A History of Loneliness

by John Boyne

  I shook my head. I felt I was under a death sentence of some sort.

  ‘You, my dear Odran,’ he said, leaning forward on his desk, both hands before him, a big brute of a man like Orson Welles playing Cardinal Wolsey, ‘you can go back to your precious school and teach those little bastards to respect the Church.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  1994

  OF ALL THE places that my mother might have chosen to die, standing by the altar of the Good Shepherd in Churchtown, with a can of Pledge in one hand and a duster in the other, would probably have been close to the top of the list.

  She started volunteering there in 1965, a year after the events in Wexford, arranging the flowers on a Saturday night in preparation for Sunday morning’s Masses, hoovering the carpets twice weekly, laundering and ironing the altar covers or the priests’ vestments and scrubbing down the sacristy counters when the room was empty. She wasn’t alone in these endeavours, of course. There was a group of women, perhaps ten of them, who volunteered in a similar way and they enforced strict rules of seniority. One might be allowed to wash the parish priest’s soutane, but another might only be allowed the curate’s. My mother never complained; she was only thirty-eight years old when she joined their collective and most of the ladies were a good fifteen years older than her. She knew that she only had to bide her time and one by one she would see them off. She wasn’t wrong either; by the day she died, she was firmly in charge.

  There were men who volunteered as well, of course, but God forbid that any of them should get stuck with the menial work. No, the men read the lessons on a Sunday morning when there was a decent-sized congregation present to testify to their saintliness. Or they became ministers of the Eucharist, standing at the edges of the altar with expressions of piety on their faces as they offered the body of Christ to those members of the flock who had failed to arrive early enough to sit by the centre aisles, where the priest himself gave communion. The men helped to write the parish newsletter, but the women delivered it; the men organized the church social evenings, but the women cleaned up when they were over; the men encouraged the children to take part in family Masses, but the women had to look after them when they did. This was not particular to my mother’s day or my mother’s church; I have known men and women like this all my life and there are some things, rotten and discordant to the eye, that will never change.

  Mam had not been well for some time, spending a week in hospital the previous summer with high blood pressure and then falling on the ice in January when she was making her way along the Braemor Road for the post office at The Triangle, badly spraining her ankle. She wasn’t an old woman, only sixty-seven, and I felt a strong sense of injustice that she was taken before her time, but then our family, it seems, was destined to be taken young.

  I heard about her death on a Saturday morning while I was celebrating ten o’clock Mass in the church at Terenure College. We usually had a good turn-out at this time, at least sixty people of all ages would show up, but they were an impatient group, hoping to get in and out by half past at the latest in order to get on with their day. I glanced up during the Eucharistic prayer to see my brother-in-law, Kristian, entering through the rear door and taking a seat in the back row, and I hesitated with my words, trying to rationalize his presence, for in all the years that I had known him, I had never seen him set foot inside a church outside of his wedding day and the christenings of his two sons. Something must be wrong. Hannah might have had an accident; but no, if that was the case then he would be with her and someone else would have come to get me. Perhaps Mam had taken another fall and my sister was by her bedside in the hospital. I whizzed through the rest of the service and the faithful were back out on the street by twenty past the hour, delighted with themselves and with me, and I beckoned Kristian to follow me as I made my way back towards the sacristy.

  ‘Will you sit down, Kristian?’ I asked, when he followed me in.

  ‘No, Odran, I think I will stand.’

  ‘I suppose something has happened, has it? It’s not often I see you here.’

  ‘I have a bit of bad news,’ he said, looking around at the unfamiliar objects, perhaps wondering what I did with all these ciboria, chalices and communion cups.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘It’s your mother,’ he told me. ‘She’s had a bit of a turn.’

  ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘Not really, no,’ he replied. ‘She has decided to die, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Ah here,’ I said, sitting down, feeling the room begin to spin a little. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Odran.’

  ‘How did it happen?’

