by Tim Buckley
I told him about going to the house and finding Hélène, and finding that Aoife was not there.
“I was going to give up and go back to London, but then I got talking to the Master and it turns out Lochlann had told him about Aoife and he convinced me to stay, to get Hélène to sit for me and to stay.” I turned my outstretched palms to the ceiling. “And that’s where we are.”
“So where’s Aoife now?”
“Don’t know. Hélène doesn’t know. She went off travelling, she was supposed to come here but that was months ago. I get the feeling that they fell out, or that there’s a bit of bad blood. But I don’t know how serious it is.”
“Does she know who you are?”
I nodded.
“I didn’t want her to know, but she figured it out. Like an idiot, I kept asking about Aoife even though I’m not supposed to know anything about her. Hélène knows Aoife was adopted, and she realised where all the questions were coming from, I suppose. That’s why she walked out last week. She got really angry, accused me of betraying Aoife. Whatever row they’ve had, she still obviously cares about her.”
Oran sat back and drew a deep breath.
“So are you going to stick around then? Wait for her?”
“I suppose so. But I don’t know how long for – depends on how long I can afford to stay I suppose, and how long Lochlann will put up with me. She might never arrive, I might need to start looking all over again.”
“You really want to find her?”
“More than anything.”
He nodded.
“Good man.”
CHAPTER 21
I never liked Áine, your friend from Tipperary. I had no reason not to nor a shred of evidence that she reciprocated my antipathy. God knows, I gave her enough ammunition over the years, enough justification for petty loathing. And yet she never rose to take the bait. First, I kept you from her for those passionately introverted first months after we met. Then, it must have seemed to her, I lost interest so that you hid away in Wexford mourning that whole Summer, and never even called when you came back to Dublin. And then, just when shallow student frivolities were giving way to the adult maturity she must have craved, I took you to London. And you never came back.
Or did she know all the time that it was the shame of unmarried pregnancy that drove you to Wexford? Was she poised, ready to help and support you when you called? Did she despair that I had abandoned you? Did they all know, all the time?
She was never one for frivolity, Áine. Serious and studious, she lived student life with the earnest devotion of one who didn’t think she ever really deserved it but was determined to repay its permission to take part. She was unbearably, excruciatingly grateful for everything. If you invited her to join us for a drink, she gushed like you had bought her a puppy. If you remarked on her grades – always good – or her appearance – always neat – she blushed until I needed to open a window. I naturally assumed it was all a deceit-based master-plan – nobody could be that saccharine without ulterior motive. And yet I was the only one to see it.
Of course I was wrong. I look back now with a splinter of shame when I think about how I treated her, tried to marginalise her. I wasn’t vicious or deliberately hurtful – I just didn’t want her in my world and nor, therefore, in yours. But she was just a girl trying to get through life with the baggage of whatever that life had thus far dealt her.
If Ireland was populated by one hundred people, or one thousand, we’d have to make the effort. We’d have to accept that the thousand people of Ireland were in our lives and that the course of our lives to some extent would be determined by them. And so we’d try to fathom them, to understand what made them the people they were. What fears and neuroses filled them with dread. What small things excited and enthralled them.
But we don’t. The population, by its very size, overwhelms us like the choice on supermarket shelves. If a tomato looks too red, take another. So it is with people. If they are too funny or too dry, too loud or too quiet – take another, plenty to choose from. So we do. And we accept that immediate gratification might come at the cost of finding a kindred spirit, a soul-mate. And even if our interest is prodded by a stranger whose conversation we overhear, there’s no time to make his acquaintance and no obvious advantage to accrue from so doing.
If I walked into McGrath’s and bumped into Oran or accidentally spilled his pint, how would I find him? Witty, accommodating, relaxed? No. Bellicose, belligerent, unforgiving? Almost certainly. Knowing him as I do, I know that to dismiss him would be to discard a gem. But few will take that chance and so few will have that chance. And yet I fell under your spell, and all too readily. Does that mean that we are destined to find the one who is meant to be found? Does that mean that I am destined to find you again? In another student bar on some obscure parallel plane, or in some other common haunt on a faraway sphere? Will you be my friend or my sister or my nemesis? Or will you once again be my soulmate? You know that I scoff at the romantic humbug that promotes such philosophies, but I still wonder.
So how would we react, I wonder, to Aoife? This slightly aloof girl with her search for who knows what and her fixation on, I suppose, herself. A bit distant, hard to get to know, none too reliable and frankly a bit uptight. Would that be our conclusion? And I wonder how I would react if I heard such a conclusion drawn? How would Áine’s brother or father have reacted to my unkind and unwarranted dismissal of her, borne of no more than a shallow and careless disrespect for what she was, a failure to take the time to understand her? To understand the forces that had buffeted her young life so that she was now so timid and so grateful and so in awe.
I find myself now, for the first time in my life, looking for the good in the people I come across, guilty that for so long I have been too ready to see the bad or too preoccupied to care. I’m frightened, I suppose, that I would just see a cold, self-absorbed young woman. Where my beautiful daughter stands.
