This Is Happiness

by Niall Williams

  These laws Moylan forgot to mention. When he had finished extolling, when he was certain his audience was in his hand and like a sugared air could sense the desire of everyone there, he paused. He swept back the magnificent hair, eyes dark and glazed as Pilkington’s glasshouse grapes. He turned the toe of one of the two-tones over and back and looked down at it as though recalling or anticipating a dance and then he clapped his big hands together.

  ‘Well. I don’t need to tell intelligent people like you, do I?’

  Now this was a risky play. Matthew Poole, you may recall, was the lad who was often to be discovered having a bit of a laugh to himself. Well, in Faha the thing most often said about Matthew was that he was fierce intelligent, the word fierce used dexterously so that it worked two ways at once, was understood to be wonderful and terrible, intelligence in its ferocity a gift and a burden, something difficult to handle and extraordinarily sharp, like a sword in the soft tissue of the mind. In general, better not to be too intelligent, was Faha’s philosophy, and though then I considered this backward, soon enough I came to understand the wisdom and recognise we are not all mind.

  Bat was on the point of answering the rhetorical, but Moylan cut him off with his follow-through: ‘The hardship of your lives is over.’

  It was a breathtaking sentence and the summit took a moment to take it in. From my place on the back step I glanced at them. The idea was too enormous, or the reality of experience too sharp to be digested. It was as if the hardship of their lives had been summoned, had come in the open front door, a history of cold and rain, of muck and puddle, dark, disappointment and struggle and disappointment again, and was face-to-face now with an army of gleaming white metal. As always when confronted with compelling fantasy, nobody knew what to say.

  ‘If only Napoleon had invaded,’ Bat said under his breath and shook his head.

  Moylan drove on to the final curtain by delivering the news that any of the machines there could be purchased. ‘You could own one of anything right now,’ he said. ‘One of everything, why not?’ He smiled his winning smile at Doady. ‘Beautiful cooker like that look well in a lovely homely home like yours, Missus. I can see it over there. A nice toaster on the table there for your morning toast. No more lighting the fire, waiting for the flames, and sticking your bread into the smoke. No more smoky toast,’ he said, unaware that no one in Faha ate toast and that smoky was not a term of denigration.

  Doady blinked at him but didn’t smile. She may have been engaged in an act of the imagination, trying to picture the totems of the modern in a room with crooked floor and walls, a twelve-foot hearth with fire on the floor and sunlight coming down a stone chimney wide enough for Ganga to climb up and out the top one year winning a Stygian dare with Bat about flue masonry or passing through purgatory. Like others there, I think my grandmother may have been chastened by a feeling the machines were looking at her, and her life, with cold judgement. I couldn’t help thinking of that moment when Pip looks at his boots and realises how crude they are. My wrists stung. In defence of my grandparents I felt a flare of outrage and wanted Moylan and his machines gone.

  Then, as the audience deflated, as the gas of the performance bled away, and people were being stitched back into the straitening of their circumstances, where the cost of purchasing anything was prohibitive, Moylan opened his arms like Christ in the picture above the window and delivered the coup de grâce. ‘Any machine you see here, you can buy, on tick.’

  Tick. It was the jump of a clock, and a ransom note from the future. Instantly, I had a grey uneasy feeling, knowing that hardship could not be overpowered by a three-pin plug and the future was not free. I think I understood too that I was living in the vestige of a world whose threads were all the time blowing away, and some blew away right then on that tick.

  The summit ended, the women went for the hills of rough sandwiches and the boiled cake, which was adjudged Just beautiful, and Moylan circulated with a form on a clipboard. O Keefe stood up and hit his handkerchiefed head off the underside of the Captain’s Ladder, grinned at the familiarity of misfortune, as if it was God who was all the time knocking his head, as if it was twisted affection, and then he and Bat went out to the gable to make their water.

  29

  Sophie Troy.

