Three

Anna’s brother Gerry had not moved into town. Anita had either made up the story or had embroidered a rumour. How people got hold of such rumours relating to the most intimate details of the lives of their acquaintances was anybody’s guess. No smoke without a fire, of course, and it was true that Gerry had been discovered to be having something – a relationship, a flirtation, a sexual dalliance, an affair (it depended on who you talked to) – with their au pair, and that Olwen, his wife, was annoyed about it. Very. His leaving the family home had been considered, shouted about, threatened, and even written about in cold little notes. But it had not, as yet, happened.

So after the launch, Gerry went home to the only home he had, the house he shared with Olwen and their two children in Bray, County Wicklow. He was among the very last guests to stagger out of the House of Lords, towards the taxi rank that was conveniently located at the corner of Foster Place. Gerry, however, did not get a taxi. He was never too drunk to remember that a taxi to Bray cost as much as two or three nights’ decent drinking, or a return airfare to Barcelona or Paris or Seville, and so he found his way down to College Green, where he caught the 145 bus. It sped out of town along a traffic-free N11 and he was home long before midnight.

Olwen was up, watching television. The bbc was doing an adaptation of Bleak House; she must have taped it, since it was screened at peak viewing time, at about nine o’clock.

When he came in and said good night, she did not answer. She had not spoken a word to him in four days.

‘Be like that,’ he said under his breath, and went up to bed.

They lived in a semi-detached house on a long street of such houses, on the north side of Bray. It was not a house he would have selected, given a choice: small, built in the 1980s, it represented to him and to Olwen more or less the opposite to their dream of what a family home should be. And what was that? A rambling vicarage, with about six bedrooms and a big kitchen, many secret little rooms, long mysterious passages, plum trees and artichokes in the garden. A babbling stream at the bottom of the lawn and a relaxing drive along the Bray Road into Dublin for the commuters. Or else a three-storeyed terraced red-brick in Ranelagh, with a good extended conservatory out the back and the Luas around the corner. Artists should live in places full of charm and character. Olwen, indeed, had lived in such a place, before she married Gerry.

But here they were, on Hazelwood Crescent, a place with no character at all, not in the estate agents’ sense of the word, which concurred with Gerry’s. The house had double-glazed pvc windows, which at this juncture in time and place were the archetypal symbol of suburban mediocrity; that you could catch a glimpse of the sea from the front ones and see the top of Sugar Loaf from the back was no compensation for the wound those windows inflicted on the ego of the socially ambitious. Which Gerry was, although he was too lazy to do much about it. His sister Anna’s windows had a conservation order on them. That’s what Gerry wanted, windows that were so significant the planning authorities could order you not to mess with them. Nobody cared what happened to windows, or anything else, on Hazelwood Crescent. You could knock the house down and build a concrete bunker in its place and the planning authorities would not bat an eyelid.

It was not, though, an address you had to be actively ashamed of. He knew many people who blushed to give their addresses, who lived in smaller houses than this in worse suburbs, where nice people, civil servants, schoolteachers, resided side by side with scobies and knackers, whose proximity lowered the value of everything except the groceries in the local rip-off Spar. Bray had banks and Tesco, Superquinn, mansions, leafy squares, as well as Hazelwood Crescent. It had a cinema and a theatre. At Christmas the local choir did the Messiah in the church on Main Street. Bray had a Main Street.

So it was ok. Perfectly ok. But very far from the cultural circles of Dublin, the circles to which Gerry belonged. Gerry seldom met people he knew here. He seldom met people it would be useful to know, who would boost his ego and promote his career. His failure to be a successful artist could be blamed partly on this – the suburban milieu in which he had been forced to reside. Real artists lived in old streets in the city centre, not out here in the sticks. Even the College of Art decreed that it was so: you could not have a college of art in a barren suburb; art belongs to colourful old urban milieux, where there are fruit and flower stalls on the street and interesting old gimcracks in the shop windows. There was nothing in the windows of Hazelwood Crescent except the backs of three-piece suites and the glow of plasma television screens.

