out of there, a neat, old-fashioned little thing, with bench seats, which went a surprising distance up into the mountains, through tunnels and hidden passes, until it emerged into high meadow lands strewn with Alpine flowers and grazed by chocolate-bar cows with bells around their beautiful, pendulous, mauve necks. The few scattered houses had heart-shapes cut out of their wooden balconies, and white quilts thrown over the rails to air in the sun. And it was all so wonderful and silly, I decided to get out at Gstaad, which turned out to be a village of a few streets, with twee little shops, all with names like Rolex or Cartier. There was a Gucci shop and a Benetton shop and a delicatessen full of astonishing cheese. I walked the entire village, and there wasn’t a single place where you could buy cornflakes, or muesli, or even toilet paper and I wondered, did the rich people get these things flown in? Perhaps they did not need them: they had moved beyond.

My adultery – I didn’t know what else to call it – lingered in my bones; a slight ache as I walked, the occasional, disturbing trace of must. I had showered that morning, but I realised I would have to go back and clean up again, and the thought made me laugh out loud. It was a vaguely horrified laugh, but still. I did not feel guilty, that afternoon in Gstaad, I felt suicidal. Or the flip side of suicidal: I felt like I had killed my life, and no one was dead. On the contrary, we were all twice as alive.

I also felt, as I went to pack and face the dreaded Seán,that the whole business was a little disappointing, let’s face it – as seismic moral shifts go. In the foyer, and on the minibus to the airport, he ignored me so strenuously I felt like writing him a note. ‘What makes you think I might care?’ It was hardly worth mentioning; not to Seán and certainly not to Conor. And though this seems hard to believe, I returned to my Dublin life as though nothing had happened; as though the lake, the mountains, the whole of Switzerland, was a lie someone had told, to keep the rest of the world amused.

Toora Loora Loora

HINDSIGHT IS A wonderful thing. With hindsight it was clear there was something wrong with Joan long before my hotel encounter, that she hadn’t been entirely right for some time. But there were so many reasons we could not see it, not least of which was that she did not want us to.

Our mother was a great beauty, in her day. Appearances were important to her. And because she was, in a way, too beautiful, she worked hard to keep the show on the road. She loved to be normal; to chat and to charm. When she was ‘on’, she lit up the room.

I used to be jealous of those strangers, who looked at my mother and loved her for half an hour at a time. Sometimes, it seemed as though we only got the downside: the despair in front of the open wardrobe door, the loneliness when there was no one there to admire. There were times, on the phone, when you could hear the drag in her voice; a loss of belief, as though there might be no one listening on the other end of the line.

I didn’t get my mother’s looks, but I got some of that thing she had, the lift as you walk into a crowded room. I got some of her chat too, her addiction to the phone. And her avoidance of the phone. There were days she let it ring out, for reasons too painful and absurd to explain. It always worked both ways for Joan. Her pleasures were too deep; she had to manage them constantly. So she always looked ‘a fright’ or ‘fine’, which is to say, perfect. And she was tough as hell on the rest of the world. Ruthless. What worked, what didn’t – hundreds of rules about foundation, lipstick, about whether to conceal or reveal: arms over forty, shoulders over fifty, the lines on your neck. Illness was not something she allowed herself. It was so unattractive. And terribly hard on the skin.

My mother lived forever, every time you looked at her, and she smoked like Hedy Lamarr. She was the last smoker in Dublin. She snuck out into the garden to do it, so her grandchildren would not cry.

She was at it again, at Megan’s next birthday in Enniskerry. You would look around and find her gone, then just as mysteriously back again. Megan was nine, so this party was a much more civilised affair, with friends from school and parents who dropped them at the kerb. It was amazing how much had changed. Out the back, the rowan tree was a sturdy, tall thing, and the fence had been rebuilt, to hide the new houses that now blocked their little slice of view. Shay threatened to arrive home and then did not, so it was just myself and Fiona and our mother, and it seemed a long time since we had played at being couples around Fiona’s witty formica table, with the men outside, checking the sky for rain. There was no wine. We wandered about, cooking ready-made lasagne and drinking tea, while a tight little herd of nine-year-old girls thundered about the house, trailed by one forlorn little brother.

Joan complained of being tired, took off her too-tight shoes, and fell asleep in an armchair. When she woke, she was agitated by the fact she had nodded off.

‘Did I say anything?’ then laughed at herself for her consternation.

She was right not to trust us. I had taken a photo of her, a secret one, ‘My mother, asleep’. I could not help myself.

I was worried sometimes by the fact that she was on her own in Terenure, we all were – her battalions of friends and lost causes notwithstanding – but our mother did not look lonely in her sleep, even though she was, in a way, ‘alone’. She looked like someone who is loved.

I might be biased. The picture looms on my screensaver and then cross fades but it is never as lovely as I remember her, that day. The older you get the less you dream they say but, absent as she was and utterly still, my mother looked, by some indistinguishable sweetness, very much alive.

And young. She was fifty-nine years old.

When she woke up, all fussed, we laughed and told her she had snored. Then Jack was sent upstairs for saying, ‘Granny farted in her sleep. Granny farted.’

‘You always have to push it,’ shouted Fiona at his busy little legs as they disappeared above her, while Joan, who was genuinely shocked as well as amused, said, ‘It’s only harmless. Would you leave the child.’

I had a mild interest in Evie that day – seeing as I had slept with her father, don’t you know – but I couldn’t figure out which one she was. The girls Megan had invited were ridiculously large and hard to fathom. They wore oversized party dresses, or funky tops; two at least were in tracksuit bottoms – you couldn’t even tell who they thought they were. These people had, besides, no interest in us, they had each other to love; the way they looked at each other was so passionate and shy.

I set out the plates with the real linen napkins that Fiona handed me, and the real glasses and metal cutlery. I put a jug of sparkling water on the table and another of orange juice; all of which I thought silly. These were big, uncomfortable children, not grown-ups – throw a bag of tortilla chips at them, I thought, and retire.

‘Who wants lasagne?’

One girl, a tall, soft creature called Saoirse, raised her hand. She was stuffed into a pink satin dress that a five-year-old might choose, and under her arm was a haze of golden-red hair.

I glanced at Fiona. She rolled her eyes in dread.

These children weren’t growing, so much as being replaced.

‘Come and eat!’

It troubled me quite a bit, actually – the hair. It looked beautiful, when it should have been disgusting. And it was twice as disgusting as it should have been, when you looked up from it to the big pudding-face of the child. I should get out more, I thought – this can not be as strange as I think it is. And I also thought, Something has gone wrong.

Then I saw Evie. She revealed herself with a flash of her father’s too-beautiful eyes. It happened when she looked straight at me, like the opening of a hidden door. She was still a bit puppyish around the chest, but the fat was mostly gone. And something else had changed – I mean, apart from everything, because everything had changed – but something essential had shifted. She looked happy. Or not happy so much as connected, for once. Not so scared.

It made me uneasy, the idea that she used to be afraid. I wondered what kind of man I had slept with – how many months ago now? – and would he arrive in through the door. Three months. It was three months since Montreux and I never wanted to lay eyes on Seán Vallely again. I wasn’t just mortified, I was actually averse; the thought of speaking to him was slightly soiling, like putting on used clothes after you’ve had a shower.

Even so, I was caught by his daughter. I watched her, as though she might hold some key to this man, whose eyes seemed to make more sense on her face than they did on his own; the long black lashes just the same, the same sea-grey with a pale sunburst around the pupil, of white or gold.

I had nothing to say to her.

‘Would you like some juice?’ I asked, as the girls gathered round the table for lasagne and coleslaw – not a pink marshmallow in sight.

‘Yes please.’

‘Oh look at that great hair,’ I touched her black curls, which pleased her. ‘Do you dry it yourself?’

She was moist with sweat. They all were.

‘Sometimes,’ she said.

‘Or your Mum?’

‘If I got straightener, it would be all the way down my back.’

‘Well,’ I said. By which I meant, ‘Time enough.’

‘Sometimes my Dad does it,’ she said. But this was too intimate for me, and I had to move away.

After the cake and candles, I took out my iPod and found myself in the middle of a sudden clamour of tweenies, demanding Justin Timberlake.

‘Hang on,’ I said, and obliged the white bud of the earpiece into Evie’s ear. As soon as the music came through, they ran off, grabbing for the other earpiece, switching tracks, turning the dial.

‘Hey hey hey!’ said Fiona, before being diverted by the sound of the doorbell.

The party was over. I hung back while the parents came and, one after another, the children were called away. In the middle of the confusion, the sound of his voice in the hall brought an unexpected pang, and I turned to pick up wrapping paper at the far end of the room.

‘Evie!’

He had arrived in the doorway. I was starting to run out of things to clear off the floor when I sensed Evie standing beside me – a little too close, the way children do.

‘Just give it back,’ said Seán’s voice, though this was what she was already doing; wrapping the wires around the iPod, as she held it out towards me.

‘Thank you, Gina,’ she said.

Gina, no less.

‘You’re welcome,’ I said.

‘Good girl.’

Seán’s voice was so cold, it was clear what he really wanted to say. He wanted to say, ‘Please step away from my child,’ and this was very unfair. It was so unfair, that I turned and looked straight at him.

‘Oh, hello,’ I said.

He looked just like himself.

‘Come on,’ he said, ushering Evie through the doorway. The rudeness was astonishing. But he faltered and turned back for a moment, and the look he gave me then was so mute, so full of things I could not understand, that I almost forgave him.

I tried to keep it at bay, and failed. When the last small guest was gone and the rubbish bag full of packaging and uneaten lasagne the thought of him – the fact of him – happened in my chest, like a distant disaster. Something snapped or was broken. And I did not know how bad the damage was.

My hands, as they picked up the heavy jug Fiona used for juice, remembered the solid span of his waist under them that night in Montreux. What was it he had said again? ‘You have lovely skin.’ It seemed a bit all-purpose, at the time. ‘So soft.’ Why did men need to persuade themselves? Why did they have to have you, and make you up at the same time?

