This Is Happiness

by Niall Williams

  But in all parishes stories have their own legs. Though telecommunications were still in their infancy, their invention already seemed redundant, because often when we stepped on to a flagged threshold I had the sense the story had got there before us. It was in the tremulous pulse of a curtain as we leaned the bicycles, and in the curious look of the wife or eldest daughter drying their hands on a teacloth and coming from the shadows inside with a So, this is the man in their eyes.

  Christy met all with the same geniality and warmth. He showed no awareness of my coolness and introduced me with ‘You know this man.’ To which the reply was often: ‘I knew his father, and his grandfather.’ By which method, simple and old as nature, I was stitched into the fabric of Faha. Though we sometimes met with a trio of the dogged, the bull-headed, and the out-and-out mulish, Christy took none of it personally. He adopted the native policy of avoiding confrontation, and most times when people spoke against the electricity he listened, nodded, noted, and said we’d call again.

  Because the machine of State forgets that it was built by people, poles were being erected in fields where permission had not yet been granted, and there were disputes, work held up, and the memorial called for. The document had no legal status, but because they were so rarely given – birth, marriage and death certificates accounting for the threefold circle of life – most people were persuaded by the authority of their own signatures. In Cregg’s the hole had to be filled back in because Sam said he hadn’t given permission. The crew shovelled it in like a grave, then stood by as Christy showed the form. Sam studied the unfamiliarity of his own autograph, the inked validation of himself in fiercely concentrated, upright primary-school penmanship that I imagine recalled in him the hardship of learning handwriting, his mother rapping his knuckles with a rule and forbidding him the freedom to play outside until his name was wrote right. Sam studied, swallowed the pride of that childhood victory. He said something but spoke with the mumble in-speak of a people who never believed they were heard, and Christy had to ask him again, and this time he nodded, and the boys unburied the hole again.

  In my grandparents’ house, perhaps because the rearing of twelve contrary children had taught them to live by swallowing the stomach acid of first reaction, the news of what was now a dawn opera had settled without disturbing the status quo. But in Doady there was a fresh proof of the universal truth that a man becomes more interesting to a woman once he is shown to have a heart. A reply to her letter about the singing episode had already come from Kerry, in it the triumphant results of a cross-mountain multi-parished rútáil, a rooting operation of detection, a Do you remember a story about a wedding that wasn’t? and a Was she a cousin to Peggy Taafe? and a Do you know who’d know that now? as a Sneem-ish intelligentsia had unearthed the bones of the drama from under the stones of fifty years. And now that Doady had the whole tale up to that point, she relished the rarity of Clare trumping Kerry for once, having the hero under her own roof, and being uniquely positioned to tell them across the river what happened next. She said nothing to Christy, of course, but when we had tea at the table in the garden, the moons of her glasses kept him in scrutiny, as if for the next episode.

  Since Christy had told me, I had failed several times to put aside the idea of him leaving Annie Mooney at the altar. A story grows in the gaps where the facts fall short. And maybe, in extravagant weather, grows faster. Maybe, the way people in Faha believe warm weather a breeding ground for germs, why the Digger Dunne put his pneumonic grandfather outside in his nightshirt in the frozen December of 1950, maybe the sun had something to do with how large the story grew in my mind.

  I knew of only one instance to compare it to, and in the quiet of the hills and hollows as we walked or cycled or sat outside evenings playing cards in incredible weather, I tried to recall what I could of Miss Havisham.

  At that time you read Great Expectations in school, and if it landed larger than your own life in the white rooms of your imagination, if it haunted your days, made you fear Magwitch, pity Pip and love and hate and love Estella until your heart was wrung and your own world less real than the one in the pages, your teachers didn’t care, as long as you could summarise last night’s chapter and pass the window-hawed time of Friday afternoon by reading out loud from wherever the boy before you had finished murdering Dickens. That in some schoolrooms Dickens survived was a miracle that endured a hundred years after his death, until the Minister, bound on a course of improving things for the worse, cut the throat of him in favour of more contemporary texts.

