The gathering - By Anne Enright Page 0,25

sun in the flowered curtains.

Happiness.

11

I WAS OPENING the car door for the girls one day before Liam died and, as it swung past, I saw my reflection in the window. It disappeared, and I looked into the dark cave of the car as the kids came out, or went back in to pick some piece of pink plastic junk off the floor. Then the reflection swung back again, swiftly, as I shut the door. The sun was breaking through high-contrast clouds, the sky in the window pane was a wonderful, thick blue, and in my dark face moving past was the streak of a smile. And I remember thinking, ‘So, I am happy. That’s nice to know.’

I am happy.

Rebecca is eight now, she looks like me. Emily is six, she has black hair and the ice blue eyes you get on the Atlantic seaboard–Hegarty eyes, only more so–and I think that, if we fix Emily’s teeth, and if Rebecca stops being dippy and learns how to be tall, then they both have a chance of being truly lovely, some day.

My children have never walked down a street on their own. They have never shared a bed. They are a different breed. They seem to grow like plants, to be made of twig and blossom and not of meat.

And yet, their parents wear them out. The last time we went on holiday, there was some bickering over directions, and in the middle of it I glanced in the car mirror and saw Rebecca staring straight ahead. Her mouth had sunk inwards and I saw, with terrible prescience, the particular thing that would go wrong with her face, either quickly or slowly, the thing that could grab her prettiness away before she was grown.

I thought, I have to keep her happy. I have to be in love with her father and keep her happy, or this thing will happen to her, she will turn into one of those people that you pass every day on the street.

‘How did you meet Daddy?’ says Emily, my rival. ‘How did you meet him?’

‘I met him at a dance.’

‘What were you wearing?’ says her sister, who is always on my side.

‘I was wearing…’ It was a long time ago, I can not remember what I was wearing. I say, ‘I was wearing a blue dress.’

This is probably not true, but they like it. And it is true that Tom was wearing a really sharp suit when I smiled at him, one night in Suzey Street–and kept smiling, in a melancholy way, until he finally stopped talking and just leaned in.

‘How did you know it was him?’ says Emily.

‘What?’

‘How did you know it was Daddy?’

‘I just did,’ I say. ‘I just did.’

Which is true–but not in the way they might expect. I can’t exactly tell them that he was living with another woman at the time, and that the moment I saw them together I knew two things. The first was that he did not belong to her, and the second was that he belonged to me.

I could make him happy. That was all. I knew that, in some exact way, I could make this man happy.

‘I knew it was your Daddy, because he was so tall.’

This will do. It is true enough. I also liked the curve to his top lip, and the way his suit hung open as he leaned over to talk to me, the dent in his chest as he stooped, the mixture of arrogance and inclination.

Tall men, they are so unwieldy. They cave in, like you have undone some secret hinge.

But this is not what you tell your daughters ten years later: that their parents only had sex by accident, and it was weeks before they managed to get all their clothes off first. That their father was so maddened by guilt he actually frightened me–until the moment when I wasn’t frightened any more. That we were swept away. That afterwards we talked about her. And when we finished talking about her, when she was finally gone, some six months later, we had triumphant, tender sex, and after that.

After that.

It was time to buy a house, I suppose. But the early, frantic stuff was important. And the other woman was important too. A little ruthlessness. A pact. A spill of blood. Because we each knew we had met our match, in terms of ambition, or damage–call it what you like–we knew we would put it all right one day with this: two