Temptation

Temptation

Dermot Bolger

For Edwin Higel

Contents

Cover

Title Page

SUNDAY

MONDAY

TUESDAY

WEDNESDAY

THURSDAY

About the Author

From the reviews for Temptation:

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

SUNDAY

I gave up my happiness to make another person happy, Alison thought, for the briefest half–conscious second when she woke beside Peadar in the night. I was somebody else once, someone different. Why was she thinking this? Their packed bags and suitcases lined the bedroom wall although she couldn’t see their shapes in the dark. Tomorrow Peadar would stack them in the car as usual. What was the dream she was trying to block out? At first all she could remember was water, a tang of salt on her lips, fear, the excitement of being somebody else. The vaguest sexual thrill. Then darkness.

But another image forced itself into her mind, from later in the dream or perhaps from a different one. An image so terrifying that she wanted to wake Peadar. A woman’s face under water, trapped at the window of a capsized boat. Skeletal, the flesh half gone, bony hands upright where they had beat against the glass. Eyes that had not yet been devoured, staring out, watching as a tiny capsule approached. Its headlights picking up the rusted hull in the mud, the drifting seaweed, the huge eyes of striped flatfish. Except that Alison knew she wasn’t in the tiny submarine. It was she who was trapped in the wreckage and her wrists that had bruised themselves against the glass, her sagging breasts that protruded through the tattered dress, her veins that stood out like blue highways criss–crossing a desert.

She was afraid to close her eyes again now, frightened the image would return. Yet, even with her eyes wide open in the dark, every detail remained clear. Her right nipple half eaten away by some dark sea creature. She felt that breast now, almost smooth underneath again where the single stitch had healed. She ran her hand over the nipple which, ever since the touch of Dr O’Gorman’s hand, no longer felt like hers. Peadar still sleepily reached for it some mornings, like a child instinctively seeking a battered toy he had outgrown. But did he ever look at them properly any more, the breasts of his thirty–eight–year–old wife? If he did, then surely he would have noticed something.

Alison hated these insidious three a.m. thoughts, demanding answers to questions she had no desire to ask. Like how had she come to be here, at this age, in this bed, beside this man? She loved Peadar and there was nowhere else she wanted to be, so why did the eyes of that woman haunt her from the dream? All her own wishes had come true. She had never longed to explore the Nile or cross the Andes. If she could have looked ahead at twenty–one to see herself now, then surely she would have been pleased. Owning a house in Raheny, the sight of which had awed her parents into silence, having three children who loved her and a successful husband who still looked boyish in a certain light.

At twenty–one she had been convinced she would end up alone. That loneliness, or the aching remembrance of it, had never left her. Walking out one Sunday over the rough stones of the Pigeon House wall, a tall figure huddled up in a coat and wearing a monkey hat against the rain, hoping against hope there might be a coffee shop at the end of the pier, somewhere out of the cold, friendly and anonymous, where some stranger might talk to her.

She could never have understood back then how there might be other kinds of loneliness even when living inside a family. This three a.m. isolation. Not that Peadar had ever stopped loving her, but sometimes he forgot how much reassurance she needed. At thirty–eight, a body changes. He had to sense it too. Was it his own ageing which caused him to always come so quickly of late or was it a lack of sustained interest in her? Twenty years ago he had been so stiff with over–excitement that he often barely seemed able to come. Now at times their lovemaking felt like a habit without need of speech, an instinctive curling into safe, established positions, his arm routinely around her as they slipped towards shared sleep.

But was it shared? What was Peadar dreaming about with such laboured breath and was she a part of it? Sixteen years of marriage, twenty years of intimacy, even if they had remained apart for three of them. Surely Alison should know him by now, surely she should feel secure? Perhaps that was the problem, they were too secure. How could she really know who Peadar was, when often at three a.m. Alison didn’t even know who she herself was, buried inside the bustle and happiness of her family life.

