THE SEATING PLAN was obscured by a cluster of guests. His wife rubbed his chest briskly, as if to warm him.
‘Here Eoin, mind my glass,’ she said. ‘I’ll find out where we are.’
She slipped into the jostle of lacy hips and elbows. It was a spring wedding. Sheets of pale light shook in through the windows, casting patches of lint and heat over the gathering. The women wore crocus colours; clean, creamy purples and muted yellow. There were wayward ribbons and awkward hats and silk shawls sliding over shoulder slopes.
At the edge of the group, a big, lumpy man scowled and pushed, huffed and shook his head. Eoin vaguely recognized him, though perhaps he was thinner before, or perhaps he had more hair. Flapping the other guests aside with large palms, the man began to wade steadily towards the plan, peered and frowned, then turned with an antagonized snort and loped head-first into the dining room. Eoin had lost sight of his wife. He watched instead the ranks of satin-bound buttocks, glossy, warped curves like shrink-wrapped fillets.
‘Eoin!’
It was the father of the bride, buttery curls of silk down his throat and a frilly carnation at his heart.
‘Well. Steve,’ said Eoin.
‘I’m glad you could come, Eoin. Glad you could come.’ Steve slapped a hand down on Eoin’s shoulder, pressed a thumb hard into his collar bone.
‘Lovely ceremony,’ said Eoin. ‘Lovely. Congratulations, Steve.’
Steve was swaying with drink or joy, but his chubby mouth puckered in a sorry pout. He patted Eoin again, squeezed again, shook him by the shoulder. Holding a glass in each hand, Eoin was unsteadied for a moment, but Steve clutched him tighter, and bent his head in close. His lower lip cupped the air as some words reached his mouth and were dismissed. After a pause he said: ‘Glad you could come, Eoin. Good to have you here.’
‘Good to be here,’ nodded Eoin, and he turned back around to face the crowd. ‘Pam is just checking the table plan.’
A tall feather wagged over the huddle of head-tops. One Halloween his daughter had dressed as a flapper. She had a feather like that strapped to her head with a gold-sequinned band.
His wife scurried towards him with her face down. Her pearly nails dug at the clutch bag that she had bought for the occasion. It was good for her to get out. He was glad they had come.
‘The Kiss,’ she said. ‘Table 4 – The Kiss.’
*
The girl – he corrected himself – the woman seated beside his wife had a sloppy sort of face, loose on the bones. She wore a disc of lavender felt tilted precariously across her brow like a misplaced skullcap. When she asked how they knew the couple, Eoin could utter only the word, ‘Our...’ followed by a guttural suck like a draining sink. His wife pressed her fingers into the crook of his elbow, and explained how they knew the bride.
The woman cocked her head as she listened, her eyebrows gathering into elaborate shapes of sympathy. ‘I didn’t even know that could happen,’ she said, ‘I’ve never heard of that happening.’ Her gaze followed the plate that was lowered before her.
‘Oh dear. Well. I’m sorry to hear that. That’s very sad.’
Still forcing that pained expression into her brows, she stabbed at a dark lozenge of meat, opening brilliant strata of pink and ruby red. She lifted her fork and paused, the bright morsel quavering at her chin while she waited for Pam to finish speaking.
Pam always finished the same way when she was telling about Sharon, ‘So that’s it,’ and a wet huff of breath. Losing their daughter had mangled many parts of his wife, but it had not shaken her politeness, her consideration. He admired her for that, but he hated the ‘so...’, the way it made people feel like it was okay, the way it let them off the hook. ‘So,’ they would echo, ‘so that’s it.’ He could hear Pam’s breath catch sore in her chest. Her fingers perched tightly on the table edge.
Closing her mouth over the meat, the woman’s eyes pulled back to meet his wife’s. She chewed for a moment, then pushed the food into her cheek to say, ‘Must be hard for you to be here then.’
‘Oh. No.’ Pam’s smile strained thin. ‘It was very nice to be invited.’ Eoin could feel her shift beside him, crossing and recrossing her ankles under the table. Her shoes were pinching her. She had taken them off in the car after the church, and he had seen the red, hurt squash they had made of her feet.
Turning towards him, Pam plucked the menu from the centre of the table. ‘The starter is squab.’ Eoin thought of those tin-can phones he made as a boy – the sound was supposed to ride the wire from one can to the other, though it never worked well. That’s what Pam’s voice sounded like now – vibrations traversing the tiny channel strung between them. ‘Seared squab breast,’ she said. ‘What’s squab? Do you know, Eoin?’
