Dermot Bolger - Temptation

The babysitter was due at eight. Alison hoped it wouldn’t be one of those teenage girls it was impossible to get a word from. The usual bedtime arguments were still an hour away. For now Sheila was happy colouring and Peadar had fallen into reluctant conversation at the table where the waiters were pouring more sherry. She could tell by the way he held the sherry glasses, poised to flee back to her. The tall man in the suit beside him laughed at what Peadar obviously hoped was a closing remark.

‘Yes, yes,’ she heard the man’s booming voice agree. ‘It’s great to forget the pressures of work and relax. So tell me, what do you do?’

Peadar caught her glance and discreetly threw his eyes to heaven. She knew he was too polite to disentangle himself from the conversation and also that, like a mother with a first child, he would soon begin to talk about the school extension. She didn’t mind. She was enjoying these rare moments alone. Two elderly couples on the sofas beside her were making friends. A waitress bent to offer her a tray of hors d’oeuvres. She finished her first sherry and looked around. Other hotels might have leisure centres and chefs that were equally good, but she had never seen anywhere to match Fitzgerald’s paintings. And they weren’t just the safe landscapes you saw elsewhere. Here paintings accosted you; some stunning, many unfathomable but every one challenging. She had grown to know the names by now: Le Broquy, Crozier, Nora McGuinness, Patrick Collins and fantastical childhood landscapes by Martin Gale that the boys loved to stare at.

Sheila pulled at her sleeve for attention, holding up a page from her colouring book streaked almost entirely with red crayon. Alison praised it and found her another page to colour. She looked up and a face caught her attention, although she wasn’t sure why. It had a disconcerting familiarity, yet the man it belonged to looked somehow out of place. He leaned down, replying to some remark from a couple in their fifties seated beside the piano player.

She recognised them as the Bennetts. They were childless, Scottish and superb dancers. They came for five nights at Easter and another week in October and entered every competition. Each Thursday night at prizegiving they walked across the dance floor to receive Fitzgerald’s mugs and plates for table tennis, indoor bowls and crazy golf. She wondered what they did with their endless supply of crockery and liked to imagine Mrs Bennett having tantrums, smashing things, while the petite Mr Bennett screamed, ‘No, dear, please, not the table quiz mug!’

Mrs Bennett looked up and waved in recognition. Alison smiled back as both Mr Bennett and the man glanced in her direction. The man’s gaze perturbed her. There was something not right about him, like a photo–fit that didn’t match. His skin seemed younger than his eyes. She couldn’t explain why this bothered her. There were so many faces you saw here year after year. Nobody could expect to remember them all. She looked away, feigning great interest in Sheila’s colouring, yet aware that the man was leaving the Bennetts and walking towards her. He even seemed to slow down as she kept her head buried over her daughter’s colouring book, then he strolled on, past Mr Diekhoff and his son, to wherever he had parked his own wife.

Mr Diekhoff had been coming here from Cologne for twenty–five years, ever since his son, Heinrich, was four. Alison watched the Down’s Syndrome boy sit quietly beside his widowed father. Strictly speaking he wasn’t a boy, but she couldn’t think of him as approaching thirty, no more than she could bear to imagine his life if he outlived his father. Heinrich’s presence here – politely asking women he knew for one dance and perpetually winning the crazy golf competition – was another talisman of her holiday. It was fifteen years since his mother had died, but his father resolutely continued this annual trip to the hotel he had discovered as a young hitchhiker. Alison knew he came for Heinrich’s sake more than his own – although he had his friends among the regulars here. He sensed her glance at him and smiled in greeting. She felt the weight of responsibility in his eyes as Heinrich waved to her cheerfully.

Peadar finally returned with the sherries, having extracted himself from the man’s company. ‘What a bore,’ he said. ‘An RTE producer. You know the type who stop strangers on the street when they can’t find anyone else to argue with.’

She looked around, meaning to ask Peadar if he recognised the stranger, when somebody else caught her attention.

‘The bastard,’ she hissed, making Peadar look at her in surprise. She nodded towards a sofa near the reception desk where a bearded man was smoking and enjoying a whiskey while his teenage daughters sulked over the orange juices before them.

‘Do we know him?’ Peadar asked.

‘He’s the bastard in the BMW who nearly got us killed. Do you not remember the pusses on those two girls gawking out the window?’

The bearded man stared directly back and raised his glass as if in a toast, although Alison couldn’t be sure if he recognised them. She had already risen when Peadar grabbed her arm.

‘Where’re you going?’

‘To throw my sherry over the smug bastard.’

‘Ah, Jaysus, please don’t,’ Peadar cajoled. ‘It will take me half an hour to get you another one if that RTE arsehole spots me going back up to the table.’

‘I’m serious.’

The man seemed to be watching, amused and impervious to what was going on. His daughters had even forgotten to look bored.

‘For God’s sake, Alison, what’s the point? Don’t spoil our holiday. You know you’re like a bag of cats on the first night here anyway.’

Danny and Shane appeared in the foyer, checking they were still there. Sheila wanted Alison to praise her colouring. Alison sat back angrily, but Peadar was right. He was always bloody right, especially when it came to her losing her temper. And she did find it hard to relax on the first night here, from a cocktail of memory and guilt.

Every year they came here the menu changed but some traditional Fitzgerald recipes remained the same. She remembered her parents uneasily stirring the green nettle and cognac soup that was still served here. And how she herself had half expected to be stung as she raised the soup spoon to her lips. Nettle soup to them was something from the famine, the poorest of the poor boiling weeds for nourishment. They couldn’t have been more shocked if the main course had consisted of the old recipe of potatoes mashed with blood from a cut made in a cow’s leg. As it was, they had been taken aback by the litany of penitent fish dishes even though it wasn’t a Friday.

Her parents had been perpetually ill at ease on that holiday, her mother making the beds each morning and frantically tidying up before the cleaners came in. They had sat in armchairs in the Slaney Room, talking mainly to the staff and just watching other guests pass by. She had only ever seen them this uncomfortable again whenever they were forced to meet Peadar’s parents. They had not fitted in here and neither had she. The other children tolerated her mainly for her novelty value, making her repeat phrases in her Waterford accent. Only the Newry boy had treated her differently, thrown together by them being the only two children not from Dublin.

It perturbed her every time she returned, just how well she fitted in here now, how indistinguishable her children were from the others running in and out of the television room. The same Dublin accents, with hardly a trace of her Waterford or Peadar’s Galway brogue – not that she herself had much of an accent left. Her parents would be proud. Yet this never stopped her from imagining them, perched on a sofa in this foyer, speaking in whispers and not recognising the daughter who had left them behind in trying to meet the expectations of her in–laws.