CHAPTER 22
I suppose I started running every day to find a way to escape. I needed to get away from the pressure of living and working in London, to run away from it, maybe. We need our own time, time to break free of the endless prying attentions of others and to just indulge in some selfish introspection, self-pity and self-congratulation. Among the pressing throng of the city, there is no personal space, nowhere to go to be alone. And yet running along a crowded river tow-path or through parks crammed with people, you can feel somehow solitary in your own head, insulated by some invisible shield from the world outside. I did some of my best work when out running, finding an imagination and a creativity that managed to elude me in the confines of the office.
For a while after Caitríona left me, I couldn’t bear to run. It was the knowing that she wouldn’t be there when I got back. I felt that if I went out, I would have to run forever to avoid coming back to the vacuum she left behind. Rather than an escape, running became a prison. In time, I started again, slowly overcoming the pain of coming home with nobody to ask how it had been. I cried the first few times, racked with a desperate emptiness that made my gut ache, the tears trickling down my cheeks as I ran.
Now, once again, it’s an antidote to all of my life’s ills. Whether overcome with lethargy, fighting despondency or even riding a rare wave of positive feeling, pounding the streets under dark clouds or blue skies is where I feel I belong, at home on the road. Maybe it’s because we never ran together that I feel it’s a sanctuary, somewhere I can pretend that everything is still ok. But still, as I turn the key in the lock when I come home, I feel the same debilitating ache in my stomach, and still I have to fight the urge to cry. Sometimes I don’t fight it at all.
Coming home to Lochlann’s house after running on the Head had proved a blessed and unexpected relief. Pauline’s incessant chatter or the sound of Oran berating a workman or of Lochlann answering the phone in his study was a far cry from the empty, quiet ch
ill of our London home. And I basked in it a little every time I came in.
And while I was out, my mind was filled more with positive thoughts than at any time since Caitríona went away. In those first, pain-filled days in London’s parks or on the banks of the Thames, I had to work ceaselessly to push my thoughts out of the negative places they always wanted to go. Like a teacher corralling children on one of our school tours to Skerries or Bray, I had to keep my mind away from the cigarette shops and one-armed bandits of self-pity and lonely despair. But whether it was the passing time or the familiarity of the Head and the comforting sight of the Sugar Loaf and the Mourne Mountains, the fight to keep the blackness out of my head seemed a little less intense and a little less fearsome.
That is not to say that the loneliness was dispelled. In the quiet moments, like in all of the quiet moments whenever I was on my own, Caitríona would be with me and I had to shake off the small devils on my shoulders and their temptations to just give up, to surrender. When the only sound was the waves and the gulls and the weight of my breathing, the blackness might still descend and the demons would linger and goad me with whispered suggestions of doubt.
That morning, the early chill heralded imminent Autumn and the trails had lost their Summer hardness. I kept the black emptiness at bay with thoughts of painting and the exhibition, but a new shadow was cast long over my consciousness. Although I wanted so desperately to find Aoife, the emerging prospect of seeing her brought a new and altogether unexpected emotion. Maybe it was acknowledgement that I was doing what Caitríona had expressly asked me not to do. Maybe it was a fear of rejection – that she would reject me or, worse, that she would not – could not – be what I dreamed she would be, what I craved. Because if she failed to meet the wildly unrealistic expectations I had crafted, it would be my fault. But I think it was a fear that finally reaching that destination would lay bare again the pain of losing Caitríona, but without the distraction of the search for Aoife. And I had no other seam to mine.
I got back to the house and leaned against the gate-post, out of breath and sweating hard after an ill-advised final assault on the hill-side trail that led up from the Baily. It was almost eight o’clock, and I could hear the reassuring sound of Pauline’s chatter and kitchen clatter. As I stretched the acid out of my aching muscles, the door from the kitchen opened behind me and a voice said:
“Thought I heard you back – you’re turning into a right action man, aren’t you?”
I turned around, and Niamh walked out of the house and down the path towards the gate that still propped me up. There was still that old vulnerability, a sort of uncertainty, about Niamh that had been there throughout our childhood and teenage years. Maybe she had once outgrown it and found a place in life where she was comfortable, only to be torn from it by the failure of her marriage. Or maybe she had always remained so, the same timid Niamh that we gently mocked but whom we would have fought to defend from the unkindness of anyone outside our clique.
“Hi, Niamh,” I smiled, a note of surprise in my voice. “What brings you up here? Were you up with the wee lad again?”
She shook her head.
“No, not today,” she said. “His father had him last night.”
“Oh right. I’m sorry,” I said, then immediately winced. The child wasn’t dead, for God’s sake, and sticky pity was probably not what she wanted to hear. I was surprised, without having any reason to be so, at the matter of fact way she said it. I suppose I was expecting a tremor in her voice, a quiver in her lip when she referred to the break-up – in the patronising way that we so often expect people’s lives to be the clichéd soap operas we imagine for them. Although timid and seemingly vulnerable, Niamh had never proven weak and I should not have assumed that she would be so in the face of this latest adversity.
