by Colm Toibin
He nodded.
“What was he saying when he was shouting?” she asked Conor.
She could see that Conor was weighing up how he should respond.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Was it Josie’s visit?” she asked Donal. “Did that upset you? Do you not like Josie?”
She looked from one to the other.
“Do you not?” she asked again.
Neither of them replied. Conor seemed ready to curl up under the blankets. He had not touched the milk. Donal drank slowly and avoided her gaze.
“Will we talk about it again in the morning?”
Donal nodded.
“We might go to eleven-o’clock mass so we can have a good sleep in the morning,” she said.
Once more, she noticed them glancing at each other.
“Is there something wrong?” she asked.
Donal stared past her as though there was something on the landing that had caught his attention. She looked behind her but saw nothing.
“I’ll definitely leave my bedroom door open as well. Would that be better?”
Donal nodded again.
“Do you think you might go back asleep?” she asked.
Donal finished the milk and put the glass on the floor.
“And call me if you start having bad dreams again.”
He tried to smile in agreement.
“Why don’t I turn the bedroom light off and leave the door open and leave on the light on the landing?”
“Okay,” he whispered.
“Nightmares never come back once you wake up from them,” she said as she moved slowly out of the room. “I think you’ll be all right now.”
In the morning, as she made their breakfast, it was clear that Donal would not tell her what the dream was about, even if he could remember, and she decided not to mention it unless he or Conor did, not to dwell on what had happened in the night in case it might increase Donal’s anxiety. She would go to Dr. Cudigan and ask him if anything could be done for a stammer, but she would not take Donal with her. She believed that paying attention to it would merely serve to make it worse. Maybe it would go of its own accord. She had heard nothing from the school about it and wondered if it were not something that happened only at home. The idea that it would stay with him for his whole life, or even all of his teenage years, frightened her so deeply that she tried not to think about it.
As she sat with the boys having breakfast, and then as she walked across the Back Road with them to the cathedral, and all through mass, the image returned to her of them looking up when Josie first came into the room the previous evening. Something in their gaze, especially in Conor’s but also in Donal’s, had appeared uneasy, almost scared. At the time she thought this was because their television programme was about to be disturbed. But then, when Donal had woken from his nightmare, and she had mentioned Josie, they had both remained silent. Later, if the chance came, she thought, she would mention Josie again and see what happened, but then she also thought that it was best to leave things alone for the moment, hope that Donal would have no more bad dreams, and hope too that the boys would settle in the house, become slowly used to the idea that their father was dead but that life would go on, and things would change and maybe some things change for the better.
Despite the fact that neither of them mentioned Josie, their response to her lingered in the air as the week went on until Nora began to wonder if Josie had come that Saturday to test the water in some way, to see how the boys might react to her, or to see if they had said anything to Nora about her. She went over Josie’s visit in her mind, how she was not able to stop talking when she arrived as though she was nervous about something. And the more she thought about it the odder it seemed. The boys had been with Josie for the two months as Maurice was dying, but they had not seen her since the funeral. Surely, when she came in to the room, they should have been friendlier and there should have been more references to their time with her in the conversation, jokes even, or mention of things they did? Josie was as distant from them as they from her, as though she were a stranger, or worse, Nora thought.
On Friday Fiona came for the weekend. The following day Nora told Fiona and the boys that she was going to Wexford to do some shopping and would be back by teatime. Fiona looked up from her book but did not ask any questions. The boys, Nora thought, were too young still to imagine that their mother could possibly invent where she was going.
She drove towards Bunclody and then turned away from the river to Josie’s house. She could be unlucky, she thought, as Josie could easily have gone out or have company, but she felt it was better to come like this unannounced and do so today before she had time to think too much about what might have happened when the boys stayed with Josie in the months before Maurice died.
Deliberately, she did not plan what she would say, or even how she would begin. She simply drove towards Josie’s, believing that she would know what to do as soon as she saw her. Aunt Josie had built her own house to the side of the old farmhouse when John had married and when she had retired from her job as a teacher. She was proud of its design, how it looked as though it was part of the original house, with windows the same shape and similar slates on the roof. She had made summer quarters, a living room upstairs with views of the mountains and a small bedroom and a bathroom beside it. Below, she had another bedroom with a bathroom attached, and then a cosy sitting room with an open fireplace, and a small kitchen off it. The doorways and the bathrooms, she loved telling her visitors, were designed for a wheelchair, but she still had not decided what floor she would live on when she was incapacitated. She would laugh then at the very idea of being incapacitated. She spent her days gardening, reading, listening to the radio and talking on the telephone.
