When she tried to think what they looked like, the women who stood in front of him at wine receptions, or at his desk, or at the door of his office, the nearest she could come up with was "drenched".
They stood with their arms slightly lifted from their sides, as though their fingers were dripping water. Like a childhood picture of the Princess and the Pea, when the princess arrives at the palace door; her dress a sopping sheet, and rain trickling out of her little green shoes.
Of course there would be other things going on - chat, or laughter, or the way they worked their eyes, but none of it so remarkable as this straining stillness; standing at his threshold, or placing some file quickly on his desk, or interrupting his small talk in a crowd to say, quite wordlessly, "Fuck me again. You must. You must fuck me again", because this was very clearly what was going on, or what had gone on and would not, at a guess, continue to go on, anymore.
It was bad for business, in a mild sort of way. Catherine was a client, after all - but these women ignored her; they just couldn't wrench their heads around to be introduced. And she did feel herself to be elbowed aside, "You must not speak to her, whoever she is. You must fuck me instead. Now. Anytime."
It happened three, perhaps four times, in the few years she dealt with him. Mostly Catherine was amused by it, though she did find the women really very rude. Each of them so beautiful and distinctive. Of course they didn't last. And she might have felt aggrieved on their behalf - for the way they were pushed out while he continued to make his way up - were it not for their ambition, which was so open, almost livid. Catherine had never slept with anyone for gain, in her life. If you could call it gain.
She wondered if she was missing something. She felt so ordinary beside them, fuddy and intellectual. There was too much pleasure, for her, in the way he just looked at them steadily, and carefully spoke, and then turned back to her to say,
"Sorry, sorry. Go on."
Phil Brogan. Five foot nine, at a push. Fortyish. Sex machine.
Actually, she liked him. Clever and restless and constantly perceptive - in some ways, he was not like a man at all. And it wasn't as if he was married, as she said to her partner, Tom, so why not? There was a story about a stationery cupboard - which she didn't believe - but even so, it said something about the suddeness of him. She assumed this was what got them going. Though she didn't know what it was that brought them back for more.
"Big cock," said Tom.
"Do you think?" she said.
"Absolutely."
Which was a brittle enough attempt, as these conversations go. But recently, they had other things on their minds.
Catherine's mother was dying, far too young, and far too painfully, of cancer. So as well as all the phone calls and the ferrying, there was the mother thing, which is to say, too much complaining and too much love. She was in chemotherapy: four months in from a late diagnosis, and an unknown number of weeks or months or years from the end of it all. Her mother was so weak she reeled into the car door everytime Catherine went around a corner, and when they braked, it was only the seat belt that stopped her from bumping her face on the dash. And she complained all the time. Catherine was going too fast, she was going too slow, she wanted to have a cigarette; what was wrong with high heels, when was Catherine going to lighten up, get something done with her hair.
And then in the hospital, when the pain relief was good, such peace: her mother existing - breath by breath - at her side. Both of them listening to her body, the silent chemicals doing their silent work, and the dent on the side of her breast the largest thing in the room.
Catherine thought about bees in a swarm; the cancer being smoked out of her mother's body to settle in the space under her arm, a drowsy mass. If she could just scoop them up as a beekeeper might, and carry them away, and leave not a single one behind.
In the evening, while Catherine dozed in the chair, a hand might come out to startle her. It would touch her arm or face, her mother's voice behind it, saying, "Go home, Kitty-kit. Go home to that man of yours".
TOM WAS being sadly perfect since these days; there was always food in the fridge and clean T-shirts in the basket, and silence when silence was the necessary thing. But Catherine knew that once the light was out he would break across the space between them, in a rush to comfort her, with hands and mouth and all his large, physical self.
"Don't," she said. "Don't make me cry."
As the months ground on she told him it was like she was missing something down there - a widget, or a grommet, or a switch you might throw. She did not say that when he stroked her, it felt like her skin was coming off under his hands.
And so they had some sex - not much - and snapped at each other or did not speak, while Catherine's mother was discharged with no talk of readmission and, around a schedule of home helps and neighbours, work staggered on.
The maddest thing was the way she decided her mother must be better, if the hospital had let her go: the way she thought, very clearly and thoroughly, that even though her mother was not cured - even though she was, in fact, dying - she was also much, much better, in many significant ways. Of course she was better. She was back home.
In the middle of this strange and untrue time, Phil Brogan rang. They had been invited to a conference in Killarney, he said, in May. Would she do it? Would she mind? The hotel was fantastically swish. Call it a freebie. Her Christmas bottle of brandy, arriving early in the year.