This, I asked myself, rather foolishly, while holding the thick glass jug in Fiona’s open-plan kitchen in Enniskerry, standing on her new limestone floor (the old terracotta floor was ‘all wrong’ apparently). I thought about the difference between one man and another when you have your eyes closed. And I said to myself that the difference was enormous. There was no difference greater than the difference between two men when you have your eyes closed. And in my head I dropped the jug and was devastated by its fall. Fiona was loading the dishwasher. Joan was taking the plates out again and rinsing them under the tap. Megan and Jack had disappeared. I could feel it, still there under my hands: thick blown glass with swirls, in the base, of cobalt blue. Such a beautiful jug. And then I let it go.

She had fits, apparently. This is what Fiona told me when she had cleared the last shards of glass, not just with a brush but also with the Hoover, because she didn’t care about the jug so much as the danger to her children’s bare feet. Evie, she said, had fits. Fiona had never actually seen it happen, though for a few years they were all on red alert. The child’s mother was driven frantic; had tried everything, from consultants to – whatever – homeopathic magnets.

‘She looked all right to me,’ I said.

‘No, she’s fine now,’ said Fiona. ‘I think she’s fine.’

‘She’s a funny little person,’ I said.

‘Is she? I don’t know. I mean, everyone was so worried about her. But I don’t know.’

‘God. Poor Seán,’ I said.

She gave me a look, exaggeratedly blank.

‘Up to a point,’ she said.

I wanted to know what she meant by that, but she had already turned away.

I watched Megan later, sprawled on the sofa, so healthy and large. Our mother was freshening up. Jack was stuck into his Nintendo. I was waiting to leave. We were all waiting, perhaps, for Shay to come home. The evening had come adrift.

‘So birthday girl,’ said Fiona, sitting down and hugging her daughter to her. ‘How does it feel to be nine?’

‘Good,’ said Megan.

We sat and pretended to watch the telly. Our mother spends such a long time in the bathroom, it used to make us anxious; wondering what she was up to in there, and when she would emerge. Meanwhile, Megan brushed her own mother’s hair back from her face, admired an earring, gave it a tug.

‘Careful.’

And the wrangle began: Megan stretching her mother’s lips into a painful smile, pulling her eyelids back into slits, while Fiona just looked at her and refused to be annoyed. They had always been like this, locked in something that wasn’t exactly love, and not quite war.

‘Leave your mother alone, Megan,’ I said. ‘You’re nine, now.’

And Fiona said, ‘Hah!’

‘Only another twenty years to go,’ said Joan. She was standing behind us in her summer trench coat and silk scarf, her mirror work done – everything the same as before, except that tiny, crucial bit better. The usual miracle.

She looked at me.

‘Will we go?’

I may be getting things in the wrong order here.

I was not yet in love with Seán. Though, at any of those moments, I might have fallen in love with him. Any of them. The first moment in the garden, by the fence that wasn’t there. The time he sat in the fold-up chair on the caravan site in Brittas Bay, or went to sit, and everything slowed to a standstill except us two. I could have fallen in love with him in a hotel corridor in Switzerland, when the lock whirred and he stayed to kiss me instead of obliging me through the door.

But I did not love him. I was slightly repulsed by him, in fact. I mean I had already slept with this man, what else was there to be done with him?

If you asked me now, of course, I would say I was crazy about him from that first glance, I was in love with his hands as I watched them move in Montreux, I was in love with some other thing from the time he ushered Evie away from me and turned back in the hall – his particular sadness, whatever it might be. So don’t ask me when this happened, or that happened. Before or after seems beside the point. As far as I am concerned they were happening all along.

And there are things I have forgotten to mention – the beauty of the children on the beach in Brittas that day seems important now, in a way I did not realise then. Perhaps it is the fact that Evie was not well, and I did not know it, but the beauty of the children matters in some way I do not understand.

Still, I can’t be too bothered here, with chronology. The idea that if you tell it, one thing after another, then everything will make sense.

It doesn’t make sense.

My mother had that old-fashioned thing, an easy death. But not yet.

And I was in love with Seán, but not as far as I knew. Not yet.

I was leaving my husband, though I might have already left him. We might have never been together – all those times, when we thought we were. When he turned and smiled at me, at the top of the aisle in Terenure church. When he dived below me, so deep you could see the water between us thickening to green.

There are dates I can be sure of, certainly, but they are not the important ones. I can’t remember the day – the hour – when Joan’s ‘poor form’ became ‘depression’, for example, or when the depression turned into something physical and harder to name. There must have been a moment, or an accumulation of moments, when we stopped listening to the words she said, and started listening to the way she said them. There must have been a day when we stopped listening to her at all – one single split second, when she changed from being our mother, Oh Joan, would you ever… and turned into the harmless object of our concern.

‘How are you, darling? All right?’

I was busy of course – I mean, we were all busy – but if I had recognised that moment then things might have been different. If I had been able to see her, instead of being surrounded by her, my beautiful mother, then she might still be alive.

There are some things I am sure of.

What happened, I mean the verifiable truth, reconstructible through emails here on my computer, calendar entries, phone calls made and received, was that, yes, undoubtedly, a few weeks after Megan’s party, I recommended Seán, and Seán’s consultancy, when we wanted to restructure in Dublin before setting up in Poland. I did it without hesitation; he was, undoubtedly the best person for the job.

All that is certain.

Slightly less certain is the fact that Conor and I had, for a while, perhaps around this time, excessive and unfriendly sex, in our sanctioned – blessed even – marriage bed.

But when it comes to Conor, I really can’t go into it. I mean I can’t even be bothered to remember what happened when; I am not going to map our decline. There is nothing more sordid, if you ask me, than the details.

Was the sex bad then, or was it just bad after I had started sleeping with Seán?

Bad is not the word for it.

The sex was, around this time, a little too interesting, even for me. But it was also beside the point – and maybe this is the interesting thing, that, in a story that is supposed to be about sleeping with one man or another, our bodies did not always play the game in the expected way.

But it is probably true that, around this time, we were actively thinking, or pretending to think, about starting a baby. One night, after a friend’s wedding in Galway and much dancing, when I had forgotten to pack the pill and Conor said, ‘What the hell.’

I can’t remember what it was like exactly, but I do remember that I did not like it. Apart from anything else, the sex was terrible, it was not like sex at all.

‘He’s fucking my life,’ I kept thinking. ‘He’s fucking my entire life.’

In These Shoes?

RATHLIN COMMUNICATIONS PUTS European companies on the English-language web. That’s what we do. But we make it look like fun.

Our office is all stripped brickwork with industrial skylights, and there is a discreet feel to the way the space is managed, an illusion of privacy which, as anyone who works in open-plan will know, just makes it worse – the paranoia, I mean. The best thing about the place is the plants contract, which is held by the boss’s otherwise challenged daughter. She comes in each morning to do the foliage, which is everywhere and fabulous, from the bougainvillaea going up the ironwork to the ivy cladding the bathroom walls. The Danes who did the refurbishment put in irrigation the way you might do the wiring so the place is a thicket, and though I am cynical about these things (the idea that a few plants make us more ‘green’) I even voted for canaries, at some meeting, only to be outvoted on the grounds of canary shit.

It is the kind of place where the lift is big enough to bring your bike upstairs, and the coffee is all fair trade. There is an amount of sex in the air, I suppose, but we’re not that pushed. We’re all pretty young. We are big on ideas: the guys who have a bed in their office are sad techie bastards who really do fold them out for a sleep.

He was sitting in the meeting room, that first morning. I saw him through the glass wall before he saw me and I couldn’t think what was wrong with him. He was using a fountain pen – but that was all right, wasn’t it? – his BlackBerry was neatly displayed on the table beside him. The suit was maybe a bit sharp, his tie a bit restrained – but I mean, he’s a consultant, he is supposed to wear a suit. Maybe it was his hair, which seemed straighter than before, and flopped forward. Had he dyed it? There was, at least, an amount of gel involved. He looked up from under this youthful mop as I walked in and he said, ‘Hello, you.’

‘Hi.’

He had a pair of Ray-Bans hooked on to the idle forefinger of his left hand.

‘You got here,’ I said.

He let the glasses swing.

‘So it would appear.’

He seemed so sure we would sleep together that I decided against it on the spot, or wished, at least, for darkness to take it away, this unexpected weakness he had for props.

I sat down, smiled neatly, and said, ‘So, how would you like to be introduced?’

The room filled and the meeting went ahead and it was all very much as you might expect. There was the usual blather from Frank, who was being edged out to blather elsewhere. This was followed by a little posturing from my young colleagues, David and Fiachra, who were maddened by the potential gap. The boss was excited; you could tell he was excited because he seemed so bored. And I – well, I, as ever, smiled, facilitated, and kept clear, because I was the girl who would win in the end, despite the fact that girls so rarely do.

Seán looked from one speaker to the next, asked some questions, and kept his opinions to himself. This surprised me a little. I had expected more of the flamboyance we saw at the whiteboard in Montreux, but Seán at work – I have always loved Seán at work – used no more energy than was needful. It reminded me a little of Evie, this ability he had to be simple, in the middle of much fuss. So I managed to forget the hair gel and the horrible architect’s watch, and I just looked at him thinking, for a while; his grey eyes moving from one person to the next. And – it might have been a work thing, this sensible, almost offhand way we had of speaking about, let’s face it, a lot of money; it might have been the fact that he was sitting in the place where I spend most of my waking hours; but it was very intimate and slightly dreamlike to see him there – like having a movie star in your kitchen, drinking tea – and I really wanted to fuck him, then. There was, for the first time, no other word for it. I wanted to make him real. A man I would cross the street to avoid at nine o’clock – by nine twenty-five I wanted to fuck him until he wept. My legs trembled with it. My voice floated out of my mouth when I opened it to speak.

