A History of Loneliness

by John Boyne

  ‘I’m sorry, Father,’ his wife said to me, but I simply shrugged and said it didn’t matter. He could do what he liked as far as I was concerned. It wasn’t my house, it was Hannah and Kristian’s. If they didn’t mind, why should I?

  As the evening wore on, the feeling of respectful misery gave way to light-heartedness, as these things tend to do. Kristian had a couple of crates of lager in a fridge out the back and the men, myself and Tom included, cracked these open while the women poured glasses of wine or sherry and told themselves that Mam would have been delighted with the send-off, even if Quinnsworth’s ham was nowhere near as good as Superquinn’s and they couldn’t imagine what Hannah had been thinking opting for the processed coleslaw instead of making it fresh herself.

  ‘What will we do with the house?’ I asked my sister, uncertain whether or not it was too soon to make plans of this sort, but she didn’t seem to mind.

  ‘Sell it, I suppose,’ she said. ‘The price of property these days. And a good solid house like that in Churchtown. You realize how much it’s worth, don’t you?’

  ‘I don’t,’ I replied. I never paid any attention to such things. I read in The Irish Times of how prices were rising and the sums that apartments alone could go for these days, let alone semidetached houses in a good area, were shocking, but I never paid any attention. I had no interest. She named a figure and I put my glass down and stared at her as if she was mad.

  ‘Are you having me on?’ I said.

  ‘And that would be on a bad day,’ piped up Kristian. ‘Realistically, you could be looking at twenty per cent more if there are multiple offers. Although there’ll be estate agent fees, death duties, taxes and what not. But still, you’re looking at a fair windfall. Sorry,’ he added immediately, having the good grace to look embarrassed by how grasping he sounded. I didn’t mind; he meant no harm. Kristian didn’t give a damn for money.

  ‘I’d never have thought it,’ I said.

  ‘The sooner we put it on the market the better,’ said Hannah. ‘There’s no point letting it go downhill and there’ll be vandals if the word gets out that the place is empty.’

  ‘How would we go about doing that?’

  ‘I can take care of it, if you like,’ said Kristian. ‘If you’d rather do it yourself, of course, then that’s fine too.’

  I thought about it. ‘If you were willing, Kristian,’ I said, ‘then that would suit me down to the ground. I don’t know the first thing about things like that.’

  ‘Right so,’ said Kristian. ‘Leave it with me for now and I’ll get back to you.’

  ‘Fifty-fifty split?’ asked Hannah and I thought it could only be the drink egging us on like this for surely it was a terribly inappropriate conversation for a funeral.

  ‘Sure what would I do with money like that?’ I asked. ‘I’d have no need for it.’

  She looked at me, an expression crossing her face that suggested she had wondered whether this might be the case and hoped it might, although she did not want to rob me of anything. She had a family life, of course, a mortgage. Two boys to look after. Schools to plan for. Universities one day in the future. Yearly trips for four of them back and forth to Lillehammer. I had none of those things. I was alone in the world.

  ‘You might find a need,’ said Hannah. ‘Once it was in your account.’

  ‘There’s five of us, isn’t there?’ I said. ‘You and Kristian, Aidan and Jonas and me. I’ll take a fifth. That’s all I’ll need. I might find a use for it when I’m older.’

  ‘A quarter,’ said Kristian. ‘I don’t need anything.’

  ‘We’ll leave it for today,’ said Hannah as Aidan hovered hopefully in the doorway with his guitar. There was a captive audience in the next room and he wanted to show off.

  ‘Today’s not the day for that, Aidan,’ said Kristian, shaking his head.

  ‘Sure maybe it’d cheer us all up,’ I said and he nodded and in we all went.