Peadar slept on, curled up inside dreams that, Alison decided, most probably concerned bricks and mortar. Peadar the planner, desperate to leave a mark behind. But tomorrow was holiday time, the five carefree nights she had been living out for months in advance. So why did she feel fearful, with a sense of foreboding souring her stomach? Those eyes still swayed in the dark above her, a tang of salt on her lips, a sense of water ebbing invisibly across the sheets, rocking her back into dreams that belonged to someone else.

All year they talked about it. It even defined them with some friends, people they wouldn’t see for months on end, but who always greeted them with the same remark, ‘So tell us, are you going to Fitzgerald’s again this year?’

The remark –Šit wasn’t really a question any more – came to annoy Alison. It made them seem staid and middle–aged before their time. Later, in the car home, she might argue with Peadar about going camping in France or visiting Barcelona like they’d done the summer after they married. But even as she railed against his stock list of excuses about the children being too small and language problems, Alison knew that Peadar could sense she was merely going through the motions, even if he gave no sign of understanding what caused her malaise.

In truth Alison was growing staid and middle–aged. Thirty–eight. Twenty years ago how ancient and decrepit that would have seemed. Twenty years ago she would have laughed at the annual notion of five nights in Fitzgerald’s Hotel during the second week of Peadar’s Easter school holidays. Twenty years ago she could never have imagined that one day she might afford to regularly stay there.

The three children woke her at seven–thirty as usual that Sunday morning by climbing into bed to demand a cuddle. The two boys were barely in before they wriggled free, asking to be allowed to watch children’s television. Their hot, bony limbs clambered off the mattress and she heard doors bang downstairs and the television being plugged in. Five–year–old Sheila snuggled on, spooning into her as Peadar slowly stirred. He turned to kiss Alison and stroke Sheila’s hair, then swung his legs from the bed. Mr Action Man, ready to organise them. Alison lay on, enjoying her daughter’s soft skin as Sheila played with the ragdoll she had decided to bring to Fitzgerald’s. But something lingered, the fragment of a dream that perturbed Alison without her being able to fully recall its details. Just eyes under water, shredded flesh.

She shuddered briefly in the warm morning light, hugged Sheila tight and pushed the image away. Sheila was walking the ragdoll up along the quilt, until it perched on Alison’s nose, staring down at her eyes.

‘Get up, lazybones, we’re going on holidays,’ a squeaky voice demanded.

Peadar moved about downstairs, doing his drill master sergeant impersonation. This was the first year when loading the car wouldn’t prove a near impossible logistical feat. Previously he would spend an eternity in the driveway, getting increasingly flustered as he rearranged their bags, shouting at the boys if they wandered out, half dressed and wanting the adventure to start. This year – with Sheila sleeping in a bed and the battered travel cot and buggy no longer required – their luggage would fit first time. But Alison knew, as she heard the rattle of her breakfast tray being carried upstairs, that Peadar would take the bags down as soon as he’d laid the tray on the bed. Loading the car first thing seemed as much a part of Peadar’s holiday ritual as her surprise breakfast in bed, his way of trying to leave the frantic pace of his everyday world behind.

She called out for him to leave the boys’ bag alone as she had more clothes to pack. He put it down reluctantly, like a child denied a final piece of jigsaw. They wouldn’t leave for another hour, yet she knew he wouldn’t be happy until the boot was shut for a final time.

Sheila slid out of bed and padded down after Peadar, saying that she wanted him to get her dressed. Alison was pleased, knowing this would buy her more time. Why did he always have to make their departure to Fitzgerald’s so rushed? Normally she was so wound up by the time they reached there that they had an argument on the first night.

This year was the first time they had ever seriously considered cancelling. Their fitted kitchen was already antiquated when they had moved into the house ten years ago and was now completely falling apart. Over Christmas Alison had argued that they should get a new kitchen instead of taking a holiday. Finances were tight since she’d given up nursing, even on Peadar’s salary as a school principal. But although, in the end, she had claimed to have chosen Fitzgerald’s so as not to disappoint the children, in reality it was the prospect of this holiday which had sustained her during the secrecy of these last months.

