I had joined Seán and Fiachra as they hovered near his sleeping wife.
‘First year – no sex,’ Fiachra was saying into his wine glass. ‘Isn’t that what they say?’
‘Ah, stop it,’ said Seán. ‘You won’t know yourselves.’
Behind us, the woman slept, while the baby – I don’t know – smiled, or sucked its thumb, or listened and knew better, while, on the back of the sofa, the side of Seán’s hand touched the side of mine. I could feel the thick fold in the flesh, at the bend of the knuckles. And it was surprisingly hot, this tiny piece of him. That was all. He did not move, and neither did I.
But once we had begun, how were we supposed to stop? This sounds like a simple question, but I still don’t know the answer to it. I mean that we had started something that could not be ended, except by happening. It could not be stopped, but only finished. I mean the woman with the chocolate-dipped mango who was eyeing up the sherry trifle, and the boys with the Bulgarian complex that had three whole Bulgarian pools, two in the garden and one on the roof, and everyone with a last drink who was thinking about another last drink, and me sitting with my hand touching the side of Seán’s hand in his own house – we were all drunk, of course, but I could no more have left it at that than Fiachra’s baby could have decided to stay where it was for another couple of years. I could no more ignore it than you could ignore the smell of the sea at the road’s end -turn back without checking that the water was there and that it was wide.
Our reflections rolled and flickered over the flawed old glass of the four long windows, with all the loveliness of Christmas past and for a moment it was as though everything had already happened. We had loved and died and left no trace. And what it wanted, what the whole world wanted, was to be made real.
The minute Fiona left, I made my way to the kitchen, with a blagged cigarette in my hand. Seán was there, opening a bottle of red.
‘What’s that?’ he said.
‘Is this the way out?’
‘Don’t,’ he said.
I looked down at the cigarette and said, ‘Oh for God’s sake.’
I made my way to the sink, turned on the tap and drowned the thing, then opened the cupboards under the sink, one door after another, and threw it in Seán Vallely’s own, personal, domestic bin. After which, I straightened up and looked at him.
‘Wow,’ I said. ‘I love your units. What are they, oak?’
‘Something like that,’ he said.
And I wandered back into the fray.
It was getting to that time when everyone is unspooled and sad to be leaving, though they never actually do leave; the hour when bags are lost and taxis fail to arrive. It was the lost hour, the hour of unravelling intentions, and it was in this extra time, while Aileen hunted in the living room for Dahlia’s abandoned shoes, that I kissed Seán, or he kissed me, upstairs.
It was Fiachra’s fault. I have never been at an event with Fiachra which he has left voluntarily. Drunk or sober, he is the kind of guy who has to be dragged backwards through life. I offered to get the coats, just to move things along, and was halfway there when I heard Seán take the stairs behind me, saying, ‘I’m on to it.’ He followed me across the landing, and I made it into the au pair’s room before turning around.
I had expected – I don’t know what I had expected – some kind of collision. I had expected lust. What I got was a man who looked at me through pupils so open and black, you could not see the iris. What I saw, when I turned, was Seán.
I kissed his mouth.
I kissed him. And as kisses go it was almost innocent; a second too long, perhaps. Maybe two. And at the beginning of that extra second I heard Evie squeaking at the sight of us; towards the end of it, her mother’s voice downstairs.
‘Evie! What are you doing up there?’ making the child glance back over her shoulder, as my eyes rolled, a little comically, towards the door.
Seán pulled away. He took a breath. He held me at the hips. He said: ‘Happy New Year!’
I said, ‘Happy New Year to you, too!’ and Evie’s hands began to flap as she lifted her arms from her sides.
‘Happy New Year!’ she said, and she barrelled into her father. ‘Happy New Year, Daddy!’
He bent to kiss her too; a peck on the lips, and she encircled him with her arms and squeezed tight, and tight again.
‘Hoofa! Ooofa!’ said her father.
Then she turned to me.
‘Happy New Year, Gina!’ she said.
And she tilted her face up, so I could kiss her too.
The coats were gathered and Evie preceded us down the stairs. She put a soft white hand on the banister and walked carefully in front of us, one sock drifting towards her ankle, a row of corrugations around her calf where the elastic left its red reminder, her hair a little dishevelled, her cheek, as I knew from kissing it, sticky with stolen sugar. She had sneaked a go of the White Linen, but, from under her clothes, came the tired smell of a body that is not yet sure of itself. She seemed so proud; like a little herald, full of news beyond her understanding.
The front door was open and Dahlia stood on the doorstep facing the night, while Fiachra lingered inside the living room, draining a final glass. As we came down the stairs, the pregnant woman stretched her arms above her head. She looked a little fat, from behind; her spine curved back on itself, beautiful and sturdy, while her hidden belly lifted to the sky.
She dropped her hands.
‘Home’ she said, and turned around to me. ‘Are you right, so?’
Aileen obliged Fiachra into the hall, then she put coats on the parents-to-be and she kissed them both. Then Seán kissed them. Then Seán kissed me on the cheek, his hands pushing simultaneously at my shoulders, so it wasn’t so much a kiss as a kind of bounce back from each other. Then Aileen gave me a hug, and stood back to look at me. She put an admiring hand on my hair, just over my ear, and she said, ‘You must come again soon,’ and I said, ‘Yes.’
‘And Donal too.’
‘Conor.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Goodnight. Goodnight!’ and she watched, silhouetted in the doorframe with her lovely husband and her lovely daughter, as we got into the car and drove away.
‘God,’ said Fiachra, slipping down in the passenger seat in front of me, while his wife grunted at the gearshift.
‘God almighty. Out of there I thought we Would Not Get.’
I have thought about it a lot, since – how much Aileen did or did not know. When it all blew up in our faces, Seán said that she had been ‘in denial’. He said ‘you have no idea’ (the things I have to put up with). They must realise, these women. They must, on some level, know what is going on. I know it sounds like a harsh thing to say, but I think we should own up to what we know. We should know why we do the things that we do. Otherwise it’s just a mess. Otherwise we are all just flailing around.
When Conor came in the door the next day, sometime after noon, he looked at me, lying on the sofa with a sleeping bag thrown over me, watching ‘The Simpsons’ with the remote in my hand. He said, ‘Where’s the car?’
The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s in His Kiss)
AFTER THE PARTY, things went quiet for a while. There was something too intimate there, that did not suit us – or did not suit me. I had flashbacks to the top of the stairs and, in the whiteness, I seemed to grow and shrink as I reached out my hand to open Seán’s bedroom door. I’d startle back to myself to find the taxi man still complaining, or some meeting called to an unsatisfactory conclusion while I sat on, my files scattered in front of me.
‘See you Tuesday.’
‘Yes. Yeah sure.’
It wasn’t just me. There was a lull in the beginning of that year; a sense of in-taken breath. The boss was in Belize, of all places, looking at a villa. Fiachra’s baby refused to arrive. Seán’s report was not due until the first of February, but nobody seemed wild about Poland anymore. I don’t know how it translated into euros and cents, I just remember it as a mood; how Warsaw, whose streets I had so recently walked, became as foreign to me as it had been when I did not know their word for Thursday and never knew I might want to. Who would have thought, growing up as a nice Irish girl, that this language would give me such pleasure? And those Polish men, my goodness, so proud and sexy as they bowed – some of them actually did do this – to kiss my outstretched hand. I mean, I nearly bought a flat there. But even then, in January 2007, it had started to go a bit cabbage-shaped. Outside the window, the day refused to stretch. Even the planet was taking its time.