Gerry’s life had taken off on a course he had never planned or anticipated. Everything about it was almost the opposite of what he would have vaguely desired as a young man – but perhaps not desired strongly enough. He was not sure how that had happened – a series of unfortunate choices had led him in the wrong direction.

He was lost.

And that was probably why the unfortunate business with Ulla had happened.

Ulla from Karlstad, their au pair, now living somewhere in the midlands of Sweden.

He undressed rapidly and got into bed in the boxroom that served as a study and a spare room, and had been Ulla’s until she left a fortnight ago, leaving the Kelly family in a state of chaos: Olwen sulking, while she gradually devised the most tortuous punishment possible for him, the children without anybody to mind them when they came home from playgroup and school. The difficulty of organising minders was complicated by Olwen’s refusal to communicate orally with him. She left notes, brisk orders, written in block capitals in case he could use the excuse of not being able to decipher her handwriting, or in case her handwriting would be taken as a sign of intimacy: ‘pick up jonathan 1.30’; ‘emily dentist 11.00 am’. No room for discussion. He had to obey the dispatches or he would be out – court-martialled, possibly, shot at dawn, on the patio.

Ulla had arrived just a year ago, in September last year, when Olwen went back to school after the summer holidays. Emily was five this year and in school until two; Jonathan had graduated from kindergarten to playgroup and finished at twelve. They no longer needed a full-time crèche, all they wanted was someone to mind them from noon until four, when Olwen usually got home from her secondary school, unless there was a meeting or an excursion. There hardly ever was - Olwen insisted that she was paid for teaching, not for going on excursions. Olwen, who was very practical, had decided that the cheapest form of childcare they could get now was an au pair.

‘You only have to pay them about a hundred euro a week, and give them room and board,’ she said. ‘We’ll be saving three hundred euro, every week! More, if she is anorexic.’ The crèche had charged two hundred and fifty per child and had been a huge drain on the family budget - such a drain that Olwen had forced Gerry to have a vasectomy, since another child would have driven them onto the streets.

Gerry – ironic, ironic – had been completely against the au pair idea to begin with.

‘We’ll have someone here all the time!’ he said, looking at the clematis that bloomed valiantly on the pergola Olwen had erected at the edge of their deck. The washing line was attached to the pergola, a touch he considered original and picturesque. Dangling from it were a few bright T-shirts, towels and tiny underpants, the universal flags of family occupancy. ‘There’ll be no privacy. And what if we don’t get on with her?’

‘We’ll find a solution to that,’ said Olwen. ‘You’re always so negative. She’ll probably be fine, they usually are. And we won’t even have to pay baby-sitters. We’ll be able to go out again on Saturday nights, we can go to plays and things if we want to without remortgaging the house.’

They collected Ulla from the airport at midday on the Saturday before Olwen started back after the holidays. Olwen had been right: Ulla was fine. She didn’t talk very much and her English was weaker than the agency had promised. Something about her immediately reminded Gerry of an air hostess – though maybe that was the context in which they met her. Anyway, she was not the sort of girl who would end up in the A & E on Saturday nights, if demeanour was anything to go by (although he knew it was not; he did not look like the sort of person who would end up in A & E either, but he had, on two occasions, which Olwen did not know about).

‘Hello, I am Ulla,’ were her first words, pronounced with a big smile and a nod at the piece of cardboard bearing the slogan ‘Welcome Ulla’, which Olwen had forced Gerry to hold up in front of him.

She was just perfect, really. Neat-casual, in jeans and a nice little leather jacket, not too fat, not anorexic-looking either. Pretty enough but not stunning, which was exactly what you needed in an au pair. She was the sort of girl who would blend into anything, a school or a party or an office. Or a semi-detached house on Hazelwood Crescent.

