by Anne Enright
‘So, honeybunch,’ I say. ‘When’s this guy of yours going to show?’
At dinner we talk about sex. Everyone is drunk quite quickly, except maybe Frank who is worried about the food. But when it is all served up, he goes too. Wham. There are two red blotches flaring over his cheeks from the side of his nose.
Sarah’s man sits all hunched over and bundled up in a T-shirt and a knitted thing and a jacket that he won’t take off, so I can’t tell what his body is like, but his hands are very small and unpleasant. He reaches on to his plate and lifts little pieces up with glistening fingertips.
So, his name is Fiach. He works part-time for his father and he takes photographs and he wants to get into advertising but more like short films, blah blah, you know the type. When he turns his head you can see the tail end of a tattoo coming out from under his hair.
But it seems that Sarah is mad about him. She looks at him with her entire face, then she gets embarrassed and looks down at her plate. I wonder what he does to her in bed, or makes her do.
And then we are all talking at once. I say that the real porn on the Internet is the property pages from France. A house in the Auvergne for fourteen grand, that’s the real porn, and Sarah is trying to tell her hitch-hiking story from Italy and Fiach is talking about the first porn shop he went into in London where the women in the magazines were like housewives, all trussed up with clothes pegs and Marigold gloves.
Amazing. We are people who have sex. Frank fills the glasses and I see it all stretching out ahead of me. Couples. I look at the rest of my life and despair.
Now everyone is excited, jumping in with their particular tic: politicians who put things up their bottoms, and the one about the lesbian journalists, and then some film star who took a shit, literally, on a beautiful black woman, this last from Sarah.
‘Oh, come on,’ says Frank.
‘Come on, what?’
‘It’s just because she’s black.’
‘Well, exactly.’
‘I mean, the story is just because she’s black.’
‘Oh, Frank,’ says Sarah. ‘Oh, you poor boy,’ and she squeezes his forearm.
Frank gets up then and goes to the counter and there is a pause around the table. He swings back with the coffee cups and says to Fiach, ‘I was looking for a camera in the duty free last month, but it’s all gizmos and auto-focus. Like for eejits.’
Sarah snorts into her glass of wine. Then she just keeps laughing. Fiach looks at her and says, ‘Don’t bother. I started with a second-hand Olympus. Bog basic. Lovely thing.’
‘Olympus,’ says Frank, but before Fiach can turn away from her, Sarah says, ‘Fiach likes taking pictures. Don’t you, Fiach?’
Then it is her turn to get up. She leaves the room and the two boys talk on about cameras and she doesn’t come back. I think she’s left the flat; I think she’s in the other room doing something dreadful, something I can’t even imagine. I try to think of what it might be, but whatever comes to mind isn’t really dreadful, after all.
Still, the air of it is in the room, the feel of something appalling, until Sarah comes back with her hair brushed and the eyeliner wiped away from under her left eye. She sees us looking, sweeps up her drink and decides to dance. Glass in one hand, she waves the other in the air. The skin of her underarm is dark and stained, and not particularly strawberry blonde. I say, ‘Sarah.’
‘What?’
But, as if she guesses, she lowers her arm, shimmies over and hooks her finger into the neck of Fiach’s T-shirt. She smiles close into his face. Then she gives up and slumps back into her seat.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ she says. ‘Let’s go somewhere. Let’s go for a bop.’
Which is when Frank brings out the brandy, still talking to Fiach about lenses, and I ask Sarah about her mother. Sarah hates her mother, though it is her father who is the manic depressive, probably. But it is the father she loves and the mother she despises, so we talk about this for a while. Then I tell her about Mammy taking the bottle out of the hot press and saying, ‘Well, at least I’m not drinking any more,’ as she pours herself another vodka. But it is an old conversation. It doesn’t work any more. It is time to go – or would be if Sarah weren’t so drunk. She leans back and looks at the boys and tests the edge of her front teeth with her tongue.
‘Fiach,’ she says.
