Temptation

Dermot Bolger

For Edwin Higel

Contents

Cover

Title Page

SUNDAY

MONDAY

TUESDAY

WEDNESDAY

THURSDAY

About the Author

From the reviews for Temptation:

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

SUNDAY

I gave up my happiness to make another person happy, Alison thought, for the briefest half–conscious second when she woke beside Peadar in the night. I was somebody else once, someone different. Why was she thinking this? Their packed bags and suitcases lined the bedroom wall although she couldn’t see their shapes in the dark. Tomorrow Peadar would stack them in the car as usual. What was the dream she was trying to block out? At first all she could remember was water, a tang of salt on her lips, fear, the excitement of being somebody else. The vaguest sexual thrill. Then darkness.

But another image forced itself into her mind, from later in the dream or perhaps from a different one. An image so terrifying that she wanted to wake Peadar. A woman’s face under water, trapped at the window of a capsized boat. Skeletal, the flesh half gone, bony hands upright where they had beat against the glass. Eyes that had not yet been devoured, staring out, watching as a tiny capsule approached. Its headlights picking up the rusted hull in the mud, the drifting seaweed, the huge eyes of striped flatfish. Except that Alison knew she wasn’t in the tiny submarine. It was she who was trapped in the wreckage and her wrists that had bruised themselves against the glass, her sagging breasts that protruded through the tattered dress, her veins that stood out like blue highways criss–crossing a desert.

She was afraid to close her eyes again now, frightened the image would return. Yet, even with her eyes wide open in the dark, every detail remained clear. Her right nipple half eaten away by some dark sea creature. She felt that breast now, almost smooth underneath again where the single stitch had healed. She ran her hand over the nipple which, ever since the touch of Dr O’Gorman’s hand, no longer felt like hers. Peadar still sleepily reached for it some mornings, like a child instinctively seeking a battered toy he had outgrown. But did he ever look at them properly any more, the breasts of his thirty–eight–year–old wife? If he did, then surely he would have noticed something.

Alison hated these insidious three a.m. thoughts, demanding answers to questions she had no desire to ask. Like how had she come to be here, at this age, in this bed, beside this man? She loved Peadar and there was nowhere else she wanted to be, so why did the eyes of that woman haunt her from the dream? All her own wishes had come true. She had never longed to explore the Nile or cross the Andes. If she could have looked ahead at twenty–one to see herself now, then surely she would have been pleased. Owning a house in Raheny, the sight of which had awed her parents into silence, having three children who loved her and a successful husband who still looked boyish in a certain light.

At twenty–one she had been convinced she would end up alone. That loneliness, or the aching remembrance of it, had never left her. Walking out one Sunday over the rough stones of the Pigeon House wall, a tall figure huddled up in a coat and wearing a monkey hat against the rain, hoping against hope there might be a coffee shop at the end of the pier, somewhere out of the cold, friendly and anonymous, where some stranger might talk to her.

She could never have understood back then how there might be other kinds of loneliness even when living inside a family. This three a.m. isolation. Not that Peadar had ever stopped loving her, but sometimes he forgot how much reassurance she needed. At thirty–eight, a body changes. He had to sense it too. Was it his own ageing which caused him to always come so quickly of late or was it a lack of sustained interest in her? Twenty years ago he had been so stiff with over–excitement that he often barely seemed able to come. Now at times their lovemaking felt like a habit without need of speech, an instinctive curling into safe, established positions, his arm routinely around her as they slipped towards shared sleep.

But was it shared? What was Peadar dreaming about with such laboured breath and was she a part of it? Sixteen years of marriage, twenty years of intimacy, even if they had remained apart for three of them. Surely Alison should know him by now, surely she should feel secure? Perhaps that was the problem, they were too secure. How could she really know who Peadar was, when often at three a.m. Alison didn’t even know who she herself was, buried inside the bustle and happiness of her family life.

Peadar slept on, curled up inside dreams that, Alison decided, most probably concerned bricks and mortar. Peadar the planner, desperate to leave a mark behind. But tomorrow was holiday time, the five carefree nights she had been living out for months in advance. So why did she feel fearful, with a sense of foreboding souring her stomach? Those eyes still swayed in the dark above her, a tang of salt on her lips, a sense of water ebbing invisibly across the sheets, rocking her back into dreams that belonged to someone else.

All year they talked about it. It even defined them with some friends, people they wouldn’t see for months on end, but who always greeted them with the same remark, ‘So tell us, are you going to Fitzgerald’s again this year?’

The remark –Šit wasn’t really a question any more – came to annoy Alison. It made them seem staid and middle–aged before their time. Later, in the car home, she might argue with Peadar about going camping in France or visiting Barcelona like they’d done the summer after they married. But even as she railed against his stock list of excuses about the children being too small and language problems, Alison knew that Peadar could sense she was merely going through the motions, even if he gave no sign of understanding what caused her malaise.

In truth Alison was growing staid and middle–aged. Thirty–eight. Twenty years ago how ancient and decrepit that would have seemed. Twenty years ago she would have laughed at the annual notion of five nights in Fitzgerald’s Hotel during the second week of Peadar’s Easter school holidays. Twenty years ago she could never have imagined that one day she might afford to regularly stay there.

The three children woke her at seven–thirty as usual that Sunday morning by climbing into bed to demand a cuddle. The two boys were barely in before they wriggled free, asking to be allowed to watch children’s television. Their hot, bony limbs clambered off the mattress and she heard doors bang downstairs and the television being plugged in. Five–year–old Sheila snuggled on, spooning into her as Peadar slowly stirred. He turned to kiss Alison and stroke Sheila’s hair, then swung his legs from the bed. Mr Action Man, ready to organise them. Alison lay on, enjoying her daughter’s soft skin as Sheila played with the ragdoll she had decided to bring to Fitzgerald’s. But something lingered, the fragment of a dream that perturbed Alison without her being able to fully recall its details. Just eyes under water, shredded flesh.

She shuddered briefly in the warm morning light, hugged Sheila tight and pushed the image away. Sheila was walking the ragdoll up along the quilt, until it perched on Alison’s nose, staring down at her eyes.

‘Get up, lazybones, we’re going on holidays,’ a squeaky voice demanded.

Peadar moved about downstairs, doing his drill master sergeant impersonation. This was the first year when loading the car wouldn’t prove a near impossible logistical feat. Previously he would spend an eternity in the driveway, getting increasingly flustered as he rearranged their bags, shouting at the boys if they wandered out, half dressed and wanting the adventure to start. This year – with Sheila sleeping in a bed and the battered travel cot and buggy no longer required – their luggage would fit first time. But Alison knew, as she heard the rattle of her breakfast tray being carried upstairs, that Peadar would take the bags down as soon as he’d laid the tray on the bed. Loading the car first thing seemed as much a part of Peadar’s holiday ritual as her surprise breakfast in bed, his way of trying to leave the frantic pace of his everyday world behind.

She called out for him to leave the boys’ bag alone as she had more clothes to pack. He put it down reluctantly, like a child denied a final piece of jigsaw. They wouldn’t leave for another hour, yet she knew he wouldn’t be happy until the boot was shut for a final time.

Sheila slid out of bed and padded down after Peadar, saying that she wanted him to get her dressed. Alison was pleased, knowing this would buy her more time. Why did he always have to make their departure to Fitzgerald’s so rushed? Normally she was so wound up by the time they reached there that they had an argument on the first night.

This year was the first time they had ever seriously considered cancelling. Their fitted kitchen was already antiquated when they had moved into the house ten years ago and was now completely falling apart. Over Christmas Alison had argued that they should get a new kitchen instead of taking a holiday. Finances were tight since she’d given up nursing, even on Peadar’s salary as a school principal. But although, in the end, she had claimed to have chosen Fitzgerald’s so as not to disappoint the children, in reality it was the prospect of this holiday which had sustained her during the secrecy of these last months.

She ate quickly now, going over endless lists in her head. Danny still got sick when he travelled and needed Phenergan medicine before they started. Tapes had to be organised in advance: songs and rhymes that Sheila would enjoy, over the others’ protests, until she fell asleep, and then a cassette of stories for seven–year–olds, carefully pitched in age between Danny and Shane. In previous years they would all fall asleep, leaving Peadar and her free to drive in silence past Enniscorthy, feeling the road widen as she silently crossed off the miles. Now their voices would fill the car all the way to Fitzgerald’s.

