by Anne Enright
Did he come home that time? There were trips when he flew right over the house, or might have done, and did not set foot on Irish soil.
A silver dot in the summer sky, her own flesh and blood inside it. Dan opening a magazine, or glancing out the window perhaps, while she caught at the gatepost to steady herself and squint skyward, 20,000 feet below.
Rosaleen had to close her eyes, briefly, at the thought of it. She put the postcard back in the drawer and tried to swallow, but her throat seemed to resist it and she was sitting back at the table when she realised she had not found Dan’s address, after all – Constance would have to sort it out for her. The next card was open in her hand. Rosaleen looked at the whiteness of it, that gave her no clue as to what to say.
‘My dear Emmet.’
Something was wrong. Perhaps it was the card. She turned the thing over to check the back and it was as she had suspected – the charity was one that Emmet did not like, or probably did not like – not because they fed the starving of Africa, but because they fed the starving in the wrong way. Or because feeding the starving was the wrong thing to do with them, these days. Rosaleen could not remember the particular argument – she did not care to remember it. All Emmet’s arguments were one long argument. Those babies, that you saw on the TV, the women with long and empty breasts, their eyes empty to match, and Emmet’s own eyes full of fury. Not passion – Rosaleen would not call it passion. A kind of coldness there, like it was all her fault.
Which, of all the wrongs in the world, were her fault, Rosaleen would not venture to say, but she thought that famine in Africa was not one of them, not especially. Not hers more than anyone else’s. Rosaleen had not said boo to a goose in twenty years. She didn’t get the chance. Her life was one of great harmlessness. She looked to the window, where her face was sharper now on the dark pane. She lived like an enclosed nun.
Her books, the poetry of her youth, Lyric FM. These were the scraps that sustained her. Mass every morning – and Rosaleen had no interest in Mass – for the chance of company; each parishioner more decrepit than the next and Mrs Prunty, this last twelve months, smelling of wee. If she’d had the choice, Rosaleen would have been a Protestant, but she didn’t have the choice. So this is what she was reduced to. Resisting bingo on a Saturday night. Waiting for the tiny bursts of pink on her winter flowering cherry. Deciding against yew and spruce, one more time, for the last time. And yet it seemed every child she reared was ready with one grievance or another. Emmet first in the queue, for telling her she was wrong. No matter what good she tried to do with her widow’s mite. Wrong to give it to this charity or to that charity and wrong to give it to fly-blown babies and big-bellied Africans: she’d be better off throwing it in a hedge.
‘Happy Christmas. Keep up the good work! Your loving Mother, Rosaleen’.
There would be no problem with his address this year. Emmet was home now – not that this made much difference to her routine. A phone call every week, a visit one Sunday in every month. Emmet was saving the world from a rickety little office in the middle of nowhere, and he had a girlfriend, no less. A drab looking Dutch thing, with good manners and clumpy shoes. She would do well to hang on to him, Rosaleen thought. He was a hard man to pin down.
And, not for the first time, Rosaleen wished her son some ease. The boy with so many facts at his disposal: that politeness edged with contempt, even at four, even at two. Yes Mama, whatever you say. The moment he came out of her, he opened his eyes and met her eyes and she felt herself to be, in some way, assessed.
Absurd, she knew. The power of the moment. The first baby she had seen right after birth, his eyes opening, whoosh, in the middle of the purple mess of his face, and those eyes saying, Oh. It’s you.
What did you do today? Nothing. How was school? Good.
He had a job in the civil service – a proper job – and he left it in 1993 for the elections in Cambodia, came back with stories of bodies in the paddy fields. And he was thrilled by these stories. Delighted. These dead people were much more interesting, he was at pains to point out, than his mother was, or ever could hope to be. And after Cambodia, Africa, places she had barely heard of. And then, unexpectedly, home.
