This Is Happiness

by Niall Williams

  ‘Ganga, I’m going to walk home.’

  He didn’t say O now, he didn’t ask me if I was sure. He just nodded absently, trying to undo the knot of his brow.

  I walked out the road in the small traffic of departing cars, carts and bicycles, and in the stillness that fell after, at the unmarked shrine of a country boreen, found the only relief by the original method, the saying aloud of another’s name.

  ‘Sophie Troy.’

  30

  But what of Annie Mooney?

  I know, I hear you. Bear with me. It’s a fact that that Sunday I didn’t look for her or think of Christy. I was lost to the breathtaking selfishness of the enamoured. Solitariness is a seedbed for absolutes and by the time I had got back to my grandparents’ I had resolved that the rest of my life would be lived in proximity to the youngest of the Troy sisters.

  Sounds mad when you say it. Seems sane when you feel it.

  That boy is out of reach now to shake him by the shoulders. He would give you the pips, was my mother’s expression. But he and I have come to an accommodation, as Thomas Brennan used say. God bless him.

  With that graven predictability some find comforting, in Faha the sun had already performed the first and oldest transformation it had enacted since the species discovered dry land, that is, it provoked a profound laziness and made man want to curl up in an afternoon sunbeam. Women, being moon-borne, or more endurable, suffered this less. By the second week of Spanish sunshine a practice of unofficial siestas had become established in the parish. Some employed medical arguments, the Fahaean flesh pale, the fireball of the sun fatal, but most simply slipped away into a meadow when they felt their energy stolen and a warm blanket of lethargy come over them. In fields of now parched ground from which the frogs had at last departed, and to the hitherto unknown whisper-music of crisp grass, men slept the impossibly deep sleeps they would remember in old age when summers were no longer sunny and sleep only came in snatches. (There were some of course not sleeping, the primary aphrodisiac of the sun proving irresistible, and sometimes you’d see a man or woman coming up out of the grass adjusting their clothes with a dazed look of shy joy that was outside the prescriptions of the time. That the children that came nine months later started life with a sunnier disposition is a gloss for which there is no statistic, but stands to reason, if reason is your measure of what’s true.)

  I had already found out that to the lure of the siesta Christy was defenceless, and that Sunday afternoon when he had not appeared at the house I went looking for him. I wanted walking anyway. All confines were impossible now. I went back along the road. The natural lassitude of Sundays was multiplied by the weather and the townland felt stunned and sleepy. There was nothing moving, cattle and horses saving energy in distant still-lifes and dogs in flat collapse in the sunburnt centre of the road chasing only in jerking dreams. You could hear the Kellys, by unrefereed dispute playing football in the distance, or, passing a house with a door open, the escaping commentary of a football match on the wireless, but nothing else. In a white shirt with the sleeves rolled and a felt hat rescued from a scarecrow, Martin Moran was standing at a gate looking into his meadow, like a figure in a painting. That he might have been there forever was the feeling you got. I didn’t speak to him. I put him in here so he’s there still, looking into that field which was his measure of contentment, and by virtue of that becomes part of mine here. If you follow.

  By Cleary’s big bog meadow, Ganga’s bicycle was shouldering the ditch. On the upper slope not far in, Christy’s crossed leg rose above the grassline, one bootless foot in the air.

  ‘Was she there?’ I asked him.

  Lying back in the grass he had a rumpled blue defeat about him, like he was thrown there. His suit jacket was under him, his shirt open. But more, his eyes were changed. He hadn’t the same shining. Before, I had thought him filled with impulsive energy, the switched-on optimism of fools or saints, the one that goes straight ahead without hesitancy into the chaos of everyday believing that because it is life it is to be embraced in all its contingency, and because God is watching and not off, say, spinning the rings round Saturn, the worst that can happen will not be so bad. For the most part we don’t realise how fixed are our judgements of others, how founded they are in first impressions and the smallest evidences we seize on to prove to ourselves that, see, we were right. Standing alongside him in Cleary’s, lambent sun-lances in both our chests, I understood that I had been wrong about Christy. I had come to believe his character irrepressible. I had thought of him as a force, with sureness of purpose, but, in doing so, I had robbed him of human dimension. The eyes that met mine were sad, his voice soft, and once it spoke I could hear the hurt disguised in it. He shielded the sun with a held salute.

