by Colm Toibin
He began to pack the cars with bags and boxes, and then he carried out her flowering plants and her sweet-smelling lilies and tried to place them carefully and gently in the boot or the space behind the front seats of the car. “One quick jolt and they’ll be ruined,” he said and smiled.
“Oh, drive carefully, please,” she said. It had begun to rain and a wind rustled through the bushes in the garden. He found an umbrella to give her shelter as they went out to the car, closing the door behind them.
He drove away from the house. They did not speak until they were beyond Shankill.
“There’s something I have to tell you,” she said. “I was going to tell you this morning, but you were too preoccupied. Niamh came over yesterday to say that she’s pregnant. She thought that we had noticed on Sunday when she came for dinner, but I didn’t notice anyway. Did you notice?”
He did not reply. He looked straight ahead as he drove. Niamh was their only daughter.
“It was the last thing I thought of,” Carmel went on. “She sounded very cool, but I think she was dreading having to tell me. How could she be so foolish! I couldn’t sleep last night thinking about it. I rang Donal but he didn’t know either. You’d think she would have told her brother.”
Carmel did not speak again until later when they stopped at the traffic lights in Arklow. The atmosphere in the car was tense with their silence.
“I asked her who the father was. I didn’t even know she had a boyfriend. She said she didn’t want to talk about the father.”
When he had driven through the town she spoke again.
“She went to England to have an abortion, and she couldn’t face it. She was in the hospital and everything; she had paid her money. I told her that we’d do what we could for her. Imagine Niamh having an abortion. So she’s going to have the baby and she’s going to keep it. Eamon, I wrote her a cheque. But it’s a terrible thing to happen, isn’t it?”
“When’s it due?” he asked her.
“November,” she said. “I can’t think how I didn’t notice.”
He turned left at Gorey and took the road south towards Blackwater.
“Well, what do you think?” she asked.
“It doesn’t matter what I think.”
“It’s so hard to talk to you sometimes,” she said.
* * *
He parked the car in the lane and opened the side gate into the garden, letting Carmel go in ahead of him. He had the key. The house had been aired; there was a fire burning in the living room, which their neighbour had lit for them, but there was still a musty smell. Carmel shivered and went over to sit by the window. Eamon carried in the first of the plants and put them in the glass porch at the front of the house. The damp smell had always been in the house, he thought, no amount of air or heat would ever get rid of it fully. And there was another smell too which he remembered now: a smell of summer dresses, a female smell. The women who had taken care of him here. He could almost smell them now, vague hints of their presence, their strong lives, their voices which had been heard in this house for so many years.
The nettles had come back into the garden, despite the weedkiller which had been put down in the spring. The nettles seemed taller than ever this year. He would get one of the Carrolls to put the front garden right. Then there would be a new smell of cropped grass, fresh and sweet with a hint of dampness.
He carried the suitcases and boxes in from the car. By now, Carmel had placed her plants all over the house and was in the kitchen. He went over and smelled the lilies which she had put in the porch. He took out the small cassette player and placed the two speakers at opposite ends of the room. He plugged it in, put on a cassette and turned the sound up and listened to the music as he unpacked the cases and cleared out the car.
They were close to the soft edge of the cliff, the damp, marly soil which was eaten away each year. He listened for the sound of the sea, but heard nothing except the rooks in a nearby field and the sound of a tractor in the distance, and coming from the house the swells of the music. He rested against the windowsill and looked at the fading light, the dark clouds of evening over the sea. The grass was wet now with a heavy dew, but the air was still as though the day had been held back for a few moments while night approached. He heard Carmel moving in the front room. She wanted everything in its place, the house filled with their things, as soon as they arrived, and he stood up now and ventured in to help her.
CHAPTER TWO
Childhood. The voice teaching was still vivid in his mind, but he could remember nothing his father said in those early years. Nor could he remember walking from the primary school across to the secondary school except for the bare, creaking stairway to the classroom where his father taught.
He drew on the blackboard with chalk—he remembered this clearly—until he was old enough to sit at the back and listen, or read, or look out of the window at the Turret Rocks and the Wexford Road. He drew maps of main roads and side roads, using different colour chalk, he drew squiggles and matchstick figures. Behing him, the drama of the classroom went on. Sometimes a cheer, a sound like “Weee, wooo,” followed by laughter went up from the boys in the class, but soon it would die down again and his father would resume. Sometimes he was bored, he couldn’t wait for the bell to ring. One day he walked up to the top of the class and asked his father if it would be much longer and the class cheered. His father told him to go down and wait in the yard.
He learned to wait, to be quiet, to sit still. And when the schoolday was over they walked home together, the teacher whose wife had died and his son, to the empty house in the new estate up on the hill. A woman came every day, first Mrs. Doyle and then Annie Farrell, and made the dinner in the middle of the day then left them their tea on the kitchen table. His father had work to do, homework to correct, books to read, articles to write. Eamon went out to play, careful not to sit on the cold cement in case he got a cold, and not to get into fights. He was allowed to bring other boys into the house, but they had to play quietly. Often, when they left to go home and have their tea, he felt relieved. He had the house to himself again and could sit opposite his father and work quietly at his lessons. He wondered at his father’s handwriting, the strange, indecipherable script, he stared at each word and tried to tell the letters apart, but it was a mystery to him and he did not understand how anyone could read it.
