The Forgotten Waltz

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. Sean 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:

Sean, 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.’

Sean 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 Sean. 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 Sean 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