She smiled at my awkwardness.
“That’s alright. I take it you’ve heard then?”
“Yes. Oran told me.”
“Hard to keep a secret round here!”
“Always has been, I suppose. Small town and all that.”
I shivered involuntarily.
“Sorry, Aengus, you should get inside before you catch cold.”
“I should. You’ll come in for a coffee?”
She hesitated.
“Ah, I won’t. I’m sure you have things to be getting on with.”
“No, really. Come on, I’m going to make one anyway.”
She shrugged with a faint smile.
“Alright then.”
I ran upstairs to pull on a fleece top and came back down to find Niamh making the coffee.
“Listen I just wanted to say thanks for rescuing me the other morning,” she said, pouring a cup for me. “You really did save my life you know!”
I smiled.
“No problem. You’re just lucky I remembered how to start a car – not the most technically competent, remember?”
She grinned. “True! So how long were you out running for?” she asked.
“About an hour I suppose. It’s beautiful out there, I’d forgotten how beautiful.”
“Do you run much?”
“Every day if I can, if I don’t get a bit lazy. How about you? Ever get bitten by the running bug?”
“God, no! Running after Micheál is about all I’m good for, and I won’t be able to keep up with him for much longer!”
“How old is he?”
“Nearly five,” she said, unable to hide the quiet smile in her voice.
“And you’ve another little one, Oran was saying?”
“I have. Ciara. She’s just gone two.”
She handed me a mug and I used the coffee to camouflage my loss of words. How did I broach the subject? Was it taboo altogether? Or could I offer condolence or encouragement or congratulation, even? There must be cases where the end of a poisonous marriage is a thing to be celebrated. Or would I risk breaking some unwritten code of marital break-up enquiry?
Niamh rescued me from the edge of the precipice.
“So, what did Oran tell you?”
I shrugged.
“Nothing really. Just that you had broken up with your husband.” I paused, looked at her for a trace of upset, but there was none. “I really am sorry, Niamh. It must be hard.”
She looked down at the floor before answering.
“It was, I suppose. Hard for Micheál especially. He didn’t understand, of course. He still doesn’t, I think. But he misses his Daddy.”
“How long ago?”
“We split just over a year ago.” She sighed. “He was travelling a lot with work, and the temptation just got too much for him, I suppose. It became final at the start of the Summer.”
“Do you see much of him?”
She shook her head.
“Not really, just when we have to. He doesn’t come round much, doesn’t even want to see the kids that often, which is a blessing I suppose in some ways. Although they miss him. Especially Micheál.”
“And you? I mean, are you ok? Moving on?”
She nodded.
“Yes,” she said, simply. She was about to continue, but stopped and looked at me, a question in her eyes. She tossed a mental coin and it landed heads. Heads you venture into the uncharted ground…
“Aengus, I heard about Caitríona,” she said slowly, as though prodding tentatively with a stick, afraid of the response. “I’m so sorry.”
My lips narrowed and hardened in the stock defensive position, set against fear of crumbling. As time went on, it seemed that people felt less obliged to broach the subject, there was less chance that they would. My friends in London had already expressed their sorrow and their pity and they knew that I still couldn’t really talk about it. So they steered clear, sometimes painfully, obviously clear, of any reference to Caitríona, like stepping gingerly over a pool of murky water. Of course she
came up in conversation from time to time, inadvertently finding her way into a story or a reminiscence. But though I had started to try, I still wasn’t able for the conversation, I couldn’t carry on talking or listening. And so my friends would stop talking abruptly, steal a guilty, concerned look my way, and change the subject. There were very few people now that I hadn’t spoken to or been with since Caitríona left, but that somehow only made it worse.
“Thanks, Niamh,” I whispered at the floor.
And yet, for the first time, I felt something else stirring, something else fighting to take over from the customary onset of tired weakness. I realised for the first time that I resented the pain. I resented it. Just like when, with Oran in McGrath’s, I had found myself suddenly tired of the pretence, I was at that moment explosively weary of feeling hopelessly lost and seeing no end to the torment. I hated the weakness of it, my own weakness. I loathed that I had lost the run of myself, lost control. But I had no bold move that could cut out the cancer, no revelation on the back of which I could clamber out of the abyss.
I took a deep breath, counted to five, trying to regain control enough to speak. I must have known that asking Niamh to share a coffee, to come inside to talk, I must have known that it would inevitably lead me to this place.
“Thanks,” I managed to muster, again.
“Oh, Aengus, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have…” Niamh couldn’t bear to be the cause of pain, and she was aghast at having blundered thoughtlessly into still painful memories.
“Jesus, we’re a right pair,” I said with a snort and a rueful smile, wiping away stray tears with a rough sweep of my sleeve. But with almost a smile.
Niamh came over and put her arms around me.
“God, Aengus. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” she whispered.
We stood there holding on to each other in silence, punctuated by quivering intakes of breath and long, deep, resigned sighs.