The Forgotten Waltz Part 3

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-fas.h.i.+oned thing, an easy death. But not yet.

And I was in love with Sean, 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 acc.u.mulation 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.

'How are you, darling? All right?'

I was busy of course I mean, we were all busy but if I had recognised that moment then things might have been different. If I had been able to see her, instead of being surrounded by her, my beautiful mother, then she might still be alive.

There are some things I am sure of.

What happened, I mean the verifiable truth, reconstructible through emails here on my computer, calendar entries, phone calls made and received, was that, yes, undoubtedly, a few weeks after Megan's party, I recommended Sean, and Sean's consultancy, when we wanted to restructure in Dublin before setting up in Poland. I did it without hesitation; he was, undoubtedly the best person for the job.

All that is certain.

Slightly less certain is the fact that Conor and I had, for a while, perhaps around this time, excessive and unfriendly s.e.x, in our sanctioned blessed even marriage bed.

But when it comes to Conor, I really can't go into it. I mean I can't even be bothered to remember what happened when; I am not going to map our decline. There is nothing more sordid, if you ask me, than the details.

Was the s.e.x bad then, or was it just bad after I had started sleeping with Sean?

Bad is not the word for it.

The s.e.x was, around this time, a little too interesting, even for me. But it was also beside the point and maybe this is the interesting thing, that, in a story that is supposed to be about sleeping with one man or another, our bodies did not always play the game in the expected way.

But it is probably true that, around this time, we were actively thinking, or pretending to think, about starting a baby. One night, after a friend's wedding in Galway and much dancing, when I had forgotten to pack the pill and Conor said, 'What the h.e.l.l.'

I can't remember what it was like exactly, but I do remember that I did not like it. Apart from anything else, the s.e.x was terrible, it was not like s.e.x at all.

'He's f.u.c.king my life,' I kept thinking. 'He's f.u.c.king my entire life.'

In These Shoes?

RATHLIN COMMUNICATIONS PUTS European companies on the English-language web. That's what we do. But we make it look like fun.

Our office is all stripped brickwork with industrial skylights, and there is a discreet feel to the way the s.p.a.ce is managed, an illusion of privacy which, as anyone who works in open-plan will know, just makes it worse the paranoia, I mean. The best thing about the place is the plants contract, which is held by the boss's otherwise challenged daughter. She comes in each morning to do the foliage, which is everywhere and fabulous, from the bougainvillaea going up the ironwork to the ivy cladding the bathroom walls. The Danes who did the refurbishment put in irrigation the way you might do the wiring so the place is a thicket, and though I am cynical about these things (the idea that a few plants make us more 'green') I even voted for canaries, at some meeting, only to be outvoted on the grounds of canary s.h.i.+t.

It is the kind of place where the lift is big enough to bring your bike upstairs, and the coffee is all fair trade. There is an amount of s.e.x in the air, I suppose, but we're not that pushed. We're all pretty young. We are big on ideas: the guys who have a bed in their office are sad techie b.a.s.t.a.r.ds who really do fold them out for a sleep.

He was sitting in the meeting room, that first morning. I saw him through the gla.s.s wall before he saw me and I couldn't think what was wrong with him. He was using a fountain pen but that was all right, wasn't it? his BlackBerry was neatly displayed on the table beside him. The suit was maybe a bit sharp, his tie a bit restrained but I mean, he's a consultant, he is supposed to wear a suit. Maybe it was his hair, which seemed straighter than before, and flopped forward. Had he dyed it? There was, at least, an amount of gel involved. He looked up from under this youthful mop as I walked in and he said, 'h.e.l.lo, you.'

'Hi.'

He had a pair of Ray-Bans hooked on to the idle forefinger of his left hand.

'You got here,' I said.

He let the gla.s.ses swing.

'So it would appear.'

He seemed so sure we would sleep together that I decided against it on the spot, or wished, at least, for darkness to take it away, this unexpected weakness he had for props.

I sat down, smiled neatly, and said, 'So, how would you like to be introduced?'

The room filled and the meeting went ahead and it was all very much as you might expect. There was the usual blather from Frank, who was being edged out to blather elsewhere. This was followed by a little posturing from my young colleagues, David and Fiachra, who were maddened by the potential gap. The boss was excited; you could tell he was excited because he seemed so bored. And I well, I, as ever, smiled, facilitated, and kept clear, because I was the girl who would win in the end, despite the fact that girls so rarely do.