The woman in the purple hat answered, relief relaxing her features into friendliness. ‘Don’t know,’ she said, chewing. ‘Some kind of game it seems to be. It’s a gamey taste. Juniper berries with it.’
‘Juniper berries?’ said Pam. ‘Is that what they are? Pretty aren’t they?’
‘Yes.’
‘A lovely rich colour aren’t they? Yes.’
Eoin found his voice then. Grateful, he said, ‘It’s dove. A squab is a young dove, I think.’
*
There were five courses. After the squab it was three pillows of nettle ravioli fried to a brown fringe in sage butter.
‘Very nice,’ said Pam. ‘Very fragrant.’
A cold liquid trickled into Eoin’s lap, sending a bolt of rage up his throat.
‘Oh my God, I am so sorry.’ The man to his left was holding a glass at arm’s length, struggling with a writhing toddler. He jiggled more wine over the tablecloth as he placed his glass down and scrambled for a napkin.
‘Oh, God no,’ said Eoin, dabbing at his trousers, ‘no, don’t worry. I’ll get that. You have your hands full.’
*
A medallion of veal arrived with a squat tower of potato gratin. A kidney dish of garlic asparagus was passed around the table. Eoin offered to hold the child while his neighbour ate, but it clung fast to its father’s neck. It was a very blond little thing, with big raw cheeks, gluey stream of snot bubbling softly from one nostril. ‘He’s a bit under the weather,’ said the father, poking at the shut lips with a wad of potato. The child shook its head; ‘Want Mama feed me,’ and the father sighed and rolled his eyes. ‘It’s Mama everything these days,’ he told Eoin, then to the child he said, ‘What about Dada? Please can Dada feed you, Reuben? Mama is being a pretty bridesmaid for now.’
‘Come here to me,’ said Eoin, ‘and we’ll see if we can make something with this napkin. What do you think we should make? A fish maybe? Or a swan? What would you like to make, Reuben?’
Reuben moved warily onto Eoin’s knee. Eoin folded the napkin while the father spoke between hurried mouthfuls.
‘He just won’t stay in his bed, you know? He is hung out of his mother day and night and Julie wants another baby now and I’m just thinking, how? She hasn’t slept a full night in years...’
‘I know,’ said Pam, smiling and smiling at the child. ‘I remember it well. Gosh, I know.’
The child wanted a plane, and was delighted with the floppy effort that Eoin created with the thick serviette. He flew the creation against his father’s shoulders, smashing open the soft folds, ‘Baff pchoooo...’ and disappeared under the table with the wreckage.
‘And our friends all have these babies who apparently slept all night through from birth and I’m like, really? Because no matter what we do, Reuben will not sleep in his own bed...’
‘Well they’re all different, aren’t they?’ said Pam.
‘So, your own kids must be grown up?’ asked the man, and Eoin felt his wife’s reassuring fingers on his knee.
They had been young parents, he and Pam, and it was a disconcerting effort for Eoin to align his place in life with the father of the bride, and not the frazzled young dad. When Steve Mahon had grabbed him earlier, Eoin stopped himself from calling him ‘Mr Mahon’. He should have thanked him for the invitation, told him his daughter looked happy, but he didn’t know how to say it without sounding like a well-brought-up child. Eoin was Steve’s junior by ten years maybe, but it wasn’t a question of catching up. He could never have afforded something like this for Sharon: all this champagne, all the flowers, the five courses with matching wine.
He watched Pam while she spoke, the tremble and flinch around her eyes, the climbing breath, the creases threading busily through her cheeks. The lines had played there for decades. Like spider webs, they only showed in certain light, but now there were heavier furrows too, delving her face into pouches and valleys. Had he done that to her?
‘So... that’s that,’ said Pam, picking up the menu again.
The child had crawled back up onto his father’s lap, a swathe of drying snot smeared across one cheek. The father pecked his head with unsolicited kisses, arms crossed tightly over the little body, shielding him from Eoin and Pam as though their loss might be catching.
‘That must have been very hard,’ he said. ‘I can’t imagine... I’m sure, I mean. No one can imagine.’
Eoin leaned towards Pam and looked at the menu; a long thing printed on stiff card, gold detail and bottle-green lettering. Up the left margin ran a detail from The Kiss, the couple’s faces squashed together, the delicate curl of the woman’s fingers, the gold swirls of her clothing drizzling down the side of the page.
