She wanted to tell Peadar about her grief but how could she start talking about another man? She wanted him to make love to her, even as she cried. To climb on top and take control, forcing her back into their own world. But he was too concerned, too guilty about abandoning her in the morning.
When she finally stopped crying, he lay curled with his arm paternally around her. She feigned sleep so he would get some, then lay awake, listening. Those special holiday sounds. Wind among the trees in the gardens, the distant waves beyond and then, when she was almost asleep, the same solitary footsteps she had heard pass along the gravel on Sunday night. She found herself trying to stay awake, perturbed and anxious to hear if they returned. But sleep overcame her and when she woke, Peadar was already dressed. It was six a.m., with grey light fringeing the curtains. She wanted to call him back into bed but mentally he was already gone.
‘I’ll phone you,’ he whispered. ‘It’s better the kids don’t see me go.’
‘Drive safely. Take your time. There are lunatics on the road.’
He nodded. She knew he was torn inside. The toughness was gone. He didn’t want to leave. For half a moment she thought he would find the courage to turn back.
‘I’ll make it up to you,’ he said.
His father’s reluctant son. She prayed that the roads would be safe, the light good. ‘Phone when you reach the house, the moment you get home.’
Peadar kissed her, then looked across at his children, afraid to wake them by venturing too close. He picked up his bag and left, quietly closing the door.
TUESDAY
Alison didn’t imagine she would sleep again after Peadar left, but she must have because suddenly Danny was in bed beside her, angrily hissing, ‘Where is he? Where’s Daddy after going?’
The room was still dark but only because the heavy curtains were drawn. Her stomach felt sick with tiredness and stress. She hated it when Danny surprised her like this, asking awkward questions before her eyes were even open. She held him tight, trying to quieten him and get him on her side before he woke the others.
Shane and Sheila would take their cue to Peadar’s departure from his reaction but it was Danny who flew most easily into tears and tantrums. The prospect of the days ahead frightened her. What if one of the children got sick or she was simply unable to cope?
‘You have to help me, Danny,’ she said. ‘It’s you and me in charge now.’ The boy stared back, momentarily flattered by the prospect of authority, then started to cry. Not angrily this time, but curled away from her in a ball.
‘What is it, pet? Tell me.’
‘Nothing. Leave me alone.’
Sheila was awake now. Maybe she’d been awake the entire time. She snuggled down into Alison’s arms, quiet in herself, asking nothing. Danny turned over, his face wet, keeping a slight distance.
‘Do we have to go home too?’
‘Of course not. We’ll have the best holiday ever.’
He put his arms around her. The crying stopped, but she knew that paradise had been tainted for him, the security of the perfect rhythm he seemed to need on this holiday. She worried for him, not just now but in the future. How could he ever cope with the imperfect adult world that would be strewn before him like pieces of a clock taken apart and never quite fitting back together again?
Breakfast was surprisingly easy. The children relished the novelty of being different, with Shane babbling away to everyone that their Daddy was missing on secret business. Jack Fitzgerald had done his work and the staff fussed around them. It was cloudy, the patio wet after rain. After eating, she put their coats on and let them wander in the gardens, while she sat at the open French doors of their room, anxious for the phone to ring.
The radio news was on in case of road accidents. She wasn’t happy until Peadar called just before ten, but even then he couldn’t talk as he was in the solicitor’s office. Still it was enough to know he was safe, after all the recent dawn crashes on the NII with people speeding for the ferry.
Shane came in, complaining that Danny had made new friends and wouldn’t let him play. Alison let him help her gather up the swim gear, then set out to find the others. Sheila was in the sandpit with her friend from yesterday. Danny sat on the seesaw with two Galway brothers, obviously twins. All three clammed up as she approached.
As they walked to the pool she scolded Danny for excluding Shane. The attendant was waiting, ready to bring Danny into the gents’ changing room where a curtained cubicle was reserved. Shane wanted to go in too, but she knew the boy couldn’t dry himself properly afterwards. She warned Danny to stay in the shallow end, while she struggled to get herself and the younger ones ready.
It took ten minutes, between blowing up armbands, then getting annoyed when they refused to wait for her. Alison couldn’t stand being hurried. It made her go slower. She had forgotten to bring plain soap for Sheila and would have to use perfumed gel on her skin. None of them were talking by the time they emerged to find Danny playing donkey with one of the twins, tossing a float over the heads of some smaller children.
She made him stop before anyone got hurt, insisting he play with Shane. The boys moved off, Danny towing Shane behind him like a ball and chain. Alison played ring–a–rosy with Sheila, lifting the laughing child out of the water. The pool was filling up. Jets of foam bubbled up from the underwater ledge at the shallow end where toddlers climbed. She sat back, letting the foam wash around Sheila and herself. The child feigned fear and wriggled away, seeing her new friend walk down the pool steps. Heinrich Diekhoff waded carefully in behind her, patiently watched over by his father.
Alison stretched her legs and yawned, then saw Chris Conway sitting at the poolside. It was ridiculous trying to avoid him. She smiled to him and he lowered himself into the water and waded across.
‘Chris, I want to apologise,’ she began.
