I watched from the sea as Aileen straggled up the beach to tend to Evie, and I realised that her thin body wasn’t fit, it was just busy. You could see it in the hunch of her shoulders; how she might walk at speed, but she took no pleasure in it.
Conor would stay in the water for another twenty minutes, his windsurf board forgotten on the roof of the car. Shay, meanwhile, had fallen backwards on the lime-green, polka-dot rug, belly to the sky. Which left Seán, and Seán’s lacklustre desiring – because we all wanted him to want us. At least I think we did, disporting ourselves (isn’t that the word?) about the place where he sat, our bodies shocked into delight by the cold sea. There we were: Fiona, who was a sort of dream, and his wife who did not matter, and me, who was – for these few moments at least – the bouncing girl. As I came up the short slope of the beach, and bent for my towel, and flung my hair back and said, ‘Hooo-eeee!’ I was the girl who liked it. The fat one.
I was the nightmare.
Or I felt like the nightmare. It must have been the way he looked at me.
This tiny drama happened and then disappeared immediately, as if by arrangement, and we sat around on a spoiled patchwork of towels, as though used to pretending that everyone was fully dressed. We talked about the year we realised you could have more than one bathing suit – which, in my case, was the year in question, when I had to go up a size, due to too much wedded bliss, and went mad in the shop and bought two. ‘One on, one drying on the line.’
Seán talked about wearing his father’s navy underpants on the beach in Courtown, and never forgiving his mother for it, the way she stitched up the flies and said they were just like the real thing. The story made us realise how much older he was than us – which also explained the stone house down the road from Fiona and Shay’s in Enniskerry. Myself and Conor still got age-rage when people waggled their bricks and mortar at us. ‘You have a nice house? That’s because you’re old, you bastard,’ though Seán – so wiry and compact – seemed hardly grown-up at all. The pair of them, husband and wife, were like mantelpiece ornaments, each so particular in the way they moved, and I felt myself inflate slowly on the beach beside them. I was huge! I was horny! I was… careful. When I looked at Seán, and he at me, it was always eye to eye.
In fact, as I discovered later, Seán wasn’t judging my body one way or another. He just waited for my own judgement to rise and then smiled it back at me. It was one of his tricks. I should have known about his tricks.
Two passing teenagers, for example, fabulous and tall; he stared at them for a second too long – stared hard, like he might have to go over there and fuck them, right now. Then he turned back to look at disappointing you.
I was sort of scorched by it, I have to say.
This is why Fiona started burbling on about buying a house in France. It was because she wanted to impress Seán – a man who, in his Speedos, was not exactly a siren song. He stirred us up. Everything he said was funny, and everything seemed to do you down. Or buoy you up. He could do that too. He sat about; a black T-shirt covering his little mound of stomach, and he pushed into the sand with his tough, white toes.
Even in the strong sun, I was caught by the beauty of his eyes, which were larger than a man’s eyes should be and more easily hurt. I saw the child in him that afternoon, it was easy to see: an eight-year-old charmer, full of mischief and swagger. But I don’t know if I saw how tactical it all was. I don’t think I saw the way he was threatened by his own desires, or how jealousy and desire ran so close in him he had to demean a little the thing he wanted. For example, me.
Or not me. It was hard to tell.
One way or another, we all ended up boasting. Practically naked as we were, in our very ordinary, Irish bodies (except Fiona’s, which wasn’t on show), we sat and bragged for a while, while the children dug in the sand and ran about, and the beach and the sky continued, beautiful, without us.
‘What was all that about?’ said Conor, in the car on the way home. ‘Jesus.’
Will You Love Me Tomorrow
THAT WINTER, JOAN complained of swelling in her feet, which, for our mother, was a terrible comedown, the row of shoes she had, going back thirty years, all forsworn for Granny boots: she just hated it. She got supplements in the health food shop and complained of depression – she was, actually, depressed, I thought – and it never occurred to her, or to any of us, to do anything about it except mope and talk on the phone about kitten heels and peppermint lotion and the various shades in which you might get support tights.
And I had gone back on the pill, which isn’t exactly important, except that the pill always makes me depressed: foggy and guilty and permanently just that tiny bit swollen, so the surface of me is too needy and stupid, somehow. I am not explaining it very well. I just think that if I hadn’t been on the pill things would have gone differently; I might have been able to listen better to my mother on the phone, or think better, but it was like I had gone to the edges of myself, and what was in the centre was anyone’s guess. Nothing, that is one answer. Or nothing much.
And I was busy, it seemed like I was always on a plane. There were times my toiletries never made it out of their see-through plastic bag.
Conor’s mother arrived for the weekend; she sat there eating breakfast and floated the opinion that two pillowcases were more hygienic, she always thought, than just one.
‘Sleep,’ she said. ‘It’s a third of your life.’ And I didn’t throw her out or shout at her that the son she reared didn’t know you could change sheets, he thought they came with the bed.
‘You know,’ I said. ‘That makes a lot of sense.’
Mrs Shiels had five children: two in Youghal, and two breeding mightily in Dundrum and Bondi. A capable, glamorous woman, she was all set to use us for her Dublin shopping base – she knew it and I knew it. For Christmas, I got her some vouchers for a posh hotel.
‘The Merrion!’ she said. ‘Lovely.’
This was a Christmas I could have been with my own mother, but which I spent instead in the middle of a scrummage down in Youghal, with forty people whose names I did not know, each and every one of whom hated Dubliners (don’t tell me otherwise) for the fact that they weren’t from fucking Youghal.
Christ.
I can’t believe I am free of all that. I just can’t believe it. That all you have to do is sleep with somebody and get caught and you never have to see your in-laws again. Ever. Pfffft! Gone. It’s the nearest thing to magic I have yet found.
But the pill is important for another reason too, I suppose, because if it hadn’t been for the pill, I might not have slept with Seán that time in Montreux. Which was – and this is a peculiar thing to say – the only time it did not matter. Apart from anything else, there was a lot of, I think, Alsace Riesling involved.
It happened at a conference. Of course. A week of management-speak on a Swiss lake with flow charts and fondue, and a little trip on a wooden boat, with a mixed gang of semi-state and private sector, a few from Galway, most Dublin-based, and drinking on the last couple of nights, until 4 a.m. Most of them, I might also mention, were men.
The title of the week was ‘Beyond the EU’. I was there to talk ‘International Internet Strategy’ – delighted to get the invite, which was a step up for me. The hotel was a confection in cream and red velvet, with gilt everywhere and stains on the carpets that might have been a hundred years old. And there on the first morning, under the heading ‘The Culture of Money’ was the name ‘Seán Vallely’.
‘You made it,’ he said. He looked better than I remembered. Maybe it was the fact that he was dressed.
‘I wondered who it was,’ I said.