Shouts rose from downstairs – Danny teasing Shane, Shane being hypersensitive. Tears and blows were only moments away. She abandoned the remains of her breakfast and made for the stairs, pitching her tone somewhere between that of a UN peacemaker and a wounded benign dictator.

The children always started counting down the miles before they’d even left Dublin. One hundred and one exactly from their driveway to the hotel car park. Peadar drove. In the early years she had shared the driving, just to show that she was not dependent. Peadar had known better than to complain but she had sensed his eyes checking the speed gauge, humouring her for the time they were losing. Peadar didn’t think of himself as a fast driver, but claimed that the NII was a road you needed to know. There were stretches where you drove slowly and others where you clawed back the lost time. Perhaps it was the pressures of his job, the endless timetables, crises and fundraising targets, which made him live his life against some invisible clock. But this year Alison planned to let him get on with driving, knowing that he hated the purposelessness of being a passenger. Peadar’s idea of a holiday, she often thought, would be two weeks in old jeans being useful with a Black and Decker drill. That, plus afternoon sex, kicking a football with Danny and Shane, sketching out a few projects for the future and the occasional round of golf thrown in.

He simply had to drive by the school, of course, even though it wasn’t on their way. Peadar half glanced across at her, wondering if he dared to stop. Beyond the boundary wall, scaffolding rose around what would soon be the finished extension. One night, after Peadar came in at two a.m. from doing budgets with McCann, his vice–principal, he had promised to let Alison smash a bottle of champagne against the finished extension to open it. She was only half joking when she’d threatened to smash himself and McCann on a rope against it instead.

He slowed the car, almost imperceptibly, his eyes following the contractor’s workmen who were earning double time for a Sunday. She could sense him gauging, almost to the brick, how far behind schedule they were with the school due to reopen in eight days.

Four years of his life were ground up in the mortar of that extension, four years of lost evenings and weekends. Nobody else could have done it on such a tiny grant, wheedling money here and there, organising bag–packing at local supermarkets, sponsored walks, Christmas vigil fasts, read–athons, cultivating politicians and local clergy who still harboured suspicions about multi–denominational schools. In bed at night Alison used to tease him about strategies he hadn’t tried yet: sponsored hand–jobs outside pubs at closing time from the female teachers, kidnapping, extortion, strip poker sessions during the Parents Association nights, a declaration of war against the United States followed by a Marshall Plan appeal for rebuilding. But mostly she felt proud of him, even if she occasionally allowed herself to acknowledge a silent, mutinous resentment. This was generally followed by guilt, as she could never decide if her pique stemmed from the intrusion of his plans into their everyday world or because he made her own life, by contrast, seem lacking in purpose or direction.

The car slowed to a halt as if Peadar was reluctant to tear his eyes from the workmen.

‘Only seven have bothered showing up,’ he said. ‘There should be a crew of eight working this morning.’

Danny leaned forward, making such a threatening noise that Peadar pulled away. Alison smiled, glad she had said nothing. It was hard to know what Danny would be in later life, but Alison wouldn’t be surprised if he became a contract killer specialising in architects.

After the Shankill by–pass the stop–start prevarication of traffic lights ended. It was open road from here to the outskirts of Ashford. Not that the route was easy – it still narrowed to one lane passing Kilmacanoge and through the Glen of the Downs, with huge container trucks straining to get past to reach the ferry to France at Rosslare.

Her Aunt Catherine had grown up in a cottage perched above this road, cycling to school in Bray during the war, fetching water from a green pump a half mile away. Alison still found herself watching out for the cottage, refurbished now and almost unrecognisable as the insignificant building pointed out to her as a child, since it had gained a conservatory and electronic gates. During their early years of driving to Fitzgerald’s she would show it to Peadar until she had grown tired of retelling the story. Now it was Peadar who drew her attention to it, every year on the same bend, like a talisman in their ritual.

The habit annoyed her, yet she would have been disappointed if he had let the moment pass. This was part of being thirty–eight too, finding that life had developed into certain grooves that made you feel secure. There were a dozen tiny habits of Peadar that irritated her, yet none of which she would change. It was like the leaking tap in the shed he had been meaning to fix for so long. She would miss the company of its drip now, putting in a wash down there at night or giving the uniforms a five–minute midnight tumble in the dryer before leaving them out for the morning.

Peadar with a perpetual tuft of hair in his nostril, the first part of him to go grey. Peadar like a furnace beside her in the bed, grumbling if she kicked off the spare blanket he kept on his side in winter even when obviously unneeded. Peadar who had never lost his Galway accent. Peadar at the beck and call of parents and neighbours during the few hours he was at home. Alison would be suspicious of some of the women calling if she didn’t know that he hadn’t got it in him to be unfaithful, no matter what her friend Ruth said about all men being the same. Peadar the builder, the planner. Peadar who had taken that Mickey Mouse school by the scruff of the neck. Peadar who was her rock in any storm. Peadar who had stoically watched his mother succumb to Alzheimer’s during monthly visits home to Galway, until she finally asked the nurse to make the strange man go away. Peadar who, since her death, hurt Alison sometimes by clamming up in his makeshift office upstairs, as if possessed by a growing malady that not even he could fathom. Peadar from whom she had kept the secret of these last few months.

Sheila was asleep before the car slowed on the narrow road twisting through woodland slopes into Ashford. They would have to wake her now when they reached Mount Ussher Gardens and the child might grow cranky later in the journey. Danny was quiet. Last year he would have prattled away until he fell asleep, pointing out passing tractors to the stuffed giraffe he once took everywhere with him. He still cuddled into that tattered giraffe after bedtime stories and sometimes stumbled into their room at night, half asleep, upset that his beloved toy had fallen behind the bed. But Alison knew this was the last year the giraffe would make the journey to Fitzgerald’s.

She had told him not to read in the car but Danny had taken out the Shoot football magazine which he now ordered in the newsagent’s instead of his Batman comic. He was intently studying match reports of obscure English third division games. She could see their names highlighted in the dense text on the page he had turned over. Southend, Doncaster, Brentford, teams and towns that could have no meaning for him. Yet his eyes seemed mesmerised, absorbed in a foreign language that took him further and further away from her. Danny, her firstborn, a gentle child never quite fitting in anywhere but happy to hover on the edge of some horde of boys. How much longer before he stopped climbing into her bed for a dawn cuddle? But he still needed her and would for a long time to come. That’s why she had to be here for him and for them all. That’s why, during the previous three months, she had been too scared to talk to anyone.

‘I know what happened, Mammy,’ six–year–old Shane had informed her recently as she pushed him on a swing. ‘Danny must have fallen at school and banged his head. That’s why he started liking football.’ Shane had swung his feet in the air, satisfied at solving the mystery of his brother’s conversion to soccer and, with it, his abandonment of the endless games of Batman and Robin he’d once devised for them both.

Shane was more babyish than Danny had been at that age but tougher as well. He’d always known his own mind. Danny was malleable, but even at a few hours old when Alison had put Shane to feed at her breast she’d felt a resistance in his neck. She’d let him go and his tiny mouth had found her nipple by itself. Shane would grow up in his own time as his own man, with nothing to prove to anybody. For now he clutched his Paddington Bear proudly in the car and would refuse to eat everything except bread when they reached Mount Ussher Gardens.

The car park just beyond Ashford was on a dangerous bend. You were almost past before you saw the entrance. A German camper van was leaving. Peadar eased into the free space and she cautioned the boys against jumping out with so many cars about. Peadar got them out and put their coats on. Sheila was sleeping so peacefully that Alison was tempted to tell them to go ahead while she remained in the car until the child woke. But something – the engine being turned off or the shudder made by the slipstream of a truck thundering past – caused Sheila’s eyes to open. Danny would fly into a rage and sometimes get sick if woken, but Sheila just smiled now as if delighted to see her mother anxiously leaning over her.

