The Green Road: A Novel

by Anne Enright

  The stairs rose up into darkness. Rosaleen did not sleep up there. Not any more.

  ‘See you tomorrow, Mammy,’ said Constance, and Rosaleen said, ‘You’ll have a cup of tea?’ hating, immediately, the sound of her voice.

  ‘I won’t,’ said Constance. ‘We’ll have tea enough tomorrow.’

  She was speaking loudly, as though Rosaleen were deaf.

  ‘Why can’t you, sure?’ said Rosaleen.

  ‘Mammy,’ said Constance with a slight lift of her arms. There it was again, that stupid word.

  ‘Mammy,’ Rosaleen said. ‘Grow up, would you?’

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ said Constance.

  And lose some weight! Rosaleen wanted to say. The woman would be dead before her. But Constance was already on her way down the hall.

  It was very ageing – fat. It made her daughter look like an old woman, which was a kind of insult, after all the care that was put into the rearing of her. The coat didn’t help. It was like an anorak, almost.

  ‘Have a good night,’ said Constance.

  ‘I will,’ said Rosaleen.

  Mind you, the child always liked to sneak things. Down the side of her bed, a little nest of papers. Crinkle crinkle crinkle in the middle of the night.

  ‘And lose some of that weight!’ she said, after the door closed in her face.

  Rosaleen waited a moment, listening to the silence, then gave a little two-fisted victory dance. She heard Constance crossing the gravel outside, the bleat of the unlocking car. Even her footsteps were clear.

  She might have heard.

  No matter. The woman was her daughter, she could say what she liked.

  Rosaleen stood in the hall of acid blue, and listened to the car engine – a purring, expensive sound. She waited for the swirl of gravel, and for the silence after it, then she turned to face back into the house. It was November. The wind was from the south-west, slicing around the landing window, and into the house. Blue Verditer, that was the colour of the hall. Through the far door was the rose-coloured light of the kitchen, and in it, the blare and nonsense of the news.

  Wah Wah Wah. The telly was a series of blanks and shouts. The light thrown out by the stupid box, thin and bright. Dim. Bright. Brighter. Gone.

  It was all wrong. The wrong-coloured walls. The stairs she never climbed any more, and unimaginable things up there. Unimaginable.

  Rosaleen reached for the curling end of the bannisters. The wood was dark, the smell of the polish she used as a child so real she might catch it on a sharp inhale. A volute. That is the name of the curl. It unspooled and swept upwards to the landing and beyond that to the boys’ rooms.

  O my Dark Rosaleen,

  Do not sigh, do not weep!

  The priests are on the ocean green,

  They march along the deep.

  The abandoned bathroom, with its porcelain like ice. The girls’ room. And the big bedroom. Untenably cold.

  And Spanish ale shall give you hope,

  My own Rosaleen!

  And in those rooms: A print by Modigliani of a naked girl leaning on to her hand. A map on the wall of the whole world, as it used to be. And for the girls; a wall papered with posies tied with ribbons of blue. She pulled herself up the stairs, one two.

  Shall glad your heart, shall give you hope,

  Shall give you health, and help, and hope,

  My Dark Rosaleen!

  And then she came down again, to stand in the middle of the hall.

  The big bedroom was directly above her now, its two windows facing the morning. And in the centre of it – just over her head – the double bed where her father lay dying, and then died. It was the bed where she herself had been conceived, and it was also her marriage bed. Not deflowered. That happened somewhere else. New mattresses of course. The same mahogany headboard, inset with a medallion of rose and cherrywood, the same dark iron frame with strong planks for cross-boards, and in it, all the pomp of her family life: kisses, fevers, broken waters, the damp of their lives, the sap.

  The pair of them lying still and awake all night long and Pat Madigan saying to her, some summer morning when dawn came, ‘I don’t know what I am doing here.’ By which he meant lying alongside her, John Considine’s daughter, a woman he had loved with quietness and attention for many years. Also patience, of course. And tenacity. He did not know what he was doing in this place – what he had been doing – if he had not wasted his life on her. He might have been with a different woman. A better woman. He might have been more himself.