‘Jesus,’ muttered Eoin to his wife. ‘That’s crass, isn’t it?’
Pam sighed. ‘Don’t be nasty, Eoin.’
‘Yeah, but really. Would they not think about it like? Did they not look at the painting before printing it on the menu? Would no one tell them, ha?’
Thirteen years ago, they had seen the painting for real. They hadn’t travelled much – not compared to the likes of Steve Mahon – but after Sharon’s junior cert they took her to Vienna to see the galleries. Sharon wanted to be an artist. Her bedroom was covered with eerie pictures of sad bodies – pregnant women, fat women, skinny men with messy hair and big, dark eyes. She cut them out of calendars and art books, and arranged them in clip frames amongst her own little sketches and pictures and keepsakes – dried leaves, cinema stubs, photographs of her as a child, doodles of eyes and boxes and teardrops. She had done a project on Egon Schiele for her junior cert and that was what started her obsession with these strange artists – Schiele and Klimt. Their paintings were in Vienna, and Eoin thought, why not? So they had gone around all the museums with Sharon, and Eoin had seen The Kiss for real.
All over the city there were gift shops selling The Kiss-themed souvenirs; there were lighters and 3D pencil-toppers, and tins of chocolates with the scene printed on the lid and he had assumed it to be a romantic sort of a thing. But when he saw the real painting – tall and personal and alive with intent – he stood stunned and his mouth dried. Eoin didn’t know much about art – he’d be the first to admit that – but the painting did something strange to his blood. He closed his eyes and couldn’t swallow. It was the stiff resignation in the woman’s mouth as she was gathered up into the man’s dark shadows, his face turning to devour her, and her hand – pinkie curled in revulsion and surrender, thumb not quite touching the fingers, a private dissociation from the scene. It made him want to flee the room, find his daughter in front of whatever painting she was lingering at in the high-ceilinged building, wrap her in his arms and keep her from the world of men and women.
‘It’s a bloody rape scene, Pam,’ he whispered. ‘Who puts a rape scene on their wedding menu? I thought Clara did art at college. She knows better, surely?’
Two blotches were beginning high on Pam’s cheeks. She looked at the napkin on her lap, smoothed it out. ‘It’s not a rape scene, Eoin. Please stop.’
‘I’m just saying, what is that about?’
Pam winced. His noises pained her. ‘We are guests, Eoin. Have some grace.’
Out of habit Pam had chosen a blue dress to complement the bright eyes she once had and set off her red hair. But the dress was a luminous, artificial shade, and she had coloured her greys to shrill orange streaks for the occasion. The vibrant tones muted her, as though the things she adorned herself with were drinking all her colour for themselves.
He could remember the weeks after Sharon’s birth, Pam sitting up in bed, feeding, and the way it seemed that all the heat and blood was draining out of her into the hot bundle at her breast. Had he looked after her? He had read up about nursing mothers – the need for tea and toast, and a glass of Guinness every day, and he had usually remembered to bring a tray in during the early morning feed.
‘I’m going to the bathroom,’ Pam said, pushing the heavy chair away from the table and manoeuvring it back weakly. She hobbled a little as she went, uncertain of herself in those shoes. She’d be alright. By the time she got back, she’d be alright. Tensions were high, that was all. And her poor sore feet.
It was good that they had come, good for Pam to get out, get to the hairdresser’s and make herself presentable. The invitation had caused them to argue, though. Pam was uncomfortable with the gift Eoin had put together – a perfect gift for Sharon’s best friend, but Pam didn’t see it that way. Even to the last minute she wanted him not to give it. She had said something very hurtful about it. She said Eoin wanted to drench everyone’s joy with his grief.
She wanted to get them the hoover off the list. In the end, they agreed to give both – the hoover and the painting, which Eoin had fitted with an antique gold frame. It was overly ornate, but that was Sharon’s style. Her friend would appreciate that. The hoover was just a case of paying online (the price of it!), but he left his own gift – a gift from Sharon, in a way – on the table in a special room near the lobby. ‘Mahon-Brown Wedding Gifts’ was marked on the door.
