Anne Enright - The Forgotten Waltz

But this could not have been the fight we had in Youghal because we were outside, far away, for once, from any screen. We were walking on the beach and the pain of the cold air on my lungs was like the pain of the view on my eyeballs, after four days of kitchen living and bad Christmas TV. It was being in the open that let it loose, I think. Even when I shouted, my voice seemed to happen in its distant echo, out where the sky grew low over the sea.

The beach was not completely empty – there was a woman walking down near the water and a man taking photographs, with a very ordinary camera, from the giant concrete steps that held the land safe from the waves. Lines of black posts marched down to the shoreline, small and smaller, overtaken, each in their turn, by the shifting sand. The new summer houses, a little toy village, tucked themselves under a distant headland. Conor said his father owned four of them, Did you ever see the like? But they weren’t too bad. They looked almost pretty under the blue winter sky, through air so still you thought it might crack. Even the waves – or is this just the way I remember it? – even the waves made no noise.

The fight was not, in fact, about money; nor was it about the internet, or the flooded kitchen, it wasn’t about the box – I remember saying this – of our lives, the colour of the box, or the smell of it, whether things worked in the box or not, but just the fact that we were in a damn box, when we might be free.

It was the last day of the year. I had decided to give up cigarettes in the morning. Maybe that was what it was all about: the yelp of the addict before it is all taken away. Or maybe it was because I was giving up for Seán, who found the smell of stale cigarettes so disgusting. So he too was looming as the day ticked on – this need I had to be right for Seán. And the anger that came with this was terrible; the pure annoyance of smashing my way out of one box, only to find myself in another one.

There is nothing like a bit of drama on an empty coastline, the shrill little screams and foot stampings entertainment for the gulls, tinnitus for the fishes. There is nothing so pointless and refreshing: a sad backside hitting a million affronted grains of sand, the faint ticking, in the rocks, of footsteps walking away.

Conor went back to the car and left me to it, to the skyline and the line where the sea lapped the shore, and I watched as the water sank into, or pulled away from the sand.

I was quite happy, then. I lit a cigarette and was happy for the length of it. Nothing moved, except the water, which was always moving. I thought the world might have stopped, except for the progress of ash down the cigarette’s white shaft.

It was New Year’s Eve – my least favourite day of any year – and I just didn’t think I could do it, this time. I thought midnight would kill me, every strike of the damn clock. I wanted to sit where I was, and let time pass elsewhere. How do you do that? You could rise up and let the earth roll beneath you. You could float on that still, cold sea. You could love one man and never stop kissing another.

Never stop.

When I climbed back into the car, I said to Conor I was going home, that I really wanted to see my mother tonight, and he could come too if he liked but I would prefer he didn’t.

‘No, really prefer,’ I said.

And that I just… wanted… some time… all right?

Conor, out of pity for this and for all sad human cliché, sighed and leaned forward to the ignition.

‘I’ll drive you up,’ he said.

‘No.’

‘Well you take the car then,’ he said. ‘I’ll catch a lift.’

And I didn’t say ‘Thanks,’ or ‘Sorry,’ or ‘It’s not you, it’s the damn cigarettes.’ I neither lied to him nor told the truth – that all this had nothing to do with him, nor even, in a way, with Seán Vallely.

I headed for Waterford along the N25, slipping down the high curving road into Dungarvan just as the streetlights came on. I thought about my mother-in-law’s face as I said my unexpected, hurried goodbye.

‘Don’t worry,’ I might have said. ‘I will not break your son’s heart.’

Or something of that nature. Even if it was a lie. Even if we were to speak, which we did not, of course. The power had shifted between Conor’s women, that was all, though I did not enjoy it as much as you might expect.

Conor brought the car around to the front door and I put my case in the boot. I kissed them all goodbye outside their big white bungalow, and my wretched father-in-law kept his hands to himself, for once. But you know, I never really minded flirting with my father-in-law. I probably liked it as much as anything. I am a terrible flirt.

I passed the turn off to Brittas and the one for Enniskerry at the beginning of the motorway lights. I drifted all the way to the Tallaght exit, worked my way through the suburban streets and pulled up the handbrake outside my mother’s front door. I switched off the engine and stood out of the car in the winter silence, the blood in my veins still hurtling on.

It was nice to be with my own family for once. Even though I had no family to speak of, and it was just the two of us, sitting in front of the real flames of my mother’s artificial gas fire, flicking channels through the midnight bells and drinking Sea Breezes.

Joan poked the ash of her cigarette vaguely at the fireplace, even though it wasn’t a real fireplace, and she loosed her stockings through the cloth of her skirt, to let them settle around her ankles, in two gossamer nests. My mother was strangely slovenly, for someone who looked so pristine. Or more than pristine; for someone who seemed to gather the available light about her. It used to embarrass me, the way she sat in the kitchen with our friends after school, getting all their chat and letting the ash topple on the tiled floor. It wasn’t as though she didn’t have an ashtray. I found one in the fridge once – which wasn’t a surprise; the contents of the fridge were often a little arbitrary. ‘What do you do all day?!’ I remember shouting at her, when I got in hungry one afternoon. To which she said nothing. There was nothing for her to say.

I suppose, in the early years of her widowhood, she let things slide and we did not forgive her for it. Children want things to be ordinary. Maybe that’s all they want.

Ordinary was, in any case, exactly what I got that New Year’s Eve: a cheese-and-tomato sandwich, a cup of tea; my mother rattling through the bottles to see if there was anything worthwhile, shaking the carton of cranberry juice, saying, ‘Good for the bladder,’ the pair of us going into the sitting room to talk about – it is hard to remember what we talked about, I can’t quite fix it in my mind. I remember she said, ‘How are the in-laws?’ and I said, ‘You don’t want to know.’

Diets, obviously; the fact that when you get older the weight all shifts around to the front. I think we also talked about separates versus dresses, old boyfriends and what happened to them, both hers and mine. My stubborn aversion to pastels. The usual.

Then, at five past twelve she stood up and made for bed, and I did not know what to do, or where to go. Maybe she was so used to her routine, it didn’t occur to her to see me to the door.

I sniffed the last of my drink and swallowed it down.

‘Am I over the limit?’ I said, and triggered much fuss. Joan, for whom public transport was a deep mystery, wouldn’t hear of my trying for a taxi, ‘On this night of all nights,’ she said.

‘Oh darling. Go on up to your own room.’

She was out in the hall by then, holding the post at the foot of the stairs and her eyes, over the drag and sough of her breathing, were large with concern.

‘Well, let me help you up at least,’ I said, but she batted me vaguely away, and started up by herself, holding on to the banister.