A History of Loneliness

by John Boyne

  ‘Sure where else would they go?’ I asked and he shook his head, laughing.

  ‘It’s a saying, Odran. Did you never hear it? Anyway, she had a bit of a reputation, that one. She was known for being a bit of a goer, but himself mustn’t have minded since he was marrying her regardless. So they’re sitting there, the two of them, smirking away, and I can tell that they’d rather be anywhere else in the world, and they gave me the usual guff about how they don’t see why they can’t get married without having to go through all of this palaver and I told them that many couples found it a great benefit to talk through some of the issues of marriage before they walk down the aisle. Household finances, keeping a clean home, the importance of the … well, you know, the other business.’

  ‘Sex,’ I said, for I could see no harm in using clear words to define what we meant; we were not children, after all.

  ‘Yes, that,’ he said, looking awkward, shifting a little in his chair.

  ‘I don’t think I’d feel qualified for any of that,’ I told him. ‘I hope I never have to give those classes.’

  ‘Sure why wouldn’t you be qualified?’ he asked, surprised. ‘Weren’t we trained for long enough?’

  ‘Our knowledge is a theoretical one,’ I said. ‘We don’t keep our own finances, the Church does that. We don’t clean our homes, we have housekeepers. And sure what do we know of sex?’

  ‘We’re not all as innocent as you, Odran,’ he said irritably and I frowned, wondering why he was saying such a thing when I had known him since he was seventeen and he had confided in me before that he had never so much as kissed a girl. ‘But look, the point is that I could see they were just going through the motions since they had no choice. Father Trelawney, he was my parish priest, he made it clear to them that there’d be no wedding in his church until they took the course and so what could they do but fall in line? Anyway, the whole thing was going dreadful and I wanted to finish up as quickly as possible. But then I tried to lighten the mood a little by saying that one thing this girl didn’t have to worry about was changing her name after the wedding.’

  ‘And why was that?’ I asked, two more pints being placed on the table before us; he must have ordered them with a wave of his hand without my even noticing.

  ‘Well here’s the thing,’ said Tom, leaning forward, drinking his whiskey in two swallows before starting in on the second pint. ‘Sláinte,’ he said, raising his glass. ‘The lad’s name was Philip O’Neill, all right? And the girl’s name, by pure chance, was Rose O’Neill. They were both O’Neills, do you see? No relation of each other, thank God, even if it was the middle of Leitrim where you can marry a hen if the spirit takes you. But an O’Neill was marrying an O’Neill. It happens, I suppose. Especially with a common name like that.’

  ‘Ah right,’ I said, nodding and giggling a little, as if this was a great joke. The drink might have been getting to me. I had an empty stomach. I hadn’t even been able to look at the ham and cheese roll on the train.

  ‘So I made this joke and the girl pipes up, good as you like, saying it wouldn’t matter anyway because she would never change her name after getting married. What’s that? says I. Sure you have to take your husband’s name, it’s the law. And she laughed at me! She laughed in my face, Odran. She said it wasn’t the law at all and that if I wanted she’d bring me in a copy of Bunreacht na hÉireann and challenge me to find where it said such a thing.’

  ‘Well she’s right,’ I said. ‘There’s no law. But it’s the natural order of things.’

  ‘That’s what I told her,’ he insisted. ‘A woman takes her husband’s name. And don’t be telling me what they do in Dublin, I told her, I don’t want to hear about any of that rubbish. But again she just laughed and said that it didn’t matter because she was sticking with her own name after the wedding and that was the end of that. But your name is O’Neill, I told her. Yes, she said. What’s your point? My point is that you will be O’Neill after you’re married so you’ll be taking your husband’s name regardless’.

  ‘She must have loved that,’ I said.

  ‘Oh she looked furious, the dirty little tart.’

  My eyes opened wide in surprise. Had he said what I thought he’d just said? He didn’t seem to notice if he had.