  A name is a thing of immense power, the saying of it both a summoning and summing up, so that standing on an empty road and sounding it is a kind of conjuring, or was in my case. It seems there were some days then when I did little else. I went out of the house and walked, my bound wrists smarting, the sun glancing off my forehead while I thought of Sophie Troy and spoke her name and took from it a kind of consolation which lessened loneliness. In a twist of fate preserved for lovers, loneliness was more profound now, as well as darkly delicious.

  Now, I am aware it may seem far-fetched that any emotion, never mind love, could be built on so slight an acquaintance. To which the answer is yes, yes it was, and absurd too, in the way life often is. I am aware too of the dangers of using the word love here, but I am trying to be true to who I was and what I felt, to see that grave and angular youth who had come from the seminary with no map for living, allow him his own blunders, and forgive him for them, which may be the point of old age.

  As will be clear, I was an amateur in this, and to me fell the amateur’s lot of making every available mistake. I suppose I knew that the word most associated with romantics is hopeless, and that the end for the ardent is disillusion, but what I was feeling I couldn’t deny or banish. I said her name, and, like the first man to eat the egg of a bird, felt a little ascension, and like him wouldn’t have been surprised to find feathers at my back.

  Only one thing was certain: I had to see her again.

  To be clear, in the risen and white-linen state I was in, that was all I wanted, just to see her walk past. Conversation, company, the touch of her hand, these were not even on the edge of hope. The truth, as I knew it, was that I did not harbour the slightest aspiration to be her lover. That was an obvious impossibility. In the context of Sophie Troy, the word boyfriend was somehow abhorrent. What I wanted was to be her Lover. I don’t know if I can convey this state of mind exactly. I don’t know if notions of worthiness and unworthiness remain in the world or are gone the way of knights, and the Church, but honestly, it was enough to be in the world that she was in. Just to see her again would be enough.

  Sophie Troy.

  On Sunday I decided to follow the Fahaean way by which men were licensed to be in the company of women, and go to Mass. I washed in the basin and fought with my hair. I had dull, forgettable hair that for some reason I couldn’t forget. I thought my quiff should fall just so in a combed curve across my forehead. Generally, I considered myself if not exactly ugly certainly somewhere below plain (and plainer now since I had seen Beauty) but if I got the curve of my hair right it would render me tolerable. Of course, I could never get it right. (Here’s a grandfather’s laugh: I would live another thirty years before baldness took away the hair to show me what had been staring me in the face: the hair was forgettable, the forehead spectacular.)

  I was upstairs in the bedroom finger-combing the C into place for the fourteenth time when Christy noted it and smiled. ‘Well?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’

  He invited me to tell him what was happening by a look.

  ‘What?’

  Now, I didn’t draw the corollary then that the failure of his fifty-year love had provoked the birth of mine. I didn’t realise any connection, didn’t admit the vanity of all lovers, that I was imagining myself a flagbearer, that mine would be different to any that went before, and where he had failed I would not.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing at all,’ he said, offering a comb from his jacket. ‘Never aim for perfection,’ he advised. ‘We are human.’

  I went to Mass with Doady and Ganga on the horse and car, my grandmother tight and erect and behind her glasses individually thanking her saints that my crisis of
faith had passed and I had refound religion. Christy took the bicycle and travelled at one-horse speed just behind us like a wavering escort.

  St Cecelia’s was hotter than a church in Tennessee. Day after day the air inside it baked. There were hooks for opening the high stained-glass windows, but no pole long enough to reach them. Life in Faha fostered the skill of getting round most things, and in the pews mimeographed copies of the Bishop’s latest Pastoral Letter were employed as ecclesiastical fans, and on the altar, when not ringing the bells or attending at the Consecration, two of the Kellys tried to cool the empurpled face of Father Coffey with slow-motion palms, as though he were the King of Siam. The church was packed, numbers swollen by the addition of some of the electricity men lodging in the parish, who, by the twin merits of being foreign – from outside of west Clare – and working with conductive cables, added a live charge among the females, some of whom I believe later found earthing there.