Gerry felt cheated in one respect. Ulla did not look in the least bit Swedish. Her hair was not even blond; it was dark brown, black almost. And she was not tall and willowy, just an ordinary sort of height. She could have been from Blackrock, or even Bray. In fact, a lot of the girls he saw every day on the dart looked a lot more Scandinavian than she did.

Olwen had possibly selected her for just that reason. It was not that Gerry had ever strayed before but she would have played safe. Gerry had not been shown application forms or passport photos, but now he realised that these had been part of the process. Olwen had known what Ulla looked like months ago. The silly placard with the ‘Welcome Ulla’ sign had been quite unnecessary, designed to deceive him, probably.

The children were with them, appropriately, which meant that they had a noisy trip back from the airport, during which Emily quizzed Ulla.

‘What age are you? … Do you have any children? … What’s your favourite colour? … What do you eat in Sweden? … Are there Polar bears there?’ And a thousand more such questions. ‘How much money do you earn for looking after me and my brother?’ Emily was always curious and unafraid to ask questions. She was a very clever child, in Gerry’s opinion.

They were in the Volvo – his favourite material object in his whole life. Or, rather, his favourite object, animal, vegetable, mineral, or spiritual, in his whole life. The M50 was not busy at this time on Saturday, and he sped along at a steady 120. How he loved this road, especially now that it extended the whole way to Bray! Particularly now that he had the Volvo. He loved it especially as it moved southwards, savouring the view of the hills you got as you passed Exit 12, the great slices of granite at Exit 13 and the old-fashioned farm, a big bungalow and a barn with bales of hay in it, which you could see stretching right down to the edge of the motorway at Exit 16.

He loved having exits. He loved it that places with names like Rathfarnham and Dundrum had now been translated to short numbers, like 13. It was like moving from a Thomas Hardy sort of landscape into a modern American one, where a number – Route 3 – could evoke all sorts of memories and feelings. N11, which used to be the Bray Road, N7 instead of the Limerick Road, these were the brave new symbols of modern Ireland. Already Gerry got a nostalgic feeling in his gut when he thought about Exit 16, their exit. Exit 16 to Dublin 18 and then on a few yards over the border to the Garden of Ireland, County Wicklow. (They hadn’t numbered the counties yet.)

‘This is our ring road, the M50,’ he explained in slow English to Ulla. Is that what you called it, a ring road? What’s this they called the one around London?

She was sitting beside him in the passenger seat, since the children had insisted that Olwen sit in the back. ‘Oh yes,’ she said, without much enthusiasm.

The Orbital. Nice name. Suggestive of space ships rather than of traffic jams. He glanced at Ulla out of the corner of his eye and decided not to share this thought with her. ‘Orbital’ was not a word for your first hour speaking English.

‘This road is brand new.’ ‘Brand new’ was idiomatic and easy at the same time. Of course, calling the M50, nearly twenty years old and now riddled with roadworks, brand new was a bit of a simplification but you had to simplify for foreigners. ‘The last stretch, which goes as far as where we live, Bray, opened only a few months ago. Before that we had to go to the airport, say, through the city centre.’ He could sense how meaningless it all was as he said it but he couldn’t stop himself once he’d got going.

‘That was interesting,’ she said, in the tone she might use to say, ‘Please keep your seat belt fastened until the captain turns off the Fasten Seat Belt sign’. Odd that she did not know the present tense. Everything in its own good time.

‘It used to take about two hours to get to the airport from Bray’ – couldn’t she realise what a hassle life had been, at least, even if she didn’t notice the mountains, or the cows in that field at Exit 16? – ‘now it takes about half an hour.’

‘Mmm,’ was what she said this time.

