Temptation

Instead she simply told him that Ruth hadn’t needed her to stay over. She had hoped he wouldn’t want to make love because of the soreness, but, during the previous months Peadar had never even noticed the small cyst develop, never mind now become aware of the tiny neat stitch on the underside. Lately he was too preoccupied in his world of contractors and architects. It hurt her when he barely noticed how much weight she had lost since Christmas, how pale she had looked or how red her eyes were at times.

When he did notice anything, it was to accuse her of sulking, being grudging in her support when he needed it most. He knew that he wasn’t pulling his weight at home, he would say, but the school extension was almost built. Just these final crucial weeks and then the damn thing would be finished. An achievement nobody had thought possible. After that he’d be at home so much that she would grow sick of him. So why this long face and brooding, he would ask, just now when he’d so much to cope with? Then always, as if promising a child a treat, he would add, ‘And remember, we’ll have five whole nights to ourselves in Fitzgerald’s.’

Five nights. Was this all her life boiled down to? On a dozen occasions she had bitten her tongue, tempted to scream at him. Yet these five nights would make up for so much. This scare would bring them closer together, by reminding them how some day – hopefully not for decades yet – one of them would be left to cope alone. All the bricks and mortar in the world couldn’t compensate for closing a front door at night and knowing there was no one left to really care whether or not you woke again the next morning.

If the children weren’t with them Alison might have told Peadar now on that secluded bench in the gardens overlooking the Ventry river where they had made love late one rainy afternoon sixteen years before. Alison, with the tear that Peadar had found in her skirt, sitting astride him with his flies undone. Thankfully not even the gardeners were moving about that day, but by the end they wouldn’t have stopped or cared. Their excitement had been addictive, the feel of him thrusting through the material, the creak of an old beech tree overhead, the dark river gushing over rocks and a solitary heron taking flight before their eyes. The gardens were closing by the time they had left, with just their bicycles in the car park. Her dress was stained but she hadn’t cared. She had cared about nothing that summer, except that she was twenty–two and free, on a dirty weekend with her first love who had come back after three years to find her.

Peadar was already ordering food in the tea rooms. The old lady in the hunting jacket was in her usual place beside the antiques, guarding the door into the gardens. Three local women ran the tea room. They remembered Peadar because of his fondness for rhubarb streusel. Danny was eyeing the rich cakes, but once they had a good walk it was unlikely he would get sick later on in the car. Alison scanned the menu, wondering was there anything she could persuade Shane to taste. Maybe she could invent a game to coax him into trying chicken. She envied women whose sons ate like horses. Yet Shane was tall and healthy, existing mainly on milk and cheese.

None of this was important, she reminded herself, or at least not at this moment. Let Shane drink what he likes. Let Danny have two cakes or three. Childhood was short and her own seemed to have been spent forever gazing in through invisible windows, being denied the things she saw inside and made to feel guilty for even wanting them. Not that her parents were mean, but the Waterford she grew up in had felt like it was ruled by some headscarfed matriarch with pursed, disapproving lips. It was a different world for children now. They were a family together on the sort of holiday she had only ever known once as a child. She had survived her scare, even if for days after getting the all–clear she had burst into sudden inexplicable tears, alone in the kitchen.

Peadar glanced at her now as the lady filled his tray.

‘You look flushed,’ he said. ‘Are you okay?’

‘I’m fine,’ she replied. ‘Just fine.’

The woman mashed up potatoes, carrots and gravy for Sheila and heated them in the microwave. Even with coaxing, the child would only eat half of it but there was enough goodness in that. Alison had plain biscuits wrapped in tissue for afterwards. She knew that both Sheila and Shane would enjoy them far more than any dessert.

The children stormed out into the gardens after they’d finished, while Peadar was still paying the admission fee. The azaleas were in bloom, stretching out before her eyes in pinks, yellows and whites as Alison walked through maple trees towards the river. Parts of the grass were deliberately cut long to give the woodlands a feel of half wilderness, half exotic Eden. Peadar appeared behind her, taking her hand but urging her on, anxious not to lose sight of Shane as the boy climbed up rough steps to a suspension bridge leading to the owner’s house located on a man–made island in the river. Alison called for Shane to run after Danny and Sheila who had disappeared among the trees. She wanted to stroll in peace with Peadar along the wide avenue of hanging rhododendrons.

