TransAtlantic: A Novel

by Colum McCann

I found the office easily enough, above a Spanish restaurant on Botanic Avenue. Up the stairs. Into the dusty light. The philatelist was short, slight, bald, with hanging spectacles and a whiff of disintegration. Belfast is full of odd people who have hidden away from the Troubles: they live inside tiny spaces and enormous imaginations. He put his spectacles on his nose and peered at me with wide eyes. There was something of the raccoon about him. He didn’t seem at all perturbed by the presence of Georgie who not so delicately sniffed his crotch.

  He wiped my chair with his handkerchief before I sat, then he rounded his desk, folded his hands, and said my name as if it were the only punctuation the day deserved.

  The library lights cast odd shadows. He was framed by a row of Graham Greene novels, perfectly arranged leather editions. The slightest clue can give us away. He opened the plastic and tut-tutted a little bit, I wasn’t sure if in awe or derision. He glanced at me and then back to the letter. He put on a pair of forensic gloves and set the envelope down on a piece of blue felt, turned it over with a pair of tweezers. I tried to tell him the story, but he kept holding up a finger to stop me. He surprised me by clicking on a brand-new computer and deftly scrolling through his files. He looked up to say that there were dozens of instances of Alcock and Brown letters available, he had been to many shows in Britain where he had seen the actual letters himself, they were worth considerable sums especially if they were in fine condition. He said my letter had come from Newfoundland, for sure, that the envelope was correct, the indicia were authentic, but it wasn’t a transatlantic stamp, it was an ordinary Cabot. There was no postmark so it could have been sent any year at all and in all the records there was never any mention of another letter and so there was no form of absolute authentication.

  The name Jennings meant nothing to him. Nor did Frederick Douglass. He took his magnetic eyeglasses apart and let them fall at the hollow of his little chest. “To be frank with you, you’d have to open it, Mrs. Carson.”

  I told him that he had missed my mother by about a decade and that she could have authenticated it quite easily, she had been in the Cochrane Hotel when the flight took off. Seventeen years old. She had watched the plane—and the letter—leave and go small against the sky. It never got to Cork. Years later she followed the letter to England, met Arthur Brown in Swansea. He had forgotten the letter in his tunic pocket. He gave it to her and Emily, and she tucked it away, not knowing what it might become. I was brief and to the point but still he seemed to disappear into his chair, until finally he said that he couldn’t quite bring himself to give an absolute value to what was obviously a family heirloom, though it was worth a considerable amount, perhaps a couple of hundred pounds, though with a postmark it could be several times this.

  He rose from his chair and opened the door, pausing to scratch Georgie behind the ears. What had I expected anyway? On Botanic Avenue the light stung my eyes, so I made my way down to the Spanish restaurant where the pretty young owner took pity on me and bought me a glass of Rioja along with some tapas, while her husband played on the piano, ragtime and Hoagy Carmichael tunes. Our own age never ceases to astound us. I am quite sure that Lily Duggan felt something similar once, and Emily Ehrlich, and Lottie Tuttle, too, the succession of women whose lives were folded in the letter I held in my hand.

  I am not of the opinion that we become empty chairs, but we certainly end up making room for others along the way.

  TWO GLASSES OF wine got the better of me. Dizzy, I eventually found the car, drove a while, but then pulled into the side of the Newtownards Road. I must have dozed for a few moments because Georgie began snarling and there was an impatient knocking on the window. A woman in uniform. I rolled down the window. Dark had fallen.

  “You’re parked cockeyed,” she said.

  The truth was that I hadn’t even realized I was parked at all. I could almost see my own thoughts moving through my mind, carp in a pool, obvious and slow. “Excuse me, officer.” I started the engine, but she leaned in across the steering wheel and took the keys.

  “Have you been drinking?”

  I reached across and stroked Georgie’s neck.

  “Do you have any family nearby?”

  I told her I didn’t know a soul, but then she threatened to breathalyze me, and suggested that I might have to spend the night at the police station—she called it the barracks—and I cast around for who might still be around in the city.