  Aidan sat down and started to play a song. ‘Sealed With A Kiss’. It was hard not to laugh as this little eight-year-old lad pledged to send her all his love every day in a letter, his eyes closed, so consumed was he by his passion for this nameless creature. He had a fine voice on him for a boy his age and I could see that he was revelling in the attention that he was getting, while Jonas simply sat in a corner with his Bobby Brewster, probably hoping that no one would call on him to do a turn next. When he finished, Aidan told us all that he’d been learning tap dancing in school and did we want to see it? We said we did and he ran upstairs to get his wooden board and came back down again, clack-clack-clacking away as fast as he could like Fred Astaire without the top hat and tails. He was a gas little fella, there was no doubt about it.

  ‘Have you been doing the dancing for long?’ Tom Cardle asked him when I found them in the kitchen together a little later.

  ‘Only a few months,’ said Aidan. ‘But my teacher says I could go all the way.’

  ‘All the way?’ asked Tom. ‘Where’s that then? The Olympia?’

  Aidan took a step back and opened his arms wide like a junior P. T. Barnum. ‘The West End!’ he said. ‘Broadway! The sky’s the limit!’

  I had a memory of my father saying something similar many years before and felt a deep sadness inside me, but Tom shook his head, thoroughly amused. ‘This is a fine one, isn’t he?’ he asked me. ‘He’s after telling me about all the television programme he watches. He says he wants to be on it himself some day.’

  ‘Do you not get goggle-eyed with all that telly?’ I asked him. ‘I’m surprised your mam allows it.’

  ‘She says I can watch one programme every night and whatever I want on the weekend.’

  ‘It’s a fine life you have,’ said Tom. ‘I had no such luxuries when I was your age.’

  ‘Did you not have a telly?’

  ‘We did not,’ he replied.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Sure we couldn’t afford one. And my dad didn’t like the look of them anyway. He said they’d probably explode and burn the house down.’ Aidan sniggered. ‘You may laugh, young man,’ continued Tom, ‘but you wouldn’t have been laughing if my father was here. He was a terrible man for the stick.’

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Aidan.

  ‘Ah come on, Tom,’ I said. ‘Sure he’s only a child.’

  ‘Sorry,’ replied Tom, turning away. ‘All I’m saying, Aidan, is that you’re lucky that you live here and now and not there and then.’ He looked back at my nephew and smiled. ‘You’re a fine little fella though, all the same, aren’t you? The big happy head on you.’

  It was my turn to smile now; it pleased me that Tom liked Aidan. It made me feel proud to be the uncle of a boy that everyone so clearly adored.

  ‘Uncle Odie,’ said Aidan, turning to me now. ‘Do you want to come upstairs and see my Star Wars figures?’

  ‘Sure you showed them to me earlier,’ I said, for I’d only been in the door when he’d dragged me up to the room that, to his great pride, was his alone as Jonas slept in the box-room next door. ‘Do you not remember?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said, frowning, before turning to Tom. ‘What about you, Father Tom?’ he asked. ‘Would you like to see them?’

  ‘Ah come on now, Aidan,’ said Hannah. ‘Sure Father Tom has no interest—’

  ‘Do you mean the film?’ asked Tom. ‘The old film? Are the boys still interested in Star Wars? That must be fifteen years old by now.’

  ‘Of course we are,’ insisted Aidan. ‘Star Wars is the best film ever made.’

  ‘Did you never see Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory?’ asked Tom. ‘I always liked that one. Your man in the big hat and the little lads with the orange faces.’

  ‘I have Darth Vader and Boba Fett and Luke Skywalker and the Death Star hanging off my ceiling,’ continued Aidan, ignoring the question as he counted these off on his fingers. ‘And loads of droids and a C-3PO with a wonky arm, but he still talks and—’

  ‘Ah here, this sounds like it needs
to be seen to be believed,’ said Tom. ‘I’ll take a look if you’ll show me.’

  Aidan clapped his hands together in delight and off the two of them went upstairs as Hannah came into the kitchen with some empty glasses from the living-room.

  ‘Are you all right, Odran?’ she asked me.

  ‘I am. And you?’

  ‘Ah sure.’ She turned the hot water on in the sink and put a few plates inside. ‘That’s most of them gone now anyway,’ she said. ‘The women leave when the sandwiches are finished. The men go when they’re told.’

  ‘Life goes on,’ I said.