There was an octagonal wooden house at the end where she remembered changing Danny, the first year they went to Fitzgerald’s, when everything was new and she was frantic about being a mother. The fear she might drop him, the incessant worry that caused her to wake several times a night to check his breathing in the cot.

Danny now gripped Sheila’s hand as he pushed ahead towards the shallow stretch of river, hoping to see the solitary heron there again this year. Another talisman of their journey. Even at eight the boy was caught up in this ritual. The riverbed was empty. Danny cupped his hand over his eyes, straining to glimpse the bird. She called out that the heron was probably hunting along the far rapids and Danny disappeared across the bridge into a tunnel of old overhanging trees.

Shane followed, running along the maze of woodland paths, while Peadar called for them not to get lost. She let go of Peadar’s hand, tired of being hurried, wanting to enjoy the cool shade of those gnarled trunks. Her family moved ahead, with Sheila demanding that Peadar carry her. From Danny’s cries she knew he had found the entrance to the secret path built along girders down a tiny tributary of the river. The steps descended to the water, with ferns and moss crowding the steep banks on either side. Sheila was frightened of falling in and wriggled away to run back to Alison.

She sat on the grass with her daughter, watching Peadar hold each boy’s hand as they negotiated their way slowly along the girders that were almost submerged in the green water. They disappeared in and out of shade, with patches of sunlight igniting the ripples that sparkled around them. This was a moment she knew she would remember when they were all gone from her. The three men in her life, calling excitedly to each other as they stooped beneath archways and rocks. Then their voices went silent, as if the riot of trailing plants along the riverbank had somehow ensnared them up inside a magical green world.

Peadar’s car–phone rang as they descended the twisty mountain road beyond Rathnew, stuck behind a horsebox being pulled by a jeep in a tailback of Sunday afternoon vehicles. Alison thought he had remembered to turn it off. He glanced across, with a sheepish grin. She knew he couldn’t resist picking it up.

‘Just once,’ she warned him. ‘If it rings again it’s going out the window.’

It was McCann, of course, fretful and over–conscientious as usual. Alison had grown to dread his voice calling at ridiculous hours about trivial matters. At first she had thought this was his method of retribution against Peadar for taking the principal’s job that outsiders felt he had patiently waited in line for, during his decade as vice–principal, before Peadar was headhunted for the post. But gradually she’d realised that his obsequiousness was without irony or malice. McCann was a natural lieutenant, not a leader. He lived alone, with classical music always in the background when he phoned, seemingly oblivious to the disruption caused by a midnight call.

‘I know,’ she heard Peadar say. ‘I passed the site. There were seven then … maybe another two have bunked off. But the deadline is in place with penalty clauses, so they’ll just have to work longer in the evenings.’

There was a silence as Peadar let McCann fret on. The secret was to wait until McCann paused for breath and then get your goodbyes in fast. Peadar braked as the horsebox slowed even more.

‘If he’s got three sites going at once then that’s Nolan’s problem,’ Peadar interjected. ‘He can switch workmen around all he likes once he meets his commitments to us, because he knows he’s not getting another red cent until I can see my face shining in the floor tiles.’

Peadar replaced the receiver, making a deliberate show of switching the phone off.

‘Sorry about that,’ he apologised.

‘No, it’s reassuring,’ Alison replied. ‘Once I’m sure McCann is still in Dublin I know he can’t pop his head out of the petrol tank if we stop to fill it up somewhere along the way.’

Peadar smiled, knowing her views on the vice–principal. She used to tease him in bed by inventing blind dates for McCann, her favourite being to pair him off with Mother Teresa.

