bare feet. Evie, she said, had fits. Fiona had never actually seen it happen, though for a few years they were all on red alert. The child’s mother was driven frantic; had tried everything, from consultants to – whatever – homeopathic magnets.
‘She looked all right to me,’ I said.
‘No, she’s fine now,’ said Fiona. ‘I think she’s fine.’
‘She’s a funny little person,’ I said.
‘Is she? I don’t know. I mean, everyone was so worried about her. But I don’t know.’
‘God. Poor Sean,’ I said.
She gave me a look, exaggeratedly blank.
‘Up to a point,’ she said.
I wanted to know what she meant by that, but she had already turned away.
I watched Megan later, sprawled on the sofa, so healthy and large. Our mother was freshening up. Jack was stuck into his Nintendo. I was waiting to leave. We were all waiting, perhaps, for Shay to come home. The evening had come adrift.
‘So birthday girl,’ said Fiona, sitting down and hugging her daughter to her. ‘How does it feel to be nine?’
‘Good,’ said Megan.
We sat and pretended to watch the telly. Our mother spends such a long time in the bathroom, it used to make us anxious; wondering what she was up to in there, and when she would emerge. Meanwhile, Megan brushed her own mother’s hair back from her face, admired an earring, gave it a tug.
‘Careful.’
And the wrangle began: Megan stretching her mother’s lips into a painful smile, pulling her eyelids back into slits, while Fiona just looked at her and refused to be annoyed. They had always been like this, locked in something that wasn’t exactly love, and not quite war.
‘Leave your mother alone, Megan,’ I said. ‘You’re nine, now.’
And Fiona said, ‘Hah!’
‘Only another twenty years to go,’ said Joan. She was standing behind us in her summer trench coat and silk scarf, her mirror work done – everything the same as before, except that tiny, crucial bit better. The usual miracle.
She looked at me.
‘Will we go?’
I may be getting things in the wrong order here.
I was not yet in love with Sean. Though, at any of those moments, I might have fallen in love with him. Any of them. The first moment in the garden, by the fence that wasn’t there. The time he sat in the fold-up chair on the caravan site in Brittas Bay, or went to sit, and everything slowed to a standstill except us two. I could have fallen in love with him in a hotel corridor in Switzerland, when the lock whirred and he stayed to kiss me instead of obliging me through the door.
But I did not love him. I was slightly repulsed by him, in fact. I mean I had already slept with this man, what else was there to be done with him?
If you asked me now, of course, I would say I was crazy about him from that first glance, I was in love with his hands as I watched them move in Montreux, I was in love with some other thing from the time he ushered Evie away from me and turned back in the hall – his particular sadness, whatever it might be. So don’t ask me when this happened, or that happened. Before or after seems beside the point. As far as I am concerned they were happening all along.
And there are things I have forgotten to mention – the beauty of the children on the beach in Brittas that day seems important now, in a way I did not realise then. Perhaps it is the fact that Evie was not well, and I did not know it, but the beauty of the children matters in some way I do not understand.
Still, I can’t be too bothered here, with chronology. The idea that if you tell it, one thing after another, then everything will make sense.
It doesn’t make sense.
My mother had that old-fashioned thing, an easy death. But not yet.
And I was in love with Sean, but not as far as I knew. Not yet.
I was leaving my husband, though I might have already left him. We might have never been together – all those times, when we thought we were. When he turned and smiled at me, at the top of the aisle in Terenure church. When he dived below me, so deep you could see the water between us thickening to green.
There are dates I can be sure of, certainly, but they are not the important ones. I can’t remember the day – the hour – when Joan’s ‘poor form’ became ‘depression’, for example, or when the depression turned into something physical and harder to name. There must have been a moment, or an accumulation of moments, when we stopped listening to the words she said, and started listening to the way she said them. There must have been a day when we stopped listening to her at all – one single split second, when she changed from being our mother,
‘How are you, darling? All right?’
I was busy of course – I mean, we were all busy – but if I had recognised that moment then things might have been different. If I had been able to see her, instead of being surrounded by her, my beautiful mother, then she might still be alive.
There are some things I am sure of.
What happened, I mean the verifiable truth, reconstructible through emails here on my computer, calendar entries, phone calls made and received, was that, yes, undoubtedly, a few weeks after Megan’s party, I recommended Sean, and Sean’s consultancy, when we wanted to restructure in Dublin before setting up in Poland. I did it without hesitation; he was, undoubtedly the best person for the job.
All that is certain.
Slightly less certain is the fact that Conor and I had, for a while, perhaps around this time, excessive and unfriendly sex, in our sanctioned – blessed even – marriage bed.
But when it comes to Conor, I really can’t go into it. I mean I can’t even be bothered to remember what happened when; I am not going to map our decline. There is nothing more sordid, if you ask me, than the details.
Was the sex bad then, or was it just bad after I had started sleeping with Sean?
Bad is not the word for it.
The sex was, around this time, a little too interesting, even for me. But it was also beside the point – and maybe this is the interesting thing, that, in a story that is supposed to be about sleeping with one man or another, our bodies did not always play the game in the expected way.
But it is probably true that, around this time, we were actively thinking, or pretending to think, about starting a baby. One night, after a friend’s wedding in Galway and much dancing, when I had forgotten to pack the pill and Conor said, ‘What the hell.’
I can’t remember what it was like exactly, but I do remember that I did not like it. Apart from anything else, the sex was terrible, it was not like sex at all.
‘He’s fucking my life,’ I kept thinking. ‘He’s fucking my entire life.’
In These Shoes?
RATHLIN COMMUNICATIONS PUTS European companies on the English-language web. That’s what we do. But we make it look like fun.
Our office is all stripped brickwork with industrial skylights, and there is a discreet feel to the way the space is managed, an illusion of privacy which, as anyone who works in open-plan will know, just makes it worse – the paranoia, I mean. The best thing about the place is the plants contract, which is held by the boss’s otherwise challenged daughter. She comes in each morning to do the foliage, which is everywhere and fabulous, from the bougainvillaea going up the ironwork to the ivy cladding the bathroom walls. The Danes who did the refurbishment put in irrigation the way you might do the wiring so the place is a thicket, and though I am cynical about these
