The Forgotten Waltz Part 7

But he was fierce and preoccupied and lay afterwards staring at the ceiling. He put his hands over his face, and pushed them up and over his eyes, which opened again as soon as he was done.

If I had a picture of that time of our lives it would be this: Sean's face disappeared under his hands, his neck red to the collarbone, and the rest of his body strangely white. There is more if I want to think about it: the sepia blush of his private parts, the condom slack and yellow, his chest hair turning white. Or I can see his hands, which I loved, square tipped and intelligent, his eyes beneath them grey as a January sea.

He shifted over on to his side and stroked my face. He said, 'You're lovely, you know that?'

I said, 'You're not so bad yourself.'

Sean filed his report and the boss took it off home with him and nothing more happened; it might as well not have been written.

And so it went. Winter refused to shift into spring, and for a while it seemed as though we knew what we were doing. We met every second Friday and sometimes, if he could manage it, the Friday in-between.

At first, I chose my clothes with great care. But we were so seldom dressed; after a while I just wore things that would not get too creased when they ended up on the floor.

There is something so open about a hotel bed, the duvet kicked away; it was like a plinth, or a padded stage, and the shapes we made there were more sweet and anguished for seeming abstract, as we fitted together our jigsaw love, one way, or another, ending up one evening at dusk, with me spooned around the curl of his body on the bare sheet; his eyes, when I lifted my head to check, burning with the impossibility of it all.

When I think of those hotel rooms, I think of them after we left, and only the air knew what we had done. The door closed so simply behind us; the shape of our love in the room like some forgotten music, beautiful and gone.

After we made love which we always did first, for fear, almost, of becoming friends afterwards, when it was safe, Sean would talk to me about his life and I would be interested, looking at him beside me, dazed by the details. The corner of his mouth, for example, which was the precise location of his charm. This was where it happened; at the point where his lower lip doubled back from the upper, the angle I had kissed it where they divided and met. In its slow lift, the charm of a smile you do not trust, and like all the more for that.

Sean did not talk about Evie, or about his wife. He did not mention the house in Enniskerry, or the house overlooking the beach in Ballymoney, though he was happy to talk about anything else. More than happy. Sean loves to chat and I love to chat, and there were times when we caught hold of ourselves for getting on too well. It was in no one's interests (we both knew this) to have that kind of a good time.

We stayed until dark and each time the dark came later.

When Sean was young, he told me, he had a red setter that would f.e.c.k eggs from a local hen-house and his mouth was so soft, he could run back home without cracking the sh.e.l.l.

He talked about Boston where he did his MBA. Two years in America makes you an outsider for the rest of your life, he said: coming home was so strange, it was like arriving in from a long walk on a beautiful autumn day to find everyone still huddled around the fire.

He told me about his family: an older brother who annoyed him for no exact reason he had blown this brother out of the water, anyway, and this made him a bit sad. Winning was a lonely occupation for Sean though that never seemed to stop him. The brother was a secondary-school teacher who thought Sean was a sn.o.b. Sean said he was anything but he thought sn.o.bbery bad for business but still the brother used to say, So how're the ghastly middle cla.s.ses, and borrow things that he never returned; box sets, a cast-iron cooking pot, a buoyancy aid from the kayak down in Ballymoney. The brother was also, I discovered when I finally met him, six foot two, with a smile that curled up, not just on one side, but on the other too; he was Sean on steroids, and gentle with it. I thought, when he looked at me in his lovely, disappointed way, that now would be a good moment to go to the nearest convent, if such a thing still existed, and take the veil I mean, on my knees that man was so s.e.xy, he was the point of no return.

Anyway. According to Sean, there was this useless older brother, with his chain-store jackets and his fat wife. There was also a younger sister, much loved, who was an artist down in Kilkenny. There was a father some years dead, and a mother who was very much alive. I couldn't tell what the problem with the mother was, except it was clear that the wrong parent had died. The way he talked, you'd think she had actually done it; slipped something into her husband's tea, or taken a pillow to his sleeping face; the mere fact of her was enough to put the man in an early grave.

And this was interesting, because for the Moynihan girls and this was our dirty little secret it was the right parent who had died. Myself and Fiona might fall out over his memory from time to time we would argue what he was, or was not (violent, for example; Fiona would say, 'He was never violent'), but there was no doubt that we felt easier about the world, for the fact that our father was no longer in it. We loved him, of course, but we both knew that life was simpler now that he wasn't just 'out', or 'late', or even 'gone on a wander', but definitely and definitively dead, dead, dead. No coming back. No late-night key scratching for the lock.

I don't think I told Sean all that much about him, though he was quite interested in the lives we led after Daddy died: the Moynihan women, all dressed in black. He really liked the sisters thing, he wanted I don't know teenage details; snogging at the corner, disasters with underwear. He liked the idea of us growing up; myself and Fiona causing a stir, as he put it, in the pants of every boy in Terenure.