The Enid Blyton tape had run out. Alison turned it over. Pip, Fatty and Daisy continued outwitting the fat policeman, Mr Goon, on side two. Danny was fascinated though he had heard it a dozen times before. Shane was happy beside him, playing some game with Paddington Bear. And Sheila … Sheila was simply happy, like it was a gift she’d been born with. Sheila, with the same jet–black hair as herself, whom they very nearly didn’t have. They had even seen a doctor about Peadar having the operation before finally deciding to go once again. Three boys would have been too much, but Alison had been certain from the moment Sheila was conceived that there was a girl inside her. Never mind that she had felt the same about Shane for nine months and told anyone who asked her. This time she’d known in her bones and kept the secret to herself.

She turned to smile at her daughter as Peadar edged in and out, trying to glimpse the winding road ahead where a gap was developing between the jeep and horsebox and the cars in front. Sheila smiled back, almost conspiratorially. Sheila who never lost her temper, even when a note arrived before the start of the Easter holidays ten days ago stating that Jean O’Connor in her class had meningitis and Alison had driven her daughter crazy, shining lights in her eyes and searching for a rash at every hour of the night. Sheila who would be her companion when the boys and Peadar were off at football games. Boys leave home and leave their mothers, but girls never quite do. They row and argue in their teens, worrying their mothers senseless, but in the end gradually become friends and confidantes in a way that no son could ever be. That’s what she had missed, with her own mother dying of cancer when Alison was twenty–two. The pendulum had never swung back. There was so much they could have talked about now, so many questions Alison would love to ask. She reached one finger out and Sheila’s hot hand wrapped itself around it, twiddling with the eternity ring she loved to turn in the light.

‘Are we there yet, Mama?’ she asked.

Alison shook her head as Peadar indicated and pulled out. At once she knew something was wrong by the intake of Peadar’s breath. Alison looked around. He was on the wrong side of the road, just where the white line started to break up. A blue van was coming towards them, but there would be time for Peadar to pull in again in front of the jeep pulling the horsebox. The problem was the black BMW with lights flashing behind them. She had noticed the bearded driver’s impatience earlier on and sensed how his constant swaying made Peadar nervous. Now the driver was trying to simultaneously overtake them and the jeep. The man was beeping furiously, screaming at Peadar through the glass like it was his fault. Peadar veered in front of the jeep, putting his foot down to try and create enough space before the BMW swerved into the side of them. The blue van flashed past. Alison screamed, waiting for the crash but somehow the BMW had managed to squeeze in behind them, mainly because the jeep braked hard, sending the horsebox swaying about on the road.

The BMW’s lights were only inches from their back bumper, feet away from her children. Peadar was rattled, shouting at Alison for screaming, cursing the lunatic behind them. The BMW pulled out again without indicating and sped into the distance. Alison could see two teenage girls looking back at them vacantly through the rear window.

Peadar said something and she snapped back. Then they both went quiet, anxious not to frighten the children more. She raised the volume on the tape, sat back and stared ahead. Peadar went slower than usual, even though the road was clear. Cars overtook them, flashing back at twenty and thirty miles above the speed limit. He looked across after five minutes and took her hand in his free one.

‘It wasn’t my fault,’ he said quietly. ‘I’d never take chances with you all in the car. It was that lunatic.’

She squeezed his hand and said nothing. What would it matter whose fault it was if they were all dead on the roadside? She wished they were in the hotel already, the children splashing about in the pool and her outside in the Canadian hot tub. The tape ended. Three voices called out different requests, but she ignored them, not even looking for music on the radio. She needed silence to get her wits back. She wanted to close her eyes as she always did at some stage of this journey and become a child again, counting off the miles in the clank of wheels as the train brought her mother and father and herself on that one magical holiday to Fitzgerald’s.

They didn’t stop again on the way down and the children were quiet, leaving her to her memories. Arklow was now by–passed and Enniscorthy wasn’t too slow. As Peadar picked up speed along the banks of the Slaney with the asylum perched on the cliffs above them, she searched for the Gingerbread Man tape. There was something about the snatches of classical background music and the narrator’s voice saying ‘at the blip turn the page’ that conjured up for her the pent–up expectation of every journey they had taken on this road. She could remember playing it for Danny when Shane was a baby and then for Shane when Sheila was teething beside him in the car. Even at home when she put it on and closed her eyes she could see this stretch of road and feel the spring sunshine through the windscreen as the car sped along these last few miles.

