Remembering Light and Stone

by Deirdre Madden

  ‘There were quite a few,’ I said, ‘but not as many as I expected.’ Ted told them about how we’d seen the children steal a wallet from a woman’s bag the day before we flew to Dublin. Nuala shuddered. ‘The stories you hear! They say people go about on motorbikes grabbing handbags from women there. I think I’d be too frightened to go to Rome.’

  While I was still in Italy, I’d told Jimmy and Nuala a bit about what I planned to do when I was in Ireland. They knew that the following day we were going to collect a hire car, and drive over to Clare. They’d assumed that Ted was going to stay there with me, but I told them now that Ted had plans of his own: he was going to drive up to Sligo to see where his great-grandfather came from, and try to trace his roots. I promised Jimmy and Nuala that when we came back up to Dublin, we’d spend a few days with them before flying back to Italy. They seemed really pleased about that, and I didn’t say it out of duty or politeness: it was something I wanted to do.

  When we left Dublin the following morning, it was raining a bit, but I didn’t care. We stopped on the way and bought some groceries, including matches and firelighters. Nuala had warned me to be sure to light a big fire, as soon as we arrived. Because of the new baby and moving house, they hadn’t gone down there for a long time, and she said that the house would need to be well aired.

  It was a good journey. Even when the scenery wasn’t anything special, it was nice to see the lush greenness of the countryside, after the summer-scorched Italian landscape. Driving through the Bog of Allen, a large flock of starlings suddenly swooped low past us. Because the land was so flat and the sky so big and the birds so close, Ted said that he felt like he was flying, rather than travelling by car. Beyond Athlone, we saw the start of the sky that I consider to be my sky, with the big high clouds coming in off the Atlantic. I was glad to be going home, but I was nervous too. I didn’t know what to expect, didn’t know how I’d react to being there again. When at last I caught sight of the roof of the house in the distance, I didn’t say anything to Ted.

  I’d expected the house to look smaller than I remembered it, but I was taken aback at how shabby and run-down it was when we pulled up outside. The paintwork – light blue with dark blue door and windowframes – was badly weathered, and the little front garden that my mother had always kept so neat had gone completely wild. The currant and gooseberry bushes were choked with bindweed. While Ted got the luggage out of the boot, I cupped my hands around my eyes, and peered through the windows. I could see dim, familiar outlines, but it wasn’t enough to prepare me for the moment I opened the front door and went inside.

  It was as if I were shrinking, and all my spurious sophistication fell away. My elegance, my smart Italian shoes: all this counted for nothing now. The memories flooded in with such violence that the self I’d made since leaving home was wiped out, and when I turned and saw a man dragging a suitcase into the room I looked at him blankly, wondering for a moment who on earth he could be.

  We lit a fire in the hearth, and I draped sheets over a chair before it, to air them. The chair had a limp cushion on it, with a crocheted cover in lots of different colours. I remembered my mother making it, out of scraps of wool. In the evening, I made dinner: potatoes, carrots and chops, and after it we had mugs of hot sweet tea, and I opened a packet of chocolate biscuits. It was raining hard. When I thought of Italy, it hardly seemed real to me. I couldn’t believe that I’d left an apartment there full of things, clothes and books and records. I couldn’t believe that my life was there. I looked at my watch, and tried to imagine the hot square, the people coming out of Davide’s shop with baskets full of vegetables and bread, the coloured plastic tapes that hung in the doorway draping themselves over their shoulders. I could picture the scene, but it didn’t have the reality of the thick striped mug in my hand. I poured more tea, and as I added milk, I thought of how Franca would have set her teeth in disgust.

  Ted set off for Sligo the following morning. I’d helped him plan his route on a map the night before, and he was excited as a child. I told him to enjoy himself, and that I’d see him in a week’s time.

  I wasn’t lonely when he went away. I realized then how much I’d needed that week on my own. I slept in my old room, with the table where I’d studied so hard for my Inter-Cert, longing to be away. My mother’s old bike was in the shed. Jimmy had told me it was still in good shape, so I pumped up the tyres and went cycling to the village to buy food. I had no friends left locally, for I’d long since lost contact with everybody I’d known when I lived there, but in the village shop, everybody recognized me. I didn’t feel comfortable, waiting to be served. People were friendly enough, probably on Jimmy’s account. They all asked after him, and wanted to know about the new baby, was it a boy or a girl? But I felt they were sizing me up, and I felt judged for having been away when my mother died. My earliest memory is of being in the shop with her. She was wearing a white dress with red flowers on it, and an old lady was offering me a tube of Silvermints. I didn’t want to take them, because the hand that held them out to me was so wrinkled and withered. I must have been barely three. All I can remember now are the sweets, the hand, and my mother’s dress: it was one of those things that are just on the very edge of your life, so near to your not being capable of memory, so near to your not being there at all. I was older now than my mother was when I was born.