He talked about his mother quite a lot. I mean, it was clear I would never have to meet this woman, he could say whatever he liked. I would not have to listen the way you do to tales of tenderness or brutality, and then shake some old woman's hand, to discover that she was quite ordinary, really: a bit dimmer than you expected, or sharper, but surprisingly faded and human, though not always as I recall from other women I have heard described by naked men entirely nice. Anyway, he told me about his mother, the way Conor used to do and before that, Fergus, and before that, Axel from Trondheim, who called his mother 'Meen Moooor' and before that various others, though my virgin years were mostly spared. After s.e.x, that is when men talk about their mothers; before s.e.x they are a little affronted by the mention of her. As for daughters; my experience of sleeping with fathers is limited, but I suspect that daughters are only discussed when everyone is fully dressed. Daughters are discussed in the morning light. Or they are not discussed at all. I mean that they are completely irrelevant and completely forbidden, both at the same time.

Don't go there.

OK. Fine.

But I am becoming distracted from the subject of Margot, Sean's mother, the bank manager's wife and Sunday painter, who drank an actual martini every day at half past five, and was not a beauty, though she considered herself to have an Interesting Face.

'Thin?' I said.

'As a rake,' he said. 'Hands like,' and he made the same swirl and grab of the air, that I had seen and loved, that time in Montreux.

'Of course,' I said.

Sean's mother needed s.p.a.ce to grow as an artist and a human being, and Sean's father moved around every few years on his way up the ladder of the Bank of Ireland, so Sean was packed off to boarding school at the age of twelve and not a posh boarding school, at that, but the kiddy-fiddlers down in Wexford, where they beat the s.h.i.t out of you, and didn't even bother to teach you French.

But the school was fine no one touched him, one way or the other there was nothing terribly wrong with the school. It was the mother and her daubings, that was the problem; it was Margot and her 'needs'. The day he got his exam results she decided it was time that she too went to college, and he spent the entire summer dreading UCD where his mother, as he thought, would be holding court in a corner of the student bar. In the event, she decided on art college instead, then changed her mind and wanted to study counselling.

'And did she?'

'Did she what?' said Sean. 'Did she s.h.i.te.'

I thought she sounded quite interesting in a way. I was almost sorry I would never look her in the eye. Or that, if I did look her in the eye, she would not know who I was: 'What wonderful watercolours, Mrs Vallely. Don't tell me you did them all yourself.'

The affair, as I had learned to call it, progressed in its Friday pace. The s.e.x became less filthy and more fun, the silence filled with talk laughter even and this unsettled me. I might have preferred silence. Every normal thing he said reminded me that we were not normal. That we were only normal for the twelve foot by fourteen of a hotel room. Outside, in the open air, we would evaporate.

I b.u.mped into him one evening in March. I was with a client, a plastics guy from Bremen, with a Plattdeutsch accent like someone walking in shoes three sizes too big for him. It was not a glamorous evening. We ended up in Buswells for a nightcap and there was Sean with some suits in the corner, being the thing the way men can do that, somehow making money just by being himself.

I took a long route to the ladies in order to pa.s.s near him, and we had a funny, offhand little exchange. There he was. Dressed. Polite. He asked about work. I answered him. He turned back to the suits and I went on to the toilets, where I started to shake so badly I could not open my bag to get a brush. I stood for a moment, trying to breathe. Then I washed my hands, and dried them carefully, with the little white towel. I touched the mirror where my face was, I pressed quite hard on the gla.s.s, then I went back in to my plastics man.

I was thirty-two. I remembered that fact, as I sat back down and looked about me. Apart from the waitresses, I was the youngest person in the room.

After the Buswells incident, I became petulant, hard to manage, and so we played that game for a while; the mistress game. He bought me a Hermes scarf I mean, I am not a Hermes kind of girl he produced it from behind his back after we kissed, like a man in a fifties film, and I said, 'Did you keep the receipt?'

A fortnight later, he produced a bottle of perfume from the same magical spot. It was a light, harmless kind of scent called Rain, and indeed it smelled a little of the rain, starting soft and warm on your skin (is there a perfume called Skin, I wondered), then opening to an afterwash of fresh air. I liked it well enough, though the end note was a bit like that chemical waft you get from tumble dryer sheets, that is supposed to remind you of clothes hung out on the line.

I set it down on the bedside locker but Sean picked it up again and sprayed some on the back of my neck before undressing me and the s.e.x afterwards was hard to judge, somehow; a little intense and laboured on his part and, on mine, distracted at every turn by the artificial smell of rain in the room.

'Rain,' I said. 'What made you buy that?'

'I just thought you'd like it.'

'I do,' I said.

