The Forgotten Waltz (v5) by Anne Enright

Author:Anne Enright [Enright, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780771030741
Publisher: The Bodley Head Ltd
Published: 2010-12-31T05:00:00+00:00

Crying in the Chapel

WE HAVE BEEN waiting, all week, for the snow. The cold came first. The air thrilled to it. Even indoors, the rooms felt bigger, their edges seemed more clear. The whole country was in a tizz. There were thirteen accidents on the back roads of Leitrim, there was black ice in Donegal. On Tuesday we watched the snow closing London down, covering the Cotswolds, building on the rails of the bridge into Anglesey, and melting, as if to prove its stealth, in the grey Irish Sea. It was snowing in Britain; it would snow here too.

Yesterday morning, the light was softer, the walls seemed to have moved closer in. Seán got out of bed and opened the curtains on the back garden, as though he was looking for something and I caught it, then – unbearably faint – the high, sweet smell of approaching snow.

Seán said he didn’t know you could smell snow. He gave me a ‘crazy girl’ look as he went out on to the landing and snapped the string on the bathroom light. I heard it bounce against the mirror, once, twice. Then a silence so complete he might have ceased to exist. I looked at the place where he had stood at the window, and noticed the frost flowering along the edges of the pane.

The place is freezing.

The duvet, at least, is light and thick. It is easy to slide my legs into the warmth he has left, to take his pillow and turn it over to the cool side, and add it to my own.

I lie there watching the familiar square of day, with its new edge of lace: our breath, the sweat of our bodies, gathered in a crystal fog, that grew overnight into fronds and florets of ice.

The room faces east. I know, as well as anything, the sparse dawn light, but the trees this morning are a denser green, the clouds are low and bruised with the colours of unshed snow.

I am back, through no fault of my own, in the house where I grew up. It is the fifth of February – twenty-one months, to the day, since my mother sat down on the path with her coat fanned out around her. And still there are rooms I can barely bring myself to open. Not that we are living here. We are just sorting things out. Seán, especially, is not living here, though it is nearly a year, now, since he washed up at the door. We are in between things. We are living on stolen time. We are in love.

Next door in the bathroom, Seán sighs and, after a waiting pause, starts to pee. There is another pause when he is finished, or seems finished. Then a last little rush; an afterthought. It worries me, this sense of difficulty, surely there should be nothing simpler than taking a leak? And I remember my own father leaning like a plank over the toilet bowl, his hand braced against that bathroom wall, the side of his face nuzzled into his arm.

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