But neither did she express surprise or dismay when shown her tiny room, and the small bathroom she would share with the whole family, since the house had been built in that sad period between fireplaces in every room and en suites in every room – it belonged to the nothing-in-any-room school of architecture. Ulla settled in anyway. That is, she played with Jonathan and Emily, she answered questions when spoken to by Olwen and him, and she was as unobtrusive as a full-grown adult could be in a house containing one reception room, a kitchen, and four tiny bedrooms, of which hers was the tiniest. To suggestions that she should walk on the seafront or find the park or go to the cinema, she was positive and receptive. When she started to go to English classes in the town, she soon made friends with other Swedes – there seemed to be thousands of them in Bray – and could be seen sending text messages to them on her mobile phone.

‘Aloof is how I would describe her,’ Olwen said, as they lay in bed about a week after her arrival.

That was so like Olwen. Gerry could see that she was changing her mind already. However, he had discovered several years ago that saying ‘I told you so’ was not a wise option.

‘She’s a nice girl,’ he said. ‘Reliable and …’ He considered. What else could you say about her? ‘And decent,’ he added lamely. ‘The kids love her.’

‘Yeah.’ Olwen sounded sceptical. ‘I wish she’d open up a bit more, that’s all.’

‘Ah,’ said Gerry, yawning. ‘She’s not the type.’

How did he fall in love with her? How do you fall in love with a boring girl who happens to be an au pair in your house?

She grew on him, like a quiet picture that hangs on your wall unobtrusively for years and which you suddenly realise you could not live without.

The first move, towards the state in which he eventually – and now – found himself, had occurred during a dinner table discussion. They were all gathered around the table in the sunroom, as they called the little lean-to conservatory Olwen had had built at the back to extend the kitchen and create a family room of sorts. It was dark outside; December. The glass walls were black, reflecting the lamp, the candles on the table, creating a rather eerie, cavernlike atmosphere that he liked on the whole, although it made a lie of the epithet ‘sunroom’. It was more of a moonroom.

For once, the discussion was not child-centred. Instead, it was focused on the kind of issue Irish people were obsessed with, it seemed to Ulla: namely, public transport. That and property values. In Sweden, property was there, and so was public transport, like the electricity or the water supply or the bank. It functioned, everyone used it, there were occasional breakdowns and failures, which were complained about, but on the whole nobody had an interest in it. Somebody looked after it – the commune, or the government, or somebody. Improvements were made periodically, without anyone caring much.

Here it was all very different. Gerry and Olwen talked about house prices, and about trains, buses and trams, at least three times a week. They were full of vehement opinions about all these things and expressed them trenchantly whenever they got a chance. A new bus lane was being created along a road in Bray. Trees would have to be cut down to make room for it and the residents of the road objected to this. A campaign against the cutting of the trees had been organised. Ulla had seen one of its projects: the protesters had tied yellow ribbons around the trees. She did not really know what the significance of ribbons, or the colour yellow, was in this context, but the ribbons looked quite pretty.

‘We need an efficient bus service,’ said Gerry. This was always his tack: practicality.

‘Those trees are two hundred years old,’ Olwen said. This was one of the ridiculous myths that was circulating in the town, along with others, some more outlandish. The trees were indigenous Irish oak. Some people were saying they were a thousand years old and the Fianna had hunted in them. The roots of the trees underlay the houses and if you cut them down, the foundations would implode. If the trees were cut down, there would be no songbirds in Bray ever again. Or oxygen.

‘I doubt it,’ said Gerry. ‘Those houses are only about eighty years old and the trees were planted then.’

‘Are you saying we should just cut down everything to make room for roads and buses?’ Olwen always deflected his logic with anger, which he hated. ‘That the N3 should be allowed to destroy Tara, like the N11 played havoc with the ancient Irish wood in the Glen of the Downs.’

‘It takes us hours to get to work in the morning,’ said Gerry. ‘We need more buses from Bray to town. If we have to cut down a few trees, well … They’re just trees, not curly headed children.’

And Ulla laughed.

She caught his eye and actually laughed.

Olwen, who had been about to get really angry (she had her manic premenstrual look in her eye), got up and put on the kettle for tea; peace descended into the moonroom.

