while a tight little herd of nine-year-old girls thundered about the house, trailed by one forlorn little brother.
Joan complained of being tired, took off her too-tight shoes, and fell asleep in an armchair. When she woke, she was agitated by the fact she had nodded off.
‘Did I say anything?’ then laughed at herself for her consternation.
She was right not to trust us. I had taken a photo of her, a secret one, ‘My mother, asleep’. I could not help myself.
I was worried sometimes by the fact that she was on her own in Terenure, we all were – her battalions of friends and lost causes notwithstanding – but our mother did not look lonely in her sleep, even though she was, in a way, ‘alone’. She looked like someone who is loved.
I might be biased. The picture looms on my screensaver and then cross fades but it is never as lovely as I remember her, that day. The older you get the less you dream they say but, absent as she was and utterly still, my mother looked, by some indistinguishable sweetness, very much alive.
And young. She was fifty-nine years old.
When she woke up, all fussed, we laughed and told her she had snored. Then Jack was sent upstairs for saying, ‘Granny farted in her sleep. Granny farted.’
‘You always have to push it,’ shouted Fiona at his busy little legs as they disappeared above her, while Joan, who was genuinely shocked as well as amused, said, ‘It’s only harmless. Would you leave the child.’
I had a mild interest in Evie that day – seeing as I had slept with her father, don’t you know – but I couldn’t figure out which one she was. The girls Megan had invited were ridiculously large and hard to fathom. They wore oversized party dresses, or funky tops; two at least were in tracksuit bottoms – you couldn’t even tell who they thought they were. These people had, besides, no interest in us, they had each other to love; the way they looked at each other was so passionate and shy.
I set out the plates with the real linen napkins that Fiona handed me, and the real glasses and metal cutlery. I put a jug of sparkling water on the table and another of orange juice; all of which I thought silly. These were big, uncomfortable children, not grown-ups – throw a bag of tortilla chips at them, I thought, and retire.
‘Who wants lasagne?’
One girl, a tall, soft creature called Saoirse, raised her hand. She was stuffed into a pink satin dress that a five-year-old might choose, and under her arm was a haze of golden-red hair.
I glanced at Fiona. She rolled her eyes in dread.
These children weren’t growing, so much as being replaced.
‘Come and eat!’
It troubled me quite a bit, actually – the hair. It looked beautiful, when it should have been disgusting. And it was twice as disgusting as it should have been, when you looked up from it to the big pudding-face of the child. I should get out more, I thought – this can not be as strange as I think it is. And I also thought,
Then I saw Evie. She revealed herself with a flash of her father’s too-beautiful eyes. It happened when she looked straight at me, like the opening of a hidden door. She was still a bit puppyish around the chest, but the fat was mostly gone. And something else had changed – I mean, apart from everything, because everything had changed – but something essential had shifted. She looked happy. Or not happy so much as connected, for once. Not so scared.
It made me uneasy, the idea that she used to be afraid. I wondered what kind of man I had slept with – how many months ago now? – and would he arrive in through the door. Three months. It was three months since Montreux and I never wanted to lay eyes on Sean Vallely again. I wasn’t just mortified, I was actually averse; the thought of speaking to him was slightly soiling, like putting on used clothes after you’ve had a shower.
Even so, I was caught by his daughter. I watched her, as though she might hold some key to this man, whose eyes seemed to make more sense on her face than they did on his own; the long black lashes just the same, the same sea-grey with a pale sunburst around the pupil, of white or gold.
I had nothing to say to her.
‘Would you like some juice?’ I asked, as the girls gathered round the table for lasagne and coleslaw – not a pink marshmallow in sight.
‘Yes please.’
‘Oh look at that great hair,’ I touched her black curls, which pleased her. ‘Do you dry it yourself?’
She was moist with sweat. They all were.
‘Sometimes,’ she said.
‘Or your Mum?’
‘If I got straightener, it would be all the way down my back.’
‘Well,’ I said. By which I meant, ‘Time enough.’
‘Sometimes my Dad does it,’ she said. But this was too intimate for me, and I had to move away.
After the cake and candles, I took out my iPod and found myself in the middle of a sudden clamour of tweenies, demanding Justin Timberlake.
‘Hang on,’ I said, and obliged the white bud of the earpiece into Evie’s ear. As soon as the music came through, they ran off, grabbing for the other earpiece, switching tracks, turning the dial.
‘Hey hey hey!’ said Fiona, before being diverted by the sound of the doorbell.
The party was over. I hung back while the parents came and, one after another, the children were called away. In the middle of the confusion, the sound of his voice in the hall brought an unexpected pang, and I turned to pick up wrapping paper at the far end of the room.
‘Evie!’
He had arrived in the doorway. I was starting to run out of things to clear off the floor when I sensed Evie standing beside me – a little too close, the way children do.
‘Just give it back,’ said Sean’s voice, though this was what she was already doing; wrapping the wires around the iPod, as she held it out towards me.
‘Thank you, Gina,’ she said.
Gina, no less.
‘You’re welcome,’ I said.
‘Good girl.’
Sean’s voice was so cold, it was clear what he really wanted to say. He wanted to say, ‘Please step away from my child,’ and this was very unfair. It was so unfair, that I turned and looked straight at him.
‘Oh, hello,’ I said.
He looked just like himself.
‘Come on,’ he said, ushering Evie through the doorway. The rudeness was astonishing. But he faltered and turned back for a moment, and the look he gave me then was so mute, so full of things I could not understand, that I almost forgave him.
I tried to keep it at bay, and failed. When the last small guest was gone and the rubbish bag full of packaging and uneaten lasagne the thought of him – the fact of him – happened in my chest, like a distant disaster. Something snapped or was broken. And I did not know how bad the damage was.
My hands, as they picked up the heavy jug Fiona used for juice, remembered the solid span of his waist under them that night in Montreux. What was it he had said again? ‘You have lovely skin.’ It seemed a bit all-purpose, at the time. ‘So soft.’ Why did men need to persuade themselves? Why did they have to have you, and make you up at the same time?
This, I asked myself, rather foolishly, while holding the thick glass jug in Fiona’s open-plan kitchen in Enniskerry, standing on her new limestone floor (the old terracotta floor was ‘all wrong’ apparently). I thought about the difference between one man and another when you have your eyes closed. And I said to myself that the difference was enormous. There was no difference greater than the difference between two men when you have your eyes closed. And in my head I dropped the jug and was devastated by its fall. Fiona was loading the dishwasher. Joan was taking the plates out again and rinsing them under the tap. Megan and Jack had disappeared. I could feel it, still there under my hands: thick blown glass with swirls, in the base, of cobalt blue. Such a beautiful jug. And then I let it go.
She had fits, apparently. This is what Fiona told me when she had cleared the last shards of glass, not just with a brush but also with the Hoover, because she didn’t care about the jug so much as the danger to her children’s
