The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright Page A

had the energy to remove. But there was nothing. I mean, there was nothing there that I could identify. It was only a glance.
    I heard something though, as I turned to leave; a terrible, soft noise, guttural and broken – and definitely human, though it sounded like a cat was dying, very quietly, behind the door. I was about to back away when I remembered the child had fits, and so I found myself stuck there, trying to do the right thing, while the little, broken mewlings continued. Up and then down. And then up again. And down.
    She was singing. It wasn’t a fit, it was a song. I put my head around the door in pure relief and there she was, sitting on the floor, with a big set of Bose headphones over her ears, crooning along.
    She dragged the headphones off as soon as she saw me. She even tried to hide them, behind her back.
    ‘You’re all right,’ I said. God, what a house .
    ‘My Mum doesn’t like it,’ she said.
    ‘Right.’
    ‘She says it makes me look stupid.’
    ‘Really?’ I said, keeping things cheerful.
    ‘You have no idea,’ she said, complicit, almost camp. The things I have to put up with .
    I laughed.
    ‘Did you hear about the magic tractor?’ I said.
    ‘No, what?’
    ‘It went down the lane and turned into a field.’
    She rolled her eyes.
    ‘What age are you, anyway?’
    ‘Like – nearly ten?’
    ‘Ah well,’ I said. ‘That’s soon cured.’
    ‘Are you looking for your coat?’
    ‘Not yet,’ I said.
    ‘It’s in the au pair’s room,’ she said, hopping up to show me anyway. Fortunately, there were other people coming to get their things: three men, the bulk of them filling the staircase from banister to wall. I had to wait until they were past before I could make my way downstairs.
    In my absence, the party had shifted up a gear. You can never catch the moment when it happens, but it always does: that split second when awkwardness flowers into intimacy. This is my favourite time. Those who were drinking had drunk too much, and the ones who were driving had ceased to matter. I got another white wine and floated through the room on a beautiful sea of noise; ended up slap bang against my brother-in-law, who bellowed at me that he had spent three years on the old-fashioned anti-depressants before he met my sister.
    ‘Just to take the edge off, you know?’
    Well I didn’t know. My brother-in-law is an engineer. He gets really uptight about health and safety on his construction sites, and this is as much insight into his emotional life as I need, thank you.
    ‘I was pretty stuck with it,’ he said. ‘Three years, you know?’
    ‘I can imagine.’
    Seán swung past with a bottle of white.
    ‘Are you drunk?’ he said, quietly.
    ‘Not really.’
    ‘Well, why the hell not?’ he shouted, and slopped some more into my glass. Then he did the same for Shay.
    ‘Shay my man, she’s a relative!’
    ‘Please,’ said Shay, holding up an innocent hand.
    ‘What? You think you got the better deal?’ said Seán. Then he turned back to me with a wink.
    It was an interesting tactic, flirting with someone you had no need to flirt with anymore. I could see the logic of it. Though I thought, also, his eyes were a little wild.
    Evie had come downstairs. I saw her shifting from foot to foot, in front of one of the academic types; an old man, who reached out to take the cloth of her blouse between thumb and finger.
    ‘Come here to me a minute.’
    I wanted us all to be sober for her: What age are you now? She wriggled and itched, and looked like she loved it too. Awful as it was to be noticed by these people (they’re nothing much, I wanted to shout over to her, they are no great shakes) she smiled and rolled her eyes to the wall, until her mother came to release her. Aileen set her hands on Evie’s shoulders, letting the child slip away from under them, and she disappeared among the adults, leaving a disturbance of lifted glasses, as she made her way across the room.
    Every time I saw her