by Colm Toibin
He woke early in the morning. It was daylight outside, but his cousins were still asleep. He felt his penis hard and he thought about putting his hand on Anne’s breast, about the silky skin of her stomach and the strong sweet smell which came from the soft wet rose between her legs. He tried not to wake his cousins as he masturbated, his eyes shut tight as he concentrated on her.
When he went downstairs his uncle was sitting at the table drinking tea; his aunt was still in her dressing-gown.
“I don’t think there’s anyone going in today,” she said.
“Can I try and hitch a lift?” he asked.
“You’re anxious to go, aren’t you?” his aunt asked. “Look at you,” she said. “You’ll be shaving soon. And you’ve shot up. They won’t know you in Enniscorthy you’ve gone so tall. It must be the country air. Don’t look so worried. We’ll get you into Tullow some way.”
“I’ve left all the books back upstairs,” he said.
“You can take any of them with you that you like,” she said.
His cousins stood in the yard to say goodbye to him. He knew that he was going home for good. His aunt had put on her best costume. She sat in the front seat while his uncle drove.
* * *
He caught the bus in Tullow. He could see out of the window this time, his journey just a few months before seemed remote in time, something which belonged to the distant past. He thought about Anne again. He should have said goodbye to her. He began to worry now about the mortal sins on his soul. He would have to go to confession as soon as he could in Enniscorthy.
His Uncle Tom met him when the bus stopped at the bottom of Slaney Street.
“Your father’s down in our house,” he said. “He’s waiting for you there.”
It was a warm summer evening and the gulls were squabbling high in the air over the railway bridge as he carried his suitcase towards the Island Road. His mortal sins now seemed more important than they did when he was away, more real and urgent.
His father was sitting in a chair in the back room of the house when Eamon and his uncle came in. He had grown much balder and his hair had become grey at the sides. Eamon stood back and looked at him. His father’s eyes seemed swollen and strange.
His father said something, but his voice was distorted. Eamon noticed that part of his face was paralyzed. He stood there watching him while his father tried to speak again. He tried to listen carefully to see if he could make out what his father was saying. He made another attempt and this time Eamon could see for sure that only half his face could move. His father was still eagerly smiling at him and saying something. Eamon nodded when he had finished as though he understood.
“I’ll walk up a bit of the way with you,” his uncle said. “You can leave one of your bags here and come back for it later.”
There was nobody else in the house. He watched his father standing up and limping across the room. He saw no pain in his face, just effort and concentration. He went over and held his arm and led him out towards the hall.
“I’m all right now. I’m all right now,” his father said impatiently and started slowly to walk without help. Eamon and his Uncle Tom accompanied him down the pathway to the road. When they reached Irish Street they walked on either side of him. It was hard to walk so slowly. People came to the doors and watched them, greeting them and eyeing his father with curiosity.
“You’re a decent man,” one woman said to his father over a half-door. “You’re in all our prayers.”
* * *
On Saturday evening Eamon joined the long queue for confession in the cathedral. He moved nearer the confessional each time a space became vacant. He watched each figure going into the box and he tried to prepare himself for the darkness in there, and the hatch being pulled back and the hushed voice. The priest was old, and he did not know him or any of his family, so it would be easier, but he felt his throat dry as he knelt in the box waiting. When the priest asked him his sins he could say nothing.
“What are your sins?” he asked. He sounded impatient, as though he might not wait too long. Eamon told the priest about Anne and what they had done.
“Did you ejaculate seed?” the priest asked.
“Yes, father.” He told the priest how he had masturbated and how many times.
“Is that everything?” the priest sighed as he asked.
“No, father.”
“What else is there, my child?” Eamon told him about making a bad confession and going to communion every Sunday.
“Did you know what you were doing?”
“Yes, father.”
“And where is your intelligence?” the priest asked.
Then it was over. He was given his penance and the priest said the Latin prayers of forgiveness. He went out of the dark box and into the body of the cathedral where he prayed until his penance was said. He had expected to feel different, he had imagined that he would feel lighter, happier once his soul was cleansed and his sins were wiped away. But he did not feel any better; he felt an even greater shame now and wondered about this. It made him uneasy that God should not be able to lift the burden of guilt from him.
In late June the sky was a clear blue during the day and the sun was hot. Eamon moved a chair out into the back garden for his father, and sat reading while his father slept or lay in the shade with his eyes half-shut. If his speech did not improve, the doctor said, he would have to go to Dublin again. He had to practise his speech.
Some sounds were easy; Eamon had come to understand a good deal of what he said. He knew when his father said his name, but one day he listened and wondered if an outsider would make sense of the sounds. He heard only “A-i-n” and he realized that a stranger would not be able to understand that he meant to say “Eamon.” His father moved slowly and reacted slowly to things. He began to go to the museum again, but he could not go upstairs, nor could he answer the questions which people asked. Eamon found it difficult to talk to his father. He tried not to begin a conversation because he knew that it would result in his father stumbling over words and making sounds which he would not be able to understand.