Alison unstrapped her. Peadar and the boys had already passed the antique shops. Stopping at Mount Ussher was part of the ritual too, the midway point between Dublin and Wexford when she could finally relax. A week of preparation went into these five nights away. Washing, sorting clothes, packing. It always took longer than expected, with Peadar hovering while she frantically crossed things off her list and their tempers flared up.

In previous years the journey to this point was spent wondering what had she left behind, if the windows were double–locked or the alarm definitely on. But this year felt different. Suddenly she didn’t care if the house burnt down when they were away. At least the battered kitchen would have to be replaced then.

The sun emerged after a squall of rain. Everything glistened as she walked, holding Sheila’s hand, beneath the archway of climbing plants to the tea rooms. The air felt like a benediction: the wet leaves, the excited laughter from her sons, the trees swaying in the gardens beyond. In January, when Dr O’Gorman’s cold hand had examined her breast, Alison had felt sure she would never stand here again, except as a dying woman or one scarred for life.

Why had she never told Peadar? She would tomorrow night, sipping complimentary Irish coffees on the long sofas in Fitzgerald’s. He would take her hand, near tears, and scold her for not having spoken. He would not trivialise it by going over the details repeatedly. She liked the clear–cut way that he absorbed information. He would ask one or two questions then lapse into silence, squeezing her hand before suggesting they return to the room. Holding hands, they would walk up the long corridor, where a baby always cried behind some door, and pay the babysitter off early. Their lovemaking would be silent so as not to wake the children, but with an edge caused by the knowledge of how fragile their world together was. Finally and fully she would have his attention.

She had been right to carry the dead weight of this worry alone. The weeks of waiting would have gnawed at Peadar. He would have hated the powerlessness of being unable to do anything, just like he had dreaded having to watch impotently while Alzheimer’s drained away his mother’s personality. Fear would have come between them, cancer taken possession of the house, filling their dreams and waking thoughts. In some lost fragment of his childhood, which she had learnt never to intrude upon, she was sure that his terror at not being in control was born.

But although in January she had been concerned about the tiny lump on the underside of her breast, she had expected reassurance from Dr O’Gorman and confirmation that it was just a cyst. Instead he had insisted on a mammogram. The public waiting list was months long. It was simpler to go privately, using the children’s allowance money she kept in a separate account. She was a nurse herself she’d informed the radiographer: he could tell her straight out. But people’s attitudes changed once they realised you had left nursing to work as a stay–at–home mother. She’d had to return to Dr O’Gorman, who would make Eeyore the donkey seem cheerful. He had insisted that the only way to ensure the cyst was benign was to remove it.

Even then, in mid March, she never told Peadar. She had lied instead on the morning of the procedure, claiming that she was going to help out Ruth, whose marriage had broken up, by staying with her overnight. The operation was in the same hospital she’d worked in. They had treated her like royalty – in at nine a.m., woken in mid–afternoon to be told the cyst was benign and sent home in time to read stories to Sheila. She couldn’t stop trembling in the taxi, released from the scenario where she would have to tell Peadar how her breast was to be removed and that, even then, they didn’t know how far the cancer had spread.

Instead she simply told him that Ruth hadn’t needed her to stay over. She had hoped he wouldn’t want to make love because of the soreness, but, during the previous months Peadar had never even noticed the small cyst develop, never mind now become aware of the tiny neat stitch on the underside. Lately he was too preoccupied in his world of contractors and architects. It hurt her when he barely noticed how much weight she had lost since Christmas, how pale she had looked or how red her eyes were at times.

When he did notice anything, it was to accuse her of sulking, being grudging in her support when he needed it most. He knew that he wasn’t pulling his weight at home, he would say, but the school extension was almost built. Just these final crucial weeks and then the damn thing would be finished. An achievement nobody had thought possible. After that he’d be at home so much that she would grow sick of him. So why this long face and brooding, he would ask, just now when he’d so much to cope with? Then always, as if promising a child a treat, he would add, ‘And remember, we’ll have five whole nights to ourselves in Fitzgerald’s.’

Five nights. Was this all her life boiled down to? On a dozen occasions she had bitten her tongue, tempted to scream at him. Yet these five nights would make up for so much. This scare would bring them closer together, by reminding them how some day – hopefully not for decades yet – one of them would be left to cope alone. All the bricks and mortar in the world couldn’t compensate for closing a front door at night and knowing there was no one left to really care whether or not you woke again the next morning.

If the children weren’t with them Alison might have told Peadar now on that secluded bench in the gardens overlooking the Ventry river where they had made love late one rainy afternoon sixteen years before. Alison, with the tear that Peadar had found in her skirt, sitting astride him with his flies undone. Thankfully not even the gardeners were moving about that day, but by the end they wouldn’t have stopped or cared. Their excitement had been addictive, the feel of him thrusting through the material, the creak of an old beech tree overhead, the dark river gushing over rocks and a solitary heron taking flight before their eyes. The gardens were closing by the time they had left, with just their bicycles in the car park. Her dress was stained but she hadn’t cared. She had cared about nothing that summer, except that she was twenty–two and free, on a dirty weekend with her first love who had come back after three years to find her.

Peadar was already ordering food in the tea rooms. The old lady in the hunting jacket was in her usual place beside the antiques, guarding the door into the gardens. Three local women ran the tea room. They remembered Peadar because of his fondness for rhubarb streusel. Danny was eyeing the rich cakes, but once they had a good walk it was unlikely he would get sick later on in the car. Alison scanned the menu, wondering was there anything she could persuade Shane to taste. Maybe she could invent a game to coax him into trying chicken. She envied women whose sons ate like horses. Yet Shane was tall and healthy, existing mainly on milk and cheese.

None of this was important, she reminded herself, or at least not at this moment. Let Shane drink what he likes. Let Danny have two cakes or three. Childhood was short and her own seemed to have been spent forever gazing in through invisible windows, being denied the things she saw inside and made to feel guilty for even wanting them. Not that her parents were mean, but the Waterford she grew up in had felt like it was ruled by some headscarfed matriarch with pursed, disapproving lips. It was a different world for children now. They were a family together on the sort of holiday she had only ever known once as a child. She had survived her scare, even if for days after getting the all–clear she had burst into sudden inexplicable tears, alone in the kitchen.

Peadar glanced at her now as the lady filled his tray.

‘You look flushed,’ he said. ‘Are you okay?’

‘I’m fine,’ she replied. ‘Just fine.’

The woman mashed up potatoes, carrots and gravy for Sheila and heated them in the microwave. Even with coaxing, the child would only eat half of it but there was enough goodness in that. Alison had plain biscuits wrapped in tissue for afterwards. She knew that both Sheila and Shane would enjoy them far more than any dessert.

The children stormed out into the gardens after they’d finished, while Peadar was still paying the admission fee. The azaleas were in bloom, stretching out before her eyes in pinks, yellows and whites as Alison walked through maple trees towards the river. Parts of the grass were deliberately cut long to give the woodlands a feel of half wilderness, half exotic Eden. Peadar appeared behind her, taking her hand but urging her on, anxious not to lose sight of Shane as the boy climbed up rough steps to a suspension bridge leading to the owner’s house located on a man–made island in the river. Alison called for Shane to run after Danny and Sheila who had disappeared among the trees. She wanted to stroll in peace with Peadar along the wide avenue of hanging rhododendrons.

There was an octagonal wooden house at the end where she remembered changing Danny, the first year they went to Fitzgerald’s, when everything was new and she was frantic about being a mother. The fear she might drop him, the incessant worry that caused her to wake several times a night to check his breathing in the cot.

Danny now gripped Sheila’s hand as he pushed ahead towards the shallow stretch of river, hoping to see the solitary heron there again this year. Another talisman of their journey. Even at eight the boy was caught up in this ritual. The riverbed was empty. Danny cupped his hand over his eyes, straining to glimpse the bird. She called out that the heron was probably hunting along the far rapids and Danny disappeared across the bridge into a tunnel of old overhanging trees.

Shane followed, running along the maze of woodland paths, while Peadar called for them not to get lost. She let go of Peadar’s hand, tired of being hurried, wanting to enjoy the cool shade of those gnarled trunks. Her family moved ahead, with Sheila demanding that Peadar carry her. From Danny’s cries she knew he had found the entrance to the secret path built along girders down a tiny tributary of the river. The steps descended to the water, with ferns and moss crowding the steep banks on either side. Sheila was frightened of falling in and wriggled away to run back to Alison.