I am not a fake sort of person, but afterwards, in the smell of fabric freshener and sad, rainy days, I traced the lines around his eyes, and said, in a way that sounded fake, even to me.

'Have you done this before?'

It was the perfume that maddened me.

'Done what?'

I am not the kind of woman who wears Rain.

'All this. Have you done it before?'

'Well, you know,' he said.

When we met the next week, I wore my black suede boots with the fringe down the back seam, and I sat in the chair and crossed my legs and told him it was time to make an end. And after he agreed, and seduced me, and I resisted and then cried (just a little), he told me about the other girl, the first one. She was someone at work, he said. She was someone he had actually hired, at work, so go figure, but unbelievably it did not occur to him, except in a 'wouldn't mind' sort of way, and anyway he wasn't ...

'What?' I said.

He just wasn't free. That was the bottom line. But something about her, slowly, something about her just broke him, the way she was, she had a thing for nail varnish, these tiny hands and her nails were done in all these bubblegum colours, they looked like sweets.

'And?' I said.

Well she was twenty-two, which, you know, looks great, but it was the emotion that sideswiped him, it came from nowhere. And she was twenty-two. So he was in love he thought he was in love and he had forgotten how it is at that age but she was really hard work. She wasn't thick, exactly she still, G.o.d knows, went on about her B in Honours Maths but she gave a very good impression of thick, talking about herself all the time, obsessing about her thighs, throwing things at him if he said the wrong, nice thing about her thighs.

And she couldn't take her drink, so it was always a mess, she was always maundering on about her mother or her horrible father, who turned out to be a guy Sean knew, actually, and she was fighting with taxi men and roaring in the street, so she had him by the b.a.l.l.s, this crazy woman, he couldn't even sack her, he couldn't take the risk. And when it was finally over, he thought: so that's it. That was his chance, his fling. That was his big romance.

I waited for the next line.

'Until I met you.'

And we made love for a second time. I was very upset, although I did not show it. I was upset because I felt so lonely, all the way through.

I had taken to ringing his home number at night, and this was a disastrous thing to do. Disastrous to want it so badly; the sound of his voice in the middle of a long fortnight, although it might not have been his voice exactly I was looking for. This was me ringing the landline to Enniskerry, the one I had seen nesting on the console table in the hall, and on the kitchen wall, and by the marriage bed. It was answered somewhere in the ordinary life of the house: Aileen with bleach foaming on her upper lip, Evie at the kitchen table, doing her homework, Sean, apparently, elsewhere. The second or third time, Aileen did not cut the connection. She waited, and the silences of her life filled the earpiece, as I heard the nearness of her breath, and she felt the nearness of mine.

I zipped my calves back into the boots, holding my legs high, one after the other, to avoid the fringe. Sean sat on the edge of the bed putting in his cufflinks. He was wearing a pink shirt, impossibly pale. His jacket was hung over the back of the chair. He did not mention the phone calls. He bent down to lace up his plain, black shoes.

He said, 'You should never do this with someone you should never expose yourself to someone like this unless they have a lot to lose.'

I ran home to him that day. I ran home to my husband, to his wise brown eyes that were not, in fact, wise, and to his big, warm body that had not kept me from the cold.

On Sat.u.r.day night I cracked open a bottle of wine and we watched 'The Wire' on box set, and after that we drank another bottle, despite which I was numb, in his arms, with the thought of all I had lost: the movement of his hand was just a movement, his tongue was an actual tongue. I had killed it; my best thing. The guilt, when it finally hit, was astonishing.

Dance Me to the End of Love IN THE MIDDLE of April Sean was guest speaker at some motivational golfing weekend in Sligo and we had two days together I can't remember what lie I told before I got on the train two days, and one whole night, to end the affair; to strangle it and beat it about the head, to throw it in a shallow grave and go home.

Sean picked me up at the station (Evie's fluffy earm.u.f.fs abandoned on the back seat), and brought me out to a hotel, far from the golfers, on the outskirts of town.

The hotel was actually a converted asylum, ma.s.sive, and grey. There were two Gothic chapels on either end of the car park, one smaller than the other.

'Protestant and Catholic maybe,' said Sean. Or staff and patients. But I said it was men one side and women the other. We looked at them when we got out of the car and thought about it: stolen glances across the forecourt. It was all there: the sackcloth, the raving, thwarted love.

'Jesus,' said Sean. 'It's the County Home.'

Then we walked into reception and found ourselves in the middle of two different hen parties, one in black T-shirts with magenta-coloured feather boas, another in white T-shirts with a pink slogan on the front. The slogan said: 'Aunt Maggie is on the Farm'.

I turned to pull a face at Sean but he was gone. Disappeared. I couldn't see him anywhere. In my foolishness I spun around in the hotel foyer, and then back again while the hen parties milled around in front of the desk. I finally pulled out my phone, to find a text that said, 'Sign in. Send no, will fllw'.

