This Is Happiness

by Niall Williams

  The night fell and the bats came out and Doady started a rosary at a low volume the Virgin Mary wouldn’t mind just this once. At Ganga’s feet, Joe sometime snortled, part-sniff part-chortle, in the deep dreams of dogs, but otherwise there was no sound.

  As I think I’ve said, at that time, telephone calls were short, so we kept expecting this one to end. The fact that it didn’t already signalled the monumental. The rosary came and went. There was a litany in backup if need be. Doady took up the knitting and knitted some more in the dark, and, with the limits of the board blurred, Ganga kept moving the kings, one-time seeing a huff that didn’t exist and another jumping his own piece and declaring victory until he remembered he was white.

  When at last Christy hung up and emerged out the front door, he had the unshelled shyness of all who’ve encountered the naked heart. He had no idea what to say but needn’t have worried because the old people had lived long enough to know how to circumvent embarrassment.

  ‘My bed is calling,’ Doady said, pressing down on her knees to alert them she was going to stand up after such a long sitting. She threw a hook of a look at Ganga. He was familiar with it and rubbed a quick rub on the back of his neck and stood, acknowledging the genius of Christy’s game by telling him, even in absentia, ‘You won.’

  ‘I think I’ll walk a while,’ Christy said.

  He went across the yard and out the gate that couldn’t close and down the road in the direction of Considine’s, what of his way he could see, hard to say, because there was no moon and he took no lamp, the red tip of his cigarette the only beacon.

  When I called to Annie the next day she showed herself a follower of the Fahaean way by saying nothing about what was uppermost. There was no noticeable change in her well-being, by which I mean none I noticed. I knew she knew that I knew, and so on, but we put that knowledge back on the tree and made like the innocent. She was still in the throes of her tidying up and clearing out, and that occupied her until exhaustion came and she had to sit in an armchair. She fell asleep the way children do, as though a switch had been thrown. But she woke the way the old do, with a start, and the momentary puzzlement that she had been taken away without her say-so.

  Christy, when he came home in the early evening, kept their lovers’ pact of saying nothing. And when the telephone rang that evening he got up ahead of Doady and went to answer it and Ganga chose a soft hopeful ‘O now!’ from his compendium and let that stand in for all commentary.

  This time he didn’t have to say This is Christy and she didn’t have to say I don’t want to talk about myself because he already knew the way ahead, which was the way of the storyteller, and, as though all day he had kept his finger in the pages, he was able to resume where he had left off when the previous night she had interrupted his account of himself by the elder’s admission I think I fell asleep for a bit there.

  He spoke the same way he had the night before, with his head bent and the words crossing his heart. Here, now, in Annie Mooney, he found the audience I had failed to be for him. Through the shrewdness of age or lover’s inspiration, he had already surmised that the way to prolong their reconnection was to invest the telling with vivid details, some of which, when he went to reach for them in memory, were not there, and he had to resort to a politician’s ploy of inventing the truth on the spot. As though under the influence of our cycling sojourns along corkscrew bends and crooked boreens, he let the story go down side roads, diversions of no fixed purpose other than the contrary one of going a different way, and soon found he could talk for half an hour and be only a half an hour further along the tale of his life.

  Sometimes, by resorting to tricks of flashback, he could end up before where he started.

  Now, even Shakespeare needed the agent of applause, and his storytelling would have soon foundered if it were not for the small sounds of encouragement that came down the line from Annie. Her breath was at his ear. Christy listened to it and for it and when it held with attentiveness or sighed like a river or when she laughed the involuntary laugh of surprise at the turn the account had taken, these were lifeblood to the teller and on them the tale grew. That night he kept on until he realised she was asleep and he said her name softly Annie? And then a little louder. And, when she didn’t respond, he kept the line open and waited for her nap to pass, listening to the sea’s tide of her breath in soft collapse sighing, and when Mrs Prendergast risked tarnishing the patina of her professionalism by coming on to ask, ‘Is this call completed?’ he said, ‘No, thank you,’ and she clicked off at the other of the three ends, and the click woke Annie and she said, ‘Where were we?’

  After the second call, we knew there would be a third. Human beings, after all, are quite simple, and a pleasure found is a pleasure to be repeated. On the third call, I think it was, Christy made his only misstep, and asked: ‘Will I come there, to tell you in person?’

  Annie’s reply had such breathtaking frankness that it would pass into Faha lore and become a byword for woman’s acuity and clear-headedness in the face of death.

  ‘Let’s not see each other until we are in the next place.’

  By that same third call, in order not to be prisoners in the garden, but still not intrude, Ganga and Doady had improvised a code of behaviour that meant Doady could go to check on the fire, could carry in some of the ware, or go fetch her pipe, doing so with eyes but not ears averted and so catching gimlet phrases, the captain said, ‘There is no hope’ or the snow to my waist or the sight of her, in her shift, which she reported back without comment as she lit up or started on the next ball of wool. Ganga would sometimes go back the road to Bat, and sometimes I took up the fiddle and played, throwing up a perforated screen of music between us and the ruptured pair, consternating Doady a parcel because she couldn’t confess to eavesdropping and say Whist, I can’t hear.