She sat on the grass with her daughter, watching Peadar hold each boy’s hand as they negotiated their way slowly along the girders that were almost submerged in the green water. They disappeared in and out of shade, with patches of sunlight igniting the ripples that sparkled around them. This was a moment she knew she would remember when they were all gone from her. The three men in her life, calling excitedly to each other as they stooped beneath archways and rocks. Then their voices went silent, as if the riot of trailing plants along the riverbank had somehow ensnared them up inside a magical green world.

Peadar’s car–phone rang as they descended the twisty mountain road beyond Rathnew, stuck behind a horsebox being pulled by a jeep in a tailback of Sunday afternoon vehicles. Alison thought he had remembered to turn it off. He glanced across, with a sheepish grin. She knew he couldn’t resist picking it up.

‘Just once,’ she warned him. ‘If it rings again it’s going out the window.’

It was McCann, of course, fretful and over–conscientious as usual. Alison had grown to dread his voice calling at ridiculous hours about trivial matters. At first she had thought this was his method of retribution against Peadar for taking the principal’s job that outsiders felt he had patiently waited in line for, during his decade as vice–principal, before Peadar was headhunted for the post. But gradually she’d realised that his obsequiousness was without irony or malice. McCann was a natural lieutenant, not a leader. He lived alone, with classical music always in the background when he phoned, seemingly oblivious to the disruption caused by a midnight call.

‘I know,’ she heard Peadar say. ‘I passed the site. There were seven then … maybe another two have bunked off. But the deadline is in place with penalty clauses, so they’ll just have to work longer in the evenings.’

There was a silence as Peadar let McCann fret on. The secret was to wait until McCann paused for breath and then get your goodbyes in fast. Peadar braked as the horsebox slowed even more.

‘If he’s got three sites going at once then that’s Nolan’s problem,’ Peadar interjected. ‘He can switch workmen around all he likes once he meets his commitments to us, because he knows he’s not getting another red cent until I can see my face shining in the floor tiles.’

Peadar replaced the receiver, making a deliberate show of switching the phone off.

‘Sorry about that,’ he apologised.

‘No, it’s reassuring,’ Alison replied. ‘Once I’m sure McCann is still in Dublin I know he can’t pop his head out of the petrol tank if we stop to fill it up somewhere along the way.’

Peadar smiled, knowing her views on the vice–principal. She used to tease him in bed by inventing blind dates for McCann, her favourite being to pair him off with Mother Teresa.

The Enid Blyton tape had run out. Alison turned it over. Pip, Fatty and Daisy continued outwitting the fat policeman, Mr Goon, on side two. Danny was fascinated though he had heard it a dozen times before. Shane was happy beside him, playing some game with Paddington Bear. And Sheila … Sheila was simply happy, like it was a gift she’d been born with. Sheila, with the same jet–black hair as herself, whom they very nearly didn’t have. They had even seen a doctor about Peadar having the operation before finally deciding to go once again. Three boys would have been too much, but Alison had been certain from the moment Sheila was conceived that there was a girl inside her. Never mind that she had felt the same about Shane for nine months and told anyone who asked her. This time she’d known in her bones and kept the secret to herself.

She turned to smile at her daughter as Peadar edged in and out, trying to glimpse the winding road ahead where a gap was developing between the jeep and horsebox and the cars in front. Sheila smiled back, almost conspiratorially. Sheila who never lost her temper, even when a note arrived before the start of the Easter holidays ten days ago stating that Jean O’Connor in her class had meningitis and Alison had driven her daughter crazy, shining lights in her eyes and searching for a rash at every hour of the night. Sheila who would be her companion when the boys and Peadar were off at football games. Boys leave home and leave their mothers, but girls never quite do. They row and argue in their teens, worrying their mothers senseless, but in the end gradually become friends and confidantes in a way that no son could ever be. That’s what she had missed, with her own mother dying of cancer when Alison was twenty–two. The pendulum had never swung back. There was so much they could have talked about now, so many questions Alison would love to ask. She reached one finger out and Sheila’s hot hand wrapped itself around it, twiddling with the eternity ring she loved to turn in the light.

‘Are we there yet, Mama?’ she asked.

Alison shook her head as Peadar indicated and pulled out. At once she knew something was wrong by the intake of Peadar’s breath. Alison looked around. He was on the wrong side of the road, just where the white line started to break up. A blue van was coming towards them, but there would be time for Peadar to pull in again in front of the jeep pulling the horsebox. The problem was the black BMW with lights flashing behind them. She had noticed the bearded driver’s impatience earlier on and sensed how his constant swaying made Peadar nervous. Now the driver was trying to simultaneously overtake them and the jeep. The man was beeping furiously, screaming at Peadar through the glass like it was his fault. Peadar veered in front of the jeep, putting his foot down to try and create enough space before the BMW swerved into the side of them. The blue van flashed past. Alison screamed, waiting for the crash but somehow the BMW had managed to squeeze in behind them, mainly because the jeep braked hard, sending the horsebox swaying about on the road.

The BMW’s lights were only inches from their back bumper, feet away from her children. Peadar was rattled, shouting at Alison for screaming, cursing the lunatic behind them. The BMW pulled out again without indicating and sped into the distance. Alison could see two teenage girls looking back at them vacantly through the rear window.

Peadar said something and she snapped back. Then they both went quiet, anxious not to frighten the children more. She raised the volume on the tape, sat back and stared ahead. Peadar went slower than usual, even though the road was clear. Cars overtook them, flashing back at twenty and thirty miles above the speed limit. He looked across after five minutes and took her hand in his free one.

‘It wasn’t my fault,’ he said quietly. ‘I’d never take chances with you all in the car. It was that lunatic.’

She squeezed his hand and said nothing. What would it matter whose fault it was if they were all dead on the roadside? She wished they were in the hotel already, the children splashing about in the pool and her outside in the Canadian hot tub. The tape ended. Three voices called out different requests, but she ignored them, not even looking for music on the radio. She needed silence to get her wits back. She wanted to close her eyes as she always did at some stage of this journey and become a child again, counting off the miles in the clank of wheels as the train brought her mother and father and herself on that one magical holiday to Fitzgerald’s.

They didn’t stop again on the way down and the children were quiet, leaving her to her memories. Arklow was now by–passed and Enniscorthy wasn’t too slow. As Peadar picked up speed along the banks of the Slaney with the asylum perched on the cliffs above them, she searched for the Gingerbread Man tape. There was something about the snatches of classical background music and the narrator’s voice saying ‘at the blip turn the page’ that conjured up for her the pent–up expectation of every journey they had taken on this road. She could remember playing it for Danny when Shane was a baby and then for Shane when Sheila was teething beside him in the car. Even at home when she put it on and closed her eyes she could see this stretch of road and feel the spring sunshine through the windscreen as the car sped along these last few miles.

The boys protested at the choice of tape but she told them that it was Sheila’s turn to hear something.

‘Just twenty miles,’ Peadar told Danny, ‘and we’re there. No more towns or anything, just open road.’

Wexford town was long by–passed, taking the Rosslare traffic away from those cramped medieval streets she had first glimpsed as the train trundled slowly over wooden quayside sleepers the summer she was twelve. Holding a bottle of Guinness by the neck, her father had pulled down the carriage window and stared out, lost in memories of which she had no part.

Weeks before, when the notion of a special holiday to mark his silver wedding anniversary arose, her father had been adamant about doing it in style by taking his wife and young daughter down to Fitzgerald’s. It was the first time she had ever heard of the hotel, but he began describing it as like a palace. His own father had taken him there by train from Waterford for lunch when he made his Confirmation in the 1930s, an extravagant day trip they had spent years talking about. And the summer after he left school at fourteen he had got a kitchen job there, living in, and bathing on the private beach every evening.

Standing at the train window, he had seemed to change before her eyes. Hidden fragments of his life tumbled out that she strove to piece together. This was the first occasion when she properly understood that parents had previous lives and secrets. Listening to him had reminded her of a boy with his nose pressed against a shop window. Always on the outside, describing the clothes guests wore to dinner back then, the size of the dining room, the musicians who played. All as glimpsed from a kitchen sink, between the swish of a swing door opening and closing as waiters came and went. Now he had decided to return with his wife and daughter in his own private triumph.

