This Must Be the Place

by Maggie O'Farrell

  But open they did, afternoon only, to appease Mrs Sullivan. So by lunchtime on Easter Monday, Teresa had been to mass, cooked the lunch, installed the toddler in her playpen in the back room and the older girl with a game of counting out dried beans, under the sometimes-watchful eye of her grandmother, and was standing behind the wooden counter, the shop overall straining over the mound of her third pregnancy – another daughter, as it would turn out.

  She was shifting from foot to foot, serving a half-blind neighbour from the next block when she heard him before she saw him: ‘… but just for a minute, OK?’ he was saying.

  The woman with him was beautiful, she saw, the discovery causing her equal parts pain and pleasure. She was small, with a gloved hand hooked around his sleeve, her hair curled and set in the latest fashion. When they turned towards her counter, she saw that the woman’s belly was the shape of her own.

  ‘Something cold, Johnny, a soda or an ice pop,’ the wife was saying. ‘What do you think?’

  It happened: he saw her. She saw the recognition, the shock ignite in his face. Their eyes locked, just as they had done four years previously, and the room, the voices, the shop, the customers, the shelves and shelves of jars and cans and flour all fell away. It’s you, he seemed to be saying to her and she answered, yes, it is.

  The neighbour fussed between two types of canned beans and the wife talked about which soda she liked best and would it be cold, what did Johnny think, and how hot it was today for April, and Teresa held onto the counter, as if caught in a gale.

  When the neighbour finally shuffled away, Teresa raised her chin a notch and took a deep breath. The wife was selecting a soda from the refrigerator and Johnny said, ‘Hello again.’

  ‘Hello,’ Teresa replied, her eyes flicking towards Paul, who was up a ladder on the other side of the shop.

  The wife put down her soda on the counter with a look of enquiry.

  ‘This is Teresa Hanrahan,’ Johnny said. ‘She …’ He seemed to lose track, his conversation falling off a precipice into nothing, causing his wife to glance sharply at him.

  ‘Sullivan,’ Teresa heard herself correcting. ‘I helped out your nephew one time when he’d got himself in trouble.’

  The wife rolled her eyes. ‘You mean Jackie? Always in trouble. I’m Lucia,’ she said, ‘seeing as my husband has forgotten to introduce me.’

  Teresa nodded at her.

  Lucia’s eyes flicked down Teresa’s overall. ‘You too?’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your first?’

  ‘Third.’

  Lucia’s eyebrows went up. ‘Third? I tell you, I will never get to three. This one’s been so much bother already. I told Johnny the other day, I’m stopping at one, honey, that’s it for me.’

  Teresa reached for the bottle of soda, eased off the cap and handed it back to her. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you might change your mind.’

  ‘Never,’ Lucia said, as she headed for the door.

  Johnny stood where he was for just a shade too long. No one else would have noticed, Teresa told herself afterwards: of this, she was almost sure. He laid his hand on the broad, worn wood of the counter, exactly opposite Teresa’s. He mimicked the arrangement of her fingers: first two curled under, thumb and final fingers pointing outwards, as if in salute, as if in welcome or perhaps farewell. Then he was gone.

  She counted the years: one and then two and then three and then four and then more. Paul’s parents moved out to live with one of his sisters. After a decent interval, Teresa asked Paul if they might make the room into a bedroom for the girls and he had nodded. He got a friend who was a carpenter to come and build bunkbeds for three.

  They invested, at her suggestion, in a large, refrigerated counter so that they could make fresh sandwiches for the lunchtime customers. Seven years, eight years, nine years. The girls started helping in the shop after school, doing their homework at the shop counter. Teresa, having thought there would be no more children, was surprised to find herself pregnant once again. She gave birth to the baby, who would turn out to be her last, a boy, Daniel. She walked the floor with him in the night – he was always a sleepless, restless baby – and she discovered that if you stood on tiptoe in the front room you could see a section of the flat, dun-coloured East River.