The boys protested at the choice of tape but she told them that it was Sheila’s turn to hear something.

‘Just twenty miles,’ Peadar told Danny, ‘and we’re there. No more towns or anything, just open road.’

Wexford town was long by–passed, taking the Rosslare traffic away from those cramped medieval streets she had first glimpsed as the train trundled slowly over wooden quayside sleepers the summer she was twelve. Holding a bottle of Guinness by the neck, her father had pulled down the carriage window and stared out, lost in memories of which she had no part.

Weeks before, when the notion of a special holiday to mark his silver wedding anniversary arose, her father had been adamant about doing it in style by taking his wife and young daughter down to Fitzgerald’s. It was the first time she had ever heard of the hotel, but he began describing it as like a palace. His own father had taken him there by train from Waterford for lunch when he made his Confirmation in the 1930s, an extravagant day trip they had spent years talking about. And the summer after he left school at fourteen he had got a kitchen job there, living in, and bathing on the private beach every evening.

Standing at the train window, he had seemed to change before her eyes. Hidden fragments of his life tumbled out that she strove to piece together. This was the first occasion when she properly understood that parents had previous lives and secrets. Listening to him had reminded her of a boy with his nose pressed against a shop window. Always on the outside, describing the clothes guests wore to dinner back then, the size of the dining room, the musicians who played. All as glimpsed from a kitchen sink, between the swish of a swing door opening and closing as waiters came and went. Now he had decided to return with his wife and daughter in his own private triumph.

Alison could remember the tiny station at Rosslare and the steep hump–backed bridge where the sea suddenly glistened into sight. They had walked the few hundred yards to the hotel, him in front with two heavy suitcases, she and her mother straggling slightly behind. She had felt a nervousness for her father. He seemed out of his depth, striding forward with a frighteningly boyish eagerness. Even at twelve she sensed he was going to be disappointed by the fact that nobody knew him, no one recalled his hands scrubbing pots in scalding water, nobody would understand the momentous nature of his return.

Yet all this she only fully understood years later, when Danny was two and Alison spent a week in Waterford after her father’s funeral, sorting out clothes and personal effects, filling in the gaps of his life through them. He had known poverty in Waterford as a boy and later on in London. Yet he always took whatever work would provide a home for his wife and his two London–born sons. The younger boy was ten before he returned to Waterford to work in the glass factory and the afterthought or mistake occurred that became her. That was a question you didn’t ask your parents back then, even if in adolescence the doubt had tortured her.

Either way all she knew was love, unburdened by the expectations that Peadar seemed to carry from his earliest years. She still remembered hearing her father rise an hour before the rest of them, the bolt being drawn back and his boots on the path disturbing her childhood sleep as he set off for the early shift. Surely he was sick sometimes but she never recalled it. He had simply got on with what had to be done for his children. But that trip to Fitzgerald’s had been for him alone. It was the moment when he could rest among the soft armchairs and know that his life’s main work was done, with one son married, a second finishing his apprenticeship and his only daughter due to be the first member of his family to ever complete secondary school.

She, meanwhile, had been preoccupied with discovering the swimming pool, the crazy golf, the private beach and the food. She had known her first kiss at Fitzgerald’s, sitting on a rock at twilight near the steps up from the beach. Three days of intense expectation with a thirteen–year–old boy from Newry had built up to that moment. The feel of his tongue for the eternity of a second before she turned and ran off, back up the steps into the safety of childhood. How could you explain time to a child? Ten or twenty years that suddenly pass? It was more than a quarter of a century since her first solitary kiss at Fitzgerald’s. How many lifetimes ago did that moment seem? A foreboding crept over her in the car, a melancholic hangover from last night’s dream. What if this was all the future held, a succession of cars carrying her ever–ageing body down to this hotel? Forty soon, then fifty, sixty. She closed her eyes, feeling the car speed forward, unstoppable, on a journey she had no control over.