‘Why?’
‘Yesterday, in the steam room, I didn’t know your circumstances. I said the wrong thing.’
‘That’s all right.’ He eased himself onto the ledge beside her. ‘Sure I wouldn’t know what to say myself.’
‘How are you coping?’ The question sounded mundane.
‘Okay. How are you?’
‘Not so good. Peadar had to go home. A builder doing work at the school went bust.’
Even as she spoke, she knew that, comparatively, her problems were minor. But she had a life of her own.
‘That will be hard,’ he sympathised. ‘Alone with three kids who seem real livewires.’
‘What were your girls called?’ she inquired. ‘Or should I ask? I’m sorry, I don’t know what I should avoid asking.’
‘Rachel and Sara,’ he replied. ‘And Jane, my wife. You would have liked her.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘That’s okay.’ He looked around at the children splashing. ‘Were they fond of Fitzgerald’s?’
‘They loved it. Jane came here as a kid, but it was well out of my league when I was growing up.’
‘Mine too,’ she said. ‘You’ve obviously done well.’
‘I’d a good partner. He understood business and I understood what we made money from. Vanity and greed.’
‘I thought Peadar mentioned the book trade.’
‘The remainder business. Why anyone would be vain enough to write a book I don’t know. You walk into warehouses packed to the gills with unsold hardbacks from the latest bright young thing. Auctioned off at a few pence each. Then, at the other end, you have punters forking out for books they don’t want, tempted by the thought of getting a bargain.’
‘It sounds sad.’
‘It’s human nature, Ali.’
‘Don’t call me Ali.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s just that I never used the name again. It makes me sound like somebody else.’
Chris smiled. ‘You look the same Ali to me.’
Alison stretched her toes out, hoping Sheila would rescue her. She had apologised for the stea
m room. Now twenty years seemed too long to try and renew a friendship. ‘Why don’t you swim where there’s space in the big pool?’ she asked.
‘I wish I could.’ Chris laughed. ‘But sure I can’t swim a stroke.’
She remembered watching him dive into the plunge pool, his seeming lack of fear, and felt unsure whether to believe him.
‘Do your kids like books?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
His toes were inches from hers. She wondered if he remembered the intense games of footsie they once played while serving customers at the library counter.
‘I must look in my van. I usually have samples, though I’m not sure what’s there since I sold my share of the business.’
‘What do you do now?’ Alison lowered her feet away from his.
She had known she would meet Chris this morning. It was why she had changed her bathing costume from the one she wore yesterday.
‘There’re only so many book auctions you can sit through,’ he said, skirting the question. ‘Especially in the States where you pick up Irish books for nothing. I remember coming home from my first trip there. Rachel – she was only five – found an illustrated edition we’d bought of The Old Man and the Sea. Printed in Thailand, with that smell you get off shiny paper there. One picture was of the old man’s palms torn open by ropes. She made me tell her the whole story, how the sharks get the fish and all. She kept the book beside her bed for a year. Every night she’d kiss the man’s hands to make them better.’
Sheila swam towards them, slowly, in her armbands. Chris’s story disturbed Alison, its intimacy making her unsure how to respond. She willed Sheila to swim faster.
‘She sounds a nice kid.’ Alison found that she couldn’t use the past tense.
‘You can’t teach kindness,’ Chris replied. ‘Kids have it or they don’t. Even in sleep Rachel looked kind, especially asleep.’
He went silent and Alison sensed his sudden desire to be away, anonymous again. Sheila reached them and threw herself into Alison’s arms. She looked at Chris.
‘Who are you?’
‘Just a man.’
His foot touched Alison’s under the water. She was about to be annoyed, then saw that he was discreetly drawing her attention to Shane leaning dangerously over the empty Jacuzzi, trying to dip a float into the bubbling froth.
Alison grabbed Sheila and rose, disturbed that it was Chris who had spotted the danger. She was Shane’s mother and he didn’t even have children any more. She was shocked by the cruelty of the thought even as she ran to grab Shane before he tumbled in. As she scolded him, she knew her anger was with herself. Yet it was true. Chris seemed like an impostor, casting a hex over the happy families in the water.
The teenage Dublin girls laughed with their father in the adult pool, oblivious to how his stupidity might have killed them all. She turned but Chris had already vanished. An elderly woman lowered herself into the water for her daily lesson with the gentle instructor who seemed just as old as her. Maybe it was the plastic bathing cap, but Alison felt this same woman had been here every year, perpetually relearning her awkward doggy paddle. This was Fitzgerald’s Hotel, a continuum existing outside time, an uninterrupted pattern forever and ever.
She shivered as she closed her eyes, suddenly holding onto the Jacuzzi rail. The images were so clear she couldn’t blot them out, one car meshed into another, bodywork compressed like a concertina. Glass everywhere, flecked with specks of blood. The blood of somebody’s children, somebody’s wife. An unknown woman who, in some way, had been her rival; whose naked body must have been compared against her unglimpsed one; whose laughter and smile were weighed against the memory of hers.
