Anne Enright - The Forgotten Waltz

The thing about you is .

It was, in a spooky way, just like being married. Though there were, crucially, differences of style. Conor used to take the moral high ground, for example, and Seán doesn’t bother – the air up there doesn’t suit him, he says. No, Seán doesn’t get aggrieved, he gets mean and he gets cold, so I always end up weeping in a different room, or trying to placate him. Sitting in the silence. Lifting my hand to touch him. Putting the work in. I coax him back to me.

Then he gets aggrieved.

Anyway.

Making up is always sweet.

And though I miss the future I might have had, and each and all of Conor Sheils’ fat babies, I do not think that we are selfish to want to keep the thing unbroken and beautiful; to hold on to the knowledge that comes when we look into each other’s eyes.

I just don’t know how to explain it.

I thought it would be a different life, but sometimes it is like the same life in a dream: a different man coming in the door, a different man hanging his coat on the hook. He comes home late, he goes out to the gym, he gets stuck on the internet: we don’t spend our evenings in restaurants, or dine by candlelight anymore, we don’t even eat together, most of the time. I don’t know what I expected. That receipts would not have to be filed, or there would be no such thing as bad kitchen cabinets, or that Seán would switch on a little sidelamp instead of flicking the main switch when he enters a room. Seán exists. He arrives, he leaves. He forgets to ring me when he is delayed, and so the dinner is mistimed: the Butler’s Pantry lamb with puy lentils that I heat up in the microwave. He reads the newspaper – quite a lot, actually – and there is nothing so wrong with any of this, but sometimes the intractability of him, perhaps of all men, drives me up the wall.

It’s like they don’t know you exist unless you are standing there in front of them. I think about Seán all the time when he is gone, about who he is, and where he is, and how I can make things right for him. I hold him in my care. All the time.

And then he walks in the door.

Seán in my sister’s garden in Enniskerry, with his back to me and his face to the view, and the rowan tree at his side has a skipping rope tangled in its branches that are still just twigs.

The day has been warm and I have had a lot of Chardonnay. I am recently back from Australia. I am in love and I am working really hard at the whole Enniskerry thing with the neighbours and the kids. So the man who is standing at the bottom of the garden is just a little rip in the fabric of my life. I can stitch it all up again, if he does not turn around.

Seán stands at the window in his pyjamas, with the frost flowering across the window. Or he stands at the window in the summer light and his naked back is a puzzle of muscle and bone – he still looks like a young man, from behind – and I want to whisper, Turn around .

Or, Don’t turn around .

The weeks I spent waiting for his call, the months I spent waiting for him to leave Aileen. The loneliness of it was, in its own way, fantastic. I lived with it, and danced with it. I brought it to a kind of perfection the Christmas before last, just a few months before he went clear.

The house in Terenure had been on the market four months already, and a flood of people had been through the place, opening cupboards, pulling up the corners of carpets, sniffing the air. My living room, the sofa where I sat, my mother’s bed, were all – they still are – on the internet for anyone to click on and dismiss: the stairs we slid down on our bellies, the dark bedroom over the garage, the stain around the light switch. I found a discussion board online where they were laughing at the price – but other than that, it was hard to know what people thought. A single bidder who might have been an investor made a lot of fuss but didn’t come through. A married couple with kids offered low, and then faded. And so it was Christmas. My father was not there to ruin the day. My mother was not there to make it all better. My sister was not speaking to me. My lover was in the cold bosom of his family, wearing a paper hat.

I thought about him all day: his daughter sitting at his feet, writing her first ever email, Hello Daddy! His wife in the kitchen, her hair drooping in the steam from the brussels sprouts. His wretched mother looking about her with a glittering eye.

I had a pathetic little tree in the corner of the living room, a plastic thing you plug in, with light running to the tips of its fibre-optic needles. I made myself a sandwich for lunch and drank a cup of tea. I thought about leaving the house but I just couldn’t. There was traffic on the road outside, but they were all travelling to each other: even the taxi men had their wives beside them and their children in the back seat.

There were times, in the last years of my mother’s life, when she could not walk out the front door, and on that day, moving from room to room, I think I understood why. Inside was unbearable, and outside beyond my imagining.

I finally drove into town around two o’clock; where I abandoned the car on a set of double yellow lines. In the windows of the Shelbourne, you could see the respectable flotsam tucking into their hotel turkey, or lifting their heads to look out on deserted streets. I walked past the locked gates of Stephen’s Green, down the empty maw of Grafton Street, the mannequins in the shop windows frozen as if to say: this is it! this is the day! I thought, if I fell down in the road, there would be no one to find me until morning. By the wall of Trinity, I passed a tall couple who looked like tourists. They turned their faces as I walked by, chiming, Happy Christmas, Happy Christmas , and I felt it keenly; the pure shame of it. I did not exist. I would end up breaking windows, just to show that I was real. I would shout his name: my lover who could not risk – he could not risk it! – a text or a call.

I didn’t break any windows, of course. I made my way back to the car and drove home. When I checked my phone, I found a message from Fiona. It read, ‘Happy Christmas, xxxxxx yr sis’ and it made me cry.

In fact something did come through from Seán about seven o’clock. It said, ‘Check the shed’ where I found a bunch of roses and a slender half-bottle of Canadian ice-wine. And despite the fact that I do not really drink anymore, I ended up drinking the lot of it, following the last sweet drops with a skull-splitting dose of whiskey. None of it was right – the perfect drink does exist, but it is never, somehow, the one you have in your hand. I worked on, nonetheless, until I was steady and empty and clean. The next day I was worried I had made a noise sitting there; some keening, lowing, honk of pain, but I am pretty sure I kept silent, and that when the day was over, the season slaughtered, I managed, with some dignity, to rise and turn and walk upstairs to bed.

I woke up late on Stephen’s Day with the headache I so richly deserved and, after a breakfast of tea and Christmas pudding, I got in the car and crawled out to Fiona’s house in Enniskerry. I wept a bit as I drove, and put on the windscreen wipers by accident. I did not call beforehand. I did not know what to say.

It was three o’clock when I arrived and darkness was already in the air. I parked for a moment and saw no sign of life, but my nephew Jack was in the front room and he opened the door before I had the chance to knock. He stared me up and down, wondering how to respond to the amazing fact that I was real. Then he decided on indifference.

‘Hi,’ he said.

‘Hi Jack.’ He hung on to the side of the door, staring at me through the gap.

‘Where’s your Mum?’