  Every afternoon, I went for a walk, usually along the beach. After Umbria, the salt air and the crashing waves were marvellous. One day, on a flat rock, I found a little group of treasures all set out: a piece of green glass, rubbed smooth by the sea, a fragment of pottery, some shells, a curious stone. I thought of the child who must have found and put them there with such care, and how, later that day, when the tide came in, they would all be washed away, back into the Atlantic.

  I did a lot of tidying and cleaning; and I threw a lot of things away, mainly clothes and old letters and papers. In the bottom of a drawer I even found the paper fan Yuriko had given me. It looked faded and tawdry, and I suppose I should have thrown it away too, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

  In the evenings, I cooked myself a simple dinner, and then sat by the fire reading until the small hours of the morning. I’d decided to re-read The Idiot while I was at home, and this time I understood why I liked it so much.

  Ted phoned me one night in the middle of the week, from a payphone in a pub in Ballisodare. It was hard to hear what he was saying: one of the World Cup matches was on television, and there was a terrible racket, but he bawled down the line that he was having a great time. ‘I think I’ve found a brother of my great-grandfather on a parish register here,’ he shouted. He told me he’d see me in a few days, and he ran out of change while I was talking to him, so that I was left standing in the hall with the receiver buzzing.

  The night before Ted was due back, I cycled out at dusk to the foot of one of the Green Roads. I left the bike there: the ground was too rough, and the hill too steep, and I wanted to walk, in any case. I like these overgrown roads you get in Clare, they’re called the Green Roads or the Hunger Roads, and they lead to ruined villages which were abandoned during the Famine. I was fascinated by them when I was a child. If we had lived in the same place, but a hundred years earlier, I used to think, there wouldn’t have been enough for my parents and Jimmy and me to eat. We would have had to leave our house, and go to America on a boat, and not just us, but everybody in our village would have gone, so that there’d have been nobody left behind to look after anything. And then, years and years later, we might have come back and looked for our home, but it would have been so ruined and tumbledown that we might not even have recognized it. It would be the saddest thing, I thought. But now I realized that what I had thought so awful had actually happened: our family home was empty and abandoned.

  I walked on up to the brow of the hill. It was a beautiful still evening. The sky was a deep, radiant blue, and out over the sea there was a new moon. I came to the ruined village. The doorways an
d windows of the houses were packed with nettles, and small trees grew in the former rooms. I remembered reading somewhere that the Colosseum in Rome had been abandoned and untended right up until the end of the last century. By that time there were over four hundred species of plants growing there. Some of them weren’t even native to Europe, having grown from seeds in the fodder of exotic animals brought to Rome to be killed in the games: lions, elephants, giraffes. Then, in a fit of late-nineteenth-century tidy-mindedness, the whole Colosseum was cleared out. Now fewer than thirty different types of plants grow there.

  On a drystone wall near by, I suddenly noticed a large cat, silent, angular, blinking, and I wondered what advantage there was for a cat to be on a Green Road, late on a summer night. There must have been something to be gained, or else the cat wouldn’t have been there. It looked at me coldly, and I moved away, for I didn’t see any need to disturb it. I walked on a bit further, and sat down on a broken stone. A corn-crake was calling. I hadn’t heard a corn-crake for years. Ted would be back the next day, and I thought of the places I would show him. I knew of a field where there was a well and a cross. A hazel tree grew over the well, and on the cross was a woman’s head with a long pigtail. It had been weathered over the years: the pale stone had the texture of bread. It was a tiny field. There were high hedges all around, and it had the air of an ancient place. I knew Ted would like it. I’d show him the Green Roads too, and Poulnabrone Dolmen, and we’d look for Bee Orchids. It might have been the other way round. My ancestors might have migrated, so that I would have been born in America, and come back looking for my roots. I watched the light bleed slowly out of the sky in a long, midsummer dusk, while the moon brightened. Then I thought of Italy, and at once the decision came into my mind, clear and resolute in a way it would never have been had I mulled over the question for weeks. I would leave S. Giorgio. When I went back to Italy, I would stay only as long as was necessary to pack my things, and work my notice in the factory. I’d come back here. I’d have to talk to Jimmy about it when we went back to Dublin, and I’d tell Ted what I was planning as soon as I saw him. I realized that he wouldn’t be surprised.

  I looked at my watch. It was later than I thought, so I turned and walked back on the grassy road. The corn-crake was still hoarsely calling, but the cat on the wall had gone.

  About the Author

  Deirdre Madden is from Toomebridge, Co. Antrim. Her novels include The Birds of Innocent Wood, Nothing is Black, One by One in the Darkness, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, and Authenticity. Her novel Molly Fox’s Birthday also was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. She teaches at Trinity College, Dublin and is a member of the Irish Arts Academy Aosdana.

  Copyright

  First published in 1992

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  This ebook edition first published in 2012

  All rights reserved

  © Deirdre Madden, 1992

  The right of Deirdre Madden to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–29809–9