  He told me and I nodded, trying to take it all in, but failing. A stroke was what they were saying. I had seen her only a few days before, when she asked me to meet her in town for a coffee to celebrate my birthday. We had gone to Bewley’s Café on Grafton Street for old time’s sake, but had to move seats as there was a young fella and a young one sitting at the table next to ours who couldn’t keep their hands off each other long enough to eat their cream slices.

  ‘Have they no shame?’ she asked, leading me to a table at the rear of the room.

  ‘Ah sure they’re young,’ I said, not wanting to discuss it particularly.

  ‘I was young myself once,’ she replied. ‘I didn’t carry on like a whore.’

  I had noticed a bitterness enter her conversation and her language over the last few years. She’d grown angry with the world and it didn’t suit her. She had always been a placid enough person – except when it came to matters of religion, of course – but since her late fifties she had started to view the world askew, as if it was a source of constant annoyance to her.

  ‘Are you well anyway?’ she asked me.

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Are you eating?’

  ‘I am, of course. Sure I’d die if I didn’t.’

  ‘You look terrible thin.’

  I raised an eyebrow for I knew full well that I could stand to get a bit more exercise. I spent too much time sitting in a classroom or behind the desk in the school library. I was thirty-nine and only a few days before had asked Jack Hooper, our permanently ill-tempered physical education teacher, whether he might not give me some instructions in how to use the gym equipment. He seemed irritated by the question, telling me that the weights and machines were for the use of the rugby team only.

  ‘Well sure the rugby team can’t use them all the time, can they?’ I asked.

  ‘Would you know how to use them though, Father?’ he asked, looking annoyed by my audacity. ‘You might break them or do yourself an injury.’

  ‘That’s why I’m asking for your help,’ I told him, smiling. ‘So you can show me. It’s not a problem, is it?’

  It turned out that it was. He wouldn’t let me anywhere near them.

  ‘How are things at the school?’ she asked.

  ‘Busy as always.’

  ‘I was over with your sister last night. She has those two boys spoiled. Jonas is a quiet little fellow, all the same,’ she said, sipping her coffee and pulling a face as if it tasted of sewage. ‘Never has his head out of a book. But Aidan’s a scream. So full of life. You’d never stop laughing when he’s around.’

  I smiled. It was true. At that time, Aidan was the life and soul of any gathering with his impressions and his jokes and the way he’d belt out a song at a party without even being asked. He moved his hips like Dickie Rock and stretched one arm out, the fingers waving in the air like Elvis. He was gas.

  ‘He’ll end up on the stage, that one,’ said Mam.

  ‘He might,’ I agreed.

  ‘He will, I promise you. I never saw a child so full of joy as him. Or with such a need to be on display.’ She put her cup down and looked around as if she was afraid of being overheard. ‘Did you hear about Father Stewart?’ she asked, lowering her voice.

  ‘I did,’ I said, for it was the talk of the parishes.

  ‘Has he been in to
uch with you at all?’

  ‘Why would he be?’ I asked. ‘Sure I barely know the man.’

  ‘You were at the seminary together.’

  ‘He was two years behind me, Mam.’

  She leaned forward, hoping for a bit of gossip. ‘But is it true what they’re saying?’ she asked and I shrugged, for although I knew it was, I didn’t much feel like discussing it. For Father Stewart had turned in his collar, resigned his office and run off to the Canary Islands with a woman he’d met at the Eurovision Song Contest in Zagreb. She’d been representing Czechoslovakia and came in sixteenth. I saw her on the telly myself. She had a decent enough voice on her. I thought she could have done better. In the contest, I mean.

  ‘Did you ever hear the like of it?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m sure he struggled with his decision,’ I said.

  ‘I doubt it,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘He was always eyeing up the young ones. I didn’t trust him. He had a glint in his eye that spoke of unwholesome appetites. I’m glad he’s gone. If you ever did something like that, I don’t think I’d ever get over the shame of it. His poor mother must be beside herself.’

