The Forgotten Waltz

It was hard, after that first occasion, to find a suitable time. Between Megan’s maths homework and Jack’s eczema, Fiona just could not get away. I was busy at work, catching up. So the house sat on, unburgled, while the smell in Joan’s wardrobe turned sour.

There was no one to look after us. We needed someone to help us go through her things: her navy Jean Muir and the Agnes B cardigans; the Biba and early Jaeger; all the stuff she bought that famous year she spent in London before my father met her and courted her and brought her back home.

Isn’t that what men are for? To tell you it’s only a skirt, for God’s sake, it’s only an old blouse. But the men left us to it, and even if they hadn’t, the fact was that neither Shay nor Conor were up to the job. They didn’t matter enough. They could not keep us safe from each other, as we took out her Sybil Connolly evening stole, or the little ostrich-feather shrug, and said, ‘No you have it,’ ‘No you.’

It was more than a question of timing, is what I am saying, though timing is what we think about now.

Outside in the garden, tethered to the gate with some vicious, strong wire, the For Sale sign stands; bright and square and always new. It was hammered in there seventeen months ago, give or take. There is no point arguing about it. Anyone can do the dates. Anyone can do the sums. It is what it is – that’s what I say. It is what it is. Our mother died in May 2007. She was dead all day. She would be dead for the rest of that week. And the week after that, she would be dead too. It was no longer, for Joan, a question of timing.

And anyway, we thought – we were in the habit of thinking – that the longer you left it, the better. Just that February, Mrs Cullen’s down the road went Sale Agreed at ‘nearly two’. That is how you spoke about these things that spring, during the last furious buying before all the buying stopped, when the word ‘million’ was too real and dirty to say out loud. Way back in the good old days, when my mother was alive, and everyone drank in the streets and, if you wanted your kitchen tiled (and we wanted little else), you had to fly the workman in from England, and put him up in a hotel.

Shay brought us to the solicitor’s, sometime in early June. We sat in his office in town and let this stranger with his fine, clean hands go through a file marked ‘Miles Moynihan’ and opine, in the casual after-chat, that once probate was cleared we would probably ask for ‘two and a bit’.

Then we paid him. A big whack of money. We paid the estate agent too. Nearly two years on, I don’t like any of these people.

But at the time, I was almost grateful. If you’re going to spin your grief into cash – what the hell – maybe it helps if the cash is crazy. We left his office and walked in silence down the granite steps. Fiona said, ‘Nice hands.’

‘He was wearing Alexander McQueen shoes,’ I said. ‘Did you see? Tiny little skulls in the leather.’

‘What does that mean?’ she said. ‘What does that mean?’

‘It means he’s a filthy rich, post-punk solicitor.’

‘Well that’s all right then. That makes me feel a lot better.’

When I think about it now, I suspect he knew something we did not. I suspect they all did, that they just couldn’t say it, not even to themselves. We spoke to an estate agent in July and there was some talk of probate, but the timing was good, he said, for the autumn market, so we put the house up for sale in the first week in September, whether we owned it or not. It went on the websites on Wednesday, it was in the property supplement on Thursday. We sat back and felt that we had managed something hugely difficult and significant. We did not want to let the place go.

We do now.

I catch my mother’s trail around the kitchen, this morning of snow, and I am grateful for it. Some days, it doesn’t feel like the house I grew up in, anymore. I don’t remember that I own it, or even half of it. That is what I should have said to my sister when we were still shouting at each other. I will only live in half. Although I am not living there, as we know. I am only keeping the place in a condition to view.

Most of the small stuff is sorted now, gone to the dump or the charity shop, to Fiona’s house or over to Clonskeagh. We divided it with great tenderness. No you take it, No you. These foolish, small pieces of cloth, that no one will ever wear again, a useful triple steamer, a few abstract oils that scream ‘1973’.

