She opened them again to glance back at her children’s excited faces. They had passed the last roundabout for Wexford town and the N25 for Waterford. These were the final miles, past the turnoff for Kilmore Quay and through Killinick in the wink of an eye. Sheila silently mouthed the words ‘How much longer?’ and suddenly Alison felt like a child herself again. She strained to glimpse the sign for the turn left, which took them down the wide country road with a dozen signs on every bend for hotels and guesthouses and always, the fourth one down, for Fitzgerald’s.
They were here now, a turn left at a garage, a sharp right again and the railway bridge was before them. Soon the first glimpse of the sea. The children craned their necks forward. But it was different for them, not like the solitary time she had come all those years ago. They expected this as a right, year after year, their break at Fitzgerald’s, remarkable and yet routine. They were excited, yet she wanted their excitement to be more. She half resented the fact they were not shouting with joy. She wanted brass bands, she didn’t know what she wanted. She wanted to look out and see her father straining under his suitcases. She wanted to call, ‘We’re here by right now, Dad, year after year.’ She wanted to feel twelve again. She wanted to cry, remembering how she had honestly expected never to see this hotel again except as a woman riddled with cancer.
Peadar turned left and suddenly it was there, on the right, rising up in cream and blue, with tennis courts visible and palm trees in the garden. Every year something changed, every year something new, but still always it was Fitzgerald’s.
The car park on the left was crammed with sleek cars, with one battered old van incongruously among them. Peadar drove in through the cream pillars and found a spot near the grass. He flung his door open, his shoulders stiff from driving, and opened the back door for Danny to jump up into his arms. He threw his son into the air and caught him as Danny raised his fist like he’d scored a goal.
‘Fitzgerald’s,’ Danny said. ‘We’re here, Daddy, we’re here!’
Shane and Sheila clambered out, running to the wall to peer across at it. Their faces were mesmerised. Peadar walked around the car to put his arm around her, then looked down.
‘Hey,’ he asked quietly, ‘why are you crying?’
She looked at him. She remembered her mother dying, her father lost and left behind. She remembered herself as an overlooked child in this hotel, the future she had imagined. She remembered how close that BMW had come to killing them, the coldness of Dr O’Gorman’s hand on her breast. Alison put her arms around him.
‘You big fool,’ she said. ‘I’m crying because I’m happy.’
The welcoming sherry reception was in the foyer at seven o’clock. In the early years Peadar and herself had laughed at it and never attended, but now it seemed an integral part of their holiday. By six–thirty the major unpacking was done and strolling down to the foyer forced her to relax. The boys were asking about it from the time they had taken their first swim at half–four. To them ‘reception’ had the same ring as ‘party’ and a party was still a party even if it only consisted of adults in suits chatting away on the striped sofas.
She knew they would get bored of it within minutes. Once they had clung to her side as Sheila did now, with the colouring book and crayons she would soon tire of and demand to be snuggled up instead on Alison’s knee. The boys waited only to get glasses of orange juice from the bow–tied waiters at the white table beside the dining room windows. Danny drained his glass and called to Shane. Like a shadow, his younger brother followed him down the corridor, ready to turn the slightest occurrence into an adventure.
Alison was happy to let them go, once she could keep an eye on the main doorway. Danny had finally reached an age to explore by himself and she knew how he loved to delve into every corner and alcove of the hotel. There were so many rooms he would have to peek into: the card room that was always empty; the smoking room with its blazing log fire even on summer nights; the TV room where Geraldine and Aoife, the children’s activities co–ordinators, were already screening the first evening’s video. The boys would settle down to watch it shortly, but Danny still insisted on either Peadar or her sitting in an armchair in the corridor. For all his new found toughness, ghosts and dinosaurs frightened him and they would have to be within reach if the film grew too scary.
The babysitter was due at eight. Alison hoped it wouldn’t be one of those teenage girls it was impossible to get a word from. The usual bedtime arguments were still an hour away. For now Sheila was happy colouring and Peadar had fallen into reluctant conversation at the table where the waiters were pouring more sherry. She could tell by the way he held the sherry glasses, poised to flee back to her. The tall man in the suit beside him laughed at what Peadar obviously hoped was a closing remark.
‘Yes, yes,’ she heard the man’s booming voice agree. ‘It’s great to forget the pressures of work and relax. So tell me, what do you do?’
Peadar caught her glance and discreetly threw his eyes to heaven. She knew he was too polite to disentangle himself from the conversation and also that, like a mother with a first child, he would soon begin to talk about the school extension. She didn’t mind. She was enjoying these rare moments alone. Two elderly couples on the sofas beside her were making friends. A waitress bent to offer her a tray of hors d’oeuvres. She finished her first sherry and looked around. Other hotels might have leisure centres and chefs that were equally good, but she had never seen anywhere to match Fitzgerald’s paintings. And they weren’t just the safe landscapes you saw elsewhere. Here paintings accosted you; some stunning, many unfathomable but every one challenging. She had grown to know the names by now: Le Broquy, Crozier, Nora McGuinness, Patrick Collins and fantastical childhood landscapes by Martin Gale that the boys loved to stare at.
Sheila pulled at her sleeve for attention, holding up a page from her colouring book streaked almost entirely with red crayon. Alison praised it and found her another page to colour. She looked up and a face caught her attention, although she wasn’t sure why. It had a disconcerting familiarity, yet the man it belonged to looked somehow out of place. He leaned down, replying to some remark from a couple in their fifties seated beside the piano player.
She recognised them as the Bennetts. They were childless, Scottish and superb dancers. They came for five nights at Easter and another week in October and entered every competition. Each Thursday night at prizegiving they walked across the dance floor to receive Fitzgerald’s mugs and plates for table tennis, indoor bowls and crazy golf. She wondered what they did with their endless supply of crockery and liked to imagine Mrs Bennett having tantrums, smashing things, while the petite Mr Bennett screamed, ‘No, dear, please, not the table quiz mug!’
Mrs Bennett looked up and waved in recognition. Alison smiled back as both Mr Bennett and the man glanced in her direction. The man’s gaze perturbed her. There was something not right about him, like a photo–fit that didn’t match. His skin seemed younger than his eyes. She couldn’t explain why this bothered her. There were so many faces you saw here year after year. Nobody could expect to remember them all. She looked away, feigning great interest in Sheila’s colouring, yet aware that the man was leaving the Bennetts and walking towards her. He even seemed to slow down as she kept her head buried over her daughter’s colouring book, then he strolled on, past Mr Diekhoff and his son, to wherever he had parked his own wife.
Mr Diekhoff had been coming here from Cologne for twenty–five years, ever since his son, Heinrich, was four. Alison watched the Down’s Syndrome boy sit quietly beside his widowed father. Strictly speaking he wasn’t a boy, but she couldn’t think of him as approaching thirty, no more than she could bear to imagine his life if he outlived his father. Heinrich’s presence here – politely asking women he knew for one dance and perpetually winning the crazy golf competition – was another talisman of her holiday. It was fifteen years since his mother had died, but