  Even as a baby, Daniel loved the river. Teresa would push him down to the shore and he would sit forward, as if straining to hear its noise of wind, boats, lapping tide. When he was walking, the two of them would go down there together, in the mornings, when the girls were at school and the shop quiet, Daniel buttoned into a knitted jacket and Teresa in a headscarf to keep her hair in check. He would reach out his palm towards Manhattan, his infant sense of distance and scale persuading him that those tall towers of steel across the water could be his, if only he could just stretch far enough.

  It was a treat for Daniel, the ferry trip that day. Aged almost four, it wasn’t necessary for him to attend pre-school every day, was it? Paul shook his head but said nothing when Teresa, on a whim, kept the boy at home with her for the odd morning. Why shouldn’t she? she demanded during an interior debate on the subject. He was her last, her late baby, why shouldn’t she enjoy him for a little bit longer?

  So she had promised him that, the first fine day of spring, they would take the ferry to Manhattan. Daniel hop-jumped all the way to the ticket office and when they were allowed on board, he ran from one end of the boat to the other, shouting something indecipherable to the gulls.

  How was she to know that he would be on the boat? That he would see the back of her head through the window, come out and sit down next to her, laying his newspaper on the bench.

  They didn’t speak but looked out at the approaching Manhattan skyline. She felt the outermost finger of his hand brush hers. She didn’t move away. Behind her sunglasses, she shut her eyes.

  ‘I think about you,’ he said, ‘every day.’

  Teresa nodded.

  ‘And nobody knows.’

  She nodded again. She felt the juddering power of the boat’s engines, carrying them inexorably forward; she felt the thick, tar-like surface of the bench beneath her skirt, painted and overpainted in repeating layers; she felt the featherweight of mascara on her eyelashes, the straps of her slip as they rested on her shoulders, the grip of her sunglasses on the backs of her ears. She heard him sigh, heard the slide of fabric as he crossed his legs.

  ‘Has it ever occurred to you,’ he murmured, ‘that we could go away together?’

  ‘Too late for that,’ she said. ‘Where would we go?’

  ‘I wish,’ he began, ‘I wish …’

  She turned to look at him. She saw that the hair at his temples had started to turn silver; the skin around his eyes was scored with lines. His shoes were still immaculate, laced, polished leather; his hair was longer, still combed to the left.

  ‘What do you wish?’ she said to him, eleven years and three months after they had first met.

  ‘I wish, that day at the library, that I’d gotten hold of you and told you how it was going to be,’ he said, in a rush. ‘I wish I’d grabbed you then and never let you go, before it was too late.’ He took up his newspaper, as if he would crush it between his palms. ‘I don’t know what we were thinking.’

  Teresa took off her sunglasses, folded them into themselves, so she could look Johnny Demarco in the face when she said, ‘I don’t know either. But we made our choices and we have to live with them.’

  ‘Then I will promise you one thing,’ he said. ‘That wherever I am, wherever I go, I will find some way to let you know. And you must promise me the same. So we can find each other if … if things change.’

  She nodded. ‘Johnny, I promise, of course I promise, but—’

  At that moment, something barrelled into her leg. She gasped with the pain of it. It was her son, panting, flushed, his jersey skew-whiff. Teresa was shocked, at momentarily forgetting about him and at the rush of love she felt for him as he stood there, lolli
ng against her leg, elbows pressing into her thigh. It was a pure, animal avalanche of feeling, this. Look at him, she wanted to say, just look at this child. Was there ever a more perfect boy? She seized him, his hot body, the birdcage of his ribs, and pressed kisses into his hair, as if the scent and sense of him might save her from all that was uncertain and dangerous in the world.

  ‘Your son?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, without taking her face out of his hair. ‘This is Danny.’

  Johnny leant forward. ‘Hi, Danny, how are you?’

  Daniel looked at the man. The man looked at him. In later years, he will recollect only dimly the trip he and his mother took on the ferry. He will recall it as a series of sensations: a sock that kept slipping and wrinkling under his heel, the startling white undersides of gulls as they wheeled above him, a girl throwing pizza crust up into the air for them, the amber beads of rust on the rails. And this: the unaccountable sight of his mother sitting with a man who was not his father, her skirt with the sailboat print arranged around her, the man turning towards her and whispering words that Daniel knew were unsettling words, persuasive words, frightening words, her head bowed, as if in prayer.

