The Salesman

by Joseph O'Connor

  ‘Anyways,’ he said. ‘I’m only boring you. And sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, what?’ He went to open the door.

  ‘Listen, Seánie,’ I said. ‘Can I ask y’something?’

  ‘Shoot.’

  ‘Where you were tonight. That bit of the sea front. You know it’s where the gay fellas go? That’s what I’m told. To meet each other.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So. You’re not gay are you?’

  He took a long last drag on his cigarette, allowing the smoke to drift from his mouth and nostrils.

  ‘Gay in Bray,’ he said. ‘Why? D’y’fancy me, Liam?’

  ‘No.’

  He smiled and threw his cigarette end out the window. ‘No,’ he laughed. ‘Well I’m not gay, no, so it’s just as well you said that, isn’t it?’

  It was only when he got out that I realised he had been sitting on my notebook.

  After your mother lost the child, things between us started to change. This happened quite quickly. There was a new distance between us which would express itself in small enough ways at first; she would seem uneasy when I went to kiss her in the mornings, for example, on my way out to work. She often seemed preoccupied and silent when I was in the room, yet as soon as I would leave I would hear her laughing with you or Lizzie. The understood glances and elisions by which, I now know, a marriage telegraphs itself as still being something alive became less frequent. Sometimes at the weekend, it would seem to me that a whole day would pass without Grace actually looking at me at all. Her comments about my weight, which had started some years earlier as a joke, and had then become more barbed for a while, simply stopped. For some reason this bothered me. Around that time I remember noticing that whenever I tried to bring up the subject of my lack of fitness in some playful or irreverent way, she would look away or shrug and say nothing. She grew thinner herself, and you know your mother, she was always so slight anyway, she did not have much to lose. The fatter I grew, the lighter she became; sometimes it occurred to me that if someone had weighed the two of us at any point in the marriage our combined weight would always have been the same. Her face took on a gaunt hungry look. There were often grey circles around her eyes. One night she was undressing in the bedroom, or perhaps just sitting in her underwear at the dressing-table and combing her hair, and I remember noticing with a shock just how thin she had become.

  Her view of me seemed to have changed fundamentally, for good reason as I can now see, but I sensed that she was troubled by other things than me too. Your mother became a woman who was marked by pain. A faint redolence of winter followed her around like a delicate perfume. Though she still played and laughed with Lizzie and yourself, and was never less than loving to you, I began to intuit for the first time that this was all an increasing effort for her. She lost interest in concerts or plays. She gave up reading poetry. She became withdrawn and very silent. There was hardly ever any music in the flat any more.

  I think it was her father who told us first about the house in Dalkey. I remember laughing out loud at the advertisement he had cut out of the Irish Times and sent to us – I still have it somewhere, but the last time I came across it, the silverfish had nibbled it to lace. There was absolutely no way that we could afford the house. It was a solid square turn-of-the-century building, in very poor condition, but with a large garden, trees, even a ruined old stone stable block. It was owned by the Church of Ireland but they did not need it any more, there were too few Protestants left in Dalkey now, the rector and his wife were about to move to the North. The advertisement made it clear that it would be an unusual sale. The Church of Ireland elders were concerned that the house should go to people who needed it. It had always been a family home, the text explained, it was not a piece of real-estate investment to be sold to a developer; they intended it to be a safe home for a family who would benefit from it but could not afford the market price. To be considered eligible to bid for Glen Bolcain it was necessary to write a letter and say why you needed the house.

  I remember that we were invited out to see it on an autumn Sunday afternoon. It was so difficult to find, pushed back like that into the cul-de-sac off the avenue, that I drove right past it several times without even noticing those two frowning stone eagles on the pillar, one with the chipped beak, which the rector had told me to look out for, and which you would always dislike. Finally, after asking directions from several mystified locals we found the house; there was the name on a terracotta plaque screwed to the huge black gates. Glen Bolcain. A winding driveway of potholed gravel and deep ruts badly overgrown with snipegrass and edged with clumps of nettles. A granite bird table on a small leaning plinth. A wooden-shuttered, damp-stained house that looked as though it was about to fall to its knees like a tottering drunk. You said the whole place looked haunted.