On Wednesdays after tea they walked down to the office of The Enniscorthy Echo to collect a copy of the paper, fresh from the printing presses. Once, a man tried to explain to him about printing, but it was the voice and the size of the printworks he remembered, the rattling noise of the machines and the small, thin pieces of metal with words written on them back to front.
His father’s article appeared on an inside page. Scenes From Enniscorthy’s Past by Michael Redmond, BA, B. Comm, the headline said, and sometimes there was a photograph of a face or an old part of the town such as the Duffrey or Templeshannon. Each week when they came home his father would cut the article out and paste it into a scrap book. He brought a cloth in from the kitchen to wipe away the paste which oozed from the sides of the newspaper when it was pressed down against the cardboard of the scrap book.
Eamon must have been eight then, or nine. The war was on. He sat in Father Rossiter’s car at the top of the Shannon waiting for his father and the priest to finish talking to a grey-haired woman at the door of her house. Each time they seemed about to walk down the cement path towards the gate they started up again. Talking. He was allowed to go with them into some of the houses, but not others. They were giving out money and food vouchers from the St. Vincent de Paul Society. There was a strange smell in some of the houses. He looked around to see if he could find what exactly made those houses so different from his own: so bare, and often cold as well.
Most of the men were in England; they were in the British Army or they were working in factories. In all of the visits he never saw a man in any of the houses. Some of the women were smiling and shy w
hen they spoke, staring into the fire and leaving awkward silences until his father and the priest stood up to leave. Others were outspoken, full of words. ’Tis God’s truth now, they would say. I’m not telling you a word of a lie. May God forgive me, Father. They had long stories to tell, and letters to search for and then find and offer to the visitors to read. There was one woman who cried, who broke down in front of them and rocked back and forth in her chair, as children his own age sat helplessly watching her, who were pale-faced and suspicious of the two men and the child who had come to the house to listen to their mother telling her story, her face suddenly red and blotched from crying.
* * *
If they moved the car he would be able to see the town below, follow Rafter Street from the Market Square, along to Court Street and then John Street with its line of trees and then the Back Road, Lymington House, Parkton, Pearse Road and Parnell Avenue. Sometimes, the two men would talk for hours, lighting cigarettes and letting the car fill up with smoke and the smell of sulphur from the matches.
Sometimes they spoke in hushed voices, as though he, the boy in the back of the car, might listen to what they were saying and repeat it elsewhere. He tried to follow the conversation. Agreed, agreed, his father said, agreed. He repeated the word to himself until it lost all its meaning and became just a sound. They were silent in the front of the car. Now, he thought, if he concentrated enough, the priest would start up the engine. But once more nothing happened. Why did he not start it? What were the two men thinking about? They drew on their cigarettes without saying a word; they both seemed to be thinking about something. He listened as they began to speak. They were talking about a woman, but he could make no sense of their conversation.
“Is Father Rossiter Fianna Fail?” he asked when they came home.
“Priests can’t join parties,” his father said.
Soon afterwards, there were often long silences in the car; Father Rossiter would drive them to the door and the two men would sit there discussing something for a while before falling into a long silence. His father began to go down town in the evenings to meetings and Mrs. Doyle came over from Pearse Road to mind him. “How lucky you are,” she told him, “just to be here on your own. Think of all the houses which have ten or twelve in the family without enough clothes to wear, or even enough food. You’re lucky too that you’re living in this nice house and your father’s a teacher, because otherwise in a few years,” she said, “you’d have to go to England to get a job.”
She left the fire set for them every evening, or if it was very cold she would light it and leave the fireguard up against the hearth so that when they came in from school the back room would be warm. Eamon had to take charge of it, because his father sat at the table absorbed in what he was reading or writing. His father never noticed anything, even a spark on the rug which could, Mrs. Doyle said, burn the whole place down. His father would let the fire go out. He would stand up and look at the embers and the ash and then point to the rug, laughing to himself. “Rugadh é in Eireann,” he would say, as he knelt down to try to get the fire going once more.
He remembered the Woodbines in Mrs. Doyle’s hand and the smoke in her voice, just as he remembered the long silences in the car, and the radio coming slowly alive with sound, and news of the war and Mrs. Doyle one evening telling him that his father was going to buy the Castle.
He waited until they were walking home from school together.
“Are we going to sell the house,” he asked, “because I don’t want to live anywhere else.”
“We’re not going to sell anything,” his father said.
“The Castle is too big for us. Is there electricity in the Castle?”
“What has you going on about the Castle?”