  The scent of the Easter lilies had outlived them and, as was apt, risen to the rafters, from which every so often a dove-like remnant floated down with a white memory of Resurrection. For once, overcoming the native fear of a chill, the three sets of doors were left open and, by virtue of self-diagnosed blood pressure, vertigo and fainting spells, some of the congregation took medical dispensation to stand outside in the shade where, in the absence of electric amplification, Tom Joyce did loud-whisper duty relaying the Confiteor, Kyrie, Sanctus and the rest, so the sacrament was both inside and outside.

  It was the Feast of the Divine Mercy.

  Though I scrutinised the pews from the poor vantage of where Doady parked us next to the Cotters, though eventually I made out the silver spines of the doctor’s hair and the green pill of Ronnie’s jacket next to him, it wasn’t until Communion that I saw Sophie. The skill of looking while not wanting to be seen looking is in Ovid’s manual of lovers, I suppose. I didn’t have it. She stepped out along the pew and I fairly jumped forward. At least everything inside me did. Boom, just like that. It’s a thing that can’t be told rightly, because in the turbulence of life we have to cling to the notion that human behaviour is governed by reason, but when you feel a force like this, a thing that just picks you up and throws you over here, takes the whole of your intelligence, judgement and logic, balls it up and says none of that matters right now because, despite the voice, loud enough too, saying this is impossible and don’t be an idiot, despite all wise and winning arguments to the contrary, you’ve already jumped the barricades of propriety and embarrassment and ceded to something compelling which can be nothing more than mystery, and the mystery of another, and the next moment you’re pushing out past all the doe-eyed Cotters who are on their knees in the devout last stages of the Prayer Before Communion, and you’re brushing aside like a thin filament the iron commandment laid down in you since you were seven that you never, never take Communion if you haven’t first gone to Confession, and now you’re thinking It’s true, mercy is divine because you’re in the line of communicants shuffling slowly forward in a red-stained sun-lanced aisle eight back from Sophie Troy.

  Martin Hanway, Mary Hanway, Mickey Riordan, Jack Mannion, Mrs Mannion, Pat Greaney, Mrs Jo Greaney, and the blue-and-orange-feathered Caribbean that was the hat of Mrs Sexton, all obscured me from seeing her. We inched forward.

  At that time, people in line for Communion bowed their heads and prayer-palmed their hands. Aware of approaching the consecrated, they didn’t look about them, and landed at the rails with a bare and absolute vulnerability, the crucifix hanging overhead. I did neither. Light with an outlaw emotion, I kept my head up, my wrists stung if I pressed my palms.

  Father Coffey had yet to make his first attempt to implement traffic regulation on approach to the rails in St Cecelia’s, Father Tom’s free-for-all still held the day, so people came up and down both sides at the same time, with jostle and press, as though the idea of a queue had not yet been invented or was dissolved under the imperative to receive. Just so then, stepping into the crowded two-way, three-way middle of the aisle to make room for a troop of Twomeys, I looked ahead and saw the gold of her hair.

  I might have pushed then. I might have cheated the line and, sanctioned by my injured hands, the holiness of the heart’s affections, and a primal urgency, slipped ahead of the Greaneys and the Mannions and the feathered Caribbean, because now I was at the rails where, a little further along to the right, the three Troy sisters were kneeling and waiting, God forgive me, to put out their tongues.

  The candles took on a shimmering intensity and made the air before the altar dance. I could feel the heat of them on my face, breathe the honeyed scent of the sanctified beeswax, and the cloying afterlife of the frankincense, all of which combined by canon strategy to confirm that when you approached the rails of the sanctuary you had left the world proper, you were no longer in the place of daily life.

  The Troy sisters received and rose and turned back into the fold of communicants. I might have got off my knees and followed them. Fixity and rashness, you see. But now Father Coffey was paused before me with the ciborium.

