The Forgotten Waltz

‘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 Sean 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 Sean.

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 Sean, 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 Sean 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 Sean 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 Sean, 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