Sean looked from one speaker to the next, asked some questions, and kept his opinions to himself. This surprised me a little. I had expected more of the flamboyance we saw at the whiteboard in Montreux, but Sean at work I have always loved Sean at work used no more energy than was needful. It reminded me a little of Evie, this ability he had to be simple, in the middle of much fuss. So I managed to forget the hair gel and the horrible architect's watch, and I just looked at him thinking, for a while; his grey eyes moving from one person to the next. And it might have been a work thing, this sensible, almost offhand way we had of speaking about, let's face it, a lot of money; it might have been the fact that he was sitting in the place where I spend most of my waking hours; but it was very intimate and slightly dreamlike to see him there like having a movie star in your kitchen, drinking tea and I really wanted to f.u.c.k him, then. There was, for the first time, no other word for it. I wanted to make him real. A man I would cross the street to avoid at nine o'clock by nine twenty-five I wanted to f.u.c.k him until he wept. My legs trembled with it. My voice floated out of my mouth when I opened it to speak.

The gla.s.s wall of the meeting room was huge and suddenly too transparent, I felt so exposed.

Not that things always go the way you might expect. Six months later Frank who still does nothing but blather was, for reasons I can't quite fathom, running much of the show; it was David who had been edged out, to do his posturing elsewhere. Fiachra, meanwhile, had got himself a new baby, an ecstatic look in his eye and a tendency to fall asleep while sitting on the toilet, much to the delight of the entire company who tiptoed in, girls included, to listen to the sound of his snoring on the other side of the cubicle door. I was still cheerful and useful and altogether indispensable, and still going nowhere in Rathlin Communications, despite the fact I had slept with the management consultant something neither of us found particularly relevant: I mean, no one would ever accuse Sean of securing the contract with his d.i.c.k. Six months later, I was talking to the bank about going out on my own and the bank was licking me slowly all over as were, now that I pause to think of it, both Sean Vallely and Conor s.h.i.+els. I am not an extraordinary woman but this was my life that year, and yes, it felt astonis.h.i.+ng. It also felt like a mess. The opposite of a nervous breakdown, whatever you might call that.

But I am getting ahead of myself here.

The office game was another game for us to play, after the suburban couples game, and before the game of hotel a.s.signations and fabulous, illicit l.u.s.t, and neither of us thought there might come a moment when all the games would stop.

It was a lot of fun.

They say consultants always recommend that you lose thirty per cent that this is what they are actually hired to say so when Sean was finished his report, we might be moved up, or out. People found it exciting when he walked out of the lift. You knew he was there. I followed his presence through the glades of rubber plant and bamboo, listened to the click of his briefcase opening two desks down and waited for his soft voice on the phone. He might have just put his head around my part.i.tion of fern, but his courts.h.i.+p was close and elaborate. Every time we spoke, it was as though we were rehearsing the lie.

'Is that you?' he might say, when I picked up.

'Yes.'

I had never had an affair before. I did not realise how s.e.xy it was to be clandestine. The secret was everything.

'Are you at your desk?'

'What do you think?'

I could hear him move and murmur a few metres away, but his real words were close, almost warm in my ear.

'Busy?'

'I am now ...'

'What are you doing?

'Well, I'm talking to you.'

The intimacy between us was so formal, so completely erotic.

'I thought we might do that better over lunch.'

'Lovely.'

Mind you, there was a certain key-jangling element to it, too; the idea that he might be reaching rather ardently into his pocket to check for spare change. The whole thing played surprisingly close to farce. I'm not sure how many people around us knew what was going on at a guess, they all did, and they were all hugely amused by it. But we were pretty amused too I mean, the rutting aside, the fierce and fleeting idea of it that ran across our minds (I must confess) from time to time we also found it slightly hilarious; the thought that we might, for once, just get away with it. And this is how we overcame our doubts because we both had major doubts. When it came to the point, some weeks later, of taking each other's clothes off, we didn't weep, or declare undying love, we didn't savage each other up against some filing cabinet, we just laughed well why not? We laughed when we kissed and we laughed at every b.u.t.ton and reluctant zip, and it was all hunger and recognition and delight.