  ‘Anyway,’ he continued, ‘at this point, the boy joins in and says that Rose is perfectly right, that neither of them have any time for this patriarchal society and that they’ve already discussed it and agreed that once they are married, he will remain Philip O’Neill and she will remain Rose O’Neill. She won’t change to Rose O’Neill, those were his exact words. Now can you see the difference there, Odran?’

  ‘Well, not in the names, no,’ I said. ‘Of course not. But what he means is—’

  ‘Sure I know what he means,’ he snapped, raising his voice. ‘And then he said, I will be my O’Neill and Rose will remain her O’Neill. And if we have children they will take both our names.’

  ‘So the children will be O’Neill-O’Neill?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s what he told me.’

  ‘What if they have a son named Neil?’

  ‘What?’

  I started to laugh and before I knew it the tears were rolling down my face. I’d never heard anything so ridiculous in all my life.

  ‘What are you laughing at, Odran?’ asked Tom, but it was difficult to recover, faced with the serious expression on his face. ‘Do you think this is a joke? A girl like that making a laugh of me? Making a laugh of a priest?’

  ‘Sure they’re young, Tom,’ I said, for the drink had surely affected me now and my spirits were high. ‘They’re just challenging your authority, that’s all. It’s what young people do.’

  ‘I’m a young person, Odran.’

  ‘Ah would you go away, you’re not.’

  ‘I’m twenty-five!’

  ‘It’s different for us though. We don’t get to live as they do. They’ll always be younger than us.’

  He sat there, furious now. ‘I don’t know why they even bother to get married if they’re going to be modern like that,’ he said finally. ‘They’re just making a farce of the sacrament.’

  ‘Did you tell them that, Tom?’

  ‘I did, but it went in one ear and out the other. They’re married now. And I know for a fact that they’re using johnnies because the pharmacist told me when I went in to ask about them.’

  ‘You went in to—’

  ‘They should be locked up, the pair of them,’ he said, his face turning red with anger. ‘I should call the police on them. The pharmacist should be locked up too. They should all be locked up,’ he roared now, and I put my hand on the table to settle him.

  ‘Would you calm down?’ I said. ‘People are staring.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, turning away, practically trembling with anger.

  ‘Why did you tell me that story?’ I asked, after a long silence between us.

  ‘Because I wanted you to know that while you were running around Rome having a great time for yourself, I was dealing with the likes of them and it wasn’t fair, because I would have liked to have gone to Rome too. I’m not blaming you, Odran, but that Rose O’Neill bitch was right about one thing anyway, that the Dubs have it all sewn up between them and they don’t give the rest of us a look-in.’

  ‘Well at least you’re in a bigger parish now,’ I said, hoping that this might soothe his rage, for I had no desire to spend a weekend listening to Tom Cardle complain. ‘You’re glad to be out of Leitrim, I’d say?’

  And it was now that his face clouded over. ‘Don’t talk to me about Leitrim,’ he said. ‘Bloody place.’

  And so we didn’t. We didn’t talk about Leitrim. In fact, it was more than twenty-five years before we ever did talk about Leitrim, and sure by then it was too late.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1972

  I WAS SIXTEEN years old when a family from England moved in two doors down from us, turning half the Braemor Road upside-down with curiosity and disapprov
al. Newcomers were always the focus of gossip, of course. A German man in his sixties who arrived a couple of years earlier had inspired fevered speculation about where he had been and what he had done during the war. Some claimed that he had served as a guard in a concentration camp, others that he had hatched a plot against Hitler and escaped to Switzerland when his plans had been discovered. Particular disapproval, however, was reserved for the English. Where one family came, after all, others might follow, and this might in turn lead to an invasion, and the feeling was that we’d spent long enough driving the Brits out of Ireland without welcoming them back in with open arms.

  Word spread that our new neighbours were a pair from across the sea with two children between them. Mr Grove was a widower with a twelve-year-old son named Colin, who had the guts to tell me one day that he wanted to be a ballet dancer, God love him, while Rebecca Summers, the woman with whom Mr Grove lived, was a divorcée with a seventeen-year-old daughter, Katherine, who wore short skirts and tennis shoes and always seemed to be sucking provocatively on a lollipop. She wasn’t especially pretty, if I am to be honest, but she had an air of danger about her, a suggestion that she could be trouble in the right hands at the right time, and I found that an intriguing possibility, more so than Mam did anyway.

