Not long after we’d met, he had mentioned a nurse from Clare who’d been working at the hospital in town; but it was only that winter, when we were eating dinner in the flat one night, that he told me they’d almost become engaged a couple of years ago. In the end, she couldn’t commit to settling down here.
‘She followed her brother to Australia,’ he said. ‘She was hoping I’d come out at some point, at least try it.’
‘Weren’t you tempted?’
He shrugged, almost apologetic, as though I would think less of him for having played it safe. ‘I had a business here,’ he said. ‘To pack it all in? I don’t know.’
‘Did you miss her?’ I meant, of course, Do you miss her? I was imagining the nurse returning, Eddie gone in an instant. I was picturing her in her starched nurse’s uniform, bustling and competent and sexy.
‘For a while, I guess, I hoped she’d come back.’
‘You did?’
He looked at me, quizzically, then smiled. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘It petered out. I haven’t heard anything of her in over a year. I don’t even have her address.’
My last relationship had been with a man from the newspaper office in Portland. He was older, maybe forty, attractive in a craggy, intelligent, distracted sort of way. He was a columnist, someone I’d admired from afar before bumping into him – literally, we collided on a street corner – in my neighbourhood one night. When I told him I worked at the homeless shelter, he went on a rant about dubious rezoning proposals aimed at gentrifying my employers out of existence. He wanted me to blow the lid off some scandal I hadn’t even known existed.
We dated for a couple of months, during which I cleaved to the idea that our chance encounter was a sign that we were meant to be. But eventually I admitted to myself that he was imperious and impatient. He had little sympathy for hesitation or uncertainty or self-doubt, and if I was anything at twenty-three, it was hesitant and uncertain and full of doubt. I knew that if I were to continue seeing him I would need to toughen up, and I wanted that, I really did. I didn’t like swimming in doubt. He wanted it, too. But when I thought of how I might become tough and sure, I felt so inadequate to the task that, instead of growing larger over those months, I retreated.
Some of this I explained to Eddie, who winced as though in pain. He said that I was grand just the way I was, and when I asked him what he meant, he said, ‘You don’t have to prove anything to me.’
The night we got engaged, we drank champagne in his flat. I sat on his lap, and he asked, ‘How does it feel?’ and I said, with mock-gravity and not a little awe, ‘I feel quite old and serious.’ I thought I was on the threshold of my life.
Just after midnight I phoned my mother with the news. She was both thrilled and saddened. Although she didn’t say it, I knew she was thinking that what the marriage meant was that I would live very far away from her for the rest of our lives. But she was a woman of curiosity and enthusiasm, and I could tell she was also excited by the idea that I had gone to an odd little corner of the world and found myself a solid and loving man to marry. She, too, had a solid and loving husband by then – Stan, whom she’d met in her fifties – and it eased my conscience a bit to know she wasn’t on her own.
My mother had never lived with my father. She had raised me herself, in a cosy, modest house in a suburb of Portland. She worked as the administrator in the philosophy department at a university in the city, which is how she met my father, a professor of philosophy at a college in Maine who had come to Portland for a semester. My mother was thirty-eight that spring. She’d been engaged some years before, and had broken it off when it became clear that her fiancé expected her to fall in line with whatever life decisions he made – a perfectly common assumption in the late fifties but one that filled my mother with dread. My mother may not have known what she wanted, but she knew what she didn’t want.
The day after I got engaged was a Sunday, and we were expected at Eddie’s parents’ house for lunch. One of his sisters was down from Dublin for the weekend and we were going to announce our engagement. On the way we stopped at Slattery’s on High Street for a drink. Eddie knew everyone there – the man who was something big at the pharmaceutical plant, two guys home on leave from the Lebanon, a cluster of plump old ladies who were somehow connected to a family celebrating a boy’s First Communion. We nestled into a corner table and ordered pints of Guinness. We’re getting married, I thought, and it was as though the very air between us was charged with the secret. We were sitting on a cushioned bench. Eddie had one thick thigh crossed over the other, and he was wagging his right foot gently. He was wearing beautiful Italian brogues and talking to the man next to him, laughing at something a little too loudly, and then suddenly he turned to me, rested his hand on my leg and asked softly was I okay.