The glass wall of the meeting room was huge and suddenly too transparent, I felt so exposed.

Not that things always go the way you might expect. Six months later Frank – who still does nothing but blather – was, for reasons I can’t quite fathom, running much of the show; it was David who had been edged out, to do his posturing elsewhere. Fiachra, meanwhile, had got himself a new baby, an ecstatic look in his eye and a tendency to fall asleep while sitting on the toilet, much to the delight of the entire company who tiptoed in, girls included, to listen to the sound of his snoring on the other side of the cubicle door. I was still cheerful and useful and altogether indispensable, and still going nowhere in Rathlin Communications, despite the fact I had slept with the management consultant – something neither of us found particularly relevant: I mean, no one would ever accuse Seán of securing the contract with his dick. Six months later, I was talking to the bank about going out on my own and the bank was licking me slowly all over – as were, now that I pause to think of it, both Seán Vallely and Conor Shiels. I am not an extraordinary woman but this was my life that year, and yes, it felt astonishing. It also felt like a mess. The opposite of a nervous breakdown, whatever you might call that.

But I am getting ahead of myself here.

The office game was another game for us to play, after the suburban couples game, and before the game of hotel assignations and fabulous, illicit lust, and neither of us thought there might come a moment when all the games would stop.

It was a lot of fun.

They say consultants always recommend that you lose thirty per cent – that this is what they are actually hired to say – so when Seán was finished his report, we might be moved up, or out. People found it exciting when he walked out of the lift. You knew he was there. I followed his presence through the glades of rubber plant and bamboo, listened to the click of his briefcase opening two desks down and waited for his soft voice on the phone. He might have just put his head around my partition of fern, but his courtship was close and elaborate. Every time we spoke, it was as though we were rehearsing the lie.

‘Is that you?’ he might say, when I picked up.

‘Yes.’

I had never had an affair before. I did not realise how sexy it was to be clandestine. The secret was everything.

‘Are you at your desk?’

‘What do you think?’

I could hear him move and murmur a few metres away, but his real words were close, almost warm in my ear.

‘Busy?’

‘I am now…’

‘What are you doing?

‘Well, I’m talking to you.’

The intimacy between us was so formal, so completely erotic.

‘I thought we might do that better over lunch.’

‘Lovely.’

Mind you, there was a certain key-jangling element to it, too; the idea that he might be reaching rather ardently into his pocket to check for spare change. The whole thing played surprisingly close to farce. I’m not sure how many people around us knew what was going on – at a guess, they all did, and they were all hugely amused by it. But we were pretty amused too – I mean, the rutting aside, the fierce and fleeting idea of it that ran across our minds (I must confess) from time to time – we also found it slightly hilarious; the thought that we might, for once, just get away with it. And this is how we overcame our doubts – because we both had major doubts. When it came to the point, some weeks later, of taking each other’s clothes off, we didn’t weep, or declare undying love, we didn’t savage each other up against some filing cabinet, we just laughed – well why not? We laughed when we kissed and we laughed at every button and reluctant zip, and it was all hunger and recognition and delight.

Meanwhile, I saw him at the coffee maker and the beauty of his tie did not offend me. I even got to like his fountain pen. I was with him all the time. He knew I was there – I was getting inside his skin. The tap of his hand on the side of his thigh. The way he leaned back in the chair and rubbed his nipple, for comfort or reward; he saw me noticing this, and stopped.

Oh, the game. The game.

The little surges of irritation, of contempt: from him, from me. Is this what you want?

If Seán were less of a tactical person, the thing might have gone sour before we’d even begun, but he knew his pleasures – more than I did, it has to be said. He knew when to put the phone down. When to go home. When to turn away.

It is no wonder I became obsessed.

We had lunch every Friday for five weeks; it was our de-brief. We went to La Stampa – fancy but not too fancy – and talked business. He was good, as I keep saying, at his job. He had no interest in complication. He looked at the company carefully, trying to split the rock with just one tap. And after business, came charm. He told a story, he told another. Really funny stories. He ordered dessert wine. He teased me about the ‘posh’ school I went to, about the height of my heels, he made me fight and flirt. I thought, by week three, that there was something wrong with my blood pressure, that I might actually faint or die.

I took to walking home in the evening – or walking somewhere. I swerved from the entrance of the pub on a Friday, because he was not there. I veered from the pedestrian light that was against me, crossed streets because they were empty of traffic, and turned different corners – not so much avoiding home as averse to any particular destination. One night, I ended up on the rim of Dublin Bay. It was October by then; dark and cold. There was a container ship lodged on the horizon, impossibly large and disproportionate. The endless strand gave way in the darkness to a sea so shallow you would think the thing was stuck to the sea floor. But the lights floated in front of me. The ship was moving, or it must have been moving. I could not tell, in the darkness, which way.

It was also beautiful, this game of not touching: that is the thing I am afraid to say about myself and Seán – how beautiful it was, how exquisite the distance we kept between us. And when I saw him one afternoon standing by the printer, lost in thought, with the light falling over his shoulders, it was as though the same light had jabbed me in the chest. I hadn’t expected to find him there. He was wearing grey and his hair was grey: the plants beside him were dark green and the floor of the corridor beyond was teal blue. These are the details and they sound so foolish: a middle-aged man in an office with a file in his hand – I mean to say. And there was no solace in his absence, either. When he was gone, I thought about nothing else: Seán in my sister’s garden, Seán in Brittas, Seán in Switzerland. I wondered where he was this minute, and what he might be doing. I thought about a future together and wiped the thought, fifty, sixty, a hundred times a day. It was all such an agitation. But somewhere in the gaps – in the certainty of seeing him after the lift doors opened, or in the shock of his voice nearby – a stillness hit, a kind of perfection. It was very beautiful, this desire that opened inside me, and then opened again. And this is what puts me beyond regret: the sweetness of my want for Seán Vallely, the sense of something unutterable at the heart of it. I felt – I still feel – that if we kissed again, we might never stop.

I lost half a stone.

Which was brilliant. I bounced into work and I ran up the stairs, too impatient for the lift. And I very seldom placed my forehead against a convenient wall, and pushed.

It is surprising how close you can get to someone, by staying very still.

There are two things I noticed, and I don’t know if they are different or connected. First of all, in the office, there was this thing he did if I knew something he didn’t, or if I had been somewhere he had yet to go – that scuba-diving holiday in Australia, for example, or my ease with languages, which was in such contrast to his own few bits of French – he managed very quickly to be proud of these achievements, to boast about them on my behalf. And this irritated me: he made it sound like he was responsible for my being so generally clever and gung ho. So it was as if I did the Great Barrier Reef and he got the credit. Or at the very least that we were in the whole Reef business together. And of course we were. I mean, who doesn’t like Australia? By the time he had finished, the whole damn continent seemed to belong to him. And all this because he had never actually been there, and I had.

You had to admire it, as a way of turning all things to the good.

‘Been there, done that,’ he might say. ‘Isn’t she great?’

But it didn’t make me feel great. I wanted to be free of it, this bag he kept putting me in. It got so I wanted to sleep with him – to love him even – just to be myself again, undescribed. But most of all, I wanted him not to be jealous of me in the first place. I mean, it was only a question of getting on a plane. This was before I heard about his childhood, of course, and long before I realised that he didn’t want this particular emotion fixed. He liked being jealous, it was his comfort and company – call it ambition; it was his protection from the night.

The other thing I noticed was that Seán doesn’t really like eating. I don’t mean he doesn’t like food, I mean he hates all the chewing and swallowing – I suppose there is much to dislike. Despite which, there was always huge restaurant palaver: the choice of table, the crack of the napkin, endless discussion about the wine, and a vague prissiness about pasta that was not home-made. The foreplay, you might say, went on forever. Then the food would arrive and he would wait. He might fold his hands together and finish his point, or make another point. Finally, he would take that ceremonial first bite, go Mmmm mmmm, and praise the dish: the toffee-ness of the cherry tomatoes, or some such. Then, a bit of ordinary eating – chomp chomp – until the moment I realised he had stopped and was looking at the food. He might attempt another forkful but lose heart before it entered his mouth. Then a bit more staring; a kind of altercation. Finally, he would stage some distraction, grab a last morsel, and push away the plate.

Then he would look up at my, still-chewing, mouth.

I was in love with this man – clearly I was in love, or at least obsessed; the rhythms of his appetite were something I took so personally. But God knows, I could eat for Ireland, so I always felt a bit lonely after our lunch dates; not just greedy, but also thwarted or rejected, as if the food was all my fault.

‘Wonderful,’ he would say. ‘Have you ever had it with pesto?’

I wondered what it would be like to live with that across the table from you, breakfast lunch and dinner. Did they all wait with their tongues hanging out, until he gave the nod? Did they stop when he stopped? Aileen, it seemed to me, was the kind of woman who would count the number of peas she put on your plate. All that containment.

I’m afraid Evie doesn’t eat ice-pops, do you, Evie?

Either they were a perfect match, I thought, or they hadn’t had sex in years. Once the idea came to me, it made enormous sense. This was why they were so neat and polite. This was the sadness in the look he gave me, when he turned back in Fiona’s hall.

But, though I lost seven – count ’em – pounds, living on love alone, I did not think about Aileen much in those office weeks. To be honest, I forgot that Aileen, or even Conor, might exist. When I came home, I was sometimes surprised to find him in the house. He seemed so large and so real.

Who are you?

Such is the delight of a long working day.

We made love properly for the first time, myself and Seán, early one evening, after we rolled back from our Friday lunch and rolled into a party for a guy who was taking a year out to be with his yacht. We managed to linger after everyone had gone, and the details of what corner we found and what we did; how we managed it, and who put what where, are nobody’s business but our own.

Secret Love

WHAT IS IT about wives? There is this thing they do – because I am not the only one this has happened to. I am not the only one who was invited in.

I picked up the phone one day before Christmas and I heard the person on the other end of the line say:

‘Oh hello, I am looking for Gina Moynihan.’