She ate quickly now, going over endless lists in her head. Danny still got sick when he travelled and needed Phenergan medicine before they started. Tapes had to be organised in advance: songs and rhymes that Sheila would enjoy, over the others’ protests, until she fell asleep, and then a cassette of stories for seven–year–olds, carefully pitched in age between Danny and Shane. In previous years they would all fall asleep, leaving Peadar and her free to drive in silence past Enniscorthy, feeling the road widen as she silently crossed off the miles. Now their voices would fill the car all the way to Fitzgerald’s.

Shouts rose from downstairs – Danny teasing Shane, Shane being hypersensitive. Tears and blows were only moments away. She abandoned the remains of her breakfast and made for the stairs, pitching her tone somewhere between that of a UN peacemaker and a wounded benign dictator.

The children always started counting down the miles before they’d even left Dublin. One hundred and one exactly from their driveway to the hotel car park. Peadar drove. In the early years she had shared the driving, just to show that she was not dependent. Peadar had known better than to complain but she had sensed his eyes checking the speed gauge, humouring her for the time they were losing. Peadar didn’t think of himself as a fast driver, but claimed that the NII was a road you needed to know. There were stretches where you drove slowly and others where you clawed back the lost time. Perhaps it was the pressures of his job, the endless timetables, crises and fundraising targets, which made him live his life against some invisible clock. But this year Alison planned to let him get on with driving, knowing that he hated the purposelessness of being a passenger. Peadar’s idea of a holiday, she often thought, would be two weeks in old jeans being useful with a Black and Decker drill. That, plus afternoon sex, kicking a football with Danny and Shane, sketching out a few projects for the future and the occasional round of golf thrown in.

He simply had to drive by the school, of course, even though it wasn’t on their way. Peadar half glanced across at her, wondering if he dared to stop. Beyond the boundary wall, scaffolding rose around what would soon be the finished extension. One night, after Peadar came in at two a.m. from doing budgets with McCann, his vice–principal, he had promised to let Alison smash a bottle of champagne against the finished extension to open it. She was only half joking when she’d threatened to smash himself and McCann on a rope against it instead.

He slowed the car, almost imperceptibly, his eyes following the contractor’s workmen who were earning double time for a Sunday. She could sense him gauging, almost to the brick, how far behind schedule they were with the school due to reopen in eight days.

Four years of his life were ground up in the mortar of that extension, four years of lost evenings and weekends. Nobody else could have done it on such a tiny grant, wheedling money here and there, organising bag–packing at local supermarkets, sponsored walks, Christmas vigil fasts, read–athons, cultivating politicians and local clergy who still harboured suspicions about multi–denominational schools. In bed at night Alison used to tease him about strategies he hadn’t tried yet: sponsored hand–jobs outside pubs at closing time from the female teachers, kidnapping, extortion, strip poker sessions during the Parents Association nights, a declaration of war against the United States followed by a Marshall Plan appeal for rebuilding. But mostly she felt proud of him, even if she occasionally allowed herself to acknowledge a silent, mutinous resentment. This was generally followed by guilt, as she could never decide if her pique stemmed from the intrusion of his plans into their everyday world or because he made her own life, by contrast, seem lacking in purpose or direction.

The car slowed to a halt as if Peadar was reluctant to tear his eyes from the workmen.

‘Only seven have bothered showing up,’ he said. ‘There should be a crew of eight working this morning.’

Danny leaned forward, making such a threatening noise that Peadar pulled away. Alison smiled, glad she had said nothing. It was hard to know what Danny would be in later life, but Alison wouldn’t be surprised if he became a contract killer specialising in architects.

After the Shankill by–pass the stop–start prevarication of traffic lights ended. It was open road from here to the outskirts of Ashford. Not that the route was easy – it still narrowed to one lane passing Kilmacanoge and through the Glen of the Downs, with huge container trucks straining to get past to reach the ferry to France at Rosslare.