‘Brown’ was a lanky thing who kept touching his bride’s spine and lowering his face into her veil. The bride was Clara Mahon, who perhaps – it was something Eoin wondered about sometimes – perhaps Sharon had loved? He had tried to explain it to Pam once, but she didn’t know what he was talking about. One Sunday morning he had tapped and entered – it was Pam who had sent him up with tea for the girls – and there they were, Sharon and Clara there in the bed. He had felt all wrong coming in on them like that, but there was a soft joy in the room too – all that fresh morning skin and their cheeks creased from sleep, arms and fingers woven together and the way they froze when he opened the door. His daughter had turned and smiled at him. He recognized the gentle secrecy in her smile, and some light on her face made him squirm. He had frowned when he closed the door, and then he had laughed. He couldn’t describe it to Pam, what he had seen: two girls cuddling together, Clara blushing and Sharon smiling, the morning sun on the lovely contours of her face as she turned to look at him. My darling daughter, he thought.
Clara Mahon didn’t look very well on her special day, truth be told. She looked tired and ill, walking up the aisle dressed like a little girl in a neat lace robe, shoulder blades skimmed in skin. Eoin couldn’t bring himself to tell her father that she looked beautiful. He was afraid the lie would show in his face, and that was worse than saying nothing.
What was so changed about Clara? What age was she? Twenty-seven? Twenty-eight? But she had already lost her looks. Perhaps that was natural. Young people are always beautiful, thought Eoin, and twenty-eight is close to thirty and thirty isn’t as young as people think. By the time he was thirty he had a ten-year-old daughter, and felt too old to change career. He hated accountancy, but it was different then. Pam wasn’t mad about her job either, but work was work. Work paid for things, and the things were the goal – the roof over his child’s head, the food in her mouth, the new bike at Christmas. The holiday that time. There was nothing wrong with providing.
No, thirty was not young. His wife too had started to lose her looks around that time. It was just before her thirtieth birthday when she first asked him, ‘Am I still pretty, Eoin?’ and he had looked at her and wondered the same. He remembered thinking it must have been the birthday that had her talking like that, but in the years after she had asked him the same question many times, her tone shifting gradually from a question, to a demand, to an accusation – ‘You used to think I was pretty, Eoin.’
Time could tangle things. Outside the church there had been women wandering in and out of focus, calling him by his surname, hugging him and patting his arm like mothers, and perhaps it was just the day that was in it, the intimacy they now assumed, or the fact that they were all dressed up and painted, but it took him a while to recognize them as the teenagers who had once filled Sharon’s bedroom with the smell of aerosols and antiseptic ointments and all those oily new hormones. Under the dull faces were the girls he had collected from the junior nightclub on dark winter nights. He remembered them huddled together, shivering when he arrived, eyes sooty and lips pale; cold, round cheeks; child bellies and women’s shoes. They would lean into each other, linking arms as they approached the car, chewing fruity gum to conceal the toxins he might otherwise have caught on their breath, giggling and whispering in the back while he drove each of them to her door, and then took his daughter home. They had lost their sexiness. He could think that now, not being a father any more. Even if he didn’t recognize it at the time, with his daughter in amongst them, they had been full of excitement once, full of sexual energy and wonder, beautiful and each of them destined.
*
‘Is this finished?’
The waiter was hovering at Pam’s plate. Eoin nodded. ‘Yes, thanks. I think you can take it. Thank you. Thanks.’
As the waiter lifted the dish onto his tray, Eoin spotted Pam approaching. She had brushed her hair to a block of static and clipped it up at one side.
‘I let them take your plate,’ said Eoin.
‘I’ve been thinking about that gift, Eoin. I think you should take it back and put it in the car. We can give it to her another time.’
‘I let them take your plate, Pam.’
She leaned in, put her face in front of his. ‘Eoin, did you hear me? I think we shouldn’t give that gift just today.’
She had touched up her make-up – red paste already drying to scales on her lips, and a layer like nylon over the hatch of lines that scrunched her mouth.
‘I thought we talked about this.’
His wife shut her eyes for a moment, took a breath to speak, and opened them.
‘Okay, but Eoin—’
‘Just leave it now. Just leave it and enjoy the wedding.’
Pam put an elbow on the table and lowered her forehead into the cradle of her palm. Her nails were like porcelain, and thicker than nails should be. She had been to a salon for them. She wrapped the other hand around the back of her neck, and rubbed back and forth, back and forth. All bulking veins and leathery creases, Pam’s flesh was testament to the sleepless nights, the dull work and a mother-joy that had wrung her dry.
‘—I just think it might be best to give it to her another time.’