Something, or someone, had spooked him. And so I queued, the only woman in the place who wasn't wearing pink, and I panicked about my credit card, which had my name on it, which would, one day, turn into a credit-card bill, and I thought how resentment is the one true opposite of desire.

The room was impossible to find. I had to walk miles of corridor, go up in one lift, and down in a different one. The walls were hung with paintings done to match the carpet; an increasingly sickening series of abstracts in cream and maroon that looked like they came out of the same two pots of paint; the inmates' revenge. The room was in fact in the old nurses' quarters: a separate, modern building connected by a walkway to the main hotel, with the feeling along the length of it of going from madness to your dinner, and back again. I didn't know if these ghosts were any easier to handle, as they crept with naggins of vodka in their white pockets to trysts with doctors or orderlies, or with patients who were handsome and sad. A swirl of magenta feathers danced over the carpet as I pa.s.sed, while at the end of the corridor some ancient echo asked me what I thought I was doing out of bounds at that hour, and in those high heels.

When I got up to the room, Sean was already lurking by the door.

'How did you manage that?' I said.

'Manage what?' Apparently it was all easy to find, from the outside.

We made love as soon as we saw the bed and then wandered the rooms it was actually a family suite with a living room and kitchenette: dark wood, stripy cushions. Sean looked different there, more domestic, and used.

It was the end, I knew that. I think we both knew.

That afternoon, we drove to Rosses Point and kissed on the beach. The tiny flesh of his lips in front of that great ocean and, when he opened his mouth, it was like diving in.

Driving back along the coast road, Sean swung in through the gates of a house with a For Sale sign outside.

'Just curious,' he said, as he went up the driveway, and we parked right in front of their lives, whoever these people were, in their eighties dormer with its lawn running down to the sea.

They had a trampoline in the garden, and a separate garage it looked nicer than the house actually with room for two cars.

A silhouette paused in front of the window: a woman, checking us out.

'Do you want to buy it?' I said.

'Do I want to buy it?' Which was another thing that annoyed me about him, the way he liked to deadpan what I just said. 'Giving it the cold read' as he called it.

'Are you interested in buying the house?'

'Always, my love,' he said. 'Always.'

My love.

We stayed for five long minutes, maybe more. At one stage he got out of the car and walked to the gap between the house and the garage, a.s.sessing the view down to the sea. Then he walked towards the car, backwards, checking the gutters as he came.

'OK,' he said.

And we left the woman with her trampoline and her swing set, that did not have the gra.s.s rubbed away beneath it, and to her life by the sea.

I kept checking my phone. No one knew where I was, and I felt cut loose abandoned almost. I spent the entire time I was there, fantasising the call; the one I might get from Conor; the one from my mother's mobile that I answer, only to hear a stranger's voice at the other end. In fact, no one missed me, or wanted me; the phone stayed dead. It was just Sligo working its voodoo as we slid along the lost lanes, in the flat plain between Ben Bulben and the sea.

At Glencar Lake, he recited Yeats to me, 'Come away oh human child, to the waters and the wild.' Then we parked beyond the waterfall, and he pushed his seat back, and there was something about him, the expansive way he sat, I knew he wanted me to get up to some badness, that this would be a treat, what with the scenery and the poetry and the fact that we were in his very own, very nice car. And I thought, this can not be true. This man can not want me to blow him, in daylight, in a public car park. This man whoever he is.

I opened the glove compartment and looked at the CDs.

'Guillemots! Is this yours?'

'Yeah,' he said.

And he drove back to the hotel too fast, where I failed to seduce him on my way to the shower and he failed to seduce me on my way out of it. And on it went. We risked a meal in town, and hated it. Then we came back and fought. I sat on the bed and cried. I said, 'Why are you so horrible to me?'

He paused. He walked to the window and pulled back the curtain to watch the darkness, or his own reflection in front of the darkness. Then he let the curtain drop.

'Gina,' he said slowly, like he was explaining something it had taken him a while to understand. 'We don't really know each other.'

Which didn't stop us acting like we did. We had four whole rooms to do it in, I could slam a cupboard door in the kitchenette, he could clear his throat while sitting on the side of the bed to undo his shoes. I could drink a gla.s.s of wine at the table while he shook out the newspaper on the sofa behind me. He could stand at the bedroom window and look out at the car park while I shifted through the stations on the remote control. We could move about like this: as though we had a claim on each other, as though we were intimate. But we were only playing at these things. I knew that too. The way we leaned or sat, or directed our gaze; the gestures and arrangements we made of ourselves: living room, bedroom, bathroom, hall. And then later when we went to bed, the same play with pillow and duvet, turning towards or away from each other, and even our breathing a kind of demonstration.

In the darkness, something gave.

Sean said his marriage was unbearable. Not over but 'unbearable'.

'You have no idea,' he said.