‘That’s me!’

‘Hi Gina, this is Aileen – you know, Seán Vallely’s wife?’

And I thought, She has found us out.

I remember every word of the conversation that followed; every bare syllable and polite inflection. I played it in my head for days afterwards, note perfect. I could sing it, like a song.

‘Oh, hi,’ I said. A little too fast. With a slight choke on the ‘Oh’. It might, if you were listening very closely, have sounded more like, ‘Go hi’. Aileen, however, did not miss a beat.

‘I got your number from Fiona, I hope you don’t mind. I wanted to invite you over, after Christmas. We have our New Year’s Day brunch, I don’t know if Fiona ever mentioned it, we just do a sort of brunch, and Seán does that consommé thing with vodka, for people who need a cure. What do you call them?’

It was the most words I had heard out of her in one go. It took me a second to realise she had stopped.

‘Bull Shots?’ My voice sounded strange. As well it might.

‘That’s the one. It’s from eleven thirty, though people wander in any time.’

She wasn’t giving me a chance to refuse, or indeed to accept. She said, ‘Seán would love to see you, and Donal of course.’

Donal?

‘Lovely,’ I said.

Maybe she meant Conor.

‘You know where we are – the one on the corner as you take the left up to Fiona’s.’

‘Yes, I think so,’ I said.

‘The rough grey wall?’

‘Rough’ that was nice. She did not say, ‘the old granite wall’, she was much too tactful for that.

Nor did she mention – why should she? – the night I had parked opposite that wall and looked up at her house for two hours, until, one by one, the lights went out. I don’t know why I did this. Fiona and Shay were in Mount Juliet for the weekend, so there was no risk of them passing by and recognising the car: that was certainly a factor. I wanted to be close to him, I suppose. I wanted to see the cube of light in which he sat. I also wanted to discover if they still slept, Aileen and Seán, in the same room. I let the car window down. The night air was completely still. Front window bright: front window dark. A baffled light from the back of the house, blocked by corners and half-open doors. Off. A different light turned on. A head rising and dipping, in silhouette, on what must be the landing – that middle window above the door. They have a house like a child’s drawing of a house; sweet and square.

No one puts the cat out.

By 1 a.m. I am no further on.

I am cold though, and so drained by the excitement of that head bobbing on the landing that I can hardly prise my fingers off the steering wheel to start the damn car.

But of course Aileen did not mention this on the phone. She didn’t say, ‘If you like the house so much you might as well knock at the door.’ She just said, very tactfully, ‘The rough grey wall,’ and I said, ‘Aha.’

I have a fluffy ended biro on my desk; a gift from my niece when she was five or six. It pokes out of my pen holder; a ballerina in a froth of blue feathers, and I stroke my face with her when I am on the phone sometimes, while the feathers twitch and waft about in the breeze of my breath. Or I look at her face, which is always smiling.

‘I think I know it,’ I said. ‘New Year’s Day?’

‘You will come. Brilliant,’ said Aileen. ‘I hope so anyway. Bye!’

‘Bye,’ I said, but she was already gone.

Aileen as socialite, ticking the calls off her list. She did not give me a chance to turn her down. Clever Aileen, no pressure, just a bit of fun. Competent Aileen. Aileen whose little fat sits in sad, middle-aged pouches about her boy’s body, who is too busy, God knows, to bother about such things, and what is there to be done, anyway, when you’re on the damn Crosstrainer three times a week. Busy with the house and with the garden. Busy with the shopping. And the cleaning. Busy with the child. Does she have a job? I think so, though I never asked, and it is certainly too late now, to pause while teasing the lobe of my lover’s ear to whisper, ‘So what does your wife do all day?’ into its red concavities.

She doesn’t know, I decide. If she knew, or even suspected, she would get Conor’s name right.

Or maybe she does know, and got it wrong for fun.

We had met, by the time of his wife’s weird social impulse, two more times. There was no doubt the first time, no hesitation. We agreed, smiling, to a Northside lunch and, as I made my way up O’Connell Street, I got a text from his phone that read:

‘The Gresham 328.’

That was all. No, ‘I need to see you,’ no, ‘I will wait for you there.’

There was nothing before the second assignation either; ten long days later in a hotel out by the airport. No rude talk, no photo enclosed of something untoward.

Just: ‘Clarion 29’.

And from me: ‘OK’.

We discussed, on each occasion, the decor; the pictures on the walls and the colour of the carpet: a hearty, natural brown in the Gresham and a strangely non-existent green in the airport hotel, where all the guests were on their way through. Seán had booked and paid each time – at a guess in cash. It was like we were born to it. No emails, no paper trail, just two, instantly deleted texts.

And inside this scaffolding we had erected of jaunty, fake arrangements and silence, after the bare number on my phone’s display, and the walk past reception where no one bothers to call my name, when the door has been found and knocked upon, the thoughtful champagne uncorked and, eyes averted, with a terrible small smile on both our lips, the carpet discussed, we had – I don’t know if ‘sex’ is the word for it, although it was also, quite definitely, sex – we did, or had, just what we wanted, and when that wasn’t enough, we pushed it farther, and had some more.

We didn’t talk much.

Silence made it that bit filthier, of course. And people do not speak, in a dream. Or if they speak, it is not in a real way. I think about how quiet it was in those two rooms as we made our way through the deliberate and surprising actions that brought us skin to skin. It was daylight. You could hear the Friday afternoon traffic and, at two o’clock, the clock chimes from the GPO. There wasn’t much kissing. Maybe this is why it all seemed so clear – too clear – why so few words were said.

But also, perhaps, because there was too much to say, and all of it wrong.

Or maybe I am being romantic, here. I mean, who knows what Seán was thinking, at that stage. He did say – I think I remember him saying – ‘Sssh.’

And, actually, that first time in the Gresham was a bit hurried and mishandled. Seán afterwards a little agitated, almost brusque. But the second time. The second assignation. Was perfect.

What was he like in bed? He was like himself. Seán is the same in bed as he is the rest of the time. The connection is easy to see, when you have made it once, but before you do, it is one of the great mysteries: What is he like?

This.

And this.

I watched him dress, in the airport hotel, and I stayed on after he left for his flight. I said I wanted a shower, but I did not take a shower. I got up and sat on the chair and looked at our after-image, his towel abandoned on the floor, the final print, on the wrinkled sheets, of the movements we had made. Then I pulled on my clothes and went out to the bar, where I sat in the secret hum of his scent and drank one single whiskey and watched, all about me, a mayhem of dragged suitcases and flights diverted and sad farewells.

‘We drove up from Donegal, the day,’ a woman said to me, with tears in her eyes, and a pint of lager in front of her. ‘She’s off in the morning,’ indicating a woman of great age and girth on the banquette beside her, with hair done up, like my country grandmother’s, in a thin, grey wrapover braid.

The old woman, whose clothes and teeth were all American, nodded to me mournfully, while across the bar, three big slabs of young-fellas checked me out, then turned their attention to the big-screen TV.

The bedroom, when I walked back to it, was truly empty. Even our ghosts were gone. Or perhaps there was something left – I tried to leave the door open but glanced back at the last moment and pulled it shut behind me instead.

I handed the key in at reception: four space-age consoles on stalks, each manned by an Eastern European with a crisp manner in a black suit. I chose the shortest queue and a blonde receptionist, with ‘Sveva’ on her name tag. I had plenty of time to read it – whatever the problem with the couple ahead of me was, by the time I got to her, we were old friends. She checked her console screen and said, ‘Yes, that’s all been taken care of,’ and gave me a smile, bright with indifference, and I thought – I wanted to ask her, suddenly – Where will it end?

Three days later, with her wonderful sense of timing, Aileen rang, like a woman arriving in a panic as the ship pulls away from the quay. She was too late. We had already embarked – isn’t that the word that people use? – on our affair.

Back in the office, the flirtation had died. I loved the blank look I gave him beside the coffee machine, the indifferent, ‘See you tomorrow,’ as I pulled my coat off its hook. This was the power our secret gave us. As far as the gossip was concerned, the trail had gone cold.

This must be the rule; that people are madly obvious before they get it together and pathetically obvious when it all stops – but when it is all happening, when the deal is done and they’re at it like knives, then they are as quiet as a government minister with an account in the Cayman Islands, and twice as good at helping old ladies across the street.

‘Hi Seán, sorry about the Poles. I’m still after them to get the numbers for you. They say Thursday. Is that all right?’

‘It’ll have to do.’

‘I’ll keep pushing,’ I say, desire like a kick of blood, that hits low down, then spreads all through me, delicious and alight. It is contained, held by the secret, my skin is the exact shape of it, because I am the secret, I am the money, and this makes me feel I could do anything.

Anything.

Except tell anyone, of course. Which means I can do nothing, in actual fact, in real life. Except be still and know.

‘Thursday,’ you say. ‘What’s that in Polish?’

‘Czwartek.’

‘Oooh. Nice.’

But the deal was not done after the first meeting in the Gresham Hotel. Nothing was certain, afterwards. If anything, he seemed disappointed – with himself, with me, with the inevitability of it all.

‘Give it five minutes,’ he said, when I tried to leave with him.

He placed his finger against my lips, rough and human, and then he was gone, leaving me to the blank walls and the digital display of the hotel clock, which refused to change. Five minutes. I stood by the window and saw him emerge on to the street below, bareheaded, hunched under the November drizzle.

That was it.

No arrangements, no hint of an arrangement.

Which might explain my little lapse outside his gate a week later, sitting in my car until after midnight, hanging on to the steering wheel. Because a week waiting for him to call is a very long time. You could go mad in a week.

You could go mad in an afternoon.

Our hands met, once. In bed. I remembered the shock. Our hands touched when we were otherwise naked and busy, and it was actually embarrassing – such was the charge of reality they held. I apologised, the way you might to a stranger you brush against in the street.

