She nodded.
‘See you soon, Mum!’
‘Bye!’ Iris waved.
Enya lifted her hand and ended the call. With the phone now face down on the table, she stared at the tabletop, unable to meet Dominic’s eyeline as he quietly retook the seat opposite her. She thought she might throw up and clamped her hand over her mouth until the feeling subsided.
‘This, this feeling,’ she took a breath, ‘this horrible sense of deceit, this is why you have to leave right now. This is why you can’t be here, and why whatever this is has to stop. Has to stop right now.’
‘We haven’t done anything wrong, we—’
‘No, Dominic.’ Finally, she looked up and into his face. ‘It’s one thing to lie to other people, saying you are out walking, meeting a friend, working onFoula Girl, or whatever ruse you spun to come here today.’
He double blinked, suggesting she had hit the nail on the head.
‘But it’s quite another to lie to ourselves. You’re right. This is notnothingand wehavedone something wrong. We are doing something wrong right now,’ she tapped the blond Danish wood tabletop with her fingers, ‘we’re hurting people. Just by being here, and by not being there,’ she pointed out of the window, ‘we’re hurting people. Our children are getting married! They don’t need any more confusion. Can you imagine how this would hijack their big day, their plans? It would be so unfair. This has to stop before we say and do things we’ll both regret.’
The words were easy. Coaxing them on to her tongue and allowing them to float out into the world, a lot harder.
Quietly, he pushed away from the table and stood. He placed his hands on his hips as he had in the car park, a physical action that was both alluring and commanding. His voice now a little less assured, considered.
‘I’ll leave. But I just wanted to say that this brief, fabulous thing that has occurred between us will stay with me. A warm place for my thoughts to reside on the coldest of days and nights.’
‘For me too,’ she admitted, not that he needed it confirming, aware as she was that what passed between them was beyond words, beyond definition, but was rather a feeling, a state of being – the strength of which was undeniable.
‘I never meant to cause you any’ – he looked towards the garden – ‘discomfort or awkwardness. Never that.’ He looked at her then, his eyes fixing her with a stare. ‘And I mean no harm to Trish, the kids or anyone. They’re my family—’ His voice broke. ‘I guess I have allowed myself a selfish indulgence, put myself first, which I don’t think I’ve done, ever, not once during our marriage.’
‘I can relate to that entirely.’
‘Because we’re those people, aren’t we?’ He found a small, doleful smile that didn’t reach his eyes. ‘I mean, you’re right, I don’t really know you, even though I feel like I do. But if I had to guess, I’d say you’re a lot like me, smoothing the path for everyone else, removing obstacles or danger, content with the reward that they are well, happy, comfortable.’
‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘What I want or need doesn’t count as much.’
It was true, she loved Jonathan deeply, and like him, adored their child, and their needs had always, always come before her own. The sweetest and most subtle martyrdom.
‘Why is that, Enya?’
It was a realisation that made her incredibly sad.
‘Speaking for myself, it has always been rooted in love. Loving those that love me a bit too much and not loving myself enough, I guess.’ This the truth that caused her tears to form. ‘Not, not a conscious thing, at all. More a slow erosion of myself, until I stopped considering what I wanted or needed to thrive and kind of... went with the flow. Then when Jonathan died,’ she took a moment to gather herself, ‘I sat very still for some time, it seemed like the best option to just sit and wait until the world stopped spinning. And in that stillness, I realised that the sun had disappeared, and the birds were quiet, the air had grown cool, and the moon was high, the sky dark. That’s what happened to my life! That’s what happened to me. I was twenty-one and the next time I looked up I was fifty-one, at that moment when day becomes night – you can’t rage against it, can’t turn clocks back or go outside and howl at the sky for one more minute of it. You can’t because it’s gone, and you are at the mercy of it. It was just like that. Itisjust like that. I just have to find a way to live with the new shape of me. I have to figure out who I am.’
‘This, thing we shared, albeit briefly,’ he paused, ‘it felt like a marvellous opportunity, a chance.’
‘Yes.’ This too she couldn’t deny, noting with conflicting sorrow how he spoke in the past tense.
‘I should go.’
Reaching for his phone, which he deposited in his pocket, and grabbing his keys, which he held, she stood to see him out. Torn between wanting him to go immediately, to put them both out of the misery of this closeness, and not wanting him to go at all, picturing them on the sofa, her feet on his lap, chatting and happy.
Happy . . .
There were no words, as he walked quickly around to her side of the table and, with an urgency to his actions, took her inhis arms. In that moment, she was the opposite of invisible. How she loved her husband, loved him so very deeply, but my God, caring for him and losing him had taken its toll. She fell into him then, fell into him heavily, landing hard with all her weight in his arms, her head against his chest. It felt wonderful to let someone hold her for a while, to take up the slack. Someone who wasn’t weakened by illness or too frail to do the job or too sick to care, or too understandably preoccupied to notice that she needed to stay here a while. Someone solid and vital and present who held her upright, stopped her from falling down and slipping through the cracks, and where, in that moment, she wanted to stay forever... forever, as if she had finally found a place to rest.
There was no kiss, no progression, no harnessing of the physical energy that sparked around them, no discussion, no plan, no goodbye, for none were needed. Instead, after some minutes, he slowly released her from his fierce yet tender embrace, until eventually, still with the shape of him against her skin and the scent of him lingering, she opened her eyes at the sound of the front door closing. It would have been hard for her to describe her feeling of abject sorrow, the silence taunting her. She ran her fingers over the front of her clothes, as if touching the tiny particles of him that might still remain.
As she stood in the silence, her limbs shaking, and Dominic left the cottage via the front, she felt a breeze whip through the kitchen. It swirled around the room and out of the open French doors, disturbing the muslin drapes and rustling the blooms of the pale-headed tea-coloured roses that grouped around the arbour.
Rushing to the lounge, she stared at the sofa and the chairs, before heading upstairs to the bedroom, scanning the room and checking the small study area on the landing, then standing at the bathroom sink to look in the mirror. She even opened the frontdoor, Dominic thankfully nowhere to be seen, as she stared at her little car. All of which were empty.