He sat, for the year his father was dying, in the front room, like his own ghost. Rosaleen would come across him and get a fright at this unkempt man who had arrived one day to live in her house; a chemical tang that lingered after he used the toilet as bad or worse than the smell of chemotherapy from his father. Rosaleen thought he was taking pills of some sort. And one day, after he had cleaned up and made a new start of himself, she saw him at the desk of the old study, and it was her father all over again: the same size – Emmet had wasted to an old-fashioned weight – the same focus, and fury, and clammy sense of sanctity. It was John Considine.
A man she had always adored.
Oh Dada.
Oh, little Corca Baiscinn, Rosaleen in a green silk dress that shushed as she walked, hairband of Christmas red, black patent shoes. Rosaleen in her ringlets on the hearthrug in the good front room, saying her piece for Dada.
Oh, little Corca Baiscinn, the wild,
the bleak, the fair!
Oh, little stony pastures, whose flowers
are sweet, if rare!
Oh, rough the rude Atlantic, the thunderous,
the wide,
Whose kiss is like a soldier’s kiss which will
not be denied!
The whole night long we dream of you, and
waking think we’re there, –
Vain dream, and foolish waking, we never
shall see Clare.
Where did the time go? It was ten o’clock, and she had not eaten yet. She wasn’t even hungry, though it was now fully dark – the only thing between herself and the night was her image on the windowpane. Rosaleen straightened up. The same weight as ever. She walked. Every day she drove out in her little Citroën and she walked. She was the old woman of the roads. But she had legs like Arkle, her husband used to say, by which he meant that she was a thoroughbred. Rosaleen recognised, in her reflection, the good bones of her youth. She never lost it. From a distance, if you keep the hump out of your back, you might be any age at all.
She was doing a Christmas card for Emmet. A man who blamed her for everything, including the death of his own father. Because that is what your babies do, when they grow. They turn around and say it is all your fault. The fact that people die. It is all your fault.
Rosaleen put the card in an envelope, then took it out again to see if she had signed the thing. There it was, in handwriting that was unwavering. ‘Your loving Mother, Rosaleen’. Four words that could mean anything at all. She read them over but could not put them together, somehow. She could not put them in a proper line.
She had lost her son to the hunger of others.
She had lost her son to death itself. Because that is where your sons go – they follow their fathers into the valley of the dead, like they are going off to war.
Rosaleen sealed the envelope with a careful, triple lick, lapping the edge of the envelope so as not to get a paper cut on her tongue. She had to pause then to remember who it was for – Emmet always managed to upset her, somehow. She wrote his first name in strong letters on the envelope, and maybe that was enough for now, Constance could finish the rest.
‘To Hanna,’ the third card was started, before she even had time to consider it. ‘Happy Christmas. We will be seeing you, I hope, this year.’ She turned the last full stop into a question mark, ‘We will be seeing you, I hope, this year?’ but that looked too querulous, she thought, and she scribbled the question mark out. Then – of course – the thing was not fit to send.
And it was not ten o’clock, because that clock had been stopped for years, maybe five years. It stopped some time after Dan went. And by Dan she meant Pat, of course, her husband. The clock stopped some time after her own true love Pat Madigan died. It was nice to think he would have fixed it for her, if he had not died bu
t, to be honest, death made very little difference to all that. His mother’s house was always tended and tarred, there were boxes of nails and guns full of mastic out at Boolavaun. But nothing of that nature ever got done in Ardeevin unless she begged him. Rosaleen had to nag like a housewife, she had to get down on her knees and wring her hands and even then, it might not happen – a new washer in the toilet cistern, a couple of slates on the roof – she might weep for them to no avail. The trick, of course, was not to want it. If she managed this for a year or more, if she actually, herself, forgot the tile or the slates or the stalled clock then it might get done. Or it might not. By this man she loved more than sunlight or rain. Pat Madigan. A man whose face she watched as he himself watched the weather.
And when the weather was right, off he went, to the land in Boolavaun. The few scrubby fields he had there, the little stony pastures, Rosaleen had planted them with pine trees, since, for the few thousand they brought in a year. Dessie McGrath organised it for her, the man who married Constance. Ugly dark trees in their serried ranks and rows.