  A braver man than me might have said Sorry, Father, I no longer believe, might have said I’d like to, I want to, but it’s gone, I have lost it, might have confessed out loud right there at the frontier of the divine that My soul has been taken by a new religion and accepted the consternation not to say apoplexy that would ensue. But all that I managed was not to close my eyes or put out my tongue. By reflex Father Coffey dipped to choose a host and had it between thumb and forefinger before he noticed. He looked at me but still I didn’t shut my eyes or stick out my tongue.

  There was a held moment. In it was a kind of suffering.

  Next to me, like a Communion clockwork, Geraldine O had already closed her eyes, tilted back her head to receive. I think I probably wished I could do the same, and by all reason should have. It was a small thing, and an enormous one. In the instants in which I was paused there, and they were only instants, my mouth dry, my forehead blistering a cold sweat, there was nothing apparent of a private agony or crisis of spirit, nothing but for what trafficked between my eyes and the priest’s. And then Father Coffey, glazed and ruddy from the heat and his Wilkinson blade, gave the lie to his youth and inexperience and transcended the rigidity of the Church by doing the most remarkable thing. Understanding that I would not open my mouth, the host he had chosen for me he brought towards my closed lips and, when it was near enough to touch, in a fluid arc, as if nearness was enough, he brought it back and laid it in the ciborium and moved on to Geraldine O. So simple, graced and generous a gesture was it that not a single person in St Cecelia’s noticed. It was as though by mime I had received.

  Returning, I didn’t slide into my place the far side of the Cotters but sat instead on the outer edge of the pew and let them in past me. There were precedents, after Communion frequently a muted Musical Chairs where people landed back in the pews in reshuffled order. No one objected, smallness of mind the first casualty of Communion. I wanted to stay where I could be seen. I thought that perhaps when the doctor and his daughters passed on the way out he might stop and ask after me or tell me to come for a check-up to the surgery, and Sophie would be by his side. I pushed into place the fall of my hair. Soon enough Father Coffey brought the Mass to an end and under the solemn intonation of the Latin the congregation did a synchronised blessing, or the Faha version. Then the church rose as one, or Faha’s version. I watched for the Troys, but the doctor had the besieged air of the General Practitioner who, because of the ubiquity of human ailment, knew every person there had something they’d like to have just a quick word with him about, and he led his daughters quickly out the door and was away in the car before Father Coffey was free of the embroidered weight of his vestments.

  In passing, Ronnie, I think, did look briefly in my direction, but it was a look I couldn’t translate.

  We came out into the day that was always different after Mass. From the intercession of her saints, I think,
Doady was light in herself and looked at me with the prodigal beaming reserved for one come back into the fold. She had to go to Clohessy’s for the few messages. A sliced pan was something not yet in demand in Faha. Throughout the parish, women, and in fairness some men, baked their own bread, but an unforeseen consequence of Moylan’s performance had been to make my grandmother realise she lived in a fossilised cave. When the machines were taken away on the handcart and her kitchen returned to its former self the room seemed lesser and could not easily recover what seemed to have been silently robbed. Moylan’s pitch, his evangelist’s conviction and rhetoric had their own afterlife, made Doady look askance at her life and circumstance and release a host of hooped taupe mealworms into her belief in the pre-eminence of the home-made. She was not alone in this, a flaw in our nature makes the glamour of the new irresistible. At the summit, several of the neighbours had signed up to buy machines they couldn’t use, or pay for, but whose value was already felt as the ouster of the antiquated, the inviolable authority of clean-line engineering and the airy promise that the days of hardship were numbered.

  ‘When we have the electric we can have toast when we get home,’ Doady said, a non-sequitur that had a sequitur in her look at Ganga. He smiled haplessly and let her off and stood a little after on the open slope of where the church gates were supposed to hang if only the committee could agree on a smith and the ground made to stop sinking. The Closed was hanging in the door of the chemist’s across the way. Christy was nowhere.