  I was thinking of Miss Havisham. In my mind I could hear the creak of the gate of Satis House, see the weeds of the yard and Pip’s candlelit ascent up the dark stairs behind Estella, I could see his rough boots, see the cards in his hand when he played with Estella and called the Knaves Jacks – the same as I did – but I could not quite picture Miss Havisham’s face. It vanished behind a pale mantilla of cobwebs and shadows. It was the idea of her more than the image that had seized me, that she had been left at the altar, and that on that day her heart had broken, time had stopped, and she had survived in a grotesque between worlds, transitioning to a caustic powder.

  Because this was my only reference, because when I read it the story imprinted itself in a way that would last a lifetime, and because we want to believe the world goes how we imagine, I supposed Annie Mooney’s life must also have been devastated by being left at the altar. The person she recalled now was Mrs Blackall, and at once I thought I understood why Christy had been so affected by her and why we had done her whitewash.

  Annie Mooney had fled from the eyes of Sneem after the failed wedding, how could she have stayed? No, she had abandoned her wedding dress on the bed – her sister Dympna wore it two years later in the renovated church of St Patrick’s at Tahilla Bridge, Doady reported, where the twenty-seven windows caught the other-worldly splendour of the west Kerry light and let love seem burnished and by God bespoke – Annie left in the night and came like all of Kerry to Killarney and was working chambermaid in the wood-and-pipesmoke of the Lake Hotel when Gaffney the chemist found her. He was eighteen years older than her. She could not love him the way she had Christy. That human beings loved truly only once was an unwritten tenet when the world was young, an idea fostered by the Church, supported by the coming knowledge of heart trauma, and by the bookstall of Spellissey’s where all the second-hand paperbacks told of First Loves. Second loves had small l’s, they existed, but were in the lexicon of male weakness where woman’s bottoms were buttresses against loneliness and the emptiness of men’s stomachs made fine words come out their mouths. For women, second loves were accommodations of convenience, not great passions like the ones in the picture houses. So, first off, I had Annie Mooney reject Arnold Gaffney’s proposal. She had said goodbye to all that. She thanked him for his attentions, but no thank you, and he blinked at the beauty of her and stood in his black suit, slack at the knees because he always hoped to be taller than he was, and because in Todd’s in Limerick Mr Mason hid the inch-mark on the tape and tilted the mirror to show his customer a taller version of himself. Arnold had no experience in courtship. He had put it aside in the dry years of study in Dublin, and it had put him aside after that. But he was fascinated by reactions, by the working of one chemical on another, and knew that in many cases nothing happened until a catalyst was added. He left Killarney, not with dejection, but with the clear brow of a scientist who knows the experiment is ongoing, that somewhere out there, X always exists, and in the time of Y eventually the catalyst will be found.

  Then, Doady said, he had a share in a chemist shop in County Limerick which was flooded five years out of six and where all around them were dropping like flies with a watery flu. They had a doctor there, a Cleavy quack from a duck pond in Cork, Doady said, using a Kerry pronunciation to let that speak for itself. So, Arnold Gaffney had a fair battle on his hands. But he was a diligent chemist and eventually the waters and the flu retreated, and in reprieve then, in a time-h
onoured tradition old as the Kerry invention of tourism in the tenth century, to recoup his spirit he came to the waters of Killarney.

  He had a touch of the rose, Doady said, across the uppers of his cheeks. But more importantly, although he didn’t know it, his expression carried a new understanding of the frailty of the human constitution and the brevity of life.

  It also carried the first instalment of a philosophy of luck. Arnold still hadn’t found the catalyst, but he found his feet walking across the creaking twelve-inch floorboards of the lobby of the Lake Hotel, which were only just drying out with the roaring fires necessitated by the reopening and living inside a waterfall. He came to the reception desk, was given the key to Room 7, and when Arthur the big-eared porter bore his case up the stairs, at the turning Arnold Gaffney passed Annie Mooney with her bucket on her way down, and he said, ‘Hello, Miss Mooney,’ and nothing more, touching the black rim of his too-big hat, flushing rose, blinking his too-weak eyes and looking at her with a look that told her she was as wonderful as he remembered.