  I discovered the tunes made it as far as the village, when, the following day, Annie said: ‘You play well.’ It was her only reference to the phone calls, and she was the first person outside of the house to hear me play. It had the effect of all praise, it made flourish. I knew I was not good, mind, but I was better than the night before, and better the night after, and knew that sometimes when he had talked himself out on to a peninsula and had no idea where to go next, Christy held up the receiver to the open window and let me be accompaniment.

  Some nights the calls were long, some short.

  ‘I have to go now. Goodnight.’

  At the end of none did Annie drop the breadcrumb trail and say, ‘I will call you tomorrow.’ Tomorrow was a presumption she was too clear-sighted to make.

  After each call Christy was unable to be still. Some nights we took to the bicycles and went off wordless and full, past the pubs we usually stopped at until breathlessness and the weight of feeling meant we could no further. We went in for just the one and sat in the corner, hoping, by local miracle, Junior Crehan might appear. He didn’t. Sometimes there was music, and much of it fine, but Christy was folded up in himself, knowing, as I did, that he was falling in love with Annie Mooney all over again.

  42

  One day after the next, the sun went through a wardrobe of pale skies. The miraculous blue, that had lost the name of miracle, was gradually screened behind a series of luminous veils. They were made of cloud, but not called cloud in Faha, because clouds there were the colour of hammered horseshoes and old bruises and these were joined in one continuous stretch without variants. The sky was almost white. It will burn off, was the common verdict. We might get a drop of rain, and wouldn’t that be all right too?

  The sunscreen was welcome. The days were still warm and humid, and still defeated definition among a population who could find no better description than It’s terrible close. The closeness was both a pressing down from above, and a nearness that was felt but could not be explained in words. It was just close.

  Annie did not call every night. Because there was no arrangement, no agreement that the call would be resumed the follo
wing night at such and such a time, each evening had the same suspended feel while we all waited and played distracted draughts to the vespers of birdsong. The call usually came around eight in the evening, but by female prerogative eight could be nine, could be ten.

  The first night she didn’t call, Doady secretly went in to check the line was working and wound the winder to get Mrs Prendergast (who was also waiting), and when she came on the line, Doady gave the not only lame but crippled excuse, ‘I thought I heard it ringing.’

  We sat and waited and said nothing but the same thought went like a needle and thread through each of our minds, Is Annie all right?

  The following day I went to check. Doctor Troy was with her and Father Coffey was standing hot-faced at the top of the stairs.

  ‘We need to pray for her,’ he said.

  I was grateful then to have the prayers in me. There have been times throughout my life when I’ve felt the same, that because of my childhood and education the prayers were things available to me, and I suppose there are few lives that don’t encounter moments when all that is available is drawn down and clung to. We stood on the landing both of us. We didn’t talk or face each other, but, in a kind of silent accord, we prayed.

  When Doctor Troy came out he said, ‘Don’t tire her.’

  We went into the room and Annie upturned our expectations by a gentle smile. ‘My gentlemen callers,’ she said. ‘Will one of you make the tea?’

  She was a remarkable woman, and, like all remarkable people, became more so the more you knew her.

  ‘Tomorrow, bring your fiddle,’ she said.

  She made no reference to why she hadn’t telephoned the night before, and I didn’t ask.

  After I left her I walked down to Avalon and Ronnie opened the door and brought me in for tea. We talked a good two hours on the weed checkerboard that had once been a patio. I wanted to lay my head against her breast. I wanted the world to stop awhile. Neither happened, but when I walked back down the avenue later I felt the workings of a balm.

  That evening the telephone pulsed again and Christy fairly ran to it.

  ‘And then…?’

  ‘And then I went to Morocco,’ Christy said, not missing the beat, and picking up from where he had left off, in the same way one tune bled into another in seisiúns and formed one continuous music, or, as he would become in the fable of this time, the Fahaean Scheherazade.

  Inside the front window, he carried on with the telling, and outside in the garden Ganga and Doady and I breathed a little easier. I don’t mind admitting that for a time I fell prey to magical thinking, whereby Christy could keep Annie Mooney alive by story, that as long as he was telling and she was listening she wouldn’t die, and his account would stretch not only time but reality and keep forever at bay the moment that followed this one.

  On one of the days around then a car drove into the yard and Harry Rushe landed. He was touring the district ahead of the switch-on. The parish was wired up now and ready and the crews had moved on. Christy was due to leave. Whether for professional or personal reasons, because the Board didn’t like to let any household through its fingers, or because he was the kind of man who crossed all his t’s, Rushe had run his finger down the column of Faha names that had turned into customers and tapped twice on the NC, Not Connected, against my grandfather’s. He recalled his last visit to the house and a small vexation blew up along his gumline. He pressed it with his tongue. It worsened. He felt defied. He put on his hat and went to his car.

