Temptation

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.

‘Yes, yes,’ she heard the man’s booming voice agree. ‘It’s great to forget the pressures of work and relax. So tell me, what do you do?’

Peadar caught her glance and discreetly threw his eyes to heaven. She knew he was too polite to disentangle himself from the conversation and also that, like a mother with a first child, he would soon begin to talk about the school extension. She didn’t mind. She was enjoying these rare moments alone. Two elderly couples on the sofas beside her were making friends. A waitress bent to offer her a tray of hors d’oeuvres. She finished her first sherry and looked around. Other hotels might have leisure centres and chefs that were equally good, but she had never seen anywhere to match Fitzgerald’s paintings. And they weren’t just the safe landscapes you saw elsewhere. Here paintings accosted you; some stunning, many unfathomable but every one challenging. She had grown to know the names by now: Le Broquy, Crozier, Nora McGuinness, Patrick Collins and fantastical childhood landscapes by Martin Gale that the boys loved to stare at.

Sheila pulled at her sleeve for attention, holding up a page from her colouring book streaked almost entirely with red crayon. Alison praised it and found her another page to colour. She looked up and a face caught her attention, although she wasn’t sure why. It had a disconcerting familiarity, yet the man it belonged to looked somehow out of place. He leaned down, replying to some remark from a couple in their fifties seated beside the piano player.

She recognised them as the Bennetts. They were childless, Scottish and superb dancers. They came for five nights at Easter and another week in October and entered every competition. Each Thursday night at prizegiving they walked across the dance floor to receive Fitzgerald’s mugs and plates for table tennis, indoor bowls and crazy golf. She wondered what they did with their endless supply of crockery and liked to imagine Mrs Bennett having tantrums, smashing things, while the petite Mr Bennett screamed, ‘No, dear, please, not the table quiz mug!’

Mrs Bennett looked up and waved in recognition. Alison smiled back as both Mr Bennett and the man glanced in her direction. The man’s gaze perturbed her. There was something not right about him, like a photo–fit that didn’t match. His skin seemed younger than his eyes. She couldn’t explain why this bothered her. There were so many faces you saw here year after year. Nobody could expect to remember them all. She looked away, feigning great interest in Sheila’s colouring, yet aware that the man was leaving the Bennetts and walking towards her. He even seemed to slow down as she kept her head buried over her daughter’s colouring book, then he strolled on, past Mr Diekhoff and his son, to wherever he had parked his own wife.

Mr Diekhoff had been coming here from Cologne for twenty–five years, ever since his son, Heinrich, was four. Alison watched the Down’s Syndrome boy sit quietly beside his widowed father. Strictly speaking he wasn’t a boy, but she couldn’t think of him as approaching thirty, no more than she could bear to imagine his life if he outlived his father. Heinrich’s presence here – politely asking women he knew for one dance and perpetually winning the crazy golf competition – was another talisman of her holiday. It was fifteen years since his mother had died, but his father resolutely continued this annual trip to the hotel he had discovered as a young hitchhiker. Alison knew he came for Heinrich’s sake more than his own – although he had his friends among the regulars here. He sensed her glance at him and smiled in greeting. She felt the weight of responsibility in his eyes as Heinrich waved to her cheerfully.

Peadar finally returned with the sherries, having extracted himself from the man’s company. ‘What a bore,’ he said. ‘An RTE producer. You know the type who stop strangers on the street when they can’t find anyone else to argue with.’

She looked around, meaning to ask Peadar if he recognised the stranger, when somebody else caught her attention.

‘The bastard,’ she hissed, making Peadar look at her in surprise. She nodded towards a sofa near the reception desk where a bearded man was smoking and enjoying a whiskey while his teenage daughters sulked over the orange juices before them.

‘Do we know him?’ Peadar asked.

‘He’s the bastard in the BMW who nearly got us killed. Do you not remember the pusses on those two girls gawking out the window?’

