by Colm Toibin
“They’re great when they sing together,” his grandfather said.
The two women appeared at the door.
“We have to stand up,” Aunt Margaret said. “There’s no point in singing this sitting down. It’s very hard now, so if we stop, you’ll just have to put up with us. Are you ready?”
Eamon turned around and watched them as they held their breath so they could each start at the same time. They started the song, listening carefully to each other’s voices, trying to harmonize on the high notes and then quickly hand over to each other. His grandmother’s face was red with the heat of the room, but she smiled as she sang, and made theatrical gestures as the song came to an end.
“That was great,” his grandfather said. “You sang that at the Athenaeum concert, I don’t know how long ago. I don’t know how we’ll follow that.”
“You’re a great audience,” his grandmother said and smiled as she sat down.
When the night was over Eamon and his father walked up together through the still, empty streets of the town. He could see the stars of frost on the pavement under the street lights on Court Street. He kept his hands in the pockets of his coat to keep them warm.
* * *
His grandfather died in January; Eamon remembered how his father came into his bedroom and pulled back the curtains and told him. He turned away and tried to go back asleep again. His father said to him that he should get dressed, but he curled up in bed once his father had left the room and closed his eyes.
Mrs. Doyle was working in the kitchen when he came downstairs. She told him that his grandfather had fallen down dead just as he was going in the door of his own house. His heart, she said, it was his heart.
“Did he get a pain?”
“He was very peaceful.”
When he went down to his grandfather’s house with his father he saw that the curtains on the front windows were drawn and there were black ribbons with a note bordered in black.
“Do you think he should go up?” his father asked his Aunt Margaret.
“I don’t know. Does he want to?”
“Go up now and say a prayer,” she said to him. “Kneel down and bless yourself first.”
There were people in the house whom he did not know, and others came to the door, their faces solemn and watchful. He walked up the first small flight of stairs and waited there. He could hear them saying the Rosary in the front bedroom, their voices murmuring together in a sing-song of prayer, and then the moment of silence before the return of the single voices: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.”
He moved up a few more steps closer to the room, he could now see the candlelight flickering on the wallpaper, he could smell the softening wax. He crept up closer until he was near the top of the stairs. The Rosary came to an end and they began reciting the Hail Holy Queen.
“Did your Mammy say you could come up?” a woman asked him as she came up the stairs. “Did you ask your Mammy?”
He looked at her hard, unfriendly face. He did not know her. He could feel his own face breaking apart, but he did not cry and instead kept his eyes fixed on the woman and said nothing.
“Which of them are you?” she asked.
“I’m Eamon,” he said.
“And did your Daddy say that you could come up?”
He did not reply, but turned away from her.
“You’re very bold,” she said and walked past him up the stairs.
In the back room downstairs the people were whispering there were bottles of stout on the table and some of the women had small glasses of sherry in their hands.
“That’s the last of them gone,” a man said. “That’s the last of the Fenians.”
Stephen was in the kitchen with Tom.
“Do you want a bottle of orange?” he asked Eamon. When his grandmother found Stephen in the kitchen she made him move into the back room out of the draught.
“You’ll get your death in here,” she said. She was wearing black; even her stockings were black.
“He went very fast,” someone said to her as she passed into the hall.
“You’ll have to be very good to your mother now,” the woman whom Eamon had met on the stairs said to Tom.
“Aye, aye,” Tom said.
Eamon went up the stairs again and sat on the top step. There was no noise coming from the front bedroom now except the whispering of prayers. He said his own prayers then, but stayed outside, all the time trying to imagine what it would be like to see his grandfather when he was dead.
* * *
There was a mist over the graveyard which became sleet as they said the prayers over the coffin. Eamon’s feet were freezing, his toes were aching with the cold. He held his Aunt Margaret’s hand and stood behind his father whose frame blocked Eamon’s view of the grave. When he found a chink in the crowd, the coffin was already in the ground. A man was holding an umbrella over the priest. His Uncle Tom and his Uncle Patrick were holding his grandmother on either side. Stephen was standing in front of Eamon, beside his father. He was shaking with the cold. As he put his hands behind his back Eamon saw how thin his fingers were, how frail his hands.
As soon as they came home, Stephen went to bed and they lit a fire for him in the room upstairs. Eamon wondered who would use the front room now; who would sleep in the bed. Would they use the same mattress on which the dead man had been laid out? He knew that he could not ask. His grandmother was in the kitchen crying, his father and his uncles went down to her and he heard one of them telling her that she would be all right, but that only made her crying worse.
“I won’t be all right,” he heard her saying, as she motioned them away.
* * *
They walked up through the town again; the sleet had lifted, but it was freezing cold.
“You’d better go straight to bed. I’ll make you a hot water bottle,” his father said.
“Am I going to school tomorrow?” he asked.
“We’ll see in the morning.”
The house was cold, he could see his breath when they turned on the light in the hall. The house seemed strange, as though they had been away for a long time. He tried to remember when they had last been there, and realized that he had slept there the previous night, and only left that morning to go to the funeral.
