by Anne Enright
The house was disappearing around her, wall by wall.
It came to her at dinner, and she could not let it go. The knowledge that if she walked out of it now and kept walking, she could reach the famous Cliffs of Moher and there she could, unfamously, die. She looked about her, at the faces moving, the food, the candles, the glassware, the yellow of the white wine and the brown of the red. She thought about the cold outside, wondered how far the fall, how long the drop. She had her baby in her arms and they twisted slowly in the black air, drifting towards the sea, and then hitting the sea. The water was hard and the baby bounced up out of her arms and they were swamped and sank, both of them, and even that sinking was just a slower fall, as they turned and found each other, and lost each other again. It was a soft and endless death – at least in her mind. The baby astonished by it, the way it was astonished by escalators, lifts, the wonder of gravity, the baby looking to Hanna and Hanna looking to the baby saying, ‘I have you. Yes!’
She heard Dan come in behind her, recognised him by the squeak of his shoe. This is how they knew each other, the Madigans, they knew the timbre of a voice, the rhythm of fingers tapping on a tabletop, and they didn’t know each other at all. Not really. But they liked each other well enough. Apparently.
‘I am getting married,’ he said.
‘Oh God Dan are you?’
Hanna turned.
‘Why?’
Dan could not find an answer to that. Not immediately.
‘Oh come on,’ he said.
‘Sorry. Sorry, I mean, who is the guy?’
‘Well that’s the why,’ Dan said. He tried to say Ludo’s name but couldn’t, the room wasn’t ready for it yet.
‘It’s someone in Toronto,’ he said.
‘That’s brilliant,’ she said.
‘Clearly.’
‘No I am. I am really pleased for you. Of course I am. I just thought that you got away from all that, you know? That great institution called marriage.’
‘I did get away from it,’ he said. ‘And now, I can do what I like.’
‘Absolutely.’
They heard Rosaleen’s little car coughing into life outside and the wheels chewing the gravel. The driveway was full of cars – the Lexus, Dessie’s BMW, the battered tin can that Emmet affected, these days. Hanna glanced out the window to see her mother’s Citroën up on the grass, headlights washing the trunk of the monkey puzzle tree, before she bounced across a flowerbed and sliced, at an angle, through the piers of the gate.
‘Nice one,’ she said.
Rosaleen was indicating right, away from the town and towards the sea. The inside light was on and everything was very yellow in there. It looked, Dan thought, like some kind of artwork, he could not think by whom – the dirty, electric look of the lit box jouncing out of the dim garden, Rosaleen, inside, in a purple woollen hat and a teal coloured coat.
Did the coat have a hood? Yes it did have a hood, it was one of those waterproof things for hikers that everyone wore these days. Did the hood have a fur trim? No it did not.
He remembered every detail. She left the inside light on. She was wearing a purple hat and a North Face three-quarter-length jacket in a blue-green. The light still lingered in the western sky. They all heard her leave and none of them thought anything of it. Except that it was Christmas Day and there was no place in particular for her to go. For the first long while after the sound of her engine faded, they did nothing.
‘Where’s she off to?’ said Emmet. ‘With no bell on her bike.’
He was passing the front room and the others followed him down to the kitchen, where the kids had turned on the TV. They were happy to leave the front of the house to its festive, empty business. They dipped into the wine and stood about. Constance would be moving on soon, and they did not want her to go.
‘Is there some nun?’ Dan said. There used to be a nun – a sip of sherry and MiWadi for the kids, who all came back from the convent parlour laden with miraculous medals and little prayer cards with their names on the back.
‘Sister Jerome? She’s long dead,’ said Constance, who was packing up, or trying to, because she had to drive her gang across town for the Christmas evening gathering of the McGraths.
‘Tell them,’ said Hanna.
‘No,’ said Dan.
She picked up the remote and turned the TV down.
‘Dan has some news,’ she said.
‘Tell them what?’ said Dessie.
Dan looked at his brother-in-law’s broad face, pink with Christmas wine and well-being. He lifted his hands up suddenly, to clack non-existent castanets.
‘I’m engaged!’
There was a small silence. Dessie’s pink intensified.
‘Congratulations, man,’ said Rory. ‘Legal! Hey.’
He loped over to his uncle and hugged him, right there and then. A big wraparound hug, complete with back pat. So no one had to ask the obvious question – the one to which they all knew the answer. Of course it was a man. Of course.
‘Oh I am delighted,’ said Constance.
‘Congratulations,’ Emmet said.
Hanna raised her glass. ‘Safe at last.’
And Rory said, ‘So who’s the lucky guy?’
So that took another half-hour of their day, because Dessie went to the boot of the BMW and liberated a bottle of champagne intended for his mother’s house, and they popped it and had an awkward glass. Then Constance was barking and squawking as she tried to get her brood out the door, and with Constance gone, there was no one to worry about Rosaleen.
The house was silent. They left the TV on and watched people singing and dancing for a while.
A phone call came in from their uncle in Florida. Emmet picked up and, after a few pleasantries, Bart said, ‘Will you put your mother on?’
‘She went out for her walk,’ said Emmet.
‘What time is it there anyway?’