  There was something very poignant about that sepia-coloured September afternoon. The rector and his wife had already packed up to go: I remember plastic crates and foil-lined tea chests all stuffed full of beautiful old leatherbound gold-tooled books. They had made soup for us, they gave you and Lizzie plums from the trees in the garden. They had loved the garden, they told us in their gentle Northern accents, as they led us around showing us the shrubs and flowers, telling you the names of some of the trees – oak, alder, yew, holly, birch, aspen. The rector was worried about the apple tree. It was a very good Bramley and it would need to be crowned soon. It had been planted by one of his predecessors almost eighty years earlier. I remember that he blushed with pleasure when your mother told him how beautiful the tea roses were. Oh, these too were the responsibility of a predecessor, he explained, the true credit belonged to another man.

  ‘History is all around us, Mr Sweeney, isn’t that right? And every garden tells its own story, of course.’

  He asked me if I had ever read George Herbert. I said that I had once written an essay on him at university but it had been quite a long time ago.

  ‘Do you know his poem on the garden at all, Mr Sweeney?’

  ‘Is it stumbling on melons I fall on grass?’

  ‘Oh dear, no,’ he said. ‘I think you’ll find that’s Mr Andrew Marvell, isn’t it? A beautiful writer, yes, but I had in mind Mr George Herbert. For me, I must say, there are few to approach old George as I call him.’ He smiled at me. ‘He was a vicar too, of course.’

  He reached out, caressed one of the roses, murmured a few lines of poetry:

  If then all that worldlings prize

  Be contracted to a rose;

  Sweetly there indeed it lies,

  But it biteth in the close.

  When I looked at him closely I thought that I could see tears in his old eyes. ‘It biteth in the close, Mr Sweeney. Aye, that it does.’

  Perhaps a month later, the Church elders wrote to say that we had been chosen for Glen Bolcain. Grace’s father gave us the deposit and we moved in almost immediately. On our first night we asked all four of your grandparents out to visit. Seánie said a mass in the living-room. To please Grace’s parents we had also invited their rabbi, a tall, solemn, barrel-chested man who sang an ancient Hebrew blessing ‘for the planting of new trees’. I remember how beautifully strange the singing sounded in the small room where I am now writing, how moving and dark those elongated, throaty vowels. It was the last time we were to see Seánie for a couple of years. He was about to leave for the Sudan, where he would be working in a poor parish so far out in the desert that his occasional letters would only arrive several months after they had been written.

  Your mother loved the house. She seemed to want to be in the house all the time; the furthest she would happily go would be down to Dalkey village to the shops, or sometimes for a walk along Coliemore Road by the sea, which always seemed so extraordinarily waveless there, in the short stretch between the harbour and Dalkey Island, despite its infamously treacherous undercurrents. She began to smoke more and changed from light to full-tar cigarettes. When we got the colour television she took a huge interest
in that, I noticed, but particularly in old black and white films and ancient, obscure documentaries on Irish history. Every other programme on Telefis Eireann back in those days seemed to have at least one flickering newsreel clip from the 1916 Rising or the War of Independence, Black and Tan soldiers marching up boreens, Pearse and the other rebel commanders being led hands high from the smouldering ruin of the GPO, walking quickly, comically, like silent movie stars, the fluttering green, white and orange flag behind them translated by the screen to black, cream and grey. Often I wondered what was the point of having colour at all, when your mother only seemed to like black and white. But whenever I tried to joke about it, she’d just ignore me or look away or shrug, as though the answers to my teasing questions were utterly obvious. She would sit and watch the screen with a closed-down look on her face, like some ancient sage scrutinising a mystic fire. Large things were happening in her heart, I am sure, and that would have frightened your mother. Though she had a temper, as you know, in truth she had no real facility for melodrama, she never liked the large things of life. An argument would exhaust her for days. But it is the small things I still carry with me from that time. One night you tottered into the living-room in ballet pumps and irritatedly asked your mother to show you how to dance. She laughed and stroked your face but said that she knew nothing about dancing. That amazed me. Your mother used to love dancing so much.

