On the morning of the wedding, Eileen sat on the bed in the bridal suite while Lola was at the dressing table. Touching a finger to her face, Lola said: I think she did the eyes too heavy. She was wearing a white wedding gown, strapless, simple in its shape. You look beautiful, said Eileen. Their eyes met in the mirror and Lola grimaced, rose, went to the window. Outside, the early afternoon was white, casting a thin watery light, but Lola stood with her back to the glass, facing Eileen, studying her where she sat on the ample mattress. For a time they looked at one another, aggrieved, guilty, mistrustful, contrite. Finally Lola said: Well? Eileen glanced down at a thin gold watch she wore on her left wrist. It’s only ten to, she said. She was wearing a pale-green dress, celadon, her hair pinned back, she was thinking of something else then, they both were. Lola remembered paddling in the sea at Strandhill, or was it Rosses Point that day, or Enniscrone. The gritty texture of sand under her fingernails and in her scalp, also the taste of salt. Then she had fallen and found herself swallowing seawater, painful in her nose and throat, a confusion of light and sensation, she remembered crying, and being carried up the beach in her father’s arms. A red-and-orange towel. Later, driving back to Sligo town, strapped into the back seat, with the radio crackling, pinpoints of light visible in the distance. In the darkness by the side of the road, a van that sold sausages and chips, the hatch open, the sting of vinegar. Sleeping in a cousin’s bedroom that night, with different books on the shelf, the furniture casting different shadows in the light from an unfamiliar window. At midnight the cathedral bells. Downstairs the adults were talking, downstairs the lights were on and there were glasses of beer. Eileen was thinking also of childhood, one of Lola’s make-believe games, a hidden kingdom, palaces, dukes and peasants, enchanted rivers, forests, lights in the sky. All the twists
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.