A History of Loneliness

by John Boyne

  ‘You have a vocation, Odran,’ she informed me. ‘You have a vocation to be a priest.’

  And I thought if she said so then she must be right. For wasn’t that the way that I’d been brought up, after all? To believe everything that my mother told me?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1980

  AT FIRST GLANCE, the train appeared to be completely full and my heart sank at the idea that I might have to stand for two and a half hours as it wound its way south to Kildare, then back north as far as Athlone before making its way towards Galway station.

  I was tired, having only returned from Norway the previous afternoon, following an exhausting week attending Hannah’s wedding to Kristian Ramsfjeld. Of course, I should have cancelled my cross-country trip, but it seemed as if the act of picking up the phone and making my excuses would command even more effort than simply going, and so I had unpacked one set of clothes from my suitcase the night before and then packed another, before enduring an unsettled night’s sleep and making my way to Heuston station for the westbound train.

  I had travelled alone to Norway, Mam refusing to have anything to do with any of this due to the fact that Kristian was not a Catholic but, like most of his countrymen, a Lutheran, a denomination which was akin to Satanism as far as she was concerned. But this was not her only issue, as she had also hoped that her daughter would join the nuns at the Loreto Abbey in Rathfarnham, insisting that she, like I, had a vocation. Hannah had refused, laughing at the very idea, leading to ructions at home, and when the name of our lost Cathal was invoked it seemed as if our mother would stop at nothing to make her fall in line.

  ‘Didn’t you get your way with poor Odran?’ Hannah roared when I came over one evening to try to broker a peace between the pair of them. ‘Isn’t he after throwing his life away because he was too afraid to stand up to you?’

  ‘Ah now,’ I said, wounded by this, for what Hannah refused to acknowledge then, and never grew to accept fully, was that Mam might have pointed me towards a path that she had laid out for me, but it was one that I was eminently suited to walk along.

  ‘A little harlot is all you are,’ shouted Mam, who was able to give as good as she got with the decibels. ‘Spreading it about for all the lads.’

  ‘And sure why wouldn’t I?’ asked Hannah, hands on her hips. ‘If you have it, flaunt it. And I have it in spades.’

  ‘Odran, will you not make her see sense?’ asked Mam, appealing to me, but what could I do, for my sister had already admitted to me that not only would she rather die than become a nun, but that she never even went to Mass any more, leaving the house on a Sunday morning and taking the bus into town to see a film instead.

  Hannah and Kristian met at the Bank of Ireland on College Green, where she was in training as a cashier on the foreign exchange desk, spending half her day converting Irish punts into dollars or sterling for those young men who were cashing in their meagre savings to try their luck abroad, where, rumour had it, there was work to be found, for God knows there was precious little of it in Ireland at the time. Kristian was studying philosophy across the way in Trinity College and would wander in every day during his lunch hour with a couple of hundred Norwegian kroner to exchange.

  ‘You don’t want to swap all of this in one go, do you not?’ Hannah asked him on his fourth appearance in as many days. ‘You realize you’re paying a commission every time?’

  ‘But then I would not get the opportunity to see you each day,’ he replied, smiling at her, and she told me afterwards that she felt the room spin a little when she realized that here was a boy who liked her, a good-looking, confident boy with bright blond hair, clear skin and a way of wearing clothes that put the Irish lads to shame.

  ‘And he doesn’t just want to take me to the Bad Ass Café all the time either,’ she added. ‘We go to plays and concerts and last week he brought me to the National Gallery to see an exhibition of Nordic paintings that was on display. And he wasn’t faking, Odran, he knew all about them.’

  They courted for a year and then there was an evening when Mam bit the bullet and invited the pair of them for dinner, but an argument broke out somewhere between the melon slice, toothpick-pierced with a glacé cherry, and the roast of lamb; Kristian refused to engage for he was a placid and even-tempered boy, but that only made my mother more aggressive, and after that he was no longer welcome in the house, a fact which bothered him not a bit. I wasn’t present – I was still in Rome at the time – but I assume that religion was at the heart of the quarrel, as it so often is in Ireland.

  The marriage took place in the town of Lillehammer, a couple of hours north of Oslo, where Kristian had grown up, and was attended by his extended family, dozens of hearty, cheerful Ramsfjelds, each one with a name more difficult to spell or pronounce than the last. Minuscules and angstroms ran through or sat above their vowels, dividing their ‘o’s in two and crowning their ‘a’s. The juxtaposition of ‘j’s and ‘k’s in their names made it difficult for me to pronounce them without making Kristian’s cousins laugh and try to correct me, even though what they said and what I said appeared, to my ears, to be exactly the same. His father, like Hannah’s and mine, was dead. By a cruel coincidence he had also drowned, in Lake Mjøsa, although he had taken no one with him and it had been an accident, nothing more. He and Kristian’s mother had actually divorced some four years before that and Beate Ramsfjeld had married again, to a man who apparently had a good chance of a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, a fact which, when revealed to my mother, led her to claim that Kristian’s mother was therefore living in sin, for God had not dissolved the union with her husband and she had not taken the new sacrament after that man’s death. It was a complicated business, certainly, and not one that I had any desire to debate with her.

