by Colm Toibin
She wrote a list of things to make the rooms more modern. A new carpet and fireplace in the back room; then the walls to be painted. She might do the painting herself if she could watch Mossy Delaney working in Phyllis’s house and maybe find out what paint he was using. Then she would move the dining-table from the back room into the front room, and maybe put a new carpet on that room too, and perhaps even paint the walls there. Conor could do his homework at the table in that room or Fiona could use it. And she would move the three-piece suite from the front room into the back room and throw out the two fireside chairs, which were shabby and not very comfortable.
In Dan Bolger’s in the Market Square she looked at curtain material and saw a catalogue in which the curtains stretched right across a wall, even though the window needed only half the amount of material to cover it. She wondered if this would work in her back room. If the walls were painted white, she could select some colour for the curtains that would be warm and rich. The living-room pictured in the catalogue used lamplight at night rather than a single light in the ceiling overhead. She could take the standard lamp from the front room, where it had hardly ever been used, and put it in the back room. Maybe she would buy more lamps in Dublin—in Arnotts or in Clerys—or in a shop in Wexford.
She began to put prices on things. Some days at work, Nora took out her list and looked at it. The painting would have to come last, when all the dust had settled; replacing the fireplace would have to be done at the very beginning.
When she explained to Phyllis that she did not want to use Mossy Delaney, Phyllis told her she was wise.
“Oh, I am sorry I didn’t have him up here just to get all the best advice from him. And then start it myself the minute he left. It would have saved a lot of trouble, and it’s probably very good exercise.”
Within a few days Phyllis called on her, having received full instructions about paint and brushes from Mossy Delaney. Phyllis had even found out the best way to apply the new type of paint and how to stop it dripping. She did imitation strokes on the wall.
Dan Bolger had noticed Nora in the shop one day, and came over to say that he had known Maurice well when they were trying to set up the credit union. He and Jim Farrell always said, he told her, that if it had not been for Maurice, it would have taken another year to get things going properly.
“I’m not Fianna Fáil myself, as you probably know,” he said, “but I always say that if Maurice Webster had run for the Dáil I would have given him a number one vote, and that’s the highest compliment you can get from a dyed-in-the-wool Fine Gaeler like myself.”
Nora smiled.
“So if there is anything I can do for you, with wallpaper, or curtain material or carpets,” he said, “then I will.”
Nora realised that if she spoke to Dan Bolger, she would get a reduction on everything. Somehow, she felt, it would make a difference if she could tell everyone that she had done it all cheaply. She produced her list.
“I’ll phone Smyth’s now because I don’t have that paint but they will have it,” Dan Bolger said. “And I can do you a good deal on the curtain material and the fireplace and the carpets. And there’s only one man can put in a fireplace without making your house look like the entrance to Croke Park on a wet all-Ireland Sunday and that’s Mogue Cloney. You won’t get much talk out of him, but he’ll do the job.”
Once she selected the curtain material and the carpets, Dan Bolger sent a man to take the measurements. When she told him that she wanted the curtains to run the entire length of the wall, he explained that there was a new system for hanging curtains that would not require a large pelmet.
“Can you hang curtains?” she asked him.
“We don’t normally do that. We’ll fit the carpet all right,” he said. “But we’ll just have the curtains made up for you.”
She left silence and did not move, as though what he was saying was causing her anxiety.
She could almost feel him wondering how he was going to get out of her house without having to offer to hang the curtains for her. For a second, she wished she knew his name or something about him so she could soften his determination.
“I can’t think who would hang curtains,” she finally said.
“Ah, well,” he said, “I wouldn’t leave you stuck.”
“Thanks very much,” she said. “That is really very nice of you.”
Mogue Cloney came one morning at eight thirty with a helper. She explained to Conor that he was going to take out the old fireplace and put in a new one.
“How do you take out a fireplace?” Conor asked.
“A few blows of a hammer against a metal bar will unsettle the cement,” Mogue Cloney said.
“Would it not take bits of the wall with it?” Conor asked.
“Begob, you sound like an old Guard who has stopped me for bald tyres,” Mogue Cloney said as he and his helper laughed.
When she came home, the back room was covered in dust and the old fireplace was lying on the lino in the middle of the room. As soon as Conor arrived, he went with Fiona to inspect everything, as though the two men were working for him.
“Where’s the new fireplace?” he asked.
“It’s in the van,” Mogue Cloney said.
“Are we sure it will fit?” he asked.
“We are,” Mogue Cloney replied.
Conor looked around the room. He seemed to be checking if everything else was still in place or if Mogue Cloney had done any damage.
When Conor and Fiona went back to school after dinner, Nora thought that she should go out. But she was uncertain if she should not be there to supervise.
“If you give us a good sweeping-brush and a good scrubbing-brush,” Mogue Cloney said, “you won’t even know we have been here.”
Once the paint was delivered, she went to Wexford one Saturday to buy the exact brushes Mossy Delaney had used in Phyllis’s house. When she borrowed a ladder from Una, her sister told her that she should not attempt the painting herself.
