The Forgotten Waltz Read Online Free PDF

him that afternoon, it was easy to see: an eight-year-old charmer, full of mischief and swagger. But I don’t know if I saw how tactical it all was. I don’t think I saw the way he was threatened by his own desires, or how jealousy and desire ran so close in him he had to demean a little the thing he wanted. For example, me.
    Or not me. It was hard to tell.
    One way or another, we all ended up boasting. Practically naked as we were, in our very ordinary, Irish bodies (except Fiona’s, which wasn’t on show), we sat and bragged for a while, while the children dug in the sand and ran about, and the beach and the sky continued, beautiful, without us.
    ‘What was all that about?’ said Conor, in the car on the way home. ‘Jesus.’

Will You Love Me Tomorrow
    THAT WINTER, JOAN complained of swelling in her feet, which, for our mother, was a terrible comedown, the row of shoes she had, going back thirty years, all forsworn for Granny boots: she just hated it. She got supplements in the health food shop and complained of depression – she was, actually, depressed, I thought – and it never occurred to her, or to any of us, to do anything about it except mope and talk on the phone about kitten heels and peppermint lotion and the various shades in which you might get support tights.
    And I had gone back on the pill, which isn’t exactly important, except that the pill always makes me depressed: foggy and guilty and permanently just that tiny bit swollen, so the surface of me is too needy and stupid, somehow. I am not explaining it very well. I just think that if I hadn’t been on the pill things would have gone differently; I might have been able to listen better to my mother on the phone, or think better, but it was like I had gone to the edges of myself, and what was in the centre was anyone’s guess. Nothing, that is one answer. Or nothing much.
    And I was busy, it seemed like I was always on a plane. There were times my toiletries never made it out of their see-through plastic bag.
    Conor’s mother arrived for the weekend; she sat there eating breakfast and floated the opinion that two pillowcases were more hygienic, she always thought, than just one.
    ‘Sleep,’ she said. ‘It’s a third of your life.’ And I didn’t throw her out or shout at her that the son she reared didn’t know you could change sheets, he thought they came with the bed.
    ‘You know,’ I said. ‘That makes a lot of sense.’
    Mrs Shiels had five children: two in Youghal, and two breeding mightily in Dundrum and Bondi. A capable, glamorous woman, she was all set to use us for her Dublin shopping base – she knew it and I knew it. For Christmas, I got her some vouchers for a posh hotel.
    ‘The Merrion!’ she said. ‘Lovely.’
    This was a Christmas I could have been with my own mother, but which I spent instead in the middle of a scrummage down in Youghal, with forty people whose names I did not know, each and every one of whom hated Dubliners (don’t tell me otherwise) for the fact that they weren’t from fucking Youghal.
    Christ.
    I can’t believe I am free of all that. I just can’t believe it. That all you have to do is sleep with somebody and get caught and you never have to see your in-laws again. Ever. Pfffft! Gone. It’s the nearest thing to magic I have yet found.
    But the pill is important for another reason too, I suppose, because if it hadn’t been for the pill, I might not have slept with Seán that time in Montreux. Which was – and this is a peculiar thing to say – the only time it did not matter. Apart from anything else, there was a lot of, I think, Alsace Riesling involved.
    It happened at a conference. Of course. A week of management-speak on a Swiss lake with flow charts and fondue, and a little trip on a wooden boat, with a mixed gang of semi-state and private sector, a few from Galway, most Dublin-based, and drinking on the last couple of nights, until 4 a.m. Most of them, I might also mention, were