The Night Stages

by Jane Urquhart

  In the room, the boy followed the tall man to his mother’s bedside, not even looking at the despised, dangerous baby or the midwife who held it. The doctor thrust a syringe into one of the bottles. He turned then and plunged the needle into the mother’s arm. Her mouth was a circle of pain: there was neither breath nor voice in it, but her eyes were bright and open, alive with suffering. The noise of the newborn was everywhere, shrill, demanding. Niall was certain that the baby had stolen his mother’s voice.

  The baby quieted and something in the room changed. Kneeling by the bed, the chemist picked up one of his mother’s clenched fists, which he held in both of his hands for several moments while looking down at her face on the pillow. Then he bent toward her. “Not too much longer now and the pain will be moving away,” he whispered into his mother’s ear, and as he said these words, the silent howl began slowly to melt from her mouth.

  She was broken. Rags and bones tossed on a bloody bed. Her loose hair shone with sweat and her thighs and knees, still open, were smeared with crimson. But she turned her face toward the whisperer.

  Niall would always remember the way the man uncurled his mother’s fingers, one at a time, the left hand and then the right, and the way he smoothed those hands, with the palms of his own, into the wrinkled sheets of the ruined bed.

  “Who are you?” she asked, and the question was one long exhalation of breath.

  They had known each other two years before Niall had spoken to Tam about his mother. By the time he finished, he was pale, exhausted, and the bottle on the table between them was empty.

  “Was that how she died?” Tam wanted to know.

  “No,” he said, “not like that.”

  The way she was pulled back to being with him, the way she submitted to the force of his personality during their times together, astonished her over and over. As the years passed there were times when she suspected that he walked unwillingly to a meeting knowing there could no longer be anything new for her to bring to him: the same room, the same caresses. Had not everything already been said, touched? Sometimes he would appear at her door like a bewildered Magi, one who had travelled too far, much too far for this small spate of comfort, the brief awakening, if it could be called an awakening, to pleasure. Sometimes, if it was winter, he would have to remove a coat, a hat, and these he would place gently on the arm or the seat of a chair, and while he did this, he would comment on the weather in the most ordinary of ways as if he had no scientific knowledge whatsoever concerning the rain he had shaken from his sleeves.

  There was always that one moment she waited for when he would place his forehead at the intersection of her neck and shoulder and she would feel his body relax against hers, a full stop, an ending to everything outside of them. The rest of her life without him vanished; then language, then geography until there was only the white rectangle of the bed and how they moved there. There was the soft zone beneath his ribs at the place where his waist met his hips, and her own waist twisting in his hands, his breath entering her throat.

  Goodbye to all that, she thinks now, looking at the entranced children in the mural here in the passenger lounge.

  They are not interested. There is no active drama left in them.

  Niall’s boss, McWilliams – he of the much-admired encyclopedic mind – was someone he cared about and quoted. McWilliams might have told him something new about the weather in Croisset during the week that Flaubert was completing this page of his Bovary, or the effect of fog on Victor Hugo’s thirty-second chapter of Les Misérables. There was a much-told story concerning the path of Halley’s Comet on the day of Mark Twain’s birth, and its reappearance the day before the same author’s death. He might have rhymed off some of the meteorological questions put by God to Job. Hast thou entered into the storehouses of the snow; or hast thou beheld the treasures of the hail are the only two she remembers. There were parhelia, and fogbows, famous gales, and bog bursts. A shower of orange snow, the village of Sneem upside down in the sky. There were Sun Dogs –even Moon Dogs. He could chart the history of a snowflake through the structure of its crystals. He was very fond of meteor showers, international date lines, undersea ridges, and the kind of low pressure systems that determined the outcome of battles.

  Sometimes she ventured her own opinions about weather, even about literature, but Niall would barely register these, was more interested in the segments of her life that he considered to have been truly hers. Her memories of her English childhood fascinated him, he having limited first-hand knowledge of that country beyond a series of weather patterns. What did she remember of butlers, he, a P.G. Wodehouse fan, wanted to know, or of Hardy country, or Constable’s cloud studies, which he had heard about from McWilliams? They would see these things together, she had told him, knowing, even as she spoke, that this would never come to pass.

  “And the two of you?” she had asked once, about the brother. “What happened?”

  “There was the living apart,” he eventually told her. “And then a kind of betrayal.”

  He told her that Kieran had moved in full-time, or at least as close to full-time as he could manage, with their housekeeper, the other mother, Gerry-Annie. “He was impossible for my father to control at home,” he said, “and knowing where he was, more or less, my father let him go to her.” Kieran soon had a bicycle – where he got it his family never knew – and had sped around the parish and finally the whole county on it.

  “He had the gift or the curse of charm, though no one but Gerry-Annie knew this in the beginning. But when she made such observations, she spoke them in Irish, and in such a declarative way! So we didn’t really understand whether they were good or bad, which was what she wanted, I imagine.”