  I had a sudden recollection of days that still seem agile with laughter. In the 1960s, Lawrence used to belong to a group of gentlemen farmers who got together on Saturday mornings. They wore tweed jackets. Plus fours. Their cartridge belts clanked as they stepped down along the lough. The wives—as we were known back then—played tennis. I never quite inherited my mother’s passion for the game but I went along with it. We met our husbands in the early evening, drank cocktails, drove our cars into ditches on the way home. There is still, I am convinced, an imprint of our wheels on the mudflats, like the remnants of herons.

  It’s hardly a hallelujah memory, but I must admit I was rather generous with my affection. Over the years, I had several affairs, most of them hurried and fretful and frankly dreary. A meeting in the parking lot, snatched moments in a golf-club bathroom, the cramped quarters of a patched-up yacht. The men all seemed to want mulligans with their lives. I went home to Lawrence, steeped in guilt and melancholy, promised myself never to stray again. I’m quite sure he did the same also, but I was never interested in finding out. I hunkered into motherhood. Still there were occasional moments when the world got away from me. The most memorable was a single afternoon with Jack Craddogh, a history professor from Queen’s University who owned a small summer house just outside Portaferry, all glass and champagne and seclusion. His wife was a furniture designer who regularly went to London. We approached each other tentatively at first, but then he ripped the buttons off my dress and the afternoon disappeared into ecstasy. How odd to recall the gymnastics we were capable of: it is as if I have taken a photograph of the one moment when my young hand lay across his thumping chest.

  I stammered a moment, then told the policewoman that I knew a couple who lived nearby, in the direction of Donegall Square.

  “Call them,” she said, thrusting a mobile phone at me, but I surprised her with my BlackBerry. Jack answered after the very first ring. He, too, sounded like he had a little vermouth on his tongue. I asked if I could stay the evening. He was confused and I bawled down the phone that they were going to throw Georgie and me in jail for the night.

  “Georgie?” he said, and then he remembered. “Oh, Hannah.” Some muffled complaints in the background, a complicated sigh.

  The policewoman hesitated a moment, then said she would drive behind me to make sure I got where I wanted. I must have wobbled a little bit because she pulled me over again and drove the car herself while her partner continued behind us. She said that it was pathetic at my age to be drinking and driving, and if it wasn’t for the dog she would have arrested me there and then. She looked like the sort of woman who had once, long ago, had a steel rod expertly inserted up her backside. It would hardly emerge now. I was tempted to tell her my exact history with Jack Craddogh, just to see if I could coax a smile out of her—he actually bit the very last button off my dress, pretended to swallow it, kissed me—but I sat quietly beside her, properly chagrined and said nothing. We were all young once: my mother used to say we should make sure to drink the wine before it turns.

  We pulled up to Jack’s large Victorian. He stood framed in the doorway under the stained glass, still a tall elegant man. His wife, Paula, lurked in a dressing gown beside him.

  Jack came down the path, carrying his age, and opened the small ironwork gate and shook the hand of the policewoman, assured her that he had it all taken care of, he’d make sure I had a good night’s sleep. He seemed a little miffed at the idea of looking after Georgie, too, but I walked her through the renovated house—high ceilings and transoms and rich wallpaper and ol
d paintings—and put her out on the small back patio where she rested her head on her paws and resigned herself to her fate.

  The three of us sat at his kitchen table, surrounded by expensive modern machinery, drinking tea, the past banging its flint against the present. Jack had become a birding enthusiast in recent years, a description which almost made me spit up my tea in laughter. The oystercatcher, the wigeon, the black-tailed godwit. He and his wife had taken to sketching the birds in the area. They had often contemplated calling across to my cottage, they said, but hadn’t quite made it, the time slipped away from them. I had to admit that the watercolor sketches were quite beautiful and they made me question my own use of time: out there sitting, swimming, watching, waiting.

  The thought of the cottage brought a mawkish mist to my eyes, names washed away by decades of rain, and I stammered something about the idea of sketching flight.

  Jack broke the seal on a bottle of brandy, and we warmed ourselves with talk of his other ongoing project: he had largely retired, but was still teaching one course on nineteenth-century history at Queen’s. His fascination was what he called the literature of the colonial. He spoke slowly, as if chewing his words. His hands were liver-spotted. He poured the brandy with a slight shake.

