Anne Enright - The Forgotten Waltz

‘How’s Budapest? Is it snowing there?’

‘No actually,’ he says. ‘Listen, Gina.’

I know if he says my name, he wants to talk about Evie. Or not talk about Evie, he wants to tell me of some arrangement involving Evie that I will not have the power to change.

‘What?’

‘Everything’s had to be pushed forward. I don’t know if I can get back tomorrow afternoon.’

‘When can you get back?’

‘I don’t know. Definitely Saturday. If it doesn’t snow.’

‘Tell me when you know, will you?’

‘Of course.’

‘How’s Budapest?’

‘Is that where I am?’

He sounds worn out. I can hear the news on his hotel TV.

‘Have yourself a nice bath,’ I say.

‘I don’t do baths.’

‘No?’

‘Not in hotels. You don’t know who’s been there before you.’

It takes me a while to hear this, or to make sense of it. I am listening to the space he occupies, I am listening to his breath, to the timbre of his voice, that is the same to me, almost, as the texture of his skin. It has the same effect. Or better. I am closer listening to him than touching him.

‘Sure give it a wipe,’ I say.

I could live on the phone.

Evie, it turns out, has – I actually blank this bit of the conversation out. Seán says, ‘On Saturday morning, Evie has…’ and my brain goes ‘tweet tweet, oh is that the time, how pretty’ and I look out at the garden and beyond to the traffic lights, casting their beautiful light, as they switch senselessly from red to green across the serene stretch of tyre-mangled snow. So, Evie has, I don’t know; horse riding or a play date or drama or the orthodontist, which means that – tweet tweet – Seán will have to pick her up on Friday from the city centre, or Enniskerry, or outside her school if there is school, except it will not be Seán because he is not here, and I say, ‘Fine, no problem,’ realising after I have put the phone down that Seán is saying something new here. He is saying that because of circumstances that have released a whole flock of sparrows in my brain, I may have to pick up Evie tomorrow. I myself will have to do it, while Seán, presumably, flies home.

Great.

Aileen, of course, must not be disturbed on this one. Aileen must not be humiliated further. It would never be possible for Aileen to ring the bell of my home, or to meet me in the street in order to hand her child to me. Her child. To me. That would not be possible. That would be like dying. And no one wants Aileen to die in this particular way.

I will never be rid of that woman.

The first few months together in Terenure, everything reminded Seán of how much he hated Aileen. Especially me. Everything I did reminded him of his wife.

One morning, I told him he would catch a cold. This was in the early days, after the bike was bought but before he had figured the clothes, so he went out in his shirtsleeves, folding his suit jacket over the handlebars.

‘Careful you don’t catch cold,’ I said, watching from the front door, and he went still for a moment before getting up on the bike and cycling away.

That evening we fought about something stupid – our first domestic – and it turned out, once the spat was over, that I had reminded him of his wife. Because whenever Seán was going on a plane, in whatever season, autumn or spring

– he could never remember what way it went – travelling to a warmer country or a colder one, Aileen would always say, ‘You’ll get a cold, you know,’ and she was always, but always, right. And Seán hated it. It was like she owned his entire immune system. And anyway, what was he supposed to do, stay at home?

There was a wasted intensity in the way he spoke about her; nailing the lid down on some coffin with nothing inside it. Or, what was inside? A joke. Some zombie wife who still twitched at the light. I spent my days trying to guess what Aileen might say, so I could say something different

– and I learned, in jig time, not to mention illness of any kind. Or weakness even. I learned not to make him feel weak in any way.

I don’t know what she did to him, but she sure did it good.

It was a delicate business, being the Not Wife. That morning he looked at the clean shirt he took out of the wardrobe and said, ‘Is there something wrong with the iron?’ Both of us stopping right there. It was not that Aileen did Seán’s shirts. Aileen had a Polish girl in to do Seán’s shirts at twelve euro an hour. But if Seán was going to live like a younger man, he would have to change.

And he did change.

A second intimacy can be very sweet. There are so many mistakes you do not have to make. I could not believe he was beside me when I fell asleep. I could not believe he was beside me when I woke. We went to the supermarket; picking up boxes of laundry tablets like Bonnie and Clyde.

‘What about these ones? You think?’

Our shoes leaving bloody footprints, all the way down the aisle.

We did the things that boring couples do: Seán cooked dinner sometimes, and I lit the candles. We went to the pictures, and for that weekend to Budapest. We even went for walks – out into the world, side by side. Seán held my hand. He was proud of me. He took an interest in my clothes and told me what to wear. He wanted me to look good. He wanted me to look good for waiters and other strangers, because we still didn’t meet his friends. Which suited me fine, I couldn’t take the pressure.

We were out one night in Fallon & Byrne’s when a woman stopped by the table.

‘My goodness,’ she said. ‘Would you look who it is.’

I did not recognise her.

‘That’s right,’ said Seán.

‘So look at you.’

She was drunk. And middle-aged. It was the Global Tax woman, the one who was there at the conference in Montreux. She chatted for a minute and then sidled back to her own table, giving me a twee, ironic little wave before sitting in with her friends.

‘Don’t mind her,’ said Seán.

‘I don’t.’ I went back to my dinner. I said, ‘She just looks so old.’

Seán looked at me, as though from a new and lonely distance.

‘She didn’t always,’ he said.

‘When was it, anyway?’

‘It was… a long time ago.’

Later, as though to remind me that it comes to us all, he said, ‘She was the same age as you are now, actually.’

And he pulled my lip with his teeth, when he kissed me.

No wonder she shrieked and writhed, the zombie wife. I thought – just in flashes – that I was actually turning into her.

I had to trust him, he said. Our second row, this, when I expected him home and he did not arrive till late – I had to trust him because he had given up everything for me. Because Aileen had doubted every word that came out of his mouth. He could not live with that again. There were times he thought she needed to be jealous: that jealousy was part of her sexual machine.

Believe me, I thought about that one for a while.

Meanwhile, we never had any tomato chutney and the cheese I bought was just bizarre.

‘Come to bed.’

‘In a minute.’

‘Come to bed.’

‘I said, “in a minute”.’

‘You said that a minute ago.’

Seán told me that I have saved his life.

‘You saved my life,’ he said. And every small thing about me is wrong. I eat too much, I laugh the wrong way. I am not allowed to order lobster off a menu; the sight of me sucking out the meat would, he said, last him a very long time. He holds me by the hips, and squeezes, testing for fat. If it hadn’t been for me, he says, If it hadn’t been for you and he kisses me, on the side of the neck, lifting my hair.

I have saved his life.

My mother is still dead.