  I said nothing. I tried to imagine what would have happened if I had written to my mother from Rome and told her that I would not be coming back, that I was no longer living in the Vatican, nor even at the Pontifical Irish College, but was staying in an apartment on the Vicolo della Campana with a woman who worked as a waitress in a café.

  ‘How are the neighbours?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh we’re finished on Father Stewart, are we?’ she asked me.

  ‘I have nothing to say about him, Mam,’ I said. ‘I told you, I barely knew him and I don’t know where he is now.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, unsatisfied, ‘Mrs Rathley has the arthritis something awful. She’s always asking after you, of course. She was always a great fan of yours. And Mrs Dunne across the road is in the garden all day and night. Those roses are all she has now, ever since himself ran off with his fancy piece. And you heard that those English people moved away?’

  I looked up. Those English people was how she always referred to the Summers family. She’d never bothered to learn their names, or if she had she’d never felt obliged to use them.

  ‘They have?’ I asked.

  ‘Sure they were never going to stay. They bought a house in Spain, if you can believe it. Said they were retiring there for the weather. More money than sense, if you ask me. I couldn’t live in Spain, could you? The son became an estate agent, I heard. I wasn’t surprised. He was always a shifty sort. He had a look in his eye I didn’t trust. And the daughter, well you remember the daughter?’ She fixed me with a hostile stare; the anger had not diminished in her, not even after twenty years.

  ‘Katherine,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, something like that,’ she said. ‘She does the weather now on the ITV.’

  ‘She doesn’t!’ I said, fierce entertained by this notion.

  ‘Not the real ITV,’ she said quickly. ‘They wouldn’t have her. No, one of the regional channels. ITV Anglia or ITV Jersey, I think. Sure no one would be watching her on them, would they, but she’ll be lapping up the attention all the same. She was always desperate for it, as I recall. Do you ever hear from her at all, Father?’

  Did I mention that my mother always called me Father? I had asked her time and again not to, but she refused.

  ‘Sure why would I ever hear from her?’ I said, irritated by the way she poked and prodded at me.

  ‘Well weren’t you the best of pals once?’

  ‘Hardly. And if we were, it was so long ago that I’m sure she’d have forgotten about me by now.’ I tried to imagine what Katherine Summers would look like these days. I pictured her carrying a little more weight, her glamour a little faded, but with the lollipop still hanging out of her mouth. I imagined she was married, with children and had a home of her own. I tried to see myself in such a scenario – with her or with someone else – and found it was impossible.

  ‘Odran,’ said Kristian, snapping me out of my daydream. ‘Did you hear what I said?’

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked, looking up. Back in the sacristy. Back in the real world.

  ‘I said it was very sudden. She just collapsed in the church and by the time the ambulance got there she was already gone. There’s that at least. She didn’t suffer.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, uncertain how much of a relief that was. We had not always been close, Mam and I, and there were parts of our relationship that I did not like to explore, but I could not imagine a world without her in it. And I was an orphan now, too, a word that seemed incongruous to me, a Dickensian notion out of date in the twentieth century. Could a man be an orphan at thirty-nine, I wondered. I supposed that he could.

  ‘Where is she now?’ I asked.

  ‘They took her to St Vincent’s.’

  ‘Did someone give her the last rites?’

  He hesitated. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘And Hannah?’

  ‘She’s there with her. She’s waiting on us.’

  I nodded. ‘And the boys?’

  ‘I left them with a neighbour,’ he said. ‘They can stay there for the rest of the day. Until we get things sorted.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘I suppose we better get over there so.’

  I finished changing and we went outside; he’d parked his car in the semi-circle outside the school reception and I saw the boys from the rugby team making their way on to the pitches for their Saturday-morning training session as if nothing had happened, as if the world hadn’t changed entirely.

  ‘Did she say anything?’ I asked as we drove towards the hospital.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Any last words,’ I replied. ‘Did she say anything before she went?’

  He hesitated for a moment. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘Did you not hear?’

  ‘There wasn’t anyone there,’ he told me.

  ‘No one there? Do you mean that no one was there when she collapsed?’