Alison could remember the tiny station at Rosslare and the steep hump–backed bridge where the sea suddenly glistened into sight. They had walked the few hundred yards to the hotel, him in front with two heavy suitcases, she and her mother straggling slightly behind. She had felt a nervousness for her father. He seemed out of his depth, striding forward with a frighteningly boyish eagerness. Even at twelve she sensed he was going to be disappointed by the fact that nobody knew him, no one recalled his hands scrubbing pots in scalding water, nobody would understand the momentous nature of his return.

Yet all this she only fully understood years later, when Danny was two and Alison spent a week in Waterford after her father’s funeral, sorting out clothes and personal effects, filling in the gaps of his life through them. He had known poverty in Waterford as a boy and later on in London. Yet he always took whatever work would provide a home for his wife and his two London–born sons. The younger boy was ten before he returned to Waterford to work in the glass factory and the afterthought or mistake occurred that became her. That was a question you didn’t ask your parents back then, even if in adolescence the doubt had tortured her.

Either way all she knew was love, unburdened by the expectations that Peadar seemed to carry from his earliest years. She still remembered hearing her father rise an hour before the rest of them, the bolt being drawn back and his boots on the path disturbing her childhood sleep as he set off for the early shift. Surely he was sick sometimes but she never recalled it. He had simply got on with what had to be done for his children. But that trip to Fitzgerald’s had been for him alone. It was the moment when he could rest among the soft armchairs and know that his life’s main work was done, with one son married, a second finishing his apprenticeship and his only daughter due to be the first member of his family to ever complete secondary school.

She, meanwhile, had been preoccupied with discovering the swimming pool, the crazy golf, the private beach and the food. She had known her first kiss at Fitzgerald’s, sitting on a rock at twilight near the steps up from the beach. Three days of intense expectation with a thirteen–year–old boy from Newry had built up to that moment. The feel of his tongue for the eternity of a second before she turned and ran off, back up the steps into the safety of childhood. How could you explain time to a child? Ten or twenty years that suddenly pass? It was more than a quarter of a century since her first solitary kiss at Fitzgerald’s. How many lifetimes ago did that moment seem? A foreboding crept over her in the car, a melancholic hangover from last night’s dream. What if this was all the future held, a succession of cars carrying her ever–ageing body down to this hotel? Forty soon, then fifty, sixty. She closed her eyes, feeling the car speed forward, unstoppable, on a journey she had no control over.

She opened them again to glance back at her children’s excited faces. They had passed the last roundabout for Wexford town and the N25 for Waterford. These were the final miles, past the turnoff for Kilmore Quay and through Killinick in the wink of an eye. Sheila silently mouthed the words ‘How much longer?’ and suddenly Alison felt like a child herself again. She strained to glimpse the sign for the turn left, which took them down the wide country road with a dozen signs on every bend for hotels and guesthouses and always, the fourth one down, for Fitzgerald’s.

They were here now, a turn left at a garage, a sharp right again and the railway bridge was before them. Soon the first glimpse of the sea. The children craned their necks forward. But it was different for them, not like the solitary time she had come all those years ago. They expected this as a right, year after year, their break at Fitzgerald’s, remarkable and yet routine. They were excited, yet she wanted their excitement to be more. She half resented the fact they were not shouting with joy. She wanted brass bands, she didn’t know what she wanted. She wanted to look out and see her father straining under his suitcases. She wanted to call, ‘We’re here by right now, Dad, year after year.’ She wanted to feel twelve again. She wanted to cry, remembering how she had honestly expected never to see this hotel again except as a woman riddled with cancer.

Peadar turned left and suddenly it was there, on the right, rising up in cream and blue, with tennis courts visible and palm trees in the garden. Every year something changed, every year something new, but still always it was Fitzgerald’s.

The car park on the left was crammed with sleek cars, with one battered old van incongruously among them. Peadar drove in through the cream pillars and found a spot near the grass. He flung his door open, his shoulders stiff from driving, and opened the back door for Danny to jump up into his arms. He threw his son into the air and caught him as Danny raised his fist like he’d scored a goal.

‘Fitzgerald’s,’ Danny said. ‘We’re here, Daddy, we’re here!’

Shane and Sheila clambered out, running to the wall to peer across at it. Their faces were mesmerised. Peadar walked around the car to put his arm around her, then looked down.

‘Hey,’ he asked quietly, ‘why are you crying?’

She looked at him. She remembered her mother dying, her father lost and left behind. She remembered herself as an overlooked child in this hotel, the future she had imagined. She remembered how close that BMW had come to killing them, the coldness of Dr O’Gorman’s hand on her breast. Alison put her arms around him.

‘You big fool,’ she said. ‘I’m crying because I’m happy.’

The welcoming sherry reception was in the foyer at seven o’clock. In the early years Peadar and herself had laughed at it and never attended, but now it seemed an integral part of their holiday. By six–thirty the major unpacking was done and strolling down to the foyer forced her to relax. The boys were asking about it from the time they had taken their first swim at half–four. To them ‘reception’ had the same ring as ‘party’ and a party was still a party even if it only consisted of adults in suits chatting away on the striped sofas.

She knew they would get bored of it within minutes. Once they had clung to her side as Sheila did now, with the colouring book and crayons she would soon tire of and demand to be snuggled up instead on Alison’s knee. The boys waited only to get glasses of orange juice from the bow–tied waiters at the white table beside the dining room windows. Danny drained his glass and called to Shane. Like a shadow, his younger brother followed him down the corridor, ready to turn the slightest occurrence into an adventure.

Alison was happy to let them go, once she could keep an eye on the main doorway. Danny had finally reached an age to explore by himself and she knew how he loved to delve into every corner and alcove of the hotel. There were so many rooms he would have to peek into: the card room that was always empty; the smoking room with its blazing log fire even on summer nights; the TV room where Geraldine and Aoife, the children’s activities co–ordinators, were already screening the first evening’s video. The boys would settle down to watch it shortly, but Danny still insisted on either Peadar or her sitting in an armchair in the corridor. For all his new found toughness, ghosts and dinosaurs frightened him and they would have to be within reach if the film grew too scary.

The babysitter was due at eight. Alison hoped it wouldn’t be one of those teenage girls it was impossible to get a word from. The usual bedtime arguments were still an hour away. For now Sheila was happy colouring and Peadar had fallen into reluctant conversation at the table where the waiters were pouring more sherry. She could tell by the way he held the sherry glasses, poised to flee back to her. The tall man in the suit beside him laughed at what Peadar obviously hoped was a closing remark.

‘Yes, yes,’ she heard the man’s booming voice agree. ‘It’s great to forget the pressures of work and relax. So tell me, what do you do?’

Peadar caught her glance and discreetly threw his eyes to heaven. She knew he was too polite to disentangle himself from the conversation and also that, like a mother with a first child, he would soon begin to talk about the school extension. She didn’t mind. She was enjoying these rare moments alone. Two elderly couples on the sofas beside her were making friends. A waitress bent to offer her a tray of hors d’oeuvres. She finished her first sherry and looked around. Other hotels might have leisure centres and chefs that were equally good, but she had never seen anywhere to match Fitzgerald’s paintings. And they weren’t just the safe landscapes you saw elsewhere. Here paintings accosted you; some stunning, many unfathomable but every one challenging. She had grown to know the names by now: Le Broquy, Crozier, Nora McGuinness, Patrick Collins and fantastical childhood landscapes by Martin Gale that the boys loved to stare at.

Sheila pulled at her sleeve for attention, holding up a page from her colouring book streaked almost entirely with red crayon. Alison praised it and found her another page to colour. She looked up and a face caught her attention, although she wasn’t sure why. It had a disconcerting familiarity, yet the man it belonged to looked somehow out of place. He leaned down, replying to some remark from a couple in their fifties seated beside the piano player.