He rode his bicycle to Cush a few days, called in on the Cullens and had a swim before riding back. But he worried about leaving his father alone in the house. He tried to stay near him. Mrs. Doyle came every day to cook for them, and clean the house. She could not understand anything that his father said.
“What’s he saying?” she’d ask Eamon, as though his father was a child.
On a showery day in August his Aunt Margaret and his Uncle Tom were sitting in the back room. They listened to his father’s slow, laborious ascent to the toilet.
“He’ll be much better when he’s back in school,” Aunt Margaret said. Eamon said nothing.
“He’s getting much better, isn’t he, Eamon? You’d notice it, living here.”
“Is he going back to teach?” he asked.
“Brother Delaney says that it’s fine. I’d say the boys will be very glad to have him back.”
They heard him flushing the toilet, and his slow hobbled step as he came back down. He smiled at them when he came in, and Eamon promised himself that he would help his father with his speech therapy every day. He had a new terror now: the terror of going back to school. He had not thought that his father would try to teach again. He had wondered about money and how they would live. When his father spoke now, he listened as though he were a classroom and he knew that they would not have his patience. He willed his father to get better, he worked on his therapy with him, trying to get him to say words more clearly, shout them out, pronounce each syllable. But he knew that there would not be enough time; school would resume within a few weeks and his fear of the first class and his father coming into the room stayed with him as something terrible, beyond contemplation.
CHAPTER FIVE
Each morning in the months after Carmel’s stroke he drove her into Wexford for her physiotherapy. He had two hours free to wander in the town while they worked on h
er voice and her bad leg and arm in the hospital. He usually left the car in the car park of the Talbot Hotel and wandered along the boardwalk looking at the old buildings along the run-down quay and the wide water of the silted harbour. Some days the mussel boats were in: they looked like relics, museum pieces, old tubs with winches and cranes added. The smell as he passed was sharp and putrid. He liked the smell and he remembered to tell Carmel about it, knowing how she would react; she squirmed and turned up her nose and smiled and said that she was glad she was in the hospital and not having to smell the mussels.
It was late autumn. Soon he would have to go back to the court, unless he could arrange a further month’s holidays, but the courts, as usual, were busy and it was hard. He had spoken to the President of the court about how well Carmel was doing in Wexford and how much easier it would be if she could continue her treatment down here.
It was good for him too; he wondered once more as he walked towards the bridge if he should not retire now. Back in the city he would miss the steel-grey sky, he would miss idly looking at a group of cormorants on a rock in the harbour, he would miss doing nothing much all day. He crossed the cool span of the bridge and stood watching the hand of creamy light on the horizon and the stately spires of the town. He walked on towards the sloblands, feeling happy that he knew no one in Wexford, that he could walk around here without having to stop to talk to people he encountered.
It was strange, he thought, how quickly he and Carmel had become accustomed to their new lives; her slow recovery now seemed part of the everyday. He turned and walked back towards the town. It was brightening up now. He wondered if he should try to keep swimming every day, even though the days were often cold. He thought that he should go down to the strand in the afternoon and see how cold the water was. He walked up one of the side streets towards the main street and then up towards White’s Hotel. He sat in the lounge and took The Irish Times from his pocket.
He looked through the newspaper. Since Carmel’s stroke they had had the telephone connected at Cush and had bought a television for the house. The most important item of news for them now was the television schedule for the evening. It was the first thing he looked at in the paper. After that he checked through the news and the opinions, but he found it difficult to read many pieces from beginning to end. He looked at his watch: another hour before she finished. He drank up his coffee and paid. Maybe in future, he thought, he should take his bathing-togs and have a swim in the hotel swimming-pool. It would make the time less heavy.
He walked along the main street until he came to the book shop. He hardly ever bought anything more than an English newspaper in the shop but they knew him now as a regular customer. He wandered around, browsing, picking up a book and looking at it for a while and putting it back again. The classics were in a section together, all of them in black-spined paperback, the Dickens novels and novels by George Eliot and Jane Austen. He decided to buy a few of them to see if he could read them now; maybe Carmel could read them too. He picked them out with the intention of putting some of them back, but he found himself at the cash register with seven or eight paperback novels and an English newspaper. He paid for them and left. He walked as far as the old barracks, stopping to buy some fruit at a shop, and turned downwards towards the car park. He could easily have done the rest of the shopping in his waiting time, but he knew that Carmel needed to feel that she was involved in the life of the house, even though she would only ever be able to do light housework, the consultant had told him.
As he walked along he noticed the gable-end of a three-storey house covered in slate; he examined the narrow street leading down to the silted-up harbour, and he wondered at how it looked like nowhere else in the world. Wexford on a mid-week morning in September, the light-filled sky over the harbour, the blue-black of the slate, the grey buildings all around.
