Anne Enright - The Forgotten Waltz

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 Seán, 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, Oh Joan, would you ever … and turned into the harmless object of our concern.

‘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 Seán, and Seán’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 Seán?

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.’

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 things (the idea that a few plants make us more ‘green’) I even voted for canaries, at some meeting, only to be outvoted on the grounds of canary shit.

It is the kind of place where the lift is big enough to bring your bike upstairs, and the coffee is all fair trade. There is an amount of sex in the air, I suppose, but we’re not that pushed. We’re all pretty young. We are big on ideas: the guys who have a bed in their office are sad techie bastards who really do fold them out for a sleep.

He was sitting in the meeting room, that first morning. I saw him through the glass wall before he saw me and I couldn’t think what was wrong with him. He was using a fountain pen – but that was all right, wasn’t it? – his BlackBerry was neatly displayed on the table beside him. The suit was maybe a bit sharp, his tie a bit restrained – but I mean, he’s a consultant, he is supposed to wear a suit. Maybe it was his hair, which seemed straighter than before, and flopped forward. Had he dyed it? There was, at least, an amount of gel involved. He looked up from under this youthful mop as I walked in and he said, ‘Hello, you.’

‘Hi.’

He had a pair of Ray-Bans hooked on to the idle forefinger of his left hand.

‘You got here,’ I said.

He let the glasses swing.

‘So it would appear.’

He seemed so sure we would sleep together that I decided against it on the spot, or wished, at least, for darkness to take it away, this unexpected weakness he had for props.

I sat down, smiled neatly, and said, ‘So, how would you like to be introduced?’

The room filled and the meeting went ahead and it was all very much as you might expect. There was the usual blather from Frank, who was being edged out to blather elsewhere. This was followed by a little posturing from my young colleagues, David and Fiachra, who were maddened by the potential gap. The boss was excited; you could tell he was excited because he seemed so bored. And I – well, I, as ever, smiled, facilitated, and kept clear, because I was the girl who would win in the end, despite the fact that girls so rarely do.

Seán looked from one speaker to the next, asked some questions, and kept his opinions to himself. This surprised me a little. I had expected more of the flamboyance we saw at the whiteboard in Montreux, but Seán at work – I have always loved Seán at work – used no more energy than was needful. It reminded me a little of Evie, this ability he had to be simple, in the middle of much fuss. So I managed to forget the hair gel and the horrible architect’s watch, and I just looked at him thinking, for a while; his grey eyes moving from one person to the next. And – it might have been a work thing, this sensible, almost offhand way we had of speaking about, let’s face it, a lot of money; it might have been the fact that he was sitting in the place where I spend most of my waking hours; but it was very intimate and slightly dreamlike to see him there – like having a movie star in your kitchen, drinking tea – and I really wanted to fuck him, then. There was, for the first time, no other word for it. I wanted to make him real. A man I would cross the street to avoid at nine o’clock – by nine twenty-five I wanted to fuck him until he wept. My legs trembled with it. My voice floated out of my mouth when I opened it to speak.

The glass wall of the meeting room was huge and suddenly too transparent, I felt so exposed.

Not that things always go the way you might expect. Six months later Frank – who still does nothing but blather – was, for reasons I can’t quite fathom, running much of the show; it was David who had been edged out, to do his posturing elsewhere. Fiachra, meanwhile, had got himself a new baby, an ecstatic look in his eye and a tendency to fall asleep while sitting on the toilet, much to the delight of the entire company who tiptoed in, girls included, to listen to the sound of his snoring on the other side of the cubicle door. I was still cheerful and useful and altogether indispensable, and still going nowhere in Rathlin Communications, despite the fact I had slept with the management consultant – something neither of us found particularly relevant: I mean, no one would ever accuse Seán of securing the contract with his dick. Six months later, I was talking to the bank about going out on my own and the bank was licking me slowly all over – as were, now that I pause to think of it, both Seán Vallely and Conor Shiels. I am not an extraordinary woman but this was my life that year, and yes, it felt astonishing. It also felt like a mess. The opposite of a nervous breakdown, whatever you might call that.