  ‘Was she at Mass, I didn’t see.’

  He lowered the salute. ‘She wasn’t.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ I was more direct than myself, the condition of my condition unearthing caution and letting loose a livewire. Besides which, in Faha, the stuck plot is intolerable.

  ‘There’s nothing to be done for now but wait.’

  When you’re young, the old can disappoint. I remember that.

  I sat down on the grass next to him. ‘You came here for her. You said so.’

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘To ask her forgiveness.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, then it’s not over until she forgives you.’

  He didn’t have a response.

  ‘You can’t do nothing.’

  ‘I have already done what can be done.’

  ‘No, you haven’t.’

  Christy considered this, or I told myself he did, and while he did I followed up with a speech that embarrassment has dissolved, the gist telling him he shouldn’t, couldn’t, etcetera, because of this, that and the other, talking myself into a state, hot, absolute, adamant, and arriving by force at the thing I hadn’t dared ask: ‘So, why?’

  He was propped on one elbow, the long meadow out before us, birds in a sun-stunned drowse not singing.

  ‘Why did you leave her?’

  He didn’t move, but his eyes, his eyes were impossible to look at. I turned away at once. Another would have left it at that.

  ‘Why didn’t you marry her?’

  I heard the movement of his large body on the grass as he sat up. He was facing down to the river. ‘Some of the things you do when you’re young are unforgivable to you when you’re old,’ he said at last.

  Again, I might have left it there. But I think I already knew there are few moments in life when people can afford to be absolutely truthful, and this was one. ‘She loved you?’

  ‘I think so. Yes, she did.’

  ‘And you loved her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Sometimes neither do I.’

  There are signals we send to say Stop pursuing me, signals to say Leave off there, but if I saw them I ignored them.

  ‘What happened?’ I looked at those deep and blue eyes that I can see now, here, more than half a century away. You’ll find that hard to credit, I know. It’s the truth all the same. And it was not just because of the beaten stillness, the birdless sun-haze, the burnt-off excesses of a Sunday afternoon that reduced the moment to essence, not just because we sat on the side of the gold chalice of that sloping meadow, in an elliptical time, other and alchemical, or because of the overwhelming need I now felt to, for want of a word, fix what was broken, to connect and make live, alive, what was dead, though all of these would in time come to seem part of it, it was mostly that I knew then that I was as close at that moment to another human being as I had been in this life, and that that closeness was in some way part of love.

  The air was turned off. The bee-drone muted. I don’t believe I could breathe.

  Christy looked away from me, broke open the cup of his hands, lowered them. He rocked slightly, rocking on the spike of the question so it went deeper all t
he time. There was suffering in it, I knew that, and was realising that when you’re seventeen the suffering of a man in his sixties can seem monumental, and till that moment you thought soul-torment the territory of the young.

  ‘I was afraid,’ he said at last. His whole face was a wince, wrinkles running off like wires to nowhere, the eyes I couldn’t look at. ‘I was afraid of what I felt. I thought it would swallow me up. It already had. I only wanted to live for her.’

  He offered nothing more, and this time I didn’t press him. There had been no row between him and Annie Mooney, no breakdown, none of the surprises or reveals by which a thing can be explained and wrong behaviour understood. I had wanted to be able to blame someone. I had wanted an incalcitrant father, a possessive mother, a wild and violent argument. I wanted him to have been forced into an impossible situation, to be the victim of circumstance, and realised that on a stage somewhere in my mind, against a backdrop of Kerry mountains and wild rain, I had set an operetta, employed all the time-worn devices of melodrama to obstruct the love that should have been. But that was not what had happened. In this story there was no story. Instead, I had only a sense of ordinary human failure. He had run away. He had left her. He had loved other women, she had fallen in love with another man, and they had lived their lives as though that love had never happened.

  ‘Well, that’s not the end of it,’ I said. ‘That can’t be the end of it.’

