So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan

Author:Claire Keegan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 2023-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

4

It was past 8 p.m. when Cathal went back into the sitting room. He’d decided to watch a series on Netflix, to binge-watch another over the weekend, but a documentary had come on, on Channel 4, about Lady Diana, some type of commemoration, or an anniversary. He’d never held any interest in the Royal Family and yet found himself sitting in a type of trance: there she was, in the white, crumpled dress, with a veil over her face, getting out of the horse-drawn carriage with her father and turning to wave at the crowd before climbing the steps and taking the long walk up the aisle to marry the man waiting for her there, at the altar.

As soon as the vows were made and the wedding rings had been exchanged, Cathal automatically pressed the rewind button on the remote before realising it was not something he could rewind. And then Mathilde came in – he felt her coming back – and soon after, during the ads, the screen grew a bit fuzzy and his eyes stung.

He felt hot and took his socks off and dropped them on the floor and left them there. There was such pleasure in doing this that he wanted to do it again. Instead, he sat watching the second half of the programme with Diana getting pregnant and producing a son, and then another. Towards the end, after she had left her husband and had gone off with another man, a wealthy Egyptian, she was sitting out in a bathing suit in the sun, on a diving board. And then there was the car crash in the tunnel in Paris followed by her young sons following the hearse, and all those flowers rotting outside of Buckingham Palace and Kensington.

When the credits started to roll, he felt the need for something sweet, and went back into the kitchen. He opened the fridge and reached in for the flesh-coloured cake, lifted it out onto the island. He took the steak knife he’d used to pierce the cellophane of her Weight Watchers, and sliced the whole tip off. Then he took out the champagne and removed the foil and untwisted its wire cage. The bottle had been in there since the night of the hen party, as she had no taste for fizzy drinks. The cork was stubborn and tight – but he kept pushing at it with his thumbs until the cork gave and finally came away with an exhausted little pop.

Back in the sitting room, he sifted through the channels. Again, there was nothing there he really wanted to see. He swallowed mouthfuls of the cake and drank the champagne neither slowly nor in any rush until the cake and the champagne were gone, and then a painful wave of something he hadn’t before experienced came at him, without blotting out the day, which was almost over. He would have liked to have slept then, but sleep, too, seemed beyond his reach.

At last, he took out

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