  ‘They’re living in sin,’ declared Mrs Rathley from next door, who had been in tears at the notion of living so close to English people, but who was almost apoplectic to discover that they weren’t even married to each other. ‘Here in Churchtown! Did you ever think you’d see the day, Mrs Yates?’

  ‘I didn’t, Mrs Rathley,’ replied Mam, shaking her head sadly.

  ‘This country is going to hell in a hand-basket. You only have to open up The Evening Press to see that. There’s killings and murders going on everywhere.’

  ‘Killings and murders,’ agreed Mam. I was in the living room at the front table, being forced to listen to them as I pored over the Modh Coinníollach, trying to make sense of it. I would have dearly liked to close the French doors between us for a bit of peace, but Mam wouldn’t allow it; she said that solitude would give me ideas and the last thing a boy of my age needed was ideas.

  ‘I thought we’d seen the last of this sort of thing when Sharon Farr moved away,’ continued Mrs Rathley. ‘But maybe that was just the start of it.’

  ‘Do not mention that girl’s name in this house,’ said Mam firmly, putting her cup down. ‘Little pitchers, Mrs Rathley. Little pitchers.’

  I looked up, offended. Was I the little pitcher with the big ears? I was sixteen years old by now and thought that I had progressed past such concerns. But then Hannah was outside playing in the garden – the back door was open too – and I told myself that Mam was referring to her.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Yates,’ continued Mrs Rathley. ‘But if you ask me, this area started going downhill when the Farrs were allowed to stay. They should have been made to move away.’

  I rolled my eyes with the dramatic intensity that only a teenage boy can muster. Sharon Farr was notorious in Churchtown for what she’d done with one of the Spanish students who clogged up the pavements during the summer holidays with their brown skin, beautiful faces and shouty voices, travelling together in packs, screaming twenty to the dozen in their own language, even though they were here to learn English. A lot of families took in a Spanish student as the Church was behind the scheme and I had wanted one badly, a pet of my own, but Mam had refused, perhaps the only time she ever said no to something the priests wanted. ‘My home wouldn’t be my own,’ she said. ‘And besides, you don’t know what kind of habits they might have.’

  The Farrs, however, had taken in two, a brother and sister, and it was said that Sharon Farr had flirted madly with the boy, who was a year her junior but tall and handsome with it, and the boy had flirted right back and the pair of them had been seen one night down by the Dodder river, one atop the other, a story which grew and developed and sprouted wings as it whispered its way from schoolboy to schoolboy. Sharon Farr was a mad thing, we all said. Sharon Farr was up for it, we all said. Sharon Farr would give you everything you asked for and more.

  And then the word came that Sharon Farr was pregnant.

  Had Mam turned on the six o’clock news and learned that Hannah had made her way to the Phoenix Park and attempted an assassination on President DeValera she could not have been more horrified. ‘That girl was trouble, always,’ she insisted. ‘The way she dallied with all the boys. And I said from the start that it was a bad idea to bring those Spanish students over. I said that, didn’t I?’

  The drama only grew when Sharon Farr ran off to Spain halfway through her pregnancy – whether she was following the boy or not, no one knew, but we all assumed that she was – and she had neither been seen nor heard from on the Braemor Road ever since. Mrs Farr was now persona non grata and walked up and down the road to Super Crazy Prices in Dundrum with her eyes cast to the ground. Father Haughton named Sharon Farr from the pulpit and made sure that her poor parents were there to hear it; I was there myself and can remember the oration he gave, a spiteful, mean bit of belligerence that felt like it came straight out of a Shakespearean play for the depth and purpose of it. I had an image of him rehearsing his lines in the parochial house in front of his housekeeper and her goading him on. The whole thing was a bad business. I look back now and see that there was precious little compassion to be found in the hearts of anyone in those days, particularly when it came to the lives and choices of women, and in that way, if not others, Ireland has hardly changed in forty years.