  Christy made no reply, and we left it there, the sun laying a glisten ointment over the topic, letting us off to heal over what had been said and remake a version we could live by.

  Later, both of us thrown there in the warm grass in that unlicensed place between sleep and dream, he asked: ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Sophie,’ I said too quiet for him to hear, and then, with the feeling of falling, helpless and wonderful, and with no desire ever to break the fall, ‘Sophie Troy, the doctor’s youngest daughter.’

  In the blue of the sky he studied all I didn’t add. He palmed his beard back against his chin. ‘It’s likely your love is doomed, Noe,’ he said, and then, with the blue glint of a Cyrano smile, added, ‘We must make sure you give it everything you’ve got.’

  Just so, in silence then, another key was turned.

  ‘You will go see her tomorrow,’ he said.

  I invented a braver self and said, ‘I will.’

  We both lay there then, flattened by forlorn desire and the airless press of the afternoon sunshine. And because in our minds we could imagine ourselves knights of first and last loves, and because of the overpowering need for something to be done, I announced, ‘Tonight we are going to hear Junior Crehan.’

  In the upshot, we did go. We followed the recipe for comedy that is two men on one bicycle, starting off with me on the bar, switching to Christy on the bar and sparing my wrists by his operating the handlebars, attempting a third variant with me up front like a giraffe transport sitting on the handlebars, before we accepted defeat and walked the bicycle like an indulged idiot companion, going in and out of numberless public houses with thirsts corporeal and spiritual neither of which could be vanquished, hearing music of matchless skill unpunctuated by pause or applause or the naming of the players but ending up in the dumping ground of all good intentions, not discovering Junior once again, and polluting the adjective unforgettable by living an evening I have otherwise forgotten.

  31

  The time they were doing The Playboy, Mick Madigan of the Faha Players had to be told he was in a comedy. Because of the circumstance and stricture of his own life, Mick always supposed he was in a tragedy, always learning the lines in the evenings after coming in from the farm and taking up the book as he called the script with a high seriousness that was part passed-down reverence for the art of the Greeks, part triumph over the end of his schooling at age twelve, and part pride that he had been given a role. Every play he treated the same. Every year when he came home from the meeting of the Players in October he’d hang up his coat, sit in by the fire, cup his two knees, and, as though it were a birthday surprise, announce: ‘The Master’s given me a part.’ He’d wait until Sheila asked, ‘Has he really?’ and he’d reply, ‘He has,’ and after a time add, ‘An important part too.’ And after another pause, dressed with small sighs: ‘The Master thinks I can do it.’ And Sheila would play her no-less-scripted part by assuring him he could, he could, and he’d counter with ‘There’s a lot of lines in the book this time, Sheila.’ And then Sheila would say couldn’t she help him learn them, and couldn’t they do a bit each night (not noting it was what they did each year, not noting that the climbing of that annual mountain was embedded in their marriage, and that the nights she’d come to see him walk out on the stage, not missing a single performance he ever gave, were garlanded luminous vindication of her decision to say Yes, yes I will, feeling but not noting aloud the perplexed truth that by playing another he became the best version of himself), and then Mick would conclude the contract by saying, ‘I suppose I’ll have to rise to it.’

  ‘You will. You will, Mick.’

  Each year they learned the lines together, Sheila playing all the parts, a paraffin lamp standing in for the footlights, and Dunne their dog doing a passing job in the part of the audience in the hall. Each year, whatever the play or part, Mick Madigan brought to it the gravity of a tragedian. He spoke his lines with the deliberation of a town proclaimer, giving each playwright’s words the weight of scripture and getting full value out of the long hard learning. And each year, Master Quinn, wearing the seven hats of leading man, director, producer, set designer, prop man, painter and prompter, would pull Mick aside and try in vain to get him to lighten. ‘It’s a comedy,’ he’d say, and Mick would answer, ‘O yes,’ and not only look like he’d got it but that it had never been in doubt, and then he’d do the lines again in exactly the same way, fairly certain that he was on the money this time. Each play was rehearsed for six months for the eventual three performances which were sold-out events that made a mockery of the physics of space and Father Tom’s ticket-only policy by the queue that swelled down Church Street and eventually, by an accordion magic, into the hall. The bedlam of the overcrowd was made worse by the fact that Mrs Reidy on the ticket desk, seeing the children sneak in for free, decided, because of the etiquette of theatre, because of a fox stole handed down from a dead aunt in Cork, not to resort to the bum’s rush employed in the Mars cinema in town.