"Hang on," she said, and checked at her diary. She could go if her mother was a little better by May. Or she could go if her mother was dead by, say, the end of April. But if her mother was actively dying during those four days in May, then Catherine would not be able to make it. So, because she loved her mother, there was only one answer she could give,
"Yes. No problem. Thanks". Not even stopping to think whether a conference in Killarney was really her bag.
In the next four weeks her mother's pain became unbearable and, talking to her GP, Catherine realised that she would have to beg for a hospice bed. Once she gave in to the idea of death, she could not stand the wait. People weren't supposed to linger in hospices - who was clogging up all the beds? Keep moving, she shouted in her head. Keep moving.
Nights, she and her sister took turns to sleep in their mother's spare room with a shelf-full of medication and a list of times and doses that they checked and re-checked until the writing made no sense. Rolling her mother over to change the soiled sheet, or scolding her while she tried to get a hypodermic into her thigh, Catherine was sustained by a peculiar fantasy - she was riding a horse around the lakes of Killarney, like a bad costume drama, with Phil Brogan in tow. Sometimes, they got down off the horses and went for a swim. Sometimes, they stopped under a spreading oak tree.
And then the hospice. The doctors were generous with their drips and shots - her mother one day wild on morphine, sitting up in bed, applying green eye-shadow and saying, "These are the things I regret: I never slept with a Frenchman. I never slept with that little fucker whatsisname who went on to make all the money. I didn't enjoy you girls enough when you were still young enough not to thwart me. I deeply resent all that dieting. Deeply. Bitterly. What else? Nothing. I hate the taste of caviar."
For two weeks, Catherine walked the corridors with sympathetic nurses and murmuring friends and did not give in to the obscene urge she had, which was to say, "Well she'll have to die soon. I am going to Killarney in May."
In the event, her mother made it with more than a week to spare.
Catherine threw twelve white roses into the open grave, and stepped back from the loose earth and the sharp drop. Tom held her by the waist and forearm as though they were skating, and that was what it felt like - an incredible lightness as she walked away from the mess of ground. The air was shocking; pure and sharp, with the smell of early summer rising from the soil. In the distance, someone was mowing the graveyard grass. It was May. The planet was turning. Her feet still touched the ground.
SHE PACKED and repacked for Killarney four or five times. She had to bring togs; she had to have business suits, and dresses for the evening, and mid-morning jeans for lounging around in and horse-riding gear. She wondered if she could play golf.
"Have I ever played golf?" she shouted at Tom through the open bedroom door.
"No," he said.
"I'm sure I played golf with you once. Somewhere high - like Howth, or Bray Head."
"Not with me," said Tom.
That evening, he walked into the bathroom as she was waxing her legs, and winced, and went back out again. In the morning, he dragged the oversized suitcase to the car, and kissed her on the forehead and said, "Relax. Have a good time".
The hotel was a large old country house. Catherine felt like another person when she walked up the granite steps: she felt like a person who liked hotels. There wasn't a piece of chintz in sight, it was all slate and warm wood and waffle-cloth robes.
She rang Phil's room from the phone beside her bed. She could hear him shift and settle after he picked up, and she knew that he was lying down too.
"So. You made it." Then he didn't seem to want to hang up, for a while.
They met downstairs and ordered coffee,
"No," he said. "What the hell, it's after four, we could have a gin and tonic or a beer, something fizzy, what about champagne? Do you do it by the glass?"
The waitress blushed. Catherine thought he was being really cheesy, until he turned back to her and said,
"Sparkling wine?"
It wasn't the waitress he wanted.
It was true. Phil Brogan wanted to do something very sudden and very urgent with her, Catherine Maguire , recently bereaved. Or, seeing as this was a hotel and not a stationery cupboard, something very urgent and very slow. She felt a rising impulse to giggle, but he held her gaze and did not look away. There was nothing in this guy's pants that liked a joke. This was what all the drenched girls knew. This imperative. This trap.
"A gin and tonic is fine," she said.
Horrible to be so mirthless, she thought, and wondered if they would end up in his room, or do it in hers.
Phil took out his mobile and went, with a flourish, to switch it off.
"Hang on. Sorry. One last call."
It was to a florist. The flowers he had ordered for his mother? He had changed his mind. "Not an orchid - roses. Twelve. Red. Right. To my darling mother on her birthday."
What a romantic.
When she thought about it later, this phone call was the weirdest moment of the whole three days - the helpless need he had to mark her cards. He loved his mother. No wonder he was still single. Catherine didn't think they made them like that, anymore.
But at the time, it was the coincidence that startled her. This wasn't about sex or betrayal, this was about flowers falling into a grave. It was about red roses or white. It was about dying. It was something she had to do.