It was hard for Eoin to look at his wife sometimes, at the thick middle of her, and those silver scars that rucked like claw marks across her belly. Making love was hard after, and it was a long time before it stopped feeling like a wrong thing and a sad thing. Pam’s breasts had suckled their child and her thighs were the strong things that had fed her into the world. His wife’s body had become a site of grief with no natural way to heal, and she had turned on it, turned away from it. She did not often shave her legs now, or have her hair done, or buy pretty things and like herself in them. He did not at all like the way the salon had made her nails.
Eoin lowered his voice. ‘I don’t understand you, Pam. I think Clara will be delighted...’
But the room hushed to the tink of silver against glass.
*
‘When Brona and I decided to raise a family...’ began Steve Mahon.
Steve Mahon was an eejit. ‘Raise a family’ – was that even an expression? It sounded like raising pigs, harvesting corn. It sounded like an investment. Steve was mole-eyed with the drink. His comb-over had loosened to cottony tufts. He was proud, so proud of his daughter here today, he said, opening a palm to the room and swinging it around to present Clara, who smiled and touched the sheet of tulle that hung either side of her face.
‘I hope you’re all enjoying the splendid meal...’ Steve said. ‘The wines are from three of the vineyards near our summer house in Italy...’
Eoin felt an ugly grin start on his lips, and he lowered his head. Pam didn’t like it when he sneered. Recently, she told him it was the thing she least liked about him, and a thing that wasn’t there when she married him – he had become sneery, she said, he ‘sneered at others’ and it didn’t suit him. She had a merciless way of putting things sometimes.
To stop from sneering he kept his eyes off Steve Mahon, flitting his gaze instead over the other guests. There were many strange headpieces – pillbox hats and feathers and gauze. One girl wore a miniature top hat set in a bed of spiky netting. The bright Easter-time dresses seemed foolish now under the dim chandeliers, like flowers opening to the night.
Some flowers folded up at nightfall and opened in the morning – you could catch them doing it if you chose the right time. Poppies were like that, and crocuses. Others stayed blooming until they were ready to die. Daffodils stood soldier-straight on their straws, beaming moronically into the darkness. It made them whackable, easy to stomp or hack, easy to cut and take indoors. Eoin preferred crocuses. He liked the neat oval beginning of them, the way they cracked clean out of their waxy buds, unfussy in their prettiness. They used to grow at the back of the garden around the roots of the plum tree; pale purple and white and egg-yolk yellow, and a few buttermilk ones shot through with dark flecks like poisoned veins. When had they stopped coming up?
Someone was looking at him. It was the jowly man he had seen perusing the table plan earlier. He was sitting two tables away, a hulking presence, looking at Eoin with that bulldog expression. As Eoin turned away, he caught a mirthless jeer in the man’s hooded eyes. Eoin had seen him before somewhere. He had known him, perhaps, but he was changed.
*
There had been no mention of Sharon at the ceremony – ‘Why would there be, Eoin?’ Pam shrugged. He thought that perhaps Clara would remember her in the speeches, but the bride didn’t speak. Only her father, then the best man, and last the groom.
While his new son-in-law spoke, Steve Mahon sat small in his chair; his flat-topped head low like an owl’s in his ruffled neck, the small eyes dark and slow in his pink face. How did Steve feel? What was it like to watch his daughter sit silently like that, skinny and pale and quiet, about to start out on a married life?
It wasn’t stoicism that Sharon’s death had brought, but a toughness of sorts. Even though Eoin could be brittle now – given to rages and bouts of mute panic, sudden shyness and, Pam said, a tendency to sneer – these were only an outward reflex. A still grief wrapped steely around his core. Nothing quite cut beneath the skin now. But people with children had so much to fear.
A few days after Sharon was born, Eoin had changed her nappy for the first time. He had never thought to wonder what the baby’s genitals would be like – not while he waited for her birth. Not when she came out slimy and writhing and was handed to him in a towel. He hadn’t thought to prepare himself for anything more shocking than odour and mess, but the baby vagina terrified him – a tense swell and no hint of hair and that strange runnel like a well-healed scar. He thought how a man’s penis would measure the torso of his tiny daughter; destroy the complex and tiny intricacies that she was made from. It was a relief, somehow, when he read some years later that baby girls are all sealed up; that no man could manage it, even if he wanted to, though why that fact could offer any kind of comfort was unclear to him.