From such a simple seed a great emotion grew and thrived.

Gerry had felt a stab of gratitude that day at the table. It took him unawares. Just because she laughed at a bad joke - a cliché, but she wouldn’t know that, her English was still bad. Just because her eyes caught his for a second of understanding.

He’d fielded sharper cupid’s darts than that, sent them hurtling back right where they came from, in the office and elsewhere. Of course, the women in the office and elsewhere were not in his house, all the time. You did not meet them as you stumbled along the landing in your pyjamas, or as you groped on the doorstep for the milk cartons before the sun was up.

But Ulla was always popping up in the most unlikely situations.

She had seemed nondescript, but gradually her small figure and her pale face got a grip on his imagination. Her eyes, which he had never paid any attention to, began to intensify in colour and tantalise in expression. Before, they had seemed unremarkable, light blue eyes. Now he noticed details: they were veined with green. When she sat facing the kitchen window in the afternoon, when the sun flooded the back of the house, they changed colour and became entirely green. Her other features, small and neat, appeared to him exquisitely moulded, like that of some porcelain ornament. One day at breakfast he found himself gazing at her ear, small and shapely, whorled like a beautiful shell. He compared it to Olwen’s ears. They were hidden behind her hair, because they were too big. Ulla’s ears were smaller even than Emily’s. That nature could create such tiny intricate things suddenly astonished him. What a miracle she was!

Her straight, dark hair shone mysteriously. Oh dim dark waves, he thought, knowing he had read that phrase somewhere long ago. In school. Or maybe he had heard it at one of the poetry readings he went to, to satisfy Olwen’s sister, Kate. Ulla’s dullness, her lack of opinions, her air-hostessyness, stopped being dull and started being appealing. Whereas she had been boring, now she seemed simply, delightfully, sane. She did not have rigid views, crazy views, like Olwen, who seemed more and more bossy, opinionated, silly as time went on. Ulla was a rock of common sense and calmness.

Obviously he was not going to do anything about his feelings. She was a young woman, living in his house and he was in a position of trust. He was a responsible adult, a father, a married man.

For months – until May, to be precise, i.e. six months – he nurtured his growing affection for her in secret, enjoying it like a precious little jewel, a little pearly ear, he carried around in his pocket and could take out and look at from time to time, and fondle. But he soon understood that his feelings were reciprocated. Without a word being said, Ulla made it clear. On joyous days, her eyes met his and spoke to him; they were red-letter days. On B days, she would indicate her affection in some more indirect fashion, by avoiding him on the stairs, or going out when he came into the house. Those gestures were not so cheering, but he interpreted them in a positive way.

She continued to be a good au pair. The children continued to love her and Olwen to appreciate, if not like, her: she was completely reliable, but she had not become a friend, which was something Olwen had hoped for, unconsciously – to acquire a female ally. Ulla was never exactly cold, never impolite, but she kept her distance. ‘Reserved’ was the adjective Olwen used to describe her when she was talking about her to friends, as she frequently was. They chatted endlessly about their au pairs, complaining about them mostly, when they weren’t complaining about their colleagues at work. That is why woman are so much healthier, mentally, than men: they spend most of their spare time castigating their enemies behind their backs, so they don’t bottle up pain; they try to spread it around, like manure.

Olwen had wanted a miracle, someone who would transform the house with a glow of warmth and humanity and understanding, who would be always there to do her bidding when required and would conveniently vanish at other times. A treasure. Ulla was not a treasure; she was just a reliable au pair doing her job.

And having an affair with the man of the house.

Although Olwen did not know that. Not yet.

On the 5th of May Gerry and Ulla went to bed together. Olwen was at school, supervising end-of-term exams and trying to prevent the sixth years from committing suicide at least until after they had completed the Leaving Certificate and left school. It was the busiest month of the year for her.