Nora tried to remember how it had happened that the boys had spent two months with her, whether Nora had asked or Josie had offered. She thought back to that time, but certain images were so filled with detail, certain hours so filled with pure, unforgettable moments, that the remaining time seemed as though it had been watched through glass covered with rainwater. Walking with Maurice into the lobby of the hospital in the knowledge that he might not come out of there alive. The moment when he had said he would like to go one more time to look at the sky and that she was to wait for him in the lobby, let him do it alone. And then the watching as he began to cry when he reached the door. All of that was too raw and new for other things such as the arrangements she had made for the boys to stay with Josie to be fully clear to her now.
She should remember what happened, she knew that. It was not as though she was not there and alert when these arrangements were made. But whatever they were, she was sure that they had seemed natural at the time, an obvious solution. She was grateful to Josie for taking the boys in, and relieved that they were safe and away from Maurice as he came home and eventually began to decline in ways that his two sons should not have had to witness.
He had not died at home, of course. She had to move him finally to Brownswood, the old TB hospital outside the town now used for general patients, when the pain grew too great and his faculties failed and she could not nurse him anymore. Even though he was on a stretcher and his eyes were closed and he had not spoken a clear sentence for days, she knew that he was aware that he was leaving the house for the last time. She held his hand, but every time he made to grip hers his hand would jerk out of control as though it were a claw. At least the boys had not been there for that.
She drove up the long rutted lane to Josie’s, opening and closing the two iron gates along the way, trying to avoid stepping in the patches of mud and muck, noting the bareness of the ditches on each side and some bright red flowers whose name she did not know. The sky was darkening, with clouds hovering low over the Blackstairs Mountains. She found herself shivering as she stood on the gravel path. John’s car, she noticed, was not there. She
did not know if it was best to knock on the door of the old farmhouse first or walk around and knock on Josie’s kitchen door, which was the only entrance to her part of the house. Since there was to be no sign of life from the farmhouse, she walked around, her shoes sinking in the grass. It must have rained here recently, more than it did in the town, she thought. When she looked in the window, she saw an armchair with a small table beside it with a pair of glasses on an open newspaper, and another table with a vase of bright lilies mixed in with the red flowers she had seen growing in the ditch. Through another window she saw an unmade double bed, and random books on the floor that looked as though they had fallen from the bed. Josie must be enjoying her retirement, she thought, and smiled.
She rapped on the kitchen door but there was no answer. It was the stillness that struck her now, the silence broken only by the cawing of crows in the distance and then the faint sound of a tractor that at first seemed as though it was approaching but then seemed to be moving away. She looked around her at the larch and birch trees that almost masked the galvanised sheds in the haggard. There was a pathway leading across the grass to what she knew had once been an orchard. She remembered years before an unexpected harvest of pears and apples, which had come in such abundance only because no one had been tending to the trees, no one had been pruning them, or so Josie had told her, and then after their huge yield the trees had died, or some of them did, and the others yielded no more fruit except some crab apples that no one wanted. It was easier, or less trouble, Josie had told her, to buy apples in the supermarket and no one liked the hard pears that had grown here, even when they were left to soften.
Josie had decided in any case to devote her attention to a new garden she had made beyond the orchard to the side of the haggard. John dug it out for her and she had bought books and manuals on how to grow flowers and vegetables. In her old age, as she enjoyed explaining, she had gradually seen a good reason to live on a farm and had understood for the first time the point not only of manure but of the soil itself and, indeed, the seasons. Nora could almost hear her voice saying all of this, as she ducked under the branches of trees and avoided thorny brambles to see if she would find her aunt in the garden.
She stepped over the stile towards the vegetable garden. Josie was growing something that required lines of wire and bamboo cane. Nora was not sure if these were raspberry bushes. To the side, there were neat ridges where potatoes had been planted. Beyond them were the flower beds but there were no flowers now. It looked as though a great deal of work went on here and she wondered how Josie’s back withstood the strain. Just then, as she turned, she saw her aunt and realised that Josie had been quietly observing her for some time.
“Nora, your shoes will be ruined,” Josie said. She had a small garden fork and some stalks in her hand. She was wearing garden gloves that seemed too big for her.
“I didn’t see you there.”
“I thought I’d leave you for a moment to look at all my hard work.”
In Josie’s tone, there was an edge of challenge as though her territory had been invaded. She must wonder, Nora thought, why she had visited and yet she spoke as though they had been in mid-conversation.
“I think I’ve done enough now for the day,” Josie said. “I often start early, I’m getting everything ready so I can start sowing a few annuals when the weather gets better. And then I go and read the paper and have my breakfast and then come up again to look at what I did. By this time of the day, I’ve finished. I just came up now to admire my own handiwork and tidy the place.”
As she moved towards Nora, she seemed preoccupied by something. Her walk was slow and deliberate, her lips pursed.
“Wait until you’re old, Nora,” she said, “and then you’ll know. It’s the mixture of being content with even the smallest thing and then feeling a great dissatisfaction with everything. I don’t know what it is. I’m not even tired a lot of the time, and all the same I’m half exhausted if I even stand up.”