Meanwhile, I saw him at the coffee maker and the beauty of his tie did not offend me. I even got to like his fountain pen. I was with him all the time. He knew I was there I was getting inside his skin. The tap of his hand on the side of his thigh. The way he leaned back in the chair and rubbed his nipple, for comfort or reward; he saw me noticing this, and stopped.

Oh, the game. The game.

The little surges of irritation, of contempt: from him, from me. Is this what you want?

If Sean were less of a tactical person, the thing might have gone sour before we'd even begun, but he knew his pleasures more than I did, it has to be said. He knew when to put the phone down. When to go home. When to turn away.

It is no wonder I became obsessed.

We had lunch every Friday for five weeks; it was our de-brief. We went to La Stampa fancy but not too fancy and talked business. He was good, as I keep saying, at his job. He had no interest in complication. He looked at the company carefully, trying to split the rock with just one tap. And after business, came charm. He told a story, he told another. Really funny stories. He ordered dessert wine. He teased me about the 'posh' school I went to, about the height of my heels, he made me fight and flirt. I thought, by week three, that there was something wrong with my blood pressure, that I might actually faint or die.

I took to walking home in the evening or walking somewhere. I swerved from the entrance of the pub on a Friday, because he was not there. I veered from the pedestrian light that was against me, crossed streets because they were empty of traffic, and turned different corners not so much avoiding home as averse to any particular destination. One night, I ended up on the rim of Dublin Bay. It was October by then; dark and cold. There was a container s.h.i.+p lodged on the horizon, impossibly large and disproportionate. The endless strand gave way in the darkness to a sea so shallow you would think the thing was stuck to the sea floor. But the lights floated in front of me. The s.h.i.+p was moving, or it must have been moving. I could not tell, in the darkness, which way.

It was also beautiful, this game of not touching: that is the thing I am afraid to say about myself and Sean how beautiful it was, how exquisite the distance we kept between us. And when I saw him one afternoon standing by the printer, lost in thought, with the light falling over his shoulders, it was as though the same light had jabbed me in the chest. I hadn't expected to find him there. He was wearing grey and his hair was grey: the plants beside him were dark green and the floor of the corridor beyond was teal blue. These are the details and they sound so foolish: a middle-aged man in an office with a file in his hand I mean to say. And there was no solace in his absence, either. When he was gone, I thought about nothing else: Sean in my sister's garden, Sean in Brittas, Sean in Switzerland. I wondered where he was this minute, and what he might be doing. I thought about a future together and wiped the thought, fifty, sixty, a hundred times a day. It was all such an agitation. But somewhere in the gaps in the certainty of seeing him after the lift doors opened, or in the shock of his voice nearby a stillness. .h.i.t, a kind of perfection. It was very beautiful, this desire that opened inside me, and then opened again. And this is what puts me beyond regret: the sweetness of my want for Sean Vallely, the sense of something unutterable at the heart of it. I felt I still feel that if we kissed again, we might never stop.

I lost half a stone.

Which was brilliant. I bounced into work and I ran up the stairs, too impatient for the lift. And I very seldom placed my forehead against a convenient wall, and pushed.

It is surprising how close you can get to someone, by staying very still.

There are two things I noticed, and I don't know if they are different or connected. First of all, in the office, there was this thing he did if I knew something he didn't, or if I had been somewhere he had yet to go that scuba-diving holiday in Australia, for example, or my ease with languages, which was in such contrast to his own few bits of French he managed very quickly to be proud of these achievements, to boast about them on my behalf. And this irritated me: he made it sound like he was responsible for my being so generally clever and gung ho. So it was as if I did the Great Barrier Reef and he got the credit. Or at the very least that we were in the whole Reef business together. And of course we were. I mean, who doesn't like Australia? By the time he had finished, the whole d.a.m.n continent seemed to belong to him. And all this because he had never actually been there, and I had.

You had to admire it, as a way of turning all things to the good.

'Been there, done that,' he might say. 'Isn't she great?'