In the first week of Sharon’s life he came home from work to find Pam chopping onions in the kitchen. Slicing so easily like that through crisp layers of bulb, the knife had made him keenly aware of the thin blub and skin that covered his daughter’s little chest – the blisters of unsprouted nipples, the tilt of her ribs, and inside her a mystery of movement and blood that chance had set going. He ran immediately to their bedroom, bent into the Moses basket and put his face to the sleeping child until he was sure that the neat parcel of her was all intact, all the organs in their place, the breath moving in and out of her the way it should. Pam had followed him to the door, the knife still in her hand, and it had taken all his strength to keep the images at bay. He had only a blind fear of the harm that could come to their child – the ease with which she could be destroyed, if some madness should send the knife into the tiny chambers, the dark mechanics of her heart.
He had trouble believing in her at first – a pinprick trill on the ultrasound, a belly-swell, a bloody squelch, a cry, and here a whole person looking back at him. He had been shocked and awed by her birth; too shocked, perhaps, too humbled to feel anything as intimate as love for the child. That had come a few days afterwards; her little body resting lengthways on his forearm, her head in his palm. He held her while Pam took a shower. He knew something then that would underpin every concern or joy that came with being her father; the palpable density of her skull in his hand; the secret vibrations of all her cells, and the detail – the specifics of each ear curve and chin fold and the way that one finger lifted senselessly away from her little fists, pivoting blindly.
Eoin had learned to drive later than other men. He was already twenty, which had seemed, at the time, like a shameful thing. His daughter was three months old when he got his licence. Once, on a Saturday morning, he had taken a driving lesson with her in the back, to soothe her to sleep while Pam slept off a difficult night. He had been robbed of a thrill, he thought, for he could never enjoy the speed, the latent danger of it. He was never at ease when he drove. It was the image of Sharon that plagued him – not of Sharon, but of her absence; a vague blot of shadow concealing his daughter’s face. Nothing more detailed than that. Whether she was in the car with him or not: when he took a corner a little too hurriedly, when he cut into the fast lane, late for a meeting, his daughter’s face was there at his shoulder, obscured by some wound that his recklessness might make.
It was only months after her death that he realized that the fear had gone – the thing had happened, the threat that had anchored his daily life. In the end it had nothing to do with his driving.
It was a violence inside her – a mutiny of her own body – that killed Sharon. She fell in school one afternoon from a heart attack. The hospital said it was probably anorexia, but that did not seem plausible to Eoin. People don’t have heart attacks at seventeen, just because they have lost some weight. Pam had said something about Sharon not eating properly – maybe once or twice she had said it, but Sharon had looked fine to him – bright-eyed, energetic, and she was doing well at school. They decided to let things lie until after the Leaving Cert; they decided that together. When that stress was gone, perhaps Sharon would get her appetite back. That is probably what would have happened, if the heart attack had waited.
They sent the GP to the house to persuade Eoin of their diagnosis, but by then he knew it was simpler than that anyway – the mysterious pulsing that had started in his wife had stopped. The organs were no longer in their places, doing the things they should, the lungs no longer filled.
She hadn’t been accepted into art college. That had really upset her; it was the one thing she wanted from life – to be an artist. It was Eoin who had gone to collect her portfolio and – he couldn’t help it – he had told them what he thought of them. Her art teacher, too, had failed to see Sharon’s real talent. It was something Pam didn’t quite understand either, because Sharon wasn’t good at art the way some more diligent children were – it was more like a special eye she had, a way of feeling things. Once, when Sharon was only ten, Eoin had bought a painting from one of the students who came door-to-door. It was a painting of a grey cat that Pam called mawkish. It cost quite a lot and Pam was angry, because only that morning Eoin had chastised her with the credit-card bill in his hand, yellow highlighter through all the unnecessary purchases she had made that month. ‘But she is an artist, Pam,’ he had said, and he didn’t know himself what he meant by that, except that there was something about his daughter that could be moved by things, and in the cat’s eyes, the slant of its head, he thought he saw something that might move her.
When they had gone to those museums in Vienna, Eoin and Pam were, for the most part, bored. The first one they went to had a tiny picture of a witchlike woman holding a womb with a dark foetus curled in it. He and Pam had looked at each other and shrugged, while Sharon stood in awe. In the next room, there was a huge painting of two men, naked, sitting side by side on their bottoms with their legs bent. Beside it was a matching portrait of two women – or two portraits of the same woman – with suspicious shadows beneath their naked bottoms. Sharon stood and wept. Standing beside her, Eoin began to see what was moving her – in the gaze of the women, and the gaze of the men, there was a childlike openness, a baffled understanding opening a chink to the terrible absurdity of matter.
