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.
II
Crying in the Chapel
WE HAVE BEEN waiting, all week, for the snow. The cold came first. The air thrilled to it. Even indoors, the rooms felt bigger, their edges seemed more clear. The whole country was in a tizz. There were thirteen accidents on the back roads of Leitrim, there was black ice in Donegal. On Tuesday we watched the snow closing London down, covering the Cotswolds, building on the rails of the bridge into Anglesey, and melting, as if to prove its stealth, in the grey Irish Sea. It was snowing in Britain; it would snow here too.
Yesterday morning, the light was softer, the walls seemed to have moved closer in. Sean got out of bed and opened the curtains on the back garden, as though he was looking for something and I caught it, then – unbearably faint – the high, sweet smell of approaching snow.
Sean said he didn’t know you could smell snow. He gave me a ‘crazy girl’ look as he went out on to the landing and snapped the string on the bathroom light. I heard it bounce against the mirror, once, twice. Then a silence so complete he might have ceased to exist. I looked at the place where he had stood at the window, and noticed the frost flowering along the edges of the pane.
The place is freezing.
The duvet, at least, is light and thick. It is easy to slide my legs into the warmth he has left, to take his pillow and turn it over to the cool side, and add it to my own.
I lie there watching the familiar square of day, with its new edge of lace: our breath, the sweat of our bodies, gathered in a crystal fog, that grew overnight into fronds and florets of ice.
The room faces east. I know, as well as anything, the sparse dawn light, but the trees this morning are a denser green, the clouds are low and bruised with the colours of unshed snow.
I am back, through no fault of my own, in the house where I grew up. It is the fifth of February – twenty-one months, to the day, since my mother sat down on the path with her coat fanned out around her. And still there are rooms I can barely bring myself to open. Not that we are living here. We are just sorting things out. Sean, especially, is not living here, though it is nearly a year, now, since he washed up at the door. We are in between things. We are living on stolen time. We are in love.
Next door in the bathroom, Sean sighs and, after a waiting pause, starts to pee. There is another pause when he is finished, or seems finished. Then a last little rush; an afterthought. It worries me, this sense of difficulty, surely there should be nothing simpler than taking a leak? And I remember my own father leaning like a plank over the toilet bowl, his hand braced against that bathroom wall, the side of his face nuzzled into his arm. Waiting.
‘God this place is cold,’ says Sean’s voice.
He flushes the toilet and then appears back in the room to lift a dressing gown from the hook on the door. The dressing gown is a plaid design in thick grey towelling, that smells like it needs to be washed. I mean, when it is cold, it smells like this. When it is warm, it smells of Sean.
He puts it on over his pyjamas of striped jersey cotton.
Even when it is not about to snow, Sean wears pyjamas in bed. It is a habit he got into, he says, after Evie was born – not that she is around to see, except at the weekends. Even so, he walks around decent, and the world rests uncorrupted, thank goodness, by his nakedness.
The slippers are brown leather mules that slap as he walks about the room. He roots through his gym bag and shakes his dirty gear into the laundry basket. He goes back to the bathroom to get his shower gel and a fresh towel and when the bag is zipped and done, he drapes a jacket over it. I have weaned him off the suits, but there is still something too perfect about his shirts. He sends them out, now, at enormous expense, after the morning when he took one out of the wardrobe and said, in a puzzled voice, ‘Is there something wrong with the iron?’
So the shirts come out of the chest of drawers now, and the cardboard ends up in a heap on top of it, and the little pins end up on the floor.
‘I’ll get the man again,’ I say.
‘God it’s fucking freezing,’ he says, shuffling out of one leather slipper and then the other, as he drops the pyjama bottoms and, with a staggered hop, gets into his underpants.
‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,’ he says, while the radiator gives an intestinal groan and something judders, downstairs.
I don’t mind if he wears pyjamas at the weekend. I don’t mind if he wears pyjamas every night of the week. We are in love. He can wear what he likes. Even so, I wonder if there was a time when he walked this room naked; was there a day last summer, when I saw him silhouetted against the window light? Because the most foolish thing about Sean’s bare flesh is its purity. And though I have lusted after him mightily, in my time, it was always about getting him to the point where his body is as simple as it wants to be; as cruel, or as easy. There is very little about it, I would have thought, to frighten a child.
‘What am I thinking?’ he says. ‘I’m in Budapest.’
‘Today?’
‘Just tonight. Just to sort it out.’
‘I don’t mind,’ I said.
He takes his trolley bag down from the top of the wardrobe, then changes his mind and puts an extra shirt into his gym bag, which he then takes out again.
‘What am I doing? What am I doing here?’
‘Where are you staying, the Gellert?’
‘I can’t face the Gellert,’ he says.
I don’t know if this is a compliment to me or not. We had a weekend there, sometime last year, before the arse fell out of the Hungarian forint. It seems a long time ago now. You could actually see Sean’s apartment up the river, a row of three beautiful nineteenth-century windows on the far bank. He had rented the place out to a guy who claimed to be an importer of mobile phones – and maybe he was. He is, in any case, gone now, along with four months’ unpaid rent. That long-ago weekend – just last year, as I say: August 2008, when everything was still to play for – Sean finished the paperwork and slapped the phone importer’s back, and we went off to spend the afternoon down in the Gellert’s hot springs. We paddled about the beautiful old pool, then went our separate ways: him to the naked men and me to the naked, mostly old, women, every shape and size of them, who groaned as they eased themselves into the gentle waters, or slapped it towards them in small waves, gathering solace. I don’t think we made love in Budapest. We made money, of course, or Sean made money, but there was too much history downstairs, soaking in the hot pools and plunging into the cold. Too many sagging thighs and bald pubic mounds and yellow stomachs, with their stretch marks of ancient silver. In the middle of it all were two California Girls, with water up over the tips of their beautiful fake breasts, who looked about them appalled; like this is all so wrong,