The bearded man stared directly back and raised his glass as if in a toast, although Alison couldn’t be sure if he recognised them. She had already risen when Peadar grabbed her arm.

‘Where’re you going?’

‘To throw my sherry over the smug bastard.’

‘Ah, Jaysus, please don’t,’ Peadar cajoled. ‘It will take me half an hour to get you another one if that RTE arsehole spots me going back up to the table.’

‘I’m serious.’

The man seemed to be watching, amused and impervious to what was going on. His daughters had even forgotten to look bored.

‘For God’s sake, Alison, what’s the point? Don’t spoil our holiday. You know you’re like a bag of cats on the first night here anyway.’

Danny and Shane appeared in the foyer, checking they were still there. Sheila wanted Alison to praise her colouring. Alison sat back angrily, but Peadar was right. He was always bloody right, especially when it came to her losing her temper. And she did find it hard to relax on the first night here, from a cocktail of memory and guilt.

Every year they came here the menu changed but some traditional Fitzgerald recipes remained the same. She remembered her parents uneasily stirring the green nettle and cognac soup that was still served here. And how she herself had half expected to be stung as she raised the soup spoon to her lips. Nettle soup to them was something from the famine, the poorest of the poor boiling weeds for nourishment. They couldn’t have been more shocked if the main course had consisted of the old recipe of potatoes mashed with blood from a cut made in a cow’s leg. As it was, they had been taken aback by the litany of penitent fish dishes even though it wasn’t a Friday.

Her parents had been perpetually ill at ease on that holiday, her mother making the beds each morning and frantically tidying up before the cleaners came in. They had sat in armchairs in the Slaney Room, talking mainly to the staff and just watching other guests pass by. She had only ever seen them this uncomfortable again whenever they were forced to meet Peadar’s parents. They had not fitted in here and neither had she. The other children tolerated her mainly for her novelty value, making her repeat phrases in her Waterford accent. Only the Newry boy had treated her differently, thrown together by them being the only two children not from Dublin.

It perturbed her every time she returned, just how well she fitted in here now, how indistinguishable her children were from the others running in and out of the television room. The same Dublin accents, with hardly a trace of her Waterford or Peadar’s Galway brogue – not that she herself had much of an accent left. Her parents would be proud. Yet this never stopped her from imagining them, perched on a sofa in this foyer, speaking in whispers and not recognising the daughter who had left them behind in trying to meet the expectations of her in–laws.

It was best to get the children ready before the babysitter came. She rose and walked towards the boys, praising her self–control in ignoring the bearded man when he spoke to her.

‘You need to trade in those wheels of yours,’ he joked, like the incident had been amusing. ‘Get something with a bit more vroom in it.’

She stared at him.

‘Maybe that’s what you need yourself.’ He looked puzzled, his daughters moronically staring through her like she wasn’t there. Her accent thickened, reverting back to girlhood. ‘I mean these things are about compensation, aren’t they?’

‘I don’t see how compensation enters into it,’ he said, defensive now, watchful of his wallet. ‘There was no accident, nobody hurt, nothing.’

‘I don’t mean that type of compensation.’ She was aware of Peadar anxiously at her shoulder. ‘I mean the other kind, the need to make up for things. Or as we say in Waterford, the bigger the horsepower the smaller the prick behind the wheel.’

She walked on, aware of the silence behind her, of the girls staring and of Peadar at her shoulder. They got around the corner before Peadar managed to speak.

‘His face,’ he said. ‘You should have seen the gobshite’s face.’ Both started laughing, unable to stop, collapsing onto the nearest sofa, while the boys hovered, convinced their parents were cracking up. Danny’s eight–year–old face was such a picture of mortified respectability that he could have passed for Peadar’s father.

‘Stop it,’ he hissed, ‘you’re embarrassing me.’

Alison pulled him onto her lap, tickling him as he struggled and the others jumped up in a tangle of limbs. Now she felt truly on holidays.