Every once in a while, I come across something we missed. After Sean moved in (though he never actually ‘moved in’) I found a photograph fallen down the back of a chest of drawers; a large glossy black-and-white picture of our parents standing in front of the control tower in Dublin airport. Going where – Nice? Cannes? Going to Lourdes, probably, with rosary beads in her patent handbag – though they managed, with her crocheted hat and his flapping trench, to make this look like a dashing thing to do.

Another time – just a couple of months ago – I spotted a brown cloth bag on top of her wardrobe. I got on a chair and took it down. There were bottles inside: I could tell by the way the glass clacked and squeaked against itself under the cotton.

When I prised open the drawstring I found an empty bottle of Tweed, a perfume I gave her myself when I was in primary school. There was also an empty bottle of Givenchy III – the original blend – and a maverick, half-full bottle of Je Reviens. I opened the Tweed and put the cold glass under my nose, trying to conjure her out of there. Joan was old-fashioned about these things; it was the last thing she put on, after her jewellery and before her coat, so the scent of perfume will always be the smell of my mother leaving; the mystery of her bending to kiss me, or straightening back up. These were the nights when Daddy was still alive, and he would squeeze himself into a tux for some ‘do’ in the Burlo or the Mansion House. They would go for drinks in the Shelbourne first, and dance after dinner, in the wooden centre of the carpeted floor, to Elvis covers and ‘The Tennessee Waltz’.

Then they’d come home in the middle of the night, completely lashed.

My father’s dress shoes were very shiny and black. Even now, I think of them as ‘drinking shoes’. I saw someone on the street, once, who was so like him. Very far gone, but immaculate with it. The kind of drinker who stays upright – also decent, and frank. The kind that likes to say ‘knacker’ and ‘culchie’, who looks like he might have more, and more cogent things to say, even when he is so steaming, the power of speech has deserted him.

I had too much wine, myself, the night after she died. After the undertaker, the phone calls and arrangements, I cracked open a Loire white, and drank it at speed, and I felt two things. The first thing I felt was nothing at all. The other thing I felt was an emotion so fake and slick I wanted rid of it. It was such a lie. There he was – my father. Not in a stranger, but in me, as I sat on my own in a straight-backed chair at the kitchen table, pausing to apologise to the wine when it slopped out of the glass.

I threw the perfume bottles away; these woody, elegant scents my mother chose to complement the smell of her cigarette smoke and her occasional night on the vodka. You might think I would want to hold on to these last moving molecules, but I did not. I wanted to open the windows, bash the upholstery, and chase the smell of her death away; the butts I found in the garden ashtray floating in rainwater, the yellow tinge on the ceilings, the cloying old glamour of Je Reviens.

Sean came to the funeral. I didn’t mind. It should have been a tactless thing to do, but it wasn’t. It seemed to come from some hidden rhythm in our lives; a better place. He came up in the church porch and gave me a hug. Sean looks like someone too busy to care, but then something happens and he does it all perfectly. The country manners coming out in him, maybe, or the bank manager father, who knew the line between doing something sincerely and doing it well. Sean did it well. The only public gesture between us. The only ritual act of touching: hand on my shoulder, hand to the centre of my back, a one-armed hug, his face in my hair, ‘Poor you,’ he said. ‘Poor Gina.’ And did not pause to look into my wrecked eyes, or to feed on the sorrow in my face, but went over to hug Fiona, and then walked away. The whole sequence perfectly timed and true to what we had become; old comrades in the war of love.

My eyes were fine, as it happened. My sister’s also. We are, neither of us, the crying type. We are the sunglasses type. We are the kind of woman who walks out of a funeral service talking about their foundation.

‘Is there a line?’ I said to Fiona, indicating the underside of my chin. Said it, and meant it. And Fiona, who understood completely, said, ‘Tiny bit. Just there. You’re fine.’

So my make-up was, at least, properly blended, as they loaded my mother’s coffin into the hearse and Sean paid his respects in the May sunshine. I looked after him as he walked away – you might even say he trotted – a busy little shortarse in a pale summer suit, his arm up for a taxi as soon as he hit the side of the road.

Then I hugged the next person.