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 Sean – 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: Sean in my sister’s garden, Sean in Brittas, Sean 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 Sean 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 Sean 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.
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.
Such is the delight of a long working day.
We made love properly for the first time, myself and Sean, 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, Sean Vallely’s wife?’
And I thought,
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 Sean does that consomme 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, ‘Sean would love to see you, and Donal of course.’
Donal?
‘Lovely,’ I said.