  After a second glass Paula announced that she would leave us youngsters be—she actually used the word youngsters—and Jack stood to accompany her out of the room, and his hand brushed against her rear end, which seemed a tremendous act of bravery in the circumstances. He kissed her flush on the lips as if to reassure her. I heard her clomping up the stairs with another sigh.

  “So,” he said, as if everything between us had begun anew, and my hand was still hovering barely above his laboring heart. “What brings you to these parts, Hannah?”

  I had the unpleasant sensation that my life was circling around again, only I was even more unequipped for it than ever. He knew of the letter from years gone by, but had never actually seen it. It was, he said, the first time he had ever come upon an actual living conceit. I didn’t quite know what he meant, and I was tempted to rip the letter open right there in front of his eyes, just to destroy the assertion. My life and my house didn’t seem a conceit to me at all: it was an actual, breathing place where gulls dropped shells from on high, and where the doors had to be closed to keep in the heat, and where the ghosts had to duck their heads when they walked through the low rooms. I don’t suppose Jack Craddogh was too astounded that I and my family had somehow squandered most of my late grandfather’s linen money down over the years.

  I was careful how I revealed the details, but he said there was very little hope that the university would be willing to take a chance on an unopened letter no matter what sort of verification could be given.

  But the letter clearly piqued his interest. He was aware of the Douglass connection: it had, he said, become fashionable of late for the Irish to think themselves tremendously tolerant. He used the word they like a doorway he could open and close. The academic question was when, in fact, they, the Irish, had become white. It was stitched in with notions of colonialism and loss. He had studied political figures in Australia, Britain, and the Tammany Hall of old New York, and how they braided into the literature of the time, how this whiteness emerged. He was wary of scholars who aligned themselves too closely with what he called the darker edges. It all seemed a little too dust-choked for me. But he knew, he said, a number of scholars who were studying Douglass’s time in Britain and Ireland. He could put me in touch with one of them, David Manyaki, from Kenya, who was teaching in university in Dublin.

  I felt myself rather dizzy with all the geography and the brandy. He rattled on about some notion of inner colonization and he broke a little smile when I began to yawn. I really needed some rest, I told him. I didn’t have the capacity for absorption that I once had. He smiled at me, put his hand upon mine, kept it there a moment, looked me directly in the eye until I glanced away. I could hear his wife pacing the floorboards above: putting towels and a toothbrush and a nightgown on the guest bed, no doubt.

  He tried to lean towards me. I have to admit it was somewhat flattering. I said I would file it under fatigue rather than desire. Seventy-two years old: some things remain better off remembered.

  THE MORNING BROKE bright and cold. The air snapped. The high gothic towers of the Lanyon Building stood stark against a very blue sky. The students walked brisk and short-haired along the manicured paths.

  My own days in the university in the late 1950s were quick and shallow. Literature had not prepared me for pregnancy at nineteen. My sweetheart from Amsterdam returned to his canals. I could hardly blame him. I was, for a long time, the sort of failed Presbyterian girl who sucked her hair into endpoints and spouted on about revolution and justice. He was terrified, poor boy. He sent money every Christmas, until one year the envelopes just vanished altogether, and Tomas never got a chance to see him.

  Tomas’s days at university were cut short, too. When I dropped him off, in 1976, there were students out along the footpaths with their Martin Luther King posters and Miriam Makeba T-shirts. Eight years since the Troubles began and they were still singing: We shall overcome. Tomas drifted among them. A hopeful shine in his eyes. He wore his hair curly and his bell-bottoms wide. He was once part of a student occupation where they took over the arts building and they were foolish enough to release white doves out the window. He grew quieter as the days went on. Put his head in his maths books. He never quite had both oars in the water, but he thought he might become an actuary. The length of lives, the probability of survival. No formula for our ironies. What was it like, that dark morning, when a couple of masked men parted the bushes? What small tremor came upon him when he clutched a bullet to his stomach?

  I quit the university grounds and brought Georgie back to the car. She laid her head in my lap as I drove. The small comforts.