  The Dark Oubliettes of the House

  Daniel, Donegal, 2010

  No cab driver around here is stupid enough to attempt the climb to the house: the track is too steep and wet weather turns it into a pebbled, rivered slipway. So my baggage and I are unceremoniously dropped at the side of the road.

  The sight of the track, winding up through the trees, produces in me such a surge of joy, of relief, that I start up it with haste, my unsuitable city shoes sliding and slipping on the grit. I have been across the Atlantic and back; I have seen my estranged children; I have sat across a table from a man I haven’t seen for half my life; I have heard tales I would rather not hear; I have absorbed information I don’t yet know what to do with; I am broken and lame-hearted, but I am home, I am here. I have made it back and this feels like an achievement against all odds, as if I am treading the fields and vineyards of Ithaca.

  The first three gates I vault. I actually hurl my bag over, then enact a full leap, so great is my homecoming joy. The third time produces a twinge in my lower back so I resolve to unlatch the rest.

  I climb quickly, enjoying the increase in heartrate, the rapidity of my breathing, the motion of my limbs. I have been too much sessile these last few days, my muscles atrophied by aeroplane seats, my vertebrae stiff and compressed. I will, in a matter of minutes, be seeing my family again, my loves. I will have them in my arms and I will be breathing the air of my house, my home.

  The thought makes me want to break into a sprint but I am not the athlete I fleetingly was.

  I am not worried that Claudette failed to pick me up at the airport. No, not at all. I tell myself this as I pass beneath the sodden branches of trees, as I move through the gates, as the distance between me and the house shrinks. Not at all. Maybe I wasn’t entirely clear about flight-times on my voicemail. Maybe she’s taken the kids out somewhere. I said in the message that I had managed to see the person I needed to find but I didn’t say any more. The thing is, I find myself asserting to myself—

  Without warning, a pheasant explodes from the undergrowth to my left, a scolding, pyrotechnic whir of iridescent green and umber. I jump back in surprise, letting out a yelled expletive. The bird plunges, swoops, then soars above the trees and is gone. The path and its woods seem unsettled, noiseless, after this interruption.

  The thing is – I return to my defence, addressed, it would seem, to the leaves, to the tree-trunks, to the pebbles pushing up beneath my thin shoe soles – if I am to account for myself to Claudette, I have to do it face to face. I have thought about this many times, over the past week or so, and have pictured it after the kids are in bed. I will draw her towards the big sofa next to the stove. The dog will be curled in its basket. We might have an open bottle of wine on the table. She will turn to me and I will tell her – what? I had a girlfriend who died. I had a girlfriend who had an abortion. I had a girlfriend who had been ill, on and off, for years with an eating disorder. I had a girlfriend who was one of the most intelligent people I’d ever met and somehow I accidentally got her pregnant. I had a girlfriend who, against my wishes, had a termination and then – and then—

  I haven’t figured out the ‘and then’ part yet. Claudette, as I might have mentioned, takes a rather dim view of infidelity, in its myriad forms. She is, you could say, somewhat black and white on the subject. This is all Lindstrom’s fault, of course, not mine, but because of him I need to be careful about how much I tell Claudette. Do I come clean about having slept around on Nicola or not? Is it something I should confess or relegate to the file of Things Claudette Doesn’t Need to Know? Does the story hang together if I elide that detail?

  I click the final gate into place, walk round the corner and there is the house before me. The sight of its gabled windows and single turret ought to be accompanied by a resounding orchestral chord, so happy am I to be home. I hasten through the front garden and down the path. No lights gleam from the windows: I am pretending not to notice this. There is no car parked out front.

  I call their names into the moist, soft air. It is close to the end of the day: they ought to be inside, perhaps having their tea, but they might still be out, romping on the back lawn, feeding the hens.

  ‘Marithe! Claudette!’ I yell. ‘Calvin! I’m home!’