For a week, after the Gresham Hotel, I pulled his love towards me, sitting utterly still and thinking of nothing but the next split second, and then the next, when he would materialise, smiling, in front of me, or my phone would jump at his call.

But it did not jump. No matter how many split seconds I imagined, in how many long days, it just refused.

I did meet him sometimes, of course: I passed his desk, he passed mine. We discussed, on one occasion, the hidden calories in your average café latte. And then he moved on.

At home, I was cross with Conor all the time. How could he be with me all evening, eat Indian takeaway, watch ‘The Sopranos’, and not realise the turmoil I was in? If love was a kind of knowledge then he could not love me, because he hadn’t the faintest clue. It was a strange feeling. Some fundamental force had been removed from our love; like telling the world there was no such thing as gravity, after all. He did not know me. He did not know his own bed.

I turned from him at night or, maybe just once, suffered his attentions – for the misery of it, and the solace. I got up at 4 a.m., to eat cereal straight from the box, with spoonfuls of peanut butter on the side. I woke in the early morning and dressed and redressed; high heels, higher. Then I climbed down off the heels and put on my flats, and buttoned my blouse back up, and went to work. And, on Sunday night, eight days after I left that room in the Gresham Hotel, I found myself outside Seán’s gate in the darkness, hanging on to the steering wheel, making deals, casting spells.

On Monday, I bought him something.

The local vegetable shop is a little yuppie shed, open to the elements. In December it has boxes of Christmas satsumas, green figs, pomegranates woven about by white mesh in figures of eight. I chose a little bag of lychees, cold and bumpy to the touch. I ate one on the way back to the office, standing in a doorway and sheltering from the rain. I had never tasted them fresh, before. The skin was like bark; so thick you could hear it tear. Under it was the dark white of the fruit; smooth as a boiled egg and more slippy, and in the middle of this grey, scented flesh was a deep red pip, surrounded by its own pink stain.

We had been talking about China. Seán had said I should learn some Mandarin. He said he was in Shanghai – had I ever been to Shanghai? It was like the fucking wild west out there – and he nearly bought a Teach Yourself DVD for his daughter in the airport, though she was past that stage where they sort of sing their way into speech, that perfect stage, when you understand how Chinese got invented in the first place. He said you got on those roads, those eight-lane highways, completely empty, and you understood something about the future – that you could do it. Certainly, it was scary. But the future was also normal.

But no, I had never been to Shanghai. I put the little bag, still spotted with rain, on his desk. Is this what I wanted to say? – what is under the skin, stays under the skin. That I was willing to keep things small.

‘Where would you book,’ he said to me later, ‘if you needed an airport hotel?’

‘The Clarion?’ I said.

And three days after I shut the door of that second hotel room behind me, and caught a minibus up to the airport terminal, and got in the taxi queue, and went home unwashed and beyond caring, I answered the phone and found myself talking to his wife, being invited by his wife; who wanted, presumably, a good look at me, now that it was all too late.

It made me more sad, than anything. I put down the phone, and waved my little feather ballerina about, in an admonishing way.

Now see what you have done.

Kiss Me, Honey, Honey, Kiss Me

MEANWHILE, THERE WAS the office party to get through. At 9 p.m., I am standing in the hallway of l’Gueuleton in Fade Street, saying goodbye to Fiachra who is trying to get out the door and go home to his pregnant wife. When he succeeds, Seán, who was assisting, finds the wall with his back and tips his head against the brickwork – once, twice – saying, ‘Fuck. Fuck.’ I say, ‘Where can we go?’ and he says, ‘We can’t go, we just can’t,’ but we are both quite drunk and end up dragging each other into the Drury Street car park for another endless kiss in some concrete corner that smells of petrol and the rain, with the sound of people wandering through the far levels and the squawk of found cars answering the remote.

And this, too, is another epic kiss, a wall-slider if there ever was one, I feel like I am clambering out of my own head, that the whole usual mess of myself has been put on the run by it. By the end, we are barely touching and everything is so clear and tender I find myself able to say:

‘When will I see you?’ and he says, ‘I don’t know. I’ll try. I don’t know.’

I walk through the Christmas city lights, not a taxi in sight and the town going crazy all around me, and I think how kissing is such an extravagance of nature. Like bird-song; heartfelt and lovely beyond any possible usefulness.

And then home: the bite of the key in the cold lock, the smell of the still air in the hallway, and the glow, upstairs, of Conor’s laptop. I go up there – drunk, surprised each time my foot meets a step. My husband is sitting in the armchair, his face blue in the light of the screen, and nothing moves except the sweep and play of his finger on the mouse-pad and his thumb as it clicks.

‘Have a good night?’

I had, of course, no intention of going to Aileen’s damn party. But it was a long Christmas in Youghal, pulling crackers, making small-talk, tippling through each day into a state of hard sobriety that kept you awake at night, angry as a stone. Conor’s family never drank in his father’s pub, though sometimes one or other of them would shrug his jacket on and jump in a minicab to take a turn behind the bar. They lived out the Cork road, with a stream in the garden, and they kept themselves separate from the ordinary drunks of the town with cases of French wine, which they got from their importer in Mullingar.

Conor’s mother wore cream trousers to match her ash-blonde hair, and fine gold jewellery on a permanent, light tan. His father was a big, physical man who liked to get a decent handful when he said hello; who thought a handful of daughter-in-law was, at his age, only fair. His wife might rebuke him, she might rap out a ‘Thank you, Francis!’ and everyone would laugh – I am not imagining this – at my discomfort, and the wonderful, horny badness of their old man.

They were a good couple, for all that. They had fun. The place was always busy with cousins and friends and various ‘associates’ who dropped in clutching bottles of Heidsieck or Rémy Martin and laughing about ‘coals to Newcastle’ as they were invited into the front room. It reminded me of my own father, the mock seriousness, ‘Oh take no notice of that fella!’, with its under-swell of self-importance and things unsaid; the way they were all in the know.

I am not sure what there was to know – my father either – I am not sure what they actually got, for all their air of being canny: the pub licence, maybe; planning permission for some bungalow. It hardly seemed worth all the nods and winks, and though it made me nostalgic for the men who tickled the back of my neck to produce fifty-pence pieces in the hall, Conor hated it – it made him literally itch in his clothes and try to shrug free.

What Conor liked about being home was the chance it gave him to be a boy again. He liked wrestling with his brothers and being a slob and leaving the kitchen work to the women, and it never ceased to astonish me. If this was regression then he was going back to some smaller self, one long ago discarded. So my rage at the sink was only partly to do with the drudgery of being a guest in that house, it was more to do with the loss of the man I knew to this loutish teenager who was a stranger, possibly, even to himself.

In bed, at night, I tried to claim him back – I was sleeping with Seán at the time, I know that, but these things don’t always work the way you think they should – and some night, before the drinking got too humourless and steady, I knocked on his shaved brown head to see if he was still in there. And he was. He opened his eyes in the darkness. Then he loved me up, down and crossways, as though I was a dream of his future come impossibly true, there among his old football posters and scattered CDs, as though the truth was better than he ever could have imagined.

We did not fight until New Year’s Eve. I can’t remember what triggered it. Money probably. We used to fight about money. His mother. I mean, tick the list. The way the washing machine was left to flood after he ‘installed’ it and pushed the button and went back to play Shattered Galaxy. The whole internet thing maddened me, by then – I can’t remember when it happened, when Conor at the cutting edge turned into Conor hanging out with a load of wasters online. I went so far as to check his browsing history once, but it was completely unremarkable – which just made it worse, somehow: at that stage I would have been happy to find porn.

But this could not have been the fight we had in Youghal because we were outside, far away, for once, from any screen. We were walking on the beach and the pain of the cold air on my lungs was like the pain of the view on my eyeballs, after four days of kitchen living and bad Christmas TV. It was being in the open that let it loose, I think. Even when I shouted, my voice seemed to happen in its distant echo, out where the sky grew low over the sea.

The beach was not completely empty – there was a woman walking down near the water and a man taking photographs, with a very ordinary camera, from the giant concrete steps that held the land safe from the waves. Lines of black posts marched down to the shoreline, small and smaller, overtaken, each in their turn, by the shifting sand. The new summer houses, a little toy village, tucked themselves under a distant headland. Conor said his father owned four of them, Did you ever see the like? But they weren’t too bad. They looked almost pretty under the blue winter sky, through air so still you thought it might crack. Even the waves – or is this just the way I remember it? – even the waves made no noise.

The fight was not, in fact, about money; nor was it about the internet, or the flooded kitchen, it wasn’t about the box – I remember saying this – of our lives, the colour of the box, or the smell of it, whether things worked in the box or not, but just the fact that we were in a damn box, when we might be free.

It was the last day of the year. I had decided to give up cigarettes in the morning. Maybe that was what it was all about: the yelp of the addict before it is all taken away. Or maybe it was because I was giving up for Seán, who found the smell of stale cigarettes so disgusting. So he too was looming as the day ticked on – this need I had to be right for Seán. And the anger that came with this was terrible; the pure annoyance of smashing my way out of one box, only to find myself in another one.

There is nothing like a bit of drama on an empty coastline, the shrill little screams and foot stampings entertainment for the gulls, tinnitus for the fishes. There is nothing so pointless and refreshing: a sad backside hitting a million affronted grains of sand, the faint ticking, in the rocks, of footsteps walking away.

Conor went back to the car and left me to it, to the skyline and the line where the sea lapped the shore, and I watched as the water sank into, or pulled away from the sand.

I was quite happy, then. I lit a cigarette and was happy for the length of it. Nothing moved, except the water, which was always moving. I thought the world might have stopped, except for the progress of ash down the cigarette’s white shaft.

It was New Year’s Eve – my least favourite day of any year – and I just didn’t think I could do it, this time. I thought midnight would kill me, every strike of the damn clock. I wanted to sit where I was, and let time pass elsewhere. How do you do that? You could rise up and let the earth roll beneath you. You could float on that still, cold sea. You could love one man and never stop kissing another.