  The debate between my grandparents as to why Ganga refused to take the electricity never happened. Doady knew her husband too well. She knew which things she could argue, and which she couldn’t. She could berate him for all manner of inconsistencies: ‘What kind of man puts the knives in with the forks? The spoons, I could find them anywhere!’ But this was a fray without casualties. The electricity, she could tell, was not for arguing. Wives have to be wiser than their husbands. She didn’t need to say anything to Ganga. She had lived with him so long she could look at his face in profile and read all that was in his head. She knew that it was not backwardness that made him reject the electricity, there were few men who would enjoy the wonders of it more. It was fear of what world they would be hurtled into the moment a switch was flicked. My grandmother understood. She understood the tightrope balance they had sustained for nearly half a century, a topsy-turvy way of living they had made up on the model of their own parents’ and grandparents’, which had survived the rearing of a dozen tearaway sons in four rooms in a drowned place on the far margin of the world, where belts could be tightened or loosened as needs be, and without anyone’s say-so but your own. What Doady knew, without saying a word, was that, within the one-foot-after-the-other confines of that tightrope, they were free.

  That she didn’t bring up the question of the electricity with my grandfather was an act of love, and marriage.

  ‘Boss at home?’ was Rushe’s greeting.

  I put down the fiddle. Rushe had a deep-fried look, ginger and crispy. He took a planted stance in front of the low fire. He didn’t take off his hat. The turf sent a few tongues of smoke towards the draught of him. There were two empty cans of peas sitting in the embers, an egg in each of them. Doady came in from the milking parlour, her hands pressing in a cloth.

  ‘Boss around?’

  ‘He’s up the back.’

  ‘I’ll get him,’ I said.

  She offered the courtesies, going for the kettle.

  ‘I won’t have tea,’ the last thing I heard.

  I found Ganga up in the back meadow. He could be in that field, just standing and watching it, at any time, and you couldn’t say exactly what he was doing, and if you asked maybe he wouldn’t have been able to say, but the sight of him out there alone had a kind of sustenance in it and has remained with me as one of the certain good things in this life.

  ‘Rushe is here,’ I told him.

  He smiled his round smile.

  ‘Rushe, he wants to see you. He’s in the house.’

  When we came into the kitchen Rushe was still planted full-square in the same spot. Doady had had to invent a behaviour for a visitor who wouldn’t take tea. It was plumping unplump cushions, including the dead one of Old Moore’s Almanac. She needn’t have bothered. Rushe was not for sitting.

  ‘You decided to go against common sense,’ was his opener. He pressed his tongue against the gumboil. For an engineer, he had exceptional narrowness of mind, or his focus was so sharp it only saw the one thing straight ahead all the time. At this moment that thing was my grandfather, who was also a gumboil.

  Ganga’s expression didn’t change. It was the same round, open, hopeless hopeful look that had nothing in it but kindness and wonder. ‘O now!’ he said and bent to scratch Joe’s head.

  And the moment he said it, the way a light comes on, and shows you clearly the thing you knew was there all along, I realised he was losing his hearing.

  When Rushe asked, ‘Have ye considered what ye’ll be missing?’ and Ganga made no reply at all, I realised he had lost it. I looked to my grandmother, and knew at once that she knew, and that the deafness fell inside the pact of them, and it was all I could do not to be overwhelmed by the presence of love.

  ‘We have,’ Doady said. ‘We’re not taking it.’

  Rushe had something in him that needed letting off. That’s what I thought later. It was not so much that he saw an opponent in my grandfather, but the pressure of rolling out the network and dealing with every kind of unforeseeable delay, doltish and contrary, human and operational, had built up a head of steam that was all but visible hissing past the hairs in his ears.

  ‘Ye’ll be in darkness,’ he said. The bad timing of the beautiful weather weakened the power of this. He resettled his stance square as a boxer. ‘Ye’ll be left behind. The rest of the world will move on. Not you. Your neighbours will have it. You won’t. You’ll be in nothing but hardship and loneliness.’ He turned his look from Ganga to Doady. ‘On
ce we leave we won’t be coming back.’ His eyes were grey stones, there was nothing giving in them.

  To cover for her husband’s silence, with a Kerrywoman’s forthrightness, Doady said, ‘We’ll go our own way.’

  Rushe scrunched up his face to show what the State thought of the individual. To signal a change in tack he pushed the rim of his hat up off the sweatband of his forehead.

  ‘It’s not because of the words we exchanged last time?’ he asked Ganga. ‘It’s not against me that you’re deciding?’

  Ganga was listening hard with his eyes and looked to Doady. It was partly against Rushe, and the manner of his interrogation of me, I thought, a thought that made me complicit, and to break the moment I said, ‘Will I make tea?’

  ‘I haven’t time for tea,’ Rushe shot out and heard himself and regretted, it seemed, the persona he had to play, and he probed with his tongue and twisted his shoe a little back and over as though there was a butt smouldering underfoot. And then, because he couldn’t abide inconclusion, because of a genuine fear he had overplayed his hand and because in that kitchen we were swaying on a rope bridge between the past and the future, he made his last case succinctly.