Sheila pulled at her hand, urging her back into the pool. The boys were already in, calling. She saw Chris emerge from the showers. He took a towel and crossed towards the steam room. A woman coming out held the door open as he made a joke and she smiled back, then walked on, already forgetting him.
Shane climbed impatiently from the water and jumped into her arms. He wrapped himself around her, her rebuke already forgotten. She could smell chlorine in his hair. His happiness was almost tangible, like a force field glowing around him. How precious and short this time was. She carried him down the pool steps. Danny clambered onto her back, causing her to stagger in the water which splashed into her eyes, momentarily blinding her. Both boys hugged her, their laughter in her ears as they pulled her down so that she choked on the chlorine. The boys found room for Sheila in the embrace too, their feet twirling her around. Alison was a good swimmer but suddenly panicked, as if there was something in the water that she couldn’t protect them from.
It was two girls’ faces she kept seeing, aged nine and twelve, one thrown across the other’s lap as firemen cut the roof away. Alison seemed to be above them, staring down. Even the diverted traffic edging past made no noise as ambulancemen knelt with blankets to cover up the woman’s body they had cut free. Water stung Alison’s eyes again as Danny and Shane laughed and kicked out. Sheila giggled too, a hymn of happiness encircling her until they were suddenly gone.
Alison opened her eyes, gasping for breath, and heard a loud splash as the waterfall came on, attracting children like a magnet. She knew Danny would swim right through it, while Sheila watched and Shane edged himself carefully along the tunnel between the sheet of water and the wall.
She watched them, her face so wet that even she couldn’t tell if she’d been crying. A nine–year–old’s face unmarked until you lifted her head and found the skull was cracked. Where were these details coming from? Maybe she had seen news footage, yet she had no recollection of the accident. There were so many photos of twisted wreckage in the paper, so many horror statistics reported that you simply blocked them out.
She checked the clock. Half–twelve. Already families would be queuing for lunch in the Slaney Room, while older couples were waited upon in the dining room. She would need a window table, close to the playroom and overlooking the gardens. That way she could keep an eye on all three. Chris’s tragedy wasn’t hers, so why was it affecting her like this? She had to pull herself together and organise the children. They would protest, with Sheila crying at having to get out of the pool. She hardly knew why she bothered. They would pile up their plates, then eat almost nothing, too excited by life, blessed at having so much new to see and experience.
But she knew she would drag them from the pool anyway, find a table and the waitress Jack Fitzgerald had promised. She would cajole them into eating something, mop up the milk they knocked over and finally set them free. Her own lunch would be cold by then and her temper frayed, but none of that mattered. This was what a mother did in the here and now world that you learnt to exist in.
She was glad not to see Chris again during lunch. Once Danny finished eating he paired off with the Galway twins, united by a shared fascination with Enid Blyton stories. They bent their heads together in huddled whispers, deciding which guests were villains, linked in a conspiracy. Alison wondered if the RTE executive realised they were trailing him, flitting between trees, while he earnestly practised for Thursday’s crazy golf competition.
Before each holiday she worried about them making friends, but Danny’s newly–invented gang was a concern too, as she could see Shane being left out. His mind was too practical to sneak behind adults, then report back to secret meetings. Besides, part of the excitement in any Secret Seven adventure was inventing passwords and Alison knew that, for Danny and the twins to feel they belonged to something special, they needed somebody to keep out.
Several times she found Shane wandering around lost, looking for Danny, when she knew they were hiding from him. Not only was he too small to be alone, but she hated his bewildered look. She was relieved when Geraldine took the children down onto the beach early. But even there she saw the three of them refuse to let him help build their sandcastles, though she knew Shane had such an individual way of doing everything that he would end up destroying their carefu
lly arranged moats and fortresses.
Sheila took one look at the beach and ran back, clinging to her. But Alison was glad of her company. She stood on the steps, holding Sheila in her arms, wishing she had a hat for the child who seemed strangely bothered by the sun. Shane was happy, pottering around on his own, but she couldn’t stop watching over him. Sand brushed against her lips. Children passed up and down in their bare feet. The loudspeaker announced a phone call for Room 103. Out at sea the ferry from France was arriving. Shane looked up and saw her. He dropped his spade and came running. Sheila clambered from her arms, ready for her favourite game with her brother. They ran towards the crazy golf course, pushing their balls along with a putter, picking them up when they spun back down the slopes and using their palms to cup them into the holes.
They raced on, laughing. Alison’s book lay on a deckchair. She sat down and, keeping one eye on them, tried to read. But she couldn’t focus. The images from the pool still haunted her. She imagined herself at the wheel. At what stage did Chris’s wife know they were going to die? Time inside a crash must surely be different. A second could stretch to eternity with everything startlingly clear as the other car loomed up, as you braked hard and knew it was not enough, as you watched the impact occur in measured stages, each frame of time crawling forward while you slowly cried your children’s names.
Alison looked up. The old lady who had received swimming lessons was watching her.
‘You should get a cardigan with that wind, love,’ she said. ‘You don’t even know you’re shivering.’
Alison told Shane and Sheila she was returning to the room, knowing they would soon follow to watch cartoons. But she was glad of the few moments alone as she sat on the bed and phoned their house in Dublin.
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