‘Fiach,’ she says.
‘What?’
On the other side of the table, Fiach is talking about some kind of goose. He says he goes to Bull Island every Saturday to take pictures of this goose. He is throwing it out like it’s a sort of trendy thing to do, but he’s also actually started listing the names of gulls and terns and Frank is looking at him with a face like setting concrete. I think he’s too astonished or too bored to speak, but then I see that he is completely interested, that he is nine years old.
‘Maybe Fiach could do the wedding pictures,’ I say, but no one is listening. Fiach is on to curlews now, he seems to be talking about their feet.
‘I said, maybe Fiach can do the wedding, Frank.’
Beside me, Sarah is trying to set her drink on fire. She has the lighter pushed down into the glass, and she’s flicking the wheel. When the spark catches, she pulls back in fright and the glass falls over. The flaming brandy licks out across the table.
For a moment, all four of us watch the flames spill across the wood. Frank lifts his napkin but does not bring it down. It is such a beautiful blue. The fire gathers the air and loses it; drinking it, slurping it down. Fiach pulls his chair back as a rivulet of flame drips over the edge of the table and lands on the floor. Then I pick up a bottle of water and put it all out.
Sarah is silent in the bedroom, putting on her coat. Then she turns to say that she is delighted. Of course, she said it when I first showed her the ring — with a big fake scream like the rest of them — but now she says it properly, she takes both my arms and says she is just delighted, just so pleased. She says that Frank is just so brilliant.
‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘Oh, Jesus, Sarah, I’m scared.’
We hug then, and I show her back into the big room.
After they are gone I go over to the stereo, turn it up and start to dance. I swing my backside. I sit down on the air and then push up into it. I say, ‘Fuck you, Sarah. Hey, fuck you,’ pushing up with my joke penis, made of air.
Frank sits on the sofa and looks at me. Then he closes his eyes and seems to sleep.
THE HOUSE OF THE ARCHITECT’S LOVE STORY
I used to drink to bring the house down, just because I saw a few cracks in the wall. But Truth is not an earthquake, it is only a crack in the wall and the house might stand for another hundred years.
‘Let it come down,’ I would say, perhaps a little too loudly. ‘Let it come down.’ The others knew what I meant alright, but the house stayed still.
I gave all that up. We each have our methods. I am good at interior decoration. I have a gin and tonic before dinner and look at the wallpaper. I am only drunk where it is appropriate. I am only in love where it stays still. This does not mean that I am polite.
Three years ago I hit a nurse in the labour ward, because I had the excuse. I make housewife noises in the dark, to make your skin crawl. I am glad he has given me a child, so I can drown it, to show the fullness of my intent.
I boast, of course.
Of all the different love stories, I chose an architect’s love story, with strong columns and calculated lines of stress, a witty doorway and curious steps. In the house of an architect’s love story the light is always moving, the air is thick with light. From outside, the house of the architect’s love story is a neo-Palladian villa, but inside, there are corners, cellars, attics, toilets, a room full of books with an empty socket in the lamp. There are cubbyholes that smell of wet afternoons. There are vaults, a sacristy, an office with windows set in the floor. There is a sky-blue nursery where the rockinghorse is shaped like a bat and swings from a rail. And in the centre of it all is a bay window where the sun pours in.
It is familiar to us all. At least, it was familiar to me, the first time I walked in, because all my dreams were there, and there were plenty of cracks in the wall.
The first time I didn’t sleep with the architect was purely social. We were at a party to celebrate a friend’s new extension. There had been connections, before that, of course, we were both part of the same set. If I ever wanted an extension, I would have come to him myself.
I asked him about terracotta tiling and we discussed the word ‘grout’. I was annoyed by the faint amusement in his face when I said that white was the only colour for a bathroom sink. ‘I am the perfect Architect,’ he said, ‘I have no personal taste. I only look amused to please my clients, who expect to be in the wrong.’ There was a mild regret in his voice for all the cathedrals he should have built and we talked about that for a while.
The second time I didn’t sleep with the architect was in my own house. I shouldn’t have invited him, but the guilt was very strong. I wanted him to meet my husband and go away quietly, but he spent the time pacing the room, testing the slope of the floor. He knocked on the walls too, to see which were partitions; he sniffed slightly in front of my favourite picture and told me the bedroom was a mistake. ‘I know what you mean,’ I said, and then backed away. I said that I could live in a hole at the side of the road, so long as it was warm. ‘Do you ever think of anything,’ I asked, ‘except dry rot?’ We were perfectly at home with one another. Even so, there were many occasions in that first year when we did not make love.
The reasons for this neglect were profound, and not to be confused with an absence of desire. The architect and I had both built our lives with much deliberation. The need to abandon everything, to ‘let it come down’ had been mislaid long ago. We understood risk too well. We needed it too much. There was also the small matter of my husband and a child.
It is a quiet child with red hair. It is past the boring stage and runs around from room to room, taking up my time. It would be a mistake to say that I loved her. I am that child. When she looks at me I feel vicious, the need between us is so complete, and I feel vicious for the world, because it threatens the head that I love. On the other hand, wives that are faithful to their husbands because they are infatuated by their offspring don’t make sense to me. One doesn’t have sex with one’s children.
I am unfaithful with my husband’s money — a much more pleasing betrayal. My life is awash with plumbers and electricians, and I change all the ashtrays twice a year. I watch women in fitting rooms, the way they stick their lips out and make them ugly when they look into the mirror. I wonder who they are dressing for and I wonder who pays.
My husband earns forty thousand pounds a year and has a company car. This is one of the first things he ever told me. But I fell in love with him anyway.
After I hadn’t slept with the architect a few times, I took to riding buses as though they were the subways of New York. I sighed when the air-brakes loosened their sad load, and sat at the front, up-top, where I could drive with no hands. I became addicted to escalators, like a woman in a nervous breakdown. Stairs were for sitting on, with my child in my lap. I joined the local library for that purpose.
These were all things I dreamed about long before I met the architect, which makes this story dishonest in its way. Under excuses for sitting on library steps I could also list: simple fatigue, not winning the lottery, not liking the colour blue. Under excuses for getting rid of a baby I could list: not liking babies, not liking myself, or not liking the architect. Take your pick.
I don’t mean to sound cold. These are things I have to say slowly, things I have to pace the room for, testing the slope in the floor. So. The architect is called Paul, if you must know. His parents called him Paul because they were the kind of people who couldn’t decide on the right wallpaper. Paul has a mind as big as a house, a heart the size of a door and a dick you could hang your hat on. He never married; being too choosy, too hesitant, too mindful of the importance of things.