“Jesus tonight!” Catherine’s mother said, but along with Monica and Mrs. Murphy, she was creased up now with laughter.
Fidelma pointed her knife straight at Catherine. “Don’t mind these ones, Catherine,” she said. “I’m not joking you. When you’re my age you’ll know that I wasn’t joking you. I mean it. Ride. All. Around You.”
Catherine tried for laughter herself, to match the gasps and shudders of the other women, but she was too mortified, felt too paralyzed in the spotlight; all she managed was a wheezing noise and a jerking of her shoulders. “It’s not really an option,” she said.
“Make it an option,” Fidelma pointed again.
“Jesus, Fidelma,” Catherine’s mother said. “Will you concentrate on the bloody sandwiches.”
“This is what you’ll find yourself doing, Catherine, I’m warning you,” Fidelma said. “Concentrating on the sandwiches.”
“Young people have great options these days,” Mrs. Murphy said almost dreamily from her armchair. “Great opportunities above in Dublin, I’d say, Catherine.”
Which started them all off again, really roaring laughing this time, bent low over the table, and Catherine standing in the middle of them, staring at a bowl of hard-boiled eggs. “Well,” she said, to Mrs. Murphy, “I suppose, there’s always something going on.”
“Ride them backwards,” Fidelma interjected.
Dancing. They all knew how to dance. Waltzes. Fox-trots. Jives. There was a confidence to them as they spun each other, moved with each other. But they never, Catherine noticed, looked into one another’s eyes. They did not seem awkward in this; they seemed, on the contrary, quite happy. They talked to each other without looking one another in the eye, and they laughed together, and they met the eyes of other dancers, other couples, but never one another. Catherine remembered her mother coming home, once, from a dinner dance, giving out yards about the parents of a boy Catherine had gone to school with — they were rich, they lived in an enormous house on the outskirts of the town, they always sat, after Mass had finished, in their pew and talked to one another, the whole family, gossiping and chattering like people who were very glad of the chance to catch up with each other. When this couple had danced, apparently, they had looked at one another, smiling, as they did so, and Catherine’s mother had considered this a deeply ridiculous, almost tacky, display; in the kitchen the following morning she had made Catherine and Ellen laugh by mocking them, grabbing Ellen and dancing her around the kitchen, pretending to be Jarlaith Byrne staring deep into his wife’s eyes. Here, on Murphy’s dance floor, the couples all observed the unspoken rule — her father with her mother now, to “The Gambler,” her grandfather with a neighbor woman, Uncle Matt with Fidelma, who was looking content and serene now, not at all like a woman who harbored a longing to go back to her unmarried years and fuck every man she saw. They moved quickly, with great skill, and they kept their eyes fixed on a point in the middle distance, which could not have been easy, since the pub was so small and so cramped; how, then, did they all find a point in the middle distance? And moving as fast as they were?
But they found it, and they fixed on it. They touched hands, but they did not hold hands; that was not what they were doing with their hands. With their hands, they tipped and they glanced and they slid, loose and confident; they knew when to fasten and when to let go. They stepped and they spun, locking and pivoting; they linked and they turned and they released. Often, Catherine had been hauled out onto this very dance floor, and it had always been mortifying, the mess she had made of dancing with whichever neighbor of her grandfather’s had thought it a friendly notion to give her a spin; always, it had been a disaster of knocking limbs, and sweaty hands, and of her inability to understand when it was time to twirl and when it was time to stay, and her arm wrenching at the wrong time, and her feet shuffling against his, and no rhythm, no glide, and a hectic, wincing farce, then, when it did come time to twirl, and the dissatisfaction in the man’s face, that she did not know the steps, could not give the pleasure, could not be relied upon even for the three minutes of forgetting that a good dance could allow. A young one who had not been taught to dance, she could see it in their eyes; what was the point of that? Forget college. Forget Europe. Forget everything that was coming, everything that had been promised yet to come. If a young one could not jive, what was the use of sending her out into the world?
* * *
Three hours later, they were back in her grandfather’s house. Catherine’s mother was in the kitchen with Monica and Fidelma, making tea and pouring lagers and pushing cloves into half-slices of lemon for hot whiskies. Her grandfather had decided that he wanted a bowl of soup; Catherine’s mother, complaining about him, was making it out of a can from the press. Catherine walked through with drinks to the sitting room, handing them out and settling beside her grandfather a moment.
What was James doing now? Catherine checked her watch again: it was ten to three. They had been in Murphy’s until two in the morning, and then the natural thing to do had been to come back here. So here they were, sitting around the room, her grandfather’s sheepdog asleep under the table. Often, she noticed, her grandfather glanced towards the slumped form.
“Shep’s tired,” she said. “He’s not used to company at this hour.”
“He’s put out of his usual spot,” her grandfather said, gesturing across to the armchair. “Ah, he’ll survive for one night.”
He hauled himself out of his own chair now and went through to the hallway; she could hear him heading slowly upstairs to the bathroom.
On the radio, 2FM was playing. Someone had moved the dial from Shannonside, where a repeat of one of the daytime chat shows had been playing; Turn off that bloody bollox, her grandfather had said, and so now it was this, the sad violins of The Verve.
It was Saturday night, early Sunday morning, in Dublin too, although it felt as though it could be a few time zones away, as though it could be midmorning there, a beautiful Sunday morning at eleven, people going about their business in the sunshine. But no: it was ten to three in Dublin, too. The late buses lining up around the walls of college. The walk home beginning for most people. The pubs spilling out, the drunks howling. Where would he be? Was he at home? Fast asleep now? Alone?
She stood.
She went through to the hallway, where the phone was. She did not have to turn on the light; she had, anyway, the moonlight spilling through the hall window.
She dialed his number in Thomas Street, let it ring once, hung up. Dialed it again, hung up. The third time, she let it ring longer, and just before she hung up, she heard it click and knew that he had answered, or that someone had. She tried again, but this time there was no answer, and when the long beeps came in to signal that it would ring no longer, she swore aloud and slammed the handset down.
From the stairs, a noise: a rustle. She jumped, and a bolt of cold shot down her spine. It was her grandmother she thought of, though that was impossible.
“My God, child,” a voice said. “You’re in a bad way, aren’t you?”
Her grandfather’s shadow; that was who was speaking, it seemed to her.
But that was impossible too.
Romance
1
Love set you going like a fat gold watch—
Was there any line as magnificent?
That had been about the newborn Frieda, that poem. Frieda, who would grow up to send the red and yellow blisters across the cover of her father’s book.