Emmet looked at his mobile.
‘It’s nearly five,’ he said.
‘Listen I’ll catch her in a bit,’ said Bart. ‘I’ll ring at seven.’
Emmet put down the phone.
‘Should we ring Constance?’ he said.
And Dan said, ‘What for?’
The Green Road
ROSALEEN WAS OUT on the green road, and she was cold. She was going for her constitutional. As she did after lunch, most days. She was getting out for a bit of air. She had left it a little late. Lunch was late. Even so, she had not thought it would be dark, not yet, the way the Atlantic sky held the light for so long after the sun was down, something to do with the height of the heavens out here on the green road. The west was still open and clear but the ground under her feet was tricky enough. All the colour was going from things and nothing was easy to see. You could not tell grey from grey.
The little Citroën was parked where the tarmac stopped, back at Ballynahown, and Rosaleen was out on the dark road under a deep sky. There was no moon. There was the sound of running water, quite loud. One of her feet was wet – the front part – and the path was uneven. Rosaleen found the strip of grass in the middle of the road and stuck to that, and, Lift your eyes. There it was. She stopped to look. The stone wall that was the remains of a fort keeping watch on the Aran Islands and the far distant mountains of Connemara. The mountains were purple and navy blue, the three islands black against a silver sea. The sun was gone below the horizon, but the light from it still bounced up off the sky. So the sea was dark in the distance and light close to. It was all a question of the angle. Because the world was round but the light was straight.
There were no more people.
The houses were far behind her. The last two on the left hand side were dark and deserted, their blank windows looking out over the valley. And then a farmhouse on the right, with an arthritic collie who herded her along her way, in sprints and crouches, its belly scraping the ground. Old people in there. Who knows what kind of Christmas in that house.
The sea was on her left, w
hile the slope, she knew, rose on the right, the boulders, grey and humpy in the darkness; the few sheep standing behind them for shelter, their heads drooped and shoulders slumped, foursquare on patient feet.
There was no wind but the air was cold. Her eyes smarted with it, and Where did it begin? That was the question that went through her, though it was more a cadence than a question, it was another scrap in a life full of scraps, some of them beautiful.
O my Dark Rosaleen!
Do not sigh, do not weep!
She was sighing now, she was weeping now, she was feeding the wind with the little shards of her tears, that the wind blew back at her, hurting her own face. Hard to know if they were tears of sorrow or of cold. She was so frustrated. Rosaleen, Rosaleen someone was calling her name, but when she listened it was no one, not even the wind.
Rosaleen was tired of waiting. She had been waiting, all her life, for something that never happened and she could not bear the suspense any longer. Rosaleen was in a hurry, now. She thought she might find a cliff edge and throw herself down it from purest impatience. She might kill herself just to get something done.
But she was not going to kill herself. She had never been interested in that sort of palaver. Where did it begin? And where was the end of it. How long would she have to continue, being like this. Being herself.
O my Dark Rosaleen.
And why was there no one to love her?
She was a small thing under a big sky, and being tiny was not the same as being dead. It was quite the opposite. Rosaleen spread her arms wide and flung her face up.
‘Hah!’ she said.
In the middle of nowhere, on Christmas Day, when no one was out, not one person was walking the roads.
‘Hah!’
Old women were not given to shouting. Rosaleen did not know if she still could, or if your voice went slack like the rest of you, when you got old.
‘Oh, don’t mind me!’ she said. She roared it. She stuck her fists down straight by her sides. ‘Don’t mind me!’
There was no problem with her voice, that is what she discovered. Old women do not shout because they are not allowed to shout. Because if they shout and roar then there will be no dinner.
And let that be an end to it now.
‘Don’t you worry about me!’
The mountain took her on. Knockauns was to the right of her and it sent her voice back her way, and there was mist, she saw, coming down for her too. So she quickened her pace and stumbled on a rock, but she did not fall.
‘Hah,’ she said.
Rosaleen was on her own. And that was the way she wanted to be. That was just great. She got in her little car and she drove away from the lot of them. The big faces on them. She left them to it. Such selfish children she had reared. She left them to get on with it, whatever it was – their lives – and she came out to walk off her dinner and take the sharpness of the air inside herself. To get the sea air.
Rosaleen opened her lungs and filled herself up.
It hurt her chest. It hurt the inside of her. The air was cold and she was cold so Rosaleen thought hot thoughts – driving up over her own lawn. Yes! And out the gate. She was so cross, the car drove itself. They went for miles down familiar roads until they found her own stands of dark pine. They bumped past the house where Pat Madigan was born, the little door painted in flaking layers of green over red over blue. They drove right past all this, Rosaleen and her little car, through another stand of trees that were her trees, horrible and dark. On and on they went, until they came to the edge of things. Then the car stopped and Rosaleen got out.
The sea was huge for her. The light gentle and great. The fields indifferent, as she walked up the last of the hill. But she got a slightly sarcastic feel off the ditches, there was no other word for it – sprinkles of derision – like the countryside was laughing at her.
Presences.