  “A sort of Irish Nelly Dean,” he said then, adding that Wuthering Heights was one of McWilliams’ favourite books because of the weather in it. She was their maid, came in from the country daily to help look after them when Kieran was small. Her name was due to the way country people of the parish occasionally identified a woman. “There would be many Annies, many Marys,” he said. “And most of them were either O’Connells or O’Sullivans. This particular Annie had been married to Gerry O’Connell: hence Gerry-Annie.”

  When Kieran went off to school, Gerry-Annie had come down to clean only two or three times a month. But after their mother died, she was, again, regularly in the house. Niall had liked her well enough, but Kieran took to her wonderfully. So, a year or so after their mother was gone, off he went with Gerry-Annie into the mountains. “It was only five or six miles,” Niall had explained, “but a completely different world, and Kieran became a part of that.”

  Descriptions of Tam’s tomboy childhood always made him laugh – the runaway in her, and her fascination with planes. Sometimes she felt she was performing for him, but she carried on, eager to make him happy. He would offer accounts of Gaelic football victories, and all the training that took place in every imaginable kind of weather. He had been a sort of local hero, he admitted. There were cups and trophies and the townspeople caught up in a number of victorious homecomings. She’d pictured him riding on the shoulders of cattle drovers and shop clerks and recalled for him the beginning of a poem concerning an athlete dying young. “Who wrote that?” she asked.

  “Houseman,” he’d said. He never would have known about this, he confessed, were it not for McWilliams. “Wenlock Edge” was a particular favourite. “ ‘Tis the old wind in the old anger,’ ” he quoted. Then, after reciting these words, he had taken her open hand and had placed it over the left side of his face, as if instructing her to silence him.

  He had read science at university in Dublin, and after graduate work in meteorology, he had accepted a position at the Dublin Weather Office. A few years later there was an opening at the weather station where his father worked, and he’d come home for that. “And to get married,” he said.

  He measured rain, the movements of the magnetic North Pole, and the fluctuations of solar wind. His father launc
hed the daily weather balloons. “Every day,” Niall said, “right on time. He did this every day until he retired.” He mentioned that his father, who could have afforded to send him to school in England, did not.

  Except for the artificial wind, created, she believes, by the rendered velocity, the mural she is looking at is oddly without weather. It is all oranges and yellows and reds, the colour of sun, the colour of heat and fire. Parts of it are blue. But no ocean, and no weather. There is full grey now beyond the window glass, and full silence. Calm and erasure. She is thinking about the fog in these terms. But when she whispers the words calm and erasure, the sound is like that of a wave pulling up a golden Kerry strand and then withdrawing.

  She is remembering a winter afternoon, the fire banked high, the wind pushing rain against the glass of the west-facing windows, and Niall speaking in surprising detail about his lost brother’s life as a child. He was establishing the actuality of Kieran, what he had been, what he still might be. She was moved by this, by the fact of him giving her, through the brother, at least this one path into his past. She hadn’t seen the pain yet. That would come later.

  “There is a natural secretiveness in my family” – he had lifted his hand, making a point – “that is to say, a natural discretion.” He looked at her then and smiled, his face flushed. She had loved this in him, his shyness.

  But in Kieran there had been a level of fearfulness added to this. “It was as if,” Niall said, “having found what he wanted, he felt anyone would try to take it from him.”

  Niall had been preparing to leave and was standing, reaching for the jacket he had placed on the back of a chair when he had entered the cottage. Two empty glasses rested side by side near a half-finished bottle. She would drink the wine later, alone, after he had gone.

  “He was out in the bog and up in those mountains in all seasons, any kind of weather. He afforded himself no protection.”

  Niall had bent over and reached for Tam’s hand across the table.

  “The girl I married had no links at all to a life like the one lived out in the country,” he said. “The smell of the turf and the animals would have put her off, I think. There was nothing in her life like that.”

  “I’m glad you became a cyclist,” she said, looking at the bicycle that he had, as always, brought into her house and that he would soon walk to the door. She did not want to talk about his wife.

  He had joined the Dublin Cycling Club on a whim while he was at university, he told her, and it had stuck. He had liked the long stretches of training, how there would sometimes be a full day of it, unlike the football practices that would often be over in a couple of hours. “I was, I still am, the opposite of my father, never fully took to quiet times in the house.” He reddened again, as if suddenly realizing the irony of what he had said and where he had said it.

  KIERAN HAD GONE QUITE WILLINGLY TO SCHOOL IN the beginning, walking solemnly beside his older brother, under the shadow of the large church, past several pubs, the bank, the food stores, the hardware store. Other boys drifted down from the High Street and joined them at the tower house, so named because of its round wall and curved windows. He was able to see himself in the glass of those windows, the uniform too large for him and his socks crumpled at the ankles. Girls passed them as they moved toward the school, dressed in their own uniforms, heading for the convent at the opposite end of the town. His brother, Niall, so much taller, older, would turn toward the Upper School, leaving him alone but filled already with a clear knowledge of his differences.