‘What?’
On the other side of the table, Fiach is talking about some kind of goose. He says he goes to Bull Island every Saturday to take pictures of this goose. He is throwing it out like it’s a sort of trendy thing to do, but he’s also actually started listing the names of gulls and terns and Frank is looking at him with a face like setting concrete. I think he’s too astonished or too bored to speak, but then I see that he is completely interested, that he is nine years old.
‘Maybe Fiach could do the wedding pictures,’ I say, but no one is listening. Fiach is on to curlews now, he seems to be talking about their feet.
‘I said, maybe Fiach can do the wedding, Frank.’
Beside me, Sarah is trying to set her drink on fire. She has the lighter pushed down into the glass, and she’s flicking the wheel. When the spark catches, she pulls back in fright and the glass falls over. The flaming brandy licks out across the table.
For a moment, all four of us watch the flames spill across the wood. Frank lifts his napkin but does not bring it down. It is such a beautiful blue. The fire gathers the air and loses it; drinking it, slurping it down. Fiach pulls his chair back as a rivulet of flame drips over the edge of the table and lands on the floor. Then I pick up a bottle of water and put it all out.
Sarah is silent in the bedroom, putting on her coat. Then she turns to say that she is delighted. Of course, she said it when I first showed her the ring – with a big fake scream like the rest of them – but now she says it properly, she takes both my arms and says she is just delighted, just so pleased. She says that Frank is just so brilliant.
‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘Oh, Jesus, Sarah, I’m scared.’
We hug then, and I show her back into the big room.
After they are gone I go over to the stereo, turn it up and start to dance. I swing my backside. I sit down on the air and then push up into it. I say, ‘Fuck you, Sarah. Hey, fuck you,’ pushing up with my joke penis, made of air.
Frank sits on the sofa and looks at me. Then he closes his eyes and seems to sleep.
THE HOUSE OF THE ARCHITECT’S LOVE STORY
I used to drink to bring the house down, just because I saw a few cracks in the wall. But Truth is not an earthquake, it is only a crack in the wall and the house might stand for another hundred years.
‘Let it come down,’ I would say, perhaps a little too loudly. ‘Let it come down.’ The others knew what I meant alright, but the house stayed still.
I gave all that up. We each have our methods. I am good at interior decoration. I have a gin and tonic before dinner and look at the wallpaper. I am only drunk where it is appropriate. I am only in love where it stays still. This does not mean that I am polite.
Three years ago I hit a nurse in the labour ward, because I had the excuse. I make housewife noises in the dark, to make your skin crawl. I am glad he has given me a child, so I can drown it, to show the fullness of my intent.
I boast, of course.
Of all the different love stories, I chose an architect’s love story, with strong columns and calculated lines of stress, a witty doorway and curious steps. In the house of an architect’s love story the light is always moving, the air is thick with light. From outside, the house of the architect’s love story is a neo-Palladian villa, but inside, there are corners, cellars, attics, toilets, a room full of books with an empty socket in the lamp. There are cubbyholes that smell of wet afternoons. There are vaults, a sacristy, an office with windows set in the floor. There is a sky-blue nursery where the rockinghorse is shaped like a bat and swings from a rail. And in the centre of it all is a bay window where the sun pours in.<
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It is familiar to us all. At least, it was familiar to me, the first time I walked in, because all my dreams were there, and there were plenty of cracks in the wall.
The first time I didn’t sleep with the architect was purely social. We were at a party to celebrate a friend’s new extension. There had been connections, before that, of course, we were both part of the same set. If I ever wanted an extension, I would have come to him myself.
I asked him about terracotta tiling and we discussed the word ‘grout’. I was annoyed by the faint amusement in his face when I said that white was the only colour for a bathroom sink. ‘I am the perfect Architect,’ he said, ‘I have no personal taste. I only look amused to please my clients, who expect to be in the wrong.’ There was a mild regret in his voice for all the cathedrals he should have built and we talked about that for a while.