At the gate beyond the last house, where the tarmac road turned into a green road and the sheepdog turned for home, she looked back on the valley of Oughtdarra. Solemn and dark now, with the Flaggy Shore at the sea edge of it, graves and dolmens there, and ancient roads and gateways to nothing, from nothing. A couple of houses were lit up for Christmas, the blink of the lights a glimmering from this distance. There was a little ruined church down in that place, with a curse in the name of the man who built it too terrible to speak aloud. This she knew from Pat Madigan who took her walking along these uplands with her little dog in the late summer of 1956. He talked more in those days and weeks than he ever did after, about curses and the like, piseogs, the fairies on the mound of Croghateehaun and the people lost in the scrubby, treacherous ground below it. He talked about the foxes behind Knockauns mountain, the seventeen ancient forts between here and Slieve Elva, and the goats that lived in the hazel scrub. He told her the depth and beauty of the cave called Polnagree, the two Englishmen who went down it with ropes and lamps. He pointed to the place where the three townlands met, Oughtdarra, Ballynahown and Crumlin, a gap in the cliff that belonged to none of them called Leaba na hAon Bhó, The Bed of the One Cow. There was a story, he said, about that cow and the end of the world.
Then he laughed, and told her about a heifer he had once, who came into heat with her head stuck in a big bucket – a tub almost, made out of blue metal – the handle was up over her poll, whatever way she managed it, and the bull was working her, the pair of them walking the field with the bucket swinging and banging until she came into a standing heat and he mounted her. ‘And the sound out of her then’, he said. ‘I am surprised she didn’t deafen herself, in the bucket.’
There was no stopping him.
He pointed to a house where a man killed himself by hanging and a rock overlooking the sea where the ghost of a hungry man was said to sit, turning to stare at passers-by. He talked of a place – miles away – where a woman kept her daughter chained in the hen-house, and a woman whose house was full of money sent by her sons in America. He said there were babies born in one house that never saw the light of day. He said that the women of one family in particular took their babies back into themselves like cats did their kittens, and it was important always to marry out, in a place like this, if you got the chance. And she was his chance. He did not say that he loved her. He said that if she would have him, a fine woman like her, unencumbered and free, with her own money and no one to stop her, if she would make her choice and choose him, that he would worship her with his body, and with his entire soul, until the day he died.
Foolish but true.
That is what he said.
And that is the way he saw the land, with no difference between the different kinds of yesterday. No difference between a man and his ghost, between a real heifer and a cow that was waiting for the end of the world. It was all just a way of talking. It was the rise and fall in the telling, a rounding out before the finish. A flourish. A shiver. And it was for her. He had saved every detail up for her alone, as though every rock and tree awaited her coming for its explication.
And when she laughed at him, he only agreed with her.
‘If I am a fool,’ he said. ‘Then let me be a great fool and not a small one.’
There was no turning him down. And when he entered her – that first time and every time subsequent – it was a sacred kind of pleasure he took. She was sure of it.
My own Rosaleen!
Pat Madigan worshipped her. And he did not tell a lie. He wanted her for the money she had, for the fine house and the children he could get out of her. He laughed at her talk and then he ignored her talk. But there were times, even in his last days, even at the very end, when he looked at her with a pride so keen it was sinful.
My virgin flower, my flower of flowers,
Somewhere along here, that is where the first kiss happened between them, her little dog sitting down for them to finish, looking out to sea. She had married beneath her. Even the dog seemed to indicate it, by the indifferent set of her head.
My life of life, my
saint of saints,
my Dark Rosaleen!
And, ‘Hah!’ she said, because she’d had the pleasure of Pat Madigan for forty years, and ‘Hah’ because he was dead and she was still alive, up here on the green road. Years since she had been kissed on the mouth. Years.
Rosaleen missed her little dog, a little grey pompom of a terrier cross, with a red tartan bow between her ears. Milly. She could feel her almost running along beside her, could feel her brush against her shins. Rosaleen lifted her foot not to tread on her and saw the blackness of the road underneath. If it was the road – it might as well be a river. Whatever it was, she was sitting in it. And there was no dog, of course there wasn’t. She was plonked like a fool on her wet backside, and it was time to get up and sort herself out. It was time to get on with it. Her walk on this road which was the road of her youth.
There was no rain, but everything was wet. Sopping. A deep liquid sound in the ditch on her left, there was a cave somewhere near and Rosaleen was afraid of caves. She was afraid of heights, too. She did not know what she was doing up here – when she thought about it she was afraid of the dark and it was getting dark now, though the afterglow lingered over the western Atlantic; a sky too big for the sun to leave.
It was old age, of course – the fear. Passing cars, children on bicycles, plugs and sockets, escalators: she was afraid of things that beeped, or hummed, she was afraid of looking like a fool, of wearing the wrong stockings, wearing the wrong clothes. She put something on because she liked it and then a while later she realised it was all terrible. Rosaleen was terrified of losing her mind, of saying things or snapping in public – if she hit at a stranger, if she said something rude or obscene, that would be unbearable. She took the precaution of saying very little, any more. Even here on the mountain she kept her own counsel. But she was afraid the stone wall would fall on her and her leg would get trapped, she was afraid of getting raped, and what were the chances of that? On Christmas Day of all days. Who would even rob you up here on the green road?