She opened them again to glance back at her children’s excited faces. They had passed the last roundabout for Wexford town and the N25 for Waterford. These were the final miles, past the turnoff for Kilmore Quay and through Killinick in the wink of an eye. Sheila silently mouthed the words ‘How much longer?’ and suddenly Alison felt like a child herself again. She strained to glimpse the sign for the turn left, which took them down the wide country road with a dozen signs on every bend for hotels and guesthouses and always, the fourth one down, for Fitzgerald’s.

They were here now, a turn left at a garage, a sharp right again and the railway bridge was before them. Soon the first glimpse of the sea. The children craned their necks forward. But it was different for them, not like the solitary time she had come all those years ago. They expected this as a right, year after year, their break at Fitzgerald’s, remarkable and yet routine. They were excited, yet she wanted their excitement to be more. She half resented the fact they were not shouting with joy. She wanted brass bands, she didn’t know what she wanted. She wanted to look out and see her father straining under his suitcases. She wanted to call, ‘We’re here by right now, Dad, year after year.’ She wanted to feel twelve again. She wanted to cry, remembering how she had honestly expected never to see this hotel again except as a woman riddled with cancer.

Peadar turned left and suddenly it was there, on the right, rising up in cream and blue, with tennis courts visible and palm trees in the garden. Every year something changed, every year something new, but still always it was Fitzgerald’s.

The car park on the left was crammed with sleek cars, with one battered old van incongruously among them. Peadar drove in through the cream pillars and found a spot near the grass. He flung his door open, his shoulders stiff from driving, and opened the back door for Danny to jump up into his arms. He threw his son into the air and caught him as Danny raised his fist like he’d scored a goal.

‘Fitzgerald’s,’ Danny said. ‘We’re here, Daddy, we’re here!’

Shane and Sheila clambered out, running to the wall to peer across at it. Their faces were mesmerised. Peadar walked around the car to put his arm around her, then looked down.

‘Hey,’ he asked quietly, ‘why are you crying?’

She looked at him. She remembered her mother dying, her father lost and left behind. She remembered herself as an overlooked child in this hotel, the future she had imagined. She remembered how close that BMW had come to killing them, the coldness of Dr O’Gorman’s hand on her breast. Alison put her arms around him.

‘You big fool,’ she said. ‘I’m crying because I’m happy.’

The welcoming sherry reception was in the foyer at seven o’clock. In the early years Peadar and herself had laughed at it and never attended, but now it seemed an integral part of their holiday. By six–thirty the major unpacking was done and strolling down to the foyer forced her to relax. The boys were asking about it from the time they had taken their first swim at half–four. To them ‘reception’ had the same ring as ‘party’ and a party was still a party even if it only consisted of adults in suits chatting away on the striped sofas.

She knew they would get bored of it within minutes. Once they had clung to her side as Sheila did now, with the colouring book and crayons she would soon tire of and demand to be snuggled up instead on Alison’s knee. The boys waited only to get glasses of orange juice from the bow–tied waiters at the white table beside the dining room windows. Danny drained his glass and called to Shane. Like a shadow, his younger brother followed him down the corridor, ready to turn the slightest occurrence into an adventure.

Alison was happy to let them go, once she could keep an eye on the main doorway. Danny had finally reached an age to explore by himself and she knew how he loved to delve into every corner and alcove of the hotel. There were so many rooms he would have to peek into: the card room that was always empty; the smoking room with its blazing log fire even on summer nights; the TV room where Geraldine and Aoife, the children’s activities co–ordinators, were already screening the first evening’s video. The boys would settle down to watch it shortly, but Danny still insisted on either Peadar or her sitting in an armchair in the corridor. For all his new found toughness, ghosts and dinosaurs frightened him and they would have to be within reach if the film grew too scary.

The babysitter was due at eight. Alison hoped it wouldn’t be one of those teenage girls it was impossible to get a word from. The usual bedtime arguments were still an hour away. For now Sheila was happy colouring and Peadar had fallen into reluctant conversation at the table where the waiters were pouring more sherry. She could tell by the way he held the sherry glasses, poised to flee back to her. The tall man in the suit beside him laughed at what Peadar obviously hoped was a closing remark.