“It’s just a few days’ work,” Nora said.
“I think you have enough to do,” Una said.
She began one day as soon as Fiona and Conor had gone back to school. If she stood on the top rung of the ladder and put the pot of paint resting on the flat top of the ladder, then she could reach the ceiling. The paint was thin and it dripped on her hair, so she had to find a shower-cap to cover her head. She was determined to do this in three or four days and also to have a visible sign of progress by the time Fiona and Conor came home. Each stroke of the brush took work and concentration, as she had to balance herself carefully and spread the paint evenly. The ceiling would be the hardest part, she thought; the walls would be much easier.
The work gave her a strange happiness and made her look forward to coming home from Gibney’s the next day and doing more. It was only when the weekend came that the pains in the arm and her chest began. She had to ask Fiona to go to see Donal on Saturday as she did not think she could drive; she was in such pain by the afternoon that it was clear she would have to go to the doctor. She wondered, as the pain seemed to dart and intensify, if she was not having a heart attack.
She winced when Dr. Cudigan touched her arm and almost cried out when he pressed a thumb into the soft space beneath her collar-bone.
“Have you painted a ceiling before?” he asked.
“No,” she said.
“It’s not something anyone should take on lightly,” he said. “You were straining muscles that you normally don’t use at all. I am going to give you a strong painkiller and that will bring the pain down and then the muscles will go back to where they were, if you don’t strain them anymore.”
“I won’t be able to do any more painting?”
“You could have done yourself real damage,” he said. “So you’d be better to leave the painting to painters.”
Th
at evening she looked at the room. Three-quarters of the ceiling was done, and not done very well. She asked Fiona to phone Phyllis to see if she could visit whenever she had time.
The next day when Phyllis came, she inspected the back room.
“Well, there’s only one solution,” she said. “And that is to call in Mossy Delaney. Today is Sunday and it might at least be possible to find him. And if I were you I would play the part of the poor woman who thought you could paint a ceiling. He objects to me most when I am high and mighty, so humility might work with him. But of course money would work too. He leaves every job to begin another, so he can leave one for you if you pay him on the first day. But you have to put the right face on.”
That evening, when she knocked on Mossy Delaney’s door, his wife answered and asked her what she wanted.
“I would like to talk to Mr. Delaney,” she said quietly.
When Mossy appeared, it was clear that he had been asleep. Nora tried to speak softly so that his wife would not hear. She explained to him what had happened.
“So I should have come to you in the first place. I am in a dreadful situation now. Really stuck. And I can pay you before you start.”
“Is it just one of those small rooms?” he asked. “It’s not the whole house?”
She nodded humbly.
“I’ll do that for you in the morning. Do you have the paint?”
“I do.”
“I’ll be there at half past eight.”
She nodded again.
“Do you need the missus to walk up home with you? You look very shook.”
“No, I’ll be able to get home,” she said. “But I am very grateful to you.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The pills Dr. Cudigan prescribed took the pain away, or they masked whatever was still happening in her chest and in her arms. There was still a heaviness and a sense of strain. On the third morning she believed again she was having a heart attack. But then the sharp pain died down once she got up.
She moved carefully and slowly all the more now since she could not sleep. She did not know if the painkillers caused her to lie awake in the night with rushing thoughts and then a blank state of being half-alert, or whether it was the lingering ache in her arms and chest. Mossy Delaney and a helper finished the painting in a day and a half. When he was done, she told him that she appreciated how obliging he had been.
“The thing is,” he said, “you’d work for people with plenty of money and they would be just plain ignorant. The money makes them ignorant. I won’t name anyone now, but there are ignorant people in this town, and if you want to know them, then go and work for them. There’s one woman I could name. All I know is that I will get my reward in heaven for not spilling a can of red paint all over her. I came close to it, mind. And I would have enjoyed the screaming. But I’d always like to help someone out, and you are a brave woman for thinking you could paint a ceiling yourself. God, we got a great laugh when we saw what you had done! Painting a room is like anything else. You have to know how to do it, missus, you have to have the skills. I mean, you wouldn’t go to Larry Kearney if you needed the bank manager, now would you? Or Babby Rourke if you needed the bishop?”
Fiona supervised the men who came to put down the carpet and she and Conor also dealt with the man from Dan Bolger’s who came to hang the curtains. There were a few things still missing, such as a new shade to cover the bare bulb that hung from the ceiling in the middle of the room, and the white walls without any pictures seemed strange and bare. During the day, the heavy curtains made the back room seem dark; after work she sat in the newly made room with the smell of fresh paint and dozed and woke again. She knew that she should stay awake so that she could find a rhythm of sleeping, but it was too hard. All night now she longed for the morning, but once she was half an hour at work she felt a desperate tiredness.
She formed the habit in Gibney’s of going to the bathroom and sitting in one of the stalls, letting her head rest against the wall and falling asleep for a few minutes and then washing her face in cold water before returning to her desk. Since Elizabeth had dropped both boyfriends for a new one, and the new one seemed to Nora to be solid and serious, and devoted to Elizabeth, they had a lot to discuss and that helped to keep her awake.