  Hannah didn’t care that our mother would not be taking the plane from Dublin to Oslo, but I felt sorry for her when I understood what a wonderful experience she was missing out on: the laughter-filled journey northwards with Kristian’s uncle and two young cousins, the beautiful church at the heart of Søndre Park that resembled something out of a Walt Disney cartoon, the visit to the Maihaugen and the walks in the countryside around the town itself. If anything, my sister seemed relieved by our mother’s absence, but I wished I was not travelling alone to this strange and fascinating country, but that she was there to enjoy six happy days eating pinnekjøtt, fårikål and brunost – all of which tasted better than they sounded – washed down with litres of aquavit and glasses of mjød, which left my head aching in the mornings and thoughts of my new life as an ordained priest in Dublin far behind.

  I liked Kristian from the start. He was a thoughtful, intelligent man with a passion for the mountains that surrounded his childhood home. And although he went on to live the rest of his days in Dublin, he and Hannah had long planned to retire finally to Norway, an ambition that would be achieved by neither of them, for he was felled by an unexpected brain tumour only a few days after his forty-second birthday, and of course Hannah’s mind began to go only a year after that. But back then, in 1980, they were a glorious young couple, full of life and beauty, enraptured by each other, as deeply in love as any two people I have ever known; that they only shared another twenty years together seems a cruel and inexplicable brutality on the part of whoever decides our fates for us, that entity that I call God but that acts on a whim to destroy our happiness and yet still somehow commands the loyalty of a faithful flock.

  But here I was home again, far from the Rondane Peaks and the Peer Gynt Trail, deciding not to visit Mam until the following week as I had no patience for her bitterness when I was still filled by such exultation, but to go westward instead.

  I made my way slowly through the six carriages, but it was a Friday afternoon and every student in the city seemed to be heading out of the capital for the weekend. Only when I got to the very last one did I give up hope and allow my shoulders to sink a little in resignation, throwing my case on the luggage rack above the seats and making
my way back towards the standing area by the doors. Leaning into the corner, I opened the novel I had started at Oslo airport the previous afternoon, a book about a young man who plans to release all the bears from Vienna zoo, and began to read. It had made the flight pass in what felt like a few minutes; perhaps it would do the same for the train journey.

  ‘Anthony,’ said a middle-aged woman with an old-fashioned beehive hair-do seated in a four-seater berth as she beckoned a little boy sitting across the aisle from her. ‘Anthony, come over here and sit on my lap and let Father sit down.’

  ‘Don’t want to,’ said the boy, placing his little finger inside his left nostril. I glanced in their direction, praying that he would be left in peace.

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘Sure it won’t do me any harm to stand for a while. The train will probably clear out a bit after Kildare or Tullamore anyway.’

  ‘Father, come here and take this seat,’ called a man old enough to be my grandfather, seated three more rows along, as he stood up and started gathering his possessions: the peeled skin of a banana and a copy of that day’s Irish Independent, Charlie Haughey’s terrible crooked head grinning out from the front page with an expression that said that while he had not quite emptied the pockets of the Irish people just yet, he soon would.

  ‘No, no,’ I said quickly, waving my hands at him. ‘Not at all. Stay where you are, there’s a good man. I’m grand here.’

  ‘Father, will you not take the weight off?’ This time a heavily pregnant woman seated near the doors.

  ‘I offered the seat to Father first,’ insisted the first woman, raising her voice now so everyone could hear, as if her initial question had given her a proprietary interest over me. ‘Anthony, get up right now or you and I are going to have a conversation.’ And this time the boy leaped to attention as the heads of the passengers turned to see what kind of terrible child would refuse to let a priest sit down, let alone what sort of mother would permit such disrespect. ‘Anthony can sit on my lap. We’re only going as far as Athlone, Father,’ she said, her tone changing in an instant from fury to obsequiousness. ‘He’ll be perfectly comfortable until there.’

  ‘Really, there’s no need,’ I protested, but the child had moved now, dragging himself across the aisle and leaving me with no choice but to take his vacant seat, blushing furiously, embarrassed by this attention, wanting nothing more than to retrieve my case from the rack and run back through the carriages to the far end of the train.