But it didn't make me feel great. I wanted to be free of it, this bag he kept putting me in. It got so I wanted to sleep with him to love him even just to be myself again, undescribed. But most of all, I wanted him not to be jealous of me in the first place. I mean, it was only a question of getting on a plane. This was before I heard about his childhood, of course, and long before I realised that he didn't want this particular emotion fixed. He liked being jealous, it was his comfort and company call it ambition; it was his protection from the night.

The other thing I noticed was that Sean doesn't really like eating. I don't mean he doesn't like food, I mean he hates all the chewing and swallowing I suppose there is much to dislike. Despite which, there was always huge restaurant palaver: the choice of table, the crack of the napkin, endless discussion about the wine, and a vague prissiness about pasta that was not home-made. The foreplay, you might say, went on forever. Then the food would arrive and he would wait. He might fold his hands together and finish his point, or make another point. Finally, he would take that ceremonial first bite, go Mmmm mmmm, and praise the dish: the toffee-ness of the cherry tomatoes, or some such. Then, a bit of ordinary eating chomp chomp until the moment I realised he had stopped and was looking at the food. He might attempt another forkful but lose heart before it entered his mouth. Then a bit more staring; a kind of altercation. Finally, he would stage some distraction, grab a last morsel, and push away the plate.

Then he would look up at my, still-chewing, mouth.

I was in love with this man clearly I was in love, or at least obsessed; the rhythms of his appet.i.te were something I took so personally. But G.o.d knows, I could eat for Ireland, so I always felt a bit lonely after our lunch dates; not just greedy, but also thwarted or rejected, as if the food was all my fault.

'Wonderful,' he would say. 'Have you ever had it with pesto?'

I wondered what it would be like to live with that across the table from you, breakfast lunch and dinner. Did they all wait with their tongues hanging out, until he gave the nod? Did they stop when he stopped? Aileen, it seemed to me, was the kind of woman who would count the number of peas she put on your plate. All that containment.

I'm afraid Evie doesn't eat ice-pops, do you, Evie?

Either they were a perfect match, I thought, or they hadn't had s.e.x in years. Once the idea came to me, it made enormous sense. This was why they were so neat and polite. This was the sadness in the look he gave me, when he turned back in Fiona's hall.

But, though I lost seven count 'em pounds, living on love alone, I did not think about Aileen much in those office weeks. To be honest, I forgot that Aileen, or even Conor, might exist. When I came home, I was sometimes surprised to find him in the house. He seemed so large and so real.

Who are you?

Such is the delight of a long working day.

We made love properly for the first time, myself and Sean, early one evening, after we rolled back from our Friday lunch and rolled into a party for a guy who was taking a year out to be with his yacht. We managed to linger after everyone had gone, and the details of what corner we found and what we did; how we managed it, and who put what where, are n.o.body's business but our own.

Secret Love WHAT IS IT about wives? There is this thing they do because I am not the only one this has happened to. I am not the only one who was invited in.

I picked up the phone one day before Christmas and I heard the person on the other end of the line say: 'Oh h.e.l.lo, I am looking for Gina Moynihan.'

'That's me!'

'Hi Gina, this is Aileen you know, Sean Vallely's wife?'

And I thought, She has found us out.

I remember every word of the conversation that followed; every bare syllable and polite inflection. I played it in my head for days afterwards, note perfect. I could sing it, like a song.

'Oh, hi,' I said. A little too fast. With a slight choke on the 'Oh'. It might, if you were listening very closely, have sounded more like, 'Go hi'. Aileen, however, did not miss a beat.

'I got your number from Fiona, I hope you don't mind. I wanted to invite you over, after Christmas. We have our New Year's Day brunch, I don't know if Fiona ever mentioned it, we just do a sort of brunch, and Sean does that consomme thing with vodka, for people who need a cure. What do you call them?'

It was the most words I had heard out of her in one go. It took me a second to realise she had stopped.

'Bull Shots?' My voice sounded strange. As well it might.

'That's the one. It's from eleven thirty, though people wander in any time.'

She wasn't giving me a chance to refuse, or indeed to accept. She said, 'Sean would love to see you, and Donal of course.'

Donal?

'Lovely,' I said.

Maybe she meant Conor.

'You know where we are the one on the corner as you take the left up to Fiona's.'

'Yes, I think so,' I said.

'The rough grey wall?'