“Mrs. Doyle says that you’re after buying it. It’s too dark and old. No one goes near it.”
“But it’s for a museum, it’s not to live in,” his father said.
Soon, as he lay curled up on the back seat of Father Rossiter’s car, he heard them talking about a museum. But the two men mumbled too much for him to catch any more of what they were saying. He asked them, but they continued talking and he had to ask again.
“It’s for old things, historical things, like old books, old letters,” his father said. “People can come and look at them on display.”
* * *
Mr. McCurtin next door showed him a map of the world. Mrs. McCurtin said that he should be in his bed, but he waited up to hear the news on the wireless and he studied each country in Europe and down into Africa to see which was in German hands and which was still held by the Allies.
“He’s too young to be telling him about the war,” Mrs. McCurtin said. His father and Mr. McCurtin drank bottles of stout and waited for the next bulletin, the sounds from the radio came in waves as though they were being carried in by the sea.
There was a big reading room in the Athenaeum with a fire blazing and a big table full of newspapers and magazines. There was a rule about silence and even if you wanted to whisper you had to go outside. One day he heard his father telling a man that they were going to buy the Castle from Dodo Roche.
“Does she live there?” he asked his father.
“When she was younger,” his father said.
“I thought that Spenser lived there?”
“That was in the fifteen hundreds. You’re getting everything wrong,” his father said.
“Is Dodo Roche going to give you old things for the museum?”
His father had the big key to the door in the garden wall of the Castle, and other keys to doors and presses on a ring.
“Can I carry the big one?” Eamon asked.
“Be careful with it or we’ll all be locked out,” his father said.
They walked down to the Castle; it was a cold day and the men waiting at the gates were shivering and stamping their feet with the cold. Mick Byrne, who was in Eamon’s class in school, was there too with his uncle. Eamon went up to him and showed him the key before handing it to his father.
“Is Father Rossiter not coming?” he asked.
“No,” his father said. “He’s out on a call.”
It was quiet suddenly when they closed the old heavy gate and stood inside the garden of the Castle. None of them had been here before, except to deliver a message to the side door. Mick Byrne and Eamon exchanged glances as though they were trespassing and could be caught at any moment. When his father turned the key and pushed the front door they could see that it was dark inside. Eamon had expected old furniture and cobwebs; instead he could see nothing. One of the men with his father lit a paraffin lamp, illuminating a huge hallway with a low ceiling. There was a sharp, sour smell.
“There’s an awful stink,” Mick Byrne said. No one else spoke. One of the men went across the room and pulled back the shutters on a side window and a pale, dim light came into a corner of the hall. His footsteps echoed as he walked back to join the others who were standing there looking around them, as though afraid to move.
Eamon stood close to his father. One of the men had opened the shutters of another window and it was now bright enough to see the flagstones.
“This is the old part,” his father said as he moved across and pushed a door which led into a room the same size as the hall, but brighter and with a higher ceiling. It was completely empty.
“This is the part the Roches built,” his father said.
Another door led into a kitchen where there were still tables and chairs as though someone had been living there. The men who had come with his father still looked suspicious and nervous, and they restrained Mick Byrne when he began trying to open drawers and presses.
“We can’t go upstairs,” his father said, “because some of the floor is rotten.”
“There’s a lot of work needed all right,” one of the men said.
* * *
As the spring came his father and the priest sat in the car more and more and talked to each other, smoking all the time. Mrs. Doyl
e would go out to look through the front window, and come back shaking her head. “They’re still talking. They’re going to talk all night. You’d better go to bed before your father comes in and catches you up.”
Most of the time they talked about the museum but they also talked about the war. They talked about how difficult it would be to get the work done with most of the men in England. Some of them were now starting to take their families over, Father Rossiter said, even with the danger. He hated to see people emigrating, he said, he hated it. A lot of the men were in the Local Defence Force as well, but if they were ready to give up a bit of their time, the ones who knew anything about wiring and plastering, then that would solve the problem.
They began to run a raffle on a Saturday night and a dance on a Sunday night to raise money for the museum. Eamon went down to McCurtin’s and waited for the news so that he could check on his atlas and mark any changes in the areas held by the Allies and the Germans, but after a while he lost interest in the radio; there were too many men talking, and sometimes the sound was too unclear, but Mr. McCurtin listened all the time; he knew everything about the war.
* * *
One evening when the sky was bright he went in the car with his father and Father Rossiter towards Oulart. They had put a notice in The Echo asking if anybody had old things in their houses which might be of historical value. People had written to them from all over the county. His father wrote back to each person, putting a tick at the top of each letter he had replied to, and then gathering them in a bundle at the back of his scrap book.
A mile before reaching Oulart they were to turn right, Father Rossiter said; these were his instructions. But he was unsure which turn to take, and they halted at several farmhouses to ask for directions, the priest jumping out to be met by a few sheepdogs or a small barking terrier. One woman came out with him to the car, peering in to see who was in the passenger seat and the back seat, her curiosity clear and undisguised.