I can’t talk about Conor at the funeral. He was great. Conor
‘Don’t tell me that thing is online,’ I said.
‘Duh!’ he said. Then he looked up at me and stalled, realising where he was.
He was wearing his black suit – too tight on him, now – his only suit, the one he had been married in. Same church, same porch, a little later in the year; the fallen cherry blossom now drifted against the steps and turning brown.
How Can I be Sure
SEAN RANG, SOME weeks later, to ‘check that I was OK’, I said I was really not OK, and I laughed. He said he knew a good guy if we wanted help selling the house.
‘If you
‘Well, you know,’ I said. I did not tell him that I was sleeping in the place, or sleeping there some days, during the afternoon. As I said, you would think the rooms might have faded, but all her things were just as she liked them. And when I came back, one day – another day, that Fiona could not manage – I put my feet up on the sofa for a moment, and woke just as dark was starting to fall.
‘What’s up with you?’ I said.
‘Nothing’s up.’
‘Are you in the dogbox?’ I said, because that’s how he used to talk about his marriage, he always used to say, ‘I’m in the dogbox at home.’
‘No, it’s not that,’ he said. But it was something.
In the old days – the good old days, when we seldom saw each other dressed – Sean did not discuss his daughter. She might crop up towards the end of the afternoon, just as he was getting ready to go. One day he said, ‘Evie wants a ferret. Can you believe it?’ Another time, going through his pockets for keys, he said, ‘A lump of Evie’s hair fell out, have you ever seen that? About the size of an old two-pence, about this wide.’
He said this sometime in the spring. I know when it was because I remember thinking, quite casually, ‘We did that.’ It was our kiss on New Year’s Eve that did this thing to Evie’s hair.
The calls he made after Joan died were different. He rang as a friend, and he talked about his daughter, the way you do.
Evie was fighting with her mother. Evie threw a pair of shoes under the wheels of a lorry because she wanted to wear high heels. Evie was so spacey, she was always late. Her schoolwork was going to pot, she couldn’t concentrate for two minutes at a time. I tried to figure out if my niece, Megan, had started her periods yet. I said, ‘Is she eating?’
‘Eating?’ he said.
‘Like, food.’
‘She eats,’ he said, though he seemed to disapprove of the question.
‘What age is she again?’
‘Ten.’
‘That’s a bit early all right.’
I told him we thought Fiona had anorexia when she was sixteen and this interested him a lot.
‘We brought her to a doctor. Have you brought Evie to a doctor?’
‘For what, though?’ he said. ‘I mean, what would you say?’
It was a thing we started to do, whenever I was over in Terenure – twice, maybe three times in the next couple of months – I sent him a text, and he would call. I slept on the sofa another time, and we talked when I woke. The third time (it was a bit like going back on the cigarettes, actually) I rang as soon as I got in the door, and we had these dreamy, walking chats, where he led me, through this and that, to his troublesome daughter, and I moved through my mother’s rooms, and touched the objects she had left behind. And I don’t know if Evie was the reason or the excuse, the day he said – maybe that day, the day of the third call:
‘Where are you? Are you there now? I’m just down the road.’
Which is how we ended up making love, not in my old room, but in the bedroom beside it. I opened the front door and he was there, all clear grey eyes in front of a troubled grey sky. I showed him into the house.
‘Funny,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘I thought it would be bigger.’
‘It is quite big,’ I said.
We went upstairs.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I mean this is a very desirable sort of house.’
He glanced inside the bedrooms, checked out the en-suite, the spare room, the upstairs bathroom.
‘Two and a bit?’ he said.
And then he hugged me, because I was trembling. I fended him off at the door to my parents’ room and at the one that led to my own childhood bed. We went to the place of least resistance. At least I think so. I think we fell through the door that felt right.
And were, of course, found out.
Sean had come into the house with some papers in his hand and he left them on the shelf in the hall where the post gets left, and a few days later Fiona discovered, among the letters there, several addressed to him, their envelopes ripped open, including one that contained – she could not help but notice – a cheque for four-hundred- and-fifty euro. She put them in her car and drove them home on the front seat beside her, and she was about to pull into his driveway and hand them in at his door when she realised that she could not do this. She thought about pushing them through the letterbox and decided against this also. She dialled my number and said, ‘I can’t believe you did this to me.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I can’t believe you did this. How am I supposed to look at them now? How am I supposed to look at his wife?’
All of this from her parked car, in the lane outside his house; the boxed fury of my sister.
‘How am I supposed to look at her?’
‘Look at who?’ I said.
And we carried on like this for a while – like married people, shouting and lying.
‘I can’t believe you did this to me.’
‘I didn’t do it to you,’ I said. ‘It is nothing to do with you.’
But it turned out I had done it to everybody. The whole world was disgusted with me and worn out by my behaviour. The entire population of Dublin felt compromised, and they felt it keenly.
Fiachra, for example, ‘always knew’. He knew it before I did. ‘I am in love with him,’ I said, sitting in the back room of Ron Blacks after too many gin and tonics. And Fiachra waited a tiny, unforgivable moment, before he said:
‘I am sure you are.’
But it was the first time I had said the words out loud, and it might have been true all along but it became properly true then. True like something you have discovered. I loved him. Through all the shouting that followed, the silences, the gossip (an unbelievable amount of gossip) there was one thing I held on to, the idea, the fact, that I loved Sean Vallely and I held my head high, even as I glowed with shame. Glowed with it.
It was something to say in the long gaps between things – because even though it felt like everything was happening, for long stretches, nothing happened. Except for being in love, which happened intensely and all the time.