Her Aunt Catherine had grown up in a cottage perched above this road, cycling to school in Bray during the war, fetching water from a green pump a half mile away. Alison still found herself watching out for the cottage, refurbished now and almost unrecognisable as the insignificant building pointed out to her as a child, since it had gained a conservatory and electronic gates. During their early years of driving to Fitzgerald’s she would show it to Peadar until she had grown tired of retelling the story. Now it was Peadar who drew her attention to it, every year on the same bend, like a talisman in their ritual.

The habit annoyed her, yet she would have been disappointed if he had let the moment pass. This was part of being thirty–eight too, finding that life had developed into certain grooves that made you feel secure. There were a dozen tiny habits of Peadar that irritated her, yet none of which she would change. It was like the leaking tap in the shed he had been meaning to fix for so long. She would miss the company of its drip now, putting in a wash down there at night or giving the uniforms a five–minute midnight tumble in the dryer before leaving them out for the morning.

Peadar with a perpetual tuft of hair in his nostril, the first part of him to go grey. Peadar like a furnace beside her in the bed, grumbling if she kicked off the spare blanket he kept on his side in winter even when obviously unneeded. Peadar who had never lost his Galway accent. Peadar at the beck and call of parents and neighbours during the few hours he was at home. Alison would be suspicious of some of the women calling if she didn’t know that he hadn’t got it in him to be unfaithful, no matter what her friend Ruth said about all men being the same. Peadar the builder, the planner. Peadar who had taken that Mickey Mouse school by the scruff of the neck. Peadar who was her rock in any storm. Peadar who had stoically watched his mother succumb to Alzheimer’s during monthly visits home to Galway, until she finally asked the nurse to make the strange man go away. Peadar who, since her death, hurt Alison sometimes by clamming up in his makeshift office upstairs, as if possessed by a growing malady that not even he could fathom. Peadar from whom she had kept the secret of these last few months.

Sheila was asleep before the car slowed on the narrow road twisting through woodland slopes into Ashford. They would have to wake her now when they reached Mount Ussher Gardens and the child might grow cranky later in the journey. Danny was quiet. Last year he would have prattled away until he fell asleep, pointing out passing tractors to the stuffed giraffe he once took everywhere with him. He still cuddled into that tattered giraffe after bedtime stories and sometimes stumbled into their room at night, half asleep, upset that his beloved toy had fallen behind the bed. But Alison knew this was the last year the giraffe would make the journey to Fitzgerald’s.

She had told him not to read in the car but Danny had taken out the Shoot football magazine which he now ordered in the newsagent’s instead of his Batman comic. He was intently studying match reports of obscure English third division games. She could see their names highlighted in the dense text on the page he had turned over. Southend, Doncaster, Brentford, teams and towns that could have no meaning for him. Yet his eyes seemed mesmerised, absorbed in a foreign language that took him further and further away from her. Danny, her firstborn, a gentle child never quite fitting in anywhere but happy to hover on the edge of some horde of boys. How much longer before he stopped climbing into her bed for a dawn cuddle? But he still needed her and would for a long time to come. That’s why she had to be here for him and for them all. That’s why, during the previous three months, she had been too scared to talk to anyone.

‘I know what happened, Mammy,’ six–year–old Shane had informed her recently as she pushed him on a swing. ‘Danny must have fallen at school and banged his head. That’s why he started liking football.’ Shane had swung his feet in the air, satisfied at solving the mystery of his brother’s conversion to soccer and, with it, his abandonment of the endless games of Batman and Robin he’d once devised for them both.

Shane was more babyish than Danny had been at that age but tougher as well. He’d always known his own mind. Danny was malleable, but even at a few hours old when Alison had put Shane to feed at her breast she’d felt a resistance in his neck. She’d let him go and his tiny mouth had found her nipple by itself. Shane would grow up in his own time as his own man, with nothing to prove to anybody. For now he clutched his Paddington Bear proudly in the car and would refuse to eat everything except bread when they reached Mount Ussher Gardens.