  And something in her surrendered then, I decided. Right there on the turning of the stairs, between Arthur putting down the case and picking it up again, pushing back his ears to resume his ten-thousandth ascent, something in her saw the recent life experience in the chemist and that it was an experience of grief or failure or both, and she knew that if he asked again she wouldn’t say no.

  The wedding was in a small church north of Killarney. Her mother and father came in a horse and cart with her two sisters, all of them wrapped in blankets saturate with rain, the length of the liquid journey giving them a drowned look and making loud the squeak of their shoes in the small congregation. By an impulse both characteristic and contrary, Annie Mooney had chosen to walk to the church in the rain. By the time she took her father’s arm for the second time at the church door, the ivory of her dress was silvered and her hair pearled.

  Like most people, Arnold had found Faha by accident. He was a Sunday motorist. Motoring for pleasure was still a novelty then, the roads were rough but empty and for a scientist carried the fascination of the undiscovered and a mechanised victory over the drawn limits of human distance. Besides which, Arnold was taller and younger in a car, and a drive in the country was discovered the perfect means to conquer the deflated time of Sunday afternoons. Being in motion, it turned out, up to forty miles an hour say, resolved the feeling of emptiness, and for the duration of the journey salved the spirit-wound that they seemed unable to have children.

  One wet June day, he came west with his young wife in a black Ford, wipers spasming over and back in what Arnold, God love him, thought a temporary shower, roads unspooling through mad green growth, motoring along grand until the engine overheated and he turned off the main road, came down by Commodore’s Cross and Cotter’s, pulled over by the forge and dashed through the rain in to Tommy to ask for water.

  And because he was given it, and because Tommy’s wife was a saint called Mary who insisted on them coming in for the catalyst of a mug of tea and a cut of boiled cake while the car settled itself, Arnold fell in love again, this time with Faha. Without it ever clarifying itself in the front of his mind, without recourse to considerations of commerce or weighing the reasons for and against, but maybe following the deeper rationale of unreason that rain would always remind him of his wedding, in his case rain and love being inextricable, he finished his tea, looked out at the gleamy water rivering down the crooked smile of Church Street, and thought: We can do good here.

  23

  I didn’t of course know, or even imagine, all of this yet. But I would eventually. From the distance of half a century it’s impossible to remember which bits came from which sources, and in which order, and I’m not alone I suppose in sometimes thinking a thing I’ve imagined happened. I may be alone in thinking that doesn’t matter.

  Through a combination of conjecture, Dickens and details that leaked sideways out of my grandmother, I had my version. Now, with the flawless clarity with which we see stories of our own construction, I saw Mrs Gaffney again at Easter Sunday Mass, reinterpreted the dignity of her bearing, and found myself moved by an imagined life.

  I say this to explain to myself what happened next.

  In the way one person can fall inside the spell of another, I was attached to Christy. In the immediate aftermath of the street singing, I expected consequence, not to say calamity. That’s how these things worked, this happened, and so then this. But not in Faha, where a deeper truth of human behaviour prevailed, and in the same way that nobody mentioned what all knew, that I had been earmarked for a priest, the singing story slipped behind the eyes of everyone and, once more, Faha resumed its natural torpor. Without jeopardy you could have erected an arch over the entrance to the village with the irrefutable declaration: Nothing happens here.

  But a dangling thread is intolerable, who knows why exactly. Through the next few days Christy and I went about the townlands with the memorial as before. Evenings he swam in the river and after we played cards in the garden with the wireless playing a scratchy music out the door, or we took the bicycles and resumed our liquid quest to hear Junior Crehan. At no point did Christy announce the next stage of his plan, an intermission I found unbearable. Then, because you can’t easily escape a religion of resurrection and redemption, I decided I had to go and see Annie Mooney for myself.

  After the death of Arnold Gaffney, it was soon realised what a wonderful service he had provided, and the foibles of his person, his slow scrupulous attention to the details of prescription, taking down a volume from the backroom and reading up about the effects of a medicine, both frontal and side, while his customer stood waiting or was sat in the red leatherette chair, Just let me have it, will you, Mr Gaffney? his un-Fahaean exactitude, his Limerick-ness, his religious maintaining of the half-day Wednesday, the compensatory use of a French cologne he sold, every curse, criticism and complaint was washed away the flood day of his funeral.