“It’s the coldest night of the year,” his father said as he put a match to the fire.
Eamon fell asleep as soon as his father put the light out in his bedroom. He knew when he was woken again that it was not yet morning; he was aware that he had only been asleep for a short while. He was tired and the bed was warm. When he put his hands up from under the blankets he could feel the cold.
“You’re going to have to get up again,” his father said. “Put on an extra jumper and vest.” When he turned on the light, Eamon noticed that his father was still wearing pyjamas.
“Why do I have to get up?”
“Your Uncle Stephen’s after taking a turn.”
He looked at his father for a moment, and wondered if he could not just put back the time an hour, maybe two hours, to when he had just fallen asleep.
“Tom’s waiting for us downstairs. We’d better hurry up.”
“Where are we going?”
“We’re going back down to the house. You can sleep down there.”
It occurred to him that they might put him to sleep in the bed in the front room upstairs where his grandfather had been laid out, and he did not want to sleep there, so he knew that he would have to try and stay awake. He looked down the stairs from the landing and saw that there was another man with his uncle; they were both standing in the hall with their hands in their coat pockets. He took his shoes into his father’s bedroom and sat on the bed putting them on. His father was almost ready.
“Did you put an extra pullover on?”
“Look, it’s under this one.”
There was ice on the path as they walked down towards the Back Road.
“Watch you don’t slip,
” his father said. The other two men did not speak. Eamon wondered for a moment if he was still asleep, if he could be dreaming, but he knew that this cold was real and the darkness actual.
“Did the doctor come before you left?” his father asked.
“Yes, I had to go and wake him. As soon as he came down and saw Stephen he told me to go for the priest. I had a terrible time trying to wake the Manse, but Father Quaid said he would go down immediately, and then we came over here.”
“It’s bad so, is it?” his father asked.
“The doctor says he won’t last the night.”
They walked in silence along the ice-covered pavements of John Street, Court Street, Rafter Street and the Market Square. When they arrived at the house the Rosary was being said in the back room. The people were kneeling down and did not look up when his father and uncle came in. His father and uncle and the other man knelt down too and bowed their heads and joined in the concentrated prayer. Eamon counted twelve of them now and himself, most of them were neighbours. When the Glorious Mysteries were over they started again, this time the Sorrowful Mysteries. When Eamon went to the toilet he met his Aunt Margaret who said that they were going to say the Rosary all night.
“Your Uncle Stephen will be in heaven before the morning,” she said.
He thought of Stephen’s soul floating out of him, seeping out of his body up through the house and into the sky. His father came into the kitchen. “We’re going to go upstairs now. We’ve made a bed for you in the back room so you can say a prayer and have a little sleep.”
Eamon went in and lay on the cushions they had put down for him. He left his clothes on but took off his shoes. They continued to say the Rosary in the room and he woke a few times as the prayers rose and fell, but soon he was fast asleep. He did not wake again until the dawn had broken. Someone had put more blankets on him; the room was empty now. He lay still for a while, afraid to move; he felt hot and sweaty and he wanted to go to the toilet, but still he was afraid.
Suddenly, he heard the bed being moved in the room above and as he lay there he knew that Stephen was dead. He turned and tried to sleep again, but he could not, and he wondered if someone would come. Eventually, his Aunt Margaret and his Uncle Tom came into the room, they were looking for something and did not notice that he was awake. They moved quietly about, whispering to each other, trying not to disturb him. Soon they closed the door and he was alone in the room again.
He did not know what they did to someone who was dead. Did they take all their clothes off? What did they wear when they were buried? An image of his mother came to him from his father’s Mass card, but he kept it away from his mind; he tried to think instead about his dead uncle. He waited there until his father came into the room.
“Stephen’s gone to heaven,” he said as soon as he saw that Eamon was awake.
Eamon turned away, he did not want his father watching him across the room. He shut his eyes. His father came over and touched him on the shoulder. He wanted to turn towards his father, but he kept his eyes shut and his fists clenched.
“Eamon, you’ll have to get up, you can go to sleep later on.”
The house was quiet now, all the neighbours had gone. He went into the kitchen and looked at the clock, it was half past seven. The house was freezing. He went to the front door and saw two nuns coming up the path, walking towards him. He found his Aunt Margaret and told her and she went out to meet them and took them upstairs.
After a while his grandmother came down from the room in which Stephen had died. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, but when she saw him she put it back in place behind her head with her two hands. She was wearing a black coat.
“Poor Eamon,” she said. “Poor Eamon.”
He put his face against her and his arms around her, but she moved away quickly and went and sat down on her own in the back room until the others came and sat with her.
“No one is to touch me,” she said. “No one is to come near me any more.” They sat in silence, all of them, until one of the nuns came down and asked where the blessed candles were kept.
Part Two
CHAPTER ONE
He woke during the night and went downstairs to his study. He had been dreaming, but now the dream had escaped him. He went into the kitchen and took some cold water from a plastic bottle in the fridge. He sat at the kitchen table for a while and then went back into the study. It was a warm night.