  Pat Madigan always knew who he was, of course, or who he should be.

  Well good for him.

  She only brought it up now to forget it. Rosaleen had married beneath her. There was no point fooling herself about that now. It was considered a mistake at the time. But she had flown in the face of public opinion, she had defied them all.

  A love match. That was the phrase people used, but Rosaleen thought love had little enough to do with it, that it was an animal thing. Three weeks after her father’s death. Not that she was ashamed of it. There were things country men knew that men from the town had no clue about. These young people with their little events below the waist, thinking they were just marvellous. Whatever it was Bill Clinton said about sexual relations, she couldn’t agree more, because when they were young and in their beauty, which was considerable, Rosaleen Considine and Pat Madigan went to bed for days. That was what she called sex. Days they spent. It was a lot more than pulling down your zip while you were talking on the phone.

  So what do you think of that?

  ‘Hah!’

  In defiance of the night, she said it out loud.

  ‘What do you think of that?’

  The bed was above her, ready to fall through the plaster, the place where her father died and her mother died, the place that later became her bed with Pat Madigan, when they moved into that room, and a kind of curse in it for the next while: no child conceived there except a few miscarried things, until Emmet was finally started and then Hanna. The bed where Pat Madigan himself finally died, his body wasted by the cancer until all that was left of him was the scaffolding. But, my goodness, he made a great ruin, for having been so well built, those big hinging bones, the joints getting larger and the cheekbones more proud, as the meat melted back and spirit of the man broke through.

  He went on a Tuesday night, and they had the lid down by Wednesday afternoon: Rosaleen made sure of it. Planted on the Thursday in a terrible downpour and not one of the mourners allowed to care that they were soaked through. The days and weeks these people spent talking about the weather. Discussing it. Predicting it. The months and years.

  It rained. They got wet.

  How terrible.

  Her father was buried in August, one hot summer, and of course John Considine was too big a man to be shoved into the earth, like a blown calf. They had to wait for priests and monsignors, not to mention his good friend, the Bishop of Clonfert. But something had gone off in her father, it spread through him in the days before he died, and it kept going off for the three or four days after, as men were summonsed from Dublin and from Liverpool; one couple, whoever they were, arriving, almost festive in their own motor car. Various nuns sat vigil by the coffin in the front room and one of them stroking her father’s forehead as she talked to Rosaleen. Vigorously. Gazing at his dead face. Stroking it. Pushing it.

  ‘Ah God love him,’ she said. ‘Ah, the crathur. Ah the poor man.’

  Brushing his hair back, over and over. The smell of incense, of roses and lavender brought in from the garden, honeysuckle soap on Rosaleen’s hands, and her father’s nose, as the days passed, rising higher away from his own face, as though in disdain. Rosaleen thought the stroking nun was mad in the head. And she thought her own virginity was going off inside her, that her womb would rot, she had left it so long, turning one or other suitor down for reasons that were always clear at the time. A brace of young men, or wealthy men, standing in the room where her father la
y now, adjusting their ties. She was much courted, John Considine’s daughter. And in the end, she gave it away to Pat Madigan in a hayrick in Boolavaun; her body, later that night, alive and tormented by tiny prickles and welts because, Pat said, the hay was new to her skin.

  Forty acres of rock and bog. That is what she got. And Pat Madigan.

  The door to the front room was closed now. Her father’s ghost was a cold twist of air turning on the broken hearth. Her father was a moment’s anxiety, as she passed the study, Hush hush! your father’s working. Fellow of the Pharmaceutical Society, Knight of Columbanus, Irishman, scholar, John Considine of Considine’s Medical Hall. Rosaleen looked in at her own narrow bed and wondered, not for the first time, whether her father was actually important, or if these men, with their big thoughts about the world, were all equally small.

  There was a dishcloth going off in the sink – she could catch the smell of it from the doorway – and the thing they put under the stairs, the new bathroom that looked so shining and so sanitary, was only another drain, really, opening into the house. The kitchen table was laden with grocery bags, the television blattering away. The evening was ahead of her, with maybe a book to pull her through it. Any book would do. She used to read while the place fell apart around her. And she still read. She liked it.