Dessie wanted to build out in Boolavaun. He had an idea for a half-acre at the end of the long meadow, on the rise that looked out to sea. The sea view was everything these days, he said. The home place didn’t have one, of course, it was in a dip with its back to the cold Atlantic. Surrounded, these days, by the dark timber, it looked like a shed in comparison with the other places out that way. Popcorn houses, Rosaleen called them, because they went – pop, pop, pop – to twice the size they had been the week before. Pop! a second storey and Pop! some dormer windows and Piff! the outhouse turned into a conservatory: rooms painted Dulux peach, and, under the glass roof, a couple of dead pot plants from the supermarket, together with some cheap wicker chairs. Rosaleen knew well what Dessie McGrath had in mind with a half an acre of the long meadow, and he could whistle for it. Or he could wait for it. He could have it when she was gone. Because that is what they were waiting for. They were all waiting for Rosaleen to be dead.
‘Oh oh oh,’ she cried, and she hit her weak old fist on to the tabletop.
It was not ten o’clock. Rosaleen had no idea what the proper time was and the card on the table was spoilt. They were all gone from her, there was no one to help. ‘We will be seeing you, I hope, this year? ‘Typical of Hanna to make her mar the thing, she was always an accident-on-purpose sort of child. Hanna lived in mess, her life was festooned in it; her side of the bedroom was like a dirty protest, Constance said once, and she was right. The girl was a constant turbulence, she was always weeping and storming off. Constance said maybe it was pre-menstrual but Rosaleen said that child was pre-menstrual her entire life, she was pre-menstrual from the day she was born. Hanna Madigan, who seemed to require a surname at all times, because she would not do a single thing she was told.
Get in here, at once, Hanna Madigan.
No she would not start a new card for her, she had not the energy. What time was it anyway? Rosaleen looked to the clock and then to the darkness outside. She was not even hungry. Her whole life on a diet and now there was no need.
Rosaleen caught the sound of mischief upstairs and looked to the ceiling. But there were no children up there any more, she had chased them all away.
‘To Dessie and Constance, Donal, Rory and.’
Rory was her pet. The clearness of him. She would remember the little girl’s name in a minute. A little strap of a thing, with blotched red cheeks and orange, tinker’s hair. Rosaleen had no problem remembering the child’s name, but her heart failed her suddenly. Something was wrong. She felt a shadow fall through her – her blood pressure, perhaps – some shift in her internal weather.
‘Oh,’ she said again, and slapped her hand on to the tabletop, then she checked the tremor, silenced by the blow. As soon as she moved, it started again. There were days she would shake the milk out of the jug. She knew a man called Delahanty, who was fine except for a little trouble with the buttons on his shirt. Less and less he was able to do them, and one day not at all. And that was how the Parkinson’s came to him, he said. The buttons were the sign.
Rosaleen left her hand palm down on the tabletop, where it buzzed a little and came to rest. Something was wrong. The turf subsided behind the metal door of the range in a sigh of ash and Rosaleen would get up to put more turf on, if she only knew what time it was. She could go to bed, but the hall was cold and the electric blanket was on a timer. Her grandson, Rory, had set it up for her. If she went upstairs, it might be toasty. Or it might not be turned on, not for hours yet.
The hall was painted autumn yellow, and under the yellow was wallpaper, with little posies of flowers, their leaves in gilt. If she opened the door she would see it now.
But she could not open the door. Because who knew what was on the other side?
Rosaleen felt the same swooping feeling and her feet were numb, somehow, under the table. She pulled a comic, small face at her reflection in the window – if her feet were dead, then surely the rest of her could not be far behind – but it was a mistake to make a joke of it and Rosaleen lost all control as she lunged for the phone. She dropped it on the tabletop, then she picked it up again and stabbed the fast-dial with her thumb, and held it to her ear, listening to the clatter of her heart. The phone at the other end started to ring, but no one answered. Rosaleen could hear it ringing, not just in her ear, but also nearby, somehow. It was real. The thing she had imagined was really happening. It was out in the hall.