Never stop.

When I climbed back into the car, I said to Conor I was going home, that I really wanted to see my mother tonight, and he could come too if he liked but I would prefer he didn’t.

‘No, really prefer,’ I said.

And that I just… wanted… some time… all right?

Conor, out of pity for this and for all sad human cliché, sighed and leaned forward to the ignition.

‘I’ll drive you up,’ he said.

‘No.’

‘Well you take the car then,’ he said. ‘I’ll catch a lift.’

And I didn’t say ‘Thanks,’ or ‘Sorry,’ or ‘It’s not you, it’s the damn cigarettes.’ I neither lied to him nor told the truth – that all this had nothing to do with him, nor even, in a way, with Seán Vallely.

I headed for Waterford along the N25, slipping down the high curving road into Dungarvan just as the streetlights came on. I thought about my mother-in-law’s face as I said my unexpected, hurried goodbye.

‘Don’t worry,’ I might have said. ‘I will not break your son’s heart.’

Or something of that nature. Even if it was a lie. Even if we were to speak, which we did not, of course. The power had shifted between Conor’s women, that was all, though I did not enjoy it as much as you might expect.

Conor brought the car around to the front door and I put my case in the boot. I kissed them all goodbye outside their big white bungalow, and my wretched father-in-law kept his hands to himself, for once. But you know, I never really minded flirting with my father-in-law. I probably liked it as much as anything. I am a terrible flirt.

I passed the turn off to Brittas and the one for Enniskerry at the beginning of the motorway lights. I drifted all the way to the Tallaght exit, worked my way through the suburban streets and pulled up the handbrake outside my mother’s front door. I switched off the engine and stood out of the car in the winter silence, the blood in my veins still hurtling on.

It was nice to be with my own family for once. Even though I had no family to speak of, and it was just the two of us, sitting in front of the real flames of my mother’s artificial gas fire, flicking channels through the midnight bells and drinking Sea Breezes.

Joan poked the ash of her cigarette vaguely at the fireplace, even though it wasn’t a real fireplace, and she loosed her stockings through the cloth of her skirt, to let them settle around her ankles, in two gossamer nests. My mother was strangely slovenly, for someone who looked so pristine. Or more than pristine; for someone who seemed to gather the available light about her. It used to embarrass me, the way she sat in the kitchen with our friends after school, getting all their chat and letting the ash topple on the tiled floor. It wasn’t as though she didn’t have an ashtray. I found one in the fridge once – which wasn’t a surprise; the contents of the fridge were often a little arbitrary. ‘What do you do all day?!’ I remember shouting at her, when I got in hungry one afternoon. To which she said nothing. There was nothing for her to say.

I suppose, in the early years of her widowhood, she let things slide and we did not forgive her for it. Children want things to be ordinary. Maybe that’s all they want.

Ordinary was, in any case, exactly what I got that New Year’s Eve: a cheese-and-tomato sandwich, a cup of tea; my mother rattling through the bottles to see if there was anything worthwhile, shaking the carton of cranberry juice, saying, ‘Good for the bladder,’ the pair of us going into the sitting room to talk about – it is hard to remember what we talked about, I can’t quite fix it in my mind. I remember she said, ‘How are the in-laws?’ and I said, ‘You don’t want to know.’

Diets, obviously; the fact that when you get older the weight all shifts around to the front. I think we also talked about separates versus dresses, old boyfriends and what happened to them, both hers and mine. My stubborn aversion to pastels. The usual.

Then, at five past twelve she stood up and made for bed, and I did not know what to do, or where to go. Maybe she was so used to her routine, it didn’t occur to her to see me to the door.

I sniffed the last of my drink and swallowed it down.

‘Am I over the limit?’ I said, and triggered much fuss. Joan, for whom public transport was a deep mystery, wouldn’t hear of my trying for a taxi, ‘On this night of all nights,’ she said.

‘Oh darling. Go on up to your own room.’

She was out in the hall by then, holding the post at the foot of the stairs and her eyes, over the drag and sough of her breathing, were large with concern.

‘Well, let me help you up at least,’ I said, but she batted me vaguely away, and started up by herself, holding on to the banister.

‘Just tonight, mind!’

In case I thought the burden of care was about to shift my way.

I followed her up and went into my old bedroom, climbed into bed and undressed piecemeal between sheets slick with the cold. In the morning, I woke like a child and came down to a breakfast of eggs and sausage, toast, butter, tea. My mother was already dressed in a raspberry cashmere twinset and tweed skirt, her make-up done – just a few crow’s feet, she really had remarkable skin. She gave out to me for my cheap tights, and sent me upstairs for a new packet of stockings from her drawer: ‘Mother, I am thirty-two years old.’

I refused the stockings, but found a huge costume ring she had from her dancing days and borrowed that instead. I nearly took a scarf, too, but some sadness made me put it back at the last minute, saying, ‘I don’t know when I’ll get it back to you.’

Then we got into her Renault and drove out to Bray where my brother-in-law was doing the New Year swim.

We made our way through the deserted town and parked along the seafront. It took us a while to find him among the crowd on the beach; my sister’s pantomime husband, dressed in a fright wig and a yellow T-shirt with ‘Aware’ written on the front. He was collecting ‘for depression’ he said, while his children pushed back against Fiona’s legs and gazed up at him, frozen and bemused. He looked fat. Or worse than fat, I thought – what with the belly and the legs made spindly by black lycra – he looked middle-aged. His feet, especially, were horrible; waxy and white on the stones of the beach, as he struggled his way down to the deep, churning water and the shrieking masochism of the crowd. They splashed about, and turned to wave at the shore, and it made me uneasy, seeing people swim in Halloween masks or bobbly hats, the way the guy beside you took off his coat and turned into a madman, who didn’t know the difference between wet and dry.

Afterwards, we went back to Enniskerry for soup and a cup of tea, and our mother stayed to babysit, while we walked up to Seán and Aileen’s for the Bull Shot cure.

So it was all natural and ordained and as it should be that, at 2 p.m., I was walking in a righteous way across the New Year’s gravel to the matt grey door belonging to my colleague and acquaintance Seán Vallely, with the hand-shaped knocker on it, that his wife had brought back from Spain.

The house was not as large as I remembered it from the night I sat and watched the lights go out. Somehow, in the days after my little stalking incident, it had grown in my mind to be a square Georgian farmhouse, with an unspecified acreage in front and behind. But in fact, it was only semi-detached, and the windows – one on either side of the door, and three in a row upstairs – were not that large. Still, it had that thing. It had lollipop bay trees with red Christmas bows, it had tasteful white lights dripping from the eaves, it had that Cotswold gravel and box hedge thing that I hated and wanted in exactly equal measure, and I walked up to the threshold with badness on my mind.

‘Nice knocker,’ I said, picking up the slender brass fingers and letting them fall. Then I fixed my gaze on the painted wood, and waited for it to swing away.

And when the door opened, there was no one there.

Of course, it was Evie on the other side, and this threw me. I had to look down from the piece of air where I expected an adult face, and my expression, when I found her, may have slipped from my control. She looked at me with that curious, caught gaze of hers and Fiona said, ‘You remember Megan’s Auntie?’

‘Yes,’ though there was nothing in her voice that would make you believe it.

Then she said, ‘Hi, Gina.’

And I said, ‘Hello, sweetheart,’ because that was exactly what she was, gathering coats in her stunned, delighted way and bringing them up the narrow stairs to be left on some unspecified bed above.

I had not thought about Evie, all this time. I don’t know why. The fact of the wife was always there, she was like a wall running along the side of my mind, but when you are in the throes of lust for a man you do not – maybe you just can’t – think about his daughter. As far as I was concerned, Evie was irrelevant to the whole business of sleeping with Seán, her shadow did not, could not, fall across our hotel bed. It would be wrong for her to exist at such a moment: it would be slightly obscene. Or less than obscene – it just wouldn’t make sense.

And now, there she was. The fact of her amazed me. I had intimations of some dark future, as I watched her walk up the stairs with my coat laid across her two forearms. Or, worse than that: there was a word I wanted to shout at her ascending back, something blurted and bizarre, like:

‘Little cow!’

But I did not know what word it was, or what kind of drama it came from. ‘Assassin!’ Was that Miss Brodie, or Baby Jane? When I was at school, we went to see Hamlet and, during Ophelia’s mad scene, a girl from some innercity school, a little barrel-chested one with unwashed hair, stood up in front of me and roared, ‘Ah, show us your cunt!’ at the actress onstage.

That was what it was like. A bit.

Of course I did not want to shout this, or anything like it, at the child. I had no words for the shout in my head, and no intention of looking for them, but it was, whatever way it took me, a giddy moment. Standing for the first time in the smell of Seán Vallely’s domestic life – all Christmas orange and clove – watching the neat and lovely back of his daughter ascending the stairs, her arms held carefully out in front of her; her white socks, the fresh and secret skin at the backs of her knees, like a child from the fifties – I don’t think you could even get Megan into a skirt by that age, unless there were leggings involved – but there she was, in a perfect little kilt and, my goodness, black patent leather shoes.

Then Aileen was in the hall, all mock bustle and precision.

‘Come in, come in!’ she said, kissed us one by one, ‘Happy New Year!’ first Fiona, then Shay and then me.

I am trying to remember the smell or texture of her skin, or lips; the sense of her proximity, but a sort of blank thing happened when she came in for the kiss. She stood back quickly. And smiled again.

‘So glad you could make it. Some of the others are inside.’

Other what?

She wasn’t as old as I remembered, though she sported some very middle-aged lipstick, pinkish and pearlised, on her unprepossessing, useful face. She was wearing a black Issey Miyake pleats dress edged with turquoise, and the collar stood up around her neck in a sharp frill. It made her look like some soft creature, poking out of its beautiful, hard shell.