  He learned to read quickly, and with considerable enthusiasm –he was delighted by anything that included a story. Early mathematics, for example, that involved children with a limited amount of money being sent to a shop to buy a specific number of apples. These children were, to him, rich with the all-frightening and wonderful possibilities of drama, and how that drama would move through their lives – even at that early age he was aware of the branching of narrative. There would have been a house of many rooms attached to each of the children who set off for the shop, and in those rooms there would be barely understood conversations taking place among adults wielding unequal degrees of power. He thought of the different voices his mother used when she spoke. How sometimes he couldn’t break through her preoccupation no matter what he said, and how that preoccupation was centred on something he felt he would never find. He knew that she had been a child once, and that there had been a whole lived childhood when she hadn’t known his father, hadn’t known his brother, Niall, or him. This fascinated and disturbed him.

  The early years of his childhood had passed in a fairly orderly and ordinary manner. He formed friendships with a couple of other boys; the relationships mostly revolving around board games. He liked the progression of the men along the straight lines of the board, the suggestion of a journey being taken, and how the arbitrarily chosen card could change the course of things, the place where a marker stood. But he was indifferent about winning and confused by the disappointment he saw in others when they didn’t win a game. Group sports didn’t interest him at all. Out of doors he preferred to be alone, or to walk through the streets in the company of one silent dog that did not belong to him and whose name he did not know but who was almost always present and available.

  He was contented enough. He and the dog had discovered that the streets of the town led to roads in the mountains, and he imagined that these roads led to other roads, other worlds. Inside his home or at the school it was always warm and dry. The prospect of his own discomfort had not yet occurred to him, though he sensed the disquiet in his mother and, at certain times, in the way his father looked at his mother when she was sealed behind the wall of that unknowable preoccupation.

  What is it, Deirdre? his father would ask softly. But she would shake her head and look away from him. She would not answer. No one in the house had ever heard her complain.

  One day when he was about eight, Kieran had walked alone into the house after school. He had removed his wet shoes and had gone silently down the tiled hall, stopping by the parlour door when he heard a male voice that was only faintly familiar. Looking into the room he saw the profile of the town chemist outlined by the low afternoon light coming through the bay window. His mother sat in a chair near the window, one arm falling across her lap, the other bent, and her forehead resting in her open palm. The air of the room was liquid with dusk and both his mother and the chemist were caught in it, perhaps drowning. No one had lit a lamp. It was only when his mother spoke that the boy knew she had been weeping, was perhaps still weeping. “I know,” his mother said, “I know.”

  “And it will always be so,” the man said. “And we can do nothing.”

  The boy instinctively withdrew, walked backwards to the front door, opened it and closed it noisily, then waited for his mother to call to him as he knew she would. “Niall, Kieran,” she sang, “come into the parlour. Mister Keating is here and he has brought your father’s Christmas gift … a new electric razor. But you mustn’t tell him.”

  “It’s only me,” Kieran called back. “Niall’s at the football.” Then he ran over to the stairs and up to his room. There was something about the brass rods that fixed the carpet runner to the groin of each step that he would always remember in relation to this, and it put him off brass in any form, for life. He did not come down until dinnertime, when there was no one in the parlour at all.

  After that he was aware of secrets and distances in the house. There was that thick, impenetrable air, and his father rarely talking but watching his mother closely.

  His mother had become like an ocean to the boy, vast and unknowable, with faraway shorelines he could never see, could not even imagine from where he stood but that he nevertheless sensed were vivid and real. He could read his father’s helplessness yet nothing at all in his mother but an ocean, then waiting and indifference. When he was older, and she had been gone for many years, he would wonder if she had been waiting for her life to pass.
r />   He had his first tantrum two weeks later in the midst of a class devoted to arithmetic. The children who had gone to the shops to buy a specific number of apples with a limited amount of money had been banished from the blackboard and from the page for a couple of years at this point and he had missed them, finding he had been unable to force himself to care about the empty numbers that replaced them. When he asked about the disappearance of the stories, one of the Brothers who taught him had laughed out loud and had told him that he had discovered the difference between pure and applied mathematics. “You’re a right little philosopher, you are,” the man had said. But this compliment made no difference to Kieran. He could not find it in himself to care about addition and subtraction when it was detached and free-floating and only about itself. Soon he began to fall behind and there was no more laughter in the classroom.

  One afternoon, while staring at a column he had made himself in his notebook, he felt something large and dark moving inside him, as if he had swallowed a sizable animal that was struggling to burst out of his body. Soon he found himself wondering where the noise was coming from, why his books were on the floor, his chair overturned, and his arms and legs moving in an aggressive manner. With his eyes closed he saw a collection of piercing beams almost exactly like the swords of blinding light that made him squint and turn away from the sea on a clear January day. He was small for his age and easily overtaken by the strength of the Brother, and in no time he found himself panting in the hall where he was told to stand for the remainder of the morning. An outburst, the Brother called it, and indeed Kieran himself was terrified by what had happened, what had burst out of him.