Constance was coming in the front door. The ringing stopped.
‘Hello!’ Rosaleen said – into her handset or into the hall, she didn’t know which.
Was that it? Was that the thing that was bothering her? The wrong thing?
‘Hello!’
She had expected Constance, maybe, and Constance had not come. Constance was late.
‘Mammy?’
Where she got the ‘Mammy’ from, Rosaleen did not know. When her children grew out of ‘Mama’, they had failed to grow into anything else.
‘Call me Rosaleen,’ she used to say. Until she realised that no one ever did, or would.
‘In the kitchen!’ she called.
Her grandchildren called her ‘Gran’, a word which made her skin crawl. And they called Constance ‘Mum’, which was worse, for being British as well as whiny: ‘Mu-um.’
O my Dark Rosaleen!
Do not sigh, do not weep!
‘Mammy! How are you?’
Constance was in through the kitchen door now, all girth and bustle. She had a couple of plastic bags she put down on the table. Even her bags were loud.
‘I hope they’re not for me,’ said Rosaleen.
‘Just a few bits,’ said Constance. ‘I was in Ennis.’
‘Was that you on the phone?’ said Rosaleen.
‘Me?’ Constance gave her a sharp look.
‘What time is it anyway?’ said Rosaleen, who could not keep the anger out of her voice, or the upset. Constance did not answer. She picked up the house phone from the table and made it beep, several times, checking something.
‘You got your cards?’ she said.
‘Oh,’ said Rosaleen.
‘They’re not too plain?’
‘Where did you get them?’ said Rosaleen.
‘I kept the Santa ones for our house,’ said Constance who smiled and turned away from her, as though there was someone in the doorway – a child, perhaps – but there was no child there.
‘How’s my pal?’ said Rosaleen.
‘He’s good,’ said Constance. Rosaleen wanted to embrace the child that wasn’t in the doorway. She put her hand out to grip the chair.
‘How’s Rory?’
‘Good, good,’ said Constance, and then, with a deliberate sigh, ‘Actually, Mammy, he’s in his room pretending to study, and he’s on the internet. Twenty-four hours a day. I can’t get him off it.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘If it’s not on the laptop it’s the phone. So I take away the phone and you wo
uld not believe it. The temper.’
‘Rory?’ said Rosaleen.
‘He’s nineteen. I can’t be taking away his phone.’
‘And could you not.’ Rosaleen couldn’t think what Constance might do. There was discussion once about his ‘credit’.
‘Could you not take away his credit?’
Constance looked at her.
‘You know, I might,’ she said.
‘Go and give your granny a hug,’ that’s what she used to say. And Rory would walk over, very simply, and put his arms around Rosaleen, and lay the side of his head against her heart.
‘Listen,’ said Constance. ‘I won’t stay. Are you all right?’
‘Of course I am all right.’
‘Put the telly on,’ said Constance, and she had the remote already in her hand. And on the telly came. ‘All right?’
Rosaleen hated the telly. People talked such rubbish.
‘For the news,’ said Constance.
The sound came on to Angelus bells, and now Rosaleen heard them outside too, coming from the church. It was six o’clock.
‘It’s very dark,’ she said.
‘Oh, November,’ said Constance. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow. You’ll come up to Aughavanna tomorrow, for your tea. All right?’
She had opened the door of the kitchen and was already moving through it, and there was the hall beyond her, painted a Georgian turquoise that Rosaleen always considered a mistake. Too acidic. Rosaleen was pulled after her daughter as she turned on the lights, and opened the door to the wine-coloured study, where Rosaleen slept now, because the room was small and easy to heat – an electric radiator, an electric blanket on a timer that only Rory knew how to control, a smoke alarm. And, tucked in under the stairs, a shining, white room with sink and toilet, all tiled and watertight, like the inside of an egg.