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 Sean 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 Sean 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
‘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 Sean, 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
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 Sean 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.’
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 Sean says it’s time to sell up again, move back into town.’
‘How’s the new house?’ said Fiona.