The car park just beyond Ashford was on a dangerous bend. You were almost past before you saw the entrance. A German camper van was leaving. Peadar eased into the free space and she cautioned the boys against jumping out with so many cars about. Peadar got them out and put their coats on. Sheila was sleeping so peacefully that Alison was tempted to tell them to go ahead while she remained in the car until the child woke. But something – the engine being turned off or the shudder made by the slipstream of a truck thundering past – caused Sheila’s eyes to open. Danny would fly into a rage and sometimes get sick if woken, but Sheila just smiled now as if delighted to see her mother anxiously leaning over her.

Alison unstrapped her. Peadar and the boys had already passed the antique shops. Stopping at Mount Ussher was part of the ritual too, the midway point between Dublin and Wexford when she could finally relax. A week of preparation went into these five nights away. Washing, sorting clothes, packing. It always took longer than expected, with Peadar hovering while she frantically crossed things off her list and their tempers flared up.

In previous years the journey to this point was spent wondering what had she left behind, if the windows were double–locked or the alarm definitely on. But this year felt different. Suddenly she didn’t care if the house burnt down when they were away. At least the battered kitchen would have to be replaced then.

The sun emerged after a squall of rain. Everything glistened as she walked, holding Sheila’s hand, beneath the archway of climbing plants to the tea rooms. The air felt like a benediction: the wet leaves, the excited laughter from her sons, the trees swaying in the gardens beyond. In January, when Dr O’Gorman’s cold hand had examined her breast, Alison had felt sure she would never stand here again, except as a dying woman or one scarred for life.

Why had she never told Peadar? She would tomorrow night, sipping complimentary Irish coffees on the long sofas in Fitzgerald’s. He would take her hand, near tears, and scold her for not having spoken. He would not trivialise it by going over the details repeatedly. She liked the clear–cut way that he absorbed information. He would ask one or two questions then lapse into silence, squeezing her hand before suggesting they return to the room. Holding hands, they would walk up the long corridor, where a baby always cried behind some door, and pay the babysitter off early. Their lovemaking would be silent so as not to wake the children, but with an edge caused by the knowledge of how fragile their world together was. Finally and fully she would have his attention.

She had been right to carry the dead weight of this worry alone. The weeks of waiting would have gnawed at Peadar. He would have hated the powerlessness of being unable to do anything, just like he had dreaded having to watch impotently while Alzheimer’s drained away his mother’s personality. Fear would have come between them, cancer taken possession of the house, filling their dreams and waking thoughts. In some lost fragment of his childhood, which she had learnt never to intrude upon, she was sure that his terror at not being in control was born.

But although in January she had been concerned about the tiny lump on the underside of her breast, she had expected reassurance from Dr O’Gorman and confirmation that it was just a cyst. Instead he had insisted on a mammogram. The public waiting list was months long. It was simpler to go privately, using the children’s allowance money she kept in a separate account. She was a nurse herself she’d informed the radiographer: he could tell her straight out. But people’s attitudes changed once they realised you had left nursing to work as a stay–at–home mother. She’d had to return to Dr O’Gorman, who would make Eeyore the donkey seem cheerful. He had insisted that the only way to ensure the cyst was benign was to remove it.

Even then, in mid March, she never told Peadar. She had lied instead on the morning of the procedure, claiming that she was going to help out Ruth, whose marriage had broken up, by staying with her overnight. The operation was in the same hospital she’d worked in. They had treated her like royalty – in at nine a.m., woken in mid–afternoon to be told the cyst was benign and sent home in time to read stories to Sheila. She couldn’t stop trembling in the taxi, released from the scenario where she would have to tell Peadar how her breast was to be removed and that, even then, they didn’t know how far the cancer had spread.