The second time I didn’t sleep with the architect was in my own house. I shouldn’t have invited him, but the guilt was very strong. I wanted him to meet my husband and go away quietly, but he spent the time pacing the room, testing the slope of the floor. He knocked on the walls too, to see which were partitions; he sniffed slightly in front of my favourite picture and told me the bedroom was a mistake. ‘I know what you mean,’ I said, and then backed away. I said that I could live in a hole at the side of the road, so long as it was warm. ‘Do you ever think of anything,’ I asked, ‘except dry rot?’ We were perfectly at home with one another. Even so, there were many occasions in that first year when we did not make love.
The reasons for this neglect were profound, and not to be confused with an absence of desire. The architect and I had both built our lives with much deliberation. The need to abandon everything, to ‘let it come down’ had been mislaid long ago. We understood risk too well. We needed it too much. There was also the small matter of my husband and a child.
It is a quiet child with red hair. It is past the boring stage and runs around from room to room, taking up my time. It would be a mistake to say that I loved her. I am that child. When she looks at me I feel vicious, the need between us is so complete, and I feel vicious for the world, because it threatens the head that I love. On the other hand, wives that are faithful to their husbands because they are infatuated by their offspring don’t make sense to me. One doesn’t have sex with one’s children.
I am unfaithful with my husband’s money – a much more pleasing betrayal. My life is awash with plumbers and electricians, and I change all the ashtrays twice a year. I watch women in fitting rooms, the way they stick their lips out and make them ugly when they look into the mirror. I wonder who they are dressing for and I wonder who pays.
My husband earns forty thousand pounds a year and has a company car. This is one of the first things he ever told me. But I fell in love with him anyway.
After I hadn’t slept with the architect a few times, I took to riding buses as though they were the subways of New York. I sighed when the air-brakes loosened their sad load, and sat at the front, up-top, where I could drive with no hands. I became addicted to escalators, like a woman in a nervous breakdown. Stairs were for sitting on, with my child in my lap. I joined the local library for that purpose.
These were all things I dreamed about long before I met the architect, which makes this story dishonest in its way. Under excuses for sitting on library steps I could also list: simple fatigue, not winning the lottery, not liking the colour blue. Under excuses for getting rid of a baby I could list: not liking babies, not liking myself, or not liking the architect. Take your pick.
I don’t mean to sound cold. These are things I have to say slowly, things I have to pace the room for, testing the slope in the floor. So. The architect is called Paul, if you must know. His parents called him Paul because they were the kind of people who couldn’t decide on the right wallpaper. Paul has a mind as big as a house, a heart the size of a door and a dick you could hang your hat on. He never married; being too choosy, too hesitant, too mindful of the importance of things.
I wanted to function in and around his breakfast. I wanted to feel panic and weight. There was the usual thing about his smell, and where I wanted that. (I felt his body hard against me. His eyes opened so slowly, I thought he was in pain. ‘Oh Sylvia,’ his breath was a whisper, a promise against my skin. The green flame of his eye licked my mouth, my neck, my breast.) But I’m sounding cold again. The architect’s smell would have spiralled out from me to fill uncountable cubic feet. I loved him.
Not sleeping with the architect helped my marriage quite a bit. I discovered all kinds of corners in my husband, and little gardens in his head. I was immensely aware of how valuable he was as a human being, the presence he held in a room, the goodness with which he had given me his life, his salary and his company car. I was grateful for the fact that he still kissed for hours, as though the cycle of our sex lives was not complete. (Sex with my architect would have been horribly frank, nothing to say and nothing to hide.)
My husband came in to breakfast one morning, and his hands were shaking. He said ‘Look what I have done.’ He was holding a letter that he had picked up in the hall. ‘I tore it up,’ he said. ‘It was for you, I’m sorry.’ He was very bewildered.
If it was wartime, we could have clung to each other and burnt the furniture, we could have deceived the enemy with underground tunnels and built bombs out of sugar. As it was, I rode the buses and he worked and we loved each other well enough.