  ‘It does. It was good of Father Tom to say the Mass with you, wasn’t it? I was worried about you doing it alone.’

  ‘Sure we go back a long way.’

  ‘Is he staying with you tonight?’

  ‘He is,’ I said. ‘I have a sleeping bag on the sofa for him. He’s got the car outside.’

  ‘A sleeping bag?’ asked Hannah, turning around just as Tom and Aidan reappeared before us, having gone up and down the stairs in only a minute or two. Aidan was still chattering away at the top of his voice about the Force and what it meant to be a member of the Galactic Federation and how he didn’t know how the actors in the film could bear to be in a scene with Darth Vader, even if it was only David Prowse under the suit, because there was nothing and no one in the world as scary as the Dark Lord.

  ‘I’d wet my pants if I saw him in real life,’ said Aidan. ‘I’D WET MY FREAKIN’ PANTS!’ he roared in delighted excitement.

  ‘Aidan!’ cried Hannah in horror as Tom and I burst out laughing.

  ‘What?’ he asked, holding out the palms of his hands to display his innocence. ‘I would! It’s the truth!’

  ‘I don’t care if it’s the truth. You don’t say things like that in front of your uncle and Father Tom.’

  Aidan shrugged, looking up at Tom then and grinning as Tom smiled back down, patting his head.

  ‘Is it right what Odran’s after telling me?’ asked Hannah. ‘That you’re sleeping in a bag on his sofa tonight?’

  ‘I am,’ said Tom. ‘Sure I’ve slept on worse. The beds in the cemetery were practically made of concrete.’

  ‘The cemetery?’

  ‘The seminary,’ he said, correcting himself. ‘There’s one for the head-doctors now.’

  ‘Would you not stay here?’ asked Hannah and Tom looked across at her, hesitating for only a moment.

  ‘Here?’ he asked. ‘In your house?’

  ‘Sure we have lots of room. Jonas can sleep on a cot in our room and you can have the box bedroom, the one next to Aidan here. It’d be a lot more comfortable.’

  Tom thought about it, frowning a little. ‘I don’t know,’ he said after a moment, a shadow passing across his face. ‘I’m happy enough with the sleeping bag.’

  ‘You might be, but I’m not,’ insisted Hannah. ‘And you’ve had a few drinks, remember. You can’t drive with drink on you.’

  ‘She’s right about that,’ I said. ‘I can get a taxi home, it’s not a problem.’

  ‘Come on, what do you say, Father?’ she insisted. ‘Will you not take the box bedroom? It’d be my way of thanking you for all you’ve done today.’

  He looked down at Aidan, who was looking up at him hopefully; perhaps he wanted to show him more of his collections. ‘All right so,’ he said finally. ‘If you’re sure it’s no trouble. It might be a bit easier on my back, I suppose.’

  ‘It’s no trouble at all. We’d be delighted to have you. Just don’t let this one keep you up all night with his stories,’ she added, nodding at her son. ‘He can talk for Ireland, this one.’

  I left about an hour later, when the darkness began to fall, saying goodbye to Tom and promising to give him a call later in the week. Jonas was already upstairs in his parents’ bedroom asleep and Kristian came to the door with me, asking whether I was sure that I wanted him to look after the details on the house sale because he didn’t want to force his way in – it belonged to Hannah and me, after all – but I said no, it was fine, and that anything he could do that would take the worry off my mind would be a great help.

  And then before I could turn away, Aidan came running out of the living room like Speedy Gonzales and threw himself into my arms so hard that he nearly knocked me over.

  ‘Goodbye Uncle Odie,’ he roared. ‘Adios amigo!’

  ‘Adios amigo!’ I replied, laughing as I turned away, and when I reached the door of my car I looked back and there he was, standing in the doorway next to Tom, who had a hand on his shoulder, my nephew waving so hard that I thought his arm might fall off, the grin on his face threatening to split his face in two.

