Anne Enright - The Forgotten Waltz

‘There is no need to touch the wall, Evie.’

Seán seemed worried she would shred the pads on her fingers – and there was something else there too, some idea of contamination; whether she would dirty things or be made dirty by them – Seán is, as we know, a clean sort and Evie plays with his disgust in the smallest ways. She doesn’t do anything truly taboo, she wouldn’t get away with it; she is, besides, at a modest age. Delicate to a fault about her galloping physicality, she never discusses sex and thinks adults are completely gross when they try.

‘Oh pull-ease.’

But she scratches her scalp into the fold of a book. She leaves sticky smears on the keyboards and remotes and phones. She twirls her hair, or sucks her hair, she is hugely uncomfortable in her bra – for which she has my sympathy, it’s a life sentence – and her underwear is constantly prised out and readjusted. She also – and this gets to me too – hoiks the phlegm up her nose instead of using a hanky.

It is all, in its way, fantastic for being so effective. Although she seems to be helpless to it, and maybe she is, it is also the best and quickest way to drive her father around the bend.

‘Evie, please!’

‘What?’

She also knows, as though by the fruit of long contemplation, the exact and simplest way to his heart. Not just by looking at him with her grey eyes, which should be enough for anyone, which is almost enough for me. Not just by doing well in school and being ostentatiously averse to boys. No, Evie has made friends with the richest girl in the class. Which in Evie’s class, out in County Wicklow, is pretty damn rich. In fact, the father of Evie’s best friend (blonde, like her mother, with beautiful slim knees) owns houses and hotels, owns whole apartment blocks, from Tralee to Riga.

Her name – and you have to admire her parents for this – is Paddy.

They are doing a project together on lice in horses. Paddy is supplying the horses. I did not ask if Evie was supplying the lice.

And sometimes, too, they are perfect: sitting on the sofa watching ‘Father Ted’, or out in the open air, or the way they talk in the car, because talking is what Seán is good at, and with his daughter there is no charm and no blame, there is just Seán. I listen to the ease of his tone with her and I think, He does not speak that way to me .

He does not hold me by the hand. He does not tickle me, quickly, to get me out of his way. He does not tango me down the hall, and arch me over, backwards. He does not wake in the night, thinking of me.

I have saved his life.

From what?

‘You have saved my life,’ he said.

But if you ask me, it’s not one woman or another that is the saving of Seán. It is the woman he loves but can never desire. It is Evie.

‘Take those earphones off, Evie.’

Evie absent or dreaming in front of a screen or a book. Evie failing to focus up, to move along, to snap to.

Evie stalled in front of the mirror for hours at a time, sprouting hair and neuroses, moody as all get out. And it seems so unfair, to be jumping with hormones when you’re still in Hello Kitty pyjamas; it is like no one is telling the truth, or no one knows what truth to tell.

I walked in on her one evening. Evie always leaves the door open when she is in the bath – You still alive in there, Evie: you haven’t gone down the plughole? Usually, she chats away – just the feel of the warm water seems to set her rattling on – and her father leaves her to it; listening, or pretending to listen, stretched out on our bed across the landing.

But this one evening, she had fallen silent and, between one sentence and the next, I walked in the door.

Evie pulled the sponge up to cover her little budding chest and looked at me with huge grey eyes.

‘Don’t mind me!’ I said, as I dodged across the room to get the thing I needed, whatever it was, from out of the bathroom cabinet.

In the autumn, Evie seemed to get rounder and rounder, fatter and fatter, after which came the amazing stretch and boi-oi-oinngg of this extra flesh into a waist and hips and breasts – though, as I recall, breasts don’t feel like fat, at that age, they feel like tenderised gristle. But they look, from what I saw in the bath, heartbreaking and simple.

There is nothing worse than being nearly twelve.

Evie is at that moment. Her body is at that moment when it is wrong to look at her, wrong to think about her nakedness, when it would be criminal to take a photograph. Her body is becoming her own. Her body is becoming lonely. Her father, who used to bathe and dry her, now stretched out staring at the ceiling, across the hall.

‘Have you rinsed, Evie? Rinse till you hear it squeak.’

He was off the bed and standing in the doorway when I came out of the bathroom. I lifted my hands in a mock shrug – because all this was normal too – and he nodded and turned away.

And I am suddenly passionate about Evie. I want to take him by the shoulders and explain that my jealousy is a kind of loving, too. Because, when I was her age, my father was sitting up in his hospice bed enjoying the fact that all women were equally nameless to him now.

‘Hello my darlings, to what do I owe the pleasure?’

I want to tell him that Evie is lucky to have him, that he, Seán, is where all her luck resides. Because after Miles died nothing went right, unless we made it right; all blessings and bounty, all unexpected joys, came from his love – pathetic as it sometimes was and sometimes huge. After Miles died, everything was hard work – marrying Conor, marrying Shay – and nothing came to either of his daughters gratis and undeserved.

I cried that night. I don’t know if Evie heard me; the strange woman weeping beside her father in this strange house. I smothered most of it in the pillow; Seán’s hand stroking my back. Me saying, ‘I’m sorry, I’ll be all right. I’m sorry.’

There she was at breakfast, an overgrown child again; her white arse hanging out of her pink pyjamas. She picked the nuts out of her muesli, and left them on the table in a little heap beside the bowl.

Seán said, ‘Eat your breakfast, Evie.’

I said, ‘Would you like some eggs?’

And Evie said, ‘I hate eggs.’

And yet, if it had not been for Evie, we would not be here. That’s what I think.

I kissed her father, upstairs in his own house, and Evie lifted her flapping hands from her sides and she ran over to us saying, ‘Happy New Year, Daddy!’ and he bent to kiss her too.

As far as Seán was concerned, nothing happened that day. Keep it simple and you will win, or if you don’t win – as he liked to say – at least it will be simple. But, sometime after that kiss, between one hotel afternoon and the next hotel afternoon, Evie started to disappear.

How such a constantly tended child could do such a thing, is hard to say. For the first long while, they did not even notice; it crept up on them. Evie was just not where she was supposed to be. She seemed to get lost on her way up the stairs. She didn’t show up for meals, only to be found in her bedroom, or the au pair’s room, or out in the garden with no coat. One day, around the time my mother died, she failed to arrive back from Megan’s house. This was a journey of some three hundred yards down a country road that even Evie was allowed to take by herself.

‘When did she leave?’ said Aileen to Fiona on the phone: two families streaming out of their separate houses, climbing into four different cars, reversing out of their driveways at a clip. They found her almost immediately. She was standing on the side of the road, as though at an imaginary bus stop, with no sense that her journey had been interrupted, or had taken too long.