The Forgotten Waltz

deftly done. But Sean followed her with his face and, at the last moment, nuzzled into her fine, blonde hair.

Then he followed her head a little further. And inhaled.

It was unnatural. They might as well have been kissing, my lover and my friend, each of them attached to this large construction of wriggle and big blue eyes and spit.

But Sean wasn’t looking into her eyes. He was smelling her head. His own eyes were closed.

Fiachra said, ‘Watch out, she is a stranger to soap,’ and Sean gave a tiny grunt of appreciation.

‘Who’s a great girl?’ he said, pulling back to look at her. He jiggled her foot, which dangled from the crook of Fiachra’s arm. ‘Who’s a great girl?’

I am not saying it was sexual, I am saying it was a moment of great physical intimacy, and that it took place in my mother’s hall while I held a bag of warm croissants and looked on.

‘Coffee?’ I said.

‘Lovely.’

‘Yes, please.’

But no one moved.

After this first frankness, Sean appeared to ignore the child, who was, I have to say, a sweetie. She sat on her father’s lap and ate her croissant with close and reverential attention while Fiachra told stories about his new life as a stay-at-home Dad. He was queuing up in Cumberland Street dole office with the junkies, he said, his round-eyed daughter watching from her Hummer-buggy, when the guy in front of him holds up a little white plastic newsagent’s knife and waves it around saying, ‘I’ll cut myself, I’ll fuckin’ cut myself!’ The cop snapping on latex gloves as he moves, big and easy, across the floor.

‘God almighty.’

Sean leaned against the counter, and laughed. He moved to set the coffee pot further back on the stove. He went over to the bin and tucked the plastic bin-liner into place. He walked out to the hall, as though there was someone at the door, and then came back in again. After a while I realised that he wasn’t so much ignoring the child as prowling around it. He approached and avoided her, all the time. He was like something on David Attenborough, I told him later, one of those silverback gorillas maybe, who has forgotten where baby gorillas come from, then Mammy Gorilla pops one out, and he doesn’t know what to do. Cuddle it? Eat it? Pick it up and throw it in a bush?

‘Are you finished?’ he said.

‘Probably,’ I said.

‘Good,’ he said. Then he walked out of the kitchen and did not come back for three days.

I had been so stupid. It wasn’t about Aileen – this anguish I had to live with, and avoid, and constantly tend. It was about Evie.

‘I failed her,’ he said.

He stood at the counter with the window at his back, the same place and silhouette as when he watched Fiachra’s child cover herself in apricot jam. It was July, and nothing was figured out yet, not even a holiday. Sean rubbed his hands up over his face, then scrubbed his scalp at the bottom of his skull. His mouth and chin distorted and his eyes shut tight. His throat produced a kind of whine, and tears popped from between his eyelids, round and clear.

He wept. And this was clearly something he had very little practice doing. Sean, the charmer, could not cry in a charming way. He cried like a mutant, all twisted and ingrown.

It did not last long. I made him a Bloody Mary and he sat at the table to drink it. He would not be hugged or touched – I did not try. How could he have done it, he said. To fail a child, it was beyond comprehending. It was not possible to fail a child. But he had done it. He had done the impossible thing.

I held him later, in the darkness, and told him the whole project is about failure. It has failure built in.

At the end of August, Sean brought me with him to Budapest to make up for the way my summer had been laid waste by loving a family man. We walked along the Danube and talked about what he was going to do, and he started to tell me about Evie.

When she was four, he said, Evie fell off a swing in the back garden in Enniskerry and they thought she had concussion. The au pair did not even see it happen, she just looked around to find the child gone, and the plastic seat of the swing still moving. Aileen arrived home to find Evie unwakeably asleep at half six in the evening. There was a trickle of dried blood coming down from the child’s mouth – not much – where she had bitten the inside of her cheek and her pants had been soiled.

‘I change her,’ said the au pair. And she shrugged, as though she was expected to live among savages.

When Sean walked in sometime later, he found his wife trembling in an armchair, Evie watching the ‘Teletubbies’ with a wan, important look on her face and the au pair upstairs, talking a mile a minute into the landline – presumably to her parents – in Spanish. Aileen had, in fact, slapped the girl but Sean was not to know this for some time: it was something he would discover later, when the arguments began. And though the room upstairs was always called the au pair’s room, this was despite the fact that there was no actual au pair after this, and from then on – from that moment on – his life was just.

‘What?’

‘Unexpected,’ he said.

And we turned from the river wall, where he had been watching the water below, and we walked on.

Apart from some speeding cyclists, the quays were quiet. We went across an iron bridge that was guarded by four beautiful iron birds. I said, ‘Bring her to Terenure.’

‘I can’t,’ he said.

‘Why not?’

‘I just can’t.’

‘Some Friday when I am away. Try it. Just bring her through the door.’

When we got back to Terenure, he looked around with an assessing eye. Then he went to the pink shop and bought her a pink duvet and a pink pillow. He also bought a matching net princess canopy for over the bed.

‘I couldn’t pass it,’ he said.

I said, ‘What age is she again?’

So he went back into town and swapped the pink bed linen for some with a chopped fruit design in acid-yellow and lime-green. He bought a lime-coloured dressing gown with purple trim, and oversized slippers with doggy faces on the toes.

He bought an iPod dock in the shape of a plastic pig and a little white chest of drawers to put it on. He bought a fish bowl and a goldfish, in a clear plastic bag. I said, ‘Who is going to feed the fish?’

‘I will,’ he said.

He gave it to me for a moment, and I held it up to the light. An orange fish, darting and stopping in its bright bubble of water.

Happiness in a bag.

Sean fed it for at least a month, every second day, faithfully, then one evening, I got a text: ‘check fish!!!!!!!!!!!’

So I feed it now, and it is still alive. A fish called Scratch. You can hear it when the house is still – actually hear it – nose down, picking up stones, sorting through the gravel. The first time she stayed over, Evie said the sound of it kept her awake all night, it was the noisiest fish on the planet.

Even Scratch is quiet, tonight. It has started to snow again and the tyre-welts on the street are softening into humps and mounds of white. The traffic lights work on. Upstairs, at the end of the landing, Evie’s room is a padded shrine of lime-green and acid-yellow, with pips, in the watermelon smiles of blood red. Her clothes, in the little white chest of drawers, tend more to black as the months pass, with rips in the right places, and skulls, and scrag- ends of tulle. Her father lets her wear what she likes. He talked about a carpet, so her sequinned hi-tops would have something to look good on, while she is away. It is like he has forgotten where he is.

‘A new carpet?’ I said.

‘Maybe a rug.’

So I hoover the rug.

I did not pay for the rug.

I nearly paid for it, mind you – that woman is bleeding him dry.

The rug has big coloured squares on it. It looks great. And I am not complaining. When it comes to housework,