  Each year, playing opposite Mick, on stage and in mid-scene, the Master could be heard directing him with an underbreath ‘Light! Light!’ and each year it would be the same and have the same effect, which is to say none, in time the parish coming not only to expect but want the tragic tone of Mick Madigan, taking a dark joy from the truth of it and the fact that for some the world is without light.

  I saw Mick play maybe three times but have thought of him more than that. I note this here by way of excusing my own character at that age. It took me many years to conceive of life as comedy, or tragicomedy anyway. The part I was playing always seemed grave and earnest. I always felt there was something I must do.

  Which, in roundabout fashion, may explain why, three days later, in some part under the influence of Christy’s directive to give it everything I had, I walked into the village seeking Sophie Troy with the tight lips and high head of Mick Madigan’s torch-bearer.

  I had never seen any of the Troy sisters in the shops. How they got their supplies was enfolded in the mystery of the beautiful. But everyone with a stolen heart sometime finds themselves leaning on a thin rail of chance and maybes. Maybe I would be lucky, maybe the very moment I would walk past a shop Sophie would step out the door. Why not? The world keeps spinning its raffle-bin. Why not me?

  Sun-smote, the village was deserted. I had forgotten about the half-day. I went past the shut shops and the church and the net curtain of Mona Ryan wearing a disguised look of purpose. Past Pender’s and Moran’s and Dohan’s and the creamery with its dried puddles of dung yoghurt. The i
mportant thing was not to look like what I looked like. But sometimes, by a treaty between body and mind, your feet have a way of bringing you where you need to go, and soon enough I was at the rusted gates of Avalon.

  There was a gravelled avenue, worn in twin ruts, a ribbon of grass in the centre. It went like a tossed hat gaily up and off to the right towards where the house itself could not be seen. Just inside the gates the looming arms of the parish’s most ancient and only surviving sycamore trees, not yet uprooted and sent sideways by the storms that would be unmatched until the millennium, not yet sawn down and cut up and sold off after the last Troy was gone and Bourke’s son bought the house for the ground with the dream of building a second Faha there. So, overhead me that afternoon the tender and unreal too-green green of first leaves wondering where the rain had gone and for how long the old tree could keep bringing water up from roots that went further back than Parnell. I stood in the sweat-skin of my white shirt by the gates, pushed the damp quiff of my hair around, then decided that I should stand across the road a bit, as though torch-bearing over there would be perfectly normal and not at all like I was stalking that entranceway for an unlicensed glance at Beauty.

  There was not the slightest breeze. Even across from the gates the trees threw thin unmoving lattices of light and shade and there was shadow-dapple cool and birdsong and the steady thrumming that is the air-engine of May. I tramped up and down with big Mick Madigan steps, as it seemed the part demanded. What I thought would happen if Sophie appeared, I am not sure. I am not sure if I thought it not only unlikely but impossible that she would, because imagination had only got me this far.

  The vigil was an act of love. That was the thing. I had told Christy he could not do nothing and by the same sweet contagion nor could I. Well, this was not nothing. The something it was though was ill-defined. I would wait there, a sentry to Beauty, and wait until Sophie came or went, and I would see her pass. That was the full of it. That would be enough, and enough for her too to know that I was her servant. That was in the thinking of it. I would stay there all the rest of that day and afternoon and be there until dark if that’s what it took. I was resolved on that, my vigil a thing naked and true that did not end when Doctor Troy’s Hillman Hunter came flying along the western road, driven with the loose steering of a man whose mind was elsewhere, shooting in the gateway of Avalon but not before he had turned his hatted head sideways and clocked me with a look in which was translated his experience of every kind of human folly, a look which read instantly the nature of my vigil and in which there was not a little salt of derision.