At times Carmel’s slow recovery reminded him of his father in the years after his operation. His father’s slow limp and impaired voice, and the pretence that, despite the damage which had been done to his system, he was well. He dreaded his father telling a story in the classroom. He would start off so confidently, but some of the words would be mere blurs. There was a story he always told about the gravedigger’s son who could not get his father’s job as he could not read or write. All the students knew it, knew how the son had gone to America and struck oil and become one of the wealthiest men in the United States. Eamon remembered his father before he was ill using an American accent for the part of the story about the day when the gravedigger’s son had to sign a contract there and then, but had to confess that he couldn’t sign as he couldn’t write his name.
“Here you are one of the richest men in America and you can’t sign your name. Where would you be if you could read and write?” he was asked.
“A gravedigger in Ireland,” was the reply.
But there was a day when his father got stuck in the story, when nothing came from him except vague sounds, and his whole face seemed drawn and twisted, but he still wouldn’t stop, even when some of the students began to laugh and others looked away, uncomfortable and embarrassed. He stood there, as he always did, looking at each face in the class, acting out the story. Eamon wanted to shout out to him to stop, please stop, could he not understand that the sounds he was making made no sense? He watched as his father turned away, before the story was finished, and went to the window and stood with his back to them looking out. The boys in the class began to talk among themselves as though the teacher was not there.
He waited in the car outside the hospital until she came out. He did not try to help her into the car. She needed to feel that she was becoming more capable. When she came out of hospital first, she and Niamh had gone into the city and bought new clothes for her and new make-up. She was careful how she looked. A few times in Wexford he had to wait another hour for her while she went to get her hair done, but he understood her need. It was what had made her survive.
“I’m walking better, aren’t I?” she asked. “There’s a woman in there, and she was much worse than I was, and she was just saying that keeping your chin up is the main thing.”
Her speech was slurred, but as the days went by he found her easier to understand. He believed that sometimes she said things that would require no response, thus leaving him free to pretend that he understood. But he felt that she was recovering. Her sister drove down to Cush a few afternoons a week and he left them to talk or to go for a drive in her sister’s car. All her life Carmel had loved people calling, and each time her sister left he thought that she was better. He wondered if they were right to stay at Cush, now that the weather was getting cooler and the place seemed more windswept and remote.
Carmel liked the television and enjoyed the fire lit in the evening. Eamon fetched the coal and the blocks from the small, damp shed at the side of the house. She placed the coals carefully on the fire with tongs, using all of her energy and concentration. He peeled the potatoes, but she prepared the other vegetables and salads, sitting at a table in the living room with a basin of water in front of her. She made brown bread, even though she found it hard to knead the dough; it took time, and she worked at it, patient and determined.
“Did I rave a lot when I was in Vincent’s, or did I sleep?”
“You tried to talk to me, but the nurse said it wasn’t good for you.”
“What did I say?”
“I couldn’t make it out.”
“I wonder what it was.”
She prayed during the day. He would find her sitting in an armchair with her eyes closed and her lips moving. She talked about God’s will to him, but she knew that he did not believe.
“God knows,” she said, “that you’re doing your best in your own way. Everybody can only do so much.”
They stopped in the village on the way home from Wexford and she got out of the car, laboriously turning so she could stand on her good leg, and went into the butcher’s. He sat in the car waiting for her, realizing t
hat each time she went into a shop, or into the hospital, he expected a face to come out and tell him that she had taken another turn.
They had lunch at the table beside the window. He put a record on, some quiet music, and they ate without speaking. The day was clearing up and the sun was strong through the glass. He told her about the paperbacks he had bought, which he had left in the car.
“We should read more,” she said, “instead of watching television.”
A wind had blown up outside, which cleared the sky of clouds. He told her that he would take his togs and towel down to the strand to see if the water was warm enough for swimming, although he doubted it.
“Be careful down there, you could be swept out on a day like this.” She was making a real effort with her speech, working on each vowel sound.
“I probably won’t go in for a swim,” he said. “I’ll probably just go for a walk.”
He cleared the dishes from the table and put them in the sink. Her sister was going to come that afternoon to clean up the house and do some washing. Carmel remained at the table, looking out. She asked him to change the record before he left. She still was not able to handle the record player.
* * *
The lane was muddy with the previous week’s rain. He had to walk on the verge to avoid the mud, and even then he was afraid of slipping. It was cold as well as windy and he knew now that taking his towel and togs had been a mistake. He put the togs into his jacket pocket and the towel around his shoulders. When he came to the turn in the lane he looked over the cliff: the sea was rough, each wave as it broke released huge choppy sheets of foam. It was the beginning of the winter sea. He walked down to the strand.
He wondered if the tide was turning as he picked up a flat stone and tried to skim it along the water but it was too rough. He searched for another flat stone but he could not find one. As he walked along he listened to the sound of the stones knocking against each other on the shore each time a wave swept in over them. It was a harder sound now, more brittle and hollow than on calmer days in the summer.