  When I got home to the island there was another letter from the bank. From the ponderous imagination of Simon Leogue. Simon says, You’re broke. Simon says, Pay up. Simon says, Sell or else. Simon says: Now. Now.

  How was it I had mortgaged and remortgaged everything that had gone before me? From the lough I looked back at the house and the whole kitchen pulsed red, then dark, then red again. I felt that I had passed across to a shore where I did not truly live, but then it struck me it was only the answering machine on the kitchen sideboard. I had thought for a while about blackening it out with a piece of paper and stripping it bare only when I wanted to. Please leave a message at the tone. I swam for a half hour, then walked up the garden, toweled Georgie, got dressed, put the kettle on, waited for it to whistle. I had a fair idea that the message was the bank calling once more, but a red light is a red light.

  As it turned out, it was Jack’s professor friend, David Manyaki, who said that he was intrigued by the idea of a letter that might pertain to Douglass and that if I ever made it to Dublin he would be delighted to buy me lunch.

  An African accent. He sounded older, accomplished, careful. Some Harris Tweed in the voice.

  EARLY MORNING SHELLS fell from the sky, bouncing on the slate roof. The gulls up there, small ziggurats across the expanse. I walked out into the dew. A couple of stray mussels lay open-shelled in the grass. It was Debussy who said that the music is what is contained between the notes. It was a relief to be home, and my energy had returned despite my bedraggled sleep. I took the pile of bills and burnt them in the fireplace.

  In the living room near the fire, some of my mother’s old watercolors hung. In her later years, she took up painting as her interest in photography waned. She thought the new machinery took the joy out of the work. She liked to sit in the sunroom and paint: there is one of the cottage itself, the blue half-door open and the lough stretching endlessly behind it.

  I sat in the kitchen listening to the radio while a ten-force blew in. The wind began hammering across the lough. Within an hour, huge waves were breaking hard against the seawall. The rain came up the garde
n and whacked the windowpanes and the storm put its shoulder to the lough.

  David Manyaki. An odd name. He would be a widower with an Achebe face perhaps. A ledge of gray hair. A deep brow. A serious stare. Or perhaps he was a white man with an African accent. Silver spectacles and charm. With leather patches on the elbows of his jacket.

  I wondered if I should BlackBerry him or Google him or whatever the phrase may be, but my mobile phone was cut off, no signal.

  WHEN I EXCAVATE my childhood it is always the journey to the cottage from the Malone Road that I like the most. Sitting in the car with my mother and father. We remember paths as much as we remember people. I wanted to retrace some of the miles for old times’ sake. I looped north to Newtownards, then east through Greyabbey and south by Kircubbin, all the way along the loughshore.

  There is a beautiful slant to the ancient ferryboat at Portaferry. I queued on the eastern shore and watched the boat come across. Churning a thin line of white. About a dozen cars on deck, the sun shining on their windscreens. A few children on the upper level, looking out over the channel for porpoises breaking the water. The journey across the Narrows is only a few hundred yards, but the boat has to attack the channel at an angle, depending on the strength and direction of the tide. For four hundred years it has gone back and forth. In the distance, the mountains lay purple against the sky. Perhaps they were called the Mournes for another reason: in the face of such beauty it always shocks me that we blew ourselves asunder for so many years.

  The ferry negotiated the current, slid into dock. I drove the Land Rover on, rolled down the window, paid the tall young ferryman. He didn’t look like the sort of young man who would understand a quip about the Styx. Still, he was good-humored and smiling. For a moment all sense, even memory, of land disappeared. I put on the handbrake, closed the car door, brought Georgie to the upper deck for a breath of fresh air.

  At the far end, a young couple snuggled into each other, speaking Russian. Perhaps a honeymoon. I tugged on Georgie’s leash and wandered along to where a family from Portavogie were breaking out sandwiches and a flask of hot tea. Two parents, six kids. They offered Georgie bits and pieces of their sandwiches, rubbed her neck. They were on their way down south, they said, for the Queen’s visit. I had been out of the loop, away from what the world thinks of itself. I had neglected the newspaper for many months. No television. My radio was permanently tuned to the classical station.