A few months after Sharon’s death, Eoin did something very selfish. He ‘went AWOL’ – that’s what Pam called it. He had been back at work a week. One day, instead of going in, he drove to the airport. As soon as he arrived in Vienna, the practical nonsense of the whole thing became real; the cold of the city, the fact that he had no luggage and nowhere to stay. He lay awake fully clothed in a hostel that night and came back the next day. It was he who had wept then, standing in front of those paintings, not because they moved him, but because he could not find the thing his daughter had once seen there.
*
‘Clara, my darling,’ said the groom, taking his wife’s hand, coaxing her to her feet. ‘You have made me the happiest man in the world. Thank you for agreeing to be my wife!’
Clara stood small beside her husband now, peering shyly from the frame of her veil. There was a rumpus of clapping and whooping as the couple kissed. Beyond Pam’s profile, the big-faced woman was crying into a napkin. Her purple hat had finally shifted on her head, showing a nest of fine metal pins beneath.
Eoin turned to Pam. ‘I was just thinking – what happened to the crocuses?’
‘To the crocuses?’
‘Remember we used to have loads of crocuses at the back of the garden, all around the plum tree?’
‘The little yellow and blue flowers?’
‘Purply blue sort of. And white.’
‘They’re still there, Eoin. We still have them.’
‘Pam, I’m thinking I’ll go and get the painting. I’ll put it in the car. We can ask Clara over for tea maybe, after her honeymoon, give her the painting then. Or we could give it to her on Sharon’s anniversary, maybe.’
*
After the dessert came coffee and a plate of cigars for each table.
The waiter lowered the tray tenderly, as though there was something sensitive and alive in the leathery cocoons. Eoin picked one up and sniffed it. He twirled it between his fingers, and glanced at the large man two tables up, satisfied to see the low-slung eyes dance back at him with mockery. Eoin smiled, and the man nodded doggedly as though responding to a joke he already knew.
Steve Mahon spoke over a microphone. ‘The good staff of the Lough Cairn hotel have agreed to serve the cigars,’ he said. ‘But we have to smoke them outside. There are heaters out on the patio...’
A violet bridesmaid – Reuben’s mother – folded onto her husband’s knee.
‘Are they only for the men?’ she asked.
‘You can have mine,’ said Eoin. ‘I’ve no interest in cigars.’
‘You two go on outside. We’ll keep an eye on Reuben,’ Pam said.
*
Eoin closed the door behind him. Relieved by the cool quietude, he pressed his back to the embossed wallpaper and slid to the floor. The room smelled of new carpet.
His had been one of the first gifts on the table, but now there was a pile of boxes wrapped professionally in ivory and silver and steely sheens of blue. He would recognize his gift – it was just a small rectangle. He had used some wrapping paper left over from his nephew’s marriage. There were wedding bells on it, or maybe wedding rings, outlined in meagre streaks of glitter. Drink-logged and aching, Eoin laid his head on his knees. He could sleep now. He could stay here and sleep. It was only the thought of Pam, left all alone with the infant and the purple-hatted woman, that hauled him up on his feet to begin his search.
The couple had received many sets of glasses. Through the flimsy cardboard, Eoin could feel the swing of fragile hollows as he moved them box by box to the floor. Sealed envelopes slid about between the gifts. He made a stack of them at one corner of the table. He lifted a shallow, broad box – a cutlery set, thought Eoin, and from the dense weight he guessed silver. He thought of the bright knives lying muffled in rows of cherry-black velvet, fork tines and spoon bellies curving into each other’s backs, each held in its private slot. He and Pam had received silver cutlery for their wedding too.
His gift was under what might have been a vase. The heavy cube had been plonked right down on top of the little picture. He pushed it off with deliberate carelessness, toppling it on its side and causing a champagne bottle to thud to the floor. The tag was missing from his gift, and as he lifted it he felt the crunch of smashed glass beneath the bubble wrap.
When he heard someone enter the room his mouth fell open, but no explanation came. It was little Clara. She smiled when she saw him – a big smile that made sinews of her cheeks – sliding her meagre figure in through the gap she had opened. She had her veil in her hand. ‘Hi,’ she said, shoving the door closed with her back. Without the veil her head looked too large for her neck. He saw that her ears still stuck out. He had forgotten about that. She looked at the gift in his hand. ‘What’s that?’
‘It’s for you,’ he said. ‘But it’s... it broke, so I’ll fix it. I’ll give it to you another time.’
She put her hand on his arm. There were patches of sandy make-up on her face, brown-blue pits beneath her eyes.