  ‘Does Father Haughton know what’s going on at number eight?’ asked Mam, and Mrs Rathley shook her head.

  ‘I mentioned it casually while I was clearing the sacristy after eleven o’clock Mass on Sunday,’ she said – Mrs Rathley was one of those women who helped out behind the scenes of the church and whose day was made if she got into a conversation with a priest – ‘and he said that he had heard all about it and had spoken to Archbishop Ryan, but there was nothing that could be done.’

  ‘Did he not think of calling the Gardaí?’

  ‘But sure it’s not a crime,’ said Mrs Rathley. ‘Not one that the courts would recognize anyway. More’s the pity.’

  ‘And what of our children?’ asked Mam. ‘Are they to look at this behaviour and come away undamaged? I have Odran and Hannah to think of.’

  ‘Father said he wouldn’t give her the sacrament if she came to Mass.’

  ‘Would he give it to him? To Mr Grove?’

  ‘He said he would. He said that the woman had taken advantage of a poor widower’s grief.’

  ‘What kind of a person is she anyway?’ asked Mam.

  ‘I think we both know what kind, Mrs Yates. There’s a word for her sort, isn’t there?’

  ‘There is, Mrs Rathley.’

  ‘And we both know that word only too well, don’t we, Mrs Yates?’

  ‘We do, Mrs Rathley. Did the priest say anything along those lines?’

  ‘He was very upset by the whole thing, the poor man. He said that women could be terribly predatory when they set their minds to a thing.’

  ‘Or to a man,’ said Mam. ‘Poor Father Haughton. I’d say he’s terrible shook by the whole business.’

  ‘Oh he is. But I don’t think threatening to withhold communion from them will do much good. They’re not likely to be going to Mass anyway, are they? They’re Protestants, the pair of them. So how in God’s name will it matter to them?’

  ‘Ah tonight,’ said Mam, throwing her hands in the air, for here was the lowest blow of all. ‘Is it Paris we’re living in now? Or New York?’

  I could listen no more. I got up and left.

  I was intrigued by Katherine Summers from the start, with her lollipops, her tennis shoes and her short skirts no matter the weather, but barely spoke to her until the afternoon I spied her leaving the Classic cinema in Harold’s Cross when I was cycling along towards home. It was a fine day and she was dressed in such a way that she
might have taken the eyes out of a blind man, and I glanced up to find out what it was that she had been to see. The Godfather was the only film playing. I had never seen it myself but had heard all about it; it had something to do with the Mafia and there was talk in the classroom that there was a scene in Sicily about halfway through that had to be seen to be believed, but at the time it wasn’t the type of film that I’d have been allowed to go to see at all. I slowed down my bike as I drew closer, all the better for a look at her legs, and when there was no more slowing down to do without falling off I sped up again and cycled along, satisfied with the negative beginning to develop in my brain that I could develop later and have a good look at.

  ‘Odran Yates, is that you?’ came a voice from behind me and I might have gone under a car for the surprise of it.

  ‘It is,’ I said, pulling into the pavement and turning to look at her as if I hadn’t noticed her at all until that moment, my face flushing red with embarrassment. I wiped a hand across my forehead to pretend it was the heat of the day that was getting to me. ‘How’s things, Katherine?’

  ‘Things can only get better,’ she said, smiling at me and flicking her hair back in a practised gesture. She reached into her bag and extracted one of her ever-present treats, which she held out for me as if I was a puppy dog learning obedience to her. ‘Would you like a lollipop?’

  I looked at it for a moment, biting my lip. She might have been Eve handing the apple across to Adam in the Garden of Eden for the provocative way she stared at me, a half-smile across her face, her tongue just teasing out between her lips, but there was no question what I would do. The stomach inside me was lurching like I was on a big dipper and I could feel a stirring down below that threatened to make a show of me. I took it off her and popped it in my mouth like Kojak.