The idea of the house grew into our marriage. I don’t know who suggested it in the end, but I rang Paul and said ‘Aidan wants you to think about some plans. We want to build. Yes at last. Isn’t it exciting?’ and my voice echoed down the phone.
I needed this house to contain, to live in his love. It would be difficult of course. There would be a lot of meetings with the door ajar, talking about damp-courses. The arguments over where the walls should be would mean too much. I would listen to the architect’s big mind and his big heart and look at his shoes. His voice would ache and retract. The green flame of his eye would lick me quite a bit. All the same, I would not fling my life into his life and say that he owed me something (which he did; which he knew), calls for responsibility being impolite these days, even with parents who gave birth and bled and all the rest. Besides, all he owed me was a fuck and whatever that implied. I had not slept with the architect seventeen times, incidentally.
I chose the site, a green field as near to a cliff as I could find – something for the house to jump off. We would take risks. From the front it would look like a cottage, but the back would fall downhill, with returns and surprises inside.
Of course he was good at his job. The place rose like an exhalation. The foundations were dug, the bones set, and a skin of brick grew around the rest. It was wired and plastered and plumbed. Much like myself, the first time I slept with the architect.
It was in the finished house. We were walking the empty shell, making plans to fill it in. I was joking most of the time. There would be no banisters on the stairs. The downstairs toilet, I said, should be in Weimar Brown and Gun Metal Grey, with a huge lever set in the floor for the flush. The bathroom proper would have an inside membrane of glass filled with water and fish. The master bedroom would be a deep electric blue, with ‘LOVE’ like a neon sign hung over the door. Trompe-l’æil for the dining room, even though it was no longer the rage, forests and animals, built out of food. I would coat the study walls with dark brown leather and put a cow grazing on the ceiling.
‘It’s just a house, Sylvia,’ he said. ‘Quite a nice house, but a house all the same,’ as he led me through the flexible, proportioned spaces that he made for me. It was all as familiar to me as my dreams: the kitchen, where we did not make love, with wires and tubes waiting in the walls; the dining room, where he did not eat me; the reception room where he did not receive me, the bedrooms where he did not bed me.
I should tell you who made the first move and what was said. I should say how I sat down on the stairs and how
his big, hesitant heart cracked under the strain.
So we did it on the first landing and it was frank, comprehensive, remarkably exciting and sad. I thought the house might fall down around our ears, but it stayed where it was.
* * *
The payment of debts is never happy. All he owed me was a fuck and whatever that implied, which in this case is a child. I loved the architect and the architect loved me. You think that makes a difference.
In my childhood book of saints there were pictures of people standing with ploughshares at their feet, cathedrals in their hands. This is the church that St Catherine built. If I painted myself now there would be a round hazy space where my stomach is, and a cathedral inside. This baby is a gothic masterpiece. I can feel the arches rising up under my ribs, the glorious and complicated space.
I can feel it reaching into the chambers of my heart, and my blood runs to it like children into school. We have the same thoughts.
Women used to kill their children all the time: it was one of the reasons for setting up the welfare state—this ‘unnatural act’. As if money were nature and could set it all to rights. Money is not nature. I have plenty of money.
I don’t want anything so bland as an abortion. Killing something inside you is not the same, we do that all the time. Don’t be shocked. These are just words I am speaking. Perhaps I will love it instead. Perhaps I will never find out what is inside and what is outside and what is mine.
We had Paul over for the celebration dinner in our new house, with its avocado bathroom, the bedroom of bluebell white, the buttercup kitchen, the apple-green dining room, and the blue, blue, blue-for-a-boy nursery, with clouds on the wall. I was a beautiful hostess, dewy with pregnancy, surrounded and filled by the men I love. Aidan is a new man. The house, the child, would have saved our marriage, if it needed saving. ‘Let it come down,’ I say, but the house is inside my head, as well as around it, and so are the cracks in the wall.