‘Congratulations, Clara,’ he said.
Then her bony arms were around his middle. She clung to him, a cool shoulder pushed up against his cheek. He put one hand on her back. With the other, he held the picture. He could feel the knobbly discs of her spine. Her breath fluttered in her throat. Was she crying?
She pulled away and looked at him.
‘So that’s that,’ she said. ‘A married woman now.’
Eoin nodded. He held the gift in two hands and gazed at the paper.
‘It’s broken,’ he said again. ‘So I’ll fix it and give it to you next time you visit...’
‘Can I see?’ she said. ‘Is it a picture?’
He pried open the corner of the paper, and let it fall to the floor. He couldn’t see much beyond the blur of the bubble wrap. The frame looked different – newer than he remembered, and shinier. The glass had smashed completely – he could hear it scrape against itself. He knew it would be unwise to unleash all those shards on the fresh carpet, but he couldn’t help it. He wanted to see Sharon’s painting again – the bowl that disappeared off the side of the page, the blurred tulip that she had placed beside it, its petals streaked watery pink and yellow. What he liked about this painting was the way one petal had come away from the flower and found its way inside the bowl where it lay like a small disc of blood. There was something very interesting about that, which the art college had failed to consider. He could remember Sharon crying about it – her teacher chastised her for not ‘plotting’ her composition. Eoin needed the reassurance of Sharon’s painting – the marks she had made, the proof of her. Perhaps Sharon had touched the canvas to pad down a peak or make a dot in the distance; perhaps there was a strand of her hair preserved in an oily slice of tablecloth. He had read once that the Mona Lisa’s pearls were made with pinkie fingerprints.
He opened only the top of the bubble wrap, hoping that the glass would be caught in the pocket beneath, and tried to slide the frame upwards, but it wouldn’t budge. He tugged at the mouth of the bubble wrap and wiggled the picture up out of it, spilling little cubes of glass over the new carpet.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Sorry, someone put something heavy on top of it—’
It was a photograph. Three girls in their school uniforms. Eoin recognized them all. The tall blonde one was Sharon. Sharon with her tongue sticking out to be cool, wearing her school tie as a headband. Clara was in the middle, her cheeks fuller than they were now, thick, low eyebrows, nut-brown hair. The girls had their arms slung over one another. They each made a peace sign with two fingers, but the way they did it looked more like they were saying ‘fuck you’ to the camera. The other girl was Maud. The stout girl who used to traipse around after Sharon. He had a soft spot for her because she was always so stuttering and polite. The other girls used to fix her make-up for her in the back of the car and tell her she looked fab and he remembered she used to wear black tights with the tiny dresses, instead of going bare-legged like the others. She had died too. My God, could he really have forgotten? A few weeks before Sharon. My God. Yes. She had leukaemia, but it was the hospital bug that killed her.
‘Oh,’ said Eoin, looking around for his own gift. ‘It’s the wrong one.’
The tree-planting ceremony. That was where he had seen that big man before – the tree-planting ceremony at the school. One tree for Sharon, and one for the other girl. They stood there – he and Pam, beside the fat man and his short wife, and the headmistress clutching her hands before her like a bouncer. The students were assembled on the lawn. The girls from Sharon’s class held each other and wept, crumbling tissues into their faces.
‘It’s from someone else. It’s a photo; from someone else.’
He placed the smashed picture in Clara’s hand, and stooped to pick up his own gift. There it was – under the table with the gift tag and the golden ribbon still on.
‘I’ll give this to you another time, Clara,’ he said. ‘Congratulations. A married woman now.’
He gave her a dry kiss and moved past her towards the door.
*
The dining room was darker when he came in, and colder, because the big doors had been thrown open onto the patio. There was a string quartet playing a fast waltz, but their sound was feeble, leaching into the dark space outside.
At the far end of the room, some couples shuffled palm to palm to the beat of the waltz, the men in crumpling linen the colour of aged paper, the women in all their murky frills like spring flowers open to the moon.
Pam was still at their table – Table 4, The Kiss – sitting amongst empty chairs, the red-cheeked child asleep on her lap. Her eyes were closed and she swayed to and fro like a lapping shore, jaw pressed to the child’s clammy hair. Her oval face was tilted like a Madonna’s, Victorian pale in the dim light. Eoin stood before her, holding the picture in his hand. They were glittery hearts on the giftwrap – not rings – and doves.
‘Pam,’ he said, but she didn’t open her eyes.
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