  Faha woke up the next day to a Closed sign hanging on the door and the awareness that the nearest pharmacy was miles away, a fact that soon proved Mrs Moran’s theorem: the further you live from a doctor the sicker you feel. Not only did the chemist’s operate in conjunction with Doctor Troy’s practice, perhaps more tellingly it provided a veterinary service to farmers who knew what their animals needed, and, because of a crossed wire in their make-up, could be dying of four illnesses but still be in Gaffney’s looking for something for a cow, calf or greyhound.

  A week after the funeral the Closed sign hadn’t turned and Faha began to fear for its welfare. As was customary, the parish sent word to the priest, through the emissary of Master Quinn, and the parish priest passed the ball to his curate. Father Coffey was in a vexed state at the time, by night writing long letters to the Bishop in which he vented all his outrage at what was wrong with the Church, then tearing the letters into minute pieces and posting them into the vegetable waste of the hens’ feed. So, with the need to achieve an actual result, he approached Mrs Gaffney the evening of the Month’s Mind, pinched the creases of his black trousers to sit in her small parlour, talk around the thing at hand and wait for the tea that was not forthcoming. Mrs Gaffney defied convention by being direct. ‘What do you want, Father?’

  ‘Oh, it’s not what I want,’ he said. ‘It’s the poor parish.’

  He let that do the talking, I’m guessing. He let the sick of the whole parish rush in and sit some moments, the phlegmy, the fevered, the dry- and the wet-coughing, the asthmatic, the chronically bronchial, sufferers with chests caught in a mazy syrup of catarrh, all kinds, chilblains, all kinds, stalled circulation, all kinds, and the infinity of other ailments that came from living inside a cloud. Father Coffey let the damp grey mass of them take up all the air in the parlour until he supposed that point was made and he waved a vague hand to vanish them, leaned forward, shining his earnest eyes to ask, ‘Were you thinking of advertising for a chemist, at all?’ And before Mrs Gaffney could answer, he
slid in with, ‘Wouldn’t it be a way to carry on your husband’s spirit?’

  When he left later that night Father Coffey’s eyes were shining some more, because although he had caught a headcold he had secured the welfare of the parish in the handwritten wording of an advertisement for the Champion.

  The ad appeared in the paper the following Thursday and gave Faha the swell of pride that used come from seeing your own place in print. There was a full two weeks to lord it over Boola, before the news spread that no chemist had applied and the Boolaeans made a crowing dance out of that, before they too started to feel the pinch and a sad truth was revealed: human beings care first about themselves. In any case, the news was not technically true. There was one applicant who had travelled all the way from the unlikelihood of Longford, a gingernut by the name of Spriggs with green eyes and corkscrew body. He had leanings towards the imaginative, and a philosophy of intuiting the patient’s ailment, receiving the prescription from the greater universe by shutting the emerald eyes and holding out his hands to the shelves like a blind man to ‘see’ what the patient required, a philosophy that made its way to the church gates on Sunday where it translated into the Fahaean shorthand: There’s all kinds.

  Spriggs did have the soft white hands of a chemist, but in the upshot was found wanting in manner, knowledge and qualifications, and Mrs Gaffney said she’d be sure to let him know.

  The parish had no chemist for the first time in thirty years, and, like Mikey Boucher when Doctor Troy told him his pistol wasn’t working, the flag was lowered.

  Eventually, as with all things in Faha, a homegrown solution was found. Following a further visit from Father Coffey, Mrs Gaffney agreed to reopen the shop herself. There was the clear understanding that it was only temporary, while awaiting a qualified pharmacist. But in all western parishes the temporary was unhinged from the temporal by the fact that it was the term used by Government to account for the short-term, slapdash, second- and third-rate solutions that were applied to bad roads, school buildings, hospitals, and the like. The people lived in the permanently temporary. They were facilitated in this by both the ferocity of the Atlantic and the teachings of the Church, both of which taught the same lesson: You’re only here for a time. In any case, as I’ve said, time itself was an unstable entity in Faha, Prendergasts in the post office the only ones who set their clock by the pips on the wireless.