  And then, around that time I would often wake up in the middle of the night to find that your mother was not beside me in the bed. The first time it happened I was convinced that she had left me. I remember getting up and walking around the house, looking for her. It even occurred to me to telephone her parents, although it must have been after two in the morning. Finally I found her in the garden, sitting on the grass under the apple tree and smoking a cigarette. Her feet were under her and she had pulled her yellow nightdress into a sack over her knees. When she saw me approaching, she asked where I had been the night before and who I had been drinking with. I was touched in a way, because these were questions that she had stopped bothering to put some time before. I sat down in the damp grass beside her and held her hand. She was so pale and delicate, she looked like an illustration of a wan ghost in a sad old storybook. She told me in a very quiet voice that she loved me and wanted to make me happy. I told her that I loved her too and she smiled and looked away. After a while she asked me to pick her up and carry her into the house. I thought she was joking, but she said no, she was not. I lifted her in my arms and did what she had asked. Then she made tea and we sat in the kitchen for a while saying nothing at all, your mother sitting on my knees, one hand on my face and the other holding my own hand very tightly. From time to time she would kiss my face and I would kiss her hair, but we did not say a word, just sat there in silence drinking tea, the two of us wrapped in an old coat, our shaking fingers intertwined like the wild flowers in the garden. I believe that was the last night we ever said aloud that we loved each other.

  In the following weeks I would often find your mother down in the kitchen late at night, with the door of the Aga open; she would be sitting cross-legged on the floor and staring disconsolately into the flames. At other times I would be woken at three and four in the morning by the smell of meat cooking; she would be down in the kitchen again, cooking up stews and casseroles which she would then put into lunch-boxes and freeze. Shortly after this she started to stay in bed late, which was fine, although it surprised me a little because Grace had always loved the mornings. When we were first married she would always rise before I did. But in the months after she miscarried that was to change. At first I was not worried by this. I understood that she needed to rest, and actually liked it when she would not get up before me. Rest and sleep were what the doctors said she needed, and I truly believed that rest and sleep would give her the things she could not get from me. We evolved a kind of routine. I would get up and make you two your breakfasts, then bring your mother up toast and a pot of tea in bed. We would sit there and talk a bit, about nothing at all, oddly formal conversations about unimportant subjects; which new films were due to come to the cinema in Dun Laoghaire, the latest headline-grabbing speech by some absurd politician. Although she would be tired, she seemed a little easier in herself in the mornings. The haunted look would have faded from her features. Her eyes would be bright and clear. I have pleasant enough memories of those mornings, the two of us in the bedroom upstairs, her dark thick hair spread out on the pillow, the smell of tea, and the delicate sunlight making the filmsy curtains glow.

  But then one day around that time I came home early from work. It was about four in the afternoon when I got in and your mother was in bed. When I walked into the bedroom she was wide awake and staring at the window. She seemed shocked when she saw me. She was like a child caught out in some domestic crime. She told me nervously that she had just come upstairs for a lie-down, but then you kids let slip later that she had been in bed all day, and that this had been the steady pattern of things for the last several months. You would arrive in from school to find your mother in bed; she would only get up at tea time when she thought that I was due home. She had asked you both not to tell me about this. It had become a kind of game, an enjoyable conspiracy, not telling me what was going on with your mother.