Ulla’s contract was up on the 6th of June, the day before the Leaving Cert would begin and the day Olwen would get her holidays. Probably the imminence of her departure had precipitated the consummation of the affair. But Olwen, miraculously as it seemed to both of them, suddenly asked Ulla to stay until the 1st of July, because she wanted to go away on a short trip with her book club as soon as school broke up. Someone had got a wonderful offer of a week in a five star hotel, with spa and beauty treatment, in Croatia. The chance of a week partly in the sun, partly in the spa, partly in a bar drinking wine or whatever it was they drank in Croatia, the chance of an entire week’s gossip was too good to miss.

Did Gerry agree?

Certainly. Most certainly. Off you go, my dear. It will crown you. You deserve a treat after working so hard all year.

Ulla and Gerry had a whole week to themselves.

This cemented the relationship so much that Ulla could not bear the idea of parting from him on the 1st of July. Or ever. She got a job in a lunchtime café owned by a consortium of fellow Swedes, and a room in a shared house in Ballyfermot.

‘I can stay in Ireland for as long as I like,’ she told Gerry blissfully. ‘Forever, if that is what we want.’

That was the first time Gerry felt another kind of stab. A stab of fear.

And very soon after this conversation, and after Ulla had moved into the house in Ballyfermot, a quality of hers that he had ignored, although he had known it existed, began to intrude more and more uncomfortably, then dangerously, into his life. The quality in question was her honesty, which came in a bulky package, accompanied by honesty’s boon companions: integrity and foolhardiness. With a large dash of obstinacy thrown into the pernicious mix.

Ulla was as honest as the day and as stubborn as a mule.

These qualities began to detract from the seductiveness of her shell-shaped ears.

What she wanted was expressed in a variety of complicated ways but essentially it boiled down to this: Gerry was to confess everything to Olwen and then move in with her.

This all emerged gradually, over a period of about a month, the month after she left the house and moved in with the Swedish sandwich girls. By the end of the month, her emotions had changed from tenderness and passion to resentment and passion, and Gerry’s had changed from love and lust to a very strong desire to escape from what had recently been Ulla’s delicate baby hands and now were her hawk-like little clutches.

‘I am sorry, I abused my position as your boss,’ he said, in what he hoped, forlornly, was his farewell speech. ‘You are very young and you should go back to Sweden and to college, as you had planned. I love you but I can’t look after you.’

‘Why the fuck not?’ she asked angrily. Her command of idiom had improved since moving to Ballyfermot.

He shrugged. ‘Because I have responsibilities to my children,’ he said.

‘I don’t see what that has to do with it,’ she said. ‘Lots of people are divorced. In Sweden it is very common. The children don’t have to suffer.’

And so on. She had plenty of arguments, and no lack of good English in which to articulate them. It seemed that the lessons at the esol place had been of a high standard.

He declared he could not see her again, and walked away.

Her next move was more vindictive than honest. She began to telephone the house and ask to speak to him, even when Olwen answered the phone. It took Olwen less than two days to smell a rat. When she next got an opportunity, she walked into the sandwich bar on Leeson Street where Ulla chopped onions and sliced ham for eight hours a day, and asked her to have a chat.

True to form, Ulla told her everything immediately. She never told a lie. Even to save her lover’s skin. What had been one of her great advantages as an au pair, her relentless honesty, was now Gerry’s nemesis.

That had been at the end of August.

Since then, Olwen had not spoken one word to Gerry. Ulla had also disappeared from his life, and from the sandwich bar and, he sincerely hoped, from the country. With any luck she was back where she came from, in that godforsaken town in the middle of Sweden. He missed her but had no intention of contacting her again.

The immediate problem for him was where he would be sleeping tomorrow night, or next week. Would Olwen, when her period of contemplative sulking was over, forgive him, stay on track, resume the journey to their nuptially agreed shared destination (i.e. death)? Or would she decide on a radical change and send him off in some other direction, down yet another byroad to God know’s where?

Not for the first time, Gerry was lost in the forest of his own life.