Meanwhile, she did not know how these seductions went. Who moved? Who demurred? Did it last for three nights, or half a night? And would she be doomed, ever afterwards to supplication and hunger; not being able to cross the threshold of his office, but standing in the rain at the door.
She left him to shower and change, then came down to dinner and flirted like crazy over the poached wild salmon. Her mother would have been proud of her. Actually, though, there was nothing else she could do - she could hardly speak, so she might as well simper. It was unbearable. At half past twelve she fled from the bar with a quick goodnight, and lay awake endlessly in the dark of her room.
She thought about Tom. Sometime before dawn she got out of bed and looked in the mirror: it was a different body in there. Grief had made her thin.
In the morning she called Phil's room from the front desk and he climbed into the car beside her, his hair still damp from the shower. She drove to a larger, cheaper hotel in town, where they walked into a function room and they did their spiel, and were good at it. After which there was the whole afternoon to fill before darkness and sex, or no sex, one more time. Phil seemed amused by all this scheduling - the intimacy of it - and back at their own hotel, he suggested they go their separate ways for a while. What for? Catherine hired a horse and trekked a path behind the hotel that opened into scrubland high above the famous lakes. She looked at them far below; green and grey, as the weather chased across the water. She looked up at the sky, and across at the light, and around her at the lichened, small oaks with their dry, scrubby branches. The horse's mane under her hand was thick and electric. She picked up the reins and turned towards home.
They met for drinks at five, by which time, Catherine could not speak at all. Which was fine. Phil told her about himself - his scrambler bike, his trip to Mexico, his teacher with the strap. He was at his interesting best. But every time she opened her mouth, he just looked at her. Why was she always throwing things off kilter? There was something that had to happen before they had sex, a personal thing, and she didn't know what it was.
"Will you have another one?" he said, waggling his empty glass.
"Yes," said Catherine. "I think I will. My mother just died."
He missed a beat.
"I'm sorry to hear it," he said.
"Well when I say 'just', it was actually quite a while ago, now."
"I see."
"Sometimes, it feels closer, that's all. It sort of sneaks up on you."
"Yes," he said. "I think I know what you mean."
It was, possibly, the rudest thing she had ever said.
OVER DINNER, she realised that he was trying to impress her. That was why she was supposed to listen and not talk back to him. Her mother used to tell her these things - she was not supposed to impress him: it was supposed to work the other way around. So she smiled, in an impressed sort of way, and tried not to think about the look in his eye, or the exact heft of his dick in her hand. She knew that if it didn't happen tonight the whole situation would become unpleasant, so she planned her move, using the moment when they pushed back from the table to suggest a walk in the garden at the back of the hotel. He looked at her and nearly smiled. Good girl, he seemed to say. Well done.
They went out into the moonlight and walked in precoital silence down shallow avenues of clipped box. Some of the roses were out already, white and grey against the black of the bushes, and there were low pools of green where a line of lights showed the way.
It was May. The central path was shaggy with lavender not yet in bloom. Someone had thrown a sweater over the gatepost at the end of the walk that, as they got closer, shifted in the corner of her eye. Catherine looked. Oozing over the concrete ball was a dripping, black, velvet swarm. Clumps of bees fell from the ragged edges, or crawled back up the gatepost to rejoin the mass. It was like watching some slow liquid spill and then unspill itself; honey making its way back into the jar.
"Bees," she said to Phil, who stood stock still as she walked forward to stare at them. Then she ducked down to catch a falling cluster and set it back on the pile. "Jesus," she heard him say behind her. The bees were bristly and soft, and their tiny legs clung to her fingertips as she shook them back into the mess of black wings. She watched them until she could not tell them apart. Then she started to cry.
But this was not what she was ashamed of, finally, as Phil Brogan lost his moment and walked her back into the hotel. She was ashamed of what she had felt as she stepped away from her mother's grave. That lightness - it was desire. And it was vast. The smell of the air and of the soil and the grass; Tom not supporting her with his arms so much as holding her to the skin of the earth. It waslike she could fuck anything: the Killarney lakes and the sky that ran over them, and posh hotels with waffle-cloth robes, and the pink scent of a rose that showed grey in the darkness, and the whole lovely month of May. She could swim in it, and swallow it, and cram it into her in each and every possible way.
All of it, that is, except for this unpleasant man, who could not face his own consequences, who stood outside her hotel bedroom and said,
"What about a night-cap? You must have got a fright".
Catherine looked at him. She did not know where the air stopped and her skin began.
"No. Not really," she said.