‘Well,’ I said. By which I meant, ‘Time enough.’
‘Sometimes my Dad does it,’ she said. But this was too intimate for me, and I had to move away.
After the cake and candles, I took out my iPod and found myself in the middle of a sudden clamour of tweenies, demanding Justin Timberlake.
‘Hang on,’ I said, and obliged the white bud of the earpiece into Evie’s ear. As soon as the music came through, they ran off, grabbing for the other earpiece, switching tracks, turning the dial.
‘Hey hey hey!’ said Fiona, before being diverted by the sound of the doorbell.
The party was over. I hung back while the parents came and, one after another, the children were called away. In the middle of the confusion, the sound of his voice in the hall brought an unexpected pang, and I turned to pick up wrapping paper at the far end of the room.
‘Evie!’
He had arrived in the doorway. I was starting to run out of things to clear off the floor when I sensed Evie standing beside me – a little too close, the way children do.
‘Just give it back,’ said Seán’s voice, though this was what she was already doing; wrapping the wires around the iPod, as she held it out towards me.
‘Thank you, Gina,’ she said.
Gina, no less.
‘You’re welcome,’ I said.
‘Good girl.’
Seán’s voice was so cold, it was clear what he really wanted to say. He wanted to say, ‘Please step away from my child,’ and this was very unfair. It was so unfair, that I turned and looked straight at him.
‘Oh, hello,’ I said.
He looked just like himself.
‘Come on,’ he said, ushering Evie through the doorway. The rudeness was astonishing. But he faltered and turned back for a moment, and the look he gave me then was so mute, so full of things I could not understand, that I almost forgave him.
I tried to keep it at bay, and failed. When the last small guest was gone and the rubbish bag full of packaging and uneaten lasagne the thought of him – the fact of him – happened in my chest, like a distant disaster. Something snapped or was broken. And I did not know how bad the damage was.
My hands, as they picked up the heavy jug Fiona used for juice, remembered the solid span of his waist under them that night in Montreux. What was it he had said again? ‘You have lovely skin.’ It seemed a bit all-purpose, at the time. ‘So soft.’ Why did men need to persuade themselves? Why did they have to have you, and make you up at the same time?
This, I asked myself, rather foolishly, while holding the thick glass jug in Fiona’s open-plan kitchen in Enniskerry, standing on her new limestone floor (the old terracotta floor was ‘all wrong’ apparently). I thought about the difference between one man and another when you have your eyes closed. And I said to myself that the difference was enormous. There was no difference greater than the difference between two men when you have your eyes closed. And in my head I dropped the jug and was devastated by its fall. Fiona was loading the dishwasher. Joan was taking the plates out again and rinsing them under the tap. Megan and Jack had disappeared. I could feel it, still there under my hands: thick blown glass with swirls, in the base, of cobalt blue. Such a beautiful jug. And then I let it go.
She had fits, apparently. This is what Fiona told me when she had cleared the last shards of glass, not just with a brush but also with the Hoover, because she didn’t care about the jug so much as the danger to her children’s bare feet. Evie, she said, had fits. Fiona had never actually seen it happen, though for a few years they were all on red alert. The child’s mother was driven frantic; had tried everything, from consultants to – whatever – homeopathic magnets.
‘She looked all right to me,’ I said.
‘No, she’s fine now,’ said Fiona. ‘I think she’s fine.’
‘She’s a funny little person,’ I said.
‘Is she? I don’t know. I mean, everyone was so worried about her. But I don’t know.’
‘God. Poor Seán,’ I said.
She gave me a look, exaggeratedly blank.
‘Up to a point,’ she said.
I wanted to know what she meant by that, but she had already turned away.
I watched Megan later, sprawled on the sofa, so healthy and large. Our mother was freshening up. Jack was stuck into his Nintendo. I was waiting to leave. We were all waiting, perhaps, for Shay to come home. The evening had come adrift.
‘So birthday girl,’ said Fiona, sitting down and hugging her daughter to her. ‘How does it feel to be nine?’
‘Good,’ said Megan.
We sat and pretended to watch the telly. Our mother spends such a long time in the bathroom, it used to make us anxious; wondering what she was up to in there, and when she would emerge. Meanwhile, Megan brushed her own mother’s hair back from her face, admired an earring, gave it a tug.
‘Careful.’
And the wrangle began: Megan stretching her mother’s lips into a painful smile, pulling her eyelids back into slits, while Fiona just looked at her and refused to be annoyed. They had always been like this, locked in something that wasn’t exactly love, and not quite war.
‘Leave your mother alone, Megan,’ I said. ‘You’re nine, now.’
And Fiona said, ‘Hah!’
‘Only another twenty years to go,’ said Joan. She was standing behind us in her summer trench coat and silk scarf, her mirror work done – everything the same as before, except that tiny, crucial bit better. The usual miracle.
She looked at me.
‘Will we go?’
I may be getting things in the wrong order here.
I was not yet in love with Seán. Though, at any of those moments, I might have fallen in love with him. Any of them. The first moment in the garden, by the fence that wasn’t there. The time he sat in the fold-up chair on the caravan site in Brittas Bay, or went to sit, and everything slowed to a standstill except us two. I could have fallen in love with him in a hotel corridor in Switzerland, when the lock whirred and he stayed to kiss me instead of obliging me through the door.
But I did not love him. I was slightly repulsed by him, in fact. I mean I had already slept with this man, what else was there to be done with him?
If you asked me now, of course, I would say I was crazy about him from that first glance, I was in love with his hands as I watched them move in Montreux, I was in love with some other thing from the time he ushered Evie away from me and turned back in the hall – his particular sadness, whatever it might be. So don’t ask me when this happened, or that happened. Before or after seems beside the point. As far as I am concerned they were happening all along.
And there are things I have forgotten to mention – the beauty of the children on the beach in Brittas that day seems important now, in a way I did not realise then. Perhaps it is the fact that Evie was not well, and I did not know it, but the beauty of the children matters in some way I do not understand.
Still, I can’t be too bothered here, with chronology. The idea that if you tell it, one thing after another, then everything will make sense.
It doesn’t make sense.
My mother had that old-fashioned thing, an easy death. But not yet.
And I was in love with Seán, but not as far as I knew. Not yet.
I was leaving my husband, though I might have already left him. We might have never been together – all those times, when we thought we were. When he turned and smiled at me, at the top of the aisle in Terenure church. When he dived below me, so deep you could see the water between us thickening to green.
There are dates I can be sure of, certainly, but they are not the important ones. I can’t remember the day – the hour – when Joan’s ‘poor form’ became ‘depression’, for example, or when the depression turned into something physical and harder to name. There must have been a moment, or an accumulation of moments, when we stopped listening to the words she said, and started listening to the way she said them. There must have been a day when we stopped listening to her at all – one single split second, when she changed from being our mother, Oh Joan, would you ever… and turned into the harmless object of our concern.