‘You okay there, pet? Can I get you something?’
It was there in the tone. I knew that I was loved as I had never been before. I don’t mean that Eddie loved me with remarkable passion or insight. I don’t mean that I felt most fully myself with him. I mean that, in the strangest way, I felt forgiven. For as long as I could remember there’d been a vague disquiet in me, as if I lived in the shadow of some humiliation whose particulars I could not recall. Until Eddie, until he absolved me, I hadn’t known there was any other way to feel.
The pubs closed at one o’clock on a Sunday, and when the time came for drinking up we were all cast out into the grim white light, a vague, half-sad tipsiness upon us. Eddie drove us back through town, down O’Connell Street, past the teahouse where I’d had my lunches the previous summer, past the draper’s and the newsagent’s and the tatty shopping arcade whose tiled floor was always lethal with the slick of rain; past the hairdresser’s with the sign that read, with no comic intent, Appointments necessary, if possible; past the doctor’s with the shingle hanging over the door that read ‘Surgery’.
We crossed the bridge and headed north. On the Donegal road, in the dip between Ballytivnan and the river, were the Travellers’ caravans. In summer, they’d had about them something brassy and defiant, but now they seemed forlorn. Two small children tottered, dazed or truculent, in the grass on the wet verge. Strewn around outside the caravans were clothes and pots and pans, generators, and furniture, and the whole tableau, even the children, looked like the aftermath of a natural disaster.
Eddie’s mother came from farming stock – her people owned untold acres of good land in Clare. She had all the pragmatism and know-how that come with being reared close to the land, but she had, too, a way of swanning into a room that was almost operatic. She knew her wines and made crème brûlée from scratch. Eddie’s father came from a different sort of background – a grubby little cottage near the Roscommon border, a bit of land, a few dairy cows. He had migrated to the town as a young man and worked his way up from shop boy at a building contractors’ company to manager, then co-owner, before gradually acquiring a number of properties in the town centre. I wanted to like him, for his audacity and lack of pretence, and because rheumatoid arthritis had confined him to a wheelchair, but I never could, for he was also coarse and demanding, and often dismissive. I gathered that he had once been a strapping man of vigour and rough good looks. Now, he sat in his wheelchair, drinking whiskey and smoking cigarettes, and I dreaded the moments, however brief, when we were left alone together. In his presence, I felt frivolous and insufficient. I would attempt to be of use by fetching him something, and then I would feel ashamed for being able to get up and walk. I am certain he thought mobility was wasted on me. Perhaps he thought it wasted on us all.
He and Eddie’s mother lived in a house with gardens front and back, which were tended by an ageing man who had been with them for ever. They also had a woman who was there most days, doing housework, and on Sundays helping to cook the lunches we attended; she was flitting and shadowy, discreet to the point of ghostliness. I had never been in a house where there was ‘help’. When I was a child, my mother employed a woman nam
ed Lula who came every other week to clean. Her flesh was discernible in rolls beneath the tight, nubby polyester tops she wore, and I remember her as raucous and indiscreet. My mother sometimes sat with her at the small Formica table in our kitchen, talking women’s talk, and more than once I saw Lula sobbing (I am tempted to say blubbering), running a chubby finger up beneath the lenses of her spectacles, which were always misted and oily-looking.
Eddie had two sisters, both younger. Nessa lived in Toronto, but Celia came down some weekends from Dublin, where she was an accounts manager at a bank. She was married to a man named Gerry, who did something in finance. Celia and Gerry dined at Dublin’s only Michelin-starred restaurant and had a home-alarm system that knew exactly where they were and would buzz their beepers if there was trouble. Eddie’s mother shook her head and said it sounded ghastly, by which she meant their entire existence in that money-grubbing and amoral city, not just the fact that it included beepers.
