Temptation. Dermot Bolger

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

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Temptation. Dermot Bolger

Temptation

Contents

SUNDAY