Anne Enright - The Forgotten Waltz

When I zipped up the case and came out, I found him on the sofa, going through my Pauric Sweeney shoulderbag.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Are you back on the pill?’ he said.

‘What?’ I said.

‘I just want to know.’

I turned and went back into the bedroom. It was all too sad to shout about. But, after a small silence, we managed to shout about it anyway.

‘I’m your fucking husband, that’s who I am!’

Conor rarely loses his temper. He does it like a cartoon, with bulging muscles and popping veins. I was almost afraid of him. And I remembered something about him that I had somehow managed to forget: how exact he was in bed; how he could, in his ruthless, friendly way, destroy me between the sheets.

‘Oh right. Oh that’s right.’

Because the unsayable thing is, that just before I started sleeping with Seán – when I was just thinking about it, when I was on the brink – myself and Conor had a lot of sex. Not the slow abandon of our early days, but rooting, rummaging, sudden sex that was not supposed to be enjoyable, strictly speaking; that was not about me. If Conor could have made me pregnant then, he would have done it without thinking (there was no thinking involved in any of this), which is why, incidentally, I think he did know about Seán, somewhere deep down.

The one thing he never said to me was that he was surprised .

Poor, terrifying Conor. Stood there in the halogen glare with his hands clenched and his head thrust forward. I tried to move past him to get to the stairs, but he would not give way so I stood back and thumped him in the face, quite hard. I thought I would feel pain when I hit him but a kind of numbness spread from the impact, it was like hitting rubber – not just his cheek, but my hand, the whole room seemed numb. So I swung at him again, to see if that would bring the feeling back.

Something messy happened, then. The suitcase was wrenched away from my grasp and, as I looked down, I was caught by the flat of Conor’s hand across my chin. There was no pain, just a jarring dislocation; my brain moving faster than my skull. When I was steady again, I saw Conor had backed away from me and was standing against the wall, rubbing his hand. It was only then that my cheek started to sting. The delay worried me. My nerves were slow. Even when the hurt happened, I couldn’t be sure that it was happening to me.

And then I was sure.

It was like that moment, many hours after the plane lands, when your ears decide to open. We looked at each other as the pain spread, and we realised that we were separate human beings.

And it exhausted us.

I waited for the script to continue, for the little surge that would make me grab my case and sling him a contemptuous glance and hurry down the stairs. But it did not come. I stood there, and lifted my face, and burst into woeful tears. Conor stepped forward and pulled my head against his shoulder and I said, ‘Don’t touch me. I don’t want you to touch me,’ but I stayed there against him. My chin was starting to ache, in the bone. I wanted a cup of tea.

We talked until four in the morning. We dredged it all up. And the things Conor told me about myself that night – ‘selfish’ was just the start of it – it was like a slug crawling over your soul.

‘Everyone is selfish,’ I said. ‘They just call it something else.’

‘You think?’

‘I know.’

‘Well you know wrong,’ he said. ‘Everyone is not selfish.’

I got him to bed before morning and I lay down alongside him, fully dressed. When he was asleep, I stood up, leaving the shape of myself on the duvet, and I walked out of the room. I took my bag, and the suitcase of clothes, and I took the thing he wanted most – a little boy, maybe, as yet unmade; a sturdy little runaround fella, for sitting on his shoulders, and video games down the arcade, and football in the park.

Then I went back to Terenure and texted Seán.

‘Have clothes. All safe.’

Seán – who likes to use a johnny anyway .

Apart from anything else, how were we supposed to pay for it? The mortgage was two and a half grand a month, the childcare would be another grand on top of that. A new house – because you can’t rear children in a lopsided box – would be hundreds upon hundreds of thousands more. So it didn’t matter what Conor wanted, or what I wanted – I mean, I like children. I have the reproductive pang – but for all his talk of bliss betrayed, Conor was actually, when it came down to it, a dreamer.

He could do the sums as often as he liked, there was something about us as a couple that meant money made no sense to us: it was always a terrible surprise.

I don’t know why.

But I am being hard on my husband, who I loved, and who is now fighting with me about money, never mind broken dreams. In fact everyone is fighting with me about money: my sister, too. Who would have thought love could be so expensive? I should sit down and calculate it out at so much per kiss. The price of this house plus the price of that house, divided by two, plus the price of the house we are in. Thousands. Every time I touch him. Hundreds of thousands. Because we took it too far. We should have stuck to car parks and hotel bedrooms (no, really, we should really have stuck to car parks and hotel bedrooms). If we keep going the price will come down – per event, as it were. Twenty years of love can be consummated for tuppence. After a lifetime it is almost free.

OUTSIDE IN THE snow, the For Sale sign looks fresh as the day it was hammered home. No one knows what the house is worth now. No one will buy it, so that’s how much it is worth. Nothing. Despite which, we will owe tax based on that ‘two and a bit’. For a house that is currently worth whistling for. I can’t figure out the fake money from the real. I walk around this magic box, this trap, with its frost-flowered windows, weeping condensation as the morning proceeds. I gather my briefcase from the console table in the hall. I open the same door I have opened since I could reach the latch. And I head out to earn some money.

By the time I get to the motorway, all is quiet: a few yellow registrations, speeding back up to the border, trying to beat the weather. It’s not my favourite road in Ireland – too straight and flat – though I like the epic way the clouds always seem to lower over the Mourne Mountains, the gateway to the Black North. By the time they come into view, their dark slopes are streaked with white and my phone is jumping with warnings and dire predictions. The snow is above us. It is about to fall.

‘Book a hotel,’ says the office. ‘And stay put!’

I bailed out of Rathlin before it hit the buffers and started in the drinks industry. I wanted a new life, but it is possible I sensed what was happening, too – that autumn with my mother’s house suspended, like a dream, at ‘two and a bit’, it is possible I sensed there was nothing under our feet.

Not that I admitted it, at the time.

Selling the house was still the answer to everything. We brought the price down from ‘two and a bit’ to ‘nearly two’ and it was still short odds on winning the lottery; it was five-hundred-and-seventy-five-thousand lamb chops, it was one-and-a-half-thousand years of lamb on your plate, it was so many shirts you would never have to wash another shirt, it was half of the townhouse in Clonskeagh and enough left over for a roof over our head, it was freedom and time to kiss, which is also called love.

But no one bought it.

Funny that.

Meanwhile I started in the drinks industry. I suspect my family thought the Sheilses a bit vulgar for being publicans but, you know, Conor’s father might have been low enough to sell the stuff, but my father was low enough to drink it. Maybe, in my separated, orphaned state, I realised what side I was finally on. Good times or bad, I thought, there will always be Al Co Hol.