Anne Enright - The Forgotten Waltz

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

FICTION

The Portable Virgin
The Wig My Father Wore
What Are You Like?
The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch
The Gathering
Yesterdays Weather

NON-FICTION

Making Babies

ANTHOLOGY

The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story (editor)

Copyright 2011 by Anne Enright

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency is an infringement of the copyright law.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Enright, Anne, 1962-
The forgotten waltz / Anne Enright.

eISBN: 978-0-7710-3065-9

I. Title.

PR6055.N73F67 2011 823 .914 C2011-900298-1

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporations Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

This novel is a work of fiction despite the use in some cases of real names which feature strictly as a dramatic device. All characters are the products of the authors imagination and any resemblance to actual persons is entirely coincidental.

McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
75 Sherbourne Street
Toronto, Ontario
M5A 2P9
www.mcclelland.com

v3.1

IF IT HADNT been for the child then none of this might have happened, but the fact that a child was involved made everything that much harder to forgive. Not that there is anything to forgive, of course, but the fact that a child was mixed up in it all made us feel that there was no going back; that it mattered. The fact that a child was affected meant we had to face ourselves properly, we had to follow through.

She was nine when it started, but that hardly matters. I mean her age hardly matters because she was always special isnt that the word? Of course all children are special, all children are beautiful. I always thought Evie was a bit peculiar, I have to say: but also that she was special in the old-fashioned sense of the word. There was a funny, off-centre beauty to her. She went to an ordinary school, but there was, even at that stage, an amount of ambivalence about Evie, the sense of things unsaid. Even the doctors especially the doctors kept it vague, with their, Wait and see.

So there was a lot of anxiety around Evie too much, I thought, because she was also a lovely child. When I got to know her better, I saw that she could be cranky, or lonely; I questioned her happiness. But when she was nine I thought of her as a beautiful, clear little person, a kind of gift, too.

And when she saw me kissing her father when she saw her father kissing me, in his own house she laughed and flapped her hands. A shrill, unforgettable hoot. It was a laugh, I thought later, mostly of recognition, but also of spite, or something like it glee, perhaps. And her mother, who was just downstairs, said, Evie! What are you doing up there? making the child glance back over her shoulder. Come on, down now.

And some miracle of her mothers voice, so casual and controlled, made Evie think that everything was all right, despite the fact that I had been kissing her father. Not for the first time, either though I now think of it as the first real time, the first official occasion of our love, on New Years Day 2007, when Evie was still pretty much a child.

I MET HIM in my sisters garden in Enniskerry. That is where I saw him first. There was nothing fated about it, though I add in the late summer light and the view. I put him at the bottom of my sisters garden, in the afternoon, at the moment the day begins to turn. Half five maybe. It is half past five on a Wicklow summer Sunday when I see Sen for the first time. There he is, where the end of my sisters garden becomes uncertain. He is about to turn around but he doesnt know this yet. He is looking at the view and I am looking at him. The sun is low and lovely. He is standing where the hillside begins its slow run down to the coast, and the light is at his back, and it is just that time of day when all the colours come into their own.

It is some years ago now. The house is new and this is my sisters housewarming party, or first party, a few months after they moved in. The first thing they did was take down the wooden fence, to get their glimpse of the sea, so the back of the house sits like a missing tooth in the row of new homes, exposed to the easterly winds and to curious cows; a little stage set, for this afternoon, of happiness.

They have new neighbours in, and old pals, and me, with a few cases of wine and the barbecue they put on their wedding list but ended up buying themselves. It sits on the patio, a green thing with a swivelling bucket of a lid, and my brother-in-law Shay I think he even wore the apron waves wooden tongs over lamb steaks and chicken drumsticks, while cracking cans of beer, high in the air, with his free hand.

Fiona keeps expecting me to help because I am her sister. She passes with an armful of plates and shoots me a dark look. Then she remembers that I am a guest and offers me some Chardonnay.

Yes, I say. Yes, Id love some, thanks, and we chat like grown-ups. The glass she fills me is the size of a swimming pool.

It makes me want to cry to think of it. It must have been 2002. There I was, just back from three weeks in Australia and mad just mad into Chardonnay. My niece Megan must have been four, my nephew nearly two: fantastic, messy little items, who look at me like they are waiting for the joke. They have friends in, too. Its hard to tell how many kids there are, running around the place I think they are being cloned in the downstairs bathroom. A woman goes in there with one toddler and she always comes out fussing over two.

I sit beside the glass wall between the kitchen and garden it really is a lovely house and I watch my sisters life. The mothers hover round the table where the kids food is set, while, out in the open air, the men sip their drinks and glance skywards, as though for rain. I end up talking to a woman who is sitting beside a plate of chocolate Rice Krispie cakes and working her way through them in a forgetful sort of way. They have mini-marshmallows on top. She goes to pop one in her mouth, then she pulls back in surprise.

Ooh, pink! she says.

I dont know what I was waiting for. My boyfriend, Conor, must have been dropping someone off or picking them up I cant remember why he wasnt back. He would have been driving. He usually drove, so I could have a few drinks. Which was one of the good things about Conor, I have to say. These days, its me who drives. Though that is an improvement, too.

And I dont know why I remember the chocolate Rice Krispies, except that Ooh, pink! seemed like the funniest thing I had ever heard, and we ended up weak with laughter, myself and this nameless neighbour of my sisters she, in particular, so crippled by mirth you couldnt tell if it was appendicitis or hilarity had her bent over. In the middle of which, she seemed to keel off her chair a little. She rolled to the side, while I just kept looking at her and laughing. Then she hit the ground running and began a low charge, out through the glass door and towards my brother-in-law.