The Forgotten Waltz

The day has been warm and I have had a lot of Chardonnay. I am recently back from Australia. I am in love and I am working really hard at the whole Enniskerry thing with the neighbours and the kids. So the man who is standing at the bottom of the garden is just a little rip in the fabric of my life. I can stitch it all up again, if he does not turn around.

Sean stands at the window in his pyjamas, with the frost flowering across the window. Or he stands at the window in the summer light and his naked back is a puzzle of muscle and bone – he still looks like a young man, from behind – and I want to whisper, Turn around.

Or, Don’t turn around.

The weeks I spent waiting for his call, the months I spent waiting for him to leave Aileen. The loneliness of it was, in its own way, fantastic. I lived with it, and danced with it. I brought it to a kind of perfection the Christmas before last, just a few months before he went clear.

The house in Terenure had been on the market four months already, and a flood of people had been through the place, opening cupboards, pulling up the corners of carpets, sniffing the air. My living room, the sofa where I sat, my mother’s bed, were all – they still are – on the internet for anyone to click on and dismiss: the stairs we slid down on our bellies, the dark bedroom over the garage, the stain around the light switch. I found a discussion board online where they were laughing at the price – but other than that, it was hard to know what people thought. A single bidder who might have been an investor made a lot of fuss but didn’t come through. A married couple with kids offered low, and then faded. And so it was Christmas. My father was not there to ruin the day. My mother was not there to make it all better. My sister was not speaking to me. My lover was in the cold bosom of his family, wearing a paper hat.

I thought about him all day: his daughter sitting at his feet, writing her first ever email, Hello Daddy! His wife in the kitchen, her hair drooping in the steam from the brussels sprouts. His wretched mother looking about her with a glittering eye.

I had a pathetic little tree in the corner of the living room, a plastic thing you plug in, with light running to the tips of its fibre-optic needles. I made myself a sandwich for lunch and drank a cup of tea. I thought about leaving the house but I just couldn’t. There was traffic on the road outside, but they were all travelling to each other: even the taxi men had their wives beside them and their children in the back seat.

There were times, in the last years of my mother’s life, when she could not walk out the front door, and on that day, moving from room to room, I think I understood why. Inside was unbearable, and outside beyond my imagining.

I finally drove into town around two o’clock; where I abandoned the car on a set of double yellow lines. In the windows of the Shelbourne, you could see the respectable flotsam tucking into their hotel turkey, or lifting their heads to look out on deserted streets. I walked past the locked gates of Stephen’s Green, down the empty maw of Grafton Street, the mannequins in the shop windows frozen as if to say: this is it! this is the day! I thought, if I fell down in the road, there would be no one to find me until morning. By the wall of Trinity, I passed a tall couple who looked like tourists. They turned their faces as I walked by, chiming, Happy Christmas, Happy Christmas, and I felt it keenly; the pure shame of it. I did not exist. I would end up breaking windows, just to show that I was real. I would shout his name: my lover who could not risk – he could not risk it! – a text or a call.

I didn’t break any windows, of course. I made my way back to the car and drove home. When I checked my phone, I found a message from Fiona. It read, ‘Happy Christmas, xxxxxx yr sis’ and it made me cry.

In fact something did come through from Sean about seven o’clock. It said, ‘Check the shed’ where I found a bunch of roses and a slender half-bottle of Canadian ice-wine. And despite the fact that I do not really drink anymore, I ended up drinking the lot of it, following the last sweet drops with a skull-splitting dose of whiskey. None of it was right – the perfect drink does exist, but it is never, somehow, the one you have in your hand. I worked on, nonetheless, until I was steady and empty and clean. The next day I was worried I had made a noise sitting there; some keening, lowing, honk of pain, but I am pretty sure I kept silent, and that when the day was over, the season slaughtered, I managed, with some dignity, to rise and turn and walk upstairs to bed.

I woke up late on Stephen’s Day with the headache I so richly deserved and, after a breakfast of tea and Christmas pudding, I got in the car and crawled out to Fiona’s house in Enniskerry. I wept a bit as I drove, and put on the windscreen wipers by accident. I did not call beforehand. I did not know what to say.

It was three o’clock when I arrived and darkness was already in the air. I parked for a moment and saw no sign of life, but my nephew Jack was in the front room and he opened the door before I had the chance to knock. He stared me up and down, wondering how to respond to the amazing fact that I was real. Then he decided on indifference.

‘Hi,’ he said.

‘Hi Jack.’ He hung on to the side of the door, staring at me through the gap.

‘Where’s your Mum?’

‘She’s upstairs having a cuddle.’

‘Right.’

There seemed very little I could say to this, but he had already turned and run back into the front room. The door was still open, so I pushed through into the hall and closed it quietly behind me.

‘And where’s your sister?’ I said, carefully. ‘Out.’

‘And what are you doing?’

‘I’m writing a book,’ he said.

He was on his knees in the living room. I thought he might tell me more about it, but he just flopped back down on to the floor and pulled the pages of his copy book into the crook of his arm. He stuck his tongue out of the corner of his mouth and wrote: bum in the air, cheek on the page, eyes inches away from the pen’s moving tip.

I sat and watched him for what seemed like a long time. The house was entirely silent. I was about to ask him more questions, when I heard someone come downstairs and go into the back of the house. It was Fiona, I saw her through the connecting doors. She was wearing her dressing gown and she looked, I thought, distinctly rested, you might almost say ‘refreshed’. She put the kettle on, then saw me and took fright.

‘How long have you been here?’

‘I just arrived,’ I said.

‘Jack, you should always tell me if there’s someone at the door. Always, all right?’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said trying to protect him from her.

‘Do you hear me, Jack?’

‘All right.’

She looked at me and gave a crooked smile.

‘You want some tea?’

‘We need to talk about the house,’ I said later when the relief hit.

‘Yeah. The house,’ she said, and waved a depressed hand in the air. And to be fair to Fiona, she has never been greedy in that way.

‘Did I tell you, we sold the place in Brittas?’

‘No.’

‘Well we did. I’m telling you, nothing is shifting over a million. Nothing. Shay says.’

‘Really?’ I said.

‘Nothing being built. Not one brick, he says, on another brick, this year. Not one.’

‘Well it was too mad,’ I said. ‘Wasn’t it?’

‘You think?’

And we listen to it for a moment; the rumour of money withering out of the walls and floors and out of the granite kitchen countertops, turning them back to bricks and rubble and stone.

Shay came downstairs, freshly showered and full of himself, in his polo shirt and jeans.

‘Gina!’ he said, like we were old golfing buddies too long away from the tees. Then he left, at speed, in order to pick up Megan. Fiona started putting a salad together on the kitchen island and I said it was over between myself and Sean. Just in case she wanted to know. Just in case she was interested.

‘Finished,’ I said. I did not want to see him again. He could go back to his wife.

‘What do you mean “go back”?’ said Fiona. ‘He never left.’

‘Whatever.’