She recognised them as the Bennetts. They were childless, Scottish and superb dancers. They came for five nights at Easter and another week in October and entered every competition. Each Thursday night at prizegiving they walked across the dance floor to receive Fitzgerald’s mugs and plates for table tennis, indoor bowls and crazy golf. She wondered what they did with their endless supply of crockery and liked to imagine Mrs Bennett having tantrums, smashing things, while the petite Mr Bennett screamed, ‘No, dear, please, not the table quiz mug!’

Mrs Bennett looked up and waved in recognition. Alison smiled back as both Mr Bennett and the man glanced in her direction. The man’s gaze perturbed her. There was something not right about him, like a photo–fit that didn’t match. His skin seemed younger than his eyes. She couldn’t explain why this bothered her. There were so many faces you saw here year after year. Nobody could expect to remember them all. She looked away, feigning great interest in Sheila’s colouring, yet aware that the man was leaving the Bennetts and walking towards her. He even seemed to slow down as she kept her head buried over her daughter’s colouring book, then he strolled on, past Mr Diekhoff and his son, to wherever he had parked his own wife.

Mr Diekhoff had been coming here from Cologne for twenty–five years, ever since his son, Heinrich, was four. Alison watched the Down’s Syndrome boy sit quietly beside his widowed father. Strictly speaking he wasn’t a boy, but she couldn’t think of him as approaching thirty, no more than she could bear to imagine his life if he outlived his father. Heinrich’s presence here – politely asking women he knew for one dance and perpetually winning the crazy golf competition – was another talisman of her holiday. It was fifteen years since his mother had died, but his father resolutely continued this annual trip to the hotel he had discovered as a young hitchhiker. Alison knew he came for Heinrich’s sake more than his own – although he had his friends among the regulars here. He sensed her glance at him and smiled in greeting. She felt the weight of responsibility in his eyes as Heinrich waved to her cheerfully.

Peadar finally returned with the sherries, having extracted himself from the man’s company. ‘What a bore,’ he said. ‘An RTE producer. You know the type who stop strangers on the street when they can’t find anyone else to argue with.’

She looked around, meaning to ask Peadar if he recognised the stranger, when somebody else caught her attention.

‘The bastard,’ she hissed, making Peadar look at her in surprise. She nodded towards a sofa near the reception desk where a bearded man was smoking and enjoying a whiskey while his teenage daughters sulked over the orange juices before them.

‘Do we know him?’ Peadar asked.

‘He’s the bastard in the BMW who nearly got us killed. Do you not remember the pusses on those two girls gawking out the window?’

The bearded man stared directly back and raised his glass as if in a toast, although Alison couldn’t be sure if he recognised them. She had already risen when Peadar grabbed her arm.

‘Where’re you going?’

‘To throw my sherry over the smug bastard.’

‘Ah, Jaysus, please don’t,’ Peadar cajoled. ‘It will take me half an hour to get you another one if that RTE arsehole spots me going back up to the table.’

‘I’m serious.’

The man seemed to be watching, amused and impervious to what was going on. His daughters had even forgotten to look bored.

‘For God’s sake, Alison, what’s the point? Don’t spoil our holiday. You know you’re like a bag of cats on the first night here anyway.’

Danny and Shane appeared in the foyer, checking they were still there. Sheila wanted Alison to praise her colouring. Alison sat back angrily, but Peadar was right. He was always bloody right, especially when it came to her losing her temper. And she did find it hard to relax on the first night here, from a cocktail of memory and guilt.

Every year they came here the menu changed but some traditional Fitzgerald recipes remained the same. She remembered her parents uneasily stirring the green nettle and cognac soup that was still served here. And how she herself had half expected to be stung as she raised the soup spoon to her lips. Nettle soup to them was something from the famine, the poorest of the poor boiling weeds for nourishment. They couldn’t have been more shocked if the main course had consisted of the old recipe of potatoes mashed with blood from a cut made in a cow’s leg. As it was, they had been taken aback by the litany of penitent fish dishes even though it wasn’t a Friday.

Her parents had been perpetually ill at ease on that holiday, her mother making the beds each morning and frantically tidying up before the cleaners came in. They had sat in armchairs in the Slaney Room, talking mainly to the staff and just watching other guests pass by. She had only ever seen them this uncomfortable again whenever they were forced to meet Peadar’s parents. They had not fitted in here and neither had she. The other children tolerated her mainly for her novelty value, making her repeat phrases in her Waterford accent. Only the Newry boy had treated her differently, thrown together by them being the only two children not from Dublin.

It perturbed her every time she returned, just how well she fitted in here now, how indistinguishable her children were from the others running in and out of the television room. The same Dublin accents, with hardly a trace of her Waterford or Peadar’s Galway brogue – not that she herself had much of an accent left. Her parents would be proud. Yet this never stopped her from imagining them, perched on a sofa in this foyer, speaking in whispers and not recognising the daughter who had left them behind in trying to meet the expectations of her in–laws.

It was best to get the children ready before the babysitter came. She rose and walked towards the boys, praising her self–control in ignoring the bearded man when he spoke to her.

‘You need to trade in those wheels of yours,’ he joked, like the incident had been amusing. ‘Get something with a bit more vroom in it.’

She stared at him.

‘Maybe that’s what you need yourself.’ He looked puzzled, his daughters moronically staring through her like she wasn’t there. Her accent thickened, reverting back to girlhood. ‘I mean these things are about compensation, aren’t they?’

‘I don’t see how compensation enters into it,’ he said, defensive now, watchful of his wallet. ‘There was no accident, nobody hurt, nothing.’

‘I don’t mean that type of compensation.’ She was aware of Peadar anxiously at her shoulder. ‘I mean the other kind, the need to make up for things. Or as we say in Waterford, the bigger the horsepower the smaller the prick behind the wheel.’

She walked on, aware of the silence behind her, of the girls staring and of Peadar at her shoulder. They got around the corner before Peadar managed to speak.

‘His face,’ he said. ‘You should have seen the gobshite’s face.’ Both started laughing, unable to stop, collapsing onto the nearest sofa, while the boys hovered, convinced their parents were cracking up. Danny’s eight–year–old face was such a picture of mortified respectability that he could have passed for Peadar’s father.

‘Stop it,’ he hissed, ‘you’re embarrassing me.’

Alison pulled him onto her lap, tickling him as he struggled and the others jumped up in a tangle of limbs. Now she felt truly on holidays.

Throughout dinner she knew they were going to make love that night. She kicked off her shoes and played footsie with Peadar, even when Jack Fitzgerald himself stopped to welcome them back. She could feel Peadar’s shoe gently brush her calf, then explore upwards between her bare knees as the owner moved off and the waitress took their order for dessert. During the two days of packing she usually just pecked at snacks, too flustered to feel hungry. This always made their first meal all the more special.

There was never music in the Slaney Room on Sunday nights. Older couples gathered around the piano instead in the French Bar at the far end of the building. Alison and Peadar enjoyed their coffees in the foyer near the open fire. The porter got them drinks and Peadar allowed himself his usual single cigar. The heat from the logs scorched Alison’s legs. Yet she loved the smell of wood–smoke. She would happily have gone back to the room then but they waited a little longer to make it worth the babysitter’s while. They nestled like lovers, her head against his chest, nursing their second drinks until sufficient time had elapsed.

The boys were asleep in single beds on either side of the double one, with Sheila snuggled down in a third bed near the French doors that opened out onto gardens overlooking the sea. Peadar had his hands under the waistband of her skirt while she was still closing the door on the babysitter. She turned and he picked her up, her legs straddling his waist as he carried her towards the bed. He collapsed on top of her, each shushing the other while simultaneously trying not to laugh. He undid the top of her outfit, his hands gripping her silk slip as if about to tear it off, while her eyes warned him against trying any such thing. He worked it upwards, his hands managing to undo her bra while she kissed him and tugged at his zip.

She wasn’t sure if their noise caused Danny to shift, his legs kicking the blankets off. But pure instinct made her slide out from under Peadar and go to fix the blankets. Peadar raised a hand to silently stop her, yet even as she touched Danny she knew she was crazy not to leave the boy alone. When would she learn to stop meddling until it was necessary to do so? She tucked in the blankets then turned back to Peadar but the mood was already broken. He looked past her to where Danny stirred again. He was not a child you could disturb in his sleep. He was half awake now and half dreaming, sitting up to call for her in distress and yet not realising she was already there. Alison settled him down once more but knew it was no use.