  Kristian hesitated as he watched the traffic. He was always a very careful driver, both hands on the wheel at all times in the ten-to-two formation. Both eyes on the road. A Norwegian thing, perhaps. Irish drivers would be practically eating their lunches and watching the telly in the car. ‘Not as far as I know,’ he said.

  I thought about this. ‘And how long was she there before she was found?’ I asked.

  ‘A few hours, maybe,’ he said. ‘One of the other women came in and discovered her lying on the floor. She called the ambulance.’

  I took this in and tried to register it: the picture of my poor mother lying stretched out in front of the altar of the Good Shepherd Church, the life seeping out of her, her eyes slowly closing, her world growing dark, her breathing slowing down, her panic rising or a wonderful serenity descending. We would all experience such a moment in time.

  ‘Then how,’ I asked finally, my voice rising slightly, higher than it had any need to be in order to be heard in the car, ‘how on earth do you know that she didn’t suffer?’

  For months afterwards I would wake in the morning having forgotten that Mam was gone. I would wonder whether I should call her that day, whether there might be anything she needed, whether we were due a chat or whether I could put it off for a few days more. And then I would remember and it was a kick to the stomach every time, and occasionally I would put my head in my hands and groan and feel a loneliness unlike any that I had ever known before. Had I spent as much time with her as I should have done? It must be a terrible thing to know that you have been a bad parent, but worse to know that you have been an ungrateful child. These were not thoughts I could allow to play on my mind for too long; they were dangerous for a man like me.

  Tom Cardle celebrated my mother’s funeral Mass with me. He was stationed in Tralee at the time, having recently been moved from his last parish in Wexford, but he drove up and I laid out a sleeping bag on the sofa in my room at
the school and offered it to him for the night. It would be like old times, I told him. We could imagine we were just boys in the seminary again but without the Grand Silence to contend with. We could talk all night if we wanted.

  He was late arriving, but came to see Hannah and me in the house just before we left for the church to ask us about our mother and our memories of her, in search of things that he might say in his homily. He seemed concerned about doing this right; he showed great compassion towards us both.

  I had never seen him in such spiritual mode before and felt an urge to laugh when he placed his hands on Hannah’s shoulders and looked at her with concern on his face. They had known each other a little over the years, probably hearing each other’s name more often than they had met, and although Hannah had never been particularly religious, she thought well of Tom, perhaps because he was my best friend and she loved me. She took the boys to Mass on a Sunday, of course, but I suspected that was only because all the neighbours did so and it would have been more of a statement not to. She would have needed to feel a depth of opposition to the Church to go against it and she didn’t feel that way; she was apathetic at best. Aidan had made his First Communion and would soon be confirmed; Jonas was halfway there.

  The service itself was functional. Tom tried his best and I said a few words too, but it was not a demonstrative affair, although Aidan and Jonas, who had been close to their grandmother, showed some outward signs of emotion. Hannah looked a little shell-shocked and only when Tom mentioned little Cathal from the altar did she glance up and put a hand to her mouth, almost in horror of the situation unfolding before her.

  The coffin frightened me; I could barely stand to look at it.

  The burial left me fierce upset.

  Afterwards, we all went back to Hannah’s house where a spread had been laid on. There was a fair crew gathered. Most of the women who had volunteered in the church with Mam were fighting for supremacy in the kitchen as to who would get the right to boil the kettle, to wet the tea, to serve the two fathers in the living room. Their husbands sat in the front room watching a football match on the television. One of them lit a cigar when his team scored and his wife ran inside at the smell of it and asked him did he not have any respect for the dead, wasn’t poor Mrs Yates only just getting herself comfortable in her grave and there he was lighting that filthy thing as if it was the middle of Christmas. The unfortunate man gave her a look that suggested he would have liked to put the cigar out in her eye, but said nothing in front of company, merely walking quietly to the kitchen sink and rinsing the end in water before wrapping the cigar in kitchen paper and returning it to his inside pocket.