She leaned on her as she made her way over the stile and pulled her gloves off as they walked through the orchard.
“Now, we’ll go upstairs,” she said when they got to the house. “It’s tidier and I have a new tea-making apparatus up there and a little fridge on the landing and everything. I’ll just wash my hands and my face and I’ll be with you in no time.”
Nora had forgotten how high the ceilings were in the rooms upstairs. The room was filled with a heavy watery grey light that hit against the grey carpet, the walls painted white, the rich blue lampshades, the blue cushions on the sofa, the blue curtains, the patterned rug and the long full bookcase and gave the room a sort of opulence that no one coming up the lane or looking at the house from the outside or walking through the dead orchard could expect.
As she stood at the window and looked out at the day, it occurred to her for the first time how much her two sons would have disturbed the life of these rooms, which had been prepared with such care. Even the very untidiness was part of Josie’s life, a life that seemed designed not to be disturbed. It had been, she thought then, a reasonable idea then to leave them with her aunt rather than her sisters. She did not take them to stay with Catherine in Kilkenny, although Catherine had offered, as Catherine had her own children to mind. And Una, her younger sister, moved into the house and looked after Aine, and Fiona if she came for the weekend. Una could not have taken care of the two boys as well, nor could Maurice’s sister Margaret, even though she doted on them. Nor could Nora have left them to be looked after by neighbours or cousins. Josie, on the other hand, had space and time and she lived close enough to the town; the boys knew her and John and John’s wife; the farmhouse and even Josie’s extension were familiar. It had seemed reasonable then. But, as Nora watched from the window and then turned and took in the space that Josie had created for her retirement, the idea that she had left the boys here for so long somehow did not seem reasonable now.
Josie had combed her hair and put on a cashmere sweater. She pushed in a small trolley with a teapot and two cups and saucers and a bowl of sugar and a jug of milk.
“We’ll let the tea settle,” she said and then went to the window.
“It’s nice here on a fine day and the heating system works so it’s warm now in the winter as well. I was worried about the heating. I thought it would dry the air, but it works—”
“Josie, I was going to ask you about the boys,” Nora interrupted her.
“Are they well?” Josie asked, moving towards the trolley.
“I never asked you what it was like having them here.”
“What it was like for me?” she asked.
Nora did not reply.
“I offered to do it, Nora, and I meant the offer.”
“What was it like for them?” Nora asked quietly.
“Nora, are you blaming me for something?” Josie asked.
“No, I’m asking, that’s all.”
“Well, sit down then and stop looking at me like that.”
Nora sat on the sofa and Josie on the armchair beside her.
“Donal came home with this terrible stammer.”
“Yes, he got that here, Nora. It began here.”
“And Conor. I don’t know what it is about him. And Donal had a nightmare on Saturday night. It was the worst thing.”
Josie began to pour the tea, having moved the trolley closer to her.
“Put the milk and sugar in yourself. I can never judge it.”
“What happened to them here?” Nora asked.
Josie put a lump of sugar in her tea and then some milk. She took a sip and put the cup down on the trolley.
“I suppose they noticed the silence,” Josie said.
“The silence? Is that all?”
“Yes. They’re from the town. And maybe I should have arranged for them to play with some of the local boys, but they didn’t want that. So they sta
yed here. And it was silent. And they thought you might come and you never did. Sometimes even if a car began to make its way up the lane, or pulled in on the road, the two of them would stop what they were doing and sit up. And then time went by. I don’t know what you were thinking of leaving them here all that time and never once coming to see them.”
“Maurice was dying.”
“Conor wet the bed most nights. I don’t know what you were thinking of leaving them here all that time,” Josie repeated.
“I had no choice.”
“There we are then. Did you think they would come home unchanged?”
“I don’t know what I thought. I wanted to come and ask you.”
“Well, you’ve asked me, Nora.”
They both remained silent for some moments. A few times Nora began to say something but then stopped.
“I was looking after Maurice,” she finally said.
“Whatever way you want to put it is fine with me. When Conor began to get upset, I tried to talk to him and reassure him, but I didn’t know when you would be coming. I never knew what Donal was thinking. He’s the one you have to watch, or maybe you have to watch both of them. I phoned that guesthouse you were staying in and you never phoned back.”
“Things changed every day.”
“I phoned and you never phoned back.”
“Everyone was enquiring.”
“Was I just everyone?”
“I never knew how long . . .”
“And the boys didn’t either. So we all did the best we could. By the end, they became better. By the end, Conor only wet the bed sometimes.”
“I didn’t know about the bed. I’m grateful to you for what you did.”
“Go home to them now.”
“I will, Josie.”
She did not finish her tea, but stood up. She waited for a moment in case Josie stood up too, but Josie did not. Her aunt was sitting forward in the armchair staring at the floor, her shoulders hunched.
“Maybe we’ll see you soon,” Nora said.