  But first she went to the drawer full of papers. The guarantee form, never posted, for the washing machine before last. Old cheque-books, one end thick with accusing stubs, the rest slapping empty. Things to do with tax. Forestry stuff for the land at Boolavaun. She found the woman in the red room and then another postcard from Dan, a thing by Kandinsky with two horsemen against a background that was also red, and something about the stretch of the animals’ necks that showed the wildness and difficulty of the journey they were embarked upon.

  Rosaleen held it up to the light.

  Beauty, in glimpses and flashes, that is what the soul required. That was the drop of water on the tongue.

  The evening was just beginning. If she made a cup of tea now, she could have a little sandwich with it; something small to stop her waking in the middle of the night and wandering out into the hall, wondering where she was, though she was never anywhere else but here.

  Where else would she be?

  But there was something wrong with the house and Rosaleen did not know what it was. It was as though she was wearing someone else’s coat, one that was the same as hers – the exact same, down to the make and size – but it wasn’t her coat, she could tell it wasn’t. It just looked the same.

  Rosaleen was living in the wrong house, with the wrong colours on the walls, and no telling any more what the right colour might be, even though she had chosen them herself and liked them and lived with them for years. And where could you put yourself: if you could not feel at home in your own home? If the world turned into a series of lines and shapes, with nothing in the pattern to remind you what it was for.

  It was time. She would doze in the chair by the range, tonight, she would not lie down. And in the morning she would walk down the town, over the bridge to the auctioneer’s. She could get a price for it, apparently; the days when people were put off by the heating bills were gone. The auctioneer was a McGrath – of course – a brother of Dessie, who married her daughter. He had to wet his lips each time she passed; his mouth went so dry at the sight of her. Well he could have it. Let the McGraths pick over the carcass of the Considines, they could have Ardeevin and the site at Boolavaun, she would move in with Constance, and die in her own time.

  They had all left her. They deserved no better.

  The gutters falling into the flowerbeds, the dripping taps, the shut-up rooms that she had abandoned, over the years. The pity of it—an old woman.

  Rosaleen took up the little stack of Christmas cards. She opened the first one:

  My darling Dan,

  I think of you often, and just as often I smile. I miss your old chat.

  All my love,

  Your fond and foolish Mother,

  Rosaleen.

  She was an old fool, that much was true. There was no doubt about that.

  ‘And by the way,’ she put at the bottom. ‘P.S Do, DO come for Christmas this year, it’s been so long!!! And I have decided to sell the house.’

  Part Two

  COMING HOME

  2005

  Toronto

  LUDO SAID HE had to do it, it was the last chance he would get.

  ‘For what?’ said Dan.

  ‘To be in the house. To see your mother while she is still your mother,’ Ludo said. He paused in his chopping and dicing and looked out at the yard. The snow outside was high to the windowsill, and the flat under-light made everything in the kitchen look drab and momentous. The blue of it took the money out of everything, Dan thought – all Ludo’s cosy objects, and his middle-aged skin. The bell peppers on the chopping board, meanwhile, were a more thrilling shade of red.

  ‘She is always my mother,’ said Dan.

  Which was Ludo’s point exactly.

  ‘Well make up your mind.’

  ‘I rejoice in my contradictions,’ said Ludo and he lifted the big knife, waving it high.

  ‘Yeah well,’ said Dan. ‘I am not saying I came out of some other woman, I am just saying it was a long time ago.’

  ‘This is not a lucky way to talk,’ said Ludo.

  ‘Lucky?’ said Dan, as he opened the fridge, its interior green as a hanging garden with lettuces and leeks, the default champagne in the rack and imported gin in its earthen bottle, keeping cold. Ludo was, among other things, a rich man while Dan, for reasons that were never entirely clear to him, was not rich. Not even slightly.

  ‘What do you mean, lucky?’

