The Forgotten Waltz

rang to say, ‘Can we talk?’ and I drove up there and saw her standing behind the old glass of the house in Enniskerry, before I put the car back into gear and drove away.

‘Don’t mind her,’ said Sean. ‘I know what she’s doing, here. Don’t mind her. You don’t know what she is like.’

But I just felt sorry for her – this woman who refused the truth. I had to remind myself this was something between me and Sean, not between me and Aileen. I might have liked her or hated her in another life. It was only incidental that she was not my type.

But this was much later – months later. For a week after that first phone call, ‘I can’t believe you did this to me,’ Fiona did nothing. I continued as usual, and Sean continued as usual, and no one spoke to anyone else as we waited for the axe to fall.

Walking around thinking, This will end, and This will end as I stacked the dishes in Clonskeagh, or turned out the bedside light. Kissing Conor, as he slept, and feeling stupid even as I leaned over him, his stone-still, dreamless head. It was all too melodramatic and silly. Maybe the axe would not fall: maybe we would continue just as before. Though I didn’t like Conor so much by then; I did not like the smell of his sleeping breath.

On Saturday morning, Sean got a call from Shay, asking him to drop round to the house. He rang me afterwards, walking back down the lane.

‘What did he say?’

‘Not much.’

My brother-in-law had been his rueful, back-slapping self. He brought Sean into the kitchen and pushed the letters across the table saying, ‘You’ll be wanting that cheque.’

‘Was Fiona there?’

‘No.’

Fiona had taken the kids off somewhere, apparently. Sean sounded a bit shook as he said this and I could imagine the delicate way Shay phrased it: Fiona bundling the kids into the car, as though the sight of the adulterer might scar them for life.

Another fabulous silence descended. For a week, maybe more, I waited for Sean to ring, for Aileen to turn up on my doorstep, for Conor to put his head in his hands at the desk and weep. None of these things happened. One evening after work, I went to the house in Terenure and fell asleep on the sofa. In the middle of the night I got up and went upstairs, to the bed where we last made love, and I have slept there ever since.

I woke to a sky full of rain, and I borrowed an umbrella from my dead mother to get the bus into town – the same bus I used to get as a teenager – there wasn’t a cab in sight. I went upstairs to windows thick with condensation, and the smell of wet commuters: stale lives, morning soap, last night’s fun. I hadn’t been on a bus in years. And I liked it. I liked looking down from this childhood height, seeing the gardens all redone, with their flagstones and big planters; the window boxes along Rathgar Road and cars guarding the gravel. The passengers were changed, too; they had funky haircuts and better clothes and they were all plugged into something, texting or listening to their headphones. We were across the canal before I realised that none of them were speaking English, and I liked that too. I had the feeling that this was the magic bus, and there was no telling our final destination.

Conor rang, sporadically, all day. I did not answer. I sat with my feet up on the desk, checking out the jobs pages of the newspapers. Undervalued, overlooked: I was completely fed up with Rathlin Communications. At four in the afternoon, the calls stopped.

He had rung Fiona.

The next few days were full of shouting. Much cliche. It seemed that everything was said. I mean everything, by everybody. The whole thing felt like a single sentence; one you could imagine bellowed, hissed, scrawled in lipstick on the bathroom mirror; you could carve it into your own flesh, you could chisel it on a fucking gravestone. And not one word of it mattered. Not one stupid word.

You never.

I always.

The thing about you is.

I think they all really enjoyed it. Fiona more than anyone. My goodness, the accusations flew.

‘I am glad she is dead. I am glad our mother is dead, so she doesn’t have to witness this.’

And, ‘Do you think he loves you? Do you think he cares about you?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think he does, actually.’

That was all I said. I didn’t tell her she could fuck off back to her muppet of a husband, who rolls on to her after his bottle of Friday-night wine, and then rolls off again. If she calls that love. Wondering has he come yet, and how much it would cost to have a horse in livery like the woman down the road. I didn’t say any of this to my sister. How I saw her being broken into mediocrity and motherhood; her body broken and then her mind – or did her mind go first, it’s sort of hard to disentangle – and then for her to turn round and say Broken is Best, I didn’t say how that made me furious beyond measure.

We were in the living room of the house in Terenure. It was easy to shout there. It was like being twelve again.

I said, ‘You’re a prig. You’re a fucking prig and you always have been. This is something for me, Fiona. Do you understand? This has nothing to do with you.’

Our mother stayed dead through all of this. Amazingly. She was dead during every tantrum and silence. And she was still dead, when we woke the next day and remembered what had been said.

Because of course you are not twelve. And you regret everything. Every word you uttered. The fact that human beings learned the art of speech – you regret that too.

Stop! In the Name of Love

CONOR AND I spent a long evening in Clonskeagh not shouting, at least for the first while. He came in while I was getting some clothes out of the Sliderobe. I always hated that thing. You could specify the finish when you signed for the house. You handed over three hundred grand and, with a special smile, they handed you a little card with squares of polished wood on it. We chose ‘Birch’. Hideous. Anyway, I was taking a few things out of the Sliderobe, when I heard Conor coming up the stairs, and a few moments later he appeared in the doorway. We didn’t speak. He sat on the bed and watched as I took an armful of clothes and laid them in a suitcase, with the hangers still attached. Then he got up and left the room.

When I zipped up the case and came out, I found him on the sofa, going through my Pauric Sweeney shoulderbag.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Are you back on the pill?’ he said.

‘What?’ I said.

‘I just want to know.’

I turned and went back into the bedroom. It was all too sad to shout about. But, after a small silence, we managed to shout about it anyway.

‘I’m your fucking husband, that’s who I am!’

Conor rarely loses his temper. He does it like a cartoon, with bulging muscles and popping veins. I was almost afraid of him. And I remembered something about him that I had somehow managed to forget: how exact he was in bed; how he could, in his ruthless, friendly way, destroy me between the sheets.

‘Oh right. Oh that’s right.’

Because the unsayable thing is, that just before I started sleeping with Sean – when I was just thinking about it, when I was on the brink – myself and Conor had a lot of sex. Not the slow abandon of our early days, but rooting, rummaging, sudden sex that was not supposed to be enjoyable, strictly speaking; that was not about me. If Conor could have made me pregnant then, he would have done it without thinking (there was no thinking involved in any of this), which is why, incidentally, I think he did know about Sean, somewhere deep down.

The one thing he never said to me was that he was surprised.