‘Take him out, quickly,’ Peadar hissed, but she hesitated, hoping against hope the boy would settle back asleep. Danny sat up and cried, making the first retching noise in his throat. His eyes were open but she knew that everything seemed like a bad dream for him. Peadar grabbed him and ran, getting his head over the toilet before the vomit came. Danny cried as he retched again, with his whole dinner coming up.

Alison watched from the bathroom door, cursing herself and knowing Peadar was silently cursing her too. Danny’s pyjamas were untouched. There were just a few specks on the tiles and on Peadar’s shoes. Peadar carried him back to bed and tucked him in. The child would sleep peacefully now till morning.

Her clothes were disarrayed, but she knew her semi–nakedness wasn’t arousing any more. It was the mundane nudity of child raising. Her nipples looked flat and worn, but Peadar wasn’t even gazing at her.

‘I might get a last drink,’ he whispered, as though anxious to extricate himself. ‘You read if you like, I’ll only be a few minutes.’

She wanted to stop him, to suggest they try again, but it was too late. She let him go, undressed and turned the lights out. It was wrong to think that Peadar was punishing her. It just wasn’t like ten years ago, when he seemed to develop a permanent erection whenever they were alone. Kids changed you and three kids wore you out. You saw your partner in situations that modesty would once never have allowed. Neither of them had been able for a third child if they were honest – no more than her own parents had been. Let Peadar enjoy his drink, let his tension subside. She found she was still damp. Her fingers touched the spot idly, wondering why his tongue always had such difficulty in locating it.

A noise outside froze her hand. A footstep on gravel beyond the French doors. For a second she thought that maybe it was Peadar, crazily planning to surprise her, to rekindle the spontaneity which had once marked their lovemaking. But he would know the door was locked. It had to be a burglar. But the kids had been racing in and out all afternoon. Was she sure she had remembered to lock the French doors? She wished Peadar was here. She waited for the click of a hand to test the handle but there was just silence as if the footsteps had moved on or she had imagined the whole affair.

She lay curled in the dark. I gave up my happiness to make another person happy, she found herself thinking, to make my family happy. I am who I’ve become because this is who they need me to be. When I got the all–clear I wasn’t even happy for myself. It was them I was thinking of. I couldn’t die because other people needed me. But what do I need? The image returned from last night, a woman swaying under water, her lifeless hands against the glass, waiting to be chanced upon by some diver.

Her body felt old and stale. Her hand was motionless between her thighs. The rich food lay heavily on her stomach while her children’s breathing filled the room. She was on holidays, the treat she had so looked forward to. So why did she feel alone, like she had woken to find she was leading another person’s life inside somebody else’s skin?

MONDAY

Sheila woke first. Alison could tell by the springs of the small bed and knew that her daughter was content to lie there, self–contained, savouring the wonder of waking in a hotel bedroom. Shane would sleep on, even feigning sleep for a time after he woke, but Danny would be out of bed once his eyes opened. Alison lay on her side, watching her elder son’s sleeping face, knowing that his eyelids would flicker automatically open at half past seven. Every morning the same so that she had stopped using an alarm clock.

She couldn’t tell if Peadar was awake or asleep. It had been late when he returned from the bar and she hadn’t turned over, forcing him to make the first move, if any. She knew that he had lain awake for a long time, with inches of sheet separating their skin. She turned towards him now. His breath was nasally and in a few years’ time he would snore. He looked older in the dawn light, worn out, although she knew that once he woke he would summon the energy to sparkle and make the children laugh. He was a morning person. Perhaps that was one of the contrasts which made their marriage work.

She spooned herself into his back and put an arm around him, her fingers luxuriating along his furry chest, then moving mischievously down to the untidy tangle of hair spilling out from his Y–fronts. He stirred, sleepily, as her fingers lightly brushed against the unsummoned stiffness he sometimes woke with.

‘I’ve told you, McCann,’ he murmured, ‘my wife is getting suspicious.’

It was an established joke between them. ‘Very suspicious,’ she whispered back, gently taking his earlobe between her teeth. Peadar turned towards her and the creak of their bed woke Danny who padded across to snuggle sleepily against her back, his eyes not even fully open. Peadar rolled over to disguise his stiffness as Danny leaned across to hug his father. All three lay in silence, then Peadar turned more fully onto his stomach as Sheila joined them on his side of the bed. Alison smiled, wondering what cold unerotic thoughts he was filtering through his head.

‘The plunge pool,’ she muttered to him.

‘What?’

‘Think of diving into the ice–cold plunge pool.’

Peadar shivered loudly. ‘I was thinking of McCann with Mother Teresa,’ he replied and stared across at Shane still feigning sleep and clutching his Paddington Bear.

‘I’ve an idea,’ he said. ‘Let’s all eat Paddington for breakfast.’

‘You will not.’ Shane uncoiled himself and landed with one spring on their bed. Peadar laughed and soon had the children laughing too, as he invented songs, with no trace of disappointment in his voice at the sexual tension which, just a few moments before, seemed about to spill over between them.

Alison was relieved some years back when Peadar stopped attempting to explain the rules of the Fitzgerald’s golfing scramble competition to her. It combined the complexity of Einstein’s theory of relativity with a propensity for appalling dress sense on the part of more serious disciples. For lesser mortals like Peadar it apparently consisted of three strangers teeing off, almost everybody picking their ball up again, everyone blaming the prevailing weather conditions or their hangovers and promising to buy each other a drink in the hotel bar that night.

However, she knew it kept Peadar happy for a few hours on the Monday morning, after which he was generally content to put his golf clubs away for the remainder of the holiday. The biggest cheer at the prizegiving every Thursday night was for the golfing competition, with scores calculated by a formula, based on points from individual rounds and a percentage of points from the scramble, which seemed better applied to nuclear physics. Alison could spot the men and women who spent whole days trying to better their scores, and evenings huddled at the bar working out minute calculations.

Every year Peadar simply put his name down to make up the numbers for some old couple’s scramble team and steered clear of everything else. Alison told him she didn’t mind if he entered the competition properly by playing a full solo round now that the children were older. But she knew how a sense of duty held him back from abandoning her for so long. His scramble partners this year, the Irwins, came from Northern Ireland. They hailed him at breakfast time, with Peadar jokingly saluting Mr Irwin as ‘captain’ and arranging to meet them on the first tee at eleven o’clock.

It was only after Peadar had left and she brought the children for their morning swim, that she realised Danny was now too big to be taken into the ladies’ changing room. She had to ask an attendant to stay in the gents’ locker room with him, and even then she was uneasy, not recognising him from any previous year.

She got Sheila and Shane changed quickly and brought them out to where Danny waited impatiently at the poolside. The attendant smiled and walked away to fix the pile of towels, making Alison feel guilty for harbouring suspicions about him.

There were two full–size pools, a kiddies’ one sloping to a depth of five feet and an eight–foot adult one nearly always empty. The sauna and steam rooms were hidden behind statues up steps beside the adult pool, with a plunge pool between them. Out on the terrace, once you braved the sea breeze and occasional rain, was an outdoor Canadian hot tub whose powerful jets of water made the indoor jacuzzi almost tepid by comparison.

Alison knew she would have to give these pleasures a miss this morning to keep an eye on the children. The boys dived straight into the kiddies’ pool. Sheila ran to the steps and waded in. Alison followed slowly, shivering and warning them to let her lower her body into the cold water in her own time. Either her bathing costume had shrunk or else her bottom was getting bigger. She needed to discreetly adjust it under the water. The kiddies’ pool was packed. She looked around, wondering if the boys would make friends this year and might Sheila be left out of things.

Parents took turns minding children while their partners lazed in the steam room or raced outdoors in their bare feet to chance the Canadian hot tub. Danny was a natural swimmer, although Shane stubbornly insisted on wearing one armband. Alison mainly played with Sheila, letting the boys invent chasing games of their own. Somebody switched the fountain on and a thin sheet of water spilled down as children splashed excitedly underneath it. She saw the man who had spoken to the Bennetts last night, just for a second among hordes of parents and children at the pool edge. Then Danny popped up before her, splashing water and looking for a chase. She swam after him in mock rage while Shane joined the pursuit and, from the corner of her eye, Alison noticed Sheila playing with a girl her own age. A powerful water jet burst into life, spraying out a current in the far corner of the pool. She caught Danny who wriggled free and threw himself headlong into the turbulent spray.