She found that if she had a cup of instant coffee in the morning made with three spoonfuls of coffee and as much sugar as she could stomach, then she would be fine for the first hour, or maybe longer. If Elizabeth left the office, she boiled the kettle that Elizabeth kept beside her desk and had another large cup of coffee. It almost made her sick but if she concentrated she did not have the same urge throughout the morning to put her head on her arms at the desk and fall into a deep sleep.
When she went back to Dr. Cudigan after seven days, he told her that it would be a mistake to take sleeping-pills with the painkillers. He checked her pulse and ran his stethoscope over her chest and back, and said that, as she had strained her muscles quite badly, maybe she should stay with the painkillers for another week or so, and then, if she still could not sleep, he would take her off the painkillers and prescribe sleeping-pills.
She was so tired at night that she had to make sure that neither Fiona nor Conor was close by when she went up the stairs, gasping for breath when she was halfway up, and holding the banister so that she would not fall back. Without taking her clothes off, she lay on the bed with the light on, and her sleep then was the same sleep of oblivion as she had slept in that basement bedroom in Sitges. But it lasted sometimes for less than ten minutes. After it, she was fully awake, with thoughts darting. Once she was in her nightdress and in bed with the light off, she did everything she could to make herself sleep. She counted sheep; she lay on one side and then on the other. She refused to let any thought come into her mind. But nothing worked. She would have to go back to Dr. Cudigan and insist either on sleeping-pills or that she could stop taking the painkillers.
Lying awake like this in the dark she could be anyone in the past, she thought. She could be either of her grandmothers, whom she had never known. They had both died before she was born and were dust now, a skull and some bones under the ground somewhere. Her mind moved back and forth over them and what she knew about them until it shifted and focussed on her mother, whose face came to her now and whose presence seemed close. She could be her mother lying here. It was just a difference of years. She lay still in the dark with her eyes open, breathing and then not hearing her breath. In the half-sleep, her mother came closer. Slowly, the image of her mother laid out after her death appeared to her, as though her mother were lying on this bed in this instant, seeing nothing, hearing nothing. No matter what she did to avoid it, that last time with her mother’s body re-surfaced in vivid detail.
She had not loved her mother when she was alive. She wondered if Catherine and Una thought about that when her mother died, as all three left their mother’s body in the care of the nuns who had come to lay her out in the upstairs bedroom of her house. As Nora sat in the kitchen without speaking to them, she knew that the next time she would see her mother she would be in the stilled, formal pose of death. The room would be darkened. There would be flickering candlelight; her mother would be at rest, no longer there, gone from them. She would lie in repose through the night and for most of the following day.
It struck her what she would do. She had seen it once before when her father died. Her aunt Josie, and her aunt Mary, her mother’s older sister, had found a chair on each side of the laid-out body and they sat there without speaking until the undertakers came with the coffin. A few times the two women took tea, but mostly they refused. They took hardly any food either. Sometimes they prayed, sometimes they merely looked closely at their dead brother-in-law, a few times they acknowledged the arrival or the departure of someone they knew. They watched and waited, having found a place where no one would disturb them. They did vigil.
Nora kn
ew there was a chair on the other side of the bed from the door in her mother’s room, an old armchair that had once been downstairs. Her mother had used it to put clothes on. Her mother, in the old days, would have made sure that all her clothes were in the wardrobe or in the chest of drawers. But in recent years she was too weak. Moving was hard. Her mother did as little as she could. Nora remembered that she suddenly felt a sadness then, something she had not felt before. It had come to her in one second what death meant: her mother would never speak again, never come into a room again. The woman who had given birth to her was not breathing now and would not breathe again. In some way, Nora had not bargained for this, had always felt that there would be time for herself and her mother to meet and talk with ease and warmth, or something like warmth. But they never had, and they never would now.
She waited, without lifting her head, until someone said that the room was ready. She passed the others without speaking. When Catherine asked her a question, she did not listen and did not reply. Whatever Catherine needed to know, she could find out in some other way. Nora was the eldest of the daughters; now she would be the first in the room. She walked up the stairs and nodded to the young nun who was standing in the doorway. The curtains had been drawn and there was a smell of freshly starched linen. She waited for a moment and then passed into the room. It was her mother’s chin she noticed first; somehow, in settling her head against the pillow, they had made the chin seem longer than it should have been. It appeared out of place. She wondered if she should say something to the nun, if something could be done about it. But she supposed not. It was too late now, she thought. Maybe it would make no difference.
She found the chair across the room. The clothes that had been on it had been put away somewhere. She hoped that her staying here would not cause her sisters or the neighbours to feel that it was because of remorse or the need to make up to her mother, to show regret for what she might have done, or what she had not done, in the past. She did not feel remorse. Instead, as she looked at her mother’s dead face, she felt a closeness to her, a connection that she had in some way always felt, but never acted on, or spoken about.