  I was on my way to Galway to visit Tom Cardle. I had not laid eyes on him since leaving for Rome at the end of 1977. Throughout my time there, I had written long letters to Tom with news of my life and asking for all the gossip from Clonliffe, where he was now in his final year. How are you getting on with the language? he asked me in one reply and I fired off a quick postcard – Grand, Tom, I’ve taken to it like an anatra to acqua. His letters seemed sorrowful and bored; he regretted the fact that we wouldn’t get to spend our last days at the seminary together, but said that the Dublin lads always got the best treats as it was still Dubs who ran all the dioceses and everyone knew that they looked after their own. His bitterness surprised and hurt me, for he had seemed pleased for me when I learned of my selection for this great honour. He told me that he had been forced to share a cell with Barry Shand, whose flatulence was legendary, since Barry’s cell-mate, a cheerful Kerry boy by the name of O’Heigh, had run off with a girl in his fifth year, providing us with the best bit of scandal we’d had for a long time.

  Shortly before his ordination, Tom wrote to tell me that he’d been assigned to the same parish where he had done a final-year placement – ‘some godforsaken hole in the arsehole of Leitrim’ was the way he put it – and I could almost hear that county’s name come spitting from his mouth in disgust, even at a distance of some twelve hundred miles.

  I was cheered up enormously, however, when he finally arrived as the new curate in that parish and, after only a gap of a few short months, wrote to say that things were not as bad as he’d expected, that there was a great deal of difference between being a seminarian and an ordained priest, and that there were advantages to his position that he hadn’t even imagined before he took it on. Leitrim, he insisted, was a godless backwater and the sheep were more interesting than the people, but he’d developed some new hobbies – he didn’t explain what they were – and was starting to realize how this life might not be such a bad one after all. And the respect we get, Odran, he added. It’s like we’re gods now! Nothing like the way we’ve been treated for the last seven years.

  His tone was so positive that it came as a great surprise to me when, within a year, he was abruptly moved from Leitrim and relocated to a parish in the Galway diocese. Typically, a new priest would be given three or four years at his first appointment to find his feet. But not Tom; he was moved almost immediately.

  Throughout my busy year, throughout 1978, we sent letters back and forth between Ireland and Rome. I confided in him the honour that had been conferred upon me and he wanted to know details, details I could not provide, for a veil of secrecy was drawn over my daily routines. And then came September and he must have written every day, wanting to know what the papers couldn’t or wouldn’t say, whether the conspiracy theories were true, little knowing that I was in disgrace and as far from the news as he was. This went on through October and November and even until Christmas when things finally began to settle down again in the Vatican. Tom, I told him time and again, Tom, I can tell you nothing. My lips are sealed.

  Playing the big shot, for the truth was that I knew nothing at all, for hadn’t I abandoned my post on the fateful night that was the subject of so much global conversation? Hadn’t I given in to my baser instincts? Hadn’t I shamed myself, allowed myself to be utterly humiliated by a woman whose name I would never even know, and left a good man to die alone?

  But back in Ireland, my Roman days behind me, it was time to renew our acquaintance in person and so this weekend had been planned and I had looked forward to it enormously. I’d been working at Terenure College for a couple of months by now and had settled in well. I was getting along with the lads, tried coaching a little rugby, failed miserably and the boys said, Father, will you not stick to what you know best? But they were kindly about it and meant no harm and I traded in the tracksuit for the library, where those boys who had the guts to say that they had no interest in sports sat, and this suited me better. The accountancy teacher, Father Miles Donlan, took my place with the rugby team and of course, as things turned out, that was a terrible mistake and one for which the college, and a handful of innocent boys, continues to pay.

  Although I almost never talked about Rome and the position that I had been given, the word leaked out somehow and the teachers began to ask questions, but I kept my counsel despite their interest, refusing to pander to their desire for gossip. And when young Harry Mulligan, a bright lad who brought the house down with his tomfoolery playing Bottom in the Christmas production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, put his hand up once in the middle of a lesson and said, ‘Father, is it true that you were there the night the Pope died?’ I was quick off my feet with an answer that made even me smile, despite the solemnity of the question.

  ‘Which pope?’

  ‘Are you a priest?’ said a voice to my right and I turned to the little boy seated next to me, well dressed but looking terribly tired.

  ‘I am,’ I told him. ‘Are you?’

  The boy shook his head and I glanced across at the woman by the window with a little girl seated next to her and she smiled; she was the mother, of course, and the children were twins. They all looked alike.

  ‘Ezra,’ she said. ‘Shush.’

  ‘Don’t be worrying,’ I said. ‘He’s curious about this, I expect.’ I raised my index finger to my collar, which was feeling a little tight that day, and tapped it, the sound ringing out like a hushed knock against a wooden door.

  ‘He’s curious about everything, this one,’ she replie
d, placing her book face-down on the table between us.

  ‘He’s young,’ I said. ‘How old is he, seven?’

  ‘We’re both seven,’ said the little girl quickly.

  ‘Are you indeed!’

  ‘Our birthdays are December the twenty-fifth.’

  ‘What a day to be born,’ I said, smiling at her. ‘Do you get double presents?’