I had nothing much in common with Celia, but I liked her. Unlike Eddie’s parents, she never treated me as though there was some secret to belonging I’d never be let in on. She made me feel it was okay that I didn’t know how to make Christmas pudding or elderflower cordial and that I came from nowhere in particular. When Eddie and I announced our engagement that day, all of us in the sitting room after lunch, with a fire roaring and a wet dusk settling outside, it was Celia who declared it brilliant news and jumped up from the sofa to congratulate us.
Eddie’s mother looked at us with a frozen smile and said, ‘Well, I didn’t expect that.’ There was a beat of silence, then Eddie’s father cleared his throat and raised his whiskey in a toast.
From my third-floor window I can see the east and west piers of Dún Laoghaire harbour, curling like the pincers of something risen from the seabed. I can see the ferries from Holyhead hoving into view, a little sleeker now than when I was a passenger, and less redolent of exile and finality. What I can see, in fact, is my own point of entry, the port at which I first arrived more than twenty-five years ago. The coincidence thrills me, though it’s hardly astonishing. There are few things on earth smaller than this country.
The house belongs to friends of a friend, a retired couple who are in Canada visiting their son, and will later go to Australia to visit their daughter. It is part of a Victorian terrace, and there is an air of decorum and seemliness about it that is like no house I’ve ever inhabited. My favourite part of it is the entryway, which smells strongly of the sea. This whole island was once under water, and I like to imagine that this large foyer, with its sideboard and its wall mirror and its umbrella stand, has retained the memory of that. I think of shell middens found on mountaintops. I half expect to find a fish fossil in the floor tiles. When I remarked, with wonder, on the smell – ‘How lovely to be this close to the sea!’ – the owners of the house expressed puzzlement. They claimed never to have noticed it, and I thought to myself: They have really lost it. But within days of my moving in, that once-overwhelming sea-smell began to fade, so that I found myself sniffing hard when I came in the front door, searching for it, missing it.
I’ve taken the house for six months, until I decide what to do, where to go. After my mother died, I left Nairobi, where I’d been working for an Irish NGO, and took a consultant’s contract and moved back here. Over the years, I had sometimes imagined that I might one day live in Ireland again. But it was not until my mother died that I came back. I was exhausted, by work and by grief, and so far from any person I had ever felt attached to, or anywhere that had ever felt like home. When I thought about where home might be I realized, somewhat to my surprise, that Dublin – where I’d lived for a time after leaving Eddie – seemed the closest approximation.
They’ve got me writing a year-end report on our work in the world’s largest refugee camp – Dadaab, in eastern Kenya. This afternoon I’m meeting the head of our Dublin office, Harry, to discuss it, though it is already clear to me that it won’t differ radically from last year’s. It’s not that nothing happens in Dadaab – there are, after all, almost half a million unhappy people there – it’s that many things happen but very little changes. Somalis keep arriving. Today I’ve been reading through case studies written by field workers, looking for a bit of human interest I might include. There was a Somali woman named Hamdi who set herself on fire outside the office. She had five children, their father had been murdered by men from a rival clan, and Hamdi had become a sex worker in the camp to support her family. If she were caught, she risked being burned alive or otherwise put to death, so it was the grimmest of ironies that she had, at the end of her tether, attempted to call attention to her plight by setting fire to herself and almost dying in the process. Apparently, it worked. After several months, Hamdi and her children were resettled in Germany. We can imagine the possibility of a happy ending. Even so, the tale is simply too grisly to include. What I would like to explore in my report, and what it is certainly not my job to explore, is the question of which is more shocking – barbarity, or the capacity to survive it. When I started in this line of work, brutality shocked me more. Now, survival does. For all the times I’ve seen people come out the other side of horrors with their sanity seemingly intact, I have never really understood how it is done.
