‘I slept in there,’ I told Dani. ‘And Mam and Dad,’ I pointed to the window next to it, ‘were there.’
I remembered the fall-apart wardrobes that the old man had built himself, the yeasty smell of the little kitchen downstairs. I remembered my last Christmas home, when my cousins had laughed at my wingtips and I’d told my mother I’d met someone. She was bent at the sink, her shoulders hunched for a painful moment, and when she turned her lip was bitten but thrust towards me in challenge. ‘Just be careful,’ she’d said and returned to scrubbing her coat.
And suddenly I felt an urge to go and knock on the door and ask if we could come in. I remembered the man to whom I’d sold the house those years before, recalled his jeans and his stubbled cheeks and his running shoes. I imagined his vague recollection of me, his suspicion of my return and the charm I would use to conquer it. I saw through his eyes the wholesome picture my daughter and I would present, and knew that he would be powerless to resist us. Already, I felt the eerie, dreamlike state into which I would enter in the hallway, the thrill of recognizing things that hadn’t changed and the poignancy of finding things that had. The whole experience, I imagined, would be satisfying in the same way that pressing on a bruise is satisfying. But more than that, I felt a sense of opportunity, a chance to create a strong memory in Dani’s mind, something she would return to when she was in this country by herself, or alone in the world once I was gone. I told her my plan.
She watched me with patience, her eyes glazing, clearing. When I was done, she resettled her glasses on the bridge of her nose.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’ She knitted her hands in her lap, her break-it-to-him-gently pose. ‘Look, if you don’t go in, then in your mind it could always be like it was. But if you do, it either will be or it won’t be, and you’ll know for certain — and isn’t that so much worse?’
She breathed slowly and with some effort. I looked up at the house. Its windows were still. I started the engine and pointed us back towards the city.
That night, after the light clicked off from the cracks around Dani’s door, I lay awake, my body clock suspended somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. The sheets were crisp, but the window seals were poor, the room airy and damp in a way that seemed thoroughly Irish. I checked my watch and calculated that, just then, Elaine would be finishing up and hurrying home from the 42nd Street Library, where she was spending the summer on an archivist’s residency. In the Main Concourse of Grand Central, she would stop for a moment to look at the stars constellated in gold against the vaulted ceiling’s blue, and she would think, I hoped, of her daughter and of me.
I reached for my phone and dialled her number, and as the phone rang I thought of the one time she had truly enjoyed a visit to Ireland, a post-engagement whistle-stop jaunt around the Burren of which, judiciously, we hadn’t informed my mother. For four gloriously, improbably sunny days, we had stamped our feet in sawdust shebeens to fiddle-and-drum combos, borne the slap of the Atlantic breeze at the lip of primordial cliffs and stood rooted to the rocky spot as two white horses raced inches from our elbows in love-chase. I had felt surer about things than I would be for a long time afterwards.
The phone rang five, six, seven times, and when Elaine answered I heard Miles Davis. But then lightly, distractedly:
‘Have you made it to Galway yet?’
My wife pronounced the word, and deliberately so, I thought, Gel-whay, the first vowel flattened and the second syllable stretched, as though the language from which it grew were too frail to withstand her tongue.
‘We’re leaving in the morning,’ I said. ‘Where are you? I thought you’d be —’
‘I told you this.’ Elaine paused. I tried to imagine what room of our apartment she might be in, but the stereo gave no clue.
She sighed. ‘I finished early. Calvin’s taking me to dinner.’
Calvin Barnes was a professor of something who sat on an admissions committee with Elaine. I’d met him once at a cocktail party at some dean’s apartment in Gramercy, and hated him on sight. He wore a grey corduroy three-piece with maroon felt brothel creepers, spoke in full paragraphs and, as soon as he got drunk (which was quickly), gazed deeply into my wife’s eyes, unashamedly at her legs.
‘Where’s his wife?’ I said. She was a big noise, apparently, in magazine publishing.
‘Somewhere,’ Elaine said. ‘Tell Dani love.’
‘Don’t drink too much,’ I said.
After I’d hung up, I thought about going out to walk the canal bank or the perimeter of the Green, as I had done sometimes in my student days. I fancied an adventure, or a drunken binge the like of which I never had permitted myself back then. But I didn’t go. I stayed, watching the weak moonlight angle on to the nightstand and listening to the night dogs yelp, while in the other room, my daughter slept.
I woke the next morning feeling sluggish, as though I’d been stepped on. But once I groped my way to the shower and the peeling blast of good water pressure, I allowed my mind to range over the long westerly drive that lay ahead, and began to brighten. I made coffee in the room, listened to the radio as I dressed, and was raring to go, relishing already the thinness of sole of my driving shoes, as I knocked on Dani’s door and waited for her emergence — but emerge she did not. I knocked again, heard a rustling. She opened the door a crack and held it on the chain.
‘Morning!’ I said. ‘All set to —’
‘Just give me fifteen.’ My daughter’s hair was madness, her eyes dark and fat.
‘What happened to you?’ I said and heard my voice find what Elaine called its Young Lady Range. ‘Did you go out last —’
‘Please,’ Dani said. ‘Fifteen.’
The door clicked shut. I wheeled my case to the lobby and, sitting beneath a plastic palm tree by the revolving door, scrolled through the Google docs Georgette had shared. An antitrust defence was in danger of falling apart a little less than a month before going to arbitration. I sent a stern but polite reminder to the client, some gentle reassurances to the partners, cc-ing Georgette on each and feeling negligent, detached.
When Dani finally materialized she looked transformed. She had gone with contacts for a change and her eyes seemed brighter than ever. Her skin was pale, her hair dark from the shower.
‘Ready?’ she said.
I followed her to the car and loaded our cases into the trunk.
‘So,’ I said as I programmed the GPS, ‘where did you get to, then, on this wild night out of yours?’
‘If you must know, I had three cocktails at the hotel bar. That’s the whole story.’
‘Did you talk to anyone?’
‘No.’
‘Did anyone talk to you?’
‘Some dude in a suit tried to —’
‘Jesus, Dani.’
‘But I pretended I didn’t speak English.’
I laughed: I couldn’t help it. We crossed the Liffey at Kilmainham.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘no harm done, I suppose. And probably best if we just say no more about it, yeah? But maybe, don’t tell your mother? I wouldn’t want her to worry. To be honest, I don’t know which of us she’d be maddest —’
‘That obelisk,’ Dani pointed out the window at a marble monument looming over the Phoenix Park, ‘commemorates the victories of Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington, in the Napoleonic Wars. Elsewhere in the park there’s a monument to Pope John Paul II, who drew a quarter of the country’s population to a special Mass in the year of his visit.’
‘1979,’ I said. ‘I made my confirmation.’
On the far side of Maynooth, the cloud cover broke and rain pounded the car. Dani called her mother to describe the dreary territory through which we were passing. I pulled in at a Topaz somewhere before Athlone, took the phone and sent Dani out to fill the tank. The forecourt was empty save for a canary-yellow Volkswagen with tinted windows and outsize silver wheels. Its driver, a young guy, was filling up as well. He wore boot-cut jeans and an untucked stripy shirt. His hair was shaved close at the sides and gelled in a quiff on top.