  I did not know what to do. I was afraid to talk to her about it: perhaps, I think now, my not doing so was a way of refusing to acknowledge what was happening, and perhaps the same could be said of her also. Anyone who has ever been in a dying marriage – and I suppose that is what ours was by then – knows that not putting words on unhappiness is the moral equivalent of leaving the lights out so that you cannot see the monsters coming. But after this incident I began to find excuses to return home earlier from work. Sometimes, if I was passing during the afternoon, I would drop into the house to see how she was getting on. I got into the habit of coming home for lunch, but always at irregular times which she would not be able to predict. I could not bear the thought of her lying in bed all day. I suppose the truth is that her doing this would fill me with a kind of dread, because it reminded me of what my father would do during the times when his own depression would get the better of him. I wondered how best I could prevent it. Of course the solution was clear. For a brief period I did manage to give up drinking, or at least, drinking outside the house, in pubs. I tried to be at home every night with your mother, even if being at home just meant watching the television for hours on end, the two of us silently smoking until the living-room was cloudy with smoke. And that did work, actually; your mother was in some ways a woman who was very easy to please. Loss had come into our lives and had shaped the way we saw love. But when I think about Grace now, it often occurs to me that all she ever truly wanted in her heart was not even love, but companionship. It is shocking to learn the littleness of the things for which most of us will settle if ultimately necessary – and more shocking that we so often deny even those small mercies to each other. Well, perhaps that sentence is just one more evasion on my part, another way of hiding my personal culpability. Certainly, if I have learned anything at all – if I have one thing to bequeath to you – it is that every single statement on the subject of human morality that contains the word ‘we’ is a lie.

  One day when I got home my mother was in the kitchen with Grace. I was surprised to see her. She was in poor health by then and did not often venture out to Dalkey. There was no reason at all for her visit, she told me, she just fancied it, she had come out in a taxi. Grace looked as though she had been crying. It was obvious from the quality of the silence in the room that I had interrupted a conversation, although my mother denied this and laughed lightly and told me not to be flattering myself, she and Grace had more to be talking about than the likes of me. I drove her home to Ringsend that night, and when we got there she asked me to come into the house for a while.

  It was late and I was tired and so I told her no, I did not want to. We sat in the car on Joy Street and talked for a while. Sh
e told me plainly that I would never know the grief Grace was going through now, and that I would have to do a lot more to support her. To lose a child was the most awful thing that could ever happen to a woman. Everything else in my life would have to be put in second place to Grace now, she said. Everything else. She looked at me and touched my hand and asked if I knew what she meant by the words ‘everything else’ and I told her yes, I did know.

  ‘You’re at a crossroads, son,’ she sighed. ‘I prayed you never would be. But you are now.’

  That conversation must have taken place in the autumn, because our wedding anniversary was coming up. As a surprise for Grace, I borrowed some money from the credit union and arranged for us to go to Paris for the weekend. She seemed pleased enough when I told her about it, but not quite as pleased as I had thought she would be, and in the days immediately leading up to the trip she was if anything more preoccupied than ever.

  We stayed in a small and cheap hotel on the Place St Sulpice, a beautiful little square with a mighty old church and a preposterously gorgeous fountain. The first day was pleasant. We went to Notre Dame and the Louvre, we walked the Champs-Elysées and looked in the windows of all the elegant shops. But that night I got drunk on red wine and somehow got involved in a disagreement with an English couple in a restaurant. The following day your mother was furious with me, though she tried her best to hide it. We walked around Paris hardly saying a word, trying to find the Hotel Des Beaux Arts, where Oscar Wilde died. We never did. It was a hot, exhausting afternoon and we kept getting lost in the narrow, serpentine streets around Montmartre. We were on a tight budget and everything was so astoundingly expensive; for some reason I still remember being maddened by the price of two small glasses of orange juice. Later in the evening we had an argument because she wanted an early night and I had booked a meal for us on a bateau-mouche. She said that if I wanted to go that much I should go by myself. I suppose I must have lost my temper. Things were said by both of us that should not have been said. We spent the night of our anniversary not speaking.