and turns were lost now, the invented names in magic languages, the loyalties and betrayals. What remained were the real-life places over which the fictive world had been imposed: the cowshed behind their house, the overgrown reaches of the garden, gaps behind hedges, the damp shale running down to the river. And in the house: the attic, the staircase, the coat closet. Still these places gave Eileen a special feeling, or at least she could, if she willed, tune into a special feeling that was in them, an aesthetic frequency. They filled her with pleasure, with a thrill of something like excitement.
Like good stationery, heavy pens, unlined paper, they represented to her the possibility of imagination, a possibility so much finer in itself and more delicate than anything she had ever managed to imagine. No, her imagination let her down. It was something other people either had or didn’t want anyway. Eileen wanted and didn’t have it. Like Alice in her moral philosophy, she was caught between two positions. Maybe everyone was, in everything that mattered. At a knock on the door they looked up and their mother Mary entered, wearing her blue dress, her patent shoes, a feather dangling upright in her hair.
Then they all began talking, quickly, remonstrating, laughing, complaining, adjusting each other’s clothing, and the activity in the room was rapid and noisy, like the activity of birds. Lola wanted to repin Eileen’s hair, to make it looser at the back, and Mary wanted to try on at the last minute an alternative pair of shoes, and Eileen, with her slim white arms like reeds, like branches, began to unpin her hair, held a shawl up to Mary’s shoulders, removed a stray eyelash from Lola’s powdered cheekbone, laughing, speaking in a quick light voice and breaking into laughter once again. Mary too was thinking of her childhood, their little terraced house with the shop next door, slivers of ice cream between wafers, chequered oilcloth on the kitchen table, patterned crockery behind glass. Cold bright summer days, air clear as cold water, and the gorse a blaze of
yellow. To think of childhood gave her a funny queasy feeling, because it had been real life once and now it was something else. The old people had died, the babies had grown old. It would happen also to Eileen, also to Lola, who were young and beautiful now, loving and hating one another, laughing with white teeth, smelling of perfume. Another knock sounded on the door, and they fell silent and looked around. Their father Pat entered. How are the women, he said. It was time to go to the church then, the car was waiting, Pat was wearing his suit. He was thinking about his wife, about Mary, how like a stranger she had seemed to him the first time she was pregnant, how something had come over her, some seriousness, some strange purpose in her words, in her movements, and he found it uncomfortable, it made him want to laugh, he didn’t know why. She was changing, turning her face away from him, toward some other experience.
In time it passed, Lola was born, healthy thank God, and he told himself they’d never do it again. Too much strangeness for one life. As usual, as usual, he had been wrong.
Outside, the air stirred the trees, sifted its cool breath over their faces. They climbed into the car together. Lola pressed her nose to the window and left a tiny circle of powder on the glass. The church was squat and grey with long thin stained-glass windows, rose-coloured and blue and amber. As they entered, the electric organ played, the scent of incense touched them, damp and fragrant, and the rustle of cloth, the creaking of pews, as everyone stood and watched them processing together up the polished floor of the aisle, Lola stately and magnificent in white, radiant with the realisation of cherished plans, accepting with composure the gazes offered to her, not bowed but upright, Pat in his suit, dignified, tender in his awkwardness, Mary smiling nervously, clutching Eileen’s hand with a damp grip, and Eileen herself slim and pale in green, dark hair pinned loosely behind her, arms bare, head held aloft on her long neck
like a flower, and turning her eyes quietly she looked for him but did not see him.
Matthew was waiting at the altar, frightened, joyful, and the priest spoke, the vows were exchanged. O my dove, in the clefts of the rock, in the covert of the cliff, let me see your face, let me hear your voice, for your voice is sweet, and your face is lovely. Afterwards on the gravel outside the church, the white daylight, the chill of wind, spindly fingers of foliage, everyone laughing, shaking hands, embracing. The bridal party stood together under a tree to have their photograph taken, inching closer and further apart, murmuring to one another with fixed smiles. Only then Eileen saw him, Simon, standing at the church door watching her. They looked at one another for a long moment without moving, without speaking, and in the soil of that look many years were buried. He remembered when she was born, the Lydons’ new baby, and the first time he was allowed to see her, the red wrinkled face more like an old creature than something new, baby Eileen, and his parents said he was always asking for a sister after that, not just any sibling, a sister, like what Lola had. She remembered him too, the older boy who went to a different school, lively, intelligent, with those strange seizures he suffered from, an object of sympathy among the adults, which made him, though he was a beautiful child, somehow freakish. Her mother always saying how lovely his manners were, a little gentleman. And she was the adolescent girl he remembered, thin and freckled, standing at the kitchen counter with her legs twisted one around the other, fifteen, always frowning. Speaking not at all or suddenly and too much, her bad tempers, her friendlessness. And those frank looks she turned on him, pink in the face and almost cross. He was that too, for her, the boy, the young man of twenty, who helped out on the farm for the summer, she had seen him, with incomparable tenderness, bottle-feeding a baby lamb, she would spend a week in agony over a glance