  And that was the last I ever saw of Aidan. Of that Aidan. The next time I was in their house, a week or two later, he was a different lad altogether.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  1978

  CARDINAL ALBINO LUCIANI, Patriarch of Venice for the last nine years, was elected Pope on the twenty-sixth of August and the friendliness which had existed between us on our previous meetings diminished immediately as he grew accustomed to his new responsibilities. I assumed that I would have more of a personal connection to him than I had enjoyed with Pope Paul, but this was vanity on my part for I was only a humble seminarian, tasked to wait on him twice a day. I was still the tea-boy, nothing more, and his mind was focused on more pressing matters than my conflicted vocation.

  At first, of course, there was great excitement. It had been fifteen years since a new Pope had lived in these apartments and while the Curia seemed uncertain how to control a man who was already showing more informality than his predecessors, the world appeared to be charmed by him. At the Irish College there was a sense that real change might happen in the Church. Vatican II and its reverberations had dominated the papacies of both John XXIII and Paul VI; it was time to build on the decisions which had been made and who better to do so than a healthy, relatively youthful man of cheerful disposition? At sixty-five he was young for a Pope. He could reign for twenty years, perhaps longer. A golden age was about to begin, we told ourselves.

  The cardinals remained in Rome for another week, long enough to witness the investiture, which Pope John Paul, as he had now become, chose over the pomp of a coronation, and some stayed even longer to intercede with him on their various plans and ambitions for their dioceses. He received them courteously, but by night, when he prepared for bed, I could see that he was exhausted, so numerous were the meetings he was forced to take, the documents he had to read and the daily routines that a man in his position, with his peculiar and unique relationship to God, was obliged to endure. Unlike his four immediate predecessors, he had not worked as a Vatican diplomat or within the Curia and I could sense the distrust among the old guard, who blamed the college of cardinals for electing someone they considered to be an outsider. Outsiders brought change, and change was feared; change had to be stopped in its tracks.

  ‘It’s incredible,’ he muttered to himself one evening as he sat at his desk, piles of papers spread out before him, each one cramped with figures and printed on the thick vellum paper of the Istituto per le Opere di Religione – the Vatican Bank. He was dressed in a warm red and silver robe and when he took his glasses off I could see the heavy bags forming beneath his eyes; they had not been there a couple of months earlier when we had sat together at the Café Bennizi, talking of E. M. Forster. He tapped away now at a calculator as if he was an accountant in a small business and not the head of a billion Catholics worldwide. I turned down the blanket on his bed and brought his tea over to him. He sat back and sighed, shaking his head. ‘These will have to wait until the morning,’ he said. ‘I will lose my mind if I stare at them any longer.’

  I said nothing. It was not my place to speak unless he asked me a question.

  ‘Rome is a peculiar place, is it not, Odran?’ he said after a moment. ‘One thinks of it as the heartbeat of Catholicism, a place of contemplation and spirituality, but no, it is a bank.’ He tapp
ed his fingers on the desk before him, his face filled with frustration. ‘I began my life as a priest, I became vicar-general to the Bishop of Belluno, then Bishop of Vittorio Veneto before becoming Patriarch of Venice. And now’ – he shook his head as if he could scarcely believe it himself – ‘I am destined to end my days as a banker.’

  ‘You are the Pope,’ I told him.

  ‘I am a banker,’ he said, laughing at the absurdity of it all. ‘The head of an extraordinary establishment which has corruption and dishonesty pouring through its veins. And how am I to solve it? At heart, I am still just a priest.’ He sat quietly for a moment before thrusting out his right arm and propelling half the paperwork off the desk angrily. I bent down to gather up the documents as he sat, covering his face with his left hand.

  ‘Do you think of your home often?’ he asked me quietly as I placed the pages on the corner of the table, averting my eyes from their content.

  ‘Sometimes, Holy Father,’ I said.

  ‘Where is it you’re from again?’

  ‘Ireland,’ I told him.

  ‘Yes, I know. But where?’

  ‘Dublin.’

  ‘Ah yes.’ He thought about it. ‘James Joyce,’ he said. ‘The Abbey Theatre. O’Casey and Brendan Behan.’