It wasn’t the waitress he wanted.
It was true. Phil Brogan wanted to do something very sudden and very urgent with her, Catherine Maguire, recently bereaved. Or, seeing as this was a hotel and not a stationery cupboard, something very urgent and very slow. She felt a rising impulse to giggle, but he held her gaze and did not look away. There was nothing in this guy’s pants that liked a joke. This was what all the drenched girls knew. This imperative. This trap.
‘A gin and tonic is fine,’ she said.
Horrible to be so mirthless, she thought, and wondered if they would end up in his room, or do it in hers.
Phil took out his mobile and went, with a flourish, to switch it off.
‘Hang on. Sorry. One last call.’
It was to a florist. The flowers he had ordered for his mother? He had changed his mind.
‘Not an orchid — roses. Twelve. Red. Right. “To my darling mother on her birthday.”’
What a romantic.
When she thought about it later, this phone call was the weirdest moment of the whole three days — the helpless need he had to mark her cards. He loved his mother. No wonder he was still single. Catherine didn’t think they made them like that any more.
But at the time, it was the coincidence that startled her. This wasn’t about sex or betrayal, this was about flowers falling into a grave. It was about red roses or white. It was about dying or being alive. It was something she had to do.
Meanwhile, she did not know how these seductions went. Who moved? Who demurred? Did it last for three nights, or half a night? And would she be doomed, ever afterwards, to supplication and hunger; not being able to cross the threshold of his office, but standing in the rain at the door?
She left him to shower and change, then came down to dinner and flirted like crazy over the poached wild salmon. Her mother would have been proud of her. Actually, though, there was nothing else she could do — she could hardly speak, so she might as well simper. It was unbearable. At half past twelve she fled from the bar with a quick goodnight, and lay awake endlessly in the dark of her room.
She thought about Tom. Sometime before dawn she got out of bed and looked in the mirror: it was a different body in there. Grief had made her thin.
In the morning she called Phil’s room from the front desk and he climbed into the car beside her, his hair still damp from the shower. She drove to a larger, cheaper hotel in town, where they walked into the function room and they did their spiel, and were good at it. After which there was the whole afternoon to fill before darkness and sex, or no sex, one more time. Phil seemed amused by all this scheduling — the intimacy of it — and back at their own hotel, he suggested they go their separate ways for a while. What for? Catherine hired a horse and trekked a path behind the hotel that opened into scrubland high above the famous lakes. She looked at them far below; green and grey, as the weather chased across the water. She looked up at the sky, and across at the light, and around her at the lichened, small oaks with their dry, scrubby branches. The horse’s mane under her hand was thick and electric. She picked up the reins and turned towards home.
They met for drinks at five, by which time Catherine could not speak at all. Which was fine. Phil told her about himself — his scrambler bike, his trip to Mexico, his teacher with the strap. He was at his interesting best. But every time she opened her mouth, he just looked at her. Why was she always throwing things off kilter? There was something that had to happen before they had sex, a personal thing, and she didn’t know what it was.
‘Will you have another one?’ he said, waggling his empty glass.
‘Yes,’ said Catherine. ‘I think I will. My mother just died.’
He missed a beat.
‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ he said.
‘Well, when I say “just,” it was actually quite a while ago, now.’
‘I see.’
‘Sometimes, it feels closer, that’s all. It sort of sneaks up on you.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think I know what you mean.’
It was, possibly, the rudest thing she had ever said.
Over dinner, she realised that he was trying to impress her. That was why she was supposed to listen and not talk back to him. Her mother used to tell her these things — she was not supposed to impress him: it was supposed to work the other way around. So she smiled, in an impressed sort of way, and tried not to think about the look in his eye, or the exact heft of his dick in her hand. She knew that if it didn’t happen tonight the whole situation would become unpleasant, so she planned her move, using the moment when they pushed back from the table to suggest a walk in the garden at the back of the hotel. He looked at her and nearly smiled. Good girl, he seemed to say. Well done.
They went out into the moonlight and walked in precoital silence down shallow avenues of clipped box. Some of the roses were out already, white and grey against the black of the bushes, and there were low pools of green where a line of lights showed the way.
It was May. The central path was shaggy with lavender not yet in bloom. Someone had thrown a sweater over the gatepost at the end of the walk that, as they got closer, shifted in the corner of her eye. Catherine looked. Oozing over the concrete ball was a dripping, black, velvet swarm. Clumps of bees fell from the ragged edges, or crawled back up the gatepost to rejoin the mass. It was like watching some slow liquid spill and then unspill itself; honey making its way back into the jar.
‘Bees,’ she said to Phil, who stood stock-still as she walked forward to stare at them. Then she ducked down to catch a falling cluster and set it back on the pile.
‘Jesus,’ she heard him say behind her. The bees were bristly and soft, and their tiny legs clung to her fingertips as she shook them back into the mess of black wings. She watched them until she could not tell them apart. Then she started to cry.
But this was not what she was ashamed of, finally, as Phil Brogan lost his moment and walked her back into the hotel. She was ashamed of what she had felt as she stepped away from her mother’s grave. That lightness — it was desire. And it was vast. The smell of the air and of the soil and the grass; Tom not supporting her with his arms so much as holding her to the skin of the earth. It was like she could fuck anything: the Killarney lakes and the sky that ran over them, and posh hotels with wafflecloth robes, and the pink scent of a rose that showed grey in the darkness, and the whole lovely month of May. She could swim in it, and swallow it, and cram it into her in each and every possible way.
All of it, that is, except for this unpleasant man, who could not face his own consequences, who stood outside her hotel bedroom and said, ‘What about a nightcap? You must have got a fright.’
Catherine looked at him. She did not know where the air stopped and her skin began.
‘Not really,’ she said.
SWITZERLAND
1.
She did him an injustice, she thought — the American. He was so full of himself. That was the way he arrived in her life, a cup that was brimful; a look on his face that said she didn’t know the half of it.
So talk to me, she said. Fill me in.
He was so healthy and new, with his recent blond hair and his fresh white teeth. He might have been made in the airport. He might have materialised in the hum of a security door frame.
Hello, Dublin.
So tell me about your grandfather, she said. About the cups wrapped in old newspaper that you found in a box under the stairs. Tell me about coffin ships and how you came from Connemara, really. Tell me about potatoes.
My great-aunt Louise, he said. When she went mad.