It was a lot of fun.
They say consultants always recommend that you lose thirty per cent – that this is what they are actually hired to say – so when Seán was finished his report, we might be moved up, or out. People found it exciting when he walked out of the lift. You knew he was there. I followed his presence through the glades of rubber plant and bamboo, listened to the click of his briefcase opening two desks down and waited for his soft voice on the phone. He might have just put his head around my partition of fern, but his courtship was close and elaborate. Every time we spoke, it was as though we were rehearsing the lie.
‘Is that you?’ he might say, when I picked up.
‘Yes.’
I had never had an affair before. I did not realise how sexy it was to be clandestine. The secret was everything.
‘Are you at your desk?’
‘What do you think?’
I could hear him move and murmur a few metres away, but his real words were close, almost warm in my ear.
‘Busy?’
‘I am now…’
‘What are you doing?
‘Well, I’m talking to you.’
The intimacy between us was so formal, so completely erotic.
‘I thought we might do that better over lunch.’
‘Lovely.’
Mind you, there was a certain key-jangling element to it, too; the idea that he might be reaching rather ardently into his pocket to check for spare change. The whole thing played surprisingly close to farce. I’m not sure how many people around us knew what was going on – at a guess, they all did, and they were all hugely amused by it. But we were pretty amused too – I mean, the rutting aside, the fierce and fleeting idea of it that ran across our minds (I must confess) from time to time – we also found it slightly hilarious; the thought that we might, for once, just get away with it. And this is how we overcame our doubts – because we both had major doubts. When it came to the point, some weeks later, of taking each other’s clothes off, we didn’t weep, or declare undying love, we didn’t savage each other up against some filing cabinet, we just laughed – well why not? We laughed when we kissed and we laughed at every button and reluctant zip, and it was all hunger and recognition and delight.
Meanwhile, I saw him at the coffee maker and the beauty of his tie did not offend me. I even got to like his fountain pen. I was with him all the time. He knew I was there – I was getting inside his skin. The tap of his hand on the side of his thigh. The way he leaned back in the chair and rubbed his nipple, for comfort or reward; he saw me noticing this, and stopped.
Oh, the game. The game.
The little surges of irritation, of contempt: from him, from me. Is this what you want?
If Seán were less of a tactical person, the thing might have gone sour before we’d even begun, but he knew his pleasures – more than I did, it has to be said. He knew when to put the phone down. When to go home. When to turn away.
It is no wonder I became obsessed.
We had lunch every Friday for five weeks; it was our de-brief. We went to La Stampa – fancy but not too fancy – and talked business. He was good, as I keep saying, at his job. He had no interest in complication. He looked at the company carefully, trying to split the rock with just one tap. And after business, came charm. He told a story, he told another. Really funny stories. He ordered dessert wine. He teased me about the ‘posh’ school I went to, about the height of my heels, he made me fight and flirt. I thought, by week three, that there was something wrong with my blood pressure, that I might actually faint or die.
I took to walking home in the evening – or walking somewhere. I swerved from the entrance of the pub on a Friday, because he was not there. I veered from the pedestrian light that was against me, crossed streets because they were empty of traffic, and turned different corners – not so much avoiding home as averse to any particular destination. One night, I ended up on the rim of Dublin Bay. It was October by then; dark and cold. There was a container ship lodged on the horizon, impossibly large and disproportionate. The endless strand gave way in the darkness to a sea so shallow you would think the thing was stuck to the sea floor. But the lights floated in front of me. The ship was moving, or it must have been moving. I could not tell, in the darkness, which way.
It was also beautiful, this game of not touching: that is the thing I am afraid to say about myself and Seán – how beautiful it was, how exquisite the distance we kept between us. And when I saw him one afternoon standing by the printer, lost in thought, with the light falling over his shoulders, it was as though the same light had jabbed me in the chest. I hadn’t expected to find him there. He was wearing grey and his hair was grey: the plants beside him were dark green and the floor of the corridor beyond was teal blue. These are the details and they sound so foolish: a middle-aged man in an office with a file in his hand – I mean to say. And there was no solace in his absence, either. When he was gone, I thought about nothing else: Seán in my sister’s garden, Seán in Brittas, Seán in Switzerland. I wondered where he was this minute, and what he might be doing. I thought about a future together and wiped the thought, fifty, sixty, a hundred times a day. It was all such an agitation. But somewhere in the gaps – in the certainty of seeing him after the lift doors opened, or in the shock of his voice nearby – a stillness hit, a kind of perfection. It was very beautiful, this desire that opened inside me, and then opened again. And this is what puts me beyond regret: the sweetness of my want for Seán Vallely, the sense of something unutterable at the heart of it. I felt – I still feel – that if we kissed again, we might never stop.
I lost half a stone.
Which was brilliant. I bounced into work and I ran up the stairs, too impatient for the lift. And I very seldom placed my forehead against a convenient wall, and pushed.
It is surprising how close you can get to someone, by staying very still.
There are two things I noticed, and I don’t know if they are different or connected. First of all, in the office, there was this thing he did if I knew something he didn’t, or if I had been somewhere he had yet to go – that scuba-diving holiday in Australia, for example, or my ease with languages, which was in such contrast to his own few bits of French – he managed very quickly to be proud of these achievements, to boast about them on my behalf. And this irritated me: he made it sound like he was responsible for my being so generally clever and gung ho. So it was as if I did the Great Barrier Reef and he got the credit. Or at the very least that we were in the whole Reef business together. And of course we were. I mean, who doesn’t like Australia? By the time he had finished, the whole damn continent seemed to belong to him. And all this because he had never actually been there, and I had.
You had to admire it, as a way of turning all things to the good.
‘Been there, done that,’ he might say. ‘Isn’t she great?’
But it didn’t make me feel great. I wanted to be free of it, this bag he kept putting me in. It got so I wanted to sleep with him – to love him even – just to be myself again, undescribed. But most of all, I wanted him not to be jealous of me in the first place. I mean, it was only a question of getting on a plane. This was before I heard about his childhood, of course, and long before I realised that he didn’t want this particular emotion fixed. He liked being jealous, it was his comfort and company – call it ambition; it was his protection from the night.
The other thing I noticed was that Seán doesn’t really like eating. I don’t mean he doesn’t like food, I mean he hates all the chewing and swallowing – I suppose there is much to dislike. Despite which, there was always huge restaurant palaver: the choice of table, the crack of the napkin, endless discussion about the wine, and a vague prissiness about pasta that was not home-made. The foreplay, you might say, went on forever. Then the food would arrive and he would wait. He might fold his hands together and finish his point, or make another point. Finally, he would take that ceremonial first bite, go Mmmm mmmm, and praise the dish: the toffee-ness of the cherry tomatoes, or some such. Then, a bit of ordinary eating – chomp chomp – until the moment I realised he had stopped and was looking at the food. He might attempt another forkful but lose heart before it entered his mouth. Then a bit more staring; a kind of altercation. Finally, he would stage some distraction, grab a last morsel, and push away the plate.