I work at a desk beside the window, watching the weather like it’s television. This morning it snowed, lightly. The flakes were blowing about, harum-scarum, and it wasn’t entirely clear where they were coming from; apart from a few tufty and benign-looking clouds, the sky was blue. When the flurries eventually stopped, a haze formed, slowly obscuring Sutton and Howth. A darkish band took shape along the horizon, growing gradually lighter and more diffuse as it rose, as though the water’s surface was on fire and this was smoke. The haze thickened to the point of obscuring the sea itself. The fire went out. Howth and Sutton sank. I saw in every direction only a grey mass, as solid as a rock face.
My mother asked me once, a little rhetorically, ‘Doesn’t anything surprise you?’
She meant ‘surprise’ as in ‘astound’. She meant I had no sense of wonder. We were sitting in her living room in a retirement complex in Florida, and she was cooing in amazement as I demonstrated, yet again, how text messaging worked. I wanted us to be able to text each other while I was in Nairobi, and that must’ve been the fourth time we’d gone over it. Each time, she had shaken her head as though she were witnessing the miracle of flight. I believe that a part of her really was amazed, and I thought maybe she belonged to the last generation capable of astonishment.
‘It’s pretty exciting,’ I said, with more sarcasm than I’d intended.
She looked hurt, and rightly so, and I felt like a bully. Anyway, who was I to scoff? I have no idea how text messaging actually works. And that was when she said it: Doesn’t anything surprise you?
Later, we walked down the back path and sat in a very gentle April sun and waited for the jitney to bring us to the beach. We shared a small bag of potato chips and discovered we both loved the ones with the little pillows of air in them, and neither of us could quite say why, but the discovery felt extraordinary, as though it were something genuinely important and we could not see why it had taken decades for us to stumble on it. For a moment, she seemed positively girlish, beside herself with delight. I looked at her shyly and had to turn my head away for an instant and gather myself. I think I knew by then. I knew somehow that it wouldn’t be long.
Still, her death astonished me. Like nothing ever has.
At some point during my last year in Nairobi, my mother, who had been youthful all her life, even into her eighties – her gait steady, her enthusiasm undiminished, her eyes bright – grew abruptly older. I began to mourn her pre-emptively; the mere thought of her caused my heart to buckle. While she was still healthy I made a decision: that I would go and live near her, or perhaps even with her, during her last years on earth. I would go, I thought, before autumn. And then, the next time I was visiting, she had a small stroke – was it the first? I
wasn’t even sure – and I began to panic. After that I travelled twice in three months to see her.
When she died, my colleagues thought I would stay in Nairobi. They said, Don’t make any rash decisions, and One foot in front of the other. But her death changed me. When I returned to Nairobi after her funeral, I felt my mother everywhere. I was awash in an indiscriminate tenderness I neither expected nor understood. Everything moved me. Everything – from a bird call, to the green of the grass, to the children playing soccer on the pitch near my home – overwhelmed me with its life. I swung between a lightness of being that bordered on vertigo and a sorrow that made the least movement difficult. In my grief, I felt awakened to the world, and a strange, acute euphoria sometimes stole over me. What I felt, in fact, was perpetually astonished.
Harry said he needs a break from the office, so we’re meeting at the Fitzwilliam for coffee. He’s already there when I arrive. We order, and he asks me first not about the progress of my report but about my mother. Or, rather, how I’m doing since she died.
I shrug. He nods. I say that grief seems to me a set of contradictions.
‘It’s like the opposite of vigilance,’ I say, ‘but the apathy is so keyed up. Everything is heightened, or intensified, and yet I seem to care about it all less than ever.’ I find it hard to talk about my mother without becoming overwhelmed, and so I talk about my states of mind. I try to be forensic. I say grief is like a drug, or a dream, like a long, slow panic attack, or like seeing everything, finally, for what it is. Harry tells me his father died three years ago, and that there have been times since when he’s felt closer to him than he ever did in life. He says he read a lot about grief in the year or so after, not self-help books but stark meditations on death. Seneca and Montaigne and Roland Barthes.
When Light Is Like Water Page 3