The house – unlike her outfit – was surprisingly unpretentious. There was a study on the right of the door we had come in, and a kitchen down at the end of the hall. On the other side, they had knocked through from front to back to make one long reception room.

‘Isn’t this lovely?’ I said to her, taking it all in.

‘Oh, it’s neither fish nor fowl,’ she said. ‘I wanted to take out the back of it, but Seán says it’s time to sell up again, move back into town.’

‘How’s the new house?’ said Fiona.

‘Well that’s the thing. We love it.’

‘Isn’t that great?’ said Fiona.

She turned to me, ‘We found this wonderful old place overlooking the beach at Ballymoney. Up high,’ then back to Fiona, ‘When will you let Megan come down? I go straight from the school pick-up, you know, let Seán follow whenever, every second or third weekend.’

I had been hoping for clues, of course, but I was surprised to get them hurled at me as soon as I walked in the door. It was not that Aileen wanted me to know about her second house – everyone over forty wants you to know about their second house – she was actually telling me her schedule. She was spelling it out for me: my husband is free every second (or third) Friday, but on Saturday he gets in the car and follows me down to the country where we light a fire, and drink a bottle of good red, and look, from on high, at the lovely, ever-changing sea.

And all this before I had a drink in my hand.

‘Oh how nice,’ I said, for distraction, looking at the series of photographs on the wall. There was a line of them in square, dark frames; the images in flaring, overexposed, black and white. It took me a moment to recognise Evie in one, then another – these were studio pictures, taken when she was a toddler. Very arty and beautiful. Aileen in a white shirt, leaning against a white wall. A tousle-headed Seán.

I thought I heard his voice from the kitchen and took a quick left into the long living room, which was comfortably full of people. Four beautiful casement windows. Food one end, drinks by the door, a Filipino circling for the refill with a bottle in either hand.

Frank was there, a little to my surprise – blathery old Frank – he gave me a slippery look across the room, as though there was something I did not know about. For a second I thought it was to do with me and Seán, but Frank doesn’t do sex, he does other kinds of hidden currents and agreements; the kinds that happen between men and are not about anything you could put a finger on – it’s not the cars, it’s not the football, it’s about who is going to win (though win what is sometimes also a question). I say this with some bitterness, because Frank was promoted over my head three months later, so now I know. A man with no discernible talent except for being on side.

I gave him a nod through the various bodies and gesturing hands between us and he came over to give me a clumsy kiss, before heading home.

‘Next year in Warsaw,’ he said.

Poor old Frank.

I heard Seán seeing him off at the front door and I went up to the drinks table, where he might look in and spot me without having to say hello. The silence when he clocked me was very slight, and very interesting. I didn’t look over at him. I smiled, as though to myself, and moved away.

I recognised a few of the faces from Fiona’s parties, except there were no children here and the mothers, dolled up in the middle of the day, looked catastrophic, some of them, or else surprisingly attractive and well got.

Fiachra was also there, with his pregnant wife called – I must have got this wrong – ‘Dahlia’. It was strange to meet her in the flesh – indeed in all that extra flesh; she was huge. She waved a large glass of wine at me and said, ‘Do you think this will bring it on?’ Then she took a sip and winced. There was a woman, she told me, who went on the lash at the Galway Film Fleadh and woke up the next morning in hospital, with the world’s worst hangover and a baby in the cot beside her.

‘Like, what happened last night? Where am I?’

‘Respect,’ I said.

‘Drunk. Can you imagine? The midwives must have loved her.’

‘How could they tell?’ said Fiachra, bone dry, as ever, and he turned to a woman who had come up to him, with a squeal.

I don’t know what she was like most of the time – Dahlia, or Delia, or Delilah – but at thirty-eight weeks’ pregnant, she was as slow and hysterical as a turnip in a nervous breakdown. She pulled me in over her belly – literally pulled me by the cloth of my top – and said, in a low voice:

‘Why is my husband talking to that girl?’

‘What?’ I said. ‘Would you give over.’

‘No really,’ she said. ‘Does he know her?’

She was crying. When did that start?

I said, ‘Would you like something to eat, maybe?’ and she said, ‘Oh. Food.’

Like she had never thought of doing that before.

I sat her on a sofa and brought her a plate filled with everything: quiche, poached salmon, green salad, potato salad with roasted hazelnuts, a grated celeriac thing; also a few cuts of some bird, with sausage stuffing and some clovey, Christmassy, red cabbage. It wasn’t catered, I noticed. They had done it themselves.

‘It’s a bit mixed up,’ I said.

‘Oh well,’ she said. ‘Never mind, eh?’

I wanted to get away from her, but it didn’t seem possible. There was an equal temptation to sit beside her – for warmth almost – and I gave in to that instead, checking around me that Seán was once again out of the room. Or perhaps it was Conor I was worried about, even though I knew he was so far away.

She was wearing a red T-shirt over maternity jeans, with a little sequinned bolero that looked, against the scale of her breasts, like it had come off a Christmas toy. She balanced the plate of food on her bump, then hoisted herself more upright to place it on her knee. Finally she put the plate on the arm of the sofa, and twisted the less pregnant part of herself around to it, leaving the more pregnant part behind.

‘Oh Christ.’

I thought I heard her whimper, as she started to eat; actually whimper. I turned to watch the room and the balloon of her stomach continued to swell in the corner of my eye.

‘Oh Christ.’

Something moved across her belly, a ripple, or a shadow, and I startled the way you would for a spider or a mouse. I turned to stare and it happened again – what looked like a shoulder bone cresting and subsiding, like something pushing its way through latex, except it wasn’t latex under there, it was skin.

Maybe it was an elbow.

‘Dessert?’ I said.

‘God yes,’ she said, without turning around. And I got up and left her, and failed to find her a dessert, or to feed her again.

It was the kind of party where no one ate the chicken skin. Glazed in honey as it was, with a hint of chilli, the chicken skin was left at the side of every plate. I discovered this later when I cleared some dishes out to the kitchen, slaloming between the guests, and humming as I went. I left them on the kitchen counter beside Seán, who tended his pot of hooch, and really, possibly, wished that I would go.

Or wished that everyone else would go. I couldn’t quite tell.

‘Good Christmas?’ I said.

‘Yes thanks,’ he said. ‘You?’

‘Lovely.’

I had, besides, no intention of going. I was having too good a time.

Back at the buffet, Fiona and the Mummies were giving it all they had. They leaned in for scurrility, then reeled back with laughter, hands going to mouths, Oh no! People dodging sideways to scoop up a glass, or snaffle an extra piece of this or that. There were little bowls of glazed nuts, and dried mango slices that had been dipped in dark chocolate. Really dark. At least 80 per cent.

‘Am I dead? Is this heaven?’ a woman said across to me, before lifting her head with a loud,

‘Fuck it, I knew her at school.’

They were talking about plastic surgery. Indeed, a couple of women in the room had the confused look that Botox gives you, like you might be having an emotion, but you couldn’t remember which one. One had a mouth that was so puffy, she couldn’t fit it over the rim of her wine glass.

‘Someone get the woman a straw,’ said the schoolfriend, and she turned to consider the sherry trifle, her hand lifting to the skin of her neck.

I recognised someone from the telly over by the far wall, and an awful eejit from the Irish Times. And of course Aileen had a job, I remembered now, she was some kind of college administrator – which explained the academic types in their alarming clothes, who hogged all the chairs and watched the room with stolid eyes. The Enniskerry husbands stood about and talked property: a three-pool complex in Bulgaria, a whole Irish block in Berlin. Seán wasn’t working the room, so much as playing it. He went about seeding slow jokes, glancing back for the bellow of laughter.

‘Don’t worry,’ he threw over his shoulder. ‘I’ll invoice you for that in the morning!’

Aileen, too, was on her mettle. She caught me in the kitchen doorway, and asked me lots of interesting questions about myself. Slightly lit up, as she was, a champagne flute in her hand, she quizzed me about my life. ‘Where are you living now?’ And she was so cheery and bright, she had everything so much under control, it was – I am not wrong about this – like a fucking interview. For what job? Who knows.

I didn’t care.

I had a few too many glasses of white under my belt, and a ring on my finger; a big plastic fake rock from my mother’s dancing days, that might have been made of Kryptonite. I could go upstairs and leave a kiss on his pillow, or a lychee – they had some, I noticed, in the turned-wood fruit bowl. I could stay too long in the upstairs bathroom and have a good snoop: olive-green walls, smelly candle, weather-beaten wooden buddha to watch, and bless perhaps, all the excretions of the house. There was a white lattice cupboard under the sink, where various products lurked: I could steal a squirt of his wife’s perfume, or just take the name for later (ew, though, White Linen?). What words should I write on the mirror, to show up later in the steam of the shower? In what corner might I dribble my spit? The cupboards were flush, the floorboards tight, but there might be a gap or crack somewhere, where a hex of mine might rot, or grow:

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.

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 preoccupied 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 where 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.

I was thirty-two. I remembered that fact, as I sat back down and looked about me. Apart from the waitresses, I was the youngest person in the room.

After the Buswells incident, I became petulant, hard to manage, and so we played that game for a while; the mistress game. He bought me a Hermès scarf – I mean, I am not a Hermès kind of girl – he produced it from behind his back after we kissed, like a man in a fifties film, and I said, ‘Did you keep the receipt?’

A fortnight later, he produced a bottle of perfume from the same magical spot. It was a light, harmless kind of scent called Rain, and indeed it smelled a little of the rain, starting soft and warm on your skin (is there a perfume called Skin, I wondered), then opening to an afterwash of fresh air. I liked it well enough, though the end note was a bit like that chemical waft you get from tumble dryer sheets, that is supposed to remind you of clothes hung out on the line.

I set it down on the bedside locker but Seán picked it up again and sprayed some on the back of my neck before undressing me and the sex afterwards was hard to judge, somehow; a little intense and laboured on his part and, on mine, distracted at every turn by the artificial smell of rain in the room.