Alison turned as Shane followed his brother, knowing the jet would keep the boys busy. That man was watching her again, this time from the Jacuzzi overlooking the children’s pool. He had obviously left his own brood to be attended by his wife. Instinctively she knew he had been watching for a long time, but he didn’t look away, even when she stared back. Instead he nodded slightly. Maybe their families had shared a holiday here before but that didn’t give him the right to blatantly eyeball her. She thought about how her bathing costume had shrunk and wondered had he seen her enter the pool. Sheila swam towards her. Alison made a great fuss of picking her daughter up, annoyed at him and furious at herself for feeling vaguely flattered. But it was a while since any man had gazed at her like that.

When Alison allowed herself to gaze back after five minutes the man had left the Jacuzzi. She glanced around the pool, wondered which mother was his wife and whether she knew that her husband stared at strangers.

Someone was calling her name. She recognised the wild brood of kids jumping into the water before she saw Joan, a woman from Dundalk who had shared this same week as them for the last three years. Alison smiled, recalling Joan’s raucous laugh and how she loved to stay up half the night, gathering other women around her to tell blue jokes.

If they lived near each other in Dublin, then Alison suspected that Joan was the sort of woman she would spend her life avoiding. But here on holidays it was good to have a laugh, without knowing that everything you said would be spun out as exaggerated gossip in the local park. Alison’s two sisters–in–law in Waterford had the same small–town look, getting drunk together at Joe Dolan concerts one night, falling out with each other the next. But at least they were there for one another, even though increasingly distant towards Alison every time she went back to Waterford.

Joan dived in, shivering with the sudden cold. She swam towards Alison, happily complaining in her usual torrent of words: ‘Is your Peadar beating the bushes on the golf course for lost balls like my Joey? I keep telling him, “Joey, you can’t piss in a straight line never mind hit a golf ball.” Joey’s version of course management is not falling into a lake and drowning himself.’

Joan aimed a palmful of water at her eldest son who threatened to swim too near.

‘Would you look at Jason there and him so sick last night we had to eat in our room. I saw Peadar at the bar when I finally got down but you were tucked away out of sight. He must have shagged you out, you know these schoolmasters and their big sticks. Here, off you go and have a sauna while I’ll keep an eye on your three.’

Alison went to protest but Joan raised a mock fist.

‘Away with you.’ She turned towards Danny who had swum over, recognising her and knowing a chase was on the cards. ‘Look at the size of you, Danny! They must be stretching you each night to make sure you make the right height for the cops. Come here till I squash you back to your proper size!’

Alison clambered out, listening to his mock screams and grateful for a few moments’ peace. Neither Shane nor Sheila noticed her slip away. She stood over the adult pool, knowing the water there was even colder. That man still hadn’t relieved his wife of her childminding duties. Alison saw him emerge from the sauna and stand beside the plunge pool. She never got down into it herself, despite Peadar’s protestations that a sauna was useless without icy water afterwards to close over the pores. But even Peadar himself always climbed down gingerly, shivering as she teased him. Alison watched the man, with his back to her, as he looked into the freezing water, then suddenly let his body fall with a splash. She shuddered, and panicked when there seemed no sign of his head reappearing. The plunge pool was seven foot deep, with a ladder going only half way down.

She looked around but nobody else was paying any attention. She had taken a step towards the plunge pool when his head resurfaced, spraying out drops of water as he shook his hair like a drenched dog. He turned, catching sight of her and nodded again. Alison found herself looking away as if caught spying. She dived into the adult pool, shivering but then enjoying its childfree waters. She swam towards the deep end, as far as possible from his eyes. She couldn’t be sure if her sense of still being watched was instinct or paranoia.

Alison swam lengths until her arms ached, then discreetly checked that the children weren’t missing her. A young mother held a crying baby in the crowded pool, glaring angrily towards the sauna, obviously waiting for her overdue husband. Alison smiled, imagining the reception that awaited him. Joan spied her and waved her away again. She checked the clock, allowing herself ten minutes before getting the kids changed for lunch.

The teenage Dublin girls had just arrived in bikinis and dived in unison into the adult pool. They climbed out again to repeat the exercise, in case any man present had missed it. Their father was heading into the sauna with the RTE executive who had cornered Peadar last night. She imagined them ladling more water onto the hot coals, anxious to outdo each other in the macho stakes as they discussed horsepower, horse–trading and horse shit.

She chose the steam room instead which was empty or at first appeared to be. She stretched out on the upper tier of hot tiles, adjusting her bathing costume, and stared up at the slow drip–drip of water converging and falling from the corners of tiles in the curved roof. It took several moments for her eyes to adjust to the steam and for the blurred outline of a man sitting against the far wall to register. She knew without being able to distinguish any features that it was him. Alison cursed herself for picking the steam room, then became angry. She had often shared this space with men before without it costing her a thought. If he was a voyeur that was his problem not hers. Besides he couldn’t get more steamed up than he was already. Alison lay back, closed her eyes and decided to ignore him.

‘They say five minutes in here earns you five years off purgatory.’ His voice broke the silence, as if he knew she had only now become aware of him. Alison made a non–committal noise, hoping to discourage him. But he laughed instead, wryly and familiarly. ‘We could have used some of this heat, stuck out at night in that mobile library in Skerries.’

Alison lay perfectly still. Mentally she checked her bathing costume, the state of her hair, a half dozen inconsequential things as she tried to place his voice. She felt naked, stripped of her anonymity. It was twenty years since she had briefly worked in the mobile libraries. She opened her eyes and tried to peer across through the steam.

‘Do I know you?’ she asked.

‘A different time, Ali, a different world.’

How long was it since anyone called her Ali? The nickname had only been used by a handful of people. It was a brief benchmark of freedom at eighteen when she got her first job away from Waterford. The mobile libraries were a stopgap until she started training as a nurse the following April. Everyone working there had a pet name that summer. The three lads sharing the top table all called themselves Harold. ‘Is Harold in yet, Harold?’ ‘No, I haven’t seen him, Harold.’ Betty was known as Sheila because she wanted to emigrate to Australia. Sharon was called Lucy because she phoned in sick to smoke dope in her bedsit and watch reruns of Here’s Lucy – a programme she swore she hated but not as much as she hated work. The nickname Ali had suited Alison back then, the bright sparkle of it as she floated like a butterfly through late–night library parties in bedsits.

In Dublin, being called Ali made her feel different from the child she became again when she took the train home each weekend. That’s what nicknames did, made you part of something special. It was why Peadar renamed her Alison within weeks of them meeting that summer, like her real name had turned full circle to become an intimate term of endearment between them. But she felt flustered in the steam room now and knew the man could sense it, because his voice changed, growing almost apologetic.

‘I hope I didn’t startle you,’ he said. ‘I saw you last night and couldn’t believe my eyes. I knew you hadn’t a clue who I was. You mightn’t remember me anyway. But, of course, the beard doesn’t help, or the absence of it. You used to joke that at twenty I looked forty with it and at forty I’d shave it off and look twenty again.’

‘Chris?’

Good Christ, she thought, not Chris Conway here, all of a slap, in the steam room at Fitzgerald’s. Chris had never needed a nickname. A manic explosion of jokes and gestures, he always stood out simply as Chris.

‘You’ve barely changed, Ali. You must have a portrait of yourself growing old in your attic.’

She laughed, flattered and embarrassed. The beard. That’s what had perturbed her about the face yesterday. Chris Conway. A dozen memories jostled together. Laughing as he persuaded her to take a piggyback off him all the way to the bank to cash her first pay cheque. The Friday afternoon himself and a driver went to do a stop in Tallaght and the mobile van was spotted on Sunday morning, still not returned from a remote pub car park up the Wicklow Mountains. His tricks to torment and thwart the old librarian who liked to bully female trainees. But Chris was right, the memories came from a different world. It was ten years since Peadar last mentioned him, something about the book trade. Alison didn’t know what to say, so she tried a joke.

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