  The trees, the clouds, the mountainside accept the noise, fold it into themselves. Nothing comes back.

  I fit my key into the lock, push the door. There is no frantic clatter of dog claws on the hall floorboards, no shriek of children. The house breathes a cold sigh into my face as the door swings shut; the place has a sepulchral silence. Again, I call their names. I am ever the optimist.

  I move through the hallway, past the staircase, which holds a dim, fading light in its curves, towards the back room. And when I open the door, I know for certain that there is no one here, that I am alone, that the house is empty.

  The stove is out, the plates are stacked up on the shelves, the dog’s bed is empty, the kids’ toys and coloured pencils are not strewn over the floor but stashed in their baskets. It could be a room in which there has been no human habitation for a long time. The paper stars studding the ceiling show themselves with a tarnished, lustreless gleam. This house has an odd habit of returning to the atmosphere of its former destitute and deserted state: I never forget, it seems to say, if we’ve been away for longer than a day or so, my stones and mortar are steeped in decades of human neglect.

  I sit down in one of the dining chairs. I sink forward until my forehead comes into contact with the grain of the tabletop and there I let it rest.

  I have always, I realise, half-expected her to do something like this, history having a history of repeating itself. How could I have been so stupid? How could I have gone off piste like that when I should have known it would push her to this? How could I have abandoned my post, knowing my wife as I do?

  Claudette has gone. She has taken the kids. She has pulled off her speciality, her pièce de résistance: the mysterious, comprehensive and complete disappearance. And I am left alone, discarded, steeped in the knowledge that it is entirely my fault. I am, in short, Timou Lindstrom the Second.

  I have often, from the victorious ramparts of my hitherto successful marriage, wondered what it had been like for Timou when Claudette disappeared on him. How I have pitied him, with a certain amount of vainglorious superiority, as I imagined him waking up that morning on the yacht. Pictured him getting breakfast, perhaps going for a swim, as yet unaware of what nefarious webs were being spun around him. I have plotted those hours of the morning, the midday, the afternoon ticking by, as irritation must have given way to concern, concern to anxiety, anxiety to panic. How would it feel for your woman and child to evaporate, to vanish off the face of the earth? To be left like that, so definitively, so humiliatingly, not to mention publicly. What
must it have been like to face the world’s media, with their questions, their demands, their allegations, with a heart well and truly pulverised?

  I have always hoped that he knew Claudette well enough to half expect it, as I have, and to recognise that it wasn’t so much him she was escaping as her whole existence, a life she had unwittingly signed up for at an early age, a milieu she was whirled into without much forethought. I have wished that for him at the very least. I have, as you can probably tell, a certain sympathy for the man. It was two months before Claudette permitted Lucas to get in discreet touch with Timou to say that he knew where they were and, if Timou wanted, it could be arranged for him to see Ari.

  Two months of not knowing where they were or if they were coming back or if he’d ever see them again. Two months of facing dogged media scrutiny, suspicion and accusation.

  I have also wondered what might have transpired if Timou hadn’t flipped them the bird, hadn’t written them both off. According to Lucas, there was a pause, a sigh, then Timou’s exact words were Send them my undying love. Then he’d hung up. End of. But what if he had said, yes, Lucas, take me to them? If he had said, I want to see my child, I am desperate to see my son. Part of me wonders if Claudette might have been waiting for that, for Timou to step up, to man up, to order his priorities so that Ari (and, by default, her) came out on top. Did she retreat to this house as a strategic move in a long, psychological game of chess? Had she been waiting for Lindstrom to come to his senses?

  I once hinted at this theory as we were getting ready for bed and she paused in the act of braiding her hair in front of the mirror. She turned and gave me a long, disbelieving look. The hair slowly unravelled and spread itself about her shoulders, like something febrile. Then she pointed her hairbrush at me, bristles first, and said, you can’t possibly mean that. She crossed the room; she took the book I was reading out of my hands; she gripped the fabric of my T-shirt. The answer, she said, her face close to mine, is no. Absolutely not. ‘I have never,’ she said to me, ‘and would never wait for that man. The best decision I ever made was to walk away from him.’