He sat at his desk and looked down at the judgment he had written in longhand on foolscap pages. It was ready to be delivered. He wondered for a moment if he should have it typed, but he was worried about it being leaked. No one knew about it; even as he sat down to write it himself he did not know what he would say, what he would decide. There was so little to go on, no real precedent, no one obviously guilty. Neither of the protagonists in the case had broken the law. And that was all he knew: the law, its letter, its traditions, its ambiguities, its codes. Here, however, he was being asked to decide on something more fundamental and now he realized that he had failed and he felt afraid.
He took a biro from a drawer and began to make squiggles on a pad of paper. What was there beyond the law? “Law”; he wrote the word. There was natural justice. He wrote the two words down and put a question mark after them. And beyond that again there was the notion of right and wrong, the two principles which governed everything and came from God. “Right and wrong”; he wrote the two words down and then put brackets around them and the word “God” in capitals beside them.
Somehow here in the middle of the night with the moths and midges drawn to the window, the idea of God seemed more clearly absurd to him than ever before; the idea of a being whose mind put order on the universe, who watched over things, and whose presence gave the world a morality which was not based on self-interest, seemed beyond belief. He wondered how people put their faith in such a thing, and yet he understood that the courts and the law ultimately depended for their power on such an idea. He crossed out the word “God.” He felt powerless and strange as he went back to read random passages of his judgment. He felt a need to go to bed and sleep some more: maybe he would be more relaxed about his judgment in the morning.
Carmel did not stir in the bed when he came into the bedroom, but he knew that she had woken. When he got into bed he put his arms around her. She kissed him gently on the neck and then turned away from him, letting him snuggle against her. She fell back asleep, and he lay there for a while holding her until he grew drowsy and fell asleep as well.
He was wakened by the alarm clock and reached across her to turn it off. They both lay there without moving or speaking, as though still asleep.
“Are you in court today?” she finally asked, almost whispering.
“Yes,” he said.
“Do you have a full day?”
“There’s a lot of work to get through.”
Another last day of term; he hoped that all the urgent applications for injunctions would go elsewhere. He knew that the press would be in his court today. This case was newsworthy. He hated the journalists’ faces looking up at him, eager for something instant which they could grasp and simplify. He snoozed for a while and when he woke he found that Carmel had left the bed. He moved over to her side and lay in her heat until he knew that it was time to get up.
It was a fine morning. Thin wisps of white cloud hung in the sky like smoke, and the sun was already strong. He realized as he tested the water in the shower that he would like to get into his car now and drive with Carmel to Cush and never set foot in the court again.
She was still in her dressing-gown when he came downstairs. She poured tea for him.
“I think everything is ready now,” she said. “Are you looking forward to getting away?”
“Yes, I am. I was just thinking that I’d be delighted never to set foot in the court again.”
“You’ll feel differently at the end of the summer.”
He went into his study again and sat at the d
esk. The judgment still lay there. He thought that he should read it over again before going into the court, but he could not face it. He felt unsure about it, but as he left the house and drove into the city the uncertainty became deep unease. It was not yet nine o’clock when he arrived at the Four Courts, and he was not due to deliver his judgment until eleven, or maybe later, depending on what injunctions were being sought.
The line of reason in his judgment was clear, he thought. It had not been written in a hurry; evening after evening he had sat in his study and drafted it, working out the possibilities, checking the evidence and going over the facts. Even so, he was still not sure.
He stood at the window of his chambers and looked out at the river which was low now because of the tide and because of the good summer. He watched a boy moving between lorries and cars on a horse, riding bareback with confidence. When the lights changed to green, the boy and his horse joined the flow of traffic towards Capel Street.
He had taken the judgment from his briefcase and placed it on the table. He went over and looked at it again. It was, he thought, merely a case of unfair dismissal, an appeal from the Employment Appeals Tribunal. It was simply his job to decide if the woman had been unfairly dismissed or not, if she deserved compensation, or if she should get her job back.
The case had happened in one of the border towns. A lot of people must live on the edge there, he thought, with strange upheavals, odd comings and goings. But this had nothing to do with the case as far as he was concerned, he knew that she had been involved in politics, he had read that in the newspapers; she had been part of the hunger strike campaign, she had canvassed for Sinn Fein. She was well known from pickets and platforms. But none of this was germane to the case.
She had become pregnant and she had moved in with the father of her child, himself married with children of his own, his wife having left him. Was she right to do this? He tapped the desk with a fingernail before answering to himself. There was no law to stop her. But, all the same, nothing in the Constitution offered her encouragement. She was not acting according to the Christian principles outlined in the preamble to the Constitution, nor was she offered the protection which the Constitution offered to any member of a family. No judgment thus far in the history of the Constitution and the courts had called what she was involved in “a family.” It was, instead, a broken family. Her child would be illegitimate in the eyes of the state. But she was not breaking the law by living with this man, or by having a child. The law offered her the same protection as any other citizen. Her rights under the law were only diminished when those rights came into conflict with another’s rights.