‘Rain,’ I said. ‘What made you buy that?’

‘I just thought you’d like it.’

‘I do,’ I said.

I am not a fake sort of person, but afterwards, in the smell of fabric freshener and sad, rainy days, I traced the lines around his eyes, and said, in a way that sounded fake, even to me.

‘Have you done this before?’

It was the perfume that maddened me.

‘Done what?’

I am not the kind of woman who wears Rain.

‘All this. Have you done it before?’

‘Well, you know,’ he said.

When we met the next week, I wore my black suede boots with the fringe down the back seam, and I sat in the chair and crossed my legs and told him it was time to make an end. And after he agreed, and seduced me, and I resisted and then cried (just a little), he told me about the other girl, the first one. She was someone at work, he said. She was someone he had actually hired, at work, so go figure, but unbelievably it did not occur to him, except in a ‘wouldn’t mind’ sort of way, and anyway he wasn’t…

‘What?’ I said.

He just wasn’t free. That was the bottom line. But something about her, slowly, something about her just broke him, the way she was, she had a thing for nail varnish, these tiny hands and her nails were done in all these bubblegum colours, they looked like sweets.

‘And?’ I said.

Well she was twenty-two, which, you know, looks great, but it was the emotion that sideswiped him, it came from nowhere. And she was twenty-two. So he was in love – he thought he was in love – and he had forgotten how it is at that age but she was really hard work. She wasn’t thick, exactly – she still, God knows, went on about her B in Honours Maths – but she gave a very good impression of thick, talking about herself all the time, obsessing about her thighs, throwing things at him if he said the wrong, nice thing about her thighs.

And she couldn’t take her drink, so it was always a mess, she was always maundering on about her mother or her horrible father, who turned out to be a guy Seán knew, actually, and she was fighting with taxi men and roaring in the street, so she had him by the balls, this crazy woman, he couldn’t even sack her, he couldn’t take the risk. And when it was finally over, he thought: so that’s it. That was his chance, his fling. That was his big romance.

I waited for the next line.

‘Until I met you.’

And we made love for a second time. I was very upset, although I did not show it. I was upset because I felt so lonely, all the way through.

I had taken to ringing his home number at night, and this was a disastrous thing to do. Disastrous to want it so badly; the sound of his voice in the middle of a long fortnight, although it might not have been his voice exactly I was looking for. This was me ringing the landline to Enniskerry, the one I had seen nesting on the console table in the hall, and on the kitchen wall, and by the marriage bed. It was answered somewhere in the ordinary life of the house: Aileen with bleach foaming on her upper lip, Evie at the kitchen table, doing her homework, Seán, apparently, elsewhere. The second or third time, Aileen did not cut the connection. She waited, and the silences of her life filled the earpiece, as I heard the nearness of her breath, and she felt the nearness of mine.

I zipped my calves back into the boots, holding my legs high, one after the other, to avoid the fringe. Seán sat on the edge of the bed putting in his cufflinks. He was wearing a pink shirt, impossibly pale. His jacket was hung over the back of the chair. He did not mention the phone calls. He bent down to lace up his plain, black shoes.

He said, ‘You should never do this with someone – you should never expose yourself to someone like this – unless they have a lot to lose.’

I ran home to him that day. I ran home to my husband, to his wise brown eyes that were not, in fact, wise, and to his big, warm body that had not kept me from the cold.

On Saturday night I cracked open a bottle of wine and we watched ‘The Wire’ on box set, and after that we drank another bottle, despite which I was numb, in his arms, with the thought of all I had lost: the movement of his hand was just a movement, his tongue was an actual tongue. I had killed it; my best thing. The guilt, when it finally hit, was astonishing.

Dance Me to the End of Love

IN THE MIDDLE of April Seán was guest speaker at some motivational golfing weekend in Sligo and we had two days together – I can’t remember what lie I told before I got on the train – two days, and one whole night, to end the affair; to strangle it and beat it about the head, to throw it in a shallow grave and go home.

Seán picked me up at the station (Evie’s fluffy earmuffs abandoned on the back seat), and brought me out to a hotel, far from the golfers, on the outskirts of town.

The hotel was actually a converted asylum, massive, and grey. There were two Gothic chapels on either end of the car park, one smaller than the other.

‘Protestant and Catholic maybe,’ said Seán. Or staff and patients. But I said it was men one side and women the other. We looked at them when we got out of the car and thought about it: stolen glances across the forecourt. It was all there: the sackcloth, the raving, thwarted love.

‘Jesus,’ said Seán. ‘It’s the County Home.’

Then we walked into reception and found ourselves in the middle of two different hen parties, one in black T-shirts with magenta-coloured feather boas, another in white T-shirts with a pink slogan on the front. The slogan said: ‘Aunt Maggie is on the Farm’.

I turned to pull a face at Seán but he was gone. Disappeared. I couldn’t see him anywhere. In my foolishness I spun around in the hotel foyer, and then back again while the hen parties milled around in front of the desk. I finally pulled out my phone, to find a text that said, ‘Sign in. Send no, will fllw’.

Something, or someone, had spooked him. And so I queued, the only woman in the place who wasn’t wearing pink, and I panicked about my credit card, which had my name on it, which would, one day, turn into a credit-card bill, and I thought how resentment is the one true opposite of desire.

The room was impossible to find. I had to walk miles of corridor, go up in one lift, and down in a different one. The walls were hung with paintings done to match the carpet; an increasingly sickening series of abstracts in cream and maroon that looked like they came out of the same two pots of paint; the inmates’ revenge. The room was in fact in the old nurses’ quarters: a separate, modern building connected by a walkway to the main hotel, with the feeling along the length of it of going from madness to your dinner, and back again. I didn’t know if these ghosts were any easier to handle, as they crept with naggins of vodka in their white pockets to trysts with doctors or orderlies, or with patients who were handsome and sad. A swirl of magenta feathers danced over the carpet as I passed, while at the end of the corridor some ancient echo asked me what I thought I was doing out of bounds at that hour, and in those high heels.

When I got up to the room, Seán was already lurking by the door.

‘How did you manage that?’ I said.

‘Manage what?’ Apparently it was all easy to find, from the outside.

We made love as soon as we saw the bed and then wandered the rooms – it was actually a family suite with a living room and kitchenette: dark wood, stripy cushions. Seán looked different there, more domestic, and used.

It was the end, I knew that. I think we both knew.

That afternoon, we drove to Rosses Point and kissed on the beach. The tiny flesh of his lips in front of that great ocean and, when he opened his mouth, it was like diving in.

Driving back along the coast road, Seán swung in through the gates of a house with a For Sale sign outside.

‘Just curious,’ he said, as he went up the driveway, and we parked right in front of their lives, whoever these people were, in their eighties dormer with its lawn running down to the sea.

They had a trampoline in the garden, and a separate garage – it looked nicer than the house actually – with room for two cars.

A silhouette paused in front of the window: a woman, checking us out.

‘Do you want to buy it?’ I said.

‘Do I want to buy it?’ Which was another thing that annoyed me about him, the way he liked to deadpan what I just said. ‘Giving it the cold read’ as he called it.

‘Are you interested in buying the house?’

‘Always, my love,’ he said. ‘Always.’

My love.

We stayed for five long minutes, maybe more. At one stage he got out of the car and walked to the gap between the house and the garage, assessing the view down to the sea. Then he walked towards the car, backwards, checking the gutters as he came.

‘OK,’ he said.

And we left the woman with her trampoline and her swing set, that did not have the grass rubbed away beneath it, and to her life by the sea.

I kept checking my phone. No one knew where I was, and I felt cut loose – abandoned almost. I spent the entire time I was there, fantasising the call; the one I might get from Conor; the one from my mother’s mobile that I answer, only to hear a stranger’s voice at the other end. In fact, no one missed me, or wanted me; the phone stayed dead. It was just Sligo working its voodoo as we slid along the lost lanes, in the flat plain between Ben Bulben and the sea.

At Glencar Lake, he recited Yeats to me, ‘Come away oh human child, to the waters and the wild.’ Then we parked beyond the waterfall, and he pushed his seat back, and there was something about him, the expansive way he sat, I knew he wanted me to get up to some badness, that this would be a treat, what with the scenery and the poetry and the fact that we were in his very own, very nice car. And I thought, this can not be true. This man can not want me to blow him, in daylight, in a public car park. This man whoever he is.

I opened the glove compartment and looked at the CDs.

‘Guillemots! Is this yours?’

‘Yeah,’ he said.

And he drove back to the hotel too fast, where I failed to seduce him on my way to the shower and he failed to seduce me on my way out of it. And on it went. We risked a meal in town, and hated it. Then we came back and fought. I sat on the bed and cried. I said, ‘Why are you so horrible to me?’

He paused. He walked to the window and pulled back the curtain to watch the darkness, or his own reflection in front of the darkness. Then he let the curtain drop.

‘Gina,’ he said slowly, like he was explaining something it had taken him a while to understand. ‘We don’t really know each other.’

Which didn’t stop us acting like we did. We had four whole rooms to do it in, I could slam a cupboard door in the kitchenette, he could clear his throat while sitting on the side of the bed to undo his shoes. I could drink a glass of wine at the table while he shook out the newspaper on the sofa behind me. He could stand at the bedroom window and look out at the car park while I shifted through the stations on the remote control. We could move about like this: as though we had a claim on each other, as though we were intimate. But we were only playing at these things. I knew that too. The way we leaned or sat, or directed our gaze; the gestures and arrangements we made of ourselves: living room, bedroom, bathroom, hall. And then later when we went to bed, the same play with pillow and duvet, turning towards or away from each other, and even our breathing a kind of demonstration.

In the darkness, something gave.

Seán said his marriage was unbearable. Not over but ‘unbearable’.

‘You have no idea,’ he said.

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 Seán. 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 sex, 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 circumstances. 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 Saturday, and though I might easily have had a few glasses 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 passed, 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, compassionate 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 pushing 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.