  ‘Life is too full of regrets,’ said Ludo.

  A big-featured man with eyes of serious blue, Ludo favoured pinstriped waistcoats and leather jackets, with buttonhole and umbrella, and his house was full of stuff. This was new for Dan, who had woken up in a lot of beautiful white rooms in his day. A nice brick-colonial in Rosedale, Toronto, it had antique cotton quilts and a rocking chair in the bay window: there were three different kinds of maple in the front yard and behind the up and over garage door was a wide shovel for snow.

  Ludo was interested in early American landscapes and Dan was surprised to find he was interested in them too. At least a little. They first met in New York over a sincere view of a river gorge that Dan was offloading for a friend. One thing led to another, of course. When Dan flew up with the piece they ended up in bed again, after which they discussed Ludo’s growing collection, as Dan had hoped to do.

  Sexually, Ludo was frankly masochistic and this appealed to Dan’s chillier side. But you can never do these things twice. Besides, masochists were always boring in the end. Also – perhaps inescapably – in the middle. And Dan was slightly bored with being bored, though he still craved that little jolt of empathetic pain.

  So perhaps it was lucky that, in Toronto, Ludo was off script; too baggy minded and curious to stay in role. Dan felt his age as he realised this was, in fact, what he had flown up for – for the chat, for Ludo’s easy, good company. It did not take them long to hang up the leathers and settle into something else: mostly in Brooklyn, when Ludo was down lawyering in New York, then some skiing near Montreal, a winter break in Harbour Island, until Dan ended up in Toronto for six months because cash was so short, and Ludo so easy. He let out his place in Brooklyn and gave it a go.

  Easy like a fox. Ludo handed Dan a credit card for household expenses with a rueful look that must have been useful to him in court. If Dan wanted to fuck him over, he seemed to say, then this would be a good way to do it, too. But Dan did not fuck him over. Or not much. And five years later, there they were, like a pair of sweater queens, sniping at each other about Dan’s mother, because ‘mother’ was one of those words for Ludo, She’s your mother.

  Ludo’s mother Raizie was back in Montreal. Eighty-three years old, she was on a kaffeeklatsch circuit with the
escaped matrons of Mile End, over in leafy Saint-Laurent, where no one, it seemed, could believe their good luck, or their bad luck, because if their son wasn’t buying a country place, he was in the middle of a terrible divorce. The daughters lost weight or they found a lump and one grandchild outshone the next. There were also disasters, of course. Men died. Women got depressed. Sons were seldom gay, it had to be said, but life was good enough for the escaped matrons of Mile End to leave some room even for this sad surprise and they were able to enjoy them both, Ludo and Dan, when they showed up. Dan was not the first man Ludo brought home but, as Raizie said, cupping his face with her dry old hand, ‘You are the nicest!’ There were no doubts. They went over to Montreal, twice, maybe three times a year, and Ludo came home each time more contented and capacious.

  Dan liked to watch Ludo about his mother’s house, a big man in a small space, the dinkyness of his hands as he washed her china cups, the unembarrassed way he sat in the old recliner, the way he said, ‘Raizie, Raizie,’ when she fretted about the past and all the things that could not be put right. It seemed to Dan that Ludo spoke many languages – even his body spoke them – while he, Dan, spoke only one. They went over to his sister’s house, and her teenage children gazed at Ludo like they knew he was something belonging to them, but they weren’t sure what, exactly. Or not yet.

  Meanwhile, he, Dan, had not been home to Ardeevin for three years, maybe five. Donal, Rory and – what was her name? – Shauna – they were different people already. Those boys of piercing purity, with their beautiful country accents if they ever brought themselves to speak, and the mottled blush when they did because their uncle was a queer: no one told them that he was gay, they just figured it out for themselves. In this day and age. And he, Dan, maddened by the shame of it, carried a boner with him all the way back to Dublin and, one time, fucked a guy until he yelped in the washroom on the train.

  The ground rushing under them in the crescent-shaped gap at the bottom of the bowl; a thousand flickering railway sleepers and the cold earth of Ireland.